Series 2 Episode 02: Jennifer Riel
On this episode of Strategy Sheroes I’m joined by Jennifer Riel, Global Director of Strategy at IDEO.
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.
Jennifer is the co-author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking. She is a true strategy expert helping businesses challenge their thinking and solve their real business problems.
Jennifer and I chat about:
Her move into strategy
Using integrative thinking to solve business problems
How to improve your creative and integrative thinking skills
Advice for women wanting to move into senior strategic roles
Check out below some of my favourite quotes from our discussion and listen to our full conversation on apple podcasts or spotify.
Why Jennifer loves strategy:
You can accept the world as it’s given to you or you can think and imagine and build your way to something that doesn’t exist today, and that’s true for products or services but it’s very much true of the strategy of an organisation or a department. You can seek to understand the world as it is and make it a bit better or you can seek to understand the world as it is and change it very meaningfully and that’s what gets me excited about strategy. Real choices that help people thrive and be successful feels like something that’s worth investing in.
On having empathy for stakeholders and using language that resonates:
Design has given many wonderful things to the world but one of the most powerful things it has given, is empathy for the end user. It’s equally important to have empathy for your peers in the organisation, the decision makers who are ultimately going to say yes or no. The way to do that is to understand the lens through which they see the world. For business leaders that is often the lens of strategy, and having some of the language that helps us connect is really valuable to better designs and also having those designs see the light of day.
Why stakeholders don’t spend time exploring alternative choices:
Our brains are naturally lazy and they’re naturally lazy for survival reasons. Thinking hard uses up calories, it uses up energy. When we were attempting to survive in the wild that was not useful to us. We had to make very quick decisions, commit to them and then move on and marshall our energy until the next time we encountered some large predator. That’s still embedded in who we are, so our natural instinct is to quickly come to an answer. The problem is there’s many other people in the world, just as we’re modelling the world around us and coming to quick answers so are they, they’re quite naturally coming to different ones.
Most of us don’t enjoy conflict and so there’s this pressure to pretend we agree, to quickly come to closure. To say things like, I think we’re really saying the same thing when we both know we’re not saying the same thing, but if we say that, the meeting will end earlier and maybe we can make it to the next meeting on time. So there’s a lot of social and physical reasons why we settle for answers that are not all that great.
But most practically it’s because we don’t have the tools to do so. No one has ever taught us what to do when we face a tradeoff and we think none of these answers are good enough…
How to get to alternative choices:
When we are starting down the path of trying to come to a better answer, when you face a tough choice, an either or, typically you’re told to get out a legal pad, draw a line down the middle and figure out the pros and cons of each choice. But what we found is that by focusing on the negatives, by looking at the drawbacks of both models it tends to lead you to give up, to feel there’s no better answer, there’s no path forward.
So what we do is create a pro pro chart, take your two opposing perspectives, make them as opposing as you can and then seek to fall in love with each of them. Figure out what would actually be great about going choosing that option, for you, your organisation, your peers, your customers. Do the same for the other. And just in the act of attempting to understand why someone would choose that possibility it can open up your perspective to say there is actually something I’d like to take from this model and take from this model to create my new solution. It helps us imagine what might be possible.
The friction of the agency procurement process on getting to better answers:
Presenting a solution as part of the pitch process cognitive science tells us it’s actually a really bad idea. Because once you have declared this could be a really powerful answer anything that is different is dissonant, and we don’t like dissonance, we don’t like to have to figure out how to overcome the tension between these ideas.
I don’t believe there’s a single right answer to any problem in the world…I want to pursue multiple possibilities as long as I can, to understand them, to ask what would have to be true to pursue them. Because I think it gives us the best chance to settle on something powerful.
My least favourite agency manoeuvre is when the agency will come back with three alternatives; the right answer and two horrible ideas designed to make the right answer look good. It’s so much theatre, everyone knows it’s theatre, it feels like a real waste of time and energy that actually could be about pursuing genuinely viable alternatives.
How to improve your creative thinking skills:
Just start, it’s like any skill it's about practice, it’s about trying. Slow down, think about your thinking, question that thinking and do that on a regular basis. Ask, what if that weren’t true? How might it be different? Having these questions in your mind that what you see in the world is only part of the picture, and therefore you have the opportunity to create something new.
Links to some of the stuff we talked about:
Jennifer’s book Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking
Useful tools employed by IDEO in creative thinking
Follow Jennifer on Twitter @jenniferriel
