“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”. So said Winston Churchill, a man who had his fair share of professional disasters to accompany his well known successes.
A less painful and more practical strategy for many of us might be to learn from other people’s mistakes. There can be no doubt that you will encounter unexpected and unwanted outcomes as a result of looking at the world through multiple perspectives, or as a result of changing or adapting your work habits in order to remain fresh and creative. So we all need to be prepared for the inevitable lows and I believe that the key is to quickly identify your mistake and take action.
It is for this reason we ask every guest about their most significant lows, and what they have learned from them.
Given their diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, here are some examples from the trenches about how a few of our highly accomplished guests from the worlds of business, academia, sports, science, and the arts have emerged from there lows and how they take that learning forward to create success.
Guests Featured in This Episode:
We believe passionately in the power of multiple perspectives to build and sustain innovation ecosystems.
And yet we are all creatures of habits, following schedules and routines that enable us to continue to perform at high levels, but which might leave us with little room for exploring the new. So unless we proactively seek out fresh perspectives, we run the risk of remaining in our own personal bubbles, surrounded by people who think only like us, so increasing the risk of biases like groupthink, not-invented-here and confirmation bias.
We always ask our guests what they do to remain fresh, to seek out diverse perspectives, and the answers are often surprisingly simple and practical. Here we provide a selection of tactics, all of which are easy to do, but are equally easy not to do. By regularly exercising your innovation muscles, the benefits to you and your organisation will build up and compound over time, as these world class performers have discovered.
Guests featured in this episode:
We have been extremely fortunate to have been able to attract some remarkable guests on OutsideVoices Podcast from the worlds of business, academia, sports, science and the arts, and all of these guests are world-class in their chosen field.
We ask our guests the same three questions, which get to the heart of what it takes as a leader to create an innovation ecosystem in your organization, irrespective of what business you are in, and where you are located. The guests are given these questions in advance so that they can reflect on them and the answers are invariably very insightful. The first of these three questions, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About Recently?" is the topic for this wrap up episode. The other two questions are featured in subsequent episodes.
The inspiration for the first question came from Charlie Munger, who in many respects constitutes one of the main wellsprings of inspiration for OutsideVoices.
Several years ago Charlie Munger made the following statement: “a year in which you do not change your mind on some big idea that is important to you is a wasted year”. This question gets to the heart of the unconscious biases that we as individuals all suffer from. Many of us go through life seeking confirmatory evidence to reinforce our decisions. Sometimes however, we are able to overcome this confirmation bias and change our minds on something big. From a business point of view it is key that you are able to overcome the organisational biases like "not invented here" syndrome, groupthink, the halo effect, stereotyping: this is how we can start to look at the market differently, to build our innovation muscles, to innovate around multiple value drivers, o change our perspective and the perspectives of those around us. So this is why we ask our guests this question, and the answers are fascinating.
Guests featured in this episode:
In this episode, we are joined by Amy C. Edmondson to discuss her latest book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Amy is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School and is the world expert on psychological safety, a topic recently made famous by the findings of Google’s Project Aristotle, the quest to build the perfect team.
What Was Covered
In this episode, we are joined by author and professor, Ed Hess. Ed has published several notable books on learning and innovation including Learn or Die and his most recent work, Humility is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age. Ed is currently a professor, Batten Executive-in-Residence and Batten Faculty Fellow at the Darden Graduate Business School at the University of Virginia.
What is Covered
My guest today is Wade Davis, an author and anthropologist, who was until recently Explorer in Residence for the National Geographic Society and is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Some of his books include "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World,” "One River," about which Sting wrote in his review “Read this book”, and most recently "Magdalena" which was described by the President of Colombia as essential reading for every adult Colombian.
Wade Davis is probably the most well known anthropologist in the world today. His work has received a huge boost recently from an article he wrote in The Rolling Stone Magazine about the decline of America brought on by the COVID-19 crisis, and we talk about the ongoing work he's planning with The Rolling Stone going forward. As well as being a great writer, this interview illustrates just how compelling a storyteller Wade Davis is.
What is Covered
- What tools anthropologists can bring to the world leaders in order to re-establish geopolitical stability and deal with the climate crisis
- Redefining the notion of wealth in contemporary society by finding inspiration in the reciprocal relationship to nature of indigenous communities
- Why Colombia is one of the hotspots of cultural and natural diversity, as well as resilience in a globalised world
Key Learnings and Takeaways
- The key thing to step back from is cultural myopia, and the idea that my world is the real world and everybody else is a failed attempt to be me; we can't afford that anymore in an interconnected world.
- In a society like the Penan culture, where material accumulation has no meaning, and where everybody can essentially make everything from the raw resources of the forest, wealth is defined explicitly as a strength of social relations between people.
- Colombia is not a place of drugs and violence; it’s a land with the greatest biodiversity, geographical diversity and cultural diversity in the Americas.
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Connect with Wade Davis at https://daviswade.com/
- Magdalena: River of Dreams by Wade Davis https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/37925/magdalena-by-wade-davis/
- The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis https://www.amazon.com/Wayfinders-Ancient-Wisdom-Matters-Lecture/dp/0887847668/
- One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forests by Wade Davis https://www.amazon.com/One-River-Wade-Davis/dp/0684834960/
- Colliding with the Unexpected with Gillian Tett on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/colliding-with-the-unexpected-with-gillian-tett/
My guest in this episode is Jennifer Berger, the CEO of Cultivating Leadership, an organization that helps leaders use complexity as the key that unlocks new possibilities for a better future.
Jennifer has worked with senior leaders in companies like Google, KPMG, Lion, Microsoft and Wikimedia. She is the author of three books, the latest one being Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity which we talk about in this interview.
She speaks at leadership and coaching conferences, and offers occasional courses for coaches at Harvard University, the University of Sydney, and Oxford Brookes University.
Sahar Hashemi OBE is best known as the founder of Coffee Republic, as well as a confectionery brand Skinny Candy. She is active in the world of entrepreneurialism and charity, and is an accomplished author, having written "Anyone can do it" about her journey from corporate lawyer to founding a successful chain of coffee shops, and a more recent book titled "Start Up Forever” helping large companies innovate.
In this conversation, we cover all topics related to being an entrepreneur, building a business, and what it means from a personal development point of view. We discuss some of the skills and mindsets that one needs, as well as how this impacts people in larger process-driven organizations looking to foster a more entrepreneurial mindset.
What Is Covered:
Key Learnings and Takeaways:
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: