How to Build a Better Business Strategy w/ Jennifer Riel of IDEO

Our guest on the first episode of 2024 is Jennifer Riel, an IDEO Partner and Chief Strategy Officer. Before IDEO, Jennifer spent 13 years at the Rotman School of Management, where she taught undergrads, MBAs, and executives how to think creatively about their toughest challenges. During this period, she partnered with organizations to help them build their strategic thinking capabilities and transform their teams. Jennifer also teamed up with Roger Martin to write the book Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking. 

In this fascinating and wide-ranging episode, Jennifer and Chris discuss: 

• The five essential questions at the heart of any strategy
• The beauty of being wrong, the costs of not embracing this narrative, and how being wrong can help you build a better strategy
• The false promises of the consensus narrative and why you should leave it behind and embrace tension
• And how to effectively communicate your strategy from the boardroom to the buyer, and beyond

And much more! 

Transcript

Jennifer Riel  0:01 
Strategy is a set of choices. That means you're choosing to do some things and not other things in service of a specific shared goal, a shared understanding of what winning will be for you and your organization.

Chris Hare  0:15 
Welcome to the Storied Future Podcast, a show where I interview high-performing CEOs, experts, and innovators who have put new narratives out into the world, and then use those narratives to shift the future. If you want to create a future where you're celebrated not only for what you've accomplished, but for how you've accomplished it, who you took with you and who you became in the process, this is the show for you.

My guest today, Jennifer Riel, is the Chief Strategy Officer at IDEO. Before IDEO, Jennifer spent 13 years teaching at the Rotman School of Management. And she has collaborated with Roger Martin on a number of books including The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, and Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, written also with A.G. Lafley. As a child growing up in Canada, one of Jennifer's greatest loves was reading Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. And it's not a stretch to say that this book was a critical input to Jennifer's worldview, and it helped shape her life's work. As I put this episode together, I knew I had to open it with a quote from Anne of Green Gables at this point in the book, and has just decided to give up her dream of going away to college, and she's staying home to care for the woman who raised her in her time of need. She says, quote, "When I left Queen's, my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along for many a milestone. Now there's a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does."

As you're about to see, Jennifer has a gift for bringing structure and clarity to the process of building a business strategy that can help you and your company navigate the uncertainty of the bends in the road ahead. In this episode, we talk about the five essential questions at the heart of any strategy, the beauty of being wrong, the cost of not embracing this narrative, and how being wrong can help you build a better strategy, the false promises of the consensus narrative, and why you should leave it behind and embrace tension. And finally, how to effectively communicate your strategy from the boardroom to the buyer and beyond. Let's dive in.

Jennifer, thanks so much for joining me on the Storied Future Podcast.

Jennifer Riel  2:22
It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Chris Hare. 2:23
So I wanted to start actually with the future, your future, and would love to understand, first day of retirement, assuming you want to retire. What do you think that you'll be most proud of? And how do you want to be remembered?

Jennifer Riel  2:38 
This question, I think, as I look to the first day of retirement, and what I would want people to highlight or remember about me, mainly is about how I impacted the people around me, the the impact I had on them, my hope is that they say that they learned and that I fostered their growth. And hopefully that I was helpful and kind. My mentor, my boss had a philosophy that he wanted to be seen as relentlessly useful. And I thought those words were quite wonderful. So I've always tried when someone is struggling or needs help, or just have a question to try to be as useful as I can in that moment. And my hope would be I would be remembered for for doing that.

Chris Hare  3:30
Well, I love that that's a great aspiration. And I actually say, we've only had a conversation once before, but your content and your books and your speaking and everything's already been incredibly useful and helpful to me. And I know it has been a lot of other students. So So now rewinding to the beginning, I would love to understand where you grew up what you were like as a kid. What did play look like for you? And then also, how did you think about the future was a little one.

Jennifer Riel  3:58
I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada, in what was a rapidly growing very diverse suburb, about an hour outside of Toronto. And as a child, I was curious, I was a voracious reader. I was a deep admirer of my big brother and wanted to do whatever he did, and so followed him around much to his annoyance. And as I sort of grew into adolescence, I was maybe slightly more socially awkward than some of my peers. So I did continue to be a voracious reader and found found a lot of inspiration and joy in imaginary worlds.

Chris Hare  4:45 
Do you recall any favorite, a favorite book?

Jennifer Riel  4:48 
Well, as a Canadian girl, you have no choice but to fall in love with Anne of Green Gables. It's a universal rule, and a few years ago, my husband and I drove to Prince Edward Island. And I said, you know, the one thing is that I need to go to Green Gables. And so had never been, as we were driving across the island, which was not, it does not take that long. It's not a big island. My husband noticed I've been very quiet for about 10 minutes and he said, "Are you crying?" "Yes, in fact, and just be okay with it. You have no idea how important it is to me that I'm going to Green Gables where L.M. Montgomery grew up and wrote this book." And it was transformative to my life to see this playful, creative, slightly obnoxious girl in writing. And as a little girl, you don't get that a lot. And so it was a really powerful moment.

Chris Hare  5:48 
You mentioned the playful piece. What else about her, and her story grabbed you?

Jennifer Riel  5:53 
She too, is a voracious reader. And not everyone's cup of tea. I think in preparation for going to Pei, I got my husband who had never watched the CBC version of Green Gables from my childhood, I got him to watch it. And about 10 minutes in and is having a particularly dramatic moment around a Tennyson poem, and it is very over the top. And she has been hyper verbal up to that point. And he turned to me and said, "I think I get why this speaks to you," with love, but there was something about her imagination and her love of words that I saw myself in and continue to see myself in.

Chris Hare  6:41
Full confession, I may have seen the entire series more than once the whole family watched it growing up.  So where did your path take you from there in college and beyond? And and then how did that the way you were, as a child translate into that?

Jennifer Riel  6:54 
I did an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts, English literature and history, largely because those were subjects that I loved. They didn't have a particular perspective on where that would lead as a career. So I just did a lot of reading about the world in that degree. And then graduated and discovered there weren't a lot of people lining up to pay me money to do something with that degree. But eventually figured out I could be a creative. So I became a copywriter and an editor worked for a large retailer in Canada for a number of years. And then my department was outsourced. And it was not a good experience for me. And I realized I did not have the credibility or tools to be making that decision, that decision was made for me. And I did not want to be in that position moving forward. So I thought, clearly, there was a place where you learned the secret handshakes and the language of business and all the things that you needed to learn to be in the room making the decision. And that was in business school. So I went to get an MBA with the intention of going back into the world of marketing. And didn't leave, I stayed at the Rotman School, which is where I got my MBA, I stayed as a as an instructor and on staff there for almost 15 years.

Chris Hare  8:11 
Yeah, actually, my I got my start as a copywriter. So as soon as you say that I totally lit up like, oh, yeah, that was my roots as well. And then now at IDEO, I'm curious, what's the thing that lights you up most?

Jennifer Riel  8:25 
I mean, there's so much often it's about the people. IDEO is a remarkable collection of people from an array of disciplines. So you might be working on a project team with someone who did development work in Africa, and someone who's an electrical engineer, and someone who's a poet, and that could be a project team on a particular challenge. And that combustible mix of perspectives is always challenging, and rewarding. So I enjoy that. And then anytime I get to slip away from that very collaborative, highly in person, culture and have a little bit of time to sit and write is also still a deep joy. I love being able to take what I'm learning, and find ways of sharing it via the written word with people. So probably a combination of those two things would be giving me joy. What do you feel like at the core of your writing in your work? What do you feel like is motivating that work that you're doing? It probably as a desire to be relentlessly your spa. Maybe it goes back to that mantra that that Roger Martin shared with me all those years ago, I just love telling stories that help people see things in a new way that might help them try something different. And that has always been a backbone of my work is how do I illustrate the point I'm trying to make in a way that someone could use it could take action could make a personal connection or make sense of it in a way that lets them do something that might make them happier or more successful or better off in some meaningful way, which is maybe a slightly grandiose framing of my own impact. I hope it doesn't sound that way. But that's the ambition.

Chris Hare  10:13 
I think something that you've done really well is taking narratives that we all tend to believe and take for granted. And examining them from a different angle, challenging them or flipping them. And to be honest, I'm sure it's uncomfortable work. I know it's uncomfortable for a lot of people to hear. But that's where the transformation comes about. So yeah, I'm excited to learn more from you about that. Is there a specific project with idea that comes to mind whether it was a client engagement or internally that kind of illustrates something that you're proud of?

Jennifer Riel  10:44 
It's hard to pick just one. I think every project at IDEO is its own unique contribution, I think we've worked on everything from helping a big company like Ford Motor Company, reimagine its future and the future of mobility to helping a new group at Planned Parenthood, figure out what their strategy for innovation and change will be to working with a big beer company on their innovation strategy. And in all of these cases, I think it's about how we leverage the tools of design, deep understanding of humans through ethnographic research, divergence and play to generate many different possibilities. And then the ability to make that tangible and concrete and real for people. And then finally, the ability to test and learn, iterate and make better over time. They all show up in different ways. No two projects are alike. Every one has its own unique thread. But yeah, all of them have been uniquely powerful and taught me something along the way.

Chris Hare  11:54 
Yeah, and I love that beautiful part with human centered design. And that I think it connects back to your love of storytelling is also like just listening to and mining those stories from the user, from the customer from all of your stakeholders, right? And just observing that and pulling the energy and matter out of those stories to create us is a beautiful thing.

Jennifer Riel  12:14 
Yeah, it's, I think, when I was first introduced to human centered innovation, the idea that you would sit and ask someone to tell you stories about their experiences was transformative. We're used to asking people for their opinions, what do you think about this? And instead saying, Tell me about what it was like to go through this experience? Help me understand what you've thought and felt? And then being in that conversation and being able to follow up with, say more about or why did you do that thing, or what happened next, and really following your curiosity to understand the lived experience of another person and really trying to be as open to what you don't expect. And that doesn't fit the pattern so that you can go deeper and learn new things. And that was a really powerful moment for me as I as I thought about what you could use to inspire new ideas. I grew up as a kid who was pretty good in school, and so often relied on what was in my own mind, the ideas that most immediately came to my mind as the right answer or the way we should proceed. And instead stepping back, to use another person's stories, another person's experiences as the foundation and to understand what that might really mean, was deeply powerful.

Chris Hare  13:43 
One of the things that I often tell my clients when we start a narrative project is this is going to be messy. And that's okay. Have you read the creative habit by Twyla Tharp?

Jennifer Riel  13:55 
I've read excerpts, I haven't read the entire thing. But I know it's deeply powerful.

Chris Hare  14:00 
It's one of my favorites, but she talks about as creative people we want, we think we want unbridled freedom. But in reality, we want freedom to go crazy inside of the scaffolding and the boundaries, right. But that messy process where, you know, actually, I had a client, once were months into it, we'd done all of the quantitative research, and they said, well, what's the narrative? Like, we need an answer. I said, I wish I could tell you, but that's not my job to tell you. We need to need to take all of these insights and take them to your audience and the experts and ask them to interact with it and right. And so it's always scary, but there's so much more texture and depth, and that emerges out of that. Right. But it takes humility, which is not easy.

Jennifer Riel  14:46 
I love that. You know, I think that unsurprisingly, I think that Twyla Tharp was correct. And it connects for me to an insight that a dear colleague once shared with me. She had started her career As a child psychiatrist, and she was talking about toddlers, and approaches to raising toddlers, and she essentially said, there's this sense, in some parenting philosophies that you total freedom is a gift to a child. And she said, actually, if you encounter a toddler who has not received any structure or any boundaries, they are paralyzed, they want boundaries to push against, that's what being a toddler is. But in the absence of structure, in the absence of the gift of constraints, they are overwhelmed by what is around them. And I think that that applies to the world of design and to the world of business. We sometimes wish we didn't have these constraints, but those constraints are the gift, they enable us to push against them, and sometimes question them and try to step outside of them. But without them, we would be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of all that we could be thinking about all that we could be focused on. And so I think there's something very powerful in that. And even within that, acknowledging that, even within the constraints, there's a degree of messiness. One of our values at IDEO is, is that we need to embrace ambiguity. And that's not one of my natural states of being. And so it is something that you have to teach yourself to do to stay in ambiguity a little bit longer than you might naturally feel inclined. And that's where the team can be so powerful, we will often have folks who are deeply comfortable in ambiguity and in fact, would stay there longer than is productive. And then folks who are more on on my end of the spectrum that are more comfortable with closure and want to move to divergence more quickly. And it's in the push and pull of those different perspectives that you arrive at something that is more of a nuanced spot, or a balanced spot between the two.

Chris Hare  17:12 
Would love to shift to talk about strategy now, strategy has tons of meetings at the same time, it has no meaning in terms of the way it is often used within business. So let's just start by defining what business strategy is. And then we'd love to understand kind of what you see as passing for strategy and how that negatively impacts business and customer.

Jennifer Riel  17:33 
So for me, strategy is a set of choices. When I say choices, that means you're choosing to do some things and not other things in service of a specific shared goal, a shared understanding of what winning will be for you and your organization. And there are many ways of defining that it's specific and contextual. And that's it's in contrast to definitions of strategy that are more aligned with with planning. So a list of initiatives or budget and resourcing allocation mechanism, or really thick binder of analysis, right? All of these things are useful and adjacent to strategy. But strategy fundamentally, is a set of choices about where you will play, and how you will win there that set you up to go after a specific time bound goal, usually three to five years in the future.

Chris Hare  18:35 
So I've had a couple of conversations within the last year, one of them was just a few weeks back with folks who are companies that need a narrative, but there is no business strategy, which is frankly terrifying. And in one case, the both the CEO and the CMO mandated that this leader create a narrative in the absence of a business strategy. Where do you imagine this will would end up and then how would you advise them?

Jennifer Riel  19:00 
So I will maybe challenge you a little and say that it is my belief that every company has a strategy. It might not be written down. They might not know what it is. But strategy is what you do every day. We're all making choices every day. And so they are doing some things and not others. They're prioritizing them some things and not others. They have some shared vague sense, even if it's not written down of why they exist, that is deeply inferior to a state of affairs where you have a strategy that you've thought through together, written down, agree to allied action around, but they all do they all have a strategy. And so if I were the CMO, and in that world, I would be beginning by trying to say what do I believe our actions tell me our strategy is, what are we ultimately aiming at? Who are our customers? What do we offer? To them, what are our sources of advantage? And how might I use that to then build a narrative? Because I think trying to build a narrative for a company, in the absence of some level of understanding of those fundamental choices, feels like at best theater, and at worst impossible to do. So I think that I would push back on the notion of they don't have a strategy, I would say they do. And it's part of the narrative building exercise to understand what that is, in order to use it as an input to the narrative.

Chris Hare  20:32 
So it's a strategy of chaos or a choice to not think about the bigger questions, but that in itself is, is the strategy,

Jennifer Riel  20:40 
Not making a choice is a choice? Absolutely. And so, and I don't want to be I don't know that company, it is possible, actually, that they have implicitly made smart choices. That happens a lot. There are entrepreneurial ventures where the entrepreneur is an intuitive strategist, they have somewhere in their mind and understanding of these choices, they just have never articulated them aloud. They're making thoughtful strategic choices, they're just not capturing it in a way that can be shared with the organization. And that is still so optimal. It's better than not having an alignment of choices, or not having someone who has an intuitive understanding. But it's difficult for the organization, because they're guessing why this decision was made or why we're heading in this direction. And so I think it's always superior to have some source of truth that you can go to, to say, ah, that's the why, oh, that's the reason. Now I understand that choice. And so I think that is just a superior way of thinking about it.

Chris Hare  21:44 
So you wrote an article with A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin that was entitled" The Five Essential Questions at the Heart of Any Strategy." Can you talk about what the five strategy questions are?

Jennifer Riel  21:55 
Absolutely. So these five questions were structured as what Roger Martin called the strategy choice cascade. So the five choices are connected and cascade together into a cohesive whole? And they are one, what is our winning aspiration? How are we jointly collectively as an organization, defining winning? There are more ways to define it than number one market share. It's whatever that meaningful when is for you as an organization. So that's one, two, where will we play? What is the playing field on which we operate our most important customers, the channels through which we reach them, the offers that we're putting into the world, the geographies in which we choose to participate, and the parts of the production process that we choose to do ourselves, or choose to outsource or partner. So those are choices about that playing field on which you choose to compete. That's the second bucket of questions. The third is how will we win? This is about competitive advantage, why our customers going to choose us over the competition through what particular mechanism of advantage. So is it because we have as Michael Porter, first put it a low cost advantage, we are able to produce an equivalent product to what's in the market, but at a lower cost to us. And therefore we have a margin advantage? Or are we differentiating our product, it is better in some meaningful way. It costs us about the same to produce it but is better because of the brand, or the quality or perceived quality or some other reason why consumers are willing to pay more for that product and competitive products. So that's the third, how will we win? What is our competitive advantage? For what capabilities will be critical to producing that advantage? So what are the activities that we as an organization need to invest in doing with excellence, to produce our advantage? So imagine your advantage isn't around the quality of your product? Well, you probably need to have capabilities and innovation in manufacturing to make sure that you are really producing structurally sustainably better products. And then the last question, the fifth is what management systems will be critical. And I recognize as I say that, that people may feel their eyes glaze over slightly at the idea of management systems. Sounds a trifle doll, but it's vital. This is the infrastructure. These are the systems physical and digital, the culture, the metrics, all of that sort of built infrastructure that supports your strategy and really is the thing that makes the difference between strategy that is a wish list on a piece of Paper is a strategy that is lived and ended up in the organization. So there's the five.

Chris Hare  25:07 
Can you give an example of Procter & Gamble in the article? Are you able to share kind of how that was used there?

Jennifer Riel  25:13 
Sure. So A.G. Lafley, for those who don't know, was the CEO of Procter & Gamble twice. But we wrote the book with him in between those two periods of him being CEO. So he had been CEO the first time for about a decade from the end of the 90s. Up until the end of the arts, I guess we call it and said, this is really about Procter and Gamble strategy during that period, when they thought about what winning was for them, they have a purpose that is about meaningfully improving the lives of the world's consumers now and for generations to come. And so they always hold that as part of the aspiration or what it means to win that they're making progress against that goal, that they are actually producing products that make lives better and in some meaningful way. And they were able to define a set of goals around sales and profits and value creation, that were for that period, how they were going to measure how they were doing against that ambition to make great products for the world's consumers and improve their lives in some way. When they thought about their playing field, in PNG is a big diversified consumer goods company, they make pampers crest and tide. And they had many, many, many brands, in many, many markets, and had for years tried to figure out the balance of where they needed to focus where they needed to invest. And he and his leadership team, were clear that they wanted growth to come from their core, from those brands that already had significant equity with consumers, that it was their job to figure out how to advance and innovate, create new jobs to be done, create new benefits so that those core brands could grow. It wasn't just about growth through the edges or incremental additions. So they thought about their leading brands, their biggest and most important markets, and on the core of their consumer base, which is really mass consumers mom, shopping for her family. They wanted to focus on home, beauty, health and personal care as the categories in which they would really seek to differentiate themselves. And they wanted to think about emerging markets as a growth area for them. So obviously, at a high level of corporate level, these are relatively abstract, but it gives you a bit of a sense of how they were shaping their playing field. And they made decisions in this era to get out of things like prescription pharmaceutical developments at food as things that they didn't think were as aligned with their core. How they win is through highly differentiated brands. Noticeable superiority is the terminology they use. When you wash your hair with Pantene, they want you to notice that it's shinier, so that you can actually see feel experience the difference from other brands. And that is backed by a global scale, and pretty ubiquitous distribution, so you can get it virtually anywhere. So that's how they win is through truly differentiated brands, better quality brands, they spent quite a lot of time thinking about the capabilities they needed at a company level, in order to build that advantage. They ultimately settled on consumer understanding, deeply understanding the person for whom they were designing products and services, innovation, continuing to make their products better and to make new and better products, brand building, right, making sure that they could communicate what the brand stood for and why people should care. They termed go to market ability, which is sales. How do they engage with their biggest customers and have a strategy for how they show up in retail channels? That, again, communicates the story at p&g is winning brands. And then finally, leveraging their scale. So how could they show up to their biggest retail customers not as the tide brand or the Pantene brand but as Procter and Gamble and bring the expertise to bear that a company of that size and scale really can bring to partner with their customers on strategies in new ways. And then they have a set of management systems, some of which are quite inside baseball, but they definitely deeply invested in strategy training for their people deep, deep leadership development that is still Altru it's a deep investment across the organization. They have a management system called N O GSM, which is their tool that they use to create strategy and run their businesses. And then a measure that they used to replace the standard measure of value, which is often just looking at the share price. They thought that that was a not sophisticated enough measure of the true value of the company. And so they created a measure of operating total shareholder return that included things like free cash flow, to really talk about the health of the business.

Chris Hare  30:37 
And what was the rhythm of strategy there? Because obviously, something like that is gargantuan undertaking.

Jennifer Riel  30:45 
So they do still have an annual cadence of revisiting strategy, which is not to say, that's the only time that you look at it. But that deep focus of a leadership team, you know, once a year, but the expectation was certainly an agent's time as CEO, that when the heads of businesses were meeting with their bosses, that those were strategy conversations, right, that they were really about the most important choices, and the challenges that you were facing in the marketplace and thinking together, how to overcome those challenges. And he really wanted strategy conversations, not to be the theater of the team coming in and presenting a deck for 55 minutes. And then the senior leaders asking one question, and that's it, he really wanted them to be joint problem solving. So let's assume you're really smart, send me your strategy deck in advance, I'll read it. And then I'm gonna let you know what my questions and concerns are. And we're gonna spend our time together on those digging deeply into the future of your business, which was hard, you can imagine that's feels risky to the people coming into the room with their CEO. But it took a while he just had to show that he wasn't doing that in any punitive way, it was genuinely a desire to bring the best thinking to bear on the challenges they faced. Well, the word that just jumped out at me was together, right? We'll figure this out together. Because when I was in the corporate world, strategy was very much how do we get this thing so tight, that when we go to the senior leadership, they will agree with us or not shoot us down, or it was very much not a together kind of approach.

Chris Hare  32:37 
So that actually speaks to this idea of, we're going to get into now, the beauty of being wrong or the power of being wrong. This might get uncomfortable for some people. Maybe uncomfortable, but it's great. So can you talk about just the importance of being wrong?

Jennifer Riel  32:52 
Happy to. So this was a journey for me too. I, as I already said, I was a child who did pretty well in school and, and there can be some brittleness that comes from that when you're used to being right. And so it's comfortable failing. And so, for me, the idea of needing to get comfortable being wrong, is a journey for all of us. Nobody likes it, nobody wants to be wrong. And that's actually sad, personal failing. It's just a deeply human thing we need as human beings to survive, to feel confident in our rightness, right, so that we can take action, right, so our brains evolved to simplify the world around us so that we could take action, and avoid being eaten by bigger, scarier predators around us, we're pretty vulnerable to being eaten by much larger things with sharper teeth. And so we have this shared sense of human beings that if we're smart, and we care about a thing, that we should be able to come to the right answer. And we often feel that whatever answer we come to, is, in fact, correct. And that lets our brain rest, we actually get a reward from coming to closure. And that rest is how we save up our energy to escape the big scary things.

Chris Hare  34:19 
So we're essentially pursuing, not necessarily the resolution or the idea. At our core, it's more about pursuing the ability to rest, I guess, and that's, that's a way to get there.

Jennifer Riel  34:31 
Closure feels great. If you're a to do list person, right, the feeling you get when you cross the thing off the list. There's a little happy jolt in your brain. And if you're like me, you might sometimes write something on the to do list you've already finished just for the joy of crossing it off. And so we definitely do get this sense that when we are done thinking about something we have achieved closure Therefore, great, you don't have to think about it anymore. And that frees up your resources to do other things. And that's good from a survival perspective. But it's hard and difficult from an interpersonal perspective. So because the world is so complex, we are going through our day simplifying our brains simplify the world. And so we see the world through our models of it. And it's actually quite natural. That because I'm building simplified models of the world through my own biases, and incentives, and experiences, and so are you, but your biases and etc. experiences are different to mine. So we can have the same notional experience and arrive at radically different interpretations about what it means. It doesn't feel like that should be true, it feels like there should be a single shared, understanding a single shared perspective on whatever it is that we've experienced. But it turns out that you and I could arrive, in fact, at opposite interpretations of the meaning of something. And we've been trained by our education by society, that our job in that moment is to prove that we are right, that the person who sees the world differently from us is is wrong, and either stupid, or evil, to hold the perspective that they do. So my job is to make those answers go away because they are dangerous. And to prove to the world that I am correct, there are deep seated human instincts around winning arguments, avoiding embarrassment being right, that we have to unlearn and train ourselves to be open to perspectives that other people hold that might deepen our understanding, shift our perspective, and maybe even make us realize that we were wrong.

Chris Hare  36:55 
And I think we adopt language that supports that data driven is a great one of like, I must be right, this is what the data says. But it's interesting now that you're sharing that of how much we fight and hold on to that being right, and then just grasp on to this different language and things to prove that.

Jennifer Riel  37:15 
Well, and the data you choose, is different from the data I choose, right? And so we each feel deeply confident that we are being rigorous and rational because this is my data that reinforces and human beings defined data deeply broadly, right? Data is inference data is experience, data is quantitative number. And different people will put different weight on different things.

Chris Hare  37:53 
Is there a story that comes to mind of a time for you where you recognize you're wrong, and were able to embrace that and it shifted something for you?

Jennifer Riel  38:02 
Oh, I'm wrong all the time. I want to think of whether there's a really good one about so I maybe this is one as I was learning as a leader. I was working at the Rotman School and I had a relatively small, but really talented and devoted team who were helping us to take the ideas and teach them in new ways to different audiences. And one of the young women was working with a school. And they were sending a study group to Toronto. And they were gonna go through an experience in this idea of integrative thinking or how you leverage opposing perspectives to create new answers. And they've been a difficult client, that sometimes happens. And they came back about two weeks before they were due to come and said, Could we blow up the schedule in the following way? Shift when we were going to be with you have a break, go do something else come back. And this lovely young woman said, so I'm going to tell them no. And I said, Well, I wonder if we might think about whether there's actually a way to make it work that could also work for us. And then I sort of laid out what I thought might be the case. And I thought that was me being a really productive and helpful boss. But two years later, we were doing some leadership development work together as a team. And one of the tools was around difficult conversations or moments where you had a conversation where it went really poorly. And each of us sort of had to write out a script of the conversation and bravely and fascinatingly, this young woman shared that conversation, and I always loved what I was being helpful. And what you do in sharing this conversation, is you not only share the dialogue as to the best of your recollection, but also what you were thinking and feeling and the way that she depicted my dialogue in that way. was me telling her that she had to do this. And the narrative in her own mind was I cannot believe she has no idea how much work this is going to be. Like, how could she possibly, of course, she doesn't have to do it like it was just this very sort of negative. And the insight for me was when you are a leader, because this was pretty early in my leadership career, what you mean, right, your intention, and the impact can be radically different. And I had one sense of what my impact was in that moment. And I never checked, I thought I was being helpful leader. And in fact, I was perceived as being dictatorial, and, and empathetic in that moment. And it really did cause me to think differently, like I was wrong about how I showed up in that room, I was wrong about the impact I was having. And it's made me very conscious of what and how I speak when I'm in a room, knowing that a suggestion can feel like a mandate. And so I want to be really clear. Sometimes what I'm saying might be a mandate, but often it's not. And so I need to own responsibility for creating clarity about which is which.

Chris Hare  41:20 
Thanks for sharing that. So when it comes to building a strategy, how does our fear of being wrong affect that process?

Jennifer Riel  41:29 
I think we try sometimes to turn the strategy into something more manageable. So rather than really deeply engaging with the difficult considerations, we will take the last strategy and say, Let's optimize this, or we try to navigate the strategy conversations to minimize disagreement. So to say, let's put together a team that we secretly know sees the world really similarly, or to have meetings before the meetings to build allies to make sure that our view will hold the day. Or to suggest when two people disagree in the room, that they're really saying the same thing, just to get out of the room and avoid that uncomfortable feeling of disagreement. And so I think all of those things play out, because we don't like conflict, and we don't like the possibility that we will be wrong. It's embarrassing, and potentially, in some organizations, bad for your career. I don't want to suggest that people are behaving in these ways, selfishly, it's pragmatic, as well.

Chris Hare  42:39 
And what's that learning process been like for you? My guess would be based on how you described yourself as a child, that you would not be historically super comfortable being uncomfortable? How have you learned to be to sit in that comfortable space?

Jennifer Riel  42:55 
Yeah, I think you just have to practice it, I wish there was a better way of framing what it is. But it's going in to the room knowing that there is going to be some different perspectives and treating those as an opportunity rather than threats. And there's some just very practical things you can do. So if you're having a strategy conversation, if you can avoid having people declare what they believe the right answer is, because we know that cognitively, once you have said out loud a preference, you now more firmly hold that preference, you believe it more than before you said it out loud. And that's difficult, right? Because then you have to move people away from this position. So if there are ways that you can de personalize the possibilities, so it's not, this is Chris's possibility, and this is Jennifer's possibility, but rather, here are a set of possibilities that we are collectively building, and that we are collectively going to examine and understand and test, then you can avoid some of that triggering that can happen, where it feels like I am challenging you, Chris, when I am asking questions about a given possibility.

Chris Hare  44:08 
Yeah, I think that's where culture is so important, right? Because like earlier in the conversation, you said, I'm going to push back on this thing. In that moment, I internally wasn't like, you know, oh, no, she's gonna attack me, you know, like, it's clear that the goal is to get to growth and get to learning, right? Versus the environment that we often see, which is, how do we kill a bunch of ideas to get to the solution as quickly as possible? And I imagined to, for me, something I can grow in as to when I come into the room, invite questions that could potentially show if I'm wrong as a way to grow in that right of asking people what do you see that could be a gap here?

Jennifer Riel  44:51 
I think it's the most powerful thing you can do as a leader, Chris. I think fundamentally for me, the people who work with me well will roll their eyes because there are things I will say again and again, but it's it's intentional. So I might say, well, here's how I'm thinking about the answer. But, Chris, how do you see it differently? She's a very specific question. And you might answer that, well, I don't really see it differently, except, well, maybe this. It's an invitation to nuance. But it is also attempting to make clear that I genuinely want to understand what you see that I don't see, you genuinely want to understand it is in my best interest, as opposed to what we often do, which is say, here's how I'm thinking about it. What do others think? Which is, on one level? useful? It's an open question. But I think there's often an implicit understanding that what I truly want is for you to tell me that I agree with what you just said. And if what we really want is the ability to understand how others see things differently than we do, then you have to be more pointed, and the kinds of questions you ask, and then the invitation that you put out to other people to share a different perspective.

Chris Hare  46:06 
Yeah, and what I see in that is very much oftentimes, at least for me, it's a very internal thing of like, I have to change, I have to shift and I have to grow in this way. Versus here, this is who I need to become. And I'm going to do this uncomfortable thing, knowing that I'm becoming that person, right. It's a very...

Jennifer Riel  46:24 
It's a journey. And I think that we can take heart and what we've learned from Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset, or from cognitive behavioral therapy, which is, you don't have to believe it, to do it, you can do it. And in doing it, you start to believe it. That's a powerful journey, it is hard to change your thinking. It's actually easier to try a behavioral experiment with intention, just to do a different thing. It's it's easier to do that than it is to change your thinking. But changing your behavior, getting feedback from that new behavior, and then repeating that behavior can rewire your brain, it can change your thinking, or at least that's the hope and promise for so many folks who who are seeking cognitive behavioral therapy for whatever social anxiety or or whatever other issues that they are attempting to address.

Chris Hare  47:20 
Yeah, I had a conversation with Jonathan Adler at Olin College of Engineering a couple weeks back. And it was interesting, with his research, what they found was, I believe it was people who were resistant to CBT in their treatment, when they would write a narrative about a different narrative about the future, and then would live into it before they even necessarily believed it, how that would transform them. And that's been my experience as well. But it's, it's not the path that we think we should be taking.

Jennifer Riel  47:51 
It's true, it's a bit it is a bit counterintuitive, but it's powerful. You can do it before you believe it. And it can help you believe.

Chris Hare  48:03 
You've made a statement that the it's in the tension that we find the answers and also have the the Alfred Sloan example. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jennifer Riel  48:11 
Yeah. So the Alfred Sloan example is a quote from Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive, and Sloan and for those who don't know, he was the CEO of General Motors. He took it from essentially a small startup to the biggest and most important company on Earth by the time he retired in the 1950s. And Drucker writes about him as a highly effective leader, and tells the story of particular meeting, where he and his senior leadership team are sitting around what I imagined to be a massive oak table in a wood paneled meeting room somewhere in Detroit. And in the story, Drucker quotes Sloan as saying, gentlemen, the foretastes. That's all guys. Gentleman. I take it, we're in agreement on the course of action here. And if that's the case, then I suggest we adjourn the meeting, postpone any further discussion of this issue, until we've had time to come to disagreement. And perhaps then we'll understand what this issue is all about. Rough paraphrase, but the time to come to disagreement is direct to that just seared into my brain is so at odds with how we think about the job of a leader today, which is to get to consensus, but a debased form of consensus, the kind of modern conception of consensus, which is no one actively objective. People mostly nodded. Nobody stormed out, right, that sort of surface level. Whereas what I think Sloane was after, and what I'm after, was a sense that people may have come into the room with differing perspectives, but they leave having expressed those perspectives authentically and feeling heard, understanding that decision that is being made coming out of that discussion. And being willing to play that part in taking it forward. It's a much higher bar of true consensus. And Sloan's argument is that you have to go through productive disagreement to get there, you have to explore the tension of different perspectives in order, not just to have a better answer, but to have an answer that people believe in and will take action on. And I would concur with that understanding.

Chris Hare  50:29  
Yeah, I've had different people ask me what my goals are for my podcasts at the end of the day. And I feel selfish saying this. But what I've discovered is it's very much for me to explore and learn and have my ideas challenged, it's for a lot more than that. But that's been a part of it that I didn't expect, right was to be challenged and to refine. So.

Jennifer Riel  50:49  
I love that. And I suspect that's why people find it useful is because you are genuinely pushing your own thinking, you're extending your own self. And so they're able to have a similar experience, as opposed to you seeking to create some deeply generalizable thing, I think that would likely be less helpful to people than the experience you're creating for yourself.

Chris Hare  51:11  
That also challenges me because, I mean, when I started this, it definitely wasn't easy, you know, stepping out there and doing that. But to your point, I think the more I can challenge myself to continue to open up and provide more opportunities for guests to challenge those ideas, I think that will be that much more powerful for my own personal growth. I love that. So I know, we don't have much time left, we're going to link to your papers and books and talks. But what approach do you recommend for building a strategy? And what does that that path look like? 

Jennifer Riel  51:45  
Sure. So, generically speaking, I think that you want to begin with understanding what is changing in your world around your industry, or your customers or your competition, that might cause you to need a new strategy. So another way of saying that is what is the problem you need to solve with your new strategy? something isn't working about your existing one, and then seek to diverge. So rather than seeking a single answer, or the strategy that will solve the problem, exploring different possibilities, where might we play? How might we win, to bridge this gap to solve this problem to have a better strategy? I then because I been deeply inspired by my colleagues at IDEO seek to make those possibilities as concrete as you can. So essentially, to design them to figure out what is a narrative way of expressing them, or a visual way of expressing them that will help people understand really what those choices are, and how they would feel what their implications would be, then it is about exploring, what would have to be true about the future about us as a company, about our competition about our customers, for us to choose this possibility, or this possibility, or this possibility? Out of that, you'll have some things, you're just uncertain to what extent they're true. You can go and do tests and experiments and learn around this things would have to be true that customers would behave in the following way. I don't know if they would, okay, how could we test and learn to build confidence in some of these possibilities or to reduce confidence in others? And out of those tests and experiments to bring your managerial judgment and nuance to bear to ultimately decide which possibility you feel most confident placing your bets on? That a generic high level is how I think about it.

Chris Hare  53:36  
And assuming our strategy is the not documenting the strategy, like we talked about before, and you have a well defined strategy, what have you found to be most helpful in creating a narrative around that, that folks across the organization and external partners, customers, etc, can understand and execute against?

Jennifer Riel  53:58  
I think there are a few things. One for me is always starting with human needs. So again, work at a human centered innovation firm. And we apply that outwardly to the design of things and of strategies. But I think you also need to think about it from a communications point of view. What does the recipient of this narrative need? And when do they need it? When I've collaborated on writing, sometimes when you're working with people who have a story to tell, but aren't gifted storytellers, they will want to include every nuanced detail of what happened that mattered to them in the story, and stepping back from that and saying, I understand that that happened, and that it matters to you that it happened. The person hearing this story doesn't need that. And in fact, it hurts their ability to understand the core of what we're trying to get across. This story. Can't tell them everything but it can tell them something important. So what Does the recipient of the story need is the first thing that I would bring to bear. And then very often, I think that that means that there are different groups of recipients that need different things. And so that means there, there may be different flavors of the narrative. The story is the story, but how you tell it, how detailed through what medium can shift, depending on who you're telling the story to.

Chris Hare  55:29  
And you alluded to at the beginning, the importance of time, and it sounded like the sequencing piece as well, right? Where I have clients who have these 25 to 50, or visions. And they come in and they share the immediate vision, and people get super excited. And then they layer on this other thing and people's brains just right, but to your point of like, right message for the right audience, and in the right order, and it's a journey that you're bringing them on along.

Jennifer Riel  55:56  
Absolutely, absolutely. You are a storyteller that that's what these narratives are. And you don't need to make the story do and be everything, you need to be really clear about what that story is intended to do. And then craft it in a way that meets those needs.

Chris Hare  56:14  
Well, Jennifer, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. And I'm really grateful for your time.

Jennifer Riel  56:20  
It was a pleasure for me. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Chris Hare  56:25  
Thanks for joining me for another episode of The Storied Future. What part of Jennifer's story did you find most impactful? Did anything shift and how you're thinking about your future, and how you're thinking about your narrative about how you want to tell your story? Find someone today and tell them your story? Because when we tell our stories, it can change us. It can change others, and it has the power to change the future. And that's it. Please subscribe, leave us a review and be sure to visit TSFpod.com for more information about Jennifer, for show notes, and to check out other episodes.

The Storied Future Podcast is a production of the Storied Future LLC. Produced and edited by Ray Sylvester. Audio engineering by Ali Ozbay. Theme music by The Brewz. Your host is me, Chris Hare. Learn more about how I help leaders use the power of narrative to transform themselves, their companies, and their industries at www.thestoriedfuture.com.