E7: Stop Loving Your Ideas & The NBA's Orlando Magic

What if loving your ideas is the fastest way to failure? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com and. And with that, we will get started with today's episode. Today we have a special episode because in addition to tackling the question, maybe loving your ideas is a bad idea, I also have my very first guest on this show. One of the things which I always find so fascinating is that in innovation, we seem to act as though, yeah, but. Yeah, but is the killer of innovation. And yes, of course, it will stop innovation from moving forward, but there is something that's more insidious, more dangerous than. Yeah, but it's the wow, this is a great idea. Why is that? When we fall in love with our ideas, there are a couple things that happen. And the key thing is that something called confirmation bias kicks in. And confirmation bias is the brain's way of filtering out anything that is inconsistent with the way we see the world. So if we think something is a great idea, we are only going to see evidence to support it's a great idea, even if a large portion of the information we get back tells us it's actually a terrible idea. So what ends up happening is we move forward with ideas and solutions that we should be killing. And this is dangerous to innovation because we end up wasting important resources that we could be seeing, spending on other more valuable concepts. The other issue with the wow, this is a great idea is something called positive test strategy, and it's a cousin to confirmation bias. And positive test strategy basically says when we believe we have a great idea and we run experiments to test our ideas, we tend to only run experiments designed to prove our idea is a great idea. We don't take the time to actually run experiments that are designed to disprove our idea, to disprove our hypothesis that this is a great idea. And so what ends up happening is we basically just confirm what we believe to be true, even if it isn't true. This is why I'm a big believer in having something the equivalent of a devil's advocate team. It's a group of people who do nothing but make sure that you are actually solving the right problem and that your solution is good. These people will be designed to basically be the devil's advocate, to be the people who will find the reasons why your idea is a bad idea. And there's a lot of different ways to deal with confirmation Bias. But I find that this is sort of the simplest one, is just have a little bit of checks and balance, make sure you have people whose bias is going to be against your idea. Now, I know in organizations there's. There's a lot of people who have biases against anything that's new, but we need to make it a formal part of the process. And so I just want you to consider that the next time you think you have a great idea, it might not be as great as you think it is. And with that, I would love to introduce my first guest on the Invisible Solutions podcast, Jack Elkins. He's a buddy of mine here in Orlando, Florida. He is the founder of Sidekick Innovation, and he's the former director of innovation for the NBA's Orlando Magic. Jack, welcome to Invisible Solutions.

Stephen, it's great to be here. I wish we were in person, but this is the next best thing.

It's nowhere near as good as the next best thing from my perspective, because I know when you and I get together, we like to ride the roller coasters at Sea World, and it's a little hard to do that virtually, but I guess this is what we have to deal with right now. What's the problem that you want to solve? Because, you know, this is a problem solving show. What's the problem you want to tackle today?

First off, I just want to tell you I absolutely love the concept of this podcast, where you actually tackle something live in real time. And to me, our ability to collaborate is humanity's greatest superpower. And I like to say I'm your number one sidekick. So what I'm passionate about is using science and tools and to help business leaders propel their teams to perform better together, which oftentimes just means solving challenges faster. So my question today is how can we solve the challenges? The challenge of helping business teams solve challenges?

Well, this is a challenge that I really like because it's sort of a meta challenge. The challenge is to help others solve challenges. So let's. Let's dive right in. What is the biggest opportunity? Like, what's the one thing. If you could do one thing with a team, what do you think is going to help them solve problems better? And just for people who've been listening to the show before, you know, we use the lenses from the book. Today, we're going to throw that aside. We're just going to have a conversation. So, Jack, what's the number one thing that you found to be most effective in helping teams drive better problem solving?

That's an Easy one is just making sure that they're prepared when they come in for a collaborative session by shifting their inner condition for what they're about to do. And there's some easy ways to do that. Cool.

Well, what are some of the ways you do it?

Well, some of the things that we like to do is we just like to make sure that we. We first get them laughing. We'll do improv comedy to make sure that we. We get them laughing. When we resolve, we resolve the tension inside them and within the group. We make sure that we remove anxieties by telling them what. Where things are in the room and make sure that there's snacks and drinks around so that if maybe somebody didn't get something to eat or drink, they just know that it's there. And we make sure that we tell them that they have permission to be there from leadership. There's a reason that we're having this project together. They're called there for a reason. They're a valuable member of the team, and so that they shouldn't have any fear about participating. And lastly, one of the interesting things that a mentor of mine helped me understand, we always had them, and I encourage you to do this wherever you're at in your organization too. We always would remove our physical badge if you had one. Take off the label, take off the name. In the hierarchy, everybody's voice is equal because you were there for a reason, and it always seemed to help kick us off.

So I love those four, and I want to just zero in on a couple of them. One is improv comedy. I think what's really powerful about improv comedy, aside from the fact that it gets you laughing, which is nice, is it forces you to listen. Improv comedy is not about talking. It is actually primarily about listening and then being able to somehow give something back to the other people. So I think that's really great, because if it's going to be collaborative, like you're talking about, improv is a great place to start. I want to, though, dive into that last one you said, because, you know, getting rid of the badges. Let's talk about that a little bit deeper because I think that is a huge barrier to collaboration and. And problem solving in organizations. When there's a perceived hierarchy, when people believe that they don't have a voice. Can you just talk about, aside from just literally getting rid of the badge, what are some of the other things you found to be helpful to be able to drive that level of collaboration, have people feel really safe and open.

The Thing that I would usually do is just make sure we emulate it. And if I didn't see that it was happening is I would call somebody out in the group. If I didn't get it in one particular session, the next time, I would specifically call certain members out to do things the next time we were in the group that maybe the group I could tell looked up to them, because people will follow and emulate off of others. And so I would just make sure that the group could see what was possible, have somebody go first, have somebody see that it's okay, and make sure that permissions are out there. So the group starts to feel part. People start feeling a part of the group, and they start to see that being a part of that tribe, being a part of that group, they start to see what the rules are. Because that's all ingrained inside us for generations. They need to understand what the rules are. And even if there aren't any actual hierarchies, labels, people are always wanting to perceive what those are within the group. And regardless of when we say all voices are equal, there's just inherent things inside us that we're always checking down on. And it's incumbent upon us, guys like you, guys like me, when we're guiding a group, to just do whatever we can the entire time to remove anything that we see happening that's stopping somebody from acting.

Yeah, that's so important. That's so important. And one of the things that I like to do is I'm a strong believer that sometimes we need to get people to think individually before we get them to think collectively. So pretty much anytime we're working on something, whether it's reframing a problem, solving a problem, any kind of work that we're doing, I will always have each individual write down their responses, their questions, their answers, whatever it might be, and only after they, at an individual level, have written down everything that they believe to be true. We then bring people together collectively to discuss and see how everything connects together. That way we get more dots to connect and we get everybody participating. And I find also, especially not just hierarchy, but also there are some people, call them introverts who are less likely to speak. This gives them a voice, and I think that's sometimes a very powerful way to operate.

That is so good. And you're so right. What you just talked about reminded me of Susan Cain. And after I read her book Quiet, I completely changed several things I used to do when I would drive creative collaborative sessions because it helped me understand that we probably had introverts in the group that weren't speaking up. And I had to make sure that I created avenues for them to do that, giving them plenty of birth and even sometimes actively calling out the extroverts in ways where I stopped them their time to allow for the introverts to come forward. So sometimes you actively have to. You have to actively facilitate for everybody to be able to speak up.

That's spot on. Let's go back to the premise of this whole podcast, which is to find better solutions, we need to ask better questions. It's all about the framing of the problem and the opportunity rather than the solution. So one of the things that I believe is the way we typically do brainstorming doesn't work. And a lot of that has to do with we're focused on ideas. So I just want to get your perspectives on reframing what do you do with the teams to make sure you're even solving the right problems to begin with. So let's, let's actually use, if you can share something from the Orlando Magic where somebody thought this was the problem when in fact you found it was something else, or you found that just by changing the way you looked at the problem gave you some different solutions. So I'd love to get something like really like a good example.

I'll actually use something even more real, recent and relevant. It's a different client. It was a football team, perennially poor football team in terms of not a very winning football team, an FBS college football team, and they're not perceived of having a really great football stadium. They were concerned that they didn't have the room and space that they needed. And I said, well, I'll tell you what, let's go on a walk. And I asked them while we were on this walk, how many of them had actually walked the entire stadium to take an actual look to see what they had. And the entire group, nobody could raise their hand to say they had seen all of the spaces. And we did this in an early January. It was a freezing cold day and we still made sure that we did this. And we discovered several thousand square feet that were unused, that could be reused, could be repurposed some fantastic new places for some rooftop bars. That would have been stellar. And it was an incredible reframing of their perspective of their spaces simply by getting out and going walkabout that.

That is the perfect example. And even though I said we're not going to talk about the lenses on this episode, that is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant example of lens number 25, which is the observation lens. So often when we're trying to reframe or solve a problem, we make way too many assumptions about what the real issue is or the real state of affairs. So in this case, there was an assumption that there wasn't enough space, which, by the way, is a different lens. This problem reframe lens, which basically says, take something that you believe to be a fact, we don't have space, and turn it into another problem. How can we create space? How can we find space that's being unused? Which is really where you went with this. So I love how just this one simple example showed several different angles in terms of the reframing. So let's talk about one last question, which is, you know, I think it's always great to talk about what works. Let's talk about what doesn't work. Like what are some of the things you found organizations do in the name of innovation, the things they do in the name of problem solving that actually are counterproductive or ineffective?

What a great question. You know, one of the things that I'm always looking for is does the group have a grasp on what their constraints are and what their desired outcome is? A lot of times we're always focused on the problem or trying to fix the thing. That's the nuance right then. And they haven't spent the time to do something like go through your lenses, or they haven't spent the time to reframe it in a way to understand what are the constraints or what are the desired outcome. And it doesn't usually have to take that much time. They just are worried that it's going to take time and they just want the solution to the nuance or the problem. And so the thing I think that they do is they shoot themselves in the foot by thinking they're going to get something quick, when in all reality there's no shortcut. And it can be really quick if they just go ahead and spend the time to identify what the real constraints are and what the desired outcome is and solve for the tension between those two.

That makes sense. I mean, if you're, you know, have a bow and arrow and you're aiming in the wrong direction, shooting it quickly just means that you move the arrow in the wrong direction very quickly. So I think what you're describing here is just what we need to do is make sure we're calibrating, moving in the right direction. So sometimes to go fast, we sometimes need to slow down. We need to actually make sure we're pointing in the right direction and that we're solving the right problem. One of the things that I found, and I alluded to this before, is I think that one of the biggest mistakes we make in organizations is we ask people for their opinions, suggestions and ideas. The problem is our opinions are based on our past experiences. They're based on so many assumptions that we have. And therefore, I believe the key is to not look for opinions, but look for solutions to those well framed problems. So I think this is a great way to sort of wrap up this portion of the podcast. Any last thoughts that you have, Jack, that you just want to share with people?

Yes, and it goes back to how we started, which is, you know, one of the things that we don't do is we don't prepare ourselves for what we're about to do either. You know, knowing that we're putting ourselves in the right position. From a, from a mindset perspective, who is in charge? The thinker or the thought? Are we being reactionary or are we being responsive? And I think that if we take the time to put ourselves in the right frame of mind and frame the problem the right way, we would be able to get our solutions much, much quicker and we would waste much less time as organizations moving forward.

Anything we can do to be more efficient and more effective is so important. Jack, how can people find you and reach out to you?

The best way to find me is@sidekickinnovation.com Fantastic.

We'll post that in the show notes. Jack, thank you so much for your time.

Stephen, great to talk to you, man.

And with that, we will wrap up today's episode of where we first started off talking about why loving your ideas can be the fastest way to failure because of confirmation bias and positive test strategy, and the fact that you might want to consider a devil's advocate team to sort of balance out your perspective. Then I invited Jack Elkins onto the show. Jack and I had a conversation around how do we help people solve their biggest problems? And in particular, we focused on the collaborative efforts of it. When you have a group dynamic, a team dynamic, how do you make the team as effective as possible? And we talked about a number of different strategies for that. I hope that you will join us next week. And again, if you ever have a problem or an opportunity or a question that you want us to solve on this podcast, just go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com there's a place for you to submit a question either through text or through voice. With that, I look forward to seeing you next week. Until then, happy problem solving.