It’s late in the night, and Mollie and Seb have been having the same argument for an hour now. Everyone else has gone quiet. They occasionally throw in a line or two, but they mostly just want to go to bed. The argument has long since gone around in circles. It’s going nowhere. It’s not a shouting match by any means. Mollie and Seb are both reasonable, respectful, and calm. It’s just that they’ve reached “That Point.”

That Point is the part of a debate where rational argument can go no further. They’ve each unpacked one another’s premises and called out non-sequiturs, ad hominem arguments, and false dichotomies aplenty. But That Point cannot be crossed. It’s a locked door and an unbudgeable rock. That Point is the moment you say, “Well, that’s just what I believe.”

Consider the following argument, examined in Alasdair MacIntrye’s After Virtue:

“Justice demands that every citizen should enjoy, so far as is possible, an equal opportunity to develop his or her talents and his or her other potentialities. But prerequisites for the provision of such equal opportunity include the provision of equal access to health care and to education.”

It’s a rational, convincing, and plausible ethical position. Yet nothing can budge. The debate depends almost entirely on the weight you ascribe to “justice.” That Point is known as aporia in philosophy. There are moments when there is a problem or a conflict with no possible (or, at least, no apparent) resolution. An unsolvable puzzle. A riddle with no answer.

We look at how common aporia is and how we can deal with it in the workplace.

Let’s agree to disagree

In our opening example, let’s imagine Seb is trying to persuade Mollie that battery farms are immoral. They debate and argue, and Seb says, “Don’t you care about animal suffering?” and Mollie honestly replies, “Well, no, not really.” Where does Seb go from here? What more can Seb say?

In our everyday social interactions, there will come a point when you meet someone who holds drastically and fundamentally different views from you about a topic. Their starting position and their initial premises are different. This is aporia. When this occurs, what usually happens is one of two things. Either you resort to name-calling,: “You monster!” Or, you agree to disagree and hope to go about your lives as smoothly as possible.

The defining characteristic of aporia is that there is no workable compromise position. Let’s say, at work, that someone prefers meetings in the morning and someone else prefers them in the late afternoon. A compromise position might be to arrange meetings around 11 a.m. or even to mix it up. No one’s entirely happy, but the meeting gets done, and the conflict has been resolved. Aporia, though, allows no middle ground. Two rams will butt heads until one is either broken or has fled.

Resolving the unresolvable

What happens, then, if aporia pops up in your workplace? How do you deal with unresolvable dilemmas and uncompromisable positions in your interactions with colleagues? Here we look at three examples and possible solutions.

Get rid of the personality. There are few things so popular in the corporate world as a good, increasingly old-fashioned psychometric test. Even if your company hasn’t officially conducted one, you can bet many people think in terms of them. “Oh, she’s such a Type A person,” someone might say. Even if you’re suspicious of psychometric tests, the fact is that you will find some people at work hard to work with. You’ll find conversations hard, and the workflow is more work-trickle. How, then, are you to reconcile the fundamental difference in personality? One study from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, offers up two practical pieces of advice. First, “start the discussion by describing the gap between the expected and observed behavior.” Be honest about how you see yourself and how you see other people. Second, “[begin] with the facts from your perspective… and share all appropriate and relevant information.” Keep it as neutral, objective, and professional as you can. In other words, if there’s a clash of personalities, try to get rid of the personality.

Use cutting-edge translation tools. There is nothing so unresolvable as literally not understanding someone. It’s rare for a company to have people of entirely different languages, but it’s increasingly common for a colleague’s language to be a second language. Struggling to communicate with someone can be both demoralizing and inefficient. Time is lost explaining terms and ideas. The instructions or requirements might be confusing. There are two ways to resolve this. The old-school way is to invest in translation services or use more visual aids. Reduce the use of overly complex language, where possible. The second way is more modern. This year will be the year of AI translation. There are already a great many options for “live translations,” and it’s a safe bet these will be common and freely included in existing services by the end of the year.

Build in a response buffer. It’s likely that you will, eventually, have some kind of conflict with someone at work. Often, that will be about some moveable and time-sensitive issue. At other times, it’s aporia. It’s irreconcilable. In these instances, it can be quite easy to simply label that someone as “that conflict person.” You will go into meetings with them tense. You’ll be looking for slights and annoying habits. You want them to fail, and you’re ready to pounce on the smallest mistake. On Big Think+, Dan Shapiro, Director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program and author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, calls this “repetition compulsion.” It’s a Freudian idea that you will behave with someone out of habit, not rationally. In the video, Shapiro gives a great many ways to combat the issue, for example, by just taking ten minutes to think before you respond to someone you find hard.

This article Workplace “aporia”: How to handle unresolvable arguments is featured on Big Think.

A few years back, I read an article about cinemas in Korea going completely contact-free. Automated kiosks would sell tickets and movie-goers would buy popcorn through LED-controlled pick-up boxes. My childhood memories of cinema nights were filled with people—the smiley ticket vendors, the ushers in their old-school uniforms, the snack bar vendors who added extra butter to our hot popcorn. Contact-free cinemas seemed safer but at the same time, somewhat dystopian.

Today, when we talk about AI, there’s an undercurrent of anxiety about machines replacing people and, similar to the cinema example, eliminating the personal touch. To a certain extent, the advent of AI will introduce cost-saving mechanisms—sometimes, unfortunately, at the expense of human jobs. But the way I see it, AI can also be a growth accelerator. It can provide a means of improving the quality of service for customers and the quality of work for employees. 

In my book, Automate Your Busywork, I highlight how important it is to take advantage of the latest tools and technology to save time so you can pursue more meaningful goals—as I call it, the “big stuff.” AI takes this goal to the next level. 

At Jotform we’re always exploring new ways to leverage AI. When I launched the company in 2006, our mission was to automate a rote, everyday task—creating online forms. Since then, we’ve built an entire ecosystem to make our users’ lives easier. We now have an Online Store Builder to readily sell goods and services, Jotform Tables to process data, a Report Builder, an Enterprise service offering for teams and larger organizations, and even an eSign tool for digital contracts. AI gives us the ability to improve the speed of development, bolster our security, and enhance our customers’ experience.

Here are five ways we’ve adapted Jotform with AI while continuing to grow our team and scale our company.

Generate auto-replies with a personal touch

Jotform has always had autoreply emails. More recently, we incorporated AI-powered tools to provide tailored responses to recurring user questions and concerns submitted via our website forms. This, in turn, empowered our customer service team to focus on more things that only humans can do, like tackling complex tasks and addressing unique user issues. AI helps us to maintain a fast and reliable feedback channel with our most important stakeholders.

From a user perspective, there’s nothing more frustrating than reaching out to a service provider about a pressing issue and feeling as though you’re communicating with a robot. Before the era of AI, automated systems would use simple keyword matching based on the words in their inquiry and the words in the company documentation. When enough words matched, the user would be presented with articles that might help them resolve the issues—or might not. The result was oftentimes a poor customer experience. 

AI can understand the nature of the person’s inquiry and fully understand the documentation and the organization. Using AI, you can ask it to not only read and review a form submission but also create a personalized response that addresses their specific question. The best example of this is with Google. Years ago Google only returned links with summaries and it was up to the searcher to click through and read them. Starting in October 2023, they began including AI-generated content at the top of the search results. In the same way as search with generative AI can prepare a personalized response for you, auto-replies can also.

Become fully present in meetings

At my company, I do my best to slash unnecessary meetings and status updates. Our global team works in various time zones and, on an individual level, according to their peak hours. If information can be shared on an asynchronous platform, we choose that over a meeting. 

That said, some meetings are inevitable—and it’s no secret, they can be draining. Before AI, we’d all take careful notes during meetings. At the end of the week, those notes would start to look like a small novel—searching through them would be cumbersome and time-consuming. What’s worse, having to focus on note-taking would diminish our full attention on the actual meeting content. 

Today, we integrate an AI tool, Otter.ai, into our videoconferences. It automatically turns our conversations into a neat, organized digital transcript. We no longer have to worry about scribbling away as colleagues speak. After meetings, locating specific parts is as easy as a Ctrl+F search. 

Once we began using an AI tool for note-taking, I noticed a remarkable change in our meetings. Attendees were more engaged and contributed more, better ideas. People were able to listen more carefully and we eliminated time rehashing points already covered. Luckily, there are various tools, like Otter.ai, Gong.io, and Rev, to automate your note-taking and remove a tedious task from your plate. Then, you can focus on the more important stuff, like being fully present and making each meeting count.

Develop compelling content

AI can be a secret weapon for today’s content creators. My team and I create a lot of content daily. Some of it lives on our website. Some of my stories are published on entrepreneurial websites (like the one you’re reading!). While I trust that AI will never replace my voice, I can use it to strengthen my writing—by generating compelling headlines, for example. No one expects AI to write the next great novel, but it can be a smart way to generate usable first drafts. Then you can spend more time flexing your creative muscles. 

For example, say you’re a writer for a SaaS company and tasked with producing lots of content. The volume alone keeps you from more meaningful work, like fully researching and verifying your articles. Deadlines are a perpetual source of dread. Instead of taking a crack at first drafts manually, you can use AI to create human-like text—tools like Copysmith, Jasper.ai, and OpenAI with GPT-3. Then, you can use the time saved to conduct more in-depth research and perform keyword analysis.

I know that for content creators, using AI may seem like a dirty word. But the key is not letting AI replace you—it’s essentially delegating the rote part of your job and giving you more mental space to improve the aspects that only you can do. And you can be sure: if you’re not taking advantage of AI tools, your competitors will be. 

Deepen engagement

My company, like so many today, spans continents and time zones. While we mostly work in the office, we often collaborate with colleagues overseas. That means that we hardly see some of our closest collaborators IRL. 

When teams that work together don’t see each other in person, it can be difficult to build and maintain those essential team bonds—and as any leader will tell you, the synergy between team members is all-important for continued innovation, motivation, and engagement. 

That’s why we use a chatbot to regularly facilitate communication between team members and ensure that everyone is feeling connected. A chatbot for online platforms such as Slack and Discord can help run daily standup meetings, collect surveys, share responses, and post updates to team channels. It’s like planning a wedding yourself versus using a wedding planner (in this case, the planner is an AI-generated tool). Why suffer the headaches if you don’t have to? 

There is no stand-in for face-to-face contact. But using bots to maintain a steady flow of effective communication helps teams stay connected and engaged. 

Boost cybersecurity

Automated sales messages can be annoying. But at their worst, they also contain harmful links. These may trick you into giving out personal information to a bad actor, or entice you to click a link that will infect your computer with viruses.

Our cybersecurity team is constantly monitoring our network for those attempting to leverage it for nefarious purposes. AI gives us the power to monitor a wider range of signals and more quickly identify suspicious forms. It helps us identify a broader and more accurate array of imposters, such as those falsely representing a bank or trusted organization. Our internal systems can then respond faster and keep our platform safe and free for all to use. Then, our employees can focus on more meaningful work, like finding new solutions and developing innovative products—that, or simply have more time to truly disconnect and recharge. 

AI isn’t the future—it’s right now. Businesses that leverage AI only stand to gain, in terms of satisfied employees (whose time is no longer needlessly consumed by rote, manual tasks) and satisfied customers. In the end, it’s possible to be nostalgic for the old days, pre automated popcorn machines, and to jump on the AI bandwagon to enhance the work that only humans can do.

This article How I adapted my company to AI: 5 key insights is featured on Big Think.

Organizational culture has become a hot topic. Building a strong cul­ture, maintaining it, and hiring applicants who fit. 

But what is organizational culture exactly? Beyond some vague notion of beliefs and values, can it actually be measured? And does fitting in with organizational culture have implications for how well people do at work? 

Just like online beer communities have terminology and linguistic norms, so do organizations. Different tribes have different lingo. Startup founders talk about “pivoting,” retailers talk about “omnichannel,” and Wall Street traders talk about “pikers” and being “junked up.” 

But beyond slang and terminology, there are other ways organizations or industries use language differently. Some may tend to use shorter, more clipped sentences, while others may use longer ones. Some may use more concrete language while others may talk more abstractly. 

To study the link between language and success at work, a team of sci­entists looked at a data source we don’t usually think much about: email. Unlike RateBeer users, employees don’t write online reviews. But they do write emails. Lots of them. Emails asking colleagues for information and emails providing feedback on others’ work. Emails sharing drafts of presentations and emails scheduling a time to meet with a client. Thou­sands of notes about every topic imaginable. 

Just for fun, take a minute, open your “Sent Items” folder, and scan what’s inside. It might seem like normal work and personal stuff. Trivial even. And it often is. But it’s not just any work and personal stuff. It’s your work and personal stuff. 

Those notes about the headers on a particular document or what im­age should go on page 23 of a PowerPoint deck might seem insignificant, but they provide a snapshot of what’s going on in your work life. Not only the progression of various projects and decisions, but how you have evolved as a colleague, leader, and potentially even friend. They’re pottery shards or remnants of that ancient civilization that is you at the office. And consequently, they provide a lot of information about you and how you have, or haven’t, changed over time. 

The scientists looked at five years of data, more than 10 million emails sent between hundreds of employees of a midsized firm. Everything Susan in Accounting sent to Tim in HR and everything Lucinda in Sales sent to James in R&D. And rather than looking at how many emails were sent, or who the emails were sent to, the researchers looked at the words each employee used. 

But this is where the study gets even more interesting. Because rather than focusing on the content of what employees talked about (e.g., doc­ument headers or PowerPoint slides), the researchers zeroed in on something completely different: employee’s linguistic style. 

When reading an email, talking on the phone, or considering any type of communication, we tend to focus on its content. If someone asked you to look at your email and report back on the language used, you’d probably focus on the main topics. There were a bunch of emails about this meeting, others about a particular project, and a few regarding that big retirement party you’ve been planning for a coworker. 

All these are examples of content. The subject matter, topic, or sub­stance of what was being discussed. 

But while content is clearly important, there’s another dimension that often goes unnoticed: linguistic style. Consider the phrase “They said to follow up in a couple weeks.” The content (following up in a couple weeks) provides a sense of what is happening, but embedded within the content are words like “they,” “to,” and “a.” 

These pronouns, articles, and other style words often fade into the background. We often don’t even notice that they are there. In fact, even after I mentioned them, you probably had to look closely to find them in the sentences. They’re almost invisible. People gloss over them as they jump between the nouns, verbs, and adjectives that make up the linguis­tic content, or what was said. 

But while they’re often ignored, style words actually provide a lot of information. Communicators have only so much flexibility in the con­tent they’re communicating. If someone asks when a client said to follow up, and the answer is “In a couple weeks,” some version of those words is probably needed to communicate the idea. 

But how we communicate that idea is up to us. We could say, “They said to follow up in a couple weeks,” “Following up a couple weeks from now would be good,” or any number of variations. And while these differences might seem minor, because they reflect how people communicate, they provide insight into the communicators themselves. Everything from personality and preferences, to how smart people are and whether they are lying.

The researchers analyzed employees’ linguistic style. In particular, how similar people’s linguistic style was to that of their coworkers. Or, said another way, their cultural fit. Whether employees used lan­guage the same way as others around them. Whether someone used per­sonal pronouns (e.g., “we” or “I”) when communicating with colleagues who used them a lot or used articles (e.g., “a” or “the”) and prepositions (e.g., “in” or “to”) to a similar degree as their peers. 

The results were remarkable. Similarity shaped success. Employees whose linguistic style was more similar to their coworkers’ were three times more likely to be promoted. They received better performance evaluations and higher bonuses. 

In some ways, this is great news. If you fit in well at your new job, you’re likely to do well. But what about everybody else? What happens to people who don’t fit in? Indeed, people with a dissimilar linguistic style weren’t so fortunate. They were four times more likely to be fired. 

So are people who don’t fit in from the get­-go just destined to fail? Not quite. Because rather than just studying whether employees fit in initially, the researchers also examined how their fit changed over time. Whether some employees were more adaptable than others. 

Similar to the beer community, most new hires adapted quickly. Af­ter a year at the firm they had acclimated to the organization’s linguistic norms. 

Not everyone, however, adapted to the same degree. Some adapted more quickly while others adapted more slowly. Adaptability, in turn, helped explain success. While successful em­ployees adapted, those who would eventually be fired never did. They started with low cultural fit and slowly declined from there. 

Linguistic similarity even helped distinguish between employees who stayed at the firm and those who left to pursue better options. Not because they got fired, but because they were offered something better elsewhere. These folks assimilated early on, but at some point, their lan­guage started to diverge. While clearly capable of adapting, eventually they stopped trying, foreshadowing their intention to quit. 

Adaptability ended up being more important than initial fit. People who were a good fit initially did do well, but those who adapted quickly to the changing norms were even more successful. Fit isn’t something we have to be born with, we just have to be willing to adapt over time.

This article Why “linguistic similarity” is so often the key to success is featured on Big Think.

Archimedes had a problem. Hieron II, the king of Syracuse, suspected that his new crown was not pure gold, so he charged Archimedes with finding the truth. The weight of the crown could be compared to the weight of pure gold using a scale, but that was no guarantee that it was gold all the way through. Archimedes needed a way to confirm that the crown took up the same amount of space as its weight in gold. But how? He was stuck with the tools of the day, locked into a riddle he couldn’t solve. Clearly, he needed a break, so he slipped into a warm bath. It was as he felt the water rising to match the weight of his body that his mental logjam broke apart. “Eureka!” he shouted (and, some say, went running out into the street naked). He had discovered displacement as a way of measuring mass, not simply by bearing down with his formidable powers of analysis but by letting go of cognitive striving and surrendering to sensation.

In 1666, with the plague raging through England, Sir Isaac Newton left Cambridge for Woolsthorpe Manor, the Lincolnshire sheep farm where he was born. Forced to set aside the intensity of his studies in mathematics, he found himself with unaccustomed leisure, sitting under an apple tree, in a self-described “contemplative mood.” Then he saw an apple drop to the ground. In a sudden flash, he realized how incredible it is that objects don’t fall sideways or upward but only downward. Somehow, these objects must be attracted to the mass of the earth. To make sense of this observation, Newton posited that some invisible force called gravity must exist. In that moment of truly attending to his senses, Newton saw the familiar act of objects falling as if for the first time. Breaking free from his driven and purely intellectual habits helped him revolutionize our understanding of physics.

Genius requires doing something new. It has many mysterious ingredients, but among them is the ability to break free from looking at things in the same old way. Many great thinkers throughout history began their discoveries by first realizing that they were stuck in the routine and the familiar. Yet their stories of astonishing insight rarely valorize grinding away at a problem until an answer emerges. Instead, we see that the grind is rarely where discovery occurs; the breakthroughs often come when the thinker sets aside their customary thought process. The interruption came not from another thought but from a sensory experience that helped them escape their default mode network’s (DMN) House of Habit. The mental intensity subsides, and in that moment of receptivity and presence, the penny drops, just like Newton’s apple. 

We can’t rewind history and do brain scans on Archimedes and Newton, but we can use our existing framework to characterize the dynamics that must have been at play in their eureka moments. The default mode network is actively rehearsing and replaying the problem at hand as well as past solutions, providing a context for active inference. The dorsal attention network is guiding the process of reflection and analysis. And then something happens that isn’t covered by either of these two networks. Amid the cacophony of cognitive activity, the unexpected suddenly dominates the mental landscape. The weight of water displaced in the bathtub, the gestalt of the apple being pulled toward the earth, captures the great thinker’s attention.

In this magical moment when cognition stops striving and sensation floods in, disrupting the DMN, all the habitual patterns and strategies are diminished if not displaced. What becomes salient is no longer the familiar, intellectual attempt to analyze one’s way out of the problem. Instead, the disruption of DMN dominance allows for new representations, a network responding to sensory inputs, as per Archimedes’s bath and Newton’s garden landscape. Archimedes’s bathwater is recast as a measurement tool; the plunk of an apple falling from a tree becomes a sign to Newton that a fundamental principle of nature had hitherto been overlooked.

The good news is that the capacity to disrupt the DMN to gain new insights is not reserved for geniuses attempting major advances in physics. Evolution shaped our brains with a system for disrupting ongoing activity whenever something shows up that absolutely demands our attention: a tiger emerges from the high grass, your boss stares daggers at you in the morning, you feel a sudden shortness of breath for no particular reason. This is the salience network, and it reallocates neural fuel—sugar and water—from brain regions that conduct business as usual (DMN) to regions that take in new sense data. The salience network cues us that things are not proceeding as expected—there’s been a prediction error.

We can then decide to exploit existing knowledge supplied by the DMN, leveraging the dorsal attention network to tweak our preexisting plans—this is active inference. But the salience network’s alarm bell can also be a cue to disrupt routine, take in new information from sensing regions in the back of the brain, and view the situation anew via perceptual inference. Because the sensory regions occupy different neural real estate and operate independently from regions responsible for thought and action, the salience network has the ability to shut down the habit system in favor of urgent updating. You can think of sensation as your built-in DMN ejector seat.

Getting up, stumbling into the bathroom, and brushing your teeth while half-asleep is a classic default-mode-network operation. But imagine that, halfway through your preparations, you realize that the tube of white stuff you’re squeezing onto your toothbrush is not toothpaste but the antifungal cream you just bought for athlete’s foot. Time to wake up and regroup.

The power of the salience network was powerfully revealed in research done by William Seeley, a neurologist and pathologist at the University of California San Francisco. He studied a relatively uncommon disease known as frontotemporal dementia (FTD),which targets the brain’s salience network. Unlike Alzheimer’s disease, in which memory is one of the first things to go, in FTD, people remember things just fine—they simply can’t control their habits and impulses. A person with FTD could tell you that brushing with antifungal cream is wrong but end up doing it anyway. The profile of FTD teaches us that the salience network is needed to mediate the relationship between one’s habits and the world. When the salience network is impaired, new knowledge can’t disrupt habit, and the intellect can’t be roused to help.

We all have our blind spots and habits we know intellectually aren’t working but just can’t shake. But unlike that of a person with FTD, our salience networks are (mostly) intact; embracing sensation allows not just a slight movement in preferences but a radical shift in the script. We’re not just repainting a room in the House of Habit; we’re doing a complete renovation.

The escape from conventional perspectives has long been the calling card not just of brilliant scientists but also of serious artists. Underground poet Charles Bukowski chronicled life on the margins, including his own long-standing addiction to alcohol. He believed that he couldn’t write without drinking and that being devoted to writing meant embracing a habit that would destroy his health. “Find what you love and let it kill you,” his commonly (mis)attributed motto, represents his ethos pretty well (whether or not he actually said it). For Bukowski, the greater danger came from conformity, a life dedicated to the rule-following habits of the DMN. Sure, getting intoxicated to create was yet another rule, but this rule successfully fed his artistic creativity—foraging for ways to defy convention worked for Bukowski, at least from the perspective of being an artist (his liver may have disagreed). 

What if Bukowski is at least half-right? What if sticking to what we know is blocking the path toward greater creativity, more fulfillment, and a happier life? What Bukowski was interested in killing was knee-jerk reliance on the known, predictive models. It’s only when we go beyond exploiting what we know that we can find the freedom to create something new. Just as Newton and Archimedes discovered, the first step toward insight is stepping away from the House of Habit.

This article How Isaac Newton and the “salience network” can unleash your creativity is featured on Big Think.

These are some of the things I use to guide myself in different situations. Maybe they apply to your situation, maybe they don’t. That’s up to you to decide. 

1. Time is more valuable than money 

You have to learn how to use time wisely and be productive. How wisely you use your time will have far more impact on your life and success than any amount of money. 

2. Commit random acts of kindness 

Being successful entails being able to not only get along with people, but also to give something back. No one gets to the top on their own, and I believe we all should be able to make those around us smile.

3. No balls, no babies 

This is something a blackjack dealer once told me when I asked him if I should hit or stick. It is also my favorite line and probably the thing I tell myself the most. Once you are prepared and you think you have every angle of preparation covered, you have to go for it. No balls, no babies. 

4. Work hard, play hard 

I went seven years without a vacation, but I sure managed to have fun. You have to find ways to blow off steam so you don’t blow a gasket. 

5. Don’t let fear be a roadblock 

You can use fear as a roadblock or as motivation. There is always going to be someone who is competing with you, and sometimes they are going to win. Rather than not doing something for fear of losing, take on the challenge. If you fail, get back up and go for it again. I have been fired from more jobs than most people have had! In the search for success, you can fail any number of times, but you only have to get it right one time. 

6. Expect the unexpected, and always be ready 

You don’t wake up in the morning with someone telling you that everyone is going to be selling lemonade so whoever sells the most wins. It’s the exact opposite. Life is unpredictable. 

You never know when a window of opportunity will open or close. You have to realize this and always know that the game is on. Whatever you are striving to achieve isn’t waiting in one static place for you to find it. It’s the opposite. Everyone has inside of them what it takes to be successful. You just have to be ready to unleash it when the opportunity presents itself. 

7. It’s okay to yell and be yelled at 

One of the rules I have is that I don’t mind if people raise their voice or even yell a little bit. At MicroSolutions, my partner Martin and I would have some knock-down drag-outs. They were always short bursts. They didn’t happen a lot. When they did, I knew and he knew that this was an issue we were both passionate about. 

As my businesses grew, it happened less often because people deferred to me more often. I hated that. If someone believed strongly enough in something and I was being passionate about something, I wanted them to match my level of passion. 

So I told people that if they thought it was the only way to get through to me, go for it! This may not work for you in corporate America, but anyone in a family business or in a private business of any size with a partner or two knows exactly what I am talking about! 

8. Everyone gets down; the key is how soon you get back up 

I can’t count how many times I have gotten up in the morning dreading the day. I wasn’t motivated. I was tired. I just wanted to crawl back in bed. Other times, I had lost a deal, we had lost a game, something wasn’t working. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and disappear. EVERYONE goes through those moments. The key is how you fight through them. The people who will be truly successful are those that fight through the quickest and come back stronger and smarter. 

9. It’s not whether the glass is half empty or half full, it’s who is pouring the water 

This is one of my favorites. The key in business and success at any endeavor is doing your best to control your destiny. You can’t always do it, but you have to take every opportunity you can to be as prepared as—and ahead of—the competition as you possibly can be. Take the lead, and you can control your own destiny. 

10. It’s not in the dreaming, it’s in the doing 

Everyone has it in them to be successful. EVERYONE. Most people only dream about what they do if they were successful, or how they might get there. Anyone can dream. Anyone and everyone has ideas about how they might be successful. It doesn’t matter if your definition of success is being a great parent, being an athlete, a business person, whatever. 

When I catch myself daydreaming about how I’m going to do this or that, I always try to wake up and ask myself just how I’m going to get from where I am to where I want to be. What EXACTLY is it going to take to DO it, rather than dream about it. 

11. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered 

This is one I got from my partner Todd Wagner. He is right on. Sometimes you have to go for the jugular, but more often than not, the biggest mistake people make is getting too greedy. 

Every good deal has a win-win solution. There is nothing I hate more than someone who tries to squeeze every last penny out of the deal. Who often raises the aggravation level to the point where it’s not worth doing the deal. Which also raises the dislike level to the point where even if a deal gets done, you look for ways to never do business with that person or company again. 

Business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal. 

12. You only have to be right once 

As I’ve said, I have been fired from more jobs than most people have had. Some jobs I have had were so bad, the only way I could justify them to myself was that I was getting paid to learn (as opposed to paying to go to school). 

I have started a stupid business that was doomed to fail (selling powdered milk). I have dated more girls than I wanted to. The beauty of success, whether it’s finding the girl of your dreams, the right job or financial success, is that it doesn’t matter how many times you have failed, you only have to be right once. 

No one keeps score. There are so many ways that each of us can find happiness and success in our endeavors, that it never really matters how many times you fail. You only have to be right once. 

This article 12 Mark Cuban mantras for success is featured on Big Think.

Sophie arrived late to the Game of Thrones craze. She held off for a while because she “doesn’t do dragons,” but she watched the first episode, and now she’s hooked. She watched the entire first season in a single lounge-lizard day. As she gets into bed that night and goes to sleep, she sees dragons. She sees swords and medieval armor. Her imagination conjures up, jumbles about, and relives nine hours of Westeros. Her waking mind absorbs, and her sleeping mind repeats.

John has watched a lot of Louis Theroux. For John, no other interviewer is half as interesting as the awkward, strange-looking Brit. John has learned about the niche, eccentric fringes of society, and he loves how Louis gets people to open up. But John’s friends have noticed something odd. John has started talking like Louis. His intonation and his beat are all Theroux. He even pauses more often and seems to embrace an interrogative conversation. He doesn’t know it, but John is being someone else.

Sophie and John are two examples of what’s called the “Tetris Effect.” It’s when you saturate yourself so much with a task that the task rewires you in some way. If you do something for a prolonged and intense period of time, then it takes over not only your dreams but your entire way of thinking.

How does the Tetris Effect work, and how can we learn to harness it in our everyday lives?

Blocks everywhere

The Tetris Effect gets its name from a phenomenon experienced by those who played a lot of the game Tetris in the 1980s. Tetris works by moving and rotating shapes into position to form a neat line. When the line is complete, the line vanishes, and the game goes on. What people noticed was that when they played the game for hours and hours on end, something changed in their mindset. When players walked away from their consoles, they started to see the world in terms of Tetris. They were inescapably aware of square windows and would obsessively stare at rectangular doors. People started to rotate buildings in their heads or try to line up cereal boxes at the store. Tetris rewired how they saw the world. Suddenly, the world was full of Tetris blocks.

It’s all to do with neuroplasticity. Your brain is constantly adapting to the world. It’s learning about — and molding itself to — all the many environments you present it with. Up until the very second you die, your brain will be forming new neuronal connections. And the way that your brain “learns” is through behavior. In other words, if you change your behavior, you change your brain. So, if you spend a lot of your time doing one thing, such as playing Tetris or watching Louis Theroux, your brain will adapt to that stimulus. It will conclude, “This thing is clearly very important; let’s do more of it.”

Seeing Tetris blocks everywhere might not be a Marvel-level superpower. In fact, some might see it as a kind of hell. But the important thing about the Tetris Effect is that not only does the brain learn that Tetris is important, but it becomes really good at it. Obsessive Tetris players develop new neural pathways and cognitive abilities, which make them Tetris professionals. Excellence, in anything, is a multi-hour, multi-day habit.

Putting the shapes together

The Tetris Effect can be both good and bad news. Good habits make us more productive, relaxed, and happier. But bad ones can make us exactly the opposite. How, then, are we to get the most from the phenomenon? Here are many ways in which we could apply the Tetris Effect.

Be thankful. The author and speaker Shawn Achor once showed how the Tetris Effect could be harnessed to give us a more positive mindset. He argued that when we are repeatedly thankful for things, then we start to see the good in life more. The same is true for work. If we consciously tell other people how much we appreciate their work, then, after a while, we’ll start to appreciate everything everyone does more. If we start to tell other people how much we like our job or make a list of all the good things about being there, then we’re more likely to be positive about things. Of course, there is such a thing as toxic positivity: if something is broken or wrong, don’t sugarcoat it. But growing and reinforcing a thankful attitude will, in the end, make you happier.

Switch your phone to work mode. It will come as no surprise that phones are addictive. Both your phone itself and the apps that populate it are deliberately designed to keep you coming back for more; they’re a bottomless, silicon-lined well of dopamine. Phones can be incredibly productive, and most modern workplaces need, or at least are easier with, a phone. But the urge to constantly check and pick up the phone is hugely disruptive. It’s disruptive, not only in terms of the time lost, but it’s estimated that it takes around 20 minutes to regain your focus. That constant desire to look over at your phone and that pathological need to open a notification are born of habit. They’re the negative application of the Tetris Effect. It’s often not practical or even helpful to go “cold turkey” with your phone, and not all screens are bad. Instead, try a work mode where only certain work apps will notify you. Or, designate a time of the day for a certain screen, such as an hour after lunch, to deal with work-related phone notifications.

Stop othering people. Work can often be a game (albeit less enjoyable at times). It involves a certain performance or role-playing. There are quests and rewards. Like Tetris, a great many parts need to be moved around if they’re to work. The problem, though, is that when you spend too much time with a “work mindset,” you start to see other people as just shapes to be moved. Spending too long in an office space and nestled in a work structure, you don’t see Fran or Bob; you see “that accounts lady” or “the IT guy.” You lose their humanity. On Big Think+, the economist and bestselling author, Douglas Rushkoff, borrows a little bit of French existentialism to refer to this as “othering.” This is when we present other people not as fully-realized human beings with their own mental and emotional lives. Instead, we see them as pawns to move or shapes to slot here and there. Rushkoff’s advice is simple and powerful. When dealing with colleagues, “meet them, engage with them, listen to them, really hear them like a human.”

This article How the neuroplastic “Tetris Effect” can unblock work-life obstacles is featured on Big Think.

During my four-decade career at IBM, where I most recently served as the Chief Technology Officer for IBM Cloud, we faced several challenges requiring innovative solutions. I didn’t realize it then, but experience shows us that there are patterns to innovation that need to be teased out and differentiated. Looking back, differentiating these patterns is key to managing the challenges that manifest when innovating. It doesn’t matter if you are in a small or large organization; these situational challenges are endemic.

Part of why it’s not obvious to us nor well understood yet is that the myriad of books that talk about innovation make incomplete assumptions about all the elements involved. Innovation is NOT invention. Too many people confuse or align the two. Invention usually requires a deep understanding of a particular subject or connected subjects and results in deep, new, original insights. On the other hand, innovation requires a deep understanding of individual and/or group behaviors where inventions may or may not change a desired behavior. For an invention to become an innovation, someone’s behavior must change relative to that invention. Look at the contrast between the invention of the Apple Newton in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and the eventual introduction of the iPhone over a decade later. Both were significant inventions, but only the iPhone hung around and fundamentally changed the behavior of millions to billions. 

At the core of the difference is a deep understanding of demand, which is a concept that has not been effectively studied when discussing innovation. Too many innovations fail or take a long time to manifest because of that lack of understanding. Furthermore, when seen through the demand lens, innovation falls into three discernible categories. 

#1. Informative innovation

The first category is “informative,” and it occurs when improving an existing business, aiming for greater consolidation or penetration into an existing market. This happens most often and only requires a little, if any, rethinking of business models or go-to-market strategy. Some simple examples are the continual improvement of cameras on cell phones or bandwidth capacity in networks and/or Wi-Fi. Another is the continual improvement of range in EVs stemming from improvements in battery technology or understanding of aerodynamics. 

These are far from easy and require invention along the way. However, the usage/business models have been established, and target markets and demand are already understood. This type of innovation can depend heavily on pure invention because the desired behaviors are already well understood.

#2. Transformative innovation

The second type, known as “transformative,” is where the market has moved on you in ways you may or may not understand, but you are busily trying to sort it out and make shifts in product design to match the modified needs. Generally, you are selling to the same or similar audience with needs in the same direction, but some of the base assumptions have shifted. 

Many of the shifts in the delivery of business software to the internet or mobile internet channels were of that nature. The core function/need hadn’t changed, but the way in which it was delivered drives many businesses to distraction. Even worse, the skill sets necessary and the shift in design may force an organization to rethink almost everything. 

In many ways, this can be the most difficult type of innovation since you not only have to figure out new assumptions but also have to overcome internal resistance to shifting skill needs. People get very nervous when they have been successful but now must relearn or shift skill sets. Fear creeps in and drives ‘destructive’ compliance and cynicism. 

Understanding shifts in demand in depth can be crucial to overcoming the natural pushbacks and shifting the organization in the right way — to say it’s not easy is an understatement.

#3. Formative innovation

That leads us to the third and most intriguing form of innovation, “formative.” This is the land of brand-new explorations. This is where innovations can come out of left field and redefine an entire space. We are going through this now with Machine Learning and Generative AI. It’s a brand-new set of tools that seems to be reshaping how we accomplish many tasks. We also went through this not that long ago with ‘cloud’ and cloud-based businesses. 

It’s safe to say that, with AI, many new businesses are emerging, but demand is still anything but clear. There’s lots of imagined demand, but we have yet to see dramatic shifts in what we refer to in the book as ‘authentic’ demand. Clearly, authentic demand emerged and exploded with cloud services. Nevertheless, there is no stopping the drive to find that ‘authentic’ demand for this generation of AI tools.

Creating new businesses in this space (internal or external) is a real challenge in demand AND subsequent execution. Quite often, it requires starting or restarting with a blank sheet of paper. Everything from design through to ‘go-to-market’ needs to be rethought or originated.

A systemic approach

As a business leader, I have experienced all three types of innovation. The first, informative innovation, is what most of us do on a day-to-day basis, no matter what business we are in. We all manage and push businesses to evolve to fit customer wants and needs in our established markets.

As challenging as that can be, I found the greatest challenges are in the latter two innovation types (transformative and formative). Not just because of the inherent issues in transforming or creating but more because I never understood, nor even considered, the difference between the three types.

Informative innovation benefits more from classic management principles applied to the successful evolution of an existing business. There is no real need to rethink assumptions about demand and target markets. One way to think about this is to consider that there is no need to change HOW you are WHO you are. You need to push hard on it.

Transformative innovation often requires changing basic skills internally to meet a shifting demand externally. The pressure usually comes from that demand shifting for your customers as well. At IBM, for decades, we were in the business of delivering software for managing online transactions to banks, insurance, and many other industries when the craze to enable commerce on the internet hit and hit hard. Our customers demanded a quick set of solutions to ‘modernize’ their existing systems to meet that need. More than invention, it required us to rethink our entire technology base WITHOUT losing our core understanding of that base. It required new skills to be developed and new systems to be created. In other words, we needed to alter HOW we were WHO we were.

Not only did much of the organization not react well, but it created internal fights over how the demand was changing. Had we had a clearer, testable view of understanding demand, we could have moved to a single solution with greater efficiency and less rancor and confusion. As it was, we eventually succeeded and created a massive business transformation.

Another not-so-successful story came as the result of the transition to Cloud and Cloud-based solutions. As we look back, this was a formative shift in the business. Generally, formative entails something coming out of left field that requires you to rethink everything, from core engineering (in our case) to go-to-market. Through in-depth study, we managed to ‘understand’ what was happening, and we tried to react by creating a new division within the business. It didn’t work. 

Had we understood the nature of the shift fully as a formative one, we would have created a spin-off with a brand-new approach to all aspects of the business. There would have been no guarantee of success, of course. But instead of struggling to bend the unbendable, we could have focused on the task at hand and maybe stood a chance, as IBM had done previously with the PC business in the early 1980s. 

When I describe it this way to former colleagues, it becomes less an exercise in ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ and more a systemic approach to thinking about innovation and demand.

This article Great leaders know when to deploy the 3 types of innovation is featured on Big Think.

People sometimes say a diverse country like the United States is a “melting pot” for culture, but this metaphor suggests blending everyone’s identities into a big stew of sameness. Instead, I prefer the metaphor of a “garden salad” that’s filled with all kinds of vegetables and, when tossed together, create a dynamic explosion of flavor and texture in your mouth. A garden salad honors the uniqueness of each ingredient (or in this case, person), while also recognizing that putting it all together makes the whole better than the sum of its parts. And incidentally, research has found that talking about vegetables can actually help us let go of our biases.

Two psychologists, Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiske, conducted a study where they asked white participants to look at Black faces and sort them into one of two groups by determining whether they were older than 21 years old, or younger. When participants did this, Wheeler and Fiske saw activity spike in the participants’ amygdala, the area of the brain that’s associated with fear and feelings of threat. However, when the white participants were asked to imagine whether the people in the photos preferred a certain type of vegetable—broccoli or carrots—they didn’t show the same spike in their amygdala. Wheeler and Fiske argue that this is because they saw the person pictured as an individual, with their own tastes and preferences, rather than as a member of a monolithic group. In other words, when we think about someone as an individual, rather than through the lens of their group identity, this helps circumvent the kinds of biases that can activate the fear center of our brain.

A good practice in general: When you meet or get to know someone who is different from you, try to individuate them by learning something specific, such as what vegetable they prefer. Are you into broccoli or carrots? (By the way, carrots all the way for me). This doesn’t have to happen in live conversation—it can be awkward to ask someone about their vegetable preferences at a business conference (trust me, I’ve tried), but you can individuate someone even by using your imagination. Before talking with someone who seems different from you, imagine whether they are more of a broccoli or a carrot kind of person. It doesn’t actually matter if you’re right—the point is to see them as an individual with particular quirks or characteristics that make them unique.

This mental trick you can play—looking at the individual and imagining their own tastes and preferences—produces “The Garden Salad Effect.” It reduces that activity spike in your amygdala and might make you less fearful when approaching someone who seems different than you. And remember, you’re unlikely to know which people you hold unconscious biases against, or all the groups that someone is a part of, so it’s not a bad idea to make this a general practice with every new person you meet. If they don’t like vegetables, you can ask them about other preferences such as whether they’re more of a beach or mountain person, or whether they like dark or milk chocolate better.

While seeing someone as an individual with their own preferences is one way of combating biases, you can also accomplish this by creating an expansive and shared identity. Research suggests that when we do this, without necessarily suppressing what makes us different, we can challenge the biases we hold toward other people. We move out of an “us versus them” mentality where we sort into separate groups, and instead move into a larger “we” that encapsulates all of us. For instance, while you may have different politics than someone, you might both be active contributors in your community. While you might have different approaches on how school funding should be spent, you could both be passionate and committed parents. Trite as it may sound, the truth remains that we have far more in common than not.

In one study, British researchers recruited a group of Manchester United fans. Then they hired an actor to jog and fake an injury in front of each research participant who did not know the injured jogger was a part of the experiment. The actor was wearing either a Manchester United jersey or one from the rival Liverpool Football Club. They found that when the actor wore a Manchester United jersey, the research participant was more likely to help the injured jogger compared to when the actor wore a jersey of their rivals. In a follow-up experiment, though, things got more interesting.

The researchers first reminded a new set of participants about their broader identity as a fan of soccer—not just for their favorite team. They also emphasized the positive aspects of being a soccer fan—which is kind of what the World Cup tries to accomplish by bringing countries together. Being reminded that they’re soccer fans highlighted a common identity they shared, which is a level up from being just a fan of a single team. This common identity encompassed people who root for any team and reminded them all of their shared love of soccer. Sure enough, when these participants who were primed as a soccer fan saw the injured jogger, they helped the actor who was wearing a Liverpool jersey just as much as the one who wore a Manchester United jersey. (Interestingly, and further proving the researcher’s point, they rarely helped the jogger who wasn’t wearing a soccer jersey at all.) Because they were reminded of their more expansive identity of being a soccer fan, it made them more empathetic and helpful toward all soccer fans, even those who rooted for a rival team.

As you can imagine, this has implications not just for soccer, but for other aspects of society where we sort into groups, such as religion or politics. By creating more expansive identities that highlight our commonalities, we can interrupt the biases we might have otherwise held toward another person who doesn’t cheer for the same team as us. In other words, we can’t just focus on how we’re all individual vegetables, we have to remember that together, we make the whole damn salad. Also, this research reminds us that if you’re planning to get injured on your next run and want to actually receive aid, you should probably wear an “I AM A SPORTS FAN” shirt to cover all your bases.

This article How the neuroscience of fandom can strengthen company culture is featured on Big Think.

One day Steve Jobs was asked to describe what he found most important in the development of a product. His response is worth reading in full: 

“You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left, John Scully got a very serious disease. And that disease, I’ve seen other people get it too: it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work.

“And that if you just tell all these other people, you know, here’s this great idea, then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows, it never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find that there’s tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. 

“There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic do, or glass do, or factories do, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push and put them together in new and different ways to get what you want. 

“And everyday you discover something new: that it is a new problem or new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently and it’s that process that is the magic.”

This insight is so profoundly true, and I like calling that process “enchantment.” In fact, that’s the reason why I named my company Theory of Enchantment in the first place, because our company’s goal is to help other businesses build ecosystems of trust and belonging so that that magical process Steve spoke about will be more likely to naturally emerge. 

But this process will be impossible to activate if there’s deep mistrust between and within departments in a business. Whether that distrust is between managers and C-suite executives, board members and executive leadership teams, or between employees and customers, this process of enchantment gets stymied because folks do not know how to build a culture of trust. In some cases, they barely know their colleagues, having only interacted with them on Zoom once a month with maybe one or two offsites (if that) in between. 

Add to the mix large, people-focused sectors like hospitals, schools, and childcare centers. If employees in these institutions do not trust each other they will not be able to provide the services necessary to treat and provide for those in their care.

Just as great craftsmanship is required to develop products, great craftsmanship is required to cultivate a community that can then go on to develop those products in the first place. How might we cultivate this? Here’s where Theory of Enchantment’s ecology of principles and practices come in. Below are two that any organization would do well to adopt as a matter of policy.

Integration

In the United States, we often think of integration as a racially-specific word concerning the desegregation of schools and businesses and the passage of legislation that put an end to Jim Crow laws in the South. 

But integration as a philosophy encompasses far more than this. It is related to the word “integrity.” The dictionary defines integrity as “the state of being whole and undivided.” This is a crucial aim at Theory of Enchantment. We equip business leaders with an ecology of practices so that they act from a place of wholeness. 

Wholeness is a state of being where business leaders practice being in a healthy relationship with the full acceptance of their own complexity, their insecurities and their talents, their baggage and their unique gifts, so that when faced with scarcity and suffering — which are inevitable aspects of the human experience — they solve for it together, holistically, and responsibly, instead of projecting the things they don’t like about themselves onto their colleagues as a way to discharge pain.

Let’s say an angry customer yells at you when trying to get you to fulfill their request. If you have not been trained, you will likely take what that customer is saying super-personally. You will not realize that the person in front of you is experiencing a pain point and that they are trying to discharge that pain by yelling at you. So naturally, in response to their anger, you will become angry back and respond with dismissiveness at best, and condescension at worst. Meanwhile you’ve made a customer who was already feeling bad feel worse and you’ve likely lost them forever. 

For managers who are coached in the Theory of Enchantment, this is not very likely to happen. They practice several wisdom traditions including stoicism and nonviolent communication. And these practices help them to a) recognize when pain is rising in them, b) breathe through that pain, c) recognize when pain is rising within the customer, and d) respond directly to the pain — not to the discharging of the pain (aka the yelling). 

This way of responding requires I be attuned to the subtleties of my own being so that I can pick up on what’s happening to the person in front of me. At Theory of Enchantment, we’ve received direct feedback from managers, employees, and staff across multiple industries that this is how they’ve responded while being coached in the Theory of Enchantment online course: When confronted with irate customers they respond by defusing the anger and those customers, in turn, calm down, and are actually delightfully surprised to be met in this way. (And in some cases customers apologize for reacting the way they did in the first place.) This is what it means to show up at work and build an integrated culture. 

Diversity

One of the chief sustaining conditions of a healthy ecosystem is diversity. As Yale political scientist professor James Scott put it,  “monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are.”  

This is true both in a natural habitat and in a business environment. If you want to build lasting products and services that surprise and delight your customers, you must survey and continuously test your products and services in the diverse environments in which your customers live. This will ensure your products and services are flexible, durable, adaptive, and able to withstand the test of time. 

To do this, you must attract, employ, and retain a diverse pool of workers who think and see differently. When I write of diversity, I do not mean a race-based quota system. I mean welcome colleagues who come from varied ways of thinking, seeing, and being. It is out of this diversity that a synthesis can emerge, making for a robust creation process. This may sound obvious but it’s actually hard to do. 

I’m a very “big ideas” person with poetic sensibilities. My business partner Peter is very structured and data-driven. At times when we first started working together I found his way of seeing the world super-threatening. “What do you mean we need to prove this is working by capturing and tracking data? Why can’t we just put ourselves out there?” This may sound inane but there’s part of my art brain that truly feels this way. But over time I learned to see the beauty and elegance of Peter’s way of thinking, how his structured, disciplined approach makes our products better, stronger, and cooler.  And it is tension between our two ways of thinking that actually creates magic and makes better products.

But I would not have been able to come to this conclusion had I not been training in the Theory of Enchantment which has made me far less threatened by different ways of thinking in the first place — by giving me practices that help me get in a healthy relationship with discomfort and pain which are all part of life. In this way the teachings are very meta. I am a student of it as much as I am a teacher. 

There are so many other first principles and practices we teach at Theory of Enchantment but I’ll leave you with these two as food for thought. As you think about how to build a company or make your existing company perform even better, I hope you’ll think about what I have written. Adopting these perspectives will help you not only fall in love with the process that Steve Jobs so eloquently described; it will help you see how that same process is already alive and unfolding within you. It will help you see that this is what it means to be human and what it means to be fully alive — and it will help you build great things.

Theory of Enchantment has released an app called DOJO! where users can complete daily 3-min quests that will transform them into more compassionate, open-hearted, human beings. If you’re interested, subscribe here. If you would like us to train your employees, join the waitlist for our newest and most exciting program, the Enchanted Games League (EGL) here.

This article Want to build trust in your workplace? Here’s a toolkit is featured on Big Think.

Robert Burton’s 1621 work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, is a vast, 900-page exploration of depression. It dances around and calls upon all the sciences of his day — psychology, physiology, astronomy, meteorology, theology, astrology, and demonology — to forensically unpack what depression is and what remedies might exist. After five editions and around 350,000 words, Burton concludes with one summary piece of advice for any depressive: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”

What Burton knew in the 17th Century, and what psychologists have proven over and over since, is that when things get hard, people often withdraw into themselves. When someone experiences stress or trauma, they will tend to isolate themselves from the world. The problem, as Burton’s advice reveals, is that the solitude of social withdrawal becomes a vicious circle. Depressive isolation is a black dog that swells to such a monstrous size as to consume the entire room. When you’re alone, problems often magnify and engorge. They are harder to deal with. And so you withdraw more.

It is a strange phenomenon of human psychology that we shrink inward when the outward world becomes unbearable. We bunker down, baton the hatches, and cocoon ourselves in a torpor. It’s sometimes called “the minimal self” theory, where, when all else fails, we revert back to a more basic mode of existence.

Depression and inflation

The Anatomy of Melancholy is a poetic and literary examination of the experience of depression in an individual human mind. Modern psychology looks at the issue in terms of mental health. But this kind of withdrawal from the world is also a sociological and economic phenomenon as well. It’s one that politicians exploit all the time.

Inflation, on a macroeconomic level, is where the prices of everyday items and consumer goods increase year on year. A chocolate bar today will cost substantially more than it did in the 1960s. Most economists agree that inflation — at least rapid, unexpected inflation — is a bad thing. The way you combat inflation is to raise interest rates. This means it’s more expensive to borrow money, and people with mortgages have to pay more to their banks. Paying more to the banks means you have less money to pay for a new TV, car, or holiday. So, with fewer people buying products, prices will drop.

This inflation-beating tactic only works because people will isolate themselves in hard economic times. They will cut “unnecessary” expenditures to focus on the household and essentials. In an economic “hierarchy of needs,” people will redirect their money to food, heating, and their immediate family. When in a recession, people tend to donate less to charity; they decide that money is needed closer to home.

Applying the minimal self

If we know that humans tend to isolate and withdraw when things are hard, how can we adapt? What can we learn from the minimal self thesis? Here are three ways we might apply it to our work lives.

Bring back the party. Forty percent of American workers say their job is “very or extremely stressful,” and one in four people say their jobs are the number one stressor in life. Work is stressful — it’s in the name. So, if we know that work causes stress and that stress inclines people to isolate themselves, we should not be surprised if stressed workers withdraw themselves. They might take on too much, stop collaborating, and rarely ask for help. The solution, then, is to give employees opportunities to vent. Officially, this might involve hiring or appointing a wellbeing lead or an HR initiative, but unofficially, it presents itself at office parties or after-work drinks. A “wine-and-whine Friday” is both popular and cathartic. The majority of workers do enjoy and need office social events.

Change your product. There are strategic insights to garner here as well. In times of recession or economic hardship, people tend to stop “unnecessary” purchases. So the key is to make your product as essential and necessary as possible. Don’t be part of the cull. A lot of this will involve retargeting your marketing. Change your feature list to focus on only a few invaluable tasks. Make it seem like your product is an indispensable part of everyday life. If you provide services and not products, pay attention to the needs of your clients. Try to appreciate that they will be focusing on themselves or their families. Recognize the need for belt tightening and budget restraints. Offer practical ways to accommodate this, such as offering a temporarily discounted fee or a pared-down service. A reduced client is better than no client.

Reach out. At the end of the day, the most important thing is your health. Business tricks and workplace hacks have their place, but if you’re finding yourself isolated or burned out at work, then you need to take steps to remedy that. You don’t need to read Burton’s 900-page tome to know that feeling stressed, trapped, and lonely does not make for a conducive or healthy work environment. Over on Big Think+, Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, offers a practical way to help deal with workplace stress and isolation. It involves a mental shift that allows you to reach out to people in a similar situation. If 80% of workers experience stress on the job, then the odds are that your boss and your team are going through something, too. The person in that meeting or the colleague who wrote that email is having a hard time. Empathy helps to diminish your own stress and encourages you to reach out.

This article Use the “minimal self” theory to flip workplace stress on its head is featured on Big Think.

Leadership is a process of applying social influence to maximize the efforts of others for achieving a common goal. Intersectionality is often used to describe the relationships between individuals and social categories (such as generation, occupation, nationality), and concepts that fall into more than one category. In the “Venture Meets Mission” ecosystem, leadership skills emerge from experience in operating at the interface of public and private, first, through developing a working knowledge of how to operate and succeed in both environments, and second, through understanding the differences in motivating and influencing in very different contexts. To thrive in a mission ecosystem, we need to develop a new set of intersectional leadership skills. 

In the summer of 1998, following his junior year at Dartmouth University, Nate Fick attended the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidates School and was commissioned as second lieutenant upon graduating. The Baltimore native then became an officer in the Amphibious Ready Group of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, training with the Australian Army for humanitarian operations deployment to East Timor. However, following the September 11 attacks in 2001, Nate led his platoon into Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom and eventually, in 2003, into Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

“I was really unsure of what I was going to do after serving,” says Nate. “As I thought about my military experience, I found that I liked building and leading teams. And I wanted to find a way to keep doing that. So, I went to business school. And candidly, I went to business school because it seemed like a socially acceptable way to tread water and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” He used the GI Bill to attend Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. Nate recounts his experience: “I had this nontraditional back- ground. I was a classics major and an infantry officer, I could not build a financial model in my life. I found myself sitting there, in business school, surrounded by all these kids that came out of Goldman and McKinsey. It was a totally eye-opening experience. I loved it in hindsight.” 

Nate goes on to say, “The most valuable thing that I got out of business school was, when things were really hard running a business, and it felt like everything was falling apart, I never once laid in bed at night staring at the ceiling thinking, ‘If only I had an MBA I would know what to do.’ And I don’t mean that to be faint praise—I think, actually the sort of self-confidence that comes with saying ‘Hey, I’ve been exposed to a bunch of situations via the “case method” [a learning system]. I’ve seen a lot of stuff vicariously and, sometimes, this is just hard.’ That really helped me, more than anything.” In case you need even more reason to be impressed with Nate, he also wrote a New York Times bestseller, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. 

After business school, Nate was recruited to a nonprofit organization that helps develop national security and defense policies, CNAS, but the decision was not understood by most of his business school classmates who were pursuing traditional banking and consulting jobs. He says, “As a leader, it was a terrific training ground. Because in for-profit companies, you have the resources to motivate people with stock options, cash, and all kinds of stuff. But in the nonprofit, all you have is mission, vision, values, and culture. That’s all you got. And there are no shortcuts. My dad used to tell me, ‘You can’t take the elevator, you have to take the stairs,’ and I feel like that’s an important message, in nonprofit management you’re walking up the freakin’ stairs.” 

Years later, Nate started working in for-profit, mission-oriented organizations such as Endgame. He served as the CEO of a cybersecurity software company from 2012 through its acquisition in 2019. Nate recalls the importance of his journey. “That was the arc of how I got here. Military leadership, nonprofit leadership, venture and private-equity-backed leadership. And all the while a focus on mission and technology. And what did I learn? They’re all the same in a lot of ways—they’re all human organizations looking for the same things. I learned that businesses can be a powerful force for society.” 

In September 2022, he was sworn in as the U.S. State Department’s first Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy. Reflecting upon his experiences and achievements, Nate says, “My career only made sense looking backwards, it didn’t make sense looking forwards.” 

Nate’s story highlights the importance of “leadership at the intersectionality.” It means having a mission mindset, above all else. Having a mission mindset means that you understand that all players in this eco-system have a similar purpose—a larger mission. At the same time, it means that you realize the differences in goals and incentives of various players in the ecosystem. Government agencies, businesses, academic institutions, and the individuals that make up these groups all have varying preferences for risk and different incentives for taking risks. This shapes the different goals of each of these groups, whether to safely promote the public good, to invest in innovation, to train tomorrow’s leaders, or to provide for a family. A leader in this ecosystem recognizes how to advance the interests of each of these groups without compromising the well-being of any of them or the mission at large. Forming this bridge helps address some of the incentive uncertainty in motivating mission-driven action. 

Nate Fick’s leadership experience also highlights a different role—one of a translator and facilitator. Experts in the government-venture arrangements frequently remark that traditional public-private partnership models constrain the players from fully capturing the plurality of relationships that can occur in the Venture Meets Mission ecosystem. Whereas traditional public-private partnerships see bilateral coordination between the business and the government, the Venture Meets Mission ecosystem brings together multiple groups in pursuit of one mission: government agencies, nonprofits, ventures, investment funds, and academic institutions. Nate’s journey through all of these institutions enables him to have a “leg up” in understanding the challenges they face when working together. Becoming a leader in the intersection of government and venture can aid in learning and developing the communication practices of their relationship, a key feature in overcoming some of the process uncertainties of government-venture arrangements. 

Finally, Nate Fick embodies the values of intersectional thinking. Trust reduces the risk and costs of partnering, and it increases a willingness to act and to act in good faith. Trust maintains a focus and commitment to agreed-upon goals and outcomes. Nate’s realization of the partnership among the various parties, all supporting one larger mission, accents the importance of building strong bridges among these groups to provide a foundation for trust. Trust is the currency of collaboration. Intersectional leadership skills that elevate common objectives and harmonize values will build this trust.

This article How “intersectional leadership skills” harness trust as the currency of collaboration is featured on Big Think.

Strategic thinking wouldn’t be necessary if the business world were benign, stable, and predictable. But, of course, it’s none of those things. It’s ever more competitive, and the stakes are high. Determining the right strategies to create or sustain success is challenging, and leaders must pilot their organizations through increasingly turbulent waters. The combination of high stakes and challenging environments is what makes strategic thinking so valuable. 

To appreciate this, it helps to understand the nature of the mental processing challenges that leaders face. Specifically, they confront four dimensions of difficulty: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA, a term that dates back to the work of Warren G. Bennis and Burt Nanus in the mid-1980s and was subsequently adopted by the US Army and then more broadly in work on leadership).

While VUCA sounds good and is easy to remember, I think the order of the words should be flipped, with complexity at the front (making the acronym CUVA). Complexity, uncertainty, volatility, and ambiguity are interrelated, and building on one dimension helps in understanding and addressing the others. Complexity is at the core of the challenges most leaders face. By understanding the complexity of your organization and business environment, you can anticipate and make sense of key uncertainties, which will help you respond to volatility and deal with ambiguity. 

Complexity means that the domain of interest (for example, developing new products) has many interconnected variables that make it challenging to comprehend with the limited cognitive capacities that we all have as human beings. An organization with tens of thousands of employees delivering healthcare to thousands of patients daily in hundreds of facilities using many technologies and dozens of processes has an inherently high level of complexity. Complexity makes it challenging for leaders to build and maintain good “mental models” of their organizations and make sound predictions about what will happen if something changes. Strategic thinkers are skilled at navigating complexity because they understand how systems work and focus their attention on what really matters. 

Uncertainty means dealing with situations with a clear set of potential outcomes but where the specific event that will occur cannot be perfectly predicted. This is the case regardless of how much effort you invest in gathering more information. Often, this is because a host of small contributing factors can influence the outcome. In the case of healthcare in the US, government regulations, which powerfully shape the industry, can evolve very differently depending on the results of national and state elections. Strategic thinkers isolate the most important uncertainties, think about probabilities, and explore the implications of plausible scenarios. 

Volatility means that important things – for example, the price of oil – change rapidly. This makes it challenging to track what is happening and adapt to the changes. In the healthcare example, new competitors focused on the most profitable businesses may spring from nowhere, rendering existing business models obsolete. The intensive pace of technological innovation challenges us to know when and how to adapt. Strategic thinkers rapidly sense and respond to emerging threats and opportunities. 

Ambiguity means there are diverse viewpoints about what problems the organization should focus on. There may also be competing perspectives about the potential of different solutions. As a result, stakeholders have divergent views about what is “right.” For example, hospital systems in the US face significant pressure to reduce costs, improve financial viability, and make care more affordable. Seen from the patient perspective, more affordable care is good. From the standpoint of hospital administrators, who are expected to do more with less, it could force tough trade-offs. Strategic thinkers negotiate among differing interests and perspectives to create shared “frames” of problems and agreements. 

Today, the CUVA environment impacts every business, making it challenging for leaders to chart the right paths forward. The intensity of these challenges is also increasing due to technological, social, and environmental changes. The implication is that the value of strategic thinking is, therefore, growing.

This article Brilliant leaders are often strategic thinkers skilled at handling complexity is featured on Big Think.

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They say the only constant is change, but in the business world, there is another one: Meetings suck. They devour your time, zap your energy, and drain your motivation for any task more demanding than a nap. Yet, managers and organizations insist on swarming people’s calendars with these schedule-cramming hours of busywork.

However, this second constant may not be as irrevocable as it seems. Research shows that meetings can be tremendously beneficial for everyone involved. The problem is that few managers have been trained to lead them effectively.

To help, Big Think recently spoke* with Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, management and psychology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the author of Glad We Met and The Surprising Science of Meetings. During our conversation, we discuss who meetings are for, why they go wrong so often, and strategies to facilitate them more successfully.

Big Think: How did the office meeting evolve, and what are its benefits?

Rogelberg: Humans gather. It’s what we do. We’ve gathered since cave-person times, but ultimately, it was during the Industrial Revolution that we started to move away from traditional command-and-control systems and started to recognize that elevating other voices allowed for more ideas to emerge. It was an appreciation that diverse voices can bring diverse ideas and solutions to complex problems.

So, in many ways, the implementation of organizational meetings was an appreciation for what humans can do together. 

The research has been consistent that when meetings are done well, they have the potential to create solutions that no individual could have alone. We know organizations that have better meetings have a better return on investment. We know that when meetings are done well, instead of being places of drain, organizations become places of gain by providing employees with a resource they can [use to] engage other people.

We can all remember experiences like that. We can all reflect on a good meeting and how good it felt. But they’re rare, and that’s the problem.

Big Think: What are we getting wrong about meetings?

Rogelberg: There are a few different forces [at play]. First, research suggests that only around 25% of managers ever receive training on how to hold a meeting. We’re relying on their intuition, and they tend to recycle the dysfunctional practices that they experienced themselves. 

Second, leaders generally think they are better at meetings than they really are. When you have that personal blind spot, you’re not motivated to make changes because you think the problem lies elsewhere.

The third force is an organizational blind spot. Meetings are an unbelievable cost expenditure. Time by wages is unreal. It’s way more expensive than IT, yet we would never expect a large organization to not have a chief information officer. So, the organizational blind spot is that we have no one who owns meetings, no one saying, “I’m going to make sure we’re getting value out of this.”

When you put these three forces together, why wouldn’t bad practices be perpetuated?

Staff meeting traps

Big Think: What are some problems leaders fall into with meetings?

Rogelberg: They’re falling into an over-inviting trap. They’re falling into the trap of having meetings that are too long. They’re falling into the trap of not facilitating — tending to feature their own voice as opposed to elevating others’ voices. They don’t end the meeting by reviewing exactly what was decided and who is directly responsible. 

Sometimes, they actually lament that they’re in the meeting. That’s crazy! You called this party. You’re the host.

Let me say one more thing: We don’t talk about meetings enough. We just don’t.

I sometimes get teased about this. People will say, “Oh, so you want us to have a meeting about meetings?” Yes! We should have a meeting about meetings. How could you not? If your people are spending 20–50% of their day in meetings, you need to step back every once in a while and have a conversation about it. Do an audit. Ask: How can we make them better? What can we trim? What helpful, new norms can we establish? 

Let’s normalize constructive conversations about making meetings better.

Big Think: Let’s tackle one of those problems. How can leaders curb over-inviting?

Rogelberg: When we’re having a meeting, we know who has to be there. We know who the must-haves are. Where we get into trouble is with the nice-to-haves.

Think about planning a wedding. We know who has to be there, but once we start inviting the nice-to-haves, suddenly we need to invite Bill. And gosh, if Bill’s coming, then we should invite Mary and Dan, too. The next thing you know, the wedding reception has gotten huge. 

It’s the same with meetings. We need to train our brains to think in terms of must-haves and nice-to-haves, and for the latter, we can have a separate way to provide input — a separate conversation or a partial invite.

Another helpful tool is your agenda. Instead of framing it as a set of topics to be discussed, try framing it as a set of questions to be answered. This way, you’re thinking about what you’re trying to achieve with the meeting. That will give you a better sense of who to invite because they’re essential to answering those questions. And if you can’t think of any questions, it likely means you don’t need a meeting.

Create some one-on-one time

Big Think: Your recent book, Glad We Met, focuses on one-on-one meetings and why they’re different from the group meetings we’ve discussed so far. What’s so unique about them?

Rogelberg: A one-on-one meeting is facilitated and orchestrated by a manager, but it’s for the direct report. It’s to address what’s on the direct’s mind. It’s a recurring occasion for a manager to connect with their people in a meaningful, genuine way. It’s your opportunity to demonstrate excellent leadership and to support and elevate others. 

By doing so, you elevate your performance because ultimately managers are evaluated on the effectiveness and productivity of their directs. [For instance], we know that managers who have good one-on-ones see better team performance indicators, their teams are more aligned, and they have less turnover.

So, one-on-ones have incredible potential. They’re the one meeting that should never be an email.

Big Think: Why is it then that one-on-ones seem to be axed from the schedule first — assuming they formally exist at all?

Rogelberg: It goes back to those blind spots: leaders who think they’re better at one-on-ones than they are and organizations that lack a system to evaluate these things. 

But unlike meetings, when we surveyed people and asked, “Do you want one-on-ones with your manager?” they were unequivocal. The answer is yes. 

Furthermore — and this is fascinating — we also asked, “Would you want more or fewer one-on-ones with your manager?” We assumed that people would want fewer because they are busy and have a ton of meetings already. We didn’t find that. Basically, people want fewer one-on-ones if they stink and more if they are good. And the typical desired cadence is weekly. 

That’s because people recognize that one-on-ones elevate their success and engagement.

Big Think: How can a manager host a better one-on-one?

Rogelberg: Before the meeting, tell your direct, “Come with a list of things that you want to talk about, and when you’re creating that list, don’t just privilege “fires.” Think long-term as well. I may want to talk about some things, but yours come first.”

Another approach is to prepare five questions. For example, what are the biggest challenges you’re experiencing, and how can I help? You ask and then say, “You can take this conversation in any direction you want.”

In both situations, the manager provides the structure, and the direct dictates the content. 

Then when the meeting starts, the manager needs to keep their mouth closed more than open. They should be asking the questions that allow the direct to express themselves fully. 

Your mindset going in should be that this person can grow. This person can become better and more effective. Starting in that positive headspace helps remind the direct why you’re having the meeting.

A sense of stewardship

Big Think: Is there a takeaway you’d like to leave our readers with?

Rogelberg: The key differentiator of an excellent leader is stewardship. Now, we engage in stewardship all the time when we meet with stakeholders, customers, and donors. We would never want those people to say we wasted their time.

But when we meet with our teams or peers, we typically don’t act as a steward. We go into autopilot. We aren’t intentional with who we invite. We don’t ask what should this meeting look like and how we make it truly work?

The best thing you can do to make your meetings better is to ask people, “How’s it going? What’s going well? Do you have ideas for improvement?” Then use that information to reflect, learn, and try new things. 

This is the ultimate act of stewardship: recognizing you may be the problem, [realizing] you have a responsibility, and then making sure your house is in order. It reflects so well on you as a leader.

* This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This article Meetings can really suck. Here’s how to fix that is featured on Big Think.

When, in October 2023, Slack reportedly shut down operations for a week to focus on upskilling, it created a media frenzy with a mix of speculation about the state of training at the firm and some praise for its commitment to learning and development (L&D). In fact, Slack didn’t shut down. It simply cancelled non-critical meetings to help staff focus on training targets. But that initiative, and the media response, was symptomatic of the intense urgency around L&D many firms feel.

Talent shortages are vexing executives more than ever. Dramatic developments are pushing the need for radical new skills — including in generative artificial intelligence (gen AI); cybersecurity; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); and working round the clock in a globally distributed organization. 2022 research by the Burning Glass Institute found 37% of necessary skills in all occupations — not just techie ones — changed in the previous five years. So even if you have ample internal talent, they probably still don’t possess the skills your organization needs in future. 

Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, says these changes alongside tightening labor markets are forcing companies to switch their traditional focus on outward recruitment toward internal upskilling. Many companies are struggling to meet the challenge. But others are responding with more radical and innovative approaches to L&D. 

“Some pioneering firms have become much better at knowing their employees’ transferable capabilities,” says Sigelman. “They’ve created talent taxonomies [a common language of skill needs across the organization] and inventories and linked these to workforce plans. They are investing in long-term L&D to ensure they have the right people now and in many years’ time. Others haven’t the faintest clue who works for them or what they’re capable of. They say they believe in training but don’t put much weight behind it. Then they are shocked to find they don’t have people to fulfill their skill needs.”

Let’s look at what six innovative companies are doing to supercharge their upskilling culture.

Deloitte shifts to data-led approach

Global accountancy and consulting firm Deloitte is investing $1.4 billion in upskilling, including supersizing its university and tech academy. Neda Schlictman — chief learning officer and managing director, Deloitte Leadership and Human Potential — says L&D initiatives have previously focused on upskilling for current roles and market demands with a top-down approach. Instead, her firm now takes a data-driven approach to anticipate future client needs and to tailor L&D to each learner’s needs better. For example, it mined over 120,000 datasets to understand more about what learners need.

Deloitte is also introducing more learning experiences — including immersive media that helps employees practice skills via virtual simulations of real-life client and market scenarios. This immersive learning has proven effective as it removes all distractions, says Schlictman. “We are catering to many more Millennial and Gen Z employees who like to learn in specific ways; and tend to want more input and choice in their curriculum, and more flexibility and learning options.”

Deborah Collier, president of educational publisher the Digital Skills Authority, adds: “I believe strongly in blended learning with mixed reality and mixed media. Immersive learning — such as smart glasses putting you in a ‘real-life’ situation — is exciting. Even better, link it to an actual real-life objective.”

Cannabiva gamifies to boost motivation

Cannabis product provider Cannabiva has gamified its L&D platform by, for example, creating badges for completing courses and leaderboards for the fastest, most completed, and most improved trainee performances. Co-founder Anders Blomqvist says these initiatives have motivated employees to learn new skills, improving employee engagement and completion rate. 

Once employees reach certain ranks on the platform, the firm funds third-party accreditation, and allows them to apply for higher positions. Marion Devine, principal researcher in human capital at think tank The Conference Board says: “Gamification is here to stay. It makes sense, not just for the younger generations — older ones interact well with it too.”

Torani flips “demoralizing” performance reviews

Beverage maker Torani has been mixing up L&D by flipping the traditional performance review — which can be “demoralizing” — on its head. It puts the onus on future rather than past performance and on employee learning aspirations, rather than manager assessment. This has contributed to Torani’s employee tenure being 53% higher than the US average, says the firm.

Devine adds: “With today’s shift to agile working, some firms believe yearly performance objectives and appraisals are insufficient and inflexible. They need something more frequent, nimble, and focused on feedback, skills and future needs. But you still need managers to assess performance to justify and provide transparency on promotions and pay decisions.”

Salesforce uses AI to align skills and goals

Salesforce, which owns Slack, has created a platform that merges employees’ previously disconnected quarterly “check-ins,” individual development plans, and performance evaluations. Bringing all this data together will enable it to use gen AI to align check-ins more closely with the business, and with more measurable goals, says the firm. 

Salesforce also tasked all employees with completing roughly 100 courses — including on AI-related topics — on the platform by the end of 2023. Slack may have needed its focus week to help staff get there, according to some reports, but Collier says that, regardless of this, scheduling time for learning is important for team morale. “Creating time for all staff to learn helps them feel they’re on a learning journey together and helps make it part of the culture.” 

Devine adds that trailblazing companies that are investing big in e-learning platforms and gen AI will be revolutionary in enabling more personalization with data-led learning and career experiences.

Microsoft blends learning into the workspace

Microsoft is supporting workers across its organization gain skills related to AI — from non-techies to IT professionals and leaders. Simon Lambert, chief learning officer at Microsoft UK, says: “One lesson we’ve learned from our AI learning journey is that upskilling means far more than merely equipping employees with skills. It requires an ecosystem that fosters adaptability and continuous learning. In the face of AI-upskilling demand, employees need faster, seamless access to learning infrastructure. For example, integrating training platforms into their workflow — weaving a learning hub into a place where employees already spend their time — makes it easier to develop a growth mindset and harness any future advancement, not just AI.”

The Conference Board’s Devine says: “Microsoft have done a lot of research in neuroscience, looking at how people interact with AI and [other] new tools. So they’re coming at it from an interesting angle and it’s an exciting area of development.”

TeamUp implements “silo-busting” to raise productivity

Fitness software provider TeamUp recently implemented a cross-departmental L&D initiative to encourage employees from all parts of the organization to learn from each other, and foster collaboration and innovation. COO Tim Green says this was a direct response to client complaints indicating a lack of basic company knowledge among employees, which could impact service quality and client relationships. “We needed to enhance interdepartmental understanding and ensure all employees are well-versed in company fundamentals,” he says.

The program also identifies unique skills and knowledge in each department, then creates a platform where employees can learn about different areas of the business. TeamUp also organized workshops, webinars, and mentoring that aimed to break silos, foster collaboration, and broaden skills.

Green says the outcome has been improved ability to address diverse customer needs, leading to 35% higher productivity and 20% better customer satisfaction. Devine confirms the wisdom of this cross-departmental approach: “Breaking silos allows a more innovative approach to L&D. It means recruiters, talent developers, and managers can work together more efficiently to tie L&D to company strategy, match skills to opportunities, and enable career advancement for all.”

This article 6 innovative and effective approaches to upskilling  is featured on Big Think.

The British sitcom Yes Minister is about a member of the British government who is trying to do their job at the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs. This minister, Jim Hacker, has his ideas, plans, and instructions. He’s by no means incompetent, but he is guilty of being blown about too easily. And the wind in Yes Minster is in the form of Sir Humphrey Appleby.

Appleby is a seasoned civil servant. He’s the kind of well-educated and well-connected bureaucrat who has seen scores of ministers come and go. What happens, then, is that whenever Hacker presents a new idea or gives an instruction, Appleby will obfuscate and manipulate the matter. “Very good minister,” Appleby will say, “but have you thought of this and that?” He will confuse his bosses with polysyllabic and breathless legalese, generously seasoned with Latin or Greek. He will hope to dizzy his listeners with his honed bureaucratic babble so that he will, in the end, get his own way.

Some of the sharpest and most astute political fictions on TV feature an equivalent of the Appleby vs Hacker dynamic. It’s when a leader tries to bring about change and tries to lead the way they want, only to be pulled up short by the bean-counting, teeth-sucking civil servants armed with red tape. Any complex organization at all depends on an administrative structure. A legislature tells an executive what to enact. A leader tells their bureaucrats what to do. A boss tells their employees what they want to happen.

Sometimes, though, the system gets in the way. Rulers cannot rule. Here we look at why that is and how to mitigate the problem.

Bureaucratic overreach

The problem, in politics and business, is that any complex organization will involve an element of “Chinese whispers” or “telephone.” When a boss or a line manager gives an instruction, it will get more and more diluted, interpreted, doctored, and selectively ignored the further it goes down an organizational structure. And, just like in the game of telephone, the final enacted action can sometimes bear only passing resemblance to the leader’s intentions.

Tsar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, once said, “I do not rule Russia, ten thousand clerks do.” His point was that no matter what he wanted to happen, he was just one man fighting against a bureaucratic behemoth. Once his orders were out the door, who knew who would listen to them or not? When the tsars gave way to the USSR, Russia’s overbearing civil service didn’t go away. Soviet Russia was forever characterized by absurd, pedantic bureaucracy. In Hitler’s Germany, top-down instructions were deliberately few, so that the upper echelons of the Nazi Party were constantly “working towards the Führer.” Various regional administrators and army generals took decisions based on what they thought Hitler wanted. Bureaucrats were in charge.

Nor is the “rulers cannot rule” phenomenon limited to dictatorships. A hundred years ago, the sociologist Max Weber worried that societies would slowly become restricted by an “iron cage” of overreaching bureaucracy. He argued that traditional and value-based social systems would give way to efficiency-driven, rule-based structures as modern society became more rationalized and bureaucratic by nature. Weber died in 1920 at only 56, and he didn’t see the modern world of congressional gridlock and legislative paralysis that occasionally plague democracies. They’ve likely proven him right.

Rulers allowed to rule

Is the iron cage an unavoidable and irrevocable feature of any complex organization, or can we take steps to avoid it? In some ways, there will always be certain differences between what is asked for and what is received, but there are ways to limit the Chinese Whispers effect embedded in a long chain of command. Here, we look at three:

Make room for charisma. For Weber, the iron cage has a key, and it’s called “charisma.” Weber was worried that in the beige cubicles of bureaucracy, there could be no room for verve and spark. Efficiency, cost-cutting, and practicalities are important, but they don’t get things moving. All organizations need an engine. They need that kind of momentum and optimism that trickles through the entire lattice of a workplace. Charismatic leaders might not be efficient, and magnetic personalities might not be good with a spreadsheet, but they often get things done. Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, and Steve Jobs all had their faults, but their superstar charisma was like rocket fuel for their companies.

Be clear about what you want. Only half of employees will say they know exactly what their bosses want. That means that the other half is having to deal with guesswork and best efforts. To avoid an instruction going wayward, be as clear as possible. Set deadlines and be specific. There was a meme a few months ago about a girlfriend talking to her boyfriend like a ChatGPT prompt. “Imagine you are an award-winning dish cleaner. In no less than ten minutes, clean the pans using the blue cloth. Use hot water and stack on the drying rack in rows.” It was a joke, but there’s a point to be made here. Humans, like large language models, often respond better to clear, direct, and thorough instruction.

Have hard conversations. In Yes Minster, there are clearly moments when Hacker needs to put Sir Appleby in his place. The bureaucrat is not the leader. Hacker needs to say something along the lines of, “Thank you for your advice, Sir Appleby, but this is what we will be doing.” Likewise, in any company, you will have to have hard conversations with people who are getting it wrong. No one likes having difficult conversations; humans are a species wired to mostly avoid conflict. Sometimes, though, if an old hand is refusing to get on board with a new direction or if a middle manager is ignoring what upper management is telling them, then you need to have a hard conversation. Luckily, Big Think+ has you covered. Here is Amy Gallo, contributing editor at the Harvard Business Review and author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict, explaining the three essential ways to get through — and succeed in — a hard conversation.

This article The “rulers cannot rule” phenomenon and how to avoid it is featured on Big Think.

At the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), we look for insights to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide across a range of settings that share the same goals: meeting performance objectives and staying ahead of the competition. 

Picture a game for your favorite sports team. The lights are bright, the crowd is roaring, and the teams are vying for victory. Now, imagine a boardroom, in a private company, a not-for-profit organization, or a tech startup. In each of these settings, leaders may be tempted to rely exclusively on their star performers. After all, these team members often have an outsized impact on a team’s performance and shine brighter than others. Our latest research suggests that banking on your MVPs is akin to trying to score with just one player. Instead, our findings point to a need to develop the whole team’s roster to ensure every player is primed to bring their A-game.

Before diving into our findings, it’s helpful to review the methods we used to reach them. Our research approach involved analyzing relatively large, longitudinal, event-based, archival data. This type of data offers several key advantages in our quest to understand team dynamics and performance. First, it allows us to control for different features of a team, giving us the ability to isolate specific variables and understand their impact on the team’s effectiveness. Second, the longitudinal nature of the data enables us to examine how team dynamics shift and change over time, providing a comprehensive view of how teams evolve. Third, our focus on objective measures of performance ensures that our findings are grounded in quantifiable results, rather than subjective interpretations. 

Laboratory for leadership

Put simply, professional sports, with its consistent rules, season-long schedules, and objective performance measures, provide a fascinating laboratory for studying leadership and team dynamics.

Based on data from the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL), and soccer World Cup, we’ve identified three key findings for team effectiveness. 

Although these findings emerged from the world of sports, they have three profound implications for teams in business and organizational settings:

#1 Success is about more than just top talent. Research conducted in both sports settings and using teams of financial analysts and sales representatives has consistently found that simply adding more talented players to a team does not yield increasing benefits. In fact, there’s often a point at which adding star players results in diminishing returns, an effect so pervasive that it’s been dubbed the “Too Much Talent Effect.” For instance, CCL found that the amount of money NHL teams spend on players is only a weak predictor of success and spending more on player salaries does not significantly increase a team’s likelihood of winning. Similarly, we found during the 2021 NFL season, teams with the most star-studded rosters didn’t necessarily win more games. Even during the soccer World Cup, where some teams can field an entire roster of stars, the most talented teams often struggle to make it to the finals, let alone win the entire tournament. 

#2 Successful teams rarely exhibit a bottom-line mentality. While it may seem like scoring is the ultimate predictor of success, our research has found that NHL players are rewarded based on a range of statistics, not just the number of goals they score. Similarly, the most successful NFL teams often find a balance between how much they pay their stars and their supporting players. For example, some teams in the 2021 season spent up to 15 times more on their star players, while others, like the New England Patriots, were much more frugal.

#3 Adaptability and resilience are key. Our research found that there’s no clear trend of teams performing increasingly better or worse over a season. Instead, teams, even Stanley Cup winners, regularly go through “ups” and “downs” throughout the year. This variability is expected and is not necessarily a sign of a poor-performing team. Similarly, our ongoing research on top-tier soccer teams across Europe found that the teams’ available talent and coordination strategies fluctuated from match-to-match throughout the season. Our initial findings suggest that the most successful teams are those that could continuously find the right fit between their playing strategy and available talent.

Key recommendations for leaders

Taken as a whole, these findings highlight the significant role of coaching and development while demonstrating the role of the so-called “intangibles” in creating successful teams. 

Based on these insights, as well as other research we’ve conducted, here are several recommendations for leaders hoping to build effective, well-rounded teams: 

• Start with understanding your own strengths and weaknesses and then decide on the priorities for building out the team. Is the primary focus on finding complementary skill sets, or is the right attitude more important? 
• Once the team is formed, developing a strategy for your talent is crucial. Will you distribute the workflow to maximize everyone’s talents or does your team’s assignment align better with a centralized approach where key tasks are completed by a single individual?
• Once the team is in place, it is helpful to consider four different areas of team effectiveness: establishing a strong core by having the right people and practices in place and knowing the team’s purpose; cultivating a collective mindset so everyone on the team knows their roles and understands who possesses key information; building cohesive relationships defined by trust and a shared sense of psychological safety; and forming connections with other teams and stakeholders through intentional and proactive boundary spanning. Just as sports teams navigate the highs and lows of a season, leaders also must revisit each of these four aspects of team effectiveness. Resist the temptation to treat them like a playbook — this is not a static game plan, but a dynamic strategy that evolves with every pass, every turnover, every victory. 

Whether you’re onboarding new employees or celebrating a hard-fought win, remember that every milestone is an opportunity to revisit, revamp, and reinvigorate your team’s development.

This article Why successful leaders are wary of the “too much talent effect” is featured on Big Think.

Adapting to new technology requires custom learning experiences based on the different skills, knowledge, and attitudes of a diverse workforce. Some firms are trying and succeeding.

Khan Academy, a nonprofit in the education space, launched a project with OpenAI in early 2020 to power Khanmigo, an AI-fueled assistant that simultaneously supports teachers and tutors students. Chief learning officer Kristen DiCerbo believes the tool helps Khan Academy meet the diverse learning needs of its users in ways that signal the future of learning, noting, “They [our students] all have different gaps. They all need different things to move forward. That is a problem we’ve been trying to solve for a long time.” If tech can get us to more personalized learning experiences through a digital buddy — we’re in!

A major financial services firm also pulled it off, notably because many wouldn’t look to the financial sector as a leader in AI. Like many established organizations, Morgan Stanley faced a knowledge problem: They had a wealth of business insights, but couldn’t figure out how to spread the information in-house. The company intranet was bulging with insights on everything from market research to investment strategies, haphazardly strewn across multiple sites in PDF form.

To make the information more accessible, Morgan Stanley uses GPT-4 to fuel an internal chatbot that finds and delivers the resources employees are looking for, based on what they need. According to Jeff McMillan, the company’s head of analytics, data & innovation, “[This] effectively unlocks the cumulative knowledge [within our workforce].”

And HR is getting its day in the sun, too. In 2023, Beamery launched TalentGPT — Gen AI for HR technology. This leverages GPT-4 and other large language models (LLMs) to redesign the experience of talent acquisition and talent management for users and HR. By personalizing career recommendations based on organizational skills gaps, they are enabling companies to accelerate skill acquisition, tackle their DEI challenges, and address their ethical obligations to boot. 

As [Beamery Co-Founder and CPO] Sultan Saidov commented, “These advances in AI technology are improving the interactions we can provide to our users, and how much time we can save people in achieving complex tasks.”

Smart working is getting smarter

The economist Richard Baldwin commented at the World Economic Forum’s Growth Summit that “AI won’t take your job, but someone who can use AI better than you, just might!” And this is the real challenge people are facing. It is less about intelligence, per se, but how we can bolster our thinking by working smartly. Having smarts — knowing where to go or how to acquire what we need — has the potential to be an intelligence equalizer. 

Therefore, we all need to get comfortable with the new language of Gen AI, to all appreciate how AI and automation will disrupt how we work, and to ensure we have guardrails to maximize the gains while minimizing the risks.

One emerging challenge is to ensure that our workforce knows how to discern what’s real and what isn’t — how to cut through the rubbish. (And there is, as we’re all painfully aware, a lot of rubbish out there.) According to an Oliver Wyman report, “Despite having low trust in the accuracy of [information on social media], our Gen Z colleagues prioritize social media’s familiar faces [and] entertaining content” over the news sources they think would be more credible. In other words, Gen Zers know that social media is feeding them garbage, yet they’re still eating it. 

We all need to be more vigilant in checking the facts, details, and sources behind any AI-generated content before incorporating it into our work and being clear about which co-workers — bot or human — are contributing to our work and any potential copyright violations.

Speaking of vigilance, how many employees do you think might have inadvertently shared private or confidential information with ChatGPT via their company computer? Probably more than you’d hope. Most companies addressed the issue early on, thanks to diligent risk and compliance personnel, but the threat is here to stay. Learning how to amplify intelligence and how to do it safely are now onboarding imperatives for us all. This is an evolving space, but here is how some early adopters tackled it:

Instituting guardrails. Striking the right balance between defining guardrails and making it easy to share learnings and promote safe experiments is key. Set up your safeguards and controls in advance of new tech coming in. This includes risk management strategies, data policies, security training, algorithm audits, and an ethical AI credo that puts people before the tech, not the tech before the people.

Installing checks and balances. Some are using pass/fail courses to certify employees before giving them access to certain tools. Others are setting up alerts or disclaimers for internal content downloads. An imperative is making certain that your country’s data protection regulations and related laws are being upheld and that updates are being regularly shared. Having people who are dedicated to the use of Gen AI with a focus on privacy and ethics, and who can guide others in the firm on these issues, will help to navigate change.

Clarifying the impact on jobs and skills. A number of companies have started to actively analyze the roles within their organization to see how this new technology will impact jobs. Deduce how AI can help with skills intelligence and strategic workforce management to meet emerging, evolving business needs. Acquiring technical and analytical skills that help with sense-checking AI outputs, and building a positive digital work culture, are also key to enterprise-wide adoption.

Identifying the impact on operations. Just as we’ve employed robotic process automation (RPA) for menial tasks, we now need to consider how cognitive processes such as conceptual reasoning, divergent thinking and evaluative thinking can be enhanced. Augmenting our own intelligence to improve decision-making, solve analysis paralysis, validate our hypotheses, and facilitate content creation are all part of the new frontier. Learning with computers to solve more complex challenges will come next.

Bolstering people insights. Assuming you have the right approvals and keep data anonymized, leveraging internal HR data sets to train custom AI models that meet the specific needs of your business will bolster the insights you have about your people, allowing for greater predictions about their health and behavior and, in effect, solving the issue of lagging human capital metrics to inform decision making. This allows for more individualized and targeted people management interventions. 

This over-reliance on technology could one day dilute our insights, compromise our critical thinking skills, and leave our decision-making at the mercy of the machines, as our own critical reasoning will have atrophied. This is the dystopian future we need to avoid, because it could lead to — say it with us, now — “The Robot Uprising.”

At the same time, drifting through an AI-driven world without getting engaged with this technology is a recipe for disaster, as a fool with a tool is still a fool. Any company or individual who doesn’t effectively use AI might be less productive — and less competitive — than those who do.

This article AI is an incredible “intelligence equalizer” — if we use it smartly is featured on Big Think.

Zebras are, on first impression, ridiculous. They are herbivorous pack animals, and their natural habitat is usually some kind of treeless grassland or savanna — green, yellow, and brown. You’d think then, given the predatory appeal of their lean meat, that zebras would try and blend in more with a bit of camouflage to make themselves inconspicuous. But no. The zebra struts around in black and white stripes. It flaunts both its color and its design in such a way as to say, “Hello savannah! Here I am: a tasty, trotting crosswalk of a feast.”

If we dig a bit deeper, though, we see the genius in the zebra’s game. Yes, alone, a zebra is ridiculous, but in a pack and moving at speed, they become brilliant. Because when you have a lot of black and white stripes jumping up and down, darting to and fro, and kicking up a dusty hullabaloo, it’s really hard to see what’s going on. Your eyes start to blur. Your head starts to spin. Imagine you’re a lion about to make chase. One minute, you’re salivating over a piano-key dinner. The next, you’re chasing an optical illusion.

A zebra’s striping works because it lives in a pack. Its strength lies in working together. This fact, known as the Zebra Effect, has a great many practical applications in our own lives.

Unicorns and zebras

Once upon a time, in the corporate world, the unicorn was the ultimate symbol of success — a rare, almost mythical creature representing companies with explosive growth and billion-dollar valuations. It’s been about disruption, innovation, and profit-centric models. The Zebra Effect (sometimes called the Zebra movement) is a different wisdom. In some ways, it’s even a pushback against the dominant unicorn model. Zebra companies are about slow and sustainable progress. They tend to collaborate often and early with other Zebra-type companies and look to balance profit with an ethical purpose that prioritizes democracy and resource sharing. The Zebra Effect is a business model that is less predatory and dog-eat-dog ruthless but one that aims to pursue mutually beneficial collaborations, which in turn create a more inclusive and sustainable business ecosystem.

The Zebra Effect is seen most obviously today in start-up culture. All start-ups need energy, innovation, and an idea. Ideally, they need some USP that will make them stand out. But there are also many advantages that come from collaborating with like-minded start-ups. Zebras Unite is a website that focuses on this idea and believes that cooperative business ventures are not only profitable but sustainable and “better for the world.” Start-up culture is obsessed with Steve Jobs disruption, or the obsessive profit-driven, crunch culture that dominates Silicon Valley. But Zebras Unite serves the “overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs who don’t fit that mold.” There is no law of nature dictating that success and entrepreneurialism need to be unicorns.

Flaunt your stripes

Of course, as in life, the answer to success probably lies somewhere between a unicorn and a zebra (a hybrid I’d pay to see). Profit and growth depend on a balance between standing out and fitting in. But, for those wanting to apply a bit more zebra-wisdom to their company, what practical examples are there? Here we look at three, outside of the startup world.

The power of the consortium. Just because another company (or even a person) is competing with you in one key area doesn’t mean that you need to compete in all areas. For instance, in the 1980s, there were dozens of semiconductor manufacturers in the US. They were all in global competition and they all had the same problem: Japan. Japan’s “lean manufacturing” meant they developed better and more advanced semiconductors, which in turn catalyzed their automotive and electronic sectors. The US companies couldn’t keep up, and so the “rustbelt” emerged. This led to a Zebra tactic. Intel’s Robert Noyce oversaw the creation of SEMATECH, a consortium of 14 semiconductor companies, which, together, restored the US leadership in semiconductor innovation. In this case, the “enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and zebra semiconductor companies decided to stick together.

The right side of history. Sometimes, it’s a bad idea to stand out. Startups might succeed by being different, and businesses grow thanks to innovation, but on some issues, you need to follow the crowd. A good example of this is with advertisement revenue or investor confidence. For example, around 2017/2018 the issue of hate speech and misinformation on social media had grown so egregious that it was impossible to ignore. So, companies like GoDaddy, Google, Spotify, Reddit, Facebook, Apple Pay, YouTube, and PayPal took steps to limit the spread of hate speech and misinformation. They ran together. It’s okay to be a unicorn, but not a unicorn in favor of malicious propaganda.

The mutually beneficial relationship. No one can get through life alone. We need a network of friends and family to help us, and a network of civil society to let us live the life we want. We are born into dependency with others, and life involves learning to rely on others. So, too, with business. This is the wisdom that Hector Ruiz, founder and director of ANSI Capital LLC, shares with us on Big Think+. A zebra cannot outrun or outfight a lion. They need collaborative strategies. So, too, with many smaller companies. Ruiz puts it like this: “When you’re a small company trying to compete with a behemoth, it was really critical to try to see if you could partner with others to be able to punch above your weight. And so it became very important for me to look around to see who I could count on. Who could I ask for help? Who could I go to?” The trick is to find a symbiotic, mutually beneficial partnership with another company.

This article The “Zebra Effect”: Why collaboration matters is featured on Big Think.

In an era where artificial intelligence is no longer a sci-fi fantasy but a daily reality, its impact on the workforce is profound and multifaceted. This rapid technological evolution brings a seismic shift in how we work, the nature of jobs, and the skills required for the future workforce. 

Technological change is accelerating, with AI promising to revolutionize entire industries and workforce dynamics within the next decade. Speculations such as “In the age of AI, it’s going to be more profitable to be a plumber than a lawyer” reflect this shifting landscape of job security and profitability. With the rise of AI, we’re seeing a significant transformation across sectors like law, where AI can automate routine legal tasks and alter profitability for entry-level roles.

Yet, while AI may reduce demand for some junior lawyer positions, the legal profession involves complex reasoning and relationship-building that human experts still excel at. So rather than avoid law altogether, future lawyers should utilize AI tools while focusing on the uniquely human aspects like advocacy and negotiation that machines can’t replicate.

Understanding AI’s sweeping impacts across operations, job roles, and policies is vital to steer its trajectory responsibly. AI already provides decision support, generates significant data insights, and automates repetitive tasks across sectors. With suitable safeguards, AI can create fresh opportunities even as it transforms existing jobs over the next decade. As AI redefines roles across industries, it’s crucial to understand its implications for the future of work.

Reshaping business models

AI is not just a tool but a transformational force reshaping business operations and competitive landscapes. In healthcare, it speeds up drug discovery. AI recommendation engines, virtual assistants, and process automation create seamless customer experiences.

In manufacturing, AI-driven robots and predictive maintenance systems enhance productivity and reduce downtime. In finance, AI is refining credit risk models, detecting fraud, and personalizing customer experiences. Retail and e-commerce are leveraging AI for inventory management, personalized recommendations, and customer service automation, dramatically improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Companies racing ahead on AI implementations gain efficiency edges that pressure laggard rivals. As AI grows ubiquitous, it reshapes sectoral landscapes and redefines competitive advantage. AI leaders like Amazon and Google also accumulate troves of training data, attracting top talent and boosting market dominance. First-mover advantages will likely concentrate gains with pioneers.

The democratization of AI, facilitated by cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, enables even small companies to harness AI’s power. New business models are emerging, too, including the platform economy and data monetization through insights. This access is revolutionizing sectors like agriculture, where AI and IoT (internet of things) are used for precision farming, optimizing resources, and boosting yields.

The transformation of work

As AI takes over repetitive tasks, human workers move towards roles requiring more complex problem-solving, creativity, and emotional intelligence. It shoulders time-intensive analytical tasks and surfaces personalized insights. More responsibilities requiring complex perception, social skills, and creative flair still need human strengths. AI is less likely to replace human jobs than profoundly reshape them. Emerging roles like AI Ethics Officers and AI Integration Specialists are becoming crucial in businesses. AI is assisting in diagnostic procedures in healthcare, but human doctors are irreplaceable for their empathetic patient care and complex decision-making abilities.

Alongside business models, AI transforms work for hundreds of millions of workers.  A 2020 McKinsey study* found that over 70 percent of companies have adopted some AI technology. The McKinsey study underscores this transformation, noting that AI automates tasks and creates new job categories and opportunities. For instance, the growth of e-commerce has spawned roles in AI-driven logistics and supply chain management. Similarly, the rise of electric and autonomous vehicles in the automotive industry is creating demand for new engineering and technical skills.

As we watch industries evolve, a myriad of new roles are emerging:

• Autonomous Vehicle Engineers at Tesla pioneer self-driving cars
• Drone Logisticians at Zipline design advanced delivery drones
• Space Tech Strategists spearheaded by SpaceX strategize future innovations
• Mixed Reality Developers at Apple and Microsoft shape immersive experiences
• Quantum Computing Architects at IBM and Google build advanced systems
• Nuclear Fusion Specialists further next-gen energy tech
• Biotech Innovators merge biology and technology

Adapting to such opportunities is essential in this shifting landscape. Embracing change future-proofs your career while resisting innovation risks obsolescence. So, while AI empowers some, workers worldwide require re-skilling as responsibilities evolve. Investing in new skills is vital for anyone to remain competitive. The key is that rather than replacing humans, AI enables people to focus more on creative and meaningful work better aligned with innate human strengths — future jobs will rebalance technology with humanity. However, smooth transitions require proactive policies, retraining programs, and compassionate change management across impacted industries.

Investing in skills

Companies and individuals must invest in continuous learning and skill development to keep pace with AI’s advancement. For instance, Amazon’s $700 million upskilling program aims to provide employees with the skills needed in a more automated workplace. This kind of corporate investment in human capital is becoming essential.

Nevertheless, workers will require re-skilling as AI transforms tasks. Higher cognitive abilities like creativity, complex information processing, and problem-solving are growing in demand. So are social skills like persuasion, emotional intelligence, and collaborative leadership. Lifelong learning to continually upgrade must substitute outdated notions of static careers. Individuals should also increasingly gain exposure to real-world AI tools to remain competitive.

On the educational front, universities and training institutions are revising curricula to include AI, machine learning, and data analytics, along with soft skills like critical thinking and problem-solving. Interdisciplinary approaches are crucial, as integrating AI into diverse fields requires a combination of technical know-how and domain-specific knowledge.

Policy choices

Effective policy-making is crucial in managing the transition to an AI-driven economy. Governments must craft policies that promote AI innovation while protecting workers’ rights and ensuring fair labor practices. Social assistance for displaced laborers is urgently needed to manage job displacement impacts on vulnerable communities. This includes updating legal frameworks on data privacy and algorithmic accountability and providing social safety nets for those displaced by automation.

Countries are taking varied approaches to AI policy. International cooperation shapes AI for the common good. For instance, the EU focuses on ethical AI and robust regulatory frameworks, while countries like the USA and China aggressively push for technological leadership. Policies promoting lifelong learning and career mobility will be key in helping the workforce adapt to the changing job landscape.

The policy efforts should incentivize formal gig work over informal labor. The portability of benefits across jobs is vital in the platform economy. Tax policies must also keep pace so that AI productivity gains translate to public investments in infrastructure, research, and social security for sustainable growth.

The big picture

AI will undoubtedly have more influence in this century than any preceding technology. With ethical and responsible development, AI can solve issues around inequality, climate change, healthcare access, food security, and education gaps. But first, stakeholders across business, government, and civil society must steward AI conscientiously amidst disruption through coordinated efforts in re-skilling workforces and assisting vulnerable groups.

Today’s decisions about AI’s development and integration into our work and lives will have long-lasting effects. Ethical and responsible stewardship of AI technology can help us address global challenges and lead to a more equitable and prosperous future. It’s a collective responsibility requiring collaboration across sectors and nations.

* A 2023 McKinsey study stated that 60 percent of organizations with reported AI adoption are using generative AI.

This article The great rebalancing: Why careful change management is essential as AI transforms our worklives is featured on Big Think.

At its core, career ownership is a resolute commitment to shaping your professional journey in alignment with your aspirations and values. It’s a departure from the traditional view of a career as a predetermined path and embracing your role as the artist holding the brush to your canvas. This shift involves cultivating self-awareness, understanding your strengths and passions, and aligning your professional choices with your authentic self. It’s the shift from being a passive spectator to an active creator of your career journey.

So, why is “career ownership” not an oversold buzzword but the essence of a fulfilling and purpose-driven professional life? In an era where traditional career structures are evolving rapidly, jobs and skills are becoming redundant, and organizational loyalty is waning, those who seize ownership navigate change more effectively. They put themselves in a position to make optimal career decisions when they reach significant inflection points. It’s a transformative mindset that empowers you to go beyond external expectations and norms, promoting a deep sense of autonomy and fulfillment. When you own your career, work becomes more than a means to an end; it becomes a vehicle for personal growth, contribution, and sustained happiness. 

The state of the global workplace

In a world where change is constant and the future of work is continually evolving, it’s alarming to note the widespread dissatisfaction and disengagement among professionals. Gallup‘s State of the Global Workplace Report 2022 reveals disturbing statistics: 60% report emotional detachment, 19% are miserable, and only 33% feel engaged. In the United States, half of the workforce experiences daily stress, while significant portions report worry, sadness, and anger.

A unique blueprint

Taking ownership of your career and unlocking your potential requires a unique strategic blueprint that aligns your aspirations with the realities of the contemporary work landscape. 

Here are the critical elements of a blueprint for career ownership:

Assess career trends: Explore current trends shaping the professional landscape before embarking on your career ownership journey. Being informed allows you to understand the abundance of choices and opportunities, enabling you to explore and be curious, and then choose based on what resonates most with you. 

Understand yourself: Dive deep into your career story, purpose, and values. Define what success and fulfillment uniquely mean to you. A holistic approach to your career involves discovering your whole self, ensuring that your professional journey aligns with your authentic aspirations. 

Create strategies to bulletproof your career: The following three strategies are a must when considering how best to bulletproof your career: embracing lifelong learning; proactively shaping your career; and mastering the art of networking to create meaningful connections. Embracing and acting on these strategies puts the future of your career squarely in your hands. 

Develop the mindset for success: Your mindset — inclinations, attitudes, or beliefs — shapes how you see the world and yourself and is critical to your success or failure. Four types of mindset are essential to sustainable career success: 

1. A growth mindset — where you believe that your talents are not fixed: they can be changed and are constantly being developed. It also means that you are not afraid of failing as you recognize everything as a potential learning experience. 
2. An abundance mindset — where you are able to recognize that opportunity knocks at every stage of your career, knowing how to look out for, and how to remain open to, new possibilities.
3. A feedback mindset — a perspective which centers not only on how individuals perceive and respond to feedback, but also creates an environment for receiving feedback. 
4. An “I determine my value” mindset — where, instead of waiting for a performance review, salary increase, promotion or recognition to tell you your value, or gauging your value through comparison to others, you prioritize self-validation. Although this might take a conscious and consistent effort, it will create self-confidence, authenticity and personal growth. 

These mindsets work together, sometimes overlapping, to fuel your sustainable career success and fulfillment.

Pursue career-building skills: Master creating increasingly higher impact, stack meaningful experiences that push you out of your comfort zone, and continuously re-skill and upskill. These actions play a crucial role in enhancing your employability and career growth. Most importantly, they are essential to achieve success and fulfillment in your career journey — as determined by you. The changing world of work and evolving expectations require self-management of our careers through these skills.

Embrace meaningful conversations: Navigate pivotal discussions at various career stages, including early career conversations, growth and development discussions, performance conversations, and salary negotiations. Effective communication is a cornerstone of career ownership.

Write your development plan: Bring these aspirations and skills all together by crafting a dynamic development plan: your roadmap for ongoing success. It should encompass your goals and action plan for each year. You will likely make suboptimal career decisions if you do not have a clear and written career plan. A lot of reflection and work goes into writing a good career development plan, a crucial step in your professional journey. Without a career plan, you risk drifting aimlessly through your career, lacking direction and purpose. 

The world is increasingly driven towards personal choice, fulfillment, and financial success. This shift underscores the significance of career ownership. Career ownership will empower you to navigate this changing landscape, choosing paths that genuinely contribute to your life and well-being — and enabling you to unleash your full career potential.

This article Unleash your potential: A blueprint for “career ownership” is featured on Big Think.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, Claude, Bard, and Gemini, have captured the attention and imagination of millions, quickly becoming the hottest and fastest growing category of consumer technology. As these tools race to capture more and more of the consumer market, businesses are just beginning to grapple with both the excitement and the sheer complexity of adopting, implementing, and deploying this new class of technology for their teams. 

While proprietary or closed-source solutions like the generative AI products put out by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are winning consumer market attention, many businesses have started exploring open-source generative AI with the hope of finding solutions that are flexible, scalable, and don’t lock them into licensing agreements for technology that is still largely untested.

Hugging Face, an AI community for developer teams, has over 400,000 open-source models available for download, including the massively popular Llama-2 and SDXL. These models, and the applications that support them, have entered the picture with a promise of scale, security, flexibility, and ownership. 

It should be noted that both open and closed-source AI have attracted the scrutiny of government regulators and AI safety experts, who are increasingly focused on ensuring their constituents can harness the benefits while mitigating the risks of generative AI. It will be important for businesses to carefully balance opportunity with safety with any AI solutions that they implement.

Generative AI fundamentals

Understanding whether to align your business more closely with open source or closed source can be daunting. There are new generative AI tools emerging every week across text, image, voice, video, and even multi-modal outputs. Regardless of its output medium, most tools — both open and closed source — operate with the same key components:

1. Base Model: The base or foundation model forms the architectural backbone of any generative AI tool. It’s the foundational framework upon which additional functionalities and customizations are built.
2. Specialized Model: Evolving from the base model, these are fine-tuned to perform specific tasks, catering to niche requirements or unique industry needs.
3. End-user application: The interface through the magic of AI is made possible — this is where end-users interaction with the AI, leveraging its capabilities for varied use cases.

Where open-source AI excels

For businesses where generative AI is vital to their core business — integral to workflows, a key revenue driver, or a cornerstone of competitive advantage — it will be important to prioritize the control and ownership of your base model, specialized models, and end-user applications. This is where open-source generative AI solutions shine:

• The base model comes with an open license, allowing full ownership of a tailored base model that aligns to your business needs.
• You can engage in the development of the open-source code, creating specific features or specialized models that cater directly to your business.
• With publicly available code, you can confidently expect that your investment will remain accessible and functional for the long term.
• Users are empowered to adapt and integrate the tool into various systems that they use regularly.

Particularly beneficial for businesses requiring high control levels, like creative teams engaged in revenue-generating projects or those handling sensitive IP, open-source generative AI offers the highest level of customization. They are great for companies that: require a high-level of control (eg. creative teams working on specific asset generation projects, workflows or tasks for revenue-generating products); work with sensitive or confident IP that they don’t want shared between orgs or used to train others models; want to be able to customize the model and application technology infrastructure to meet their organization’s specific needs and use cases.

The case for closed-source AI

Generative AI, while transformative in many sectors, might not become a core function in certain businesses where either the nature of the work doesn’t align with what AI can offer, or the value added by AI is marginal compared to other factors. In this case, closed-source options typically provide a more controlled, “out-of-the-box” experience with the trade off of less customization, control, and ownership. In most closed-source solutions:

• Customers license access to a proprietary model that the vendor owns. There is less freedom to modify or adapt it to their specific needs or creative direction.
• The applications are designed to output a high-quality generation for general purposes. They accomplish this by automatically manipulating prompts or inputs on the backend to improve the quality of the generation, though most systems do not share with the user how their inputs are being manipulated. 
• The application gathers user input data to improve the proprietary base model, which results in higher quality outputs for all users, but less transparency in how your team’s creative works are being used by the vendor.

Closed-source solutions make sense for businesses that do not see generative AI as core to their business and have less concerns over privacy, security, provenance, and compliance. They are generally better at producing a high-quality output for users that are just getting started or don’t need to use the tools as part of professional workflows that contain sensitive employer-owned content or other confidential intellectual property.

Strategic choices

Open and closed source aren’t binary options and most businesses will incorporate both open and closed generative AI solutions. However, it is important to understand the strategic choices and potential outcomes of licensing proprietary tools compared to adopting open-source models and applications. To add to the complexity, it is often difficult to fully understand whether the solutions you are considering are even fully open. 

Some companies publish their source code but restrict commercial use through licensing, while others, like OpenAI, license access to a closed-source model despite an ethos of openness and transparency. During procurement, businesses will need to carefully consider the core technology powering the solutions they are considering to ensure they will meet both immediate business needs and business needs at scale. 

The backbone of AI infrastructure

Closed-source generative AI tools are likely to dominate the mass consumer market, thanks to their ability to provide high quality outputs across a variety of modalities for novice users. However, the B2B market is still largely undefined. If history repeats itself, we’ll likely see open-source solutions rise as the backbone of generative AI infrastructure. 

Just as Linux, Apache, and MySQL became foundational building blocks of the early internet era, businesses seeking higher levels of customization, flexibility, and scalability will likely turn to open-source solutions to power their generative AI infrastructure.

This article AI strategy: Should my business choose “open source” or “closed source”? is featured on Big Think.

The challenge to developing innovative solutions is having the patience, perseverance, and sustained effort to really address a problem from a new angle. Those who master this build a game-changing skill that will separate them from the competition and deliver solutions that delight customers. 

In the innovative process, idea finding entails discovering solutions to well-defined problems. If you’ve done a good job in problem definition — the problem is so well stated that one or two solutions leap out at you — you may find it difficult to resist simply grabbing one of these solutions and running with it. Fight the temptation. Instead, generate as many potential solutions as you can without judging them. 

The more potential solutions you generate for a challenge, the more likely you are to find a superior solution. Among the many techniques for generating ideas, those based on deferring judgment and extending the effort to create multiple ideas lead to the most innovative solutions. Here are four techniques you can immediately use. 

#1. Brainstorming — One of the most effective techniques for generating solutions is brainstorming. It can be done alone or with a group. In either case, you come up with ideas for meeting your chosen problem while following these important rules: 

• Don’t criticize any idea. 
• Go for quantity of ideas. Quantity breeds quality, so the more ideas the better. 
• “Hitchhike” or piggyback one idea onto another as much as possible.  
• Freewheel as much as possible. The wilder the idea the better. It’s easier to tame a wild idea than to enliven a dull one.

Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to find a good idea from a long list than from a short one. Don’t waste time pondering what you dislike about an idea. Instead, select promising fragments and use your imagination and experience to build on them.

Suppose you’ve defined a problem as, “How might I better attract attention from potential buyers?” A freewheeling idea might be to take along an elephant (yes, a real one!) to sales calls. While this is hardly a practical idea, it would almost certainly attract customers’ attention. Now by visualizing the idea, you might find intriguing fragments on which to build. Picturing the elephant’s trunk, you might think about taking along a travel trunk filled with contest prizes or product samples.  

#2. Blitzing — Blitzing means blowing up an idea into many more specific ideas. Here, you focus on a single idea that suggests a broader theme. For example, a team working on the challenge “How might we improve our potato chip bags?” might have come up with the idea, “to make them more useful when empty.” In order to blitz this theme, the team creates a new problem definition: “How might we make our potato chip bags more useful when empty?” Brainstorming this new challenge leads to more specific ideas, like modifying the bags to be used as trash bags for a car once the chips have been eaten.

#3. Forcing connections — This technique requires you to use your imagination to force a fit between seemingly unrelated ideas or objects. For example, a product development engineer’s challenge might be, “What new household products might we introduce?” You could make two lists. One could be a list of objects you might find in a room of the house. The second could be a list of objects from, say, the contents of your work desk. 

If you chose one object from each list at random, you might end up with a skylight and a pair of scissors. You could ask yourself, “How might I improve a pair of scissors by making them more like a skylight?” Ideas for solutions might include, “Put miniature lights on the scissors so you can use them in low light,” or, “Equip the scissors with a magnifying glass for visually impaired people.” You’ve forced a connection between two apparently unrelated things. 

#4. Deliberately building radical ideas — Here you select a preposterous idea from a list of possibilities and blitz it, focusing on its good aspects. For the problem definition, “How might we generate publicity for our website?” a group might select the seemingly wild idea of using a cobra as a mascot for the company. Blitzing could lead to finding mascots from among other creatures that are less lethal but just as provocative. Or the group might use the cobra figuratively to jazz up the company’s shirts and promotional material.  

Zeroing in on innovative solutions

Using these techniques deliberately helps you generate a surprising number of innovative yet practical ideas worth pursuing. How many solution ideas are worth a closer look? Use these guidelines for your selection process: 

• Pick concrete ideas. You should be able to visualize what the idea will look like when completed.
• Pick ideas that are easy to understand. An uninitiated bystander should be able to understand your idea.
• Make sure the selected ideas are on-target. They should address the selected problem definition challenge rather than other related challenges.
• Pick ideas for which an easy next step is obvious. An idea with a clear action you can implement is your best bet.

Following these guidelines will help you avoid ideas that appear noble but are too esoteric and vague.

This article Boost innovation with elephants, cobras, and deferred judgment is featured on Big Think.

The book shop in Garrett’s local town always has beautiful displays. Every time he walks past, Garrett smiles at some quirky, cuddly toy hang-gliding over the book mountains. He pauses to take an Instagram photo of tiny robots mingling around a steampunk scene. At Christmas, the window is a carousel of festive wonder — a snowy village of cheerful snowmen and sleigh-free reindeer glowing in the twinkle of a thousand tiny, frosty suns. Garrett stands there for a full ten minutes, gawping in wistful and nostalgic wonder. He doesn’t know he’s crying.

That night, Garrett did his shopping from his sofa. He bought a stack of books for his family. He didn’t even pause for a moment as he clicked to confirm the order on his $231 Amazon basket. Twenty books ordered, all arriving the next day, and that’s his Christmas shopping done. Somewhere down the road, a twinkling bookshop closes early because they can’t afford the staff.

There are untold many stories of Garrett — people who bemoan the death of the local shop and reminisce about the days of variety and good-old-fashioned, bricks-and-mortar, shopping. The problem is that one Garrett becomes two, and two becomes a million. Another independent bookshop will close, and Jeff Bezos will write a happy email to his shareholders.

This is known as the “tyranny of small decisions.”

A slippery slope

In 1966, the economist Alfred E. Kahn first coined the term ‘tyranny of small decisions’ in an article of the same name. Kahn used this concept to describe how a series of small, individual choices could lead to an end point no one really wanted. It’s when various discrete and minor actions string together into something not desired by the decision-makers as a whole.

Kahn used the example of an essential train service in a small, remote, but inhospitable community. The train can operate through any weather conditions and all year round. When things are snowy and horrid, people will use the train. It’s crammed with grateful customers. In the sunny, blue-skied days of summer, people don’t bother — they drive a car or cycle around. Over time, the train runs out of money. The busy winter months are not enough to keep the service viable.

The “tyranny” in this case is that the majority of people in this community want to keep the service open. They need it. Yet their small decisions led to its demise. Kahn refers to this as a “market failure,” but it might equally be called a human psychological failure. The train company could hike their winter fares to pay for the summer turndown, yet customers will not pay more in the short term, even if they know they’ll be unhappy in the long term. An independent bookshop might charge higher-than-Amazon prices, and you might need to go to the shop, but that’s what keeps it open. Most people know this and appreciate it on a rational level. Yet, they would rather sit with Garrett on his sofa, saving $1.78 and with next-day delivery.

Reappraising small decisions

Kahn’s original paper was more slanted towards economic philosophy than practical tips for modern business. But the “tyranny of small decisions” idea is now a staple among many business researchers and advisors. Here are three ways that the logic behind Kahn’s idea can help your own business.

Don’t skimp on your training days. You’ve just sat at your desk with a creel of tasks to get through, and you get an email: “Morning everyone! Don’t forget to follow this link to the cyber awareness training today.” You sigh, you click the link, and seethe. Few people like training days, but if you drop them you will potentially suffer greatly for it. In 2014, a hacker group called “Guardians of Peace” stole and erased great swathes of confidential Sony data. It cost them $80 million. Sixty percent of small businesses go out of business within six months of a cyberattack. Cyber-vigilance matters, and small decisions to skimp can have huge ramifications. Buying only basic internet security might save some money. Missing or having irregular cyber-awareness training might make you popular with your team. But few businesses can survive an $80 million hack.

Don’t wag the dog. There’s a lot of exciting talk about side-project time at the moment. This is where people are given free rein to work on a product or idea that, hopefully, benefits the company. A lot of great and lucrative ideas have spawned from side-project time. But if too many people spend too much time on their own projects, then “side” becomes “main.” When individual employees make isolated decisions, without concern for an overall bigger picture, it can do one of two things: either it hamstrings the forward stride of the company or it directs it in an entirely new way. The tail wags the dog. This is known as the “path dependency” phenomenon, where each small decision subtly steers the company’s direction. It might not be very modern, and it might not be very popular, but sometimes a leader needs to lead, and employees need to toe the company line.

Apply “systems thinking.” The problem at the heart of the tyranny of small decisions is when people fail to see themselves as part of a unit. Everything we do will affect someone else, and in business, the decisions we make will make someone else’s life easier or harder. In a great interview for Big Think+, Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, Amy Edmondson, calls this “systems thinking.” She describes it like this:

“Systems thinking is the self-discipline to back up and say, ‘Well, what might happen later as a result of doing this now? And who and what else might be affected as a result of doing this now?’ A nurse working in a hospital ward who runs out of linens might just go next door and take some from the unit next door. She’s solved her problem, but of course she’s created a problem now for the other unit… It’s just about stepping back a little and thinking about who else and when else will this simple decision now have an impact on. And this is a way of thinking that contributes to the prevention of many failures.”

This article How to fight the “tyranny of small decisions” is featured on Big Think.

Mike Massimino has been many things: a NASA astronaut, a professor of engineering at Columbia University, a senior advisor at the Intrepid Museum, and a TV personality. He was even an early social media influencer, having sent the first tweet from space. But one thing Massimino was not? A natural-born leader.

By his own admission, he was always more comfortable as the co-captain. He enjoyed being the guy you could have a chin-wag with over drinks. He wanted to bring the team together and be their confidant when times get rough. Calling the shots? Being responsible for the mission? Leave that kind of stuff for the head honcho.

But that wasn’t an option at NASA. There, the natural progression is for people to take on more leadership responsibilities. For some, that will mean moving up to serve as the agency’s chief astronaut or its administrator. For others, it may mean leaving NASA to pursue leadership opportunities at an organization or through active duty. Even if someone’s career path didn’t culminate with a fancy title, they must still lead those coming up behind them so the next generation would be prepared for the challenges that may arise.

“You were expected to be a leader,” Massimino says.

Big Think recently sat down with Massimino to discuss the lessons he learned as he advanced from rookie to leader in the space program. During our conversation, Massimino shared many important lessons. Here are five every leader should take to heart:

1. Develop your leadership style

Massimino is an amiable guy by nature. He doesn’t like the idea of dominating others or yelling at them to toe the line. It’s one reason he initially gravitated to being second-in-command, the worry that leadership demanded a transformation into that alpha dog stereotype.

However, before his first space flight, he underwent several training experiences designed to help him develop his leadership skills. One of them was a cold-weather exercise at Cold Lake in Canada. As part of the training, every participant was assigned to be the leader for the day. Instructors with the Canadian army helped that day’s leader plan where the team would go and what they would do. The next day, the team had to execute the plan.

Now, this was no summer camp. In addition to the frigid cold, not every participant was a freshman astronaut like Massimino. Some were accomplished military leaders — Air Force colonels and Navy captains who were deft hands at leading teams through challenging situations.

Afterward, the participants discussed everyone’s performance and classified each other’s leadership style. Massimino was crowned a “relationship master.” He learned his style wasn’t about dominance or Machiavellian power struggles. He leads others through his empathy, positive influence, and keen ability to raise spirits during difficult times.

“What I learned was that you don’t necessarily have to be dying to get control: ‘I’m in charge here. Listen to me,’” Massimino tells Big Think. “You can be yourself and still be an effective leader. That was very helpful to me, and I think getting those experiences was good training.”

2. Care about everyone on your team

Alan Bean was the fourth person to walk on the Moon and a mentor to generations of astronauts. However, like Massimino, he wasn’t a natural-born leader. He had to grow into the role, and in Moonshot, Massimino shares an important lesson Bean taught him during his first year at NASA.

While preparing for the Apollo 12 flight, Bean had a serious problem with an engineer. The guy always spouted odd ideas, and when Bean voiced his concerns to his commander, Pete Conrad, he was told he didn’t know the first thing about leadership. Alan objected, presuming that the first rule of leadership is to stay focused on the mission.

Conrad corrected him: The first rule of leadership is to admire and care for everyone on your team.

It took a while, but Bean eventually saw the truth of Conrad’s advice. He got to know and care for that engineer. He came to respect those who could point out a fault in his plans and admire the people who conjured up odd, yet brilliant, solutions.

“If everyone thought the same way, we never would have landed a person on the moon,” Massimino says. “We never would have built a space station or the Hubble Space Telescope. None of those big problems can ever be solved if everyone thinks the same.”

In time, Bean added a corollary to the first rule: When you have problems with someone, don’t assume you don’t like them. Think instead, “I don’t know them well enough,” and then get to know them better. Today, Massimino adds, Bean is remembered as one of the greatest leaders to have worked in NASA’s Astronaut Office.

3. Invest in the “bank of good thoughts”

Massimino vowed to follow the first rule of leadership, but as a leader, he had to discover a way to merge it with his own style. He found that when he became the lead spacewalker on a mission to repair Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.

While he was honored to lead a fantastic team on such an important mission, there was one engineer who kept proposing off-beat ideas. Like Bean before him, Massimino was ready to write the guy off as a lost cause. Then he remembered Bean’s corollary and made a special effort to get to know the engineer and seek out his opinions.

Turns out, the engineer was a brilliant man who was as dedicated to repairing Hubble as Massimino. He just didn’t know how to communicate his ideas effectively. This experience led Massimino to add his own corollary to the first rule: the “bank of good thoughts.”

As he explains it, leaders should maintain an account of good thoughts about their team members. Why do you like this person? Which of their skills, talents, and personal traits bring value to the team? What do you have in common or find admirable about them? What can you learn from them?

Then when something goes wrong — they make a mistake, disagree with you, or present a frustrating shortcoming — don’t approach the situation with anger or annoyance. Instead, make a withdrawal and come to it with a sense of care and appreciation.

This strategy helped Massimino recognize the engineer’s value as a team member and good thing, too. One of his “off-beat” ideas turned out to be critical to the mission’s success.

“You can say a lot of good things about people and build up a lot of goodwill. But you say that one bad thing and that could ruin the whole situation, relationship, or team,” Massimino says. “Remember that there are people involved. Don’t neglect the human element of things.”

4. Build trust and communication norms early

Many leaders today are challenged with bringing a team together and communicating effectively when their people may be a world away. Massimino has experienced the same, only with the “world away” being more literal.

He’s had comms drop contact with mission control for periods of time. Spacewalkers have confused their support with a miscommunication or unclear word choice. And, of course, he’s experienced the challenge of understanding someone when those vital body language cues are missing.

To meet these challenges, he recommends leaders build trust and effective communication habits early and reinforce them often. Establish important communication nomenclature that removes ambiguity and delivers messages with speed and precision. Invest in activities that build trust and open relationships so people feel they can say what is necessary without reprisal. And establish all of this “while you are on the ground” rather than trying to patch it together during a critical moment. 

“Even though we were communicating over such a distance, I felt like they were with us the whole time,” Massimino says. “I felt like the control center was there, and that’s because of the time we put into getting to know each other and working together. When you get separated, you’re still able to communicate and support each other.”

5. Lead with awe and gratitude

Even as a child, Massimino dreamed of going into space. He achieved that dream and helped other people achieve their dreams, too. He worked on important projects that advanced science and space exploration. He met amazing people from around the world and experienced the pale blue dot we call home in ways few can.

“Being in space was extraordinary,” Massimino says. “I miss those times.”

Other astronauts have expressed similar awe in the face of our planet’s horizons and space’s vast expanse. Psychologists even have a name for it, the “overview effect.” And while such awe makes people feel small in comparison, it also leads to feelings of hope and contentment.

Thing is, we don’t have to travel to space to experience it. As Massimino points out, we can find it here on Earth by appreciating the work we do. We can find wonder in the problems we are solving as much as the solutions. And we can be thankful for the opportunity to experience the triumphs, obstacles, and relationships with the people on our team.

“I don’t see the Earth from a distance anymore, but I can now engage with it firsthand,“ Massimino says. “Wherever you are, just take a few minutes to look around and see how magnificent it all is. Just appreciate how beautiful this planet is and how lucky we are to be here.”

This article Dare and care: An astronaut’s guide to leadership is featured on Big Think.

Almost all of us will work with other people. Whatever the size of the organization we work for, or even if we work for ourselves, we will connect, communicate and engage with others. The team around us can determine everything, from how much we enjoy work and value the company, through to how productive we are. Other people are too important to ignore, and if things aren’t working, they need reworking. 

Gallup, the global analytics firm which gathers data from the workplace around the world, poses an interesting question in its annual survey: ‘Do you have a best friend at work?’ Many people still draw a line between home and work and therefore consider their best friend to be in their home sphere, possibly from school or the neighborhood where they grew up. However, Gallup is asking specifically about the workplace and places the emphasis on ‘best’ friend because it recognizes the impact of a meaningful and close relationship at work. So, do you have a best friend at work? 

Friendships at work used to be frowned upon. Even today some old-school managers don’t want people being too friendly at work as they view it as disruptive and counterproductive. They believe people will be too busy having fun and socializing to get the work done. Those managers are wrong. People who have a ‘best friend’ at work are shown to be happier and healthier in the workplace and are also seven times more likely to be engaged in their role. Not only that, close friendships between employees boost productivity, retention and job satisfaction. 

Those we work with have the ability to make us feel safe, motivated, connected and purposeful. However, they also have the power to disengage us and make us miserable, especially if team dynamics aren’t working or if we feel constantly at loggerheads with our co-workers. 

The idea of a team and team dynamics is a strange one. Within a team, we have a combination of many different people, with different ideas and personalities, all coming together to achieve the same goal. We get thrown together into the mix, under the heading of ‘team,’ and are expected to work well together. Like all successful relationships, a healthy team dynamic is going to take work and dedication. 

We don’t get to choose our colleagues. In any other realm of our lives, if we were spending hours and hours together, we would think carefully about who we spend that time with. Imagine you had to go on holiday with a friend from your social circle. You wouldn’t leave that to chance. You would think carefully about who you wanted to spend the time with, who is likely to want the same type of vacation as you, and whose company you would enjoy the most. All of that is just for one holiday together, whereas we spend a third of our entire lives at work. Our colleagues really matter. 

Don’t panic if your team isn’t working, both literally and figuratively. If your team isn’t being productive and engaging in their work, or if they are not getting on together and you’re struggling to find your place in the team, then don’t panic. Teamwork can be reworked and made a lot more comfortable.

There is a very normal team process which the American psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified in 1965: the ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’ process. The forming and storming stages are typically where people may feel apprehension and see problems. Forming is your team coming together, and this is a constantly developing process as people join and leave a team, or team dynamics change (e.g. when a change in leadership occurs). When we are forming our teams, we are trying to figure things out, work out who is who, and trying to identify a role or ‘fit’ within the team. This can take quite some time, so if you are in a team and you feel you haven’t found your place yet, then don’t give up – it will happen. 

The storming stage is the one people find very challenging, and often panic about, but it is a normal part of teamwork and needs to be approached calmly. It is the storm before the calm where the team falls into norming, where they are working well and performing, where they can achieve excellence. Storming is the stage where all the different characteristics, ways of working, opinions and beliefs come to the surface and can clash with one another. Naturally, this can lead to some challenging conversations, and people can experience friction and conflict. 

The best way to manage this phase is to identify it, name it, and work together to move past it. Most people have heard of the Tuckman model, and storming, but some believe it happens on day one of a new team and then we all get past it and move on. But teams constantly storm. That’s OK, and it’s a normal part of team dynamics. Every new project or focus may lead to a storming phase as people challenge one another on the best way to do things or the roles each team member should take. 

By highlighting the normality of the storming stage, you can prevent it feeling personal and help your team to recognize it as a healthy part of team development. Clear identity of roles and responsibilities will help people through the storming phase, as it alleviates anxiety and gives a clear focus. Leave storming unchecked and you’ll find the team splits into different micro-teams based on similarity of thought and behaviors. This can lead to a rupture in the team which is hard to repair. Much like a split sauce, you cannot just leave it and hope it comes back together; it needs help. Revisiting roles, responsibilities, overall aims and the motivation for completion is a great way to reunite a split team and remind them of their joint purpose and the roles everyone has in achieving it. 

A storming phase is a really positive opportunity to grow and build psychological safety into the team. We can ask ourselves, ‘Are other people wrong or just different in their way of thinking?’ As we know, when we are uncertain, we tend to stick with what we know, and so we may side with people with similar thinking and ideas. This isn’t great for creative problem-solving or diversity as you will get the same ideas echoed back to you. 

Next time you feel your team is storming, deliberately seek out alternative views, work with people in the team you haven’t typically connected with. Name where you are, and tell people in your team if you are feeling a little lost or out of place. This creates the psychological safety to openly explore and discuss team dynamics and rework what’s needed to lead to positive change.

This article Teams are constantly “storming”: Here’s how to do it well is featured on Big Think.

A defining factor of Brex’s success has been its leaders, and the biggest predictor of leadership can be defined as the “ability to operate at all levels.” As we continue to grow the company, expanding our team of 1,000+ employees, all over the world, we maintain expectations for what makes a great team member and what we look for when hiring new talent. 

Like most tech companies, Brex is made up of a diverse team of engineers, design teams, sales teams, operations, and more.And while our talent pool brings a variety of skill sets to the table, the underlying commonality we seek in all of our employees is the potential to demonstrate exceptional leadership. 

We define this as someone whose leadership qualities can permeate an entire team — someone with the ability to work from the ground up, operating efficiently and effectively at all levels. 

While it’s okay in most companies to hire someone that builds a team and delegates work, we don’t have space for pure people managers. Instead, success is defined by leaders who can deftly “context-switch” from vision/strategy to operational details. For example, it should be normal that they could work on a 12-month roadmap and vision while also delving into the details of designing an API, closing a deal, or writing marketing copy in short spans of time. That’s a high bar, especially in a company with 1,000+ people.

To understand why I believe that an ability to switch context is so crucial to successful leadership, it may be helpful to define and unpack what I think it means to “operate at all levels.”

First, it doesn’t mean operating at all levels all the time. It is about finding ways to contribute at any stage. Our best leaders know when to switch from macro to micro. We build teams where merely being capable of writing code, closing a deal, writing marketing copy, or building a financial model — and occasionally doing it — means you’re familiar with the nuances of doing great work at the ground level. This is where all the real work happens.

Second, management alone creates little to no value. Management is just a tool to coordinate a large number of people to work cohesively. However, the creation of real value lies in hands-on tasks like selling, writing code and supporting customers. And not just any selling, or any code. Exceptional sales skills, and exceptional system design, are where outsized value gets created. 

For example, we want an engineering director to not only lead the strategy and direction of our AI team, but also simultaneously find the time to write tools that help engineers reporting to them improve their performance and efficiency. We want to build teams of people who know the nuance of what it takes to build a great product, from setting the product vision, down to the details of a particular component. We need management that sets this as an expectation, not an exception, and coaches their teams to do the same. 

By instilling this concept of operating at all levels, companies can become places where people can generate the best work of their lives. But the first step is building management teams full of exceptional leaders to cultivate this work. If a leader has no clue what great work is, they can’t lead someone towards it. It’s like a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse.

A leader that operates at all levels will naturally earn respect from their team. They lead from the frontlines, and have compassion towards the people actually doing the work. Great leaders value craftsmanship, and inspire everyone around them to understand, respect and appreciate the nuances of great execution. They value all levels of work from a menial task to a defining achievement. Leaders understand what’s uniquely hard and simple about all of it. This perception and recognition of all kinds of work make them better coaches. 

At Brex, we search for leaders like these to have on our team. As we continue to grow, recruiting talent globally, and building out products like our expense management system and Brex AI, we have to set simple expectations for our team — establish this model of operating at all levels and foster other leaders who do the same, so that everyone can create their best work from the ground up, and be exceptional at what they do.

This article Why the ability to “operate at all levels” defines leadership is featured on Big Think.

Let me demonstrate the power of microeconomics by solving two microeconomic problems, one simple and one a little harder. 

The first problem is this: Berkshire Hathaway just opened a furniture and appliance store in Kansas City, Kansas. At the time Berkshire opened it, the largest-selling furniture and appliance store in the world was another Berkshire Hathaway store selling $350 million worth of goods per year. The new store in a strange city opened up selling at the rate of more than $500 million a year. From the day it opened, the 3,200 spaces in the parking lot were full. The women had to wait outside the ladies’ restroom because the architects didn’t understand biology. It’s hugely successful. 

Well, I’ve given you the problem. Now, tell me what explains the runaway success of this new furniture and appliance store that is outselling everything else in the world. 

Let me do it for you. Is this a low-priced store or a high-priced store? It’s not going to have runaway success in a strange city as a high-priced store. That would take time. Number two, if it’s moving $500 million worth of furniture through it, it’s one hell of a big store, furniture being as bulky as it is. And what does a big store do? It provides a big selection. So what could this possibly be except a low-priced store with a big selection? 

But you may wonder, why wasn’t it done before, preventing its being done first now? Again, the answer just pops into your head: It costs a fortune to open a store this big, so nobody’s done it before. So you quickly know the answer. With a few basic concepts, these microeconomic problems that seem hard can be solved much as you put a hot knife through butter. I like such easy ways of thought that are very remunerative. And I suggest that you people should also learn to do microeconomics better.

Now I’ll give you a harder problem. There’s a tire store chain in the Northwest that has slowly succeeded over 50 years, the Les Schwab tire store chain. It just ground ahead. 

It started competing with the stores that were owned by the big tire companies that made all the tires, the Goodyears and so forth. And, of course, the manufacturers favored their own stores. Their “tied stores” had a big cost advantage. Later, Les Schwab rose in competition with the huge price discounters like Costco and Sam’s Club and before that Sears, Roebuck and so forth. And yet, here is Schwab now, with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. And here’s Les Schwab in his 80s, with no education, having done the whole thing. 

How did he do it? I don’t see a whole lot of people looking like a light bulb has come on. Well, let’s think about it with some microeconomic fluency. 

Is there some wave that Schwab could have caught? The minute you ask the question, the answer pops in. The Japanese had a zero position in tires, and they got big. So this guy must have ridden that wave some in the early times. Then, the slow following success has to have some other causes. And what probably happened here, obviously, is this guy did one hell of a lot of things right. And among the things that he must have done right is he must have harnessed what [economist N. Gregory] Mankiw calls the superpower of incentives. He must have a very clever incentive structure driving his people. And a clever personnel selection system, etc. And he must be pretty good at advertising. Which he is. He’s an artist. 

So, he had to get a wave in the Japanese tire invasion, the Japanese being as successful as they were. And then a talented fanatic had to get a hell of a lot of things right and keep them right with clever systems. Again, not that hard of an answer. But what else would be a likely cause of the peculiar success? 

We hire business school graduates, and they’re no better at these problems than you were. Maybe that’s the reason we hire so few of them. 

Well, how did I solve those problems? Obviously, I was using a simple search engine in my mind to go through checklist-style, and I was using some rough algorithms that work pretty well in a great many complex systems, and those algorithms run something like this: 

Extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors: 

1. Extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Example, Costco or our furniture and appliance store. 
2. Adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success, often in nonlinear fashion, as one is reminded by the concept of breakpoint and the concept of critical mass in physics. Often results are not linear. You get a little bit more mass and you get a lollapalooza result. And of course, I’ve been searching for lollapalooza results all my life, so I’m very interested in models that explain their occurrence.
3. An extreme of good performance over many factors. Example, Toyota or Les Schwab. 
4. Catching and riding some sort of big wave. Example, Oracle. By the way, I cited Oracle before I knew that the Oracle CFO [Jeff Henley] was a big part of the proceedings here today. 

Generally, I recommend and use in problem-solving cut-to-the quick algorithms, and I find you have to use them both forward and backward. 

Let me give you an example. I irritate my family by giving them little puzzles, and one of the puzzles that I gave my family not very long ago was when I said, “There’s an activity in America with one-on-one contests and a national championship. The same person won the championship on two occasions about 65 years apart. Now,” I said, “name the activity.” 

Again, I don’t see a lot of light bulbs going on. And in my family, not a lot of light bulbs were flashing. But I have a physicist son who has been trained more in the type of thinking I like. And he immediately got the right answer, and here’s the way he reasoned: It can’t be anything requiring a lot of hand-eye coordination. Nobody 85 years of age is going to win a national billiards tournament, much less a national tennis tournament. It just can’t be. Then he figured it couldn’t be chess, which this physicist plays very well, because it’s too hard. The complexity of the system and the stamina required are too great. But that led into checkers. And he thought, “Aha! There’s a game where vast experience might guide you to be the best even though you’re 85 years of age.” 

Anyway, I recommend that sort of mental puzzle-solving to all of you, flipping one’s thinking both backward and forward. And I recommend that academic economics get better at very small-scale microeconomics as demonstrated here. 

From: Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults after Considering Interdisciplinary Needs. Herb Kay Undergraduate Lecture, University of California, Santa Barbara Economics Department, October 3, 2003

This article Can you solve Charles Munger’s microeconomic puzzles? is featured on Big Think.

We all crave it: connection, openness, belonging. But more than that, we all crave the permission to be brave enough to share what we feel and know we are safe doing it. When we are brave with others, a circle forms. This creates a brave space where we can experience shared flow and selfless work, where deep empathy helps us see each other and the nature of our work with new eyes, where we can be vulnerable and respectful as we live out our creative identity. We can design this kind of space. It doesn’t need to be a physical space; it could be the psychological space we extend to each other that allows us to be brave together.

In business, engineering, and technical areas, the term “skunk works” refers to a group given the freedom to break from bureaucracy and work on special projects outside their day job. Brave space is the skunk works for today, applicable to any domain. It’s a blank canvas, a sandbox with toys, a big garage designed for people who want to make a difference through co-creation. 

Here are the core features and benefits of a brave space:

It generates ideas. A “safe space” is one in which people can experience respect and psychological safety. A “brave space” starts from a place of respect and takes brave mindsets to push the boundaries of what’s possible with others. We can talk about the stuff that doesn’t usually get talked about. We can face it together without fear of punishment. In a brave space people can build big ideas horizontally, not just vertically. It breaks barriers, crossing teams, organizations, companies, and communities without boundaries.

It encourages sharing. A brave space invites radical candor that’s also respectful, where leaders and peers give honest feedback based on shared principles. It converts passive-aggressive behaviors into open minds and open hearts. A brave space can become an incubator for the best ideas, creative thinking, and co-created solutions.

It empowers people. Connected people feel empowered to connect dots together. It isn’t an exercise in venting, even though it may seem raw. We need raw materials to build. And we need to first see how things really are, not how we imagine them to be. In a brave space, we can lean into new insights and revelations, breaking ground, opening the floodgates, and challenging what’s been done before. Not everything needs to be changed. A brave space allows us to identify what we can improve and provides opportunities to make upgrades. We’ve witnessed innovation in organizations that create a brave space. They don’t wait to see if they can trust their people. They extend trust early and often. When they bring new people into their first meeting, they share a long-standing problem they’ve been facing and tell them, “We want to make this better. Please show us how. That’s why you’re here.” And they mean it. This level of permission converts into power as the whole team bravely build new solutions together.

It makes co-creation possible. A brave space enables better ideation of products moving through the right teams to iterate and hit the market with a splash. In a brave space, we can align ideas to ideas, people to people, and ideas to people. It allows the best projects to be crowdsourced by the culture, based on relevance and the interest of employees. These projects can be supported by senior leaders with resources to accelerate the builds.

Here are some great examples of brave spaces: the “Clapham Circle” in England, built by Hannah More and William Wilberforce, destroyed the slave trade. The “Junto” in Revolutionary-era America, led by Benjamin Franklin and polymaths from different occupations, created the first public library and other innovations. The “Camera Braintrust” at Apple, is revolutionizing what a camera in a phone can do. The “Cultural Braintrust” at Pixar is shaping the future of human stories. The “Mandalorian Gallery” is bringing directors together to shape a shared vision far greater than any single one could imagine. How can you influence the circles you’re in to become brave spaces?

The size of the team doesn’t matter. Just pull together people seeking to share the vision. You can start small, even with just two or three people—a mini braintrust. This team can build strong co-creative muscles together and have brave conversations that spark creativity. When it takes hold, like it did at Pixar, it can grow from a small group of people to taking hold in the DNA of the organization. Braintrusts everywhere.

Co-creative teams are the future. The answers won’t be found in a committee or a new program, putting it all on HR, or hiring someone else to solve problems for you. We need to build a creative fire that spreads, a wave that grows and carries the whole organization forward, lifting people as it goes, inspiring us to do the best work of our lives.

This article Co-creation in hyperdrive: Why a “brave space” should be your new skunk works is featured on Big Think.

Excellence is not just a destination but a journey — the gradual result of always striving to be better. In the world of team dynamics, this pursuit of excellence becomes a shared mission, elevating each member’s personal and professional performance. Excellence, then, is not merely an aspiration but a continuous process, grounded in the humility to constantly learn, adapt, and grow. This journey is marked by a willingness to test new ideas, learn from every outcome, embrace failures as stepping stones, fail forward and collectively evolve through rich experiences.

If you’re a leader aiming to instill a spirit of excellence within your team, your role transcends conventional management. It involves becoming a beacon of inspiration, a living embodiment of the ideals you wish to see in your team. This means not just directing but actively participating in the journey of growth, setting a standard for others to follow, and being the role model that inspires and encourages excellence in all things.

It all starts with you. Renowned leadership author, speaker and mentor John Maxwell says, “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” This is your moment to step up, serve and lead at higher levels of excellence.

The principle of marginal gains

The Progress Principle is a brilliant book that reveals how small wins and incremental progress can lead to significant achievements and happiness. Authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer emphasize the importance of recognizing and celebrating daily accomplishments to fuel motivation and foster a sense of fulfillment.

Sir Dave Brailsford, the former performance director of British Cycling, is often credited with popularizing the principle of marginal gains. This concept revolves around making small, incremental improvements in multiple areas, which when combined lead to significant overall progress. Brailsford believed that by focusing on achieving just a 1% improvement in various aspects of a task or process, the cumulative effect of these minor enhancements would result in a substantial positive impact. Under his leadership, this approach transformed British Cycling, leading to numerous successes and gold medals. The principle of marginal gains encourages individuals and organizations to identify opportunities for growth in every detail, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and long-term success.

Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer, also embraced a philosophy of continuous improvement by encouraging its employees to get 1% better every day. This approach aimed to create a culture of constant learning and growth, where each team member focused on making small, incremental improvements in their skills, knowledge and performance. By fostering this mindset, Zappos believed that the cumulative effect of these daily improvements would lead to significant overall progress and success for both the individual employees and the company. This philosophy helped Zappos become renowned not only for its excellent customer service but also for its innovative and positive work culture.

Excellence is an intrinsic trait

By taking a quick look at a list of the top companies in the world, including Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Disney, Microsoft, Tesla and others, you’ll notice they constantly strive for excellence by focusing on innovation, customer service, quality, culture and continuous improvement in their respective industries.

One of my previous businesses was a 120-seater coffee shop, where our team members who swept the floors and cleaned the restrooms had a higher spirit of excellence than some of the other restaurant managers in town. Excellence is not a role, a title, a position or a badge of honor. When I talk about excellence as part of a high-performing team’s DNA, I’m emphasizing that the quest for excellence is woven into the very fabric of the team’s culture, values and mindset. It’s not just a goal but an intrinsic trait that guides their decisions, actions and behaviors every single day.

A high-performing team that truly embraces excellence is endlessly committed to producing exceptional results, continuously refining their skills and setting the bar high for themselves and their work. They tackle challenges head-on, see setbacks as opportunities to learn and push the limits of what’s possible. These teams cultivate an atmosphere of open communication, collaboration and co-creation, where each person is encouraged to take charge of their work, think outside the box, support each other and contribute their unique strengths and insights to achieve shared success.

Leaders of such teams are essential in nurturing this culture of excellence. They set clear expectations, exemplify the desired behaviors and provide the necessary resources, guidance and encouragement for team members to grow, innovate and excel. By celebrating victories, treating failures as priceless learning experiences and stressing the importance of continuous improvement, leaders can make sure that the pursuit of excellence remains at the heart of their team’s DNA.

As a leader, how are you instilling a spirit of excellence within your team to drive growth and success?

Five practical steps to cultivate a spirit of excellence:

1. Encourage curiosity: Foster an environment where asking questions is encouraged. Stimulate thought and inspire learning by posing thought-provoking questions and promoting open discussions.
2. Enable learning: Provide resources and opportunities for your team members to continually develop their skills and knowledge. Offer training, workshops and other learning experiences to help them achieve mastery.
3. Empower people to take action: Encourage team members to apply their newly acquired knowledge and skills in their work. Support them in taking the initiative and making decisions that align with your organization’s goals and values.
4. Embed teaching and sharing: Encourage your team members to teach and share their expertise with others. This not only helps others grow but also reinforces the individual’s understanding of the subject matter.
5. Embody a coaching culture: Lead by example and develop a culture where team members coach one another to improve and excel. This collaborative approach empowers everyone to reach their full potential and contribute to the team’s overall success.

By managing and measuring your team’s progress, you’ll see continuous improvement. No matter what level your team is currently at, there’s always another level of success and significance to achieve. Remember that mastery takes time. Transformation takes time. Keep pushing the boundaries and striving for excellence together.

How will you invest your time, talent and treasure to cultivate a spirit of excellence with your team? There’s a significant return on investment (ROI) to be had when investing in developing yourself and others. There’s also a cost of inaction (COI) when you don’t.

The journey towards excellence is a continuous one, marked not just by achievements, but by the growth and development that comes with each step forward. Embrace this journey with your team, for in the pursuit of excellence, every effort counts, every moment is an opportunity, and every small improvement paves the way to greatness.

This article 5 ways for leaders to cultivate a “spirit of excellence” in teams is featured on Big Think.

In 15th-century Italy, you had to at least pretend to be modest. It was a boorish faux pas to go around flaunting your money or to strut around in opulent glad-rags. All art had to be strictly Christian in look or tone, and it was the Catholic Church who would decide who or what got commissioned. If you wanted to make it into the inner sanctum of high society and rub shoulders with Italy’s noble families, you had to spend your money inconspicuously, or at least piously. But Cosimo de’ Medici was not a noble. He was the son of a banker, and his father’s Medici Bank was among the richest and largest in Europe. When his father died, Cosimo inherited a considerable fortune and, with not a care for tradition, he wanted to spend it.

Cosimo didn’t just spend his money on private mansions and cellars full of wine; he became one of Europe’s most prominent patrons of the arts. Cosimo commissioned artists, architects, and poets from all over Italy to paint, build, and write some of the greatest works of all time. Over many decades, the Medici family poured money into various cultural projects around Florence.

If you were a struggling artist down the road in Pisa and you heard about this Cosimo throwing money at anyone with a paintbrush, what do you think you would do? The greatest artists, philosophers, and scientists from across Europe descended on Florence. Florence became a bubbling spezzatino of creativity, innovation, and discovery. Thanks to the likes of Cosimo, Europe entered its Renaissance.

Today, this is known as the Medici Effect.

Rival theories

The Medici Effect occurs when you gather together a diverse and energetic mish-mash of creatives who spark off each other. They are often seen in the central hubs of empires, but also wherever the money comes from — be that seed funders, angel investors, or Florentine bankers. The essential element of the Medici Effect is a creative dissonance where alternative views meet and rival theories combine. The philosopher Georg Hegel argued that progress happens in the struggling arms of “dialectic.” A thesis meets an antithesis, and the two fuse or compromise to form a synthesis combining the best of both. Cosimo’s Florence was a golden agora — or assembly — of dialectic.

In his book, The Act of Creation, the sociologist Arthur Koestler compares creativity to humor. He says eureka moments of epiphany work just like a good joke. When someone tells you a joke, they lead you along a certain narrative path. You think the story is going to go one way. Then, at the punch line, they pull out the twist. They wrench the narrative into an unexpected tangent, and the result is, hopefully, funny. So, too, with creativity. Ideas have their path. Ideas have grooves in which they move and boxes in which they operate. Creativity is an explosion. It breaks out of the box.

In Florence, ideas and people were constantly bumping into one another. There could be no established narrative or “the” way to do things because there were just so many ways. So, people learned from each other. They took on other people’s ideas and adapted to others’ techniques. Florence was a place of intellectual theft and artistic homage. The result was innovation.

Applying the Medici Effect

What can we learn from 15th-century Italy? How can we hope to apply the Medici Effect to our lives, and how can businesses hope to harness a bit of creative dialectic? Here are three ways:

Find the synthesis. Your existing business model is one “thesis,” and if you are to innovate, you need to find your “antithesis.” Discovering a different approach and establishing the middle ground between two methodologies is crucial. Ask yourself: What is the best of both? Consider the example of the card game, Magic: The Gathering. In the early 1990s, card-battling games almost always involved having one deck of cards play another identical deck — a card version of chess. This was the “thesis.” It took a mathematician called Richard Garfield to spot the antithesis. Garfield noticed that cards, like baseball cards, could also make ridiculous money as trading or collector items. But for an item to be rare or interesting enough to sell, it needed to be different. So, he decided to make hundreds of Magic cards. Each player could buy, collect, trade, and build the deck they wanted to play against another person. He took two models — card battling and card trading — and found the middle synthesis. He also founded a billion-dollar brand.

Play the ball, not the person. The trick to creating a culture of creativity is to embrace a certain kind of conflict. You need an environment where people can challenge others and defend themselves without it becoming personal. Few people enjoy conflict. If you had to fight, argue, and bicker your way through the working week, you’d burn out within the month. But the conflict necessary for the Medici Effect is one where you take your ego out of it. In his book, The Medici Effect, entrepreneur Frans Johansson puts it like this: “It is important to depersonalize conflicts. People should be able to disagree with anyone in the group [in] an open environment where all ideas get a fair hearing.” The trick, according to Johansson, is to keep criticisms specific and limited. For example, highlight what it is specifically about an idea or product execution that isn’t working or that you disagree with.

Move outside in. Jeff DeGraff is a business professor at the University of Michigan and an expert in advising Fortune 500 companies about innovation. In an interview for Big Think+, DeGraff focuses on the “outsider” element of the Medici Effect. The Renaissance was not about Florentine minds. It was about Venetian, Pisan, and Genoan ones. The greatest talent in Europe flooded into Florence. Innovation was, as DeGraff calls it, “from the outside in.” DeGraff puts it like this:

“Innovation does not happen in the middle of the organization. It happens from the edges, the outside of the organization. The middle of the organization is designed to eliminate variation. It’s designed to become efficient or optimized. [But] innovation is not produced by alignment.”

Sometimes, you can’t think outside the box. In fact, a lot of the time, your job will be to think exactly inside the box — that’s what your company needs. It is better to simply find someone who is already outside that box.

This article How the “Medici Effect” can spark a renaissance in your business is featured on Big Think.