Why Smart Ideas Fail—and How to Build Curious Teams (5 Skills)

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: People who do out-of-the-box stuff, they do it, it's not by accident. It's by how they look at what they're trying to solve. And they look at all the assumptions that somebody makes, and they start challenging all of them.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's biggest challenges. Today, we talk creativity with one of the most interesting people that I have had the honor of bringing on Meet the leader, man who has made puzzles under the nom de plume of Dr. Crypton, done color commentary for chess competitions, and headed up the Encyclopedia Britannica. He currently runs one of the most beloved science institutions in the United States. He's going to talk about thinking creatively and making complex ideas irresistible.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Don't forget: rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum, and this is Meet the Leader.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: I believe you need to connect with people.

If you actually stop to think about the sentence, you don't understand what it means and too many people have let that slip because they didn't want to be dumb and ask: what did you really mean by that?

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: We are about to be flooded with ideas. Thanks to AI, you are already likely seeing an uptick and far-too perfect decks in your inbox, all with very well-meaning advice, messaging, strategies.

The volume of this stuff can distract us from some very well worn truths. No good idea is enough on its own. To really gain traction, an idea needs to break through the noise. And your creativity and curiosity is a leader to pick the right idea, to chart the right course, to get your message across to execute is needed now more than ever.

Leaders who can spark curiosity and creativity have always been rare, but those leaders who get understood, make people stop, make people care, and who can get teams so engaged, they use the full breadth of their smarts and talents, those are the ones who are gonna make the most of any newfangled tool in the toolbox to build something with you that you never could have imagined.

Paul Hoffman knows a little something about this. He is the CEO of the Liberty Science Center. That is a major cultural institution for the sciences in New Jersey. He's also a longtime science writer and the former head of the encyclopedia Britannica. What I'm getting at is he is a noted expert on the public understanding of science and his work over decades has focused on connecting people to complex ideas and making those ideas understandable and irresistible.

He's gonna talk to us about the skills that all leaders must develop in themselves and in their teams to really capture hearts and minds.

I'm gonna run this episode in a new format, Creativity Countdown, going skill by skill, one by one. You can tell me on social media how you like it.

We will start with tip number five, a personal favorite, breaking down jargon. It is obvious that speaking clearly is the fastest way to be understood, but buzzwords still won't die. Paul is going to share with us how Liberty Science Center makes science come alive, and how that and other roles he's held can teach us lessons on crafting clear messages to get people excited.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: We're the largest cultural institution in New Jersey, and also the highest-attended interactive science learning center in the tri-state area. So what we do is take the natural scientific curiosity that every human being is born with, right? We try to keep that curiosity alive.

I mean, our basic mission is to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers and innovators.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: We try to create a place that's both hands-on, so you're learning by doing things actively or minds-on. By that I mean that it's just a very intensive and, in a good way, engaging experience. So our planetarium is not hands- on, you're not touching anything but you're blown away by this being surrounded.

It's 90 feet across and it has the definition of the best HDTV in your living room. But these are real images that are coming, for instance, from the Webb Telescope that's out there. So that's one thing. I mean, there's nowhere else in the world where you get a planetarium that is this size and this advanced in terms of the technology.

We have a wonderful exhibition that just opened on Sue, the T-Rex, which is the most complete skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found. I wasn't aware until recently -- I've always loved dinosaurs starting as a little kid -- of how few skeletons we actually have of dinosaurs. Many dinosaur species are represented by one skeleton. That skeleton also may be just a few bones. So paleontologists are extrapolating to what the whole animal looked like.

So we have only a hundred T-Rex skeletons. Many of them are just one bone. Sue is 90% complete T. Rex. And this animal that died 67 million years ago We can even tell what this T. Rex died of: a jaw infection. You can see Vertebrae in her very long tail I should say their very long tale; Sue is the name of the researcher that discovered the T. Rex So we don't know whether it was a male or female. But in Sue's tail you can see where Sue suffered from arthritis where seven of Sue's ribs were broken, probably because of fights with triceratops that gored Sue while Sue was trying to eat them. So I think it's just remarkable that you can tell something about the life story of an animal that died 67 million years ago.

And we have bones that you could touch, you can smell what scientists think a T-Rex's breath smelled like, which, believe me, you really don't wanna do. But our exhibits are visceral. We try to appeal to all the senses. So that's an example of something we have right now.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: I feel like all of this ladders up to improving and expanding public education of science and technology but also being a booster for curiosity and I want to know what prepared you for this role.

So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna ask you how different roles in your life have prepared you for it. One, you were a science writer for some time. You ran Discover Magazine. You were their EIC, their editor-in-chief and president. You also ran Encyclopedia Britannica. How does that inform your current role?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: All my jobs had one thing similar and that was taking serious academic content and trying to reach a larger audience with it without watering it down, right? I mean, that's what Encyclopedia Britannica was about, you know, that you could read an article and you're not a specialist in that field but you could still understand it.

That's the same thing we try to do at Liberty Science Center but it's really by doing it in an immersive sensory way. I mean, I'm just curious about the world. I mean, it started when -- I am not sure what age -- I was seven or eight, my neighbour had a telescope and he said, “You want to look at the rings of Saturn?”

So I looked through, I had to go around and check because I thought he put a photograph on the end of the telescope. I mean, was so brilliant to see the rings on it. I mean, we are all curious human beings. Again, it's the language of science and stuff that can be formable and exclude some of us.

But if you get to the basic ideas. I mean, what could be more interesting than understanding just how old is the universe, right? And that's what we try to get across.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: In working at Discovery or Encyclopedia Britannica or Scientific American, as well, there's still sort of a gut check where you want to make sure that hey, it's serious, that we're talking to people about something that's got some teeth to it, something that is real but also not putting a wall in front of you with jargon.

What's a gut-check that anyone can have to make that they're not creating walls to innovation?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: You need to be able to understand whatever you're doing. I think that too often people that are in either science or in the business of scientific communicators, they let stuff slide that they don't personally understand because they don't want to look dumb by asking about it.

So it's like a writer and an editor and the scientist. My articles would go pretty deep on a subject but I needed to assume that you're a smart person; you know nothing about the subject I'm writing about. Because, I mean, that's how I approach things.

All the time, I'm reading things about, I don't know how quantum computing works. I need someone to start at the beginning. But that's the real problem with a lot of science writing is that if you actually stop to think about the sentence, you don't understand what it means.

And too many people have let that slip because they didn't want to be dumb and ask the scientists, well, what did you really mean by that? So I think that's one thing.

And the other thing is that stuff that you might think people aren't interested in, they're actually really interested in. I mean, I put black holes on the cover of national magazines but probably one of the first editors to do that. We sold so many more copies – this is back in the day when people had magazines and there were newsstands, sold so much more copies than subjects that you think would have more universal appeal.

People wanted to understand this stuff. They knew it was heady and exciting. And then if you delivered, you deliver with a piece that was engaging, it had a large audience. I mean, it takes a lot of work to take difficult subjects and figure out an approach to but it's incredibly rewarding when you do that. And the proof is in the pudding.

I mean people in our institution, Liberty Science Center, they'll skip an exhibit or give up after five seconds or walk past it if you haven't done a good job.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Which leads us to tip number four, consider your audience. What do you want them to think, to feel, to understand? What do they uniquely need? Paul will take us through two past lives, including a college job as a doorman that drives home that service mindset that good communication can't ignore. But he'll start with what we can learn from his time giving color commentary for chess tournaments on ESPN. Unlocking the drama of a sport many people don't follow -- and getting them hooked anyway.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: You know, it was similar in a sense, because chess is something that's pretty arcane and this is ESPN and my fellow commentator, Maurice Ashley, who's one of the top chess players in the world (I'm not. I'm a good amateur player. I am a very enthusiastic chess fan). And the two of us tried to explain the ideas that these players were getting at, even for people who couldn't follow what was happening on the board. And just the human tension of two minds huddled over a chessboard for four hours.

We've got a larger audience on that. I'm always learning by how people respond to what it is that I'm doing. I'm not doing this for my own pleasure. I want to reach people. So I guess that's what you need to be attentive to your audience. And I don't try to speak down to anybody but I don't want it to go over people's heads.

I mean, I'm out on the floor of Liberty Science Center a lot. I show up on weekends. You can see I'm casually dressed. People don't know I'm the CEO. I'll sit there and see how people respond to our planetarium shows, what they get stuck on in some of our interactive exhibits, what works for them.

I'm very focused on how real people are responding to what we do or anything that I do personally.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Is considering the human response, emotions like joy or excitement or even fear, is considering that human response also really critical to making something that's engaging?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: I mean, absolutely. I believe we learn a lot through play. We learn a lot through ways that, you know, aren't the traditional classrooms sitting there all in a neat row at desks and having someone lecturing at you, right? There's many different ways to learn.

At a museum like Liberty Science Center, we use art, we use music and smell a T-Rex breath. So we're appealing to the sense of smell, not just sight and sound and touch.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: One of your early jobs while you were in college in Harvard, you were a doorman. How does being a doorman, which I think would actually prepare people for many roles in life, but how does being doorman sort of help you as a CEO and as a leader?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: Being a doorman is a customer service job, right? I mean, I also own some restaurants with friends and they work, I think, because, you know, we're conscious of trying to appeal to who our audience is. The doorman was a fascinating slice of life.

It was in a very fancy building on the Upper East Side and it was a large staff of people that operated the service elevators, the front elevators. They were all Yugoslavian. And during their vacations, which happened to fall when... my summers from college, I was hired to fill in.

And it was also the first time I was around very well-to-do people. It helped me completely widen my horizons both about what it was like to be in a real service industry job, a slice of New York that I hadn't been exposed to before.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: When we're serving an audience, we are putting their needs first, right? How important is that also to sort of keep that in mind, right, where you're not saying, oh, people should just know what this is, I'm not gonna explain it.

You know, like how important is it to, you know, learn that ability to put yourself back and put the other first in communication.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: I mean, it's completely important. In my industry, it is museum designers that when there's nobody in an exhibition hall they start to blame the audience, right? Or they blame the marketing team.

Sometimes the marketing teams could have done a better job of getting what that exhibit is about across to the people for a larger audience. But it's the same with writers. I believe you need to connect with people, certainly, the occupations that I've been in.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: For tip number three in our creativity countdown, we look at challenging assumptions. Paul's puzzle-making days as Dr. Crypton remind us of the power of thinking outside the box to solve problems. That's something that's key for creativity and also for crafting messages that stick.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: So I used to design puzzles. They were in books, films, different kinds of media, where if you solved these clues, you got a very large prize. I mean, in one case, it was several hundred thousand dollars. I was one of the first to do these sort of mass puzzles with prizes.

There was a guy named Kip Williams that wrote a book and put clues in his illustrations. And that was a worldwide bestseller. And I saw that and I thought, okay, I could do that in a different way where there were large prizes.

And so I did that, I wrote a newspaper column that was in newspapers all over the place, there were mysteries that you could read and actually solve as opposed to a lot of mysteries where the author pulls it together for you but you couldn't actually solve the stuff. So that was my particular niche.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: How does being a puzzle master, how does it help you as a problem solver today?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: It's easier to create puzzles than solve them. Problem-solving is tough. But I'm very interested in creativity and how other people that are smarter than me have solved really important problems. And one thing I've found that's common to diverse areas is that people who do out-of-the-box stuff, it's not by accident.

It's by how they look at what they're trying to solve. And they look at... all the assumptions that somebody makes, and they start challenging all of them.

And that may not lead anywhere, but it could lead to, here's an assumption that everybody has made, no one has ever questioned that and you are able to think about it in a different way.

I mean, I understand that that's what Elon Musk has done on the whole car assembly line, where he's looked at every step in the process. And, every other car company does certain steps in exactly the same way and he would say, well, why do we do that then? What if we did that?

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Tip number two. Model the creative behaviors that you want to see across your team. If you want people to be vulnerable and take risks, it starts with you.

Some of the biggest barriers to new thinking are cultural. You can hold back the big solutions that are right at your team's fingertips. Paul has worked with a host of companies and organizations on brainstorming and he shares what he saw during that work and the advice that he gives to help teams brainstorm more effectively.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: So when I worked with companies on brainstorming, I work with them on trying to understand whatever all these basic assumptions were in their industry or their product, right? And looking at them and seeing what would happen if you overturned some of them, even if it seems like crazy, at least as a thought exercise to do that.

I mean, we're so often blinded by what we bring that nobody questions. Sometimes it's cultural things. I'll just give you a broad example. You know, for years it was thought that ulcers were stemmed from mental conditions. In other words, like an unhealthy mind leads to an unhealthy body. So if you had ulcers, it was because you had too much stress in your life.

You know it's turned out that the vast majority of ulcers are caused by a bacteria and have nothing to do with stress at all. But it was very hard for researchers to discover that, because they were all under this sort of Freudian worldview that mental stress would cause bodily harm.

And in fact, when the first researcher came up with the idea that most ulcers or many of them anyway, were caused by bacteria, the medical community didn't believe him.

And he stood there on the stage of a conference and drank a beaker of or a test tube of the bacteria that he said caused ulcers and sure enough, he came down with ulcers and then showed he could take an antibiotic and that was an extreme thing to do.

But just that for decades, we were blinded to even considering the possibility that the troubled mind leads to ulcers might not be correct. That kind of thing is prevalent all over the place. You need to isolate what your assumptions are and then do the thought exercise. Say, well, what if I'm wrong about that? And see where that leads.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: What other things can sort of help with brainstorming? Where does it go sideways? What can they do to sort of give themselves the best shot at having the best discussions?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: I mean, you want to create an atmosphere where people aren't pouncing on each other and criticizing each other's ideas. You need people to be able to feel a comfort level with their colleagues that they can say stuff, maybe it's silly, okay, then move on to another subject if that doesn't spark something interesting.

But you need to create sort of a safe space where, particularly initially in brainstorming where you're not being judgy about something. Instead, whosoever the facilitator is, is trying to capture all the ideas.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: It's like an anonymous Google doc or something that where people can just put whatever in there without any sort of fear of reprisal or even name. Is that sort of thing where they kind of get a thought starter together? Is that helpful? To get people's thoughts moving.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: That could be, I mean, I did a lot of things in groups, I did a lot of things talking to people individually, because sometimes a person who's shyer in a certain setting, because I might walk into something in a company where I don't know the history of the dynamics between the individuals in the room.

So I didn't come in as a corporate psychologist, I'm not there to like solve dysfunctional things but I'm in there to try to get people to... for them to work together to be more creative and succeed.

And a lot of it has to do with the team dynamics. I mean, some people think that you need, let's get the 12 smartest people together, that's gonna lead to the brightest ideas. That's not true at all. You need a team that plays off each other and works well together.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: And how can leaders promote curiosity?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: By demonstrating it themselves, right? If a leader cuts him or herself off to ideas too quickly, that's not expressing any curiosity. They need to be curious about their employees, their employees' lives and of course, about their joint work together.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Are there overlooked curiosity killers, things that people maybe they don't realize they're doing it but it's actually sort of dampening people's ability to think outside the box?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: You know, a leader that's just, you know, not a good listener and not, you know, understanding, you know, the passions and interests of the people around him. I mean, someone who comes across as too authoritative, it's a leader's job in the end to make hard decisions and all that but you really need to set up a space where people can be playful without fear of repercussions.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: How do you do that at Liberty Science Center?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: My style is fairly casual and I'm also very, very accessible and that's part of it. So the people I work with, I mean, see me often. It's not like they’re, “oh my god, I'm not going to see him for six months, I’ve got to prepare and we're going to blow our chance to get this new thing going unless we really impress him in that five minutes.”

No, I run into people constantly. You know, I like to start with talking about things in a… informal way, I don't want people to spend 40 hours doing the perfect pitch. Why don't we start with something and then if it seems interesting, then go off and develop it.

I mean that's something where leaders have to be conscious of. If you have people putting in like oodles of work to get something to a point and then you shoot it down in five seconds, that's not great, of course.

They've put a lot of effort and time into it. You need to set up a system where you're engaging with your team and people early enough so that the work that they are doing is ending up being something that you're going to use and they feel good about.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Before we get to our last tip in our Creativity Countdown, if you are looking for new thinking and approaches, check out our recent episode with Nick Thompson. He is the CEO of The Atlantic and he shares a turning point in his life that changed what he thought he was capable of. I'll put a link in the show notes.

The last tip is something that is often overlooked but should be woven into your every day. Explore. Can you go for a walk? Can you talk to someone who might surprise you? Find ways to broaden your perspective and add a couple more colors to your little creative palette. Here are some of the simple ways that Paul makes time to explore -- and makes time for new thinking and new ideas.

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: Get out in nature. I love cities, I love New York. I've lived there my whole life. It's wonderful being here in San Francisco with you but I also like to get out in it. That's important, even if it's for just short periods of time.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: Where do you walk these days?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: I walk a lot up in the Catskills in New York. I also walk a ton around New York City. I mean, I hope sometimes I'll spend a Saturday and I'll end up going eight to 10 miles. I didn't intend to but it's a great way of exploring neighbourhoods.

So I like going way out in nature but I also like exploring cities, just spend the day walking around.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: And how does it help you sort of tend to your curiosity and your creativity?

Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center: Because I just see a lot, you know, I'm exposed to stuff. I mean, that's the thing. You should just go out and do stuff. Now I go to a lot of art openings, a lot performances and things. You know, stay in touch with younger people in my case. I have a 26-year-old, so it helps. But you want to spend time with people that are different than you, so that you just get a broader perspective of the world.

Linda Lacina, Meet the Leader: That was Paul Hoffman. Thanks so much to him. And thanks so much to you for listening.

If there's anyone in your life who's looking to spark curiosity and creativity, send them this episode.

For a transcript of this chat, as well as transcripts from my colleague's podcast Radio Davos, check out wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me with Taz Kelleher as editor and Gareth Nolan, driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.