Hey podcast listeners, this guest is proof positive that you belong to a really high quality, excellent organization in the FCCMA. Our guest is Kyle Shealey. He was the keynote speaker at the FCCMA annual conference. And how often do you get to listen to a podcast where the guest is titled, "The Patron's Saint of Crazy Ideas." Kyle will teach us about how the constraints were under how we can break through those with creative ideas, puts a nice process in place, gives us some really good suggestions that these constraints, whether it's limits on taxes, limits on budget, limits on process, limits on this, limits on that, those constraints actually foster creativity. Here's to some pointers on how to bring out the best of your staff as we enter difficult times, given the fact that the legislature is hell-bent on saying to you, "I'm going to cut your revenues, Kyle's the exact antidote you need to do a better job and to keep those high quality of services you're used to delivering for your communities in place. Listen in as we have a really fun conversation as well with Kyle. Greetings, I'm Steve Van Corps and this is the FCCMA podcast. The service produced by and for the Florida City and County Management Association, Amir Host. Each episode, we interview a city or a county leader, usually, who's in a position to share interesting and useful insights into the operations of local government. We're doing something a little differently today. We are broadcasting or taping from the beautiful Rosen-Shingel in Orlando. It's the FCCMA annual conference at the end of May. If you missed it, you're going to love this episode because today we're interviewing the key note speaker, Kyle Shealy. But if you were here, you're going to pick up some other stuff that he didn't get to because it's me and I'm going to ask him a bunch of different questions about his presentation. This is a good repeat for those of you who attended and for those of you who missed it, I think you're going to really enjoy this. Kyle has been often noted as the patron saint of crazy ideas. Kyle, first off, how did you get that moniker? Did you give it to yourself or did somebody say, "Do your nuts." No, the late great Hugh Weber, who is a great friend of mine in a creative powerhouse. He called me that once and it just sort of stuck. But my life story has really just been one thing after another of an idea that I thought this will never work and then I gave it a shot and it turned out so much better than I ever imagined. One thing after another that's led to a string of the last 20 years of a bunch of crazy ideas. You know, it's funny. We often joke about sell the foamy goodness when you're selling an idea and I talk about one crazy idea in the early 90s, as this guy said. I think I could sell $5 cup of coffee. The average price of a cup of coffee in 1992 was like $1.20 and he said, "I'll sell $5 cups of coffee." You're like, "You're nuts." But today, you and I are sitting here at this table both with Starbucks cups of coffee and they were probably $8. Yeah, exactly. Well, we're in a hotel so you pay a little bit of a hotel premium, but crazy ideas. In our pre-talk, you said you have to be creative. My first thought was, you know, when you have constraints, that seems like the time you have to be more creative and you kind of just jumped out of your skin. Talk a little bit about that concept because the people listening to this are perhaps they have more responsibility but also more restraints, whether it's legal restraints, whether it's restraints from their commission, whether it's restraints on the ability of staff, restraints of budget. You're highly constrained, folks, but you're coming and saying, "Be creative. Hit me." Yeah, so I think that there's often, oftentimes, when we get constraints, people then think, "Okay, we need to pull back on innovation. We need to pull back on creativity." And when things get a little bit better, when we've got more budget, when we've got more team, when we've got more time, then we can start trying creative things again. But I think that's a mistake. I think that creativity thrives within constraints. There's a saying, thinking outside the box, but the box is a vital part of the creative process. You don't have constraints. You don't need to be creative. If I said you can have all of the budget and all of the team and all the time in the world, then you just write a big check and you get whatever you want. But when you have to get creative, it's when you don't have the time that you need or that you think that you need. You don't have the budget. You don't have the team. You say, "We still have to get this done. We're going to have to get creative to figure this out." And I think that that is where true creativity comes into play. We should have called you instead of the patron saint of crazy ideas, the Maghiver of ideas, right? Isn't that the whole concept of Maghiver with a pen and a paperclip and some duct tape, he was able to build a parachute and escape from the mountain? You know what I mean? And we wouldn't be impressed if Maghiver had a full hardware store and all of the technology that he needed and anything on demand. He could still defuse a bomb. We would go, "Yeah, well, that's easy to do. It's hard to do and it's impressive when you do it with a paperclip and a box fan." So you're more of the Maghiver, not Ethan Hunt, who has every thing that is disposable to do impossible things, right? Exactly. So tell me a little bit about your presentation. What are you trying to share with these city managers and county administrators that can make them better at their jobs? So what I'll be sharing today is a few things. One is just building an environment where creativity has a fighting chance. We oftentimes we think of creativity as this lightning bolt of inspiration, which makes it feel like it's outside of our control. And I think the question that we should be asking is, how do you build an environment where lightning strikes more often? What are the resources and needs that ideas have? And how do we put those into an environment where we'll get the best ideas out of our people? And then second, I'll talk about how do you do that in an environment of constraints? How do constraints actually make the creative process better? And how do you navigate those things? Give me an example of which one? Of highly constrained and you saying, "Teach them how to build an environment of creativity. How do you build an environment of creativity?" So the things that an idea needs are not expensive, they're not complicated, you don't have to bring in all these different systems. They're pretty simple things that I compare it to like a plant. A plant needs air and water and soil and light. And if you put those things into an environment, a plant will do it the rest of the job. One of the things that an idea needs is a chance. An idea needs an opportunity. You need to believe that you have the power of creativity and you have to also believe that about other people around you. Warren Buffett said what the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact. Your brain is not a truth-seeking machine, it's a belief justification machine. And so when you believe, well, I'm not a creative person, do your brain just go to work defending that? I want you to say both of those things again because I strongly agree with them and I think they're really important. We don't gather data and then make a conclusion based on the data. We do it together. We start with a conclusion. Exactly. And Lewis Carroll had it right, right? And Alessand Wonderland is like, "Vertic first, then we'll take the evidence." Yeah. That's crazy, but now we've learned through Dr. Heiden others. No, no, that's the way Dan Economan and other people do. That's the way the human brain actually works. Yeah. So how do you apply that when you're running a local government? Well, I think that one of the things that you have to do is to just acknowledge that every human being is creative. It's so easy. Well, oftentimes what we say is, "Well, I'm not a creative person. Oh, I just do this. I just run this department. I just do whatever that job title is. And I've seen this in every industry. Oh, I'm just an accountant. Well, I'm just a lawyer. I'm just do this. I'm not creative." And the reality is, all human beings are creative. We're creating things all the time. But the way that we justify it. That's funny, but by the way, accounts, engineers, etc. Architects have to be by virtue of their jobs because of all those constraints. There tend to be some of the most creative people you can work with. But what they often think is that, well, that doesn't count. We go, "Oh, well, that doesn't count." Creating a spreadsheet doesn't count. Making a building plan doesn't count. We think art counts, music, dance, theater, those are all creative things. But oh, all of this other stuff doesn't count. And that's not true. But what that does is it gives your brain an excuse to go, "Okay, well, I'm not creative." So when you do start thinking of creative ideas, your brain just goes, "Throw these in the trash. We don't use these. This isn't what we're for." And that's a really sad thing to do to yourself. But then what often happens is we take the step of doing that to other people. Because if it's a pretty short step from, "I'm not creative to Steve's not creative. She's not creative. He's not creative." And we take this person who's a human being who's been on this planet for decades and probably experienced all sorts of stuff. And we say, "Oh, that's Jeff. He's the COO. Oh, that's Tanya. She's the marketing director." And we reduce them to this role. And then that means that we limit the things that we're able to get out of that person. We don't go to that person for ideas about the things that are keeping up us up at night or the problems that we're working on. So your point A would be, everybody should be involved in a creative process. Everybody has something to add to that soup. Yeah. One of the ways to do that is just one of the questions I ask or two questions that I ask leaders is, "Do the people that work with you and for you, do they know what the problems are that you're working on, the things that are keeping you up at night, whether that's short term, medium term, long term, that might be a problem that you're trying to solve by the end of the week, or that might be a 10-year succession plan that you're worried about. Does your team know about that? And second, do they know if I have an idea that could solve that, where do I put that idea? Who do I show it to? What's the process for vetting an idea around here? How do we get input from other people? What resources are available for testing out an idea? Because if I don't know those things, then what happens to an idea as it comes into my head and then I don't know where to put it, and then it just goes away. So are you a mindset of, you know, this people say, "Well, there's no bad idea."
ideas and I'm like no no there are bad ideas of course there are bad ideas but we need you said the magic word there needs to be a process for vetting them and people need to feel that they're in a I hate this term because it's so but a safe space to express your ideas but also it needs to be safe enough to go look at thank you keep giving this ideas that's not a good one yeah yeah no I definitely think there won't be plenty of bad ideas out there but I also think that as a creative person myself who's who's had all these successful projects I can tell you that most of my ideas are bad and I had a friend tell me when I became a public speaker he said every speaker has 50 to 100 bad speeches inside of them and the only way to get the good ones out is to get the bad ones out first you got to kind of clear the well and unfortunately with ideas it's the same thing but it's not like oh all the bad ones are on top and then you get the good ones it's just a mixture of good ones and bad ones and so you have to be a bad idea that turned out to be a bad idea that you could share with us oh man I'll put you on the spot I know I've had tons of ideas that have turned out to be bad ideas well I mean as a few years ago during the pandemic I accidentally grew a TikTok following I literally went from 17 followers to a million followers overnight and there are so many times I've shared videos on TikTok since then as someone who has this big audience and I'll think oh this one's gonna be great like they're gonna love this and then it just does nothing at all and then there's other videos that I have just just kind of made very quickly and just been like oh this won't do anything and then they've gotten a million views two million views four million views and so I think I mean I can't think of specific videos off the top of my head or I can but they have to explain how ridiculous the video is but there's things that I thought oh this is gonna go so well yeah and I think that you don't always know that and that's why you know the reason I talk about crazy ideas Peter D. Amanda as you found it the ex-price he said the day before something is a breakthrough it's a crazy idea that the idea of selling five-dollar coffee seemed insane and then we all just went with it and we are not good at understanding what's going to be possible or what's not going to be possible we look back and are able to justify now oh of course everyone paid five dollars for coffee but at the time you're right it seemed insane well and what it seems to me is when you have an idea that's you know sounds a little crazy a little different then you have to reverse engineer it and say does this fit into the law does this fit into the open records does this fit into our budget will this be allowable is it doable and then from that you can then morph it and change it until you've come up with a workable solution by the way I thought of one really bad idea my wife had during the pandemic in the early days of member Trump saying oh it's my vaccine it'll be the greatest vaccine ever and everybody was into vaccines we were lining up and and you were you were you were waiting in line you go to CVS and the line was out the door for people wanting to get vaccines so she said you know what we should do somebody should create a little piece of jewelry like a little VX that you could wear if you were vaccinated had she done that had we invested the money in that you know put it on Etsy or eBay or whatever and then when everything turned right it would have been like the Jewish start during the Nazi encampments right it's like oh no you don't want that you don't want to wear that people gonna start attacking you right it's like that would have been great idea honey no no that would have been a really bad idea right yeah you never know what you never know like it's sometimes any ideas you've had that were like oh this is not gonna work and suddenly it takes off like crazy oh I mean I think the TikTok idea like me posting on TikTok wasn't was it in saying idea like I had no I'm not I'm a 39 year old man you know the end the point at that point I was 34 35 and I thought no one's gonna watch this stuff like it's not gonna work I don't have an audience here at all and I posted a dumb video about photoshopping a picture of my dad and it went insanely viral I got 68 million views it's it's been the amount of time that has been spent watching that video is almost as long as my dad has been alive it's just bananas and that that was if I would have gone hey here's my plan for getting attention I'm going to Photoshop a picture of my dad and tell a story about it on the internet you'd go that's not a viable plan for generating an audience but it's worked and so I think that one thing after another like that that shouldn't have worked what one of the stories that I and we'll tell on stage today is this is probably 10 years ago I bought a tandem bicycle at an antique store there was going out of business and I had this idea I'm gonna chop the back seat of it off I'm gonna build a horses butt back there and then when you ride on the front of the bike you look like a centaur yeah how cool is that that idea was so silly and so ridiculous but that's gone I mean 16 million people have watched videos about that Peewee Herman tweeted about it it's been posted all over the internet it's opened up all sorts of doors you know you've arrived when Peewee Herman retweets your tweet right now okay no my god rest his soul he passed away last year I believe yeah yeah and so like that and that's also open doors you know you would expect if you're gonna get reposted by a celebrity from a centaur bike it's gonna be Peewee Herman but I've had talks with CEOs of multi-million dollar companies that saw that video and said hey we'd love to work with you and so you never know what an idea is going to do in terms of doors it's gonna open window of possibility that's gonna open for you I could tell story after story of things that shouldn't have worked and did so we have a situation in local government in Florida in particular right now where the Florida legislature is you know it's been I would call it tactical warfare for the last 25 years 30 years starting with a bill signed by Jeb Bush's first act was to mandate that local governments pay extra benefits to local law enforcement whether you like it or dislike the bill but it was the state telling local government how to run its business and so we've had this tactical warfare where there was vacation rental rules uber you know ride share rules etc etc but we're shifting towards what I would consider be more nuclear warfare where there are one of the ideas on the table is to abolish property taxes that seems to be settling into severely limit property taxes and so I think every person walking in this building today that's in the back of their mind that there's going to be severe constraints likely to be severe constraints on their budgets on how they operate and it doesn't seem to be letting up at this some sort of psychology in the local in state government that they just strongly dislike local government now seems to be more for for you to be part of their thinking it's guys how do you bounce your budget how do you still do the things that your citizens demand that you do so what what pointers would you give them in moving forward because this is this is going to be severely about budget constraints yeah I mean I think that constraints limit the the focus of what you're able to do they give you some real clarity on hey here are our options but there are there it does come a point where constraints just put you in an unwinnable situation and I think that if if you're all of your funding is cut then you have to go what either we can get this funding or we can't and if we can't if we can get it where do we get it where where do we make up this yeah and looking at other other other states other options and if that's not possible then you have to go well then we have to cut these services or we have to go into a deficit and that's the first thing they I hear some cities talk about is well we're gonna have or county we're gonna have to close the libraries on Saturdays and Sundays we have to limit limit limit that's non-creative thinking to me it's like well look you have little league you know your parks and wrecks says little league right now you charge thirty five dollars you're gonna have to charge a hundred and thirty five dollars you're going to have to find new sources of revenue you're gonna have to be creative about that and there are companies there are companies at this conference right now that can help cities create enterprise funds that will generate revenue through other sources yeah and that that's creative thinking right yeah well I think what you end up doing is looking at you know I have a friend who's a consultant for multi-million dollar businesses and he's he I one time I was doing some consulting work and I said you know I feel like I'm just showing them obvious stuff here and he said yeah I get paid a lot of money to say hey do you see how this column is bigger than this column because it needs to this one needs to be the same number as this one and I think at the end of the day you have to look at your revenue and go okay we have to either lower our expenses or bring in more revenue or both what are the options for doing both of those things and there are a lot of different options for bringing in revenue there I mean some of them are better than others but there are hey can are there donors in the city that we can find to underwrite some of these things are there nonprofits can we raise prices on services can we lower prices on or lower services well no you've got assets that you've never thought about before that can make you some money like every wastewater treatment plan produces methane okay now it's bad for the environment but capturing that methane and finding a company that would build a capture system and then sell it to you split the revenue there's a source of revenue I remember being brought in to a municipality that the cost of disposing of trash well you know waste was really high and it was at a time when recycling was selling he says if it goes in the green can I make money if it goes in the black can it cost me money I need to put more in the green can than the black can and so we came up with it we did some polling we did some research and we said hey first of all your green can pick up is every other week make it every week secondly coordinate on the same day a logistical nightmare for the for the operational people but if you can bring out your trash on the same day then I know every Thursday night I bring out both cans not every other Wednesday I bring out the green can and invariably when you drive down the street when it was every other week the green cans were overflowing meaning they they ran out of capacity and that was money you were literally leaving at the curb not figuratively you were literally leaving the money at the curb so creative
solution was bring them both out at the same time, give them bigger green cans and smaller black cans, nudge them in the direction. And it was a net increase in recycling in the first three months of 30 percent. The cost of the black can to the city went down and the income from the green can went up. There's a great example of highly constrained, you have limitations, but you've got to be creative in approaching it. And I think part of your problem is when people here that were creative, they think of mad man and they think of people coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas. That's certainly not what creativity is about. Creativity is problem solving. And I think that in that example that you just gave, there were probably a million people who would have told you all the reasons why that couldn't work. Oh, you mentioned electricity. Electric people were going crazy. And yet they figured it out and they made it through that. And that's one of the things about working in constraints is figuring out which of these constraints are actually constraints and which of these are preferences. And oftentimes you'll have somebody tell us, we can never do that. That'll never work for all of these reasons. And then sure enough, when the stuff hits the fan, all of a sudden they figure out a way to do it. When times get tough, they go, you know what, we actually can do this. Or on the opposite side, sometimes you'll have someone say, the deadline is this day and it has to be done by Thursday. And then you talk to somebody who's worked there for 10 years and they go, listen honestly, if it's done by Monday, he'll be thrilled. He always says Thursday and he always is fine with it done on Monday. So you have to figure out what are the constraints and what are the, what happens if you go past this? What happens if you violate this thing or what happens if you don't do the thing that you're told to do and then work within those. You know, and figure out which constraints are beneficial also and which ones are just kind of preference. Well, and Collie, this is the perfect audience for you because I got to tell you, as a city manager, you have a pile on the right of things people want you to do and expect you to do that's high and on the pile on the left is the time and the money and the resources you have to do those things. It's never in balance, right? You're always trying to do more with less and it seems to be now is a time to do that. Any tips on creating or fostering a creative environment within local government because you're right. People have defined roles, they have defined departments. What do you do to encourage people to kind of swim out of their lane and think it's okay for the garbage logistics guy to say to the recycling guy or gal, it's a war. Hey, try this, we've tried that, we failed, but we tried this and it worked. What kind of things can you do to create that? Yeah, so one of the things that I said earlier is that every idea needs a chance and then also every idea needs a home, they need a place to live. So I advocate for people individually. I say, if you just start carrying around a notebook and writing down your ideas or if you start writing them down in your phone, you will find over time that you're training your brain, oh, I should write this stuff down. Within an organization, ideas need a place to live as well. People need to figure out, hey, when I have an idea, where do I put it? What do I do with it? As I mentioned, are there resources available for that? That can look any way that you want that to look. It's not important, is it a special software or is it a document or is it a wooden box or a hole in the top that says suggestion box? It doesn't really matter what it looks like. What matters is do your people know about it and are there stories that you permeate your organization that go, hey, this person gave this idea here and here's how we saw it implemented. Because once people see, hey, if I have an idea, there's a pathway for it to get brought into the real world, they will start sharing their ideas more. And you know what I like about that idea is, we use the word idea a lot, right? But I like about that is so stay with me here a second. I started doing these morning, the news got distressing to me, so I started doing more morning games as opposed to reading all the news with the New York Times and one of the things is called the spelling bee. And I learned something about the way the brain works by doing the spelling bee. If you sit there and through brute force, just try to, and for those of you who are not familiar with it, you get seven letters and one center letter has to be in every word. You kind of come up with as many words as you can. You have different layers, right? You try to get to genius every day. Or queen bee. No. No. Not every suggestion, Kyle, is a good suggestion. Getting to queen bee is a damn near impossible here, especially yesterday, okay? Okay. With a K, it was really hard, okay? I'm not tricking at all. But if you try it through brute force, what you find is you hit a wall. Yeah. And then what I find fascinating is like in between meetings, I'll be sitting there and go, I want to, I got to go back because I'm only at, you know, great, not amazing. Yeah. And then you look at it with a fresh eye later on and suddenly, oh, anthem. I didn't see the word anthem. I'm an idiot, you know? And the brain needs time to percolate because if you walk into a meeting and say, all right, we need creative ideas. We have a problem here. It ain't going to work like that. You have to set the frame. You have to set the tone. You have to set, these are the parameters. These are the clear goals we're trying to achieve. And then give it time because, again, thinking about my experience with spelling bee, where I really learned a lot about myself was I can usually get to genius if I touch it four times during the day. Yeah. I got to give a-- Exactly the same way. I play spelling bee all the time. And I, it's, what, I, the first thing in the morning, I do wordle, I do strands, I do the mini crossword, and I do connections. And then the rest of the day, I give myself basically till bedtime. You want my experience? Yeah, I do. I'm constantly doing that because I've realized the same thing. If I walk away from it, it sort of resets when my brain looks at it in a new time. It is. It's like, oh, before I was looking at these specific patterns of letters, and you're right, you come back and you go, "Hey, I'm them. How did I not see that?" It was right here. Sometimes you look at it and you're like, "It's literally spelled out like in the circle." Yeah. And I just missed it. But I think that the same thing is true of ideas. And oftentimes you've got to give people a chance to walk away and think about it. I never did a study that said that you get significantly more results out of people in terms of creative ideas if they go for a walk. And there are certain things that you do where you just go, "We don't know why this works. We don't understand the mechanics behind it. We just know that, hey, if you let people walk around, if you go outside, you will have more creative ideas." And so sometimes it's an environmental thing where you go, "Yeah, you put everyone in a window list cubicle and then you wonder why you're not getting good ideas out of them." Sometimes it's like, "Hey, we're city and county managers. We can probably get a park that we can borrow." So let's go have a meeting there. Let's give people the idea that we're trying to solve, the problem that we're trying to solve. And then let's give them some time and ask for those ideas back and see what happens. No. And it's also the, you said it, let them percolate. Here's the parameters in the first meeting. Here's what we're trying to achieve. Anybody has any blank suggestions that you can come up with right away. First let's hear them, let's talk about them to kind of get the conversation rolling. But then everybody take a knee, think about it, go for a walk, go for a swim, go for a bike ride, do whatever it is you do to get the endorphins moving. And then come back in a day or two with suggestions for these ideas. And like you said, either a drop box or a chat room or whatever that is on your messaging apps, whatever to kind of vet those ideas. Because for those listening, you're not going to get the best creative ideas if you just go, okay, anybody got any ideas? We got a real problem here, you know? Well, and I've also heard Shane Parrish and others have said that you should have, ideally, if you can afford it, two meetings. There should be a first meeting where you're defining what the problem is. And a second meeting where you're trying to solve it. Because what often happens, especially with intelligent people, is somebody really quickly jumps in and goes, oh, here's the problem. And then everyone starts trying to solve that problem. And you never actually go, is this actually the problem? Is the problem that the cans are overflowing or is the problem that we're losing revenue on every black can and making money on the green cans? And so sometimes you have to go, let's have a meeting where we all try to figure out what the problem is. And then once we all agree on that, then we'll walk away and then we'll come back next week and we'll all try to bring solutions to it. You know, I own a polling business and the cost of polling has gone up dramatically because it's all cell phones now. People are more resistant to answering polls. We have to make a lot more calls. Labor costs have gone through the roof. And we were looking at every possible way. And I was thinking very one-dimensionally, how do I lower the cost? How do I lower the cost? I lower the cost. Of course, without compromise and quality because it's what people expect. And then after really wrestling with us for an extended period of time, it was like, oh, we could raise the price. And exactly zero of our clients pushed back on the raising of the price. And when some of them did ask, wow, this is a lot more expensive than it was last year. And I go, yeah, between labor costs, people not answering the phone, us doing, do a stratified sample, etc, etc. They go, okay. And almost universally, it was like one of those, like, do you say the spelling bee. The word was right there all along. But you know what, though, I'm glad we did it because I'm glad we went through that process of trying to first not be creative, just go, how can we lower costs? Where can we buy the data sets from? Is there a way we can use a service that auto dials calls, which turns out to be against the law? And then we can, okay, we've done all that. Now we're out of those ideas on that end of the spectrum and it hits you and the head you go, we could just raise your costs. Yeah. But I think that doing that work is probably going to turn out to be beneficial down the road because you end up, one of the things that I say is that every idea is just a combination of existing ideas. Uber, it was not a new thing. It was just Taxi's plus an app. And then Netflix was originally blockbuster plus the post office and then it became kind of like blockbuster plus the internet plus a movie studio. Like that's every other thing.
idea is just a remix of other ideas. And so the more inputs that you put into your system, the more your brain is like a particle accelerator for concepts. It's just smashing stuff together all the time and going, what if we tried this? What would it be like if you smashed these two things together? Or what would it be like if you took this thing and took it out half of it out and put another thing in there? And so when you go through the process of going, OK, we're trying everything. We research, is it, turns out it's illegal to have robodilers? And OK, we can't try that. What if we did this? What if we did this? What if we did this? Oftentimes, then when you settle on the solution of raising prices, you think, well, I wasted all that effort. No, all of those things are now in the hot-- Thomas Edison. Yeah. And they're jumbling around in there. And then later on, it's all worth something. You're all adding stuff into the feeder, and it's good for long-term ideas. Well, when I referenced Thomas Edison, I was thinking about when he had tried different types of metals to create the incudence and lipo, which it turns out apparently he didn't invent it. He just stole the idea of something else. But good for him, you stole it, right? But when somebody said, you must be severely disappointed. He goes, why? Because I've been doing this for weeks and weeks. What we've learned is I know 97 metals that I cannot use, which means I'm getting closer to my real solution. We only have five more minutes yet. But I want to ask you, are there any not-to-dos, any things that you would say to people, look, that will stifle creativity, that will impede progress, that'll shut people down. What are the not-to-dos? Yeah. So one of the things that I phrase that as a to-do, which is what things ideas need is, I say, ideas need a bodyguard. And ideas, especially in the beginning, are very, very fragile. And ideas at the end, a fully developed idea whose time has come, can flip the whole world on its head. Democracy changed the entire world. AI is changing the entire world, right? These things, when one idea like that can totally change everything, but at the beginning, every idea sounds ridiculous. Every idea, when there's no proof for it, when everyone had kings, you go, what if we all decided who the king is? They would be like, that's never going to happen. And yet, it's changed the world. And so I think that in the beginning, before an idea has a chance to get its legs underneath it, before it has a chance to kind of figure out what it's going to be, you've got to protect that idea, because every organization and society at large is just rife with devil's advocates, people who will tell you why the idea won't work, and here's all the flaws with it. And you need those people, but you need them at the end. You need them once the idea has some validity-- You know, I like that because when you're showing-- because in that opening session, there's always going to be this different personality types. It'll never work, a guy. But you do need that. It'll never work, a guy, to explain why not, to tell you what are those constraints that we need to get through? Because here's the challenge that city and county administrators have. They don't have a choice. If the city wants a new park-- if the public wants a new park-- and you can't get through a local government podcast anymore without using the words pickle and ball in the sense. And the public wants demands, has to have. It's crisis communications here. You've got to have new pickle ball courts. What do you do? And there's going to be the-- well, we can't touch the tennis courts because the tennis league will lose their minds. Like, well, wait a second. Can we repaint them and have at least from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and you find out cities are having 24/7 pickle ball tournaments, right? Yeah. He's like, yeah, you found a way to do it. Yeah, and I think that, again, all those things are things that people would think would never happen. Even when pickle ball first came out, people thought, this is a flash in the pan. Now what's going to keep playing this? And then it's become this phenomenon. So we don't always know what's possible. And when you listen to those people early on, who tell you all the reasons-- pessimists always sound like they're doing you a favor. They sound like they're on your side. Oh, I'm going to tell you all the reasons why it won't work. And optimists sound like they're just blowing smoke. But you don't often know who's actually right in that situation. The story that I tell on stage during this time is when I was in college, I really wanted to write children's picture books. I love children's picture books. I've always loved them. And I started working on those. And then I started researching how do you get published. And basically, what everyone told me was you don't. It's impossible. It's so hard. You'll never get an agent. You'll never get a publishing deal. And so I'd listen to all those people and stop writing for like 10 years. And when I finally came back to that dream, none of the stuff that everyone said was going to be hard was hard. I got an agent that I loved. I got a publishing deal that I love. My Amazon put my book in their Christmas catalog. They call it one of the best children's books of the year. It's been on billboards in New York City. All of this amazing stuff happened. And I listened to all the people who told me that it wouldn't work. And those people sounded like they were right. And they sounded like they were the reasonable ones. And they knew what they were talking about. When, in fact, they didn't. And that's the interesting thing. You didn't have to publish a children's book. But the city has to make sure the lights work. The city has to make sure this fire response. The city has to make sure they have adequate police. And they're properly funded. And they're properly equipped with all the stuff they need. So therefore, while you didn't have to do the children's book, you learned, listen to the pessimists. But they're going to show you what roadblocks are there that you can knock down, but you persevered anyway. They don't have the luxury of that cycle. They have to get these things done, which means your speech, your presentation, is exactly what they need to hear. As we approach, I think what's going to be some very difficult times that are going to absolutely 100% require a lot of creativity from local government leaders. Absolutely. Well, Kyle, Shilly, I really appreciate you coming in. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for being a part of the FCC manual conference. Folks, this is Steve Van Corps. And this has been the FCCMA podcast. A service produced by and for the Florida City and County Managers Association. Management Association. Now, beta housekeeping, if you have a guest you would like to recommend, send me an email at
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