Building an Intelligence Engine

<span style="font-weight: 400;">I’m excited to share this rambling and wide-ranging conversation with Srinivas Rao.</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Srini is the host of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast, and has recorded over a thousand episodes with such luminaries as Danielle Laporte, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin,</span> <a href= "https://podcast.unmistakablecreative.com/daniel-stillman-how-to-design-conversations/"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">and me!</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">Srini describes his podcast as “If TEDTalks met Oprah”.</span> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Srini has interviewed so many different types of folks, from bank robbers to billionaires. He also has a business degree from UC-Berkeley and an MBA from Pepperdine   University.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We talk about podcast interviewing (meta, I know!) and we unpack a topic that’s close to both of our hearts: creative output.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of my early podcast</span> <a href= "https://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/4/17/sara-holoubek-on-human-companies-and-solving-problems-that-matter"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">episodes was with Sara Holoubek, CEO of Innovation Systems consulting firm Luminary Labs.</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Sara introduced me to the idea of having what she called an “Intelligence Engine'' - a process by which organizations turn insights into action and action into opportunities, not just every so often, but consistently and regularly. It’s not a dissimilar idea from Jim Collins’ “Flywheel effect” in that, ideally, you tune up your engine often, and even upgrade it when you need to.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of my core beliefs is that conversations exist at different scales, and that they act in similar ways at these different scales. I also might take the idea of a conversation too far…in that I feel that any iterative, adaptive cycle is, in essence, a conversation.</span></p> <p><span s