Today's guest on the podcast is Diane Chadwick-Jones, a safety executive who recently retired from her position as BP’s Human Performance Director after 30 years at the company. She was appointed the Director of Leadership and Culture at BP just days before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Regular listeners and those who have read Meltdown know that Deepwater Horizon was pivotal for me. Before it, I tended to think about complexity in the context of financial systems and global markets. After it, I saw clearly what kind of impact complexity can wreak on the wider world.

Diane and I don't talk about the Deepwater Horizon accident, and that's very intentional.

But we did get a chance to talk about her approach to safety, what it means to be a systems thinker, the problem with (some) incentives, and building a culture of learning without scaring people off.

Listen to the interview here.

Today on the podcast, I speak with Amba Gale, the owner of Gale Leadership Development. She has run leadership development programs for some of the world's biggest companies for the past four decades—something I find incredibly impressive.

A previous podcast guest, Bill Weymer, recommended that I speak to Amba, who has worked with Bill and his team at Town & Country Markets. If you listen to my interview with Bill, you’ll gain a sense of how Town & Country Markets has built a culture of participation, sharing, creativity, and collaboration—and Bill told me that Amba was instrumental in creating a cohort of leaders there who grew that culture.

In our conversation, Amba shares her thoughts about leadership (particularly the nature of leadership in the modern world) and talks about how to support leaders and transform organizations in an intuitive, human-centered way. We also talk a lot about vulnerability and the art of listening (really listening).

I felt very present and grounded in this conversation, and it was an impactful conversation for me. I hope you take something from it, too.

Find more about Amba Gale at https://galeleadership.com/.

You can register for her free course that introduces her work: https://galeleadership.com/next-opening-intro/.

Read about her upcoming class called Crossing Thresholds: A Conversational Bridge to Your Next Opening: https://galeleadership.com/the-next-opening/.

Ep. 26 — Jason Barnwell — How To Build an Innovation Machine by Chris Clearfield

Today on The Breakdown™, I speak with Bill Weymer, the humble, thoughtful, and down-to-earth president and CEO of Town & Country Markets, a flourishing family-owned grocery store chain in greater Seattle that’s been around since 1957.

We talked about a lot: what it was like to run a public-facing retail business during 2020, why Bill and his leadership team lead with humility, how to develop a companywide culture and shared sense of purpose amongst workers, and the importance of listening to, caring about, and investing in workers both during peacetime and COVID-19.

Bill and I also talked about the way that, like every part of our world, technology has become a huge part of the grocery business, an industry where margins are tight and relevance is fought for.

Today on the podcast, I speak with Rani Olson. We talk about the food system, as well as different economic systems. We discuss the cost of those systems, as well as the cost that fully buying into the system without awareness can bring—not just for us as individuals, but for us as a society.

Olson is an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Arizona, where she also coordinates the Nutrition and Food Systems Degree Program. Throughout the course of her career, she has worked in virtually every corner of the food industry, most recently as a chef and a farm-to-table coordinator for Tucson’s largest school district.

How can organizational change actually be successful?

That’s what I’m talking about today with my guest Elsbeth Johnson. We discuss concrete steps that senior leaders can take to ensure that their efforts work out.

Elsbeth was the perfect conversational partner to discuss organizational change with: she is an MIT Sloan professor and the author of Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Deliver Strategic Change in Your Organization, published last year. She has also worked as a change consultant for at least ten years.

Among other things, we discussed:

- Elsbeth’s articles “How to Make Strategic Choices in Uncertain Conditions” in People + Strategy Journal and, with Fiona Murray, “What a Crisis Teaches Us About Innovation” in MIT Sloan Management Review

- Using the Cynefin framework to help with decision-making

In this episode, I speak with Nippin Anand, a master mariner and safety expert. He is the founder and CEO of Novellus Solutions, a consulting firm that helps organizations build cultures of safety and learn from accidents. Nippin and I talk about how cultures of safety are created (and destroyed), the importance of cultivating psychological safety among employees working in high-risk industries, and why managers are often not-so-great listeners.

In the episode, we talked about:

- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

- Innovation in knowledge-based companies vs. high-risk industries

- How unsafe conditions are worsened by managers’ inability to listen to line workers

- The role of psychological safety in high-risk organizations

- Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick

- How managers’ urge to seek consensus and solve problems can cause more problems in the long run

- How the urge to blame managers (instead of line workers) springs from the same place as the urge to blame blame line workers (instead of a managers)

- Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster by Lee Clarke

- Faster, better, cheaper, safer—is it possible?

David Gagnon is a researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the director of the learning research lab Field Day at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over the course of our conversation, we hammer out a definition of learning, discuss David’s work creating educational video games for elementary school students, and talk about how to create environments that foster experimentation, curiosity, and, ultimately, growth.

During the episode, we touched on:

- Learning—what is it? What isn’t it?

- Dave’s social constructivist approach to learning

- Literacy—what does it mean today? And the New London Group's multiliteracy manifesto

- Using video games for learning (e.g., Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case created by David’s research lab)

- The desire—in business, in education—to be right all the time… even when being “wrong” fosters learning

- The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (2011) by Eric Reis

- The humility that can come from having an understanding of complex, complicated systems

- If it’s possible to go overboard with radical transparency when working with outside partners?

- Deschooling Society (1971) by the radical Catholic priest Ivan Illich

- Attending to participants’ feelings when navigating organizational change… and how artists and storytellers can lead the way

In this episode, I speak with Jennifer Riel, a writer and strategist, and the global director of strategy at IDEO, a global design consultancy. With Roger Martin, she is the author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking, a Wall Street Journal bestseller. We talk about design (what it is, why it’s important), creating resilient organizational strategy, the future of work, and the value of developing a growth mindset.

In our conversation, we talked about:

- Design—at its most basic form, it is creation with intention

- IDEO’s commitment to human-centered design

- How design doesn’t just apply to physical objects—organizations, services, and strategies can be designed, too

- Designing organizational structures that support organizational strategy

- How the best strategies are resilient—neither static nor reactive

- The Good Job Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits (2014) by operations management professor Zeynep Ton

- Major takeaways from Jennifer and Roger Martin’s 2017 book Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking

- Applying psychologist Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” to the corporate world

- How there are very few “right” answers in complex social systems

In this episode, I speak with Laura Gassner Otting, an executive coach and speaker, as well as the author of the 2019 book Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life.

This episode is a little bit different. Instead of interviewing Laura, I asked her if she would be willing to give me an executive coaching session, which we would record and share here, on the podcast. She was game.

During the course of the session, Laura asked me tough yet insightful questions about my work history, my career trajectory, and my hopes for my business in the future—questions designed to help me identify any gaps between what I do and who I am.

It is Laura’s belief that real success comes from achieving consonance—harmony between what we do and who we are.

When this harmony occurs, Laura argues, a limitless life is possible.