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In this episode, I speak with Adam Kahane about his new book, Facilitating Breakthrough, Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together.  In the conversation, several things stood out for me. Here are a few What does it mean to be a facilitator?  Many years ago, when I first received training, I thought about this question a lot. Since then, I have taken its meaning for granted. Adam got me to take a second look at the word and its purpose. For Adam, his work is about facilitating collaboration with groups from different organizations and sectors who may not agree with, like, or trust each other but think they need to work together.  In this book, he is trying to upgrade the meaning of facilitator so that anyone can be a facilitator. Secondly, it is a way of helping groups of people collaborate.  The facilitator as a partner.  In this part of the conversation, we refer to the insider/outsider tension that often pops us in change work. Adam reminds us of the notion first pointed to him by Bill Tolbert. It is not that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Instead, and more interestingly, is the idea that if you're not part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution. Your capacity to help a situation is limited if you cannot see how you are part of the problem - even if it is a small part. Otherwise, you are trying to bring about change by force.  To facilitate effectively, you must move between an outsider and insider stance with whomever you work with. Adam calls this partnering.  The role of polarities  Facilitation does not involve choosing between one approach to facilitation over the other. It is knowing when to use a particular strategy rather than another direction. Adam reminds us to lean into tensions and avoiding the tendency to collapse polarities rather than hold their tensions.  Perhaps most insightful about both the conversation with Adam and his book is the new casting of facilitation.  He argues that there are only five dimensions of facilitation. These five dimensions involve ten moves.  Dimensions Moves How do we see our situation? Inquiring and Advocating How do we define success? Advancing and Concluding How do we get from here to there? Discovering and Mapping How do we decide who does what? Accompanying and Directing How do we understand our role? Standing Inside and Standing Outside

In this conversation with Paul Desmarais III, we talk a lot about Disruption. In this episode, he shared many unique insights. Here are a few that stood out for me. What is Disruption? Naturally, this podcast has explored the word Disruption and what it means. Paul describes it as adding more people into the majority. He even said it was like growth. This idea that Disruption is about breaking things needs to change. The idea that we are going to dismantle entire industries is not helpful. It should be about creating value and pausing patterns that no longer work for us. Exploring Disruption is fruitful. Playing the long game. As a coach, I often work with my clients to help them raise the level of their gaze. Help them play a long-term game. Paul Desmarais III is part of one of the most successful families in Canadian business. One of the things he points out in this episode is that one of the benefits of being part of a family-owned group is taking a long-term view. For those of us who can play the long game, it can genuinely change our destiny. Families in Business Paul reminds us that they are not a family business. They are family in business, and that is an important nuance. As Paul notes, being in a family business ties you to a specific company, industry or business. When you are a family in the connection is to values and a particular philosophy. A family’s goal is to transfer the entrepreneurial and philosophical approach to the next generation so that each generation can reinvent themselves. When family businesses can avoid the shirtsleeve-to-shirtsleeve pattern, they can truly build something great. The specifics of the business matter less than the entrepreneurial spirit. Focus on what you can impact. Particularly this year, I have been coaching my clients to draw three columns: Complete Control, Partial Control, and No Control. What you need to do is move as many things as possible into the complete control box as possible. Paul told a story about dining with David Rockefeller. David told him at the dinner to only worry about what you can impact. To worry about the things you can have no impact on is a waste of time and energy. Instead, the goal is to focus only on what you can impact. Over time, you succeed at what you are doing. Concentrate on the things you can have no impact on can be harmful to the here and now. Focus on what can I do not to impact my current reality? The power of infrastructures of service One of the conclusions I have come to is that it is tough to disrupt infrastructure businesses. For example, it is challenging to disrupt whoever owns all the fiberoptic cables of the internet. They own the infrastructure. As a strategy for Disruption, what if you take a page out of Pauls book. He describes how the entire world of financial services was going to change in the years ahead. He also notes that most companies are playing a zero-sum game. With a small amount of capital, you could create a delightful experience in today’s world and could change how consumers interact with financial services. So instead, what if you focused on an adjacent area and find profit pools there? Creating a flywheel. I have always thought about innovation as affecting the way we live. With Paul’s Flywheel notion, he suggests that by partnering with marketing defining companies, they can create prosperity in the communities in which they invest. For example, in Canada, they want to make many jobs and a lot of wealth. They are creating a flywheel so that those entrepreneurs can create wealth, philanthropy and employment. So in their goal to create five unicorns companies, they are making a flywheel of prosperity. What is your superpower? Paul described his superpower as networking. He tries to deploy his network for good. Recently Paul co-founded the Black Wealth Club to leverage his superpower. He asked himself, how do you build a network with a group of people with who you have had very little interaction? Then, how you leverage your network to help a new group of people access new things. In this approach, it is essential to note that he is defining wealth as more than money. Wealth is about intellectual capital, human capital and relationship capital. Your most valuable asset is your people. In thinking about his own companies, Paul is making sure that he attracts the best talent. He wants his teams to behave lives that are in balance. He commented that “your most valuable assets walk in and out of the door every day.” His jobs, as he sees it, is to build a platform that makes them their best. He believes that nurturing talent means investing in talent. Not investing in people puts you at a competitive disadvantage. We approach every conversation with a bias. The question of imposter syndrome or doubt has been popping up for me more and more. Here you have one of the wealthiest men in Canada admitting that he has Imposter Syndrome. Sometimes his internal talk, when he walks into the room, is that people are thinking, “here is someone who has never done anything.” “Here is a rich kid playing with a cute idea.” We all have imposter syndrome. Well, maybe not all of us but at least those of us who love our work. After you get into the room, you then need to overcome the hurdle of internal doubt. Are you good enough? Are you worthy? None of us is alone with these thoughts. Seek to understand the drivers of your people. By default, we judge people as generalizations and not as individuals. Each of us needs to work hard to dismantle these trends. These stigmas permeate society, and it is horrible that people are often judged by generalizations. Fear of failure often cripples people. Paul admitted that he has learned to check his fear of failure and try things that are out of his comfort zone in our conversation. For him, fear is nothing but a lack of preparation. He likes to say that all of his success in life has come through luck. He tries to be prepared and positioned for luck. He is working on not fearing looking stupid for having taken a risk. He is also trying to ignore what people are going to think if he makes a mistake. Paying attention to the adjacent profit pools. There are substantial adjacent profit pools that we often ignore. Instead of a focus on each other, focus on a world of abundance. A lot of conflicts are about mindsets of scarcity. We can rethink how we build things. How do you help bring opportunity? Change the world view. Go where others are not willing to go. If you would like to learn more about Paul Desmarais III. Visit his website: https://www.sagardholdings.com/

Christian Madsbjerg is a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he teaches German and French philosophy from the 20th century. He has also founded a company called Red Associates. Red Associates is a Social Science-based or anthropology-based company to advise on human behaviour and how humans make sense of the world, and what is meaningful and important to them from the level of experience. In this conversation, we explore perspectives on the role of social science in business. Here are some of the things that stood out for me. Design systems, products and services for humans? This might sound obvious or, as Christian described, banal. Yet, much of the thinking around organization has come from management science. In many ways, management science attempted to bring the rigour of science to the business world. As a result, the field has been influenced by disciplines like economics, engineering and Mathematics. Social Science has much to contribute to the study of human arrangements. The proposal is simple. Reduce risk by using social sciences to produce new products and services in the business world. Do not pass judgement too quickly. Understanding people is about waiting, careful observation and not passing judgement too quickly. To find insight, we have to observe humans slowly, intentionally, and patiently. We need to be open to the first judgement not being true. Building your capacity to suspend judgement is the core to finding good insight. Seeing things work. When you see things work, it can be transformative. Using slow observation, you can find frugal, novel or simple insights that can be transformative. Disappointment is a better source of innovation than wonder. Where do people find inspiration in their search for innovation? It is an interesting provocation to ask the question, what disappoints you? What are you disappointed in, and how can you change it? Think for a second about where you find your inspiration. Where are the philosophers? The technologies of tomorrow will transform our future in ways we cannot imagine. What if we had philosophers at the decision-making tables? For example, what if there were philosophers in the room when we first launched Facebook? What questions might they have asked to help curtail some of the unintended consequences of technologies like social media? Insights can spread like wildfire. When an organization can find beneficial insight, it can spread throughout the organization. Insights can be fuel for transformation. Who is too comfortable in their power? Christian gave the example of what happens when Finance and Technology are too comfortable in their power. When one of these becomes too comfortable, it does not end well. This might be true of any domain. When people are too comfortable, especially too comfortable in their power, it can increase their blind spots. How do you notice when you are too comfortable in your power? Be interested in humans. We often find comfort in abstractions, models, or systems when we need to be focused on humans. When need to be interested in the things humans do, feel and say every day. We live in a world that has placed enormous trust in abstractions that don’t often get us as far as we thought. You are probably wrong. Christian tells a beautiful story about working with Samsung. At the time, he thought it was a terrible idea to put a camera on the phone. What he learned is that it is better to go with observation and analysis than intuition. Tap into talent as it is globally. It cannot be that the best people in the world all come from the same country as you. It does not work that you tap into talent globally. Learn to tap into global talent. Questions can change your world. Christian shared a story about working with Adidas. They asked the question, “Is Yoga a sport?” That question took the company on a journey to explore sports that are not about winning. Today, 60% of their revenue comes from sports that are about winning. What is like to be? The central message from Christian is to observe. His favourite quote is, look, don’t think. As I understand it, he is on a quest to understand why people do what they do? When we observe the everyday activities of real people, we gain real insight. We need to start with observing everyday human interactions. Questions bring perspective. They often can lead to insight or something new. To learn more about Christian Madsbjerg, visit: https://www.redassociates.com/

Paul Pangaro has a deep interest in the relationship between machines and people. He describes himself as an interaction designer, pragmatist and practitioner. He thinks, like me, believes if you have a good theory, you can then make progress. Currently, he teaches at Carnegie Mellon in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute there. In this conversation, talk about how conversations help us make sense of the world. Several things stood out for me, and here are just a few of them. Conversations are not just between human beings. In referencing Gordan Pask, Paul makes the argument that conversations are not just between us as individuals. We can have conversations with objects in our space. We can have conversations with ourselves. One school of thought can have a conversation with another. It is these conversations that make us human. Without conversation we cannot learn from one another. The thing that distinguishes human beings as an animal from other animals is our capacity for language. Language gives us the capacity to create agreements, actually to agree and to collaborate. For him, conversation is the essence of all things human. If you wish to accomplish something design the conversation. What is the action you take when you want to accomplish something? For most people, the default is to assemble a team. Here Paul puts forward what might seem like an obvious provocation. What if you started with designing the conversation? What if you thought about the cadence of the conversations you need to have. Everything we ever hope to accomplish is done through conversations. So why not pay attention to how you design your conversations. In doing so, you increase your capacity to act. We need to think about the goals, means and classes of conversations. What do we need to learn or what did we learn? What if you ended each conversation in your organization with what we need to learn or what did we learn? Do we or did we have the right people in the room? New conversations and language help you see things in completely need ways. Conversations can help you rethinking distinctions, relationships, and values. Business gets better at doing the same thing better and better. They thus do not see what the new is. We ask the wrong people to come up with innovation. When we ask people who are operational to thinking about the new way forward, we ask the wrong people. These people are two caught in the existing paradigm. Getting people to think in new ways is to remove the conflict of their day to day activity with the future you hope to bring forward. Language helps us create new language. We need to use conversation to create what we do not know we are going to create. Find your misfits. We cannot expect the people who invested in the current paradigm to help you imagine the new world. To do this, you need to find your tribe of misfits. Our self-interest always drives us. There is a distinction between choice and options. Paul references a quote by Heinz von Foerster, which says, “I shall always act to increase the total number of choices.” Paul points out that the quote is really ethical imperative. Where we help people make real choices in a world that generally gives us options. No matter the change you wish to make, it should be couched in your values. If you are always honouring your values, you will still have your values no matter what you do in the world. A great quote referenced in the episode by Heinz von Foerster, “Person A is better off when person B is better off.” For more information about Paul Pangaro Visit his website: https://www.pangaro.com/

Joel Solomon is a financial activist and co-founder of a mission venture capital firm called Renewal Funds. He is also the author of The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism. In this episode, we explore many a wide range of topics. Here are some of the things that stood out for me. How do we make money a force for good? The question can seem so simple. It is loaded. In our conversation, Joel and I discuss the notion that money as a force for good should be the status quo. For example, his company invests in clean food, nontoxic households and climate. I love that he is walking the walk and trying to bring others with him. On his journey, he spends time ensuring that as many people as possible can do things that matter, something they genuinely care about and invest in businesses or organizations that do things that matter. It all starts with his story of origin. When I asked Joel how he got into the work, he talked about early life experiences. He admitted that early childhood experiences of seeing African-American’s hosed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He also referenced the Vietnam war and hoped for a career in creating a kinder and gentler world. The Golden rule vs The Platinum Rule. Joel and I talked about how his life has been informed by “do onto others as they would like have done onto them”. We discussed the Platinum Rule, do onto others as they would like done onto them. These rules have informed both our lives. The prospect of death can give us great perspective Joel told the story of how he was diagnosed with a genetic kidney disease. The diagnosis was, he could die soon, or he could live long. And there’s not a lot that he could do about it. Having to live with that from an early age greatly influenced him. Joel described how it caused a certain kind of awakening in him. He was keenly aware that time was limited. A question he posed was who you would like to have been? Ib considering that question, it became salient for him that death was around the corner. I ask the silly question, what it was like to be living in a way where death was always imminent. Joel reminded me that it was true for all of us. We just live “as if” it could not happen to us. When death becomes salient, it becomes influences our choice and our perspective of the world. The inner work is the most critical. Joel admitted that he works with four different professionals who help him do inner work, reflection, and seek insight. For him, some of the most critical work is to be questioned by experienced, intelligent people who work to support him. The goal for him is to move from challenge-based seeking help to anticipatory practice. For many of us, we seek help when trauma, fear or other challenges arise. It is an important question to ask, what if you instead worked from an anticipatory lens? How did I get to be who I am and how I am? I thought this was simply a wonderful question to consider. What is the role of purpose and vision in capitalism? Joel describes himself as a financial activist. He believes that capitalism can bring out humans’ very worst aspects without a clear motivation and purpose. For him, the goal of merely accumulating money without a clear purpose is an empty choice. We all die someday, and we cannot take all with us. In my own words, I understood his comments to mean that some questions require deeper or continuous reflection. Questions like, how much is enough? Why am I here? Are not questions that can be answered quantitatively. For Joel, he prefers to have influence, especially to influence positive outcomes in the world. We are ancestors of what’s coming. His fundamental belief is that we can do better. The goal for him is to choose a path he can be proud of on his deathbed. A few question he posed in our conversation were, “How do I want to be thought of, felt, and known when I die? How did I impact the world? How did I first find myself? Joel considers his job to be a good ancestor. The test for him is when he walks into a room, how does the room respond? In this is grounded in his belief in the inner work. The tragedy of the under-examined human species. When we have not taken the time to examine ourselves, we are driven by emotions, reactions, responses, and interpretations of the world that generate unhappiness, poor health, poor relationships, and harmful practices. How do you work on yourself, so you become proactive about how you respond to the world Disrupting by being. I found this idea to be powerful. One quote that stood out for me was, “the inner work leads to the ability to, first of all, choose what must be disrupted and then ultimately not even to choose it, to just be it.” For Joel, he has come to the stage of his life where he would prefer to be disruptive in subtler and gentler ways. Ways in which the advances and success we make, make us inherently disruptive. Learn more about Joel you can visit his company website and his personal website: https://joelsolomon.org/ https://www.renewalfunds.com/

Elizabeth Stokoe is a conversational analyst. This means she studies conversation in the wild. She looks at real-life conversations works to understand how talk works. Her work focuses on social interactions. What are people doing as they interact? Here are some of the highlights from our conversation. We build our world through social interactions. This may seem obvious, yet so few of us pay attention to the things we do and say daily. I have come to believe that the things we say and do build our future. In this conversation, Elizabeth and I tune into the conversations play in shaping our interactions. Revel in working with people who are better than you. When I asked Elizabeth about the best lesson, she ever learned she told a beautiful story about her dad. Her dad was a teacher. He taught woodwork. Elizabeth explained that he would revel in working with students who were or would one day be better than he was. I found this to be such a glorious insight. Her dad wanted his students to be better than he was. He wanted his students to pursue and treat woodwork in the same way they would treat traditional professions. Perhaps most insightful for me here is that we then get scared or intimidated by the competition. How would your life be different if you found really talented people and worked to support them? People show you what matter to them. We had a nerdy conversation about research, but I love that Elizabeth used a research lesson to demonstrate the impact of what she does. For example, she pointed out that people show you what they care about in the words they use. Someone might say, “oh, you know, there were three girls, sorry, women”. This self-policing demonstrates what people care about. Her research uses examples to show how gender is constructed and how our interactions build our gendered constructs. Communication science is likely the most important thing to understand in the 21st Century. I often refer to this as the debate between big data and thick data. Thick data is qualitative research that goes deep. Elizabeth’s work is a great example of how thick data can be so informative. She uses thick data to bust very compelling myths about conversation and communication. For example, there is an extensive belief that communication is largely done through our bodies. It is based on a study that did not actually find that. If however, that was true, we would not be able to communicate in the dark. We would not be able to talk on the phone. Researchers like Elizabeth helps understand the world just a little better so we can bust these very compelling myths. Conversations are organized and messy. In our conversation, Elizabeth also described talk as being full of idiosyncrasy, yet massively systematic. She gave a great metaphor for thinking about it. “Imagine you are in a helicopter or a hot air balloon high above a field. You can see from above what the path is. Now imagine that you’re looking down on that field and you can see a dog walker and their dog. The dog is on one of those long leads that extend and retracts. When you look down in one field, you see the dog walker and the dog. They’re basically moving across that field in a fairly predictable way along the path without much variation. They transverse the field. When you look down again, there’s another dog walker and their dog. This time the dog is absolutely all over the place and the dog walkers got to keep going back and get them out of the field and come off the path. But you also know from above that you can see where they’re going to end up because that’s kind of where everyone ends up.” This is what a conversation looks like. We often end up in a predictable place. What is effective communication? Effective communication is when you sort of get from one point to another. We hope we can minimize friction, misunderstandings, and having to do it again. We want to smooth out the journey Just because you talk, it doesn’t mean you understand communication, scientifically. In our conversation, we talk about how people have strong feelings about conversations. People have conversations every day and as a result, feel they understand communication. Understanding communication scientifically is very different. We build our world conversation by conversation. Perhaps my favourite insight in my quest to understand conversations is that we build our world conversation by conversation. This quote sums up much of what I have been exploring when we think about organizations as conversations. Hope you enjoy this episode with Elizabeth Stokoe. You find her at https://www.carmtraining.org/ and on Twitter as @LizStokoe. Hope you enjoy this episode.

Dr Larry Richard is a former Lawyer, who now works to understand what makes Lawyers tick. In our conversation, he shares his findings from his work with lawyers. His major insight is that skills and tools that make Lawyers good at law do not necessarily make them good leaders. In analyzing a variety of personality assessment tools, he found that Lawyers tend to be overrepresented in various traits. For example, when you analyze a population using the Caliper tool, you usually get most people scoring around 50 on each trait. With Lawyers, you get seven traits where the majority score outside of the middle range, usually 40-60 Scepticism being the most dominant. The challenge is that although these traits help with performance as a lawyer, they are often less helpful in things like Leadership. In today’s world, for Lawyers to be successful, they also need to develop skills for which a larger portion do not score well. Here are some of the other insights that stood out for me. Leadership is about admitting you do not know the way forward. Having worked with many Leaders, very few are willing to admit that they do not know. Richard commented, “leadership demands that you ask your constituents to trust you as a way of getting them to follow you.” For him, “Leadership isn’t necessary when things are stable. Leadership only needs to emerge when things are changing and uncertain. So leaders can never say, I guarantee this is the right path, which means they always have to say to their constituents, I think this is the right path. Follow me, please trust me.” His point is that because Lawyers are so high in scepticism, it is difficult for them to trust others and ask for trust. Lawyers then are immediately in a dilemma. Asking for and gaining trust from a group of people predisposed to be, and trained to be sceptics, is hard at the best of times. Additionally, in my experience, most people think leaders need to know it all. When should you choose emotion over logic? When you are trying to get people to do teamwork, logic can be helpful. Emotions, however, can get you there faster and easier. Logic is a great tool for finding solutions. When it comes to implementing solutions, however, we need to leverage emotions. Bringing out the best in others is not a logical endeavor. People are multifaceted. In our conversation, we talk about how, for some people, their talents may not be valuable, until a particular context arises. People are complex and multifaceted. Bringing out the best in others is not a logical endeavour. Boost performance by helping people find satisfaction and productivity. In our conversation, we share some of our insights on workplace performance. One conversation that stood out for me is that insight that productivity and satisfaction feed each other. This really resonated with me. Effectively doing things with less friction and better results can be the holy grail of many people’s performance. Workplace engagement has a satisfaction component and an engagement component. When you can connect the two, you increase performance. Avoiding the hedonic treadmill. For so many of us, we spend our lives chasing the next goal. In our conversation, we talk about how lawyers are prone to get stuck on the hedonic treadmill. They chase the next thing. I will be happy when I become a partner. I will be happy when I get that new house. When we met those goals, we set new ones. This is the hedonic treadmill. In my own work, we help people work from a lens of consciousness. We help people be intentional about how they spend their time. Doing things today that give them what they want in the future. Sometimes people are their own worst enemy. We have a conversation about we often get in our own way. When we look at the things we want to achieve, often the biggest barrier is ourselves. Predictive tools vs. Heuristic Tools In our conversation, we talk about how we should think about psychometrics tools. The distinction we discuss is that some of these tools are better predictive tools, (help us predict the future) while others should be thought of as heuristic tools (help us think about and imagine the future). This distinction is important in several additional domains. For example, strategic planning is often thought of as a predictive exercise. The truth is close to it being a heuristic tool. Quote: I loved the quote Dr. Richard shared. Absence diminished mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld For more information, about Dr. Richard visit: https://www.lawyerbrain.com/

In this conversation with Daniel, you hear from two people who are really fascinated with understanding conversations. We take a practical and philosophical journey thinking about and exploring our current thoughts on conversations. Here are some of the things that stood out for me in this conversation. We are designing conversations all the time. If you have ever asked a friend to read an email, you are about to send. If you thought to yourself “how should I say this?” If you have ever done anything similar to that, you were designing a conversation. We design conversations all the time. The challenge is that we are not often intentional about designing our conversations. In this conversation, Daniel gives some great tips on how you should approach designing conversations. In his words, “We’re all designed in conversations to try and titrate and clarify our intent in hopes of achieving our goals.” You should also visit his website: The Conversation Factory to read his book and download some great material. We have conversations all the time, yet we spend very little time thinking about them. Daniel spends a lot of time thinking about and designing conversations. We communicate every day, yet very few of us thinking about this action we take that builds our future. One of the ways to design a conversation is to be as specific as possible. Conversations have structure. Spaces influence the conversations we have. This space can be physical, or it can be the space between words. All our conversations have a structure. Most of the times, we are not aware of the structure. Space is just one example of the elements that influence our conversations. In his book, Daniel outlines what he calls the Nine Elements of the Conversation Operation System. The elements are: People Invitation Power Turn-Taking Interface Cadence Threading Goals Error and Repair. I strongly suggest reading his book. It is both a great introduction to conversations and an excellent summary of help frameworks for designing conversations. What are you tuning into in a conversation? In conversation, we tune into things. Sometimes we are intentional about what we tune into. However, most of the time, we are unintentional. There is considerable value in paying attention to what you are attending to in your conversations. Design your conversations We set up our spaces to have conversations. The spaces in which we have conversation speak to the kinds of conversations we can have. One of the things that Daniel has helped me do is to double down on my belief that people should be designing their conversations. He helps people do it for a living. In the same way that we work on other skills, we should strive to have better conversations. Designing the conversations starts before the conversation. In the podcast, we talk about designing conversations within a facilitation setting. This principle, however, is one that I believe should apply to any important conversation. If you have a conversation that matters, try designing it before you enter the conversation. There is value in silence. One of the easiest ways to design your conversations is by leveraging silence. There is, however, a caveat, most of us respond after about two hundred milliseconds. In conversations, if we take longer than that to respond, our brains interpret that as trouble ahead. So ask permission to think for a bit. Having said that, silence can give you tremendous control in conversations. Use it wisely. Before we segue off of this point, here is something to think about. We can think at 4000 words per minute, yet we speak at 125 words per minute. What does this mean? It mainly means that you are getting only a small portion of what they are thinking when someone is speaking. Silence can transform conversations. What do we mean by design? In my view, design usually starts with a question. In the best cases, it is focusing question. In our conversation, four conversational design questions stood out for me: Daniel talked about how design asks you to notice the choices that you are making. What are the implications of the choices that you are making? What if versus what is? Are you thinking about who is attached to which question? Are you thinking about who has a vested interest in exploring one question over the other? Are we having the same conversation? How adaptable are you? A question inspired by the Tendayi Viki who appeared on episode 61. I am going to continue to think about these questions. Midwifery and Palliative care For regular listeners, you may notice that theme of Palliative care and Midwifery has appeared again. Daniel talks about it within the context of grief and that people need to grieve the loss of whatever is changing. There are three parts in all change contexts: what is being midwifed into existence, what needs palliative care, and the bridge between the two. It is also important to think about or visit the Berkner to Loop model which Daniel also references in his book Are we having the same conversation? Daniel used a nice metaphor to talk about what designed conversation does. From our perspectives, designed conversations give us more clarity and focus. They help ensure we are having the same conversation and not speaking past each other. Take some time and imagine you were to open a door and I am trying to close the door from the other side. What happens to the door? Whoever is stronger gets their way. If, however, we’re both trying to open the door together or close the door together, then we’re going to be working together. The door will open or close with more force, with more acceleration. I love this metaphor, and it reminds me of my conversation with John Robinson and his sailboat approach to change and disruption Check out episode 69 here. Speed and cocreation are more durable. This notion is something that really resonated with me. I cannot count the number of times people have not had the patience for co-creation, yet cocreation produces much better results. If we are going to have something owned by everyone, it is going to take more time. We are addicted to the expert, and although Daniel does not say this, I think it has to do with our perceived notion that an expert can get us there faster and our addiction to silver bullets. Light touches make it hard to demonstrate your value. Something I often struggle with is as a coach, is that I believe that when you are doing your best work, the client feels like they did it themselves. This always poses a question to the value you bring, but it is an important way to continue working. To learn more about Daniel Stillman visit: The Conversation Factory: https://theconversationfactory.com/

Dan Doty describes himself as a father, husband, entrepreneur and outdoorsman. He is the co-founder of Everyman. A global organization that brings men together to learn and practice emotional skill sets. Men too can learn to be in touch with the vulnerable parts of life. They can learn to express as fully as possible. This conversation with Dan was an inspiring one. Here are a few of the things that stood out for me. It stops with me. Perhaps the most powerful thing I took away from this conversation is that more and more men are saying no. They are saying that no exploring the full spectrum of masculinity stops with me. This is a powerful statement and undercurrent to notice. I love this as a potential movement that we may see in the world. Society has gap in it defines and prescribe masculinity. The make experience ought not to be defined or prescribed too narrowly. Masculinity should explore the full spectrum of human emotions. What does it mean to be a man? Although there seem to be many groups grappling with this question. Dan’s work seems to be one of gaining significant traction. We explore how so few men had fathers who were present during their childhood. We talk about what it means to be a good husband. The time has come for men to explore the full spectrum of the human experience. Talk about ‘girly’ stuff. To broaden the definition of what it means to be a man. A different way is possible. In this episode, Dan tells the story of attending his first men’s group. Past podcast guests have described similar experiences of being introduced into another world. It makes me wonder about the role of experience in our journey. How not knowing there was another way limits the choices we make. I love that he and I explore this question throughout the episode. Meditation and outdoors When I asked Dan about the best lessons he ever learned, he talked about mediation and being outdoors. I could not help be see the obvious connection. Using being outdoors as a time to do active mediation. As someone sceptical about the role of meditation. It leaves me with questions. For example, what is the value of intentionally allowing your mind to rest? We can find sanctuary wherever we are. Dan describes how finding the men’s group gave him a similar experience to being outdoors. The idea that he did not have to get outdoors to find sanctuary. This is powerful. It reminds us that we can use the resources we have access to. This may sound like a simple insight, but it is profound. What does it mean to be married to a mother? Since becoming a father, the question, “What does it mean to be married to a mother?”, has sat with me. In response, a friend asked, “What is like for your wife to be married to a father?” The mirror question had not crossed my mind. So, “What does it mean to be married to a father?” In one action, my identify changed, and so too did my wife’s. I had been so focused on supporting my family. I had not thought about how my needs. How have my needs changed since becoming a father? What does this new me want? What are his hopes, dreams, and desires? These are all new questions for me to sit with and explore. What would we notice if masculinity was healthier? Dan pointed out to me that men who had supportive families are rare. He also noticed that perhaps adults who had parents who were happily married are also rare. So what would it be like to live in a world where neither of these was rare? I loved this question as a place to land in my conversation with Dan. I have no answers. I do enjoy that I get to sit with these questions.

In this episode of Disruptive Conversations, we hear from Liz Elam, founder of the largest coworking conference in the world know as the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC). There are a number of great takeaways. Here are a few of the insights I found helpful. To change your life, you have to change something you do every day. Later in the episode, Liz shares that it took her some time to come to terms with the word alcoholic. She is now 11 years sober. When she said, “to change your life, you need to change something you do every day,” she was talking about things like exercise habits or losing weight. Later in the episode when she talked about AA meetings, it put this comment into perspective. It seems simple, yet it is so profound. She changed something she was regularly doing, and it changed her life. What is something you can change today that will change your life tomorrow? Where work needs to be design for wellness. A major theme in this episode is that work environments are not often designed for people to thrive. Take air quality as an example. Do you know how good the air in your building is? Is your physical work environment designed to help you thrive daily? Chances are it is not. Yet, we spend a lot of our time working in unhealthy spaces. This idea again seems simple but is so disruptive. Work is also about community. Loneliness is an epidemic in our society. One of the ways we can combat loneliness is by building communities in the workplace. Coworking offers a great avenue for addresses workplaces needs and community needs. It could be how we begin to address the epidemic of loneliness. People have choices or should have choices. COVID-19 has demonstrated that we can work differently. People can have choices. For example, some people may prefer to have to visit regularly. Others may prefer to work at home. Still, others might prefer to work in a coworking space. The future of work will likely include choices and companies who able to offer their employees choices will likely thrive in the long-term. Mr CEO, your biggest changes are going to be talent attraction and retention. To attract and retain the best people, companies are going to have to think about the environments in which their best people work. One way to both attract and retain the best talent is to give them a choice in how they work. In today’s world, this is not a difficult proposition. The future of work will likely include choices for companies who manage to attract and retain the most talented. There are many other insights in this episode. To dive deeper into this episode, take a listen below. Also visit: Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) https://gcuc.co/

In this episode of Disruptive Conversations, I interview Isobel Stevenson, Director of Organizational Learning at the Connecticut Center for School Change. The Center is a nonprofit based in Hartford, Connecticut. In this conversation, we discuss a range of topics that span areas like coaching, leadership, evaluation, and even the role of gaming the system. You will need to listen to the episode to understand the last one. Some of the things that stood out for me in this interview were: How and where should leadership meet coaching? I am of the view that in today’s world leadership should adopt more of a coaching approach than what is traditionally thought of as leadership. In my view, leaders should be having more coaching-like conversations. In our conversation, Isobel and I discuss the idea that leaders need to develop the skill of challenging peoples thinking through conversations. In my view, we use conversations as the mechanism by which we get people to gain insight and a new perspective. Evaluations are pretty much worthless. I have always questioned the value of evaluations. Isobel, on the other hand, goes as far as saying they are worthless and gives some clear example of how they lack utility. Particular concerning their stated purpose. One way I understood the conversation was that they are useful but just not in the way they were intended or how we purport to find utility in them. What Isobel argues, and I happen to agree, is that evaluations are the best way to get people to become defensive. It is the best way to stunt their growth. We put them in a defensive frame which is not a place of growth. Show up and focus on the process. When I asked Isobel about the best lesson she ever learned, she talks about interviewing a very experienced coach who said show up. For her, this simple prompt got her to think about showing up for people and being of service to them. It moved her away from focusing on the end. Instead, it got her to focus on how she showed up for people. What I got from this is that it is vital to show up and be present for the people you serve. In short, focus on process and not the outcome. What is the focus? In our conversation, we talked about the tendency for people to focus on feeling better or feeling good. Isobel says in our conversation, she is not convinced that is the goal. Instead, let us think for a moment where people gain a sense of identity, pride or dignity. For many, it comes from feeling a sense of competence. Things have changed. Suddenly we are no longer feel that sense of competence. So not only are we feeling less competent. We are also managing loss and change. That is a lot to handle. One question that came up for me was, instead of working to feel good or better. What if the focus was on regaining a sense of power and control? Problematizing the tendency to be positive. We have a tendency, that is as far as I can tell, finds its roots in self-help books. We are obsessed with putting things in the affirmative or the positive. Here Isobel and I dive into this a little. For example, if one thinks of good as going smoothly or well, then we need to have a conversation about what that means. The goal could be things like learning. In my language, we instead ask people to notice the progress they have been making. Often, we need to reframe how we think about the goal because if we only wish to frame things in the positive, then we may be focusing on the wrong things. We have a very dive deeper into this conversation in the episode. Robust Discrepancies I love this framing. What are the robust discrepancies that we are noticing? I was delighted to be reminded to pay attention to the robust discrepancies that occur in systems. For Isobel, as an educator, they are opportunity, experience and outcomes among student groups. We all exist in systems that produce robust discrepancies, and two things came up for me. Firstly, how then do we notice these discrepancies? Secondly, how do we address these discrepancies? Take for example, as Isobel points out, “if we are looking at a situation where the students who identify as white are outperforming the students who identify as Black or Latino. If the white students are outperforming students of color by, in some cases 20 plus percentage points, that’s a pretty big discrepancy. And it’s not just about the test that they take that reveals that discrepancy. It’s also about what classes those students have the opportunity to enrol in while they are in school. And what you know, what that experience looks like.” I think it is so important to pay attention to these robust discrepancies. We are all affected by the optimism bias. This conversation reminded me of the planning fallacy, which is the that people tend to underestimate how long it will take them to accomplish or complete a task. This bias is deeply connected to another common bias known as the optimism bias. This is important because it disrupts people at the individual and organizational or group level. If we tend to underestimate how long things will take then when things take longer it affects us at several levels. The quote that I think should not be missed is that “the plan itself does not produce the outcome we desire.” For Isobel, many leaders attain their roles because they focus on potential and not problems. This means that they are sometimes blind to problems and have an optimism bias. They too can miss the issues. Changing beliefs without changing people’s capacity I enjoyed this quote. It is something I have struggled with on many occasions. In my work, I have contemplated the ethics of changing beliefs without providing people with the capacity to enact or respond to those new beliefs. I enjoyed this part of the conversation with Isobel. Doing evaluation better. One of my favorite questions in thinking about organizations is, are we doing what claim to be doing? Isobel’s provocation, as I understand it is that “we should probably stop claiming that evaluation is a mechanism by which people get better.” The idea is that an evaluation will improve people is unfounded. Rank Introduces a level of scepticism Isobel makes the point that there is a phenomenon where people who have less power have a bias towards scepticism for people with power. If leaders understood this, it could change how they approach conversations with the people they serve. People are less willing to give the benefit of the doubt. As a result, leaders need to think about communicating better.

In this conversation with Hubert Saint-Onge we explore a number of big ideas. Below are some of the ideas that stood out for me. Hold back your precocious advice giving. When I asked Hubert about the best lessons he has ever learned, he responded, it is about listening for what is being said? A key part of conversations is listening. Over the years, I have come to understand that listening is probably one of the best leadership skills one can work to cultivate. In this episode, Hubert reminds us to start with listening. There is no finished work. This simple phrase is a great reminder that we are all a work in progress. When we work within organizations, there is always room for improvement. There is no finished work. So much of the dominant discourse assumes a linear finite world that ends at some point. For example, if someone asks you when we will finish the strategy? It is a clear sign that they believe that strategy work ends. In the same way that we should think about strategy as a temporary holding position, we should also hold onto the idea that there is no finished work. I enjoyed this reminder and think it is something we can all benefit from. Work with people to help the organization realize their full potential. This notion is given a lot of lip service in organizations, yet so few organizations genuinely embody this simple idea. When we invest in people, they enact the full potential of the organization. Most of us are not prone to learning agility. Hubert cited some work he sponsored in one of his previous roles. His researchers found that 10% of people are active learners. These people are constantly willing to learn, change and adapt. 60% of people are passive learners and need to be hit across the face before they change. They are reactive learners. Finally, 30% of people are block learners who take refuge in past success. The play and act the part while their world is falling apart. Inner Agility Hubert and I have had many conversations about inner agility, and you can listen to a webinar where we deep dive on the topic by following this link. In short, inner agility refers to how we respond to problems. Our brains instinctively seek stability. The challenge with our brains seeking stability is that in an uncertain world, it can lead to paralysis. Instead, we need to move ourselves to a creative space where we confront the uncertainty of the world. Some of the questions Hubert presents are, how do we relax at the edge of uncertainty? How do we pay attention to the clues that we see? How do we learn from them? The goal is to avoid becoming blind to the clues that present themselves so we can adapt the new set of circumstances that are emerging and do it in a healthy way. We need to build our ability to question our own beliefs. Hubert discusses the idea that throughout our lifetime, we gather a set of beliefs that inform how we see and understand the world. When we encounter challenges in the world, we then draw on experience to try to address these challenges. What we need to do is develop our capacity for questioning these mindsets that once made us successful yet will no longer make us successful. The challenge is that they are difficult to identify on their own, which is why you need someone who can point them out for you. Where am I causal? Hubert reframes one of my favourite questions. How are you contributing to the problem? I love this way of framing the question. I love asking instead, how am I causal This is what I need to do here to contribute positively to this situation. In our conversation, Hubert and I talk about organizations mired in entitlement. In the conversation, we arrive at an interesting destination. Something I think many of us can relate to. Organizations that are based on entitlement; in other words, there is a culture where people believe that by being present, they don’t need to be engaged. Their presence means they are owed things. In these organizations, it isn’t easy to transform and get results. In these organizations, instead of owning their performance or learning and working to craft their future, people believe that through their presences, they have earned a reward. This part of the conversation really resonated for me and encapsulated so much of my work. Respect the other persons view as valid. Recently, I have been exploring this notion as I shift to the idea of better conversations. It is a challenging notion to understand. Here is the essence of the idea. Someone can have a valid view, and it may not be correct. In this conversation, Hubert and I explore our tendency to personalize things. We ask questions like, what if we started by putting issues in the middle of the table? What if we move to an inquiry mode? What if we were to embrace our own ignorance? For many of us, we tend to be declarative where the opportunity lies in moving to an inquiry mode.

David Burkus has focused much of work, writing and research on how to not make work suck. A common joke in the world of organizational psychologists. He written books on creativity, networking, teams, teamwork and more recently remote work. In general, he asks, what do we think we know about work? Now that we have some ideas around that, what does the research or evidence say about what we think we know? In really enjoyed my conversations with David. Here are a few things that stood out for me. Getting teams aligned and motivated. Recently, I have been questioning this term alignment in organizations because in many ways it assumes a certain level of homogeneity in organizations that simply does not exist. What I liked about my conversation with David is that he spoke about the role of purpose in getting trams aligned and motivated. He used the phrase, “speaking the same language”. Whose job is it to get the team to align and speak the same language. What does that mean in practice? His notion is that we need to pick a fight. People need to know what they are fighting for. It has little to do with who they are fighting against. People, for David, need a crusade. They want to work on something that is bigger than themselves. This is how you drive motivation. Lessons from terrorists. I have always been a fan of learning lessons from people we disagree with. Most notably, white supremacy groups have been very good at building a movement. What can we learn from them? One of the things David points out is that terrorist movements give people two things the rest of the world is not giving them: A sense of sacred values. Things that are worth defending. A larger group identity. One of the things he reminds us about is often when you give groups task that require collaboration for them to complete, they often put aside their difference to achieve the task. See episodes: Mindfulness can be found in places other than Yoga. I love this part of our conversation. I am not the biggest fan of the mindfulness movement. I do, however, acknowledge its value. There is tremendous value in working on presence, focus, and intention. The challenge is that many mindfulness programs over promise and under deliver. These are my words but what David and I talk about is the possibility of finding mindfulness in soccer, martial arts, or work. There is value in mindfulness in many places other than in temples and retreats. Avoiding the pull towards self-similarity. In his book, Friend of a Friend . . .: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career, one of the arguments he makes is that we have a tendency towards self-similarity. Network have a tendency to serve you self-similar people. We have network problem. When you recruit from the same clusters, you get the same kinds of people. To grow and diversify your network you need to avoid the tendency for networks to move towards similarity. Disinfect at the source. We know that emotional contagion spreads like a virus. David tells the story of his wife who is medical doctor and how they have developed procedures for disinfecting the car and her clothes before she enters the house. His point is that work is often a source of stress, negative energy, frustrating bosses, disengagement or toxic work cultures. The challenge is that when people get home, they do not leave this negative energy at the door, instead, it spills into the family life. We laugh at the show the Office because it mirrors certain aspects of our lives. If we are going to stop parents bringing negative energy into their homes, we need to disinfect at the source. We need to create beautiful workplaces. Lean into conflict. There is a big distinction between task conflict and versus people conflict. Conflict around ideas can yield tremendous reward for organizations. We can also avoid conversations by assuming we know the other persons motivations because we can only speculate. There are ways to avoid conflict and speculating about other people’s motivations is a major one. There are a few tricks: Give the other person the most generous assumption. Ask people, what would need to be true for X to happen? Focus on challenging the idea and not people. Pick a crusade worth fighting for. For more information on David visit: https://davidburkus.com/

In this episode, I interview John Ruffolo former Chief Executive Officer of OMERS Ventures. We explore how many of the entrepreneurs they invest in have a passion for solving a problem. He tells the story of Shopify. One of Canada’s great entrepreneurial stories. John and his team look for founders who care deeply about the problem to be solved. He explains that there is a confusion between invention and innovation. For John, he doesn’t see a lot of new invention, but rather interesting applications of technology in particular industries. When entrepreneurs are able to combine implementation and the idea, they can generate innovation. John describes his work as providing the fuel for the rocket, while entrepreneurs work to build their ventures. In this interview, we share many insights from John and his years of experience advising some of the world’s most innovative companies. John and his team are on the search for the most disruptive companies. This podcast was recorded over Skype. Both speakers were in different locations.

In this conversation, Peter and I explore how solution-focused conversation has helped to shape his view of the world. This conversation is full of beautiful insights, stories, metaphors and quotable quotes. Here are some of the things that stood out for me in the conversation. Where do we have power and influence in conversations? Peter reminded me of the power we all have in conversation. He uses an example of how someone can complain about the political views of a friend and say something like, “and I do, however, enjoy playing tennis with them.” We tend to focus on the complaint. What if instead, we focused on learning more about what they enjoy about playing tennis with their friend. We all have considerable power in our conversations. Often we fail to exercise that power. A conversation is an interaction. This may sound simple, but the idea that we can improve our everyday interactions seems powerful to me. I am curious about how we can leverage conversations to improve our daily interactions. So this notion that conversations are interactions in anything by trivial and can reframe our everyday experiences. Breaking away from a reductionist world. Like many social sciences, psychology has imported practices from the natural sciences and tried to apply it to human interactions. Part of what has made the science so successful is a reductionist view of the world. The idea that we can break things down into its component parts and understand how they work. Within the dominant discourse, science is often considered to be more credible than the social sciences. As a result, many social sciences have worked hard to prove that they are a science. This reductionist approach has worked well in engineering but does not always translate to human relational systems. Our social interactions are not reducible to cause and effect relationships in that same way that we can identify cause and effect in the natural sciences. I love that Peter so casually challenges years of dominant discourse to propose a stance of not knowing and not needing to know. He also offers a viewpoint where the coach, therapist or helper does not require a diagnosis to be helpful. They do not need to understand the other person’s problem to be helpful. Assume that people have good reasons for their behavior. I find it challenging to hold that stance that people have good reasons for their behavior. Peter offers us a very simple gift. What if your intervention was one of curiosity? What if, you instead said something like, “John I am sure you had good reasons for your behavior, can you tell me some of those good reasons?” Now imagine a parent whose instinct is to yell at a child. What if instead, they asked, “can you tell me some of those good reasons for your behavior?” It is such an elegant way to generate a productive conversation. Get whomever you are trying to help to refocus their attention. Peter tells a beautiful story about some clients he worked with who got into a food fight. His intervention was to ask them to do something different. In this case, the wife decided to throw food at her husband, and it resulted in a massive food fight. It disrupted the previously unhealthy pattern of them getting into fights and instead allowed them bond over cleaning up the mess. What stands out here is that Peter could have never thought of this as an approach to addressing the issue yet the simple prompt – do something different – produced a novel approach to addressing their conflict. Instead of yelling as she usually did, the wife threw food at her husband. This novel action made all the difference in the world. The notion of getting your conversation partner to focus on something different is so powerful and frees the client to discover their own solutions. Get out of the client’s way. In western culture, we tend to focus our work around the practitioner. Peter proposes what I think is a radical idea. What if we accepted the notion that clients can make progress without the help of the practitioner? Instead, the job of the practitioner is to help the client discover or uncover solutions by asking questions. The task at hand is to guide the client towards finding and making progress. Even more insightful, is that client can often make progress without know why or how they made progress. In this episode, Peter also references two quotes that I find to be extremely powerful. Ludwik Fleck- “he is a poor observer indeed who does not notice that a stimulating conversation between two persons soon creates a condition, in which, each utters thoughts he would not have been able to produce by himself or in different company.” John Weakland – “Influence is inherent in all human interaction. We are bound to influence our clients and they are bound to influence us. The only choice is between doing so without reflection or even with attempted denial and doing so deliberately and responsibly.” Resources cited in the episode: http://www.microanalysis.ca/ You can email Peter at pdejongsft@gmail.com

Michael Unger is a professor of social work and is currently the Canada Research Chair in Child, Family and Community Resilience at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Although he began his career as a family therapist, today he is a researcher and looks at resilience in populations that under stress. He works around the world to try to understand how social and environmental factors help to foster innovation. Below are some of the things that stood out for me in this episode. What makes someone successful? When you as people this question directly, they usually attribute it to something related to their mindset or grit. Their own self-determination. What Michael and other researchers have discovered is that if you study what makes people successful, access to resources and being in a supportive environment significantly contributes to their success, yet people tend to either understate or credit their success to more internal factors. In the podcast, he talks about interviewing Renaldo (I am assuming CR7 I forgot to ask) and learning that despite Renaldo’s tendency to attribute his success to notions like having a positive mindset his research demonstrates that the world around contributes to your success. See episode 70 with Kate Sutherland for more insights. Asking a different question. Many years ago, Michael began to ask a slightly different question that focuses on how a resourced life contributes to success. This reframe has given him tremendous insight into helping us think about and understand how we build resilience. For him, he heard one too many stories in which one sibling was successful, and the other was not. Often the children would attribute the difference being that the successful child had skills or interests that the environment supported. This led Michael to focus on social and environmental factors that contribute to resilience. The miseducation of mindfulness. This is not going to be a popular conclusion, but Michael’s research that most mindfulness programs are successful in the short run but less successful in the long term. Additionally, what he is really pointing to is a straightforward idea. If your environment is not supportive, no amount of mindfulness is going to help you become successful. An interesting implication If Michael’s research is correct, then our entire culture of rugged individualism is put into question. This idea that we determine our destiny versus things that external to us profoundly challenges many of our long-held beliefs. Differential Impact There is a research concept called “differential susceptibility”. The idea is that in genetics determine how susceptible we are to a variety of things like addictions, disease, stress etc… what if we thought about that a little differently and thought about “differential impact”. What this refers to is the idea that the same program can have a different impact on different people. For example, a program that focuses on adult mentors with people who have experienced sexual abuse may have an undesirable effect on participants. That same program, however, could have a desirable impact on people who have been physically or emotionally abused. It is very similar to the idea that there is no silver bullet from episode 42 with Amanda Hache We need to stop blaming the individual Michael has found that when we blame people for the situation, they are in, often if we change the environment, it can make a significant difference. We need to stop blaming people and start looking at systems. Sarah Kaplan makes a similar point in episode 85. Bounce back, adapt or transform I learned from a mentor, Brenda Zimmerman that systems have a tendency to bounce back. Often when we speak of resilience, we talk about returning to how things were. What if we instead looked at three types of change, incremental, adaptative and transformative change. These are all very different kinds of outcome to the change. Admittedly, Michael does not talk about incremental change, yet these four categories can be beneficial in thinking about change. Michael gives an example, so instead of asking employees to meditate and do yoga, you make the work less stressful. You transform the environment to change the individual. For example, if you want to improve children’s education, you don’t focus on the children, you focus on the teachers. You resource the teachers, and they will take care of the children. The influence of a compelling story “We are not this kind of people who allow three-year-olds to die on beaches.” Many of us remember the photo of Alan Kudri. The Syrian boy whose body washed onshore in Turkey. I will never forget the image of the red shirt and blue pants. This story galvanized the world around the Syrian refugee crisis. Similarly, so to how the video of George Floyd catalyzed the world around Black Lives Matter. In research, N usually refers to the sample size, and when we can tell a story of one person and the difference we make, it can catalyze people to act. In the episode, Michael talks about the photo of Alan Kurdi influenced the Canadian elections. One party was proposing a prolonged approach to allowing Syrian refugees into Canada while another party was suggesting much larger numbers and a faster rate of immigration. When that photo was released, it tapped into the psyche of the country, “we are not this kind of people who allow three-year-olds to die on beaches.” As a result, the party that had much more favorable policies to Syrian refugees was the party that was thrust into power. To learn more about Michael work visit: https://www.michaelungar.com/

Aneil Gokhale is the Director of Philanthropy at the Toronto Foundation. In this conversation, he and I cover a range of topics related to Philanthropy and the charitable sector. At the Foundation, he and his colleagues are trying to get people to think differently about how they give. In our conversation, we cover a range of inflexion points within the world of giving. Some of the things that stood out for me where: In a blink of an eye, you can be 40 years old and your life has passed by but you may not have lived. Aneil took a risk by leaving a very comfortable job at General Electric and ventured into the NonProfit world. As a Top Salesperson, he was able to transfer his skills into fundraising. What I love about this conversation is that Aneil full acknowledges that he had a safety blanket that allowed him to pivot. He responded to an internal conversation that said, the work you are doing is not currently aligned with your values. So he decided to make the pivot. With all his success he has managed to do so with grace and humility. Aneil worked his way into a sector that was more values aligned. Not everyone is brave enough or as he acknowledges, privileged enough to be in a position to make that kind of pivot. I respect this part of the Aneil’s journey and his venture into the unknown. Build your network Aneil and I have had many conversations about relationship building. I appreciate that he articulated the role networking has played in his career. For example, the thought he puts into thinking about how he introduces people is one to admire. He always asks the person if it is okay to connect them with whomever he would like to introduce. One of the lessons from this conversation is you can use networking to build trust in a sector where you may be an outsider. The battle with Imposter Syndrome. As a person of colour, I have often found myself in rooms asking myself what am I doing in here. The story I am often telling myself is, “when they find out more about me, they are going politely ask me to leave.” I love that Aneil was vulnerable enough to share similar moments where he did not feel like he belonged. In this episode, we both talk about how we struggled with imposter syndrome, admittedly he does not call it imposter syndrome, and how the secret is that everyone struggles with feeling either out of place or like they do not belong. The importance of data Toronto Foundation has really drilled this detail into my mind. 66% of all charitable donations go to 1% of organizations in Canada. The inequity of giving in Canada is enormous. In my mind, it falls into the camp of things we should deem unacceptable. What I appreciate about the way Aneil talks about the implications of this statistic is that we need to disrupt the patterns of giving, if we are going to influence the pattern of 66% of all donations going to 1% of organizations. This is a conversation we need to have more of in Canada and around the world. Additionally, one of the most innovative initiatives I have seen in the interest of creating a better world is Toronto Foundations Vital Signs Report. If you interested in a data-driven approach to philanthropy, see link here: https://torontofoundation.ca/vitalsigns/ Start with values and the cause One of the major insights I took away from this conversation is to start thinking about the cause you would like to support versus the organization you would like to support. A mentor and friend of mine often say where there is a difference there is a need for distinction. We need to make a distinction between giving to a cause and giving to an organization. For me, this really revolves around asking people to think about their why. Why are you doing this in the first place? What would you like to be different as a result of your actions? The answer to these questions takes us to a very different place than thinking about what organization you would like to give to? Disrupting Philanthropy There is one section of our conversation that really stood out for me. Aneil talked about getting people to think differently about philanthropy on three fronts: 1. Getting organizations and people to think differently about operational funding and or core funding. Let organizations decide what is most important to them and where they can create the most impact. 2. Multi-year commitments so organizations are not caught in a race to find funding annually. Instead, they know they have money they can count on. Doing this will greatly improve organizations capacity to plan. 3. Valuing qualitative data just as much as quantitative data. Qualitative data or “thick data” as I like to call it, tells you so much more about an organization and its impact than numbers. Perhaps we can have a world that places more weight on qualitative data. I hope you enjoy this podcast. Links related to this episode: 1.Toronto Foundations Vital Signs report: https://torontofoundation.ca/vitalsigns/ 2. Connect with Aneil on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a_goks 3. Learn more about Toronto Foundation: https://torontofoundation.ca/

In this episode of Disruptive Conversations, I speak with Sarah Kaplan (PhD). Sarah is an innovation scholar at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She has recently written the book The 360˚ Corporation. Today, Sarah works to explore how ideas from innovation can be applied in a way that helps to create a world of social and economic justice. Although much of her work focuses on gender equality, it is clear Sarah takes an intersectional approach to her work. Here are some of my many takeaways from this conversations. Transformation is not something you can do on the side. For many years Sarah thought of her innovation/academic work was her day job while her concerns for gender equity and other social issues was something she did on the side. One day she woke up and realized she had been told the story that the Women’s Liberation Movement had fixed everything. Women would not face barriers brought about by patriarchy. Yet, when she looked around the world, her students and women around her were still facing the same issues that the Women’s Liberation Movement was supposed to have addressed. She realized that 30 years later, the conversation had not changed. It was in this “ah moment” she decided that her two worlds needed to collide. Her transformational work was no longer something she could do part-time. Words echoed by Zaid Hassan a past guest on the podcast you can listen to him in episode 34, The Tragedy of Strategic Planning. Change the conversation. The thesis for this podcast has always been, if we are to transform organizations, we need to change the conversation. It is always wonderful to hear your guest make similar comments. For Sarah, the conversation about gender equity has focused on approaches like unconscious bias training. These approaches focus on the individual and not the systems that maintain the status quo. For example, many of the dominant approaches focus notions like women do not negotiate or do not negotiate well. These ideas ignore that women who negotiate are often thought to be selfish, unreasonable or generally unpleasant. People do not receive negotiations from men in the same way they receive them from women. To change the status quo, we need to transform the conversations. As a result, Sarah’s work focuses not on changing the individual, but on changing the context. We ignore the social wake companies create. It is always interesting to me to learn my guest’s point of entry into the work they do. As a business and innovation scholar who has also been interested in the rise and fall of empires, it is not surprising that she came to the conclusion that we are not going to change the world if we do not transform business. For Sarah, if we are to create a fair and equitable world, we need to transform businesses from within. In this episode, we had an insightful discussion on the idea that we shouldn’t need a term like social entrepreneur. All businesses are social or create social outcomes. What we tend to do is ignore the social wake that companies create. Sarah’s book, The 360˚ Corporation, explores the tradeoffs companies make. In the book, she makes a compelling case for how companies need to approach these tradeoffs. The point that stood out for me is that companies often need to change their business model if they are going to reduce the wake they create in the world. This is not an easy proposition, yet Sarah’s does make a compelling argument by juxtaposing two very different companies, Walmart and Nike. One of the surprising things about her book is the way in which she is able to help the reader understand the tensions these companies face and how their business models can often constrain their choices. Focusing on the individual has a recoil effect. I recently had a conversation with a very senior executive who wanted to implement mandatory anti-blackness training. In this episode, Sarah highlights what the research says about these types of mandatory programs and how they tend to have a recoil or backlash effect. For example, when people are mandated to attend these programs, they tend to harden or double down on their views. Additionally, these kinds of programs can also make people hyper-aware of marginalized groups. Often their response can be to tokenize or other the very groups we are trying to help. These approaches although well-intentioned can have ill effects when not well thought out. Two tangible ideas from the episode: Stop focusing on the individual if your goal is to create change. Get rid of the mindset that we have to fix individuals. Identify the social structures and systems that create the outcomes you wish to change. Transformation is about changing ourselves and the environment. So much of the self-help literature focuses on changing yourself. Ralph Stacey, one of my favorite scholars in writing about transformation, says “entities are forming patterns of interactions and at the same time, that they are being formed by these patterns of interactions”. When we focus on the individual, we focus on the first part of his quote and ignore that “entities are being formed by these patterns of interactions”. Much of the dominant discourse focuses too much on the individual and ignores the structures. Perhaps if you take anything from this episode, it is that although there are times when paying attention to the individual can make a difference, it is perhaps my fruitful to pay attention to the structures and systems in which that individual resides. Regardless of how much the individual changes, the change will not happen until the context in which they reside also changes. For more similar ideas listen to Episode 70 with Kate Sutherland, Dismantling the myth of the lone wolf. For more information about Sarah Kaplan’s (PhD) work you can visit the sites below: GATE website: www.gendereconomy.org GATE explainers: https://www.gendereconomy.org/explainers/ Sarah Kaplan’s website: https://sarahkaplan.info

Can we change the way people have dialogue? Can we make their interactions better? This is the simple premise of Haesun’s work. Admittedly, we share similar perspectives on the role conversations play and their potential to help people thrive. So often, we blame other people for not communicating well. When we are in fact not listening. Conversations, although we have them every day, are complex. If we are to improve our conversations, we need to be more intentional in how we enter dialogue. Haesun asks us to pause and be intentional about our interactions. We create patterns. Many of us can think of someone with whom we would like to have a better conversation. For many of us, it is probably a sibling or an ex. Instead of living with these terrible conversations, what if we asked, what would we like to be different about our conversation? Rarely do we ask questions like this. It has probably never occurred to us to ask what do wish our conversation were like? We are too often caught in the existing pattern or are emotional about the conversation in which are involved. Haesun has developed a framework for helping us identify when we are in an unhealthy conversation so can work toward what we hope to get out of the conversation. It is a way of breaking patterns so our conversations could be just a little bit better. Conditions of possibility The idea of creating the conditions of possibility is one of my favorite ideas. Using Haesun’s Dialogic Orientation Quadrant can help us open get closer to cocreating conditions of possibility. In this podcast, she tells a story of how her mother always encouraged her to dream. Encouraged her to believe that anything was possible. I hope that most of us know that anything is not possible but the culture of creating a sense of hope is one that we can all probably benefit from. For so many of us, we focus on faults. What is not going well, what did not go well, and why things will not work. In this conversation with Haesun she provides, at least in my eyes, a sense of pragmatic hope. A hope that draws on the future you wish to bring forth and the times in the past where you have done well at using the resources to overcome challenges. Where you orient your attention that is where you move towards. I have played sports all my life. Over and over, I have been taught, the ball will go in the direction you are looking. If you look down, the ball will go down. If you look up, the ball will go up. In a race, keep your eyes on the finish line. Do not look left or right, ever! Run your race. In life, it is very easy to pay attention to all the things that are not going well and not look at the things you want more of. The conversation with Haesun is a reminder that we all need a nudge to orient ourselves to things we want more of. Change is visible. Change is audible. I have taken classes with Haesun and she often encourages her learners to record their conversations. Look at what you do does. A simple provocation with profound implications. I see it as an invitation to be reflective. We all have a habit of mouth and a habit of mind. The way connect the two can be very intentional should we choose to do so. How do we improve our habits so our conversations are better? There is a lot of cover in this episode. Including a story about dying with dignity but to learn more, I encourage you to listen to the episode. Links in the podcast: To follow Haesun’s work visit: https://www.briefcoaching.ca/ To learn more about her quadrant follow this link: https://www.briefcoaching.ca/blog/dialogic-orientation-quadrant

Stefan Kollenberg is a Co-Founder of Crescendo. Crescendo delivers tailored microlearning for every employee inside of Slack. In our conversation, we discuss a number of themes. I really struggled to summarize this conversation but some of the things that stood out for me were: Using existing platforms to deliver a novel solution. Crescendo uses Slack to deliver micro-learning within organizations. I love this idea because it reminds me a past episode with Nick Scott, where he talked about trojan mice. Getting into large well secured spaces through tiny cracks instead of trying to get a trojan horse through the front gate. Their technology solution is so simple and leverages their other existing technology. Personal Learning Journey’s The ability to personalize learning is so important. When it comes to diversity, so many people are simply afraid to ask questions. Afraid to feel silly or look ignorant so they do not ask. In this platform, not only can people get customized learning journey’s they can do it over time. I am a big believer that change happens slowly, slowly and then suddenly. A long time frame of micro-learning versus one off workshops seems more lasting to me than what I have seen. Be vulnerable with your journey I admire Stefan’s willingness to talk about his struggles with addictions. It is important that we start to have these conversations in public. Stefan owns it and I admire that. He references something he calls radical ownership. In the conversation, I introduce two of my own favorite questions: How are you contributing to the problem? How are you contributing to the solution? Avoiding unproductive Conflict Like so many people Stefan has experienced toxic work cultures and has never wanted to go through that again. Part of his mission is to create spaces were people feel like they belong. Teams that are inclusive are a major part of the and his companies purpose is create more spaces were people belong. Disruption Metaphor Perhaps my favorite thing in this episode is Stefan’s metaphor for disruption. He describes disruption “like trying to change the current within a set of rapids. So you need to understand how the water flows and then set up interventions to create a path that is easier to take than the existing.” So simple, so visual and so great. It is all in the narrative Stefan referenced the work of Marshall Ganz from whom he learned a framework for storytelling. He describes it as follows: •Start of first with a story of self. Answer the question, why me? Why do you care about the cause or the work you do? Why do you care about the people you seek to serve. •Next follows the story of us. Why should we care about this issue as a group? How are we implicated? How would we benefit from solving the challenge or following the mission? •Finally, why now? Why is this relevant to do right now? In my own work we use a similar framework and I do like this some aspects of this framework. I posted a video of Mashall Ganz I was able to find here: https://youtu.be/g7CW_10C7lQ