Matt Kutz PhD - Thinking in 3D with Contextual Intelligence

Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1: Welcome to Beyond Leadership at the intersection of leadership and everything else. In this Cleveland Clinic podcast we will commingle with extraordinary thinkers that explore the impact of their ideas and experiences of leadership and management.

Dr. Brian Bolwell: I'm Brian Bolwell your host. In today's episode I'm joined by Matt Kutz, an award-winning author, award-winning educator, and award-winning researcher. He's been a featured guest on TV, podcasts and radio, has presented on the TEDx stage, and consults with Fortune 500 and multinational corporations. In 2013, his book Contextual Intelligence: How Thinking in 3D Can Help Resolve Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity was honored with a Leadership Book Award for Innovation and Cutting-Edge Perspective. Matt is also guest faculty at one of our internal physician programs aimed at helping accelerate leadership capacity at the Cleveland Clinic. In this program, he teaches the practice of contextual intelligence and the decision-making application redefines both context and intelligence through an organizational lens and describes how former models and research are inadequate for today's health care landscape. Matt, how you doing today?

Matt Kutz, PhD: I'm doing really well. I really appreciate you having me on this morning.

Brian Bolwell, MD: Well, thanks for joining us. Can you briefly describe what contextual intelligence is and what it's about from a leadership perspective?

Matt Kutz, PhD: What CI does is it offers a way to see leadership, to see the decisions you make through a different lens. And that lens is the lens of what I call 3D thinking or time and its past present and future. And how we do that and how we use CI is kind of a real time perception of the environment around us. So it really is about discerning your environment. It's about understanding all the different variables that come into play in a situation, so that we can make not just good decisions, but better decisions everyday taking in account for a lot more information than we typically do.

Brian Bolwell, MD: It's interesting that most people tend to focus on the present you know our current problems. How are we going to get past this obstacle? Give me an example of how focusing on, I guess one way, in which we focus on the past to get to the present is one definition of insanity. If you repeat the same thing and you expect a different outcome that probably isn't going to work out, what are some other examples?

Matt Kutz, PhD: I think one of the things that CI does, or contextual intelligence does, it gives people a unique perspective. It requires us to also go back to the past as well as the future. And you mentioned, you're absolutely right, in that we oftentimes try to solve our problems with what we see right here and what's in front of us now. And we fail to go back and learn the lessons from history. And I don't mean antiquity history, although that's certainly valid and important, but I mean our own history, our experiential history, and I think that's really critical.

And the other thing that I think even fewer people do is they look towards what others have called your anticipated memories, which is really your future. And if we take stock and get input from not only the cues we're taking in right here right now, but we filter those through the lens of past experience, we have some really good insight. We have some really good stuff in our lives that we can use to make decisions better than how we do. And then we also apply the same principles to any of those anticipated memories and looking at what I need to happen, what I want to happen, how I hope the future will be and use that also as a filter. When we do all three of those things--hindsight, insight and foresight--we tend to just...you know we don't make perfect decisions. We're never going to make perfect decisions, but I am convinced we can absolutely make better decisions for sure.

Dr. Brian Bolwell: So I'd like to talk about foresight in a minute, but you mentioned hindsight bias. What exactly is that?

Matt Kutz, PhD: So, hindsight bias is when we go back and we remember something--we have a tendency as humans, everybody does it-- to place themselves as the central character in every memory that they have. And what we do is we misremember the past in our favor. And you think about any interaction that you've had with anybody be it professional, be it personal, all those things, we go back--and it's a natural thing to do and that's fine--except that it's often wrong. It often is really not what happened. And so it's really important that we go back to those moments. And one of the things that I really encourage people to do is make a list of--what I do and I call watershed moments--and I go back and talk about meaningful experiences in my life that have shaped who I think I am and who I am becoming.

And I have a list, and then I go back and I revisit those experiences just to see if in fact I learned what I was really supposed to learn. Because we all take lessons away from the experiences that we have which is part of living, part of life and it's natural and good that we do that. But what we do is we, again, we suffer from that hindsight bias. So when we reconstruct the memory or reconstruct that event, we put a very favorable light on our actions, our intentions, our motives, our thoughts, our beliefs, our values, and put more of a negative light on everybody else who's involved in that same experience, they weren't quite as purely driven as mine were and they weren't quite as... as they misunderstood me, I didn't misunderstand them." And that's what we do, and that's what we need to do.

So when we're reframing these watershed moments, it's really important to do two things. One, make sure that you are getting all the lessons out from it that you can because one thing for sure, is there more lessons there than just the one you took away from it and I think that is critical. The second thing is understanding that you are in fact suffering from hindsight bias and you are misremembering the past. So the second thing you need to do is make sure that the other people in that story think the outcome was the same as you thought it was and get their input on that. So being contextually intelligent is fundamentally a collaborative process. I don't believe it can occur in isolation, in an individual's development on their own. You really have to invite other people into this process to really make it actionable and learnable.

Brian Bolwell, MD: Additionally, one of the keys to the theory of contextual intelligence is to apply your knowledge gained from something that happened over there to a problem over here. They may seem to be disparate events, and yet there's some sort of commonality from a lesson learned perspective that you can apply seemingly very unrelated challenges and use a similar kind of train of thought to come up with a solution.

Matt Kutz, PhD: Correct. That's one of the most fun things for me about contextual intelligence and exploring it. Because first of all, it is learnable. This is something that you can absolutely learn. Now there are people who are better at it than others just like anything, but anybody can learn to be better at this. And that's exactly one of the strategies, Dr. Bolwell, that is fundamental to learning and developing this, and that is going back and unpacking some of those experiences that on the surface appear irrelevant to the certain context or situation that I'm in right now.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So another interesting thing that you and I have talked about before is it's, for me, I tend to get some of my better ideas when I'm working out, when I'm on an elliptical machine and I'm listening to music. And it seems rather paradoxical that I'm listening to Brittany Spears. And yet I come up with some sort of epiphany about some problem that I'm facing at work. How does that work?

Matt Kutz, PhD: So, I call that 3D thinking free fall. And I've been talking about CI now for a while, and I've been fortunate enough to have presented this content in, I don't know, a dozen or more different countries, to huge organizations and it's been a lot of fun. And I ask this question all the time and at first it never really dawned me but I would ask, "Where are you at and what are you doing when you're having your best ideas?" these epiphanies that you mention.

And they would get responses back. And I always get very similar responses, "I'm in the shower, I'm exercising, I'm driving my car." Those kinds of things.

I always get those "You know, I've never had an epiphany. I've never had this great idea, I've never been able to solve the problem at work."

And I'd begin to really wonder about that and think about that. So it led me on this journey and you're exactly right. It turns out what we tend to do is when we're in these moments, is our brain and mind has developed the capacity to form schematics. And I call them file folders.

And we have all different kinds of file folders in our brain. We've got a work folder, we've got a husband folder, if you're a husband or wife folder or whatever, we've got a dad folder, we've got all these folders in our brains from everything that we're involved in. And every time we do something relative to that folder and learn a lesson, we file that lesson or that idea away in that specific folder, which explains one of the reasons why, when you're looking for a good idea to have you can't find it because typically you're looking in the wrong folder.

But what we have is in the moments that you're describing, these moments when we have these great ideas is we're letting all the folders open up. And what you're doing is you're pulling data. You're pulling information experiences from a hundred or more different folders in your lifetime, both from the past, both from anticipated future and from what's going on right now. And you find a great idea in that moment because you're opening yourself up to so many different and even unrelated or irrelevant experiences and you get this great idea.

Which by the way, the irony there of course is once you have that great idea, we typically tell ourselves it's such a great idea that I won't forget it again. And the second you go back and try to tell somebody, remember what it was, it's gone again because you've gone right back into your file folder mode.

So one of the things that is critical to facilitate this kind of contextual intelligence is allow yourselves the opportunity and the time to engage in 3D thinking free fall. So just recently I found out --I was reading some essays-- and it turns out Thomas Edison did this exactly had a practice that he developed explicitly to capitalize this type of thing that we're talking about. And what he would do is he had three ball bearings that he always kept on his desk. And this is I suppose legend, I don't know that there's proof to this, but this is the way the legend goes anyways. So Thomas Edison kept three ball bearings on his desk and what he would do, he would put those ball bearings in his hand, he would lean back in his chair at a certain time of the day and just go into this quasi meditative daydreaming state.

And the idea of the ball bearings was right before he would nod off to sleep he would drop the ball bearings, and it would fall out of his hand and rattle on the floor and would wake him up. And he kept a legal pad right next to him because he claimed, or at least the people around him claimed, that he always had his best, most creative ideas, right at that moment before he would nod off when he was daydreaming but right before he completely fell asleep. So he wanted to find a way to capture that moment and that's what he did. And of course he didn't just invent the light bulb. He has hundreds of other patents and legend has it that that's how he was able to come up with so many great ideas. And so I do think that's a very interesting concept. I'm glad you brought that up.

Dr. Brian Bolwell: So that's a pretty cool story. So one of the real keys to CI is the ability to forecast the future and to use your experiences to almost be somewhat clairvoyant. How does that work?

Matt Kutz, PhD: So, foresight is an interesting phenomenon. There are some practical strategies that we can use. I think one of the things that's fundamental is understanding the difference between complexity and complication. So much of what we do in our lives and so much of what we've been taught and what we buy into about life is that it's complicated. And I don't want to get overly technical or anything like that, but I do think semantics and meanings of words are critical. And when you say the word complicated, sometimes we'd do it in error because what we really mean is complex. And life is actually complex more than it is complicated. And if you explore those two concepts, you'll see that something that is complicated is very Newtonian. It's very mechanistic.

There's many moving parts to a machine and when you put all those moving parts together, you have what we say in an organization, is a well-oiled machine, or a machine that's firing on all cylinders or something like that. And if you remove a part from that machine, the rest of the parts are unaffected. They continue to be plugged in and do what they do. And that's a complicated model, but really the world is complex.

And what a complex model is more attuned to what I like to use the analogy of Play-Doh, for example, the little kid--not Plato the philosopher--but Play-Doh the dough toy that we tell kids not to eat all the time. And we take different colors of Play-Doh, for example. If you would just doing this mind experiment, this thought experiment with me, and imagine we have several different colors of Play-Doh here in front of us.

And we open up the bottles and we begin to mash the Play-Dohs together, the different colors you're eventually going to get a grayish greenish, weird, ugly color. But all the blue is in there, all the red is in there, all the yellow is still in there. And if I need to get the yellow or red back, I can't. It's been permanently integrated in. And that's what complexity is. And very much, especially with humans, especially with human organizations--organization is nothing more than a glorified organism anyways-- and so we have, they're very natural, they're very organic and it's really important we understand that it's mixed together.

Now what does that have to do with foresight? What does have to do with the future? It has everything to do with it because it has to do with how we anticipate what's coming. If we anticipate what's coming as only something that's machine-based. Like, "Well, if I have an organizational difficulty. Well, I need new personnel or bring in human resources, we're going to change this person out for that person and fix this." It's a very mechanistic approach to organization. It's a very mechanistic approach to forecasting and problem solving, when in fact it's more complex than that. When we let somebody go or change somebody's job, they leave a fingerprint with the organization that will go on forever and they take with them. Just like trying to get the red Play-Doh back out of a mixed ball of Play-Doh. You're going to get some of the red back, but you're going to get a mix of other colors in there too. And some of the red's going to have stayed, and that's kind of how we need to think about it.

So when it comes to foresight, I think the first big transition we need to make is understand that it's way more complex and less complicated than we think. And when we do that it now requires a different strategy. So the strategy then for forecasting, the strategy for foresight, the strategy for anticipating now requires looking for as many variables as possible. And I think this is one of the things that CI does for us that other models don't, and that is allows us to take in more variables. Now it would be ideal. I teach at a research one institution, I teach a research methods class. And it would be ideal and perfect if we could identify every variable that has an influence on any particular outcome, but anybody who does research knows that that's impossible to do.

So my job as an ethical and good researcher is to identify as many as I can. And I think the same thing is true when it comes to leadership and management. We have an obligation to the people we follow, or the people who follow us and the people who we're leading to find out as many variables as we can just from an integrity standpoint. And I think foresight and the way that we work foresight and transitioning away from a complicated framework toward a complexity framework allows us to do that better. And then the second thing that requires then that requires feedback from other people.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So along those lines, one of the things that you write about is the importance of intuition as it relates to contextual intelligence, how does that fit?

Matt Kutz, PhD: So, obviously, this is a funny thing because this is where I find my existential crisis as a researcher myself, and someone who very much values the empirical method and all those kinds of things. So I don't want to diss that side of my identity, but there's also very much rigor even, and significance to this idea of the hunch, as it were, or intuition. Now, what we need to understand is there is actually a word for that called synchronicity. And synchronicity is this interesting idea that revolves around coincidence.

Carl Jung, you know a famous psychotherapist, actually coined the term synchronicity. And he did it actually in a clinical setting. And what he was doing--it's a true story--is he was actually treating a patient in the hospital who was having this recurring image in her dream that was, just for lack of a better term, freaking her out.

Sorry to use colloquialisms, but it was just freaking her out and she couldn't understand it, so she was trying to explain to him what this symbol in her dream was. It turned out it was a beetle and she'd never seen this beetle. During the treatment session, Dr. Jung--there's a little kid outside the hospital room window, throwing rocks at the window--so he's getting agitated. He goes over to yell at the kid and there's no kid out there. So he resumes his treatment and sure enough, this happened again. So now he's upset so he goes over and tries to open the window really fast and catch the kid. And it's not a rock, but it's actually a beetle hitting the window, falling down. So he picks up the beetle, shows it to the patient and the patient just goes crazy.

[The patient] Just is like, "Oh my gosh, that's the beetle that I've been dreaming about." Now he recognizes that as coincidence, which the patient is not going to believe that. The patient believes this is a sign, this is something supernatural that's happening. And even Dr. Jung, when he recounts the story even admits, "Yeah, I got to admit, this is pretty weird."

And what they did is they created meaning from that coincidental experience; he calls that process synchronicity. And this idea of intuition that we have and this, "The little birdie told me."

Or these gut reactions, or these hunches that we have so much actually don't just fall out of nowhere. And that's just what I think is important for us to understand. And this is why I think it's valuable for contextual intelligence. It's when we have those intuitive moments or, what I call now from a more technical scientific way, tacit knowledge. And that's really what intuition is.

You boil it down it's tacit knowledge. Where it comes from are all of these experiences that we've been talking about. These coincidences will all of a sudden collide together and we create meaning out of it. And that's what an intuitive moment is, or a tacit moment is. It's when we have different experiences; they can be in close proximity in terms of times or in distant proximity. It could be several years ago or several hours ago, it doesn't matter. They collide together at some moment, we recognize that collision and we call it an intuition.

And I think that's really important. And that goes back, and that's why cultivating those watershed moments. That's why inviting people into participate in foresight. These blue sky or these 3D thinking free fall moments are so important. Because again, what we do, it raises our capacity or probability of having intuitive moments that are actually based on experiences and not just random occurrences. So I think that intuition piece is really, really important and we can cultivate those.

Brian Bolwell, MD: Isn't that also part of unpacking your files that you've got in a very rigid way in your brain? And it sounds like intuition is kind of not unlike what we're describing with exercise. It's just that it just flies out of nowhere, and yet it's based on real past experiences. Another thing that you've written about is how industrialized societies, when it comes to managing disruption or chaos tend to havesignificant challenges compared to us developed societies that are used to things not always going as planned. And sometimes we get a little too programmed into thinking everything's going to go right. How does CI help in those situations? The world obviously is changing very quickly. 2020 is a pretty good example of it.

Matt Kutz, PhD: We couldn't ask for a better example right now.

Brian Bolwell, MD: Well, there you go, so how does CI help?

Matt Kutz, PhD: Yeah. So what it does is, again, it makes us more comfortable with uncertainty. In fact, people ask me, "Well, what's the biggest value." So there's lots of values, leadership, stuff like that. But for me personally, the biggest value with CI is the fact that it makes ambiguity and uncertainty manageable. It makes it better than that, it makes it okay. I like to say chaos is the package that your potential arrives in.

People who have higher amounts of contextual intelligence and we can measure this by certain behaviors tend to respond better because they do better with ambiguity. I noticed this when I was a Fulbright Scholar in the medical sciences in Rwanda for a few years, a few years ago, sorry. And when I was there, I noticed exactly what you're referring to.

And I begin to notice that their life is helter-skelter, it's certainly not nearly as developed as ours here and they just went with it. It's just, "It is what it is."

It became annoying to me as a American there who had had different expectations. They would say, "TIA, TIA, everything's TIA. Oh TIA."

And I'm like, "What's TIA?" And they're like, "This is Africa. This is Africa." Nobody's on time, everybody's late. It's just everything is chaotic. Everything is hectic. Everything's helter-skelter, but they just ran with it. And they had so much more peace than I had.

And I'm like, "Boy, what is it that they have that I don't? Because I'm Mr. Fulbright Scholar, I'm Dr. Kutz. I'm the one that's here to help you solve your problems. You invited me here for this and I'm looking around thinking man I need to be more like you guys."

And I begin to realize this is exactly what you're talking about because they were just comfortable with ambiguity. They learned to live with uncertainty and just go with the flow. And I begin to realize that because of the state of their life--if you look at a biological system or an ecosystem, and I don't want to get again way off of our topic--but every once in a while, big events happen that caused a shifting and adjusting in a culture and in a society. And I'm not saying this is that, but it certainly seems like it could be because there are a lot of people shifting or pivoting.

There's a famous quote out there right now, "Just got to pivot. Just got to pivot." We're pivoting and people who have high degrees of contextual intelligence pivot more easily than those that don't, I think is a fair way to.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So, is that Matt? Why is that? How does CI help you be able to do that?

Matt Kutz, PhD: I think it's because we're practicing what we've been talking about, so the watershed moments, the 3D thinking piece, the going back and looking at other experiences you begin to realize something that we forgot and that's everything's going to work out.

The value in a complex environment or in chaotic times is, "I don't know what we're looking at here, but you and I together can do this. And here's the value of my experience to you as I do know it's going to work out. Somehow it's going to be okay and somehow it's going to work out."

And I think that's what they have in these developing countries that we don't have. We need it structured; we need it organized; we need a plan right now. And we kind of lose the, "You know what, let's just see how this goes and it's going to work out. Everything's going to be fine."

I have a sign on my wall in my office right now says, "This too shall pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass." And that's kind of where we're at. And we've got to start embracing that kind of thinking.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So we're experiencing a very prolonged kidney stone passage right now.

Matt Kutz, PhD: Yes we are.

Brian Bolwell, MD: Fair enough. Got it. Another thing you write about, it's interesting how people with contextual intelligence tend to be change agents. And part of that is to quote you, "To have the courage to raise difficult and challenging questions." How does CI allow people to do that? Because sometimes you have psychologically safe environments and sometimes you don't.

Matt Kutz, PhD: Yeah. I might deviate from conventional here a little bit. I recognize the importance of a psychologically safe environment, and I think that's critical. And I think that is an obligation of people in authority positions to create those, so I will say that.

I also think, however, I can create my own psychologically safe space as well by how I respond to my experiences and understanding exactly what we've been talking about. Again, it's going to work and I need to be able to be a change agent enough to know that even if it's not a psychologically safe environment for the better good so to speak, or for my own integrity, for my own personal ethic of, "I've got to say something that's on my mind or on my heart as it were. I've got to do that."

So there is a boldness and a courage, I think that comes with change agency. But also I think the change agents who really put an emphasis on contextual intelligence, again, they realize their value of their life, for example, is not just this one thing. But we need to ask people from outside of our frame of reference and comfort zone, who we know are reasonable people.

And I guess that's the challenge is, well, people who we disagree with we typically think are unreasonable. Well, again, we have to have some integrity in our own evaluation system here. Realize I may disagree with you, but that you still have value. And I think that's where change agency originates from. And when we begin to think in those terms, we find ourselves being willing to ask people for more input and being willing to offer more input.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So I think this is a pretty important concept. It's fascinating that you said to have the courage to raise difficult conversations, you need to realize you have value beyond the workplace. That you have value in a lot of other situations as well, including I guess when you look in the mirror. And in some way contextual intelligence allows you to live your values, which is arguably a pretty important thing.

Matt Kutz, PhD: Yeah, it sure is. I'd say a very important thing. And that's part of why people are so frustrated I think with their lives. And when you look at people where they're at, I think it's because there is a disconnect sometimes between with what they're doing and what they really believe they should be doing or could be doing.

We talk in organizational speak, we talk about competing stakeholder values. And that's the important thing when you're talking about strategic planning and strategic thinking. But let's make that personal because we also have competing internal values.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this idea of the value that we bring, it transcends just this moment that we're in, and I think we tend to forget that. And again, the person who's more contextually aware tends to understand that my value and my worth goes beyond just what we're doing right here right now and that's where CI is really valuable.

And that's where people I think find the courage to practice many of the CI behaviors. There are 12 specific CI behaviors and people who actually practice these 12 behaviors at a higher frequency than other people, I think have that awareness that the value that I bring transcends this moment right now.

Brian Bolwell, MD: I think that's a really, really important point so thank you for that. So another thing that's on that list of 12 is an ability to be socially responsible. And I think that's, again, probably really important today. How does CI allow you to do that?

Matt Kutz, PhD: So the social responsibility aspect is something that I refer to as being a communitarian. The person who is contextually aware, I think, understands that I can have a greater good that immediately affects us here and now. Not neglecting national issues, global issues for sure. It's a completely different thing to actually roll up my sleeves and go out and engage with my community over a common cause for people who may or may not think differently than I do.

I think we need to do both and if you have to pick one I'd recommend picking the local one, the communitarian piece. Because that social engagement and social activism so to speak is so important for (a) increasing your awareness, [b] increasing your experiences, bringing in diverse ideas and it just makes you more contextually aware just by doing it.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So if you're a leader and you lack contextual intelligence, how will that manifest itself?

Matt Kutz, PhD: Myopic vision. They only see what's in front of them; they don't see the big picture. You'll know it because the people around you are frustrated, and that's what contextual intelligence enables us to do. It helps us see what other people see or having multiple perspectives. And I think that's critical and the way that we see it and manifest people who don't, is that people around them are frustrated. Solution, they start seeing what they see and that is all about what CI is.

Brian Bolwell, MD: Finally, tell me about a time that you made a huge mistake or messed up and then what you learned from it.

Matt Kutz, PhD: There are so many mistakes that I've made. Just thinking earlier in my career. Lacking contextual intelligence, I failed to recognize what the people around me thought and would say, and I was being interviewed for a particular newspaper about something. And I just started putting words in the mouths of my colleagues, which is textbook lack of contextual intelligence. And I remember saying certain things and not thinking at the... being completely oblivious to it, just thinking I was flying along having these great things. And the next day coming in my office and I have a litany of memos and emails and notes, "Who the hell do you think you are? You can't say that. And the dean wants to meet with you now." And I was like, "Oh my gosh."

Dr. Bolwell, it was me in a low spot of showing a complete lack of contextual intelligence and just assuming. It's the sin of presumption. I was presuming I knew what everyone else was thinking and feeling and just didn't. And, boy. Actually, I still relive that moment and how I just felt so heartbroken that I disappointed, and that I would actually be that presumptuous to presume I knew what other people were thinking and feeling, and then how they would even articulate it which was , which was. So that was a big one for me that I learned a big lesson on.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So for people who want to improve their contextual intelligence besides reading your book, what do you suggest?

Matt Kutz, PhD: Okay, Well, thanks for that one. I think realizing first of all that contextual intelligence isn't a super power, it's absolutely something that is very easy to obtain when we give it attention. So the first thing I would recommend is just start giving it attention.

Understand that hindsight bias is a real thing and that you suffer from it kind of thing. So we've got to own the fact that (a) you do suffer from hindsight bias; (b) you do think the world is more complicated and less complex and that you need to flip those. And just being aware of that, so that's a big part. And understanding that when I focus my attention on actually thinking about my experiences and thinking about these things, I will get better. And I think that's really the best place to start.

Brian Bolwell, MD: So for the audience, I think this is an incredibly important topic. Matt writes really well. I highly recommend his book. And I highly recommend additional study of this topic. It certainly has helped me and I think it's really cool stuff. So thank you very much Matt. And thanks to all of you for listening and welcome to a future episode of Beyond Leadership. Take care.

Matt Kutz, PhD: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Beyond Leadership. We welcome any topic ideas, comments, or questions about this or any past episodes. Email us at executiveeducation@ccf.org or by clicking on the link in the show notes.