Training Your Antennae: Cultural Observation Exercises

When I think about the fastest, most creative teams I’ve ever seen, they all share the same blueprint: trust creates safety, safety fuels risk, risk sparks creativity, and flow binds it all together.

That’s why I brought two of my favorite creative leaders into this conversation—Ivy Ross, VP of Design at Google, who has reshaped the look and feel of fifty-plus products and won hundreds of awards, and Jody Levy, serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Summit, the legendary community of creators and change agents.

What I love about this episode is that Ivy and Jody don’t deal in abstractions. They talk about how they actually build cultures where people move faster, see further, and flow together.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:

1. Kill fight-or-flight before it kills creativity. Most companies live in survival mode. Ivy and Jody show how trust and psychological safety pull people back into the “green zone,” where creativity thrives.
   

2. Rehearse the future until it feels inevitable. Strategy isn’t just a plan—it’s a story rehearsed so vividly that people can’t help but believe and move toward it.
   

3. Intuition is compressed expertise. Our best calls don’t come from spreadsheets. They come from years of pattern recognition surfacing as a hunch you can trust.
   

—Steven

P.S. Over 300,000 readers get my weekly newsletter translating neuroscience research—llike how to build high-speed creative teams—into practical strategies for flow, focus, and performance.Join them here: https://www.stevenkotler.com/yt

Guest Bios:

Ivy Ross is the Vice President of Design for the Hardware organization at Google. Over the past six years, she and her team have launched 50+ products, winning over 240  global design awards. This collection of hardware established a new Google design aesthetic that is tactile, colorful, and bold. 

A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Ivy’s innovative metal work in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums.  

Ivy has held executive positions ranging from head of product design and development to CMO and presidencies of several companies, including Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach,  Mattel, Bausch & Lomb, and Gap. 

Ninth on Fast Company’s list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2019, Ivy  believes the intersection of arts and science is where the most engaging and creative  ideas are found.  

Most recently, Ivy co-authored with Susan Magsamen Your Brain on Art: How the Arts  Transform Us. Jody Levy is an artist, a systems thinker, and a serial entrepreneur who’s built everything from WTRMLN WTR, a category-defining beverage brand, to NeuroPraxis, a platform bridging the gap left by one-size-fits-all approaches to brain and spinal cord injury rehab. She also leads large-scale recovery operations and is the former CEO of Summit—the legendary community of creators, builders, and change agents. Jody’s work lives at the intersection of wellness, innovation, and impact.

She has a rare ability to turn bold ideas into real-world systems for healing, creativity, and human optimization. 

In This Episode:

00:00  Unlocking the Blueprint for Team Flow
04:30  The Unexpected Partnership That Sparked Big Ideas
16:55  Reinvention Strategies from the Trenches
19:21  Why Trust Is the Ultimate Speed Hack
21:27  Rituals That Turn Safety Into Creativity
26:10  Rehearsing the Future to Accelerate the Present
30:59  What Navy SEALs Can Teach Us About Flow
41:14  The Hidden Costs (and Payoffs) of Collaboration

1:00:21  Training Intuition as a Leadership Superpower

1:10:13 How Great Leaders Sustain Creative Energy

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Flow Radio Is Presented By Steven Kotler’s Flow Research Collective