Matt Abrahams: Constraints catalyze communication.
My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach Strategic Communication at
Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.
Today I look forward to chatting with David Epstein.
David is a science writer and investigative journalist, best known
for his number one New York Times bestseller range and the Sports
Gene in his latest book Inside The Box, how Constraints Make Us Better.
He explores the counterintuitive cognitive science showing that the limits we have.
Free us up to be more creative.
Well, welcome David.
Thanks for being here.
I really look forward to learning from you today.
David Epstein: It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Matt Abrahams: Okay.
Shall we get started?
David Epstein: Let's do it.
Matt Abrahams: In reading Inside the box, I really resonated with,
when you talk about the Christmas tree effect or featuritis.
Can you share what these ideas mean and how can we prevent when we communicate in
our core ideas from being drowned in just the unnecessary complexity of so many of
the things we end up communicating about?
David Epstein: That's a great question because those are phrases that come from
designers primarily, featuritis and the Christmas tree effect, that essentially
mean the same thing, adding more.
So featuritis is like you get carried away by always adding features to things.
The Christmas tree effect is similar, meaning you just keep putting ornaments
on the tree over and over and over.
And humans have a hardwired what's called additive bias to always solve
problems by putting more and more on.
In a related bias, the flip side called subtractive neglect bias,
we tend to overlook solutions that involve taking things away.
I think when it comes to communication, and I've been guilty of this for sure,
I'm curious about a lot of things and I have a desire to impart everything
that I think is interesting to someone.
And I think that shows in my first book, which did well, but in retrospect, going
back, there are things in here that I would take out looking at it now.
So I feel like an antidote to featuritis when it comes to communication
would be something like, assuming the other person's gonna forget
everything except one thing you said.
Now decide what that one thing is before you're opening your mouth.
That doesn't mean you can't add other things.
But that one thing you wanna make sure that you get across.
And I think that's an approach, like many good constraints do, can help
you clarify priorities when you're trying to communicate clearly.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah.
One of the things that I coach the people I coach and the students
I teach is to really think of the bottom line first before you speak.
And I like how you said, what's the most important thing?
And then build the message from there rather than thinking of
everything you have to say and hoping that some of it sticks.
Growing up, one of my favorite books as a kid was Green Eggs and Ham.
I love Dr. Seuss.
Can you tell the story of Dr. Seuss, Theodor Geisel, and The Cat in the
Hat, and how that was written with vocabulary restriction in mind?
And how can that type of restriction lead to new and novel input and output?
And have you thought about that in the way you do your communication, and perhaps
all of us could do our communication?
David Epstein: So Dr. Seuss, we take for granted now that there's a lot of
interesting children's literature, but at the time he was working, it was boring.
Like I went back and read some of the stuff and it was just super
literal stuff, very pedantic.
And Dr. Seuss was asked to create a children's book using only 200 words from
a kid's vocabulary list that he was given.
And so what does he do?
First he starts complaining to his wife.
'Cause he looks through and he says, there's basically no adjectives.
And in fine Seussian form, he compares it to trying to make a strudel without
any strudels, which I love because it's like he was the same person
in private as he was in public.
But then he gets exasperated and decides he's just gonna take the
first two rhyming words on the list and write a book around them.
And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat, and the rest is history.
But that restriction forced him to experiment with rhythm because
he couldn't experiment vocabulary.
And after he did that, his famous publisher bet him that he couldn't
do it again using only 50 words.
And he did that for Green Eggs and Ham where he had to experiment
with rhythm even more because what can you do with 50 words?
And it became this rollicking tale, of course, that spawned imitators
and changed children's literature.
And gave rise to psychological effect known as the Green Eggs and
Ham effect, which is the idea that the quickest path to creativity
is by blocking familiar solutions.
So our brains are actually lazy.
You know, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually
made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because
thinking is energetically costly.
So if you're given complete freedom, you'll just go down
what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance.
You'll just do the thing that feels convenient or that you've done before.
And so the best way to become creative or have new ideas is to take that away.
So in a communication perspective, one thing I would think of is, let's say
you're going into a client meeting or something and you say, if we were not
allowed to pitch or recommend or say the usual thing, what would we do instead?
And I think that can be a fruitful thought exercise for thinking of what are other
ways we could frame this, or what are other ways we could propose this, or maybe
even directly in the communication medium, if we were not allowed to communicate this
using PowerPoint slides or whatever it is that we're used to, how would we do it?
I'm not saying you necessarily have to do that, but it tends to be a
very generative exercise in figuring out what is the core of this thing
and what are ways to communicate it.
Matt Abrahams: I love the backstory on Dr. Seuss's initial successes and this idea
of putting constraints into communication to get you to think differently about it.
I have a colleague who when they do an activity in class and they're
teaching conflict resolution, they ask the students to have a conflict,
they create a simulated conflict, and the students can only ask questions.
They can't make declarations.
And you can see how it would change the dynamic, right?
And again, she's not advocating that every conflict should be resolved
through questioning exclusively, but it changes your mindset
and it changes how you listen.
David Epstein: When I'm in my mode as a journalist, I think I'm legitimately a
better person because it's not that I'm only asking questions, but it's that I go
into every conversation with the mindset of trying to understand, not to be right.
And that frame just makes so much difference in how the conversation goes.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the challenge for all of us, you first have to recognize the habits
and patterns, heuristics, that you have to then begin to challenge them and
say, okay, now we're not gonna do this.
But I think there are a lot of possibilities and another reframe you
could use, go into any situation as a journalist, what would a journalist
do here could be really helpful.
What is chunking and how can it help us in our communication?
David Epstein: Chunking is in the sense that psychologists
use, it means essentially the grouping together of information.
So maybe I can give you an example, would be an easy way to explain the phenomenon.
If I said 20 random words to you right now and asked you to repeat them
back, you'd have trouble doing that.
If I gave you 20 words in a sentence, you may well be able to repeat that
back to me, or at least most of it, and they could be the same 20 words
just in the first case mixed up.
But it will make your memory seem so much better because you've learned a
system of grammar and groups and phrases of words that are chunked or collected
into groups in your brain, so you're not actually remembering 20 different things.
You're remembering just a few different chunks that fit together in some
coherent scheme, and that's how humans are able to remember and access as much
information as we can because we chunk information into related, meaningful
groups and then into these broader networks or templates of knowledge.
Matt Abrahams: So how does this lead to novelty?
How does it lead to creativity and new ideas when you're attaching to
previous existing old information?
David Epstein: Our older ideas or familiar ideas are actually the jumping
off point for new ideas typically.
In fact, as I was doing the research for the book, one of the things I learned
was that the idea that creativity and originality are synonymous was not even
a thing until the late 18th century and this group of people that wanted
to say not everything is logical, like creative inspiration comes in
these lightning strikes out of the blue and there's no rhyme or reason
to it, and that's not really true.
It actually typically comes from modifying ideas that are already very familiar.
And I think if we're thinking about this in a communication frame, one of
the important things is that if you want to get people to come along with
creative or radical ideas, a really important thing you have to do is ground
it in things that are very familiar to them, and then layer the more radical
thing on top of it so that this vision of change also comes along with it
an embedded vision of continuity.
Matt Abrahams: Demonstrating consistency and showing how what you're talking about
is familiar, it makes it easier for people to one, buy into it and to follow through.
Anybody listening to this show knows that I am a huge advocate for frameworks
and structure and communication for the very reasons you've just talked about.
They allow us to understand and predict what's coming so we can dedicate
and focus more information on it.
We're not good at remembering just list after list, item after item.
When you package it in a structure like problem, solution, benefit, past, present,
future, all of a sudden that chunking allows us to have a framework that we can
attach to and it makes it more memorable.
So I definitely appreciate you defining that term that helps us see something
that we often talk about on the show.
In your book, you talk about the podcast, This American
Life, one of my favorite shows.
Can you share with us what you learned from your interviewing of them?
David Epstein: I did a piece for This American Life and I had never
written anything for radio or narrative podcasts essentially.
And this was like a 35 minute piece that I'm writing.
I know nothing about what I'm doing, and I'm a science writer, so I was used to
putting a lot of technical information in articles, or reasonably technical,
and that's okay when people can stop and reread it or slow down, not so
okay when it's flying by them in audio.
And so This American Life had this system where you do these
read-throughs where it's like Ira Glass sitting there holding a stopwatch.
You're reading the narration, your producer hits play when you
wanna play some interview audio.
And then people say what confused them.
They don't tell you how to solve it.
You have to do something, you can't ignore, but they don't tell you how.
And then you keep redoing that.
And every time you do it, there'd be at least one new person who had
never heard it before, every time.
And that person gets to say what confused them.
Then you just do that over and over until the new person comes
in and says, nothing confused me.
I got everything.
And so the process titrated out confusion, and it's a brutal process, but the
greatest editing process I've ever been through because it just relentlessly
exposes all the assumptions you are making about things that you know really well,
and that you've even lost track of the fact that not everybody knows this stuff.
And even though I'm sensitive to that as a professional science communicator,
I'm thinking about that all the time.
And yet there's still stuff that just becomes so routine or, or so obvious
to you once you know about it, but it's not obvious to people who don't.
So it's a great system in that way that people can really lose track of
what the other party doesn't understand if they start taking for granted the
meaning of things in their world.
Matt Abrahams: The American Life story highlights the importance of
making sure your audience understands.
But what I really like about it is the question they asked,
they said, what is confusing?
Many of us will say, did you understand everything?
Were things clear, et cetera.
But when you put it in, hey, what was confusing?
That helps people be more specific, and I really like that they
don't then give suggestions for how to make it less confusing.
They leave that to you.
So that, I think, is where that creativity comes in.
And I think you learn more when you're not given direction on how to fix it.
And I'm really gonna take this lesson to heart as a parent, as a teacher, as
a coach, because often it's my reaction to then immediately give, here's
what I think you could do to fix it.
David Epstein: I thought it was fantastic because just wrote a book obviously about
useful constraints, but there is clearly such thing as too much constraint, right?
If you're telling someone what they have to do and how they have to
do it, if the person says, there's no room for me to surprise myself,
then it's too much constraint.
But in this case, it really impressed upon me the power of having someone define
the problem for you really well, and instantly you're fired up about solutions.
They'd say, I just did not understand this beat in the story, whatever it was.
And if they could define it really well, it feels very empowering for
then doing the problem solving.
I, I see the problem clearly.
In many cases, I think a clear definition of the problem is the
best tool for getting it solved.
Matt Abrahams: Right, it helps to distill that down.
Very good.
Another term I need you to define for our listeners, what is
precluding and how does it work?
David Epstein: Yeah.
Precluding is, in this context, blocking the most familiar solutions.
So, in the history of innovation, preclude constraints are basically ever
present, where either by someone's choice.
In artistic innovation, it was often the case that people did this by choice,
in order to innovate, in technological innovation, in many cases, it was more
necessity, but that a preclude constraint means it precludes the previous solution.
It blocks the path that has been taken most regularly, and once that's
gone it's maybe the most generative creative prompt you can possibly have.
The thing you're used to, the thing everyone's always done,
you're not allowed to do it.
So what now?
How can you get this done?
It kind of reminded me, actually, one of the early readers of the book was
a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was the first chief knowledge officer at NASA,
basically like the head psychologist, he stopped partway through and said, I
gotta tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where the team ended up with
half the time in budget they expected.
And so what did they do?
First they complained and then they said, well, if we were gonna get
this done anyway, how would we do it?
And it led them to repurpose things.
So they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature
sensors from NASCAR and created a probe that confirmed water on the moon.
It was incredibly innovative and it led to other missions where they
realized they could repurpose lots of technology, but they just never would've
done this if they hadn't been forced off of the convenient path basically.
Matt Abrahams: And we can challenge ourselves to do that.
We don't have to have some external thing or people tell us that we can
say, what if this weren't possible or this were taken away so we can actually
leverage this as a tool ourselves.
Before we end, I like to ask everybody three questions, one I make up just
for you and two I've been asking everybody I've interviewed in the past.
Are you up for that?
David Epstein: Absolutely.
Matt Abrahams: Alright.
I'm gonna give you a constraint.
If you were to give our listeners one boundary that could help them in their
communication, what would that advice be?
David Epstein: Make the other person's argument first.
I realize there's no rule that applies to every situation, but I found this
when I critiqued Malcolm Gladwell pretty stridently in my first book, and we ended
up, we first met for a public debate, and then we became really good friends.
So this was a very generative relationship based on disagreement.
One of the things that really helped was at that initial debate, we decided
to start, he and I together, by stating what we thought the other person's
argument was, and I think one, that gave you some first empathy for the other
person's argument, but it also gave the other person a chance to decide if
they were actually being misunderstood.
So you both had an understanding of if the other person heard you and then you
could know what you were talking about when you were having this discussion.
And so because of that, he and I then became running buddies and all this stuff,
I started taking that forward to other situations where I thought I might have
a different perspective than someone to start off, even if it's just to myself.
Like that was a formal debate with him.
But even to myself, what do I think the other person's point of view is?
And, and I will, if I think it's appropriate, try to work
that in early in a conversation.
So what I'm hearing you say is, and then you're basically fact checking
in real time and they'll correct it if you're wrong, and that's useful.
So I think that idea of going in with making the other person's argument
first, even if it's just to yourself, is a really useful constraint to enter
certain types of conversations with.
Matt Abrahams: I really, really like that.
If nothing else, it puts you in service of the audience.
It makes you focus on what's going on for them.
Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?
David Epstein: Not to be redundant here, but I do wanna say it's Malcolm
Gladwell because in those series of disagreements that led to us becoming
good friends, he was very open-minded.
So we had a debate at the same forum, 5 years apart, and the second time around,
he started saying the things that I had convinced him of, and I didn't have
nearly as much professional capital the first time we met for a debate.
You could have just crushed me just because of who you
are, and you're very clever.
And he said, yeah, but I have the luxury of learning from my critics.
And that stuck with me so much.
The idea that an earnest critic, you have the luxury of learning from
them instead of becoming defensive.
And now I've seen that in his writing where he has decided some things that
he wrote that became very famous, are not right, and has changed direction.
And I think that's an amazing thing to do when you've been so successful with
a certain idea, because I've definitely seen the opposite of other writers
who, once they've become successful with an idea, they are not changing
their mind, no matter the evidence.
So his ability to acknowledge that and address it even directly, I think is
rare and amazing and quite frankly, became really a role model for me.
Matt Abrahams: That notion of there's something to be learned from the criticism
and just the openness there, I think we could all learn something from.
Final question for you, David.
What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
David Epstein: I think identifying the type of conversation you're having.
We've all probably had this issue at some point where you are saying
something or someone else is saying something you're upset about and one
party offers solutions and really it's a I need to be heard conversation.
And I think that can be a very upsetting disconnect for both sides.
So identifying the conversation type.
I think keeping in mind what psychologists call the peak end rule, which is that the
way your brain remembers an experience is more or less an average of the moment
of peak intensity and the last moment.
You may not be able to do much about the moment of peak intensity,
but you can end on a good note.
That end moment has more weight than just an average moment.
And the third I would say, and this is more group focused, would be relatively
equal conversational turn taking.
So, not that everyone has to have a turn in every case, but there is a body of
research that I write about in the new book that shows that one of the hallmarks
of teams that are good at solving problems together is that over the course of a
day, for example, if they're working together, there will be relatively
equal conversational turn taking.
When I was writing about Pixar, where Ed Catmull, the co-founder, told
me that they banned Steve Jobs from certain feedback meetings specifically
because as he became this larger than life personality they felt his voice
would take up too much space and crowd out other people who might have a lot
to add but not be quite as eloquent.
Or there's this colloquial term, HIPPO, highest paid person's opinion,
where if that person speaks, everyone will start to gravitate around them.
So I think putting boundaries in place that facilitate more
equal conversational turn taking.
Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate the three ingredients.
They're very specific and they're all science-based.
Be aware of what type of conversation you're having, what's needed in this
conversation, what's your role in it?
Think about how they end and can you end it in a way that increases the
likelihood that people will remember it and have the experience you want them
to, and then to really consider the turn taking that takes place because
that does impact how people feel about it and the quality of the interactions.
David, this has been fantastic.
In many ways you've unconstrained my thinking and hopefully that
of our listeners, even though the book was all about constraints.
Thank you so much.
Good success on Inside the Box, and I appreciate learning from
you and having our conversation.
David Epstein: I enjoyed this very much.
Thank you.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of
Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.
To learn more about constraints, please listen to episode 108 with Dan Klein,
Adam Tobin, and Patricia Ryan Madsen.
This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder.
With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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