Innovation at Deloitte with Geoff Tuff

Debbie said, you know what, I never would have dropped out if I had my posse with me. And so Debbie, back in her early to mid-20s, had this idea along with a couple of others, you know, what if we set up an institution, set up a foundation that brought really talented, high leadership potential kids together from backgrounds where they wouldn't necessarily have access to top-tier educations, group them together in groups of 10, a posse, and put them off on a full ride to some of the nation's top universities? And so that's what the policy is going to be.

Welcome to Innovation and Leadership, where I interview uncommonly high achievers like top investment fund managers, elite special operations soldiers, startup CEOs who sold their companies for billions of dollars, pro athletes, Hollywood filmmakers— really, as many different kinds of experts as I can. The whole idea is to hear how they did it and then what advice they have for the rest of us that can be applied to the organizations we're trying to grow and innovate. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy today's show. This is part 2 of our interview with Geoff Tuff. Geoff, I didn't even ask in the first part, what's your official title at Deloitte?

Well, my official title is a reasonably simple one. It's principal in our Deloitte Consulting business, and I have a lot of sort of subtitles and roles and what have you, but that's my, that's my title.

Okay, so we're talking about your new book that comes out in September, Provoke, and anybody who missed part 1, please go back and hear about what we've covered in that already. But can we do kind of a quick overview of kind of the middle of the book, the part 2 on those, the fatal human flaws, and then let's hear about some of the stories?

Yeah, so I hope this will be quick, but the beginning of the book actually addresses the reality that we are these days, and I would say this is increasingly true over the course of the last, call it decade or so, we're increasingly living in a world impacted not by linear change, but by exponential change, which means that we need to consider a much wider range of possible outcomes as we look to the future than we have historically. It doesn't feel natural to do that because most of what we've learned over time is about— I mean, literally, as human beings, we think in a linear way and we imagine the world in a linear way. It's how we're genetically coded. But we need to be able to start thinking exponentially. The challenge that we've got is that partly because of individual natural human biases and in part because of organizational tendencies, even if we recognize we have to have this really wide— call it playing field or consideration field or what have you— as we look forward and consider a range of different outcomes, we unintentionally layer on more and more blinders to our point of view to the point that we actually get back to really just considering one dominant version of the future and one dominant path forward. And the types of biases that I'm talking about actually are ones that are well known to any student or non-student of behavioral economics, things like availability bias. We tend to overweight information that we have easy access to, or status quo bias. We tend to believe that things staying the same is better than things changing. And I won't take you through all of them right now, but you know, it's, it's an important setup to the rest of the book because unless we can actually understand when we're being impacted by those biases, And unless we can increase the cognitive diversity in our organizations, which usually comes from actual diversity, then we're not going to be able to consider the entire field of vision that we need to and then be able to act in the way that we need to provoke the future we want.

So, okay. So how much do you want to go into more of those, or can we talk about Deborah, or what do you want to go next?

We can go wherever you'd like. I mean, that's the general premise. I think to go deeper, I'd have to start enumerating them, and that may—

I think that's a good premise.

Yeah. So anyway, that the premise is that we unintentionally layer on those organizational blinders. And so the question is, how do we get rid of them?

Yeah, it's interesting for me, I feel like a lot of people are familiar with some of that stuff from like Daniel Kahneman's work or stuff like that. But for me, like, I'm such a Warren Buffett nerd, I feel like I have to bring him up on every episode of the show, right? But his partner, Charlie Munger, has really done some interesting work taking that stuff and applying it to the investment world, you know, at At our fund at Greystoke Investments, we, we really try to— we do try to push back on ourselves. And it's partially because Charlie Munger is so harsh. He's so harsh.

Or just honest. Just honest.

No, he's harsh. He's a harsh guy. He's harsh about his honesty. And so I feel this like gut check of like, oh yeah, you know, like, I don't know, am I giving myself a pass too easy on things? Do I need to think harder? Anyways.

Again, without going into it in detail, one obvious solution to those organizational blinders is get people around you who don't see the world the same way you do. I know Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett are longtime friends. They may see the world in similar ways, but for whatever reason, he has an ability to challenge Buffett and everyone else around him that actually is that cognitive diversity that forces you to really consider, are you Acting with these organizational blinders, with these individual biases?

Well, it's interesting. He talks about— because he's very widely read, and he talks about this idea of having a mental latticework where he is intentionally and consistently— you think about the innovation principle of like how many innovations are found on things that are the opposite end of the universe from the groupthink I belong to, right? And he essentially invents that for himself. by this mental latticework of all the different types of information he consumes and uses to challenge himself and is obviously a big fan of Kahneman, but also people like Nicholas Taleb and some of those folks, right?

I mean, and again, it's a great— it's just yet another example of diversity of thought. I mean, one way to achieve that diversity of thought is to be really not just well-read, but diversely read, as you put. Often people will ask Steve or me at the end of a talk or at the end of a show like this some of the top advice we can give, and one of the top bits of advice is go read more and read more different stuff than you're used to. I can't claim to be smart enough to have a mental lattice work I can actually envision, but I do know that I do force myself to read a breadth of different things.

Well, quite frankly, it's part of the reason I started this show. Probably my favorite innovation book out there is the Steven Johnson Where Good Ideas Come From. He just talks about how many of the best innovations are like somebody goes on their own, they work on their stuff in the closet, and then they go mix with a whole bunch of other ideas and they bump into 1,000 other ideas and end up discovering another half of theirs. He calls it like a liquid network of good ideas.

As long as you have lateral thinkers in the mix. That's another critical trait, the ability to see something in one context and put it in another context and imagine it for its essence working in a different way. Because if we were all like totally linear thinkers, expert in only our own way, and we didn't have those connectors, it'd be very hard for those networks to lead to good outcomes.

Well, like, so I feel like my books are that way and these interviews. I get to talk to so many great people, but, you know, interview people in Africa and England and Taiwan and the States and Canada and like From so many different industries. Yeah, it's like there's 2 things about it. One, I was looking for what are ideas I've never considered that could be stolen and brought to my industry. And 2, what are the— what are like the principles? What are the truths that show up regardless of the industry? Like if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a pro athlete, if you're a nonprofit person, if you're a special ops veteran, you know, what are— what are principles that show up over and over?

Yeah.

And things like humility, things like listening.

You should be the one writing books, not me.

I plan on it. But it is interesting to hear themes like humility and listening.

Totally.

That are so simple and so obvious, but so deeply lived by some of the most successful people I've ever had on the show. Like they just embrace it harder than the rest of us that know we should or something.

Yeah, I absolutely believe that that's true. And it actually goes back to our opening conversation around Canadians. Not to overstate it, but you know.

Yeah, I will say this. I feel like Americans are a little better at getting stuff done, but Canadians are funnier. There's a lot more laughing in Canadian culture, in my opinion.

Well, I— yeah, we don't need to enumerate the, the various successful US-based comedians and actors who have actually originated from our homeland, but— Right.

Okay, well, yeah, tell us one of your favorite stories from the book.

So I, as hopefully people will learn, The way that we end the book is actually reflecting on a lot of the lessons, a lot of the— and the book is chock-full of kind of stories from the business world, but we wanted to end in a way that reflects on a lot of the lessons but brought to life through real people who have actually provoked a different future. And in particular, provoked a future that actually leads to more sustainable opening of the organizational blinders, if you will. And so the third section of the book is actually called Profiles of Provocateurs. It's my favorite part of the book because it's real people who have been out there living the principles that we tried to capture in the book, whether they knew it or not. And so there's 3 folks who we profiled. One is Debbie Beal, who's founder of the Posse Foundation. Second is Ryan Gravel, who has actually done a number of different things, runs a number of startups out of the Atlanta area, but he's known as the BeltLine guy, the guy who envisioned a different way of being in the city of Atlanta and opening up a lot of green space along the way. The third is Valerie Rainford, who is founder of LRE Talent Strategies, but she really made her name first at the Fed, then at JPMorgan, essentially bringing diversity into the talent pool. And so all 3 of them are amazing stories. You know, the story of Debbie and Posse, the Posse Foundation, is one that I know personally because I've been involved with Posse for some period of time. But it really is an amazing story of—

And what does the foundation do?

So the Posse Foundation It, it, the term comes from an experience Debbie had 32 years ago or so when she was working in New York in an afterschool program for folks that, and I'm, I'm, I'm gonna get the entire story of, of the, the origination a little bit off, but she was working with kids who were super talented but didn't necessarily have access to all the opportunities that others might have, especially around arts. And, and Debbie had met a really outstanding young, I, I think it was a young man, although I don't actually know if it was a man or a woman, but someone who went off to college, should have done extremely well at college, came back, dropped out, came back, saw Debbie, and said, you know what, I never would have dropped out if I had my posse with me. And so Debbie, back in her early to mid-20s, had this idea along with a couple of others, you know, what if we set up an institution, set up a foundation that brought really talented, high leadership potential kids together from backgrounds where they wouldn't necessarily have access to top-tier educations, group them together in groups of 10, a posse, and put them off on a full ride to some of the nation's top universities. And so that's what the Posse Foundation has been doing for 32 years now, I believe. They've given out over $1.5 billion in scholarship. This past fall, they named their 10,000th scholar that they supported through the education process, and they've now evolved the model so it's not just about first of all, finding the high leadership potential kids and then preparing them for college and then helping them through college and their first steps of their career, but in an ongoing way to help them through their career to find access to new different types of opportunities with the intent of actually changing the face of leadership in the U.S. And it's just a remarkable story, coming back to Debbie, of someone who was constantly just a little bit ahead of everyone else out there and constantly provoking in a way that got others to see the vision she saw and to do the things that she thought might actually lead to a better future, even if she didn't know the entirety of how it was going to turn out. So it's— I think hopefully the readers will find it's a very— all 3 of the stories are incredibly inspiring stories of people who are natural-born provocateurs, whether or not they ever recognized it.

Yeah. Can you give us some more examples of like the obstacles she had to overcome or whatever to do that?

Well, I think, you know, the first one, which we write about in the book, was just sending a group of I think it was actually 5 or 6 largely Hispanic kids to Vanderbilt. And, you know, apparently even though she had some strong supporters in the Vanderbilt administration, there was a local newspaper that had a headline. I don't know if it was quite this ridiculous, but the headline like 5 Hispanics show up at Vanderbilt. Like that was how unheard of this model was back in the, back in the late '80s, early '90s when Posse was being founded. So. That's— those are the types of things that I think she recognized and the rest of the Posse Foundation recognized early on, just what the nature of the hurdles they were going to run into, but they just kept going. And so there have been multiple different times over the course of Posse's history where, whether it's a funding gap they were having to face or where, for example, the model is so successful at some universities that the Posse— some universities have more than one Posse, so there may be At any given point in time, especially over the course of 4 years, you may have upwards of, call it, 80 or so Posse-affiliated kids. And sometimes that can grow into a pretty significant voice that some administrators start to see as being disruptive to the community, even though it added a lot of diversity and a lot of strong leadership. Sometimes it can feel as though it's challenging to the status quo, and they've had to, they've had to work over time to figure out how to make sure Posse continues to live the mission while also not getting in the way of what the organizations that they work with are trying to achieve as well. And, you know, recognizing which of those to prioritize at any given point in time is something that I think the Posse Foundation in some ways has developed an instinct over time for.

Interesting. Any specifics that come to mind on like something like coming up with the funding gap? Did she come up with some innovative way to do it or any specifics?

Well, so that's the thing. It's a great question because the answer is no. There's no— there have been some sparks of brilliance in all these stories along the way. But the thing that inspires me about them is these are not about moments of genius that people have, even though Debbie was actually named a MacArthur Genius Grant. These are not— to be a provocateur does not require sparks of genius. It requires an ability to look forward and act with confidence even when you don't have all the data. Small steps every day, every week, every month that continue on towards the mission that you're trying to achieve. And I think even though there, as I say, there have been remarkable moments in the stories of all 3 of our provocateurs, it's not primarily about those sparks of brilliance as I said before.

So I'm interested, does the confidence— do you feel like the confidence comes from taking enough small steps? that you can get some footing? Or where do you feel like the confidence comes in the face of the uncertainty?

Well, it's interesting. So I think about the 3 people we got to know as the provocateurs. I think a lot of it is just— it's confidence learned from life experience, even though all of them have had very different life experiences. But for the average person, I think it's— if there is a commonality, it's probably learning That right small step, the right size of a small step, and having had enough success over time with those small steps that you recognize you don't get burned if you don't take too big a step. And actually, it's always a process of course correction along the way. And so the type of confidence that I think great provocateurs have is not the confidence to go and take big leaps, come, you know, whatever the outcome. It's the confidence to just keep plowing forward even in the face of small obstacles, because ultimately you are going to be able to course correct yourself your way to a good outcome.

Yeah, it's always interesting to me, kind of like confirming when I hear similar principles show up in multiple fields, right? Like, I think about the Jim Collins Great by Choice where he talks about shooting bullets, not cannonballs.

Yep.

Right. Last week, staying at one of the partners in our Grace Oak Investments fund, She lives over in Hawaii and our family went and stayed with them for a couple of weeks.

It was great, right?

But she talked about one of her mentors. This guy's worth several hundred million dollars, client of hers, friend, talked about very similar process in the idea of like send canoes, not the whole ship. Like, can we send some canoes over there?

I need a snappy analogy of something.

Yeah, you got to come up with a snappy analogy. But for anyways, it's just fun to like hear the same principles repeatedly. It gives me more confidence in them, even though they should make logical truth. They should like the logic once should be enough, but for some reason I really like seeing it multiple times in multiple applications, and and then it makes me think it helps me question myself because I I do want to shoot the cannonball. I do want to bring the whole ship. You know, I can convince myself of the outcome I wish for, and that's that's been a problem at certain times. And so this helps me like be restrained of like okay actually you know what yeah you're right let's just send the canoe. Let's, you know, I claim to know the future. Let's send a canoe and confirm it.

Yeah. And, you know, I think the narrative around what it means to be a successful and innovative leader has shifted over time. At least I hope it's shifted over time. You know, we used to hear these big, bold, audacious stories of people who have taken on the world and disrupted their industries. And yes, there are some of those, but most of the time, actually, innovation successes are the people who send the canoes, not the— what is it? What was the other one? Battleships.

Yeah, whatever. Don't send the whole ship because if we crash the whole ship, we're in big trouble. Crash one canoe, we could probably survive it.

Exactly.

Well, you think about raising, you know, rising to the top of leadership at Monitor, being up at the top of the game at Deloitte, bestselling books. When you think about how few people have accomplished what you have statistically, what do you think that you've done different than others?

I think honestly, just not taking myself too seriously. I, I, the, the key over time, I think, has been to first and foremost make sure that I'm having fun doing what I'm doing and people around me are having fun. And that's led to this virtuous cycle of I try to be engaging, I engage people, I see that it works, and I've both been able to form a career around being out in the public domain and speaking with people and motivating them to do something that doesn't feel natural to them as people. but also learning a ton from people in the process. I mean, there's nothing in any of the writing I've done over time, whether it's these books or articles or what have you, that doesn't come from the client interactions that I've had over time. And I think a lot of the time, whether it's consulting or other careers, you know, people have a vision for what it means to be successful. And the vision is about a career path, about a ladder, about, you know, a set of things they want to try to accomplish. And I honestly, I've just, I've never really thought about what's going to come next. I've thought about how can I have fun out on the road and get different types of experiences. It's been excruciating for the last 15 months as I've not been allowed to be out on the road, but hopefully that will be coming back.

I'm really interested in this. I think that for me, I feel like that has done— a similar philosophy has done really well for me of like, when I'm having a good time, it's magnetic. People want to come have a good time with us.

Exactly.

Right? And yet, at other times, I find myself giving into fear, giving into feelings of desperation, giving into all sorts of things that are not fun. And then I'm, I'm not operating from a place of abundance. And I'm not, I'm not as magnetic, frankly. And, and so I am interested in like cultivating this idea of like making sure that I'm having fun, and that the people around me are having fun.

And I can get quite task-oriented on certain things, you know, as we all can.

And like, you know, I'm a nerd for efficiency. Like, it's like a sport to me. How little can we invest and get this much profit out the back end? Or, or what's the maximum profit we can get for this investment? It's like a sport, right?

Yeah.

But in that quest, I can lose sight of fun and enjoyment, even though it's been such a success pattern for me. Any thoughts about like calming down, slowing down, Having more fun and still getting your result?

Well, this is going to sound dead obvious, but first of all, go have fun. Like, don't spend your entire life working and thinking about the things that you're trying to accomplish in your professional life. I spend a lot of time outside work, especially with my kids and my wife, out seeing jam band music shows. I mean, that's our thing. And so that— just having an outlet like that is really important. So I don't know if this is true for everyone, but the time that I find myself receding and getting worried is when I'm too focused on what's to come in the future and what, you know, what, what, how I can be perfectly controlling of the outcomes, which again sounds antithetical to the book that we just wrote. But I think it really is important that we have an idea for how the future is going to unfold, but focus more on the here and now and the immediate next steps we can take as opposed to how to actually control all the different outcomes. So, I, you know, one experience I had earlier on in my career, and I'm sure many others have had, is thinking forward financially to the ability to buy a certain home or have a certain type of lifestyle. It's incredibly crushing to think 10 or 15 years in advance and think about all the different steps you can take there other than just to put that— say, yep, that's something I'd like to do at some point. How can I focus on taking the next best step forward and enjoy the things I'm doing? in a way that may actually orient me towards that future. And so I think a lot of it actually does come back to the small steps conversation we were having before. Focus more on the smaller steps in the short term and how to have fun along the way than taking those big steps towards forcefully bringing about the future that you think you want to have.

Yeah, I get a lot of anxiety out of controlling the future. That's not controllable.

Yeah, by definition.

It makes me think now I need to like go home and introduce my children to the Bill Murray classic. What's the one with the baby steps and Richard Dreyfuss at Lake Winnipesaukee? Now I need to go watch the Bill Murray movie about baby steps with Richard Dreyfuss.

Yeah. So what is— wait, what is that movie? That's the—

Is it What About Bob?

It could be. It's ringing a vague bell, but yeah, I think, I think that's what we've come back to time and again here, taking those baby steps, focusing on the, on the immediate here and now.

Too funny. Well, again, where can people connect with you online and preorder?

So I am easy to find on various different social platforms. Probably the best and the one that I'm most responsive to tends to be LinkedIn. And the book can be preordered at Amazon and it'll be out in mid-September. So the book's name again is Provoke: How Leaders Can Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws. And I hope everyone enjoys it.

That's great. Well, thanks again for doing this.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Okay. Bye everyone.

All right.