Caroline Webb on the Leadership Skills AI Can’t Replace

I'm Rufus Griskym and this is the next big idea today the Science of Leadership I have to confess something I have a mild allergy to leadership books it's not that I don't think the subject matters having found and run for companies I know how vital it is to become a nimble manager not that I've always pulled it off the problem is that so many books in the leadership genre are written by would be gurus who've never led so much as a little league team or else they're vain glorious memoirs disguised as big idea books most of the time they're thin on evidence and long on anecdote Caroline Webb doesn't do that for her new book leadership intelligence which comes out next month she went deep into the latest science psychology neuroscience behavior economics and surface with tools you can actually use in a Monday morning all hands we get into it in this conversation how to make better decisions how to build camaraderie on a team how to navigate uncertainty and why human leadership still matters in the age of AI maybe more than ever as you'll hear I've already started implementing Caroline's techniques at the next big idea club I have a hunch they'll be as useful to you as they've been to me whether you're leading a team of 10 or 10 thousand managing a family rallying a book club we're delegating busy work to a small army of AI agents today's episode is brought to you by granola life at the speed of play north west registered agent and sequencing granola is an AI powered notepad built for the way that real people actually meet try it totally free for three months at granola dot AI slash idea life at the speed of play is a new book by renowned serial entrepreneur mark pinkis it also happens to be one of roofes is all time favorite business books and if you purchase one copy at get marks book dot com slash next mark will send you to northwest registered agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years they are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the United States visit northwest registered agent dot com slash NBI free to start building today sequencing makes genetic testing kits and DNA reports for health and wellness and they're offering next big idea listeners up to 10 percent off a full genome test plus free shipping when you go to sequencing dot com and use promo code idea for 10 percent off Caroline Webb welcome to the next big idea thank you very much for having me Caroline you've written a new book about leadership at a time of great uncertainty about what the world will look like in five to ten years a lot of people are asking questions like what kind of work will we be doing who will we be leading will it be humans or agents or some combination and this is really an incredibly comprehensive Bible for business leaders that you've written and inspiring business leaders which is all of us how does your new book leadership intelligence help us address the challenges of the current moment yeah i've been coaching leaders uh in one way or another for over 25 years now believe it or not and what i've always noticed is that uh a little bit of understanding about how the human mind works makes it so much easier for them to bring the best out of the human talent the human intelligence we might say in their teams so i've always taken an approach that's been rooted in cognitive and behavioral science and i've seen that get more important because we're at a point where as a i becomes more capable we as humans need to raise our game and we need to lean into our human strengths and our human intelligence and you know by that i mean critical thinking and judgment and building relationships and so forth and we need leaders who know enough about the human mind to be able to bring that best out of the humans because i think we're still going to be in the mix alongside the agents most of us are still going to be managing some humans and you know arguably a lot of the things that will help us be great leaders of humans might have a knock on effect and might make us a little better at managing agents too this pesky business of interacting with other homo sapiens there's no sign that that's going away thank goodness it is a science of sorts as you say i would also make the case that in a world in which we really all have the possibility of delegating work to AI or to agents it's in a sense made all of us business leaders right business leaders of our own of our own lives i think in that sense there's sections of your book about delegation and management of complex systems that i think all of a sudden like the audience the relevance of that in my mind has expanded i definitely see that i also see that it just sharpens your sense of well actually what is it that i'm good at what is it that my people are good at oh yes it's actually exercising judgment and you see what an output is and it's saying you say okay well how do i test this how do i check that is this right does this fit is this makes sense is this the right priority we are going to be running these two strands of management alongside i think the huge opportunity that's on the table perhaps that leaders are not thinking quite much about at the moment is that maximizing of human intelligence and potential you know it's that ability to read the room and see what's going on and adjust your approach because of what you're sensing and to be deliberate about that and intentional about that knowing that if you shift your approach to being more attentive to what really motivates people or yes that brings the best out of them in other ways then you're going to achieve much more as a as a leader so i don't want that human side to get lost alongside all of the appropriate excitement about about AI and our teams yes and i and i think we could make a case that that that hopefully in in the better scenarios the increase in efficiency and productivity of AI liberates us to be more mindful and attentive at about how we interact with other humans how we empower them to do their best work how we persuade them to do things that that matter exactly i mean that they are human interactions are maybe the single most powerful piece of leverage we have in trying to do these endeavors that we care about exactly so it's an imperative and it's an opportunity the imperative is well we better be good at the things we're good at you know let's not just half-ass it and drift into the way we problem solve the way we interact the way we build trust you know let's actually know how to do that really well let's actually really maximize you know what what we can be good at as humans rather than just hoping that we drift into it so and then you know the mass of opportunity is as you say well actually we should have more time we should have more mental energy freed up to do those things that actually so often do get chased out because we're you know thinking about admin or dealing with process you know there should be more mental capacity and that actually is important because we've got such limited working memory our brains are so limited in capacity anything that frees up capacity to do what's the highest and best use of our intelligence is a very good thing your book is so deeply steeped in neuroscience psychology behavior economics it's really to some degree just about the the science of kind of understanding within successfully interacting with other humans I think of it kind of like you know if you're a carpenter you have to understand the properties of the different types of wood you're working with right whether you're working with the grain against the grain the weak spots the knots you know and in business you have to understand people I guess we've had this really kind of a revolution in the intersection of cognitive science and business right so it would you describe it as a science yeah I do think it's a science you know it can be a bit jagged around the edges but there's enough there if we just understand actually a few key principles and this is where you know a lot of my work in the background has has focus is how do you take all of this work and how do you create the most elegant system so that the busiest leader can wrap their head around it and it's also still correct right because you can simplify science but yes right to play to study actually correct right so that's been a lot of work underpinning the book that no one will see yeah that kind of finding that elegant synthesis which I hope puts all the sort of research the key points from the research in the hands of anyone who picks up the book of course understanding our fellow humans starts with understanding ourselves and so it was really a meaningful portion of the book that's about how we can better understand ourselves manage our own time manage our own you know focus and priorities let's start there with with time management which is something that we all struggle with how can how can we be more effective at making time for our top priorities the way I think about this is that you know we're very patent as human beings you know we most of what we do is on autopilot and if we don't actually stop to look at the way that we're using our time we often just carry on with patterns that have served us I mean sometimes not just the last job but the jobs many many iterations ago and so your calendar is not something that's going to happen. that you've been really deliberate about saying, well, if this is really my priority as a leader or a professional, does this even bear any resemblance? Is there any alignment here? And so I work a lot with leaders to help them get really clear on what I call their yes, grow, no, which is a little checklist for thinking, okay, what am I saying a positive yes to? Yeah. That's what your unique value add is as a leader, which is typically things like strategic thinking or bringing the best out of someone on your team who's perhaps not firing on all cylinders. And if you don't do that work, no one else is doing it. So that's got to be your positive yes. Then if there's anything else that, okay, you're good at because you used to be good at it, and so you quite like it, and it's part of your identity. But someone else could do it, even if not as well as you, which is the key phrase, that's what you need to let go and grow. Yes, that's often hard, it's often hard because we have often been very good at what we used to do. That's why we're a success in some way. So letting go that little piece of your identity is actually also pretty difficult to redefine yourself as saying, okay, my job now is not to be the smartest person in the room, it's to make the whole room smarter. So you have to have to be much more deliberate about that. And then the positive note is the compliment for, if you've got things you absolutely have to decline and pull yourself out of a lot of us struggle with doing that because we want to preserve our relationships. So there's a technique that I teach, which is ways to do that warmly, but crisply and clearly. So you need a process because otherwise you're just always going to have so much coming through the door, you need a really conscious process so that you're using your tiny bit of conscious attention in the right way because we'll have a very small amount of conscious attention. And so this subset of things that get a positive yes, right? So these are the things that only we can do to which we bring a unique value. I've always loved this phrase, the highest and best use of my time. What is the highest and best use of my time? Which I think often overlaps nicely with the stuff we most enjoy, but not always, right? Well, that's the challenge. You know, I was coaching a CEO who is a terrific public speaker. And he loved it. Meanwhile, he was frustrated that his team was delivering things as quickly as they could and didn't perhaps have the ambition that he wanted them to have. And this was the hard conversation we had, which was, okay, what is it that you're uniquely placed to do in your role? It's not public speaking. However much you like it, how much you're good at it. And what really is the only thing that only you can do is to develop your team, coach them, push them, challenge them in the most graceful way, give them feedback, stay involved in how they're thinking about the work. So you're building their capability. Oh, that was a hard shift. But then he was thinking about, well, okay, so who does all the speaking engagements? And it turned out he could let go and grow because although they weren't as good as him, he could delegate some of that to younger people in his organization. And we talked about how to get him comfortable with that. And it turned out you can get training on being a better presenter. So he organized that for some people in his organization who got great exposure as a result, learned a lot. Meanwhile, he was able to pull himself up to focus on the things that only he could do. And so you say with a positive no, there's an opportunity, I mean, we basically, we need to get more comfortable with saying no. And maybe part of what can help us get more comfortable with saying no is to find a way to say it that is loving and appreciative. How do we do this? We're flattered by the offer. I'm saying yes to other things. I would so love to do this. Yes. Yes. I mean, you're exactly, I mean, I think you've got the heart of it there. You start with warm. Why bother saying that? Because when we're stressed about saying no to something, we so often go, oh, I can't do it. I'm really sorry. So starting with, oh, that's a really nice request or that conference sounds fantastic or what a wonderful project. It's going to change the way that the other person is going to hear what you're saying. Then the next thing, and this is really the core of it, and it's really counterintuitive is to start with your yes, not your no. So I'm working on what I hope is going to be a really go-to leadership book for the next 10 years, and it's a huge project, and I'm loving it, but it's all encompassing. And as a result, I'm having to say no. Finally, you get to know, and I want to say no to things that would otherwise love to say yes to, and I'm afraid as a result, I'm going to have to decline your invitation. And then end with warmth, also something we sometimes forget when we're stressed about saying no, wish them well with the project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, a bit like a bit like the CEO is just talking about maybe there's someone else who could step up for him. This would be an amazing opportunity. Yeah, yeah. So that's your recipe. I got this since Caroline that you've said that a few times in the last two years. I do have that down pat, yeah. I mean, honestly, I don't, I do really try not to put anything in my writing that I don't do myself. I do try and hold myself to that. So, you know, so when we get to these are lists of things to which we've set a positive yes, you say, and we've all heard multitasking doesn't work. You say at one point in the book, notice when your mind feels full of too many things at once. And I thought to myself, I feel that way all the time. I'm sure many people, many people tuning people feel the same way. Yes. So what's the case? I mean, I think the case deserves to be made again. Okay. Like why shouldn't we multitask? How do we single task? Well, your brain has a very small amount of conscious attention and conscious processing capacity. And you know this because you know how that feels when your brain feels full. It, it, you know that it's kind of hard to remember lists as longer than three or four things. And so that's the limitation of your working memory. And you know, there are a few different theories on exactly what the problem is. But we definitely know that there is a problem with putting too much into it. Some researchers say it's because the switching costs are very high. Some people say it's no, it's just purely about capacity. Either way, both seem to be true. And that means that when you do juggle more than one thing that's requiring conscious attention, you bank between two and four times as many errors, you slow yourself down by about 30%. Some studies show you miss the kind of obvious analytical or creative solution. Yes, not great. And so you feel busy, but you're actually less effective at doing just about anything that requires conscious attention. So you know, sometimes people say, oh, but I can listen to music. Is it okay to listen to music? If it doesn't require conscious attention, that's fine. Yes. And for that reason, I have, I have like five albums that I can listen to. Right. Because they no longer trigger novelty. They're invigorating. They're relaxing. They make me feel serene. And sometimes I'm tempted. Oh, a friend just recommended this album. I was maybe to try that. But I know, no, you can't do that because I'm going to be. I'm going to be far too focused. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So I have a, I have a playlist that's hidden string quartets that I've listened to a million times. I have a playlist that's a instrumental deep house. I know these playlists inside out. And I have to be very careful about putting else of anything new in, as you say, because as soon as it demands some processing, you're splintering your attention. If you splinter your attention, nothing gets the full value and volume of your intelligence. The mantra that keeps coming back to me was from our friend, Cal Newport, who we've had on the show a few times. Most recently, but his last book, Slow Productivity, in which he said, do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality, and then this great counterintuitive notion that when we do fewer things and work at a natural pace, we actually get more done. Right. It's actually this sort of beautiful discovery that I've had in my own work that you can actually take more joy in the work, take more pride in the work. It's a beautiful combination. Absolutely. Now the challenge is joy is in the mix, for sure. I'm a big advocate of saying leadership is wonderful work. Right. It's noble. It's this opportunity to help everybody create and do more than they would otherwise. And when you're a leader, you have to really interrogate, okay, am I doing this because I enjoy it? Or am I doing it because this is what I'm uniquely placed to do for all my people? That's a little thing you've just got to keep on top of. And it might mean that you need to find more joy in those unique roles. You know, I definitely have leaders I work with who, you know, loved what they used to do. Right. And, you know, now they're in this role with it. It's all about managing people. And so some of the work is connecting to the joy of that and rediscovering a new way of feeling good about how you're using your time. This is an extraordinary time for medical innovation. We've talked with some of the leading doctors and scientists in the world on this show about breakthroughs changing how we think about health. And one of the biggest right now is in individualized medicine. If we understand our genetic proclivities, I want to tell you about granola. No, not the breakfast food. I'm talking about the AI powered note taker that's become my constant companion as I bounce from one zoom call to the next. I honestly don't know how I did it before granola. granola securely transcribes all of my meetings. There's also a place in the app where I can just jot down my rough notes. And then it turns everything into a clean structured super useful document as soon as the meeting ends. And the best part is that it works with my computer's audio. So it's painless to set up and there are none of those awkward bots on the calls. The thing I love the most about granola is that I now have an archive of every meeting I've attended for, I don't know, like two years at this point. I can go into the app and ask questions about those meetings, right? So I can go in and say, when did Rufus first suggest such and such idea to me or what was that really good insight Michael had in our jam session last week? If meetings are eating up your day, granola is a no brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just had to do granola.ai/idea. That's granola.ai/idea to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai/idea. Well, on the topic of some of the best uses of our time, you have a wonderful section on how we come up with fresh ideas and solutions. The generating of new original ideas, I think is still an arena in which humans have the edge. But it's not easy as you point out. There are a few challenges that we face in trying to generate truly novel, original ideas and solutions. The better you can get at using your brain well in this particular setting, the more you can use AI intelligently to support you. So the model that I use is I call it fuse. So that sounds for focus, unpack, shift and energize your mind. So the first is focus your mind. And that's about how do you quiet the external environment and turn off your notifications and get yourself into a place where you're not looking at 40 tabs, but you're a little bit more undistracted. But the focus is also about getting clear on what the aim of your little thinking session is, because I think all of us have had the experience of sitting down saying, "Okay, I've got to think about my strategy. I've got to come up with a solution to what's going on with that customer." And you sit down, you surround about all sorts of things. I mean, 10 minutes have gone past and you only had 25 minutes. And you've done nothing. Wait, wait, wait, what was it I was supposed to do? So getting super clear on that. And I speak for myself. I will use an app to block all sorts of things that I think are distractions. I use the freedom app for what it's worth. I'm not on commission, I promise. And then the question of what's the real issue I'm trying to solve here? And then unpack is where you dump everything that's going around your mind and you collect it on a piece of paper, virtual or not. And then you use your working memory really well by collecting them into four chunks, maybe three, maybe five, because your brain can better process that. And this, by the way, I love this detail that if we just make peace with the fact that we really have, if you think of sort of RAM on a computer or something, like the short-term memory, our working memory is really limited. And making peace with this. And just saying, hey, you know what, I'm going to embrace these tools that I have. The simple of which is paper and pencil, but there are any number of other tools. But it's actually powerful, right? Just again, as you say, dump and chunk, like just just get down all of your thoughts and then give them a little bit of a little bit of order. Don't use your working memory for trying to remember what's in your mind. And you know, the the role model in this chapter, because every chapter has a leader I know who's particularly good at this. He is someone who, you know, constantly has a place where he's dumping his thoughts so that he's not distracted. And he's chunking them throughout the day under themes. I'm going to show you my very low tech. What I'm holding up here is a whiteboard, which is divided into various topics so that whenever I think of something I should be doing to take my book out into the world, I gather it. And if it's a list of 50 things, I feel quite upset. If I gather it under five chunks, I feel like, oh, right. Okay, I can imagine I should think about this. Yeah. So focus and unpack are a lot about making really good use of your limited, you know, mental capacity. And then shift is about saying, okay, one of the things we can be really good at as humans is seeing things from multiple sides. But only if we're really deliberate about it because we'll tend to look at what's right in front of us and focus on that. So I have three techniques I like for this. One is rubber duck. Oh, yes, I love this. Which is where you adopt the perspective where you're talking to someone else. And it doesn't matter if it's a rubber duck research being done to show that even when you imagine yourself talking to an inanimate object, you sharpen your understanding you start to see different angles. The second is consider the opposite where you flip your assumptions. And, you know, really say, oh, hard colleagues, you're assuming this. But what if it were not the case? And you just entertain the possibility and you see what becomes possible. Yeah. And then two-byte rule is where you shift your mind by literally walking away and then coming back. Right. And then energize is just being really practical about the fact that sometimes you book yourself 10 minutes, 25 minutes to think about something. But you forget to really crystallize what the next step is. And then you come back to it the next day. Where was that posted note that I was writing? Where do I get to? Where are my notes? We've all been there. And you can be kind to future self by being clearer about, okay, what's the immediate micro-step as I call it? Right. So if you do those four things, you can make quite good use of really quite small amounts of time. Yeah. And you're way more likely to come up with fresh ideas than if you just try and fit it in between writing two emails. I love it. So it's fused, focused your mind, unpack your mind, shift your mind, energize your mind. And I'm glad you came up with the E for energize your mind, turn things into micro-steps or something happens. Otherwise, it would have been fuss, which is not really as good as fused, so it's important. Yeah, I wanted to create the sense of a momentum from the thinking process, but yeah, this is critical to step I often leave out. It is to sort of define your next steps and then initiate them, right? I put things in motion. I will say that actually one of the most powerful uses of AI in my own life in the last six, 12 months has been an approach to the dump and chunk action, which is that I probably now almost every day will create a five to 15 minute voice memo just dumping out completely my thoughts on a given topic. It could be a challenge that one of my children has. It could be a business problem of some kind. It could be an entirely new business idea that popped in my head. Then I can copy and paste the text of that voice memo in my iPhone, pop it into, you know, GPT, Claude, and we could organize those thoughts almost instantly. Yes, yes, yes. And you can prompt it, I think, using some of your techniques around the shift your mind, come at it from different perspectives. What have I considered? Right. Check my thinking. Test my thinking. Absolutely that. And then easily prompted with like, okay, what are the micro steps? How can I break this out into taking action? Yes. To me, this is actually one of the single most empowering uses of artificial intelligence. It's amazing how effective it is. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that example because I think it is exactly what we're talking about, the sort of the Cuban and the AI alongside. And if you're much more conscious of what it takes to do good thinking, then you can see it almost becomes obvious where you can use AI in support. Well, so on the topic of our, of our all to human brains, you have a wonderful section on how to make an important decision. And it opens with an overview of human biases. And I've always been fascinated by human biases because I've always thought like, you know, our brains are like an old car that the steering wheel might pull to the left. And if you want to go straight down the road, you have to sort of pull the steering wheel to the right. You might have to pump the brakes, you know, to get the car to stop there. Yeah. Yeah. And our brains are quirky old cars. And we have to understand their biases there in order to see the world more clearly, right? Because we have all these biases, right? Your breakdown of our cognitive biases is actually the best overview of human biases that I've encountered. I think it's very useful. Thank you. I appreciate that. What I would say is, even that list is longer than the list you really need. I would say, actually, let's imagine your brain is actually not an old car. But it's an incredibly efficient car, super efficient. Okay. Just entertain us for a second. And it's always looking to use the least gas. Your brain is always too afold looking to be efficient and use the minimum energy possible because, as we've said, you know, this side. a limited capacity. So you need one process that gives you a structured approach to thinking about decisions, and you don't need 400 of them to address every single bias. One process I found, again and again, will basically get you to a clearer outcome. And I call it acorn after the steps. And it's a synthesis of so much science, so much decision science. And it's easy enough, I see leaders use it again and again, both of themselves, but also with their teams, with their boards. So I'm going to hopefully get a chance to run through those steps. Yes, yes, acorn. I happen to know I'm cheating here. The A and acorn is aim. What's the objective of the decision? What good things will happen if I make the right decision? It's often the case that we don't stop to say, what's the point of this? We so often evaluate the thing that's in front of us without taking two sets back and say, okay, what is the point of this again? Yeah. There's a recent study that J. P. Eggers did with his students at NYU Stern, where they had students who were in teams using AI trying to come up with interesting new solutions for all sorts of things going on in New York City. And the teams that did best were the ones that spent most time framing up, what is the problem we're trying to do here? This aim, whether you've got AI in the mix or not, whether you're on your own or whether team is such a crucial step. Okay, so we've got the A and acorn. This is how we make important decisions. And if you do nothing else, you'll improve your decision. Okay. You better aim. Yeah. Okay. And then C is for criteria, which is where you list out the things will be the ideal criteria of an ideal solution. This is what's known in decision sciences decomposition. So you're listing out, okay, well, what are the characteristics of a good outcome? So it might be speed, it might be cost, it might be ease, it might be what customers are going to say. And if you're really clear about that list, again, study show that if you do only this, you'll make better decisions. It could be energizing the team, you know, benefits customers, you know, minimizes disruption. There's a, it's worth really thinking through what the criteria might be. Exactly. And the trick is to do it before you do everything else. So, you know, after, sometimes people get started and then you think, oh, Hannah, what are we trying to do here? You go back up and you say, okay, criteria. And then you think about what your options are and we say options plural because you don't want to have default bias. We're just evaluating one thing in front of you as far as possible. You want to think about multiple options and you have to really work sometimes at saying, okay, I know we want to do this. I know we think this is the right organizational design for our restructure. But what if we were to do a functional cut and what if we were to do a geographical cut? I know we don't think that's the right thing. But just bear with me. Let's, let's do this and compare the pros and cons that actually on its own again, tends to increase the quality of the decisions that you make. And the more the better, I would think, when it comes to options, right? I mean, I mean, up to up to up to a point. It's a good question. I mean, yes, so you don't want cognitive overload. So, you know, you want to think about a reasonable number of options to compare. Three is probably better than two. Ten is probably worse than three. But then the next step, and this is, you know, such a big payoff when you do it, is rating your options against the criteria. And oh, my goodness, even if you just do this as high medium low, but even better if you do a, if you force yourself to say, if I had to put this as one to ten, where would I score it? What you then get is so much crispening of your thinking. And you can add up the numbers. And you might say, well, okay, I'm just making up these numbers. I don't know whether it's a five or a seven, but I will tell you that even if you're not yet sure and you can go back and test this and improve your ratings, it just gives you so much clarity. And every time I've used this for myself in deciding on a major career move, because, you know, I do try and use this approach for everything. It's given me an answer. I was a bit surprised by, and not totally comfortable with. And then I had to do the next steps, which was to sit with it, test it a bit, kick the tyres, maybe do a bit of future back, you know, okay, in five years time, if I look back on this, will this feel good? Is there anything I'm missing? But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's remarkable. And also, and the other version of the future back, and the pre-mortem is, if I look back on this in five years and it proved to be a bad decision, what will have gone wrong? Right, exactly. Yes. You're describing it much, much more crisply than I was exactly that. And then the now forward, so that's what I call future back. And now forward is, okay, if I take this decision and then there's a consequence tree, what then happens? And you play this out effectively. You're playing your chess game, but you're kind of, you're really sort of diagramming it and saying, okay, then you can really test what emerges as the lead contender from your rating stage. And then, you know, if you do need to go back and rethink, then, you know, you can. But if you do these, these, these five things, you are so much more likely to, I mean, I'm not saying it's going to guarantee success in every single case, but your average, you're going to get luckier if you use the ACORN test. Do you and, and K never use this in picking restaurants for the evening? It's like, okay, the criteria, we really want some plays close. I'm thinking of something savory. So I actually have to credit. I have to credit K, my husband, actually, because, you know, there was a time as many as ago, we were, we were trying to pick an apartment. And, um, he did this. He made a grid and here are the three, you know, here are criteria. And then here are the apartments. We rated it. And then we realized the criterion was missing. Okay. So we did them, tried to kind of be objective. I thought, oh my goodness. So, you know, obviously, you realize, you realize, you realize, you had, you realize you had, you hadn't just found an apartment. You'd found a husband. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I tell you what's interesting about that is, yes, it helps you make a choice that you can stand by. It makes you feel in a world that's very complicated and uncertain. Okay, at least I can feel proud of the process. I can't know what the outcome is going to be, but I can feel like, you know, the apartment we chose might have had some catastrophic thing we couldn't have predicted, but we made the decision in good faith with a good process and a good structure. And the other thing that I would say is silly sort of personal example in a way, but, you know, it's really good to do it collectively because, especially if you're in a team where someone has a really strong point of view, it is a really perfect way of getting everybody on the same page because people can see there's a fair process that's been used. Yes. It's something that scientists call procedural justice. You know, the other thing I would add to this is that I think that, particularly in digital businesses, the opportunities to quickly test ideas, you know, I mean, this would apply to certain subset of decisions, is that having a bias for action and a bias for testing and testing things quickly is an opportunity that exists today that didn't exist in the same way. You know, we just had Mark Pinkis, the founder of Zingga on the show recently. He told the story about how they would, when they had new business ideas, they would actually put links in the margins of all of, you know, Zingga was reaching hundreds of millions of people through Facebook, you know, social gaming, and they would actually put links up for these new business concepts. And if somebody clicked on it, they got a 404 error, but they were able to test how much appetite there was from their own audience in this new business concept. So opposed to simply having a big meeting and saying, we are going to all decide to, you know, take six months to build this game, they could just very quickly test appetite. Wonderful. Yeah. And I do think that's, you know, the other part of great decision making is being open to testing and learning. And so, you know, what I call stage track pivot, you know, that not, you know, being very transparent with people that you made the decision you could based on the information you had. And then you're going to get more information. So you need to stay alert to what you're picking up. And if you normalize that right at the beginning and say, we're operating under uncertainty, we made best decision we could. And then what we're going to do is in two months time, we're going to check the data and then we're going to see what we're going to do and we're going to pivot if needed. It's so much easier if you flag that up, you know, right at the beginning and say, okay, good job. We made this decision and we're going to be nimble and we're going to, you know, we're going to adjust if needed. I recently decided that the next big idea should get with the times and set up a website. But I had no idea where to start. I'm not a designer. I'm not a developer. I don't know how to code. I know what I like, but I have no technical expertise to bring it to fruition. But then I found Hostinger. I've been able to build a professional website all by myself, giving the next big idea a new way to share our favorite episodes with wonderful listeners like you. With Hostinger, you just described what you want and the Hostinger AI agents build a version in minutes. And it doesn't stop there. Once your site is up and running, Hostinger's AI agents act like built-in specialists for SEO, website copy, email marketing, and more. If you're not curious already, get this. Plan start at just $3 a month. Hostinger builds your vision step-by-step, create your website today, go to hostinger.com/nbi, and use code NBI for 10% off now. The next big idea recently pivoted to video. Well, not pivoted. We still make great audio episodes every week, but we now post video versions on YouTube. And that meant I had to teach myself how to become a video editor kind of overnight. My first question was, is I movie still a thing? My second was, where do I find cool music, sound effects, B-roll? The answer is storyblocks. Storyblocks is a 100% human-made stock media library that is built for creators. Every asset in the library is made by professional filmmakers and artists. It's never AI generated, and it's all curated and pre-licensed so it's ready to use whenever you are. Rufus and I are now among the 150,000 creators who rely on storyblocks as part of our workflow. Join us. Head to storyblocks.com/nbi to access the human-made stock media library that is essential to my workflow. For a limited time, they are offering 15% off any annual plan. And that discount is only available through my link. Again, that's storyblocks.com/nbi for 15% off annual plans. When Mark Pinkett came on this podcast, I told him that the four best business books I've ever read are Good to Great by Jim Collins, The Lean Startup by Eric Rees, Build by Tony Fidel, and Mark's new book Life at the Speed of Play. What I love about Mark's book is that it isn't just a business book. It's part memoir, part business playbook, and part instruction manual for how to live a rich, innovative, ferocious life. Mark is the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind Zinga, and one of the most prolific idea generators around. One of the central ideas in the book is that ideas are easy. The hard part is figuring out which ones are actually worth pursuing. He gives you a battle-tested framework for rapidly testing ideas, separating the promising ones from the terrible ones, and killing the losers before they waste years of your life. It's an instant national bestseller. It's only about 170 pages, and it reads less like a business book than like you're sitting at Mark's kitchen table, getting 30 years of hard-won lessons. And Mark has a great offer right now for next big idea listeners. Go to getmarksbook.com/next. Buy one copy, and Mark will personally pay to send you a second copy for free. That's getmarksbook.com/next. Moving on to group dynamics, how can we get people aligned behind a goal? I really like this section. You say there are two core things people really want to feel. They want to feel competence and connection. If you're thinking about motivating people, you really want to have an instinctive understanding of the brain's reward system, because what you're doing really is the brain's reward system is the engine and motivation in the human brain. It's what makes us want things, want to do things again, and want to repeat them, want to try hard, and so forth. So you really want to know, well, what does engage the brain's reward system? And yes, money does, but it's short term, and it's limited. You can't give everybody a bonus every day, otherwise you wouldn't have a business for very long. So what is more lasting, what is more durable, and what is more meaningful? It's competence and connection. This is what the research clusters around. Do I feel good about what I'm doing? Or if I'm not feeling good just yet, am I on the path to it? Am I learning? Am I being given space to learn and to grow? And then connection is, do I feel useful? Do I feel like my work is useful to other people? And if you can understand that these are the big drivers of motivation, then you want to think differently, perhaps, about how you create and set goals, because I think we've all been in situations where you're dealing with maybe a goal that feels pointless. So you don't feel particularly connected to the point of helping other people, you're just like, why are we doing this? Or they feel muddled. So you don't feel particularly competent, because you can't really sort of see how everything fits together. And so if you set goals with competence and connection in mind, you approach it in a kind of different way. Seems to me there are a couple things happening in the competence category there. One is that people really love to feel that they're good at what they do, right? Right, right, right, right. Do you want to feel like you nailed it? We want to develop mastery. We want to feel like we're learning, we're getting better. But we also want to think, and this is sort of adjacent to it, and maybe they both fall under competence, that our efforts have an effect. You're not pulling this lever that's flapping in space. That's right. It's actually connected to something that makes it different. I think of like the button you can push to try to change the driver's place. Oh, the gun, the elevator. Yeah, absolutely. It could be the right there, but I'm thinking like, it says, oh, push this button. So to get a green light to walk across the street, and I'm thinking, is it, you just call it the hope button? Like it doesn't, does that button actually do anything? Is that it? But we said we want to feel like I always love the word feckless, meaning having no effect. We want to be feckful. We want to have an effect, right? Yes, yes, exactly. So you want to make people feel like there's a purpose to what you're doing. There's some kind of coherent path so that you feel like everything is pointing in the right, you don't have things that are pointing in different, you don't have a goal over here that conflicts with this goal over there. You want to feel like you've have a hand in shaping the goals, ideally. So that's the people side of things. So the more that you involve your people in setting goals, the more they'll care about them. And you want to show people evidence that progress is being made towards that goal, right? And that's like, in decades of building small digital media companies, I did find that, you know, you can give pep talks all day long, but really what the team needs to see is that we are incrementally making progress towards the goal. We can see it, and we can celebrate it, right? Absolutely, absolutely. And so I think the best goals, you know, eagle-eared listeners might have noticed that we said purpose, path, people, and pace, which I call the pillars of possibility. And the four P's. The four P's, right? And if you bear those in mind, whether you're thinking about what you're getting your team to do this week or whether you're trying to tackle an enormous, you know, new strategy, you will find it a lot easier to get people on board and excited and keep them on board and excited because you've got that motivational engine of competence and connection running through it all. And so the path P, how do we get there, right? You cite, I think, a really wonderful technique from Darcy Verhoun, I think CEO of Canadian Diagnostic Centers, who talks about KPIs that ladder up. Yes, yes. Which you describe as a joined up plan that links top to bottom, long term to short term. We need a plan that links each individual contributor, each person on the team to the broad goal. Each member of the team helps define their own key performance indicators, right? Like these are the things that we wanna be able to measure at the end of each quarter, whatever it is, to assess like, are we making the progress we wanna make on your individual tasks? And these are the key performance indicators for our entire business. And here's where they connect. I have to think that that is, it's satisfying everybody's contributing to it. And it helps formalize a process to show people that yes, their efforts are having an effect. We're moving the ball forward, that feels good. Exactly. And it gives you that sense of competence. It gives you that sense of, oh, we're moving. We're making progress. That is so crucial to feeling like your work is worth it. And there's purpose to what you're doing. But it can get a little bit lost, especially when you're growing fast. And I think it's always worth saying, well, hold on, how does this all join up? You may don't have to do it every week, but you might do it every quarter, just to keep people on track and in sync. One activity that you make reference to, at some point in the book, I remember where it was, was actually working together on a shared project. And for many of us who work remotely these days, we've started to do this more and more with our team at the next big idea club, where we'll just get together on a Zoom or Google Meet, share the screen, and work together through a given task. And it's amazing how both effective that can be. And it's also a bonding exercise. Yeah, I love that. And you'll get to a much more robust answer about what you should be doing. One of the things that I was always gobsmacked by, and McKinsey was, I thought I had a good idea, sip with the team, the idea got better. It was just never, never failed. And you know, that you've brought this collective intelligence together, but then also, as you say, you've actually bonded the team. The biggest way to bond a team is actually to do collective work together. It's not to go bungee jumping necessarily, at least. It is to do real work together, you know, it makes it more robust if you're you're deciding on what the change program is, you know, what the culture is, if you can make it a collective effort because we're all much more attached to things we've had at hand in shaping. It's actually known as the IKEA effect. Forgive me for saying, Caroline, that you were not always, I happen to know that you were not always quite as proactive in seeking out collaboration and input from the team. And this is the perfect segue to how to give and receive great feedback. You had an experience many years ago, right? Well, you've got a little tough love from your boss. Can you tell us about that? So this is from the incredibly wise and wonderful Suzanne Hayward. And I was working with her on a leadership development program that was for every government department across in the UK, as you can tell from my accent, that's where I'm from originally. And it was a fantastic leadership development program. It's for high potentials across all government departments. And I was loving the work. I was also trying to impress Suzanne. And I thought that the best way to impress her was to be incredibly self-sufficient and really just, you know, power ahead and get the work done without really asking for any help or input. And we were walking back one day from a meeting for the cabinet office in London, walking back to our office. And she did what I would say is just a beautiful job of giving me feedback. I mean, she first of all told me about the things that I was doing well and the way that the client was clearly delighted and how to, you know, how I was engaging them and making them feel heard and so forth. And then she said, you know, Caroline, I care about you as a person and, you know, I care about your career. So there is something I want to show with you. Okay. That's, you know, the clear intention up front. This is a development conversation. Okay. And she said, I've noticed that you've not actually asked me for my input. And this is interesting because I actually know quite a lot about government. She'd actually worked at the Treasury and, you know, she knew a good deal about government. And she said, it concerns me because I think I've got something useful to offer. And, you know, I think that, you know, together we could make this even stronger. And I was so taken aback. I was thinking, gosh, did I not ask for her input? No, I didn't ask for her input because I thought that was a good thing. And then she said, so tell me what was going on. And so then I start to share, oh, actually, I believed that it was, you know, the right thing to do, not to ask for help. And then she said, okay, so what can we do differently? And we agreed that we would work together in a way that was drawing on all the, all the inputs and all the intelligence in the team. I mean, the deeper shift for me was, oh, my goodness, it's not actually the best thing to do to just power ahead and just work on your own and not ask for help or input. So that was a deep shift for me. But it was also just this gorgeous illustration of what I call the factual feedback model. She went through everything in a way that meant that I wasn't defensive. She wasn't saying you're uncollaborative. She was homing in on a very specific observation that couldn't be argued with. And then she was taking ownership of how it made her feel, which also couldn't be argued with it's another type of fact. And then she took the time to surface the fact that, you know, what was going on in my head? Why was I doing this? And it really set me on a different path. And it's also happily the example that I use 25 and half later to illustrate factual feedback in my book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is, I mean, it is a skill to give feedback effectively. And it's also a choice to actually give the feedback at the first place, which meant many of us avoid because it's, you know, it feels uncomfortable. And so it seems like a really important skill to develop. What are the things you say is, you know, never lash out. If you lash out, that's not feedback. That's a complaint. Real feedback is fundamentally infused with a desire to help someone improve. And I think that's palpable in the tone of voice, right? In the choices that you actually have the person's best interests at heart. It seems to me that's half of it, right? Exactly. It's absolutely. And the other principle is specificity. We often think, Oh, I want to make a more general point because that's more interesting than to make a specific observation. The risk is that if we start to say, well, you never involve people, well, actually, there's not, there's not entirely true. It can be argued with. And it's also just harder to wrap my head around than you actually didn't ask for my input at any point. And that's more specific. And it lands more in my mind. And I think that's, you know, everything that we know about information processing says that people are going to take on board what you say is so much more of its specific. And it also stops you when it's developmental feedback. It stops you from unintentionally making an ad hominem attack. You're not a collaborative person. You're a terrible person. It stops you from doing that. That keeps you in much safer territory. Well, finally, let's talk about how to build healthy resilience as a team. And you talk about what happens in our brains when we process threats and how this can cause us to slip into defensive mode. What's happening here? And why is it important? So when your brain scans the environment and picks up that there's a potential possible threat that's about to come your way, it could be a physical threat in the workplace. It's usually not. It could be more likely a psychological threat, some substance that's going to undermine your sense of wellbeing, your sense of competence or connection perhaps. Your brain says, OK, well, there's this potential threat. I'm going to launch into a mode that amplifies vigilance. So activity in your brain's salience network tends to rise. And then depresses deep reasoned thinking that takes a lot of time and is a little more complex. So depresses activity in the central executive network. So you've got this rebalancing. It makes you jump here and it makes you somewhat less smart. And that's the challenge of whenever we feel at all threatened, even if it's an unconsciously and even if it's really not a big deal. And even if it's not actually going to happen, but you think you might be running into a situation that could be a threat to your psychological wellbeing, then your brain launches this shift. And we really want as leaders to keep people out of defensive mode this defensive stress response. And we want to keep ourselves out of it because of that effect on cognition and the effect on behavior. And so that's really, I think, a deep and powerful skill for any modern leader to have to understand the mechanisms around that. And then to have a playbook for helping people to get out of that sense of a defensive stress response. And to do that really helps to know that situations that tend to trigger that stress response are both demanding, uncontrollable and unpleasant. And that's an interesting combination, right? Because if you take any of those away, it's not that stressful. It's something is controllable. It's not that stressful. If something is pleasant, it's not that stressful. Right. So this is where the room is as leaders. If we can help people feel that something is, okay, not controllable necessarily, but manageable, at least to a degree. Yes. And if we can help people feel, okay, we can't say an unpleasant thing is pleasant, but we can help them feel like maybe it's at least meaningful. There's a point to going through this awful stretching, stressful period. Then you're much less likely to get that defensive stress response. You're better able to keep people thinking clearly and creatively solving problems. So that's the skill. And it's a real leadership opportunity, isn't it, right? Because I mean, it's this reframing that's so powerful. And it seems to be not only can we make things more manageable and more meaningful, but we can also make people feel more connected, right? That strikes me that these times of crisis or challenge are opportunities for connection, for bonding. And it's like it's the old saying, there's opportunity in every crisis. Where's the opportunity? And it always strikes me that one of the opportunities, I mean, there are opportunities to see your business challenges differently, to identify. Maybe there's a silver lining. There's a new opportunity somewhere. But it is certainly an opportunity to bond the team. Absolutely. And I think that's part of making it feel meaningful, actually. Anything that you can do to make it feel like you're pulling together. Okay, we know this is really awful. This is really tough. Maybe there's something dreadful that's happening in your company. Maybe you have a pandemic. Maybe there are all sorts of things that we can be facing as leaders and teams. But if you can help people feel like, okay, we got this. We're pulling together. You've got your manageable and meaningful right there. And if you keep this top of mind, you can help people navigate even the toughest of situations. with a little bit more of their intelligence fully intact. I loved your observation when you talked about how to lead through uncertainty and upheaval that there is also an opportunity to befriend the worst case scenario. You know, and this is something that I've always throughout my life kind of done. I've always thought, like, when I've really felt deeply stressed and at a loss, I've thought, "Okay, well, how bad is the worst case scenario?" Yeah. Let's sort of map this out and let's say, when you make peace with it and embrace it and say, "Okay, well, that's it. You can declaw, in effect, the worst case scenario, and the whole world looks a little brighter." Exactly. You give a little bit of controllability back because you think, "Okay, well, I understand what this could look like. I can at least make the outlines of a plan." And actually, the story that I tell in the book is exactly that. The team did bottom out the worst case scenario. The leader, Vivek Bapat, was extremely good at helping the team home in on what they knew for sure, what they were as a team and were going to continue to be, and what they could do. And this was a team that was under threat being disbanded, and he helped them navigate that in a way that led to their work having a lasting impact in the organization. And that was, I felt, just a wonderful, realistic story because they did actually get disbanded. And so it's not that this is saying, "Oh, bad things don't happen," but the way that he equipped people to move through that and find new roles, but also do amazing work while they were still, you know, together as a team by helping them route their heads around, you know, the worst case scenario. I thought it was really inspirational. I love it. Well, Caroline, your book "Leadership Intelligence" is inspirational and it will have a lasting impact, I think, in any number of organizations, certainly ours. And so thank you so much for this book and for your time today. Thank you so much, Rufus. And that's our show. "Leadership Intelligence" comes out September 8th, but you can pre-order it right now on amazon bookshop.org or wherever you buy your books. You won't be disappointed. This is a real Bible for business leaders. If you want to hear Caroline's focus playlists, check out the Spotify links in our show notes. If you enjoyed this one, we'd love it if you be so kind. It's to leave us a rating and a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You may be tired of hearing us say this, but it really does warm our hearts. We read everyone, so thank you in advance. Today's episode was produced by Caleb Bissinger. Our associate producer is Ira Dashbock. Our audio engineer is Mike Tota, and our video editor is Maxi Frini. I'm Rufus Griskem. See you on Thursday.