#E52 We Need to Stop Putting So Much Value on Being Busy, With Lisa Bodell
About Lisa Bodell
Lisa Bodell is an award-winning author and CEO of FutureThink, who is also known as a renowned futurist and panelist.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript
Briar: Hello Lisa and welcome to our studio in New York. Nice to have you here.
Lisa: Thank you. It's great to be here. I love it. Great studio.
Briar: So tell us a little bit about your background and also tell us what is a futurist?
Lisa: Oh my gosh. Well, everyone thinks a futurist is a business psychic, and it's not that at all I'll tell you. My background is… I've always been a very creative person, but I'm also an entrepreneur. So I'm a business person. And when I first started out - and this was [in the] eighties - I went to school and the only creative jobs that were really available - it wasn't even dot coms yet - was in advertising. So I went into advertising and I was an account person and I worked really well with all the writers because I'm a writer and I gave them lots of ideas. And then everybody said, thanks so much now go do your job. Because their job was being creative, mine was not. And I thought, as an entrepreneur, how can that be? My job is to be creative about business and I wanted to teach people how to be that way because I thought that was so limiting.
Lisa: Like, how much potential are we missing if only a few people get to be creative? And I just had this chance meeting. I was having coffee with someone at my agency and I said, I really want to meet different people, connect different dots. And he said, oh, you should meet my friend Andy. He's a futurist. And I said, what the hell is a futurist? And my world completely changed. I flew to Midland, Michigan, and I met the head futurist from Dow Chemical and he was the head of the Association of Professional Futurists, which is like this sad little group of people. I'm part of it. So I say that, of like futurists that are very academic, but they want to change their world with their funky ideas and help businesses do it. And I trained with them to become a futurist. And it totally changed my life because now I can be creative and I can be in a business, but I can teach them how to be more innovative. That's the big difference. Futurists help people be more innovative and I think everyone needs to do that.
Briar: What kind of training did you undergo to be a futurist?
Lisa: You can get a degree in it, it's called foresight. So for people that are listening to this, some people say a degree in Futuring, but it's a master's of science. They teach it at the University of Houston. They teach it at Manoa, they teach it in Leeds in London. They teach it all over the place. But the idea of getting a master's in foresight is you're teaching people how change happens. And what you're trying to do is teach them scenarios for change, that the future is not a straight line, it's a winding road and you can shape it. And most people think the future is just handed to them. They don't realize they can shape it and there are tools to do it. So you learn about reversing assumptions and you completely turn them on their head. You learn about forecasting and backcasting. You learn about positive and negative outcomes. You do scenario planning. It's really cool stuff that teaches that there are multiple futures and you should learn how to predict each one and put bets on them. So the more we learned how to do that and the more we trained other companies to do it, that's how innovation got born. It's not being creative, it's about being innovative from a business perspective. That's what futurists do. They teach them how to think about the future in new ways.
Briar: And how do you think your role as a futurist has changed from say like the 1980s through to today?
Lisa: Nothing has changed at all. It's exactly the same. We knew about AI then. The techniques really don't change. There are a lot of ways… You should still reverse assumptions. You should still connect different dots. You should meet with diverse people. What's changed is people's attitude about it. Innovation got cool. So everyone's got to be innovative. Everyone's got to think new. Well, that's great because now futurists are like, yeah, you do, but you just got to think longer term. Don't keep thinking about the next quarter, like Wall Street, you got to think 10 years from now, that's where the big stuff is happening. Like when you think about AI, we haven't seen anything yet. Do you remember when websites first launched and how terrible they were?
Briar: Oh yeah.
Lisa: But we were like, oh my God, this is revolutionary. Like, we thought the <blink> tag was something amazing, and now we're like, can you believe this? Such a piece of shit. That was amazing. So I think what's changed is people's attitude towards it. They know they have to think better about the future. But what hasn't changed is that people are scared of it. And that's still something very human that we have to help people overcome that the future can be positive, not negative.
Briar: Do you remember when we were children and we used to dream about the future? And I remember dreaming about the kind of person I'd become, like my wedding, who I was going to meet, like what kind of profession I was going to have, like what life was going to be like. And we really do explore our imaginations. I do wander if perhaps in today's society, with all of the technology that we have around us, it's very easy just to spend time on our phones and not actually sitting and being and thinking and getting excited.
Lisa: We used to… I laugh about how when we're younger, like you said… we think in terms of possibilities. There aren't as many guardrails around us. But then as we get older, everything has to be very black and white, yes or no. We have to get the answer right, because if we don't, you're not going to go to college. You're not going to get a job, you're not going to get married. The stakes become so high and they don't have to be, everyone wants to fail. Everyone wants to try new things. And I think the problem is as we get older, we tell people they should experiment, but we make the price of doing it too high. So for me, I think that we want to keep that wonder with people and think in terms of possibilities and how we can start doing that actually is teaching them to be curious again. So you said like, being able to wander, have nothing to do, being bored. Can you imagine? But that's where the ideas come. And we're trying to teach people actually within companies right now, that we have to stop valuing being busy because that's why people can't come up with new things. They don't have time to think.
Briar: Yeah. I think I was saying to Georgia recently as well, I took her down to my old house. I used to live a decade ago in New York. And I was saying to her actually about how it wasn't until I was in my early twenties where I had some time to move overseas and to be away from friends and family that I really found I started to get to know myself, who I was, what I wanted to do, what I was good at, what I wasn't good at. And it was kind of like a little bit awkward at the start, beginning to get to know like a new friend.
Lisa: So being uncomfortable is really important. And like you were saying, I think we do a lot of things to help self-soothe. When we feel uncomfortable, we make ourselves busy. We like to gravitate towards the known, we fill it with social media because that's kind of mindless. We don't have to think. It's very comforting. But the only way that we grow is by being a little bit uncomfortable. And so that's why when I travel, and I know you travel a lot too, I love to wander. I even will go into wherever I am, I go into a local grocery store because you can see how different people live and what they buy and what they eat. I think it's really important for you. If you want to think differently, you have to do differently. And we try and teach people to do that even in their everyday life. Like take a different subway to work. Meet with a different person that you normally wouldn't, you'd be surprised what you can learn in those little micro changes in your daily life.
Briar: So Lisa, we spoke before about how people should be curious and excited for the future. And I think sometimes what I'm seeing happening on social media is that people say Briar, how can people be excited about the future when they're struggling on a day-to-day basis? They're struggling to get off their couch, they're struggling with the food they eat, they're struggling with their power bills? How can we change this? Like how can we go about maybe this change, seeing a change in society? I think also to a certain extent, the media doesn't help. The media feeds off our fear because that's how they make their money.
Lisa: I was going to say, it's kind of like taking a different route to work. It's the same thing as changing your algorithm. So I think of course, like you can have, you can self-feed. I notice my feed changes whenever I get on. I start following the same kind of comedians online. Suddenly all I do is have the same humor or the same music, but I don't learn anything new. So one of them I would say is put down your phones and meet with people. That's a huge thing. How can we actually do something different? My question to them is, well, do you like the way things are? Because then keep doing the same things that you're doing. Otherwise you have to change something. And this is going to be a little provocative, but I think it's really easy for people to blame other things.
Lisa: And I like to teach people that there's more in our sphere of control that we can do than you think. So there are a lot of things, when I say to people, what's holding you back from doing more innovation or thinking creatively? Oh, at work it's the organization. Oh, the policies, oh, the regulation. And I'll say, well, what do you spend your day doing? Meetings, emails. I said, is that a regulation? Is that a policy? Most of the things that people do every day are in their sphere of control. And they've got to get comfortable with, there are things tactically that we can have and we can change. We just have to try it. And we have to do it in a small way. They're being held back by fear. That's really what it is.
Briar: I think it's interesting. I think this whole embracing change thing is really important. I was actually thinking recently about how my job as it is today did not exist 20 years ago. And it's probably not going to exist in another 20 years as it does today. So therefore, that's just life.
Lisa: But what do you do about it? That's exactly right. So I would say… When I was younger and you were talking about what did we dream that we wanted to be when we grew up, I cannot ever remember a time growing up and saying, you know what? I want to be a keynote speaker and a futurist. That just wasn't a thing. But I meandered into it. My future wasn't a straight line and I wouldn't have been able to get to where I am today if I hadn't gone off the beaten path a little bit. So I think some of this, what you're saying is people have to, we have to be more guarded with our time. This is kind of related to this, which is if you want to actually change your life and you want to better embrace change, you've got to be more intentional with how you spend your time everyday because I think frankly, we give away our time without even thinking about it. And what that allows us to do is to blame other people for where we are. And yeah, some people are restricted and some people do have a lot of guardrails around how they have to live. But I do think there are small things within our control that we can start to change.
Briar: We all have so much more power than what I think we realize. And you spoke earlier about creating a future and that obviously really resonates with me. I discovered transhumanism and it just even fits from my day to day perspective. I used to go around when I was a teenager, an early adult thinking that life owed me something and I had a real mindset shift when I moved to New York and I was like, you know what? I can actually go out there and actively create a life that I want to live with some action, with some guts, and with a bit of a plan.
Lisa: Well, so going back to when I said, I met this futurist. And I flew to Michigan and I met this futurist. I didn't even know that was a thing. But the reason that happened is I met someone new, they told me about this and I made the decision. No one told me I couldn't, no one was saying, you can't go to Michigan. You can't fly and meet this person. But for some reason I thought I couldn't, like I was waiting, who was going to give me the permission? So I gave myself the permission to go and do it. And I think it's taking small steps like that, that allow us to start to shape our own future rather than having it be put on us because that's a passive way to live.
Briar: And creating a future as a society. Again, you spoke earlier before about how people seem to think that the future kind of creates itself. But what should we be thinking of when it comes to artificial intelligence, when it comes to other technologies, scientific, medical advancements?
Lisa: So Alvin Toffler, if you know him as like one of the godfathers, he wrote Aftershock and then the book 50 years on his Future Shock. He was one of the first people in the fifties that actually people just took for granted. They just assumed that the future happened to them. And he was one of the first people that taught them that you can change, you can question and challenge your future. There are many outcomes. And what was really cool about that actually was people had never thought… It was just 50 years ago that people started to change the way that they act. Let me pause here. Tell me the question again.
Briar: So we're talking about how through like technology and scientific and medical advancements, like the fact that we can create our future.
Lisa: So with the scientific and medical advancements, if we don't have people that challenge the way we do things, we won't advance. So think about it like the fact that we can now code the human genome that was unthinkable a few decades ago. And now, well we've been doing it forever. You can actually take a personal test now and get the markers for what you might have in the future. My husband realized, well, he has Alzheimer's in his family, but he also has male pattern baldness who knew that he could know that in the future. But now we have things down to the personal degree because somebody challenged the way we are and somebody experimented. So I think there are a lot of things that we can do and we can be curious about if one: we allow ourselves and the teams that we work with to ask questions.
Lisa: And a lot of people are scared to ask questions. They think they're going to get fired or they think they're going to look stupid. And the other thing is having time to think. And I think that's the biggest problem with society today is we know that there are problems, but we don't have the time to solve them. We're busy. We think that's important. And the people that are actually making a difference, they don't care about being busy. They care about making a difference. And so they use their time with intention rather than just giving it away. And that's an important thing for people to think about. Are you investing your time or are you spending it? And most people are spending it, which to me is a waste. You're not going to get better that way.
Briar: I often speak about pushing back against these cheap dopamine hits that our phones give us and actually going out and doing something meaningful and sustainable and actually seeking-
Lisa: And I do it all the time. I have to tell you, I get so mad at myself because I have a stack of books next to my bed that I'm going to read, but I never seem to get to it because, oh, I get sucked into Instagram or whatever, TikTok at night. And it's an easy hit. It makes you feel like you've accomplished something without having to use your brain because we're tired. And one of the things I'm a big champion of and this relates to innovation, is we've got to simplify our lives if we're going to make progress. So like you said, people are like, how am I going to do this I'm so busy? And my reaction is, we have to stop thinking that our lives are more valuable by doing more. And we have to think about doing valuable things. And some of that is learning to say no. That's how we're going to be able to better embrace change. If I don't have time to think and I'm too tired, I'm not going to come up with a good idea. But if I have time to take a walk and I actually set time aside to do that, I know that is valuable versus doing my emails, I'm going to have probably a better life.
Briar: So would you say that saying no is kind of the core of the power of simplicity, which you talk about a lot?
Lisa: No, I think that it's subtraction, so there's a difference because I think it would be glib of us to sit here and tell people, well just say no. Some people can't just say no, that's ridiculous. I think what they have to do is again, using their time with intention. So it's about how do you think about subtraction being powerful in your life? So time's a non-renewable resource, you will never get it back. Once you spend it, it's gone. So how you use it is very important. Most people give it away without even thinking. We just kind of are on autopilot or we feel like we have an obligation or we have a fear of missing out. I would say starting small of, yes, saying no to things, but also learning how to get rid of things. And what I mean by that is less meetings on your calendar. Maybe you don't have to go to that party. Maybe you don't have to participate in everything that you're asked to do. So some of that is saying no, but it's also proactively saying, what am I going to stop doing? And that's a little different.
Briar: Would you say that the future is going to be more simple or more complicated?
Lisa: Yes. That's what I would say.
Briar: Both.
Lisa: Yeah it's kind of like when people say to me, does technology help us or hurt us? And the answer is yes. So let's use the topic du jour, which is AI. I think one thing that's interesting about AI, I just had someone on a podcast, excuse me, a keynote I gave today at Eli Lilly. Huge pharmaceutical firm. Very restrictive. Very regulated. And they asked me the same thing. So do you think it's going to be simpler and more complicated? And I said, well, I think AI is going to make your life simpler because it's going to take away the unnecessary complexity. That's what we're talking about, the unnecessary work. It's going to put things on your schedule, it's going to make your plane reservations, it's going to do your carpools. But it's going to help you with the mundane work and that's great. However, what it's not going to help with is the creative work, the hard work, the strategic work. And so what's great about that is that's what makes us human. And that's hard work. And I want to carve out more time for that. I don't think it's going to get easier. I just think it's going to shift. AI is going to help me, but I think life is still going to be complex because there are always problems to solve.
Briar: So people shouldn't be worried about AI taking over their jobs?
Lisa: No. Well, let's put it this way. Yes. If you have a mundane job that is easy to replace because it's rote, there's not a lot of thinking involved. It's something, I think about this a lot when I'm on the highways now and you go through what used to be a toll booth, but it's just a scanner. People live their lives being toll booth operator [audio gap] field, like what you and I do. Like, we think about creative work, we think about how to create a future. AI's not doing that yet. And I would say it's helping us augment our lives because it gives us more time to think about that. I'm not worried about it right now.
Briar: We spoke a little bit about the power of simplicity and maybe ditching meetings from our calendars, sending less emails. What other things do you think that organization should be doing in order to free up people's time so that they can focus on the big things?
Lisa: So that's such a great question because I want my organization, by the way, thinking about how can we better embrace AI, like how can we shape the future? What's going to happen with the transhumanism by the way? Like really cool stuff. Mental health and wellness. I want them thinking about those things and the impact and how we can improve lives. Here's the number one thing I think companies can do. Teach your teams to kill stupid rules. This is such a simple thing. And we do this all the time at my company. We go in and we ask people, if you could kill any two rules at work that would help you do the work you were hired to do in the first place, what would you get rid of? And all you do is ask people for this and they give you a flood of answers. It's like lighters at a concert. Everyone is so excited to tell you about, oh my God, you want me to tell you all the things we should get rid of?
Briar: What kind of things do you get when you ask this question?
Lisa: Well, all the time sucks are things, they're stupid. They're things like why can't our meetings be 30 minutes long rather than 60? That's not a regulation. No one told you, you couldn't. Can I not be invited to these meetings anymore? These reports are redundant. Can we kill one of them? Is there a way for us to be able to have a decision-making power? Why do I have to always get approvals on X, Y, Z? They change these things in the moment. And literally, like we were doing this with AT&T. We asked a thousand people in a room to kill rules and we had over 5,000 answers in just a few minutes. And there were all kinds of things. But the thing that was most interesting is most of the things they suggest aren't rules. They're annoyances, they're habits, they're things that were based on fear that they didn't know they could do. And it opens up a discussion with your team and you agree to what you can get rid of. And it's a collective [sigh]. It's so nice because people are like, oh God, no more time sucks. I can finally do more important things. So why not ask, try it, it's free.
Briar: I think I'm sure that goes down very well because people love being able to express themselves. They love having input. And I might ask my team this as well. I'm just looking at Georgia off-camera.
Lisa: I mean, it's amazing what happens when you ask people. The other thing we do is we do work hacks. And that's kind of a cool futurist thing, is how do you hack the future? Well, what you have to do before you think about the future is you have to hack the work today. You got to create the space for that to happen. And like Novartis does this. They hack work. If they have a problem they can't solve, they ask their teams. And it's amazing because they have lots of suggestions. And when the boss usually… this happened there… One of the bosses looked at his team and said, you have so many ideas, why haven't you told me this? And they said, we were scared we were going to get fired, like we were doing something wrong by hacking work, like doing a workaround. Am I going to get fired? Is this wrong? Is this illegal? And he said, no, they just needed permission. And I think we don't give ourselves permission to get rid of things. It's important.
Briar: What about our attention spans?
Lisa: What about them? Yeah, we don't have them.
Briar: Is it true that we've now got the attention spans of fish? I've heard as well that we are seeing a lot of attention deficit traits. So people are actually going into clinics and saying, I think I've got ADHD and now doing a bit of research into the person's childhood and things like this, they're going back and saying, you know what I think you've got attention deficit traits. Like over time your brain has started to develop these quirks that perhaps ADHD has.
Lisa: I wander about this a lot. I wander if we're going to see like an incredible hockey stick, like higher incidents of ADHD caused by, a lot of it by social media. Because it's this phone addiction, like you said. But what's so interesting to me is 10 years ago, it's like no one talked about having ADD or ADHD. Kind of like no one talked about mental health, but now everyone, I even make a joke about it. I say to people everyone is time-starved. Everyone has ADD and everyone, they laugh because they all do. It's just a matter of where they are.
Briar: I'm smiling because I found out two years ago, I got clinically diagnosed with mild ADHD.
Lisa: There you go, everyone's got it. It's just how much do you have? And I think some of that, it's like we make fun of it, but it is serious. And I think the idea is because we're multitasking, work used to be linear and now it's a Venn diagram. I do meetings and emails. I do reports and I have to find data. I mean, everything is an overlap. So of course you have ADH - you are constantly context-switching. That's why I tell people, learning to get rid of and stop is so important. You can't focus on the important stuff like shaping the future if you're sitting on a zoom call all day, how are you going to do it? You need time to think.
Briar: So how can we give ourselves… I know this seems like probably such a simple question, but I don't think it is that simple. How can we give ourselves time and space to think? Is it just a matter of sitting on our couch, locking our phone in another room and just being?
Lisa: No, I love this. Well, let me say this. It could be, for example, I was talking about this keynote I gave this morning and one of the things I ask in my keynotes is when and where do you do your best thinking? So where do you do your best thinking? Do you know?
Briar: So I like to walk down the river, the Chelsea or the Hudson River, I think it is, in Chelsea. So just walking down, looking at the water or just even in random spots like, I don't know, commuting, like when I'm traveling in the plane or I'm sitting at a restaurant or just pottering around, it's certainly not in my office.
Lisa: Ah, bing, bing, bing. So when I ask people, when and where do you do your best thinking? It's amazing. And I always say to these groups, congratulations. You're like everyone else, which makes them feel good. Like you guys, we all do our best thinking... They say things like in the shower, when I'm driving, when I'm going to bed, when I'm waking up, when I'm having a cup of coffee, when I'm going for a run. For me, it's when I'm on an airplane. But the consistency, the consistent theme is we do our best thinking when we're alone, typically when it's quiet or we're doing something we don't have to think about, walking on the river and it's never at work. I have never ever had someone say, I do my best thinking when I'm answering emails, when I'm sitting on a team cal. But what that says is, where do we spend most of our time?
Briar: On emails, on team calls.
Lisa: So people have to, yes. And it's important for us to think about when and where do we do our best thinking? Because we get our best ideas when we're alone, but we build our best ideas when we're together. And so the problem is at work people get together and they want to have a brainstorm, but no one's had time to think. So they keep coming up with the same crap ideas. So a couple of things you can do, if you're listening to this, think about when and where do you do your best thinking. And the second thing is, mandate time in your calendar for deep work or thinking, I do that at my company. Accenture does it, Microsoft does it. And what that does is it gives people permission rather than hiding it on their calendar. Remember people would be like, oh, my assistant is going to put a time slot of a recurring meeting on my calendar. It was just so people couldn't steal their time. Mandating time to think really gives you permission to do deep work. And especially when you have ADD, that's a really important thing to do. So try those things. Figure out how you do your best thinking and put thinking on your calendar.
Briar: I think those are really good things for us to think about.
Lisa: Pun intended. I love that.
Briar: So in your opinion, what are the key skills and habits that you think are essential for high levels of productivity in workforces?
Lisa: Well, key point of distinction for me is, if I want someone to take away one thing from this discussion, it's, I am an expert on simplification so people can reach their potential. And when I talk to leaders, I say please don't tell people to simplify so they can be more productive. I don't want to teach people how to do better emails or run better meetings. That's ridiculous to me. What I want them is to do more meaningful work. So what I want them to be able to do is to identify the things that are a waste of time and get rid of them - unnecessary stuff - and create space for valuable things to happen. So what are the skills to being productive? It's not just about being productive, it's about identifying what meaningful work is. And if you ask a lot of leaders, they'll say, oh yeah, my teams know I want them to work on meaningful work. And I'll say, what's the definition of meaningful work? And they can't tell me. So defining what that means will give people a compass for how to better spend their time. So I mean, if I had to ask you what's meaningful work and is that easy for you to answer? It's typically not. It's a good exercise.
Briar: It is a good exercise. And I think it's kind of, yeah, thinking into the future and pulling the dots back, a little bit too. I closed my suit label recently. I had a real-life suit label. I developed it during COVID time. Obviously there was a lot of blood, sweat and tears that went into that. But this year I was really thinking about my future and the kind of things that I wanted to be doing. And I've got a digital fashion label as well. So I love technology, the fashion, and then just the fact that we don't have to stick with the rules of physics in the metaverse. So I actually made a decision to close that. But it was a very tricky decision to make. But it was so that I could focus my time on the things that I think ultimately make me happy and bring me value and where I see the future going too.
Lisa: Well, first of all, I'd love for you to dress me because I need a lot of help. So that's a takeaway from today. But one thing that I think is really cool about what you said, you just said all these words of like I took some time to think about what I wanted. Look at that, because you wanted to focus. You decided and that's a hard decision. It was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. If you're doing meetings and emails, you can't do the hard work, which is exactly what we need to do to get ahead. You don't just make a fashion label, like that's a lot of work and you decided to close something down. You decided to stop something that wasn't working. So you can make space for something that was. That's exactly what people need to be doing. But you couldn't do that if you were just doing the same old thing every day. Oh, I can't seem to get my future going. You took the time. And that's hard. But that's what people need to do to move forward and I think that's brilliant.
Briar: So what kind of conversations are you having with fellow futurists these days?
Lisa: Oh my gosh. So let's talk about AI. Everyone needs to talk about AI, but I think what I'm talking even more about is the human side of the equation. Like you said, people are worried about their jobs. I think what people are more worried about is just mental health. And so it's interesting because the biggest things futurists are talking about is all things related to AI. But they're also talking about mental health as it relates to the ethics around AI. Who gets to program what, who says, where's the diversity in it? Who's going to be leading the charge? Because that's going to shape a lot of policy for people and it affects people that don't have a voice. And so I think that's a big area. The other thing is mental health and wellness. And in an age of technology, when it's so easy to just check out and not let our futures happen to us, what does that do to our mental health? I'm a big champion of people talking openly about mental health because I think by doing that, we keep the human in work versus just investing in the tech of work. And that's where all the dollars go and where it doesn't go is to mental health.
Briar: I went and got brain training as part of my quest to become better, stronger, faster, and smarter. And I thought I was all good. My brain was fine and everything like this. And then what it discovered is that I was suffering from chronic fatigue. And I'd probably had chronic fatigue for about three years. And my reply to the lady that conducted my test was, well isn't every entrepreneur and busy business person fatigued? And she was like, it's funny how many people I hear this from. And what I found so interesting was that… that had just become my new normal.
Lisa: There, because you just said, doesn't everybody have fatigue? Because you've got these high cortisol levels that are off the chart because you're so driven and that's fine. But the problem with being busy is you can't tell the difference between being in a groove and being in a rut. And those are different. They look and feel the same. But being in a groove is for important things. Being in a rut is, it's comfortable, but I'm not getting anywhere. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs do fall into that because if we're not busy, we're not moving forward. That's not necessarily true. It's kind of like, being organized isn't being simplified. They're different.
Briar: And I like what you're saying about the fact that there's more conversation around mental health. There's less stigmatization around it. And I think as well, I think in the past when we used to think of mental health, we used to think of brains having problems or something that's not quite right with it whereas I think now the conversation’s shifting to become more like mental maintenance. Like this is the interesting thing when it came to my brain training, I was like, why the hell am I going to the gym three, four times a week?
Lisa: But you don't have a therapist.
Briar: Really taking care of myself, but not doing the equivalent for my brain.
Lisa: That's correct. I mean that's what's really interesting now, I think it's very hopeful for the future is you've got a lot of innovative schools right now that are having… it's not just guidance counselors. It's having therapists, not psychiatrists that can prescribe, but psychologists that can go and help kids with mental health. And you know what? They embrace it. All the Z’s they are way into it, all the Alphas, way into it because it's normal for them. And I think that is brilliant because that's going to normalize people treating, you said brain training, but taking care of our brain and our emotions is just as important and probably more important sometimes than our physical health because Our physical health is affected by that.
Briar: What other things are you seeing with the next generation, Generation Z and Generation Alpha? I just finished launching my Roblox fashion label.
Lisa: Yeah, congratulations.
Briar: I designed today. We had a soft launch. And I'm just baffled that Roblox sees over 70 million daily users. A lot of which are Gen Z and Gen Alpha. What kind of things do you think that we have to be thinking about when it comes to the next generation?
Lisa: I didn't answer directly. So let me say here, you said, what are the kind of skills and behaviors for the future? And it's very generationally driven. It's true. So myself as an X’er. One piece of advice that always get laughed at now is I say, if you don't get an answer on email, which first of all they're like, email, what's that? I said, pick up the phone. Picking up the phone. I have kids that are teenagers and adults, like in their twenties, they're like, never call me, like they don't want to be on the phone. So how we communicate is very different. So it's all about like text or on Snap with them and those are short pieces of communication. So what am I seeing? I'm seeing immediacy. I'm seeing slower attention spans.
Briar: Slow attention spans. Describe that to me more.
Lisa: Sure. So shouldn't say slow attention spans, I should say no attention spans. Everything is immediate. Everything is instant. What's my reaction to that? I like that people want to move the speed, but we were talking about coming up with ideas and just having wander time, being bored. I do get concerned that there is very little of that. And so what's missing is we don't really have time to think. And what comes with that then is we don't have time to connect. And I notice this a lot whenever I've brought on a lot of younger people onto my staff, like it's weird to me to walk down the street and have the whole group be on their phones versus I'm always talking to somebody. And I think if you don't have the human connection, which is awkward, like humans are awkward. And we don't get used to the awkward and embrace the awkward, we're really missing out. And I think that's where the growth comes from. And we are missing out on that. We're hiding behind the technology. We're hiding behind the immediacy versus giving ourselves… It's scary, I think for a lot of people to have time to think or be alone with their own thoughts.
Briar: I think it's interesting with a lot of, and my companies we do remote work. We're fully remote here in New York. In Dubai we've got hybrid because that's just what suits the culture there. But regarding the younger generations, I often wonder about what it must be like to graduate and then go into a fully remote role as a young person.
Lisa: I can't decide if people like it or hate it because sometimes people, they would complain. I don't know what's right. I mean, for me, I love working remote, but my job is being out on stage and meeting people. So I get my juice that way all the time. I'm not completely alone. But I do like my alone time, I'm kind of on the introvert side, except when I'm on stage. But for young people, I don't know on one hand, I don't want to go to the office. You can't force me to be in the office. And I'm like, right, it should be fit for purpose. But the problem is, then they say, well I don't get to collaborate with anybody. Well, you got to meet with people to collaborate. So which is it? So I think we have to get more realistic about our expectations. It's kind of like, I want to be rich, but I don't want to do any work. Well, yeah, I'd like to win the lottery and not have to get out of bed, but that's not happening. So what's realistic for me? And I think as we get older and things happen to us, people will get more realistic about stuff. I don't know. So what do I think? We'll see how it plays out. I feel like every generation replays a lot of stuff.
Briar: What are some things that we should be doing today in order to create a future with all of us in mind and without bias?
Lisa: So a couple things come to mind when you said that, first of all, and it's interesting, the World Economic Forum talked about this as a really important skill is teaching curiosity starting at a young age. These are the power skills. They're not soft skills anymore, they're power skills. But curiosity is very important because it allows us to challenge the assumptions around the work we do and the solutions we're coming up with. That's really important to teach people how to be curious. And there's a way to teach them, like how do you ask better open-ended questions? What if, how else could we, what are all the ways we might? Teaching people those question stems so when they do get in a brainstorm, they do those possibilities. Making that part of our curriculum versus multiple choice, that's very, very important. So when they get out into the work world, they actually keep that alive and going. I think the other thing is allowing people… so curiosity is one. The other one I think for people is being able to get comfortable in a really diverse group.
Lisa: So we talk a lot about diversity, especially here in the States, and I think that's really important, diversity, but it's not a quota. It's about having diversity of thought and that's where you start to get uncomfortable, is learning how to deal with descending views and people that come from lots of different places. So if you're young and you get into a room, it's not about having people of different colors and sexual orientations. It's about people that have views that are different than yours. So take the United States, it's people that have different political views than yours, where they live in a different part of the country than you. It's designed to create productive friction. And the more we can get uncomfortable or get comfortable with being uncomfortable, the better solutions are going to be. So curiosity and diversity.
Briar: I sometimes find people to be quite dismissive almost these days about opinions that do not suit their own. I certainly see that happening on social media. I see rather than people opening up the conversation and talking about why they disagree. And quite often I actually agree with why they disagree. Like these are still very real concerns that I even might have. Obviously I'm getting my microchip this weekend and there have been times in my life where I've been so against getting a microchip. Obviously some people are saying to me, oh, what about your data? What about in the future if everyone gets microchips against their will? I agree with them. These are all interesting things that I still think about, but thinking is not black and white. I think the interesting thing that I'm seeing on social media these days is people are like, I will die on this hill or I'm just going to insult you because I don't agree.
Lisa: I know, I mean, I feel like I'm with you and I feel like some of that is just so blowhard because I feel like a lot of people have morals of convenience versus morals of conviction. And what I mean by that is it's really easy to say stuff on social media, but if they were in a room with somebody, I think they'd behave differently. We see those social experiments all the time. I think what we have to get, we have to get good at uncomfortable conversations. We don't know how to deal with dissent, it's offensive versus it's not offending you, it's just having a point of view. The other thing I would say is that contrast is different than conflict. And we think everything is conflict. Like when you have a political discussion in the United States, if you think about Republican and Democrat, ‘it is a conflict.’ It's not. Sometimes they actually have a lot of the same views, but we've become polarized. So we view everything as a conflict, not a contrast. They're actually starting to teach in schools. My son goes to the University of North Carolina. And in the business school they teach a class that is about productive agitation and learning how to talk to people with dissent. And I think that's really important for the future.
Briar: What does that actually mean? Talk to people with dissent?
Lisa: That dissent, have dissent from you. So it's getting people in the room that have contrasting opinions and trying to come to, it's like model UN, trying to come to a consensus together or a decision. You don't have to have a consensus, but you have to agree. And learning how to deal with people and not having your opinions dismissed is important. People want to be heard, but that doesn't mean they have to win. It's different. And so they talk a lot about that. It's kind of like philosophy meets business meets psychology in business school. And I think that's really important because that's how negotiations happen. That's how teamwork and collaboration happens. And we don't teach that. We teach economics. We only want to teach how to deal with people, and that, especially as we become more technology-driven, the human side cannot be dismissed. So kudos to the schools that are learning how to teach that now because those students are going to be better.
Briar: That's really reassuring to hear because I often think back to my own education and the kind of things that I learned in mathematics. I don't think any of that was really helpful.
Lisa: Yeah. Good thing I learned that calculus but we didn't teach them how to file a tax return. I mean, there are so many things that are just, we teach people how to do, I don't know, to look at something on a graph and AI is going to take care of a lot of that stuff. But we didn't teach them a lot of the human element in terms of collaboration, agility, resilience. I mean, there are so many things I think. I tell all my friends, please have your kids take an entrepreneurial course because what you learn as an entrepreneur is very different than when you work in a big business. It is up to you. Your success and your failure, it's up to you. And that's very different than having a safety net at a big company or other places. And just the experience of it really teaches you something. You grow a lot more quickly. And kids need to learn that no matter where they're working on their own or in a big company, resilience, going back to your question about younger generations, that's something that would be great to teach people rather than having to have it happen to them later on.
Briar: It's been so nice to interview you today.
Lisa: Thank you.
Briar: Thanks for coming on the show. It was fun. Wasn't it fun?
Lisa: It really just flew by.
Briar: I'm always like this. I'm like, oh, I could do with another two hours. But no, absolutely we should hang out again. I would love that.
Lisa: Love it. Thank you. I think what you do is great. I love the show and it's really thought provoking.
Briar: Thank you, yes.
