I am here to talk to you about rebel talent and I would like to start by
asking you to think about the type of words that come to mind when you think
about the rebels in your organizations. Now this is a question that I love to
often ask whenever I talk to people like you or whenever I'm spending time in
organizations and it's interesting to see the type of words that usually come
to mind. So there are the outcasts, the troublemakers, sometimes I hear words
like criminals, can you please show them the door, they are annoying, they should be
punished. Now what I want to do in the time that we have together is try to
give you a new perspective on who the rebels are in organizations. At least in
the way I think about them as I think about them agents of positive change.
People who can really bring about a lot of innovation by doing something a
little bit differently. What is interesting is that we can go back to a
company like Pixar, and they embrace this agreement, in fact they've done a lot of
interesting activities around the fact of bringing tension and conflict out so
as to improve what's going on with producing their movies as well as life
at work. In fact you might have heard about they're really interesting
initiative of having a notes day where basically people go to work and they
don't do what they're usually doing but they spend time thinking through what's
not going well in the organization, in their team, in their jobs, and then they
write notes about just that. They share them with others,
and then they figure out how to make the organization better. This is just one of
the ways in which tension and conflict is created so as to make the
decision-making process better and in the end the outcomes that the
organization is interested in also better. Now what is interesting is that
that's very different from what we all enjoy. Think
about conflict that's usually the way we try to face it we avoid it altogether
and having disagreements just makes us uncomfortable. We love people who look
like us and we rather move away from attention and conflict since we think
that is not an important part of the process. And I would argue that rebels
are fighting against these national tendency of avoiding conflict, of
avoiding tension, and instead they embrace it the same way that you see
Pixar animators and producer do. Now one way in which we can embrace conflict is
by bringing in multiple perspective. I'd like you to think about a current
decision you faced whether at work or in your life. If I were to guess the way you
approached it is by asking the question, what should I do? And as it turns out
that's the wrong way of approaching the question, even if it comes natural to us
and it's the wrong way because it focuses our attention on our own view
and is usually just one view. What we should be doing instead is embracing
other perspectives and for doing that we need to ask the question a little bit
differently. Rather than saying what should I do, we should be asking what
could I do. Just that little shift allows us to bring multiple perspective, create
tension, create conflict, but in a way that can be productive and helpful to
our own engagement. Now I would like to stop thinking about conflict for a
second. I'd like you to engage in a little exercise. We talked about the
importance of reflection so I like you to take a piece of paper and write down
the answer to a few questions. I'm gonna give you four dimensions and for each of
them I would like you to think about who's in this room and rank yourself
against them. So let's imagine that I'm giving you one dimension if you think
that on that particular dimension you're the
best person in the room, you're gonna write down a hundred percent. If you
think you're the worst person in the room, it's a zero and if you think you're
somewhere in between you can choose a number between zero and 100 percent. Your
ability to make a decision is the first dimension like you to rank yourself on.
The second dimension is your ability to get along well with other people. The
third dimension is your ability to negotiate effectively. And finally why
not your honesty you've all done the math? Yeah? As I said the numbers of yours
but if you don't mind just out of curiosity, if the average number that
you've wrote down on the piece of paper is a number bigger than 50 just
raise your hand up high so you can see it. See that's why I love the idea of
spending time with you this morning. This is fantastic that basically we got, I
think, 99% of the room having numbers above 50 we just proved a mathematical
impossibility in this very room. Now, we're doing this exercise not to make
fun of each other but to point to a natural tendency that we all have which
is to think very highly of ourselves in fact I could have picked whatever
dimension and we would have seen the same results. To convince you I want to
bring some data into the picture and tell you about a survey that was
conducted back in 1996 on a thousand Americans. They were asked a slightly
different question, and the question was, who's most likely to get into heaven? And they
were ranking a bunch of people, one of which was Bill Clinton—didn't do so well,
at the time, remember this was 1996— another person was Michael Jordan who
did a little bit better. Mother Teresa interestingly enough of Got a 79
percent chance of getting into heaven. We have high standards that's not a bad thing,
I would say. But the reason why I'm mentioning this data to you
is that there was another category of people who did even better than Mother Teresa and
that was the respondents themselves, with an 87 percent chance of getting into
heaven. Now this is interesting, I'm gonna summarize it for you with a picture. This
is what we do. This is our own natural tendency. And so when we are at work with
others in meetings, we fall in love with our own perspective, we fall in love
with our own view, and that makes it difficult for us to embrace conflict.
What rebels do that's different from what most people do, they embrace
different perspective. They embrace diversity of opinions. They fight against
this very natural tendency to go and stay narrowly focused on our own view
and also if we open up to go with people were very much like us.