Greg McKeown:
Welcome, wherever you are. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I’m the author of Two New York Times Bestsellers, Essentialism and Effortless. And I’m here with you on this journey to see how we can operate at a higher contribution.
What is one problem you are dealing with in your business right now? What is one problem you are dealing with in your life right now? Well, whatever problems you are facing, this conversation with Jeremy Utley is the answer because, as he says in his new book, Idea Flow, every problem is an ideas problem.
Today, I’ve invited my friend Jeremy to talk about his research. His insights developed over many years at the D School, the design school at Stanford University. He and I co-created a class designing life, essentially. And now I’m thrilled to be able to explore these new insights that he’s put together to your benefit.
By the end of this episode, you will have, in effect, the solution to every problem. So let’s begin.
If you want to learn these ideas about ideation faster, understand them more deeply, increase your influence with others, teach at least one idea about these ideas to someone else within the next 24 to 48 hours.
Jeremy Utley, welcome to the podcast.
Jeremy Utley:
Thank you, sir. I’m glad to be here.
Greg McKeown:
We have been friends now, a long time. This is years and years.
Jeremy Utley:
Close to a decade, I think.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. Decade of work. Tell us, for those that don’t know you as well as I do, give them a, you know, two-minute Readers Digest version of who you are.
Jeremy Utley:
Awesome. Yeah, I’d be happy to. I’m currently the director of executive education at the Hasso Platner Institute of Design, or the D School at Stanford, where I lead our work with organizations. I’m a recovering MBA, which means I’m a spreadsheet junkie. I’m a former management consultant, and now I advise CEOs and senior leadership teams around the world in innovation strategy, how to implement this stuff that we called design thinking at the D School. And the way I got here was I was derailed actually by the D school myself as a student at Stanford. I had the good fortune of spending a summer in Delhi, India, working at a startup that, unbeknownst to me, had actually originated at the D school. And I expressed enough curiosity about how they made things that they started telling me, you know, you’re kind of D schooly. You should go back to the D school whenever you’re in your second year.
Greg McKeown:
They were right. They were right about that, weren’t they? You are.
Jeremy Utley:
They were. They were right. I didn’t know what it meant. I took it as an insult. I’ve come to see it as a compliment, but, you know, I came back to Stanford my second year of business school. I thought I was going back to my, you know, strategy consulting job. And I spent a bunch of my elective units studying design, and I just got hooked. And I had experienced a handful of epiphany moments that really changed what I thought about work and what I thought about what I wanted to do. And you know, 13 years later, I’m still doing it. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.
Greg McKeown:
And this is reminding me that for those people that know that I co-designed a pop-up class at the D school, it was with you. And that was the most popular pop-up class of the season, in fact, if I remember right. But absolutely, it was an honor to be able to teach that with you. And now, you have written a book called Idea Flow, The only Business Metric That Matters, which is an awfully good subtitle. Share with us a story, something, a case study that helps us understand, you know, why this matters so much to you and why you think this should matter to CEOs and people who want to be the CEO of their own life.
Jeremy Utley:
Okay. So I’m going to do this in two parts, if you will, if you’ll indulge me. One is very personal, and then the other is more of kind of, you know, the academic thing. Yeah, the personal thing. Just cause I think it’s useful. Why does this matter to me? You know, like they used to say, Men’s Hair Club, I’m not only the president, I’m also a member. The reason this matters to me is, like, I need it. So just by way of personal example, I’m in the car the other day. I’m driving and running errands for my family, and I’ve got, somehow, I ended up with, you know, the 3D jigsaw puzzle of Jenga blocks in my car trying to fit everything in. And for some reason, I stacked the 40-pound cooler in the passenger seat, precariously balanced to basically damage my rotator cuff with every right-hand turn.
So I’m, I’m just enduring this pain, and it’s like, I know I’m going to be in the car for an hour. This is a serious, legitimately pain-inducing experience, and I’m trying to kinda wedge my elbow up so that I can give myself some relief so that the momentum, at least of the thing, doesn’t slam me so much. And my brother calls. My brother’s a construction worker. He does roofing in Texas, and he and I are catching up just, you know, lighthearted. And after about five minutes, he, as only a little brother can, he goes, Hey, why do you keep grunting? And I said, Oh, I’m sorry, man, I’ve got this stupid cooler, that keeps slamming into my shoulder every time I turn right. You know? And he goes, Well, have you buckled it in?
And it was this moment of, I mean, I can’t explain to you except to say like, it’s like, you know, bang your forehead kind of moment.
And he’s, you know, of course, almost starts apologizing. He’s like, I mean, you know, that’s what I do when I’m in my truck, and I got a bunch of gear in there, you know, I’ll just buckle it in. He’s like apologizing for saying the obvious thing.
And I was like, Zach. And in one minute, I mean I stopped the car, I buckled the cooler in, and in 10 seconds, the problem that I had resigned myself to be stuck with for an hour was solved. And the reason I share that story is I’m the problem-solving guru. I’m the innovation and creativity expert. And yet I find there are consistently problems in my life I don’t even identify as problems in need of a creative solution. And to me, just that metacognitive moment of zooming out and realizing there’s a whole chapter in our book on seeking unexpected perspectives and the value of that in driving creative thinking. Right?
You know, who has a really valuable perspective in the moment that I’m feeling pain because of a jostling Jenga brick of a cooler is a construction worker who deals with that stuff all the time, Right? If I had framed the problem, I would have thought of how to solve it. The problem I experienced, the problem a lot of us experience, is we don’t even realize it when we got an idea problem. And that’s what we call that in the book is every problem is an idea problem, meaning what it yields to as solutions.
Greg McKeown:
Say that again because it’s such an important point.
Jeremy Utley:
Every problem is an idea problem.
Greg McKeown:
Every problem is an idea problem. That’s a really important paradigm for the justification of writing this book and for the discipline behind it, is that if you have a problem in your life, if a person listening to this has a problem with a colleague, has a problem with their board, has a problem with their top executive team. If they have a problem with their partner, with their spouse, with their child, with the school, with the everything, everything is an idea problem.
Jeremy Utley:
I genuinely believe it. It like all of a sudden, there’s a question like, what does that mean really? What, And that, which leads me, it’s kinda to my second story. I told you, I warned you, I wanted to tell you two stories. Now for the more, you know, empirical or academic story of nature, starting with a personal note, which is I need this just like every other reader does.
What do we mean when we say every problem is an idea problem? What we mean is problems yield to solutions. And perhaps the most unexpected finding of lots of research is that the biggest factor that impacts the quality of a solution you identify is actually the quantity of solutions you identify. So when we say, that every problem is an idea problem, what we mean is come up with a bunch of solutions.
And as an example, there’s this great story, this professor of photography at the University of Florida, his name’s Jerry Yulman, he’s a famous photographer, and he teaches his photography class. And this is an experiment he’s run on a number of occasions where he basically divides the class in half, tells the whole class at the end of the semester, you’re going to be judged by a jury of professional photographers, and they’re going to rate the quality of your work to one half of the class. He tells them, your job is to make one spectacular photo and to get an A, it’s got to be truly spectacular to get a B, it’s got to be very good to get a C, it’s got to be pretty good, et cetera, et cetera. And then the jury will evaluate to the other half of the class, he says, You’re actually not going to deal with the jury. I’m just going to count the number of photographs you submit. If you submit over a hundred, it doesn’t matter how bad they are, you get an A, if you submit over 90, it doesn’t matter how bad they are, you get a B, and so on. And at the end of the course, he brings in this jury. He shows the jury all the photographs of both groups. And what astounded him and what astounded the jury is none of the A-caliber photographs were submitted by the students whose prompt was to submit a spectacular photograph.
Greg McKeown:
I think that’s amazing. So interesting.
Jeremy Utley:
All of the A-caliber photographs were taken by students who said that quality doesn’t matter, just focus on how many photographs you take. And it’s a perfect illustration. I mean, Dr. Dean Keith Simonon has confirmed this in loads of fields beyond photography, from science and invention and the arts and discovery, et cetera. The single greatest variable at your disposal or lever, you could say, if you’re trying to get a good idea, as Linus Pauling once said, you need to have a lot of ideas. And so when we say every idea is an idea problem. What we mean is you’re fundamentally dealing with a quantity problem. Are you thinking about generating lots? And where, going back to my car, I wasn’t even thinking about generating any. And for sure, I’m not going to experience a life-changing solution if I’m not even thinking that there’s a problem I could solve, let alone that, that this, that the answer actually lies in coming up with lots of answers.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. And it seems to me that the more you do this, the more that you exercise that mental muscle, the better you are at generating ideas and solutions in any situation.
In fact, I just was talking to Dr. Benjamin Hardy like literally earlier on today, and he shared with me this idea of high-hope people versus low-hope people. And the difference in the research is that high-hope people feel there’s a better, more likely chance of them reaching their goals, their success because they have a sense of the necessary pathways to doing it. And it’s the pathway. It’s like, it’s all to do with, with how many pathways you can see to achieving an objective. Low hope people, maybe they see one pathway or none. So they feel frustrated, and it’s not possible. Whereas at a high-hope person, it’s like, look, there’s 50 different ways. I don’t know which ones are going to work or even if these will work, but there’s 50, and we can generate another 50 after that. Go ahead.
Jeremy Utley:
Well, you’re hinting at something that’s actually really important, Greg, which is expectation matters. So there’s a famous study, it’s called the Creative Cliff Illusion, and the illusion is the important word there. But, what these authors of this study have empirically demonstrated is most people’s expectation of their creativity is that, that it will experience a cliff. It will precipitously decline after some period of time. And what they’ve studied and proven is that’s actually not true. There’s no such thing as a creative cliff. And in fact, there’s a possibility of a creative ramp. So if you think about time on the x-axis and, and quality of ideas on the y-axis. Most people expect there to be a cliff. Meaning over time, the quality of ideas goes to zero. The truth is it’s more of like a plateau, and the quality of your ideas persists for much longer than you expect.
But the most fascinating part of the study to me, and the part that is related to exactly what you were just saying, is for the people who had the expectation that they would have good ideas later, all of their ideas were better for the people who had the expectation that their good ideas would probably come early. All of their ideas were worse. And it’s a fascinating implication to realize if you have this expectation, better ideas are going to come. You know, we can, we can keep coming up with stuff. And to me, it’s intimately related to this idea of hope.
Greg McKeown:
This is another conversation, but I just had another conversation with the author of a new book called Live Life in Crescendo. It’s co-authored with her late father, Stephen Covey. And that seems consistent with this idea, not live life in crescendo but come up with creative ideas in crescendo.
Jeremy Utley:
Right. Solve problems in crescendo.
Greg McKeown:
Exactly. Solve problems in crescendo.
Jeremy Utley:
Well, and that, not to just be too nerdy here, but I mean, as a couple of professors, we can just talk nerdy to one another. But you know, to me, there’s a cognitive bias known as the Einstellung Effect. And by the way, it’s the exact opposite of the crescendo. But basically, this, you know, researcher in the 1940s, Abraham Luchins, coined this term the Einstellung Effect. And I like to refer to it as the anti-Einstein effect because of its phonetic resemblance to a certain breakthrough thinker. But what Luchins and others, Carl Dunker, and many others have identified various facets of this. But it’s the tendency for a human being, once they identify a solution, not only do they stop looking for other solutions, that’d be bad enough, but even worse, and this was confirmed by researchers at Oxford more recently studying novice and expert chess players who they discovered that once a player found a solution, they were incapable of seeing a better solution, which is exactly the opposite of crescendo. Right?
And once you become aware of this cognitive bias, I have this bias, my brain has this bias that once I have a solution, my tendency is to glom onto it and hold onto it and justify why it’s the best thing, it’s like admission is the first step of a recovery. It’s something like that. Once you’ve become aware of the bias, you can start to short-circuit it. And there are really simple hacks to short-circuit that bias. But I love this idea of crescendo, and I would say we rarely, in many of the problems we face in our lives, we rarely think in terms of crescendo. We think in terms of almost a task orientation. How quickly can I get this out of the way?
Greg McKeown:
There’s so much to unpack there. When you say that there are some practical things you can do to overcome this bias, what are some of those practical things?
Jeremy Utley:
Well, the most simple thing that we have people do is what we call an idea quota. And an idea quota is simply once a day, take a problem that you’ve been trying to find the right answer for. And emphasis right there on the, and ordinarily that could be almost any problem, if you become aware of it, you realize in every situation I’m looking for the answer. And once a day, typically, you know, usually earlier, the better. But once a day, you flip your orientation from quality, i.e., the right answer, to quantity. 10 possible answers. And doing an idea quota is a really great way to short-circuit that bias. Just like, you know, I’m friends with John Cassidy, who founded Klutz Press, which is the, you know, klutz guide to juggling, for example, the whole first chapter of the Klutz Guide to Juggling. You know what it is?
Greg McKeown:
I’ve read this. I’ve read the book when I was a kid.
Jeremy Utley:
Well, you know, the first chapter.
Greg McKeown:
The first chapter is like, you literally throw the ball up and let it drop on the ground.
Jeremy Utley:
Exactly.
Greg McKeown:
And you do it 50 times. I don’t remember the number of times I was like a 10-year-old when I first read this, but like, you literally, it’s a sort of ridiculous first chapter, but you don’t try to catch it. You let it drop 50 times. You let it drop, drop, drop. You aren’t to do it. And you think, what is this guy asking me to do? But go ahead.
Jeremy Utley:
He’s desensitizing you.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah.
Jeremy Utley:
Nothing, nothing happens when the ball hits the ground. How can you possibly learn to juggle if you’re afraid of the ball hitting the ground? Right? And part of the fascinating virtue and value of an idea quota is the realization that nothing happens if I write down a bad idea. Nothing.
Greg McKeown:
Mm.
Jeremy Utley:
And what happens, though, when we start allowing ourselves to write down bad ideas is we effectively cognitively are increasing the variation of possibility by writing down bad ideas. I also, by that same kind of mode, if you think about a normal distribution or if you think about the mean, if there’s a mean or a median of idea quality, the only way to get to, you know, two standard deviations to the right is to be willing to go two standard deviations to the left. Otherwise, you never achieve the mean. Right? And everybody wants to go two standard deviations to the right. They want to be a genius.
The other day I was talking about the idea quota with an executive at a Japanese pharmaceutical company, and I was asking this small group, How many ideas did you do in your idea quota?
We were saying you got to do at least 10. Most people were 10, 20, 15, whatever. Right? And this one guy, Tony, goes three. I said, Tony, that’s not the rules. I mean, you have to do at least 10. And he said, No, I did 10, but I only had three good ideas. And I said, Tony, you have to count the bad ideas too. Right? But it’s this tendency we go, I don’t even count the bad ideas. Right?
And I think going back to the klutz metaphor, the notion with an idea quota is the cost of a bad idea is exceptionally low, but the benefit of allowing your brains the variation and the kinds of outputs you entertain is enormously high.
Greg McKeown:
I love this idea. In my head, I already have a very specific problem that I would like to improve. And I’ve added it to my, I have like this it’s a project turnaround plan that I have, and I have daily, weekly, monthly tasks, not tasks, routines, things I want to do on those, you know, at that rate. And I’ve added it as my daily activity to run an idea quota. 10, you know, so-called bad ideas a day in order to be able to solve this problem. I think that’s a great thing to be able to build into a system for being able to continually search for ideas that eventually, by simply this process of increased options, will deliver something eventually an outlier, something that is exceptional. And it reminds me this idea of a daily routine around an idea quota reminds me of Johnny Ive describing when he was talking at a funeral service that they held at Apple for the late Steve Jobs, what it was like to work with him and that they met every day, which itself is insightful that the CEO and the head of design a meeting every day and what they’re doing, they didn’t use the term you’re using, but they are producing an idea quota.
And yeah, he’s saying, We just went through idea after day. What about this? What, if we did this? What if we did this? What if we did this? And he said almost all those ideas, you know, they just didn’t do anything he says. Then once in a while, we would say something, and it would take the air out of the room. And we’d be like, Oh, that’s something. That’s something.
Jeremy Utley:
Wow. That’s great.
Greg McKeown:
And so when Steve Jobs says, you know, out of every, is it 99 or 999? I don’t remember. Out of every thousand ideas, you know, 999 of them we say no to in order to say yes to the one. Right? Yes. Now, everybody who quotes that, including me, is quoting that to make the point that you have to be really selective. You have to find the right idea. Everyone’s saying that. They’re missing. The other really important part of that.
Jeremy Utley:
Do you have a thousand ideas?
Greg McKeown:
You have a thousand ideas. Because if don’t, you can’t find the one, the key isn’t just to pick the one. Right? If everyone could just pick the one they’d, Well, great. I mean, we’d all do that. It’s the willingness to have an environment that is capable and a routine around the idea creation that seems to be part of that, part of that process.
Jeremy Utley:
I absolutely agree. I love that. It is such an important thing to realize. The only way you earn the right to choose the one is by doing the work of generating the thousand. And what most people want to do is they go, You know what? I got ten good options. And I mean, as, as an example, I realize I cut myself off, but it’s purposeful. We happen to know quantitatively how many ideas you need to get to a commercially viable idea. If you want to define that as success, that’s great. And I’ll tell you the number in a second, but as a, as a parlor trick, oftentimes what we’ll do, you know, and we did this recently, one of the world’s largest consulting firms had a global meeting of senior partners. There’s three or 400 people in the rooms, all seated at these kinds of eight top banquet tables. And we said, we gave the Linus polling quotes, to have a good idea, you need to have a lot of ideas. And we said, what’s a lot? You know, we all get that you need to have a lot of ideas, but let’s define a lot. And we said, just so there’s some skin in the game, winning tables, they’re all going to get Bose headphones. Okay. And I tried to drop that phrase Bose headphones enough times that the event organizers knew I wanted some and they gave me some. So that was great.
That’s true story. But, so we had all of these tables, you know, eight tops conferring to decide how many ideas does it take to get to a good idea? And then we went around the room and the mode, you know, there’s 20 or 30 tables in there. The mode was probably 20, I would say on average. You know, some people were a hundred, some people were five, you know, with the exception by the way of the chairman, the chairman of the board sitting at the front and center table in the middle, and he stands up boldly and he, and he just proudly proclaims one. You need one good idea. And, you know, you talk about taking the air out of the room, you know, my next slide is of course showing the data, which suggests it’s more like 2000 to get to one good idea.
And it’s kind of an embarrassing moment. You don’t want to belabor the point, but the, the simple point is people, they dramatically underestimate, not by a little bit, but by orders of magnitude, they underestimate how many ideas they need to have to get to a good one. And so going back to the Steve Jobs thing, it’s easier for people to go, Yeah, he chose, he eliminated, he said no to 999 things. But what precedes saying no is coming up with the 999 things.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I’ve just, I’ve just found the quote. Right?
So he says, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things that I have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.”
Right? But, so there it is. You are saying that, that, that, you know, that technically it’s actually 2000 things, but, but we’re actually in the range Yes. Of being a literal thing. And, and I think it’s quite profound because I literally have never heard anybody talk about this idea from Steve the way we are right now talking about it.
Jeremy Utley:
Well, I was just going to say mileage may vary a little bit. You know, in pharmaceutical discovery it’s more like 10,000 compounds get tested to get to one, you know, viable Alzheimer’s drug, for example. Right? if you think about James Dyson making the Bagless vacuum, he made 5,000 prototypes. If you think about SNL, you know, as a hit making machine, right? They got tons of viral videos. But how many times you turn off SNL because it’s so bad you can’t stand it. And that’s the good stuff after quote unquote good stuff after they spend a week of eliminating all the bad stuff, right? So point being, this is true. In the Taco Bell Food Lab, I read an interview with the person who runs the Taco Bell Food lab. She said she bet she tested 2000, I kid you not, she used that number, 2000 different versions of the Doritos Loco taco shell. Okay.
But the point is, the phenomenon, as you start to look for it, it’s kind of everywhere. But nobody acknowledges. We, it’s really, I mean, as, as you’ve pointed out with essentialism, wisely and rightly so, saying no is critical. It’s essential not to bad pun, but the thing that most people don’t realize is you have to have stuff to say no to when it comes to problem-solving.
Greg McKeown:
The first pillar of essentialism is explore. It’s not eliminate. Explore is number one, eliminate is number two and execute is number three. There’s a, there’s a process there and an ongoing continual process. If you don’t get the balance right between exploration and elimination, then then you don’t get the the dynamic equilibrium you need to be able to actually produce momentum. And so it’s two sides of a sort of yin and yang innovation you know, relationship here. Highly selective through the options, but you’ve got to have the ideas going forward.
I have another interesting story related to this. I’d love your reaction to it. I once went to a camp, I’d been invited to speak at Steve Harvey’s camp for sort of an underprivileged young men and their single mothers. Okay.
So that’s the environment. One of the things that’s interesting about that, right? So, Steve, who we normally see on television, Family Feud, you know, in a certain kind of role, is in a completely different mode there. He’s in sort of almost army clothes boots. And he’s just also completely relaxed, just like no cameras on. And so he just riffs, and he just goes and he just talks about what he really wants to do in his life and what he’s really learned. And he’s just very raw about it. And one of the things he said, he said, Listen, I’m going to tell you all right now what the problem is, the problem for everybody here is that you’re not asking for enough from your life. You’ve got a, a few things you want. There’s a few things you want that you don’t have.
And you think, Okay, well I’ll just work on those things. He said, Here’s the challenge is that you go home, I want you to write down 400 things that you want.
He says, Let me tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to go home, you’re going to start doing this, and you’re going to get to like number 45, and you are done. You have no idea what you’d want beyond those things. He said, So you have to push yourself beyond that. You’ve got to get to 50, 60, a hundred, and you just keep on going. And it’s not a commitment list. You don’t have to do everything on this list, but you have to push yourself beyond the thinking you’ve had before about what you would like from life and what you’d like to achieve. And, and I went home, and I started doing this, and I’m telling you, I got to like 65, and they were major things. So it’s not like there wasn’t a lot represented, but that was it. And I have since continued to try to add to it for the same, I think, basic logic here, right?
So if life is the big problem to solve, then we have to generate a lot of ideas of what to do with it, what we’d really ideally love to do with it. If we want to find one idea that really names it for us, you know, how many people have I talked to that say, I say, What do you want? And they don’t know what they want. And I think, well, yeah, what I need to say is, okay, write down anything right you could possibly want and just make the longest list possible. And then you see you get to 400 by the time you’re there, you found something that you go, wow, that, that, I really want that.
Jeremy Utley:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. I think part of the challenge is the more significant the task or the moment, the more we tend to clam up and put our blinders on and really narrow our focus, and we lose sight of the fact. And that’s kind of the beauty of a daily idea quota is it’s a regular recurring opportunity. I mean, worst case scenario, you build the muscle. Best case scenario, you solve the problem, right? It is a really great value proposition. But when it comes to these really significant moments, we think, Well, I got to have, I can’t afford to have a bad answer here. And we equate coming up with a bad answer, with implementing a bad answer. And the two are very different. And being willing to entertain a bad answer may be just as informative, maybe even more enlightening. Well, why did I have such a visceral reaction to that one? That might be as enlightening as the one that I go, wow, I really resonated with that one. But we only get half the data we could get because we only entertain the good.
Greg McKeown:
Related to that is this problem that I see that people go from idea to execution with hardly a thought. There’s, there’s nowhere for the ideas to go, right? So that you can actually explore them, add to them, and create a portfolio from which to select something to invest in. They’re already spending time and resources on the first idea that comes to them. And so it creates a very reactive, frenetic, frantic type of experience in execution. But in this case, there’s got to be some sort of process. I’m curious about your thoughts. So you generate your idea quota. What’s the process after that? I do these ten ideas a day. Now what?
Jeremy Utley:
Yeah. Well, I want to slightly riff on that for just a second before getting to the implementation question because you’re, you’re alluding to something that just sparked for me that I had kind of forgotten about actually till right now. But there’s a really famous, one of the most famous studies of creativity was conducted by this World War II spymaster named Donald MacKinnon. And after the war, he kind of became obsessed with this question of practical creativity and how does it work? And what he did was he undertook a longitudinal study of architects because he felt they were the nice balance of aesthetics, you know, and visual, you know, beauty consideration, et cetera. But then they had to deal with things like, you know, very practical things like gravity and seismic forces and such. And so what he did was he surveyed all living architects at the time, and he asked them who were the most exemplary contributors to the field.
And he got a short list, and he went and spent time with each person there. He did kind of a day in the life week in the life month in the life kind of empathetic or yeah, kind of ethnographic immersion to understand their working habits. And then he went and did the same thing with people who weren’t in that group. He didn’t tell them that they weren’t in that group. I don’t think, I hope not, wouldn’t be very spy masterly of him if he had. But he studied, and he basically contrasted the two groups. And there are a couple of fascinating findings that I think have implications on what you were just saying. One, just, just by way of like a teaser, which we could, you know, do in another episode later. He found that the most successful architects were far more likely to engage in play.
Again, we don’t have time to cover that right now. It’s too deep of a topic. The other topic, though, that is relevant to this is he found that the most exceptional architects were far more likely to delay decisions than the nonexceptional architects. And you can take it as an example, someone like Frank Lloyd Wright, he’s a classic example of this. It’s the rumor has it with falling water, which probably the most, you know, famous residential architectural development of the 20th century, that he had been commissioned to do that, this, this development. And he had never approached the drafting table. And some time passed by longer than I think most of his associates are probably comfortable with without any meaningful work product being completed. And one day, the client called and said, I’m on my way to the office. I want to see an update. I’ll be there in two hours.
And quickly, Frank Lloyd Wright approached the drafting table, and he laid down the foundations that became falling water. But what would he do? He would nap oftentimes, multiple times per day. Okay? This kind of behavior is a barrier, you know, to the productivity-oriented of us. It’s really frustrating to people who say, I want my output and my sense of progress to map perfectly with time where, you know, at 10% of the way done, I want to have 10% of the answer, and at 20% of the way done, I want to be 20% of the way done and 30, et cetera, right? And what wildly creative and effective, I would say creative is almost like not the right word, because people dismiss it. What the most effective breakthrough thinkers do is they recognize that this time for gestation is necessary, this time for marination.
And what MacKinnon discovered as he studied this phenomenon was that the most breakthrough architects opened themselves up to new possibilities by not deciding. They opened themselves up to new sources of inspiration, new possibilities, new ideas. And they ended up delivering better products because they deferred the tendency to make the decision as quickly as possible.
And anyway, you reminded me of that anecdote when you were speaking earlier about it’s the natural tendency is just to, oh, what you were saying, come up with, with the idea and implement, come up with the idea and implement. Right?
And we want to just do this fast cycle. And what the research, what it seemed to indicate is for things that matter; by the way, if it doesn’t matter, procrastination is just a stalling tactic, right? But if it does matter, procrastination is almost like your right brain’s tendency to trigger your subconscious and activate it into consideration. But it’s only if you give yourself space to incubate, you know, a very kind of simple model for creative thinking is a four-stage model. That’s basically, stage one is preparation, two is incubation, three is illumination, and four is verification. That’s a very well-established cognitive model. Preparation, incubation, illumination verification.
I would submit that what those architects were doing is they were giving themselves time for incubation. And what we lack in our hyper connective, hyper efficiency-oriented, hyper measurement oriented, I mean, I’m aghast at some of the productivity measures I see among now white-collar workers and such. It’s like, it’s no wonder creativity is being snuffed out of the system. We aren’t giving our brains any space to think or consider or incubate. And it’s in that incubation period that the unexpected combinations start to take shape. And the unexpected combinations are actually by, you know, Arthur Koestler defined creativity as the collision is apparently unrelated frames of reference. And the apparently unrelated only collides when there’s space for it to collide.
Greg McKeown:
My best friend in England, he was raised on a farm. And so he had an incubator for some eggs that he was hatching into little chicks. The incubator turned off in the middle of the process without anyone knowing. And as a result, mean I’m, I sound like I’m laughing, but I’m not. It’s, they, they came out you know, they came out either they died, or they were deformed. Like it didn’t work. because you know, the incubation period had not been invested in, you know, I mean, I’m, I’m making already a connection to the, to the point I’m making beyond the metaphor. But I think that’s similar to this idea that if you jump too soon, commit too soon to a full implementation, then you maybe end up with, you know, poorly thought through ideas, the sort of broken chick kind of idea that, as I’m exploring here, and let’s come back to the subtitle here, The only business metric that matters. Help me understand what precisely that business metric is.
Jeremy Utley:
Well, the measure itself is very simply, how many solutions can you come up, up with to a problem in a given amount of time? And you can measure it simply by taking an email in your inbox so that you need to write and, say, set a timer for two minutes and see how many subject lines you can come up with or how many opening lines you can come up with. So you can do it in kind of a superficial but useful way. But I think a more relevant and, ultimately robust way to think about it is over time, are you in the habit or the practice of generating lots of solutions, lots of potential problems to be solved, and solutions to those problems on a regular basis?
And the reason that we say it’s the only business metric that matters is ideas are the future. Solutions are the future. You know, the number of problems we face, I mean, to go all the way back full circle to my, you know, the story of me sitting in the front seat. We’re facing problems all the time. And the sales department or the HR department or the, you know, finance committee or the board, in all of those environments, there are metaphorically these coolers slamming against shoulders, damaging rotator cuffs. And people go, What do we do? You know? And having a robust and rich ability and resilient ability to meet such problems with a divergent, open, non-precious, rapid mindset of ideation is the source of, it’s, it’s the only way to solve tomorrow’s problems. And the rate at which disruption is occurring. Now, I mean, in the, it is well-established disruption is happening at, at a rate unprecedented in the modern economy, at least the only way to survive is to continue to reinvent and continue to solve problems that aren’t even on your radar yet.
And so, for us, the reason that we say it’s the only business metric that matters is because I can guarantee if a business is not developing its ability to solve problems, it will cease to exist. Period, bar none. It doesn’t matter how well received. I mean, look at Clubhouse, a great example, right? I mean, not to pick on Clubhouse, by the way, I never used the product. I mean, other than tried it a couple times. I’m not shorting it or something. But you look at Clubhouse, it’s like this, like stratospheric success for a moment, right? And it used to be that a stratospheric success, you could write it into the sunset for decades right now, it’s like people are going, Wait, what is that again? Or where did it go? And that’s, to me, a great parable for the kinds of success that are experienced today. Unless you’re prepared to continue to solve meaningful problems and identify better problems to solve and have better, more resilient, more robust ways of solving them, doesn’t matter how relevant you are as an individual or as a business, you will face obsolescence quickly.
Greg McKeown:
Jeremy Utley, who tells us all this great truth, every problem is an ideas problem. So regardless of the challenge you are facing, if you are listening to this podcast right now, this book, by definition, must be the answer. And it has a terrific author at the head of it. I’m proud to introduce you to him. If you don’t know him already, I think you’ll love the book. I think you’ll find that absolutely fascinating and helpful in trying to solve, among other things, the problem of the 10X dilemma. If you want to achieve 10X results, you can’t work 10 times harder,. You’re going to need lots of ideas to be able to bridge that gap, and get to the next level without burning out. So this is a marvelous conversation. It’s been great having you. Jeremy, thank you for taking the time to teach us.
Jeremy Utley:
Greg, I’m thrilled. It’s been a hoot to catch back up with you. I owe you so much in terms of my own learning as a teacher and as a leader. I’ve learned so much and continue to practice essentialism in my own life and also with my students. And what an honor to be on your podcast. I’ve got a free bonus chapter on the website. The folks who’ve listened today want to check it out. It’s called How to Think Like Bezos and Jobs. And it’s a distillation of a bunch of research that didn’t make it into the book, but it’s amazing tips and tricks of how those incredible breakthrough thinkers thought. So folks can check it out for free on the website ideaflow.design, and hopefully, they love the book as well. I can’t wait for feedback.
Greg McKeown:
So what is one idea from this episode that you can share with someone else today?
What is one thing that stood out to you? What’s one insight that came to you? Maybe it’s not what I said, or Jeremy said, but something else that you can share.
And if you have found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts. The first five people who write a review of this episode will receive free access to the Essentialism Academy. For more details, go to essentialism.com/podcastpromo. Remember to subscribe to this podcast while you’re at all of this so that you can receive episodes every Tuesday and every Thursday using the new structure that we have committed to.
So wherever you are listening to this today, whether you’re out on your run, I see you there. Whether you are on a bike ride or driving to work or driving from work or picking somebody up, or working in the garden, maybe you are cleaning up as you go. I just want to say one more time, thank you. Really, Thank you for listening.
