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Real Life Superpowers.

David: Whether it’s because you’re drawn to computer science and programming, or because you end up in that career, that job is all about problem solving. For people who are called to that sort of work, there’s nothing more stimulating and engaging than spending 36 hours trying to find a bug, and feeling like it’s kind of you against the machine to figure out what’s going on.

Host: Hello, hello. In this special episode we speak with David Benjamin, the co-author of Cracking Complexity: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast. In the book, he and his co-author David Komlos share their proven formula for dramatically shortening the process of cracking an organization’s toughest challenges. Their formula has been really put to the test over the past few months of the new reality of COVID-19, which makes this episode ever so more interesting. In regular days, David guides leaders and their teams through their application of the formula. In this capacity he has become a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies and US government leaders on how to organize for complexity and find traction in the face of the intractable. I think anybody who is faced with decisions in life, which, who isn’t, really, would find this episode super insightful. Hope you enjoy your listen.

[Music]

We have the technology. Real Life Superpowers.

Host: So David, welcome to Real Life Superpowers.

David: Thank you.

Host: I’ve got to say, I have a conspiracy theory. I’m thinking that you just might be the person behind COVID-19.

David: Why is that?

Host: Because your book, dealing with complexity and helping leaders in difficult circumstances, has come out basically at the peak of COVID, right?

David: Well, in fact it’s been on the market for a year, and that’s because complexity is complexity, and it’s existed for a very long time. But certainly this year, as we’ve encountered the pandemic over the last few months, it’s been very much more timely than we expected when we published.

Host: And how are book sales? Did you suddenly feel the impact?

David: No, they’ve been kind of slow and steady. The book got some traction at the beginning, and we’ve just sort of been out there speaking and publishing. With our customer base, we’ve been using the book as a business card, often, in terms of just sort of opening the door to a conversation. Not that we’ve heard in terms of any kind of peak over the last few weeks. It wouldn’t surprise me, but we haven’t heard that.

Host: Okay. And how did you end up writing this book? Was it to be a business card, or did you have a really strong message to share? I guess also both is probably a relevant combination.

David: Yeah. I think personally and selfishly, this is something that we always wanted to do, David Komlos and I, my business partner and co-author. I’d say that we felt we had an obligation to make some noise about what we were doing and how to approach really important business imperatives, like developing strategy and executing on key plans and key projects. We feel that we have a way that is better, faster, stronger than sort of traditional approaches, and felt an obligation to let people know that and to give them an alternative to, for example, traditional consulting.

Host: What was the first thing you did? When you start a book, what do you do?

David: Well, interestingly, because we were writing about something that we’ve been doing for so long, personally we’ve been working very actively with the formula that we talk about in the book since 2002, I feel like the book was mostly written before we sat down to write it. It was very much in my head: the stories we wanted to tell, the insights we have, the steps in the formula. So I remember, just as we were getting started, I was describing to David Komlos how I felt like a hockey player. I’m a Canadian, so of course I’ll use a hockey analogy. Standing on the bench, pounding a stick, just waiting to get out there on the ice. I knew there was a story to tell, we could tell kind of the structure of the story we wanted to tell. It was just a matter of putting pen to paper and letting it come. It was there for the taking.

Host: And how did this formula evolve? Did it come out of a personal pain, or did you work with organizations and sort of structure it through experience?

David: Yeah, we acquired the rights to a methodology back in the early 2000s, which, if you look at the ten-step formula, three of the steps, seven, eight and nine, really reflect that methodology. But we were bringing something that was very different to market. We were dealing at a time when complexity wasn’t part of every executive’s lexicon. It was something that sounded as abstract as systems. So we really had to kind of create a market, and as we started to work with some of the companies that could hear the music early on, we got to sort of apply the methodology as we inherited it, and then enrich it and expand it and sort of localize it to the American market, which is very different from Europe, where the method was first being used, kind of in the late 1990s.

Host: And how did you find out about that method?

David: Well, it’s interesting. David Komlos and I had both been working in a company kind of riding the dot-com wave in the late 90s, and my father and his business partner knew Stafford Beer, who was the inventor of this methodology, and were helping him try to make his way to North America. So when David and I were part of a series of acquisitions that ultimately collapsed a whole bunch of businesses, we found ourselves without work, and I went and took a job to feed my young family, and David went out to do what entrepreneurs do and look for his next thing instead of jumping into something, and started speaking to my father and his business partner, got introduced to Stafford Beer and this methodology, and he came knocking on my door sort of a year later and showed me what he’d found. He had done some due diligence, and I was so excited by it and so drawn to it that I literally gave notice the day that he showed it to me and started working with him the following Monday.

Host: Wow. What was it about it that seemed so appealing?

David: Well, I’m a mathematician and computer scientist, I’ve got a very logical brain, I like puzzles, and what he showed me was some geometric shapes that are used as a network architecture for what we do, a way of organizing people so that they’re optimally connected to each other. And I just saw that and said, yeah, that makes complete sense. It’s sort of in the realm of Buckminster Fuller and buckyballs, geodesic domes, which are sort of optimally connected, with balanced tension and compression, so that you can build buildings that are bigger and stronger. If you’ve seen a geodesic dome, you know they’re kind of lighter, bigger, stronger than traditional architecture. So this same kind of thinking was being applied to how you organize human groups to think together and to solve things together. And as I said, it just made perfect sense to me that that would work. And again, the whole space, helping people solve problems, solving problems, figuring out puzzles, is something that’s always attracted me, again, as sort of a mathematician and computer scientist.

Host: Where did you find out that that’s what you loved? And how do you know that solving problems with human beings works in the long run? How do you test that out?

David: Well, again, we’re helping organizations, we’re helping leaders deal with their problems almost whenever we do this, so it’s really a matter of hearing what they tell us afterwards. And what they’ll tell us is, when they apply the formula, they get great solutions, very good solutions, maybe better than they would have otherwise, maybe not, but they get them in days or weeks. And what they characterize as the most important thing is that there’s a critical mass of people who’ve kind of co-created those solutions and are really eager to make it work and make it happen. So execution is far greater than what they experience when they do sort of the traditional 18-month consulting project, and it’s faster and it’s cheaper. So we hear from them about their successes, we keep in touch with them over the years, and they’ll still refer back to the work they did as a turning point, kind of three years later. But David and I have never really been satisfied with that, and we decided more recently that we need to be using the formula more on ourselves and on some of the key business decisions we were making. So for example, when we wrote the book, the last thing we did before publishing the book was put it through the formula with a group of people and invite them to give us the critique and edits and changes that they suggested. And it worked. They created a book, we thought, that was much better, and we made those improvements over the course of a few weeks.

Host: These are brilliant people, you know, big companies, and you’d think that they would know how to find these problems, think of different solutions, maybe not the best solutions like you think of. But how do you explain that?

David: We’ve had it explained to us a little bit, because we’re always curious about that as well. We know that the formula does something very powerful, which is, again, to get a large group of people really aligned and mobilized around an answer that they’ve created. And when they’ve created it, they believe in it. And nobody likes to be wrong, either, so once people have said that that’s the solution that’s going to work for us, they work like hell to make sure that it does work, to prove themselves right. So we have been told, for example, in a very large company with a strong reputation for innovation, what we thought was the benefit of this formula is what I just described, but what we were told by one of the executives is that their Achilles heel is how smart they are, how many smart people they have at that executive boardroom table when they’re trying to figure anything out. And because they have so many smart people, they can’t decide anything quickly. Everybody’s got a strong opinion, everybody’s right, everybody’s smart, so it takes them a very long time to land a solution. It’s not that they can’t do it, and it’s not that several of them might not have the right solutions, it’s convincing each other about what needs to be done. So we were told the value proposition for them when they work with us is the speed at which we force those people through the process of making a decision. We do that in days, three days with them, and normally, he said, that would take us six months.

Host: And maybe the objectivity as well, because there’s political dynamics, and you have to give the executives the respect, and when you come, you’re objective. Does that have anything to do with it?

David: Yeah, I think that’s really key. We are completely neutral. We don’t come with a point of view, and we’ll often tell the people we work with, your people are the experts, we’re not the experts. And they’re used to the experts coming in, who know their industry, know their problem type, and do the research and then tell them what to do. We say that’s not us. Your people are the experts, the talent in and around your organization. They know the answers. But what you’re not good at, that we’re good at, is getting all those people together and figuring out the answers quickly and effectively.

Host: And what’s the biggest challenge to implementing? Because these are people, right, and you’re a tech guy, right? So I’m interested. It’s really easy to implement on a computer, right, but people are people. So what was the biggest challenge in implementation?

David: Well, again, as you just said, as a computer programmer I understand that when you’re trying to have a computer do something, it’s a matter of giving it a set of instructions, and it will follow those instructions. So that’s what we call a complicated problem. It’s a completely deterministic system. Getting a computer to calculate something, that’s a complicated problem, because you just have to go through a series of steps to get to an answer. Human groups are anything but deterministic. The dynamics are very complex: a lot of moving parts, a lot of opinions, a lot of personalities and styles to deal with. And so that’s why you need a formula that will sort of systematically break people down, bring them together, align them and unify them on a set of answers they believe in. And it really is, it’s not us, it’s a formula. It’s almost an equation that we execute with a large group, an algorithm that we run that takes them from point A to point B systematically.

Host: And do you have to do a lot of convincing to get them to even spend time trying to align to this formula?

David: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the convincing is really with the sponsor at the beginning, because what we say sounds too good to be true, and it’s really only in their conversations with people who’ve done it before that they start to believe that, hey, maybe this will work, I’ll give it a try. Once we get people there, one of the things I’ve learned, I don’t know if I’d call this a superpower or not, but it’s very powerful to tell somebody ahead of time that it’s okay if they’re cynical, to encourage them to disbelieve that this is going to work, to tell them to embrace whatever they’re feeling, because that’s the right way to feel. Very powerful. It gets past their defenses. We tell them, you know what, give us this first day, trust the process we’re going to put in front of you. By the end of the day, I can tell you, you’re going to feel frustrated, you’re going to feel like a lot of things were surfaced and that we didn’t make much progress, and that’s going to be okay, because that’s where you should be at the end of day one of what we do. And by telling them that in advance, you’re actually at the same time building confidence. At the same time that they’re frustrated or concerned, they also feel like they’re in good hands, with somebody who knows what they’re doing.

Host: It’s interesting you said superpower, because I want to backtrack for a second, because what’s really interesting about everything you do, if you look at it from a higher level, is that everybody has it, even day to day, not even organizations. The world today is a lot more complex, because there’s a lot more information and opportunities, okay? And you said you loved puzzles and figuring them out, and what’s interesting is, and that’s me thinking, because that’s what you told us, if you know how to solve complex puzzles, that means actually that the output is you’re a good decision maker, right? So I’m trying to understand: when you solve puzzles, you probably evolved from a child later on and found different ways to think. Is there something that you can analyze internally to say, okay, this is why a complex idea is a very simple output for me?

David: Yeah, I am pretty sure, and I’ve seen this with a few other people, that whether it’s because you’re drawn to computer science and programming, or because you end up in that career, that job is all about problem solving. For people who are called to that sort of work, there’s nothing more stimulating and engaging than spending 36 hours trying to find a bug and feeling like it’s kind of you against the machine to figure out what’s going on. And I have a father who always loved very difficult cryptic crossword puzzles, which include puns and anagrams and everything else. So as a child I was always sort of by his side, learning to think that way, and learning to approach problems with a different lens, to expect the unexpected, to trust that as you stare at something and think about it for a long time, something is going to emerge. Answers don’t just come the first time you try. It’s about the perseverance of really digging in and committing yourself to finding an answer, and then trusting that it will come, trusting that your brain is far more active and creative than even you give it credit for, if you kind of give it the time to marinate in a problem.

Host: So this is really interesting. I once talked to a well-known data scientist, and when I asked a similar question, she said, “I’m actually not good at analyzing information, but I’m really good at asking questions.” So I’m wondering, is the idea knowing what to ask to get to what you’re solving, or is it more solving the puzzle in front of you?

David: Yeah, that’s a great comment, because sometimes it’s obvious what you’re solving. If I use the example of a crossword puzzle, you don’t have to ask yourself, “Okay, what’s the task here?” You know what the task is. But when we talk about the formula, the second step in the formula is actually about formulating the right question. It’s very important, as soon as you’re trying to solve something with someone else in particular, that you be aligned on what it is that you’re trying to solve. Because I’ve seen far too many times when people think they’re speaking the same language and going after the solution to the same problem, and they’re not. They just haven’t articulated the problem to each other. So that second step in the formula is about writing a really good question that makes it clear what you’re trying to solve for, and makes it exciting to solve for it. So I think, as an externalized process, when you’re working with several people, that’s a really important step, to formulate the question. And even, I think, when you’re sitting alone and trying to figure something out, a good way to kind of retreat from the churn of trying to solve is to ask yourself, “What is the question I’m trying to answer here?” and confirm with yourself that you know what that is.

Host: In that sense, when you started with the cryptic crossword puzzles, which I’m really intrigued to see one, because I don’t know what a cryptic crossword puzzle is, and I’m also Canadian, so I probably read the same papers as you did…

David: So the Globe and Mail has one every day.

Host: Okay. It’s probably my dad’s thing, he wasn’t interested in that at all. But on the dad’s side, did you feel you were good at it, or was it fun for your dad to do it with you because he was good at it? Did you get good feedback? How did you get that thing, that you got passionate about it? Or was it a natural thing, like you saw it and you fell in love with it in the same second?

David: Yeah, it’s hard to remember. I’d say part of it is, anything that you do with your dad, whether you’re throwing a baseball, or sitting and reading, or whatever it is, you’re sitting with your role model, and that role model is doing something, and you want to be capable of doing the same thing. But there was also this element of these really interesting puzzles. And again, if you ever look at a cryptic crossword, a good one, and I think they’re British in origin, so they’re very, very twisted kind of puzzles, and every question is different. You might be looking for a pun or an anagram or all sorts of other crazy things. It just bends your mind. And if you go into that expecting to know what the pattern is that you’re looking for, you won’t see the pattern. But if you somehow just kind of soften your expectations and create the conditions for something to pop that you’re not expecting, to me that’s the key. So you don’t know what lens you have on until something starts to emerge for you. There are some really good books that have been written about breakthrough thinking, and a lot of it is sort of retreating from false starts and trying to set aside your biases and your assumptions as you look for something. Something magic happens in your brain. It just pops.

Host: Okay, so that passion, that’s really obvious why, starting out on the tech side. But then I’m intrigued, because from my experience I’ve noticed that there’s a differentiation between someone who’s very tech oriented and someone who’s business oriented. And I know you say to yourself you’re not a business-oriented person, but that’s impossible, because you have that attribute as well. But I’m wondering, if I’m a tech person out there, okay, an entrepreneur that’s on the tech side, and I want to move that scope to something where you are taking those tech capabilities and putting them into a human process, and not into a UI or SaaS or anything else, what would you advise them to do to go there? Because they would all feel self-conscious actually getting out of their comfort zone, right?

David: Yeah. I would say that, first of all, if you’re not passionate about something, and if you don’t believe it’s going to work, you’ve probably heard this said 100 times before, and it’s completely true: if you don’t have passion for it, if it’s not fun, if you don’t believe in it, then I think you’re going to spin your wheels for a long time trying to convince other people. So first of all, make sure that what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about doing, is something that you could do for the rest of your life and be happy. I like to think about the things where, when you’re doing them, you don’t notice the passage of time. It’s different for everybody, but for me it was reading and solving problems, where, when I was in university working on programming assignments, I’d look up and it’d be 3 a.m., and I’d been working on it since 8, and I hadn’t noticed, and I hadn’t eaten, I hadn’t had anything to drink. And when you find that thing, if you can find that in your work, in the thing you’re trying to bring to market and the business you’re trying to start, you’ve got a fantastic chance for success, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s very hard to engineer success. It really is about, I like to think of planting things in my head, putting the pieces together later, but noticing the individual components as you go, things you want, things you see, things you observe, and trusting, again, that as you begin to put the pieces together, things are going to coalesce around the real answers. Again, it’s being very fluid in your thinking, being very patient about emergence. The best way I can describe it, I don’t know if you know, there are these patterns on a page, and you have to stare at them, you know what I’m talking about, and there’s a technique to staring at them, and if you try to force it, you can’t possibly see the image. You have to just relax your eyes and sort of set aside what you think you’re looking at, and then an image will suddenly emerge for you. To me, that’s what navigating an entrepreneurial exercise is like. You’ve got to kind of let it come, and trust that you’ll see it when it’s ready to be seen.

Host: There’s something almost spiritual about silencing a bit of the thoughts down and letting something deeper surface. And you’re also talking about geometrical shapes and formulating this, and it doesn’t sound like a formula from an angle of sheer math. It sounds like formulating something to be more connected to deeper roots and deeper wisdoms, so that people can sort of connect through a more common ground. Does that make sense?

David: Yeah, and it’s funny, it just gave me a different way to think about our formula. I think the formula is really all about systematically taking the right group of people and quieting their thoughts, letting them set everything aside and find, as you were just characterizing it, that quiet thinking space where in fact they can do it together and have the experience of emergence of something that they all see and believe, but again, not by forcing it, by step by step making your way towards it. I kind of like thinking about it that way.

Host: I think sort of letting go and tapping into some sort of collective wisdom, when people stop hanging on to their opinion and sort of ease back into something maybe bigger than themselves. It’s like your brain waves. There’s brain waves that are different when you’re relaxed, and when you’re relaxed you also become more creative. So I think maybe through your formula you’re sort of helping people tap into that.

David: Yeah. You know, a quick story, a quick analogy. I don’t know if you’ve seen or participated in dragon boating, these long boats with a whole bunch of people on them and a drummer beating a drum. One of you has, okay. So that was an amazing experience for me. I did it with the office one year, and you have to go from being an individual rower to sort of setting aside your individuality when you’re on that boat, and falling into a rhythm with the entire team. And we weren’t particularly good throughout our training as a team, but as we got into the competition we actually got a drummer sitting at the front, and as that drummer gave you the drum beat, it really made it much easier to fall into a pattern with everyone else, not notice your surroundings anymore, just kind of feel part of a collective that was focused on a goal. And I remember the experience of looking up when we crossed the finish line and realizing we had won a race, when all the way through training we never had. The difference was having a drum beat that we were all focused on, and giving ourselves over to that. It’s very powerful, and I’d say we try to do that systematically with groups as they think through challenges.

Host: I can really relate to that. And I read this really amazing book, maybe you’ve read it, Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and, I think, Jamie Wheal, I’m probably not saying his name right, and they discuss a lot the topic of group flow, and how when groups tap into that flow together, and it happens a lot in extreme sports, then it’s something on the verge of magic that happens, because there’s zero room for mistakes. And that’s a really interesting experiment, to see how people can collaborate when there’s no room for mistakes and each are sort of accountable to each other, and when they’re all in that same state of flow, the human performance that’s the outcome of such experiences is fantastic. And it really seems like you’re translating this into leadership and, I’ll say, boardrooms.

Host: Sorry, but just one thing. That’s like the destination, because on that boat, what happens is the interests are aligned. You have a collective goal, right? So it’s easy to get into flow when you have a collective goal. We’re all trying to get to this destination and do it as best as possible. And then you have the drum beater, which is giving, let’s say, the collective feeling of getting to the success. And what you said before about an entrepreneur putting the pieces together, I just want to get stuck on that for a second, because Steve Jobs said that in the opposite way when he talked to college students. He said that in hindsight, getting out of school and doing the fonts helped him make that company, but probably he had not that certain plan. But he collected those things because he knew there was a larger destination, connecting the dots. And then, if I’m putting it into the context of what you’re doing, and this is more of a question, sorry, I think that part of what you’re doing is that, [unclear] you know already the solution, or the area of the solution, and you want them to go through the whole journey so that they can explain to themselves that they’re in the right place, and they made that decision together, and then they can go and row that dragon boat together with the drum beat. Am I correct?

David: Yeah, I think so. Again, you give them the right goal. We talk about how a really good question includes an aspirational goal of some sort. And yeah, you bring all the right people together. We talk about the right variety of people, and we really mean an aggressive search for the right variety of people, not just falling into the patterns of involving the same old people, the entire executive team, all the directors, whatever that is. Just really, what’s the right variety of people who need to be put into this boat if we’re going to make it to that goal? And then, having done that, with clarity on what that goal is, because people are people and they’re so complex, you have to kind of give them time and direction on how to let go and let something emerge. And again, this is where iteration kind of drives emergence. You can’t do that all in one step. You have to work them through a problem set and a set of discussions that they know are the right discussions. You have to work them through it three times, so that they have a chance to unload, because nobody’s ready to think while they’re frustrated. You’ve got to let them tell their stories, then you have to get them to ideate, and then, only then, is the pump primed for them to solve. And so there’s this union of art and science to this. And I’ve got a very big creative streak. I’m not just somebody who’s a logical thinker and a programmer. I also like to write and I also like to create, and it’s finding that blend of the science and the art that I think, at least for me, has led to success.

Host: It sounds like it’s the ultimate intersection, because otherwise you’re sort of shutting off one thing that’s very natural.

David: Yeah, and I think people make the mistake of trying to turn off their creative urges so that they can focus on business, when you can find a lot of success by finding the union instead of treating them as two separate things.

Host: And probably the best businesses are the ones that are actually creative in some form or other.

David: Yeah, exactly. I mean, otherwise you’re kind of just doing a me-too copycat. And again, there’s a lot of success you can have, if you’re looking for financial success, in doing something that’s already been done and doing it better. For me, I wouldn’t feel satisfied with only that.

Host: Yeah, because it sounds like you’re really trying to tap into something that sort of has a higher meaning, and get people to become their best version. I’m sort of feeling like this episode is a bit of a meta episode, because we’re trying to tap into people’s formula for getting to peak performance and becoming the best versions of themselves, and in a sense that’s exactly what you’ve made your mission: to help people tap into their best selves, and how to make decisions based on peak performance, if I’m understanding correctly.

David: Yeah. And I wouldn’t say it’s ironic, but to find your best self, I think it’s really essential that you listen to others with a lot of curiosity and a lot of open-mindedness. Everybody’s walking around having figured out little bits and pieces of life that maybe you haven’t figured out for yourself, and you can get into conversations with people and discover things about yourself if you’re listening really carefully to what they’re saying and what their personal insights have been. If you really, as I do, believe in people, and that people are generally good and smart and want good outcomes, you can learn a lot if you can shut yourself up and really connect yourself to what somebody is saying, and ask questions and dig in, as the two of you are doing. The answers are there, in people. So again, in personal life as well, you’re surrounded by a variety of people who see things differently and who see you differently. Talk to them about you and about your journey, and you’ll get a lot of insights.

Host: So, I mean, I know everything is in the book, and I don’t want to spoil it, but maybe you can give us a taste of this, even as an example of a personal life situation. What would you suggest to somebody who is trying to figure something out in their lives? What steps, according to the formula, should the person take?

David: Start with a question. Write a really, really good question that you’re trying to answer. And I don’t mean sort of jot one down. Think about it, have it down on your table for a few days and keep looking at it. And the question should be exciting to you, it should be challenging to you, it should have a goal, it should be ambitious. If you get the question right, it should be something you’re very excited to answer and very scared to answer, because it seems so daunting. And then the next step is, think about who in your life can help you inform the answer to the question you’ve written, and what’s that crazy mix of people who would all see the question differently and give you different sides to the answer. So that would include family, and maybe spiritual leaders that you interact with, maybe business people that you respect, and a professor from university who you revered, friends, and people who have always been blockers for you, and cynics, who are just as important, because they have important insights to tap into as well. Think about who that variety of people is, engage them in your question, and ask them first to think about what the topics are that I need to answer for myself if I’m going to find answers to my question. I’m kind of up to step six at this point. What’s the stuff I should be reading? What’s the stimulus I should expose myself to? And again, depending on the number of people, talk to them individually, in groups, iterate with them several times as you go through your journey, and open yourself up to whatever emerges. Don’t try to force an answer.

Host: Okay, so it’s a lot of really honest reflection and feedback.

David: Yeah, giving yourself time. Time is so important. I don’t know if you have kids?

Host: Yeah.

David: You certainly learn with kids that if you want to convince them of something, it’s not going to take one iteration, right? In fact, they have to convince themselves, and so they need time to let go of what they thought they knew and at the same time find a way to save face. And so over the course of a few days you can sway your kids to do things, you can work with your kids to figure things out, but if you try to sit them down and tell them, it doesn’t work. And that’s sort of the equivalent, I think, of working with teams.

Host: Yeah, that really leads me to my next question, because I’m thinking, with a lot of people and a lot of organizations that I work with, there’s a recurring issue of team members who have a lot of good ideas and initiatives, but they sort of stumble into very strong resistance and no real willingness to listen and adopt any sort of change, which is understandable, because at the end of the day management have their own anxieties and are afraid of change and need to be convinced. And it’s a sort of endless loop that doesn’t yield progress. And I’m thinking, what would you suggest in such a situation, either to a junior in an organization trying to push forward an idea, and also maybe just in general, how can a group or a startup become more open when some people within the group are just very stubborn?

David: Yeah. And again, without sort of applying the full formula, it’s hard to get people into an environment where they understand that they’re there to collectively solve something, and that they should set aside what they believe, what they know they know. Again, if you get them into a proper setup and encourage their resistance as a form of contribution, not necessarily resistance, but make them a critic. So we use behavioral roles, as an example, when we’re in meetings. You can set up a meeting of nine people and have six people be members of the meeting, who are tasked with answering a question or figuring something out, and those six people collectively are there to talk something through and find answers. But take the other three people, and rather than making a group of nine people who are all equally members, make those three people critics. And when they are critics, what they have to do is listen to the six members talk for 10 or 15 minutes, and they’re not allowed to say a word during that time. But at the end of that 10 or 15 minutes, tell them you’re going to give them the floor, and you’re going to give them one minute each to critique what’s going on in front of them in terms of the members’ conversation, what they’re talking about, how they’re talking about it. Hear their critique, force the members to listen to it without responding, then ask them to be silent again and go back to the members, and you’ll see the members start to evolve their thinking based on the feedback they just got. Do that again, 10 or 15 minutes more conversation, back to the critics a second time. And when you set up a meeting that way, you change the natural habits and behaviors of people. So if you take that cynical person who’s just naturally resistant and put them at the table and ask them to be creative and constructive with the rest of the group and hear from other critics, they’ll start to feel like they can suspend their own doubts and their own critical minds and just get into the conversation, because someone else is taking care of the critiquing. Or you make them critics, and you make it a constructive role for them to play in the conversation, and they feel heard, and they are forced to listen. And again, you’re changing their dynamics. So little things like that can make a big difference.

Host: I feel there’s a big superpower here. You’re always saying that you’re a tech guy, but you haven’t used one acronym or a high-level definition, which is clearly a characteristic of someone who’s very tech oriented. So I’m wondering, you’re articulating like super not a tech guy, so I’m really interested in that. How do you do that?

David: I think a lot of reading. Again, I was never fully a programmer, if you know what I mean. I was good at it, my brain was fully engaged when I was doing it, but I’ve always had a very curious mind and I’ve always done a lot of reading. And you might be assuming I mean business books and how-to books. I never read any of those kinds of books. I was a big reader of science fiction and fantasy, and historical fiction, for some strange reason, because I hated history in high school, but I love reading historical stories, things like Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar. And it just gives you a different vocabulary and a different way of expressing life. So on the one hand you’ve got the mathematical brain, and on the other hand you have the brain that’s drawn to literature and reading and ideas. And I believe a lot of language skills come from just reading, if you’re reading the right books, and talking and having great conversations with people.

Host: If I read The Hobbit and I’m a tech guy, that’s it, I’m done, right?

David: I think you should read The Hobbit and maybe a few other things. But just to give you another example, I’ve got a daughter who’s 11 now, and we actually have two older daughters as well, so she’s quite a bit younger than her two older sisters. But since she was born, whenever we watch TV we have closed captioning turned on. So all the TV watching she’s ever done has come with words at the bottom of the screen that are showing her the spelling and the actual words being used. And so you’re being entertained at the same time that you’re learning, and you have no idea that you’re learning. To me, there’s a lot to that. There’s a lot of development in activating reading as a core skill, just like listening, and just like puzzle solving. Those are three different things, and if you’re constantly flexing those muscles, I think you can really make yourself very well-rounded.

Host: And I’m wondering, when you started advising companies, how did you end up working with the Fortune 500 ones?

David: Well, I mean, a lot of that is David Komlos’s superpower of being able to convince people to take a meeting. He’s great at creating some doubt in people’s minds, that if you don’t listen to what I’m saying, you’re going to miss out on something that’s really important to you. But as you get into those companies, I characterize myself as a bit of a systems thinker, which I never really understood until I started recognizing patterns. When you look across industries, because we work across industries, when you look across corporate cultures, when you look across the geographies you work with, you can see patterns, and when you start to see patterns, you can pattern match. So you can be talking to a company you’ve never worked with before, the CEO can be telling you a challenge he or she is having with the dynamics of the C-suite, and you can say, “Well, I don’t know your company, but in several companies I’ve seen that sort of dynamic, and here’s what was going on.” And all of a sudden you seem like you’re a Magic 8 Ball or something, able to give answers without very much input. And that does a lot to build credibility and trust. When you’re able to abstract what you’re seeing and tell people the patterns that they match with, and what was done in those other situations, it starts to be very insightful and powerful for them.

Host: Yeah, that makes sense. And do you identify very common patterns between different companies?

David: Yeah. So for example, I think this is fascinating. As we apply the formula, one of the steps in the formula is about the group setting its own agenda. So you give them a question, and then you put them through an exercise, a meaningful half-day exercise, to take the question and find consensus on what the topics of discussion are that they have to have. So every time we apply our formula, starting with a question, no matter where we apply it, the group has to come up with a set of topics they’re going to discuss. Now, having done this since 2002, when you throw all that data, all those data points of all the topics they’ve ever chosen, into a good analysis, what we found was that there were actually 23 subject areas, and that’s it. Looking at thousands of topics from across companies, industries, etc., there were only 23 subject areas that they needed to cover to find answers to their questions. That pattern we then built into a tool that we call the Predictor, which allows us to talk to other companies, answer some questions about the challenge they’re facing, pattern match with past applications of the formula, and produce a set of subject areas that they likely need to cover. And so, because we’re neutral, because we don’t come with an agenda, because we’re not trying to sell a CRM system as a result of working with us, or a long implementation project, we can have a lot of credibility in serving up patterns and letting organizations see themselves and their challenges through a very abstracted lens.

Host: Yeah, that sounds really impactful. So, this is a big question, so brace yourself, but do you feel like you found your life’s passion?

David: Oh yeah. Before starting to do this in 2002, I had never remained in any position for longer than three years, and that’s because I always stop doing things that stop being fun. So in any other job I had had, after two or three years I felt like I had cracked the nut. I had learned what there was to learn, I had solved whatever puzzle I needed to solve, and yeah, I could keep going and growing within this organization, but there was always that constraint of being in the four walls of that organization, doing what it did. For someone like me, this has been a chance to solve new problems constantly, to see new patterns, to expose myself to new companies, new situations, new people, new cultures. There’s no reason I can imagine that I’d ever stop doing this. And the last few years have been about trying to translate the experience into experiences I can share with others through books and writing, and that’s just created a whole other level of happiness and contentment with what I do.

Host: Do you remember the minute when you realized, this is it, this is what I want to do forever?

David: I think it was the first time that we had done the whole cycle of selling what we do and then seeing it through with an important client, and watching the process, the formula, work, and hearing from the client about the experience of the formula. I realized, wow, this is powerful, this is fun, this suits what I do. And feeling that feeling of, maybe I was meant to do this, maybe this is kind of what I’ve always been looking for. And it’s interesting, as we recruit people, you can see in the person, almost the minute we start talking to them, if they hear the music or not. And when people hear the music, they recognize that what we do is something that others are not doing. And we have people who’ve been in the company almost as long as I have been, who would say the same thing I just said, which is, “What else would I do? This is what I was meant to do.”

Host: What a rush.

David: Yeah, it’s great.

Host: Fantastic. I can’t wish for anybody more than that. I mean, besides health and everything. But I really feel like, in Maslow’s pyramid, it’s the ultimate situation to be in, to just know you’re in your place and doing good for others.

David: Yeah. And I think, if you think about the pandemic and social distancing, what I’ve found is it’s been a great opportunity to sort of step back from the usual day-to-day and look at the patterns. We’re in an unprecedented situation, and the chance to create and to innovate and to think new thoughts and respond to new stimulus, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as much as it’s an enormous burden and comes with significant challenges to all avenues of life. It’s also, how often do we get to do that? Just to sit back and reflect on life, on what we do, on why it works, on what we want to do, and on what we could be doing, given a whole set of new opportunities that are opening up in front of us daily.

Host: Yeah, it’s like confronting us with ourselves and making us ask questions, and maybe applying the formula without knowing it.

David: Yeah, exactly. Getting us that quiet time, which is so key to cracking any problem.

Host: And also taking away the FOMO. That’s really interesting. For me, on that note, I was thinking to myself, why is it so quiet, and why do I have so much time to think and micromanage and all kinds of stuff like that? And then I decided that what happened is, for me at least, it was not having a form of fear of missing out, and that’s what led me to be so still and think and micromanage, because it actually took away all the pressures. And by the way, they’re not important, those pressures. For me, that was the biggest insight I had there.

David: Yeah. I like the word that you just used, stillness, right? We all have a superpower between our ears, above our shoulders, right? And it can be trained to do the day-to-day and to navigate the usual same old stuff and get really good at it. But how often do we give it time to do what it’s also meant to do, which is to pull pieces together, to surface insights, to absorb new information? And again, I feel like I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have found that this time has really transformed the way they think about their own work and how they’ll approach that work going forward. What could be more exciting than that?

Host: Yeah, I think there’s so much good. So David, what would you say your superpower is?

David: I think it’s that ability and interest and passion for problem solving, coupled with the ability to listen really well. And if I think about the things that have really advanced my business and my career, it’s been the ability to take in stimulus, store it away somewhere, and fire up a pattern when the final piece presents itself to me five or six years later. Just kind of having your brain ready with all sorts of different kinds of information, so that when the last piece of information enters, you can suddenly see what it is you’ve been trying to see. I think part of that is how you’re born, and some of that comes from doing the right things, like reading, and going through a computer science training and learning to apply logic. And then the other side of me is the expressive, again curious, but wanting to be able to share what I’m hearing and thinking, and finding the voice to do that effectively. That probably was always a power, and I think it has become more of a superpower just through the practice of writing, continuously writing.

Host: And maybe I’ll add that another superpower is helping hone superpowers and helping others find them out.

David: Yeah, that’s a lot of fun, and it’s a different challenge altogether, because then you’re dealing with what worked for you and trying to apply it to people who are wired differently, and trying to help them find what works for them.

Host: Yeah, I can totally understand. It’s, in a very different sense, what we’re sort of trying to tap into by doing this podcast. So just speaking to you sort of makes me understand a lot of things, and just how exciting it is to figure out a path to your inner self.

David: Good, I’m glad.

Host: And then the inevitable question: what would you say your kryptonite is?

David: Because I am so stubbornly optimistic about people and circumstances, I don’t like being let down. It’s not crippling, it’s not kryptonite in that sense, but it really hurts to have your assumptions about people betrayed by their behavior. It doesn’t happen a lot, not enough to throw a wrench into your belief in people, but when it does happen, it probably feels like Superman feels when encountering kryptonite.

Host: So are you working through that?

David: Yeah, you just stop surrounding yourself with people who let you down. And for example, when you’re recruiting, I think you can pattern match, and you can really trust instincts that you have about the person in front of you. Not fully, not exclusively, but when you sit down with somebody to start to talk about them and how they might fit in your organization, if you have this nagging doubt that there’s something off that’s not going to work, I think as you get deeper into your career you begin to recognize that you can just trust that.

Host: Yeah, which is, again, what you do at the holistic level anyway.

David: Yeah, exactly.

Host: So David, where can people get a hold of your book?

David: It’s available on Amazon. You can come to our website, syntegritygroup.com. There are links to all the different ways to buy the book. There are also links to a lot of articles. We’ve been very actively writing, we’re Forbes contributors, actively writing about some of the new thoughts and insights that are happening for us as we go through the pandemic. You can just look at the headlines and decide which articles are interesting to you. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that I think we’re thinking about, but we’re also interviewing a lot of interesting people and continuing to stimulate ourselves with their thoughts. So I think there’s probably something for everyone if you just go visit our website.

Host: Well, I definitely advise that people do. Do you have any final message for people now going through COVID, who maybe could somehow make use of the formula?

David: Yeah. I think, don’t lose hope. Be stubbornly optimistic about the opportunities that are available to you right now. Give yourself time to think. Pay attention to the silver linings, to the bad habits you’ve broken as a result of being forced out of them, and don’t let yourself revert to who you were before this, because I think it’s been a time of very positive change for people, if you’re open to that. And the last thing I think you want to do is just go back to normal.

Host: What wise words to end this with. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

David: Oh, it’s been my pleasure, and I hope maybe we can do this some time again. Thanks for your time.

Host: Anytime. Thank you so much.

David: Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.

[Music]

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