[UNKNOWN]: music playing
[SPEAKER_00]: welcome back to the coaches rising podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today with Gayle Karan Young.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to be exploring the work that Gayle does with organizations around the world, with pro-democracy groups around the world, helping them to create thriving cultures.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll explore the complexity and nuance of this work.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you actually begin to surface to bring into awareness?
[SPEAKER_00]: the culture of an organisation.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Gail calls minding the invisible.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk about the different doorways that Gail uses or the ways that she listens to begin to help accompany see its culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, what do they do when a challenge arises or what are the repeated conversations that keep occurring?
[SPEAKER_00]: How does the founder cast a shadow over the organization?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll look at the link between the mythic and the mundane, the mythic being, the visions, the values, the stories, and the mundane being, the policies and practices, and how do those two influence each other?
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll also explore what happens once you begin to surface the culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you do next?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can you enact cultural change?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are some of the pitfalls and the ways that people often approach that?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a really rich conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think really what shines through is Gale's depth and breadth of experience with this nuanced and complex work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So as I said, Gale works with organizations and pro-democracy groups around the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gale was in the process of becoming a monk.
[SPEAKER_00]: When instead, she became an executive taking on the role of chief culture and talent officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in two thousand and fifteen, she decided to return to private practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's also on the team of cultivating leadership, her clients have included companies like McDonald's, Kaiser Permanente, Yale University, Ernst and Young, and many others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's keenly interested in the intersection of technology and human rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alright, so that all being said, let's dive in here as the podcast with Gail, Karen Young.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Gail, it's a real pleasure to have you on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember when we met a couple months ago and I came up, I call highly energized and inspired, so yeah, I've been looking forward to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: How are you today?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm well, thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a beautiful day here at the Pacific Northwest and the blackberries down the land are just starting to get ripe.
[SPEAKER_01]: I picked a couple early ones and it's an interesting meditation on timing and eagerness to consume because they're just delicious, but they're not quite ripe, but just a couple more days.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got a Goji Barry tree in our garden that's gone crazy, so it just gets the gift that keeps on giving.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've been enjoying that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something so precious about that kind of experience, especially when we're online and with the pace of everything unfolding in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a moment where I just really enjoy picking the Goji Barrys.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's actually a really important source of resilience is that there is and always will be a lot going on in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it could be so easy to shape our attention around those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's equally important to shape our attention so that we're really getting to experience the incredible bounty, like a fruit tree is such an example of the incredible bounty that nature has to give us at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way I'm a glorified door opener is it is my role in this household problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in a moment, you're going to hear him bang on the door.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like keeping these bits in the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I'd love to explore your work today.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're working with leaders and with organizations working, I think primarily with cultural change and leadership development.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you could just share a little bit about what's a headline of what you're up to in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: My first lens on it in some ways is as a psychologist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I go became a psychologist because I wonder why we're so weird as human beings with one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why is it that we're so capable of some of the most extraordinary acts of beauty and moral imagination?
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet we can be such shifts to one another as human beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really astonishing to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that curiosity led me to wonder about
[SPEAKER_01]: What we're like in systems and societies like I worked in a lab when I was in graduate school and I was in was run by this extraordinary human being who is generous and thoughtful and really the way that he led
[SPEAKER_01]: inspired the best out of us like we wanted to do well for him because we felt respected cared for intellectually stimulated and he built a community out of those of us who were working in the lab and the lab next door was frankly run by someone who was
[SPEAKER_01]: inconsistent on a day-to-day basis, you never knew how that person would show up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the kinds of behaviors that it drove in my peers is the lab folks who worked under that person was really astonishing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I thought, huh, isn't it fascinating the way that leadership culture and context are completely inextricable from one another?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that really
[SPEAKER_01]: instigated a lifelong curiosity.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say the other key variables that instigated a lifelong curiosity on this is watching a lot of Star Trek.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in the midst of the Cold War,
[SPEAKER_01]: seeing a Russian on the bridge, seeing a black woman as a communications expert, seeing an empath, have command authority on the bridge of the USS Enterprise was a really fascinating thing for me as a child and as a geek and someone incredibly socially awkward myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so those variables were a
[SPEAKER_01]: key part of my background in history and the early lens and also growing up by cultural, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because they're growing up by cultural, you don't ever get just one way that the world is.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get conflicting stories about this is how you're supposed to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: to be well in the world, you know, don't do this, do do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's conflicting narratives made me realize that there are many ways to be in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Although, you know, as a teenager, of course, I was more in rebellion to those ways of being than really consciously thinking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But later on, life, I came to really appreciate growing up by cultural and the way that it gave me a lens on culture early on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this whole idea of leadership in culture has been
[SPEAKER_01]: really long fascinating to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, because I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and leaders, there's a great song-hime lyric about making a hat where there never was a hat before.
[SPEAKER_01]: This gift that human beings, I think, bring forth of imagination, fundamentally.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the clients I worked with just last week was a company called Element.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they have essentially an electrolyte drink, but it's not just an electrolyte drink.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a reimagining of our relationship to salt and things in the body.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's an entire way, not just of marketing and product, but it's also a way of thinking about how we relate to our bodies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this making a hat where there was never a hat before is something that
[SPEAKER_01]: entrepreneurs, artists, executives are constantly trying to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a great colleague at Cultivating Leadership named Heidi Brooks who says, you know, something is trying to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: So often organizational life is constructed where something is trying to happen, whether it's gendered of AI, whether it's an organizational initiative, whether it's a product, something is trying to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the constellation of human beings trying to make that something happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: is deeply independent on how the leaders lead and what followers should look like as an active act, not just to pass to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what the enabling conditions are of organizational culture for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to pause there because I've just set a bunch of different things that we can follow any number of paths through it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can follow the path of how I show up to a particular engagement.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can follow the path of what do I think of about culture and so I'm curious, Joel, where you might want to go from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I definitely want to go into what you're doing when you go to organizations.
[SPEAKER_00]: But first would love to ask
[SPEAKER_00]: how you see your work in these times, it feels like in particular the last few years where you really are entering into this liminal space and things seem to be breaking down and more visibly.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you find that the global context of what's unfolding
[SPEAKER_00]: impacting your work with organizations at the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are there any themes that are present and, you know, do you feel that you see organizations really responding to what's happening?
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, they probably have to, but yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I certainly do.
[SPEAKER_01]: So how are organizations responding?
[SPEAKER_01]: to the complexity of what's happening in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: First, even the conversation around complexity has shifted.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like he's to have to talk about war when it takes to lead in complexity before COVID.
[SPEAKER_01]: And something about COVID, plus geopolitics, plus climate, have made complexity an undeniable variable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, of course, we have to lead it through and lead ball through.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that has shifted the nature of the conversation fundamentally.
[SPEAKER_01]: The nature and tanner of it and the uncertainty combined with a greater sophistication about how the body carries and holds uncertainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the conversation around resilience and what that looks like through it and how that's enacted, both at the individual and collective level, the sophistication of that conversation is also changed over time, which I find are profound relief, so that's wonderful in that the conversation is widened, but also people are simultaneously more at sea about it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: This acknowledgement that we are living in a wild
[SPEAKER_01]: interconnected interdependent world where there's a multiplicity of worlds within any given system.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think up to over seven, then the subsequent repercussions to Palestine scale have really highlighted that there is no organization that isn't touched by internal politics.
[SPEAKER_01]: at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so watching organizations attempt to grapple with having multiple races, multiple religions, multiple belief sets, multiple geopolitical affiliations within an institution while people are theoretically trying to row in the same direction to get work done is stark in a particular way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think of my job, you know, Jeanine Benius from the World of Biomemicry has this idea from biology.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not particularly her idea, but I think she's really highlighted it about islands of coherence, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That there are these tree islands, there are clusters of treaties and vegetation, and they create microclimants, and that their presence becomes an attractor for a localized ecosystems of fungi and birds and animals who bring more seeds in organic matter and over time these tree islands heal the land through these self reinforcing feedback loops.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think part of my job is to nurture these islands of coherence where they exist within organizations, especially larger ones where we tend to have more different kinds of islands because of the subcultures that are part of each different ecosystem within an institution.
[SPEAKER_01]: So nurturing that being that, I also think that's part of my lineage in the Zen Chaplaincy tradition that I also
[SPEAKER_01]: deeply rooted within.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's never going to officially appear on my, you know, proposal to an organization.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's certainly part of the way I think about the work is being translated or bridge builder.
[SPEAKER_01]: a sear, not as in like seeing the future anything, but offering a form of mutuality.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that people who I work with get the experience of I see you and you see that I see you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a, there's a bi-directionality and neutrality in that that is the foundational building block.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think about making other things able to happen, making a hat where there never was a hat before, for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's really beautiful what you share, you know, that I think everyone will relate to this global context, you know, with all these different kind of forces at play that are, you know, complex and interdependent and
[SPEAKER_00]: and in a sense like sometimes overwhelming or often overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's like, we're in a dojo of a kind, and that is bringing up for people, I think, and move towards things like embodiment and
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, coming back to things that resource and bring resilience.
[SPEAKER_00]: So therefore, it's complex, you know, and I'm wondering when you get brought in by an organization, you know, I'm imagining the remit is like, can you help us thrive as an organization, you know, and so you could correct me on that if it's a bit different.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if that's the case, what do you start to do when you arrive at an organization?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're working in this intersection between culture and leadership and context, I'm fascinated to know, you know, leading an organization myself, like, what would you start to do to be able to support that organization?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so many different entry points, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way that someone would go to a doctor and say, I have a pain here, and they don't actually know what's going on, but they're aware of the pain.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're aware of the pain's impact on their lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they have a bunch of theories about it that are likely to be a simple story.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I just fix this thing, like everything else will be better.
[SPEAKER_01]: And unfortunately, systems don't work that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the first step I think of that seeing is a co-exploration, you know, that first of all, it's a company meant into territory so that people feel less alone in it, which they can often feel as the organizational leader.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think first of all, since of a company meant second, bringing in my own sense of ground in this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm naming these things to Joel because there's a difference between the foreground conversation and the background conversation.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like,
[SPEAKER_01]: A client is never going to know necessarily that part of what I'm bringing to them is my own sense of groundedness.
[SPEAKER_01]: They'll experience of that of me and they'll tell me things related to
[SPEAKER_01]: really liking having me in their space without ever really knowing why.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I'm probably doing is we talk about the mythic and the mundane and making the invisible visible as part of culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I'm doing right now is making a little piece of my invisible or beneath the surface visible to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those are the background bits that I consciously attend to.
[SPEAKER_01]: As part of the presence in an organization and then there is a close co exploration so all of.
[SPEAKER_01]: No David White talks a lot about the conversational nature of reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the basis of mutuality, understanding resilience lies in this conversational eddy between you and I, how are you and I seeing something together and making sense of it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if I were to ask you about your organization, it would give you an opportunity to just sense make of it through the particular questions I ask you in a given way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of the ways that you sense making about it, you might not have already had time
[SPEAKER_01]: to think about it in that particular way before, often because the executives that I work with are so stretched, in what they do, that the capacity to take that balcony view for a moment isn't often a part of their daily existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first step is that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then another step is to just mutually explore what are the moves that can be made from a particular given place that you are, where you are in an organization,
[SPEAKER_01]: what your degree of influence is, what can be rolled out individually or programmatically, so that that's the next step of the organization.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it can range from incredibly informal.
[SPEAKER_01]: one-on-one coaching and having a particular individual executive or leader explore the set of moves available to them, or it can come into the door away.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is a programmatic intervention, like a larger scale one that involves groups or teams or collective learning?
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a couple different doorways.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it really, of course, depends on the nature of the
[SPEAKER_01]: on the nature of the beast inherently.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I do a third of my work with programocracy activists, which is really challenging because that world is chaotic and under significant pressure.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, you know, talking
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Hong Kong activists, we, your activists, Venezuela and Bolivian, Turkish activists from North Korean activists who often work against incredible asymmetric
[SPEAKER_01]: power structures.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're talking like surveillance from government level institutions, which is, is, is longer as I just received a call a few days ago from a colleague of mine, who's a Nicaraguan activist, whose friend was just assassinated in Costa Rica.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, which is a democratic country.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the scale range is from that to working with
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the top four hundred leaders at Nike.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's the scale of the slides that it work with is very, very different.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I actually really appreciate that because there's things to learn from all of them, and then I also work in philanthropy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the part of the reason I like working across these different contexts is because
[SPEAKER_01]: The scale of human challenges is so different, but yet there's still an underlying substrate.
[SPEAKER_01]: We still all need to learn how to be in the midst of enormous complexity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each one of them has their own unique challenges and those challenges are deeply and personally felt each of the leaders that I work with have families they care for, lives they love, things that they resonate deeply and things they believe in.
[SPEAKER_01]: even though it can seem radically different to work with someone who's experienced multiple assassination attempts and work with somebody else who's dealing with large-scale supply chain issues because of US tariff laws, the underlying humanity of them does not change even if their context might seem very different.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, incredible, incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask you about in a moment about how we might make what's invisible, visible, but I wonder first if it's worth seeing if we can tease out any kind of universal principles or you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's something there's a way that you are seeing and interacting with these different types of organisations and people and groups that maybe has a kind of functioning that's universal to each of them, that how an organisation or a group will come into coherence or come into thriving.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just wondering if you could speak to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it about when something that's invisible becomes visible?
[SPEAKER_00]: Something becomes possible then?
[SPEAKER_00]: What might these principles be?
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a few principles for me working with folks.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think we're always working with what I call the mythic in the mundane.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a particular polarity.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you've talked about polarity, but this podcast before is one of my favorite concepts from Barry Johnson's work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so as a, and this is one of the I came up with what I was at Wikipedia is Chief People Officer.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, this, this, this, this dynamic tension between the mythic and the mundane.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the mythic, the, the vision, the values, the story, you know, whether you care about democracy or you care about performance and the athlete and all of us, you know, you're, you're constantly working.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is our relationship to,
[SPEAKER_01]: something at scale, you know, and that lives in the mythic level and our own journey in relationship to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the mundane looks like, which is really not so mundane, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the policies, the principles, the practices are enacted.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the cadence with which you meet your teams, the values that get imparted the way that you handle conflict, you know, which, again, isn't so mundane, but those very, very tangible, tactical things.
[SPEAKER_01]: definitely impact the mythic and vice versa.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so part of what I think about coherence going back to the idea of islands of coherence is that you're looking for a degree of alignment in coherence between those two things.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're looking for, and then you can throw in also the need to have alignment in coherence with
[SPEAKER_01]: with strategy as well because what coherence gives you is it gives you the capacity to have a stronger organizational culture you get more aligned decision making more collaboration and adaptability and accountability and if you don't have that coherence between these dynamic
[SPEAKER_01]: polarities and tensions that we're talking about, wherever you are, whether it's in the pro-democracy space or whether you're a Fortune-Five-Hundred company, you get incredible cognitive dissonance, you get burnout, you get decreased trust, you get reputational damage, what I like to call unintentional organizational hypocrisy and at worst moral injury.
[SPEAKER_01]: and toxicity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And part of the reason that you get that is that when you have incoherence, people's attention is caught by it and they experience increased cognitive load and frankly, waste a lot of time and energy trying to reconcile those dissonances.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're running a pro-democracy organization in a very dictatorial way, for example, that really, that kind of dissonance that creates creates a organizational and energetic sort of lead and burn off.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the attentions that I pay, and I do think I had a teacher say to me once that nothing happens without our attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so attention, I think, is one of the most incredible
[SPEAKER_01]: offerings that we can give both to another human being but also into an organizational life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And paradoxically, is also one of the things that things like social media and this current environment of distraction that we're constantly in is constantly bleeding off.
[SPEAKER_01]: So attention, coherence.
[SPEAKER_01]: relational resilience.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are some of the things that I paid deep attention to within the concept of constructive organizations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in this weaving between the mythic and the mene.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you speak, I get a sense of
[SPEAKER_00]: an organism that if there's incoherence, there's a lack of flow or dissonance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The vibratory health of that organization isn't online in the way it can be and therefore it's
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's genius, it's ability to create and to serve is kind of diminished and dampened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, like you said, attention is call in certain places.
[SPEAKER_00]: And vice versa, like when there's coherence, there's a kind of certain kind of intelligence and vibration that comes online and kind of thriving.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it's very visceral.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is very, so in a kind of elegance to it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: About where and how you're spending your attention and time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things, so you turn fifty to zero, which are really excited about, and I started weightlifting, which sort of cracks me up.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not my typical milieu.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things that I've been so delighted to continue to learn about is the bodies
[SPEAKER_01]: natural efficiencies the way that it wants to learn and the way that you can move in ways that actually conserve more energy by even just making sure your spine is stacked on top of your hips and your head is stacked on top of your spine and like oh this actually works for you and I think that there's a lot to what you're saying that when I talk about alignment
[SPEAKER_01]: you want that kind of alignment, but you don't want so much alignment that you lose flexibility or frankly that you become a cult.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you want alignment with room for positive deviants.
[SPEAKER_01]: So again, you've got that polarity in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You want coherence and a bit of deviants within the midst of it, but you want what love of coherence and deviants still has integrity to the whole of the organism as you're naming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could you give any examples of when you were in an organisation there was a way that you were able to attune into where there was a lack of alignment between the mythic and the mundane in some way
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, maybe it's the vision and values aren't clear or but anyway that you've seen that in the past and how are you able to, you know, kind of tease that out and then what happened here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I use one from Wikipedia because we Wikipedia is famously an open source organization which means all our code is online and usable and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of our commitments in being an open source software shop was to also use open source software.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a deep value.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is part of our identity structure to use open source software.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, at the time, when I haven't used open source software on this particularly lately, but the open source open office products
[SPEAKER_01]: We're just less efficient.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're harder to use in Microsoft Office.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it created this enormous tension where the identity of the organization.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the values were really rooted in using a particular form of software and yet from an efficiency and donor value perspective and also because a lot of especially for the legal team legal documents are passed with tracking in Microsoft Office and that was the standard across the external vendors and partners that we were using and looking at.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there was constantly this kind of sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: attention point, this real rub with we want to do this thing that's values aligned, but we really want to use software that's easy to use and efficient and it came up to ahead repeatedly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what I would say about that and because I was partly in charge of handling these conversations, it's the level of nuance and sophistication that you have the conversation about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not ever saying to our legal team, you can't use Microsoft Office.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's saying, let's lead judicial in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And where else can we really live out our values in ways that doubled down on them and reinforce them in the system so that people can still experience this coherence and yet being flexible enough to make the right adaptations?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's what nature does well.
[SPEAKER_01]: It adapts to context and circumstance.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not being about being rigid about the particular values and the way that they're enacted.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's a way about
[SPEAKER_01]: have collectively sense making and that collective sense making by the way is easier in an organization that's five that's fifty people or two hundred people and a lot harder to do an organization that's um two thousand or five thousand or twenty thousand people wine right that that that that you have less time and bandwidth for
[SPEAKER_01]: making every conversation as nuanced as you need it to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is where you sometimes collapse cultural constructs down to like, like, um,isms, like, perfect as the enemy of good.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you have people attempt to live them out in, like, microclimate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um,
[SPEAKER_01]: as opposed to like helping that conversation happen in nuanced level with every single part of the organization.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the way that a conversation has that alignment coherent conversation needs to shift along with the scale of organizational culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot in what you just share.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I'm hearing is being clear on
[SPEAKER_00]: values and the story of the organization is really important because if not then you can't really know if you're acting in alignment with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm imagining that's sometimes a place that you'll
[SPEAKER_00]: go to in the conversation with a leader in an organization is to kind of explore the values that are maybe implicit explicit and how they're being lived in alignment with or how the organization the culture is in alignment with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how far do you want to live them into, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you can even take a beautiful value, like mental health.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can actually carry that too far in interesting ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find this to be a true of organizations that are social justice oriented, for example.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've run into places where the value of making room and space for someone, which is so important and valuable to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: runs into another belief that, let me come out at this into a slightly different way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one of the, you know, I love there's an ongoing conversation about, to what degree do a do systems need to attend to the wellbeing of people in them?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm part of this, this well-being summit that is that explores this question beautifully because I think the question of helping people be well needs both be more core to the organization because it's a radical retreating over.
[SPEAKER_01]: of the old industrial production element of what people exist for.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the same time, I don't think it's an organization's job to make people well.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's people's job to make people well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I've literally had to have a conversation with an arts collective about when people were saying, I want the organization to be this place, or that's deeply trusted, where I could have all of my corrective developmental experiences that will be profoundly safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is no, your organization is not the place to get those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're reliant on your organization for all of your...
[SPEAKER_01]: corrective developmental experiences in your early life trauma to be worked out around power and family and structure and systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: This organizations are not set up for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, could you do it in a relational way?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but you need to keep the relationships separate from the actual institutions and people often overload that relationships which should be institutional and overload the institution with what should be relational.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think having an eye towards some of those nuances is again part of my job to bring that.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a great body of work by my friend Christian, around the language of spaces, and she draws this out very, very clearly.
[SPEAKER_01]: We make relational sometimes what should live in the realm of process.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so things get collapsed and messy in that realm.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I just don't, you know, I had a chief of staff coming in and he's like, you know, I think it's my fault if people aren't sleeping well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said,
[SPEAKER_01]: The part of that that's your accountability is to make human-sized jobs that are adequately resource for the role ahead and thinking about what that looks like structurally, but you never know and the limitation of your
[SPEAKER_01]: agency and really at another human being.
[SPEAKER_01]: So someone could not be sleeping well because they have a newborn baby or because they don't have good sleep hygiene or or it could be because you know you've merged two parts of an organization, lost some people are unable to hire the people and they're carrying two jobs, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That latter scenario might be more of your responsibility.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those formal ones aren't.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the discernment is so, so important there.
[SPEAKER_01]: to understand what kind of ability it lies with the leaders who are so implicit in organizational culture and structure and strategy and a whole lot of it lies outside of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we need to be really, really careful and thoughtful about boundaries in this particular scenario.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's beautiful to hear that distinction and it makes me wonder again like coming back to what kinds of inquiries would you make when you start working with an organization or with a team that would guide you to where what might want to be highlighted like the example you just offered there.
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of ways are you looking and sensing?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know you've already talked about the mythic and the mundane.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could you, yeah, what kinds of questions might you ask leaders and people to begin to kind of zero in on where might be the best acupuncture point?
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that you use acupuncture points.
[SPEAKER_01]: They do think that's exactly what I'm trying to target, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to waste my energy and there's a thousand things that could take energy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The number of times it's devolved into, let's look at your employee handbook, which by the way is a very mundane thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is necessary to look at, but it's frankly not my sweet spot in life, but you end up sometimes looking at things like bylaws and employee handbooks and maternal leave policy, and I think those are all important to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also get sometimes to a place to just like kill me now if we have to.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we have to dive too far into that, I believe that's the legal team.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think it's like policies and practices are an incredibly important part of cultural alignment.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do, I look at
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember who wrote this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to find a site to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: We could keep the end of me once to make sure that there's an appropriate citation for things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what does the longing look like in a system?
[SPEAKER_01]: How is exchange handled right now?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the order of a given system?
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a couple of the things that I like looking at.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do people experience a system and then we get more subjectively into it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Although you can argue that any of those things are subjective, but what do people experience as the pain points in a given system?
[SPEAKER_01]: Where do worse there are stuckness?
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are there repeated conversations that happen over and over and over again that seem fundamentally unresolvable?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what does the founder shadow look like?
[SPEAKER_01]: I consistently run across founder shadow over and over and over again, which I find utterly fascinating in the ways that that rises up to the level of the board and the way it plays out through senior leadership and down through the organization at scale in ways that most I find it fascinating, the degree to which most
[SPEAKER_01]: Organizations are deeply unconscious about how much founder shadow plays out pretty much at every, every level of the system, we find that deeply, deeply fascinated.
[SPEAKER_01]: A couple things, you know, and, and because I believe that, that structure should follow strategy, I get curious and strategy, you know, is, and this strategy has a lot to do with where an organization wants to place its attention, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So going back to the conversation, we began earlier on attention,
[SPEAKER_01]: Where is the organization's attention?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it all the things that it should be on?
[SPEAKER_01]: And if the organization's attention is on the things that shouldn't be on, why is that?
[SPEAKER_01]: With a lot of generosity and curiosity, there's a lot of reasons for an organization's attention to be on various things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And is it broader, is it focused and who is paying attention to what?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so that's another curiosity I have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to, I'd love to unpack some of the things you just named actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: You said about belonging in exchange.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote down a list.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to pull a few out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you say, when you name belonging in exchange, you know, that's very relational.
[SPEAKER_00]: So with that, would you be
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of listening for the way people feel a sense of belonging to their role or to the organization, to their team.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way exchange is flowing between the people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who feels out through feels in, do people feel, you know, people often feel like
[SPEAKER_01]: They're outside the culture or inside the culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm really this, or they feel slightly outside of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And somehow, side or nest is great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually think, I think it's a to that point about not having over too much coherence that you feel like a cult, you know, some outside or nest is phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I sometimes use the example of our former
[SPEAKER_01]: General Counsel at Wikipedia, Jeff Brickett, who is just a genius, and I adored working with his man.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't feel like a typical Wikipedia, but he was so fierce and so wise in his legal knowledge that he reminded me of something outside patrolling the boundaries of a system to make sure that the system stays in integrity and full.
[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes you need those, like,
[SPEAKER_01]: those edge folks who don't fit the archetype of a particular system, but yet playing incredibly valuable role in it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But he absolutely belonged in certain ways, like he sat on the executive team, he drove our legal policy, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, but I'm looking for degrees of insider outside orness, and then why?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, is it a sense of AI?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the precariousness of that belonging.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I spoke to someone just last week who was really well regarded within the institution.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet they always felt like they could be exiled at any moment, which is interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It says something about the organizational culture in some sense that the sense of belonging felt so precarious.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, you get into dynamics of gender, race, et cetera, that can be wrapped up in the idea as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as it's most simple level, you know, do people feel like they are part of the system or outside the system and why.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the boundaries of the institution.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Wikipedia was particularly notable in some ways because the boundaries were so permeable, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So community members felt like they were part of the institution even when they weren't on payroll.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I remember a community member
[SPEAKER_01]: because we were open sourced and so we gave people access to some of our external privatization functions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, something was getting assigned tasks by this community member that turned out to be, you know, a very, very smart, you know, seventeen year old living in his mother's basement.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was, you know, sitting there thinking, like, why am I getting assigned these tasks?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was hilarious, and a signal of the permeability in that particular system.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the next change, right, whether it's a pay time, et cetera, but is it fair?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or are there, are there things that feel like gross violations?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that can create a sense of dissonance and craft and anxiety in the organization, if something about the exchange feels fundamentally unfair.
[SPEAKER_01]: And is there mutuality in that exchange, you know, that there's that both are given again, and mutuality not just in terms of the tangible things, but also influence.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, to what degree do you feel like you have influence in a system as well as letting it influence you?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you can feel in a team and a system when someone feels like on the outside in some way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whether that's good or bad, you know, because I know that feeling too, when, you know, if someone is a little bit dissonant, the system
[SPEAKER_00]: you know and then they might step out and then suddenly there's maybe a relief but then there's a kind of conformity that's there that's a little you know it's a little kind of black maybe bland or something you know like there's a bit of frees on in that in that kind of dissonance I mean some people in our team who like you know often looked for like where there were problems or gaps and things that didn't work you know and then sometimes people would be like oh you know they're always
[SPEAKER_00]: They're always pointing out, but actually, they were amazing people to have because they were taking care of something really important.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, I'm appreciating how you're naming the sense of a light-livingness of a system and not that it's just about making it solely extremely coherent.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, and I think I love that you use a phrase taking care of.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who is taking care of what and how?
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like even all of our adaptive strategies are taking care of something.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, however bad some of our adaptive strategies are.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you can't change that, but the strategy, however bad it is, unless you make sure that the thing that's taking care of is being taken care of by a better strategy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's true of organizations as individuals.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I can see why people bring you in because, you know, someone else I know said, when someone else steps into your team or your organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what I did when someone came in more recently was like, I was like, tell me, what is it like to be here?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they were like, yeah, you know, there's this thing you guys all do, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, what is that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And hey, have you noticed there's like a real lack of connection in this place?
[SPEAKER_00]: But within like three or six months it's like they've tuned in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly they're swimming in the water of the system and they can't see it anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I could see why people bring you in because you're not in scones and already blind to what's happening and you've also cultivated a sense of a tune to the listening to the system that
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of leaders, it's just you're so immersed in the mundane and in the work that it's very difficult to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's that it's having that other person who comes in who the experience, the sense of care, but they also experience that like elevation of perspective, curiosity, a company, I really do love the language of accompaniment because it's like having somebody alongside for a moment who was, you know, relatively non-drugy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I say relatively, somebody once said that I said, I seem very, very non-drugy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, it's not that I
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not judging.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty, I'm actually fairly judgmental.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just don't hold them very tightly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I look like a bad judgment.
[SPEAKER_01]: So buy a while.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's, it's a, it's a, I'm not particularly grippy about them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that being in this work requires one to bring in any given moment, like moment by moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm both one's knowing and unknowing at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the experiences that I've built up over doing this work for thirty years and then there's the what I think has given me is just a sense of growing surface area where you realize that the surface area of all the shit you don't know is just that much great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and that's true because the context is changing for me as much as anyone else.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I am trying as much as any of my clients are to make sense of what's going on in this moment geographetically globally culturally, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that sense of a long side and a company meant is very real because because I'm in it also.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm to realize that to recognize that I can imagine makes you a more effective practitioner than you're holding it more lightly and there's a spaciousness to attune to the livingness of what's unfolding moment by moment more than
[SPEAKER_00]: being caught by too many of the ideas you've accumulated over the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like you mentioned like experiencing a system, I'm curious about that because, yeah, I imagine that is difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you invite people to experience the system itself?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, first of all, I think we're storytelling things, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We like I think about our old ancestors.
[SPEAKER_01]: room, whatever a culture, sitting around sharing stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that's such a beautiful way for things to be transmitted.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the idea of transmission.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, obviously comes from the, the Dharma traditions of the East, but I also, this idea that we transmit, we transmit anxiety to one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think one of the key things for leaders in a moment of anxiety is to continue to be a non anxious presence because we transmit it like ants, but we transmit culture through stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's listening deeply.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and I do mean that listening deeply and not that.
[SPEAKER_01]: that not the half-hearted listening, or you've got email open on one screen, if you've got a phone, or if any, that's not the kind of listening I'm referencing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it's a real, I think, attention to emergence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because any complex system is constantly kicking up bits and pieces to look at for you to grapple with, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then what you do with it, there's a loose silk lift in line that I love where she says I made it up here on this bridge between star shine and play.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, this is the bridge we stand on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, would say we're, you know, neither of, of Earth's nor of heaven.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we, we, we live in this realm between those two things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that that plane is, is where we meet people in systems at.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there is that listening into and then by the listening into.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you know, Joel from the developmental work of the fundamental kind of building block of development just makes things that are that you're subject to and which culture is so much that one of the water that we swim in right and then be able to make it object for a moment so that you can see that you can apprehend it, comprehend it, work with it, explore it, almost like a navigator.
[SPEAKER_01]: or a wayfinder.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the wayfinder, way Davis's conceptualizations or the myore conceptualizations of wayfinder is such a beautiful way to conceive of how one goes about culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you don't ever get to architect culture by saying, this is what I want it to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we're going like.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just that culture does not work like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cultural works one decision at a time, one story, it wouldn't have frankly one reaction at a time.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so every time I were doing something, whether it was Wikipedia or cultivating leadership, or on our team of cultivators now, and I get the privilege of working with Jennifer Garvey Burger and a really phenomenal team of other, like mindedly, developmentally curious folks is I often get curious about how a system reacts to anyone given moment, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it is an example.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was working with an organization a month ago where somebody mistiked a key inventory number and depleted inventory in some massive way around that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a massive mistake that had significant financial consequences.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for me, the real interesting thing is how does the organization respond to that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, the reactions say a lot about Institute and everybody gets to have their first second and third reaction, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you got the immediate one, but then how is the organization tell the story about it and what does it reinforce through the storytelling of that particular moment?
[SPEAKER_01]: And especially, there are key things with an organizational lifecycle where the responses are particularly telling, letting people go, firing,
[SPEAKER_01]: including what you fromisms you use around them, dealing with external changes.
[SPEAKER_01]: how we do leaders at every level.
[SPEAKER_01]: And particularly in the middle level where you're responsible for implementation, but not as sure responsible for making a lot of decisions, which is a real challenge sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: For when you're a second of a set one of the sandwich levels in an organization, how is the story about a particular decision told?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so many different examples I could use around that particular thing, but organizational reactions.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the stories that get told or frankly made up about those organizational reactions.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think are a major way that culture is transmitted and also understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is really helpful for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I get a sense of how much like as an individual
[SPEAKER_00]: when you encounter, you know, challenge in your life that can reveal your sense of self, your parts, you know, ego structure and that's beautiful because then you can bring that into awareness with compassion and there's a kind of metabolization that can take place.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a sense it's like the evolutionary impulse of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of showing up and and being revealed through those challenges and I'm hearing in a sense that's the same organizationally that that you can hear the culture through those moments you know the moments of challenge I mean any moment in a sense but maybe maybe challenges are particularly good one because it
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my amplify the way you people traditionally react around things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like you said, the stories that get told or the habits.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's really revealing to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm wondering, so you mentioned like development, that developmental move.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a way, one thing is being able to listen and
[SPEAKER_00]: begin to reflect back or articulate, oh, notice what happened here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this familiar?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you said also that culture never changes by saying, we want to go over here and then making it happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm probably misrepresenting how you said it exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't project managed culture into being.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you could project management elements of it into being, don't get me wrong on that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you have to implement a new compensation system, you can project and you want to bring the compensation system into a better alignment with whatever you want to bring into alignment with, you can project management and that element of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can't project manage.
[SPEAKER_01]: And part of the reason you can is because culture itself is a complex dynamic emergent thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so at Wikipedia, we
[SPEAKER_01]: partly understood culture to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: So first of all, we're based in California, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're based in San Francisco, which empties around burning man every year, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So to understand Wikipedia as an organizational culture, you actually have to look at the reference other cultures.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, in Google Facebook at the time, Mozilla, other open source organizations, the nonprofit industry as a whole, the tech industry.
[SPEAKER_01]: The culture is because it's permeable and partly societal and partly organizational and partly founder-based.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can say the things that you want it to be like and drive towards those things, but there's always going to be other elements kind of fomenting in and amongst it at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, your culture might be really fit for something.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as we talk about with change and scale, which so many organizations are so often attempting to do, comes pressure.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that kind of pressure, whether it's a developmentally revealed in a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: really, really illuminates where the cracks are in a particular given thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then how you decide to work with the cracks just like with individual development, really becomes the underlying foundation for the next phase of cultural evolution and growth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that was what I was going to ask, which is, you know, because you, again, as you described the complexity of culture that it's not just, you know, boundary that the organizational culture, but it's in sconce, within all these different influences, then, you know, as a leader, I start to go, oh my god, like it, you know, and, but what I'm wondering is then,
[SPEAKER_00]: How one can, I don't know, if engineer is the right word, maybe it's... I love that I'm at least sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I'm at?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like rituals, I've heard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dave Snowden talk about, you know, designing rituals that create interactions, that you don't really know exactly what will emerge, but it's kind of aligned with, you know, with what's important to the organization so on.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, how
[SPEAKER_00]: How would you invite leaders to, and again, I know this is impossibly complex and it's a general question and it's often very specific and unique to each case, but how would you invite a leader to begin to enact cultural change?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm delighted that you brought, and they've done ritual, and obviously, can heaven, and still this work on complexity is deeply informed my own lens.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm complexity is part of the way that I see the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that just like every life has its moments, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Birth, death, adolescence, marriage.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are rituals, graduations.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are moments in organizational life, product launches, new hire, new employee hires, particular scale of growths, the way that an external pressure comes in and announcements.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I have a client that's a national laboratory, of course, and they're looking at significant layoffs.
[SPEAKER_01]: How it handles those moments?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, how do leaders decide to show up in those moments?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the presence?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the tone that they want to hit?
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it aligned with the values?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are the values clearly articulated?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ways the values get lived out in these moments?
[SPEAKER_01]: and can there be ritual around that?
[SPEAKER_01]: So there are these things that shift out of linear time into deep time for a moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you can drop into that, you can touch with beautiful and resilient and deeply human, because organizations fundamentally are still human, they constructed and live on top of our individual nervous systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: and brainstorms and all, like the bio, they live on top of the biological constructs that we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can't forget that we are biological constructs engaged in this, which is why I was so grateful that you brought in the term organisms earlier, that we have these moments where we can enact using our oldest cultural shaping technologies like ritual.
[SPEAKER_01]: and storytelling to cement or solidify something a little bit more into making a hat where there never was a hat before.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really love this idea of the relationship between leadership and imagination.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is why I love that Lucille Clifton quote so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: I made it here up here on the spreege between the stars shining clay.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are all just making things up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's just be very, very real about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember working for a Fortune five hundred team when I was in and the privilege doing it sometime in my very, very late twenties working with larger team and I thought, oh my God, I've been a work with these giants of industry and they're going to know
[SPEAKER_01]: you know what they're doing and I'm like oh my god they're just making it up just like the rest of us okay it was incredibly liberating to have that that realization and also really funny I was like oh dear and so I think that the what age and experience gives you is a look at how to do just making it up a little better right but not necessarily so the creative endeavor moral imagination mythic imagination
[SPEAKER_01]: the imagination to see a different world whether you're working the pro-democracy space imagination to create a different campaign that engages the athlete and all of us see the imagination to think about a new kind of engagement with energy in people's homes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like all of these are fundamentally acts of imagination.
[SPEAKER_01]: As is ritual and myth making and so I think those capabilities are deeply entwined and so I think there's a real alive vibrant creative
[SPEAKER_01]: edge that leaders get to step into, which is the exciting part about being a human being and a leader, that is part of cultural building, organizational shaping, leadership that I hope is in lifeening more than it is daunting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so that for when you talk about imagination and deep time, so it's this
[SPEAKER_00]: intelligence that we have, and we can feel, you know, we've talked about embodiment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the importance, and I'm wondering what you think about this, but the importance of not being in the mundane all the time, you know, the lure of like metrics and stats and strategy, but it has a particular field to it if it's
[SPEAKER_00]: divorced from wonder and imagination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for me, that's this place where this enlightenment comes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagination isn't just random images.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we're like our heart responds to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we open and let go in that way, it's got a kind of intelligence and clarity and emergence that comes forth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's something in us says yes to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: imagination, creativity itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I'm just wondering if that's an important aspect of, you know, organizational life and culture and the work you do with people, inviting them into that kind of space.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's essential.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's one of the most, I mean, this is why I started with the Sondheim.
[SPEAKER_01]: piece about making a hat where they never was a hat before.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think that there is such a erratious and beauty to that and a live-ness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is taking something, you've seen Dan Seagulls work on the field of possibility and he's such a delight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And his wheel of awareness meditation links so beautifully into that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is touching the fundamental, I think, quantum field of possibility that exists
[SPEAKER_01]: and pulling from it is something into actuality in mutuality with other people, which is inherently a creative act in and of itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that we are in some ways, our most alive when we can be generative in that particular way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And certainly for leaders who can get to imagine a different relationality, it's shift in the world, I think it's an incredible
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's say the word afterdue, Jack, but I think I mean something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who knows?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, maybe it's a good, maybe it's a good word, because it has an error as to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has a, has a kind of, there is a, there is an attraction taking place in that, in the way we hold all that, I think that, you know, it's, it's kind of something being born, something being made.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think a good friend of mine, Riko Fabianaro is a shame and talks about tending what is living and tending what is dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think about Dr. Kelter's work on moral imagination, on awe.
[SPEAKER_01]: moral imagination, acts of moral beauty and humans being one of the strongest sources of awe, but also being close to life and death.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the creativity is part of being close to both of those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And used in earlier words to a tunement, which is an apartment of it too, because I don't think you just imagine things.
[SPEAKER_01]: As you said, it's not like, like, here's a new emoji out of the blue that I've ever met.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a tuning to something.
[SPEAKER_01]: I read somewhere once and trying to remember the source that great leaders transgress taboos in service of deeper values.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so both the transgression, which is an imagination, imagine of active positive deviants to create something where there wasn't something before.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the piece around in service of the deeper thing is, are both very, very important elements of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a beautiful line.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to listen back and pull that one out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Really stunning.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish I'd come up with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should find a citation for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll make sure to email it that to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to ask you, girl, about the founder kind of shadow because I'm a founder.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so I remember when people first died saying to me like, yeah, there's a particular way this organization works, you know, and the kind of response from me and my other co-founder, although he was more gracious, but you know, it was a kind of denial like that we were influencing the organizations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm just curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, other common themes, again, it's probably difficult to say, but other common ways you see founders influencing organizations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what do you do, basically, if you start to see that that's happening, maybe it's a positive influence or not, you know, like, how do you go about working with that?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I say founder shadow, but I should also say founder light side, because I think both of those things come into play.
[SPEAKER_01]: And both variables, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just a founder shadow that comes into play, but it's also often there's strengths and gifts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's the better if they have a lot of strengths and gifts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some don't, but I suspect we never hear about them because the organizations just don't work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or they get tanked really early on.
[SPEAKER_01]: But part of the way that I see it play out is in is
[SPEAKER_01]: that founders, all of us humans are essentially kind of mildly reality warping bubbles, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And founder, they think do that more than others because their worldview is entered into in some way by the people who choose to work with and for and around them.
[SPEAKER_01]: and often unconsciously self so that you attract you pull in people who tend to have some of those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, wise founders will also hire for somebody who has, you know, countering patterns and worldviews.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if they can tolerate that difference, then the organization tends to be healthier for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the thing to be thoughtful about is that
[SPEAKER_01]: People will sometimes make personal what is actually a systems issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I watched somebody relatively recently saying, it is my fault that I don't handle X thing well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like literally about five minutes later, I heard the founder of the organization and there's a fair amount of distance between the two of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I heard the founder of the organization saying, I don't handle X thing well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, isn't that interesting?
[SPEAKER_01]: that this whole thing that they don't handle well is actually, and because I heard it for a number of places, all up and down throughout the organization, but everybody thinks it is just themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the place that I would say requires and deserves some attention and awareness is how do you help people individually work with a systemic issue?
[SPEAKER_01]: and understand it as a systemic issue not to evade responsibility because it absolutely has a personal element that people need to take some accountability for, but not over personalized, a systemic issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because what that does and we're so good at making things personal failures
[SPEAKER_01]: that aren't us, we're also incredibly good at being defensive about a personal failure that maybe we should take accountability for, so human beings are delightful on both sides of that particular accountability spectrum right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's something really important I think about helping people who tend to already have a harsh internal self-critic, not overly personalized, but is actually systemic in order for them to be able to work with that more constructively.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they can see it as a piece of founder shadow and it gets collectively work the growth around it has and a possibility of being exponentially accelerated.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so that would be one way you would be able to, sort of, listen for a founder shadow, is through the individuals again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, as we've been exploring through our whole conversation, what are the stories being told?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the ways people react in moments of challenge?
[SPEAKER_01]: I was kind of like handled, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a very, very classic window into where the shadow of an institution lies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And where the shadow of an institution lies is often somehow related to where the shadow of the founder lies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe how decisions are made as well, or these other decisions are made.
[SPEAKER_01]: Decision making conflict, that's a belonging.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's certainty, uncertainty.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's just one last thing I want to ask, which I think let me see if this question fits.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, at the beginning, you shared like, what am I doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, in a sense, I'm helping people
[SPEAKER_00]: make what was invisible visible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, kind of surfacing, surfacing what was not seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then helping leaders decide on the kinds of actions that are required, you know, what might be needed to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a question, like I think probably is true that once you see
[SPEAKER_00]: what was invisible, then the response probably follows from that quite easily.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that define the case that it's quite obvious what to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think that you, there's a particular way you see that that is helpful for your client?
[SPEAKER_01]: I was testing in my head.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you see things and you can't unsee something even though you wish you could.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that part of making thing, and I call that, for me, I call cultural practice, minding the invisible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like the dark matter between stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you, my metaphor for it is dark matter, because if you think about the universe and you take into account what's visible, you actually miss most of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet this dark matter has such an invisible, intangible, but very, very
[SPEAKER_01]: dense impact on the on the ways that that structurally things are related to one another and so so attending to that by attending to the you know the visible elements of it understanding
[SPEAKER_01]: that the visible elements will help queue you in to what the structure of that dark matter is, and it's so important.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then what you do with it there, I think it's a lot of nudges and experiments.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, where are you willing to put yourself on the line for what you personally is a leader care for and value that you want to pay attention
[SPEAKER_01]: and invest in sense of your life energy and to changing bits of it in a particular direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in complexity, I really like the language of nudges, as I said, it's very hard to project plan your way into it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of those nudges can be larger scale nudges.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of those nudges can say, they're going to try this larger scale intervention and see if it leads in this direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the thing about culture is because you're working fundamentally with complexity, you not only have to pay attention to the intended consequences,
[SPEAKER_01]: but the unintended consequences as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is why I think, you know, Rebecca Solant talks about the tyranny of the quantifiable and the quantifiable helps you pay attention to the intended consequences, but you also need to have some mechanism, whether it's listening deeply into the informal networks of your
[SPEAKER_01]: of your organization to also pay attention to the unintended consequences as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because those are important.
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually, some of those unintended consequences might be the thing that you end up wanting to turn the volume up and amplify anyway, which is the other reason.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that unintended consequences are not all bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they're actually quite useful and good for you to work with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm aware we're coming to the end of our time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so fascinated.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been a really rich conversation, Gail.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just very grateful for having you on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I could feel how I could follow up on like another ten questions I've got.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, thank you so much for joining us as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't have this anything you want to share in order to feel complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I'd love to
[SPEAKER_00]: and write you to share what we can find out more about your work too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the cultivating leadership websites probably the best place for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Jell, it was such a joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really enjoyed this.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a really interesting and loved the way that we tossed the ball back and forth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you have such richness and depths of your own experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that Coach is rising and the work that you do is such a gift to the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Certainly that thought leaders that you have
[SPEAKER_01]: highlighted over time have been deeply influences on me as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm grateful to be part of the constellation and larger tapestry that your own attention and curation has made visible to a large number of people who might not otherwise have pieces of visibility into this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I mainly want to end with just a sense of deep gratitude for you and your own.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, so you haven't touched.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well then thanks, Gail.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, very happy to be sharing this with our community.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're at the end of the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just have a heads up again.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coaches rising.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Put your name in the sign up box there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll also find some of our other offerings online trainings for coaches there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just want to end by wishing you well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll see you again next time.