Chapter 1

1. The Need for Holistic, Creative Thought

The future is coming, to a life near you.

My parents were a wonderful mix of left brain and right brain.

My father, Buck, was an insurance-company executive whose parents divorced in the 1920s, long before divorce was normalized. He grew up as a Depression-era child doing odd jobs in Kentucky, Indiana, and Chicago to survive. When World War II hit, he had a friend memorize the eye chart so he could enlist, despite being blind in one eye. To him, it was logical: America was attacked, so he should defend it. Later, he was one of the few World War II veterans in our community to speak out against the Vietnam War. Again, the decision was a logical one. He hated war and didn’t believe, in that instance, we should be fighting. He always pushed me to consider problems logically, rather than simply conform to what others in my perceived “group” thought. To this day, I try to honor this way of thinking.

Conversely, my mother, Margaret, was a creative soul with a variety of eclectic pursuits. For twenty-three years, she sang with the Chicago Symphony Chorus under choir director Margaret Hillis and symphony director Georg Solti. At the end of her time, she was the longest serving member of the choir, every member of which had to audition annually to maintain their positions.

She also helped write a dictionary on Hittite (an ancient hieroglyphic language) at the University of Chicago and collected modern art, antiques, and gorgeous Oriental rugs. From classical music to painting, needlepoint, and playwriting, she enjoyed many different forms of art. One such passion was literature and in particular, for reasons I never quite understood, James Joyce.

Her fondness for Joyce went beyond merely reading his modernist, avant-garde novels. She worked with a rock composer named Sigmund Snopek III to create a musical performance based on the ten multilingual portmanteau words of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

She even collaborated with Joycean scholars Gareth and Janet Dunleavy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. For decades, they, along with scholars internationally, had worked to understand the riddle buried in the strange structure of Joyce’s novel Ulysses. If you’ve never read it, Ulysses is a novel of eighteen chapters, representing the hours from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m., and is loosely modeled after the Homeric epic poem The Odyssey.

As it turned out, the academics’ inability to solve Joyce’s riddle had nothing to do with a lack of skill, intelligence, or ability. They just needed a holistic perspective on the problem.

I have to be honest. James Joyce is one of my least favorite authors. For me, reading him is a bit like watching paint dry. However, he is broadly credited as one of the most important avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century. Joyce was a novelist and poet, and, coincidentally, a singer. In truth, if he hadn’t made it as a writer, he might have made a career in music.1 Apparently, he had a wonderful voice and, being Irish, music was a huge part of his cultural heritage.

Through his love of music, Joyce buried a riddle in the structure of the book, which became the essential element that scholars struggled to understand—until, serendipitous though it might seem, my mother figured it out.

Like Joyce, my mother came from a musical background, so when she analyzed the novel, she noticed something that nonmusical scholars simply couldn’t see: Ulysses is structured as a fugue, a compositional technique in music in which short musical themes are introduced early in a composition and come up repeatedly at later points throughout. Given her life’s dedication to music, my mother was well acquainted with the pattern, and through this intersection of thought, she observed that fragments of text introduced early in Ulysses are interwoven through subsequent sections.

It wasn’t a failure on the part of Joycean scholars for not realizing this; they simply lacked the necessary outside expertise. By bringing my mother to the table, who was able to apply her musical knowledge to the problem, they found an answer that had eluded scholars for years.

Creative Problem-Solving in a Combat Zone

It’s this type of holistic thinking upon which this book hinges. Believe it or not, it’s also this type of holistic thinking that directly relates to detecting IED attacks.

Hear me out.

You might remember the frequent news reports about IED attacks during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Maybe it even affected someone you know. Never before had improvised explosives been used with such lethal effect, and it was a source of extreme frustration for military planners. Adding to the problem, the enemy used videos of the attacks as propaganda. One of the biggest challenges for the US military in finding a solution was trying to predict where the enemy would place the IEDs. Many brilliant military minds worked on the problem without much progress.

Ultimately, one of the key insights came from a surprising source—Hollywood filmmakers.

Similar to my mother, someone looking at a challenge from an entirely different perspective uncovered a solution to a pressing challenge. I’m going to talk more deeply about this later in the book, but for now, let me describe an interesting dynamic.

My company, RL Leaders, built an IED simulation system called the Improvised Explosive Device Battle Drill (IEDBD). It was incredible and brought technology usually reserved for flight simulators to soldiers on the ground.

Among other things, we had to examine the placement of IEDs. We turned to a variety of professionals in the national security and entertainment communities, and I’m reminded of a story from a gifted director named Randal Kleiser. Randal was the director of Grease (1978) and Blue Lagoon (1980), as well as the director of the IED Battle Drill. Though we already knew IEDs were being placed for propaganda, he realized that how they were placed optimized the best camera angles. Getting “the shot” was really important for those laying the IEDs.

It was a brilliant aha moment that not only impacted how we went about building the IEDBD but, perhaps more importantly, played a significant role in helping our troops identify where and how the devices were placed, all with the goal of saving lives. Although the IEDBD never fully lived up to its potential for reasons I’ll describe later in this book, it’s something that everyone who was involved takes enormous pride in to this day.

Overcoming Groupthink

Randal’s discovery in the IED Battle Drill massively changed our entire approach, in just one of many examples evidencing the importance of holistic thinking. No matter what issues you face in your personal or professional life, new perspectives uncovered by holistic thinking will reap enormous benefits.

In your own organization, your team is almost certainly comprised of highly intelligent, capable people. The fact that some challenges appear to be beyond their abilities is no reflection on their excellence. They may simply lack a wide-enough range of perspectives. On the surface, it makes sense to select team members from the same industry. After all, if you want to tackle an accounting problem, you bring in skilled accountants, right? If you want to reroute downtown streets, you bring in civil engineers.

That’s the usual approach, but when every member of a team has relatively homogenous experiences and possesses the same general expertise, you run the risk of falling into groupthink, the very opposite of what the Renaissance represented, and the opposite of what we need today. A depth of knowledge is important, but it’s no substitute for a breadth of knowledge.

Even first-tier consulting companies fall into this trap. Take McKinsey & Company. Many consider them brilliant—and they may be. However, they also recruit the same people from the same universities over and over again, which yields teams burdened by the same perspectives.

Over time, a homogenous team becomes highly proficient in the tactics that have always worked for them, so leaders instinctively assume those same tactics will continue to work in the future. Those tactics might even work 80 percent of the time, which can reinforce a leader’s confidence. However, it’s the 20 percent of the time that can unexpectedly cause calamity. When that happens, teams often feel mounting panic as their usual way of solving problems suddenly stops working. In turn, leaders become frustrated with their team.

“Come on, folks. Why can’t we figure this out? Let’s get on the ball and fix the problem!”

Homogenous thinking is often characterized as “groupthink,” which, unfortunately, has widespread effects regardless of industry. The term “groupthink” was first used in the 1950s to describe a phenomenon of “rationalized conformity” in which the desire to seek concurrence on an idea overrides any attempt at considering alternative courses of action.

Yale psychologist Irving Janis famously used this term to describe the chain of events that led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. President Kennedy had made it clear to his subordinates...