Catching the Next Wave

Is intuition fast or slow? Is it about making new connections or adapting the existing knowledge? How does wisdom fit into the picture? Is there a connection with cognitive biases?  Is our anticipatory brain devoting us from free will? These and many more topics we touch upon in the conversation with Dawid Wiener: a psychiatrist, a doctor of philosophy, a cognitive scientist, a teacher of the psychology of design,  and an entrepreneur.

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“Kinds of minds” by Daniel Dennett

“How emotions are made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett

“7 and ½ Lessons about the brain”  by Lisa Feldman Barrett

“The artist’s way” by Julia Cameron

“Handbook of intuition research” by Marta Sinclair

“The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” by Joseph Henrich

We seem not to be quite educated to listen to our intuition these days. It might be our schooling system, the way the business world operates, or perhaps the fact that because we don’t know how intuition works, we are slightly scared of it. In this 8th season of the Catching The Next Wave podcast the hosts, Aga and Łukasz Szóstek aim to catch the intuitive bull by its horns and go to figure out what is intuition, and whether it’s worthwhile to listen to it or not.

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“The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron

“The Umami Strategy” by Aga Szóstek

“Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman

Alistair Cockburn talking about the Shu Ha Ri model

Our co-host, Aga, has published a book on September 10th, 2020. The book is a guide on how to create and implement a powerful experience strategy that will help your organization stand out on the market. In this conversation between both hosts, Aga explains how it is time for the next step in thinking about customer experience and what are the ingredients of creating an experience strategy that will truly make you be loved by your customers.

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“The Umami Strategy: Stand out by mixing business with experience design” by Aga Szóstek

The link to the book on the BIS Publisher website

Season 7 of Catching The Next Wave podcast was about change. We attempted to look at it from the personal, organizational and global perspectives. While you might think that there aren’t many common threads, we managed to find quite a few. Join us to listen to another set of eight amazing conversations with fantastic guests from the domains of social and behavioral change, tourism, finances and organizational development.

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The link to the conversation with Scott Belsky will only become available in December 2020. But the good news is that we will launch it as a bonus episode on CTNW, so it will be delivered to you as soon as we get hold of it :D

Where lies the difference between tourism and travel? What does it mean to get out of the comfort zone? We investigate the notions of sustainable tourism, transformational travel and resilience in this great conversation with Audrey Scott and Daniel Noll, writers, storytellers and propagators of conscious adventures into our beautiful world. We touch, among many other topics, upon the difference between a genuine experience versus commoditization of holiday time and also the importance of language to explain what sustainable travel is all about to the different people potentially interested in it.

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Audrey and Dan’s website

An interview with Audrey

The 5-minute Journal app

“Guns, germs, steel” by Jared Diamond

“Man’s search for meaning” by Victor Frankl

What is the difference between equality and justice? What are the best places to start change? These are a few topics we touch upon with our guest Amanda Gigler who is leading the development of Mama Cash (the feminist non-profit fund from Amsterdam) next 10 year strategic guide. We dive into the differences between feminism, activism and social change and discuss (among other things) the importance of creating narrative for change.

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MamaCash

“Permaculture design” by Aranya

“Dispossessed” by Ursula de Guin

With our guest, the amazing bond investment expert, Darek Kędziora we dive into the world of financial change that is swiping the world today. Darek shares his opinions (strictly personal and in no way any sort of advice) about how the pandemic impacts current geopolitics and how it is reflected in the world of finance. We touch upon the global trends in technologies, the power changes and also the role of China in reshaping our world. It’s not all dark though - Darek convincingly talks about some things that can have a huge positive impact on our future.

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Darek's blog Fintaste

“The Great Rupture” by Viktor Shvets

“Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond” by Gideon Rachman

“Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself” by Osho

Managing practices of today are still deeply rooted in the industrial era. But there is a new way emerging called: regenerative management. Our guest, Kim Korn (in collaboration with our other guest Joe Pine) are on the mission to make this new way become the new standard for managing organizations. Kim shares with us the foundational ideas for regenerative managing practices that aim to help your organization grow rather than just stay focused on self-optimization.

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Kim's website

“Handbook of Self-Determination Research” by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan

“Man’s search of meaning” by Victor Frankl

“Radical management” by Stephen Denning

“In search of excellence” by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr.

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins

“Infinite possibility” by Joe Pine and Kim Korn

“Freedom Inc” by Brian Carney

“The Tyranny of Metrics” by Jerry Z. Muller

Can you undergo a process of transformation and keep on innovating? Are opportunities or options the same as solutions? With our guest, Milan Guenther, the author of the book “Intersection” and the founder of the Enterprise Architecture Association, we talk about the change in the context of mature organizations. We discuss the interplay between brand perception, customer experience and infrastructure architecture with an aim to find the big picture that helps you take the best decision of what to invest in next.

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“Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap between Business, Technology, and People” by Milan Guenther

“Reinventing organizations” by Frederic Laloux

“Design sprint” by by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

“Design-driven innovation” By Roberto Verganti

“The Elements of User Experience” by Jesse James Garrett

“Who moved my cheese?” by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard

Holacracy

Zachman Framework

Presentation by Erik Roscam Abbing at the Intersection conference in Paris, 2014

Let’s be honest - change is tough. First we tend to experience denial, then anger. Once we come to terms that change is necessary and start following it, soon we find ourselves in the dip, the valley of tears. With our guest, Michael Liehmann, a change consultant, we explore the phases of change, its antecedents and ways to make it last in your life and in your org.

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Michael's website

The Discworld novels by Terry Pratchet - if you would like to start, this is the very first book in this series of 38 books

Shelter Me by The Rolling Stones

The pandemic has shown us that what seemed impossible is actually quite possible after all. With our amazing guest, April K. Mills, an author and a change agent, we discuss the challenges of progressing rather than regressing with the change that started happening around us. We discuss the importance of not being held accountable for trying to change things but above all the importance of trust in building agency to create meaningful change.

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“Everyone is a change agent” by April K.Mills

“Change tactics” (work-of-progess) by April K.Mills

April’s assessment framework

“The Rickover Effect” by Theodore Rockwell

“The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman

Is behavior change possible? Sure thing, it is but under certain conditions. With Natalia Romero Herrera, an associate professor from Delft University of Technology, we discuss how necessary it is to embed behavior change in values and beliefs. We dig into the topic of self-judgement, self-experimentation and personal storytelling as one of the most crucial tools to inspire change in people.

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Article by John Zimmerman “Designing for the Self: Making Products that Help People Become the Person they Desire to Be”

“Cradle to cradle” by Michael Braungart and William McDonough

Year 2020 has brought an unprecedented change to the world as we knew it: change that we might have not been quite ready to embrace. In this seventh season of Catching The Next Wave podcast we decided to embark on a journey to understand what change means, what are the necessary conditions for it to happen and how it can be successfully implemented. We chose to look at it from three perspectives: the perspective of personal development, the one of organizational transformation and finally from the edge of introducing global change to the way people think. We hope to inspire you to change in the ways that help this new world we face be the one we all would like to live in.

In the age of machines business needs more romanticism. In this bonus episode we talk to Tim Leberecht, an author of “The Business Romantic” and the co-founder of the Business Romantic Society and Monika Jiang, the communications and community manager at the Society about the need for radical change in the way business is conducted today. We also discuss their unique global conference The Great Wave, a networked event full of flavor of secret society with a ton of romanticism, of course.

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“The Business Romantic” by Tim Leberecht

The Great Wave conference

House of Beautiful Business

Business Romantic Society

Technological development should matter and should solve real problems, shouldn’t it? In this insightful conversation with David Millen,  a Senior Manager of Design Research at IBM Watson Health and an ACM Distinguished Scientist, we dive into the topics of purposeful innovation, developing an organizational culture that is ready to take risks and the need for diverse teams with a common language. David discusses how IBM is in a very different business it used to be and how an organization needs to be able to morph over time. Finally, we get into futures thinking and its value as a tool to rehearse scenarios, so you’ve seen some of them before as fiction when you face them in reality.

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Seed Cards

Steven Johnson, “Where do the good ideas come from?”

Can you get too much attention to innovation? In this insightful conversation with Ton Kalker, the CTO at Xperi and an IEEE Fellow we dive into the aspects of predictability, risk taking and trust, and their relationship with radical innovation. We discuss the role of an innovation-focused CTO and also chat about what are the aspects worthwhile considering if you think of doing innovation that matters.

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Scientific American

Does scientific research equal innovation? Is there at least a common denominator? In an insightful conversation with Christoph Bartneck, a professor of human-robot interaction at Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, we discuss the actual need for constant progress and whether there is anything truly new “under the sun”. We talk about robots and their interactions with humans and also about innovation being about deliberate changes in our immediate surroundings to make our lives better. We, finally, look into the notion of whether “better” means the immediate impact in a form of instant gratification or an impact over time that truly changes the world for the better.

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Christoph’s Human-Robot Interaction Podcast

Podcast episode with Anton Angelo

Podcast episode with Joe Rogan and Elon Musk

“The Good Place” - the Netflix series

Jibo robot

Robert Pirsing, “Zen and the art of the  motorcycle maintenance”

Alan F. Chalmers, “What is this thing called science”

Many organisations think they innovate, but do they really? Ralph Talmont, the photographer, writer and creator, talks about the power of imagination to change your mindset towards true meaningful and, above all, ethical innovation. We discuss the importance of taking into account the environmental costs of doing business and we talk about the differences between easy innovation and the difficult one, one that aims at the long-term impact on the world rather than being the selfish drive for biggest profit. We also consider stealing creative processes from artists as a way to start thinking differently.

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Boma.global

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Chandler, “Black Swan”

Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

Salomon Ash 

Kazimierz Dąbrowski

Kazimierz Dąbrowski “Positive Disintegration”

Innovation takes time. You can only see its effects over time, so you need to step back and see a bigger picture. How to do so? In the conversation with Jens Heitland, a former Head of Innovation at IKEA Centres and now a business innovation designer at Fjord, we investigate how to create a powerful innovation team and what its role is in your organisation (and it is not one to create more innovation). We discuss the criticality of the innovation mindset and the importance of having a powerful North Star to ensure you are going in the same direction. We also talk about the need to get your hands dirty (not only on the operational level but also in the executive one) and the importance of good measurement.

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Jerry Z. Muller, “The Tyranny of Metrics”

Eric Reiss, “The Lean Startup”

Thomas Gordon, “Leader Effectiveness Training”

Simon Sinek “Start with Why”

Seth Godin “Purple Cow”

Tim Ferris “The 4 Hour Workweek”

About Warren Buffett by Alice Schroeder, Kirsten Potter “ The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life”

Big breakthroughs are, in fact, a series of incremental steps. If you have one, it means that you were patient enough and humble enough to stick to your course. With Steve Thomas, an Innovation Director at JPI Media, we dive into the ways to set up your innovation machine (no matter whether you are a startup or a mature organisation). We discuss the importance of empathy not only towards the customers but also towards the internal stakeholders whose necks are on the line. We also talk that you can’t predict innovation but you can enable for it but in order to do so you need to have a “punk mentality”, a rebellious spirit informed by strong passion and purpose to become a champion of innovation.

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Story of Dyson making ventilators

Story of Cristian Fracassi 3d-printing ventilators’ valves

Story about helping to feed the frontline initiative

Daniel Pink “Drive”

Ryan Holiday, “Ego is the enemy”