Overcoming The Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. – #320

David Schonthal: Overcoming The Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.

David Schonthal is an award-winning Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking, healthcare innovation, and creativity. Along with his colleague Loran Nordgren, David is one of the originators of Friction Theory – a ground-breaking methodology that explains why even the most promising innovations and change initiatives often struggle to gain traction with their intended audiences – and what to do about it.  This work is popularized in David’s bestselling new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.

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James Taylor 0:00
I'm James Taylor and you're listening to the super creativity podcast a show dedicated to inspiring creative minds like yours. David Chantal is an award-winning professor of strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking healthcare, innovation, and creativity. Along with his colleague, Lauren Norgren, David is one of the originators of friction theory, a groundbreaking methodology that explains why even the most promising innovations and change initiatives often struggle to gain traction with their intended audiences and importantly, what to do about it. This work is popularized in David's best-selling new book, the human element, overcoming the resistance that awaits new ideas. Welcome to the super creativity podcast, David.

David Schonthal 0:47
Thanks, James. Nice to be here.

James Taylor 0:49
So in this book, you use the analogy at the start of a bullet to explain how to build aerodynamic ideas, which I love is the phrase aerodynamic ideas. Can you explain how and convince others of our ideas we need to recognize that there are two different and competing forces always at work? Yeah,

Bringing New Ideas Into the world

David Schonthal 1:08
the metaphor that we use at the beginning, as you mentioned, is usually formed in front of an audience. We'll start by asking the question, what is it that makes a bullet fly like when a bullet is fired from a gun, leaves the barrel at enormous speed. And it can travel as far as two miles hitting its target with a fair amount of precision in its shot from the hand of a steady Sharpshooter. So we asked the audience what is it that makes a bullet fly and overwhelmingly, people's first reaction is well, gunpowder, which is certainly true, but only partially true gunpowder is the thing that gives that bullet at Spark, it creates gas inside of the chamber that forces the bullet out the other end and propels it towards its target at great velocity. But along the way, towards its target, the bullet encounters all sorts of problems, it encounters the problem of gravity, which is trying to drag it to the ground, and encounters the problem of wind resistance, which is trying to veer it off of its course. And unless a bullet is able to overcome these headwinds and forces of friction that stand in its way, it won't be successful, it will be powerful, but it will be imprecise. And so we talk about that as kind of the perfect metaphor for bringing new ideas into the world, that it's not just about creating fuel behind your ideas or power behind your ideas or magnetism or features and benefits. It's also important to think about all of the headwinds that face that idea on its way to meet its target audience in the book is about helping people identify and mitigate those to make sure that their ideas are successful.

James Taylor 2:42
So fuel and frictions, and what are the common types of frictions that we often see our ideas or innovations coming up against? Yeah, so

Types of frictions that we often see our ideas

David Schonthal 2:51
in the book, we highlight four frictions in particular one is the friction of inertia, which is a human being's overwhelming bias to stick with the status quo. Despite how much we know that the status quo might be imperfect. And then there may be better ways to do things or new ways to do things. Our desire to stick with what's familiar is more powerful than most of us give credit for. So that's the friction of inertia. The second friction is the friction of effort, how much physical-economic or mental exertion is required to adopt that change. And it's not just about how much physical effort I need to put into implementing technology or changing behavior. Like how ambiguous is it in terms of how I go about implementing that change that all ladders up under this friction of effort? The third one is the friction of emotion, which is the undesired feelings, our new idea causes and others, often the very people we're trying to help, sometimes inadvertently, we can create anxiety or trepidation with people simply by introducing something new to them. Anytime you're asking somebody to adopt something new, there's always a little bit of hesitation, how do we identify and mitigate that. And then the fourth is something we refer to as reactance, which is a human being's aversion to being changed by others. One of the things that human beings value above almost anything else is our autonomy or freedom. And when we feel like change is being imposed upon us, no matter how valuable that change might be, or how sensible that change might be, we will push back against it with equal force because we feel like we are being changed by other people. And so in this book, we talk about these four frictions and how they show up and everything from product innovation to strategy to behavioral change.

James Taylor 4:36
So on that first one inertia, how exactly can inertia kill innovation? What mitigating things can we do to ensure that doesn't happen?

Inertia

David Schonthal 4:45
Yeah, I think one of the mistakes that innovators and entrepreneurs, and creative people make sometimes when they're putting something new out into the world. There is this overwhelming desire to highlight the newness of the thing. Like, here's this new piece of software, it has all of these features and benefits that old software didn't have. And isn't this great. And aren't these features really cool? And in doing that, we're excited about it, because we're the innovator. And we know all of the different benefits that these features can provide. But on the audience's side, here are all of these things that I am unfamiliar with hearing all these bells and whistles that I might not know how to use, here are all these ways that I'm going to have to change the way that I live and work in order to implement and adopt this idea. And so while the bias of the innovator is to highlight the newness of the thing, the audience really craves something that well, it may provide them new benefit feels more familiar to them than in the past. And one example we talked about in the book, and it's kind of a classic example from design. If you think back to the introduction of the Mac computer back in the late 80s. Prior to the introduction of the Macintosh, most personal computers, all personal computers were IBM or DOS-based computers, which meant that if you wanted to have a personal computer in your home, the first thing you needed to do was learn how to speak the language of computer you needed to learn how to program or interact in DOS, which was effectively learning a different language. So if you're trying to get more people to adopt personal computers, the expectation at the time is first you need to learn how to interact with a computer, then buy a computer and get it to do the things that you wanted to do. Jobs and Wozniak smartly realize that while a computer can do all sorts of interesting things, that people can't do an analog, it's pretty ridiculous to anticipate that everybody who ought to be using a computer will first get up the learning curve on figuring out how to interact with it, and then buy one. So what they decided to do is practice a really important design principle that we use in the design world today, which is to meet people where they are, don't expect people to change, adopt the idea, adjust the idea to meet people's level of comfort incompetence. And that's why the graphical user interface was invented. And that's why that even to this day, the home screen of a Macintosh is called a desktop because a desktop is where you do work. And on your desktop, you create documents, and you put your documents in folders, and when you're done with them, you crumple them up and you throw them in the trash. Those design principles remain to this day, 40 years later, simply because they're familiar. And that's how you get to activate more people in the market, activate latent demand is by making unfamiliar things more familiar to the people that ought to use them. Now in terms

James Taylor 7:35
of how you can get those things kind of bubbling up to the surface, or you figure out what are those maybe the inertia maybe people are pushing back on because it requires effort. One of the techniques you share in the book is kind of an old auger tool, well known tool like that Toyota five, why's being five years olds in the room, like Whoa, yeah. So can you give an example like how to like that can help us identify some of those things? There's there are challenges, there are things that we need to answer in terms of different audiences?

5 levels of why

David Schonthal 8:08
Yeah, sure. Um, so we talked about the five whys, as you mentioned in the book, in the chapter, specifically on emotion. Emotion is probably the trickiest of the four frictions to identify because people don't typically wear their emotions on their sleeves. So if James, I said, you know, would you like to adopt this new smartphone technology or this new organizational design for your company? You're probably not going to say to me, Well, you know, no, because it makes me feel uncomfortable or no, because I'm afraid I'm going to look like a Luddite to my peers or no because it's going to make me feel inadequate about my level of competence in this particular domain. Instead, you're gonna say something like, it's too expensive, or I'm not crazy about the features. And so usually, the first answer that people give us, is probably the shortest way for them to express their pushback but doesn't necessarily give us the authentic reason why people say no, particularly when we're trying to understand the emotional friction that stands in the way of somebody saying, yes, we need to be able to dig further and further below the surface to truly find out what the root cause of their pushback is. And again, like the Toyota Production System, when you're trying to identify the root cause of a production problem, the root cause of somebody's emotional friction is usually four or five levels of why deeper, and once you move past cost, and once you move past features and benefits, you start to understand that maybe they don't feel adequately prepared, or maybe they're uncomfortable about how they're going to look relative to their peers. But once you identify what that source of emotional friction is, usually the solution to the problem becomes pretty obvious. And so one of the things that's kind of beautiful about emotional friction, in particular, is once you identify its cause how to remedy it is fairly apparent.

James Taylor 9:55
One of the I think things in the book I really liked I hadn't seen expressed in this way, was the idea of ambiguity. And if you've made it was a conversation I was having recently with it with a client. And they there was seen that he used to work for a very well known American soft drinks company. And they said they had a manager there who just, they were having some problems, some manufacturing things. So just just just go and create a solution, just going to go and do it. And he said, it never felt so kind of demand, demoralized and, and it speaks to that the thing you talked about ambiguity, so can you maybe share with us like how, and why is this idea of ambiguity so important when it comes to making innovation happen?

 

Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.

 

Idea of ambiguity

David Schonthal 10:39
Yeah. I mean, first of all, innovation is such a nebulous word, what does innovation actually mean? I think if you ask 10 people, you'll probably get 10 different definitions. So when a company says, Alright, here's one day a week that you and your team have to work on innovation projects, like first, like, well, what does that mean? Like? What do we do? Like, there's ambiguity, even in the request? And then if you're saying, all right, you know, your job is to or your team's job is to come up with innovative solutions to these age-old problems we have if you're not trained in design thinking, or you're not trained in lean methodologies, like how do you what's the first step of innovation? Like? Do I go into a room with a bunch of posts and a whiteboard and ideas just kind of divine themselves out of thin air? Or is there a method and a process that I follow? And so sometimes, in an effort to try to spur creativity inside of organizations, leaders will say, Now, here's, you know, some free time or some whitespace to go work on, on a project. But until we give people that don't have familiarity with that idea, a roadmap to follow, like step one is going out and doing some primary research. And step two is synthesizing that research to identify some interesting insights. And step three is ID ating, around solutions and prototyping, etc, etc. Unless we give them that roadmap to follow, the ambiguity of the request can become paralyzing. So I think leaders in organizations large and small when they make requests for things like this, not only need to make the request, but also define what it means and give people some roadmaps to follow. So that the process seems less onerous and less ambiguous. And what winds up happening, the phenomenon we talked about in the book is called cognitive load. By asking somebody to think too much about how to get started, the overwhelming reaction people have is just not to start at all. So giving people a step-by-step roadmap can be a really helpful thing on the road to a bigger innovation project.

James Taylor 12:36
Because even one of the things you mentioned in the book, which I thought was really nice when you just said about you, I think you're calling like FedEx days, this idea of FedEx days, and actually just putting, instead of just saying, Okay, go and be creative, even if you just like just take it one level further, okay, go and be creative on this project on the last Friday of every month, you know, putting the date and putting a date on it and giving some kind of so maybe she ever goes like that even something as simple as that. And this idea of FedEx. FedEx gave me people who haven't heard that phrase before.

David Schonthal 13:07
So the this, this comes from a company that was trying to challenge its its employees to come up with creative solutions to problems. It's called FedEx days, because FedEx delivers something overnight, or in 24 hours. So what this company was doing was two things, one, removing the ambiguity of you know, one of the questions that people ask when an organization says be more innovative is like, what day of the week? Should I be innovative? What time of the day? Should I be in? Like, when, relative to my other work? Should I actually do this thing that you're asking me to do? So one of the things that the things that company did cleverly was say, All right, it's on this day of every month that we're going to have these FedEx days. And in another principle of creativity, knowing that creativity is often born out of constraint, I'm not going to give you a wide-open blank canvas on which to execute this project, I'm going to give you a very discreet period of time to try to come up with something and that's 24 hours. So on this day, in 24 hours, you and your team have this obligation to produce something interesting, overnight. And by having a very defined sandbox, and having a very clear time of the week and time of the schedule to do it. You're removing a lot of this ambiguity and a lot of this nebulous illness that often stands in the way of people getting started.

James Taylor 14:22
So that idea was what that kind of FedEx idea kind of gets people focused on on things. The analyst is a professor of innovation, I guess, you're always seeing what other companies are doing and how they're going to spring creativity and innovation. What I was talking to a client about the other day was the you know, the kind of kick boxes stuff that Adobe kind of got started and it was coming Procter and Gamble and Gates Foundation now use it. More recently, have you seen or they've been things that you've seen that you see just in terms of useful initiatives or useful kind of tools, not even in your own work, but other people's work where you've kind of gone that's a really good tool to get a team working together. and exploring a problem or a challenge and coming up with solutions for it.

David Schonthal 15:04
Yeah, I mean, there are sort of two ways to answer that one is a methodology or a mindset. And the other is actual tools. On the tool side, there has never been more. There have never been more options of ways of making ideas real. I think that's something that's always stood in the way of teams being creative is like, how do I actually turn this into something that I can show people, one of the principles of innovation and creativity is often shown is way more powerful than telling. So how might I embody this idea in a way to put it out into the world for people to react to so that I can rapidly iterate on it, the advent of no-code or low code prototyping tools for web apps and mobile apps. I mean, they're so good right now that these things literally look and feel and behave like software, even though there's really no database architecture behind the scenes, you can walk somebody through, it looks like feels like an example, within 24 hours of coming up with the idea in a way that gets some authentic reaction and responses. So things like that are really helpful. online collaboration tools, like Figma, has an online collaboration tool, and Miro and mural. These are really great tools, particularly for remote workforces, or people that have distributed employee communities where they can collaborate in a project space, even though they might not be in the same room at the same time. So kind of manufacturing a little artificially some of the creative collisions we usually get in office environments. And then on the methodology side, you know, I'm still a firm believer that design thinking is a phenomenal approach and a tried and true approach to coming up with new ideas to solve challenging problems. And the same with Lean Startup. Same with a lot of the work that people like Alex Osterwalder do with, with the business model canvas and some of his methods, which is all about the first, the first step is the same, which is the importance of starting with people, and giving people some tools and some frameworks and methodologies to go and understand the needs of people and then to use those insights on which to build versus to, in an ivory tower, hypothesize about what people might want, and then hope that somebody says yes to the idea that you come up with on your own.

James Taylor 17:17
And you've been using the phrase, our creativity, and innovation at different points in the conversation today. And so I have to ask you, as a professor of these topics, how would you define those things? How are they different? How are they similar? Or whether they Is it like a Venn diagram? Where do they connect?

Creativity VS Innovation

David Schonthal 17:35
Probably, I mean, everything is every good idea presented in the form of a Venn diagram. I wouldn't say that the difference between I mean, creativity is an ingredient into innovation, I don't think that that is the outcome, right? Sort of like intuitiveness is an output of design. It's not an input of design. So I think in order to come up with innovative ideas, there need to be some ingredients of creativity, which might show up in different ways. Innovation, as I define it is a creative idea that has, like tangible impact on the world, whether it's in business, or it's in social change, or it's an organizational design. But innovation is really about the implementation of the creative idea, not just coming up with the idea in a room and having it never see the light of day or achieve its objective.

James Taylor 18:24
Or measure that I can't remember who said it but there was someone that said that phrase of creativity is about bringing ideas to the mind create innovation is about bringing creative is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world. I think that

David Schonthal 18:39
is the far more concise way of saying the gobbledygook that I just

James Taylor 18:44
want to tell who said that. And I would love to do I heard it a long while back. You just did maybe an Instagram of or tweet. And so in terms of your, this book was written with one of your colleagues, Lauren Graham. So we often in creativity, we often talk about this idea of creative peers, you know, you mentioned was napkin jobs, Mary and Pierre Curie. You often see these two people working together. So I'm interested in creating this book as a co-created thing. Yeah. Talk us through that, that that process, what does that actually look like? How do you collaborate? And how did you decide to do different parts of the book or one person did this kind of thing? Now person did that? Or how did it work?

The Human Element

David Schonthal 19:31
That's a fantastic question that I honestly don't get enough of. So this is a book that I think Lauren and I both believe neither of us could have written on our own. Lauren comes from a background of psychology in studying human behavior. My background is in innovation and entrepreneurship. But we both have a mutual interest in the same problem, which is why is it that people say no to good ideas, he from a behavioral science standpoint and me from an innovation stance? point. We are colleagues at the Kellogg School where I speak to you now from. And one of the benefits of being in academia is that there are some brilliant people in this building that have a totally different vantage point on a problem than I do from the applied side from the approach of theory and science. And so Lauren and I have been working together for four or five years on projects here and there. But this particular question is one that just kept rattling around in our minds. And we would do a little bit of research together on it and write a little bit together on it. And honestly, COVID provided us the opportunity to clear other things off of our plate, and really dedicate ourselves to turning this into a narrative. But I think that the reason that this book hopefully resonates with readers, is because of this combination of explaining the science of why the human mind favors certain things over another why the human mind is resistant to certain things, and explaining how it will work scientifically, but also showing the application of how to identify it and overcome it. And I think it's that collaboration of theoretical and applied that's, that's really powerful. Now, we are super different people, Lauren, is and I'm, I hope he doesn't mind me saying this Lord is bad. Like, he's super disciplined. He's very routine and very regimented, the dude would wake up at 530 Every morning, and just write for three hours. Like, it didn't matter what came out of his head every morning, you know, three hours content on a page, my creative process way different, like, it could be days where I just didn't feel like, I don't know, the muse was upon me like I was more I guess the artist here, where I was like, oh, I gotta wait for inspiration to strike. But then when inspiration strikes, struck, I would probably like to write for 36 straight hours. So if you were to look at the curve of productivity between the two of us, it was like this very steady, like every day, the same product in my mind was like this crazy sine wave. And to be honest, there were moments where we really had to practice the philosophies in the book. And one of the things we had to do very early on agreed on how we were going to work together and also check in along the way, because sometimes we might make assumptions about the other person and the other person's creative process. And in that assumption, are some dangerous frictions that could cause some tension in the relationship. So we made a point of trying to externalize these things and talk them through as a way of enhancing the overall work product and not stifling us as we try to create.

James Taylor 22:33
I think I'm interested in co-authored books as well as is the so you think about that kind of style of writing like a Malcolm Gladwell is kind of third-person omniscient, kind of is the way that it's written. And I've read some other books recently, which were co written, which were very much you sense that ah, this is Jay, speaking at this bit, this is this other person speaking at this? How quickly did it take you to kind of find that kind of rhythm like, so? What voice whose voice would be speaking it? From what perspective? It was like? What tense? You know, all those kinds of things?

David Schonthal 23:08
Another fantastic question, it was an iterative process, we, we threw out a couple of drafts of earlier versions, because you could kind of tell that it was like now Lauren's on the mic, and now David's on the mic. And then we found a style that I think was kind of this really nice equilibrium between the two of us. And the way we wanted to write this book is that we were having a conversation with the reader. And it was really important to us that like, like, we would have a conversation with students or executives at a company, we wanted it to feel like our personalities were coming through, which is why we tell a handful of personal anecdotes in the book, why we kind of ribbing each other a little bit in the book by telling some stories. But it was very important to us and Lauren and I have similar communication styles in many respects. So it wasn't like, we were coming from totally opposite ends of the spectrum. But it did take some rehearsal, honestly, in some practice of finding that rhythm. And after a while, I felt like I could start channeling a little bit of Lauren's writing style, and he could channel a little bit of my writing style. And surprisingly, we thought we would have to have an editor come in and unify our voices at the end. I think the highest compliment to the process was that there was very little that was done editorially to try to make it feel like it was written in conjunction. And I think that's a testament to just the sort of iterative process we went through.

James Taylor 24:30
So even from a technical standpoint, because normally a writer you'd be writing a book, you do your first draft, and you'd send it to an editor or you might even do individual chapters and send to editors and get feedback coming back that way. So I'm gonna say, I mean, what were you just using Google Docs or like how are you actually writing it? How are you ensuring that there was no that you what who was doing what?

David Schonthal 24:52
God, so I'm a big Google doc fan Lord, it turns out am not a huge fan. So believe it or not, we were just firing Word files by But we kept, we kept drop boxes with chapters in them and basically assigned captain. So Lauren would Captain this chapter and I would captain that chapter. And then we would basically flip and he would review the first draft of this that I did and vice versa. And so is this sort of cyclical process of flipping back and forth over time. But, yeah, I kind of would have preferred Google Docs, but we went old school on this, and it had a few challenges, but it worked out, it worked out just fine. In the end,

James Taylor 25:30
you probably just described every client and agency relationship in the world whether using different technologies as well. And then there's

David Schonthal 25:37
like version control things, and it just it gets a little chaotic. But in the end, it was it worked out just we

James Taylor 25:45
definitely had a unified field to in the end, how do you keep your own thinking fresh, I mean, how, what influences you to try and surround yourself with so you're always coming up with new ideas, new perspectives?

Fresh Ideas

David Schonthal 25:57
Well, I mean, being on a university campus is really helpful, because there are lots of interesting things going on here and interesting people to talk to and research to look at. I'm a huge fan of analogous inspiration. So if I'm trying to think about how to do something different in the world of design, or the world of business, frankly, or entrepreneurship, I like looking at other domains where people are dealing with not the same problem, but similar feeling problems and see how they manage it. So I spent a lot of time playing music and studying the musical process and learning about visual arts, traveling, and going to when I can, I mean, obviously, it's been a little hard lately, but getting out into the world and seeing how other cultures approach problems, I think we tend to get very comfortable in our own spaces in our own studios and fall into some rhythms and some habits, I find that it's super important to break out of those and literally get out of the building and go see how other people attempt to solve different things. And travel was, for a long time, one of the biggest outlets for that, and I hope it will be again soon.

James Taylor 27:02
Absolutely. And do you use any specific technology that allows you to either free up your time to do more kind of deeper kind of creative thinking or other technologies that you maybe even use to augment your work in terms of your writing in your, your reading work?

 

Technology VS Ideas

David Schonthal 27:19
Um, so the truthful answer to that question is I actually find that technology is sort of the enemy of my creative process. And I'm surrounded by constantly, I'm being pinged by constantly. So one of the things I've tried to develop discipline around is for at least a couple of hours a day working in analog, whether that's reading and analog, but oftentimes, I mean, you can see the this my office at the Kellogg School, literally trying to spend two hours a day sketching on whiteboards, working with materials, being kinesthetic, versus sitting in front of a computer. And I've always found that just moving and being active and working in analog and sketching on locks, things for me that just working on a screen can't. So I guess my answer to the technology question is I try to avoid it when I'm trying to be creative versus embracing.

James Taylor 28:15
I think it reminds me I don't think it was Austin Kleon, the writer who has an analog setup and a digital setup. And he said the trick is never done getting those two things mixed up, like living in this thing, fully embodying those places, then, and using that different part. Because, as you say, there's a physicality that comes with the analog.

David Schonthal 28:34
Yeah, and just the ability to externalize ideas and move them around and see them in space. It's I don't really know how to describe it other than it's a different chamber of the brain that activates and I find that that it's helpful to have that diversity of modality, not just one.

James Taylor 28:52
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit there was that David Byrne did a great TED talk about how the places in which music was composed actually influenced the music. You know, the music of Mozart, because it's getting played in big boxy rectangular rooms. How's it going? A certain sound has it gotten timbre if you go and listen to choral music, very long, young gated notes. If you go to a jazz club, you know very different kind of bottom end more sink more syncope, because you hear all those things, you go to stadiums, like Guzzi Bon Jovi. It's like a mid-tempo rock because that's the stuff that carries I do wonder, the tools that we're using how the impact that actually has on our creative process.

David Schonthal 29:30
And talk about analogous inspiration. I read an article I can't remember where it was maybe the New Yorker on David Byrne, like the how the city of New York influences his writing, and the right he rides his bicycle to commute around New York City, and he deliberately does not wear headphones or anything to get in the way of his ability to absorb and just the sounds of the city and like the sounds of tires on cracks, create rhythms in his head that he then goes into the studio and, and lays down tracks on He just absorbs the world around him to influence his music, which I think not only does it create unique rhythms and meaning unique syncopations but it also, you know, you can feel a little bit in New York City in the work that he produces, which is just awesome.

James Taylor 30:16
Yeah, I think it I think the room is equal that genius loci have places themselves have their own genius to them as well. And all those others, Louie Armstrong, I think, Duke Ellington tunes, they all had a kind of similar feel because someone said that he had his own Pullman coach train that all the bands traveled on, he did most of his writing on this on this train as promo code. So a lot of the tunes have a similar kind of feel because they have the motion.

David Schonthal 30:40
And it's also why like, certain albums by certain bands have a different field because they recorded them in very different studios, like Led Zeppelin recording in a country house in the countryside of England had a very different feel from their studio stuff in the City of London, and I think a lot of bands look for new energy by going to very different places. And, you know, there's that famous scene and I hope it's a famous scene in Bohemian Rhapsody, where queen goes off into the country and lives in this ramshackle country house and produces some of their finest work just by being in a different environment and having all of these different stimuli.

James Taylor 31:16
So I have a different theory about that, because most of those, those houses are incredibly cold because they're not heated properly. And I do think that you know, like when you live in like warmer, really nice warm countries, you can have you take things a little bit slower, you don't want to create as much but when you're in this kind of you just kind of want to get the work done, get out and get somewhere warm. So I do wonder why

David Schonthal 31:36
rush was so polar prolific stuff in Canada.

The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas | Wiley

James Taylor 31:39
Oh, the Scandinavia is so much great innovation comes out of New York. Turns out an album in a day. Yeah. So. So The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. Now we're going to have a link to that. If people want to learn a bit more about you, David, and the other projects you've got going on your teaching and other writing, where should they go and learn about that?

David Schonthal 32:00
https://www.davidschonthal.com/. Also, there's a faculty page on the Kellogg website for me. Both of those places can share a little bit about what I'm looking into and what I'm working on.

James Taylor 32:14
Great. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on. Sharing all ideas from the book on the Super creativity podcast.

David Schonthal 32:21
In James. This is the first time I've ever had a chance to talk about David Byrne and rush and one of these interviews. So thank you, you can

James Taylor 32:27
subscribe to the super creativity podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there. Leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the super creativity podcast.

Overcoming The Resistance That Awaits New Ideas.

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