Curious Minds at Work

How do breakthroughs happen? Not how we think. Movies, books, and articles, constrained by time and word limits, often leave out the realities --  the messy work, filled with dead ends, abandoned questions, and accidental discoveries. That is what Stuart Firestein, Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, wants to change. He believes that the roles ignorance and failure play in the discovery process are vastly underappreciated, so much so that he has written two books about them, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, and Failure: Why Science is So Successful. An advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for The Public Understanding of Science, Stuart shares insights from his own work as a successful researcher and scientist and from those of his peers, as well as scientific philosophers and historians. Insights from our interview:   Knowledge and facts are important insofar as they help us ask better questions Conscious ignorance offers a useful playground for discovery The messy process of science and discovery is where the value lies The disconnect between scientific textbooks and courses and actual science The innovative course he teaches that helps students gain a scientific mindset What it is that makes a problem interesting How scientists, researchers, and creatives look for connections Why failure can be useful even if it never leads to an eventual success The fact that the more expert a person is the less certain they will be How systems limit innovation Why we need better tools for assessment and evaluation in schools Why we need feedback tools that are more diagnostic and less judgmental Why he worries most about people who dislike or are disinterested in science Why he sees his lab as a cauldron of curiosity How writing books requires a different way of looking at things How philosophy and history can impact science in an interactive way Episode Links Stuart Firestein @FiresteinS Be Bad First by Erika Andersen Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud by Peter Medawar James Clerk Maxwell Principles of Neuroscience Eric Kandel Kenneth Rogoff D.H. Lawrence Do No Harm by Henry Marsh MCAT NIH NSF Sidney Brenner Michael Krasny Karl Popper Thomas Kuhn Isaiah Berlin If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Want to succeed in work and life? Be bad first. Do not confuse this with the familiar call to fail fast (so often heard in the startup world in recent years). This is a longer game. It is about getting comfortable with being novices and of committing to learning new, hard skills that take years to acquire. In a world of rapid-fire change, constant connection, and lots of choices, it is a necessary goal. Erika Andersen, wants to teach us how to do just that. Erika is the Founder of Proteus, author of three books on leadership, and a Forbes contributor. She shares concrete tips and great examples in her latest book, Be Bad First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future. Insights from our interview:   The key skill for success in the 21st century Why being bad first is not about failing fast or failing forward How open are we to learning new ideas? Less open than we say. How we hate being bad at things but love getting good at things How our desire for mastery can work in our favor with new challenges How hard are you clinging to the skills you have? How is that working for you? Four mental skills crucial for learning How Michelangelo successfully navigated being bad first The role innovation plays in getting ourselves to learn new things How to put our self talk to work for us rather than against us How we cannot get the help we need if we do not know our gaps How to revise and reframe our negative self talk What does healthy curiosity look like in adulthood? Confused about curiosity? Watch a 3-year-old! Get curious by unleashing your drive to understand Value the expertise of others enough to ask them questions Expected to be expert in your field? Beware of asking these questions. Want to reclaim your innate curiosity? Start with your hobbies! Anti-curiosity strongly connected to negative self talk Risk-free way to practice being bad first? Write with your non-dominant hand. It is impossible to be good at something you have never done - remember that Learning something new? Find your bridge - the part you know something about. Three things we need to believe in order to change our behavior. When leaders model new behaviors, change goes faster in their orgs Every year, pick something new to be bad at. Episode Links @ErikaAndersen Erika Andersen Rookie Smarts by Liz Wiseman Duolingo If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Is pride a deadly sin or a key to our survival? Will it lead us down a destructive path or can it actually help us resist temptation? In this conversation, Jessica Tracy answers these questions and more. Jessica is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of the book, Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. Her research has unearthed findings that help us see just how important pride is for human progress and survival. Her discussion of pride takes us beyond associations of boastfulness and arrogance, in order to understand how feelings of pride can boost creativity, encourage altruism, and confer power and prestige in ways that benefit us as individuals and as a society. In this interview, we talk about:   Why we need pride to feel good about ourselves The fact that pride is innate, rather than learned The body language we associate with pride and what it signals How residents of Burkina Faso helped us recognize that pride is universal How philosophers like Aristotle and Rousseau helped us see pride as positive How studying narcissism clued us into key aspects of pride The fact that there are two kinds of pride - authentic and hubristic What we learned when we asked people to talk about times when they felt pride How the speech of one political candidate included both aspects of pride Why asking if you are a voter vs if you will vote makes you more likely to vote How we can resist temptation by imagining the pride we will feel if we do How displays of pride convey status and why that is important What residents of Fiji taught us about pride, status, and evolution Why we evolved to have hubristic pride and the dominance that comes with it The connection between prestige and authentic pride How people with hubristic pride dominate through fear How dominant leaders are better at helping groups solve problems How prestigious leaders cultivate creativity and innovation in groups The fact that cultural ideas evolve through learning How pride motivates us to create and make things better How pride helps us want to teach and share and let others copy When people show pride in answering questions observers will copy them The fact that pride guides social learning How pride helps helps scientists make progress - they want to be right and it feels good when that happens Why we did not evolve to be selfless - we evolved to build a sense of self How hubristic pride is about a false sense of self and why it leads to shortcuts Why our sense of self is different from that of any other animal To what extent do pride and shame drive bad behaviors? Episode Links http://ubc-emotionlab.ca/people/dr-jessica-tracy/ @ProfJessTracy Dean Karnazes and Ultramarathon Man The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan Cumulative cultural evolution Lance Armstrong If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We produce more wind and solar power than ever before, yet coal, oil, and gas constitute over 90 percent of our energy sources. Why? Blame it on the grid. While our electrical grid was once an engineering marvel, today it is the Achilles heel of energy efficiency. In her book, The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future, McGill University Professor Gretchen Bakke explains why. A former Fellow in the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University, she holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. In this interview, Bakke shares how our grid became what it is today and offers fascinating insights into the technologies, personalities, and policies that got us here. Along the way, she explains all the fascinating ways innovators are helping us rethink it and what the future of energy looks like. In this interview, we talk about:   What the U.S. electrical grid actually is The history that informs the grid Why it matters when we use electricity Why the more we invest in green energy the more fragile our grid becomes How our current grid binds us to non-renewable energy sources How overgrown trees, sagging power lines, and a computer glitch caused a massive blackout in 2003 How electricity became a monopoly and a commodity How grid complexity works against complete reliance on alternative energy The good, the bad, and the ugly of smart meters Why energy storage is the holy grail of the energy business The innovation of vehicle-to-grid initiatives The feasibility of wireless electricity How an energy platform can help us reimagine the grid How an energy cloud can help us de-regionalize our reliance on energy sources What a cultural anthropologist brings to our understanding of the grid The values and history embedded in our electrical grid The fact that we made the grid and the grid makes us Whether choreography serve as a tool for helping us rethink power Episode Links Arc lamp Charles Edison Charles Brush Samuel Insull National Energy Act PURPA Energy Policy Act of 1992 Enron Walkable City by Jeff Speck Vehicle to grid Elon Musk The Paris Talks Energy cloud If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do good people discriminate more often than they think? That is exactly what a team of researchers found when they analyzed the thoughts and reactions of millions of people around the world.   Harvard University Professor of Social Ethics, Mahzarin Banaji, author of the book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, shares surprising findings from Implicit Association Tests taken by over 18 million people from over 30 countries. What she reveals may surprise you. Banaji is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as the Radcliffe and Santa Fe Institutes. She and her co-author Anthony Greenwald, Professor at Washington University, have spent their careers uncovering the hidden biases we all carry when it comes to issues like race, gender, age, and socioeconomics. In this interview, we talk about: How knowing our blindspots can help us innovate How we can measure the extent of our biases with the Implicit Association Test How the implicit association test can launch a dialogue around bias Who we say is American versus who we really believe is American How our tendency is to be curious and to want to learn about ourselves How much we want to know is a measure of our smart we are The role competition and social knowledge play in motivation to learn and grow Why we need to get beyond learning about it to doing something about it The importance of what we are willing to do to address our biases Knowledge of bias helps us rethink hiring, law, admissions, medicine, and more Bias in our minds hurts us, too The fact that implicit bias starts as young as 6 years old Disappointing differences in explicit vs implicit love of our ethnic or racial group What is not associated with our groups in society gets dropped from our identities Bias and discrimination can come from who we help How referral programs can reinforce bias and lack of diversity A tip on how to ensure referral programs cultivate diversity The fact that we all like beautiful people and how that harms us Ways to outsmart our biases What symphony orchestras can teach us about overcoming bias in hiring The fact that good people can and do have bias How we will be perceived by future generations if we can address our biases Whether Mahzarin likes science fiction Episode Links @banaji http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/ Anthony Greenwald Implicit Association Test Fitbit Inclusion Conference 2016 What Works by Iris Bohnet Social imprinting Group identity Stanley Milgram Abu Ghraib My Lai Massacre If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What stands between us and meaningful work? Email! It is killing our productivity and distracting us from the creative work we crave, yet we spend over a quarter of our work week on it. What is behind our addiction and what can we do about it? Jocelyn Glei, author of the book, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, explains the science behind our addiction and offers strategies for prioritizing meaningful work. Jocelyn is the founding editor of 99U and editor of three productivity books, including the bestseller, Manage Your Day-to-Day. In this interview, we talk about:   The challenge of living in an age of distraction Why it is easier to be busy than to focus on meaningful work How, on average, we check email 11 times an hour and process 122 emails daily How we spend over a quarter of work time on email How the random rewards of email keep us addicted How completion bias makes us strive for inbox zero How designs like progress bars and percentages speak to our completion bias How our negativity bias influences every email that we read How empathy, emoticons, and punctuation can compensate for negativity bias The fact that email goes awry because of a missing social feedback loop How empathy goes a long way in overcoming email negativity bias Email is great for asking but awful for declining The difference between an email asker and an email guesser What it means to do creative, meaningful work Steps we can take to ensure meaningful work rules the day The role momentum plays in doing meaningful work Why we need to synchronize calendars with to-do lists How scarcity of time and resources impacts capacity, mindset, and attitude Tech setups to help us avoid frequent email checks How the best way to fail at email is to rely on program defaults Why the more we check our email, the less happy we are How segmenting emails senders helps us decide which emails to ready by when The fact that not all email messages are created equal How quickly we respond to emails sets expectations How to ensure your emails stand out How productivity can be about what we choose not to do Why we need to spend more time deciding than doing Why it is about leaving a legacy Episode Links @jkglei http://jkglei.com/ B. F. Skinner Daniel Goleman and emotional intelligence Mark McGuinness Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Gloria Mark Manage Your Day to Day Clayton Christensen If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Is there a formula for innovation? Yes! And the most successful individuals, teams, and organizations rely on it to achieve their goals. Innovation psychologist, bestselling author, and Founder of the leading innovation firm in Australia, Inventium, Amantha Imber has worked with organizations like Google, Disney, LEGO, and Virgin. In her book, The Innovation Formula: The 14 Science-backed Keys for Creating a Culture Where Innovation Thrives, she distills the science behind game-changing innovation and offers concrete examples of what leaders can do to cultivate it in their teams. In this interview, we talk about:   What it means to democratize innovation in our organizations Innovation as change that adds value What happens when we assign projects for challenge vs capacity The Imagination Breakthroughs Project at GE The diminishing returns of cash rewards for performance Why leaders are trading cash for time to support innovation Guarding against groupthink in long-standing teams The value in walking in stupid for doing innovative work The kind of leadership that sets the most innovative organizations apart Why leaders should do innovative work rather than delegate it How the Kickbox project helps companies like Adobe spark innovation Why blue-sky brainstorming is a lazy way to innovate Innovative ways Engineers without Borders and Tata Group learn from failure The power of assuming abundance by sharing generously Why we need a certain level of noise to do creative work Hack-in-a-box to support student innovation and entrepreneurship Episode Links @amantha http://www.inventium.com.au/ Jeff Immelt of GE Imagination Breakthroughs at GE Wieden + Kennedy Advertising Originals by Adam Grant Adobe Kickbox project Tata Group Engineers without Borders If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

How do we make time for creative work, and how do we sustain it? Amy Whitaker, author of Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses, tells us how. Writer, artist, researcher, and teacher, Amy works at the intersection of art and commerce. She holds an MBA from Yale and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine arts. She is also a professor at New York University. In this interview, we talk about: Why art and creativity are responsible for our greatest human contributions That art is the opposable thumbs equivalent of what makes us human How creativity is about personal discovery and contribution The fact that creativity is not a distant land of mythic geniuses and art theorists The value in taking a wide-angle or systems view for art thinking The role of play and creativity in important scientific discoveries How to develop a habit of studio space for creative work Why it is normal to feel disoriented and vulnerable while creating The importance of working in the weeds to feel alive Why we need to trade discernment for judgment Whether we are standing at the easel versus sitting in the armchair The power of becoming a good noticer How creatives are inventing point B rather than moving toward it When Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile and what it did for running Inspiring ways to manage creatives Why managing is about creating the space for creatives to do their work The importance of good enough versus perfect or right Why creatives need to think about the letter versus the envelope Why we need to have our own metaphors Thoughts on Leonardo da Vinci if he were alive today Why we need to find language for the middle space Episode Links http://www.amywhit.com/ @theamywhit Thomas J. Fogarty Takahiko Masuda Target blindness Brene Brown Amy Poehler Harper Lee Actor-observer bias Truman Capote Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think by Mona Patel Kristian Still Dialectical behavioral therapy Amy Schumer Cubism Brexit Roger Bannister and YouTube video of him breaking the 4-minute mile Donald Keough and New Coke If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Smart machines are coming, so what are we doing about it? Instead of cowering in fear, what if we took a proactive approach? What if there were a playbook we could use to anticipate and thrive in an increasingly automated world? In his book, Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, Thomas Davenport, offers ways to accomplish that goal. His book is a guide for employees and students who want to know what they can do to work successfully with smart machines. Tom is a Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College and co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics. He is also a Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He teaches analytics and big data at Babson, Harvard, MIT, and Boston University and has written over 17 books In this interview, we talk about: What the number of bank tellers working today can tell us about smart machines 10 reasons to look over your shoulder for smart machines in your own work What separates humans from machines The 4 markers of machine smartness and which one we are living now Why employers should aim for augmentation vs automation wherever possible How smart machines can liberate us to do more creative and valuable work Augmentation at its best in freestyle chess How we can step in with machines in the workplace Why we would want to step up with machines in the workplace What it looks like to step forward with machines in the workplace How we might step aside with machines in the workplace How some are stepping narrowly with machines in the workplace Why every organization needs an Automation Leader Why we need to get past STEM as the only solution The important role organizations play in providing professional learning Why Tom argues against universal basic income How companies can be more resilient in a digital age with increased competition The fact that so few of our political leaders are talking about this big shift Episode Links @tdav http://www.tomdavenport.com/ Oxford Study on The Future of Employment Bricklaying Robots Ex Machina Freestyle chess Former WaMu Risk Officer Stretch by Karie Willyerd 2020 Workplace Report If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Multitasking is a myth. And we are poorer for trying to do it. The research shows that we have less productivity, more stress, diminished creativity,  and poorer relationships when we try to do many things at once. And yet, in a hyper-connected world, we can often feel like we have no other choice. And yet, if we honored how are brains are designed, we would see that singletasking is the answer. That is the message and the research that Devora Zack, author of Singletasking: Get More Done -- One Thing at a Time, wants you to hear. And she gives practical tips about how to do it even in the most frenetic of moments. Devora is the author of two previous books, Networking for People Who Hate Networking and Managing for People Who Hate Managing, and CEO of Only Connect Consulting. She’s worked with clients at Cornell University, London Business School, and Deloitte, and is a visiting faculty member at Cornell University. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal. In this interview, we talk about: The myth of multitasking How single tasking ups our productivity and creativity and state of flow Using time shifting to avoid a multitasking mindset The price we pay for multitasking The fact that excessive media multitaskers have trouble remembering Why single tasking requires us to commit to a choice Tips for starting small with single tasking The three different ways most of us make sense of the world and why they matter How accessibility and our need to please can prevent us from single tasking Why single tasking lets us bring the best version of ourselves to what we do The fact that some prefer to shock themselves than sit in silence How device-free staff meetings can increase focus and productivity A great tip for being more fully present with friends and family Ways to build fences to prevent interruptions before they occur The power of cluster tasking with tasks we do daily What we can do and say when colleagues interrupt us Tips for open plan offices and colleague interruptions What team members think and feel about leaders who single task The connection between happiness and single tasking Episode Links @Devora_Zack http://www.myonlyconnect.com/ Deep Work by Cal Newport People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone with Their Thoughts Slow Reading Club If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!