A conversation with Jennifer Rei, Partner and Global Head of Strategy for IDEO and author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking
“I think that it is challenging to bring our own thinking and our own mental models to the surface because we’re not trained to do it. We’re not really teaching kids how to be reflective of their own thinking and the role that their emotions play in framing up their conclusions and how they feel about the world. And so we don’t have great capability in that. It doesn’t mean we can’t, there are certainly people who have developed and cultivated a deep practice of reflection and metacognition that enables them to understand not just what they believe, but why they believe it. But I think the truly foundational thing to engaging in this practice for yourself and with others is a recognition that there are very, very few right answers in the world, right?”-Jennifer Reil
In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jennifer Reil about her experience working at IDEO, metacognition, and teaching at the Management School at the University of Toronto. We talk about her new book Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking. We then discuss the difficulty in building the capacity to think about what we think about and opposing modals of thinking. Listen in to learn how to build empathy, the curse of knowledge, and failing better.
Show Highlights
[1:40] How Jennifer Became A Strategist
[7:30] Recognizing That Their Are Rarely Truths
[14:05] Opposing Models Of Thinking[17:00] Integrative Thinking
[32:50] How Might We Fail Better
Links | Resources
Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking
About the Guest
Jennifer Riel is IDEO’s global director of strategy. In this role, she collaborates with clients and internal teams to push the edges of creative problem solving, leveraging strategy and design thinking tools. As a strategy advisor, Jennifer has worked across industries and countries, helping organizations and teams to build winning, sustainable and human-centered strategies.
Before IDEO, Jennifer spent 13 years at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, where she taught undergrads, MBAs, and executives how to think creatively about their toughest challenges. During this period, she partnered with organizations to help them build their strategic thinking capabilities and transform their teams.
Jennifer is also the author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking. Creating Great Choices is a Wall Street Journal bestseller and was shortlisted for Canada’s National Business Book Award.
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 three 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 Jennifer Riel at IDEO where she is a partner and global head of strategy. She’s also the author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking. Welcome to the show, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Douglas: That’s so great to have you. I’m really excited to have this conversation, and let’s kick it off with a little bit of background about how you got your start in this work.
Jennifer: Well, my original starting career was as a creative. I was a copywriter. I worked in retail on creative copy for catalogs and for the early days of .com, which dates me a little bit when I say the early days of .com. I really enjoyed that work. I loved writing. And then, one day my department was sourced, and we were sent to work at a company that was a pretty miserable experience. It was a company that had values that didn’t really fit with mine and actually thought it was a bad business decision as well to outsource our department, but no one had asked me, right? I was not around with the decision-making table as a senior, a copywriter about whether they were going to outsource our department. And so I decided that I needed to get around that table. And the route that I chose was to get an MBA.
I thought I was going behind enemy lines. I was going to learn the secret language and the secret handshake and whatever I needed to learn in order to go back and make better decisions than I thought the leaders were making around me. And when I was at the closest business school to my house, which was my decision-making criteria, I met our then Dean, a man named Roger Martin, who became my mentor and colleague, and coworker for the next 13 years where we tackled the question of how do leaders make choices and how might they make better ones and really enjoyed that work. It became the mission that we shared to help leaders in business make more effective choices more of the time and led to the book, Creating Great Choices and then ultimately to my decision to join IDEO, which is about helping bring design thinking and strategy together again in service of helping leaders make really great choices.
Douglas: I want to come back to a word you used in the beginning of that story which was criteria. So your decision making criteria, and one of the things I’ve found in this world of decision making is often people miss the criteria because they’re blinded by the choices. And I’m just curious to hear… It’s funny you said your criteria was like, what’s the thing that’s closest to where I live. So clearly, that was weighted highly. So that helped that choice rise at the top. I’m curious, in your work, have you noticed criteria lacking or any advice on people maybe tuning in more to their criteria to help them see the choices differently?
Jennifer: I think the notion of turning into the criteria is the part of your question I’m really excited to pick up on which is, I believe that the criteria are always there, but they’re very often implicit because some of the criteria are things that we wish weren’t criteria or that we pretend aren’t criteria. So we have this mental model of ourselves as leaders, as highly rational, logic-driven people who are making reasonable decisions on the basis of evidence and logic and are setting bias and emotion and all of these other very, very human things aside in service of our being a business person right now and I think that is ludicrous. Very often, we are deeply, deeply influenced by these much deeper, more emotional criteria. This has to be a decision I feel good about, it has to be a decision that fits with my values. It has to be a decision that can be executed in the next three days, because then I have to move on to the next thing, right?
We have all of these criteria that we don’t raise to the surface that sit like icebergs. We just see the very tippy-top of them, and they are what cause the decision to ultimately sink, right? We hit the iceberg, and it produces significant damage to the decisions that we make. And it really is… The term metacognition doesn’t cover all of it because metacognition is explicitly about how we think about our thinking. And I want to think about our thinking and our feelings and our social connections and all of those criteria that we bring to our decision making, whether we know it or not, whether we wish it were the case or not, and bringing more of that to the surface, unpacking it so that we can be more aware of it can help us make a more informed or more thoughtful choice.
Douglas: Yeah. And as I hear all of that, it’s like the hair on the back of my neck were rising up, because it’s like, I think about, how difficult it can be to unpack some of that, especially when biases are at play. And then you layer in a group of people trying to work through this together, and people are different altitudes or have different mindsets at play, that can be quite challenging.
Jennifer: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that you couldn’t be more right about that. I think that it is challenging to bring our own thinking and our own mental models to the surface because we’re not trained to do it. We’re not really teaching kids how to be reflective of their own thinking and the role that their emotions play in framing up their conclusions and how they feel about the world. And so we don’t have great capability in that. It doesn’t mean we can’t, there are certainly people who have developed and cultivated a deep practice of reflection and metacognition that enables them to understand not just what they believe, but why they believe it. But I think the truly foundational thing to engaging in this practice for yourself and with others is a recognition that there are very, very few right answers in the world, right?
I was talking to someone the other day, and they were talking about academics and their pursuit of truth. And I just smiled to myself because I feel like there’s very little in the world that I can look at and say that is a truth about the world. Something that is undeniable and proven and that all of us would agree on. And I’m not saying this in a fake news kind of way, but rather we are limited in our understanding of the world kind of way, right? We struggle to take in all of the complexity of the world.
And so instead, our minds build these wonderfully simplified models of whatever we are thinking about. They filter out a bunch of the complexity of whatever it is that we happen to be engaging with. So you are in the process right now of building a model of me. And it is based on eight minutes of information based on this conversation and what you Googled about me in advance of this, and maybe what you’ve read that I’ve written in that model is at least a little incomplete. It is a partial view of who I am. But what we tend to do is treat our models of the world as real or truthful.
And so, when we encounter someone who holds a different or counter view, we tend to be very threatened or triggered by that because if I have the right answer about the world and you have a different one, that is pretty clearly wrong, right? My answer, correct. Your answer, different, therefore wrong, that’s threatening. And it’s dangerous to engage in conversation with someone who has the wrong answer, because what if your wrong answer sways, other people? That’s dangerous.
And so, for me, the baseline of how we engage with other people more productively in a decision- making process is at least a little recognition that even the very best models that we hold of our world are incomplete or wrong if we want to be more extreme about it. And therefore, if someone else sees the world differently than we do, that’s an opportunity rather than a threat. The only way my model gets better is if I engage with people who see the world differently than I do.
If you and I are in violent agreement on everything, I might feel better about my perspective, but I haven’t learned anything meaningful about it. I haven’t advanced that thinking through stress testing it or challenging it. And so it really is for me about embracing this understanding that while I have a thoughtful perspective on the world, it is now and always will be incomplete.
Douglas: It reminds me of the quote you shared from Sloan about, “Are we all in agreement? Okay. Great. Let’s have the meeting next week until we’ve all thought about some different things.”
Jennifer: Yeah. I think Peter Drucker writes about Alfred Sloan, leading general motors and the turn of phrase is even more delightful. I think the big thing you framed it with is, “Let’s adjourn the meeting until we have had time to come to a disagreement.”
Douglas: Yeah.
Jennifer: Which I just find completely delightful. And I think what Sloan is getting at is it’s not that he’s against consensus. I think he ultimately wants to get to agreement, but it’s a higher order of agreement. It’s not the kind of agreement or consensus we often default to in organizations today, which is nobody actively objected. We didn’t get in an argument in the meeting, we got in, and we got out. Nobody asked the hard question, and people noded generally while we were talking, that’s the level of agreement we tend to seek in the modern organization.
And I believe what Sloan was after was a level of agreement that is much deeper. I may have thought differently when I came into the room, I may still believe there are other ways of thinking about this, but I deeply understand the choice we’re making. I feel heard about the other choices we could have made, and I personally am willing to take action to bring this choice to life. That’s a much higher bar of consensus. And I think that’s what Sloan was after, and I believe he believed that the way to get there is through the constructive consideration of disagreements.
Douglas: It also makes me think about the concept of local maxima. So if we’re all just locally agreeing and we haven’t gone out and explored and found alternatives, we might not realize that, oh, wow, we seem like we’re at the top of the peak, but once we look around, we realize, hey, there’s a bigger peak we could climb if we’re willing to put in the effort.
Jennifer: Absolutely. It ties for me back to comfort, right? Our brains are pretty naturally lazy and for very good evolutionary reasons. We don’t want to waste a lot of energy in case we are attacked by a predator, right? That’s the reason our brain likes to be at rest, but what that means is that there are very real physical rewards to being at rest, to coming to closure at the answer that feels right. And so, we don’t tend to seek that better answer because that requires an act of will. It is energetic, right? We have to lean into doing the work, and we don’t always know how to do it. We don’t always feel like it’s worth the effort relative to the reward, but I think that that is often the case when we are thinking quite narrowly about the end result, right?
Jennifer: If all we want is for people to nod, it’s not really worth looking for that higher answer that is better than my local optima. But if what you want is for the organization to truly be engaged and taking action on the choice for the solution to actually solve the problem, it’s sometimes incumbent on us to seek out that better answer that isn’t obvious. And that pushes us out of our comfort zone into something that is a little uncomfortable for a while.
Douglas: That also reminds me of something that I think you brought up in the book, which was this notion of opposing models. And I’m a big fan of it. I’ve always thought about it from the perspective of paradox, and I am a big fan of complexity theory. And how do we support these things that seem at odds with each other? And this conversation’s really resonating with me because it’s like these models that we have might be influenced by even the recency bias, like what priority do we recently talk to the shareholders? So are we considering them more importantly than our consumers or our employees? So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. To me, that’s maybe something that companies struggle with the most.
Jennifer: I think we absolutely are influenced by our biases. And one of those is recency bias. I think we also tend to pay attention to what already fits our worldview. We know that people tend to hire folks who look and sound and have similar perspectives to theirs, right? So who looks and sounds like them. And so you surround yourself in marketing with other marketers who see the world similarly, and then the finance people surround themselves with other finance people who see the world the way that they do. And then we’re surprised that those two silos avoid each other and don’t want to talk to each other because they see the world so differently. And in fact, start to cast dispersions at one another, right? The finance folks think that the marketing folks aren’t realistic or don’t understand the value of a dollar. And the marketing folks think, well, if only the finance folks understood what really matters, which is serving our customers supremely well, right?
And so we find ourselves in a place where we’re not even talking to each other, like forget that we’re disagreeing, we’re just avoiding each other. Refusing to engage with that alternative perspective, and it gets far worse when you get outside the at least nominally, collegial world of an organization into social media or politics where not only are we not engaging with people who see the world differently than we do. We are actively disparaging them and then wonder why it’s so hard to move past what feels like an incredibly entrenched and polarized world that we’re dealing with right now.
Douglas: That’s the fascinating topic of how can we use this integrated thinking approach to even solving issues in our local community or even in our families because a lot of this polarization, while it surfaces in the business setting, to some degree, it really manifests itself in these social settings for sure. I think to me, the thing that resonated from the book was this notion that instead of looking at how you make a compromise, it’s how do we find a third option that considers attributes or understandings of those current choices?
Jennifer: Yeah. I think that’s really the foundation of what integrative thinking is. That the principle holds that if you have two perspectives that are intention with each other rather than seeing the task as simply analyzing and choosing that you can, in fact, think about those two perspectives as the raw materials of your creative process. How could I seek to deeply understand these two ways of thinking about the world or these two different answer to my problem and leverage them not to choose, but to create, to find that third and better way that is something other than what I came in the room wanting and something other than what you came in the room wanting, but not the sad compromise. The sad compromise is; I’m a little less happy than if I’d gotten my way, and you’re a little less happy than if you’d gotten yours.
An integrative solution is again a higher bar. It’s about saying, how could we both be better off? How could we both be more satisfied by the solution we come to together than if we had simply chosen what I came into the room with. So the idea of creating new value, and I think that we’ve already talked about one critical element of that, which is metacognition, the ability to understand your own thinking and what you believe and why you believe it.
But the second really important aspect is empathy. And I worry a little when I say that word because I am conscious of just how loaded that word has become in our modern political context. When I say empathy, I don’t mean being nice to other people. I don’t mean hugging Nazis. I don’t think it’s about agreeing with other people just to be nice. Empathy, as defined in literature, as originally defined, is about seeking to understand another person’s perspective as they themselves understand it. Trying to be in their shoes to get their perspective, not how you would feel or how you would think if you were them, but rather how they actually think and feel.
And so, for me, one of the fundamental paths to integrative thinking is deeper curiosity about other people who see the world differently than you do. Again, that’s not agreeing with that person necessarily, but genuinely seeking to understand what they believe and why they believe it. Because my experience has been that when you fail to have that curiosity, when you simply react to reject an opposing perspective, you actually tend to push that person further away to make them entrench more deeply in the view that they had. And then you entrench more deeply in yours, and it becomes really hard to find a better answer, but it also becomes interpersonally really, really fraught because now we like each other a little bit less than we did when we walked in the room.
Douglas: Something that’s surfacing for me as you share that, is how much jargon can play a role in these disagreements or lack of understanding. And if we can just use our curiosity can be a tool to get past the jargon, because if we just ask people, how do you feel about defund the police? People might say, well, that sounds horrible. But then, once you get down to the’ what are your beliefs around should police be helping people that are struggling with schizophrenia?’ Oh, well, that doesn’t sound good. And so you get to the truth real fast. You get past the marketing sheen and the jargon and get curious at those lower levels.
Jennifer: Absolutely. I was on social media this morning, which is maybe not the healthiest early morning choice to make, but there was a video clip that I was watching about, it was an older gentleman in the states and he was being asked about Critical Race Theory. And the punchline, essentially that really liberals like me are meant to laugh at, is essentially he was saying, yeah, I don’t know what Critical Race Theory is, but I know I’m against it. And we’re meant to laugh at that, right? We educated elite liberals are meant to find that depressing and funny at the same time.
And for me, that’s a deep failure of empathy, right? So this is a person who’s been told. This is a bad thing by people who he trusts and has been told by people on the opposing side that he is both stupid and evil for listening to the people that he trusts. And then we’re surprised that he doesn’t dig any deeper, that he accepts on faith this perspective of at least people who are willing to welcome him to their side of the debate. And I found it a lot more depressing than other people seemed to find it. They seemed pretty amused, certainly on Twitter this morning, and I was pretty bummed about it.
Douglas: Yeah. I think I saw the same clip, and the thing that strikes me especially after being part of the first half of this conversation, his incomplete model is what failed him in that moment, right? He might still not be happy that it’s taught in schools, but he had an incomplete model. So his understanding was vague at best. And I think that really shines a light. It’s a great case and what you’re talking about around, he formed an impression, and I had a colleague tell me, has this concept of like, is the story you’re telling your story or someone else’s story?
Jennifer: Yeah. That’s the side of it that I had a great deal of empathy for. I think it was so easy to look at what was incomplete about his model. And what I wanted to do was understand more deeply where that came from and why he was telling someone else’s story, what that did for him and how it was tied to his identity. And again, we don’t have to love everyone we encounter. It’s not about that, but it’s so easy for us to dismiss, and other people. And I don’t think that serves us well in these times where we have so many enormous problems to solve, and if we are only working on them in our silos, I just don’t know that we get there.
Douglas: Yeah. Talking about this polarized world and empathy just brings me back to a little piece of advice that you share in the book that I think is really profound because it’s simple, and simple things that can create big results are amazing. And so I wanted to make sure listeners knew about this and it’s the idea of reading fiction can increase your empathy and especially in this time of the polarized nature of the way things are, the new cycle is just so negative. I heard an NPR report around how the New York Times is the most negative publication. And it’s been like a more and more negative leaning across all the media. But the point is, maybe there’s some other rooting in the research that proves that makes us more empathetic, but man, it helps us escape the polarization too.
Jennifer: I think it does. This is work that was done at the University of Toronto, where they were able to measure using the best tests we have, people’s inherent level of empathy. And then they asked them to read a piece of fiction and then measured again. And they started with great literature, like Dusty Eski as the thing that they had people read and saw meaningful, though temporary, but meaningful lifts in the level of empathy, because you need when you’re reading to put yourself into the experience of the person you’re reading and you’re building these worlds in your mind very actively, but then they went back and did more experiments and said, well, what if we give you a comic book, does that still have the same effect? And it does. It really is the act of engaging with another person’s experience. It does matter that it’s written, it doesn’t have the same effect if you’re just watching it, because you can see the other person and know that they are not you, you are not in their shoes. So it’s actually reading that seems to make the difference.
Douglas: It reminds me too of, I think the day in the life activities that a lot of UX researchers would do. And it reminds me of a story from IDEO, I can’t remember the gentleman’s name, but he checked himself into a hospital with a camera and filmed the whole experience, including the lights that were just like intense, and the ceiling tiles, and it just was very unpleasant overall. Even though it was him, he put himself in a different situation that modeled a different scenario to step out of the day to day. This is who I am. This is how I’m experiencing the world.
Jennifer: Yeah. Empathy is a huge part of the practice of design thinking. And the work that we do at IDEO is foundational to how we solve problems. If integrative thinking is about beginning with mental models and the tension between opposing models as our starting place. Design thinking says, start with a real human being and their real experiences and understand what those unmet needs are and use that as the basis for innovation and imagination.
And so an audio designer going, and spending six hours in a hospital emergency room with a broken leg, of course not an actual broken leg, but going through that experience, there is something deeply different about saying the average wait time in an emergency room is six hours and actually waiting in an emergency room for six hours. And even the ability to watch on speeded up video, a single individual that you know, going through the experience of waiting for that long can be meaningfully boosting to your empathy of what that experience must feel like for folks who are going through it for the first time or folks who feel equipped to deal with the complexities and ambiguity. Think of folks who don’t fluently speak the language of the hospital or the country that they’re in and how intimidating and painful that can be. The lack of information and what that does to heighten your anxiety.
I think that folks who work in hospitals, they’re almost universally good-hearted folks, but they struggle because they stop seeing what’s happening around them. They are so used to it. They’re nerd to the experience. And so whatever we can do as IDEO to help them see that with fresh eyes to feel that again is really, really important to convincing them that they could make change.
Douglas: Wow. Yeah. It reminds me of the curse of knowledge, it’s not only becoming experienced in something and just do it over and over and over again, you start to just go on autopilot.
Jennifer: Yeah. And you stop seeing things. You just stop noticing and confirmation bias makes that worse, right? Because we increasingly notice the things that we expect. And so design thinking is about noticing what is unexpected, where do people do something we didn’t design for? Where do they find off ramps to the system that we didn’t anticipate? And how do we think differently about what we might design given what we, and they really need?
Douglas: So thinking about designing for the unexpected, one of the things that we spoke about in the pre-show chat was this notion of what’s next in the world and creating ever-better choices. I’m curious to hear how some of those conversations are going and maybe how that process is unfolding for you.
Jennifer: Yeah. I am deeply interested in what comes next as we come out of this period of massive human disruption. So the disruption of the world of work is one thing, but we were disrupted just as human beings when you could no longer do the things that you’re used to doing or see the people that you love or travel to the places that you want to travel to. And in some cases, we’re meaningfully confined to very small spaces and that you were not used to being confined to. And what are the changes that are more or less permanent from that? What have we learned that we won’t unlearn? And what do we default to that feels comfortable or reassuring even though we know it’s not a terribly effective design.
And so I watch with a little amusement the organizations that are stamping their freedom saying, you will all be back in the office all day, every day as if that was something they could continue to mandate. Because of course, now we know that you absolutely can do most jobs from almost anywhere. And how do we think about what we do need to come together to do? How do we think about what being a part actually brings us, and how do we design for the answer that is neither fully remote nor fully in person, but actually better than either of those two extremes that gives us the best of collaboration and the best of heads downtime with maybe slightly fewer carbon emissions from commutes and airplanes and all of those things that we just accepted as the cost of doing business the way we did it.
Douglas: I was just live recently with my friend, Nancy Jude Dono and she was talking about what we’re going through now is similar to what happened in 2007 where there was a paradigm shift with the iPhone and these things. But some of it had gotten a bit obscured by the financial crisis. And so here we’re in this massive social shift, that’s somewhat been obscured by the pandemic. And of course, not only social, but the way we’re working on things as well. And a lot of companies haven’t truly changed the way they’re working. They may have changed their rhetoric around diversity and inclusion. Have they really stepped back and thought about what it really means to really include people and make them feel welcome from a policy and from the way that we structure things perspective. And that’s what comes up for me as you talk about this work is like it seems like a huge opportunity for these companies to upgrade their operating system.
Jennifer: I would agree, and it’s actually a really apt metaphor because the challenge of upgrading to the new operating system is, is it compatible with your legacy systems and what breaks when you try to do that? And I think that that’s something every organization is grappling with. There are organizations that were a little more well suited to thinking about inclusion differently, thinking about different ways of working in different working styles. And there were some that were spectacularly ill equipped, because they didn’t have existing norms around psychological safety and trust. And so needing to build those up in order to install the operating systems on top of it feels like a daunting task.
Douglas: Yeah. As you were saying that, it reminded me of companies that had legacy software systems versus more modern modular service oriented architectures. When DevOps came along, long and containerization, it was more easy for those service oriented folks to migrate things versus folks that are more entrenched in legacy stuff. So yeah, it’s almost like carbon dating some of your structures and policies.
Jennifer: Absolutely. And a lot of what I do is thinking about the strategy of organizations and a big part of that is thinking about their management systems, the choices they’ve made around their structures, and their culture and the digital infrastructure, the physical infrastructure. And the physical infrastructure is such a fascinating question to consider if we know that people want to work differently, that being proximate and near each other still matters, but in different ways, then there is a significant redesign imperative around what our shared physical spaces need to do for us. And I think that there are some organizations that are leaning very heavily into that conversation and some that are still feeling a little bit scared to have it.
Douglas: Yeah. There’s still a lot of ambiguity.
Jennifer: Mm-hmm.
Douglas: Excellent. Well, I think that’s a great stopping point because I think it is interesting to think about the future, and how this work is much needed for companies as they’re beginning to explore what version three of their OS is. And also just as we near the end of the pandemic, whenever that happens, we certainly are going to be addressing new shifts and new changes. So kudos for the work that you’re doing. I really appreciate you. And I wanted to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.
Jennifer: Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on. And I was thinking about what’s the last thing that I saw or read that caused me to stop. And it was again this morning on my taking a break and spending a little too much time on Twitter. I was reminded of a quote that’s actually a quite famous one, but I don’t think I’d ever really paused and read it closely. And it’s Samuel Beckett taught about failure. And so the quote famously is, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” And I don’t think I’d ever really gotten to the last two words of that quote and paused on what that means. I’ve just felt wildly inspired about the idea of failing better, what an amazing mission statement for each of us, knowing that we are flawed, knowing that we are making progress, but not reaching perfection. How might we together fail better? I was just really inspired by that this morning.
Douglas: How lovely. It’s so great. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting. Thanks so much for joining me.
Jennifer: It’s an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
