Curious Minds at Work

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!

Why is social media so pervasive? Many have searched for just the right metaphor to capture its explosive growth, yet few have found ones that fit. Instead of turning to concepts like networks or connections, maybe we should be looking to biology. And that is exactly what Oliver Luckett and Michael Casey have done in their book, The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Your Life. In it, they offer a provocative theory: that social networks mimic biological life. As part of that theory, they explain how our capacity to create and share memes actually facilitates an evolutionary process. That process mimics the transfer of genetic information in living things. Oliver is a technology entrepreneur and currently CEO of ReviloPark, and he has served as Head of Innovation at The Walt Disney Company. Michael Casey is the author of three books, including The Age of Cryptocurrency. He was a reporter, editor, and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and also a senior advisor to the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT Media Lab. In this interview we discuss: Social media as the vehicle for a shift from top down gatekeeping to broad and open distribution How the creative expression that is part of social media mirrors the evolutionary process of biological organisms How the Internet operates as a social organism that we feed and contribute to as it evolves and reproduces The fact that there is an order inherent in the chaos of social media, just as there is order inherent in biological systems and organisms How the evolution of social media, like that of organisms, is not about progress, but about randomness, feedback, and interactions important to the evolutionary process How the metaphor of social organism better helps us to understand and respond to our changing culture in ways that encourage healthy responses and interactions How changing online business models hamper the kinds of organic, authentic, creative expression we need to be healthy online and to support an organic evolution of social media How the distribution mechanisms for information and creative expression have shifted from physical elements -- the TV tower, printing press, newspaper delivery truck -- to our brains and social networks How artists like Banksy are using social media to collaborate and impact the art world Why memes are like cultural currency and replicating tools that get repeated and absorbed into our culture to help it evolve How censorship works against our building up immunities to that will allow social media to evolve and increase in authenticity and creativity How social media is a human phenomenon that allows for a vibrant exchange of ideas Why we need to get it right when it comes to understanding social media, especially as we head into our AI future Episode Links @mikejcasey and @revilopark http://thesocialorganism.com/ http://www.michaeljcasey.com/ Norman Mailer Holarchy Banksy and documentary Banksy Does New York Hatsune Miku Richard Dawkins 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!

Think we want creative ideas? Think again. While most of us are swimming in creative ideas, the research shows that we tend to go with what we already know. This love-hate relationship with creativity discourages innovation and causes people and organizations to stagnate. Jennifer Mueller, author of the book Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It, has spent years studying how leaders and organizations handle creative change. She understands why we resist creativity and how to recognize this tendency. She also gives us strategies for promoting creativity in our organizations and for pitching our creative ideas. Jennifer is an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego, and she has served on the business school faculty of Wharton, Yale, and NYU. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. In this interview, we discuss: How our discomfort with uncertainty can cause us to kill creative ideas How generating creative ideas is easier than moving ahead with them The novelty of creative ideas is what makes them so difficult to accept How leaders really want ways to determine which creative ideas have value, not more creative ideas Why it is hard for leaders to admit they do not know whether a creative idea has value We prize correct solutions over a creative ones because of the uncertainty involved How creativity is uncertainty unleashed in a particular moment Why a how-best mindset limits our ability to stay open to creative ideas What a bias against creativity looks like and how we can reduce it Whether we are rejecting a creative idea or how it makes us feel and why this matters Why a successful medical inventor avoids using the term incubator for his startups Why we should treat innovation like a process rather than an outcome How coaching and encouraging trumps teaching when it comes to creative ideas How and why we need to evaluate creative ideas differently from other kinds of ideas How strength in decision-making works against being open to creative ideas Why the ways we communicate creative ideas makes all the difference The important role pattern matching plays in connecting experts to our creative ideas How convincing others of our creative ideas may mean helping them feel failure How pointing out that no one else is doing it as a way of supporting our creative ideas actually reinforces the status quo Why we need to broaden how we think of creativity in schools Why millennials are more anxious about creativity and less motivated to elaborate on creative ideas than previous generations How little we actually know about who has the potential for successful leadership and how this limits creativity in organizations Key skills leaders need to learn and demonstrate to support creative change How any new idea needs to be socialized before it can live in an organization What change circles are and the important role they play in supporting innovators How strengthening our capacity for creative change allows us to solve global problems Episode Links @JennSMueller http://jennifersmueller.com/ Thomas J. Fogarty Spencer Silver Ignorance by Stuart Firestein Star Wars High Noon 2001 Space Odyssey Rob McClary Do Schools Kill Creativity? Ken Robinson TEDTalk 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 do some succeed with so little, while others fail with so much? Scott Sonenshein, author of the book, Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less and Achieve More than You Ever Imagined, thinks it happens because we get caught up in a mindset of chasing. A Professor of Management at Rice University, Scott is also a strategy consultant for organizations in healthcare, education, manufacturing, and technology. Drawing on research from psychology and management, Scott makes a case for doing more with less, what he calls stretching with what you have -- and it is a far cry from being cheap or refusing ever to spend. In this interview, we talk about: How waiting for the perfect tool gives us an excuse to delay working on our goals Why chasing after resources can cause us to get caught up in destructive comparisons Looking beyond the conventional uses for a particular resource and why that matters How reflecting on scarcity can help us get more out of the resources we already have How a mindset and culture of ownership lets us solve problems more creatively How stretching with the resources we have is a skill we can teach and learn How a culture of belief in people to solve problems creatively makes all the difference Why stretching is a far cry from being cheap and more about being frugal Why more expertise, knowledge, and practice does not equal greater problem solving How we approach problems more narrowly when we look only for expertise How and why outsiders bring a fresh perspective to problem solving Ways we can cultivate an outsider perspective in ourselves How, when we overplan, we count on a world that may or may not exist Why, in turbulent environments, successful organizations are both fast and accurate The power of running lots of small experiments to learn How we can leap without looking by doing and gathering data without learning from it How sticking to our plans at any cost can work against our own best interests The creativity the comes from unthinkable combinations How stretching makes a difference in how we live our lives Episode Links @ScottSonenshein http://www.scottsonenshein.com/ Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling Ron Johnson 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!

Research shows that happiness is elusive. So how can we achieve a deeper, longer lasting sense of joy? Emily Esfahani Smith, author of the book, The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life that Matters, studies the powerful distinction between meaning and happiness and why it matters. An editor at the Hoover Institution, a policy think tank at Stanford University, and a columnist for The New Criterion, her writing  has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. Her research reveals four pillars, or themes, associated with meaning. The stronger these pillars are in our lives, the more meaningful our lives will be. In this interview, we talk about: Why we should strive for meaning over happiness How meaning helps us think longer term The fact that meaning helps us connect to something larger than ourselves The four themes of meaning -- belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence Why belonging is the most important pillar of meaning How belonging helps us see how we matter, helps us feel valued, respected, cared for Why purpose is all about what we can contribute to others How the story we tell about our lives is a way of crafting our identities How transcendence helps us connect to something larger than ourselves How we can help each other have a healthy sense of belonging at work through the social cues that we send, like making eye contact and smiling How purpose and belonging overlap when we become more focused on service Why we need to act on our talents and strengths to recognize our purpose Narrative identity arises from the stories we tell about our lives and our experiences We have agency in shaping the story of our lives in ways that help us move forward Paying attention to our current future selves - who we want to become How astronauts rethink their values and their ambitions as a result awe experiences What growing up in a Sufi household taught Emily about meaning vs happiness Episode Links @EmEsfahaniSmith http://emilyesfahanismith.com/ The New Criterion The Hoover Institution Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue by Veronika Huta and Richard M. Ryan Shawn Achor The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan Carlos Eire Jeffrey S. Ashby Sufism Rumi Whirling Dervish 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 we get angry or excited, our emotions can seem automatic. But are they? For decades, scientists have described these feelings as hardwired, beyond our control, and associated with certain parts of the brain. But recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and psychology are upending this classical view, with revolutionary implications for how we understand ourselves and the world. In her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, helps us rethink what it means to be human, with repercussions for parenting, our legal system, and even our health. Lisa received an NIH Directors Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain and has been studying human emotion for over 20 years. In this interview, we talk about: The fact that our emotions are not hardwired but are made by our brains as we need them Old, inaccurate ways of thinking about emotions and the brain, like emotions as associated with specific parts of the brain How variety is the norm when it comes to expressing and feeling emotions How having emotional granularity helps us feel, express, and understand our own and others emotions more deeply The fact that our brains are not reacting but rather are predicting and constantly guessing what will happen next based on past experiences How the predictions our brains make, based on past experience, yield the thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs we hold and feel How the brain of a baby is awaiting instructions for how to wire itself by capturing experiences it can draw on in the future How baby brains look very different from adult brains because they have not yet had the experiences an adult has had How our present and future selves are conjured from our past The fact that our emotions are not universal or identical by have variations and shades based on the situation How we actually have not one anger but many angers and happinesses and so on Why we must have knowledge of an emotion in order to experience it How the easiest way to gain knowledge of an emotion is through emotion words How an extensive emotion vocabulary benefits us socially and academically and helps us see varied emotions in other people, gives us greater empathy The fact that we can combine past experiences in brand new ways to create new knowledge if we have not yet had those actual experiences The fact that emotions are abstract concepts rather than physical properties and that they can guide us toward a particular goal of say using anger to overcome an obstacle If a tree falls in a forest and no human is there does it make a sound? No! If we have no concept of a tree then we would not hear the sound of it falling in a forest. Why we cannot understand unfamiliar languages or music How our brain is constantly anticipating sights, sounds, tastes and taking in information from the world and our bodies based on past experience How granularity in color perception is similar to what it means to have emotional granularity Why staying physically healthy is tied to being emotionally healthy How awe experiences help us gain perspective and regulate our physical and emotional health How curating awe experiences daily -- like walking outside, reading something new, taking in nature -- helps make our immediate problems seem smaller and less worrisome How the physical health of our bodies is intricately connected to the emotional health of our minds How many gun laws work against what we now know about our predicting brains the the ways past experiences taint our beliefs and what we see and how we act How understanding how our emotions are made helps us see that we are more in control and empowered than we may think to create the life we want to have