Dan Ward, Senior Principal Systems Engineer and Author: Catalysts Are Just Powder in a Jar

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: I'm Tracy Lovejoy, the co-CEO of catalyst constellations which is dedicated to empowering catalyst to create bold, powerful change in the world. This is our podcast move, fast, break ship burnout, where we speak with catalyst leaders about ways to successfully lead transformation. Today, I'm, incredibly excited to have time with Dan ward.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Dan is currently a senior principal systems engineer and innovation catalyst at Mit Corporation, and he served in the Air Force for more than 20 years in a multitude of innovation, roles, and retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: He then launched Danward Danward, consulting

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: to help clients reduce cost time and complexity of delivering world class innovations. He's published 4 books, putting us to shame. Fire. How fast, inexpensive, restrained, and elegant methods ignite innovation, the simplicity cycle lift innovation lessons, from flying machines. Oh, my gosh! I'm excited to read that one, too, and punk the book I told him I just ordered cannot wait. It's going to be a Christmas present prompts and provocations for authentic innovations.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: He presents and lectures globally. His writings have appeared in many places like fast Company Forbes Harper's Boston globe. I'm sure I'm missing a few, Dan. You can let us know he has not one, not 2, but 3 engineering degrees has received the Bronze Star medal for his service in Afghanistan. Like Whoa! I bow down. Thank you for being here with me today, Dan.

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Dan Ward: Tracy. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the lovely introduction and kind words, and I enjoy your show. I'm looking forward to being part of it, so.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: All right. Well, then, let's let's have a conversation.

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Dan Ward: Indeed.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: So would love to understand. That was, you know, a quick intro.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: What do you? How do you think about your history? And can you help us see the catalytic moments along the way.

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Dan Ward: I love the sort of that framing of identifying those catalytic moments along the way of somebody's career, trajectory and path. And as I thought about that and getting ready for this. There's maybe 2 or 3 that I might highlight. One was when I was in the Air Force when I was in uniform. I was stationed at the Air Force Research Laboratory, a tiny little postage stamp of a base in upstate New York. There were like 80 of us in uniform.

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Dan Ward: One of the things I got to do there was develop or help develop the rapid innovation process for the Air Force Research Lab. So Afrl, the Air Force Research Lab is chartered to do like fundamental bench level research as well as building prototypes. And you know all of that stuff for military technologies. So communication systems, radar systems, all of that stuff. And so

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Dan Ward: figuring out what is the repeatable process.

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Dan Ward: and not just a repeatable process that we can define, but a repeatable process that practitioners will actually use

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Dan Ward: for the entire Air Force Research lab with like 10,000 people in like 10 different locations. It was just a delightful opportunity to help kind of really dig in at that practitioner level. Get it written down, get it propagated, you know. I'm sure they've updated it since since that time. But the

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Dan Ward: the impact that that had, I think, was much bigger than I had expected at the time, I thought, well, we'll just kind of. We'll write down the process. And and then people started doing it. And you're like, Oh.

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Dan Ward: that! That was that catalytical moment where you accelerated. You sort of reduced the activation energy required for people to make good stuff happen quickly. So

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Dan Ward: you know, that was sort of in my day job, like my official responsibilities. The second sort of big catalytical moment. And actually the other 2 were both. Aside from my day job, which I think is kind of classic for catalyst the way you write about it, and your book was so good. By the way, I loved it.

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Dan Ward: I had written a number of articles I wrote like 80 or 80 plus articles before I wrote books. I wrote articles

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Dan Ward: mostly in like obscure tech. You know military tech journals that like nobody reads except for this one.

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Dan Ward: So this article, I said, basically all the same things that I've been saying for years about speed, thrift, simplicity, and bringing all those to bear on the way we define design, develop technology systems.

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Dan Ward: The twist was this one. I used Star Wars as a metaphor for all the same stuff, I've been saying. But now the tagline was build droids, not death stars.

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Dan Ward: so build droids, not death stars was inspired by my daughter. She was the catalyst who really triggered that particular article. They had finally gotten old enough to watch the Star Wars movies. This is when there were only 6 of them at the time. We watched all 6 of them, and partway through Empire strikes back one of my daughters, said.

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Dan Ward: Dad. They shouldn't build those death stars anymore. They keep getting blown up, and I was like, hang on. I'll be right back. Let me go write an article about that right

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Dan Ward: enough.

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Dan Ward: Fun. Fact, fun, family lore. Both my daughters claim to be the one who said that

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Dan Ward: memory is funny. I remember one of them saying that I won't say which one, I think, said it, but they think they both said it, and you do seem to be on mute. By the way, if that is on purpose. Okay.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: I I keep myself on mute, so that your your audio is the primary. But you but you know I'm hearing you in reaction.

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Dan Ward: Just in case, yeah.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, yeah.

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Dan Ward: So that article went viral in a way that none of my other stuff had. Rachel Maddow tweeted about it. Like.

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Dan Ward: Wow! You still hear that that came out in, I think, 2011. I still hear from people saying, Are you the guy who wrote that Star Wars article and so the impact that that single article had on shaping the way people see the world and how they define goodness.

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Dan Ward: you know, because we do have a tendency to want to build death stars. These metaphorical things that are big, expensive, complicated end up getting blown up in the second act. They contribute less to the fight than they were envisioned, because complex systems tend to do less than they were designed to do. Simple systems tend to do more than they were designed to do.

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Dan Ward: getting that concept into people's heads in a way that was digestible and memorable, and it became the kind of thing that people would be like, oh, you got to read this. They would tell somebody about it and pass it along.

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Dan Ward: That's how it got out of this obscure, you know, Dod Journal, and into like

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Dan Ward: Rachel Maddow's desk like, how does that happen? What

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Featured in any of your books. I'm curious.

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Dan Ward: All of my books do tend to have a lot of Pop culture references.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Dan Ward: You know. That's sort of part of my my voice, my my vibe as a writer.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Is an article, or is that going to become its own book? One day.

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Dan Ward: So the basic concepts and practices in that article became the foundation for my 1st book, Fire, which is all about speed, thrift, and simplicity, the concept of build droids, not death stars. I'm like this is the book length. Treatment of of that concept is book number one. That was fire.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Got it. Well done, daughter, that's nameless.

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Dan Ward: It's 1 of one of the 2. Definitely. It was definitely one of the 2. Seth.

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Dan Ward: So, and then the 3rd sort of catalytic moment more recent. So this is after I retired from the Air Force, and when I was 1st joined Mitre.

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Dan Ward: one of the coolest things I've ever done. If I do say so myself.

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Dan Ward: I started a group called the Green Pen Squad.

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Dan Ward: and this was, I'm new to the company, you know. Mitre is 10,000 people in 60 different locations, and I just wanted to find my people. I wanted to find who are the frustrated innovators who are the energetic people who are trying to make a difference.

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Dan Ward: And I just needed to find some people to like to know and to work with. So I launched what I called the green pen squad, because green means go. Green means good green means growth, and I bought a bunch of green pens, and I wandered around and I talked to people, and we'd have a quick coffee together. And if I got a sense like, Oh, yeah, they may be one of these people. I would offer them a green pen.

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Dan Ward: And I would say, Would you like to join my green pen squad. Because when I'm writing with green ink, it's a visual reminder to think differently. It's not black ink, it's not blue, it's green.

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Dan Ward: It's a social signal. Hey? That Guy writes in green ink, that's that's a little different. That's a little weird. And so once a month, plus or minus, we had this sort of very casual, informal co-mentoring group that we evolved into where we would have a chance to test out our ideas and give each other presentations and just sort of ask questions. And and you know.

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Dan Ward: we've really sort of built a nice little experimental, collaborative, innovative, catalytic community.

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Dan Ward: one of the spinoffs from the green pen squad became the the mitre innovation toolkit, which is a product. It's a it's a free product, since Mitre is a I should tell people what mitre is in just a second. Don't let me forget to do that.

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Dan Ward: But Mitre's innovation toolkit is a free resource. You can go to itk.mitre.org. And you get access to the whole thing. We don't even ask for your email address like you can just use it all. It's 2628 different tools and techniques and methods that are designed to help people work together more effectively, to deliver innovative solutions to hard problems, everything from like understanding what your problem is to exploring the solution space. We've got

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Dan Ward: analytical tools. We've got ideation tools, understanding your user journey, maps, tools for simplifying tools for going, divergent thinking and tools for convergent thinking.

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Dan Ward: For each of the tool pages there's a description of what is the tool?

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Dan Ward: When would you use this one versus some other. Why would you use this one versus some other step-by-step instructions on how to use it? Free downloads? There's no software to download. There's like templates and things like that. And that project was launched by 4 or 5 of us from the Green Pen squad, who are like we should make a thing. I want to make something. What could we make?

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Dan Ward: And and 6 years later we have, I think.

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Dan Ward: 44 certified Itk facilitators across the company in 14 different locations. I can't even name all the locations anymore. I used to be able to have lunch with the whole Itk team. Now, I haven't even met everybody.

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Dan Ward: and yeah, we've used the these innovation tools with general officers in the Pentagon, with senior executives at NASA and with high school kids. I was just off at a university recently doing an Itk workshop there as well, and so just 5 people getting together over lunch. We had no time. No money. No, it wasn't an official project. It's still not an official project. Nobody has ever been assigned to work on this Itk project. We've all sort of self selected. We're volunteers who are like, Hey, I'm going to go do this thing.

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Dan Ward: and we turn it into products and services that people actually pay for. So.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: What is that that's stand for.

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Dan Ward: Oh, Itk stands for innovation. Toolkit.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: That's it. Just the that makes sense. Okay? Okay. So you told me to tell you to tell people what Mitre is.

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Dan Ward: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So yeah, I work for a company called Mitre for those who haven't heard of it. Mitre is a not for profit systems engineering company, which is sort of a rare thing. There aren't a lot of engineering companies that are not for profit. We are chartered to work in the public interest, and our mission is to solve problems, to make the world a safer place. So we often provide the deeper level of technical expertise that the Government can't.

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Dan Ward: You know Cantor doesn't have in-house. We're kind of serve as the government's trusted advisor by statute. We can't make products, and we don't compete with Boeing and Lockheed or Deloitte, or any of those

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Dan Ward: we can make prototypes that we can then share. We can do things like the innovation toolkit and kind of put that out into the world. So we do a lot of cybersecurity work, a lot of national security work, a lot of work with Hhs, so health and human services. So we're in like healthcare policy technology, big data. And really, what we do is we run 6 of these federally funded research and development corporations or Ffrdcs. We love our acronyms right.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Indeed, I'm given that.

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Dan Ward: Yeah. So these Ffrdcs Federally funded research and development corporations, I think, is the C.

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Dan Ward: It's just a way for the government to, you know. Give us money to go off and solve these hard problems.

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Dan Ward: you know, with with

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Dan Ward: in an objective way, you know. So we're we're just here to kind of be the trusted advisor and the honest broker, analyzing technologies and things like that without actually like having that profit, pressure or stake. You know.

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Dan Ward: stockholders and things like that.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, well, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing that. And I know that that's going to be meaningful. It's such a purpose driven place to be.

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Dan Ward: It's very purpose driven very mission driven. Which one of the things I love about it. Yeah.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: I can imagine, and I have all kinds of follow ups from your 3 moments that you shared. But I'd love to ask first, st how do you personally relate to the concept of catalyst? And how does it support you as a leader, if at all?

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Dan Ward: So I think, being a catalyst, I mean in chemistry, catalysts, accelerate, change, right? You introduce the catalyst into a into a solution. And what does that do? Is it reduces the activation energy and it makes the chemical reaction go faster. Yeah.

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Dan Ward: you know, I think so much of what we call leadership is is

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Dan Ward: is being a catalyst. So being that accelerant being an enabler of change.

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Dan Ward: helping change to happen that would not have happened otherwise. So that's really what I try to do in in my writing.

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Dan Ward: So what I try to do in these, you know, groups and teams that I like to to build one of my favorite things is to build and lead small teams. Building Co lead. I should say I like to build teams with a shared leadership structure. So the green pen squad didn't have like

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Dan Ward: I wasn't like my like, I wasn't leading. I was organ. I was catalyzing it right. And similarly, with the the Innovation toolkit team project, we've got a leadership team of about 6 people, and it's very egalitarian and very kind of

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Dan Ward: anybody can make any decision that they want. As long as you just sort of inform the rest of us, you know. Ask for advice occasionally.

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Dan Ward: but sparking those sparking those teams bringing people together and saying, Hey, you want to try this. What do you think about doing that?

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Dan Ward: Helping make things happen that wouldn't have happened otherwise,

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Dan Ward: is is kind of what catalyst means to me.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, no, it's a beautiful definition. And I see that in each of the moments in your history that you share. And when you talk about the Star Wars article right? You

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: really show us that moment you're watching the movie. You're with your girls and like the dots connect and you run, and you have to, you know, kind of put out what has synthesized for you. And so I'm curious. In the 1st example, I think you called it a rapid innovation method. Forgive me if I got it wrong.

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Dan Ward: Innovation, process, yep.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Up the prop. The process. Sorry. So what spawned that? I'm curious.

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Dan Ward: Oh,

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Dan Ward: In a word, I think people spotted like we. We had a perfect storm of just

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Dan Ward: the right people. So we had a senior person at the lab who

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Dan Ward: had the vision. He's like, Hey, you know. I think I think the Afrl could go faster. I think we need to ramp up our capacity as a laboratory to accelerate this innovation work.

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Dan Ward: And then he found me and a few other sort of junior officers who had been doing the thing.

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Dan Ward: But we didn't quite know how to scale up. He knew how to scale up, but needed help at the practitioner level to do the thing so so that partnership, I think, was really

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Dan Ward: well. That was sort of their chemical reaction began to to happen.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: And was it him who was like, Hey, we need this repeatable process, or did it come from the people coming together.

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Dan Ward: A little bit of both. I think

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Dan Ward: the thing that he wanted to have happen is a bit different than what actually did happen because it evolved. And as we sort of you know, we learned more day day one is when you know the least about the project. Right? So he's like, Hey, I think we want this thing. We're going to make these networks, and we're like great.

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Dan Ward: We're going to start there. But by the time we take step 2, step 3, step 4. We're going to be heading in a slightly different direction. So I think we hit the bullseye, which maybe wasn't the bullseye that he was aiming at initially. So, yeah, it was a very

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Dan Ward: collaborative, exploratory, experimental approach to defining this process which really got to our, you know all of our skill set as as lab rats. Right? You know, we're working in the lab. We're all about doing experiments. Well, boy, let's let's experiment with how we do experiments. Let's innovate on the way we do innovation.

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Dan Ward: And and yeah, that that mutual trust and the the egalitarian nature. He was much more senior than some of us junior folks who are working with him.

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Dan Ward: But it was all very

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Dan Ward: yeah, very egalitarian, which doesn't always happen in a military environment happens more often than people think.

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Dan Ward: You know, we can kind of leave our rank at the door more often than you might think, but.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Okay.

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Dan Ward: But it's not a guarantee that that'll be the case.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: There was something you and I were talking about before I hit record and I won't have us go into it completely. But you. You brought up this notion of the confidence paradox right in a you know, just a short element. The idea that often we will resist getting started because we don't yet have the confidence, and the paradox being that the confidence gains when you get started right so that we can stall something I'm hearing in both. That 1st and 3rd story you share is that

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: there's other people that were really part of what you were doing. You know you were, you know an element, a chemical element, as a catalyst.

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Dan Ward: Hmm.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Handing out the green pens, recognizing people. But you know the Itk came from the Brain trust that the repeatable process came from the people coming together. So I would love to just have you talk a little bit about

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: what what it is. You think an innovation that is the individual.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: what it is in innovation. That's the group. And any advice you have for folks out there.

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Dan Ward: You know, and that's where the catalyst metaphor really works so powerfully, because I mean again in chemistry. If you just have a jar of catalyst sitting by itself.

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Dan Ward: Nothing happens right? It literally. It's inert.

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Dan Ward: right? So a catalyst by themselves

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Dan Ward: is just a, you know, some powder in a jar, the cataly. The

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Dan Ward: the actual chemical reaction only happens when that catalyst is in contact with the other elements, right? The the water and the reactants and things like that. So yeah, I mean, when I look at.

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Dan Ward: I don't think I've done anything ever in my career, and otherwise that that didn't involve other people. So, you know. That's why I said. Catalysm and and leadership go together.

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Dan Ward: partly because, like the the people aspect of it, you know, if you're a leader all by yourself, and you don't have anybody following you.

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Dan Ward: You're not a leader. Right?

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Dan Ward: Leaders require followers. Catalysts require reactants and and other other pieces of that puzzle. So yeah, I think the catalysts

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Dan Ward: role. If if you want to sort of find yourself in that position, I want to be a catalyst.

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Dan Ward: which is a weird aspiration. But I am a catalyst. I sort of recognize it. That's that's my. That's how I show up. Well, you got to find some chemicals to go react with. And that's like with the green pen squad where I just wandered around like.

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Dan Ward: Hey, who wants to take one of these green pens and meet with me next Wednesday, and

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Dan Ward: it's unofficial, and we're just going to kind of eat lunch together and and talk and get to know each other, and maybe we'll make something cool, you know. Someday those are the people who are like. Oh, I'll join that chemical reaction.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah. And I would imagine the rate of imposter syndrome is high for any human, and in the catalyst population we see it a lot, because catalysts tend to want to go, do new and different things and solve new challenges. And so by definition, then they are stepping into places where they have very low competence again and again and again. Right? And so it sounds like one of the ways that you have learned that can really help catalyst through that moment is don't see it as a me.

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Dan Ward: Right.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: That if you always go in knowing that I I love it like I'm just a jar of powder.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: If I'm just the catalyst sitting alone, right that it has to be in conjunction with others, and that the, as you talked about the repeatable process, it will evolve from that initial idea with the people that become part of it.

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Dan Ward: Yeah. So let me pull 2 threads there. You know. First, st the idea of

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Dan Ward: confidence. And you know, imposter syndrome.

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Dan Ward: If we base our imposter syndrome on our competence, on like our skills and the things that we, you know. Then, of course, we we have imposter syndrome. None of us are as competent as we would like to be.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Dan Ward: But if we instead frame our identity as like, I have accepted the challenge.

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Dan Ward: that's just true. That's just something that I can decide is true. I have now accepted the challenge, and I am a person who has accepted the challenge.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Dan Ward: There's no imposter syndrome around that, like you've just. You haven't even begun applying yourself. You haven't started taking the classes yet, or learning and honing your skills. Yet even before that, you can still say I am somebody who has accepted the challenge to do that. And I'm going to go sign up for that class, or I'm going to.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yep.

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Dan Ward: My guitar and do the rehearsal. And I'm gonna you know, gain these skills right? But you can. There's no imposter syndrome around accepting the challenge, because that's just entirely a decision of a moment. Right?

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Dan Ward: And then, you know, when we talk about people and bringing people together, I think one of the big barriers is is failure.

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Dan Ward: and this gets into the.

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Dan Ward: you know, imposter syndrome as well. Oh, I tried it, and it failed. It didn't work out. And so now I have even worse imposter syndrome.

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Dan Ward: So learning to learn from failure

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Dan Ward: is, I think, a key to to dealing with all of this. And so the Itk team, the innovation toolkit team. We have an amazing practice around this, and it's called failure cake.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Fill your cake.

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Dan Ward: Clear cake.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Okay.

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Dan Ward: So failure cake is about what it sounds like. And it started our team early days. We had no time, no money, no resources. We had. We had put in a pitch to try and get some funding to go turn itk into something real, and we didn't get funded.

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Dan Ward: We were rushed we. We had really put all our our hopes into this, and we we thought we did a great job, and we worked really hard, and and they didn't give us any funding.

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Dan Ward: So the next day one of our teammates shows up with a cake.

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Dan Ward: and on the cake she had written, Can't stop. Won't stop, you know a little, Taylor swift lyric always, always good idea. And we sat around at lunchtime that day, and we ate that cake together.

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Dan Ward: And what did that do for us? It destigmatized the failure. It took some of the sting out, because it's hard to be too sad. If you're eating cake because cake is delicious. We love cake.

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Dan Ward: As we ate the cake we talked about. What did we attempt? What did we accomplish? What did we learn? What might we do differently next time. So this is a way to socialize through the failure.

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Dan Ward: It was kind of celebratory, but what we we were not celebrating the failure. Right? Failure sucks. We hate failure. Nobody wants to fail.

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Dan Ward: What we were celebrating was the attempt.

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Dan Ward: You guys, it is worth celebrating that we tried. It is worth celebrating that we we took a swing.

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Dan Ward: hey? It didn't work out all right. Well, you know. Fine. But we're still gonna celebrate the attempt. So the team eventually developed. The one of our slogans is the worst thing that can happen is we get cake.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: The worst thing that can happen is we get kicked.

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Dan Ward: Do you know how bold that team will be? We will try anything with no assurance of outcomes like we're just gonna try it. Because, hey? If it doesn't work out, at least we get cake and cake is delicious, and we love cake.

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Dan Ward: So this has become a regular part of our practice. Where anytime we try something that doesn't work out.

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Dan Ward: We get a cake and we talk about it, and we learn from it, and we define failure, and we do use the F. Word pardon my language, but we do use the F word. I think it's important to use the F word. We define failure, as you know, when effort does not produce the desired results.

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Dan Ward: Right effort does not produce the desired results. We're not talking about blame. We're just recognizing, hey? We put in some effort and we didn't get the results we wanted. We're going to call that a failure. It's not the end of the story. It's not the whole story. I am not the failure like it's not an identity. It's an experience.

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Dan Ward: And people said, Oh, don't call it a failure. Cake. Call it a learning cake.

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Dan Ward: and I'm like

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Dan Ward: We do learn from our failures, but calling it a learning cake, I feel it kind of misses the point like right? We want to call it a failure because we want to deal with reality, want to deal with the data. We're all. Most of us are all engineers on this particular team.

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Dan Ward: I think data data matters. So failure cake is a way to help us learn to learn from failure.

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Dan Ward: We do another version of fair cake. It comes in a couple of flavors or set up a cake, or we do cupcakes these days because it's just easier to you. Don't have to cut them.

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Dan Ward: We get a big table and a big whiteboard in a public place.

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Dan Ward: and a bunch of little yellow stickies. And as people are walking past like Hey, free cupcake. Would you like a free cupcake? All you got to do is write down a short failure story on one of these yellow stickies and put it up on our whiteboard over here.

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Dan Ward: and very quickly the whiteboard fills up and we sit around. We eat the cupcake and we read everybody's failure stories, and we're like, oh.

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Dan Ward: I'm not the only one who fails. Everybody has a failure story. And oh, that one's funny! And oh, that one's sad, and I'm glad that wasn't me. And oh, my gosh! That happened to me, too!

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Dan Ward: And what that does to the culture of that space, as you're sort of standing shoulder to shoulder. We each have a cupcake. I may not know you, but we can have a conversation about failure.

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Dan Ward: I mean, it's a it's been a game changer, and the good news is.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Amazing.

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Dan Ward: Anybody can do it.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: That's right.

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Dan Ward: Whose permission do you need to do that? You can just show up and do it in a public space somewhere and see what happens.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Funding necessary. Yet Shannon and I have been working with a particular client, helping their workforce embrace their value of innovation, because it's a little opaque for folks, and at the last in-person workshop we ran. We had the senior executive share. Their failure resumes.

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Dan Ward: Oh, I love it!

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Right. So like going back to like I got kicked out of law school, or you know, or like all these different things. But how each like. What was it that allowed them to pivot.

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Dan Ward: Hmm.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: For that next thing. So I I love the the failure story and cupcake wall idea. That's fantastic.

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Dan Ward: So. And the failure wall with the cupcakes is just yeah. It's a remarkable we do that with classes. Sometimes we've we've been on to sort of set it up in the cafeteria, you know, or just a public hallway, and just be like, let's let's see. And every time the the wall fills up really fast, and some amazing conversations happen.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Amazing. Thank you. You've been sharing so much wisdom. And so I want to pivot to give you a moment. You have 4 books that exist in the world. And so I'm curious. And you mentioned earlier kind of, you know, thrift and speed. What are some of the things that you feel the most compelled

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: to bring to the world in terms of lessons learned around innovation.

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Dan Ward: Oh, oh, that's a great question.

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Dan Ward: you know, when I started. My, I'm I'm an engineer by training but I started writing.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: 3 degrees.

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Dan Ward: Right? Yeah, true. True.

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Dan Ward: I started writing just as a way to kind of test my own ideas and just like, put them on paper and hold them up to the light and be like. Is this true? Can I justify? Can I do the math publicly and get specific about it? And then I eventually kind of figured out, hey, I'm not just writing a series of articles. I'm writing a book, one article at a time.

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Dan Ward: I kept coming back to these same themes of speed, thrift, and simplicity, that innovation doesn't have to cost so much or take so long or be so complicated. And then issues of like communications and dealing with complexity and learning from failure. All of these things.

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Dan Ward: And you know, I realized, like, I kind of wanted to do a book length, treatment of the topic. So the books are not like an assembly of the articles. It's all new, all new stuff. But I realized like there is such a thing as a writer as like a book author like that exists. I didn't know any other book authors, but I thought.

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Dan Ward: maybe be me. What if I tried that? And as a writer like the voice that I try to bring in my writing has 3 main points. I want to be personal, practical, and funny.

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Dan Ward: So as a writer, that's what I want my voice to sound like, personal, practical, and funny. I want it to be clear that like this is, this is me. There I was. This is what I did. This is what I saw. I used the 1st person pronouns, you know I write about I was there. This is what I did.

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Dan Ward: Practical. I want it to be people like oh, I could do that.

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Dan Ward: Here's some step-by-step instructions. Here's some prompts to kind of get you thinking. And then funny. I hope people get a chuckle. I hope they hope it makes them laugh and think this stuff should be fun. And I know, like when I write something, if it doesn't sound right, it's probably because I missed one of those 3.

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Dan Ward: So so that's been a piece of it.

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Dan Ward: just wanting to kind of share and contribute to the larger conversation that my profession is having. You know. I think I think that's an obligation of every professional.

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Dan Ward: If you are a professional, you're in some profession, law, medicine, engineering, whatever. We all have an obligation to contribute to the conversation

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Dan Ward: that the profession is having, and if you're not sure what conversation your profession is. Having

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Dan Ward: read right, you know, go go read and see. What are the questions people are wrestling with, what are the problems? What are the the friction points? And as I read more, I was like, Oh.

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Dan Ward: I've got something to say on on that problem, on that theme on that, whatever and and yeah, 4 books, 4 books later. So.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Well, thank you for the contributions that you've made, and thank you for the call to action. I think that's amazing for all folks out there and definitely to this catalytic audience of

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: what is the contribution that you're making to the field that you sit in.

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Dan Ward: But speaking of call to action, let me do my my quick book math for everybody.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Dan Ward: See, I think people should write books for the same reason they should get advanced degrees. You're going to learn a lot along the way.

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Dan Ward: You'll have fun if you do it right. You're going to meet some really interesting people, and you get a nice credential that you can point to and be like, Hey, this is a thing that that boosts my street cred.

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Dan Ward: Right? So people should write books, whether your book is worth reading or not. That's that's a whole other question. Right? Books are worth writing. So.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: There he is!

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Dan Ward: Here's my book Math. My 1st book was about 50,000 words, 50,000 words is a good length for a nonfiction business book.

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Dan Ward: 500 words at a sitting is a reasonable amount of words to write in a single sitting half an hour to an hour. You can generally get 500 words onto a piece of paper in that timeframe in a single sitting.

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Dan Ward: 500 words per sitting. Here's here's my engineer doing public math. 500 words per sitting. 100 sittings gets you to your 50,000 words.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Look at.

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Dan Ward: That means you got to sit down 100 times. Write 500 words. Then there's your 1st manuscript. If you do that once a week.

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Dan Ward: once a week. Your book is done in 2 years.

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Dan Ward: twice a week. Your book's done in one year.

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Dan Ward: so if twice a week you can sit down and write 500 words.

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Dan Ward: You got 50,000 words by the end of the year, 3 times a week, and it's 8 months, and you can kind of do the math from there. But I say that to kind of like sort of scope out like.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: How much achievable.

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Dan Ward: Does it really take to write a book

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Dan Ward: and a year or 2 that's comparable to a degree.

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Dan Ward: and more people have degrees than have written books, you know, they sort of in my space. So a book sort of stands out a little bit more in terms of that. That credential.

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Dan Ward: Yeah, I just I they're fun again. I learned so much doing it. You'll meet some interesting people along the way. There's my my recommendation, my call to action. People should write books.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Again. Amazing. We don't have a lot of folks talk about that process. So that's really helpful.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Okay? So you mentioned a little bit, for, you know, kind of a passing comment of how the military can be different as we think about innovation. So I'm so curious. Can you share one or 2 of the biggest challenges you've faced as a catalyst leader specifically in your 20 years in the military.

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Dan Ward: Okay,

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Dan Ward: boy, there's there's there were several where to begin. You know, the the failure thing was certainly a challenge, like, how do we

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Dan Ward: deal with failure honestly and openly, in a way that we learn from it? In an environment where the consequences are life or death?

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Dan Ward: Right, you know, when I talk about fair cake I will be a little playful and and a little glib, and sometimes but you know we're talking about medicine or or military, like

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Dan Ward: life or death consequences, I think, in those situations we need failure cake even more

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Dan Ward: because the consequences are so significant of these failures.

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Dan Ward: We need to have mechanisms that allow us to talk about them and and process them and learn from them, because the alternative

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Dan Ward: is to deny that it was really a failure.

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Dan Ward: and then to fail to learn from it and then guess what we're going to repeat it.

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Dan Ward: So so helping people kind of again that that activation energy that's required to get over the hump to be like

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Dan Ward: no failure is not an option. Failure is always an option.

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Dan Ward: Whether we admit it or not. Then let's go ahead and admit it, and let's deal with the reality that that sometimes failures happen. And let's make sure we learn from it so in the Air Force we often call that a hot wash.

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Dan Ward: So after the event, you know, we kind of do the thing, and we do a quick, hot wash to say, How did that go? What do we learn from it?

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Dan Ward: so so that was a piece of it, you know. I think I come from a tech centric world, and I often find that

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Dan Ward: communication skills or the lack thereof

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Dan Ward: is a huge barrier to making stuff happen.

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Dan Ward: And I say, communication skills really, specifically, because that's transmit and receive

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Dan Ward: right transmit and receive from a sort of a radio type. So that storytelling and listening

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Dan Ward: active listening skills are a vastly underdeveloped skill set in in so many people, you know not just the military like. I wish there was the equivalent of toastmasters for listening.

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Dan Ward: Right? You know we have toastmasters that will teach you how to get up in front of a crowd and say some words. Where's the equivalent of toastmasters for active listening skills.

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Dan Ward: I'm not sure that quite exists. Improv might be a close, Eric, because to really do good, improv and frankly, most improv is terrible, but really good. Improv. I should say. Most improv isn't funny. It's really hard to do like funny improv, but really good. Improv involves like listening closely and being attentive to the person sharing the stage with you and receiving the gift and then building on it.

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Dan Ward: So improv will teach you some of those listening skills.

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Dan Ward: But yeah, storytelling and listening skills. If I could wave a magic wand and give everybody those.

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Dan Ward: oh, the world would be such a better place.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Were you naturally good at both of storytelling and active listening? Or did you have your own journey.

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Dan Ward: So I had my own journey, and I was a magician. When I was a kid I worked my way through high school and college doing magic shows for birthday parties, libraries, hospitals. So I kind of grew up on stage.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Dan Ward: So I think I had a natural well.

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Dan Ward: I had training from an early age of standing in front of a group of people and and saying words. I think the listening.

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Dan Ward: It's just a harder skill to learn, because it's we're not often taught. But when I realized, like, Oh, that is a thing that matters a lot. You know. There are ways to learn how to listen. There's books on on that kind of stuff and ways to practice.

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Dan Ward: so, so, yeah.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Learn.

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Dan Ward: How did I learn?

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Dan Ward: I'll have to. I'll come up with some of the the books and titles

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: You read books.

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Dan Ward: I read a lot of books. Yes, I read a lot of books, and I

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Dan Ward: like once people pointed out that like, Hey, listening skills are really important. I began to notice like, Oh.

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Dan Ward: that person is not a good listener, and therefore people don't follow them. That person is a really good listener. And people follow the heck out of them

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Dan Ward: right? And just seeing the impact and finding those models. So books and and finding the role models who demonstrate the skills and abilities that I you know I wanted to adopt

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Dan Ward: and if anybody's looking for a tip on how to become a better listener.

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Dan Ward: It's it's not terribly hard.

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Dan Ward: Increase the number of questions you ask by like a factor of 10.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Like.

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Dan Ward: Just ask, or by a factor of 2, ask the next question. You know when somebody says something respond by.

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Dan Ward: tell me more about that even just as simple as tell me more about that.

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Dan Ward: and then shut up and and let them tell you more right.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: That's that's a key part.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: It's so you said something that's so peaking to me that like Look. And you started to notice that people followed the good listeners, which is a little counterintuitive in our culture, and certainly my imaginings of the military. You know I kind of think of the military as the place to bark. Orders.

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Dan Ward: Right 20 years. I never gave an order. I don't think I ever gave an order in my entire military career.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: So interesting that people follow leaders who listen.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Thank you

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: all right, as sad as I am to be here, because I want to talk to you all day as we wrap up. I get to my final question, but it is my favorite question.

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Dan Ward: It's excellent.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: I'd love to hear your favorite catalyst, past or present, who inspires you, and why they stand out.

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Dan Ward: All right. So my favorite catalyst is a guy named Octave Chanute.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Octave.

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Dan Ward: Octave Chanute. Right? So I love him because he has a really cool name.

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Dan Ward: So he was a civil engineer and a railroad engineer in the late 18 hundreds, 18 eighties, 18 nineties, and having made his his impact and his fortune, doing railroads at a time when railroads were like the Internet of the age. He shifted over to explore aviation.

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Dan Ward: So that's like a modern Internet billionaire doing rockets. He was a railroad engineer, a railroad millionaire who went into airplanes, and so he did several things that I think were just brilliant.

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Dan Ward: He studied everything that anybody had ever done in the field of aviation, and these are like 20 years prior to the rights having their 1st success of light. 19 0, 3,

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Dan Ward: he brought people together. He studied their experiments, he studied their failures. He published a book in 1894, called Progress in Flying Machines, which, when Wilbur Wright went to the Smithsonian and said, Hey, my brother and sister and I. We want to build a flying machine. What book should we read? The Smithsonian was like Chanute's book.

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Dan Ward: because progress in flying machines documented 400 years of failed aviation experiments, everything anybody had ever tried. He wrote it down, and with his engineering discipline his engineering mind analyzed it, and he could identify. This is a dead end. Stop gluing feathers on your wings! Stop flapping wings. Those are not going to get us off the ground.

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Dan Ward: Fixed wings with no feathers glued onto them. That's probably the promising path. That's the way to go. And then he built hardware, and he did flight tests of his own with gliders. So he was a connector. He was a learner, he was a teacher, and he was a builder. All 4 of these.

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Dan Ward: and he advanced the field in just magnificent ways. So that's the model that I try to follow. I want to be a connector. I want to be a learner. I want to be a teacher, and I want to be a builder. Not a lot of people kind of hit all 4 of those. So he's my aspirational catalyst that I try to exemplify or try to imitate. He's 1 of the main characters in my 3rd book lift.

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Dan Ward: which looks at aviation pioneers prior to the rights.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Well getting to have this conversation, Dan. It feels really clear to me that you hit all 4 really beautifully, and I have to say, I really appreciate that every time you're you're teaching you do it in a way that's so succinct

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: like to what you say. You bring in your book that element of simplicity, right? Like, I feel like people can listen to this conversation and take away so many actionable ways to go and feel more effective as well as more connected in what they're going to be doing in the world.

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Dan Ward: I hope so again, if I'm Amy for personal, practical, and funny, that practical piece is really important to me that people hear this or read, or whatever, and be like. Oh, I can go do something a little bit different because of what I just learned here. So I hope people go off and do this failure cake thing at the very least.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Sure, and the failure. Wall, I'm all in.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Thank you for the time today this has been a joy for me.

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Dan Ward: Tracy, this has been a blast. Thank you so much. Great questions.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: Thanks. I I try to do the listening. I do try.

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Dan Ward: It was terrific. Yeah, I love it.

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Tracey Lovejoy - Catalyst Constellations: And thank you so much to our listening audience. If you'd like to learn more about how to create bold, powerful change in the world. You can check out any one of Dan's 4 books, or check out our book, move fast, break ship, burnout, or go to our website at catalystconstellations.com. Because we know you enjoyed this episode as much as I have. Take a few seconds to rate it on itunes, spotify stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcasts and hit the share button for the other catalysts in your life. Thanks again.