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Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg voice and host of Inside Personal Growth. And Jeff I've been doing this for a long time 18 years and over 1250 podcast. But it's infrequent that I run across a book as interesting as the Art of change, and we're going to join. Jeff DeGraff is joining us from University of Michigan.

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Right, Jeff, is that where you are today? Correct? Okay. He's actually sitting in his office there, as you can see. Jeff, basically is a professor there. And I'm going to give a little the viewers a little background, but he also owns interview atrium is I say that right. And innovate trim, innovate trim, just like atrium.

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But you know, and you can get there by going to I in an over at our I U-M dot org.org. There you can learn about his books, his resources, his teams, his services, his providing. And so let me tell him a bit about you. I'm really thrilled to have you on the show. It's been about a month since our pre-interview, and I've been waiting for this interview.

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So clinical professor at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and the founder of Innovate Trim, an innovation consulting company. He spent over three decades working with fortune 500 executives, the military commanders, NASA leaders, helping them navigate transformation and innovation. He's also the coauthor of this brand new book with his wife, that was published, past April.

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Just makes the approach unique in his revolutionary framework. And doesn't shy away from contradictions. Instead, he embraces them. His book explores seven fundamental paradoxes that actually drive transformation growth. Like how we can achieve more by doing less. Why creating, why certainty often leads to failure. And when resistance becomes the catalyst for change. So welcome, Jeff to the show.

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Thank you, Jeff, again for being on hey, right for me on, it's it's an honor to have you on honestly. And again, there's another website for Jeff too. It's just Jeff DeGraff Jeff degraff.com there. You can learn more about his books. You can connect with him, what's going on in the news, his speeches and things that he's doing.

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He's very active. You can look him up on YouTube as well. So. All right, so look, this is a crazy winding road. You're a professor. You and your wife have written three books, and, this one is transforming the paradoxes into breakthroughs. How did you get here? Just tell us listeners a bit about your background and why you're so passionate about this topic.

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Because you are one of the most passionate guys I've met. Well, my mission in life is the democratization of innovation. And, I worked on for many years very large innovation systems we call ecosystems. So the first one, first thing I did was crazy. I was brought to Ann Arbor when I was 25 years old. So I'm one of those blue collar kids who kind of got lucky and went through college is a teamster.

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You know, I'm from the neighborhood, if you will. But somehow I got through with, with the technical Ph.D. as a young man. Was brought to Michigan into the medical school. Didn't like it. I met a guy with about a 20 to $50 million pizza company, and I became an executive in building Domino's Pizza, which was the fastest growing company in the United States in the early 80s.

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And we basically created the delivery business. So I learned a lot about connecting dots, different kinds of people. And so when Michigan came knocking and said, well, we'd like you to teach you the business school, I remember thinking, no, it this is no, because I spent my career kind of going around these people. Well, they convinced me I've been you now 36 years.

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And that's what brought me to Apple. And working on Apple Net, which becomes iTunes and working on Coke Zero and Hulu and a bunch of stuff. And most of my work is about connecting dots, taking very large groups of people that have different ideas about the world and how you get them all together to build something better and new.

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Well, you do a wonderful job of it, you know? And you opened this book with Colonel Lewis's story about military technology acquisition during Covid. Now Covid is, look, this was a huge shift in our world. So many things happened technologically. As a matter of fact, the system that we're operating on today, I think had only evolved a little bit prior to the zoom, Covid and you made your, you this made you realize that organizations simultaneously love change, but hate.

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They're change makers. Can you explain? Because most change that occurs whether somebody is intentionally trying to do a change initiative inside of a company or change happens externally from things that happen in our world, like Covid and were forced to adopt. Explain how people get to embrace this change versus going oh my God, it's Covid. Watch out for the train, here it comes.

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Yeah, well the story I start the book with this story of saying, I had a very small role in the development of the acquisition process for the Covid vaccine, and I worked with a man in the military. We're going to call him Louise. And, the, the first challenge and this is the way a lot of change works.

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The first challenge was in Covid. It was how to acquire new technology faster. And because of my work in the tech sector, they came looking for me and said, how, you know, how would we do this? Well, I it wasn't a month later that Covid hit and I got called into all the middle of this, which you can imagine was no fun.

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And so the very beginning of this had to do with the groups that were responsible to create a vaccine for this went like this. And they immediately tried to use the existing systems that they had, and it was clear that they weren't working. They spent a lot of money, a lot of time. And I want I want to be very honest with your listeners.

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It was a challenge when I got brought into this that not everyone liked it, but one of the things I understood was that there's creative power and constructive conflict. Now, the key word here is constructive. The key word here is positive, not tearing people down, not prejudicial. That's that's out of bounds. I'm talking about when you're pursuing like entrepreneurs one thing, but people have different ideas.

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So what we had to do was widen the funnel. We had greatly widen the funnel. So we went from a handful of people trying to solve it who had never solved the problem like this ever, to a much larger group. About 500 people ended up in phase one trials, and then it basically came down very quickly, and we took an eight year process and did it in eight months, which, which was which was stunning.

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But it wasn't inventing. It was pulling in. It was saying, who knows who's who's who's the expert at this? And then what was interesting was we had nine therapies in September by September 9th of 2020, which was astounding. And if you remember, Greg, remember, the rest of the world looked at us. Did America forget how to do this?

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Here's the man you know, America. No, no, no, we know how to do this. But we did it in the way we know how to do this by bringing these different groups together with different ideas and kind of shaking the box. But here's the other part of the story. The guy who was responsible for bringing all this together didn't get promoted.

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And part of what I need everybody to understand is organizations have two roles. One role is to stabilize, and that's what managers do. And the next row a role is to grow, and that's builders do. And the interesting thing is when organizations are healthy they do both. But you know and I know once we kind of get to that next piece what be a peak.

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A lot of times the, the change maker is the first one to go. So I don't want to sugarcoat this. I want everybody to understand the real challenge of this real change takes real change makers. Well, that's a real life story that I think anybody can relate to, which is, you know, you were thrown into that mix to bring 500 people together and within nine months create some solutions or some outcome from that.

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And my hat's off to you on that. Now you distinguish between what you call change theater and real transformation. I think for people reading the book, they'll get it. But can you help the listeners identify when they're witnessing genuine change, as you call it, versus performance? Yeah. What a difference. Yeah, there's a lot of change theater. There's a lot of we're going to follow this process.

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If the people who are in charge before the change are in charge after the change, if the people of the money are the same, people have the money after the changes they were before the change. You didn't change. All you did was rearrange the furniture. So the issue becomes a lot of what people talk about. Change is really change theater.

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And I think a lot of it is project management. There's a lot of X marks the spot stuff. Real change is building the bridge as you walk over. It is my friend Bob Quinn, famously said, and I think he's right. There's a whole issue of ambiguity and paradox in change that you have to work through. And, you know, and I'd be the first to tell you, I'm a terrible hypocrite, Gregg.

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I hate doing it. I hate it, right? I have to do it all the time. I can't stand it, but it's the only way to get through it. You're kind of feeling your way forward. If X marks the spot and you're able to hit it, you probably haven't changed very much. It's probably sort of an incremental tweaking of something.

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Real change takes real transformation. So you you talked these about these paradoxical mindsets in the book. And one is you call it the either or mindset versus the paradoxical mindset. Why do most people default to like single mindedness? I mean, we're talking about what you've had to go through when facing complex problems. Is it just overwhelm? Is it not understanding?

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Is it a fear of facing something they've never seen before or all of the above? So all the above? I mean, yeah, there's an issue that we saw during Covid which is called cognitive overload. You know, these poor doctors were trained, you know, to do one thing or all of a sudden thrown into the air and they have to do 87 things and they freeze, just like sometimes soldiers doing combat.

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Right. But it's not this is nothing. To talk down to people's is very difficult kind of stuff. I would say. The big thing is this, though, what people forget is what people believe is far stronger than anything else. And I have a one of the paradoxes I listed the books is that, we use facts to change people's minds, but facts don't change people's minds.

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And we all know that we've been on social media. You know, the person who went berserk. Forget about religion or politics. You know, they went berserk about Franken food or GMOs. And yet and you showed some rational ways of thinking about it. Then they just get more inflamed. And I want to point out how how incredible this is.

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Now, it depends on whether you look at the Johns Hopkins studies or the Brown University studies. But out of the first million people who died of Covid in the United States, some are between 25 and 40% of those people died because they refused the vaccine. People will die rather than change their mind. And I want everybody get this.

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This is what we need. I'm not trying to make a political statement. This is not a political statement. I love everybody right. But the point is people would rather die than change their mind. That is a real issue because when you change your mind, there's a whole lot of other stuff in your life that changes. Your relationships change.

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You know what you know, if you could go all the way to what you believe about the world, so that becomes the biggest thing. The only thing that really changes minds is experiences. Experiences change minds it and true experience because there's people that are in the inner circle and people are on the outer circle. So a good example of that, I'll bring this up at this point is, okay.

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That owns or founded the Land Institute, West Jackson, and he's currently working on Kernza, which is the new grain, and he's working on perennial farming. And we know the degradation of our soils. Now, my friend, just completed the documentary, which was most of it funded by Peter Buffett, and I'm involved in the promotion of it. But the slowness to change by our agricultural and corporate, we don't want to call them farming practices is just so hard to get people.

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What would you what might you say if you were talking to West Jackson, who, by the way, is aligned with Michigan, your university? What would you what would you say to this group of people? This is a real life example. It's got me concerned and I think West said, if you're not trying to solve a problem that's bigger than you in your lifetime, you're not trying to solve the right problems.

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I'm with West all the way on this. It takes to West. First of all, I would say two things to West. Yeah. First of all, all great innovators. I write a lot about this, and I call it standing at the edge of the circle. All great innovators stand at the edge of the circle, and they usually have their whole life, you know, the middle of the circle, you become Dean or you become the company president.

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And innovators don't want that. What they want is freedom. They want to their builders. They naturally want things to be better and new. That's their that's their zeitgeisty. Yeah. So I can say they say this because I'm organized like this, right? They're not very good in the middle where you're managing things. So West is going to be on the outside, which allows him to see the future first.

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And he's going to be very frustrated that the people in the middle don't. He's the canary in the coal mine, if you will. Yeah, yeah. All people are like who are like that. Now, here's what he needs to wait for. There's always an inflection point. You can define the inflection point or the, you know, the burning platform or whatever you want to trigger event.

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They raise a ton of terms for this. And here's what you need to understand. And all your listeners need to understand the basic apparatus. The modus operandi of an organization is to maintain its equilibrium the way thing. That's why people say, you know, the way things used to be a buck. Yeah, but the world isn't like that anymore, right now, I need you to think about your life as a bell curve.

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Think about your life is a bell curve, Greg. When do you really change? Really? It change when your life sucks, when you get a divorce, when you lose your job, when you go belly up, when somebody close to you dies. And the reason is simple. The risk of trying something radical and the reward of staying where you're at is reversed.

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And a crisis. So. So what people get wrong, why they think West might be getting wrong. Although I don't think he is is it's not the 8020 rule, it's the 2080 rule. It's easier to change 20% of an organization, 80%, than it is to change 80% of an organization 20% less. Repeat this. Yeah, it's easier to change 20% of an organization 80% than 80% of an organization 20%.

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But you gotta find the crisis. Don't believe it. The most valuable. The first company to ever make $1 trillion in capitalized value was Apple was trading below $5 a share in 1997. Risk and reward is reversed now. The other time is when you're on a roll, when you're on a roll, which is what you're talking about post-Covid. That's exactly what you're talking about.

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All of a sudden, we're on zoom and mRNA technologies dealing with childhood leukemia. We think we might have a, you know, we might have some ideas about diabetes. Now. And all of the sudden this stuff starts coming out because we're on a roll. There's investment, there's attention paid to it. We have some Nobel laureates. You have to think about change as moving from the outside in, not from the inside out.

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So West has got to find an inflection point. He's got to find something that's going really wrong. So in California you're having a problem with fires, right? Go to the southeast. You're having a problem with flooding, right. All of the sudden people's opinions are changing because they're at the edges of the curve on this. Is this making sense?

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That's where you want. So in a sense you have one flip okay. Yeah. To change at the yeah at the base. You know he is making progress by creating awareness with the documentary. But what I would say is it's it's a great example of what we're talking about for somebody who is on the outside edge, kind of looking the other direction.

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And I love your analogies about change. The book talks about seven first principles included abundance of ideas and risk taking, which you just manage. Which of these principles do you see leaders struggling with? Like West's, most in today's business environment? I the first one, we seek to change others, but we can only change ourselves. I know I sound like a new age person and I should have an institute or something.

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But the point is, you know, I start by telling the story of this girl I dated in college. I was a wrestler in college, and, she spoke. I liked everything about it. She spoke. And I tried all the things that you tried to get. Somebody stop smoking. Right? You try. Was that Katie? Yeah. Katie. Yeah. So I couldn't get her to stop smoking.

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I got to start smoking. And, you know, I really liked her. She's real pretty and smart and everything. And I really liked her. But, you know, I would say she wanted to go to Broadway. I'd say I'm going to be doing a thing out in New York. Let's go. But I can't stay in a hotel room if you can change smoke.

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She didn't go with me. You do the threatening part at the other end, you know. Well, here's. And you do the information part. Here's what the Surgeon General says. Right. So at the end, she, you know, she dumped me, which, of course, I would have dumped me, too. I'm a stupid 18 year old at the time, and but not that I've gotten any smarter.

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But what was interesting was I had met her years later in a grocery store, and, I'd be graduating. They talk about this in the book, and I noticed she wasn't smoking, and I had to ask. I said, okay, why'd you stop smoking? And she said, I met a guy that's. Oh, I feel like this tall at this point.

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And she said, and he really loves me. And he never pressured me to do this. And I decided that I was going to be good to myself. So I quit and I thought, there it is. So at a very early age, you can't change people. What you can do is you can encourage them in a particular way. You can.

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You know, you can surround them with ways for them to come to decisions on their own. And it's like being a parent, you know, that. You know, you, you, you bring up in me some really interesting stuff because I've studied this for a long time. There's a book that was out by MIT called Immunity to Change or Immunity to Change, and it was about a study at Kaiser about doctors that would tell people who just had a heart attack, they need to do this, this, this and this and change.

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And if you don't change and then within six months, they were doing all the wrong things back again that they used to do prior to the heart attack. Right. And I remember the studies and it was so paradoxical because it's like you would think if somebody had just been through a heart attack, that they'd certainly listen to the doctor who was telling them to change, but they weren't listening at all.

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Let's well, look at statistically, people in the lottery go bankrupt like four times more common than a normal person does because the behaviors don't change. But that's the point of the paradox, Greg, isn't it? The point is, it's not about you can't go from having a sedentary lifestyle and eating sausage every day to eating kale. So the paradox is, you have to work through the old lifestyle to the new lifestyle and find something that works.

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So maybe you're not eating pork sausage, maybe you're eating something leaner. And I think part of the problem with change is we try and flip this switch and go all the way. And you know, we all know these people. They're always on a diet or they've always got the inside track on how to make a gazillion dollars. And it's all like, ta da!

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But it never works that way. One of the, I think one of the most, one of the most caustic phrases that people use in the business community is go big or go home. I can tell you this, being around these people my whole life, most of them go home. Yeah, because real change is usually done in steps. And and you know, not not all of it sticks.

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So look at somebody trying to quit smoking. Going back to Katie. You know, when somebody tries to have a cold turkey, most of the time that doesn't work in most the programs that work, you know, you know, you stop smoking for half a day, then you smoked again. But you have to forgive yourself. So the next day you go back and try it.

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So it just kind of this muscle memory you're building. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I you when you said kale and sausage was a good analogy because they just had, Doctor Michael Greger on the show about his work, which almost everybody knows who he is. Right. Because he's this vegan who basically, professes that that's what's going to could save you, right?

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It could. Well, your longevity would be more. But, you know, the thing that you talked about, you have you know, you you have this story about your dismissal and then this case about helping franchisees is brutally honest. How did you recognize your own voice of judgment to change your approach to conflict? Because they think this is in the personal stories and key paradoxes.

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This is a good one. Yeah, I'd say this, Obviously in the book I very unmasked about what the companies are, but it's a company everybody knows that I got brought into the company. And again, I'm one of the guys that one of the executives that was at Domino's with Domino's sort of invented this industry. Right. And we didn't mean to make people fat either.

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Right. So I want to point that out. No sauce or pizza. But I went into this company and there were a lot of people who said, look how great we're doing. And the reason I got brought in by very senior person was to say, well, you know, you know, these other companies have come in and done coffee and these other things, and you're losing market share to them.

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And the more belligerent they became, the more it triggered my stuff, because when I was building or working a building with a lot of other people, Domino's, some of the franchisees could be challenging. Can we say that? And so emotionally, I'm leaking out. And by the time I got dismissed, I had to. It was pretty clear to me that I was not in the right frame of mind.

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So there's this other issue about, are you being generous? Are you trying to be positive with these people? And this is Greg is my cross to bear. You know, I'm from a blue collar neighborhood. I came up as an athlete. It's very hard for me when I see somebody sort of dig in with a bad idea that they're going to lose.

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It's very hard for me to be generous, and it's a lot of it's sort of it's sort of personal therapy. How do I get to a mental space? And so what I typically do, if we're talking about constructive conflict here, there's the two modus operandi. I have the two ways I operate. One, I like to lean in and talk to the people are very different than I am.

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I do, I'm a good listener and I do adopt some of those things. But I also, Greg, have bad days. And when I have a bad day, what I try and do is let somebody know I'm having a bad day. I need to disconnect because I think I'm going to be the source of the problem here. Right. And I think in that case, I just was not self-aware enough to do it.

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Recognize to to do that. Yeah, I can imagine because the voice of judgment was there and you knew you needed to change. But, again, you. Yeah, I like your approach. Change is gradual. But Katie didn't quit smoking because you told her to see her in a grocery store. She's now not smoking. And you argue that change is driven by deviance for leaders listening who work in risk adverse organizations.

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How do you believe, how do or how do they balance the need for innovation with organizational stability? It's hard. And it really goes back to these inflection points you can see behind me. I'm a lot of metals. I do a lot of work with the military. The people protect us. Right. And you can imagine in those kind of organizations like a university, you know, there's a lot of hierarchy and there needs to be there are organizations that are at scale the complex.

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They need process. But at the same time, that process can be so stultifying that the whole need for freedom and growth is is stopped. So what you need to do is find the place in that hierarchy that's no longer working. Right. And that comes back to the edges of the organization. There's always a part that isn't working. That's true for your own life, too.

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What part of your life isn't working? That's the part you need to work on, right? So the so in an essence, the thing that you didn't that didn't work is where you need to focus. And I write about this in the book. I call it the paradoxical mindset cycle. Right. And I talk about the story of saying I like I'm a tree person, I live on the river, I have a lot of trees, and I love apple trees.

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Well, I have a had a beautiful apple tree. I bought a whole bunch trees. By yard I mean huge trees, 200 year old trees. And I did that. We had a really bad snowstorm and a bunch of priest came down with people cutting down. You have to. And where I live. But there was an apple tree that's leaning over the sunroom, the conservatory, my house.

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And this guy said, you want me cut it down? In his snap judgment, I said, yes, and he cut it down. And the minute he did, I regretted it. And then I said to myself, okay, what happened here. So the first thing you do is you tell your story over and over again to yourself. What happened, what happened, what happened.

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The relationship didn't work. The apple tree got cut down. Second thing that you have to do is you have to ask yourself, okay, where was the paradox? I love trees, I let this guy cut it out. I not only let him, I paid him. Cut it. That kind of a paradox. Yeah, that was like, whoa. Third, what simple rules can you divined from this?

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Well, I was panicked. Who's. You know, there's a lot of trees in the yard and make sure nobody gets hurt. I mean, these are large trees and came down, you know, the road is blocked. You know, you're in a heightened state of concern. So the first simple rule was, you know, be aware of your state of concern.

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Second syllable rule, you know, count to ten, you know, give yourself five minutes. A third simple rule, ask other people around you what other options are available. Sort of like kept the Picard right on the on the sagas, right? Yeah. And you know, and then the next thing is run an experiment. And I write in the book, you know, that I went into I ran into a situation where I ran the experiment and it worked.

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And I said, okay, so what I now know about this mindset is that I'm prone to do things that are paradoxical, that don't work for me. And what I really need to do is work through the paradox to find the thing that does work for me so that you don't regret the decision, the wise decision, because you weren't listening to Yoda.

00:29:02:10 - 00:29:25:12

You know, you bring me to this point, Jeff. This morning I did a training for, a whole group of arborists. We talk about this same thing on arbors. Right. That's how, synchronistic this is. So I can add to this discussion. And when these arborist go out to sell tree services, like your guy said, what do you want me to cut it down?

00:29:25:14 - 00:29:48:00

But there's so many other options, right. So as the you want to if you're emotionally attached to the tree, the decision shouldn't have been to cut it down. It should have been to try another option. Right. So the tree was leaning maybe because it just had to lean it wasn't going to risk your house or was it maybe your atrium.

00:29:48:05 - 00:30:06:13

So that's why you did it or premed or whatever. But the point was, is these arborist gave me like 10 or 15 different things that you could do this morning that I thought was interesting. But you chose the one chopper down. See you later. And then you regretted it afterward. And to this day, I regret it. Yeah, yeah.

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Oh, it is. You know, you don't ever get over the. That was dumb. And I'm sure all of your listeners, I just want to say I have a lot of those days, you know, I, I am not above any of this. I am it's like being in Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm working through it too. I, you know, I've got days like that was really dumb, Jeff.

00:30:24:18 - 00:30:51:14

Why why did you do that? And that's where the cycle starts again. Yeah. So that this concept of accelerating future seems counterintuitive. And you were talking about the art of change, transforming paradoxes into breakthroughs. Can you give us a practical example of how a listener right now, today, listening to this podcast, could implement this in their own work or their own life?

00:30:51:16 - 00:31:21:16

Yeah. One of the things is let's bring this down to brass tacks. You're you're you've got a job and you want something more out of your job. You've gone to a bunch of seminars about the future and I and the different kinds of I or mRNA tech, whatever it is, you're you're you're mid-career, you're older, you're not confident and going back to school, you know, you're you're stuck.

00:31:21:18 - 00:31:43:20

You've got a mortgage to pay, you got to family. My advice would be pretty simple. Number one, go back to first principles about what is it in life that you're you're really great at. So you're masterful. You're kind of one of one of a kind because the notion of try, I don't believe in the whole idea that we're able to kind of be everything.

00:31:43:20 - 00:32:03:23

There's sort of a lot of self-help about that. At the end of the day, there's there's 1 or 2 things at the most that were really spectacular, but one, identify that and talk to people close to you. What is that? Number two, we get stuck in the planning cycle. We go to the meeting about the meeting, the report, about the report.

00:32:03:23 - 00:32:25:01

We think too much about what's going to work and what's not going to work. And because of that, what we end up doing is one of two things. We either get stuck in the planning cycle and never change, or we go all in and blow up our life. You know, this is the I was a nurse and now I'm a baker and nobody comes but my bakery.

00:32:25:03 - 00:32:44:09

So what you want to do is quite different. Greg, you want to take a series of experiments and you want to start them immediately. Like now, the next two weeks give them very little money and very little time. And what you're trying to do is accelerate the failure cycle, not avoid it. And the reason you're hedging is because you can take little risks.

00:32:44:11 - 00:33:03:14

So, you know, you sell those brownies, see if the perceived the see if the nice restaurant in your town will buy you brownies, see if they'll take your consignment of a book, a novel you've written. You've made a few copies of it, little things so you don't embarrass yourself. You don't feel like you're a failure. You're trying little things in.

00:33:03:14 - 00:33:22:23

The reason you're trying them is you're looking for feedback. And most importantly, this is the quality control people you're looking for. Confirming feedback where you're wrong, where you're wrong, and try to accelerate that. So you go from four little experiments to two, and now the two get a little more juice and then one. And what's going to happen?

00:33:22:23 - 00:33:46:06

And anybody's ever made a big change, they'll know that there's a thread that got pulled right. So the second piece is now we're on to something. Now the third thing nobody gets from here to there are low. Who travels with you? And the people who travel with you shouldn't be like you. The people who like you on Facebook are not the people you want to start a business with.

00:33:46:08 - 00:34:14:04

They right? They're your friends. They love your stuff. They're not going to help you. They're not expanding your horizon, making you better. So those three things one, what are you, masterful or unique? Get to hedge, diversify and movement the universe. Yeah, well, now I sound like a new rich guy. The universe ups. The universe loves movement, momentum, and then three series attracted.

00:34:14:05 - 00:34:36:15

You will attract new people. And that's. And it's scary because some of the new people you'll attract really well, you maybe you're not exactly sure about this person. Yeah. Good. That's you're not supposed to be. And then what you have to do is once you get momentum, you got to keep momentum. That's been my whole career. So in a sense, this is where Tom Peters, the famous business guru, was right.

00:34:36:17 - 00:34:55:08

We are just a collection of projects. We're a collection. It's like a you're like an artist. Yeah. You're, you know, your last show, I was watching a documentary on Janis Ian, the wonderful songwriter singer. And, you know, there's, you know, I don't know how many shows she's had. She's a million them, some of them great and some have not been great to.

00:34:55:08 - 00:35:17:06

Some have been great not covered in, some were not great. And they were covered unlike you just have to understand that's part of the deal. So I think what you're saying though, Jeff, is, is in this accelerating failure and pardon me for interrupting you, but you you brought up another story in me, and that was when I used to work with Larry Wilson.

00:35:17:08 - 00:35:35:24

And we used to play a game where there was $1 million on one side, and there'd be all these little dots and circles across the thing, and you'd have to go, Craig, you probably remember this, and most people would be afraid to step on the landmine. Right? And the reality is, is you want to find out where as many of those landmines are as possible.

00:35:36:04 - 00:35:57:01

And but that's my movement. That's not my fear. You can't let fear paralyze you to not make the movement to stop the clock. So the reality is, if you started with a million and the clock's ticking down and you're sitting there going, oh, man, I'm worried I'm going to step on a landmine, just like you said. Test it a little bit at a time, find out where you're getting acceptance.

00:35:57:01 - 00:36:18:19

See where you can go next, and then you'll work your way across the the pond and not drown. There's it's kind of I would I would just add to that this idea, I think there's a kind of, there's an insensitivity when people say, you know, in a crisis, you pivot. And I think that's very insensitive because there's a lot of the dark nights of the soul.

00:36:18:19 - 00:36:46:06

Your stomach hurts, it's back, and I'm the first person to tell you I'm a total hypocrite. If I could not change, I would not change. Right? Right. You have to. So to me, the point is simply this. You know, when you're in that situation, the only way out is forward. That's like it. And in a sense, you kind of have to try and forget the history of all this, because if you do it, you're going to it's going to weigh you down.

00:36:46:08 - 00:37:04:21

What you're trying to do is say, what did I learn from all this? And how do I get it out of this, going in a different direction? We all have. And you know, there's even theories about how I, you know, every 24 years, one theory says nothing, you know. So I don't know, I don't know, I don't know enough about the cycles.

00:37:04:21 - 00:37:23:17

But to know that there's always inflection points and half the inflection points are not things that happen to us. They're things that we do. So almost in all of our lives, it's like chapters where we ran, we had a life of a certain point, and then that chapter ended and even though we knew it was kind of ending when it ended, we're kind of lost.

00:37:23:19 - 00:37:46:23

You lose the job, you lose the relationship. You, you know, you lose a parent. Whatever it is we're here and and it's awful. I don't want to make this so nice, but the only way forward is forward. Yeah. Hey, that's about as simple as it gets. That's great advice. You have to move. You can't let inertia just let you sit there.

00:37:47:00 - 00:38:18:18

And one of the people that you profiled in the book toward the end and your conclusion is Benjamin Franklin. Now, I happen to have been blessed by having an author who wrote several books about Benjamin Franklin recently be on the show and then come to a university here close by and talk, it in. And so in this case, he kind of viewed both his life and his country as a work in progress, just like what you're talking about.

00:38:18:23 - 00:38:46:09

Yeah. And he there were so many things that he did. And I think that Michael Douglas portrayed him, when they did the the documentary was really quite an interesting documentary, to be honest with you. But how can leaders embrace this incompleteness as a superpower rather than a and as a weakness? Yeah, I think there's kind of a couple pieces to it.

00:38:46:09 - 00:39:14:08

The first piece is every in every age of our life, things are going to change. Let's start with that rational table stakes. So, you know, one of the things I really hate, I have to be honest with you, is somebody will say, this is the greatest period change ever, you know, okay, you're in the 12th century, Leon, France, and, you know, and the Crusades marked back through town and three quarters of the people die.

00:39:14:10 - 00:39:41:20

Well, that's pretty big change. Or, you know, the infidels at the gate or whatever. It's always the greatest period of change. Always. So those first step stop the delusion, the human condition is all about that. And and then it ends. Right. So I know I'm full of good news here, right. But the point is, so the way in which a leader can deal with this is to become very aware at situational efficacy.

00:39:41:22 - 00:39:59:16

And think of it like this way. Think of it like a bull market or a bear market, right? When the market's a bull market, if you're a bear trader, you're going to not make any money. And if it's a bear, if it's a bull market and you're a bear trader, right, you're going to you get the point. You lose your heels, you lose everything.

00:39:59:18 - 00:40:19:03

So the point is you have to lead according to what the situation is. It's not this. Again, this is where self-help literature is completely wrong. It's not about what you want to do. That's a lot of narcissistic. The universe revolves around. It doesn't. There's a situation and you have to manage to it. Now we all have different ranges.

00:40:19:03 - 00:40:42:15

I know I don't have a lot of it. My range is about this big, so I have to bring a lot of people in who are different than me, who have different ideas than me, right? Which is scary. Right? So as a leader, as people change, you have two choices. You can either change with the situation right as it changes, or you can enlist other people.

00:40:42:15 - 00:41:00:19

So one of the things that I see, for example, right now in big organizations, I see a lot of people where we're trying to deal with this technological shift to I shoot, and I don't even think that's as big as the shift from mRNA. I think what's happening in the biotech industry and in maybe in power generation is far bigger, right?

00:41:00:19 - 00:41:20:23

The notion all of a sudden that we might actually know how to, you know, create energy without sort of destroying our environment anymore, although it might be nuclear, didn't Tesla not already have that a long time ago? Yeah. Wow. And I think it got shelved. It's somewhere else. Well there's there are always political issues out there right. Yeah.

00:41:21:00 - 00:41:41:05

Whatever. You're whatever side you choose or whatever you. Yeah I think we have an abundance of power. But let's we go on from that last point. I'm trying to make it simple that you have to optimize to that situation in that chapter, or you have to find somebody else who can. And that's what I that's what I would say to leaders.

00:41:41:06 - 00:41:56:20

I'd say the same thing to people who are under leaders. You know, we have to forgive our leaders for not being great at everything. So we've got a lot of leaders for kind of like my age. And even though I have a background in artificial intelligence. Right. Leaders my age who are just not fluent did that.

00:41:56:20 - 00:42:13:19

And so we get young people saying, I don't know why he doesn't or she doesn't do this stuff like she does know how. So maybe your job is to help them do that, right? Maybe you're the maybe you're the missing link to that. And I bet they'd appreciate it. And I had one of the thing nobody cares about.

00:42:13:21 - 00:42:36:07

I hate to say this. Nobody cares about your innovation. Nobody. What they care about is you solving their problem. Right? That's the whole idea of change in innovation. Everybody reads their own horoscope first. Well, one of the things you just mentioned about bringing yourself around people with diversity, with different mindsets, different levels of knowledge to help you work through it.

00:42:36:10 - 00:43:06:13

I saw your fingers do this. You said your bandwidth was about this much, which means you need others that have greater bandwidth to be around you for you to see a particular problem in new light yourself, because you're not always the only one that comes up with this great solution. So one of the things you have done is you've lived this, you've experienced it, you've been in the trenches, you've written three books about it.

00:43:06:15 - 00:43:39:16

And so here would be my final question after this third book, the Art of change, what's the most surprising thing you have learned up till now about yourself? Number one, while writing the book? And two, how has it changed your approach to navigating change and what would you advise others up? Well, the biggest thing I've learned in this book and in all three books is how incredibly bad I am at it.

00:43:39:18 - 00:43:57:12

You know, no, I mean, you know, people look at you and they're, you know, you're the guru or, you know, I'm just bad. So and I instantly I know a lot of other people are, like, really well known people in fields like innovation and change, and they're just they're they're just, dad, I know I'm like, look, I'm in there, you know?

00:43:57:12 - 00:44:25:05

I'm working through it too, all right? So I don't want to be I'm very aware that I haven't, you know, I haven't evolved. The second thing that it really, really emphasizes to me is how important it is to get to the next place and to stop, stop the push and move to the pot. And what do you mean by that is there's a lot of things that are wrong with anybody's life.

00:44:25:07 - 00:44:46:00

Tons. Everybody can make a laundry list they wake up to in the morning with it. That's not going to help you. You're in a reactive position. You're trying to make something not happen. Tall is very different is saying, what's that, North star, what is it you're trying to get to? Right. And the only reason I come back to the Covid vaccine work the way I did was it was clear that we're trying to get to something.

00:44:46:05 - 00:45:15:13

We had to get past the past, which is hard, which is something that I've learned a lot about. And then I said the final thing about my own life and where I'm going with this. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of half truths we tell ourselves. And they they work on both sides, half truths about what we can actually think through rationally, and half truth about what we could wish for.

00:45:15:15 - 00:45:34:17

Intuitively, I really think it has to do with how these two things come together. I think a lot of great, change agents and innovators have an intuition, and then they're able to rationalize and figure out how it works. You know, think about Tesla, you know, in this whole thing and think about kind or the other way.

00:45:34:17 - 00:45:59:01

Think about Edison and how that worked. I think that that's my big takeaway is that some were in between, you know, some of the psychobabble that you read in some of the self-help stuff and some of the real hardcore kind of callous stuff you read in business or economics. Somewhere in between there, there's a Venn diagram, and that's these are real things that you can actually do.

00:45:59:03 - 00:46:22:05

So I would say it's sort of my big insight is listen to your intuition, but don't listen too much to it, listen to it, and then try and figure out what does that look like in the world. Well, that's a good way to end this, because I wrote a book called Hacking a Gap. From, intuition to innovation and beyond.

00:46:22:11 - 00:46:47:10

That's my book. And I would say, yes, intuition is important. I would also say you're talking about half truths. And I want to make a comment. I think that many of us, live in the world of MCU making shit up. So we make up a story, and then we live that story, and we we believe that that is our story.

00:46:47:12 - 00:47:13:08

The only way to break that cycle is to be aware of the story that you made up, and how incorrect it could be and the life you could live. But we we're all culprits of making stuff up and then believing that we made up and then living our lives as if that was real. So you have a give it,

00:47:13:10 - 00:47:33:24

All through. Yeah. You have given us a ton of insight today, Jeff. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for spending some time from, the university there with all of your accolades and books behind you. I can't wait to do this again. I'll definitely need one. That's sure. Your listeners can also follow me on LinkedIn.

00:47:33:24 - 00:47:59:18

I'm one of the original LinkedIn influencers, so that's an easy way to see what I'm like. Didn't you say you had a quarter million people are 600,000 over there? Whatever the number is, it's big. Who knows? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you've been around for a while, like me. And, the reason you're one of the original influencers is because you were probably there before Bill gates bought it.

00:47:59:20 - 00:48:12:23

Oh, right. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Greg, it's been a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful rest of your afternoon. And thank you. Namaste. Day to you.