Give ideas a seat at the table (with professional innovator and ThinkBIG keynote Kyle Scheele)

This episode's guest is author, speaker, and "patron saint of crazy ideas" Kyle Scheele. Listen in as he makes the case that creativity at financial institutions isn’t confined to marketing teams—it’s simply problem-solving, and it belongs to everyone at your organization. He shares why “culture eats strategy,” explains the importance of making space for innovation in a traditional industry, and suggests practical ways leaders can experiment to reduce the big risk that all community FIs face: losing customers to more innovative competitors.

We'll explore:

• The risk of losing customers to fintechs and how creativity helps you win trust.
• “Commit to the bit”: the surprising power of shared enthusiasm to build culture and collaboration.
• Two questions leaders should ask to unlock hidden solutions already inside the organization.
• Lightweight systems to surface employee ideas and how strong cultures act like magnets for attracting new talent.

About the guest: 

Whether he's holding a Viking funeral for the regrets of 21,000 people, hosting the world's first fake marathon, or gaining a million TikTok followers in just 25 hours, Kyle Scheele is always on the lookout for crazy ideas that produce wildly outsized outcomes. Over the last decade, his projects have been featured in prominent outlets Fast Company, WIRED, The Washington Post, Yahoo!, BuzzFeed, UpWorthy, and Goalcast, among others. His videos have been viewed over 250 million times, and he has spoken to hundreds of thousands of audience members across the United States. More than anything, Kyle hopes that his story can inspire others to chase their own crazy ideas and become the people they were meant to be.

Helpful links:

Read about one of Kyle's projects: Home Run Marathon attracts more participants than Boston Marathon on TikTok - The Washington Post

Hear more from Kyle at Abrigo's 2026 ThinkBIG Conference.

Chapters

• 0:00 Tempo: 20.0

Transcript

Kate Randazzo:
  Welcome to Ahead of the Curve, Kyle. We're so excited for this sneak peek at some of the wisdom you'll be bringing to our Think Big conference in May. 

Kyle Scheele:
I'm excited to be here. 

Kate Randazzo:
We really appreciate it, and I know that this is a detour from our usual subject material, but I'm really excited to see how relevant it is to our listeners. We have listeners who have great ideas, and we know they have great ideas because they send us great product ideas all the time, but it's really difficult to become an idea factory in a traditional industry like banking. And when I started reading about you, I thought, you know, bankers might hear about this and think we don't push boundaries, we manage risk. I don't know if any of that sounds familiar to you. 

Kyle Scheele:
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So I totally understand why a banker might hear you know that the keynote is entitled Becoming an Idea Factory and go, well, I don't, I don't do that. I manage risk, or they might say that's not our job. You know, our job is risk mitigation, but I would say the risks you're managing have changed. They will continue to change, and they're changing faster than ever. I mean, when I signed up for my first bank account a long, long time ago, nobody was talking about crypto or AI or even mobile banking. I mean, if I wanted to get money from my bank, I had to go during the few hours that they were open and I had to go talk to a teller and all of these different things. And over time that's changed and now all of those things are in play. And if you don't have good answers for those questions, your customers will find someone else who does. I think it's easy to think of banking just from the financial side of risk mitigation, but that's not the only risk that you have to think about. You also have the risk of losing your customers to someone who can do a better job serving them than you are. So it's no longer in any industry. It's no longer a question of will this industry innovate. The question is now who will do that innovating? Is it going to be us or is it going to be our competition? And so managing risk is still very much the core of your business, but you can't do that without customers who trust you to manage their risk, and creativity helps you find those customers. It helps you convince them that you're better than the competition. It helps you develop new product offerings that help serve them and then deliver the experience that keeps those customers coming back. 

Kate Randazzo:
Absolutely. So well said. And I feel that most people recognize that creativity is relevant in their field. It's just hard to do that in the day-to-day. And I'm not even sure that our audience, I obviously will link to all of your crazy videos in our show notes so that they get a sense of who you are. But for those of our audience that maybe haven't seen some of your ideas, can you tell me about one crazy experience you've had that taught you something important about leadership or culture or collaboration that you weren't expecting. 

Kyle Scheele:
Yeah, so this this past May, my birthday was in May and I have a friend who he found this guy on social media who goes around like travels around Europe lifting these really heavy rocks. There's all these rocks over all over Europe that are like feats of strength. The strongest guy-- this guy just travels around lifting all of them and my buddy just got fascinated with this whole thing and we started like talking about rocks and lifting big rocks. And so one day I have some property out in the country where we live and I found this big like probably 4 foot wide rock just half buried in this hillside and I had the dumbest idea. I was like, for my birthday party, I'm going to invite all my friends over and we're going to dig this rock out of the ground with no tools, just like sticks and stones and our lower backs. And and I turned it into this huge event. Like I was like, I'm going to make this theme birthday party. Like people, I made worksheets. People had to guess the final size and shape of the rock and there were prizes. Like a rock tumbler and a pet rock and a DVD copy of The Rock, the movie with Sean Connery. I made custom T-shirts for everyone that said Rock Fest 25 on it and it had Latin on the front that translated to I came, I saw, I dug. It was just this whole thing. And you know, I could have done just a traditional like strategic, what is the best kind of birthday party and thought really hard about OK, what's the best cake? What's the best invitation? And and I didn't do that and it was that was just supposed to be something kind of for me and my friends. But I made this little highlight video and I posted it on social media and it's done like almost 3,000,000 views and and it's gotten reposted by people who are like culture experts who talk about creating, you know, meaningful experiences. And they're saying, here's all the stuff that this did right. And hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments of people saying, I wish I had friends like this. I want something like this in my life. And I just think what people connected with wasn't this stupid idea of digging a rock out of the ground. It was the friendship and collaboration and it was just everyone kind of going.
Hey. We're all just going to commit to the bit. We're all going to go all in on this thing. And it reminded me of that Peter Drucker quote where he says culture eats strategy for breakfast. Like you can plan the most strategic best event, but culture, it comes from shared experiences and even a less than great idea if people rally around it can be more impactful and build a stronger team than any strategy ever could. 

Kate Randazzo:
Absolutely. I like that you said commit to the bit because what I hear in that story is you thought of just every possible rock related idea that you could and then you absolutely went after all of them at once and just to see what would stick and what people would think is a good idea, which I think. 

Kyle Scheele:
I that's not even the half of it. We did sifting for gemstones. We did breaking open geodes. We we had I made a rock themed playlist. So like all the songs were like I want to rock. I am a rock like a Rolling Stone. I mean it it was just I just went how can I commit fully to this bit because I think that that's what that's what people resonated with. 

Kate Randazzo:
That's awesome. 

Kyle Scheele:
With was like, you didn't just go, we're gonna dig this rocket. I had a six foot cardboard cut out of Dwayne the Rock Johnson. It just went all out. I know, I know. I was like, this should be life-size. But yeah, I think there's something about going all in and then just and bringing every idea to the table and saying like, OK, well how can we do this thing and say, oh, that's a great idea. And then we can do this other thing too. 

Kate Randazzo:
Yeah.
Yes. And it's enthusiasm that gets the other people on board in my experience, which I think is super cool to see in your friend group. And I know that it can happen in the workplace. I've seen it on marketing teams before, but I think a lot of bank executives think that creativity belongs to those marketing teams and not to their lenders, their customer-facing, their compliance officers, things like that. How can leaders build that belief in their institutions that creativity is for everyone on this team? 

Kyle Scheele:
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think that I totally understand where that belief comes from, because marketing people get to do the fun, flashy stuff. But I think that that's like a really common misunderstanding about what creativity means. Creativity doesn't just mean art and sculpture and dance and and music and and marketing.  Creativity comes into play anytime something new comes into the world that didn't exist before. So building a great spreadsheet is a creative act. Finding a way to get someone into a home when their financial situation is unusual or complicated, that is a creative act, and though all of those things count.
And the problem with this belief that like, well, creativity is just for other people, it's just for this group, which really like when you apply that belief to yourself, what you're saying is I am not a creative person. And the problem with that is that your brain actually doesn't care if any of your beliefs are true. We think of ourselves as like, oh, my brain is a truth seeking machine, but actually your brain is just a belief machine. Your brain sees its job as proving that you are right. And so when you decide I'm not creative or worse, my team's not creative or this work isn't creative, your brain doesn't care if that's true or not. It just goes, OK, I will go build a case for that argument. And so then when you have an idea, your brain goes, no, no, no, shut it down. Like we don't do that. Remember, we said we're not creative. That's. 

Kate Randazzo:
Yeah. 

Kyle Scheele:
It's not our thing. And the reality is creativity is not about art and science or art and music and theater that those are creative acts. But so is anytime you make anything. And and really, like at a broader sense, creativity is just problem solving. Anytime you make something that solves a problem, that's a creative act. And that problem can be as simple as like I'm bored. I need 5 minutes of entertainment or I want something cool to hang on the wall. Or it can be like, hey, we've got to find a way to get this person into this home in this time period. That's a creative act. And if you reframe it that way, then you realize, well, all of us are creative because all of us solve problems and that allows us to say, well, OK, if that's true, then let me.
As a person who hasn't identified as creative person in the past, let me look at some of these more creative industries and like let me look at the marketing team and let me look at artists and entrepreneurs and see how do they solve problems and how can I use some of those tools in my context to solve the problems that are in front of me. 

Kate Randazzo:
Definitely. And I think a lot of our audience would resonate with the fact that a lot of those problems that need creativity injected into them are process problems. Things like, you know, we could do this better, we know we could do this better, but this regulation's in the way or we've always done it this way or we would have to totally clean the slate and where we would have to compile all this data and it's really difficult to break free of those patterns of this is a roadblock, so we're just going to let it slide. And also it's difficult to be creative while you're still accomplishing day to day tasks to to make time to really think outside the box. 

Kyle Scheele:
Yeah. 

Kate Randazzo:
Would you have any advice for being able to identify and disarm those really subtle, ingrained innovation blockers that we all have at work? 

Kyle Scheele:
So again, I totally understand where the mentality comes from. Like bank people's like most precious asset often like their their hard-earned money, this thing that and it's their retirement, it's their house savings, it's this thing that they do not want to lose. And and I think protecting that is vital and I think that regulations and processes are there for good reason. But there's this famous story of a woman is baking a ham and she cuts both ends off of it first and puts it on the pan. And her husband's walking by and he goes, why did you cut the ends off? And she said, I don't know, my mom always did that. That's how she always did it. So he calls her mom and asks why did you always cut the ends off the ham? And she said, oh, that's how my mom always did it. So she calls her grandma and says, grandma, like, why do we cut the ends off the ham? I'm trying to understand this. I realize I've just always done this and the grandma just goes, oh, I I just didn't have a pan that was big enough to fit the whole ham in there. And I think that like the original reason made perfect sense. She didn't have a big enough pan. But over time we just copy the what instead of the why. And if the reason, if the why disappears, then the what should change too. Sometimes there is initially a really solid, compelling reason to do something one way, but if that reason goes away, we should jettison that that accompanying behavior that we created in response. I think tradition can be a great thing, but only if it continues to meet a market need today. So I think you have to ask yourself why have we always done it this way and then are all of those things still true? And then also, even if they are still true, is there a more efficient or a better way to accomplish that? Why with a different what? I also understand what you're saying about it can be hard when you've got the day-to-day stuff and you're like, I don't have time to redo this entire process. I would say that you sometimes you have to build that time or you have to look for that time. I was talking to a friend about this the other day because I've been redoing some processes in my own business about how I catalog ideas and how I reference them and how do I store those that are easier to find later on. I think that that using your team's experience thing is so huge. It comes into play because the reality is like you hired these people for a reason. You hired them because they were the best candidates for the job. And every one of those people, we used to live in this culture. Both of my parents worked essentially at one organization for almost their entire career. My dad worked at one company that's manufacturing company. He started at the bottom, worked his way up to the top. My mom was a nurse in the same hospital system for decades. That doesn't happen that much anymore. And you're going to have people that come into your team that have never worked in banking before, or they've worked at a credit union, or they worked at a nonprofit or they worked somewhere else. And that means that they are picking up experiences and perspectives.

 And ideas and solutions that you can't see because you weren't in their shoes. And so when you just go, well, blanket statement, commercial real estate is bad or blanket statement, commercial real estate is good, that loses the nuances of those people have been traveling through the world and seeing things and you go, hey, how do you guys like see this thing and what are the risks that I don't see and what are the opportunities that I don't see. And then you get a lot more eyeballs on that. And oftentimes you see solutions that you just can't see from where you're at because they see a side of the customer or the problem or the issue or the market or the regulation that you haven't seen because you haven't had their experiences. 

Kate Randazzo:
Definitely. And I think banking cultures often reward precision and caution on both sides, on the lending side and on the financial crime side. So what are the practices that you could recommend to people who maybe leaders could introduce these to make experimentation feel safe for really long time bakers who've seen things hit the fan and know what's at stake with regulatory guidelines. 

Kyle Scheele:
I think, I think I would reframe that. And it's not so much about making experimentation feel safer. I think it's more about acknowledging that being overly cautious is also just as risky, if not more risky. There's a certain sense in which banking culture rewards caution, but as a market, as a customer.
I would just tell you the market doesn't care about banking culture. I do not care about banking culture as a customer. I care about my needs as a customer. And as a customer, when I think about the biggest banking innovations of the last decade or so, the names that come to mind are Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, Cashapp, Coinbase, Robinhood, and those are all organizations that I have used or currently use to send, receive, store and invest my money, which means that those dollars, those aren't all my dollars, but those dollars are not being managed by my local bank. Those companies also dealt with regulations and protections and they proceeded with varying levels of caution, but they didn't let that caution keep them from finding new ways to meet market needs. And I think that just all goes back to this idea from earlier, which is that risk management is not just about financial risk. It also means managing the very real risk that your customers will take their business elsewhere. And so I think it's not a matter of going like, Oh well, how do we make this feel safer, but it's also like you can do that.
And I think there are ways of just saying, hey, well, let's try things on a small scale before we roll them out. Let's not just like immediately delete all the regulatory stuff and just do whatever we want. Like, yeah, you can, but you start small and you build bigger and you get experience, but also acknowledging, hey, you know what doing the same thing that we're doing today, for the next 20 years will put us out of business and that is also a very real risk. 

Kate Randazzo:
Definitely. So if one of the bankers listening today wants to make their team more innovative tomorrow, what is one small experiment that they might try right away? 

Kyle Scheele:
So I think people always ask me like about innovation and how do I become more innovative and and so I'll be talking about this in the talk. It's like how do you meet the needs of an idea, right? Like ideas are like plants need water and air and soil and light and ideas need things as well. And the first thing that every idea needs, it sounds so simple, but an idea needs a seat at the table. And Harvard Business Review published this article a few weeks ago where they they interviewed chief innovation officers at a bunch of these major companies and their findings were really startling. They said when these people gave their teams the bandwidth to explore a challenge, 70% of the time they found that the solution to that problem already existed inside of their organization, but it was inside the head of someone who had never been asked, whose ideas had not been given a chance. There was somebody who already knew how to solve that problem, but they didn't know that that problem was on the table. And then they said despite that, less than 10% of employee suggestions actually get formally reviewed at most organizations.
And so that means that organizations are sitting on a gold mine of great ideas and they're often going, why can't we solve this problem? And they're looking around and they're bringing in high-priced consultants and and and looking outside and they go, no, the call is coming from inside the house. You have the answers here. And so two questions I like to ask leaders are #1, does your team know the problem that is keeping you up at night, do they know the things that you're worried about? That could be short term, medium term, long term. And then #2, do they know the process for suggesting a solution? In other words, if they don't know what problems you're trying to solve, their brains won't be thinking about those problems. Or there's a very, very low percentage that they just happen to be thinking about that same thing at the same time. And even if they do know the problems, if they don't know who do I bring this idea to? What is the process for testing a solution? What kind of resources are available? How do we get feedback? If they don't know, at least like the first couple steps down that pathway, then what happens when a great idea comes into their head is nothing. Nothing happens to it because they go, oh, that's interesting and I don't know where to put it. I'll set it over here and then it just goes away.
And the and the crazy thing is you're going to pay those people the same amount of money whether you get the ideas out of their head or not. So it is in your best interest and your and your institution's best interest to go, OK, well, let's build a system. Let's let's find a way to to like streamline that a little bit. And so I would say to answer your question about a small experiment.
Tell your teams a problem that you want them to be thinking about and then tell them a way to suggest a solution. That could be, hey, we're all going to meet up on Friday and I want to hear everyone's ideas about blank. Or it could be, hey, everyone, add their thoughts to this document. It doesn't matter what you could put a wooden box in your office with a hole in the top and a little card pile and some sharpies. It doesn't matter like the format. Does this process exist? Does your team know about it, and do they trust it? And what you'll find is that when you give ideas a chance, ideas will then kind of flow into that system because your people are generating ideas all the time. Right now, they just don't know where to put them, and so they're going to waste. 

Kate Randazzo:
Yes.
Absolutely. That's so true. And we've seen a lot of huge improvements at Abrigo that come through our customers and the Abrigo community having a process for, here's my idea, I'm submitting it, I can watch its progress, I can watch who's viewing it and what they have to say. And sometimes there is a solution for it and other times they've had a great idea and it gets incorporated into the next update, but I also see it in our internal life. We do a yearly hackathon and Abrigo team members from all different departments are just randomly selected to solve ideas that our coworkers and our customers have had about how to improve Abrigo. I never learn more about my role and the roles of other Abrigo team members than I do during Hackathon. People from all different departments are just randomly selected to solve ideas that our coworkers and our customers have had about how to improve Abrigo. There's a lot of oh, I didn't know that you did that or oh, I didn't know that that was possible. I didn't know this database exists. It's a big company and it's just a great opportunity to see what other people are concerned about, see what other people are working on and see how you can support them in ways that maybe they didn't even know were possible or didn't even know that we were working in tandem the whole time, so.
Yeah. 

Kyle Scheele:
Yeah, I mean, it all just comes back to like the human, human connection and realizing that, hey, other people have these ideas in their head. And I'm a big fan of of any kind of, you know, new technology and A I and all this stuff. It's it's all great. But at the end of the day, like a I can't get the ideas out of my head if it doesn't know what they are. All the technical solutions in the world and the more we move towards like, hey, every person's just doing their own thing, we're losing that connection of going, well, maybe that person actually has the answer. And so having conversations, having pathways for people to go on, putting together things like a hackathon, those are all incredible ways to just go, hey, let's just all dump our perspective into this one thing.
Hopefully you've got half the idea, I've got half the idea and somehow we figure that out. I think that there's this myth in the American psyche of like the self-made man or the self-made woman or like this kind of Lone Ranger. And that's just not actually how anything gets done. And I tell people all the time that part of the reason you haven't solved your problem yet is because you think that you have to do it by yourself. And so the more that you can bring other.
people into it, it just makes it easier. 

Kate Randazzo:
Yeah. And that can be challenging. I think post pandemic life has stayed a little more siloed than maybe it used to be. And we know that a lot of our customers have a hybrid work model now. Thankfully not a lot of banks have gone totally remote, but maybe that's statistically entry. But in our customer base it is and I think that part of.
The appeal of having remote work is that we've seen it attract and retain younger talent who grew up in this era and who kind of expect that they're going to be able to work from home a couple days a week. So that's one way that bank leaders are maybe trying to attract younger talent is by giving them a little more flexibility, but that can also take away from the.
Problem solving. So can you think of any more creative or idea driven culture suggestions that maybe banks can use to help attract younger bankers without detracting from the group mentality? 

Kyle Scheele:
Yeah.
Yeah. So I think that that young people, that they do want flexibility and they do want, you know, a paycheck and all of those things, but they're also looking for purpose and growth and the chance to make an impact. I would say that cultures are like magnets, like a good strong culture attracts good strong people and if you build a reputation.
As a place where ideas don't go to waste and where people actually can affect change and make that happen and see their ideas like brought to life, you will attract the kind of talent that every leader wants. My wife started working for a company a few years ago and she just loved her job and and still loves her job and was raving to people all the time. I'm like, I can't believe I get to do this.
This job and I love my company and I love the benefits and I love the work schedule and I love the environment and I love the work that I do. And as a result, like all of our friends started, anybody who was not happy at their job started kind of like cozying up and going, hey, tell me a little bit more. Do they have a jobs page? Is there like a careers tab like and and by the end of that year like half of our.
Our friend group ended up working in some capacity for this company and I think that that like when you build an environment like that, I mean it's the Field of Dreams, right? If you build it, they will come. But the alternative is just as like scary as that is powerful cuz magnets don't just work one way. Magnets attract, but they also repel and if your response to every idea is we don't do that here or here's five reasons why that won't work. Then your best innovators are just gonna go and they're gonna, best case scenario for you, just leave and you don't hear from them again. Next best case or worst case is like they go work for one of your competitors. But I think worst case of all is they just go become your competitor.
And put you out of business. And so I think that with those are the people that you need the most. And so you have to build a culture where you go, hey, we're going to give these people a fighting chance. We're going to give their ideas. And not to say, I think there's often a criticism of Gen. Z and millennials of like, oh, they just want all their ideas to be. No, that's not what we want. What we want is a seat at the table. What we want is to go, hey, how does this process get changed? I'm not saying I have the answers, but I'm just wanting to know, hey, someday I'm gonna be the guy making that decision, hopefully, or I'll be further up the chain. So what's the process for changing the process? What's the process for implementing a new thing? And how do I learn that? And how do my ideas get seen as valuable? And how do we get input on those things? 
If I feel like I'm a part of that and I have a voice and I have a seat at the table, I'm never leaving. I'm never leaving that organization. And so I absolutely. So I think that it all comes back to culture and building a place where ideas have a chance. 

Kate Randazzo:
Right. We feel so much more invested.
This has all been incredible advice. Thank you so much. And I'm going to do a challenge for our listeners today, which is if you enjoyed this episode, get on a Breo community, send us an idea you have for a product, because sending us the idea might get you free points toward your ThinkBIG ticket where you can come hear Kyle speak more on these topics, more on innovation specifically for banks and credit unions like your organizations. And we're so grateful that he's on the docket. We're really excited to hear from you at the conference and it's going to be a great time. 

Kyle Scheele:
I can't wait. It's gonna be awesome.