How do you stay optimistic in a world that feels increasingly uncertain?
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon sits down with futurist, bestselling author, and digital anthropologist Brian Solis to explore why the future will reward people who are willing to slow down, stay curious, and rethink what they know.
Drawing from his latest book, Mindshift, Brian shares why innovation begins with self-awareness, how to break free from reactive thinking, and why it’s crucial to develop an open mind. Together, they discuss the power of storytelling, the importance of psychological safety, and how leaders should use AI to imagine new possibilities, instead of just increasing productivity.
Brian’s Mindshift framework for navigating uncertainty and leading through change.
What companies like Pixar and Airbnb can teach us about innovation through storytelling.
How curiosity, wonder, and optimism can become leadership practices.
Links from the episode:
Brian’s new book: Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Leading for Tomorrow (the collaborative book Lisa and Brian both have chapters in!)
Want to contact us? Email hello@howwefuture.com
Brian Solis: We have to think about it in terms of AI business reinvention. All of the executives that we work with, they’re not coming to this moment with reinvention in mind. They’re coming to this moment with efficiency and cost-cutting in mind. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t cut your way to innovation, and you can’t automate your way to growth. These are things that require that imagination, and to have that imagination, you have to give it purpose.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow, starting today.
When the world feels like it’s changing faster than ever, it can be easy to stay in reaction mode, but what if the best way to handle change is to learn to see it differently?
Today’s guest is futurist and bestselling author Brian Solis. In his latest book, Mindshift, he argues that navigating uncertainty starts with slowing down, becoming more self-aware, and staying open to possibilities we might otherwise miss. In this conversation, we explore how to break out of old patterns of thinking, why storytelling is such a powerful leadership tool, and how curiosity can help us shape the future instead of just reacting to it. As you listen, think about what assumptions you might be carrying that are ready for a mind shift. Leave a comment letting us know.
Let’s jump into it with Brian Solis.
I’ve been waiting so long to have you on How We Future because you really are how we future. That is who you are. You’re a futurist, you’re a sensemaker, you’re always on the edge. What I love about what you do is that you’re on the edge in the most optimistic and generous way. You’re just always looking for opportunities to raise the floor for everyone. Welcome to How We Future.
Brian Solis: My gosh. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Any moment with you is just a moment well spent. I always leave our conversations thinking deeper and always smiling.
Lisa Kay Solomon: That should be a new metric. How’s the smile metric? Sometimes I think, Brian, we’re going to get into your ninth book, Mindshift, and your next book, but one of the things I really appreciate about what you do is you really help leaders navigate uncertainty in this moment in dramatically new ways. Sometimes in my own practice of navigating this, what feels like a highly stressful moment, I’ll think, “The day’s going to start, the day’s going to end. How many people can I connect with in that process? How many smiles might I elicit?” Not in a performative way, but in a meaningful connection way. I like that new metric, new smiles.
Brian Solis: I’m leaving with that smile and also a new metric. You picked up on something earlier that I want to call out, which is there is very little optimism these days, and it’s so much so that we have a word for it, whether you’re scrolling or whether you’re thinking it’s everything’s a doomsday scenario. When you allow yourself to get put into the doomsday corner, one, there’s no smile metric, but two, it’s very difficult to think creatively in a position of uncertainty, anxiety, fear. As much as I feel those things because I’m a human being, I believe that the only way forward is to see things differently, to hope, to explore opportunities, and to believe that possibility takes work. That’s my daily mantra.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It takes work, and importantly, it’s learnable. That’s what I really loved, even going deeper into your book Mindshift, which is really about how do we have self-awareness about how we are encountering others in the world and how we’re seeing problems. There’s a lot in the opening parts of this book, which is really focused on getting centered, on naming that you’ve not necessarily been taught how to think about a world that’s changing around you in productive ways, about how to do something that might feel antithetical to incentives or systems around you, starting with slowing down.
Yes, the world feels like it’s speeding up, but you have to slow down, slow down enough to find out who you are and slow down enough to maybe realize that some of the ways you’ve been going about your work or your personal relationships, A, are not the only ways, and B, may not be serving you super well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why that was so important to you to really have a number of chapters about really inviting people to do a little self-reflection.
Brian Solis: A lot of people will say that the moment a book is published is the most exciting moment where it comes to life. The best part about books for me is the actual journey of creating it, developing it. My publisher probably doesn’t want to hear this. I don’t set out with 100%, this is what I’m going to do and what it’s going to look like and what the outcomes are going to be. The journey is also, I think, the magic where things come to life.
What I realized during the development of Mindshift was I spent my whole career in Silicon Valley observing trends, making sense of them, playing them out in a variety of different scenarios that were going to be impactful for the people that mattered to me, and I had never really sat back to think about, “What’s the process of all of this?” I always showed up as this person who’s written nine books and all these research reports, and, “Yes, let’s do it. What are we going to do? What are we going to work on today?” That moment of, “Oh, hold on, press pause, take a step back and let it in,” just let it in. I got to tell you, that is the hardest part.
I also have a day job, so I have this saying that work days are for meetings, and evenings and weekends are for emails and getting the work done that you’re supposed to get done. It’s really difficult to just stop and pause and breathe, but if you do not do it, then magic cannot happen. You’re just caught in the cycle, and even on your greatest day in that cycle, you’re only going to be able to make yesterday better tomorrow. You’re not going to be able to reimagine what tomorrow could be. That dedication of the first part of the book is really helping people, and myself included, slow down.
Lisa Kay Solomon: That is so beautiful, Brian. I know this isn’t just your personal belief. You’ve worked with senior leaders for decades and have seen the ramifications of not slowing down, of always being in that reactive mode. I think, honestly, I went to business school, and no one was like, “You know what you need to do as a leader? You need to make sure you daydream. You need to make sure you go for long walks. You need to make sure you pause and protect time for reflection.” That was not it, and that was a very long time ago.
Now living in Silicon Valley, of course, in the move fast and break things or in the land of exponential, we had Carissa Carter, Scott Doorley talk about runaway design, that we’re putting up things in the world to just make us crazier or nuttier, as Scott says, where we never feel up to speed, NUTS. It’s really a learned practice. I appreciate that you’re bringing all of your gravitas. The whole book, honestly, reads like, I don’t know if anyone has said this in the review, but it almost reads like a love note. It’s like, “I believe in you.” There’s just so much heart and care in the book. You can feel it in those chapters. Like, “I’m telling you, this will be good for you.”
Brian Solis: No one said that. You just made my whole year with that because it is a love note. I’ve tried to do something with every book where I want you to know I’m right there with you. This is not coming from someone trying to be the smartest person in the room. This is coming from someone who’s probably not supposed to be here in this chair right now, and figured it out along the way because I believed in the people around me and the possibility between us. Hearing you say that, I’m at a loss of words right now.
Lisa Kay Solomon: That’s okay because I have words. I have words that you wrote. I want to be very concrete because it’s easy to listen to some of this stuff and be like, “Ah, that’s so out there.” “Yes, sure.” I love your description of mind shift. You say, “It’s an opening of your mind and heart. It’s your ability to see something new or differently, to learn and unlearn, to react creatively in times of change.” Then you go on to say, I’m not letting you off the hook yet, “It’s rewiring your inputs, expanding your horizons, rekindling your purpose, abandoning your comfort zone and reimagining outcomes, exploring the art of the possible.” Who doesn’t want that? That is amazing.
I’ve been playing around with this term earlier in our podcast around “optimistic offense,” this idea that this world is making us play defense. I think, again, your invitation is to say, you don’t have to let it be that way, and that’s so much of the kinds of conversations we’re trying to bring forward here. I just thought that definition was so beautiful, expansive, and yet purposeful.
Brian Solis: That is right. I think, especially going back the last decade, we have been hit by black swan events, one after another. We’re living in a reality that does not seem like a reality, and it is very easy to react from very human positions like anger or angst or fear. The journey towards possibility has to start with a more open mind and an open heart. What I realized is that it’s very difficult in this world to have those two things because just everything that’s happening, not just at work, but just in life in general. When I try to explain what I do to my parents, for example. I’ve been doing this for decades, and they still don’t know what I’m doing.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Join the club. You’re not alone.
[laughter]
Lisa Kay Solomon: Then you add your children in there. “What do you do?” “Good question. How much time do you have?”
Brian Solis: I was giving a talk this last week, and I just randomly opened with, you probably heard the word “futurist” and wondering, “What is that?” I try to explain, in my sense of humor kind of way, it’s not someone who predicts the future. Believe it or not, it’s actually a thing, even though I don’t necessarily get paid to be one, because in order to get paid to be one, you’d have to want to know what’s happening outside of your day-to-day world in order to prepare ahead for it, and that is not the world we live in most of the time.
Most people are reacting, and this would be, as you said, strategic offense. This is thinking forward so that we don’t have to react, because there are so many things that have happened and are happening right now that we know are going to affect us, and we can do something about it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: One of my favorite models, and you give so many great frameworks, you talk about the distinction between the vicious cycle, which is really informed by a fixed mindset, which again, I think just getting the privilege of working with Stanford students, it’s not their fault they have that. They’ve been in years of systems that is like, “Did you get the right answer? Did you get the A? Did you perform?” Versus the virtuous cycle, which is really informed by the growth mindset, the lifelong learner.
I appreciate it, I’ve not seen it done this way, where you really almost talk about it like you have these beliefs, and those beliefs inform the capabilities that you need to build, and those capabilities inform the kind of experiences that you’re willing to take on or not take on or opportunities that you’re willing to do, and even the horizon which you’re looking at. I just think it spells out so clearly the traps of being in a system that doesn’t reward the exploration that you’re talking about.
Brian Solis: I think you can appreciate Carol Dweck’s work around growth mindset was a big inspiration, clearly. One of the stats at the beginning of the book is we all think we’re self-aware, yet studies show that only 10% of us are actually self-aware. If you’re not self-aware, you cannot receive signals that might make you say, “Hmm.” Most of the time, we don’t realize it, and it’s true in society at large today: we receive the signals that reinforce our beliefs. That is where we start to see the division. We start to see the lack of creativity, the lack of innovation. We start to see ruts and vicious cycles.
Without realizing it, everything we do, those signals, whether they’re coming from social media or the media in general or the politicians you follow, those things reinforce those beliefs. To break that cycle, to be self-aware enough that you’re not doing that, I put those systems in place so that as you turn each page-- By the way, I even read my own book. It’s fully highlighted in notes.
[laughter]
Brian Solis: I keep it on my desk because I still practice this to make sure that I’m open enough and staying open enough to start each experience when a news event happens or a signal is received, that I am in a place where I can wonder.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that you included that wonder and the importance of awe and being in a space of openness to even, as you say, receive that. Also the notion that it is a learned and has relearned practice, because just to name it, it’s very hard to be in a place of wonder and awe when our attention is spliced so thinly. Not only is it thin, it’s also narrow. We’re staring at this very small screen all the time, and we’re being asked to be generative, be creative, be long-term thinking. You’re like, “Wait a minute, that feels like a big ask.”
What I appreciate is that you are encouraging people to design their own practices and their own environments in order to be in a place where they can see wider and further. Maybe there’s an opportunity to get into this wonderful process that you articulate that starts with receiving. Once you’ve done the self-reflective work, how do you make yourself open to the signals?
Reading that opening part about receiving, which I want to spend some time, where you’re really paying attention to the peripheral signals, what’s out there, what might cause you to be curious, you note that so many CEOs are not in that mindset, that they are in their importance and in their leadership. They’re focused on the things coming their way, and they’re missing an opportunity to be in that receiving mode.
Brian Solis: It’s hard for anyone to hear that they’re not receiving the things, that they’re not open to insights. Everything about life is programming us not to be in that state of mind. To your point about the small screens, we are driven by algorithms that, through years of neuroplasticity, are wiring us for speed and consumption and stripping out things like creativity and keeping us more isolated in our cycles and our inputs. I want to call that out, that that has to be broken, not just from the work perspective, but from a life perspective.
If I can be honest for a second, I had to step away from writing books and research for many years. My last book, Lifescale, which came out in 2019, was about how to break that cycle because I fell victim to it as well. To your point about self-help and process-driven, there were extremes of-- No one was talking about digital addiction or social media addiction or what the algorithms were doing, and the research, at the time, was scant, except for Tristan Harris was one of the loudest whistleblowers at the time. I looked for books, I looked for research to help myself. I’d realized that there was something, “I think that sounds a lot like me,” and there was nothing.
I went through this journey to figure out how to break that cycle, and hence the term “Lifescale” became, “Where am I trying to go?” The systems, like in Mindshift, they’re the same systems you can use for life. Where am I trying to go? How am I going to get there? What are the things I need to do every single day that are keeping me on that trajectory, and how can I measure that? Once I figured that out, I recognized, this is coming back to your question, that the journey to open your mind to receive signals, to see opportunities, to think differently, you have to break the cycle. I did humanize a bit of that introduction of the book to get there.
Here’s why. You mentioned your Stanford students. I care deeply about students because, one, they’re the future, but two, because they’re not going to have the same shot at the future that you and I had. They’re now coming into a world where decision makers, leaders do not understand what AI can offer them. When they don’t have an open mind, they lean on what they do know: their experience, their expertise, their leadership, their measures, how they’re measured for success. That means that we see a lot of efficiency, we see a lot of cost-cutting, we see a lot of career ladder being chipped away, starting at the bottom.
When you take a step back, and you can work with someone like you, work with someone like me to say, “We might not be thinking about this in its fullest possibility.” Let me tell you a story. When you and I grew up, we followed the rules. We were graded by how well we followed the rules. Then we went into the workplace, we followed the rules. We grew and were compensated by how well we followed the rules. Every time we did that, we prevented ourselves from asking different questions or challenging the rules or challenging the status quo.
We never allowed ourselves to explore the path of innovation, which is just simply defined as creating new value that didn’t exist yesterday, because if it’s not about new value, it’s improving yesterday, which is iteration and not innovation. I know this is a long answer to your question, but this is that moment, especially with artificial intelligence for students, for humanity, that if we’re not allowing ourselves to receive, if we’re not open to see things differently, then we are going to get caught in what I call the iteration trap, which is going to actually be more destructive than constructive.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Thank you for sharing all that. It reminds me of this great point you make early on, which is, basically, if you’re not flexing your mind shift, then others are mind shifting you, that you are in their paradigm.
Brian Solis: Absolutely. If I can tell you one last story, there’s also a part of the book where I talk about the captain of the Titanic. Clearly, there’s stories of real life, but as inspired to me by movies. I was talking about the movie Titanic, where in the scene, I think it was Bill Paxton, he’s telling the story of the captain before he hit the iceberg. He says years of experience that that captain had was actually working against him in that moment, and he didn’t even realize it.
It reminded me of the CEOs of Coca-Cola and Walmart just recently, as they were stepping back, they said, “We can start the AI transformation, but we’re not the people to see it through.” You can imagine if the captain at that moment had said, “I’m not the right person to navigate all these icebergs.” That’s openness. That’s that open-mindedness. That’s learning and unlearning. That’s what we need.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Thank you for sharing both those stories. There’s so much to learn in that. Again, part of it’s like, this book is an invitation. You give out lots of invitations. Some people are going to really resonate with the real case study. Some people are going to resonate with the stories that you tell, and I know you talk a lot about Pixar. I think what I’m also hearing, and I hope that folks that are like, “Yes, how do I get my team to think differently,” it really has to be an empathetic invitation in, and that all of those case studies and all those stories and all those sources of inspiration are opportunities to open up that receiving mode.
I’ll tell you a little anecdote. Just this week, I worked with my dear friend Jeffrey Rogers, who was a past guest on this. He’s a futures facilitator. He also comes to this work from many different experiences, one being a historian, which makes him a great futurist, and also many years in outdoor ed, which means he is fearless when it comes to experience design.
One of the things we did to get people in a receiving mode, to, Amy Edmondson, our colleague, might say, creating psychological safety, is we said, “Hey, talk amongst your team. How many years of experience have you had in the HR field?” Each table then tallied up the total number of years. Then we also said, “How many kind of inflection points have you been through, whether it’s reengineering or total quality management or even growth mindset or design thinking?”
We went around the table. There was, I don’t know, 100 or so, and each table, we were like, 110, 90, 80 total collective years. In the room, we tallied we had 1,655 collective years in HR, which, to your point, extraordinary. What a just bounty of experience and knowledge that is so valuable and perhaps an anchor, and perhaps keeping us from really reimagining more broadly. Just naming that upfront, what a gift, and let’s not bound ourselves to the fact that we are the experts in the room, so they should just listen to us, to look on the other side. It was just a fun way to make that point that was light, but also backed by some data that was surfaced from the group.
Brian Solis: Oh, that is such an awesome story. I’m smiling because that, one, is exactly right. Two, to your point about our friend Amy and psychological safety, I’m sure you can appreciate, in that scenario, let’s just say we’re even going to brainstorm and we’re going to bring in the team and we’re going to think outside of the box. The reality is that box, we never leave it without that psychological safety. I always believe that it’s really difficult, not sometimes, all the times, it’s really difficult to recognize something in you has to change. If you surround yourself with people that can bring the best out of you, even if you don’t believe it’s in you, it’ll come out.
To your point about Pixar, when you think about different approaches, and you’re surrounded by people who can help you think about those approaches and help you believe that you can do something you didn’t know you can do, those creative meetings, those brainstorm sessions now become something more possible, where my collective wisdom or the years of experience aren’t working against me. We’re actually leaning in now as human beings to do something extraordinary, is probably the right word.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Pixar really is. Creativity, Inc. from another colleague, Ed Catmull, is one of my favorite books, and particularly the chapter on brain trust around how they critique movies and the idea that you can put some processes in place that are designed to make you better, that are not personal, to improve. This is that chapter where they say, look, every one of their brilliant Oscar-winning groundbreaking movies, I think Ed Catmull says, at some point, was an ugly baby.
Their job, I think he said this, was to go from suck to non-suck. It sucks as an idea. We got to get it to non-suck. They would have these reviews where they would bring in people to look at the movie where it was, wherever it was, and their job was to give feedback on what they’re seeing, not to solve it, but to help widen the data of what’s happening, to then give the director an opportunity to then use it or not, say, “Hey, thank you so much. It’s not the vision, but it’s just really accelerating your ability to improve.”
I love that because right now, we’re so scared of negative feedback, and particularly, I think, in a world that’s so performative of, “Oh my gosh, why didn’t I get 20 likes for this?” This is a funny story. We’ve been doing a lot of experimentation around AI at the d.school. We did this really fun learning experience where we had to partner up with someone, talk about an experiment we tried with AI and how it failed or what we learned, and then take the transcript of that story, so it had to be a story. Then we put it back into AI to make a single visual out of it, like a New Yorker cartoon.
My partner told this hilarious story, speaking of what happens when we don’t get enough critical feedback or help. He told the story about how he brainstorms with Claude, and Claude is so effusive in his praise. “Oh my gosh, that’s a brilliant idea. Fantastic. You are brilliant. That’s brilliant,” whatever. Then Claude dialed down their effusive algorithm, and so now it’s like, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” He’s like, “Wait a minute, I was brilliant. Now I’m not brilliant.” His visual was him lying down on a therapist couch with the robot AI therapist taking notes and him basically saying, “I was brilliant, and now I’m not brilliant.” Anyway-
Brian Solis: [laughs]
Lisa Kay Solomon: -this is a very long tangent, other than to say that we can put processes in place to make us better receivers, to think about the safety required, to put us in a state of learning.
Brian Solis: I think that’s exactly right. That’s exactly the point. In a world where people do need those guardrails, that’s the system I try to introduce, you introduce, each in our own way, so that we can just allow ourselves to go in and out of our routines in order to be able to think differently, to think bigger.
To your point about Creativity, Inc., I’ve read that book so many times. I read the second edition just recently. I also read Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act. The beauty in both of those examples, because I’ve read them both while I was writing Mindshift, was the systemization of creativity, of openness, and not even just of open-mindedness. I think the Rick Rubin side of that experience was about the beginner’s mind, which was not even just opening your mind and saying, “Okay, I’m ready to receive.” It was recognizing you could start from a childlike wonder standpoint.
In fact, I know I’m in the right zone when I’m gullible. When someone says to me, “Did you know that that mountain broke in half due to this thing that happened?” I’d say, “Really?” The reason why I know that I’m in a good state of mind is because this happens quite a bit. Someone said, “You’re so easy to fool. You’re so gullible.” At first, I was so insulted. Then I realized, “Oh no, no, no, I was in a good place.”
Lisa Kay Solomon: You’re just open. You’re open to it. Yes, you’re open. I think it’s interesting. You’re making me think when I first went to college, I met a lot of people that grew up in New York City. I’d never really met anyone that grew up in New York City. They felt like five years older than me, just by their nature, their sophistication, what they were exposed to. Also, they had this, not everyone, but there was such a skepticism and cynicism about them of protection.
On the one hand, I was like, “Wow, I’m so intrigued by that,” and the other, I remember thinking, “I wouldn’t want to have that as my veil. I just think that that puts you in a guarded mode all the time as opposed to a more open mode.” That doesn’t mean that you’re Pollyanna, but the willingness to be open, what a gift, what a gift of a stance, and how unusual that is, again, in a world that feels so bombarded.
Brian Solis: You’re such a good storyteller. I forgot we were in a podcast.
Lisa Kay Solomon: That’s the best. A flow state, a flow state. I want to make sure that we help our listeners who may not yet have your book understand that this receive part, self-awareness receive, is just the beginning of this wonderful process to go from really looking at signals to then making sense of them. Oh my gosh, talk about naming, Brian. I just have to go through this. Receiving: taking signals, being anticipatory, being open, being curious. Yes, I love it. Then going into perceiving: you take all this in, now you’re going to apply some weights to it, you’re going to analyze it, some critical thinking, to weaving.
We have receive, perceive, weave, thinking about it through a narrative, through a story. To conceive: wait, was there a new story here that we need to conceptualize, that we need to bring to life? To believe: how do we take that story and get others to also be excited about that story, not just in their head, but in their hearts and in their spirit? To achieve. First of all, how you found all these words that actually mean the thing you want them to do and also rhyme, modern miracle. I love that there’s a flow there, and for each and every one of them, there’s a set of practices and processes.
I really want to focus on the weave, conceive, believe, going back to this idea of why stories are so important. You can do all this data collection, and thanks to AI, we could do it much faster. We could collect even more numbers, but it’s not the numbers that are going to get people to invest in the future in building, specifically, a challenging status quo preferred future, if I want to throw some futurey words out there. Talk to me a little bit about your belief in storytelling as a key vehicle to getting more people on board.
Brian Solis: Thank you. You took me right back to the moment when I was putting that framework together, because that is taking years of work and giving it a name, basically. Storytelling is not about you trying to tell a story that makes someone say, “That was a great story.” True storytelling is getting someone to believe that they are in the story and that they see themselves in the journey.
Ultimately, if it’s believable, then they can see themselves in the potential outcome. They become a protagonist in the story. The art of those chapters were helping, one, you see yourself in that journey, and then two, how do you help others come along for that journey? It’s such a beautiful experience to undergo, but it’s also very complicated to simplify it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Yes, and it takes a lot of time and work. Speaking of visuals, I love that you talk about Airbnb borrowing from the Disney practice early on to storyboard out the experience, to really move in those very early days from a really cool technology that might connect people that had extra rooms in their homes and people that were looking to rent something different, to an experience company. Through the visualization of the different touchpoints, they could really understand the work they were doing to elevate the experience in a very different way.
Brian Solis: Yes. That story is also Pixar-related. If I could just quickly share why that was so important, because that’s rare to see in business, where Brian, the co-founder of Airbnb, had read on a flight the autobiography of Disney, and he was inspired by the whole development of the movie Snow White. At the time, animation was very complex, was very manual, and no one had attempted a full-length feature film through animation. Snow White was basically that endeavor. They created tools in order to do that, which included storyboarding.
I had always grown up thinking storyboarding, I can’t draw very well, but storyboarding was this way of visualizing the story before you go through the very expensive process of elaborating on it, creating it, et cetera. That’s partly true, but what Brian set out to do at Airbnb was to visualize the story through the lens of the people experiencing the story.
In Airbnb’s case, they had learned by going through this very empathetic process that the journey was about people who rent someone’s home, someone’s room, and the people who rent them out to them. Whereas, especially coming from Silicon Valley, it’s very easy to get caught up in the tech, the trend, the mobile. That was during the mobile revolution. They were going through this reinvention. They were crashing. They were getting negative press at the time. They realized that they were missing this story of the people who were their customers. It helped them.
They brought in Nick Sung, who was a Pixar animator, worked on one of my favorite movies, which is Up. He helped them take the data, and he helped them systematize how to process that data to understand who is renting and why. Why are they coming to someone’s home, a stranger’s home, when they could go to a Marriott or a Hilton or a Four Seasons, whatever your favorite brand is? Then why would someone rent out to strangers, aside from just trying to make some money?
They ended up going through these beautiful stories of why, and the storyboards became believable. The whole act became believable. You could see yourself in these stories. That’s when Airbnb became an experience company, and they transformed their whole model around this, that feeling, that sentiment.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love you sharing that story. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the co-founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, are designers, graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, so very visual, very focused on that. I remember going to Airbnb headquarters pretty early on, where they would have that storyboard in the center of their office. Not only did it outline every single step, making the abstract, “oh, renty renter,” but no, first they have to search, then they have to get trust, which helped them understand they needed high-quality pictures and all the rest.
Each one of the boards were coded green, yellow, and red. Green, we’re doing pretty well here. Yellow, we’re improving the experience or the process or the mechanics. Red, this needs a lot of work. What I love about that is that having it front and center, first of all, gets everybody to be aligned on the priorities. Whether you’re a UX person or you’re a researcher or you’re an engineer or you’re a product manager, you’re all looking at the same bigger goal of, that’s red, we have to make it green, or at the very least, yellow. It makes that very complex process more simple and is very aligning in a concrete way. I just think that is so powerful.
I think the lessons from Snow White, I was also a total Disney nerd, is that when you go from making a short to a long feature, I think the idea was, at some point, you’re going to get lost. Being able to come back to, where are we in this story, what needs to happen in this moment in order, for Airbnb’s case, to continue to build trust and all the rest, I think then it opens up imagination because you’re not having to hold everything at the same time. I think that’s another benefit. It’s just so genius in thinking about it. We could talk on and on, but I want to make sure, Brian, that we use this, speaking of opening up creativity of what’s next. Can you tell me about this new book called Infinite?
Brian Solis: Yes, I will. Just to acknowledge that point you said, one of the things I learned when I was writing Mindshift, and we’ll close the chapter on that, is in order to get there, like the way that you talked about the colors and have everyone see what part they play in turning red to green, for example, opening up imagination, yes, but what I realized what we had to systematize was the purpose. I had to give you purpose to want to shift that color to red. You felt like that was your one thing you have to do today because you felt it, and that that purpose, it gave it meaning. It wasn’t just trying to do something for the sake of checking the box.
Speaking of purpose, yes, my boss, who’s our chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, and I, we set out to write this book because we recognize that all of the executives that we work with are coming to this moment in artificial intelligence. As Bill McDermott would say, we have to think about it in terms of AI business reinvention. They’re not coming to this moment with reinvention in mind. They’re coming to this moment with efficiency and cost-cutting in mind. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t cut your way to innovation, and you can’t automate your way to growth. These are things that require that imagination, and to have that imagination, you have to give it purpose.
We systematized. We start with describing what we’re seeing with AI natives, how they’re reimagining companies from the inside out, how they’re reimagining org charts into work charts. We go into this whole thing of what it looks like and how to get there and why. The subtitle is How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies. It just came out. I got to actually go do that work to say it’s out.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Yes. We’re going to help you say it’s out and so necessary. Now, having worked in a couple of gatherings of very senior people leaders in the HR functions and talent and development, they are hearing that message of efficiency a lot. Oh, AI, you could do more with less. You don’t need people. It is a very narrow mindset about what this technology can do. I think it is much harder to dream bigger. Like, “No, this is asking us to reimagine everything.”
It was interesting to hear one of the leaders reflect. He’s like, “We’ve been asking for a “seat” at the table for a long time on the strategic table. Now is our moment.” I can imagine that this book will really be just a gift to give them permission to dream bigger. Probably the two of them will go hand in hand. Really, you have a moment now where you can receive wider, thanks to, again, AI helping you, if you set your intention that way, and to have courage to put out a new idea that doesn’t yet exist, that may be more achievable. First, you got to believe it, and first, you got to articulate it.
Brian Solis: That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. I know our time is limited, but I’ll share a very quick story. I had a “privilege,” I’ll use that word intentionally, a privilege recently of hosting about 75 CEOs and COOs of some of our favorite restaurant brands, several of which I patron frequently. Because it was such a small group, it was all day. We would break about into these small little chunks of workshops to talk about what AI can mean to them.
Even though they were workshops and we had these wonderful outcomes, it all had to start first from everything we’ve been talking about here: opening up, taking a step back, being in a safe place. I heard CEOs say, in every single one of those sessions, differently at different times, “I’m supposed to know what to do right now, and I do not. I’m doing what I know to do, and I don’t feel like that’s right.” That was so powerful, but that’s exactly right. That was the inspiration, those types of conversations I’ve had, to work with Dave on doing something about it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: What a gift it must have been for them to just even say the words out loud. What a relief. Like, “Ah, there, I said it. There, it’s out there.” That’s so beautiful. Brian, I want to close again with some beautiful words that you wrote towards the end of Mindshift, where you say, “Remember, your destiny isn’t a matter of chance, it’s a matter of choice. You have what it takes to be the hero you need and that we all need.”
“Your heart and intuition already know who you can truly become. Stoke your passion. Embrace courage. This is your mind shift moment. This is also their mind shift moment.” Mic drop. Beautiful, beautiful. I love it. I really am excited for more people to learn about it, and your new book, and of course, the new book that we contributed to called Leading for Tomorrow. Lots of resources for people.
Brian Solis: Oh, yes. I’m so excited for that. I know we’re out of time, but boy, when we were talking earlier about the company you keep, I’ll use the word “privilege” again, our little group has inspired me, and when that became an opportunity for us all to collaborate, oh, what a moment. This will go down as one of the things I’m so proud of in my life to be part of this.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I agree. When I interviewed Chris and SPK earlier, I was like, “This is like the Super Friends.” I grew up on the Super Friends.
Brian Solis: [laughs]
Lisa Kay Solomon: “This is like the whole Super Friends.” It’s fun that we’re learning from each other, that, even though I don’t know how to swim, I can learn from my friend Aquaman or Wonder Woman, all the things.
Brian Solis: Super Friends. Oh my goodness, you just took me back.
Lisa Kay Solomon: So good. Brian, thank you so much for being on How We Future. You are just such a gift and a treasure, and I’m honored to be in your orbit.
Brian Solis: I’m honored to be in your orbit. Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity and thank you for your friendship.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Thanks so much for listening to this episode. I’ve been thinking more and more about how the future is not just about adapting to new technology. It also requires new ways of thinking. Here’s something to try this week. Identify one assumption you’ve been making about your work or life and ask yourself, “What if there were another way to see this?” If this conversation shifted your perspective, let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear what’s changing for you. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who’s ready for a mind shift. Thanks for listening to How We Future. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and we’ll see you next time.
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