The Great Conversation

The Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, was the seminal event that created the awareness of an entire ecosystem that a trend was unfolding that would challenge our notions of risk, resilience, and security for the education sector. Kristina Anderson was a student at Virginia Tech when she was shot by the active shooter. It changed her life. She founded an organization, Koshka, that is having a major impact in schools across our nation.

Gene Deisinger intersects with Kristina. Dr. Deisinger served as Deputy Chief of Police & Director of Threat Management Services for Virginia Tech, positions to which he had been recruited following the 2007 mass casualty incident at that campus.

In this short but compelling conversation we learn what they believe is our progress since the incident.

Christopher Stitt has spent more than two decades in international security, emergency management, and law enforcement with the Federal Government. He is also Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University and is credentialed as a Certified Emergency Manager by the International Association of Emergency Managers.

His specialties include: Emergency management; multi-jurisdictional crisis management; enterprise-wide crisis management policy development; program development and management; strategic planning; risk analysis and mitigation strategies; policy and procedure development; technology/policy/process integration; criminal, personnel, internal, and counterintelligence investigations; and dignitary protection. 

So, it was natural for us to turn to him to get his take on a framework for evaluating emergency plans and preparations.

Annette White-Klososky has been advising CEOs and their teams on leadership and organizational culture. She shares her tools of engagement including the need to be human and digitally aware to adapt to the changes ahead.

Annette Klososky is a founding Partner at Future Point of View - a boutique technology advisory firm. She is a sought-after consultant and executive coach in all facets of organizational culture and leadership development. She is the owner of the Women’s Executive Board, a leading advisory board for executive women and Chair for the Oklahoma Chapter of the Women Presidents' Organization. Her executive advisory boards include female executive members representing companies with over 40,000 employees and $23 billion in total annual revenues. She was recognized by The Journal Record as a Woman of the Year nominee, has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Forbes. 

We have never found the secret sauce for persistently turning our collective ‘Me’ into a collective ‘We”. In The Great Conversation we have identified the ‘Why’, we have pursued ‘Meaning’, and we have yearned for a culture that would be highly adaptable and engaged, but we are still yearning for a tried-and-true system for rallying human beings around a singular goal.

And that might be the problem.

We speak with Jeffrey Leinaweaver, consultant, practitioner and co-founder of Find Mino, a personality and career assessment platform that simplifies the process for individuals to find their path and design the life they want. We explore the disruptions in traditional systems and see another approach evolving. And Jeff is the right one to have a conversation around this topic. He has been a senior human resources leader, strategic business partner and certified sustainability professional with a unique track record of helping top organizations address challenging talent acquisition, workforce planning, and leadership development and sustainability/ESG.  In this great conversation, we search for the integration of our individual story with the story of us and the larger undefinable "awe" story within us.

Pause for a moment and reflect on how you use your voice and your ears in everyday life. Your brain is best leveraged when it can integrate disparate data through all your senses. Without audio and voice, you lack a complete picture. We have seen evidence of this in footage from video surveillance cameras that lacked sound. We wonder: “what really did happen and why?”

Cameron Javdani, the President of SoundSecure helps us navigate how we are processing audio today through technology. And he provides context around privacy issues recommending some fairly simple best practices to help us complete the picture in our businesses and security programs.

Many of us believe that our people best perform their roles within a measurable process using integrated tools that optimize their performance.

This interaction between business process, technology and people is the focus of our conversation with Kami Dukes of AMAG Technology, a unified technology platform.

This conversation is infused and informed by the unique experiences Kami has had in the field as a Security Design Engineer for a Federal Defense contractor. She oversaw the design, installation, and commissioning of complex security systems, primarily in Japan and Korea, for the US Army, US Air Force, and US Marine Corps. She also has experience in corrections at the Midland County Juvenile Care Center, a maximum-security detention facility in Michigan. Kami holds a B.A. in Criminal Justice.

Currently she is the Director of Business Development for North America where she and her team work closely with end users and the consultant community to drive new enterprise opportunities through road-mapping, specifying, and systems execution planning.

Interesting new research from Gartner advises CIOs take on the ‘COO’ role of digital transformation due to the inability of most organizations to create the interoperable and secure roadmap demanded of this strategic transition.

We sought out Gary Gooden who has recently transitioned into the CTSO role after becoming the CISO at Seattle Children’s a few years back. As you listen to the conversation, you will see the kind of thinking that Gartner is referring to which bodes well for the future of Seattle Children’s and the industry.

Prior to the CTSO role, Gary was driving the IT Security Strategy for the organization (people, process, and technology). He and his team were executing against a roadmap that was created by him to modernize the Information security footprint within the hospital, research, and foundation environment both from a technology and governance perspective (inclusive of the technology for physical security). This is currently being done in close collaboration with other IT departments and related business areas within the larger enterprise environment. In his current role as CTSO he is now creating an aligned strategy for core infrastructure and security.

We have all been through some form of personal development. One of the courses I took was the Clifton Strengths Finder that later was purchased by Gallop. I read the original book, took the assessment, and, later, as a parent, experienced my kids doing the same. But you know the drill. The path to value is littered with good intentions without a persistent practice of discipline in achieving your goals. 

Because of this, I would later ‘rediscover’ Strengths Finder through a course taught by Brandon Miller of 34Strong right before the lockdown in 2020. I also recently noticed that Brandon has recently co-authored a book with his wife called ‘Incredible Parent’ and I asked him into a Great Conversation to help me connect great parenting with great leaders.

Kim Quaintance is the co-founder of two unique companies, ‘IQ Gemini’ and ‘Move to Think’  focused on personal development, organizational engagement, and the digital transformation of both.

Our conversation starts with a huge source of human suffering: feeling disconnected from your work. If your employees experience this it builds pressure in the systems of your company eventually causing cracks that create uncertainty, doubt, and fear. With Covid amplifying these pressures, we must begin the journey of reinventing our dialogue and discovering the lost art of play in imagining our future.

We took a virtual ride up north from Seattle to sit by a virtual fire outdoors in the woods near Puget Sound. It was a camp that is used for corporate retreats and much more. Over 350 organizations visit Warm Beach Camp and Conference Center in Washington State every year. We wanted to know its secret sauce for creating the context for profound organizational change and innovation that for many, is repeated year after year.

We had a conversation with Ed McDowell, the Executive Director, to get his insights into why this venue has prospered, what he has learned, and how he is growing to meet the needs of our time.

Located just one hour north of Seattle Warm Beach offers year-round camp, conference, and retreat rental facilities and has programs for youth, families, and adults. Serving greater Puget Sound since 1956, Warm Beach Camp provides rental facilities and event planning services for church, school, non-profit, and governmental groups throughout the Pacific Northwest and the lower mainland of British Columbia, Canada.

“People need hope and purpose to sustain what they are doing in life”, Ed says. “The combination of camps, retreats, conferences and consulting provides a rich platform for me to help people sustain hope and purpose in their lives. My faith informs my purpose.”