Why The Best Ideas Come From a Marketplace of Ideas

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In August of 1932, the Australian government declared war. Not on a foreign nation, not on a political rival— on emus. In fact, 20,000 of them, enormous 6-foot-tall birds, had descended on the wheat fields of Western Australia, destroying crops and overwhelming farmers who had no way to stop them. So the government did what governments do when faced with a problem. They sent in the military. Specifically, they dispatched Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, armed with 2 Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. This, they decided, was a problem that could be solved with superior firepower.

Todd Henry [00:00:43]:

I don't know what kind of firepower the emus had, but probably less than that. What happened next has been described by historians as one of the most embarrassing military campaigns in modern history. Let's just summarize it by saying the emus won decisively. The guns jammed, the birds scattered into small, unpredictable groups the moment the shooting started, making mass targeting impossible. When soldiers chased them, the emus simply outran them. An ornithologist observing the campaign noted that the emus seemed to have divided themselves into small groups, each with its own leader. They were even organizing better than the military campaign. The major in charge eventually conceded.

Todd Henry [00:01:27]:

And I want you to notice this phrase. He said, if we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world. The campaign was abandoned within a month. The emus, they remained. They won. The wheat fields remained destroyed, and Australia had to live with the fact that it had officially lost a war to birds. Now, here's what I find fascinating about the Great Emu War. And by the way, this is 100% true.

Todd Henry [00:01:57]:

You can look this up. Here's why I think it matters for us today. The military assumed the problem could be solved from the top down. One central command, superior resources, overwhelming force directed at a single target. What they encountered instead was something radically different: a distributed system. Adaptive, leaderless, one that could reorganize and respond faster than any centralized strategy could predict. They were trying to win a new kind of problem with an old kind of thinking. I think about this story a lot when I consider what's being asked of leaders right now, because in many ways, the challenges in front of us in our organizations, in our industries, in how we think about and adapt with innovation and creativity, well, they look a lot like the wheat fields in 1932.

Todd Henry [00:02:46]:

The old approach was, hey, just find the genius, give them the resources, aim them at the problem, and voilà, everything's gonna be fine. But the problems we face now don't cooperate with that kind of force. On today's episode, we're gonna explore this from two very different but deeply connected angles. First, I sit down with Emily Tedards and Jason Wilde, co-authors of the book Genius at Scale. They've spent years studying hundreds of leaders and organizations across 40 countries, and what they've found challenges almost everything we think about how innovation actually works. And then I'm going to talk with Susan Reilly, founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM and the author of Creativity's Edge. Susan makes the case that in the age of AI, right now, this very moment, human creativity is not just a nice to have. It is the edge.

Todd Henry [00:03:37]:

It's the one thing that AI, for all of its stunning capability, cannot yet replicate. Not because it lacks the data, but because creativity is backward looking. It moves us into a territory that doesn't even exist yet. So two books, two frameworks, one thread. The future doesn't belong to the leaders who have the best ideas. It belongs to those who know how to unleash them in others and in themselves. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day.

Todd Henry [00:04:10]:

My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Emily Tedards [00:04:16]:

And so what we've seen is that there is this misconception that the job of the leader is to be the visionary, to set the direction and get people to follow them to the future.

Todd Henry [00:04:29]:

That's Emily Tedards. She and Jason Wilde are the co-authors of a new book called Genius at Scale.

Emily Tedards [00:04:35]:

But what we see time and again in a situation where you depend on numerous diverse perspectives inside of your organization and outside is that getting to innovative outcomes delivering on the purposes that we seek to deliver on requires activating collective genius instead. A few things I wanted to say just about the myth of the lone genius. Research has showed that the best ideas come from generating an effective marketplace of ideas. So that's from diverse perspectives interacting, able to engage in constructive conflict and come to integrative solutions. Sometimes the best ideas are combinations of seemingly opposable ideas into new solutions. But the challenge for leading and building an organization that's capable of doing that is it's actually much more complex than having your siloed R&D team with the people that are supposed to be specialized in innovation. Suddenly you open that up to people from supply chain, finance, legal, etc., and you're increasing the diversity of perspective, thus increasing the complexity that you have to deal with and increasing the possibility of conflict. And I think historically, if we look at periods of major technology-driven industrial revolutions, the research says most of the gains come not just from the technology itself, like the railroads or electricity, but it's rather the organizational reinvention that comes afterwards.

Emily Tedards [00:06:06]:

And that's a much more holistic approach to innovation. It requires the entire organization to be integrated and working in new and different ways.

Todd Henry [00:06:14]:

I know in the wake of the 2008 recession, a lot of organizations were having to make changes to how they think about innovation, how they think about budgeting during the economic downturn. And we did see a lot of organizations slashing their innovation pipeline and starting to collaborate outside of where they would normally look for ideas. And it's because prior to that point, everybody saw innovation as this silo within their organization. So I'm really curious, Jason, I know this book really is a result of kind of a practitioner mindset combined with a researcher perspective. And you're a veteran practitioner. How did your firsthand experience with what you call organ reject syndrome for new ideas at tech companies, how did that shape the way that you approached research for this book?

Jason Wild [00:06:58]:

Yeah, definitely. So I've been blessed, Todd, to lead innovation projects in 40 countries, having led embedded strategy innovation teams at Microsoft, IBM, in Salesforce, sometimes it's difficult to zoom out and see some of the patterns and understand what really great looks like. And one of the first things that really resonated with me was this idea that you can't mandate innovation. You have to invite people to the process. And to me, having been a part of very different cultures and one of them that enjoyed crises, you mentioned 2008, which was a real financial crisis. And I think they saw the power of how crises could get people's attention and get them to do what they wanted. So as a result, they started inventing more crisis and it led to a lot of burnout and it became a place that was much more risk-averse than I think it really intended. And so the timing of that and meeting Linda and Emily was just an incredible opportunity to say, hey, let's do some mind melding.

Jason Wild [00:08:04]:

Come up with some hypotheses around where we think innovation is going.

Todd Henry [00:08:08]:

I love that you saw this as a love letter to the innovation process. And also, like you said, we're attracted to those stories, right, of the lone genius, the person working 100 hours a week. And, but I, I love that underneath all of this was a desire to really get to the heart of what's really going on. Not what are we saying is going on, but what's really going on under the hood inside of effective organizations. Emily, I would love for you to share a little bit about what you call the ABC framework. Can you briefly explain those three roles and how they help you move from building internal communities to galvanizing global innovation movements?

Emily Tedards [00:08:44]:

That's a key role that we see played by the architect in our framework. So when we think about leaders as social architects, their primary job is to democratize innovation in their organizations. On the one hand, it's about shaping the culture and capabilities in their firms, and they know that, as Jason said, that can't be done in a top-down way. You can't tell people to think and behave in specific ways. So the question is, for leaders, how can they craft that invitation so that the people in their organizations are both willing and able to innovate? So our architect role is really about leaders that we've observed excel at those things, the culture and capabilities in their organization, which kind of ladders up to creating this sense of community, an innovative community in their firms. But really, when you're having to orchestrate partnerships across organizational boundaries, or let's say having to activate innovation at the level of ecosystems, leaders have to begin thinking about their own role. They have to have different mindsets, different behaviors, different approaches to influencing behavior, and in the most complex scenarios, to influencing behavior of people multiple degrees of separation away from them that they might not even have the opportunity to directly interact with. So that's where the bridger and catalyst roles come in our framework.

Todd Henry [00:10:06]:

What is a bridger and what is a catalyst in your framework?

Emily Tedards [00:10:09]:

Yeah, so bridgers are, if the architect are leaders that operate inside the boundaries of their organizations, we think of bridgers as those that operate at those boundaries, building partnerships across people from different types of teams and organizations so that they can co-create together. For the purposes of the book, we situate the bridger at the firm boundary, but in practice, you could think of an architect as operating within the team level and then a bridger bridging across teams, both within firms and at firm boundaries. But at the high level, then, if bridgers build partnerships, catalysts we see are building innovative movements. So they're activating ripple effects across ecosystems, trying to get large groups of people that they can't even directly interact with to innovate. And they do that through a new capability we identify, which is movement building.

Todd Henry [00:11:03]:

Jason, one of the things we often hear inside of organizations is that conflict itself is a bad thing, right? Like, we don't want conflict inside of the organization. I hear leaders say this all the time. We're a very healthy team. We never fight. And I want to say you're profoundly unhealthy because you don't fight, because you never argue over ideas. You highlight that too little conflict, not too much, is what impedes innovation often. How do we facilitate the right amount of conflict? What should that look like inside of an organization that aspires to innovate?

Jason Wild [00:11:36]:

Yes. And this is something that I think is a core part of the architect role that I really see as just foundational, building on what Emily said, that you need the bridges, you need the catalysts, but It's really like the cliché about building a house on sand if you don't have that architecture foundation. And it is an interesting one because Linda Hill, our co-author's previous book, she talked about this concept called creative abrasion and how do you actually intentionally create the environment that you're saying where there's the right amount of conflict that's appropriate for the culture and whatever the mission is. From my own experience, having worked almost 30 years at IBM, Salesforce, and Microsoft, all in tech, very different cultures. I do think that a bit like you could fail your driver's license exam in Paris for driving too slow, not just too fast, that many organizations are too nice to each other. And they are willing to have the difficult conversations that confront the reality. And one of my previous employers, who I won't mention, I was a part of an internal transformation program that basically was about how do you create a single version of truth. And it was a multi-year program, a lot around data, highly political.

Jason Wild [00:12:52]:

And long story short, I saw the before and after. I saw the before of politically charged emotional conversations. My data is different than your data. I don't trust your data. And a lot of wasted time. And then once this was in place and they all believed in the same data and they were using that data's input into the same shared language, how emotions were put aside and the conversations were much more impactful and productive. And okay, hey, what— let's not put our time and energy into what are we going to do about this and learn from these experiments. I think it's a billion-dollar question.

Jason Wild [00:13:31]:

It's a great question, Todd. But I do think that generally most organizations in the West and the US tend to be too nice. And there is an opportunity to be more direct and have the necessary conversations while still being respectful to each other.

Todd Henry [00:13:46]:

So you said find a better way. You call the exceptional leaders in the book wayfinders. I would love to, for each of you to answer this question. For a leader listening today who feels like the innovation engine is broken inside of their organization, what is a step that you believe they should take to start finding their future together with their team?

Emily Tedards [00:14:07]:

One idea that we think runs across all of the leaders in our book is the notion of really reflecting on their why and their values. Because the fact is that we've spent a lot of time discussing pathfinding versus wayfinding and the difference between those two. By definition, wayfinding means that you can't see the path forward. Pathfinding is about identifying the path and helping others follow that path. But in a world and in a context like the one in which we live today, I think many leaders feel like they're staring into a fog and it's really not clear how things are going to play out in the future. Thus, what we see the leaders in our book do is turn inward. In those moments of uncertainty, it's really reflecting and clarifying one's value and purpose and asking why are we seeking to do what we're seeking to do? And the biggest gift that we've seen leaders offer others in this wayfinding journey is asking that same question to others, like really initiating a conversation about values and what is the why that is driving us individually and collectively.

Jason Wild [00:15:19]:

I think for me, the opportunity to re-embrace as a leadership team or as an individual contributor, as a team, being a learning organization. And you think about the topic of innovation, understandably, when you talk about innovation, most people's brains and hearts immediately go to what's the next killer app? What's the acquisition? And what we found through our research is that really organizations that focus, as Emily said, on the why, clarity of purpose, but we feel that's incomplete. When there's clarity of why, plus a very strong focus on the how, creating the conditions, the culture, and the capabilities for innovation to happen routinely. And when you focus on both of those, the result then is a predictable steady stream of the what's to innovate. And so I think it's reframing it in many ways as a leadership team saying, hey, there's always going to be firefighting. There's always going to be things that we have to react to. But what are the one or two big questions that we want to get smarter about individually and collectively as a team? Those questions will lead us to even probably sharper and better questions by doing this consciously. It'll also shine a light on the data that we have or that we need to be in a position to have the confidence to be able to find the right way back delivering on that promise of the purpose or the why.

Jason Wild [00:16:50]:

They got everyone excited.

Todd Henry [00:16:53]:

The book Genius at Scale is available now wherever books are sold. So the architect, the bridger, the catalyst. I'm going to hold that framework for just a moment because I think it reveals something important. Emily and Jason spent years studying leaders who built collective genius, and what they found is that the work happens at 3 distinct levels. First, you shape the culture inside your own walls. You democratize innovation, you invite people in, you create the conditions. That's what the architect does. Then you reach across boundaries, you build partnerships, you find collaborators you wouldn't normally work with, you bring perspectives in that don't live inside of your org chart.

Todd Henry [00:17:31]:

That's what the bridger does. And then the largest scale, you build a movement, you activate people that you may never meet around a shared purpose powerful enough to travel further than you can personally go. That's what the catalyst does. Now notice that each of these functions, each of these roles requires something that no AI system can do for you. The architect has to see what culture needs to be built, the invisible dynamics, the unspoken fears, the question the room isn't even asking yet. The bridger has to feel across relational boundaries, has to find common thread between two people that think they have nothing in common. And the catalyst, the catalyst has to imagine a future that doesn't yet exist and make it real enough that other people want to live there. They want to be part of the movement.

Todd Henry [00:18:15]:

That's not a retrieval task. That's not pattern matching against what's already been done. That is at its core, a creative generative act, which is exactly where my next guest comes in. Susan Riley is the founder of the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM and the author of Creativity's Edge. So we're going to talk in just a moment with Susan about how creativity is the essential killer app, the thing that makes us most human and also most effective. We'll be right back.

Susan Riley [00:18:49]:

When you look at a tea kettle and you see that stuff coming out of it, we call it steam. It's a colloquial term, but it's not true. When we see it, it's water vapor. It's when it goes invisible that it becomes steam. And that's what I think is happening right now with AI, that we have turned the corner.

Todd Henry [00:19:05]:

That's Susan Reilly, author of Creativity's Edge.

Susan Riley [00:19:08]:

And AI's been around for a really long time. People don't realize that it really started to evolve back in the 1950s in Dartmouth. It's not like something that just came up in 2020. So it's been around, it's been water vapor for a really long time, but it has now jumped to steam. So if it's surrounding us, how can we use it? How can we be aware of it and how can we navigate through it when we can't see it?

Todd Henry [00:19:32]:

I, I interviewed a, a Disney animator last, at some point last year, and he said there was a time he was an animator during the time of like pen and ink and hand coloring of cells and all of that. And he said, and then when the computer, when CGI became a thing, all of a sudden everybody was animating with a computer. And he said, we lost this entire generation of people who knew how to animate by hand. He said, because there was like, there's no need to do it anymore. So we lost this entire craft and you could argue, oh, but it makes us more efficient and whatever. But there's also something to the actual craft, slowing down, adding friction to the system. Forcing you to have to sit and be with the work of art, right? And there's a balance there between efficiency and craft. Just being— the friction is what makes it a craft, right? If you just push a button, it's not really a craft.

Todd Henry [00:20:24]:

We have spent a lot of time in education in some ways, like I think recently, trying to help kids get to the right answer. The right answer is a button away now, but what is missing maybe is the how do we help them inject the right kind of friction into the process that forces them to have to think and maybe use AI as a thinking thinking partner. So I want to talk about the 4 branches of creativity that you describe in the book. Could you share those with us and why they're each important? Because I think some people think, I'm not creative, but that may just be because they are— maybe they— everybody's creative, first of all, because everybody solves problems. If you can converse with someone, you're creative. Like, we're doing an improvisational creative act here right now. What are those 4 branches and why are each of them important.

Susan Riley [00:21:09]:

Yeah, it's— I think it's interesting that when people say, I'm not creative, or I can only draw stick figures, right? That encapsulates their understanding of what creativity is. And really, that's just one branch of creativity. That's the skills branch. When we're thinking about art skills, music skills, and we're thinking about these are the things that artists leverage, that's one branch of creativity. But then you also have the branch of creative thinking, which is how are we thinking laterally, divergently, convergently? How are we solving problems? How are we thinking critically and using creativity to solve those things? That's all encapsulated in creative thought. And then we have the branch of creative application. So now you have maybe some skills and you have some thinking around a different content area, or perhaps you're focused on a report that you have to pull together for your boss, right?, and you're thinking about the best way to do that. Creative application is merging two disparate components together and creating something new.

Susan Riley [00:22:13]:

And so how are you gonna take that report and make it something that people aren't gonna fall asleep when they, you have to present it, right? How are you gonna mix it up, make it different? That, that is creative application. And then the fourth branch is creative expression. So this is when you are experiencing creativity in real time and sharing your perspective or how it's making you feel or how you are experiencing something with the world. So if you're singing in a choir, that's a great example. If you're in a community choir, you're expressing how you're feeling within that moment. If you're journaling and something, you know, that about a rough day or something that happened, that's your expression of what happened to you and how you're working through it. So creativity lives in all four of those branches. It encapsulates all of them.

Susan Riley [00:23:03]:

And so when we say I'm not creative, this is such an untrue statement. Maybe you're not great at that one branch, but you've got other branches that you can work with and rely on.

Todd Henry [00:23:12]:

I wanna talk about the three I's. You conclude that the future belongs to those who master the three I's: integration, intention, innovation. How do these three elements distinguish a human creator from a creative machine?

Susan Riley [00:23:24]:

These kind of relate back to the branches of creativity. And cert— with integration, innovation, we're working through this idea of there's— it's not an algorithm. These aren't things that you program. These are things that you practice and that you intentionally pull together in ways that you've decided in order to move forward with either a decision or something that you're working on creatively, a project. These again are things that evolve over time. And so when we can master these I's, when we can pull them together and manipulate them and play with them and pull them together like a Rubik's Cube almost. There's infinite possibilities then of what we can do and what we can create and how we can move through the world that again, you can't program. When we talk about the magic of creativity, this is where they converge.

Susan Riley [00:24:18]:

And so by, by working through these three, you can really build them out and express yourself in a way that nobody else can replicate.

Todd Henry [00:24:30]:

So back in 1932, the Australian military looked at 20,000 emus and saw a problem to be eliminated. What they couldn't see from inside the command and control frame was that they weren't up against a target. They were up against a living system. It was adaptive, it was distributed, and completely unimpressed by superior firepower. That's the reframe that this episode has been building toward. Emily and Jason showed us that leaders who actually move things forward aren't the ones who have the most authority or loudest vision. They're the architects who create the conditions, the bridgers who reach across boundaries, and the catalysts who build movements larger than themselves. And as Susan reminded us, underneath all of that structure is a human being who has to actually be creative, not just efficient, but genuinely able to see what isn't there yet and bring it into existence.

Todd Henry [00:25:21]:

In this age where we're running headstrong into artificial intelligence, integrating it every single day in our work, that capacity isn't a soft skill. It the edge that we need to maintain. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like our full interviews, full interviews with everyone, including Emily and Jason and Susan and all of our past guests, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com. Just enter your name and email address. We'll send you a private feed to listen to all of our interviews absolutely free. My name is Todd Henry. If you'd like more info about my work, my books, my speaking, You can do so at toddhenry.com.

Todd Henry [00:26:00]:

Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant. We'll see you then.