>> Amy Draves: Thank you. David Burkus,
Visiting Speakers Series. Thanks for coming. David is here today to
discuss his book: The Myths of Creativity. It's a fascinating look at
how myths can inhibit innovation. David highlights the mistaken ideas
that hold us back and shows us how anyone with the right tools can find
the best new ideas, projects and processes David Burkus is an Assistant
Professor in the College of Business at Oral Roberts University. He's
the founder and editor of Leader Lab, an online publication that share
insights from research on leadership, innovation and strategy and his
work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company and the Harvard Business
Review, along with several other publications. Please join me in
giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> David Burkus: Well, thank you all. I have to address this right
off the bat because I'm already feeling way overdressed to be here
today. So I come from the East Coast. I was born in Philadelphia,
lived a little in Boston, now I live in Oklahoma where we kind of do
sort of dress like we're country folk from fire group land. And I kind
of thought maybe I'll spiff it up, et cetera, I'm coming here.
And I pulled in and I was like I'm going to be overdressed. I
shouldn't tell you this but I literally had a pocket square, left it in
the car to feel, dressed down a little bit more like I belonged.
So I want to talk today about kind of one myth in particular but first
to give you a broad idea of the book and what it's about and where I
think it's helping, at least that I'm hearing it's helping a lot of
people. You don't write a book to get famous because it doesn't
happen.
You don't write a book to sort of make a ton of money, because that
doesn't happen you want ideas to spread. Those of you I met earlier
you saw I wrote in the book let's get these ideas to spread. What I
found when I actually finished up my doctoral research was there's this
weird misconception about exceptionally creative companies; that they
do certain -- it's kind of a grass is greener effect. They do certain
things, and I wanted to study, okay, is this true, specifically in the
context of leadership, what are the things that leaders of creative
companies do that presumably noncreative companies don't do.
And what I found was a lot of those leaders are in line with what
psychological research about creativity tells us is true, tells us
happens. The ironic thing being, though, that there's nothing inherent
in that team, that company or that leader.
It's perfectly accessible to the other group. So that also begs the
question, whenever you see that happening, okay, why is it not
happening. So I began to really dig into what is it about these
certain people that say, that would just say, oh, I'm not all that
creative.
I've noticed this weird thing about humans. I have a two-year-old. My
two-year-old is the most creative person I know. He does not speak
English and I don't know what language he speaks, but it's a language,
right, because he'll say, he'll come up to you and blather and you'll
say: What? And he'll say the exact same thing. It means something to
him and he's created that in his own mind. We're still trying to
translate it.
I have several nieces and nephews, kindergarten age, first grade age,
if you walk into a kindergarten classroom and how many people here
would say they're creative, every single person raises their hand. But
somewhere between kindergarten and college that number drops off.
A classroom of 25 kindergartners who are all creative turns into a
classroom of 25 people with two that might raise their hand. And
depending on what major you're in in college, you might get no one. I
teach one class that draws a lot of accountants. They always tell me:
I can't be creative, I'm an accountant. I get where they're coming
from. For sure, I understand it. At the same time, though, there are
companies like Intuit putting out products like Turbo Tax, that are
incredibly innovative and incredibly creative. So there's something
else going on. It's not really that a lot happened cognitively,
there's not a lot that happened genetically, personal-wise between
kindergarten and college. What happens is the stories we tell
ourselves. The stories you tell yourself about the world affect how
you interact with that world.
I use the term "myths" to describe a lot of these because, A, they're
not really in line with the psychological research, but, B, they're
really powerful stories that are shaping how people are looking at the
world. And myths come about whenever we have something mysterious or
seemingly mysterious and we're trying to explain it based on our own
experiences or maybe the experiences that are handed down from other
people. So this is where you get ideas like probably the most famous
myth of creativity, this idea of the Greeks and the muses.
And even though none of us really is worshipping at shrines to the
different sisters of creativity, we still kind of talk about things
like inspiration, which comes from the Greek to be breathed upon as if
it's still there. We still go to museums which actually means place of
the muse, where creative works dedicated by the muses were gathered.
So that story is still there in us. And today what I want to do is
drill down on a particular story, one that I think see a lot of times
especially in large organizations, especially competitive
organizations, where the grass is greener effect if we think ourselves
not creative or team should be and look at some other company idealize
them saying they're a center of creativity. And one of the things I
find in particular is this idea of cohesiveness, this idea of sort of
fun loving. If you close your eyes and picture a average Silicon
Valley start-up, whatever your idea of creative company is, I actually
used a lot of time think of Pixar, because people think it must be a
wonderful place to work. If you've ever been on the campus of Pixar,
there are giant larger-than-life sculptures of the characters. There's
like 18, 19-foot-tall Luxo Junior lamp just sitting on the campus.
There's foosball tables everywhere and cereal dispensers. Not just
like free food, but like specifically Lucky Charms, Fruity Pebbles.
Awesome. You think this must be this fun loving place where everybody
gets along and it would be so much fun to work there because everybody
would be so supportive. That's not actually true.
That's not to say it isn't true with Pixar, because it might be a fun
place to work, but it probably looks a lot more like the place that you
work. It may not have a foosball table, but actually a campus this
big, I promise you there's one somewhere here, if you haven't found it
yet. It's like people: I know where it is. I got it.
>>: Every floor.
>> David Burkus: Every floor. I love it. It's not the foosball table
that does it. Conflict is a part of even those organizations, too.
They're not as fun loving and cohesive as we think. The truth that's a
good thing. Because throughout history we have examples especially in
business of people who cultivate conflict to drive innovation and make
better decision-making.
The example that I really love is this man Alfred P. Sloan. How many
familiar with Alfred P. Sloan? If not you probably listen to NPR like
I do, know there's this Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Means there's a
guy named Alfred P. Sloan. Long-time chairman of General Motors.
Oversaw a huge expansion of General Motors. And there's this great
story about Alfred P. Sloan when it came time for General Motors to
make a key decision.
They're sitting in the boardroom, senior leadership team, gathered
around your long wood table. You can visualize Sloan at the head of
it, looking at all his senior leadership team. And he says:
Gentlemen. Because it was that time, unfortunately. Gentlemen, I
believe we're all in the agreement with the decision that needs to be
made today. And he watches as one by one every single head nods,
everyone was in agreement with Sloan on what needs to be done. I
propose we suspend this decision and meet back when someone has an idea
for why it won't work.
See, what Sloan knew is that without conflict we don't know that we're
not seeing the whole perspective on this idea. What he knew was
divergent perspectives and people fighting over their perception of an
idea that fighting over the merits of the different ideas is proof that
there are various ideas there which means that whatever decision comes
about is probably better for it.
When you have total lack of conflict, like we would envision these
great sort of fun cohesive cultures being lack of conflict, we have
lack of conflict to actually signal there are no new ideas either being
generated or, even worse, being generated but not being presented.
Conflict is something that can be harnessed to make incredible
products, to make better decisions. And one example that I love,
fast-forward from Alfred P. Sloan, to a much more modern time is this
one EverNote. How many people have an account with EverNote. I love
EverNote.
I have it on my phone. If you think about the structure of the brain,
I call EverNote my pre-prefrontal cortex. I consider it part of my
brain and it sits on my phone right in front of my prefrontal cortex.
It's kind of a nerd joke, I know. But it's my pre-prefrontal cortex.
What a lot of people don't know about the history of EverNote, EverNote
was birthed out of a fight. There are two companies, one called
Ribbon, one EverNote. They were both working on these super secret
external memory programs. Super secret projects.
Not really sure how this happened, but they found out about each other.
Super secret project. Don't know how it happened. Suddenly, hey, they
know there's someone working on a super secret project. And rather
than fight it out in the marketplace, rather than fight it out in
various app stores on various platforms they decided let's join forces,
fight it out together. So they merged together. And all these
programmers are now engaged in a fight because line of code by line of
code they have to figure out what's the best version of this product we
can put out. And it now, I mean, was it -- it was at least half, if
not more that say they use EverNote, more that even say I know what it
is. It has this sort of dominance -- there are other programs out
there. They're okay. They don't have the market penetration that
EverNote does. And a lot of people in that founding group believe it
was because of that early fight, only the best ideas won. But the fact
that they were even challenged made it proof that only the best ideas
won. And now we have an incredibly successful -- I have a
pre-prefrontal cortex. So I'm grateful for this fight.
The truth is this situation isn't alone. A lot of companies have fun
ways to have structured task oriented conflict in order to drive their
ideas, drive their products, drive their projects further.
Now there's a difference I should say between personality conflicts and
personal conflicts and task-oriented conflicts. I'll share in a little
bit how to keep it on the productive one to keep it from getting to the
unproductive one. But first some science.
I'm a bit of a research nerd. The whole idea of the book is let's take
a lot of stuff out there that's been proven empirically, find how to
communicate and pair it with stories that have been proven in the
marketplace. So I think this cohesive myth comes out of the
traditional rules of brainstorming. How many people have been ever
been in a brainstorming session? How many people have been in too many
brainstorming sessions? Some people didn't raise their hand the second
time. I attribute it to fatigue or you're really doing good
brainstorming sessions. But I'm going with fatigue. Brainstorming has
been around for so long that it's hard to actually process what I'm
about to tell you. But brainstorming was invented. It's an invention,
just like anything else. It was invented by a guy named Alex Osborne.
He was one of the principals of BBDO, an advertising firm. He put it
out into the world in a book called Applied Imagination.
Get a copy of Applied Imagination, it's really cool because they're not
in print anymore, sort of hard to find even a third edition printing of
the book. But you have the root of a lot of ideas that are still out
there. And one of them is this idea of brainstorming. And
brainstorming, according to Alex Osborne, had four rules, four simple
rules for generating better ideas, if you will. Chief among those
rules is this idea of deferred judgment. You all know you go on a
brainstorming session, you hear things like no idea's a bad idea. Or
this is a judgment free zone. The idea is let's suspend content -people shaking their heads, no this never happens that way. That's
okay. I'll tell you why it's okay in a second. They have other rules
like quantity rules. We're not going for quality, we're going for
quantity. Free will, which means just go wherever, if it seems like
totally stupid, move on, we'll cut it out later. And even combined.
If you take two ideas, you combine them, you don't have two and a half
ideas you don't have two ideas, you have a whole third idea. Combined
idea.
But chief among these rules is deferred judgment. And that's what
caused the rolled eyes for some of you rolled eyes and for some of you
nods when I said that.
So an interesting group of researchers led by Charlene Nameth decided
to test whether or not this idea was really valid, because everyone
just assumed, been around since Osborne put the book out, everyone just
assumed okay this has got to be the way it works. So they decided to
test it. Here's how they did it. It's really kind of unique. They
set up two groups, randomized experiment, you always have to have a
placebo control and they set up two groups of people, asked them the
same questions. In the first study they asked students in the San
Francisco Bay area how do we alleviate traffic in San Francisco, and
then just to prove that there wasn't any sort of cultural bias, et
cetera, they went over to Paris, France, and asked college students
there how do we alleviate traffic programs inside of Paris. So we make
sure we have a quasi-global study going on. Still very, very western.
And we have our own takes on conflict. But a little stronger than just
if it were San Francisco.
But all of these two, all of these small pockets of brainstormers were
into two main groups. And at the heart of the separation was, to the
first group, deferred judgment, quantity rules, free will combined,
Alex Osborne's original rules.
And the second group they sort of lied about what Alex Osborne's
original rules were. They said, because they're college students, they
don't know anything, you can tell them anything and they'll believe
you. So he said, okay, Alex Osborne said if you criticize ideas as
you're generating them, it will be better, it will be a better end
result.
So as an idea comes up, challenge it, criticize it, refine it. Then
they gave them the same rules beyond that. So the core of this is
that. Now who wants to wager what's happened? I know tons of you just
rolled your eyes when you said judgment free zone. Who wants to wager,
which teams generated more ideas? How many people want to say one?
>>: The first.
>> David Burkus: The first one, because that's Alex Osborne's rules,
right? How many people are going with the second one? You all
probably point out what's going on and like where the twist and turns
in movies are. You're the ones that love the ruin the surprise.
Yes, group two actually had significantly more ideas in the session.
They generated more ideas in the session. And when their ideas were
rated by an independent panel their ideas were better quality. Here's
what I think is the most interesting thing. In the follow-up to the
study, as the students were sort of closing out, filling out their
paperwork, receiving out their compensation, extra points, they asked
any other ideas you thought of since you had that session, the group
two group had an average of 2 to 3 more ideas than students in the
group one group. Even after the session was over that presence of
criticism and conflict is getting people to think about how to refine
their ideas and how to come up with new ideas based on the feedback of
criticism.
This does not jibe with what Alex Osborne preached as gospel, which is
challenging. This doesn't personally, I don't think this jibes with a
lot of us because nobody likes to be criticized. We're actually really
good at it, most of us, especially if we're married, we're really good
at criticizing or at least really good at being on the receiving end of
criticism.
But nobody, we feel it stifles our process. We'd rather have a
judgment free process. What I submit to you is the teams that are
really able, the companies that are really able to keep the benefits of
this conflict driving innovation are the ones that I said earlier are
able to keep it task-oriented, focused on the decision and not
devolving into personality conflicts and personal conflicts. Not
pointing out that you're wrong because you're stupid, I'm pointing out
you might be wrong because have you thought about this option. So how
do you do that? I'll show you two examples.
And forever -- for the rest of your talk, if you learn nothing else
from this, I want you to remember these two examples, because these two
examples will show you what the Pope and Pixar have in common.
So, first, the Pope. The Catholic church, for the longest time, for
over 500 years, had a system in place to decide who would become known
as a saint. They had a very rigorous process. If you've ever seen the
movie The Saint with Val Kilmer, number one you're too old, and you
wasted two hours of your life, but you remember there are rules to
becoming a saint in the Catholic church. Have to have three miracles.
You have to be dead. And then you still have this independent panel
that decides whether or not you're going to be canonized into
sainthood.
And for the longest time they had a process to make
the best most righteous people became saints. They
probably pronounced that wrong, not good at Latin.
high school. What this translated to, you probably
devil's advocate.
sure that the only
called it [Latin],
I took German in
already see it, the
Truthfully, if you watched the movie with Al Pacino instead of The
Saint, you might know more about being creative. Just kidding. The
devil's advocate. The idea was that one person in the group of people
making the decision for sainthood, it was considered their job to come
up with every single reason why that person should not be a saint, to
find dirt on that person and come up with logical explanations
explaining away all the different miracles and to present a case
presumably on behalf of the devil, present a case for why this person
was not worthy to be a saint.
What I think is really interesting about this is that this devil's
advocate term was not the only term they had for this role. The other
was [Latin], the promoter of the faith or the defender of the faith.
The idea being that their faith, their saints were only as strong as
this process would allow. Because it wasn't about, okay, did you just
find their own person and you find a way to excuse it away, it was if
this person, in light of all the things that this devil's advocate has
just presented, is still worthy enough, then we're okay, then this
person will help promote even beyond their life will help promote and
be an example of our faith.
I can't speak to every single saint that has been canonized into
sainthood, but I can tell you this: This devil's advocate practice is
not in play anymore.
In 1982, Pope John Paul actually did away with this process. He said:
I don't like it. It's too conflict-oriented. It shouldn't be a part
of our process. So he abandoned this devil's advocate process. Again,
I can't speak to who is worthy of sainthood or not, but here's what I
think is interesting. From the history of the church, presumably AD
33, from the history of the church, until 1982, 500 people were named
as saints. From 1982 until today, anyone want to wager to guess how
many people have been made saints? 500? Keep going.
>>: Ten.
>> David Burkus:
Ten.
No, the opposite effect.
>>: A thousand.
>> David Burkus: Over 1300 people have been made saints since 1982,
and a large portion of other people have been beatified, taken to the
third or fourth steps of sainthood.
Again, I'm not going to criticize each individual saint. But I think
the numbers are very telling as to the rigor of the decision making
process, this devil's advocate idea puts forth. What I think is really
telling too is that this is not sort of the negative Nancy, I'm going
to put the devil's hat on for a moment, as if the devil wears headgear.
But we do this in meetings all the time. Let me play the devil's
advocate, et cetera.
What this came up with is ahead of all our decision-making meetings,
we're appointing one person. That person rotates. But we're
appointing that one person to take on the sacred duty of being negative
Nancy, finding all the reasons why the idea won't work. Basically
being the person that Alfred P. Sloan was begging for in that meeting,
and it wasn't seen as something negative. It wasn't seen as that
person just trying to bring us down, it was seen as that person has a
solemn role in our group. Because of that it's not personal; that's
their job. And all of our jobs is to figure out and to prove that
person's, to go above that person's comments.
If it's submitted as an entire process, this is one way to take that
devil's advocate role that some of us are really already good at.
I wrote an article about this in Harvard Business Review. I got an
e-mail once about how criticism must be a spiritual gift of the church
because it was so effective. I can't go that far, but it was seen as
that level, that solemn. I think it's really, really telling.
Now, so that's the Pope. Let me talk to you about one other
organization that has a little bit different way, and it doesn't
involve the devil's headgear. And that's Pixar. Now, how many have
seen a Pixar film at some point in your life? Everybody. It's sort of
one of those things I want to work out your right hand. I'll just keep
asking questions. As I said earlier, I have a two-year-old, which is
amazing because I've seen every Pixar movie again. And he doesn't know
what's going on in any of them but he just stares at the screen.
Pixar, I think everybody would argue, is one of those standards of
creative company, standards of an innovative company, to the tune of 23
Academy Awards. I lost count, actually. I don't remember how many
they got in the most recent one. It might be higher than that. But
when I wrote the book it was 23.
And Pixar has a process that they use often in developing a film in
progress, designed to increase the quality of the film by leveraging
this conflict, leveraging these ideas. Every once in a while,
sometimes daily, if it really calls for it, but at least on a regular
basis, the director of the film, the animators of the film, will
display the film.
They'll show the film in progress to whomever wants to come in and
watch that screening. And frame by frame they'll go through the film.
And frame by frame they will criticize it. Some people actually call
these shredding sessions, because the idea is to shred the film apart
and from that it will get better. Think about it, frame by frame,
Pixar animates at 26 frames a second. So basically what you have, you
might have worked your entire day one day doing four frames, five
frames, and then each one of those gets criticized the very next day.
It can be a brutal process. But they have a technique in place to make
sure that they leverage that criticism without actually making it
personal, without having such a negative effect on the morale of
people.
And they stole it from Improv and they call it plussing. Now if you've
ever taken Improv, you know one of the fundamental rules of
improvisation is always accept an offer. If someone says something
always be building off of it. Like the three people who have taken
improv classes are nodding their head, always accept an offer.
If you don't know, now you've already learned how to be a better improv
partner. Always accept an offer. The idea is to always be building,
always be moving and pushing forward, building off of other people's
ideas.
In Pixar, what they do is they call it is plussing. If you have a
comment about this frame, a comment about the film, you can make that
comment. If it's a good thing, bad thing, criticism, et cetera, make
that comment.
But you owe us a plus. You owe us an addition, a suggestion on how we
can make it better. It's not enough just to criticize it. That
criticism has to be paired with a positive idea, a suggestion moving
forward. And at the end the director actually reserves the right or
the animator reserves the right to walk out of that room and accept or
reject any of the criticisms.
But what we've done in that session isn't just pointed out a bunch of
criticisms, we've given the animators, the directors sort of a
quiver-full of ideas for how they can improve upon it. And they can
accept them and build off them or say that doesn't necessarily fit with
my vision. They reserve that right which keeps it from being personal.
But the wonderful part about it we're not saying this is wrong, we're
saying this is wrong but we should add this.
It's a bit like, if you've been in a corporation longer than three
months, someone at some point has explained to you how to do the
complement sandwich.
I teach a class on HR. I have people come to me, like this is a
revolutionary idea, the complement sandwich. Some are looking at me,
what is the complement sandwich? I'll tell you. The complement
sandwich is supposedly a way to make feedback easier to take.
What you do you're supposed to say a complement, you always come to
work on time, a criticism, you smell awful, please shower and another
complement, but you get your work done quality on time. The end result
of a complement sandwich to me, the first time I was on the receiving
end of one, I didn't know if I was getting a bonus or getting fired.
It's sort of vague. I get the heart of it, right, but it's very, very
vague.
What plussing is not that. What plussing is, is this needs to be
fixed, here's an idea for how to fix it. I'm not leaving it on your
own, I'm also giving you that benefit. It works and it helps lighten
that process that's otherwise brutal, works to the tune of over 20
Academy Awards in the case of Pixar.
I want to give you a chance though, because a lot of people hear this
is a great concept, what does it look like. I'll give you a clans to
try it out. I asked permission to do this. It's only going to take
five minutes, but it involves you being a little more active than you
planned on being. Grab a partner and if you came here with someone,
don't grab that one. If you came with the person on your left, grab
the person on your right. Grab a partner, and I really want you really
quick, inside of a minute, you say here's what I'm working on right
now. Please don't share anything you're sort of not allowed to share.
Keep it open. But if you can: Here's something I am working on.
Truthfully, you could do it in work or personal life. The only
constraint I'll say please do not murder any animals. I did this one
time and somebody said I'm having problems with coyotes. And suddenly
all the plusses were about how to kill coyotes. Please don't harm any
animals.
But other than that, the spectrum is yours. Share: Here's what I'm
working on. Don't even say here's what my problem is. Just say here's
what I'm working on.
Allow the other person to say here's where I think you're going to go
wrong and here's an idea. Then switch. It should literally only take
about three minutes a side, here's what I'm working on, here's a
project, allow the person to criticize it. What I've decided to do in
my own life, if all they do is give you the criticism, you're sort of
sitting there, you tell them you owe me a plus. You still owe me a
plus. Are you with me? Okay. Let's grab a partner and let's plus our
ideas, see what comes out of it. [Group noise].
>> David Burkus: All right. Let's bring our focus back in. That was
fast, was it not? It's really easy to get people's attention when
you're standing on a chair. I just figured I would.
I used to do this thing with my college students where I could not get
them to stop talking to start class, and so I would literally stand on
a chair and I would do this. Whoever was paying attention would mirror
me and together we would all clap and the four or five kids who were
still talking would just be like what in the world happened. And then
everybody caught on, I can't do that anymore. I just stand up on a
chair and it works. That was fast, wasn't it? How did that feel,
first of all? You gotta -- so you got something you're working on
criticized. But it felt pretty good. It felt like, oh, I have some
ideas. Anybody want to share? Nobody's killing a coyote, right? So
we're okay. Anybody feel like they want to share theirs? Okay. So I
had my own plussing session while you guys were talking. We were
chatting about what to do with all of these talks, what to do with this
sort of Speaker Series because all the good names are taken. Sort of
like we're going to call it like speakers@whatever but we can't do that
because Google's taken. I said the @ symbol is overused in technology
all the time. You can't do it. My plus: Use the ampersand. This is
on video. It's on record. If you guys start doing Microsoft ampersand
whomever, I came up with it. Right? It's December 18th, 2:07, I'm
officially placing that idea into creative commons. You can have it.
I'll find something else.
>>: Or we can just use a plus.
>> David Burkus: Or you could use a plus. Right. Okay. [laughter].
Now I like that idea better. Truthfully, I like the elegance of the
ampersand. That's all it is. It's underutilized. But here's what I
think is great. A lot of you said it felt good. If you can be on the
receiving end of criticism, if it is that sort of plus. The truth is
that we don't really work this way very often. We look at those sort
of outstandingly creative companies and we feel like everybody should
always get along. We feel like if we're having a lot of conflicts, if
people are shooting down our ideas a lot, we feel that's a signal maybe
we need to move on to somewhere where people would be more accepting of
me, et cetera. The truth is we're inherently good at criticism.
There's a whole other myth in the book I sort of talk about that
explains where a lot of our judgments and criticisms come from. That's
not the point. The point today is I don't think there's any company
out there that is devoid of conflict. If they are, it's actually a
pretty good sign that they're on their way out.
I can't see into the boardrooms of General Motors over the last 20
years. But I would bet you that at a certain point in time, certain
point in time, they probably didn't resemble the boardrooms of Alfred
P. Sloan, probably not enough people cultivating necessary conflict.
What Sloan knew I think that is genius is what the animators and
directors of Pixar knew, it's what truthfully the church knew for a
long time, if you really want to push ideas forward, it's not enough to
just have lots of ideas, judgment free zone, and then just pick one.
You have to go through a process, a process of refinement, a process of
there's an amazing freedom in the word beta because essentially what
you're doing is you're inviting conflict, you're inviting criticism,
but you're saying don't hold it against us, don't make it personal
because we're working on it. So what all these groups have found a way
to do is to structure that in a way that's always channelling it
towards building.
Right? And so what I would submit to you today, as you go from
wherever it is, if you're having a problem, anywhere in your sort of
life, what we're trained to do is to find out people who will
sympathize with us, find out people who will tell us it will get
better. Everything happens for a reason. Some things don't happen for
a reason. But we say everything happens for a reason. It will get
better. This too shall pass. Whatever we want to use. When what we
really probably need is someone dressed up in the devil's headgear
saying no, here's why it's not going to work and then adding plus. But
hey if you did this, this would actually work.
I've had it for eight years. I call it Jana. She's my wife. She does
a really good job of that. When we started out, we were very conflict
oriented. We've shifted to being very conflict for the sake of
structure. We both have very A personalities. And so when we fight a
lot it's like, but when we put it together, there's no end to where it
goes. So if you're stuck somewhere, what I would submit to you is
don't look for greener pastures or more cohesion, instead go the
opposite way. See if you can't find the devil's advocate, and see if
together you two can't plus your way forward to being more creative and
more innovative.
We covered a lot of different stuff. Got a little nerdy on research.
Took you on the history of the Catholic church and talked about Pixar
and General Motors and EverNote. What questions do you have for me?
>>: What if conflict leads to people disrespecting each other?
>> David Burkus: Yes. And the larger question I get inside of this.
So the question was what if conflict leads to people disrespecting each
other.
What I feel a lot of times, basically the same question is hey these
ideas are great, how. How do we change our culture to where it doesn't
devolve into personality. And this is where the real key behind,
there's no magic research behind why the devil's advocate works or why
plussing works, the real key to why they work is you're submitting
yourself to a process.
Other people use a different one that doesn't necessarily jive with the
research much called Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats the idea is
everybody is wearing a certain hat, that's their job, not going to hold
it against them.
The idea is to keep it that, keep it focused on the job. I think this
is where especially a facilitator, kind of brainstorming sessions are
really important for saying no, no that's personality criticism, we're
not doing that right now. And where I think plussing works is kind of
improvisationally without a facilitator because you can look back at
someone and say that's great but you owe me a plus, a way to get it
sort of better.
How do you change an overall culture into one where it doesn't devolve
into that? It takes a lot of time and takes people getting more
familiar with the process, takes little experiments like we did today,
to where we now have a room of people going I know this can work, I
just need to roll it out and refine it, get more used to it.
I wish there was sort of a magic do this and there will never be any
personality conflict. It takes some time to get people adopted to
this. Pixar had an advantage, they've been doing it from the very
beginning. I suppose the same thing with the Catholic church. Now
they might have a hard time going back to it.
It's about trusting that process and really using that as your excuse.
And that's your out. That I'm just submitting myself to a process.
Because I think a lot of times where it gets personality is because
it's something that was said that wasn't personal. But it got
inherently taken as it and then the response back is what's the actual
personal one.
And so as long as you can say that initial criticism, just about the
process, what my duty is to do, you can usually cut a lot of that out.
Now that said, there's always that person that's just crazy, critical,
awful person to be around, don't get a lot of Christmas cards. You
don't want -- I'm looking at the shirt over here. You would want to
mark them as spam. Love it. Just don't the let that person be the
devil's advocate for a while.
Let some other more positive people be it as you're learning how to use
the process and maybe give them the shot, maybe never give them the
shot. They're already the devil's advocate. We don't have to beatify
them as one.
Other thoughts or questions?
Yeah.
>>: So this is kind of more specific about plussing. But there are
certain scenarios where you can identify a problem with an idea but
maybe not have a solution for it. Does that mean you should not view
it as a problem or how should you approach that?
>> David Burkus: So in the book I talk about this other myth called
the brainstorming myth, essentially that whenever we have a problem
let's get in a room, throw out a bunch of ideas, we'll pick the best
one.
What plussing I think is a part of is that ideation area. But the
truth is the reason I call it a myth, is that's great, but it has to be
part of this larger process.
Albert Einstein once said if he had an hour to solve a problem he would
spend 55 minutes structuring the question properly, which really speaks
to the amount of research and definition and refinement of the problem
that needs to go into before you get into the brainstorming sessions.
So a lot of times when you can't think of ideas, you can't think of
ideas that work, it's time to circle back, go clearly we don't have the
right problem, let's move backward a step, do more research until we
can figure out the problem. Make sense?
Cool. Awesome. I love that. By the way, you're free to steal that
too, the 55 and one, it makes a lot of sense, a lot of sense, if you go
from Albert Einstein to I think Tony Robbins once said if you want a
better answer, ask a better question, which I'll go with Einstein
because he's Einstein. But both are the same perspectives on the idea;
how you structure the question matters. If you're not getting the
answers you want, take a step back see if you're asking the right
question. Other thoughts -- other people who want to ask the right
question?
>>: What if conflict leads to deadlock?
>> David Burkus:
As if there's nowhere to go forward?
>>: Take Congress for example [laughter].
>> David Burkus: Where would you like me to take them because I know
where I'd like to take them. [laughter]. I think what is genius to
the plussing methodology, and I would say that first the devil's
advocate approach would basically be if there's conflict and deadlock,
clearly the person is just not good enough. And so deadlock almost has
a purpose. The plussing mentality, basically the larger process that
Pixar goes through is remember that the director, the animator,
reserves the right to accept or reject that criticism.
So what the director gets exposed to, what the animators get exposed
to, all these different ideas. Even if there's deadlock, they still
have a right to leave the room with whatever ideas they want and leave
whatever ideas they don't want in the room. So I think that basically
says, okay, even if there's deadlock, there's one person ultimately
that pulls it forward. And we're all submitting to helping them.
So even if there's four people who say this and four people who say
this, that one person who actually gets the decision-making authority,
it rests with them and we're all submitting to the process of helping
them get better. So we're all okay with whatever they decide.
And I think, truthfully, to say Congress, I think if we had that sort
of mentality a bit more that we're here to provide different
perspectives on an issue, but ultimately certain sort of people, there
was something about checks and balances where this was supposed to
happen, where ultimately there were certain people that could sort of
help with that. But it doesn't necessarily work out that way.
The other thing I should say is Pixar employees know they'll be there
for longer than two years and they don't have to cozy up to their boss
at the end of that two-year cycle to get rehired. So I think it helps
them make tough decisions. But anyway. Yeah.
>>: So in your research, how does this process actually work, because
if I'm the animator and I can go out of the room and still do whatever
I wanted to do before I entered the room and listen to my criticism,
you know, my personality type tells me I'll go back and do exactly what
I wanted to do before I entered the room. Did you get any feedback on
whether they took the suggestions or not?
>> David Burkus: So I would suggest you may not be the right animator
for their process and you might have more fun at Dream Works ripping
off fairytales. Oh, that was mean, because that's the same thing that
Disney does so it doesn't matter.
Anyway, so I'd submit that -- I think in general I think you have to
come with the mentality that these people are here to help. They're
not just here to criticize. They're here to sort of to point things
out. The truth is all of us have situations in our lives -- this is
what happens in these sessions more often. Where we're not capable of
seeing certain problems that we have, certain criticisms we have.
Everyone who has a Facebook profile or a Twitter profile automatically
has this vision of them as a little bit better than they really are.
And so there are people who are in your very real life that need to
remind you that your selfie is not an accurate reflection of you. That
your accurate self is different from your selfie, that's good. I like
that. I just came up with that on the fly.
I think this is where that process comes in. This is an opportunity to
say here's my vision but I want to make it better so point out what I'm
missing. And when you come in with that attitude, you can really
benefit from this. If you're not willing to come into that attitude
with that, then you probably won't last very long as part of the
organization as a whole, and they're not afraid to change it up, move
it around, change different directors.
I'm a big fan, one of my favorite Pixar films is the Invincibles. They
came about when all the directors had their rhythm down. What they
decided to do is kind of throw a wildcard in there and they hired Brad
Byrd, previously directed The Iron Giant, a wonderful film but total
box office flop. They brought him in, basically said we need to shake
up our process a bit.
So the team he built, et cetera, was willing to push that forward.
That's the story that gets circulated around because that's the right
sort of attitude that they want to cultivate. Is nobody's perfect,
everybody can get better. If you think you're perfect we'll find
somebody else. I saw that one first. I'll catch you in a bit.
>>: Question on when you talk about criticize during the brainstorming
session. So could you give some practical tips how to do that, because
what I realize is we have tried that, a lot of times we go into the
criticize, go into a ten-minute debate, because one person really want
to explain the idea and they keep developing each other to get more
people to really contribute, and then so how did you really facilitate
a whole brainstorming session, ask everybody to contribute at the same
time creating those conflicts?
>> David Burkus: The question is basically how do we incorporate
criticism into that brainstorming session where it doesn't just devolve
into two people arguing the whole time and everybody else just sits
there wondering what are they going to do. This is not in the study.
It comes out of my personal experience. I think there's a variety of
phases to an ideation session. And I often use the term ideation
because it makes me sound cool. But also because ->>: [indiscernible].
>> David Burkus: I know but brainstorming -- here's the thing,
brainstorming is so overused. People walk in assuming they want
something. I talk about idea generation sessions, ideation sessions,
whatever you want to call it. They have to be phases. When I go in
work with companies, nonprofits, one-on-one I start the session with
individual writing time because I promise you if you have more than two
people in the room, one is probably going to be a little bit more
introverted tendency and they get shot over in a sense and talked over.
So I want to give them the time to write down their ideas. Then we get
into sort of group. And as criticism comes up, some teams have
probably done this before, you have a parking lot. Our parking lot is
only for sort of demolition derby parking lot.
It's only for criticism ideas. The thing is throw them all out there.
And then when we're done throwing them all out there and we have a full
parking lot, then turn by turn we go into these different criticisms.
And you might still find you have to spend too much time on one
individual criticism in the parking lot. But at least all of the
initial ideas have been gotten out and at this point we're going
through the parking lot and seeing what new ideas come out, out of that
criticism. And finding a place to put those on. So different phases
is kind of how I handle it.
>>: You're talking about the process when we have a bunch of people in
a room and how to do things. What I have seen people struggle with to
understand why people should work in a certain way, how to work in a
group. And in other words how to generate like-minded people who are
ready to have this kind of discussion. Like we are talking about like
what happened if something goes wrong in a particular discussion how to
handle it. But how do we even get people in place to say, yes, this is
a good way of doing it. Because if there's no fundamental agreement on
that, yes, this is right, then everything else is just trying to here
and there and we'll not give you optimal design.
>> David Burkus: The question is sort of how do we get people to buy
into the idea it's about the collective mind instead of I'm just going
to pursue my idea, you pursue yours, we'll refine just as we go, that
sort of stuff. There's another myth in the book I called the lone
creator myth, which I sell to a lot of people this is the reason we
need this.
We think about Thomas Edison inventing light bulb trying a thousand
times, 5,000 times, 10,000 times, we picture him alone in a facility
somewhere testing out all the different filaments. Not a lot of that
ever actually happened. For one thing I know for a fact he didn't work
alone. He didn't actually invent the light bulb. There 22 patents -22 inventors of light bulbs that filed patents before he did. His
patent was for improvement in electric lamps, that's a different story.
But the truth is his greatest greatest invention probably wasn't the
light bulb which is good because January 1st we do away with it. His
greatest invention was Menlo Park, this facility where about 10 to 15
people at any given time were working on various different projects.
Most of the patents that came out of Menlo Park had lot of different
people's name on them. Very early on though they called themselves the
muckers. That was their collective term for their group. But early on
they found out that people would pay more money if they thought Thomas
Edison was working alone on their project. But that the project would
be better if they all sort of worked together and pulled their minds
together.
Edison, the man, suddenly became Edison code word for all of us because
you could charge more. And I think that speaks to this idea that
people sell themselves on that: I just know what to do and I'm going
to drive after it. The truth is almost every great sort of creative
work you can actually find a team behind.
I shift from Thomas Edison to Michael Angelo. We picture him alone on
scaffolding painting the Sistine Chapel. There were 13 other people
painting it too. Hate to break that to you, ruin it for you.
But the truth is there's really little research to support the idea one
person has all the ideas they have, they can't get better from that. A
lot of times it takes them selling them on that idea. The examples
that I sort of talk about again to go with this, you sort of have a
culture agreed upon and accepted and so if not you have to really work
on a culture shift. Wish I knew a way to wave a magic wand and do
that. One of the reasons I wanted to address it in the book, I wanted
to sort of speak to those people who can say I can do everything on my
own, yes, you can, but you can do everything better with a group of
people. Make sense? Are you with me? I know, probably not -- it's
not the magic wand answer you wanted to hear. I wish I had like a
collaboration pill we could just force down people.
>>: I get the idea.
>> David Burkus:
So yes, in the back.
>>: What I observed in the sense you asked us to do is the person next
to you is a random person and --
>> David Burkus:
Hopefully.
>>: What I was working on. The perspective that I got was very
different and very interesting. The question I have for you is who
should be in the brainstorming session and how many brainstorming
sessions that are associated with that one?
>> David Burkus: I wish I knew the answer as to how many, is there as
many as how many it takes. But who should be in the room is probably
more people than you think.
So one of the things that ties on to this idea of this lone creator and
collaboration idea is there's some interesting research done actually
out of microbiology labs where the more sort of diverse the people that
were attending the weekly meetings working on different projects, what
would end up happening is when you said your problem, -- you probably
have actually -- here's an analogy for you. You probably have had
this. You talk to someone on your team, you explain your problem one
way. You go out with a group of friends who don't work here, don't
work anywhere in the sector, you explain it a different way. You use
different metaphors, different analogies. What's happening in their
mind is the exact same thing, they're hearing those analogies and those
metaphors and they're translating into their jargon.
And because of that you're actually getting multiple times to get
different perspectives. So the most productive microbiology labs as
far as putting out research were the ones that had the widest range of
stuff because when they got together they were using analogies to
explain stuff, using analogies to understand it and doing the same
thing backwards.
So you had this big diverse. There was another group of researchers
that wanted to test this idea how much diversity, et cetera. They
looked at Broadway shows. Year by year they looked at different
Broadway shows based how diverse the production teams behind different
shows were.
So they would measure everybody. And this was a huge project, because
some of the stuff is not -- there wasn't an IMDB for Broadway at the
time. They had to go in sometimes go playbill by playbill and look at
all this. What they found was in any given production year, the most
successful production year. If you were to rate a scale 1 to 5, 1
being total homogeneity and one being total diversity, the optimum was
about a 2.6, so just a little bit over diverse.
Uniform enough to where everybody's familiar with the process and
familiar with certain terms, et cetera, but diverse enough to where new
ideas are being presented. I think what's interesting, the question
isn't -- I think the question isn't how do we make sure the right level
of people are in the room, because they didn't do it on a show-by-show
basis, they did it year by year, the question is how do we build a
whole company, whole department, a whole team of people to where the
people we're going to pull for to go in any room can provide that, be
constantly remixing. Not necessarily about the individual teams, it's
about the entire network, how do we build one that's diverse enough to
pull 2.6 teams out of.
>>: Is there intended symbolism in your cover picture?
>> David Burkus: My cover designer is awesome. That's all. I was
telling the story earlier, especially when you're doing your first
book, you don't get a lot of say in the process. Probably a good thing
because I would have put a light bulb on there and everybody would say
boring.
What they usually do, they come to you, give you ten proofs, say tell
us which ones you like out of these, we'll push them forward. Then I
got an e-mail and it said -- I probably shouldn't share it with you all
but I will.
I got an e-mail and it said: Here's two. So immediately my mind's
going oh, no, because I only have two to pick from. Then the second
line of the e-mail says: I want you to know everybody around the
office really likes the first one. [laughter] which is sort of code
for I hope you like the first one because we're doing it. And I opened
it up. It was sort of that. Right? There's nowhere in the book do we
talk about monkeys or little kids. Actually, different people have
said this is a boy, a girl, a Lady Gaga.
Everybody has their idea of who this person is. I think it's a boy.
I've seen the larger photograph. I think the idea, though, is that
sometimes we don't really know who is in charge. Sometimes we don't
really know who is doing the studying and sometimes we're not studying
stuff the right way, hence the explanations we get are not necessarily
the right one. Truthfully, you've got to have a creative cover if
you're going to write about a book creativity. Light bulbs don't cut
it anymore.
>> Amy Draves:
pleasure.
>> David Burkus:
[applause]
I want to say thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
It's been a