215: Stay Relevant, Sense What's Next, and Solve Difficult Problems with Stephen Shapiro

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am so excited and grateful to be here today with Steven Shapiro. Steven cultivates innovation by showing leaders and their teams how to approach, tackle and solve their business challenges. He is an incredible thinker and I have to say, part of Steven, one of the serendipitous things that happened is, well, I got lucky enough to be in a friend tour group with you Mastermind during this whole craziness. The sickness, as my four and a half year old niece refers to it. And then randomly as soon as we had scheduled this podcast interview, I'm in a different mini Mastermind. And they were just separately recommending Steven Shapiro. His work is a game changer. He just came out with a new book last month called Invisible Solutions. And then the next person chimed in and said, I am absolutely upset with Steven Shapiro and his work. His loved your book. Best practices are stupid. One click ordered Invisible Solutions and we just had this Stephen love fest that happened. And then I was very grateful to be able to chime in on the thread and say, oh my gosh, I just invited him to the show and now here you are. Welcome.

Well, great to be here. It sounds like we're going to have a really good time today.

Yes. I didn't tell you it's customary that I embarrassed my guests as soon as you arrived. So I didn't tell you that before you hit record.

Well, I'm glad this is not video because I'm blushing right now. So thank you.

Me too. Me too. Oh my gosh. This is one of those interviews and it actually doesn't happen to me very often where there are so many good ideas that resonate from your book and your Body of work that I just get almost. I'm almost tongue tied right now with where to start. And I don't want to do a standard book report podcast that I used to do when I first started. But I have to tell you, another aha. Moment that I had in preparing for this conversation was that you are the creator of Personality Poker.

Yes, I am.

I didn't know that. I've had these decks. I got them through Actionable. I'm sure, you know, the actionable team.

Sure.

And they're such a good icebreaker.

Well, great. Yeah. It's one of my favorite. Maybe it's my most underutilized product that I've created. People just love playing cards, and it was something which came to me about 15 years ago, years ago to create it, and we've had just a blast using it.

I love the connection between knowing of those decks. I have some right in my office. And then reading Invisible Solutions, your new book, and seeing that you recommend people look at adjacent industries, and one of the adjacent industries that you're looking at is magic. So it kind of ties together. And then I. And then the Personality Poker. And just so listeners know, each card has. What is it? A personality trait. It's been a little while since I actually pulled them out.

Yeah. So personalized poker, it's 52 cards. Like a regular deck of cards. Suits, colors, numbers on them. But in addition, there's a. They're a trade. It's like, are you analytical? Are you organized? Are you empathetic? Are you logical? Are you creative? And so what you do is you trade cards with people. And the goal is very simple. You want five cards that best describe how you see yourself. To me, the most fun part of the game is when you gift cards to other people. So in addition to collecting cards for yourself that describe how you see yourself, you will also receive cards from others that describe how they see you. And that is often a really big part of the conversation.

That's the magic, too. Right. Because sometimes it's hard, as they say, to read the label from the inside of the jar. So getting the cards from others about how they see you is very powerful.

It is, you know, and here's what's interesting, is neither of them are right. How you see yourself is not necessarily an accurate depiction of who you are and how others see you isn't necessarily an accurate depiction, but it's a conversation starter. And to me, that's really the key of all of this. And just to step back for just a second. I mean, the Reason why I developed this is the world does not need another personality test. It is not a personality test. It is an innovation and team building tool. And so each of the suits link back to a step of the innovation process. And it also helps us make sure that we are, as I like to say, playing with a full deck and that we have all the different styles necessary to properly execute each of the different suits. So even though it is a personality test of sorts, that's not his primary function.

I agree with you. I mean, I think it does come across too, as a conversation starter. Your. Your most recent book, Invisible Solutions 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems, happened to launch on March 3, 2020. What has it been like for you launching during this crazy time? And then I just, I mean, it's not that you could have predicted what's coming, but oh my goodness, in a way, now is the time we need to solve difficult business problems more than ever. So it must be kind of wild for you to try to think about applying these lenses in such a dramatic context as we're all experiencing now.

Yeah. You know, it is interesting because when the book came out, my first reaction was, you know, what a terrible time to launch a book. But on the other hand, I actually wrote this book. And here's the interesting thing is people who know me know that everything that I've written for the past 20 plus years has been all around innovation. And when you look at this new book, the word innovation doesn't appear anywhere on the COVID And that was by design, because I was always assuming that we've had such a strong economic run, that there was going to be some kind of economic downturn. I didn't predict it would be this, but I assumed we're going to have some kind of recession or some kind of economic downturn. So I wrote the book not from an innovation perspective, which is great during good times, but from a problem solving perspective, which tends to rise to the top during tough economic conditions. And so it's actually a very timely book. I've done very little to promote it since all this happened, just because I didn't want to be one of those opportunistic people. But I'm starting to get back out there because I know this book can help a lot of people solve some of their most difficult problems right now.

Well, that's always so interesting. In your interview with Mitch Joel on March 8, and I don't know when you recorded that you had said problems magnify during a recession is Very interesting to me. And especially because you spent your career going the other way. You know, like even the title Best Practices are Stupid. It just makes me laugh every time. And so how interesting. And you also say, by the way, that leaders and we're now allergic to the word innovation. But it's so interesting that you almost reverse engineered from a recession and said, okay, I know that's when problems magnify the most. So you oriented the book that way. It's just, it's, it's really a testament to your way of thinking, which is almost unpacking things backward and sideways and as you would call it, looking at the challenge rather than the question.

At least to start.

Well, look, I mean, there was.

I couldn't predict that this was going to happen. I just know that economies go in cycles. But the other thing also is, look, the book is built around 25 different lenses. And these lenses are different ways to look at any problem you're trying to solve. And so like one of lenses is the pain versus gain lens. And one of the things that we know is that people are more likely to take action to minimize a loss or to address a pain than they will for a gain. And innovation is typically thought of as gain thinking, whereas problem solving and problems and issues and challenges and pain are obviously the pain lens. And so even when I wrote the book, I tried to use the pain lens rather than the gain lens. That was just one of the things that I decided to do is apply the lenses to the process of writing the book. And we see that right now as, you know, talk, whether it's about virtual work. We've been talking. Virtual systems have been around for decades now, but it's only rapid adoption now because of the pain. As a quick aside, the same thing happened in the mid-1970s when the ATM machines were launched in New York City by Citibank and nobody wanted them. They wanted the personal teller, they didn't want the technology. And then the blizzard of 78, which dumped 2ft of snow on New York City, shut down the entire city. And now all of a sudden people couldn't get money from banks and they couldn't get money from anywhere. And so ATM machines went through the roof. So I wrote this book from that lens and it just happened to be that we are in a time of pain. So it worked out from that perspective.

That ATM example, there's a real zero to one shift that happens that I'm experiencing, I would say for the first time in, in this way in my career, which is let's Take, for example, teaching my grandma how to use Zoom. All right, so pre pandemic, when it wasn't a must, and we even had the option to go visit her in person, she probably would have said, I don't want to fiddle with all that stuff. Like, probably wouldn't even have wanted to take the five minutes. Nor would we have pressed it, because we know she'd rather we just fly out and see her now because she was able to learn Zoom, and my mom got on the phone and coached her and taught her how to use it with her friends. There's no going back. She knows how to use it now, whether it's her preference or not. That aspect of technology and modern life is not a mystery to her anymore. And there just must be so many areas of society and business that that's happening. I mean, even you and I, we're connecting on Skype because the audio recording does tend to be better for podcasts. But we were saying, and you're not the first person who has said it this week, oh, I never go on Skype anymore. So it's just amazing how quickly things can be disrupted as you talk about.

Well, absolutely. I mean, you look at. I mean, this has been written about before, but I just did some quick calculations the other day, and, you know, the market cap of Zoom is now larger than American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, and JetBlue combined. Now, whether it's going to stay that way, who knows? When people start flying again, the airlines will go back up. Zoom may come back down to earth a little bit, but there will be some level of adoption. ATM machines have been around for, you know, 40 years, but people continue to use them. And I think when we have these major situations like this, people move into an adoption mindset that will. Will last long, long after everything gets back to some level of normal.

I love thinking of that. I talk about the pivot mindset, but the adoption mindset, that's a cool way to put it.

Yeah. People.

There'S nothing that we are doing today that wasn't available to us before. It was just the lack of adoption. And that, to me is what's always very interesting about technology, is we always say, build it, and they will come, but that's rarely the case. I say solve a problem, solve a pain, and they will come. And it's fascinating when you look at infomercials, for example, pretty much every infomercial in the world, they don't say, hey, buy our great.

Food storage device because your food will stay fresh. No the beginning of every single infomercial is the same. It's usually in black and white with this melodramatic music. Are you tired of your food going rotten in just a few days and wasting all this money and people smashing their lettuce and vegetables on the ground or whatever it is? It's like introducing our new zip seals or that's. But that's the way people think is people make decisions based on eliminating pains much more powerfully.

Well, how do you think people can do that without coming across as gimmicky? Like, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the online world or whatever there. Sometimes there's such an overemphasis on the pain that it can be a turnoff.

Yeah. I think sometimes the best thing to do is just to create a pain that someone didn't know they had or help them see the pain in a way that they hadn't considered. So one of my favorite advertisements, I'm from Boston originally, and there's a furniture store in Boston called Jordan's Furniture. And so when I moved to Boston from London back in, like, 2001, two time frame.

I decided to invest in a really expensive bed because I like my sleep and so bought the best mattress. And if you think about most mattress commercials, they all say the same thing. Buy our mat mattress. Get the best night's sleep. And so I had the best mattress in the world. None of those advertisements are going to get me to think about buying a new mattress. And then I turn on the TV and there's this advertisement from Jordan's Furniture that says, did you know that if your mattress is over eight years old, it will weigh twice its original weight due to the dead skin cells and dust mites that have accumulated over the years? And the guy's vacuuming the mattress, and he empties it on the mattress, and it's just full of this guy gunk. And I'm like, okay. My mattress at that point was about 12 years old when I saw that advertisement, and I was out buying a new mattress. So I think we can do things that, you know, it's like a friend of mine would always say if she was a meeting planner, and she'd always say, like, you know, think about all the things that could go wrong. And I do find when you share people your expertise, here's the things that I've seen can go wrong. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Have others considered that? I think it's still a really, you know, people don't think about the downside when we're painting the upside. And I think there is an ethical and non goofy way to do that.

Yes. And even the mattress example, it's a fact. I mean, he's showing you visually with his vacuum how much stuff has accumulated. I wonder how many people listening to this are going to go, I'll get a new mattress. It's contagious because you're like, oh man, okay. It makes me think I have this one favorite pillow and they don't manufacture it anymore. It's like a Tempur Pedic. But really.

Who only knows how much gunk that thing has.

You never know. I think the tempurpedic ones are probably a little safer. I think they're a little more resistant. But and also just, you know, if people are listening, that statistic about it weighing twice its original weight has been refuted. It was originally reported in the New York Times and then there was sort of a retraction on it. But regardless, there's a lot of stuff you just don't want to think about.

But you're right that it's more effective than saying, do you like your mattress? If not, I don't know, then the approach you described where you just weren't even thinking about your mattress. Otherwise it wasn't even on your radar. What about in the book? You're a self described road warrior. I've actually met you only in the month of March or April that we've connected. So I'm so curious because I know you've been saying it's been kind of a relief doing things virtually. And you have some interesting approaches of how you've. You've shifted during this time. But I'm wondering what. What is unfolding for you or what are you learning about yourself that you weren't previously aware of, given how much the nature of your work has changed in certain ways, at least the context of traveling everywhere, even if the content is still quite similar.

Yeah. So there's a few things that I've been just. I've taken the time to reflect and I think what happens is we get really busy so we don't stop and look back. One is that I've always labeled myself as a keynote speaker. That's how I would position myself. But what I realized is that's not who I am. I am a problem solver and I help people solve their own problems. And yes, I can give keynotes. But when you think about it, from. And one of the lenses in the book is the real business lens is what is your real business. And if I think of myself as a keynote speaker, the questions I'm going to ask myself and the problems I'm going to solve and the way I'm going to look at the world is going to be extremely limited by that definition of my business keynote speaker. But if I reframe it, to think of myself as a problem solver, as an innovator, somebody who helps other people solve their own problems, well, now it opens up a whole wide range of opportunities. And although I've been doing virtual work for decades now, in one form or another.

It really has hit home to me how much I love delivering in the virtual world because there's actually we can create more or value. And the key is to not replicate what we do on stage in the virtual world. That doesn't work, in my opinion, but rather to step back and say, what is the outcome we're trying to create and how do I reverse engineer that experience for the audience? And so I've used a completely different approach and a completely different process for my virtual work than I would do for my in person work. And it has been just really incredibly valuable. And I'm having a lot of fun doing it because I think it just creates greater value without having to get on a plane.

And I find that question, what's the outcome you want to create? It's crucial for anything. Pivoting, presenting. It's like. It almost boggles my mind because it's so central for me too, that one would do something without even understanding what that is first. You know, and you're right that the outcome is transformation, problem solving, illumination. And if you have those in mind, your intention of the outcome you're trying to create, then it's so interesting to hear how you're piloting and experimenting with how you get there in a virtual setting.

And like I said, the process I use, I've actually used for about a decade now, but it's, it was sort of a, I will use this process if I can't get there in person. So there was a client of mine over in Europe and we couldn't make my schedule work because it was just too close to some other speeches that I had and travel costs for Europe were expensive. And so I've been using this process for a long time, but it was almost like the fallback, it was the process to use when I can't be there live and I'm actually flipping my business. This is my default way of delivering content. And the in person is not necessarily the fallback approach, but I'll be more selective of when I do it, and it's going to be integrated into the larger process because I find I can create a lot of greater, you know, a lot greater value for my clients. And that, to me is really what it's all about, is if we stop thinking ourselves as, you know, whatever we have thought about our businesses being and really just start asking, what are our differentiators? How do we add value and how can we deliver that in a different way? That, to me, is amazing.

Yes, it is so powerful, that shift that even you, who's so innovative in your thinking, but that shift from I am a keynote speaker, the activity to reconnecting with I am a problem solver, and I help people solve their problems. It's so powerful to see that. And I think I know for I'll speak for myself and hopefully listeners too. But I feel very inspired by that to think about. Okay, what is it that I actually do that's separate from the activities.

You mentioned? Oh, go ahead.

I just want to add one thing there because, look, I think it's human nature, and I think the opportunity we have right now, if we take it, is to put a pause button. Because if we're running on a treadmill all the time, we never hit the pause button to stop and say, who am I really? What is my business? What am I doing? What am I creating? And one of my beliefs is that expertise is the enemy of innovation. The more you know about yourself, the more you know about your customers, the more you know about your industry, the more you know about your competitors, the harder it is for you to think differently. And part of the big issue is that you knew your customers, you knew your competitors, you knew your industry. It doesn't mean you still know them. And I think we've seen how in just a matter of weeks, we knew the keynote speaking industry. We don't know it anymore because it's totally different. But what if we shift our perspective of what business we're really in? What if we shift the perspective of the problems we're solving and that pause button to just get out of our past experiences and our beliefs and our assumptions. Our assumptions are the thing which are going to destroy our ability to think differently. We need to challenge them all the time.

So well said. And that pause we had said in a different conversation, you mentioned the phrase pivot versus divot. So it's almost like we have a pause and then, what's pivot versus divot? What do you think determines which way someone goes and what is a divot in this context?

Well, a divot is the way I golf, which if you're a golfer, basically you'll know that a divot is when you swing a little too deeply and you basically get a chunk of grass that instead of the ball going where you want it to go, a big chunk of grass goes with it. And, you know, that's what's been interesting is even before this whole thing happened, I was talking about, you know, everybody's asking, what's your pivot? What's your pivot? What's your pivot? And I kept on thinking, I feel like I've always, as an innovator, always spent my life trying to pivot. And I decided that I was going to divot. And the reason why I wrote the new book was it wasn't a new topic, it wasn't a new conversation. It was actually taking what I've been doing for the past 15 years and going deeper and deeper and deeper. So to me, the divot is that depth that's really just saying, okay, I'm not gonna move on to the next thing because I haven't still gone as deep as I possibly can where I now, I may shift the way I deliver the content. I may shift it in terms of whether it's virtual or whether it's video or things of that nature. But content wise, who I am, again, if I'm a problem solver, well, I'm going deeper and deeper and deeper into problem solving, rather than saying, well, I'm going to be a problem solver and an innovator and a person who's an expert on making margaritas. That, to me, is what a lot of people tend to do. And I figured I want to go deeper and deeper as much as I can.

There's so much good stuff in there. One, I love how you flipped. A divot is seen as a bad thing in golf, but in this case, it actually is going deeper and in that way, helpful, which applies your analogy lens, I will say of this is like that and using that golf metaphor to dive into this topic. And I'll also say that the way I talk about pivot is exactly how you've described a divot, which is take the thing that's working and double down on it. So in a way, I like thinking of it as a divot. Now that so many of the most successful pivots are actually, you're not starting from scratch. You're saying, what is the one aspect? What is this pivotal point of the work that you're doing or what's at your core that you can shift around. And that. That doesn't always mean chasing the new shiny thing. It's almost the opposite of that.

And that's brilliant. I mean, the way you said it is just so brilliant, and I think it's so true, is I think people hear words. It's the problem with the word innovation. You say the word innovation to people and they jump around and they think it means this, that, or the other thing. They think it's about novelty or lots of ideas. And it's none of that, really, in my opinion. And I think the same thing is probably true with the word pivot. Just the way you described it is a beautiful articulation of what we need to be doing when we're pivoting, rather than thinking about pivot as what's the next bright, shiny object. And so that's just great. I love the way you just described that.

Thank you very much. I love how you have the word. A word like innovation is on your timeout list. Let's say I. I feel that way about the word success. I would not allow it to be anywhere in pivot. And even the word career, I think, is obsolete at this point. And I wouldn't let the publisher put it in the subtitle because I thought as soon as you put career in the subtitle, this book is dead. It's gone.

That makes sense.

Those are my. Makes sense. Yeah. Okay.

Well, there's words that we just use all the time because they're. I'll say it's because of laziness. We use words like success. It's like, what is like. Okay. Because I can't define it, so I'm not going to take the time to define it as opposed to really getting clarity around what we're saying. And I think once you get that clarity, everything comes into focus. I mean, that. That's why the book is around lenses, is because we're typically looking at the world in a way that is actually blurry and we don't realize it and so need lenses in order to see the world differently. And that's exactly what you just said, is the words we use, the language we use is so fundamentally critical in terms of how we see the world, and we're just sometimes lazy.

And you give so many good examples in the book about how one word can change the question, which can then change all of the outcomes. One word.

Yep. I mean, one of the simple examples is, you know, NASA during manned spacecraft. One of the problems they were trying to solve is how do we get clothes clean? And how do you get clothes clean means cleaning fluids and washing machines and space and all these other complicated things. And then they change it from how do we get clothes clean to how do we keep clothes clean? One word, change. And now all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait a second. Now we're not even talking about cleaning fluids, cleaning machines, pumps, pipes, valves and gravity, but we're talking about a material science problem. How do we create clothes that don't need to be cleaned, that will stay clean? One word, problem Change, one word. And the problem is shifted to unleash a completely new range of solutions. But we don't take time when we're solving problems to step back and say, am I being precise with my language? Am I really thinking about each and every word I'm using?

That's what I wonder. Okay, what's been your observation in these last few months? In a way, it just sent everybody scrambling to problem solve. It's like, ah, everything is on fire. Whether in personal business. I mean, there was a month there where it just felt like total chaos, at least to me. Things were changing so much every day. How are you seeing this play out? Do you see people taking time and do you think even as a society that we are defining the problem and spending enough time on that? Or are we putting out fires or trying to jump to solutions or your fav. Brainstorming too soon?

That was a question that a client of mine just asked me the other day. And my thought on this is we're going to see a couple of different waves of, let's just use the word, innovation. I think the first wave is a reactionary innovation. I think what's happening right now is it comes from survival. And it's important to understand that we're wired primarily for survival rather than innovation. And so when we're in a true survival mode, like we are right now, we will innovate. But it is almost like a knee jerk reaction to the environment rather than a well thought out reaction. So it's like, okay, can't meet in person. I'm just going to take what I've always done in the past and just deliver it virtually. And it's really automating the past. And one of the things that we know is if you automate a bad or broken process, or if you automate the wrong process, you're never going to get a good result. And so that's the first thing I'm seeing. And I think what's going to happen is. And I think we're starting to see it now already, is people stepping back and saying, okay, you know, what do we really need to achieve? What's the true outcome rather than just automating what we've done previously? What are different ways that we can tackle this? And it's a much more thoughtful approach to identifying better solutions. And I think we'll see that as a second wave of innovation. And the nice thing is that first wave created that adoption that we talked about, where people are adopting technologies now. I think the second phase is going to be around leveraging those technologies fully along with better processes and recognizing that not everything is a technology solution.

And probably I would imagine dropping a lot of fluff. Like just I somehow see, and I don't just mean trim the fat in terms of a business sense, and hopefully not too much contraction in terms of people losing their jobs, but it also seems like part of the innovation process, however we define it. Although I want to read your definition, which I think is fantastic, is dropping a lot of the stuff that these activities. You know, my friend Julie in her book Work Revolution talks about impact, not activities like how much stuff of what we were doing was just activities that were not making the impact that leads to the outcomes that we're really looking for.

I think it's probably, first of all, that's a great question to ask. And I think what we are finding is that we've been doing a lot of unproductive work in the past and that will change.

But I think that's a natural course of business anyway. Is pendulum swing. 2008 was, I guess, sort of the last pendulum swing. And we step back and start to rethink things and start to focus and reprioritize our energies. But then the pendulum swings back. And this is, I think, sort of the course of business as long as I've been in business. And so things will return to some level of normalcy, but the pendulum almost never swings all the way back. It might swing to a slightly different place. And I just think this is a. But I think it's a great opportunity because if companies get smarter about how they differentiate and they get that clarity, I really do believe that we're going to see a greater value for customers, greater value for employees. I think it's a terrible time right now, but I do believe on the other side of it, we have some really great opportunities.

Yes. When you said when you use the pendulum metaphor, I was picturing us we could just hop onto the pendulum Like Tarzan and then somehow enjoy these swings.

That sounds like fun.

Yeah, you mentioned differentiating and this is a big theme in Invisible Solutions. And interestingly, it comes toward the end where you talk about the 5D's of you say instead of trying to solve every problem, you want to innovate only where you differentiate.

Boom.

That blew my mind. Like it was so simply clearly put, instead of trying to solve every problem, you want to innovate only where you differentiate and you talk about the 5D's distinct, durable, disruption proof, desirable and disseminated. I'm going to leave it as almost a teaser that listeners are going to have to get the book and I encourage you to do that because there's a little lens 25 lenses cheat sheet in foldout in the book. But I really want to dig into this a little bit of differentiation because it's so much more effective to innovate and problem solve only where you're differentiated. And yet I can speak for myself, I have a very hard time doing that, probably because I haven't used your 25 lenses yet. How do you help people start to understand how they're differentiated and how to become disruption proof when as you say, sometimes your biggest competition is not another person or company, it might be economic and even societal shifts.

So I think first of all, definitions are important. Differentiation doesn't mean different. I think a lot of people think about, you know, how are we going to be different than our competition? How are we going to be unique? Look, that's part of it. But you know, if you. The goal here is to make sure what you are doing creates value in the minds of your customers and your clients in the market. So it creates value in a way that they are willing to do business with you and not someone else. And so the way we define our differentiators really just to get clear about what makes us special, not unique, but what makes us special in a way that people are gravitating towards us and we have something to offer that others don't. And then what we want to do is really double down on that as much as possible. Recognizing the world does shift. And when the world shifts, we need to shift with it. So coming back to the definition of innovation, I'll give you my one word definition of innovation. Relevance. It's not about novelty, it's not about being different. It's not about creativity, it's not about ideas. It's having something that people value enough that they're willing to pay for it. It's about being relevant in the minds of the consumer, in the minds of the buyer. And so if that's the case, we can't be the best at everything. So let's figure out partnership strategies. So when I'm always looking at my business, I say, what do I do best? What I do best is I help people solve problems. And I can, and I have the one of the things that I'm really particularly good at is I help people figure out how they can solve their own problems. And that's what this whole methodology is about. But I'm not the best at technology, I'm not the best at websites, I'm not the best at marketing, I'm not the best at, you know, instructional design. I'm not the best at a thousand things. And if I try to become masterful at everything, I will become masterful at nothing. And so I'm always looking at who do I partner with, who do I find that's masterful at something and create an arrangement that's going to work for them. Sometimes there might be money involved, sometimes there isn't. In many cases it's a gain sharing arrangement. I've had so many different arrangements over the years where I will partner with somebody, they will develop something for me and the agreement is they get a percentage of whatever we generate from a revenue perspective. And I've done this probably like 10 different times. And to me these are valuable relationships on both side of the equation. But it allows me to focus on what I do best.

I love how you put that and to just pull out this word relevance as the one word definition of innovation. And then partnering. I mean, I feel like there's so much around the word relevance because it could mean relevant in the minds of your customers and the market. And then I also think about relevance in terms of how do you stay relevant. What would you say about the latter?

Well, that's the key is being relevant today doesn't mean you're relevant tomorrow. You know, we always have this expression, if you watch TV commercials, a lot of times they'll say past success. Your favorite word, past success has no guarantee of future success. And you know, from my perspective, it's actually so much worse than that. Past success is a pretty good predictor of future failure. And the reason is coming back to what I said before, expertise is the enemy of innovation. So what that means is when organizations innovate, what they tend to do is they tend to do what we would call incremental innovation. That is, it is improvements over what we've done in the past. But it's just step changes. They're like, you know, incrementally better. Whereas we need. They're small steps, I should say very small steps. Whereas what we need in many cases to stay relevant are large steps, radical changes. We need to look at the world from a different perspective. So relevance isn't a snapshot in time. It is an ongoing process of sensing where the market's going and recognizing we need to have these larger step changes, these sea changes, these business model changes that will keep us relevant. Whether it coming back to something you said before is it's not new competition necessarily. It could be new technology, it could be economic shifts, or it could be pandemics like we have right now. But all of those are key to relevance.

That sensing process is so important. I feel like as a writer, observer, thinker, synthesizer, sensing is something I'm always trying to get better at. And I'm very fascinated by people who do this really well and people who are sort of in the trends space. I actually think probably not only is everybody getting a black belt and pivoting right now, but people sensing antenna are going to be up in a way they weren't before because nobody has the answers. So in a way, it kind of puts it on everybody out there, no matter what career you're in, to sense what are you experiencing, what do you think is coming, how do you think you can shift, and how do you want to be most helpful during this time. And it's almost requiring everybody to wake up their sensing antenna.

Yeah, I think that's a great perspective. And it sort of raises another interesting question, which is, in the world of innovation, one of the biggest reasons why innovation fails is something called confirmation bias. And confirmation bias is basically where when we take in information, we tend to filter out anything that is inconsistent with our beliefs, inconsistent with how we see the world, inconsistent with how we want to see the world. And so the challenge with sensing and the challenge with innovation is that we tend to only hear the information, read the information, and agree with the information that's consistent with what we want to believe to be true. And it's important for us if we're going to be better at sensing, is to really have almost like a little devil's advocate on our shoulder that anytime we say, yeah, that makes sense. I heard this piece of information that confirms what I believed. The second you start thinking that confirms what I believe, that's when you should have that little devil on your shoulder saying, what if? That's absolutely wrong. And the reason why I say it's cause of big innovation failure is because when people have this wow, this is a great idea mentality, when somebody strongly believes that their idea is a great idea no matter how much information they receive, to the contrary, no matter how much information they receive that says it's actually a bad idea, they're only going to hear that it's a great idea. And so they implement it and it fails. And so this confirmation bias is such an important part of the conversation right now.

I love in the book, I laughed out loud when you said there's this big trend of saying, yes. And I share that in pivot and then not saying, yeah, but, and shooting ideas down. But you say the biggest enemy of innovation is saying, that's a great idea.

Right.

It's just so funny. And it makes me feel better because there were certain times as a manager, even recently, where someone said an idea and I didn't respond with that's a great idea, which is normally my default because I try to be like, positive and encouraging. And I didn't. And I remember kind of kicking myself, jenny, ugh, you're so bad at like brainstorming or encouraging people to have ideas. But I look back and I just think it just wasn't my authentic reaction. I just didn't think it was a good idea. I'm not saying that's the right way either. I didn't shoot it down, but it probably meant we weren't. I wasn't helping frame the discussion around getting the challenge exactly right or the right or the, you know, focusing on the question and the lenses instead.

Well, and I think that last part is so critical is the reason why we tend to get a lot of faulty information is because we're solving wrong problems. I mean, no matter how hard you try to solve the wrong problem, you'll never get the right answer. And we don't take the time to step back. And so one of the things, one of the other lenses in the book is something called the performance paradox. And the performance paradox says that paradoxically, the more you tend to focus on one factor, like a specific outcome, the less likely you are to achieve that. And it's the same thing is true with problem solving, is the more you try to find solutions to your problems, the less likely you are to find solutions. The key is actually to step back and reframe the question, reframe the problem, the issue, the challenge, the opportunity, and make sure it's the right one. Because if you're doing that and you get clarity around the problem, statement, then the solutions have relevance, and then you will probably have had a different reaction than you did. But most cases we're running around with just spouting ideas all over the place like a fire hose, not even thinking that we're just getting people wet. I mean, it's not adding anything at all to the conversation. It's just ideas. That doesn't create value.

You call it idea fatigue.

Yes.

So good. So good. I mean, I do in pivot I talk about pivot paradoxes. And the performance paradox is a huge one. That one of the biggest problems when people are pivoting is they put so much pressure on themselves to know the answer to what's next that it completely paralyzes the entire process. And the third stage of pivot is pilot, which is about small experiments to test what's next. And of course you talk about that too, that the, the antidote to idea fatigue is get people to become masters of small scalable experiments. So I was giving you a virtual high five when I was reading that part. And this is also why I don't like the word success, because I feel that success triggers a performance paradox of sorts on a personal level or professional where what is success? I mean, unless you define it really carefully and thoughtfully, it just creates compare and despair, really, I think. And success to me sometimes defines some kind of linear or metrics based measure. And I dropped goal setting a few years ago, maybe in 2014. 15, 16 is when I really started not even having goals in my business, which some would say I'm a terrible business person because I don't have them. And I learned that your whole you've had goal free living was one of your big ideas and parts of your body of work as well, which I find so interesting. You wouldn't think somebody with as methodical a process as you would also be saying, yeah, goal free living, it's where it's at.

Yeah, that was actually my second book back in 2005, I think it was. And it. Look, it doesn't mean, I think some people, when they hear goal free living, they think that it doesn't mean you have. You're like just lazy, sitting on your butt eating bon bons and watching.

Right, of course.

Television all the time. No, but it's having a sense of, it's having a direction. You still are directional, but I call it meandering with purpose. And to me, meandering with purpose means that we never have enough information today to make it a totally informed decision for sometime in the future. And as long as we. And it's coming back to something you were saying before about that sensing is as long as we are taking steps forward in a direction and we're gathering new insights, new information, new data that allows us to then course correct. That to me is actually the ultimate of pivoting is it's not major pivots, like saying, okay, I'm going One Direction today and now I'm going to take a 90 degree turn tomorrow. But rather it's small one degree pivots on a regular basis as we gather new information. That to me is the ultimate way to move to create progress is because informed progress rather than just plowing forward in the wrong direction.

Well, that's always when I'm speaking, I say the big secret to pivot is that we're always pivoting. It's continuous. And the better you get at pivoting, the less sharp those pivot points are because of exactly what you just described. We're always making a thousand tiny iterations over time that might look from the outside like bigger moves. And I guess every now and then we sort of like take some big massive leap in our lives. But the most graceful pivoters, I think are. It's almost invisible.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. And.

If you were doing that meandering with purpose mindset, then you don't have the need. Exactly what you just said. I mean, you don't have that need for these big shifts all the time because you're constantly moving in the right direction based on the information you have. So I just love how we are, you and I are just so, so aligned on so many different things. It's really awesome.

I do too. And that's exactly how I felt when I was reading your book and preparing for this. And in fact, I saw you worked at Accenture and this is something. This was, let's say.

I don't know, my career didn't overlap in that same way you had 15 years there. I have this secret FOMO that I never worked at a consulting firm because I have this. It's like a chip on my career shoulder to this day that what systems am I missing out on? I feel like the one thing those consulting firms do really well is somehow systems and systematic thinking. So I'm wondering, maybe you could share a nugget of. Of what you took away, how that 15 year, 10 year shaped you in terms of systems thinking.

It was great. I mean, I have to say, Accenture is just an amazing company and it shifted Me in a lot of different ways though. Part of it is because of the variety of projects I got to work on and the variety of industries I got to work on and the types of projects. And so my first big pivot. You want to talk about pivots? This was a big pivot. So beginning part of my career, I'm an engineer out of college, industrial engineer. I was a. A geek in high school. So I get to Accenture and I'm doing computer programming and I'm doing sort of engineering ish type of work. And then I became actively involved in something called business process re engineering, which was all around business optimization. It was about how do we optimize a company's processes. And I love this work because I travel around and work with companies and it was just a great way to think about efficiency. The problem was I discovered that when a company optimizes their processes, they will in many cases downsize their workforce. And I started to see tens and tens and tens of thousands of people losing their job at my clients because of the work that we were doing. And I just realized I couldn't do this anymore. So my pivot was I walked off of a project. I literally left the project in the middle of the project saying, I'm out of here. When I saw the impact of all these lost jobs and I took a six month leave of absence and, and my big shift was I wanted to do what I was doing, but instead of helping companies shrink, I wanted to help them grow. And this was 1995, 96 timeframe when I decided, even before innovation was a popular word, I wanted to help companies innovate. And that's what I started to do, is just really help companies grow the top line, create jobs, create wealth for their employees and for society. That was a huge pivot for me. And that for me is one of the most valuable things I got out of Accenture is having so many different experiences and seeing what I loved and also what I didn't love.

Yeah. And what a powerful insight to see, oh, the work I'm doing is directly leading to so many jobs being cut. And it. I will say one of the AHAs I had reading your new book was when you say, don't try to correct a problem or state it as a negative, instead word it optimistically. In a way, you did it so simply at that time. Instead of helping companies shrink, I want to help them grow. And you found the thing that you did want to do while taking all the skills that you had developed within Accenture. It's really very interesting. Also, I liked reading about your career, that you were like, doing very manual work. Right. In your first job. I don't remember exactly when it was. You were like, mopping floors. There was something that sounded really intense.

Boy, you really did make it through the very end of the book because I think that was like a closing. Closing section. Yeah. So during high school, you know, or even during college, during the summers, I would work in a warehouse. And, you know, I. The story I have in the book is sort of a silly story, but it makes an important point, which was it was like in the middle of the summer, as hot as heck inside of this warehouse. And I was on the maintenance team. And so we would weed, you know, manually weed the sidewalks or we would build walls or take down walls. And one of the things that also I did was I would sweep up the floor. And this one time, it's like so hot, and I'm sweeping the floor and the barrel. The wastebasket that I was putting the dirt in was maybe about 5ft away from me. So I'd walk over, sweep the dirt, walk over with the shovel, empty it into the bucket, walk six feet, clean up a little more, walk back to the basket, the waste bin, walk 10ft. And I did this over and over. And my boss was shaking his head, looking at me, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm cleaning the floor. He said, move the basket, move the waste bin so that it's closer to you so you're not walking 20ft every single time. No wonder you're so tired. And this is what we don't do, is we don't move the question. We don't think about the question. We don't shift the question. We assume the question is this fixed thing in a corner that we have to keep on walking to, as opposed to saying, if I can change it, if I can change that question, I'm going to get different answers.

I have to give a corollary to your story because my husband is very good at this. And it only occurred to me as you were speaking. And when I read the Move the trash can story when we were potty training my dog Ryder, he was two and a half months old and it was mid winter, mid December, we would put on all our winter gear to. As soon as we looked like he had to go to the bathroom to run him downstairs onto the sidewalk, morning, noon and night, getting him to go outside, okay, it's exhausting. And we just. We were like beside ourselves, like Cleaning up after him all day. But it's full winter. You can't just run out the house. We're in an apartment in New York City. Then I went away for a week at Christmas. And do you know how my husband solved this problem?

I can't wait.

He just propped open the terrace door and he let Ryder go out in the middle of the night by himself as a little puppy, which I probably would have freaked out. Like, he's only three months old. What if he looks through because we're on the third floor? He just propped open the terrace door and we hardly ever had to take him out in the moment. Like he hardly ever had accidents in the house again. Ryder is more than happy to let himself out onto the terrace to do his business. And it just, I can't even tell you how much time and energy and tiredness it saved. Just like your mopping story.

Exactly. And that's the thing is we tend to assume we just need to do what we've always done, better, faster, cheaper. But maybe we need to just rethink what we're doing, why we're doing it, who we're doing it for. And there are always creative outcomes. There's always a different way, a different lens, a different perspective that you can take on anything you're working on that's going to give you a fundamentally different solution that's going to be better, guaranteed.

I love it. Steven, thank you so much. I myself am going to listen to this one three times through and I have to give a special shout out to Kathryn and Sarah, who have known about your work for a very long time and they were so excited and wanted to make sure that you knew what an impact your work has had on them. So thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

The best way to find me is just on my website, steveshapiro.com and I just want to say this was so awesome for me. This is one where I'm like, like, I can't believe we've been talking this long and I really feel like we're just getting warmed up. So this was so, so awesome.

I feel the same way. I have a smile ear to ear. I already know we could go another hour, so maybe we'll have to do part two. And it's just such a delight. Your work is so powerful and my problem solving mind, like my system's brain. I just bow to you for how you think and your body of work and what you've shared in such a way. A crisp, clear, powerful, compelling and most importantly, helpful way. Thank you so much. And listeners, you gotta buy it. Invest in the hardcover. It's worth it. Invisible solutions, 25 lenses that reframe and help solve difficult problems. Steve, you're the best. Thank you so much.

Oh thank you. This is really my pleasure.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for PivotList, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.