SuperCreativity Podcast with James Taylor | Creativity, Innovation and Inspiring Ideas

In this episode of the Super Creativity Podcast, host James Taylor sits down with Robert Hannigan, former director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cyber security agency. Robert shares his journey from being the Prime Minister’s security advisor to establishing the UK National Cyber Security Centre and now serving as the international chairman of Blue Voyant. Tune in to learn about the lessons from counterintelligence that can be applied to problem-solving and creativity, the importance of neurodiversity in intelligence work, and the fascinating history of Bletchley Park.

Sound Bites:

1. “I was trying to answer the question of how was it that Bletchley Park… created the world’s first digital programmable computer.” – Robert Hannigan

2. “Tolerating that kind of eccentricity frankly is one of the interesting challenges for an organization, particularly a company, trying to engender creativity.” – Robert Hannigan

3. “It’s really important that people can express any ethical concerns and discuss them and have them addressed.” – Robert Hannigan

4. “The blend of these different types of thinking and ways of looking at the world is massively powerful in creativity.” – Robert Hannigan

Robert Hannigan is the former director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cybersecurity agency. He established the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible for the UK’s first cyber strategy in 2009. Robert is now the international chairman of Blue Voyant, a global cybersecurity services company, and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co. He is also a senior fellow at the Belfast Center at Harvard, a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London, and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth for his services to national security and is one of the only non-US citizens to have received the US Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal. His new book, “Counterintelligence,” explores what the secret world can teach us about problem-solving and creativity.

Robert Hannigan

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• 00:00 – Introduction to Robert Hannigan and GCHQ
• 03:33 – Focus on Cybersecurity and Oxford University
• 06:17 – Insights from “Counterintelligence”
• 08:06 – The Lessons from Bletchley Park
• 09:56 – Overcoming Challenges with Diverse Teams
• 11:56 – The Role of Neurodiversity in Intelligence
• 15:23 – Managing Diversity in Modern Organizations
• 22:04 – The Importance of Open Communication
• 24:52 – Balancing Optimism and Pessimism in Intelligence
• 28:09 – Personal Sources of Creative Inspiration
• 30:00 – Book Recommendations and Further Reading
• 31:53 – How to Connect with Robert Hannigan

James Taylor (00:09)
What can the secret world of counterintelligence teach us about problem solving and creativity? That’s what my guest today and I will discuss. Robert Hannigan was director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest technical and cyber security agency. He established the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 and was responsible for the UK’s first cyber strategy in 2009. He was previously

the Prime Minister’s security advisor at number 10 and worked closely with Tony Blair for a decade on the Northern Ireland peace process. Robert is now international chairman of Blue Voyant, a global cybersecurity services company, and was a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co. He is a senior fellow at the Belfast Center at Harvard. He is a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London and an honorary fellow at Oxford University. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth for his services to national security.

and is one of the only non -US citizens to have received the US Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal. His new book, Counterintelligence, which is absolutely wonderful, is about what the secret world can teach us about problem solving and creativity. And he looks to answer a couple of questions. How do you hire smart people who can work together to prevent terrorist attacks and decode encrypted technology? How do you come up with creative, counterintuitive solutions to solve major global problems?

And how do you provide the right environment for these people to thrive and work at their best when under immense pleasure? And it’s my great pleasure to welcome Robert Hannigan on the Super Creativity Podcast today. Welcome Robert.

Robert Hannigan (01:41)
Hi James, well thanks very much, very good to be with you.

James Taylor (01:45)
So currently what has your focus? You’ve got the book is out now. What are you currently focused on?

Robert Hannigan (01:50)
Yeah, so the book is out and obviously I have a role in Oxford which takes a lot of time in term time and then my main focus is on cyber security obviously which is my day -to -day work and that’s changing very fast and every day we see new headlines which kind of emphasize how fast moving and how sophisticated the threat has got. So cyber security is where I spend most of my thinking time.

James Taylor (02:16)
Now in this book, I learned so many interesting things. I learned a lot about Bletchley Park that I didn’t know in the work that went on there and the history of GCHQ. But there was a quote that you have right towards, you mentioned something right at the beginning of the book, which I thought was interesting. The other day I was in Austin in Texas and I was speaking and this sounds very strange compared to what we’d probably be talking about, but…

I was speaking for a company that manufactures the ingredients for bread and pastries and chocolates. And while I was there, I met a gentleman who was the sourdough librarian for this company. His job is to keep the sourdoughs of all, he goes around the world collecting sourdoughs from these amazing places and he has a library of this. And in the book, earlier on, you see this, you talk about the work of…

of Bletchley Park and the GCHQ is less about mapping the DNA of Bletchley Park and more like identifying the ingredients of a digital sourdough starter, a messy blended fermentation that constantly changes, that is never entirely within the baker’s control, but nonetheless produces something entirely surprising. So my first question I had for you is, what are the good ingredients for someone that’s working in counterintelligence and has that changed over the years?

Robert Hannigan (03:35)
So I love the idea of a sourdough librarian, that sounds fantastic. And Austin, Texas is a great example actually of tech innovation at the moment, as I’m sure you saw when you were there. What I was trying to answer, and I didn’t want to write one of these prescriptive books that says do X, Y, and Z, and you will have creativity, because I just don’t think it works like that. I was trying to answer the question of how was it that Bletchley Park, which was this not particularly impressive.

country house in the English countryside where they gathered to break codes during the Second World War and to solve one big problem which was how do you decrypt and then use a massive amount of intercepted radio material that was coming into Bletchley and then get it out fast enough for commanders to use. So that was the problem they were trying to solve. But in solving it, they

created the world’s first digital programmable computer colossus. And so in that problem solving process, there was this immense creativity and everything we now have. So what we’re communicating on our laptops, our iPhones and so on, you trace their lineage back to Bletchley Park really. And so I wanted to explore, so how did that happen? And to come to your sourdough analogy,

Many people at the time described Bletchley as an asylum, as rudderless, as full of crazy people. It wasn’t, they thought, structured and hierarchical in the way it should have been. And so what were the ingredients? Well, the ingredients were, of course, the people. And it was this amazing mixture of people. Not just mathematicians, not just Alan Turing types, if he is a type, the famous people, but predominantly women. So 76 % of the staff of Bletchley were women.

Most were young, most were under 30. So you were quite old if you were over 30 and you were ancient if you were over 40 at Bletchley. But it wasn’t just mathematicians and academics, it was people from manufacturing, from banking, from department stores, from the telecoms world. And it was putting those people together both as disciplines and as individual ways of thinking. And we might come onto neurodiversity.

But that’s where the magic and the creativity came from. And I think that’s closer to a sourdough starter than it is to any kind of business book which tells you, do this, this, and this, and you’ll get creativity.

James Taylor (06:07)
The thing I found really interesting, and you talk about this towards more towards the end of the book, but it’s actually, it’s a bit of a thread that kind of goes through is what you mentioned, like neurodiversity. And we’ll kind of come back to that. But there were lots of, we’re talking about this building this kind of culture and there was lots of very interesting characters where the Bletchley Park and obviously now in GCHQ. One of the ones that made me laugh was early on you talked about Dilly Knox, I think was the name and Rym Forty at the old Admiralty.

he decided to do something a little bit unusual, something to help his creative process, which I actually, I do today as well. So can you share what that was?

Robert Hannigan (06:46)
Ha ha.

Yeah, and Billy Knox was an amazing character, but he did a lot of his thinking in the bath. So he had a bathtub put into the old Admiralty building in Whitehall. And then when he moved nearly 20 years later to Bletchley Park, he had a bathtub put into the cottage there and he was sitting in it for hours and hours at a time. So much so actually in Bletchley that one of his colleagues thought he had drowned and broke the door down. So…

It wasn’t just an affectation. He didn’t just occasionally go and have a bath. He would find it a good place to think. And we now know from neurological research quite a lot about the effects of warm water, water in general, on the brain. So he wasn’t wrong. He described it as, bathing helps me with the perception of analogies. So not exactly sure what that means, but we think it…

closest to a kind of lateral thinking, making connections in the brain that wouldn’t otherwise surface. And he was a very passionate, slightly irascible character. And so the calming environment of a bath probably helped as well, helped him focus his thinking. But it’s a nice example of something which no corporation would naturally think of doing. So.

tolerating that kind of eccentricity frankly is one of the interesting challenges for an organization, particularly a company, trying to engender creativity. You’ve got to be allowed, you’ve got to allow people to work in the way that they want to up to a point. And his is a kind of extreme example. He’s also a great example.

James Taylor (08:31)
I wonder if you got inspiration from that from, I was recently in a place called Ortesia, near Syracuse in Italy. And about two and a half thousand years ago, there was a king hero, his name, and he was trying to figure out a problem. And he did like what I guess many

business senior people do today as they bring in a management consultant. And the management consultant was Archimedes and we heard the story of like the bath and jumping at the bath, Eureka. So I wonder if he was, had a bit of an Archimedes thing kind of going on there as well.

Robert Hannigan (09:05)
Yeah, maybe, and he was a classicist himself, so he would have known the work of Archimedes well. And of course, that was a brilliant scientific breakthrough in itself, giving him the idea of the volume, measuring volume. But yeah, a good example of a non -mathematician, everything’s computing and is about mathematics, but in his case, he was a papirologist. So he spent much of his career trying to piece together these little fragments of

papyrus that have been found in the sands of Egypt around mid to late 19th century. And he tried to put these together to restore the poetry that was written on them. And I think the interesting thing about that is the puzzling theme that runs through the book. All these people loved puzzles. And for him, the puzzle actually wasn’t about, it wasn’t like a jigsaw, it wasn’t just finding little bits of papyrus and making them put together, though that helped. The real puzzle was that

The people writing the poems on these bits of papyrus weren’t the original authors. So they were copying them out two, three centuries later. And so the challenge for him was to work out the mistakes they’d made. So these were scribes who were often bored, didn’t really understand what they were copying, didn’t really care very much, made mistakes, human error. And there are big lessons in code breaking. So a lot of the progress that was made in Bletchley Park in breaking German codes was about understanding the people at the other end.

and the mistakes they were making, the human errors. Same is true now in cyber security. It’s trying to understand the human errors in cyber security, defense and offense. So he’s a good example around it.

James Taylor (10:41)
When you think of when people think of Bletchley Park, they often think of the movie kind of highlighting Alan Turing and I always kind of push against it and I sense that you kind of pushed against a little bit in the book, although it was amazing telling that story and it brought to attention the work of Bletchley Park to a wider group of people. But my bugbear, I guess, with that was always that it kind of does the whole lone creative genius.

thing. And in the book, you talk about really, that’s, that’s kind of not how it worked. So I mean, maybe you can give us some ideas in terms of what at that point, when they’re breaking these codes, what was around, for example, Alan Turing, who was he, who was he working with? How was the collaboration side working there?

Robert Hannigan (11:29)
So you’re absolutely right, James. I mean, the Imitation Game was great for the profile of Bletchley Park and actually big increase in visitor numbers in the years that followed. So I’m not knocking it, but it was very Hollywood. It was all about good and bad, goodies and baddies in Bletchley. And it was also all about this, as you say, this lone, solitary genius. Now, no question Turing was a genius by any measure, but he wasn’t a loner in his work. He very much worked as part of a team.

And in Breaking Enigma, he relied very heavily on the fantastic work of Polish mathematicians before the war, of French mathematicians, and he acknowledged all that. And then those around him in Bletchley were absolutely critical to him. So he wasn’t this sort of lone person who just crapped it. And the other thing I think that doesn’t quite come across in the film is Joan Clarke, who’s sometimes fiance for, wasn’t for very long, but…

who was a really talented codebreaker in her own right and mathematician. And after the war, she went on to work at GCHQ until the 1970s. And in fact, just as she was working on counter -UVOTE, counter -submarine work in Bletchley with Turing, she ended up working against Argentine submarines in the Falklands War in 1982. So she had a remarkable career in her own right. And she wasn’t just the fiance of Alan Turing. So the film gets lots of things wrong.

But overall, as you say, it was great for the profile.

James Taylor (12:58)
There was another type of, you mentioned the relationship with him and his fiancee wife at one point as well, was in the US, you have the National Security Agency, which I guess is the equivalent of our GCHQ in the UK. And you talk about Elizabeth and William Friedman there. I believe that William Friedman was the founder of America’s NSA. But you talked about how, I use this term creative pairs. They can operate it, they had very different.

ways of looking at problems and challenges, but they can lent something to each other. Can you talk about that relationship? I thought that was that was interesting when I’d like to maybe kind of learn a little bit, go and maybe read a little bit more about that couple.

Robert Hannigan (13:38)
Yeah, so there’s some wonderful books on them, actually. And there’s a wonderful parallel story going on in the US alongside what’s happening in the First World War in the UK and then Bletchley Park. And at the same time, these big characters emerge. So William and Elizabeth Friedman, as in a way, the founders of US code breaking, US cryptology. And they met in this weird

scientific research establishment in Chicago and outside Chicago just before the First World War and it was run by an incredible man who’s worth reading about but called George Fabian who had this obsession, had lots of obsessions, but one of his obsessions was that Shakespeare plays weren’t really written by Shakespeare. They were written by Francis Bacon and so he hired all these people to try to prove this and in trying to prove it, so William and Elizabeth.

met, spent the rest of their life together and they conclusively established that actually Francis Bacon hadn’t written these and it wasn’t in secret code, much to George Fabian’s disappointment. But they’re an amazing couple because I think you’re right, they complement each other. Elizabeth had her own career in the 30s against smuggling during the prohibition era and it’s only actually in this century that her contribution has been recognised by the

US government and by Congress in particular, she tended to get overshadowed by William. But actually, William himself would have been the first to say she was an amazing codebreaker in her own right. So these partnerships are important. And there’s an interesting story about the two of them in the First World War, trying to break up a particular machine that had been given them to test the British machine, actually. And William asks Elizabeth to close her eyes.

and say the first thing, clear her mind, say the first thing that comes into her head when he says a particular word. And she gets it right, of course. And they put that down to gender, actually. They said maybe there’s a different way of looking at this. Williams was very structured, hers was more creative and fluid. Yeah, it may or may not be right, but it’s certainly true, as you say, James, that partnerships sparking off each other, teamwork is absolutely essential to creativity.

it isn’t on the whole a solitary pursuit.

James Taylor (16:08)
And then towards maybe the last quarter of the book, you move into talking about kind of just picking up on that, about gender, but also talking about diversity of thought and also wider, like neurodiversity as well. There was one stat in it that really blew my mind that we find here one in four people that work at GCHQ are neurodivergent, which I thought was fascinating. And then as you’re kind of getting into this,

You were just talking about people obviously with autism. My father is a musician and he has synesthesia. So he sees musical notes as certain colors and you talk about that and the benefit of that for code breakers as well. You mentioned briefly, I think in Israel they have a, I think it’s called Unit 9900, which is made up of people with specific, the forms of neurodivergence. So tell us, as you were kind of researching and kind of learned,

learning about it. Was this just something you were kind of picking up on because you were just around different people at the time you were kind of noticing this pattern? Or was there something else that kind of led you down this path to want to investigate this area more?

Robert Hannigan (17:18)
I’m fascinated by this area and although if you look at Bletchley Park there were lots of people who were clearly neurodivergent. It wasn’t called that in those days, tended to be seen as eccentricity or just oddness. But when I got to GCHQ and I’d spent 15 years in and around it before I became director, I would just met more and more staff who had really interesting views of the world and perceptions of the world.

and I started to talk to them and then to research more about what neurodiversity was and just how diverse it is actually, as you say, the synesthesia is a fascinating example of how the brain works and shows how little we understand about it. But I give one example in the book where I was chatting to someone who was overlooking the car park and the building of GCHQ’s headquarters is a donut -shaped building. It’s very similar to what Apple have now done in Cupertino.

And round it is this massive car park. And looking out at this every day, he would say, he felt compelled to organize that and explain the distribution of cars. Whereas to the rest of us, we would probably just accept, well, people park and they get out and they go into work. He felt this compulsion to systematize that. And of course he was right. It wasn’t random. So this is about putting order into the world and finding patterns.

And he was absolutely right because not only was there a computer program booking system for the car park, which was complex, but all the trends of economics, of car sales, of where people lived, of their school runs, all those things influenced the organization of those cars around the building. And while the rest of us might just not even think about it, he felt a compulsion to explain it every day. And I think…

That is interesting in itself, but it’s also a massive advantage in a creative team to have people who think like that, who are systematizing brains, if you like, and all the other neurodivergent traits that are explored in the book, all of which blended with other people in a team can be massively powerful. And one of GCSQ’s of the secret world’s great strength has been able to value that and say, these people are not a problem.

they’re a huge advantage. They may need extra support, they may need understanding, they may need the right conditions in which to work, but actually they’re a fantastic asset. And you give the Israeli example, I mean, I think, I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying we need to employ certain types of neurodivergence in certain jobs, but for sure the blend of these different types of thinking and ways of looking at the world is massively powerful in creativity.

James Taylor (20:06)
What advice would you give if someone’s listening to this just now? Maybe they’re, I said they’re not in the world, most of us not in the world of the counter intelligence and code breaking and things like that. But we do have to manage people, often in large organizations, you’re managing a big mix. You have, you know, you make your diverse people within the organization. You also have generational differences. I know a lot of leaders I speak to, they said they really, they struggle with figuring out, you know,

everything from Baby Boomers to Gen Z to Gen X to millennials, like working with them. What can management more broadly learn from the way that organisations like GCHQ manage that diversity of employees?

Robert Hannigan (20:50)
That’s a great question, James, and it’s the one I get asked most often by board level people and managers. And I think three, just three quick examples. I mean, one is around recruitment. The way most companies recruit staff militates against those kinds of people because they’re very often very open questions designed to explore competence, competencies. That is the worst possible.

kind of interview for many people with neurodivergent conditions who need something much more structured. So thinking about and getting advice on how you recruit is really important. Once you’ve recruited people who are neurodivergent, you need to support them. So that might be very practical things like computer programs that help them, but it may also just be really good line management. You have to invest a lot of time.

And you have to accept that there’s going to be some disruption. And one of the interesting things about Bletchley is that the first leader of Bletchley, Alastair Denniston, spent a lot of his time protecting his staff from criticism from outside, particularly from senior military and Whitehall, who would say, you know, these people are scruffy, they’re too young, they’re arrogant, they’re telling me what to do, they don’t respect authority, you need to do something about it.

and he would push back and say, no, you’ve got to accept that if you want the amazing things they’re doing, you’ve got to accept some of the difficulties that come along the way in this unusual group of people, as he put it. That takes courage in a leadership management context. So yeah, there are definitely some lessons on how to do it, practical and cultural.

James Taylor (22:32)
One of the ones that I read, which I’d never seen before, where you talked about, you called it tea parties, where bletchily, because of the work of the shift system, they work in these shifts all the time, someone would come in and they would sit and they would write down, challenge an idea, something up on a, it could be an equation up on a board, a white board. And the next team that were coming in, can almost kind of look at that idea and pick it apart or figure it out, or that would maybe spark them as well.

Do you, without going into any confidence, what is the modern, is there a modern equivalent of that to ensure that you’re using this hive mind, this collective consciousness well?

Robert Hannigan (23:13)
Yeah, it’s an absolutely key part of the culture of lecture that’s been carried through GCHQ to the current moment actually. And there are two sides to it really. One is having those opportunities for people to discuss and feed in informally their thoughts about how to do things better. And the second key thing is to stop that being hierarchical. So there was always a principle in GCHQ that any member of staff, so getting on for 10 ,000 at some periods, could approach the director.

directly through email. Now that could be a burden at times, but actually it’s really important. And it goes back to the power of young people as well. But actually, most people, as I said, were under 30. And you have to accept that some of them will have absolutely brilliant groundbreaking ideas and be able to do things that all their senior distinguished colleagues haven’t thought of or haven’t been able to do. And to allow that to happen, you’ve got to have some…

parties as they were called at Bletchley, we would call them something different in modern GCSE but get different disciplines together to discuss problems. But you’ve also got to allow the most junior, youngest people to have their ideas and have their say because that’s often where the magic comes from and there’ve been some good examples post -Bletchley of exactly that happening with people straight out of university coming up with amazing, amazing cryptological solutions.

James Taylor (24:38)
Now you also said something in the book which I thought was interesting in light of what’s going on in many organizations today where, you know, the general thing is, you know, don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about religion, you know, there’s certain things in many organizations that they don’t talk about. But I thought it was quite interesting that in terms of like politics, talking about these ideas does seem to be quite open within the organization. I don’t know where that just came from.

a Bletchley thing or if that’s more recent, because I know that many organizations, they tend to stay, you know, let’s keep all that very separate, but you seem to embrace it in some ways.

Robert Hannigan (25:18)
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I wouldn’t go overboard on party politics, I think. So it’s important that these are apolitical organizations and it’s written into the law actually that those running these agencies must be apolitical and implement within the law, implement the wishes of the government of the day. But I think what’s different about the secret world is you are not allowed to take anything home.

So you can’t take your work home. You can’t discuss your work at home with your family and friends. And so there’s a kind of world inside which you’re working where you have to have an outlet for some things. And if you’re thinking of the ethics of intelligence gathering and intrusion into privacy that goes with intelligence agencies, it’s really important that people can express any ethical concerns and discuss them and have them addressed. You don’t want to have that kind of bubbling away.

It’s also important to make sure that we maintain the highest ethical standards and a huge amount of effort goes into adherence to the law, into legal advice, but also into ethical considerations. So giving staff an outlet to discuss that is really important. One of the parallels in the book is with the John Lewis partnership. So we’ll meet a lot of people in the UK and not so much outside, but it’s a mutual, a very successful

department store and grocers. And they had pioneered this in the early part of the last century for their staff and they have a gazette which still exists I think where people would express their views on all sorts of things. And one of the key people at Bletchley came from there and indeed there was a big interchange between the two organizations over the years. But one of them inherited a lot of these management processes and brought them into Bletchley, which is

probably part of why they were so successful, but who would have thought it would come from a department store.

James Taylor (27:15)
Yeah. And the other thing I think most of the time that I know you and I, we speak at different conferences, different public events, or for companies. And in my role, I’m usually the, I guess, the tech optimist. You talk about utopians. I’m usually painting a more utopian picture of, I kind of talk about the dangers, but probably 80 % of what I’m sharing is these are amazing things that are going to happen. You know, in

in GCH QAnon and those services is almost like that is flipped. And your job is to look at the dangers, the risks in these things, how these things will affect it. So is this an organization of pessimists or is it just clear eyed folks that are there?

Robert Hannigan (27:50)
Yeah.

That’s a really interesting question because obviously they’re mostly tech people themselves or interested and inspired by technology. So it’s an organisation of optimists who are enthused and excited about the technology as you are yourself, James. I guess that what makes a difference is that their job is to focus on the bad things that could happen. So what are bad people with bad intentions going to do with this technology in the future? Because technology itself is kind of ethically neutral on the whole.

It’s all about what people do with it and how will it be abused is a question which the big tech companies are never going to put front and center, partly because they’re utopians, they’re optimists, partly because it doesn’t make commercial sense. You don’t spend a lot of money developing a product, push it out and say, by the way, we’re worried that this might be, might have to do it. So take social media, for example. They’ve spent 30 years saying, this is great building communities, connecting people, all that fantastic stuff.

But they haven’t said, well, all the bad things that can be done with it from election interference through to the impact on teenagers. Those are things which have kind of been forced on them. And so I think getting the balance right, I mean, overall, I am an optimist too. And I think, primarily, I would say, technological advances are fantastic and they’re bringing human progress forward at an incredible rate, or as you know, better than anyone.

But to do that completely without looking at the downsides is a real risk. And so it’s quite useful to have some agencies whose job is to look at how things might be abused in the future.

James Taylor (29:47)
Now bringing it back to your own work, as I was reading it, I was thinking, you’re just touching on AI, you’re just touching on quantum computing. And I thought, is this where the next book’s perhaps gonna go for you? But where do you go to get creative inspiration? You mentioned in the book about the donut, GCHQ, has a garden in the middle, which I love the idea of that. We often get inspiration when we’re out in nature, or where that color green is around us.

but also you have these open plan offices which I know for some people can cause real stress, especially if you’re more quiet person. So you have what they call caves and marketplaces. But for you, where do you go to get inspired? Where do you go to think about these big ideas and ways of solving them and actually in your writing as well?

Robert Hannigan (30:33)
So I do go outside, I do like to be out in nature. I do find that inspiring. I also find talking to people, wandering around, just seeing what they’re doing inspiring, which is a very, literally, DTHQ thing to do, actually, just to kind of wander around and chat to people. I’m not sure that you can prescribe that, different people find different things good for their creativity, from baths, as you said earlier, to sitting in a garden.

if you’re lucky enough to have a garden that’s accessible, not everybody does. I mean, your point about mathematicians and what they need is something that’s kind of occupied a lot of my time, both at GCSQ and also now I’m in a university in Oxford and we think a lot about the architecture, how that helps or hinders academics to think. And there have been some wonderful examples of institutions for mathematicians which try to blend that.

time alone that they need, almost a kind of monastic cell to go and think. But the interchange of ideas, the sort of marketplaces you say, where they can be sociable and exchange ideas. If you get that wrong, you can significantly damage the potential for creativity by just limiting the environment in which it can happen. So it’s really important. I think the built environment, the natural environment are really important to creativity.

James Taylor (31:58)
Yeah. It’s like the genius loci, the places themselves have their own creed and they can inspire their own genius as well. Just a couple of quick, back to the classic, so quick fires, we just start to finish up now. Is there a book you’ve personally been reading just now that has just kind of got you thinking differently? And if anyone is interested in maybe creativity, innovation, technology, future trends, where the world may be going, is there one book you would recommend people check out just now?

Robert Hannigan (32:01)
Exactly.

Absolutely, it’s back and back to the classics.

If I’m absolutely honest, I tend not to read books about those kinds of technology developments. I prefer to talk to people, but I ought to read the tech press. There’s a lot going on in the tech press, which I find very inspiring. And I tend to read fiction. So I’m reading Long Island at the moment, which I think is great. But…

Yeah, I try not to read too many of the… There are some very good ones out there, but I try not to read too many of the kind of predictions of the future books. Partly because I think a lot is being written about AI that is not particularly helpful. There’s a lot of hype around AI. But of course, AI was actually a big part of AI.

James Taylor (33:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s one of my things as I watch more like TV shows, they have a very dark view of where we’re going as a civilization in the future. And I hope that we have more interesting storytellers. There are some amazing things that we had, where we had Sir David Ormond on, we form a colleague of yours, we were talking about the three body problem and there is really interesting fiction going on just now.

Wonderful book, so Counterintelligence, What the Secret World Can Teach Us About Problem Solving and Creativity. Robert Hannigan, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you. If you want to learn more about you and your work, I know you’re heavily involved in different universities, I think you’re in the Bletchley Trust as well. Where can people go to learn more about you?

Robert Hannigan (34:02)
I’ve got a website, roberthanigan .com, or there are more details in the book. The proceeds of the book go to Bletchley. It’s been a real pleasure, James, and thank you very much. I think podcasts are a great way of exploring these things. It’s probably more dynamic than books, actually, so it’s great to be here.

James Taylor (34:20)
Well Robert Hagen, thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.

Robert Hannigan (34:23)
Thanks, James.

The post Robert Hannigan – The Power of Neurodiversity in Innovation, Cybersecurity, GCHQ and Counter-Intelligence #342 appeared first on James Taylor.

Summary

Sam Dixon, Chief Innovation Officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson, discusses the role of AI in the legal profession and the challenges of driving innovation in a traditional industry. He shares his journey from online retail to law and how he became involved in innovation. Dixon explains the different applications of AI in the legal sector, such as document automation and machine learning for document review. He also discusses the buy vs. build argument and the potential impact of AI on pricing and billing in law firms. Dixon emphasizes the importance of developing social intelligence and complex problem-solving skills to remain relevant in the evolving legal landscape.

Sound Bites

“Generative AI is able to do a lot of that work without the need for lots and lots of examples.”

“The key for me is creating that culture of innovation where it is part of the conversation and where people are enabled to suggest ideas and implement ideas.”

“I don’t think lawyers need to be coders. I mean, query in the modern world of low and no code, how much coders need to be coders?”

Sam is the Chief Innovation Officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson in the UK. He is also a practising lawyer in the firm’s restructuring team. His innovation journey started in online retail in the early 2000s and led him to law via a brief detour through the world of DJing. 

Sam specializes in advising various stakeholders in relation to distressed businesses, charities and providers of public services; especially in scenarios with a continuity of supply requirement or which involve complex stakeholder management. 

He is a qualified insolvency practitioner (non-practising) and has 18 months’ experience in a non-legal banking role within the business support team of a major clearing bank.

He has particular experience in the education, healthcare and charity sectors.

Sam Dixon

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00:00 Introduction to Sam Dixon and Womblebond Dickinson

03:33 Focus on Restructuring in Commercial Law

06:17 Applications of AI in the Legal Profession

08:06 Overcoming Resistance to Innovation in Law Firms

09:56 Two-Tier Approach to Innovation

11:56 Deciding Between Buy and Build in AI Adoption

15:23 Impact of AI on Pricing and Billing in Law Firms

22:04 Exploring the Potential of Data Licensing

24:52 Parallels Between AI in Law and Music

28:09 The Changing Role of Lawyers in the AI Era

30:00 Using Generative AI as a Sounding Board

31:53 Book Recommendation: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

sam-dixon-the-supercreativity-podcast-with-james-taylor_scp341-sam-dixon-full-video.txt
James Taylor (00:08)
Sam Dixon is the chief innovation officer of law firm Womble Bond Dickinson in the United Kingdom. He is also a practicing lawyer in the firm’s restructuring team. His innovation journey started in online retail in the early 2000s and has led him to law via a brief detour through the world of DJing. And if you don’t know Womble Bond Dickinson, I’m gonna put my hand up here. They are a client of mine. I’ve spoken to them for a number of times before. I think they have about a thousand.

lawyers in the US and the UK and they cover lots of different areas of business as well. And we’re going to be taking a deep dive into the work that Sam and his team do around innovation, specifically in the legal profession. So Sam, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Sam Dixon (00:50)
Good afternoon, James. Thank you for having me.

James Taylor (00:52)
So share with us just now what’s going on in your world, what currently has your focus at the moment?

Sam Dixon (00:57)
Well, I think it would be very difficult to give an answer other than generative AI, to be honest with you. It’s stormed onto the scene. We’re working our way through the hype cycle, of course. And it’s keeping us all very, very busy, both in terms of what we can do right now with it, but also what the future trajectory is going to be and where we might end up.

James Taylor (01:18)
And take, how did you get into this role? I mentioned that you’re obviously a practicing partner, you’re a solicitor, you do DJing as well. Tell us how this journey into the current role happened.

Sam Dixon (01:29)
Well, I’ve always had a bit of an interest in doing things differently and innovation and in the use of tech. Going back to, you mentioned the online retail at the start of my journey. And essentially for me, that was working in an outdoor equipment retailer in a shop and then ended up taking over their mail order business, turning that into an online retail business in the relatively early days of online retail and doing things like using AdWords and a computer.

a different way to how anyone has used them before. So we were targeting essentially a product comparison approach that no one else was using at the time. And fast forward in, sorry, go on James.

James Taylor (02:07)
I think, yeah, I was gonna say the move into the law. So you didn’t come initially from the legal profession then. You kind of, you were starting in e -commerce and retail first, and then you kind of, how did you find your way into the law?

Sam Dixon (02:22)
Well, in some respects, in a relatively conventional route, in the bit of online retail, and then I was doing a law degree. Now, being honest with you, whilst I was doing a law degree, I was doing quite a lot of DJing and event promotion, and I didn’t apply for a training contract two years ahead of time in the way that people normally do, because frankly, I thought I was going to be traveling the world DJing. And as I went into my final year, I had a number of offers to work in various parts of the world as a DJ.

But in my final year, we did real legal work. And I ended up dealing with a multiple conspiracy to murder case, so some gangland stuff. And it was fascinating. And at the same time, the firm I’m currently with, which at the time was called Dickinson Dees, prior to a number of mergers, they approached the university I was at and said, do you have anyone who might be interested in starting a training contract in a few months’ time? So I went in and had a chat. And one of the icebreaker questions was, do you know?

tell us something interesting about your week last week. So I explained that I’d DJed for an artist called Chesney Hawkes. It turned out the head of graduate recruitment was a massive Chesney Hawkes fan, and the rest, as they say, is history.

James Taylor (03:37)
So you went into, obviously, you started initially in the kind of legal side around criminal law. But my understanding is that one Bond Dickinson is known really for commercial law, and it’s that kind of world. And then you specifically, you focused on the restructuring side of things. So how did you get into that particular part of commercial law?

Sam Dixon (03:58)
Absolutely, well as you say it’s a commercial law firm so the criminal side of things was just part of my university experience. As soon as I joined what’s now Umubon Dickinson it was commercial law from the start and I started off as a trainee like all lawyers do and I rotated around a few different seats and being honest I didn’t know an awful lot about restructuring. I didn’t know what to expect but as I was going into my final seat it was in the height of the recession.

And there weren’t necessarily the opportunities in other areas that I would have perhaps liked to have done. And so someone gave me the chance to go and work in the restructuring team. And it turns out it was a really good fit for me. So I qualified into restructuring and insolvency and spent a number of years learning the ropes and really enjoying the restructuring sector, helping to try and save businesses and that kind of thing. But over time, I saw there were a number of things that we were doing in restructuring, which

I think it’s probably fair to describe as a bit boring at times. James form -filling, doing the same precedence again and again that he didn’t necessarily feel was the best way of doing it. There must have been a better way. And that got me to start looking at document automation. Originally using things which with hindsight look like quite archaic technology now and borderline kind of coding. Whereas,

things have evolved and it’s got easier and easier to do. But that first time that I saw a suite of documents that are automated, where in the past it would have taken hours to produce it, to then be able to just go out to answer a few questions and it’s going to tell me what documents I need. And it’s going to produce them all for me with all the associated paperwork. This is just amazing. And it was that that really was the trigger point for me gradually over time becoming more and more involved in our innovation.

efforts across the firm.

James Taylor (05:53)
I know with a lot of law firms I’ve worked with in the past, they initially got very excited about RPA, robotic process automation, taking some of those agreements, automating things to a certain extent. We’ve now moved from just doing that into obviously artificial intelligence and machine learning as well. When you’ve seen these technologies start to be applied in the work of law firms, where do you typically see it? Is it in document?

Is it being document management side? Is it looking at risk in relation to contracts? Is it helping lawyers draft agreements or something else?

Sam Dixon (06:31)
So I think it depends on the particular technology. But if you’re talking about that document automation side of things, that’s the production of documents very clearly. When you look at machine learning though, that’s usually around something like a document review. So that might be a due diligence exercise. It might be someone wanting to understand their range of contracts, whether it complies with their policies in a particular area. They might be trying to understand the lease portfolio and wanting to extract various bits of information across that portfolio because,

they’ve inherited it from someone else, it perhaps doesn’t have the level of detail and structure that they need. And that original transition machine learning tools worked to a degree to deliver that task. And there has been some success on that front. I think where it gets really interesting is that generative AI is able to do a lot of that work without the need for lots and lots of examples.

and the proactive work to train the particular machine learning tool to look for particular points of interest.

James Taylor (07:41)
Now your work obviously around innovation, a lot of law firms struggle around innovation because it’s traditionally the legal industry is one that’s focused on billable hours, your six minute increments or however long it is. And so everyone obviously partners associates very focused on those billable hours and to be able to take a step back and think actually, is there a better way of doing this or a smarter way, a more productive way of doing it? It’s often very difficult when people just focus on those billable hours. How did you…

to change the mindset within a firm, especially with those colleagues of yours who maybe said, we’ve been doing this for years, why do we have to change it?

Sam Dixon (08:20)
I think you chose a great word at the start of that, James, which is traditional. And law is a very traditional sector. People have a very traditional mindset. What we’ve tried to do to get people to think a bit more differently and to try out some of this new stuff is, first of all, just to get it on their radar. Because if they don’t know about it, then they haven’t even got the option of trying to do things differently.

So we do things like our International Innovation Week, where we work with our colleagues in the US and where you’ve spoken before, to just tell people stories about innovation, give them that inspiration. It’s about making them want to get involved. And are you going to get absolutely everyone to take a more innovative approach? No, you’re not. With the best will in the world, that’s never going to happen. But you don’t know exactly who is receptive to it and who isn’t.

So the key for me is creating that culture of innovation where it is part of the conversation and where people are enabled to suggest ideas and implement ideas. So, sorry James.

James Taylor (09:30)
No, I was just going to say, so take us through like an example of that. Let’s say you’re a partner in the restructuring part of the business and you’ve been doing something for a while and it works, it’s fine. But you’re thinking, listen, maybe I want to try using some of these AI tools and thinking about things in a more innovative way. What does that process look like? Is it lead often led by the partner? Is it led from the innovation lab within it? Is it led by an associate? Is it project managers?

How does it start to come together?

Sam Dixon (10:03)
So we take a two tier approach to innovation, James. And what I’m talking about there is our starting point and the first tier of that two tier approach is what we call our self -service toolkit. So we’ve been focusing on trying to sort of leverage that experience across the whole business. So rather than having a team of people centrally who are the ones who innovate, the others.

We try to stay away from that and empower everyone to do differently what they know best, what they’re dealing with day in, day out. So the self -service toolkit is a series of pieces of software with training materials made available in a way which minimizes the need for central approval, be that cost approval or whatever else so that people can pick things up.

take ideas forward with the appropriate approvals from within their own teams so that ideas aren’t being duplicated and so that time isn’t being wasted when it should be applied on something else. But really empowering everyone to be able to take that forward. We do recognize though that some of what people want to do might be a bit more ambitious. And it might require a little bit of coding skill. It might require some admin.

access rights from an IT perspective, which with the best rule in the world, we’re not going to expect our lawyers to have. In my view, I don’t think lawyers need to be coders. I mean, query in the modern world of low and no code, how much coders need to be coders? But lawyers for me certainly don’t need to be. And therefore, we have the second tier, which is the complex automations. And that’s where you’re looking at potentially an end -to -end process.

with a lot of heavy automation in there and probably integrations between multiple different systems.

James Taylor (12:01)
So let’s say on that then, let’s say you’re having all folks from different parts of the business say, we’ve got this problem, we think we could use, we would like to use AI to help us on this problem. Someone else sees an opportunity. How do you then kind of sort and sift all that, decide actually this is where we’re going to focus on? Is there strategic kind of pillars that you’re focused around? Will you only do projects where you think it could benefit across the whole firm rather than a particular department in the firm? How do you decide?

Sam Dixon (12:30)
Well, I think it depends on what support is needed, James. I mean, the idea of the self -service toolkit is we don’t need to decide. The individual teams, for example, restructuring can say, right, well, we’ve got a sale agreement here, which we think will benefit from being automated. There’s a self -service tool available to let us do that. And we, as a restructuring team, can assess whether or not we want to use our own team resource in order to progress that.

So that’s one side of it, obviously on the complex automation side. There is a need for prioritization. And that’s done on a business case basis, as you probably expect. And so we listen to what teams want. And sometimes teams don’t necessarily know what they want. This is as much about a conversation as it is about anything else. And I’m currently touring all of our UK offices just talking to people.

floorwalking, having conversations around, right, well, what are your pain points? What are you trying to achieve? What is the most boring thing you’re doing, the most frustrating thing you’re doing? And where have you got to work around? Because that’s always a great example of an innovation opportunity is where someone’s currently trying to work around existing systems and processes. So we have those conversations. We then review the business cases and we work out where the best ROI is, frankly. And sometimes,

That’s where there is really well structured workflows that are high volume and it makes a lot of sense to put a lot of structure around that. But other times there might be things which could benefit a very broad part of the firm. And actually someone in one particular team has come up with an idea which is of much, much broader application. And then it’s not around that really well structured work necessarily. It might be.

around a particular aspect of a task or just something that everyone’s doing. Like for example, reviewing agreements in Word. There are aspects of that. One of the tools that we’ve put in the self -service toolkit recently, which has been really, really popular, is, it sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but essentially it’s a sidebar in Word that scans your Word document and it allows you, rather than…

jumping around the document back to definition tables and clause 12 .5 that’s referenced down here, it allows you to just double click on the work, the defined term, or double click on the relevant clause, and it pops up alongside you. So you don’t have that constant context switching and loss of focus. And it turns out that is something that is applicable to a really large part of the work that we do. And it’s saved an awful lot of time and to be frank, has probably improved consistency as well because…

even the best lawyers in the world get tired and sometimes miss things.

James Taylor (15:27)
So how do you decide, and this is the thing I’m starting to see with some firms where they’re saying they’ve been using a lot of off the shelf products from different providers. Some that focus very much on the legal industry, others that are just more broad like the chat, GPTs of this world, for example. And then there’s those firms that say, actually, we are going to employ our own data scientists. We’re going to build our own models. We’re going to do that work as well, which is obviously more expensive and sometimes is not in the…

the usual field that a law firms would do. Have you made that, have you started coming up against that? Have you started thinking about that decision about, okay, when are we going to have to maybe think about starting to build our own things that will have basically be WombleBone Dickinson creative products?

Sam Dixon (16:12)
The buy v build argument is something that’s been going on in the legal sector for a long, long time. And I’m largely still of the mindset that firms that specialize in developing software, be that for legal tech or otherwise, are probably going to win and probably going to produce something better than we can. It’s the old adage of keeping the main thing the main thing, isn’t it? What we do is provide legal services. We don’t develop software.

Where we really have the advantage is in using that software, in integrating different pieces of software together using APIs where that might not have been done previously. And that’s where the edge is. However, I do think there’s a bit of a blurring of the line now between buy and build, because how you’re using some of these tools increasingly starts to look like building rather than buying. So.

I mean, you reference people building their own models. Personally, I think the idea of someone building their own large language model as a law firm is bonkers. The scale that is required and the broad capability that existing models have, it just doesn’t make sense to me for someone to build their own model. But you can go and use Microsoft Azure Studio, OpenAI Studio, to develop your own.

GenAI powered chatbots. And that’s something that we have done. Now is that buy, is that build? We’ve created the system messages, we’ve played around with the p -values, the k -values, the temperature, we’ve put the data set into it. I don’t know whether it’s buy or build in that situation where we bought in a tool and then we’ve used it to build a GenAI chatbot. And frankly, I guess it doesn’t really matter which side of the line that falls in.

And we’ve started relatively simple and there’s an ambition to build out from there. So what we’ve built so far, we’re calling iWomble. And iWomble currently looks over our 70 something policies and procedures and answers plain English questions about them. In line with our AI policy, people still need to verify the answers. They can’t completely rely on what’s provided, but we’ve found, passed over a relatively small data set, what we’ve

built, bought, is really quite accurate. And people are finding it far, far easier to get to the right answers, especially when some questions are answered across multiple policies. And it brings them all together, gives them an answer like if I asked you the question and you knew all of our policies, the kind of answer that you would give together with citations so that people can go and check them. And then that saved a lot of time. And due course, we’ll build that out on a modular basis to look at all sorts of other areas of the business as well.

James Taylor (19:12)
If I was a client, one question is going to be coming up in my head just now. Okay, when I get my bill and I have partner X, 20 hours, a junior associate X amount of hours, paralegal X amount of hours, where does the AI, where does AI Womble AI, AI Womble live in that? Are you going to bill that as a separate kind of product service within it, or are you just seeing this as something that just helps augment the…

the folks that actually already work in your firm.

Sam Dixon (19:45)
I think it’s still quite fluid at the moment, to be honest with you, James. I think the whole sector is trying to work out how generative AI is going to impact pricing. For me, currently, it’s a question of looking at things on a case -by -case basis. We are still, I believe, at a relatively early stage in gen AI being applied to law. So there are a number of major vendors who are building gen AI solutions onto existing products. And the roadmap for those is sort of

during the course of this year. So a lot of the legal specific benefit is still to be realized. When you look at something like iWamble, for example, those questions around policies and procedures, clients are benefiting there because some of those policy questions will be around how a particular process works. And we’re making sure that people get to the right answer quickly. Now, some of that probably wasn’t time that was.

was ever charged to clients in the first place because it’s our own internal policies. Some of it, depending on the nature, might well be. So there’s some savings and efficiencies there which would just be passed on. The more general potential for this around document review and things like that will be discussed on a case -by -case basis. So it might be that clients are given the option, for example. It might be, look, we’ve got this new tool.

We can do it this way, and we can agree a fixed price of x. Or if you prefer, we can do it a different way. And it’ll be charged based on time, but those rates might reflect, for example, the overhead cost of the AI. So there’s different ways of looking at it. Whether we’ll get to a place where there’s a technology charge.

that sits on files alongside time, for example. That might be one route that the industry goes. But I know that when other industries have tried that, there’s been some pushback there. So I think that could be challenging. One thing that could well happen, James, and as I say, this is all really fluid at the moment, it might well be that as with other overheads, essentially, chargeout rates are adjusted.

to reflect the fact that work is being done more efficiently, but there’s a big investment cost in these tools in the first place. So it could be that it’s offset that way, but time will tell.

James Taylor (22:08)
Yeah, I was I was thinking we had one of our other guests we’ve had on the the season is Sir David, Professor Sir David Allman, who was the formerly head of GCHQ. And so what with all the intelligence services, one stat he shared was of the public of publicly indexed information is out there, I when you’re on Google or Yahoo, wherever, that is only 0 .3 % of information exists, because most information exists on intranets or

dark web or places that the general public do not have access to as well. And one thing I was wondering there was, were some of these larger clients that you might have where you say, listen, we can maybe do a, almost a quick pro -crop because AI, we need data to train it on. And if there’s some way that we can obviously, it needs to data security and all the things and anonymize and all the things you would normally have, but there’s almost a bit of a competitive advantage there because some of your clients who have large data sets,

large amounts of information going back many, many years, that’s amazing information to train an AI on.

Sam Dixon (23:14)
It is, and I’m sure over time we will see more and more licensing style deals to get access to content that isn’t indexed, like the Financial Times announced last week or the week before. I think for a law firm, it’s really, really challenging because you’ve got that duty of confidentiality, you’ve got all the information security requirements, you’ve got all the data protection requirements, and…

Again, I guess it goes back to keeping the main thing, the main thing. To what extent do we want to be distracting from what we do best by having conversations with clients around potentially acquiring their data for a different purpose to how we normally use it, which is essentially what we will be talking about. And I don’t know.

Call me traditional James, call me someone who’s been trained as a lawyer, but it just makes me inherently nervous and I wonder if actually the way that that will progress is for the really big players to approach some of the big multinationals and do licensing deals with them in the same way as they have done with the FT rather than trying to partner with law firms who leverage it.

James Taylor (24:28)
Yeah, it’s almost a little bit like the within the UK with the NHS data that’s been anonymized. So and just different companies that have access to that so that they can run models and do, you know, use AI assay models and things to kind of test but individuals information is not necessarily known by that AI. I’m interested, you know, with your your other side of view, which is the DJ, which we’ve come to just now. I mean, the world of music is being

changed so fast just now because of AI, especially generative AI. I was playing with something for an event I’m doing in London later this week, a tool called Suno AI. I don’t know whether you’ve been playing with it at all where you can just write in some ideas for some lyrics, give it the kind of theme that you, the kind of style of music you want to do, and it will do you a track. And it sends this real sounding audio, real sounding vocals, real sounding everything. And it’s great. It’s good for getting a first idea. And some of them are quite funny as well.

Are there any things that you’ve seen within the music space and your background as a DJ where you’re kind of thinking, actually, I’m starting to see this now within the legal profession, perhaps in terms of how the job is changing or how we’re going to have to take a certain approach or a certain position in terms of how we work with AI?

Sam Dixon (25:47)
Well, I think there are going to be parallels across lots and lots of different sectors. And I think if you look at how DJing has evolved over time, I started in the CDJ era. So just after vinyl, the early days of CDs being the medium of choice, simply because you could carry more of them. But you were still actually mixing. You were still exercising a degree of skill over time.

And I suspect there’s lots of modern DJs who would be screaming the, their radios right now, but over time, technology and earlier forms of AI have increasingly been able to say, right, well, this is this many beats per minute. That’s that many beats per minute. and what we can do is marry that up and we can line up. So when you, when you drop the one track over the other, actually you’re slightly off in your timing and therefore I’m going to adjust it for you and make it play. So what that’s done over time is level the playing field a bit.

and allow people to, more people to access that particular profession and to perform at a standard that they weren’t previously able to perform. And I suspect that generative AI might have a similar levelling approach for certain bits of legal work going forwards. And the key will then be, well, what skills are the ones that really add the value?

when you get to that place. And for me, when you look at what’s going to be left as AI advances, and who knows when we’ll get to the end game on that. But it’s going to be things like the social intelligence and that complex problem solving in a complicated set of circumstances. And that’s where I think lawyers need to be really focused on developing those skills and making sure they remain relevant. And the other thing is you’ve got to accept

that the world will change and you can’t fight against that. It’s better to be part of that change and to embrace it and to accept that the skills that you needed before are different to the skills that are needed now. I mean, handwriting is a lot less relevant in the role of the modern lawyer than it used to be, James. I think many lawyers would argue with that. So it’s just another step in the evolution.

James Taylor (28:13)
guess also, you got a front row seat of this in terms of all those young trainees are coming in young and older trainees, you know, people are going to university later in life. But some of the younger trainees who have come up being that first generation who have been using chat GPT for in their exams, for example, in different ways, they’re now coming into your firm saying, Hey, I was able to use this when I was at university studying for my law degree, why can I not have access to these same tools in a firm? So you’re kind of you’re coming.

You’re going to be coming up against that as well. Quickfire questions as we start to finish up here as well. Is there a quote or a line or statement that you kind of live by that you often kind of is kind of your, is your kind of compass in life in some way?

Sam Dixon (29:06)
I’m not sure that there’s any one statement to be honest with you James.

I mean, I was once mocked roundly and I suspect I’m about to be again, but I will do it because it’s the answer to the question, I guess. I was once stopped and interviewed by someone from Radio Lancashire and asked exactly the same question, essentially. And as a 16 -year -old, I said, keep it smooth. That was my response. And I guess as cringe -worthy as that was and as much abuse as I received from…

James Taylor (29:34)
Keep it smooth. Keep it smooth.

Sam Dixon (29:43)
friends at the time for saying that. I think there is a certain truth in just staying calm and objectively assessing problems in order to properly work out what an innovative solution to that problem is, which is my attempt at a neat segue into your next question.

James Taylor (30:04)
And then, so on that, we’ve been talking about just having a sense of perspective on things and assessing in that way as well. Are there any tools that you use or apps that you use you find are very useful in the kind of work that you do? We’ve mentioned obviously the Chat GPT and different Microsoft tools and things. Are there any that you particularly think, I don’t think I can live without this now?

Sam Dixon (30:31)
Well, I think it’s probably more use case for one of the tools we’ve touched on rather than anything else. And that is generative AI for me has become a really useful sounding board. It’s essentially a coach for me. So I might draft a new idea, a new element of our strategy, and then say to it, right, act as our managing partner and ask.

what questions would you ask about this documentation? Critique this for me. And I use that on an iterative basis to try and anticipate some of the things that people might ask and some of the challenge that might be put back against a particular idea.

James Taylor (31:12)
I use a very similar thing I call virtual masterminds where I’ll put in an idea for a project or a business plan that we have, and then I’ll give it six people that I respect who have very different perspectives on business and things. And I’ll say, okay, find all the flaws on this. And it’s fascinating because you get to see from different perspectives and then we kind of do the human bit, which we kind of triangulate all of that and say, okay, that’s fine. Now that I know how Elon would approach it or how Warren Buffett would approach it.

now I need to think like, okay, how would Sam Dixon approach it? What would we do? What about books? Are there any books that you can recommend to our listeners, maybe around AI or the future in some way?

Sam Dixon (31:56)
Well, Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, I’m sure you’re familiar with it, James, is a fascinating read about AI and about, well, I would guess the potential doomsday scenarios that we might all face. But in approaching those doomsday scenarios, you do get a reasonably good feel for the progression of AI over time and a good grounding in what AI is.

James Taylor (32:24)
And if people want to connect with you to learn more about Womble Bond Dickinson, more about the firm, what’s the best place for them to go and do that?

Sam Dixon (32:31)
Well, you can find me on LinkedIn or on X, I am at Innovation in Law.

James Taylor (32:38)
Sam Dixon, Chief Innovation Officer of Law firm 1 with Womble Bond Dickinson Thank you so much for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.

The post Sam Dixon of Womble Bond Dickinson, The Evolving Role of Lawyers in the AI Era #341 appeared first on James Taylor.

Summary

John Craske, the director of innovation at CMS, discusses the firm’s AI strategy and the role of innovation in the legal industry. He emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture of curiosity and experimentation. The firm has implemented an innovation department and introduced innovation hours to encourage employees to pursue their ideas. Craske believes that AI can enhance the efficiency of legal work and sees opportunities for collaboration between humans and machines. He also highlights the need for foundational legal skills and human skills like empathy and creativity.

Sound Bites

1. “We’re using our computers more like electronic typewriters for many years.”

2. “Innovation hours are like seed funding for ideas.”

3. “AI has captured the imagination of people in a way that lots of other technology has never had.”

John Craske is responsible for the innovation and knowledge functions at CMS, with the aim of helping their clients and business to work smarter: to find the right balance between client satisfaction, cost effectiveness, profitability and opportunities for our people. He leads their dynamic Legal Innovation, Legal Operations and Project Management, Legal Tech, Managed Legal Services and Knowledge teams. He’s passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging people to be curious, ask questions and experiment. John is currently leading our firmwide AI strategy as tjeu look to use AI to supercharge our digital transformation programme. He regularly works with clients (and others in the legal industry) to help design / implement practical (and innovative) solutions to their challenges.

CMS Legal

James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.

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00:00 Introduction to John Craske and his role at CMS

03:04 The Development of Innovation Departments in Law Firms

06:44 Overcoming the Tension between Billable Hours and Innovation

09:26 Building a Team and Aligning Innovation with Firm Strategy

12:08 The Opportunities and Challenges of AI in the Legal Industry

15:23 The Importance of Human Skills in the Age of AI

27:23 Final Quickfire Questions

james-taylors-studio-hj5fj_james-taylor-may-27-2024-001.txt
James Taylor (00:08)
John Craske is the director of innovation at CMS, an international law firm with offices in over 40 countries. He is responsible for innovation and knowledge functions at CMS with the aim of helping their clients and businesses to work smarter and to find the right balance between client satisfaction, cost effectiveness, profitability, and opportunities for their people. John leads CMS’s dynamic legal innovation, legal operations and project management, legal tech, managed legal services, and knowledge teams.

He’s passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging people to be curious, ask questions and experiment. Currently, he’s leading the firm -wide AI strategy at CMS as they look at AI to supercharge their digital transformation program. In his role, John regularly works with clients and others in the legal industry to help design, implement practical and innovative solutions to their challenges. He loves hearing about specific legal and business challenges.

that clients have and then trying to solve them. And John, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

John Craske (01:09)
Thanks James, lovely to be here.

James Taylor (01:11)
So share with us what’s going on in your world just now, what currently has your focus.

John Craske (01:15)
Well, thanks for the intro. Yeah. I think the focus at the moment is working hard on our AI strategy roadmap. But secretly, I think we’re using that to help kickstart the digital transformation innovation journey for all of our lawyers. That’s been quite hard in a law firm when I think probably if I’m being unkind, I would say we’ve been using our computers more like electronic typewriters for many years. So it’s great to sort of be secretly using that to help drive it.

James Taylor (01:45)
Well, we’re definitely gonna get into the AI piece, we’re gonna get into the genesis of AI piece as it affects the legal industry. Just let everyone know, my wife is a lawyer and a solicitor, so I’ve been getting a kind of a bit of a seat to see how that world is transforming with some of my legal clients as well. But let’s just take you back, how did you get into this work you do? Did you come from the legal profession before that or from the technology background?

John Craske (02:09)
Yes, so I’m a qualified lawyer. I’m actually a Scottish Solicitor, even though being English, so I live up in Scotland. I know you do too, James. And I’ve always been interested in that sort of junction between the practice of law and the business of law. But a long time ago, my wife told me I need to do something a bit more creative and she didn’t mean painting or music, although I do love music. And then I think it was a series of…

lucky accidents maybe that everyone’s careers a bit like that so you know I had a boss I didn’t get on with so well we did a merger with Anderson Legal and then a de -merger with Anderson Legal when the Enron Scramble happened and then another things like that and so I’ve just kind of taken the opportunities when there’s been moments of change to get into that why are we doing things the way we’re doing it and I’m also always been that person in the room who asks the stupid questions and

why are we doing it like this? And that’s kind of led me down the path that I’ve gone down.

James Taylor (03:10)
Now, a lot of my legal clients have innovation departments, innovation labs. I was speaking the other week for a law firm. They had an innovation week to help their partners and their associates and their administrators kind of focus around legal tech and innovation. Tell us about the development of the innovation department within your business. How did that get started? How did it start to develop over time?

John Craske (03:40)
Sure, so I think we started probably a good long time ago. I mean, we’ve always been interested in using technology to help us be as efficient as we can be, both for our clients benefit, but also because the more efficient we are, then obviously the more profitable we can be like every other business. So for both of those reasons. But…

think the lawyers find it quite difficult to get involved and think about how they can use technology themselves. It’s almost like they would want somebody else to do it for them or provide it for them or innovate to them and then maybe that’s something we can come back to a bit later. So we started off quite gently. We did lots of work around legal project management and helping people think about

how they might structure their work in a sort of more innovative way. But then we realized we had a sort of missing gap and we were talking to all of the practice groups about innovation and what does the future of their work look like and how they’re gonna develop in the future. And actually they almost universally then said, that’s great John, but what tech have we got? And…

and so we were like okay no we’re not really here to talk about technology that might well be a way that you can use you can use technology to help you innovate but that’s not what we’re here to talk about and they’re like yeah well we’ll get to that our clients are demanding to know what technology we use so what tech have we got so that’s when we built out our legal tech capabilities and built our portfolio of tools that we’ve got and then moved on from there and actually we’ve always whilst we’ve always been sort of nudging away at the

core innovation piece, it’s only relatively recently when we’ve been able to go back and say, okay, well we’re back to talk to you about innovation. And still they say often, well what tech have you got? And we’re like, okay, well we’ve got a good answer to that now, we’ve got a team that can help you and we’ve got lots of tools. We really want to help you think about what ideas you’ve got for the way you deliver your work, what services you deliver and stuff. So we’ve incrementally grown the team out and it’s been a bit like a guerrilla war as well. So.

messages from the top and infiltrating from the bottom as well.

James Taylor (05:58)
Now there’s this tension that often exists in legal firms and accountancy firms, audit firms, where as a lawyer, you’re often thought to, you think in billable hours or five, 10 minute chunks. You’re always having to do your, I know lawyers have to do their time sheets and they’re thinking about that and the files and everything as well. And innovation obviously doesn’t work in that way. It kind of works in a slightly different way where we sometimes have to step away from the problem, kind of think from different perspectives, do a lot of research.

That takes time, that takes resources to do that as well. So how have you worked with the people within the business in order to get them to think about really innovation and the value of innovation as a concept and something that they should do, rather than it’s like, well, this is a compliance thing or you think about innovation from that perspective.

John Craske (06:50)
Yeah, sure. It’s actually, funnily enough, it’s every six minutes. Well, most law firms, it’s every six minutes rather than five or 10 because it’s a neat divider for the hour because you get 10 of them in an hour, right? But you’re absolutely right. It’s one of the key drivers in the law firm is this sort of need to record every six minutes of your day. And actually, most lawyers, certainly in private practice, will have targets around the number of…

billable hours or billed hours that they have to achieve in a year and if they don’t achieve those targets then they don’t get their bonus. So you know, we all know you get what you measure and so that’s what the lawyers do of course is that’s why they were driving. So we’ve done a number of things. The first thing is we’ve started at the bottom and we’ve made sure that innovation is in everybody’s competencies and that the people understand it’s part of their job.

Now, that’s only a beginning. We also try and do some training around things like creativity. I actually heard somebody once say to me, I’m sure you’ll disagree with this, but I heard someone say to me that, you can’t train creativity. But I don’t think that’s true at all. I think you absolutely can. But probably the, you know, one of the most interesting thing we did was introduce this concept called innovation hours. And I managed to convince the management team that.

This would be a valuable way of demonstrating to both the firm and to our clients that we took innovation seriously. So the way they work is if someone’s got an idea, think of it like seed funding for ideas and if they’ve got an interesting idea that they want to pursue then they can say, hey I’ve got this idea, this is what it’s about and can I have a budget of hours? And so then they kind of get a budget for hours the same way they would get a budget of hours if they were working on a client job. So…

and then we would support them with either help accessing tech if they need to do that or with the creative process if they need that or connecting them with other people around the firm or externally to try and experiment with their idea. Importantly I guess that the hours aren’t contingent on whatever it is being successful, it doesn’t matter, it’s more about them getting into the zone of trying some things out. So over the years we’ve had an increasing number of

innovation hours projects. And as I said, it’s partly symbolic. Of course, it’s partly practical because it gives people hours that count towards their target, but it’s also partly symbolic because it shows the way that that’s important for the firm.

James Taylor (09:32)
And how do you link that in terms of the strategy of the firm as well? So let’s say you have a partner or associates or people within the marketing functions of a law firm and they want to, they have maybe an idea of a problem they want to try and solve or an opportunity you want to look at. So they need to think in an innovative way. How do you then basically maybe build a team around this? How do you ensure that it is in alignment with what you’re trying to do as a firm? So it’s maybe has wider.

applications across the firm, so it has maybe a bigger impact. And then how do you go to that next stage where maybe you’re going from say a prototype of an idea to actually it being reviewed and saying actually this is something that we can give more additional resources to.

John Craske (10:16)
I think we try and start early and just help and the short version is and then just iterate around it to try and improve it, make it better, improve it, make it better. Each of the practice groups, so the legal departments in the firm has got a partner who’s responsible for innovation and they tend to have a group around them of lawyers who are interested in it and so we try and cultivate that and often…

the ideas for innovation project will come out of those groups not exclusively sometimes they come from someone who just got you know and and and idea to help solve the real pain point for them or for their clients and but we really trying support each person as they come through but we don’t try and do it for them i think that’s been quite an interesting journey that we’ve been on in and it in as i said earlier we quite often get the lawyers wanting us to innovate for the more to them and actually

that may be a bit like parenting. You can’t do that for them. You have to kind of do enough to support them and help them along the way, but you can’t do it for them. They need to learn themselves. And then, depending on what the idea is, we will either extend the project or iterate again around it. And then there’s been a few of them which have ended up being sort of market -facing things that we’ve launched, or just as many which are internal things about efficiencies or improving things for teams.

James Taylor (11:42)
Now, whenever you start talking with lawyers about innovation, the first term that usually comes up is artificial intelligence. How are we going to implement AI and what we’re going to do? How is it going to make us more productive? Is that a threat? Are we going to get rid of all these paralegals that we have in our law firms just now? So tell me, in terms of your personal approach to artificial intelligence, where do you see the biggest opportunities in the short term for firms like yours? And then maybe what are you a bit more excited about?

in the medium to longer term around AI.

John Craske (12:14)
Yeah, so I mean, I think it’s captured the imagination of people in a way that lots of other technology has never had, has before, at least I’m starting to sound like a beer advert if I say it quite like that. But the, yeah, and I think that’s been brilliant because we’ve, for one of the first, which is why we’re using it as a lever to help drive the digital transformation, because for the first time people are coming to us and saying, hey, how could I use this? Or what can I do with this? Which is really exciting.

I think there’s loads of opportunities to work with the technology to improve the way that we work. I think it’s really, really actually fascinating because people do say, well, what’s going to happen with our particularly junior resource and whether that’s paralegals or junior lawyers. And actually, I think…

The key, and people at work who are bored of me hearing me say this now, I think the key is to think about this sort of human plus machine. And I know from watching some of your stuff, James, that this idea of working on the human bits is something that you’re passionate about as well. But I think what we need to be doing is we need to be thinking about the future. So right now we can be using AI in what we do. And that can improve the efficiency of what we do. And we’re doing lots of experiments with AI.

things and we’re trying out a bit of a portfolio approach on lots of tools. So we can do that now, but we need to be thinking also about the longer term, about how are people going to be working in the future and what skills will they need to work with the machine, so the plus bit, but also what are the human skills that they’re going to need to make the best, do the best job. There’s also a bit of a thing around foundational skills. And this is not just law, but if machines are going to be doing

what our junior people are going to be doing. We still need senior people. We still need senior doctors, chefs, lawyers, whatever it is that, you know, where some of the stuff might be being done by machines. But how do you get to be a senior person if you’ve not been the apprentice, if you’ve not learned the basic skills? So we’re still going to, so those people are still going to be needed in the system. So I’m not worried about, you know, major like losses of jobs in the legal industry.

I think there is going to be major change in the legal industry though in terms of the tasks that people do. But I think that people will, so we’re going to need to think very carefully about how we build those foundational skills, legal skills in our case, into people and all the way through from university through to when they’re training in a law firm and then getting experience on jobs. But I think we’re also going to have to think about those human skills. So human skills, things like empathy and emotional intelligence and creativity and curiosity.

and those things that make us fundamentally human. I think actually we’re going to paradoxically we’re going to need those things even more in the relatively medium to medium to longer term, maybe not immediately. And that’s going to be an interesting thing, as I think as a, you know, for law firms, for industry, for humans, I think it’s really fascinating.

James Taylor (15:30)
a few years ago in California, I used to live in California and there was a young gentleman called Robert Huang and Robert trained as a computer scientist first of all learning about AI and then he went and trained as a lawyer. I’m not quite sure why you would go from being a software engineer to a lawyer, it’s kind of unusual, I can see you maybe going the other way but so he went trained as a lawyer and his early years as an associate he realized how mind -numbingly boring a lot of legal

work is, especially if you’re doing due diligence and certain things, and he said there must be a better way of doing this. So what he would do is, during the day he would do his legal work, and at night he went home and he basically programmed and worked on AI programs to replace himself. That’s really what he was doing, and by the end of the year he’d essentially replaced himself by building out different tools and functions to do that, and then being entrepreneurial he went and started a new type of law firm called, I think it was called Robot, Robot and Huang.

and there were three partners. Two of the partners were AIs and one of the partner was him as the human. And one, I think Darya, she specializes in AI, but specialized in litigation. And the other one specialized in mergers and acquisitions, I seem to remember. And what I find interesting about that is what then the human, what he was doing in his role. And it was exactly what you were speaking about there. It was the, the creator work, the curious work, the strategizing, empathy, building, building that relationship with clients.

so much of the kind of softer things that we don’t think, while the machine was able to do what is better doing at a tactical level as well. And certainly a lot of my clients, that’s what I’m seeing a lot of them using that for the first level is amazing for discovery, amazing for being able to send an algorithm across all of your legal agreements to say, hey, there’s this new Brexit has just happened or something has just happened. What is the risk factors to all of our legal agreements that we have with our clients just now?

and it pulls up that. So there’s obviously great things there as well. And I don’t know whether you’re seeing this in some of my clients, I’m seeing what traditionally was, let’s say, a 30 page contract, because some of these firms are using AI now, and on both sides are using AI, we’re now seeing 100 page contracts, because the AIs are kind of adding things that maybe the human wouldn’t necessarily have thought about adding before.

John Craske (17:47)
Well, I think we’ve seen the trend of contracts getting longer and longer for a good while actually. And I’m not sure it’s AI that’s driving that. It’s a mix of the world just being more regulation, more uncertainty, more volatility, all sorts of things and complexity that’s going on in the world. But you’re right. And I do wonder whether actually they will go over a peak and then they’ll start getting shorter again because they’ll only put in the contract the things that you really need. Who knows? But yeah, absolutely. We’re…

when we’re seeing AI helpers, you know, summarize meetings and actions, coach you in your email with your drafting with your, you know, like your sidekick. But it is really interesting to think about the mode in which people are using it because actually quite a lot of lawyers are good at delegating. So delegating to a more junior lawyer to do that or paralegal to do a task, but not so good at sort of

co -creating and working with and a lot of the interesting challenges around AI especially around the sort of edge of where AI is capable today and of course that edge is moving out all the time. It’s not universally good at every task and one tool isn’t universally good at every task so but so when you’re on the edge of the capabilities you need to be working with it not delegating to it. So if something is very capable then you can delegate to it but if something you know and

and there’s a lot of noise in the world around hallucinations of generative AI but if you’re working with something then actually a lot of those risks around hallucinations go away because you’re using it, you’re working directly with it to help you in your work process, whatever that is. So yeah, I think that’s going to be really interesting to watch.

James Taylor (19:36)
I know within the world of management consulting, there was a study done the other day by Harvard University and Boston Consulting Group, where they gave a bunch of their consultants access to a generative AI. And it was interesting just seeing how, I think it increased productivity by 40%, the task was judged to be, I think, 12 % better in terms of quality. But what I thought was interesting about it was that you had these two groups in particular that really excelled, and they were called Cyborgs and Centaurs. So, yeah.

John Craske (19:44)
Yeah, that’s exactly it.

That’s right, exactly that, that’s what I’m referring to.

James Taylor (20:04)
Yeah, so the Centaurs were what you were kind of talking about a little bit there, where you would look at a project or a task and you would say, okay, these are the things that the AI, I’m going to give to this AI to do this particular task, and these are the things that I’m going to reserve as humans. Whereas the cyborgs, and they were almost intertwining everything that they were doing with AI. It became like a guitar player would have a guitar, or, you know, it just became an extension of themselves. And that is the kind of more that, that kind of co -pilot thing kind of going on. It’s more collaborative in nature.

John Craske (20:35)
i think that’s exactly right and that’s the same study of referring to them to read if any of the listeners are wanting to get that it’s called the navigating the jagged edge of a i a that’s a harvard business review article and within that they they collaborated with boston consulting group is worth reading the whole thing but actually that nothing cyborgs and sent or this is like almost like a a footnote in appendix seven or something is right at the very end and but i think it’s one of the most interesting nuggets in the whole thing and

James Taylor (20:58)
Ha ha.

John Craske (21:04)
If I’ve got time, my daughter, if she ever listens to this, will be embarrassed about me telling you this story. So I read that and I didn’t really absorb it. And then just over Christmas time, she was doing some homework, or before Christmas, she was doing some homework at the kitchen table and I was cooking. And she was writing an essay, a critical essay on a book they’d been reading in class, which is, it’s another twist in the tale. It’s a book about female empowerment, about…

Oliver Twist’s sister that you’ve never heard about before and and and she had chat GPT open and she had a word processor open and she was Working with it in the way you described like playing a guitar So she didn’t go chatgy page chatgy PT write me an essay about this book You know the way that we’re all worried about people cheating on exams or whatever with generative AI She just didn’t do that. She was like she’s the right route a bit and she went. I’m not sure about some words

Hey, can you give me some words that mean this or describe that? And then she wrote a bit more and then she said, not sure about that paragraph, copied that paragraph into chat. Can you help me rewrite this? And she was backwards and forwards all the way through. And so she produced something which was probably, she produced something quicker and probably better than had she written it herself, but she didn’t just delegate the task to the AI. And I think that was for me a real, a real light bulb moment about how we should be.

talking to our people about how they should be using AI at the moment, especially at that jagged edge of AI where it’s not universally capable at that thing. So forgive me for the story, James.

James Taylor (22:38)
No, but I think it’s great as well. I mean, obviously that generation is coming through now. A friend of mine, Mark Prensky coined the term digital natives and you know, very much. And actually her generation is way beyond that. They’re AI natives. You know, they’re using these tools in slightly different ways. My wife who’s been in law for a long time, she hadn’t really been using many of these tools. And I just kind of sat down with her one day and she was having to…

John Craske (22:46)
Yeah, totally.

James Taylor (23:05)
review a new piece of legislation that’s currently going through the courts, going through the Scottish Parliament around food. I think it’s called the Good Food Bill or something around food. And it was amazing because what she was able to do was to pull in all these different studies from different places, feed it in, and then it was about the quality of the questions that she was asking, in this case, to chat GBT, to help her think about how to term something, how to kind of use the language, in this case, of the…

the Scottish government to kind of refer back to what she was wanting to do, her target, her goal with this particular thing. And it was like that, I was saying, and you could see her, it was the first time I’d really seen her eyes kind of go sparkle because she’d, I didn’t realize I could use it in this way. I just thought, I didn’t realize I could use it as that type of collaborator. So it’s not too late for everyone. If you’re kind of coming to this a little bit later in life and you’re not a youngster, then there’s lots of opportunities here.

John Craske (24:03)
Yeah, totally. And that’s why I talk about human plus machine. Because so you’re now, that sort of prompting skills we’re talking about is that plus bit, right? So you have to work how to work with it as well. But you still need the human questions and things. So you need to be able to ask them. So yeah, I think it’s lovely when we start to see that, whether it’s at home or at work and people exploring it. I think it’s great.

James Taylor (24:30)
And then your own journey as a lawyer working within innovation as well, was there a key insight or a light bulb moment in your life and you work your own creative journey?

John Craske (24:43)
I think when I realized, I mean I’ve always been interested in this junction between the practice of law and business and law, but when you described doing due diligence as really boring, I was a real estate lawyer so I was just doing lots of occupational leases, which for those of you if you’re not a lawyer means…

if you ever get a shopping center and all of the units in their elect every one of those got a leak behind it and the whole framework documents of such a doing those all day and there’s only so many occupational leases i think i could could do and and so i’d and that my wife and saying to me that i needed to do something more creative is probably the real sparkle and what led me down this that this path i think this many light bulb moments all of the all the time though i think it’s

you know so i i’d wanted home just a couple weeks ago and i bought myself a new saxophone because i’ve never i’ve always wanted one i can’t play the saxophone it’s not very well yet but i have played the clarinet for ages and the guy in the music shop he was like olivander honestly matching instruments and things to people but i’ve been playing my clarinet with the same mouthpiece i’m fifty one now so it must have been for forty years with the same mouthpiece and he went

you’re on beginners mouthpiece what you want is one of these and so he sold me a new mouthpiece a bit of plastic only at you know 100 pounds or whatever it was and you think 100 pounds for a mouthpiece and I played it and it was like it was like the clouds parted and the sun came out so you know so that idea of having the right kit and knowing your as part of knowing your craft and things because you know people always say that it’s about the kit but of course it’s not it’s this join between the person the human and the

kit and knowing how to use it whatever you’re doing so yeah there’s a there’s a personal one and a work one.

James Taylor (26:36)
Yeah, that reminds me a little, we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Professor Roger Neybone, who’s the world’s leading expert on experts. He wrote a book all about experts and he’s a surgeon originally. And he talks about this idea of a mise en place in French, you know, if you’re a chef, you have certain tools closer by because these are the ones you’re using all the time. Well, you might have other ones a little bit kind of further out of reach because you’re not using those so often. It’s that distinction of being able to know which tool to use in the right way, in the right order for the right

right thing and that adds, you know, that adds a little bit of distinction from someone that’s just an amateur in what they’re doing to actually someone who’s a professional and more skilled and more expert at it as well. Let’s get into some final quickfire questions before we finish up here. First of all, is there a quote that you live by that kind of a guiding light for you in your life?

John Craske (27:29)
I don’t think I’m a big one for quotes or sound bites, but I do firmly believe that you get out what you put in. And I remind myself to try and lead with kindness.

James Taylor (27:38)
Beautiful. And is there an online resource? We’ve been talking a lot about tools and technology today, but is there an online resource or a tool, like Gmail or Evernote, that you find very useful in your work?

John Craske (27:50)
I like finding new tools and things, but I think I’m going to give you a bit of a different answer. I love Spotify. It’s always got something to listen to, whether that’s new music, trying to take you away or focus on something or podcasts or audiobooks. I consume new music all of the time, almost all genres, so I love Spotify.

James Taylor (28:08)
Great talk, great talk. And if you could only recommend one book to our listeners, what would that book be?

John Craske (28:14)
We’ve been talking about AI today, so I think everybody should listen to or read The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman.

James Taylor (28:23)
Great, wonderful book. And as we finish up here, Sher, what is the best way if people want to connect with you? Maybe we’ve got a lot of lawyers that listen to the show. We’ve got a lot of people within legal profession, a lot of people within innovation labs as well. If we want to connect with you, learn more about the work you do, learn about your firm, what’s the best way for them to go and do that?

John Craske (28:41)
Probably just message me on LinkedIn, that’s the best way to get in touch.

James Taylor (28:45)
We’ll put all these links on the show notes. People go to the SuperCreativity Podcast, go to jamestaylor.me, just look for the SuperCreativity Podcast. We’ll have all the links for this particular episode and all the other things we’ll be talking about on the show today. John Craske, thank you so much for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.

The post John Craske of CMS, Collaboration between Humans and Machines in the Legal Industry #340 appeared first on James Taylor.

Summary

JD Meier, high performance and innovation coach, discusses his focus on using AI to advance high performance and change how the world innovates. He emphasizes the power of one person businesses to impact and influence a billion minds. Meier shares his two-track transformation model for innovation, which involves sustaining innovation in the current business while also working on disruptive innovation for the future. He also highlights the importance of productivity and offers strategies such as setting three wins each day and reflecting on weekly achievements.

Sound Bites

1. “I’m all about trying to use AI to advance high performance”
2. “I call it billion dollar solopreneur, not because you’re going to make a billion dollars, but it’s about impacting and influencing a billion minds”
3. “You have your current business, which is your current business model… and then you have your future business model”

JD Meier is a High Performance & Innovation Coach who has 25 years of experience changing the world at Microsoft. JD was the former head coach for Satya Nadella’s innovation team at Microsoft and is also the author of the bestselling book Getting Results the Agile Way. His WHY is to advance human potential and to help people realise their potential in work and life while his specialty is to provide proven practices combined with information models to advance a space. People at Microsoft know JD for innovation, productivity, and changing the world because he always took on big challenges and moved the ball forward.

jdmeier.com
My story of transformation
Agile Results Productivity System

James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.

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In this first FREE video series, award-winning keynote speaker James Taylor reveals how to become a 7-figure speaker.

00:00 Introduction

05:07 The Billion Dollar Solopreneur

08:58 The Two-Track Transformation Approach

15:03 Improving Productivity with Three Wins and Reflection

31:07 Conclusion

jd-meier-the-supercreativity-podcast-with-james-taylor_copy-of-scp339-jd-meier-edit.txt
James Taylor (00:08)
Meyer is a high performance and innovation coach who has 25 years of experience changing the world at Microsoft. JD was the former head coach at Satya Nadella’s innovation team at Microsoft and is also the author of the bestselling book, Getting Results the Agile Way. His why is to advance human potential and to help people realize their potential in work and life, while his specialty is to provide program practices combined with information models to advance the space.

People at Microsoft know JD for innovation, productivity, and changing the world because he always took on big challenges and moved the ball forward. JD, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.

JD Meier (00:48)
Wow, that was a great intro. Thank you.

James Taylor (00:51)
So share with us what’s going on in your world just now. What currently has your focus?

JD Meier (00:56)
Okay. So that’s a great question. AI is definitely top of mind and specifically, I’m, I’m all about trying to use it to advance high performance. I think there’s a lot of tricks and hacks that people haven’t thought about yet specifically about enhancing your senses. And, the other big thing is really, I’m trying to change how the world innovates. I know that might sound audacious, but when I wake up in the morning, I actually ask myself how to want to change the world today. It actually guides a lot of what I do.

And with innovation, I think there’s an incredible, easy way to change how we innovate at the individual level, the team level and the org level. So that’s got my focus. The other big thing I would say is, I call it billion dollar solopreneur. I call it billion dollar solopreneur, not because you’re going to make a billion dollars. You might, but it’s about impacting and influencing a billion minds. I think that we’re in a perfect time and age where the one person business.

can actually share and scale their expertise with the world. And so I’ve been diving into that, looking at it from two perspectives on the, let’s say the left -hand side. The left -hand side is the tech arena. So what can we do with AI, of course? What can we do with social media? And what can we do with SEO? I know a lot of people think, SEO is dead, but not really. SEO, what I found, especially as an innovator, is the best way to figure out the language of your customers and your audience. There’s pains, needs, and outcomes, even if you don’t do SEO.

But so that’s on the tech side. There’s this other side though, this other side of scaling to the world. There’s tools that we have. So for example, there’s a massive transformative purpose. So for example, Nike, you know, just do it. Everybody fights their demons every day, but you get on board with Nike’s bigger mission. Microsoft empower every person in business to achieve more. Again, you know, it’s, it’s bigger than you. When you have something bigger than you, it’s easier to get on board. But there’s also these ideas of like,

simple, sticky slogans, the things that stick in your mind. And if you can create those idea viruses as the one person and then share and scale with the technology, you’re on fuego. So I think now is one of the greatest times ever to be able to change the world as one person. And even though I say one person, it doesn’t mean you’re just one person. You have your friends, your partners, your network, your family, you have your everybody, but it means that you don’t have to go and be part of a giant business to go change the world. I think that’s the key.

James Taylor (03:24)
Yeah, we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Elaine Pofeld, who wrote the million dollar one person business. And I interviewed her, actually, and I spoke to her recently, we were doing an event for the New York Public Library together. And she said, if she was to change anything about the book, she said, maybe the one million is too small, because you have people, especially with technology now, that are doing and you see, you look at a number of companies now, I think of especially in the AI space who have very few actual employees.

JD Meier (03:42)
It’s too small. Yep.

James Taylor (03:52)
but they are billing multi -billion dollar businesses. So maybe the one person billion dollar business is closer than we think just now as well. Yeah. So you’re obviously passionate about productivity, you’re passionate about innovation as well. I thought where we’d go first is, because we’ve had a number of guests on the show recently who have talked about the challenge in being able to do the main…

JD Meier (03:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s a reality. Yeah. And it’s exciting.

James Taylor (04:21)
of what that business is about, whether it’s a legal business or it’s a technology business or whatever the business is. And then at the same time, innovating in their industry, innovating in their businesses as well. How do you, you know, those are two wild horses. How do you deal with those horses?

JD Meier (04:37)
Yeah. Okay, so great question. It starts, believe it or not, it actually starts with your mental model. I asked an anthropologist long ago, I said, what are the best business leaders do that other business leaders don’t? And the surprise was she said, they share their mental model. I was like, for real? Like, is that really it? And it actually was, because when you don’t share your model as a leader, and you have tens of thousands of people reporting to you,

People guess and they make things up and they try to figure out how to do innovation. So they end up either doing innovation despite the organization rarely with the organization, because they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. So with that in mind, I kept going back through all my experiences, like where did people get stuck? Like why did I call it the innovator gets fired? I call it innovation gets a fired side -liner pushed out. And it’s because they don’t have a space in their mind where innovation goes. So recently I shared the model, but I call it two track transformation.

And the idea is to have a simpler, better metaphor for to do innovation in parallel. But here’s how it works. You have your current business, which is your current business model. It’s your current customers. It’s your current talent. It’s your current products and offers, and it’s your current KPIs. You know that track, but I’m, I’m letting leaders know like, look, that is your sustaining innovation track. That is your 10 % growth. Yes. Take care of it. Good. However, in parallel.

This is where we need to work future back. This is how we avoid getting disrupted. This is how we disrupt ourselves. This is your future business model. This is that second track. This is your disruptive innovation, possibly 70 % growth cumulative over time. This is your different set of talent, because it’s a different type of talent to actually focus on these kinds of things. But the reality is, is you’re stepping into the future. And this is where it’s going to be.

A lot of people get lost because they step in the future. They have no empathy for it. It’s like a stranger. You’re stepping into the future and you’re breaking it down into small business experiments to check value today. You validate value today. So what you’re really doing is you’re not suddenly wildly changing your business. What you’re doing is you’re setting up these two tracks and running them well. Because if you don’t do it like this, what happens is you use your current KPIs against the second track and you break everything. You don’t make space for innovation.

But with this, this two track mindset, with this two track mental model, you have space for both and you can do both well, especially when you recognize that, that first track that’s yeah, we’re doing innovation. Yes. You’re doing sustaining innovation, 10 % growth. Great. Do you want a piece of that 70 % growth? And do you want to have a chance to be able to survive in the future? And do you want to make sure that you’re not the one disrupted or that you disrupt yourself? Yes. Okay. So that model, it’s easy for me to whiteboard it. It lands well with people. People follow it very easily and it.

Usually it can easily get people out of the muck and the mess that they’ve been in going by all these other different, you know, models of innovation and trying to do even something as simple as like an innovation portfolio. As soon as you have those two tracks in your mind, now you know which KPI is to focus on. Now you know why they’re different. It’s intentional. And that basically makes space for the real, cause usually when people are thinking about innovation, they’re thinking about the disruptive stuff.

they’re already doing sustaining, they don’t realize that they’re innovating in their processes and their products. They’re doing that 10 % optimization, but the disruptive innovation is really where the big action is, especially in today’s world where change is so fast. And the other thing I told people do when you’re working backwards from that future to make it real, make your mock press releases, make your one page write -ups of those future scenarios that you want to bring to reality. That

lets everybody feel the future. When you can feel the future and start to create empathy, now you get more stakeholders and sponsorship in the game. And then that’s a good thing. But if we don’t, if we do not make space for this in the minds of the leaders, then there will be a lot of sabotage. Maybe not even on purpose, but it happens. But when you are very deliberate about carving out that space, you could protect and support it. Otherwise the current business.

is going to eat it up, is going to fight for the resources, is going to fight for the money, and it’s going to defeat it with the current KPIs. Does that make sense?

James Taylor (08:58)
So you’re building almost like your competitor, your category killer, alongside you’re building the existing business as well. I love the idea of creating those mock -up kind of press releases. I’ve heard authors do that before where they’ve actually written up the reviews of their book before they’ve written the book to give them a sense, what value do I want to have this book? What kind of impact do I want this book to create? So you’re doing that. So that’s really kind of talking about, I guess, imagination.

JD Meier (09:03)
Yeah, yeah, -huh.

Yeah.

James Taylor (09:26)
and having a depth of imagination. I’m a big critic at the moment for, I see loads of great stuff on Netflix and Apple and all these great TV shows just now. But it feels at the moment when we talk about the future, a lot of the future that we see on TV and in movies is like a post -apocalyptic future. TV shows like Fallout, which are great, which are really fun and everything. But it doesn’t feel like we have so much of that painting that picture of…

JD Meier (09:27)
Yes.

Yeah, right. Yep.

Yes.

James Taylor (09:56)
a more optimistic future, what that could be and how technology can actually help us get there.

JD Meier (10:00)
Yeah. Yep. I agree. And I think we have a deficit when it comes to the visionary leaders that can share that vision. That was actually the instigator of the billion dollar solarpreneur. I realized that people weren’t able to share the big visions. I’m like, you know, where’s the Disney’s? Where’s the Andrew Carnegie’s? Where’s the captains of the industry? And I was lucky to be surrounded by a lot of great people that were very good at articulating a future state. Like you could step into the future and they could connect the dots and they could light up these beautiful scenes of the future.

And it got people excited and inspired. And what I realized was, a lot of people don’t think about the future as this space of creativity and opportunity. They just project more of the past. So their past drives their present. And their present is driving the future, but all driven from the past. When you step out of that and you step into the future for real, but to do this, there’s also, I found that there’s another gap. So.

There’s a skill strategic foresight. It’s actually more popular in Europe than it is in the U S that kind of surprised me. But with strategic foresight, you’re learning about trends, you’re building vocabulary around the trends. So you have all of these little building blocks. So, I have a couple of frameworks that I use, but you know, one of my patterns is I call it the CEO pattern, customers, employees, and operations. You know, how do you transform the customers, the employees, the operations makes the people to realize where to focus their effort. But then the other thing I do.

Is then I would pull in, well, how does mixed reality or augmented reality change the scenario? How does AI change our customer experience? How does, and when you step into it that way, now you’re using these building blocks for innovation to create these scenes of the future. You become the choreographer, you become the director of the future. And if you decide deliberately that you’re going to work backwards from, you’re not going to accept bad scenarios in the future. You’re going to create great scenarios in the future.

you’re not going to try to predict the future. You’re actually going to create and shape it. When you come from that place, you have a lot of, it gives you a lot of empowerment. And especially if you stay on top of the trends, enough to know which ones to pay attention to enough to know which ones to ignore. And when I do that, I like to take a, a 10 year view. So if I look 10 years back, 10 years back was utility computing, your cloud companies, your Amazon, your Microsoft, your Google’s 10 years forward.

And the big mega pattern is ESG, environment, social and governance, or I think of it as good for people. I call it good for people, good for the planet. You know, think about it like that. Every business then has to reimagine itself, has to figure out how to be good for people, good for the planet. That means that you can actually go back to the basics of your business. And I like to use a business strategy pyramid. You can think of it like this at the top is your bold ambition. In the middle is your business model. And in the bottom.

is your operating model. The problem is too many people think, I’m transforming. And they’re focused on cloudifying or transforming or digitizing the operating model. And what they’re ignoring is that ambition part to start with the ambition. So if you were backwards from bold ambitions, it changes the strategies you choose. It changes the opportunities that you create. So you’re right. There’s a lot of a lack of imagination for the future because it’s focused on just doing more of the past. And it tends to be pretty pessimistic.

James Taylor (13:18)
Yeah.

We had on Professor Sir David Ormond on the show and we’ll put a link here as well to that. And we were talking about, so he is the former, basically he was the person that advised the prime ministers in the UK on the various security services. So in the UK we have MI5, MI6, GCHQ, in the US you have CIA, NSA, similar kind of roles. And he was talking, what you just mentioned about the strategic foresight in his book, he calls it strategic notice.

JD Meier (13:41)
Hmm.

Hmm.

James Taylor (13:53)
So he said, you know, part of the role that you’re trying to do as an intelligence analyst is the kind of work he would probably talk about is taking that 10 year view that you spoke about. And he said, that does require both critical thinking and creative thinking, like the imagination and like, well, what is the probabilities? And now we get into the mathematics of it. What do we believe is the probability? And when we look at risk, obviously just today, today, we see…

JD Meier (14:04)
Yeah.

Yep. Yes. Yeah.

Right.

James Taylor (14:19)
certain risks that we’re seeing like now it’s on CNN, it’s on Fox and those channels, but the environmental, the E of the ESG piece, feels a little bit further away. So we kind of push it out a little bit further and we don’t kind of bring it in a little bit. So you’ve spoken about vision, we’ve spoken about the big picture stuff and promoting that vision and helping people understand that mental models with the Charlie Munger, like the kind of mental models. What about when it comes to the rubber hits the road, the productivity?

JD Meier (14:23)
Hmm.

Yeah, right.

Hmm.

James Taylor (14:49)
You’ve worked with these leaders at Microsoft and you’ve really helped these leaders on their productivity, both as a leader individually and as a team. Where do we get to on that? What are some of the key things that you notice on those people and the teams that are really great at productivity?

JD Meier (15:02)
Yeah.

Yep, so it’s definitely a mind shift because usually what happens is people start to care about it when they’re in pain. They get a bad review in terms of their health score, their org score, their whatever score. Then now they start to care about it. And because I moved in so many different orgs in Microsoft, I had to learn how to change the culture fast. And I learned that I could change it through questions because smart people like to answer questions. And so one of the questions I would ask, I would…

You know, so we’d say, yeah, that productivity stuff. Why should we do this? I said, well, you spent a lot of time last month, right? You did, you spent a lot of energy. You probably did more than 40 hour work weeks, right? Everybody on the team did a lot of work, right? What were the three wins? I asked them for the three wins. And usually first I see a deer in headlights. Then I see them start to rattle off like meetings they went to and activities and all this stuff, but it doesn’t accrue to anything. And I go, you know, we can completely change the game.

by telling three stories of victories. We should be able to tell three stories of victories a day, three stories of victories for the week, three stories of victory for the month, three stories of victory for the quarter, three stories of victory for the year. And when I put it out like that, they said, well, we’re doing OKRs. I’m like, OK, show me your OKRs. And usually, it’s something abstract and disconnected that they don’t really have empathy for. And I go, look, if you’re trying to tell your manager that that was your impact,

Would that feel like a wow moment? Is that a press release? Where are the wows? And so I actually combine some of the practices I have in Azure results, where some of the practices that people do look like the OKRs, but thinking of three wins, it’s the simplest, easiest way to start to drive better outcomes because you’re working backwards now. Otherwise you fall into the trap of, and I fell into this trap too, where you hope that your process takes care of you. You hope that by doing the right things each day, it’ll lead to these awesome things.

But if you never put a line in the sand, if you’d never sketched out that model of the future, if you never thought about what that future scene of victory looked like, you’re not going to look your way there. Kind of like, you know, you’re not going to wander your way up the mountain, right? You’re not going to wake up one day and I’m on the top of Mount Everest like a zigzag. So the idea here is that you’re working backwards. At the same time, I’m a big fan that you do need to work your way forwards. And so the way I do it is I have the backbone of my book, I call it…

Monday Vision, Daily Wins, Friday Reflection. So on Monday, you step into your Friday and you look back on your week. What do you want those three victories to be? So that’s your Monday Vision. Now imagine that you’re looking forward to going through your week because you have three victories to pull you through. And it sounds simple, but now what you’ve done by identifying these three victories is you’ve prioritized. You’ve chosen what you’re going to do, what you’re not going to focus on. You’ve also created a way.

to channel your energy. So now you’re going to find your motivation. It’s meaningful. You can connect it to your values. Don’t call back a customer when a raving fan. Don’t go do a project, lead an epic adventure. Don’t go do a task. Turn your chores into chances to practice and master what your strengths and your special abilities are all about. So that’s really the key. That’s the Monday Vision on the Daily Winds through Winds for Today. So when you wake up, you’re going to have a day. You’re going to spend a bunch of time.

What are the three wins for today? You can do your, have your existing to -do list. It might be a laundry list, actually a lot of stuff, but just put the three wins at the top that you hope that you can achieve. So you can direct your energy and attention and you’ll get better at it. You will get better at that. And then Friday reflection. This is where personal development meets your productivity. This is where self awareness comes to life. You actually reflect on what were my three wins for this week? You know, what are three things going well, three things to improve.

And it’s that improvement piece that means that you’re going to get, but this is your chance to be honest with you and go, did you bite off more than you could actually chew? Did you get randomized? Like if you completed things that had nothing to do with your goals, did you get randomized or are you not good at learning in your system? Are you not good at understanding and predicting what’s going to be expected of you in the week? So you get better at that. And the surprise, this is, this to me is the biggest surprise is that, by practicing Friday reflection.

You know, I started by putting an appointment on my calendar for 20 minutes on Friday. I made space for it. I got so good at my basic productivity, like extreme, that I started to take on much bigger goals. And, one of the things that I started to do was I just started to add checkpoint questions about ways that I want to improve myself at the identity level. And I had read the book leadership challenge and in it.

One of the questions is around, you know, seeing around corners. How will DC around the corners? So I had this one little question in my Friday reflection. So each week I was just asking myself, yeah, how am I getting surprised? Am I seeing around the corners? Am I predicting what’s going to happen? That alone improved me to the point where I actually think if I trace it back, that led to me becoming an innovator that led to me becoming a futurist. That was the basic skills that helped me become the head coach for Satya’s innovation team.

So it surprised me in a lot of ways. But those are the basics. If you can do a day well, you can do a week well. If you could do a week well, it compounds. But you want to be working backwards from your big dreams, your ambitions, your future scenarios, your future state, and using that to drive why do you do what you do today? and then the.

James Taylor (20:36)
Those questions obviously, so please carry on.

JD Meier (20:41)
I was going to say this. There’s one more frame that really helped me a lot, like the light bulb went off. It was super productivity, as when you’re working on the right things at the right time, the right way. When you unpack that and you start to dive in, am I using my strengths? Am I driving from vision? Am I spending more time in my values so I can renew my energy? You’re on fire.

James Taylor (21:07)
thinking as you were talking about this and kind of bringing some of these ideas together, there was Marshall Goldsmith, the leadership coach for a lot of various executives. He has someone who calls him every day, I think at the same time, to basically ask him a series of questions. That’s their only job. And it’s an accountability, it’s a way of keeping him on track in terms of what he’s doing. Now, that’s wonderful, but not everyone can…

JD Meier (21:26)
Wow. Wow.

Hmmmm

James Taylor (21:36)
You can afford to have someone that that’s their job. So I was thinking obviously now with AI, not everyone can afford windy roads from billions on their team that’s asking those questions and making them think slightly differently about things, but everyone can pretty much afford an AI to be asking questions, asking better questions every time and asking questions that kind of nudge us out of our usual way of doing things.

JD Meier (21:37)
Right. Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

Big time. And so first and foremost, I would say structure your week. So for example, I have three recurring appointments on my calendar that ask me the question. So like my Monday vision, when it pops up, it asks me, what are your three wins for this week? And then each day it pops up, what are your three wins for today? And then Friday reflection, it pops up. So I made the space and the time for it. And then to use AI to take you to the next level.

You can actually pair up with AI. I think if it is pairing, you know, pairing up, you can pair up with AI to figure out a good personal, actually a great, a great personal development plan for the month. I think that when you do it at the month level, you get a different balcony view. And in that balcony view, you can ask higher order questions. Cause if you get too mired in the day to day, I think, and if you ask yourself too many questions in the day to day,

It’s kind of hard to see the forest for the trees, but I think when you do it at these timeframes, like, okay, what’s the, what’s the mindset of motivational questions for today that keep me growing and showing up strong. Like for example, one that I never expected to have is how do I want to change the world today? But there’s a little story there. Like, I kept for some reason it’s like deep in me. I think it’s because one of my early managers at Microsoft, every time he came by the office or in the break room.

He would say, did you change the world today? Like every day. And I’d be like, yeah, we changed it, but everybody wants us to change it back. And so, you know, it’s, it’s strong in me. And one of my early books, you know, went to like 800 ,000 people in six months. So when, when would you do that? You get used to changing the world. And so one day I found myself asking the question, how do you want to change the world? And I thought, you know, everybody’s stressed. They’re worried about the future. They’re worried about today. They’re,

James Taylor (23:32)
Yeah.

JD Meier (23:57)
overwhelmed, they’re overloaded and they’re in fear mode. I was like, that sucks. It’s like, what’s the best thing I can give people that would help them to start their day. So I ended up creating a, so that night I was like, okay, how do I change the world today? I want to change how the world wakes up. So that night I put together like 40 slides. I created a framework on the fly. I created 40 slides. I called it wake up great. I haven’t written. I don’t think I’ve even written about it yet, but it’s a, it’s wake up great. And it’s, I’ve been teaching it to different companies, but it’s a G is gratitude.

If you feel grateful, you can’t feel fear. So when you actually do gratitude, right, and you’re in that grateful mode, you can feel fear. So I thought, wow, what a great way for people to start, you know, gratitude. R is reflection. Reflect on your future self. People go, okay, reflection, but they don’t know what to reflect on. Reflect on your future self. Last week or even yesterday or even today, are you being that person that you want to be for the future? So R is reflection. E is of course, exercise, but people, I don’t have time and I don’t know what to do.

And so I put together a small set of things that people really can do, like Bruce Lee’s three minute workout. When he broke his back, he had to figure out how do I work out my full body? Well, he’s got a three minute workout. So when you learn these kinds of things, you, you open up these possibilities. So then there’s a affirmation, but most people do affirmations wrong. What do they do? They have a bunch of affirmation. I am smart. I am happy. I’m great. I’m strong. Choose one. You choose one. You picture it in your mind so your subconscious can see it.

So you know what you actually mean and you’re congruent. Otherwise, if you say like an apple, red apple, green apple, Steve jobs, you know what? So you picture it, but you have to feel it. So my affirmation, for example, for today, I am strong. When I say that, what do I look like when I’m strong? What do I feel like when I’m strong later in the day, when I don’t feel strong, I remember in the morning. So you say it, you feel it because you’re rewiring your nervous system. You’re changing your nervous system. That’s where this gets real.

So G -R -E -A and then T. It was funny when I was making the framework that night, I was like, what’s T? Three wins, you know, from my book. It was like, it was perfect. I was like, picture three scenes in your day, morning, noon and night, your three victory scenes. So you can have a compelling day that you’ve just envisioned on the fly in the morning, in your strength place, in a place of gratitude and greatness where you can be as strong as you could possibly be. And so, you know, that was like, you know, quick little framework, but it helps, it changes lives.

James Taylor (26:03)
you can have a compelling day to just envision on.

I love that.

But changing how the world works, I often think about when I go into the shower in the morning, I call the shower my ideas machine. Because different people have their ideas at different days and at times of day. For me in the morning, I actually ended up having longer showers because all these ideas start coming to me. Obviously, you’ve been ingesting them overnight. You’ve been kind of thinking through them overnight. For yourself, where do you go, where do new ideas generally come from for you? Where do you go to just…

JD Meier (26:31)
Yep.

Yeah.

James Taylor (26:50)
Maybe take a step back from your day to day to kind of reflect, to really think at that kind of higher level.

JD Meier (26:56)
Yep. So where do the ideas come from? God, they come from so many places, but of course, like you, the shower. So this morning I had a thought about thought maps or thought structures or thought scaffolding. I thought about a lot of times people give you a thought to think, but they don’t break it down. And I had a parallel thought around, and program management work, breakdown structures. I thought about what if we actually shared these thought challenge and responses for specific challenges that we have.

because people do have these thought patterns. There’s success patterns and there’s anti -patterns. But too often, I think we hit the tip of the iceberg, but we don’t drill in. And I bet that if we start to share examples of thought maps, like what should be my thought structure when I feel like nervous or anxious about presenting? What does that look like? Break it down, but like little example of thought structures. So showers is a place, of course, before bed is of course another perfect time. So I keep my handy little sticky pad, my yellow sticky pad and pen. It’s been my greatest advantage.

And I also use a practice I call Imagine If. Imagine If is how I channel my imagination, but in any situation that I’m in, I imagine how it could be better. And so it gives me a lot of flexibility around choreographing the future of like a restaurant or even in the movie theater, you know, traffic, you know, how would I redesign this? So playing with Imagine If and just playing out future possible scenarios completely changes the game. A quick example is…

You go to the grocery store and this is before we have all the things that we have now. But I remember I was supposed to design, you know, the future of, grocery stores for big company. And I thought, man, when I drove up parking sucked. What if I could just drive to the curb and the groceries come to me? And then another scenario was like, wow, I can’t find anything in the store. What if I could hold up my phone and like either play, find the vegetable or I could find the gluten free, whatever, you know, whatever I need to go look for. And, you know, as I’m going to fill these scenarios, I was like, well, what if.

groceries came to me. This was before they did. What if the groceries came to me? And to scare the leaders into the future, I gave them a competitive idea. I said, look, your house is the future store. If you don’t fill the shelves, then Amazon will. And so it’s those little ideas, but they come from everywhere. But what made that even possible was I read a book called Thinker Toys. And in it, Thomas Edison shared his idea quotas. And so that was the idea.

That first week, I took my little yellow sticky pad and I wrote one idea per note. By the end of the week, I had 10 notes. And I thought, wow, my God. But it wasn’t that. It was that as soon as I put the ideas down, and these were good ideas, these are 10 good ideas, when I put it down, my head was empty from those. I didn’t realize how much those were bouncing around. Once my head was empty from those, ideas wouldn’t stop coming. So the next week, I filled two of the notepads.

By the third week, it was getting silly. It was just absolutely ridiculous. So I think a lot of people don’t realize if you keep your ideas floating around in your head, see what happens when you put them somewhere. Have an idea catcher, a thought catcher, an idea portfolio, an idea catalog, put them somewhere. And then you’ll be amazed at how much space and room you have for ideas to come your way. And practice that imagine if habit. It’s a habit you can practice and share with your friends.

James Taylor (30:07)
That’s great. And while we’re talking about capturing ideas, is there a tool that you use or an app, some way that you find it very easy, because you’re getting all these ideas all the time, how do you ensure that you can capture them so you can then go through them at a later date?

JD Meier (30:17)
Yep.

Yeah, I know it sounds old school, but I use Evernote and I have more than 30 ,000 notes and the it I’ve been on a quest for probably, I guess, a couple of decades. I’ve been actually on a quest to find the world’s best insight and action. So I have principles, patterns, insights for mind, body, emotions, career, finance, relationships, fun. And so I have not just a big, deep library of profound knowledge, but then I have my catalog of my ideas where I have, I do two things. Actually, I have a.

a notebook for my best ideas where I capture those in different domains. And then I have a daily insights where it’s just, it’s, it’s a running note. I put today’s date and any like little idea that pops up, I put it in my journal. So basically the daily journaling combined with my catalog, my portfolio of my best ideas.

James Taylor (31:07)
Yeah, I love I’ve been like you, I’m a long time Evernote user. My only complaint, if anyone from Evernote is listening just now, please speed up the mobile app, because it’s by the time you have the app from the idea to capturing it, those six seconds or 10 seconds it takes to open the app and put it in can be really frustrating. Very, very simple thing there. What about if you were to recommend one book?

JD Meier (31:11)
Cool.

my god. my god. Yeah.

Yeah.

James Taylor (31:29)
to our listeners. You mentioned one that’s Thinker Toys, which I’m going to definitely check out that one. If you would recommend one other book to our listeners, not one of your own, but kind of links to your own, what would that book be?

JD Meier (31:30)
Mmm.

Hahaha, yeah.

It would be Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins. That’s my secret of how I read faster. But Unlimited Power is probably the deepest book that I’ve ever read that goes into the inner engineering. And what I’ve learned in life is that all things are created twice, first in the mind, then in the world. I think of it as inner world, outer results. But that book is probably the deepest that I know for modeling, learning, sharing, and scaling expertise of other experts. It’s a way to distill it because it’s the inner engineering.

You watch somebody shoot pool, you watch what they did with the cue. You don’t go through the thought process of wait, their neurology. What was their breathing? Where was their focus? Did they look at the, you know, the hole? Did they look past it? Did they focus on the cue ball? So that is probably the greatest book for profound performance, I would say.

James Taylor (32:24)
a huge, like you, massive, I think I’ve read that, I don’t know how many times I’ve read that book. I read it when I was probably 13 years old, changed my life. I think it was, there was a line in that you mentioned in questions. I think you said, Tony said something along like the quality of life is the quality of the questions that you ask. And it’s just that constant, wonderful book, absolute classic. Let’s, as we finish up now, what is the best way for people to connect with you JD, to learn more about your books, your writing, your other things you’ve got going on just now? Where should they go?

JD Meier (32:33)
my god.

Yes, yes, so true.

Probably the best starting point is JDMeier .com. So JDMeier .com. Yeah, that’s the best bait.

James Taylor (33:03)
Well, JD, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today. After listening to you, I’m gonna go and pick up my old battered copy of Unlimited Power and reread it again as well. Thank you so much for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast.

JD Meier (33:09)
Hahaha.

Thank you for having me. Awesome times. Take care.

The post JD Meier of Microsoft, Productivity Strategies for Success #339 appeared first on James Taylor.

Summary

Professor Sir David Omand, former UK security and intelligence coordinator, shares insights from his book ‘How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence’. He discusses the importance of critical thinking, the SEES model used by intelligence analysts, and the role of creativity in decision-making. He also explores the impact of biases, the Bayesian approach to probability, and the challenges of decision-making in high-stress environments. Omand emphasizes the need for diversity of thought and expertise, especially in the face of emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology. He concludes with the importance of ethical decision-making and recommends the book ‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Cixin Liu.

Sound Bites

“We have a polluted information environment, which AI, I’m afraid, adds to with the ability to make deep fakes and to provide misleading information.”

“You can spot trends in technology, international affairs, domestic affairs and social attitudes, and then have the imagination to say, well, if that were to happen, what would it look like?”

“The Reverend Bayes was an 18th century cleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur mathematician. And he came across this rule, which we call Bayes rule named after him, which essentially relates the likelihood of something happening to which you’ve worked out to how you should then recalculate that likelihood when new evidence arrives.”

James Taylor is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, often booked months or even years in advance due to his exceptional expertise. Given his limited availability, it’s crucial to contact him early if you’re interested in securing a date or learning how he can enhance your event. Reach out to James Taylor now for an opportunity to bring his unique insights to your conference or team.

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00:00Introduction and Background of Sir David Omand

02:32The Polluted Information Environment and AI

06:18The Bayesian Approach to Probability

09:00The Importance of Explanation in Intelligence Analysis

11:34The Role of Creativity in Intelligence Work

15:34Navigating Biases and Creating a Safe Space for Decision-Making

23:29Teamwork and Decision-Making in High-Stress Environments

25:25The Importance of Expertise in Crisis Management

29:23Preparing for the Challenges of Emerging Technologies

32:09Ethical Decision-Making and Doing What Is Right

James Taylor (00:08)
Sir David Omand was the first UK security and intelligence coordinator responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter -terrorism strategy and homeland security. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee and was permanent secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that, director of GCHQ, the UK Signals Intelligence Agency. Previously in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under -Secretary of State for Policy,

He was particularly concerned with long -term strategy, with the British military contribution in restoring peace in the former Yugoslavia and the recasting of British nuclear deterrence policy at the end of the Cold War. He was principal private secretary to the defence secretary during the Falklands conflict and served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK defence councillor. He’s been a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College since 2005 to 2006 and his latest book is called

How Spies Think, 10 Lessons in Intelligence, where he shares the methodology used by British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence, and act decisively. The British former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, the Right Honourable Jack Straw, calls How Spies Think a brilliant book by one of the UK’s true polymaths, author, academic, administrator, mathematician, and former spy. But this isn’t just a book for those interested in the secret world of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, it’s for

anyone wanting to know how to make better decisions and avoid traps into which businesses and governments can and do fall time after time. Professor Sir David Orman, welcome to the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Sir David Omand (01:43)
Thanks, James. Delighted to be on the show.

James Taylor (01:46)
So this book was first published 2020, then you added a preface on the paperback edition in 2021. Since then we’ve seen the invasion of Ukraine, artificial intelligence enter very much the mainstream and increasing tensions with the West and China. If you were publishing this book today, as we’re filming today in 2024, any big changes that you’d be making to it do you think?

Sir David Omand (02:09)
Not to the guts of the book, which as you say is about critical thinking, I might emphasize even more than I did in the book that we have a polluted information environment, which AI, I’m afraid, adds to with the ability to make deep fakes and to provide misleading information. So my message, which is how do you think clearly and straight, even when?

some of the messages reaching you are not true or are designed to be deceptive. That still holds, I think.

James Taylor (02:46)
Now you give these 10 lessons towards the end of the book, but then you talk about the main framework, the way to think critically about situations, whether it’s in business or in other situations as well. And you call it the SEAS model, which is really how intelligence analysts think. First of all, maybe give us just a bit of a kind of top line, and then maybe we’ll get into some of those four parts of this particular model.

Sir David Omand (03:09)
Yeah, I put C’s S -E -E -S just to make it memorable. But the first S is situational awareness, which is answering questions about what is going on, where and when. Facture, questions which ought to be answerable if you’ve got a good grasp of the situation. But then the first E in C’s is about explanation. And that’s the bit we often get wrong.

because that usually involves getting inside somebody else’s mind, an adversary, a terrorist group, a dictator, and trying to work out why are we seeing what we are seeing, what’s behind it, what are the motivations? So those questions that have why in it or what for. And then if you’ve got enough situational awareness and you’ve got some decent explanations,

You can move on to what the British Intelligence Community, the Joint Intelligence Committee, I spent seven years on the committee, what they tried to do, which is to assess and provide an estimate based on assumptions, but trying to peer over the hill to give an estimate of how things might work out. Normally in the sort of short to medium term. So that’s why the final S.

I add into my acronym Cs is strategic notice. Can you actually spot some way away developments which could either provide big opportunities or perhaps more often could provide serious challenges? It’s not a prediction. I’m clear in the book that there are no crystal balls. Nobody can produce accurate.

predictions over any length of time. But you can spot trends in technology, international affairs, domestic affairs and social attitudes, and then have the imagination to say, well, if that were to happen, what would it look like? And are the things we perhaps should do now in order to try and make it

that future more bearable if it were to come about.

James Taylor (05:35)
One of the critical thinking tools you talk about in the book is the Bayesian approach. Hopefully I’ve got that right. What is this Bayesian approach and how can this be applied in the work that, maybe you’ll listen to this show in business when you’re thinking about probabilities, the chances of something happening or not?

Sir David Omand (05:55)
The Reverend Bayes was an 18th century cleric in Tunbridge Wells, and he amateur mathematician. And he came across this rule, which we call Bayes rule named after him, which essentially relates the likelihood of something happening to which you’ve worked out to how you should then recalculate that likelihood when new evidence arrives.

So you have the prior position, which you believe, you’ve read intelligence reports, you think you’ve got a grasp of it all. And then some new intelligence arrives and should alter your view of how likely your proposition is to be true. And of course, all these magical AI neural networks that we’ve got used to in the last year or so, they are all based.

on Bayesian thinking you train the model and every time you provide some new information to the model, it works out. Does that help me? How do I get closer to the accurate answer? It adjusts the weights in its neural network, depending on whether it got it right or wrong. And if you iterate that millions of times, you end up with a sort of trained.

AI program, which is rather better at recognising faces than a human being, which is what indeed has happened, all playing chess.

James Taylor (07:27)
And so this is often expressed in a kind of formula that we might see. I know you were involved in the creation of contests where we, in the UK, we had this thing, the Prevent Strategy, for example, where you expressed, I guess, risk using this type of formula.

Sir David Omand (07:32)
Yeah.

Yes, I mean, the basic approach when we put together the UK counter -terrorism strategy was to reduce the risk that terrorism posed to everyday life. So it was based on this idea of normality and can you take steps which helps maintain normality? And when you think about it, the risk is the product of the likelihood of bad things happening. Your vulnerability.

to those bad things, which is something you might be able to do something about. And then if they were to get through your defenses and something bad happens, what’s the reaction? What’s the impact of that? Both immediately, how well did the emergency services cope, but also in the longer term, how resilient are the systems? So after, say, a terrorist attack, next day, is the London Underground working?

Well, on 7 -7 it was.

James Taylor (08:45)
Now, one of the things you said as a common mistake you see organizations, governments make, policy makers make, is they immediately try to jump from situational awareness into the third part with the estimates, making estimates of what’s gonna happen. But there’s this kind of stage before that that you need to spend time on. Can you go into that?

Sir David Omand (09:06)
Yes, that’s the E that stands for explanation. Why are we seeing what we are seeing? It’s a truism in all statistics that correlation is not causality. Just because you’ve spotted two things happening together, does that mean they are necessarily related or that one is causing the other? You need an explanation. You need some sort of explanatory model.

And particularly when you’re dealing with human beings who may mean us harm. So take the period just before President Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine a couple of years back. All those tanks had been on an exercise, tens of thousands of soldiers. Was he going to invade or wasn’t he?

And that’s the point at which you don’t just jump from those tanks to assuming he’s going to it. You actually have to work out what’s the explanation. And in that particular case, UK and British and American intelligence, they had the intelligence to be able to say with near certainty, yes, we know what he is up to. We know he’s going to try and mount a false flag operation to provide a pretext for the invasion.

We know that the medical supplies and other logistics have been, which you wouldn’t see in an exercise, have actually been activated. This looks like the real thing. So that’s the explanatory bit. And it is difficult to do. It’s the bit we most often get wrong.

James Taylor (10:58)
Now, something I noticed in the book, I love the book, and it was just great how it took through in a very kind of systematic, very kind of logical way of thinking through things to think more clearly, as you say. But one thing you didn’t speak about so much in the book was the role of creativity in this. And I guess what you were talking about there in terms of the explanation is, is this is us as humans also using our imagination to understand, well, what is the role of this being? So I wonder, like, what is the role of creative thinking?

as opposed to critical thinking in the work of, let’s say, the analysts? And is that different perhaps from the people who are, let’s say, the agents in the field, that people are actually having to be a bit more improvisational in the work that they do?

Sir David Omand (11:40)
Yes, I mean, you don’t want your intelligence analysts to be too creative. It has to be grounded. And this is, of course, the great lesson of 2003 to 2003 intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. So you want it to be grounded. You want critical thinking to be applied every step to be tested. But when you look further ahead,

you certainly do want imagination because you want to be able to see some of these trends, which may not be obvious, which could lead to significant problems in the future. If the Chinese were the first to develop a quantum computer that works at scale, which nobody has yet really done, then they would be able to read, get through the encryption.

that protects all our financial transactions, our military communications and so on. There’s no guarantee they’ll get there first and maybe we will or the United States. But if they did, and this is the point about strategic notice, if they did, it would create quite a difficult situation. Implication, very obvious. Let’s spend a bit more resource on building quantum resistant encryption.

which can be developed and persuade people to use it so that we’re not stuck with that position if one of our adversary nations were to get there first. And that’s simple example. Where creativity comes in is particularly in the work of the intelligence agencies to think about how are we going to get around the determined will of the adversary not to let us.

see his secrets. So this is what secret intelligence is about. It’s about getting better decisions made because you have uncovered the secrets of people who mean us harm. Dictators, autocrats, people smuggling gangs, terrorists, criminals, and so on. They have secrets. They desperately don’t want us and our allies.

to find out those secrets. So that’s where you have to be really creative in trying to think of ways they haven’t thought of, which will enable you to penetrate the secrets of the terrorist group or the narcotics smuggling gang or whatever it might be. That requires a diversity of mind. And that’s something I would certainly want to emphasize. It’s something that my old department, GCHQ, has…

James Taylor (14:18)
So,

Sir David Omand (14:29)
has really developed is to employ people who think differently. And that diversity of minds makes it more likely that somebody will make the creative breakthrough, which is new and helps.

James Taylor (14:47)
So with diversity of minds, when I often talk with organizations, we talk about, there’s different ways of doing this. I know we sometimes have things like, going back in history, like Edward de Bono, six thinking hats, a way of just looking at things from different perspectives. In the book, you talk about one of the biggest challenges for us as humans, humans and machine side, that the human part is biases that we all have and recognize that you talk about Dick, I think it’s Dick Huer of CIA.

Sir David Omand (15:15)
Hmm.

James Taylor (15:16)
and these six key biases that we have. What are the ones that you often in your career, you’ve often seen most coming up in these biases? And then second to that, how do you create a space, a safe space where these biases can be discussed, sometimes with colleagues, sometimes with other governments, for example?

Sir David Omand (15:37)
Yes, I once went on a training course with Edward de Bono himself. It was fascinating and we wore the hats, his thinking hats. It’s a little artificial. What I was trying to get people to recognize is we’re all subject to cognitive biases, as they’re called. And it’s a natural human instinct, confirmation bias. We interpret information in the way we…

kind of unconsciously feel that’s what we believe. That’s what we would like to see. The group think is very well established. So if you’ve got an analytic group and it’s coming up for closing time at the end of the day, and there’s a lot of pressure to reach an answer, that’s where you want the, perhaps the one analyst who doesn’t agree not to just quietly accept,

the group consensus, but to say, no, I think you’re missing something. It’s a great skill to be able to work a group. There are different techniques that are taught. One is empowering individuals to, well, for the next five minutes, tell me what we’re getting wrong here. What are we missing? So that an individual doesn’t feel that they’re, particularly junior, that they’re somehow challenging.

the authority, but actually they’ve been told to, it’s your job to take this information and then tell us what are we getting wrong? Or what would it, an interesting question, what would it take for us to reach a different conclusion? And when you apply that logic, you may well find that your thinking is all based on one report, which when you examine it closely, say, well, we don’t, we can’t be so certain.

Creating the safe space is one in which people work as a team and they’re not dominated by the most forceful personality in the room. Something that I touch on in the book and I’ve come to talk about even more is that when you think about any serious decision that any of us have to take, whether it’s in the family or whether it’s the prime minister or something,

major matter of state. There are two different kinds of thinking have to be integrated within the single mind of the person taking the decision. On the one hand, you’ve got the emotionally based thinking of this is what I want to achieve. This is what I must achieve. This is what the world I want to live in looks like. And on the other hand, you’ve got the analytical thinking that says,

These are the limits of the possible. This is what the spreadsheets show. And so both are necessary. So if you haven’t got the emotionally based thinking, then you won’t have the right kind of narrative to incentivize people. You know, Churchill in 1940 gave the British people the narrative. Zelensky has given his people the narrative to enable them to keep going despite the odds.

but neither of them neglected the analytic part, which is it’s not enough just to have bombast. You’ve got to have grounded analytical thinking about what armaments are we going to need? What steps do we need to take? Churchill brought in Beaverbrook to revolutionize Spitfire production. So you need to integrate both. If you just have the former, then…

Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, it’s emotional. It may sound very powerful, but it’s not backed up with solid analysis. If you just have somebody talking off a spreadsheet, who’s going to put themselves out to do extraordinary efforts on the basis of what a spreadsheet says? So you need both. And that, I think, is one of the secrets of getting this safe space where…

you have the analysis, but you also can bring out the narrative of why all this has to be taken seriously and developed into a public message.

James Taylor (20:21)
I’m wondering, as I was reading the book, and I was thinking, especially the story you start with in the book, which is about the beginning of the Falklands War, when there was a period of obviously high stress, you’re in a very intense period, time is contracted. I wonder what that does in terms of people’s biases, how that safe space is created. The other day I was doing an event and I was sitting in a dinner next to Willie Walsh, who’d been formerly the CEO of British Airways.

IAG. And we were having this discussion about stress, because I thought, you know, your job as CEO must be very stressful, things happening all the time. And he said, one of the things that you often find is that in high stress environments, people kind of revert to a version of themselves that is sometimes not the best. And he said, as a leader, your job is over time to try and nudge that and move that to a slightly better place as well. In your own working, I mean, is the

with these skills that you’re talking about, is this something you can be trained to become better at under more high stress environments where you’re maybe not sitting in the comfort of a nice ideation brainstorming room with cups of tea, for example?

Sir David Omand (21:34)
Yes, I mean, I’ve written another book. It’s the paperback comes out on the 6th of June from Penguin called How to Survive a Crisis. And this is very much at the heart of how we survive a crisis, because the point about a crisis is not we have emergencies all the time. So I distinguish between emergencies and crises. And when a real crisis arrives, the person in charge won’t know what to do.

If they did know what to do, it’s just one of those emergencies that companies have to deal with all the time. And British Airways, you know, sometimes the computers go down, people know how to sort it, you get on with it. But a crisis is when events are hitting you faster than your responses can cope with. I have what I call the rubber levers test. You pull the normal levers and nothing seems to happen on the ground.

If anything, it gets worse. And some of the steps that you may have taken early on actually seem to make things worse and you risk sliding into disaster. And that’s where it’s so important that the person at the top, and that’s the person who doesn’t know what to do by definition, gathers the team. And this takes you back to the safe space and says to the team, we’re in serious trouble. We’re mobilizing.

all the best people we can get our hands on. This is number one priority for survival of a company or the business, or indeed the nation. This is now the priority. And together we will work out what the solution is. And that takes you into teamwork. Surviving crisis is a team sport and it’s not something that the leader will.

James Taylor (23:20)
It seems so… yeah.

Sir David Omand (23:30)
instinctively know exactly what measures to take. That’s why you need the expertise, you need the team together. And it’s high stress. And it’s very well documented that in conditions of high stress, tempers fray, people, there are what I think are called the Ds. So the first is denial. This can’t really be happening to us. Let’s just wait a bit.

Prime Minister Johnson doesn’t turn up to the first five COBRA meetings on the COVID emergency. That’s a very well -known phenomenon. You have the disparagement of people bringing bad news, so you send them away to do more work. You have displacement activity, where people, you get the staff to focus on anything other than what they really have to focus on, which is the…

crisis which is looming. So you can trade, you know, just talking about this, having little exercises, being coached, there’s a lot of things can be done to improve the performance of those at the top when something unexpected happens. And as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been saying this morning, we’re entering an era.

of more and deeper crises over the next five or 10 years. So we better prepare ourselves.

James Taylor (25:04)
And we had a guest on the show a little while ago, Professor Roger Nibran from UCL, I think, and also from Cambridge University, who wrote a wonderful book called Experts. He’s like the world’s leading expert on experts. So do you think we’re in a time now where maybe post -COVID experts are coming back into fashion? Because it certainly seemed in the UK for a little while, they were deeply unfashionable for a while.

Sir David Omand (25:26)
Indeed, and we would have been well and truly stuffed if we hadn’t had the expertise, for example, on the vaccines task force. And if those vaccines had not been developed and innovative ways found of getting them into people’s arms quickly, then we would still be in the depths of a very major pandemic. It’s still hanging over us and people are still suffering, but we’ve got over the worst of it. But there are…

more pandemics to come, undoubtedly, and new diseases will jump the species barrier. So we’ve got to be ready for that. Technology will turn much of our life upside down. We’ve already mentioned artificial intelligence, but quantum developments, bioengineering, we’re going to see some remarkable things happening with bioengineering. We’ve already got

DNA being used for genetic disease treatments, which are entirely novel. It’s very exciting. There are lots of opportunities, but, and it’s a big but, are those who mean us harm, our adversaries, will take advantage of some of these. And we’d better be ready for that.

James Taylor (26:52)
So you were talking about this idea of diversity of mind, having that diversity of mind, being able to hold emotional and analytical thinking at the same time. You’re obviously absorbing, taking in lots of inputs all the time. You’re obviously reading widely, you’re a polymath in the work you do. But where do you go for inspiration? How do you go to sort and sift this stuff in your head to take, you know, then to be able to take a step back and think about, well, what is it, AI or climate change or whatever the thing is, how do you…

Sir David Omand (27:05)
Hmm.

James Taylor (27:21)
set that self and yourself so you’ve got that time to yourself to be that kind of creative part of you to think in that way.

Sir David Omand (27:28)
Well, the best thoughts come to me when I’m out running early in the morning. And I think that’s quite a well -recognized phenomenon. You do have to give yourself time, but this is one of the difficulties that as technology advances so quickly, you actually got to put in the hard yards to understand what is actually happening.

So to have the first inkling of what is going on with generative AI and what the magical treatment is that has turned simply machine learning into something so much more. You’ve actually got to do the work and you’ve got to study it. But we have a wonderful way. If you think about going to any hospital or medical clinic and you’ll find lots of talk about, well, we’d better get an MRI scan.

done and people talk about MRI scans, but that stands for magnetic resonance imaging. And magnetic resonance is one of those extraordinary, to understand that is one of those extraordinary parts of the quantum world that we’re talking about the resonance of molecules and atoms in a way that the general public has no idea of what is driving the MRI scanner.

So all advanced technology, you know, it looks like magic when it first appears. And then we all get used to it. I have no idea what is under the bonnet or the hood of my car. I used to, 20 years ago, I’ve been able to say, well, that’s the carburetor. And there’s probably a fuel pump. You know, there’s a bit of dirt clogging the fuel pump. I’ve no idea whether my car even has a fuel pump. So…

A certain amount of work is needed as well as relaxation.

James Taylor (29:29)
And it’s interesting, you know, with obviously artificial intelligence, first coin, 1956 has been around for a long, long time, but obviously we more recently it’s, we’ve seen this drive primarily through big data, which the fuel for it as well. what’s for me is interesting is now seeing almost I can imagine a few hundred years ago, you know, invention of electricity being used where suddenly anyone has the ability, you don’t have to know how electricity works to be able to flip that switch or to.

Sir David Omand (29:35)
Hmm. Hmm.

Hmm.

James Taylor (29:58)
add electricity to your business in some way. Now you see people using it for good and for bad. Bad actors using generative AI to create deep fakes and all this stuff as well. So we’re certainly going into a pretty fascinating time in human history.

Sir David Omand (29:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the parallel is probably with the invention of the printing press, which has produced world literature and made it available to everyone. And simultaneously, a lot of other stuff, which we ideally would not have had to suffer. So the printing press turned the world upside down. It led to decades and decades of religious war, AI and

the other technologies, particularly biotechnologies, are going to do the same to our world in the next five to 10 years. So, you know, buckle up. It could be a bumpy ride.

James Taylor (30:56)
So just to finish up, a couple of quick fire questions for you. There’s some wonderful quotes in the book, wonderful lines by different folks, Churchill and all kinds of different areas. Is there a quote that you live by you can have as a bit of a guiding star for yourself?

Sir David Omand (31:11)
that’s a difficult question. Perhaps there is one. And I owe it to my former boss, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary and I was his senior official, I was his permanent secretary. And Jack always approached the difficulties by saying, when in doubt, do what you genuinely believe is the right thing. It will still go wrong. Most things go wrong. And you have a defense.

Well, knowing what I knew at the time, I took the decision to do what I believe was the right thing. That’s a defense and a solid one. But the moment you start to say, I’m not going to take the straightforward course, I’ll try some devious maneuver, I’ll blame someone else, or I won’t tell all the truth, and you try and shimmy your way through, spin your way through, as the spin doctors say.

when it all goes wrong, you have no defense. Yeah. So I think it’s not a bad principle in life.

James Taylor (32:14)
there’s no right way to do a wrong thing. It’s the ethical dimension.

And then what about, is there a book that you would recommend to our listeners? We’re going to have links to your books as well. Is there a book just now that you’ve been reading that’s really made you kind of rethink? We’ve been talking about AI, we’ve been talking about biotechnologies as well. Is there something that you think people should check out?

Sir David Omand (32:37)
Well, a lot of people have checked it out, but the three body problem, and there’s more than that’s the first volume of the trilogy by Fikin Liu, if my Chinese pronunciation is right, is mind -bending. And I thoroughly recommend it.

James Taylor (32:54)
Yeah.

Sir David Omand (33:04)
It’s you can watch it on Netflix, which is rather a shortened version and rather a sort of dumbed down version, but the original. And there’s also a Chinese series in 30 parts, which doesn’t spare the mathematics and the but it’s about the future and it’s about, in a sense, a plausible future. And it’s well, it raises some very deep questions.

as well as being great fun because it’s an entertaining story.

James Taylor (33:40)
Well, it’s been a pleasure being with you today. If people want to learn more about you, learn more about the books that you have coming out as well, where’s the best place to go and do that?

Sir David Omand (33:51)
The King’s College website, I’m a visiting professor at King’s College in the War Studies Department and they can find all about it or just Google me and you’ll find a lot of details about the, as I say, latest paperback out on the 6th of June, how to survive a crisis.

James Taylor (34:12)
Professor Sir David Omand, thank you for being a guest on the SuperCreativity Podcast.

Sir David Omand (34:17)
It’s been a pleasure.

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Hey there, it's James Taylor here, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today, I'm in Chicago, Illinois. And I'm here because I'm keynoting a conference in a few hours' time.

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And it's a law firm conference. Actually, it's lots of law firms that are coming together. They're sending all their senior partners. Their managing partners all around the world. We have people from Japan, from all parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe, and of course, here in North America.

And the topic that they brought me to speak about is innovation, specifically how law firms and legal firms can innovate better. And the key thing I'm going to be talking about really is collaboration, and how we deepen collaboration, both within law firms and also across different law firms. So different firms can collaborate with each other. And in order to build the pie, increase the size of the pie and their businesses. Now, one of the interesting things last night, we were at dinner, and we went to an amazing restaurant, the client, for this particular event organized for us all to go to a restaurant, it was one of Frank Sinatra, and Al Capone's favorite restaurants, great restaurant.

So we're sitting there, and we're kind of having a conversation with some of the partners from these different law firms. And one of the things that we kind of all pretty much agreed on is that productivity stayed pretty high during the pandemic, all these law firms, professional service firms, and many businesses were able to transfer pretty quickly to working virtually working online. So productivity actually stayed held better than many people thought it would. But the thing that really suffered was innovation, innovation, and culture, which were the two things I see that many companies are bringing me in today to talk about because it really got pushed down further. And it was much more difficult to do in a virtual context.

So one of the great things here is all these people coming from all over the world, they'll have different perspectives, different skills, different expertise. And it reminded me of something that Andy Jassie from Amazon said the other day, and he said one of the reasons we want people coming back together and collaborating physically in the same spaces together, is because we just weren't riffing the same way was his expression here in Chicago is famous for the blues and jazz. And I'm actually gonna be talking about the role of riffing and improvisation as a way of improving collaboration in law firms. So let me show you a little bit of footage from today. And maybe you're a law firm. Maybe you're a legal network you want to bring me in to come to speak at your next conference. Go and check out JamesTaylor.me. Lots more information there. We have case studies from some of the big global 50 law firms that I work with. Check this out.

Innovation Keynote Speaker in Chicago

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Good morning, James Taylor here. Keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today I'm in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

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Good morning, James Taylor here. Keynote speaker on creativity, innovation, and future trends. Today I'm in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, where the blues and lots of cool things are here speaking for about 50 of the top law firms from around the world. I'm gonna be talking to them about collaboration, what collaboration means, and why collaboration is so important to innovation, especially within the legal industry as well.

It is my first time here speaking in Chicago, been here many many years ago, this city is really famous for its architecture tell clean city. And I'm actually going to be adding in a whole section about architecture to like you know, the pillars and the foundations and all that good, good stuff. I always like to add a little bit of a tailor-made something in the speech that relates to the police in which you're having the client having their event. So let me give you a little bit of a tour around you can check this place out

so he told me the best way to see Chicago is from the water. So I'm going to go on one of those,

Chicago Keynote Speaker

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