The video provides insights into interactive and engaging methods to foster a growth mindset, particularly in organizational settings. The key theme of the video is on embracing failure, and how it can be used to promote personal and professional development. By conducting activities that encourage uncomfortable yet fun experiences, the speaker demonstrates how to adopt a positive attitude towards constraints and failure, turning them into opportunities for growth.

Part of the discussion centers on the impact of Carol Dweck's research on the growth mindset, focusing on how individuals and leaders can shift their perspectives towards challenges. The video also explores Mary Murphy's and Amy Edmondson's contributions to understanding failure in organizational contexts. Edmondson's work particularly highlights the need to differentiate between blameworthy failures and those that lead to learning and innovation. By integrating these concepts, leaders can cultivate an environment that supports experimentation and constructive feedback, avoiding the stigmatization of errors.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. valence [ˈveɪləns] - (noun) - The intrinsic attractiveness or averseness of an event, object, or situation. - Synonyms: (attraction, appeal, allure)

Sometimes when we play that game, we then turn it over to now give something to somebody that's kind of more on a negative valence kind of thing

2. continuum [kənˈtɪnjuəm] - (noun) - A continuous sequence or range that exists between two extremes. - Synonyms: (range, gradient, sequence)

And she realized that this could be contrasted. And by the way, these are of course, continuums. And I'll say a little bit more about that.

3. incremental [ˌɪŋkrəˈmɛntl̩] - (adjective) - Relating to small additions or changes. - Synonyms: (gradual, progressive, step-by-step)

We've done all of our research, we've taken small incremental steps in our research

4. blameworthy [ˈbleɪmˌwɜrði] - (adjective) - Deserving of blame or condemnation. - Synonyms: (culpable, guilty, reproachable)

And so she has this continuum in the book where she talks about blameworthy failure that many of us unfortunately have seen in the organizations and teams that we've led

5. deconstruct [ˌdiːkənˈstrʌkt] - (verb) - To analyze something by examining its components and their relations. - Synonyms: (analyze, dissect, break down)

But I think as social scientists at least, we need to actually be a little bit better at deconstructing and understanding failure.

6. illustrative [ɪˈlʌstrətɪv] - (adjective) - Serving as an example or explanation. - Synonyms: (explanatory, descriptive, indicative)

She talks about several of these. She talks about as so, for example, evaluative situations. In her case, the great example she gave, which is very resonant to any academic, is delivering an academic paper or defending your dissertation or something like that.

7. sabotage [ˈsæbəˌtɑːʒ] - (verb) - Deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct something. - Synonyms: (wreck, damage, vandalize)

That is when somebody does something like sabotages something that we've been working on or fails or makes a mistake because they're not paying attention

8. psychological safety [saɪˈkɒlədʒɪkəl ˈseɪfti] - (noun) - A belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. - Synonyms: (trust, security, comfort)

And one of the things that she said about her earlier work and has said about her earlier work is that it's really a shame that so many people have taken this sort of idea of psychological safety and creating psychological safety and kind of translating that into let's celebrate failure.

9. deliberate [dɪˈlɪbərɪt] - (verb) - To think or discuss something very carefully. - Synonyms: (consider, contemplate, ponder)

You're being evaluated by a lot of very, very smart people who are going to ask hard questions.

10. resilient [rɪˈzɪliənt] - (adjective) - Able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. - Synonyms: (strong, tough, hardy)

Many of you know Carol Robin and David Bradford to now emeriti faculty from the gsb. They wrote a book a couple of years ago referred to as a learning mindset. Very, very similar. And one of the pieces in this book that I absolutely adore is the kind of way in which they focus on curiosity.

"Embracing Failure," Professor Sarah Soule

I'm so delighted to have this opportunity to see some of my good friends, my former students, and to give you kind of a couple of different things all in one hour. The first is the team asked me to do something to kind of set the tone, get people into the right mindset for thinking about this wonderful reunion that you are beginning now. So that's part of it. Another is to preview some of the work that we've been doing here with the curriculum. And in particular, and some of you who are recent graduates know this, and others maybe who have come back for reunions, have seen us preview some of this. Increasingly, what we as faculty do is work with folks from, for example, our theater department or from other places around campus to try to develop content that is both based in research, but then encourages people to spend some time getting a little uncomfortable by doing some exercises that should be sort of fun.

I'm going to preview some of this, some of what we've been increasingly teaching here at the GSB, and some content that I've had the wonderful honor of putting together and developing with one of our favorite professors at Stanford, Dan Klein, who is an expert in improv and theater and others. So people know Dan, maybe he's here. He's around this weekend. He'll speak with you tomorrow, too. And then finally, the third thing that I want to spend some time thinking about is the actual topic today, the topic of thinking about embracing failure. So that's kind of a lot to do in an hour, but we'll see how far we get.

Mostly my goals are that you spend some time having some fun, interacting with one another, and also learn a little bit about how we can think about the power of Carol Dweck's research on the growth mindset for thinking about how you all can be a little bit better at embracing failure. Okay, so we're gonna begin this all with a very short activity, something that I hope will be fun. It's something that I'm going to ask you to do with a partner. I'm going to ask you if you are able to stand up. If you don't feel like standing up or tired or can't stand up, find a partner to sit close with you for this activity. Okay? So go ahead. If you are able to stand up. If you're not able, find somebody who will sit with you.

Find a partner, introduce yourself. And if you hear my chime, it means I'd like you to listen to me. So there we go. That's another Thing that we do. This is a pretty difficult task. What I'm about to invite you to do is very difficult. In fact, I used to say being able to do this was a sign of intelligence. I don't really believe that anymore, but it's a difficult task. Here's what I would like you to do. You and your partner are going to count to three, but you're going to take turns. So, Eugene, you'll say 1. Giuseppe, you'll say 2. Eugene, you'll say 3, and then you'll begin again. Okay? 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. See how difficult this is? But the trick is try to do it fast, as fast as you possibly can. Does that make sense? Go for it. And then listen to the chime. And that's when I'll ask you to pay attention to me. Go for it.

How was that? Did you mess up? Okay, raise your hand if you did not mess up. Oh, okay, overachievers. Good, good. You weren't trying hard enough. You weren't going fast enough. Okay, now I'm going to raise the stakes just a little bit. We're going to go on to round two. Round two is going to be a little bit harder because as you do that exercise, I would like you to clap rather than say the word. One, then go. Two, three. Clap, two, three, Clap, two, three. Make sense? Give it a go. Give it a go.

Alright, this time, raise your hand if you didn't mess up. Oh, okay. There's still a few. Okay, there's still a few. For those of you who did mess up, what did you notice yourselves doing? You can just call it out. Laughing. Okay, good. Laughing, giggling. Right. What else? Thinking a little harder. Needing to try a little bit harder. What else? Anything else? You slowed down and tried to, like, make it a little bit better. Now, what you might not have noticed, but what is very obvious to me up here with this wonderful view, is that a lot of you cringed and you winced. Yeah.

And you kind of pulled in a little bit. What do you think that's about? Not being perfect and failure and maybe perhaps. I mean, I'm pretty sure your partner wasn't going to punch you in the nose. Pretty sure. I don't know. I don't know. All of you, all of that. Well, maybe. But I think we are. We feel we may be punished, and if not punished physically, we may be judged by somebody else for our failure. Right. And what we want to think about and what often happened, and I saw this with a lot of you is you. You first cringed or winced and then you laughed, but it wasn't like a full belly laugh. It was sort of a. And I think that that's about releasing the tension is what I really think it's about.

But let me give you a different way to release the tension when you mess up. Okay, we're going to do another round of this. As you'll see, I'll raise the stakes a little bit more. But this time, when you mess up, I want you to pretend you are a circus performer, a trapeze artist who has just fallen and stand up, throw your hands in the air, and say, ta da. Okay? So if you mess up, throw your hands in the air and say, ta da. Everybody try it. Ta da. Perfect. Good. Okay, great. Now here's the new stakes. Round three. Clap snap three. Clap snap three. Clap snap three. Make sense. Give it a go and say ta da when you mess up.

Okay, how did that feel? Somebody tell me how that felt, that round when you said ta da. A little bit better. Sometimes I hear people say, oh, it was freeing. It really felt great to throw my hands up and laugh and say, ta da. Sometimes people say it feels a little weird. That doesn't feel natural. I wasn't trained to throw my hands in the air and say ta da. But most of the time, I think we feel okay. That's a little freeing. We're going to do one more really quick round, but I want you to do one additional thing. And that is, well, first of all, I'm going to make it harder. You know that already. But the other additional thing that I would like you to do is when either of you mess up, both people say ta da.

So if your partner is the one that messes up, assume it was your fault and just throw. Both of you throw your hands in the air and do a ta da. We're just going to do a quick one. The round is much more difficult because it is now. Clap, snap, stomp. So no words. Go for it. Both people say ta da. Let me say a few words about this, about this exercise.

One of the things that we talk about when we talk about embracing failure is this willingness to embrace failure with a kind of a tada. Maybe not a literal physical tada, but at least a mental tada. But what we know, of course, as leaders, is that there are many situations in which when we fail or make a mistake or mess up, it would be wholly inappropriate to scream tada. Right? For example, we know that there are surgical errors and mistakes that surgeons make. I don't know about you, but I don't want my surgeon throwing his or her hands in the air and saying, ta da. But I kind of also don't want them wincing and cringing and hiding the mistake even worse, right?

And one of the things, and you all know this, having been at the GSB, one of the things that we often hear here in Silicon Valley is that we need to embrace failure, celebrate failure, have failure parties, and all of that. But I think as social scientists at least, we need to actually be a little bit better at deconstructing and understanding failure. And a wonderful book came out earlier this year by Amy Edmondson, who some of you know, one of my colleagues at the Harvard Business School who has spent many decades now studying failure, often in very high stakes situations such as hospitals, surgical theaters, and so on. And one of the things that she said about her earlier work and has said about her earlier work is that it's really a shame that so many people have taken this sort of idea of psychological safety and creating psychological safety and kind of translating that into let's celebrate failure.

And so in the latest book, she says, let's actually try to understand failure and understand failure that is in fact failure. We should be celebrating and differentiate that from failure, which we really shouldn't be celebrating. And in fact, we should be blaming people about. And so she has this continuum in the book where she talks about blameworthy failure that many of us unfortunately have seen in the organizations and teams that we've led. That is when somebody does something like sabotages something that we've been working on or fails or makes a mistake because they're not paying attention. There are processes and rules and steps in place and they've just kind of forgotten them or disregarded them and so on. We have to, as leaders, do something about that kind of failure, blame that kind of failure.

But then there's the kind of failure that she talks about, which we often associate with scientific advancement, with great innovation. And that's the failure that is on the other side of the continuum. The failure that happens with experimentation, the failure that happens when we have done everything we possibly can to prevent the failure from happening. We've done all of our research, we've taken small incremental steps in our research. We have tested pretested, perhaps even done simulations where no harm will be found and so on. When we fail in those kinds of experimental settings, that's the kind of failure we should be celebrating. In the book, which I'll give you in just a minute, she talks about the long road in developing open heart surgery and the many failures along the way, the failures in which those who were developing the procedure had done everything they possibly could to prevent a death from occurring.

They had practiced on animals, they had done all kinds of things to get to the point where today that's a procedure that is much less risky than it used to be. That's the kind of failure along the way we should be celebrating. Now, what's interesting about what she discusses in this book, and by the way, these slides are available to you afterwards, if you're interested. Hidden in the slide deck, beyond sort of after any of the activities that I'm doing with you, there are little take home notes in case you thought it was fun and want to teach your children or teach your teams or whatever you want to do. But one of the things that I think that she spends a lot of time talking about in this new book about the right kind of wrong is the middle part of that continuum.

Because that's the part where often, frequently we as organizational leaders find ourselves, we find ourselves in situations of what she calls complex failure. That is when, for example, and many of you have had this happen or seen it in case studies, when something's kind of not necessarily perfect with organizational culture, with the processes, the routines and so on in an organization. And failure is happening, but it's not because of inattention or sabotage, but it's also not the good kind of failure. And that's where leadership really comes in, thinking about how we can prevent the kinds of failures, the complex kinds of failures which come from really organizational failures and team leadership failures. So it's a terrific book and I think, well worth thinking about if you, like me, sometimes think this, all this celebrating failure and failure parties and all of that.

Isn't that a little simplistic? Yes, it is. So I want to play just another quick little exercise. You can do this. You can do this with just three or four people around you. If you're sitting in the front and you don't have anybody, you can just kind of turn around or group together, maybe groups of four or so. And here's what you do. The first round, somebody in the group will call out to somebody else in the group and say, hey, I've got a present for you. So I might say to Debbie, I might say, hey, Debbie, here's an apple. Whatever I give Debbie, she has to reply, oh, good. And you can say something obvious like I was hungry.

Or you could say, oh, good, I wanted to try to practice carving a pumpkin on a small prototype. I'll try an apple. Something like this. Okay. Whatever you're given, say, oh, good. And then why you're thankful for that gift. And in the group of three or four, just make sure everybody gets a chance to give something and receive something. Say, oh, good, thank the person. The last thing, make sure that when you do this, it's something that's neutral or positive. Don't give somebody a punch in the face or a global pandemic or something like that. Okay? So three or four, you can just group together in whatever makes sense. Oh, good. One person at a time. And remember.

Oh, one more tip. One more little tip here. A good tip. Pro tip. If you can't think of a response, you can say, oh, good. As you think about it, go for it. So. Sometimes. Sometimes when we play that game, we then turn it over to now give something to somebody that's kind of more on a negative valence kind of thing. But I decided not to do that because it's a little bit of a bummer as you head into this. The reason, though, I like that exercise is that sometimes I think that one of the things that we do as leaders is that when we are given a constraint, whether that be something difficult or what on earth am I going to do with this rotten pumpkin that somebody just gave me? Right.

Our instinct is rather than to say, oh, good, to say, oh, shoot or oh, crud or whatever, you fill in the blank. Right. But sometimes I think if we could try to embrace whatever that constraint is with an oh, good attitude, it might be more helpful. You know, one of my favorites is thinking about something like, you know, a teammate that maybe is struggling with a particular skill set or a particular way of leading or giving people feedback. And rather than getting frustrated and saying, oh, I want to stomp your foot in a bad way, maybe saying, oh, good, this is a wonderful opportunity for me to give some development to somebody who could use it or something like this. So I think sometimes if we reframe the constraints that we get with an Oh. Good. It can be a helpful sort of technique for us.

And it's very much in line with Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset. Now, many of you have come across this either here at Stanford when you were studying or since you've left Stanford. Carol is our colleague in the Department of Psychology and has built her career over many, many decades thinking about what she refers to as a growth mindset. Now, her research was traditionally done on school age children, and she was interested in how they approached learning. And what she noticed after many, many years of studying school age children was that some children seemed to approach whatever subject it was with what she began to refer to as a growth mindset. And what she meant by that is that they would approach whatever topic it was with being very curious about the process of learning about what it was that they needed to do to master it, as opposed to focusing on the actual mastery of whatever that topic is.

And she realized that this could be contrasted. And by the way, these are of course, continuums. And I'll say a little bit more about that. What she realized is that there were other students that she would work with who had what she called a fixed mindset. And those were the children who believed that whatever things they were doing well, let's say they were doing very well in mathematics, was because of their innate ability to do mathematics. And on the flip side, wherever they were struggling, maybe they were struggling in English, English literature or something, they would say, I'm just terrible at this, I'll never be good at it. And so, rather than embracing the challenge and thinking about how to grow and learn, fixed mindset, children tended to either shut down or focus only on what they could do well and perfect that even further.

Now, what is, I think probably the more most interesting part of this is that when she followed these children over many years, she found that those children with a growth mindset usually ended up performing better, but also were happier in life and more satisfied, more fulfilled, and those with, as compared to those with what she called a fixed mindset. Now, typically, how the research would work on this, and I'll just say this very quickly, is that she would do these experiments in the classroom. And in this particular case, she would compare two sets of children who were doing roughly the same with respect to scores in mathematics. And she would coach the teachers to give a certain intervention. And the intervention was nothing more than in one condition, Some of randomly, she would just tell some children, praise them for the effort that they put in to solving the math problems, give them feedback on the process that they followed in the math problem.

And then in the kind of control mindset group, I mean the control group, not the growth mindset, they would just get a grade. There you go. 88%, 94%, 52%, just the outcome. And what she found over time was that when the kids, the children were praised for the process that they used and praised for the effort that they put into the assignment and the problems they ended up growing and doing better, whereas the children who were just given a mark a grade ended up over time declining. Similar kind of set up here where it's looking at a pretest, post test, number of problems solved, same exact idea. And in this particular, the second study here, not only did you see the same sort of pattern of the growth mindset, kids doing better, but that was even the case when they started out at a deficit.

So the point of all of this really, I think, is that. And I'm going to get to organizations in a minute because this is now being used in organizations and I'll talk about it. But the point of this is, after many, many decades of this research, thinking about how we can be better at embracing a growth mindset, I think is really important. Now I'm going to ask you to do the following. You can do this sitting down. I'm going to ask you a set of questions, and the questions are going to be in the form of raise your hand at a certain level to indicate how good you are at the task. Okay, so the first task is talking to strangers. Oh, I saw a hand shoot up back there. I'm going to find you afterwards. Yeah.

And look around as you do these too. The second one. Here we go. So the second one is singing. Okay, good. I'm seeing some. Okay, look around too. You notice, right? Math. How about math? Okay. Yes. Lots of GSB grads. Good at math. Good. Excellent. Graphic design. Okay. Ooh, good. Okay. And then how about learning new languages? Okay. Pretty international. Good. And then finally, public speaking. Okay, good.

Now, if you were looking around at this, you noticed a couple of things. And this is, I think, important one is we can have a fixed mindset. These are fixed mindset, classic fixed mindset questions. How good are you at this? We can have a fixed mindset in some domains, but not all domains. And that's important, right? Because it's not like we go through life as a fixed mindset person or a growth mindset person. We can have a growth mindset in one domain and a fixed mindset in another, and neither and so on. Right? That's the first thing. And then I think the other thing is in a group this size, there's a lot of variability and a lot of variation on how we think about these things. And so those are two really important kind of nuances I think, in Carol Dweck's research.

And that is, again, we don't label a person or a child as a fixed mindset kid or a fixed mindset adult or something like that. It really is domain specific. The other thing that I think is really important, and this is important in to me as a sociologist who likes to. Likes to study culture and likes to study how context affects us as leaders. Carol's student Mary Murphy came out earlier this year with a wonderful book called Cultures of Growth. And in this book, and this is the jump from thinking about children and mindsets to thinking about organizations and leadership, she said, look, understanding mindsets is very important, but we have to be attuned to understanding how situations and contexts can, in her terms, trigger us into a more growth or fixed mindset. So think about this right.

As leaders, if you could somehow figure out a way to trigger your people to be in a growth mindset space, wouldn't that be amazing? So that's where we're going with this. She talks about several of these. She talks about as so, for example, evaluative situations. In her case, the great example she gave, which is very resonant to any academic, is delivering an academic paper or defending your dissertation or something like that. You're being evaluated by a lot of very, very smart people who are going to ask hard questions. Sometimes that can make you feel like engaging the questions and wanting to learn from the questions and build on the research. Other times it can make you feel like very fixed mindset. I'll never be able to do this work as these other smart people can. So evaluative situations, perhaps more familiar to leaders, is thinking about critical feedback.

When you deliver feedback that is going to be more critical or developmental, depending on how you decide to deliver, it can sometimes push the people who you are giving that feedback to into a more or less fixed mindset position. So we want to think about those kinds of things. I think success of others is a really interesting one because I think many of us have had our best friend or our partner win some amazing award, and sometimes that inspires us and we think, oh my gosh, that's so great. I really, really, really, really, I'm so inspired by you. But then sometimes there's this little voice in our head that's demotivating and says, I'm never going to be as good as that person. So the point of this is just that as leaders, you get to set that culture of your teams and your organizations, and you should be playing with and thinking with how you can promote or nudge people, if you will, into the growth mindset, that kind of space, when you can.

So that's kind of the point of this in organizations, I promise you, I'd give you a concrete example. Many of you have been following one of my favorite leaders, Satya Nadella, who when he took over Microsoft in 2014, he had just read Carol Dweck's work and he was really interested in how this could be used in organizations, wrote a wonderful book called Hit Refresh on what he did to change the culture of Microsoft all the way from thinking about small routines of meetings to the way in which they engage with their clients and customers, and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to bake a growth mindset into an organization. So another good example, I think, of trying to take Carol Dweck's work and bring it to the context that we all play in, I think related to the growth mindset. Many of you know Carol Robin and David Bradford to now emeriti faculty from the GSB. They wrote a book a couple of years ago referred to as a learning mindset. Very, very similar.

And one of the pieces in this book that I absolutely adore is the kind of way in which they focus on curiosity. You are all GSB alums. You came to the GSB whenever that was with a great deal of curiosity and you've gone out into the world and kept that curiosity. But approaching any kinds of constraints or failures or road bumps along the way in your organization with the mindset of I wonder why this isn't working can often be a little bit more productive than blaming people, which is what we often do, per the Edmondson work we were talking about. So another really, I think, related piece and a final related I'm drawing connections because so many of us have read some or all of these books. This is all the growth mindset is very much also related to Angela Duckworth's wonderful work on grit and thinking about the courage and resilience and optimism and confidence in the face of constraints and road bumps. So another kind of tie in, I think, to a lot of what it is that many of you, I'm sure, have been engaging with over the last some years.

Okay, so I wanted to also bring this back to thinking about constraints. You know, when we did the oh good exercise and I said oftentimes when something happens, the last thing we want to say something negative happens is oh good. But that can be a nice mindset. Constraints, and many of you have heard this almost as a mantra, can be the source of great innovation. There's some good examples of this from business. There's lots of examples of this, I think, in our own personal lives. When you have encountered something that Seems like it's going to be a terrible roadblock or something. That is going to be something that is going to be very difficult to get over. Often once you've gotten to the other side of it, you recognize that it was a source of something really beautiful.

So thinking about playing with constraints as a way to encourage a growth mindset is another kind of practice that organizational leaders can use. And I'll give you an example. I love this example. It doesn't work with 24 year olds. Like my son who said, who is that guy? And then when I said, oh, you know that song? It says something about like, oh, you have the moves. Like Mick Jagger. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that song. Yeah, that's Mick Jagger. Anyway, people, of course, most people, most people over the age of 24 know who he is and also know Mick Jagger's moves and his dance moves.

But not everybody knows where he learned to dance like that. He learned from Tina Turner. Lucky him. Now what's interesting though is he sort of had all kinds of coaching and teaching from Tina Turner. But then when the Rolling Stones were getting started, they were playing in much smaller venues than what Tina was teaching him or how Tina was teaching him to dance. So he had to adapt all of the wonderful things that she taught him to take place in a small, very small space. So that constraint of the small space led to his own iconic moves. So I want to do an exercise to play with that a little bit. And part of the reason I like playing with this is that all of us, or I'm.

I shouldn't say all of us, that's presumptuous of me. But many of us use brainstorming with our teams and organizations and groups. And sometimes giving people constraints in a brainstorm can lead to great innovation. So we're going to play with that a little bit. So what I'd like to invite you to do is to get into a group of, again, maybe four or five, whoever you can get around you if you want to move a little bit and find somebody new to interact with. And we're going to do an exercise which is going to be you all brainstorming about the next reunion. Maybe it'll be next year, maybe it'll be five years, maybe it'll be 10 years from now, whenever it is the next reunion. And you are going to come up with a list of things to give to the GSB for ideas.

But here's the constraint. The first person who speaks has to start the sentence with the letter A. So for example, Somebody may say, awesome, I'm so glad that we are going to be planning the next reunion. Then the next person has to start with the letter B and they may say something like, baboons. We should have baboons at the next reunion. And then the next one has to start the sentence with the letter C and so on. Does that make sense? So find. And if you want to get up and move around and find some new people to play with, go ahead. Groups of maybe four, five, whatever feels comfortable.

Do an Alphabet talk plan of our next reunion. Thank your group. And now let me ask, did anybody get through the entire Alphabet? Woo. All right. Raise your hand if you did that. Okay, great. Wow. So, you know, sometimes when Dan and I do brainstorming sessions, we give people all kinds of constraints. And it's actually really amazing how constraints can end up getting us to some very maybe terrible ideas, but certainly funny and wild ideas, which often can be turned around and become and made really good.

So, you know, think about how you can play with constraints with your team and with your organization. One more example of this from the world of business is that until recently, you all know that Southwest Airlines had an unusual, shall we say, boarding process where you wouldn't have a seat and you would board in group numbers and so on. Right? Well, that came, as many of you know, because there's a couple of great case studies on Southwest, many of which have been taught here at the GSB for some years now. But many of you may remember that part of that came from a really big constraint. And that was a few years into after they were founded, they ran into some problems, some financial problems. They only had five planes and they were flying five routes at the time, but they had to sell a plane.

And they said, okay, well, so how are we going to manage this? Are we going to drop a route? And they said, no, let's figure out how we can. We can maximize the time in the air and minimize the time on the ground. And that led them to all kinds of innovations in terms of the boarding process and other kinds of ticketing processes and so on. Again, a constraint. We suddenly only have four planes now led to some innovations in this particular industry, if you remember that case study. Well, of course, now they've dumped that, I guess I've read recently. So we'll see what happens. Maybe they decided it wasn't such a great idea.

Okay, we're going to do one final exercise before we close today, and we're going to do two rounds of this exercise. And the exercise is the group shared fake memory. So I'm going to invite you in just a minute to group up again. Four or five people and somebody in the group will throw out a prompt. And the prompt should be in the form of, hey, do you remember when? Okay. To the group.

Now here's the thing. Everybody in the group, you're creating a group shared fake memory. Everybody in the group has to agree in principle with this fake memory. Whatever it is, don't have it be something like, remember that time we went to the GSB reunion? Maybe make it a little more fantastical. Remember that time we. Remember that time we flew dragons to the top of Mount Everest and skied down? Something like that. Okay. In the first round, however, everybody has to agree in principle, But I would like you to disagree on the details. So remember that time we flew dragons to the top of Mount Everest? Yes. Yes. Except for it wasn't dragons. We flew pterodactyls. And then the next person has to contribute something but disagree on the details. Does that make sense? So somebody toss out a prompt.

Do you remember that time we went to Santa Cruz to ride the roller coaster on the boardwalk? Agree but disagree on some of the details. Make sense. Same groups, you know, four, five, something like that. And it doesn't matter who begins. But get everybody to contribute something to this wonderful shared fake memory. Go for it. What I want you to do in the second round, you can use the same prompt if you like, or you can come up with a new prompt. Whatever you want to do, either one, I want you to do the same thing.

But rather than disagreeing on the details, I want you to agree on the details and build on those details. That's the first thing. Okay. So no disagreeing on the details. No matter what somebody says, you have to say yes and add something new to the group shared fake memory. First thing. The second thing, if you have a chance to make one of your teammates the hero of this memory or the heroine of this memory, do it make somebody look really good in this shared fake memory. Does that make sense?

So say yes, build on it and make somebody look good. Preferably everybody look good. Okay, go for it again. Reconvene New fake memory or same fake memory. Any observations on those two rounds? How they felt amongst the team? Anybody have any observation comparisons? Yeah. What do you think? Happier? Yes. Happier. Motivating, uplifting and fun. Did you get further. Get more interesting things? Raise your hand if the second you had a little bit more interesting in the second.

Yeah. In the world of improv, many of us have often heard of yes, and you see it on tote bags and T shirts and stuff. And I think what's really important is in the first round, I asked you to disagree on the details. That wasn't necessarily saying no to somebody, but it was a partial no. Right? You were disagreeing on the details and it's still kind of blocking what people are trying to do. Another principle from improv is to make people look good and so that your partners will trust that you will protect them and make them look good. Even if they've, say, for example, made some kind of mistake, it can help to make them look good. Super easy to do on your teams and in your brainstorming and so on to set. In addition to setting constraints, also thinking about ways to set the culture of making others look good when you can and trying to agree and build as opposed to block or partially block.

Sometimes. I have my students go back through their emails for the last month or responses to people and count how many times they sometimes don't say but, but there is a yes, but in all of those emails. It's astonishing how demoralizing and killing that can be to group culture and teach team culture. Okay, we are at time and I'm the only thing standing between you and the evening's activity. So I'm going to leave you with just a quote that I hope will help you think about this reunion and engaging with your classmates and other GSBers. And that is, this comes from a master improv person who unfortunately died recently. A bio is linked here in the slide, which are available for you. And Keith Johnstone says there are people who prefer to say yes and there are people who prefer to say no. Those who say yes are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say no are rewarded by the safety they attain. Neither of those is bad, right? Neither of those is bad at all.

But I do hope that this session maybe helps you think a little bit about approaching this reunion and your classmates with a growth mindset and a willingness to engage, a willingness to make others look good and a willingness to say yes and have a wonderful reunion. Welcome back and enjoy the weekend.

Education, Leadership, Motivation, Growth Mindset, Failure Embracing, Organizational Culture, Stanford Graduate School Of Business