John Coyle Explains the Concept of Design Thinking & Manipulating Time!

Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Chief Chat. What is up, my exchange family from all over the world, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of Chief Chat. My name is Chief Master Sergeant Kevin Oseby, and I'm your Senior Enlisted Advisor for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service. Before we get started with our guests today, I would like to introduce my lovely co-hosts, Kiana Holliman and Emily Zarske. How y'all doing, ladies?

Good, how are you?

Doing good, how are you?

I'm doing good, doing good in D.C. again. I'll be DC probably for the next freaking month. It feels like it, but, uh, but I'm enjoying myself, having a good time. How y'all doing?

DC has a lot of good food there, so I don't feel bad for you.

Well, well, well, don't feel bad for me because DC does have a lot of good food. But what I heard is, I heard you were in Cabo recently, uh, uh, Shark Tank guests, uh, and so our next guest is is somebody that you met in Cabo. I got a huge eye roll. Uh, you talking about food and you enjoy yourself, trying to make me feel better about it. But, uh, so since you, since you were able to meet this guest in Cabo and bring them on, without further ado, Emily, why don't you introduce today's guest?

Okay. Yes, I was very fortunate to be in beautiful Cabo San Lucas a few months ago where I ran into this next guest. We started talking and he was so gracious to come and share his story. He is an Olympic silver medalist turned head of innovation for a Fortune 500 company and world-leading expert in innovation and design thinking. He has educated audiences of more than 500,000 in over 15 countries, and he's here today to share his insights and personal story of success with us. Please give a warm Chief Chat welcome to John Coyle.

Hey, hey, John, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

So can you, can you let our viewers know where you're coming to us from?

I am in sunny Las Vegas where it is quite warm.

Oh yeah.

It is really hot. I was gonna— so we're all in Dallas, and I guess we can't really argue that it's hot here because Vegas is a whole different kind of heat. So we're right there with you. Um, but so John, you're known as an unconventional speed skating champion. What inspired you to take up speed skating, and what was the path to Olympic silver like?

So I was a— as a kid growing up, my father was really into cycling, and so he encouraged me to, uh, to go biking with him. So when I was 8 years old, I actually, uh, joined him on a series of rides, century rides, so 100-mile bike rides. And so the summer that I was 8, I managed to pull off 13 century rides, which you— if you think about it, how many 8-year-olds on the planet rode 13 100-mile rides? Probably one.

Yeah.

And in the winters, the coach encouraged us to pick up speed skating as a second sport. So I started speed skating in the winter, and that's how, uh, that's how that began.

Now, so you obviously made a successful career out of your youth's experience. You even show your medal to those who get a chance to attend one of your speaking engagements. So what does your medal mean to you?

So, you know, the medal is That's a great emblem. I guess it's something that goes missing in the workforce a lot. You know, I think a lot of athletes have a transitional problem because when they move into, you know, the regular working world, the way to win isn't as clear, right? Like, there's no podium at the end of the work week or the end of the work year. You might get a performance review, but that's about it. And success isn't as clear. So having a visible talisman of— those, you know, decades of investment is something that's quite nice. It's quite nice to be able to hand around as well when I do speaking engagements.

Oh yeah. And when you mentioned an 8-year-old doing like 100-mile rides, I'm going back to when I was 8 years old and I probably had training wheels and, you know, probably half of a kickstand on the bicycle that probably got tired going 2 or 3 blocks. So I couldn't even imagine going That long, about 8 years old. But, but, but in, but in addition to being an Olympian, you are a very smart person. You went to some prestigious universities, Stanford University and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. So you went on to become the head of innovation for a Fortune 500 company. What sparked your interest in innovation and business after Well, they're actually somewhat related, actually.

I was training while at Stanford, still trying to make, you know, teams for speed skating. And my senior year, I managed to make the— what's called the world team, which is the equivalent to the Olympic team, even though I was in California with no coach and no training program. And so after graduating from Stanford, I decided to go to New York City. decided to join the Olympic team full-time. And so I trained with them full-time, and I thought I could go from 12th to 6th to 1st in the 2 years I had to prepare for the next Olympics. But they put me in a program of fixing my weaknesses, which it turns out are many and varied. And I ended up going from 12th to 34th to not even making the team 2 years later. And at this point, this is where my education sort of kicked in. Design thinking, which we can get into, is a method of creative problem solving. Suggests that whenever you get stuck, you might be solving the wrong problem. And so I decided I wouldn't do that program anymore of fixing my weaknesses, that I would quit the team, not the sport, and train on my own. And so I did, and I trained for my strengths rather than trying to fix my weaknesses. And a year to the day later of not making that Olympic team, in the exact same meet, the world team trials in a non-Olympic year, My first race back in a sport where hundredths determined first from second, I broke the US record by 5 seconds and the world record by over a second and went on to set every single US record back to back.

Wow.

Wow.

So no big deal. Casual. I'm over here trying to get through 4 years of college and he's just That's amazing. But so you've taken experiences to stages worldwide, including multiple TEDx events. What inspired you to reach back and help others design a life or business they can be proud of?

Well, you know, it was really— it was the story I just told. I was telling in a business meeting like 7 or 8 years ago, a variation of it. And I was invited by somebody in the audience to do a TEDx talk.

Maybe.

And I said, I can't do that. You know, I don't know how to do that. And they said, no, they'll help you. Don't worry. You should give it a shot. And so I showed up to TEDx Naperville, I think 7, 7 and a half years ago, and I told this story. And almost immediately after getting published, my clients started reaching out to me and asking me to do it for their sales meeting or their marketing meeting or some event coming up. And so I ended up doing it 19 times over the next 3 months. But I wasn't getting paid. My company, my consulting firm I was working with, was getting paid. So I decided to quit and go on my own. And now this is all what I do, actually.

Nice. So as you mentioned, you've had a lot of amazing opportunities to speak to leaders at organizations including Google, McDonald's, Allstate, Deloitte, Stanford, and SMU. So what is it like to share your expert advice with business leaders? And what is a piece of advice you'd like to share for business and military leaders who may be tuned in with us today?

Yeah, I have been fortunate. In fact, I was even lucky enough to speak for the Prince of Dubai and the Princess of Jordan. So those were some pretty cool audiences.

Yeah.

The lesson that I share in this talk, which I'm fortunate it's universal, it doesn't matter what country you're in, it really doesn't matter what language if it can be translated, is this notion that we all do have natural talents. And when I say All, I mean, not just you individually, also as teams, as enterprises, like companies have strengths too. And when you double down on what you do well, that's when breakthrough performance happens. There's a quote I can't attribute, but it's my favorite is, what the world doesn't want from you is to get slightly better at what you're mediocre at. What the world wants from you is to get amazing at something you're already great at.

Man.

Yeah, it's profound. It's pretty deep. That's awesome. And many of your talks are based on the concept of time, and you're actually known as the Time Guy. And how important is time to you, and why should it be an important concept to others?

So, you know, when you're in sport, small intervals can really, really matter, right? Like the difference between the gold medal and the silver medal in my events. in the 2002 Games was 2 hundredths of a second. The difference between the gold medal and 10th place, so hero's welcome or being sent back to Siberia for 4 more years because he got 10th place at the Olympics, was 31 one-hundredths. So, if I clap that out for you, that's this. 10 people in that space after a lifetime of training. And as I retired, I was 30 when I retired and got my first real job, I started noticing this thing that most adults feel that Summers were getting shorter, that time seemed to be speeding up, that life and time seemed to be accelerating. And I wasn't okay with this. And so I started doing some research into how the brain constructs time. And so I've been working on this book and this idea for 7 years now, but it's my favorite talk. And this is the notion that not just like athletics, time that we construct in our brains is made of moments, not minutes, not months, not years, but the decisions we make in moments. ultimately determine the trajectory of our future. And in English, we only have one word for time. It's time, obviously. And it's the most common word in the English language. The Greeks had 2 words, chronos, clock time, the way we tend to use the word. And then they had kairos, which is human time, which they use 67% of the time in all the Greek texts. They use that more often. This is human time, the way we actually experience time. And And, you know, just from your day-to-day, if you've ever said, I can't believe that was yesterday, it feels like last month. I can't believe that was last month, it feels like it was yesterday. I feel like I've been in this meeting for 3 hours, it's only been 20 minutes. I'm sitting down with my best friend, it feels like 20 minutes has gone by, but it's been 3 hours. This is the way we actually experience time. It speeds up, it slows down, it stops. And so the Greeks had it right. The way we construct time in our brains speeds up, slows down, stops, does all kinds of crazy things. But if you can learn to manipulate it, which is— the précis of my book. You can actually slow, stop, reverse the acceleration of time most adults feel and experience the endless summers of your youth again.

Man, no, yes, I need the recipe for that.

I know, I am interested in that for sure.

And we're like, not to put our age out there, but we're in our 20s and 30s. So imagine like How fast we feel life has kind of elapsed over time. Like, it feels like yesterday I was an undergrad, but now I'm like 27 doing adult things like paying bills and worrying about gas and all these things. So interesting, but love it. So you've taken your speaking engagements and your lectures a step further with the John K. Coyle Design Thinking Academy. So why should business leaders educate themselves on this idea of design thinking? And can you also elaborate more on what design thinking is and how important it is to companies.

Yes, so design thinking is a method of creative problem solving out of Stanford. Its father was a guy named David Kelley. He's famous in his own circles for a few reasons. He's the head of Stanford's design school. He's the head of IDEO, which is a consulting firm that's known for innovation. And perhaps most importantly, he's famous for being Steve Jobs' right-hand man, key designer for 15 years. Co-designing the mouse, the Macintosh, the Lisa, and eventually the iPhone. So huge famous designer in his own right, but he invented or coined the term design thinking, which is this process and mindset. I'll give it to you in very short, short order, but first step is you have to accept you have a problem. This sounds obvious, but we all know people that haven't done that. The second step is you have to define it. Do you really understand the problem? Have you really gathered the right amount of information to look around it and grasp the edges? Third and most important, and it's really the core of design thinking, is empathy. Are you solving the problem from the shoes or person or situation you're solving for versus your own situation? And then and only then generating ideas, lots of ideas to solve for that problem, and then test, prototype, and repeat those ideas, getting back to all the time, are we solving the right problem? So that's design thinking in a nutshell. It's important because if you look at some of the most innovative firms on the planet right now, be it Apple, Cisco, Google, it's endemic. It's part of their fabric of those companies. And so slowly but surely, the rest of the world's been latching on. And it's very big in the Middle East, very big in Mexico. It hasn't drifted that far to the East Coast yet, oddly, but I end up speaking quite a bit in the Middle East and Central Eurasia. around this topic as well as down in Mexico, South America, and all over the West Coast and the Middle Coast.

It's a lot of travel. You must have amazing airline miles.

I tend to use them, but yes.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah.

And I want to, I want to give Kiana a shout out for reversing time because she put me in my 30s. So I appreciate that, Kiana. Yeah, you're going to be the time woman for me. Thank you. I appreciate it. And some know of you as an incredible storyteller. So what's your favorite anecdote to share with your audience?

Ah, that's a good one. I, you know, I'll share this one. This is the way I tend to end one of my talks. And it really speaks to, you know, a lot of what you guys are doing in that We all have something that you've probably heard before called a leadership shadow, right? Like when you're leading others, your influence is broader than you know. And sometimes you don't find out for a long time the effect you might've had on somebody. So this story happened 4 years after my first Olympics, or actually it started then. I trained for a second Olympics after winning the silver medal. And I was lured into rejoining the Olympic team for my final year. And they put me in that same program of fixing my weaknesses, which was a huge mistake, a disaster. It didn't lead to good things. And I ended up not, not even making the team, much less bringing home the gold medal I was hoping for. And I was so embarrassed— humiliated is the right word— that on the last race of the Olympic trials, I got off the ice. I didn't even put on my skate guards. I, I knew I would never skate again. I walked across the concrete without bothering to do that. I grabbed my skate bag. I got in my car. I changed my skates in the car because I didn't want to see anybody to see how upset I was and bawled my eyes out and drove to Arizona, 45 hours away, and had nothing to do with the sport for the next 4 years. 8 years, actually. But then I got invited by NBC to be the Olympic analyst for the next games in 2006 in Torino. And so I couldn't say no to that. And so I was back at the Olympic Games, invited to interview the parents, coaches, and skaters to give them the backstories to the commentators. And so I'm there at the Winter Olympics. I'm warmly welcomed back. They knew me, I knew them. Hadn't been that long. But on the 16th night of the 17 days of the Winter Olympics, one of the parents pulled me aside at dinner and in about 20 seconds changed the entire trajectory of my life. 20 seconds changed your life. So we're sitting there at dinner and he looks over to me and he says, John, I need to tell you something. It's really important. I said, okay. So we got up, we left the table, we went in the corner of the room. And he said, you know, I just want you to know that we wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for you. And I said, I don't know what you mean. He said, you won't remember, but 12 years ago, after you won your silver medal, you brought it to a little reception in Bay City, Michigan. I brought my son Alex. He was 11 years old at the time. He'd never skated before in his life. You signed an autograph for him. You put your medal around his neck. The next day, he joined the Bay City Speed Skating Club, and tomorrow he's skating in the gold medal final.

Oh, wow.

That's awesome.

Just like that, everything changed. I was no longer embarrassed to be a one-timer first loser. That's the way I thought of myself for 12 years or 8 years was one Olympics, second place. But instead it mattered, even if it only mattered to one kid, it changed everything. I started coaching, I got my daughter skating, and most importantly, I started talking about it, which, you know, this is all I do. And I've told that story to more than half a million people all around the world. The really cool datum out of that story, before I turn it back to you, is I wrote that parent a letter that evening via email. He wrote me back when he got home, and the way he closed his letter is like this: I guess you never know what you'll do or say or not do or say that could change someone's life forever. And then Alex, his son, called me 4 years later and— actually, 4 years ago. We're good friends now. And he said, hey, John, I just want you to be the first to know, I just got off the phone with the U.S. Olympic Committee. I've accepted the head coach position for U.S. speed skating. I'm taking the team to the Olympics in Pyeongchang.

Wow.

So all of that out of one moment.

Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome. And, and like I said, I, I've told that similar story to younger airmen or whatever the case may be, like You never know who you're impacting. And most people like the instant gratification of—

Right.

Thank yous or whatever the case may be. But I tell them all the time, you may not get that thank you until 10 years from now when that person's in a different place in life where they really understand the impact that you had on them in that moment. And so, and I tell people all the time, because folks were like, why didn't you do your 20 years and get out? Like, I mean, close to 25 years. And anytime I got close to really getting out, I would get that phone call from somebody that I used to supervise or mentor from years ago to say, hey, Chief, thank you for what you did for me. I just made E-7, or I just did this, or I just did that. And that kind of refuels my— it gets me to want to keep going. And so I'm just like, man, it's— I just need people to stop calling me with these phone calls so I can go ahead and retire. But I appreciate, like I said, I, I, I love the folks that, uh, I get a chance to, you know, serve alongside. And, uh, you know, they, they motivate me and keep me going every single day. So big shout out to them.

That's awesome. That's awesome.

And that's an incredible story. And, um, we also, we have service members and their families watching us live right now.

Is there anything you would like to Well, of course, thank you for your service. I mean, it's not something that I've ever experienced firsthand in terms of the kind of, you know, things that you guys go through. But, you know, we have, we have, you know, there's some similarities in terms of the travel and the overseas and the scariness of all that. So, you know, I think, you know, And, you know, whenever we're over at the Olympics and things like that, we tend to be able to hang out with some of the folks. And, you know, when we go to foreign countries, we often go to either the ambassador's house or some of the military campuses to say hello. So hello, everybody out there, and thanks for having me on your show. Super happy to have this chance to share with you guys.

And we do have a few comments from our viewers. So Eddie is a big Olympics fan. He says, way to go from Birmingham, Alabama. He says the World Games start in Birmingham tonight. Not familiar, but that's exciting. And then Mariana wants to know, what is your advice for professionals who want to create an innovative environment at their company?

Great question. And that is really, you know, it's part of what I do is how do you create that sort of culture of innovation in an environment? And, you know, I will say this with full candor, and I think it's true that the leadership creates culture. So if you don't like the culture you have, well, you get the culture you deserve. So you're creating it, whether you are intentionally doing so or not. And so how do leaders create a more open culture, a really important way that that happens is how they handle ideas that bubble up from people beneath them. The very typical way that leaders tend to deal with ideas from people below them is to judge them immediately. And they're doing it out of a place of concern and out of goodwill, which is, hey, can we do this promotion? And the easy answer would be, oh, we tried that before. Legal wouldn't let us. Marketing wouldn't market it. Sales wouldn't sell whatever. But you're actually quashing that idea. You're actually squashing that person. You're actually shutting them down, actually temporarily, in terms of their creative function in their brain. So even though you might know things, the the real lesson for leaders is to not know all over those people that you work with and to be open to ideas. I'll always ask the next question. when everybody judges an idea that comes out of somebody's mouth, I'll say, but when was that? And they'll say things like, well, that was back in '96. And I'll be like, so the world has not changed in 26 years? Maybe, just maybe, the world is a different place now and we need to be open to that. And so this sort of bump-set spike of generating ideas and then slamming them down needs to be quashed if you want to create Creativity. Just ask more questions about that idea. Okay, well, let me understand that more. Do you— have you run that past legal? Have you checked with somebody in marketing? Let them run with an idea. And this, this is actually a true story. I was actually starting to tell a true story. So somebody came to me with a promotion idea at my wireless company to do a free phone promotion. I'd already been told no 8 times, so I just told them the same thing I'd heard, which was, oh, legal won't let us. There's some tax implications. For some reason, we're not allowed to do free phone So that new person got squashed and then a new person started and I had heard this coaching and so I decided to ask him, you know, have you checked with legal on that? We've had trouble getting any sort of traction on doing a free phone promotion. New guy goes to a new guy, goes to a new woman actually in legal and both of them are new so they both don't have any pre-embedded ideas of what's possible and they figure out how to do it. And so he comes back to me and he's like, yeah, so we got permission from legal. Would never have happened if I had said, that won't work. We tried that before. Which, by the way, are the most damaging words I think you can say in the workforce. That won't work. We've tried that before is the death knell of creativity.

Agreed. What do you think inspires that? So what do you think inspires leaders to sometimes be like, oh, it doesn't work. What else do you have? Do you feel like it's a need for wanting new things? Not trying to give you an answer, but what do you think is the inspiration behind that response?

So there's 2 leadership archetypes that I've been talking about here. There's the knower archetype, and then there's the learner archetype. And being a learner archetype doesn't mean you don't know. It's just a way of showing up. Knower archetypes tend to be all new middle managers. You've gotten to a place to lead people because you're an expert. So you develop your expertise, you get promoted, and now you're leading people, and you want to justify your position through your expertise. And so you tend to use your knowledge as a tool Not intentionally making it a weapon, but unfortunately it becomes that way where you show everybody that you know stuff. A Learner leader archetype is very different. They're always asking questions, always curious, always not 100% sure that they know, even if they are pretty sure they do. And so these are the leaders, you know, that you've brought a bad idea to before and they've just asked you some questions and helped you figure it out that it was a bad idea rather than them telling you that it's a bad idea.

Yeah.

And here's the thing. About organizations. We know this, right? People join organizations and they leave managers. And what's the number one reason that people leave managers? 52% write in votes, my manager, my boss is not open to my ideas. So people leave because their ideas are not heard.

Yeah.

No, I totally agree. Like I said, You know, being in the military 25 years, I've been in kind of different levels of leadership. And, uh, and it's the stuff that you're saying is stuff that we, we talk about all the time in the military and trying to, uh, culture and, and, and empowering folks that underneath you to, to bring ideas to the table and not shoot them down. And, and, you know, some people are like, at my last base, I guess that's a running joke, at my last base we did, we did it this way. And people Right. You know, now that's, that's a, you know, people roll their eyes every time you say, at my last base. So that's a running military joke. But, uh, but no, you, you're giving us some great nuggets. And, uh, you know, leadership, like you said, across the board in any country, um, it's, it's, it's pretty, you know, they got some pretty fail-safe methods that, you know, that I'm glad that you're preaching to everybody. So what, what's ahead for you? You got any new things on the horizon?

You know, I'm work— still working on this book. The book is called, um, Counterclockwise: How to Design Endless Summers. And so it's a prescriptive book on— first, it's descriptive in terms of how does the brain work, how does it construct time, how, how are memories created, stored, and retrieved, which is very much correlated to your sense of being alive and how long you've been on this planet. And then the second half of the book is really how do you design the kinds of moments that are written down, highly recallable, and deep enough to have meaning such that you feel that a summer that used to be fleeting is now endless or even longer than the summer when you were a kid. So that's what I'm working on right now, hoping to have that finished by the end of the year.

That's awesome. And then where can our viewers go to keep up with all things John Coyle?

So the easiest place is just johnkcoyle.com. That's my website. So I keep that pretty up to date. I also do publish out to Facebook and to Instagram. I joke that my job is that I get paid to travel the world, to have adventures, and then go to parties and talk about them, which is kind of true, actually. So You know, you know, I show up to these events and, you know, they're always somewhere nice and it's always got a cocktail reception and a dinner and all that stuff. And, you know, I speak for an hour and get to meet some smart, uh, influential people. So it's a pretty good gig. Yeah. Um, so I document that through there as well.

So now we know where Emily was at. Okay, Emily, you're at the party, kind of telling it up. Okay. Okay.

Really, really influential, Chief. You have no— I have a totally different life. You have no idea.

Gotcha.

Oh, uh, for our Chief Chat viewers, uh, this episode will be available on YouTube and Spotify. You can rewatch with your friends or catch up with past episodes. Uh, tune in at noon on July 21st when we welcome NBA legend and Hall of Famer Shaquille O'Neal, and also set your notifications to 11 AM on July 26th when we welcome Eli Young Band to the show. So, John, we are— thank you so much for, for joining us today and sharing these leadership nuggets. I got a few takeaways. You got this amazing positive 12-step program of design thinking, admitting that you are first, you have a problem. So I'll get there. I got to get past step 1. And, and also this, this great concept of slowing down time because I feel older every single day. Well, you know what, my spirit feels younger, but my body is, is not catching up with my spirit. So I need, I need you to, I need you to do— when you get the spirit going counterclockwise, I need to figure out how to get this body going counterclockwise.

Oh yeah, I hear you.

But no, we appreciate the, like I said, the leadership nuggets that you gave us. I said, it's pretty universal. And, and, and I'm gonna have to kind of follow some of your, your TED Talks or whatever the case may be. I didn't get a chance to catch up before the episode. But I'm just interested to hear different perspectives on leadership because that's— it's fascinating to me. So I appreciate what you do. And thank you for joining us on the show.

Thank you guys for having me. It was super fun.

Absolutely. And so we're gonna, if you don't mind holding on with us until after the live so we can kind of say our formal goodbyes. But Just want to, you know, this means a lot to our nation's heroes, and we appreciate you, and we wish you all the best. Chief Chad out.