A conversation with Liya James, Design Entrepreneur & Author

“Once people have the experience [to step] outside and they’re willing…to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, ‘Oh my, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.’” -Liya James 

In this episode of Control the Room, Liya James and I discuss the value of environment shifts in organizations to unleash creativity and the significance of a creative & courageous mindset in the workplace. We explore the space companies must offer employees so they can be their most authentic selves, and the unique purpose of Liya’s new book, The Get Real Method. Listen in to hear Liya’s perspective on empowering members of your organization to thrive in creativity and courageousness while simultaneously unlocking diversity & meaningful innovation. Liya also explains the impact of manifestation, creating the work-life career you want to live to start now, and sharing the skill sets necessary to living a fulfilled life. 

Show Highlights

[1:33] Liya’s UX Career Start
[9:01] The Environment Shift to Unleashing an Opening 
[16:34] The Creative & Courageous Mindset   
[26:56] Finding the Space 
[29:37] Liya’s Book: The Get Real Method

Liya’s LinkedIn
Liya James
The Get Real Method

About the Guest

Liya James is a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. She offers opportunities to help people tap into their creative courage when it matters the most so that they can implement the power of their imagination to create anything they want in business and life. Her approach spans nearly two decades of experience in design innovation. She has worked alongside disruptive startup founders whose collective exits total several billion dollars. Liya has delivered innovation and creativity training to leaders at some of the world’s largest brands, including Mercedes, LinkedIn, AT&T, IBM, and HP. Her book “The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters” is now available.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download The Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Today, I’m with Liya James, a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. Her book The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters is available now. Welcome to the show, Liya.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s good to be here.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s been a while since we connected and I’m super excited to have this conversation. So let’s get started with just a little background on how you got your start.

Liya James:

That’s a great question. Well, I don’t want to go way back, but I have spent about 20 years working in the UX field, UX problems of all sorts in all kinds of settings, startups, corporate environments, freelancing agency, you name it. That was really how I got my start. And that work was really about focusing on how to make machines more human, so when we interact with them, it works for us.

And essentially I got exposed to a lot of human suffering in that process. I saw teams trying to innovate and bring ideas to the table and designers basically trying to work on their charter of figuring out what’s the next big thing, right? And during this project and, and working with teams, I really saw that the processes that we were using for innovation worked to some extent, but they really failed people. A lot of times we were able to create products and launch them into the market and help our customers, but in the process we leave some bodies behind.

And so that experience helped me thought about… When I moved to Austin, I started a design studio. And as part of that business, we said, “Well, let’s figure this out. Let’s try and see if we can help executives and leaders understand creativity a little bit more and how they can apply it to their businesses.” So we started this, we launched and designed this whole training around design leadership, creative leadership, and all over the world we were teaching it.

And that’s when I really had a big aha moment about the work experience. I saw people reconnect with themselves in these trainings and workshops like where, I mean, I saw grown men cry at the end of the training, and I saw people tap into their creativity imagination. Just in this training, we had people sort of use all their senses to create and understand methods of how you connect with your customers, but also just connect with people at a human level.

And I would push people to tap into their own imagination and just let it go. Because it was a safe environment. You’re not at work. We take you out of that space. Right? And we said, “Just go,” right? Because I know in my teams know at that time that you’re born with creativity and all we have to do is get you to experience it. So you know what your designers and your creative teams are actually going through when they have to stare at a blank piece of paper and do the work you’re asking to do. Right?

And the result of that experience was me actually being present to these intimate moments of seeing people wake up to their own creativity and their God given power of imagination. And sometimes you see corporate executives being shaken by that.

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

You just have these glimpses of people doing that.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating, just this idea of professionalism and how people have been kind of conditioned to almost not be creative because we needed to act in a certain way and behave and say certain things and dress a certain way. And I see so many people that are afraid to step out because that means there’ll be recognized as being a little different. But as soon as they do it, it’s so liberating. And so I’ve seen it a bunch and what you speak to is very powerful and it’s so great to see other people doing this kind of work.

What have you noticed to be kind of the triggers or the moves or prompts that are most effective, when you’re getting pushback or someone’s being a little bit resistant? What’s helpful to get them to basically get up and dance?

Liya James:

Well, sometimes it’s just a little push or shift in your environment, right? So when we were developing this training, I was very adamant that we find places that are natural. Take people out of the conference room. So leaving an environment and just getting a new perspective can sometimes draw people into, “Oh…” For example, in Silicon Valley, we would have the setting where there’s fruit trees everywhere. And it’s not a conference room, it’s like a house, you know?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

And so, in fact, the last design studio that I ran, we would often find spaces to have our studios where it doesn’t look like a corporate environment. And we’d bring in a lot of nature because for people to feel safe… I think safe is a really big deal when it comes to creativity. Right? So we want to craft places of belonging and places where people feel like, “Oh, this is like a home.” Right?

And you can do that inside a corporate environment too. Right? We’re seeing a lot of corporations starting to design where they would dedicate creativity spaces to do the work, where it’s not cubicles and it’s not necessarily conference rooms. IBM is a really good example of that. When they established their design studio here in Austin, they put a lot of intention into how the space makes somebody feel, right?

So I think space is one thing. And then the energy is the other thing. So one of the things that I always do in these trainings is I would incorporate things that may not seem like relevant. For breaks between exercises or between modules, where we’re teaching people new ideas, we might meditate for five minutes. So I do a lot of things that people don’t normally do or expect to do in a training setting where you’re in a corporate environment. And we would often hear people say, “We want to bottle up the energy in this training and bring it back to work.” So really paying a lot of attention to the experience side of it and not just the content I think is a big trick in thinking about that.

Douglas:

I think you’re dead on with all of that. The space, the context matters so much. And also this notion of the experience and this comes back to some advice that we give around meetings and how people… The classic advice is always make sure you’re having an agenda. Well, an agenda typically is a list of topics. It’s very content centered, where if we take a moment to step back and look and say, “What’s the experience? How do we want to start? How do we want to end? What kind of journey do we want to take people on?” I think that’s such good advice.

I want to come back to the space piece from a learning science and a retention and integration standpoint. I’ve always struggled with, there’s a risk of when we take someone out of their environment and they go learn some new thing. Now they have to bridge that gap between that place where they discovered these things and try to apply them in the day-to-day. Right?

Liya James:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And so what are some of your go-to approaches for helping people bridge that gap? Because I agree with you, it is helpful to not have the distractions of the office and to give people the courage to actually kind of jump into this new way of being. But once they’re now, they’ve felt that feeling, how do we help them translate that back into the day-to-day?

Liya James:

Well, what’s interesting is that we create an opening, right? And then people get curious, right? So one of the things that we were really intentional in doing, and I still do that to this day. First of all, I want to circle back to something you said, which is, I don’t think about meetings as its own separate thing, because if you think about it, we’re spending all of our time in meetings. So that’s essentially synonymous to work right?

Now, what’s awesome about what you guys are doing, and I think facilitators in general, is that now it’s becoming accepted that somebody can take the role of design in that experience for people so that we can go from elevate these okay or maybe not even okay meetings to amazing experiences. And to me, doing that is actually about elevating the human experience. Because it’s purely just because of how much time we’re spending in meetings in our lives in general. So I want to say that.

And then the second thing is it doesn’t take that much. That’s the great thing about shifting environment. So we shift the environment, take people out of their work so that they can open up, but once they open up that opening stays there. Right? And so for example, in a lot of the trainings and facilitation I do, I assemble kits. And in those kits are really simple things like Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, Post-its glue sticks, things that you’d find around your house, that your kids are playing with all the time. So it’s very accessible, right?

So once people have the experience outside and they’re willing to use these things to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, “Oh my God, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.” Right? Then what they can do is, at the end of the training, we always say, “It’s really simple. You don’t even have to have dedicated space. Put some big foam board up. Suddenly you have creative space. Buy eight pieces of foam core, put it up around your office, wherever, outside of your cubicle, put stuff up. Here’s a box.” And we actually let people take it home.

We usually give them a bag at the end, and we’re like, “Put all this stuff in there because we want you to have…” I actually created diagrams of what the things are, what are they good for and where they can go and buy them, pretty much at Michael’s or any store, Target. So we make it really accessible, right? So it’s not saying you have to invest tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have innovation and creativity. All you have to do is have the willingness, but that connection to the self is super important, I think, in order for that opening to be there.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of, you mentioned creating this opening and creating this curiosity, and it made me think about how that negativity is addictive, right? If someone starts getting negative, all of a sudden you start seeing the negativity brewing because people love to commiserate. Curiosity is also addictive. If we start all actively practicing curiosity, everyone starts to kind of do it. Right? And so as leaders, if we can kind of shape the direction of kind of where we want our organizations to grow, it has a way of kind of infecting things in a good way, right? That curiosity can go viral.

And likewise, when you were talking about all you had to do is put up some foam core, et cetera. It made me think about this notion of exhaust. Activities have exhaust. They require supplies, they create artifacts, and that is a reminder of what we’ve been doing. And also if the supplies are laying around, then it’s really easy to go back into those activities. Right? We’ve got it. It’s at our fingertips. It’s not in a closet somewhere.

So just bringing those things out and honoring the fact that this is what we want to do. This is how we want to spend our time and making it easy to be curious and explore. I think that is so much more powerful than worrying about like, “Do we have the best view and is it all glass?” And all these kinds of things, right? Is it just comfortable to think and do people have stuff available to them?

Liya James:

Yeah, and I think a lot of… In the old days, I think it’s more accepted now to play. Playing at work, serious play is a bit more, I think, accepted in the corporate environment. But we also have this just limiting belief about work, that it has to be serious, quote-unquote. Right? But on the other hand, we’re demanding of every department at the company should be innovating. And unfortunately, if we’re not tapped in to our ability to have ideas and come up with new ways of thinking. If we’re not tapped into that, we really can’t be innovative. Right?

Douglas:

That strikes a big chord with me, Liya. What’s the classic place where everyone thinks of ideas? It’s the shower, right? That’s the classic example, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

I came up with it when I was… Why is that? Right? Well, it’s because I took a moment away from everything else and the idea came to me.

Liya James:

Right.

Douglas:

And so where does innovation and ideas come from? It comes from free space.

Liya James:

Yes, yes.

Douglas:

When you create space, innovation rushes in. Yet companies are so fearful of their need to change and move fast that they just literally cram their schedules full of activities, and they don’t leave that room for innovation to creep in. And what you say resonates with me deeply because it’s like if we don’t allow ourselves that ability in that space, then we’re just kind of just stamping stuff and just on repetition.

It brings me back to something you mentioned in the pre-show chat, which is this kind of conundrum around when we’re faced with this idea of serious play or kind of just letting loose a little bit of this kind of pre-conceived notion of what is work. People are confronted with this question of: Is this professional? And how can people move past that moment of maybe anxiety and actually bring their best self to work? I mean, you told me that that is the only way that people can be truly courageous.

Liya James:

Yeah. So we were talking earlier about this pyramid that I’m developing with belonging on the bottom, creativity, courage and innovation… Innovation ultimately at the very top, right? If there was a hierarchy of company culture and on the other side, you get innovation. The company’s self-actualization, right? I think that belonging’s on the bottom and you have to have creativity and courage in the middle.

And the reason for that is that feature parity is such a common thing still, right? If a competitor’s doing that so we have to do that. We have to do more than that. Right? But we all know though that deep inside that’s not how innovation happens and that’s not how you beat the competition. Okay? And it does sound counterintuitive to go back to belonging. How does that even belong in the conversation of innovation, right?

And the more I’m studying this, the more I’m realizing that the experience of work has to allow for the whole person to come to it. And because why? Because creativity, the root of innovation, has to do with lots of ideas. Where do lots of ideas come from? Diversity. And if people can’t bring their whole selves to work, you have uniformity. Uniformity, it is the opposite of diversity.

So as facilitators and designers and leaders of all kinds, our mission then is really to say, “How do we create an inclusive culture where people feel comfortable bringing themselves to work, their whole selves, all of their perspectives, all of their background and knowledge and lived experience?” Because without that, you’re not going to get unique perspectives. And guess what? The world, the people you’re selling to, are made up of people with all of these unique experiences, shared experiences as well as unique experiences, right? It’s a very intersectional world out there.

And if we’re not tapping into these perspectives, innovation’s not really possible, because we’re just recycling the same ideas over and over again, and sure there’s a place for remixing. Right? But there’s definitely… You and I both know because we’ve been in this space for so long. There’s definitely limits to that. Right? So I think right now there’s just a really amazing opening right now where people are asking corporations, organizations of all kinds are asking, how can we be more inclusive? And what I would say is start with allowing people to bring their whole selves to work and be creatively courageous. Right?

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that really jumps to me, it was a quote that I’ve lived by for years now, which is, if we’re all thinking the same, nobody’s thinking.

Liya James:

Yeah, yeah, that fish bowl effect.

Douglas:

It’s not condemning anybody. It’s actually condemning the system if anything. Because if we’ve created a culture or a system where people don’t feel safe, the psychological safety is just so abysmal that they can’t bring their whole self and they’re not able to even let those thoughts surface because they’ve got barriers in place, protective barriers. They’ve had to set boundaries just so that they can even show up. And that’s very dysfunctional and we may be doing just fine as a company, but we might be missing out on excellence, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

And that’s where it’s sometimes hard for people to really understand or factor these things in. But any leader will tell you their number one expense is payroll. And you hire and spend so much time recruiting these amazing people. Why would you want them functioning at 50%, 60, 70, even 80%? When we could be functioning at 80% and it’s not that hard to do. It’s just to your point about making people feel safe, including them, making sure they’re seen, heard, and respected. And next thing you know, the things start flourishing.

And if someone’s not flourishing in that environment, that’s a really healthy thing. It becomes very clear and we can understand, “Hey, you’re going to flourish somewhere else. The values are mismatch here and our work to create more belonging has made that more apparent. Let’s find a place that you’ll be better fit for.” And then we can likewise find someone that’s going to thrive in this environment. And so belonging is not about, in my mind, not about just kind of changing the company to suit everybody, but it’s about making sure that we create space for everyone to thrive that aligns with the values.

So anyway, I get really passionate about this and I love that your work has focused on it now. I want to come back to, I started thinking a bit during this conversation about maybe how courage and curiosity kind of work together in an interesting way. And I hadn’t thought about this much before, but during this conversation that’s been coming up a bunch for me. And because the curiosity that opened that door for folks in the example you gave, gave them the courage to change their thinking and change their behaviors. And so I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts on this kind of connection between curiosity and courage,

Liya James:

Curiosity and courage, they go hand in hand. So I’m so glad you made that connection. Actually, there was a book, I think it came out in the ’80s called Tribal Leadership. Have you come across that book? And it was a really cool study that they did with like 12,000 people in all different corporate environments. And they were looking at groups of people and how they form effective tribes at work. Okay?

And in that finding, they put tribes in different levels. And what they found is level five, which not even Apple as a company can stay in, in that space. But one of the key indicators of top performing teams from the study is that they have this really interesting thing where everybody in the company have access to what they call innocent wonderment. And what that means… David Kelly talks about it, the IDEO founder, about sort of this childlike, innocent, creative opening to thinking about ideas. And it’s connected to our ability to not always be thinking about who are we competing with, but what is our ultimate kind of purpose and goal for existing, right?

So we all know that the why is really important at work. But I think people have a really hard time tapping into that like, “How do I connect my work with the why? How do I be productive?” Right? And what’s really cool about this skillset, I think it’s a skillset, innocent wonderment, is to be able to have the space to say, “What if? What if this happened? What if I were to combine this and that?” And to say, “You know what, I don’t have data to support that. But my company says it’s okay for me to tap into my courage and try things anyway.”

Because as you and I both know, innovation isn’t… When you come up with ideas that actually work in the market and in a way that it blows everybody’s mind, the path there is never bulletproof data. Right? It’s courage. You wrote a book on remix, right? So it’s our ability to put ideas that normally don’t go together together and try it. And then you create data along the way. So in order for us to have real creative courage, that possibility, that safety to be able to do this, to sometimes tap into that creative wonderment or that innocent wonderment is really important.

Douglas:

This concept of innocent wonderment’s so beautiful. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier on space and slack time, because I don’t think you can find that innocent wonderment if your cortisol levels are just totally jacked up and you’re just high anxiety and running from task to task. It’s just like that space for innovation. Right? We can’t find that momentum unless we kind of nurture it and give space for it to emerge.

And likewise, there’s an element of courage that comes from, I would say, endorsement, or when authority gives permission so to speak. And that might sound a bit too controlling, but it can be kind of almost inherent permission or just the culture is set up to where everyone feels like they have permission. That gives you courage, right? Versus feeling like you have to get things approved or everything gets shut down.

And then it also reminds me of a topic that’s very prevalent in the innovation space, which is creating a learning culture, right? Or some people will talk about fast to fail or safe to fail. But to me it’s really about learning versus failure, but still the point is if we develop a culture where we’re really focused on learning and we get excited about what we learn, that creates courage, because then we don’t have any fear about repercussions or failing.

Liya James:

And I want to go back to one more point that you were trying to get at before too, is this idea of how do we give people space? How do we give people permission? And sometimes it’s really from a leadership perspective and a facilitator perspective, because I don’t see the difference between the two, is sometimes it’s a one minute thing, right? So about five years ago, I shifted my practice to primarily work with mission-based companies. And one of the first ones that I worked with really changed my perspective because I was really struggling with this idea of like, “Well, how do you be professional and do all these things I know works?”

And we’re all really secretive about it. We don’t talk about it at work, but we do it at home, right? Like you said, we do yoga, we meditate or we journal, we do all these things that we know helps us tap into our creativity and our thinking. Right? But we don’t do it at work because we don’t think there’s a place for it. But I was working with this company and they happened to be in the space of meditation. And so oftentimes I would be part of really important meetings, because we were consulting on some strategic work.

And they often would open an important meeting with a meditation. It’s not hierarchical. Anybody who would feel called to do it would lead it. And sometimes it’s about intention setting with the meditation. And it really puts you in this place of like, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re here to do. This is our intention.” And sometimes, for example, if there’s like major world events going on or during this time with pandemic and racism and all this stuff going, sometimes we would do wellness scans at a check-in. We just go around and say, “Okay, how are we feeling at a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level?” And people can just go around and check in on that, 30 seconds, a minute per person. Right?

And since then I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have different cultures like this, not all the same and not all the same methodologies, but it’s a reflection of what the group wants at work. And what I noticed is that it does not take away from the productivity and the professionalism. In fact, it’s key to it. And it’s addictive like you said. I look forward to seeing these groups of people instead of… Sometimes I’ve had experiences with client work where you just dread it, like, “Ugh, Wednesday, there’s a meeting and I’m dreading it.”

Douglas:

So I want to move into a bit of a closer and we haven’t had much opportunity to talk about The Get Real Method and the book is out now. And I’d love just to hear a little bit about what’s it all about and what should our listeners know? Is there any tidbit that you might think that they’ll find especially helpful? What’s it all about?

Liya James:

Yeah. So The Get Real Method, so on my journey of figuring out this innovation thing and how belonging plays into it, what I realized is that right now we have this great turning, great opening where organizations are saying, “We want people to feel a sense of belonging. McKinsey is telling us this is good and there’s data to support it.” Well, if people aren’t used to that, it will be really hard for them to bring their full selves to work. And so this book was actually the beginning of this pyramid.

So I wanted to arm people with the techniques and tools that we designers actually know very well. So the book is actually really about arming people with the skillsets to find their whole selves, what it means for them individually to be fulfilled, to do meaningful work. Who are you? I have a three-step method in there that talks about how do you sense where you are, how to attune, use attunement to understand where you want to go next and manifesting your visions.

And this is actually all the same methodologies we use in design thinking. And so the book is really how to be your own design strategist in life and be powerful at work. Right? How to stand for something, and also at the end of the day, what it’s really about is to be able to show up with your full self, wherever you are, whether at home, at work at play. Right? So The Get Real Method is really about the first step in that creative courage, innovation journey.

And I’m hoping that, for your audience, I think when I say the word design strategist, that they’ll get it. And there’s a little sprinkle of ancient wisdom in there too. So it should be really fun and it’s filled with workshops and step-by-step how-tos, so I’m not leaving you with just ideas and concepts, but it’s very practical.

Douglas:

Yeah. So good. I love this idea of an environment scan and then kind of just checking in and attuning and going, “Well, what’s really going on here?” And then also kind of this future casting. Well, if I want this bad enough, what does it really mean to manifest it? And it’s important work if we really want to shape our future versus just sitting around and waiting for it just to happen to us.

Liya James:

Yeah. There’s no reason to wait.

Douglas:

No doubt. Liya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on today. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Liya James:

Well, creative courage means doing what it takes to make a vision real, even if you don’t have all the answers. So I would encourage everyone to not wait for the answers. Don’t do a whole lot of planning and go for it, whatever it is you’re searching for and whatever you’re trying to make happen.

Douglas:

And how can they find the book and maybe connect with you or learn more about the work that you continue to do?

Liya James:

Definitely. I am on LinkedIn. That’s my only social media platform. So Liya James, look me up. I think I’m the only Liya James, and then liyajames.com is where I share all of my latest thinking and the book is available on Amazon now so definitely go get it.

Douglas:

Yeah, definitely check out The Get Real Method. And, Liya, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining me.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.