Jeremy Utley is the Director of Executive Education at Stanford’s d.school and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford's School of Engineering. He is the co-host of the popular web series "Stanford's Masters of Creativity", and the co-author of the book ‘Ideaflow’.

In this episode, Subbu and Jeremy explore the concept of Ideaflow – why generating more ideas is critical to business success, and how leaders can enable a culture of ideation, experimentation and implementation.

Key topics

1:35 - Jeremy's career trajectory and the courage to deviate from the past

3:30 - Primed for a breakthrough

4:25 - Quantity over quality of ideas

7:55 - Why we need to focus on creativity

10:00 - Every problem is an idea problem

11:30 - Defining Ideaflow

12:30 - Psychological safety as an essential enabler for Ideaflow

14:40 - The Einstellung effect

18:20 - Dare to be obvious

19:30 - Why is picking the best idea so difficult?

22:00 - Designing great experiments

28:20 - Working in a culture that doesn't support creativity

31:00 - Rapid-fire round!

33:45 - Why is collaboration so messy?

36:30 - How to brainstorm well as a team

38:30 - The value of a non-homogenous team 

40:00 - Pixar's dailies

42:50 - Creative collissions - what they are and how to have more of them

45:45 - What leaders get wrong about the creative process and what they should be doing instead