- Welcome everyone to the UW-Green Bay Last Lecture Series
in celebration of the 50th anniversary of
the University of Wisconsin Green Bay.
Given the opportunity, what would faculty say
if they had one last lecture to give?
Thankfully, this is hypothetical question
and the six people who were generous enough
to deliver a last lecture this year,
this is not their actual last lecture.
Describing the faculty in the words of William Wordsworth,
"What we love, others will love, and we will show them how."
And that's really the truest sense of the faculty
because of their passion for their scholarship
and their field of study
and they transmit that knowledge to the students.
So it's my great honor tonight
to introduce you to the Last Lecturer Doctor Phil Clampitt.
Doctor Clampitt got his PhD from the University of Kansas.
He is the Blair Endowed Chair of Communication
at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay.
He was previously designated
the Hendrickson Chair of Business
and the Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review
have highlighted his work on decision downloading,
which details how companies can effectively
communicate decisions to those not involved
in the decision-making process.
It's a really important skill.
His most recent book,
Communicating for Managerial Effectiveness,
is a SAGE Publication best seller.
In addition, he's co-authored
"Transforming Leaders into Progress Makers:
"Leadership for the 21st Century"
and "Embracing Uncertainty, the Essence of Leadership."
Along with being on the editorial boards
of numerous, numerous professional journals,
top journals in the field,
his work has also been published in these journals.
Professor Clampitt is a recognized expert
on communication assessments,
having conducted more than 100 communication audits
and he uses these experiences to write chapters
in the "Handbook of Communication Audits
"for Organizations and Communication Audits" by Cal Downs.
In addition to many guest-speaking opportunities
in the United States, he's also been invited
to speak internationally at the University of Pisa,
the University of Aberdeen, University of Ulster,
and numerous multi-national businesses
and professional organizations.
He's consulted on communication and leadership issues
with a variety of organizations such as Pepsi,
Manpower, Schneider National, American Medical Security,
Dean Foods, the Bolt Company, Phil Mani Papers,
Dental City, Prevea, the US Army War College,
the City of Appleton, the Neville Museum, and Nokia.
And that's not the full list.
In addition he created a website devoted
to improving critical thinking and communication practices.
And I believe that's the www.drsowhat.com?
And I went to the site and it's really quite helpful.
The site contains complementary communication tips
and various tools discussed in his seminars and classes.
So speaking tonight on the magical connection
between uncertainty, innovation, and the human spirit,
please join me in welcoming tonight's Last Lecturer,
Doctor Phil Clampitt.
(audience applauds)
- Well thank you for those kind words.
It's just enormous pleasure to be here
and see so many former students
and current students and friends of mine in the community.
It's just a huge honor, so it put a lot of pressure on me,
and I just said, "I'm gonna have fun."
And we're gonna have fun tonight.
I wanna share with you some thoughts
about something, and it's gonna be a little bit different
for those of you who need refresher lessons,
I assume that's why some of the alumni came,
so we're gonna be a little bit different than you've seen before,
it's gonna be a little bit more about my life
and how I came to think about
these issues in a way that I did.
And so you'll get a little bit of insight into that.
And I think you'll have a lot of fun
and I think you'll learn something as well,
at least that's my hope.
So I'm gonna start at the beginning,
and I'm gonna start with this diagram right here.
And you think that's an odd place
for a communication professor to start.
It's an odd place for a lot of people to start,
but apparently that's where I started,
because my father told me that one of the first things
I learned to say when I was a young kid--
in fact before I said, "Mommy and daddy"--
I learned all these planets, Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
And he was quite proud of showing all his science friends.
He worked at Oak Ridge, the Oak Ridge Lab,
right after World War II and he was quite proud
of demonstrating that even though I couldn't,
at the time, I'll probably say mommy and daddy.
I could say all those things and he was quite proud of that.
And my father was quite instrumental
because I remember and I'll never forget,
we used to go out at night, he built a home-made telescope,
and I'll never forget going out late at night
and all the other kids were doing what other kids were doing
and we'd look at the stars, we'd look at the moon,
and we'd learn all these incredible things,
and he told me these incredible stories
and those are vivid, vivid memories as a kid.
Because it was cold, not as cold as Wisconsin, but cold,
and the best time was the winter sky to go out
and see things as some of you know.
We've got a scientist in the room
who probably knows that better than I do.
But I remember doing that and how profound it was.
And then, he told me a story.
And this is what really got me going on my path.
It was about the planet Neptune,
and those of you who have studied Neptune
and know about it know that
one of the things that was most interesting about
the planet Neptune was, nobody could see it.
My dad could point me to Venus,
and I can still point to Venus, believe it or not,
and I know where Saturn and Jupiter and all those,
but you couldn't see Neptune, nobody could find it.
But they knew from mathematical formulas
that you could predict the not seen
or something that wasn't seen from a mathematical equation.
And this just intrigued me to no end,
how you could take things like telescopes and math
and find things that don't exist by doing this.
And this had a profound impact
on the way I began to think and look at the world.
I didn't recognize it at the time,
and I think a lot of these things we don't.
I recognize it today.
And I'm gonna share with you one other thing.
My lovely wife is back there some place.
She doesn't know this story, so,
and there are some of my basketball buddies, right,
you wanna raise your hands, guys I play basketball with,
they will admit it, they're here and we play basketball
over at the gym every now and then
and we used to play more regularly.
I'm going to give you the ultimate power word
to use with me.
So you guys, this is just for you.
But it also had a profound impact,
and this slide's gonna say like, "What in the world is going on?"
So here we have a stop sign,
we have a toad, and we have some stairs.
And when I was in high school,
I played football and I was a junior in high school
and the coach, I'm not gonna name his name,
but he was, the coach made us run stairs.
That was how we got in shape.
All the football team would go up and down the stairs
just to get back in shape
and frankly, today, even today, this morning,
this afternoon, I spent 30 minutes on stairs climbing them,
it's a lifelong habit I picked up.
Jay's sitting there and he knows I do that,
he taught me some new things.
But what in the world does that have to do
with the stop sign and the toad?
Here's the way this particular
football coach motivated everybody.
We were running up the stairs, he would always say
to the seniors who he's trying to groom,
"Hurry up you toad!"
And if you were going slow, he'd call you a toad.
And that was the worst thing you could ever be called
is to be called a toad.
So guys, if you want me to stop dead in my tracks,
just say, "Don't be a toad, Phil."
So Laurie, you can say that, "Don't be a toad."
And I'll probably just a visceral reaction to that.
Now I've got a counter argument to that,
but I'm not gonna let you know what it is.
As you imagine I would.
But the interesting thing was,
I had never been called a toad while running the stairs,
I always kept running up and down the stairs
and I was never called a toad.
This particular coach was the driver's ed instructor.
Now I'll never forget this.
It's weird how, you know how we all have
these strange situations where we remember things
and this is a strange one.
I was in a car with a young lady
who was driving the car and the coach,
the coach who called everybody a toad
would start-- we were driving along and--
I can actually name the street and know where it is--
We were driving along and the young lady
stopped at a stop sign and the coach turned to me
and said, "Did she stop?"
And I went, "Well, kinda, sorta yeah."
"Look, do you wanna be a toad?
"Did she stop or did she not stop?"
I said, "Well she kinda sorta."
"Well did she stop or did she not stop?"
I knew what the answer was,
I knew what he was hinting at, I didn't agree with him.
"She did not stop, Coach."
"Okay, so you're not a toad, wonderful, okay."
But I'll never forget that incident
because you know what I thought?
I still think to this day, we all do this, right,
we sort of stop, and then there are other people
who have a full stop.
Both of them count as stops, in my book.
Particular around-- we have any police officers in the room?
You know, both of them count as stops.
Now you'll kind of,
you'll say, "Why is he telling that story?"
And it'll come to fruition in just a minute.
And then, years later,
I got my PhD and I had fun
and that was all great and I enjoyed it.
And I was invited to go to the North Norwegian University
Science and Technology,
this particular school that you see right here.
Very, I mean, very, like almost Cambridge-like
in the way it looks and Oxford-like.
If you've ever been there it's just incredible.
And so I was asked to go there to be on a committee
for a defense committee of somebody getting their PhD.
They tried to get the top scholars
in the field of organizational communication
for this young woman's defense.
And I knew the other two people
who I'm not going to mention right now,
but I flew over, I was the outside international observer.
They paid the whole way. It was great.
It was a great time.
Well I didn't get the dissertation 'til I got on the plane.
And I read it on the way over,
on the way over on the plane.
And the first 10 pages or so were almost direct,
they weren't plagiarized, but they were
almost direct citations and comments
from one of the members of the committee.
And then I read 10 more pages
and they were from the second member of the committee.
And I read 10 more pages and it was how wonderful
and brilliant professor Clampitt was
for saying all these things.
And it was all my stuff.
And I kept saying, "This isn't what,"
to myself, "This isn't what a dissertation's
"supposed to be about, it's supposed to be
"about creating new knowledge."
So I said, "What's the one question I could ask,
"that would really cause this candidate to pause
"and think about what she was doing?"
And so, I thought of that question.
And so we're in this really big auditorium,
twice as big as this, it's much more intimidating,
this environment, and it looked like it came right out of
Cambridge or Oxford and it's a cold day,
it's beautiful, and the candidate walks in,
her parents are in the back,
and it's really exciting and cool,
and the candidate comes up.
And the couple of the former--
Those of you who know dissertation defense,
I know some of you do, it's kind of like what some of us have done
and most of you have done who have had class with me, you do the Q and A afterwards.
So she makes a presentation
and the primary thing was Q and A.
So I started doing a Q and A.
And the first question I ask after they got done was,
"If you could name one idea."
It happened to be on leadership and communication.
"If you could name one idea in the literature
"that you disagree with about leadership and communication,
"what would it be?"
And I said, "I'll give you bonus points
"if you contradict any one of
"the three of us in the front row."
The reaction was amazing.
She was set there in stunned silence.
She couldn't-- Now she had just been answering
for 30 minutes all kinds of other
technical questions and everything.
She could not answer.
And so, being the person I am,
I have been through this, she's gonna go
through a little grief as well.
I'm thinking, I'll just pause and see what happens,
and she still couldn't say anything.
And so finally I said, "Let's take a break.
"And when we come back,
"can you answer the question?"
And we took a break, and I could see
there was nervous chatter going on in the background,
nobody talked to me, 'cause I was the guest,
except my colleagues that I knew,
and they said--
And I came back and I asked her the question.
Now guess what happened next? Could she answer?
And the answer is no.
She still couldn't answer, so we had to go on.
The good news is, I said,
"In America, in the United States,
"I would not say yes to this dissertation."
'Cause it didn't create anything new.
But in that culture, that was what
they taught as a dissertation.
And then they told me something
when we went back in the committee room to deliberate
this word, janteloven.
Janteloven.
And I had never heard this word before.
It sounded kind of sexy, so I thought.
Well, I'd better learn what janteloven sounds.
I wanna be able to say that to a lot of people, you know.
And as you begin to look at the notion
of what janteloven is, I want you to look,
I just pulled this from Wikipedia recently.
Janteloven: You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you're as good as we are.
That's why she wouldn't answer me.
She'd put me up on this pedestal,
the three of us who were,
you're on a pedestal, you're not to convince yourself
you're better than we are.
You're not to think that you're more than we do.
You're not to think that you're more important than we are.
You're not to think you're good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
Well, I love laughing, so I don't understand that.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything.
That's completely the opposite
of the kind of environment in which I grew up,
which I grew up in a sense of wonder,
you always question and you answer.
And in fact today, in Norway,
there is an anti-janteloven movement
and I won't say, since we're on television,
I won't tell you what they named the anti-janteloven.
You can look that up on your own,
but it's pretty abrasive, they really wanna go after it.
Okay, so, what do all these stories have in common
that I wanted to talk about?
Well I'm gonna give you what I call
social scientist journey.
I always thought my father was the best
because he was a PhD in chemistry
and he was like a real scientist,
but that wasn't what I was interested in.
I was interested in social science.
So I'm gonna give you my journey about it
and I'm gonna start with these four things.
This is essentially an outline of what we're gonna talk about.
The first one is contemplation and experimentation.
The second one is
incubation and innovation.
I wanna get my notes here.
And then we're gonna talk about argumentation, implementation,
and then I'm going to try to talk about
devastation and reconciliation,
which is really quite hard for me to talk about,
but it's important because it's part of the journey of life.
So let's start with contemplation.
And here's the contemplation.
Think about this, what happened to Pluto?
This guy killed it.
It's no longer a planet.
It's no longer a planet, they don't do it.
So that thing that I memorized,
what could be more solid and more,
you know, stable, than the planets?
It's no longer a planet. That's one thing.
Another one, janteloven. We just talked about it.
What does janteloven do? It suppresses uncertainty.
And this is the picture that some of you may not believe,
but this is what I do in probably
the place I'm most comfortable,
a picture of me at the University of Oklahoma
when I was a young boy studying.
It was taken-- it's on the back cover
of the Oklahoma University catalog.
I was in such deep thought.
I don't even remember somebody taking it.
That's what I did.
I thought about all this stuff.
Yes, there's hair there, I know.
(audience laughs)
I know it's me because of the watch.
That was a very unusual watch at the time.
So what did I do?
What do you do?
Well, I think you always start when
you don't understand something by reading
and getting all your facts.
In fact that's why those of you who've taken classes with me
know that we always start with 100 facts.
What are the 100 facts that you have.
I don't care what they are but you always start.
And as I begin to read about the whole idea of certainty,
we came up-- there were all these types of things.
I created this diagram called certainty
of the things that are known, that are wall-like,
sure, clear, predictable, absolute, simple and stable.
Uncertainty is unknown, chaotic, unsure, vague,
random, provisional-- I love the word provisional.
I think that's really interesting.
We'll come back to that.
Complex and turbulent.
And so, trying to weigh this out in my head,
because that's they way I was when I was in a library,
I'd always think about it.
I love going to the library, I've always loved
being surrounded by books because
there was so many ideas there, but it was a calm,
peaceful place where I could think about them.
Let me give you an example of why this is so important.
So one of the things I do is test myself,
debating back and forth.
So here's some alleged certainties
in the world that we've had.
The world is flat. That was one for a long time.
Aristotle, pretty smart guy, right.
The world is only composed of four elements.
My favorite one, there's a great book about this:
hand washing does not prevent the spread of infections.
You all know about that.
For 50 or 30, 40, 50 years there were people
that just refused to believe that.
These are smart, good people.
There's nothing nefarious about them,
they're just misguided.
There's no need for the photocopy machine.
Some of you in the room will remember
carbon paper and messy stuff.
Many of you do not.
And then of course our famous most recent one:
There were WMD in Iraq.
And so you can find these kinds of examples forever.
In fact when I stated getting ready for this lecture,
I started finding tons of these examples.
One of my favorite one though goes back to
something I already talked about.
Remember Neptune?
Neptune, we discovered it.
There's also something nobody talks about.
It's called the hunt for Vulcan,
which was another planet that was predicted
that is currently going on and nobody could find it.
For 50 years people looked for it,
until Einstein came along and looked at it a different way.
So I can find examples in science,
I can find examples in social science, et cetera,
and all those types of things, those are alleged certainties.
Let me give you another example
of what types of issues you start thinking through
when you start playing with this continuum of uncertainty and certainty.
Here's an example of just some statistics
about wrongful convictions,
and what you see in the wrongful convictions literature
is so many are done because eyewitness testimony is wrong.
And we hear about DNA exoneration and all that,
but even eyewitness testimony can create it.
So you start looking into this, you find that
things that you thought were so certain and so powerful
turn out to be not necessarily true.
There was a book written several years ago
called "The Wisdom of the Crowd,"
and don't forget, these are all jury convictions
and that was a crowd of people who
thought through the evidence
and they were wrong, the evidence was wrong.
My favorite one is a book I just started reading recently
called "Snowball in a Blizzard."
Now I'm just gonna read this really quick
because it has to do with medicine.
"My argument is that uncertainty
"is the great unspoken secret of medicine
"and that by ignoring fundamental uncertainty,
"we are doing real harm to ourselves.
"False certainty can lead us as doctors and patients
"to misinterpret data and thus make bad choices."
One of the craziest, and one of the ways
that you begin to start thinking about this
is you realize we go to experts,
like I was, in Norway,
and you say they have all the answers.
Well even doctors don't know, oftentimes.
There's a high degree of probability that
the diagnosis is perhaps wrong.
There's even less probability that they know
exactly what the prescription and what it will end up doing,
so obviously we trust them and we have to live in that environment,
so how do you do that?
And then let me give you another profound one
that kind of affected me personally when I was in college.
I'm just giving you a group of things
that kind of roll around in my head.
And here's another one.
Some of you may remember,
there's a wonderful film called "Sophie's Choice,"
and it got me right here.
And was about a terrible decision.
If you haven't seen it, I won't tell you any more than this,
other than a woman had to make,
a mother had to make a choice between two children.
And she knew one of them was gonna
go away to a concentration camp,
so that really got to me, and it caused me to go
from here to here up to my head
and say, "Well, how do those kinds of--
"Where does that come from?"
And there's lots of reasons and lots of things
you can do but at the same time, I was reading a book,
around the same time, a very famous book called
"The Ascent of Man."
I still think it's a wonderful book, it's long gone,
and there was a series on PBS, believe it or not,
about this that was absolutely stunning.
And in there he talks in The Ascent of Man about--
He has this wonderful phrase
that helped explain to me how something
as terrible as that, what is pictured
in Sophie's Choice could happen,
and he calls it
"the monstrous certainty of the leaders."
And I know, you don't know,
follow me, I'm the only answer.
And so there's an issue of
certainty and power as laying out.
So all this stuff kind of rolls around in my head,
and I'm gonna start thinking about this.
How does this-- how do you begin to make sense of
a world where people kind of crave certainty
but they also hate uncertainty, et cetera,
and so I developed this kind of idea,
so I'll go through this quickly.
On the one hand,
uncertainty allows creativity,
it allows growth, it allows innovation.
We're in kind of an uncertain time here at the university.
And in one sense it's really good because
we can do all kinds of innovative cool things.
On the flip side of uncertainty though is
it creates fear, it creates insecurity,
and it creates paralysis by many people.
And on the positive side for certainty,
there's order, predictability and stability.
We know what to do, we know how to do it and get it done.
But it can create stagnation, conformity, and boredom.
So where do you come down?
It's a false dichotomy, I know that,
between uncertainty and certainty.
In fact there's been all kinds of research
about most people crave certainty.
Very few people like uncertainty.
And then the pendulum swung back.
They crave uncertainty,
but they want some certainty.
So the pendulum's gone all over the place in the literature.
So where do you come down on this?
Well I come back home to football.
The Green Bay Packers.
Now, think about this.
Certainty and uncertainty.
Why do you go to a football game?
You don't know what's gonna happen, who's gonna win.
At the same time, there's all this uncertainty
for a certain period of time,
and then at the end, you've got a certain result.
So my suspicion is that
most of us like to live in that middle zone,
probably more closer to the uncertainty area.
I'll give you one other quick example.
If any of you've ever taken--
I've taken, my wife and I have taken,
and she's taken students on trips abroad,
many of them who've never been on a plane,
many of them who've never been abroad before.
The amazing thing that happens is this.
We get off the plane, wherever it is.
Where's the first place they wanna go?
They're looking around.
You're in Paris, for goodness sakes.
Where do you wanna go?
McDonald's!
Why do you go to McDonald's?
Why is there such a stampede towards McDonald's?
Because it's certainty amidst all the uncertainty there,
and hopefully you move out of it.
So there is this kind of interplay between them.
Now this is where you get to help me out,
because I'm gonna give you a quiz.
So all this is rolling around in my head,
all these types of things are rolling around in my head,
and I create, we create with a colleague of mine,
we create this thing we call
the uncertainty management matrix,
and I'm gonna show it to you right now and there's a quiz.
We'll see how good you are.
I will just tell you with this quiz-- I got the answer wrong,
which is exactly what a good researcher should do.
I got the answer wrong.
So here's the grid.
And what we did is we--
Beause I'm interested in organizations and how they work
and we created an instrument.
You can take it. It's all online and stuff.
But do you-- does your organization
on this bottom layer,
does the organization encourage you to embrace uncertainty?
Do they talk about their doubts?
Do they talk about what types of things they don't know?
Do they share that information?
Do they embrace change with all that type of thing.
Or do they avoid it and do they suppress uncertainty
in one way or the other.
That's what the bottom axis is all about.
The vertical axis though is employees management.
What do I wanna do?
Do I like to live with uncertainty,
which would be embracing it on the top,
or do I try to avoid it?
And that creates these four climates called,
the stifling climate is a stifling climate
where the employee embraces,
the employee says, "I love uncertainty
"but my organization depresses it."
Then you've got the placid climate,
which is, "you know what, I don't like uncertainty,
"my organization doesn't provide it,
"and it's gonna be placid."
And then you've got the unsettling one,
which is really the really kind of an interesting one,
hint, hint, hint,
because it says, "Look, my organization embraces uncertainty
"I'm not particular comfortable with it."
And of course you've got the dynamic climate
where you have people who have, they like uncertainty
and their organization embraces uncertainty.
So here's the test.
I think we surveyed 2,000 people or something like that.
In fact a lot of them were public employees,
which, this is why I was really stunned at the results
and I'll see why in just a minute.
Which climate produced the most
employee engagement, excitement...
and just to buy into what the organization has done?
How many of you think it was the dynamic climate?
Will you raise your hand?
Okay, I think I maybe set this up a little too good.
That's the answer.
That's the one that most employees like, dynamic climate.
But here's the one that is really stunning,
in my view, and so I've set this up
a little bit too well, I suppose.
What do you think is the second most
energizing, exciting climate up there?
Think about that just a minute.
This is one of the most, this is just--
I will tell you, I was stunned.
See, I get a little too excited about these things
'cause I was wrong on this.
So how many of you think--
We've taken dynamic climate off the table.
How many of you think that the climate that was most
enriching, motivating, people think it's a well-led,
was placid climate, anybody?
Alright, well some of you, you're on my team.
Sorry, you're on my team.
You're on the wrong team, though.
Sorry, as often comes the case.
How many think it was stifling?
Some of you.
It's actually unsettling.
People want to work in a climate where things are changing
even when they don't personally--
and they embrace uncertainty--
even when they personally find difficulty doing that.
In fact, we got statistics that indicate this.
So I think that's pretty cool,
because I actually thought, because of all my training,
that the placid climate would,
the two, the placid and the dynamic climate,
that's where everybody wants to live.
That's where I thought they would wanna live.
It turns out that's not the case.
People can-- and I suspect I know why--
is because they know the world is changing.
Even if they can't deal with it,
they know that there's uncertainty out there
and they trust the group,
they trust the leadership
to help them embrace the uncertainty.
So that's why the unsettling is there.
In fact, we got data to support this.
I won't go through all of this, but we surveyed
and looked at what employees deemed
as well-led organizations, and that's the blue one,
and you see how high the well-led organizations are
in response to, as opposed to
the not well-led organizations
and you see the placid climate,
which is what I thought would be the high,
actually turns out to be just the opposite.
Not well-led organizations tend to have
placid and stifling climates.
Well-led organizations tend to have
dynamic and unsettling climates.
Well that's kind of profound and kind of interesting.
It's not particular actionable,
so we need to take the next step.
It's not enough to just have data that shows that,
because in my world where I have to implement this stuff
with real people and real executives and real students,
how do you live and create
those kind of environments?
So what I would argue is that,
I had to begin to incubate and think about those ideas
and develop innovative approach to dealing with it,
and so we tried to take this to the next level.
And the next level says,
you know what, when you start thinking about this,
there are different kinds of uncertainty
and the ways that people deal with it.
I would call the difference being,
the difference between what we call tweaks and jumps.
And let me give you an example of what I mean
by tweaks and jumps and how that plays into it
and we'll talk about that in a little detail.
So here's an example of a tweak.
You remodel your house.
Here's a jump, you get a new house.
You say it's time to move on to another house.
I can't tweak it anymore.
I've watched enough HGTV, and I'm sick of watching it,
just get me a new house.
I didn't love it, list it baby.
(laughter)
So it's one of those types of things.
Or, here's a new sitcom.
You create a new sitcom.
Alright, that's somewhat innovative and somewhat interesting
but it's nothing like when reality TV came on,
that's a whole another genre, if you will.
Here's another one. A new iPhone model.
Okay, yeah, we got that.
The iWatch, that's a whole different ballgame.
Synchronized traffic lights.
Doesn't that sound cool?
That's one way to control traffic flow,
or you could do round-abouts.
Those are very different. That's a bigger thing.
Here's another one, marriage counseling.
We need to tweak our relationship,
or get a new spouse.
A new girlfriend, new boyfriend.
And here's another one,
more fuel-efficient cars, electric cars.
So those are the kinds of things
that you begin to think about when you start thinking about
the types of innovation,
and I'll link this back to uncertainty in just a minute.
So then you start saying,
"Alright, well how do we put this all together
"in a way that's manageable?"
So I'm kind of giving an insight into how
people like myself and others who think in these ways,
how we contemplate and how we come to these ideas.
They look much sexier when you read them in a book,
I'll tell you that.
But this is the origins of where they come from.
So I developed this little diagram called--
that deals with the idea of platforms.
And so if you look on my far right, your far left,
you see a little, what I call a node.
In that node, you create the first time
it's ever been created, and I call it node 1.1.
And in there you have these episodes of
exploring an idea, refining an idea,
exploring an idea, refining an idea, until you get something
that's relatively stable.
Those of you, students in the room,
you know how I encourage you
to have these arguments in your groups
because that's the process of creation,
that's the process of innovation, et cetera.
And then, once you've got a stable,
a relatively stable platform, like 1.1,
that becomes what you throw out there.
So think of it this way,
it's the first iPhone that comes out,
the very first one.
I don't know, they were like clunky or something.
And you're big.
Or it's when Danielle Bina,
where are you Danielle?
Someplace.
Danielle and I helped create a new course on this campus
because of continuous improvement feedback
that one of our students provided said,
"We need a course in social media."
And I said, "Well, nobody has a course any place
"that I can think of that has course in social media."
And I know many of you graduates never had that.
I created it, we created it. We're teaching it now.
And so that was 1.1.
I don't know what iteration we're on, Danielle,
but probably we're at 1.4 or something like that.
And every time we try to make it better.
So what is that node from 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4?
It's continuous improvement.
It's taking what we already do
and improving it and making it better.
It's really, really cool.
And that's kind of one spirit of innovation.
It's not the only spirit, though.
The other spirit is this.
Now that's a complicated diagram,
but what I want to point out is that
the one on the far right, platform one, is one platform.
There's another platform, there's platform two, platform three.
Ignore the dotted lines for just a minute.
Here's, I have to go back to space.
I don't know why, but I always go back to space.
Some of you in the room are young enough
to remember when we were kids,
the most exciting thing that was going on in the world
was not who was calling what politician what name.
It was the most exciting thing was the space program.
And I followed it as a kid.
I just couldn't get enough of it.
Walter Cronkite getting on and doing all that stuff.
So it was always just great.
And you begin to look at that, what was that?
If you go way over on my right, your left,
platform one was the Mercury Program.
One astronaut going up to see what we could do and not do.
Platform two, the Gemini Program.
Starts off, there were some bumps,
and there were some accidents, some tragic accidents,
and it got better and got better.
But platform one or platform two
couldn't put somebody on the moon.
You had to go to platform three,
which is where the Apollo Mission occurred.
And that's when you had three astronauts.
Now, that's a rough overview
of how I think innovation works
and how you embrace uncertainty.
The lines that are there--
So notice the line, the dotted line that says number two.
The minute I get something really, really, really good,
I have to jump back up to uncertainty
and do something I didn't,
I don't know what I'm doing, exactly,
to establish this new platform.
Now I can take the lessons I learned from platform one
and use them in platform two, but still,
it's a jump, and it's a leap into uncertainty.
Now that's a very, very simple overview
of what I would consider to be the innovation process.
Now we're coming to the part that a good 90% of you
know is going to happen at one point
or the other in this presentation.
You know what it is?
It's this. So what?
We have a So What? T-shirt here.
Somebody who's taken So What? T-shirt
to Antarctica I believe, is that right?
Where are you?
And some of you may wanna know where did Dr. So What come from?
Right here, Ben Kotenberg.
He's writing with me on a cycling,
and he said you should just call yourself--
forget about saying "So what?"
"Just call yourself Dr. So What."
And I said, "Sure, let's do that."
So I started doing that and he's the one
who kind of created it.
So we created this kind of idea of
how do you think through problems, so what...
what are your assumptions, all these types of things.
By the way, those of you who are grads,
we got a little gift for you, a So what? gift for you
at the end of this, so you wanna get it,
you come down, Laurie will give it to you.
So here's the So What?
There are different skills required
of refiners and explorers,
in some ways I'm sad about having discovered this
because what I discovered is is that some people
that are really good, and I've talked about this
with a lot of executives and it's really hard,
it's hard for them to deal with,
that some people are really good at doing six sigma.
Some of you know what that is,
or doing these kinds of processes
that create great efficiency, they're fabulous refiners.
And then you refine things to a point
where it's obsolete and you have to jump to a new platform
and that's where you need the explorers.
And so the skill sets that you need to be refining
and what you need to be exploring
are oftentimes somewhat different.
And so it takes a real test of wills
to make that happen in an organization.
Success in one platform is no guarantee
for success in another platform.
Just ask Michael Jordan.
Great basketball player, you jump to baseball, not so good.
I wonder in the teaching world if it's the same way.
Great face-to-face instructors may or may not
make great online teacher type instructors.
I know I'm struggling with that.
Those are the kinds of things that you have to deal with.
Third one is that knowing when to tweak
and knowing when to jump represents the key skill
of leaders and frankly of wise people.
The hardest decision I think we ever have to make
in life oftentimes boil down to these questions of,
can I tweak this to make it better?
Or do I need to blow it up and start all over
and move in a different direction?
In our department, for example,
we got a really good communication department.
We're just tweaking to make it better.
But we have other programs that are brand new.
We're losing a faculty member and we got all young faculty.
We're just gonna blow it up and start over.
Because we can't do that.
So we need a new platform for that.
We got another platform that we can refine and tweak.
And I think that is a really tough judgment
and is really tough to pull off.
I call those people that can do that
the progress makers.
Well I don't ever wanna stop there.
I still wanna ask, "Alright,
"this sounds like a sexy cool idea, Phil.
"Let's see if you can really use this.
"And now let's put it through the grinder."
And so my grinder is this, is argumentation.
The grinder is let's debate it, let's talk about it.
And so I'll sit down with an executive
or I'll sit down with students or the faculty and say,
"Tell me where I'm wrong.
"What are we wheezing. Where are we wrong?"
And they may be wrong. I may be wrong.
The best idea wins, that's the whole idea.
So we argue, and then we try to implement.
Okay, if we say, and I'm telling you right now,
I kind of lean towards let's embrace uncertainty.
We're gonna embrace uncertainty.
That's probably the way to do it.
Either if we embrace it by continuous improvement
or we embrace it by building a new platform.
And that's where I come down on this difficult debate.
I don't wanna live in a janteloven world.
That's not where I wanna live,
and I don't think that's what our society
and country has been about.
So alright, if we believe that,
what are some problems with that philosophy?
Well, here's one.
How can you make decisions and embrace uncertainty?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is one of the premier
management thinkers in the world.
She says this, "Perfect clarity is not always possible.
"Leaders are not always in control of event.
"But that doesn't mean the action must stop."
And I think acting despite the uncertainty
is a hallmark of good leaders.
Now here's another one I get from time to time,
and I've coached enough executives
to know that this is the big one.
And it's this.
How can I-- they don't say it this way,
they're much more subtle and smooth.
How can you be viewed as a strong leader
and embrace uncertainty?
It's like, "I look weak if I admit that
"I don't know something."
Now I've seen over time people who have developed that skill
and it's an enormous advantage.
So I put this to the test.
Like, who's one of my favorite leaders?
Well, it happens to be Winston Churchill.
What did Winston Churchill say?
This is the most famous speech he ever delivered.
"We shall fight on the--" I wish I could do it like him.
"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight
"on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields
"and in the streets and we shall fight in the hills
"and we shall never ever surrender."
And then, the uncertainty.
"And even if, which I do not for one moment believe,
"this island or a large part of it
"were subjugated and starving,
"then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded
"by the British Fleet would carry on the struggle,
"and in God's good time, the new world,
"with all its power and might, which steps forth
"to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
Beautiful phrase, beautiful thing.
And what he was able to do was to weave together
uncertainty and certainty in a way that allows him
to maintain his ability and perception as a leader.
So how do you do that in a practical way?
Let me suggest that one of the things you can do is,
even if you don't know what is going to happen,
you can say, "Hey, I know how we're gonna do it.
"That's the process.
"I know why we're gonna do it.
"That's the purpose.
"I know when it's going to happen.
"I know I got the best people in the room to make it happen."
Those are the kinds of certainties you have to provide
in this kind of environment.
And I think all of us, one way or the other,
whether it happens to be in a business
or it happens to be an organization
or it happens to be in our personal life,
we have to grapple with uncertainty,
whether we choose to or not.
And I think it's the source of innovation.
That's the magical connection, or at least part of it.
So, alright, how do I keep calm and embrace uncertainty?
Well, let me give you three kind of thinking tips
about how to do this.
I could have the whole lecture just about these three things
but they just kind of permeate the way I think
about the world and those of you who
are students of mine right now, you don't know it,
but these things are always behind the scenes working.
And the first one is, to think probabilistically.
I'm gonna show you what probability's all about
with this balloon.
(air filling balloon)
Now, what is he going to do with this balloon?
Here's what I mean by thinking probabilistically.
I can guarantee you, almost guarantee you,
99.9% probability this balloon is not gonna go out
through those doors and land on the other side.
We can almost guarantee that. But we don't know for sure.
Now I know we got some physicists and exciting data
scientist kind of guys in the room, too.
Right Ben, where are you?
Data scientist kind of guys, right?
So you guys wanna say, "I can predict everything."
Well you can't predict this.
You can't even predict particles and stuff.
All you can predict is that it's gonna land
someplace in the room, and we're gonna see,
if I'm correct in my prediction.
That's the probability. So, yeah, there it goes.
How cool is that?
When it comes to thinking probabilistically,
how do you do that?
And I love this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"The test of first-rate intelligence
"is the ability to hold two opposed idea in the mind
"at the same time and still retain
"the ability to function."
Now that sounds nonsensical.
How do you do that?
Well I thought about that for a long time
and I found out an easy way to do it.
There's an 80% probability this will happen,
there's a 20% probability this will happen.
And now I've got both things in my mind.
Let me give you an example, another example.
I know that the average hiring decision,
there's a 50% probability you're going
to make the right decision.
I know if I ask the right questions I can increase it to 80%
but I still have 20% that I'm not necessarily
gonna make the right decision.
We also know probability-wise, those of you who are in finance,
my wife is wonderful at doing that.
Diversify, why?
If you don't diversify, you may end up
like a really big winner, but you also are gonna end up
like some people did who invested all their stock in Enron,
and you're worth nothing.
So we diversify.
Health care's another one.
How many of you hate it when you hear the drug commercials
and they say, "This thing has so and so and so and so
"potential side effects."
We all hate that, right?
And the lawyers made them do it, I know.
So that's fine but I actually think
it's a good healthy thing, because everything you take,
whether it's aspirin or even a vitamin
has a health risk associated with it.
I think it's kind of a nice reminder.
And then finally let me just show you
about thinking probabilistically.
We live in this age where
there are so many-- you can communicate
with millions of people at one time, millions of people.
There's this wonderful mathematical principle
called the soft law of large numbers.
And the soft law of large numbers says
if you communicate to enough people,
there will at least be one person who will be offended.
Or somebody be offended.
So I think, as you think about social media
and all those types of things we have to deal with.
Let me give you a couple other quick examples.
I love this quote from the former Secretary of Treasury
Robert Rubin, "Anything significant is inherently uncertain.
"Therefore all judgments are probabilistic."
Anybody who can promise you,
who promises you 100% guarantee,
don't believe 'em.
There's no such thing. There's no such thing in life.
You can't have 100% guarantee whether it's life insurance,
whether it's choosing a spouse, you go to Panera,
your favorite restaurant,
you go there, there's not a 100% guarantee
it's gonna be perfect but there's a pretty good probability.
You start thinking about that way.
And the other thing I combine it with is this diagram,
is an if-then diagram.
Start thinking about things like free speech.
There's kind of an assault going on in free speech.
So I always think about it:
"A" is less suppressed speech.
What are the likely consequences that come out of that?
Okay, what if we allow free speech, which would be "B"?
What are the likely consequences that come out of that?
And that's the way you can reason through
whether free speech is a good thing or a bad thing.
And most people end up and the founders ended up,
some people's idea of free speech is that they are free
to say what they want back before someone says
any back that is an outrage.
So that kind of provides you that kind of detail.
Let me give you two other quick thinking tips
then I wanna wrap up.
Identify the proper level.
I love this image, it's the first image of a hydrogen atom,
and always the difficult thing in any decision making
in an uncertain environment-- I think the toughest.
I mean other than figuring out whether jump or tweak,
I think figuring out the level of intervention.
How many of you know lazy people?
Come on, how many of you know,
you all know lazy people!
Now the question is, go back to my stochastic model of that,
do you tell them, "You're lazy."
What will be the likely response?
Direct response is, "No, I'm not!"
And we have a big argument about that.
So then you say, "Well what can I do to correct that?"
And you say, "I can go below the level of
"that judgement about lazy."
We can say, "Well maybe the problem is at the behavior.
"Maybe we can change some behaviors."
Or you could say,
"Something with the organizational structure is a problem."
So you could do that as well.
Same principle holds whether you're talking
about organizations, I do this all the time.
Our company's under performing.
Our organization's under performing.
Okay, where's the problem? That's the first question.
Is it the people? Is it structural?
Is it a policy?
Is it something about the culture?
Or is there something that's going on in the industry?
Now the way in which you make that decision
and reason through that is a probabilistic--
a judgment that somebody has to make.
And they're very difficult to make.
Finally, let me note this, on how to solve this,
then we're gonna move on to the final part,
which would be the toughest part for me,
but I wanna do it because I think
some of you need to hear this.
And that is control the comparison levels.
What do I mean by comparison levels?
It means what do you compare things to?
Here's an interesting thought problem.
When do people,
in terms of percentage, when do most people
who commit suicide, do they do it on a rainy day,
or do they do it on a sunny day?
Very interesting decision.
I won't ask you to vote or anything like that
but research is pretty clear on this.
They are more likely to commit suicide,
if they commit suicide, on a sunny day.
Because if it's not, the comparison level is "I'm depressed,"
I can blame it on the weather.
You see how we compare things?
I always think that one of the most important decisions
we can make is what you compare things to.
So when I hear people complain about
change or things like that, I always say,
"Well, what's the alternative?"
We're gonna perish if we don't change.
This company's gonna go away sometimes.
That's one of the responses.
I don't know if it's always true, but it's certainly.
Here's another one, a little trick.
I'm revealing lots of tricks, you can call me a toad,
and here's another trick.
So here's another trick I do in grading.
So you all know about grading,
you can get zero to 100, whatever.
I never give 100s on any major project.
I never do, and most of you are shaking, "Yeah, I know that."
But what you don't know is,
I had somebody complain to me this week--
or not this week but couple months ago.
"Professor," and it was an online course.
"Professor, what did I do wrong?"
I gave him a 95 on this particular project.
I wrote back, "Nothing."
And then, I did this on purpose to create a little dialogue.
And they're like, "Nothing?
"What kind of crazy guy is that?"
And then, "What can I do to get better, to get a better grade?"
"Oh, you got an A." So we have this little talk.
"So, you got an A."
"Okay, but what do I need to do better?"
And I said, "Wow me.
"That's what 96 to a 99 is all about.
"It's wowing me."
And you say, "Well how do you wow you?"
And I have no idea!
Some of you in the room have wowed me.
I know you're on Phil's Hall of Fame, you wowed me.
I didn't know I was gonna be wowed today.
But I wanna give you the opportunity to wow me.
I wanna give you the opportunity to be uncertain.
So if you're getting a 95, don't be depressed,
just figure out what's that sexy, wild,
crazy thing you can do to get to 96.
So that's that.
I wanna end this by
telling you about the saddest day of my life.
And it was the day my mother died.
I'm a private person.
Believe it or not, I know some of you don't believe it,
but I actually am.
And I didn't tell any of my colleagues about this.
I kept it to myself, and I don't know if that's the way
you're supposed to deal with it or whatever,
but that's the way I dealt with it.
My wife and I would,
she knew, I couldn't even speak at her funeral.
I wrote what I wanted to say but I couldn't speak.
I know you find that hard to believe.
But it's true.
And as I reflected back on it over the years,
I would reflect back and then said,
"How will I survive this dreadful loss?"
Which is the ultimate devastating kind of uncertainty.
And I've kind of discovered that--
And this is a message I hope that resonates
with many of you and it's why I share it,
I don't share this very often, it's very hard for me to do.
But I think it is founded in habits
that I formed over a lifetime, how I dealt with this.
And it has habits of mind and habits of spirit.
I had a lot of really close friends that really helped me.
I didn't really talk to them about it, they just were there,
they knew I didn't want to talk about it and I did.
Laurie helped an enormous amount.
I'd also had an incredible foundation because of reading.
I read all my life and those of you know know me well
know I love books and I read an enormous number
of biographies of really smart people,
hoping that I can pick up some ideas.
So here are some examples of the biographies,
of Helen Keller and how she went through
enormous amount of pain.
My buddy Albert Einstein, who looks at me in my office,
who says imagination is more important than knowledge
when I write, that's the picture that's across from me.
Barbara McClintock who won the Nobel Prize
for doing something really bizarre called,
that people, we got biologists and people in the room
who know this better than I do,
but her biography was fascinating,
because she worked in obscurity
for a long, long period of time,
advocating what are called jumping genes
that is now accepted practice.
And then of course Richard Feynman
who is kind of where I get my craziness
because he's a wonderful physicist
and my dad turned me on to him
and he's just really exciting.
And of course Winston Churchill, the whole biography.
And there's hundreds of more that have done that.
And what it does, what biographies do,
good biographies, I should say, not Kim Kardashian,
that good biographies do is they teach you
about the travails and what goes on in life
and how they struggle.
Every one of these people struggled through dark times
and dark periods and they were able to go on.
And so that's really important,
to be able to have a foundation.
So I'm always reading biographies
and I think that's really helpful.
And then, exercise.
There were days where the last thing I wanted to do
was to go to the gym and play basketball,
or get on the stair master, things like that,
but it was a habit, it's still a habit.
Some of you in the room know I believe
even if you can't do that, you do integrated fitness
or you never take the stairs,
in fact there's somebody in the room, Sherie,
who says she feels guilty now when she takes the elevator.
That's a good kind of guilt, so that's a good thing to do.
And, of course, eating right.
And then, the last thing that
helped me get through this time was
the Double Violin Concertos by
Johann Sebastian Bach.
What would happen was I would be so sad
coming to school or going to some place,
and I don't think Laurie even knows this,
but I would put this particular piece of music on.
I'll play just a little excerpt from it if you don't mind,
play a little excerpt of it.
I'd put this little piece of music on
and I would listen to it like,
I listened to this, it's about seven minutes,
I won't play that, I promise,
but about seven or eight minutes,
and I would play this.
I would drive all the way from here to our Door County House
listening to that over and over and over again.
And there's something about this particular piece.
And Johann Sebastian Bach,
these aren't necessarily the people that did it,
there was something about this piece that resonated.
I would come to school at eight o' clock morning
teach a class and I didn't even know if I wanted
to get up and teach a class, but I had to,
and it was part of my habit and I wanted to do it right,
and I would listen to it all the way from our home
all the way to school and by the time I was here
I'd be ready to go.
And I didn't do it every day, but there were just days that would somehow remind me.
So I wanna play a little piece of this,
and then I wanna show you, tell you what I think happened.
Hopefully.
("Double Violin Concerto" by Johann Sebastian Bach)
*
And I think what that,
for me, it was like, because I thought about it,
and I'm sure Bach never intended this,
but people interpret music in their own way,
it was like this despair and hope
fighting against each other and then
if you listen to the two violins,
they reconcile and they go apart and they come back together
and I think that was what really helped me through this.
It wasn't the only thing,
because the next, the final story I wanna tell tonight,
and finish is the hardest one to tell,
but it's absolutely true, and I know there are people
in the room that maybe have
different religious persuasions, et cetera,
and you take it for what it's worth,
but what I'm gonna tell you is absolutely true.
And some of you in the room have heard this before, but it's very hard to tell.
I kept going on and on and on and on, using these habits
and I was still morose and I even was reconciled
and all these types of things.
And Laurie and I went out on a bike trip
out to Zion National Park.
I kept cycling, that was always helpful,
and there'd be biking, biking, biking, biking.
At the end of that, of the days we were biking,
it was just absolutely stunning, it was dark overcast day.
This came out of a movie, it sounds like,
but it's absolutely true.
I hiked this mountain,
the one to my right over here.
And there are places,
you can't really capture it in a picture,
but there are places where it's literally,
if you go one way or the other, it's sudden death.
It's thousands of feet down.
And there are actually hand rails that you go in,
and Laurie loves to hike and I love to hike as well,
and Laurie walked up about half way.
And she couldn't go any further.
I was gonna get to the top of that mountain.
(laughter)
And the guide that was with us took me up and he said,
"I don't know, do you really wanna do this?"
"I'm going to the top of a mountain, guide."
And the guide would say, "Are you sure?"
He said it a couple times. I said, "I'm going,
"I don't really get scared of heights very much,
"I'm going to the top of that mountain."
And I got to the top of the mountain,
up in the top on the plateau up there,
there were a few people up there, not very many,
and the guide hung back, Laurie was back,
I was all by myself, all alone,
which is where I think you have to do these things sometimes.
And the sun came open
and I was okay.
It was like it was over, the loss.
It all was done.
And it was like, I can live with this.
And I came back down the mountain
after about 10, 15 minutes up there.
I was worried that Laurie was waiting for me too long,
and so I came back down the mountain
and I said, "Guide, that is the most magical place."
I said, "What is the name of that place?"
I didn't know, because I oftentimes go out
without maps, as you can see, I kind of go around.
I just go wherever and I'll figure out what I'm doing.
And the guide said something,
and then all the tears came out.
He said, "Phil, that's called Angel's Landing."
And that was it, I was okay.
And it was just a mystical, magical type of thing.
I don't want to end on a sad note, I wanna end on this note.
Because I think this is the key to the connection between them.
Richard Feynman my hero said,
"I feel responsibility to proclaim that doubt,
"even doubt about your own emotions
"and doubt if you can make it
"is not to be feared,
"but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility
"of a new potential for human beings.
"If you know you're not sure,
"you have a chance to improve the situation."
And I wasn't sure how I was going to do it.
And so that's the journey of one social scientist.
It is not over. It is going to continue.
I hope to have a fifth bullet point some day,
but that was my journey.
So we end with the question we started on.
What's the magical connection between
uncertainty, innovation, and the human spirit?
You've seen on display my view of uncertainty,
my view of innovation, and you've seen a little bit,
I've shared with you a little bit about my spirit.
I would say you have to do this.
Embrace the doubt.
Experiment and debate, embrace the debate.
Know when to jump and when to tweak.
Very important skill.
Move beyond your fears and express gratitude.
And there's plenty of people in the room
to express gratitude, my lovely wife,
colleagues that are around here, students,
my former professors who believed in me,
the crazy idea of Professor Lee Williams,
Professor Cal Downs, and I wanna express my gratitude
to UWGB, too, they hired,
Cliff, where are you, Cliff, you hired me!
You hired me to allow me to do these kind of things.
What a wonderful world we live in
to allow people to kind of go in their own direction,
develop, improve, and do those wonderful things,
and these are the kinds of angels that I've had in my life.
And so I wanna end with, here we all stand,
on a solid but uncertain land of our current knowledge
and current way of doing things,
and we peer, I believe, into the beauty
and mystery and wonder
of an uncertain but glorious future.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)