Jeremy Utley, Co-Author of “Ideaflow”
Today, my guest is Jeremy Utley, Co-Author of the book Ideaflow and the Director of Executive Education at Stanford’s d.school, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering, where he has earned multiple “favorite professor” distinctions from graduate programs.
Jeremy co-leads the d.school’s Executive Education programs, and co-teaches two celebrated courses at Stanford, Leading Disruptive Innovation (d.leadership) and LaunchPad, which focus on creating real-world impact with the tools of design & innovation. He is also on the teaching teams of d.org, an organizational design course, and Transformative Design, a course that turns the tools of design onto graduate students’ lives. Jeremy has taught alongside the likes of Lecrae, Dan Ariely, Laszlo Bock, and Greg McKeown. Jeremy holds a BA from The University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
In this candid conversation, Jeremy shared the real stories behind his transition from management consultant to Stanford design school director, the truth about the “innovation muscle,” and actionable strategies for generating breakthrough ideas.
1. The Innovation Muscle. Jeremy highlighted that despite the massive corporate hype surrounding creativity, true innovation cannot be achieved through a one-time workshop or a temporary hackathon. He insists that innovation is actually an ongoing capability that will quickly atrophy without regular use. Comparing it to his athletic sister who naturally does bicep curls with gallons of milk at the grocery store, he emphasizes that innovative people must adopt an “athletic mindset” and treat everyday problems as mental dumbbells to constantly exercise their creative muscles.
2. The Quantity Paradox. Jeremy warned against the “Einstellung effect” (or anti-Einstein effect), which is the dangerous human tendency to immediately fixate on the very first solution that comes to mind simply to achieve cognitive closure. To successfully bypass this psychological trap, he advocates shifting the goalpost entirely from quality to sheer quantity. He demonstrated this in his own life when his children shattered a 114-year-old window in his home; instead of instantly defaulting to the standard punishment of grounding them, he forced himself to brainstorm a quota of ten different consequences, ultimately discovering that having the offending child teach a lesson on household rules to her younger sisters was a vastly superior solution.
3. The Tyranny of Reason. Pushing back against traditional corporate cultures that falsely reward individuals merely for aggressively spotting errors in a meeting, Jeremy argues that teams must learn to suspend judgment. To foster true collaboration, he advises people to stop asking “what do I think of this?” and instead ask “what does this make me think of?”. Quoting David Ogilvy, Jeremy noted that professionals are frequently trapped by the “tyranny of reason” and constantly self-censor their ideas. To break free, he actively encourages executives to dare to state the blatantly “obvious” or deliberately brainstorm ideas that are completely “illegal,” as permitting temporarily unreasonable thoughts is often the only way to unlock truly original pathways.
4. The Power of the Unresolved. Highlighting a fascinating World War II-era study on the world’s most imminent architects, Jeremy revealed that the absolute best creators actually deliberately delayed making decisions for as long as possible. While this tendency deeply maddened their productivity-obsessed colleagues who demanded constant, linear progress, keeping a problem actively unresolved intentionally triggered the creators’ subconscious minds to keep working in the background. By refusing to close a problem too early, these visionaries kept themselves entirely open to unexpected new information and ultimately assimilated significantly better combinations of ideas.
