Hunch

Todd Henry [00:00:03]:
The year was 1928, and Alexander Fleming was trying to cure influenza. The world had just undergone an influenza crisis, and he was working on solving the problem. As a researcher at St. Mary's Hospital in London, he had spent years studying bacteria and potential treatments for various diseases. But one September morning, he noticed something odd about one of his petri dishes, something that had nothing to do with his flu research. Fleming had accidentally left a culture plate of Staphylococcus bacteria uncovered near an open window. When he returned from vacation, he found the plate was contaminated with mold. But what caught his attention wasn't the contamination itself.

Todd Henry [00:00:43]:
It was what happened around it. The areas surrounding the mold were clear, suggesting that the bacteria had been destroyed. This accidental discovery led Fleming down an entirely different path than his original objective. The mold turned out to be the Penicillum genus. And Fleming had stumbled upon what would become one of the most important medical discoveries in human penicillin, the first antibiotic. But what's particularly fascinating is that Fleming wasn't looking for antibiotics. That was not his objective. He wasn't even working on anything related to antibiotics.

Todd Henry [00:01:20]:
His failure to maintain proper laboratory protocols, leaving the petri dish uncovered, created the perfect conditions for this revolutionary discovery. It would take another decade and many different researchers to develop penicillin into a usable medicine. But Fleming's accidental discovery during his flu research has saved countless millions of lives. All because he remained curious about something that, by all conventional metrics, was a mistake in his experimental process. As we enter the season of New Year's resolutions and ambitious goal setting, this raises intriguing questions about the nature of progress and innovation. How often do our carefully laid plans actually prevent us from seeing unexpected opportunities? What if our objectives, even those well intentioned January 1st resolutions, become blinders, causing us to miss the peripheral discoveries that could lead to breakthrough innovation in our life and in our work. Perhaps the real skill isn't in setting better objectives, but in developing the ability to recognize and pursue promising accidents when they occur.

Todd Henry [00:02:39]:
One of the most significant breakthroughs come not from closely following our plans, but from remaining open to the unexpected detours along the way. Maybe the key to innovation and breakthrough in our life and in our work isn't better goal setting, but better awareness, the kind of awareness that allows us to spot the significance in our supposed failures and mistakes. In our rush to define clear objectives for the year ahead, are we actually limiting our potential for transformative discovery? On today's episode, we're going to explore how to turn moments of serendipity into catalysts for progress. This is Daily Creative, a podcast for creative pros who want to be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:03:35]:
There are people out there who believe that they're not the kind of people who can have breakthrough ideas, that they are reserved for people in special places and special with special circumstances. You know, maybe Silicon Valley savants or people with special resources. In one way it lets us off the hook. You know, we say oh well, you know, we haven't got access to those resour.

Todd Henry [00:03:59]:
That's Bernadette Diwa, a recognized global authority on the role of story in business innovation and marketing and the author of five best selling books. We had a conversation about her book Hunch in which she explored how everyday insights become big breakthroughs. In fact, she discovered a few common traits among those who seem to be more readily able to spot those potential ahas.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:04:22]:
Who are these people who have great ideas and what's special about them? And what's special about them is. And what they share when I've gone and done the research is three qualities. Curiosity, empathy and imagination. And their attributes we can all develop.

Todd Henry [00:04:43]:
In Hunch, Giwa argues that there is a difference between opportunities and ideas. And we often confuse the two with less than stellar results.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:04:53]:
Well, opportunities are different to ideas because, you know, ideas are not something that's a problem begging for a solution. So an opportun opportunity is a problem that's begging for solution. When you think about an idea, you know, one of our ideas that we might fall in love with, you think about something like a segue, which you know, might have been a great idea, a great piece of technology, but was it solving a problem for a particular set of people? And an idea is only becomes meaningful when it's adopted by people. Whereas contrast that with something like a Tesla and you know, that was an opportunity, it was a problem begging for a solution. And you know, people who are, who act on hunches are empathetic and they understand how to make their ideas meaningful to other people.

Todd Henry [00:05:50]:
And this is an important distinction. I mean it might seem to you like a distinction without a difference, but it's not. Many creative pros go through their lives trying to generate ideas, but they're oblivious to the opportunities that are all around them. Instead, instead of seeking problems to solve, they begin with an objective, with a project. And that objective might make them blind to opportunities in their path. I'm currently reading a book called why Greatness Cannot be the Myth of the Objective, yes, this is what I do for fun over holiday break. The book's authors posit that at times the thing that gets most in the way of us achieving an objective is dun, dun, dun, dun. The objective itself.

Todd Henry [00:06:33]:
When we have tunnel vision, we ignore the noise in our environment because it doesn't seem relevant to efficiently solving the problem, to achieving the objective. However, it's often the noise in the environment that provides the most useful information and shows us non intuitive pathways to achieve the objective. Or maybe even discovering a new objective we'd never even considered. This is what happened with Fleming and his penicillin discovery. He wasn't trying to develop an antibiotic. In fact, the contaminated petri dishes were a nuisance to him. Achieving his objective. But because he was curious, he uncovered a new, much more valuable discovery.

Todd Henry [00:07:12]:
Had he just focused on his idea and not the opportunity in his path, he would have missed it altogether and countless more lives would have been lost. Bernadette has some specific ways in which we can cultivate a deeper sense of curiosity in our lives and in our work.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:07:31]:
Well, you're paying attention to what's going on in the real world. You're asking yourself the kind of questions, what's wrong? And how would I fix that? Or what's happening there that shouldn't be happening? Or what's not happening that should be happening, which is flipping that. And that's a great question to ask. And just observing, paying attention. And I talk a lot about, and I know this is a hot topic and you talk about it a lot, which is distraction. It stops us being curious. We're in our filter bubbles, we have got heads down, we're in our phones, we've got our earbuds in and we're not listening to conversations that are going on around us. And we're missing some golden opportunities.

Todd Henry [00:08:16]:
So paying better attention not just to what's happening, but how what's happening makes us feel, what it makes us think, what it makes us do in response. Noticing how the world is shaping us and considering how we might shape it back, these are all tactics to help us better spot opportunities through our curiosity.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:08:36]:
So that means we have to be thinking about problems and thinking about things in the everyday world and noticing. And there's no more valuable skill than noticing what's going on around you. I love some of the things that ideo, the design firm, does simple things like asking people to unpack their bags and explain to them why you carrying that stuff, you know, why is this in your bag? And just noticing the little shortcuts people take in their lives and things people do to adapt their environments to suit them. And, you know, this is how things like the iPhone, the GoPro camera, you know, Tesla cars, anything that we can care to think about, Starbucks, coffee, Spanx, they were all a result of somebody being curious about why. Why is it this way? How. How would we change that?

Todd Henry [00:09:39]:
Why is it this way? How would we change that? Now, that's the opposite of how many companies and creative pros approach their work. Instead, they begin with a project and just jump immediately to ideas. What if we do this? What if that. But what if instead you asked, what's the core problem here and why does it exist? Why does it have to be that way? Then you gave yourself some time to explore, to just experience the world while considering that problem. In doing this, you open yourself up to the possibility of entire universes of opportunities that you're not even considering. That's why I always coach leaders and teams to define the problems they're solving, not the projects they're accountable for. This is a core part of my book, the Accidental Creative. As you make progress on solving a problem, it's constantly redefined.

Todd Henry [00:10:31]:
You learn things along the way that might lead to the discovery that you're actually solving an entirely different problem than you'd originally thought. And that's often where breakthroughs come from.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:10:43]:
Really standing in somebody else's shoes and trying to get your head around, you know, what it feels like to be them. And that can be a tricky thing to do because we think we know and, and when it comes to ideas, we just go off on a. On a train. We. We fall in love with our own ideas. Is. Which is what you mentioned. You know, we think this is, you know, fabulous idea and, and everything's good with it.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:11:12]:
You know, the story of Sarah Blakely, who invented Spanx, which is the women's shapewear brand. She. She can tell stories about the people in the industry who thought they had it nailed. They had been making underwear and shapewear and. For. For women for years, and they'd never actually fitted any of this shapewear on a real woman. They. They use plastic models so that.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:11:44]:
How. How could it be coming to that? And how she actually evolved her brand and made it, trying her products on real women and getting feedback from them and then iterating from there.

Todd Henry [00:12:01]:
And as you are iterating, imagination plays a key role. The willingness to suspend your doubts and to follow intuitive hunches.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:12:09]:
It's about making a leap, isn't it? You know, imagining is about what Steve Jobs would have said is connecting the dots. You know, it's about having this foresight to make a prediction and then trust your gut and go, you know, we've got all this data right now and I think we lean on that quite a bit.

Todd Henry [00:12:29]:
One of the examples that Bernadette mentions in Hunch is Tina Roth Eisenberg, who is one of my favorite creators and someone who has always been very supportive of my work, and I'm really thankful for that. In addition to being a phenomenal designer and writer, Tina has founded a number of initiatives from Creative Mornings to Tattly, a temporary tattoo company. Tina is one of the many examples of entrepreneurs who fell in love with problems rather than objectives.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:12:55]:
She could do anything, whatever she would turn her hand to. I'm glad you mentioned Tina. You know, lots of stories in the book about female entrepreneurs. The founder of GoldieBlox, the girls construction toy, and people with what seemed like very ordinary, boring ideas. An ironing board cover. The farmer who discovered that he could take his waste, his carrots that he couldn't sell because they didn't pretty and, and pre prepare them and then sell them for more money and change the car. You know, just reinvented this whole category. So yeah, it's just an exciting, it's an exciting thing to think about, you know, the potential that we all have to, to do this work.

Bernadette Jiwa [00:13:39]:
Noticing and questioning are two of the most important things you can do in your day. It's so tempting to consume instead of creating and you know, that's, that's the easy route and, and you've got everything you need to get going. So just do, just do start.

Todd Henry [00:14:05]:
Bernadette Giwa's book is called Hunch and it's available wherever books are sold. Our original conversation took place in 2017 and you can listen to our full interview with Bernadette in the Daily Creative app at DailyCreative app. There you'll also find daily episodes, prompts, Q and A segments, and the full archives of episodes dating back years and years and years, noticing and questioning. Maybe this year, instead of making a resolution or setting an ambitious goal, you should instead start with a problem. Why are things the way they are? How might they be different? What opportunities could there be for you to make that change? And how can you be more mindful in your daily life about noticing serendipity hunches, those little accidents in your petri dish? Maybe instead of starting with the objective, we could start with our own curiosity. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd again, like full interviews, daily episodes, Q and A segments, courses, guides, videos and much more. Just visit DailyCreative App Plus.

Todd Henry [00:15:17]:
It's a great way to support the show and we're appreciative of all of the app subscribers. My name is Todd Henry and you can find my seven books, my speaking, and much more at toddhenry.com or wherever books are sold. Until next time, May you be brave, focused and brilliant.