Mastering the Art of Idea Generation: Insights from Stanford's D School

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What does it take to generate new ideas? What does it take to break through? We've gotten innovation all wrong. What is our human responsibility? People settle for good enough. I wouldn't admit that publicly. It is a matter of professional neglect. Probably in danger of never being employed again. I don't know if you want to go there. I had no idea that people just like me are innovators. I'll Never forget my first epiphany. Verbal vomiting into ChatGPT Problem solving is all about problem finding.

Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode I bring you an inspiring leader or expert in to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show. Today's special guest is none other than Stanford University's Director of Executive Education, Jeremy Utley. Jeremy has wrote a book called Idea Flow and he says this is the only business metric that matters. Today we talk about how to use AI and LLMs in your everyday life for your health, your wealth, working through emotional challenges. We also talk about his incredible research piece that Harvard Business Review have just published around teams that do and don't use AI and which ones perform better. You're in for an absolute treat today, so please sit back and enjoy the show. Jeremy, a huge welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast.

Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Absolute pleasure. Look, I was just really taken aback. I looked at Idea Flow. I was like, I need to buy the book. And then secondly, I look at the subtitle, I was like, the only business metric that matters. I was like, I definitely got to read this book. So tell me about IdeaFlow and why you feel it is the only metric that actually matters.

So Idea Flow is inspired by the past 14 years of leading executive programs in design thinking. At Stanford's D School, I've been leading executive programs and I also had the privilege of running the Leadership Lab for Graduate Students and the new Venture accelerator. So I've been studying creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship in the applied context of Stanford for the last dozen plus years. And IdeaFlow is meant to provide a new learner or a new reader some introductory understanding of what does it take to generate new ideas, what does it take to break through. And it turns out that we've gotten innovation all wrong. And so the Hope is that IdeaFlow sets the record straight on some of the key behaviors and mindsets that are required for real teams or real individuals to have breakthrough ideas much more routinely. Rather than being an accident, we actually believe that innovators can commit a breakthrough. And so that's what the book's about.

That's amazing. Well, I'm excited to jump into it during today's conversation, but I guess the one thing I want to acknowledge for anybody who hasn't met you yet is one, you're the executive Director there for Executive Education at Stanford's D School, but you're not one of those individuals who spent his entire life going from school, college to university and creating these ideas around what you think works in business and in entrepreneurship. You've actually walked the walk. So I'd like to take a little bit of a dive into what happened in your life and where you've traveled that's really informed a lot of how you feel about entrepreneurship and business. So I noticed Africa, South America. I know you've been down here to New Zealand as well.

Yeah.

What are some of the big moments in your life, both business and personal, that have shaped your worldview?

Okay. I mean, there's a lot there. And I would start by saying Stanford is very entrepreneurial. So the fact that I'm a faculty.

I'm a very unique faculty member, so I'm a practitioning faculty, which means that everything that we are teaching in the classroom is stuff that we've been applying in organizations.

So whether it's in Hyatt Hotels, inventing the lab hotel, and cascading innovation mindsets across their thousand plus hotels around the world, or whether that's with Novo Nordisk in Copenhagen, Denmark, or whether that's with Westpac New Zealand in Auckland, which I love Auckland, by the way, and any chance I have to get back there is great. I've done a bunch of work with Better by Design and NZTNE over the years. But the point is that everything we're teaching in the classroom and everything we put in the book is inspired by or, or, or better yet, it's a misadventure that we've experienced in the real world. So I came to design by way of a kind of management background. So as a management consultant, worked at BCG for a bunch of years, did investment management for a bunch of years. And I thought, you know what my calling is economic development. I spent some time in Bolivia in. In Santa Cruz, Bolivia, actually working to establish a startup accelerator there. And then I spent some time in Zambia working at an AIDS orphanage. And I came away with the distinct belief that entrepreneurship and new business formation is a way of helping folks get out of poverty. So I actually came to Stanford business school in 2007 with my mind and heart set on working in the developing world. And it was through a summer internship at a startup in Delhi, India, called Delight Design, which has now changed over a million people's lives around the world by bringing low cost, high quality light into homes in rural, unelectrified villages. And now they're entering Sub Saharan Africa as well. They're an incredible organization. But while I was there, I was exposed to this methodology that Stanford calls design thinking, popularized by the design firm ideo. David Kelly is the founder of ideo. He's the founder of the D School. I, back in, back in those days, it was in the early days of the D School, I had no idea about it, and I had to go halfway around the world to Delhi, India, to discover what Stanford was pioneering. And I got immersed in the methodology there and it just blew my mind.

No, that's incredible. I really love it. So when you were there on the ground, let's talk about how you felt. So, you know, you were seeing what was unfolding for these people in India. Like what was going through your mind? How did you feel about what you were seeing from a human perspective?

Well, I mean, just tremendous opportunity is the. Is the truth. And also.

The. I didn't know there was a practice or a methodology around new idea generation and innovation. You know, I thought innovators are these kind of. They have a different DNA strand or an extra DNA strand. Right. It's not me. And when I saw people like me going into the field and going into the slums and ethnographically engaging in rapid prototyping and coming back and putting a bunch of stickies on the wall with ideas about how to revolutionize people's lives, I had no idea that people just like me are innovators. You know, I thought innovator is some other class of person. And so that was really transformative. I actually, I came back to Stanford in the fall of 2008 with the goal of I want to learn everything I can about this design methodology. And what I learned blew my mind because I'm a spreadsheet junkie by training. I'm a finance guy. I love a good pivot table. I love a DCF calculation. And what I realized was in the universe of tools to solve problems, Excel is a useful but spectacularly narrow tool. And Excel was kind of the only tool in my toolkit. And so, coming to the D school, all of a sudden, I started getting tools added to my toolkit. And I'll never forget my first epiphany.

Tell me.

Okay, I don't know if you want to go there, but the.

So again, I'm not the innovator or in my mind at that time, I'm just a business school student who's trying to get out of finance. I took a class called Design Thinking Bootcamp, which was for graduate students at Stanford, which I later taught for years as well. And in that class, the first design project was reinvent ramen. Okay. I thought, I am an expert. Okay? In my undergrad days, I ate ramen every single day. I am going to crush this project. And there were these weird, kind of seemingly unnecessary steps in the process. For example, we had to go to an Asian supermarket. And of course, to my efficiency loving, spreadsheet touting MBA mindset, I already know everything about ramen. Why am I going to go to an Asian supermarket? Little did I know, right? They also required that we actually go to a ramen restaurant. Now here's the funny thing. I didn't even know there were ramen restaurants.

Wow.

I thought ramen was only came in these little plastic packets and you put it in a, in a styrofoam cup and you poured hot water and it stirred it for a second, right? So imagine my surprise when I show up at this restaurant called Maruichi in downtown Mountain View where I've lived for the last 10 years. And I show up in, in downtown Mountain View and there's a line around the block and I'm going, what are these people doing? You know, what are they here for? And I realized they're actually making ramen. Just like, you know, the Italian pasta shops make pasta. They're making it live right there in front of. And it was sensory overload. It was imagination overload. But I learned there a fundamental principle about idea generation and about creativity, which is the following.

Our imaginations are sparked by unexpected input.

And if you don't have a Practice around seeking unexpected input. You shouldn't be surprised that your imagination's not sparked. If you want to spark your imagination, you've got to go out and learn something you don't already know. And that is what I subsequently came to learn is really the practice around inspiration. We call inspiration the disciplined pursuit of unexpected input. But to my kind of MBA spreadsheet loving mentality, I can redesign ramen here at my desk. Why do I need to go to this store? Why do I need to go to the restaurant? Right? So you can imagine my surprise. So anyway, there's, as I said, there's all sorts of seemingly unnecessary stages of this process. The other unnecessary stage was before you could make a recommendation for how to reinvent ramen in the class, you had to make at least 50 sketches. Now, I thought this was patently absurd, obviously, right, because I already have an idea right from the get go, But I kind of, you know, I went through the motions. I started making sketches. I got stuck after 12, so I went for a run. And then I got stuck again after 34. So I. I asked a couple friends what they thought, and I got to 42. And then I slept on it and I woke up. And somewhere along the way, call it sketch 47 or so, a new idea came to me. And it's only because I was forced to kind of dig at the bottom of the barrel and imagine what I like. One of the things that I observed in the ramen shop was there's all this slurping, James, and I don't get the slurping right. I look around and everyone's slurping. And to me, to my mind, I went to the University of Texas at Austin Hook em.

And to my mind, the noodles were the point. But as I listened to all this slurping, I realized to all the people in this kind of fine dining establishment, the broth is the point.

And I had no idea. And I realized chopsticks are all about the noodle, right? The reason you use chopsticks is to get the noodle out, but what do you do for the broth? And in that moment, somewhere between sketches, call it 45 and 49. I don't know where the idea came from. It was like there are these moments that you can refer to as an epiphany where you have this realization of where did that idea come from? And this is my first epiphany. Why don't I make telescoping chopsticks that are hollow in the inside, that could be used as Straws as well.

That's awesome.

And, you know, good or bad or indifferent, whatever, I don't care. But the point is, that was the first time in my life that I had this palpable sense of, you know, like on, you know, the Matrix, Keanu Reeves says, I know kung fu. It was like. It was that kind of a moment for me. It's like.

I can imagine things that I've never thought of before. And that became such an invigorating sensation. I spent the next year at Stanford seeking those experiences and building products and services and working with different students in the metal, medical school, law school, engineering, et cetera. And at the end of the year, someone at the D school kind of saw I'd become kind of a design, you know, groupie, so to speak, and they said, hey, you might as well spend another year here as a fellow and we'll teach you more of our methodology. And so I thought, okay, for one year, I'll do that before I go on to economic development. And James, honestly, 14 years later, I just never looked back. But I had so many interesting opportunities to apply this stuff to, whether it's cosmetics in Colombia, in Bogota, Colombia, whether it's banking in Moscow, or whether it's silicon development in Taiwan. I mean, I've had the incredible privilege of taking this methodology into radically different contexts because, as I said, Stanford's very entrepreneurial. They give faculty members a percentage of our time to actually go experiment in the world. That's where probably 90% of my learning has come from. And then I come back to the classroom invigorated or humbled by the learning that I've experienced and I share with students, whether it's business school or law or engineers. I share with students. I share with executives. Some of the things I and my team have been learning is we're on the front lines applying this stuff in the real world.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from Australia armies to small businesses to large corporates, to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show. Notes.

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Seriously amazing. I think as a student that would be mind blowing to have access to that knowledge and that wisdom. I'm thinking about some of the things that are unfolding around us globally. You know, we've got a lot of unrest, a lot of civil unrest, political unrest. Can design thinking be applied to, like, human behavior and conflict?

Actually, right now there's a great design project at the D school underway around voter education and getting out the vote, so to speak. And if you think about even the political process or the electoral process as fundamentally a human process, then it stands to reason that if we understand the humans who participate, or perhaps who are failing to participate or refusing to participate, then we can design interventions and mechanisms and incentives.

To cultivate engagement. And so there are teams at the D school. I mean, I'm just a very small part of this amazing team. But there are teams that are working in healthcare, There are teams that are working in ecology and water systems and politics and machine learning and startups and economic development through extreme affordability. There's all sorts of different applications of specialization, I would say. Absolutely. In regards to the political unrest, it's incomprehensible that someone's not orienting the tools of design towards that challenge right now.

As we speak, 100%. And in terms of human behavior. So I think it was Johann Hari, his book Stolen Focus, and he talked about at Stanford, there's essentially a lab around human behavior. Have you been a part of that or had access to that?

Yeah, I've had the Privilege of getting to interact with.

BJ Fogg, who's the Stanford Behavior Design Lab and many others. I mean, Laszlo Bach is the head of. He was the head of HR at Google at the time. Youngest C suite executive at Google in history.

Dan Ariely, who's a Duke professor, wrote Predictably Irrational Lecrae, who's a Grammy Award winning hip hop artist. Greg McEwen, who's a new York Times bestselling author. I've had the incredible privilege of getting to work with such incredible people because the D School has really created this hub for interdisciplinary collaboration. Our kind of founding premise is that some answers are not discovered by going deeper and deeper and deeper into any one kind of disciplinary bucket, which if you think about the kind of conventional model of academia, every PhD is just is drilling another foot deeper down a particular hole or mine. Right? The D School's founding premise is what if we put a side bet on interdisciplinary collaboration? What if we just say, well, what if, what if mathematics and philosophy come together? What if law and computer science come together? Right? And so I think that attracts folks who believe in the power of interdisciplinary thinking. And where design thinking really shines is it's a methodology and a language for interdisciplinary collaboration. Because when the problem doesn't fit neatly in the if this isn't clearly, for example, a mechanical engineering problem, how do we solve it? What's the methodology we use? Right. If this isn't clearly a legal policy problem, how do we solve it? Whose methodology do we use? Right. We offer up design thinking as a way for radically diverse teams to come together and collaborate on solutions that don't fit. They kind of cross across disciplines.

That's really incredible. And I'd like to ask you just about AI, you know, where are you currently sitting in terms of your perspective of AI and are you planning to engage and interact with at D School significantly?

Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I can only speak for myself, right? But absolutely, AI is a critical tool to me. I believe that any serious professional should take AI exceptionally seriously and treat it like Internet bandwidth. I don't know any serious professional who says, I've got a DSL connection that's good enough. You know, people want the fastest connection possible. They want broadband, they want mesh, WI fi, right? They want the fiber optic cable. I think it is a matter of professional.

Neglect if you aren't paying for the very best LLM that you can possibly access. I think it's that important. And if you say, for example, like the modern knowledge worker, I think their, you know, average hourly rates, $100 an hour. Okay, great. Hundred dollars an hour. You know, chat GPT plus is 20 bucks a month. So that means it's got to save you a fifth of an as 12 minutes. It's got to save you 12 minutes a month to be worth it. Can. If you can't think of a way that ChatGPT can save you 12 minutes a month, I wouldn't admit that publicly because you're probably in danger of never being employed again. Right. So to me, the notion that someone is opting out or is standing on the sideline because they aren't really convinced, it's like standing on the sideline saying, I don't need an email address. I think it's that fundamental. And what I've been doing actually over the last year collaborating with a colleague at Singularity University is we've been studying how do teams that leverage AI perform relative to how teams that don't leverage AI. And what are some of the secrets to outperforming? What are some of the dangers to be aware of? That's an ongoing study that's actually, you know, probably by the time that this episode is released, will have been featured by Harvard Business Review as some of the most interesting research that they've observed over the last publication cycle.

Well done. And I'm going to put a link to that for the listener and the viewers, then go check that out at hbr. But for now, what did you find? What were the findings for those that did and didn't use AI?

Yeah. So the brief of it is, most folks, despite the fact that AI's potential is tremendous to amplify and accelerate the creative capacity and innovation potential of a team, we found that most teams fail to realize the potential that AI represents because of well established and easily avoidable cognitive biases. Okay. One of the most fundamental cognitive biases that plagues our ability to solve problems and not novel ways is called the Einstein effect, which is basically Carl Dunker, you studied it. Abraham Luchin's in the 1940s was the first person to kind of coin the term. Researchers at Oxford more recently have demonstrated how the Einstein effect affects any problem solver, rookie or expert, novice or experience. Right? And basically what Einstein posits is when someone is trying to solve a problem.

And there are recognizable patterns to the problem or the solution, the problem solver defaults to a good enough pathway and does not find the optimal solution even when they're told there's a better solution possible. Researchers at Oxford, for example, have studied chess players and they watch their eye movements as they're looking at different potential moves. They'll tell a chess player there's a better move available to you. But with eye tracking software, they're able to prove the chess player continues to look at the move they've already decided to make, rather than looking for new moves. Right. So Einstein satisfies saying Herbert Simon in 1954 won the Nobel Prize in economics, which is basically same idea, people settle for good enough. So that's a well known, well established human cognitive bias. And the truth is it's for a reason. Right. It's calorically expensive to always be looking for a better solution. Right. And good enough in a lot of our lives, let's be honest, is good enough. But when you're trying to innovate and you're trying to do something new, you don't actually want good enough. You want the best solution. Right. And what we observed with teams that leverage AI is that.

AI assisted teams tended to arrive at good enough much more quickly. But rather than persisting to excellent, many teams simply settled for good enough.

Wow.

And the fundamental kind of mindset or paradigm shift that we recommend is moving from treating an LLM like a search query, where you enter a search and then you hit, you know, submit, and then you get a bunch of responses. That's kind of treating AI like an oracle. It's all knowing, it's going to give me the answer. Shifting from that. And by the way, that feels magical. People who do that feel like, wow, that's actually pretty good, let's go get coffee. Right. But they underperform, Right. The teams that instead of approaching an LLM like oracle, approach it like a thought partner, like a conversation partner, they tend to outperform, meaning they deliver much better work. And yet it's not nearly as satisfying, it's not nearly as magical to them as the people who treated AI like an oracle.

Wow. And for the person right now that's listening going, how do I start my AI journey? How do I engage with an LLM? You know, because a lot of people are skeptical and I feel very similar to you that the people who disengage with it right now will be like the people nowadays who don't have an email address. They will be like unemployable, they will be irrelevant. We've got to engage with it. So where do they start, in your opinion?

Yeah. So it's going to be counterintuitive, but I would say here's an activity anyone can do and we actually, we've built different models. We recommend what we call a fix it model, where F, I, x, I, t focus, problem, ideate individually, provide context. The next I is ideate iteratively, and then T is team incubation. So we kind of lay that model out in the research. But fundamentally, we have to grow our conversation ability. We have to grow our comfort level with AI. And the way to do that is not to start with work. It's to start in your personal life. Life. So here's a really easy assignment you can that any listener could do right now to great effect. Think of a personal problem that you're trying to solve in your life or an emotional decision you're trying to make. Okay, so it might be, should we have kids right now? Should we move? Should I sign my daughters up for karate? I don't know. I'm just, should we give this babysitter a second chance? Should I retire? Should I move into a nursing home? Right. You can imagine a human emotional decision where you'd ordinarily ask another human, here's what I want you to do. Think of that decision. Go to ChatGPT and say, I'd love your help. Thinking about whether I should move my family into the forest. I don't know. Before you give me advice, could you ask me three or four questions so that you get to know me better before you give me some input? And then allow ChatGPT to ask you some questions? Respond to those questions and see what happens. I've got a friend, actually, who he was trying to demonstrate the power of LLMs to his grandma. And his grandma said he ran her through this exercise based on our instruction. He said, okay, what's an emotional decision you're trying to make, Grandma? And she said, I wonder if I should move into a nursing home. And he said, okay, let's play through that. And so he asked, chatgpt, I'd love your help in helping my grandma decide whether she should move into a nursing home. Could you ask us three or four questions before giving us advice? ChatGPT immediately said, sure. Tell me about any changes to your grandma's mobility recently. Grandma said, well, I haven't. I still go to the gym a couple times a week. And, you know, your grandfather fell recently, but he's. He's okay, and he still golfs and he's fine. You know, totally unstructured. Right. Next question. Tell me about your relationship with your caregivers and grandma. You know, the guy's just like, grandma, what do you say? We don't really have caregivers you know, we have neighbors who check in on us occasionally. My daughter drives up a few hours away from her home to. But she's not really caregiving. She's just saying, is that what he means? You know, just, it's a free form conversation. Right? Handful of questions like that. And then, and then, you know, the grandson kind of said, okay, Chad, GPT, based on what you've learned from my grandma, what do you recommend? How should we approach this decision of a nursing home or assisted living? It was mind blowing. But here's the thing, James, here's the cool thing. My friend told me that they were away on a holiday together. He said, all week long, Grandma's coming up with novel uses of generative AI. Grandma's going, hey, we're out of cream of mushroom soup. Could ChatGPT recommend a substitute for this green bean casserole recipe? Oh, I bet. So.

Right.

And so the point is, she starts imagining possibilities that I or my friend could never imagine. But what it requires is that she has this personal epiphany where she sees the power of a conversation, unlocks all sorts of possibilities that she never even knew were on the horizon. Right. That's where every human being can start. We built up, actually, we built kind of a Slack bot, kind of a model that any organization can integrate into their Slack or into their teams, where this is basically a drill coach, where we've kind of preloaded this conversation bot with a bunch of drills just like the one I just described. And every day, users and their own company, Slack or their own company teams can basically check in with coach. And Coach will give them a drill they can do to build their conversational fluency. And we believe that folks who are equipped with conversational fluency are the people who are going to be imagining the I need a substitute for cream of mushroom soup and the green bean casserole recipe at the office. And so it's not that conversational ability is the end point, it's that it is the necessary starting point. And so for us, we're kind of picturing coach. And some of these technologies is almost like a duolingo for AI literacy.

It's really powerful. I mean, I work with clients, I'm an executive coach, and I often think, how can I leverage AI? So recently I created a GPT and uploaded all of my disc profiles, cliftonstrengths, my values, my habits, priorities. I said, hey, you know, if I had a client who had this issue, how could you support them? And what it brought back was mind blowing. And inspiring. And I thought, well, a lot of that I actually agree with. And this other, well, I didn't even think of that. So it's a really powerful tool that I believe I could actually give to my clients, say, hey, we're only connecting once a month. But in between that, use the GPT and see how it serves you. So it's really. I think it's a powerful tool. It will rewrite many industries in terms of how they operate. But also there's the ethical, scary side of AI too. What are your thoughts around what could happen with AI if it went wrong?

You know, I personally think fear. I think my read of the research is that fear is the predominant sentiment. I think folks need to move from. I've got like an F spectrum here, right? Because of course, the professor thinks in terms of Fs, right? But you've got fear on the one hand, I think you have to move from fear to familiarity and from familiarity to fluency and from fluency to fun.

And to me, that's actually the most important thing is when someone starts to have these conversational moments, they love it. I'll give you an example. I've got a great friend. And they stop thinking in terms of fear because they see the human.

Generative AI is not thinking of anything that I haven't prompted it with. And yet. And now it thinks of things that I never would have thought to prompt it with. Is it my idea or its idea? Who knows? But people start to become just really enchanted by the possibilities. I'll give you an example. A good friend of mine is a technology leader at a financial services company here in the United States, and she hadn't really used generative AI for much. And I was talking to her one day and I said, hey, just, you know, ask it an emotional question that you're a decision you're trying to make. And she kind of, you know, dragged her feed and then I checked in with her and she said, hey, I finally, I finally gave ChatGPT a try. And I said, what did you do? She said, I asked for feedback on my script. I've been working on this movie script in my spare time. And I was frustrated because I had hired this coat, this script writing coach, and he's taking forever to get back to me. And then I get an iteration. He takes forever. And she said, I uploaded my script. I uploaded three or four scripts of movies. I love Silence of the Lambs, you know, whatever stuff in the public domain. And then I said, would you compare my script in terms of pacing, in terms of style, in terms of plot line, narrative arc, et cetera. With these five said instantaneously, I have a far more comprehensive comparison than I ever had and I didn't have to wait. And then I started asking questions and I'm now in a conversation, she said, with my coach. I've got to book a meeting. It's going to be two months away, all this stuff. Whereas ChatGPT is basically an always on imminently available coach. And if I provide the parameters, how would you critique this? If were Steven Spielberg, what are the core principles of Wes Anderson's direction and how might you leverage those in a critique of this script? Right. And on and on and on. She said, I never knew how much more feedback and iteration and thoughtfulness was available to me until I felt that need. And so a lot of times it's like, where are you feeling frustrated? Where are you feeling? Or like for me, another very practical example I'll give you. Hopefully this just sparks listeners imaginations. That's the goal, is to spark people's imaginations. But what I'll do, many times after I get off of a call, you know, I, I like to even just recap my own thoughts, you know, or maybe, maybe send a note to somebody after. And so, you know, take for example this conversation, I might get off and I, I use the voice memo kind of functionality in ChatGPT. So I'll, I'll, you know, pull up the voice and I'll just say, hey. I spoke with James Laughlin on his podcast and we talked about ideal flow, we talked about generative AI and fears. I don't feel like I gave a great answer on fears. I wondered if you could help me think about composing a follow up where I talk about how excited I was to get to talk to him. I'm really excited to hear how folks in New Zealand and Australia and the rest of his audience react to these ideas. Not only on the book but on this new research. I'd love to know if he has any recommendations of things that I should look at. You might just to craft a quick memo that I could send to him tomorrow. Okay. By the way, I'm stretching, preparing for my run. Right. And whereas like if I think about all of that follow up and if I start to compose that note, it's like dear James, what do I start with? Really enjoyed. I'm wasting cycles and bandwidth on stuff that doesn't really matter. Whereas by just kind of verbal vomiting into ChatGPT, it's, it captures the stuff that I actually care about. And then I can fine tune the edges. That's fine. Right? But so to me, that happens to be a pain point in my life is.

Following up. Right. I don't know what it is for others, but I think my point is I've got enough reps. I mean, to me, anybody who's listening to this episode, if they haven't spent at least 10 hours playing with ChatGPT, it's a stop everything. Book an hour per day on your calendar for the next two working weeks and force yourself to play, force yourself to experiment, force yourself to try new tasks if you are finding it's not doing it very well. Newsflash, it's a user error. It is not like people who come to ChatGPT and say, hey, cast off some spurious prompt and then dismiss what it gives them and go, ah, the technology's there, yet you are missing so much. But if you won't engage and if you won't play, which to me is. Goes back to the kind of beauty and elegance of an emotional decision you care about, because implicit in all of that is you actually care and you'll actually push back and you actually want to know what it thinks and it's, it just kind of, it changes the paradigm a little bit a lot of times at work. The real problem, to be honest with you, as I interface with professionals in many organizational contexts, they don't care enough to push back. And it's like, it's okay, it's okay, right? But when it comes to how I want to raise my teenage daughters, no, I really care. No, I really want to make sure this advice is, is really tailored to my unique girl, that I'm really, you know, it, it totally changes the paradigm massively.

And it's, it's interesting I look at ChatGPT and the way I think about it, because I've had a lot of people say, james, do you use it at all for content creation within your team? Of course I do, but is that right or is that wrong? I said, well, let's look at this. Let's take Obama or Biden and they come out and they deliver this amazing speech. They did not write that speech. They contributed to it. They had a speechwriter and the speechwriter wrote the speech. It was probably a whole team of speechwriters. And then they added their touch. I was like, to me, my GPT is literally my speechwriter, and I'm utilizing it like that. I'm inputting and prompting it, and then I'm refining it with My own voice. So I have no guilt when I do use it. And in fact, it gives me so much more time to think. It gives me so much more time to engage with activities I love. So I'm with you. I'm a big fan of where LLMs are going.

Yeah, I feel most people, again.

It'S a function of exposure. And if, for example, you had AI shoutouts in your team meetings, you'd start to be blown away by what people are doing. If you had a AI channel in your company, Slack, you'd start to be blown away by what people are doing. Right. And right now the problem is folks aren't. They're imagining going back. By the way, connecting the two, conversation imagination is what stimulated by unexpected input. How do you increase the likelihood of unexpected input in regards to AI? You know, I've actually a good friend of mine who's an entrepreneur, Henrik Werdelin, he started Bark and Pre Hype and RO and a bunch of incredible companies. He and I have a lot of friends who we admire their use of AI and we've actually started a new podcast called beyond the Prompt, which is all about using AI in your company. And the point is, every time we get done with the call, I'm going, I gotta clear the decks because I gotta try that. You know, I think at the very least we have to take some authorship and some agency in our lives. This is a fundamental shift as every bit as fundamental as the Internet, I truly believe. And part of the reason that, you know, I feel passionate about it is I wrote the world's greatest book on idea generation that was published one month before ChatGPT came out. Wow, that's like writing the world's greatest book on retail just before the Internet comes out. You know, the whole thing's got to be rewritten. Right. So I am a world leading expert in innovation and there is now a technology which fundamentally changes so much of all of that thought leadership and expertise. I feel it's critical to be making sure that people see the potential and, and feel a sense of agency and inspiration to go and learn and to go and discover and to try things that I've never imagined trying, you know, 100%.

And what are the talking about idea flow? What are the top three insights or takeaways from the book that you think are just the most impactful for the reader?

Okay, this isn't a script. I'm just kind of going off the top of my head here, but let me play with it for a second. Problem solving is all about Problem finding, that's the first thing. So if you want to be a good problem solver, be a better problem finder. That's number one. If you don't know how to find problems, keep a bug list. That's something we've been doing at Stanford since the 1960s. It literally means write down a list of things that bug you.

Okay, brilliant. I have a massive list.

Yeah, that's good. So number one, be a problem finder. That's problem solving. And innovation is all about finding problems worth solving. Okay, And I could talk a lot about that, but that's the short number two. If you want to generate a good idea, generate lots of ideas. The single biggest variable that determines the quality of your ideas is the quantity of your ideas. So don't think about having better ideas, think about having more ideas. More is actually the critical part. And if this is like kind of call it. If I'm looking at an outline of my three bullet response, this kind of 2B, you know, 2A being, don't look for better, look for more to be. Again, I'm a finance guy. You can't get it out of me, right? It's like I'm thinking in terms of the spreadsheet. How does this flow? 2B is, if you want more, try bad. Look for bad ideas. Generate bad ideas because that increases the variability in your thinking and that's actually critical. Taylor Swift, recently, she was accepting an innovation award at the Iheart Music Awards Festival and she said, I want everyone to know that it's my hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that have led me to my good ideas.

There you go.

Which, by the way, that accords with every bit of research. You know, Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, says it takes a multitude of bad ideas to have a good idea. So most people just want the good, they don't want the multitude of bad. So anyway, 2B is kind of generate bad. Three would be if you want to. Now, if you've got a bunch of. So you found a problem worth solving, you've got a bunch of ideas on how to solve it. Step three is commission a portfolio of experiments. Never just do one thing, okay? And if you say, well, I don't have enough time to do more than one thing, then redefine what it means to do it. I'm not talking about a perfectly polished, refined, beautiful thing. Make it scrappy, make it ugly, make it, make it fast. Experimental velocity and volume are critical to end stage innovation. So be it. One, be a problem finder. Two A generate a Lot of solutions. Two B, generate bad solutions to get to a lot. And then three, commission a portfolio of experiments to figure out which one you should invest more time, attention, resources into putting into the world.

Beautiful. It'll kind of Edison comes to mind when you share what you just shared. Of course, like, Edison didn't just do it like this. It was like iterations. It was volume and eventually had a couple of golden nuggets that came from that. Yeah, it's incredible. Now, I heard that you are incredible at helping people to shift deeply and change, shift deeply ingrained beliefs within themselves. How do you go about doing that?

Well, I think it comes down to.

Walking someone through this kind of personal epiphany process. If I can get someone to have that moment that I had at the ramen shop or at the Notebook, where I go, where did that come from? There's so much.

About our identity that is fixed that we don't know is fixed. And that actually is not fixed, but it's our perception of our identity which is fixed. And having those epiphany moments, I find it's almost like the ice gets broken. Right. And there's a lot of. I mean, you know, my classes are filled with methods and tools. You want to have a great one, write your own eulogy and then talk to a partner or a friend or a spouse about where there are meaningful gaps between what you value implicitly in your eulogy and how you are living, how you're behaving, how you're being right. We call that value being alignment. There's a whole project in our transformative design class around that. Right. Again, just an example of.

Such activities. Facilitate epiphanies for people. I have found that if you can facilitate an epiphany, you give someone an opportunity to change a belief. I'm not creative. Well, maybe I am. I'm not patient. Maybe I could be on and on and on. Right. But it really requires holding someone's hand. And you know how I knew it? Because I'm a front row student in this classroom room, you know, that's how I know it. I am not just a professor, or you can call me professor, really, I'm a student. And the beauty of the position that Stanford's given me is I have the privilege of learning alongside my students and then sharing what I learn. And that's what I try to do in my blog and my newsletter and on my podcast and interviews like this. I try to say, here's what I'm learning in my life alongside you.

That's great. We need more educators, professors and teachers like that. You know, in my experience, I've had some like you, and I would arguably say they're the greatest teachers and professors I've had in my life ever. They're fun, they're engaging, but a large majority are more fixed minded and by the book, they don't have that appetite for growth and learning. And those to me are the worst kind of teachers you can be around. Now, you've got a ton of books in the background there. I want to ask you, in the last six months, what are a few books that you've read that have been quite inspiring?

You know, I just for the, for the first time in probably a couple years, I read a work of fiction, which I've got it here on my desk.

I love this book. CS Lewis, that Hideous Strength.

Okay.

It's part of his. He calls it a space trilogy. I had read the first two books, but I'd never read the third one. And then a friend of mine recommended is prescient for the day in which we live. Absolutely prescient. Because he imagines a world where science is being pushed to the very, very edge. And the question is, what is our human responsibility? What is our human dignity in the face of. And by the way, he wrote this, you know, on the footstep of World War II. Right. So similar to Vonnegut. I find that C.S. lewis and Vonnegut are very kind of similarly imaginative about, about their kind of dystopian views of the future. Anyway, that was one of the most inspiring books I've read. And then let me look.

You know, one book I really loved, I mentioned him earlier, but Kevin Kelly, excellent advice for living. He's the founder of Wired magazine. He's an incredible technologist and optimist and he lives not too far from me, actually, here on the California coast. That's a really fun book. A really good read and really fun. And then of course, probably my favorite, if I had to just pick one book on creativity and innovation.

Because I've given you a fiction book, I've given you kind of an advice book and then just a great solid innovation book, I'd say it's Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc. And I had the great privilege. He's the founder of Pixar, he worked for Steve Jobs, and he's got 11 Academy Awards to his name. He invented computer animation. And I had the privilege of interviewing him on my podcast. And the first episode of the third season is my interview with Ed. Ed is so eloquent, knowledgeable, practical. I can't recommend that book highly enough. And I try to dive into to me, what are some of the most interesting parts of the book I try to dive into in that interview. But I can send you a link if folks will please do.

And I'll make sure that for the listener that is in the show notes so they can go straight over to that interview and listen to it and subscribe to your podcast.

He's so good. I mean, it's all Ed. I'm just, all I'm hoping to do is get out of the way enough so that he can just be his amazing self.

I love it. This has been honestly an amazing conversation. Before we wrap up, we've got a last question that I'd like to ask all of my guests. But I do believe that this will be the start of several conversations over the next few years. Your heart fascinating mind. And I'm in California a few times this year, so hopefully we get to connect in person.

I love that.

It'd be great. It'd be good fun. But what I'd like to ask you is this. So if we were to fast forward many, many years into the future and you're highly aware that it's your last day here on earth, very young person that you love dearly, maybe a family member, a grandchild, a great grandchildren, walks into the room and asks you, hey, Jeremy, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

I'd say.

Find three people.

Whose example.

You'D long to follow, emulate, etc. And get as close to them as you possibly can.

Such great advice. And that looks like advice that you actually live currently.

Yes.

Jeremy, that's amazing. I just want to say a heartfelt thank you for the work that you're doing, for the book that you've shared with the world. And as I say, I'll put a link in all of our show notes so that the listener can grab a copy of that book right away. But just much appreciated and I look forward to our next conversation.

Yeah, likewise, James. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders of the it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.