John Montgomery: Frank, thanks so much for the time to chat with me. To start us off, I’d love to understand, what does innovation mean to you?

Frank Gleeson: To me, it’s trying to look at things from a different lens or taking known information and assembling it in a different way. I used to think innovation was some kind of creative genius. That you had this spark of brilliance that no one had ever had before. And my God, that’s an awfully high bar!

I realized, at least for me and for anything I’ve been involved in, it’s an attempt to find a new way to define something, find a new way to solve something. It’s more reflective than it is inspirational. There must be some level of inspiration, but it’s more reflecting, listening, and trying to create clarity for what you’re attempting to achieve.

It’s particularly relevant in the context of Satellos because we’re doing just that. We’re looking at a medical challenge through an entirely different lens. To me, that is the very definition of being innovative. It’s not always well received, but that’s how you progress. You stop doing things in the conventional mold. You don’t have to break the mold entirely, but you want to break out and do things differently.

Innovation is more an intellectual framework than it is an invention. Innovation is taking tools, taking what’s known, looking back on what we understand, and trying to assemble the pieces differently. It’s like putting the puzzle together when all the pieces are turned upside down.

JM: That’s a great visual metaphor. I had a senior developer who worked for me 15 years ago, and he was a deep physics programmer and animation action-scripter. He made the complex parts of game design feel fun to play as a player.  We used to give away this award, a kitschy clapping monkey, and whoever got it last would give it to the next person they thought had done amazing work over the previous month. He got it the first time and named it Maui Kissy Kiss. We weren’t expecting this (he was this coke-bottled glasses guy who didn’t talk much), but he suddenly said in the most thoughtful way, “I named it Maui Kissy Kiss because that is the Tongan god of creativity.” He continued, “It would seem to me that creativity is not inventing something new, but it’s rearranging what you already have in your mind into new configurations, creating something entirely new from existing pieces.  But to do this begets 2 things: one, you should always be open minded about allowing things to collide together in your mind without restraining it, and two, you should always be out in the world putting brand new things into your mind, so you have more rich material to bang up against each other.”  Your comment just reminded me of that wisdom.

FG: Good. Okay, well, that’s high praise.

JM: Building off of that, what part do you think design and storytelling play in innovation?

FG: Well, it is the story, isn’t it? When we worked with GoodLab, what I felt you helped with more than anything was creating a cogent story that fit what we were trying to do. It’s how we align with each other, isn’t it, through storytelling? Joseph Campbell would tell us that it’s all about the story. That’s all mythology is – a story.

In our case, we want a story that resonates and reflects what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s like, suddenly the jacket fits. You’ve got your jacket, not somebody else’s jacket, and it makes it easier to move forward with what you’re trying to achieve. It makes it easier to enroll other people in what you’re trying to achieve. And, of course, it makes it easier to communicate what you’re trying to achieve. That’s what you want to distill.

In the science world, I think what scientists get trapped in a little bit is that they believe the science is the story. The way a scientist is trained is to figure it out. So, when they communicate, they’re expecting their audience to figure it out. They don’t see it as their responsibility to make it easy for you to understand what they are doing. They see it as your responsibility to align with them.

Whereas, in storytelling, it’s the other way around. We’re trying to find a way to touch the audience, to align with the audience, to give them the opportunity to align with us. I think it’s powerful if you can make it work and painful if you get it wrong.

JM: Well said. I’d love to talk about applied design. Sometimes when people talk about design, they solely think about colors and shapes and typography, the aesthetic of design. When we think about design, of course we think about the aesthetic, but we really apply design thinking and develop design systems to solve problems of all types. The first rule of design to me is, what is the problem we’re solving for, and what are the problems underneath the problem that a system is designing to solve for? So, that’s a long-winded tee up to the question, how do you currently think about design within your organization?

FG: That’s a good question. I suppose in my left-sided brain, I kind of view design as an emotion. When I see an Aston Martin, I have an emotional response to seeing an Aston Martin. It’s just beautiful. But I’ve never really thought about how did they design that? How did they bring structure to make that beauty? I’ve looked at other cars that don’t give me that kind of reaction. I think, well, obviously, they didn’t bring anything to trying to come up with a beautiful design. What are they missing? So how do we apply those kinds of principles? I’m not sure I’m the right person to answer that question. What I can tell you is what I try to do.

When working with others, I try to bring some level of process and a large degree of openness. I’ve learned over the years that closed-ended questions get you closed-ended answers and closed-ended thinking. So yes/no type of questions or leading questions are unhelpful if you’re trying to create something, design something, or solve a problem because you’ve immediately trapped everyone in some framework for right or for wrong, for good or for bad.

All the problems we’re trying to solve are problems we have to talk about and work through together. There’s a lot of data involved that needs to be analyzed, but even analyzing data is subject to getting trapped into a way of looking at the data. This is something I was surprised to learn in working so closely with such high-caliber scientists. Everybody brings a bias, everybody brings a prism, not a prison, but a prism, to how they look at things. And that prism can become their prison. They trap their mind in how they look at something. People get trapped into a particular way of going about their business. So back to innovation, it’s how to break that kind of stuff down so everybody can have an aha moment to say, oh yeah, I get it.

In long-ago times, there was a creativity thinker named Edward de Bono. I attended a couple of his seminars back in the 1980s, and maybe the early 1990s, but certainly in the 1980s when he was well known and prominent. I went to his seminars because I was working in industry. I’d done a business degree and then an MBA. I was really good at math, so I did finance – finance was easy. I hate finance. I hate everything about finance. I don’t like money. I don’t like thinking about finance, but I was good at math, and it came easy, so I got good marks, and I did more of that.

But I had no emotional connection to it. Because I’d done so much business training, I thought I couldn’t be very innovative. I couldn’t be very creative. I must be programmed to be dull. I could always make girls laugh, but sometimes they were just laughing at me. So, I thought, okay, I’ll take these courses with de Bono. He’s a creativity genius.

His most essential message was – create conditions to allow dialogue to evolve. When you do that, and it’s not directed and it’s not biased, ideas will start to percolate. Ideas will create more ideas. It’s like kinetics start to happen in thinking. I never forgot that. It works every time I’ve ever been in a situation where you want to solve a problem. You always get more than you counted on because you let people, against their own better instincts, be unguarded and just say something.

JM: Wow, that’s great. Now I’ve got to look up de Bono.

FG: Yeah, Edward de Bono. I think he was from Malta.

JM: I spent time in Malta once, years ago. Got trapped on the island. Lost all my money. Had to work in a bar there to earn enough money to get off the island… Malta is not a place you necessarily want to be with very little money.

FG: That’s a story.

JM: For a different time.

JM: Can you frame up, what are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to face in the early stages of building this venture? Has the work we’ve done together, around design and storytelling and branding, helped with any of those challenges?

FG: Those are deep questions. Initially, our challenges were kind of legion. We fundamentally stumbled. I would say science is stumbling, and you’re in the dark until you trigger the light. Michael, our lead scientist, really stumbled on a profound discovery. He has a nose for this kind of profound discovery. It’s not the first time in his career he’s made significant discoveries of a scientific nature. We were met with disbelief and probably a lot of other reactions as well. For quite some time, it was very difficult for us to feel that we were getting traction with the power of what he’d discovered. Some of it’s just natural – that there’s resistance to a radically new idea. It’s the way humans seem to be wired.

I think, looking back, we told our story in the most complicated way imaginable. We made it all about this remarkable discovery at a very granular scientific level. For anyone who wasn’t sure they wanted to believe; we would give them even more granularity. We would start close to the core of the onion and keep going deeper and deeper until, of course, everyone in the room is crying because of all the acid from the onion.

As we started to make some progress, we started to get to the point where we could figure out technically how we were going to modulate this discovery, the stem cell discovery. We could start to put more shape to it. To me, design, back to the Aston Martin, it’s about shape. I think one of the things that worked well when we connected with GoodLab was that we were ready. We were ready to figure out the story we needed to tell. We were ready to figure out the tone we needed to use to tell the story.

What GoodLab was able to do was align with all of that and guide us and listen to us in trying to articulate both verbally and visually and frankly, emotionally, what it was inside that we were trying to say. This is something that I personally believe is the greatest attribute the GoodLab team brought. You were able to get it out of us.

It’s Socrates, right? Socrates’ thinking was that knowledge is in there. My questions are designed to get the knowledge out and for you to realize that you have that knowledge. It’s not me teaching you. It’s you teaching yourself. That idea, to me, is what GoodLab represented in dealing with us. You helped us get it out there. If we were left to our own devices without a chaperone, I don’t think we would have got there. If it was a different sort of chaperone that was more directive, we probably wouldn’t have got there either. We would have got someone else’s idea, not our idea.

You guys got us our idea and put it out there. Now it’s authentic. It’s not anybody else’s. It’s ours. Right, wrong, good, bad, doesn’t matter. It’s ours, and it feels good, and it fits. Now we’ll see how far we can go with it.

JM: We can’t wait to see how far you guys are going to go.  An amazing team on an amazing mission.  Godspeed!