Jeremy Utley outlines the importance of portfolio thinking, and it's about to get vision-driven

"If you're looking to break through, stop thinking in terms of single ideas, single experiments, and single solutions. Portfolios are the answer." This installment of You've Got This features my conversation with Director of Executive Education at Stanford’s d.school?Jeremy Utley discussing the importance of ideas in business and beyond and how you can break through and tap into your own 'idea flow.' Don't miss his answers, along with announcing our next guest, author and Founder of The Board Curators Daphne E. Jones .

Victoria: "What experiences along your career trajectory inspired you to focus on this topic?"

Jeremy: "I'm a former investment analyst and recovering MBA. When my fashion designer wife (fianceé at the time) told me about an upcoming 'inspiration trip' to Paris, I thought it was a boondoggle for macarons! To my spreadsheet-obsessed mind, I had no idea where to put things like color or texture in my financial model, and so I wrote the practice of seeking inspiration off. Little did I realize how important inputs to ones thinking are in driving breakthrough outcomes. Over the following dozen years, teaching entrepreneurship and leadership to graduate students and executives at Stanford's famed d.school, I came to see just how wrong I was. As I studied breakthroughs across history, and observed them in my own classroom, I came to realize how little appreciated ideas are in business today, and how poorly understood the process of generating and nurturing them really is.

"Despite all the hype that innovation gets as a strategic priority, it remains one of the most under-nourished, poorly understood capabilities in organizations."?

Victoria: "In your new book?IDEAFLOW: The Only Business Metric That Matters , you argue alongside your co-author Perry Klebahn that input is more important than output, and quantity more important than quality. Can you share some common instances of ways people inadvertently block the creative process, and approaches you'd recommend overcoming those hurdles?"

Jeremy: "One of the classic mistakes people make when generating ideas is, they give up the search too quickly. This is a phenomenon that plagues almost every human being in search of a solution. Dubbed the Einstellung Effect by Abraham Luchins in 1942 (subsequently validated by Karl Dunker and researchers at Oxford), it describes the tendency of a problem solver to cease searching for solutions once a seemingly feasible solution becomes available. Worse, both novices and experts have been demonstrated to have become blinded to better solutions once they identify a feasible one. Why is this so dangerous to the creative process? Because there's no evidence that suggests the first solution you identify is actually the best! To overcome this bias, you have to change the objective: instead of 'looking for the right answer' to that pesky scheduling challenge— or performance appraisal, or sales pitch, or email subject line —shift your goal to generating lots of?answers. Not good?answers. Lots of (good, average, and bad)?answers. This 'interrupts' the typical cognitive pathways and enables much better solution discovery."

Victoria: "What key advice would you have for those looking to break through and find their next great idea, whether personally or professionally?"

Jeremy: "Ironically enough, my financial training has come in handy in an unexpected way: the best way to hedge risk in innovation is exactly the same as in finance:?Think in portfolios.?Innovators from Bob McKim to Astro Teller have leveraged a simple hack to drive breakthroughs: demand options. McKim was known to tell students 'show me three' anytime they asked for feedback. Teller, 'Captain of Moonshots' at Google X, is famous for asking teams to bring five ideas to a meeting instead of one. He told me that folks try to undermine the process by bringing dummy ideas. 'The thing is,' he says, 'many times, one of the dummy ideas they bring is every bit as good as the idea they would have pitched as a single solution.'

"So if you're looking to break through, stop thinking in terms of single ideas, single experiments, and single solutions. Portfolios are the answer.?Instead of coming up with one answer, come up with five."

And then, instead of choosing one to bring forward (there's research from Stanford's Justin Berg that suggests we don't choose our highest-potential ideas anyway!), try all five. You'll be amazed at how much more you can learn by commissioning prototypes in parallel (Scott Klemmer) than even deploying the same number of experiments in sequence. The same goes for problems: Nobel Prize-winner Richard?Feynman used to tell people ?to keep a list of 'a dozen of your favorite problems.'"

Follow Jeremy on LinkedIn. ?

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Our next guest: Daphne E. Jones

You might think of EDIT just in the sense of writing—but in the view of senior executive and author Daphne E. Jones , it represents a new paradigm towards approaching personal/professional development. Serving on multiple boards of directors and leveraging 30+ years of experience in general management and senior executive roles from companies like IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric, here's what I'll be asking Daphne:

• Can you share with us the pivotal moments that have helped define your career?
• In your new book, Win When They Say You Won't, you combine personal experience with insights such as the EDIT process, with EDIT standing for envision, design, iterate and transform, to help readers upgrade to the best versions of themselves. What do you hope readers take away from the book, and can you share with us an example of the EDIT process in-action?
• A quote you share in the book is that "there's value in your vision: hold onto it!" What words of wisdom would you be able to share for those who are looking to strengthen, develop or re-envision their careers as we approach the New Year?

Have your own question for Daphne? Ask away in the comments below, and thank you for being a part of You've Got This.