282. Finding Freedom in Systems: A Journey of Innovation with Doug Hall

Speaker A: Welcome to Work from the Inside Out, a, uh, podcast that highlights real life stories, practical strategies and best practices for transitioning your career from unhappiness and dissatisfaction to fulfillment, meaning and joy. Now here is your host, career and executive coach, Tammy Guler Loeb.

Speaker B: Hey, everyone. I am delighted to introduce today's guest, Doug Hall. Doug is the author of Proactive Problem Solving. He's also the founder of Eureka Ranch and Brain Brew Distillery. He has been named one of America's top innovation experts by Inc. The Wall Street Journal, Dateline NBC, and CIO Magazine. Doug helps organizations find, filter and and fast track big ideas. His earlier books include the best selling Jumpstart yout Brain and Driving Eureka. A chemical engineer by education, Doug was master marketing inventor at Procter and Gamble. Earlier in his career, for his pioneering work in innovation, he was awarded a Doctor of Laws from the University of Prince Edward island and a Doctor of Engineering from the University of Maine. Please join me in welcoming Doug hall from his home office in Cincinnati.

Speaker C: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, Doug, as you know, I, um, work from the inside out. We love to begin at the beginning. So take us to your formative years a little bit and tell us a little bit about how those may or may not have informed where you are today.

Speaker C: If I think about my early years, I was born in Maine, Cortland, Maine. And then we moved to Nashville, New Hampshire. And I was always curious. I was always curious. And, um, my grandmother Hazel hall was quite an inspiration as well as my great grandfather Will Holder, who was a sailmaker, an entrepreneur. And I was just intrigued. And I had heard stories about how my great grandfather had brought sewing machines into the sail loft up in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. And my mom's from Canada. And it was an innovation that he did. And so between my grandmother showing me remarkable new things to doing and just absolutely believing and that I got somewhere, got the concept that I wanted to be an inventor. And I just loved inventing. And so at a very early age, at age 12, I invented a, uh, Learn to juggle kit and Boo Boo balloon animals and a collection of other things. And I started doing, performing as a magician, juggler, and then selling kits. And then also at Christmas time, I'd go to the mall and have a booth and sell these things and in the summer went to county fairs. My dad, who is also very inspirational to me, uh, later years, I said, why'd you come to the county fair and stay the whole time? He said, because I had no idea what you were doing. I couldn't stop you. But I wanted to make sure in case there was a problem I could be there. So I had incredibly supportive parents and grandparents and great grandparents. Just incredible. And my dad didn't know what to do with me wanting to be an inventor so he suggested I become a patent lawyer. Now I didn't know what a patent lawyer was but whatever. And so here I'm running my own business selling these magic tricks and juggling kits and balloon animal kits, et cetera. And so I go to the University of Maine where my grandmother, mother, father, brother, sister and even my son have gone. So it's a legacy school to be clear.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I took chemical engineering because of all things it was the degree that required the least amount of writing, math and science person. Lo and behold I've now written eight books. So go figure.

Speaker B: That's really funny.

Speaker C: And I'm much more of a writer now than anything else probably. And I worked at, went uh, there and then I went to work one summer at Procter and Gamble at one of their paper plants as a chemical engineer. As a summer engineer. And I learned about this thing called brand management that they had where it was your job to work between sales and research and development and finance to put together and to lead brands and to grow them. And so fortunately for some reason they decided a chemical engineer from Maine who uh, was quite entrepreneurial would be somebody good to brain. And so my wife and I, we got married just out of school.

Speaker B: Uh huh.

Speaker C: And I gotta go back 6m months because the December before we I graduated. Yeah my father called me into the living room. Now my mother was Canadian and like uh, and I am too, I Canadian American but. And he called me the living room. And my mother, the living room was very Canadian and Scottish Canadian in that it was oriental rugs, Duncan, five couches. You only went in there during holidays or when you were in trouble. And it was, it was close to Christmas but it wasn't close enough. And he sat me down and he said Douglas and he's still using my full name. So I knew I'd be like oh man, I might have really messed up here somewhere. And by the way I'm engaged at this point so all I'm interested in doing is going to see my girlfriend who we've been together now for 49 years. The he said I've been working with this guy who is teaching the Japanese how to transform quality and it's the reason why the US automakers are getting killed by Toyota and Sony has taken over and there's a guy that did it. He's a statistician from Powell, Wyoming. His name is Dr. W. Edwards Demme. And he taught me that 94% of the problem is the system, 6%'s the worker. And that we've got to focus on the systems instead of the people. People want to do the right thing. And I was distracted and he got very upset with me. He said, douglas, you got to listen to this. This is the new way. This is going to be the new way. And my father was a engineering, uh, physics major, not prone to emotion. So I suddenly, as he got emotional, I said, wait a minute, this must be really serious. And that afternoon in Nashville, New Hampshire, in the living room, transformed my entire life.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: They put that framework and my entire work. And the. You were so kind to mention the honorary doctorates are for applying the system thinking Lean, Six Sigma and all of the from the factory to innovation and how we work together. And innovation is about how the people innovate. It's about work systems and it's also about new products and services innovation pipeline stuff. So I went to P and G and in my 20s. So P and G, they pay you based on your probability of becoming a brand manager. And 70% of the people never make brand manager. Uh, and let me just tell you, if you're a Harvard mba, you got high odds.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: If you're a chemie from umaine with a two point something grade point average, you have very low odds.

Speaker B: That was you.

Speaker C: That was me. But I had an advantage in that my dad had pounded into my head the concept of systems and of the interconnected parts where my compatriots would be in marketing and they would hand stuff off to product development or to sales. I looked at it as an interconnected system. And so I would go out to the product development labs and have to sit and see and feel it. I would sit with finance and have them show me how to do the math. And I would sit with sales and I would go out with sales to understand the customer. So I was, you've called a renaissance person. But I was trying to understand all of these pieces. And I got known as the person who took the time to learn these other departments what's going on rather than sitting and complaining about them.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: I went and learned and then worked to optimize it. Lo and behold, there were two of us that were the first promoted from our class, the dweeb. Um, and we get it. And so I went up through the ranks and then finally I asked to leave Brand management. They had me on a track to go to the 11th floor to leadership. I said, that's not me. I, I like to invent. So I worked on new products and then I led the P and G invention team where I was given the freedom to do whatever I thought was right. And this was a time when innovation was booming, but we didn't quite know there weren't systems, there weren't structures to it. It was a gamble.

Speaker B: And

Speaker C: I put together a small team and I taught them about systems and I said, we're going to approach this differently. We're not going to have an ego that it's our department. And if I did my job and you screw up, it's not my fault. It's our fault all the way. We need to look at the whole. And we ship nine products in 12 months, which is still considered something of a record.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: Highly bureaucratic thing. And it set off a thing. And this may be ridiculous, but it's what happened. I. So I'm working there in the corporate life and it's clear I am not a corporate person.

Speaker B: Well, that's what I'm like. I'm reading between the lines and hearing

Speaker C: this and thinking, wow, somehow I got away with it. I had senior people who were just inspired by the energy and the innovativeness. And so I was very much focused on learning. And I figured getting paid by P and G was cheaper than going for an mba. I considered it my mba. So I figured I got all these really smart people, they know a lot more about this stuff. Um, I've never had a class in business in my life. And so I, I did two things. One is I set up a. I started a company about, I was there 10 years, so about five years in when I was leading the invention. When I moved to the invention team, I started a game and toy company, non competing. Told them what I was doing. They said, yeah, go ahead, whatever. Procter Gamble's not gonna do games and toys. And I started licensing, inventing and licensing games of toys and making money to the point where I was actually making more money from the games and toy royalties than P and G, which is hilarious.

Speaker B: So that was on top of your full time role at P and G.

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, I have an active mind and. But the other thing I did is I made a deal with myself. I said, as long as I'm. Because people would ask, why are you still here? Why are you still here? You can go do other things. And I was being recruited by lots of companies, big companies, because the Word had gotten out about my ability to ship and people would refer, oh man, this is the most innovative person in the company. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And uh, my answer was simple. I said, Every six months, January 1 and July 1, which happens to be Canada Day for those who know, I look up and say, am I smarter than I was six months ago?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And if I'm smarter, I'm staying. And then one January I wasn't. So I retired from corporate life and it was that simple. Now, by wife, we've got our third child coming. This is not planned. So I went into our basement and I created what's now known as Eureka Ranch, where at the time the focus was on big bang inventions. People wanted disruptive ideas and I happened to have, uh, a really amazing track record. But more than that, I had systems, reproducible, reliable systems that could enable me to do it very fast and very efficiently and very effectively. And so then I started the Eureka Ranch and it took off. Got on the COVID of Inc. Magazine and Wall Street Journal, did big feature stories and the New York Times. Then CNN and ABC Dateline NBC did a couple of big segments. And I was the guru, even though I would laugh and I'd say, I'm not a guru, I just got smarter systems. But that's boring. So nobody would like to report on that. They just wanted to talk about the genius, which was so fraudulent. And I laughed at it. But that's what they would say. I said, no, I got a system. And the systems are more powerful because. And just as an aside, the minute I said system, I could see in the thought balloon of those people driving in their car listening to this right now, thinking systems. Oh my God, it's time to turn this off. I don't like systems. But let me tell you this. You have a good right to oftentimes not like systems. Because the key to a system is what's the aim of the system? And if the aim of the system is to control you, then you have every right to. Not like that, because that's not helpful to you.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: If the aim is to enable you and to liberate you and to help you find joy in work.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Then that's a great system. And that's the kind of systems I'm talking about.

Speaker B: Wow. Can you give me an example of how that plays out?

Speaker C: Um, so when we were inventing ideas, I had a challenge in that people always say they want big ideas, but usually leadership is lying when they say that, because then you get them to you and go, oh, no, that's. I, uh, can't do that. I can't do. That's too much. That would be too hard. And so I quickly learned that what they were saying was not necessarily what they wanted. So I instituted measurement and I started and I had a couple PhDs working for me and we started measuring teams create. And this is from like Nike, Disney America. Big companies and working on some of their most important projects. You know the project that led to the Centurion card, American Express's black card. It costs $5,000 a year. It was big new resorts for Disney, the whole kids business for Nike. Important stuff. And so they're under incredible stress and pressure. And so I said, if I think of it as a factory, I got raw material coming in. The raw material are those humans. M. If I knew where their mindset was, their strengths and weaknesses, I could then adapt how I put together the experience that they're going to go through. Through a Eureka Inventing session over multiple days. Because I know what I've got coming in about 18 months of research, measuring people during the inventing every, every 45 minutes and all, uh, putting all this data together. You start to gronk it. We end up with a pre assessment that we can do. We also end up with measurements during the session on a real time basis. After every exercise. People would answer four questions within the first hour. I could predict the rest of the week. And then what I did is I could then adapt and make tangible changes in how I'm doing it to make them be better to the point where the results went up. That was a 10x improvement in the quantity and quality of ideas that we could do by measuring the people. Not in an evil way, not to blame, not to fight blame, but in fact one of the things, uh, early on I said, all data is secure. There are two people that have access and one's a statistician and one runs it and they're not going to give it up. I, uh, don't care what you want. I've had CEO say, I want to know who scored this. These scores are not good. I want to know what the. I said, I'm sorry, there will be absolutely no release. And that data that I gather then led to my first book and a collection of books then where I was able to give people data on how do you invent ideas? What are the principles for inventing ideas with hard data behind it? I could measure how to assess an idea on its odds of success and I could quantify that and this set uh off a whole thing, which eventually led to the creation of another 10 years of doing that. I got bored because I could. I invented everything for everybody, like it was easy to do. So I said, let's do something bigger. And because I had all of this data, I got the universities. I did a collaboration with some universities, including Maine and others, to create a new field of study called Innovation Engineering and the art and science of it and where we would teach people. And uh, because I had data, I was academically approved and I could go through peer review and do it. Otherwise it was just Doug's program that's not worth nothing. But because of all of the data we had, we were able to create this new field of study and create a collections of training programs, which we do today. And the primary I'd, uh, say focus was on big ideas for new products, new services, or renovating established businesses that have gotten tired. Mhm. Going down the life cycle curve, one of the pieces of data we had that really bothered me a lot was that. And we had it from three separate sources. It's one thing to get one piece of data, but when you get two collaborating studies, that really increases your confidence in it. When an uh, idea goes into the development process, on average it loses 50% of its value from when it starts the development to when it ships. And at this point, I made a mistake, by the way. I made a mistake. I thought that the reason was because the product development people, when it was hard to do something that was really unique, they kept compromising on the idea. The problem was the development process. And so with Innovation Engineering, we built a whole commercialized system for how to try to prevent that. And we taught people about the risk and we went through that. And it, amazingly, it still worked. But it didn't give me the scope of impact that I was really looking for. And this continued to bother me. And then just before COVID I had worked in the whiskey business for a long time. Many. Because as an inventor, you can work with who you like. And I like whiskey. So I worked with Diageo and Macallan and others.

Speaker B: Uh-huh.

Speaker C: And I had learned that 70% of the flavor of whiskey comes from the wood. That the spirit isn't that important. It's basically moonshine. And I'd been a chemical engineer and I'd worked at a pulp mill. And I said, that's like paper making backwards. Because you see, when you make paper, use the heating to remove the lignans. So to get the cellulose Fibers to make paper. When you make whiskey, you put the white clear moonshine, new make spirit in a barrel. It gets hot in the summer. The whiskey goes into the wood through the char layer into the wood, bonds with malignants. It gets cold, it comes back out morning to night, summer to winter. This process, over 8 to 12 years, creates the water of life. They call it an amazing, smooth and flavorful whiskey with lots of layers of flavors. I said, how hard could it be to do that process with more quality control? Because you see there's no control over the temperature. You have a hot summer or a cold summer, it changes things. Store the barrels at the top, near the roof versus at the bottom. It's different, right? And when I inquired about how they managed quality, I learned they don't. They just get a bigger tank and pour them all into a big tank. I go, that's not quality, right?

Speaker B: What are you doing? Yeah.

Speaker C: So I found a young guy named Joe Gargash who was working at a restaurant that I was helping the owner start up just on the side, just helping them. And I went in to talk about systems and how we needed to have systems at this place. And Joe, dude, I got systems, man. You don't run a restaurant successfully. I've started up three restaurants. You only start up restaurants with a system at 7 o' clock on Friday night. If you don't have systems, if everybody doesn't know their role and you don't have your systems, you're dead. He said the reason the restaurants fail is usually because of poor systems. That's the key thing. That's what causes the meltdown. Employees quit and a whole chain reaction. And I'm like, dude, you're awesome. Uh, we got going and long story short, he decided that he wanted to try something else. I said, I got this whiskey thing. I bought this piece of equipment that allows us to control the temperature with very high precision, like crazy precision. I said, I can give you a job for six months and we'll just screw around and see what happens. Okay? So we started experimenting and it, uh, didn't taste terrible. I wouldn't say it tasted good, but it didn't taste terrible. And I said, uh, that's pretty cool. So I gave him another six months and that became another six months. And at 18 months, he says, there's a, uh, North American bourbon competition in New Orleans. I think we should submit some of the. So we submitted three products and sent, uh, them down. And he says, I'd like to drive down. I said, dude, this is Our first competition, we Yahoos here in Cincinnati. Nobody's. We don't have a chance. A few weeks later he calls me up and he says, you're not going to believe this, but we won three of eight double gold medals at the competition. And I'm like, holy crap. He said, I said, you want to start a company? So I, uh, started a company and he co founded it with me and we started off doing that and we started growing and doubling the company every eight, nine months. The sales was doing it.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: So you had to quickly get really good with systems.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: What we also had to get was we had to have employees who were on the journey with us. It was not going to be possible for Joe and I to do this alone.

Speaker B: Of course.

Speaker C: And it's interesting because you teach about it, it's another thing to live it. I built systems in the invention team to do it. But here I am dealing with a factory without not high end employees, great people, but not, you know, bottlers and people at Stack. And so I said, we need a way to do this because it's not about the idea. Now remember, connect this back to when I said we lose 50% of the value.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I'm in the middle of that exact world.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: We've got, I got these huge ideas, okay. To do custom whiskey where everybody can get their own whiskey by the glass at the bar. You answer some codes and you scan it and you get it. Setting up blending experiences where you can make things that nobody's ever done before. Working with 200 Year Oak, which nobody's ever done before. Cherry wood, maplewood, smoked. Coming up with whole new ways of smoking whiskey. And I'm coming like a mile a minute. And Joe's sitting there running operations, says, dude, slow down man. I can't handle this. I'm just trying to get. Our volume just went up and I got to manage that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it became an interesting experience because I quickly realized that the problem in the middle were two things. One was employee engagement.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Employees are engaged in the mission, which means intrinsically engaged. That's what Deming taught psychology, intrinsic. They had pride of work, they had joy of work. They were doing something that mattered. Meaningful stuff.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Meaningful work. And it's leadership job to paint a vision which in proactive problem solving, uh, I talk about it, the what and the why. What we need to do and why. Explaining to the employees why we need to do this. Which is its highest embodiment in practical problem solving. We call it the blue card, which comes from commander's intent from the military. And that when you tell them the what and the why and you get them engaged and then you teach them how to create ideas and how to problem solve, uh, a transformation happens.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so we were able to go from a few thousand to a hundred thousand cases. Covid comes, we give away 50 million bottles of hand sanitizer. Never sold a bottle. Got donations and support from people, which was amazing. People were so kind at that point. I don't know what happened, but we were really kind to each other back then. And I realized somewhere in the middle of COVID a Professor Lynn Colley at the University of Oregon came to me and he said, doug, the American Psychological Association's hamburger consumer behavior, surprisingly has never had a chapter on innovation ever. And I'm like, really? He says, yeah. And I want you to write it now. Now this is a book where it's really an honor to do it.

Speaker B: I.

Speaker C: And I'm like, not even like a real PhD. I've got honoraries, but I'm not real. And I said, I don't know anything about psychology. He says, I'm not sure the industry does either, but I'll give you the words. But I've seen you in work and you have psychology in what you're doing. You just don't know it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So for 18 months or so during COVID I'm working on this article researching psychology. And the minute I learn something, I'm applying it in this distillery, immediately starting to do it. And I looked at this and I realized what was engagement. The other thing that you really needed to do is remember I talked about as a chemical engineer, I worked with the sales people, the R and D people in finance, in innovation engineering, I called them the three risks. Market risk, will the customer buy it? Technology risk, can we actually make it? And organizational risk, the regulatory, the finances, et cetera. And what I realized is we started projects and we'd get in the middle of them and there would be a regulatory thing that we couldn't solve and we wasted our time. Or, uh, we'd get through the idea and then we'd take it out to customers and nobody was interested. But we were excited because it was a cool technology. And I realized that in order to reduce that decline in ideas, we had to get employee engagement. But we had to also, before we even started, do what became known as the business opportunity recommendation, where we assess the three risks and scope them out and just spend some time. It's like a three legged stool. Because if you don't what happens. There's many organizations that are consumer driven and all they care about is does the customer like it? And then they go figure it out. Or if you're a technical company, it tends to be around the it what you're building. And if you're owned by venture capital, it's just the profits. But when you put those three together with engagement, suddenly miracles occur. And this applies not only to products, but systems. So we've got one company that I worked with, their marketing department, it's an industrial company, has to generate leads, sales leads for the salespeople using the Internet. And they had one or two million dollars worth of leads, which was not enough for the size of this company. They were getting beat up a lot. They'd gone through a lot of leaders, four out of five, four leaders of marketing in five years. And so the CEO said, let's see if your system stuff can help them build a better system. Six months later they had $50 million in the innovation pipeline and they're on the way to a hundred million by changing the system, the human work system, on how they work together.

Speaker B: So I have a question for you about that. But you still have to get people enrolled in working with the system.

Speaker C: What's interesting about it is when you can lay down the system and Deming teaches us he's got a simple system for changing it. Make the system visible, look for, look for psychology and then plan, do study X, uh, cycles to improve it, which I explain in practice problems on. And when you make it visible and you've run the experiments and you've done it and you're doing it, you've got the what and the why. Mhm. Okay. And you're transparent as opposed to just saying I need you to do the system. If your system makes sense and if it doesn't, you should be doing it, you get much more engagement pretty easily and especially if it can help people work smarter.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And do it. One company said by doing this business opportunity recommendation, looking at the three legs of the stool before you go in, you make my job so much easier.

Speaker B: Yep. Okay.

Speaker C: That's pretty cool when you can see that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so this then led to me writing my eighth book, Proactive Problem Solving and putting together a program to teach people how to do it and to enable it. And I gave you the loftier level of the managers. But now let's talk about the frontline people.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: People who come in every day, they're not the highest paid, probably not the highest educated, but we need them to move the boxes, to do the programing, to do the accounting. I'm talking the frontline people. Yeah, the bulk of the people in our organization. And I started doing the training, I got a real pushback. There were two pushbacks. So the book actually got delayed a couple years. The first pushback was my people don't give a care. This new generation, you need to have a way to do that. Okay. Then the other pushback I got was your methods are best. These are the methods to invent big things. This, uh, they're golden. But if you ship this, I will not use it at all. I said, why? I said, because unless you have a training for their manager, you light up employees, but you don't do the manager. You're just going to create problems. M. For me. So that one was easier. I put together a training for managers, for the team leaders. So if they got their team members on how to motivate them, that was easy. But the first issue of how do you get them to get excited? Was hard. And after a lot of thought of the psychology, I said, okay, we're giving a what and why for the company and what it does. And that's really nice. But these people don't care. They're not getting bonuses, they're not getting. They're like, whatever. So you can't. The things you can do with managers, you can't do as frontline people. Oh, they'll give you lip service. But they're not going to really do it because those are extrinsic things.

Speaker B: And also, they've been given the flavor of the week before.

Speaker C: Totally.

Speaker B: And so here's another consultant coming in with a grand idea. And I know you were successful. I think what I was struck by, because I've done a lot of work with groups of people who push back and are resistant to change and don't want to have to learn a new thing and then find out that they're doing it a whole different way another six months or a year from then. But when you said six months, you saw these dramatic results. That really had my attention.

Speaker C: That was for the systems. Yeah, uh, listen to this. So I said, what we're going to do with the frontline employees, to get it started, we're not going to do proactive things like fix the work system. We're going to do reactive things. We're going to stop the stupid. I sat with employees, I said, do you have any stupid stuff that goes on? Bureaucracy, bad forms, IT systems, stupid work systems, poor tools. They get in the way of you doing your job. Yeah, you can feel the excitement in the room. I'm talking rank and file, folks. In fact, I got good at it this time. And the Eureka Ranch team, they'll say, give me your most obnoxious people who complain the most because that's usually a sign that they care. Okay? And so I remember early on, a lady put her hand up and I'll never forget this. I said, what do you got? This stupid. She says, my back hurts. I said, what? How long's your back hurt? She says, about nine years. I said, why is your backer. She said, I assemble these machines and when I'm done, I have to lift them up to put them in the box. And as you can see, I'm not very big. I, uh. She says, I said, that's stupid. Get back. She says, I agree. She's very proud. And her team leader was there. I said, what else can we do? And then we use some of the techniques they've been taught. And sure enough, somebody sparks an idea. And they said, I think in another part of the factory they have one because the machines are so big where you roll it onto the cardboard and then you build the box around it instead of lifting it in. Problem vaporized. Her back doesn't hurt. That's cool.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So with proactive problem solving, the idea is to look at the simple stuff that's getting in the way. And what does this stuff do? It's the reason why we have only 31% engagement and almost 70% disengaged. Why do people quit? Because of the stupid stuff.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: It's not the big stuff. And I said, if we could enable them to stop the stupid. And we start with do a three step process. First is to get them engaged, have them focusing on stopping the stupid, working with their team leader within their sphere of influence. Because everybody's got a sphere of instruments that they can do a lot more than they think they do. And people complain. I, uh, go, you can, you have control, control over a lot more than you think you do.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker C: And so we get them going. That builds their confidence. And then the manager starts doing proactive things. They put out blue cards to say, this is a bigger thing. Now the team, they're getting joy because they. You don't go into work and say, I want to do stupid stuff. You want to do stuff that matters.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And suddenly they're finding joy in work. They get involved in that. And then phase three, you can start to work on cross departmental work ones because everybody's talking the same way, everybody's talking the same language and everybody's engaged. And uh, that is where I am now. And that's what I'm thinking to change.

Speaker B: I want to know. Not to get political, but I'm going to get political for a minute. Why? I'm not going to ask you for a big explanation of this. We need you.

Speaker C: In Washington D.C. there is a level of. Dr. Demi would famously say, why don't managers or leaders or politicians know this? And he would say, because they don't know about it. Because how could they know? How could they know there's any other way to do it than command and control from the top?

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker C: And what gives me great hope is that when you start going away from the baby boomers and down to the younger generations, they are less likely to do this. I grew up in a command and control world. Procter and Gamble. Early on I was told to work on a spreadsheet. If you asked me what I was doing, I could explain it. They said I don't know and I'd be there till 7 or 8 o' clock at night working on it with no idea how to do it. And today's employees want to know why. And you know what? They're the smart ones. I was the dumb one back there. And so I have great hope for the future.

Speaker B: I'm glad to hear that.

Speaker C: But it is. There's a co collection of people who have got. They think the way to do it is a very machismo, dictatorial approach. And that's why you have turnover and that's why you can't get employees and that's why you have problems and that's why things take forever because they defend their territory rather than working for the good of the whole. And people close in and that's the issue. And it's Deming. It's what Deming taught moving. The Japanese crisis was there.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And it's what we're teaching. And I'm very proud to say that the Deming Institute, which is led by Kevin Cahill, Deming's grandson. I'm on the the board of trustees of IT and we're working very hard together to help bring Deming because this guy was a pretty smart guy. Pretty? Mhm. Amazing. 94% of the problems the system, 6%'s a worker. Beating your workers will not do it. Getting new workers if they don't work. Fireball, get another one. Guess what? It's going to be just as dumb as it was before unless you change the system. And you can do it. You can do it.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker C: You just have to get a mindset shift.

Speaker B: Totally agree. I've seen it done. I know you're moving lots of people in that direction. I want to try some of that bourbon, too, but I could talk to you for hours about all of this. Doug, It's. I love what you're bringing to all these organizations. If we could only clone you, that would be great.

Speaker C: We have partners, and so we have gone very carefully to build this scalable.

Speaker B: Tell me.

Speaker C: One of the things that I did early on is I decided this is too important for us to be consultants, going out and doing it. And so we have licensed partners, we have universities and colleges, community colleges that teach this and inside companies. We do basically the first couple trainings, but then we train them to become innovation, engineering, black belts, and they train the rest of the company. I mean, we're not holding it close. We're expanding it. We're teaching students on campus. Uh, and we are doing everything we can to scale that. But through. So we've got train the trainer programs that make this very cost efficient for people to do it. It's too important. It's too important to hold it tight.

Speaker B: I agree. And I want to go back to the original something that you said originally, because I think that is a. It's a foundational piece to all of this. And that is. You said, I've always been curious. And what I've seen on this podcast, what I've seen in my clients, the people who really do move things forward and are fully engaged, are the people who are most curious. And I hear also a lot of noise these days about AI and about. I talk to people who teach in universities, and they're very concerned that some of the younger folks. I say that. I'm like, I'm calling them younger folks now. That must mean, um, I'm really old. But you know that they're losing some of that curiosity because they're leaning in to too much on AI in using AI, maybe even incorrectly. I'm curious what your thought is about that, because there are often conversations I'm in with people where they'll say something to me like, I didn't have a choice. And then I'll ask them a question and it'll be like, oh, they didn't get curious. They saw where the walls were closing in.

Speaker C: So I was just. With some campuses and the AI thing, I don't even know what. How to hear a professor anymore. Didn't, uh, do it anymore. But it'll resolve itself. As Churchill said, eventually. Americans get it right. We'll figure it out.

Speaker B: I hope so.

Speaker C: We will figure it out. I'm, um, inherently optimistic. But the way I like AI is not very smart. The research shows clearly. If you look at the academic research, if you're not a very good writer, it makes you a good, average writer.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: And if you're an average or above rider, it doesn't really help you that much.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: It doesn't really think. It's a pattern recognition system. And it's a very brilliant one. And we use it. We have our wizard where you answer 13 questions to create your custom bourbon. So it's very useful. The way I use it when I'm inventing things is I use the thing where I say, assuming I'm a 21 year old, how would I think about this? Assuming I am a very artsy type person, how would I do this? I just did it for cocktails. Assuming I'm a 30 something woman, what type of recipe might I like? Assuming I'm a baby boomer who grew up in the Midwest, what kind of bourbon cocktail might I like? And so I use it as a diversity, which is an exponential kick, to help me look at it as stimulus that I then process. So as a stimulus creation thing as opposed to the destination. It's a tool to help me open my mind in other ways. And that, uh, is very helpful.

Speaker B: I'm not worried about how you're using it, Doug. Uh, that wasn't really. I'm not concerned about that. But it's helpful to hear and I want the audience to hear how you're using it because I think that's how it should be used. Not that I'm the authority on telling people how to use it. Tell me about proactive problem solving. The book. Who's your ideal user or reader? I'm m thinking it could be just about anybody.

Speaker C: There's a review that someone wrote which was a thing, and they said, if you've got humans who have to do stuff, you need this book.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker C: Just because it's your biggest expense and you didn't hire droids, they became it. And so when we ask people, and this number is crazy, the average manager wastes three and a half hours a day dealing with employee mistakes and broken Systems. Oh, and 80% of that is the systems. And when we ask employees why they don't solve them, they said they don't know how. And the second thing is they don't think it's their job Those sound like management problems. That sounds like a problem for management.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Management needs to make an engagement. And am I m thinking it's real simple. Give me your desperate date list your worst problem and give me 30 days with those frontline people.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And then you figure out if you think this is worthwhile or uh, not.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And of course it's a no brainer because people inherently want to do stuff that matters. Matters.

Speaker B: Yes they do.

Speaker C: Inside out. The reason we don't like our job is because we're not doing crap that matters.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker C: We're wasting our time and we don't want to do that. And I think what we're going to find with AI is very little intrinsic reward to typing into chat GPT extrinsically. It's nice.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: But you talk about losing your engagement if you use it in the wrong way.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker C: There's a lot of stuff that's issues there.

Speaker B: Yeah. So let's talk about for a moment. There's two things. One is I want to make sure that people know the best way to either get in touch with you or learn more about your work. What would be the best way?

Speaker C: Just go to doughall.com really simple.

Speaker B: Um. All right. And for people who a lot of what we've talked about here with systems and people working together to solve problems or to innovate. Uh, I know I'm saying that in very simple terms. I love the sound of that. There are some people who are still trying to figure out where they want to place themselves or where they envision themselves going. So on an individual level I see what you're doing with proactive problem solving. I could see somebody applying some of those principles to a job search or to figuring out what they want to do next. Yep.

Speaker C: Uh, literally. Dr. Andy Van Gogh to the University of Oklahoma. We did a study. We had people do brainstorming, just sit in a room either individually or in a group to create ideas and then use the approach that I talk about in proactive problem solving using stimulus, diversity and experimentation. And there's a whole weight system. They came up with 5, not 5%, 500% more high quality ideas. The ideas were written up and they were scored by a company to see which were the high quality ideas. Literally 500% more ideas.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker C: Uh, it's epic. You didn't get a user's manual with that brain. And the stuff we're talking about, ideas of feats of association. You need stimulus and the stimulus sparks one thought and it sparks another thought. And you need diversity of different people who, uh, all multiply it up. And then when you get it, you have to start running failfriend fast fail cheap experiments and his uh, system. And the devil's in the details obviously, but your ability to create is so much greater than you think.

Speaker B: I totally agree. So based on that, what would be, and I think you've already given this to us, but I'm going to ask you to state it as a declaration. What would be a key piece of advice or direction you would send someone in who's saying, I know I want to do something that matters, that's more meaningful than what I've been doing recently or I'm ready for the next thing. What would be the place you'd have them looking or the next thing they should do?

Speaker C: Well, uh, the first thing is, I think the basic thing is are you learning M. You were six months ago. And if not, get up, get out, you're dying. If you're not growing, you die. The tree cannot stand still. It either grows or it dies. And if you're not smarter than you were six months ago, get out now before rigor mortis of the brain gets in. And you end up like old people who end up quitting their job or retiring early because they hate it and they don't like it and they're even more miserable after they retire. And I tell them you should never retire unless you are retiring to do something that you want to go, something you're curious about, something that you want to spend time on. And if you don't like, if you don't find yourself, if when you leave your job you got nothing to think about, you're not engaged, right? And so when you're looking for something, it needs to be something that speaks to you intrinsically that you're like, I want to know more about that. Yeah, I write books. Why do I write books? To learn how the story comes out. I love uh, IT because it's a process of uh, there's never an outline. I just start writing and I start writing because I wanted to learn. How could I take the work I'd done creating big ideas, multi billion dollar inventions and apply it to the person in an organization, in the IT group and the sales group and the manufacturing. I don't care where it is to help them find more joy and work by uh, initially starting a stupid and then participating where they can contribute and do something. And it's just fun. And I still am learning on it. And when this is done, I'll move to the next thing every 10 years. My girlfriend of 49 years here, my wife says, you reinvent yourself.

Speaker B: I love it.

Speaker C: And we're reinventing it again.

Speaker B: You are definitely working from the inside out. There's no doubt about it. I'm just, I'm enamored. And I want to encourage everyone who's listening to this, whether you think you're moving forward or not. Proactive problem solving. I can't imagine anyone not finding value

Speaker C: in a book like that. And interestingly, most of My books are 140, 150,000 words. My publisher, who's a dear friend to, said, he says, you only get 50,000 this time. He says, and think about who your audience is. I said, Man, 50,000, he says, and wait, do you see how hard that is? And it was really hard because the idea was tell the whole story, but in simple words and simple things. So I'm just a pitch. I saw recently an article that said that 40%, the amount of people that read for fun has gone down by. By 40%.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, so I'm telling you, it's a simple read. It's easy, no fancy words, conversational. It's a simple thing. When you read it, you're gonna be like, I remember when I heard him, he was the same way. It's just we're sitting, having a conversation and you read it in a weekend. It's a simple book, but with some powerful things that can make a difference in your life.

Speaker B: And on that beautiful note, I'm gonna thank you for being here and really appreciate what you've shared here. I think it is enormously valuable for. I can't overstate this for everyone.

Speaker C: It's coming. It's going to happen because the human is still going to be important and AI and things are wonderful. Don't get me wrong, they're good tools to create stimulus, but we can do things to make a difference, to change the world. And all of us, whatever part we live, it's our job to make a difference on this planet.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Doug, that I, uh, love ending this conversation on a note like that. Thank you so much.

Speaker C: You're welcome.

Speaker B: Thanks for sticking around to the end of my interview with Doug Hall. What is your key takeaway from our conversation? If you are interested in any of the resources mentioned in today's podcast, you can find them in the show notes on my website at Tammy Gulerlove or podcast. Just look for episode 282. And while you're there, you can subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes. Did you know that ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts can help this podcast reach more people? Please help me to inspire more people to move their careers in meaningful directions by clicking on the Apple Podcasts page button and leave an honest rating and brief review. Are you anticipating your next professional move? Check out my award winning book, Work from the Inside Out. Break through nine common obstacles and design a career that fulfills you. It's available through my website, Amazon, Barnes and Noble Independent Bookstores or through your local library. You can also help sustain this podcast by buying me a cup of coffee, uh, @buymeacoffee.com TammyGL since this podcast is self funded, your support is acknowledged and appreciated. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, it's never too late or too impossible to increase your sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in your work and other meaningful activities. Let me know how it's going for you. I would love to hear from you. Bye for now.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Work from the Inside out podcast. For more information you can find us at www.workfromtheinsideout.com.