169. Imagination at Work: Why The Future Belongs to the Curious with Liz Rider and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:03

This podcast is for people who know that the workplace can and should be better and are ready to do something about it. You will learn practical ways to change organizational cultures and human behavior without passwords, without box ticking, without performative leadership. I am the boss of Prino Shark Consulting, working with executives, leaders and teams to create work cultures and environments that actually work for people. I am Prino Shark. I specialise in organizational culture change and human behavior change. I am all about making work better with people who give a damn. So if you think I can help, contact me via LinkedIn. I am here to help you to find decent ways to change the workplace. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast with myself, your host Prinasha. And I'm really excited to bring to you today a friend of mine all the way from Sweden at the moment, but she travels around the world, she's all over the place. Liz Ryder, welcome. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Oh, hi. It's a pleasure. Very early in the morning for me, but wonderful to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Yeah. And Liz, I really want to speak to you about something very crucial in a sec, but I'll tell our audience why. Uh, I saw this brilliant post on LinkedIn from Liz. If you're not following her on LinkedIn, her details are in the show notes. Check out what Liz has to say. Say, there's lots of interesting stuff. But there's one thing about you being curious uh within the workplace and with your clients. So I want to talk about that. Liz, I'm thinking the topic of this podcast episode, Imagine Imagination at Work, Why the Future Belongs to the Curious. I'm thinking. We can riff off this. We can riff off this. Um, before we even kick off, could you do a bit of an intro to you? I've got your formal bio and everything. I will read that out uh afterwards. But what do you do and why do you do it, Liz?

SPEAKER_01 1:57

What do I do and why do I do it? Well, I'm gonna start off by saying I'm an organizational psychologist, which is great now because we've got people like Adam Grant who people know, and and and I used to get stopped on the train and like, oh, you're a psychologist. I've got a problem with my teenagers. Like, hey, I I don't know anything about them. Well, I do now because I've got to. But I work with people in organizations and I really focus on leadership because that's where I believe the biggest impact can happen. Uh, we don't necessarily have thriving organizations. I mean, you know, the return to the office mandate just keeps popping up over and over and over again. And psychology can explain so much. Um, so I work with leadership, human-centric leadership in particular. Oh, and why do I do what I do? Well, huh, it's a good question, and it probably starts from my childhood, of course. Um, and I was always curious, always asking the why, like most kids do. And I always wanted to understand, you know, why were the, you know, the bad kids the bad kids. And so that curiosity was there. I never never lost it. You know, and a lot of people lose it, but I had never lost that curiosity. And uh, you know, having an incredibly talkative mother meant that I became highly observant and able to listen. So I kind of like learned those listening and observation skills pretty early. So I started to take notice of what was happening. Um, so the first top tip of the day, listening gives you so much information. You know, I can just go and sit and listen in an organization for a couple of weeks and I can kind of go, okay, I know what's going on now. I've got the analysis here of what's going on. So, yeah, so sum it up, it's working with executive coaching. I do a lot of keynote speaking, and then what I call leadership advisory, which could be anything from you know, how do I set up my leadership strategy to run in some workshops around leadership?

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Beautiful, beautiful. I'm gonna take you back to your childhood.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

So don't take a psychologist back to her childhood. No, I know.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Where do we open this can of worms, right? So on that LinkedIn post, which I loved by the way, um, you were once told that you have a childlike imagination in today's workplace. Is that a liability or a competitive advantage?

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Well, I was told that I had a kind of off-the-school imagination, childlike, okay, when I was applying for a job, which I got. So I'm gonna say it's an absolute competitive advantage. Um, and I think there's a uh quite a famous piece of research from George Land, uh, who was working with NASA many, many years ago, um, and and looking at, you know, who who are the who are the geniuses. Um, and George Land actually took four and five-year-olds and assessed them and found out 98% were geniuses. He then followed them throughout their lives, continuing to assess them, and found by the age of 10 that had dropped to 30%. High school, it's gone down to 12, and adults less than 2%. So that really says a lot to me. You know, what are we doing in education, in the workforce to reduce, you know, that creativity, that critical thinking, those skills that we really need in this AI era. So it definitely uh is something that we need in our companies. Um, and I think it was um it was EEY said that organizations must strategically leverage their imagination.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

So you you talked about the uh percentages of um genius really dropping over our time. Uh so we've heard, if you haven't heard from Sir Ken Robinson and his amazing TED Edg talk about how um schools kill creativity. Please listen to it. I'll add it to the show notes if I forget, Google it. But then there's something about the fact beyond schools, so two less than two percent, you said as as adults, you know, we lose our genius. So we then enter the workplace. So what is it? And I'm I'm riffing with you here now. What is it about the workplace that stifles our curiosity and our creativity, in your opinion, or from research as well, Liz?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

No, but I I think it it is very interesting, and you sort of think it almost it does start at school where we're taught a curriculum and there's a there's an answer to it, there's a right answer. Yeah. All right, you know, we uh and then in organizations, you know, we're in jobs and you know, we do our jobs and we do them in a in a certain way. We do. Um and I I think it's very interesting. It was uh McKinsey said that you know executive team teams spend twenty-two percent of their time on short-term um sorry, on long-term growth. I was gonna get all mixed up. Uh this is what I want. I want it to be the other way around. Um, and 78% of their time on short-term, you know, the operational stuff.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

And that's very common when I work with leadership teams. You know, I'll kind of go in and they're often working on the firefighting, that that operational detail. And I think many leaders who are listening to this will recognise that they kind of get a bit trapped in the firefighting.

unknown 7:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

You know, the urgent, important stuff that has to happen right now. And we always spend some time trying to work out how we can adjust that so that there's time to, you know, what do you really want to spend my time on? Oh, well, I want to spend my time on innovation, on strategy, on the somewhat intangible, yes. And of course, because it's intangible, it becomes harder because I can deal with the fire. But dealing with what does the future look like is a little bit more complicated. So it's then how do we turn that into something that's tangible? How can we start to imagine? Because imagination, I mean, you think of oh, you know, I don't know, fairies and goblins or whatever, and dismiss it. Yes. But it's important to be able to think what could it look like and not dismiss it. We're very good at, oh, that'll never work. Oh, that can't happen. You know, look at Tesla when Tesla first came out. I worked in automotive, you know, everyone's going, nah, no way. That's not gonna work. Look where they are now.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Yeah, yeah, completely different. So you are speaking to many an executive, I'm hearing, and people uh who are listening in right now thinking, this is us, this is us. So you talked about the intangible stuff being really difficult, but the firefighting being really easy, which is why we're constantly on firefighting modes as executive teams. But the intangible stuff is the stuff that's really gonna take us further, it's gonna grow our organization, it's gonna enable social impact at a higher level as well, all of that beautiful stuff. So, how do executive teams, especially I'm thinking about, uh, or leadership teams, or you know, like change management teams focus on that curiosity aspect and the intangible stuff? What can be done?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

I think uh I think the you can tell I've got a high imagination because as soon as you ask me a question, I've got three different answers going on in the so first of all, I would probably look backwards and look at what's happened um uh historically. Yeah. Now, if we look at Netflix, it's quite a well-known example, you know, 1999 Netflix comes on the scene as a DVD postal rental. So you could get your your film via the post. Correct. Um and I know at the time, you know, I had small kids and I was going to blockbusters. That was our kind of like Friday night. Go and choose a blockbuster film, and then uh pops Netflix DVDs in the post. No late fee returns, which of course I was a prime suspect for that. I was always the one that was late returning. But of course, Netflix's game plan wasn't that, it was streaming, but we were not ready for streaming, we didn't have the capability.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

And they had the foresight to say, okay, well, let's start with DVDs, then we're going to build up our brand, our customer base, our logistics, supply, etc. etc. And then once the internet's ready, we can jump on the streaming. And that that was being able to look ahead. And how do they do that? Well, they they don't just focus on today. They were able to look ahead. They were able to look at what's going on around them. I mean, one of the things that I do when I run executive programs is I take them out of their business and go out and see. I think that's super important.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Um, and I I remember going to to Shanghai um quite a few years ago, probably 2017, something like that. And these uh I remember two of the the VPs who were from the US just their mouths wide open going, wow, we didn't realise how fast it was here. And just seeing it, we can hear it on the news, we can read about it, but just actually seeing the reality. Um, you know, if we go back to automotive, you know, in China we probably got about 150 uh electric vehicle brands now. That just wasn't that you know, it just has exploded. And of course, any criticisms around quality uh diminishing because they're just getting better and better and better. So looking back, you know, what's happened in history, knowing it's not gonna get any slower, it's if anything, of course, gonna speed up. Yeah. And starting to look around us, you know, what are other people doing? What are other industries doing? Yeah we can learn a lot from other industries and and bring that back into our game. And and just being aware of what what's going on around us, um, and also internally, often we have a lot of hidden knowledge in our organization. So going out talking to the frontline who are talking to our customers and finding out what's happening out there, what do you think happens next?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

And trying to stop that voice that's saying that'll never work.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Yes, we have to work.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

That'll never work. Because we do, it's our logic. Our logic goes, ah yeah. You know, we we're we're being told at the moment that uh AI will help us live to 150. And you know, my my very best friend who's an engineer is that that's rubbish. That'll that'll never happen.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Let's see, let's see. Okay, I I've got my brain has just gone all over the place. But like you've given us some huge lessons, okay? So breaking out of our own echo chambers, and you know, the workplace does this, you know, the the systemic nature of an organization is that you work in here, therefore this is your lane. This is your lane, and you just stay in your lane. Don't don't let's not that great, let's not cross quality.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Yeah. I I tell you, I was um when I was uh heading up leadership, global head of leadership at Volvo Cars. Uh I r I remember uh being in the R D department and seeing a sign that said, um uh what was it? Come to the come to this workshop if you've got ideas and you're curious. So of course I went. Right. Because I signed up. Yeah. Uh when I got there, it's like, well, what are you doing here? But I've got ideas and uh, you know, I'm curious. And it was like, no, but you belong over in in in the Leadership Academy. What are you doing here? And of course, through dialogue, we worked out that we had similar ambitions, but we were coming from different angles. I was coming from the people side and they were coming from the uh the the more RD side um technical side. Yeah. And it worked, but we had to have, if you like, the conflict before we moved forward. And it was great, really good.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

That's when magic happens, right? Yeah, absolutely. So it's breaking your echo chamber, so not staying in your lane ideally, but then breaking your echo chamber from an industry perspective, you talked about, looking back to look forward, that's really interesting as well. I've got another question for you in terms of looking back to look forward in a sec, but internally talking to your frontline, so doing a bit of a listening tour of your people, they're seeing stuff and they're probably future predicting as well. So why not speak with them? But I have a question for you, okay? AI, this big thing called AI, artificial intelligence, is here, it is here and it's staying here for a while. TG. Now, AI is very much taught on our past behaviors and our past actions. Exactly. Right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

So, in relation to AI, uh, can it partner with us as an imagination kind of tool? Or is it a kind of tool that can kind of limit us? Do you have thoughts on this one, Liz?

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Of course. Yeah, it's good. Um, I I've got a nice little quote from Fay Fei Lee, uh, from the AI side, who said that the the human touch, intuition, curiosity, and moral, and there's a highlight on moral uh imagination is essential to sh shape AI for for good. Um and uh you know, I think there is a sense, yeah, there's been quite a few articles now that Chat GPT is dumbing us down because it's repeating back what everybody is is what it's learnt from from the rest of us. Regurgitating Exactly. So it's it's repetition. You know, we're training our systems on this, you know, existing data. So it of course it's going to reflect back what what it what it knows about us. So I think then there was that recent um on LinkedIn, wasn't there, that some women were changing their profiles and pretending to be men because they uh said that their um uh impressions were dropping. Wow. Which was very, very interesting. And of course LinkedIn said no, it's not the algorithm, but arguably the algorithm is picking up on the data that it's finding.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Oh gosh.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

And and and I think that's that's super interesting. You know, if we if we look, for example, um, yeah, if we if we look at the average CEO in the world, they tend to be white and men and between 50 and 60. And that's just the way it is at the moment. And so of course, if you're using data from that source, then that's you know, that's what you get back. So when it comes to innovation and creativity, I think we've got to be careful with AI. But I think we can use AI. I mean, use AI as the baseline. I often do that, just you know, tell me about this topic.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

And, you know, and I might get some very generic ideas, but then that can be part of the the group of ideas. So when you're doing your brainstorming, what is AI saying? What are we saying? Um, just to rely on it without thinking would be a disaster.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Absolutely so. Okay. So you know I'm all about organizational culture and you know, making making work more meaningful. So, what does a curious workplace culture look like in behavior, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 18:38

A curious work culture. I mean, I think there are some that claim to to be, of course.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Um, I think uh places like Google, for example, is well known for having this uh 20% where you can work on any project you you like.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Um so I like that. So a day a week, there's there's other companies that I know that have an Imagination Friday, which I love. Clear the meetings, and from the top, you you work on learning or going to visit another company or whatever it may be.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

I think that's really important. Um, some organizations have uh have curiosity embedded into their performance. So, you know, what have you learned? And I think that is really important. Uh, you know, uh giving people that opportunity to learn because we need to be learning and we need to be learning all the time, right? I mean, it's not like you do uh one course a year, oh, and I'm I'm done, that's it. No, uh it it's learning as part of the job, and that was an interesting story. Recently, I was speaking to um a leader who said that her leader had told her that she had done enough learning for the year, and it's like how can you ever, ever, ever do enough learning and it's you know, it's it's always and forever, right? Indeed, indeed. Yeah, yeah, no, I think um yeah, it's it's really, really focusing on that um curiosity culture, which of course when we're establ an established organization and and we've been very successful doing what we do, we can find that that very, very difficult. Uh and it's this idea that we've got to perform and transform. And that's hard because they're two different sets, skill sets.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

They're very different. One is just, you know, business as usual, another one is here, there, everywhere. And you, you know, we we we're trying, we with ideating, definitely you you have goals, you achieve stuff, but you're also gonna fail. Um going back to learning as well, and the fact that that person's manager said, I think you've done enough learning for the year. Um perhaps, and I'm really trying to get into the manager's head here, a lot of the time managers go into budget thinking, oh, well, you've allocated your money for you know, blah blah learning this year. That's what that language might be around potentially. But I mean, this is tapping into your brilliant background as well. How can organizations create a learning culture? Because this is clearly an important thing given the rapid pace of change, the rapid pace of technological change, and therefore the fact that the workplace has to evolve as fast as everything else.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Yeah. And I, you know, I think if we look at a degree, you know, the the the setup of a degree work retire, I mean, that's that's kind of out of date now, right? Uh when you look at the half life of the knowledge of a degree is just reducing rapidly. Yeah, the last time I looked, it was five years for an engineering degree, and and and that is constantly changing. So we can't rely on that formula anymore. So we need to be able to learn as we go, if you like. I think we'll see more of this. I think we'll start to see universities and businesses working much more closely together.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

And and uh and Amy Edmondson frames it in quite a nice way because she said, you know, why are we not framing work as learning? Because it is really and it should be if we're transforming. We are learning every day. So how can we have that mindset? Um, I think a common theme that I often hear uh from maybe sort of middle managers is we just don't we don't have time. Yeah we know that process is broken, but we don't have time to fix it because we've got to deliver. And that's a such a common theme. You know, it's so focused on delivery, so there's no time to improve the process that is slowing us down. So I think uh uh another good thing is is when leaders, of course, role model learning. I had one organization recently where the CTO was online learning a new AI system and being vulnerable and showing you know what he didn't know. And I think that's really powerful because when the CTO is going, well, I don't understand this, and you know, I can't do this, it's sending a very clear to to the to the employees that it's okay because we don't know and we can't know, and we can never know it all. This mindset. Um companies like Microsoft, of course, you know, they when uh Nadala went in there and found that they had a really toxic, competitive culture that was very much we're experts and we know it all. And he encouraged listening, curiosity through questioning, coaching to be able to understand each other, and went from this know it all to what he calls a learn it all culture. I think there's a lot we can we can learn from that. Yeah, how can we make that shift? Because they did. Look at where they are now. I mean, we can't argue with their their valuation really, but um you know they've they've made quite a transformation.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Brilliant learning there. So uh another question for you. So imaginative thinkers often feel ahead of their time. How can they sustain themselves when others are not seeing that thing yet? But I see it, though, Liz, I see it. Others are not seeing it yet. That can be really frustrating in the workplace. I've been there and done that. Yeah, tell me about it.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Uh yeah. It takes persistence, it takes time. I think you know, the a key is trying to help people to see this in different ways. So you have to build on what's already there and what they already know. Okay, but it does take time to for people to catch up, and I'd say something that I've often done to deal with the frustration is to find my people.

SPEAKER_02 25:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Also find the people that do understand it uh in your organization, and then almost cause a group, you know, the early adopter group, and start to influence and build together. I I remember one uh one lady who was working in an organization who thought it would be a good idea to create a a coaching culture, so she said, but there are many qualified coaches in our business, so why don't we bring them together and they can coach other people in the organization and kind of like they you know, a knock-on effect. They then coach others and others and others. And the CEO was like, No way, this is ridiculous. We're not doing that. You know, they need to be doing their job. So she started it anyway, okay, and and built quite a community of coaches and it became really successful. And the CEO came to her and she got an award, and it was like, I was wrong. And that's fantastic, right? Beautiful. Because it was an initiative that was helpful for the business, helped with the results, of course. So, you know, helped them around many, many, many things. So um, you know, sometimes saying I'm wrong. Yeah. And I'm sorry I'm wrong, you know, because of course we're gonna get it wrong.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Absolutely. So for those organizations who are not being curious, what kind of regrets do you think they're gonna have beyond this?

SPEAKER_01 26:51

I think there'll be many regrets, right? You know, there's so much happening uh that you know, even the people I know who are so-called AI experts have no clue of what's happening because every day there's something new pop in.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Um, so there'll definitely be a lot of regrets. Uh, I think the the biggest one for me will be those organizations that don't embrace human-centric ways of working. For me, that's human-centric leadership. Um, but we we've said probably all the time that you and I have been working that people are our most important asset. But yes, Dill. The statistic that I got from Deloitte was 59% of organizations are putting tech first.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

And often they're ignoring the human touch. And we know, we know that when we put people first and bring them along on the transformation journey, bring them along on this AI journey, we get greater results. But we somehow uh are refusing to believe in this. And that will be the biggest gr regret, I think, for the companies that don't adopt a human-first approach. Because, you know, we have unlimited potential as human beings. If we're box boxing it in and keeping us sort of stuck in silos or jobs that are restricted, then we're not bringing out the best in our people.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Okay. So we've picked up loads here. So break out of your echo chamber or your lane, whatever you want to call it, look back to look forward, do a listening tour of your people, find out what the hell they're seeing, feeling, believing about the future, and really truly listen and then do something about it. Curiosity embedded into performance. I love that. There's a thought there, and then creating a learning culture in relation to that as well. Learn as we go rather than we know everything. We we'd never do. I mean, that's just a silly statement itself. Um, I've got one question for you. Ms. Liz Ryder. If I was to hand you a magic wand, this podcast is called Ways to Change Your Workplace. What is one way that you would change the way of the workplace, Liz?

SPEAKER_01 29:24

I would focus on leadership as a whole. Uh leadership is seen often as leadership development.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

And it's not. It's not just programs. It's much more than that. It's how leaders show up, it's how they role model, it's how they promote other leaders, it's how they tolerate behaviors within the organization. So it's much, much more than that. So I would shift from what I would say we've predominantly had, which is a bus business-centric businesses, to human-centric businesses. So it is a mindset shift and it is a behavioral shift. And that doesn't mean we stop looking at profit and a beta and et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't at all. It actually improves all of that. Yes. And so if we put humans at the heart of everything we do in business, knowing that that's how we will get to results. We will do better. But at the moment, we're still a little bit trapped in a model that has been there for over a hundred years. And it's broken, and we know it's broken because we've got people who are so busy every single day, working crazy hours and not really getting anywhere. So we need to change the system, and we need to start now.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

You speak my language, work isn't working, and Liz Ryder's details are in the show notes. Liz, I cannot thank you enough. If you like this episode, check out the show notes and sign up to my newsletter. That will help your workplace to be less shitty. It's full of novel ideas, good food for thought. And if you like this episode, pass it on to at least two people who will benefit. That's your good deed done for the day. Also, remember to subscribe to the Ways to Change Your Workplace Podcast via your podcast provider. And I will see you in the next episode.