[Music] hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to inside strategic coach with Dan Sullivan Dan as part of the subject of our latest book that we're working on you have talked about something that I find totally interesting and fascinating and that is guesses and Bets and you made a reference to it in our company meeting recently one of the bets that you'd made and guesses that you'd made was about unique ability and how that impacted our company so we'll we'll pull that apart a little bit but could you please talk about guesses and Bets because it is such a cool I'm going to say for me healthy way to look at the future and it takes some of the angst out of things so let's talk about guesses and Bets yeah well this is a topic that is very front and center these days because of a belief in certain circles that the capabilities of Technology are such that you can now start predicting the future with technology in other words it can make with great certainty that things are going to happen this way okay and I think it's silly I think it's very very silly because the creators of the technology are guessing um something they're guessing that this particular technology their particular approach to technology is better than any other technology and that somehow technology has an intelligence that can predict the future okay and my sense is that the technology will not be able to predict the future in anything that's different from the thermostat in your house noticing that it's dropped below a certain temperature and it's time to adjust the heat so I don't think we ever get beyond the fact where technology is just reacting Ive and the reason is that the programming of Technology all comes from human beings who are making guesses and bets on the technology so the technology cannot be superior to the human thinking that goes into it so I don't want to get into a long discussion about the technology I just think it's a very silly idea and there's been other predictions about other factors related to religion related to politics related to economics where things say it's a sure bet and that's a sure prediction it's not even a bet that things are going to happen this way and then it doesn't happen and part of the reason is that the future is always created by every human being on the planet every day making guesses and Bets about their individual future that alone should discourage you from making claims about technology because there's no way of understanding or even detecting what kind of guesses and Bets 8 billion people are making they didn't even think about it yesterday but this morning they got up and they said you know I think I'll do this with my day okay well that got created in the moment that's a guess because they got to fill up their time between getting up and going to bed again at night and they say well we could do this we could do this we could do this and then they bet on certain things which means they commit their time they commit their activity and in some cases they commit their money to doing this particular activity and that gets made up every single day by every single human being on the planet so the future is not predictable at all there are Trends which unless reversed can end up at a particular this place in the future as opposed to this future but those are simply Trends based on what's happened up until now and even when you predict that a trend is going forward you're still guessing and betting because nothing happens in a straight line things can go to the right they can go to the left they can go up they can go down so my feeling this whole question about prediction and there's always this desire that we be able to predict the future somebody played a game once at a party and they said if you could have one power a superpower that that would just make you Superior in relationship to everybody else and I said Yeah tomorrow's Wall Street Journal today yes please especially the stock prices yes exactly I would like to know tomorrow's stock prices right now before closing hours but that's not possible it's not going to be possible when technology has advanced 100 years into the the future thousand years into the future there's just no possibility because the future is made up by human beings and each of them does something different every day that's not predictable they make a guess and a bet so and I think that's really key Dan Because unless people actually understand technology how it comes to be artificial intelligence which we've all been talking a fair bit about you know artificial intelligence especially the new chat GPT and new capabilities coming out it's based on pattern recognition which is the past and probability and probability but it's not the future and an unpredictable human can disrupt that immediately which is why you can't count on it for creativity you can't count on it to do unpredictable things that's literally not built into it and so once you actually drill down into how the technology is created you know what to expect from it you also know what not to expect and I think that's a very critical distinction for people to have as we move into our our own self-creative future yeah Co so what I'm saying is that this desire to predict the future has been around forever it plays a role in the development of mysticism in religion you know the way that power is handed down from one generation to another generation but it's still the wild card factor is just each individual just thinking of something new today they're making a guess that this would be a good way to spend my time today and I'm betting on this and it's gotten more unpredictable over the future because we have way more freedom on an individual basis than we had a century ago and there's many more human beings now so the chances of surprising things happening just triggered by individual Behavior have grown greatly you know oh expell I was born in 1944 the population of the planet is three and a half times now than it was when I was born in 1944 I think it was 2.2 billion now it's 8 billion so it's more than three and a half times yeah it's g onot in my lifetime another factor is that half of them are connected to each other with cell phones and with the internet so just a sheer number of unpredictable things that can happen so that's my basic thesis about this but I just happened to mention we were having a team meeting this morning and I was just marveling at the teamwork and the excitement because we had each of the teams we have a dozen or so teams in the company and each of them was giving a report on new things that they are doing things that they've achieved and I was just sitting there marveling because before the report I knew about 5% of the things that were talked about and I was just sitting there and enjoying it yeah and I just happened to mention in my part of the sum up after the meeting we had a little summing up for the organizers of the meeting and the team leaders and I said you know I was feeling enormously rewarded by the team meeting today because so many things are being done that I had no idea of and I feel very rewarded for Babs and I making a big guess in a big bet before we even started the workshop program in 1989 that we would build the organization from start and continually just focusing on one thing that that we were going to make it possible for everybody who joined our company to very quickly identify their unique ability so in our language that means that this is something that you're really great at and it's also something that you love doing so that's our definition of unique ability you have Superior skills but the other thing is that gives you total enjoyment to do this activity so that's unique ability at the individual level and then you also have the ability to link your unique ability up with the unique abilities of other team members who have different unique abilities okay unique means that each of them is a one of a kind okay and that if we did that we would have a organization continually growing that was first of all self-managing yeah that you didn't have to manage people who who are in their unique ability you don't really have to manage them you don't have to monitor them you don't have to motivate them it's built into how you're allowing them to operate in the company it's internally driven unique ability internally drives people you know they want to get to work because they so much enjoy the work both within their own skill but they also enjoy the work in the teamwork we guessed that if you based everything in the growth of the organization on unique ability and unique ability teamwork that would pretty quickly become a self-managing company but beyond that it would become a self- multiplying company so we as Leaders wouldn't have to be paying attention to that we would just be giving greater Vision to the company which is really bab's unique ability she can see the future of the company and I would focus on giving the vision for the future of the program okay so we have two Visionaries in the company one's the organizational Visionary and I'm the program Visionary and I was just feeling very rewarded from the meeting because we saw evidence that it was a self-managing company based on unique ability teamwork and it was now becoming a self multiplying company based on unique ability teamwork so it was a good guess and a good bet well there's a couple things that strike me as you were saying that one is that you don't need to manage monitor or motivate which I think is that takes so much time in most people's companies like are people doing what they're supposed to be doing and there's this lack of trust because you're not lining things up with people's individual unability which means they need to pay attention to it and take it seriously you need to do the same thing we use lots of profiles to help get at the heart of it we have unique ability processes we've got our unique ability book Discovery 2.0 and we have book clubs around it we have like all the things and everyone's really incouraged to really focus on that and then of course leadership also needs to reinforce it and the cool distinction here Dan is that leadership is really much as you talked about sharing the vision charging people up but you don't actually have to babysit them because they come in excited like it was interesting I was talking to someone who's said you know I think the opportunity is to really inspire people outside work and I was like to me it's actually making sure that work is a phenomenal place for them to be where they can be their best selves making their biggest contribution having the most fun if you give them that they'll handle the rest of their life and I even to that point had a team memb say oh my gosh work is where I come it's one of the best parts least complex most focused most interesting most fun parts of my life and I have friends there you know people I work with are friends yeah I think it would be the rare member of coach who didn't have a close friend who worked in the company very true which happens to be one of the Gallup 12 questions do you have a close friend at work and chrisy who was the MC of our meeting today she asked a really interesting question she just gave us a few seconds then we posted in the chat which is what do you most enjoy about being a coach and what people wrote in the chat was so exciting affirming get to do my unability the difference we make for our clients get to be ourselves like it was just so validated exactly the guess and the bet that both you and Babs made which was really gratifying yeah and the thing is that it's not for everyone so over the years I think for every person we've had we've had three who came and left you know we're at about 130 worldwide and I think that we've had easily three times that maybe 400 individuals are there sometimes it was just making a bad guess and a bet on hiring someone when you weren't really true to your principles you know you weren't right there but a lot of times they had the unique ability I mean potentially they had a unique ability they hadn't really developed it yet you know and then you don't know whether they're going to be any good at Teamwork because it's not just that you have a great individual but they don't play well with others it's got to be both they got to be great at what they do but they have to be great in playing with others you know and working with others yep that is such a key point it's funny is like I'm all about teamwork and I'm like yes I mean I tend to focus a little bit on individuals but in unless they can make those connections and play well on the darn sandbox it doesn't play out it doesn't work our teams went around and did their positive Focus this morning which was so fun as you were talking about and I calculated based on the numbers that were given the number of people we hired versus the number of resumés we had gone through yeah was yeah was 0.1% not 1% 0.1% is how many we hired I think it was 4500 resumés we received and we hired five uhhuh we hired five yeah and that's in the UK that's in Canada and that's in the US yeah so we had 4,500 resumés and only five people yeah and we have a lot of sensors about this I think there's about five stages that you go through if you want to work at coach we have such a unique ability culture that I think our screeners you know the people who are bring people and they can just tell right off the bat I don't think this is going to be a fit right you can just tell how they respond and one of the observations I had that if they were in their unique ability they would be a good team member but they don't take their unique abilities seriously they don't take seriously the notion that they have a unique ability yeah we take their unique ability more seriously than they do and that's not good that's not good we want them to be surprising us with their unique ability as they develop their unique ability we don't want to be the person who keeps pointing things out to them right I love what Andrew said this morning one of our membership advisors in Chicago he goes yeah and if someone does slip through they don't stick around very long we course correct really quickly it's interesting Dan what you say about people they need to take themselves seriously at least as seriously as we do and the people who don't and I've seen this in other organizations occasionally in ours too is where someone overrides their unique ability because of intellect because of their cognitive training and the weight that they give to that or they're so status oriented right they want to climb the ladder and we don't really have much of a ladder here at coach so it really is your expansion of value creation is based on your expanded contribution of your unique ability and status is a byproduct of contribution not the other way around which I find really interesting so for me it's always just interesting human behavior when you see people override and you mean that by the fact that they don't want the job that they end up with by following their unique ability because it doesn't match their goal for status in the organization exactly they'll strive for something that they're not uniquely good at because in their mind it has higher status exactly and there's nothing that koses I think of CAS I think everybody can it's actually why I wrote multiplication by subtraction it was a client's company I was like oh just so hard to watch so Dan I really appreciate you sharing the fact that you know guesses and bets are what the future is about and this is an early one that you and Babs made partly so that you could also stay in your unique ability very astute of you and I think it's an interesting exercise which we've actually done in one of the connection calls or workshops I can't remember it was a workshop which is what are some of the best guesses and Bets you've made in the past and then what are you excited about I'll be doing it next Tuesday with the big free zone fantastic oh that'll be so great so would that be an interesting thing to take out of this conversation I mean I think you can take guesses and Bets as a practical application of today's conversation or the bet on unique ability because if people are at all frustrated with their team their team work it might be very worthwhile bet to move things more towards the unability end of the dial yeah what would you recommend for people taking well I think it' be true since our audience are entrepreneurs but you can't spot unique ability in other people unless you first of all take ownership of unique ability in yourself so it's the entrepreneur who's guessed and bet on their own unique ability now wanting to expand the power of that in the team that they great you know so my sense is that somebody who hasn't done it for themselves would be no good at creating an organization that consists of unique ability Teamwork because you're toned deaf yep I think that's really true that's a really great Point yeah and I think in both bab's case and my case this was incredibly welldeveloped before we even met each other so you guys are really self-aware about where you had energy and attention and creativity and where you didn't yeah yeah and do you find that some people just never clue in or constantly override it oh yeah the vast majority of people never I think the environment of a coach Workshop especially if it has the entrepreneurs have some ears in the program is just automatically energetic and Powerful because everybody's there participating with their unique ability right okay and I think it's rare in the world that you ever have the situation that we have in one of our 500 Workshop days a year where just everybody in the room is there on the power of their own unique ability and what they're learning is how to maximize that I mean they come to the program how to maximize my own unique ability how to surround myself with team members who operate according to Unique ability and I would say the longer that they're in the program the better they get at guessing and betting it's interesting Dan as you're talking about the room it's also our team because our team is 100% in their unique ability in the room too like there's certain roles that you and I are doing then certain roles which we will never do and vice versa it really simplifies if you think of all the rage you know the age of Rage I call it in the social media and the news media and everything about people being insulted because their identity is not respected and I don't care about anybody's identity I couldn't care less what your identity is but I do care 100% about what your unique ability is and I don't care of skin color I don't care where you come from I don't care what you're attracted to or not attracted to none of that really matters it's just what are you good at that you have Superior skills and you love doing it and if we can fashion a role for you inside of our company that you'll stay with it forever and get better and get better and make a great contribution with other with teamwork and everything like that it solves a lot of problems unique ability teamwork just solves a lot of lot of you know problems and people feeling disrespected people feeling insulted and everything because you don't recognize their identity it's made up it's like a fashion they bought at the store and they're wearing the fashion for this quarter and unique ability is so core to who someone is well it's Unique it's Unique and there's none like you no it might start off small but if you grow it and expand it and put time and attention and intellect and problem solving an experience behind it it grows and expands and it doesn't change it's timeless it might get deeper it might get richer you might get more refined about your audience but it's going to go wherever you go yeah and it's not changing based on the season which is to go back to your fashion and Aly yep I agree Dan thank you I love talking about guesses and Bets it's such a as I said at the beginning a freeing way to look at things and the fact that you brought that into coach and unique ability for me you've been able to explain why unique ability is so powerful and the type of environment that it creates unique ability unique ability teamwork may explain so much of the success of coach and the future of Coach because that's what we're going to keep betting on which I find really exciting so thank you thank you Sharon