Deck of Brilliance: 3 Ways to Think Differently When You’re Stuck at Work

0:00Hi, I'm Helen. And I'm Sarah. And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly podcast where we talk about work and borrow some brilliance from things that we've been seeing, listening to, reading, and try to connect that to your careers in hopefully interesting and useful ways. and all of our episodes if you are new to the squiggly quiz podcast all of our episodes come with a one-page summary which we call a pod sheet it has all of the ideas that we talk about it has some coaching questions it has some links if you want to learn a bit more you can always find that on our website which is amazingif.com so sarah is leading the show today and she has borrowed some brilliance and she's going to tell us more about it and i'm going to i'm going to learn as we go

0:42Helen:i think in the conversation okay so a bit of a different one today because we're always trying to try different things out um and i couldn't resist partly because this is actually called deck of brilliance so i'm like well if you can't borrow brilliance from a deck of brilliance someone's going wrong we're either wrong or the deck has failed but you'll be you'll be glad to know it's anything but a failure and actually helen asked me before this she was like how did you first hear about it and i actually don't know you know like i can't i can't remember whether it was someone recommending it to me um or whether it popped up on linkedin or something but i just remember start you know when you start to have a play with something and then you're like wow this is really good and really interesting and really useful what is it so the deck of brilliance is so it's a guy who's put this together um it's a website i guess but it's a very beautiful looking website um and the guy's name is jumpji ramkishnan and apologies to him if i've not pronounced that right and what he has done is he has put together a number of decks of brilliance based on a kind of overall theme.

1:46Helen:So one of them might be generating ideas. So like if you need to generate ideas, here is a deck that shows you 15 different ways to generate ideas. And then it will give you an example. So it might show you like an advert or a product that like brings that to life. So it could be idea generating, it could be storytelling, it could be working out a mission for your organization it's all creative I would say overall if you want to get better at creative thinking I feel like spending some time with a deck of brilliance would help you to do that I don't think you need to be in a creative job to to find it useful um but what is lovely is all of the different examples so you kind of read about the different ideas but then like I've ended up watching old Skoda adverts.

2:41Helen:I've learned about, it's very global, you know, I've learned about different products that just were completely new to me from all across the world. And it's very thoughtfully curated. So it's not just, you know, like throw loads of stuff at the wall and see what sticks for generating ideas. You feel like he's really thought about, okay, well, one way of generating ideas is let's say, let's choose one we're not going to talk about today, maybe like jeopardy and then maybe he would show jeopardy in a few different ways like jeopardy in a film or jeopardy in an advert that you really remember um and you know generally we talk about borrowed brilliance is about curiosity looking out not getting stuck in your silo it just helps you to do all of those things and it's free so most of it is free which is why we felt good about putting on the podcast and though i do subscribe even the subscription is not very much it's definitely something you could afford individually.

3:39Helen:I looked at it, it's like$10 a month, isn't it? Yeah. $100 for the year. So I did do that, partly also to say thank you. You know, when you feel like someone's put together something really amazing and it's clearly, I read a bit about him and it's clearly he has just done this. So use the free version. And if you're thinking, well, maybe as a team, we would use this all the time. You could always have it for like three months and see what's useful so i have picked three different ways of coming up with ideas and i thought we would apply those to squiggly careers and to amazing if life um i did actually have to give helen a bit of homework for this one today because um we actually went away and did a bit of extra research and so i just thought by bringing these to life it we could have a bit of fun with it um and see how we get on are we ready i'm ready i'm ready i'm intrigued i'm curious okay so the first sort of idea like way of creating ideas is make a bug a feature so the idea here is you take the thing that you're most self-conscious about and you double down on it flaws the bits that don't work and he he says in his description uh stop fixing it and start flaunting it and I was like I really like that um so some of the examples he gives is like you know maybe you're if you've got a product maybe your pack's really ugly um or maybe your name's hard to pronounce I've actually worked on a fashion brand before where that was true like the name was hard and people said it in lots of different ways um maybe your product is like loads slower than everybody else is use that as your hook so making the book the feature is kind of the whole point so I was like oh that's fascinating because I think both you and I wouldn't like this I'm like I don't want to talk about the books of Squiggly Careers and Amazing It.

5:28Helen:So let's do it on a podcast episode where thousands of people can hear us doing it. Yeah, I sometimes forget about that bit. But I was like, but neither, what you and I, I think, have the opposite approach. I think we go, right, how do we fix it? How do we make it better? We certainly wouldn't want to talk about it. Flaunt our bugs. We wouldn't want to, and I think that's, it's quite anti, both you and I, I think, for different reasons. so maybe we should start with what we think our bugs are i've had a few thoughts what would you think are some of the bugs about squiggly careers and amazing if i hadn't obviously i haven't thought about this advance this is very very much off the top of my head and bit sparked by some of the examples that you were giving um i was thinking actually i think squiggly careers and amazing if as two brand names that coexist is a is a bug because i had that uses people okay yeah okay that's one but um what is another bug um our size is sometimes a bug so we want to make squiggly career is better for everybody but we are sort of like a deliberately small team so it's like how do we have the impact that we want to have in the world when we also want to keep our team small um so that's almost like could that could that be a bug our size do you know one i had which people have said to us before is a bug could be having too much so people say people say like you've got too many too much content essentially you've got too many podcasts you create too much um and people are not saying that in a oh that's great way sometimes people are like overwhelmed it's like overwhelming or it's hard we know that sometimes it's hard to find so I was like one of our bugs could be squiggly careers like all the work that we do for squiggly careers can feel hard to find or it could feel hard to navigate or it could be overwhelming that that would be a bug um you could say like one of the bugs about you could also go what are the bugs about squiggly careers as a concept i started to think about that as well so i think sometimes what might bug people about squiggly careers would be money so oh well i'd really like to develop in different directions but the the bug there is but i can't afford to earn less so are we talking about i can only get paid more if i get promoted so i'm like all that because you could look at it as like the bugs in our company which are some things we just described but you could also look at like bugs in your concept and then you could go well look so how are we going to hero that we've had the feedback for example like amazing if and squiggly careers where people are like what's you know they're kind of the sitting with both of them and we've even kind of gone oh do we get rid of one or do we get rid of the other and so what how do you think that would so if the bug is we have two different brand names that we invest in um to showcase the work that we do to the world um and the bug is that could be confusing how do you how do you so you you turn that so what you could do is these things actually do really appeal to me i'm like oh yeah um you could have a logo that goes you know our squiggly careers logo and our amazing if logo has the same squiggle so your squiggly careers logo could be like um could be like dynamic so it disappears and gets replaced by the amazing if one and then disappears and gets replaced by the squiggly career so you actually you always put them together you like rather than going oh you do one or the other or they're two separate things you connect the two maybe you have um squiggly careers it finishes the squiggle then goes into amazing if and you always put them together and you that would be making like i say i don't i don't want to do any of these things um but that would be making the bug a feature you go well actually it really works for us to have those two things and like we like you know you and i can rationalize why we have both of those and so our natural i think what's really interesting about this the reason i chose this one is i think it's very against you and i's natural instincts and i think that's sometimes really good yeah yeah yeah it's definitely it definitely feels uncomfortable for me because i think i go to i go okay so we do that so it stops being you you kind of go oh the bug is that it's confusing but what we could do is put them together so it's actually more curious but then i go oh no because i'm so am i supposed to keep that it's confusing is that the point don't don't make it curious keep it confusing yeah yeah yeah or you you could i suppose the point is as well you can be and it's why looking at the deck is also really helpful it does give you lots of different examples so there is not only one way to make a burger feature um and also the examples are all different things so it's not always like we might be talking about a website or you might be talking about an advert you might be talking about a logo you could be talking about a newsletter like what but I think the the point is I think it gets you to different kinds of ideas and different kinds of conversations and even if like talking these things through with you now what you might realize is actually we don't want to keep that bug like we don't want to make that bug a feature and if you almost like if you don't well then maybe you should be squashing the bug but maybe you should be doing it you know maybe you should be doing it sooner maybe you should be prioritizing it more who knows like you have to decide right what you're going to do but it does get you to some new ideas i think it gets you thinking differently so i found it interesting uncomfortable and interesting okay um are you ready for the next one yeah this one you do know a little bit more about because i had to get you to do some homework so next one is called switch perspectives so the idea here is sort of putting like what you do your product what your team does um and give it to somebody else get someone else to kind of be in charge or to describe what you do who doesn't already know it who isn't really close to it um so here they describe like a parent becomes the child um a human becomes the product i guess a manager could do your job you could do the manager's job yeah yeah and so the idea is that if you get this right the kind of reversal they describe it as can be like funny surreal emotional but it should be revealing you should like learn something maybe you didn't know before.

11:43Helen:So for us to do this we asked everybody in our team to ask somebody, friends or family who didn't know squiggly careers well or at all to say what is a squiggly career and we asked people to record them with voice notes and we thought we would play some of those now so that you can you can hear them. So we're going to start with someone in our team and their son sharing what he thinks a squiggly career is. Here we go. What do you think a squiggly career is? A career that changes or has the ability to change. So short and specific there from someone in our team. And then same person asked her husband.

12:22So what do you think a squiggly career is? A squiggly career in my mind is one that pivots and changes course throughout your career. I guess just using different transferable skills you've picked up and acquired over the years and applied just to different scenarios and different changing roles that companies are demanding from us.

12:47Helen:Right now we're gonna have Helen's kids okay let's see what they've got to say so this is Henry Henry when we work on squiggly careers what do you think a squiggly actually is. We work together and join in, even if that means stepping out of our comfort zone. Impressive. I know. What I really enjoyed at the end was where you said impressive and you just went, I know. Okay, and then here's Madeleine. Madeleine, what do you think a squiggly career is? Even if you have butterflies in your tummy, just keep going. Motivational statements there for you all from Helen's kids. Honestly, motivational Madeleine, that's what I call her.

13:29Helen:Okay and then now we're going to finish with Max my little boy. Do you think a squiggly career is a good thing or a bad thing or an okay thing? Bad. Do you think it's a bad thing? Yeah. Why do you think it's a bad thing? Because squiggly means like it's going all over the place maybe. Yeah interesting so do you think you would want a squiggly career or not? No. No what kind of career do you know what the word career means um yeah kind of like what you do for your job yeah okay well done so what kind of career would you want then if you don't want a squiggly one um a straight career a straight career so there you go obviously not indoctrinated uh the people around me enough um so he wants a straight he wants a straight career no a squiggly career is not bad he can write that book how to have a straight line career and we won't play all of the others but we also got someone in our team to pass a phone around in a pub and say like what is a squiggly career and what is so interesting is these are people who genuinely don't know us don't know our work and I heard from people a real 50 50 split as to whether a squiggly career was a good thing or not a good thing so still 50 % of people saying um yeah it's it's like messy it's when you don't really know what you want to do uh you know basically a sort of even the adults a kind of more sophisticated version of what you just heard from max like oh i don't i don't want a squiggly career that doesn't sound that doesn't sound motivating or that doesn't sound like something you would want i think one one person was just like yeah when you're just like a bit all over the place and your kids as we said did the um they just did really good motivational statements they feel like they're just i'm channeling it i'm ready ready ready to go and so the point there is i think by asking people outside of yourself it stops you getting stuck in that echo chamber trap and honestly listening to them all this morning and i probably had about 15 to listen to it really made me realize i was like okay so for a lot of people like they probably are still attached to the idea of like good looks like climbing a ladder and if they haven't come across squiggly careers their first thought hearing the name is not what we would want you know we don't want people to think that it's knotty and messy and all over the place I mean my eight-year-old doesn't want one now you know and he's quite he's quite a long way from quite a long way from work so it would make you challenge yourself on kind of going okay like what would we need to do what would we need to change how could we help people have a different view of squiggly career do you know if you're being really if you're being very like dramatic you might be like change the name is it the word does the word squiggly like get in the way for people if you ask a different group of people a non-linear career which we would never want to say but would you get a different set of answers don't know if you ask people to draw it what would everybody draw um so the idea really here is just to it's kind of that's taking a moment to sort of step away from your day-to-day and i suppose it like for me i mean it definitely made me laugh but it also sort of burst the bubble you know the bubble of being like oh well everyone understands now that squiggly careers are just the reality i will say for listeners that apparently my son had a little existential crisis in the car with my partner afterwards saying did i get the answer are wrong and should i have said it was a good thing oh i feel so much um i was just thinking about situations um to relate this to because obviously we kind of we've got a concept it's quite interesting to look at that way but i was thinking sometimes when you're in a company and you know you when you're working on a project so if i think about if i relate it to me uh when i was at virgin we were launching virgin red and everyone in the bubble of launching that business was you know we were bought into it we thought it was the biggest and most important thing in the whole working world and it was you know you know all the things that happen when you are working on a project in a bit of a bubble with people and I think it could be quite interesting to ask those sorts of questions of people outside the bubble to get more perspective because I think you can you know you're on a high pressure project or a high profile project or a pacey project those ones you can lose a bit of perspective and maybe asking people you know how would you describe what you think this project is designed to do or if you were to describe the impact of that project in three words what three words would you use you know that and then just because you do a type form couldn't you or you just email me a three words or in one sentence what would you say you know ways to frame it so that it's quick and easy for people to respond to but comparing those outside responses to what you all think believe or want to be true within the bubble that you are in would be quite a useful way of i think not making assumptions that everyone thinks the same as you or values it as much as you do well i also thought you did this and it's a smaller switch but it's still a switch with the listener focus group that you did for the podcast so you've got the people us recording the podcast then you've got people listening to the podcast and we don't we don't get that much time with people who listen to the podcast we you sometimes might meet someone who listens but then they probably just go oh I listen to the podcast you think you say thanks but you're not getting I'm not getting a new perspective on the podcast in that moment but actually by doing that focus group you definitely heard things that we didn't know my favorite thing about that so we had maybe i forgot maybe like 14 people in the room and i split people into three groups based on their engagement with our work and there was like the people that always listen to the podcast that never miss an episode probably listening to this hello to you um and then there were people that on a sort of needs basis listen so oh i need to listen to an episode because i've got an interview or oh i'm intrigued by the deck of brilliance i might listen to that one so kind of slightly more sporadic occasional and then there were people in the room that just didn't listen they just didn't listen to the podcast and you might think well why were they there there's a focus but it was so interesting because they they said oh I listened previously but I don't listen anymore um because I have sort of slightly disengaged with that form of learning but I still look at all your resources so I follow you on LinkedIn I use your pod notes I use your pod sheets and that's sort of enough for me but it was just really interesting to say well I often think about listeners whereas I think it made me think oh we should think about learners like listening is not the only way people learn and it made me think what we create is a system of learning around squiggly careers that people can choose how they want to so it definitely made me think differently about it and then this one which I am still figuring out like what this would look like for us so i was like oh this one is an intriguing one so this one is called put the audience to the test and the idea here is that you whoever you kind of work with whatever audience means to you you turn them from being passive to active participant participants so they almost have to make a choice or judge a situation and then kind of what comes next is kind of down to them so at a very basic level it's a bit like the kids books where my head was going okay yeah you know so the kids you go well do you want the person to sleep in a haunted house or to go and live in the cottage in the woods or whatever go through the door and meet the wizard turn to page 96 so it's it's kind of like that or um i suppose like matrix red red blue pill um it made that that was one of the examples actually in that deck um and funnily enough we i've watched that again recently and then one that I've seen that um I've perhaps talked about before on the podcast but I've seen people bring like books to life using like a GPT but where you as the person using it has to answer questions and that will then take you in different directions depending on like how you answered and kind of what you wanted to do next so is this like sometimes we um there's a workshop that Sarah and I run uh based on our book The Squiggly Career which has five skills in And so if we are just running that session, normally we just do all five skills in the order that we have planned to do it.

22:07But sometimes we would say, here are the five skills. Which skill feels most important to you right now? I'm going to spend most of my time there. And then the second most popular one that I'll cover that one too. So we let the audience design the workshop based on what's most important to them that day. Is that the kind of thing?

22:25Helen:Yes, though perhaps with some of the examples that I've seen, even more involved than that. So that's probably like a good starting point. But I suppose it would be more about an audience choosing, let's say you gave prompts on a GPT. And then they would choose a prompt, let's say say the hard thing, the GPT we did recently. And then you'd be like, here, say the hard thing scenario 1234, which is how we did it, like micromanaged by manager, you need to give hard feedback and then as well as then them maybe learning how to say the hard thing they would then maybe have some sort of um test afterwards you know it would actually kind of start to then rather than coaching you through it perhaps at some point it would also switch to going now I'm going to give you a situation you tell me what you think you should do and like take you kind of down that route so it's just um it's almost like things get revealed as you go and it's really trying to make the person very active I mean there is it's it's I've not seen it um it's in the US it was a computer game that was done um called the final exam and it was created actually by a parent of a kid who had been killed in a school shooting and it is I'd not seen it but it is like watching it is really moving because the idea is that people don't understand the safety measures that schools like need to put in place and so they brought it to life in a computer game they sort of went and it's I mean it's obviously it's horrible to watch but it was this guy going well it's the best way we could think of to bring this to life this dad who really wanted to kind of advocate for these rights and for obviously tougher gun laws um watching that when you really see how you can get really creative with like decision making so should you put a sign here or a sign here and then you see the consequences of the sign in part a versus part b so almost you can there's almost is more of a right answer and a wrong answer oh if you put it there it's not going to work but if you put it in this other place actually that helps to know because the fire doors open struggling with thinking about it in a team like an like average I don't know we're working on a project we've we're we're trying to put a new process in whatever it is how do you think it could work there well one thing I was thinking about is scenario planning because I feel like scenario planning gets you to figure out different situations like what might happen next but that's obviously not putting the audience to the test that's almost you putting yourself to the test which is not quite the same but that's okay right the whole point of these is just to to have a play with them so i saw it a little bit of scenarios i think i think that might work if we made this decision then follow it through you know like if we made this process twice as fast this would happen that would happen you know all of the kind of knock-on impact and kind of consequences um for your audience i was thinking about you know most companies your audience is often another team you know it's an internal you know like i'm in I don't know I'm in sales and it's marketing or I'm marketing and I'm trying to persuade finance to give me more money to spend on marketing it's sort of like gamifying so I was like oh is there a way I mean I'm not sure how ethical this is but you know of like gamifying choices and kind of going well we could do this or we could do that and if we do let's you know almost like kind of like deal or no deal like what's behind this box and I've not quite I've not quite worked it through I think it is a as I said I think I find it intriguing it is a bit of a harder one to make that jump to how would we do this how would we involve our audience I was wondering whether um you know all of those cool direct to customer brands that have popped up over the past couple of years I feel like they're very good at involving their audience about going you know what would you prefer like like make a choice about this packaging or and i feel like they're very sort of user led or very very audience led they're really good at like listening to their audience they let their audience make choices or kind of make decisions or at least appear to um but yeah it's worth it's worth having a look at the idea i do know because i think what i'm struggling with is almost like the execution of it but the idea to be audience led so you kind of you know we could be helen and sarah led to squiggly careers which is this is what we think we should put out in the world or we could be audience led and we could say the next six months of what we produce is up to you ultimately our business is to support people squiggly careers so what do you need most topics tools um like fill this in and the next six months of our work is going to be led by you and then sort of make that commitment that that's what we're going to do so I almost find that framing when I when I was thinking about oh GPTs and team meetings all that kind of stuff I find that hard but actually think if you were going to be entirely audience-led for a week a month six months whatever how would you do it and what could that mean that you'd be doing um I think is an interesting an interesting thing to play with even if you don't actually do it even if you said well let's imagine we were going to be audience-led like where we're getting that information from what they're likely to say and even if you get some insights and say what what would that mean we were doing i don't think you you don't think you necessarily have to no change everything but it's that mindset of being audience-led some of the things that it talks about which i was like oh this could be interesting um with some training is you can use it to like test assumptions so you know like getting people to make choices and then it can be quite confronting so it might come back and then say to you okay well you know for things like bias actually based on those answers sarah um what's most likely to get in the way of your learning recency bias you know almost like because of the choices that you've made or because of what you've just told us um yeah like it maybe it's recency bias maybe it is a bias to spending time with people a bit like you because yeah yeah that feels more comfortable um and so i think it's you can almost either work with the audience which is the way that you just described it so you're like being very like audience first you tell us our job is to give you what you want or you can sort of almost test your audience um and because then they're so involved and i do i do think that the reason i was like interested in i was like there is something in it you know like when we are involved in anything you're so much more engaged you're participating um you know you're part of the process you feel like you're shaping something rather than having something happening to you you know like learning and career development you don't want to be told no one wants us to be like do all of these things in this way i always think with these things i i find it with my brain examples easier to understand these ideas otherwise i'm like oh i get it's a nice idea but what can you do with it and i was just thinking about um there's a program that sarah created with a company that we work with where you started it with this is what we think about i think it was on feedback this is what we think about feedback and then every and then you put it up to the group to say yeah you know why wouldn't this work and what needs to be better and then you kept them the next time you took that version and then you evolved it again and so what then after i don't know six or seven versions of that you ended up with something different than you started with and I guess that that is an example of being audience led in that situation because you didn't know where you were going to end up you you just kept letting them iterate on the start that you provided them with yeah that's a that's a really good example and with another program actually we've done something where I will say right on a scale of one to ten how useful is this idea and let's say they say six and then the way you put the audience to the test is I then say to them turn that six to an eight so that that would be doing that that would be putting the audience to test so again rather than us going here's the answer you've gone well use your skill use your knowledge to make this better and then it also becomes becomes yours and actually when I was reading about it it says this approach drives deep self-reflection and conversation and people realize what they might have missed or how they responded and so that's why I think it's quite interesting kind of for our work it's like how do you really involve people in it um but generally I mean I have just picked out three here and I could have picked out 25 there was there were um I mean I think I got rid of three or four that I was like oh that's interesting that's interesting there was one about um symbols you know also about as in like the squiggle itself like a sim how symbols are really interesting there's ones about sounds um all sorts of different ones and I think you can pick the ones as well that you think feel like oh that might be interesting for like my team or for kind of wherever I work um and as I said then you click in and then you just you can like play and watch with all the examples but you do get these nice descriptions which I have read out to you today like some of them which just brings it brings it to life so you get a bit of a starting point and we'll include the link to the deck of brilliance in the pod sheet and we'll also put it in the show notes as well so if you want to go and have a play uh you can find it there but i hope that brilliance has helped you to be more brilliant um if you ever have anything involving the audience that you would like us to uh borrow brilliance from please just email us we're helen and sarah at squiggly careers um and we're always really interested to collect and connect more curiosity dots so we can help everyone to learn and grow in their squiggly careers but that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening and we'll see you again soon bye for now bye everyone