What If? So What?

An Interview With Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow and 9x best-selling author.

• Perficient, Inc. • Episode 58

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What if Your Digital Transformation Was as Easy as Changing Your Mind?

In this episode of "What If? So What?" Jim chats with Brian Solis, a renowned futurist, author, and the Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow, to discuss the evolving landscape of leadership and innovation. Brian shares insights from his latest book, "MindShift," and explores the importance of self-awareness, cognitive bias, and explains how the beginner's mindset can drive business transformation. The conversation delves into the role of storytelling in leadership, the impact of Generative AI, and the future of work. 

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Brain Solis:

So if you're telling the story of disruption and generative AI is going to unlock new ways of work, you can't just say this is what's going to happen and this is what the work is going to be, and this is what people are going to do and hope to scare someone into action or creating a burning platform. What you do is you inspire someone to be into the story of what the new world is going to look like and how people are going to thrive, and you're basing the characters on the people that you feel are your stakeholders and you're turning the story and how all the stakeholders can be successful. It's a Disney-like approach to telling the future of your organization in a way that people feel inspired, that they want to be part of that story.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Welcome to What If? So What?, the podcast where we explore what's possible with digital and discover how to make it real in your business. I'm your host, Jim Hertzfeld, and we get shit done by asking digital leaders the right questions what, if so what? And, most importantly now, what. I'm very excited today to have Brian Solis on the podcast. Brian is a real life futurist. He's the author of over 60 leading research publications, eight bestselling books and currently the head of global innovation for ServiceNow. Brian, welcome to what If so what.

Brain Solis:

Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to our conversation .

Jim Hertzfeld:

Great. Thanks for joining. So, Brian, we've been following and inspired by your work for years. It's really informed a lot of the what and how we think about digital strategies, CX strategies for our customers and some of our listeners, though, may not be as versed in your story. Could you give us a little background on kind of your focus and how you got here?

Brain Solis:

Yeah, it's a long road, but I think, for those at a high level who haven't followed my work I've been a longtime analyst.

Brain Solis:

I've been a longtime digital anthropologist, futurist I've been a tech geek for my whole career, starting in Silicon Valley in the 90s.

Brain Solis:

The big thing that all of those paths have crossed has been the understanding of technology, technology trends, what's on the horizon, how they affect human behavior in a variety of contextual forms, like consumerism or influence or employee experience, for example, and played those out over time. If we believe these things to be true, then what could be next? How could that inspire products? How could that inspire business transformation? How could that inspire better customer experiences? How could that drive innovation? And so that led to many reports, many books on the subject, speaking all around the world advising CEOs and CIOs on these subjects. But now I am at ServiceNow as the head of global innovation, focusing on much of the same type of work actually studying the emerging trends and helping customers understand how to invest in those trends around business transformation and digital transformation, to not just react but to get ahead of them and to play out over time where they might go so that they're building the business of the future, literally today.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Well, a lot of that is sort of the genesis of this, even the title of this podcast. You know what if? What if this could happen? What if we could do this? So what then? What do you do about it? So you know, I'd like to kind of dig in and get started by understanding the motivation for your latest book, Mind Shift. For me, when I read this book, it was sort of I don't know how you interpret this, but it was sort of a cry for help. It was a kind of a plea for a change in leadership thinking, which I was refreshing and welcome. I think a lot of the legacy leadership in IT, even in business in general, sort of needs to be amended, you know, in my mind, and I think some elements probably need to get left behind. But I kind of interpret this as sort of this amendment and you point out a lot of different things. But what was sort of the motivation behind MindShift for you?

Brain Solis:

So, many different motivations, but first, Jim, thank you for reading it. I vanished. If you don't follow my work, it's not a surprise out there for anybody watching this now. I vanished for about three to four years after our Altimeter Group, the analyst firm that I co-founded with some really brilliant partners like Jeremiah Ouyang and Charlene Lee, I decided that living the life on the road of a published researcher and author and speaker was a little difficult with young daughters at home.

Brain Solis:

So part of the motivation, Jim, telling you that, was to actually see what was happening in the world and recognize that we weren't getting much beyond platitudes to inspire new leadership. And if you think about the last eight years alone, with societal polarization, with climate change, with COVID in 2020, with generative AI completely dominating the technology and business scenes in 2022, all of these revolutions and cycles that continue to happen at breakneck speeds, I realized that maybe there was a voice necessary here to challenge leadership. If you think about where leadership has been over the past let's just say decade with some of those massive black swan events, some of those massive disruptions we saw semblances of change. We saw semblances of transformation. I noticed the opportunity to help leadership see opportunities that they weren't seeing. So, for example, if you remember, in 2020, it was like an overnight shift to accelerate digital transformation for the first time at that speed that it had been since 2012, where it really started to pick up momentum. And so overnight. We're getting e-commerce, we're getting curbside pickup and buy online pickup in store, we're getting remote work supported All of these things that just took years and years and years to justify were finally being done. But what wasn't being done was thinking for the long term. For example, we started to hear terms like next normal and new normal, but now we're seeing things like return to office and we're not really seeing much great innovation on the e-commerce fronts like we did in those first couple of years, and so we find ourselves sort of elasticized into this new domain and then snapping back into business as usual. Not that there's anything wrong with successful businesses getting back to their core and doing what they do best, but at the same time, each one of these disruptions also are creating opportunities that we're not necessarily taking advantage of or even seeing.

Brain Solis:

So the inspiration for the book really came down to what if we had new leadership to push us in new directions? What if we had people who are willing to take the time or invest the resources, hire the people to look at what was happening, to look out into the future and to uncover those opportunities to create a better future, not just for the organization, but for everybody. If you think about generative AI and then you look towards the future, we know it's going to introduce needs for new skills. It's going to introduce new ways of working. It's going to create new opportunities beyond automation. If we were to embrace and invest in augmentation, as an example, those are all areas where we could be making strides and investments in to prepare ourselves for the future today.

Brain Solis:

So it was all of my research, more so than the books. Each previous book was an idea, but all of the research was focused on transformation and innovation and leadership, and so I thought, gosh, I've never written a book about these things. This is the time. So, last but not least, Jim is big question. At ServiceNow, I spend pretty much every day with customers and they're all trying to figure this out. What does AI mean?

Brain Solis:

What does business transformation mean? What could the future of work look like? And so we're having these really big, meaningful future forward conversations and I figured the framework that's in the book, the inspiring stories that were in the book, felt like. You know, I can't scale one person, but maybe through a book we could scale a movement.

Brain Solis:

Jim Hertzfeld: Yeah, that's great. I really appreciated what you put to paper and, like I said, it's sort of my interpretation was a plea right, hey, we've got to keep this going and here's how we're going to do it. So it really resonated. You know a couple of things that really stood out to me. I would love kind of your personal take. I love, by the way, reading a book and you know, you gosh, I wish I could talk to this guy. I need to have a conversation and here we are, so I really appreciate it.

Brain Solis:

Well, right off the bat, you talk about three things that sort of by bundled together self-awareness, cognitive bias, the beginner's mindset, and I love these concepts. We talk about pragmatism, we talk about scrappiness and we have a phrase we love think big, start small, move fast. But to buy into all those things, you really have to have this initial mindset. A lot of leaders, I think, maybe lack this. So what would you share with organizations, especially those that are sort of had a track record, they've had success, they want to build on what they've done, but what got you here won't get you there. So is that kind of what's behind that thinking?

Brain Solis:

Brian Solis: Yeah, absolutely, well first, thanks for picking up on the key elements. A mindset is how you see the world, how you see opportunities, how you see challenges. Jim, I know you work with companies that are also trying to invest in digital transformation, now business transformation. A mindset is what they see they need to do, and then what they do is work with brilliant minds like yourself to then bring that strategy and those goals to life. But if the mindset is limited to what it knows, then all it can do is iterate. Make tomorrow better than it was yesterday faster, cheaper, more scalable. If you look at all of the disruptions that are hitting us left and right today, if we attack those with the same mindset, the best we'll be is iteratively better, with chat, GPT or generative AI, for example. So there are going to be organizations that are going to ask what if, or what about, or why can't we, and those, those mindsets, are going to ask different questions that are going to get different answers, of which then are going to unlock different opportunities. And what you're going to have over time here, slowly but quickly, is, if you think about the linear path of organizations that are constantly improving, incrementally improving.

Brain Solis:

Take all of these new innovative technologies. It might do that faster, but what's also going to happen is we're going to have people who say, well, beyond automation, what about augmentation? What if we use, for example, AI to do things we couldn't do before, to not just make yesterday better, but to do what we couldn't do yesterday tomorrow? Or if we get leaders who say, well, what are some of the things that we just couldn't do, that we didn't think to do? If we're looking to accomplish these things, what else could we accomplish?

Brain Solis:

And so what's going to happen is you're going to create this inflection point self-awareness, new mindsets asking different questions, curiosity, imaginations where they'll still probably do the linear things, but then they're going to break into this exponential growth curve, and the delta between the two is really business disruption, competitive disruption. So the humanity of things like self awareness, recognizing your mind shift, recognizing where your biases limit your thinking and your questioning today all of those will create white space to explore curiosity, to entertain it, to dance with imagination, to look at these new technologies, for example, and to say what, if? Why can't we? Instead of we could never do that, that's too expensive. We have to take costs out of our current implementations. Today we got to look for three to 10% out every year and breaking that iterative mindset.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Yeah, that's great. I'm glad to see some of that coming back and we're recording this. It's the CES is going on and some great announcements. I was just chatting with a colleague today Like, wow, there's some big announcements. Of course you know they're in the sphere, which is awesome, so that amplifies it, but yeah, so I'm hoping this is maybe a year. Some of that mindset is taking place and settling back in. You know another thing you talked about maybe you touch on a little bit. You are a great storyteller and you touch on storytelling a little bit. I feel like it's sort of an underappreciated skill set, an underappreciated art form. Again back to a mindset. You know how do we communicate and identify with other people. If you could just touch on kind of your perspective on storytelling as a leadership or a mindset tactic.

Brain Solis:

Yeah, you know one real quick point on self-awareness, because I think that's really where it begins, and you brought up a point that I didn't touch on, which was beginner's mind, and then I'll get into storytelling. Yeah, sure, you know, a beginner's mind is someone who brings a more open self to a problem, any meeting, any opportunity, just any moment, and to have a beginner's mind is something I think we'd all like to believe that we have, open minds. I don't know if you know this or not, but one study showed that only about 10 to 15% of us have the recognition of self-awareness and, in reality, rather than a beginner's mind, we usually bring to a moment an expert's mind you know where we have ideas, we have experience, we have a gut hunch, whatever it is, and those are essentially cognitive biases manifesting themselves.

Brain Solis:

It's also very human and normal. Of course you want to bring your best self, your experience, that's who you are that's how you got here to these moments. And so the idea of having the beginner's mind is challenging, if not impossible, unless you intentionally try to do that. And in that white space to help people get there, storytelling becomes very important. You can't just say to someone you're not self-aware, you're not thinking as creatively as possible, and so storytelling becomes very important in every step of the mind shift. It's how do you give one to yourself and then how do you give one to those who work with you, so that you're inspiring full imagination and creativity to tackle these opportunities in ways that just weren't possible before. And that's a mind shift before you even get to all of this incredible technology. But storytelling, one of my biggest idols since I was a kid probably true for many people is Walt Disney, and I think of Walt Disney as an innovator, a master storyteller, the original Imagineer, if you will. Yeah, so I was very lucky when I came across the name of someone who used to be a Pixar Disney storyboard artist. His name is Nicholas Sung and now he is a storyteller at Netflix, which is very cool to watch his career take off. I had the opportunity to work with him after meeting him when he was doing storyboarding work for Airbnb, and this is a really famous story.

Brain Solis:

When Airbnb, back in the day, was going through its big identity crisis, they hired Nicholas Sung to come in and work with the data team, understand what the challenges were, what guests were looking for, the problems they were having, what hosts were looking for and the problems they were having. They were looking for the aspirations of each side, and they were able to uncover these stories that they just had missed. Why does someone put their home open to strangers, or why does someone want to rent the homes or rooms of strangers rather than going to, I don't know, the Four Seasons? And they were able to put these into aspirational storyboards, of which then they brought decision makers, investors, the board together around these stories to then invest in the change that was necessary for Airbnb at the time. I had always thought storyboarding was about capturing stills and putting them into a linear format to be able to tell the story in an inexpensive way, before you started investing in all of the animation. It turns out that's partly true.

Brain Solis:

The reality of it is a way of testing the ability for the story to become believable. Do you see yourself in the story? Do you see yourself in the characters? Because you're not just looking at the board. People are acting out the board in front of you and they're making changes to it in real time.

Brain Solis:

So this believability aspect of the storyboarding process is a very different approach than just simply telling a story.

Brain Solis:

So if you're telling a story of disruption and generative AI is going to unlock new ways of work, you can't just say this is what's going to happen and this is what the work is going to be and this is what people are going to do and hope to scare someone into action or creating a burning platform.

Brain Solis:

What you do is you inspire someone to be into the story of what the new world is going to look like and how people are going to thrive, and you're basing the characters on the people that you feel are your stakeholders and you're turning the story and how all the stakeholders can be successful. It's a Disney-like approach to telling the future of your organization in a way that people feel inspired, that they want to be part of that story. And learning from Nick and working through the storyboarding process with him he even worked on this book with me it's life-changing because now you realize that the story is bigger than just your work or what you feel is important. Because of the research you did, you're now making it a story of transformation and a human conquest towards greatness, of one of which people want to be part of, and that, for me, was probably the most important part of the book is recognizing kind of coming back to self-awareness, and a beginner's mind is that you're not your audience, and to become part of your audience requires empathy.

Brain Solis:

Storytelling is built on empathy and then building up from there.

Jim Hertzfeld:

Right, that was a great connection. I didn't see that coming and storyboarding and storytelling is a design process. You didn't mention what I heard and I love about good design processes. It just sort of reveals the truth, right, it reveals the need, and I heard a lot of that. Tell us a little bit about what's going on at ServiceNow. Where you're kicking off the year, what are you seeing? What's sort of the vision that you're seeing with ServiceNow?

Brain Solis:

Absolutely. We have an incredible leader in Bill McDermott and he is all in on AI, business transformation and at ServiceNow. You might know us as one part of your organization, largely built in foundationally in ITSM, right. But what a platform does is connects work, and AI helps you to automate that work, helps you put agents to work, it helps you take your organization and make it more optimized and efficient, but what it also does, it allows you to reimagine work, so you're connecting the dots across the organization. If you think about what powers AI, well, it's data. Data doesn't work well when it's in silos. So when you're connecting work, you're actually connecting your organization. You're building the foundation for more intelligent enterprise, and so the leadership under Bill especially here in 2025, is really going to help our customers unlock the future of work without having to completely control, alt, delete their businesses, and I think that's a pretty special value for opposition.

Brain Solis:

So a lot of the lessons that are taught in the book. For those who didn't know, bill McDermott also wrote the foreword to the book and it's very inspirational. It's very Bill, and in fact, I'm actually rereading my book, as you can see. I enjoy it and one of the reasons I'm rereading it to your question is we're going to spend 2025. I work in the innovation office at ServiceNow and our big charter is to be the voice of innovation, not just for ServiceNow, but for our customers and helping them see these opportunities, the storytelling aspect of it, understanding where they are where they're trying to go, and helping tell the story of where else they can go. What else they could do. And helping them accelerate those aspirations of that type of transformation for those leaders who want to build the business of the future today.

Jim Hertzfeld:

I'm glad you're there, Brian. I'm excited about what you guys are going to do and a mind shift that you're going to create, I think, both within the organization and with your customers, and I hope we connect over a project someday.

Brain Solis:

Jim, anything to help you and help our customers. That's what I'm here for and I really appreciate one the time you took to read the book and then also the time to invite and host me on the show. It means a lot and we can inspire new leadership. You said earlier at the beginning of the conversation something that I meant to touch on that it was like this cry for new leadership, and it's exactly how I described it when we were finishing the book and thinking about how we were going to market it. It was literally the words we use was rally cry for new leadership, because leadership isn't management, and I think, if you look at organizational evolution, management is important and companies have to scale and they have to save money, they have to make money, but they also have to innovate.

Brain Solis:

I had an opportunity to spend time with Mark Randolph about a month ago and Mark Randolph is the co-founder of Netflix with Reed Hastings, and we were talking about, a lot of people don't recognize this. They just sort of take for granted, like, what's Netflix releasing now, because I've got an insatiable need to stream a series today? But Netflix started out, as those who may remember, as a DVD mailing company, Then the DVD mailing company at the time, e-commerce was becoming a thing, so they had to shift towards e-commerce. Then the internet became even more powerful and they shifted towards streaming. The story that isn't as popular as Mark was sort of alluding to is that every one of those evolutions was a foundational business transformation exercise. Every one of those evolutions was a foundational business transformation exercise. They were profitable in each one of those segments of their life but decided that because they were a small company, it was all or nothing. They couldn't stay in DVDs while investing in e-commerce and stay in e-commerce while investing in streaming. And so they made really tough business decisions and transformations to let go of their core businesses. Each time they would move to the next stage of their transformation. And those are big stories.

Brain Solis:

And I asked Mark you know what's the mindset that business leaders need today? Understanding that they're essentially facing the next thing. We know that Netflix would look at the next thing by going all in on it, but business leaders tend to invest more in the core rather than let go of the core, and it really was a mind shift moment where he was talking about that. This is that moment for all companies to at least invest in what is next. Keep your core, nurture your core, but don't abandon the future. And it was really inspiring, relevant and timely story to share with those.

Brain Solis:

And so, coming back to leadership and closing out, leadership isn't just a title.

Brain Solis:

If you believe in something, if you make the case in something, if you tell the story in something, that you believe in what you're seeing where everything is going, it's generative or AI or neurocomputing or spatial computing or whatever it is that you're passionate about. Leadership is a way of life, it's a way of thinking, it's a way of acting, and leaders can come from anywhere. And that was really the rally cry is that we're not just writing a book for existing leaders, we're writing a book for those around existing leaders. We're writing a book for the next leader, the emergent leader, the next entrepreneur, to recognize that there is a mechanical process to understanding what something means and breaking it down so that you can take the what to, so, what to the now, what levels and move people with you, so that you're making the rallying cry towards that transformation. So the book helps well, hopefully inspires your story, but also gives you the tools necessary to become either the leader and the leadership enabler, the CEO whisperer or a leader yourself.

Jim Hertzfeld:

That's awesome. Brian, thanks for the conversation. I really appreciate it and I hope you have a great future this year.

Brain Solis:

Oh, thanks. Jim, happy New Year and wish everyone the best, most successful, brightest future possible, but recognize that it's all ours to shape

Jim Hertzfeld:

Awesome Thanks

Joe Wentzel:

Perficient with Jim Hertzfeld. We want to thank our proficient colleagues JD Norman and Rick Bauer for our music. Subscribe to the podcast and don't miss a single episode. You can find this season, along with show notes, at perficient. com. Thanks for listening.

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Jim Hertzfeld

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Brian Solis

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