Can Talking to Strangers Boost Your Creativity: David Sturt (Transcript)

And it just blew his mind.

He thought, “How in the world do you get that many people working together that quickly to solve a problem?”

And then the idea occurred to him. What if I had a conversation with those guys? I wonder what we could learn from the pit crew that might inform our solution in post-surgery?

And so he did something that a lot of people don’t do. He picked up the phone and he called the Ferrari pit crew in Italy. Got a hold of the leader of the pit crew and said, “I just want to talk to you. How do you do what you do? How do you pull this off with such precision and such speed? How do you do it?”

They had a long conversation that led to them inviting him and one of the other doctors to go to Italy and actually see the process. How do they pull this off?

That led to more conversations.

While he was there, the leader of the pit crew said, “Look, why don’t you videotape this transfer and send it to us and we’ll gather together as a pit crew and we’ll take a look at it? And we’ll see if we might be able to help you.”

Who does that, right? What does a pit crew know about post-surgery issues?

So the doctor did it. They filmed it. They sent the film to them. And the pit crew called them back and said, “Oh, my goodness, it’s chaos! How is it that more people don’t die?”

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So that then caused follow-up conversations where they started to break down the processes and say, “Look, I don’t see anybody in charge here. I don’t see all of the correct protocols that you need to use if you’re moving fast.”

And so that led to them implementing a whole bunch of these operational improvements that led to a 50% decline in error. 50%!

Now you ask yourself, “How does that happen?”

Why is it that a conversation between doctors who understand their discipline very, very well, and a pit crew who knows nothing about that, how can that facilitate and spark fresh thinking to solve a problem?

We had similar questions. I have the good fortune of working with the O.C. Tanner Institute where we study all kinds of human behavior as it relates to work. How people work and particularly how do they innovate? How do they actually make a difference through their work?

One of the things we were studying was thinking: “If all of these different people are innovating across thousands of examples and thousands of industries, what do they do, are there any common practices?”

And so we took a subset of a database that included millions of examples of people who had actually received an award from their organization for the innovation and difference that they had made. And we thought to ourselves, let’s study those nominations for those awards. And let’s see if there are any patterns.

And this is across a wide range, from hospital janitors to vice presidents in big organizations. What are they actually doing that contributes to innovation? Are there common denominators as we look across the data?

So we took a random sample of 10,000 of them. And we read through every one of them and coded them according to the themes that we saw emerge: Out of what actions were they taking that seemed to make all the difference?

One of those actions was the kinds of conversations that they were having. Conversations that ended up leading them to innovate and to make the difference that people would love.

As you think about our conversations, all of us have an inner circle, right? We have an inner circle of 2 to 5 people where we spend most of our time talking with them.

This is the group of people you can call up and just quickly have a conversation. Not a lot of overhead. These are people that you trust and instantly you can relate to, right?

Think about your own people in your inner circle. Usually there’s a family member or two. Are all of your family members in your inner circle? Generally not. Which is kind of an interesting question, right?

To be somebody in your inner circle usually requires a level of trust, and a level of connection between you and those individuals that you can pick up and talk to.

It’s a wonderful support group when you’re struggling with something. You can have conversations with somebody who understands you, who trusts you, whom you can relate with.

However, inner circles also serve as a bubble. Inner circles are a tiny, little community of ideas and thought. That’s the restriction of the inner circle.

What we found in our data was that conversations with your outer circle — with people far outside your own inner circle of either friends outside of work life or your inner circle in your work life — conversations with your outer circle is what drove the innovation.

And in fact, our research and other research proves that the further out you go, the further away you go from your core team, increases the chances that you’ll have an innovative, fresh, new, different idea. That’s where our best ideas and thoughts come from.

So why is that? What is it about conversations with somebody who’s totally different from you, who has a different discipline from you, different life experiences from you? Why does it work? What is the mechanism that drives that?

Let me share with you the principles behind the brain. We heard a little earlier from Lee, our mind and our brain is made up of over 100 billion neurons, brain cells.

And while I find that just astounding that you can get 100 billion of anything inside your cranium, the most important part of the brain is its ability to connect. To create connections between neurons.

Turns out you have all kinds of specialized neurons. Think of them as little communities of living organisms. These communities specialize in things like smell or taste or sight or touch.

And the most remarkable thing to me about the brain is its ability to draw from millions of conversations across all of these different regions of the brain, and draw from all of those up into our consciousness, turning it into thought about philosophies, turning it into action.

It’s remarkable to me that it’s made up of communities of cells in conversation with each other through electrical conversation, chemical conversation, that bring ideas together and thinking together.

And in fact, as you look at how you have a new idea, it’s different from the way I thought it was. I thought a new idea sort of came out of space and landed in your head, and suddenly you had an idea.

In fact, a new idea is born when two disconnected things become connected. Let me give you an example of that.

This was an individual that we interviewed in a little, tiny school in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Skip decided that toward the back end of his career he wanted to go to work for the school.

As he began his work after he was hired, they had 55 students, K through 12, in this little, tiny school. Here’s a picture of Main Street.

I was actually quite impressed by the grandness of the sign, because as you drive through town it looks like this all the way. Tiny, tiny, little town. It had been a mining town.

And what had happened is the mine had closed many years ago and so the community had shrunk and shrunk and shrunk to the point where the school was getting so small they were going to need to close the school.

And so Skip was trying to think: How can I expand the school? What can I do to reverse this now couple decade trend of shrinking school? He wracked his brain. You can’t bring business into here. How do you attract new kids?

Turns out he thought I need to start talking to some other people about this. One day he was having a conversation with a family member who was working in Australia. Somehow they got on the conversation about international students, and international school programs making up a pretty significant part of the Australian economy.

And then it hit him. He thought, “Wow, what if I brought international students to my little, tiny town? It’s the safety place on Earth, we don’t even have cops in this community. It’s a fabulous place to bring people from all over the world. And the second thing that it would do, is it would strengthen the educational quality in the school by bringing in fresh thinking.”

This was the picture of the high school kids that graduated from his international program last year. It was fascinating: kids from Russia, Serbia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, France, from all over the place.

As I talked to the history teacher, she said, “You cannot believe what it’s like when you talk about the Vietnam War and there’s a kid from Vietnam in the room.”

It’s a whole different kind of conversation. A different kind of educational experience. It was powerful.

One of the things that blew me away is that Skip has since doubled the size of his school. Phenomenal results that came from a conversation that sparked some fresh thinking.

Now isn’t it interesting to think about? Skip was an educator with three decades of experience. He knew about international programs. That wasn’t new to him.

He knew all about his school. He had never connected the two until that conversation. That’s why conversations are so powerful. Particularly with people who don’t think like you.

Because they spark lots of opportunities for your brain to be able to make new associations, new connections. Isn’t it funny that even the language we use to describe thought is the same language we use to describe social interaction?

And when you look at the brain, it’s a microcosm of the entire social interaction. It’s remarkable to me. They work the same way. And our thoughts and innovation come in the same format.

So why don’t we do it? I think we all instinctively know having conversations outside my own inner circle are good for me. They bring fresh thinking.

Why don’t we do it? What’s in our way? What keeps us back from that?

One of them is people asking us, “Well, what would they think? If I’m working in accounting and I sort of walk over and talk to somebody in sales about a problem I’m trying to solve, what will they think?”

Will they think, “Geez, aren’t you supposed to know that stuff? Aren’t you the expert?” Will they think that?

Let me just remind you, they don’t already think you know everything. Just in case you’re wondering. They won’t be that surprised.

So we’ve got to get over that and realize that as we have conversations with people from different disciplines, it is going to spark fresh thinking and new ideas. So that’s a myth I think we have to bust.

Another myth that I hear a lot is: “Oh, they’re too busy. They won’t want to talk to me. They won’t want to make time.”

Have you ever been approached by somebody who sought out your opinion? Who said, “You know, I’m trying to solve this problem.”

Or, “There’s this opportunity and I thought of you.” How do you feel when somebody approaches you that way?

You’re honored. You’re like, “Wow. Thank you.

Let me put my best thoughts together and see if I can help you with that.” Right? It elicits some of your best thinking when somebody does that. We need to just let that go that people aren’t willing to help.

Everybody loves participating in making a difference. We’ve got to just reach out and have those conversations.

Or then there’s this one. “They won’t understand this problem. It’s too complex. It’s too hard. You have to have some real expertise to figure this thing out. It’d take too long just to even describe to them. What would they know about this?”

The question I would ask is: “What does a pit crew know about post-surgery issues?”

That’s the whole point. You want to talk to them because they don’t know all the things you know. They know something completely different than the things you know. That’s exactly why the conversation can be so valuable.

As I thought to myself, “What is holding me back?”

I discovered something about myself that was getting in the way of having these kinds of conversations. And it was this.

As was mentioned, I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and I went to a British boy’s school that was very strict, and canings were fairly regular for stepping out of line for a variety of things.

But one of the values that was so profoundly taught in a school — and think about your own school experiences — one of the key values that I heard pounded in, and pounded in interesting ways, was this: You’ve got to do your own work. Your work has to be yours. You can’t collaborate with any other student.

What is collaboration called? Cheating! There’s a label for collaboration that gets applied in a school setting. Isn’t that interesting?

And I kind of had to come to grips with my own thought processes, and think to myself, “How much is that subconsciously affecting how I go about my work? Am I thinking that my work needs to be done on my chair, in my cubicle, or in my office, because that’s what I’m supposed to do?”

And I’ve since had to rethink that and flip that on its head. And realize that work is in fact an incredibly collaborative co-creative endeavor. And that if we want to be the innovators, if we want to be change agents, we need to be bridge walkers.

We need to connect to communities, to thoughts, to ideas, to people that are specifically and intentionally different from our own. Because it’s those kinds of conversations that will spark our very best thinking.

I believe that there are millions of ideas that are just sitting out there waiting for the right conversation to bring them into being. And it will take each of us getting outside of our past thinking in order to get us there.

And there’s an abundance of innovation and ideas in our own work that would solve community, that would solve environmental issues, if we will learn to put off what we learned as little, tiny kids, which was probably good advice back then: “Don’t talk to strangers.”

But guess what, we’re all grown up now. It’s time to talk to strangers.

Thank you.

Resources for Further Reading:

Why You Should Talk to Strangers: Kio Stark (Full Transcript)

7 Ways to Make a Conversation With Anyone by Malavika Varadan (Transcript)

Celeste Headlee on 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation (Full Transcript)

Every Conversation Can Change A Life by Pat Divilly (Full Transcript)

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