Assorted Q&A with a Management Science and Engineering Prof | Stanford Professor Tina Seelig

I would love to hear from you about what aspects of this are the most interesting, surprising, useful. How can you use these in your projects here and take them forward? Yeah?

One of the things that really struck me was how you said like don't put things in boxes and I had heard that before and it really just hit me now how it applies to everything. Like you used the math problem and I was like, wow, I had never thought about that before. So now I know we shouldn't use context of, you know, throwing a party. No, it could be a celebration. It could be a fireworks show or, you know, parade or whatever, you know.

Right. The fact is what I do with my students is I have them framestorm before they brainstorm. Before they start brainstorming the ideas, we spend the time brainstorming about the question they're asking. Because if you're not asking the right question, you're going to basically spend a lot of wasted time not really unpacking all the different alternatives. Great. Other people, other ways that you can use this? Yeah?

I really like the idea of engaging and then envisioning and not the other way around.

It's really powerful, really powerful, right? Because think about like Lyft. Do you know Lyft, the car ridesharing? You know how that company started? Do you know how it started? The guy who was the founder was in Zimbabwe and he noticed people picking everybody up on the side of the road. And he thought this is in such sharp contrast— so the cars would be packed with a lot of people sharing their ride. And he said this is in sharp contrast to 101 where I just got stuck in traffic where every person is in their own car. And he said wouldn't it be great if I could start a car-sharing business? And so when he started it was actually called Zimride, named for Zimbabwe.

Okay.

He then changed— they changed the name to Lyft later. But that was inspired— he would never have come up with that idea. if he hadn't been on the streets in Zimbabwe saying, hey, this is kind of interesting. He was engaged and then he envisioned how he could use that idea elsewhere. Others? Yes.

It seems to me a lot of people don't believe in entrepreneurship and I think it's really kind of hard to be innovative because you just kind of go for the first thing that comes into your head without really trying to apply it to something that's— Mind-blowing, and I think it's interesting how you look at it that way.

You're absolutely right. I've been in situations where you say— I've asked people, how many ideas should you come up with in a brainstorming session? And people go, oh, I know, I know, 2. It's like, no, not 2 ideas, you want 200 ideas. I have my students like brainstorm 250 flavors of ice cream. 250 flavors of ice cream, you got to be kidding. But you know what, once you get past the first 50, that's when the really cool ideas come up. So it's really hard. One of the things that's important to keep in mind is that people think that creativity should be easy. It seems like we were all so creative when we were kids, but it's not easy. To really make this work, it's a tremendous amount of work to really come up with breakthrough ideas and to understand that and understand that you have to push past the creative ideas to really come up with the innovations. Great point. Any more thoughts?

Yes.

I think that's a great point.

So I have a question. So as an adult, right? So once you and kind of growing up in a different like environment where we're creative. So for example, I grew up in Pakistan and you're not like women especially. You're not encouraged to be creative because then you're pretty much rich. So how do you? So I understand like you know it's easy to be creative and put yourself out there. But then if you want to teach adults to be creative, it's a skill, right? And you can teach. to get comfortable. What would be your, like, 2 top things on how to go about teaching somebody how to get out of that shell and learn to be creative?

So I have so many things to say about this. First of all, I might have mentioned I have a new book coming out next month. I just put it up there. It's called Insight Out. That's the— on here, which is all of this model sort of blown up into a book. And I have a story about Khalida Brody— do you know her?— from Pakistan, who— and how really she has been really pushing through and challenging assumptions in Pakistan having to do with solving the problem of honor killings.

Yes.

But here's a point that you brought up. As adults, isn't it a sad, sad thing that I am teaching creativity to adults? Young kids are creative, right? Were you guys all creative when you were kids? Right? Every time you see a kid, they're totally creative. What is it that happens to us when we go from being a creative kid to an adult that's not creative? What happened to us? It's a crazy thing. Is there anything else in life besides learning new languages Is there anything else we get worse at as we get to be adults?

Creativity.

Creativity. I mean, it's crazy. Why is it? What happens to us?

School.

School.

Assimilation.

School, school, school that gives you problems like what is the sum of 5 plus 5 and where there's one right answer. The problem is our school system is designed to make it easy to grade people. And there's a wonderful quote from Einstein, I just love it and I'm going to get it wrong. It's something like, all things that count can't be counted, and all things that can be counted— not all things that can be counted count. Make sense? The fact is in school they want to be able to measure things. And so they measure a lot of things that are easy to measure, like can— do you know the sum of 5 plus 5? But they are— it makes it much more difficult to have problems that don't have one right answer and to measure your creativity or your ethics, right, or love. How do you measure love? Is love important?

Of course.

But how do you measure love? Well, so we just don't measure it because it's hard to measure, okay? And so we really need to rethink the way we teach and rethink the way that we evaluate students. And so as an adult, you're absolutely right and you brought up something super, super important is that this is a skill. This is a skill. If I— how many of you know how to— how the pieces on a chessboard are set up? How to set up the pieces on the chessboard. Great. How many of you know how to play chess, how to move the pieces? Great. How many of you are master chess players? How many of you are— you're a chess master? Are you a chess master? Pretty good.

Actually, I played it a lot in my past, but then I didn't play for a few years. And here we have 4-way chess.

Oh, yeah?

So that's even more difficult.

Yeah.

And one guy beat me 2 times. And then I was like, okay, I've got to figure this out.

Yeah? Did you figure it out?

Yeah. In the end, I didn't win because there were 4 players, but I did last 4 and a half hours and won.

Wow, that's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. So the point is, how did you become such a master chess player? How did that— what did that require?

10,000 hours.

10,000 hours, right. A lot of time, right? It's a skill. This is an important thing. There's knowledge, like the knowledge of how to set up the board. But there is a skill of how to use it. And this is critically important. When we come out of school or when we grow up, we need to have a set of base of knowledge, we need to have a set of skills, we need to have the right mindset. This is what we spend our time doing in our program that we teach at Stanford, is focusing on knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Because guess what? If you don't have the right attitude, if you are not engaged, if you are not motivated, if you are not focused and if you're not persistent, you're not going to be able to make it around this cycle. Your attitude is just as important as the skills and the actions. So really important and so it takes practice. And it's hard work, but it absolutely pays off. Yes?

Thank you.

Do you think—

do you think that the current educational system is completely obsolete? It's not obsolete. I think we need to augment what we do with teaching knowledge, by teaching skills and fostering an entrepreneurial mindset. People come out of school and they feel rudderless, they feel lost, and they don't know how to make the life they want to live a reality. We should be teaching people to craft the lives they want to live. Do you agree? Right? All of you showed up here because you wanted the tools to make things happen. We should be embedding this type of education in everything we do from the time that someone is young. So it's not totally broken, but you realize the world is changing so fast, we need to teach people how to learn and how to adopt and how to solve problems as opposed to just a set of facts that are regurgitated. So how are you changing your classroom and how you're grading and counting your students? So really good question. I tell my students, I am happy to give everybody an A in the class, no problem, no problem, but you laugh. But the bar is really high. I have— I want them to be internally motivated. I don't want them to be externally motivated to please me. In fact, I tell my students— in fact, it's the title of one of the chapters in my new book is You're the Customer. You're the customer in your life. I'm not the customer of your life. You need to figure out what you want to accomplish. So if you're at school, for example, if you're at Stanford and you've got a new company you're starting in your dorm room or there is an extracurricular curricular activity that you're super excited about or maybe something is going on in your social life that's really taking a lot of time. Guess what? Put your time into that. There certainly will be consequences. You might not get the best grade, but that's your choice. I'm not going to be mad at you. You need to pick the path that you want in your life as opposed to following the path that I put out for you. So that's one of the things that I do is I really hope to empower the students to figure out what they want to do and then give them the tools to make that happen. There was another question, comment, yeah.

How to apply creativity to big companies? I mean, if you work as a Big 4 accounting firm, as I worked for, I mean, you don't have— you cannot be creative because you need to follow rules and accounting standards and blah, blah, blah.

You know what, I just had lunch with the head of Deloitte from Silicon Valley, like on my way over here, and she would totally disagree with you. these companies need to be creative. In order to compete in a dynamic marketplace, if they're not being creative and pushing the limits and really being innovative, their customers are going to go to other firms.

Yeah, but the culture is not creative. I mean, if you try to create something, your boss is going to say no, we already have—

Well, so let me— this happens all the time. So what's your name?

Luciano.

Luciano, great. So Luciano, this is a problem a lot of people face. They end up in companies where they feel so stifled, right? You're so creative, you're so motivated, you've got all these ideas and you feel stifled. So there are several solutions for you, okay? One is find other like-minded people in your organization and start doing some experiments. There is a great quote from one of my colleagues, Rich Cox, who teaches with me, and he said this in our last class, I thought it was totally brilliant. Asking for permission just transfers the risk to someone else. Does that make sense, right? If you're my boss and I ask you for permission to do something, now I've all of a sudden transferred the risk to you, right? Because if you say yes to me, now you're responsible because I like— well, what's your name?

Malcolm.

Malcolm, like Malcolm told me I could do it, right? So he's probably going to say no. But if I do some quick prototyping and experiments and try something small and I can show Malcolm, Malcolm, look what I did, it works, What's the likelihood you're going to say yes now?

Very likely.

Very likely, right? Because you now saw some early success. So it's often you can get a small group of people, do some experiments and then present them as a solution to a problem that people are trying to face. Does that make sense? So you really want to find like-minded people, do some experiments, demonstrate it. I can assure you that at Stanford I teach— I run a center called the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. And I also teach at the d.school, the design institute. And the d.school started as a small group of our little motley crew of faculty doing crazy things in a little double-wide trailer. At this point, the things at the d.school have— and the vocabulary and the philosophy has infiltrated the entire campus.

Why?

Because there were sort of examples and people started seeing successes and those successes led to more successes. So you can start with a small group of people. The other thing you can do, leave. I'm often— I know really and truly, I find that people often get trapped in their own lives and don't know how to leave. If you find that you're in an organization that does not really feed your soul and foster your creative spirit, then— and you really have tried, go somewhere else. Start your own venture, start your own culture where that's celebrated, okay? All right, guys, one last question. Last question.

Okay, so I have a question more of like some advice you might have. So I always get bogged down and like pressure myself to have to innovate when I want to innovate or be creative when I want to be creative. Do you have any like advice for how to kind of alleviate the pressure system put in place and just kind of let it flow?

What would be an example of that? Help me understand the—

Yeah, so like for example, when I'm trying to figure out the best solution to the problem, I'm thinking to myself like, okay, I have to figure out a solution.

No, I need it to stop.

Yeah.

Yeah, or else there's probably not going to be a time when I do figure it out.

So one of the— we all each have to figure out our own best places to do it. You know what my best place, and maybe some of you do the same thing, I love to give myself challenges before I go to sleep at night.

I do.

Really? You're up all night? I find that for me, going to sleep chewing on a problem, A, takes my mind off things that might be bothersome, but it keeps— gives me something interesting to dream about and I usually wake up in the morning with something interesting. When I write books, I write in the mornings and I give myself the challenge of what I'm going to write about the next day before I go to sleep. And so I kind of dream about it and think about it and I wake up and write. So that's one approach. Other people, obviously there's the whole— Daydreaming and ideas in the shower, walking. So I think the thing is figure out where it is that you feel most creative and to give yourself the space and time to not feel pressured. I don't know if that's helpful, but—

Yeah, not the sleeping room.

Not the— find some other places, great. I wish I could take more questions, but feel free to reach out to me. I'm super easy to find and I know these folks will connect us. Together if you want. I would be delighted to take any of the further questions and you guys totally rock.

Thank you.