Curious Minds at Work

What's behind the extraordinary experiences that stay with us? Are they as random as we're led to believe or is there a pattern to them that, if we understood it, would allow us to create them ourselves? In his research, Dan Heath, co-author of the book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, uncovers four key elements that characterize these kinds of moments. And he explains how we can create them not only for ourselves, but for our family, our friends, and the people in our organizations. Dan is a Senior Fellow at the CASE Center at Duke University and co-author of the bestselling books, Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive. In this interview we discuss: The important role that elevation, insight, pride, and connection play in defining moments How we can tap into defining moments to celebrate and inspire employees at work Ways to spot opportunities, like important work and life transitions, to design defining moments How our brains hold onto the peaks and endings of defining moments The fact that great experiences are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable What it looks like when we break the script to create unforgettable moments Why we need to beware of the soul-sucking force of reasonableness to create defining moments How defaulting to ease and efficiency can turn peak moments into speed bumps How social moments of shared meaning and responsiveness build connection The key roles that understanding, validation, and caring play in connecting with others Why we build deeper connections more quickly when we work together on something bigger than ourselves How creating the right mission and conditions can get people to take on difficult challenges The fact that purpose has a greater impact on our performance than passion Why purpose is central in making us more effective in our roles How we can learn to cultivate purpose How just one hour visiting student families in their homes completely changed the culture of a low-performing elementary school Why 36 simple questions can help us deepen our relationships in less than an hour When people experience crystallizing experiences that cause them to rethink their work and their lives Links to Episode Topics http://heathbrothers.com/ https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/team_profiles/dan-heath/ John Deere and CEO Sam Allen Magic Castle Hotel Images of Joshee on vacation Simply Brilliant by Bill Taylor Harry Reis Sharp HealthCare Morten Hansen Flamboyan Foundation Carlie John Fisherow Arthur Aron and his 36 questions Post-traumatic growth Option B by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal Roy Baumeister and the crystallization of discontent If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Maybe performing under pressure is easier than we think. In those moments before an interview, an exam, or a presentation, we often feel our worst. Yet Daniel McGinn, author of the book, Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed believes we can decrease and even repurpose those anxious feelings to up our performance. Senior Editor of Harvard Business Review, Dan has written for Wired, Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine, and Newsweek. In this book, he draws on the fields of performance and sports psychology and shares quick and simple techniques we all can use. In this interview we discuss: Why we should take a page from pre-performance rituals of top athletes How we can leverage stress before a high-stakes event and maximize our performance What it means to fine-tune our emotions before a high-stakes event The role that centering plays to enhance high-level performance How pre-performance routines distract us from feeling anxious and prime us for the event Why that lucky pen, ring, or tie really can make a difference in our performance How the words we choose and the connections we make to something bigger than ourselves can help us psych up our teams Why a highly experienced, highly motivated team may not need a pep talk How listening to certain kinds of music can improve our performance in all kinds of tasks How a sports DJ is impacting two of the top sports teams in the U.S. Two factors that make a song motivational - how its musicality -- beats, tempo - resonate with us and how emotionally connected we feel to it How our self talk, our visualizations, and our mental rehearsals before an important event can improve our performance The important role priming -- physical and emotional - plays before a high-stakes event Why we should reflect back on past successes to increase our confidence in a new performance task How we can sit there feeling worried or we can develop a set of practices to give us confidence before a high-stakes event Links to Topics Mentioned @danmcginn http://www.psychedupthebook.com/ Improving Acute Stress Responses: The Power of Reappraisal Yuri Hanan and the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning Don Greene and centering The River and Laura Donnelly and Hugh Jackman Malcolm Gladwell Peak by Anders Ericsson Stanley A. McChrystal Sports DJ TJ Connelly Eye of the Tiger Nate Zinsser The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When you hear the word power, what comes to mind? For most of us, we imagine power-hungry leaders or think of phrases like power corrupts. But when my guest, Eric Liu, considers power, he sees something different. He views power as a positive force. In fact, he believes it is a gift each of us can use to shape society. At a time when many of us feel powerless, Eric offers a simple set of instructions for seizing power and using it to help shape our communities, our nation, and the world. He is Founder and CEO of the non-profit, Citizen University and author of the book, You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen. His TED Talk on citizen power and voting has been viewed over 2 million times. In this interview we discuss: How power is an important literacy Why power is about who gets to decide How power is a gift we are continuously giving away How our citizenship endows us with unearned power and privilege that we should share with intention Why we need to ask ourselves, to whom am I giving my power, my might, and my imagination? The myth of rugged individualism in the face of game-changing collective action and collaboration we have seen across history How we are part of a collective web of relationship, obligation, and mutual aid The fact that power compounds as people with voice and connections amass it The fact that power justifies itself as incumbents spin narratives to maintain it The realization that many rely on intimidation and self-justifying narratives to maintain their power How power is infinite as demonstrated by movements to push back and reinforce pockets of power How we can reframe power by changing the game, the story, and the equation The fact that we are all better off when we are all better off The power of story in organizing for change -- the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now How a civic collaboratory taps into the shared need and wisdom of organizations to amplify their impact How we are strong in our ideals of citizenship but weak in practicing them Why citizenship is about power plus character - working on behalf of a greater good How we accuse others in order to excuse ourselves How taking responsibility sets in motion a cycle of responsibility that is contagious Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @ericpliu http://www.citizenuniversity.us/ The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner Nick Hanauer Marshall Ganz Jose Antonio Vargas Bonds that Make Us Free by C Terry Warner If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Few of us realize how dependent we are on the people and objects around us for our knowledge. But Steven Sloman does. He reveals that we are constantly accessing expertise stored in our communities, our technologies, and in our environment. In fact, research reveals that many of us adopt positions on issues like climate change and health care from certain experts, without even realizing it. These findings have enormous implications for our increasingly polarized society, including the fact that educating people about issues is probably not the most effective way to change their minds. Steven Sloman is co-author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.  He is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Cognition. His work has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal. In this interview we discuss: The fact that we tend to think we understand how things work better than we actually do How we fail to distinguish what we know from what others know How complexity prevents us from understanding many of the things we think we do The fact that knowledge must be collective to offset all the complexity in our lives When we want to understand how the government or our car works, we figure out enough causal structure to solve our problems What the deliberative mind is good at, which is coming to causal conclusions How deliberation depends on a community of knowledge and connects us to other people The unique ability of human beings to share intentionality, that is, to engage in tasks with other people The limitations of understanding that comes from someone else How understanding is contagious and community based Much of our understanding comes  from having access to knowledge rather than actually knowing Why it is important to help people see that they do not understand -- that they cannot explain something they think they understand well Our conviction that we understand or know something comes from the trust we place in certain experts The fact that we cannot convince people by making them experts but by convincing them to  believe in a different set of experts That we tend to stick with our first explanation or conclusion, even if it is found to be incorrect The fact that most of our beliefs are formed independent of data -- they tend to be shaped by our culture and what our community thinks The fact that the thought leaders we look to actually determine what we believe How we actually vote for what our communities judge to be the right things, not what the right things might actually be The fact that group intelligence is derived from how well team members communicate with and relate to one another rather than individual intelligence How many VCs make investment decisions based on the team and their collective intelligence That what should spend more time on collective or team intelligence over individual intelligence A question we can ask individuals whom we hire: How have you contributed to group performance in the past? How engaging in the activity is key to helping us learn and to gaining causal knowledge Why it is so important to be aware of what we do not know -- to reduce our pride in what we think we know How intelligent nudges can guide people toward better decision making Why focusing on policy consequences is preferable to the values associated with those policies yet is much harder to do Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast Steven Sloman Frank Keil Clark Glymour Michael Tomasello Herbert Clark and common ground Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo Anita Woolley Pixar Disney Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference.

Most of us are aware of the negative effects of income inequality on health and well-being. But few of us realize that just seeing yourself as unequal can produce the same results. Keith Payne, author of the book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die, and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and on NPR. His research helps us understand how inequality is the public health problem of the 21st century. In this interview we discuss: How we see ourselves compared to others is a better predictor of health and well-being than income and education How inequality is a better predictor of drug use, health outcomes, crime, and other self-defeating behaviors than poverty in advanced economies The false dichotomy of blaming the system or the individual when it comes to understanding inequality rather than understanding how individuals respond to their environments How bees engaged in high risk, high reward behavior after they lost some of their honey supply and how this mirrors how humans behave when they have less How people living in areas of greater inequality search Google on more high risk, high reward topics like payday loans and lottery tickets Why how we feel about our status in relation to others can have a greater impact on how we vote than our actual status How the poor do not actually tend to vote against their own self interest -- how there is more to that story than meets the eye The fact that there is a strong correlation between the rise in income inequality and the rise in political partisanship The fact that parts of the world with greater equality are less religious How pay incentives works well for individual performers but less so for collaboration and teams Does your organization value teamwork and collaboration? Then think twice about incentivizing individuals with big payouts for performance. How we often overlook the fact that inequality is driven more by the wealthiest than by the poorest How solving the problem of inequality by adopting a public health mindset can help develop bigger, more impactful solutions How moving to a zip code with less inequality can potentially have a more positive impact on future outcomes than moving to a wealthier zip code Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @UNCPsych http://bkpayne.web.unc.edu/ Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi Nancy Adler Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy ONeil Angus Deaton Anne Case If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Could our code be making us more human? When most of us hear the word code, we think of computer code -- the digital instructions that drive our devices. But when Philip Auerswald hears the word code, he sees the instructions that drive the human race. Phil is the author of the book, The Code Economy: A Forty-thousand Year History. He is an Associate Professor at the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, and Executive Director of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network. He is also the co-founder of Innovations, a journal on entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. Phil believes that as machines and algorithms play ever bigger roles in our lives, we will actually become more human. This long view of automation--a 40,000-year view--also gives us insight into a different, more innovative perspective on how to think about the future of work. In this interview we discuss: A broader definition of code as the DNA of human society from the simple to the complex The importance of getting beyond singularity vs dystopian views of humans vs machines How humans will redefine their own value -- as they have done repeatedly -- as robots, machines and algorithms play a bigger role in our world The fact our ability to learn -- to experiment and share what we learn -- is what sets us apart How human beings are constantly exploring spaces of possibility How evolving understanding, knowledge, and knowhow results from finding the adjacent possible The fact that cities are actual platforms in that they stand on problems solved in literal ways -- sewage and electric power and subway transport How platforms of today are increasingly digital The concepts of bifurcation and substitution where a product is split over time into cheap and high volume vs expensive and low volume, as in watches and clocks How high volume and low cost items typically lend themselves to automation The fact that we are trying to recapture a 1960s way of living and working that is no longer viable How we need to rewire rather than retire The concept of a job has only been around for about 150 years due to the introduction and growth of large-scale institutions that needed people serve in a role and act on specific routines Why subsidizing higher education and retirement are not the right ways to think about the problem of machines, robots, and automation Why the evolutionary nature of ideas and actions opens us up to abundance and new opportunities How it is almost irrational to think our creative processes will come to an end How the inequality that exists within cities and between cities and rural parts of the U.S. are the driver of political discord Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @auerswald http://auerswald.org/ Stuart Kauffman Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford Shinola Nexus by Ramez Naam Milton Friedman Permanent income hypothesis Otto von Bismarck Larry Harvey and Burning Man The Absence of Design in Nature Scale by Geoffrey West Jose Lobo Progress and Poverty by Henry George The Origin of Populist Surges Everywhere by Philip Auerswald If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Why are high-school memories of popularity so strong? Because they still shape our lives today. Mitch Prinstein, author of the book, Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-obsessed World and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains how teen popularity impacts adult happiness, our health, and our relationships. And surprisingly, not just for unpopular, but for popular people, too. And, according to Mitch, if you thought there was only one kind of popularity -- the high status kind -- then you are seeing only half the picture. There is actually another kind -- one based on likability -- that plays a key role in our lives. In fact, understanding what sets these two kinds of popularity apart -- for ourselves and our organizations -- can mean the difference between being a mediocre and an outstanding leader. In this interview we discuss: The connection between adolescent brain development and our desire for popularity How memories of our popularity as teens stays with us in adulthood, for better or worse The difference between likability and high-status popularity and why it matters How and why high-status teens can suffer from relationship, mental health, and addiction problems as adults How bosses who bully may have achieved high-status popularity as teens The ill health effects low likeability, low status teens experience as adults How our bodies are attuned to our experience with popularity as teens Why likeability and kindness trumps high status when it comes to popularity How our brains get a signal for social pain when we perceive we are excluded or unpopular How perceived unpopularity can trigger in our bodies an unhealthy inflammation response How the more sensitive we are to physical pain the more sensitive we can be to social pain and rejection How likeable people tend to hang back and observe before talking How likeable people say things like: I wonder if . . . , rather than: We should . . . The fact that our memories of popularity from our teenage years influence how we see the world, including what we attribute actions of others to When someone stands you up or shows up late, do you blame yourself or blame them? Our popularity when we were younger influences how we view popularity for our children Anxious and insecure mothers often have popular children because they pay attention to how their children interact with peers and tend to coach their children in proactive ways How parents can help their children to achieve likeable popularity by modeling what it looks like and scaffolding support through young adulthood How our likability as young people has a greater influence than many other factors when it comes to our health and well-being as adults How the kind of popularity we associate with social media, like likes,is not the kind of popularity that serves us well as social human beings How the extent to which others like something online can lead us to engage in more risky behavior How the ways we interact with social media are changing what we value and care about Why the more we connect online for status, the lonelier and more isolated we can feel Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @mitchprinstein http://www.mitchprinstein.com/ Naomi Eisenberger Take Pride by Jessica Tracy Martha Putallaz If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When it comes to economic growth, why are some countries and companies better than others? While many experts look to factors in geography, finance, or psychology for the answers, César Hidalgo asks us to look instead at information and networks. Cesar is the author of the book, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. He is also an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Collective Learning Group. Cesar wants us to think about the amount of knowledge and knowhow people accumulate and the kinds of organizations where this information is stored. He and his team work on collective learning — that is, the learning of teams, organizations, cities, and nations. And he wants us to understand why building these kinds of networks and organizations can be challenging. In this interview we discuss: What it means to describe the objects around us as crystallized imagination What distinguishes wealth from income and why it matters Why the challenges of economic growth are tied to the challenges of learning in individuals and teams Why individual skills, knowledge, and ability do not scale well and how this impacts economic growth Why group or team knowledge trumps individual knowledge Why it is not about knowing what needs to be done but about creating a team of people who have the knowledge and knowhow to do it Why we can view products as alternative channels of communication in that they endow us with their knowledge -- we cannot build a phone but we can communicate with one or we cannot build a plane but we can be transported by one Our capacity as individuals is augmented and expanded by the products and tools we have access to, from running water to smartphones -- channels of knowledge and comfort are transmitted through products Economies are amplifiers of our knowledge and knowhow -- just look at how few people make toothpaste yet how many use it Our ability to create products is limited by our knowledge and knowhow which is influenced by our social networks How learning from experts, through experience, helps us learn and get better faster The key differences between knowledge and knowhow and how this influences economic growth How Ford Motor Company in 1928 experienced the challenges of transporting knowledge and knowhow through their failed experiment in Brazil called Fordlandia The importance of asking, what are the channels that drive collective learning? Episode Links @cesifoti http://www.chidalgo.com/ where you can find all the data tools her mentions in the podcast Pep Guardiola Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Doug Rushkoff Wernher von Braun Fordlandia Ricardian Trade Theory Steven Pinker Richard Dawkins Jonathan Haidt Joseph Henrich Kurt Vonnegut If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Does our obsession with the myth of the lone genius cause us to miss out on opportunities for high-impact innovation? Scott Page helps us see how diverse teams repeatedly outperform not only smart individuals, but also teams of talented individuals with similar backgrounds and cognitive tools. Scott is the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, and Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan. His findings have deep implications for what we teach students, how we evaluate employees, and how we make some of our biggest decisions. In this interview we discuss: How cognitive diversity includes how we think about the world, how we solve problems, and how we search for creative solutions How we can help others innovate by asking them to come up with adjacent possibles or ideas similar to the ones we are talking about How people who are successful in their fields accumulate skills in subtle ways over time The marked impact team diversity can have on the accuracy of its predictions How leaders can compile data on employee competencies and experiences to inform which people they place on which teams and to determine when they may need outside perspectives Why we should gather data on which team members made the most accurate predictions on the most important projects Why we want to consider the most important aspects of the work we are trying to do in order to determine which people to put on which teams Why we should ask ourselves, do we have diversity on the dimensions that matter most? If not, then find members outside of the organization who do. Given a certain competency threshold, randomness of team members may trump ability The fact that research shows we are always better off including some diversity as opposed to forming teams of all the best, most similar people Why even very small improvements due to difference accumulate in big ways over time The fact that team diversity allows us to make continual improvements How we suffer from a siren call of sameness where we want to work with and hire people who look like us, attended the same schools, and travel in the same social circles, yet those are some of the people we should most avoid when we want to solve complex problems How quants are giving us clear insights into the impact of diverse teams How complexity is driving us to work in teams yet how we are still evaluating most people in our organizations only as individuals The fact that we want both deep talent and diverse talent in our organizations and on our teams The fact that with people from only one identity group, we have a limited set of life experiences and ways of seeing the world that limits our creativity and problem-solving abilities When it comes to social policy work we want to be sure we have people in the room who can assess the policy from a multitude of perspectives and experiences Why young people should be thinking about depth and difference and the tools and skills they need to learn to demonstrate either or both What skills, tools, and behaviors are we helping young people accumulate? Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @ScottPage4 http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/ John Taylor Lu Hong Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox by Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten Jon Kleinberg Maithra Raghu Steven Johnson Stuart Kauffman The Great Courses Jack B. Soll Ray Dalio Juliet Bourke Whiplash by Joi Ito Rule of 72 Sheen S. Levine Radical Candor by Kim Scott Leigh Thompson Verna Myers Steve Jurvetson Barbara Mellers and Philip Tetlock Malcolm Gladwell Kimberly Crenshaw Tim A. McKay Reid Hoffman If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference.

Have you ever had a great idea only to have it rejected by your organization? If you are nodding your head, you will want to read Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work that Matters. The authors, John Bielenberg, Mike Burn, and Greg Galle, lead a Silicon Valley innovation firm called Future Partners that gives people the language, frameworks, and tools they need to drive positive change in their organizations and communities. John, Mike and Greg explain the two important reasons we experience these hurdles, namely, human biology and culture. Then, they walk us through ways to challenge and, ultimately, overcome them. In this interview we discuss: How thinking right is all about predictable results and ho-hum solutions How thinking wrong feels awkward because we are acting outside what is acceptable The fact that we cannot follow the same predictable paths if we want to create and innovate How a lot of brains operating on the same neural pathways create a culture The six practices of thinking wrong: be bold, get out, let go, make stuff, bet small, and move fast How letting go is about rethinking assumptions, biases and orthodoxies The importance of making stuff so that our ideas come to life for others to see Why betting small lets us run lots of inexpensive experiments How moving fast allows us to iterate together on learning to accelerate progress Why innovative outlaws need a shepherd and a scout to offset organizational sheriffs and posses How biology and culture limit our thinking and ability to innovate The fact that we say we want innovation when we really want optimization How stepping off a predictable path makes us feel uncomfortable and vulnerable The value of teaching different kinds of problem-solving systems The value of learning from investment over return on investment How incremental innovation, or increvation, will not help us solve big, important problems Episode Links @FuturePartner Future Partners Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio Mach49 Deflection Point Exercise Uncertain and Unknown Exercise Creative Change by Jennifer Mueller Project M Pie Lab If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!