TCTC 85: Interview of Adam Alter, author of "Anatomy of a Breakthrough"

imagine that you're very competent should I have five other people who are also at the 90th percentile on that Dimension or should I get five other mediocre people on various other dimensions and there's all this incredible evidence that it's not surrounding yourself with the best it's surrounding yourself with the most different that leads to the best outcomes Adam thank you for uh coming to be part of the consultant and the coach podcast congratulations on your brand new book that is coming out in May anatomy of a breakthrough so you're a professor of marketing at the stansky teaching Excellence faculty at New York University's Stern School of Business and he also a graduate of Princeton University got a doctorate in Psychology and you were also named poets and quants 40 best professors under 40 in 2017 and New York Times best-selling author of two books drunk tank pink and irresistible so what did I leave out I don't think you left out too much I think that's a pretty solid introduction I'll take it it's all it's all true so that's that's a good place to begin there we go awesome awesome well first like I said first congratulations on finishing this book it's always a you know huge celebration to finish a book and not only one this is your third book so what kind caused you to want to write the book anatomy of a breakthrough yeah it is my third book it's funny I think the the DNA of all these books goes back a long way and this one's no exception so this one I think I really started thinking about it probably about 20 years ago I was doing some research on how people across the world think about change and whether they're good at anticipating when changes are coming and so one of the things I did was I went all around the world to a whole lot of different countries and I asked people imagine that uh you know a stock in the financial markets has been doing really well what's going to happen tomorrow and I found some really interesting cultural differences I found that in in the East so in in East Asia in particular in Japan Korea and China people think that things are going to change a lot they're anticipating change they're ready for Change and they're preparing for change but in in the US in the West in the US I found this in Britain I found this in Australia I found this in New Zealand people don't anticipate change they anticipate that things are just going to keep going the way they've been going and the the problem with that is that that's a inaccurate things change all the time and B when they do change you're not really prepared for that change and so I became very curious about this idea that when change happens and since it happens a lot we have to deal with it a lot we may not be all that well prepared for it and so this book is really a sort of blueprint that I've been thinking about and sort of sitting on for the last 20 years for how we cope with these moments when we get stuck usually in the face of something that's shifted yeah almost ironically something changes therefore we can't right because we're not prepared right that's the yeah I love it I think this this book I mean for the Consulting work I do this this book is spot on for so many of the leaders I work with and the companies I mean and you could go down the list of keystones of course um I was wondering you mentioned a lot of great researchers great examples great stories in the book I really appreciated that I felt when I first saw the book I thought oh my goodness it's really thick in terms of the density of the content like I'm never going to get through this but then it read really smoothly so that's great um who would you say were some of the like the key influencers for you of like the long list of researchers and other things that will link to the book what are some of those kind of key folks who mentored or brought you along either directly or maybe just through their writing and research that really contributed to this work yeah it's a good question and I think they are very inspiring and so there are some people who say everything's a work in progress and so I will never assume that where I am right now is where I will always be and as a result of that they're constantly experimenting they they don't assume that anything is as good as it can be and so they keep pushing against whatever boundaries there are and that makes them incredibly Nimble in the face of not just change but in in the face of these sticking points that arise um there are some great examples of this one of my favorites was um this uh this Olympian I spoke to he was a back stroker for the United States he swam the backstroke in the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games and the thing that fascinated me about him was um physically he was not as tall or as broad-shouldered or as as large or as dominant as some of the other competitors but he was incredibly intelligent he was dogged so he had all the right sort of mental attributes uh but but what he did was from a very young age he experimented constantly he assumed that the way that the rest of the the world was doing the backstroke was not optimal or at least was open to the idea that there might be a better way and one of the things he discovered he actually went to Harvard so he was a cerebral guy a very smart guy one of the things he and his coach discovered was that people when they're swimming aren't fully underwater fully immersed much faster than whether when they're half breaking the surface of the water so he developed a technique that came his name is Dave burkhoff it became known as the burkhoff blast off it was the way he pushed off a wall that kept him underwater for longer than the other swimmers and he ended up breaking the world record and there's a very famous Australian swimming coach named Lori Lawrence who I remember as a kid growing up listening to this guy very colorful character and Lawrence when he saw who had broken the world record couldn't believe that this guy who was like half a foot shorter than all the other swimmers in the pool had triumphed and and I found that totally fascinating the idea that with the right approach with this sort of experimental mindset you can always push against whatever limitations there may be and and so he was he was a particularly inspiring person and as someone who likes sport a lot I'm also not a very tall guy but I I think I'm pretty dogged as well I liked the idea that he had found a way and I really enjoyed his story yeah no that well and you'll find Eric and Arabic sports fans Runners Eric's an accomplished Runner I pretend to be uh and we just uh I loved all the sports analogies it was great in terms of how the crossover between business and sports is uh it's huge so um well I I like that analogy you you said about the swimmer as well too I was just thinking recently of Dick Fosbury who just passed away but he did the same thing in the high jump where people used to go over from the front side he's like no let's flip this thing over and flipped it over set a couple world of work records and literally changed everything and I've noticed frequently there's so many great people you can learn from athletic Endeavors that move over to business and vice versa it's it's we could come up with hundreds of examples so I absolutely love that so um as you were writing this book what were some of the things that just surprised you I know you've been doing research for decades but what just like hey something surprised you you did not expect to come when you were doing research for this book yeah there are a few things I'll pick on one of them that I still think about a lot actually and that's um that I think in business in in almost every context we strive for originality for True genuine radical originality we're always looking for something different and I think there's nothing wrong with that it's true for Creative Pursuits it's true for artists it's true for musicians for writers and one of the things I discovered that was really interesting when I was doing the research for this was that trying to be truly original is actually paralyzing it's very difficult to do and actually when you look at people who others consider to be truly original they weren't striving for that um and so there are some examples in the book I talk for example about Bob Dylan who when other singers are asked who's the most original singer of the 20th century a lot of them say Bob Dylan they they find a lot of his approach to music was seen as something that was genuine and different from from what other people were doing uh there are examples of artists as well who people pointed to a lot of people said Van Gogh was was a completely different artist from anyone who came before him in the the late 19th century and there are a lot of examples of people who I I held up as these truly radical original examples or exemplars of whatever they were doing but when you ask them that's not at all the way they perceive it and actually if you dig deeply a lot of Bob Dylan's techniques were borrowed from other people in other adjacent areas of music and if you look at Van Gogh he was constantly borrowing from 10 other artists who were around at the same period who maybe didn't rise to the same level of Fame eventually that he did but but what you see is that the people who do really well what they're doing is not so much trying to be truly original even if that's what they end up being perceived as but they are evolving they're taking something that works really well and they're either recombining to to existing elements into something new or they're just tweaking things in just the right way and there are some examples in the book from business from art from music of of this kind of approach to to evolving rather than trying to create revolutions which are very hard to do and if you think about it if you're trying to get unstuck if the only way you feel you have succeeded is to be truly original that bar is tremendously high and so a lot of the time it's knowing the right kind of body used to evaluate your work um there's one of the examples that I really loved was this cell phone company where instead of trying to make the newest flashiest cell phone um this this group of of entrepreneurs led by a woman named Arlene Harris basically said well you know the cell phone market is heavily trafficked there are a lot of people buying cell phones there are a lot of young people making cell phones for other young people but there's a huge Market of people older adults who don't love the way cell phones work today this was about 15 years ago they find them difficult to use the buttons are hard to press why don't we take old cell phones this Market that hasn't really been tapped and and figure out a way to really do what they want and and to find a way to recombine these existing elements and she created a billion dollar company it was bought by Best Buy and uh it's one of those examples of finding just the right Evolution from where we are in the market today and so that was that was I think one thing that I really found surprising and quite inspiring yeah that and that's a great in fact that leads right into the first question I was going to ask for my like book question so that's good timing a little bit about us just we didn't have a chance to do that just so you know kind of our lens you may have potentially a little bit about us but so Eric and our good friends we've been uh working in business for over 40 years he's an executive coach I'm the strategy consultant we uh we started this because we're book nerds and love to talk about you know hard Concepts in business and figure out how to help our clients and so that's why we do this and we're really happy to have you on here with us and um we certainly talk a lot about you know Christian faith also informs us and there's a big group of folks out there trying to figure out that piece too and um certainly not a requirement for anyone to be on the show or to come along for these uh these great uh podcasts but that's just kind of who we are um and I think one of the problems we tend to see watch is why your book was so appealing was uh you know there's a lot of companies and leaders who I see get stuck right and so that's when I saw your book I said oh my gosh we gotta have Adam on and we got to read this book and learn more about this because I think I run into this a lot um and so with that you know going back to the novelty concept which you mentioned um I like that was like my first topic I want to address so good it's like quick compared notes um all the examples were great I think the question I was wondering about maybe you could talk a little bit more was um you know I find it hard to figure out when that novelty threshold is reached right like how do you like I mean other than experimentation which maybe that's the answer but how does someone think about or how do they know okay I've tried these things and I'm actually I'm not finally finding something that's novel like that even that is well not the highest bar in terms of originality like you said it's also a very fine like the actual funding of that can be tough but how do you how would you help a business leader think through like when they've found something that's truly novel right when they've actually gotten it yeah I see I I think the problem with novelty as a yardstick as a tool to measure whether an idea is a good one is that it starts too early what you really have to do is work backwards from it from the end and to work out what matters to you so for me in business I teach thousands and thousands of MBA students and um they all want to be successful a lot of them want to be successful in business and the question is at the end when you look back on this business this Venture whatever it is that you're trying to do that requires some degree of novelty how will you know if you've succeeded and that's what Ali and Harris did with her phone she said what I want to do is I want to attract say five percent of the over 65 Market older adults who are looking for phones and then I'll know I've succeeded and the nice thing about doing that is it's very concrete it's objective it gives you something to strive for you might need to tweak it over time maybe five percent isn't the right number for Eileen Harris in the end but what it does is it liberates you from the idea that the product you're making has to be a certain way because honestly being original is really hard to do I talk in the book about how we can move in that direction how we can make products that are more original and come up with ideas that are more original but I think it's better to think about what matters to you at the end of the day objectively what's the measure that matters and so maybe it's a number of sales maybe it's a profit number maybe for this venture to be successful my return on investment needs to be X it really sort of depends on on what matters to you what sort of scale you're looking for how many people you're trying to support with that business is this A Five-Year Plan a 10-year plan is it a just a sort of side hustle all of that's going to matter a lot and I think that will determine whether you've you've cleared whatever bar you're setting because then clearing the bar is really Tethered to some end goal some outcome and I think that's the best way to think of in business of any objective is we're at a b c what does Z look like you know that's really what matters well I like that because so many times with entrepreneurs I've worked with um there's there's certainly a lot of emphasis around like what's the pain Point you're going to solve and what's the market size right so yeah there's the pain Point there's the Tam total addressable Market but you're also talking about like what's your actual outcome that you're shooting for so I like that addition to that thinking I think that makes a lot of sense and I'll take that that's good that's good nugget along the same line as an entrepreneur I I did not know this until I read your book that you said the average age and I'm going to use air quotes of a successful entrepreneur is 42 and in in this age it's almost like the younger one is when they start this the better hey they started this at Harvard or Princeton in their college days yeah and I'm just like oh crumb I'm 46 years old granted I have a few businesses but at the same time now tell me about the age of successful entrepreneurs yeah this was really interesting to me I'm actually 42 so I'm bang on that age right now so I better do something magical this year but um this book is it there you go yeah okay good good so I'll take it I'll run with that but yeah I found that really interesting you know we fetishize these very young entrepreneurs because they're interesting stories and I think a lot of the biggest businesses now happen to be Tech businesses that happen to have been started by very young people that's true for a lot of these tech companies that they were started by people in their 20s some of them dropped out of school to start them and so as a result we're focusing on 18 19 20 21 22 year olds and that's vanishingly rare that's not how most successful businesses work and there are very good reasons for that because over the years you develop skills competencies your brain matures your brainism isn't even fully mature until you're in your late 20s early 30s that's that's how the human brain develops so you're working with a sort of not fully formed set of cognitive faculties until you're older your impulse control improves as you get into your late 20s in pulse control turns out to be very important for success in in business long-term planning not being too impulsive yes taking colossal risks and looking at a new market something like say the market that's now been opened up by chat GPT and these these other generative AI models that's fascinating stuff that's dominated by young people so we're all going to pay a lot of attention to that but the vast majority of these businesses that come from 40 something year olds that's 20 years of failure of of pushing against failure of of learning how to fail better next time so that you get closer and closer to the Mark it's not that they only they started their first business at 42 it's that they were successful at 42 and so you have 20 years over these young entrepreneurs to fail and come back again and I think that's that's a huge part of this is developing certain skills that take time to to marinade and and as you get closer to the mark figuring out what it is that requires you to to move in that correct direction as opposed to the wrong direction all of which takes time yeah I really like that too because I think it paired with that concept that kind of Records in the same chapter but you referenced it was just the fact that um the first idea is not always the best idea and I know I've made that mistake a lot before like I'll sit down and whiteboard a fresh idea on the Whiteboard and I'll look at it and I'll go and usually I'll say oh that's really great and I'll show it to a couple people and they say no that's not that great and then I just and then I leave it right I don't keep turning on it because I think oh the first one wasn't very good so it must not be a thing but I appreciated the fact that you sort of enlightened this idea that um you actually can fail and then try again and fit and actually it does get better with time that was very encouraging because I know I've definitely gotten discouraged very quickly when something doesn't seem original or novel from like the first time on the Whiteboard right it's easy to lose lose focus so and you don't see that right I mean most of the time right what you see is you see Google the 20 second search engine and say wow that was a success and that was something new and different or you see you see the you know Jeff Bezos had some ideas that perhaps weren't as successful or Bill Gates had it some ideas or Walt Disney had is you know all of these entrepreneurs who were ultimately very very successful what you don't see is all those ideas that were ultimately erased from the Whiteboard because they didn't quite work out and so by Nature we always see what succeeds and where what's hidden from us is what doesn't and so we always feel like our own personal failures uh they're so visible to us and so much more visible than anybody else's failures that um that's I think an important myth to dispel yeah can we talk a little about habits yeah let's go there so not to jump to the end of the book but I want to spend some time about how this piece so I like this section we've actually done some work some previous books on habits uh power to change by Quaker shell we've we've read uh the habits Academy what's it called No Atomic habits I didn't review that book um we uh we've had some other it's come up in a few books so it was funny I thought you were actually going to go a different direction with that section but it was totally fine it was good um I was thinking more about the automation idea that you brought up I think in chapter eight or nine about um habits in that format sort of carve out or don't don't take any Creative Energy Right was the idea of those habits but then you actually talked about the difference between that and also what I read was I'm just trying to check my notes Here the habits I think of creativity and getting unstuck um is what you described as I think the experimentation exploring and exploiting and sort of taking action right so is that how you were do I have that can you talk more about just what you meant by those habits and how you form presumably like those are three kind of big habits you were sort of encouraging folks to adopt in some way is that right yeah so the book is sort of divided into these three well it's four h's but the three H's that I really focus on are heart head and habit hard is how you deal with the emotional consequences of being stuck uh and that's really the first thing you have to do because until you you can con calm yourself in the face of being stuck you're not going to be very successful at getting unstuck so there's this heart then this head which is the cognitive strategies the mental strategies for for moving forward and then the last section as you mentioned is habit habit is the actions and and really if you think about dealing with emotions the thoughts and then the actions the actions are essentially what this is all about you know that the emotions and the the thoughts are all in the service of action that gets you to where you want to be and without the action there's there's nothing so I think action is Paramount it's the most important thing and so you were mentioning this this idea of habits or cultivating certain practices that get you through and get you unstuck um there are a number of ideas there we talked a little bit about Dave burkhoff and his approach to experimentalism and experimenting and trying different things until you figure out what works best um the the thing that I think is really interesting about um about action is that well there are two things one thing is that when you are acting by definition you are not stuck right so if you're a writer and you're you're just feeling like you you have writer's block one thing to do is to lower the bar from here where I this is what I consider good writing all the way to the floor and just spend five minutes pouring out all the nonsense that's in your head just type whatever comes to your mind now by definition you are not stuck in that moment you're writing and that kind of greases the wheels it gets things moving and there's a lot of evidence for that that as long as you lower your threshold with the ultimate aim of raising it again later on that's very freeing and there's some really interesting examples of this from very very successful people in in the creative world is um Jeff Tweedy from Wilco the singer from a band called Wilco and he talks about this idea that all the stuff that's on the surface if you're a songwriter or or a writer or you're trying to create any sort of new content all of the stuff on the surface is kind of nonsense it's not good stuff you've got to get rid of it get below that to get the really good ideas so he talks about this this act he calls it pouring out the bad stuff in the morning so he gets started writing and he dumps out all the bad stuff for 10 minutes and then the good stuff starts to pop up it's similar to the idea that your first ideas are not going to be your best ideas and it's that idea that if it were if it comes to you first it's coming to other people first it's probably deeply unoriginal and if it hasn't been done yet there's a reason for it so spend a bit of time and so that idea of pouring out I find very liberating especially when I'm stuck as a writer I will sit there and just type nonsense for a little bit and then things start to start to loosen up a little bit and then I feel that I get somewhere and I I think that's a that's a really important part of acting is that act in really small bits maybe a minute at a time at first if you need to lower the bar and then things start to to work again yeah I I really like that because I think the connection I make to several both books and people I've heard about in Consulting work is um the the the active of taking that action even when it's not very good action actually leads to a quicker resolution or or like what I like to say is it's almost like you come in with this Assumption of assume you're going to be stuck and therefore put all the habits in place so that when you get stuck you're not surprised you'd actually be doing all I think I think about Jerry Seinfeld right and he's talked about he wrote a joke a day for about decades right I bet you a lot of those jokes aren't very good like they're probably pretty bad right exactly but he he has this habit right and he's done it and he's and it gets out of that writer's block even when it's not a good one and I think that's a just one I thought of reading the book so I really like it um so Josh jumped to the end and he's like hey what's the Habit what's I mean as as a true consultant and as an executive coach I'm like you started with the heart and a lot of times in my coaching of Executives they want to jump right to the habit and I frequently have so I'm trying to bait you to go in this direction now people want to jump to the Habit because that's where the money is but right a lot you can't until you hit the heart first so I'm happy that you did that so tell me more about the hard aspect because Josh really wants to get to the habit and as a coach I'm like dude you can't do that you went the right order I just jumped yeah so you talk about the heart yes where do you start with the heart and why so this really begins with the idea that um I'm very I'm a scientist and I study uh human psychology and I'm very interested in the way people think and the way they respond to outside stimuli and there's this fascinating thing you'll read in the news every few years of say persons walking down the street they see that someone's trapped under a car and they they get what is known as historic hysterical strength they pick the car up and they save this person there are moments when we are stuck or when someone else is stuck where we respond in this very strong physical way that's adaptive that's there's an evolutionary reason for that there's this Rush of adrenaline that that leads to historical strength it turns out that as adaptive as that is when you're physically stuck it is maladaptive when you are psychologically stuck in these states that we've been talking about because that hysterical strength what it does is it just completely dismantles your ability to control your emotions and struggling and thrashing about might be very good when you're trapped under a car but it's not very good when you're trying to figure out a sort of Niche strategy or something that requires a little bit of thought so the first thing you have to do is to to Grapple with that that emotional shock of feeling stuck and that's one of the things I found I ran this series of surveys with 100 in fact thousands of people now all around the world asking them are you stuck in some respect everyone says yes there's always something in their lives that makes them feel like they're stuck and then the next question is how does that feel and all of them say I feel alone this doesn't feel good it feels like it's just me against the world I don't even think anyone else is stuck although of course everyone's stuck in some other respect so that that feeling of loneliness is is misplaced but it's clear that for people who are stuck it's a very emotional experience and so you really have to get your your emotions right you have to pause take a break accept that you're where you are there's a whole psychological component to dealing with being stuck and until you do that you can't really grapple with strategy and whiteboarding and brainstorming and um the behavioral side of things the habits the actions I don't I'm not saying it's you need to set aside three months to get to deal with the emotions but at the very least you have to recognize that your emotional responses are part of what is further entrenching you and once you deal with that and grapple with it you tend to do a lot better in actually forming the strategies to get unstuck so how do you recommend so even if you say hey I am unstuck that and there's definitely some feelings around being unstuck how would you get to that point how do you get to how do you get how do you get to getting unstuck yeah yeah so the emotional part of it I think one of the things we do is we are very quick to act as we've just said you know the first thing we want to do is act and there are some stories in the book of people who have learned to strategically pause to do the opposite of acting so although acting is critical you can't act until you've paused and figured out what the lay of the land is one of the people I talk about here is uh Lionel Messi widely regarded as the greatest soccer player alive today and maybe of all time I think he's the greatest of all time and the interesting thing about Messi is first of all he is a he's known to be a very nervous starter of matches so when when a soccer match begins he's nervous more nervous than you would perhaps imagine for someone of his ability in his stature and um for years he was physically sick before games and his coaches used to say how can he be a leader if he can't grapple with his emotions and so what he started to do is he started to develop a strategy of just not effectively not playing the game for the first few minutes so he gave himself he knew he was effective as a player but he gave himself the first few minutes to calm down and so what you do is you can you can look at every player now in this age of Statistics in sports you can look at every play you can look at which minutes they score goals in you can look at how much they move during the course of a soccer game or really any other Sport and the thing you see with Messi is he basically does not move except for a couple of little steps here and there for the first five minutes of the game he's looking at all the players he's working out where the weaknesses are where the strengths are he's sacrificing the first five minutes of the game so that for the other 85 Plus he will strategically be in a better position and also emotionally in a better position so if you look at the games where he scores goals over the years he has scored in every single minute of the match except the first two because he's really not even really playing yet and that's very unusual you don't see that in many players and so he's just one example of of these people who say look I'm going to sacrifice the right now for the benefit that comes later when I've I've got the lay of the land and so and it goes against the grain for humans right we want to do things right now and so it's very important to cultivate that practice of slowing down of taking a pause I think that's one of the the best first things you can do in the face of being stuck to get unstuck yeah I love that example I'm not sure when you did all the writing for the book but I actually thought it was a great example because that you know watching the World Cup obviously he just won the World Cup and they talked about that strategy in the World Cup if you're watching any of the Argentinian games which I work with a firm we have talent and teams in Argentina so we were obviously cheering for them and and connecting with our colleagues there and um so anyway I don't know if you heard it for the world cup or not but it was a good timing and definitely something that they talked about a lot so it was uh that was great yeah yeah I didn't I I'd written it before the World Cup I was very happy to see him win obviously gave the gave the anecdote a little bit of extra Force yeah I was hoping Argentina wouldn't be edged out in the final and it all worked out well so that's right the anecdote stands yeah yeah I wondered with uh just the way the writing was if you probably had written it before and that's why I typed that up because I thought that was good um speaking of some of that in terms of the that process of the Strategic pause I think one of the things I really liked about the book was the theme of persistence right again this idea of you know just because it's not great on the White for the first time maybe you're in the middle of being stuck um in just the importance of sticking with things for difficulty right I think that's really important um I think uh Like the quote that I wrote down I think you said I'm not reading it you wrote it so you know what it says for people listen to the podcast news it's hard to train people to believe that mental difficulty is a sign of progress rather than stagnation um how does someone sort of how do you build someone's capability to sort of come overcome that stagnation like that ability to sort of know the difference between yes I'm stuck but I should keep going or know I'm stuck and this is the kind of thing I should pivot right like when how do you build someone's sort of resilience or persistence through that from a training perspective or a culture perspective yeah I think a lot of it's education so the first thing to know is that we almost always stop too soon it's much more common than going too long and spending too long on something on over committing to a bad idea so that's the default is to begin by saying well maybe I should spend a bit more time on this um that's at least what I have found in in research and in my experience and one of the reasons for that there's an idea I talk about in the book known as the creativity or creative cliff and um this idea is based on some research by a couple of psychologists who found that when you ask people when their best ideas are likely to emerge they say early you know if I if I'm sitting down for a brainstorming session in the first few minutes my best ideas will tumble out they're the ones that come to me quickest there's a reason for that they're probably the best ones struggling is a sign that things are just kind of getting a bit clunky they're probably not my best ideas and so the researchers tested this and they gave people say multiple sessions and looked at the quality of their ideas across those sessions and they found that that wasn't true that either your ideas are consistently about the same but in a lot of their studies they found that they got better over time and it comes back to this idea that you're pouring out the obvious and maybe the not so good early on and you're mistaking the ease with which those first ideas tumble out for goodness because that's what we we're constantly doing that if I ask you how well do you speak a language you say well it's easy for me it's very easy for the words to just sort of tumble out well then you probably speak that language very fluently but that doesn't apply to everything fluency is not a good guide to Quality in every domain and in fact when we're talking about creativity or newness or doing a pivot from where I am now or tweaking something or getting unstuck where by definition whatever I've been doing in the past isn't going to continue to work being okay with the struggle is critical because the struggle is a sign that you're you're probably doing things a bit differently you're grappling with change you're working out something new and so that's an essential component of what you're doing this is known in psychology as metacognition so we have our thoughts but the metacognition is what sits above our thoughts and that's how easy easily did those thoughts come to me was it hard for me to get them were they inaccessible did they take a lot of effort and metacognition is a guide to for example how well you speak a language if something's easy but it can lead you astray a little bit if you're if you're striving for forgetting unstuck or creativity so you have the opportunity to let's just say teach thousands and thousands of students in business school and in the book you talk about coaxing greatness from others so especially with students there there are Your Business Leaders that want to go to the next step what are your uh what's your advice for coaxing greatness out of others whether it's be a new business leader who then needs to lead their team or as you're leading these you know future business Executives or entrepreneurs what you know what are your recommendations yeah it's a huge a huge question right and and that's why I I ask them I I show them that that example that cell phone example and the reason I like that one and I return to it so often is because I think it it explodes some of the myths that are quite problematic among MBA students in particular and and in in students of business anywhere what we do is we try to cater to ourselves we think of the market as just lots of people just like me it's one of the reasons why you I talk about this in the book you need to cultivate a bit of diversity around you if you're young find some older people that if you're living in a city find some people who live in the in rural rural areas where they're experiencing very different things because you are by Nature egocentric and you're going to be making decisions for yourself and so one of the things that you find is that you know you've got these incubators in the form of Business Schools where all these students come out in their mid-20s late 20s creating businesses for other people who are in their mid-20s and late 20s but it turns out that that's the time of our lives where we don't have that much disposable income that's early on in our careers a lot of us are dealing with student debt and things like that um it's really your 40s 50s 60s 70s when you have more disposable income so the first thing to do is to say is there a world out there of people who are not like me who are just hungry for products in a particular industry where they've been historically overlooked it's one of the one of the big things we do together is in in my classes is think about that that question what's different from me and can I cater to that audience and I like that as a sort of narrow instructional example when you're thinking of strategy to think Beyond who you are but I think it's also an incredibly valuable skill in in leadership and in coaching in general is to to recognize that almost no one is exactly like you in fact there's probably no one who's exactly like you and so surrounding yourself with others who are different is is really valuable there's some really interesting experiments that I talk about in the book that I came across that that talk about the fact that it's it's actually instead of having imagine that you're very competent let's say you think of yourself as a sort of I'm at the 90th percentile on some Dimension that really matters to me should I have five other people who are also at the 90th percentile on that Dimension or should I get five other mediocre people on various other dimensions who have other focuses that are Central to them and there's all this incredible evidence that it's not surrounding yourself with the best it's surrounding yourself with the most different that leads to the best outcomes in fact agents of chaos people who come in and just kind of throw everything around and say what you've been doing is wrong here are some new ways to do that Pixar talks about this they call them the black sheep they always bring in some Black Sheep into their projects like we've been doing it this one way we all think alike we like the way we do it and the agent comes in and says I'm the black sheep and I think everything you're doing is wrong and here are here are 15 things you should think about that are different that is incredibly valuable that disorganization that throwing things upside down and all of that comes from from diversity broadness breadth in general and I think as an academic I'm very sensitive to this idea do you write a PhD you drill down into an idea you get narrower and narrower and narrower over time and you start to forget that there's all this other stuff out there in the world if you're not careful and I think that's a problem in business as well so just avoid myopia in leadership in business general in general now to tack onto that in my experience some people some a lot have problems when they do encounter to those black sheep yeah so then I I understand what you're saying but what do you do in that instance when hey someone's saying my idea is not the greatest idea in the world what then well that's Universal right that's that's what Black Sheep are designed to do by definition they spoil the flock they change things up they they turn things upside down so you know there are always going to be people who struggle with that I think it's very important particularly As Leaders to recognize that there will be people in a group that you're managing who will be there may be some Black Sheep but it's also really important to cultivate them and to recognize their value their worth because I think as Leaders when you're looking for Harmony in a group you're looking for a culture that feels like it's cohesive the people who like being around each other that's obviously one of the signs that you're a good leader right you've formed this group that feels close-knit in all sorts of different contexts there's a lot of value in that but I think in in business and in a lot of other contexts as well having maybe one or two people in the group who think differently is is unbelievably valuable and you need to wreck recognize that and not push against it too hard you're not trying to turn all the black sheep you're not trying to throw white paint at them and make them look like all the other sheep you're recognizing that they're there and they have value and obviously it's hard right if you if you're the kind of person who's very sensitive about your ideas to have someone tell you that your idea is not the best idea and that sort of fragility in general is not is not great it's not great in a team because you need to be open to the idea that your ideas aren't the the best ideas out there and I think as as leaders and as managers it's very important to point that out I often think about my kids I have two kids and they both think they have the best ideas and they're not always the same best ideas and you've got to make sure that they recognize that it's there are like 15 different ways to be the best and that's true I mean you can have these different approaches and you can still be valuable and worthwhile without um without every one of your ideas being drowning out all the other options and I think that's going to be true in management of teams and in leadership in general as well well a follow-up to that I think that tells one of the questions I and related to the great example you gave about the Doctor Who series and I'm not I'm not a fan but I kind of know of it and it was great to get actually an overview of what that's more about I didn't know had been such a long-running show for so long and it's great I think one of the things I was struck by kind of tying that this concept I think you're getting at but maybe it was more in there and I just didn't pick up the Nuance but I noticed there seemed to be attention of you talked about for example in the Doctor Who series they would regularly change over the creatives and the talent who are contributing to the series and I was struck by you know they changed them over and I don't think it's exactly right but I think it looked like they changed kind of key leadership I'm sure it is every season or two or three you know folks would you know be running with the show for so many episodes but it wasn't ever a long number of episodes and I guess what I was thinking about was the tension of well why not change the creatives every single episode like there's there's certainly some continuity that comes from the same team being together for some period of time so you would do it it's like what's that tension and how do you build a team around sort of how do you keep the right folks together so you do have that cohesiveness right and then when's the right time to have those shifts whether it's a new person thinking differently about ideas or a different set of creatives because at some point you you lose the value of that cohesiveness right that's what that I was like I was picking up on attention I'm not sure if that's what you meant but I was struggling to figure out like how what's that formula for putting a team together right in the right way for how long and at what point do you realize it's stale swap them out you know whether it's six months two years five years anyway love to hear more yeah it's I'd say that they're obviously the opposite ends of the spectrum they're changing things up every day like I imagine every day you rolled out of bed and you had to reconstruct your life from scratch and figure out what I'm going to do today and there's a i today I'm a firefighter and tomorrow I'm going to be a police officer and the next you know that's one way to live your life is to jump around almost schizophrenically from one thing to the next the other way is to do exactly the same thing every day wear the same clothes eat the same meal and there are people in this world who do that there are articles I've read recently about people who eat the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for lunch and have done for 60 years right and that's you know what honestly if you like that sandwich and it keeps you healthy use your energy elsewhere that's fine automate that my Approach yeah I I'm not too far from that but um I think the key is to work out what the value might be of both of those ends of the Spectrum in whatever it is that you're doing and I think there are endeavors where consistency is really valuable cohesive teams where you know that someone's your right hand the other person's your left hand and so you sort of function as one big organism there's Great Value to that in some instances in some areas creating a TV show like Doctor Who over a 60-year period That's not a good recipe for Success you can't have just the same every day for 60 years and expect your show to be successful as the whole world changes 50 different ways so you need newness and creativity and Novelty there but I do think that automation is really really important having consistency in the same thing in some domains is really really valuable investing is a great example where if you try and reinvent the wheel every time the market changes in some way it's it's exhausting and you're by making changes you're likely to fail you're likely to make bad decisions one of the best indications of success in the long run in investing is not making decisions Warren Buffett talks about this the 20 hold card punch his his idea is that when you're born you get to a little card that says this is your investment card you get to punch it 20 times throughout the course of your life so you can only make 20 investment decisions or trades throughout the whole course of your life and his idea is the value of that is it stops you from making tons of bad decisions when you make a decision you're careful about it because you've only got 19 more than 18 and 17 but it really raises the bar for when a decision should be made often Omission is better than action and so that's again in favor of automation I think you just have to know when when to shake things up and we have limited resources so you know there's a lot of research on on how we think and the the way we we describe this in in cognitive science is the system one processing and system two processing system one is automatic it's based on existing rules if every time you enter the store to buy a soda and you had to start from scratch and say well now let me spend the next half an hour looking at every soda all the ingredients figuring out the right decision you'd be paralyzed you'd never get anywhere and so you what you do is you say I know Coca-Cola I'm going to take that one and have that one because I know it's good save my resources for something else so most of our decisions are like that system two decisions take up a huge amount of energy and time and and thought and those are the ones where you're really starting from scratch from the bottom up now like what career should I pursue which car should I buy which home should I buy which town should I live in how many kids should I have these are questions you spend a huge amount of time thinking about as you should and they're hungry for information when we're going through those those processes but you you need the automation the consistency the team that's been together for a long time for most of what you do yeah no that's great thank you that was um it was a really I just love that Concepts and started thinking about him so thank you so I have four kids Josh has three kids you mentioned you have two kids and I'm now 19 next month will be 19 years in my current business that I've seen Grown I and this is more of just nothing more than my own personal example I've noticed that as my kids have gotten older they've taught me a lot about business for a number of different reasons for better or worse so since you mentioned you have children of your own what have they taught you about some research that you already had and like shed some more light on this this really works or hey no I need to go back and do some more research yeah so it's really interesting my my kids when I was writing the previous book the day I had it in that manuscript which was in 2016. I know exactly the date it was the day my son was born because in that morning I handed the manuscript in and then my son was born later that evening I I remember for the third book what a different experience it was writing the third book Because by then I had two kids and so things were very very different I'd learned quite a lot one of the things I learned was that second book was about screens and how we grapple with screens and how we learn how to live our lives in the non-digital world given how much of a suck the digital world exerts on us it pulls Us in and one of the things I remember with my son was I'd written about how you know kids not having kids yet I wrote about how kids struggle to deal with screens and the screens are so exciting to them and interesting to them and I remember the very first time my son ever smiled was when I had my phone on my lap and he leaned across and he sort of swiped it accidentally and the screen picture changed and his eyes went big and he smiled at the screen I was like well that's the first time I got him to smile was when he actually accidentally swiped my screen trying to exert control on the world and and one thing I realized one one thing was I I sort of imagined that his first smile would be in response to something a little bit more romantic than swiping a screen by mistake but it wasn't but what what I learned from that was how important even from a very young age controllers and how much humans crave it and so his first experience controlling the world in a way that felt like he had exerted himself on the world and it had responded was was intoxicating to him so a lot of my research has been about trying to find that control in a world that I think is is increasingly difficult to control things are things are more and more I don't know it feels like things are moving faster it's harder for us to get on top of the way the world works and so this book is an attempt to do essentially what my son did with the phone that day which is to uh to bring back control for processes that feel like they're they're overwhelming to a lot of people I've been speaking to kids I think the other kind of parenting question I picked up on was just this kids ask a lot of questions and I like the fact that you pointed out the fact that kids sort of ask tons of questions and one of my children in particular is um boy he will wear you out with the questions you get a chance um and I know it's good to encourage him I think the thing I was how do I help you know teach how do we teach adults to be more Curious right because clearly many of us had it at one point in our life and you know how do we how how do you help your MBA students and even going out into companies like how do you how do we build this culture of curiosity to actually be more like children right in this way to ask more questions yeah that's that's the chapter I write about experimentalism as a sort of philosophy a way to approach the world and and um you know we'd mentioned a little bit earlier this idea of um of Dick Fosbury changing the way we do the high jump and Dave burkoff changing the way people did backstroke in the late 80s and um the way that happens is you have to question things that are seen as Orthodoxy as as they are the way that you do this particular thing and they always have been and they are entrenched and so in whatever you do whether you're in a particular business whether you're an athlete I'm also a runner so when I run I'm constantly asking myself I take this many breaths I have this many strides a minute I look at my Strava data and I look at my heart rate data and I'm constantly asking like a bit of a Madman um could things be different is there a tweak for me that would be like burkhoff's tweak for the backstroke or fosberries tweak for the the high jump and I think that's that's a it's a habit that you can ingrain and teach yourself to ask questions about everything and I mean you could do this right now think about whatever your business is whatever you happen to do whether you're in business or not um anything that's important to you ask five questions about things that you take for granted as being true these are you know unassailable truths and ask yourself why they have to be true and whether there might be Alternatives and one of the exercises I do with people sometimes is come up with three alternatives for the the five things that feel like they are the most have to be this way like in your world in your world whatever your world may be these are the five things that have to be this way well now what are three alternatives to that and what happens if you shake things up in that direction and it's really instructive because it shows you that even the things that you see as foundational as essential and as immutable as impossible incapable of being changed they can be changed and sometimes when you when you think about it even for one minute you realize oh that there's a sort of over the hill there there's there's some a pasture that looks really interesting I've never even considered going there maybe I should try it for a month and that's what experimentalism is all about it's like saying well let's make the next year let's make the rest of this year or the the next 12 months 12 separate periods to experiment with 12 different things I'm going to tweak things for the next 12 months and that'll bring back dividends for the next 20 30 40 years and so that's that's the sort of thing that I think you can learn from kids because they're obviously early on in their lives everything's sort of they get wide-eyed about everything but we should be doing the same thing as adults there's no reason for us not to be just as curious about whether things could be better than they are yeah I think the other question can I jump in a little more please do um was thinking about that what I rhetoric kind of building on the experimentation was proceeding experimentalism and exploitation right the other half of that yeah I've noticed in some scenarios I liked what you talked about the cycling between those two um and I was thinking about I have some scenarios in business where literally the cycle between experimentation and exploitation will be day to day week to week because I pay we're building a technology product so we go do Discovery with a with a client that they give us some insights or the customer gives us some insights we go do a design and show it back to them they say yes that's it we go build it right and that takes a course of you know a couple of weeks versus some kinds of experimentalism and exploitation like it takes years right you spend years in experimentalism Phase so how do you think about sort of the the time-based kind of overlay on that back and forth and then what when do you think about you know okay I can rotate between these two or toggle between these two frequently enough too frequently if you could tell me more that was another space I was curious about yeah so we've talked a lot about experimentalism which is one half of the equation for Success there's a lot of research showing that you can experiment but if you experiment forever you'll never actually commit to anything and that's not a recipe for success and the other half as you mentioned is is exploitation which sounds like a bad term it doesn't sound very nice but the idea is you're experimenting until you find something that works and then you you go deep into that thing whatever it is having experimented you know that this is the best of all options in theory and then you make a lot of value you get a lot of value from it and there are a lot of examples of of um film directors and writers or artists or book writers people who tried five or six different approaches before they realized this is this is gold for me and then they went deep and they figured out you know Jackson Pollock with his his spatter paint spatter approach that wasn't where he began his artistic career he tried a whole lot of other stuff before realizing hey this is gold and so then he he did really well with that approach and I think you're right that it's going to be domain specific where you switch from experimentation to exploitation and I think what you need from experimentation before you move on to the exploitation phase is you need feedback and you need to have learned something and in some domains that move really fast feedback comes quickly um it in the tech World maybe if that's if that's a domain that you're in you might get rapid feedback if you get user data that comes in you know big tranches of user data coming in every day you're learning things constantly but if you're creating a product and you're prototyping and you're trying five or six different iterations you're exploring your options and that takes time it takes time to manufacture it to get it out into Market to test Market it and so on and so your experimentation phase might last a year or two years or three years you just have to figure out for your domain that you're in how long it takes you to get that feedback that allows you to then say I've experimented with versions one to ten I know that version seven is gold this is where I'm diving in um and there are a lot of examples of this not just in business not just in creativity it's funny that the area where I got really interested in this was was truffles finding truffles oh yeah in Italy and there's this whole process they use where they get these these this this one breed of dog in the whole world that can sniff out truffles but here's the magic it doesn't eat them when it finds them because they used to use truffle finding pigs to find these truffles these sort of fungi that grow under the ground but the pigs would freak out when they found them and they'd eat them all so you spend all this time looking for them so they found this dog that roves the roams around the the hillsides in Italy where they tend to grow and sometimes they find a patch really fast sometimes the exploration phase goes on for much longer but once you find that patch you've got to spend a lot of time there to make sure you find all the little species of truffle that are there because it's incredibly valuable um and so there that their cycle of Explorer exploration and exploitation shifts depending on how the exploration phase goes in the first place I think that's true for any domain yeah no I like that and that feedback piece is great um so thank you yeah that was very helpful well good well hey Adam congratulations on your book Thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule um I have like 30 more questions to ask you I'm sure so what's what's one thing just just leave us with one last parting comment that uh you'd like you know you've written this book you've done all the research what's the one thing that you want our listeners and those watching us on YouTube to take from um your book that you just that's coming out on May 16th this year yeah so a lot of my Consulting has been focused on a process known as the friction audit it's where you essentially audit your business or your life you find friction points and you sand them down and it's it's been really useful and I think the the big philosophy behind it that I find has been useful for me personally and that seems to be useful for others is that we we tend to add a lot when we're trying to improve things like you have a business and you say I'm going to make it even sweeter my product's going to be even better I'm going to the service is gonna I'm gonna add three extra features and we we complicate things but I think the first thing to do if you want to return on investment and not to spend too much in the process is to strip away simplify remove remove the elements that are in essential and that's that's key to a friction audit is to go through and to sand down the bits that are maybe a little bit Jagged and so in general as a default the thing that I've I've learned the most through this process of researching for this book is that for almost everyone in almost every context the best first move is to strip away the stuff that's in essential rather than trying to bolt on new flashy extras and and that's that's been very valuable for me well super well we won't keep you any more time but I will say we'll have a link to your book at the bottom of the podcast and uh if they want to find out more about you know what a friction audit is where do they go uh you can find me on uh Twitter you can find me on LinkedIn and uh you can also find at my web page where I have a lot of this information I'm going to have some downloadables one pages on things like the friction audit there if you just search for Adam alter and uh anatomy of a breakthrough you'll find all of that pretty easily um but uh thank you both thanks Josh and Eric for having me I really appreciate it okay thanks so much thank you so much Adam appreciate it and uh blessings thank you

Channel: The Consultant and the Coach

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Length: 56min 17sec (3377 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023