Driving Innovation: The Importance of Risk-Taking and Continuous Improvement.

Feeling the pressure to keep up with rapid changes in the business world? What if embracing innovation and failure could be the key to your company’s resilience and success? If you're ready to discover how to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape, this episode is for you.

In this episode, I explore the crucial role of innovation in business resilience with Yngvar Ugland. We discuss how businesses need to swiftly adapt to changing environments and build a technology-driven portfolio of solutions. Ingvar shares his insights on embracing failure as part of the learning process, using the mnemonic "FAIL - First Attempt In Learning" to promote a culture of risk-taking and continuous learning. This conversation is packed with intriguing ideas on balancing incremental improvements with moonshot initiatives and challenging the status quo.

Imagine your business not only surviving but thriving amidst uncertainty and rapid change. 

By listening to this episode, you can:

1. Cultivate a Culture of Innovation: Learn how to foster an environment where failure is seen as a learning opportunity, encouraging risk-taking and continuous improvement.
2. Embrace Cutting-Edge Technologies: Discover the potential of generative AI and other advanced technologies to push the boundaries of creativity and innovation in your business.
3. Future-Proof Your Business: Gain insights into the future of banking, money, and societal structures, and understand the importance of investing in innovation to stay ahead.

Three Benefits You'll Gain:

1. Enhanced Resilience: Develop strategies to build a resilient business that can adapt swiftly to changing environments.
2. Increased Innovation: Foster a culture that encourages risk-taking and continuous learning, driving innovation within your organization.
3. Technological Advancement: Learn how to integrate cutting-edge technologies like generative AI to stay competitive and forward-thinking.

Are you ready to transform your approach to business resilience and innovation? Scroll up and click play to join our enlightening discussion with Ingvar Uglund. 

Embrace the power of continuous learning, challenge the status quo, and discover the technologies that can reshape the future of your business. Start your journey towards a more resilient and innovative business today!

Bio:
Yngvar is a renowned technology leader, currently leading DNB NewTechLab, the Moonshot Unit of DNB Bank. As the Colonel of Moonshots, Yngvar and his team delve into the uncharted territories of new technology from their bases in Bjørvika, San Francisco, and Palo Alto.

Yngvar is also a co-author of several books and serves as an Industry Professor II at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen. He has previously lectured on Moonshot innovation at Singularity University and Rehumanize Institute.

With a Master

STOPTIME: Live in the Moment.

Ranked in the top 5% of podcasts globally and winner of the 2022 Communicator Award...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:08] Back to It's an Inside Job podcast. I'm your host, Jason Liem. Now, this podcast is dedicated to helping you to help yourself and others to become more mentally and emotionally resilient so you can be better at bouncing back from life's inevitable setbacks. Now, on It's an Inside Job, we decode the science and stories of resilience into practical advice, skills, and strategies that you can use to impact your life and those around you. Now, with that said, let's slip into the stream.

[0:36] Music.

[0:44] Hey folks, welcome back to It's an Inside Job. Today, we're going to be exploring the crucial role of innovation in ensuring businesses' resilience amidst uncertainty and disruptions. Now, innovation isn't just a buzzword. It's vital for helping businesses adapt to changing environments, optimizing resources, and staying productive during tough times. You know, innovation, it prepares companies for future challenges, enabling them to pivot quickly in response to market shifts and other external factors. You know, innovative cultures foster rapid problem solving and swift implementation of novel solutions. We see this in companies adopting AI and automation, shifting to e-commerce and creating new products to meet emerging needs. Today, I have a special guest who is an expert at fostering innovation, Ingvar Uglund. Now, Ingvar is a distinguished technology leader currently heading DNB New Tech Lab, the moonshot unit of DNB Bank. As the colonel of moonshots, Ingvar and his team explore cutting-edge technologies from their hubs in Bjordvika, San Francisco, and Palo Alto.

[1:53] In addition to his leadership role, Ingvar is the co-author of several books and an industry professor at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. He also lectured on moonshot innovation at prestigious institutions like Singularity University and Rehumanize Institute. He's also a regular media presence. You know, he frequently appears on TV, podcasts, newspaper, op-eds, debates, and stages both nationally and internationally. And in 2023, well, he was nominated for the Nordic AI Influencer Award of the Year.

[2:25] And of course, I feel very privileged to have Ingvar on the show today. So without further ado, let's slip into the stream and meet Ingvar Ugland.

[2:32] Music.

[2:46] To the show. Thank you very much. I was wondering if we could kick off the episode by you introducing who you are and briefly what you do. Yeah, so my daytime job is at GMB Bank and I run a unit called New Tech Lab. We're a small and quite autonomous unit at the far end of what you can called banking, and in many ways we consider ourselves the moonshot unit. And also I have a part-time job at the Norwegian School of Economics, NHH in Bergen, where I also speak mostly about moonshot innovation. And what we do is that we do think that we have never known as much as we know today about how little we know about tomorrow. And that recognition of that uncertainty is baseline for what we're doing.

[3:48] And when the future is uncertain, in many ways, the best thing you can do is to build a portfolio of options for what the future might become. So you have some, then you have optionality and easier to navigate. Gates and that's basically what we're doing a technology driven portfolio of options for what the far future might become and um and that's it um the the future is uncertain but that also means that and the opportunity space has never been as um as big as as it is now and and also because of something that we have believed for a long time but that most people can now start to acknowledge knowledge and feel is that things are moving faster than ever.

[4:37] And also, things will never change as slowly again, ever again, as it does right now. Yeah, we've picked up a speed and there's no kind of braking or pumping the brakes on this one. You just feel it's sort of accelerating in the sense of how we need to innovate as individuals, companies, societies. You know, part of this podcast is to speak to resilience and something called equanimity, being comfortable in the discomfort or the uncertainty of things. You know, a lot of people speak a good game about innovation, but yourself and your team at Dan B or D&B, sorry, work with this every day, every week. I mean, what would you say? How would you operationally define Ingvaard, sort of the innovators mindset? Mindset like what is needed sort of character wise sort of character trait wise yeah there's some um.

[5:34] There's a metaphor I often use, and I don't know if you're familiar with this thing. It's an invention by Kjell Öykryst. It's featured in the movie Flåklypa. It's the car called Iltempo Gigante. It's a wild, it's a racing car that is built by Mr. Reodor Felgen. And it has some really strange features. Like it has, well, it has, this was built for the movie that came out in 75, and it has two engines and a big radar circling on the top. And that's like the most ridiculous type of feature you can ever build on a car. And then fast forward 50 years, and Tesla Model S has two engines and a radar. It just looks vastly different. It doesn't look like a fantasy thing at all. And that's kind of one aspect of these looking at imagining things that might become something into the future.

[6:42] Eventually, some of those things you're imagining will become reality. It will just take a very different shape. But to my main point, it has another feature, and it has two speedometers. And one goes from zero to 250 kilometers per hour. And the other one goes from 250 kilometers and up. And then you can ask, well, that's ridiculous. Why don't you just have one speedometer that goes from zero to whatever? And here's the point. The moonshot type of innovation that we're doing, that's the second speedometer. And it's a separate speedometer because it's a vastly different discipline. It's a very different craft than the first one. The first one is applying technologies for improving quality and improving what you already have, making sure you're more efficient. You can do the same thing and save money. It also includes adding new technology-driven features to what you already have.

[7:52] And all of that is good for business. It's easy to talk to your CFO about that, because if you save money, you improve quality. If you add new features, that's all good for business. So it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. You also need the second speedometer, because you can live out of quality, adding features and optimizing your operations today and halfway into tomorrow, metaphorically speaking. But the day after tomorrow, all history shows that something will come and render what you're currently doing obsolete. And that might be sooner or later. We don't know that. But it's typically driven by some unexpected change. And unexpected change is often driven by a technology shift. And that's what we're doing. And this is where, these are the things that you can't ask your customers about what they want, because they're bound into a speedometer one type of mindset. And the analogy I often use on that is that it was never breeding faster and faster horses, they gave us the locomotive. It was vastly new technology driven forward by totally different people than the horse breeders.

[9:19] And if you gave the steam engine to the horse breeders, they would probably use it to heat the place where they keep their horses.

[9:28] And when you look at breeding faster horses, it made total sense because what can a horse do? It can take you from A to B, which is what the customer would ask you for. But then if you come up with a locomotive, it can only take you from C to D. And that's C and D are predefined by rails. So if you were going to go from A to B, you have to go from A to C and then take the locomotive to D and then again to B. And it seems like a ridiculous idea, right? And many of these moonshot type of things are like that. They seem ridiculous in prospect, but often they are obvious in retrospect. And then again, this locomotive, that was the one thing that succeeded. There were probably hundreds of ideas of how to use the steam engine that totally failed. So it's not like you will succeed only by thinking differently.

[10:35] That's not enough. But it is required. Similar with, it was never breeding more and more location specific, what is that called in English, homing pigeons? It was never that they got us telegraphy. It was a totally different technology driven forward by totally different people than breeders of homing pigeons so so i think that's that is that it means that there's a significant difference and and the speedometer two type of thing the moonshot type of thinking starts with um with a simple um acknowledgement and that is that change is inevitable.

[11:19] Change is good and the biggest changes have not yet happened plan making making a good plan and executed well it's not an option for leadership in such circumstances yeah i mean there is that as you said sort of between hindsight versus foresight i mean hindsight we all can have wisdom to see how there's a natural progression and how roadblocks or obstacles or hindrances were there oh yeah that's a that was a sort of a given that's how they made it around that But I think hindsight, obviously we can learn, but foresight, that seems almost like reading a crystal ball. And so you talked about it's how do we think differently? I mean, is this sort of inbaked into some personalities or is this something that you can teach? I mean, and what does it mean to think differently or think innovatively? I mean, are there specific questions we need to ask? Is there some sort of mindset we need to learn over time?

[12:23] Yeah. Take it where you will. There's a little bit, you know, there's some creativity part of that. And creativity is necessary, but it is not sufficient. So but there's something some interesting correlations between how creative you are and and and a few other factors. And as we know, all children are creative. And then at some point we stop.

[12:54] So we have it in us naturally. And then we just stop for some reasons. But it can be trained and it can be maintained. Obviously, some people are naturally more creative than others, but there are definitely techniques on how you can become more creative. And one interesting correlation I learned was that there is a clear correlation between how creative a person is and one, how many questions he or she asks during the day. And two, how much that person is laughing during the day.

[13:34] Are you laughing a lot then? I mean, it's pretty interesting that you need that kind of playfulness in order to be creative.

[13:52] And being creative is, as I mentioned, it is a necessary prerequisite for challenging the existing. Thing and but a lot of this starts with the acknowledgement and again i talked about this change is inevitable and and also the hardest part to accept is that the biggest changes have not yet happened because as human beings we we would like to think that yeah we acknowledge that there's been a lot of changes in the past but now now with generative ai and llms and chat gpt now everything has happened i'm pretty sure and that's like um it's very easy to convince ourselves of that and i think it's um i think it's because we need that as you know in our reptile brain so to speak um we.

[14:45] Uh um we're also searching always searching for for um for something that is stable it's constant because you know uh from back in the days when our reptile brain was created and what it was created for means constant means stable and that means we're not going to die and then um that also means that we're missing out on the opportunity space if we're if we're not using our more modern human sapiens type of brains to um to uh to break out of that pattern.

[15:22] Yeah.

[15:26] I was probably on some kind of thread here, but I am not. That's okay, we'll pick up the thread. Because from my experience, my background, again, we come from two different disciplines, mine's in the clinical and cognitive sciences, psychology per se. And logically people understand that change is coming, change is inevitable, yes, yes, yes. But it's emotionally, you know, I don't think people have a problem with change per se, but they have a problem with being changed themselves. And I think it's the emotional hiccups. So meaning that logically we're on one side of the fence and emotionally we're on the other and we're not aligned. And what it sounds to, from my perspective, what you're saying, Ingvart, is that sort of an innovator's mindset is someone who is both logically and emotionally aligned with being changed and accepting changes and big changes that, you know, we haven't reached the pinnacle of human evolution per se in technology or medicine or whatever field it is. But once, from my perspective, looking at different behaviors, once you have the head and the heart aligned, then the hands, the behavior naturally follows to accept change. They may reluctantly accept it, but that's what I think I hear you're saying. Yeah.

[16:50] And it's interesting that you put it that way, because the way I like to say, to explain this, is that I have four overlapping circles. And one says the head and the other one says the heart. And then the third one says the hands, or like the craftsmanship. And the last one says hovedpersonen or the main characters it's just something I get at 4-H's it works better in Norwegian yeah yeah, and the last the main characters is just way to say like leaders and team members but I totally agree so you're pushing to, the choir yeah.

[17:42] And there's something about, I mean, it is quite like learning things and unlearning things seems to be quite stressful for us as human beings. And so in this world of like when you don't know what the future brings and you don't even know all the things that you don't know. So there are unknown unknowns. unknowns and that means um you don't always know which questions to ask because the question asking the questions from the speedometer one metaphor might be very limiting so so that um that means that when you don't know what you don't know well then you the best thing you can do is just to do something because then you learn something more about what you don't know and And maybe it's enough to form a question. And once you have a question, you can test it with hypotheses and experiments.

[18:48] But also, if nothing is certain and nothing is stable and nothing is given, it can be quite confusing. So I think some of the things we've done is that we just move it up on one abstraction level. So we say that the thing that is stable in our world or in our discipline is that we do the same thing every single day. We practice doing something we've never done before.

[19:25] So, in a way, we've created some stability in that change. Well, what are you doing today? Well, the same as I did yesterday. I'm going to try something I have never tried before and practice being as good as possible in that. That um so and in that there is you have kind of created some some stability that is less stressful.

[19:49] But it also um incorporates the acknowledgement that changes inevitable change is good and that the biggest changes have not yet happened but you talked about from the head to the heart to the hands of the main character and so a lot of people will speak sort of innovation we need to innovate and they start in the head and then they launch something and then it flops or it fails or it misfires and then emotionally here's the misalignment again they're thinking oh what's the point you know self-compassion or the sense of learning goes out the window and there's this sort of self-flagellation they kind of whip themselves and said oh why are we doing this I mean, how important are, from what you've said, it sounds like you have, you create a routine of asking

[20:41] questions of innovative processes, and that creates a sense of stability every day. And that allows you to, not you, but you and your team to embrace change or to embrace the unknown and uncertain future. But do failures and flops or however you operationally define it, do they help you and your team to come up with better questions or maybe more refined and well-engineered questions to try to embrace that future? Yeah, I think part of the problem is that the way we're being.

[21:15] The way stories are being told about successful innovators.

[21:20] Successful businesses, successful startups that have become world dominant companies is that we hear about one success after the other. And we only hear about that and we never hear about how many things went wrong on the road and and when we have every once in a while hear that someone writes a book then it's very polished it doesn't tell you anything about how much blood were in the streets it's also like um you know we like to to uh to uh think of this uh generative ai revolution that was you know the last a year and a half now, as just another industrial revolution. And we often hear people say, and I do that too, is that it just means that, again.

[22:15] Technology, it used to be mechanical machines, but now it's been, you know, the internet and lots of technologies. It's just another...

[22:23] Another step on that same long-term revolution or series of revolutions and it means that yes some people will lose their jobs as they did during the first and the second industrial revolution it just means that we as human beings now can do new things and we don't know yet what these jobs are but they will be i'm pretty sure and then we say this as kind of a good the good news and then And we often forget that when during all industrial revolutions before, it has been very stressful for a lot of people and like whole groups of society when they were rendered obsolete and probably felt that, OK, my skills are not useful anymore. And they probably felt that I am not valued in society anymore. More um and so so um so when if you if you just read history like that all failures will be emotionally challenging um but if you if you know how the sausage is made you know that that's not how innovation happens i mean we have a ratio from from ideas which is creativity we say that For hundreds of ideas, we have some tens of prototypes or proof of concepts or experiments.

[23:52] And then out of that comes a few innovations in the real world. And so it means there's two orders of magnitude from hundreds to a few. And everything else in between just dies. And that's reality. and if you look at that as failure well then you then you need to kind of adopt the silicon valley type of mindset where failing fast is the is failing fast to succeed sooner um and there's um i have a i have a like a a tagline on that that works uh the best in uh in uh in norwegian but but I've translated it into English as well, and that is the word fail. It's not a verb or a noun. It's an acronym, and it stands for first attempt in learning. And that's a more healthy way of looking at it. And I think Thomas Alva Edison, he at least has been quoted or attributed to this thing. He said something about, although I tried like 500 ways of getting that thing to glow, it wasn't paler. It was success in eliminating things that would never work, something like that. That's a more healthy way to look at it.

[25:17] When we only hear about those companies or those experiments that actually succeed, we have to remember that that is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Most things that have been tried have paled, and people have been learning on the road to do that. So that's why if you only give yourself or if you're a leader or an executive and you only give the innovation teams a few attempts, then you're probably going to see, and they know that, you're probably going to see that they're not taking enough risk. Risk they're not looking far enough into that bigger opportunity space that is ahead of us because if you only have a few attempts you will take down risk and make sure you succeed in the few attempts you have and that's why you need to do innovation across this spectrum you need to do incremental stuff that you can quickly test with customers but you also need to do the speed the AMRT2 type of things, which will be what if the future looks vastly different to the future? And in our team, we've asked big questions like when we see that.

[26:44] Most of our engineering colleagues in D&B are trying to build the best possible mobile experience for our customers, be it for private consumers or small businesses or for personal savings when that is the mainstream then a question to to ask would be well what if there are no phones in the future and uh and that's then it means okay then we need to have other ways to offer our services or what what would our services look like maybe it's not the same thing if things change that significantly and also what if what if there are no banks in 40 years, how are we going to solve the ultimate problems or how are we going to provide the ultimate value proposition of a bank if there aren't banks as such? And what if there are no conventional money like we know it today?

[27:47] What if the monetary system as it is today is being replaced? And that sounds like a crazy thing. But if we look in the back mirror, every once in a while, the financial system has been changed to something that in prospect would look totally crazy and unbelievable. And then in retrospect, it turns out that it looks, it seems to be obvious and it should have been obvious all the time, which it wasn't. That's just, you know, at the book, Luke's cup.

[28:18] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the wisdom

[28:21] after the thought. Because there's three things I'd like to touch on. You said a lot and a lot of very astute points. Just unpack it. You know, the first is the acronym of FAIL. You said, is it first after in learning or? The first attempt. First attempt. Sorry. First attempt in learning. I think that's very important because in psychology, when you're working with people to try to get beyond if they're stuck somewhere, sometimes it's to understand that maybe the situation, you can't influence the situation. But what empowers or motivates or fills people with energy is changing their perspective of how they look at that situation. And so failure for some is like, okay, I'm not good enough. But what you're saying, no, based on this acronym, you haven't influenced the situation. But what we can do is to see how we can learn from this situation. And what I hear is then asking bigger and better questions. I think the second thing, and this is something I've just kind of attached, is that organizations may have to have a dedicated resources specifically to innovation. And it sounds Dan Baer has made that wise choice a long time ago, and they have a dedicated team for these moonshot methods. You know, one of my clients is a seismic company, and they are so driven by sales and operations.

[29:46] That they actually have an innovative department where that's all they're dedicated to. And it's in pretty much 80, 90 percent of the chance and perspective. I mean, situations they are protected to do what they have to do to try to take this seismic company to the next level, new technologies or what have you. And if not, all these these these dedicated professionals would have been pulled into operations to support when things get really crazy. And so that was the second point I just wanted to make, because I think dedicated resources, if a company has that, sounds like it's very important based upon what I hear from you and what I have experienced with other companies. And I think the third one, which I really like, is the questions.

[30:32] What if everything we know gets wiped out? For example, currencies or this type of banking system. It's like, what are we left with? What do we do? that's a very general question those are just the three things my brain kind of hooked on to what you've said yeah yeah that's a good summary and uh um i also like i appreciate that you from from your profession and your point of view can kind of uh uh like explain to me why why it helps from a psychology perspective to to to uh to look at it as like just this is This is not something that is going to, it's not your fault. And it's like a way to look at it would be the solutions are already there.

[31:22] We just need to find it. And the way to do it is trying all the things that don't work. A little bit like Thomas Edison said.

[31:32] That is a mindset that is very different in the moonshot type of speedometer. But as I said, like the seismic company you mentioned, they're probably doing a lot of speedometer one type of innovation. And as I said, it is necessary. It's just not sufficient in the long term. Um but but it is important that you um well with a few exceptions and those are probably like silicon valley startups with uh investors that are willing to fund a company through 10 to 15 years of research and innovation to do some groundbreaking things with the exception of that you need to survive in the short run in order to have funding to uh realize the things that are today's moonshots and today's moonshots some of them maybe one out of a hundred will be uh, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow's um.

[32:31] Bread and butter or operations that you need to improve quality on so this the spectrum is important and that's why um there's a metaphor of uh of uh of the car hill temple gigante is so powerful because you can't do one without the other.

[32:48] I think considering what innovation actually means, speaking to you as a professional who's worked in this so many years, it shows that for me, there's a certain dedication, a certain sense of guts that are needed. As you said, an imagination or creativity. That's not everything, but it's the curiosity. You said how many questions you ask, or having, I think you said, a sense of playfulness, you know, so having that play, that sense of playfulness would suggest that there's a certain suppleness, a certain sort of buoyancy where you can play with different ideas and you're not so rigid or fixated on one.

[33:32] You know, like what we say in English is kill your darlings, you know, don't get stuck on one particular idea. Maybe think about all these crazy ideas, maybe not everything floats. Notes and sometimes when I'm kind of I don't use the term brainstorming but when we're trying to come up with different ideas of how to crack a problem with one of my coaching clients I sometimes talk about a diamond and I said you know in this session today we're going to talk about the top part of the diamond where it goes from a point outwards and we call this divergent thinking so I don't want to hear any critical thoughts I want you to just spitball with me and let's put all the ideas. And the next session, once you've had time or a couple of weeks to think about it, then we talk about the other end of the diamond, where we refine it down to a point, which is convergent thinking.

[34:21] We have exactly the same model. And if you went to our website, you would see a diamond that goes like this. It is divergent. We like to think that we spend 20% of our time on divergent thinking, expanding the opportunity space and identifying some candidates that are high risk, high reward, and new technology. If they don't fulfill those three requirements, we're not going to go through with it. So that's why we think of it as broad exploration.

[34:53] And then once we identify something we want to test or experiment with, we go to convergent. And then it's from broad exploration to deep experimentation. And it's basically about expanding the opportunity space, acknowledging that the biggest changes have not yet happened. And from there on, systematically reduce uncertainty to take it from something that might be just a wild idea that we don't know if can ever be realized or if anyone ever would want if we built it or if you can make money off it anytime in the future to something that is tangible, either as an innovation or as learning that this did not succeed because of this and that and that. And those learnings are as important because especially when you're trying to make some guesses, which these things basically are, creating that portfolio of options for what the future might become, a lot of things will be premature.

[36:01] And this would like if we experimented with what would a society look like if we didn't have the current financial system? Well, it's very hard to test in the current world. We might be able to isolate some kind of subset and run tests on that. But we will also see certain things are not fulfilled that would have to be fulfilled in order for this to succeed. And then maybe in five years time, we'll see indications that if we just look at this a little bit differently, that criteria might actually be either now obsolete or even fulfilled. Field. And there's also this idea of, or again comes down to an acknowledgement, is that all organizations.

[36:53] Type of inventions have gone through this continuum on going from impossible to invisible, and it starts with something that is just an idea that it's not possible and then it goes to impractical then it goes to possible then it goes to require expected and then required, and once it's required like no one is ever thinking about it anymore and just think like Like people trying to fly. In the beginning, they just looked at birds and they're like, what? What are they doing? And then people were rolling over in tar and then in feathers, waving their hands because they saw other creatures do that. Jumping off the cliff. Yeah. And, well, that didn't succeed. And then many hundred years later, there was the Wright brothers and a few guys in Germany that could manage to pull off a flight. The first human flight was 28 seconds or something. And now I think we're already 10 years ago since the first autonomous single person flying taxi could be booked in Dubai or wherever it was.

[38:11] And it takes a very different form. than you initially imagined, but everything goes from that. And if someone told you 50 years ago about the internet, people would not have any idea of how that could be possible. All of a sudden, you can display all your products in your store to all people in the whole world, and and and they can just they can just do something with something called a computer and they can just buy it and they end their lives in.

[38:48] Music.

[38:55] Involves creating a portfolio of options to navigate uncertain future filled with vast opportunities. Now, Ingvar discussed the innovator's mindset, which includes two approaches. The first is about optimizing existing operations. And the second, well, it's about preparing for transformative technological shifts. Now, the first approach enhances the quality, the efficiency, and the features of current offerings. And the second, well, that's better known as the moonshot innovation. It anticipates current practices will become obsolete to disruptive technologies, initially seen as absurd, but later obvious in hindsight. Now, central to the innovator's mindset is the belief that change is three things, that change is inevitable, that change is beneficial, and the greatest change are still ahead of us. Now, he notes that while humans are evolutionarily wired for stability and certainty, well, in the moonshot lab, where change and and uncertainty are constant, creating a sense of stability is imperative.

[39:56] Ingvar and his team achieved this by emphasizing the importance of taking risks and practicing new approaches every day. This consistent practice, while it builds on a foundation of stability, enhances their ability to adapt. For Ingvar's team, failure is not just an outcome, but an integral part of the innovation process. They embrace failure as an essential learning opportunity. This is captured in the acronym FAIL. First attempt in learning. Now, this mindset encourages experimentation and resilience, fostering an environment where novel ideas can be explored without the fear of setback. And on a final note, innovations typically progress through a predictable path from impossible to impractical, then to possible, expected, and then finally required. And as Ingvar said, over time, these innovations become so integrated into daily life that they fade into into the background, becoming an unnoticeable part of our everyday experience. Ingvar emphasizes that recognizing and navigating this journey is crucial for

[41:01] any organization aiming to stay ahead in an ever-evolving landscape.

[41:04] Music.

[41:07] So let's slip back into the stream with part two with Ingvar Uglund.

[41:19] Well i've read time and time again where a lot of sort of innovators will look to sci-fi science fiction and and one common at least in north america is star trek with the communicators and with the teleport beams and the tractor beams and all this but you can see how a lot of those technologies thought imagined up by the screenwriters back in the day whatever that was 62 63 1962 63 a lot of that is as you said have been realized today so sometimes maybe that's a also a source that at least that i've read that people pull from sci-fi because you know sci-fi you can you can write anything and people accept

[41:59] it because it's just it's science fiction yeah Yeah. And I think it's a very good example of some of the things I described earlier, because it starts with fiction. So it's just imagination. And once you practice your imagination, you can imagine everything. And if you can imagine it, it exists. It just doesn't exist in the real world yet. it um um and and then since it's science fiction okay what would what would it take from science for this to be possible and then they make up the science and that's a very interesting thing and there is a book that i should have reached for it that is written by one of my mentors in, San Francisco.

[42:48] So he and Stephen Hawking and a few others, they.

[42:54] They wrote a book about starships, so what they consider being the next frontier of humanity, way beyond the solar system. What would it take us to get to the next star? And there are also him and Stephen Hawking and a few other scientists. They write this anthology together with four science fiction authors. And it's basically just, OK, what are they saying? Because they have no limitation on science. What kind of science are they inventing and how can we be inspired by that coming from what we currently know? And as we know in theoretical physics as well, things are being discovered in theory way before it actually is observed in the universe. And um and that is that idea of science fiction what can what what can we imagine and what kind of science need to be in place in order to make that possible um and just the fact that like big big scientists like that co-write anthologies with science fiction authors is just a testimonial of what you were just saying. So, yeah, and this, we, our human mind is somewhat limited because we, you know, as children, it's very divergent and creative. And then we tend to limit it a little bit.

[44:22] And I, to be honest, I hope that we'll get a lot of help from artificial intelligence, especially this generative AI to help us on improving our imagination and also I would be disappointed if we don't get some kind of scientific breakthrough because of generative AI. Because in many ways they are so better at scale to imagining up things that we have, that we typically limit ourselves to because logically it doesn't make sense. But that's just based on this logic, just based on our current knowledge. And when I went to school, I was so happy when we were taught Niels Bohr's atom shell model because it was so beautiful and so pedagogically perfect it's elegant yeah right and then it then it turns out that oh it's just a simplification and the real thing is something else and then and now we figure okay at least not at least no now we know it's just that we don't we just made some abstractions that makes it easy for us to deal with it.

[45:52] And one of my science heroes, Richard Feynman, he once said that the electron is such a powerful model, that sometimes we get tempted to believe that it actually exists. And I was like, oh, crap. Of course, it's just a model. It's just a simplification to make it possible for us to consume with our human brains. But it's just a reminder that there are more things to be discovered and the same goes with how we can bring society forward as well. Most of the solutions are out there, we just need to find them.

[46:40] By uh maybe by uh excluding all the possible solutions that won't work well i just just to address that i want to come back to something else but just to address that a little sidestep here because we have something called the reticular activating system it's a ganglia of brain cells ganglia just means a cluster of brain cells at the brain stem and so we we get we get bombarded through our senses billions of bytes of information every second literally and for us to be able to make our way through this world our brain needs to be able to filter and so for example but let's say you went out and bought yourself a new blue shiny tesla right and you're just driving on the highways not that you were looking for them but all of a sudden you start seeing other bright right? Shiny, blue Teslas. You know, all the thousands of cars you pass a day, there it is, there it is. Or you buy yourself a new L bicycle, right? And it's all that you see them, hundreds of them go by, but the one you bought, all of a sudden your brain is picking that out. And so what you're saying is, or at least what I am hearing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that by asking ourselves certain questions.

[47:53] We bring up to the mind's radar what is actually important for us maybe to see something different to see something alternative to see a new angle or perspective or uh angle on something as i said and then all of a sudden our brains are wired to search for that so if you go out for a walk and i say hey i just want you to look for mailboxes that's all i say mailboxes as few and far between as they are now but all of a sudden you're just walking down and then bang you see a mailbox right it just it's drawn your head's drawn to that because your brain picks that up, that part. And so the innovative process, I think, is very important. So if we can ask ourselves well-engineered questions...

[48:35] Well, that's what I try to do with my clients, you know, when they get stuck. We were talking about the divergent-convergent. Well, that's a cognitive technique. We help people, we individuals help people to reframe things, to see situations in different lights. And I just find it fascinating. We come from two schools of discipline, but how there's a lot of overlap between what you talk about. And we use different vernacular, different terminologies. Geez. I just wanted to kind of speak to that. Yeah. And I have this conviction that when you don't know what you don't know, the best thing you can do is do something because then you start learning. But also after having been in this field of the unknown and knows for some time, it seems like in my team, we're building up some kind of intuition.

[49:32] And I was just thinking, maybe the thing you just described by all of a sudden you see all these things that you didn't see before. It could be kind of an explanation to why we think that our intuition is becoming better. Maybe it's just that we... Uh we've been used to looking for uh maybe the blue teslas would be uh totally new opportunities like a little bit more wishy-washy than the the mailbox and the blue teslas but um what is your um do you think there's a it's a yeah i i think there there there is something that what you're saying is because you know the brain as we understand it currently it's a storytelling telling machine so basically when we have this inner chatter this mind talk or this self-prote it's trying to make sense of the world our point in the sense of the world as you call it from your head hard hand main character well you are a main character in this on the stage right and so by your team constantly thinking in innovative ways by asking standard questions that for most of us would be extraordinary questions like,

[50:52] oh, that's a very curious question. But that becomes standard practice. As you said, that creates a sense of stability in all the uncertainty for you and your people.

[51:01] And so after a while, by asking these questions, you start, it forces you to see the world around you or a particular situation or theory or philosophy from a different perspective. Now, I'm just spitballing here. so this is not like a scientific paper we're writing here and now in this conversation but i think by constantly asking uh these innovative disruptive questions maybe a better word it forces us to see certain things right i mean i could sit in a room with a person and we'll we'll talk and i say just just as fun i'll say oh can you feel your butt on the chair like the, Their body's picking it up, but all of a sudden their attention goes down there and that becomes that sensation of feeling the surface of the seat where they're sitting. That becomes top of mind. And we could be talking about something completely different, but this is a form of reframing. It forces the brain to focus on something else.

[52:09] And when we talk about But we teach people how you can get better at just being creative. Rule number one is just practice how you can look at the thing, just look at it differently. And we use examples like fire. It used to be the worst thing that could happen to humankind kind because either your house or whatever you were living in would burn down or you would you would die or later your crops would be gone but just look at it differently and looking at as what is that ball like bonfire all of a sudden you could cook your meat and it meant totally so much for evolution of even being in the digestion system and everything and even Even our size and strength. And it's just like, how can you just look differently at it? And that's the most powerful thing. And also, like you said, we're not writing a scientific paper here or anything.

[53:25] Maybe not yet. Or maybe many of these conversations are happening, maybe hundreds of them. And some of them might lead to something that becomes, you know, from now we're just having some discussing some ideas between two disciplines and we come up with some new hypothesis. And maybe down the road, this will be common knowledge. But maybe it's just gibberish and it fails, who knows? And in a way, this is just an example of some ideas have been exchanged between people with.

[54:06] Radically different point of views and then something new is coming out of that. It might be a good idea, it might be not, who knows? But also many of the most important and radical new inventions or innovations are simply just combining or interconnecting two things that already existed for a totally new purpose. Us uh and that also makes it uh interesting just to go and look for things that you don't know what you're looking for but maybe just trusting that you you will know you will know when you find it, uh that that kind of curiosity and uh you know opened open mind type of uh of mindset uh helps you on what if what if what if we just tried this we don't have to create anything new it doesn't It doesn't have to be groundbreaking research or science, just trying combining two existing things that already existed for two different purposes. What I find fascinating is when you have a number of human beings sitting in a room who are open, who are playful, who are trying to discover something, right?

[55:28] I might come up with an idea, I throw it at you, you hear it, you absorb it, but because you are a completely different person with education, background, ethnicity, culture, whatever, everything that makes you Ingvar, all of a sudden you take this idea. And there's just to connect an idea here one of my people i really love reading is sort of david eagleman he's um uh a neuroscientist and he wrote a book on creativity and he says you know the brain tends to take this ideas in and let's say jason gives ingva an idea and ingva's experience and his knowledge and his background will blend the idea will break the idea will uh um blend the idea blend, break, and bend, I think is what he uses. And that can be an innovative process.

[56:19] I just find it very interesting because I remember I was back in undergrad. It was about creative thinking about how to see psychology and stuff. And one of the questions that always stood out to me is the professor asked us in this big auditorium, he says, think about this. It's about the quality of the question. Exactly what she says. He says, what is the similarities between a bread box and a bell, right? I mean, two completely different nouns, and then you have to think, right? But the way he asked that question comes back to what I was referring to before, the reticular activating system. So I ask you to look for mailboxes, well, then your brain will start kind of grinding and looking for that, even though you may be listening to a podcast or talking to someone as you're strolling.

[57:07] But I just find it very It's very interesting how human beings, when they're open and they're flexible and buoyant with ideas, how we can bounce ideas off of each other and actually come up with very innovative things. It may be very simple or it may be completely revolutionary. Yeah.

[57:28] I was thinking about this. I don't even know if I came up with it or someone else did, but the more you know about a certain domain, the more you tend to be cursed by the knowledge of that domain, because you also understand how difficult it would be to radically change it. And then on the other hand, you have this idea that the less you know about the complications of it, the easier it is to imagine how it could be solved radically different. And then you become, in a way, blessed by this ignorance. And this is just asking, but what if, and just acknowledging that, okay, yeah, I understand that it might be impossible. That's okay.

[58:14] Okay, what are the criteria that would have to be fulfilled to make it possible? And maybe we can think differently about that. Or maybe we can just circumvent the reasons why it's impossible in the first place. It's interesting how the brain works and how it can be trained. And also some of the things you're teaching me is very much in harmony with the way I experience how we work or how the brain works in our moonshot innovation type of work.

[58:51] You know, when I'm working with clients and, you know, usually it's sort of a person who needs to be better at managing themselves or managing situations, managing others. And, you know, we could take the typical sort of management speak and management theories, which are all good to try to help that professional move forward in whatever way he or she wants to move forward. But when I bring in my disciplines of clinical and cognitive psychology or the underpinnings of neuroscience to explain what's going on in how they're leading themselves or leading others, what it does, I find time and time again, is that it forces fresh thinking, right? It creates a whole different path of discovery and conversation of how that individual can professionally develop him or herself or find a unique approach that they haven't tried before. Maybe they have thought about it, but they've never sort of executed on that. So that's why I love doing this podcast because talking to professionals of your caliber and knowledge and such, it feeds me. There's like whole universes that I've never discovered. it and allows me access to brains like yours and to understand. And I sometimes think that's what clients get from having a coach or a sparring partner in general.

[1:00:13] I read some research from the Institute of Future Science in Copenhagen that said that out of any.

[1:00:27] Population, 70% of the population believes that things are as good as it will get right now. 20% thinks it was better before, and only 10% thinks it will be better in the future. And I like to think that, that's just an observation. It doesn't have to be like that. So I think I think there are probably good reasons why it's like that. I mean, it's easy to think of the past and romanticize it and think it was better before. Maybe it wasn't. It's also easy to understand why people think that, well, now it's actually pretty good. I don't want this to change. And then only 10% are looking forward to, either because their current is not that good, they're dreaming of something better, or simply having an innovative mindset of, we can imagine how it could be even better, But based on what you're saying and what my experience is, I think we can change that. I think it's just an observation of the general population that this is the reason why it's like that.

[1:01:51] And like you're saying, you can kind of manipulate your brain to look for new

[1:02:00] things, and then your brain will just go after that. And when that new thing you're looking for is, you know, know what if type of questions i think that i can see any reason why why more why why it shouldn't be possible to increase that 10 percent of the population that uh it's looking or can can can believe in that thing we can we can improve things even even even more in the future so basically optimists that that's how i look at it i think it comes back to what you said uh for it's the quality of the questions that dictates the quality of the answer or the breadth or the altitude and latitude of solutions possibilities opportunities.

[1:02:47] I wanted to come back to a point one of the points you made is that you kind of asking the general questions what if we wiped out everything that we know what are we left with considering that and And then linking to another point you made about the fascination of generative AI, how do you use or to what extent do you and your team use generative AI to ask some of these innovative questions for new financial solutions at D&B or whatever project you guys are working on? There's something about this. When you know how the sausage is made, you're a little bit more careful with how much you consume of it. The large language models, as they are called, the text-based generative AI tools like ChatGPT and so on.

[1:03:40] They are simple models that have been trained to be very good at creating new, language content that didn't exist from before, based on language content that existed before. So the fact that it creates something that didn't exist before means that it's inherently creative. But people often use the word hallucination because it gives I don't like it because for two reasons it's anthropomorphizes the the technology it makes it seem like a human being that's just picking up things or like it's mentally ill and the second reason is that it's actually by design it's it's in its design that it's only creating language content, so text or sentences that make sense. They're really good sentences. There are times when the meaning of the language or the text content that it creates coincides with facts. That is just a statistical coincidence. students.

[1:04:57] So it's not a knowledge model, it's a language model. So that's the thing about when you work in the sausage factory, it's like, okay, there's a lot of things to, it might taste good, but there's a lot of ingredients here that are not healthy for you.

[1:05:15] So that said, we know how careful we should be with it. But definitely, when it comes to just getting an idea, look at it differently, and just asking good questions and telling the AI to...

[1:05:34] Pretend or behave like this or that, you can have some wonderful conversations with the AI and that will radically challenge your point of views. I think opening it up and looking inside its body is healthy to know what it's good for and what it's bad for, but also just given those those limitations of it getting getting to know uh or using it and get used to what it can help you with and what it can't is especially for creative uh things and point different points of view it's uh it's um it's super powerful as long as you don't necessarily can um confuse, creativity with knowledge because it is a language model it's not a it's not a.

[1:06:29] A knowledge model. I just find that fascinating what you said, sort of just a rift on what you're saying because one of the things, I think it was a year or a couple of years ago, where they had Go, the Chinese strategy, and the, I don't know what they call them, the grandmaster of Go, there was five, they were going to play five games with very advanced AI. The Go master, being human, won one of those games, but the machine just crushed him on the other four, pretty much. But what was fascinating is that the AI, and forgive me, I don't remember the name, but the AI that was playing the Go came up with such innovative moves and strategies that nobody had thought about before. And I think that talk about disruption and now what it has changed is changed the terrain in which people play Go. They're actually implementing those ideas or those strategies, those actions and those moves that that AI played against the Go master. And that's become part of the, I guess, the toolbox, the strategies, the plays. I just find that kind of fascinating, how AI can give us such new ways of seeing things, a sense of reframing.

[1:07:53] Yeah, it's really true. And an example I like to use from, I was out at a conference giving a talk on probably on AI. And then when I got back, I found my team and they were sitting in front of a big, juicy computer. And I was asking, what are you guys doing? Well, there was something we needed to discuss with you, and we couldn't get a hold of you because you were probably on a stage or in a podcast or something. So we just created an AI of you. The instructions that they gave to the large language model that was going to behave like me, it was something like... I can't remember it word by word, but it started out well. You're an intelligent person from the south of Norway. And then it's something like you frequently answer questions by questions. And you often reference philosophical and existentialistic literature in all your answers. And your answers would be, well, hard to figure out until you think it over once or twice. And then it's like, okay, that's a super good description of how I actually behave. Not that I ever asked and got that feedback, but just by reading the way they instructed the AI to behave.

[1:09:22] So sometimes when no one is listening or can see what I'm doing, i'm asking my ai that they created how would you respond to this like if i'm uh if i'm uh, not if i'm in a podcast because but if i'm like uh if some some journalists would ask me something and i'm like okay what would you say and then he comes up with an answer and he's like, that's actually pretty good i'm going to use some of it and then the the point was um And because they made a point that I often reference all these philosophical things, sometimes I pause and think twice.

[1:10:10] What would my ai think and then i i respond the way i think my ai would have responded so it is like uh it's really reinforcing itself just like you said when the the i think that it was alpha go, from deep mind the uh oh okay yeah yeah i think that exactly that was what it was yes and uh like some of the things that they come up with are then being applied by human beings same here uh okay Okay, maybe I should do a Hemingway quote before I answer that, because that's what my AI would do. How is that? I mean, you can imagine far into the future where the AI, based on the quality of the prompts you put in, that is almost a cognitive and psychological duplicate of ourselves or yourself. self. I mean, well, some of this, that term sort of uncanny valley, meaning for those listeners who are not familiar with that term, when we look at a robot that is shaped as a human, there's this weird sort of, this weird sense that we have that someone quoted uncanny valley. I mean, for yourself in the future, let's say five years from now where the AI is far ahead of where it is now and you kind of talking to Ingvard, your you're AI doppelgangered.

[1:11:34] How do you think you feel, or how did you feel talking to the AI now, sort of conversing with it?

[1:11:42] I think you're asking five years, and I always say that that's impossible to answer. But I can imagine what it would be in 20 years, because it's just easier to wipe out all dependencies of the current. And I don't know. Nobody knows, but if you look at the first version of ChatGPT, it was built on GPT-3. Version 2, GPT-2, in 2019 could hardly count reliably to 10. And then GPT-3 was.

[1:12:22] Phenomenally good. We were surprised by what it could. And then 3.5 and 4 was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And that is just going to increase. And I think already now we've seen, and again remember that these are just statistical models on which word does it make sense to put as the next word in any sequence of words. And what comes out of that are sentences that are very meaningful in very many situations. The significance and the semantic meaning of those sentences have capabilities or make up capabilities that we don't really understand why they have it. Like, again, they're just making really good sentences. And all of a sudden, they can even explain jokes.

[1:13:29] And we have no idea why. And that's where we're at right now. I mean, explaining jokes is hard enough for a human being. And although they struggle with being, like, comedian-level funny, But that's also going to, we were going to get to that level, but they can explain jokes and we have no idea why. So I'm just thinking there is no reason why the capabilities, I'll call it capabilities, not intelligence. But I don't see any reason why the capability of these large language models should stop at human level or combine humanity level of skills or capabilities. Because it doesn't have any conscience or like, well, maybe we should stop because now we are as intelligent as human beings. It's not going to happen. So it's about time that we... I think if you look at how little we know about everything in the universe.

[1:14:43] I choose to be the optimist here. And I think it's just it's going to expand our capabilities and eventually I think there will be a post-AI AI era where we don't think about, we're not going to, we're not going to think about what is driven by silicon or whatever the chips will be made of and what is from our carbon based brain. I think it will be just. Impossible to distinguish one from the other. I think it's what you said before, that curve of innovation where something becomes impossible, becoming invisible. So it sounds like another permutation of that.

[1:15:27] Ingvar, I'm very respectful of your time. I was wondering, are there any last tips or ideas you would like to leave with our listeners, whether they're students, whether someone leading themselves or leading others in an innovative process, whether it be business or their own personal lives? Lives well um if you look at like big conferences like uh oslo business forum and stuff the last couple of years it has been about thriving in chaos and uh and like the future is uncertain and so on and um in moonshot type of innovation very like at the core um is the premise that the future is uncertain.

[1:16:12] And just some of the tools we have are about dealing with that uncertainty. So in many ways, I think that the broader application of moonshot innovation, that type of thinking, the skills and the craftsmanship and the techniques are also very useful in general when it comes to modern leadership, because it's not anymore more just about making making a great plan and execute it well um and also in in in personal leadership um and uh although as a company or even as a as a human being you you don't necessarily have the resources to set aside a unit to work full-time with uh realizing all these type of, or experimenting or testing out all these possibilities. But there's one thing that everyone can do. And that's what starts with like with the, the, the head and also that is guided by the heart. And that is this imagination and the acknowledgement that if you realize that most people.

[1:17:26] Most of what is given today, sometime in the future, will not be like that. And you acknowledge that change is inevitable, but it is also good, and that the biggest changes have not yet happened.

[1:17:39] And use that as a positive framing for your imagination. Then I think a lot of a lot of strategies for the future for your company or like what like even even things like what what is the purpose why why we have this organization or company and also for yourself what is if if if the world is going to be significantly different in the future what is it that i can imagine that i can contribute the most with that i don't do today or would like to to do more of that is aligned with my my deeper purpose with the heart so i think that's uh that would be like the universal takeaway uh on on moonshots it's it's not just for for some geeks uh at the far far end or at the restaurant of the end of the universe but it's there's something about this acknowledgement of uncertainty gives a great opportunity for good and that goes for for both society, organizations, and us as individuals.

[1:18:50] If you can imagine it, it will exist in the future. Well, Ingvar, thank you very much for your time. It's been a fascinating conversation, going down this path with you. There's hundreds of other questions I'd love to ask, but maybe they'll have to be a part two.

[1:19:07] Music.

[1:19:17] Delved into the crucial role of innovation in navigating an uncertain future. With insights from Ingvar on the dual approaches of optimizing existing operations and embracing moonshot innovations, we've learned that the innovator's mindset is rooted in the belief that change is both inevitable and beneficial and that the best changes are yet to come. Now, by fostering a culture that embraces risk and views failure as first attempt in learning, reasoning, well, we can create a stable foundation even in the most uncertain environments. Ingvar also shared a profound perspective. He said, the more you know about a domain, the more you tend to be cursed by that knowledge. Counterintuitively, the less you know about the complications of the domain, well, the easier it is to imagine how we could solve a problem. You are actually blessed by ignorance. Now, this reminds us that sometimes a fresh perspective Perspective can be our greatest asset in finding innovative solutions. Ingvar, a personal thank you from me to you for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom and your experience on innovation and the moonshot mindset. I've really appreciated our time and I have a lot to think about. Well, folks, that brings us to the tail end of yet another episode. I appreciate you showing up and allowing me to be part of your week. And until the next time we continue this conversation, keep well. Keep strong.

[1:20:45] Music.