Dare to THINK DIFFERENTLY with Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman (ep. 213)

An adaptive mindset means you have to be willing to reflect on how you're thinking and assess its suitability to the current situation. And that's what I mean by an open mind. That was Harvard Business School Emeritus Professor Jerry Zaltman. I am really excited about this episode. The truth is, I'm excited about every episode of Talk About Talk for a variety of reasons. For this episode in particular, I'm excited to introduce you to one of my favorite people on this planet. If you haven't met him before, Jerry Zaltman is one of the wisest and most generous folks that you will ever meet. I'm sure you'll agree after you're done listening to this episode. Let's do this. Let's Talk About Talk. Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and I'm your executive communication coach. My goal with this podcast is to coach you to improve your confidence and your credibility at work so you can achieve your career goals. You can learn more about me and what we do at Talk About Talk if you go to talkabouttalk.com. Okay. As a leader, you may have noticed how open mindedness created creates exceptional decision making. But how exactly do you ensure that you have an open mind? Great question. This episode is going to challenge you to think about how you think. It will encourage you to think twice about your own thought patterns, about your assumptions, about your biases. This episode may even dare you to think differently, which happens to be the name of Jerry's latest book, Dare to Think Differently. When I learned recently that Jerry was writing another book, I scooped it up right away, devoured it, and then I contacted him to set up an interview. And here we are. Finally, instead of summarizing this episode with three insights like I typically do at the end, instead I'm going to challenge you to consider each of the six research based techniques that will help you tap in to the creative power of the subconscious. Yes, there are six in our conversation. Jerry and I go through each of these six and you can also reference them in the Talk About Talk podcast show notes on whatever podcast platform you're on. Again, my challenge to you is to consider which one or two of these six techniques you're going to commit to try experimenting with to cultivate your own open mind. Let me tell you a little bit about Jerry now and then we'll get into this. Jerry or Gerald Zaltman is Emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School. Decades ago, I had the great privilege of learning directly from him in seminars and then he served on my dissertation committee. Jerry also served as an executive committee member of Harvard's Mind, Brain and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. You're going to see that this is a theme with Jerry. Inter faculty cross disciplinary thinking. Over his career, Jerry pioneered the use of tools and insights from cognitive neuroscience, art therapy and linguistics to understand subconscious customer thoughts and feelings. He's a co founder and senior partner in the research based consulting firm of Olson, Zaltman Associates, or oza, whose clients include some of the world's most respected firms and brands. Here we go. Thank you so much, Jerry, for joining us here today to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about thinking about our thinking. Well, I'm delighted to be here and I've been looking forward to this ever since you raised the possibility. I always enjoyed our conversations, in particularly your questions. They always make me think, and often differently as well. Thank you so much for saying that, Jerry. That really means a lot. Okay, here's the first question. It's really the origin story for the book. What made you want to write this book? What was the problem that you are trying to solve? Is it related to AI? Is it related to the polarization of our society? What's the origin story here? The book was conceived after I had been spending a lot of time investigating why it is that people, even within the same family, same workspace, people who would otherwise be very close friends or had been close friends, suddenly found themselves not talking with one another, speaking to one another. And that's because certain topics arose that were highly politicized. And to hold a contrary position or even a position that you're actively thinking about, was received as a very concerning character flaw by others. And I was experiencing that toward others, even in my family, you know, and we were becoming what I thought of as a family of strangers socially. There were certain topics that were off limits and they were growing in number. And the consequences of putting them within the limits of a conversation were increasingly painful. And as I was working on that, I wrote a paper on that. I realized that ultimately what I was addressing, there are contrasting, even clashing, not thinking styles, but clashing thoughts. And I felt that there was some other problem operating and the problem that I found operating to produce that was also the problem I was finding in companies with executives, that there were pockets of thinking that were considered and ways of thinking that were considered, in effect, sacred and that that needed some investigation. And so I decided to follow my favorite tool, the one that I find suits me best when I'm Foundering, trying to understand the origins and nature of a problem. And that was with Z Med. And I began with the team of people doing cement interviews with executives on how they approach messy or difficult problems, which were the ones that were often very divisive within a firm. And eventually I thought, since I'm working so hard on this, I might as well turn it into a book, which I might as well, which I find a very effective device for disciplining yourself and forcing yourself to understand what you don't yet understand to identify that. So that's kind of a long story to tell, the origins of the book. But that's pretty much how it began. I remember having conversations in your office, Jerry, about the fact that you would encourage me to think about something and then not worry if I can't solve it and walk away and work on other things. And my brain would be non consciously focusing on whatever that problem was. And also directly related to what you just said. You encouraged me to write as a way of thinking. Don't wait until you have all the answers to start writing. And I found that to be so true. Especially now I'm writing a book and I'm introducing the readers to some processes that I coach people on. And actually as I'm writing the book, I'm coming up with better processes. Right? The book is better because of my having that very same style of writing. It's a way of interrogating yourself and you can be unforgiving and not suffer as a result to just a very productive device. So it's about being open minded. Back to the executives that you mentioned. You're thinking about when you were doing the Z med as well, you're. You said it was a problem you first noticed with your family. And then business executives were also experiencing the same thing, or you diagnose the same thing. And in my experience, executives and leaders often believe that they already are good thinkers. And actually, in fact, many of them are what we would call like good thinkers, smart people. I realize I'm opening a can of worms here, Jerry. I think most people are pretty good thinkers. I mean, most people have. They're not in jail, they're not having problems with drugs or, you know, whatever. They're navigating a complicated world successfully. And actually more than that, they're often making major contributions. So the thinking is fine. The problem is the environment in which they're thinking no longer is. If you go to the. Let me back up a step. Thinking is something that is highly personal. I mean, it's an expression of who you are. You don't think of it always in that way, but it is. So when I get that criticism for something I've written, I do take it personally. I also know enough to realize I shouldn't and probably a lot of other people would have the same response. So I'll act on that feedback. But the difficulty is that if you read the World Economic Forum's publications is the world is changing rapidly. The environment in which we practice our thinking is not stable. It's changing at a very high rate. The different sectors where this change takes place are connected. So it's kind of like Covid. It can spread a problem in aggregation, can have a major impact on transportation or broadcast media. It's just a networked world and it's a rapidly changing world. And we consequently need to have an adaptive mindset to adjust our thinking in that world. An adaptive mindset means you have to be willing to reflect on how you're thinking and assess its suitability to the current situation. And that's what I mean by an open mind. Am I thinking properly for this context? And often the answer is no. Or some change is needed and you have to improve how you think. But you've got to be willing to not treat your default thinking process as sacred. It's not. The world doesn't care much about that and it's not going to change to protect my sacred way of thinking. That's what I mean. You have to by open minded. You have to be willing to think about your own thinking, not to mentor someone else's. So as I was preparing for this interview, Jerry, I was thinking about the context of AI and how myself and a lot of my clients are trying to use AI to actually to improve our thinking, but just generally to improve our communication, using it as a productive tool. And yet myself and most other people that I talk to don't want to use it to generate ideas before they've generated their own ideas, at least because they don't want it to bias their thinking. That's exactly one of the thoughts that I, that I had. It's like AI will bias our thinking. And then it did occur to me as I was going through your book that our own brains are biased, right? And so this is more than just having a growth mindset. This is about really being conscious of how we're thinking in the context. I think it's bias. Bias gets a bad reputation. You know, there are clearly instances where that's deserved, but in most cases you can't get by without Bias. Bias is what makes you unique and uniquely successful with a particular category of issues. You don't want to give those up. And you can afford to be biased if you're always going to assess your own thinking and whether or not a certain preference and thinking has outlived its usefulness. But you know what you were saying it was today, and I'm trying to think of the source. I put it aside to read this evening and I'll look for it and send it to you. But it was an evaluation of executives in terms of how good they were or how effective they are in being a partner to AI, A collaborator, where they had. And they had these criteria for assessing a really good collaborator. And most of the executives, no matter what the level was, scored rather poorly on this evaluation. They're not good partners with AI, which is just a very interesting commentary on how effective we are in using whatever it is that AI might be able to give us. So back to the. The benefits of these executives and leaders thinking about their thinking. Right. Understanding maybe what their default patterns are and the risks of not doing so, which we can also get into. I would love it, Jerry, if you could briefly list and summarize the six specific ways that you outline in your book the specific qualities of an open mind. Because I feel like this is going to help us get some traction here. People will say, okay, it's more than just having an open mind. What is it really? Not everyone practiced all six of those, but across a set of interviews, all six came up, each about as prominent as the other in total. And they also exist not in a sequence. And this is where writing a book is very frustrating, because a book is linear and these qualities of mind are anything but linear. It is a system. But nevertheless, I'll start with the first one, which is serious playfulness. Many decisions really have serious consequences, not just in profit sense, but, you know, it's human. Human in fact. And that can cause people to be fairly reluctant to be bold, to take bold action, because there's a number of people and you don't maybe know who will be hurt, could be hurt in some fashion. But that somberness, especially if it is concerned with meeting my profit goals or sales goals for the period that. That can really inhibit you it from trying something different, thinking differently and acting differently. So you need to introduce a kind of playfulness. And I have to admit, and I won't spend this much time on the others, but I have to admit that was a sober experience for me as a young band. I was working on some consumer economics teaching tools for high school students. And there was a school for the blind of the visually impaired nearby where I was working on this project. And they had expressed an interest to have someone come over and use the teaching module that I was developing for their students. And that was great. I went over it for two days, spent two days. And I was thinking I was probably selected because I'm so empathetic. I can relate to people and understand, you know. So everyone was getting kind of a baby head. And within the first half hour of my glowing about my empathic abilities, someone came into the meeting with a blindfold and. And asked me if I would mind being blindfolded. And I remember thinking, I wouldn't mind. You know, I get caught in phobia. I don't. But of course, I said, no, you know, you can do it. And I was blindfolded for two hours. And we continued the discussion. We. I had to navigate my way to the cafeteria and around to the restroom, all of that stuff, within two hours. And after two hours, the blindfold was removed. And I Learned later that 2 hours is about the period of time a sighted person can be suddenly blindfolded without freaking out. Oh, and I could get that. But it had such a huge impact on me in terms of expanding my capacity to empathize, to identify with the students and the staff in that program. I consider that act, that putting a blindfold on a visitor or consultant to be an act of playfulness. It was a way of introducing an element in a safe way that I needed to have exposure to, but in a controlled, you know, reasonable dose. And that has always stuck with me. So I was delighted when I saw this quality appearing so often and just spontaneously with executives. Can you share any other examples that come to mind, Jerry, of executives who benefited from serious playfulness? I'm curious, is it typically role playing? It can be role playing. I. My favorite, personally, is in a classroom or in a business meeting to have. This is when I try to teach people about mental models. You have this construct connecting to that construct, and people are sitting there getting, you know, shaking their head. They understand what the constructs are until you say, okay, you are going to be the variable, a construct extravagant. And you over here are going to be the construct frugal, which happen to be connected. They interact. I said, go ahead and have a. Oh. And I'll usually appoint someone to take notes, to monitor and interpret what's going on, going on. But the frugal and extravagant need to have a conversation. They do in real life, in our heads as we go through that. That is a very effective device for having people understand. There's a lot more richness to the ideas that we have than what might be on a questionnaire or in an interview. That is, especially as these ideas share differences and similarities. Yeah. So much of our thinking is just surface level. Right. Serious playfulness is one way to get deeper. I guess all of these qualities are, though. And it's not that you have to have an immediate change as a result of the intervention or that exercise. It's more just to kind of get people to realize there's more in their mind than even they are or more in other people's minds than they allow for. I also like to make use of what I call the clairvoyant and wizard. You might have gone through that, where I have people role play each of those. Oh, that's an effective device. Trying to think of some other, you know, other easy, easy examples that people can imitate. So, Jerry, one thing that I'm thinking here is that this is like next level adoption of various roles that sometimes people assign in meetings. Like, you be the devil's advocate, you be the customer advocate. This is like next level of that. Right, Right. You want to push them a little bit beyond that, so their own thinking has to imagine. And I can't understate the role of imagination in all of this. And once you unleash the power of imagining, which I define as picturing that which is missing, you unlock a whole lot of good things. Imagination is probably the most frequent term in the book. I distinguish it from creativity also. So we've got serious playfulness. And this next one I feel like is it may be a trigger for a lot of executives who may describe themselves and be described as other as. As someone who has authority and insight. The second technique for adopting an open mind is befriending ignorance. That's possibly the toughest one. I'm not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if we could rank these. That. That would be the toughest one because, well, for the obvious reason, you're being paid because you know something. I mean, to put it in a somewhat exaggerated way, but have you ever seen. I thought about this the other day. I've never seen on a resume expertise in befriending ignorance. I mean, that's probably the last thing you would ever list as an attribute of quality. And it's probably the first thing you'd notice if you were reviewing your resume. And I'll wager your curiosity would go through the roof and you'd want to have that person in read that. But in any event, ignorance is something bad. I mean the label you're ignorant or that's ignorant is about as pejorative as you. You can get in the. In the scheme of things, but where else do new ideas come from? I'm trying to think of some major innovation that didn't have its origin and things that weren't known. And if you're going to be imaginative, it's a term we throw around a lot. But if you're going to be imaginative and you think of it as picturing that which is missing, it really is picturing that of which you are ignorant. You don't know it exists or maybe no one else does. It reminds me of when you were training me on the ZMET technique. Simply instead of asking a scripted question or assuming that I knew something and trying to lead the conversation, the technique of repeating the word, the person's words back to them, encouraging them to elaborate that. I think that may be a way of befriending ignorance. Yeah, I mean it certainly is a way of defining the interviewer's ignorance because really know what the person means by guilt or fun. Those things have so many different meanings and that's a good way to get them to handle your or, you know, my ignorance. But that is different from the. I have the list in front of me on my screen here. The, the next quality of an open mind is asking the right discovery question. So repeating the person's words back to them is a discovery question. But that's not what you mean by that, right? I hadn't thought about that. Actually. I think that would be a discovery question because you're discovering or asking them to help you discover what they mean and that helps them discover what they really mean by that term. That's true. This is actually one of the most fascinating. I owe someone a chapter on this. Where do questions come from? Well, they come from what you don't know, which is a good starting point. But I can't find anything in the literature that talks about the cognitive origin of questions where they literally. What's the neuro. Neuro pathology of a question? We know a lot about answers, but not a lot about questions. And breakthrough questions are questions that historically. A good friend of mine is working on this, a colleague is pointing out, is in science, the person who comes up with a breakthrough question, a powerful question that threatens to, you know, could change a whole field, is generally ostracized in various ways. Some Conspicuous. Some not. And for a while, people who are advocating what turn out to be breakthrough questions of a difficult social life and professional life. But where do your questions come from? We know about answers, but it's hard to justify how to come up with a history of a question and yet without them you won't have answers. And have an answer. We hear when people are talking about a phenomenon where there's some skill or expertise associated with it that like, I'm so ignorant about this that I don't even know what questions to ask. Right, yeah, that's a good phrase. I mean a good observation. I mean, not having a question is sort of the worst case of being ignorant. So I'm thinking about the context, Jerry, of innovation here. Right. And how the incumbent, who you would have assumed would have come up with an innovation often doesn't because they're not. I'm going to use the word bias again. I'm not sure that's the right word. But they're biased. But what they've already done and what they already know versus this brand new company comes in and they're solving for something else. They're asking different questions. And then that innovation catapults the existing innovation from the incumbent company that everybody thought was on, on a trajectory of a success. Right. I think a question is a focusing device and it's a way of determining where your resources should be allocated. Answered this question. And here's where these things become synergistic because you wouldn't have a question if there was an answer readily available. And so a question is at the same time not only a neat device for focusing where you're going to go, but it's also an acknowledgement of what you don't know and what your colleagues or others don't know. So it's, it's a very powerful device. I think other things being equal, which they aren't, I would always prefer a really solid question to a really solid answer. Okay. Because the solid question has potential. A solid answer, however important it is, has a more preord or ordained or future is not as interesting as an unaddressed question. I feel like this is one of the qualities that you've outlined here. They're all relevant. But I feel like leaders and business executives maybe can particularly get traction on this one. Asking the right discovery questions. Right. Like we, we are here, this sort of cliche advice that as you become more senior, you should be listening more and talking less and asking questions. So before we go to the next one, I just want to Ask you if you can elaborate a little bit, Jerry, on what do you mean by the right discovery questions? Is there, is there, I don't know, like some sort of list of criteria of what makes a discovery question correct or right? I don't think there is an arbitrary set of criteria or an even single criterion that makes it right. But the right question is not the wrong question. It's the question that survives all the wrong ones and remains on the table. And so it's the question that is evaluated in terms of whether it's potential answer or answers, even if those are not clear. But you imagine this is where, again, imagination comes in. Yeah, this question, if we pursued it, there are many more opportunities, as I would view it, you know, the different answers that might command a richer context to play in than is another question. And so I say that's the right question, but it's also right in another way. And that is it has to have a caffeine element. It has to wake people up and has to be a question that makes everyone think, why didn't I think of that? And that is, I think, a constructive wake up call to everyone who thinks that way. I often had, you know, had that experience with colleagues. They'll have a question, and that's, Damn, I should have thought of that myself. And I didn't. Why not? I think there's a, there's this element that makes it right socially or collegially, in a sense. So simply put, it could be that the right discovery questions are the ones that make an impact, where impact is defined as making. I love, I love your caffeine charged metaphor there, Jerry, but it's about making people think differently and think about something in a, in a new way that is thinking differently. That's right. It's a surprise, actually. Yeah, that's why you. I attach the word discovery to it. So the next quality of an open mind is chasing your curiosity. I know none of the words here are accidental. So why are we chasing our curiosity? And how is that different from befriending ignorance? These are a system of things. They're more than cousins to one another. They're. They're siblings, in effect, and it's hard to have one without the other. Just one of the big lessons that I learned from these interviews. But curiosity is actually on the decline in the United States at least. I've seen published reports that measures of curiosity, and that's something that is apparently declining. And the decline begins somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade, according to some sources. So it occurs fairly early in life. And regardless of when it occurs, there's a social contagion for it. And I worry about that, that colleagues aren't sufficiently curious. There are times when I think I'm not, you know, sufficiently curious. I read very broadly and I get frustrated, but I don't pursue every lead I can't. That I find interesting. But chasing curiosity, it is meant to convey the fact that it's elusive, it escapes us. And it's partly because we don't want to admit we don't know the thing that we're now curious about or that we don't know how to interrogate with a question. Curiosity. If we ever caught the creature, what do we do with it? And that's another. Another problem. But I think curiosity. I think of it. I don't know if I use this phrase in the book, but it's the itch that you have to scratch. And it's something that's in a. In like that. It's fairly visceral. You've got to feel it in a visceral way that would make you want to pursue it when everyone else is telling you that's a dead end, it's a blind alley. It's, you know, that's not something that a junior faculty member, an assistant brand manager, would do or propose and so forth. All those things are encouraging people to stay put, not to be pursuing their curiosity. You're reminding me, Jerry, of a interview that I recently conducted with Michelle Boudria, who started working the front cash at McDonald's and worked her way up to CEO of McDonald's Canada. And she worked in different countries and all. All different functions. But she shared with me some of what the factors that she believes built her success. And one of them was an insatiable curiosity. Constantly asking her managers, why are they doing this this way? Why aren't they doing it that way? And she said at one point, one of her managers actually said, fine, I'm going to give you this project. Run with it and show us. And so she had and has still a genuine curiosity. She's constantly looking for feedback, but also external to what she's doing. She's curious about why things run the way they run, why they are doing things the way they're doing them. And this fueled her success. Yeah, you're not surprised. Yeah, that's. And chasing it. It also has. You have this relationship with it whereby it's a bit elusive, maybe very elusive, but it's yours to chase. You're responsible. You've got to catch it. And you don't know even what it's going to be, you know, when you finally get to it or catch up with it, you know, so there's a relationship that takes a. A kind of dedication and a sort of a mental endurance to the conditioning to go after. So back to the point I made before about the Every word here matters. It's not an accident that it's chasing your curiosity. Not just chasing curiosity for the sake of curiosity's sake. Yeah. Actually, just to kind of underscore that I don't want to be chasing someone else's curiosity, I want to be chasing mine. I'm going to run faster, I'm going to feel better catching it if I, you know, can catch up with it. Being told what to do is something I've always resisted. Okay, the next quality of an open mind is, well, like you said, they're all related. And I do want you to share why there's an octopus on the front of the book which relates to how these qualities are all related to each other. But can you describe panoramic thinking? Yeah. There's another word for it that doesn't quite work for me, and that is multidisciplinary. And that has some obvious meanings. And, you know, it's. And it's structured in a sort of way. But panoramic thinking is more than being multidisciplinary. It's looking in diverse and seemingly unrelated fields that no one has ever thought would converge. My best current example, recent example of all things, there is a phenomena out in space, very distant space, with kind of like a cloud of things that they can't quite capture or they couldn't quite capture. And then in a way which I've not yet found out, someone figured out that there was something in the design, nature's design of the eye of a lobster that provided a solution so that they found a camera that could take a picture there. And someone saw that the cloudy situation that was giving them trouble, part of what they also wanted to study was comparable to. To the cloudy situation lobsters find themselves in 200ft or 100ft deep in the water, the deep water lobsters, and that the solution that nature provided with their vision may have relevance for that other one. That's the last thing I would have, you know, thought about, but that's panoramic thinking. I remember when I was your student, Jerry, and you encouraged me to read in depth the academic research on gift giving, because I was studying word of mouth and why people give recommendations or warnings about products and services that they'd experienced to their friends and family and how to think about it and kind of what mechanisms were at work. And you suggested along this vein of panoramic thinking. Now, certainly it's not like interstellar phenomenon and, you know, the lobster's eye, but the insights from the research that I did on gift giving certainly illuminated the phenomenon of word of mouth. So why. Why do we give? How do we give? How do we feel about it when someone rejects our word of mouth or they tell us that we're not right? All of these things made a big difference in my understanding of the phenomenon. If you were to look in the bibliography of Dare to Think Differently and just kind of run down, looking at the titles of journals and books that are used to elaborate on or justify or give evidence for what managers are doing, you'll find that there's a very broad and extensive academic literature supporting what these guys were discovering on their own. And I used it to kind of give the managers, you know, a little more grounding and validation for what they were sharing with me. But they didn't know that. They don't know that. But take a look at the bibliography, you know, you'll see it. I have and I. I will look again, I speak of bibliographies. This reminds me of another book that I read when I was taking one of your classes when I was a doctoral student, Jerry. And that was the book Consilience. Do you remember that? It was E.O. wilson. Right. That's great. Yeah. And I think that book, the. The thesis of that book is about panoramic thinking. Would you agree with. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. See, you made a. You made a huge impact on me, Jerry. You definitely impacted how. I think. Okay, the sixth and last quality of an open mind is. And again, I want to remind everyone that these are in no particular order. Right. They're certainly not a sequence. But the last one we're talking about here is using a voyager outlook. That's kind of my way of framing ambiguity, and you can see how it would fit with the others. But what does a voyager. And I'm thinking of a voyager more in the, like the 15th, 16th century, even earlier than that, the Norsemen and so forth. There is a willingness to go out to the unknown to space that they're ignorant about. I mean, the maps all had, at that time or in the early days, there be monsters. You know, there was a line drawing, and after that, no one knew it was there, but they, you know, guessed that there'd be Monsters out there. I think managers, executives, not them alone, really don't like ambiguity. And I'll comment on intelligence in a second. And I don't blame them. I don't want to have something, we can all empathize with that. But if you're not chasing curiosity into the unknown, if you're not discovering what you don't know, that is literally how you define the unknown, the lobster eye, for example, you're going to get stuck. You're not, you're not just not going to grow as a person or as a company. And I talk about my alternative for that was embracing ambiguity. That's like, you know, embracing a leper. People wouldn't, were reluctant to do that. But it takes that kind of spirit to do all the other qualities in the, of an open mind. So I love that you reframed or chose a term for this last quality of an open mind to make it sound more positive, like something we can strive for as opposed to something that we're avoiding. Right. Using a voyager outlook is something we would strive for versus we would avoid ambiguity. And you use the word spirit. So back to something you said at the beginning. Executives want to be seen as intelligent, right? They want to be seen as having insight and authority and experience, and yet at the same time befriending ignorance, asking questions, chasing their curiosity, using panoramic thinking, thinking like a voyager. This seems like it could be contradicting it. I, I know it doesn't have to be, but if, if you could share some, I think, advice. Yes, Jerry. Prescription for these leaders on how to think differently and benefit from this way of thinking in a way that isn't going to sacrifice their credibility. You know, after I developed Z Med, I encountered or discovered why it works. It wasn't beforehand. So even to this day, new things are coming to my mind to show that it has even more support as a basic method. But in moments of honesty, I didn't know all that when I was developing it. But one of the things that's very important every manager shares with all the staff that they work with, senior to them, junior to them, is that the mind works on the basis of analogy. And there are excellent treatises on this, you know, really thoughtful people, that memory itself is organized analogically. We have memory files of potential analogous things to use when we encounter ambiguity or we encounter something we don't know. We can retrieve. What's it like? That's the first. You have three questions. What is it? What is it like? That's when you begin to make Progress. Maybe it's like a lobster making that up. And then what? All of it, what do you do with it? But what's it like? It's fundamental question when we're making sense of a problem, where else have we seen it? And so on. And I think that if a manager sort of not just worries about what something is and what do you do about it, but understands first, what is it like, where else has this happened? They'll come up with many more solutions or things to adapt or alter. And that's where metaphor comes in. Because metaphor is really the language of analogies, analogical thinking. And so I think they should leverage what they have naturally to a steep ability to think in terms of analogy. And a lot of problems will look a lot more trackable, solvable, if they indulge in that. And that's kind of a natural thing. And they can leverage their colleagues, help them, get them to participate. That's a big lesson. And I think that intelligence is the ability to make sense of ambiguity. It's not a paper and pencil test. It's the ability to clarify what is amiss, you know, chaos. And using analogy is what a wise person does. So I'm trying to read the minds of the listeners here. And I can imagine they're thinking that this is very compelling thesis and I want to dare myself to think differently. So what are some specific. I was going to say almost physical things. So asking questions seems like the low hanging fruit. What are some things that they can do themselves? And also to encourage people in their organization so that they can really get some scale on the benefits of thinking differently, I think I would resort to finding examples of serious play. The plague is everyone a degree of license that they don't ordinarily have. And that's very free and important, but it's serious. You know, is this a problem to be solved? And that's where the clairvoyant and the wizard come in. And I would ask first, I use those guys all the time. What would I have to fix? That's the wizard. If we went down this road. The clairvoyant is someone who sees the future. Okay, what do I anticipate is going to happen? And the two guys get together, People get together. There's an issue of gender with that. I use it with my MBA class a lot. A clairvoyant apparently has feminine qualities and a wizard, masculine qualities. That's also true of a lot of archetypes. Right. But I would, I would make serious use of those characters and other devices for Serious play. Role playing. Okay. You know, I'm going to try this even within talk about talk Very small organization. I'm going to try serious playfulness, assigning the wizard and the clairvoyant, and we'll see what happens. I'll report back to you. Can I ask you the three rapid fire questions now, Jerry? Okay, I know I've asked you these questions before in the past when I interviewed you. We'll see if it's changed. Question number one. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Introvert. Do you know what you said one time when I asked you that question? You said, can I just be a vertical? Okay, you're an introduction. That shows you how retiring I am supposed to be. Rapid fire, Andrea. Okay, okay. Question number two. What are your communication pet peeves? A dry mouth, looking out at an audience. If I'm the communicator, I really don't like those situations. Third would be, I guess I'm not very forgiving for someone who can't hold my attention. So if I leave a speaking engagement and I have a lot of ideas to pursue, it's usually because I wasn't paying attention. They didn't hold my attention. Not that they gave it to me, so that's not a good sign. I remembered. I know this is not very rapid fire, but I do remember in your office you were talking about how some of the academic presentations that you and I attended together weren't always that interesting. You told me, or you encouraged me to watch their presentation techniques, their communication, and maybe learn that if I wasn't going to learn the material that they were presenting. Okay, question number three. I'm really curious about this one. Given how broadly and extensively you read, is there a book that you've read or a podcast that you've listened to that you find yourself recommending a lot lately? Yes, there is Ed Yong, and it's all about other forms of life here on Earth and how amazingly sophisticated they are and how extraordinarily developed one or another is with various senses and other capacities. And it's a very humbling reading. I think humans are really pretty impoverished in a sensory sense compared to almost any of these creatures. He goes to spiders, frogs, bats. It's become a classic book. I think I will definitely read it based on that recommendation, Jerry. And it reminds me of, I think, a theme of this conversation which is really about humility. I'm curious if you agree with that and maybe you can share your final thoughts with the Talk About Talk listeners about daring themselves to think differently. You'll see in the book frequently I'll mention together the need for humility. That's always the first one. The courage. Courage is another one. And discipline, it's hard work, takes discipline. It requires being bold, you know, being censored in some sense, in various ways, making other people uncomfortable, not deliberately, but just inadvertently. In humility, which is you have to see yourself as someone with so much to learn. There's no space for arrogance. I love that it's a beautiful place to end. Jerry, especially listeners know that I'm a huge fan of the Power of Three. So in addition to all of the inspiring insights that you shared, I guess if we can all take away an even increased respect for humility, courage and discipline and doing our best to succeed on all of those dimensions. Thank you so much, Terry. I really enjoyed this conversation.