Signal To Noise

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In 1948, a 31 year old mathematician at Bell Labs in New Jersey published a paper that would change the world. Not in the dramatic, obvious way, like a bomb or a rocket, but quietly, in the technical journal in language so abstract that most of his colleagues at the time barely understood what they were reading. The paper was called a Mathematical Theory of communication. Scientific American would later describe it as the Magna Carta of the information age. His name was Claude Shannon, and the central problem he was trying to solve was deceptively simple. When you send a message, how do you make sure that what arrives on the other end is what you actually sent? His answer, and the insight that birthed the entire digital world was that every communication system is swimming in noise, static, interference, distortion. The challenge is never the signal itself. The signal is always there.

Todd Henry [00:00:57]:

The challenge is learning to separate the signal from everything else that's fighting for space on the channel. Shannon called this the signal to noise ratio. And his paper proved mathematically that you could always transmit a message with perfect accuracy if you understood the noise. Here's what I love about this story. Shannon's own life was a kind of demonstration of this theory. He was, by many accounts, one of the most focused thinkers of the 20th century, a man who could sit with a problem for years and come out the other side with an answer that no one had come even close to. But he wasn't serious or solemn about it. He was famous at Bell Labs for riding his unicycle through the hallways sometimes while juggling.

Todd Henry [00:01:39]:

He built a mechanical mouse that solved mazes. He built a computer that calculated in Roman numerals a robotic juggling clown. He was just constitutionally incapable of paying attention to things that didn't interest him. And yet, with all that noise, he produced some of the most consequential intellectual work of the century. Because the work he chose to protect the signal, he refused to let the noise drown out. He protected completely. I think it's helpful to think about Claude Shannon in the context of what it takes to do meaningful creative work today. Because the noise has never been louder.

Todd Henry [00:02:14]:

The meetings, the messages, the notifications, the endless stream of inputs clamoring for our attention, none of that was part of Shannon's world. It just simply wasn't. I know it probably felt like it at the time, but it's nothing comparable to what we experience today. And still he understood that the great discipline of a creative life isn't generating signal, it's protecting it. In my book, Herding Tigers, I wrote about the leader's essential job Creating the conditions where brilliant people can do their best work. Before you can do that for your team, you have to do that for yourself. You have to decide what your signal is, the work that actually matters, the contribution that only you can make, the thing that you are positioned to, to contribute to your team. And then you have to build a life that keeps the noise from swallowing it.

Todd Henry [00:02:58]:

Today's episode is about exactly that. My first guest, Ron Friedman, is the author of a book called Superteams. He spent many years studying what the highest performing teams in the world do differently. And a lot of it comes down to deliberate structural choices about where their attention goes. And then we're going to welcome Fred Marshall, the author of Thrive. He's going to show us how to take that same thinking and apply it to our whole life, not just to our team. The noise is always going to be there. Shannon proved that.

Todd Henry [00:03:26]:

The question is, what are we going to do about it? This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, 20 years, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Ron Friedman [00:03:44]:

So over the last few years, my team and I have gone deep on what high performing teams do differently.

Todd Henry [00:03:49]:

That's Ron Friedman, author of the new book Super Teams.

Ron Friedman [00:03:52]:

And here's we did it. We pulled thousands of workers and we asked them two key questions about their teams. The first is, how effective is your team at achieving its goals? And the second is, on a scale of 1 to 10 compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team's performance? And then we looked at the patterns and we looked at what are the teams who are achieving perfect scores. A very tiny group called super teams. What are they doing differently compared to average teams? And we looked at everything from how they structure their day to how they run their meetings, to even how they recover on downtime on evenings and weekends and vacations. And what we found is that super teams share three key strengths. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy and attention. The second is they don't just collaborate well.

Ron Friedman [00:04:38]:

They actively make one another better. And the third is they're not satisfied when things are going well. They're constantly building new skills and improving over time. And the message I try to convey to people is that this is great news because each and every one of those strengths is learnable, which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance.

Todd Henry [00:04:58]:

You introduced a phrase in the book called the Sunday Litmus Test. Could you. Can you Describe what that is. Yeah.

Ron Friedman [00:05:03]:

This is one of the best indicators of whether you're on a high performing team is how do you feel on Sunday night? A lot of people feel like this growing sense of dread. And there's actually a term for this, it's called the Sunday scaries. And if you feel that way, if you feel like you're pretty good mood Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, not so great. Sunday night, you're like, that's a sign that maybe you're not on a high performing team. On super teams, they are far more likely to look forward to going into work on Mondays because being at work energizes them. It allows them to do their best work with the people who really build them up. And that's what you're looking for in terms of the team you work with. And anyone can have that.

Ron Friedman [00:05:40]:

It really is possible.

Todd Henry [00:05:41]:

I think we've all experienced that, that sort of pit in our stomach at some point in our life. We've all had a job where we're like, wait a minute, I don't think. And then that really speaks to, I think, the culture that we're stepping into, whether we're truly excited about the work, whether we really are excited to collaborate with people that we're going to be collaborating with. And I want to dive into those three kind of essentials that you talked about. Can you talk? I want to talk about shared goals first because I think this is really tricky because we all have our own career objectives, our own career goals. Maybe there's some competition involved when we're collaborating with our peers, but still there's some competition involved because we're all vying for maybe for the, for recognition, for the promotion. How do effective teams align around shared goals? What are some common practices that they have?

Ron Friedman [00:06:26]:

Yeah, so before I get to the common practices, let me explain why shared goals are so important. So in the book and the introduction to the books, the first thing I talk about is how do you turn a group of people into an actual team? We use that term team all the time. But just because people work together in the same group, that doesn't mean they share. They're actually part of a team. A lot of times, a lot of organizations I've worked with, you just basically have people who have their own objective tasks that they're working on. But it's not really clear how my work fits with your work or why we should even worry about making each other better. And so how do you create that team mentality? Look, teams have three key components. One is A shared goal, meaning that we're all working towards the same objective.

Ron Friedman [00:07:08]:

You pointed out most organizations that's not really the case where I have my own career objectives, you have your own career objectives, and they don't overlap. The second is role clarity. I need to know what I'm responsible for and where that responsibility ends and where your responsibilities begin and how they fit together in order to help our team move forward. And then finally, we need to have interdependence. Interdependence is a psychological term that just means we need to believe that we need each other in order to succeed. If we're individual salespeople that don't have any overlapping metrics that we both need to contribute to, there's no reason for us to have a shared goal or any sense of interdependence. And so it's really up to leaders to create that sense of having a shared goal and build interdependence if they want people to feel like they're part of a team. So how do you do it? One obvious approach is to develop a metric that can only be achieved through collaboration.

Ron Friedman [00:08:04]:

For example, if we're salespeople and we have. We have our own individual quotas, that's not something that necessarily can lead both of us to feel like we need to collaborate. But if there is a team wide quota, that starts to get a little closer. Another metric you can use is customer willingness to recommend. That can be another metric that both of us need to contribute to. I can do a great job in terms of the customer service I provide on my sales calls, but if you do a poor job, then we're going to fall. We're going to fall short. And then tying some kind of financial incentive around that team metric.

Ron Friedman [00:08:40]:

In a different part of the book, I talk about a metric that a the 30% rule, which is a. A tactic that 3M uses to incentivize innovation. 3M is a company that is best known for Post its and Scotch Tape. They've been around for 120 years. How do you create a team that's been around that just continues to evolve over 120 years? One of the secrets is the 30% rule. The 30% rule says in order for a division to earn its bonus, at least 30% of its revenue must come from a product introduced in the last four years that keeps people focused. Even if things are going well, they're constantly thinking about what's next because they want to earn that bonus. And it requires the entire team to work together in order to achieve that objective.

Ron Friedman [00:09:21]:

That's how you create a shared goal.

Todd Henry [00:09:23]:

I love that. I want to also talk about role clarity, because this is a problem that I encounter. I'm sure you encounter as well when you're working with organizations. A lot of the conflict in organizations comes from people encroach either encroaching on other people's turf or not fully occupying the turf that they're supposed to occupy. So other people have to step in and cover for them. Right. And it creates all kinds of resentment and frustration and tension. How do we better, especially as the leaders listening, how do we better help define that role clarity for our team?

Ron Friedman [00:09:54]:

I think a big part of it starts with moving away from tasks to outcomes. So instead of saying, you're in charge of updating the list on Mondays, this is what we're. This is. These are the metrics we need every Monday. And how it gets done is up to you, but you're responsible for the outcome. And so rather than thinking about tasks, we need to think about outcomes, and we need to empower people to feel like they're the ones responsible for achieving those outcomes.

Todd Henry [00:10:21]:

I would love for you to share with us what your research revealed about the bank of many professionals existence, which is meetings. Most of us look with dread at our schedule. What have you discovered about how effective teams use meetings differently than most organizations?

Ron Friedman [00:10:38]:

So let me give you a snapshot of how the average worker spends their time. The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. They then lose another 11 hours a week to messages. What does that leave for real work? For most people, it means they have about a single day to do a week's work. And so what happens when you have to cram a week's worth of work into a single day? You look for ways to create more time. You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends. And that approach can serve you in the short term. But if you work like that over a period of years, invariably you're going to burn out.

Ron Friedman [00:11:10]:

So what super teams do differently is they are much more deliberate with how hours are spent in the workplace. They don't make meetings the default. They make meetings a last resort. They're 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They're 54% less likely to schedule recurring meetings. And recurring meetings are particularly insidious because they're so difficult to remove from a calendar, because it almost feels like you're breaking up with someone to tell them, hey, I don't find our time together valuable anymore. If you can avoid recurring meetings that's incredibly helpful. The other thing they do is they don't just play defense, they also play offense.

Ron Friedman [00:11:43]:

They dedicate focus time during the day to getting real work done during regular work hours. They do things like meeting free days, except they don't call them meeting free days. They call them get things done days because they want to reinforce the purpose behind the initiative. The other thing I'll say about meetings is the simplest way to shrink the number of unnecessary meetings on your calendar is to get clear with your team on what deserves a meeting and what doesn't deserve a meeting. And I call these meeting guidelines. So, for example, on my team, we have one simple guideline. No decision, no meeting. Unless there's a decision to be made.

Ron Friedman [00:12:17]:

We're not going to pull people away from their work. If you have a question, pick up the phone. If you have an update, send an email or take a screen capture. What that allows us to ensure is that people get to devote more of their best hours to actually moving the ball forward instead of being stuck in meetings all week.

Todd Henry [00:12:33]:

So I just want to ask you about feedback because this is also an area where I find a lot of conflict, especially in the creative teams I work with. Either leaders don't know how to give feedback, or people in the organization don't know how to ask for feedback. They don't know the right way to do this. So what do super teams do differently? How do they treat feedback?

Ron Friedman [00:12:52]:

First thing they do differently is they are much higher in feedback seeking. And this is one of the key behaviors that contributes to the third strength. So we talked about the three strengths being better, managing time, energy, and attention, making each other better. And the third strength is they keep getting better over time. So feedback seeking is a behavior that involves going to your colleagues proactively and saying, hey, what do you think about this? And then using your feedback to improve your work product before it gets to the manager or to the client. And so when you're higher in feedback seeking, and this is something that the leader needs to model, they need to go to the team when they need feedback. So that starts with the leader. But the other thing a leader can do is when someone submits a work project to you, say, hey, did you run this by Henry? What did Henry think about this? Or what did Madeline have to say about that? And that teaches people that actually it's expected for you to share this with your colleagues before it gets to the leader.

Ron Friedman [00:13:47]:

So that's one component that helps super teams improve is being higher in feedback seeking. The other thing I'll say about feedback. And there's a section on this in the book. 97% of feedback doesn't improve performance. Even worse, a third of feedback actively worsens performance. And so how do you get into that 3% range of feedback that actively improves people performance? In the book I in super teams, I talk a lot about the different strategies, but I'll just give you one now, and that is don't focus on the past, focus on the future. Don't go through a litany of all the things that your colleague did wrong and how it impacted you. That's a lot of leaders are taught to do that.

Ron Friedman [00:14:26]:

Don't do it. It's not good, it's not effective. Because what happens is it requires people to get. It makes people defensive because now they have to explain why they did what they did or correct your assumption that they actually did those things. Instead, just say, hey, Todd, the next time we have an interview, would you consider sending me your questions in advance so I can give richer answers instead of saying, hey, Todd, I wasn't expecting half those questions and no wonder, I bombed the interview. So that way you both focused on the future and it really feels like a collaboration where both sides are moving each other forward.

Todd Henry [00:14:59]:

By the way, you are excelling in this interview. I just want to be clear about that.

Ron Friedman [00:15:01]:

Ron, I appreciate the reason your next

Todd Henry [00:15:04]:

performance review is going to be stellar. I'm just telling you right now. Okay. There's one other area I want to explore with you because this is counterintuitive to a lot of leaders. Organizations are designed to achieve efficiency. That's what organizations tend to do. So we tend to organize around trying to make things as efficient as possible. But the problem is when we're doing mind work, some of the things that we do in order to produce value look inefficient to the organization at times.

Todd Henry [00:15:29]:

I was working with an organization recently and somebody said it's not inefficient, it's invisible efficiency. And I loved that phrase. I thought it was a really great way to say it. But I want to talk about the importance of downtime, which is something that I think you call it strategic recovery. In the book. Talk to us about why that's so important. What did your research reveal about that and how do great teams do this effectively?

Ron Friedman [00:15:51]:

Yeah. So if you're listening to Todd Henry's podcast, I assume that you understand the value of downtime. But I will say if you look at top performers, if you look at top, specifically athletes, they take their recovery as Seriously, as their on court or on field performance, they are really deadly serious about it. So to me, where I think this gets really interesting is a lot of people assume that not working is equal to recovery. In other words, when you're not working, you're automatically recovering. That is not the case. Just because you are scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix, that doesn't help you recover. You know what helps you recover? It's mastery experiences.

Ron Friedman [00:16:30]:

It's doing things that stretch your skills and challenge you in new ways. So depending on your interest, that can mean learning a new song on the piano, or trying out a new dish in the kitchen, or playing pickleball and entering a pickleball tournament. The key is to find something that enriches your life and challenges you in new ways, helps you learn new things, because that empowers you to show up with more energy at work. And so the way to think about this is when it comes to downtime, don't try to slow down. Instead aim to accelerate in a different direction.

Todd Henry [00:17:02]:

I think your point about just not working is not the same thing as recovering. And that is, I think for a lot of creative pros who use their minds all week, sometimes they want to just on the weekend, they just want to completely blink out and check out and binge Netflix or something and listen, there are times for that when you are thoroughly exhausted or on the verge of burnout maybe. But to your point, I think engaging in thoughtful activity that really does allow you to reclaim your sense of passion or just rejuvenate yourself. Right? Just to get engaged in a different way, to apply that sort of to keep your. The quiet fire, the little flame alive inside of you is so important.

Ron Friedman [00:17:41]:

Remember, super teams experiment more often and this could be your experiment. So find just continuously working on how the team works, utilizing the feedback to get better the next time. That's how we all learn. And the same applies for the way our teams operate.

Todd Henry [00:17:57]:

Ron Friedman's book Superteams is available now wherever books are sold. What he just described, at its core is kind of a design problem. The Average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings, another 11 hours to messages, which means most people have maybe one full day of actual work each week. That's not a personal failing. That's an environment that hasn't been designed with intention. And super teams in Ron's research distinguish themselves largely by their willingness to redesign it, to make meetings a last resort to protect focus, time to build shared goals that give everyone's work a common direction. And that's the Team level. But there's a prior question, and I think it's a harder one.

Todd Henry [00:18:38]:

What about the individual level? What do you do when the noise isn't just in your calendar, but it's in your head? When the overwhelm isn't just a meeting problem, but a thinking one, a cognitive one. When you're so saturated with information and input and open loops that you can't even find the signal you're supposed to be protecting. That's the territory Fred Marshall lives in. Fred's work starts from a deceptively simple premise. We're living through something that Alvin Toffler predicted back in 1970 called Future Shock, a cognitive overload so severe that most people just lock up. And the antidote isn't to slow down, it's to design better. Ron gave us a playbook for protecting our team signal, and Fred Marshall is going to give you the playbook to protect your own. We'll be right back with our conversation with Fred Marshall, author of Thrive, in just a minute.

Todd Henry [00:19:29]:

Stick around.

Fred Marshall [00:19:39]:

Foreign. So Alvin Toffler, way back in 1970, was the first person to recognize that information technology was going to accelerate everything, including the rate of change, but most importantly the rate of information flow into our lives.

Todd Henry [00:19:59]:

That's Frederick Marshall, or Fred, as he told me to call him. He's the author of a new book called Thrive.

Fred Marshall [00:20:05]:

And he didn't anticipate the iPhone, he didn't anticipate social media, he didn't anticipate 247 cable news. None of that existed at the time. So it was pretty prescient of him. But he was a bit ahead of his time. And now the situation that we're in is one everybody experiences every day, is that there's too much of everything and it's hard to process. Our brains really struggle to keep up with it. And so future shock is this almost a syndrome where you just kind of shut down. And some people, there's a recent article in Harvard Business Review called brain fry, or about brain fry as the extreme version of this.

Fred Marshall [00:20:40]:

But future shock is when you can't process anymore and you just kind of lock up.

Todd Henry [00:20:44]:

What you just described is the situation I think, that many leaders find themselves in right now, this situation of it's not even uncertainty. I think uncertainty has always been our ever present companion as we try to lead other people. It's an inability to even process the uncertainty. At least in the past, there's been a shape to the uncertainty. We're not sure where things are going, but there are probably three or four different directions things could head and we're not certain, but. But at least there's some clarity. But I feel like there's even a lack of clarity for a lot of leaders. What is the timeline? What's this gonna look like? What's my job gonna look like? What skills should I be developing now to be able to be useful in five years or seven years or next year?

Fred Marshall [00:21:26]:

Nobody knows the answer to that, unfortunately. Right. We, we're all grappling, but we know some things are going to stay the same. Houses have been the same for about 300 years. They haven't changed really much at all, except for ac. So a lot of our lives are going to be exactly the same as before. But I think what's different is the amount of information that we have to manage and deal with as leaders and the organization of that information. For example, I love the Weather Channel, specifically Apple's little weather app on my phone, because I don't need to know anything about barometric pressure.

Fred Marshall [00:21:56]:

I just have the simplest data compressed dashboard. At between 1:30 and 4, there's an 80% chance of rain. Okay, I can act on that, but if you just gave me spreadsheets of data, then I can't process it. And if I've got four or five or six or seven data streams coming into my brain that are not very well organized, I have to work to separate signal from noise because it's not form, it's not pre formatted yet. You know what I mean by that? And so that's where great design comes in. Because if you can design the way information is flowing into your mind and the different areas that you're responsible for and put together what I would describe as data compressed, nice, clean, elegantly designed formats that let you go, oh, okay, I get the gist of this. Next. Oh, this is what this is about.

Fred Marshall [00:22:44]:

Next. We're not. Our brains can't handle unstructured data very well. It just is too. It burns out our mitochondria and every neuron in our brains. Oh my God, I can't keep up with this. And so I think that's a practical solution is to really focus on what we're letting into our brains and who we're letting into our brains as well,

Todd Henry [00:23:04]:

you suggest that we should view our lives as an integrated ecosystem rather than a stack of unrelated tasks. I love that perspective. Could you explain or just give us an overview of the Super 8 building blocks that you describe in the book?

Fred Marshall [00:23:17]:

So this isn't necessarily for leaders, but it's also appropriate for leaders as well. This is just for anybody. So there are really eight areas that if you get them dialed in and working together, you're going to be a happy camper. And right now for most of us, they're kind of all pointing in different directions. And if you just get even partial alignment, you're going to be good to go. You're going to be so much happier. So the first one is your neural net. We think of it as our mind, our brain, and.

Fred Marshall [00:23:42]:

But it's really a neural net. And neural nets have very specific qualities. But the most important thing to remember is that what you feed your neural net determines what you end up doing and creating in your life. So that's the first building block. The first of the Super 8 is your neural net. Be careful what you feed it because that drives your destiny. Decisions, conclusions, actions. The second is your biological self.

Fred Marshall [00:24:05]:

And to me, that's all about your cells. We're made of a lot of cells, trillions. So plus or minus. And they all work together seamlessly to create. You talk about working together perfectly. They work together elegantly, but there's a lot of wear and tear on cells. And so we have to take good care of ourselves if we do that. Everything else works.

Fred Marshall [00:24:25]:

Organs, tissues, life, sight. Everything else is good when your cells are happy. The third is relationships. The right people simplify everything and the wrong people can kind of mess things up. I'm sure you've had that experience where some people walk into a room and they just complicate everything and other people walk in and they just simplify it instantly. I'm really good friends with Peter Diamandis. I was just on a call with him yesterday and we were talking about some stuff and he said something really simple and elegant. He said meaningful and productive work on meaningful things.

Fred Marshall [00:24:59]:

If it's not meaningful, I'm not even paying attention to it. He just simplifies everything and then make sure that we're being productive, we're spending the right amount of time and right amount of attention. And that's such a powerful notion. And people belong in that equation too, right? This person doesn't belong in this medium, maybe doesn't belong in my life, and this person does. And actively curating who you let into your life and surrounding yourself with amazing people is such a game changer. The fourth one is systems. So we live in this complicated world today, and to keep up with the world, you can't do it yourself. You can't rely on memory, you can't rely on muscling through all that.

Fred Marshall [00:25:37]:

You need good systems to triage and navigate life and manage the details. And so the saying that I have is, better systems, better life. If you want to reach great heights, you need great systems. And once you get those in place, everything really runs smoothly. So just to run with that for a second, a system for doing workouts, a system for nutrition, a system for relationships. If you have those systems in place, then everything just flows. It's really elegant. Those are the first four.

Fred Marshall [00:26:07]:

Do you want. We can go into more.

Todd Henry [00:26:09]:

I would love to dive a little deeper into. Specifically into attention. You mentioned Peter Diamandis in the Meaningful and Productive. You introduced something you call the three bucket model for how especially creative pros should be allocating their attention. Could you share a little bit about that? Because I think that gives a little more granularity to what you were describing about meaningful and productive.

Fred Marshall [00:26:29]:

Yeah, it does. So what's the problem that we're trying to solve? The problem that we're trying to solve is that the world is clamoring for your attention. I get interrupted so often with this darn thing. Text messages, notifications, CVS wants me to pick up my prescriptions. I have other stuff to think about right now. And so you can divide everything that's clamoring for your attention into three buckets. The first and most important are your priorities. So those are things.

Fred Marshall [00:26:55]:

I define it as things that will change your future for the better. And if you think about it, everything that we want in life is on the other side of priorities. Love, health, wealth, deep relationships, meaningful work. All of those things can't be done in a weekend. They require larger arcs of time and larger arcs of attention to bring to fruition. Beautiful home, a gorgeous garden. I'm a big gardener. So priorities need to be protected because life will get in the way.

Fred Marshall [00:27:27]:

And it's really easy to let the priorities fall to the side and let urgent and maybe not so important get in the way. The second group are obligations. So that's the stuff that you have to do. I have to take out the trash. I have to do the dishes. I have to support people in my life. I have to respond to my boss's email or a customer's request. And obligations are really important.

Fred Marshall [00:27:49]:

They maintain the present, but they don't move your life forward. And so what you don't want is obligations to fill the frame of your calendar and crowd out your priorities. You have to make room every week. And I think the week is the magic unit of action and planning. Have a long Term vision, then pick what am I going to do this week to move that along and block out 60, 90 minutes to do that and really concentrate on that. All the best CEOs and great innovators I've ever met, they all do that, whether they call it that or not. They get a weekly cadence going in their calendar where they're really focused on priorities and not letting obligations consume their lives. And then the last is noise, and that's everything else.

Fred Marshall [00:28:33]:

And noise is seductive today, right? That you get a post, oh, I want to go there, it's so bad, but it's just AI slop or it's just a news feed, it's going to resolve itself. This thing that's the biggest nightmare and everybody's freaking out today about it's going to be gone in three days, maybe even three hours. So let that go. And if you organize your life to get the obligations automated, delegated or contained so you can focus on priorities and ignore the noise, you're going to get those Super 8 dialed in and have a great life.

Todd Henry [00:29:06]:

One of the pieces of advice that I often offer to leaders when I'm working with them along those lines is the line between meaning and obligation can be blurry as well, right? Because so much of leading anything is about tension. And I think most leaders see tension as a problem to be solved. And so they move those existing tensions into what they would consider to be meaning, even though really they're just obligations that need to be managed. But instead they move them into the meaning bucket, thinking, I need to be actively working on resolving this tension. And instead what they need to do is recognize this tension is never going to be resolved. This is a baked in inherent tension of leadership that's always going to be there. And if I allow it to, it will rob me of the time, the capacity, the mental intuition necessary to be able to do the work that I'm actually the value I'm being called to create. So how do we distinguish between obligation and meaning in those buckets? Especially when it feels so urgent, it feels so palpable to us.

Fred Marshall [00:30:09]:

Well, the tyranny of the urgent, right? The tyranny of relationship tension or emotional tension, or even something as simple as an open loop, something that's kind of nagging at you, this thing that you have. To me, open loops are stuff I have to get done I haven't done yet. And if it doesn't have a lot of emotional baggage or weight to it, I can kind of ignore it for a while. But if it's Connected to something emotional, A strong relationship where there's tension like you described. And that open loop is there. We're in conflict we haven't resolved yet. That'll occupy space in my brain. You'll dream about it at night.

Fred Marshall [00:30:39]:

It'll keep you up. Yes. And so recognizing that is. Is the first step, that there's some open loop or some tension that I have in my life that I need to work on. The second. Is this something that's maintaining the present? That's the question. Or is this something that's building the future? And if it's building the future, I need to work on it right now. If it's getting in the way of the future, I got to solve it immediately because I can't let the present hijack my future.

Fred Marshall [00:31:08]:

Do you know what I mean?

Todd Henry [00:31:09]:

I do, and I love that distinction. It's such an easy filter through which to. To flow anything that's creating anxiety or uncertainty for us.

Fred Marshall [00:31:20]:

Yeah. And I love the word anxiety, and I love the word uncertainty because that's how it's packaged.

Ron Friedman [00:31:25]:

Right.

Fred Marshall [00:31:25]:

It shows up as I get a knot in my stomach, or I feel weird about something, or I like, oh, my God, is this. And then because it's emotionally charged, it lingers. It's got a half life.

Todd Henry [00:31:35]:

That could be one of the areas of anxiety and uncertainty for probably everyone listening right now, or most people, is a fear that AI is going to replace us.

Fred Marshall [00:31:46]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:31:46]:

That AI is going to supplant human capacity. I think AI is probably the first deconstructive technology that I've experienced in my lifetime. Meaning it's deconstructing narratives about what it means to be a human in a way that I think no other technology has. Right. So you talk about human AI symbiosis, and I would love for you to give us some hope. Why is that shared consciousness of symbiosis important? Why do you think that's the future?

Fred Marshall [00:32:13]:

So let's talk about AI for a second, and then we can talk about symbiosis. So AI is good right now anyway. It's good at three different things. It's great at recognizing patterns in complicated data sets, and, boy, is that useful and powerful. The reverse of that is generating patterns. And generative AI. It recognizes patterns in facial features and hair movement and so forth. And it can generate videos of people that look incredibly real because it's been trained upon all that data.

Fred Marshall [00:32:41]:

So those two functions are so powerful. You could look at all kinds of patient records and look for patterns in the data that suggest that there's a correlation between cause and effect, between this action or this thing and some disease state. The number of use cases for that are just incredible. And AI can just knock it out in record time. What is human AI symbiosis? It's when you think of AI not as a simple tool, but as a collaborative partner in doing the three things that we need to do. Move our priorities forward. Right. Help me create that future that I want to create.

Fred Marshall [00:33:18]:

And it's so good at that. And it's getting better every single day. Help me manage my obligations, triage my calendar. I think Apple is starting to get there with the phone. It's doing a relatively good job of triaging my email and dividing it into buckets. And so I only look at the first buckets, the one that I really care about. And the other stuff I kind of ignore. That's fantastic.

Fred Marshall [00:33:41]:

And then the third is to get rid of the noise. Get the noise out of your life. So what human AI symbiosis is at the basic level is using it to contain your obligations and manage them in the background automatically. Just like your thermostat keeps the temperature in your house where you want it to be, and then helps empower you to deliver the future that you want. But there's another level, too, that we'll get to maybe 20, 28, 29, 30, somewhere in there. And that's where we literally have shared consciousness. So you know how you have a friend and you're talking with them and you can finish their sentence. What that means is our neural nets have this commonality, the structure of our minds, the experiences and the patterns that we've uncoded, if you will, or untangled.

Fred Marshall [00:34:31]:

They're common. And so if I head down a path, my wife knows where I'm going, for example, but any good friend can do that. I started to notice that with ChatGPT, and then Gemini. And Claude is really good at it. It's starting to anticipate where I'm going. And that's. It's not cre. It could be creepy, but I don't think of it as creepy.

Fred Marshall [00:34:50]:

I think of it as fantastic. Yeah, that is where I'm going. So how do we build on that? How do we create a shared consciousness? And at some point when the guardrails are really good and tight and we can trust them and that will come. It's not here yet by all, by any means, but it will be there. We'll have really tight guardrails and high trust, then you can delegate so much, you can collaborate so much, you can do stuff together. So we know how to solve that problem, right? We talked about it earlier. You got to chunk it down, simplify it, and put together a abstracted version, a data compressed version of it. That's like the Weather Channel.

Fred Marshall [00:35:27]:

It just has a cloud with some rain things on it. And the probability of the rain, oh, it's 40%, okay, I'm going out. It's 80%. Okay, I better bring an umbrella. That's the kind of data compression and dashboarding that's going to simplify everything. And then the other thing I think that needs to be said is let AI manage all those details. It's not there yet, but it's going to be.

Todd Henry [00:35:51]:

Fred Marshall's new book, Thrive, is available now wherever books are sold. So I want to come back to Claude Shannon the story we started with for just a moment. The insight at the heart of his 1948 paper was this noise doesn't have to win. No matter how much interference exists in the channel, you can still get a clean signal through if you understand the structure of the noise and design for it. The problem isn't the noise, the problem is the failure to design. That's what both Ron and Fred have been telling us from different directions all episode long. Ron would say most teams are losing not because they lack talent or ambition, but because they've never sat down and asked a simple question, what deserves a meeting and what doesn't. They've never built shared goals, they've never protected focus, time that real work requires.

Todd Henry [00:36:37]:

Fred would say, the world is never going to stop clamoring for your attention. Future shock isn't a phase, it's the baseline. The only antidote is deliberate architecture. Again, in my book, Herding Tigers, I argue that the most important thing a leader can do is create the conditions where brilliant people do their best work. But you can't create those conditions for others if you haven't created them for yourself. So let's start with an honest question. What is your signal? Not the work you're supposed to be doing, not the tasks on the list. The real thing, the contribution that only you can make.

Todd Henry [00:37:10]:

The work that will still matter in five years. The creative or leadership act that's been waiting for the noise to quiet down long enough for you to hear it. The noise isn't going away, but you don't have to let it win. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like all of our interviews in full, you can get them absolutely free@dailycreativeplus.com all you have to do is go there, enter your name and email address, and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to every interview in its entirety. My name is Todd Henry. If you'd like information about my books and my speaking events, you can find it@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.

Todd Henry [00:37:51]:

We'll see you then.