The Role Of Tension In Breakthrough Thinking

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and we’re here for the second segment of this podcast. It’s called “The Thinking Tool Universe”. And this is about the inside look at Strategic Coach.
 
Steve Krein: So if you use that example, and I’m glad you brought up Strategy Circle and VOTA. And I remember you gave out a drawing like on this parchment paper.
 
Steve Krein: You remember that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Joe has it on the wall at his office and Howard Getsen has one, but we had a flood in our building and all the spare copies that I could do where I could put his name on it got flooded out, but we do have the digital file on it.
 
Steve Krein: Well I have the original parchment paper, too. I don’t have it framed but I have it, and the reason I’m bringing it up is it was a visual, right? It was a diagram. But that was your business for a while.
 
Dan Sullivan: That was my whole business for the first 15 years.
Steve Krein: Yeah. So fascinating, because even though it’s such a core part of what your business was, there’s a formula underneath it that is inherently, you know, it’s everything you’re doing. Can you just-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, those things which seem to oppose your goal,
 
Steve Krein: -obstacles that oppose your goals are-
 
Dan Sullivan: ...actually the raw material for achieving your goals.
 
I didn’t come up with that. Catherine Nomura, who was a team member for 20 years, we were giving a speech in Carmel, California. We were out walking on the beach afterwards. And she says, “What I noticed is that there’s kind of like a source code for all the Coach tools you do.”
 
You know, we batted it back and forth and Vision came out and Obstacles came out and then there’s a Transformation of some sort that happens when you put the vision and the obstacles together, there’s a transformation, and then there’s an Action that comes out of it.
 
We played around and she says, “It’s kind of like VOTA, you know, V-O-T-A.” And I says, “Yeah, it is VOTA. Yep, exactly. That’s what it is.” And all the tools follow a VOTA formula. Yeah. But you can’t get new thought unless you put two opposing thoughts together in some way. You don’t always do it in the same way.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. So how do you know, out of curiosity, I want to go back to something, and I think it’s a thread for all of these, like the Strategy Circle is such a multi-dimensional tool for so many different situations. I think about the evolution of, I think, The Negativity or Experience Transformer became The Results Multiplier.
 
And so how do you know when to just use that old tool? How do you think about it? Use an old tool to help them think it through, versus even though we’ve done it a million times, is it about the freshness of it? Is there something that like you said, you’re not falling in love with any of them?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and one of the things, the tools become more useful. They become more specifically useful, like The Triple Play, The 3x3.
 
What I’ve noticed is I can attach The Triple Play to any other tool, and they get a result from the first tool, and they said, “Gee, that’s really interesting.” I said, “Now take the three best results you got from the first level of thinking, put them in The Triple Play and watch what happens when you go through it.” And they come out and they said, “I had no idea of this before.”
 
And I needed a new tool for Free Zone. I was saying, “You know, there’s got to be a new tool for Free Zone because they’re putting things together that have never been put together.” People say, “Oh not The Triple Play again,” and then they do it and they say, “Geez, I never saw this before, this is totally-”
 
And so I’ve developed a thicker skin regarding people’s first response and first reaction over the years. I’m 50% of the creative process and the clients are the other 50%. Okay, so my sense is, you don’t know anything until you’ve tested with the check-writers. You know nothing about what you’ve created. And I’ve seen people labor over a backstage process of two or three years with a book, with a new production, and they’re afraid of the marketplace. And I said, for entrepreneurs, the only truth is in the marketplace.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, there was another dimension to the exploration of tools, and I’m going back a couple years where you talked about them as shortcuts.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Steve Krein: And there’s a big discussion, maybe even a couple tools, by the way, talking about what your shortcuts are, what your tools are. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Because ‘shortcut’ could seem like cutting corners, but I think the way you framed it was very helpful, because if you can help people do things faster and easier and more efficiently, you’re creating value. But I wanted to just give you a little bit of time to talk about the shortcut element of tool- creating as a background to it.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, one of the tools that I came up with, which was very much needed, is that the only thing that you really have to identify when you’re dealing with a customer or client is their D.O.S. issues: their Dangers, Opportunities, and Strengths. Okay?
 
And I’m very axiomatic, you know, I mean, axioms are self-evident truths. Modern life doesn’t deal with first principles. We’re always dealing with effects of effects of effects of effects of effects. And I said, “But where does this start? Where’s the beginning of this?”
 
I went to a school that we just read and discuss the Great Books of the Western world. And one of the early thinkers 2300 years ago was the mathematician Euclid. All physical geometry today comes from the original books of Euclid, the mathematician. And for more than 2000 years, Euclid ruled the world. But everything that he says is a self-evident truth. You know, if you have two lines, and if they converge, they’re converging. And if they don’t converge, you know, but they stay the same distance, they’re parallel. . And
 
And people say, “Yeah, well, that’s obvious.” Yeah, but it makes all the difference when you’re building a building, whether things are parallel, you know? So he just builds up and he has a first book has got 47 propositions. And you can’t get to number two unless you know number one, you can’t get to number three unless you’re number two. And number 47, you don’t understand till you do the first 46. And I said, “What a beautiful learning system.”
 
So I aspire to that with Coach. This is entrepreneurial geometry, you know, and what I’m aspiring is creating a fundamental lasts -forever geometry for entrepreneurs to think about every kind of entrepreneurial situation. I think I know it for one quarter, but then they give me new stuff the next quarter to work on.
 
Steve Krein: You know, you call it geometry. It’s not a straight line. And what’s interesting about the library now, this vast library of thinking tools. And I think probably a lot of your clients have their own as well, their own client -based learning and D.O.S. creation and instigate these new tools.
 
What have you learned about people who like using tools and people who don’t, clients that don’t or people who look at the exercise of filling in little boxes and do that. I mean, I love it. I know by the time you get in Free Zone, if you don’t like it, you’re not in Free... I mean, you kind of like, you understand that learning style, which is community -driven because it’s not just about what you’re writing in your boxes, you’re getting together and sharing it with other people. And what have you learned about? I mean, the learning about people just introducing the idea of tools.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I was at Richard Rossi’s DaVinci 50 two weeks ago and Regan Archibald who’s in the Free Zone with us together, he introduced two tremendous tools when I was responding to the tools, I said , “Regan these are terrific tools.” They were really simple, they were really clear you know they had you know what people’s aspirations were regarding eight different levels of their health. His business is health coaching, you know, fitness and health coaching.
 
And I said, “Geez, this is a terrific tool.” And he was thrilled. You know, it was like, there was a mathematician, Gödel, who very famous 20th century, very famous Kurt Gödel from Austria. And somebody said to Einstein, he said, you know, “You’re the greatest mathematician, maybe in history.” And Einstein said, says “No,” he says, “the greatest mathematician is Kurt Gödel.” And that was a bit like Einstein telling somebody, you know, I mean, Regan says, I mean, “Your tools are just amazing.”
 
But I think in tools, you know, I mean, at this stage, I’ve been at it for 40 years anyway, I’ve been in 40 years and thinking in terms tools. So my mind is a diagrammatic mind. I mean, I see experiences in terms of circles, arrows, squares. So when somebody is telling me about something, I’m seeing the relationships in the experience.
 
I don’t know. I mean, you’ve got a network of 400, close to 500 startup health companies in, what is it , 30 different countries, 26 different countries?
 
Steve Krein: It’s 30 now.
 
Dan Sullivan: There are 30 different countries, but when you hear someone talking about their Startup Health, you’ve got a series of criteria and checklists and say, “Yep, yep, understand that, Yeah, yeah.” You have an awareness what the entire health universe looks like. And you say, “Where’s that? Yeah, this sounds like a good startup.”
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Well, it’s actually about the innovator or the entrepreneur themselves. And so the question around when you put a tool in front of a client to complete, there’s a reaction. And I think there are some people take out their pen and they love it. And I noticed, and this is in my community as well, and some of it’s cultural, by the way, when you get outside of the US and you’re in certain places, people get uncomfortable thinking about their thinking.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, and first of all, being public about their thinking, you know, I mean, and being willing to share their experiences and you know what happened, You know, it’s like when you ask someone the R- Factor Question and they say, “Well, I don’t even know you. I can’t give you the answer to that question.” And you know, right away that they’ll never know you, you know, they’ll never know you.
 
Steve Krein: Well, it is a little bit like the R- Factor Question in response where the people will tell you about them by the way they respond to the question or the worksheet. So I think it’s an interesting thing because you end up, you know, obviously by the time you’re, you know, a year or two into Coach, if you don’t like tools, it’s not the right community for you. But if you love them, it’s a great place. But I think back to the Pocket Coach. And for many entrepreneurs, I’m sure when they get that, that’s a whole new world of dissecting, I think it was like the Top 20 Club and the Farm ... You’re talking about qualifying relationships, you’re talking about setting goals. And so there’s almost a little bit of a nursery school.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The other thing is people take to different tools and they don’t take to others. You know, there’s a real variety and you know, entrepreneurs, the more you get to know them as individuals, the more you realize what unique universes each entrepreneur actually lives in, you know, in terms of their Unique Ability and, you know, what the business actually is, what kind of product or service or experience that they’re creating and what kind of clientele they have and geographically where they are.
 
For example, we have a lot of British clients, but we have almost no European clients. I’m talking relatively speaking and strangely enough about half the European clients are from the former Soviet countries. Then somebody said to me, “Why are we getting so many people from Poland and Czech Republic?” And I said, “Well, they really know the difference between being trapped and being free. They really have a strong sense for freedom period and then independent freedom.
 
So I think that the big thing is that you’ve got to simplify an experience, and what you do is you just compare the going back to what we’ve already said, you have to go back and create a binary situation with what makes you a hundred percent happy and what makes you zero happy, and you have to simplify the whole situation between that and the R-Factor Question you’re using the future as the present and you’re using where you are as the past. So if we were in the future three years from now and we’re having this discussion, you’re looking back over the last three years back to today, what has to happen over those three years for you to feel happy with your experience?
 
I’ve created an instant binary using the future in the present as polar opposite, because clearly where they are today is what they have in the vision for three years down the road is incomparably bigger than where they are today. So I’ve created this tension using time as a tool.
 
Steve Krein: Well, it’s funny if you look behind you on your bookshelf: “Who Not Ho w”, tension between the two opposites. “Gap and Gain”, tension. “10 X 2 X”, tension. As you described that it’s clear in the formula that that’s the raw material. Right. And go back to VOTA but it actually is inherent in all of the framing of the books. Specifically with this book, though, what’s the hope here that when you finish reading this book, you know, I was thinking about geometry with life is was it everything? Everything’s not fair. Was it life’s not fair?
 
Dan Sullivan: Everything’s made up. Nobody’s in charge.
 
Steve Krein: Nobody’s in charge. Nobody’s in charge. Right. So you have this whole framing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Everything’s made up.
 
Steve Krein: That was a good one. And I think what you shared in that book, and I’m interested in how you’re thinking about this book. And have you done the whole outline for this book with a scorecard and everything yet?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, that comes at the end.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. So how are you thinking about when someone reads this book, what are you hoping occurs? What’s kind of the result, if you will, of them reading the book or listening to the book?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, it’s being written in such a way, because first of all, you’re just seeing my outline that I present to Shannon Waller. And Shannon interviews me on this. So we’re up to chapter four of the book this morning. We did two, three, and four this morning. And Shannon looks at my outline. She says, “Well, what’s an example of this and how does this work?” and everything else?
 
Steve Krein: incredible, by the way.
 
Dan Sullivan: She, she’s one of the most amazing interviewer because anything she doesn’t understand, she says, “Can you go deeper with this? Can you sort of explain?”
 
Steve Krein: Like, you know, when she does understand she asked that and it works really well. It’s authentic, her style and your bouncing back and forth, whether it’s on your podcast or your book interviews. By the way, go back to that tension representing the listener.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, she has an enormous sense of putting herself into someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know our stuff. And then, you know, “Well, can you give an example that people will understand?” I put myself totally in her control for the interview. And I said, “Whatever you think needs clarifying, Shannon, that’s where we’re going to go with this.”
 
And then our transcription plus the outline goes to our writer and editor team, who are brother and sister. And the editor has been with us for 20 years and she just knows my voice. She’s been editing me for 20 years and her brother will write the copy and she says, “Dan wouldn’t say it that way.” This is Kerri Morrison and Adam Morrison and they’re a team and they’ve been working eight years we’ve had them on the project, and he listens to it five times speed. He’s blind, He’s been blind since 15 and he’s in his late 30s. He’s got all sorts of technology that actually makes it easy for someone.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, I can do 2x speed, but you starts to sound like a duck after two.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, he does it at five times speed. And he says, “I don’t have it yet.” And he plays it again, five times speed. He says, “don’t have it yet.” And about the fourth time he goes through, he says, “I got it.” And then he just sits down and he writes it.
 
Dan Sullivan: The format is always the same . It’s four pages of copy for each thing. It’s got five subheads.
 
Steve Krein: I imagine when I get a new book from you and kind of understand why you wrote it, why did you want to write this one?
 
Dan Sullivan: we’re right in the midst of taking a huge jump and the introduction of AI is a crucial factor. So we’re going through Evan Ryan’s, he’s got a six -module, tomorrow’s number six. He does two things. One, he gets people feeling easy about AI that we’re not asking them to do this to replace themselves. And the second thing is that you just look at your existing work in the same way you would identify a ‘Who ‘, a personal human Who to do work that you don’t really like doing. And we’re constantly reinforcing Unique Ability, We want you spending more and more time in your Unique Ability, and we want your teamwork to be Unique Ability teamwork. So you got to spot other people who can do the work that you don’t like doing but they love doing it. And now we’re going to extend it to technology. Maybe there’s a technological Who can actually do it.
 
So we’re just going through this and what we’re shooting for is a 20% increase in overall productivity every year from this point forward by people using technological Whos. It’s getting more and more powerful.
 
But the other thing is that top line this is our best year, bottom line we took a real whack like everybody else did during COVID. We were down 40 percent in clients at the end of the first year and we regained half of that in next year 2021 and then this past year we were just back to where we were in 2019, and this year we’re past where we were the best ever. The three books are doing us an enormous amount of good. Not that people read the book and sign up, but it screens for great leads.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: You still have to sell peo- I mean, you’re charging 12,500 and people don’t just automatically sign up and spend 12,500. Everybody has to go through a D.O.S. conversation with our salespeople. We don’t accept them unless they’ve done their answers to the D.O.S., you know, as part of the sale, actually they’re getting value from the salesperson.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, so you put these out, give them away, and they become...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, so our primary one is it’s equal to each other. It’s our own team members to know why we do and we have a team member in on all of our interviews, Shannon and I do. And after every chapter we said, “Does this resonate with your experience?” And they said, “Yeah, totally resonates.” So we’re five for five. We’ve done the intro and four chapters. And Margaux is the person who, she makes sure that it gets recorded.
 
Steve Krein: You ever hear it not? Do they ever say it doesn’t?
 
Dan Sullivan: No. Well, this book in particular, because we’re talking about our teammates’ experience.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: And then the other one is the clients. I mean, it’s equal because the clients want to know how we do what we do backstage and we’re telling them, you know, and the really good ones will take the book and give it to their team members, you know. An d the ones who don’t give it to their team members-
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, it’s a good explanation.
 
Dan Sullivan: Probably going to fire their team and hire a new team, you know.
 
Steve Krein: So each one of your mass -market books, “10x”, “Who Not How”, and “Gap and Gain”, have come out of these little books. What’s the next one that’s kind of born out of the little books?
 
Dan Sullivan: It’s this one.
 
Steve Krein: Wait, you think this one’s going to be a mass -market? Really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. I think people who are not experienced with Coach when they see this, they say, “What kind of organization is this?” You know, because you know yourself, if you spot any incongruity between the way people present themselves front stage, but that’s not the way it is backstage. It lessens your appreciation and respect.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, that’s maybe a great place to kind of wrap up this episode. I could talk about this for hours with you, Dan.
 
It’s really fascinating how, I mentioned this earlier, you become very transparent over the last three or four books with the topics and how they’re kind of what’s going on in your head, the origin stories and helping piece together why you do what you do. And I think the type of “school”, quote unquote, you’ve built, you know, it’s a coaching program, but it’s a school. It’s got a certain style. It’s not for everybody, but those who are a good fit with not only who you want to be a hero to and help, but those that this really serves—coming back to Ned Halliwell’s thing, like the ADD mindset of like really helping get clarity and very, by the way, very quick. Like some of these are like, you’re done the tool in less than 10 minutes. Sometimes you’re sprinting in a workshop. And I know that sometimes we’re 10, 15 minutes in, we’re done the tool.
 
Dan Sullivan: I shoot for 10 minutes, maximum 10 minutes to they can start talking about what they wrote down.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, I think that’s another interesting dimension as we wrap up because I hadn’t, I hadn’t appreciated the boundaries you put on it, what your recipe is, But maybe use that to wrap up the framing is but what’s your recipe here you talked about a lot of them around a need grabbing the past the future VOTA . You just mentioned one it’s quick, you know if you have to spend too long on it too long for the workshop I know, especially in the connection calls, you’re sharing a tool we’re in sharing breakouts within 10, 12 minutes.
 
Dan Sullivan: That’s 10 minutes. 10 minutes was my goal that they’re in the breakout.
 
Steve Krein: Anything we haven’t covered today?
 
Dan Sullivan: The other thing is the binary effect, you know, that, I mean, “Best and Worst Result”, basically, that creates a tension immediately in the person’s mind. Well, you know, for entrepreneurs, 60-40 isn’t good enough changing their behavior. You know, it’s got to be close to 100% to change their behavior, the clarity about a new decision or a new action. And my sense is that entrepreneurs are the fast people on the planet. They’re the fast thinkers, they’re the fast deciders, they’re the fast action takers, they’re the fast achievers. And therefore, if you’re coaching entrepreneurs, what you’re doing has to be really fast.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, As you bring that up, I was thinking about we are in the world of innovators, a lot of academic founders who are building companies. And a lot of the speed at which academia works, research and development works, are years and years and years. And I think there’s a lot of people get used to that pace. And then as soon as you get involved in the entrepreneurial side of things, the business side of things, and a lot of our teams, probably a third of our teams have co-founders from scientific or academic backgrounds that are from the bench labs or from university. And there’s a real different kind of pace that they have to get used to.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh yeah.
 
Steve Krein: The speed is a really, really significant determinant of either get on that bus or you don’t. But if you’re operating the way that world works, very frustrating for everybody.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I grew up in the same town that Edison, Thomas Edison was born. Edison, I think, is the great creator of modern research and development based entrepreneurism. He understood stock markets, he understood marketing, he understood demonstrating things so that people could understand what his invention was. And his first invention that he actually sold, which was in the day, I think it was in the 1860s or 1870s for $10,000, which is in the millions of dollars, was for the gold exchange in New York. All the ticker tapes were Morse code and they had Morse code readers and he created an invention that just did it in English and it gave the people who were taking advantage of it a three second advantage in bidding and that just changed the gold exchange.
 
Steve Krein: It’s a shortcut.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, it’s a shortcut. So entrepreneurs are always introducing shortcuts. And if you have entrepreneurs, then the way that you communicate to them has to be a shortcut. Everything’s gotta be a shortcut.
 
Steve Krein: Morse code. Well, I’ll share my biggest insight, Dan, and I’d love to hear yours from reflecting on it. But I always learn something from our discussions. But today, I have a deeper appreciation for and now I’m staring at your books behind you and now see it so clearly that tension, “10x 2x”, “Gap Gain”, “Who Not How”, VOTA. It’s literally in plain sight and I have a deep appreciation for the gift you have of always being able to make sure that those are both present in everything you do. So really enjoyed this conversation. What was your biggest insight?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing was that it’s time for a quarterly book called, How to Create Thinking Tools. I’ll get this transcribed because I’ve never responded to anyone or told anyone. And I discovered some things along the way. You know, I created a lot of tension. There’s a tension that without the tension, there’s no creative breakthrough.
 
Steve Krein: Yeah, Yeah. Well, as I think about how often we talk about a future without talking about a past as raw material or that tension, the brain just needs that. I told you this on yesterday’s connection call. I read 10 X a year ago in the galley.
 
I read the small book 10 years ago, whenever that was, I remember the original 10x Mind Expander and like the you know, iteration of tool. But I had a new appreciation for that tension when you really flipped the 80/20 to what you have to get rid of and keep. And again, just maybe it’s at 80th time I heard it, but it finally sunk in this notion of removing, you know, in stopping 80% of what you’re doing if you want a 10 X and the opposition was really clear. So I love this conversation. Look forward to reading the finished book and see you on the next episode of the Free Zone Frontier podcast.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, thanks a lot, Steve.
 
Steve Krein: Thanks Dan.