>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm
pleased to welcome Josh Shenk to the Microsoft Research visiting speaker
series. Josh will be discussing his book, Powers of Two. Two is the magic
number because of the nature of creative thinking. Each partner pushes the
other to greater heights than either could have reached alone. The most
successful ones thrive on conflict and endure while some pairs simply flame
out. Josh Shenk is an essayist and author whose magazine pieces include
cover stories in Harpers, Time, and The Atlantic where his essay What Makes
Us Happy was one of the most read articles in the history of the magazine's
website. His first book, Lincoln's Melancholy, was named one of the best
books of 2005 by several publications including the New York Times. He is
curator, storyteller and advisor to the MOTH and he has taught creative
writing at The New School, New York University and Washington College.
Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[Applause].
>> Josh Shenk: Thanks, Amy. And thanks to Microsoft for having me here
today to talk about Powers of Two. This book started with a question: What
is this thing we call chemistry or synergy or electricity? This quality
between people that leaves us feeling sharper, smarter, funnier, in my case
feeling funny. It is an unusual thing and it happens around particular
people. I feel like I'm a different person in other people's presence, and I
was curious to try to get to it. And I thought if I looked at eminent
partnerships, places, you know, epic duos, whatever I was after existed in
the space between these people. So I thought about Watson and Crick who
co-discovered DNA in just a few years at Cambridge. George Balanchine and
his dancer Susan Farrell. Balanchine had many muses but this was his last
and many consider his greatest. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
who together laid the foundation for women's equality. They didn't live to
see it but they created the movement. And I began to continue with this
list. I thought if I looked at many, many partners I would get to the
converges, the common themes over and over again, but quickly I started to
ask myself questions because I thought about Vincent Van Gogh. I knew that
Theo Van Gogh was a presence in his story. There is a book called Dear Theo,
an autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh, most of what we know about Vincent
comes in letters that he wrote to Theo. Theo is also often described as
Vincent's supporter. As a common word used. And I thought, what is the
story with that relationship? And I began to ask myself about other
relationships. Martin Luther King, in his last speech, referred to Ralph
Abernathy as "my best friend in the whole world." And that was another
question mark. Albert Einstein, when he was in the patent office, arranged
for an engineer friend of his named Michele Besso to have a job there and
they would take long walks around lunchtime and Einstein said it was as
though the human contingencies did not exist on these walks. And so
suddenly, I began to see relational excitement operating in places where I
thought there had been a lone genius. And I encountered that over and over
again and now, suddenly, this idea to look at chemistry, which I knew was
exciting but I thought was an outlying phenomenon, I thought it was this very
unusual sort of peak experience phenomenon. It began to seem as though it is
in one way or another through many variations and manifestations underneath
the creative process constantly. And this really butts up against our
conception of creativity, our conception of history, our conception of
culture, which is very much a lone genius model. We read biographies. On
the cover of Fast Company, we see a single CEO profile. We have this idea
that creativity, especially these great epic things, arises from within an
unusual figure and one manifestation of this is actually really accurate is
drunk history.
>>: The War of 1812 happens. So when Brittain, when they arrived on the
shores, these British guys show up and they're like, awesome, like, no one is
here, so we'll just drop anchor and start trashing the place. While Dolly
and James were in the White House, they get word that, holy [beep], these
guys have landed and they're heading this way. So James Madison is, like,
you know what? I'm gonna get on a horse and I'm gotta go there and I'm gotta
be like, guess what? Knock, knock. President's here. And she's like, okay,
see you for dinner. James leaves. She stays in the White House while
everybody else in Washington was kind of being pussies and leaving. And
she's like, are holy [beep]. James just left on a horse. And the [beep]
going down. Like I can hear the cannons going off. I can hear the [beep]
happening. So Dolly was like show Washington that I'm not leaving. Everyone
else can be pussies and they can leave. I've got my spyglass and I'm just
going to be checking the [beep] out. I'm going to take care of everything.
>> Josh Shenk: Okay. That is hilarious, but also very much the way that we
tell stories with creative achievement or any kind of achievement. The drama
of the single actor. We think of the president riding off on his horse and
whether or not we're stone cold sober or 3 or 4 drinks in, that is the way
that we conceive history. And in fact, what I'm hearing to suggests, what I
saw over and over again, over five years of research, is that in one way or
another, relational connection is underneath everything. And when we see
that, we begin to see very many distinctions in relationships and there are
three fundamental types that I want to suggest. The first is the overt
partnership and this is what we think of when we think of collaboration, we
think of mat stone and tray Parker. We think of Lennon, McCartney and yes,
of course two people who are in the same room, who are both associated with a
common body of work, that is one place where this manifests. But there's
also the phenomenon of the hidden partner. You have someone who is out
front, who is very well known, and you have someone who is behind the scenes
or off to the side, perhaps like Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King.
Just barely off to the side, he was constantly there from the Montgomery bus
boycott, all the way to Memphis and the labor unrest that brought them there.
They were staying in a motel room that was known as the King/Abernathy suite
so often had they stayed there alone. There's another picture of King and
Abernathy, but of course King's roll in the partnership was to speak to the
cameras. He was the philosopher King. They chose him for good reason to be
the face of the movement. He had an elevated moral tone. He had a Ph.D.,
whereas Abernathy had a low sense of humor and was a canny strategist and he
was constantly at his partner's side. And yet, when the story is told, he is
written out of it. And then there is Theo Van Gogh. This is what we think
of -- and have thought of officially for many decades a self portrait by
Vincent of Vincent. It is now thought to be by scholars a portrait of Theo
Van Gogh. And the emergence of Theo into image is a metaphor for the way
that when you pay attention to Vincent Van Gogh's story, you begin to see him
not as an incidental supporter but really as a co-creator of that body of
work. And that's not me imposing a radical story line, that's me
paraphrasing Vincent Van Gogh, that his brother Theo was as responsible for
the works attributed to him as he was. So we have overt partners and hidden
partners and then there are also distinct partners. There are places where
two people who may be known separately from one another for distinct bodies
of work are actually influencing each other and connecting with each other
and competing with each other and critiquing each other and supporting one
another. And this also is extremely common. C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien
never coauthored anything significant. We know Tolkien for The Lord of the
Rings and Lewis for the Narnia books and many fine essays, but in fact, they
co-created a forum, this idea of the mythic parable soaked in Christian
imagery in a time when it was ludicrous to their colleagues at Cambridge and
they got together, they began meeting once a week together over lunch and
then they assemble a group around them called the inklings and they met every
week in this group and they read their work allowed to one another and
critiqued it and responded to it and were competing with each other. And
Tolkien said that for a very long time, Lewis was his only audience. You
also see this with Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe the same distant
partnership and very often, the people that we are most entwined with and
most connected with are where out there. Maybe they work at another company
if you're in business. But what we're after is that sense of excitement and
energy and heat that happens between people. There are also many different
ways that these relationships are structured. They may be asymmetrical. One
person may clearly work for the other or have a much smaller share of the
enterprise. That's the case with Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. Charlie
Munger is not only the hidden partner, he's also very much the junior partner
and yet, it is very clearly a partnership. Very often these relationships
are also subtle. As matter of a feeling that's evoked more than any name
that could be put on it. In fact, one the characteristics of these
partnerships is that it's very often hard to summarize what two people do for
each other. And the partnerships may also be serial. There may be many
partnerships. They may actually be parallel. There may be many partnerships
simultaneously as with me and my book editor, me and my literary agent, me
and my research assistant, but there also may be serial major partnerships
and at Microsoft is a great illustration of this. The company created, it
was a 13-year-old Bill Gates and I believe a 15-year-old Paul Allen. Another
major partnership between Gates and Ballmer. And this ongoing partnership of
the Gates Foundation between Bill and Melinda Gates. So now I had this -- I
was swimming in a sea of examples. And hundreds and hundreds of partnerships
and trying to look at whenever possible at the primary evidence actually what
people within the partnership said and did or what was observed of them by
people who were in the room with them or were in a position to know and I was
looking for the essential points. The thing that happened over and over
again and I did find these six major stages that each were connected to a
moment in the story. I tend to -- try to understand human experience through
stories because I think that that is a much truer way than the thin slice
that we often see in popular social science and it begins with this feeling
of chemistry or electricity, this excitement and it very often is immediate.
And it also may have anything on a continuum of industries in terms of the
way it makes us feel. Sometimes electricity is like being a little toy car
and you just don't have your battery and someone puts a battery in and you're
zooming across the floor. Very often feels that way to meet with someone and
connect with them. Sometimes it feels like you're getting an electric shock.
When Lewis and Tolkien first met, Lewis went home and wrote in his diary, "no
harm in the fellow, only needs a smack or so." And there's also a famous
story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin meeting and immediately braking out into
an argument and someone said that they were like two swords sharpening each
other. So electricity, it arouses us, it galvanizes us. It may not
necessarily feel good. And while electricity can happen in a moment, what
happens next is a much slower, longer, meandering process where two people
who may excite each other as individuals, slowly come to a kind of joint
identity. You have two I's who move into a "we." And that often actually is
a literal phenomenon. People begin to speak in the first person plural,
which is a good sign of this happening. Or you may veer back between the
first person plural and it's first person singular, which is an indication of
I don't know, is this our project, is this my project, is this your project?
Once you begin to have that question on your mind, you are in this -- you are
in the movement to join identity. I used the metaphor in the book of
confluence when two rivers flow together, and sometimes one absorbs the other
and it takes the name of the larger river as with the Ohio moving into the
Mississippi. Sometimes two rivers come together and it needles a new name
for an entirely new phenomenon and in fact, that is often the place where a
partnership needs a name. When there is a sense of being bound up together
which may be existential or it may be legal and again, in the history of
Microsoft, there's this moment when Gates and Alan moved to Albuquerque to
begin writing Basic and they all of a sudden they needed a partnership. They
needed to negotiate credit, ownership, and they also needed a name at that
moment and they began bantying about. Allen and Gates was their first idea
and then suddenly this document appears in legal agreement that is Paul Allen
and Bill Gates doing business as Microsoft. And a discussion over who owned
what. And this famous conversation where Gates insisted on 60 percent to
Allen's 40 percent. That is a moment of being a "we." The next stage is
rules. Now people have met each other, they've excited each other, they're
feeling this chemistry to begin with, and they've formed a joint unit.
Within that joint unit, there are often very profound distinctions. Again,
just as we think very narrowly about what electricity is and we only think
about collaboration, we tend to think that only two people in a room doing
the same thing more or less serving the same role like Lennon and McCartney
as songwriters. In fact, very often, one person's job is to be on stage.
Like Warren Buffett. He speaks to the world as the oracle of Omaha, whereas
Charlie Munger is off stage and advising and cajoling and he is the man
behind the scenes and that is an example of a dynamic that recurs over and
over again. We're familiar with the way that personality types that repeat
over and over become archetypes of personalities. The same is true of
relationships. There are certain relationship types that recur so often they
are like arc types and the arc type of the on stage person and the off stage
person, I call the star and the director. And that is a -- there is a
literal truth to it that one person is known and we can see them in the
spotlight and the other person is off stage and there's also an under current
of the energy where the director is the person who is calling the shots from
off stage and so with Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger you have Buffett's
famous quip that "Charlie does the talking, I just move my lips." The next
stage surprised me the most because I thought that once pairs were
interlocked and intertwined, that was really the end of the story. But it
turned out over and over again, pairs have to negotiate an optimal distance
from one another. They need to have enough time together and enough time
apart. The founders of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky, they came by this very naturally. One of them was a morning person,
the other one was a night person, and they would meet every day for lunch.
Sometimes it's much more extreme. You have writers who are in solitude for
months at a time before they show anything or may actually be in solitude
permanently like Emily Dickinson and there's a long discussion of the case of
Emily Dickinson in the book because what we mistake as isolation and
disengagement I think actually needs to be reread as a very deliberate and
quite canny and successful employment of distance. This is also a very live
topic. Susan Cain, in her book Quiet, has really lit a fuse and a
conversation about introverts and the particular needs of introverts in a
culture that is emphasizing collaboration. Very often these two things are
pitched against each other but, in fact, I see them as a kind of dance. In
other words, the introvert, yes, needs time alone and needs time to breathe,
maybe physically, maybe psychologically, maybe both, but also needs to have
someone to whom he or she can bring that work. Someone who is -- who you
know, at the end of this period of going into a cave, to come out into the
sunlight and to connect and that dialectic between solitude and connection
turns out to be very fundamental and also it's one of the reasons why the
pair's a very special unit because pairs can move so fluidly between solitude
and connection. One reason that pairs need to get enough space from one
another is that they need to rock back and like a boxer getting ready to take
a strike and tension, power struggles, even out right conflict that can be
very extreme is very fundamental to this story. Pairs begin with a great
deal of rapport and alignment and often shared values and often a great deal
of ease with one another but there's always some profound difference.
There's a different way of seeing the world, a different way of working. A
different body of knowledge, different background. And when they come
together, there is the -- there's the cliche of peanut butter and chocolate.
It just tastes better together and that is often true in these partnerships,
but the other cliche that applies is the oyster and the grain of sand, the
sense that someone is irritating you because you're never quite on the same
page but very often that is what drives people to do their best work. And
finally, we come to the end of the story and there's the question of why do
some pairs endure and why do others flame out? And of course tension often
brings people to a boiling point and the only way out is to get out of the
pot. This is the moment in the story where I really draw back the camera
because in my understanding of pairs who endure versus those who split up,
the real distinction is not a change in the dynamic, often the dynamic is
present at the beginning. John Lennon and Paul McCartney are a great
example. John was a swaggering, dominant presence, very associative and
poetic. Paul was great with form and structure and was also, though a very
dominant type himself, was willing to be the number two only to John Lennon,
really only to John Lennon his whole life. And there was both an enormous
amount of shared vision. They both had this ironic comedic style and they
both loved the same music and a radical difference in the way they saw the
world and there was a great deal of competition that was friendly and
otherwise and what happened towards the end of the Lennon/McCartney story is
not that their dynamic changed but that the world around them changed. They
had been managed decently well by Brian Epstein. They had this very reliable
third person, George Harrison who was a kind of a constant sense of support
to their song writing nucleus. He helped bring the band into being. Brian
Epstein died, George Harrison began to buck his role and also now, this world
in which these two men Lennon/McCartney had been primary to each other and
really the only people in each other's lives, in a very basic way, began to
shift as they were in their late 20s and began to think seriously about
forming serious partnerships with women. I want to turn to conversation with
you and I want to leave with you a couple of core points from the book.
Myths of interconnection. One very fundamental point is that we tend to have
this oppositional idea and it's natural to the human mind. We understand
things by pitting things against each other. So we think of the mind versus
the body. Of course, if we reflect on it a little bit, we know that the mind
and the body are interconnected and it's the same is true with solitude and
connection. The question is not whether we do our great work alone or
whether we do our great work with other people, but how we move back and
forth between these things. And finally, competition and cooperation. This
idea of going up against someone, challenging them, being critical, is not
necessarily at odds with trying to advance a common interest. And very often
in fact, it's the people who have the courage to step to each other and push
each other the hardest who are able to do the best work with each other. I
want to say just a little bit about how the dyad is relevant in the context
of teams because I know that is the sort of the root unit of many corporate
cultures and a root unit of cultures at Microsoft. Even when groups are at
play, dyads are often essential. The pair is the primary creative unit. And
I say that just based on sober logical research into creativity that finds
that critical advances even in the context of groups often happens within a
pair. And the impressionists, this was the case. In Monty Python, obviously
a group ethos was created, but they would pair off to do their writing in a
writer's room like mad men. You have a kind of collaborative, you know,
give-and-take with 8 or 10 people around a big table but then scripts are
assigned to individual writers who will work with the head writer. So very
often the dyad can function well within a team but also there can be dyads
that happen between groups of people so you may have a leader in relationship
to the group. And many of the principals of dyads can apply there too. And
that raises this -- brings us back to the critical dynamics that show up over
and over again in the book. There's this dynamic between the liquid and the
container, the person who is pushing out and trying to dream of something new
and the person who is paying attention to form and practicality that may
happen between two people. It may also happen between two factions and it's
worth noticing and paying attention to it because it can be extremely
generative. And finally, you know, the main thing people often ask me, can I
boil this down to a single lesson? And the word that recurs to me is
humility. Because to be pushed by someone to be drawn out of our skin, to be
drawn out of a place where we're comfortable, to be drawn into a place where
we're actually not even sure where the boundaries are, our individual self
end and our relationship to someone else begins is inherently uncomfortable
and it can be the source of enormous excitement and growth but it also can be
the source of enormous vexation and difficulty. And to have a humble
attitude towards it will allow us to cultivate it and bring more of it into
our lives. With that, I want to thank you very much for coming. I'm eager
to stay in touch with any of you who would like to be -- have more questions
and of course I'm glad to take your questions now.
[Applause].
>> Josh Shenk:
Yes, sir.
>>: So you talked about how the idea applies in organizational setups. You
know in most organizations you do have the team setup, the predominant one is
assigning one person to go lead the charge and like own discrete things
across the team. Each person owns a thing. We rarely think about two in the
box [indiscernible] ideas. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about,
you know, should organizations evolve to kind of apply this idea more
discretely in how they assign staff.
>> Josh Shenk: Yes. So what's an example, off the top of your head, of a
discrete task that someone would be sent off to do on their own.
>>: [Indiscernible] and it's usually made up of five individuals. Everybody
has different strengths. But the way it works allocated is every challenge
that five challenges are assigned to each one. Let's say teaming up two to
go take on a challenge.
>> Josh Shenk: Yes. Well, certainly the assignment to go off on one's own
and return to the group can be fruitful and generative. There's a reason
from that shows up over and over again. To some extent, I would think about,
is the nature of the work and the person who is going off to do that work
best suited for an individual in solitude, or is it best suited for a team?
Because very often, a team of two kind of going offer in a pod from the
mother ship is a more effective unit. For the purposes of song writing and
the Beatles, for the purposes of comedy writing in Monty Python, they would
get together, John and Paul and the Monty Python guys, these two teams, and
do all the things that are -- two people are very well suited to do. Hash
out ideas and long periods of silence and also going off from within that
pair and spending time alone and then bringing it back to the other. And I
would say it's worth looking at, at least because we are not in a position to
properly evaluate what pairs have accomplished in history because so much of
the DNA of pairs is effacing one member of it because so often one member of
a pair is a hidden partner, is off in some corner of history and the dots
don't get connected. Gandhi is this, you know, towering lone genius figure.
We think of him, you know, alone on his cane, sort of standing up to the
British Empire. Gandhi had a partner who was his ghostwriter, his chief of
staff, his constant companion, he kept his diary. There were texts that this
man, Mahadev Dcsai, wrote that Gandhi would make a single change to. He
would cross out Dcsai's initials at the end and write his own initials and
that is one of the few things we know and it's very telling because this
man's whole presentation in the story was erased and you could read a great
scholarly biography of Gandhi and learn very, very little about this man. I
alluded earlier to the relationship between Einstein and Michele Besso.
Besso is entirely -- I mean, he has virtually know presence in the Einstein
story and I'm not here actually in that case to tell you a story that has
been lost because it's irrecoverable. And there are many, many other places
and there was -- in the book where you can restore these relationships and
you can now evaluate work that we had previously thought as the province of a
lone individual, you know, as the product of a partnership. And so if we
don't think of two as a potent unit, it may be because in that instance, it's
not the best unit but it very well may be that we were -- we simply have not
appreciated the power of two. Yes, sir.
>>: Through your research and thinking that you've done about it, have you
observed any differences in the dynamic between partnerships where it's two
men versus two women versus a man a woman together.
>> Josh Shenk: Sure. Well, there are so many variations. They're gender
variations. They're -- some partners are brothers like the Coen brothers.
Some are married. Some of not married but sleeping together. People, you
know, they're fathers and sons. People who are actually dislike each other.
There's a whole discussion in the book of adversarial collaboration. Two
people actually trying to beat each other and yet in that heat, in that
energy, bring out the best in one another. And really do become partners.
The story that I tell to lead that section is Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.
They were literally trying to defeat the other and crush the other and took
pleasure in each other's suffering and all the while they really made each
other and they did together save the NBA. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse
are a similar story, and the relationship between Microsoft and Apple over
time is a story of co-opetition, competition and cooperation that are
conjoined. And I do have, you know, digressions where I pay attention to
these distinctions but I'm constantly trying to channel things back into
these common themes and so whether you have two women or two men or there's
an erotic charge, of course these are worth paying attention to and are
interesting, and yet it was really remarkable to me how often these same
basic themes emerge over and over again. And I will leave many of these sort
of subset discussions to people who I hope will follow on and continue this.
I mean, how much of this is a western phenomenon versus an eastern phenomenon
is very interesting but if you look at the cofounders of Sony and you look at
Gates and Allen, it's amazing how much the stories of people when they first
meet, there are these basic things that happen over and over again that we
can begin to recognize and integrate into our own lives as we think about
partnerships and you look at the roles people take on and on, the
reoccurrences were staggering.
>>: In your research, were you able to notice any sort of reoccurring themes
on how these pairs were able to find each other.
>> Josh Shenk: Yes, you know, it's so simple, it's almost ridiculously
simple but it's, you know, people tend to meet through similarities and they
tend to meet because someone introduces them and they're usually that
introducer usually has the point of simulator in mind so it's Curies first
met because Marie, who was not then Marie Curie but Marie Sklodowska, I
believe, needed a lab space and someone said, oh, well, you know, I know a
scientist, Pierre Curie, and perhaps he could be helpful to you. And they
were introduced. That is an extremely common story. Buffett and Monger,
Buffett went to pitch this doctor in Omaha and the guy was quite taken with
him and invested in him and it was a big deal and Buffett was a little bit
taken aback that the guy was so willing to take such a big risk on a very
young investor and he said, you remind me of Charlie Monger and that's why
I'm going to invest in you. And then that family set those two guys up to
meet. So introductions. And then the other term that shows over and over
again is magnet places. People who are drawn by their similar interests to a
shared space. John and Paul were both drawn into the music world and Paul
came out to hear this band, the Quarrymen, that John Lennon was in and they
began to excite each other. Schools, companies, places where you go because
you want to do something very specific, that's where it happens. And very
often it's worth thinking about that as the foundation. It is literally the
foundation for many pairs but then on top of that, on top of that
commonality, that's where it's sense of difference and opposition comes into
play. So you want to go to turn this into a self-help point, you want to
think about the people that you have a profound amount of commonality with
but then on top of that sense of almost being like identical twins, you want
to look for the person who is so strange, it's like they're a member of a
different species and the person who on top of that feeling of great rapport
and alignment, the person who really pushes you and maybe even shocks you
with the way they come from a totally different place. Yes, Amy.
Amy Draves: Got a question from online. He says, I'm interested in your
thoughts about novelist coauthors. For example, Michael Dorris and Louise
Bergerick claimed that they each left their work and open to the other to
co-write which I think would cause total insanity.
>> Josh Shenk: Yes. So that is a really interesting example of two writers
who in a week co-wrote all their work, although they also fell into very
distinct roles. One would bring and idea to the other and they would hash it
out and then the other would go off and write an outline or write a draft and
that would -- then it became Doris's book, in quotes are Bergerick's work and
they were not actually co-writing a lot of the time in the technical sense of
having both their names on the book. And so even within this place of
immense fluidity, they did fall into roles and that is how the kind of you
know, what would strike the asker of the question as a kind of madness and a
kind of chaos, it resolves into some kind of form by the things that people
do repeatedly and the patterns that they fall into. And writers, I mean, I'm
very interested in this because I am a writer and people think it's quite odd
and they often say, well, didn't you, you know, isn't it strange that you
wrote this book alone? I think people often think it's a little bit
hypocritical and I say, well, my name is the only name on the cover. I am
the author. That is my role. I'm here to talk to you. I did sit in front
of a computer screen for many years. But I had an editor who was a
co-creator of the book who is fulfilling his role, who is now somewhere in
his Office in New York City tending to other books but also tending to the
aspects of production and marketing and distribution who respond today my
text and who was the -- I would initiate and he would critique. So very
often -- and this is also a classic case of a hidden partner and also a star
and a director. I'm the star in the sense that I am associated with this
body of work. He is the director in the sense that he actually is a lot of
the times telling me what to do. And then I'm shouting back at him and we're
getting into the tension stage. Yes.
>>:
Is there stuff you can do to thing strengthen one of these partnerships.
>> Josh Shenk: Definitely. You know, that is often the -- my experience
of -- in my own life and also talking to people is there is a kind of
awakening in contacting with this material to how important and valuable this
stuff is, to what it can do for us and also to the way that it's operating in
our lives often in ways that we haven't fully articulated to ourselves or
recognize -- and I think the book as a kind of frame around experience that
often gives a language and vocabulary for things that we are already
experiencing but may not have fully recognized and along with naming things,
there is a sense of I think often implicit instruction. So the tricky thing
is that that instruction is kind of a series of paired opposites so I
wouldn't tell you, not knowing anything about the partnerships operating in
your life, that you need to enhance your role distinctions. It may be that
you're in a partnership where you have gotten a little rigid in your roles
and you're not in enough play and one guy is the marketing guy and the other
guy is the engineer and you're holding on to those identities a little bit
too tightly. If that's the case, then two people paying attention to the -the rule is clarity and fluidity and so if you find yourself a little rigid,
you may need more fluidity. If you find yourself overly fluid like man,
we're here and we're doing this thing together, but I don't know what you're
doing, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what my identity is in this
or what you're identity, I don't even know how we can be accountable to each
other because it's all so vague, well, then, maybe you need to define roles.
And that is very often a strengthening moment for relationships. The same
with tension and conflict. A lot of times people have just gone way too far.
They're at each other's throats. It's miserable and they don't want to be in
each other's lives and a lot of times people will break up in that moment
when in fact there's an enormous amount to learn from the tension that
emerges and stepping back can be very helpful and say, okay, well, you know,
why am I so threatened by this? The opposite point may be true too, that you
are too polite. That you don't want to hurt someone's feelings. You don't
want things to be unpleasant and then I think it's worth paying attention to
the history of innovation, including the history of this company. And
there's a lot of unpleasantness. There's a lot of pushing and a lot of
shouting and I'm not saying that that's necessarily -- that's not the only
style that works. And you do have people who work together all the time and
they're really -- they don't report much overt conflict but it's also true
that overt conflict is -- shows up over and over again and sometimes needs to
be engaged. I had a great deal of overt conflict with my editor towards the
end and I talk about it in the epilog of the book and the irony is that he
revealed to me only a couple weeks ago when we did an event together, I quote
this e-mail he sent me which is one of the most brutal communications I've
ever gotten telling me, you know, I had to finish the book or else, and
eviscerating my performance up to that moment and he told me that he was
actually inspired by the material of the book to send that e-mail, that he
was having these thoughts and he was furious at me and he really thought I
did not get the way that being slow on the book was affecting him, affecting
his colleagues, affecting all his other authors. And he sat down and he
wrote this -- he got into his -- the highest dungeon he could get into and he
wrote me this note. And that is often helpful too. There's a kind of
honesty and a kind of respect in bringing your toughest stuff to your
partner.
>>: Do you see patterns where the more productive a partnership was or a
powerful, to use your title, the sharper the relief when it ended, when
partnerships ended.
>> Josh Shenk:
When you say relief --
>>: When those partnerships ended, were they more abrupt or sharper? Was
there [indiscernible] between that and how productive they were or not
necessarily.
>> Josh Shenk: Certainly it's true that from great heights, there are great
falls. From great alignment, there is great enmity within partnerships and
afterwards. And the story that runs through the book, I return to it over
and over again, because it illustrates the theme so perfectly and because I
just love the music is the Beatles and Lennon and McCartney and it's mythic,
the breakup between them and we all feel like we know it and yet, the story
is much deeper and more gnarled in that, as I pointed out, the real drama had
not do so much with the dynamic between them as a way that that dynamic
became exacerbated by the changing conditions in their lives. But then, the
next piece of the story is to say well, then, what actually happened? And I
have a chapter towards the end where I say why did Lennon and McCartney split
and then the next chapter is did Lennon and McCartney split? And the
argument of the chapter is that in the sense of ceasing work together, yes,
there is a moment when they were in the studio together for the last time.
They had their last writing sessions and whatnot. You could say their
relationship was no longer functioning as a creative relationship after that.
But in the sense of being disengaged from one another, being uninterested in
one another, losing that sense of competitive spark with one another, losing
a desire to create with one another again, that never ended. And in fact,
John and Paul, they ceased work together in the late 60s but -- there was a
great deal of nastiness in the early 70s But as early as 1972, 1973, there's
a real interest in them working together again and for a variety of reasons
it never happened but John Lennon in 1980 began talking openly to the people
he was closest with about going back into the studio with Paul and writing
songs together with him and hoping that George would come along because at
that point George was the holdout. And this was shortly before Lennon's
assassination. So had Lennon lived, we might tell that story in a very
different way. I'm not sure I'm totally getting to your question, but I
think ->>: I just think about like probably one of the most productive partnerships
I had in a work environment where we produced a lot of real good quality
things, really kind of went through that fire together, once that ended, like
I haven't spoken to that person in years.
>> Josh Shenk:
I see, yeah.
>>: Well, so I was wondering if that's unusual or just another example. I
think it's because someone who went through like these battles and then it
was over and it was like, it was so much, it was like that was ->> Josh Shenk: Yeah. No, that resonates with what I've seen and it -- you
know, I think it -- it draws on a central point which is how do you
characterize a sublime or even a high functioning or even a very good
creative relationship and what are the criteria. And in some ways it
resonates with friendships and with romantic relationships even and it brings
out our best and so forth. But there's a sharp distinction because romantic
relationships and friendships, you know, the real test is how does it feel?
And do you enjoy it, whereas the test of creative work is what is the quality
of the work? And whether you love each other or really dislike each other or
anything in between, if the work is great, then the relationship is high
functioning. And it is often the case that people, you know, it's hard to be
in that space and people do need a release from it. And it can be -- once
you're out, it's hard to be in any kind of middle ground because it wasn't a
middle ground to begin with and a lot of times these tensions last years and
years. I was just re-watching the 60 minutes interview that Allen did when
his book came out, The Idea Man, and it has these very kind of harsh things
to say and is reporting a harsh reality of his partnership with Gates and she
says, well, have you talked to him about it? No. We haven't talked about
it. You know, do you think you will? I think we will and I think -- it will
probably be pretty heated. So I kind of thought watching that maybe they
won't. Sometimes when you are in one of these very heated partnerships, it's
not the kind of thing you can go to couples therapy for. It's not the kind
of thing that you sit down over coffee and hash out in a friendly way.
Sometimes it's too intense. Yes, ma'am.
>>:
So the power of two, do you think it would work for like three people.
>> Josh Shenk: Thanks for that question because it really is essential. I
began this project thinking about chemistry and so that naturally drew me
into thinking about two people because it was a natural unit. But as I began
to see relationships underneath so much creativity and innovation, that
raised the question, well, what is unusual about a pair and that became an
important part of the project to draw that out because there is this repeated
sense, this repeated finding that an unusual amount of creativity does happen
in a pair. Very often companies will have a team of founders but you can
zero in on the nucleus which comes down to a pair a lot of times a three some
will jettison a member of that founding team. A lot of times, when there's
apparently a three some or a four some, you know, it takes a little digging
but you can find that nucleus within. And there are certain reasons why the
pairs are an unusual unit. It is the smallest possible social unit. So you
can create a whole world with another person that you can't quite do in your
mind. As a small child, locked in a gaze with a caregiver, that becomes your
reality. Thinking is literally a download of external exchanges between a
child and an adult and at a certain point -- this is obviously a simplistic
metaphor, but it is -- it does represent psychological thinking now, that
more or less becomes downloaded into the mind and those exchanges become what
we call thinking. The pair is also a unit where people can be playing roles
and then can switch roles so one person could be initiating, can be dreaming,
can be brainstorming and the other can be responding, critiquing and then
they can flip. If you had a third person to that dynamic, what you get, the
benefit is structure and stability. People are going to tend to fall into
roles that reoccur over and over again and that can be extremely valuable.
Especially if you're trying to build something that endures. But it becomes
less flexible. It becomes more rigid. And this dance between solitude and
connection, which is so fundamental to creativity, is harder in a group. If
you think about a room with three people in it, and you leave, you have left
the group. It may be something very simple. You have just gone to lunch and
they're continuing on. You have made a choice. That group exists and you
are out of it. If you're working with one person and you break, now you have
two people who are in solitude. And that just in some ways very subtle,
whether you add that a third person or a fourth person, but it's actually
quite profound and that's the reason why you see people returning to diads
over and over again. It's the reason why John and Paul, who were very much
in a trio with George and actually at one point the name of the Beatles was
JAPAGE, the first few letters of their names, and they thought, when they
really got going, shall we include George as part of the song-writing team?
And they -- I don't know if they were applying any principles of pair
dynamics to the decision but it's telling that they decided against it. They
maintained the dyad as the core unit and John said Paul and me were the
Beatles. You see that over and over again. And it's not been attended to
just to say very briefly. You have a lot of discussion of creativity of the
province of the lone genius. You have a lot of discussion of teams and
networks and cultures. There's a mass of business literature on this. You
have very, very little material on the pair. And it's hugely under attended
to and it's under attended to in part because it takes us into things that
are inherently complex and inherently dialectical which is a fancy word for
talking about the way two things come together and form a third. But it call
on us to work with contradiction and paradox and ambiguity which is often,
you know, uncomfortable for people who are trying to systematize and
rationalize something and a lot of the business literature is trying to do
that, you know, apply some kind of framework that you can use over and over
again and relationships are not -- they're more subtle and delicate. There
are certain principles that apply but you have to be living it and be present
in it in order to do your best within it. Yes?
>>: I wonder if you touched on or did you discover in your research any
parallels between sort of the theory of the bicameral minds and sort of
talking to yourself.
>> Josh Shenk:
>>:
Yes.
Or the voice in your head versus the exterior voice of a partner.
>> Josh Shenk: Yes. Yes, this is one of my favorite pieces of discovery.
And that when we look at creative thinking, because of course, an enormous
amount does happen when you're walking on the beach or when you're swimming
or walking.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, this great psychologist, the creator of the idea of
flow, and wrote a seminal book on creativity gave pages to lots of creative
people and pinged them and had them report what they were doing at the random
moment that he had pinged them and it turned out that walking and I believe
swimming was second and so this sense of being in a rhythm, often being in
solitude, the sort of the beach stroll is the iconic indicator of that. We
all have this experience and it's extremely common and then the question
becomes what's actually happening in that space? What's happening to Paul
Simon when he writes a song? What's happen to Rilke when he is, you know,
is -- has a poem almost appears to him as an external entity and what you see
over and over again is again a dialogical phenomenon. You see a dyad
happening and the dyad here is inside the creative mind is a sense of a
receiving presence and a sense of a generating presence. And if you pay
attention, people really struggle with how to describe this. They may talk
about the unconscious. They may talk about a muse. Usually these days,
metaphorically, but they're trying to represent this sense of an internal
conversation. And you can contrast that to two extremes. One is the extreme
of kind of being frozen and there's just kind of a white noise in your head
and the other is experience of many, many voices. Well, you could try this
but what about this or how about this? Neither tends to be creative. Of the
creative moment is when you -- an idea presents itself and it somehow, you
are regarding it as though on a screen. Or hearing it as though a voice is
speaking it into your ear. And I know as a writer, those are the finest
sentences that appear in that way and that has a great deal in common with
the kinds of dynamics that are embodied in pairs and so the pair is not
just -- it doesn't just actualize creativity. It also becomes a model with
which we can think about things both inside our head and within teams and
within organizations and even within cultures. You can think about the ways
that the dialogue happened to further creativity or to disrupt it. Yes?
>>: There's a fair amount of work around pair programming and how two
programmers work together and their body of code gets to a piece of quality
faster than two individual programmers.
>> Josh Shenk:
Yes.
>>: Do you think that there's organizations in human resources where they're
actually thinking about saying, you know, when I set up my goals this year,
I'm going set them up -- I can work -- I choose to work on my own or I can
choose to team up with somebody and my goals are -- we're a pair and our
goals are tied together. Are there companies that are thinking about those
kind of things.
>> Josh Shenk: The pair is still largely neglected and largely obscured.
That example of paired programmers, I have heard of but it's presented as a
kind of oddity. The root unit in most corporate cultures is the team still.
And when people are called on in cultures to deal with interpersonal
dynamics, it often feels extremely exotic. I know someone who is a high
level consultant who works with CEOs and COOs at a moment of breakdown for
instance and she comes in and begins to apply certain basic principles and
she says people are always very uncomfortable and they always make the joke,
is this like couples therapy at work? Just seems really out of place. And
because so many things arise, we tend to think we ought to separate our
feelings as people and our petitnesses and our jealousies and our desires
that are not work-related from whatever we're doing at work, but in fact,
it's extremely porous, especially when we're doing creative work where we
need to bring our whole soul to what's in front of us. And he is when we get
into conflict. There's a cliche that when you're in conflict, separate -make these very neat distinctions between what's relevant and what's not.
But the very physiology of conflict is going to break down those barriers and
what these psychologists call hot topic, that you're going least able to do
that in these moments of high tension and so in order to think about how
pairs function well together, we need to have conversations about emotions
and we need to have conversations about dynamics that are not strictly
rationale. But I do think that there's a future for this and a lot of my
work is to represent these stories and you know, it's pretty intense the
feedback I'm getting. I met with a guy who I won't name, it wasn't on the
record, but he is the, you know, second guy in a piece of culture that is
known all over the world. A major, major, major piece in the culture and he
is the hidden partner very well respected and acknowledged of course in his
field. Very well treated and very happy in his work but he told me, I always
thought that collaborating was the easy way out. I knew I was good at it. I
knew I do my best in concert but I always had a sense that one day, maybe I
would do something on my own and if I did, then I would really have done
something creative and if I didn't, well, then it's okay what I've done. And
he was really thunder struck by this material and at one point we had lunch
together and he raised his hand and he said, I'm not ashamed anymore. And he
began to think, well, maybe doing something on his own would not be going
off, you know, into a cave somewhere. Maybe it would be identifying another
partnership he was a senior partner and he could be calling the shots and
actually enacting much of the same dynamics that he enacts in his present
role. That is -- that's happening a lot. People who are actually running a
business together are coming up to me with sort of their eyes, you know, kind
of wide open and they never -- they never thought about -- of course they
knew that the CEO and the other person, the COO or whatever they understand
these mechanic it's but they never thought about this as a relationship in
this mythic way. And never thought about it as something that deserves a
great deal of attention and respect and thinking and where there's certain
things that happen over and over again, that you may, when you're in the
midst of it say, well, this just sucks. A friend of mine who runs a business
has a guy who is his trusted deputy, who he has done great work with but has
always been the number two to my friend who has always been the number one
and this number two guy is like, I gotta do something on my own, I gotta be
the lead guy, and it's kind of tragic because they, neither one, can do as
well without the other. And when you're in the midst of this, you may think
you're all alone. In fact, that is an extremely common dynamic. It doesn't
fix it to know that it's common but at least allows you to get some
perspective and distance and say, okay, we're playing this -- we're playing
out something has happened from the beginning of time. And we're, you know,
if we're encountering problems, it's not a sign of a partnership being
problematic, very often encountering problems is a sign that you are doing
the work of partnership and that's the moment to dig in. And to carry on
with whatever the work at hand is.
Amy Draves:
I think we have time for one more.
>> Josh Shenk:
Okay.
>>: [Indiscernible] on people coming together voluntarily [indiscernible]
programming for example, it might be mandated, like I work for some company
where it was mandated to [indiscernible] program.
>> Josh Shenk: Right. The arranged marriage versus the romantic model of
love. I do think that the chemistry which is where this begins is -- it's
animal. We don't fully understand why people arouse us and why we feel a
certain level of comfort. I have identified certain patterns in the book and
there are certain sort of discrete lessons to draw, things that happen
repeatedly, but on some level, it's ineffable. And my best understanding of
how to have more of it in my life is to come into an awareness of it. I
mean, I find the way that I speak, the way that I think shifts sometimes
subtly, sometimes dramatically, according to who I'm in relationship with.
And when I am my best self, and when I'm most fluid, it's often on a needle,
you know, this sort of the needle points here towards empty, just dead
inside. I simply cannot communicate with this person. Or the opposite
extreme is, you know, I'm like a Lamborghini with this person. And you know,
very often, it's in the middle and learning to pay attention to that, I think
is extremely important and really does tend against a kind of arranged
marriage model though does not necessarily mean you can't do a kind of
speed-dating model where you give people create an environment where people
get to have lots of little experiences with one another and you see how good
is the work, what's it like for them to be within it. I think actually, just
throwing people together, you know, because something makes sense on paper, I
mean, it may be a decent place to start, but if you're not paying attention
to their internal experience and the actual output, and you think that the
paper qualifications are enough to make that match, I think is really
problematic. It just negates -- you know, it negates agency and idiosyncrasy
and passion and desire and all these things that may not be hugely valued by
organizational managers but as creative people, we know that's the soul of
the machine.
Amy Draves:
Josh, thank you.
>> Josh Shenk:
[Applause]
Thank you.