Podcast 886: Provoke with Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach

Hi, this is Gregg Voisin inviting you to listen to our latest Inside Personal Growth podcast number 886 with Stephen Goldbach and Geoff Tuff about their new book entitled Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws, first edition. This podcast number 886 is brought to you by Michael Clinton, author of a new book entitled Roar into the Second Half of Your Life Before It's Too Late. In my interview with Michael, we discuss about roaring into the second half half of life being happy, strengthening capabilities, and achieving harmony and success through a dynamic process called ROAR: Reimagine Yourself, Own Who You Are, Act on What's Next, and Reassess Your Relationships. If you want to learn more about Michael Clinton and his new book, ROAR: Into the Second Half of Life Before It's Too Late, please visit his website at www.roarbymichaelclinton.com. Or you may also want to listen to this recent CBS Morning Show that he did at www.cbsnews.com, where he shares tips on how to thrive into the second half of life. And now for our featured podcast, please listen to my interview with Stephen Goldbach and Geoff Tuffs about their new book entitled Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws, first edition. Happy listening.

Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisin, the host of Inside Personal Growth. And for all my listeners, uh, we have 2 great authors on. Um, one of them is joining us from his New York, uh, residence, and that's Stephen Goldbach. And Geoff Tuff is joining us from Connecticut. Is that right, Geoff?

Actually, so I was in Rhode Island. I'm now in Massachusetts. Massachusetts.

He's in Massachusetts now. Well, thank you both, both for being on the show. Um, the book we're going to be talking about is Provoke. How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws. This is first edition. They have another book out that we'll put a link to, Detonate, which we'll also put a link to as well. And you guys can check them out on Amazon. We'll put links to Amazon as well. So, Stephen, let me start with you. Stephen is a principal at Deloitte and serves as the firm's chief strategy officer. He's a globally recognized strategist and executive advisor. Prior to joining Deloitte, Stephen was a partner at Monitor Group and a co-head of its New York office. Additionally, he was a director of strategy at Forbes. Steve helps executives and their teams transform their organizations by making challenging and pragmatic strategy choices in the face of uncertainty. And as I said, the prior book that they had was— the book is Detonate: Why and How Companies Need to Blow Up Best Practices. and Bring a Beginner's Mind to Survive. Um, on the other side of the screen is Geoff Tuff. Geoff is the principal of Deloitte Consulting, and he holds various leadership positions across its sustainability, innovation, and strategy practices. In the past, he had led Adoblen, the firm's innovation practices, and was a senior partner at Monitor Group, serving as a member of its global board of directors before the company was acquired by Deloitte. He has been with some form of Monitor for close to 30 years. Geoff's work centers on helping clients transform their businesses to grow and compete in non-traditional ways, and they're both sought-after speakers. Uh, they hold degrees from—

he does—

Dartmouth College and Harvard. Stephen, I forgot to tell people where your degrees were from. Where?

Queen's University in Canada and Columbia Business School.

Good. So we have 2 very intelligent men on the phone here to talk about their new book called Provoke. You know, I'm gonna start this question off, and you guys, I may move around because I do that, but in your chapter on patterns from the past, okay, that's kind of how this starts, you mentioned predictable patterns or trends that too many executives failed to anticipate. And again, you know, in our modern world today, Uh, we all talk about speed. We know things are moving fast. We know things are changing, uh, every day, every week, every month for most of the executives out there. Um, trying to see around corners, as our good friend said, we talked about before. Um, you also mentioned that you've seen those over and over again and have prompted you to write Provoke. In other words, these mistakes about trying to kind of predict what's going to be happening. Can you share those patterns of behavior that this is what's happening with leaders. You know, they've fallen into these patterns. We'll get into some of the cognitive side of that as well and why these are important in writing provoke.

Well, I'll kick us off, Greg. The pattern that we observe is effectively a 4-stage process. You know, we see leaders starting by just flat out missing really important trends that are pertinent to their business. And when those trends are eventually brought to their attention, to some extent we see the behavior pattern to deny the trend, to somehow question its validity, to question the analysis that underpins the observation of the trend. And then after that stage is over. They get into the stage of now they start to look at the trend and overanalyze it. So, they want to understand it from every possible angle. This is all before actually taking any action. And then when finally they get around to taking action, it's usually too late to have any bearing on the business and it's responding meekly. So, why is this important right now? Why is that pattern of behavior so problematic? Because we're living in a world of exponential technologies, and those exponential technologies are causing business models to quickly become obsolete because the technology enables benefits that are either an order of magnitude better from the customer standpoint or an order of magnitude cheaper. So, you don't have time to go through that cycle and then respond meekly. And so, are here to say that the better action is to do something earlier because that uncertainty that they're feeling is gonna— you're gonna learn more about the uncertainty by provoking it and doing something against it than you will by studying it.

And I will, if I could just add very briefly to that, Greg. Sure. You know, the interesting thing in all of this is, as Steve described some of those challenges that a lot of executives face, These are not dumb people. Okay, so, and so we're talking about very successful executives at some of the world's biggest companies. And the reality is all of those tendencies to miss the trend or deny the trend or overanalyze the trend, they're learned behaviors. But they're learned behaviors that came from a different context in a different time. For basically the history of business, we've lived in a world of linear change. It's just the reality of the world as it's been up until about 6 or 7 years ago. And it's really only been the course of the last, call it 5 or 6 years, where we've started to see some of the impact of exponentials hitting the markets that we work in. So we're not here to say everything you've done in the past has been completely ridiculous. We're simply saying you got to shift your behavior given the way that the context in which we all operate is changing itself.

Well, I know in succession planning, guys, look, we have a lot of very mature senior leaders in many spots. And while on one hand, that's a big strength, Uh, from my other hand, it's like, so when do these people step down to bring in new leaders who are literally, uh, in with the times, right? They, they have ideas. These are graduates from business school and other places, and maybe not even graduates, but they do know how to put the dots together. What comments would you guys make about, you know, uh, obviously Marshall Goldsmith and all the other ones that are out there talking about how are we going to do succession planning is important. But the reality right now is, do we need that shift in leadership?

I'll start off, Geoff. I don't think it's an age thing. So, I think the notion that there's a younger version of a leader who somehow is more in tune with these events. I think that's— I don't believe that that's the case. I believe that there is a curiosity factor, that there's a willingness to learn and adapt that is the thing that makes the difference between leadership in these times and leadership in the past. And so, there is something to be said for experience. And we talk about this. We think a really important quality of leadership is the ability to take a different position when there's new data available to support a different one. And so we think the most important quality is the ability to learn and adapt and change your leadership behaviors in the face of these things, as opposed to trying the same leadership tactic over and over again.

Although I will add to that, all that said, I would say it's— there's reasonably good proof out there that some of the qualities that we believe will make good leaders in the future are more natural for people who have entered the workforce more recently than they have been people who have grown up decades and decades in business decades and decades ago. And that can't help but be in some way related to, quote unquote, age, but it's actually, I think it has to do with experience as much as anything. You can have an older executive who's new to an industry who can bring the beginner's mind that you need to look at things differently. But facility with digital technologies, openness to working through ecosystems instead of putting up barriers, thinking about how We can actually leverage technology to our advantage instead of being worried about it as a disruption. Those are things that are naturally kind of ingrained in the way that people learn in school and business school today.

Well, you know, you guys both speak about these biases, and like I said, we're going to get to them. And we do have ingrained biases in generations. That's why people talk about the various generations that we have. Um, so in chapter 2 where you said, we believe human behaviors is the most basic subatomic element of business, what advice would you give the leaders listening to us in shaping up the future of overcoming what you call these fatal human flaws? Because hey, the word fatal to me, you know, that's a pretty tough word. You're saying that it's a catastrophe. It literally— it's like, you know, you detonated, you blew it up, right? So speak with us about that, if you would. Geoff.

And I'd be happy to talk about that. And I will just offer apologies for what may be a slightly hyperbolic word in the title. But we actually, we do believe there are real constraints to advancing. And I'm sure we'll talk more about the biases specifically and why we think they get in the way. But, you know, starting with the first part of your question, the human behavior point is one that Steve and I have, have learned, I think, deeply through both of our careers in strategy consulting. And it comes down to the basic notion that The best way to drive the creation of new economic value is to focus on very specific behaviors that themselves have economic value and disproportionately align your resources and your efforts to go after those behaviors that have the most upside potential. And so let me try to explain that in slightly less consultancy speak. I think we have, and I think Steve agrees with me on this, I think we as business people as executives have lost sight of the fact that there are some just fundamental purposes to business if you're a profit-oriented entity. And instead, what we've done over time is we've layered on, on every organization processes and playbooks and rules and requirements. And so we spend the vast majority of our time every day thinking about how to fill out a template or how to plan a meeting or how to write an agenda or things that may or may not be actually specifically related to making our business successful. At the heart of business is the movement of human behavior. And so our— this is overstatement for effect slightly, but our basic rules for how to be a successful business are, first of all, understand the human beings that constitute your value chain. And I don't care how digital a company you may be, you still have human beings behind the scene. We're not just talking about customers, we're talking about customers and employees and suppliers and regulators and everyone that's involved in your business value chain. Number 2, understand the relative economic value of shifting one group's behavior versus another group's behavior. And that does not have to be a massive combinatorial model to figure that out. Most executives understand where the hotspots of their business are, and you just need to do the comparative math to understand, is it better for us to go and try to change that behavior or this behavior? And then, as I said before, focus your efforts and focus your investments on driving those behaviors. That's it. And if that's not the vast majority of what you're doing day in, day out, as a person within an organization, then you're probably wasting a lot of time.

So let me go back and state this, um, Geoff. You know, we're dealing with a multiplicity of problems that people are having, and not all related to the pandemic, but a lot related to the pandemic, of course. And obviously change happening. And, you know, I just learned yesterday of a large furniture manufacturer client of mine that decided to pull out of Taiwan and bring everything to Mexico because you can't get shipping containers cheap enough to create the furniture. I'm just using one small little example. Now take that example and multiply it. How do you as consultants assist those individuals in provoking— this is a good one— the ability to kind of see that coming and saying, look, the cost of shipping something overseas now is going to be far more expensive than it was 12 months ago. So let's shift gears here. What is it that you get? What do you do to get them to change their mindset to do that? That's probably not the greatest example, but it's an example.

Yeah. So why don't— let me start this and then tee up Steve to talk about some of the biases that we think get in the way, because this may sound overly simplified, Greg, but I think it's less about changing a mindset And more about encouraging them to not forget that the playing field that they now operate in is way wider than it ever has before. It's no longer sufficient to just look forward in a reasonably linear fashion.

Good point.

We need to consider all possibilities, and many executives understand that, but unfortunately, the fatal human flaws we talked about before, the individual biases combining together to create organizational tendencies, take what they recognize to be a necessary open view of the playing field, and it constrains their view further and further and further. And so, Steve, why don't I, why don't I hand off to you to talk about what—

Well, I, I'll add to that, Stephen, because, you know, you speak about the human biases that create the precondition for our systemic organizational blindness. I think that's exactly what I just talked about with that previous question. That was a blind spot to finally go, oh well, we didn't have any idea. But you did. Uh, if you look at history, if you knew the indices, you would see that that was coming. Uh, talk to the listeners, if you would, about the cognitive biases and why these biases contribute to the inability of the individuals or companies to see— now, in that case, it was to see that trend, to see that shipping prices were going up. Let's just use that same example.

Yeah, well, so, and let's put a pin in this example to come back to it when we invariably talk about scenario thinking later on, because that can be one of the tools that they can use. But let's— okay, so how do we make decisions, Greg?

Right?

What we do as human beings is there is almost a limitless pool of information and data available to us as human beings, and I don't mean data as in binary or spreadsheets. I mean, just what we observe and see every day. But what we do as human beings is we select some of that data and we process it in our brains, and then we draw a conclusion about it. And what the challenge that we have is that because of various different cognitive biases, it causes us to select some data and not other data, and we literally don't see that data, right? And those biases are things like a bias for the status quo, right? We have a preference, we have a leaning towards things that are happening now because we experience deviation from the status quo as a loss. And as human beings, we are loss-averse.

And a lot of times, just to step in— sorry, but a CEO will take the path of least resistance. So, they think it's the least resistance, but it turns out not being. In other words, they're so conditioned to go down the same way, That they just keep going down that same way because that's the vendor they used and they figured everything was going to be great and they didn't explore or they weren't curious about the other opportunities that were available to them. Yes?

Totally right. And, uh, one of the things that Geoff and I are fond of saying is that the status quo has a real challenge with it. It comes with the fact that it doesn't feel risky. But in a world of exponential change, it actually is incredibly risky, but it doesn't feel it. It's like, oh, my goodness, it feels good, but you really shouldn't do it. And doing something different, taking action in a new way feels really risky but actually isn't very risky because you're trying to do something and you're going to learn from doing that. So, the status quo bias is one of those examples of those cognitive blinders. Affect heuristic bias, which is we require a strong affect emotional feeling in order to move, or whether it's an overconfidence bias. There are a number of these cognitive biases. Again, and Geoff said importantly earlier, it's not because leaders are incompetent or evil or stupid. It's because we're human beings. And I'm including we because we are all subject to these same biases. And so, when you couple those cognitive biases with the way that we tend to interact in teams and in organizations and large-scale organizations, like doing things like avoiding embarrassment in meetings, that further constrains the availability of that information, what information it selects, and what it discusses in order to make that decision, reinforcing stuff that feels safe but isn't.

But is it enough to just make people aware of their biases? Because I have a feeling that the human condition defaults back to it. Um, and I, and I— look, you guys have brought up a wonderful point here, and that is we're conditioned. We have biases. These biases exist. Unless somebody points them out to us, we probably are doing this blindly. Okay, we're making these decisions blindly. What is the step, the next step the two of you would take as consultants to not only bring awareness But then to say, now with this awareness, let's take a different path.

So I would actually argue that awareness really does matter, Gregg. Naming something and making it discussable is a very foundational step to starting to remove those blinders. And when I say making it discussable, I mean actually openly discussable in meetings where you can say, you're falling prey to the availability bias right now. Let's try to work beyond that. But there are more structural steps we can take. and ways of acting, recognizing that we're never going to completely get rid of the biases. As you say there, or as I interpreted your comment, they're deeply ingrained. They're human. And so, Steve, why don't you talk a little bit about the importance of cognitive diversity and some of what we advocate for in the book related to that?

And while you're talking about that, maybe you want to take on explaining this peripheral vision, which you mentioned, because that is You can't see what you're blinded to. That's what I just said, right? I said it in a different way, but that's what you said in the book. And you can't address what you can't see. Okay, so what are some of the best anecdotes— which is the way I didn't phrase the question the same way—

Yeah.

Uh, to narrowing of organizational peripheral vision, uh, and I'm gonna say individual peripheral vision Because in the end, there's one person probably in a team that's going to make a decision. And so because we don't want to hurt feelings, or we have a bias toward a certain vendor because they're a good guy, or they've given us great pricing in the past, or whatever it might be, these are all things that are happening all the time.

Well, that's a great— well, the, the— we have, we have comfort with the vendor is a great example of both the status quo bias, the availability bias, and the and affect heuristic bias all in one full swoop, Greg. And it is helpful to name them, but we can't forget that we are still subject to the biases even if we're aware of them. And so one of the things that we think is the most important thing to do is make sure that you've got a diverse team. And why is diversity so important? And by diversity, I mean cognitive diversity. It's been proven that cognitively diverse teams, the teams that think about problems in different ways, will see more of that information because they'll— and they'll process it differently. But where does cognitive diversity come from? Real-world diversity, different backgrounds, different upbringings, different countries of origin, different ethnicities, that all contributes to cognitive diversity. And if you're solving increasingly complex and new problems, you need that diversity in order to see enough to have that peripheral vision. Because if you don't have the diversity, everyone's subject to the exact same biases. And therefore, the group's blinders are pretty narrow. As you start to diversify the team, the biases start to cancel each other out and you can see more of the periphery. And so, that's the starting thing that we would recommend.

Well, you talk about in the book the PROVOKE Quintet. I thought that was great the way you say it. Can you tell the listeners more about the 5 general models, uh, that you talk about that you state in the book and why it's important to the provoke mindset? Now I can see you guys taking these biases and supplanting a new word called the provoke mindset because the mind is actually going to pick up on something like the provoke mindset. It gets like, oh great, are we now practicing the provoke mindset here at XYZ company? And the reality is that's the term that we need to use to replace the old language that we were using that was creating the biases to begin with. Absolutely.

It totally makes sense, and we totally agree with you. And by the way, just as a hint, we did the same thing with detonate, with the detonate mindset, and that seemed to have worked pretty well in, in getting people to try to take action on it.

No, I like your provoke mindset a lot. I think it's great. Uh, if you don't mind, I'm gonna borrow it.

Oh, please, please borrow it and spread it.

Okay.

So there's actually a lot packed into your question. It's— I mean, it is one of the most central questions related to the book. So let me describe the general model that we have in mind here and what that provoked quintet is. So one thing we haven't talked about so far in this interview is that with exponential change comes a shift in the nature of the environment in which we're operating away from a world that's governed primarily by risk to a world that's governed primarily by uncertainty. And what risk, as we've, as Steve and I have said many times, risk is measurable and therefore manageable. Uncertainty, you can't measure, you can't manage it. The only way to add contours to uncertainty is to go provoke a reaction in the market, whether you're talking about an external market or an internal market, and see what happens. And so at the heart of the provoke mindset is engendering the belief that we have to overcome the desire to get perfect data before we go and do something. We want people to take smaller steps, more quickly in order to provoke reactions from the outside world. So the PROVOKE quintet is founded on the idea that whenever you're looking at an uncertain trend, you know, some uncertainties never come to fruition and they just kind of evaporate, which are not the ones we're concerned about. Other uncertainties actually do resolve at some point from being a question of if they're going to happen to being simply a question of when. We may not know everything about them, but we know that eventually this uncertainty will resolve and become a reality. We don't know exactly when it's going to land or at what rate, but there is something that Steve and I call the phase change between if to when. That is the critical moment that we all need to be on the lookout for, because if we as leaders can recognize the phase change earlier than anyone else, position ourselves for it, and then take advantage as we pass through that phase change, as something changes from being an if to a when, then we create advantage for our organizations. So very briefly, the 5 moves that the PROVOKE quintet that we think can enable— and we're happy to go into any or all of these in more detail— but the 5 moves that run roughly sequentially through that phase change of if to when are envisioning the future, and I'll talk more about that as we dive into envision in more detail, positioning yourself based on the way that you're envisioning the future, and those are the 2 foundational capabilities, the 2 strategies that will get you to that phase change. When you enter the phase change, you then have one of 3 options, and they're not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you can work all 3 of them at different points in time, but you either drive the outcomes you're looking for, you adapt your model to, to respond to the eventuality of a market that may or may not be in your advantage, or you can activate an ecosystem to drive towards the type of future that you'd like to see. So those are the Very briefly, just naming them, those are the 5, uh, 5 aspects of the PROVOKE Quintet.

Well, I think it's important, and I didn't have you guys hold up the book, but if you would now hold up the book for all my listeners. There you go. Uh, this is the book you guys want to get because this is going to give every leader an opportunity to actually shape the future. Now, it's not the book that'll shape the future, it's the ideas you'll take out of the book that you actually apply. And what I find when I do these podcasts, it's always like, well, how do I distill this down and apply it? Now, I happen to be listening to a podcast, and I think this is very relatable. It was on TEDx, and it was the health podcast. They were talking about the 2 scientists that worked on the mRNA for the thing for the COVID right?

Mm-hmm.

And they talked about the experimentation that was required in the process because they knew They had the disease, right? They had the virus, right? But they had to see how those proteins attached. I think the scientific mind is really an interesting mind about studying how I could take a protein so that it would release. Now, I use this example for this reason. If I know a certain field really well, but I don't know about the uncertainty of this particular unknown, Okay, which is what we're talking about. You said risk we can manage, we can figure it out. We all knew that virus was an unknown, right? But then to be able to get your hands around it in 9 months and really do something about it and create a vaccine was just mind-blowing to me. These 2 German scientists, right, that were speaking originally from Turkey, I think, actually.

Yeah.

But all of us have the same problem. We just don't know that we have it. Okay, we all have those levels of uncertainty, right? The question I would ask you guys— you say in chapter 6 you tell a story about Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. And in 2015, I'd like you to share the story with the listeners in relation to envisioning seeing the future. That's the chapter in the book that you were talking about. I don't know which one of you is going to talk about it, but it's, it's relatable to my audience.

So I'll talk about it, Greg, because the dirty little secret— we start off that chapter by saying one of us is an avid sailor, and we had some discussion about whether we should name that person, and I'll just out myself.

It ain't me.

Yeah, I'm the one who likes the sailing. Um, first of all, I wanna, I wanna I'm going to react to your story about the podcast, and then I'll come back and talk about Envision. I couldn't agree with you more in the— and I don't know everything about how the protein release study was done, but I'm pretty sure those scientists did not sit back and study all the past data about how vaccines have worked in the past. Instead, what they were doing is trial after trial after trial after trial on the bench in the lab until they actually discovered more about it. That's exactly the motivation.

And then, Geoff, on top of that, worldwide shared the data. Now granted, Pfizer was behind this. Okay, so granted, there's a big corporation that's going to make a lot of money in the end, and I'm not gonna go there with that. But Pfizer funded— they funded this, right? But my point was, is they had an unlimited pocketbook to actually continue to test and test and test and test. And that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah, and so I think the challenge for all of us is how can we discover— I'd like to think that those tests, if they were— obviously we had a worldwide pandemic to get under control there, so the spend was probably worth it. But there are ways you can run tests really quickly and really cheaply that don't need to require the backing of a large Fortune 100 company to get there.

Great.

Anyway, back to Mobile Bay. So the story that we tell on that, and I won't dwell on the story itself and instead dwell on the learnings. But this is a story of a sailing race that has been raced down in Mobile Bay for years and years, the Dauphin Island Race, I believe it was called. And it's something that I think— and I don't know all the aspects of the story, so forgive me if I get some of the details exactly wrong— but the same people entered the race every single year. It's kind of a local community race. It was something that Everyone had some well-worn grooves around. They understood how long it would take them if they entered the race. They knew how long the race was going to take. They knew roughly their preferred route. They knew the prevailing winds of the bay. And as I said, it had been run for, I think, decades before this incident in 2015. We like sailing as an analogy for how we need to think because sailors, as we say in the book, are natural scenario planners. So they go out for a sail, and I can report this myself, you go out for a sail with a basic idea in mind about how the sail is going to go and what the tide is and how strong the wind is and what have you. But the art of sailing, or even just the job of sailing, is to constantly be on the lookout for changes in what you assumed was going to happen. You're always looking for wind shifts, you're always looking for other boats, you're always slightly changing the sail trim to try to go a little bit faster or what have you. And, and that's most of the time why, why sailing adventures end up in a good way. This day, things ended up in a really bad way because there was a— it was something equivalent to a 100-year collision of storm cells over the race that no one had predicted. They all knew that there were storms possible in the, in the forecast, but no one predicted that both these storms could hit simultaneously with the ferocity that they did. Because they didn't—they forgot to be scenario planners in the moment. They didn't consider all the eventualities or the possible eventualities, even though some of them might be very remote. So we we tell the story in this, and there's a lot more to the story that you'll find in the book. We tell it at the beginning of this chapter because this chapter is all about the envisioned provocation. It's about using scenario planning as a better way to look towards the future. Historically, I would argue that most businesses have had a dominant version of how the future is going to unfold. And then they run some sensitivity analyses around upside and downside so that they're not putting all their eggs in one basket. But there's basically, as they look towards the future, there's a primary path that they think is going to be the right one for them. Scenario planners instead say, you know what, we don't know the way the future is going to turn out. We have no clue. And actually, we need to have the humility to recognize that we have no clue. And instead, What we're going to do is paint in sufficient relief multiple different versions of what the future are going to be that are quite different from one another. And then importantly, we're going to place our bets against all— usually there's 4 scenarios in any good scenario plan, but we're going to place bets against all 4 of those, not necessarily in equal proportion, but we're going to prepare ourselves even for the possible eventuality of 2 supercells colliding over a race, just to extend the story into that. And so that, that when I mentioned at the beginning of the description of the PROVOKE quintet, that envision foundation runs throughout the ability to be a provocateur. If you can think in terms of scenarios instead of predicted futures, you're going to be in a better position to act in— act sooner than many others will and therefore create advantage for yourself.

And it's very well put, and I think your example is excellent. What I do know about sailing versus running a company is that most CEOs don't know their life depends on it. Whereas when you get in a sailboat, you know your life depends on it. A little bit different situation when you're running scenario planning. If every CEO came to work every day saying my life depended on it, you might see more of that activity taking place. Uh, shorting the winds, making sure that, you know, the weather was going to be right, all of that. Because I see them get in the middle of these storms. And one of the examples that Jonathan Brill used in Rogue Wave was the Titanic. They knew when the Titanic went across that there were 1,800— I didn't even know this— 1,800 icebergs out there. And yet the captain of the ship ran full speed. Knowing that at that time of year those icebergs were there. Now that was crazy, because if you knew it, why would you take an action that would have risked the ship, which it did? Obviously it sunk. And in chapter 7, you tell different stories about provocateurs and mention that we all have the power to be provocateurs, no matter our title or perceived position. relative to others or age or experience. What advice, Stephen, can you give our listeners on how to become successful provocateurs? In other words, hey, everybody in the company needs to be a provocateur. You need to have a provocateur mindset. You need to have that provoke mindset, right? Because it— you can come from the bottom of the company and give the company an idea That could actually be the winning formula, right?

Totally, Greg. And I would come back, we had talked earlier about the notion that these human flaws were fatal. And I think it's important to note here that they can be fatal to a company. So, the inability to see when exponential change is happening around you is increasingly a fatal flaw when it comes to the the lifeline of a business. And so, that's hence the reason for the fatal in that term. As far as what it takes to be a great provocateur, I would say practicing scenario planning like Geoff talked about in the prior segment, but also an innate curiosity about your customer. And so I think one of the things that we see littered in the world is great technologies that had no customer use or didn't make the life of a customer better in any way, shape, or form. And so in order to be, you've got to be really curious on how you can delight your customer in some important way. And when you change the way a customer makes a decision about what product or service she might buy, what you do is you change the algorithm by which business transpires in that particular segment. When you're changing the algorithm, it's super important. So for example, in the pandemic, lots of us had local grocery stores. I bet you some of us switched the grocery stores to stores that offered curbside delivery quicker than others because that all of a sudden the algorithm of where you shopped became a safety question, not just a convenience question, or not just a brand selection question. So being able to flip a long-standing way that the industry gets segmented into some other way is super important, and that comes from a mindset of curiosity about what will delight those customers.

Hi, that's a great—

I want to make sure that when people hear you talk about customers, Steve, that they hear it in the way we intend it, which is Sometimes literally customers in a market. Sometimes it's a talent base within an organization. For example, your employees are your customers sometimes as an executive. So we're not just limiting this to people who buy products. There are people through the value chain. But sorry, Greg, I interrupted you.

No, no, no. I mean, look, we can all go back to looking at Blockbuster and Netflix and AMC now that went down the toilet. And we can talk about all kinds of things that when you guys say uncertainty, you know, could Blockbuster have done something? Could AMC have done something in the light of a pandemic, uh, to change the complexion or where they were going to go? And you look, the streets are riddled with success stories and failures, fatal flaws, fatal flaws and decisions that were made. And in chapter 9, you describe these ecosystems. And I remember from my own business studies, I remember Margaret Wheatley talking about this. You guys are probably old enough to remember Margaret Wheatley, and she was a biologist who used to use that in the business world, the ecosystems, right, as one of the best ways to sense, respond, and to then appropriately accelerate a phase change to a more certain and desirable future, right? So it's like, okay, I put something nasty in the ecosystem and it starts to affect every cell inside that, you know, that tube, which is what we're talking about with the, with the, um, uh, COVID, provoke— invokes working and through an ecosystem to get things done. Can you share with the listeners your stories about the ecosystems and why it suddenly seems to be the hot new thing in management thinking?

Yeah, and Greg, I'm sure we could spend an entire hour on this subject, probably, but you can shorten it in itself, and maybe we can do it at some I'd love to. Let me just hit one aspect of it, which I think is really important to consider as we try to think about creating advantage in the, quote unquote, exponential times. One of the uses of ecosystem is to approximate scale really, really quickly. Okay, so if you tap yourself into an ecosystem, you suddenly have a set of abilities that are far broader and far, far more capable than if you try to build it all on your own. Okay, and there's a reason why that's so critical right now. Historically, scale has largely been a benefit for businesses and an advantage for businesses because it allows for efficiency. It could be efficiency in tapping into sources of supply, it could be efficiency in tapping into demand systems, but ultimately big companies wanted to get bigger because it made them more efficient and it gave them more advantage that way. Increasingly in these exponential times, there's another reason to achieve scale, and that is that it gives you the ability to learn better and faster than anyone else out there. We think that, to Steve's point about curiosity, we think that those with access to information, to breadth of information as quickly as possible, that's one of the aspects that will make companies successful as we try to act more in the moment and provoke reactions from the uncertain markets that we serve. If you're a critical node in an ecosystem, think about it as lighting up a cellular network, if you will, where you put a pulse out to the ecosystem to try to understand what the effect's going to be. You're going to get a lot stronger and more varied signal coming back if you send it out through an ecosystem than if you try to work on your own to run test after test after test out into the market. That's just one reason why ecosystems are so effective these days. As I said, we could talk about many other aspects of it, but that's one of the reasons why we really advocate tapping into ecosystems as a mechanism for getting to be more provocative.

Well, I think the example I gave earlier about the scientists working on the virus for— I should say the vaccine for COVID— was the ecosystem was so large. Uh, to draw from the data. Uh, it was worldwide sharing data because we— their life depended on it. There wasn't an hour, a minute, a day, because they saw these people dying, that they literally wanted to share data and cooperate instead of, hey, you know, it's mine, this is, this is Pfizer's, we're going to keep it. No, we're going to share this data and come up with a solution with many minds working on it. A really good point you made. Thank you. You know, guys, in wrapping up the interview, uh, if you were to leave the listeners with 3 things that— I always love this part— where they could take away from the book and apply to their business and their employees, uh, what advice would you like to give the listeners today about provoke, becoming a provocateur, um, taking I don't want to call it calculated risks, and learning more about uncertainty. What might be uncertainty in your— uncertain in your field? What could you see that could be uncertain that might affect it? What would you guys leave them with? Where would they go?

Yeah, Geoff, why don't I start and you pile on? I would say one thing that, Greg, I would leave, and this is a common element, I think, across all of the provocateurs that we profiled in the last part of the book, Valerie Rainford, Debbie Beal, and Ryan Gravel. The thing was a passion for what they're doing. And so, if you want to be a provocateur, you've got to pick something to be incredibly passionate about because otherwise, you'll just lose steam. I think life's too short not to have fun doing what you're doing. And it's incredible that that's an incredibly important part of the equation, is to be able to have fun at that. And when you're doing something that you're really passionate about, the fun will come along. So, if you're going to be a provocateur, pick your spots where it matches you well, where you're going to do that. And then the one other thing I'll add and then let Geoff fill in is that you got to be curious. You got to be curious about the world. you got to be interested in learning because you're not going to provoke anything if you kind of believe that you're right about everything. I think you've got to be skeptical about your own point of view and very open that you could be wrong about something. So, curiosity and passion and having fun are a few things that I'd—

You sound like Steven Kotler in The Art of Impossible. So, his was, look, Focus is free. Curiosity— after curiosity, find 3 passions, string them together. After those passions, create the goals and then the subset goals. And after that, you better have lots of grit and determination because you're not even halfway there yet. You've literally defined what the passion is, but now you got to eke it out to do that. And I, I think the formula applies here as well. It's like, okay, uh, find out what you're curious about. From that curiosity, develop those passions. From those passions, come together with a plan and a strategy about how you're going to execute on the passions you want to create or what you want to do, uh, and then work like hell to get there.

And as Steve says, you know, the, the stories of the provocateurs in the, in the third part of our book, real-life people who accomplished amazing things— yes, couldn't be better illustrations of that, Greg. Look, just to wrap up really quickly, we talked about one of my pieces of advice already, the criticality of driving diversity as a way of achieving diversity and inclusion as a way of achieving cognitive diversity, which is the primary mechanism to remove the blinders. And if anything else, just have resonating in your brain always, do something. Just go do something.

Do something, exclamation point with hashtag. is on your homepage. So we'll let our listeners know it's #DoSomething! Um, actually, I put that in and, uh, it's interesting. So I'd say they do that. And if they want to learn more about the two of you, they want to learn more about the book, we'll have a link. But you're going to go to www.to.deloitte.com. Uh, in there you'll see Services, Industry Insights, And I would presume in the search engine they could just type Provoke and it's going to bring up the Provoke page, because the reality is the string of things to actually get there is too long. Just go to the search engine.

Just Google Provoke the book, you'll end up there.

Yeah, you'll end up there anyway. Um, to the two of you, thanks for writing a book that I actually believe, um, can have people see these cognitive biases that you talk about. And then become a provocateur, um, with encouragement. And like I said, it's the application of the awareness of knowing what it is that we do that allows us to change the things that we haven't been changing inside of our companies, inside of ourselves, to actually make a transformation not only personally and professionally but organizationally. And the human capital needs to move along with that, right? So all those people that work with it, and the you could not be better suited people to have written the book and actually, um, inform people about this. Um, I don't like telling because I don't think that's what you do. I think you're informing and educating. Uh, any last words from either one of you?

No, just thanks. Thanks for having us on, Greg. That was a fun conversation.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Stephen, thank you. And Geoff, thank you. Both of you, thank you for being on Inside Personal Growth. And thank all my listeners for hanging in there and learning about the book Provoke.