In today’s world, sometimes not knowing all the answers is your greatest advantage. Celebrating our 100th episode, we’re joined by Alan Gregerman, an internationally renowned authority on business strategy and innovation, often called “one of the most original thinkers in business today” and “the Robin Williams of business consulting.” Join Can You Hear Me? Co-hosts Rob Johnson and Eileen Rochford as they unpack how enlightened ignorance can spark breakthroughs in business and leadership, the key ideas from his new book, and how leaders at all levels can promote creative thinking within their teams.
Alan Gregerman is an internationally renowned authority on business strategy, innovation, and the hidden potential of grownups who has been called “one of the most original thinkers in business today” and “the Robin Williams of business consulting.”
As the president and chief innovation officer of Washington, D.C.-based consultancy VENTURE WORKS, a best-selling author, sought-after keynote speaker, and community volunteer he focuses on helping companies and organizations unlock the genius in all of their people in order to deliver the most compelling value to their customers. He is also the founder of Passion for
Learning, an award-winning nonprofit that teaches girls technology skills as a key to life and career success.
His work has been featured in over 250 leading publications and media outlets in the U.S. and in other countries including the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, The Economic Times, Business Week, Dagens Industri, and Fast Company and his writing, speaking, and teaching has informed and hopefully inspired over 700,000 people.
His three previous books—The Necessity of Strangers, Surrounded by Geniuses, and Lessons from the Sandbox—challenge conventional thinking about people, the world around us, what it means to be remarkable, and where brilliant ideas come from. His new book, “The Wisdom of Ignorance: Why Not Knowing Can Be the Key to Innovation in an Uncertain World,” provides a powerful formula for making a difference in a world moving super-fast.
Fun? fact…In March 2021 I had a rare and remarkable stroke and lost the ability to see and speak. It happened during dinner with my family and was a very clear reminder that we all live in an uncertain world. Fast forward and after eighteen months of speech, vision, and occupational therapy I am doing great, traveling, climbing mountains, kayaking, walking our dogs, and speaking with audiences around the world. Definitely grateful!
The Wisdom of Ignorance is out October 14th!
Rob Johnson: [00:00:20] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Can You Hear Me podcast. I'm Rob Johnson, president of Rob Johnson Communications. [00:00:27][6.9]
Eileen Rochford: [00:00:28] And I'm Eileen Rochford, CEO of the Harbinger Group, a marketing and strategy firm. Today, we're focusing on harnessing the power of enlightened ignorance for breakthrough leadership and team innovation. And we are thrilled to welcome our guest, Alan Gregerman. Alan is a renowned keynote speaker, a four-time award-winning author, sought-after innovation guide, and dedicated community volunteer. His latest book, The Wisdom of Ignorance, Why Not Knowing Can Be the Key to Innovation in an Uncertain World, offers a blueprint for navigating uncertainty, unlocking team genius, innovating fearlessly, and staying relevant in a rapidly changing future. Welcome, Alan. [00:01:09][40.9]
Alan Gregerman: [00:01:09] Well, greetings. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm delighted to talk with you guys about the power of not knowing stuff. [00:01:16][6.1]
Rob Johnson: [00:01:17] I want to make sure our listeners know stuff, and that is this is our 100th episode. So it is we're honored to have you on as our special guest in our 100 episode. And Eileen, it's been an absolute joy doing this for the first 99. [00:01:30][13.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:01:31] Oh, thank you. The feeling is mutual. I cannot believe it's been 100. It feels like we just started doing this yesterday, but that's a good sign. It shows that we're definitely having fun, right? [00:01:40][8.7]
Rob Johnson: [00:01:40] Absolutely. [00:01:40][0.0]
Eileen Rochford: [00:01:42] All right, so let's welcome our guest, Alan. We always love to kick off our guest conversations by asking for some background. Tell us about how you found your way to being an innovation consultant. [00:01:55][13.2]
Alan Gregerman: [00:01:56] OK, well, great. No, so I've always been interested in ideas and innovation and new ideas and learning from people and different places around the world. And I think it's like a seven year old. I used to sit on the floor of the den in our house and I had an old Hammond World Atlas and I turned the page and I'd point to a place and I asked my parents if they'd ever been there. My parents had never been out of the country. But we all aspired to go to these places. And I imagined in pointing to any place that they knew stuff that would be cool for me to know. Having said that, I was a doctoral student. I actually have a PhD in geography tied to my love of places. And I, to be honest, I didn't enjoy being a doctoral student, but I committed to finishing. What I enjoyed was I volunteered while I was a doctoral students with a group of entrepreneurs in Detroit trying to keep their businesses alive and growing and I found I really loved hanging out with them and kind of brainstorming ideas and I really hated doing my research. So it was clear once I got my PhD, I was going to go and work with people thinking about new ideas. [00:03:06][70.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:03:07] That's great. It's good to know your strengths, right? [00:03:09][1.8]
Alan Gregerman: [00:03:11] You know, my few strengths. It's good to know those, I think. [00:03:14][3.0]
Eileen Rochford: [00:03:15] Certainly our own our weaknesses, great self-awareness. Good for you. [00:03:18][3.3]
Rob Johnson: [00:03:19] This, your new book dives into something I think is really fascinating and that is enlightened ignorance. And you're thinking, hmm, what could that be? Can you explain what you mean by that and why leaders should embrace not knowing all of the answers as a path to better innovation and outcomes? [00:03:34][15.2]
Alan Gregerman: [00:03:34] Yeah, be delighted. So think about this really simply. And that is the world is changing really fast. And so it's a little bit presumptuous for any of us to believe that we can kind of keep up and that the stuff we know remains relevant in the future. What I found in all the work I've done and I've been an innovation consultant for, oh, since way before innovation was like a hip cool kind of thing to do. But so think about, if you know a lot about something, you're way likely to be able to make it better. So here's the idea is I know deeply how everything works. And so I figure out how to make it better, I figure out a new feature or a new element of it. And it can be in any industry, whether it's communication or high tech. If I don't know anything about something, I'm more likely to take a fresh look and imagine new possibilities. So the reality is I like to say, if you want to make something better, be really smart. If you want to create a breakthrough, don't know anything about all about it at all, because that really opens you up to new possibilities. So enlightened ignorance is a unique kind of ignorance. And I don't want people just to be ignorant in like a stupid way. What I want people to realize is enlightened ignorance is how breakthroughs have always occurred. So think about science. Science is not about knowing stuff. It's about not knowing stuff, right? I don't do an experiment about stuff I already know about. I do an experiment about stuff I wanna know about And so I need to have a set of skills that make it possible for me to leverage the right kind of not knowing to doing something remarkable. That's really incredible. [00:05:08][94.0]
Eileen Rochford: [00:05:09] I just love the phrase, honestly, enlightened ignorance. But the way that you explained it makes honestly almost perfect sense. Like, of course, that we have biggest innovations occur when the least amount of knowledge exists, but the greatest need or demand coexists. [00:05:24][14.9]
Rob Johnson: [00:05:25] I know where you were going with that, Alan, but how much of this is related also to not having all the answers, to asking, because we've dove into this in a few episodes back about asking better questions and doing that sort of thing. How much of the enlightened ignorance is, I don't know all the answer. There are people on my team that do. I wanna learn more about it. And I'm gonna ask the right questions and listen. Is there any important element in that? [00:05:53][28.1]
Alan Gregerman: [00:05:53] Well, no, I think you're spot on, but here's what I'd like to think. And that is that as leaders, one of the greatest things we can communicate to our team is that we actually, none of us know all the answers. Okay, and that not knowing the answers should actually inspire us to be remarkable. So if a leader says, I actually don't know what we should be doing here. I know all of you have ideas, but let's commit together to find the best possible answer or the best solution. That changes the whole equation. When leaders are humble about that, then suddenly everybody says, it's okay to try and figure things out. When leaders don't say that, everybody says I better look smart because otherwise it's not a particularly good look to look like I'm kind of glueless or ignorant. So leaders sanction enlightened ignorance by saying we don't know it all, or we know a lot, but what we know today isn't gonna get us to the future. [00:06:49][56.1]
Eileen Rochford: [00:06:50] So what's a good way to kind of open that up if you haven't used this technique in your organization? What are some good phrases or exercises? [00:06:58][7.6]
Alan Gregerman: [00:06:59] Okay, perfect. [00:06:59][0.4]
Eileen Rochford: [00:07:00] Yeah. [00:07:00][0.0]
Alan Gregerman: [00:07:00] So of course it depends on organizations and how they communicate. And you guys know much better than I do how organizations communicate. But imagine this, let's say that once a month, I hold an all hands meeting, or once a months I get my leadership team together, I would start and say, you know, the world is changing really fast. In fact, if we just paid attention and looked outside the window, we'd see it moving right by us as we speak. Because the world's changing fast, we may be really good today, but five years from now we have to be different. We don't know what the world is gonna look like. We have to go on a journey together to figure that out. And so I want us to all admit we don't all the answers and commit together to figuring out how three years, five years, from now, we continue to be the most remarkable company in our industry or the most a remarkable organization in the field we're in. [00:07:57][56.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:07:57] Ah, that's beautiful. Perfect. I'm totally gonna steal that. Thank you. No, that's great inspiration though. Because you know, there's a lot happening in the industry that Rob and I are in right now in terms of marketing communications and artificial intelligence. It impacts everything. We can't stop talking about it because it's almost the focal point of everything right now. But it is literally upending the way, not only the revenue models, but the way work has been getting done, you know even as recently as last year. So admitting I don't have the answers, nobody here has the answers because we really, really can't see into the future with AI. We can only, you know, sense. So what does that mean for our industry? That's a conversation that I'm actually having to have quite a lot with our team right now. [00:08:45][48.2]
Alan Gregerman: [00:08:45] Well, but even if we think about, and of course AI is changing really quickly, but humans really matter. You know, so humans decide how to use AI, humans decide how to engage AI to partner with them. But... Humans still are responsible in every organization that your listeners are part of to say, we've got to figure out how to be valuable in the future. And then we can figure out how to use some AI to help us get there. But I don't want anybody to think that AI absolves us of being innovative and thinking brilliantly. You know, we've just got to do that. We have to engage the world head on. [00:09:24][38.8]
Eileen Rochford: [00:09:25] Yeah, and I would argue, Ellen, that what you are teaching in your new book is essential right now because humans are so vitally important. If we are human first in our thinking and in our creativity and our curiosity, we're going to stand out from the organizations that are relying too heavily on AI because they're all going to look the same, you know? [00:09:51][26.5]
Alan Gregerman: [00:09:51] Oh, I think you're actually, you're really right. I mean, you can already see it. And my guess is your listeners can see an awful lot of generic stuff they're getting that is the work of AI and machines thinking about how to get them to be engaged. And engagement happens when humans connect with each other. We can get some ideas from AI if we know how to use it, but we've got to be the ones that do that. And leaders, leaders, it's even more important for leaders to engage their people, you know? So we talked about the idea that leaders need to kind of come clean and be humble about the fact we don't know everything. Leaders still need to be purposeful, you now? There's a notion in innovation that is just wrong. And that is, you know, leaders say, you know we need to be more innovative. Does anybody have a brilliant idea? The reality is, and a lot of organizations still do this, the reality is without a clear purpose and a focus, innovation really doesn't happen. The right innovation doesn't happened. So leaders need to enthusiastically human and purposeful. They need to authentic, but they need to say, this is the direction we're all going together. The world's going to be different in that direction. Let's figure it out together. [00:11:05][73.6]
Eileen Rochford: [00:11:05] Yeah, I love this. Okay, so should I jump to our next topic, Rob? What do you think? Oh, yes. [00:11:10][4.6]
Rob Johnson: [00:11:11] Let's do it. [00:11:11][0.4]
Eileen Rochford: [00:11:11] Okay, here we go. So you have taken leaders on field trips outside the office to spark new thinking. Tell us what makes these experiences so effective and how can leaders create more opportunities for fresh perspectives within or without, or outside of, I guess, their own organizations based on what you're doing with your field trips. [00:11:31][19.8]
Alan Gregerman: [00:11:31] Okay, good. Well, so here's the thing. Most organizations and many of the folks who are listening are going to say to themselves, okay, so we need to be more innovative. Let's get the smartest people together in a really nice room with whiteboards and sticky notes and whatever it takes to kind of brainstorm. And then let's give them all of blank. Sheet of paper. And then let's have them rack their brains. Well, the world we need to be remarkable in is walking past our building every single day. And yet we look inward as opposed to looking outward. So here's what I do. So folks say, are we gonna need a meeting room for this? And I go, well, not exactly. The world is our meeting room. So I actually take teams of people and I say, here's, what we're gonna do. We're actually gonna leave the building. I don't want you to think about your business for the next day or two. We're gonna wander around Chicago or New York or Boston or London. And we're gonna look for brilliant ideas. Brilliant ideas tied to what we're trying to accomplish as an organization. So go back for a moment. We talked about being purposeful. If we know what we are trying to do, but we know there's a better way and we don't know it yet, let's go out there and look and see what's going on. Let's look for ideas. Let's see how the world is changing. Let's inspire our people to imagine that other folks have ideas too. And let's simply try and figure out what's remarkable. Then use those remarkable ideas as the starting point for our own best thinking. Now, this is tied to something that a lot of people don't know that's absolutely true. Throughout the course of human history, 99% of all new ideas have been based on someone else's thinking or something found in nature, okay? And so if that's the case, I don't wanna suggest to Rob that his profession began with cave drawings. But the reality is that almost all new ideas are based on someone else's thinking. We don't need to come up with an original idea. What we need to do is take an idea out there and craft it in our own remarkable way. And so... That's part of why I get people out. Now, what's the other advantage of doing that? That is, you can build incredible teamwork when suddenly people are stuck, stuck, actually, they enjoy it, spending a day or two exploring kind of an interesting place, a city, and thinking using a different part of their brain. People get energized. I break them into small teams. They have assignments. They've gotta go to places. They've got to think differently. We go to businesses, museums, hip restaurants. I take them to concerts where the performers don't even sing in a language. They sing in to get them to understand the power of a performance. We just have an awful lot of fun and we think about lots of ideas that could spark our best thinking. It's actually pretty awesome. [00:14:25][173.6]
Rob Johnson: [00:14:26] I love it when you consider, you don't have to come up with a new idea. You just have to find your own twist on one that's already, you know, it's already been out there. I think that's, as you sit there and brainstorm with the team and you say, somebody needs to come with a innovative idea. And what you're suggesting is, every good idea is somebody else's that we're just developing. I think, that's a really interesting way of looking. [00:14:47][21.0]
Alan Gregerman: [00:14:47] Well, so we're gonna add our own secret sauce. You're in Chicago, maybe. So we're going to add our secret sauce, isn't that where McDonald's started? So we are going to put our own secrets sauce. But the reality is we are gonna begin with an idea that's already out there or something we observe. So now, what I want all of the folks who listen to think about is the idea that one element of enlightened ignorance is curiosity. You know, I gotta be curious about the world around me. If I do that, I can be remarkable. My team can be a remarkable. A lot of people don't know this. So, Velcro, something that we all use, it has like 100,000 different applications, wasn't created by a guy in a lab with a blank sheet of paper trying to figure out something that's... Velcro was invented by a guys walking his dog through the Alps, who noticed that his dog was covered with burrs. And when he saw his dog covered with Burrs, he pulled some off and said, this is kind of cool. Was he the first person to pay attention to this? Probably not. People had dogs as pets for like 30,000 years. Was he first person to say burrs are cool as opposed to being a nuisance? Yes. And so he looked at them under a microscope, saw this little hooking action and imagined how he could use this to improve the quality of life. So, ideas abound, we just have to pay intention. Your listeners probably don't realize they could walk through a bustling city neighborhood or a local park and find lots of inspiration. They just need to do it. [00:16:16][88.3]
Eileen Rochford: [00:16:16] Yeah. So powers of observation play a huge role in innovation from what you're saying. It sounds like Alan. [00:16:23][7.3]
Alan Gregerman: [00:16:23] Well, so being curious, observing things, then actually getting out there where the customers are. So I did a lot of work for a big healthcare company and they were having an awful lot of trouble getting young people to buy health insurance policies because if you're a young person listening or you have young people as kids or nieces or nephews, you realize they think they're invincible, right? Our son races bicycles. He's going down a mountain like at 50 miles an hour. He's holding his camera up to show us and we're going, please just tell us when you're safe. But so they, young people didn't wanna buy insurance because they thought they were invincible. And yet health insurance companies need people who don't need a lot of healthcare to buy their insurance. And the executives, generally older folks couldn't understand why this was happening. So I took them to a nightclub to hang out with young people. And we went to a nightclub. And there in the nightclub, that night called the 930 Club here in Washington, was a group called Augustana, which became pretty popular in a song called Boston. I won't sing it for you. And we stayed till two in the morning. I said, here's what I need you guys to do. I just want you to talk to all the other people here and ask them if they have health insurance and if not, why not? And what it would take for them to be willing to buy health insurance. And as a result of that, we learned some interesting things. One is we learned these people didn't think health insurance was that important. Second is that they wanted to figure out how to live their best lives, something young people talk about. And we created a program which was called Thrive. It was a program that had as the core, a portal that was really a lifestyle portal. How can you stay healthy? What are activities you can do? How do you connect with bicycle clubs or running clubs in your community? And suddenly people said, oh, that's valuable to me. It's gonna allow me to stay healthy. I have health insurance as a backup, but it's gonna to allow me to live my best life. [00:18:20][116.5]
Rob Johnson: [00:18:21] That is such great advice. I wanna explore a little something different when you're talking about getting out of the traditional workspace and how so many new perspectives can be opened up for you and building on that, can you share more about your 99% rule and how most breakthrough ideas are actually inspired a little bit more about the existing concepts? Cause you talked about that a little earlier. Yeah. But let's do it under the prism of the 99% role because as I said, we kinda got into it a little but, but I wanted to explore that a little bit more. [00:18:51][29.4]
Alan Gregerman: [00:18:51] Okay, perfect. So think about this. If in fact, almost every new idea is tied to another idea, then our job is to put ourselves out there in a world filled with ideas tied to what we're trying to accomplish. So let's say that some of your listeners are working in an organization that tries to improve customer service, okay? It's not like there aren't really good role models. I mean, there's some really bad role models, but imagine this, I could quickly and maybe now I use AI, I could quick Google or chat GPT and say, who are the most remarkable providers of customer service in the world? And If they're not in my industry, that's okay. So some things that might come up are Nordstrom, Ritz Carlton Hotels. I would then actually go there and figure out what they do and then adapt what they know to my industry. I actually did this with a hospital chain based in Malaysia, 31 hospitals, that suddenly realized the customer experience is about as important as the care you get going to a hospital because a lot of it is how you're treated in a hospital, whether you feel somebody understands you. So I actually took them to Ritz Carlton Hotels and we spent a day at two different Ritz-Carlton hotels talking to all the employees and asking them what they do to wow their customers. So ideas are out there. I just think, and Rob, your question is good, I just feel like people miss so much. We go out, we commute, we do whatever we need to do generally with our earphones in or looking at our cell phones and the world passes us by. I like to say that each day I pass a hundred people who could change my life. I just never connect with these people. And so why wouldn't I do that? So I just want people to go out there and say, where might there be some wisdom or insight about the problem that our company's trying to solve? And let's go talk to those people. They'll spark our thinking, they'll get us started because they already know something I don't know. [00:21:00][129.4]
Eileen Rochford: [00:21:01] That's great. Oh, I love this. The curiosity is near and dear to my heart. It happens to be one of the core values of my company, The Harbinger Group. So we are insatiable in our appetite for new concepts, new anything. So I just, I'd love you hearing you talk. [00:21:17][16.2]
Rob Johnson: [00:21:17] You all live it every day, Eileen. [00:21:18][1.4]
Eileen Rochford: [00:21:18] A curiosity. So Alan, I am curious about the real world outcomes that you've seen in relation to the overarching themes in your book. Can you tell us more about those real world outcome? [00:21:33][14.7]
Alan Gregerman: [00:21:33] Yeah, so I talk about the wisdom of ignorance. I talk the idea that you create breakthroughs by not knowing a lot of stuff. Let me give a few examples of kind of breakthroughs that have happened that all of your listeners should be familiar with that are based on people not knowing. And then I'll give a a few more ideas of projects we've worked on. So some of your audience has probably flown Southwest Airlines. And before they had a 2022 tech meltdown, and then before a few months ago when they decided to have baggage fees, they were the most popular airline in America. Southwest was started by two guys who'd never been in the airline business who one day at a bar in San Antonio decided to draw the concept for a new airline on a bar napkin, okay? They later relayed that if they had known what they were getting into, they never would have started an airline, and yet they started an airlines. Uber, all of your probably listeners use Uber. Uber was started by two friends who were in Paris, France and couldn't find a taxi. What they realized was, and go back to what Rob was talking about, the 99% rule, okay? Now the 99 percent rule evolves over time. More things are known. So these guys can't find the taxi. But what's happened since taxi companies kind of expanded is GPS or GIS technology, the simple notion that we can figure out where people are and bring them together. And so they suddenly said, we can't find a taxi, but there's technology that allows somebody who has a car to connect somebody who needs a ride. So this should never be a problem again. They started Uber. Airbnb, three friends trying to pay their rent, who decided to make couch surfing possible, advertised a design conference was happening in San Francisco. They advertised to people who had signed up, would you like to spend less and sleep on our couch? And we'll give you some local advice. That's now the largest hospitality company in the world. And that was like 16 years ago, they rented out their couch. So those are examples. I've helped companies to come up with major breakthroughs and cost savings and how they package their products. One large pharmaceutical company, we saved $155 million by actually taking them to a produce market in London and asking them to buy produce that came in a perfect package and protected its insides. And we then took all this produce back to their facility, took it apart and tried to understand the principles founded nature that protect things. And we applied that to their packaging and have saved them $155 million. So that's an idea. There are just so many ideas out there. I'd love people to read my book. There are a lot more in there in all different walks of life. You don't have to run a private company. You can run a nonprofit to see the power of enlightened ignorance in terms of taking a fresh look at the things we need to do. [00:24:38][184.8]
Eileen Rochford: [00:24:38] And we will certainly include a link to all the details about your book. And since we just came into acquaintance recently, I haven't had the opportunity to read the whole thing, but I really look forward to doing so. [00:24:50][12.0]
Alan Gregerman: [00:24:51] Likewise, that's amazing. I would love your feedback. That would be awesome. [00:24:54][3.6]
Eileen Rochford: [00:24:55] Cathy too, we'll definitely share your feedback. So Alan, thank you so much for joining us today on Can You Hear Me? This has been a really interesting conversation and more to come once Rob and I have read your book completely and we'll tell you everything we think about it. [00:25:10][14.8]
Alan Gregerman: [00:25:10] Awesome. Well, I appreciate the chance to be with you. Thanks for the conversation. I hope these ideas were valuable to your listeners. I hope all of your listeners feel they have permission to actually admit they don't know stuff and to get out there in the world and make stuff happen. [00:25:25][14.9]
Eileen Rochford: [00:25:25] Yes, that is a great parting comment. I always love to say we don't know what we don't know. So let's go have some new ideas. I love it. [00:25:34][8.8]
Rob Johnson: [00:25:34] Well, I think that's gonna do it for our 100th episode of Can You Hear Me? Eileen, it's just been a joy being on this journey with you. [00:25:42][7.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:25:42] Thanks for letting me do this with you, Rob. Super fun. [00:25:45][3.4]
Rob Johnson: [00:25:46] Thanks for listening. I'm Rob Johnson. If you'd like to comment on the podcast or suggest a topic, please contact us at our Can You Hear Me? Podcast page on LinkedIn. [00:25:55][8.5]
Eileen Rochford: [00:25:55] And I'm Eileen Rotschrad. If you like what you heard, please give, consider anyway, giving Can You Hear Me? A very positive review, if we might ask, because your reviews help other future listeners find our show. And for that, we would be very grateful. Thanks everyone. [00:25:55][0.0]
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