Chris Clearfield, founder of System Logic and Co-Author of Meltdown
Bill Ringle and Chris Clearfield discuss the remarkable simplicity that can avert catastrophic business disasters, applicable to organizations of all sizes.
>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth. My Quest for the Best is a top-rated small business podcast with over 300 episodes of thought-provoking and insightful interviews with today’s top thought leaders and business experts. Host Bill Ringle’s mission with this show is to provide the strategies, insights, and resources that will unlock the growth potential of your business through these powerful conversations.
Interview Insights
Key points that you’ll learn from this interview:
- Complexity is unavoidable, so here is how to think about it in order to manage it successfully.
- Why it is important to consider how many things have to go RIGHT for your project to succeed.
- The importance of developing a test and feedback cadence in your work.
- The myth of the open door policy.
- How a Toronto hospital cut down unnecessary (and costly) x-rays by changing its protocol
Read the Show Notes from this Episode
- 2:41 Chris tells about the time when a physics professor took the time to explain a difficult subject to him, and eventually took him under his wing, and the impact that had on his young mind.
- 3:56 “When you’re doing science, you don’t always have the answer, and sometimes you get an answer that you don’t expect…the world is not a straightforward and linear place.”
- 4:46 Chris describes his role working for James Street and using computers to recognize how much things were worth.
- 6:58 “Once I understood the trading and I understood the infrastructure and the regulatory stuff and the way everything came together, I switched to a role where I was looking at these bigger questions of risk.”
- 9:00 How reading about aviation infrastructure, or lack thereof, in Asia allowed Chris to see the complexity inherent in the system.
- 9:24 “Why do some organizations do a great job of making decisions in really complex environments and managing risk and others do not?”
- 9:58 “Aviation has figured out how to manage some of these risks prospectively.”
- 11:00 The genesis of starting his own firm.
- 11:57 Chris recounts his interest in the BP oil spill. “I was really interested in understanding what happened, and as I dug in more and more…I became fascinated with how the accident happened.”
- 12:37 “The greatest environmentalist in the last 50 years, might’ve been someone at BP who said, ‘No, this isn’t the right way to do this.’”
- 13:53 The reason to buy down risk. “There are things happening in the world that [people] don’t quite understand that will affect their business.”
- 15:18 The importance of preparing for the “knock-on” consequences.
- 15:58 “It’s not about figuring out what hatch to close, it’s about developing a different perspective and saying: ‘Oh, these things might interact in a way that causes a big problem.’”
- 16:24 “We wear a seatbelt not because we know the exact kind of accident we’re going to get into, we wear a seatbelt because we want to protect ourselves regardless of the accident.”
- 17:34 On the post-disaster case study. “I think what that training did was give them the confidence they needed so that they were able to, the next time these things came up, not only deal with it in real-time but see the precursors.”
- 19:12 “In this day and age, there is so much more interconnectedness and complexity.”
- 20:02 How the Meltdown Quiz can you help you think better about your existing systems. “How many things in this project have to go right for this project to succeed?”
- 22:28 “We need to add structure to our thinking…we do a lot of work with leaders to help them develop a process to add that structure to their thinking.”
- 23:05 How to avoid falling into the trap of making the situation more complex than it needs to be.”
- 26:10 What it means to, as Cal Newport named it, “do deep work.”
- 27:16 How Chris tracks his deep work hours.
- 27:53 “I realized that my morning routine with my five-year-old son looked a lot like a crisis.”
- 30:44 Why you should start your meetings a little bit differently.”
- 33:18 How doctors in Toronto figured out that asking patients a handful of questions could quickly determine whether or not the patient needed an x-ray.
- 35:00 “An open-door policy is not enough.”
- 37:25 Chris’s three big takeaways.
Subscribe With Your Favorite Podcast App
My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.
Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!
Expert Bio
Before starting System Logic, Chris worked as a derivatives trader at a prestigious proprietary trading firm focused on understanding and hedging risk. After years as a trader in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, his role matured from trading to analyzing the financial and regulatory risks inherent in the business of technologically complex high-speed trading to devising policies that mitigate those risks.
He co-authored Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It with András Tilcsik, a Toronto business-school professor, to tell us how and why.
He graduated from Harvard, where he studied physics and biology and is a licensed commercial pilot. He now lives and works in Seattle, WA with his family.
Contact Info and Social Media for Chris Clearfield
Resources Mentioned by Chris Clearfield:
Below are key people, places, books, quotes, websites, and other resources that we discussed so you can explore further.
Books Authored by Chris Clearfield:
