L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - The Cognitive Mosaic: Building teams that win with cognitive diversity and intellectual humility

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

It may be time to remove “culture fit” from our recruitment and hiring vocabulary. Sure, a team that gets along well and shares a set of values is likely to be happy and productive. But a lack of perspective–and even conflict–also means such a team will struggle to innovate and grow. So, how do we build teams that thrive by the virtue of cognitive diversity? This week, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and author Shane Snow is here to share insights from a fascinating career that includes building high-performing teams around 3 successful startups.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. Today we speak with Shane Snow. Shane is a journalist, entrepreneur, author, producer, keynote speaker, founder and CEO, and last one, I promise, an explorer. In addition to having written three bestselling books, Shane regularly contributes to major publications such as Fast

Company, GQ, and The New Yorker. As the founder of several companies, including Showrunner and Contently, Shane has developed his own lexicon As the founder of several companies, including Showrunner and Contently, Shane has developed his own lexicon around the topics of team development and storytelling. Through film, corporate courses, his writing, and his speaking, Shane has taught millions of people to work better, use lateral thinking, and develop intellectual humility. He has helped expose government corruption, performed on Broadway, eaten nothing but ice cream for weeks, and won plenty of awards while doing it. There's lots to cover here, so let's dive in. exposed government corruption, performed on Broadway, eaten nothing but ice cream for weeks, and won plenty of awards while doing it. There's lots to cover here, so let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Shane Snow. Shane, thank you for joining me. It's great to see you again. How are you?

I'm good. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's been years, I think. Time flies. Yeah, five years, I think, since we worked together is probably about 2018. You have since gotten married and had at least one child. How many kids do you have at this point? One kid. We got a dog during COVID, so I have two boys now. Okay, well, congratulations. It's great to see you again. So I was reading through your stuff, catching up on your work. I had previously read Dream Teams and I was kind of speed reading through the other books, but I also took a look at some of the articles in your blog. And one stood out to me.

You recall the early pandemic times when business leaders, CEOs, were trying to sort of placate or encourage and comfort their people when things sort of hit the fan. And what you refer to is that a lot of them just sent out these boring emails that said, hey, you know, withstood challenges in the past, we will withstand this one as well. And they all kind of came out in the wash as boilerplate emails that probably every CEO sent one of these out. And you put in there that your advice to leaders in times of change is to stop

using platitudes and to start telling real stories. So my first question ultimately is, how do we find powerful stories that can really help people and really encourage people in such a time when the immediate past was truly catastrophic and frankly devastating? And the immediate future with the rapid pace of technology and AI and what's coming next is just so incalculable. And we really don't know what's coming. Yeah, I mean, wow, I want to start off with the easy question. I mean, there's a few things here,

right? Me writing, like, don't use platitudes, tell stories itself could be seen as a cliche, which I'm conscious of now. But the sentiment there, if you imagine the movie where the leader has to like inspire people to fight the final battle or whatever, they get up and they're like, our thoughts and prayers are with you during this hard time. No one's going to be like, yeah, let's go fight or whatever. I actually have in front of me, my movie posters in my office, in front of me I have Pacific Rim.

I don't know if you saw that one. They build the robots to fight the monsters and there's this scene. It's not like the greatest piece of cinema ever, but there's a scene at the end where Idris Elba gives this rousing speech where he's like, we started as humanity and then the monsters came

and we fought and we had loss and we built this city and now we will fight! And that's just so much better. But what he's doing in that and what a lot of these, I like to think of movies as ways to kind of grab onto, like,

what am I supposed to do when I'm trying to do this thing? Like storytelling. Okay, great. How do they do it? Like the greatest heroes in movies do it. You see this pattern

where they often will tell this story of the group's history up to this point. It's like, we need to do something hard. We got to adapt. We got to deal with something. Leaders will often get up and they'll say, hey, we became a team during these times. And maybe they're hard times. Maybe they're good times. Maybe it's easy. Maybe not. And then like,

so-and-so joined and we had conquered this and we overcame that. And now we have this other hard thing. That I think is a go-to that has worked throughout history and it works in all the movies. You would ask, where do you find stories when times are changing or the world's crazy or you're in the moment? Your own history as a team is the best place to mime for stories. As I said, there's three things. That, I think, is the most powerful. The second thing is as a leader or teammate

or someone who's wanting to use storytelling instead of generic platitudes to like inspire people or to help them. Your own things that you're going through or have gone through or people in your life who you've seen go through things, that's really good fuel for stories.

So the one that comes to mind actually for me during the pandemic, I had a company called Snow Academy. It's still around, but a small little team there. And then later in the pandemic, I started a startup, which is called Shore Runner. It's a bigger company now. But with Snow Academy, there was this... I had to do this thing as a leader with my little team. We're now all remote and things are hard. And I remember sharing this story

of an aha moment for me with my team, which is where this outsource accountant, this freelancer, who we were on a call, she was talking to me about bookkeeping stuff. And then her grandson comes into the room crying. And she's like, oh, I'm so sorry. Like, this is so unprofessional. Let me call you back.

And I was like, okay, yeah, no worries at all. And it made me realize that I had not thought of our outsourced accountant as anything but someone who's doing this little piece of work for us. And then I realized that, oh, she's a grandmother. She's taking care of her grandkids while she's working, while the world is falling apart around us. And that helped me treat her better,

but also think a little bit differently about what I'm asking people to do. I remember sharing this story with my team about how, as a way to say, hey, all of you are going through things and we don't all know everything that's going on. And because of that, let's be a little kinder to each other. Let's do this because we're all in this together, even our accountant, who, by the way, we should send a cake to because she's like a hero. It's a small example, but it's something that had just happened to me that made me think differently

and I wanted to pass that on to kind of inspire and help people keep going. The third thing I'll say is in history, there's great stories that you can always tap into. You don't have your own. That's at your fingertips. There is great stuff from history or movies. And I think what you do,

I think lends itself well to that at some point. Yeah, absolutely. I was actually going to say I am on a Broadway kick lately because I live in New York City, and that's somewhat new for me, the theater. And there's some really strong, rousing speeches in Broadway, you know, thinking of some really strong classics. I mean, as far as like Les Mis and then even some more modern stuff. But especially when it's musical, you know, that really, it flips how you think about persuasion when you hear something put so beautifully and

sung to you. So sometimes I find myself like, I wish my CEO would sing this to me in a very aggressive manner almost. But also more CEOs should send cakes to their workers. I think that's a really a nice one too. I'm a fan of that. So yeah, speaking of all of this, you have founded a handful of companies. They're all more or all of this, you have founded a handful of companies. They're all more or less, you know, content companies. One of them is literally called Contently. Is that how you say it? Is it Contently or is it Contently? It started out that way. Everyone started saying Contently. So we rolled with that. I want to talk about that stuff a little bit later and content and learning and all of that. But I want to dive into teamwork

because that's sort of one of your areas of focus, one of your specialties. And this also goes to just the challenging times. But I'm curious, you know, when you were creating your businesses, when you were founding your teams and putting them together and kind of starting things up, one of the things that you advocate for is one of your central tenets developing your teams is cognitive diversity. This refers to the many ways that one sort of sees and thinks about the world based on their past, their identity, their experience, and that sort of thing. And we'll talk about that a little bit. A term that I like that kind of describes all this is, is it cognitive mosaic? And I guess let's jump into the topic by maybe defining that and just talking about what this ultimately means, cognitive diversity. So we all think differently

in some ways, and many of us think very similarly in some ways. And the reason all think differently in some ways, and many of us think very similarly in some ways. And the reason we think differently about certain things in our lives or in the world are based on who we are and what we've experienced. And in many ways, who we are shapes what we experience, how people treat us, how we navigate the world ourselves. But that basically anything you see or encounter

in the world is going to go into your brain and be interpreted in a certain way. And that will be subtly or very unsubtly different based on, you know, who we are and what we've been through. And that's what cognitive diversity kind of at its core is thinking different, slightly different or very different. And really where that comes into play is when you combine, you know, if you have one person who thinks a certain way, it's only different if you have another person who thinks a different way. Within your own head, you can have had multiple experiences that cause you to see something in two different ways. So I spent a lot of time in Latin America, and I've spoken

Spanish for 20 years. So I can see certain words or certain ways of putting things in two very different ways, kind of automatically in English and in Spanish, a simple example. And so in my own head, there are certain areas, one being language, where there's cognitive diversity, there's different ways that I can play with ideas or interpret or see things. And I think about wise people, you know, whenever you think about someone who's truly wise, often they're older. That's kind of the stereotype. And yeah, that's usually the case because older people have been through a lot more and wise people have used that to be able to turn things around in their heads and think, you know, and to use more wisdom. And wisdom, I think, is a function of being able to look at things in different ways. being able to look at things in different ways. So cognitive mosaic is my analogy that I like to use, the visual analogy for how are you seeing this thing,

whether it's a debate or it's a problem to be solved or just the world or a person that you're dealing with. You're kind of looking through a pair of glasses and I almost think of it like stained glass. There are all these little pieces, kind of a glass of different colors in front of you that affects how you could look at this person or situation. And you can close one eye and kind of look through one piece and say, hey, based on my experience doing this and whatever, like, let's look at it from this way. Or you can look at the whole thing and have a different picture than anyone else who's looking at it. at it. So people who have largely been through very similar things will have a similar kind of mosaic about things that are relatable in that way. So my family, you know, we grew up in Idaho in the same house, and we went through a lot of the same things. We'll largely look at various

things through the same kind of mosaic. However, my sisters will look at that mosaic differently than I will because of how we operated, what we were into, how we were treated at school and at work. And so we will have some differences in the way we look at things. Most of what we have in general about navigating personal family life is going to be the same, but we do have a different spot than that mosaic. So that's my metaphor I like to use when I think about who is it that's going to help me think differently about something I'm working on or the world. Usually I think of it in problem solving. Who could I add to the team that has a different mosaic so we're all not looking at things the

same way so we can explore different ways of looking at things. That's what cognitive adversity is about. And you advocate for, what you say, culture add instead of culture fit when you're sort of building a team. So I'd like to hear either sort of how you look for this in your teams or, you know, how you sort of recommend that people actually go for this. Because to me, you know, culture fit is very deeply sort of historic way of looking at recruitment and hiring and that sort of thing. And it kind of seems obvious now that we should be looking, you know, more to diversify, you know, based on recent history and how DEI is such a strong focus and what we know now that we, you know, used to more or less ignore. But it does seem like a bit of a

challenge to create a culture that is flexible in that way that virtually every time you're bringing somebody new to the team, there's going to be sort of incremental change. So how do you recommend that we set our cultures up to be ready for that and in fact, seek out culture ad? that we set our cultures up to be ready for that and in fact seek out culture ad i like this question because it easy for a lot of these things that you know that i've researched and that i teach and other kind of topics in in business or in psychology to be interpreted in a very sort of black and white way it's like either culture fit or not culture fit and there is this kind of messy middle where a lot of the best things happen. And that's, I guess, kind of the intro to my answer to your question. If you have a group of

people and you want to accomplish something, whether it's like traditionally how we think of culture, you want to live in a town, you want to provide food and water resources and safety, we're going to live and we're going to have this culture. It is better for that goal, especially to maintain stasis, to have people who are all kind of the same, because you'll have less conflict. It is better for that goal to have all the same than chaos and fighting and destruction. That's counter to your goals. better resources for people, or the saber-toothed tigers have moved into the area and now you have to figure out how to solve the problem of keeping them out. Everyone being the same is going to limit your ability to grow and to solve problems. And I think at an individual level, if you go to the gym and you work out with a trainer who never pushes you, you're not really going to get stronger. And so a culture, I think, you know, a group can

serve that function, we can push each other to get smarter and stronger and be better, because we're there kind of subtle differences or things that don't remain completely congruent with the rest of the group. The big thing, though, is, you know, how do you achieve culture that can adapt and grow when things change, and you're adding new people, when it is definitely safer and easier to just add people who already fit what we have. And again, that's kind of at odds with the growth. I had this epiphany because I asked this question

to one of my mentors years ago, Charlie Kim, who's an entrepreneur, like amazing, amazing guy in New York. He's run a few awesome enterprises. But I asked him this very question. I'm hiring for my startup. I want people who fit the culture, but I also know that we need more. We need to do things that we can't do right now. And he said, you got to stop thinking of culture fit, start thinking of culture add, who can add to the party rather than just be part of the same party. And differentiating that from

chaos and culture killing, you can add people to the group who actually take away from the culture, who make things worse. So another, I'm full of analogies today, I apologize. But if you're having a potluck, we're throwing a Thanksgiving dinner, whatever it is, and everyone brings the same dish, that is not nearly as good of a Thanksgiving dinner as if everyone brings different dishes and you've added, and it adds up to a meal. There's got to be some orchestration, or you end up with all side dishes and no dessert, no turkey. But you also don't want someone to bring a boa constrictor who's going to eat all the food and no one's happy. It's a very weird on the spot analogy.

I'm not a potluck that I've been to in my history. You don't want someone to bring something that ruins the potluck. So I think in order to achieve that kind of balance, that thing in that messy middle, there do need to be a few things in common for a culture to be able to adapt and grow and have it be healthy. I think really two high-level things. One is a respect for different ways of being. If someone's going to come and add something to the party,

you've got to respect that people are different and kind of not resist that, at least not in a personal way. And then willingness to explore what others contribute. So you got to be okay with someone bringing potato salad to the potluck. And if you don't like potato salad or you've never tried it, you got to be willing to at least have a taste or allow everyone else to have a taste and find a way to kind of recognize that that is contributing to the greater good, even if you don't particularly like potato salad. Those things, the respect and willingness. Without that, you could potentially have this chaos and culture killer. With that, you can have a lot of different things show up and you can work with them.

And again, it's not to say that every different person belongs on every team. There's got to be some orchestration or you have chaos. But that's where I think the balance is achieved. So for HR leaders and hiring managers and those that are actually looking for new folks and hiring, where should they be looking? What should they be doing? Should they be expanding their pool from which they, you know, draw applicants and candidates? Should they be looking in, you know, new corners when they are recruiting and hiring? How do you advise they go about sort of seeking culture ad? For sure. All you're recommending for sure. I don't know. No, it's easier said than done. Anyone who's in hiring or in HR sure can hear like, oh yeah, I'll just go find new people

somewhere else. Like it is not an easy job. What I think something we got to recognize and appreciate. But yeah, sourcing from different places for sure. One thing, a mistake that we made at one of my previous companies was we had a referral program for referring employees when we were growing really quickly. And it worked out too well where we had too many people refer,

people that were their friends and they went to school with. We had a group that ended up being kind of lopsided in terms of basically its way of thinking. We now have an army of people who are really good at what they do, and we have no one who knows how to do this other thing or how to think about something a little bit differently. And well-meaning people, you get stuck that way. So I think referral programs, you got to be careful about incentivizing people to bring on people who are just like them. You're the one who

thinks like you. We don't need someone who thinks just like you, but incentivizing you to bring in someone else. The other thing that I would say is it's not just sourcing. Sourcing is a kind of a big, I would say an easy route, sourcing from different places. But this screening process, I think placing more value,

like more mental points or maybe their actual points on people having different journeys, whether they look alike or not, whether they went to the same school or grew up in the same place or not, the journey that they went on is going to form that cognitive mosaic.

For example, current company, we hired a bunch of engineers. And in interviewing these engineers, by the time it gets to me as the CEO, I already know that they're good enough at software engineering that like, I don't need to ask them about their coding skills. And my co-founder of the CTO,

he's got that on lock. For me, I want to understand what they've been through, what's going on for them as people that shape the way they think. And recently we hired a woman. I don't know if she did the interview or if it was just our first meeting.

I'm trying to remember which one. Either way, she does a lot of her meetings from the CrossFit gym where she teaches CrossFit. So the co-working space that she works out of is in the corner of the gym. When I first met her, I double clicked on that. I was like, all right, so you do CrossFit. Tell me about that. And for an engineer, software engineer to be really into CrossFit and to teach CrossFit means that there's a set of interests and there's a journey that brought her there. But also that got us into like, how do you think about teaching? How do you think about

coaching? What could you take from teaching CrossFit and apply to, you know, helping junior engineers on our team? That kind of conversation like helped me to see like, oh, this is someone who's bringing a different approach or potentially different way of thinking to the task than just like, can you solve this coding challenge? Can you code in JavaScript, whatever it is? So I think the hiring screening process, using that as a place to get at those things that indicate that there's cognitive diversity. And also, in doing so, you're giving people the sort of implicit, if not explicit permission to bring that to the table. You're saying like, we hired you because of the whole package. So like when we have conversations, you know, and problem solving and debates and all that, tap into that, share stories and analogies from your CrossFit days, or, you know, feel the permission to speak up,

even if it's not directly from your software engineering experience. That's where I think the most value is had is after you've found the people really drilling into their stories. I think we've seen plenty of scenarios where a lack of cognitive diversity kind of blows up and brings a company to its knees. In some cases, I think of a few different disruptors that have had a lot of trouble. But I would think that Uber is one of the more popular examples that they had a really toxic culture. And that was seemed pretty clearly to be a lack of diversity of many varieties. But I would say that it's important to do this stuff early on, you know, early when you're developing a team before you sort of develop like a hegemony and just a style

of thinking and behaving because then it becomes harder to add to that culture when things, you know, sort of gain normativity. I'd also say that I do think that there are lots of resources out there for recruiting in diverse ways. So especially when it comes to like racial diversity and that sort of thing, you know, you can sort of deliberately reach out to HBCUs for recruiting. And especially when it comes to like tech and that sort of thing, there are resources for finding women in tech. And I think that's especially important these days, especially now that we're looking at AI and large language models and sort of feeding machines data. Like, I think it's imperative that we really make sure that we have all categories of diversity in our companies. Who's shaping how

the machines think is super important. Exactly. I think we're probably already on a somewhat dangerous path, to be totally honest, if I had to predict, but based on the issues that I've seen with AI in the past few years, like, I think this thing is very, very critical. But ultimately, I think, would you agree that starting critical. But ultimately, I think, would you agree that starting early with this and, you know, from the ground up, having this in mind is very critical? I mean, it's certainly much easier to start on the right foot,

to establish, again, like the couple of things are, like, we appreciate people are bringing different things and we're willing to explore what they bring. And establishing that kind of baseline as a norm, a lot easier to do than to say like hey we got to change some things we got to reset like you know a place where we can do that i'll say that i've run a few companies now and every time i've gotten a little bit better at doing this thing from the start because it's kinds of problems you're solving initially especially

if we're talking about a you know small business a startup, or maybe like a tactical team inside of a big company, like we got to form a team to solve a problem. Early on, you will be focused on solving that discrete problem, which maybe doesn't get as much benefit out of certain types of diversity being on the team as the longer term trajectory of the company. So like solving a specific software coding problem might not require, I think you always get benefit out of cognitive diversity, but it might not require the kinds of diversity that a large culture benefits from or, you know, a team of 10 plus benefit from. So what you do is you solve the discrete problem first, you get all of your buddies that you went to college with, and you solve the problem. And then suddenly you're, you know, a team of 10 people who all went to Ivy League schools you solved the problem. And then suddenly you're a team of 10 people

who all went to Ivy League schools and did an engineering program and you have two interns named Lauren and you can't hire anyone who doesn't look like you. And I'm using that example. That's exactly where my first company kind of ended up at before we decided like, hey, if we want to hire executives

or anyone at a certain point and not scare them away that they don't belong here, we're going to start making this a place where everyone belongs. Resetting at 10 people is a lot easier than resetting at a thousand. But starting with that in mind is a lot easier than resetting at any number. Thank you for being candid about that. I appreciate you telling that story. We're all learning, like we're all doing our best. I think it's important to talk about how we got to be a little bit more wiser about this stuff yeah and you've written entire books on it now so clearly there's progress so what about when it comes to within the team the actual day-to-day behavior you speak and write a lot about using debate and conflict for progress i actually just this week

we released our episode of adrian bellargen he's based out of Australia, but he's written a book called Teams That Swear. And one topic in one of his chapters, it's very important, is sort of using debate to a positive end. And this is a challenge for me because when I debate, I like to win. And I think most of us do. But, you know, I see what this is about. And the example that we use with the Wright brothers who, you know, they would argue very viciously and then they would swap sides. And I would argue that the Wright brothers probably had, you know, minimal cognitive diversity between them. So that was one tactic. But what do you suggest for as a leader fostering good debate and also making sure that it doesn't get out of hand and sort of lose control so that debate and conflict actually results in progress and the discovery of truth and movement forward. Oh, such a chewy question. I'll have to check out this book. I hadn't heard that it came out, but it sounds right up my alley. I wrote about the Wright brothers in Dream Team very briefly.

It's this sort of famous story, right? That they argued and it worried their existence. And then they would switch sides of the argument and that kind of broke the tension. They were able to do that. I think the underlying kind of reason that worked for them, even if they got kind of vicious, was because they knew that they loved each other

and they were not going to fall apart no matter the outcome of the argument. They knew that they had to defuse things or they would debate to win rather than debate to learn. But because they were brothers, because they were close, you can fight with your family a lot harder than you can fight with your colleagues because the relationship, you have enough history that you can preserve the relationship. I think that's where in a debate, as soon as it becomes about you and not about the idea,

that's when it gets dicey and that's's when you risk, you know, not making progress. If the debate results in the team falling apart or the partnership falling apart, then you've lost the team and partnership at the expense of maybe getting to the right answer, but probably not. It's at the expense of, you know, someone winning and someone losing. I think debate needs to be used as a mechanism not to win, not to beat someone, but to learn and explore. And if everyone in a debate scenario is thinking of it that way, and they can let go of their own ideas, like you win if you explore and you learn. Even if you learn that someone else is right, you won because you got there. That's how you kind of preserve your ego in that scenario.

you kind of preserve your ego in that scenario. Now, often you're debating with people who don't think that way and haven't had this epiphany. And so what you need to do is recognize, like, look out for the signs that someone's starting to take things personally, that they're trying to debate to win, that this is about something else

besides learning for them. And it can happen at the flip of a switch, and it doesn't mean there's ill intentions, just how humans are wired. But recognizing that, and especially if you're in a position of a power, defusing that kind of personal thing, you know, if someone says something and it's gotten personal for someone else, and that's derailing the debate, recognizing that and saying, let's take a pause, let's take a break, having one-on-one conversations with people

as needed to kind of reset things, or even without taking a break, resetting things of like, hey, let's reframe what was just said there so we can get back to the thing we're really trying to learn we're not trying to prove who has the most experience here and who's we're not trying to prove who's right or who's better or whatever we're trying to find an answer like resetting that goal of debate there's a thing that i like to do specific tactic this is one of the things that we train people at SoCal, I mean, I do workshops on myself sometimes, which is going back to the scientific method. I like to think of, you know, elementary school experiments where you make the volcano. Scientific method starts with an observation, you then ask a question, you then make hypotheses about what the answer could

be, and then you do experiments to see which is the right answer, if any. You try and disprove them. And often you'll have debates, impromptu or formal, where you can reset things to be kind of a healthier, get things back on track by saying, hey, just for a moment, for my sake, or if you're in a position of power, for all our sakes, can we step back and talk about what's the observation that this is all based on? What started this?

Like, what is the set of things that kick this off? And what is the question we're debating? What is the question we're trying to get to? If there's a bunch of questions, you got to handle them separately or in order, but pin things to the side. And then kind of like after establishing,

like, what is the observation? Now, what is the question? You can actually have a debate around, like, what is the real question we should be asking? That might be kind of a healthy debate. Once you get there, you've gotten the team on board with this joint exercise.

If we have together found the observations, that's got to be objective. It's really hard to have things be too personal. It's got to be inarguable. Things that we observe, let's agree on that. Question, let's get to that. Let's agree on that. Great, we've agreed twice.

Now let's put forward these hypotheses. Now let's talk about what should be done and what we think is right. And then together we can try and disprove them. That kind of reset, I think, helps a lot. And then, yeah, this sort of pinning, all right, we're talking about two things here. Let's pin the one thing and get back to it. Promise we will, but we can't talk about whether you're going to get the promotion, if this works out or not, and if this is the right path at the same time. We got to talk about them as two different exercises. An analogy I use a lot, if you're on the team at M&M's and you're in the conference room and your boss runs in and says,

sales are down, we got to come out with a new color of M&M stat. You guys figure out what color M&M we need. And then they leave. You could very easily jump into the debate of like green M&M, lime green M&M, black, purple M&M, pink M&M, whatever. Or you can say, hey, let's reset for a second. Maybe we need to call the boss back in. But like, what's the observation? Sales are down.

Can we elaborate? Sales are down year over year, blah, blah, blah. The question is, why are sales down? Like, let's get into that. Now, is the question based on sales being down, what color M&M should we launch? Or is the question, how do we get sales up? Because if that's the real question, maybe we can expand beyond what color M&M, because we think about reduced sales. That's one hypothesis, but maybe sugar-free M&Ms, or maybe new packaging. We can have a healthier debate. But we also now, we've collaborated on those first two steps

and it's a lot easier to get people on board with exploring after that. So I like using that M&M story of like, yeah, it's fun to debate. Like I think the pink M&M is great for all these reasons, but that might be the wrong debate and we can kind of have a healthier one if we reset things.

If you don't already, I think you should consult for M&Ms because those were three brilliant ideas that you just spit off right there that I would absolutely purchase M&Ms for the first time in 10 years if any one of those things happened. So you also think that leaders should sort out teamwork challenges without inhibiting creativity. And you've touched on this a little bit already, but in other ways outside of debate. So an example that you use in one of your articles is work style diversity, and you actually compare you and your brother both as writers, and you have sort of radically different systems where you work in the morning and he works at midnight and sets up his space

as a garbage factory or something. I'm sure this was maybe years ago at this point, but different work styles that in a collaborative work setting probably wouldn't mesh very well because of the systems that you have to put in place and software that you use and this and that. But you believe that people should be encouraged to maintain those sorts of things, work style diversity. And if those things are inhibited, then so is creativity. So how do we reconcile all of this? You also recommend that we don't use best practices or that we sort of reconsider what best practices mean. So how do we reconcile all this and make sure that people are still creative, even though they might not have similar systems and different ways of working?

I love these questions. There's a similar thing to what I talked about earlier of like, the difference between chaos and complete sort of conformity, right? In the middle, there's that's where the magic happens if indeed people think differently and if indeed thinking differently can add up to more than the sum of our parts but thinking the same usually does not then what is it that people who think differently do and how do they think best and how do they get to the most contribution that they can add to the culture or to a problem solving process is by doing things the way that they do, their thinking process. Now, sometimes we need to sort of nudge people to try new ways of thinking

and being inspired and being creative. And that I think is really important as well. You know, an example of my brother and I, say we're collaborating on a script. He's got his notepads, he's writing in pencil, he wants to write at midnight. I have my whole system that's all electronic and I'm doing sticky notes.

And he has to like, this kid is amazing. He's the most creative guy ever. But he's like, I'm redecorating my apartment so that I can get a new mode for this new story. I should not be forced to do things his way. I should not force him to do things my way. But at a certain point, we do have to collaborate. We got to make this script together. The product that we are putting together is one thing. So there's a few ways that we can go about this, but I think in a creative process, there are moments when you're doing your own work, and you should do your own work the best way that you can,

and you should build a process of collaboration that allows for that. So we go off, we get together, and we're going to talk about what's going to be in this script, what's the story, blah, blah, blah. Maybe we actually go off and we prepare first. It's probably a good idea. And then we come and then we have that conversation. And then I say, all right, you go off and you write the first draft and do it your crazy way. And when we come back,

then I'm going to take it, I'm going to write the second draft, I'm going to do it my crazy way. And then we'll come back and we'll talk. It mimics a person's internal creative process in many ways, like a brainstorming process. There's a different thing you do when you brainstorm. You're trying to find lots of ideas that when you cull things down, sort of divergence and convergence is what design thinking talks about.

Culling all these ideas down to the ones that could work, you're filtering out things based on your goals. We can do that as collaborators. Now, something like a creative project, like a script, it's a little easier to do that. It's easier with two people than with four people

who have all insane processes. At a certain point, you need an orchestrator to manage these different things. But in a more typical business setting, you might have, we have files we need to deal with. We have people who are project managing.

We need a system. And I think the ideal is to allow people to do their own work in their work style when, where, and how they work best. And the only constraint you should put on them is when they need to provide communication, work, or meetings or whatever deliverables for the team. That thing should be a shared system. or meetings or whatever, deliverables for the team. That thing should be a shared system. And I think your choices that you make as a team leader or as the CIO or whoever's putting in these systems should be based around how do we allow for that flexibility

with that kind of shared source of truth. So right now I'm obsessed with Notion as a tool for collaboration because I can make my notes however I want when we're sharing with the team, we have team meetings, there's like a meetings notion where we put notes in or whatever, there's a bit of a system. But you can use sticky notes if you want. You can use Notion yourself. You can organize your Notion any way you want. We all have this shared source of truth in Notion

that's managed by a project manager. But that's a tool that allows me to do things my way without forcing my way on other people with a shared source of truth. So I think making decisions based on that idea, I think is key. The other thing, totally monologuing to answer your question, is just knowing how people work best actually does a lot for you. Knowing that someone does their best work at midnight or knowing that they got to pick their kid up in the afternoon so like, don't have meetings butt up right against the time when they got to leave for their kid.

Knowing what people's constraints are or when they do their best work helps us to kind of be there for each other or sort of like schedule how we collaborate so that everyone can benefit. And that just shows a tremendous amount of benevolence, which itself is good. They do need to bend over backwards for you

because we got to collaborate in a way that's not ideal for you. You have been trying to help them out. So now they'll help the team out. I think that sort of thing is really important. The reference to your brother sort of creating themes for his apartment and flipping the way that he thinks for

a new story or something like that. It makes me want to rewind a little bit and talk about cognitive diversity once more, because I think that is a really cool tactic for probably thinking differently. But I want to ask the more general question for those of us who can't redecorate our apartments or who refuse to or who would rather do something else. What can we do to think differently? So the way that you put it simply is always be thinking differently and teaching yourself to think differently. And I want to talk about something that I found with Get Abstract recently. So Get Abstract has many large clients, a handful of pharma companies, actually. And I was looking at the usage of our product at one large pharma company. And I was looking at the categories that they can read summaries from. So, you know, we have the big categories like leadership and self-development and that sort of thing. In the top 10 most read categories of this pharma company was classics, which is, you know, literary classics, it's fiction. And it was actually exactly tied with

the science category. I think they were tied for like fifth place out of like 50 categories and then a lot more like subcategories. So that really stuck out to me. I mean, I'm sure that all companies have folks who are just curious about, you know, classic literature, as I was when I studied English as a student. to me, that was an indicator that like people are kind of looking for different ways of thinking, you know, obviously, there's, you know, not everybody at a pharma company is a scientist, but it seems like because they're reading both science and they're reading both classics that people are kind of, you know, seeking out different ways of thinking in that way. So that felt like a start there. But you know, what do you think? How do we push ourselves as individuals to constantly think different? So first of all, I love that I've started actually going back and reading some classics myself that I had missed recently, I just started I don't know if this actually counts. But I started reading the original Alice in Wonderland. So I'd never

actually read it. It's delightful and way more bizarre than I thought it was going to be. But you know, what you're getting at, I think is really important. So our cognitive mosaic, how we see the world, how we operate, how we can solve problems, all of that, it's based on our experiences. And the more diverse experiences you have, the more interesting a mosaic you have. If you only have experiences in one place, you only read one type of thing, then you'll have blind spots where you'll at least potentially have a harder time thinking differently. So you're only drawing from a limited pool. Having experiences all over the place does give you a bigger pool to draw from. So this is why, you know, sort of the classic examples, advice that's given for creativity is like travel,

go take walks, go to new places, meet new people. And there is good research actually that says that reading more and watching more in different categories helps sort of build that muscle of being more open to different ways of thinking. I think there's two things that go part and parcel. You can't think of anything that is not somehow attached to something that's in your brain. You have to see something or have been through something. So you have this pool that you're drawing from or this mosaic that you're looking through. So you have this pool that you're drawing from or this mosaic that you're looking through. So the more that you can add to that to diversify it, the more likely you'll be able to make a connection from this place over here to this place over here and have aly willing to take the thing that's over here and say, what if this went with the thing that's over here? That muscle

of being willing to explore things that don't seem like they make sense or don't make sense together, that's built by having diverse experience. And reading is one of those things that really helps with that. So if you give a romance novel a shot, you might learn some things or experience

some things that actually aren't so bad if you give YA a shot or you give the classics a shot. You read some, I personally have been annoyed or roll my eyes at how much stoicism is being repackaged lately, but maybe that's saying that I should go

read one of these stoicism books because I'm probably going to learn something that very least could nudge my thinking in a different direction, even if I'm like, okay, still not for me. There's something about that that helps your brain, that muscle, be more willing to explore things. So I think I'm a huge fan of reading as that exercise, but travel, meeting people, conversations with people, those things all kind of in that same category. That's why I think sabbaticals are important, you know, taking, not just going on vacation in the same place. If you're going to relax,

fine. But if you're going to like, maybe expand your mind a little bit, go to a new place like that. Those kinds of things always help. I want to wrap up by asking about the same topic, but more systematically. So from the perspective of a learning and development leader and L&D practitioners, and even just managers in general, as I said before, you're a content guy, you do a good amount of learning content. And you say that most trainings, especially video trainings come off as just lectures these days, which I agree with, I've seen tons of these, and I've dealt with them in past careers. And I want to ask about how we can make learning more exciting so that achieving this cognitive diversity is a little bit easier. And what you say, and at least on your website for Snow Academy, is that you have a good

amount of sort of neuroscience research done that goes into how you create your courses and the content that you make. So I'd love to hear what you can tell me about that. What have you found? What kind of principles are you following? What makes good content ultimately? Thank you for taking that up. Well, so it's all kind of related to what we've just been talking about with learning in particular, basically, like think back to when you're in middle school

or high school, when there's a lecture, there's a certain point that the lecture goes on when you and all of your classmates are tuned out. The teacher that switches up the lecture with the science experiment or the crazy story or the quick video or the activity, everyone get out of their desks and do this thing. The teacher that does that constantly, first of all, is the teacher everyone loves because it's super fun,

but that's the one that people pay attention to the most. That's kind of the obvious in retrospect. We didn't need so much scientific research to figure that out. But we did. We used a couple of tools to basically have people basically tracking people's brainwaves, essentially, measuring their attention, measuring their kind of lean forward and lean out and measuring their emotional engagement and immersion. There's this tool called Immersion Neuro, get immersion, I believe is the website. That's the main one. Or actually, those are Neuro Insight and Get Immersion. Those are the two that are kind of my favorites

that Neuro Insight, we've done for a bunch of like ad stuff that applies to then Immersion Neuro for the education stuff. But basically, people stop paying attention. They stop caring as much when you drone on too long. And so for a pure video course, it's like that lecture in class, even if the person giving the course is awesome,

your brain no longer thinks it's novel after a little bit of time, unless they do a couple of things. They switch up the stories. They actually tell you things that are novel. And some of that is dramatic performance. So some of these masterclasses you watch are like way better than others

because it's like, oh, we have this awesome person who's just boring as hell. They're just talking. Or you have this awesome person who has these amazing stories that keep you engaged. So storytelling is one that, from an neuroscience standpoint, is a slam dunk. use a story. You have places that you want people to pay attention, throw in a story. Don't just throw in a story, perform a story. That's one. If you can do not just video, it's even better because what we found is that when you switch the modality from here's a video where there's a story to here's an interactive exercise, we have to sort cards to here we're reading and there's a gif as part of the reading that's illustrating this analogy. Your brain is continuing to fire this attention center. You're more likely to keep going. It's kind of like scrolling through Reddit or Instagram.

What's next? What's next? You don't know what's going to be next. It's not like 20 more minutes of droning on. What's next is going to be anything else. Your brain keeps going with that. That's kind of like the first core insight behind how we do things in So Academy is switch up the modality. And then yeah, the second one is actually the first one that I said is that storytelling, especially stories that engage your emotions, you know, that there's like tension, or there's, you know, anticipation or curiosity, the stories that have

relatability. So you're emotionally engaged because you know someone that is like this character or you've felt this thing that the character felt. And then novelty of how the story turned out is not how you expected it. Those kinds of things keep people very engaged and that makes the message stick. There's kind of more that's afoot with what we're doing, like drilling in deeper.

But those two principles, I think anyone in education, switch up the modalities and lean more on emotionally engaging stories. And that is 10 times better than any one single, whether it's text or video or audio kind of modality for teaching. People just will tune out or absorb less even if they're tuned in over time if you don't switch those things up. I would add to this that I think maybe a switch up of setting and kind of changing the pace and the tone and what is even on there visually can be really impactful from a social media perspective because that's also what I do. I saw a video yesterday on, I think it was just TikTok.

It was a one minute video and these are very prominent now, but it was just one minute. It was like this goofy narrative about two guys who are best friends and then they become lovers. And it shows like the next 70 years of their lives just over the course of, you know, one minute with very little dialogue and just music. And then the first comment in the video was from the creators saying, Hey guys, this took us 12 hours, nine locations. We had eight people working on this and it was all for a one minute video. I think that's such a good example of like, you know, really switching things up to sort of capture attention like that. Oh, that's amazing. I want to see it. I'll send it to you. Anyway, thank you so

much, Shane, for joining us. Before I let you go, can you just let our folks, our listeners know where they can learn more about you? You got several websites, but pitch whatever you like at this point. Thank you. Well, ShaneSnow.com is my website that you can kind of get to everything. My two companies right now that I'm running, one is snow.academy. It's learning and development, business skills, and what we call human skills for business people. And then really my full-time job right now

is showrunner.tech. That's tools for filmmakers. So if anyone here happens to also be a filmmaker, check that out too. Thank you. Again, thank you for joining us. And for our listeners at home, thank you for joining. We will catch here that happens to also be a filmmaker, check that out too. Thank you. Again, thank you for joining us and for our listeners at home. Thank you for joining.

We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating,

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