How to overcome the resistance that awaits new ideas

Jeff interviews David Schonthal, Clinical Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and co-author of The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.

Related topics

This episode is about the friction we face as innovators. Jeff is joined by David Schonthal, Clinical Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and co-author of The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. Jeff and David discuss the headwinds that stand in the way of innovation; the four frictions that, unless overcome, will prevent new ideas from succeeding. We’re hard-wired as humans to focus on new product features and functions. While important, Jeff and David had a rich conversation about the inevitable friction and resistance that innovators inevitably face when designing and bringing new ideas to market. We all face friction; David offers a creative roadmap to get past it.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

How to overcome the resistance that awaits new ideas

1 hour 11 mins 14 secs approx | 16 November 2021

Introduction

Jeff Saviano

Hey, Better Innovation, Jeff here. Continuing with our recent effort to bring to you our great better innovation listening audience, the best-selling author is in our innovation world, today we're thrilled to bring to you David Schonthal. David is an entrepreneur our investor and business school professor with experience building and growing companies across a wide range of domains and markets around the world.

David's a clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. At Kellogg, David teaches courses across many innovation disciplines, including new venture creation, design thinking and corporate innovation and creativity. David also serves as the faculty director of Kellogg's Zeller Fellows Program. That's a selective venture accelerator program that's designed to help student entrepreneurs as they launch or acquire new businesses.

David has a few other innovation roles outside Kellogg, including at the leading design firm David Schonthal and also at 7wire Ventures, a healthcare technology focused venture capital firm. David joins us in the studio today because he's just written a book. He has a co-author, Loren Nordgren. Together, David and Loran wrote a book called The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas, and that's available this first week of October.

David was so kind to send me an advance copy of the book and I loved it. As humans, we are all wired to focus on new features and functions of products and solutions, the fuel that moves those products forward. Well, of course, that's important. But David and I had this rich conversation about the inevitable friction and resistance that we as innovators will face when designing and bringing new ideas to market.

Let's face it, we all will see friction. David offers a creative roadmap to get past it. Okay. Can I give you a prediction? I think the human element is destined to be a bestseller. It will clearly fill an important gap in the innovation genre. All right, here we go. A conversation with David Schonthal, though. David, welcome to the show.

David Schonthal

Thanks. Nice to be here.

Jeff

I got to say, David, we love having authors on better innovation, I feel like this is a little something that we can do in the innovation community. This is our part to get the best new, innovative ideas to the world and one aspect of better innovation that we love is that we really want this show to be a complete portfolio for the entrepreneurs and innovators in our audience.

And we're going to talk about a book that you've got coming out very, very shortly, and we'll be great to talk about that in the context of ‘this helps us fill a gap’ that we had within our better innovation portfolio of guests and topics that we've addressed. So first, I want to thank you for that, that we're really looking forward to having this conversation today.

David

Me too. Thanks for having me.

Jeff

I'll give you an example of that. We had one of the EY leaders, Hank Ski, come on our show about a month ago and talked about trust in innovation and how to adopt new ideas. And we realized that that was a topic that hadn't really gone and done a deep dive into elements of trust. I think your work, David, highlights another gap that we haven't really explored on the show about friction. And for this reason, I think it presents a novel approach for our listening audience, for innovation. And so, we've really been looking forward to talking to you about that today. You have such an interesting background from entrepreneur to designer and venture capitalists and now professor and author.

Can you take us along your journey and help give our audience some insights. How did you end up where you are today?

David

The short answer is entirely by accident. I started my career actually at Arthur Andersen and then Deloitte and Pwc, so spent quite a bit of time, in what was then the Big Five. And through a personal relationship with my very first boss, Boston, Arthur Andersen actually wound up going to work in an early stage startup in the healthcare space in San Diego, California.

And from that very first moment of working at a small company and wearing multiple hats and having visibility into all aspects of the organization, determined right there and then that small company startups was a place that I wanted to be, not only because it gave me a lot of exposure to every different dimension in the business, but also there was a very short amount of time between when we created something and seeing the impact of that thing out in the world.

And that was pretty stimulating, particularly in health care, where the stuff that you're building is unambiguously helpful to people when you do it right. And then, after the operating side, if you're spending time at a couple of startups, went to the funding side to work in venture capital and help some of these businesses grow which was a different lens on the same problem.

What does risk capital do to accelerate the growth of these things and bring them to market faster? And then the design side came from when my wife and I moved back from San Diego to Chicago. We're both from the Midwest, started spending some time in a few different areas. One, building a health care incubator here in Chicago to help launch health care businesses.

The second was, I started working at IDEO and at the time, IDEO, which is a global design and innovation consultancy, was interested in learning how it could do more work with early-stage businesses. Traditionally, IDEO spent most of its time working with large organizations and governments but didn't do as much with early stage venture businesses or startups, and so worked with IDEO to help develop programs that could marry IDEO designers with early-stage companies so that those that partnership produced interesting results.

And to this day, some really great ventures came out of it, like Pillpack and others that have become quite known. So, learned design the process of design by getting involved in this early stage emerging business portfolio for IDEO. And then the faculty position at Kellogg kind of came out of thin air. One of my colleagues in Chicago who worked as a professor in undergrad at Northwestern was taking a semester off from teaching his undergraduate entrepreneurship class and asked me if I'd be willing to fill in for one quarter as an undergraduate entrepreneurship adjunct, which I said sure, I'll give it a go.

And quickly realized that being a university professor or a business school professor was the best job I've ever had. It was so much fun and I really enjoyed it. And the rest is history. So now there's this portfolio of activities between still spending a little bit of time at IDEO, working at a couple of venture funds as an operating partner and then is a faculty member at the Kellogg School.

And that's a really nice balance of having one foot in the applied and running foot in the academic world.

Jeff

Yeah, I love how you describe that, and we've had so many great entrepreneurs on this show, Steve Blank, who I know that that you know and he wrote one of the blurbs to your book, which we're going to talk a lot about.

And he's terrific. I love how he describes it as a serial entrepreneur coming in and out of different entrepreneurial ventures and describing the rush the rush of actually showing something to the world and getting that feedback and especially, as you mentioned, in the health care space. And do you feel like that's an important aspect of your work is that you've got? One foot in academia and new ideas and staying at the cutting edge from the best of academia, but also rolling up your sleeves and building products.

David

Yes. Is the short answer. I think they're both mutually reinforcing. I think the work that I do in venture or in design impacts how I teach at Kellogg, because every six months, every year, the world is changing, the market's changing, the tools to build, businesses are changing. So, in order to stay fresh, and relevant in the classroom, I need to be connected to what's happening in the market.

But what I've come to appreciate over time is the importance of actually research in theory, I used to think, well, there's no such thing as theoretical entrepreneurship, and you need to just be a practitioner and that's all that it takes. But by spending time with people like Steve, but also spending time with people like Clay Christensen over the years, what I've learned is the importance of theory in building businesses, because experience might tell you what works, but theory explains why.

And if you're going to be advising people on how to be better innovators or better venture builders, that it works is only half the equation. Why it works is essential to making it scale and doing it repeatedly.

Jeff

And is it fair to say that you look across most MBAs stacks certainly ten, 15 years ago there was very little very few schools had an entrepreneurial stack.

You know, those MBA programs have certainly evolved, and I'm sure Northwestern's and many other universities are obviously evolving, too. But it's great to see because, again, as you know, Steve talked so much about when he came on the show that you don't manage big businesses and big organizations, the same as an immature startup. They're very, very different, aren't they?

In fact, Steve was one of the first people to identify that historically, the way that business schools taught entrepreneurship was just that startups are small versions of big companies. And so, it was a business plan writing class we would teach you because big companies relied on business plans to bring new ideas to market. And the business plans are great when you're absolutely clear on what the destination of the thing is.

But in the early days of a startup, the destination is unclear and it's going to be iterated upon. And so, Steve redefines startups in a way that I really like, which is that a startup is just a temporary organization in search of a repeatable and scalable business model. And once it's done that, it's no longer a startup, and now it can start to practice more of the methodologies of larger organizations.

But that reoriented so many academics view of how entrepreneurship to ought to be taught and no rhyme intended. And Steve was really instrumental in making that case, his customer journey process and that journey of discovery for our customers has been so helpful to so many in getting ready for today. And I think as we record this interview the earliest days of October, you've got a big week next week, your books coming out, you shared with us before we came on the air that perhaps you're a little tired in the lead up, that it's been a bit exhausting.

Let me just repeat for our audience benefit. The book is called The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. And our guest, David Gentile is the author along with his co-author, Loren Nordgren.

Tell us about what the journey has been like of writing this book. I'm sure some of it probably finished during a pandemic.

David

It was actually the entirety of it was done during the pandemic and the research that informed it had been done for a couple of years, years before. But the writing of the book was done during the dark days of COVID.

So, this this began as a partnership between Loran and myself. So, Loran is an extremely talented psychologist who studies behavior and emotions and is an expert on influence and persuasion and myself coming from a background of innovation and entrepreneurship, we were both puzzled by the same problem, which is once you create a really cool idea, a really cool strategy or a movement that that should be instrumental in changing the world for the better, why is it that even though people say they wanted and even though market research says that there's a need for it and people in focus groups talk all about how they're going to adopt it once it becomes real? Why is it that so few of these things actually get traction in the market? And what we learned in studying this problem is that we typically only teach, at least in innovation programs and sometimes even in innovation consultancies, we really only focus on one half of the innovation equation, which is how to make this, how to make the idea great and how to find the right market for that idea, that relationship of product market fit.

So, the right product or service for the right audience or the right strategy for the right audience or whatever it might be. And we spend a ton of our time talking and proselytizing about product market fit. And, we think that once we've done that, we've got we've got things sorted, but we fail to recognize that even when you have product market fit identified ideally, which is hard enough as it is, that doesn't necessarily mean that the human beings that should be adopting this thing will.

And so what Loran and I decided to do is try to uncover or expand what are the reasons that people say no to good ideas and what we arrived at through research as well as a bunch of application is that there are four frictions, four sources of headwind that stand in the way of any new idea. And no matter how good that idea is and no matter how deep that need is from the market, unless those headwinds are mitigated or overcome in some way, the best ideas will fail to get traction because entrepreneurs and innovators and consultants and business leaders don't know that these things are the causes that are inhibiting their growth.

Jeff

Yes. And we're going to we're going to unpack those four headwinds. And the book is very much about the resistance. Resistance that awaits new ideas and as we had mentioned early on, this word, friction, the friction that will typically be experienced and very, very early in the book, in the first chapter, use the metaphor of a gun and a bullet and thrust versus drag.

What are the forces that propel a bullet? And this thrust versus drag dichotomy. Talk about this thrust versus drag dichotomy and how that applies to new ideas.

Yeah. In order to try to contextualize the theory of what we call it, friction theory, in order to contextualize it, we needed to start with, as you point out, a metaphor that could orient the reader to what it is that we're talking about in the first question that we ask readers is what is it that makes a projectile or a bullet fly?

David

You know, a bullet can travel up to two miles and hit its target very precisely in a steady hand. And it's a pretty remarkable innovation when you think about it. What is it that makes a bullet fly and what is it that makes it hit its target? And most people's reaction is its gunpowder, it's the explosion. It's the explosion inside of the barrel that propels the projectile towards the target.

And that is the reason that a bullet is successful in achieving its goal. And what we talk about next is that, you know, gunpowder is half of the equation, but really, the bullet encounters a bunch of force on its way to the target, one of which, as you point out, is drag, which is all of the headwinds literal headwinds that face that bullet as it's making its way to that target and the reason that a bullet is not only powerful, precise, the reason it is able to hit its destination target is its aerodynamics. Is the fact that it reduces the drag that it faces as it travels through the air. And we use this metaphor to talk about how ideas are much the same. Most people focus on the thrust or the fuel behind an idea how to add a feature, how to benefit, how to increase the sizzle of the thing.

But most often people don't think about the drag that faces that idea as it makes its way to the market. And so, one of the things that we aspire to do in this book is teach people how to make their ideas more aerodynamic. So even though they face headwinds, these ideas still make it to market on target in the way that they're meant to have the biggest impact.

Jeff

Why do you think that is, David? Why are we so hard wired to focus on the fuel? And I suppose one example of that would be the feature sets and the functionality of a product. Why do you think that's it seems to be ingrained in us as humans to focus there. Why is that?

David

Yeah, I think the fuel based mindset and one of the things that Loran and I talk about in this book is that the reason we default to the fuel based mindset is that we tend to think about things in our own frame of reference, in the things that we have some control over.

So, for example, it's really difficult for human beings, any human being, to understand the external forces of the world around them. They tend to think about themselves as the protagonist in every story. So, if you're driving down the freeway, for example, and you see somebody driving really erratically around you, you from your own frame of reference because you are not in any position of duress or you're not in the same boat as that individual.

Your default judgment is, well, that person's a crazy driver or that person is inebriated, but we don't pause to think, well, maybe there are external forces in that person's world that are causing them to drive like this. Like they're an EMT, they're an EMT on their way to an emergency, or they've got a child that desperately needs to use the bathroom in the back seat, or somebody is going to be sick.

And it's because we don't necessarily perceive these forces that we don't have control over. And entrepreneurs, because of their passion that drives them to be entrepreneurs or innovators, because their passion that drives them to be an innovator tend to assume that if somebody is not adopting their thing, it's because there's something wrong with the thing. Surely, we haven't described its benefit well enough or we haven't added all of the features that we ought to because that's in our sphere of influence, that's in our area of control. Why people might resist that new idea for very personal and internal reasons is just usually out of the mindset and outside of the considerations that of an entrepreneur in it or an innovator. And that's what we're trying to shine a light in this book is you getting your job done properly is great, but what happens in their heads and on their side when they're considering this new idea is something entirely different.

Jeff

And some of that, I suppose David is wrapped up in empathy. Is that fair? How much of that is just the need for entrepreneurs to look through an empathetic lens and an understanding empathetically what their customers are facing?

David

Well, I think that's a big part of it. And I think this is a really nice thing about the partnership between Loran and I.

Loran approaches this from a site from a psychology perspective and a research perspective. And I approach it from an applied perspective. The applied side of me would say empathy is a really great place to start because you're attempting to see the world through the eyes of your users. Now, what I would say is there's a lot of talk about empathy right now, and people express their desire to have empathy, and actually being able to see the world through the eyes of another person is very difficult. But what I would also say is it's really understanding why people's brains work like this. That's the importance to overcoming these forces of resistance. So, having empathy is part of the equation, but understanding what causes people to stick with the status quo, what causes people to have anxiety about new solutions, only when you understand the why behind the what can you truly address those frictions?

Jeff

Got it. So helpful. And David, in the book, you outline that there are four headwinds that entrepreneurs face. Let me just run through them quickly. Let me just name the four then. Then we're going to spend some time unpacking each. How does that sound? Is that okay?

David

Great. Sure. Yeah. Okay.

Jeff

The first is inertia, powerful desire to stick with what you know. The second is around effort, whether that's real and perceived effort to make changes happen. Third, emotion, unintended negative emotions, that may result from that change. And the last is this notion of reactance, which I think is going to take an explanation. Reactance impulse to resist change. Yeah. How did I do? Those are the four.

David

Yeah, well, we refer to these as the four frictions.

And you got them right. And maybe I'll just expand on them a little bit. Inertia, as you point out, is the tendency to stick with the status quo and I guess the way I would voice over this a little bit is innovators drastically underestimate the tug of the status quo. And, we genuinely believe that if we create something that is good enough or desirable enough, that people will give up their current habits in order to adopt that new thing.

And what we hopefully illuminate in this book is most people under appreciate just how strong that gravitational pull to the status quo is. And so, we talk about that and how to overcome that. And I'm happy to dive into that in a bit more detail. Effort, as you mentioned, is this how much exertion is required to adopt this new thing?

And this isn't just physical exertion, although that is part of it, but it's also cognitive exertion, cognitive load, ambiguity. How clear is the path to adopting this thing? And if any ambiguity comes into the picture that tends to cause people reasons to resist. Emotion is the most, I think, tricky of them because it's often the hardest to spot. But sometimes the ideas we bring to market to benefit people tend to make those very people we're trying to help; very anxious and nervous. How do we understand those sources of emotional friction and overcome those? And then reactance, as you pointed out, is people's resistance to being changed by others and depending on when you're listening to this, I think if you look around the world right now, particularly in the United States, there's plenty of examples of reactance where there's plenty of data to suggest that people ought to do certain things, but that data alone is not enough to convince people.

How do you get somebody to adopt a new idea when they're very resistant to the idea of being changed?

Jeff

We're going to spend some time with each one of these. And there are some great examples. One of the reasons I love the book, the use of examples in real life examples of how companies are facing this today and in both the public sector and the private sector.

But before we do that a few times, in the book, and I think you've also mentioned it here today, David, is that it's hard to uncover these frictions sometimes. Why is that? Why is it difficult and why is it more difficult to uncover the frictions perhaps as and maybe that's what pushes entrepreneurs to focus on the fuel or the feature sets, because these frictions are at all the time that visible.

David

Yeah, I think that's a pretty spot on way of framing it. And I think the last thing you said is the answer, which is and this is why there's a huge benefit in me writing this book with a psychologist is a lot of the reasons why people are resistant are not on the surface they don't wear them on their sleeves.

In fact, you need to use the right methods to uncover them because somebody is not going to say to you, I don't want to adopt this new strategy because it makes me anxious about my role in the company going forward. They might be recalcitrant to adopt the idea, but they will very rarely be vulnerable enough to tell you the real reason why or I don't want to adopt your product because I'm afraid I'm going to look like a Luddite to my peers because it's a little bit too technologically advanced.

And I'm a little nervous about how I'm going to perform relative to others in my division or in my organization. So, one of the things that we try to help with in this book is by laying out some clear methodologies and approaches people can use to uncover these frictions that we refer to as being twice buried.

And they're twice buried because they are often not even known to the people that are experiencing them. In fact, somebody will tell you their reason for not adopting something is one thing when in fact it's something else. And so, we talk a lot in this book about how to uncover these frictions. And often once you identify what the sources of friction are, the solutions are relatively self-evident.

But oftentimes we're treating the symptoms of something that isn't even signaling the underlying condition. The underlying condition is something very different from the symptoms. So, entrepreneurs tend to react to the symptoms and they tend to spend a lot of money trying to manage the symptoms. But really the problem is something more deep. And so, we try to show people the secret to uncovering those in managing them.

Jeff

In this first friction of inertia, how much of it is grounded in the fact that that as humans, that the more familiar that we are with people and ideas, the more we like them? Is it? How much of this is about that familiarity? How important is that?

David

It's hugely important. It's hugely important. And, you know, it can be acute or it can be seemingly innocuous.

But I think, again, entrepreneurs and innovators I work with, as we talked about in the intro, I work in Venture Capital. One of the funds that I'm affiliated with is a digital health care fund. And we get a lot of digital businesses from entrepreneurs who are trying to change the way medicine is practiced in the clinic by creating better workflows or better uses of data. But invariably, it requires somebody in the health care system to change either the physician or the patient or the caregiver or both. And there's so many times where these entrepreneurs walk in to pitch us and they say, you know, here's this thing that we've created and here's all the reasons that it's going to work. And here's the market research that talks about how desirable it is and here's the growth opportunity, all the things that you would expect.

And then we'll always ask the question, so what is it going to take to get this idea adopted into practice? And the answer, in a very roundabout way, essentially boils down to, well, it's just going to take doctors and clinicians completely changing the way they practice medicine. And we're like, and so how difficult do you think it is going to be to change the behavior of somebody who's been practicing medicine in a certain way for the last 25 years?

All of a sudden, because your thing shows up, they're going to change 25 years of rode behavior to adopt it. Right? People underestimate the tug of the status quo. And it could be something as complicated as adopting a new piece of software into workflow. It could also be something as crazy as like a brand changing its logo and some of its loyal customers go up in arms simply because they've changed the label on the box.

And we share some examples of the most extreme forms of inertia to the most seemingly innocuous, but it almost doesn't matter where they fall in the parallel to the person, to the customer. Even the smallest change can cause a ton of friction.

Jeff

It's going to accentuate. I love the words that you use, David, that that oftentimes we underestimate the tug of the status quo.

We underestimate the tug of the status quo. And they're such great examples in this particular section of the book. One of the ones that I found really most compelling was one of our favorite social media platforms that, you know, can you imagine they change the layout of the page. And then what happens? What happens when there's one particular social media platform change that.

What was the response of some of the users?

David

I mean, revolt. I mean, people become very familiar with the user interfaces. People design their interactions with products around the way the products are served to them. And when you start changing interaction, when you start changing user interfaces, that requires people to relearn a little bit about how to use it, and that requires effort, right?

So there's the inertia of the way that it's been done, and they've sort of built it into their mental workflow. And so it's almost mindless for them to interact with a piece of software in a certain way. But the moment some of those interfaces change and I need to relearn where to find something, or I need to relearn how to do something that takes cognitive effort, that takes cognitive load.

And I would say that these days we live in a world where people will not tolerate a product that doesn't work like they expect it to. And if you've developed five years building a relationship with a piece of software and that software, it changes you. And I think we're seeing this right now with products like Microsoft Word and other things that are constantly tinkering around with the layout.

Users get really flustered really quickly, and rather than take the time to learn how to use it, they just sort of shut it off and switch to another Word Processor, shut it off and switch to something else. So, people's tolerance for change right now is very low. People's desire for familiarity is very high, which creates a lot of challenges for UI, UX designers and anybody who's trying to introduce something new into the world.

And so one of the remedies for this this problem that you're talking about is actually to make new ideas feel more familiar just because your idea is new and whizzy and it could do all of these interesting things that the existing product or service or strategy can't do. Your desire shouldn't be to amplify all of the changes in all of the cool things that it can do, because that could freak somebody out.

Rather, it's how do you make a new idea feel a little bit more familiar so that you can warm them up to that change.

Jeff

And that's an important part of the book, too. I just want to highlight I hope this goes without saying that, that the reason that you wrote this book was not to identify these friction points and then have people stop innovating.

David

That's not that's not the option not to be super depressing. And then wish you luck.

Jeff

Yeah, that would be yeah, that wouldn't be a very fun, compelling book to read. Stop coming up with new ideas because it'll never work.

David

Hopeless. It's hopeless. Give up.

Jeff

Instead for each of these sources of friction, you identify by some real strategies to fight it.

And for this one in particular, I thought that and there were there are five strategies that you lay out in the book we won’t of time to go through to go through each one of them. But I think that the readers will find them extremely helpful. I'll just give you one arounds repetition. And so perhaps if there's a repeated affirmation that it may fix itself in your mind.

So, it's accepted in the end as truth by the users, that repeated exposure can perhaps make a novel idea more familiar. And I just found that to be a real practical advice for entrepreneurs to fight this inertia. Yeah. Did I get that about right?

David

Yeah. I mean, that's the repetition is definitely one. Familiarity is another, relativity is another.

But that is the hope, right? The hope is that once you know these things and I'll just sort of jump to the punch line, the hope with this book is that by looking at the world through the lens of friction, you won't ever see the world in the innovation ecosystem the same way it will be impossible for you to not notice frictions that might that you might encounter with your new ideas.

And I would say that if you were thinking about the continuum of the ratios of diagnosis to remedy, 70% of all of the of overcoming frictions is just being able to spot them in the first place. And once you spot them and know which frictions you're dealing with, the remedies become pretty self-evident.

So, we talk about some really easy suggestions. But hopefully you found, Jeff, that none of them are particularly challenging to implement. None of them are particularly steep learning curves to get up, but knowing which friction is present and which remedy to use is really the key. And I think that hopefully you'll find these things pretty actionable.

Jeff

I think it's that, I think you're absolutely right.

But frankly, maybe even more basic than that, it's a framework that that, you know, when I finished the book, it made me think of I sort of ran through in my head eight or ten of the biggest solutions that we're building on our teams. And just thinking about activity, actually, one of them went and looked through work plans and what are the work streams and the feature sets and to see how much of this are we focused on and what is that percentage of the mind share?

And that's was one of the things I took away from it is that I honestly think that there are many entrepreneurs that are really locked in on the thrust and the fuel and getting the feature sets right and the timing of the release is Nirvana. Like, what else do I need as long as I get the features right?

And you really debunked that perhaps as one example.

David

I mean, this is this is something we encountered at IDEO all the time, but also startups, I think both. But we'd spend a lot of time creating the perfect solution to a problem where the new strategy, but didn't spend as much time thinking about. Alright, once the thing is built, let's assume that it's built and let's assume that it does what we're hoping it will do.

Who on the other side who is going to receive this and have to integrate it into their lives or integrate into their work and not just as an organization, even in B2B right. We think that we're building a product and we're going to sell it to Corporation X, and we think about Corporation X as this entity, it's B2B, but inside of Corporation X, inside of that B are a bunch of individual customers who all have their people.

They all have like not necessarily aligned objectives and not necessarily symbiotic relationships to the strategy. How will those individuals receive this? Will they feel threatened by it? Will they feel like it's very effortful for them to have to learn how to do it? And if we can't convince the individuals in those organizations to receive this warmly, then no matter how good it is for the business, how good it is for the corporation, it will be dead on arrival.

And a kind of interesting example that might appeal to this audience from the book. I was invited a few years ago to speak to a bunch of chief procurement officers at a big procurement event in New England. And what was billed to me, and this is not a joke, somebody asked me if I would be interested in speaking at the Davos of procurement, to which, how can you say no?

Right. Like, well, that's super interesting to picture in my head. I would like to just go see this. And I spoke about design and innovation. And over lunch time, I sat next to one of the chief procurement officers from a big global bank and at the time was thinking with my IDEO hat on about if I were to provide consulting services to this bank.

What's the best way to interface with procurement? What's the best way to interface with purchasing? And I started throwing out ideas like, well, to make your life easier to make it easier for you to do your job and minimize time to implementation. Should I just as a consultant come to you with best and final pricing should I just be very transparent about how we're pricing this, where the discounts might come from and just provide you full transparency and just make this as easy as possible for us to get started? And this person's response was, ‘Oh, please don't do that’. I'm like, why? This makes everything super easy in this person's response was, ‘yes, but then what value is my group adding to the organization? What value are we demonstrating to the CFO and the CEO and the board?’ And it makes you stop and think like, all right, this might be in the best interest of the company.

This might be in the best interest of the project to be able to get it up and running as soon as possible. But these humans, whose job it is to source and negotiate and find the most value in a consulting engagement or in a materials purchasing contract, all of a sudden, if I decrease the effort for them, I actually increase the emotional friction because now they're worried about irrelevancy.

And like, I never would have thought about that had we not had that conversation. But that is a very real thing.

Jeff

I feel like this is your next book. Is double clicking on the frictions in complex organizations and how to navigate those different components of an organization and how much more difficult it makes it. You mentioned it could be the B2B context and you don't sell to an organization.

There are people, corporate people, are people, too. Corporations are people, too, for sure.

David

And it's absolutely essential. I think a lot of my students, when I'm presenting examples that are consumer examples in class, they'll raise their hand and invariably will say, well, how does this apply to B2B? And my answer is, these are just a bunch of CVs kind of duct tape together.

And it's even more complicated because now they have to work with each other and negotiate with each other and come to resolution with each other. It actually is a much more complicated and interesting dynamic but once you're able to see the Matrix a little bit, you can design those interventions, you can design those implementation strategies to minimize the headwinds.

It's not like the headwinds are going to go away entirely, but you can absolutely minimize them if you know that they're there well and not turn well. We can come off of this.

Jeff

I want to move to the next source of friction but and not overly complicated, but and we're seeing clear trends where there's opportunities to build solutions for entire networks of organizations, not just for a single corporation or a single government, but public sector, private sector partnerships, multiple stakeholders together developing solutions.

And we're finding you think it's hard developing for a single use or whether it's an individual or an organization, try developing something for 50 organizations that need to use that same tech platform.

David

And my guess is that what you're doing in this, we talk about this when we talk about reactance, because if you develop something for a network and somebody doesn't feel like they're engaged in that design process and you drop that thing off at their doorstep, they're going to be like, nope, yeah, even though it's great solves their problem, they'll say no because they had no hand, no role of inventorship, and they'll feel like that's something that's being imposed upon them versus having them participate in the design process where instead of an idea to be received, it's now an idea that I have had a hand in inventing, and that changes that dynamic entirely. So, I'm picking up what you're laying down.

Jeff

Let's go to effort. I want to talk a bit about effort. And, you know, the way you describe it, David, in the book, why we follow this path of least resistance. And if I could ask you to talk about it in the context of the University of Chicago example, the common app example, I really found that compelling. Is that okay? That one?

David

And I should also say the University of Chicago is a fantastic institution. My brother attended the University of Chicago. So, this is not in any way a judgment on the UofC, but it's an interesting contrast in approaches. So the University of Chicago is undeniably one of the best universities in the world. It's usually top five in almost every ranking. It's a phenomenal educational institution. But a number of years ago, they had a much lower applicant pool than any of their peer schools. The other Ivy League schools, by like an order of magnitude fewer students were applying to the UofC than were applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. And a lot of the rankings in university ranking systems have at least one part of the rubric based on applicants versus acceptance rate of acceptance.

And in order to improve that ratio in the favor of the exclusivity of the university you need to boost the applicant pool to be able to show a little bit more selectivity. And so the University of Chicago, while undeniably a phenomenal academic institution, was having lower yield when it came to applications. And the reason why is that most universities are on what's called the common application, which is that you can submit one application and customize it a little bit.

But then with one primary application and a few customizations around essays, one application can serve your application process from multiple universities, which makes it really easy for the student to apply to multiple universities. By design, The University of Chicago did not use the common application in fact, they used an uncommon application that had lots of really U of C type questions built into it, like develop an algorithm to decide how many sea shells Sally sold by the seashore and, you know, other types of, you know, things that make you chuckle in your head.

But you're like, Gosh, this is going to be a nuisance. That's no fun. And is the applicant. Right? And as a result of all of this atypical, very different methodology of the application in the effort required to submit an application to the USC? They were getting really low yield until one of their most recent presidents, Bob Zimmer came in and decided that we should do away with the uncommon application and start to utilize the common application instead.

And not surprisingly, application rates went up substantially. And it's just this notion that what might be kind of cool and culturally significant and interesting to the university and feel very University of Chicago to the people they were trying to influence, just this additional cognitive effort was enough to meaningfully decrease the number of applications they receive. So yeah, sometimes in a desire for originality, we can actually be creating the antithesis of what we desire in an outcome.

Jeff

I think it hit home for me. David, I have three kids. My youngest just graduated college this year, so I think I, over the last six or seven years, been living this within our family. And, you know, back to the point we raised about empathy. At the time when the applicants, the students are submitting they are in school that probably playing a sport or they're in band, they're doing a hundred different things. They're also applying to like a dozen schools now is pretty routine. And if there is such a pull on them that I think is such a such a good example that you raised in the book that you know the point that those students the candidates are like they can barely hang on with what they have. And, if there's an application that's so time-consuming and so different, even if it's a school that they like, they're just going to blow past it.

David

Or they're going to fill out all their other applications and set this one off to the side and they'll come to that later. Yeah. And at that point, they're so fatigued, it's never going to happen.

Jeff

That's a good one. Yeah. It's not there or it doesn't happen or it's just not there. It's just not their best work.

And so what happens? It deters applicants. And I'd love to hear one of the quotes on the book. The way that you phrase it, the greater the effort the stronger the resistance. So let's just break it down into its simplest form, the law of least effort as you described it, the greater the effort, the stronger the resistance. And so for each one of these are better innovation audience. You'll love that there are some great tips for us. Okay. So how do you overcome that? And there's some really great examples of that. The one I want to just ask you to highlight is this this notion of road mapping, what does that mean? What does road mapping mean?

David

Yeah. So this is, I think, effort. We, we hear the word effort and we immediately is, is human beings think about physical effort, physical exertion, like how much energy will it take, how much even economic exertion, how much time will it take? These are all where our brain goes. But one very strong force of effort-related friction is the ambiguity of a process.

If we're making people figure things out without making it clear to them the cognitive load involved in figuring it out for yourself, can be more than people are willing to bear in this kind of goes back to what we were talking about with product design. People don't tolerate using products that don't work the way they expect. The moment they pick it up.

And if I've got to spend a little bit of time figuring out these new features in Microsoft Word, I'm just going to bail and use Google Docs. People's tolerance for learning things right now is about as low as it is ever been, and what we talk about with road mapping is if a process is in some way ambiguous, how do you lay out very clear steps for people to follow to make an unambiguous process feel less ambiguous?

And this concept is not particularly novel, like how do we make this journey fairly self-evident and user friendly? But it even shows up in stuff like user interfaces and software. If you're filling out an application online or you're filling out a process or a form online, even just having those progress bars at the top of the screen that show you where you are in the journey and what happens next in the journey. Those can be really meaningful for people, especially when somebody is engaged in a survey or engaged in a process and they have no idea where the end is. They may be near the end, but if they don't know that the end is next, they'll churn out because they don't know how much effort is required. And it's one of the crazy things that we've noticed in this research is the smallest, smallest little nuance details can make a huge impact like staying in digital interfaces for a minute.

We interviewed a few UI UX designers, user experience user interaction designers for this book because they're in the business of removing friction. And we asked them what the single greatest innovation in e-commerce has been over the last ten years. And the answer universally was Autocomplete. Autocomplete is that a little bit of JavaScript that when you're filling out, when you're when you're purchasing something a retail for the first time in a new store and it says, fill out your billing information, fill out your customer contact information, and you're like, oh, eight fields of detail that I need to fill. I mean, think about how ridiculous this is relative to 2000 when, you know, e-commerce was basically the origin of the wheel at that point. Now we're like oh, eight, eight fields of content we need to fill out that feels very effortful. But now the moment you put your first initial in that first field, all of a sudden your personal details, autocomplete for the rest of the fields, including your credit card information, you're now like, right.

Wow. All right, I'm ready to begin this transaction. Whereas each one of those fields that you fill out is a moment of effort, it's a moment of like exertion. And what we found is that, you know, even just filling out a phone number, putting in a personal email address can be a reason for somebody to churn out of an experience so small things make a huge difference in road mapping as a way of at least showing you the path to make it.

Jeff

As crazy as it sounds, it actually may be just a little shot of dopamine that you get to use. The example of the survey we had on one of our guests, David on the show, Bob, who's the CEO of a company called Encore, and they've used AI systems to redesign surveys. And one of the breakthroughs they had is if you're filling out 100 questions survey after you complete let's say question six, they'll flash how others have answered that question. And what they found is that it gives you just a little bit of dopamine to like, okay, now I'm getting something back from that, right? I want to keep going. I don't want to stop because I'm not just providing you something. I'm getting something back in return. You're making progress. I'm making progress. Or even just a price range, a green checkmark.

There's something else. And we're all wired. So that and you gave a great example in the book with road mapping about voting. Sometimes people don't vote because they don't know where the voting station is or they don't they don't they're not quite sure. Do I take the six bus or do I take the subway to it? And just as simple as making it crystal clear, removing that ambiguity.

David

Yeah. And there's so many beautiful examples of removing ambiguity and making things less effortful. Geisinger, we don't talk about this in the book, but there's a health system in the East Coast that was noticing that a bunch of their patient population that was at risk in not keeping particularly healthy that suffered from chronic diseases, they were utilizing the emergency department of this hospital system regularly, which is of course expensive for the hospital. It's expensive for the patient. It's just not using an emergency department as a primary care alternative is just not good for patients or clinics. And one of the things they noticed is part of the reason these individuals were suffering from so many chronic diseases was poor nutrition. And one of the reasons they were suffering from poor nutrition was because it took a lot of effort for them to go to the grocery store.

These might be elderly people. People that had mobility issues, took a lot of effort for them to go to the grocery store and buy fresh foods and it was so much easier for them to get fast food or to eat unhealthily. And when you know that this is the problem and you know that what's standing in the way is effort, well, what do you do? What this health system did smartly was start a food delivery business for these individuals where they, as part of the membership in this health system, delivered fresh groceries to these individuals on a weekly or biweekly basis, which reduced utilization of the emergency department for adverse events by a material number. And yes, it's a loss to system some money to actually deliver the service.

But it was nothing compared to what they were saving in terms of overheads, of running the business the way that it would have been run, treating these flare ups or these adverse events with chronic conditions. So, if you understand the root cause of friction, whether it's effort or emotion or inertia or reactance, and you address that root cause, all of a sudden it's like removing a log from a long logjam, everything starts to flow.

Jeff

So as if inertia and effort are difficult enough to overcome those frictions, you had to bring emotion into it. Explain the role, David, of emotion. And there are some really good examples. The one that that I found most compelling was the great story that you told in the in the book about Sweetwater Sound, which was amusing.

So, we'll talk a bit about emotions and what emotion has to do with this.

David

Yeah, Sweetwater is a great example. And what I what I'll say just to be a little bit of a prelude to this is one of the beautiful things about removing friction is by removing friction where if you're one of the if you are a business that removes friction and your competitors don't, you're actually able to not only take greater market share, but to grow the size of the market.

Removing friction can be the key to actually growing the market. And I think of a lot of companies that I've worked with have this aspiration of growing the size of the pie, growing the size of the market. And you ask, how are you going to do that? And usually the answer is, well, we're going to create greater products that have greater magnetism and pull people into the market that would have sat on the sidelines. What we generally find is that's not nearly as effective as removing the friction that stands in the way of their participation in the first place. In the Sweetwater example that you mentioned, Sweetwater is the largest musical instrument retailer in the country. Recently, the largest musical instrument retailer in the country, and they're based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And while a couple of years ago one of their largest competitors went out of business or filed Chapter 11, didn't go out of business, but filed for bankruptcy, Sweetwater was having one of the best years on record and when you dive into how Sweetwater is able to grow so quickly and able to expand the size of the market and you interview some of their sales reps and you interview their founder, one of the things that they had noticed is that there are a ton of American consumers who would love to pick up an instrument, who would love to begin to play the guitar or play the guitar again after putting it down for 20 years. I myself am a drummer. I was a drummer in high school and went on like a 25 year hiatus and then recently got into drumming again. But there were a lot of things that stood in the way of my ability to start drumming again, but particularly for a first time musician. One of the things that stands in the way of their ability to pick up an instrument is the intimidation of starting. And if you walk into a typical guitar shop and which is staffed by typically semi-pro musicians, who are doing this to make ends meet while they gig in the evenings, they are super passionate about guitars, they're super passionate about everything that they're working on. And if you're a beginner who doesn't even know what the threat of a guitar is, to walk into one of these guitar shops that's staffed by professionals, the very first conversation can be off putting because you're talking about details and technical specifications and this neck versus that neck. And a novice can get so intimidated by that initial encounter with a guitar salesperson that they can be like, Oof, this is uncomfortable. I'm not going to explore this any further. I feel stupid or feel anxiety, right? I feel dumber having walked in after walking in than I did when I walked in in the first place, because the salesperson making me realize just how little I know. And so the interactions that are meant to sell people on the idea of a guitar, missed the key principle, which is what they're shopping for, is confidence to be a musician. The guitar is an artifact. What they want to do is take the first step to becoming a musician. And Sweetwater, by contrast, understands this perfectly. They understand that a novice is who calls up who's about to begin playing an instrument. The first thing that Sweetwater has to convince them of is that they've made a beautiful choice. They made a great choice to even explore this passion. It's not about selling them a guitar. It's not about selling a kit of drums. It's about reinforcing that they have the ability to do this.

And that's so cool. What made you decide to want to pick up this instrument? What bands do you listen to? What orchestras do you listen to? And they sort of celebrate the attempt to become a musician first and then talk about selling them a musical instrument second. And because they have this propensity to welcome the uninitiated, they, unlike their competitors, are able to grow the size of the musical instrument market by taking these would be musicians and in one phone call turning them into actual musicians, where most other competitors feel that their job is to sell an instrument. These folks at Sweetwater are selling them on the idea of becoming a musician, which is a material difference in framing. I think it's such a wonderful example that I think our audience could, you know, put themselves in that position where you're walking, just envision walking into a music store.

Jeff

You really want to get started, but you're anxious. There's a real anxiety about it or, you know, as you said, the person person's a professional and made you feel like you really didn't know anything. And it made me think of even again, back to this B2B context that there's even emotion there because there's people there. Change is difficult. Change produces decisions that can lead to anxiety. And, what I took away from this lesson was to spot that, try to spot where that real anxiety or where that emotion and go right to it with strategies in order to overcome it. And I think it's that of the four, this is one that my sense was that our audience would really, you know, take something powerful from because I don't think especially in the B2B context, people think of emotional friction at all.

And I think that there's a bit of a blind spot there. Yeah, maybe that's going a bit too far.

David

But no, I think this goes back to that procurement example, right? That had nothing to do with cost. It had nothing to do with products and services and had ever the way that that deal was going to get done was by not only delivering the right offer, but by making the folks inside of that group feel that they had they were able to generate value for the organization. And if a salesperson or a consultant were unaware of that, they could be talking themselves out of an engagement versus into an engagement without understanding that emotional friction that could have stood in the way. Because, again, which salesperson I'm like, the least effort I can provide you, the better for all of us. And their response, which is totally illogical in some respects is no, no, no, I need a little bit of effort otherwise I feel useless. Like in what other context would we ever know this? And so it's really important to look at it through that lens.

Jeff

Which I think is a great lean in to the fourth of the four headwinds - Reactance; why we feel this impulse to resist change. What do you mean by Reactance?

David

Reactance is the phenomena, again, as you mention of human beings, aversion to being changed by others. I personally can't think of an example of a moment or having a change imposed on me was ever welcome. I truly welcome. We want to feel a sense of autonomy. We want to feel a sense of ownership over the choices we make and over the decisions we make. In having something imposed upon us immediately puts us on edge and puts us on guard.

Jeff

Or even feeling pressured. Even if someone's like giving you a directive to do it. But even in what I took away from even if there is a sense of persuasion, like if I feel like I'm getting pushed in that direction, I'll push. It doesn't even have to be at the direct of course, one of the points I took.

David

No, absolutely. In fact, I don't know. I mean, I think we're seeing this in real time, at least in the United States, when it comes to public health that there's overwhelming if you think about an idea, a good idea, you know, public health initiatives like vaccinations and mask wearing, pretty unambiguously good ideas. Right. The data is clear that it reduces hospitalizations. The data's clear that it reduces the severeness of the illness or prevents the illness altogether. And yet there's a large variety, a large portion of the country that is resistant to the idea of getting a vaccine. And it's not because the data isn't there and it's not because the results aren't self-evident. It's because people don't want to be changed by others. They don't want to have this decision imposed upon them. And our approach right now as a government or as a society is to say, well, maybe we're not giving them enough data or maybe we're not telling them enough stories about people that wish they would have gotten a vaccine. And sometimes we fail to recognize that the strongest data is actually a cause of the most friction.

Right? The strongest evidence can sometimes be the worst evidence. And rather than if you know that this is not an issue about data, this isn't an issue about the idea, this is an issue about people wanting to feel like they've got some autonomy over their own life and over their own decision making. You might approach the problem differently than you might have his story.

Jeff

Sure. That was a great example I thought just had such a wonderful, simple example of the power of in which you're referring to the self-persuasion with antismoking ads. Explain that. I thought that was pretty cool.

David

Well, I mean, just in general in public health, but any real public health initiative there's often more than enough data to tell people like smoking is going to cause potentially cause lung cancer and it's eventually going to be a cause of death or that eating fatty foods and not exercising will cause issues with obesity and maybe some chronic disease.

Like there's no confusion about what the cause and effect of these things will be. But this goes back to the power of inertia and habit in some respects that even though we know things aren't necessarily good for us, habits are really hard to break. Changing people's behavior is really difficult but one of the ways that we can engage people in conversations about these types of initiatives versus feeling like changes imposed upon them and instead making them feel like a participant is not to tell them, but to actually engage them in the discussion where they can help generate arguments for themselves. There's nothing more powerful in persuasion than a self-generated argument. And for example, if you talk to somebody who is a smoker or you talk to somebody who's managing a chronic disease, or potentially could change their lifestyle, may be the way to do it isn't to talk about them and to say, you know, you will wind up potentially exposing yourself to risk of cancer if you smoke or you will get emphysema. Maybe the better way to do it is to say, can you tell me a story about like, is there someone else in your life or can you tell me a story about someone else you may have met in your life that has suffered from a chronic disease or has suffered from cancer? And like, tell me about them. Tell me about their experience managing that disease. And abstract the idea away from that individual and have them talk about somebody else. But then what they'll start doing is telling you about the challenges that that person had in telling them, telling you about the challenges that that person suffered through. And then the next question is, so what advice would you give somebody to help them quit smoking or help them avoid a similar path or help them avoid a similar outcome? And now they're not talking about themselves. They're giving advice to other people, but at the same time, they're generating arguments that they should probably follow on their own, which is a very different way of approaching the topic than it is to say, you should do this and you should do that. You should do this because everybody's reaction is, Yeah, go take that advice somewhere else.

Jeff

Yeah. Well, and even I found it so compelling that there was advertiser's anti-smoking advertisements where there is imagine there was some data or statistics about the parade of horribles with smoking, and they found that when a narrator read that and when the narrator through the ad is telling the audience about those horrible things that will happen, it would have some effect but not nearly as impactful as just putting the words on the screen and let the audience read it to themselves, like just the act of reading it yourself. Self-persuasion to read it and understand it rather than somebody saying the words for you is more effective and I thought that was such a simple example.

David

And this is another real point of underscoring the importance of Loran's partnership on this book, because again, we talked at the beginning about the importance of theory. Theory explains why. And if you didn't know the why behind the what, that even just having that internal voice of your own inside your head, encoding this idea on your brain differently than being told this idea, this is where the psychology of the human element is so important because human beings are really complex creatures and small things can make enormous differences.

And if we don't know what those small things are, they're often hiding in plain sight. And really simple methods can be really effective. And so, one of the huge benefits of Loran's fingerprints on this book is that he not only helps us explain the psychology of why things work, but also the really small and seemingly innocuous or insignificant things that make huge differences.

Jeff

I think that's a great anchor point, David, for our audience to take away as we as we close the conversation. And I just want to also perhaps this is a bit of a tease for the audience, really encourage our Better Innovation audience to go out. And by the time this episode airs, the book will be available October 4th, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas will be available at your favorite real or online bookstore beginning October 4th.

And the close of the book are three case studies. And I thought just a wonderful way to wrap it all together and to show the four headwinds and how they even intertwine to one in particular about entrepreneurship in Dubai. I found just really great, but I want to thank you. And before we close our Better Innovation session today, David, we have a way that we end all of our interviews with three rapid fire questions.

So, we think this is a great fun way for us to close it up. What do you think, you’re up for it?

David

Yeah, let me grab a sip of coffee here and then and then we're ready. All right. Fire away!

Jeff

All right. Here we go. All right. First question, what book do you have on your nightstand?

David

I have Sapiens by Yuval Hariri on my nightstand right now.

Jeff

I have that. I haven't read it yet, have you?

David

I'm just getting into it. And this is kind of a beautiful symbiosis with what we're doing in the human element. I mean, there's so much about human behavior that is explained by how we have evolved, that it's fascinating to see how behavior of early humans translates to organizational design in large corporations.

So I'm finding it very eye-opening.

Jeff

Excellent. Love it. Great. Okay. Second one, David, tell us about a historical figure who you admire.

David

So you say historic figures, and I'm not sure how far back history needs to go, but I'm going to say Charlie Watts, who is the longtime drummer of The Rolling Stones, who just passed away a couple of weeks ago.

And the reason that I admired Charlie Watts is he was the anchor of a very flashy band. You had Keith Richards, you had Ronnie Wood, you have Mick Jagger, who are very rock and roll, very sort of fast and loose and kind of personify why so much of the sizzle of rock and roll. But Charlie Watts was a non-flashy, non-flamboyant drummer who just absolutely anchored that band and kept perfect time and the reason that Mick Jagger and Ron Wood and Bill Wyman and Keith Richards could do all of the interesting stuff they were doing was because Charlie Watts laid this beautiful foundation of excellent rhythm in timekeeping and did it in a way that didn't shine a lot of attention to himself. But the reason the Rolling Stones of the Rolling Stones is because they had this foundation of Charlie underneath. And so, I just really admire that to have a meaningful impact, you don't need to be the front person.

Jeff

What a great answer. Yeah, what a great lesson. And I assume if our audience is looking for your booking agent, you'll help us with that event.

Oh, yeah. Are you doing gigs yet?

David

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have a gig coming up next week. Anyone who's in Highwood Illinois and I don't know when you're going to listen to this pumpkin fest, we will headline great.

Jeff

Maybe. I'm sure it'll be some place on the Internet. We'll find it on YouTube somewhere.

Last question. Here we go. What do you see as our greatest opportunity to build back stronger? This is our as we close it out. This will be uplifting for our audience, David. Our greatest opportunity to build back stronger when we emerge from this pandemic.

David

I think this goes back to the frictions, actually and inertia. I think that inertia is the tug of the status quo.

I hope that we will look at the disruption of the last 18 months as an opportunity to influence new directions. Never before have habits been broken so quickly, whether it's online education or whether it's working remotely and supporting a diversity of lifestyles. I hope that we won't go back to the inertia we had before the pandemic, and we will look at some of the habits that we had before the pandemic is not necessarily being the best, and we can build new opportunities on top of new behaviors that the pandemic helped warm us up to.

Jeff

I think your book comes at such a great time in the world. Lots of innovation we're expecting for all of us innovators and that's why we're here on Better Innovation, to help the entrepreneurs in our audience that we think we're going to go through a period of pretty intense innovation.

We think the world needs it. The world is ready for it. And, so this book comes at a perfect time, and as I mentioned at the outset, fills a real gap in how we've looked at it. And I think how many look at new ideas. And for that, David, I just want to thank you for your contribution, and you'll pass this along to Loran, your co-author and I'm really look forward to the book coming out next week and seeing the strong reception that I'm sure it's going to get.

David

Thanks, Jeff, and thanks for having me on and a great discussion.

Jeff

It's great. Thank you.

Presenters

Jeffrey Saviano

EY Global Emerging Technology Strategy & Governance Leader

Podcast

Episode 2

Duration

1h 11m 14s

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.