Adam Grenier: evaluation

Transcript context

…It sounds like it's really helpful, one, in marketing, creativity and positioning, and things like that you just described. Have you found it also to be helpful in collaboration like this "Yes, and..." piece? I'm curious, is there an example or story where you like "Yes, and..." someone? Do you actually say "Yes, and..." in a meeting? How do you actually find that you use it? I hear it every now and then. I don't usually literally say it. I think one of the areas that I've found it to be valuable is when you've got cross-functional work. So, obviously at Uber we dealt with city teams a lot, and so a lot of the times the way that the central team would scope a problem versus a local team would scope a problem, would almost feel at odds with each other. And if you approach it with that "Yes, and...", it's often still true. It's like, oh, both of these things can be true at once. You could have a different goal than I have, or you have a system problem local to you that is important to you and it's not important to me. That's okay, both things can exist. So, now that we accept both and can work off of each other, we're more likely to build both a better rapport and energy among ourselves because we're not just saying, "No, no, no, no, you're wrong. That's not true, that's not important to the business. Why are you doing that?" That type of energy when cross-functional work, it just kills the scene, it kills that progress. And then you don't build relationships, you don't build the right solutions, all that type of stuff. It sounds really good. Everyone in theory wants to be really good at this. And I imagine just doing a bunch of improv is a really good way to get better at not getting defensive and being like, "Yes. And how do we make this idea better?" Is there something you can advise folks to work on this skill, or is it just do a bunch of improv classes and it'll kind of help build that skill?…

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