>> Kirsten Wiley: So good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley, and I'm
here today to introduce and welcome Eric Liu, who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft
Research visiting speaker series.
Eric Liu is here today to discuss Imagination First: Unlocking the Power Of of
Possibility.
This book introduces us to a wide variety of individuals who have learned how to make a
habit of imaginative thinking and creative action.
When imagination becomes a habit, it can transform your work and your life.
Imagination First offers a set of universal practices that anyone can use to transform their
life at work, at home, and at play.
With stories drawn from the lives of leaders, teachers, scientists, artists and other diverse
professionals, Imagination First is a guide for practitioner of a possibility at any scale
and in any sector.
Eric Liu is the founder of the Guiding Lights Network, dedicated to mindful and
imaginative mentorship. His previous books include Guiding Lights: How to Mentor
and Find Life's Purpose, the official book of National Mentoring Month; The Accidental
Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, a New York Times notable book; and the national
bestseller The True Patriot, which he coauthored with Nick Hanauer.
A former White House speechwriter and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, Eric is
now an educator and civic entrepreneur in Seattle.
Please join me in welcoming Eric Liu to Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Eric Liu: Thank you very much, Kirsten, and I want to thank all of you for making it
out this afternoon. This is -- it's really lovely to get back to the Microsoft campus. I
didn't get to tell you about this, but about, boy, 13, 14 years ago, I spent a lot of time on
the campus as Slate Magazine and MSNBC were getting launched, and spent a summer
living in Redmond and spent a lot of time here. So it's always -- whenever I see the
Azteks, I pull off of 520, I'm like, ah, I'm back home. So it's a nice, friendly feeling.
But I just wanted to give you a little bit of roadmap of what I wanted to speak about this
afternoon, and I'll try to keep my comments fairly compact so we can just have a good
give and take and a conversation here for the balance of the time.
As Kirsten mentioned, this new book that I've written that I think a number of you have
had a chance to at least get if not read is called Imagination First. My coauthor, a fellow
named Scott Noppe-Brandon, is the executive director of the Lincoln Center Institute,
which is the outreach and education arm of the great performing arts center, Lincoln
Center in New York.
And we came together in collaboration in ways that I think themselves instantiate why we
think imagination matters.
A previous book of mine, Guiding Lights, about great, life-changing mentors, has yielded
now every year in January a national gathering, a conference called the Guiding Lights
Weekend that we hold at Seattle Center. It's actually coming up January 29th and 30th
this year. And it's a very playful, experiential conference on the art of mentorship,
leadership and community building.
And the spirit of that conference is meant to really infuse play into this work. And to
remind folks that the art of mentoring is as much art as anything else and that the work of
mentoring itself at the core is about cracking open someone else's sense of possibility and
imagination about what they can do, what they can be, how they move in the world, what
they're capable of.
And it was through the Guiding Lights Weekend that we began to collaborate with the
folks at Lincoln Center, because they in their own parallel path as a great performing arts
center were trying to think about, okay, we in the arts get imagination, but how can we
start fostering conversations outside of just the arts, about the role and the centrality of
imagination, to a vibrant, healthy, diverse society.
And so they began looking all around the country for partners they could play with who
could spark just these kinds of conversations that really bridged the gap from a
self-selected crowd of folks within the arts to other domains and professions.
That's how we began to collaborate around Guiding Lights Weekend. And the more we
collaborated, the more we realized that there was something here that needed to be done
first. And that was just to define terms and explain to folks in the first place why we
think imagination matters.
And so the three chunks of stuff that I'd like to talk about this afternoon are just the what,
the why, and the how of this book and of imagination.
The what and what we mean when we say imagination is something very specific. We
don't mean it just in a generalized, interchangeable sense with innovation, with creativity
and so forth. That's the way in which I think a lot of people, when they hear that word,
it's just lumped together in this kind of broad, you know, net of concepts.
But the reason why the book is titled Imagination First is that we've got a point of view
that says that these three things -- imagination, creativity, and innovation -- are actually
distinct and they're part of a continuum; that imagination, if you define it as a capacity to
conceive of what is not, to conceive of what is not, you know, that's the foundation of
everything.
That's where everything starts, that ability, both cognitive and emotional/psychological,
to go where people aren't going, to ask what people aren't asking, to imagine what is not,
to conceive of what is not.
Imagination applied, when you do something with that cognitive and social/emotional
capacity, that's creativity.
And then creative acts, which can run an incredible gamut, if those creative acts
themselves somehow advance the state of the art, move the ball forward, that's
innovation. Right? .
Now, in American life, you know, at Microsoft and in the business world, in academia, in
research, everywhere you go, we love to worship at the alter of innovation. We want
innovation now. We want to celebrate innovation. Where's the next innovation. We
want to find it. We want to celebrate, we want to highlight it.
But to simply focus on innovation like that and to wish for it to kind of pop up and show
up is like hoping for fruit to appear without the seed. And this we think is a problem
that's endemic, it's across the business world.
I spend a ton of my time in Washington State on public education. I serve on the state
Board of Education. I'm cochairing the Seattle school levy right now. And education,
same kind of thing, you know, we want results, we want accountability, we want
innovation. But we don't particularly tend to the garden of imagination. We don't tend to
the ways in which these habits of this capacity get formed. That's the what.
Well, why? Why does this matter? You know, in our view, this is not just some abstract
ontological, philosophical discussion about defining terms and making these distinctions
and whatnot. Right? To us it matters centrally.
I mean, I think I'm preaching to the converted here. Here we are at Microsoft in Building
99 in the home of Microsoft Research. People out in the world can say, well, this place is
a -- you know, it's an operating system machine so they're just printing money, right,
because Windows is out there and they don't have to do anything.
Well, you, everybody in this room knows that's not true; that this company, as great as it
is, is only going to be great for another generation to the extent that imagination is
cultivated here, that that imagination gets turned into creativity, and that that creativity
yields some innovation, whether it's in Microsoft Research or just in your day-to-day
practices of how you do any of your jobs in any part of this organization.
But take it up one level. It's not just Microsoft; it's our economy general. Nationally.
You know, what -- if you think about the American economy, and if you think about
Washington State's economy in particular, there is one thing that at the end of the day, no
matter how much globalization, no matter how much outsourcing, no matter how much
tech infuses itself into the processes of commerce, one thing that cannot be outsourced,
and that is our native capacity for imagination.
And so if we want as a state and as a country to retain a competitive advantage and
watching the ways in which slice after slice of the salami of economic work gets
outsourced, right, you realize there is a core here that can't be given away.
But at the same time, it is not automatically self-generating or self-renewing. We have to
be mindful and intentional in every institution and organization that we're in, whether it's
in the world of business, in the world of education, in the world of parenting, in the world
of mentoring, which I spend a lot of time on, we have to be intentional about how we
cultivate imagination.
It matters when you think about particularly the next generation. I'm a parent. I have a
daughter who's in fifth grade right now. And some of you may know, if you spend time
with anybody who's ten, you know, ten is one of those years where that metamorphosis
begins to happen, you know, the shift from this incredibly open, nonboundary-drawing,
nondistinction-making child full of wonder to an eye-rolling teenager, right, who's
making judgments constantly and who's making judgments about her judgments and
who's putting things into categories and boxes and assigning things to their proper place.
Right?
And as I watch that I think, okay, well, part of that is a necessary aspect of socialization
and growing up. And part of it is a darn shame. Right? Part of it is just a darn shame.
And as a parent my responsibility is to try to for as long as I possibly can in as sustained a
way as I possibly can to hold that thread of that wide-eyed wonder and that sense of awe
and possibility and boundarilessness.
And it's not to say that we as working adults, people with responsibilities, can or ought to
just be frivolous and childlike in a pejorative way. Every one of us would do well. And
Microsoft as an organization would do great to the extent that each one of you gets to be
more childlike in your mindset, in your approach, in the way you play together, in the
way you either draw lines or don't draw lines.
And so, you know, it matters for how we raise the next generation. That's a huge part of
the why.
Well, the book itself, Imagination First, has a front piece that is about this kind of what
and why and a little short essay that just frames up the issue.
But the heart of this book is 28 1/2 practices that Scott and I have drawn from all these
different domains and realms, as Kirsten was saying, from the arts, from science, from
diplomacy, from politics, from the sports world, from the media business. Whatever. All
these practices that people use to cultivate imagination. And that's the how.
And we have a theory of action here, which I think is worth making explicit, which is that
imagination, contrary to one of the myths that I think a lot of people, just folk wisdom,
hold, imagination is not one of those things that either you've got it or you don't. Right?
If you just walk out on the street and just ask people, kind of confront them and say what
do you think about imagination, are you an imaginative person, chances are, oh, no, that's
not me, I'm not one of those types. You know, I know some imaginative people, but
that's not my thing, I do X or I do Y instead, or I'm good at this thing. But imagination is
not really my gig.
And part of our underlying point here is that imagination is everybody's gig. Right? This
is a native, innate, human capacity. Now, it's not developed equally in all of us, and in
some cases it's quite squelched. And we operate in environments that either reward or
don't reward imagination. But it is not a thing where -- you know, a magic fairy dust
that's been sprinkled on some and not on others. We all have it.
And if you recognize that we all have this capacity, then it becomes not just of academic
interest, it becomes almost a moral obligation to think about, well, then how do I develop
it. If I have it, if my child has it, if my coworker has it, if my boss has it, if my
subordinates have it, not cultivating it, this act of omission, is nearly criminal. Right? .
And one of the other myths that obtains about imagination is that it's not teachable. So
you might get -- you know, come along with me as far as I've gone and say, okay, I get
that everybody has imagination, but, you know, how do you actually cultivate it in
somebody else, how do you lead people or manage people or mentor people in a way that
cultivates and develops their imagination. Is that possible.
And our point of view is that absolutely, yes, it is possible and absolutely, yes, it is
necessary. That the web of things that we call imagination, that our, as I say, partly
intellectual, partly emotional, partly dispositional can be broken down in so many ways
to sets of habits. Habits of the heart and habits of the mind.
Now, it doesn't mean that you can just bottle it and, you know, that I've got -- that in the
book here, you know, you can take an imagination vitamin and have it and you're good.
Right? But it does mean that it is reducible to a set of habits, or the word that we choose
to use in the book, practices.
Practice. Right? When you think about in so many other domains in our lives. Sports,
right? Sure, there are people out there who are born, just born free-throw shooters or
born to hit a baseball or born to throw or to catch a football. But it's only through
practice that that inborn ability actually turns into something. And in the sports world we
accept that without blinking. Of course practice matters. Right?
I played violin as a kid and, yes, I was pretty good at it naturally from the start, I
understood it, it spoke to me, I could get it, but it was only through practice. There are
people we know, there are people in this room probably who are deeply soulful
practitioner of meditation, of religious reflection, spiritual reflection.
Well, there too, it's not simply that you were blessed from the outset with a capacity for
clarity, but practice has mattered. In meditation in any form, it is literally about practice.
In yoga, in physical as well as emotional and spiritual flexibility, these things come with
practice.
And yet in the realm of imagination and creativity, we don't often acknowledge that that,
too, is a realm where practice matters and practice can move the dial. But it is.
And our willingness to be mindful and intentional about practice, not only to be
disciplined, but to be voracious, kind of omnivorous about looking at different people in
different places and saying might there be a practice here that I could borrow, might there
be some something that I could take and fold into my practice and synthesize. That that
mindset is itself a thing that we lose as we glow up, quote/unquote. And that we wrote
this book in part to really rewind that particular imaginative aging process.
So as I say, the heart of the book are these 28 1/2 practices. And, you know, when we get
into conversation, we can talk about some of them. But just to give you a quick taste of
two or three of them so that you know what it is that I'm talking about here.
You know, one of the practices that we have in the book is called hoarding bits, around
this comes from a variety of people, but I was down in California and spent a whole
chunk of time with the Disney Imagineers, the team of folks there -- actually, quite a
large group of folks who are responsible for conceiving of and executing every new
Disney experience. And, you know, like working at Microsoft or Microsoft Research, it's
a pretty cool environment.
And spending time with some of these imagineers who are designing the next theme
park, designing the next interactive experiences at Disneyland or Disney World, one
thing that -- one common theme that arose was the extent to which these people were
literally in terms of their physical -- the physical layout of their offices and their
workspace, but also mentally incredible packrats.
They were hoarded bits. Everywhere they went, there was a little thing, oh, I don't know
what this is, but I kind of like the way this little umbrella looks. Oh, I love that logo over
here. Oh, what a cool little windup toy over here. Oh, what a funny little poster this is.
Oh, that little bit of a song I heard there, I love the rhythm there, I'm going to save that as
an MP3.
And all this stuff where, you know, you go into their offices and it's just this -- some of
you may know back in medieval or times prior to medieval times, in either preliterate
societies or in a lot of religious environments where there were great, detailed bodies of
knowledge to learn and to memorize without the benefit of having easy access to a
laptop, to a book even.
The way that people in those days, one way that they kind of sharpened their capacity for
memory was to build what was then called memory palaces in their mind, right, and
literally to imagine in their mind a building in which over here in the east wing of the
building is all the stuff that I know about medicine. And over here in the north wing of
the building is all the stuff that I know about geography and the village that I live in and
the land that I'm in. And over here in the south wing of the building, of the palace, is all
the stuff that I've ever learned about botany and about the natural world and so forth.
And over here is all the kind of ancient epics and poems that my culture and my tradition,
you know, impart to me. And they had this incredible ability in that oral culture to
construct these memory palaces.
Well, folks like the Disney imagineers that I spent time with have memory palaces both
in their heads and in their offices. And the beauty and the power of them constructing
this kind of crazy packrat environment is not simply that they kind of can't bear to part
with some of these little items and bits, but that it sits there as this kind of dormant
vibrating repertoire from which to continuously make random new connections.
And so they'll be sitting there as they think about trying to solve problem X, right, and
problem X might be, you know, how do we carve this path from, you know, this ride to
that ride at Disneyland Tokyo. Right? It can be something very mundane and prosaic
like that.
But as they're sitting there kind of banging their head on a wall trying to figure that one
out, they're sitting in their room and they suddenly see this object here and it lights up an
idea. And then they turn over here and then they see this sign over here, and it lights up
another idea.
It is the physical instantiation of the ways in which our neural nets themselves light up in
the ways in which we make associations and connections.
And if you think about in the realm -- a different realm altogether of kind of imagination
applied, think about a great standup comic, right? Robin Williams. Right? You watch
Robin Williams do something, you turn on his famous YouTube video clip about golf,
right, and he's riffing on golf and he's going ping, ping, ping, all these different places,
and you're like, how does it? He's insane. Right?
But the thing is, what makes Robin Williams a genius is not that he's able to make
connections, he's a genius because he can make connections really fast. Right? But the
way that he's able to make connections in the first place is he, too, is a voracious hoarder
of bits everywhere he goes.
And he's got an incredible capacity to fill up a repertoire with little observations, you
know, Seinfeld-ian, Robin Williams-ish observations about the world we live in. And
then he's able, because of practice, to randomly and very speedily access those bits and
make unseen connections between them. Right?
That practice of just trying always to make sure what bits you're surrounded with and
then trying to figure out new ways to make new connections across them is something
that you see in domain after domain.
Another practice that I'll just say a word about just to get your juices flowing is a practice
called challenging your challenges. Some of you may know here in the Northwest a
fellow named Erik Lindbergh, who is the grandson of Charles Lindbergh. And like his
grandfather, Erik is an aviator and a flight instructor and he's on the board of the X
PRIZE Foundation and very involved with the creation of this new aviation high school
in south King County. And he's a great guy.
But one of the things that Erik Lindbergh, his story, is a great example of is for the
longest time being the grandson of Charles Lindbergh made Erik run 180 degrees the
opposite way. Right? He wanted nothing to have to do with that legacy. He didn't want
to have anything to do with aviation. He didn't want to go there.
And so all the goals that he set for himself were in domains altogether different from that.
Right? He was a competitive skier, he was really into sports, he was really into all this
other stuff.
And it took him a little while as he entered into his 20s and his 30s to realize that by
running that hard and that far away from this legacy and the goals and the challenges
inherent in this legacy, he was as much a prisoner of it as he would have been had he just
stayed there, right, and been trying every day to measure up against Charles Lindbergh.
And he realized that he was no more free over there than he would have been over here.
And it was that, the beginning of the dawning of that recognition, that made him realize
the challenges that I've set for myself are not that great because I have failed to face the
biggest challenge, which is how you accept being a grandson legacy of a great person like
that and how you find your own voice and identity, not because of that, but in spite of
that legacy and in spite of the ways in which people see and hear and encounter you not
as you but as the grandson of X. Right?
And that was the greater challenge that he recognized he needed a face both as a person
and as a citizen. And that personal reflection that he had, that he needed to challenge his
challenges, is something that then he took into the work that he brought over to the X
PRIZE.
So the X PRIZE, which I think most of you probably know about, right, is this prize
created a number of years ago initially for, you know, the first manned suborbital space
flight. Right? And it was a certain amount of money, I don't know, a million, $10
million for the team that could figure it out by a certain period of time. And then that
happened and Burt Rutan won that. And they've subsequently created other challenges,
right?
And one of the things that the people at the X PRIZE are always asking themselves is are
the challenges that we set challenging enough. Right? There is great power in having a
challenge award, like a million bucks for an X PRIZE or, you know, your competitor,
Google, and the prize that they had and all the free labor got on coming up with a good
recommendations algorithm, right, for -- I mean, not Google, but Netflix, right? The
Netflix prize.
But all these organizations out there that use challenge awards to stimulate imagination
and creativity and innovation, that's great, but one of the things that the folks at the X
PRIZE Foundation, the folks at Netflix recognize they have to do from time to time is ask
themselves are the goals that we're audacious enough. Are the challenges that we're
putting forth there interesting enough. Are we just getting into a rut of now, okay, now
we can do a whole bunch of aviation prizes, cooler aviation prizes. Right? And so, no,
now they've branched out into green technology prizes, into other kinds of prizes
altogether.
An organization some of you may have heard of called the Buckminster Fuller Institute,
you know, Buckminster Fuller, the creator of the geodesic dome.
You know, BFI is this great organization that has taken that same spirit and they now
created a thing called the BFI challenge, which is trying to challenge people to come up
with great world-charging cheap technology-based social innovations around clean water
or around reading for the braille -- I mean, reading for the blind, around -- you know, you
name it. All these different global challenges.
And one of the ways the practices that comes up time and time again is this willingness to
step out of the mesh of the work that you're doing and ask yourself are the challenges to
which I am -- toward which I am striving, against which I'm measuring myself
challenging enough, what are they missing. What are the blind spots built into these
challenges.
And because in a goal-oriented environment like Microsoft, it's a given that you're all
hard chargers, that you're all going at the goal that you have and that you're all trying to
make your number or get your thing or get your launch date or whatever it is. Right?
But it's not necessarily giving it all that you're asking yourselves are these the right goals,
are we driving at the right things, are we going for the right metrics.
But the last practice that I'll just talk about just to, again, give you a taste -- as I say,
there's 28 1/2 of them in the book, is one drawn from the world of improv theater. It's
called "yes, and."
And some of you may know in the world of improv when you get a group of -- you
know, we could do it right here. If you got five of us and we just started doing an improv
situation, right, the number one killer of improv sketch comedy is when someone on
stage with you says or does something kind of random, kind of weird and you don't quite
know what to do with it and what you say back to them is no, dadadadada. The word no
kills dead improvisation.
And so what improv comedy actors are trained to do from the very beginning is never say
no, say "yes, and." Right? So you're in this sketch and someone's doing something kind
of wacky and they've created this improbable situation and they're giving you this weird
dialogue, and then they kind of turn to you and you just say, "yes, and," and you take it a
totally different direction, because you don't know what to do with what you've been
given.
But the difference between no and "yes, and" is profound. And you can get this and you
can agree as we sit here in this room, and every one of us in the last 24 hours can
probably point to one way or another in which we've said no when a "yes, and" would
have done the job better, with a coworker, with a kid, with a neighbor, with a mentee,
whatever.
And I think this is one of those practices that is so simple on paper and so hard to do and
so hard to really build into the way you move and the way you operate. Because part of
being willing to go to "yes, and" instead of no is being willing to release both control and
the illusion of control.
When you say no, you're at least creating for yourself the illusion that you're in charge of
the direction of stuff. At the end of the day it turns out you're not even, right? But at
least it gives you that sense of agency, no, we're going to go this way instead.
And so "yes, and," like so many of the practices in this book, are fraught with risk. They
are fraught with risk.
And this is why I want to close by saying this final thought, that one of the points we try
to make throughout the book, and certainly at the closing of the book, is that it is
certainly meant to be read by you individually as you sit with your hard copy or with
your Kindle or whatever it may be. But it is meant to be practiced in the company of
others; that imagination -- you know, imagination, what's going on in each of our heads,
is a network, is a complex adaptive system.
And so the practice of imagination should also happen in a network within complex
adaptive systems. But the myth of the solitary geniuses banging away at stuff, having
eureka moments, creating things unbidden, you know, completely unforeseen, is just that:
It is a myth. All cognition is bootstrapped. All thinking is analogical. All imagining is
relating to what others have said, done, what you have thought before, what is out there.
And we make sense of the world and we imagine new things based on what we've
encountered in the past.
And so the more we can think about ourselves as networked together, as being
collectively part of an imagination, whether it's within the culture of Microsoft, within the
civic culture of the greater Seattle area, within the civic culture of our state, the more
powerful and transformative we can be in whatever domain or arena it is that we want to
be.
It is this recognition -- and I can speak to this later in the dialogue, too, and some of my
other books, this recognition that the myth of the self-made man or woman is something
that we need now to banish. We need now to banish.
You know, every knows here. I mean, you guys know better than most. In the American
popular mythology and the popular culture, Bill Gates is the quintessential self-made
man.
But if any of you read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's book, you know, yeah, Bill Gates
had off-the-charts personal drive and intelligence. And Bill Gates had the following:
Bill Gates, Sr., Mary Gates. Lakeside school. Growing up in Seattle. Growing up in the
United States. Growing up in the United States at a time when technology was
blossoming such that there might be something called computing.
Bill Gates was located in a network and a context of opportunity and imagination, 99
percent of which he had nothing to do with. The 1 percent he had something to do with,
boy, he leveraged that pretty well, right?
But 99 percent he had nothing to do with. That was all the context that we all
collectively are authors of. And I think that is so fundamental for us to recognize when
we think about how we practice imagination, is recognizing the networked, contagious,
sideways scaling nature of this stuff.
And so as we have our conversations, as you get a chance to read this book and think
about these practices, I beg of you to kind of talk to each other about them. And the
conversations can be: That guy, Eric Liu, was a crock. I hated him.
But great. Don't just think that to yourself. Get five other people and all talk about how
you hated this and talk about what you liked and what you didn't like, you know, that it's
doing it in community and in fellowship and creating networks that will allow us
individually to be as imaginative, creative and innovative as we possibly can be.
So thank you very much for having me. With that, I'd love to just open up to comments,
questions, dialogue, and what have you.
Yes, sir.
>> First of all, thank you for coming. I think it's a great talk. I find that there's not a lot
of imagination in people. I think we're constantly imagining, role playing, all that stuff.
But I find that there's a challenge with the acceptance of imagination. In fact, that's what
I think happens when you're going to into those preteen years is that you start looking
around and you start going, well, what I think is probably too crazy for the rational world
around me to accept, and so I better shut up and say what people want me to say, and
then from there on.
Or you have to have a really strong belief system in yourself, which if you look at Bill
Gates, too, he fought enough with his parents to have counselors come in and create a
situation in the house where the counselor finally said this guy's going to win.
So, I mean, either you have a strong enough belief system that just says to the world I
don't give whatever, I'm going to do what I want to do, in which case imagination
blossoms, or I would argue that for 98 percent of the people, they just confirm at some
point that it's you against society for your imagination against conformist beliefs, which
at some point take over or win.
How do you get society to accept this is probably the question I was pondering. It's not a
dearth of imagination. We imagine -- we sort of unlearn that skill.
>> Eric Liu: Yes, yes.
>> So how do you ->> Eric Liu: I think that is incredibly well put. We unlearn it. And it's -- and you state
descriptively exactly the challenge. Certainly from adolescence or from late childhood
on, and then as we enter into professions which have their own vocabularies, norms,
mindsets about what is and isn't permissible, and then you get into large organizations
that have their own bureaucratic imperatives and take on momentum and life of their
own, it is many orders of magnitude easier for everybody in this room to think about
what kills imagination than to think about what cultivates it.
Right now you could just immediately tell me, any of you, about someone or something
that's happened to you that stifled imagination, your imagination.
And to your question, well, what do we do, how do we change society, how do we make
it so that the person doesn't stifle that spark, that impulse, I think, you know, there are
two broad ways of addressing that question.
One is about leadership. I think leadership matters in organizational setting particularly.
If a leader -- and I don't mean necessarily the CEO of Microsoft. It could mean the leader
of your team of four or the leader of your unit at Microsoft or the leader of your
neighborhood association or of your child's preschool parent group or whatever it is.
Leadership matters in the sense of having people who create a culture and set a tone in
which this is one of the practices in which foolishness is okay. Right? In which in fact it
is foolish not to be foolish. Right? Where being too conventional gets looked down on.
The tone that you set in leading in any kind of organization.
And this has to do at the end of the day with a word we haven't yet talked about much,
failure. Failure is the real F word in American life I think. We don't like to go there. We
don't like to say it. We euphemize it, we talk around it. We patch it up. We create Ponzi
schemes to hide it.
Failure is a thing we are all running from. And it is the fear in general, but the fear of
failure in particular is one of the greatest preemptive self-editing killers of imagination.
And so as a leader, as someone who is trying to foster a culture, I think the -- having a
high tolerance for failure is central. And not just saying, hey, you failed, great, I'm not
going to punish you, I'm not going to slap you for failing, but to rather ask people how
can you fail better, how can we fail well, right?
And, you know, even in a culture of perfectionists like Microsoft, every one of you
knows, you cannot forever stave off failure. Failure will arrive and it may be small or it
may be catastrophic. But it will arrive. And the only question is what you, your team,
your culture, your company do with resilience and adaptability of that moment to convert
that failure into the stuff of new invention.
So I think how we reckon with failure and our willingness to talk about it, to examine it
from a distance. In the medical profession, you know, hospitals have a great kind of
built-in thing called M and M conferences, morbidity and mortality conferences, in which
it's a liability-free zone and people talk about mistakes they've made. Ah, I misdiagnosed
this thing or, ah, I kind of didn't do this thing right or I wasn't sure how to handle this
particular patient and the results were bad.
They recognize in that space that you have to create some environment where people
cannot just hide or want to sweep under the rug the ways, large and small, in which we
fail.
So I think that's one part of the answer. And that is a lot about leadership and the tones
that our leaders set for us and that we set for others.
But the other thing of it is I think as you were saying, I mean, Bill Gates, one of the ways
in which Bill Gates is an outlier was his absolute faith in his -- in himself in his
convictions.
And so, yes, that is an outlier level. But all of us can aspire to a, you know, high
percentile, if not total outlier level of that same capacity.
If you think about entrepreneurs in history, business entrepreneurs, civic entrepreneurs,
political entrepreneurs, military entrepreneurs, they are people who on some level nurture
within themselves this capacity to hold a voice that says when everybody's running this
way and I want to go this way, I'm going to be able to talk myself into not freaking out.
I'm going to be able to talk myself into remembering why I think this way is really the
right way.
And I may not be Bill Gates and be able to, like, browbeat the other 99 percent into
realizing they're stupid and have them come with me, right, I may or may not be that, but
if I can at least cultivate that capacity to kind of sustain for myself I know why I want to
go this way, and to have the courage of that conviction, that is a matter more of personal
practice than of kind of group contextual leadership stuff that I was talking about earlier.
And I think it's cultivatable. It accrues. It accretes. And the more we do it, the more we
do it.
But, yeah, I think you put your finger on what I think is just the -- you know, in
education, for instance, you know, one of the great ironies of our time right now is that,
you know, when you think about the grand geopolitical coopetition between the United
States and China, right, and you look at our education systems, in this kind of crazy way
they look at us and they think American kids are so creative and so innovative and
unconstrained and free, and so they're knocking on our doors asking how can we kind of
import some of this secret sauce into our education system, which is rote-driven,
drill-oriented, very fact cramming and so forth and creates people who know their stuff
but don't necessarily know how to solve problems creatively. Right?
At the exact same time that we're looking over with them -- to them with yearning and
longing and saying gosh we sure could use some more of that drill, some more of that
kind of fact cramming, some more of that kind of test driven accountability.
And there is this kind of passing-of-ships element where what we have to recognize is the
synthesis, right? And for us, when we talk about Imagination First, the title of the book
is not imagination only, right? We're not saying just sit there and dream loopy stuff and
think of -- no, we all operate within environments that have metrics, that have rules, that
have processes, that have expectations and that have outcomes.
No one's arguing that we should dispense with those. But it is not only possible, it's
necessary if a place like this isn't going to get sclerotic and bureaucratized and top heavy
and too slow to kind of pivot. That you infuse the structures and the units that you have
here with that more open, playful, failure embracing spirit.
And I think that is done best not at the scale of ten thousands, it's done best at the scales
of tens. Maybe ten tens at most. But, you know, Dunbar's number, the number of -- the
maximum number of an effective, coherent social network that has integrity, is about
150. In culture after culture, setting after setting, you know, anthropologically,
historically, 150.
And so trying to think about how -- you know, you may not be able to change Microsoft,
but you can change 150 people you know at Microsoft by how you carry yourself, by
how you make choices, by how you decide not to freak out, by how you decide to open
up and listen to people's wacky ideas. You can change 150 people. And if everybody in
this room changed 150 people, you know, you'll be eating Google's lunch real quick.
Yes, sir.
>> How do you personally put some of these principles into practice in your daily life? I
actually think there's a lot of imagination here. I think we, you know, came out with a
tablet PC and a smartphone before Apple ever did anything called an iPhone. And, you
know, we just sometimes maybe come up with the idea and half the vision but maybe fail
to put it into practice the way some of our competitors do. So can you talk a little bit
about putting it into practice?
>> Yeah. I will. And then I think embedded in your question, though, is another very
interesting, broader organizational question.
You know, for me, just in practice, it is recognizing that it's not like when I look at like a
given week's calendar that realize, oh, this meeting that I have here is going to be a big
imagination test and so I better really gear up and prep for this meeting and get all my
imagination muscles kind of toned and ready to go for this one.
It's much more a matter of I wake up and it's time to make breakfast and my daughter
comes down and she says something, and in that moment I have a tiny little choice to
make about whether I say a response is, you know, stop drawing that picture, we're late,
we gotta go, or something else.
It's a hundred tiny little choices you make before you're at -- you know, you're out of the
house about whether you are opening to possibility or trying to close it.
And so it's not so much that I have a set of totemic magic practices but just how I weave
it into mindfulness every day. I mean, I use that word also drawn from the world of
meditation. It is continuous mindfulness. That's for me as a matter of personal practice.
I'm very interested in the kind of implied comment and question, you know, when you
talk about tablets or smartphones and things like that. And I don't know -- I mean, I've
not read the case study of how it was that the iPhone beat -- how Microsoft didn't have
the first iPhone and so forth. But I suspect, you know, I mean, being not a total stranger
to the Microsoft culture, having spent time on the media side at least at Slate and
MSNBC, that it does have something to do with just the nature of scale and bureaucracy
and that -- you know, that 150 magic number that I talked about here, I can't emphasize
that enough both in business and in government and in self-government.
Like in politics, I spent a lot of time in politics. And American culture, over the course of
the last half century, we all as citizens have come to think of ourselves as little things and
government as this big thing over there. Now, that's -- without regard to your ideology.
Some of you love that big thing over there and love what it's doing for you, and some of
you hate that big thing over there.
But in both cases, we feel that government is this thing abstracted from us and into which
we have little input, around which we have no influence. And the direction of which we
can't change. And one of the things that I believe we fundamentally have to do is break
apart the scale of civic life. And you know the old saying, all politics is local. I believe
all government is local too.
And so it's great to have President Obama and the congress trying to bang away on
national terms and standards for health care reform, for instance, but I think there should
be radical decentralization of experimentation of how you then implement health care
reform. Same with education reform. Set the standards.
I'm not only for -- you know, I'm for the strong state standards we have here. I think it
would make sense to have national standards. It's sort of silly to have a race to the
bottom between our standards and Mississippi standards and so on, so forth.
Having national standards is great, but then having maximum level experimentation
within the operating system of those standards. Now, bring that to an organizational
setup like Microsoft. I mean, how many tens of thousands just in the Redmond area
alone? I mean, it is at an unfathomable scale. Right?
And so I would bet that if I were to do that case study, it would have less to do with
people not having imagination and more to do with the fact that this place was not
structured in a way that allowed that imagination to flower and that gave people at the
unit level, at the small unit level, enough of a sense of ownership, agency, and kind of
capacity to be decision-makers to kind of push a great idea up.
Another organization that I've spent a lot of time both in and spent time studying is the
United States Marine Corps. So people might from the outside have this view of the
Marine Corps as a big monolithic military thing, this kind of monolith. But it's not. The
Marine Corps, more than the other branches, has this ethic woven into the way they do
war fighting and do their business in which they train small unit leaders, down to the
squad level, you know, a dozen people, to know the big picture of what your objective is,
of what the strategic and tactical objectives are, and then take initiative and take
ownership.
And you are rewarded for doing that. Because they know that at the end of the day in the
field you cannot keep waiting for calls to go up the chain to headquarters and then orders
to come back down. And no knock on Microsoft, it's just the nature of large
organizations that more time is spent on waiting for stuff to go up and waiting for stuff to
come down. And there's kind of infidelity of transmission as it goes up and as it comes
down.
So by the time decisions get made and people -- you at that unit level are only half
empowered to do only half of what you meant to be asking to do. And that kills
imagination. You know why? Because it kills your motivation. A fear and fear of
failure, particular there's one piece of it, that intrinsic motivation is another huge part.
And institutional life can just drain us of the motivation. And if you've had enough times
where you've run it up the flagpole and it's come back down half shredded, you're going
to be like, you know what, I'm going to apply my imagination at my kid's soccer camp.
I'm going to apply my imagination over here. I'm going to apply my imagination, you
know, in a screenplay that I'm writing at night. You know, because it's not just worth my
energy to keep trying to do it up here and down here. Right?
And I think again, leadership matters in trying to tap into the motivation and sense of
ownership that people have that says I got a great idea and I think I can run with this, will
you let me run with this.
And the more that a -- that leaders at every level can create a culture where that's not even
a question, the stronger your results will be.
Yes, ma'am.
>> A couple of motifs are going through my mind. One thing that I often come across in
work on creativity is part uncluttering the mind, and I was intrigued by the description
that people whose environment is what many of us would regard at cluttered.
I'm an artist when I'm not here, so like at my studio space it's just a nightmare, I'm always
pulling together things for collages I may never get around to make, that kind of thing.
And I always think, you know, I need to unclutter all of this so that my mind can just be
clear. And, yet, what you're really describing is something that's the opposite of that.
And what I wonder is whether for that to work what you have to have insight is the
clarity -- a practice of clarity in your mind so that the outward clutter doesn't become
inner clutter.
>> Eric Liu: Love that. That is -- so that ->> [inaudible]
>> Eric Liu: [laughter] well, I don't know that any of us ever totally attains that, but I
love that you ask that question. Practice number one in the book is called make mist.
And it's actually another Disney imagineer whose story yields the name of this practice.
This imagine near whose office and whose work life is as cluttered as we're describing.
She's trained as a set designer, so she's the one who's really figuring out how to build the
stuff.
Make mist comes from the practice she has. Every morning she gets up before she has to
get to her office and be in this kind of buzzy, Disney Imagineering kind of environment.
And she spends way longer than someone in drought-ridden California should be
spending in a shower. Making mist. Right?
And it's her meditation period and she is clearing her mind. And she literally visualizes
the melting away of obsessions, worries of that moment, things that from the moment she
popped up, you know, in bed was already kind of starting to make noise. And she lets
that stuff melt away in the mist. She visualizes them.
And everybody's going to have their own way of doing it, right, of how you visualize and
how you do that stuff. But, I agree, fundamentally that clearing -- you know, I guess I
would say this. Clearing the mind and having bits and a repertoire of materials from
which to construct collages are not mutually exclusive. They reenforce one another if
you are intentional about the sequence. And this particular woman, Lori Coltran
[phonetic], was very intentional about the sequence.
>> If I can follow up on that briefly, the thing in the workplace that seemed a challenge
for a lot of us is that we have a clutter of information [inaudible] and I was wondering if
you have any particular insights about that, because you're talking about the bureaucratic
chain of command being a deadener for imagination. But also just [inaudible] your
attention split so many ways can be a real deadener. We all know it, and yet it's the
ocean we swim in.
>> Eric Liu: It is. And you're right. And I think the -- it is a myth that -- I mean, it's a
myth that now, right, I mean, there are in fact scientific studies showing that it is a myth,
right, that we are -- that our capacity to do anything is degraded on all fronts when we
have, sorry, multiple windows open in our desktop, right? After a while we crash, right?
And so that is true. And I think the art of this, right, back to someone like Robin
Williams, when I talk about the ways in which he can have all these bits and have this
very lightning quick, random association from one corner to another, that's all happening
within the context of his being incredibly focused on collecting bits and on comedy.
He's not also thinking about how to run a hedge fund. He's not also thinking about kind
of his garden design. He's not also thinking about this other thing. He is kind of
obsessive about how to generate great comedy. And within that -- you know, his tactics
for doing that are about embracing and capitalizing on the clutter of his bits.
But I could agree. I mean, I think that is particularly in a technology environment like
this -- one of my previous visits -- I don't see anybody in the room from that visit. I was
here visiting with folks from Microsoft Research in the fall. Not for a public event,
actually, but one of the books that's over there that I cowrote is this book called The True
Patriot.
My coauthor is a fellow named Nick Hanauer, who some of you may know. He's a
Seattle-based entrepreneur and investor and founded aQuantive, which Microsoft
acquired.
So the book, The True Patriot, was a book arguing that we have to reframe and reclaim
patriotism, the idea of patriotism in terms similar to what I'm talking about here, kind of
around values of shared responsibility rather than just kind of chest thumping we're
number one-ism.
Well, we're working on a sequel book that is about kind of a new theory of government
and asking ourselves in this age now, this moment that we're in in history and technology
and the changes in society and demography, isn't it time that we refresh the operating
system for government. And our work is incredibly influenced by this burgeoning field
that's cross-disciplinary, I mean, to the point we're on the cusp on the second
enlightenment of complexity theory, the study of complex adaptive systems.
And from the world of economics to the world of anthropology, to the world of biology
and epidemiology, you know, this confluence of new ideas around complexity and
contagion and network theory make it a super exciting time right now.
And when -- so we came over to Microsoft Research to visit with Eric Horvitz and some
of the other folks here who are engaged in some really interesting work around complex
adaptive systems. And Ed Lazowska over at the U-Dub had put us in touch here. And so
we were having this great conversation.
And one of the things that struck me as we spent this afternoon with folks from Microsoft
Research is how it's a great thing for Microsoft as an organization to have a thing like
Microsoft Research where people can be freed to unclutter and to imagine and to create
and to explore things without necessarily the driving pressures of ship dates and what
have you.
And the question that arose in my mind as I thought about that was how can -- in a scaler
way, how can every part of Microsoft create its own space where that kind of freedom is
also possible. Right? Where every unit at Microsoft can have a part of it or a part of
your time or a part of what your weekly practice, where you explicitly and consciously
make a choice to close some of those windows, to stop multitasking, to ask yourself
what's really interesting right now.
Like when I step back, what's going on that I haven't been paying attention to
consciously, but in the back of my mind I've been noticing a trend is piling up and that's
cool and there's opportunity here.
So I think part of it is trying to build into team-level practice and culture, the space and
the time to do that kind of uncluttering.
There was someone else over here ->> [inaudible]
>> Eric Liu: Okay. Is there any more? Yes.
>> I have a question. Can you give some guidance, if you're not the leader, what you can
do as a team member to influence the dynamic of a group to make it more open to
creativity and imagination?
>> Eric Liu: Did you all hear that question? I think I would answer that question in part
by challenging the premise of it. You may not be the manager of that group, with the title
of the group, but you can be the leader of it. You can be the leader in terms of how you
set a tone, of how you approach a project, how you model asking questions and how you
have offline conversations with the titled leader of the group to say, hey, maybe -- I just
have an idea. Maybe if we did it this way instead of that way we'd get more ideas or if
we tried this thing instead of the other thing.
I think -- partly it's a semantic thing about kind of never too quickly yielding both the
mantle and the opportunity of leadership. Right? But the other piece of it, too, is, you
know, obviously, again, in a large organization, right, managing up, right? The skill no
one teaches you in school and yet it's kind of more than 50 percent a part of what you
worry about and what determines your path and your success in a place, how you manage
up.
And I think the way I would answer your question, which kind of meshes in with how to
manage up for imagination has everything to do with a particular practice of imagination,
which is empathy, right, and imagine yourself in the shoes of this manager, of your team
leader, right?
Whether you like that person or don't like that person, whether you're agreeing with them
or not agreeing with them, really trying to imagine if I were them right now what are the
pressures I'd be feeling, what are the -- what would be the circumstances that would
frame up my choice set, right, and trying to get into their head so that when you try to
then say, hey, boss, why don't we do X or Y, it's always oriented toward what would
make the boss feel more effective and capacious in their work.
It's not about you trying to show that you've got a good idea; it's about how you can tap
into whatever it is that's making the boss feel limited or frustrated or pressured or stressed
out and what can you contribute to helping to make that boss feel less of those things.
And so tailoring all of your ideas and the framing of your ideas about imaginative work
with that in mind. Right? It's a win friends and influence people kind of thing. I mean,
it's just really getting into their head and -- because, you know, the higher up you go as
you're managing up, the more pressure people have to just deliver on results and the less
free they feel to let you practice imagination.
And so it gets harder the higher we go as we think about the bosses that we have. And so
it becomes I think all the more imperative that we don't get oppositional in thinking of
here's the [inaudible] and here's me with all the great ideas, but try to get into their head
and ask if I were them, you know, what would be freaking me out and how can I kind of
feed my good ideas in a way that will make them feel more powerful and not less. Yes.
>> I think a relating question is that -- and this is to some degree universal and to some
degree more true at Microsoft than other places. We have a very large number of
extremely bright people who are nevertheless not particularly articulate and not good at
getting into somebody else's head. And even more so, not very good at listening to other
people's ideas and absorbing them like that. And it's a -- that's another skill that needs to
be exercised.
But, you know, what do you do when you find yourself in a situation like that, that you
have this great idea, you know it would do wonderful things, but you can't do it yourself,
you have to convince a bunch of people to do it and you're not capable of convincing
them?
>> Eric Liu: That is a great and profound question. And I know exactly what you speak
of. I didn't mention that my first few years in Seattle I worked at RealNetworks, which,
as you know, is linearly descended from Microsoft and had a lot of the Microsoft culture
in it, you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And I think the -- it is true that there are some organizational environments that are just
flat out not -- do not reward listening all that well. That is true.
And so I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish here and say that, you know, if you just set your
mind to it you can undo completely the DNA of a culture.
That said, I guess there's two things I would say. Number one, I keep using this word
contagion. These kinds of habits are contagious just by example. And so I'm not even
talking about kind of oral persuasion of your peers. But just if you've got a great idea and
are able to show it, that it visually, tactically, that this is a cool thing, this works or this
is -- this is sparky, right, then trying to be mindful of mapping -- doing a network map of
where you work, right, you have your org charts, but I'm talking about a network map,
like who in my organization is influential, who in my organization is pretty persuasive.
Who in my organization has just like so much enthusiasm that they could be talking
about, you know, puppy dogs and you'd be really super interested. Who are the people
who can be the supercarriers of this virus.
And if you start thinking in epidemiological terms and you think the way a public health
person thinks about -- you know, you think about all the things that we do to contain
H1N1. And so it's about thinking about the host environment. It's thinking about who
are the supercarriers. It's thinking about all the little practices that we are kind of asked
to cultivate, cough into your arm and Purell your hands and all these little things.
Well, now think about what you'd want to do if you wanted to spread the virus. And here
in this case the virus is your good idea, right, or your imaginative approach to a problem
of some sort.
You've got to do the epidemiological map of your environment here and ask yourself
where are the most hospitable people, who are the ones who are most connected to other
connectors. Is this person, though really on my side, at the end of the day too much on
the periphery of the network to really help make this thing go from -- go to scale.
So I think the first thing I would say is that, is just kind of mindfulness of the networked
horizontal environment within which you work and being strategic about injecting your
imagination virus in the right places.
But the second thing I'd say, which does go more to, you know, your observation about
how a lot of people who are brilliant on the science and the technology of what makes
Microsoft go may not be as practiced or as brilliant on, you know, getting in people's
heads of persuading other people and so on, so forth.
That, too, I guess I would have to say is to a great extent, to a far greater extent than
many of you will acknowledge, malleable and increasable by practice.
And I'll give you one example who I know and write about in the book, a scientist, a guy
named Mark Roth, who is a McArthur genius, award-winning cancer researcher at the
Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center. And his field is -- and it sounds like science
fiction, but it's not. His field is suspended animation. He is figuring out ways to so slow
the metabolism and so slow the activity at the cellular level that you are able to stop a
tumor in its tracks, you are able in a traumatic incidence, if somebody's kind of severed a
leg in a car accident or on the battlefield or something, kind of so slow them down that
you have time to get them to critical care.
And so he's doing all this incredible work and this incredible research, and it was just
genius stuff. And for the longest time, people didn't know about it, because, number one,
he wasn't super skilled at managing up and working the -- you know, all the bureaucratic
politics. But, number two, he wasn't all that practiced at telling the story and he felt kind
of intimidated about -- felt quite intimidated about telling the story of what he was doing.
And what he decided at a certain point, you know, his work was getting funded and
everything, but what he decided, you know, and what helped him make the breakthroughs
was he literally sought instruction. He went to the people who run PR at the Fred Hutch
and said can you find me somebody who's really good at coaching people on public
speaking, communication, written communication, persuasion?
And with the same intensity that he brought to bear in cancer research, he began to focus
on improving his ability to communicate and to persuade.
And he went from zero to 60 really fast by practicing. And he had practice sessions of
every kind, how to practice in a meeting setting, how to practice in a public talk setting,
how to practice in a media interview setting, how to practice in a large speech setting.
Right? And just practice.
And he failed and he failed and he failed and he stunk and he failed well. And every
round in every way he got a little better at this stuff. And so now it's just second nature
for him, right, to be able to -- to infect other people with enthusiasm for his ideas.
Now, again, maybe Mark Roth is an outlier. Right? But every one of us can raise our
game. Every one of us can raise our game if we commit to practicing on these things.
It's just identifying, as you just did, that, you know, maybe there's an incidence, maybe
there's many incidences where the problem isn't the absence of an imaginative idea, the
problem is the comfort with the skill set to infect others with this idea.
Practice. And I think that word is a pretty great way to end the conversation. I urge you
to carry forth that idea in that spirit. And I'm going to be sticking around here to sign
books and happy to continue one-on-one conversations. But, again, thank you to Kirsten,
to Microsoft, to Kim Ricketts Books for being here, and thanks to all of you for making
the time this afternoon.
[applause]