Disruptive Conversations

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 [email protected]

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