Curious Minds at Work

It can seem like we’re working harder, yet rarely getting to what matters most. John Zeratsky understands how we feel and wants to help. He’s the co-author with Jake Knapp of the book, Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. Their book is an innovative way to look at our work, inspiring by years of productivity hacks that ultimately left them unfulfilled. John was a designer for tech companies like YouTube and Google before working at Google Ventures with close to 200 startups. There, he began experimenting with hundreds of teams, in order to help people accomplish their most important goals. What he discovered has been distilled to dozens of bite-sized tips and strategies readers can try out and build into their lives. John’s first book was the New York Times bestseller Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. He’s also written for The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Wired. In this interview we talk about: Why checking off items on a to-do list can make us feel productive yet unfulfilled Why we need to get off the “busy bandwagon” with meetings, email and chat How endless streams of content are bottomless “infinity pools” for our attention The direct connection between our tech’s default settings and attentional exhaustion How to keep the positive aspects of our tech and lose the not so good parts A four-part framework for making time for work we value How choosing a daily highlight can make all the difference on how we spend our time Why we should trade our to-do lists for might-do lists How to “bulldoze” our calendars to free up time for our daily highlights How making simple changes to our tech can help us create barriers to distraction Why dusting off our wristwatches may be the way to go Why quiet and boredom our invaluable for our work and our health Key ways we can design our environment so that the right decision is the easy decision Links to Episode Topics @jazer https://about.me/jazer Getting Things Done by David Allen Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam and you can find her interview here on Curious Minds Curly Lambeau and Lambeau Field https://maketimebook.com/ If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings help others find their next podcast. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. And thank you for listening and sharing!

Long hours, 24/7 access, and crushing goals have become the norm in many workplaces. Jason Fried, co-author of the book, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, thinks we need to stop celebrating this approach and, instead, actively work to create calmer organizations. Jason is the Co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, an incredibly successful project management and team communication software company. He’s written three other books about work — Getting Real, Remote, and the New York Times Bestseller, Rework. In this interview we talk about: Why it’s invaluable to think of your organization as a product How curbing our ambition can be good for us and our customers Why we should understand that “a company is just a collection of choices” Reasons why leadership needs to defend their employees’ time from distractions The important role office hours can play in helping people focus Why we should embrace JOMO over FOMO The negative aspect of encouraging employees to think of each other as family What a trust battery can do for our relationships with others at work Why we should think twice before taking on projects we believe to be low-hanging fruit Why strong writing skills can be invaluable, no matter a person’s role at work Why expecting new employees to “hit the ground running” is unfair and inefficient What job candidates gain when leaders eliminate salary negotiations The value in supporting employee learning in areas of interest outside of work What everyone gains when we slow down how we make decisions about new ideas How to make a decision when team members disagree How building reading time into the start of a meeting can make the rest of the meeting more productive Links to Episode Topics @jasonfried https://basecamp.com/ Background on concept of disagree and commit A New York Times article on JOMO Morten Hansen on his book, Great at Work, on Episode 102 of Curious Minds Tobi Lutke and Shopify Article on Jeff Bezos and reading memos at the start of meetings If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings help others find their next podcast. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. And thank you for listening and sharing!

What if you could make better decisions? Even with the biggest, life-altering choices, such as where to live, who to marry, or whether to start a company? Steven Johnson, author of the book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions that Matter the Most, thinks we often face decisions like this with little to no training and that we could use more tools in our decision-making toolbox. Steven is the bestselling author of ten books, including Wonderland, How we Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad is Good for You. He is also the host and creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. When it comes to complex decision making, he thinks we can do better, and in this interview about his latest book, Farsighted, he shares strategic approaches to help us get there. In this interview we discuss: How our most important decisions are complex and life-defining yet our approach to them is often too simple and quick Why breaking complex decisions into steps can help us get started Why you may never use a simple pros and cons list again How mapping all the variables that influence your decision can provide more wisdom Why our decision-making blindspots actually limit the kinds of decisions we make The important role outsiders or non-experts can play in expanding options for decision making Why diverse teams make more intelligent, thoughtful decisions than homogeneous teams The important roles uncertainty and lack of confidence play in making smarter decisions Why we need to take the either-or option off the decision-making table How influence diagrams can help us map who might be influenced or impacted by our decisions How charrettes can ensure we’ll get feedback from diverse stakeholders Why it’s important to speak to group members individually when trying to make a thoughtful decision The important role daydreaming plays in predicting outcomes in decision making The characteristics and practices of the most accurate predictors Why it’s important to map the degree to which we’re uncertain as we make important decisions How an effective decision-making process can help us work our way into important insights that may never have occurred to us otherwise Why we should try value models over pros and cons lists How reading novels provides decision-making simulations that help us practice Why decision making may be one of the top five skills we need to learn Links to Episode Topics https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/ @stevenbjohnson How We Got to Now|PBS Collect Pond Pierre Charles L’Enfant Paul C. Nutt Highline in NYC Katherine W. Phillips Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath Influence diagram Charrette Simple Rules by Donald Sull Phillip E. Tetlock Thomas C. Schelling Value model Middlemarch by George Eliot If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings help others find their next podcast. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. And thank you for listening and sharing!

When we try to explain cultural differences, we often turn to descriptions of east versus west, rich versus poor or, in U.S. politics, red versus blue. But Michele Gelfand, author of the book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World, argues that we’re overlooking the most comprehensive explanation of all – how tightly or loosely we adhere to social norms. Michele is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and her pioneering research into cultural norms has been cited in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Science, and on NPR. Drawing on decades of research conducted in over 50 countries, Michele shares how these cultural characteristics play out around the world. In this interview we discuss: How our unwritten rules of behavior are the glue that holds societies together How tight cultures typically have stronger social norms than their loose culture counterparts Just how early we begin to learn social norms – typically by the age of 3 How our social norms affect our behavior from morning to night How social norms can cause us to follow along even when we don’t agree Why they play an important role in what we can accomplish as a society The tradeoffs of tight versus loose cultures when it comes to creativity, safety, openness, and cooperation How disasters, diseases, and diversity serve as indicators of tight versus loose cultures The dynamic nature of tight and loose cultures in response to temporary vs long-term environmental threats The role of social status and power in relation to tight vs loose cultures The impact of organizational tightness versus looseness on the success of mergers and acquisitions Why we should seek tight-loose ambidexterity to accommodate change How culturally ambidextrous leaders are more successful than their rigid counterparts Times we might compromise or negotiate with others when it comes to tight vs loose How our social norms will influence robot behavior Links to Topics Mentioned in the Podcast @MicheleJGelfand https://www.michelegelfand.com/ Culture Lab Solomon Asch The Secret to Our Success by Joseph Heinrich Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me! Robert Levine The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle Fractal Betty Dukes Tom Curley The Muppets If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. And thank you for listening and sharing!

Gatherings play a big role in our lives. Weekly work meetings. Weddings. Holiday dinners. But over time, our gatherings can have a ho-hum feel. Priya Parker, author of the book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, thinks it doesn’t have to be that way. Priya is the founder of Thrive Labs, an organization that draws on her training and experience in conflict resolution, organizational design, and public policy to help others create transformative gatherings. From the momentous convening of the World Economic Forum to a light-hearted picnic in the park, she walks us through new ways of bringing people together, including who to invite, how many, and even how to start. In this interview we discuss: How the category of a gathering – like a wedding or networking event – should never supersede its purpose Why knowing why we’re meetings should drive everything else about the gathering How an innovative justice center in Red Hook, Brooklyn rethought its purpose for gathering in order to solve problems of poverty and crime Why the New York Times had to replace ritual with purpose in its infamous “Page One” meetings The kinds of questions we can ask when planning a meaningful gathering Why “the more the merrier” works against effective meetings The connection between purpose and the number of people we invite to a meeting Why we need to think about the ratio of meeting space to number of people attending The responsibilities a host has once the gathering begins How we can use simple rules to create the feeling of a temporary alternative world How to start a gathering (and how not to) How an activity like “15 Toasts” drives connection Why the end of a meeting is just as important as the beginning Why gathering is an act of courage, rather than an act of perfection Why we need to stop hiding as we plan and lead meetings of purpose Links to Episode Topics @priyaparker Priya Parker’s website Red Hook Community Justice Center New York Times “Page One” Meeting Dean Baquet Jonathan Cook The Power of Moments by Dan and Chip Heath Young Presidents Association Presidio in San Francisco Alamo Drafthouse Cinema “I am here” days Jill Soloway Transparent 15 Toasts Ocean’s 11 movie If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. And thank you for listening and sharing!

Do we know what others think? What about our partners or closest friends? Nick Epley, author of the book, Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, explains that we can read the minds of others, but not nearly as well as we think. In fact, we can barely read our own minds. Nicholas Epley is Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research has appeared in more than two dozen journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Wired, NPR, and on CNN. In this interview we discuss: The fact that we aren’t as good at understanding others -- even those closest to us -- as we think we are How our predictions of what a group thinks of us is are, on average, more accurate than what we think any one individual in that group thinks of us Why our confidence in how well we understand people we spend a lot of time with outstrips the accuracy with which we actually do understand them How the faster we decide what another person thinks can cause us to be that much more confident in our assessment, even if we’re wrong The gap between what we think we’ll do in a particular situation and the ways we behave when we’re actually in that situation How we’re really making up stories or guessing when we attempt to explain why we feel a certain way or take a particular action Why a surefire way to ensure we won’t understand others is to dismiss their capabilities, dehumanize them and, in general, distance ourselves from them How we can misunderstand others just by paying attention to different things or focusing on something else Why interpreting information differently from others -- seeing the same situation in a different way -- makes it difficult to understand their perspective How body language reveals much less than we assume when it comes to understanding what others are thinking The importance of perspective getting over perspective taking -- how we need to test out our understanding by asking the other person what their experience was like, listen to what they have to say and then repeat it back to ensure our understanding, rather than work from the stories we’ve made up in our minds How we’re happier connecting with strangers on trains, buses, and in cabs, though we predict we’d be happier if we kept to ourselves Links to Episode Topics Nicholas Epley at Chicago Booth Richard LaPiere The Influential Mind by Tali Sharot If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What kind of self-talk can best help us achieve our goals? When we run into challenges, the voice inside our heads can be harsh and critical. Kristin Neff, Associate Professor in Human Development at the University of Texas, Austin, explains that this kind of self-talk does us more harm than good. What works instead, she says, is to speak to ourselves as we would to a close friend -- with kindness and understanding. Kristin is the author of the book, Self-compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. She is a pioneer in the research on self-compassion and first established it as a field of study almost a decade ago. She also makes it clear that we shouldn’t confuse self-compassion with self-pity or lowering our expectations. Instead, we should see it as a strategy that’s been proven effective for achieving our goals. In this interview we discuss: The important differences between sympathy, empathy and compassion How compassion shifts our response from understanding how someone feels -- being empathetic -- to taking action by providing care and support The important role mindfulness plays in allowing us to remain open to ourselves and others when difficult feelings arise The ways self-compassion gives us permission to be kind to ourselves and to show support and understanding, while recognizing our struggles are part of the human condition How self-compassion differs from self-pity and emotional self-indulgence Why self-compassion is more helpful than self-judgment or self-criticism as it allows us to view mistakes and failure as part of the learning process How asking ourselves, what would you say to a good friend in this situation, can shift our perspective from one of harshness and judgment to compassion The importance of recognizing that being human means we are imperfect, we will make mistakes, and difficult things will happen to us and to others -- that we are not alone How our self-talk - the kinds of things we say to ourselves, our inner voice - should be that of a supportive, caring friend rather than a harsh critic The importance of having our own back -- of having an inner ally -- and how that gives us the strength to cope with difficult things in life How veterans’ level of self-compassion was more predictive of whether or not they developed PTSD than how much combat they’d seen Why the advantage of self-compassion over self-esteem is that it is not dependent on our success or what others think of us How self-compassion gives us the freedom to cultivate a learning mindset because it frees us up to make mistakes and try again How self-compassion allows us to accepts ourselves without being complacent How “the texture of wisdom is gratitude” Links to Episode Topics @self_compassion Kristin Neff’s website Emiliana Simon-Thomas The Greater Good Science Center Chris Germer The Mindful Self-compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff and Chris Germer If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When it comes to time, most of us feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Yet we’ve probably got more time than we think. It's just that the way to win back more hours is counterintuitive. That’s what Laura Vanderkam reveals in her latest book, Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. In it, she shares research on how our brains perceive time, interpret new experiences, and make memories. She explains how this knowledge can change our relationship with time, especially if we analyze how we spend it. Laura’s written 5 other books, including, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fortune. Her TED Talk, How to Gain Control of Your Free Time, has been viewed over 5 million times, and she’s co-host of the podcast, Best of Both Worlds. In this interview we discuss: Why knowing how we spend our time helps us enjoy our down time that much more How tracking our time -- even for a few days -- gives us the data we need to be more mindful Why, to change our relationship with time, we need to take charge of it How a program that tracked a veteran school principal’s time helped him focus more of his attention on instruction How we can each make every day a "realistic ideal day" within the framework of our lives How one way to stretch time is to add more memorable activities into your life Why we need to manage our experiencing selves in order to make more memories that expand our sense of time How we can woo good memories to make our lives feel fuller and richer Why we should leave blank spaces in our calendars, so that we can reflect, slow down, and connect with others in the workplace How savoring increases our enjoyment of an experience as we plan something enjoyable, take the time to anticipate it and then share it with others How we can invest in our happiness by examining the pain points in our lives and, wherever possible, spending wisely to alleviate them How taking the time to exercise gives us energy to enjoy our time more Why taking time to reflect can help us step outside the stream of time so we can ask ourselves if we like how we’re spending it How a better-than-nothing goal, or BTN, can help us accomplish big goals by committing to small daily activities that add up over time, like writing 400 words or running one mile a day How spending time with the people in our lives expands our sense of time and means we should deliberately build time with others into our schedules A simple way of building a network over the course of a year by reaching out to one person a day with a question, a tip, or a helpful article or piece of information Episode Resources @lvanderkam https://lauravanderkam.com/ National SAM Innovation Project Daniel Kahneman Unsubscribe by Jocelyn Glei Fred Bryant 10 Steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life Molly Ford Beck Redbook If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

How do you feel about asking for help? For most of us, asking for help feels uncomfortable, mainly because we expect we’ll be rejected when we ask. Yet there's a good chance we're wrong. Heidi Grant, social psychologist and author of the book, Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You, explains that a lot more people want to help us than we tend to predict. It’s the way we ask for help that determines the result, and that’s where Heidi’s practical tips can make all the difference. Heidi is Chief Science Officer of the NeuroLeadership Institute and Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. She’s the author of a number of books, including No One Understands You and What to Do about It and Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. In this interview we discuss: How our brains process social pain -- rejection, exclusion, not feeling valued or respected -- using some of the same areas of the brain as physical pain Why fears of social pain -- rejection, exclusion, not feeling valued or respected -- can prevent us from asking for help How we’re twice as likely to get help from strangers as we think -- we tend to underestimate how much others want to help us How we often underestimate the likelihood that someone will help is because we focus on how onerous the task is We also underestimate the social cost of someone saying no to our request How helping others feeds into a desire to connect and feel good about supporting someone else in their work There are three responses we can have when someone asks for our help: (1) no; (2) yes, but I don’t want to because I have to; and (3) yes, and I want to and it feels rewarding When you ask for help, don’t make it weird by being overly apologetic -- it makes the helper feel uncomfortable How offering a reward can make the helper feel like it’s an exchange or a transaction rather than something they’d want to do for you How offering a reward for someone’s help can shift the motivation they have from wanting to help for the sake of helping to wanting to help only if they get something in return Why we should ask again even if someone has already turned us down -- especially if they’ve turned us down - because they often feel guilty and will want to help the next time How we may not be getting the help we need because we aren’t letting others know we need their help -- they may be completely unaware The fact that nothing goes without saying, since others can’t read our minds to know we need their help The fact that someone may want to help but holds off so as not to offend Why we should be specific in asking for what we need and in asking the right person, rather than making general asks to a group of people Why your requests to meet up with someone just to pick their brain or chat may not be getting you the results you want Why it’s so helpful to communicate what you have in common with the person whose help you’re requesting, like shared goals, experiences, or identities How others are more inclined to help when they’re aware of the impact they’ll be having Why it’s so important to go the extra mile to make the help you seek rewarding to the other person -- that way it’s a win-win for both of you Episode Links http://www.heidigrantphd.com/ @heidigrantphd NeuroLeadership Institute Motivation Science Center at Columbia Business School Reach by Andy Molinsky Illusion of transparency Diffusion of responsibility If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

In times of rapid change, people who can think creatively are invaluable. Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book, Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, calls this type of thinking elastic. It is a bottom up approach that unleashes new ideas, and he believes anyone can employ it, since it is innate to us. Leonard’s previous books include Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), The Drunkard’s Walk (a New York Times Notable Book) and The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking. He’s also written for the TV Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. During our conversation he shares more about what elastic thinking is, why we need to cultivate it, and concrete ways to do just that. In this interview we discuss: Elastic thinking as a way of making new or breaking already-established rules, as well as framing or reframing problems The fact that we need elastic thinking now more than ever in a world of rapid change How bottom up thinking serves as the basis for artificial intelligence and machine learning Why humans, with our 100 billion neurons, still outdo computers when it comes to elastic thinking How our point of view can preclude us from solving a problem, so that we constantly need to challenge our hidden assumptions, in order to see things differently Ways to broaden our thinking include asking about the least popular dish at a restaurant and then trying it, talking to people not normally in our social circles, questioning a strongly held belief, and thinking about times we made a mistake How giving our brains down time to make associations, generate ideas and relax our mental filters can improve our problem-solving abilities Episode Links @lmlodinow http://leonardmlodinow.com/ Encyclopedia Britannica Wikipedia Caltech Ellen Langer The Net and the Butterfly by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack Natural neural networks Google translate Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Doolittle Raid If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Tech addictions don’t just happen to certain kinds of people. Increasingly we’re finding they can happen to any of us. In today’s technology-rich world, many of us check our phones obsessively, binge watch television programs and pour over social media. Author and New York University Professor Adam Alter calls this behavioral addiction, an area of psychology he’s studied in relation to the irresistible games, apps and other software that compel us to play, watch, read, and respond. Adam is author of the book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He’s also author of the New York Times bestseller, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, and he’s written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Atlantic, WIRED, and Slate. In this interview we discuss: How advances in the fields of psychology and design have made our tech so much harder to resist The fact that most of us dramatically underestimate how much time we spend online and how little joy it often brings us How the presence of an iPhone on a table undermines our ability to connect The fact that our tech-rich work, travel and home environments actually set us up for addiction Why screen time poses a threat to children’s ability to learn empathy How addiction is a form of learning where a seemingly pleasurable activity becomes a learned behavior Important research on want vs like when it comes to addiction How tech designers take advantage of the destructive and addictive side of goal achievement How breaking goals into small steps helps us feel success daily, rather than failure until the larger goal is achieved Why the lack of natural break points in online articles and programming sets us up for addictive online behaviors How tech and online designers tap into our preoccupation with closing loops and completing tasks to hook us Why it is so important that we carve out daily time to put our tech away How we wouldn't give most people the ability to interrupt us, yet we continually give our tech that power Episode Links @adamleealter Adam Alter Kevin Holesh and Moment app Your Smartphone Reduces Your Brainpower, Even If It’s Just Sitting There by Robinson Meyer Technology Addiction - How Should It Be Treated? Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use Among U.S. Vietnam Veterans James Olds Peter Milner Reward system Deep Work by Cal Newport Aryeh Routtenberg Kent Berridge Natasha Dow Schull Scott Adams on systems vs goals Benjamin Franklin and the to-do list Social comparison theory Zeigarnik Effect - Bluma Zeigarnik - cliffhanger The Sopranos The Italian Job Angry Birds by Rovio American Academy of Pediatrics If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Unhappiness at work is at an all-time high. While some might blame bad attitudes or a lack of motivation, Daniel Cable offers another perspective. He believes that the routines of the modern workplace are simply out of step with how our brains are wired to explore and experiment. Daniel Cable is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School and author of the book, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. He believes our biological urge to learn and discover is what’s needed in today’s fast-paced work world. He also thinks that the organizations that will most benefit from it are those willing to redesign how they operate. In this interview we discuss: How our brain’s urge to explore and discover is an asset in today’s workplaces The fact that most workplaces fail to tap into our innate abilities to innovate and problem solve The kinds of rewards organizations might gain for customers, workplace cultures, and the bottom line by tapping into what our seeking systems innately crave How our brain’s reward system is triggered when others take the time to understand our perspective and unique strengths How trying something new and novel also triggers our brain’s reward system Why it’s so important for us to see the impact of our work on others -- to understand our purpose How our seeking system is a feature and not the bug that Henry Ford believed it to be as he built scalable systems for repetitive work How fear in the workplace can create learned helplessness The fact that play is an important way for us to learn what we are capable of Why encouraging employees to bring their best selves to work significantly increases their long-term retention and engagement, while also increasing customer delight How team members problem solve more effectively when they share in advance when they have been at their best Why it’s so important that leaders be willing to learn from employee experimentation, since it may not always go as planned -- and that’s part of the learning process How servant or humble leadership works best in supporting employees’ desire to explore, discover, and innovate How the role of the leader is to get the most out of their people at work by providing resources, removing obstacles, modeling psychological safety and modeling a growth mindset How our perceived resistance to change flies in the face of our building flying machines and developing cures for diseases and so much more Episode Links @DanCable1 Dan Cable Dan-cable.com Jaak Panksepp Ventral striatum KPIs Martin Seligman Henry Ford Frederick Taylor In the Lab of Happy Rats video - Jaak Panksepp Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi How to Activate Your Best Self and What Happens When You Do by Dan Cable Wipro Harvard Kennedy School Let Your Workers Rebel by Francesca Gino William B. Swann Jeffrey T. Polzer Osteria Francescana and Massimo Bottura Creative Change by Jennifer Mueller KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and KLM Surprise and KLM’s ‘Adios Amigos’ Tweet Servant leadership The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner Growth mindset and Carol Dweck If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Can facts change someone’s mind? Most times, this approach is a dead end, especially when we try to convince those with top-notch analytical skills. In fact, neuroscience shows that analytical people will tend to use data to find fault with facts they don’t like. If we want to bring someone closer to our way of thinking, Tali Sharot suggests another way in her book, The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals about our Power to Change Others. Tali is founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC. Tali is also author of the book, The Optimism Bias. In this interview we discuss: Why we tend to seek out information that confirms what we already believe Our attraction to information associated with people who think like us How bias compounds as we filter for information that aligns with, and people who agree with, our beliefs How we will avoid getting advice from experts - on something completely unrelated to politics - if they are not aligned with our political beliefs Why people with strong math and analytical skills can become even more entrenched in their beliefs on a topic How our brains tend to encode information from people who agree with us and how that impacts the decisions we make Why starting a conversation by focusing on an area of agreement can help us view one another as more similar than originally thought and help us listen more fully to a different perspective How our brains can synchronize when we listen to an emotional, compelling speech and how that helps us predict what the speaker may say How feelings of happiness, sadness, stress, and so on, can be emotionally contagious for others in a family, group or organization How social media serves as the amygdala of the internet, rousing us emotionally in ways associated with how the amygdala works How immediate, positive feedback, associated with progress and situated in a social setting, can improve performance The fact that our phobias arise from areas of our life we cannot control How our brains view choice as a reward Episode Links Tali Sharot @affectivebrain Affective Brain Lab Dan Kahan Mentalization How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett Susan Cain Uri Hasson Weizmann Institute of Science Hospital Hand Hygiene Project Discovery health insurance If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We all know people who seem especially lucky or, in some cases, unlucky. Janice Kaplan wondered whether this was due to random chance or luck overlooked, so she co-authored the book, How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life. In writing the book, she learned how we can tilt the scales in our favor, even in cases where the odds are long. Janice is the former editor in chief of Parade magazine and author of 13 popular books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Gratitude Diaries. In this interview we discuss: How there are aspects of luck within our control How a winning combination of talent, hard work, and knowing your goals can increase your luck How optimism and a belief in making our own luck makes good things happen Why an optimistic mindset ensures we will apply the effort it takes to make our own luck Why we need to toggle between focused and wide-ranging attention to see events as opportunities What it means to choose the statistic we want to be How we can put ourselves in a position where luck can find us The fact that our weak ties have a greater chance of helping us achieve our goals Why we may need to zig versus zag or try out a different lane to be successful How revisiting what we thought of as dead ends can help us see new possibilities Why goals and knowing what we want are paramount to making our own luck How lucky breaks can actually be small events that make a big difference if we know how to take full advantage of them Why it can be helpful to navigate life with a compass, rather than a map The key role curiosity plays in helping us do things differently in order to make a lucky moment out of something that does not seem that way at first Episode Links Barnaby Marsh Martin Seligman Doug Rauch Lara Galinsky Mike Darnell American Idol Steven Strogatz Six degrees of separation Joi Ito If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

How do we build remarkable teams, the kind that are more than the sum of their parts? Daniel Coyle answers that question in his latest book, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. After talking to some of the greatest teams, such as the Navy Seals, IDEO, the San Antonio Spurs, and Pixar, Dan found a replicable pattern of three behaviors shared by these dynamic cultures. They each actively work to (1) Build Safety, (2) Share Vulnerability and (3) Establish Purpose. Dan shares how our teams can do this, too. Dan is also the author of The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent, The Secret Race, and Hardball: A Season in the Projects. In this interview we discuss: Why certain groups add up to way more than the sum of their parts What kindergartners can teach us about group performance How status management undermines group performance How culture is something we do, not something we are Why culture is about moving together toward a common goal The three key skills of group performance - vulnerability, safety, and purpose How bad apples chip away at psychological safety and derail groups Why we need to be intolerant of brilliant jerks The outsized impact of warmth as a counter to negativity Key indicators of high-performing groups, like rapid speech, light physical touch, laughter, and high energy, which indicated safety and connection The incredible value of collective intelligence in groups as they share information, problem solve, and connect the dots Why belonging cues are so powerful for group performance How great coaches, like Gregg Popovich, exude curiosity and care for their teams The role emotional control can play in supporting team members How Navy Seals use the vulnerability loop to amplify team safety and boost performance How an after-action review - a discussion of what went right, what went wrong, and what will happen next time -- helps teams improve performance The value of warm candor - telling a hard truth but emphasizing connection - over brutal honesty Why cheesy catch phrases can be stronger indicators of group performance than we might think Why we should focus on the first five seconds when we interact with someone for the first time, especially when it comes to our energy level, eye contact, facial expressions, and engagement How asking our team members about one thing we should keep on doing and one thing we should stop doing can help us get better at what we do Episode Links Navy Seals IDEO San Antonio Spurs Gregg Popovich Pixar Peter Skillman Alexander Pentland Sociometer Collective intelligence The Captain Class by Sam Walker Draper Kauffman Gramercy Tavern Danny Meyer Laszlo Bock If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What sets top workplace performers apart? To answer this question, Morten Hansen, Professor at University of California, Berkeley, studied over 5,000 U.S. corporate employees for his book, Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More. Through his research, he found that top performers engage in 7 key practices that explain 66 percent of the differences in their level of performance. Co-author with Jim Collins of the highly acclaimed book, Great by Choice, Morten is also the author of the book, Collaboration, and he has been ranked one of the most influential global management thinkers by Thinkers50. In this interview we discuss: Why working longer hours is not enough to achieve high levels of performance How seven work-smart practices can explain 66 percent of the differences between top performers and their peers Why we need to do less and then obsess to produce exceptional work How an obsession with sled dogs led one explorer to reach the South Pole before his highly competitive and well-resourced peer Why Jiro, the famous sushi maker, is one of the best examples of someone who does less and obsesses his way to a Michelin star The key question employees need to ask their bosses in order to do less and obsess: which of these projects is of the highest priority for achieving our goals? How a lack of prioritization can be the linchpin to doing less and obsessing over it to provide key value How a high school principal architected a work redesign that epitomizes what it means to start with delivering value and then determining goals The value of redesigning our work without spending more or adding staff Why our goals should emerge from the value we seek to deliver How focus on fewer work projects allows you to ask deeper questions and provide more value Why a focus on passion and purpose allows us to contribute more than passion alone The fact that the goal of collaboration is better performance, not better collaboration Why we need to avoid over collaborating and under collaborating and, instead, focus on disciplined collaboration to achieve our goals How small changes can help us achieve big results, especially when it comes to focusing more, saying no to some things, setting better priorities, and collaborating more strategically Episode Links Robert Falcon Scott Roald Amundsen Jiro Dreams of Sushi Psyched Up by Dan McGinn A Flipped School and Greg Green Hartman Goertz and Tangier Terminal Berkeley Executive Education Genevieve Guay Curious George If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Sometimes an outsider can offer a game-changing take on a tried-and-true process. When it comes to performance, that person is Idan Ravin, author of the bestselling book, The Hoops Whisperer: On the Courts and Inside the Heads of Basketball's Best Players. Over the course of his career, Idan has worked with athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry. Though he never played for or coached a professional basketball team, his outsider status coupled with his passion for learning and performance science, have made him a one-of-a-kind teacher. In this interview we discuss: How some of the most impactful teachers can come from unexpected places How his outsider status and commitment to self-teaching made him the incredible teacher he is today Why teaching young people served him well in teaching professional basketball players The importance of seeing people for who they can be vs who they are not Why seeing what others never notice in performance is akin to the approach a plastic surgeon takes How high performing athletes can lose their love of the game and why Idan works so hard to recapture it Why he combines high intensity with sensory overload approaches to improve performance Why learning requires the comfort of safe spaces where we can make mistakes Why learning also requires the discomfort that comes with stretching ourselves to gain new skills The humility and modesty that comes with being vulnerable in our learning How rewiring our brains takes time, can be incremental, and is often far from linear Why he wants to redefine the word selfish to include reaching for something because you have earned it through self-reliance and responsibility Why the best teachers help us gain the skills we need and then support us in ways we express them Why he believes dreams are a luxury while faith is something you can control and act on The meaningful exchange that can take place when we teach and learn from those we teach The importance of taking action to achieve our goals How some of the most credentialed and strongly affiliated individuals can also be the least knowledgeable when it comes to learning and performance Episode Links Carmelo Anthony New York Knicks Nike commercial Peak by Anders Ericsson Adam Levine The Voice If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Many of us view motivation as the spark we need to achieve our goals. But Jeff Haden, author of The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win, explains that it is actually the reverse. To feel motivated, we actually need to take action, that is, to complete at least one small task toward our goal. That is because accomplishing an initial task causes our brains to release dopamine, the reward and pleasure chemical. The good feeling we get when we do this can spur us on to accomplish more. And who better to talk about using motivation to achieve lots of goals than Jeff Haden, the most popular columnist for Inc.com and one of most widely followed influencers for LinkedIn. Jeff is also the author or co-author of 50 nonfiction books, and his work has also appeared in Time, Fast Company, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur. In this interview we discuss: Why motivation is not something you get but something you create How accomplishing tasks associated with your goal can create a virtuous flywheel of motivation, achievement, and happiness Why successful people set a goal and then forget it How focusing on big goals can overwhelm and even defeat us and what we should do instead When we focus on accomplishing the daily tasks associated with our larger goal, we maintain motivation and feel happier Why serial achievers are happier and experience less regret and why we should all aim to be them Why, for most of us, choosing that one thing we might want to do for 40 years is unrealistic Why we need pros rather than coaches to achieve new, challenging goals How pros can pave the way and prevent us from reinventing the wheel The fact that pros hold the key to our success as they have done the thing we most want to do To gain willpower, we need less willpower, provided we structure our environment in ways that reduce our options How maximizing our edge time can help us achieve more The fact that doing what others around us are doing will only get us what they have gotten -- we need to work harder and smarter to achieve something different How successful people work on big goals serially, rather than concurrently How paying attention to the details and making small changes can improve our performance Why the proud feelings you have in accomplishing hard things creates momentum to achieve more How taking productive, rather than relaxing, break can help you achieve What success means to Jeff -- and it has nothing to do with cars or houses or stuff Episode Links Venus Williams Jerry Seinfeld Tony Robbins Friday Night Lights Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling Choice architecture Jim Whitehurst and RedHat David Brailsford If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What is the secret to changing our habits? Too often, we are led to believe that we need to study successful people and then use our willpower to act like they do. But UCLA Medical School Professor, Sean Young, reveals that this approach mainly leads to failure. Instead, Young and his colleagues point us to seven forces that succeed in creating lasting change. Sean is the author of the book, Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life - for Good. He is a Professor at UCLA Medical School, and Founder and Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior and the UC Institute for Prediction Technology. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Science, and CNN. In this interview we discuss: Why we need to shift from self-blame to a thoughtful process for change How education alone is not enough to change behavior The ABCs of behavior -- automatic, burning, and common The seven tools Sean discusses to support behavior change - stepladders, community, important, easy, neurohacks, captivating, ingrained Just how powerful stepladders or very small steps can be in changing unwanted behaviors or habits The importance of creating the right-size steps to stay on track in reaching our goals How success with small steps increases our self-confidence to help us stick with it The fact that community -- the influence key others have on us -- can help us change behavior How purposefully structured online, peer-driven communities can help drive behavior change Why quick mental shortcuts or neurohacks can change our brains to help us change our behavior How taking action helps us see ourselves as someone who engages in the behavior we want to have Why it is important to pair the type of behavior with the right tool, like stepladders with common behaviors Why one of the most game-changing tools is making it easy to engage in behavior changes Episode Links seanyoungphd.com @seanyoungphd Michelle Segar, author of No Sweat Richard E. Petty Yo app If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What if you are creative, but your organization is not? Many of us have worked in places that have tried to adopt more creative practices, and we know that it doesn’t always produce the desired results. In fact, if we introduce creativity, it can even seem to backfire. But Jon Kolko has devised a formula for injecting creativity into resistant organizations. Author of the book, Creative Clarity: A Practical Guide for Bringing Creative Thinking Into Your Company, Jon is a Partner at Modernist Studio and Founder of Austin Center for Design. He served as VP of Design at Blackboard, has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 companies, and has written four additional books on design. Jon shares insights for achieving creativity and innovation in even the most resistant organizations. In this interview we discuss: Why attempts at introducing creativity into organizations can make things worse The role framing plays in the creative process and how it helps with innovation How leading with a creative strategy changes can yield more innovative solutions Why summary problem statements are so important How to push through complexity to arrive at simplicity Why creative people work best a flow state of uninterrupted blocks of time Why embracing a creative culture means embracing uncertainty The role of feedback in a special kind of meeting called a critique The two reactions to avoid when receiving feedback How creative approaches differ in small versus large organizations The three types of ownership of ideas The one skill that every instructor needs to teach students in creative fields What mentors are invaluable Why teaching design thinking is inseparable from teaching of design Episode Links Jon Kolko Creative Clarity Frog Design Ideo Flow The Swoop and Poop Design Thinking If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do you have the seven qualities of a great leader? As the former sports editor of the Wall Street Journal, Sam Walker chronicled the exploits of some of the most remarkable teams ever assembled. Fascinated by their success, he spent over a decade researching which teams performed best and how they did it. Sam lays out his findings in his latest book, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World’s Greatest Teams. Initially, he expected to find a magical combination of factors such as exceptional skill, brilliant coaching and remarkable strategy. Instead, he discovered something completely different: the 16 teams with the longest winning streaks across 37 elite sports succeeded because of a single player -- the captain of the team. These captains were not only not the best player, but also possessed all or most of seven characteristics rarely associated with great leaders. Sam is currently deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal, where he worked as a reporter, columnist, and sports editor. He is also author of a previous book, Fantasyland. In this interview we discuss: How talent, coaching, money and strategy rarely result in teams stringing together years of consecutive greatness Why a single player, the captain of the team, is the key to the enduring success of outstanding teams Why most captains were appointed by the coach, not selected by the players What the analogies are for this coach-captain in the workplace How these captains excel in seven ways: they are relentless they are aggressive They are willing to do thankless jobs they shy away from the limelight they excel at quiet communication they are difficult to manage they have excellent resilience and emotional control The secrets of success of players like basketball great Tim Duncan Why all of the little things on a team must get done Why Pele, possibly the greatest soccer player of all time, was never a captain Why none of these captains were inspiring speech makers What maps of team interaction reveal about captain communication Why shared cognition is such an important part of team communication Why superstars can sometimes decrease great team performance Why sacrifice for the collective good of the team is so important to winning How we should look for the least likely candidates when searching for group leaders Why we should not mistake the ability to take praise as a sign of a great leader Why criticizing others is a right we earn and how to earn it Why elite leaders are often boring Episode Links Sam Walker The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World’s Greatest Teams Fantasyland Barcelona Cuban Women’s Volleyball Team Boston Celtics San Antonio Spurs The Pittsburgh Steeler Tim Duncan Richard Hackman Brazil’s National Football Team Pele Carlos Alberto Hilderaldo Bellini Yogi Berra Sandy Pentland Charismatic Connectors Shared Cognition French National Handball Team Jerome Fernandez Richard Davidson Maurice Rashad Montreal Canadiens Richie McCaw Carla Overbeck United States Women's National Soccer Team If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Breakthroughs can take our work to new and exciting places, yet they rarely happen as often as we’d like. Are there ways to prompt these kinds of moments, so we can create them more often? Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack tell us how in their book, The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking. Olivia is the former Director of Innovative Leadership for Stanford StartX and bestselling author of The Charisma Myth. She has worked with companies like, Google, MGM, and Deloitte, and she has lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Yale. Judah Pollack is a former faculty member at Stanford StartX and a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. He has worked with organizations like Airbnb, IDEO, and the U.S. Army Special Forces. In this interview we discuss: How breakthrough thinking requires two systems in the brain: the Executive Network (the net) and the Default Network (the butterfly) How we need off-task time in order for the Default Network to engage and create breakthroughs The 4 types of breakthroughs: Eureka, Metaphor, Intuitive and Paradigm How Eureka Breakthroughs are sudden insights that are fully formed, when everything seems to fall into place That we are predisposed to certain kinds of breakthroughs and how it helps to honor our natural style That no one style of breakthrough is any better than another How Metaphorical breakthroughs help us see topics in new ways How Intuitive breakthroughs seem like just the beginning and less easy to trust, requiring us to have faith in the process How Steve Jobs had an intuitive breakthrough that the iPhone needed to be made of glass That our brains our physical objects that need to build new neurotransmitter receptors in order to construct new knowledge How our practice with exploring new experiences in the brain affects our ability to make breakthroughs How surfing the net for new things or watching new movies can help with building the brain plasticity that helps to make breakthroughs How curiosity enlivens brain plasticity How fear negativity affects the Default Network and works against us having breakthroughs Why our best ideas may come to us in the shower How our inhibitions can cause us to feel like imposters or make us overly critical, either of which can hinder breakthrough thinking How the placebo effect can be used to our advantage Ways we can practice failure in order to normalize our feelings about it Three supertools that can help us achieve breakthroughs How the journey toward topic mastery create preconditions for breakthroughs How implementing these practices can affect us down to the gene level How to find the balance between our fast-paced, hyper-focused work world and the slower, more diffused approach needed for breakthrough thinking Links to Episode Topics Olivia Fox Cabane Judah Pollack The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking The Charisma Myth Stanford StartX University of California Berkeley The Executive Mode Network of the brain The Default Mode Network of the brain The Arab Spring The Revolutions of 1848 Occupy Wall Street Steve Jobs Think Wrong Neuroplasticity Impostor Syndrome Inner Critic Placebo Effect Meditation If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Are you prepared to live to 100? Research shows that it is becoming the norm, but that few of us are planning for it. Many are surprised to learn that it not only requires rethinking saving and retirement, but also education, jobs, and relationships. To guide us, London Business School Professor and future of work expert, Lynda Gratton, has written The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. In addition to her many books, Lynda writes for Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes. She points out the possibilities, as well as the challenges, associated with living longer lives. Lynda also encourages us to plan for what lies ahead, so that we can take full advantage of this opportunity. In this interview, we talk about: What learning will look like as we continue working into our 70s and 80s Why working well with robots will decrease our odds of obsolescence How generational markers, such as millennials, limit how we think about work and life Why we will become age agnostic as people of all ages learn and work together Are you building, maintaining, or depleting current skills? The secret to increasing our adaptability and willingness to change Three new life stages that are upending how we think about life and work Are you spending your free time in recreation or re-creation, and why it matters? The important role experimentation will play in our lives as we live longer How marriage and friendships will change as we live longer lives Why juvenescence holds the key to navigating a longer life Why we should be worried about wealth disparity Why living longer will push organizations to rethink work policies and expectations Why individuals and families - not most organizations - will guide us in innovating Selected Links to Episode Topics @lyndagratton www.100yearlife.com 100 Year Life Diagnostic London Business School World Economic Forum Andrew Scott Future of Work Consortium The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here by Lynda Gratton Stretch by Karie Willyerd and Barbara Mistick If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We have more control over our happiness than we think. And if we follow the advice of the most cutting-edge happiness researchers, we can help others achieve it, as well. Emiliana Simon-Thomas happens to be one of those researchers. A neuroscientist and Science Director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she speaks and writes about the connection between happiness, meaning, compassion and wellbeing. She also co-teaches an online course, The Science of Happiness that, to date, has been taken by over 450,000 people. In this interview we discuss: Just how important social relationships are to our happiness and wellbeing How our baseline for study is social, not solitary The fact that social deprivation leads to greater stress, lowered resilience, and less happiness How friendships helps us reframe challenges as more achievable The fact that an ongoing sequence of pleasurable moments does not guarantee happiness How happiness is derived from a rich emotional life that includes negative emotions How happiness speaks to the ease with which we experience the entire range of human emotion The fact that happiness stems from our ability to transcend ourselves - to view our lives in relation to a bigger purpose How the ways we spend our time, where we put our focus, and how we view others determines our happiness How forgiving others can have a greater impact on us than the person we forgive How mindfulness is about noticing the world beyond ourselves How graduates of the Science of Happiness course show significant improvement when it comes to happiness, flourishing, and connections to others, along with decreased loneliness and stress The fact that the quality of our relationships has a significant impact on our happiness The game changing difference it makes when we express our gratitude toward others How practicing gratitude helps us feel more optimistic, decreases our self-absorption, and increases feelings of pleasure that can create a reinforcing loop How practicing gratitude and showing appreciation can shift workplace culture The difference between valuing someone for who they are versus what they achieve How our ability to express gratitude and to show compassion are culturally influenced habits, not gendered skills How the data shows that happier employees are more productive, more engaged, more loyal and more attentive to creating a better customer experience The importance role self-compassion plays in our ability to be happy, to show compassion to others, and to improve or maintain our wellbeing Links to Episode Topics Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas @GreaterGoodSC The Expanding Gratitude Project Gratitude and Wellbeing at Work The Science of Happiness course Eric Liu Social baseline theory - James Coan and David Sbarra Robert Emmons Judson Brewer The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan Center for Positive Organizations Davita Kristin Neff If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Ninety-five percent of us think we are self-aware, but only ten to fifteen percent of us actually are. How important is that difference to our well being and happiness? Well, according to Tasha Eurich, self-aware individuals are are better at their jobs, more satisfied with their relationships, raise more mature children, are better students, lead more profitable companies, and choose better careers. Tasha is the author of the book, Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-aware As We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. An organizational psychologist and researcher whose work has been featured in Entrepreneur, CNBC.com, The Huffington Post, and FoxBusiness.com. In this interview we discuss: Why self-awareness is the metaskill of the 21st century How self-awareness includes how clearly we see ourselves and how well we understand how others see us The fact that 95 percent of people think they are self-aware when the reality is closer to 10 to 15 percent How the ways we self-reflect can work against the benefits we might gain How reflecting on what, not why, shifts us into action and a more positive mindset Why we should journal to figure things out rather than merely ruminate or emotion dump How a focus on learning well helps us take on new challenges in ways that a focus on doing well may not Ways we can mine solutions to problems by asking ourselves what it might look like if the problem were already solved How getting feedback from others helps us gain additional perspectives on how we see ourselves How asking for feedback allows us to show vulnerability in positive ways Why we want to control the kinds of feedback we ask for by choosing the right people, asking the right questions, and using the right process Why we should seek out loving critics for feedback -- people who couple honesty with care How the ways we receive feedback are also important -- that we should give ourselves time to process feedback and to determine if we should act on it Self-aware teams practice honesty and transparency Leaders are the linchpins when it comes to self-aware teams Self-aware teams need psychological safety and an ongoing awareness process Team members can jumpstart self-awareness by taking small steps, like admitting something they do not know or something they did wrong Why it is important to recognize when you cannot influence someone to be more self-aware Links to Episode Topics @tashaeurich http://www.tashaeurich.com/ James Pennebaker Carol Dweck Solutions focused therapy How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett Alan Mulally http://www.insight-book.com/quiz.aspx If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Most of us can learn anything, if we're taught how. Yet few of us find this to be the case. Why? Because we lack the skills we need to deal with the resistance and frustration we inevitably face when learning difficult topics. Barbara Oakley wants to change that. Author of the book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science, and Professor of Engineering at Oakland University, she shares techniques for mastering any subject. And these are techniques over 2 million people have experienced in her incredibly popular MOOC, Learning How to Learn. In this interview we discuss: How she made the leap from self-described high school math "flunky" to accomplished engineering professor What inspired her to make the shift from Russian linguist to engineer How offering interesting learning hooks can help people learn content more effectively How a diffuse or relaxed mode of thinking helps us organize what we learn The importance of toggling between focused and diffuse thinking to learn The fact that learning difficult things is hard How sleep helps us build the neural architecture we need to learn new things How we can be strategic in our approach to learning Why you actually need content knowledge to become an expert - we cannot outsource it How repetition, practice, and seeing things from different perspectives builds important neural patterns for expertise Why conceptual chunking -- memorizing and understanding -- help us create these neural patterns How our prefrontal cortex relaxes when we know something, so that we can build on that knowledge to solve more complex problems What it means to have an illusion of competence when it comes to learning How we can check our understanding by seeing if we can explain it to a five year old How neural reuse theory, or learning something new by attaching it to something we already know, is a powerful learning tool Why teachers should emphasize how simple something difficult can be to learn How interleaving helps us learn when to use one technique versus another How transfer helps us use learning we have done in one area in a new area and how it is best learned by doing How we can reframe procrastination by focusing on the process not the product How breaking the work into tiny tasks helps us overcome procrastination Links to Episode Topics @barbaraoakley https://barbaraoakley.com/ The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/ Bayes Theorem Negative binomial Geometric distribution Pomodoro Technique and Francesco Cirillo Terry Sejnowski Lynda.com If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do you really know your neighbors or coworkers? To understand human behavior, we need research participants who act and respond truthfully. But that is a tall order when it comes to topics that are embarrassing or even incriminating. Social scientists have found it hard to get honest answers when asked about topics that might reveal racism, sexism, gluttony or a slew of other socially unacceptable traits. Researchers like Seth Stephens-Davidowitz have found a way around that problem by analyzing data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches. And it turns out that the candid words, phrases, and questions we type in reveal a whole lot about us. Seth is the author of the bestselling book, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are. He is also a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. In this interview we discuss: How Internet datasets help us ask bigger questions than ever before How word and picture data expand the kinds of questions we can ask and yield unexpected insights How data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches serves as a digital truth serum for learning more about what we actually think and do How big data is giving researchers insights into small groups of people we rarely had before How big data is helping researchers engage in rapid experimentation and conduct quick tests to see how people respond How horse racing analytics data scientists like Jeff Seder help us think beyond traditional data sets to uncover game-changing findings How night lights in India revealed key insights regarding economic activity Just how much creativity is involved in data science research How researchers studied big data in the hopes of helping political leaders shift hate group behaviors What Google search analysts learned about gender from searches on children and intelligence What we are learning about poverty and economic mobility from big data The connection between the health of poor people and the number of rich people living nearby The connection between the number of tax accountants and how many people cheat on their taxes How data scientists are using our doppelgangers to anticipate what we might want to buy How the healthcare industry can use doppelgangers to personalize treatment The fact that Google conducts more experiments in one day than the FDA does in one year How your love of curly fries may signal high intelligence to prospective employers How it is becoming harder than ever for regulators to stay ahead of all the things companies can know about us as the number of variables keeps on growing How researchers may use big data to figure out, once and for all, which foods are nutritious -- and whether we really should be eating broccoli Links to Episode Topics @SethS_D http://sethsd.com/ Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner Jeff Seder American Pharoah Night Lights and Economic Activity in India 2015 San Bernardino Attack The Rise of Hate Search New York Times article Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What's behind the extraordinary experiences that stay with us? Are they as random as we're led to believe or is there a pattern to them that, if we understood it, would allow us to create them ourselves? In his research, Dan Heath, co-author of the book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, uncovers four key elements that characterize these kinds of moments. And he explains how we can create them not only for ourselves, but for our family, our friends, and the people in our organizations. Dan is a Senior Fellow at the CASE Center at Duke University and co-author of the bestselling books, Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive. In this interview we discuss: The important role that elevation, insight, pride, and connection play in defining moments How we can tap into defining moments to celebrate and inspire employees at work Ways to spot opportunities, like important work and life transitions, to design defining moments How our brains hold onto the peaks and endings of defining moments The fact that great experiences are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable What it looks like when we break the script to create unforgettable moments Why we need to beware of the soul-sucking force of reasonableness to create defining moments How defaulting to ease and efficiency can turn peak moments into speed bumps How social moments of shared meaning and responsiveness build connection The key roles that understanding, validation, and caring play in connecting with others Why we build deeper connections more quickly when we work together on something bigger than ourselves How creating the right mission and conditions can get people to take on difficult challenges The fact that purpose has a greater impact on our performance than passion Why purpose is central in making us more effective in our roles How we can learn to cultivate purpose How just one hour visiting student families in their homes completely changed the culture of a low-performing elementary school Why 36 simple questions can help us deepen our relationships in less than an hour When people experience crystallizing experiences that cause them to rethink their work and their lives Links to Episode Topics http://heathbrothers.com/ https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/team_profiles/dan-heath/ John Deere and CEO Sam Allen Magic Castle Hotel Images of Joshee on vacation Simply Brilliant by Bill Taylor Harry Reis Sharp HealthCare Morten Hansen Flamboyan Foundation Carlie John Fisherow Arthur Aron and his 36 questions Post-traumatic growth Option B by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal Roy Baumeister and the crystallization of discontent If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Maybe performing under pressure is easier than we think. In those moments before an interview, an exam, or a presentation, we often feel our worst. Yet Daniel McGinn, author of the book, Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed believes we can decrease and even repurpose those anxious feelings to up our performance. Senior Editor of Harvard Business Review, Dan has written for Wired, Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine, and Newsweek. In this book, he draws on the fields of performance and sports psychology and shares quick and simple techniques we all can use. In this interview we discuss: Why we should take a page from pre-performance rituals of top athletes How we can leverage stress before a high-stakes event and maximize our performance What it means to fine-tune our emotions before a high-stakes event The role that centering plays to enhance high-level performance How pre-performance routines distract us from feeling anxious and prime us for the event Why that lucky pen, ring, or tie really can make a difference in our performance How the words we choose and the connections we make to something bigger than ourselves can help us psych up our teams Why a highly experienced, highly motivated team may not need a pep talk How listening to certain kinds of music can improve our performance in all kinds of tasks How a sports DJ is impacting two of the top sports teams in the U.S. Two factors that make a song motivational - how its musicality -- beats, tempo - resonate with us and how emotionally connected we feel to it How our self talk, our visualizations, and our mental rehearsals before an important event can improve our performance The important role priming -- physical and emotional - plays before a high-stakes event Why we should reflect back on past successes to increase our confidence in a new performance task How we can sit there feeling worried or we can develop a set of practices to give us confidence before a high-stakes event Links to Topics Mentioned @danmcginn http://www.psychedupthebook.com/ Improving Acute Stress Responses: The Power of Reappraisal Yuri Hanan and the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning Don Greene and centering The River and Laura Donnelly and Hugh Jackman Malcolm Gladwell Peak by Anders Ericsson Stanley A. McChrystal Sports DJ TJ Connelly Eye of the Tiger Nate Zinsser The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When you hear the word power, what comes to mind? For most of us, we imagine power-hungry leaders or think of phrases like power corrupts. But when my guest, Eric Liu, considers power, he sees something different. He views power as a positive force. In fact, he believes it is a gift each of us can use to shape society. At a time when many of us feel powerless, Eric offers a simple set of instructions for seizing power and using it to help shape our communities, our nation, and the world. He is Founder and CEO of the non-profit, Citizen University and author of the book, You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen. His TED Talk on citizen power and voting has been viewed over 2 million times. In this interview we discuss: How power is an important literacy Why power is about who gets to decide How power is a gift we are continuously giving away How our citizenship endows us with unearned power and privilege that we should share with intention Why we need to ask ourselves, to whom am I giving my power, my might, and my imagination? The myth of rugged individualism in the face of game-changing collective action and collaboration we have seen across history How we are part of a collective web of relationship, obligation, and mutual aid The fact that power compounds as people with voice and connections amass it The fact that power justifies itself as incumbents spin narratives to maintain it The realization that many rely on intimidation and self-justifying narratives to maintain their power How power is infinite as demonstrated by movements to push back and reinforce pockets of power How we can reframe power by changing the game, the story, and the equation The fact that we are all better off when we are all better off The power of story in organizing for change -- the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now How a civic collaboratory taps into the shared need and wisdom of organizations to amplify their impact How we are strong in our ideals of citizenship but weak in practicing them Why citizenship is about power plus character - working on behalf of a greater good How we accuse others in order to excuse ourselves How taking responsibility sets in motion a cycle of responsibility that is contagious Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @ericpliu http://www.citizenuniversity.us/ The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner Nick Hanauer Marshall Ganz Jose Antonio Vargas Bonds that Make Us Free by C Terry Warner If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Few of us realize how dependent we are on the people and objects around us for our knowledge. But Steven Sloman does. He reveals that we are constantly accessing expertise stored in our communities, our technologies, and in our environment. In fact, research reveals that many of us adopt positions on issues like climate change and health care from certain experts, without even realizing it. These findings have enormous implications for our increasingly polarized society, including the fact that educating people about issues is probably not the most effective way to change their minds. Steven Sloman is co-author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. He is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Cognition. His work has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal. In this interview we discuss: The fact that we tend to think we understand how things work better than we actually do How we fail to distinguish what we know from what others know How complexity prevents us from understanding many of the things we think we do The fact that knowledge must be collective to offset all the complexity in our lives When we want to understand how the government or our car works, we figure out enough causal structure to solve our problems What the deliberative mind is good at, which is coming to causal conclusions How deliberation depends on a community of knowledge and connects us to other people The unique ability of human beings to share intentionality, that is, to engage in tasks with other people The limitations of understanding that comes from someone else How understanding is contagious and community based Much of our understanding comes from having access to knowledge rather than actually knowing Why it is important to help people see that they do not understand -- that they cannot explain something they think they understand well Our conviction that we understand or know something comes from the trust we place in certain experts The fact that we cannot convince people by making them experts but by convincing them to believe in a different set of experts That we tend to stick with our first explanation or conclusion, even if it is found to be incorrect The fact that most of our beliefs are formed independent of data -- they tend to be shaped by our culture and what our community thinks The fact that the thought leaders we look to actually determine what we believe How we actually vote for what our communities judge to be the right things, not what the right things might actually be The fact that group intelligence is derived from how well team members communicate with and relate to one another rather than individual intelligence How many VCs make investment decisions based on the team and their collective intelligence That what should spend more time on collective or team intelligence over individual intelligence A question we can ask individuals whom we hire: How have you contributed to group performance in the past? How engaging in the activity is key to helping us learn and to gaining causal knowledge Why it is so important to be aware of what we do not know -- to reduce our pride in what we think we know How intelligent nudges can guide people toward better decision making Why focusing on policy consequences is preferable to the values associated with those policies yet is much harder to do Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast Steven Sloman Frank Keil Clark Glymour Michael Tomasello Herbert Clark and common ground Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo Anita Woolley Pixar Disney Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Most of us are aware of the negative effects of income inequality on health and well-being. But few of us realize that just seeing yourself as unequal can produce the same results. Keith Payne, author of the book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die, and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and on NPR. His research helps us understand how inequality is the public health problem of the 21st century. In this interview we discuss: How we see ourselves compared to others is a better predictor of health and well-being than income and education How inequality is a better predictor of drug use, health outcomes, crime, and other self-defeating behaviors than poverty in advanced economies The false dichotomy of blaming the system or the individual when it comes to understanding inequality rather than understanding how individuals respond to their environments How bees engaged in high risk, high reward behavior after they lost some of their honey supply and how this mirrors how humans behave when they have less How people living in areas of greater inequality search Google on more high risk, high reward topics like payday loans and lottery tickets Why how we feel about our status in relation to others can have a greater impact on how we vote than our actual status How the poor do not actually tend to vote against their own self interest -- how there is more to that story than meets the eye The fact that there is a strong correlation between the rise in income inequality and the rise in political partisanship The fact that parts of the world with greater equality are less religious How pay incentives works well for individual performers but less so for collaboration and teams Does your organization value teamwork and collaboration? Then think twice about incentivizing individuals with big payouts for performance. How we often overlook the fact that inequality is driven more by the wealthiest than by the poorest How solving the problem of inequality by adopting a public health mindset can help develop bigger, more impactful solutions How moving to a zip code with less inequality can potentially have a more positive impact on future outcomes than moving to a wealthier zip code Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @UNCPsych http://bkpayne.web.unc.edu/ Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi Nancy Adler Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy ONeil Angus Deaton Anne Case If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Could our code be making us more human? When most of us hear the word code, we think of computer code -- the digital instructions that drive our devices. But when Philip Auerswald hears the word code, he sees the instructions that drive the human race. Phil is the author of the book, The Code Economy: A Forty-thousand Year History. He is an Associate Professor at the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, and Executive Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network. He is also the co-founder of Innovations, a journal on entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. Phil believes that as machines and algorithms play ever bigger roles in our lives, we will actually become more human. This long view of automation--a 40,000-year view--also gives us insight into a different, more innovative perspective on how to think about the future of work. In this interview we discuss: A broader definition of code as the DNA of human society from the simple to the complex The importance of getting beyond singularity vs dystopian views of humans vs machines How humans will redefine their own value -- as they have done repeatedly -- as robots, machines and algorithms play a bigger role in our world The fact our ability to learn -- to experiment and share what we learn -- is what sets us apart How human beings are constantly exploring spaces of possibility How evolving understanding, knowledge, and knowhow results from finding the adjacent possible The fact that cities are actual platforms in that they stand on problems solved in literal ways -- sewage and electric power and subway transport How platforms of today are increasingly digital The concepts of bifurcation and substitution where a product is split over time into cheap and high volume vs expensive and low volume, as in watches and clocks How high volume and low cost items typically lend themselves to automation The fact that we are trying to recapture a 1960s way of living and working that is no longer viable How we need to rewire rather than retire The concept of a job has only been around for about 150 years due to the introduction and growth of large-scale institutions that needed people serve in a role and act on specific routines Why subsidizing higher education and retirement are not the right ways to think about the problem of machines, robots, and automation Why the evolutionary nature of ideas and actions opens us up to abundance and new opportunities How it is almost irrational to think our creative processes will come to an end How the inequality that exists within cities and between cities and rural parts of the U.S. are the driver of political discord Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @auerswald http://auerswald.org/ Stuart Kauffman Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford Shinola Nexus by Ramez Naam Milton Friedman Permanent income hypothesis Otto von Bismarck Larry Harvey and Burning Man The Absence of Design in Nature Scale by Geoffrey West Jose Lobo Progress and Poverty by Henry George The Origin of Populist Surges Everywhere by Philip Auerswald If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Why are high-school memories of popularity so strong? Because they still shape our lives today. Mitch Prinstein, author of the book, Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-obsessed World and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains how teen popularity impacts adult happiness, our health, and our relationships. And surprisingly, not just for unpopular, but for popular people, too. And, according to Mitch, if you thought there was only one kind of popularity -- the high status kind -- then you are seeing only half the picture. There is actually another kind -- one based on likability -- that plays a key role in our lives. In fact, understanding what sets these two kinds of popularity apart -- for ourselves and our organizations -- can mean the difference between being a mediocre and an outstanding leader. In this interview we discuss: The connection between adolescent brain development and our desire for popularity How memories of our popularity as teens stays with us in adulthood, for better or worse The difference between likability and high-status popularity and why it matters How and why high-status teens can suffer from relationship, mental health, and addiction problems as adults How bosses who bully may have achieved high-status popularity as teens The ill health effects low likeability, low status teens experience as adults How our bodies are attuned to our experience with popularity as teens Why likeability and kindness trumps high status when it comes to popularity How our brains get a signal for social pain when we perceive we are excluded or unpopular How perceived unpopularity can trigger in our bodies an unhealthy inflammation response How the more sensitive we are to physical pain the more sensitive we can be to social pain and rejection How likeable people tend to hang back and observe before talking How likeable people say things like: I wonder if . . . , rather than: We should . . . The fact that our memories of popularity from our teenage years influence how we see the world, including what we attribute actions of others to When someone stands you up or shows up late, do you blame yourself or blame them? Our popularity when we were younger influences how we view popularity for our children Anxious and insecure mothers often have popular children because they pay attention to how their children interact with peers and tend to coach their children in proactive ways How parents can help their children to achieve likeable popularity by modeling what it looks like and scaffolding support through young adulthood How our likability as young people has a greater influence than many other factors when it comes to our health and well-being as adults How the kind of popularity we associate with social media, like likes,is not the kind of popularity that serves us well as social human beings How the extent to which others like something online can lead us to engage in more risky behavior How the ways we interact with social media are changing what we value and care about Why the more we connect online for status, the lonelier and more isolated we can feel Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @mitchprinstein http://www.mitchprinstein.com/ Naomi Eisenberger Take Pride by Jessica Tracy Martha Putallaz If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When it comes to economic growth, why are some countries and companies better than others? While many experts look to factors in geography, finance, or psychology for the answers, César Hidalgo asks us to look instead at information and networks. Cesar is the author of the book, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. He is also an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Collective Learning Group. Cesar wants us to think about the amount of knowledge and knowhow people accumulate and the kinds of organizations where this information is stored. He and his team work on collective learning — that is, the learning of teams, organizations, cities, and nations. And he wants us to understand why building these kinds of networks and organizations can be challenging. In this interview we discuss: What it means to describe the objects around us as crystallized imagination What distinguishes wealth from income and why it matters Why the challenges of economic growth are tied to the challenges of learning in individuals and teams Why individual skills, knowledge, and ability do not scale well and how this impacts economic growth Why group or team knowledge trumps individual knowledge Why it is not about knowing what needs to be done but about creating a team of people who have the knowledge and knowhow to do it Why we can view products as alternative channels of communication in that they endow us with their knowledge -- we cannot build a phone but we can communicate with one or we cannot build a plane but we can be transported by one Our capacity as individuals is augmented and expanded by the products and tools we have access to, from running water to smartphones -- channels of knowledge and comfort are transmitted through products Economies are amplifiers of our knowledge and knowhow -- just look at how few people make toothpaste yet how many use it Our ability to create products is limited by our knowledge and knowhow which is influenced by our social networks How learning from experts, through experience, helps us learn and get better faster The key differences between knowledge and knowhow and how this influences economic growth How Ford Motor Company in 1928 experienced the challenges of transporting knowledge and knowhow through their failed experiment in Brazil called Fordlandia The importance of asking, what are the channels that drive collective learning? Episode Links @cesifoti http://www.chidalgo.com/ where you can find all the data tools her mentions in the podcast Pep Guardiola Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Doug Rushkoff Wernher von Braun Fordlandia Ricardian Trade Theory Steven Pinker Richard Dawkins Jonathan Haidt Joseph Henrich Kurt Vonnegut If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Does our obsession with the myth of the lone genius cause us to miss out on opportunities for high-impact innovation? Scott Page helps us see how diverse teams repeatedly outperform not only smart individuals, but also teams of talented individuals with similar backgrounds and cognitive tools. Scott is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, and Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan. His findings have deep implications for what we teach students, how we evaluate employees, and how we make some of our biggest decisions. In this interview we discuss: How cognitive diversity includes how we think about the world, how we solve problems, and how we search for creative solutions How we can help others innovate by asking them to come up with adjacent possibles or ideas similar to the ones we are talking about How people who are successful in their fields accumulate skills in subtle ways over time The marked impact team diversity can have on the accuracy of its predictions How leaders can compile data on employee competencies and experiences to inform which people they place on which teams and to determine when they may need outside perspectives Why we should gather data on which team members made the most accurate predictions on the most important projects Why we want to consider the most important aspects of the work we are trying to do in order to determine which people to put on which teams Why we should ask ourselves, do we have diversity on the dimensions that matter most? If not, then find members outside of the organization who do. Given a certain competency threshold, randomness of team members may trump ability The fact that research shows we are always better off including some diversity as opposed to forming teams of all the best, most similar people Why even very small improvements due to difference accumulate in big ways over time The fact that team diversity allows us to make continual improvements How we suffer from a siren call of sameness where we want to work with and hire people who look like us, attended the same schools, and travel in the same social circles, yet those are some of the people we should most avoid when we want to solve complex problems How quants are giving us clear insights into the impact of diverse teams How complexity is driving us to work in teams yet how we are still evaluating most people in our organizations only as individuals The fact that we want both deep talent and diverse talent in our organizations and on our teams The fact that with people from only one identity group, we have a limited set of life experiences and ways of seeing the world that limits our creativity and problem-solving abilities When it comes to social policy work we want to be sure we have people in the room who can assess the policy from a multitude of perspectives and experiences Why young people should be thinking about depth and difference and the tools and skills they need to learn to demonstrate either or both What skills, tools, and behaviors are we helping young people accumulate? Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @ScottPage4 http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/ John Taylor Lu Hong Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox by Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten Jon Kleinberg Maithra Raghu Steven Johnson Stuart Kauffman The Great Courses Jack B. Soll Ray Dalio Juliet Bourke Whiplash by Joi Ito Rule of 72 Sheen S. Levine Radical Candor by Kim Scott Leigh Thompson Verna Myers Steve Jurvetson Barbara Mellers and Philip Tetlock Malcolm Gladwell Kimberly Crenshaw Tim A. McKay Reid Hoffman If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Have you ever had a great idea only to have it rejected by your organization? If you are nodding your head, you will want to read Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work that Matters. The authors, John Bielenberg, Mike Burn, and Greg Galle, lead a Silicon Valley innovation firm called Future Partners that gives people the language, frameworks, and tools they need to drive positive change in their organizations and communities. John, Mike and Greg explain the two important reasons we experience these hurdles, namely, human biology and culture. Then, they walk us through ways to challenge and, ultimately, overcome them. In this interview we discuss: How thinking right is all about predictable results and ho-hum solutions How thinking wrong feels awkward because we are acting outside what is acceptable The fact that we cannot follow the same predictable paths if we want to create and innovate How a lot of brains operating on the same neural pathways create a culture The six practices of thinking wrong: be bold, get out, let go, make stuff, bet small, and move fast How letting go is about rethinking assumptions, biases and orthodoxies The importance of making stuff so that our ideas come to life for others to see Why betting small lets us run lots of inexpensive experiments How moving fast allows us to iterate together on learning to accelerate progress Why innovative outlaws need a shepherd and a scout to offset organizational sheriffs and posses How biology and culture limit our thinking and ability to innovate The fact that we say we want innovation when we really want optimization How stepping off a predictable path makes us feel uncomfortable and vulnerable The value of teaching different kinds of problem-solving systems The value of learning from investment over return on investment How incremental innovation, or increvation, will not help us solve big, important problems Episode Links @FuturePartner Future Partners Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio Mach49 Deflection Point Exercise Uncertain and Unknown Exercise Creative Change by Jennifer Mueller Project M Pie Lab If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Why is social media so pervasive? Many have searched for just the right metaphor to capture its explosive growth, yet few have found ones that fit. Instead of turning to concepts like networks or connections, maybe we should be looking to biology. And that is exactly what Oliver Luckett and Michael Casey have done in their book, The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Your Life. In it, they offer a provocative theory: that social networks mimic biological life. As part of that theory, they explain how our capacity to create and share memes actually facilitates an evolutionary process. That process mimics the transfer of genetic information in living things. Oliver is a technology entrepreneur and currently CEO of ReviloPark, and he has served as Head of Innovation at The Walt Disney Company. Michael Casey is the author of three books, including The Age of Cryptocurrency. He was a reporter, editor, and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and also a senior advisor to the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT Media Lab. In this interview we discuss: Social media as the vehicle for a shift from top down gatekeeping to broad and open distribution How the creative expression that is part of social media mirrors the evolutionary process of biological organisms How the Internet operates as a social organism that we feed and contribute to as it evolves and reproduces The fact that there is an order inherent in the chaos of social media, just as there is order inherent in biological systems and organisms How the evolution of social media, like that of organisms, is not about progress, but about randomness, feedback, and interactions important to the evolutionary process How the metaphor of social organism better helps us to understand and respond to our changing culture in ways that encourage healthy responses and interactions How changing online business models hamper the kinds of organic, authentic, creative expression we need to be healthy online and to support an organic evolution of social media How the distribution mechanisms for information and creative expression have shifted from physical elements -- the TV tower, printing press, newspaper delivery truck -- to our brains and social networks How artists like Banksy are using social media to collaborate and impact the art world Why memes are like cultural currency and replicating tools that get repeated and absorbed into our culture to help it evolve How censorship works against our building up immunities to that will allow social media to evolve and increase in authenticity and creativity How social media is a human phenomenon that allows for a vibrant exchange of ideas Why we need to get it right when it comes to understanding social media, especially as we head into our AI future Episode Links @mikejcasey and @revilopark http://thesocialorganism.com/ http://www.michaeljcasey.com/ Norman Mailer Holarchy Banksy and documentary Banksy Does New York Hatsune Miku Richard Dawkins If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Think we want creative ideas? Think again. While most of us are swimming in creative ideas, the research shows that we tend to go with what we already know. This love-hate relationship with creativity discourages innovation and causes people and organizations to stagnate. Jennifer Mueller, author of the book Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It, has spent years studying how leaders and organizations handle creative change. She understands why we resist creativity and how to recognize this tendency. She also gives us strategies for promoting creativity in our organizations and for pitching our creative ideas. Jennifer is an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego, and she has served on the business school faculty of Wharton, Yale, and NYU. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. In this interview, we discuss: How our discomfort with uncertainty can cause us to kill creative ideas How generating creative ideas is easier than moving ahead with them The novelty of creative ideas is what makes them so difficult to accept How leaders really want ways to determine which creative ideas have value, not more creative ideas Why it is hard for leaders to admit they do not know whether a creative idea has value We prize correct solutions over a creative ones because of the uncertainty involved How creativity is uncertainty unleashed in a particular moment Why a how-best mindset limits our ability to stay open to creative ideas What a bias against creativity looks like and how we can reduce it Whether we are rejecting a creative idea or how it makes us feel and why this matters Why a successful medical inventor avoids using the term incubator for his startups Why we should treat innovation like a process rather than an outcome How coaching and encouraging trumps teaching when it comes to creative ideas How and why we need to evaluate creative ideas differently from other kinds of ideas How strength in decision-making works against being open to creative ideas Why the ways we communicate creative ideas makes all the difference The important role pattern matching plays in connecting experts to our creative ideas How convincing others of our creative ideas may mean helping them feel failure How pointing out that no one else is doing it as a way of supporting our creative ideas actually reinforces the status quo Why we need to broaden how we think of creativity in schools Why millennials are more anxious about creativity and less motivated to elaborate on creative ideas than previous generations How little we actually know about who has the potential for successful leadership and how this limits creativity in organizations Key skills leaders need to learn and demonstrate to support creative change How any new idea needs to be socialized before it can live in an organization What change circles are and the important role they play in supporting innovators How strengthening our capacity for creative change allows us to solve global problems Episode Links @JennSMueller http://jennifersmueller.com/ Thomas J. Fogarty Spencer Silver Ignorance by Stuart Firestein Star Wars High Noon 2001 Space Odyssey Rob McClary Do Schools Kill Creativity? Ken Robinson TEDTalk If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Why do some succeed with so little, while others fail with so much? Scott Sonenshein, author of the book, Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More than You Ever Imagined, thinks it happens because we get caught up in a mindset of chasing. A Professor of Management at Rice University, Scott is also a strategy consultant for organizations in healthcare, education, manufacturing, and technology. Drawing on research from psychology and management, Scott makes a case for doing more with less, what he calls stretching with what you have -- and it is a far cry from being cheap or refusing ever to spend. In this interview, we talk about: How waiting for the perfect tool gives us an excuse to delay working on our goals Why chasing after resources can cause us to get caught up in destructive comparisons Looking beyond the conventional uses for a particular resource and why that matters How reflecting on scarcity can help us get more out of the resources we already have How a mindset and culture of ownership lets us solve problems more creatively How stretching with the resources we have is a skill we can teach and learn How a culture of belief in people to solve problems creatively makes all the difference Why stretching is a far cry from being cheap and more about being frugal Why more expertise, knowledge, and practice does not equal greater problem solving How we approach problems more narrowly when we look only for expertise How and why outsiders bring a fresh perspective to problem solving Ways we can cultivate an outsider perspective in ourselves How, when we overplan, we count on a world that may or may not exist Why, in turbulent environments, successful organizations are both fast and accurate The power of running lots of small experiments to learn How we can leap without looking by doing and gathering data without learning from it How sticking to our plans at any cost can work against our own best interests The creativity the comes from unthinkable combinations How stretching makes a difference in how we live our lives Episode Links @ScottSonenshein http://www.scottsonenshein.com/ Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling Ron Johnson If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Research shows that happiness is elusive. So how can we achieve a deeper, longer lasting sense of joy? Emily Esfahani Smith, author of the book, The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life that Matters, studies the powerful distinction between meaning and happiness and why it matters. An editor at the Hoover Institution, a policy think tank at Stanford University, and a columnist for The New Criterion, her writing has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. Her research reveals four pillars, or themes, associated with meaning. The stronger these pillars are in our lives, the more meaningful our lives will be. In this interview, we talk about: Why we should strive for meaning over happiness How meaning helps us think longer term The fact that meaning helps us connect to something larger than ourselves The four themes of meaning -- belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence Why belonging is the most important pillar of meaning How belonging helps us see how we matter, helps us feel valued, respected, cared for Why purpose is all about what we can contribute to others How the story we tell about our lives is a way of crafting our identities How transcendence helps us connect to something larger than ourselves How we can help each other have a healthy sense of belonging at work through the social cues that we send, like making eye contact and smiling How purpose and belonging overlap when we become more focused on service Why we need to act on our talents and strengths to recognize our purpose Narrative identity arises from the stories we tell about our lives and our experiences We have agency in shaping the story of our lives in ways that help us move forward Paying attention to our current future selves - who we want to become How astronauts rethink their values and their ambitions as a result awe experiences What growing up in a Sufi household taught Emily about meaning vs happiness Episode Links @EmEsfahaniSmith http://emilyesfahanismith.com/ The New Criterion The Hoover Institution Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue by Veronika Huta and Richard M. Ryan Shawn Achor The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan Carlos Eire Jeffrey S. Ashby Sufism Rumi Whirling Dervish If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When we get angry or excited, our emotions can seem automatic. But are they? For decades, scientists have described these feelings as hardwired, beyond our control, and associated with certain parts of the brain. But recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology are upending this classical view, with revolutionary implications for how we understand ourselves and the world. In her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, helps us rethink what it means to be human, with repercussions for parenting, our legal system, and even our health. Lisa received an NIH Directors Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain and has been studying human emotion for over 20 years. In this interview, we talk about: The fact that our emotions are not hardwired but are made by our brains as we need them Old, inaccurate ways of thinking about emotions and the brain, like emotions as associated with specific parts of the brain How variety is the norm when it comes to expressing and feeling emotions How having emotional granularity helps us feel, express, and understand our own and others emotions more deeply The fact that our brains are not reacting but rather are predicting and constantly guessing what will happen next based on past experiences How the predictions our brains make, based on past experience, yield the thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs we hold and feel How the brain of a baby is awaiting instructions for how to wire itself by capturing experiences it can draw on in the future How baby brains look very different from adult brains because they have not yet had the experiences an adult has had How our present and future selves are conjured from our past The fact that our emotions are not universal or identical by have variations and shades based on the situation How we actually have not one anger but many angers and happinesses and so on Why we must have knowledge of an emotion in order to experience it How the easiest way to gain knowledge of an emotion is through emotion words How an extensive emotion vocabulary benefits us socially and academically and helps us see varied emotions in other people, gives us greater empathy The fact that we can combine past experiences in brand new ways to create new knowledge if we have not yet had those actual experiences The fact that emotions are abstract concepts rather than physical properties and that they can guide us toward a particular goal of say using anger to overcome an obstacle If a tree falls in a forest and no human is there does it make a sound? No! If we have no concept of a tree then we would not hear the sound of it falling in a forest. Why we cannot understand unfamiliar languages or music How our brain is constantly anticipating sights, sounds, tastes and taking in information from the world and our bodies based on past experience How granularity in color perception is similar to what it means to have emotional granularity Why staying physically healthy is tied to being emotionally healthy How awe experiences help us gain perspective and regulate our physical and emotional health How curating awe experiences daily -- like walking outside, reading something new, taking in nature -- helps make our immediate problems seem smaller and less worrisome How the physical health of our bodies is intricately connected to the emotional health of our minds How many gun laws work against what we now know about our predicting brains the the ways past experiences taint our beliefs and what we see and how we act How understanding how our emotions are made helps us see that we are more in control and empowered than we may think to create the life we want to have How we are the architects of our own experience Episode Links @LFeldmanBarrett http://lisafeldmanbarrett.com The Memory Illusion by Julia Shaw If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do successful people possess talents that we lack? Or do they just do things that scare the rest of us? Andy Molinsky wants to help us embrace difficult challenges that can lead to growth. He is the author of the book, Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge, and Build Confidence, and a Professor of Psychology and Organizational Behavior at Brandeis International Business School. Andy has spent his career studying how people learn to have difficult conversations, take on new roles, overcome shyness, and achieve the success they crave. He often writes on this topic for Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Fast Company, The Economist and The Financial Times. In this interview, we talk about: Concrete steps you can take to step outside your comfort zone The connections Andy made between what immigrants face and what we all face when we enter a new, challenging situation How so much of learning new things and taking on new, stimulating challenges is about stepping outside our comfort zones What we gain by stepping outside our comfort zones Why it is about everyday acts of courage, like making smalltalk with supervisors, speaking up at meetings, connecting with someone who holds a different point of view How reaching helps us grow and advance in our lives and jobs to take on new roles, achieve goals and dreams, and help others The techniques we use to avoid reaching, like playing the avoidance game The excuses we make when we try to avoid reaching and how they harm us How perfectionists can avoid reaching The important role scaffolding plays as we take on new challenges and opportunities How we can customize or personalize aspects of a situation to feel more empowered The props, behaviors, costumes, and poses we can employ when we reach How fear is about trying to predict the future rather than living in the present How reaching is so often a process of self discovery The epiphanies we have when we reach -- easier than we thought and better than we imagined we would be How a friend or colleague can remind us of how well we did the last time we reached in this way Why sticking with it when things get hard means all the difference How we can build small wins into our plan to help us gain perspective and resilience Why reaching is really about learning, not failure Why it is all about adopting a learning orientation How keeping a diary can help us track our learning journey Why reaching is about much more than taking a leap -- it includes planning, practicing, trying out tools and techniques The fact that we are not alone when we feel uncomfortable reaching -- most of us feel this way How so many of us feel like imposters when we reach Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @AndyMolinsky www.andymolinsky.com Global Dexterity by Andy Molinsky Emotional Agility by Susan David Lev Vygotsky Carol Dweck If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Leaders face an onslaught of new challenges that demand increasingly innovative solutions. Yet their approaches to finding them often get stuck in either blue-sky brainstorming or bottom-line decision making. Instead, leaders need a path that blends these two approaches -- a middle road that engages not only the minds of their teams, but also their hearts. To address these challenges, Lisa Kay Solomon co-authored the book, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. Lisa is an innovation, leadership, and design expert and Principal Faculty and Managing Director of Transformational Practices at Singularity University. Her writing has been featured in BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. In this interview, we talk about: Why we need to bring the human side -- our hearts and minds -- to strategic conversations How designing strategic conversations is an important leadership skill How strategic conversations differ from brainstorming and decision making Why strategic conversations are about more than getting the right answer Why these kinds of conversations are about the future of our organizations, of challenging the status quo, and of multiple perspectives, whether that involves new products and services, entry into new geographic regions, new business models, or new ways of staffing How strategic conversations can help us build understanding and help us see what success looks like The power of staying in the exploration space, staying expansive in our thinking Why these conversations are about mindsets, emotions, new ways of thinking, and new possibilities versus logic, right over wrong, or defending particular points of view Why strategic conversations require leaders to develop greater self-awareness and an understanding of their biases Why strategy is emotional How our education and schooling tees us up to think of strategic planning as all about the correct, numeric answer The important role design thinking, empathy, and supposed soft skills play in strategic conversations Why designing strategic conversations is a craft, not a crapshoot The importance of engaging multiple perspectives rather than just identifying participants -- paying attention to diverse ages, people outside the organization, visualizations, etc Why we should prepare participants before bringing them together, so that we set them up for success How background readings, information on who else will be in the room, meeting goals, etc, can help participants do their best work Why we want to design backwards when bringing people together for strategic conversations The importance of asking what participants will be thinking or saying to friends before, during, and after strategic planning meetings Why framing the issue of the strategic conversation is so important and so challenging How framing the issue is like providing the picture on the puzzle box because it is about setting the parameters How we can reframe discussions of market competitors by asking who is delivering value in new ways to our customers Why a school considering adding a high school asked should we do it versus can we do it Why leaders need to get comfortable bringing emotion into the room How setting the agenda is about making it an experience, getting people invested, and engaging emotionally, rather than just about getting things done Why we should value discussing our fears, what we care about, and what makes us nervous about the issues we are discussing Addressing the yeah but of long-term vs short-term thinking and planning Being able to speak to the reality of organizational politics and turf wars Having empathy for knowing how to engage with one another in these ways -- with visualizations, storytelling, conversations, and new ways of thinking Recognizing that strategic thinking can be learned and that it is a set of skills we are not taught and that probably did not get us to where we are in leadership The value of helping employees understand the purpose and intention of the organization The fact that every day is an opportunity to ask ourselves what we can learn, how we can stretch, and what is possible Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @lisakaysolomon Pierre Wack Simply Brilliant by William C. Taylor The Nueva School Chris Ertel Singularity University California College of the Arts and its MBA in Design Strategy Design a Better Business by Lisa Kay Solomon If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

How can we stay on top of changes that are not only getting faster, but more complex? We need strategies to take advantage of breakthroughs in fields as diverse as data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning, since they are changing the ways we work, research, and live. To navigate this change, Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab and author of Whiplash, shares insights from research at the Lab and offers us nine strategies for surviving our faster future. In this interview, he does a deep dive on creative problem solving, teams, diversity, and learning. He talks about: How the Media Lab got started and the current focus of its work The importance of the white space between and beyond disciplines How the Media Lab has shifted from operating as a container to operating as a node How neuroscientist Ed Boyden embodies the multi-disciplinary approach of the Lab How pull over push problem solving is about finding and using the resources you need when you need them How the 2011 Japanese earthquake became a focal point for pull over push problem solving The power of diverse teams - and diverse tools - for creative problem solving The sweet spot of disagreement and diversity among productive teams When it comes to diversity, why we need to ask, are we looking to the other or just another? How innovative cybersecurity folks are designing systems that assume failure rather than seeking to avoid it and how this is about resilience over strength Why we need to think about the interaction among objects - the systems in which they operate - in order to innovate for greater success The role nuance and complexity play in thinking about open source How machine learning and artificial intelligence are impacting fields like cryptocurrency and genetic engineering The fact that policies and regulations are behind where machine learning and artificial intelligence are taking us Why lawyers need to learn more about tech and scientists need to learn more about ethical and legal issues Kevin Esvelt and his work at the Media Lab in genetic engineering and his focus on responsible ways of deploying these tools in conjunction with everyday citizens Why we cannot wait on ethicists and policymakers but must get scientists on board instead How our education system is the opposite of what robots and artificial intelligence are ensuring we need when it comes to creativity and innovation Why the Media Lab emphasizes the 4Ps of play, passion, projects, and peers and how that differs markedly from what U.S. schools are about Why our education system and our schools need to be as dynamic and open to change as the fields that will have the greatest impact on us and them How we might look to the ed system in Finland regarding assessment and project-based learning The value of the Montessori approach The value of looking at countries like India and others where they are experimenting with schools and learning The power of informal, interest-driven learning Why we should be spending more time on getting people engaged in their learning Why he believes learning is a social and cultural problem, not a tech problem, and why we need to create a culture of learning How he thought programming and coding would be more about mindset and creativity than employment Why he believes we need to nudge human-machine interactions in the right direction Episode Links @Joi https://joi.ito.com/ MIT Media Lab Jerome Wiesner Nicholas Negroponte Marvin Minsky Seymour Papert Muriel Cooper John Seely Brown Ed Boyden Optogenetics Just-in-time manufacturing The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly Scott E. Page Donella Meadows Reid Hoffman Kevin Esvelt and Rewriting the Code of Life CRISPR Mizuko Ito (Mimi Ito) and Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Can extraordinary innovation happen in ordinary organizations? Yes, if you know how. In his latest book, Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways, Bill Taylor shines a spotlight on innovation in organizations such as banks, fast-food joints, and nonprofits. And he shares how they do it. Co-founder of Fast Company and bestselling author of the books, Practically Radical and Mavericks at Work, Bill has written for the NYTimes, the Guardian, and Harvard Business Review, and he blogs regularly for HBR. In this interview, he talks about: How Silicon Valley companies make up less than 10 percent of businesses How having a compelling lighthouse identity helps ordinary organizations stand out The 4 key elements of a lighthouse identity What it looks like when innovation meets the ordinary world of banking The fact that we want to do business with companies and brands that are fun Why being ordinary is not an option for every day organizations How an investor seeks out missionary over mercenary businesses The role teaching and psychology play in a fast-food standout What happens when leaders read and discuss books together Why an every day company requires its leaders to teach What it looks like when company expansion is driven by employee growth How big and rapid growth can decrease what makes a young organization so special The incredible role thought leadership plays in extraordinary organizations What Bill learned by spending a training day with employees from Quicken Loans How being bold, exciting and compelling in the marketplace requires we be that way in the workplace How the most successful organizations prioritize ideas and people Steps experts can take to see their work with fresh eyes What jazz can teach leaders about provocative competence What it takes to find our next ideas and why that is more important than ever How a wildly successful company prioritized learning to get unstuck Needing to ask: When is the last time you did something for the first time? Why we need to spend less time being interesting and more time being interested How being interested is about seeking out big ideas and small sources of inspiration Needing to ask: Am I learning as fast as the world is changing? Why the future is shaped by tough-minded optimists The importance of asking how to help more people benefit from the wealth of the few Episode Links @williamctaylor https://williamctaylor.com/ Metro Banks Willy Wonka John Doerr of KPKB Pals Sudden Service Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award The Art of Sun Tzu The Innovation Formula by Amantha Imber Quicken Loans and Dan Gilbert Rosanne Haggerty and Community Solutions MacArthur Fellows Program Robert Wennett WD-40 John W. Gardner If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening! Thank you to Emmy-award-winning Creative Director Vanida Vae for designing the Curious Minds logo, and thank you to Rob Mancabelli for all of his production expertise! www.gayleallen.net LinkedIn @GAllenTC

Innovators often invent the future and some do so by rethinking the past. For example, innovative historical researchers not only help us understand what happened yesterday, they improve how we respond to those issues today. Ibram Kendi is one of those researchers. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, he uncovers the history of racist ideas in America. Winner of the 2016 National Book Award, his research reveals that racist policies fuel ignorance and hate, rather than the other way around. His findings challenge what many of us were taught to believe about racism in America today and the strategies we use to address it. Highlights from our conversation include: How racist ideas stem from racist policies that reinforce power structures History shows that 200+ years of educating and persuading away racism has been less impactful than eliminating racist policies How uplift suasion has worked against blacks by making them believe they are responsible for the racist ideas of others Why there is a very real mutual interest in working against racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty to eliminate one and all of these isms How eliminating racist policies and disparities are key to eliminating racist ideas The fact that racist ideas connote racial hierarchy while anti-racist ideas connote racial equality How misleading statistics and unscientific approaches reinforce negative stereotypes around predominantly black neighborhoods How the academic achievement gap is a racist idea Three perspectives on our ongoing historical debate on race - segregationism, anti-racism, assimilation - and what they mean for blacks How W.E.B DuBois helped us recognize that black striving for suasion and uplift maintains false notions of black inferiority How Angela Davis taught us about the complexities of our identities in terms of gender, race, class, sex, age, etc How scientific racism served to reinforce notions of black inferiority How even after scientific racism was disproven by biologists and geneticists those in power wanted to fixate on any tiny percentage of difference to reinforce superiority How the debates we are having today about race are not new and are informed by a long history of racist policies in the US that allow those in power to argue that blacks are inferior How the US government sought to use deportation to evict freed slaves Episode Links @DrIbram http://www.ibram.org/ Jefferson Davis Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy ONeil How the Academic Achievement Gap is a Racist Idea by Ibram Kendi Cotton Mather Thomas Jefferson William Lloyd Garrison W. E. B. DuBois Double consciousness Angela Davis Intersectionality Bill Clinton Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Employee engagement is at an all-time low, but why? Francesca Gino, an expert on employee engagement and productivity, advises that if we do only one thing to fix it, we should encourage our employees to stop conforming and be themselves. When she and members of her research team introduced small interventions that encouraged people to be more authentic, the results were dramatic. Francesca is a Professor at Harvard Business School and author of the recent Harvard Business Review article, Fostering Rebel Talent at Work. She has won numerous awards for her work in psychology and management, and her research has been featured in publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and Scientific American. She is also author of the book, Sidetracked. Highlights from our conversation include: Why being ourselves at work increases engagement, creativity, and productivity How authenticity at work increases employee engagement and retention How opportunities to reflect on our strengths and unique qualities as early as onboarding increase our engagement and desire to stay on Why engagement goes up when we ask employees to share strengths during onboarding Concrete ways to encourage new employees to add to organizational culture How reflecting on who we are increases happiness and engagement Simple ways we can be authentic at work without waiting for permission The importance of asking why we do things this way How an award-winning chef helps his employees be authentic at work How it takes courage to be authentic and why it breeds success How leaders can model non-conformity for their employees What leaders can say to encourage employees to voice dissent How leaders can make clear when conformity is the rule The one quality a high-powered search firm seeks in candidates above all others How curious people can be better decision makers and creatives Why asking people to read a variety of books may hold the key to fostering creativity How her own experience coming to the U.S. from Italy led her to the research she does That rebel talent is something we can learn to embrace and cultivate How leaders can start small to help their employees be themselves at work Episode Links @francescagino http://francescagino.com 360-degree feedback HBR The Conversational Firm by Catherine Turco Massimo Bottura and Osteria Francescana elBulli Mellody Hobson and Ariel Investment Egon Zehnder Pixar and Ed Catmull IDEO If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Self-driving cars are just around the corner. Are you ready? With the advent of machine learning and related tech, autonomous cars are more technologically mature than most of us think. Yet old-school policies and regulations are lagging behind, making it difficult for large scale adoption to take place. Essentially, driverless tech has become a people, rather than a technology, problem. To help us sort out the complicated landscape on our horizon, Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman wrote the book, Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead. Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University who specializes in artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing, and Kurman, an expert on the impact of technology on the economy and our daily lives, lay out the advances in technology that got us here and the benefits and challenges that lie ahead. Highlights from our interview include: The staggering number of lives self-driving cars will save How the maturity of driverless tech has outpaced updates to policies and regulations How traditional models of car insurance do not hold up to what autonomous cars require How a safety standard comparing driverless tech to humans is key How driverless tech can reduce noise and idling pollution Ways parking spaces and garages can be repurposed with fewer cars on the road The fact that city planners are focusing on public transportation and neglecting driverless tech and its impact on transportation budgets The important safety challenge of an incremental versus an all-out shift to driverless tech How driverless tech is now able to out-perceive humans at the wheel The role DARPA played in advancing driverless accelerating driverless tech How a shift from rules-based to machine learning birthed driverless car tech How sensors and software feed information to driverless cars How a combination of sensors and software help driverless tech overcome individual vulnerabilities in tech How gaming software held the key to advancing driverless tech The role ImageNet played in advancing image perception needed for driverless cars The fact that deep learning includes machines learning what we may not have words for Why we need to be talking about the impact of driverless tech on jobs How driverless tech can reduce isolation and increase mobility for the elderly and visually impaired How networked driverless cars can amass thousands of lifetimes of experience very quickly as they learn from one another in ways humans cannot How the shift to self-driving cars is less about the tech and more about the human issues of policies and regulations How driverless tech will usher in new businesses we cannot even imagine or predict Episode Links Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University DARPA Grand Challenge The Grid by Gretchen Bakke Lidar GPUs ImageNet Deep learning Qualia If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

If you struggle with exercise, Michelle Segar has a secret for you: Stop blaming yourself! Blame the system! After years of studying the science of motivation, Michelle Segar, Ph.D., Director of SHARP -- the Sport, Health, and Activity research and policy center at the University of Michigan -- has created a framework for rethinking exercise that swaps out prescription for meaning. Filled with practical tips and strategies, Michelle’s bestselling book, No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, is informed by years of putting these findings into practice with people just like you. Some of the things we discuss in this interview: How systems determine our success in sustaining physical activity Why exercise is about so much more than weight loss Why finding the right whys make all the difference in our health and wellness How reflecting on how we feel when we move can help us sustain activity Why relying on willpower is such a short-sighted strategy The important role of emotions and decision making in activity for life Why meaning trumps should every time when it comes to changing our behaviors How we approach eating following a workout we enjoy versus a workout like work How exercise recommendations became so prescriptive Fewer than 1 percent of American adults know how much exercise is recommended How small of a role logical and rational behavior play in our choosing to exercise Why we need a new kind of fitness prescription based on how we live and feel How we help others when we prioritize our self care How a go-to activity resource prevents us from wasting time and energy Why reflecting on the immediate benefits of physical exercise fuels us long term The importance of finding exercise we love Getting past the idea that movement only counts when we sustain it for periods of time How awareness of our current situation empowers us to take ownership for what we want it to be Why negotiation skills can reap big benefits in helping us create time for physical activity Episode Links @MichelleSegar http://michellesegar.com/ Paulo Freire Dan Ariely Behavioral economics Reward Substitution Self-determination theory No Sweat Resolutions Quiz 2015 USA Best Book Awards SHARP at the University of Michigan If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!