Teaching How to Think vs Teaching What to Think

In this episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta are joined by their partner Ervin Fowlkes and 2012 Re-Wired Group summer intern Tom McBrien for a conversation about what it means to teach people how to think rather than what to think. Tom walks through what he learned applying Jobs-to-be-Done to real qualitative data, why causality and asking the right question matter more than chasing an answer, and how the framework even led him to reconsider his college major. The episode closes with audio from a recent trip to Boston to see Clayton Christensen, who tells the story of explaining disruption to Intel’s Andy Grove.

Use the player above, then read on for the key takeaways and the complete transcript, organized by topic with short explainers of the core concepts: causality, the four forces, coding interviews, and hiring a product (or a major) to make progress.

Welcome: teaching the intern how to get to the answer

Chris: Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Jobs-To-Be-Done Radio. We’re here for our 10th episode which is big time. I’m here as always with my partner Bob Moesta. I’m Chris Spiek; we are also joined today by Ervin Fowlkes, who is another one of our partners here at the Rewired Group and our intern, Tom McBrien. So as promised from the last episode we are going to talk to Tom a little bit about his experience here at the Rewired Group being the intern, soaking in as much Jobs-To-Be-Done information as possible; as well as the recent process that he went through which is helping us code some qualitative data that we gathered in a recent Jobs-To-Be-Done project.

We had a huge response to last week’s episode which included some audio of a recent trip that we took to Boston to see Clay Christensen so that went over really well. We’re going to continue that so we will leave you with the last half of this week’s episode with some audio from that time that we spent with Clay because we know everybody wants to hear that.

Bob: Right I think this one is going to focus on more about Clay’s comments around not teaching people what to think but teaching them how to think and I think from whether implicitly or explicitly I think we bringing Tom on-board as the intern I think that’s what our goal was not to teach him kind of what the answer is but how to get to the answer and hopefully through the process of being our intern you were able to get there. So welcome Tom.

Tom: Thank you.

What Tom learned: causality and the right question

Chris: So Tom when you start, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you have learned about Jobs-To-Be-Done so far and how you have applied it.

Tom: Okay well I’m Tom, so I’m Tom McBrien, I will be a sophomore at University of Michigan this year. This has been a really interesting experience at Jobs-To-Be-Done. Coming in I had really not a lot of business or consulting experience and I knew a little bit about Jobs-To-Be-Done, I read the whole Milk Shake Story and a couple of Clay articles and a couple of articles from you guys but not a lot of experience and it was a pretty steep learning curve but it was very experience based which definitely helped me and I guess the biggest things I really took out of it, there are few things. One of those was the importance of causality in everything and you know this is, I see this day to day in our work here but I have also been able to kind of apply to my life which I will talk about it a bit later.

Tom: But just how, where you’re at is one point of data, but the trends that are pushing you are so much more important to kind of get back to realize to see the projection of where you’re going and likewise if you’re looking at a product or you’re looking at a company or you know what you’re looking at, how important that whole causality factor is. So that was really big thing and the other big thing was knowing how to ask the right question. I feel like a lot of times in my life and a lot of times what I see with people is they jump on the first question they find and they go and they spend so much time and energy and money trying to answer that question only to realize at the end that that’s not even helpful, that’s not the question they should have asked. So a lot of what Jobs-To-Be-Done is taught me through the causality and through asking the right question has been able to step back and really look at the underlying factors to be able to make the best decision.

Bob: I think we talked about that today when we were kind of analyzing the data, I think Irwin you brought it up it’s like Okay how long do you sit here and try to piece it together to get that final causality and again I don’t think the causality has ever final but it’s a framework to be able to just help you understand you know kind of what’s happening, why is it happening and what are the things that we can do to either help people hire or fire what they have and so by understanding that causality it’s just very, it’s not easy and Clay call’s it all the time theory building, again we have spent pretty much all day today looking at videos, you have coded the data. We will talk about coding maybe in a little bit but we are coding that data. Looking at kind of applying some math to the data, all these different things and in the end it’s trying to look at from so many different perspectives to say what’s the essence of what’s going on here.

Tom: Yeah and it’s a tough process to do, it’s tougher than you would think and down to the essence of something but.

Chris: It’s very tough, I think the hard part is you don’t know when you’re done and so at some point it’s like when you look at it from six different directions and it kind of all looks the same from those different directions, you can say this is it and when you can find something that holds true on most of the situations, you’re talking about is like Okay this is the essence of how it works and I think that was our struggle today is you know we have one look and like yeah but this doesn’t work now, Okay if that doesn’t work now how do we think about it differently and so it’s that back and forth that we have to do. To me it’s the work, that’s the real thinking work, the hard part of jobs but it’s a pretty simple concept to get but to actually get to the essence is a lot of hard work.

“where you’re at is one point of data, but the trends that are pushing you are so much more important to kind of get back to realize to see the projection of where you’re going”Tom McBrien

Setting up the job study and staying true to the question

Tom: I think there are couple, so there is tools that we use to do it, all right. I mean we saw a lot of them in action today, one I think is when you look at the question that you’re trying to answer. We are constantly looking at the boundaries we are working with right and saying that we are going to start to go down a path and then you end up some place and you say, yeah we found something here but it’s not really what we set out to initially answer. So do we keep going on that path or do we bring it back to what we are initially trying to ask.

Chris: The importance of setting up the job study is that again you just think hard about that question and then as you go and get the data it’s you want to make sure you’re still, you might find a lot of other things along the way but you need to make sure you stay true to that question you were originally trying to answer.

Math as the language of causality

Tom: Yeah and I think something helps with staying true that and with, you know you’re doing a lot of abstract thinking and I have never considered myself much of a math person. I have always been good at math but I have never enjoyed it. I have never enjoyed math as much as I did here just because of the practicality and it’s not, we are not writing calculus at this stage you know. Math really has helped us to just organize our thoughts you know graph them.

Chris: Yeah.

Tom: Assign numerical values to different forces that we see or different options or choices that people make and just how much clear that makes this whole process because we are talking, I mean we’re almost like to the level of philosophy some of the things we’re talking about. But that we’re able to quantify that stuff, it’s powerful and so clarifying.

Chris: It gives you that reality check I think in one aspect and then it also gives us in the room at least the ability to talk about things that are really abstract. So you take like you say a philosophical idea and take it down Okay this time is this divided by this equals this and we can also hear and say does that make sense or do we need to move something around or does it really hold true.

Chris: The key to me about the math is that it helps us to find relationships and so as much as we can talk about abstract ideas, jobs is again is about causality and that causality can be defined in relationships in math and so math is just, to me I think of math is the language of causality. So it’s a way what you say does this cause that or does – does this goes up, does this go down, how do these two things relate? It’s all about the relationship so to me, words don’t do a justice it’s just that they don’t.

“to me I think of math is the language of causality”Chris Spiek

Tom: So try to make it a little bit more concrete for the listener without going into confidential space, I think the way we usually end up using the math is that we will be watching either recorded videos around qualitative research that we have done or listening to phone interviews and we’ll stop and literally throw something up on the white board that says, this is the energy that the user is putting in times the energy that the product is providing over some other effect equals this and we can all kind of stop and think about that but it’s, the math is only a result of absorbing forces that the consumer is experiencing right. So it’s just a way to illustrate that or way to communicate it rather.

The four forces: push, pull, and the anxiety of moving

Chris: So I mean let’s try to make it concrete let’s say in the moving terms. So again we are thinking about, in a lot of cases we’re always thinking about our people being pushed from their old situation to the new situation or they are being pulled to the new situation and so you got to be able to look at it and say moving is a function of what and it really gets back to is how bad is it in the current situation and how bad do they see it in the future right and it really has to be greater than the anxiety of actually moving and so we sit there and say how hard is it for you to move and as we ask the question how hard was it for them to move, if it was really big let’s say what did you do to get it down and part of it is to look at and say how does their ability to reduce moving anxiety or boy I gave this away or I did this as moving anxiety went down boy and the push went up they were able to move irrelevant of how attractive the new home was and so it’s trying to define relationship through this math, and it allows us to have conversations that we really I would say challenge ourselves not to have just in abstract word terms.

Coding the interviews: time slicing the story

Chris: So it’s that relationship that I think really kind of the key to it and the coding helps and so the best way to describe the coding is it’s think slicing of video by in some cases just watching somebody tell the story of them switching from one thing to the other and characterizing what about it you know what’s that story look like in terms of push, pull, emotions all the different aspects to it so in a lot of cases we are trying to teach empathy so you can empathize with that person who is telling the story and actually answer better questions to help us from the math perspective.

Tom: Right and every story there, it’s a sequence of choices people make and a sequence of outside factors that are forced upon them and I found that and we found that we can quantify most of these choices and most of these outside forces, so did you, you know do this or did you do this there are really two choices. We can assign a zero if they stayed the same or one if they change. How are you feeling before, how are you feeling during and after. Each time depending on their mood you can assign them a negative three, they are very negative, positive to very positive and you know through these numbers and afterwards we can do some crunching.

Chris: Right.

Tom: And it’s amazing you have all these stories and none of them, a lot of them aren’t even similar. The people are so different, the situations are so different but you get these patterns and with the math you can see these patterns and you look back and you can’t believe that what was so unclear before is now so obvious.

There is a catalog of actual interviews along with analysis available here.

Chris: That’s right. I think that’s the power of jobs, is that it gets back to the essence of what’s going on and again when you look at things at the surface they just don’t look the same until you kind of dig deep and try to understand that cause will mechanism and it’s about combining words, combining terms, combining efforts, combining things that kind of say how does this work and so you know Clay has a good talk around curiosity and he talks about you know how you got to be curious. I think that’s really at the core of this is that you know for us I think, I know for me I’m very curious about how everything works and why it works the way it is and why did it work before and not work now and you know I was guilty as a kid always kind of taking things apart and getting in trouble because I want to know how things worked.

Chris: So how is Jobs kind of impacted has it done anything for you in terms of personally?

Hiring school for a job: how Tom changed his major

Tom: Yeah the thing I kind of liked I was thinking about this beforehand, the thing I would like to bring up is my major. So going into college I had no idea why I want the major and then around halfway through freshman year I thought I really like to major in Mandarin because I lived in Asia for a while, I think it’s, I have always really liked languages, I think it will be really useful to know. So I knew Mandarin, then the other half was I also earned a major in English because I have always loved writing, had a passion for literature. It’s just been kind of one of my things, so that was kind of my track for the whole second half of freshman year and the beginning of the summer. But then over the summer I was thinking, I was thinking back to the years I studied biology and I was thinking how much I enjoyed that and kind of coming at it now after I have had this experience with Jobs-To-Be-Done I was thinking a little bit about my majors and what jobs I was trying to do to them.

Tom: And I realized that while English was my passion, English was something I was already pretty good and English was something that I can pursue you know as a hobby. I can read literature on my home; I can think about it, I can ruminate over it. Meanwhile biology on the other hand that’s not something that’s easy to teach yourself.

Tom: And that’s something that you need some training in and so I thought if I already have I have pretty great writing skills, I can think about literature, why would I major in that when I’m kind of doing more of the same, why not go to biology where the job there is I’m actually being trained, I’m learning stuff. I’m learning it different way to look at the world. I’m learning the skills through these labs, through these math courses that I didn’t otherwise have. And so now I’m a double major in Mandarin and biology and I’m really excited about that because I can see myself learning these skills that I don’t have a lot of already and while at the same time enjoying it.

Chris: So you actually switch, it’s like you switch the way you looked at the jobs so as much as we call it a major this is really about what I hiring school for.

Tom: Right.

Chris: So it’s either higher school to get me better at what I’m passionate about or hire it to teach me something new that I won’t be able to otherwise probably pickup on my own. Right, so you changed that dimension, this is really interesting.

Tom: Well it changes the dimension of performance Clay talks about again. So to me I think it’s a great choice because again it’s very causal oriented and it’s also very in nature, it basically gets back to the forces and so I think no matter what you do biology is going to teach you a way of thinking in a language that allows you to apply to pretty much anything you wanted, whether you’re writing or whether you’re a lawyer or whether you’re a biologist or a doctor. I think you will see how the whole notion causality through biology, it’s a great, great discipline to have as a foundation to do whatever you want to do.

Chris: Yeah and when you kind of bring up the job of education I was thinking that I took a few English classes in my freshman year and I did really well. So I could hire education to kind of you know bring me a good GPA or accolades or whatever or I could hire it actually learn something that I really don’t know too much about yet.

Tom: Right. Even you know it’s not like I gave up the passion for something I don’t really like. I know that I’m interested in biology but it’s something I don’t have a lot of skill in yet. So even though you know it might or it might take a hit on my GPA and stuff but I will come out of it a lot more value than I have.

Chris: Right what I can say is that I think that when you start to look at when people hire things to help them transform themselves so to me you were doing English to get through school as opposed to doing English to make you better and so part of is that when people hire things to say I don’t know biology now and when I come out I know biology, you value those experiences so much more and at some point it’s like five years out of school. I know people who went in, who were English people and came out let’s say English people, they were like I could have done what I did when I came in. They didn’t really get that much out of it, so the whole idea of making sure you take your experiences and make them transformative, is the heart of job. So that’s awesome.

Causality everywhere: turning shit into sugar

Chris: So one of the things I had you do because of my dyslexia I had you read a bunch of books. What was your favorite book?

Tom: My favorite book was actually probably the last one I read which was the 50th Law, co-wrote by Robert Greene, well written by Robert Greene. It’s kind of half prescription for living fearlessly and half biography of 50 Cent.

Chris: 50 Cent the rapper.

Tom: The rapper, that’s right, going into it, I really didn’t know what to think, I mean it’s about 50 Cent, I was like this is going to try too hard, you know is this trying to bring together two worlds, the author I read another book of his who is very focused on history. He is very, not dry but very academic and obviously I don’t think you would call the life of 50 Cent very academic.

Chris: No not at all.

Tom: But it was just amazing the way he was able to form tenants out of 50’s life as well as forming tenants and applying and proving them through the life of 50 Cent. So it was all about fear and how fear controls us and you know the way that fear creeps into our lives and places we wouldn’t even expect. Kind of talking about, you know he was talking about hustlers on the street and I was like Okay well once they kind of made it on the street they probably don’t have fear, right because they are dealing with you know they are dealing with violence they are dealing with all that they wouldn’t be the most fearful people. Then he was talking about how they once if made it can be some of the most fearful on earth because they are afraid to transition. The hustling life is the only life they know, so I mean that was just one example but it’s just really powerful book.

Chris: It’s another book of causality. Because it just gets back to motivations and why do people do what they do and to me the reason why I like it is it’s just one of those things about been able to understand, it’s just something else who has done the work to kind of get down to those essence of what makes people tick and this was to me a really good understanding of what makes 50 Cent tick, but then abstracting it up to the level to kind of say how do you use what he knows about yourself and what are your afraid and how is fear really driving you and how do you turn something that you think, I love the one that’s called turning shit into sugar.

Chris: The whole notion of how you see opportunities. At some point a lot of who look at the situation and say well this is shitty I can’t do anything about it and in the book they talk about how it literally is like Okay you literally have the choice to figure out how to frame it completely differently and turn shit into sugar and it goes through examples and I think that’s the amazing thing like when you start to do the jobs interviews you just start to see people who take products and say yeah I know this wasn’t ideal, I know this wasn’t the right thing and I use it and all of a sudden it’s like wow, holy crap how did they do that and it’s, it does a new job for them and so I think it’s the same kind of, same philosophy if you will, very good book.

Ervin on jobs: the science and the art of seeing patterns

Chris: Irwin, so let’s just can we turn for you a second?

Ervin: Absolutely.

Chris: So Irwin has been kind of going back and forth on a couple of projects with this and what is your take on jobs?

Ervin: Well my take my jobs I would have to say is getting the causality but also the depth of which you can go into something and also…

Chris: What do you mean by the depth?

Ervin: The depth of and I can’t, without getting crossing any type of confidentiality, but just certain things that I took for granted that people just did.

Chris: Yeah.

Ervin: I realized all the emotional, social and functional things that go beyond that that even I do them. Where I thought I was completely new to this, not that the world out there is crazy but I’m the smart one. But now I realized that wow we are all just kind of out here floating around, with all these parametric devices acting upon us, let make choices about things and then Jobs is such a keen way of digging through that, what would seem to be the new word to learn today is pablum, it’s all chaotic and we’re all just kind of floating into the soup. But now it’s actually scientific basis for everything we are doing and you can actually diagram the model and look at it and say wait a minute I can interrupt this pattern and interject a new product and a new way of doing it, that way can completely renovate someone’s life almost.

Chris: That’s right. I think the only way to just kind of listening to you talk, I think what we need to do for the one of the episodes you might have brought this up last week is maybe show one of the videos that we have on home building and go through the time slicing. Because I think the only way that you can experience that level of depth that you’re describing, is to go through the process of slowing down consumption to that level. I’m saying you’re not just a series of random reactions to things, you’re actually weighing out things as you visualize yourself, consuming something, pick something off the shelf, buy it, whatever situation you’re in, but to see the video and see it time sliced I think we will give people in the listening audience the ability to actually experience that depth and without it I think it sounds like a gobbely-goop [SP] that’s the target, the other part about it is that you know we have colleague that we work with that will explode at the mere mention of an impulse purchase, right? Because it’s while we have worked in categories where things are cheap and they are commoditized and it’s like we can’t differentiate it all or we can’t get the consumers eyes because it’s just an impulse purchase, they are going their cash register out and just grabbing something off shelf.

Chris: Get the video of the last time they bought something and the cash register and time slice it out and understand what was going on in their lives. Clay uses the example of picking up the New York times at the newsstand, you don’t do that just because of nothing. You have a job that you’re out there to find and without time slicing it you’re right, it just looks like you know they grabbed it and moved on and there is just no reason around it.

Ervin: I just wanted to be very clear is as much as you can say it’s science it’s still art. It’s still a way in which we are taking scientific principals and kind of throwing them on behaviors and we’re trying to empathize to say what if people are, if there are forces acting upon us to make these decisions how can we frame them in a way that at least helps us understand how what was going in and what’s the most from our perspective rationale or rationale but most, what makes sense from that perspective. Was it emotional, was it social etc. But at the same time is then once you have done that can you see patterns and how everybody else has done it and so as much as people want to see there is a science behind it, there is also this art of being able to see things and work within the constraints and kind of so we use almost like a scientific language to help work in the very artful world of research to find out what people do. So, we’re going to, I think the other piece we are going to play now is about when we are with Clay about couple of weeks ago and Clay goes into talk about the notion of when he went to see Andy Grove. The whole aspect of Andy was a very, Mr. Grove, I’m sorry, was a very impatient man and wanted Clay to just tell him how does disruption affect Intel and Clay basically didn’t do that, he made him stop and think about to understand it so Mr. Grove could have his way of understanding how the theory could actually, as Clay puts it, the theory had an opinion on what it was going to do but.

Ervin: It wasn’t Clay’s opinion.

Bob: It wasn’t Clay’s opinion it had to be the theory’s opinion and only Andy Grove could figure out what that theory was.

Ervin: So we will leave you with that. Is the conference sold out?

Bob: It was sold out, it sold out in three days like he predicted.

Ervin: Okay so we will be at 37 Signals on October 1, but if you haven’t bought tickets it’s too late. So stay tuned for the next one. We will be back next week as always, if you want more information go to therewiredgroup.com/jobs-to-be-done. We will back next week.

Clay Christensen and Andy Grove: teaching the theory, not the answer

Clay: Minding my business here and one day Andy Grove called me out of blue, this is late 90s and he is a gruff man; and he said it’s Andy Grove, do you know who I’m? And of course I do and he said well as you know I’m very busy and I don’t have time to read, dribble from academics like you but somebody read something you wrote and they concluded from it that Intel is going to get killed and I said I never wrote anything about Intel and he said well they say you did, but whatever. I want you to come out two weeks hence I have got a meeting with my indirect reports and I want you to explain you’re research and tell us what it means for Intel. So for me it was a chance of a lifetime.

Clay: So going out and we knocked on the door he opened it up and he said “look, stuff happened and we don’t have any time for you. But look you have come all this way I will give you 10 minutes and tell me what it means for Intel and then we got to get on with things.” and I said “the problem is I don’t have an opinion about Intel but the theory from my research the theory has an opinion, but I need to explain the theory so that then we can ask the theory what its opinion of what Intel is.”

“the problem is I don’t have an opinion about Intel but the theory from my research the theory has an opinion, but I need to explain the theory so that then we can ask the theory what its opinion of what Intel is.”Clayton Christensen

Clay: So anyway, nobody has ever framed that before and so he sat down very impatiently. As I described the model of disruption about five minutes and he chopped off and he said look I got your stupid theory, tell us what it means and he got what he got and he really did get it and then I said Andy I can’t apply it to Intel just yet because to really understand it I got to describe how this process of disruption worked its way through an industry that is so different than yours that you can understand it in the abstract and then I promise we will bring it in. So I told him how the mini mills came in at the bottom of the business against the integrated steel companies and picked off rebarb and then went up to sheeth steel [SP] and when I was finished with that Grove said, “Oh, I get what you’re telling me.” He described how at the bottom of the market where these two companies Skyworks and AMD and he said “we got to go down, we got to kill those guys, don’t we?” I thought that and until he did you know and I thought about this a million times because if I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the micro-processor business, he would have killed me.

Clay: But rather than telling him what to think I taught him how to think and then the answer was obvious. So then he didn’t standup in front of mankind and say Intel is going to the bottom of the market ladies and gentlemen because that was so counter to the profit logic of the company and so we said at the seminar which I did the first few and then hand it over to him and his staff and it lasted a whole day, did it 20 times over the course of a year, brought in a 100 people at a time to go through this and so we present a little bit about the theory of disruption and have breakout groups to discuss are these guys really going to kill us. And always it was I don’t want your opinion I want to know what the theory opinion the theory has on this question. And then I present a little bit more and then we have breakout groups to discuss, how could Intel disrupt the other companies to start new businesses and then present a little bit more and have breakout groups to discuss how do we need to change the way we will organize to deal with this. And so last year Intel shift about $23 billion from products that emerge from these breakout groups. So I was asking Grove a couple of years ago about how he had pulled that off and he said you know Clay your theories didn’t give us any answers but they gave us a common language in a common way to frame the problem so we can reach consensus in order to counter-intuitive course of action. I just thought that was brilliant and so when I have been in situations like you and I actually mean you’re situation here because we are getting disruptive by corporate universities, let’s know the story.

“But rather than telling him what to think I taught him how to think and then the answer was obvious.”Clayton Christensen

Clay: But I never answer if people ask a question about these issues that you post here I never answer it but I always say look there is a way to think about it and given the theory that is relevant whether it’s Jobs-To-Be-Done or disruption and then I’ll show how it’s happened in other industries so they can visualize it and then almost invariably their answer to me was Oh, I get it.

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