Unleashing Ideas that Expand Core Business with Luke Williams

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Are you trying to go beyond conventional business practices to spark creativity and lead with resilience? Our guest, Luke Williams, a Professor of Innovation and the Founder and CEO of Idea Skills, believes it's possible for all of us. And he'll join us to dive into how to spark creativity within your teams. Tune in this week to learn how easy it is to disrupt, as we explore the metaphor of cooking with recipes, using ingredients around you to create something extraordinary. Luke will also challenge the conventional wisdom of using business best practices, emphasizing the importance of fresh approaches for future success. And in a thought- provoking twist, he'll make a case for why ideas often considered free and less valuable may be more important than execution. This intriguing perspective promises to reframe your approach to innovation and growth. So teamwork makes the dream work, and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast. My name is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the HUDDL3 Group. And today, I have a fellow Australian joining me, Luke Williams. Luke is the author of Disrupt. He's the CEO and Founder of Idea Skills, and also Professor of Innovation at NYU Stern. I knew I'd mess one of those up. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Williams: Thanks, Dane, and wonderful to be speaking to a fellow Aussie. I think we're making each other homesick. That's great.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. So my goal for today is I'm going to loop Bluey in, because we were talking about Blue before the show. So storytelling innovation, so that's in the parking lot.

Luke Williams: Beautiful. Yeah, Dane and I were just talking, for everyone, before we hit record. Bluey is the best show on TV. It doesn't matter if you're a kid, you're an adult, you're going to learn something from Bluey, absolutely brilliant Australian innovation.

Dane Groeneveld: It absolutely is. So, talking about innovation, and particularly disruptive innovation, we were sort of talking about before the show, Luke, what is it that brought you to be doing this great work? You are very wide in your work. You're writing, you're teaching, and now this new platform that you're bringing to market. How did you get here? What was the journey so far?

Luke Williams: Yeah. So my background is in industrial design, so I studied industrial design and marketing in Australia. And Australia is a fantastic place to have a marketing career, because you get to market products no matter what they are. But most of those products, particularly physical products, are coming from overseas. So the decisions for those products are being made overseas, which isn't great for a product designer. I wanted to be at the table where these decisions were being made. So I was going to be over at what, turn of the millennium with a bunch of friends. We said, " We'll go to the South of France. We'll party over there." And I said, " This is it." I've always been one of these guys who had 10 companies around the world he'd cut off his left arm to work for. And I said, " Right. I'm going to ring them all up. I'm going to tell them I'm going to be in town, and I love what they do. Will they meet with me?" And Dane, to my surprise, they all said yes.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Luke Williams: So after the turn of the millennial, I basically toured Europe and America. I went to all these companies that I just would love to work for and just tried to talk my way into a job, because of course it's hard. They've got to do sponsorship and all the rest.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And to cut a long story short, it was not going too well. And I was up to my last interview, and I remember calling home and I was talking to my mother at the time and I said, "Oh, this has been a giant waste of money. I can't believe this. Nobody's going to take me on." And my last interview was the next day, and it was my number one choice, Frog Design. Frog got famous doing a lot of work for Apple.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Luke Williams: And anyone in industrial design just loved Frog Design. They did the first Apple Mac. And I was obsessed with Frog. And I walked into that interview, and it was the best interview that had ever happened. Something just clicked. The universe came together. Six months later, they offered me a job and it was a happiest day of my life.

Dane Groeneveld: Awesome.

Luke Williams: So I basically left Australia, came over to America, started working in Silicon Valley. And about 2001, which of course was the. com bust, and I had to go through all that, but made it through that. And then after... So I had an amazing career at Frog working with a number of different industries, and then moved to New York to start an office over there in product design and got involved with NYU. And NYU wanted to put innovation in the curriculum at this point, because it was very rare to have innovation in the MBA curriculum. And I'd done some guest lecturing there, so they asked me to get a curriculum together, so I did. And so, I've been teaching that course for about 15 years now.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: I went full- time faculty for the last 10 years or something, and I also ran the Entrepreneurship Center there. And the course and what we did at the Entrepreneurship Center was all targeted around teaching the skills of disruptive innovation, which is a very different skillset to the skillset of incremental innovation.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So that's where we are today.

Dane Groeneveld: That's awesome. It's a big shift into teaching from industry, but you're seeing more and more of that.

Luke Williams: More and more of it, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Anything that's driving that? Yeah. It's different.

Luke Williams: Well, everyone seems to have a course these days or an online course.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: But not many of the people offering online courses have actually taught in a traditional institution. And I guess that used to bug me a little bit, but now I actually kind of like it, because the sharing of ideas and knowledge is the most important thing we can do. It used to be that we used to think that, " We've only got these scarce resources. We've got to be incredibly strategic with how we allocate these scarce resources." And then, of course, this was all based on traditional economic thinking, traditional factors of production: land, labor, capital. These things get scarcer the more they're consumed. The thing about knowledge and ideas is they don't work that way.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: They're subject to increasing returns the more they're consumed. So the more you share an idea, the more useful it becomes. The more people consume ideas and knowledge, the more useful those ideas and knowledge become. And if I give my knowledge to you, Dane, it doesn't mean that I've lost it. It means you gain and I gain.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And this is the benefit of podcasts like this and anyone doing an online course. It is literally the most important thing we can do, increase the amount of knowledge and ideas in the world.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That word scarcity jumps up at me. One of your colleagues who I follow closely, Professor Scott Galloway and his podcast, he's lately been talking about scarcity, particularly in the context of higher education. Obviously, we had that Affirmative Action shift in the Supreme Court the other week, and he put some material out. But I've seen that over the years, that are the professions, are the academic institutions, are certain organizations creating scarcity around what they think is important at the cost to society, at the cost to teams being able to get access to resources, to ideas, to opportunities to unleash pilot projects? So I wonder, in your eyes, Luke, what is it that you think is the unlock right now to just encourage people to be sharing more, to be moving away from this scarcity mindset when it does come to just starting small innovative efforts? And how does that translate to larger, disruptive, innovative efforts?

Luke Williams: Yeah. I'll give you a metaphor that I use quite a bit because I think it's quite empowering for people. But I always joke, we're so obsessed with cooking shows in the United States. You flick through the channels, you see one on every channel. I saw one the other day, it was like MasterChef for kids or something.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Williams: They were like five years old or something, picking out sophisticated ingredients. They were cooking duck a l'oragne or something I couldn't even pronounce. And I'm thinking, " Whatever happened to fish sticks, for goodness sake?" Anyway, the next time you're watching one of these shows, just have a look at the range of personalities and educational backgrounds and characters on this show. It's the most diverse mix you've ever seen. None of us doubt for a second that any of these people can cook. Some are going to be better than others because it's a competition.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: But we don't doubt that anyone can follow a recipe or learn to get better at cooking. Even if you don't cook, I bet in the back of your mind you're thinking, " Well, I could cook. I just choose not to cook because I go through GrubHub or Seamless." But you don't think it's beyond durability. And I want people to have the same conception of innovation. Innovation, I define ideas as the recipes that we use to rearrange resources to create new value and wealth. And when you think of it that way, you are surrounded by all these ingredients, whether it's your value proposition, whether it's your customer segments or client segments, whether it's your relationship you have with your customers, the key activities you do, the cost structure, the revenue model. All of these things are ingredients in a business that can be remixed in an infinite number of ways to create new value and wealth.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So there might be scarcity in some of the physical resources, and you hear people talk about that. But when we're talking about the creation of new value, there is no inherent scarcity.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: You can always find ways to remix what's available, currently available, to create new value. And I think that's a very empowering way to think about innovation. So I encourage all my students to think of themselves as master chefs in their own kitchen. They're surrounded by all these ingredients. And the question is, "What are you going to do with these ingredients?" Now, the scarcity thing that you were talking about before, I think that's a branding play for luxury brands obviously.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Preyed on scarcity, and so they want to drive demand through scarcity. And Scott Galloway's point about education is it really is a luxury brand.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Some of those higher education, and what he's doing with Section, for example, is trying to make elite business education much more accessible. And this is what I'm trying to do as well with idea skills. I'm trying to make innovation skills accessible to absolutely everyone so you don't have to sign up for an expensive MBA program. So there are a lot of initiatives where people are trying to get the ingredients out there, get the resources out there.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: But Dane, I don't think that's the challenge. I think people are not taking opportunity of all the new ingredients out there, because I think too many people, to continue the metaphor, are cooking from a traditional recipe book. So if you are cooking a traditional recipe that was written 10 years ago, it wasn't asking for any of these new resources that are available today in 2023 to be included, because how could they?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Williams: These resources, they weren't even invented. So anyone who's cooking with a traditional recipe is foregoing the opportunity to mix in some of these later arriving resources or ingredients.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So I think I'll sum it up by saying this. Growth, for anyone listening, growth in your business, in your career, in your industry over the next five years is going to come from you finding better recipes, not just doing more cooking.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that. That's such a powerful statement. I'm going to repeat it. So growth comes from better recipes, not more cooking.

Luke Williams: Better recipes, not more cooking.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: It's not just me saying that. Professor Paul Romer at NYU as well won the Nobel Prize in Macroeconomics in 2018 for this insight.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: It's a theory called New Growth Theory, which, if we go into that in detail it'll bore your listeners to tears. But at its core, it has that very simple premise, and that is that ideas are an inexhaustible resource.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And I think that's an incredibly important thing to understand.

Dane Groeneveld: It is, it is. So as you shift from, and you mentioned it earlier, people get stuck having to run the core business. It's all about the more cooking mindset. That's how most business leaders are running their teams, their departments, their businesses right now. Is that why we're seeing the real disruptive innovation happening outside of large organizations, because people aren't beholden to doing their day job? They can come in and actually spend a bit more time looking at what's in the kitchen and who they might team up with. Do you see some linkage there or have I got that wrong?

Luke Williams: Well, I see that used as an excuse a lot of the time.

Dane Groeneveld: Excuse, yeah.

Luke Williams: I see people saying, " Well, we're not Google or Apple. We don't have the resources of Google or an Apple, so we don't have time for this."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And I just call BS on that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Absolute BS. I know from running the Entrepreneurship Center that today, for probably the first time in human history, you can experiment with ideas in a way that you never have been able to before. And you can get those ideas up onto a landing page and start getting feedback on those ideas from all the social media channels. Even the explainer videos that we often teach people to do, the sort of videos you'd see on Kickstarter for a new concept, now people are putting those on TikTok and getting immediate feedback on their concepts before they even write a line of code. They're getting quick feedback on a short from TikTok. So I just don't buy the lack of resources. And it's not the ideas themselves that are risky. What you are risking is the thinking time that is required to actually get those new ideas to a place where they're worth experimenting with further. And if companies and organizations, no matter what their size, are honest with themselves, that's not what they're willing to risk. They're not willing to risk giving their people some thinking time to think about ideas that don't support the current core business.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And we can get into why that is a recipe for disaster. We can explore that next if you like.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that is worth-

Luke Williams: If you're only coming up with incremental ideas that support the core business, you are going to find yourself in a very, very dangerous position very soon.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That is one we should jump into because I think it is an obstacle. I think you've called it out right. And we might want to sort of debunk that myth that, " Hey, if I'm distracting my team with giving them thinking time to go and do things that are way outside of the box, am I confusing them? Am I upsetting customers? Am I creating tension amongst team members?"

Luke Williams: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: How do you approach that?

Luke Williams: Okay. Well, first of all, one of the big myths of disruption and why people don't want to do it, it's sort of a... When I first wrote the book Disruptor, it was like the publisher was going, " Really? This is kind of a negative word." It's like, " Nobody wants this." Clayton Christensen already had the theory of disruptive innovation, but it was still seen as a really negative thing. And my whole point was, " It's not about spotting and reacting to disruptive change. This is how to be the disruptive change. How do you do that?"

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Now, one of the ways you do that is you need to bust this myth that disruption is a destabilizing force, like, " Oh," I hear this all the time, " Luke, we don't need any more ideas. We've just got everyone aligned with the strategy and focused. More ideas will just confuse everybody." And that is just the complete opposite mindset that you actually need to build the capabilities you'll need for the future. No decision- making was ever improved with a deficit of ideas.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: But that's what strategy is. You do have to make choices. But where I was going with that is everyone who's listening to this who's working in a business is working in a system, because a business is a system. And that business is in a category; that category is a system. That category is in an industry; that industry is a system. So we've got systems within systems within systems.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So system dynamics apply. And in a system, if you've only got a reinforcing feedback loop, like one single reinforcing feedback loop, which is what a core business is, so if you are just incrementally getting better at your current product service and business model and you are getting feedback from your best customers on that, you're in an incremental reinforcing loop. Now, there's nothing wrong with that when things are going well, but the problem is when circumstances change, those same mechanisms, reinforcing mechanisms, flip from a virtuous cycle into a downward spiral and accelerate your decline, which is why we see Kodak, Polaroid, Blockbuster, you name it, Blackberry, all seemingly in dominant positions all of a sudden go bankrupt or become irrelevant overnight, because they've only got these single reinforcing feedback loops. So in order to grow your business, your team, your industry in a sustainable way, you need to add a balancing loop. You need a feedback loop running in the opposite direction. And when we're talking about innovation and building future capability, that balancing loop is introducing disruptive ideas, ideas that might be in direct conflict or at least inconsistent with what you're doing in the core business. You need a constant influx of what we call discontinuity, so ideas that would not naturally arise out of the core business. And you need that in order to strengthen what you are doing and be prepared for whatever happens in the future.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. And when you... I'm playing that out even further down line, even with some of the efforts I've put in play in my own team. So I'll create the tiger team. I don't have an innovation center, but I'll go and create a tiger team and I'll be like, " Hey, let's have these three people take this pilot project and see what they can do with it." The next issue that I have, even if I'm trying to create that balancing loop, embrace the discontinuity, is that those individuals now need resources from some other team member. And then that team member is like, " Hey, I'm busy. I don't even understand your project. Why would I give it to you?" So there's almost like a second- order friction that some departments have. Maybe it's because we're so heavily in front of our screens, but people aren't used to lifting their head up and having the time to just provide that half an hour of support or whatever it might be to keep the pilot moving.

Luke Williams: Yeah, you're absolutely right. So now we're into some interesting territory because we're in organizational behavior territory here.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Now, one of the biggest disconnects is a lot of people are running around claiming that they're innovative and they want everyone to be innovative. And they're saying to their team, " We want disruptive ideas. We want your disruptive thinking." But the next layer, that's what we often call the values layer in an organization or a team. It's like, " What do you value?" So if innovation is not valued, it's very, very difficult for any ideas to make it through. But the next layer down is where the disconnect is, and that's your metrics, awards, and incentives. If you are saying to people, " We want disruptive ideas. Give me your fresh thinking. And no idea is a bad idea," whatever that you're incentivizing, all their reward structure, everything that you're incentivizing them to do is geared around maintaining that reinforcing loop I just talked about, maintaining the core business. None of those ideas, you're not going to get any disruptive thinking. And if you do get a couple of disruptive ideas, they'll quickly be rejected because those ideas would be, whoever's evaluating those ideas or evaluating them from the perspective of the core business, so of course they get shut out as irrelevant or unjustified or, " We don't have time or budget for that." So it's just an absolute disaster. So I love the concept of tiger teams, because all the literature around innovation centers suggests that they're a bad idea.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: I've started a number of innovation labs. I love an innovation center and a lab, but if you've separating the center, the innovation center or lab from the core business, it doesn't work, because you get all these barriers to adoption. You've got, first of all, there's not- invented- here syndrome. So it's like, " I don't have to be innovative because here working in the core business. The innovation center is off doing that." But things are changing so fast now. We need everyone to innovate. We need everyone remixing those ingredients in the organization. So that's the first thing. The second thing is if the innovation center or lab comes up with a disruptive idea, you can't just throw it over the fence and expect somebody who's incentivized to keep the core business running to all of a sudden change gears and try and work this disruptive idea into their project or their timeframe. It just doesn't work. So the separation of those two is a disaster. So the benefit of tiger teams or any temporary teams like that is that it is temporary. So I often call it shadow boxing teams.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So I advise my clients to get a shadow boxing team together, send them away for a weekend. Their job, and this could be depending on the size of the organization, it could be three people, it could be six people, it might even be 12 in a larger organization, their job is to dismantle the current business model, take it apart, look for the vulnerabilities, and attack those vulnerabilities with the spirit of an entrepreneur or a group of entrepreneurs that want to take you out of business. And then, they exploit the vulnerability, they'll come up with the products, the service, or maybe the entirely new business model that would take you out of business, kill the core business. Then they come back to you as the management or the senior team and they say, " If we were going to take you out, this is exactly how we would do it." Now, the senior team, the management, they're under no pressure to implement these suggestions, implement those ideas, but at least they're seeing the information. They're exposing themselves to potential disruptive thinking and ideas. And there's so much they can do with that information. They could put it on the back burner or maybe they could green- light it so the team experiments with it a bit further. They could start another brand that doesn't interfere with the umbrella brand. They can green- light a mini pilot in some sort of small customer segment to see if what the team came up with resonates. If they're sitting on a ton of capital, they can go and acquire a startup that is doing the same thing. But all of these decisions happen once you're exposed to the thinking, once you're exposed to the idea.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Your choice of language there, it seems very intentional, " attack the vulnerabilities, take you out of business." Am I right?

Luke Williams: Well, I often use that language. I normally hate language of conflict, and I can't stand military metaphors for strategy, but I normally talk about it that way because it fires people up. They go, " Yeah."

Dane Groeneveld: You fired me up.

Luke Williams: Yeah, yeah. It's like, " Absolutely," because I do want them to have the energy of an entrepreneur who's looking to disrupt a market. That's what I want. And with my students in the class, they have to choose a category and they have to go and disrupt that category. So they have to come up with an unexpected solution that the category is not in a million years going to think about. And they have to say, " Right. If we put this disruptive solution onto the market, this would upset the competitive dynamics of that category or that industry."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And in order to do that, they have to look for vulnerabilities and weaknesses at the moment. But I tell you what, they also look at strengths, because what's working well at the moment, the strength of an idea keeps it protected. So if your listeners out there think, " Wow. Our business model is going really well. We've got a great business model. We're using the best practice of the industry." That is a red flag. You know why? Because that best practice, that business model, is not getting any of your thinking attention.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: It's just running on autopilot.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: What you're doing is running around focused on all the things that need fixing and the big problems, whereas the richest areas for your future, the richest areas for disruptive innovation, are the areas where absolutely nothing in your business appears to be wrong.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Or nothing in that category appears to be wrong. So what do I get the students to do, it's not just looking for the vulnerabilities and weaknesses. It's looking for, " What are the perceived strengths out there? What is nobody paying attention to and everyone's ignoring because these things are working so well?"

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: "Let's think about those things. Let's target those for disruption."

Dane Groeneveld: I think there was a story, and I'm going to butcher it, but there was a story in the early print days, where I think it was Xerox came out and rather than building better printers, they just built a better service department. And they just took over the market because, to your point, going and focusing on building a better printer, it's a big lift. It's hard to take on the competitor. But, " Service is going well. Let's build on that strength. Let's explore it more." And they turned it into an engine, if I got that right.

Luke Williams: Yeah. No, absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: I often teach this technique where the first step of this process, if we're talking in the recipe metaphor again, people might say, " Well, how do you start to look for new recipes?" Well, first of all, you've got to break apart the recipes that you're already using.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And the best way to do that is to surface what I call the cliches. We've all heard the term cliches before.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: These are the widespread beliefs everyone has about how to do business in this particular space. So you surface the cliches, and they're not hard to find because they're everywhere and they're all known. And best practices, it's like a cluster of cliches.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Anyway, you surface these cliches, you work out what everyone's taking for granted, and then you mess with those cliches. So you deny them. You run in the opposite direction. You completely exaggerate the scale. So if something's inexpensive, you make it super expensive. If something's expensive, you find a way to make it super cheap.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: I was working for a shoe company, a really famous footwear company, but they want to break into new areas. So of course, the first thing we did was say, " You don't make shoes anymore." Now, that doesn't mean they won't continue to go and make shoes because it's 98% of where their profit's coming from. But if you're going to do an exercise like this, you have to remove whatever the critical success factors you believe are. Whatever those critical success factors are, you've got to take them out. So if you've got a profitable product right now, you take it out.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Williams: Because this frees you up to think about how else you could deliver value.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And I think all of the strategy has been dominated by thinking about core competencies and core capabilities. But these things can, and what they're called in the academic literature is they can become core rigidities very, very quickly. So a lot of these techniques are about challenging your core capabilities, your core competencies at the moment so they don't turn into core rigidities for you and prevent you from seeing the future.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I like the way that you're also structuring that energy that it creates to tackle something or to remove something and to bring that entrepreneurial energy, because that's not common to most organizations. It's, " Hey, let's go and get in a conference room and talk about this." But you mentioned get out of the business, go away for a weekend. I'm starting to think, " Let's dress up. Let's put some costumes on and really change our characters." But you kind of have to take someone well away from all of those core rigidities that are hard to break away from.

Luke Williams: One of the things about that, Dane, is I think even more important than that, I think changing the environment can be important, but more important is you using artificial frameworks and tools because the sort of innovation we're talking about is counterintuitive. It's completely counterintuitive to search for alternative ways of thinking about the business when the business is at the peak of its success.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: It's completely counterintuitive to slowly experiment with long- term solutions when you've got all these pressing short- term problems.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So I often say, " We educate at the business school. We educate leaders to be reasonable, rational decision makers. And then, magically we expect them to be irrational, unreasonable disruptors on the trail of the next hot breakthrough." This has to stop. It's absolute lunacy. So a lot of these thinking techniques are counterintuitive, which means you need artificial tools and frameworks. So the other thing about sending that team away, it's not enough just to release their inhibitions. This is where creativity... There's a lot of theory around creativity where you supply a lot of beanbags, you give the teams water pistols. You get them to take off their ties and sit on the floor and behave like children. And this is all meant to release the inhibitions which are holding us back from truly great thinking and ideas. And this is where creativity has a long history of drugs and alcohol coming into this because it's removing inhibitions. And again, I think this has been holding us back from a more deliberate approach. I've facilitated brainstorming sessions for six people up to, I think, 420 people was about my largest group. If you've got 420 people in a room, and often we do this over the course of a day, if you are just asking people to sit on the floor and come up with crazy ideas, I can tell you from experience, those ideas will dry up in about 20 minutes. So what are you going to do for the rest of the day? So you need to introduce deliberate tools to help people get past their conceptual habits and biases. All the things that block people from actually thinking outside this metaphorical box we're always talking about, you need deliberate tools to actually enable that to happen.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So I'd never send one of these tiger teams or these shadow boxing teams away without some sort of framework that they had to work through to actually get that disruptive thinking going.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I've got a massive smile on my face because I love this concept, the artificial framework and tools. And you gave me exactly what I was looking for, which is a segue back to Bluey. All right. So Bluey, Bandit is the dad, for those listeners that haven't watched it. And he's a legend, and he has a great way of interacting with his kids. But invariably from episode to episode, he creates this framework. There's one episode I can remember in particular where he becomes the bus driver and his two daughters are the elderly ladies on the bus, and they go on this journey around town. But he's taking them on a journey, he's giving them opportunities to get on, get off. He's introducing toys. He builds this whole framework, and all of us parents out there know how hard it is to play with a two- year- old and a five- year- old. But he creates a framework which makes it fun for him, fun for the girls, and they just keep exploring and creating new stories, new characters. It's phenomenal. So there's a perfect example in a quick and easy way.

Luke Williams: Yeah, Absolutely. Yeah, Bandit Bluey is a great example of disruptive thinking, actually. They overturned a lot of cliches in the industry. They never use the traditional forms of conflict. There's never a villain in Bluey.

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Luke Williams: So that's an example of, I call these things disruptive hypotheses. That's an example of a denial hypothesis. Disney and all the people who've been making kids' shows, they've always just relied on this cliche of, there's got to be a villain who's trying to upset the status quo and blah, blah, blah. Bluey just took that out. So that's a denial hypothesis. You deny what everyone else is taking for granted. And they found other ways to keep the interest in the show which weren't about that sort of conflict and fighting. And the other thing that I found interesting about Bluey, and particularly when it started, they put a lot more emphasis on the father. Now, that might've stood out to me because I was a father myself of young kids.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: But often in those traditional shows, the father was sort of seen as this pretty hands- off sort of dud that would just be there for laugh factor. Like in Peppa Pig, for example, the father is just always doing this stupid stuff.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Luke Williams: In Bluey's case, Bluey's father was incredibly engaged, coming up with a lot of the creative play. And we just saw fatherhood in a way that hadn't been portrayed before in kids' shows.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: That's what stood out to me. But I think it's a great example of disruptive thinking, actually. And the success of it has been incredible.

Dane Groeneveld: And maybe playing off that, maybe the way that they've showed Bandit in a different light of fatherhood, we're looking for ways to show leaders in a different light of driving disruption within their organizations.

Luke Williams: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's very cool.

Luke Williams: Absolutely. On the leadership thing, we've been stuck in this cult of personality model for so long. Whenever I see an article talking about, " The five successful traits" or" There's five character traits of successful entrepreneurs or leaders, I just run the opposite way. I just think that is just a nightmare. And particularly when it comes to innovation, I'm not asking anyone to change their personality. I don't care if you're an introvert, an extrovert. I don't care it you've... You might never have done any innovation before. A lot of my students think, " Well, I'm not an innovator. I don't have any patents." I'm going, " That doesn't matter at all."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: It gets me back to the cooking metaphor. " Do you think you can cook?" " Yeah." " Well, then you can innovate. Let's get these ingredients out and let's start remixing them and see what new arrangements and new recipes we can come up with." And the cult of personality thing is just holding us back. We just have to see leadership and innovation and teamwork in a much more deliberate way, where it doesn't... The Belbin team roles or thinking about different people's characteristics and how they all mesh, it's important on one aspect, but it's not the whole game.

Dane Groeneveld: No, no. Actually, that reminds me of something. This week we published a show with John Boudreaux, who's doing a lot of work around disaggregation of work. And John gave this great example of, and it's another one of your framework examples, too. Go and talk to the leadership team about talent, like who's on the team, but reframe it as a supply chain. So in this case, what he describes is if your team only hires the best computer science engineers out of Harvard, you may have a problem. They might be brilliant, but you may have a problem. If I told you you could only build this product with the highest priced, highest quality components, would you still build the product? So he just changes the way of thinking so that that team now starts to say, " Well, actually, maybe we can start to interject some different team members, some more diversity, redesign roles." And that might create a huge unlock for that team, particularly in today's era when ChatGPT and the whole framework of coding is changing rapidly. Companies need to create exercises like that and think about hiring talent not as a job description and a resume, but" What ingredients do I need in the recipe? How do I reform that recipe with everything that's just popped up?"

Luke Williams: That's a good point, Dane. And it reminded me of something else, actually. What you just talked about and introducing diversity in the teams, we've known for some time that's incredibly important for divergent thinking, creativity. But what that is doing, it's a mechanism of discontinuity. So by introducing different people into the team, you're introducing deliberate discontinuity. So you're trying to force some different perspectives. And often, when we see an organization where they have to make a big change, they think, "We've got to change the people. Our people, they've been thinking the same way for too long, so we need to change the leadership or we need to get fresh people." And I think that's one way of introducing discontinuity, but I actually think it's low hanging fruit, and I think it's a little lazy. So I'm all about, " This isn't about changing our people. Sure, it's good to have diversity, but if we don't have that or how can we work with the people we've got right now, the team we've got right now, and introduce deliberate tools, different tools to help them actually start to think differently?"

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Because everyone can do it, and everyone when they use these tools can think differently. But it's just another way of introducing deliberate discontinuity.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And it often frustrates me when people also just hire for culture fit as well. You would've seen this in the teams, and we used to do it at Frog. " Somebody didn't quite fit the culture. We didn't think they'd be a good fit." All that's doing is reinforcing the system of continuity, this hamster wheel, this single feedback loop I was talking about.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: You need to hire difficult culture fits if you want to introduce deliberate discontinuity into the system.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And so, I think culture fit is another big problem there if you're only-

Dane Groeneveld: It's another cliche that's dangerous.

Luke Williams: It is. It is.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Yeah, that is fascinating. And I think it's probably a good segue to idea skills. So you are building this new platform now. You've referenced about bringing this way of thinking and these tools to other teams. What is it about idea skills that you are really out there trying to change for the good of disruption?

Luke Williams: Yeah. I've spent the last, what, 20 years in innovation. And I'll tell you what happened, Dane. I went from individual contributor to leader very quickly, not in terms of timing very quickly, but the switch was very quick.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Luke Williams: And this often happens to people. They'll go from... I was having to bust out all the ideas and the concepts myself as a designer, and then I got promoted to a creative director. And of course, it's not your ideas anymore. You are having to judge and evaluate the ideas of others. And then, you're having to set direction for those ideas, and you're going to have to pick directions and select directions. And so, no longer can you rely on your own ideas. It's more about evaluating, judging, reacting to other people's ideas. And of course, I've always been a big reader, so I went to the literature. There was nothing on it.

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Luke Williams: There's all sorts of books on traditional leadership and management. There's nothing on sort of this more creative innovation leadership. So for the last 15 years, I've been obsessed with finding ways not just how to generate better ideas, but how to actually more effectively judge and evaluate and pick directions for ideas. We worked on a lot of projects. I remember working on a project for Kodak at some point. We had all this amazing talent working on printers for Kodak just before Kodak filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Kodak should not have been working on printers at this time.

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Luke Williams: So a lot of people say the execution is what's valuable and the ideas are cheap. Idea skills is the opposite. Execution is the commodity. Ideas are the most valuable assets that you manage. No amount of taking action will help you if you're not heading in the right direction.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: So idea skills is all about how do you find that right direction? How do you pinpoint that right direction? And it's about making these innovation skills accessible to everyone regardless of their background or their personality type, as I said before. So I'm super excited about it. And we've got a lot of online stuff planned, so we're just trying to make it as accessible as possible so you don't have to come through an MBA program at one of the elite business schools.

Dane Groeneveld: And that'll be accessible to leaders, entrepreneurs, individual contributors. Are you thinking that it's a direct- to- consumer, people come in? Or is it only going to go through organizations and their learning management teams?

Luke Williams: It'll be a bit of both.

Dane Groeneveld: A bit of both.

Luke Williams: Most of my work outside the University at the moment is speaking and workshops and training for large organizations.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: But we're definitely planning a direct- to- consumer model, putting online courses out there, and other things that just make it far more accessible.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. That's neat. It actually draws me back to some of my formative experiences in the last few years, starting the podcast, being out, working with founders, exploring new technologies. I've been trying to advise and do some seed investment. And that time's been super powerful for me in my day job, because I'm coming back and I'm seeing just the energy that people with ideas bring and how to have conversations and how to learn from challenges that they're facing or share from my learning. But I think lifting our minds up and thinking, I loved the way you frame it as, it's the idea that's the asset. It's not the person or the process or the code, the line of code that's written. It's the idea and how much can people collectively share those ideas, build on those ideas, grow? That's just really exciting. It's really fun, too.

Luke Williams: Yeah, absolutely. People often say, " Attention is the new oil." I'm more of the opinion that ideas are the new oil. I think ideas are more important than they ever have been before. And we talked a bit about this before, I think we're bad at change. I don't think we are... We are good at technological change, but I think what are often called our social technologies, meaning our institutions, the way we run education, our business models, all these things that involve human affairs don't adapt and change very, very slowly. I often say, " Ideas used to live longer than people."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And so, basically, you could have a 30-year career and not have to change any of your ideas or beliefs about that industry in the entire 30 years. Now, of course, people live a lot longer than ideas, so you're having to change your ideas, your core beliefs around a category or even a career maybe every five years. You throw a global pandemic in there and you're having to change these ideas every week or every month.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Now, where are our tools for helping us change our ideas? We're pretty good at coming up with new ideas, but we're terrible at escaping from old ideas. And I think this is because we always get into an argument and clash. So whenever someone's got a new idea, they've got to criticize the existing idea. And there's always going to be someone who's defending that existing way of operating, so of course, they defend with even more vigor. And we get all this wasted energy on clash and argument.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: I think there's a way of having a much more productive discussion, much more productive dialogue around new ideas versus old ideas. So anyone out there who is trying to introduce a new idea to their team, you have to know it should never be a criticism of the existing idea. And for those who are defending the status quo, you have to know that you need to have conversations around potential new ideas way before your current way of doing things is proven wrong or obsolete.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: Because if you wait for what you're doing to be proven obsolete or wrong, it's going to be far too late to change. Things are just moving too quickly.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I'm glad you brought that up, Luke, because we did talk about that before the show. And normally, I ask people as a final question to land it, " What's your hope for the future of teams in work?" And I think you've just answered it. And just to replay that, tools to help us change our ideas as teams, that's massive. You talked about it with Disney shows earlier. These shows bring the villain. A lot of businesses have often worked off the burning platform, or they've worked off an existential risk or a fear to drive change. But that whole concept of, " Let's be having the ideas. Let's be creating productive discussion around ideas before we need them." That's a great future of teams in my eyes.

Luke Williams: They have to be doing it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Luke Williams: And you have to be doing it on a regular basis. And I'd sum that up by saying, " We need to change the way we change."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. That's a great call to action. Well, so many points that I could summarize today, but I'm not going to nail it. So I would say" ideas are the new oil" is probably that big soundbite and" changing the way we change" as your final call to action is a great one, too. Thank you for joining me today, Luke. It's been a wonderful conversation. If any of our listeners want to find out more about your books, your keynote speaking, idea skills, how do they best find you?

Luke Williams: I often tell people, " Just go to LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn, go to Luke Williams." There's a lot of Luke Williams out there, I'm finding out. Just type in NYU, you'll find me. But that's where I'm mostly sort of communicating with people at the moment. So hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd love to keep in touch.

Dane Groeneveld: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Luke. I appreciate your time.

Luke Williams: Thanks, Dane. Appreciate it.