Simon Brown (00:09.571) So hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm one of the co-authors of the book, The Curious Advantage. And today I'm here with my co-author, Garrett Jones. Unfortunately, Paul can't be with us today, but we're delighted to be joined by Margaret Heffernan. Hi, Margaret.

Garrick (00:21.354) Hi there.

Margaret Heffernan (00:28.908) Hi, how are you?

Simon Brown (00:30.477) Great, and warm welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast, So Margaret, you're a renowned author, you're a speaker, a business leader, a builder of businesses, and you explore innovation and collaboration. And through your books like Uncharted and The Bigger Prize, you've inspired many to embrace uncertainty and to prioritize curiosity. So perhaps to kick us off, could you share a little bit about your journey and how you ended up where you are today?

Margaret Heffernan (00:59.908) Yes, sure. I was born in Texas. I grew up in the Netherlands. I moved to the UK when I was about 14 and decided to stay. I went to university here and then had a 13 year career at the BBC, first in radio, then in television. And it's to say I was pretty curious, which is why, you know, I moved from radio to television, from television directing and production to the sort of business side of television.

I then ran a trade association representing independent film and television production companies. And then I got kind of itchy feet and I moved back to the US to Boston, Massachusetts, where I ran tech startups for about eight years before then returning to the UK where I've since been, as you said, writing, just finishing my seventh book.

mentoring CEOs of large global organizations and doing a host of events and speeches for all kinds of conferences and festivals and that kind of thing. I've also somewhere along the line written six plays which have been produced. So I would say that, you know, that kind of weird career is absolutely

absolutely driven by curiosity, desire to learn things, a desire not to settle really. So that's why I'm so happy to be on a Curious Podcast.

Simon Brown (02:40.319) sounds like an incredibly curious career so we'll dive deeper into many of those aspects.

Garrick (02:46.955) We sure will.

Simon Brown (02:48.505) So maybe let's start around the topic on leadership and curiosity. So in a lot of your work you've highlighted the need that we question the conventional thinking, conventional wisdom. So maybe starting there, how can organisations encourage critical thinking, encourage us to go against maybe the conventional way of doing things?

Margaret Heffernan (03:15.346) Well, I think the first thing is really to start with a fair degree of humility and accept that there's always infinitely more that we don't know than that we do know. And that, you know, even the very best organizations and individuals make mistakes from time to time. And I think this is really work that grew out of the research I did for Willful Blindness, which really showed that when organizations have spectacular failures,

You know, it's very rarely the case that it was just one or two bad apples, as the cliche goes, that caused this. It's because of all sorts of other things happening and quite a lot of enabling systems. And, you know, when I wrote that book, it came out of a play, two plays I wrote about Enron for the BBC, where I looked at the trial of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, the CEO and chair of Enron, respectively.

And at the end of their trial, the judge, Simeon Lake, had referred to the legal doctrine of willful blindness. It says, if there things you could know and you should know and you somehow manage not to know, then you're deemed to be legally, sorry, you're deemed to be willfully blind. And a sort of chill went down my spine when I read that because I'm pretty sure there have been times when I was in positions of responsibility and there were things I could have known and should have known.

And so, you know, at the very least that makes you curious to want to know more because not knowing can be very dangerous. But I think it also just showed me how much more complex many of our organizations, many of our systems are. And certainly one antidote to the intrinsic vulnerability that that presents.

is to be very, very much more open-minded about what's going on, who people are, and what is there for you to see, potentially.

Simon Brown (05:22.585) essentially to be curious.

Margaret Heffernan (05:24.41) Essentially to be curious. Yeah, and I mean, let's face it, you curiosity is What got us to where we are today both good and bad? You know, we wouldn't have the capacity to be doing a podcast if some lots and lots of people throughout history hadn't been curious about all the ways of thinking and doing That are required before this technology is even possible

Garrick (05:44.935) Mm.

Garrick (05:50.027) We stand on the shoulder of giants so many times, all the little things that we take for granted, we really do.

Margaret Heffernan (05:55.898) Yeah, I mean it's not like it was sitting under a rock, you know, and we just happen to knock the rock one day. So, you know, I think people who aren't curious, I'm always very curious about them, is it that they think they know everything, in which case that's, you know, implausible, or is it that they don't know how much richer curiosity makes your life?

Garrick (06:00.144) No.

Simon Brown (06:00.227) Hahaha.

Garrick (06:03.633) That's right.

Garrick (06:10.587) Mm.

Garrick (06:22.932) I'm fascinated by the breadth of your interests, know, not only reporting and researching and writing, but writing plays in particular. mean, you really piqued my interest when I think about you as a playwright. Yes, you, Enron, great play, and really sort of opened up so many of the ideas that people were taking for granted or made so clear to us what.

what everybody was, what was happening in open daylight, what was happening in front of everybody and yet it was ignored. And so the whole thing had a catastrophic failure. I mean, there's so many questions I would ask you about not any willful blindness in organizations and what we need to do, the antidote to them and what else we can do to make sure that our cultures don't lead to organizations that fail.

But I'm also interested in the act of writing a play or the act of a scenario in the application of research. If you're curious about something and decide to write a play, how does that focus the mind? How does that enable your curiosity to move forward in a different way? What kind of questions does it throw up?

Margaret Heffernan (07:25.283) Margaret Heffernan (07:39.96) Hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean first of all, I should probably clear up any confusion. I did not write the play, the stage play called Enmon by Lucy Preble. I wrote two plays about the collapse of Enmon, one of which was called Willful Blindness. I wrote that before I wrote the book. And doing the play really is what led to the book.

Garrick (07:57.374) Yes.

Garrick (08:06.218) Can I re-ask the question then about your play Willful Blindness and just focus on that if I may?

Margaret Heffernan (08:09.614) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (08:16.154) Yeah, sure, of course.

Garrick (08:17.833) So apologies for making that mistake. So I'm fascinated about not only the idea of wealth of blindness and what we need to do to ensure that things that are going on are brought to the surface and things that are in front of us are focused on, but I'm also fascinated by your act of being a playwright. I mean, the idea of writing a play that leads to an outcome, writing a play that

if you take some research and move it forward. Can you talk to us a little bit about those activities which are fascinating as means of understanding something more?

Margaret Heffernan (09:01.358) Yeah, I mean, I guess.

I guess I'm interested in the two different forms, partly because I spent quite a lot of time directing plays at beginning of my

But in the case of the very first book I ever wrote, which is called The Naked Truth of a Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters, which was a very early book about the real challenges that women still face in 2004, at a time when, it seems incredible to believe this, but it's true,

Everybody thought all the big fights that women had to fight were over. So was a kind of early book saying, actually, I don't think so. And having finished that book, I thought, well, this is a very, think, coherent, piece of work. And I don't think it fully captures the emotional suffering and isolation that many, many, people feel.

Simon Brown (09:51.123) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (10:11.14) So I took a lot of the research and applied it to a different form, which is in itself intrinsically more emotional.

Garrick (10:20.822) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (10:22.17) I think I could say that when I wrote my two plays about Enron, one of which was called Willful Blindness, in turning the trial and the background to the trial and the aftermath of the trial, because Ken Lay died before he could be sentenced, I just started thinking of all kinds of

aspects of willful blindness, which then made me want to write the book, which is much denser in terms of what is the mechanism, the institutional mechanism that allows something as venal and as corrupt as Enron to continue, especially under the leadership of someone who deeply believed himself to be a very good man and in fact who's

Garrick (11:08.685) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (11:18.596) pastor whom I interviewed thought of as a very good man because he had brought public transit to Houston, Texas, which enabled people with very low income to travel into better paying jobs. So one thing really feeds the other. mean, what Spock, the Edmonds plays was reading Ken Lay's obituary and thinking,

Garrick (11:34.828) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (11:48.632) This is a very, very deeply conflicted human individual. How fascinating.

Garrick (11:54.328) Hmm. Yes.

Simon Brown (11:56.643) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (11:57.966) So it's a sort of circular process. doesn't really kind of matter where I start. But I usually end up with a lot more material and a lot more understanding than sits comfortably within a single format, I guess.

Garrick (12:15.599) Hmm.

Simon Brown (12:17.353) And diving into that challenge a little bit that you were describing there as a CEO or a leader in an organization being held liable for that willful blindness of things maybe you should have known, but whether you did or didn't know. as you're coaching CEOs now, what's the guidance that you give them around that? Because you started off around how we can't know everything, we need to be humble that we don't know everything.

risk both personal and to our organisation in the things that we don't know. So how do we navigate through that balance of being held liable for knowing enough about everything without being able to actually know everything that you need to know?

Margaret Heffernan (13:03.704) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I don't have a formulaic approach to my mentoring, but something I'm always on the lookout for is, among other things, maybe what are the topics my client isn't talking about that I might expect him or her to talk about? Where is the narrative too coherent? How much argument, debate?

Simon Brown (13:29.239) Yep.

Margaret Heffernan (13:33.786) is there within this organization? How safe is it to have an argument with this individual? How open-minded and curious are they? How formulaic are they? So it's certainly something that's always at the back of my mind. And also, what are the questions that I can ask that perhaps the people that they work with on a daily basis don't ask?

they don't ask themselves. And I come at this really from a perspective of having run a number of companies in an age before mentoring or coaching was particularly professionalized and really wishing I had a good thinking partner, somebody who would challenge me and probe. And so I think the approach I take is very driven by the kind of challenge

Garrick (14:16.177) Mm.

Garrick (14:22.363) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (14:32.734) and if you like, criticism that I wish I'd had.

Simon Brown (14:43.865) We had a while back Brian Murphy from Microsoft on and he talked about the notion of holding lightly on what we believe to be true. And in what you're describing there, if someone sounds almost too certain, too coherent about something, maybe that's actually a warning sign. There's something else I was listening to recently where it talks about, we have our...

Garrick (15:03.27) Yes.

Simon Brown (15:08.781) beliefs and then we have what what we deem to be true but actually most of what we know to be true we don't actually know to be true and we need to actually be constantly challenging of actually there's not really very much that we can be absolutely certain is true that most things can be challenged or could change and yeah we need to be very cautious around holding things as absolutely definitive.

Garrick (15:35.261) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (15:35.386) Yeah. And I mean, mean, you know, in his testimony to Congress, Alan Greenspan called those things ideologies, right, when he had to acknowledge that he had an ideology which had blinded him to failures in the derivatives market every two years for the 10 years leading up to the financial crisis. Now his ideology was that deregulated markets were always safer.

And yet there were, you know, almost like clockwork every two years, there was a big blow up of some kind, which he dismissed as irrelevant. And he admitted, you know, in his testimony to having identified a flaw in his ideology. Now, this is very tricky because all of us, I mean, I don't call them ideologies, I call them mental models.

Simon Brown (16:12.505) you

Garrick (16:20.52) Hmm.

Garrick (16:30.58) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (16:31.282) All of us have mental models. We couldn't function if we didn't. Mental models show us what to pay attention to, what not to pay attention to, what's important, what isn't important. We all develop those and modify them as experience teaches us. And they are very, very helpful. We would drown in trivia and detail without them. But the danger is that

Simon Brown (16:35.033) Yes.

Garrick (16:43.934) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (17:00.398) they draw our attention to confirming data and away from disconfirming data. And one of the heroes in Mineralful Blindness, if it could be said to have heroes, is an epidemiologist, Alice Stewart, who identified the danger of cancer in the practice of X-raying pregnant women in the 1950s.

Garrick (17:03.774) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (17:28.694) And she had a fantastic way of thinking about this because she had fought this battle for 25 years before either the US or the UK medical establishments stopped doing that. And her way of working was she employed a colleague who was a statistician whose job it was to prove that she was wrong. And her argument was if he couldn't prove that she was wrong, then she could carry on fighting the good fight.

Simon Brown (17:51.641) You

Garrick (17:52.415) Mm.

Simon Brown (17:57.687) Love that.

Garrick (17:58.86) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (17:59.0) Now I think that's a fantastic model for thinking.

Garrick (18:02.731) I agree. I'm so struck in this conversation, which is fascinating for me, about the negative. When you said it's not only the things that people, there's two coherence, but there's also the things they're not talking about, maybe just as revealing. What are the things that are sort of hushed away, or things you would expect to be open about, but they're not there? have just two things come to mind. I've just come from seeing...

a play by Robert Icke on the West End called Oedipus, which is a reworking of the Oedipus story, put set in modern politics. And of course, all the tragedy unfolds. But what it is, is essentially a whodunit of, and they give you all the ideas right at the beginning, and then it unfolds. And there's a collective moment where you realize it's been in front of you the whole time and the entire audience kind of sighs and breaks down as they sort of realize.

the tragedy and then of course the tragedy unfolds and it's just... I have... It's catastrophic!

Simon Brown (18:59.297) I hope you've not just given away the plot for anyone that's about to see it.

Margaret Heffernan (19:04.098) I mean, to be fair, know, Oedipus is kind of the patron saint of willful blindness. And of course, you know, it's not just a metaphor in that.

Garrick (19:08.629) Yes.

Garrick (19:14.753) No, that's right. And then the catastrophe is, of course, extreme. But I'm also struck by Lord Russell, Bertrand Russell, who really looked at this idea of mental models in some respects and where they can not only help us, but also the heuristics of where if we hold on to them too tightly, they can lead us down a road where we make assumptions about the reality that's not there. So we need to check reality. And he's famously said something like

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, you know, people have ideology, but it's the wiser people who are full of doubt. And I think...

Margaret Heffernan (19:52.334) Well, and Voltaire said it before Russell said it, but he said something to the effect of, doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd.

Garrick (20:03.578) I love it. I was thinking, you've also spoken about the uninspiring nature of our organizations and many of our office spaces. Things have changed. A lot of people are working from home, but there's a requirement that a lot of people go in. Organizations are working that out post-COVID. Should we be in the office three times a week and so on?

You often highlighted the need to question conventional wisdom. Bring those two together. What do you think we need to think about fostering curiosity and collaboration in our offices or in our organizational spaces in this digital world?

Margaret Heffernan (20:49.754) Well, I mean, the first thing to say is I'm not an architectural determinist. I don't think you can create a curiosity pod into which people walk and suddenly become very curious. But I would say a couple of things on that topic because it's certainly been, to my mind, a very banal and frustrating debate to witness.

Garrick (21:02.423) Mm. Okay.

Margaret Heffernan (21:16.442) The first thing I would say about the whole remote working, you know, malarkey, is I think that the productivity debate has been deeply uninformed. There's a very, I would say among managers, there's a very poor understanding of productivity. There's a general instinctive belief that more hours equals more output. And we've known since 1888, which is when the first serious productivity experiments were conducted.

We know that this is not true. We know that productivity taps out at about 40 hours a week because after that people get tired. When they get tired, they make mistakes and then they need more time to clear up the messes that they've made. I think we all relate to this. When I do my taxes late at night, you know, it's a really bad, bad decision and I end up redoing them in the morning, for example.

Garrick (22:04.827) You

Garrick (22:11.067) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (22:15.16) So I think there's a failure to really to absorb that basic fact which has been confirmed across countries, across industries forever and ever. There's also fantastic research which I think hasn't been paid enough attention to which is a fantastic researcher whose name will come to me but she was working with a software company that had never shipped a product on time.

And now to the software industry, can say that, you know, software is infamous for never being shipped on time. And so she was called in to being asked essentially, you know, what can we do about this? And she did the kind of classic thing. Linda Babcock is her name. I knew it would come to me. She did a classic time and motion study. She asked everybody to keep a log of how they were spending.

Garrick (22:43.726) Right.

Simon Brown (22:50.386) Yeah.

Garrick (22:51.136) Yeah

Margaret Heffernan (23:12.61) And when you read the logs, it's kind of heartbreaking because they feel like a lot of our working days, which is, which is one example, a guy comes in to work really early because he has a big chunk of work he wants to get done really before the day takes off. And he sits down prepared to dig in and then somebody else has come in early and stops by and chats to him and has a question.

Then there's, I don't know, there's a fire alarm and then there's an IT reboot and then there's a meeting and then somebody stops him in the hallway. And it goes on like that as normal work does until four o'clock in the afternoon when finally, while they're tired from his early stop, he finally gets to do this work. And what's interesting is that kind of work, the head down, focused, concentrated, isolated, solitary work, everybody describes his real work. It's really thinking.

and it really benefits from no interruption. And in the logs there's real work and there's everything else basically. That's what work is. It's real work and everything else. It's the meetings, the hallway conversation. All of these are important by the way. Anyway, Babcock has this very brilliant insight that the problem, one of the problems might be that the real work

Garrick (24:21.969) Hmm. Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (24:33.112) needs a lack of interruption, needs protection. So she proposes what she calls quiet time windows, which if I remember correctly are, for example, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, nobody can interrupt anybody else until noon. This is quiet time. You can send them an email, they don't have to read it, you can't drop by, you can't phone them, you can't text them, you cannot interrupt.

The rest of the working week, so that's every afternoon and full days on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it's everything else. They achieved a productivity increase of 60 % in this experiment. Now, it didn't cost anything to do, and yet I have struggled to find a single company prepared even to try something like this. Now, if somebody said,

Simon Brown (25:17.305) Wow.

Garrick (25:29.76) you

Margaret Heffernan (25:31.0) Margaret, you can improve your productivity by 60 % by following this simple pattern. I would leap at it. I mean, I definitely try to introduce it into my life in the sense that I try to keep my mornings clear for writing because that's when I'm at my best. And it's certainly before the work I do in other countries really gets going. But I think we have to appreciate that there's much about

Simon Brown (25:39.735) haha

Margaret Heffernan (25:59.416) the way that we demand that people multitask, the multiple ways of insisting that they communicate, the kinds of offices that means that people are endlessly distracted, that absolutely guarantees a loss of productivity. That's what you should be talking about. Not about who's where when, but teaching people to understand how they're most productive and then trusting them.

Garrick (26:18.655) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (26:28.932) to make the right decisions. In other words, if I have to do the budget, or I have to do a presentation, or I have to write something, if I have kids at home, I'm probably much better in the office. If I don't have kids at home, I'm definitely better at home. Yes, the second, sorry, I'll start again. The other crucial thing about this experiment is that when Babcock analyzed it in detail, what she found was...

Part of the productivity gain is an increase in helpfulness. Now what do I mean by that? Well, what does she mean by that? When you know you have protected time to do the real work, when people ask you for help, you're much more willing to give it. Instead of saying, as I had to say to somebody yesterday, I just cannot possibly, possibly, possibly help you. I'm just too overloaded with work.

Simon Brown (27:00.909) you

Simon Brown (27:17.241) you

Margaret Heffernan (27:28.068) people suddenly said, I can help you, can I do it tomorrow afternoon? Now, helpfulness is one of the absolute characteristic markers of high achieving organizations and teams, because essentially helpfulness is information flowing throughout your organization. And people knowing more means they can solve problems much more quickly. So I think this is a much, much,

Garrick (27:53.142) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (27:57.614) more realistic, cheap, can I say it, compassionate way of thinking about productivity than these dictatorial mandates saying you will be here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or you will be here four days a week, or you have to be here five days a week, even if it's unproductive, right? Because I want to show I can boss you around.

Garrick (28:03.178) Yeah

Garrick (28:23.372) Mm.

Margaret Heffernan (28:27.116) Now, how does this relate to curiosity? It's not possible to be curious when you're overwhelmed, overstretched, and tired. Because all you want to do is focus to get the work done as fast as you can so you don't feel so harassed and stressed. So the way we work people in very traditional, very forceful ways,

I think intrinsically mitigates their curiosity. And I've had many organizations ask me, how do we make our people more curious? And I usually go through a kind of menu, which is, so are they in the office almost by demand most of the time? yes. Do they have a really detailed job description? yes. Do they have KPIs and targets that they have to meet? Definitely.

And did they get bonuses if they meet them or exceed them? Absolutely. And then I'll say, there's nothing I can do. You can just manage curiosity out of your institution. People are going to do exactly what you tell them. They're going to struggle if there's too much of it. They're going to get tired and stressed. And the extrinsic reward that you dangle in front of them will absolutely distract them from any intrinsic

Simon Brown (29:33.888) You

Garrick (29:37.738) out yeah

Garrick (29:56.068) Mm.

Margaret Heffernan (29:56.839) pleasure or motivation which might, might make them curious.

Garrick (29:59.364) Mm.

Garrick (30:03.098) reading yesterday about how extremes, motivation is absolutely key to learning anything and how we need those motivators within ourselves to actually pay attention and so on. But the other thing that occurs to me is about the digital and it's such a narrow bandwidth and it's one of the reasons why we wrote The Curious Advantage because we were thinking about what we teach, you know, kids and the next generation and people we work, you know, with or who we lead.

in this new digital realm. When you talk about helpfulness, it really makes me think because there is a small idea that can lead to very large outcomes and can have knock-on effects. And I love that. When you talk about... I was triggered a little bit when you said you're not an architectural determinist because I think I am a little bit, in as much as.

I'm not knocking it at all, in as much as, you know, we talked to a couple of architects the other day and they talk about MIT and how there's this corridor in MIT, the long corridor that joins people together, where they're sort of, you can write on the walls in some respects and the water coolers along there. And they've had so many Nobel prizes that have come out from the intersection of people in that corridor. And the other thing I was thinking of, you know, there's some great schools where

Margaret Heffernan (31:18.351) Yeah.

Garrick (31:31.399) a headmaster introduced a time in the day when all the teachers would be present in a space and all the pupils were free to come or not come to just have a free exchange of information. Someone could meet each other to talk about a water polo requirement, the development of the school play. They could, you know, who's going to meet whom to achieve just a free flow of information, which had a huge impact on how the school organized.

and how people were motivated extrinsically within it. Enormous impact on results, just that one thing. And yet to... Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (32:07.258) So I would not disagree with that in the sense that I've certainly seen what you're talking about. I I spent a long time at CERN when I was writing about the incredible breakthroughs that have occurred there. And they have a lunchroom about the size of a football field. And that's pretty much everybody will tell you where all the work gets done. So I absolutely agree with that. And I have...

Garrick (32:19.078) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (32:36.47) All the companies I've ever run have had open plan offices. I'm a very big believer in having beautiful things around people. I'm a very big believer in getting rid of straight lines and right angles. And I'm horrified by the battery chicken farms that modern offices nowadays are. I mean, I think they're hideous. But...

Garrick (32:40.605) Yes.

Garrick (33:01.042) Yeah. How do we deal? Sorry about it.

Margaret Heffernan (33:05.688) But I would also say that you can introduce these areas where people can meet and linger. And if you overload people with work, nobody will be there, right? So I'm not an architectural determinist in the sense that I think that culture can kill any building, no matter how beautifully designed it is.

Garrick (33:22.268) Yeah. Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (33:34.2) I'm also reminded of Robert Shiller, whom I interviewed once, the economist, who described how when he first started working as an economist at Yale, the department shared a building with sociology and psychology. And he said the interactions were incredibly exciting, interesting, and enriching. And he thought it was a dark day.

when each department became so big that they separated out into their different buildings. And, you know, when I think about actually how dehumanized much economics have become, I think he has a point.

Garrick (34:05.651) Mm.

Garrick (34:17.129) Yes, the reason I love your point about helpfulness, which seems so small yet I think has huge impact, is because it's something that you can do online. the challenge we face is that whether we bring people into work or not, or even if all the work is done through freelance networks and communities and organizations, there's something about working

Margaret Heffernan (34:26.936) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (34:31.289) Yeah.

Garrick (34:45.574) apart from each other, we may not be able to construct these opportunities to bring people together in different ways, even if we want to get, but there's also another opportunity to bring so many people together who wouldn't normally connect. So it has, you know, it swings around about, but helpfulness, when I think about it, that's, that's a trope that I can apply in my life, which I think would have impact beyond, it doesn't matter whether we're together or we think anyway, that's.

Margaret Heffernan (34:57.743) Bye bye.

Garrick (35:15.592) That's my response.

Margaret Heffernan (35:15.642) Yeah. Now I think it's interesting because it, you know, it feels like a kind of a Boy Scout kind of word. It doesn't feel like good old, you know, robust management speak. But the late Richard Hackman really devoted most of his scholarly career to the study of helpfulness. And it's from him that the research comes showing that it is an absolutely key identifier of very productive organizations.

Garrick (35:23.135) Yes.

Garrick (35:27.381) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (35:45.154) And so that depends in turn on people being curious about one another. Who are you? What are you doing? Why did you come to work here? Why are you interested in that discipline? What are you working at right now? And I remember the very first tech startup I ran in Boston.

Of course I hired really brilliant people, gave them really hard problems to solve, this sort of stuff you're absolutely supposed to do. And I remember looking out across the office and thinking, wow, this is way, way, way too quiet. And I would see people working away, working away at their screens, and then they'd stop and they'd go into the kitchen and they'd get their lunch out of the refrigerator, go back to their desk and eat and carry on working. And then at night they'd go home and I'd think...

Well, this is terrible. It's just terrible. What am I going to do? What did I do in the UK? Well, at the UK, because traffic in London is so terrible, we'd stop working and go to the pub for half an hour, maybe an hour, to wait for the traffic to subside. And here I am in Boston, and it's winter eight months of the year, and there are no pubs, and I don't know what to do. So I just, I was desperate, because I just thought we're never going to get anywhere like this.

So I said, okay, every Friday, 4.30, down tools, you can have a glass of wine, of beer. Three people every week are gonna stand up and tell us who they are, what they care about, what their hopes and dreams are, their favorite music, their favorite book. And because we need to get to know each other. And this, I have to say, it really was excruciating. Of course, quickly dawned on people.

that it was equal opportunity excruciation, if you like, because I'm going to be nice to you if you're doing it, because I want you to be nice to me when I'm doing it, when it's my turn. And it was miraculous. mean, you know, within two weeks, people started talking to each other. And strangely enough, I was talking about this at an HR conference in Boston a couple of years ago.

Garrick (37:39.841) Yes.

Simon Brown (37:46.233) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (38:03.288) And unbeknownst to me, there was a woman in the audience who had worked for me then, who stood up in the Q &A and talked about how this completely changed the whole atmosphere in the office. And I feel as my great contribution to management thinking, this is a little simple. But it is astounding what happens if people don't have anything to go on.

Simon Brown (38:22.905) It is. Simple as that.

Garrick (38:24.559) Ha

Margaret Heffernan (38:30.38) I had a conference a couple of months ago in Washington. A young woman came up to me in the break and asked me, how do you make conversation with people? And I said to her, well, you do exactly what you've just done, which is you ask questions. But she was really anxious about this because I mean, partly a post pandemic, but you know, I think much more significantly the rise of digital.

Garrick (38:30.767) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (38:59.002) meant she felt really uncomfortable being curious, showing she was curious about someone that she didn't know. And I think this is desperate. This is desperate for her as a human being, desperate for her professionally, and desperate for all of us in terms of being able to weave something we might identify as a society.

So curiosity, you know, it really is a vital part of our life plan.

Simon Brown (39:27.801) Thank

Simon Brown (39:33.401) Absolutely. So we're thrilled to be talking with Dr. Margaret Heffernan, a renowned author, speaker and business leader whose career spans media, leadership and organisational psychology. Margaret spent 13 years at the BBC producing dramas and documentaries and writing Simon Sharma's television. She later led multimedia initiatives for companies like Intuit and Standard & Pause before serving as CEO of several tech companies. She's an accomplished author of six books, including Willful Blindness that we heard about earlier and Uncharted. And Margaret's work's been recognised

globally with her TED Talks amassing over 15 million views. She's currently Professor of Practice at the University of Bath. She mentors global CEOs, chairs the board of DAACs and advises cultural inquiries in the UK, continuing to inspire leaders worldwide with her insights on curiosity, collaboration and resilience. So Margaret, earlier you mentioned chickens and your TED Talk was where I first came across you with the notion of super chickens. So can you tell us a little bit about

Margaret Heffernan (40:28.281) Bye.

Simon Brown (40:33.456) a super chicken and whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Margaret Heffernan (40:37.976) Yeah, so the super chicken story came about when I read some research about an evolutionary biologist who was studying productivity. And in his case, it was a bit simpler than with human productivity because it's really easy to measure. You just measure the eggs. And he was wondering, you know, what can you do to increase the productivity of chickens? So he did an experiment where

He put a whole bunch of kind average-ly productive chickens together in... together for... can't remember. Let just... me get this story clear in my head again. I'm trying to remember the collective noun for chickens. Flock. Flock, flock, flock. Okay. Right. Okay. Now it's a flock. It's a flock.

Simon Brown (41:29.913) A flock of chickens

Garrick (41:30.94) clutch.

Garrick (41:36.656) Or cluck, or is that a duck? I can't remember. A flock.

Margaret Heffernan (41:40.762) So this came about when I was thinking about a collective nature of productivity. And I came across some research done by an evolutionary biologist at Purdue University. But he wasn't studying human productivity, which is obviously incredibly difficult and complex to measure. He was studying it in chickens. And it's much easier to study it in chickens because you just count the eggs.

So he designed an experiment where he took a whole bunch of average-ly productive, healthy chickens, put them into a flock, and left them to do whatever it is that chickens do all day long for three generations. And then he constructed, much more carefully, a flock made up of specifically the highest, the most productive chickens that he could find.

in his lab and he let them do whatever it is that chickens do for three generations. And after that time had passed, the contrast was really startling in the sense that the average flock was more productive than ever. Lots of chickens, all very healthy, cranking out eggs like crazy, know, fully feathered, fantastic flock. The other super productive super chickens

were a completely different story because all but three had died. They basically killed each other.

Garrick (43:14.514) Haha

Simon Brown (43:15.226) Yeah.

Garrick (43:16.881) you

Margaret Heffernan (43:18.1) And his conclusion was that the productivity of the three remaining chickens had cost the productivity of all the rest. And when he rolled this out to his fellow academics, one of the scientists in the audience jumped up and said, I know those super chickens, they work in my lab. And instantly what people saw, which I'm not sure if he had had in mind when he did.

Garrick (43:28.137) Hmm.

Garrick (43:42.142) Yeah

Margaret Heffernan (43:48.632) was that getting people to compete with each other, which people often think is a great way to make people productive, action ends up fostering enormous amounts of dysfunction, aggression, and waste. And the parallel with organizations, I think, is there for all to see. There are many, many organizations that deliberately foster

Garrick (44:00.076) Yeah.

Garrick (44:07.264) Yes.

Margaret Heffernan (44:17.018) competition between people. That's what forced ranking is all about. And of course, forced ranking was proselytized by GE under Jack Welch. And it's really interesting because I did some work for GE Aviation a few years ago. And I said, you guys still doing forced ranking? And he said, no, we gave it up years ago. I said, that's so interesting. Why? Because you persuaded.

Garrick (44:23.19) Yes.

Garrick (44:41.974) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (44:44.666) most of the Fortune 500 companies to adopt this, as well as companies all over the world. So how come you gave it up? And by the way, did it so very quietly. And they said, well, eventually we got around to crunching the numbers. And we found that it didn't improve productivity at all.

Garrick (45:04.598) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (45:05.582) What it turned out to be really good for was firing.

Garrick (45:10.811) yeah, terrible.

Margaret Heffernan (45:11.554) Now, at the same time, I was thinking about Microsoft. So I know Microsoft pretty well. They invested in one of my early companies. They absolutely had an incredible culture of internal competition. And at the same time, they had a whole string of misses. So when Netscape went public, first ever internet IPO, Microsoft didn't have a web browser even in development.

They never developed great database technology, although the database is the foundational structure of the internet. They came late to games, they came late to phones, and they came late to natural language search. So these are the five foundational technologies of the internet, and this great company managed to miss them all.

And I was not the first or the last person to start saying, I guess this would have been around 2012-ish. The internal competition in Microsoft is really what is messing it up. It's a kind of religious belief and it is destroying what was once a great company. Now, a really interesting thing.

Almost the day Satya Nadella was announced as new CEO. This was at a time when people were writing Microsoft's obituary and they couldn't find a superhero, which is what they really had wanted. They had to find an internal hire. One of the very first things Nadella did was announce that they were going to get rid of forced ranking. And I thought, isn't that interesting? As it's somebody who works inside the company.

see that too. My country's lots of people could see it. And what you actually get in companies that use forced ranking is the top fight like crazy to stay there. The people at the bottom are just in a state of fear that they're going to drop out and be kicked out. So that's not very productive. And so you don't have to be a mathematical whiz kid to figure out the safest place to be.

Margaret Heffernan (47:34.816) is in the big fat average middle of the bell curve.

So this theory that if you make everybody compete the best rises to the top, depends a lot on how you define the best, maybe it's the most vicious, but there is really no evidence to suggest that it improves productivity or innovation.

Garrick (48:01.135) It's amazing you talk about Microsoft and Satya in particular because one of the other things he introduced was the idea of curiosity and really made a big, big move in trying to put curiosity on the agenda and something again, you know, that small idea that had a huge impact in getting people to connect in different ways and giving up force-drinking in that way. I've never thought about in those terms and how damaging it can be. I mean, you

Margaret Heffernan (48:09.251) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (48:21.082) Yeah.

Garrick (48:29.829) In your book, A Bigger Prize, you emphasize collaboration of competition, for sure. Have you got other tips and tricks? How can leaders cultivate genuine collaboration, do you think, in today's workplaces?

Margaret Heffernan (48:34.554) Mm.

Margaret Heffernan (48:42.69) Well, I think certainly, you know, very large organizations would struggle to live without hierarchy, but I think you can try to make the hierarchy as flat as possible. You can certainly look at a company like Arup, which is in, I don't know, 40 different countries, and there definitely are hierarchies within Arup, but I think only three levels, maybe? Maybe a few more, but not a lot. The, you know, the span between the highest salary and the lowest salary isn't

gigantic. And it does have very much of a learning culture in the sense that if you're an expert in one area and you want to learn another technology, you can join a project that involves that new technology in a very junior role. So this creates a lot of lateral movement.

which means again, much improved information flows, which is one reason I think that company is so incredibly innovative. So I think those sorts of structures definitely help. think what, know, Satya Nadella is an outspoken advocate of Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset. And that's absolutely about intrinsic motivation and curiosity. So I think...

Garrick (49:46.737) Yes.

Simon Brown (49:57.817) you

Margaret Heffernan (50:07.03) I think creating a culture in which it's very well understood that learning is how companies grow. And the more people love learning and pursue learning, the richer the knowledge base of the company becomes. And my personal view is I don't care what people learn as long as they're learning something. I mean, I don't care if they want to learn crochet or knitting or painting or Greek or

Garrick (50:31.25) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (50:36.922) or a new database language. I think learning keeps people alive and curious. And it's why I was always in favor of providing payment for people who wanted to learn something and time for people who wanted to learn something. Because I think the employer benefits. Wholeheartedly, it doesn't have to be a specifically tactical subject.

Garrick (50:47.432) Yeah.

Margaret Heffernan (51:05.378) So I think that definitely helps collaboration, having an appetite for learning because we want to learn from each other. I also think time together fosters collaboration. We know again that teams that work together for long periods of time get better. We don't need to keep swapping people out in and out in the hope that that refreshes the team. Time together makes people care about each other.

I'm also very smitten by a really wonderful research paper written by a scientist named Gauri Alon at the Weizmann Institute, who like every other scientist running a lab, has a lab meeting once a week. But he has a really interesting rule, which is the first half hour nobody can talk about science. Now, I'm married to a scientist. I know scientists love nothing more than talking about science, you know.

Garrick (51:33.064) Hmm.

Simon Brown (51:59.604) Hahaha.

Margaret Heffernan (51:59.77) So I can imagine this is a tough rule to assert. But what he said, so they can talk about theater, sport, politics, holidays, kids, anything, not science. And what Aurielon said was that when he was doing his PhD, he got to a point, and this is very common, I know, where he didn't know which way was up, whether he was learning or forgetting or getting somewhere or going backwards.

And to the point that sometimes he couldn't even get out of bed in the morning. He was so overwhelmed and confused. And he said he realized that actually what kept him going were other people and their care for him and their interest in him. And so he thought, that's what I need in my lab. I need people who care for each other and take an interest in each other. And that's why he does that. So I think what's interesting now to me about all of this is

Garrick (52:41.142) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (52:59.992) that spending time together not talking about work turns out to be very efficient. It just doesn't look that way. And everybody is so obsessed with efficiency, mustn't waste time. Don't talk to each other, don't get to know each other, just log on, crack on, keep working and cut the small talk because there's work to be done. I think this is a catastrophe. It does nothing for collaboration.

Simon Brown (53:11.641) Hmm.

Garrick (53:11.937) Hmm.

Margaret Heffernan (53:29.914) It does nothing for helpfulness. It does absolutely nothing for the intrinsic reward of work.

Simon Brown (53:39.041) Music tonight is Margaret and I have been working on our learning strategy at UI and that time together and time to learn are two pieces that feature very prominently in how we're taking things forward. So we're coming up to time. We had a fascinating conversation. So some of the things we've covered, your background and your move from Texas to the UK through the BBC, through radio into television, through your plays into tech startups and then your books and your

mentoring of CEOs with curiosity is a key theme throughout that. Talking about willful blindness and how that linked into Enron and this dilemma of needing to know things but not being able to know everything that one actually needs and the power of curiosity in that context. Talked about some of the great questions to ask around looking at what topics people aren't talking about, where are people too coherent, where is maybe the argument too strong, or is it really safe to actually have an argument with

someone to open up their mind to other things. We talked around how doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd. I love that as a quote. Around how do we foster curiosity in the workplace? And some great tips that you shared for doing that. This notion around more hours equaling more output and how that's not true in some of the productivity research around that, particularly diving into Linda Babcock's

work as well and yeah how we can teach around things to the things to do to be most or how we should be teaching around the things to be most productive. Great discussion around helpfulness, power of helpfulness and maybe that's a very easy win for us to be encouraging more helpfulness in our organisations. The challenge you saw in your business that when it was too quiet and how you instilled an alternative to the British pub by

bringing in time for people to have drinks in the office and actually share some things about each other and the power that that created. Then we dived into super chickens and the role of productivity and that maybe we don't want to encourage too many super chickens after that research where only three of them survived the experiment. And actually the more average flock was far more productive in reality. And then dived a little bit into collaboration, talking about

Simon Brown (56:08.835) forced ranking and some of the things maybe in the past that's been held up as productive and maybe the research is telling us otherwise and then ending on that lovely point around time to learn and how learning is how companies grow and how learning keeps us alive. So lots that we covered. From all of that, one takeaway maybe that you'd leave our listeners with.

Margaret Heffernan (56:30.49) Good! Well that's quite a lot in an hour!

Simon Brown (56:33.771) Exactly. A very productive discussion.

Garrick (56:34.368) Hahaha!

Margaret Heffernan (56:38.244) Very productive, yes. Well that's partly because you came to it very organised.

Simon Brown (56:45.002) So a huge thank you Margaret for spending time with us. It's been a fascinating conversation.

Margaret Heffernan (56:49.929) Well, thank you for asking me. It's been a wonderful, wonderful conversation and I'll look forward to hearing it when it goes up.

Simon Brown (56:59.395) Fantastic.

Garrick (56:59.952) That's fantastic.

Simon Brown (57:01.357) Yep, you've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're always curious to hear from you. So if there's something useful or valuable from this conversation, then we do encourage you to write a review on your preferred channel saying why this was so and what you've learned from it. We always appreciate hearing our listeners thoughts and having a curious conversation. So join today using the hashtag Curious Advantage. And the Curious Advantage book is available on Amazon worldwide. Audio, physical, digital, or audio book copy now to further explore our 70s model for being more curious. Subscribe today and follow the Curious Advantage on LinkedIn and Instagram.

to keep exploring curiously. See you next time!

Simon Brown (57:37.219) Thank you, Margaret.

Margaret Heffernan (57:38.702) My pleasure.

Garrick (57:38.896) Thank you, Margaret.