How To Boost Productivity
productive in the goals that I am
aiming at so say you know this podcast means a lot to me so I want to be more
productive when it comes to figuring
out how to move this podcast forward how to innovate um how to solve some of
the
problems and challenges that we face
what are the first things that spring to mind when I start speaking
about productivity with a very
focused task I mean I think your a challenge for you is going to be that this
podcast has
gotten so big and you've gotten so
competent at it that you're going to be in what uh a rut of competence or what
Economist Russ Roberts told me a
hammock of competence you're in an area where you're so comfortable and so
successful that getting better is going to be
harder because there's disincentive
from changing anything that you're doing right and you have to take some risks
I
mean you know that you're an
entrepreneur if you're going to want to get better you're going to have to take
some risk I think that's going to be a difficult thing to do because you know
there are people in this room that
depend on you uh risk for you is risk for them too and so I think you have to
start thinking about what would be
some smart risks if you want to innovate with the podcast what might that look like
and finding ways to run small
experiments I'm a huge fan of low
stakes practice right how can you set up some low stakes practice for what
might be a
worthwhile larger experiment and I
think that's the same for individuals dring in their career
like I love this phras my my
favorite my absolute favorite phrase in range was is a paraphrase from this
woman named
herminia Ibara who's a professor at
the London business school and she studies how people make work transitions so
her
phrase was we learn who we are in
practice not in theory so the thesis of her work is that there's this idea that
you can just introspect and go forth
and know what you should be doing you know like like Clark Kent running into a
phone booth and ripping off his and
becoming comes out as Superman but work is part of identity and it doesn't
change like that from introspect you
actually have to go try something see how it went what was unexpected what did
you learn that you might be
interested in or or that you're better at that you didn't what's something that
you're good at that you realize you're not
using and then you make your next
step based on that right and I think when you're so competent and successful
and
getting only you know tons of
positive feedback for something uh it becomes hard to take risk and so I think
that'll
be a challenge for you because if
you take a sufficient amount of risk right you want to be in your zone of of
optimal push so for anything you're
doing if you're doing practicing whatever physical skill anything if
you're not at least like 15 20% of
the time failing then you're not in your zone of optimal push where you're
getting as much better as you
possibly can and I think when you have something that's
very successful that's hard and so I
would start thinking about what risks you're willing to take and it doesn't
mean it's a failure if something
goes backward right if the views go down or whatever metric you're you're
measuring on it's interesting it's supp to see
something it's one of my great
obsessions in life and it's also one of the things that keeps me up at night
bugs me in the shower is um how to keep
The Explore/Exploit
Tradeoff
a team conducting experiments and
failing more when they are successful so when this podcast went to number one
in
Europe I hir ahead of failure and
her sole responsibility is to increase the rate of failure and experimentation
in
our team which means just get all of
our different departments we've got different departments in this particular
business so there's 40 40 odd people in
this company called the D CEO and
there is a production team there is the social media team there's the
commercial team
for example and there's the guest
booking and Logistics team and I I felt
we're actually in La driving down
the road and I was speaking to jamaa who's the head of the guest booking and
research team and I was saying like one
of the the most important thing now
now that we're number one is that we keep like disrupting ourselves because
there's going to be some kid like we
were three three years ago that
because of their naivity that they're not encumbered by all of this sort of
like
convention and all this success so
hide a head of failure and experimentation who's in our team has been working
and
now in in the last couple of days
we're running an experiment where every single one of those departments has
essentially
like a failure assistant in it who
is who's because you know what happens with people they they get busy doing
their
job and experimentation and failure
is always secondary to their job so if we put failure people into the each team
and they drive the experiments they
understand the team they drive the experiments they measure them and most
importantly they report their failures
and experiments back to the whole
team because there's really transferable learnings for example there was one
the other day where the social media team
discovered this thing on Tik Tok
which allows us to look at a guest like you and find your most popular videos
ever
on Tik Tok with a click and the social
media team had figured that out which was really useful for them but then the
research team over here that are booking
guests who are trying to find the
best videos that a David has ever made they also benefited from just the
discovery
of that button because instead of
having to scroll through the entire Tik Tok they can press one button and see
your most popular videos so it's all there's
this real 1 plus 1 equal 3 getting
the teams to share their fails failures and experiments so they don't have to
fail
in the same ways so what did you
just write down this this brings up so much stuff because the fundamental
problem
you're getting at here is the one
called the explore exploit tradeoff right um and so explore is what it sounds
like
looking for new knowledge or new
things that you can do that'll add value exploit is taking stuff you're already
good at that you already know and
drilling down on it and this is like
the fundamental challenge for people in organizations that did good is once
they've find something they're
really good at and they drill down in it they tend to ditch explore modee yeah
right and balancing that explore
exploit and there's all these of course you know these like famous business
cases like
Kodak invents the digital camera and
scuttles it because they're like why would we disrupt our own business but
there was this fascinating work led
by a guy named dashen Wong in Northwestern uh who does like people will do
Career
Development studies looking at 20
people and he'll look at 20,000 people you know so his work's just fascinating
and he
what he saw in this work with his
colleagues was that people tend to have
hot streaks in their careers their
best work tends to come in clusters most people will only have one
some people will have more than one
if they're lucky and reliably what precedes a hot Ste he was looking at I think
it
was like 26,000 like film directors
artists scientists reliably what precedes a hot
streak is a period of exploration
where they're trying these different styles they're going broad they're they're
keeping a smaller team so they can
be nimble they're moving between teams and then they find something and they
they drill into it and if going to have
another hot streak they do it again
they Zoom back out and they go to this explore explore explore and then exploit
so they toggle between these modes
instead of staying just in one but the clear message of his work is that
exploration precedes a hot streak
and if you don't do the exploration you just settle into exploit at sort of a
middling level then you're you're
kind of sacrificing your your hot streak so that that was one of the things
that came up for me the other thing was this
you got to something this idea of
people not only doing things that might fit fail and I think that's great that
they have the title failure right cuz you'll
have the uh you know Adam Grant who
I think we both know is he he he mentioned me
some once something called the hippo
effect where it's like the opinion of the highest paid person in the room I
think the is the acronym where their
their signaling is really important for everyone else so if you're not just
giving lip service like yeah failure
is good but actually giving people that title I think that's a great signal for
you're underwriting risk you're
underwriting risk for people psychologically and you're creating what
what scientists who study sort of
networks like groups of teams call an import export business of ideas and this
is one of the Hallmarks of
organizations and and ecosystems that learn and adapt to to a
changing world and the import export
business of ideas means you need to have information flowing through an
organization you have people doing
different things maybe people even moving teams here and there so I always
think of the engineer uh Bill Gore who
created the company or founded the
company that created gortex and he fashioned the company based in his
observation that organizations often do
their most impactful work in times
of Crisis because the disciplinary boundaries go out the window and people
start what can I learn from my
neighbor you know and working together or do he like to say real communication
happens
in the carpool which I think is a
funny saying but I worry about that with more hybrid and remote work where you
can't
necessarily just rely on Serendipity
for people to be sharing these ideas in this
informal way and so I actually think
we have to be a lot more thoughtful about setting up our own import export
business of ideas internally and it
sounds to me like that's what you're doing okay so what about then on in an
individual level how do I as an
individual I've got you know lots of
things I'm doing I'm writing some books at the moment I do the podcast lots of
other things how do I become more
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