I caught up with the authors about how the continued integration between technology and humans, and their call for a “Digital Magna Carta,” a broadly-accepted charter developed by a multi-stakeholder congress that would help guide the development of advanced technologies to harness their power for the benefit of all humanity.

Lisa Kay Solomon: Your new book, Solomon’s Code, explores artificial intelligence and its broader human, ethical, and societal implications that all leaders need to consider. AI is a technology that’s been in development for decades. Why is it so urgent to focus on these topics now?

Olaf Groth and Mark Nitzberg: Popular perception always thinks of AI in terms of game-changing narratives—for instance, Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov at chess. But it’s the way these AI applications are “getting into our heads” and making decisions for us that really influences our lives. That’s not to say the big, headline-grabbing breakthroughs aren’t important; they are.

But it’s the proliferation of prosaic apps and bots that changes our lives the most, by either empowering or counteracting who we are and what we do. Today, we turn a rapidly growing number of our decisions over to these machines, often without knowing it—and even more often without understanding the second- and third-order effects of both the technologies and our decisions to rely on them.

There is genuine power in what we call a “symbio-intelligent” partnership between human, machine, and natural intelligences. These relationships can optimize not just economic interests, but help improve human well-being, create a more purposeful workplace, and bring more fulfillment to our lives.

However, mitigating the risks while taking advantage of the opportunities will require a serious, multidisciplinary consideration of how AI influences human values, trust, and power relationships. Whether or not we acknowledge their existence in our everyday life, these questions are no longer just thought exercises or fodder for science fiction.

In many ways, these technologies can challenge what it means to be human, and their ramifications already affect us in real and often subtle ways. We need to understand how

LKS: There is a lot of hype and misconceptions about AI. In your book, you provide a useful distinction between the cognitive capability that we often associate with AI processes, and the more human elements of consciousness and conscience. Why are these distinctions so important to understand?

OG & MN: Could machines take over consciousness some day as they become more powerful and complex? It’s hard to say. But there’s little doubt that, as machines become more capable, humans will start to think of them as something conscious—if for no other reason than our natural inclination to anthropomorphize.

Machines are already learning to recognize our emotional states and our physical health. Once they start talking that back to us and adjusting their behavior accordingly, we will be tempted to develop a certain rapport with them, potentially more trusting or more intimate because the machine recognizes us in our various states.

Consciousness is hard to define and may well be an emergent property, rather than something you can easily create or—in turn—deduce to its parts. So, could it happen as we put more and more elements together, from the realms of AI, quantum computing, or brain-computer interfaces? We can’t exclude that possibility.

Either way, we need to make sure we’re charting out a clear path and guardrails for this development through the Three Cs in machines: cognition (where AI is today); consciousness (where AI could go); and conscience (what we need to instill in AI before we get there). The real concern is that we reach machine consciousness—or what humans decide to grant as consciousness—without a conscience. If that happens, we will have created an artificial sociopath.

LKS: We have been seeing major developments in how AI is influencing product development and industry shifts. How is the rise of AI changing power at the global level?

OG & MN: Both in the public and private sectors, the data holder has the power. We’ve already seen the ascendance of about 10 “digital barons” in the US and China who sit on huge troves of data, massive computing power, and the resources and money to attract the world’s top AI talent. With these gaps already open between the haves and the have-nots on the technological and corporate side, we’re becoming increasingly aware that similar inequalities are forming at a societal level as well.

Economic power flows with data, leaving few options for socio-economically underprivileged populations and their corrupt, biased, or sparse digital footprints. By concentrating power and overlooking values, we fracture trust.

We can already see this tension emerging between the two dominant geopolitical models of AI. China and the US have emerged as the most powerful in both technological and economic terms, and both remain eager to drive that influence around the world. The EU countries are more contained on these economic and geopolitical measures, but they’ve leaped ahead on privacy and social concerns.

The problem is, no one has yet combined leadership on all three critical elements of values, trust, and power. The nations and organizations that foster all three of these elements in their AI systems and strategies will lead the future. Some are starting to recognize the need for the combination, but we found just 13 countries that have created significant AI strategies. Countries that wait too long to join them risk subjecting themselves to a new “data colonialism” that could change their economies and societies from the outside.

LKS: Solomon’s Code looks at AI from a variety of perspectives, considering both positive and potentially dangerous effects. You caution against the rising global threat and weaponization of AI and data, suggesting that “biased or dirty data is more threatening than nuclear arms or a pandemic.” For global leaders, entrepreneurs, technologists, policy makers and social change agents reading this, what specific strategies do you recommend to ensure ethical development and application of AI?

OG & MN: We’ve surrendered many of our most critical decisions to the Cult of Data. In most cases, that’s a great thing, as we rely more on scientific evidence to understand our world and our way through it. But we swing too far in other instances, assuming that datasets and algorithms produce a complete story that’s unsullied by human biases or intellectual shortcomings. We might choose to ignore it, but no one is blind to the dangers of nuclear war or pandemic disease. Yet, we willfully blind ourselves to the threat of dirty data, instead believing it to be pristine.

So, what do we do about it? On an individual level, it’s a matter of awareness, knowing who controls your data and how outsourcing of decisions to thinking machines can present opportunities and threats alike.

For business, government, and political leaders, we need to see a much broader expansion of ethics committees with transparent criteria with which to evaluate new products and services. We might consider something akin to clinical trials for pharmaceuticals—a sort of testing scheme that can transparently and independently measure the effects on humans of algorithms, bots, and the like. All of this needs to be multidisciplinary, bringing in expertise from across technology, social systems, ethics, anthropology, psychology, and so on.

Finally, on a global level, we need a new charter of rights—a Digital Magna Carta—that formalizes these protections and guides the development of new AI technologies toward all of humanity’s benefit. We’ve suggested the creation of a multi-stakeholder Cambrian Congress (harkening back to the explosion of life during the Cambrian period) that can not only begin to frame benefits for humanity, but build the global consensus around principles for a basic code-of-conduct, and ideas for evaluation and enforcement mechanisms, so we can get there without any large-scale failures or backlash in society. So, it’s not one or the other—it’s both.

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Conley’s new book, Wisdom at Work, reflects on the new realities of a five-generation workforce and how the wisdom of age and experience can benefit the speed of digitization and technology. Conley shared his experience as Airbnb founder Brian Chesky’s “mentern” and how that shaped his values of diversity and inclusion.

Lisa Kay Solomon: Wisdom at Work explores the role of “modern elders” in this increasingly digital world. What is a modern elder and why do you believe they are so important to organizations focused on speed and growth?

Chip Conley: The term “modern elder” is one I developed to describe a new reality in our society—one where older workers pair their skills and experiences with those of less seasoned executives. This can happen in the context of fast-growing companies reinventing our economy as well as from non-profits and legacy companies. A modern elder has liberated the word “elder” from the historically derogatory term “elder-ly” and is a highly valued asset in ways concrete and abstract.

Anyone with meaningful experience—generally a decade or more older than those that surround them—can reinvent themselves as a modern elder by becoming unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.  Whether in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or beyond, modern elders are both student and sage, mentor and intern, and have a thirst for mastery.

In this historic time, when there are five generations simultaneously in the workforce, the modern elder can play a critical role up and down the organizational chart, from quietly mentoring senior, but less seasoned leaders, to serving as a source of ideas that impact an entire organization’s culture based on previous experience and best practices.

LKS: You joined Airbnb back in 2013 as a somewhat “reluctant disruptor” after selling your very successful hotel company, Joie de Vivre, and you became a “mentern” (mentor + intern) to CEO Brian Chesky. What inspired you to take the leap?

CC: Brian silently asked me a provocative question when I first met him: “How would you like to democratize the hospitality business?” Having spent my entire career in the hospitality industry building the country’s second-largest boutique hotel company, I was both intrigued and taken aback by the audacity of Brian’s question and his description of his vision for Airbnb.

I had sold Joie de Vivre Hospitality a few years earlier, and a few tech-minded friends told me Airbnb was a rocket ship ready to launch. My gut told me that home sharing might just be scaling the experientially-minded “live like a local” ethos that boutique hotels had pioneered for the previous quarter-century.

So, I decided to take the leap—a leap I initially thought would be a 15 hour per week advisory role but turned into a 15 hour per day full-time job. And it also turned into one of the great chapters of my life.

LKS: In your book you talk about the importance of finding new ways to blend EQ (emotional intelligence) and DQ (digital intelligence). What’s required to create an environment where both are honored and supported?

CC: There’s an implicit trade agreement between boomers (and GenXers) and millennials: emotional intelligence (EQ) for digital intelligence (DQ). The rare individual may possess both, but in most high-growth technology companies, the modern elder possesses the lion’s share of EQ gained during life and career experiences, while the younger, tech-savvy leaders possess far more technical skills and DQ.

The culture necessary to honor, support, and share both EQ and DQ has to do with individual and organizational DNA. The modern elder generally is able to create trust through his or her deep knowledge and connection of an industry that younger cohorts are looking to disrupt. But the successful modern elder also mixes his or her superior number of life experiences with a strong dose of humility and relevancy, as his or her younger colleagues aren’t looking for a history lesson.

LKS: There’s a lot of discussion about diversity and inclusion these days, with a particular focus on equality for gender and ethnicity. You focus on the importance of age diversity. Why is that so important?

CC:  When we used to speak of age diversity, it was often around the men and women nearing the traditional retirement age in their 60s. Today, it’s a whole new world. We have executives with median ages in their 20s running some of the largest and most influential companies in the world. Facebook, Google, and Apple have median employee ages of 28, 30, and 31. No matter their digital intelligence, it seems realistic to ask if these executives have the seasoning to be building and managing multi-billion-dollar businesses without the benefit of some more seasoned colleagues.

Enter the modern elder.

The modern elder can help balance the vision, passion, energy, and drive of these young masters of the universe with the real-world experience gained through a decade or more of work.

Age diversity is often the difference between a great idea and a great company. Would Facebook be what it is today if not for Sheryl Sandberg’s role as the modern elder to Zuckerberg? The examples of others with brilliant founders who have either succeeded wildly or flamed out spectacularly are countless based to some degree on whether or not a visionary leader was paired with a modern elder.

LKS: What is your advice to ambitious entrepreneurs on how they can engage and benefit from “modern elders”?

CC: Brian has a huge appetite for learning. He has a growth mindset, so beyond just reaching out to me, he’s never been shy to connect with a thought leader to learn from them. Another way to engage a wise counselor is to suggest a mutual mentorship, in which both of you can teach each other something of value, much like the EQ for DQ relationship I mentioned earlier. A modern elder is naturally curious, so you may have something to teach them, and the modern elder will likely possess some or all of the five attributes from which the ambitious entrepreneur can benefit:

1. Good judgment: Modern elders have a long-term perspective based on the wisdom they’ve gathered over the years.
2. Unvarnished insight: A modern elder can cut through the clutter quickly to find the core issue that needs attention, whether in a job interview or a strategic discussion.
3. Emotional intelligence: Modern elders are self-aware, patient, and empathetic people who are good at both understanding and managing their own emotions, and tuning in to the emotions of others.
4. Holistic thinking: The modern elder’s brain has the capacity to traverse from one side to the other more adeptly, dispassionately recognizing patterns more easily.
5. Stewardship: The modern elder wants to put his or her lifetime of experience and perspective to work to positively impact future generations and has moved from success to significance in their life.

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Pirie has had a front seat at the learning and leadership table for years, developing digital learning platforms at Oracle, serving on the board of the Association for Talent Development, and leading several NGOs in the space. He believes that digital disruption and the rapid pace of changing skills requirements are creating a ripe moment for the total transformation of corporate learning.

We discussed the trends driving the need for new learning strategies, and what leaders can do right now to best support the learning and leadership needs of their organizations.

Lisa Kay Solomon: Corporate learning and training have been around a long time. What’s unique about this moment in time?

Chris Pirie: Suddenly leaders care a lot about learning and skills at every level and across industry and the public sector. Building skills for the future used to be the exclusive domain of universities and colleges, with some gentle tweaking provided by corporate training departments to keep employees operating as good compliant citizens (see Starbucks) and prepare the workforce for their next role.

This is changing fast as skills development, and especially skills for the future, ramps up as a major preoccupation of our corporate and political leaders. There are several forces driving the accelerated change in the world, and thus, the urgency for organizations to ready and retool their workforces.

Here are a few of the most disruptive.

The Disruption of Digital Transformation. In the future (indeed now) many believe value will derive from data as much as from goods and services, and the skills and ability to collect, manage, analyze, and derive insights will be highly sought after.

The Rise of the Robots. The fourth industrial revolution is disrupting jobs at all levels, promising to automate white collar roles that were traditionally not impacted by automation. The shelf life of existing skills is shrinking, while new emergent skills are desperately needed.

The Demands of Modern Learners. What learners want and what they truly need may be at odds. Learners have less time to learn and want access to instant and more customized learning experiences, their expectations of “just enough, just in time, and just for me” access, customized experiences, and rich selection of media are set by their consumer experiences. But real learning—acquiring skills, understanding new paradigms, and changing behaviors—takes time and costs attention.

LKS: How has digital proliferation changed the nature of what we learn and how we learn?

CP: Thanks to the internet, both content and expertise are easy to access, but ironically hard to find. Content is often free and abundant, but this endless stream of content adds incredible pressure for the learner—there is now no excuse not to know, and yet it’s hard to judge the validity and provenance of the information. Do I take a corporate course or an online MOOC from a reputable school? Do I pay, does my organization pay?

As a result, many of the corporate training departments I meet with have a deep feeling of inadequacy.

Their traditional models of classroom and top-down knowledge transfer seem wholly inadequate for the task ahead. Across a number of surveys, a pattern is emerging: corporate leaders and employees want more impactful learning. But everyone (including the learning leaders themselves) demonstrates little confidence that training groups can respond in a meaningful way.

LKS: What do you see unfolding in the future related to corporate learning?

CP: The learning scientists are coming! Within corporations, we’re going to see a fundamental rethink of the role and responsibility of learning in organizations and the creation of a new type of learning organization. The learning scientists will draw on several disciplines to make time spent learning more effective and efficient, and to build a learning culture that unlocks the natural curiosity and learning prowess that we all have to provide competitive advantage to the organization.

Data Science. These hybrid experts will use the “digital exhaust” and apply sophisticated algorithms to search for behavior patterns to get a read on how knowledge and information flow through organizations and networks. Through these data-driven methods, we can see which meetings are productive, where pockets of expertise exist in the organization, who are the teachers, who are the curious, and what are the behaviors they exhibit.

Neuroscience. Secondly, we’re going to see continued progress in neuroscience to inform our understanding of how we learn and how the brain maps new knowledge and moves it from short-term to long-term memory. We’ll start to know what it looks and feels like to pay full attention and which social and physical conditions can accelerate or throttle the learning process. Organizations like NeuroLeadership Institute are codifying the research into workable models that help leaning designers to leverage those brain chemistry process and biases. I believe we will soon see diagnostic tools to help evaluate costly corporate learning programs against such standards and tools to help learning experience designers design for maximum impact.

Social Science. Thirdly, anthropologists and social learning scientists are exposing the inadequacies of the traditional corporate approach of “we’ll tell you what to think” against the natural state of curiosity and peer-to-peer teaching and learning that is always at work in organizations (but not always in service of the leadership strategy). We’re seeing the emergence of a radical re-think of the role of learning organizations, informed by social anthropologists, cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, and culture experts who are driving dialogue across the industry on the importance of engaging social and informal learning networks.

Computer Science. Cheap and ubiquitous computing power has already fundamentally re-shaped the learning process, particularly in the context of content development, search, social learning networks, and collaboration. As today’s knowledge workers use web hosted collaboration tools like Office365 and Slack, as well as professional networking tools like LinkedIn, they create a set of digital exhaust that is rich in information regarding how expertise and influence flow across an organization.

For example, agents/bots can recommend precise micro-learning content for a technical sales consultant based on the opportunities she is tracking in her CRM system and about to call on today—these engines learn from the research and learning habits of other sellers who have closed similar deals. How humans learn will likely not change, but the process will get a big assist as machine learning and AI specialists build technology that will help us gain new knowledge and skills more efficiently.

LKS: What can leaders do now to promote cultures and reinforce systems of learning within their organizations?

CP: In 2018, a Conference Board survey of the global C-suite revealed that talent and skills are the number one hot button issue for talent and organization leaders. Similarly, the Deloitte Talent Report for 2017 suggested that the phrase Learning Organization no longer referred to the training department, but was now a desirable posture for the entire enterprise. The role of the leader then is pretty clear: job number one is to care deeply about learning!

At Microsoft our inflection point was the announcement of our new CEO, a new corporate mission, and some deep soul searching on the need to shift from a “know it all” to a “learn it all” organization.

Here are three key approaches I’ve observed that Microsoft and other organizations are taking to build a deep learning culture to create sustained competitive advantage.

• Embrace a growth mindset culture by learning from failure, pursuing deep customer empathy, and celebrating curiosity
• Harness the social learning already happening across and between organizations and set your teams free to learn from customers and each other
• Remove friction. Use technology (whatever technology you have to hand) to build high-scale learning programs and knowledge networks that are woven into the fabric of work

Lastly, at Microsoft we are applying these approaches not just to our employees, but across our entire ecosystem, bringing modern learning culture and techniques to our partner and customer programs and building deeper customer trust by infusing learning principles into marketing and sales activities.

Teaching our customers and learning from them in equal measure is essential for both our own transformation and our customers’ digital transformation journey.

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Dulski has spent a career launching new ventures and leading global teams at Yahoo!, Google, and, mostly recently at Change.org, where she was the COO and president of a global platform that inspires millions of citizens around the world to ignite and support positive change. Dulski’s new book Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? provides the playbook on how to become a successful catalyst of positive change.

Lisa Kay Solomon: You wrote Purposeful after nearly two decades of leading positive change in education, social impact, and most recently, as head of Groups at Facebook. What inspired you to write this book now?

Jennifer Dulski: I’ve been fortunate in my career to support movement starters from all walks of life and to witness what is possible when everyday people stand up to make the world better. Some are activists, some are entrepreneurs—and all of them are making a difference. In Purposeful I tell their stories and share their lessons, as well as some lessons from my own career, to show how we can all be movement starters for the causes that matter to us. At a time when our world seems increasingly divided, I believe it is important to highlight what can happen when we come together with a common purpose.

LKS: In Purposeful, you describe a new type of leader you call “movement starters.” Can you briefly describe some of the core aspects of a movement starter and some patterns of successful ones?

JD: I draw a distinction between managers and movement starters. Managers do their best with what they are given, and movement starters push to go beyond what is currently possible and mobilize others. I’ve seen that successful movement starters, regardless of cause or industry, are all effective at the same core skills: creating a compelling vision, mobilizing support, effectively persuading decision-makers, navigating criticism, and overcoming obstacles.

In Purposeful, I walk through these steps in detail, highlighting stories and tips from leaders who illustrate each one. We can all learn from a young woman with Down’s Syndrome who helped persuade Congress to pass the largest law benefiting disabled Americans since 1990, an entrepreneur revolutionizing the way we think about personal nutrition, and a high school student who convinced multinational beverage companies to remove a harmful chemical from their products, among many others. My hope is that by offering tangible advice alongside inspiring stories, people will feel empowered to stand up and start their own movements.

LKS: You talk about how important building allies and connections are in the process of fostering movements. What are some strategies for doing that in a time when we seem increasingly divided?

JD: There are two strategies I have seen to be particularly effective at building support for a movement. The first is having the courage to share a personal story. The more vulnerable people are willing to be in sharing why something matters to them, the more others will rally behind them. Sharing your personal story will help make connections with others who may have had a similar experience or feel the same way. And given the technology that’s available to all of us now, it’s easier than ever to spread these stories and mobilize people quickly.

The second strategy I’ve seen work well is to trust those around us. It’s tempting to think we need to do everything ourselves or be afraid to ask for help. Unfortunately, movements don’t exist with just a single, passionate person; they need a team of supporters. By trusting people around us to participate and asking for help when we need it, we can mobilize armies of support.

LKS: In a world that seems dominated by speed, you talk about the importance of pacing. This comes, in part, from your early experiences as a coxswain of a national champion crew team. Can you share more about this?

JD: While it’s possible for movements to prompt change quickly, most movements build over time with determination, patience, and ongoing action. Motivation of teams is as much an art as it is a science, and when you are building a movement with the help of others, it’s crucial to know the fine line between inspiring people and pushing them too hard.

In rowing, there’s a technique called a “Power 10” when rowers in a boat take ten strokes at their absolute maximum power, usually to try to move past another boat in a race. As a high school and collegiate coxswain, I was responsible for deciding when to take a Power 10. I found that a team can usually take 2–3 in any race—more than that and they stop being effective because the team gets too tired; too few, and you may end up behind another team who’s taking its own Power 10.

This same idea is applicable for leaders of movements. When you need to rally people behind your vision and ensure they feel bought in, a few well-placed sprints or “Power 10s” can work miracles. The key is to know the most strategic time to call for a Power 10—such as having a deadline before a big decision or brainstorming to overcome a particular obstacle—and to use them sparingly.

LKS: In nearly every powerful movement or entrepreneurial effort, there are inevitable setbacks and obstacles. What are some effective ways of getting through them?

JD: Whether you’re trying to enact change in your workplace, build a company, or get legislation passed, you are going to face criticism and obstacles. One key to surviving these challenges is to expect them. The more you can get comfortable knowing setbacks will be part of the package, the easier it becomes to navigate them. My daughters had a great math teacher in elementary school who used to tell them that math wasn’t about getting the right answer, it was about “the struggle.” The best mathematicians were the ones who could keep working on the same problem for years, through many failed attempts, without giving up until they finally solved it. And of course, each attempt taught them something new about what would and would not work.

The same is true of movement starters. Whether traditional activists or entrepreneurs, those that can master the struggle are the ones most likely to be successful. How they do that varies. For example, you can try to leverage naysayers to your advantage, or view yourself as a professional athlete. The key is resilience, because as Mary Pickford said, “This thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”

LKS: You talk about movements creating a sense of hope. What gives you hope these days?

JD: All the stories featured in the book give me hope, as does the renewed wave of activism we are seeing in communities all around us. From teenagers to grandparents, and from veterans to violent crime survivors, people all over the world are rallying others to create change.

While we live in a world that is increasingly divided, hope lives within all of us. It appears in what we do and say, how we treat each other, and what we stand up to fight for. My goal with Purposeful is to give people the belief and the tools they need to turn that hope into movements, whether in their workplaces, their neighborhoods, or the world.

If more people believe they can stand up and start a movement, and muster the courage to do it, imagine how much stronger and more compassionate our world could be.

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Recognized as one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world (Thinkers50), Whitney is the author of Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream.

I recently caught up with Whitney about her latest book Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve, which explores the strategies leaders can use to build adaptive, high-performing teams and flexible organizations.

Lisa Kay Solomon: In the world of innovation, companies often talk about disruption from new technologies and competitive business models. What does it mean at the personal level?

Whitney Johnson: We all recognize that we are living in an era of extremely rapid change. New technology is certainly a huge part of that; something that is freshly innovative today can make the lifespan journey from “cutting edge” to “obsolete” in a pretty short timeframe. Businesses have to be nimble to adapt to changing market demands.

What we sometimes forget is that all this change originates in the minds of human beings. Disruption isn’t just happening to us; we are the force behind it. If individuals aren’t being creative and working disruptively, businesses and technologies aren’t going to change and disrupt either.

People are the starting point for new ideas, and we are innately wired for change. That aspect of our humanness has to be acknowledged and nurtured in the workplace. We need to be disrupting ourselves—shaking things up professionally—every few years or we, too, can become obsolete. We will be overtaken by more agile and ambitious people—disrupt or be disrupted, just like the latest technology.

LKS: In a world of accelerating change, how should leaders be thinking about talent development, both for themselves and for their teams?

WJ: Surveys and studies abound that convince me that even more than keeping an eye on profit/loss statements and quarterly reports, leaders need to be concerned about employee engagement. High engagement drives productivity and profitability in turn; disengagement leads to decline. People, not businesses, are the basic unit of innovation and disruption; human brains are the instruments of creation. They like to be learning, thinking, engaging in problem-solving and challenge. Without a strategy for talent development, including our own, it is a matter of chance whether we will be creative enough to compete.

Leaders need to foster work environments that provide learning opportunities and new challenging roles internally. There’s a tendency to want to keep productive employees in place, but in most cases people will get bored. Most don’t stay happy doing the same things again and again, no matter how capable they are.

Valuable employees leak away to other companies when they no longer find satisfaction and growth in the work they do. Train and have open conversations about next career steps for all talented employees. Reward leaders who focus on talent development and act on the reality that sacrifice of short-term comfort leads to long-term gain.

LKS: We typically think about “S-curves” for technology. How does that concept apply to individual and team development?

WJ: The S-curve is a model that was originally devised to help provide predictability to an unpredictable process—how rapidly a new idea or innovation will penetrate and then permeate a market or culture. People are also unpredictable, and it’s impossible to describe or predict the process of human change with any kind of scientific formula. But the S-curve can help us model this process. We talk about learning curves for people; the S-curve is a visualization of a learning curve.

At the low end of the S-curve we think “entry level.”  There’s a lot to learn, and a relatively high level of discomfort while we get a handle on the new job. In time, we gain competency and shift into a higher gear that propels us up the steep back of the curve.

Eventually we’ve mastered pretty much everything associated with the job, and the curve flattens out. Learning has diminished and so has challenge. We’re coasting across a plateau, in danger of boredom, complacency, and stagnation. If there isn’t an opportunity for employees at this stage to jump to a new curve, starting again at the low end of high learning, they will usually leave, or you will wish they would.

Everyone is on a curve. The key to building an A-Team is to balance the curves occupied by members of any given team and give attention to developing each individual on their particular curve, while planning for what will come next.

LKS: You advocate that leaders hire for high potential rather than maximum qualifications. Can you share more about this idea?

WJ: This seems counterintuitive and is certainly counter to the way most leaders are hiring. In fact, it’s more common to inflate the qualification required for a position and then hire the candidate who most closely fills those exaggerated requirements. But it’s a mistake that contributes to the revolving door of employees leaving for other opportunities almost as soon as they’ve been hired and trained.

Every S-curve has a shelf life. When we hire the most qualified candidate in the pool of applicants we are often shortening that shelf life. We should be hiring high-potential people who nevertheless have plenty to learn in the role we’re hiring them for. They will be more engaged and productive for a longer period of time. The highly qualified candidate will more quickly exhaust the potential of the learning curve and be looking around for something else to do.

Optimally, employees will ride a learning curve for three or four years. But a large percentage of the workforce is looking for a new job within a half year. It’s a costly waste of the investment we make in recruiting, hiring, and training. Human resources are resources like the others we invest in. They should be developed, not come ready-made.

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Sachs is the founder and former CEO of Free Range studios, a pioneering creative firm that helped create some of the first viral marketing campaigns around social issues, such as the “The Story of Stuff,” which was viewed by over 60 million people and whose purpose was to educate and engage people about the environmental and social impact of consumer goods.

Working on global campaigns from Greenpeace, Human Rights Campaign, and the ACLU, among corporate clients, Sachs has helped pioneer innovative approaches to digital media to bring new social values such as equity, empowerment, and responsibility to the forefront of business and popular culture.

Sachs’ newest book, Unsafe Thinking: How to Be Nimble and Bold When You Need It Most, blends decades of research on creativity and performance with stories of trailblazers in business, health, education, and activism and provides practical tips for how we can all get more comfortable bringing bold, world-changing ideas to life.

Lisa Kay Solomon: What does it mean to support “unsafe thinking”? Why is it so important at this moment in time?

Jonah Sachs: Unsafe thinking is the term I use to describe the ways innovators break out of standard operating procedure, break old habits of problem solving, and go against dead conventional wisdom when they need it most. We live at a time of extremely rapid change, and that means we too are constantly challenged to change. But that’s really hard for human beings, and it often gets harder once we’ve reached a reasonable level of success.

If we want to tackle the enormous business, social, political, and environmental problems we face, safe thinking and incremental solutions simply won’t work. I believe that practices of unsafe thinking can help us accelerate intelligent risk-taking and empower innovators to be more creative and to act more boldly.

LKS: A lot of the stories you share in the book mention leaders who had to learn how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Can you share some tips on how more leaders can embrace that practice in their everyday work?

JS: I was initially surprised by what I heard from innovators. I had expected many of them to just be naturally drawn to risk, to be the “crazy ones,” as the old Apple ad called them. But each of them told me how much fear they’ve faced throughout their careers. What made them different than average performers wasn’t that they didn’t feel anxiety. It’s that they learned to reframe it, for themselves and their teams. They consistently told themselves that they’d never had an idea that was breakthrough that didn’t scare them and that didn’t bring up many easy objections. So they came to see fear as a sign they were on their creative edge and chose to make a hit of moving toward it rather than away from it.

LKS: You’ve spent a lot of time with leaders who have used meaningful setbacks as fuel for their next ventures. What are some patterns you’ve seen from leaders who are able to recover—and even thrive—after a failure versus those who don’t?

JS: One of my favorite stories was that of Julie Wainwright. When I met Julie, she was running The Real Real, a billion-dollar online consignment business. She was passionate and confident. But Julie is also known in Silicon Valley as one of its biggest failures. She ran Pets.com during the first dot-com bust. She lost her company, her reputation, and her marriage all on the day she had to shut Pets.com down. Julie had this amazing ability to learn from but not dwell on failure. Instead, she used it as one of many experiences that she referenced as she made choices about the future.

Experiences with strong emotional content tends to occupy unreasonable space in our understanding of the world—it’s known as availability bias. When we have a strong negative experience, we tend to walk into every situation and see signs that it’s similar to the one that’s caused us pain. This bias can be extremely distorting because failure is often the result of some combination of the environment we were in, our actions, and luck.

Leaders are best served when they humbly use their failure as only one of many data points they use to evaluate a new situation. Often, focusing on the stories of others instead of being solely focused on their own stories helps introduce these needed new data points. That’s part of the reason I tell a lot of stories in the book about those who bounce back from failures.

LKS: Your work talks about the importance of balancing the “beginner’s mindset” with expertise. Why are both so important for creative thinking and innovation?

JS: The idea of a rank beginner coming into a field, seeing something nobody else does, and shaking it up is a nice one, but it’s a myth. To do anything of value, we need to gain expertise: to know what’s been tried before, to understand the patterns around us, to benefit from the thinking of the masters that came before us. But there’s a point on the graph at which expertise and the potential for innovation part ways. That point is called “entrenchment” and it happens often when our egos get attached to what we know, or what we think we know. Experts who are acknowledged in their fields and who self-identify with their expertise are often threatened by new information that doesn’t fit their models of the world. They don’t look at ideas that contradict theirs with curiosity and openness—the costs seem too high.

In games with clearly-defined rules that never change, unlimited expertise is great. But in games with sketchy rules that are always changing—and that’s the world we face today—identifying as an expert can be deadly. I found that the best unsafe thinkers identified as explorers. That is, they were passionate about gaining knowledge and understanding their fields. They just never thought of themselves as experts.

LKS: How can leaders build cultures of “unsafe thinkers”? What are some choices they can make to help scale creative, nimble, and bold behaviors?

JS: Ironically, I found that cultures that encourage unsafe thinking worked hard to make people feel safe enough to take big risks. I spoke to Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, a team that has the most creative style of play in NBA history. Steve told me his first work taking over the Warriors involved turning down the pressure and sense that if a player didn’t perform, he’d be kicked off the team. He made the locker room a refuge where everyone felt valued and accepted. So when they got on the court, they were freed from having to look over their shoulders.

Companies can do a number of things to make their teams feel safe enough to get unsafe.

They can celebrate rule-breakers who find important hacks and workarounds instead of forcing these creative rebels to operate in the shadows. They can directly reward not just results and the people who originate great ideas but the people who speak up and challenge consensus or those who take intelligent risks even when those risks fail.

Finally, they need to embrace a wide mix of cognitive types.

Companies that insist on “hiring for cultural fit” too often become monocultures of thought and action. Plenty of research shows that cognitively diverse teams vastly outperform homogeneous teams in situations where creativity is called for. Companies need to work harder to expand the concept of diversity and bring on people with different life experiences and even different value systems. If employees get the message that they must conform to the group and contribute to harmony as a top priority, you’ll get a lot of nice people, but little in the way of breakthrough results.

Image Credit: Roman Tarasevych / Shutterstock.com

Denise is on the faculty of the Stanford Business School and the CEO of the Thought Leadership Lab. She is also the author of the book Ready to Be a Thought Leader? and runs online classes on thought leadership through LinkedIn Learning. I asked Denise to share more about her views on thought leadership and the importance of investing in it as a leadership practice and organizational capability.

Lisa Kay Solomon: What is thought leadership? Why is this important these days?

Denise Brosseau: Thought leaders are the informed opinion leaders and the go-to people in their field of expertise. They are trusted sources who move and inspire people with innovative ideas, turn those ideas into reality, and know and show how to replicate their success. Over time, they create a dedicated group of friends, fans, and followers to help them replicate and scale their ideas into sustainable change, not just in one company but in an industry, a niche, or across an entire ecosystem.

Thought leaders are changing the world in meaningful ways and engaging others to join their efforts. They create evolutionary and even revolutionary advancements in their fields, not just by urging others to be open to new ways of thinking, but by creating a blueprint for people to follow. They provide guidelines or a set of best practices.

Thought leaders are all around us—men and women, young and old. They come from every ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic background. Most thought leaders are change agents, people trying to change the world around a cause they care about. They engage with stakeholders and followers so that together they can bring about long-term sustainable change.

The world is full of challenges and injustices, and we need more leaders who understand what it takes to become a thought leader. We need people who can create change and even build movements that transform laws and attitudes and galvanize others to take action.

LKS:  We often think of thought leaders as people with special credentials or status, and that followership flows from that position. But in your book Ready to Be a Thought Leader?, you state that thought leadership starts with finding your purpose.  Can you share more about that perspective?

DB: To become recognized as a true thought leader takes time and a lot of stick-to-itiveness. This is why I highly recommend you start with what you care about. Choose a niche that is aligned to your purpose. Then you’ll be far more likely to work to build the credentials and expertise needed to be recognized as a thought leader.  After that you can take the steps to gather followers.

Ask yourself, what are you committed to? What do you spend time on when no one is watching you or paying you? What topics get you fired up?

This is usually something you can speak passionately about. It could be the latest tax code changes, the importance of saving the condors, or why women need their seat at the table.

People want to affiliate with those who are well-known and in the know. Thus, thought leadership also leads to invitations to join corporate boards, serve on government commissions, and participate in industry-wide committees—opportunities to raise your profile from the local to the national to the international stage.

Thought leadership is like the ripples in a pond—you start as a leader, encouraging those around you to make change. Then, as you engage people to share your ideas, those ideas reach a wider and wider audience. As your followers grow, you can accelerate change locally and then at a national or even international scale.

LKS: You talk about different types of thought leaders. Can you explain that a little bit more?

DB: While the path to becoming a thought leader is often similar, people who become thought leaders are not all motivated by the same priorities. Some are builders, motivated to create and show a new path.

Others are collaborators who are motivated to create connections between people with the goal of finding and shaping the best solutions for all. Another category is what I call the competitors. They are motivated to be at the top of their niche, to “win” in a sense by differentiating themselves and standing out from the crowd.

I think of some folks as intellectuals. They are motivated to share their research, knowledge, or lessons learned.

Next, there are the provocateurs, who are motivated to shake things up and challenge the status quo. Some are constructive provocateurs who are willing to patiently make incremental change. Others are revolutionaries ready to abandon the present methods and completely start over. And finally, there are the defenders, who want to protect something important from being changed or destroyed.

LKS: You’re now doing work with organizations that aspire to be thought leadership organizations. Can you describe what that is? How does that differ from just strong branding?

DB: Thought leading organizations are usually motivated by far more than building a strong brand. They know their reputation is shaped by more than their products and services, or even by the voice of the CEO. They want to cooperate with a group of stakeholders to advance industry priorities or a shared cause. They work to establish a strong voice and point of view in the marketplace. They strive to build trust among their customers and community.

They empower every employee to share their knowledge and expertise as an ambassador for the organization. Then they can truly stand out from the crowd and accomplish their goals.

Recognized thought leaders will have the power to persuade, the status and authority to move things in a new direction, and the clout to implement real progress and widespread innovation.

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As a researcher, educator, and author, Weiss teaches a course called “Leading with Compassion and Mindfulness” at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, one of the most competitive MBA programs in the world, and runs programs at HopeLab.

Weiss is the author of the new book How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim your Sanity and Embrace the Daily Grind, endorsed by the Dalai Lama, among others. I caught up with Leah to learn more about how the practice of mindfulness can deepen our individual and collective purpose and passion.

Lisa Kay Solomon: We’re hearing a lot about mindfulness these days. What is mindfulness and why is it so important to bring into our work? Can you share some of the basic tenets of the practice?

Leah Weiss, PhD: Mindfulness is, in its most literal sense, “the attention to inattention.” It’s as simple as noticing when you’re not paying attention and then re-focusing. It is prioritizing what is happening right now over internal and external noise.

The ability to work well with difficult coworkers, handle constructive feedback and criticism, regulate emotions at work—all of these things can come from regular mindfulness practice.

Some additional benefits of mindfulness are a greater sense of compassion (both self-compassion and compassion for others) and a way to seek and find purpose in even mundane things (and especially at work). From the business standpoint, mindfulness at work leads to increased productivity and creativity, mostly because when we are focused on one task at a time (as opposed to multitasking), we produce better results.

We spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our families; if our work relationships are negative, we suffer both mentally and physically. Even worse, we take all of those negative feelings home with us at the end of the work day. The antidote to this prescription for unhappiness is to have clear, strong purpose (one third of people do not have purpose at work and this is a major problem in the modern workplace!). We can use mental training to grow as people and as employees.

LKS: What are some recommendations you would make to busy leaders who are working around the clock to change the world?

LW: I think the most important thing is to remember to tend to our relationship with ourselves while trying to change the world. If we’re beating up on ourselves all the time we’ll be depleted.

People passionate about improving the world can get into habits of believing self-care isn’t important. We demand a lot of ourselves. It’s okay to fail, to mess up, to make mistakes—what’s important is how we learn from those mistakes and what we tell ourselves about those instances. What is the “internal script” playing in your own head? Is it positive, supporting, and understanding? It should be. If it isn’t, you can work on it. And the changes you make won’t just improve your quality of life, they’ll make you more resilient to weather life’s inevitable setbacks.

A close second recommendation is to always consider where everyone in an organization fits and help everyone (including yourself) find purpose. When you know what your own purpose is and show others their purpose, you can motivate a team and help everyone on a team gain pride in and at work. To get at this, make sure to ask people on your team what really lights them up. What sucks their energy and depletes them? If we know our own answers to these questions and relate them to the people we work with, we can create more engaged organizations.

LKS: Can you envision a future where technology and mindfulness can work together?

LW: Technology and mindfulness are already starting to work together. Some artificial intelligence companies are considering things like mindfulness and compassion when building robots, and there are numerous apps that target spreading mindfulness meditations in a widely-accessible way.

LKS: Looking ahead at our future generations who seem more attached to their devices than ever, what advice do you have for them?

LW: It’s unrealistic to say “stop using your device so much,” so instead, my suggestion is to make time for doing things like scrolling social media and make the same amount of time for putting your phone down and watching a movie or talking to a friend. No matter what it is that you are doing, make sure you have meta-awareness or clarity about what you’re paying attention to. Be clear about where your attention is and recognize that you can be a steward of attention. Technology can support us in this or pull us away from this; it depends on how we use it.

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We spent time with Dan exploring his philosophy on improv, and how we can all benefit from practices of structured play and spontaneous possibility.

Lisa Kay Solomon: How do practices of improv help us get into a more creative and open mindset?

Dan Klein: The essence of improvisational practice is that we have to be present.  Most forms of theater operate off a pre-planned script.  One of the things that happens when we’re acting off something already scripted is we’re planning ahead.  Improv doesn’t have a script. It asks us to focus our attention entirely on the present—on what’s happening right now.

And the moment that you’re thinking about something else, asking yourself, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna say next?,” you’re taken out of it.

The other thing central to improv is that it’s not about you; it’s about your partner. And your job is to make your partner look good, to give them a good time, to make sense of what they say and do and, in a sense, to celebrate them. And that takes all the pressure off of yourself.

As soon as you get the ego out of it, great work happens. It doesn’t matter what you were thinking in the moment. What your partner just said is a thousand times better. When we’re in that open and generous mode, amazing things happen. Our own creativity naturally gets unlocked, but we’re not trying to unlock it. We’re just there for our partner.

LKS: You’ve been teaching improvisation to Stanford students and industry executives for nearly 20 years. What are some of the unique skills of improvisation? How are they learned?

DK: Thanks to the success of Saturday Night Live and Chicago’s Second City improv theater, infamous for launching comedic actors like Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, and Tina Fey, among others, there is popular belief that improvisation is purely comedy based. A lot of people come to improv thinking they are going to learn to be funny.

When I first started, I was very intrigued at the idea of making people laugh, but when I got into the classroom, I realized that’s not the best way to go about it. I’ve learned that one of the worst things you can do as an improviser is try to make a joke. More often than not, your joke won’t work and then you’ll have a silence that is the worst death you can imagine.

And so you learn that rather than try to steal the scene by being funny, it’s much better to respond to what’s unfolding in the moment, and to focus on helping your partner look good. It turns out that what you can create together is funnier than you ever thought it could be.

That was a fundamental lesson in that first class. We’re not capitalizing on the skill that you already have. We’re recognizing that everybody has the capacity to notice what’s going on, pay attention, and then add a little bit. And, if you do those things, you don’t have to be clever or funny or interesting. You have to learn how to pay attention and respond to what’s next.

Over the years, I’ve found it’s almost impossible for me to predict which students will be the most exciting to watch on stage. It’s not the ones that look like they’re going to be the best. It surprises me almost every class who holds our attention the most. I do think it’s learnable. I might be wrong, but I’ve staked my entire career on the concept that improv is learnable.

LKS: How can improv help us get more comfortable with taking risks and learning from failure?

DK: When I work with any group, whether they’re students or executives, I often start with a game that intentionally exposes them to failure. I want them to experience how we respond to failure. Our normal reaction is to tense up. We wince, or flinch, or cringe almost instinctually. We physically and literally guard or protect ourselves. My theory is that we’re defending ourselves in case we’re about to be punished.

But that response is not resilient or responsive or generative or agile. And those are all the things we want people to do in their work—especially when things get more complex. So one of the first things I do is have people experience the exact opposite response to failure. We want to celebrate failure. We want to embrace it as an indication that we’re on the right track. If we’re messing up, we’re in new creative territory. Mistakes are opportunities. Mistakes are gifts.

Mistakes don’t just offer us a chance to learn, but oftentimes they’re a chance to discover something new that nobody was planning. The other thing that I think is incredibly powerful is that when we give each other permission to make mistakes, we bond even faster, and I think that’s maybe the secret sauce.

LKS: In this moment, where it feels like a lot of the strategic challenges we’re facing are ones that don’t have answers, how can improv help us discover new ideas?

DK: Improv is a form of play and discovery. It requires us to get into a more open mode of collaborating by setting up different rules than the ones we’ve learned to impose on ourselves.

If you think about it, when we were kids, we used play to discover the world. That’s how we formed connections, and that’s how we learned about social dynamics. As we get older, we enter worlds that don’t value play in a measured way. Most of our education and professional environments focus more on execution and performance.

I work with extremely high achieving students who tell me all the time that they feel like they used to be creative when they were a kid. It was a part of themselves that they really valued, and it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. So I think part of my job is to show them ways to get that creativity back. I help them reconnect to their playful selves and help them find inner sources of inspiration. When do they delight? When do they get inspired?

In improv, the key is not just finding this out for yourself but also creating that authentic engagement and delight for others. There’s a moment that an improviser has to pay really careful attention to their partner and they’re making eye contact as often as they can. You’re looking into your partner’s eyes, and the great improvisers are trying to get their partner’s eyes to light up. That’s when you know you’ve created something special.

Note: The above responses were edited for length and clarity.

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“There’s a lot of pressure, especially from Wall Street, on the short term,” Baxter says. “But the best companies are asking, ‘What can we do for our customers forever?’”

We caught up with Baxter to talk about her latest book, The Membership Economy, and learn more about how the “forever promise” is transforming the way we do business.

Lisa Kay Solomon: You help companies craft strategies to create customers for life by delivering on what you call a “forever promise.”  Can you describe what this is?

Robbie Baxter: I got the idea when I was working with Netflix. At the time, they were disrupting the video rental industry by offering their members professionally-created video content delivered in the most efficient way possible. This was a relentless focus for them. I realized that this was their “forever promise” of value to their customers. Over time, the vehicle of delivery has changed—they don’t mail DVDs anymore, you can stream content directly—but their promise to their members has remained the same. The forever promise has to justify the forever transaction.

And as I bet you can imagine, they get all kinds of inquiries all the time. “What if you did video games or music, or user-generated content?” And they say, “No. We do this and we do it really well.” So that focus is one thing they do differently.

They  have a clear understanding of the matrix that drives success, and that allows them to provide their employees with tremendous freedom to innovate within those constraints. As long as you come up with new ideas that fit with their core principles, you’re allowed to try almost anything.

LKS:  How is technology helping organizations build new relationships with their customers?

RB: Building trusted relationships with customers is the holy grail of unlocking sustainable value. We all want to feel connected, feel recognized, treated as the special individuals we are. And new technologies are enabling organizations to build those kinds of relationships with their customers at scale. They end up thinking of their customers more like lifelong members and less like one-off transactions.

LKS: Can you give us an example?

RB: Amazon has invested heavily in the idea of customers as members. They built a technology that learns about our preferences and behaviors, and they created a “forever promise” for their members, which is basically, “as long as you need to buy things we will make it as easy and pain-free as possible.”

They do that with Amazon Prime, their annual membership for shipping, which takes away the pain of paying for shipping. They do it by making recommendations for you about the kinds of products and services you might want, given what you’ve done in the past.  They give you the opportunity to subscribe and save, which is a new offering they have where you can actually replenish certain products on a regular schedule without having to reorder.

They’re always thinking about how to make it as easy as possible for customers to get exactly what they need when they need it, without them having to put in a lot of effort.

Fundamentally, what Amazon realized is that nobody wants to go into a store and buy things. What we want is to have things that will make our lives better and easier. They turned the model on its head. Instead of saying “we’re going to be an online retailer that sells transactions” they said “we’re going solve the problem for our members.”

LKS: In studying membership models, are there some consistent themes you’ve seen from leaders who get it right?

RB: The best leaders focus on the long-term relationship with the customer. There’s a lot of pressure, especially from Wall Street, on the short term. But the best companies are asking, “What can we do for our customers forever?” And they’re willing to evolve their offerings over time to continue to meet a customer’s needs, even as the environment changes around them.

So new technology emerges that probably has implications for what we can do for our customer. New players emerge and that has implications for what our customers’ expectations are going to be. So those leaders that are really doing great things, like Jeff Bezos, are focusing on the long term. They’re focusing on the customer needs as opposed to their products, processes, or even the specific people they have on their team.

LKS: A lot of companies are building relationships with customers by giving away their services for free to build loyalty before adding revenue-generating services, also known as the “freemium” business model. What is your advice regarding creating sustainable business models using a membership orientation?

RB: I think of free as a tactic, not a strategy. Organizations say, “We’re going to give it away for free and then we’re going to make lots of money, like Facebook, right?” But in order for free to work, it has to fit into the overarching business model. It has to play a role. What is free doing for the organization? There are really three things that free can do.

Free can change behavior. For example, the New York Times wants to move people to digital, so they give away ten articles a month and then you have to start paying. What they’re doing is changing your behavior. If you’re reading more online, you’re willing to pay for a subscription.

Another reason to offer something for free is for viral effect, which basically means that the customer serves as a marketing channel. You send me a survey because I’m in the club.

The third reason is network effect, where members of the community are part of the value. Each new person that joins for free creates a value for the people willing to pay. An example is LinkedIn, where the vast majority of people pay nothing, but a few people are willing to pay a high premium to access the free content.

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