Continuing the discussion from Episode 478, Terence Mauri, acclaimed author and founder of Hack Future Lab, talks about having sweet AND sour in your life, teaching wisdom & judgement, tearing down information silos, the 3 forms of curiosity, deliberate reductionism, and other important topics.

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One of the things that occurred to me, how

valuable it must be as a leader to stay tuned in to the rapid

innovations that are occurring, otherwise you can't leverage

them. What do you encourage people to do, to stay plugged in

to what's going on? How are people in your orbit receiving

their information and staying tuned in to the future?

Brilliant question, it's a little dividend

here, which is the science. The science shows, the research

shows, we feel it at a heart a level as well. Is that when you

part of a community, virtual or face to face, three things.

Number one, discovery, the ratio of new ideas, new perspectives,

counter intuitive perspectives. It goes up, and that's

important. So discovery. Another one is energy. You know,

actually, it's a great source of inspiration and action. And

number three is cross pollination, that actually, you

know, ideas need to connect together to create, to create

breakthroughs. And so discovery, energy, cross pollination, all

of this together, you need to be thinking about these three

dividends and how you activate them in your in your life. And

that can be done through reading, listening to great

podcasts, watching Tiktok videos, attending lectures,

speaking yourself, writing yourself as well, going to

events, conferences, dinner events, you know, do the basics

brilliantly. But also, once a quarter, do something that

scares yourself. It scares you or excites you or throws you out

of your comfort zone. And yeah, for example, I did an event with

Google where they had a kind of dinner. Leaders came together,

and it was called the sweet and sour dinner. And the idea of the

sweet and sour dinner is that let's talk about the good stuff,

but let's also talk about the bad stuff. Let's talk about the

stuff that should be said that's not being said. Let's ask the

questions that should be asked that are not being asked. You

know, because of fear or politics or whatever. Sweet and

sour is a really important point. So these sorts of

conversations, conversations that don't just make us feel

good, but make us think hard, gives you so much vitality.

I love that. Given that this is your whole

world and work, so you're very plugged in. What would you say

are your favorite either conferences or maybe it's

podcasts, or where are your best channels for staying informed

right now?

I love, for example, masters of scale, a

great podcast. Reid Hoffman, that's a great one. I was on

disrupt TV with Vela Ashe, and that was an amazing

conversation. So disrupt TV, Web Summit in Lisbon is a great one

as well. Slush in the Nordics, that's another great one, which

looks at the future of work, the future of leadership, the future

of AI. These would be some examples of what I'm excited

about right now that I'm constantly engaging with.

Coming back to the academics of things which

probably could use even more disruption. What do you think,

from your perspective, is the class that's not taught but

should be?

I think it's this idea of what happens in a post

AI world. So this intersection of psychology, anthropology,

humanity, sociology, that I think the olog is the future is

about the origins. It's not just about AI and technology. That's

one half of the narrative, but it's dominating every

conversation. The other half of the narrative is the origins,

because technology changes fast. But humans don't you know, we

have Paleolithic brains, God like technology, medieval

institutions, the complexities of the world are going like

this. Our Paleolithic brains, capacity to respond to the

complexities is like this. If you think about the processing

power of a chip, it's increased over a trillion times since the

1950s our Paleolithic brains have stayed the same. That

creates a wisdom gap, and we're not talking enough about that

right now in academia, academia as well, is still very linear.

It's kind of very, you know, siloed, and silos can blind us

to new perspectives. So I think the future is horizontal. It's

silo busting, its cross pollination. Collective

intelligence. It's the ologies.

Yeah, you said wisdom. And I thought to myself,

how does one teach wisdom? And maybe part of wisdom is

judgment, right? And how do you help people have better

judgment, or more effective judgment? And that is a

challenging question probably worth solving.

And I mean, imagine, you know, if university

there was a subject to University on wisdom. And

actually, when you go to university, you just don't, you

don't go for just three years, very transactional. But our

relationships with universities are stretched out over, you

know, maybe a lifetime. I think it's time, you know, this age of

AI, Age of convergence, Age of disruption, Age of possibility

means that we need to radically rethink, reset, reimagine these

outdated structures, institutions that we've been

holding on to. And this would be one example of how do we

reimagine our relationship with academia over a 50 year to high

horizon where we get mentoring, we mentor, and we're mentored.

We're part of a long term community. For me, we need to

rather get stuck in these silos at such an early age and become

very transactional. I'd love to see societies and communities

where we're tapping onto this collective spirit, collective

generosity, generosity, reciprocity, and growing because

of that, for the benefit of society, the planet,

relationships, institutions.

Yeah, well said, and you're right. I think about

the silos in particular, you know, in medicine, you see it,

it's siloed in the brain or the spine, and then, you know,

someone goes into someone's else's lab, and they find a tool

or a resource that they could have been using over the last

five years.

Some of the most pioneering innovations have

happened at the Cleveland Clinic, for example, to do with

heart disease. And one of the reasons why they've done that

their ratio of innovation is so high at the Cleveland Clinic is

because they got rid of silos that, you know, they made it

easier for happy accidents to happen. And what I mean by that

is doctors, surgeons from different parts of the hospital

coming together to talk, to share different perspectives on

the same challenge. And they found that by doing that in an

engineered way, engineering cross pollination, the ratio of

IDEA, the ratio of innovation, that's now saving more lives,

went up in a significant way, in a very measurable way, we can

learn from these sorts of courage leap examples.

And that's a great example of disruption that

doesn't involve, sometimes people, I think, collate

disruption with a software and that's a great example of

disruption being in almost a human, organic meeting, where

it's it's simply, like you said, cross pollinating and breaking

down the silos to solve problems.

Exactly.

You know, what actionable steps can a leader

take to sharpen their organization's readiness for the

future?

I think, start with this idea of future

readiness muscle and, you know, we have muscle memory. So what I

mean by that is some mindset shifts the the future. And the

reality right now is that the future is not just about

technology or trends that's important, but even more

important than that, it's about mindset shifts and choices and

voices and so this future readiness muscle we need to

sharpen in meaningful, intentional ways. For example,

the curiosity to learn, relearn and unlearn, the clarity to

focus, because our attention spans now are one of the rarest

and purest forms of leadership, capital, the conviction to make

decisions, decision velocity, under pressure, despite

volatility, despite uncertainty, these would be some muscles to

sharpen, individually and collectively within the

organization. A practical example that of that would be at

Novartis, the pharma company. They have a 30 day curiosity

hackathon, where they sharpen three types of curiosity over

the course of 30 days, 100,000 employees. They focus on inner

curiosity, so know yourself, know your blind spots, know your

strengths other curiosity. Know, the people around you build

bridges and outer curiosity, which is, what's a point of view

you have about your industry? What's a point of view you have

about weak signals or big trends that are impacting your

industry? And what are you going to do about them? They call it

triple curiosity, inner, other and outer. That's one example of

how a company is bringing this future readiness muscle to life

in a really human way. So inner is yourself out. Other is other

people, and outer is really curiosity outside of the

business. So looking at external trends, inflection points,

competition. And even other industries, because with

industry convergence happening as well, we also can learn a

lot, not just from our own industries, but again, that you

get trapped in silo thinking, but also breaking into other

industries.

Love that. And just a little speed dating

questions that we love to end with, with a lot of our guests,

I wanted to ask you a few of these too, because I think you

have a different perspective. We heard a little bit of what

you're listening to. What are you reading?

I love Cal Newport, uh, slow productivity.

That's a great book. Slow productivity, this idea of do

less but do better and practice reductionism, then we have this

brain bias, adding complexity to complexity. Again, it's not a

winning strategy. When the world is coming at you at light speed.

You need we all need to start thinking intentionally about

reductionism, and what I mean by that is doing less, but doing it

more intelligently. For example, once a quarter, look at your

business. Look at your workload. What do you need to detox? What

do you need to declutter? What do you need to delete when you

practice the reductionism in a deliberate way? It's a

clarifier, an energizer, a multiplier. Gives you a no

strategy as well, which helps you to obviously achieve greater

things in shorter time spans. So reductionism. Cal Newport, slow

productivity. That'd be one book. Another one would be Paul

Oster, Brooklyn Follies. That's fiction. I think reading fiction

is really great for the imagination. We've got to be

careful about look at this little look down syndrome,

constantly looking down and actually reading fiction. The

research shows that reading fiction sharpens your

imagination muscle, your empathy muscle as well. It also puts you

in a slower, beater state of consciousness, which is

absolutely a source code for strategic thinking, big picture

thinking. The risk that we all take, these are addictive, and

what that does is it forces us to become very transactional and

very short term, and we get addicted to dopamine hits, short

term thinking, reactive thinking, at the expense of

longer term, deeper imagination and strategic thinking. So you

know, read fiction as well a couple of times a year, at the

very least, because that requires discipline. That's

important. But also you'll really cultivate your reservoirs

of imagination, which will make you stand out, by the way, in a

world of sameness, you know, when we've got access to the

same AI, the same chat bots. The biggest risk is this curse of

sameness and commoditization is going to be your imagination,

your onlyness that makes you stand out.

I love it. I mean, to some degree, we're pretty

complex computers ourselves, and so that power for creativity one

of our biggest strengths that it's been a trend I've seen from

a lot of interviews. Thank you for that. You've been through,

you know, obviously a lot of personal transformation yourself

when you think back. And the question I ask all of our guests

to the part of your life we probably didn't talk about as

much, which is the pre 21 year old Terence. What's the message

you think you would go back and deliver having lived the life

you've lived now that that young man would benefit from hearing?

I think, don't, you know, don't get I mean, it's

easy to say this with hindsight, but we're forced into boxes. We

force ourselves into boxes. You know, I remember everyone asking

me questions from from about the age of 10, what, who do you want

to be? What do you want to do? And I understand the intention

behind these questions, but who the hell knows at that age, I

didn't know, and I think it puts unnecessary pressure. So I know

that it's positive intention behind a long time, but the risk

is we put ourselves into boxes. We get stuck with perfectionism.

We also get really obsessed with getting everything right first

time. And of course, sometimes it's impossible not to escape

that, because that's the way that college and school work.

You know, you pass or you'll fail. So there are some

institutional constraints that we have to deal with. I would

say, be easier on yourself. Focus more on experimentation,

and don't get so obsessed with a plan at such an early, early age

focus on developing curiosity skills, relationship skills,

conversational skills, presentation skills, skills that

will define you and make you more distinctive in a world of

sameness where everybody's got access to the same tools, these

would be some sort of early reflections and Find yourself

mentors. You don't even have to label it, but surround yourself

with people who are different to you and your divergent

perspectives, younger, older, different cultures. Go

traveling. These are, these are great, you know, great

initiatives, great actions, and practice courage. Redefine your

relationship with. Failure as well. And ask yourself every

year, what have I done this year where I've grown, where I've had

a setback, where I've shown courage over comfort?

I love it. I think one of the words I latched

on to, that you just said, was experimentation. I think when

I've looked back that whenever I've even while we're in

academics, it doesn't prevent us from being able to try things in

the real world scenario, especially with our connectivity

nowadays, and it's so valuable every time you go out and you

test an idea instead of just reading about it. This has been

a phenomenal interview, where can people go to just stay

connected to Terence and understand more?

Well, first of all, you know, thank you for

such an incredible interview. I've loved your questions. I've

loved our connection, and all the themes that we've discussed

are so close to my heart, and I know they're close to your heart

as well. It's always great. It's always an honor to meet a

kindred spirit, and you never know what's going to happen. So

thank you. Thank you for that opportunity. And so for me, you

know, I'd want to pay it forward. There's a couple of

platforms to stay connected, to reach out part of this community

that were constantly part of building and nourishing number

one is LinkedIn. Obviously, LinkedIn is a big one. Terrence

Maori, LinkedIn. Another one is my website, terencemarry.com

check out my podcast show, hack the future. And these would be

two or three, and then obviously my new my latest book, The

upside of disruption, is another great resource to check out the

upside of disruption. And you know, I wish everybody good

fortune, health and happiness. I leave everyone with the words of

the late chemist Marie Curie. She said, in life, nothing is to

be feared, only understood, and the more we understand, the less

we will fear. But also Ted Lasso, my favorite coach, he

said, stay humble, stay teachable.

Couldn't agree with that last one more. Thank

you so much, Terence, for your time. This was fantastic. Was a

great interview. I learned a lot.

Thank you so much, Adam.