Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney Podcast Por Phil McKinney arte de portada

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney

De: Phil McKinney
Escúchala gratis

Why do smart leaders make terrible choices about breakthrough ideas? Phil McKinney spent 40 years making high-stakes innovation decisions — as HP's CTO and now CEO of CableLabs. Each week, he shares the thinking frameworks and decision patterns that separate breakthroughs from expensive mistakes. No theory. No hype. Just what actually works. Running weekly since 2005. Full archive at KillerInnovations.comSee http://philmckinney.com Desarrollo Personal Economía Gestión y Liderazgo Liderazgo Éxito Personal
Episodios
  • How to Think For Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You

    How to Think For Yourself When Everyone Disagrees With You
    Feb 24 2026
    When neuroscientists scanned the brains of people going along with a group, they expected to find lying. What they found instead was something far stranger. The group wasn't changing people's answers. It was changing what they actually saw. We'll get to that study in a minute. But first, I want you to remember the last time you were in a meeting, and you knew something was wrong. The numbers didn't add up. The risk was being underestimated. And someone needed to say it. Then the most senior person in the room spoke first: "I think this is exactly what we need." Heads nodded. Finance agreed. Marketing agreed. The consultant agreed. And by the time it was your turn, you heard yourself saying, "I have some minor concerns, but overall I think it's solid." You're not alone. Research shows that roughly half of employees stay silent at work rather than voice a concern. And among those who stayed quiet, 40% estimated they wasted 2 weeks or more replaying what they didn't say. Two weeks. Mentally rehearsing the point they should have made in a meeting that's already over. That silence isn't a character flaw. It's your neurology working against you. And today I'm going to show you exactly why it happens and how to stop it. It starts with what was happening inside your head during that meeting you just remembered. Why Your Brain Surrenders to the Group Most people know about the Asch conformity experiments from the 1950s. People were asked to match line lengths, and seventy-five percent went along with answers that were obviously wrong. That result gets cited everywhere. But the more important study came fifty years later, and it revealed something the Asch experiment never could. In 2005, neuroscientist Gregory Berns at Emory University put people inside an MRI machine and ran a similar conformity task, this time with three-dimensional shape rotation. Like Asch, he planted actors who gave wrong answers. But unlike Asch, he could watch what was happening inside people's brains while the conformity was occurring. Berns expected the MRI to show activity in the prefrontal cortex, the brain's decision-making center, when people went along with wrong answers. That would mean they were knowingly lying to fit in. Just a social calculation. That's not what the scans showed. People who conformed showed no increased activity in decision-making regions. Instead, the activity showed up in the parts of the brain that handle visual and spatial perception, the occipital and parietal areas. The group wasn't changing people's answers. It was changing what they actually saw. Their brains were rewriting their experience to match the room. And the people who resisted the group? Their scans told a different story. Heightened activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat detection center. The same circuitry that fires when you encounter physical danger lit up when someone disagreed with the group. Berns put it plainly. The fear of social isolation activates the same neural machinery as the fear of genuine threats to survival. When you caved in that meeting, your neurology wasn't malfunctioning. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do. Keep you safe inside the tribe. This is why what I call mindjacking works so well. Algorithms manufacture social proof by showing you what's trending, what your friends liked, and what similar people chose. Your wiring responds the same way it does at the conference table. You're fighting your own threat-detection system every time you try to hold an independent position within a group. You can't turn off the wiring. But you can learn to catch it in the act. And that starts with one critical distinction. The First Skill: Separating Updating from Caving Sometimes the people around you know something you don't. Changing your mind in a group isn't always a surrender. Sometimes it's the smartest move in the room. The real skill is knowing which one just happened. You can test this in real time. When you feel your position shifting in a group, ask yourself three questions. First: Did someone introduce information I didn't have before? If the CFO reveals a data point that genuinely changes the calculus, updating your view isn't a weakness. It's intelligence. That's new evidence. Second: Can I articulate why I changed my mind, in specific terms? If you can say, "I shifted because of the margin data in Q3 that I hadn't seen," that's a real update. If you can only say, "I don't know, everyone seemed to think it was fine," that's capitulation. Third: Would I have reached this same conclusion alone, with the same information? This is the killer question. If the answer is no, and you only arrived at this position because others were already there, you haven't updated. You've surrendered. Getting this wrong is costly. And not just the one time. When you capitulate and call it updating, you train yourself to stop trusting your own analysis. Do it enough times, and you won't even bother preparing, because you ...
    Más Menos
    20 m
  • Better Decisions Under Pressure

    Better Decisions Under Pressure
    Feb 17 2026
    "We need an answer by the end of the day." Ten words. And the moment you hear them, something shifts inside your chest. Your pulse ticks up. Your focus narrows. Careful thinking stops. The clock starts. You probably haven't even asked the most important question yet. Is that deadline real? Most of the urgency you feel every day is fake. Manufactured by someone who benefits from you deciding fast instead of deciding well. Most people can't tell a real deadline from a manufactured one. By the end of this, you will. Let's get into it. What Time Pressure Actually Does to Your Brain Last episode, we talked about decision fatigue. How your brain degrades over a long day. Time pressure is different. Fatigue is a slow drain. Time pressure is a switch. When the clock is ticking, your brain stops analyzing and starts reacting. Normally, the front of your brain runs the show: careful analysis, weighing trade-offs, long-term thinking. Under time pressure, a faster, older, more emotional region takes over. You don't feel less accurate. You feel more confident. Decades of decision science research have found that under time pressure, people's confidence in their decisions goes up while their actual accuracy goes down. You're not just thinking worse. You're thinking worse while being more sure you're right. That false confidence makes you predictably worse at three specific things. Evaluating trade-offs. You lock onto whichever side your gut grabs first.Considering consequences beyond the immediate. Second-order thinking goes offline.Recognizing what you don't know. Because you feel certain, you stop looking for what you're missing. And that's exactly what manufactured urgency is designed to exploit. This is mindjacking in its purest form. Someone engineers the pressure, your brain switches modes, and you make their decision instead of yours. The Urgency Trap: Real vs. Manufactured Not all time pressure is the same. Some deadlines are real. Your tax filing date is real. The board meeting on Thursday is real. The patient who needs a decision in the next ten minutes? That's real. These deadlines exist because of actual constraints in the world, not because someone manufactured them. A huge portion of the urgency you experience? It's engineered. "This offer expires at midnight." Really? Will the company stop wanting your money tomorrow? "We need your decision today." Why today? What actually changes between today and Wednesday? Manufactured urgency is one of the most effective persuasion tools ever invented. Countdown timers on websites that reset when you refresh the page. "Limited time" sales that somehow run every month. Negotiators who invent deadlines because pressure extracts concessions. Manufactured urgency is everywhere. And it works because of what we just covered. Time pressure flips you into fast-decision mode. When someone engineers urgency, they're not just rushing you. They're changing which part of your mind makes the call. The decisions that actually shape your career almost never show up with a countdown timer. The urgency trap pulls your attention to whatever is loudest, while the ones that matter sit quietly in the background. Until it's too late. Five Tests for Manufactured Urgency How do you tell the difference? I use five tests. Test One: The Source Test. Ask yourself: who benefits from me deciding quickly? If the answer is "the person creating the deadline," that's a red flag. Real deadlines serve the situation. Fake deadlines serve the person imposing them. The car salesperson who says "this price is only good today"? That deadline serves the dealership, not you. The surgeon who says "we need to operate within the hour"? That deadline serves the patient. Test Two: The Consequence Test. Ask: what actually happens if I wait? Not what I'm told will happen. What actually happens. "The offer expires." Does it? What would happen if you called back next week? In most cases, the offer magically reappears. Real deadlines have real, verifiable consequences. Manufactured ones have threats that evaporate on contact. Test Three: The History Test. Has this "urgent" situation happened before? If the company has run "ending soon" promotions every month for a year, that's not urgency. That's a business model. If a colleague marks everything "urgent" in their emails, that's not urgency. That's a habit. Test Four: The Reversibility Test. This one builds on our earlier work in the series. How reversible is this decision? If you can cancel, return, or renegotiate, urgency matters less. But if the decision is hard to reverse, like a long-term contract or a major hire, artificial urgency is especially dangerous. The less reversible the decision, the more suspicious you should be of anyone rushing you. Test Five: The Separation Test. Remove yourself from the pressure source and check if the urgency survives. Step out of the room. Sleep on it. Call back tomorrow. Real urgency persists when you leave. Manufactured ...
    Más Menos
    17 m
  • How to Beat Decision Fatigue

    How to Beat Decision Fatigue
    Feb 10 2026
    A nurse in Pennsylvania had been on her feet for twelve hours. She was supposed to go home, but the unit was short-staffed, so she stayed. During that overtime, a patient was diagnosed with cancer and needed two chemotherapy doses. She administered the first, placed the second in a drawer, and headed home. She forgot about the second dose. It wasn't discovered until the next day. The patient was fine; they got the treatment in time. But think about what happened. This wasn't a careless nurse. This was a dedicated professional who stayed late to help her team. Her skills didn't fail. Her knowledge didn't fail. Her energy failed, and her judgment went with it. That's the trap. We assume our thinking stays constant, that the brain in hour fourteen is the same brain that showed up in hour one. It's not. Last episode, we tackled deciding under uncertainty. But fatigue does something different. Uncertainty makes you hesitate. Fatigue makes you stop caring. Why Your Brain Makes Worse Decisions by Evening You've probably heard the popular saying: "Making too many decisions wears you out, so by evening your judgment is shot." That idea dominated psychology for twenty years. Researchers believed decision-making drained from a limited mental reserve, like a battery running down. Then, independent labs tried to reproduce those results at scale, and the effect vanished. One study, 23 labs, over 2,000 people, found nothing. A second, 36 labs, 3,500 people, same result. The experience is real, though. People do make worse decisions after a long day of mental effort. What was wrong was the explanation. Your brain doesn't drain like a battery. After sustained effort, it shifts priorities. It starts favoring speed and ease over accuracy. Not because it can't think carefully, but because it decides careful thinking isn't worth the effort. Decision fatigue isn't your brain shutting down. It's your brain quietly lowering its standards without telling you. Decision Fatigue in the Real World That science isn't abstract. It plays out every day. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital tracked over 21,000 patient visits. Doctors prescribed unnecessary antibiotics more frequently as the day went on. Not because afternoon patients were sicker. Because saying "here's a prescription" is easier than explaining why you don't need one. Five percent more patients received antibiotics they didn't need, purely because of timing. The same pattern shows up everywhere. Surgeons make more conservative calls later in the day. Hand hygiene compliance drops across a twelve-hour shift. Financial analysts grow less accurate with each additional stock prediction they make in a single day. The drift always goes in the same direction: toward whatever requires the least effort. That drift explains something we've been exploring across this series. When you're exhausted, someone else's conclusion isn't just tempting, it's a relief. The algorithm's recommendation saves you from having to evaluate. The expert's opinion saves you from forming your own. That's mindjacking, finding the open door. Fatigue doesn't just degrade your thinking. It makes you grateful to hand it over. Your Four Warning Signals Knowing the science is useful. But what matters more is catching fatigue in yourself before it costs you. Here are four signals that your judgment is compromised. Signal 1: The Default Drift. Someone proposes a plan that sounds... fine. Not great, not terrible. Two hours ago, you'd have pushed back, asked harder questions. Now you just nod. You're not agreeing because you're convinced. You're agreeing because disagreeing takes energy you no longer have. Signal 2: The Irritability Spike. A colleague asks a reasonable question, and it feels like an interruption. When your emotional response is out of proportion to the situation, it's not the situation. Your reserves are low. Signal 3: The Shortcut Reflex. A decision that should take twenty minutes takes thirty seconds. You skip the analysis, go with your gut. There's a version of this that sounds like confidence. "I trust my instincts." But late in the day, that phrase is often code for "I'm too tired to think this through." Signal 4: The Surrender. You stop forming conclusions and start borrowing them. Someone says, "I think we should go with Option B" and you feel a wave of relief. Not because Option B is right, but because you no longer have to figure it out. That relief is the signal. When outsourcing, your judgment feels like a gift instead of a loss, you're running on empty. If two or more of these show up at the same time, stop. Your judgment isn't reliable right now. Don't trust it with anything that matters. Four Moves to Protect Your Judgment Those signals tell you something's wrong. Here's what to do about it. Move 1: Postpone it. Move the decision to a high-energy window. For most people, that's morning. Think of those hours like premium real estate. Stop filling them with trivial meetings. ...
    Más Menos
    16 m
Todavía no hay opiniones