Curious Minds at Work

By Gayle AllenBusiness Science Social Sciences Arts Books Management

Curious Minds at Work episodes

November 07, 2016 CM 061: Susan David on Emotional Agility
It is essential to achieve our goals, yet few of us practice it.
It is emotional agility -- the ability to navigate the thoughts, feelings, and stories we tell ourselves as challenges arise. This does not mean ignoring how we feel or wallowing in those emotions. And it is certainly not about just being happy all the time. It is about recognizing that the monologue inside our heads is not in control of us but, rather, we are in control of it.
That is something Susan David knows a lot about. Author of the book, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, she is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology. Her writing has been featured in numerous publications, including Harvard Business Review, Time, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal.
Insights from our interview:
How we deal with our thoughts and emotions impacts our well being
In a time of unprecedented complexity we need to be agile and responsive
We get hooked when we treat our thoughts and emotions as facts
How we can be blind to what is right in front of us
The fact that we will look for information to support the stories we make up
We engage with thought blaming when we give too much power to our thoughts
We need to let go of our need to be right
Between stimulus response, there is a space where we can choose
When we bottle emotions our emotions, we miss out on what they can teach us
When we brood or give too much space to thoughts and emotions, we get stuck
Brooding prevents closure and moving forward
Our consumer culture can make us feel that we are not good enough
When we extend compassion to ourselves we are more open to change
Constant comparison to others sets up a never ending competition
Giving language to our emotions helps us make plans and solve problems
Journaling thoughts and feelings for just 20 minutes a day can be life changing
When we walk our why, we are more resilient and focused
Walking our why helps us overcome social contagion
The value of tweaking our emotions from have to to want to
Making the shift from have to to want to is about prioritizing our values
Have to language makes our brains rebel and is about obligation and shame
Our brains are wired to make us comfortable - the unfamiliar feels unsafe
Aim for a state of whelm, rather than over- or underwhelmed
Emotional labor is the difference work demands and how we feel
How many workplaces are operating out of old industrial models?
How to raise emotionally agile children? Help them identify and label emotions.
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking.
Faced with complexity, we are less likely to collaborate, innovate or relate
Complexity requires we develop inner skills
Episode Links
Susan David
@SusanDavid_PhD
Emotional Agility article in HBR
Victor Frankl
Charles Darwin
James Pennebaker
Take Pride by Jessica Tracy
NYTimes article - Teaching Your Child Emotional Agility
The Quiz - Emotional Agility Report - Susan David
How Levis Is Building Well-Being Programs Where They Matter Most: In Factories by Adele Peters
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
1 hr
October 31, 2016 CM 060: Stuart Firestein on How Breakthroughs Happen
How do breakthroughs happen? Not how we think.
Movies, books, and articles, constrained by time and word limits, often leave out the realities -- the messy work, filled with dead ends, abandoned questions, and accidental discoveries. That is what Stuart Firestein, Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, wants to change.
He believes that the roles ignorance and failure play in the discovery process are vastly underappreciated, so much so that he has written two books about them, Ignorance: How It Drives Science, and Failure: Why Science is So Successful. An advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program for The Public Understanding of Science, Stuart shares insights from his own work as a successful researcher and scientist and from those of his peers, as well as scientific philosophers and historians.
Insights from our interview:
Knowledge and facts are important insofar as they help us ask better questions
Conscious ignorance offers a useful playground for discovery
The messy process of science and discovery is where the value lies
The disconnect between scientific textbooks and courses and actual science
The innovative course he teaches that helps students gain a scientific mindset
What it is that makes a problem interesting
How scientists, researchers, and creatives look for connections
Why failure can be useful even if it never leads to an eventual success
The fact that the more expert a person is the less certain they will be
How systems limit innovation
Why we need better tools for assessment and evaluation in schools
Why we need feedback tools that are more diagnostic and less judgmental
Why he worries most about people who dislike or are disinterested in science
Why he sees his lab as a cauldron of curiosity
How writing books requires a different way of looking at things
How philosophy and history can impact science in an interactive way
Episode Links
Stuart Firestein
@FiresteinS
Be Bad First by Erika Andersen
Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud by Peter Medawar
James Clerk Maxwell
Principles of Neuroscience
Eric Kandel
Kenneth Rogoff
D.H. Lawrence
Do No Harm by Henry Marsh
MCAT
NIH
NSF
Sidney Brenner
Michael Krasny
Karl Popper
Thomas Kuhn
Isaiah Berlin
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
36 min
October 24, 2016 CM 059: Erika Andersen on Getting Good Fast
Want to succeed in work and life? Be bad first.
Do not confuse this with the familiar call to fail fast (so often heard in the startup world in recent years). This is a longer game. It is about getting comfortable with being novices and of committing to learning new, hard skills that take years to acquire. In a world of rapid-fire change, constant connection, and lots of choices, it is a necessary goal.
Erika Andersen, wants to teach us how to do just that. Erika is the Founder of Proteus, author of three books on leadership, and a Forbes contributor. She shares concrete tips and great examples in her latest book, Be Bad First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future.
Insights from our interview:
The key skill for success in the 21st century
Why being bad first is not about failing fast or failing forward
How open are we to learning new ideas? Less open than we say.
How we hate being bad at things but love getting good at things
How our desire for mastery can work in our favor with new challenges
How hard are you clinging to the skills you have? How is that working for you?
Four mental skills crucial for learning
How Michelangelo successfully navigated being bad first
The role innovation plays in getting ourselves to learn new things
How to put our self talk to work for us rather than against us
How we cannot get the help we need if we do not know our gaps
How to revise and reframe our negative self talk
What does healthy curiosity look like in adulthood?
Confused about curiosity? Watch a 3-year-old!
Get curious by unleashing your drive to understand
Value the expertise of others enough to ask them questions
Expected to be expert in your field? Beware of asking these questions.
Want to reclaim your innate curiosity? Start with your hobbies!
Anti-curiosity strongly connected to negative self talk
Risk-free way to practice being bad first? Write with your non-dominant hand.
It is impossible to be good at something you have never done - remember that
Learning something new? Find your bridge - the part you know something about.
Three things we need to believe in order to change our behavior.
When leaders model new behaviors, change goes faster in their orgs
Every year, pick something new to be bad at.
Episode Links
@ErikaAndersen
Erika Andersen
Rookie Smarts by Liz Wiseman
Duolingo
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
31 min
October 17, 2016 CM 058: Jessica Tracy on the Benefits of Pride
Is pride a deadly sin or a key to our survival? Will it lead us down a destructive path or can it actually help us resist temptation?
In this conversation, Jessica Tracy answers these questions and more. Jessica is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of the book, Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. Her research has unearthed findings that help us see just how important pride is for human progress and survival.
Her discussion of pride takes us beyond associations of boastfulness and arrogance, in order to understand how feelings of pride can boost creativity, encourage altruism, and confer power and prestige in ways that benefit us as individuals and as a society.
In this interview, we talk about:
Why we need pride to feel good about ourselves
The fact that pride is innate, rather than learned
The body language we associate with pride and what it signals
How residents of Burkina Faso helped us recognize that pride is universal
How philosophers like Aristotle and Rousseau helped us see pride as positive
How studying narcissism clued us into key aspects of pride
The fact that there are two kinds of pride - authentic and hubristic
What we learned when we asked people to talk about times when they felt pride
How the speech of one political candidate included both aspects of pride
Why asking if you are a voter vs if you will vote makes you more likely to vote
How we can resist temptation by imagining the pride we will feel if we do
How displays of pride convey status and why that is important
What residents of Fiji taught us about pride, status, and evolution
Why we evolved to have hubristic pride and the dominance that comes with it
The connection between prestige and authentic pride
How people with hubristic pride dominate through fear
How dominant leaders are better at helping groups solve problems
How prestigious leaders cultivate creativity and innovation in groups
The fact that cultural ideas evolve through learning
How pride motivates us to create and make things better
How pride helps us want to teach and share and let others copy
When people show pride in answering questions observers will copy them
The fact that pride guides social learning
How pride helps helps scientists make progress - they want to be right and it feels good when that happens
Why we did not evolve to be selfless - we evolved to build a sense of self
How hubristic pride is about a false sense of self and why it leads to shortcuts
Why our sense of self is different from that of any other animal
To what extent do pride and shame drive bad behaviors?
Episode Links
http://ubc-emotionlab.ca/people/dr-jessica-tracy/
@ProfJessTracy
Dean Karnazes and Ultramarathon Man
The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan
Cumulative cultural evolution
Lance Armstrong
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
44 min
October 10, 2016 CM 057: Gretchen Bakke On Innovations In Energy
We produce more wind and solar power than ever before, yet coal, oil, and gas constitute over 90 percent of our energy sources. Why? Blame it on the grid.
While our electrical grid was once an engineering marvel, today it is the Achilles heel of energy efficiency. In her book, The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future, McGill University Professor Gretchen Bakke explains why. A former Fellow in the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University, she holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.
In this interview, Bakke shares how our grid became what it is today and offers fascinating insights into the technologies, personalities, and policies that got us here. Along the way, she explains all the fascinating ways innovators are helping us rethink it and what the future of energy looks like.
In this interview, we talk about:
What the U.S. electrical grid actually is
The history that informs the grid
Why it matters when we use electricity
Why the more we invest in green energy the more fragile our grid becomes
How our current grid binds us to non-renewable energy sources
How overgrown trees, sagging power lines, and a computer glitch caused a massive blackout in 2003
How electricity became a monopoly and a commodity
How grid complexity works against complete reliance on alternative energy
The good, the bad, and the ugly of smart meters
Why energy storage is the holy grail of the energy business
The innovation of vehicle-to-grid initiatives
The feasibility of wireless electricity
How an energy platform can help us reimagine the grid
How an energy cloud can help us de-regionalize our reliance on energy sources
What a cultural anthropologist brings to our understanding of the grid
The values and history embedded in our electrical grid
The fact that we made the grid and the grid makes us
Whether choreography serve as a tool for helping us rethink power
Episode Links
Arc lamp
Charles Edison
Charles Brush
Samuel Insull
National Energy Act
PURPA
Energy Policy Act of 1992
Enron
Walkable City by Jeff Speck
Vehicle to grid
Elon Musk
The Paris Talks
Energy cloud
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
38 min
October 03, 2016 CM 056: Mahzarin Banaji On The Hidden Biases Of Good People
Do good people discriminate more often than they think? That is exactly what a team of researchers found when they analyzed the thoughts and reactions of millions of people around the world.
Harvard University Professor of Social Ethics, Mahzarin Banaji, author of the book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, shares surprising findings from Implicit Association Tests taken by over 18 million people from over 30 countries. What she reveals may surprise you.
Banaji is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as the Radcliffe and Santa Fe Institutes. She and her co-author Anthony Greenwald, Professor at Washington University, have spent their careers uncovering the hidden biases we all carry when it comes to issues like race, gender, age, and socioeconomics.
In this interview, we talk about:
How knowing our blindspots can help us innovate
How we can measure the extent of our biases with the Implicit Association Test
How the implicit association test can launch a dialogue around bias
Who we say is American versus who we really believe is American
How our tendency is to be curious and to want to learn about ourselves
How much we want to know is a measure of our smart we are
The role competition and social knowledge play in motivation to learn and grow
Why we need to get beyond learning about it to doing something about it
The importance of what we are willing to do to address our biases
Knowledge of bias helps us rethink hiring, law, admissions, medicine, and more
Bias in our minds hurts us, too
The fact that implicit bias starts as young as 6 years old
Disappointing differences in explicit vs implicit love of our ethnic or racial group
What is not associated with our groups in society gets dropped from our identities
Bias and discrimination can come from who we help
How referral programs can reinforce bias and lack of diversity
A tip on how to ensure referral programs cultivate diversity
The fact that we all like beautiful people and how that harms us
Ways to outsmart our biases
What symphony orchestras can teach us about overcoming bias in hiring
The fact that good people can and do have bias
How we will be perceived by future generations if we can address our biases
Whether Mahzarin likes science fiction
Episode Links
@banaji
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/
Anthony Greenwald
Implicit Association Test
Fitbit
Inclusion Conference 2016
What Works by Iris Bohnet
Social imprinting
Group identity
Stanley Milgram
Abu Ghraib
My Lai Massacre
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
49 min
September 26, 2016 CM 055: Jocelyn Glei On Slaying The Email Dragon
What stands between us and meaningful work? Email!
It is killing our productivity and distracting us from the creative work we crave, yet we spend over a quarter of our work week on it. What is behind our addiction and what can we do about it?
Jocelyn Glei, author of the book, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, explains the science behind our addiction and offers strategies for prioritizing meaningful work. Jocelyn is the founding editor of 99U and editor of three productivity books, including the bestseller, Manage Your Day-to-Day.
In this interview, we talk about:
The challenge of living in an age of distraction
Why it is easier to be busy than to focus on meaningful work
How, on average, we check email 11 times an hour and process 122 emails daily
How we spend over a quarter of work time on email
How the random rewards of email keep us addicted
How completion bias makes us strive for inbox zero
How designs like progress bars and percentages speak to our completion bias
How our negativity bias influences every email that we read
How empathy, emoticons, and punctuation can compensate for negativity bias
The fact that email goes awry because of a missing social feedback loop
How empathy goes a long way in overcoming email negativity bias
Email is great for asking but awful for declining
The difference between an email asker and an email guesser
What it means to do creative, meaningful work
Steps we can take to ensure meaningful work rules the day
The role momentum plays in doing meaningful work
Why we need to synchronize calendars with to-do lists
How scarcity of time and resources impacts capacity, mindset, and attitude
Tech setups to help us avoid frequent email checks
How the best way to fail at email is to rely on program defaults
Why the more we check our email, the less happy we are
How segmenting emails senders helps us decide which emails to ready by when
The fact that not all email messages are created equal
How quickly we respond to emails sets expectations
How to ensure your emails stand out
How productivity can be about what we choose not to do
Why we need to spend more time deciding than doing
Why it is about leaving a legacy
Episode Links
@jkglei
http://jkglei.com/
B. F. Skinner
Daniel Goleman and emotional intelligence
Mark McGuinness
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Gloria Mark
Manage Your Day to Day
Clayton Christensen
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
40 min
September 19, 2016 CM 054: Amantha Imber On The Formula For Innovation
Is there a formula for innovation? Yes! And the most successful individuals, teams, and organizations rely on it to achieve their goals.
Innovation psychologist, bestselling author, and Founder of the leading innovation firm in Australia, Inventium, Amantha Imber has worked with organizations like Google, Disney, LEGO, and Virgin. In her book, The Innovation Formula: The 14 Science-backed Keys for Creating a Culture Where Innovation Thrives, she distills the science behind game-changing innovation and offers concrete examples of what leaders can do to cultivate it in their teams.
In this interview, we talk about:
What it means to democratize innovation in our organizations
Innovation as change that adds value
What happens when we assign projects for challenge vs capacity
The Imagination Breakthroughs Project at GE
The diminishing returns of cash rewards for performance
Why leaders are trading cash for time to support innovation
Guarding against groupthink in long-standing teams
The value in walking in stupid for doing innovative work
The kind of leadership that sets the most innovative organizations apart
Why leaders should do innovative work rather than delegate it
How the Kickbox project helps companies like Adobe spark innovation
Why blue-sky brainstorming is a lazy way to innovate
Innovative ways Engineers without Borders and Tata Group learn from failure
The power of assuming abundance by sharing generously
Why we need a certain level of noise to do creative work
Hack-in-a-box to support student innovation and entrepreneurship
Episode Links
@amantha
http://www.inventium.com.au/
Jeff Immelt of GE
Imagination Breakthroughs at GE
Wieden + Kennedy Advertising
Originals by Adam Grant
Adobe Kickbox project
Tata Group
Engineers without Borders
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
36 min
September 12, 2016 CM 053: Amy Whitaker on Carving Out Creative Space
How do we make time for creative work, and how do we sustain it?
Amy Whitaker, author of Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses, tells us how. Writer, artist, researcher, and teacher, Amy works at the intersection of art and commerce. She holds an MBA from Yale and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine arts. She is also a professor at New York University.
In this interview, we talk about:
Why art and creativity are responsible for our greatest human contributions
That art is the opposable thumbs equivalent of what makes us human
How creativity is about personal discovery and contribution
The fact that creativity is not a distant land of mythic geniuses and art theorists
The value in taking a wide-angle or systems view for art thinking
The role of play and creativity in important scientific discoveries
How to develop a habit of studio space for creative work
Why it is normal to feel disoriented and vulnerable while creating
The importance of working in the weeds to feel alive
Why we need to trade discernment for judgment
Whether we are standing at the easel versus sitting in the armchair
The power of becoming a good noticer
How creatives are inventing point B rather than moving toward it
When Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile and what it did for running
Inspiring ways to manage creatives
Why managing is about creating the space for creatives to do their work
The importance of good enough versus perfect or right
Why creatives need to think about the letter versus the envelope
Why we need to have our own metaphors
Thoughts on Leonardo da Vinci if he were alive today
Why we need to find language for the middle space
Episode Links
http://www.amywhit.com/
@theamywhit
Thomas J. Fogarty
Takahiko Masuda
Target blindness
Brene Brown
Amy Poehler
Harper Lee
Actor-observer bias
Truman Capote
Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think by Mona Patel
Kristian Still
Dialectical behavioral therapy
Amy Schumer
Cubism
Brexit
Roger Bannister and YouTube video of him breaking the 4-minute mile
Donald Keough and New Coke
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
45 min
September 05, 2016 CM 052: Tom Davenport On Avoiding Obsolescence in an Automated Age
Smart machines are coming, so what are we doing about it?
Instead of cowering in fear, what if we took a proactive approach? What if there were a playbook we could use to anticipate and thrive in an increasingly automated world?
In his book, Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, Thomas Davenport, offers ways to accomplish that goal. His book is a guide for employees and students who want to know what they can do to work successfully with smart machines.
Tom is a Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College and co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics. He is also a Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He teaches analytics and big data at Babson, Harvard, MIT, and Boston University and has written over 17 books
In this interview, we talk about:
What the number of bank tellers working today can tell us about smart machines
10 reasons to look over your shoulder for smart machines in your own work
What separates humans from machines
The 4 markers of machine smartness and which one we are living now
Why employers should aim for augmentation vs automation wherever possible
How smart machines can liberate us to do more creative and valuable work
Augmentation at its best in freestyle chess
How we can step in with machines in the workplace
Why we would want to step up with machines in the workplace
What it looks like to step forward with machines in the workplace
How we might step aside with machines in the workplace
How some are stepping narrowly with machines in the workplace
Why every organization needs an Automation Leader
Why we need to get past STEM as the only solution
The important role organizations play in providing professional learning
Why Tom argues against universal basic income
How companies can be more resilient in a digital age with increased competition
The fact that so few of our political leaders are talking about this big shift
Episode Links
@tdav
http://www.tomdavenport.com/
Oxford Study on The Future of Employment
Bricklaying Robots
Ex Machina
Freestyle chess
Former WaMu Risk Officer
Stretch by Karie Willyerd
2020 Workplace Report
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
33 min

About Curious Minds at Work

From the publisher's feed

Want to get better at work? At managing others? Managing yourself? Gayle Allen interviews experts who take your performance to the next level. Each episode features a book with insights to help you…