Sally Dominguez on the Power of People

Futurist and award winning inventor Sally Dominguez has a dual background in Architecture and Entrepreneurship. She is a faculty member at Singularity University and coaches business leaders in m moonshot thinking, 10X strategy, and sustainable transformation.

Famed for saying that innovation is her touchstone to helping others activate their creative confidence, host Dr Graham Kelly asks Sally what drives her to empower others to improve their confidence and explain more about her 10x mindset approach.

You have said that helping others activate their creative confidence is your mission – what fuels this mission?

It’s important to start off by expressing that creativity is not always art per se. It can be art, but you know, I’m always amazed at the number of people, and I’ll call out specifically surgeons and scientists who tend to discount the word creative because they think that I’m talking about art.

What I’m talking about is the ability to imagine and then deliver that kind of thinking. And it’s so important right now for people to recognise their own creative confidence because we’re in an era where people are feeling profound anxiety isolation.

We’re in the kind of guts of fourth revolution change, the rise of machine intelligence and the changing of the human response to machines. And so if we consider that machine led intelligence can already predict and analyse as well as spot behaviour change hundreds of times faster than the best human – it’s little wonder that most people out there in the workforce and in general society are freaking out, going what’s our role?

But you know our role is to harness those tools and use them to think bigger and then deliver huge possibility, huge thinking with impact and scale. I do believe we have the smartest machines right now, but they still cannot stack up to the human brain.

Do you have any sort of examples where you’ve taken someone who, you know is not in that creative mindset at all, to delivering something that was amazing?

Yes, so many!

I recently worked with NASA Langley, which is the big research centre of NASA, and they wanted me to help clarify and define a strategy for 2040. I knew, walking into the workshop that I was dealing with largely an introverted crowd who were also hypothetical thinkers.

Part of my five lenses exploratory process is that I use generative AI to suggest to me some words that will bring comfort to hypothetical thinkers when talking to them about levels of possibility. Often when I deal with a room of scientists, I’ll call out physicists in particular – often the smartest people in the room – who are very much defined by a discipline and a level of expertise. I like to push you outside of expertise. You have to let go of knowledge in order to move outside of what you know, and into the realm of possibility.

The beautiful thing is that if it push them hard enough they will always try something new if you just frame that tool in the right way. And when you see the breakthrough happen,  the new thinking then comes.

We’re seeing this in science all the time right? The things we thought were finite, the things we thought were possible and impossible are being redefined by our access to information and data.

Tell us more about your five lenses approach.

I’m excited about the five lenses I have. I initially started teaching this as a class at Stanford University, which was originally named “adventurous thinking”. My mind works in swirls! During my architecture studies I learned about linear, where everybody is supposed to have the same thought process,  I’m a swirly thinker. I’m extremely ADHD and I’m extremely multifaceted. So I thought, what a challenge to have to express swirly thinking – something less literal and still pursuing to possibility.

And so I started thinking about different aspects. One was empathy, which is classic design thinking, what are our inherent biases? And how can we get around that to focus on more sideways thinking.

Rethinking is a lens where we actually manipulate, something we know really well, using the core value to make it larger or smaller, and that is a lens that I use all the time in business consulting

Thinking is to me is essentially circular. It’s looking at when a product or service or campaign ends, you know, we’re so focused on, let’s get it launched. let’s begin it, let’s let it crescendo rather than when does it end. But things become so much more clear if you understand the ending at the beginning, it gives a clearer purpose.

Can you define what you mean by purpose?

The importance of purpose right now, is in giving people a reason to be doing what they’re doing when there’s so much uncertainty. You need reasons, right? You need ideas to share. You need community, and you can’t build community without purpose.

Take Sony for example, their purpose is inspiring emotion through creativity and technology. They are currently developing personal purpose statements, such as what are your top three values and what impact do you wish you could have on the world.

So purpose serves a really important productivity piece, a really important aspirational piece. It also enables you to find unexpected partners. Because who else wants what you have. Who else wants to inspire emotions with creativity and technology? Who else wants a better world for the many people? And so you start building platforms of like-minded people. It’s so much more than making money right. And then below that comes strategy and tactics.

How important is idea sharing to create this like-minded community?

Idea sharing has a ripple effect. Inviting people to discuss ideas can have a profound impact, this is when amazing things happen. It’s all about optimism.

I really feel right now Graham, and this saddens me, that people have their eye off the prize in terms of collaboration, because they’re so entranced by the shiny object of AI. AI is using up crazy amounts of energy. Personal energy and data centric energy. For me, we need to question what people are doing unless they are using AI to really move the game forward.