Day 156: Michael Bungay Stanier
“I think about design and elegance because that’s in part what design is, is a way of going how … it’s an active choice as to how do I see the world, how do I bring myself into the world. That’s a source of inspiration for me.”
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Toni Reece: Hi Michael, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Michael Bungay Stanier: Sure. My name is Michael, Michael Bungay Stanier. My company is called Box of Crayons, and we say at Box of Crayons we help organizations and people in organizations do less good work and more great work.
Okay, so introducing yourself is always tough, right, because it always sounds like you’re beating your chest particularly loudly to say “Look what a flawless and deeply interesting person I am.” So here are five things about me, which I’ll just try and make up on the spot. Here we go.
Toni: Okay.
Michael: So I’m Australian by birth and won a Rhodes Scholarship, and the best thing about when … the two best things about winning a Rhodes Scholarship were, one, it stopped me becoming a lawyer because I had done a law degree in Australia and, two, I managed to meet my wife, my Canadian wife, studying at Oxford.
Second thing about me: I finished law school being sued by one of my law lecturers for defamation for $50,000.
Third thing to tell you about me: I’ve written a few books. One is called Get Unstuck & Get Going on the Stuff That Matters, and the other is called, and is newly out, called Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork and Start the Work That Matters. I’ve created a bunch of other bits and pieces including some popular internet movies, the most popular of which is called “The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun.”
The fourth thing about me: on my first day of work ever when I finally staggered out of University, I was sitting on a hill in England eating my sandwich that I brought from home with me. It’s a lovely summer day, sort of early summer in England, and this cute dog cuddled up to me with big brown dog-like eyes, and it lifted its leg and it peed on me.
Toni: Oh dear!
Michael: So that was a metaphor for something about starting my working career.
The fifth thing about me is I guess I’ve been a coach for about … a professional coach for about eight or nine years. I’ve trained with CTI. I’ve spoken at a few of their … like three or four of the ICF conferences and quite a few of the ICF chapters.
There we go, that’s a random mix of stuff.
Toni: Well thank you so very much. I think on the Get Inspired! Project we haven’t had such a unique introduction. As we’ve talked about, the Get Inspired! Project is all about inspiration. And there’s four questions that we want to ask. and we can clarify in between, but when you think about that word inspiration, Michael, who do you think you inspire and how do you do that?
Michael: That is actually quite a tough question to answer, so all I can go on is data that I hear back from people, people who write about me or tweet about me or say nice things about me, and it’s really a pretty eclectic bunch of people. I would describe them as smart, restless people who are asking questions and who are looking to take responsibility for the life that they’re leading.
So that’s a very broad brush and it really means that, you know, I get emails and very nice notes from people who are young, you know, in their teens, students in University, folks going through middle age which, you know, twenties to seventies and the people who are older than that and who are … you know, I get regular people who are going “I’m 78 and I’m striking out doing something interesting, and I’m looking forward to finding out what I’m going to do when I grow up.”
So it’s … the truth of the matter is the stuff that I produce, which is often how I touch people through my movies and my books and the like, I do it in part because I’m inspired by it and I’m lit up by what I do and I’m excited by what I create. I quite frankly think the stuff that I do is like incredibly cool, and I love that.
You know, when I design the movies and I have the guy who animates them create them for me and he comes back and he shows me what he’s done, and I’m like I’m going to wet my pants because I’m so excited about what this is, and I actually think less about “Well, who am I trying to target and who will this touch?” and I more go “This is great work for me. I’m just … if nobody sees this, I’m so deeply proud of it that it’s a worthwhile endeavor.”
Toni: So the way that you inspire others is really to demonstrate that passion, excitement, and joy that you have for the great work that you do and that people seeing that — and you can certainly hear it in your voice as well — inspires others. That’s what I’m hearing that you do that helps to inspire others.
Michael: Well you know, if I have any gift apart from relentless self-promotion – it’s a joke – if I have a gift it is probably … What I like to do is try and take concepts and make them simple and practical and accessible and lighten them up a little bit. So really, that’s the heart of where I work in terms of the process, which is making wisdom accessible and useable for people.
Toni: So on that point then, making wisdom accessible, which is a fantastic thought, how do you think that it helps other people to explore their own potential?
Michael: Well, I guess this is how I hope it works, and really, this is preaching to the choir because it’s a restatement of what I think coaching can do when it’s at its … when it’s working well and at its best. You know, people’s lives are so busy these days, and people are so committed to all the stuff that’s going on around them that it’s fairly easy to wake up one day and go “Oh my God, I’m old – what happened? How did I get here? Whose plan was it for me to end up living this life?”
Part of what I think I try and do is, in effect, almost be like a little pause button in the busyness of people’s lives. So whether it’s the movies or books or the coaching or the courses that I run, really all I do is create some space for people to stop and reflect for a piece, and really that’s a description, a definition, of what coaching is about is a place to stop, reflect, see new perspectives, decide on what the next action might be rather than just sort of blindly rush into it.
Toni: Thank you for that. Let’s talk about you now, Michael. What inspires you?
Michael: Well, gosh – there’s sort of a deeper well that I draw from and then a range of … what’s the right metaphor for this … “well” is a bad metaphor, but it’s like there’s a constant, deeper source that I draw from, and then there’s a range of other less deep things that continue to provoke and inspire me. So you know, when I talk about what the heck I’m doing, I often come back to this as a sort of statement of my mission which is to infect a billion people with the possibility virus.
Toni: Oh, fantastic!
Michael: Now, here’s my thinking behind that. My bigger quest is to have people take responsibility for their lives, to recognize that they’re constantly at choice and sort of have them make the best possible choices. Now, you can’t actually tell people to make the best possible choices, because that sort of contradicts itself. So what you need to do is create the space that best allows people to step forward into that place of what Peter Block would call “assuming responsibility for your own freedom.”
So my theory is that if I can help people understand the art of creating possibilities, see what possibilities are out there and create better possibilities, then I hope they’re going to make better choices and live richer, deeper, more impactful lives.
The point about being a virus is … the metaphor … why I like that as a metaphor is that it means that I don’t have to be in the center of the activity. In fact, I kind of create stuff that will spread on its own and work without me because, believe you me, I love the spotlight, but I know that I have limited impact if everything has to flow through me for it to have an impact.
I can’t remember what the question was, but that’s my answer.
Toni: Well the question was – which was a great answer – the question still is, what do you need to be inspired? And it really does go back to the work that you create, and I guess just to the point here that you made for yourself, have you always been this way? Have you always come to the table thinking that this is the way it should be, that there are possibilities and options and we deserve the right to do great work?
Michael: No. You know, there’s a quote I love which is “Inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense.” Just like everybody else on this call or like the vast majority of people, quite frankly, I stumbled into things and out of things and bumped into things and slowly have got clearer and clearer about what I’m good at, what impact I want to have on the world, and how I can actually nourish and bring those skills to the world.
So I’m not actually a big one for, you know, vast, elaborate plans. Like five years ago, I had no … there is no way I could have told you that this would be my life and, in five years’ time, no idea what I will be doing. But I suspect that as you get older you get wiser, and you get a little clearer about “I know what I’m good at, I know what lights me up.” I know that will evolve and change over time, that there’s some deep, deep rhythms that will be part of me, and it will be about teaching and creating and trying to keep a sense of lightness and fun and trying to have a sense of generosity. I mean, really, I’m just, you know, speaking to some of my deeper values.
Toni: Absolutely. So Michael let me ask you, are there certain tools or things that you reach for on a consistent basis when maybe you – I don’t know if you ever do – but if you ever reach a point where you’re like “You know, I’m looking for a little inspiration here.” What do you tend to reach for?
Michael: You know, I’m a glutton for just sucking other people for inspiration, and almost certainly almost everything I’ve created is just plagiarizing somebody else’s stuff. So you know, there’s a great quote that says “originality is just unacknowledged plagiarism,” and I believe that. It’s like, I know everything that I do is old wine in new bottles, and so part of my job is to find the most elegant, most funky, most beautiful bottle and see if I can offer that up to the world.
So, I read really widely. You know, on my shelves are science books and business books and self-development books and young adult literature and grown-up literature. My university degree … I actually wrote articles on James Joyce and Ulysses, so reading broadly is really important to me.
The other place that I think is really important is actually the world of design, because in a world where information is now free and there’s no value in it … in fact, it’s not valued less, it’s actually negative value because it’s actually overwhelming for people. Creating information and sharing information is not enough. Actually, what you want is a sense of beauty and elegance and design into the way you bring information into the world because, in its true design, that information becomes wisdom.
I don’t know if that’s true; I just made that up on the spot, but it sounds good, doesn’t it, so we’ll run with that.
Toni: I wrote it down; it’s going to work for me.
Michael: Exactly.
Toni: Fantastic! I really like the “old wine in the new bottle” too. I thought that was pretty fantastic.
Michael: People should know that if they’re listening, they should not take anything I say at face value, because some of the stuff I’ve thought about, some of the stuff I’m making up as I go along. Put an asterisk next to everything going “This may or may not be true.”
I’m a believer that design adds value and design creates attraction and compels. So you know, I subscribe to design magazines, and I read a lot about design, and I think about design and elegance because that’s in part what design is, is a way of going how … it’s an active choice as to how do I see the world, how do I bring myself into the world. That’s a source of inspiration for me.
And then we have little things like there’s this awesome little creativity tool called … by a guy called Brian Eno, who anybody with a musical background will probably recognize that name, and Brian Eno created something called the oblique strategies – oblique strategies – which consists of about 60 cards, and they’ve just got little strategies on them that Brian Eno used to sort of unblock himself. So I often just pull out a card and use that to help me think differently.
So you know, I pulled out one now and it says “Always first steps.” And then, another card … “Try faking it.” And then a third card “Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.” So when I feel stuck, that’s often something I turn to to actually help me think differently.
Toni: Well thank you for that, and I think you’ve answered the fourth question in describing what inspires you, but I’m going to ask it anyway and see what you come up with. And that is, what do you do now to continuously explore this beautiful potential so that you can keep creating the work that you’re doing?
Michael: Well, it’s in part to try and live a life of some degree of self-examination. You know, I preach “Do less good work and do more great work,” so it’s useful if I practice that at least a little bit. So that’s part of what I do is spend time thinking about “Well, what do I want to do, and where’s my edge, and how do I step up to that?”
You know, I’m hungry for experience. I mean, yesterday I signed up for a tea-pouring course. Now I have no really idea what this is, but it just strikes me that there’s something interesting in learning how to pour tea. I’m sure I’m not going to be the most stylish tea pourer in the world, but there’s something about you step outside your domain of expertise and practice being a beginner, because from the place of being a beginner, vast amounts of things are possible.
Toni: Oh, that is fantastic – “Practice being a beginner.” I would certainly, and I think everyone on the call, would love to touch base with you later to find out what the heck the tea-pouring conference was all about.
Michael: Just remember, everything I’m saying has an asterisk saying “This may or may not be true,” so don’t take it as truth, but it might be something to think about.
Toni: Well, Michael, thank you so very much for answering these questions for the Get Inspired! Project.
Michael: My pleasure.
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For more information about Michael Bungay Stanier: www.domoregreatwork.com
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