Chris Deaver: Co-Creating for High Growth

Our interview of Chris Deaver for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere.

Chris is co-founder of BraveCore, a leadership and executive coaching consultancy. Chris is also the co-author of Brave Together: Lead by Design, Spark Creativity, and Shape the Future with the Power of Co-Creation—and he tells us exactly how to do that—how to lead and drive change—through collaboration.

Chris shares insight from his journey through multiple proving grounds in corporate leadership and how to keep asking the right questions to move projects forward and empower team members.

A full transcript of this episode is available at Jon’s entertainment law blog at www.pfeifferlaw.com/entertainment-law-blog/

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Chris Deaver. Welcome to the podcast.

Chris Deaver:
Thanks. Good to be here.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now you are the co-author of, and I have to look down to read the title. It's a little long, Brave Together, Lead by Design, Spark Creativity, and Shape the Future with the Power of Co-Creation. First question, what inspired you to write this book?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, it's been a journey. I've always wanted to write a book that would mean something to me and hopefully to other people. I was always inspired by, well, two things that really inspired me was Disney and just the creative world of what imagination can be. And then later I was also inspired by Stephen Covey and the Seven Habits book. And I thought, well, there's got to be, the future as it is now is so different from what it was even 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. There's got to be a way to navigate what we're experiencing now.

And so the book was an attempt to first give myself that and other people a way to navigate and have principles that could really guide them in today's world that's changed a lot. It keeps changing.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You had mentioned Disney. I read somewhere where you sent a letter when you were what, in college or maybe even before college to Disney asking for a job.

Chris Deaver:
That's right.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Tell us about that.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, I wrote a letter to Roy Disney, and it was just brash and crazy and said, "Hey, can you get me a job there? Love what you do." And then I forgot about it and fast-forward three or four months later, and I was in an animation program at BYU, and it was kind of the first class there and it was very experimental, but I wanted to work at Disney.

And so fast-forward three or four months later, I got a call from a recruiter and she said, "Hi, this is Lisa, Roy said to talk to you." And I had wished upon a star. It came true. There was pixie dust just bursting and flying everywhere, and it was a crazy moment. And what happened next was also strange, but that was kind of the story of what came to be that moment.

But I actually decided to pivot. I said, "Thank you," and I got off the phone and I didn't pursue it, which was also crazy. But there was other things in store for me that I didn't quite understand at the time that it had to unfold as part of my story.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I have a client and a friend now that went to Georgetown and he decided he wanted to be in the CIA, so he called them up. Apparently the CIA is back when people used the phone book was in the phone book, and he just called him up and said, "I'd like to come work for you."

Chris Deaver:
That's the way to do it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And they put him to human resources and the lady said, "Of course you would like to come work for us." But he started the process and he worked for the CIA a number of years.

So back to the book. It is in three parts before we delve into the different parts, what's your favorite part?

Chris Deaver:
I think the second part, the hero's sacrifice. We talk a lot about the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell, any great story. I have a good friend that's a Marvel story artist, and he's worked on all the classics, Iron Man, Captain America, Avengers. And we talk a lot about this idea of our life stories and we love the part in the hero's journey of the rewards, and we're just basking in the glory of slayed the dragon and life is good. But what we find is in our day to day, it's actually, it's the messy middle. Startups talk about that and I think with all the exponential change we face today, it feels like more and more life itself is a messy middle, and the hero's sacrifice is the part of the journey that it's a paradox, some of the greatest joy that we can find in suffering for others with a purpose or for our better selves.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So just to put in context, the three parts are part one, The Mirror Test, which we'll come back to. Part two, is The Hero's Sacrifice, and part three, is Become the Future. So just because I'm that way, let's go in order. What is the mirror test?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, appreciate that, Jon. I think well, as a mirror does, it gives us a clear view of ourselves, but more than that even the idea of the mirror test is to go deep and to ask ourselves a personal question, whether it's about life or leadership is, what do I need to do differently? And this is something that I experienced and I'd say I learned on a deeper level at Apple.

Steve Jobs, he talks about this in his Stanford speech about staring in the mirror, and they're a company that they didn't look around left or right to imitate other companies. They don't really operate that way. They don't think about competitors. They really focus on what do I need to do differently? And also it is a question that helps us be resourceful in our lives, but it's also the power to confront the good, bad, and the ugly too, and we talk about the notion of the real versus the ideal.

There's the real version of what we're dealing with in our life. If we're too extreme on either side of the ideal, we're going to be frustrated with our life doesn't look like all the things we want to, or all the gloss and all the amazing flash that we see in other people's social media posts.

And if we're too far on the real side, we're going to be down on ourselves and feel very frustrated. And so it's kind of striking that synthesis and the balance of a clear view of where we're at and keeping a very positive approach to where we can go in the future, leaning into that.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I kind of call it the PCH test. If you're driving down Pacific Coast Highway and you, or to judge your life based on the other cars you see next to you, you're going to think, why don't I have a Lamborghini SUV?

Chris Deaver:
Exactly. Exactly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's not real.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, yeah. No, and it can be distracting, right? And I think we're seeing that. I think there's a feeling in the world now, and I think especially with Gen Z. I just read an article about this yesterday and I feel this with my kids or Gen Z is, there's more of a practical view of things. It's a view of like, well, what is it going to be used for? What is life for? And just leaning into that. And I think that's a good healthy approach because we end up there. We all end up there anyway.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How old are your kids?

Chris Deaver:
My oldest is 17. He'll be graduating next year from high school. And then I've got my second son's 15, and then my daughter's 11.

Jon Pfeiffer:
That's a fun time.

Chris Deaver:
It is. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I mean, I look back and maybe in that sense I was blessed that I enjoyed their high school years where I know that's a bad time for some families, but that was my favorite time was the high school years.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I feel the same. I hear teenagers and there's all the stories, and of course, being a teenager, I've had this, my oldest, they know everything. But you kind of have that fun debate and that conversation that's ongoing. And for me, it brings me back to being that age because I realize, oh yeah, I'm sure. But those same looks on my face and moments teaching that my dad would have with me I'm having now and it's fun. I love it. It's a great time.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So two things. One, the only piece of parenting advice I'm going to give you is when they just get in that mood, throw them some meat, especially the boys. It's like, okay-

Chris Deaver:
Love it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
... calm down. And then two, I read where you're an Eagle Scout.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Are your sons into scouting?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah. Well, they've been, and they're, in fact, we're going out to camp next week. I'm going with them and we're doing hiking and all the things. So yeah, I love to stay involved. My dad was a Scoutmaster for 30 years, and so I used to go on the hikes and the trips, and there's something about being driven towards an objective. And then what I saw too was leadership and all its forms.

The best test was always like the pup tent test of what are these three or four boys? How long is it going to take? Back then it was like the polls that you had to pull together and, yeah, leadership in its most basic form. But there's a joy in that. And yeah, certainly with my sons, I see them stepping, and I love to see that. I love to see them stepping into leadership and with their friends or with their peers. It's great. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I digress, but we'll get back to the book. What kind research did you have to do for the book?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, a lot of it, well, I'll say this first, I went through iterations of trying to write a book for years, and I actually wrote book proposals and actual books all the way through.

But in conversations with friends or people I worked with, they'd say, well, that's great, but don't you really need some life experiences that people would be interested in, in your story? And so I realized I hadn't had those yet, and I felt like when I worked at Disney, so I ended up at Disney and working on their culture and really leaning into the future, they had just acquired Pixar. So we were infusing the Pixar mindset into all these other businesses, and that included bridging the acquisitions with Marvel and Lucasfilm and all this just fun work.

And I thought, well, I think I've kind of gotten there to that point. But I got a book agent that worked with the Shark Tank folks, and I was close, but there was still something missing, and it was really a deeper experience at Apple.

And I think that kind of crowning experience, working with them on their culture and really shifting from thinking different to working different together, being even more co-creative with products like Airpods or iPhone other products. That was a really definitive experience. And once that happened, I was able to see the path kind of forward to write the book.

And also, the other thing was, the philosophy I realized I was landing on was, it's not just about hacks and hustle and work harder and work smarter. It's about being brave together as a team. We see this, the Beatles, they're at their best as a team. YouTube has transcended time because they're a team. And I realized I needed a team, and so I got a co-author. Eventually we met, but that all had to happen. And I knew intuitively that had to happen, but I also didn't know who or when, and it had to happen organically. And so once those things converged, it was the right time.

And so my co-author, Ian, we met actually through our sons. They were playing basketball together, and we were on the sideline and just started chatting, and we had a lot in common and that was how it turned out, yeah, the kick off.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I found when my younger son was in little league, you had nothing to do as a parent watching a little league game is to talk with the other parents. Then, I don't know how long they are now, they were a captive hour and a half, but you had an hour and a half watching bad baseball.

Chris Deaver:
And then you're always eager to just get out there and get them moving, especially their younger age when it's just like a flock of kids fall under where the ball is.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So let's talk about creativity. I love that topic, and you have a line in the book. I don't remember, I pulled it out. I don't know where I got it from, but about how companies kill creativity. Why do they do that-

Chris Deaver:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
... and how do they do that?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the short answer is I don't know why I've given everything, but I will say in studying it, what I've realized is over the years and decades and centuries, and this is a double-edged sword because there's an important element to this, which is companies have relied heavily on science. We go back to the Frederick Taylor assembly line view of, or Dale Carnegie coming in with the human relations side of that. But it's very science oriented. And management has been viewed as a science for a long time and the way organizations operate structurally and how functions operate in verticals, finances, accounting, etc.

But that's a very efficiency oriented approach or view. And then later you have information age, you have knowledge workers, white collar jobs that have emerged, and people like Stephen Covey who are talking about effectiveness and leaders can optimize and be better at what they do, which is all great.

But the missing link, it seems, has been leaning into the creative notions, the art of who we, and the interesting is it's been hidden in plain sight. There's a lot of consulting companies that have hired for people that have had humanities backgrounds, and there's a reason, because the human side, we all want to be creative. But yeah, companies have squeezed the creativity out of people. And the best test of this is we see in most jobs, people will, if you ask them, is there any creative element to this? And they'd say no. And do you feel like any of this makes your heart sing?

No. And that seems to be the test of, and the strange thing, that's the test of purpose and meaning in life. And so that's fairly disturbing. And even before the pandemic, we had about 70% of people that were disengaged in their jobs, and we had a mental illness or mental health crisis. Now, as far as people feeling alone, that's only been exacerbated. And people want to express their creative identity. We have a creative propensity. We see this in influencers on you name the platform, right? TikTok, and I know you work with a lot of these people and YouTube people and just they're expressing constantly, but then they go back to their day job and it's, "Hey, we have an agenda for this meeting. Stay in your lane. Check the boxes." And why is there such a chasm or a gap between those two things?

And by the way, the real strange thought going back to I don't really understand why they do this, is that the best cultures, the best brands, the Apples, the Pixar's, Disney or the Nikes, they all tap into that creativity in a collective way, and they harness that potential energy. They make it kinetic, and that's how they create great products.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So it just begs the next question, what can we as individuals do to tap into our creativity?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, I think there's a few things. We know best what ignites our fire? I think one of those things is, well, I think one is actually getting out in nature is a good start. If there's, I think especially in today's world where you can kind of feel kind of a little drained or we get stuck on Zoom or whatever, go out and put your hand on a tree, step on the grass grounding. Somebody told me it was like nature bathing. There's now a word for, I'm like, okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I've not heard that term. That's interesting.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, and somebody's probably selling courses about it. It's getting out in nature. That's one. I think the other one is find those things that make your heart sing, and it might be new territories for new frontiers. I find I also, it's exploring ways to do it in a co-creative way. That's also something that I found that expresses creativity differently.

So I actually do paintings and I do some crafts with my daughter, and we kind of co-create things, and that's something I enjoy. Painting, music, whatever those things are that inspire you. And I think in the context of work, it's figuring out ways to have a creative mindset to the work you do. And I think that's part of it, is creating space. And one of the best ways to do that is questions. We talk about lead with questions, and we have a podcast called Lead With the Question. And we inherited this principle from Ed Catmull who worked with Steve Jobs the longest, 26 years and he started Pixar.

We had the chance to sit down with him at one point, and it was supposed to be a 30-minute meeting, turned to three hours. And I thought, he's Yoda. We're going to sit down and hit the wisdom dispenser button, and he's just going to pour his wisdom into us and we're going to become the Padawan Jedi's we need to be. But it didn't happen that way, actually. I was just sharing and talking about the work I was doing and curious, and he just kept asking great questions and listening.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you prepare for a meeting like that, where you're going to meet Yoda?

Chris Deaver:
I, well, the funny that you asked that, because I'm sitting and Ian, my business partner, or co-authors front room at his house, and we're talking about, this is two weeks before that happened, and we are wrestling with these notions of writing this book, and we realized, we don't know.

We basically landed on a conclusion. We don't know what we don't know. We need to understand. We talked earlier about efficiency and effectiveness kind of being the past waves, and there's this bigger wave that's now hitting, and we knew this, it co-creation but we didn't know what the principles were to really lean into that future and catch that wave.

And so we're sitting in his front room and I was like, well, we probably need to talk to somebody and said, well, Ed Catmull, right? He started Pixar. And so suddenly we thought, well, how are we going to make this happen?

So suddenly you have an idea, and I believe in you can manifest the best things in your life, but it was a little audacious, and it turns out, but instantly, if we have an intention where they say, where your intention goes, energy flows. And the energy started flowing. And I realized, oh, I actually know somebody at Apple University that worked with Ed, and there's a chance that something could happen there, but who knows?

So I met with him, his name's Randy Nelson, he started Pixar University, and he and I had done a little bit of work at Apple. And so I'm sitting with him and I'm just sharing, and some of the work I'd done, which he had some overlap with, but then, and he said, "Oh yeah, this is similar to what we did at Pixar." And I said, "He goes, yeah." And I said, "Well, yeah, you worked with Ed Catmull." And he said, "Yeah." I said, "I'd love to meet him sometime." He goes, "Well, I can make that happen." And so he sent this intro email, and this is the best thing.

And this is classic, Randy's one of the best human beings I've ever met. But yeah, he sent this intro email to Ed and he says, "Ed, fearless leader of Pixar, I'd like to introduce Chris, fearless leader at Apple." Don't know if I could live up to that. But we ended up going to a restaurant, this place, Lazy Dog in Cupertino, right next to Apple, the Spaceship Campus, and I staked out. We found exactly the right table that was kind of off to the side, and we talked to the people there, and it's all of it. And so we planned for a great conversation.

Jon Pfeiffer:
This from the guy that sent a letter to Roy Disney, so you're able to wrangle that.

So how long did it take you from inception of the idea to actual publishing of the book? How long was that journey?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, I think once we landed on, so for example, that conversation with Ed gave us that principle of lead with a question. There was a set of other principles that we discovered, and I had kind of loose raw material that I realized could turn into these things.

But once we really knew what it was or what it wanted to be, we wrote a book proposal, brought that to an agent. She's phenomenal. Her name's Jill. She does great work. She's actually based in Southern California and done a lot of books. And so she connected us with McGraw-Hill. We got a phenomenal editor. Yeah, I'd say the process from, I mean, that was, gosh, it was probably about a year and a half between once we landed on what it was going to be, what the principles were. But there were years and decades of preparation and experiences to get to what it wanted to be. And maybe for other people that's different. But for me, certainly it was a journey.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And once you started writing, did you ever have writer's block? Did you ever have a time where your creativity was not flowing when you were writing about the creative process?

Chris Deaver:
Oh, yeah, all the time. I think one of the things that was helpful for me especially was a co-author, right? Ian. We'd go back and forth and we set the intent. Once we got into the rhythm and we do this, we'd book proposal. You would kind of give them a timeline. And I think it was four months for us to produce the manuscript. And we didn't know exactly. Well, yeah, we'd framed up the summary. So we had 16 chapters planned. And so what we did was said, "Hey, we're going to knock out a chapter each week." And we stuck with that.

But there were times where it'll be working on one and pulling things together, and it just wasn't coming together. And it was just the agony and ecstasy of the wrestle. And sometimes it was Ian saying, this isn't going to work, or That's not going to work. Or the editor, Casey, who's phenomenal tearing out or doing some surgery. Tearing out a story or something that wasn't right. And of course then you're stuck.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I love that story.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah. I mean, I had one that it was the best, but she was right. It wasn't the right fit. And the crazy thing was that suddenly it opened up possibilities for other stories. And there were things that were happening in my life, literally, she took, I don't want to get into it, but there was a story I loved. So it's out. And suddenly we're like, well, we've got to close out. We got to get this chapter. And it has to have an intro story that pulls people in.

And I had just been at this event, it was at a house next to one of the Google Founders house in Palo, Alto over there. And this guy showed up with this leather hat, and I'm thinking, who wears a leather hat besides the crocodile Dundee guy? Does this guy have a bow knife now? Am I That's not a knife. Is that what's going to happen here? No. And this guy, I started talking, somebody actually wanted to introduce him to me, and turns out his story is just unbelievable. His name is Bill Tai.

The short story of him is he embodies the principles of the book, of not just being brave, but being brave together. And he helped. He started this thing called, it was My Tai Global where they just get people together, entrepreneurs. So he was an investor, but he stepped out of that world, and he just started bringing entrepreneurs together for kite boarding. And this turned into all these connections happening where these companies started. Zoom actually started this way, and Bill became the first investor in Zoom.

There's other stories that he told me actually about, he told me about that Steve pitched him Pixar at one point, but it was early stage. They were just burning through cash like crazy. Millions of dollars every month. And so Bill's like this thing's not investable. He's like, "Why are you doing this, Steve?" And Steve's like, "Well, it's just going to be something. I know it is. I know." So he's just following that intuition, but it wasn't on paper anything.

And so of course, it became what it was. And Bill said, Steve from then on would've always invite him to the openings of Toy Story or make sure he's in the front row. He's like, "Hey, bill, how's it going?"

Jon Pfeiffer:
You could have been part of this.

Chris Deaver:
But I think Bill learned from that. What I gathered was, because that was before, right before he pivoted out of that traditional world of investing, the boardroom, the shark tank into the ocean and creating these connections.

And so Zoom a bunch of other companies, he helped start Canva. He was the first investor in that company with Melanie Perkins, and that's become huge. I think it's a $40 billion company now. So that was a great story. So that story fit nicely, and it just happened where it was in that moment. I just met him. So yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So what has feedback been from readers of Brave Together?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, we've heard people say it's helped them become a better person. It is how they live life, better leaders and how they can influence culture. We talk to a lot of different leaders, startups, people that are trying to have an influence in today's world. And it's hard.

It's tough because again, I think things have changed and things keep changing so fast. And even the world of, whether it's creativity or influence, there's always a new platform, AI's changing. It's unbelievable. And the pace of it, who knows what tools are going to be created just as we're talking right now, right? They're going to launch.

So yeah, I was at, well give you some example. I was at Comic Con, spoke there, and they had the writers or actor strike. This was last fall of last year. And there's just a lot of existential questions. People, there's shakeups, right? There's layoffs happening. And I think a lot of people are asking, "What do I do in the midst of all this? And am I an employee? Am I an entrepreneur?" And that's the dilemma.

But what we pose is the synthesis that you can be a co-creator, and you can exist in both, or either, or both worlds as a co-creator, and it's the best version of who you can be. So to give you an example of that, we have a good friend who he works on, he edits Cobra Kai, that series Karate Kid works.

Jon Pfeiffer:
On, I interviewed one of the creators of that for the show.

Chris Deaver:
Okay. Yeah. Great show. I'm a huge Karate Kid fan. And yet his name's Zach Arnold. So he does that. And then he also works with optimization and coaching and has a team and does scripts as well, and creative work there.

He had this realization, he was telling me, I was on his podcast, he said this, so we described it as tier one is employee, tier two is entrepreneur, kind of shifting away from, and then tier three is co-creator the synthesis. And he said, "I studied it." He said, "I realized I've been a co-creator, T-three all along, and I didn't know it." Like, wow. But now he has language to understand what that is. And so that was interesting, those kinds of aha moments.

But then it also gives people the power to amplify that and to do more of that and to really lead the future, right? Because we're interested in giving people the tools. And you think about influencers, people doing their own thing, maybe on TikTok or other things. I think that's interesting. Some of the most powerful versions of that. We see Mr. Beast where they'll do collaborations, they'll partner with people, and suddenly these things proliferate that you didn't expect.

Jon Pfeiffer:
We don't call them collaborations. They're collabs.

Chris Deaver:
Collabs, exactly. But yeah, it's all co-creative-

Jon Pfeiffer:
You don't use the whole word.

Chris Deaver:
Yeah. Yeah. It's all co-creative. And it's like, wow. And it makes sense. It's like one plus one is seven, 700, 7 million depending on, yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So one last question for you. Where can people find the book and where can people, well, it's two questions. And where can people find you on the internet?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah. So bravecore.co, www.bravecore.co is our website. It's got information on the book, the book's available on Amazon, all the major outlets. We have an audio version. We have a video version of the book that's at lit book videos, and it's a great kind of visual version. Compresses the whole book down to 30 minutes for those that are more visual learners. Like some of us.

Jon Pfeiffer:
We don't want to devote enough time to read a book.

Chris Deaver:
But people love to connect on LinkedIn as well, or Facebook, or we have some other material on YouTube as far as videos and podcasts and things. And then we have a podcast lead with the question that it finds itself sometimes moving up or down the charts. And sometimes in random countries we find out, we're like, oh, it's in Poland up there, or Colombia or wherever. So that's fun.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, I mean, it's been a couple of years now. This podcast was number nine in Israel, and it's like-

Chris Deaver:
Wow.

Jon Pfeiffer:
... how did at that happen?

Chris Deaver:
Yeah, that's the world we're living in. It's totally global and yeah, I appreciate it, Jon. And it's great what you're doing, and I love when those worlds collide, right? You have the work of the support, the function of, hey, helping people have the context to be successful in their work, and then inviting the creative juices to flow. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
No, thank you. This has been fun.