Ep. 243 - Josh Linkner, Author of Big Little Breakthroughs on Taking Action and Being More Creative and Innovative Every Day

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Josh Linkner, Author of the upcoming book, Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results. Josh gives us a sneak peek of his new book, shares some of his research and stories about how you can take action and be more creative and innovative every day. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Josh Linkner, Author of Big Little Breakthroughs

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with us is Josh Linkner. He is a creative troublemaker, jazz guitarist, founder of five tech companies, keynote speaker. I think you've done over a thousand keynotes. And you've written a new book that's coming out called Big Little Breakthroughs. Welcome to the show Josh. 

Josh Linkner: Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be with you. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm so excited to have you on the show. And I'm excited to have you because you have a brand-new book coming out. You're an author and have written a lot of stuff out there. What made you decide to start in another book and what's it all about? 

Josh Linkner: Well, so Brian, you and I share the passion and love for human creativity in all its forms. And bringing that to life and in the business sense. And that's really been my whole career again. I started as a jazz guitarist and I built and sold several companies.

I've been involved in a launch of about a hundred startups. But what happened is that to me, Innovation, I think is so misunderstood. And even though I've written three other books on the topic, I really said, could we flip it upside down? Now, most often we think of innovation as these massive change the world things.

But in that context, that's not for most people. You know, most people aren't wearing a hoodie or a lab coat. And so, I tried to make this like Innovation for the rest of us. It's really focused on helping everyday people become everyday innovators. So, I tried to demystify the creative process, lots of fresh research.

I spent over a thousand hours in research and interviews with people all over the world. And what we came up with is this notion of big little breakthroughs, which are small everyday acts of creativity that add up to big stuff. It's sort of like the little baby steps of creativity, but when you think about it, in terms of high velocity, lots of little approaches, it's way less risky.

It's way more accessible. It's way more fun. And they can all add up to great things, while we're developing the skills. So I think that most people have Innovation backwards. It's not swinging for the fences. It's actually going after it. One little, teeny idea at a time. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think that's so important. You know, the work that I do with companies and that. A lot of the times, first thing we have to do is kind of level set of what innovation means. And I think you're right. A lot of people think that innovation has to be, you know, I've got to create the next Uber or the next Facebook or whatever the case may be. 

And a lot of the real value is created at that iterative approach almost. Where it's like, how do I spot problems in my workplace or in my life? And how do I solve those? And it can be something, you know, fairly simple or small. But those things add up over time and it's good to have that level set of what innovation means. 

Josh Linkner: By the way real quickly. So new research out of Harvard shows that, you know, we think that our economy is driven by Elon Musk, inventing some new spaceship or whatever, and yes, that grabs the media attention.

But a new study from Harvard shows that 72% of our gross domestic product here in the United States is driven not by crazy giant ideas. It's by the little ones. And yet sometimes they show up as incremental. Sometimes there's just little things that don't capture the media attention, but maybe you make a tweak in the way you pitch your product or service, and your sales go up 11%. Or maybe you hit your factory floor. You, you find a new way to be more efficient and those little things are less glamorous, but they're absolutely impactful. 

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. What holds people back from taking these creative steps and that. You know, is this something that's found in every one of us or what holds people back from creativity?

Josh Linkner: Absolutely in every one of us. And the research here and I've been studying human creativity now for 20 plus years is crystal clear. That all human beings have enormous reservoirs of creative capacity. Much of it is dormant, but we all have that capacity. Our hardware's there. Like your brain and Picasso's brain are pretty darn similar.

You know, we all can be creative. Now, we don't all develop those skills, which is kind of sad, but we all have the capability to do so. That level set number one. What holds most people back is not natural talent, it's fear. So, fear is that poison of course that robs us of our best thinking. And you know we've all done it.

You're in a meeting and you have a crazy cool idea. But instead of sharing that one, you share your safe idea. Because you don't want to look foolish or be embarrassed or whatever. And it's a totally natural thing, but fear and creativity cannot coexist. 

So, we've developed, and I share in the book a number of systems and processes, and even techniques. Think of them as like idea extraction techniques that are way more fun than brainstorming, way more effective than brainstorming, but they essentially help people cut through the fear to get their best thinking forward.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about that. Like how do you generate the best ideas and actually take something small that you may think is meaningless at the time, and then create something of value from it?

Josh Linkner: Well, I've studied this a lot, you know. If the premise is that we all have dormant creative capacity and by the way, mine's dormant to. I still have, you know, extra capacity, we all do. Then the question is like, how do you extract it? What's the best technique to get it out into the surface and drive the outcomes that matter most to all of us. 

And so, what I've learned is that brainstorming, which is the technique that most people well use, is just awful. Like it was started in 1958. I mean, a lot of things have changed since 1958. And furthermore, it’s actually a good tool if you want to generate mediocre ideas. Because again, you know, fear creeps in, right. Just not a good technique. So, over the years I've developed a toolkit of like 13 way more effective and way more fun techniques that help people get that creativity really flowing.

Just a couple of quick examples. One of them Brian is called role storming. So instead of brainstorming as you, you're brainsto...