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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to asbo international's school business insider. I'm your host, john brucato. Each week on School Business Insider, I sit down with school business officials and industry experts from around the world to share their stories and explore the topics that matter most to you. Find out what it means to be a school business official and get your insider pass on all things school business. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to School Business Insider. Today I'm joined by John Coyle, a leadership expert, design thinking practitioner, and Olympic silver medalist who recently spoke at the ASBO International Leadership Forum. John brings a unique perspective on leadership, blending storytelling, human centered design, and high performance experience. In our conversation, we'll explore how design thinking applies to leadership in school business, how storytelling shapes influence and culture, and how leaders can become more intentional in the way they approach challenges, decisions, and change. John, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you.
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B
I'm so glad to be here, John. I'm excited for our conversation.
- [01:17]
A
Same here. And I'm glad Kristen kind of connected us and we were able to take the opportunity that, um, so, so a few of us had at the leadership conference and really kind of broadened that to a wider audience. But that being said, you really have a very interesting and, and fascinating background, from Olympic athlete to leadership expert. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that journey and really what led you into the work you're doing today?
- [01:40]
B
Yeah, I guess I'll give you my origin story, John. Uh, I. I went to Stanford because I got in, which would never happen these days. It's.
- [01:49]
A
That's reason enough, right?
- [01:50]
B
Yeah. Somehow they decided to let this kid from a small parochial school from Detroit area into this institution. And I struggled. I really struggled at first because everybody else had had much more preparation than I would say I had. But eventually I sort of made my way into a degree called Product Design. And the head of the now what's called the D School is a guy named David Kelly. So he became my mentor. He's notable for a couple reasons. He is still the head of Stanford's D School. He's the head of a consulting firm called Ideo. But he was Steve Jobs, right hand man, best friend and co designer of Macintosh, the Lisa, the first iteration, the iPhone. So I happen to have a really great mentor and professor who taught me this thing called design thinking. Design thinking at its most basic is, are we solving the right problem? Always coming back to are we solving the right problem? And are we solving it with empathy for the people we're solving for so, you know, I go through the degree of the program. I'm still trying to be an Olympic speed skater in California while studying at Stanford with no coach and no training program. So this, this seems like an impossible endeavor. But I managed to get 12th place in the world in the sport of speed skating my senior year. So now I'm all cocky and I'm thinking, okay, after I graduate, I have two years to prepare for the Olympics. I'm going to go from 12th to 6th to 1st. That, that was my plan. However, when I got to the Olympic team, they put me in a program of fixing my weaknesses. I did exactly what they did, said for two years, and I went from 12th to 34th to not even making the team two years later, finishing 30th in the US trials. I had won two years prior. So at this point, I was ready to quit. But I did anchor to design thinking and said, wait, am I solving the right problem? Is fixing my weaknesses the right way to go here? Maybe I should go back to what I was doing, was doing all the kind of training I like to do, what I'm good at. So I quit the team, not the sport. Trained all by myself for a whole year and one year to the day of getting 30th and getting crushed at the Olympic trials in the same exact meet, same structure, same people, same everything. It's not Olympic year, but for the World team trials, I managed to show up in the first race, break the US Record by five and a half seconds, the world record by over a second, and set every single US Record back to back. Which is to say designing for your weaknesses is not the way to go. The way to go forward is to design for your strengths.
- [04:07]
A
And so how did you arrive at that in terms of the design thinking process? Does that entail you, you have your, your, your eye on the goal, and then you kind of work backwards from that and leverage your strength, like you said, like, maybe, maybe focusing on your weaknesses isn't the, the strategy of design thinking, but tell me a little bit more how you really identify what needs to be improved. Because you were, you were coached to work on your weaknesses, that obviously wasn't working. So what does design thinking really help you target?
- [04:34]
B
Well, I'll give you the five steps, and the coaches wouldn't have known this. Like, they don't. They wouldn't use design thinking as a framework, but they essentially went through it. The first step is you have to accept there's a problem. They did, they sat me down. They said, john, there's a problem. You have a weak aerobic motor. Agreed. Accept. We all know some people in our families that are not even willing to do that step. So, so you know, moving forward, define what is the problem. They said your problem is you have a weak aerobic motor and we need to so you can't go very far very fast. I think that was well defined. The third step is empathy which I argue they completely skipped. The fourth step is then ideate what can we do to solve this problem. They said, I think what we need to do is we're going to train you differently, we're going to trade you harder, you're going to do more aerobic work, you're going to do 16 mile runs and 100 mile bike rides. When everybody else is doing jumps and squats and they'll have you ready in two years and prototype you just start trying it out. So we followed four of those five steps and then it didn't lead to any success. And so but design thinking always hearkening back to are you solving the right problem? Do you have empathy for who you're solving for? And ultimately I decided to have empathy for myself. But my self front and center say listen, the weakness approach isn't working. The strengths approach appear to be working. So let's try that again.
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A
So what did you do? Did you go back to jumps and squats and not running 16 miles every every couple days?
- [05:57]
B
I
- [06:01]
A
did more of the more explosive strength training rather than just long term endurance running 100%.
- [06:07]
B
The other thing I did, if you want to know the details, is if you've ever watched short track speed skating, you know it's in a hockey rink and you're moving at you know, 30 plus miles an hour inside of a tiny little rink. And the G forces in the corners lead. I mean it's three GS. It's literally triple your body weight all on one leg while leaned over at 72 degrees. It's a 500 pound one legged squat from deeper than 90 degrees while traveling 33 miles an hour on a 1 millimeter wide 18 inch blade on ice headed towards the wall. It's hard. Everybody in the world was skating very wide. They were minimizing the G forces by skating much wider than strictly necessary. And so I realized that with my strengths of anaerobic power I could skate a super tight track, take the brunt of those G forces, use my one little superpower of anaerobic power and just skate less far. So I skated 11% less far than everybody I can go 10% less fast and still win. So that's what I did.
- [07:03]
A
It's great. So tell me more about your experience in the 94 Olympics. As you had mentioned your silver medalist, how did that experience really shape your perspective on leadership in performance? I think your arc from getting into Stanford and struggling and then finding the right mentor, but then all of a sudden coming out on top, did that change? I mean, design thinking, obviously was a portion of that, but your broad perspective on leadership, I would assume, has broadened, and you've learned a lot of lessons from that. So tell me a little bit more about that experience and how your perspective on leadership really has. Has changed.
- [07:38]
B
Well, I'll. I'll tell you. I'll tease you up for a story we'll get to later. But, you know, I went to the Olympics, and I at the time was the. I was the fastest guy on the team. So in the final race, which is the Olympic relay, it's always the last day of the Games. Naturally, you skate. The fastest guy is the anchor. So I would be anchor. That's what I've been doing all season. But we were skating on figure skating ice, which is very soft and slow. So after days and days of practice on this terrible ice, we sat down the night before the gold medal round to discuss who was going to anchor, which is not a normal conversation. You would have that late in the game. And the coaches said, and by the way, it's a real honor to be the anchor. So, because you're the one that sort of crosses the line and raised your hands like, so I didn't. They're like, coil, you're out. And I knew it. Like, I was not the right choice because on that eyes, I was not the fastest guy. Next fastest guy on the team. Also big and tall like me. Andy, you're out. Next guy, a little smaller, a little bit slower, but maybe, Randy, we should skate you. Finally, we look at our fourth fastest guy at that time on the team. Smallest, lightest, best endurance. And we knew it would be a race of attrition, not a race of top speeds. And so we put our slowest guy in for the gold medal anchor. And thank God we did, because he passed his way from almost losing bronze to silver. He had half a lap more. He had gold. Point being, in teams in business, industry, this metaphor works so perfectly. You hire for diversity of skills and experience and backgrounds. If you make everybody do the same job the same way, you've just wasted all that. You got to place the right person in charge for the right situation doesn't matter. Title level, let them do their what they know how to do best. That's great.
- [09:19]
A
I do have kind of a sidebar question. Just getting in the Olympics, I obviously, you were very talented. Who do you talk to? Where do you go to even say, hey, I'm. I'm really good at skating. Can I compete?
- [09:30]
B
Well, I grew up in a. In Detroit area, and so there was actually quite a number of speed skating clubs in Michigan. And I happen to be in a club that was called the Wolverine Sports Club out of Detroit, Michigan, that has Produced, produced for 40 years, half of all, a quarter of all medalists in the sports of speed skating, cycling. And nobody was from somewhere else. And it just so happened that my coach's mantra was race your strengths, design around your weaknesses. So that combined with David Kelly and design thinking, gave me the right way to frame solving the problem the right way.
- [10:11]
A
That's great. So you are a norm storyteller. It's something that people are drawn to. Why do you think storytelling is such a powerful leadership tool?
- [10:21]
B
Well, you know this, John, and I think we forget sometimes 94% of behavior is driven by emotions. Depends which poll you look at. That's in the 90s. It's not 100%, but it's definitely not lower than 90. Yet we as business leaders more often not try to rational our way to and logic our way to success. And so you blah, blah, blah, facts, logic, data, and then people nod and smile, walk out and do nothing. However, you can't just emotion them into it either.
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A
Right.
- [10:56]
B
You do have a prefrontal cortex that has got a gatekeeper, let's say. Listen. That doesn't sound right. As emotionally attuned as I might be to John Percato and his story, I'm not sure about that. So I think the perfect mix is you gain some trust that you have some expertise with your audience, and then you illuminate it with storytelling. Because storytelling activates the emotional centers, gets your amygdala going. And so if you can do both, you can get past the gatekeeper. You can actually get people to do stuff. And you can get it to do stuff sometimes in 20, 30 minutes, which would have taken six months of repetition and prodding and goading and asking and wishing and hoping. And so storytelling, I think, is the shortcut for leadership for change today. And almost all leadership today is leadership for change. The old days, it was like, operate harder, work faster, whatever. Today it's like, okay, so now we've got a. Now we've got this new technology now we're acquiring this company. Now we've got a new leader now we've morphing our business into X, Y and Z. Like change, leadership comes, I think through storytelling. And it's, you can tell a story that's fundamentally solid in terms of statistics, but appeals emotionally. Nobody can argue with a customer story that's statistically true and also emotionally driving like that, that's, that's what works.
- [12:17]
A
You, you kind of touched on this already. But I want to unpack this a little bit more when, when you, you mentioned storytelling. It really drives it home and you know, beating people to death with facts and logic is, there's that gatekeeper. Right. But I think about my industry and we're so rooted in data and you know, long range planning and numbers. I feel like storytelling would just take too long. But you already kind of said you in, in, in a way that take the extra time now to make us make it a story and tap into that emotion because it's going to pay off long term. You're not spending six months logicing people to death. But can you tell me a little bit more about kind of the philosophy behind maybe front loading the time it takes to, to, to tell that story rather than, you know, logicing it to death for, for six months?
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B
Yeah. You know, I'll give you a quick example from my time in industry. I was at a wireless carrier and we had decided we would try to change the paradigm of contracts requiring contracts to get a shiny new phone for a discounted or even free price. Everybody hated contracts. We had the statistical data proving everybody hated contracts. The number one pain point in the industry. In the industry that's lowest ranked of just about anything I did. Statistically significant survey. 52% of people in our footprint would rather go to the dentist than our store. Like you can't get a lot worse than that. So we got the stats right and so then we decided to change it. Which would have meant, which meant that everybody's job changed. Right. Contracts drove commissions, payments, financials, quarterly earnings, even logistics like contract new handset needs to come in like it drove everything. So this is a seismic shift. But the way we did it is I went on stage in front of a thousand people each day for five days, every employee and told him the story of what turned out to be. He was a farcical customer we named Bill Jensen. He was an amalgamation of those stats. But, and it's a true story in many fronts, but this guy goes to work, drops his phone In a bucket of water. He drives back to the store, he gets in an argument with our manager, he throws his phone at their face, gets arrested and can't do his job for the rest of the day. His kids don't know where, his wife doesn't know where he is. I went to a store in Waterloo, Iowa. There were three holes in the wall. So this is fundamentally true. There were three holes in the drywall from three customers throwing their phones in the last two weeks. So even though Bill was in amalgamation, the story was true. And I said, you know, this is the story with a wireless contract list view future. Bill goes in, he's like, oh, I've got points saved up. Okay, I'll use those points for my free handset. Walks out there, he's back on the job 30 minutes later, no arrest, no handcuffs, none of this stuff happening. So told that story and I said, here's what we're doing and here's why, and here's the data, just to back it up. We had no problem getting 9,000 people to change their way of doing business in less than six weeks because they knew that that story was true. They knew it was true. They'd seen it, Everybody had seen it before. And they knew that the solution would lead to a better future. So if you can create a story based on data, you can get people to change in fairly short order.
- [15:17]
A
And I'm guessing too, you're making it personal for those 9,000 people. It's not just looking at bar charts and graphs and saying, listen, if we don't change what we're doing systemically, then we're going to be losing profit. You made it personal. Is that really part of the point of telling a story is to draw people in, to have them identify with the problem and then ultimately the solution?
- [15:40]
B
Absolutely. Like if I was working with Ohio ASBO or any local asbo, and you have something you want to shift, right? We need to shift resources from X to Y. You say this family came into our school district and such and such happened, and this might not be a completely true story, right? The Smiths, or whatever you want to call them might be an amalgamation, but here's the data, right? Like 72% of families feel this and this that happened, whatever. You can get people to really emotionally grasp onto why this is important, and then the data backs it up so their prefrontal cortex gatekeeper can say, no, this is right. This is not a made up thing at all. I've experienced it. I've seen this myself. You know, Then people are on board really easily.
- [16:25]
A
It's great. So I'd like to dive into a little bit more specifically on design thinking and leadership. You spoke about how design thinking really allows you to identify the problem, the right problem, how to effectively solve it. But I also want you to talk about what it means to really take a human centered approach at problem solving in organizations. It's one thing to identify are we solving the right problem? But then how do you rally the human component around that in a design thinking model?
- [16:56]
B
Well, I'm going to give you two aphorisms or maxims that you might have heard of. John, are you familiar with Occam's razor? You ever heard those two words together? All right, so Occam's razor.
- [17:07]
A
I mean, I've heard them, but I couldn't articulate what it means.
- [17:10]
B
So Occam's razor is that the simplest given solution to any problem is probably the right one, which I would argue is true for simple problems and almost never true for complex problems. Unfortunately, when it comes to complex problems, we tend to try to use Occam's razor anyway. This is where Maslow's hammer comes in. This aphorism says that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I would argue in most organizations this is how problem solving goes. Here's a complex problem, oh, here's a simple solution, let's do that. And then their solution actually creates more problems than the problem they're trying to solve. So that is not the way to do problem solving. When it's complex problems, you need to really back up, get a true definition of it, make sure you're in the shoes of the person you're solving for, and then, and only then, move forward into ideation prototype. I'll give you a quick example. This is straight design thinking stuff. A number of years ago, a large airline carrier did some statistical research about why people didn't like their industry. And at the time, this would be 15 years ago or so you may recall, one of the biggest pain points was waiting in line to go, then check in, talk to a person. They typed in terminally for God knows what reason, because, you know, it's just my name, my birthday, like, how hard could this be, right? But you'd wait there and each person would take, you know, two, three minutes to process. And so you have to wait in line for a long time. So they're like, okay, this is the number one pain point. Let's fix it. So they did. They spent millions of dollars to put in new systems it'd be much faster and trained everybody on it and put it back into place. And they got the, I'm making up numbers here, but they got the time down from, I don't know, two and a half minutes down to 40 seconds, probably roughly accurate. And then they did their statistical research and found satisfaction with the industry had gone down. So people were even less happy. And they're like, well, why did we spend all these millions of dollars? Right? So they hired a firm, I think it was ideo actually to observe. So ideo and design thinking firms generally don't do a lot of statistical research. They observe. So these people just watch people try to checking in. And they noticed this thing that at least in the old days, there was some back and forth, there was eye contact, there was human interaction. And then the new system was just typing, typing quickly, quickly, here you go. So they felt depersonalized in a system that still used humans. There's a super silver lining here, which was the insight was well, you're not really interacting with anyway, so you might as well just automate the whole thing and make it a kiosk. Which they did and everybody else followed suit. And now we check in at a kiosk which I personally love. Like I'm there, I show my passport or my ID or I put in my boarding pass number and in and out a few seconds like so ultimately it did turn out to be a, a great silver lining for the story. But you know, that's sort of design thinking at work, having empathy for the person you're solving for. If you're solving the problem from your shoes, you're solving your own problem. Right.
- [20:10]
A
And it sounds like in that instance maybe not totally an Occam's razor, but just trying to solve one component of the, the check in process by strictly looking at time, not really necessarily the individual experience, is that right?
- [20:25]
B
100% they not in the shoes. They were doing the math. That's it.
- [20:31]
A
Right. So how can leaders then apply design thinking principles really in their day to day work? You know, we are in an industry of schools, specifically school business. We are straddling the line of managing school finances while ultimately trying to provide the best educational experience for students. How can design thinking really help your school business official in their day to day lives?
- [20:56]
B
I think the first line of fence is making sure you're thinking through this perspective of who you're solving for. Whether that's the school organization, their leadership, or down all the way to parents and students, depending on the nature of the problem, making sure you're always viewing the problem from their lens, not yours. Because you're in the jar. There's a great phrase from the south, you can't read the label when you're sitting inside the jar. It's very hard to see things from other people's perspectives. And so that takes some, some doing. The other is this, this is where things like Agile come in. What this airline should have done, they, they should have piloted a brief, maybe even fake check in process with the new time going down to 40 seconds to see does this improve satisfaction? Or have we created a new problem we weren't aware of? This is what happens when you solve problems. A lot of times you solve one problem, you create two more. It's like the hydra, right? You cut off one head and now you've got two. That's the real risk in problem solving. And so testing really quickly in a cheap, inexpensive, cost effective way is part of that test, prototype, repeat part of design thinking. And then and only then, once you've really ascertained you have a working solution, then and only then do you put the big money behind it. And you know, there's so many companies that have been burned by trying to innovate that they stopped innovating. I can give you a classic example if you'd like. Motorola back in the Guess 2000s, I know the, the backstory for this. I was telling the story for years and I finally heard the backstory. The origin story was one of their senior executives down in the Bahamas with his wife. And she's like, why doesn't this phone work down here? Like, like, aren't you the somebody something of this, you know, company, can't you? And he was a real creative genius. Like, oh my God, if we bounce the signal off of satellites, we could totally do this. Like we have a phone that worked on Everest in the middle of the ocean. So he ganged up with his engineers and they produced this amazing phone, the Iridium phone that they didn't do any actual research on to see who would buy it. And turned out only like 200 people in the world actually needed this thing. So they spent a billion dollars on the Iridium phone, which fun, you know, it was a great technology, just the market wasn't there for it. So then Motorola, honestly, they lost their, their panache after this, right? They, they got so risk averse. They weren't trying new things because they were so burned by this big mistake. But what they should have done is said, okay, if we do this, let's Pretend, you know, put somebody in island, Bahamas, you know, by the way, this is going to be $2,000 per month. Are you, are you down with this? And then they would have found out their market's pretty tiny and maybe they have to wait till the technology catches up. So, yeah, it's, there's really important factors you have to sort of let play out in taking design thinking forward.
- [23:49]
A
Well, I will give Motorola credit because my favorite phone to this day was the Motorola Razr in maybe like 2008. That was the best, absolute best.
- [23:59]
B
That was them at their height. I mean, who would have thought that really cool skin and the way it opened would have been so tantalizingly beautiful? You know, they were, they were right on par with, you know, where iPhone came out with or the ipod came out shortly thereafter. Like design was spot on.
- [24:19]
A
You know, I don't know if they, if they have a newer version, but I'm so sick of just being constantly plugged in with my iPhone. I'd love a T9 keyboard and a motorboat razor. Again, you know,
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B
those were the good old days.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned empathy is what step three of the design thinking process. I'm wondering, maybe it's not officially a part of the design process, but one of the common threads that I'm kind of picking up in terms of identifying the right problem and then solving it must be vulnerability. There must be some component of admission that you're not doing what you set out to do, or maybe not necessarily that you're doing something wrong, but you're just not meeting the need. The airline example is great. They saw the problem, but it wasn't necessarily the right problem. Can you speak to maybe how being vulnerable could be an important aspect in terms of design thinking?
- [25:12]
B
You really hit on such a really important key aspect of design thinking. We've been talking about the process, five step process. Sometimes it's six. Doesn't really matter. There's a mindset that sits behind it that's it's very odd to most people. So most people see a problem, they get emotionally driven to solve it. They see what looks like an amazing solution. They're emotionally driven, so they want to go hammer at it with Aunt Maslow's hammer and make this work. We will solve this. Rally the troops. Let's get this done right. All good intentioned all. Lots of smart people do it this way. Design thinkers, they have this weird thing that happens when they see a problem. They get very detached and analytical at first. I know what I think. I know, but I'm pretty sure I don't know other stuff about this thing. I'm probably actually really dumb about this. I'm going to be, per your word, like I'm going to be vulnerable. I'm going to pretend I am the dumbest person in the world. I'm going to look at it from so many angles. I'm going to try to get so many perspectives. So then I'm just anchored to the first thing that comes to mind because I'm going to fall in love with my idea and then try to sell it through. That's what happened to Motorola. So I need to get lots of perspectives. And then we're a test, prototype, test, prototype, test a bunch of them. Okay, we've got, we got a potential winner here. All right. Now the system is rejecting change. This is where they finally pull emotion into the equation. Right now we're going to fight for this tested solution. I am now going to be a human again. I am going to fight for this. I'm going to tell the stories, it's required. I'm going to lobby the right people. I'm going to pull for the investments. I am now actually involved with this solution. But occasionally I'll back up and take a look from side to side just to make sure. So that's how they are. They're very clinically detached in the problem solving phase and they only get emotionally attached after they have a fairly tested solution because they're going to need that energy to run it through a system and create change.
- [27:15]
A
It's interesting to me it seems counterintuitive because empathy being such an important piece of it, but also having to be detached, I mean, it sounds like to be an effective design thinker you kind of have to switch it on and off and maybe even compartmentalize those emotions, right?
- [27:29]
B
Absolutely. I mean, one of the hardest things, probably the last consulting project I ever did was, was for a figurine maker. They're called, what were they called? It's, it's a Hallmark sub brand and they make these little, little figurines and they're, you know, getting into the target segment. The target segment was a 72 year old grandma who buys these for her grandkids and she fills out a paper form, a paper form in spring, orders them and then they show up in late summer where she puts half the money down on layaway and then picks them up in November. Like there couldn't be anything farther from my experience as, you know, whatever 40 something male, technology adept person. But we had to be. We called her Agatha. We had to be in Agatha's shoes to be able to sort of think through this problem. And that was not easy. But ultimately, you know, getting to know, spending time with some of the buyers, seeing how they interact with the store, the purchase process, the. Their. The ultimate recipients which were, you know, their offspring and their offspring's offspring, like, then you start to finally get some empathy and get different perspectives. It's really about putting aside your ego because, you know, immediately all of us are like, well, she just digitizes. We ordered online and she gets it, you know, two days before Christmas. Like, that was obvious. She wasn't going to do that. So, yeah, being in the shoes requires some vulnerability and requires displacement of ego. Everything you've been talking about.
- [29:06]
A
And I wonder too, I mean, I think, I would assume design thinking will evolve over time as generational expectations change. We think of Agatha in a traditional model, maybe not so digitally adept, and then fast forward to a Gen Z that may do everything in the palm of their hand. How does design thinking allow itself to evolve over time generationally as. As needs change and wants change?
- [29:36]
B
Well, I think that's where, you know, I think IDO started this practice. But other design firms have followed. Like, instead of just statistical research, this rather painstaking process of observation, being there just. There's a classic IDO case study of these amazing geniuses. Figured out how to create the first MRI machines. And. And then kids were so terrified of them that they wouldn't go in. And so they tried making them, you know, less noisy. They solved all the obvious problems. Instead of two hours, it's an hour, whatever. I'm making up some of the stats. And then one day, somebody just got really smart and they painted this thing as a submarine or as a spaceship. And then these kids are like begging to go back into the spaceship, right? Like, you got to solve the right problem. Actually, I'm going to tell you probably the worst, best design thinking. Story of my life. That is so simple and I'm so dumb. I am so dumb. I swear, I teach this and I can't do it. I'm in LA a couple years ago. I am in a friend's house. They have this lovely spare guest room. It's 68 degrees out, the window's open. They don't have screens. There is a mosquito in my room. It is absolutely obsessed with my right ear. Will not leave it alone. So I do that thing we all do. I jump up, flip on the lights, look for it, can't find it. Go back to bed. Ten minutes later, same thing. This goes on for three hours, John, like, and then I'm like, wait a minute, what problem am I solving here? The mosquito does not need to die. It needs to leave my ear alone. I don't care about its lifespan. I don't. I mean, I kind of want it to die, but you know, it doesn't really matter. I just want to sleep.
- [31:12]
A
Yeah, after three hours of no sleep, I get it.
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B
So I'm like, oh, turbulence. I will, oh, there's a little fan in the room. I'll put the little fan near my head. I will put that fan's jet way over the top of my face. Problem solve. Slept through the rest of the night. Mosquito got his life saved. Like, define the right problem, you can find the right solution.
- [31:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious then, how do we parlay this into leaders? Being able to better understand the user experience in schools of student staff, in the community when making decisions, there's. It's not like we're making widgets.
- [31:48]
B
Right.
- [31:48]
A
This is a very human experience when it comes to schools. I mean it's hyper emotional because you're dealing with parents and their children. So whether it's changing class sizes and if impacting the student's experience every day to the lunch that they're served and, or breakfast, how does a leader really dive in to understand that user experience?
- [32:11]
B
Well, I think one thing that most of us humans get wrong all the time is we, we tend to treat humans like a science experiment. And vinegar and baking soda always react, always. But vinegar with baking soda, you're always going to get the exact same reaction. People are not like that. They're super unpredictable. Right. You can add, you know, vinegar to baking soda and it's cool classroom and you have no idea. Nothing could happen. The whole room could explode. Like the level of different outcomes that can come with humans from the smallest stimulus. Sometimes it's terrifying, of course, but proper design, proper testing, empathy can lead to really incredible advances with sometimes small inputs. There's a great book nudge about just how we can do small things that lead to larger outcomes. But I do think it does come back to do we, are we in the shoes of those we're solving for? And you know, the best way to do it is to observe. I mean be in the classroom, be with the administrators, just come to a couple meetings, like, see the dynamics. Do not try to solve from afar in a tower. It's never going to work.
- [33:39]
A
So it's fair to say that design thinking and this intentional leadership doesn't happen from behind a desk. You need to be in the work, out in the field, observing it with your own eyes.
- [33:49]
B
Yes. Cannot make informed opinions about the complex social dynamics of human beings without seeing how they play out real time. You can't do it.
- [33:59]
A
So speaking about intentionality and leadership, what does that truly mean in practice?
- [34:06]
B
Explain a little bit more, John.
- [34:08]
A
So you, you talk about this in a lot of your work in terms of leadership, the intentionality and performance of it all. When, when you speak about what it means to be intentional in leadership. What, what, what do you mean by that specifically?
- [34:23]
B
Well, I, I will answer this with one of my favorite sort of concepts. You're probably familiar with the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. Carol Dweck's work from Stanford back 1970s. This has evolved into something that I, I teach a lot. It's called the knower mindset versus the learner mindset. And I, I, I, I did a whole module on this for the SBO event this summer, this past summer. Let's toss aside the dictionary definitions of a knower and a learner. This is, these are leadership archetypes and these are leadership intentional styles. Per your words. Most new leaders managing people show up as what we call a knower leader. They got there by being an expert, they got there by being good at what they do. They got there by knowing stuff. And so the first order of business when they have people reporting to them is they want to prove that I, I deserve this, like I earned this I know stuff. And that's a good intention. But it tends to come out sideways a lot. The most common way it comes out sideways is that won't work. We tried that before, which is a phrase coming from good intention. And my gift to all of you listening is whenever you hear that, ask the next question, which is when was that?
- [35:35]
A
Because I always, we've always done it that way, right?
- [35:38]
B
Yeah, this is like 30 years ago. Nothing has changed in 30 years. No, we, we might want to revisit this. That won't work. We tried that before thing. So knower leaders tend to shut people down. They tend to always give their opinion, they tend to pretend they're right all the time. They ask yes or no questions versus open ended questions. The learner leader archetype, which is what we want to be, but it takes a lot of skill and strength is to ask open ended questions, to be open to ideas, to not shut people down. And, you know, the questions become. Okay, that sounds like a hard problem. To solve. Have you talked to some other people about it? Like instead of that won't work. We tried that before. And so learner leaders ultimately are the smartest leaders because they're always getting new opinions. They're not shutting people down. And this is where the neuroscience of this is relatively well studied in the last few years. When you judge the ideas of people in the room real time, you shut everybody in the room, peer level and lower down, their prefrontal cortex shuts down, they emit cortisol and catecholamine and the whole room gets dumber and less creative. You want to make the room dumber and less creative. Judge their ideas as they come out of their mouth and it looks like the bump set spike of volleyball. Like, here's an idea, I'm a new person. And you're like, no, that won't work. We tried that board before and we slap it down. The way to do ideation properly in any meeting at all times is to separate the generation of ideas from the judgment. This is straight out of design thinking as well. Let's get some ideas, let's get them on the board. No idea is bad. We're not going to judge them right now. We'll come back to them at the end of the meeting. That's the simplest way to avoid this problem. But what happens is this is the 1, 2, 3 sort of strikeout situation is new person offers idea, maybe it's a bad idea because they don't know the business well enough. You shut them down in the meeting by saying that won't work. We tried that before. We don't have the budget for that. Our sales won't sell, marketing won't market it, tech won't build it, whatever. And so they don't bring their next idea in public. They're not going to do that anymore. So now they bring their next idea to you personally in your office and then you judge it again and then they're done. They just don't do it anymore. And the stats are clear. People join companies and leave managers. And the reason, number one reason people leave managers is because they're not open to my ideas. That's literally how to kill the entire culture of an organization. So you got to imagine from openness.
- [38:03]
A
I imagine too being a learner leader can be self fulfilling in a sense too. And I think back to, to my own career. When I started out in this profession, I knew next to nothing. I had a school district take a chance on me. I was hired on a whim. I think just really out of desperation because there wasn't really anybody else. We were, as an industry in a tough spot where we don't have a lot of qualified or experienced, rather I shouldn't say qualified, experienced school business officials to backfill a lot of the retirements that are happening. And, and I say all this because of my own experience. I tried to model that learner leadership almost out of necessity because I didn't know what I didn't know. So I leaned on my staff to not only empower them and to give them agency in our own work, but really it was to teach myself how to do the job day to day.
- [38:56]
B
Absolutely. When you're thrust in a position that maybe you're not qualified for, you're going to be a learner leader. And those, by the way, new employees are like, that's your one magic font of insider information into what you're doing wrong. Because you've been so used to doing everything the same way. When they ask what seems like dumb questions, you gotta lean and go, hmm, maybe that's not as dumb as it sounds.
- [39:22]
A
Right? And I've seen some of my colleagues, newer colleagues, maybe adopt the knower mindset, whether it's unintentionally or maybe it's just a defense mechanism, but I think it is sometimes spawned from they just don't want to seem like they don't know what they're talking about and don't want to be the perceived dumbest person in the room. Right?
- [39:40]
B
100%. This, by and large, the knower mindset comes from a place of good intentions. They don't want people to spin their wheels. They don't want them wasting their time on things. And they want to shortcut the to the answer. But, and, but if you do that all the time, you're going to quell the creativity and capability and agency, which is the perfect word of the team. They'll just be like, well, we'll just do what he says, what she says. But when you can give them opportunities to provide input, to even make mistakes, learn from them, you absolutely have to. That's the only way they're going to grow. Right? You got to teach them to fish, not just hand them the fish. But not to say you should abdicate all leadership all the time. You know, if the house is burning, don't say, this is a fire extinguisher. You have to pull the pin to hold it like, no, like you can put out the fire. But when there's time and space, you should give your team the capacity to lean into, offer ideas, make mistakes when they're not going to hurt the business in a significant way.
- [40:41]
A
Great. So as we wind down here, what's one mindset shift that you would encourage school business officials to really make as a leader and to take a look at themselves, to make some deliberate changes?
- [40:55]
B
You know, I, I would just say that the one part of design thinking that is unique to design thinking, there's all kinds of problem solving frameworks. There's 10 step, there's 15 step ones. There's all kinds of complex processes you can put into place. But I think design thinking was the first to place empathy at the center and the core. Human centered design. Same, same thing. Are you really listening and hearing the voices that need to be heard before you solve the problem? Are you there in a way where you can see the emotions driving people's intentions? Because the stats won't give you that.
- [41:35]
A
Right.
- [41:35]
B
The stats will give you why, what the behaviors are, but they won't give you the wiseness. You can infer the wise and you might be wrong. Right? Right. You just might be wrong. So get out there, talk to people, observe quietly, and really just being in the shoes, I think that's the way that great problems can be solved with this framework.
- [42:00]
A
Great. Well, John, thank you so much for joining me today on School of Business Insider. It was a pleasure unpacking design thinking and really taking home some leadership lessons for school business officials across the world. So thank you again.
- [42:11]
B
Yeah, John, I enjoyed it.
- [42:14]
A
Thank you for tuning in to School Business Insider. Make sure to check back each week for your favorite topics on school business.