Turning frameworks into funding: The hard truth about scaling thought leadership | Lisa Kay Solomon

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining me on the podcast today. Today's guest is Lisa K. Solomon, and the quote underneath her bio, which I love, is the future doesn't have to be something that happens to us. So Lisa is a designer-in-resident at the Stanford D School. She's an author of several books, co-author of a couple of books, and she's on the Thinkers50 Radar list, or has been on the Thinkers50 Radar list. So let's just hit it. How are you doing today, Lisa?

Oh, I'm great, Peter. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited for this conversation.

Yeah. No, no, no, me too. So how did, how did this happen? How did you get here? Like, 'cause this is a non-traditional, non-linear, non— predictable place? Like, how does— is this what little Lisa dreamed of?

Oh my gosh. Nope. Nope. No kidding. It's non-traditional. And I will say, Peter, I do wake up these days in spite of how challenging the world feels. I wake up every day grateful to be doing what I'm doing, to be able to have conversations with people like you, to be working with students at Stanford at the D School to help them envision wider futures, futures they want to be a part of and build the skills required to bring those futures to life. It is an accidental career, no doubt, no doubt. But it is one that I was really lucky to design for myself following my own curiosity about why things in the world seem to work and, and what was behind those things that worked. And to understand that behind a lot of what I found to be interesting or magical or awe-inspiring was this incredible discipline of design.

If I were to say, what was the original plan of I was going to be an X and I wound up a Y, and what were the forks in the road?

Yeah, well, it depends how far back in the Wayback Machine you— Yeah. But honest to goodness, and I have thought about this a bit, when I was younger, middle school age, maybe even younger, I wanted to be president of Walt Disney World. Not like a princess, but like president. And the reason why I wanted to be president of Walt Disney World and why that captured my imagination was because I was lucky to go there as an early kid and found that awe, the happiest place on Earth. And I remember thinking, how do all these things add up, right? They didn't just happen. That magic didn't just happen. How was it that you could go and visit a place and it could transport you into a totally different feeling, a totally different sense of, of wonderment. And, and that was really what I wanted to be. Yeah. When I, when I was younger.

Stay there a minute because if you talk to, say, people in the theater, they tell you about the first time they saw a Broadway play or whatever it was, and it was magical and I wanted to be in the theater. Not, I wanted to run the theater. No. All right. So, so that's a diff— you know, so I've, I've heard lots of folks say, oh, and then the first time I saw a movie, I wanted to be an actress or write film or direct or whatever. Right. But like, Boom. Like, I wanna, I wanna run the show here. Yeah. I'm like, because I would argue most 8-year-olds or whatever, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds don't even realize there is that.

Like, you know, I know, I know. I agree. I, and I think, let me just connect one more dot, which didn't make sense going forward, but kind of makes sense going backwards. My grandfather was in the restaurant business. Mm-hmm. So the only big thread in my, in my early life was being infatuated with what made for great restaurant experiences. I mean, I literally, Peter, I'm such a nerd. I, I would get architecture books of restaurants. I was like 12, you know, trying to understand like, wow, that's so cool that they're taking this approach and that approach. And we would now call that not just architecture, but, but experience design. Didn't have a language for that at the time.

But, you know, most would be, it's cool, grandpa owns a restaurant. I get all the chocolate cake or whatever I want.

Right, right. Popovers, chocolate. Yeah. You know, I ended up going to Cornell, but I didn't actually go to the hospitality school, which I think was a miss. But I always found myself there. We call them hotelies. I should have been a hotelie. But I was really just enamored with the experience of day-to-day life and those moments that just felt so wonderful and magical and really did find my way to exploring the fields of what we now call experience design, organizational design, cultural design. And over the course of my career, realized that the same process and skills that allow designers and inventors to create magical things in our lives, whether they're products or services, are the same kinds of things that leaders need in order to create new ideas that will help bring us to better futures. And we could talk more about that, but that's the thread. You know, the thread is like, how do we have more agency to make choices that create value for others.

So what does the portfolio of Lisa look like from the standpoint of— obviously there's teaching, there's writing, there's research, but what are— who's engaging with you other than students? So let me put it this way, who's, who's paying you to get what done then on the, on the non-academic side?

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I think there are a lot of different people that are, uh, well that are paying me to get things done, but then there's the stuff that they don't yet know they need, that they need to be paying me to get stuff done. And at, at the core, I think it's like, help us navigate this rapidly changing world that feels like it's happening at a velocity that we just haven't experienced before.

And, uh, they didn't put out an RFP for that. What if, no, no, thinking about what you do is If the toilet's running, I know, okay, that's a plumber problem, right? So what are the things that they're looking at and going, something's off here, number one, and number two, oh, and Lisa's the gal that can fix that. Like, how do you connect those dots?

Yeah, I mean, you know, and, and it, it will depend on, on the audiences. I, I am lucky enough to be affiliated with the d.school, so, you know, there's a lot of excitement around design thinking and what that can offer. So some people find me that way. Some people find me, I've got a LinkedIn course called Leader as Futurist, so they find me that way. They're curious, what does that mean to be a futurist? And some folks find me because they know that I've written a lot about how to make decisions amid complexity and ambiguity. You know, 10 years ago, I, I wrote a book with my co-author Chris Hurtel about the practice of designing strategic conversations. And what that means is like, how do you bring people together that make, that have to have conversations about the future and about the future that involves challenges that are both high stakes and highly important. So for many, that could be board meetings. I get a lot of calls and say, Lisa, we've got an important board meeting coming up. How do we design it to make sure that we're really looking at the future in a new way? Or conferences. Lisa, we're gathering hundreds of people together to have a conversation about the future. We don't want it to be talking heads on stage. How do you infuse energy and ask the right question and make sure that we're highlighting the, the right perspectives in the right way and we're making it experiential? So I, I get a lot of those phone calls. What they're looking for are new ideas. What they also get with me though, are new capabilities. This idea that not only are we like thinking about the new possibilities, but we're also improving our own ability to be more resilient and generative in the process.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps. As well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. You said a lot that was interesting to me there, but one piece I want, I want to push on or learn more about is, you know, they're looking for an outcome, right? So if I hire you to design my conference, what I'm thinking I want is a better conference, right? A good experience. And I, and that would be reflected by attendance, feedback score, you know, like whatever, whatever. I wasn't, I didn't ask you to develop a capability.

Right.

So it's sort of a, an accidental outcome. No, I'm probably thrilled that I got that, but say more about that.

Well, it's not accidental to me because that's what I want. Right.

Right. And it wasn't what I saw.

I want transformation, but people don't say, Lisa, can you get me some of that transformation? They don't say that, right? They say, I'm feeling this acute pain, or I'm feeling like we are stuck, or that we need to rethink how we're going about things, but we've never been not, can you help us? Can you help us come up with a process? Can you help us get to— when we leave here, we want new ideas. We want things that we could fund. We want things we could start. Great. All that's great. But we know that those great ideas that they wanna start will fall flat if they don't also have a window into understanding, well, how do they keep them going, right? How do they continue to fuel that? And I'll say it even more succinct, Peter. This is one of my favorite chapters in the book, Moments of Impact. At the end of Teaching the Process of How to Design Strategic Conversations, we have a chapter called Overcoming the Yeah Buts, as in, yeah, but that would never happen here.

Right, right, right.

Like, yeah, like, great Lisa, fun session, but that would never happen here. First of all, I often think like, who's the they in this? Like, they will never let, like, aren't you the they? Right? So that's a big like headline for me. Like, you are the they. I could sort of, that's what could be my next. But the yeah, buts come in 3 flavors, and I think all of your listeners can really identify with this. The first is that, yeah, but we gotta focus on near-term results, right? Yeah. Like, yeah, that long-term thinking is important, but we have quarterly plans, we have an annual plan, we have a strategic plan. This is, we've got ARs, KPIs, right? All of our incentive systems are, are near-term focused. The second yeah, but is, Yeah, but I don't have the budget. I don't have the team. I don't have a this. I don't have that. Right? And we would call that like internal politics. Somebody has it, right? You don't have it. Somebody has it.

I would get it. Right.

Yeah. And the third, yeah, but is like, I don't know how to do this. I've never been taught. And that's the thing that really drives me going back to the capability gap. Right? Like, and I believe that you can learn to take a longer-term futures, uh, length. Like you can go from near-termism to having a future orientation. You can, with, but that's not, I would say, yeah, but, right?

But that's not something most of us picked up along the way, right? If I was to study to be an accountant, an attorney, a this or that, that wasn't on the list of, you know, oh, there's a critical thinking class or there's a tort law class or whatever, right? There isn't a class that says how to be a long-term thinker, right?

That's what I do every day, Peter. Okay. Let me give you another thought experiment that I do with my, with my students and leaders. I will often start a session, particularly with, I know there's a lot of skeptics in the group, like, What's this futures stuff? I'll say, how many people here have taken a class in history? Every hand, right? Taken a class, master's, PhD. I say, great. How many people here have taken a class in futures?

Great. Zero. Right.

Right. Then I say, which one of those can you influence? Thud. Yes.

And where are you gonna spend most of your time?

You know, and so I, I really do come to it with great empathy. It's not our fault that we don't know how to think about the futures in a disciplined both creative and critical thinking approach, we've never been taught. You know, it's not a thing, but it is a thing, right? And so my job is to invite more people, make these practices more accessible so that people understand that they are teachable and learnable. Just like learning how to tell a great story is teachable and learnable. Just like learning how to build a PowerPoint is teachable and learnable, or a spreadsheet. I wasn't born knowing how to like build a discounted cash flow. Maybe you were, I wasn't. But when I help leaders say, look, we can go from the known to the unknown. Here's one way to do it, right? Let's use a futures implication wheel and just ask ourselves a series of questions of what if, what if, what if. Let's do a rapid-fire scenario planning so we can bring the future to life in tangible ways that provoke better questions today. Let's go look at the 10,000-year clock that the Long Now Foundation is building. Yeah. About the kind of stewardship that they're trying to foster. You know, how might that influence that? All of a sudden you're changing the dynamic. All you gotta do is like open up that wedge, you know, that sort of like, oh, I used to see it in black and white. Now I see it in Technicolor. Now I understand that this strategic plan that I've been operating around is actually a social invention. Somebody created that. It's actually not serving me well because the future doesn't care about your 3-year plan. Oh, okay. Now I, now I could be more adaptive, but you have to the right window to open that up.

So let me ask you the final sort of two questions here. As a thought leader, right? What is the, uh, easiest or most fun part of what you do and what's the most difficult?

The easiest and fun part is I love what I do and I learn something every day. Right now.

It doesn't come across cuz you're low energy and low energy.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Energy of an, an actuary that hates being an actuary.

If always something interested me. Right now, Peter, I'm teaching a class called View from the Future at the D School. Every week we bring in an industry pioneer on the edge of their, their field, exploring what's next. I get to have conversations with these incredible leaders that are architecting the future of food. Yesterday we did the future of media. Next week we're doing the future of architecture. That is so fun. And my job is to tee up the conversation. And help connect dots for our students so that they're changing their own thinking. What a blast. What a blast. I love that. I see opportunity everywhere.

And the hard part?

The hard part is, is that it's really hard to communicate it quickly. People are busy. Our attention spans are, are shrinking. Probably most importantly, our amygdalas and our nervous systems are wired for threat and fear. And in order to try to invite them to have a generative an abundant conversation about the future, I have to work against both the biological system that we are endowed with and the context that we are in right now, which is serving up more fear than possibility.

Love it. Thank you so much for that. That was, uh, there's, there's a lot here. This has been a lot blast. So thanks for coming on and thanks for sharing your story with us. I appreciate it. Thanks, Lisa.

Thank you. Thanks for what you do.

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