TLDR;
This story is going to resonate with so many leaders out there:
Once upon a time, you built your career/business on a foundation of expertise and experience. You followed the rules and made sure every plan was perfectly laid out.
But lately, you’ve started to feel stuck.
You’re slowly realizing the old playbook no longer works in a world of constant change.
In this episode, I, Michael Hunter, the host of the Uncommon Leadership Podcast, sit down with innovation expert Keith Hopper to expose a rather uncomfortable truth behind this feeling.
The problem isn’t a lack of experience or a bad plan.
It’s a fundamental confusion between risk—something you can prepare for—and uncertainty—the great unknown that you can’t possibly predict.
Relying on an old-school project plan to handle the unpredictable is a trap.
This trap leaves leaders paralyzed on a leadership teeter-totter.
On one side, they make a massive, blind leap of faith that often leads to spectacular failure.
On the other hand, they are so afraid of making the wrong move that they do nothing, allowing great ideas to die and their teams to stagnate.
But what if there was another way?
In this breakthrough conversation, Keith reveals the key to escaping this cycle.
It’s a low-cost and high-reward way to learn exactly what you need to know—allowing you to move forward one small, intentional step at a time.
Your next breakthrough might just be a small experiment away.
So, it’s time to stop waiting and start discovering.
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Grab a chair. Join the Conversation. Here’s why:
- So that you finally stop confusing risk with uncertainty. Because the former can be managed with a plan, but the latter requires a renewed mindset.
- Learn how to avoid the Teeter-Totter of Leadership. Don’t go all-in blindly, and don’t let the fear of uncertainty stop you from moving at all.
- Understand the true impact of a series of tiny experiments and how it can help you learn and adapt through change.
- The concept of true innovation and how it begins the moment you admit you don’t know the outcome.
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About the Speakers:
Keith Hopper
Founder @Danger Fort Labs | Guest Lecturer @Harvard Business School | Author & Instructor @LinkedIn Learning | LinkedIn Top Voice in Innovation and Discovery
As the founder of Danger Fort Labs, Keith Hopper advises executives and teams on how to drive organizational change and growth. He is also a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School and an author and instructor for LinkedIn Learning, where his course “Business Innovation Foundations” has reached over 80,000 students.
Keith believes the best way to achieve breakthrough solutions is through experimentation and discovery. He helps leaders create work environments that move more quickly and build smarter, happier teams through continuous learning and discovery.
More from Keith Hopper: https://www.dangerfort.com/
Michael Hunter
Founder @Uncommon Change | Interlocutor / Curious Host @UncommonLeadership Interview Series | Author | Change & Innovation Partner
Michael Hunter partners with top tech leadership teams across six continents to create extraordinary cultures. With 35 years of experience at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Tableau, he helps leaders sustain meaningful change. Michael believes that only by integrating mind, heart, body, spirit, and intuition can leaders truly navigate change safely and build a lasting legacy of impact + human-centered leadership.
The best way to connect with Michael Hunter is on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbugreality/
More from Michael Hunter:
https://uncommonteams.com/
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Transcript:
Michael Hunter
Whether you want more innovation, more easily, you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, or you simply know that something isn’t quite the way you know it can be. You are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams, and cultivating the resilience, adaptability, and ease necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving.
I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams, and today we’ll uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead today. Joining me today is Keith Hopper. Keith is the founder and principal of Danger Fort Labs and the creator of a LinkedIn learning course on innovation with 80,000, that’s eight with four zeros learners.
Keith helps leaders integrate exploration, risk taking, and iterative learning into their jobs and lives. His discovery manifesto summarizes some of that process and his other learnings from working with dozens of startups and other companies. His focus is always on creating work environments that move more quickly and create smarter, happier teams.
Welcome, Keith.
Keith Hopper
Thanks, Michael. It’s great to be here.
Michael
I’m so excited for this conversation today. Me too. When did you first recognize that integrating your whole selves, bringing that into everything that you do, might be a valuable approach?
Keith
Yeah, this is interesting ’cause I may have an unorthodox answer to this question, which is that I think I’ve done it backwards, where I feel that in my very earliest days of working, I would bring my whole self, which actually got me in trouble. I don’t think that I did it because I had a sort of higher purpose or desire, demand to be authentic, integrated in a way that I thought was necessary.
It’s simply ’cause I needed to do that to be motivated. I wanted to engage with the things that I was curious about. I wanted to say the things that I was thinking and my ideas that I had, and this is the value that I really wanted to bring. But I found in a traditional workplace, which is where I spent most of my career, this wasn’t always welcomed.
And so I found myself like getting in trouble and going to new jobs, and eventually recognizing that, that the, problem maybe even, though it takes two to tango, the problem wasn’t necessarily with me. It was with the situations that I was in. And, so maybe if to answer your question somewhat indirectly, big moment for me came when I recognized that I not only needed to seek out environments in which I could bring my whole self, but also create environments where I could do this and do it for others.
And that sort of was the big unlock, was recognizing that many other people felt just like me, right? That they wanted to be able to share their thoughts to explore ideas without, without offending others or without getting themselves or their organizations in ‘trouble’ in quotes.
And by creating environments that gave people the permission to do this and to help guide them in how to do this, because it turns out there’s some real difficulties in doing this. Not just in upsetting people, but in threats to our identity and all these things that, that I’ve really found my ability to do what I’ve been trying to do all along.
Michael
I agree that everyone wants to bring their full self into everything that they do and has some sense of dissatisfaction to the extent that they’re not able to do that. And many of us don’t realize that this is in play. And so we try to fix all sorts of other things or switch to a different job or different role, different company, different working hours.
We try to fix all sorts of other things and it’s never quite enough because we aren’t fixing problems that we’re actually experiencing.
Keith
I thought that’s true as well. Yeah. I think, and it begs the question why, what’s going on, and I think there’s so many interesting places to explore there. But in hearing you describe that one of the things that immediately comes to mind is, is something that doesn’t really seem problematic, which is this desire for organizations and for teams in particular to want to get along.
And which may seem strange, but, in organizations where there’s good chemistry and where people are friendly and encouraging, and the work becomes a place that people want to be, this gets protected. This gets celebrated and protected, and we don’t realize that there’s potentially a negative aspect of that, which is that now we walk around without even maybe knowing it with this sort of low grade fear that we’re going to upset somebody or we’re gonna step on their toes, or we’re gonna say something that then we might feel bad about. And so we don’t want to create these conflict situations. And so we, and the norm, the social norm in our organizations is oftentimes built up around this. In fact, people often celebrate, like how well their teams get along. And I’ve actually found this, it can be detrimental because it becomes very difficult to bring yourself to a conversation or to an environment when you have thoughts and opinions, when you want to be able to respond to what other people say in ways that, that on the surface, if people don’t have strong, underlying, norms, and understandings can actually, can actually feel bad, and potentially make somebody else feel bad. And so we end up not being ourselves.
’cause it gets in the way, the idea is off often characterized as psychological safety as you and your listeners are probably aware. But it really comes down to that concern about interpersonal conflict. And, the good, now I’m talking too much a little bit, but the good news is that there’s, when we’re in an environment where we feel okay, because we’ve set up these norms and we’ve modeled the behavior and we’ve done these things that, that permits that sort of whole self to be there, it often looks like conflict, right?
We’re often like challenging one another and throwing out ideas that, that may feel scary. And, and so to a casual observer, this may appear to be, Wow, what’s going on? People have strong opinions and they’re saying lots of things. But the reality is that in those sorts of environments, the individuals who are participating like, don’t feel threatened, don’t feel like your idea is aimed like me personally, and that my contribution isn’t a criticism of others and things like that.
So once we realize that those are, that’s the case, and that we can assume positive intent, for example. We can, it permits those sorts of show showing up in that way. And that way can mean a million things for a million different people. It’s not just about ideas and, that happens to be a place I focus, because organizations really struggle with this.
But it could mean showing up in whatever way is meaningful to you.
Michael
I agree. I find the same. And this is one reason I always talk about there’s a way to bring who you are into what you’re doing in a way that is safe for you and for everyone else. How do you help teams have those conversations and build that culture where everyone feels safe and empowered to bring everything that they are into everything that they do, into every aspect of the workplace?
Keith
Yes. So that’s something I’ve definitely, I definitely think about and I’m still trying to figure out. One place that I’ve found is helpful for starting is to look at what the real risks are, that we either, that are, what’s actually going on that we may not always fully recognize and acknowledge, right?
So there’s this aspect of interpersonal conflict. And like I said, it’s oftentimes unspoken. We have this wonderful team, we all get along, we go out after work together. And, which by the way is all great stuff. I’m not trying to suggest that we shouldn’t be that way.
But I’m just saying when we, when we overvalue that we, it can get in the way of these other things. And typically in that environment, so I’m gonna answer it for that, and then I’m gonna shift over to a different kind of risk. But, in that environment, there’s three things that I’ve seen work.
Basically, it comes down to the behavior of the individuals on the team. It works really well when the team is small and everybody knows each other. It gets much more difficult when you try to do it at a organization level or even at a leadership level. We often look to leaders and say, Oh, the leaders aren’t saying the right thing, so they’re not setting up an environment that lets this happen.
But it turns out, in all my interactions with executives, it turns out the executives have a lot less power to change than we might think. They don’t wanna ride roughshod over if they’re good leaders. They don’t want to ride roughshod over their leadership team.
So they can’t make people do stuff. And oftentimes, these things, particularly when they’re emotional and cultural, you can’t wave a wand and create these sorts of changes. I do think they play an important role, oftentimes, what I’ll be saying in a minute, I think it’ll be clear what, role I think they can play. But the three things that can happen on a team are based on three behaviors. One is modeling. So we show up and what do we actually do. And then when people see us do these things, they, we implicitly give permission for others to do the same.
The second thing is to, encourage or enable. We have to send signals very specifically that we want a particular kind of behavior. So we have to invite it and then, and then, celebrate. So when we see the behavior, we need to highlight it and say, Ah, that’s it. That’s great. And so to give a concrete example, that relates to the kind of work that I do, around discovery and experimentation on teams, is being able to say, so the first one, modeling behavior, being able to say, I don’t know. Which seems pretty straightforward, but our workplaces are built around having expertise and confidence and a level of certainty and predictability in our actions, and being smart is often perceived, sometimes implicitly, or having the answer is often perceived implicitly as a sign of strength.
So it can be difficult to say, I don’t know. So just being able to do that, makes it okay for other people to say, I don’t know. That’s the modeling component. And when you’re dealing with uncertainty, let’s face it, like that’s the definition of uncertainty is that we don’t know. And so to be able to actually say that and talk about it and make it part of our work and our dialogue is critical.
So the modeling is the first part. The making space for it, like permitting it and inviting it, oftentimes look, looks like something like, I need help. Again, something that our workplace is don’t always encourage us to do. But that’s the reality, right? If I don’t have the answer, maybe somebody else does or maybe they’ve got ideas.
And having a diversity of thought and perspective in trying to solve difficult, thorny, and uncertain problems is absolutely critical. So to be on a team and recognize that you’re reliant and on others, and that we need each other’s opinions and challenges and ideas, which are the very things that I’ve mentioned earlier can get us in trouble, right?
’cause we get scared of sharing them or we get scared of hearing them. We need to invite it. We need to specifically say, I need help. I need your ideas. Maybe this is very specifically what I need. And we need to obviously be genuine about that. And being genuine about it is where the third part comes in, which is around celebrating.
Which is when somebody does it, when somebody says something like maybe that in another context, might cause us to go, whoa. If they say, yeah, I think we’re making a mistake in doing X, for example. I think we’re spending too much time in meetings.
We’re having too many meetings. And now if I’m the one that like, that calls all the meetings, that I may be threatened by that, right? It might be like, oh my gosh, they’re like threatening my leadership. But in that situation, to be able to say to that person, I’m really glad you brought that up. It’s not something maybe we talk about enough.
So let’s talk about it more. Why do you think, we have too many meetings? Explain to me, like gimme examples. I want, I wanna understand where you’re coming from. And so, we’ve just done the third thing where we’ve celebrated somebody doing it. So now somebody feels oh, they didn’t get upset, great!
Maybe then others see that, right? And others go, Ooh, maybe I can do that too. And then we go back to the it, I mean it was a sneaky little move, right? Where I reintroduced that middle one around the invitation again. I went back to that one, which would said, tell me more. I wanna know more.
I’m actually curious. And yet, being genuine about it. And, in a weird way, it’s as easy as I’m saying, and it’s quite, quite magical. I have a set of cards that I use to help teams practice these things. As I say it, everybody’s probably listening and going, yeah, I get that. But it’s funny, we forget, right? Or it’s just a tiny bit hard, right? It’s tiny bit hard to say, I don’t know. Not impossible. We can all do it, but it’s just a tiny bit hard. So to be reminded, it can be really helpful. So I use these cards and, they have all sorts of different things around these three behaviors, all sorts of different ways.
And it tends to do with like experimentation and exploration and idea sharing. And, many, if not all of these ideas are familiar. For example, I have practice not knowing, right? What does it look like to show up and not know? We use these cards, you might take a random subset of them, and then, we go through a meeting and everybody tries to practice one or two of them, maybe without even saying explicitly that they’re doing that.
And then at the end of the meeting, we go, how is this meeting different? And it’s amazing, like in a single meeting, you can actually change the tenor of the conversation, in a way that can, feel quite liberating. And now it, it takes some repeated practice and reminding, and that’s why there are these behaviors, right?
The mistake that people make is they put a sign up on the wall of the office that says, create psychologically safe teams or whatever. Or it’s the first slide in our workshop deck, that basically says, Okay, here are the norms, these are the things we’re gonna do.
But putting it on a sign or on a slide doesn’t change behavior. Like we actually have to do these three things. And, like I said, they’re, not that hard. And, I have yet to meet anybody who looks at the cards and go and has been like, what? This is nuts, right?
Everybody goes, oh yeah, like these, I get it, but also everybody goes and I forget to do it. Or I don’t realize the impact of not doing it. So I’ll pause for a minute, but that’s all this stuff on kind of the interpersonal risk taking side of things.
Michael
A fourth key that is maybe implicit in everything that you’re saying, and I will make explicit, is giving people the space to practice this and to create those outcomes that are different from what we want.
Because as you say it, we rarely are perfect or even remember to do this much more than very infrequently when we’re just starting out. It’s like when you go to a driver’s education class, you learn how to drive a car and it’s all really simple, there’s gas, there’s brake. If you have a manual, there’s a clutch of the gear shift, that’s really all you need to drive the car.
If you wanna get a little more advanced and there’s turn signals and windshield wipers and horn and headlights, it’s still less than 10 different things. And yet when you go sit in a car, we’re not a perfect driver that first time, or probably the second or third or 10th, it takes practice. We have to have space to have those herky jerky stops and gear shifts to indicate a right turn when we in a left turn or turn on windshield when we into a turn signal and going backwards and we meant to go forwards ’cause we didn’t get the gear quite right. It takes practice and if our parent or the driver’s ed teacher or best friend is in that passenger seat with us making very clear all the things that we’re doing wrong, it’s gonna take way longer and we’re gonna be way less able to experiment and get to that point where we can be a confident, facile driver.
Keith
Yeah. there’s two things that can I highlight a couple things in there? You said that earlier, right? Please. First of all, I think that driving analogy is great because let’s be honest, driving is high stakes, right? There’s certain things we could do wrong, that’s no big deal. I turned on my windshield wipers instead of my blinker.
But there’s other things obviously that would be really bad. And to some extent, our workplaces are similar somewhat, but it’s also important to recognize they’re not right. No one’s gonna die if you probably There’s certain workplaces, obviously, and we wanna acknowledge that, right?
if I’m doing brain surgery or I’m flying a plane, like there’s some things that, that, or I’m, or maybe I’m driving somebody else for a living, right? I’m an Uber driver. But for the most part, a lot of what we do like around impersonal conflict, no one’s gonna die, right? And so that’s, I think, interesting, the two things I wanted to mention, one is around, is around performative culture. And we maybe don’t even fully acknowledge this, but our workplaces are, are evaluating our performance constantly. Even if it’s not done explicitly, like, where people aren’t like literally giving us, like ratings after a presentation, which in some employment situations actually happens. But for the most part, we may not even realize that we’re constantly thinking about how we’re being judged or how we’re being evaluated. Did Keith have the answer? Is he showing up consistently? How did he do in the meeting? Did he speak up or did he not speak up or speak too much?
What are the results of the work? Has he been busy? It’s, oh, is he interacting with me? Is he interacting with my peers? What do his employees think of him? What are his bosses think? Like it’s constant. And, we almost don’t recognize that, that we live in this performative culture where we’re always on and we’re always being evaluated.
And how do you learn right? To your point around driving and in the early days of driving when you’re always on. And the analogy I like to give here is one of our professional athlete, and I’m talking like, even not just good athletes, but I mean like the best in the world, Olympic athletes, that the, the way they get, I think this is so obvious, but it needs to be stated.
The way they get better is not by performing all the time. In fact, their performances, they’re, when they’re actually, competing or, doing the sport, doing time, trials, whatever, like that is actually quite rare. The vast majority of time when they’re developing as athlete is spend in deliberate practice, which is the word we haven’t said yet, but, is the important word, right?
How do we learn and grow and develop when we have no space for practice? And practice means, and you can ask any athlete, they will tell you. It means trying things that they don’t yet know how to do. And we’ve seen the videos on TikTok or whatever of the people doing back flips into foam pits.
They don’t just magically get on the skateboard ramp or the snowboard ramp or whatever and do those like crazy things, like they practice and figure it out, and push themselves and do play with the windshield wipers and the things, having no idea what they do, in order to figure out how to do this stuff.
And I think that’s one of the great sort of crimes of the workplace is that we don’t have space to use your words, I think, to really practice, and do it in a way that it’s okay to flip the windshield wipers when we meant to flip the blinker. And the second point I wanted to make was around your example of the person in the passenger seat criticizing the person driving, which is a form of performative culture, right?
And taking away the space to practice. And there’s a great story, my friend Dan Coleman, who’s an amazing, designer and educator, he tells me about, a writing course that he provided for grade schoolers many years ago, maybe third, fourth grade. So when you’re really starting to get your wings around writing, that in most of those contexts, still today, in most schools, what happens is you write your first few sentences or whatever, as part of an assignment, you give it to a teacher, and your teacher, looks at it and corrects, takes out the red pen and corrects all the things that you didn’t do right?
Maybe gives you a grade and then hands it back to you. And so your very first experience trying something that’s brand new, is one where you screwed up and all the things that you’ve screwed up. And so how are you gonna feel about that, right? You’re gonna be like, I did this thing and it felt bad, so am I gonna do it again?
I’m gonna do it again if I’m gonna be made to feel even worse if I don’t do it. But it now is not something I’m gonna approach with curiosity and excitement. It’s gonna be something I approach with hesitation and trepidation ’cause someone’s gonna poop on me.
And so he developed this program where students would write very small stories, 1, 2, 3 sentences long. And they would submit them to the teacher, and the teacher would do something totally different. What the teacher recog or what Dan recognized in this circumstance and his collaborators recognized that what we need to do, what’s our goal in this context?
And they’re recognized for somebody trying something where there was uncertainty where they were probably not gonna get it right and they were developing. What we needed to do is help them connect with the part of that activity that is rewarding because if they’re gonna continue down this trajectory, they’re going to be able to enjoy those benefits.
But only if we help them see that. And in the case of writing, they said, one of those things, one of the reasons that writers write, and many of them who are teaching this program were writers, so they’d understood this, was being able to connect with your readers. Sounds obvious, but it’s actually a really interesting benefit because as we write, we think about connecting with our readers.
And, by connecting, I mean maybe sharing an experience or understanding where the reader’s coming from or helping them see the world in a different way, or telling ’em a story that connects with their heart. And so we begin to anticipate that when we write and we feel excited about that. We enjoy the sort of emotional and cognitive benefits of connecting maybe after the fact when somebody has read something.
But when you’re first writing, you have no idea that this is the case. And so what he decided to do was focus on that. And so there’s a story of, he just gave me one example where, a girl, maybe third grade wrote, I went out in the rain, I stepped in a puddle and my shoes got soaking wet.
And that was the story handed into the teacher. Spelling was horrible. Handwriting was horrible. Punctuation was horrible. He didn’t do, he didn’t touch any of that stuff. He just wrote on the page. I hate when that happens. That’s all he said. I hate when that happens. And get, and gave it back to student.
Guess what happened? The student went, that happens to my teacher too? Oh my goodness. Like I just connected. Now I understand that tiny little bit of feeling of what it feels like to connect with a reader, and now she wants to write more. She’s like, Oh, what else can I connect? Can I connect with? And might not even be thinking about connection and all these sort of cognitive thing layers that we put on top of writing.
We just know we wanna give people that experience. And to tie it back to the workplace, this is something that, that I am, I leverage, as aggressively as I can around helping people, run tiny experiments because, when it’s time to, to step into uncertainty, we have to try things in order to learn.
We can’t just do research or, maybe ask people. We actually have to try stuff. And that’s scary because what if it doesn’t work? We fail in front of our peers. We may threaten our own credibility, the credibility of our companies. We may feel bad about ourselves, like all these, like potential negative aspects of taking these kinds of risks.
And so what’s really important for me to do is help people connect with the benefits of taking risks and do it in the same way that Dan did with his students. And this doesn’t mean the people I worked with are three year olds. I think we could all recognize that we all are taking risks and doing things that might scare us and are trying new things for the first time.
And it’s really critical that we create that space for, for failing safely. Doing our back flips into the foam pit, but also for connecting with the joy and with the elements of the thing that we’re trying and realizing firsthand what the benefits are. When you’re asking to do something, when I’m asking somebody to do something scary, I can tell them what the benefits are.
Oh, if you do this experiment, you’ll learn something really important that you didn’t previously know. And then you can use that learning like to make sure that whatever it is you wanna do will actually work and will be better. And we’re gonna construct this in a way that it’s not so bad. Like I can tell ’em all these things and they’ll smile, they’ll nod, but then they won’t do it.
And so I’ve learned that I have to get people to experience this firsthand. And it’s why that, it’s one of the key reasons, the word tiny is in there, because you have to make it so they’ll actually do it. And so, just to tie the bow on this and bring it all around, right? There’s these risks that are associated and these things that keep us from either being ourselves or trying new things in the workplace and being able to provide spaces that permit failures, which we can just call learning.
And that don’t immediately bring out the red pen, but that figure out how we can encourage, and help people get an understanding an internal recognition of the benefits, not me telling them, but them experiencing it and integrating that into their own worldview on their own. Those are the critical steps to getting people to change and embrace these ideas.
Michael
One way to summarize all of those ideas and experiences is we’re you’re talking about leader turning from a task, my words are escaping. From someone who’s judging the outcome of a task to someone who is encouraging curiosity and experimentation because in really everything that we as humans do, everything we’re doing is something we’ve never done before. Even if I am a someone who is taking an off-the-shelf software and installing it into a particular organization in a way that I’ve done a thousand times before, I haven’t done it for this organization. And even if I have done it for this organization, I haven’t done it at this organization in this point in time.
So even if I had happened to have done this a week ago and now I’m doing it all over again, for some reason it’s a week later. People are different. I’m different. The machines we’re installing on are a week older. The weather outside is different. Everything is different. And so we’ve never done exactly this before, which means we can never actually know what outcomes are going to be.
One of the reasons I talk so much about making everything a tiny experiment is because this helps us remember that we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We have some guesses, we may have some hopes, and all we can do is perform the experiment and then observe the outcome, and then discover what we learned from that and use that to decide what experiment to run next.
Keith
I obviously agree. What you’re getting at is this idea I often talk about the difference between risk and uncertainty. Where, and I’ll probably be corrected either now or soon about the exact definitions, but the way that, that I often see it as risk is something that we can predict.
And there’s a certain chance that it’s going to happen and there’s things that we can do to mitigate or avoid, or reduce or whatever, the chance of that thing happening. But in uncertainty, we actually don’t know. And like we, it’s not that there’s this thing that could happen, and we know what it is and there’s a cha we know what the chance is.
It’s like we actually don’t even know the thing that could happen. And I think they’re different and we conflate them. For example, the example I often use is project planning. Project plans are actually a way to reduce risk and we don’t often think about them this way, but the people, including myself, who really spend a lot of time and get a lot of energy from doing planning, it often becomes, is because we’re actually, we see, we’ve developed it as a tool and we recognize it maybe intuitively as a tool that helps us reduce and avoid risk. Because what we try to do is we try to anticipate every possible outcome, we look at all the dependencies, we try to identify like all the different roles and all the different tasks.
And by doing that, by going deeply into those things, we develop increasing sense of confidence and control over the situation. But guess what? That only works when we know what all the potential outcomes are, right? When we know that Hey, this thing could be late, or Jane could be sick or on the project, which could delay, or here’s some of the skills that maybe we don’t have and so we can break out all those pieces, but how do you do a project plan for something that, that you literally don’t know what could happen?
Particularly when you’re in a highly uncertain environment and, I like your example that there’s uncertainty everywhere and in everything, but I think it’s also important to recognize there’s some things that are, that have a lot more uncertainty than others. For example, like introducing a new, a bold new initiative, like we want to do this brand new thing, which is oftentimes what companies bring me in to help them navigate.
Like they want to do something, they want to introduce new product or service, or they wanna launch a big new initiative, or they want to try something and they just inherently recognize that there’s a ton of uncertainty associated with it. And I’ve done like, worked on all sorts of stuff, like everything from, an organization trying to figure out how to navigate changing, a coming back to work or a hybrid work environment, right?
It doesn’t really feel like a big innovation, but they recognize that there’s, they have no idea what the right way to do it is. And they recognize this potentially rife with problems because they have employees who feel differently and people maybe aren’t voicing their thoughts, and everybody might have different opinions.
And so like, how do you do that? How do you navigate that space in a way that’s authentic and gets you to a good place? There’s a lot of, there might be some predictable risks in there, but there’s just mostly just large chunks of uncertainty. And so being able to recognize the difference and recognize that things like project planning aren’t going to help you.
And, there’s also, there’s a number of pitfalls. Project planning is one sort of concrete example. I sometimes talk about it as a teeter totter. And that people typically fall on one side of the teeter totter or the other when they’re facing these sort of highly uncertain situations.
One is they take a ‘damn the torpedoes’ approach, which is, Look like we have to move. Like we can’t sit around and debate something. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, but we shouldn’t let that stop us. We should go and we should do our, we should take our best guess and we should go for it.
And oftentimes, that isn’t, it might seem in some ways to be a good strategy. Let’s not let us hold us back. Oftentimes it tips way over onto the side where particularly when it gets pent up, an organization like wants to do something, wants to do something, hesitates, and then one day that some leader pounds their hand on the table and says, Gosh darn it, damn the torpedoes, we’re just gonna do this project.
And they throw $20 million into it. They spent 18 months building something out only to somewhere in there, inevitably face one of the uncertainties that you’re talking about. And then they realize, oh crap. Like we didn’t, we didn’t think this through. We, this is, there were untested assumptions.
We really should have come up with a mechanism for figuring out like whether what we were doing that was the right thing to do. And then the opposite side of the teeter-totter is the one that I focused actually more on, because it’s hidden, which is the one I talk about all the great ideas that die in the shower, right?
So it’s all the things that the organization, particularly in an individual level, might be seeing and might want to do, and might have ideas to do, but because they recognize the inherent uncertainty in pursuing these things or there’s inherent risk in, interpersonal risk, in even mentioning them to each other, they never get mentioned. And so it’s the hidden cost of this where, and this is actually how I feel most workplaces function, where people just walk around and don’t rock the boat. Let’s just keep the trains running on time. And, and so we miss this massive opportunity to express ourselves around the things that we’re curious about or we’re concerned about, or that we have ideas for changing and doing.
And so we don’t do anything, and there’s a number of ways we navigate that space. We might launch into sort of big research projects, we may try to get consensus around an idea because if we all agree and it doesn’t work, then it’s not my fault, right? Or we debate, we might even have an environment which we, can debate.
Debating without evidence is just debating, and keeps us from moving forward. And so this is where I spend this time, is trying to push people to the middle of this teeter-totter. How do we make progress on ideas, by learning. How do we use those environments to, by using things like tiny experiments or other discovery efforts, that help us learn as we go, and help us make sure that we’re pointed in the right direction and that we, we’re constantly embracing this idea of learning by trying and, we’re doing it in a way that’s safe and small and iterative and builds on itself and so on.
Things that you’ve talked about before on this program.
Michael
And there’s always a way, if an experiment feels too big to make, there’s always a way to make it smaller so that we can get to the point where everyone, wherever on a teeter-totter they are feels okay enough with the risk and reward of what we’re probably gonna learn versus what Michael catastrophically wrong, that it’s not gonna be a big deal, whatever happens. And we’re yes, we’re all on board with running this experiment and discovering what happens.
Keith
Yeah, what’s interesting about that, and maybe a little bit nefarious, is that isn’t necessarily our instinct. Our instinct oftentimes is to make the experiment actually really big.
Which for the kinda the reasons I was talking about a minute ago is, we actually don’t want this thing to fail. Maybe it’s an idea we care about. And so we end up designing this elaborate thing that, that, oh, we don’t wanna put something out in front of customers, for example, that, that they’re not gonna like. So let’s spend a long time like trying to polish it and make it so it could, they couldn’t possibly disagree with it.
So in a weird way, like we’re our own worst enemy when it comes to some of this stuff. And to be able to make it smaller is a bit of. It’s a bit of an art form. But again, it goes back to the, if you can give people a positive experience going through a tiny experiment, then they can go, Ah, I see, if I try something, maybe before I fall in love with it, then it’s okay if it doesn’t work out right, just the exact way that I thought, which by the way, it almost never does. And that, and then I’m open to learning from it as well. I see these things coming in and I’m not like ignoring them, and I, confirmation bias isn’t leaking in all over the place where I’m only seeing what it is I wanna see. I’m very open to like, when something goes sideways, I go, Oh, wow, look at that. Look at what just happened. I had no idea that’s what my customer was thinking, or whatever.
Yeah. So you also hinted at this thing of when we make it smaller, there’s always something that, there’s always a way to make it smaller. One of the ways that, that, I like to think about this. There’s this term called affordable loss, which I love, which is being able to say what is it that we’re okay with going wrong?
And that we actually acknowledge it and recognize it ahead of time. There’s something kind of magical that happens when you do that. And we start recognizing that there’s so many things that we could do where we’d never bothered to actually look at what, the affordable loss is. What are we willing to let go sideways or to not work?
And sometimes that affordable loss is a physical cost. Sometimes it’s a cost of time, and sometimes it’s an emotional cost. Like we have to recognize that, are we okay if this doesn’t go well? Like, how are we gonna feel about ourselves and about the work? And so to be able to recognize that, it’s funny ’cause not only is it helpful in designing the right size experiment, it also makes us realize there’s so many things that we go through in the day that we overestimate the cost of running it.
We just, in the back of our heads we’re like, Oh, if it doesn’t work, let’s not try it. But there’s so many places where that’s not true. So one of the examples I give, I like to give is, Neil deGrasse Tyson tells this wonderful story about, when as a parent, he leaves his toddler in the room with a new purchase for just a few seconds or maybe a minute, and then comes back in the room and sees, and the purchase was a bouquet of flowers that the child has systematically pulled all the petals off of the, off of the flower or the flowers and made a huge, and they like just bought it.
And obviously the temptation is gonna be like, Johnny, don’t do that. But, if you do a quick assessment of the affordable loss of the situation, like we’re gonna recognize two things. One is the $10 that we spent for the bouquet more than paid for itself in this sort of botanical investigations of the toddler, right?
They played with this thing, they were curious, they took it apart to see how it worked, and they probably got smells and pollen on their hands. There’s all sorts of stuff that came from the experience. In hindsight, it’s easy to look at that situation and be like, that was $10 well spent.
It isn’t really a big cost. And then the second thing we realize is that if we did, or if we had said, Johnny, don’t do that, then we have just introduced a significantly bigger cost. The cost of telling that person, just like being a passenger seat in, in somebody learning to drive, telling that person that what they’ve just done is bad and are they gonna, what about the next time they want to do a botanical experiment, what are they gonna think? I’m gonna get yelled at, right?
I’m gonna, I’m gonna have done something wrong and we’re gonna be cheating our child from a world of curiosity and exploration. And that seems like a much more significant cost. So I like that the story for those two reasons, right? One is we overestimate the cost of situations like that, of trying small experiments because it just feels oh, what if it goes wrong?
So what? Like most times it doesn’t matter at all. And then the flip side is sometimes we miss costs of stopping experiments from happening. We don’t recognize the opportunity cost associated with, maintaining the status quo or of trying to keep things in control.
Michael
This reminds me that when we’re searching for ways to make an experiment smaller, it’s not necessarily the physical or conceptual size that we’re searching for a way to shrink, isn’t the only option. For example, if we want a way to get, if we have a new product idea, if we want a way to, we wanna get feedback from real life customers early, we could put together a full product. As we were saying earlier, we could put together a very basic MVP thing that everyone talks about these days, that does one thing happy path all the way through none of the edge cases or even the can’t even cancel dialogues.
We could also go to the customers with a pile of stickies, or note cards, and on the fly, draw out the UI and explain to them what’s going on and say, okay, what do we do next? Say, I’d push that button. Okay, so if you click that button, here’s what happens. And then draw a new UI on a new sticky or have a prototype of the like window that we’re dragging sticky based buttons and widgets out onto and moving around and things.
A super low cost way, we can get on the fly feedback, follow the customer wherever they’re going that doesn’t involve doing any development work.
And there’s always I find alternatives to what we think is the lowest cost way of doing something that will be even more lower cost and get us even faster to the information we really want to know if we can take a step back and really examine what is the outcome we really are trying to get out of this. It’s not that we wanna know what products build, it’s not that we want to know, is the widget or that widget better In this context, it’s how is the, what is the customer really trying to accomplish, or what is the customer’s concept of how this program works or the tasks that they’re trying to do works or, what their experience in this environment is.
If we can get out the way of the outcomes that we think we’re going after and understand what the outcome, we’re really going after it. And oftentimes that leads us to not just as little outcomes in the moment, but bigger outcomes that are much more impactful, is pretty more surprising and unexpected from what we originally thought.
That then is these are where the big innovations and the concepts, the products that take the world by storm come from because they’re solving problems that people actually have, that they didn’t realize.
Keith
Yeah. There’s so much, there’s so much in there that I get excited about. I almost don’t know where to start. Yes, the notion of designing experiments that, that don’t just look like a shrinking of a product, but look like maybe a completely different way of interacting with our users and customers is, is such a great and rich, fertile ground for people to play.
You mentioned at the top, that a course that I have on LinkedIn, that I encourage people to check out and maybe we can talk about that later, how I can help people do that. But I go specifically into this, and help people because we don’t walk around doing this stuff all the time, we don’t have examples to tap, we don’t have like frameworks or ways of thinking about, of running these things.
I call one approach the purpose driven prototype, which is that if we know what we’re curious about, we can actually design an interaction that helps delve into that curiosity. And if we only look at ways of taking the product and creating different manifestations of the product, like on note cards or on a prototype or on a full scale application, like we’re actually limiting ourselves because really we’re trying to get answers to questions. We’re not trying to showcase how our product might manifest or showcase how our product works. That certainly can help us learn, but there’s all these other ways that can help us learn.
Lemme give a quick example, so I’m not speaking just in abstracts. We had a product that I worked on, which was to help people do during their yearly enrollment process. Most people get their benefits from work. There’s this yearly thing that happens in October, November where we have to sign up for benefits every year.
And there’s a deadline. And, so this organization I was working with was trying to make that process easier. And one critical part of their solution, was this idea of greatly simplifying the experience because they had actually done some other tests where they talked to people and watch them go through the enrollment process and learn that people, this is one of those like breakthrough learnings you mentioned. They learned that people hit what we came to call speed bumps, where they would hit something as in their enrollment process that they didn’t understand. What’s an out-of-pocket maximum? I don’t know what that is or what’s like what, when they say premium, do those change and what is that and is that all I’m paying?
And so people have these questions and I dunno about you, but I have these, as the words are coming outta my mouth. I don’t have the answers to those. It’s just confusing. And so they were like, it seems unnecessarily confusing. What if we just simplified these things for people and made that a critical part of our experience that we offer to them.
Such a core good idea. Such a core part of the solution. But the way that they wanted to do that, to run this test is to design this like workflow, right? Where you go in this, you log in and then you get to go through this part and then you’re presented with the products and you’re given these like different choice architectures and then da-da-da-da. And they were gonna mock it all up and they were, like, no, we won’t build it. We’re just gonna build this whole thread. And I said, How long that’s gonna take? It’ll take us a week or two to build it, and then we’re gonna schedule users a month, six weeks, whatever.
And I was like, what if we just took two pieces of paper and wrote three descriptions of three insurance products on one, using the language that’s provided to us by the insurance providers, and then we wrote the same three products, but in the language that we think it was really what we’re talking about might be simpler, more direct, and then ask people to pick an insurance product using one piece of paper, and then ask them to pick one using the other piece of paper. We designed it in an hour. We ran it by the end of the day and we had our answer. And so the nice thing about that is it’s a not really, it gets at this key question we have without us not only having to build, but without us even thinking about the solution really, it’s a component, sure, but it’s a component we’re very curious about, but it’s a way of plucking that out of the bigger experience and, focusing just on that bit.
Michael
This is all circling around and hinting at something I’d like to make explicit, which is what is the business value of doing all this squishy people culture building work?
Keith
Yeah, I know you’re right, and that we’ve been circling about around it, but probably the biggest and most obvious was when I was trying to talk a little bit about uncertainty, and you mentioned that there’s uncertainty in everything, even the predictable things that we did yesterday and we’re doing again today.
I think it’s not a stretch to suggest that we’re moving in a direction in our lives and in our work of increasing uncertainty, where things are changing very quickly and where organizations can’t rely on what worked for us in the past. We have to be constantly trying to figure out how to better serve our markets and how to better work together and all these things, or organizations are gonna design themselves into obsolescence very quickly because somebody else is gonna come along and do it easier, faster, cheaper, or with AI or whatever.
And so to be able to, be able to understand that and understand that the tools that we have for navigating uncertainty in a traditional environment are not serving us particularly well. The ability to do that is gonna, is simply the difference between our organization surviving and thriving, and then, also individually, I think it’s actually, certainly there’s the same component, right? There’s the, just take AI, setting aside a lot of potential concerns and upsides and downsides, I would argue that being able to understand it and be able to talk about it and understand its, pros and cons and, how it may fit into your work and your industry.
is it an important thing? And to be able to figure that out and navigate and experiment with it, is going, is something that’s gonna potentially like set, not maybe not everybody and not every circumstance, but is potentially gonna set us up.
But the opposite, right, of resisting it or avoiding it or not, like approaching it with curiosity is gonna potentially get us in trouble.
So there’s some very practical things, right? Like the world’s moving, not just in our companies, but in our careers and in our lives. What are the things that, bring us meaning and that we wanna pursue? Those things also have uncertainties associated with them. In fact, maybe even scarier uncertainties because the idea of confronting things that are central to our identity as human beings and our passions that we care about confronting those sometimes are the most scary propositions of all, right?
Because then what happens if it doesn’t work and, all this? But also to us, where we started the conversation the very beginning where, what happens to us emotionally, to be able to bring ourselves to our lives and to our work and to our families, it is pretty important.
And, we live lives of quiet desperation when we can’t do that. And we might not even be recognizing that we’re living those lives because, ’cause we’re following, invisible lines painted on the road and invisible guardrails. Or maybe they’re not invisible, but maybe we don’t talk about them.
And we just presume that we should be driving on this road and following this path and forget that maybe there are other options. And so I think just for personal fulfillment, for learning, and growth and for many aspects of, I’m thinking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or everything from the most practical basic, like, how are we gonna make sure that we continue to make a living and that we can be contributors to society and that we can feel valued and that we can actually solve very specific problems and help our family.
Like those things like, like we need experimentation and exploration and discovery to figure out when the world’s moving quickly, but then all the way up to the very top, like, how do we feel about ourselves? One of the things I like to talk about is this idea of evaluating ourselves based on our expertise versus evaluating ourselves on our ability to figure things out.
And so evaluating our expertise means if we step into an area that we don’t know, we’re gonna feel threatened. If we fail all of a sudden. And if we evaluate ourselves and our expertise, that means we’re no good. Like we’re not capable. Maybe I shouldn’t do this. I’m gonna feel horrible. So I kind of stick to the things that, that I know how to do, which are potentially becoming increasingly irrelevant.
And then there’s this idea of, what if we didn’t evaluate ourselves? Just not on a new level of it. I figured out AI, now I’m gonna evaluate myself on my ability to understand AI. But instead of that, we go, no, let’s stop evaluating ourselves and expertise and let’s start evaluating ourselves, if at all, but, we probably can’t help it. But on our ability to, to do this sort of discovery work, to get answers, to learn and adapt and grow, to be able to figure things out when there’s uncertainty, like to have a way of looking at the world and a set of tools that allows us to move through these things where we don’t know.
There is actually, that’s what I do, is help people figure out how to think and work differently in these spaces. So I know it’s totally learnable, and, if we can develop confidence in an identity around that, around being somebody who can figure stuff out, not somebody who’s existing skills now feel threatened. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be in a place where I have a much healthier relationship with my work and myself and others, and I can achieve things I would argue that are way more significant to what’s important to me. It doesn’t have to be like fame or whatever, right?
It be lots of different things. But it’s important to me, I can actually do those things. Whereas in the former situation, I’m trapped in the things that I already can do. And I think that difference, like at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that difference is profound. And I think, is absolutely critical for us functioning as individuals and as communities and as workplaces like to have that ability is a game changer.
That was a very long answer, but it’s important to me. So, I think about it a lot.
Michael
Yes. If I could contract your fabulously detailed answer into a very few amount of words, it’s that the more we’re able to bring everything that we are into everything that we do, and the less that we are in it, spending our energy, fitting ourselves into a little box that chafes and burns and is super, super onerous, the more energy we have to put toward to developing the creative solutions that are going to help create all the outcomes that the businesses there to create. And the more we can bring everything we are into everything that we’re doing at work, the more likely we’re gonna want to stay there and continue helping this business create those outcomes rather than defecting off to some other business that we hope will be a better fit with who we are or allow us to do that.
Keith
Yeah, that’s right. I’ve definitely experienced this. I have a program that I designed with the Nature Conservancy and that, we both agreed that we can talk about this like publicly, but basically it, was, it’s exactly that. It was, it’s designed to help people in their individual jobs, explore these very ideas like how do I integrate, trying ideas and learning from trying an iterative experimentation like into my day-to-day work.
So we focused on the very granular, and we had people essentially design and run their own sort of micro experiments within their day-to-day work. And we did this as a longitudinal program. So it went over several weeks. It was a very small part. So they didn’t pull them outta their day job.
And it was really integrated. and we took, we drank our own champagne or whatever where we, we ran the course iteratively and we set up all these measures and I think we ran it six times over the course of about a year and a half continuing to revamp and improve. And in a couple places, overhaul and landed in a place where we were aiming to do exactly what you were describing was changing the experience of individuals in an existing organization of what it means to do my job and change it so that people can bring their own, their own authentic selves, their own questions and curiosity, their own ideas about what’s possible.
Their own ways of solving problems, their own ways of working with people differently that were more encouraging and more rewarding. Then we measured those things, and found significant modifications in people’s, in people’s interest in their jobs, in the meaning and purpose it brought to their work.
And in the change that they were able to bring about. Some cases, pretty massive. These things we were doing were same, but being so small that they would, as we talked about earlier, like that people would kinda just go through the experience of like within a couple weeks tops, of them changing some tiny little thing.
It was oftentimes like, Oh, I’m just gonna bring this different thing to a meeting or whatever. In what we found in some cases, not only in almost all cases did people significantly change the way that they looked at their work, but in some cases, there was significant impacts to the business. And this was in a, in an environment where we weren’t trying to get impact to the business, we were just trying to get people to experience the benefits so that then they could carry it forward and have an impact to the business.
But even in this context, we had significant changes. One of my favorite stories, if you’ll entertain me, I just, because I love this one, is, of how it really changed somebody’s work and perspective, was so we ran it for everybody in the organization, that wanted to, so we got, we have the, actually the director of the whole organization, and all sorts of different folks.
So one person was, was an executive assistant and we were brainstorming together. ’cause the coaching was sort of part of this program. What is it that, that she’s curious about maybe, that she wanted to try or that, she wanted to learn as part of her job? And she sort of, there’s something had just just happened to her and so she blurted out and she was like, significant part of my job, like maybe 40% of my job is going to all these different meetings and being present in these meetings and taking notes so that they ensure that, that they have them and that people can come back to those and help make sure the projects move forward and make sure the important things were captured.
And she’s so this is part of what I do. And what recently happened to me is it was a really important meeting and I wrote up very detailed notes and I posted a link and sent it out to everybody. And, weeks later, I decided I needed to go back and check like an action item from there. So I went back to the email and I clicked on the link and the link was broken.
I had sent the wrong link, and it had been sitting there for three weeks and nobody ever said anything. And it dawned on her that nobody had probably ever looked at her notes for any of her meetings. And she was horrified by this. And so we designed a tiny experiment. And this was in the very early days of meeting transcription services.
Like nowadays, there’s a lot of ’em out there, zoom and Otter and all this stuff. This was in the relatively early days, so they weren’t very commonplace. And so she, but, together we discussed them and we, she was aware and she, the simple test was to approach, it wasn’t even implementing a transcription service, it was just approaching some of the executives that she worked with and posing this option and trying to recognize like what was important to them about her taking notes so that she could get a better understanding of the goal and could see whether or not a solution like this was even possible.
She did that in a couple days. She just went around and talked to a few people. She got the green light because she recognized that their goals and these solution potentially matched. She ran a second experiment where she ran these things and had people look at the notes compared to her notes and found those notes totally acceptable for the goals that they wanted, and within a week, she had gotten back almost half of her job to focus on more valuable stuff and was like incredibly empowered because she made it happen, right? It wasn’t something that somebody else figured out and it freed up her time. It was her own initiative and it was her own curiosity, and it was her own recognition, her own boldness to take, to have these small discussions with, the people that she worked with that made the difference.
And some, so some of these meetings like have tears in them, when people really think about how they can, and sometimes they’re very small, but it’s still that’s a pretty big example. But there, there was one example where somebody simply changed a conversation that they were having with a partner and introduced something that they hadn’t considered before to that partner conversation.
The partner was excited and relieved and had wondered why the conversations had never gotten into this more practical, more tangible place. And it was a little bit of a risk, right? What we talked about, how to de-risk that, how to make it small, how to run it like an experiment. And it was a single meeting and a partner was like, was overjoyed that this person had recognized that they had something to bring to the table and had asked for their input.
And it totally changed the tenor of the partnership. And like these stories are like constant, and so the desire here is be able to create sort of these ripple effects. And anyway, my point is this is real. It makes real changes. Sometimes it’s at the tangible, obvious, immediate business value and sometimes it’s inside us and helps us be more interested and willing to show up for our work, be more willing to engage with the people around us and to get more meaning and purpose in the stuff we do.
And, I wanna stress that, this is just as true outside of work as it or outside of traditional work, as it is inside. So there’s things that we can do as part of our lives that involve these very ideas as well, particularly when it comes to things that we’re passionate and curious about and, but maybe we’ve always been a little scared to do.
Michael
Certain lovely simplifications of everything we’ve been talking about today.
Thank you, Keith. For people who would like to check out your course, learn more about what you, how you might be able to help them make tiny experiments and make their culture more exploratory, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you, find your course?
Keith
They can go to keithhopper.com, and I assume in your show notes, you can see the spelling and it’ll probably spelled like it sound.
And where you can see, you can get access to my newsletter, you can get links to my course, you can see the content that I produce and I link, I’ll link off to some other stuff and other places where that stuff is. But in particular, I’d like to offer free access to the course for any of your listeners who are interested, they can go to keithhopper.com/uncommon and there find, just give me your information and I’ll email you a link to the course. This will give you access to it for free. And it’s on LinkedIn learning. If your company already provides you with this, if you’re employed, then you’ll already have access to it and you can just see where it is and I’ll point you to it. But if you don’t have access, this link will give you free access to the course.
Michael
That’s great. Thank you so much, Keith. What would you like to leave our audience with today?
Keith
Oh, boy. You gave me an opportunity to say so much.
And I’m grateful for that. I think, I think something I’ve been thinking a lot about is, is hope, and I think, and, really how important it is and how maybe we don’t, or at least I didn’t fully recognize that it can be cultivated, and it’s a word we haven’t used in this conversation, but I really try to leave people with it when I work with them, both at an organizational level, but also as at an individual level.
And, I hope people can see that embedded in some of these ideas. It can be a sense of hope and possibility in that even though things might not be great, we all go through this. I’ve definitely experienced this, whether it’s concerns about we have about the world, or concerns we might have about our workplace and how maybe it’s not as great and our job not as great as we hoped or we want that within these situations, there are ways of looking at the world and specific tools that while they won’t solve all of our problems, can give us a sense of possibility, and can help us recognize that there are things that may have felt intractable. Like, we’re unable to make progress on something we, we’ve always dreamed of, for example, we keep procrastinating or whatever. There are things that can unlock the answers to those, and that there are things that we can play with ourselves. And so we don’t have to have maybe our bosses endorse them, right? We can look for safe ways, for example, to experiment within our own jobs, as one way to, to consider doing this, but this idea of looking at the world, I talk about discovery mindset as the way to look at the world as a near endless series of learning opportunities. That simple idea through some of the things that we’ve discussed today, can unlock so much, and help us think about what’s possible. I just, I think looking at the tools as a potential engine of hope makes me excited. So if anybody else, if it resonates with anybody else, I would encourage them to pursue, to pursue tools like this. And like I said, I have some stuff that on my site that I can point people to that help, will help them get started.
Michael
That sounds great. Thank you so much, Keith, for all the ideas you brought today and for this fabulous conversation.
Keith
Thanks Michael. This was a really great experience.
Michael
And thank you, audience, for joining us today. Please let Keith and I know, what kind experiment are you running to engage your curiosity a little bit more?
Thanks, and have a great day.