Meaningful conversations can be a creative lab space. At their best, they're a place to share perspectives and be heard. They can also be a place to stress test new ideas and catch the limits in our thinking.

When conversations work, we gain a stronger connection to the people we work with. We feel like we understand each other better and that we're channeling each other's knowledge and skills to achieve a bigger goal.

Yet these kinds of conversations are far too rare. And I don't think it's intentional. I think it's because we don't know how to design them.

That's what motivated me to read Fred Dust's latest book, Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication. A former senior partner and global managing director at international design firm, IDEO, Fred's designed these kinds of conversations for hundreds of organizations across multiple industries.

Fred gives us permission to make better conversations a priority, and he shares insights on how to do it effectively.

Episode Links

Where Do Ideas Come From? Fred Dust at Aspen Ideas

Active Listening

Frank Osborn on Brainstorming

Responsive Classroom

The Op Ed Project

Courtney E. Martin

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For most of us, networking is a topic that brings up a lot of strong feelings. And most of those feelings aren't all that positive.

Ultimately, we know we should network. But just thinking about it can make us uncomfortable. In fact, research shows that many of us associate networking with something dirty. On top of that, we feel guilty for not devoting more time to it.

That's why I wanted to interview Marissa King. Author of the book, Social Chemistry: Decoding the Elements of Human Connection, Marissa is Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale School of Management and an expert on social networks.

Marissa's take on networking is refreshing because she emphasizes the relational aspect. She also provides tools for gauging how we network, so that we can easily see how well our approach is working.

Her discussion of networking and her strategies for how to reframe it more positively help us to walk away without feeling icky. At the same time, her tips inspire us to tend to our professional network the way we would our personal one.

If you're looking for a fresh take on networking, I think you'll enjoy hearing what Marissa has to say. 

Episode Links

Shout-out to Heather Cox Richardson for her Letters from an American

Professional Networking Makes People Feel Dirty by Carmen Nobel

Do People Mix at Mixers? by Paul Ingram and Michael W. Morris

Marissa King's site for assessing your networking approach as convener, broker, or expansionist

Self-monitoring

How to Build a Better Social Network and the work of Ronald Burt

Why Do People Gossip? by Sophia Gottfried and the work of Robin Dunbar

Yo-Yo Ma and Silkroad

Homophily

Heidi Roizen

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When challenging situations arise, how do we make the shift from bystander to helper? What are the factors that determine whether or not we take action? And what if helping means disobeying an authority figure?

These are the kinds of questions that made me want to read Catherine Sanderson's latest book, Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels, and to interview her on the show.

In particular, her discussion of the Milgram Shock Experiment, a study that's always fascinated me, got me thinking more deeply about those pivotal moments when we decide whether or not we're going to speak up or step in, rather than stand by.

For some background, the Milgram Shock Experiment was first conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale. He wanted to find out how far people would go in obeying an authority figure when their obedience knowingly caused harm to another person.

In the study, participants delivered an electric shock to a subject they couldn't see. The voltage increased with every wrong answer given. If they refused to administer the shock, a member of the research team - the authority figure - responded with one of four scripted statements.

The electric shocks weren't real, but the participant in the study didn't know that. If they refused to administer the shock, the authority figure would recite one of the four scripted statements, for example, "The experiment requires that you continue," or "You have not other choice but to continue."

Aside from statements like these, the authority figure never forced participants to deliver the shocks. Yet every participant did. Not one refused. Even when the person receiving the shocks sounded out in pain with moans, shouts, even pleas to stop, the participants kept going.

What Catherine talks about in her book, though, are the many participants who wanted to stop. The ones who communicated, at some point along the way, that they didn't want to continue. That's the moment I'm curious about. What would it have taken for them to disobey authority? And what would I have done in that same situation?

Catherine is a professor at Amherst College. She's studied what neuroscientists and psychologists have learned about why we stand by and why we speak up. She's also studied what leaders can do to make it safer for people to speak up, which training programs work best for teaching these skills, and what drives the brave souls who always speak up.

Episode Links

This week's shout-out goes to Emily Levesque, author of the book, The Last Stargazers

Bystander effect

Young Children Show the Bystander Effect in Helping Situations

Social loafing

Kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart

The Pain of Social Rejection

KiVa anti-bullying program

Curious Minds Team

You can learn more about creator and host, Gayle Allen, and producer and editor, Rob Mancabelli, here. 

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What will the world look like when we're living and working with robots every day?

Robots work on assembly lines. They zoom around warehouses. And they even fly planes. Most of us aren't surprised to hear these stories anymore. But how will we work with robots when they're driving our cars or delivering our food?

When millions of robots populate our sidewalks, offices, and residential buildings - when they move beyond the factory floor - we'll need to learn how to interact with them, even teach them. Julie Shah, co-author of the book, What to Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration, believes we'll need to tap into our ability to create, problem solve, and learn from experience, in order to "transfer those insights to machines and integrate machines into our work and our everyday lives."

She also believes we'll need to think differently about how we design robots and how we gather and share robot data. In particular, she argues that industry and government will need to work more closely together so they can share information on robot performance. This information will help us make rapid improvements, so we can integrate robots more quickly and safely into society. She explains, "The capability of these systems is so dependent on the data used to train them. Being able to share learnings across companies and across an industry is equally important."

Julie Shah is a roboticist who directs the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT, where she is also the associate dean of social and ethic responsibilities of computing.

Episode Links

Inner Workings: Can Robots Make Good Teammates? by Carolyn Beans

Integrating Robots into Team-Oriented Environments by Julie Shah

Don Norman

Three-body problem

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

Affordance

Aviation Safety Reporting System - NASA

MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

Julie Shah's co-author Laura Major

Curious Minds Team

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What if mathematics could help us rethink gender equality by questioning how society is structured?

Women are often told that, to succeed, they need to be more. More competitive. More confident. Even more resilient. In other words, women need to fit themselves into environments created mostly by men.

But Eugenia Cheng, author of the book, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, argues that it's not about what women lack but about how society operates. For her, the question is not, "society is like this, how can women become more successful in it?" Instead, it's about asking "why is society like this in the first place?"

Eugenia rejects associating certain traits with traditional, binary gender roles. For example, she doesn't think it's helpful to think of men as more competitive or women as more caring. She disagrees with the notion that there's only one way to achieve success, such as the myth of the resilient individual achiever who's unaffected by criticism. Instead, she argues that we're stronger and more resilient when we "build networks of people to help support [us], rather than just having to be strong all by [ourselves]."

Eugenia Cheng is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and honorary visiting fellow at City University of London. Her previous books include, How to Bake Pi, Beyond Infinity, and The Art of Logic.

Episode Links

Higher-dimensional algebra

Mean, median, mode

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

No Contest by Alfie Kohn

Equity: A Mathematician Shares Her Solution by Jory Lerback

Curious Minds Team

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What's driven our relentless obsession with economic efficiency and who are its winners and losers?

For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. economy benefited most individuals and families, no matter their social class. In recent decades, that's not been the case.

Roger Martin examines this shift in his latest book, When More is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency. He shares data indicating that, while the wealthy continue to prosper, the average American family does not.

While Roger is concerned with what lies ahead for these families, he is equally concerned about the future of the U.S. economic system. He says, "What set off the project behind this book is that the median family, who is also the swing voter, is going to give up on capitalism as the system it wants to have run this country."

Professor of Strategic Management, Emeritus, at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, Roger previously served as Dean and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute. In addition, he's published eleven books, written numerous articles for Harvard Business Review, and has been named the number one management thinker by Thinkers50.

Based on his extensive research and his work with hundreds of companies, Roger believes organizational leaders can change things for the better. In this interview, he shares examples of how companies, like Southwest Airlines, have done just that.

At the same time, Roger discusses how our longstanding model of the U.S. economy as machine got us here. He points out, "It's kind of an accident. We've done some things based on models we thought were good that have gotten us in places we don't like at all."

Episode Links

Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo

The Persona Project 

Wassily Leontief

Pareto Distribution

David Ricardo and comparative advantage

Cristiano Rinaldo

Curious Minds Team

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How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care deeply about complete strangers?

From an evolutionary standpoint, we shouldn't be kind to strangers. Yet, history shows, time and again, we are.

Scientists see it as a puzzle to solve. Michael McCullough, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, believes it's what sets us apart. He says, "[We] love to talk about ways in which humans are biologically unique, and there's a million ways. But I really do think that our regard for strangers, absolute strangers, is one of them."

Michael is author of the book, The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a Moral Code. Drawing on multiple fields, he crafts a story of how our empathy for strangers has changed over time. 

He covers a lot of ground, moving from ancient history to modern psychology. Ultimately, he arrives at the pandemic present, where he asks, "How are you going to bring the tools of reasoning, ethics, and science all together to make rational choices about collective courses of action?"

A Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Michael is also the author of two previous books, To Forgive is Human and Beyond Revenge.

Episode Links

The War for Kindness by Jamil Zaki

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

David Sloan Wilson

Group Selection

Behavioral game theory

Robert Trivers

Code of Hammurabi

Curious Minds Team

You can learn more about creator and host, Gayle Allen, and producer and editor, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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We recognize the biases we hold around race, class, and gender, but what about language?

Katherine Kinzler, author of the book, How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - and What It Says about You, explains, "The language you speak, and the accent or dialect you use to speak it, is such a foundational part of social life."

Yet speech and language are often overlooked aspects of social identity. In fact, Katherine's research reveals that the way we speak can "determine who you might connect with, but also the judgments you make about other people, and the judgments they might be making about you."

In her book, Katherine discusses how language, accents, and speech influence life experience and outcomes. In particular, they can be tools for social division, discrimination in hiring and firing, and other forms of bias and prejudice. It's one of the reasons Katherine advocates language learning in school.

She says, "a lot of times, we think of language [learning] as 'icing on the cake'...nice to have but not really a fundamental part of learning. I think we could do so much more if we changed how we thought about the necessity of more than one language."

Katherine Kinzler is Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. She holds degrees from Yale and Harvard, has written for the New York Times, and was recently named a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, one of the 50 scientists under 40 working to shape the future.

Episode Links

Bilingual Brains Better Equipped to Process Information 

Neuroplasticity as a Function of Second Language Learning by Ping Li, Jennifer Legault, and Kaitlyn a. Litcofsky

Want to be More Rational? Learn Another Language by Rob Smith

How Speaking a Second Language Affects the Way You Think by David Ludden

How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Found Her Voice by Katy Steinmetz

Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World by Olga Khazan

Meyer v. State of Nebraska

Emotions Shape the Language We Use, but Second Languages Reveal a Shortcut around Them by Beth Daley

The War against German-American Culture: The Removal of German-Language from Indianapolis Schools, 1917-1919

Linguistic Insecurity

Bilingual Children's Social Preferences Hinge on Accent by Jasmine M. DeJesus, Hyesung G. Hwang, Jocelyn B. Dautel, and Katherine D. Kinzler

The Native Language of Social Cognition by Katherine D. Kinzler, Emmanuel Dupoux, and Elizabeth S. Spelke

Research: How Speech Patterns Lead to Hiring Bias by Michael W. Kraus, Brittany Torrez, and Jun Won Park

Multilingual Environments Enrich Our Understanding of Others by Christopher Bergland

Jane Elliott

Ways to Support the Podcast

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Curious Minds Team

Learn more about creator and host, Gayle Allen, and producer and editor, Rob Mancabelli, here.

How can we escape the time traps that keep us from living our best lives?

These are the traps that make us feel like there are never enough hours in the day. They leave us time poor, a term Ashley Whillans talks about in her book, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. 

Ashley is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and a leading scholar on time and happiness research. She explains the negative impact feeling time poor can have on our health, our productivity, and our relationships. 

In contrast, when we prioritize how we spend our time, we gain many positive results, no matter where we reside in the world. Ashley says, "People who value time report greater happiness, less stress, less negative emotion. Doesn't matter where I study this, in India, in Kenya, in the U.S., in Canada, in Denmark, focusing on time is an important path to happiness."

Ashley designed tools to help us rethink our relationship with time. These include self-assessments and checklists for making smarter decisions about how we use our time. She explains how incorporating them into our lives can prompt us to ask, "not only how much would that decision cost you, but how much time would it cost."

Ashley Whillans is part of the Workplace and Well-Being Initiative at Harvard, and she advises organizations on workplace and well-being strategies. Her work has appeared in publications like, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal.

Curious Minds Team

Learn more about creator and host, Gayle Allen, and producer and editor, Rob Mancabelli, here.

Episode Links

Daniel Gilbert

Time poverty

Autonomy paradox

Time confetti and Brigid Schulte

Yes-damn effect

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Mere urgency effect

Psychological safety 

Time affluence

Time is Tight: How Higher Economic Value of Time Increases Feelings of Time Pressure by Sanford Devoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer

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How did we get to a place where life's become an endless treadmill of work?

In her latest book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen tackles this question. Her book is for anyone who feels their life has become an endless to-do list.

In particular, Petersen describes the plight of today's millennials, a generation she believes is under constant pressure to perform. She explains how, for many millennials, it begins in childhood, when activities originally intended for fun get repurposed for resume building. She argues, "You're taking things that are meant to be leisure, that are meant to be those joyful corners of your life that are not work, and you're turning them into work."

Petersen discusses the social and economic forces that have led to this cultural shift, including the demise of labor unions, increasing reliance on contract workers, and the rise of the gig economy. In each case, she points out how companies benefit, while workers struggle to make ends meet.

At the same time, she wonders if millennials are the generation that can break the cycle. She muses, "I'm curious if we can refigure our relationship to work. I am curious if millennials are broken, if we are just too far down this road, or if we can take a different road."

Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed. A former academic, she received a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where she focused on the history of celebrity gossip. Her previous books, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud and Scandals of Classic Hollywood, were featured on NPR, Elle, and The Atlantic.

Curious Minds Team

Learn more about creator and host, Gayle Allen, and producer and editor, Rob Mancabelli, here.

Episode Links

The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace by Lindsey Pollak

How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Annette Lareau

Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman

The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can be Done to Improve It by David Weil

The Effects of 'Clopening' on Employees: What Employers Can Do by Tom Starner

Are You Just LARPing Your Job by John Herrman

How Does Your Ugly Garden Grow? by Anne Helen Petersen

Ways to Support the Podcast

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