Tonya J. Long: 0:07

Welcome home, friends. I'm Tonya Long, and this RESET where where purpose meets possibility. Each week, we share conversations with thought leaders, innovators and the dreamers and doers who are reshaping the future of work, technology, longevity and purpose. Whether you're navigating AI's impact, reimagining your career or searching for deeper meaning, you're in the right place. So settle in, open your mind and let's explore what happens when purpose meets possibility. Hello and welcome to RESET where purpose meets possibility. Today's guest really does embody the essence of what it means to reset.

Tonya J. Long: 0:58

I only met this guest a few weeks ago and was so impressed with her story, and I'm thrilled that she agreed to join us for today's episode, so that we can understand better that resets come in all forms. She's a Stanford-trained mathematician and at one point and I would argue still she epitomizes Silicon Valley success. But her life changed dramatically. She had a violent attack occur and it left her with a traumatic brain injury and it left her with something called enterograde amnesia that I won't even try to explain, but through those circumstances it led her into the path for the rest of her life. It led her into the path for the rest of her life. So, instead of letting this setback define her, J transformed this new reality into what I think is a remarkable approach to business innovation.

Tonya J. Long: 1:57

So, through J company Prototype Thinking Labs, she's helped organizations like Google, Asana and my personal favorite, Lego, save millions. Her journey from delivering groceries after grad school to becoming a sought-after innovation consultant it is more than inspiring. It's a masterclass in turning limits into advantages. J, I am just really excited to have you here. I adore you. Every conversation

Tonya J. Long: 2:31

we've had has been filled with meaning and with hope, because you always are looking toward the solution. Before we go deep, tell us what you've been working on. Before we go deep, tell us what you've been working on.

J Li: 2:45

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I was really excited to get invited to talk about what accessibility looks like for everyone, and I know when we met, we instantly got on like a house on fire. So when I heard that you were working on this project, I'm really happy to be here and contribute how I can.

Tonya J. Long: 3:07

I'm mindful that it is awkward to talk about the parts of our past we'd like to forget. I really am, but can you take us back to the time before your injury?

J Li: 3:30

for your injury, because I want the audience to see how things looked for you as a Stanford graduate, yeah, and I will also say I'm very happy and very open to share about this, and I think that a lot of disabled people are as well, because for us it's actually it's not as big of a deal, right, it's just kind of something in the course of our lives. So please feel free to ask me about anything. I came up through life as kind of your classic Asian American academic hotshot. When I was young, I was at the top of my state. I ended up going to Stanford, I studied math and I had the fortune of being born with an eidetic memory, so I just pretty much never learned study habits my whole life. And then at some point you do math and it gets like more advanced.

J Li: 4:13

I was somebody who, like saw all of these patterns in my head, right, my whole life I had been told that I was going to be a good Asian girl and I was going to become, you know, kind of a technical professor, right of something scientific. This whole time in my heart I actually really loved business and that was something that no one in my family had ever touched. I have little kids now and going back and thinking about my favorite books as a kid. They were all like little kid versions of business books where, like, there's somebody who was like selling toothpaste, right. So that had always been like kind of a part of my mind. But I followed the academic route and, um, you know, and I was honestly, I was kind of a dick about the whole thing. Right, you grow up and you're like, oh, I'm smarter than everyone else, you know, oh, I don't need to listen to everyone else because I'm the person who gets to the answer fastest. Um, and then what happened was that I ended up harling. I was like, okay, well, what if I take the math and then try to go to business school? So I got into a business program at Penn and it was a master's grad program and on the night before classes were supposed to start I got mugged.

J Li: 5:28

The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital, being incredibly confused, and apparently what happened was that somebody had snuck up to me as I was walking down the street and hit me really hard in the back of my head and knocked me out and, you know, grabbed my things, and then so I woke up in some hospital. I'd never been there before. I just moved to a new city for school, right. I knew almost no one, and I just remember waking up with a strong sense that everything was going to be different, like this extremely deep, compelling sense. And apparently what happened, um, is that I had, uh, a really bad concussion, and um, getting knocked out is not what it's like in the movies, you don't just like fully recover. And it turned out that I ended up with a bunch of cognitive disabilities, one of which was amnesia it's the way more common, way less exciting form of amnesia, which is called interrogated amnesia. You have trouble making new memories.

J Li: 6:29

Suddenly I was in this completely new environment, in a new city, with no support network, and doing something I'd never done before. I had a mountain of student loans and I was about to enter grad school and I couldn't do basic things like read. I had this pile of books that I had to study because I was taking classes, right, but by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I would forget what happened at the beginning of the sentence. I'd have to read the same sentence like nine or ten times, very slowly, to retain it, to move to the next sentence and then by the time I got to the bottom of the page I would forget the top of the page.

J Li: 7:07

Suddenly I had no information around me in the world. I was just incredibly bewildered, right. I only kind of had the information that stayed with me in bits and pieces and I was in a completely unfamiliar environment and obviously I couldn't do math or computer science anymore and I still can't. I've done a lot of rehab on it, like now I can read, for example. I did get mostly better over like the five years that followed. But there are some things that I still can't do. I still have terrible short-term memory, I still have to take notes on everything and I'm still a slow reader and there's no way I can hold like a very concrete mental model in my head enough to code anymore so you were quite young, without a lot of life experience to fall back on, to know, to, to inherently know everything would be okay and yet, and yet, you moved things forward.

Tonya J. Long: 8:05

I can't imagine what it would be like to have all those skills and have my life fully in front of me and then have that summarily shifted. So what was the hardest part?

J Li: 8:27

of realizing that you were not going to be able to function for what you'd been training for for your whole life, so 20-something years.

J Li: 8:31

Honestly, it was kind of an identity moment, right, because I'd spent most of my life doing what other people wanted me to do and the one thing I had going for me was that I was smart, right, this is kind of what happens if you haven't built the relationships and you haven't built, like, the empathy and the connection with the world, and so up until that point, I wasn't a great person, and the thing I had going for me was that I was smart.

J Li: 9:05

Suddenly, like, I was not able to perform, you know, at even a really basic level, right, and so that meant like, who was I and what was my place in the world anymore? And also, what was I going to do? Because at the time, I was estranged from my family as well, right, I had no support network. All I had was registration as a student, which got me health insurance and the ability to get these student loans, and I had to turn this into, you know, a future for myself, using, you know, like the whatever my brain had to go for me, right, and I could never get a job again using anything that I was trained in. I had nothing to fall back on.

Tonya J. Long: 9:46

What, what, what an incredible experience you talked about when I met you. You talked about delivering groceries and I can't imagine how that would feel. You'd been a hot shot. You use those words and I think those are. You'd been a real hot shot, attending the best schools. Looking at this, really brainiac experience and suddenly your brain was not such a golden ticket for your future Seemingly at least, not the way you'd trained it to be. What was going on?

J Li: 10:20

I mean, I think that's absolutely accurate. I did pretty much the only thing I could. I just signed up for everything. I was like, well, at this point I'm equally bad at all things I do. So let me just like the only thing I can do is try to just get more life experience in whatever I can touch so that I can start getting more like kind of visceral visibility in how the world works right. So I studied a bit of everything I sign up for, all of these random, unrelated like projects. You know I deliberately put myself in situations, um, in which I would bomb right. Like you know, I signed up to do like this kind of um. It was like this consulting project that through the school to help underserved students, like in North Philly, right, I signed up to volunteer on the sustainability partnership.

J Li: 11:09

I was able to get into things right. I mean, from my point of view, I was just kind of running experiments right, and I started like learning how to perceive things differently. I started learning how to, you know, notice what was right in front of me, because that was the only data I had access to. Part of not being able to keep the whole picture in my head anymore was that I also couldn't keep my assumptions in my head anymore. I had to actually get really, really good at listening to the humans in front of me to figure out what was going on and what was important. Right, you've spoken a few times about you know this was a really challenging moment, but for me, I am really really grateful that it happened, because it forced me to learn to be a good person. Right, it forced me to approach the world with humility and say, like, what is the best that I can do and what is the best I can bring forth in this moment, even if it's 5% of what anybody else is doing, and what is the most that I can hear that other people need in this moment? And I think that was something that had been very, very missing for me. So I just learned to be incredibly sensitive to signals based on tiny amounts of data. Right, like, I got really.

J Li: 12:19

Like you know how some people say, like you meet a person and you get a red flag about them and you don't know why, but there's something about them that tells you to stay away. I started developing this flag system about everything. Right, like I'm having an interaction and like this is a little flag that indicates that this person actually wants to engage more. This is a flag that indicates there's something more complicated going on. So if I get myself into that complicated situation then I'm going to have to like learn the dynamics of the situation before I can navigate it. You know, when I met you the first few sentences you said I was like OK, what are the flags I have about this lady? She is extremely confident, right. She knows she's used to occupying a large amount of space and she has a very like thorough mental model of what's going on.

J Li: 13:08

You came across as someone who enjoyed shepherding other people. So I'm like okay, you know you have a preset path that you enjoy like shepherding people on. So it's not a perfect match to the path that I wanted to go on at that talk that evening, but also I had no other paths available to me because I was in a new environment. I didn't socially know anyone, so let me just run with yours, because you kind of have a vision about how everything fits together, right? And so I just started noticing all of these leading indicators, right?

J Li: 13:43

Or things like if somebody tries to say something to me four times, if somebody says the same thing to me four times, it means that there's something utterly essential about what's going on that I'm missing. So then I just drop everything that I'm working on, all of my assumptions, and go oh, I've noticed that you said this one random sentence to me four times and even though that sentence didn't mean anything to me or it didn't seem like the point, it sounds like this is actually the punchline for you. So let me figure out what it is for you. So, like I started seeing all of these doors about how you unpack things Right and that allowed me to navigate, like and and really really prioritize where I spent my mental effort and where I spent my social effort, because I couldn't spend it everywhere, I only had a tiny amount, but I was always spending on it in the most optimal place.

Tonya J. Long: 14:31

How remarkable that you shifted from I don't know that math is binary, but math is formulas and rules, and you rewrote the rules of how you interoperate with humans, which you know. We have patterns, which you've learned to declare, that you see so that you can respond to them effectively. But we're pretty unpredictable because you know a math theory pretty much holds but each person is very unique in how the same situations will cause them to interact. So you've developed a model for doing that, which I find just amazing, and then I think you've turned that model into your. You talked about being in school and you had a few things that were resources for you, so that you could move into you know your next chapters Well.

Tonya J. Long: 15:32

You've turned this mental modeling into one of many elements you do to solve business problems, so you've adapted your disability to become something that can be taught to others with what you've learned. Like I listen to you, reflect on how I showed up and I'm like I don't think as much as I should about how other people show up and what that means about them, and I think that's a remarkable skill. When did you first start realizing that these adaptations for your disability would would be useful in business?

J Li: 16:04

Well, that took a while, Okay. So I mean, at first really for me like in my head it was all to survive, right, and like I tried doing my thesis on it and it was kind of okay. But then I managed to reconnect with some people in my life and I moved back to the Bay Area and I actually had a couple of pretty moved back to the Bay Area and I actually had a couple of pretty rough years in the Bay Area, right, I was still very much in recovery. I needed to make a living right and I got myself in this situation where, like all of my friends had moved on to go become managers at Google, and this was like in the heyday of tech, where they had these glamorous tech lives. And this was like in the heyday of tech where they had these glamorous tech lives.

Tonya J. Long: 16:48

We're still in the heyday of tech.

J Li: 16:50

This was in the amazing cafeterias. Heyday of tech.

Tonya J. Long: 16:55

Oh, I've been in those cafeterias. They are quite a production. So you came back during the heyday.

J Li: 17:07

And this was during the heyday of tech right, the heyday of tech employment right, where people like love lived these luxurious lives in google cafeterias and, you know, worked for all of these major tech companies that were wooing them right, and I managed to get a part-time job as a delivery driver for this startup right. It was, you know, before doDash, but it was like an early version of that, where it was like matching home chefs. I was the worst driver in the fleet because they gave us little paper handouts at the time with our routes every day and I couldn't read the handout, so I would like be the last driver out the gate because it would take me like five minutes to copy the address into my phone. But then gradually I was able to work my way into the back office and I started learning about the way that this lady had started the startup. The company was called Gobble and the founder was Ushma Garg. She's also from Stanford.

Tonya J. Long: 18:00

I tried a few home delivery services at one point in my life. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure they're one that I tried a few home delivery services at one point in my life yeah, and I'm pretty sure they're one that I tried. So it's a small world with early adopters and people who want to try new things. But you delivered with gobble.

J Li: 18:12

Yeah, who knows?

Tonya J. Long: 18:13

Maybe I deliver to you. You might have. I'm downtown San Jose, so you might have.

J Li: 18:18

Yeah, so I was, you know, working back office and doing like chef, liaisons and stuff, and it was actually like I really appreciated Ushua in this company because I think she gave me the safe space to start working again and to start practicing my rehabilitation again and so I recovered faster working for that company than I had previously. Right, and especially in the academic environment. We were working late one night and she was telling me her founder story, um and uh, so, and the way that she had started this company was that, um, she was really hungry and so she missed her dad's home cooking. So she posted on craigslist and looked for a bunch of home chefs willing to do home cooked food and then she put together the menu from them. And then she called and emailed and messaged all her friends and she was like this is the menu for this week. Who wants in? Right, and then people, more and more people started trying to join and she'd get week over week growth and she'd be doing it posting on Craigslist, right.

Tonya J. Long: 19:22

I love your energy. I think that your energy, you are so you're not just excited, but you're so sharing the hopefulness you had and and this, this ability to to not look back, just look forward that is, I think, truly remarkable. And we all get into dark moments of uncertainty and, you know, maybe that's a good question for you is did you ever have dark moments of uncertainty? Because just listening to you certainty, because just listening to you, it was all about regenerating not just the connections, the neural connections, but regenerating your life.

J Li: 20:14

I I'm just not much of a look back person, honestly, like I, for me, I'm just part of it is just I'm too relentlessly curious, right, like I'm the sort of person who, like you know, goes on vacation and all our vacation plans fall through, and like we're, like you know, stuck in Rome after like a you know 15-hour flight with like no hotel to go to, and like night is falling, and I'm like this is an adventure. I wonder what's going to happen, happen, you know, um, and so that's kind of like how I felt about it. I was like, well, I mean, this is different, right, like you know, I wonder what's gonna happen.

J Li: 20:55

And then, after I did it once, now, every time I'm in a new and messy situation, I'm like, well, I rebuilt my brain once before, right. I know that if I just put myself in a situation like I know, I'm like, well, I rebuilt my brain once before, right, I know that if I just put myself in a situation like I know how I get through it, right, I just try some stuff until I learn how to learn, and then I'll learn, and then I'll do it right, and it's this kind of three-step process. But at the beginning, when it's really like you know, when you have no idea what's going to happen, that's because you haven't done anything yet.

Tonya J. Long: 21:25

Hmm, I'm letting that sink in. Okay, I love that, I I maybe I need a tattoo, I should, but but seriously, that's, I mean that's, that is wisdom.

J Li: 21:41

Okay, can I tell you the way I actually secretly looked at this Tell?

Tonya J. Long: 21:45

me, tell me, how did you look at this?

J Li: 21:48

So I am a role playing gamer and I totally looked at it as leveling up and D&D leveling up? Yeah, because in gaming, right, you start out bad at everything and then you fight monsters that are your challenge rating right. There are things that are the right size for challenge size for you to tackle and there are things that are too big for you to tackle, right. So if you are a level one player, you cannot go fight a challenge rating 10 monster. You will just immediately, you know, your party, will wife, um, you know, and you'll get smushed, right. So you go find, you know your level one monster, which might be like you know, a potted plant or something, and then you go fight that one right. And then gradually you gain experience and then you level up and you can take bigger and bigger monsters, right. So it's about finding the right challenge rating to go for. But the fact that you're level one doesn't mean that you can't someday be like a level 20 demigod, right, who's like saving the world. It just means you can't do it today and we're all level one in some situations and level 10 in some situations and level 20 in some situations. But it's just about like literally making your experience bar go up until you do it.

J Li: 22:57

In most RPGs you have to pick your character class, like their specialty, and that's all you do, right, in Skyrim Skyrim, anybody can do anything, but you just pick which one you're focusing on now and you get like a 10% experience bonus on that one. That is like my life philosophy, right. It's like this is the thing that I'm going to level up right now. And I went through this period and I'm like I'm going to level up listening. Now I'm going to level up focusing and like working hard. Right now. The thing I'm going to level up listening. Now I'm going to level up focusing and like working hard.

J Li: 23:26

Right now, the thing I'm trying to level up is finishing Right, and if you're like that's the thing that I'm trying to get better at, I just put myself in more and more situations that I'm doing it that are my challenge rating and then pay attention and that's where my attention is. So the fact that I'm paying attention to it means I'm getting that experience bonus Right and then gradually, like I was able to kind of build myself back up to a version of myself that could do things and that I mean mostly to me. Like that I care about is that's a much, much better person, right like so I always have. I try to have like a practical frontier and a moral frontier that I'm working on in a given moment.

Tonya J. Long: 24:03

I've never been a gamer and I learned something every time I talk with you, but I absolutely love this, you know, because there's this, um bias, maybe that I have my godson will, you know, have like an eight foot wide television playing games all day long and be happy, and I tend to think of gaming as just mental escapism.

Tonya J. Long: 24:30

But you've just educated me on a whole new way of gaming being a framework for incremental improvements and socializing you to think that way, to make choices that way. I think it's fascinating, right, that you found the tool that spoke to you, that helped you experience change and move forward and say, oh, I did that, I did that. So now, when you get to Rome and there's no hotel room booked, you're like, well, we've never done this before. What will this lead to?

J Li: 25:02

Yeah, and my husband was like, like next time you're going to book a hotel? And I'm like, okay, she's like, J, this is our honeymoon. And I'm like, look, I was planning the wedding.

Tonya J. Long: 25:11

Okay, we're in rome, that's good enough I got married in rome, so you had a honeymoon in rome.

Tonya J. Long: 25:18

yeah, yet another thing that you and I have in common, that's the dream it is, but I love how you had so many opportunities to adapt, because I just you know you do tend to like push it off that, oh, this is just how it is, but it's not how it is. A lot of people, a lot of people, give up, you know. A lot of people have something happen and people receive bad things, up to and including the company that you run that helps other major major companies. Let's talk about prototype thinking, because I think it's a culmination of all this learned wisdom and confidence you've gained. That moved you into helping others, and I'm not going to say it as well as you do, but you've taken your disabilities and adapted them and recognized that some of that thinking really helps companies succeed because it's a different way of thinking. So can you share with our audience some of how that framework helps you use prototype thinking to help clients?

J Li: 26:55

Yeah, absolutely. So this is going to sound like a funny pivot. Um, so prototype thinking is our process for helping people who are building new products or services or solutions um internal or customer facing um figure out the right way to build it that really works in the market and works with the humans that they're building it with. In a very, very short amount of time, with astronomically less resources than are typically used including compared to agile or lead startup or those kind of like move fast processes we still save about six months to 24 months of runway or of time to market using our process.

Tonya J. Long: 27:41

I've put over 400 products in market in my tech career without prototype thinking and I'm and I'm painfully aware of some of the sizes of teams we had to deliver on, you know, relatively modest revenue products. Uh, what about prototype thinking? Is is different or unique than what you would be aware of. Development was like seven, eight, nine years ago.

J Li: 28:06

So for me, the biggest difference of how we do things with prototype thinking is that we look at a challenge where you're building something completely new and you don't know how to do it, and we break down the steps based on building understanding rather than making progress in the development journey. So it goes like this so let's say that you're, you know, launching a completely new line of business, right, like you're, you know, a large company, you have a massive customer base and your innovation function says that you know the market is changing and you want to leverage your existing customer base and bring to them a new type of product, right? So when you start out doing something like this, if I were to ask you, on a scale of zero to a hundred percent, how confident are you that your current best guess about how to build it is the right answer? Right, like, like, at the point that this project has been, you know, identified and that you know, we know, that we have to innovate in this direction, right? If your design team or your innovation team or whatever, or your exec team has to, like they had to pick today what they're going to go to market with, how confident are they that that guess is the right answer. So typically a good prototype thinking project is when the confidence is under 40%. And in practice, when we launch new innovation projects, a lot of the time like we're starting work on something when we're only like 10% confident on it or 20% confident, right, and there's this kind of a hidden phase of the innovation process that lives between that initial zero to 10% is like you've done your market research and you know it has to happen.

J Li: 29:53

If you're 0% confident, you're probably not working on the project, right. And then after like 50 or 60%, you have an educated guess about what your main value proposition is and how it's going to play. And it's more about like designing, like you know proposition is and how it's going to play. And it's more about like designing, like you know, after 60% it's like designing the usability and kind of how it fits and you know what version of it, what exact version of features you want to tweak and so on. Right, but there's this gap between 10 to 60%. That is like what does it mean? Will this basically even work Right? What does V1 look like?

J Li: 30:24

We have six possible ideas for how to tackle this strategy right, or how to, how to realize the strategy right, which one is the right solution that's actually going to succeed with the humans. And what happens is we don't realize, like I think we as a society largely do not realize that this phase exists because we are, like our entire, like society is kind of built up of people who are we've all been taught as high performers. To get an A right and like even our grading system only starts at 60 percent right, like you get a D or it doesn't count, right, and people who are in senior corporate jobs or you know, who are in innovation roles or starting companies, typically have very high standards for themselves Right, and got there because their entire lives and their entire careers we've had high standards for ourselves, right. So we're like well, how do I present the thing in a way that I know will succeed? We'll hit all the things? How do I get an A plus out the gate Right? Present the thing in a way that I know will succeed, will hit all the things. How do I get an A plus out the gate right?

J Li: 31:25

And the thing is that, like, if you are 70% confident about something, you can work harder and do some systematic research to get to that 99% A plus, or at least that you know. Maybe 90% at pilot and then 95% at launch, whatever right. But if you are early and we call that pre-tangible or sometimes it's a version of the zero to one right, like if you are that 10 to 60% there isn't really a process in place for how to get through it. So what happens is that teams spin there and work harder and harder and they get into a lot of arguments and debates because they're like oh, I have this idea, but here's the downsides of this idea. That's not going to work. And someone's like oh, but we can fix those downsides with this thing. But then that has downsides. And suddenly months have passed, right, and you have produced an enormous number of PowerPoints Like so many PowerPoints that are remarkably gorgeous these days, using AI now to produce even more of them. Right, and you've modeled all of the possible things that you could do, but you're still actually just as confused as you were, like six months ago. You just worked harder in the meantime and argued more and had 500 meetings.

J Li: 32:41

So prototype thinking is the process for explicitly getting through this phase reliably, efficiently and in a really fun way 100% of the time, and it's an accessibility process, because the reason why it is hard to work when you are 20% confident about something is because performing at the level that you want to perform and being able to actually build the product is not actually accessible to you yet, like because you don't have the understanding right. You haven't learned how to learn and you haven't learned what you don't know right, so you don't know what the variables are, you don't know the language that the solution is being written in. It's not that you don't know which of the six answers users would want, it's that you don't know how users basically break down the problem, and the answer is almost never one of those six options. It's almost a weird always a weird mismatch, a mix and match of all of those, of bits and pieces of those that you can never have conceived of right.

J Li: 33:45

And so we've done so many projects to help people get through this phase, and what we've learned is that it usually takes at minimum three pivots to get there. And so in startup world, right or now, it's more common, but a pivoting is something you're like, oh, we have to pivot. And so they're like, okay, maybe you plan to pivot once, or maybe you plan to ideally do it without a pivot, and that works sometimes. But if you want to be the team that reliably succeeds every single time, you just have to make a roadmap that assumes that you're going to pivot at least three times, and then you say what experiments can we run? What can we do?

J Li: 34:22

to get ourselves quickly to the first pivot. So I love this idea of experiments, keep going. So specifically like, the one kind of really pivotal insight right that we've just kind of unexpectedly found over doing our projects is that no matter how hard you work or um, how much effort you put in, or you know how much you build right, you can only get about 15 to 20 percent more confident in one step. So if you are 10 confident about something you could spend a year developing or two hours developing, and you um, before you do a live like you know, um, immersive, like behavior, pilot with humans, right, um, and you will, you know well, you will only get to 35 confident in one step.

J Li: 35:15

So this takes a huge amount of the pressure off because it means that we spin because there is no way to get an, a right. We spin. We spin because we're 20% confident. We're trying to get out that gate and get that A, but we can't. The only thing we can do is get to 35%. So then we say don't worry about anything else, right, what is the lowest effort thing you can do to just get yourself to 35% confident. And we have a stable of experiments that we lead people through that are highly optimized, right, and if you work with us then we can give you some of our highly optimized experiments, but you don't even need to do that you can just sit with yourself and say, okay, you know, I'm launching this new product.

J Li: 35:53

I'm 20% confident. What can I do in three days that will get me to 35% confident? That involves engaging real users, right. And then you go, do that and don't worry about anything else. Don't roadmap, don't plan, don't anything right, don't build in depth, don't, you know, invest in infrastructure. Then you look at your world, because the universe at 35% confident looks completely different. And then you say what can I do to get myself to like 45 or 50% confident? And the universe there looks different. And you're like and then you're like now I know I have the language of understanding what they want.

J Li: 36:28

I have some basic ideas about what's likely to succeed now at 50 confident, but which of them is right, like I think I have the right language, right answers in, but I haven't proven the right answer. So then, what tests can you run? Maybe this time you're 50 confident, you can take a whole two weeks to test. Then right, only use effort commensurate how confident you are. So two weeks later you're like okay, I'm like 65% or 70% confident. Now, now I know which solution we're picking. Let's go and you know usability, test it, build it, and this absolutely doesn't have to be software, it can be anything right. People redesign their lives this way too, in their careers, like you know, and then suddenly you look up and you're like well, you know, it's actually only been like a month and I've pivoted three or four times and now I'm 80 confident.

Tonya J. Long: 37:09

I'm good right now now I can do what I do best right, and now you're at your zone of genius, at a place where you can exactly your zone genius exactly that.

J Li: 37:19

Now you're you.

J Li: 37:20

You just keep pivoting until your zone of genius becomes accessible to you right and it's the same as the Dungeons and Dragons model right, you're only tackling challenges that are appropriate to you, right? And it's the same as, like, the kind of really confused, like you know, post-concussion space I was in, in which, like I could not possibly build a career. Then I could just only do some stuff, and it's the doing of stuff that gets you the data right. As long as you do stuff in the true environment that it needs to exist in and do stuff with actual human users, behaviorally right, then that gets you the data and we as humans are fabulous synthesizers, right. So enough random data. You don't have to run these like large scale survey, controlled surveys, because there's a lot of math reasons I can get into why, like scientifically, they're not valid until you're at least at 70% confident. Just get yourself in that situation and your brain will do it for you. Your brain will do it for you.

Tonya J. Long: 38:24

I love the part just a minute ago where you noted that it's the iterations that are happening early that get you to where you need to be. And in my history it seems to me that we get a request you know in corporate software development and that request is an expectation, it is a roadmap item and there's not as much iterating because the declaration has been made that we will create these features to satisfy these customer needs and people are trying to make it work. What are some of the success stories that you maybe without logos, but what's a success story that you think is pretty remarkable? Showing how that old framework, when changed with this more iterative, experiment-driven process to get to that 70-80% level driven process to get to that 70, 80% level to show how that really changed things for a company.

J Li: 39:33

So we did a project with Autodesk and they it's a great company.

J Li: 39:37

Yeah, they're a fabulous company. They create industrial design software for engineering architecture. Like, if you've driven a car, it was probably designed on Autodesk software. If you've walked into a building, it was probably designed on Autodesk software. A number of years ago, before the rise of popularity of Gen AI, right, autodesk was using a lot of AI to do mathematical modeling and engineering prediction, so Autodesk had been using AI for a very long time.

J Li: 40:04

So there's a group of engineers who wandered away to start thinking about they're handling so much data customer data. They wanted to think about data ethics and how their engineering teams handled data sets. And this was at the time again, this was before the AI explosion, so there wasn't a lot of discussion about ethics in AI. So all of them were working on it in their spare time, aside from their other projects. It was like one of the smallest projects we'd ever done. Right, we were working with them on some other stuff and they're like hey, you know, I think this AI ethics project is cool, come work with us.

J Li: 40:38

So we facilitated this project with them. We did a simulation test where we grabbed a few teams who had recently completed projects and we learned that for the teams, it wasn't about rating the ethics of a project and deciding whether you had a problem right. It was about making a proactive plan from the moment the project is launched to be able to ethically responsibly handle data the entire time. Like what good is it to score our ethics right? Like what we actually want to do is have this handled. And they were willing to do like five times more work than the team thought in order to do it proactively. And also the team was completely wrong about all of the points in the workflow, so like they rebuilt everything right and then tried it again. About 50 Autodesk projects have gone through this framework now, and then the explosion of AI and AI popularity happened and Autodesk was a company that was able to say actually, we have been working on this this entire time.

Tonya J. Long: 41:36

We have been discussing ethics for years what I love that you said, though, was that their original assumptions were all wrong the original assumptions were all wrong.

J Li: 41:46

The original assumptions are always wrong.

Tonya J. Long: 41:52

In my career of hundreds of companies, I've had one where their original assumptions were correct, but I think there's not a cadence for teams challenging the original assumptions very well in my opinion. I think making it okay and giving people a safe place for the original assumptions to be a launching point maybe. Maybe I'll pull back on. They weren't wrong.

Tonya J. Long: 42:08

They were a launching point where the experimentation led to um clarity, yeah, and I think for a lot of people, learning, you know, speaking truth to power is just it's one of my gifts but a lot of people just don't have that tendency. They execute. They execute very well on what they've been told, but I think training teams and a mindset of experimentations to look at, of experimentations to look at they were told to build a table, but maybe what we really need is a counter instead. Just to think of things differently and to have the courage to raise those things is an amazing process, I think, for teams to go through and ultimately be stronger. So I can make this a lot easier, okay.

J Li: 43:04

So my number one I love that you can assumption testing and stakeholder management of executives because, let's get real, when you run an innovation project, it is 80% stakeholder management of executives. Right Is to yes and everything. It's just test everything. Because you can actually build these lightweight experiments so easily. There's no reason not to say yes to every single stakeholder. So if somebody has an idea that is their pet project, be like yes, we will build and test that, right. Somebody else has a conflicting pet project? Yes, we will build and test that too, right? It is like 20 times easier to test every single idea than it is to get people to agree on which one idea to test.

Tonya J. Long: 43:47

Oh my goodness, and that is why we don't do ideation.

J Li: 43:51

We are the only design and innovation process that like. Does ideation last instead of first? Because in practice, your ideation is going to be your starting assumptions. You can run beautiful brainstorms, do a ton of research, do all these beautiful ideation tools and at the end of the day, like you sign up for mountains of stakeholder management, right. Or you just like test seven different ideas but you put like an hour or two into each one, right. And then you can get an hour on a call with a dedicated one-on-one with a user, especially if you're an enterprise SaaS swap out a few different ideas with them and just get good enough.

J Li: 44:25

It's all about that. 15% more confidence, right. You 15% more confident on seven ideas, right. And then you know a week or two or three weeks if it's enterprise SaaS and you can't get your customers on the line very easily, right. And now you have this huge body of perspective on how everybody responded to everything. And then you send those videos to your executives and be like this is how the human responded to your idea and suddenly your executive will massively, statistically and conveniently over index on that one video you sent them, so send them the right video. Just take yourself out of the conversation, right, and just be the person who facilitates your stakeholders' emotional relationship with the data, right, you're just there to guide them through their own journey and just it's between them and the data, right. But you're not giving them the post-processed data. You're giving them the raw behavioral videos of the human interacting with their idea, and nothing changes an executive's mind faster and you just don't have to sign up to explain and pitch things for two months.

Tonya J. Long: 45:31

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

Tonya J. Long: 45:34

As you were talking, I couldn't help but think of the application for individuals as we pivot, because that's really the reason for this podcast is because I believe we're going to have pretty large scale transition in the workforce with AI over the next few years and I want to be in conversation with a lot of people and for a lot of people around having the courage to move into something new. That's why you appealed so much. But as you talk about your iteration process, a lot of us execution oriented people were builders. You know, tell me what and I'll go build it. And they get so involved in the build because it feels good. They don't consider it like experimentation. So, as we see this disruption that I think a lot of us foresee coming, how do you think that the approach if taken into consideration for the individual?

J Li: 46:42

how do you think it helps people navigate uncertainty. So let me give a very different example that is as small scale as the other one is large scale. So we had a small client recently who was a writing professor and they were sick of their career and trying to figure out where they wanted to work and they were thinking about building like a personal writing coaching practice. But they also kind of had a spirit, wanted a spiritual dimension, and they're like, well, who would receive writing coaching anyway? Right, and this is very common, right, like many, many people now.

J Li: 47:24

Yes, right, are people who have successfully built careers with institutions and are ready to go on their own and do something that has more meaning. Right, so they used the exact same process, right. I was like OK, how confident are you about a writing coaching career you could build? Ok, you know. And they're like OK, I'm 30 percent confident about who I would sell to. And I'm like, okay, well, why don't we list your top four ideas? Right, and then like just go try it. Right, go get like one client in each thing and just do one trial session and just kind of feel it out. Right, like you don't have to brand yourself, you don't have to market yourself, you don't have to charge the money. Right, like, because, really, what is your biggest risk? Right, like, what is your? If they're only 30% confident about where they're going? Like, what's their biggest question? Their biggest question is can I even do it? Does anybody want it? What is the there there that I'm doing? Right?

J Li: 48:17

Also, there's this other part, right, where when you're an individual looking to redefine your own career, a lot of the time your most important user is yourself. Right, and we often miss that because we're like well, what will the world accept about me. I'm going to define a new career. What will the world accept about me? Will the world accept this or this right? But it's like, well, why don't you try, like these three different ideas you had on the type of coaching you would do, and see how that feels on you and whether you want to do more of it right and that feels on you and whether you want to do more of it Right? And so there's a lot of. You just use social capital to get one friend to do you a favor, right, or a friend of a friend, and you just set it up.

J Li: 48:53

And the thing is that when you're talking about running a handful of very low confidence experiments, you don't have to worry about having a scalable thing to put in front of the user and you don't have to worry about your user recruitment being scalable, just like you know, spend your social capital, grab someone off the street like craft a really good request. On our website we have like requests, so we'll convince all sorts of people to to test with you if that's what you want to do right, um, and then just get that test done, because you only need like three to five tests in order to get to your first pivot. If you run them right. They ended up finding a different job that they could work at part time for, like a base salary, in order to connect with their congregation over everything that's going on. That was going on with Israel and Palestine at the time. So now, like they've built their book out of rabbis, which was not on their list of initial ideas Right, but now they are a rabbi. Sermon coach.

Tonya J. Long: 50:08

And yet it's not that far from where they started. It's just much more explicit about what they want to do. Right.

J Li: 50:16

Right, but they never would have thought that Go ahead.

Tonya J. Long: 50:19

Go ahead.

J Li: 50:22

This is what I'm actually so passionate about. It's that I meet all of these people who have, like this thread of truth or this thread of magic that they want to bring forth in the world. And whether it be an individual redefining their career, you know, or somebody you know defining like a massive global innovation project, right, there's always the spark of genius and passion in everyone. Like, no matter what size of organization you work in, the humans who are doing it, like have a vision, and the thing is, everybody has a vision of impact that connects themselves in the universe. Right, and there is a way like that thread. There is a thread that connects the heart of the magic for you and the heart of the magic for the customer. You just have to, like you know, do this kind of little accessibility, wiggle, pivot until you find it, but it's out there.

Tonya J. Long: 51:22

Those are some of the most important words that have ever been spoken on this podcast. Okay, so thank you for that. No, sincerely, because I think that we all struggle either moving up the ladder or moving off the ladder. What? You've described is just so helpful to help people understand that it is within their capacity and with a little more I overuse this word but with a little more intention, they can move themselves in that direction with these incremental steps.

J Li: 52:03

Like when you are disabled, right, when there's something that other people can do that your body or your brain or whatever can't right. It really hones your sensitivity to relevance and like. One of the things I liked was, if you're familiar with, like, marie Kondo. She talks about, like her process isn't really about organizing and cleaning, right, or it's not really about decluttering. It's about tuning into your sensitivity to joy, right, so it's really about optimizing your environment so that there's a much higher fraction of things that only bring you joy, right, and decluttering is kind of a side effect of that. For us, I feel like it's the same. It's about honing into your sensitivity to what's relevant and what's important both to you as the human and to the people that you're trying to improve the lives of.

J Li: 52:53

And everything else is flexible, right. Because when I'm disabled and I want to have dinner with my friends but they're all going to a restaurant and I'm now incredibly sensitive to sound and there's background music and I can't go to somewhere where there's background music, right, like suddenly I have to have a conversation about how do I make this approachable to me. Can we change restaurants, right or no? It's my friend's birthday. This is her favorite restaurant? Right, she deserves to have this thing. How do I have it so that she has our special birthday moment and I can also be there?

J Li: 53:23

Right, and you think about what can you be flexible about that you wouldn't normally be flexible about? Can we ask the restaurant for a favor? Is there a type of music I can do? Can I come early and give them a different playlist? Right, can we ask the restaurant? Can I pay extra? Have the restaurant catered and we eat it somewhere else? Right, and suddenly, as long as you know what two goals you are fulfilling, everything else is flexible. You just do the flexible thing and have and achieve that one thing, that thread of connection, right, be as flexible as you can achieve the next thread of connection and and I think that that's, I think that's our new economy, right, I think that that's, like you know, in this time of incredible economic upheaval, right. Right, like humans, connecting with humans will never change, right? So you just have to design the way to exist that works for you, but be willing to be flexible about everything else and all of your other assumptions. Perfect.

Tonya J. Long: 54:20

So what advice would you give to people who are on this journey or about to start this journey, the folks who are looking toward their own RESET moment? How would you tell them to get started?

J Li: 54:40

Well, first I would say, get started and do some random stuff, right? Like, don't spend a lot of time thinking and planning it. If you really want to get hardcore, just do a confidence check. Okay, you want to do your reset on a scale of zero to a hundred percent. If you had to pick your new path today, how confident are you that your next path is the right answer?

J Li: 55:02

Okay, what is something you can do in one week to get 10% more confident? Not what's something that you can research or something that you can think about, but what is a thing you can experience, you can go out and actually have in the next week or two to just get 10% more or 15% more confident. Like, who can you get in front of? What is something you can do? One of? Right, you have a few ideas for your reset, but you don't know what you is something you can do one of? Right, you have, you have, a few ideas for your reset, but you don't know what you like. Well, go find out what you like by doing some stuff. Right? Um, you'll get there, but don't worry because you're. It's not your job right now to know what the answer is. Right, it's your job right now to follow yourself and just try some stuff until one day you've realized that you're sitting on the answer.

Tonya J. Long: 55:54

I love it. Are there any places that you would recommend that people could find more information? I mean, I'm sure that your website has some things maybe a book also that you'd recommend, or an article that you think is particularly helpful for individuals who are moving on this.

J Li: 56:12

You know trajectory, I mean honestly like come talk to me and you know I'm always happy to have a casual conversation with you about what you're working on. We have a lot of free resources on Substack as well. Prioritized Thinking, substack or PrioritizedThinkingio, is our website.

Tonya J. Long: 56:33

I have to admit I have not checked out your Substack yet, and I should, and we'll put those in the show notes because I think you know you are. You're a genuine, authentic thought leader. You really are.

J Li: 56:46

Thank you.

Tonya J. Long: 56:46

And so I'm looking forward to seeing what is on Substack for you. So we'll put your website, as well as your Substack link in the show notes so people can get to know you and the way you think before they actually call you because you're busy, but you do have a genuine heart for helping people, so I don't want to take away from that either. Wonderful. So what do you think is next for you? I mean, I, what I want you to do next is to start a massive movement to help individuals, because I see that being, over the next couple of years, a real, um, a real gap in society, with people not being clear on how to move forward and what.

Tonya J. Long: 57:29

What I hear you say says to me everyone has a zone of genius and everyone can move toward something new, but it's small steps and most of us aren't patient for the small steps. We just want to go into the thing, and you make it okay for it to be iterative. So anyway, I'm giving my pitch for what I want you to do. What, what are you? What are you planning to do next with prototype thinking?

J Li: 57:56

so, um, we, I mean, we have a lot of things in the works, right? Um, yeah, we, I've been doing a lot of thinking about what innovation is going to look like in the next decade. Yeah, and I agree with you, I think that there is. I've seen this incredible rise of innovation at the individual scale, right, and what I've really seen a rise of are people who are advanced in their careers looking to make a categorical change, and I think that the economy is just changing so much right now that no one has a sense of security and, like often, we think well, you know, the economy is shaped by the behaviors of large organizations. So you know what are the big corporations doing, you know what's happening at a government policy level, right, but in some sense, the biggest corporations are actually the least secure about what's going to happen because they're swept up in it too, right?

J Li: 58:51

So I think that the new economy is going to be built up of a combination of top-down patterns and bottom-up patterns, right, and we're seeing kind of this austerity push from the top-down, right, but what we're also seeing is this kind of grassroots niching, individual networking, network building, resourcing going up from the bottom up, which is like more and more small businesses are forming more and more unique connection niches, right, like, think about how often we're talking about business niching now compared to five years ago. Right Like now everyone's trying to niche. Before you never heard about that. Right, you have a lot more vendors who are doing one very specific thing, and this is kind of an analog to the mutual aid model, right, where you have these grassroots small organizations that are all becoming one step in a big human ladder or a big human web of the kind of economic interaction, right, and so either you're going to belong to one of these like kind of austerity behemoths, or you're going to be in this web or you're going to something interesting is going to happen when they meet right, so I'm really fascinated about the patterns that are emerging and how to help people be successful wherever they land.

J Li: 1:00:10

Right, and especially, um, as so many people are currently being laid off from the workforce, like what's, how do we help ensure that everybody can still make a living? Right, and you know, and the economy is is very not pretty for a lot of people right now, and I think ultimately, like, like you know, my inborn passion is business, right, and for me, true business is humans working together with other humans to create mutual value for society, right Is that? Handshake of magic on magic, where value is created for everybody? Right? Handshake of magic on magic where value is created for everybody, right Um. And so I'm here to fight for the success of positive, positive impact business, right Um. And to make sure that you know every that people are still here helping each other.

Tonya J. Long: 1:01:05

Wow, I want to be on that journey with you because, let's do it yeah, the vision, the impact, the and the heart that you truly have foreseeing.

Tonya J. Long: 1:01:20

And I love what you just said about business. Business is really just that human to human contact, moving things forward. You said it much more elegantly, but it really is, I think, where we're all headed. So it has been just a true honor to have you visit with us today, share your wisdom. I can't wait to see what you produce next. That's, that's visible. Yeah, I told you when I met you need to write a book.

J Li: 1:01:54

Uh, and that's not everybody we're also working on a book. If, if people want to run some prototypes and be in our book. Come join our list and you can user test our book for us of, of course, you're user testing a book. Of course we have to user test a book. We can't do it without testing it.

Tonya J. Long: 1:02:13

Yes, I'm just so impressed and grateful and the nuggets that you've shared today. I want to thank you. It really is wisdom for the ages and I want more people to be able to hear what you're offering, because there's more than a glimmer of hope in what you're describing Right, because it is scary to look at a year or two and anticipate what might be happening, the direction that we see coming. But you're not scared at all. You've been through. You've been through some rough times. You know you can reinvent yourself. I think, having others see how that's done and have the confidence that they can figure out their own path as well, with some help, with some frameworks, with constructive guidance. We're all going to need more of that and I'm just grateful that you're here in the world to help. You are here in the world to help do it. So thank you.

J Li: 1:03:19

Thank you. I mean, I think the difference this time is that I'm scared for other people, right? So I want to level the skills that will help me be able to be a better support for other people, and I do think that accessibility is going to be one major thread of the future economy, right, and disabled people will be the first to say that, like, accessibility is for everyone, because, you know, not everyone has a brain injury or not everyone, you know, has like, no legs, right, but everybody has something, actually has many things that make normal life not accessible to them, or work not accessible, or not as accessible to them, and by all of us looking at something and saying, how do we value every human being able to access what they need, that will also, in turn, help disabled people access the resources that we need. So, yeah, so would just say, be entitled to you know, access what you want, right, like be entitled to ask for the adaption of the accommodation that you need and to, you know, creatively look for it.

Tonya J. Long: 1:04:39

Beautiful and to recognize that other people will benefit from that same accommodation. Right, yeah, because spoken to me. Yeah, because it's a skill.

J Li: 1:04:47

Yeah, it's a mindset skill. Once you learn to do it right, then you automatically start doing it for everyone around you right. Like you know, there's nothing like a disabled person who like hanging out between somebody who has misophonia and cannot handle people eating around them and someone who has a blood sugar issue and cannot live without eating and cannot handle people eating around them and someone who has a blood sugar issue and cannot live without eating, and somehow the two of them have to spend time together. Right, there is some creative negotiation there and that is also business.

Tonya J. Long: 1:05:14

I want to thank you again and I can't wait to bring you back, maybe after the book launches. I'm not sure what the timing is, but bring you back to talk more about the book. But thank you, and I can't wait to see how our audience takes into consideration what you've said and applies it, and let's see what happens from it, organically. Maybe we'll get some requests to connect you in and make the difference in that impact that I know that you're on a track to accomplish. So thank you.

J Li: 1:05:49

Thank you so much and thanks again for having me.

Tonya J. Long: 1:05:53

So, everyone, this is RESET with J Lee, where purpose meets possibility and, as she has shown us, there is so much room for possibility, let's all go out there and grab it. Thank you, have a wonderful day. Thanks for joining us on Reset. Remember, transformation is a journey, not a destination. So until next time, keep exploring what's possible. I'm Tonya Long and this is home. This is Reset.