How to Drive Innovation with Brian Solis, Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow

Richie Cotton: Hi, Brian. Welcome to the show, Richie. It's about time I know. Where have you been? The last three drills or so episodes. It's exciting times, as I'm sure you're aware. There's so much going on with ai really interesting stuff. But it can also feel difficult to keep up with stuff sometimes. Easy to feel like you're drowning.

How do you stay afloat? 

Brian Solis: I got AI floaties and they go right here and every day the news cycles come through, the technology breakthroughs come through. I'm riding along right there on top, but but you're right, it is becoming more and more difficult. So just as an aside, I'm someone who absolutely believes in having the most minimal amount of tabs open in any given day on, and every day there's a new report.

There's a new article, there's a new breakthrough, and right now I am drowning. I think that last count, I have over tabs open of research I need to read. And so let me just say that I'm in the process of building and deploying agents. And digital twins to keep up. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. I like that. Using technology to solve the problem of too much technology.

Do you think it's gonna work 

Brian Solis: well, it's not working as it is without it, so anything can be better. Let's hope so. Fingers crossed. I'll report back. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. Alright. Yeah, so I think it's a challenge that everyone faces is like how do you deal with the sort of the fire hose of information and new developments.

Bill so I know a lot of your focus is around changing your mindset in order to be able to deal with this. So talk me through maybe, I guess to begin with, give us some motivation. So have you come across anyone who has a successfully changed their mindset to be more amenable to innovation?

Brian Solis: Oh boy. You just want to jump right in? Oh, yeah. Straight to it. I suppose if it was easy we probably would be at a very different state of affairs in terms of all things related to a mindset. It took an entire career to write this book. It's called Mind Shift transform Leadership, drive Innovation and Reshape the Future.

And what I had learned was that we can't change people's minds because we want them to, or we tell them to. They have to believe that they play a part in the story and that they can see themselves on the other side of what change looks like in order to even have the conversation. And what I had learned is that you need a Jedi metric to tell people how to see things differently.

But no, in all seriousness it, it is the work is on the person who has a vision. To help other people see, feel, and believe in that vision. And it's taken a long time to figure it out. But I gotta tell you, Richie, the storytelling element of this becomes more important than I, I think then people give it credit, but it's certainly as important as the vision that you have.

Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah. So storytelling's one of the, our favorite topics here on, on data framed. Okay. Do you wanna talk me through how does storytelling help change people's minds then? 

Brian Solis: Yeah. I'll give it my best. I wouldn't say that I'm an expert storyteller, but people like Nick Sung or Nicholas Sung who used to be a Pixar Disney storyboard artist to me are the experts out there.

In fact, so much so that we've worked together over the last decade. I've hired him on a couple of fronts. To teach me the ways of Disney Pixar storytelling. And I think what's most interesting is that as a storyboard artist that he is, he would say that when you think about putting together these cells or these frames of how a story unfolds that you might be doing so at a sequential series of events, in order to play out the story, play out the character development and then.

Use that to get it to a point then before you invest in the expensive animation or shoots, or in our case, speaking with executives on what the data means and what's on the other side of the data and what potential strategy could look like as a result. But really what it's for is it's an understanding, it's an opportunity to basically put all of the pieces together.

Not just the data in our case, but also the people on the other side of the data or the processes or all of the things that kind of service the foundation for a story. And that the whole point of storyboarding was to, beyond the assembly of these pieces and people and things and ideas, was to test the believability of the story and of the characters and also the relatability.

Do you see yourself? Does it mean something to you? Does it move you? And then the as, as any true hero's journey unfolds, it puts you as the audience or as the stakeholder through the process of recognizing that you are part of the story. And that you go through these transitions in the story of not just believability or relatability, but also empathy.

And what's on the other side of empathy, which is hopefully that you see yourself in the story so much, that you want to be part of the change, that you want to be part of the solution, and that you want to be part of the outcome. And so there's a deep sense of humanity. There's a deep sense of emotion, and there's a deep sense of losing the ego, a deep sense of vulnerability as the storyteller to put, take yourself out.

Of the way and let the story become the thing that other people can connect with. It's selfless, but it's beautiful and wonderful, and it's also a lot of work. But what happens is that then you scale empathy from one to many, which then sets the stage for a better outcome for whatever the story is you're trying to tell for more than one person on the other side to want to be part of that transformation.

So Nick Sung is his name. He now works with, he still does animation and storyboarding, but now he works with organizations like Nike. It's a famous story of him working with Airbnb, if you wanna look it up. It's called snow White, where he helped lead their transformation. But storytelling has always been at the center of his work.

And every bit of transformation I've ever done, and I'm still doing now with ai. 

Richie Cotton: Let's go. I say I love the idea of. Doing some storyboarding and thinking about what you wanna say, especially in a business context, like before you have that conversation with your with your CEO, is maybe just think a little bit first.

Brilliant idea. And also I love the idea of having a bit of empathy with your audience, like making them feel something. Now if you Pixar and you go I think what was the thing in Toy Story thi with all the toys about to melt. I don't wanna spoil it for too many people, but yeah, that's a really emotional moment in a business context.

You don't, you've not got like the toys and the sad moments, but talk me through how do you get empathy in the business context? Have you got any examples of like really emotional business stories? 

Brian Solis: Oh boy, absolutely. And. None of this comes without experimentation.

It's easy to say be a great storyteller. And sometimes people just confuse the ability to tell a great story as being a storyteller. But the honesty of it is that you have to get someone else to first open their mind in order for that mind to change. And that, I think is where, for example, it's, let's go back to Nick Sung's story with Airbnb.

I think that, 'cause that's the story that changed my mind and it was at a time where Airbnb was going through an incredible transformation. They had a real big brand issue, real big MPS issue mobile was coming up at a time where it was gonna require not only just a different interface, but a different way of navigating a service like Airbnb.

So what they had recognized was that the heart of the problem was that they were a data company. They were a logistics company in many ways. That was part of the problem. What they didn't know was how to effectively recruit more hosts for properties, whether that was rooms or apartments or houses and how to recruit more travelers and visitors, and then how to connect them via a mobile device or a smaller screen.

One day Brian Chesky, his co-founder, and now he's the current CEO, was on a holiday flight and he was reading the story of Walt Disney. And in that Walt Disney biography, they talk about how storyboards were used for the movie Snow White. And at the time, storyboards didn't exist. Snow White was the first animated motion picture, so they were breaking a lot of ground.

So storyboards became a way of testing a lot of things out before making a movie and breaking ground. Coming back to the relatability and the believability. That became the art and science of storytelling. 'cause essentially you had to practice Mc Disney and his imagineers and artists would practice the storytelling in front of these storyboards with a room full of other artists and colleagues to test the believability and the relatability and get that feedback before the story was ever told.

So there, I guess there's two business cases here. One is the making of Snow White and how that became successful coming out of the gate. It touched Brian and he realized he didn't have the relatability, the empathy the emotionality of what Airbnb was trying to become because he didn't know the hosts and he didn't know the users.

He was thinking about it, that space as people saving money, as people getting different types of experiences versus going to a traditional a hotel or what have you. And what ended up happening was that he had heard about I think it was a mutual connection with Nick Sung, who at the time was a pixie p Pixie, Tim Pixar, Disney storyboard artist.

And he came through and with the team they analyzed the data and they went into that with different questions like, who is the host? Who is the guest? Why does somebody open up their home to strangers? Why do strangers go to a stranger's home versus a traditional hotel with amenities, et cetera, and a brand?

And so they let the data tell the story. They used the insights that they were getting to start to build that story arc. And then they used Nick Sung to visualize the, those stories. And so they came up with a host journey and they came up with the guest journey. And for the longest time, those storyboards were existed in the the Airbnb lobby.

But why this is an important story is because number one, it helped just like in the room full of artists and colleagues for Disney. It helped everyone at the organization see. The ahas at an emotional human level that they didn't see, like it gave their work purpose, it gave their work, meaning it gave that transformation.

Now an understanding of what are we doing? What's our mission, our vision, what's the north star? What does, what could success look like on the other side? But more so they took those storyboards and now they had the capacity to tell that story to the board and to the investors and to all other stakeholders, to then further invest in the company to transform Airbnb to what they are now, which is an experience company, regardless of the screen you use to book that experience, that is at the heart and soul now of how you inter interact with Airbnb.

Now, as a user, we could have a different conversation, but the purpose of that story in that transformation was profound. And that, that was the moment that I started working with Nick, and we have done those types of transformations. Even with my own work and how I approach, for example, books and developments of books and the design of books with that same approach, 

Richie Cotton: I love that when you've got a company that where I guess leadership understands that you really gotta change a lot about your business because something's not working right.

And there's many different elements. So you talk about trying to find out what are your users as you want, you speak to a lot of them using data to synthesize all that. And then you need that story to tell, to persuade I guess everyone in your organization that this is the thing that we need to do.

And I guess I love the idea of having just the result of this in the lobby, just like your final visualizations. This is gotta be like a career defining moment. I think for anyone who's involved in that the business intelligence, like top spot hit, look, this is what our business is doing.

Okay. In terms of trying to figure it out doing transformation systematically or at least transformations of your mind, I know you've got a six step framework for this with rhyming names for each of the steps. 

Brian Solis: Yes. Rhyming names. One of, one of the things about it's like always the story of the power of threes is that if you could make it well relatable and memorable, you can make it shareable.

And I think that's the big that's the big trick to any framework, and this being one of the frameworks, which is the six stages of mind shifting, which is receive. Perceive, weave, conceive, believe, and finally achieve. It's it's a journey as much as it is a framework. And the book, the first half of the book is designed as to what does it mean to mind shift?

And it's gets the reader ready to recognize. So before we, we can actually dive into the framework, I had to start with the first part of the book to get us ready for the framework. And it's true for any story. People can't just hear the story or create the story. They have to actually get to the beginning point where they recognize that they might be part of the problem.

Which means that anytime we do the work, anytime we're extracting insights or trying to find patterns. We put ourselves in that story. We're stakeholders. We've got skin in the game. We take this personally because we've put in the work and the due diligence to get those things out. And now we, our drive is to get those insights in front of somebody in order to drive a decision or to drive a, an outcome or to drive some type of transformation or adoption or whatever it is.

But in reality, we are not the protagonist, we're not the hero of this story. We are merely the humble servant for it and trying to bring it not just to life, but to scale and to bring others along for the journey. And that's why I say that the sixth stage framework is actually a journey as much as it's a framework.

So the first part of the book. We have to recognize that in order to open minds or in order to change minds, we have to open minds. And that starts with our mindset. So self-awareness becomes a real big deal. And in the book, I tell the, I share a stat where most of us a hundred percent of us believed that we're self-aware.

And you have to be self-aware in order to recognize that you are not the hero in the story, which is hard. But turns out that studies show that really only % of humans are actually self-aware, which was a humbling statistic. And of course, everybody's gonna say I'm part of the %. Yeah, it must be somebody else.

It's totally somebody else. But it's, it is actually true. And so the beginning of the book is really about getting you to a place where you recognize that your mind. Isn't as open as it could be or should be. And it kinda walks you through opening your own mind so that by the time you get to the first stage of the framework, which is receive you are actually ready to receive, which that part of the framework talks about the the signals.

So that could be data points, that could be whatever you are tracking in terms of then receiving those signals to not just analyze 'em, but to interpret them to per to essentially empathize with them, to humanize them and then carry you on through the rest of the journey. 

Richie Cotton: Okay? So I love the idea that openness to new ideas is important.

So I meant. With all the sort of modern psychological or psychometric tests, there's five big personality traits and openness is one of them. So is this something that's fundamental to people, or can you learn to be more open? 

Brian Solis: Not only can you learn to be more open we all need to be more open.

I think that's part of the problem that we're facing in society today. So outside of artificial intelligence and business transformation if you look at socioeconomics, if you look at politics, if you look at just look at social media in general. I wrote a book about this in called Life Scale.

It probably is more important today than it was when it came out. And it, it demonstrated how insular and polarizing information was becoming in social because of the people we follow, because of the algorithms that determine what we need to see and what we don't need to see. We were perpetuating a much more finite realm of information.

And as a result of just being human beings, that information then becomes our reality because we're not self-aware enough usually to recognize that there must be something else that I'm not se seeing or considering. And so just our day-to-day life perpetuates the challenge that we face. And if we bring that same mindset into our work, we bring a limited view of the opportunity and of possibility.

And so this is in the absolute best case, can lead to iteration, which is taking those insights and improving what we did yesterday to do better tomorrow. Profitable, scalable, faster, et cetera. But we'll never get to innovation that way. And so what we try to do just in terms of a long story short before you frame up your next question, is we have to recognize that there are two paths forward.

And this is where it gets difficult because we're usually tasked with one, which is iteration. Now, the opportunity, especially with artificial intelligence, is to unlock how do we compete differently moving forward? How do we use AI to differentiate our work? How do we use AI to create and scale new value in addition to improving yesterday?

And because I believe that you cannot automate your way to innovation. 

Richie Cotton: So this is an interesting point, do you iterate on your existing stuff or do you go for something completely new? So we've had differing opinions on the show already. Last year we had Ilia str from Stanford University.

He works with a lot of venture capitalists and he was like, yeah, you gotta go for the big bets on something completely new. And then earlier this year we had it was Don Keefer and Nelson ing from MIT talking about, they come from like a manufacturing background versus, okay, you just gotta find one problem at a time, fix that and just solve lots of little problems.

And that's the way to success. So it's do you go the big bet or lots of smaller bets? So I'm not sure whether there's one right answer to it, but there's certainly different opinions. I'd love to hear your take. 

Brian Solis: I think context matters. It's always mattered but I don't know that there's one right way forward.

I think what I need to understand and every situation is who and why. Are we even considering this? Whether that's going from first principles, whether that's going to, before we get to first principles, getting to the, even the answers to those questions. That is the hardest part, but it's also, I would argue that it's one of the least traveled paths to resolution or outcome.

The reason I say that is because as my friend Ryan Holiday famously said, ego is the enemy. So what, how I interpret that in my work is we are where we are because of our experience, our success, our ability to get to that outcome or resolution systematically the way that we've always done. That in many ways has made us successful.

And I would argue that in many ways puts us and locks us into a position of iteration, not innovation. And so whether I make those bets, whether they're small, medium or large, are going to be limited by my hypothesis or idea or my gut feeling around what that iterative potential is. And I won't call it iteration because it's my idea, it's my methodology.

So therefore it can only be innovative. But that ego check that I have for myself is I'll make two columns or I'll make a four, or, two by two, whatever I'm working on. And I will say one bucket is iteration, one bucket is innovation. I define iteration as improving Yesterday.

Innovation, I define, and this is just for simplicity's sake, innovation, I define as creating new value. And so now I have to see does this idea or does this bet fall into. Either of the buckets. And my assumption is that I need both buckets eventually and systematically over time to improve and explore or exploit it.

Explore as many thinkers would say. But you can't get both with just one. And you can't unlock exponential opportunity with just iteration. So therefore you have to have a constant cycle of experimentation in order to yield the returns of those bets at the greatest odds as possible in terms of competitiveness.

Richie Cotton: Okay, Eli? That you probably need both of these things and maybe one more than the other at different points, but yeah, I suppose you can't just keep coming up with. Brand new ideas all the time. You're gonna have to refine those ideas. You do need the iteration, but if you just stick with the iteration, you're not gonna see the or harness the exciting new ideas.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. We got slightly distracted there from the six step process. So we you're talking before about opening your mind. So suppose you've managed to do this, you've opened your mind. Okay. I need to get started. I felt the biggest challenge is with doing something new.

It's just the time. It's like you're already doing things like everybody's busy. How do you find the time to try new ideas? 

Brian Solis: That is probably the greatest challenge that any of us face. In when I wrote life scale towards the end I talk about putting some sort of analytical process in place so that you can understand how to get to the root of that question.

And. What I had found is that time is a construct largely built on belief systems. And those belief systems create according or, corresponding value systems. So meaning a typical week is probably structured with meetings reporting those two things alone probably take up a majority of that time.

If you use teams or if you use other internal messaging platforms, that's probably let's not forget email. Those platforms are also going to take probably an unruly and unwieldy amount of time added to that with meetings wealth. Those pockets of in between, aside from bio breaks and lunch and what have you, you're not left with a lot of time.

The joke is that you, weekdays are for meetings and email and messages and weekends are for catching up on the work that you were supposed to do. And so coming back to that time as a construct of beliefs and values, a simple question is, where am I trying to go? How does, what does success look like at the end of the week, end of the month, end of the quarter, aside from all of the other things that, that everyone else says are, that's what success looks like.

Because what we have to do, this is the, this is hence the name of life scale. Where are you trying to go so that the activities that you mindfully invest in are scaling your life or your work in that direction. Because if you're not structuring your day. Around those things, then you are not achieving then what you're setting out to achieve.

So the measure that I used, this was before mind shifting by the way. I had to come up with a mechanism in order to create the time to research and write mind shift. And so what I'd started doing was tracking what I did every single day and how much time was spent towards it. And I put this pie chart together and let me tell you if that, if the word humbling ever really was a gut punch, that was it.

Because I saw exactly how very little time I was making to do the things that I set out to do. And that boy, and okay, so that's part one. Part two is that what are you gonna do about it? You gotta say no to all the meetings that come to your way. Are you gonna say no to responding to messages and to all the teams messages?

You have to create, like you do in. Your personal life, you have to create boundaries and guardrails and governance systems that dictate then how you're gonna spend your time, how you're gonna communicate that to people so that you're not part of the problem in the organization. You are part of the solution that you become a leader, that hopefully this becomes contagious so that other people are doing the same thing as well.

So I'll give you an example. The most powerful word in this transformation is no, I don't need to join that meeting. No, I don't need to respond to that message. And then also start saying, what are you saying yes to? And you have to communicate that out so that you're not the problem child.

You are the person who is actually taking a leadership position and achieving the things that are gonna help you, your team, and your organization. So that exercise was as painful, but as thorough as necessary to answer your question, which is if you do not make the time. Then you do not achieve what you're setting out to achieve.

And that was the hardest part, was recognizing that I was the problem in that scenario. 

Richie Cotton: Wow. I can imagine that's a very tough thing to say. Okay, I'm the problem. Yeah. And it's very easy to be the bottleneck. I think it, especially when you collaborating with the people. So I love the idea of saying no to stuff.

Do you have any tips for like, how do I politely decline this meeting or this piece of work or whatever? Like, how do you say no and practice without just annoying everyone you work with? 

Brian Solis: It comes back to, comes back to storytelling because there's how you are intending to, to say something and then there's how someone's going to receive and perceive that message.

And so I probably spend way too much time thinking about that stuff. 'cause I'm an empath at heart. So that comes with its own set of challenges. But I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, this is a funny story, says it. I don't know if it's folklore or if it's actually research based, but the idea of a minute meeting became the norm simply because it was the default setting in outlook.

And the same is true when it became the default setting for minutes, that became the norm. Suddenly every meeting had to either be minutes or minutes. Most meetings, whether it's minutes or minutes, most meetings will last that long just because that's your mental model for how long a conversation takes place.

But I think it's Jeff Bezos who famously said that, we're not gonna have meetings like that. We are going to have meetings that are aimed at outcomes or decisions. And so they changed sort of the framework. But before I get that, a friend of mine decided, minutes is unnecessary. I have studied my time spent with others in that minutes.

There's a point of diminishing returns in that minutes where we just be, start filling time at the beginning, at the end, let's get right to the meat. And he started experimenting with and minute meetings. And he had found that when he would send out invites or if he received an invite and then asked for it to be switched to to minutes, or whatever he felt was necessary, the natural response was, it's my time not worth your time.

I asked for minutes and you're proposing minutes. It's, because our mental model with us is the, with ego at the center. How could that possibly be? So I don't know if he is, he's the kind of individual who's that's my time. Take it or leave it. But I would say like a fixed auto response.

I'm experimenting with a new thing to see if we can't give each other time back to improve our own day-to-day productivity and the deliverables that we're saying to do, whatever it is that you wanna say. So I'm experimenting in minutes, and by the way, here's what I learned. If we organize the minutes this way, we get some things done.

Jeff Bezos said, this is how our construct is gonna be. Your in the invite have your pre-work, so you're gonna carve out time to get that stuff in your head processes. And then in our time together, we're going to make decisions about it so that you break it out in stages. But it's really now what you're starting to get to is how do we not hurt feelings, but also communicate the why we're doing this to see if we can't make it contagious.

And now you're talking about norms. You're talking about behaviors ultimately, which add up to the culture of work. And that's a bigger conversation 'cause that technically needs to be designed, not one employee at a time, but at, from a leadership level like, Bezos and their meeting culture.

But I think transparency and even a little fun involved in why you're doing that, I think goes a long way. 

Richie Cotton: Definitely. I do like the idea of transparency there and I feel like there's not many people are gonna push back on shorter meetings. Like maybe there's a couple of people who are like really enthusiastic about meetings and they want the extra time, but most people think about short the meeting fine.

And you say, okay, Jeff Bezos recommends shorter meetings. That's probably gonna be good enough for most people, 

Brian Solis: hopefully. But I did find it fun in look, just think about it this way. If I get to the rest of the story later, that'd be great, but. Think about it this way, how often have you been in a meeting where it goes all the way to the end of the scheduled time or even over, and you're like, my goodness, this is this could have ended a long time ago.

We've shifted from productivity to pain. Now my impatience is all consuming and I just wanna leave. And then suddenly someone says, I think that's it. I think we've we've got everything covered. I'm gonna give you back seven minutes. And you're, oh, wow, I just won the lottery. Like, how good does that feel?

And that's, I think ultimately if we could get there proactively and then start to manage our time and then start to be intentful or intentional with our time purposeful with our time towards an outcome, then. It's essentially a behavioral shift or a mind shift to getting us to, the answer to your question is how do we make the time?

You make the time by spending the time where you need to in ways that are beneficial to you and those who work with you. 

Richie Cotton: I think we've covered time management very well now. I also wanna talk about trends. Since you are furniture futurist, analyzing trends is a lot of what you do.

And I guess if you're gonna do something new, you need to figure out like, what's the cool next thing or what's the useful next thing. Talk me through your tips for how do you find out about like useful up and coming trends? 

Brian Solis: Oh, I just ask Chad, GBT the solution to everything. What is Chad gt?

That certainly seems like what everybody's what everybody's doing these days. But I don't know, just on, on a side I read this beautiful beautiful story in Harvard Business Review that talked about work slop, which was how everybody's easy to ai. To essentially write their emails write their LinkedIn posts write their summaries, et cetera.

And slop became synonymous with AI because it was like mindless stuff in order to just check a box versus to be thoughtful with it. So how do I think about it? That's essentially what, probably never gonna get to it in this conversation, but that's essentially what the six stages of the mind shift are about.

So this shift from receive to perceive is essentially setting up your brain and your work and your processes and your systems essentially to be open. So not just your mind, but also your ability to. Essentially identify the signals out there that you want to now start to track and then start to perceive, so receive to perceive and then essentially understanding those signals that are important to your work today.

And then also understanding how those signals converge so that you can start to identify where are things going. And start asking yourself questions like what does this mean? Where is this going? And why is it, or could it be important to us now? And or over time? And as you start understanding this, what you're allowing yourself to do is piece together puzzle pieces that essentially form potential stories or as I would call 'em, scenarios.

If I believe these things to be important, and if I believe these things to be true, if they come together. This is one potential scenario that could happen. How would I think about that moving forward? And so that's the the weave part of the framework is that you now start putting all of these things together in order to be meaningful to you, to make to make sense of it.

And then the next stage is weave. You are scattering all these different inputs into visionary possibilities so that you're essentially unlocking create problem solving. And then in the conceived stage, that vision now starts to become tangible. It starts to serve as the foundation for that storytelling component.

So that the believe part of this now is that you are so vested in this possibility, this vision now that you are compelled to bring others. And then the last stage, which is achieved. This is where that mindset that vision now becomes a movement. And essentially building that movement into one that leads to whatever that outcome or decision or that transformation is all about.

So try to squeeze a lot into that. I was gonna say, no two companies are tracking the same signals, but many are Ai, gen, ai agents, ent a GI if that's on your realm of possibility Quantum. So there's usually a series of signals that we're tracking, but what they mean is going to be unique to your approach, what they mean to you.

Because you have a unique set of customers, you have a unique sense of set of shareholders and stakeholders. And so coming back to our beginning part of the conversation around storytelling, we have to make those things more human. More empathetic. So those signals then become profound and meaningful so that the work as you're trend casting as you're thinking through translating those trends into possibilities or into scenarios that they're deeply meaningful to people who are gonna need to hear about them, not just the trend or the shiny object or the data or your personal insight because you are, you it's becoming meaningful to other people.

Richie Cotton: This idea of signal does seem incredibly important. But it raised the question like, how do you know what's a genuine trend and what's just a fad? We've had a few tech fads in the last few years. Think about the Metaverse or NFTs were super hyped and then disappeared. Generative AI seems to be a huge trend.

Same with agents. And then you mentioned stuff like a GI, quantum. How do you evaluate these things? Are they gonna be real. 

Brian Solis: I certainly spent a lot of my cycles really analyzing the metaverse, for example and WebAnd those are trends that you could say burst with with the hype cycle.

But in, in my work, I did find that the Metaverse actually has really killer apps attached to it when technology and experience design catch up with it. So I'll give you an example that is the type of thing where somebody would throw it back in my face and say, yeah, but Brian, you said this about the metaverse, and now look at where the Metaverse is.

But I would say if you read my stages of the Metaverse, you would see that ultimately, follow the Gartner Hype Cycle. We would hit the tr of disillusionment until we found those killer apps and also the technology that could power those killer apps. And here's what those killer apps could look like.

And now in that metaverse application, things will become real. So I know for certain we will be back in, in that regard. So how do you do that? It's the same process that we just talked about. It is ma it is sensemaking of all of the things that we need in order to be able to make it meaningful to our organization so we can assess where we are.

We can assess where things might be but ultimately we have to make sense of why they're impactful to our organization and when they might be impactful and why they might be impactful. So the example I want to give you with the metaverse not that I'm championing that there's still plenty of.

There's still plenty of work we need to do around the five stages of ai, which we can get to as well. Or five stages of generative ai I should say. There's a new model that just introduced by Dr. Fefe and she's tremendous. If you don't, if you don't follow her work, she's been in ai forever.

Dr. Fefe Lee Stanford brilliant Vine in artificial intelligence and her new company just launched a model called Marble. And if you think about what SOA is to video or what chat GPT is to text, marble is to three-dimensional immersive worlds. So it's multimodal. So you can you could type, you could voice, you could upload images or what have you to create an immersive D world.

It is persistent and consistent. So meaning it has memory. So as you design this world and you move an object, it remembers what you moved and where you place it. If you move around a corner, it remembers where you are, but also remembers what you left. And so this now then becomes essentially imagine creating these worlds, aside from business applications like architecture or say we're doing molecular research.

Say something silly like for me, not silly, but fun like a game or for vr. Say you grab an Apple vision prone, you've designed this world and now you can move through and work, whatever. Like now we're starting to see technology evolve in ways that democratize this type of capability, of which then these platforms like Apple's Vision Pro or Medis Quest, or the new Steam Frame.

These things now become the conduits for those experiences to be delivered at scale. You and I can become the architects of those worlds and design the applications of which then become, become meaningful or not. But all of these things then are an example of how do we I trend sites. So it's sharpening the receivers state to tune into these signals.

Then trend sighting, which is systematically collecting, organizing, and analyzing this information. I introduced in the book this thing called a trends scape canvas. So it's a framework of which then where do you place it? Is it on, is it a potential bubble? Is potential hype? Is it something worth further study based on what we're, what the other signals are telling us and where we're trying to go.

And then the process of then communicating that in terms of storyboarding is what I call trend fluence. And then trend spark is about igniting action around that idea. Maybe it's not now, but maybe it is quantum, for example, we've been saying years. Now we're starting to see real activity. At what point do we take action, either with a COE or a Quantum lab in order to start answering these questions?

That would be done by your signals work. So that way we know it's, ah, we don't need to do anything for years. But at least you'd have an answer to that question. 

Richie Cotton: I have to say you are perhaps one, one of the few people who's very positive about the metaverse. Yeah, I love the idea of having there are killer apps on their way, which is called Be a Little Bit Patient.

And maybe yeah, certainly Fafe Lee is artificial intelligence royalty at this point. And yeah if anyone can can pull this off, then I think she can. So yeah. The idea of AI for D Worlds, that seems very cool. And yeah, maybe that's. One, one way we'll get to metaverse fun times.

The other part of this was around like is there a way determining what's gonna be a trend? What's gonna be a fad? And so I like the idea that, yeah, I've got this methodology about just looking for trends and then just, I guess crunching them and seeing are they gonna be relevant to you?

So there is a full blown methodology. You there. Maybe that's like a whole episode in itself. Okay once you've gone through like figuring out, okay, we've got some trends that are interesting to look at. Suppose you find something you believe in once you go from I believe in this, you then got to figure out okay, everyone else believes in this as well.

So this is, I guess the storytelling stuff that we talked about before. And then as an individual, that's fine. If you're a manager, like what's your process for going, okay, now we've gotta act on these exciting trends. 

Brian Solis: Oh boy. Yeah. At that, by the point. At the point where you believe that this is the belief part of the framework.

You are vested, you've done the work, you can validate that these are important. It's not just a belief. It is actually something that you have documented, studied, and proven to be relevant to the organization now or at some point in the near future. And it's now time to really start talking about that.

So essentially this is where this, the storytelling part comes to, to bear. How are you gonna put that? I think I, I was gonna get a copy of the book and start showing you, I, I dedicate three or four chapters to this answer. Because there, there are parts of the story that are just important because you've been able to say it's important.

Now the work begins of making it relatable and meaningful to somebody else. There are empathetic attributes to this, and there are also influence attributes to this. My friend Jason Corman, who's the CEO of a culture design company called Gaping Void, he would say that leadership is influence. And by that I don't mean the latest dance video on TikTok to go viral.

What influence means in this capacity is the ability to change behavior or outcomes. And so that's, that becomes like the fundamental foundation of how you bring that trend to life in a way that isn't just believable and relatable, but now there is action on the other side of it. And so the, these last three chapters of the book.

Essentially help you turn that foresight into force in, in, into transformation. And you're doing it through this storytelling construct that essentially everything I learned from Pixar and Aristotle. And the hero's journey from Joseph Campbell are all broken down into actionable steps to answer that question.

Richie Cotton: I love how we're putting like Aristotle's rhetoric Triangle and Pixar in the same sentence. So just have nothing. But I like, okay, cool. You, you said management is influence. Now, earlier today, I had failed to do it. Asked my boss, had asked me to, and his message to me was, once again, I'm yelling into the void.

In theory management is influence. What are the sort of high leverage points if you wanna make organizational change? I feel like there are some times within your organization or some situations where you're gonna have more ability to change your culture rather than like other times where it's gonna fall flat.

Brian Solis: Let's go back to the the rhetoric triangle for a second. So those who haven't followed that work, it's essentially the framework for how to be essentially persuasive. And it was highly effective at the time in politics at, and still probably highly effective.

I would add now a fourth dimension, which seems to be polarization, but we could talk about that that later. There is, and I say po political within the organization in its truest. Truest sense in that you have to win favor, you have to be convincing and persuasive. And you have to have someone's interests in mind because they need to believe that you are or they are a constituent of yours, that they are a colleague of yours.

And that by listening to you and potentially working with you, that there is something in it for them, whether it's better, faster, cheaper things, or greater influence on their own part. So really understanding the dynamics of the organization, the culture, the gravity, potential resistance potential organizational trends like for example in some cases there could be kingdom building.

There could be short cutting, there could be ladder climbing. Certain things that are inherent within the organization that either become the cultural norm or just be, become a known. These become things we have to that we have to navigate. But in any story of change is understanding where we are and where we wanna be and what are the things that inhibit us from getting there.

I have to say that some of the best work that I've ever done before I even think about driving change is understanding how people perceive where we are, how people perceive, what some of the challenges are, and what's, how people pre perceive some of the opportunities are, even if they haven't done all of this work you and I have been talking about for the last hour.

That does two things. One gives you a real understanding of not just the actual landscapes dynamics, but the perceived landscape dynamics. And as we all know, perception is reality. The second thing that it does, it's it's not unlike, gosh, I hate to say it this way, but it's not unlike campaigning you are talking to people, you're building relationships.

You are listening to people feel like they're being heard. And as you now start to communicate then your ideas and your thoughts your potential, the things that you are seeing why you feel they're important and why you feel, why you believe it's important to them, et cetera, all the things that we talked about, you're creating a community of being heard and then getting feedback.

And ultimately that community becomes not just mutually beneficial, but also mutually influential in theory, right? If we're doing things the right way and not talking about imposing your beliefs on someone else but instead trying to help activate that rising tide metaphor that we've used so often, and I have this saying, it goes way back to the earliest ideas of mind shift, which is like years ago, which was community is not about belonging.

Community is about. Belonging in, in joining others that makes belonging matter. Like why are we together? What are we doing together and how do we do this? Not just together, but for the betterment of the community. So that's really the spirit of this. And yes, it's lot, a lot of work. Yes, it's not in your job description.

Yes, you have to try to squeeze this in between your and minute meetings and all the messages that you get. But making the time for the right things with the right people for the right reasons, towards the right outcomes, it is the right way to move forward. It is the right way to bring about differences or to make an impact, to make a dent in the universe, as Steve Jobs would say.

Richie Cotton: Okay. So I love that analogy of. Getting your colleagues to try a new idea. It's like a political campaign and you've gotta be there, knocking on doors and saying, okay, this is what we're gonna do now. This is how we believe stuff. I'd love to touch on the operational side of things because we've been through a lot of steps in terms of changing your minds.

You've gotta change your own mind, you've gotta change your colleagues' mind. You've gotta create this community where people believe in this stuff. At some point you have to do the new work. And I'm wondering like, when do you start that? Do you do you go to implementation after you built the community or can you start earlier?

Brian Solis: If I'd knocked on your door, and let's just assume you live in the neighborhood where you would open the door to a stranger and I hand you a pamphlet or a brochure or something and I say, here, I need you to vote, but here are all the reasons why. You're probably going to take that, maybe give it a glance or two.

See something your mind naturally wants to gravitate towards seeing the thing that's going to just make it easy for you to just go recycle it instantly versus wanna read through the rest of it. And so that in that entire process, I just lost my ability to operationalize anything by handing that to you and just assuming that you would connect the dots and come with me.

That aspect of community building isn't just about rallying people together around a north star or a mission that we all believe in. It's also helping to understand then how we systematize our next steps as a community. Rarely does the person who recognized the signals become the leader for enacting.

Those signals or the strategies necessary to benefit from those signals. Those people who do are usually entrepreneurs or founders, and they go create a company around it, and they're that founder throughout, like Brian Chesky at Airbnb. So this is where an organization then is modeled around how can we activate this at scale, whether the, there's an official construct for that or whether it's a matrix model, what have you.

I do believe that, let's just say artificial intelligence it is generative AI probably formed a number, stood up a number of COEs, maybe also a number of advisory boards and task forces. And so in many ways, however it got there, that process of championing it became a. The system of which then stood up this group of which then part of it was to either become this, the Center of Excellence for Governance and Information and Knowledge or it became also a center for strategy and execution or that existed somewhere else.

So however, the organization culture and Construct is models throughout that system. But it really becomes meaningful once it, it's organized on a racing model or whatever model you use. And then measures are tied to it. And then also the good old what's in it for me is inherent in this work too, but.

The reason why generative AI scaled that so quickly is because I always say there's two moments for an impetus of change. And this is the story, this is important for the storyteller, which is there's the aha moment, which is, oh wow, Brian, this signal that you're talking about, that something called generative ai is on its way.

And the way that you made me see like what my work could look like on the other side of it, we gotta take action. And now there's a bunch of people like that in, in the in, in the construct. And now we're gonna form a COE to start learning more and start propagating this information throughout the organization, teaching people about the marbles of generative ai.

But in reality, that's not what happened in November, It launched and everybody found the other moment of change, which is uhoh, we gotta do something all hands on deck. Let's go figure this out. And then like back into that formal process of change. But it usually we'll find it'll usually find its way to the center of excellence.

Task forces, races and measures. But the difference I would like to see moving forward is that how often can we respond to oh moments, understanding that technology is faster and more impactful with every wave. And AI itself is, I believe, transformative in our work at ServiceNow. Bill McDermott, our CEO, he talks a lot about AI business transformation that is his North star.

And by that he doesn't mean like what MIT found in its research, like % of AI pilots are failing. What he's talking about is breaking out potential ideas like we talked about earlier, from not just iteration, but to innovation. What can we do differently with AI and how can we tie that idea to something that's more, that's a bigger impact across.

Organizational constructs. So what could be end-to-end? What could be cross-functional? What could work across silos and across data centers? And that type of thinking, those types of questions are gonna beget answers. And so the reason I'm sharing this is because not every change can happen at a grassroots, organic level.

Sometimes we're gonna need change to happen at the top and then to activate all of this stuff, but. That leadership this was the biggest inspiration for Mind Shift, is that I believe we need a new genre of leaders who want to believe that things can be different, that want to explore the unknown, that don't wanna just take all of these trends that are happening and put it in the box of business as usual.

Who, and use terms like, oh, this is a new normal, or this is a next normal, but who want to control alt, delete and reboot is something better and more meaningful and impactful to society, the world to markets to each other, to employees, to stakeholders, to shareholders. I want a leader who wants to mind shift and bring other people along to empower them to mind shift, to also be leaders.

Because I believe a true leader isn't someone who tells somebody what to do. A true leader is someone who empowers other people, who also find ways to be better and do better at scale. 

Richie Cotton: That's, great vision. I'm board with that. No I agree. So the thing you talked about first was about how quite often changes happen then you oh, and everyone has to panic.

And that is a very powerful way of making change happen, but it's also exhausting for everyone where you're having to react to things and scrambles to keep up. And so I do like the idea of just be proactive and be like what could our company like, or how can we do things better for our customers?

And have that vision and then persuade other people about the vision and and change things. It's a wonderful idea. It feels like a better way of doing things. I like that. Okay. Just to wrap up do you have any kind of final advice or suppose you've persuaded someone they get, they wanna be a change agent for their company?

Yeah. What's the one thing they can do? 

Brian Solis: I would say this is that. I have this saying that if you're waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you're oftentimes on the wrong side of innovation. What I believe is, and another reason why I wrote Mindshift, was because we can't wait for today's leaders to have a dream and wake up because they saw something differently and say, ah, everybody let's do all of the things that we've not let you do or we didn't listen to before, but to become the leader that you're waiting for.

And that is the whole framework for the book is so how do you become the leader you're waiting for by recognizing these opportunities before they become uhoh moments and bringing people along for the ride. So that. They become part of the change because they want to become part of the change.

And then we're probably not even using the word change. We're using probably more proactive, productive words like enhancement, optimization enrichment, whatever it is that vibes with the culture of the org. But it's really about becoming that leader and recognizing the things that are happening and bringing people along for it.

So that whether it's your small team, your large team, your cross-functional teams, that there's leadership at every level and hopefully we all meet in the middle and lead to essentially figur or more figuratively than literally, but more like flatter organizations that are all working together in a way that is to.

Everyone's benefit. Now that might seem very Pollyanna, but at the very least to answer your question, we need to become the leaders that we're waiting for. And this is a construct that turned the future into action today. 

Richie Cotton: Alright. So just be a leader regardless of whether that's on your job title or not.

Yeah, I like that idea. Or just add it, there's a pen. Put it on your business card if you still have one of those. But it's not a, it's not a role. Sorry. It's not a title as much as it is about a role. And I don't know that any leader who wouldn't want people to be proactive and productive and understanding like, what are the things that are gonna impact us so that we can do something about it today so that we all win.

Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely some people who have leader in their job title, maybe not so much. Some people who don't have it on their title. And you can tell they really are leaders. So I like that. Yeah. That task for everyone in the audience and become a leader. Finally, I always want people to follow.

So yeah. Who's working you interested in at the moment? Oh gosh, I going back to all those tabs, you'll face the tabs. Hoping we can have a long list. I it's hard. It's a hard question to answer because there are, there's so many incredible people that of course there's my team at at ServiceNow and my colleagues at ServiceNow that I'm paying a lot of attention to just simply because they're on the front lines of building the stuff that are bringing to life all of the things that we talk about.

Brian Solis: But I can't help but recommend a friend of mine, her name is Ali K Biller, or my friend Connor Gr, are individuals who are trying to make leaders out of just everybody, not just the people with the title, so that they can use AI versus being trained and waiting for that sort of construct to roll out.

And like how should you work with ai? Like you take it to you, you take. You take control of your own destiny by learning how to use it in your day-to-day personal professional lives. And they're doing all of the things. There's Amy Webb, who is an incredible futurist. There's, there was just an at the Trucker Forum with Johan Rouse, who's got a book coming out called Human Magic, which is essentially how to use AI to humanize the collaboration, creativity all of the things, all of the soft skills are the human skills that make people scalable, not replaceable with ai.

But look, if you follow me on LinkedIn you'll see. I'm constantly spotlighting their work. And so this becomes an answer in perpetuity. 

Richie Cotton: Alright. I knew this was gonna be a good source of ancestor. Certainly. Yeah. Connor, I know he came on one of our webinars last year. Yeah, he's a great speaker and very deep thinker and yeah, some more people to check out as well.

Alright, so I guess the answer is follow you on LinkedIn then and see who you're chatting about and get a good list. 

Brian Solis: Yeah. Or send me an email. What I'll do is I'll take it as an action item and I'll just, actually I should, I'm just gonna do this anyway. I'm gonna put together a list of everybody I'm following and publish it so that way it's pay it forward.

And maybe there's, and hopefully there's people you don't know of today, and that way we're putting the ladder down for each other to bring everyone up together. 

Richie Cotton: I have to say all those LinkedIn posts, which just like lists of other influencers I spent half my life just like scanning those and contact everyone for new guests.

So yeah that's a brilliant idea. I would say go and do that. Alright. Thank you so much for your time, Brian, 

Brian Solis: Richie, thank you. And to everyone listening or watching this thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and for sharing my work and thinking. And if you have any questions you can reach me at [email protected].

My website is brian solis.com or I'll see you on LinkedIn or your favorite social network or choice. 

Richie Cotton: Wonderful. Alright. Thank you.