Author: John Jantsch / Source: Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Have you ever had a hunch about something or you saw something and you went “Gosh, somebody needs to make that or fix that or do something about that?”

There’s this unmet need. A lot of times data isn’t available for that hunch or for that unmet need and a lot of great business owners … a lot of entrepreneurs over the years have just gone with their gut, gone with a hunch, and it’s worked out spectacularly. I think that there are qualities of people who have those hunches, that do come up with winners, and on this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, we visit with Bernadette Jiwa. She’s done a bunch of research on this idea of a hunch and has a book called “Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights Into the Next Big Thing”, and I think there’s some tremendous lessons and some tremendous exercises in this thinking, so check it out.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Bernadette Jiwa. She is a recognized global authority on the role of story in business, innovation and marketing and the author of five bestselling books on marketing and brand storytelling, and today, we are going to talk about her newest book called “Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights Into the Next Big Thing”. So Bernadette, welcome back.

Bernadette Jiwa: Thanks, John. It’s a thrill to be back talking to you.

John Jantsch: So essentially, what we’re talking about now is using intuition to make decisions. Did I sum the whole book up?

Bernadette Jiwa: You summed it up really well.

John Jantsch: How does that play when you go into to talk to somebody and say, “Just trust your gut.” I mean that’s kind of, that’s another … I don’t know if that translates to Australia. That’s a very common US idea of business owners making decisions, just kind of on a hunch, as you’ve put in the title. How do you crystallize that idea and make it more than just luck?

Bernadette Jiwa: Well, there are couple of things, John, that I want to start with, which is you’re not ignoring data, it’s just that there are different kinds of data. There are data all around us. People who … like Jeff Bezos or Howard Schultz, they’re not ignoring data they’re just possibly not looking at historical data or data in the sense that we think about which is in a spread sheet. So there is a piece to it, which is noticing problems, noticing what’s happening and that shouldn’t be enough seeing what’s not happening that should be and looking at patterns with practice.

There are three traits that I’ve, in my research, noticed and uncovered that these kind of entrepreneurs have and their curiosity, empathy and imagination. So it’s not just a lucky guess. It’s not just a case of crystal ball gazing or predicting which numbers are going to come up in a lottery this weekend. It’s a little bit more nuanced than that.

John Jantsch: Well I’m glad you brought data up because I think that some of the biggest hunches, if you will, actually either didn’t have data to inform them or they kind of said “You know what? The data’s wrong”. Would you agree?

I mean, you have a load of examples in there and it seems to me like in a number of the examples they kind of said “You know what? I see this differently”.

Bernadette Jiwa: Well, let’s think about one example. You know, there’s plenty of common ones. You know, the big ones. You know, the Apple’s, the Uber’s, the Facebook’s, the Google’s. No data for those. You know they just had to go with their guts that they were on to something.

But one of the examples in the book is the woman who invented disposable diapers. She went to the manufacturers and said “Look. This is what’s happening. What we’ve currently got is a solution that’s not working, it’s leaking, it’s giving baby’s nappy rash.” And what they said to her was “We don’t need this product. We don’t want this product. People are buying our product and they’re really happy with it”. Well, there was no alternative so of course they were buying the product.

So we can look at data and skew it, if you like, to our world view.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that’s interesting because there are a lot of industries. The one that I like to pick on all the time is the newspaper industry and how, you know, they were … the classified ads. That was their cash cow. Nobody was going to take that away from them. You look up today and they don’t even exist anymore or maybe are a meer shell because of Craigslist and other things that came around.

So I want … my question is then, do you constantly need to be, kind of, applying this idea to what could happen, you know, regardless of where we are today?

Bernadette Jiwa: Yeah. It’s a couple of things. You’re looking for what’s going on right now. Looking at the patterns that you’re seeing around you and that takes practice. So it’s not just “I’ve seen this today, I think I’m on to something”. It’s “Okay. That’s interesting. I think I’m going to keep looking at that and keep digging there”.

And then also, you know, the thing about entrepreneurship is you have to take a leap by definition into the unknown. You have to do something that you’re not quite certain of. We’ve fallen into this trap, I think, of relying on data. Almost using it as a crutch in all kinds of ways, in our marketing and our innovation to I guess mitigate against having been wrong.

John Jantsch: Well, yeah. I mean, certainly a lot of business leaders lean on the data to not have to actually make that risky decision.

Bernadette Jiwa: And every decision comes with risk. Absolutely every one.

I read something recently and I put this in the book late, which was somebody said when they saw Elon Musk doing something incredible, again, and it succeeding. “Elon Musk’s greatest strength is that he’s fearless” and absolutely not. He’s not fearless. You can’t similarly be invested in something and not care about it in the same breath. It’s not that he’s fearless, it’s just that he’s practiced at taking those leaps that perhaps other people wouldn’t take, and sometimes they work.

John Jantsch: Well so, let’s stay there for a minute because obviously you have a lot of examples of people that did this and it worked. But I would suggest there are probably millions and millions of examples of people that did this and it was a miserable failure.

Bernadette Jiwa: Absolutely. And the same with data driven innovation. You know, making predictions in the election didn’t … in the U.S. election didn’t work out even though we had a lot of data.

There’s a story I didn’t include in the book, which I should’ve done regarding that one. Just a couple of weeks before the election my husband and I were visiting New York. He was at a Behavioral Summit where people like Nate Silver and Nobel Laureate’s and super clever academics were speaking about the election and saying, you know, it was 99% certain that Hillary … they didn’t say 99 but it was, there was a high probability that Hillary was going to win the election. And the day after the event we were taking a walk outside the Rockefeller Center and we met a guy selling hats emblazoned with the names of the candidates and he said to us “You know Trump’s going to win this by a landslide” and we looked at him as though he was crazy and he said “I cannot keep stock of these Trump hats. They’re just selling like hot cakes.” and he was having conversations with people on the street. There was data in those stories and we missed it.

John Jantsch: Can people get better at this? So in other words, can somebody say “Oh okay. I need to use this kind of mindfulness and curiosity and empathy”. I mean, is that something you could teach a business leader and entrepreneur you think?

Bernadette Jiwa: I teach my clients this all the time. I invite them to do this all the time.

One of the case studies in the book,…

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