Scaling Flow: What Google and Summit Know About High-Speed Teams

<p>When I think about the fastest, most creative teams I’ve ever seen, they all share the same blueprint: trust creates safety, safety fuels risk, risk sparks creativity, and flow binds it all together.</p><p>That’s why I brought two of my favorite creative leaders into this conversation—Ivy Ross, VP of Design at Google, who has reshaped the look and feel of fifty-plus products and won hundreds of awards, and Jody Levy, serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Summit, the legendary community of creators and change agents.</p><p>What I love about this episode is that Ivy and Jody don’t deal in abstractions. They talk about how they actually build cultures where people move faster, see further, and flow together.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:</strong></p><ol><li><p>Kill fight-or-flight before it kills creativity<strong>.</strong> Most companies live in survival mode. Ivy and Jody show how trust and psychological safety pull people back into the “green zone,” where creativity thrives.<br></p></li><li><p>Rehearse the future until it feels inevitable. Strategy isn’t just a plan—it’s a story rehearsed so vividly that people can’t help but believe and move toward it.<br></p></li><li><p>Intuition is compressed expertise. Our best calls don’t come from spreadsheets. They come from years of pattern recognition surfacing as a hunch you can trust.<br></p></li></ol><p>—Steven</p><p><br></p><p>P.S. Over 300,000 readers get my weekly newsletter translating neuroscience research—llike how to build high-speed creative teams—into practical strategies for flow, focus, and performance.Join them here:<a href="https://www.stevenkotler.com/yt"> <u>https://www.stevenkotler.com/yt</u></a></p><p><br></p><p><strong>Guest Bios:</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Ivy Ross is the Vice President of Design for the Hardware organization at Google. Over the past six years, she and her team have launched 50+ products, winning over 240  global design awards. This collection of hardware established a new Google design aesthetic that is tactile, colorful, and bold. </p><p>A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Ivy’s innovative metal work in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums.  </p><p>Ivy has held executive positions ranging from head of product design and development to CMO and presidencies of several companies, including Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach,  Mattel, Bausch &amp; Lomb, and Gap. </p><p>Ninth on Fast Company’s list