Walking Towards the Unknown
with Management Innovator Nilofer Merchant
You don't have to fix what failed you. You can build what frees you.
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon and Nilofer Merchant talk about Nilofer’s new book, Our Best Work, and why to question the invisible norms that are limiting the way we work and lead.
Nilofer argues that many of the ways we measure work today focus on what has already happened—revenue, productivity, efficiency—rather than the leading indicators that tell us whether we’re actually doing the work needed to create a better future.
In this conversation, Lisa and Nilofer explore:
Expanding our definition of intelligence to include intuition, context, synthesis, vulnerability, and the unique perspectives each person brings.
The difference between actually helping people grow or simply making ourselves feel helpful.
Building trust through integrity, where our actions consistently match our words.
Walking toward the unknown without needing to know the entire path ahead.
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Nilofer Merchant: Our definition of our best work today is too small, and it's limiting our economy, it's limiting our team, it's limiting our joy. When we can actually really expand the aperture of what else is possible, we will build the right things, and we will engage all of our capacities, and I believe the economy will grow at such an exponential rate that we will be able to fix so many of the problems that we have today.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
What if we stopped accepting the rules that aren't working for us and started creating the conditions for something better? My guest today on How We Future is Nilofer Merchant, one of the world's leading thinkers on innovation, leadership, and the future of work.
Over a 25-year career in technology, Nilofer has launched more than 100 products and services, creating billions of dollars of revenue and shaping many of the technologies and ideas we use every day. She's also the author of four books, including her latest, Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us. In our conversation, we talk about why change can often start with a single conversation, why we need to rethink what we mean by intelligence, and how to get more comfortable walking towards a future we can't fully see yet.
Thanks for being here. Let's jump into it with Nilofer Merchant.
First, I just want to thank you for being on How We Future.
Nilofer: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Well, it's really fun in many ways, full circle. We met, I want to say, a decade and a half ago through our mutual friend, Andrew Blau, when you were a guest at Global Business Network, which was the scenario planning firm, my introduction to strategic foresight, scenario planning, futures thinking. You have had a long career of basically futuring, putting new ideas out in the world, building businesses, being bold in your point of view. I think this big book is a compilation, it feels like, of everything you've learned and really a gift to everyone who reads it. Maybe we'll just start there. What motivated you to write this book?
Nilofer: Yes. I've been thinking about this topic of metrics for a while. I didn't even realize how long I had been thinking about it until my son left for college. I took all these moleskine notebooks up to the Hermitage, which is where I go for solitude. I flipped through them to be like, "What's next? Now that he's done, that project is done, what can I pick up as a new project?"
I noticed the word metric in one shape or form every few pages over something like 15 years. I was so surprised. People from the outside probably know that I've been thinking about this question much more clearly than I knew because sometimes your nose is too pressed up against the glass. I started thinking about the metrics challenge that business has that we know how to measure the outputs. We know how to measure revenue and productivity and efficiency and certain things like brand, but we don't know how to measure if we're doing the work we need to be doing.
What are all the leading indicators in economic terms that would tell us whether or not we're driving growth and the right level of change and the right level of innovation? We don't have those. I just started proposing in my mind, I wondered if we could create those, and then if we could create those, could we communicate it in a way like an econometric that would actually let boards and C-suites have a part of a dashboard that they just are missing right now? That was the question that drove, so it's literally been like a percolating piece for a super long time. I'm so grateful to have this book out there, which names the future-facing metrics.
Lisa: Oh, I mean, you're speaking our language, and I love how concrete you make them. You name these 24 norms that really remind me of that great parable of the fish swimming in water, the young fish swimming in water, and the old fish were like, "How's the water?" The young fish were like, "What water?"
Nilofer: "What's water?"
Lisa: "What's whater?" I just feel like you do such a great job of naming these things that are not serving us well, but we accept them anyway.
Nilofer: None of us can see anything, whether we're in personal relationships or in business relationships. Whatever we're blind to is the thing that rules us. It's the invisible, unquestioned norm that we think, "Oh, we can't change that because that's just how it is." If we can see it, name it, then we can have a conversation.
I remember early on in my career, I read Patrick Lencioni's work around the five dysfunctions of team. I remember it going, "Oh my God, this is what we're experiencing." Then you could pass it around and be like, "This is what we're experiencing." I was hoping that, and still hoping, that this book might offer that same enthusiastic response of, "Oh my God, we finally can call it what it is."
Lisa: One of the things I love about the book that I thought was so genius is that you really seem to write it and design it to be read in pairs or like a learning partner. It reminded me of the genius of Sesame Street. I don't know if anyone's connected your book to Sesame Street yet, but wait for it. When Sesame Street was first created, it was designed to be watched by a child and an adult to be that third learning partner in the triangle.
A lot of the protesters, because at the time Sesame Street was so disruptive, "What? You can't learn through television. That's terrible. You're outsourcing education." The intent was actually to add a third pillar to the relationship for the adult and the child to watch at the same time. Anyway, when I read your book and just how often you say, "Find your partner or do this practice with your partner, because each of these 24 chapters ends with a practice, like these practices for the future."
Nilofer: An innovation practice.
Lisa: I just thought that was such a small innovation, but so powerful to just have an accountability or a learning partner to go through this with.
Nilofer: One of my really good colleagues and somebody I've worked with now for a while, probably equally 15 years, is Tim Castell. He said, "Change happens in conversation." I was like, "Yes, that is such a deep truth," because it's not just us sitting here thinking by ourselves going, "Oh, yes," and then we'll make a decision. It is us in context with all the relational ways in which we interact with people to go, "Hey, what if we go here? What if I do this?" Then we negotiate that change to be, "What can it be? Where will we go?"
When change begins in conversation, that means that I don't want you just to think the big thought. I want you to then go, "Okay, what would that look like here? How do we make sense of it here? What are the things we'd have to give up here?" That slow conversation, that emergent conversation that says, "Oh, now I can take the right next step."
Lisa: That was one of my favorite quotes in the book. You say conversation is the smallest unit of change. As someone who literally wrote a book about conversations and conversations about the future and why it's so important that we think of them as things to be designed, not to be taken for granted, really, your whole book is an invitation to design your work differently, to design the way that you go about the relationships that you're building.
When I read that line, I was like, "Yes, are we even having conversations? What has technology done to really intercept deep conversations because our attention are so spliced, or we haven't really created space or opportunities to be vulnerable?" I just love that you put that in, in that very first chapter about change and your call for us to get more comfortable with change. If I could just name that you talked about, trading comfort for change, going from planning change to practicing change.
Nilofer: One of the things I just want to observe is that in order for us to walk towards something, we have to leave something behind. I don't think we 100% process that when we're at work. Change management, as it's defined in management terms, is someone sets a direction and defines accountability metrics and hires, fires, promotes based on those metrics. If people aren't on board, they're told to get off the bus or whatever. That is how you direct change.
I sat there and thought about it, and I thought about every experience that I've ever had driving change. It was never about somebody directing as much as inviting. When people choose, that's when change actually happens. When people are directing, we're actually controlling other people. We have to see that for what it is, as uncomfortable as that is.
All management norms are telling us, as I've been the boss many times, I've been the employee many times, as the boss, it tells me, "Take charge, be clear, communicate well," blah, blah, blah. As the person who's being told those things, I'm like, "You're not making any sense. It doesn't fit with my lived reality. The pacing doesn't match what will actually work. You haven't addressed my own uncertainty with the situation." I'm like, "Okay, well, then what is it that we're actually doing as leaders and thinking we're doing right that we actually have to let go of in order for us to walk towards a model that unites us into doing our best work?"
Lisa: That theme appears in so many different chapters, whether you're talking about power or politics or just the messages that we get that really undermine our own authenticity and ability to imagine our metrics and put them on the board. Talking a little bit more about change, it reminds me, we had a conversation earlier with my colleague, Scott Doorley, who's the creative director of the d.school. He said, "We need classes in change literacy, especially now."
That chapter really highlighted that for me, and I love that you really make the analogy that change is uncomfortable. We shouldn't expect it to be comfortable. When you talk about babies learning to crawl, they're crying out of frustration because it's uncomfortable.
Nilofer: By the way, I cry out of frustration. Whenever I'm changing anything in my life, I'm always going through the struggle of, "But I know this thing behind me. I know how to succeed at it to the degree it sucks. At least I know where it sucks. The future is this open terrain. I have no idea where I'm going," all that stuff. I just always center what is the lived experience any of us have when something's happening to us, and then try to write into that space.
One of the stories I wrote in that chapter, which I absolutely love, and I'm hoping one day Orangetheory will invite me to come give a keynote for them because I wrote them into the book. I belong to Orangetheory, which is OTF. One of the things they do when you're running on the treadmill is they basically have these base paces, push paces, and all-outs. All outs is really trying to build your anaerobic capacity. Any one of us can be on that thing and go, "Who wants to be that uncomfortable?"
They have this very particular protocol where they say, "It's going to be 30 seconds, and then you can take a minute to walk," or, "It's going to be 30 seconds, and you're going to come down to base pace," whatever it is, the instructions. Then they'll say, "Remember, it's supposed to be uncomfortable." What you're doing is priming your brain to be like, "Yes, it's supposed to be uncomfortable, and now I have to make a choice about if it's 30 and then base or 30 and then walk, what is my all-out in that situation? Then can I commit to it?"
What they're essentially doing is creating agency so that each of us can grow and stretch. For those of us who love doing health stuff, we're like, "Oh, get it." Then when we come back to work, we're like, "But can't I just tell people what to do? Because it's so much easier." That's the piece I think we need to look at ourselves and go, "None of us want to be treated that way, so how do we start to create more agency inside our organizations?"
Lisa: I'm so glad you brought up that example. I've done Orangetheory just a couple of times, but I do it with a friend of mine who is one of the most competitive people I know, and she is like, "I won Orangetheory." I was like, "Is that a thing? Do you win Orangetheory?"
Just even then, that subtle framing of like, "We're going to go all out, we're timeboxing it." What you're signaling is on the other side of that, you're going to get time for recovery. You're not going to stay there. Give yourself a little bit of chance to be in that zone of productive discomfort just to see what happens, and we'll catch you on the other side. We're going to make that happen. We're going to get you to be a keynote at Orangetheory, for sure. For sure.
Nilofer: I love that so much. To be real, every leader could probably handle the uncertainty better if they knew it was 30 seconds or if they knew it was a month, but they're afraid that if they go down this path of not directing other people, that it will go on forever and it will be chaotic, and so they can't sign up for it.
That's, I think, when I was doing strategy work for companies, I probably spent the most amount of time just telling them, "It's going to be six weeks. This is a six-week problem. Hang with me for six weeks." It would always get solved. There was never any question it would get solved, but I had to go, "Is it a four-week problem, is it a six-week problem, is it an eight-week problem?" Then I had to basically deliver on that timing because they were going to sweat it if we crossed that even a little. That's where I think we need to help leaders go, "This is not going to be forever. How do we actually structure this so it can work?"
Lisa: Yes. One of our earlier guests, Rae Ringel, is a leadership coach, and she talked about this idea that for now is not forever. I can't tell you how many people who have listened to that bring that back, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, that was so helpful." Even I had a friend of mine who is a very senior leader, was coaching his daughter through her first breakup, and he was like, "Honey, for now is not forever." That's just such a good reminder.
Nilofer: Yes, exactly. We got to learn to trust that we can handle that uncertainty. That's, I think, the other part that we're not necessarily acknowledging as leaders. Sometimes we are so afraid that we don't know what we need to know. I'm like, "Well, in that case, by the way, that's the human condition, we don't know what we need to know." The key is to go, "Whatever happens, I trust that I can handle it."
Lisa: Yes. In so much of what we teach in design is, I trust I can create the conditions to learn more about it, to discover it. Another chapter that I loved so much was this reframe about intelligence and that front. I think a lot of what our students get in our d.school classes are swings at the bat, reps, whatever way you want to talk about it, but chances to practice being uncomfortable, chances to practice being in discovery mode where you really don't know what the answer might be.
Again, as someone that thinks a lot about the conditions to make it safe for leaders and students to practice things that they haven't practiced before, as both a process and ideally getting to an outcome that they are excited about, is this idea of changing our mindset about where intelligence comes from. I love that you talk about it from a cultivating perspective. I wonder if you could share a little bit more about that philosophy of giving people permission to say, "I don't know, but we are going to find out together."
Nilofer: Yes. Let's anchor against what we're leaving for a minute as we talk about intelligence. What we're leaving is this idea that there's one way of being smart. In Silicon Valley where I live, the smart is defined as unemotional, rational, logical, failing fast, in the absence of having an ethical constraint. The main goal there is to make money and to grow.
There's a very particular form of smart that is rewarded in this culture. Then somebody who might be more emotive or have somatic intelligence or other intuition, all sorts of different forms of intelligence are discounted. I like to think about it as Spock on Star Trek, so old reference. Spock was analytic almost to a fault. The part that made him so interesting was he was also part human. He then could sometimes step outside that rational frame and draw on something else in order to make a conclusion.
What I'm just saying is, smart, as we defined it, is a really narrow box. That narrow box is sometimes about deductive reasoning. That's why so many people think that AI is so interesting. I'm like, "It doesn't have the kind of reasoning I love, so I don't find it as interesting." I use it, and I'm considering new and different ways all the time to figure out how to optimize it. I don't think it will ever replace that leap that we make when we're inventing the future, that hypothesis we're willing to pursue in absence of data, that hunch that we have. That hunch is a leap.
When we think about that, it is both coming from an individual and contextual. It is the idea that each of us stands in a spot in the world, only one stands, and so we have a point of view that is so discreetly our own. The person we then share it with goes, "I could see that," or the opposite, "Don't see that." The social context then changes how that idea is embraced or not, built or not, and then joined together with other ideas, so it becomes a real and robust solution. It is contextual. It is social. I call that intelligence as different from smart. Many different forms of smart. Then we create intelligence together as a shared asset that we built.
Lisa: How powerful that is. This idea comes up in a number of different chapters, which I so appreciate because my experience as someone that has really spent a lot of time learning how to synthesize, how to facilitate, how to create the right kinds of conversations and conditions, totally overlooked, totally discounted. It's hard work. Everyone has their own craft at it.
This was the gift I had from working with folks like Andrew and others that were really gifted listeners, synthesizer, hypothesizers to, "Hey, what I'm hearing is this." Takes a lot of vulnerability. We don't think of that as intelligence as much. I'm just so glad that you bring it up in a number of different ways, encouraging people to be authentic, to redefine what smart or intelligence looks like, to find ways to bring people into the fold so that we can go after these hard problems.
Nilofer: I had a young man in my universe say to me, "That's not intelligence. What you're describing is not intelligence." I said, "That's interesting." In his mind, as an engineer, he's like, "Well, there is a right and wrong answer, and there is absolute certainty. I do want to debate that until we get the clarity." I go, "I hear you. I hear your comfort with that model because it's your model and what you're trying to optimize. I want you to see that by not recognizing all the other models, you're not allowing the kind of intelligence that will actually build the next big thing."
If we're going to keep using the skillset we have, we end up with what we've already built. That makes sense, right? We end up with the economy we have, the products we have, et cetera. The minute we get a new perspective that other people are willing to join in on, we start to shape the world. We could think of all sorts of fun example, Airbnb, being people who were used to couch surfing. When they first went to raise funding, and I happened to see their proposals, it went by. Literally, the entire venture community who had never spent a night outside of a hotel when they were someplace, or if they weren't the people who went and couch surf, were like, "Huh?"
You and I could do this for an hour and find all the different ways that those distinct perspectives built the future, but it involves that person foreseeing something and being able to hold that seeing as possible, and other people going, "Oh, but in order for that to work, it would need to have X, Y, and Z."
Lisa: I'm so glad that you brought that up because, as you said, if we're only looking at the past or what's comfortable, we miss the opportunity to really see what's in front of us. I think you have this point about that the present is not the past, and it's certainly not the future. We had Brian Solis on, beautiful futurist, writes a lot about helping more people see signals. He talks about the importance of pausing in order to give us a chance to perceive what is going on in order to then think about how might that suggest something totally different is unfolding, and you might be the first to bring it to life. Jim Dator, a great futurist who used to--
Nilofer: I love his work.
Lisa: Said, "The first idea about the future," I'm paraphrasing here, "should be preposterous." That takes a lot of courage to put that out there.
Nilofer: It's the quote from the book, "The truly new looks truly wrong at first," Alice Fulton. I was like, "Yes." I know that what I'm building with this book is very new. I am holding the possibility of work being incredibly different than what we see today by redefining who is included within the definition of our. If our and who benefits from the value creation, value distribution process is a really small group, then an economy and joy and work processes are designed a certain way.
If best is defined as making money versus solving meaningful problems, you end up solving either small or larger. Then if work is defined as the job versus a calling, then we also change how we approach people's full intelligence, people's smarts on all the varieties that come with it. What I'm trying to do is say our definition of our best work today is too small, and it's limiting our economy, it's limiting our teams, it's limiting our joy. When we can actually really expand the aperture of what else is possible, we will build the right things, and we will engage all of our capacities. I believe the economy will grow at such an exponential rate that we will be able to fix so many of the problems that we have today.
Lisa: I just love how intentional you are with each one of those words, doing the work. You call out like, "Work is not working. Let's just name it. It is not working." Then I think the real invitation and the quote I kept coming back to that I thought was so freeing and liberating is, you say it at the end of the book, but it's really throughout, "You don't have to fix what failed you. You can build what frees you." If that's not a How We Future sentiment, it's a really invitation to say you don't have to be limited by these conditions, and it's not going to happen on its own. You have to start to notice it and imagine and question and really think about what you can bring in order to unleash what's possible.
Nilofer: Yes, I did write it with the idea that every changemaker out there lacks the vocabulary for what they're doing well. They're building the future, and they're doing it in some remarkably interesting ways, but then they use the language of the old in order to describe it. In fact, one of the stories in the book is around that. They'll say, "Oh, I just did it bigger." I was like, "Bigger was available already. Bigger was a model that already existed." I basically challenged the premise of what he was actually doing, and what he was actually doing needed new language. Rumi had that beautiful phrase of, "We speak a new world if we have a new language." That, I think, is what this book has the potential to do, at least in my eyes.
Lisa: Yes. I'm very lucky. I get to work with lots of different-aged aspiring leaders, emerging leaders, established leaders. I really hope the younger generation, in particular, picks up this book. This is me projecting, full disclosure. What I hear a lot in their hopes and dreams is that they have big aspirations, and they've been handed an old set of rules. They really want to believe the promises, particularly when they hear some of the stuff coming out of Silicon Valley, that it applies to them and not just a select few.
Part of the reason why I started this podcast was I feel like, first of all, there weren't enough stories of hope out there that is possible. I love that the book is filled with real-life examples of what you have been through. It's an incredibly vulnerable and personal book, and you share people that you've worked with. Making it transparent so people can learn from it because we can't learn what we don't talk about.
I feel like that there's this just huge gap in these hyperbole statements and what happens on the ground floor. Each one of these chapters is a little window about how to pay more attention about what's happening on the ground floor and make a different choice. I'm really hoping that for this newer out of college that is just reading these one bad headline after another, that they're like, "No, no, no, this is going to be my guide. Put it in under my arm, under my pillow, going to share with some friends to be like, 'Wait, what are the metrics we care about? Wait, how do we talk differently about our purpose? How do we not sacrifice our well-being and personal wellness because we're not sleeping because that was what the norm is and say it doesn't have to be that way.'"
Nilofer: Yes. My son, who is now, next week, in fact, 23 years old, he read the first draft of everything. He'd come home, I want to say it was sophomore year or junior year, I can't remember now. I was planning on hiring someone about his age to read the draft stories and give me feedback because I didn't want to do dated references and so on. It's something like, "Just look after this to make sure I don't sound like a millennial, even though I am."
He read it, and there was one chapter in particular where he's going along and going along and giving me specific feedback of, "This story works, this doesn't, you're missing this point. Mom, you usually say it this way." He knows my body of work, so he also can do this really interesting feedback. He loves criticizing, so it's good. Then he turned to me on this chapter on trust that I had written. He did this, almost like you'd smelled a skunk look on his face, and handed it back to me, like, "PU." I was like, "Huh, why?" He goes, "No one ever trusts anyone. You should never trust your boss." It was just this cart launch, your job is to figure out how to get as much off the table and not believe anything they say.
I was like, "Boy, that is a sad and cynical stance, and also earned. I'm not discounting it. I get it." I ended up reworking that chapter a lot. To think about what was the model that I believe will actually allow us to move forward. I essentially switched from a model that was built on authenticity and showed a model that's built on integrity. Integrity being that your actions tie to your words. That's when we start to earn trust with each other. That's actually what we need to do.
We need to actually stop saying the stuff and thinking about thoroughness that raised so much money based on a bunch of stuff that wasn't true that actually put people in harm's way. Yet they were able to get away with it for so long because it sounded so good. While there's accountability in that model, there's so little accountability in Silicon Valley lately. It's easy to see why my son is so skeptical. I did the dedication of the book to him, to Kiddo, as I still call him, and I'm hoping that the generation finds it.
Lisa: I think one of the things I appreciated is just how personal and concrete all the stories are that you share to break the model that work is not one monolithic thing. That it happens in these bite-sized moments where we have choices.
I just have to bring up one chapter that really moved me. I have to say, when you talked about the difference between caretaking and caring. I think the chapter is Don't Mistake Paternalism for Leadership. We talk a lot, particularly in our young people, about, "Get a mentor, find a advocate, find someone that really has your back and is going to support you." Wow, I had not really thought about the nuance that you brought up about what happens when someone that is supposedly advocating for you is actually perhaps undermining your growth a little bit or maybe unintentionally not giving you the best opportunity to thrive and grow. I wonder if we could just take a few minutes to talk about that because I just thought it was so powerful.
Nilofer: That was such a powerful story. Let's just share one vignette from that chapter. It's a story about a leader who really thought he was a great mentor to women and, to a large degree, has been. In his generation, he definitely was very feminist point of view from where his generation comes from. We were both doing a fireside chat together. This is someone I really look up to. He said something like, "I've mentored so many women and really encouraged them and helped them to grow," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I paused him for a second, and I turned towards the audience that was-- there were some women in the audience, but mostly men. I turned, and I said, "Just the women in the room, how many of you feel like you need more mentoring?" It was dead silence. I said, "How many of you would like it if someone like him, instead of helping you, actually went around the other side of the room, opened the door, unlatched it, and just opened it up for you and let you walk right in?" There was this round of applause. It was just me jumping on an intuition of, "Yes, I think it can feel like you're doing the right thing by helping, but you're making an assumption there that the person isn't already capable."
One of the things that I've learned in parenting as well as in leadership is if I assume someone's capable, if I lean in that direction and I look at what are they capable of, because each age, for example, as a child is different and each skill level is different in a person, but go, "What are they capable of? How could I give them more room to show that capability?" They actually rise, and I can just get the heck out of the way.
I was talking to a leader this morning who said their biggest problem is they always feel they can do the job so much better than everyone else. They just have to resist going over there and being like, "You could fix that." I said, "Yes, what you're actually trying to do is have a whole bunch of mini-mes. What we actually need is a whole bunch of variety in the room, and then they'll actually solve the problem in ways that are different."
Lisa: Absolutely. The thing that is serving maybe that person to be like, "No, I'm such a good mentor," without pausing to be like, "Wait, really? Are you?"
Nilofer: Am I solving the problem? I think that's the piece is like, "Is it about me, or is it about the thing?" If it's about me, then I'm going to want my kids to adore me when that is not the goal. My goal as a parent is to raise that person to be a great citizen as they head out the door. I need to teach them how to cook. I need to teach them how to clean. I need to teach them a series of things about how to navigate the world in terms of conversations and communications and so on.
They don't have to like me. My job is to prepare them for the world, and it has nothing to do with me. If I need them to stick around, then I'm not going to teach them any of those things because then they need me. They're going to come home and ask for money, and they're going to come. My kid never asked me for money. I would give him so much money if he did come home, but he's not going to ask me because actually I raised him with the idea of, "You're capable."
Lisa: You share such a powerful personal story at the very end that gives us a window into why you believe that to be true because of what you have lived through. I've read that, and I was like, "Oh my." I've been following your work for years, but really understanding where your independent voice comes from, your ability to name things, to call it out, started at a very early age for you at 18, having clarity about what you wanted, and really making some incredibly courageous and hard choices to bring that to life.
Nilofer: It almost brings our conversation full circle to where we started, right? For the audience that's listening in, let's fill them in. I was supposed to get an arranged marriage because I was raised in a very traditional Islamic household. For those people that came from India in the '60s and '70s, they tried to figure out how to cut and paste the culture of the '60s and '70s and just bring it with them and never change it. They lived in a very interesting and slow little bubble.
Growing up in America, I was raised here since I was four and a half in Palo Alto, and then Cupertino. It was a foot in both lands. During the day, I'm part of the FBLA, which is this Future Business Leaders Club of America, which I find so funny when I say it out loud now, where I was the best accounting student, and I learned how to type and so on. Then at home, managing all the chores and being the dutiful daughter of all the things you're supposed to do, cook, et cetera.
At some point, I was hoping to seamlessly integrate my two halves together, get the arranged marriage my mother wanted to arrange because that got her a house, and then also be able to go on and get an education and pursue some goals of my own. What I'd asked my family is that they just ask the guy, who they had already picked, if I could get an education because that would buy me a year or two because, otherwise, you'd have to build a relationship before you can do the ask, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "Just ask." They didn't want it. My mother did not want to do it.
Remember the FBLA story when I say this next little vignette. I said, "Well, you can't do this deal without me." It makes perfect sense to an FBLA kid. "You can't do this deal without me, so you've got to do it." I, in my desire to convince her, literally grabbed an Indian grocery store box, which are always these soggy old boxes with no lids. I grabbed it, and I put three outfits and something like five books, my priorities, no toothbrush. I was just like, "She's going to stop me before I even leave my room? No. Stop me before I get to the door? No. Stop me before I get to the end of the driveway? No."
That's when it hit me that I didn't know where to walk next. Everything I knew was behind me. My family, my community. I had literally no money to my name because when I worked, I gave all my money to my mother. That was expected. I didn't have a banking account of my own. I had nothing. I was like, "In order for me to have something better than what is," you're an appendage of another person, "I have to walk towards something unknown and deal with the uncertainty and the unknowingness and the incrementalness of it all."
"How is I going to sleep tonight," was the first question. Just the series of questions that are unfolding so slowly of like, "Today I've got to worry about where to sleep, then I've got to figure out how I'm going to eat." Each day was like that for several days in a row until somebody noticed I was sleeping in the student government offices and said, "What's going on?" I explained. They said, "Okay, let's give you a loan."
They walked me down to the school disbursement officer and said, "Make her a loan." I want to say it was $300, might've been $500. I remember saying to the guy, "I'm not good for it," because I was like, "I don't know how I will pay you back." He was like, "No, I'll cover you," kind of thing. The world today and who I am today certainly could not be any more different than what I had expected my life to be. It's because I walk towards something unknown, which is very much what the change process is, believing that better was possible.
I think that's the same thing about how we future is if we get really stuck on-- well, this is every single thing I know, all my support system, all the love I know, everything, I'm going to lose everything. It's an all-out bet that everything is going to be gone tomorrow if I go this one route. That's what it feels like when any of us are futuring. We always feel like we're putting so much at risk, but if we go, "Actually, we're walking towards the idea that something can be better." That's the instinct that drives us forward.
That day, I walked to a donut shop, hung out for a while. This was before cell phones. I waited for a while, and then I was like, "Okay, maybe I should call my sister," thinking she would know what to do. Then my sister called my mom and then called me back and said, "Yes, she's not relenting." Then I was like, "Okay, then the next problem is, where do I sleep?"
I just kept going. What's the right next step just kept presenting itself. I think that's the reason why today, when I'm helping major organizations do reorgs and redesigns, putting the context together for figuring out what their future is going to be, I trust that if we make the right next step, it just unfolds. It unfolds because we're asking the right questions, we're generating intelligence together, we're solving a problem we know we want to solve. I thought that the heart of who we are guides us to the place we need to be.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I read it, but just hearing you tell it just brings me, oh gosh, back to reading it.
Nilofer: Thank you.
Lisa: Just so much admiration for your willingness to put all of that out there and build on every experience you have and then turn around and give it back to others in this book. I want to end, it's a perfect segue, with something I read in your book that's just so beautiful, building on that story. You say, "What I know is this, nothing is preordained. The path ahead isn't marked. It's made by walking, by acting, by stepping out the front door, down the driveway, and onto the path that doesn't yet exist until we go there." Beautiful.
Nilofer, thank you so much for joining us. I cannot wait to share this with our listeners and just get more people excited to imagine their best work because it's ahead of us. Thank you for this gift of your time, for this body of work, and all that you do.
Nilofer: Thank you so much.
Lisa: Thanks so much for listening to this conversation with Nilofer. If you're interested in her invitation to build what frees us, instead of spending our energy fixing what's broken, here's something to try. What's one thing you've been trying to fix that you could choose to build differently instead? Leave a comment and share what you're imagining. Thanks for listening to How We Future. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and we'll see you next time.
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