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The Whole Elephant Episode 2
11 Plays11 months ago
In this episode, podcast host Dr. Lee Hibbard sits down with Dr. Mary Lynn Realff once again and is joined by Dr. Merrick Furst, co-author of The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand. They discuss Dr. Furst and Dr. Realff's collaboration and philosophy of team based learning and project management as detailed in the book, and share their stories and insights into the importance of authenticity in teambuilding and innovative work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Launch
00:00:21
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Whole Elephant, a podcast series showcasing the effective team dynamics initiative at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I'm your host, Dr. Lee Hibbert, and today I'm sitting down with two wonderful guests to talk about one of the current projects the initiative is associated with, a new book called The Heart of Innovation, a field guide for navigating to authentic demand. And I'm joined first and foremost by a recurring guest, Dr. Mary Lynn Ralph. Welcome back, Mary Lynn. How are you today? Thank you. I've had a wonderful day today. Thanks for asking.
00:00:52
Speaker
Fantastic. Glad to hear it. We are also joined by one of the authors of the Heart of Innovation, Dr. Merrick First. Welcome, Merrick. How are you today? Thanks, Leigh. I'm good. I'm Mary Lynn. Always good to see you. Thanks. Awesome. Well, we are going to get started just to hear a little bit more about Dr.
Inspiration and Writing Challenges
00:01:11
Speaker
First's work. Merrick, I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about yourself and the work that you do.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah, well, you caught me on a good day. Today is the day that our book launches. It's been in the works for a really long time. So thanks for that. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help people with innovation and with startups and trying to figure out how to become of value in the world. And I've had a chance to work with Mary Lynn on those sorts of things. I run something called the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech.
00:01:39
Speaker
And Marilyn and I have worked on that. Marilyn is actually a permanent fellow of the center, so I get the privilege of working with her and learning about effective team dynamics from her. And what else would you like to know? We've got this, I have three co-authors, and there are four of us who wrote the book, so I have three co-authors. One is a fellow named Matt Chanoff, who's been a good friend and a business partner and quite talented fellow.
00:02:04
Speaker
Danny Saba was a general manager at IBM for many years, and Mark Wegman, who's a member of the National Academy of Engineering and also IBM Fellow.
Dambala Company Story
00:02:12
Speaker
My partner, Matt, this relates, I think, to something that maybe Mary Lynn can explain to us after we gave the book in its entirety to the publisher, having spent about two years trying to write the thing.
00:02:24
Speaker
My partner Matt said to me, you know, I think our biggest accomplishment might be that we didn't kill each other writing these books. It's four people trying to write all of us at a distance and all of us had opinions. Anyway, so thanks for having me here today.
00:02:40
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Thanks for being here. I think to start us off, I would love for our audience to learn a bit more about this book that you're working on. So if you could tell our audience more about the book, The Heart of Innovation and the principle of deliberate innovation that you work with.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So let me tell you a story that maybe helps people understand the book. So I've started quite a few companies. One of the companies we started was called Dambala. It started when some people from Georgia Tech was actually two faculty members in computer science and a graduate student in computer science came to me and said they can find all the bots on the internet, which at the time was a
00:03:16
Speaker
particularly big deal. People didn't really know what bots were. There are these things that take over computers and cause a lot of fraud. And they asked me to help them start a company because I'd started a bunch of companies and I said, okay, I'll try. Now, I know that one of the most important things of having a company is you have customers. So I asked them who would use this and they explained to me how eBay at the time could have used this product. What they said to me was,
00:03:41
Speaker
What was happening, fraudsters were taking over people's computers worldwide and they were using those computers to trick eBay into doing something they call trust fraud. These computers would log into eBay and there would be a fake camera seller for high-end cameras and these bots would come and they would pretend to be legitimate buyers and they would boost the rankings of the eBay fake site.
00:04:04
Speaker
to a platinum level, I think it was platinum back then. And then real people would come, see that this site looked legit, spend $10,000 by cameras, which
Overcoming Indifference to Innovation
00:04:13
Speaker
never arrived. And then eBay had to absorb some of that loss.
00:04:17
Speaker
So I happened to know the person at the time who was the chief information security officer at eBay. And I talked to him and I actually flew out and met with him and his technical people. And they said, wow, this could save us like tens of millions of dollars a year in fraud. Can you really do it? And I said, I think they can do it. And he asked me, well, how much would it cost? And I said, I don't know, $150,000, I think I said. And he said, go make it. We went home. We made it. We came back.
00:04:43
Speaker
Six months later and they never bought and then people kept trying to figure out why aren't they buying was it not integrating with their system? What's going on? And now I would say here's what we've learned The guy said it would save him tens of millions of dollars. It would really only cost 150,000 It seemed like that would tell me that they're gonna buy but actually now I would say what about that ever led me to think that they were gonna buy I
00:05:10
Speaker
And at the heart of the book is the question of, well, how come it is that we run around thinking that people will buy things or use the things that we make?
The 'Not-Not Principle' Explained
00:05:17
Speaker
And yet when you end up actually presenting it to them, there's often a lot of indifference. So what the book is about is how is it that people are able to be so indifferent to things that you think they can't be indifferent to? And what would it look like? And how would you actually manage to get to a place where
00:05:32
Speaker
When you described to people what you were doing, they actually reached for it, and they weren't so indifferent. And that's what the book is about. The heart of innovation is about this thing which we call the not-not principle. What makes someone a customer is that not buying is not OK. In the case of eBay, as crazy as that seems, they had lots of ways, it turns out, to save tens of millions of dollars. We just made one more way to save tens of millions of dollars, and they weren't going to use us either.
00:05:58
Speaker
So that's the story in the book. And the book talks about how this not-not principle and this what we call an authentic demand.
00:06:09
Speaker
How do you deal with indifference in the world shows up not just in startups, but also in large corporations that are trying to do innovation there and also in nonprofits and academics. This is something that you can, we're going to talk about Marilyn, I hope, and how she managed to use these principles or employ these principles and how it made a big difference in what she's doing with others.
00:06:29
Speaker
And also with personal experiences, like how could, how is it that you might be out there and think that you wish that people weren't so indifferent to you or the things you're doing? Anyway, that's the book and it's called The Heart of Innovation.
Team Dynamics and Education Innovation
00:06:42
Speaker
Absolutely fantastic. And that's a really interesting principle. I hadn't really thought of it as, I appreciate the turn of phrase of the not, not principle. It's got a good ring to it. And when you explain it, it actually does make a lot of sense.
00:06:56
Speaker
Well, I'm glad. It's better than the alternative. It's true. It would be bad if it didn't make sense. No, thank you so much for sharing the topic of the book and also sort of the story of where it came from. You mentioned when we first got started that the book is multi-authored. It's an inherently collaborative process. How did the four of you coordinate when it comes to multi-author writing, publishing? What was that experience like for you?
00:07:25
Speaker
I feel like I should make up a story about that. I don't know if the reality is worse or better than the story I would make up. Matt and I have been business partners and we've developed a lot of the ideas when we were running something at Georgia Tech called Flashpoint, which was a program to both invest in and help startups. Initially, it was run as an experiment at Georgia Tech, and then my partner and I spun it out and run it as a company, but also alongside of Georgia Tech.
00:07:55
Speaker
The things we learned, which are actually built into the book and into these notions of authentic demand and this not-not principle, which turns out to be so useful in practice, it occurred to me, as Matt and I were thinking about a book to write, that there was much greater application to it than just in the setting of a startup.
00:08:13
Speaker
And corporate innovators have exactly the same difficulty that startups have. It's just that they happen to have money and salaries and opportunities beyond. So I have new people for quite a while, my friends Danny Sapa and Mark Wegman, who were at IBM. And I started talking about the ideas in the book and Danny said, well, I totally knew this, but I didn't have words for it.
00:08:36
Speaker
Mark got excited and he said, you can't believe how many projects, how many ideas have come through the research labs at IBM, which people built. And then they discovered there was no demand for it, that the world was, was indifferent to it.
00:08:50
Speaker
I wish we had had these ideas before, so the four of us got together and started sharing stories. And the book is really stories. That's what seems to be the best way to understand these things. And the stories are meant to be readable and accessible so that people can maybe see themselves in it or they can see others and see how to maybe be better at this themselves.
00:09:08
Speaker
So a lot of what was hard about the book was figuring out which stories to include and everybody has their favorite stories and then figure out how to tell the stories in a way that it rings true for others. I think Mary Lynn likes the book partly because one of the big stories in the book is a story about Mary Lynn and about her experiences trying to reach authentic demand with the fantastic work that she's done with effective team dynamics.
00:09:35
Speaker
I must admit I am biased in that way, Merrick. Which one? Because you looked yourself up in the index. I like that. So I think I want to connect with your story, Merrick, about working with those startup companies. And that was very interesting to me.
00:09:59
Speaker
I got involved when you had the big idea of taking this to innovation and education. That was one of the draws that I had to this work. I didn't know if you wanted to talk about that a little bit. How you went from startups to education innovation? That's a great question. We have a colleague, a friend.
00:10:22
Speaker
Richard de Miller rich de Miller who had been the dean of the college actually was the person who helped me come to Georgia Tech He at the time was working for the provost on something called the next in education He had put together a group of about 50 faculty members They were working to try to find innovative projects to be able to move Georgia Tech forward in this in the education space and to write something I forget was it 2035 2025 they had some target and they were gonna write a document which was to
00:10:50
Speaker
describe how education was gonna, what was the next in education. And Rich said to me at one point that he was a little worried that the way the innovation was going, that the 53 people that were in 53 professors that were involved felt a little bit stuck and that there were some people who were really trying to figure out how to move things forward. And he wondered whether or not some of the things that he knew I was working on that we were working on at the center could be applicable. And I said, I don't know, let's try. And I believe we took about a
00:11:17
Speaker
10 faculty members, we offered this to the group of 50, and 10 faculty members took us up on the offer to come. We teach this stuff in some sort of sprint slash cohort process, and they signed up in the sprint.
00:11:31
Speaker
Mary Lynn maybe can tell you a little bit about what that was like. Often what it's like is people think, well, this is bullshit. And then they discover maybe it's not, and it actually can change their lives in a good way. I'm going to just question that along the way, I must admit. Working with skeptical people is actually a good thing.
00:11:50
Speaker
And then that group, actually almost everybody in that group who didn't move away or actually have some other job that took them away, ended up becoming a permanent fellow of the center. And another one is Mike Schatz, who is a physicist and was the chair of the physics department for a while. And he and Mary Lynn are now part of the strategy group at the Center for Deliberate Innovation. Now we work together. I learned a lot working with that group because that group had individual projects that they were working on.
00:12:18
Speaker
If you talk to Mike, maybe you should have Mike on the podcast at some point. He'll tell you that part of his work, he's a physicist, but part of his work is physics education. He's always been struck by the observation that they figured out ways to teach things, in particular in physics, that they know will work. That is, it'll actually get better learning outcomes. But it's almost impossible to get professors to actually use those methods of teaching. He was out there seeing how the indifference was happening.
00:12:46
Speaker
even though they had something to offer. And the work that we've done at the center of the work that I've been working on to explain how does indifference happen and how do you overcome indifference was something that was very attractive to him. And in a similar way, Mary Lynn was working and I should let her tell the story more. But my experience with Mary Lynn was she had this incredible set of things that she could do to really help people who were going to work in teams. And she was very, very interested.
00:13:12
Speaker
and seeing students who were working, being forced into teams to work, to have these better methods to work in teams so they weren't getting into fights and so on. But it was hard for her at the time to see a way to actually make it so that there were people kind of beating down her door to get her to be able to offer the effective team dynamics in that setting. And so we also, we worked with some other people in the same group, but that's, I think that's a connection enough to get back to Mary Lynn's story. Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:42
Speaker
Marilyn, you want to tell your story? Sure. I came to the Center for Deliberate Innovation with this idea of effective team dynamics. I was very excited. I remember Merrick showed this one slide. It was this boat. The boat goes around and around and around making this vortex, pulling things in.
00:14:11
Speaker
Is there really a demand or is it you're in this boat going around and around trying to make this demand kind of happen? And that was one of the most meaningful slides. But the thing I remember most about effective team dynamics, I remember I was walking across campus one day before I got involved in the center and there was a Starbucks on campus and there are people like sitting there talking to each other and, but they weren't from the same part of campus.
00:14:41
Speaker
So just a side story, my children did not like walking across campus with me because I would stop and talk to everybody. They're like,
Engagement Breakthrough in Education
00:14:50
Speaker
you know, everybody, mom, can we just like walk where we're going? So there were all these people who I knew, but they weren't supposed to be together, but they were discussing this new funding that was available. And I had been working for years to try to figure out not only how to help students and teams, but how to actually get it funded.
00:15:11
Speaker
Because education research is actually a little bit difficult. It's difficult to know who your customer is and what the demand is, but it's also difficult to find the people that it's not okay to not give you the money to do the work. And I arranged it so it was not okay for these people to not give me the money to do the work, which was amazing, just to get back to the not not principle.
00:15:40
Speaker
In the center, well, let me back up. In this group of 53 faculty that Merrick was talking about, one reason they were off track was because they all sat together and they talked to each other, other faculty, about what they should do to students to, you know, fix the education. But nobody was talking to any of the students. None of them were talking to the students.
00:16:09
Speaker
And they were asking us to do things like rank which ones of these projects should we do? And it's like, wait, we've not talked to any students. We don't know what the situation students are in. And so how can we possibly come up with this innovation? For me, you know, getting back to Merrick's customer question for his eBay idea, right? I had to figure out who my customers were. And I remember one clear
00:16:39
Speaker
situation, I care about students. I love students. It hurts when the students are having trouble in teams. And I want to help them have a great experience because I know in teams, you can do more things than you can do just by yourself. And so using Deliberate Innovation Process, I remember figuring out that my customer was not the students, it was the faculty.
00:17:02
Speaker
And I think Merrick can agree, like I was devastated. I was like, I don't even like the faculty. You can edit that out if you want, but I love the students, right? Faculty, they're my colleagues. I like most of them. But I really thought my passion and my customer were the students. But using the deliberative innovation process, I found out that when I go up to students and they're in a team and it's not working,
00:17:31
Speaker
it's it's too late, like it's too late to kind of help them they won't reach out to me they just.
00:17:37
Speaker
say, well, I've only got, you know, six weeks left, I've only got 10 weeks left of the semester, I'll just suck it up. Can I jump in? I remember when you first were describing that to me, and I was thinking, all I could think to myself was, it was like Mary Lynn is a marriage counselor, she's walking up to a couple fighting in a mall, and she wants to tell them, listen, I know how to, couples should talk to each other. And they might not just be interested in her in that moment, that was going to be pretty tough.
00:18:05
Speaker
So when you do things to students or for students or because you care about students, you also look at who's connected with them. And this is talked about in the book, what situation are they in and who are they interacting with in this situation? And so, of course, the students are interacting with the faculty. As Merrick said, you know, they force them to work in teams. I think is what you said earlier, Merrick. I wrote that one down.
00:18:30
Speaker
And so I had to talk to the faculty to see where they were and see what was going on with them and also talk to the students about their interaction with the faculty. You know, if I could just, because you said something earlier that just connects to this and it connects back to the eBay story. The reason I was blind that where the company we started was blind with the eBay situation was we had a product in mind and then we took that product and we showed it to people.
00:18:56
Speaker
And when they reacted to it, we thought that their reaction to it was something we could learn from. By the way, when you do that, it puts you into a blind spot.
00:19:07
Speaker
what you really want us to do is see the people who might use your product or see the people that you care about. But if you show up with a product, all you really see is the product and it confuses everything. So part of, I think, what Marilyn might be saying is that when she was thinking about effective team dynamics and thinking about it in terms of how it could actually help the students, all she could do was see that. And so sometimes that means that you're in a blind spot. And in this case, the blind spot
00:19:31
Speaker
that unlocked a lot of things was to realize that this is actually, what she was doing is actually quite meaningful for faculty members, but maybe not in the way that she realized it would be meaningful for faculty members. So maybe that's a connection back and maybe an entry point to the next part of the story, Marilyn. Yeah, so we noticed, and with again, the deliver an innovation process, you don't think about it and think it through yourself.
00:20:00
Speaker
You have other people who help you notice, help you see these things. And that's a really big part of the process. And so as we were talking to students, they were saying faculty were telling them things like, figure it out. You've been on a team before, figure it out. You have to be on a team again. You're going to get a job. You're going to have to be on a team, figure it out. And as we talk to faculty and students about this situation and things that are said back and forth, we found out
00:20:29
Speaker
The students think the professor is saying, I don't care. So when the professor says, figure it out, they're saying, I don't care. I don't care about your team. I don't care that you're miserable. I don't care that I put you in that team. I don't care that I don't know anything to help you out of this situation. I don't care. I've just forced you to be in this team. It turns out I have not found a faculty yet who doesn't care.
00:21:01
Speaker
Even the faculty you're thinking about, if you're listening that you had in college or in high school, I guarantee you they care. They do care. And it turns out they don't like it when other people think they don't care, as you might imagine. I mean, think if your friends thought you didn't care about them, that would be, you know, that would be disturbing. So it turns out faculty care.
00:21:29
Speaker
It turns out they can see that with effective team dynamics, we can come beside their students when they're in a team and really help them gain the skills. So if it was a professor in aerospace and they were teaching fluid dynamics or something like that, they would know exactly how to help that student figure out that equation. With Merrick, he teaches algorithms. He knows exactly how to help them with algorithms. But not a lot of faculty know how to help people work better in teams.
00:21:56
Speaker
And so it's a really good partnership between effective team dynamics and someone who is forcing or putting their students in teams because it gives the students these skills that they need when they need them in the class.
Expanding Team Dynamics
00:22:10
Speaker
You know, just because it's so subtle and it went by so quick, I just want to point to that again. It wasn't just that the Maryland discovered that the faculty members cared. Because if you just go to the faculty members and say, do you care about your students being successful in teams? They might say yes, but they weren't still reaching for Maryland. She figured out something more subtle, which is the kind of thing that's just hard to see until you see it, then you can't stop seeing it. What she found that, the way I understand it, is a faculty member
00:22:41
Speaker
can't really be okay if they think that their students think that they don't care. So the not-not for the faculty member was, it's not okay for my students to think that I don't care.
00:22:54
Speaker
And so somehow Mary Lynn found that using our methods and our tools and kind of an, it's a surprising thing once you see it. And it's one of those things that you could say, well, that might be true, but it's actually really true. And what does it mean to be really true? It's like when Mary Lynn figured this out and then found the way of expressing that to a professor,
00:23:14
Speaker
It was as if the professor wouldn't let her leave the room. The professor's reaction wasn't, that's nice to hear Marilyn, which is what indifference sounds like. What the professor did was say, when can you come to my classroom?
00:23:28
Speaker
And I'll just tell you, it's now been a few years since Marilyn figured that out and has been making progress on that. And to my chagrin, what that mostly means is I don't get very much time with Marilyn because now she's trying to meet all of the men and people wanting her in their classroom. I remember one particular professor, I was walking across the parking lot, coming back from lunch, and I hear this person screaming across the parking lot.
00:23:58
Speaker
Mary Lynn, Mary Lynn. And I'm like, who's calling me? You know, I'm looking around. You're coming to my class next semester, aren't you? You're coming to my class next semester. And that was pretty amazing having someone like track me down across the parking lot to make sure I was, you know, I was coming to their class.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's very admirable. That's what non-indifference feels like when you find that that's what a not-not feels like. I mean, people might not take advantage of it, but for them to not take advantage of it just feels wrong. In fact, that's the insight we had is what makes someone a customer is they fought for anything that you're doing, whether it's
00:24:44
Speaker
nonprofit thing or something personal or something commercial, what makes someone a customer is they find themselves in a situation somehow, they're thrown into a situation somehow in which not buying or not using your product or not taking advantage of something you have to offer, that just doesn't feel okay. Or another way of saying that is that all the other paths are somehow not okay. And if you can make it so that all the other paths are not okay, then
00:25:10
Speaker
there's a draw to the path that you're making available for them. And I think this example from Marilyn was great, which is why it's in the book. And also, it's just great, I think, for Georgia Tech and beyond, because now so many people are getting the advantage of effective teen dynamics. And I hear people tell them, you know, you hear people chasing after you, Marilyn, to get it. And I hear people afterwards saying, well, how happy they were to have gotten it. Thanks.
00:25:37
Speaker
That's great. And I think that ties into the sort of next talking point of the conversation. You mentioned that this is a great opportunity for the effective team dynamics initiative. What other things excite the two of you about the initiative being featured in a book like The Heart of Innovation? Well, I mean, I have a very selfish perspective, which is I think the things that Mary Lynn knows how to do are the kinds of things that any team ought to know how to do. And the kinds of teams that I'm typically working with or we're working with at the center or beyond.
00:26:06
Speaker
are teams that are coming together for a purpose. Usually the purpose is to create some innovation, which could be because they want to be successful as a startup, or they want to bring something into the world and make the world a better place, or they want to somehow be inside of a large corporation and find some way to make their project, actually see the light of day and be meaningful. There are things that happen in those settings. Beyond the work that you have to do, what we found is the work of deliberate innovation itself is learnable and it's
00:26:36
Speaker
kind of weird. It's in the sense of it's quite counterintuitive. Like I have to say learning to think in terms of not knots is a little counterintuitive. Oh, and I have good news. There's no reason to think in terms of not, not, knots. It turns out for technical reasons, not, not, not is the same as not. So you only get up to three knots, or two knots rather. But even so, when you get people to learn this stuff, they still have to operate as a team. And they're just things about a team,
00:27:04
Speaker
how you understand each other's strengths, which is something you should get Marilyn to talk more about. I'm sure the whole podcast will talk about that. And also for people to understand each other's strengths and also for people to have clear communications and be able to manage conflicts, manage decision making. Those are things that are universal. It's actually something which we haven't that effectively built into
00:27:27
Speaker
our direct work with teams that we work with, but it's something that I aspire to. So maybe Marilyn can say a little bit more about that and maybe more about how we can get our team to be better at getting other teams to work together. Well, I think it's been very interesting doing this work because people see us doing the work. Of course, I said we started with students. We started with undergrad students. And then somebody said, oh, the graduate research teams need this stuff.
00:27:56
Speaker
And the undergrads and the graduate students work with faculty and staff. Some of the courses that we go into are actually instructed by staff. And so it's been so interesting to see how all the people involved are seeing that they are working in a team and seeing that what we're doing with effective team dynamics can help them.
Supporting Innovation Teams
00:28:25
Speaker
I'm really excited about the book because I want more people to learn about effective team dynamics so that we can have other people doing this at other universities. One of the things that we saw early on in talking to other people at other universities was that they wanted a way to be able to replicate this at their university. We had an online version of our graduate workshop. It's a two-day thing. We did it one afternoon in the next morning.
00:28:55
Speaker
The evaluation person said, oh, Mary Lynn, you'll have people show up for the first day, but it's going to be 50% are going to show up for that second day. It's just what happens with these online trainings. You shouldn't feel badly. And then we had also planned to have an information session after the end of the second half day for anybody who wanted to be able to be a facilitator and do this type of thing on their campus.
00:29:23
Speaker
And so they said, oh, well, if, you know, one or two people stay for that, you should be really happy. So we had, uh, the second day, the same number of people showed up. Now one person was different and we knew that one person was going to join us on the second day. We didn't know that one person was going to leave the first day, but they actually sent us an email saying they didn't feel well. It's why they didn't come back for the second day. Uh, but we had all the, basically all the people show up and we had 12 different places.
00:29:52
Speaker
that stayed for the after hour and a half afterwards to talk about facilitating it on the campus. And one of those places was in Texas, University of Texas, San Antonio Health Systems. And they have been doing this on their campus for the last three years. Wisconsin was also interested. And so out of that group, we had people who actually reached out to us afterwards to really get the training. I'm going in,
00:30:21
Speaker
a few weeks to Japan where we're going to be training them to do this on their campus. I thought that I was developing the facilitator guides and things like that so that people on this campus at Georgia Tech, I can't do it all. Well, I was hoping I couldn't do it all because I was hoping there was going to be this pull and this authentic demand for it so that I couldn't do it all, which has been the case.
00:30:47
Speaker
Uh, and so I developed those tools really for on campus and to build that on campus. Uh, but as we interacted with people and, and talk to people and they interacted with us, we found it could be a lot bigger. So I'm hoping this book will hit a lot more people and they'll be able to find out what we're doing and, uh, that they'll be drawn to the work that we're doing. Right. That's fantastic. It sounds good to me. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
00:31:16
Speaker
And then for our final talking point, we've talked a lot about the way that this is applied to an educational setting and also the wonderful collaboration this has given us with deliberate innovation. Considering the understanding that you have Mary Lynn of effective team dynamics and deliberate innovation, and of course your expertise, Merrick, in the corporate sector and the startup sector, where do you see opportunities for effective team dynamics to play a larger role in supporting the work of corporate and startup innovation teams?
00:31:49
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's of course, as I said before, every team could use a dose of becoming more effective and understanding how to make themselves more effective. I think the puzzle might be for Mary Lynn to figure out in the way that she figured this out for her colleagues at Georgia Tech and the way she's figuring this out for her colleagues at other universities.
Authentic Demand and Innovation Success
00:32:12
Speaker
I wonder how that becomes something which becomes an authentic demand inside of large corporations. The basic premise that we've learned about authentic demand or the basic first principles understanding is what creates the authentic demand is the situation that people find themselves in. So when Mary Lynn learned to talk to professors, the way she learned to talk to professors so that once they heard from her,
00:32:36
Speaker
And they realize, wow, if I don't do this, my students are going to somehow think that I don't care about them. And that's just simply not true. Therefore, they reach for her. That is unlikely to work in a corporate setting. You know, it's hard for me to imagine a CEO worried that much about the innovation team thinking that they don't care or something. So with the innovation team thinking in a similar way, there's something else going on. So there's work to be done.
00:33:00
Speaker
And that's something that might be fun for us to do if Marilyn feels like she has time or wants to pursue it, to understand what might be the draw for doing effective teen dynamics in those kinds of settings. There's another direction which I kind of wonder about. One of the things that was a surprise to me and to the people I work with on this
00:33:21
Speaker
when we told people how to do this kind of deliberate innovation work. By the way, the difference between deliberate innovation and accidental innovation is sort of the point of it. People do accidentally find their way to authentic demands, although they make a lot of errors along the way. It's quite expensive. The puzzle for us was how do you make this more deliberate? How can you think about it more clearly to be more effective and cost effective and be more certain of yourself as you're going about it?
00:33:47
Speaker
One of the things we discovered, which we found quite surprising, was that people didn't come back to tell us about how effective it was for their projects, per se. We helped them raise money. That's true. It helped them get customers. That's true. It helped them avoid fights in their teams. That's true. What they often said is it changed their lives in some way. They started to see themselves. They started to see others. It changed their relationships with their spouses, with their colleagues, with their kids sometimes.
00:34:14
Speaker
So that's an important piece of the book for me. It's hard to sell the book on those terms, but when people read it, I hope that that'll be meaningful for them. There's a way in which individuals aren't really teams.
00:34:29
Speaker
But there is a way that an individual who's trying to become of value, which I'll say it kind of poetically like this, it's a famous guy named Frederick Buechner who said it this way, where people are called to is the place where their deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I think part of what makes Maryland's work on effective team dynamics work is that when people figure out what their deep gladness is, which usually is tied to their deep strengths, and they discover how it is that their teams have some sort of deep hunger that they can meet or the world has some sort of deep hunger, that's the connection.
Future Directions and Conclusion
00:35:05
Speaker
And she has a lot more to say about that. But the same thing is true for the work we do in deliberate innovation. So what people are generally drawn to, the reason they don't usually feel quite right is either they don't care about what's being asked of them.
00:35:16
Speaker
where they care to do something, but other people don't care that they're doing it. And the place to get to, the authentic demand or the place you're called to is a place where what you're doing feels right for you to do, and it feels right to other people that you're doing it. So having said that, there's some deep connection between effective dynamics and the work we do in this work on deliberate innovation.
00:35:42
Speaker
that I think could be built out. Maybe there's more that we can add to Mary Lynn's work on effective team dynamics, or maybe there's more ways that we can get her work to actually affect the work that we do directly when we're just talking about deliberate innovation. I think for me, you ask about going in the corporate area and innovation, which of course is one of Merrick's expertise.
00:36:12
Speaker
When we did this stuff on Georgia Tech campus, we, as I said, we interacted with staff. And one particular group of staff that we worked with, we started out with a group of, I think it was about 10 or 12 people in this one unit. And it was a unit that helped with the learning management tool and implementing that on campus effectively for student learning.
00:36:41
Speaker
But then it grew to this bigger group of 40 people in that unit on campus. And we have been doing things with them for about two years. And we had one particular interaction with that group where one of the senior leadership team members was at that activity or that thing we did with the effective team dynamics.
00:37:07
Speaker
Our next step with that group was supposed to be this, uh, workshop with 115 of their managers. And so I was very excited. Oh, we're going to, you know, affect more people in this unit. They're going to be able to work better together and it's going to make a great impact. Well, the senior leadership person contacted me and said, you know, like, uh, you know, we've got to reschedule this. And I thought, Oh no, what happened? Like we have to reschedule.
00:37:33
Speaker
You know, I'd been looking forward to doing this. I developed some new activities for them based on their situation that they were in back to the language of deliberate innovation. And they said, yeah, we have to have this for our senior leadership team before we have our managers do it. And so it was not okay to not have their senior leadership team experience the effect of team dynamics training and activities.
00:38:02
Speaker
Uh, and so instead of working with 115, I worked with these, uh, senior leadership team, which was a smaller group, but I was so excited and we're still going to do the larger team. It's going to happen, uh, in a couple of months from now, instead of, uh, when we thought it was happening. Uh, but I'm interested in using deliberate innovation to talk to more people and senior leadership team situations. Like, is it true for other? I mean, right now I would love to think.
00:38:29
Speaker
that this is true for all senior leadership teams, that it is not okay to not have the training if they're going to have their middle managers or manager people to do the training. Okay. Okay. Dream on. It's a dream. It is a dream every day of the week. Senior leadership teams have management people do things that they don't do or manager teams decide to do things as senior leadership manager
00:38:58
Speaker
don't even know what's going on. But I'm very excited to learn more about the situations that people are in these other organizations that either they're attached to academia or not. How can we come in and be meaningful to those people? Because as Merrick says, they're all in teams. The other thing is these innovation teams, a lot of times they fall apart. So maybe there is some kind of demand, but something happens with the team.
00:39:27
Speaker
And the team just falls apart and therefore it's not a viable company. And the startup is a start down, I don't know. I don't know if it wind up. So for people who can hear our voices.
00:39:42
Speaker
If you're finding yourself in a place where you've got people working for you and you have some worry that they're not being effective as a team, Mary Lynn is the person you should call. And if you're on a team in which you think that the people on your team could use some of this, all I'll tell you is that's a lot harder because they probably think the same thing of you, but you should still give Mary Lynn a call. Absolutely.
00:40:10
Speaker
Well, that is about all we have time for today. Unfortunately, I feel like I could speak to the two of you for hours and hear the two of you talk together for hours about all of this, but it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you both so much for speaking with me today about effective team dynamics, deliberate innovation, and of course, the heart of innovation, which is out now as of November 7th and available all major online retailers.
00:40:33
Speaker
Yes, at Amazon and at all the fine e-tailers you can find. Fantastic. It's a field guide to authentic demand. For more information about the effective team dynamics initiative, visit etd.gatech.edu. Stay tuned for more podcast episodes about the other ways ETD is making an impact across Georgia Tech campus and beyond. You've been a terrific audience. This is Dr. Lee Hibert signing off.