David Benjamin_mixdown

David: [00:00:00] Every time you hit something complex, it's new, it's different. There is no playbook, there is no checklist. And really what you have to do is get all the right people involved in sort of sharing what they see. No believe, understand, get them buying into the right way to to move forward. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, the right way to move forward when it's complex is to try things.

Hapreet: [00:00:39] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists of Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours. You can register to attend by going to bitly.com/adsoh I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review.

Hapreet: [00:01:21] Our guest today is a complexity expert and highly skilled process architect who's been a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 and government leaders tackling some of the biggest gnarliest challenges. He's the one organization's call when they need to find traction in a landscape of unorganized, intractable complexity based out of the greater Toronto area. He spoke in near and far on a wide range of topics related to complexity, effective and efficient problem [00:02:00] solving and human dynamics in systems. Today, he's here to talk about his book, Cracking Complexity, which is a cutting edge, highly engaging step by step formula for cracking incredibly knotty and important challenges. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, co-founder of Integrity and chief architect behind the implementation of the complexity formula, David Benjamin. David, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I really appreciate you being here.

David: [00:02:34] No problem. This is going to be a great conversation.

Hapreet: [00:02:36] Absolutely. Man, your book is amazing. You guys need to go pick it up. Cracking complexity, as you could tell by my copious tags. I really enjoyed this book. And I know you guys as Data scientists will as well. Before we jump into the book, though, let's learn a little bit more about you. So, David, where did you grow up and what was it like there?

David: [00:02:58] I grew up in Toronto and sort of the northeast suburbs. It was quiet, safe, clean.

David: [00:03:06] You know, even in Toronto during those days, your kid could hop on the subway, go downtown, hang out with their friends, come back and, you know, parents wouldn't miss a beat in terms of worrying about them. So really nice childhood

Hapreet: [00:03:18] At Toronto is a cool place, man. I really like a lot right there on the on the lake and everything. Beautiful, beautiful city. So when you were, you know, cruising around on the subways, going in and out of the city as a younger youth, what did you imagine your future would be like, frankly?

David: [00:03:36] You know, I don't remember giving it much thought. I always had a lot of confidence in the future. I've always been someone who sort of lets things come. My dad worked for IBM, so I think that was always hitting my head that, you know, IBM might be in my future and computer science because it was relatively new then. And my father, again, you know, was pioneering work in that space. But, you know, I knew I wouldn't be a basketball player or [00:04:00] a hockey player, so it would be something professional. And I just kind of let it emerge.

Hapreet: [00:04:05] And did you get a chance to eventually work with IBM through your consulting work that you've done or did that?

David: [00:04:12] Yeah, as a co-op student at the University of Waterloo, I did, I think three work terms that IBM is awesome.

Hapreet: [00:04:19] Yeah. So how different is that to say

David: [00:04:22] Later in my career I spent another three years there as well.

Hapreet: [00:04:25] Yeah. So how different now is is life than what you imagined it would be like? It sounds to me that it might kind of be in line, but did you ever see yourself breaking out to start your own company or anything like that?

David: [00:04:37] No, I never would have thought of myself as an entrepreneur. And it was really, again, just something that came to me. I didn't seek out the adventure of starting a business on my own, but somebody who I had worked with. He went and found the Stafford beer work and he found disintegration, brought it to me. And I basically just dropped what I was doing and joined him as we were starting it in 2002.

Hapreet: [00:05:00] And kind of what was the the path that led you to there. So what types of roles were you working in? What types of things were you doing that then eventually led to to this being the thing that you chose to pursue?

David: [00:05:13] Yeah, I remember an earlier role I had in probably one of my father's companies, somebody commenting on what a good systems thinker I was. And I had no idea what that meant. You know, it sounded like a compliment. So I said thank you. But, you know, I say this to people sometimes there is no sort of path that puts you on the career trajectory of complexity, let alone even facilitating. Right. But you do you watch kids in their natural setting with with friends and in programs. You see the ones who sort of sit and listen and kind of take over the conversation, not dominating it, but asking questions and drawing people out. And I think in the same way, there are kids who kind of look at the systems and the big patterns in life and sweat the details, much less. Those [00:06:00] are probably the ones who grow the system, scientists and complexity scientists. So I guess I would say, you know, it was just, again, being that kind of kid, having a father who had businesses and in fact, worked with Stafford Beer, who is the pioneer, as you read in the book, a lot of the work we do. So it just kind of came together that way.

Hapreet: [00:06:22] So what does that mean to be a systems thinker? How do you interpret that? What does it mean?

David: [00:06:29] To me, it's it's a matter of sort of looking at the big picture, paying attention to the patterns, how they connect, you know, as my early career, I was a programmer. Right. And you're stuck on a piece of code and you're dealing with a bug that's in front of you. And that's very, very micro and very, you know, in the moment. But as you sort of pull back the lens and you look at the larger system that you're building and start to see how all the pieces come together and then how it's going to be used and where it's going to be used and so on, you start to see like more of a system view of what you're doing. So it's kind of a weak analogy, I guess, or maybe a little too literal. But to me, it's really just more about seeing the whole being a holistic thinker. And again, for me, as I'll tell you as we get into this, it's about seeing patterns and how pieces come together and how problems kind of get solved when you when you don't get stuck in the micro.

Hapreet: [00:07:24] Yeah. Like that. The definition of what makes it really clear for me. So do you think, like the systems thinking, is this a skill that anybody can cultivate, that anybody can pick up, or was it something that you're born with? Like how did you develop this system thinking mindset? Was it just through work?

David: [00:07:43] Yeah, I mean, for me, I think it's always just been very natural. You try to trace it back to childhood. I think I had three older sisters, right. And they were all older than me. And going through life, I had the means to sort of just watching how life works and learning from mothers kind [00:08:00] of sets you into that into that mindset of observing the moving parts and how they connect. I think you can learn a lot of systems thinking tools, and you can you can pick up some of the kind of patterns to look for and how to look for them.

David: [00:08:16] And I think it helps if you have an innate interest in sort of holism. There are personality types, I think, that just get very mired in details and it's much harder for them to kind of look at them and see everything. And how it all fits together

Hapreet: [00:08:31] Is there is a good book you might recommend to our audience about systems thinking if they wanted to, to exercise that the muscle, so to speak.

David: [00:08:39] There's several good books. I mean, Standardbearer was a very prodigious writer and he wrote a lot of books about systems thinking. He pioneered a lot of bottles that are in use. But again, you have to have the appetite for, you know, a university textbook kind of mode explaining things. So I read the good parts at the beginning and I didn't get all the way through all the detail in his books. And to me, that's I read a lot. And you kind of know when you hit the point where you've been saturated with what you're going to get from a book. And so, you know, as I as I go through a lot of the systems thinking materials, I pretty much know what I'm going to get from the book and and don't go all the way through cover to cover it.

Hapreet: [00:09:19] But I think. Thanks for that. Appreciate that. So let's let's talk about now. You touched on a little bit. But, you know, let's let's get more in depth here about the path that led to your fascination with complexity so that we kind of touched on it there. But if you want to just reiterate that for us.

David: [00:09:37] Yeah. If I kind of reverse engineer how I ended up doing what I'm doing again, it was I remember my father hosted Stafford Beer at our house for his 16th birthday party or something like that. And I was a teenager. So I just remember seeing all these like long haired, crazy CyberKnife Titian's, you know, and scientists and having a great time drinking a lot. [00:10:00] And I think that sort of lodged in my head. And 15 years later, 13 years later, something like that, maybe 10. David, Carmelo's my partner. That's Integrity co-founder. He he showed me what he had come across in terms of this methodology that Stafford Beer had had developed. And there was something about it that just appealed me, appealed to me right away as a as a mathematician, there's, you know, efficient network models baked into what Stafford Beer was doing. And it just made sense. It was you kind of look at it and you say that that works. And in software, I had had several career instances where there was a lot of smoke and mirrors kind of selling and convincing going on and, you know, figuring it out after you've made a commitment to client. This was just really well engineered stuff that got at the core of really big challenges. So we didn't get into it as sort of this is complexity and we're going to solve complexity. It was just much more about helping large groups deal with large scale problem solving. And the foundational premises all made a lot of sense. The model made a lot of sense. And as soon as we started doing it, I felt like I had been born into into this life.

Hapreet: [00:11:22] So break it down for us. What what is the difference between simple, complicated?

David: [00:11:28] Complex, yes, so simple and complicated challenges are deterministic, they're sort of the domain of science, they are completely solvable, they are solved. There's a checklist you can follow to solve them consistently. So, for example, repairing a car would be a complicated challenge. And so the difference between simple and complicated, all those same characteristics. But when the challenge is complicated, you need to seek some expert help in order to execute the solution, execute the checklist. So again, with that car example, [00:12:00] you can see it's simple because not just anyone can go fix your car. You need an expert so categorically different from that of complex challenges which are not solved. They have a lot of moving parts, a lot of hidden interdependencies, and there's just too much stimulus to know what the patterns are and how they're going to work. Until you've tried things and discerned what works, only then can you know sort of how to make progress on something that's complex. So the domain of the expert complicated the domain of kind of figuring it out from scratch each time. That's complexity.

Hapreet: [00:12:36] What's your favorite example of a problem that on the surface looks like it fits the description of complicated, but as you start to dig a little bit deeper, it turns out that it's actually complex.

David: [00:12:48] You know, it's funny because, again, from a software background, I would have said twenty five or thirty years ago that writing systems was a complicated challenge, building computer systems. But as you look at how big and central these systems became to running big businesses, you realize that, well, it might be it is complicated to write software to actually, like successfully implement software and get it in use in a company. Well, right. And meeting user needs, that's definitely a complex challenge. So I think one of the traps we fall into is trying to believe that it's merely complicated to get an ERP system or any other kind of system working successfully in a company. It's if anything, is complex, that is, and then sort of the more mainstream site. I like to talk about how planning a wedding, it's complicated. Having a happy marriage is complex and that really helps people. OK, so I can execute the checklist of how to prepare for my wedding, but where is the checklist on how to navigate a marriage

Hapreet: [00:13:55] Like that, like that section of the book where you break it down for all these different types of problems. [00:14:00] And it's a complex and complicated that really, really enjoy that part. So I'm curious, though. How is the problem solving process different for a complicated versus a complex problem?

David: [00:14:17] Well, I mean, it's it's just a matter when you're dealing with something complicated, you know, it's a matter of finding the expert who knows how to solve this. And so, again, if you've got a piece of software and you need it configured in a particular way and you don't have that capability, you can go find an expert who does car breaks down. You go hire a mechanic, they'll get your car up and running again. So it's really sort of knowing who to engage and making a choice among one of often several experts that you can bring in to help you with that. But when you're dealing with something complex, the experts may tell you they've solved this before. You know, we've we've done talent management in many companies before. We know how to do it, but they don't know your company and and they don't know what changed since last year. And they don't know, you know, the particular demographics of your company. Every time you hit something complex, it's new, it's different. There is no playbook. There is no checklist. And really, what you have to do is get all the right people involved in sort of sharing what they see. No believe, understand, get them buying into the right way to to move forward. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, the right way to move forward when it's complex is to try things it's not, you know, to be confident that everything like is figured out. We're just going to do this and we're going to get through this problem. It's not like here's a few things we're going to try. We're going to watch them carefully. They work will. We'll scale them up. They fail, will shut them down. It's that kind of approach

Hapreet: [00:15:50] Is really interesting. I mean, I wonder if complexity does it. Like, can one person view something as being complicated, but then that same [00:16:00] situation might be viewed as somebody else with maybe less of an understanding or less of a command or mastery of that subject as complex. And this business this comes to mind, as you know, as a data scientist, I'm pretty well versed in Data science workflows, right. How to go from raw data to to decisions. But I'm placing the situation at work where I have to create a Data strategy for this organization, massive organization. And to me it's like, OK, well, man, I've got no clue what I'm doing. So I'm just like read up and and do a bunch of research. And, you know, to me, this making Data differentiator for my organization is complex as hell for me. But somebody who's done it before, it might not be complex to them. It might be complicated as that kind of how it works.

David: [00:16:48] Yeah, well, they might see it as complicatedly and again, a lot of times in order to sort of sell your goods or sell your services, you've got to have that confidence and belief and convey to the client. We know what we're doing. We've done many times before. Don't worry, you can trust us and they'll interview people. They'll they'll get information. But ultimately, if you're doing something like Data strategy, what you're going to get back is their view of the right Data strategy for your organization. And in fact, you know, human systems are like human bodies. They have sort of antibodies that fight off foreign substances. So when that when somebody else is Data strategy lands inside an organization, you know, the natural response is to try to fight it off as a as a foreign entity in the body. And I'm sure you've seen that right. So instead, as you get into the book, you start to see that really the key to dealing with complexity is to get people get their fingerprints all over the solution, get their fingerprints all over the strategy. And I can't imagine a situation where doing Data strategy is only complicated because, again, the market, the business you're in, the people who work [00:18:00] there, you know, it's going to be different every time. And of course, are you going on and on. But if you take the last year is a great example. Right. Think about how much changed overnight beyond anyone's control and how many Data strategies stand unchanged as a result of what happened in the last year. Strategy has just been like thrown out the window in so many different facets of life in business by what just happened, and that's the nature of complexity. Go find an expert who will tell you how to do work 2.0, which a lot of companies are struggling, hasn't been done. It's got to be figured out and it's got to be figured out by the people who are going to live with the strategy

Hapreet: [00:18:43] That I just it's funny to me because we're talking about this global pandemic that we're going through. There's like literally an example in your book, a company that was dealing with the pandemic situation, how they would respond to that. And I was like, I had to go. I had to flip back and look what year this book was published, because it was just so, so striking. But, yeah, there's one thing that I really found interesting about this whole, you know, tensorflow for me that you have that really definitely to get into was how much that involved people and getting people together. And I think it's only fitting that, you know, Marshall Goldsmith had written the foreword, you know, the emotional intelligence master for this book. And it's it's very, very fitting. So I want to toss this question. Would you open chapter to it right back at you so the audience can get an understanding of how to create an effective approach? You know, when it comes time to face these complex challenges. So we talked about a situation where I'm in, you know, trying to create Data strategy where I've got no foreknowledge of what's going to work, what's not going to work. So how do we best deal with that? How do we best deal with something we've never dealt with before without knowing what's going to work and what's not going to work?

David: [00:19:49] Yeah, I think, you know, if I kind of break it down, you

David: [00:19:53] Got to start by getting a handle on what the problem is,

David: [00:19:56] Right. And and then

David: [00:19:58] Articulating the problem in [00:20:00] a way that everyone can kind of see the same problem in front of them. So there's a few steps that get at that. But ultimately, once you kind of frame the problem, another concept we talk about is the requisite variety, getting all the right people and right necessary and sufficient. That's why the word is requisite. But right in terms of perspectives, experiences, what they see, what their job function is inside the organization, outside the organization, partner organizations get all those very people involved and then you get them like dealing with that problem. All agree is the real problem, figuring out possible solutions. And because you're in the complex domain, what will always happen is you'll end up with some very clear, complicated things that need to get done. And if you've done it right, one or more important experiments to try because you've got to kind of grow forward, see what works, see what doesn't work, learn as you go, adapt as as things develop. And that's the way you make progress

Hapreet: [00:21:05] That a lot of a lot of experimentation. I put some of that science into it. So before we jump into some parts of the complexity formula, I was hoping you could name a couple of the principles that you outlined that laid the necessary foundation for us to leverage the complexity formula.

David: [00:21:26] Sure. I think a really

David: [00:21:28] Foundational thing is this law of requisite variety, which I mentioned. But just again, to explain what that is, that comes from a guy named Roger Ashby, sorry, Ross Ashby. I always see Roger Ashby because growing up, Ross Ashby, who is a cyber dietician, which is the science of good management, just to greatly simplify that.

David: [00:21:48] And what he said is

David: [00:21:49] That only variety destroys variety. It's a it's a natural law. Like the only way to deal with something is highly complex is to bring to bear a matching amount of variety [00:22:00] in terms of the people who are dealing with it. And so that more of the requisite variety is all about sort of thinking about the complexity that you're facing and really getting creative about the necessary people who need to get involved. And one of the lenses into that is another kind of principle that we talk about, which we call Sabga, which is about sensing, absorbing, thinking, deciding and acting in all those functions that are involved in really getting a handle on problem, sensing what the problem is, absorbing the implications, thinking about possible options, deciding on one and then enacting your decision. Those are fragmented functions in any organization. And the reason that matters is as an individual human being. You have sat baked into one nervous system to the employees. You walk into the office, you see a line on the desk, you are immediately able to sense, absorb, think, decide and act. And so in the blink of an eye, you're running in the other direction. Right. But if you take the line at the desk as a metaphor for challenges facing the larger organizations, the sensors are all over the place.

David: [00:23:07] They may or may not be the ones who pick up the stimulus of a threat or opportunity in the market. Then you've got a different group of people who absorb the implications. Those might be Data scientists who are looking for weak signals or strong signals, others who think about options and weigh the cost benefit of different approaches. Then the deciders and then finally the actors. And as most organizations function, there is no smooth, integrated way for those functions to to work together and get the action fast. So it takes months and sometimes years to pick up a threat and get to the point where you're you're going down the path of solving for it. So that's really key. As you think about any complex challenge and you put that with writing, it begins to really bring to life what it means to have the right variety people to deal with big challenges and then [00:24:00] iteration emerge. And it's all part of the stack, you know, and if you do it all right, you're going to make it through from a challenge to solutions every time, which is funny for me to say, because it makes it sound like solving for complexity is merely complicated. But in a way it is. There is a formula.

Hapreet: [00:24:24] And it's interesting, solving for complexity is this complicated. Just go through go the stuff. But there are there are hard steps, right? And I think each step is. Each step might just be complex in its own right. Definitely to dig into some of the steps. But one thing I know that the Data scientists, the audience are really going to love is this DIKW model. So can you explain that to us? What is it and what should we know about it? And you've got a data scientist before. So what should we, as Data scientists know about this?

David: [00:24:59] I think you all I think most

David: [00:25:00] People who work with Data, you know, already, at least intuitively understand this comes from that particular model. I see Russell Worton spoke about it really kind of refined the model. I don't think he originated the model, but it basically says there's this hierarchy that goes from Data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And what Russell would say is that analysis of information is worth a pound of Data and an ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information. An ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of knowledge. And that's I forget the exact ratios, but that's the IRA. You're trying to make your way to wisdom. And it takes a lot of Data to get to some really solid information, a lot of information to get to solid knowledge and all the way up to wisdom. We inserted into that hierarchy the notion of shared understanding, because I think that's. So you don't just get from knowledge to wisdom without getting again. [00:26:00] Group wisdom means getting like a group of people who are dealing with the Data information and knowledge, coming to a shared understanding of what it all means so that they're ready to try things, learn and produce wisdom without shared understanding. You end up with with people who are just looking at the same source materials. I mean, what better example than the state of the world right now in terms of people able to look at the same data base and come away with completely different interpretations on climate change through everything about what's going on in the world? So, again, without shared understanding, you don't get to wisdom. And I think that's really important that people who work in Data to understand, it's probably why a lot of people bang their heads against the wall is because it's so clean and clear to them all the way up to the point of knowledge. And yet it's really hard to get people rallying around that knowledge and behaving accordingly and in a coordinated way.

Hapreet: [00:27:02] How do we get to that share of understanding? Like what do we do to help facilitate that?

David: [00:27:08] It's a real struggle and people need time.

David: [00:27:11] This is where

David: [00:27:12] Sort of iteration comes in. As an example, I like to give the example. I've got three daughters. I think anyone who's got kids has learned that if you kind of just tell them to do something, you're never going to see. If they don't think that's the right thing to do, you're not going to convince them in one moment of telling them, no, no, no, this is absolutely the right thing for you to do. But if you give them time to iterate through the conversation a few times and so you give them time to pause and think and take it on to themselves and find the win right where they can concede that that was the right thing to do. But and that's how people learn. And so people changes, they need they need to actually let go of things before they can take new things on. So when you're talking about getting to a shared understanding, it's not [00:28:00] like here's the Data. It's clear you've got to get in the conversations. You've got to work your way through. You've got to help people think it through. And you've got to go in understanding that you are likely, in some respect, wrong in your interpretation of it. And you really have to weigh a five way or twenty way conversation about like what? What are we seeing? You're listening in ways that you don't listen, not thinking about what you're how you're going to convince them that you're right, but like, really allowing for the fact that you might not be.

Hapreet: [00:28:30] Thank you very much. This can be this will be something I'm going to run back a couple of times. Let that sink in, because be a lot of necessity for shared understanding, for the need to be on it. So I want to dig into a couple of parts of the complexity for me before we do that. Maybe at a high level, super high level that can walk us through these 10 steps and then we'll go deeper on on a couple of them.

David: [00:28:56] Yeah. And I've given you

David: [00:28:57] Some of them already. But basically, I mean, it starts from a place of humility for leaders who are going to like wade into this and be the formula. You got to recognize that. You don't know what you don't know that it's OK to ask for help in figuring something out. This prevailing thought that I make the big bucks so I should know and I look bad if I don't know what you're going to let that go. You got to be humble about that and acknowledge that you're facing something that requires you to engage a whole bunch of people to help figure it out that articulate what the problem is. That's crafting a really good question. Then use that as a lens into what's the requisite variety of people. As I was talking about before, I allow that to be a large group, 30, 40 people who are all the perspectives I need to help inform my answers on this challenge I face and get them all seeing the challenge and understanding it. It's funny, we published the book before the pandemic and for 18 years of our history, it was about then getting all those people together in one place. And you probably read that chapter of the smile on your face. But what we all learned [00:30:00] since March of last year is that you can actually localize people, bring them together, assemble them really effectively over some of the video platforms that are in use now. So you get them together physically, virtually. And really, I think one of the really interesting and different steps in this process is that you don't tell them what to talk about. You've given them a question.

David: [00:30:23] There's so much prevailing wisdom about needing an agenda. Don't have a meeting without an agenda. Well, we say the opposite. We say don't have an agenda as you come in. What you've got this variety of people, you've chosen them because they know things you don't know. So the last thing you want to do is tell them how to talk about the question you've given them. So give them time and space to work together to identify the topics they need to cover. And then it's about iterating through those topics three times, specifically because the Data says that a fourth time would be diminishing returns and two times is also three times. And the whole thing is it is with this kind of mindset that the right things are going to emerge if we approach this the right way. It's not believing that, you know what the right answer is, but it is believing that if we do this right, engage the right people, iterate together. As soon as we make our way to answers, the right answers will emerge. And of course, what also emerges when you do it that way is alignment and by and mobilization to to take action. So, you know, as some details in terms of how to actually have good meetings when you've got that group together on those topics they've identified. But what comes out the other end is clarity on the things that need to be done, the complicated things that simple things that need to be done, things that need to be tried. So, again, those are those experiments and potentially some kind of lurking additional complexities that you didn't know were there until you got.

Hapreet: [00:31:56] Yeah, I found that part really, really interesting, where you get this [00:32:00] group of people together and we're just like you guys make the agenda, but it makes complete sense because if you are the one setting the agenda, you don't know what everybody else cares about. You don't know what direction they want to take things. And this way you're making sure everyone's concerns are going to be addressed. I found that really, really fascinating. Definitely something I'm going to be leveraging as well in the future.

David: [00:32:19] Yeah, I'm sorry if I can just add when you're talking about that humility of the of the leader, if there's one thing that leaders have struggled with from the beginning that we've been working with them, it's really letting go of the agenda and trusting that what matters is going to come up. And how do I know you know, that they're going to talk about this if I don't tell them they have to talk about this and we say, no, you're going to be part of the group, you're going to be telling them that you think it's important trying to convince them. And if they agree, then it should be talked about. If they don't agree, you're going to have to let that go and follow there. It really is a different kind of leadership than a lot of people are used.

Hapreet: [00:32:53] It seems like the more and more I read about leadership and leadership books that this letting go is a huge part of good leadership. What do you think?

David: [00:33:03] Well, you know, even if I was ready to debate with you a year ago, if we've learned one thing over the course of the last 12 months, it's that leaders need to be vulnerable, transparent, humble. Nobody knew what to do when this thing landed on us a year ago. And I don't think very many people tried to pretend they knew what to do. So you had to kind of most people just had to shift into a completely different mode of leadership. And it is the mode of leadership that also fits when you're dealing with anything complex, not just the global pandemic. And again, it's there's a little bit of need for command and control at the very beginning to let everyone know that, don't worry, we're on it. But as you try to figure out, like, what does this mean for our customers? What does this mean for our internal operations and efficiency? You know, what happens after? How do people work going forward? Those are all questions nobody's ever answered before. And [00:34:00] I don't know anyone who would be right in thinking that they could figure it out on behalf of their organization. So we've really set the stage for a whole new generation of leaders and some transformed leaders to approach complexity with the humility I was talking about, because we've all been humbled.

Hapreet: [00:34:18] So when it comes to acknowledging the complexity that we have in front of us, isn't just a matter of saying to yourself, holy shit, man, this is f ing hard or is there more to it?

David: [00:34:28] You know, you can you can kind of if you're looking for your thinking that way, you can ask yourself a few questions that will pretty quickly reveal the difference between something that's complicated and something that's complex. So, for example, if you just ask yourself, is there any way that there's a checklist that would guide me through solving this? Right. A lot of times you'd say, well, no, there's there's no way that can be done. And so we're dealing with something complex, you know, another kind of cutesy way. And think about it is if you got that company that helped you, like, navigate talent management a year ago, if you asked them to help you again now that a pandemic is here with a fixed price, the project for you, would they be so confident that they know how big the project is going to be or would they, you know, instead say, well, we're going to go time materials on this one because there's a lot to figure out, you know, just those kinds of things. Is this is this something if I think about it, like this kind of challenge five years ago, is it the same or is it completely different? And I think, you know, just the pace of change these days, like five years ago, I can't think of anything that's the same in terms of solving like a significant organizational challenge.

Hapreet: [00:36:17] So [00:36:00] that's an interesting question. Do you have. If you're so used to measuring progress via a checklist and some benchmarks and stuff like that, and you're in the realm of complex, like, how would you measure progress in these types of scenarios?

David: [00:36:34] Yeah, it's it's you know, that's part of setting up your experiments. Right, and set objectives. You set measurable things. You say, OK, we're trying to do this. Let's try that and we'll watch for those indicators as to whether it's working or not.

David: [00:36:48] And then even then,

David: [00:36:49] I think you have to be attuned to what else you might learn because you may not have anticipated all the positive or negative impact. You know, that, you know, in advance you're going to be measuring kind of as we've I think I've probably had experience you've had over the last little while, which is just talking to a lot of smart people and able to learn from them. And there's so many things they're saying about their experiences. Business leaders, thought leaders, you know, what they've seen, what they've heard. It really is. You know, the common theme is just the amount of change in that everything has to be rethought and redone. And you know that this new style of leadership and approaching things differently isn't a choice anymore. And we're not going back to normal.

Hapreet: [00:37:33] And we're on the topic of, you know, known unknowns and nobody knows how things going to work out. So, you know, every problem, whether it's complex or complicated, it's going to have its share of known unknowns, unknown unknowns. So. I'm curious about these, you know, the breaking down these unknowns and breaking down unknown unknowns, right. What are some questions that we can ask ourselves [00:38:00] so that we can find a way forward in these types of situations?

David: [00:38:05] Yeah, I think the whole point of the unknown unknowns is that they're not even sufficiently on your radar to ask yourself what you know about them. So the unknowns, you know, I don't know how this is going to work. That's going to work. They at least have the dimension of something that you understand. You may not understand what's happening to it or what's going to happen to it. But you know what exists? The unknown unknowns. This is, again, back to COVID. You may not be aware of something really important or lurking or a big opportunity around the corner. There's a much better chance that if you really tap into the variety of talent in and around the organization, somebody is going to bring that to light. So the point of the unknown unknowns is, is casting the net wide enough that you're likely to pick up on it. And I think, you know, this notion of like weak signals in Data, I think that it does get at like I don't know what it means. There's something happening over there. It's it's weak, but it's worth my attention to try to figure out whether that's an unknown or an unknown unknown. I think you'll discover as you try to figure that out, but it may lead you again to something very surprising.

Hapreet: [00:39:18] Something I've been trying to wrap my head around as I'm working this Data strategy at work is and there's so much stuff I don't know, but there's so much stuff I don't know that I don't know how how am I going to tame this? And it has been you know, I don't have the I mean, maybe I do have the requisite variety at work and with the colleagues. I just haven't reached out to them. But for me, my request for aid has been just reading books and reading articles and just getting other people's perspectives and things like that. So is that ever a substitute for that requisite variety? You know, internally in organization like let's say we are in a situation where we might be a little bit on our own, can we inject requisite variety into [00:40:00] our world in different ways?

David: [00:40:02] I mean, it doesn't hurt and it certainly doesn't hurt to kind of read what other people's thinking on things. But ultimately, getting into a conversation is very different from reading. That's why when we talk a requisite variety, you know, in almost any situation, there's kind of the obvious cross section of people who are inside your organization and users and managers and everyone else. We're going to contribute. But then the fun part starts and you really dig into it. Like if we're going for requisite the necessary variety, like we need people from the outside, we need perspectives from the outside. Who could that be? What what might that look like? So in the example of the Data strategy might mean going to a completely different industry for just insights from somebody who you've never met before about what they went through on your Data journey. Right. It might be, you know, not just kind of the end users of the product, but their customers. Right. And and how they would see reflected some from your customers. You know, the importance of that Data why it matters what what they need from it and just kind of thinking through all dimensions of, of course, demographic diversity.

David: [00:41:11] We also talk about personality types and thinking styles. There's a few rarest thinking styles that are worth their weight in gold that you've probably encountered the person who who will sit and listen for days. Right. And then they'll say one profound thing and everybody will mouth agape, go, oh, my God, that's that's it. And then there's the storytelling's. Right, who are able to take concepts that are emerging from a bunch of people. Just play it back in a way that everybody says, yeah, that's exactly what we've been trying to say, all those different personality types, all the different ways people engage in teams, all their different backgrounds, every organization has such a rich pool of talent around them. It's just that when it comes to solving complex challenges, they've been trained to go to the consultants. They're [00:42:00] going to go to that pool of talent over there, outsource the problem over there because everyone's too busy or my people don't know about innovation or whatever it is.

Hapreet: [00:42:10] It's one thing I like to talk about fairly early on in the book is that actually you don't really need to go to consultants. You can work with who you have internally. You just have to be open to it. Right. What do you think is such a challenge for organizations?

David: [00:42:25] Well, I mean, first of all, I would say that a great

David: [00:42:28] Wealth of talent for you to draw on in your writing group is that consulting you've been working with on your Data strategy or whatever it is, because they've seen a lot of industries you haven't seen. They've got a lot of company industry, but it's not bringing them into their model. It's not bringing them in to be at the hub of a hub and spoke interview process. Right. That's what doesn't work. But you take them and you put them into a group of people and you connect everyone together. Those concerns are far more effective because in the context of a conversation, know things that that can just completely change the conversation, move forward as long as they're kind of parking their self-interest and engaging as like an equal participant in this really important conversation. And I've seen many consultants who do that very, very well. And I've seen others that can set aside their desire to sell the next contract or or whatever, because it's threatening to them in terms of why do companies use traditional consulting? It's because it works. It takes longer. You get great, very elegant solution, maybe better than the solution you'll get by applying the formula. And where it breaks down is on implementation and execution again, because it's their solution. And people who haven't been like engaged in and part of the conversation and don't have authorship for the answers, have a hard time [00:44:00] rallying around those answers on say that somebody else figure that.

Hapreet: [00:44:06] It kind of feels to me like when you are hiring consulting agencies, it's like you're outsourcing requisite variety. I'm sure those consultants have requested a variety on their teams and they're work on your problems.

David: [00:44:18] So they have variety on maybe the challenge that you're dealing with, maybe that includes other industries and so on. But they don't they don't know a thing about your company unless they've been in there for a long time, in which case, again, they're very valuable to have as part of your variety. But they're not doing all the jobs inside your company. They're not dealing directly with the customers every day. They don't have the twenty five years of history, what we tried back then. That only comes from, again, like this, this organism you put together in your writing group, like the mega mind of all of that, you know, needs to have a lot of local knowledge and stake in order for it to actually solve anything.

Hapreet: [00:45:04] And that's why you kind of qualify that as not just variety needs to be that requisite type of variety. And earlier in our conversation here, you gave us that great I like the concise, precise definition of requisite. I was wondering if you can state that for us again.

David: [00:45:20] Yeah, just necessary and sufficient.

Hapreet: [00:45:22] Necessary and sufficient.

David: [00:45:23] Yeah. So again, if I dig into that for one minute to me again, I come from a math and computer science background. So there's like whenever there's a good puzzle involved, I get interested to satisfy requisite. It's not just like let's think about everybody we could possibly engage for all that variety. The fun of it is trying to reduce that number down to as small as possible and take your 40 people, make it 30 people and still have the same variety represented. And what that means is you're looking for people who have like a variety of experiences themselves, who've worn different hats with different functions, come from the competitor being a customer, [00:46:00] know. And they're a millennial and they're a woman and and and OK, good. We've checked all five of the qualities we wanted to involve with that one person. And when you get really good at that, you end up with a really interesting mix of people as well. Not just that you've checked all the boxes, but you've now got a really important, really busy, really accomplished, really interesting people augmented with people who've never done this before and they're just coming in for the first time, you to the job. And it's it's crazy what you see happen when you get that kind of mix of people working effectively together.

Hapreet: [00:46:34] I love it. And I love the name of your company as well. Integrity is like synergy, integrity and synergy from variety. That kind of

David: [00:46:45] That's a standard. Berezan, again, it's Maccabean Synergistic 10 Segre. That you didn't see that? No. So you got a synergy, it's that 10 Segretti, which is really interesting. It's so Stafford be really studied a lot of different areas of science. And he was a contemporary of Buckminster Fuller, for example. And he was fascinated with Buckminster Fuller, Buckminster Fuller, his work in architecture and what Fuller was saying, you know who he is, buckyballs, these domes. He was talking about how in nature for billions of years of evolution, how tension and compression, when they're in balance, they make sure very strong structures so that you can say it's that balance between tension and compression. So standardbearer looked at sort of Fuller's work on geodesic domes and who was proving that architecture could get bigger and stronger at the same time. And he said, well, if that works for architecture, think that probably makes sense, that it should work for people. So he designed this integration, this term synergistic can say as a way to get at you know, it started working in large groups on complex challenges. [00:48:00]

Hapreet: [00:48:00] I'm definitely going to be getting some Stafford Lehr books after this conversation happened right on Amazon. What's what's the number one book that myself and the audience that's listening, if they wanted to really benefit from from his thoughts, what would that book be?

David: [00:48:15] You know, I think the best way to kind of benefit from his thoughts personally is to seek out some videos. I'm not sure what's available on YouTube, but, you know, you probably find something. He's written books

David: [00:48:27] That are more or less not

David: [00:48:29] Available without sort of getting special printings of them, or you might find them in the library. But he wrote a series about something called the Viable Systems Model, which again, is it's a good read about systems and it gives you a sense of what systems thinking is all about. But there's one of his books Teeters on the brink of being, as I said, a textbook. You've got to have the appetite for that.

Hapreet: [00:48:55] Yeah, I mean, all Data scientists listening at that habitate. I think I'll definitely be looking into some of this stuff on on YouTube as well. So we'll talk about one more of the steps, which is one of my absolute favorite steps just because of a podcast. And I have to do this, which is constructing questions, but specifically constructing a really, really good question. So what's the difference between a, constructing a good question and asking a question?

David: [00:49:24] Yeah, we thought we use the word constructing because it's never easy. And that might be something that seems like it should be complicated. And I wouldn't go as far as to say it's complex, but there's a lot of moving parts in question and there's a lot you can get wrong. So if you again, if you remember what I said earlier, that there's not going to be an agenda when you get people together to answer this question, the question has to give them a clarity of scope and breadth. Right. What we're here to talk about and you've got to do that the the art of this is to do that overly biasing it. And it's very easy to accidentally [00:50:00] put bias into your question. So no bias. We talk about the need for a call to action like it should be action oriented. What must we do? What can we do? What should we do? And is it can, should or will? That's that's one of those moving parts to figure out. Really important is that it contains an aspirational goal. And, you know, there's even delicacy there because you want it to be aspirational. You want it to inspire people. You don't want it to turn them off. And it's very easy to set the bar too high where people go, okay, well, we can't do that.

David: [00:50:31] What do you what are you asking a stupid question for you or to set it too low? And that's actually the more common mistake where you think you're being aspirational. You're giving a group a number one point two billion dollar revenue target and everybody knows we can hit one point two billion. People need this guy to ask the question. Doesn't know that. And then you don't get any new thinking. Right. So it's you've got to get it, you know, aspirational enough that people are going to think differently about it. And and so, you know, we almost never get to the question in a first attempt. We'll we'll work it with someone. They'll say, OK, that feels pretty good. Let me go. Let me go speak about the time frame, because that's another element that 18 months is it starting now? Starting next month. Right. And then we iterate through that a few times until until finally we get it right. And the more people who are involved in that, again, you run the risk. That goes from having a really good question to a question that's been watered down to something people are comfortable with. One of the things we say is if it's a question, it's comfortable, it's the wrong question. You want to kind of educate people a little bit with your question.

Hapreet: [00:51:39] And so you talk about these rules of cue in the book as well, and how these rules help to make a question really, really good. And you might have just touched on those right now, but I wonder if he can break that down for the audience.

David: [00:51:52] So one of them is what I just said, that it's it's it's uncomfortable. It's good. And if it's if it's kind of soothing to read the question, [00:52:00] then you've got the wrong question. Another interesting one, which, again, took kind of years of realization, is that, you know, a lot of times we'll be in a situation where we're the company we're working with and saying, look, we got this H.R. thing and culture thing and we're kind of trying to figure out how do we frame the question around that or do we frame the question around strategy and then we'll get to the culture question. Or maybe it should be about safety, which kind of reaches into the other things. And I'm recounting like a real conversation we were in. And it turns out, you know, it's complexity. It's all one pool. If you think about a swimming pool, it's all one pool and each of those different ways of jumping into the pool, those are different decks where you jump from. You're going to end up in the same pool. And what that means is when you ask the question about talent, you're going to end up talking about corporate strategy. And if you ask the question about corporate strategy, you're going to end up on talent and everything else that matters and its complexities. Inter connected, entwined. It's all about disentangling things that have connections. Same reason, same wherever you start, you're going to get to the same issue. So that's what that rule was about. I can't remember all started with the third one was to come back to the origin.

Hapreet: [00:53:18] Yeah, no worries. So we're talking a little bit about, you know. How we ask questions and sometimes we can bake in faulty assumptions in the way that we ask questions. So how is that? How do faulty assumptions make us ask bad questions?

David: [00:53:38] Again, an

David: [00:53:39] Example is when I started asking, which is when you set the bar too low on your aspirational goal, you got a lot of personal bias and you're making assumptions yourself as you kind of think about what is what is the right target to set.

David: [00:53:54] So something like that, I

David: [00:53:56] Would say you've got to go consult a few people and kind of finesse where [00:54:00] you where you land that number. You can also be making assumptions about who the we is. So what must we do? If you're dealing with Bank X, Y, Z, you could say, what must bank X, Y, Z do? Sorry for the Canadian citizen, but I'm talking to somebody in Winnipeg. But maybe the question is, what must we do? Because it's not just the bank people in the room, it's their ecosystem. So maybe we should say so. Again, from a personal perspective, without giving much thought. Your bias about numbers, about deadlines. Sometimes you're breaking into a question, some constraints, because that's necessary. What do we have to do to grow the business by 400 percent over the next five years while continuing to be a great place to work? That's a that's probably a good constraint. That's a nice tension to it. But we've had questions where, you know, a hardware company was saying, you know, what do we have to do to protect our legacy business while we embark on these new things for our customers? Well, that's an assumption that it's worth protecting the legacy business. And again, you know, nobody who asked that question would necessarily think, well, I'm revising it with my assumption because that's their right, is that we've got the legacy business. So, you know, this is something that's better done in teams. Just not too many people that end up kind of watering everything down to the lowest common denominator or common factor. It's one or the other. You don't want that to happen.

Hapreet: [00:55:33] So speaking of teams like we talk about this a little earlier about do we need to get people together? And, you know, one of the 10 steps is getting a bunch of people actually physically in the same location. And we know that's definitely hard nowadays with our pandemic situation. You talked about how it's actually working out to be pretty, pretty good. You know, why is that? Why is it that when we are having these face to face types of interactions and discussions [00:56:00] that we're able to create complexity?

David: [00:56:04] Yeah, I mean, we we always observe first hand that there was something

David: [00:56:08] Really magical happens when you get people together. And it's not just together in the room for conversations. It's also when they go to the snack table after meeting, a lot of stuff happens there when they hit the bar at night and when everybody kind of has an overnight to think about things come back the next morning with new ways of thinking. Those are all real better, don't get me wrong. But what I've personally learned, again, a lot of what we do is facilitating meetings. And I've always really relied on the body language in the room and the facial expressions and and everything else. You can pick up a lot of things. But I've been really surprised when you're doing a zoo meeting. There's there's a lot of cues you can pick up on there, just not necessarily the same cues you're used to. So, for example, you've probably been in conversations where you see someone coming and going back on. You come, not you going back on you.

David: [00:56:55] You know, they're trying to get in

David: [00:56:56] And they might be getting frustrated. Right. Or you see people who like unmuted three minutes ago and haven't had a chance to say anything. And those are the kinds of things you can pick up on. And of course, you know, the facial expression. What you can't see is whether they're wearing pajama bottoms, more cancer jeans. I think a lot of signals are coming from those parts of your body, mostly what's on screen, and can still see those things through zooming through teams, WebEx, whatever platforms you're working on, some are better than others.

Hapreet: [00:57:27] It's really interesting, I never considered that that what you just mentioned, like know somebody is meeting on off, on off. They've been unmetered for quite some time. That's telling us something that we should probably pause and see if they want to say something. Does it like in your experience with how things have been this year? Does it matter if it's. Cameras on, cameras off. Does that have an effect on anything when we're working together?

David: [00:57:53] Yeah, you know what cameras are, if you can, but there's all sorts of practical advice that we put into the book [00:58:00] and some of it's not our advice. So this notion of two pizza teams, I don't know if you've heard it before. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So this notion that you can have a productive conversation in a group that's too large or too large pizza, it's completely true. You know, we've always known that it's always been sort of this range of six to eight people can have a good, productive conversation. Same is true, you know, in this world. And some of the techniques we use to break down a group of, let's say, 12 people into eight people having a conversation is you divide them into members and critics. So eight members having a conversation. And what we've been doing in the digital world, which is really effective, is we have the critics go off camera. And then in June, for example, you can say hi, non video participants, they disappear so the members can have a conversation and they forget the critics are there. And so this critical, it's all about people who are listening to the conversation then at intermittent moments coming in and offering feedback to the team. Well, now it's really powerful because these members are losing themselves in a conversation. Suddenly these other spaces are appearing on the screen to tell them that this person is dominating and that you're spinning your wheels. And here's something to talk about. The impact about has a has a lot of impact. And and so in some ways, the fact that we're stuck behind this technology right now is has improved some of the experiences of executing on the phone the.

Hapreet: [00:59:25] There's some really good advice. Thank you so much for sharing that, some excellent tips. So I'm curious, is cracking complexity? Is is it an art or a science?

David: [00:59:35] That's a good question, I mean, because of what I was saying before this, this is a formula. So there's science here for sure as we kind of talk about the personality of our brand and our company and the people who have been doing what we do for clients in the real world and helping them solve big challenges, there's this level of mastery of the formula, which I think does make it an art, as you said, like it's a formula. So it's scientific. But as we get into each step, [01:00:00] there's an art to landing. A good question. There's an art to requisite variety. And just you know it when you watch it happening, when that one additional person who you got pushed back on, that person is starting to like change things. You feel like the glee of an artist, right? You know, I'm thrilled as you as you kind of run meetings for people. It's not like just anyone could watch it on screen and pick up what I was saying before. But people have mastered facilitation in the real world of real world. They can master facilitation here and they'll pick up on things that others don't see.

David: [01:00:36] Right. So there is mastery. There's artistry in what we do. I think if I were to take one thing in the formula and say it's very, very much like art, it's this notion of emergence. It's this faith that the world is a place that magically serves things up to you at just the right time. If you created the conditions for something to emerge, you know, that's what artists do. Artists, they don't know what they're going to create necessarily ahead of time. They allow themselves to be stimulated by what they're seeing, what they're observing, what's going through their head, and maybe they don't know what they're creating until they're finished creating it. That's kind of the notion of dealing with complexity needs. You don't know what it's going to look like at the end. You don't have a picture on the front of the box that you can refer to as you kind of put this puzzle together. But when you start to see the image. Right. You feel like you're in the domain of art, not science.

Hapreet: [01:01:33] I absolutely love that. I like that chapter in relations as well, kind of open to talking about serendipity and I absolutely love that I interviewed a author, Dr Christian Bush, for the book The Sensitivity Mindset, and that's fascinating. But one of my favorite ones from 20 20 that I read. So talk to us about the the role of serendipity. Tushnet just now a little bit, but you get to spell it out for us. Like, how do we create [01:02:00] serendipity when we're working on complex problems and maybe when we're working isolated from people?

David: [01:02:10] Yeah, and it seems like such a conflict to be able to say we engineer serendipity to serendipity is like happenstance, lucky accidents, happy accidents. And, you know, if you think about the design of innovation centers and companies that are trying to be more innovative, you know, a lot of it is setting up these spaces where where the doctor might bump into the engineer and have the conversation over Snax. That triggers something amazing for one or both of them. Those are kind of happy accidents. And so, you know, there is progress, I think, in companies recognizing that those kinds of spaces create spaces where good accidents can happen. But when you're engineering serendipity, you go beyond that, right? You create by, you know, by design situations where many people with a lot of different perspectives could benefit from interacting with each other can collide. And you do it repeatedly. Right. So, again, it's this stack that's in the formula. It's the collisions of the iteration. It's the requisite variety of people. You create the conditions where you are through tens of thousands of collisions, far more likely to have that happy accidental collision, you know, happen.

David: [01:03:26] And it may not

David: [01:03:27] Be all you can do is get thirty thousand and hope that one nearly triggers and usually people will reflect after they've been through the formula just on it was the fact that we got everyone together and that I had a chance to understand what that person was doing and apply that to my work and then play it out. And this person picked up on that, reshaped it. It's that collision between people and that flow of information Data none of it accidental. But, you know, it creates something magic. You can call that an accident or you can call that an engineered accident. [01:04:00]

Hapreet: [01:04:02] I like that like that the concept of kind of remixing, taking somebodies approach and remixing that with their own and and making something new happen. Yeah, yeah.

David: [01:04:10] I've always thought, for example, I haven't had a chance to do this. You know, it'd be great to get like all the personalities from a cold case from 15 years ago back together in a conversation about it and just rhetoric and I think not through interviews with one detective, but everyone talking to each other. What you might trigger in terms of like a few pieces coming together that didn't have a chance to come together back then.

Hapreet: [01:04:34] Thank you, might have a Netflix special in your hands that if you try that hard enough with a true crime scene coming up on Netflix, like a lot. So yeah, yes. And keep an eye out for that one. So the last formal question for a jump into real quick random round here. It's one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

David: [01:04:53] Yeah, it's actually a really easy question. I mean, I want to be remembered for my family, for my daughters and their descendants. And maybe that's not what you're asking, but I would like to have some amazing people right on the tips of my my family tree, just like changing the world and taking everything that I thought and believed and just blowing it out into wonderful, glorious things. I would be great. I would like to be remembered. It's funny you're asking because I'm going through the lens history thing right now. Well, we've been in with the family tree trying to get back as far as I can. And there's so little information about people. I would want people to know that I was a good person. I want them to know how funny I am. And I want to be remembered by people who like are directly related to me as that kind of person. And I think the book, you know, is only the first of what I hope for many books. I want the personality and the sense of humor and everything else to be like in the pages of those books so that even the strangers can say, you know, that guy sounded [01:06:00] really interesting.

Hapreet: [01:06:01] I absolutely think it definitely is the interesting. That's why I was like the I got to reach out to this guy, got to bring them on the other side. That's you know, I'm a new father. My son's about 10 months old. Now, that's something I've been thinking about a lot is like. Like this ancestry thing, because when I think back, you know, I've met my great grandparents, one of them. Two of them, actually. But beyond that, I don't know know anything, right? This is an interesting thing. But like, I'm I'm thirty eight. I'm thirty eight. Have my first kid. So by the time my kids my age, I be seventy six. That's pretty damn all that much time left. And if he's he's anything like me just waiting forever to have kids then you know, I don't know if I'll see my grandkids. It's just weird thinking about that when you start thinking I didn't think about they shit. Tell us like fathers. Yeah it's interesting. Yeah I like that. I like that, you know, have the tips of the family tree doing some awesome stuff like that. Yeah.

David: [01:06:57] I think that would be great to be able to look down and say oh my God. Like I did that. Yeah. That's one of the powerful things about this ancestry. Like if you go back several generations, they start to show you statistics about how many people are descended from that couple. It's in the hundreds. Right. It's crazy to think about,

David: [01:07:18] You know, and as far as your parenting, your ten month old, ten month old sorry, you're going to be passing a lot of things to that person that they're going to remember for a lifetime. Right. And you're going to shape who they are. So, yeah, you start thinking that way. Now, what are the values you want to pass on? Who do you want them to be? Right. You have a chance to really influence those those leaves, you know, that appear for one hundred years.

Hapreet: [01:07:44] That's what I really started really writing in journals a lot more recently because that not just journals my brain up, but just journals like, you know, what I'm reflecting on on stuff and trying to pass down wisdom. Yeah. You know,

David: [01:07:56] Obviously, it's not too late for me to give you this advice. I did this with [01:08:00] my I got a third daughter who's much younger than the first two. And every year on her birthday, I like in my blog, I write her a long letter just about who she is this year. What happened to her this year? You know, how she grew and everything else. So I've got this bank. She's turning twelve this year. I've got this bank of letters I've written her every year. And it's I think it's a really important capture that she'll probably treasure forever, right?

Hapreet: [01:08:23] Yeah. Like that. Like that idea. Please do. So let's jump into a quick random round here. In your opinion, what do most people think within the first few seconds when they meet you for the first time?

David: [01:08:38] I think I come across as like intense and aloof. You know, if you walked into like a University of Waterloo lecture hall in my first couple of years, if there were two empty seats in the hall, they were on the other side of me. And it wasn't Haiji, it's I carry an air without me. I've never been able to quite put my finger on. So I chalk it up to being kind of intense,

Hapreet: [01:09:00] As interesting and tense and aloof. To me, that sounds like to opposite.

David: [01:09:05] I don't mean to be. It's just I think I carry that with me.

Hapreet: [01:09:09] Do you think you have to achieve something in order to be worth something? I mean,

David: [01:09:17] It depends on what you mean by achieve something. I think to be to be worth something, you you know, you need to recognize what the value is that you carry and how best to bring that value to the world. Right. So it's not necessarily through achievements. You might you know, you're your greatest value might be is a really good listener. Right. And that can be tremendously valuable and a rare skill. But the difference you can make to someone who needs that is enormous. So I'm taking achieve is a very specific word. And I'd say no. I mean, if that's what you bring, if that's the value you bring, it's well worth getting to know.

Hapreet: [01:09:56] You like that. What are you currently [01:10:00] reading?

David: [01:10:02] I am reading the prequel to what's it called the Ken Follett Cathedral series and trying to remember the I think I wrote it down. It's. The E the evening and the morning, so I don't know if you've read Ken Follett, he did Colors of the Earth than he did three that took place later on during the blacklegs Pillars of the Earth is about building the great cathedrals of Europe. And as dull as that sounds, it's it's an amazing you know, he's an amazing storyteller. So this is the prequel. And I also I had to write this down. I'm also reading some science fiction right now called The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. I don't know why it ended up on my Kindle, but it did. And I'm really enjoying it.

Hapreet: [01:10:49] It's one thing I need to work on is getting more fiction into my. By reading diet, I don't think I have enough of that, like the fiction I am read right now. It's the Unicorn Project, which is a fiction about my day to day life, which is just weird.

David: [01:11:04] But, yeah, you know, it's funny historical fiction, as it turns out, like I'm fascinated by it. And I hated history in school. Yeah. And but when when they tell you about Genghis Khan, like in a historical fiction novel, it's like these are great stories. So there's a lot of learning to do in fiction and nonfiction.

Hapreet: [01:11:23] Yeah, I've got one historical fiction that I've been meaning to read. Steven Pressfield was my one of my favorite authors. I know him more for his nonfiction works, but he did a book called The Virtues of War, which is about Alexander the Great Historical. Yeah. What song do you have on repeat?

David: [01:11:41] Well, the closest to an accurate answer to that is probably the song that gets played most. The thing is, I share my phone with my 11 year old when it comes to music in the car and everything else. Right. So we actually every year we we cut a playlist that that represents the songs [01:12:00] that we have in common themes that feels like. So the thing that I think is enduring is, you know, Macklemore, Dongtan

David: [01:12:09] Or, you know, the good old days and other Macklemore just again, for whatever reason, that's like in that Venn diagram, overlap of our music tastes.

Hapreet: [01:12:19] And I check that one out. So I'm going to pull up the random question. Generator will go a couple from here. And first one, what's the story behind one of your scar's?

David: [01:12:32] I don't have many scars, frankly. I had a pretty terrible free childhood and my dad would say that's because I was a coward. So I've got a scar on my right ankle that came from awkwardly jumping over a sprinkler as a child at a party when I landed on the sprinkler and cut my foot. So how's that for, like, unexciting?

Hapreet: [01:12:53] Yeah, I know. At least like three kids growing up that had cut their foot on sprinklers. They've become one

David: [01:13:00] Of those hazards. You don't think about

Hapreet: [01:13:02] What is one of the greatest values that guides your life?

David: [01:13:07] You know, this comes from my father. I think people are good. And I like to walk around with the assumption that somebody I'm meeting is a good person, even like at the risk of being taken advantage of by people who aren't. I'd rather have like this default understanding that people are good. The last year really challenged that for me, and I found myself shaking a little bit as like there was so many nasty things going on, particularly south of the border. Yeah. But, you know, I'd say it's still important to me to to to feel that way and to pass it on my kids like that.

Hapreet: [01:13:45] If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?

David: [01:13:52] We just did this as a family, we've been doing family calls and we have like different questions. And that was one of the questions I try to remember. Oh, I think, you [01:14:00] know, the immediate healing, the regenerative ability, everything else doesn't matter if there's a kryptonite that can take you down, but if you can regenerate, then, you know, go ahead and do whatever you want. You're going to you're going to recover in the end

Hapreet: [01:14:16] That you can also live forever if you always regenerate. Right.

David: [01:14:19] And then I can tell my you know, because of my tree, all about me and I've already old man.

Hapreet: [01:14:26] So how can people connect with you and where can they find you online.

David: [01:14:29] I am complexity DB at least on Twitter. And David Benjamen on LinkedIn. Our website is Integrity Group dot com, not synergistic considerately dot com but integrity dot com. And you know, David Carmelo's and I David's the coauthor of Got Complexity So Much and that we've been writing very, very frequently in Forbes. So if you just go search for us in Forbes, you'll see a lot of interesting articles in some of the things that we talked about today.

Hapreet: [01:15:02] And I'll be sure to link to all of those right there in the show notes. Thank you so much, David, for coming on the show. You guys got to pick up cracking complexity. One hell of a book. I really enjoyed it. I know you guys will as well. David, thank you so much for taking time and are scheduled to be on the show today.

David: [01:15:19] Oh, no problem. Always enjoy this kind of thing.