TRANSCRIPTIE 🔗
WEBVTT
00:00:02.345 --> 00:00:05.812
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis Podcast Practical Wisdom for Leaders.
00:00:05.812 --> 00:00:09.121
Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world Today.
00:00:09.121 --> 00:00:13.432
This is episode 300 and probably 301.
00:00:13.432 --> 00:00:17.289
And I'm so excited for this conversation because I have a guest.
00:00:17.289 --> 00:00:33.399
He's probably been a guest and a co-host more than anyone else in the world and that's Jonathan Reams, and he is a curious seeker and has recently left academia and is now doing work with organizations around the world and he's a bit of a mad scientist.
00:00:33.399 --> 00:00:34.743
He's building something.
00:00:34.743 --> 00:00:37.991
We don't yet know what it is, but he's building, building, building.
00:00:37.991 --> 00:00:41.421
He showed me code the other day, so it's going to be cool.
00:00:41.421 --> 00:00:42.762
It's going to be very, very interesting.
00:00:42.843 --> 00:00:52.029
But we both have this passion for the puzzle of how we better prepare people to serve in these really challenging roles.
00:00:52.029 --> 00:00:53.069
What do we do?
00:00:53.069 --> 00:00:56.070
How do we do that and how do we scaffold that learning?
00:00:56.070 --> 00:01:00.514
How do we approach that learning theory?
00:01:00.514 --> 00:01:13.923
And today we may geek out a little bit on some of that theory, but the search here is what do we need to do to make it actionable?
00:01:13.923 --> 00:01:16.548
And ultimately, again, how do we better prepare people to serve in these roles and be of service to those individuals?
00:01:16.548 --> 00:01:18.953
Use that theory to inform practice.
00:01:18.953 --> 00:01:22.331
Jonathan, thank you so much for being with me today.
00:01:22.331 --> 00:01:25.727
I don't know exactly where this conversation is going to go, but I know it's going to be fun.
00:01:25.727 --> 00:01:36.007
You are one of the only people that I know that has said you know, I've listened to every episode, and so you reached out a few weeks back and said hey, I've got some things I'm thinking about.
00:01:36.007 --> 00:01:39.935
You know, and I'm excited to hear about your thinking.
00:01:39.935 --> 00:01:41.224
So how are you, sir?
00:01:42.361 --> 00:01:47.552
I am fine, scott, I am really excited about today's conversation.
00:01:47.552 --> 00:02:02.492
It came about when I was in the gym as I often am when I'm listening to your podcast and you were talking with Amal and Berndt about the knowing-doing gap in the paper they'd written on that.
00:02:02.751 --> 00:02:03.033
Yes.
00:02:03.774 --> 00:02:06.900
And that sparked so many associations.
00:02:06.900 --> 00:02:22.485
But I was in the gym and I saw I had to really listen to it, download the transcript, start writing responses in the transcript and really for me it's ever since I read Keegan and Leahy's and everyone culture.
00:02:22.485 --> 00:02:38.067
Yes, this question of how do we enable developmental processes and we mean something specific by developmental but that they are clear and simple enough to scale easily in organizations.
00:02:38.067 --> 00:03:05.604
And I would say over the last 10 years I've made lots of different experiments with different programs, platforms, processes, trying to explore the same territory that Amal and Berndt were talking about, and so I wanted to kind of build on and take off from some of the things they laid out and explore those with you, yes, yeah, let's do it.
00:03:05.663 --> 00:03:06.004
Let's do it.
00:03:06.004 --> 00:03:06.687
I'm excited.
00:03:06.687 --> 00:03:09.673
I will follow your lead, sir, so let's jump in.
00:03:09.673 --> 00:03:10.522
What are you thinking about?
00:03:10.522 --> 00:03:11.186
Where do you want to start?
00:03:12.300 --> 00:03:17.989
Well, I'm trying to go in a semi-organized way here.
00:03:17.989 --> 00:03:21.395
Yes, and you laugh knowingly.
00:03:21.395 --> 00:03:26.831
Yes, and you laugh knowingly, so let's maybe start early.
00:03:26.831 --> 00:03:34.602
One of the things that Amal described was the challenge of training transfer.
00:03:34.602 --> 00:03:37.705
When looking at the literature about, what do we understand about?
00:03:37.705 --> 00:03:44.894
What helps leaders is we send them off, we run them through trainings and they go back to the organization.
00:03:44.894 --> 00:03:46.817
What happens?
00:03:46.817 --> 00:03:54.554
Well, there's all sorts of things around how the culture is ready for that, how the people are prepared, all those kind of things.
00:03:54.554 --> 00:04:09.724
But she was pointing to that most of the literature is in more the behavioral sciences, training transfer issues and so on, and I think that there's a number of things that come up from that One.
00:04:11.086 --> 00:04:25.312
We're all practicing philosophers, whether we like it or not, and what I mean by that is we may say, well, we just use the data, or we just, you know, focus on empirical evidence.
00:04:25.312 --> 00:04:34.730
All the choices that we make have implicit, unrecognized paradigms behind them.
00:04:34.730 --> 00:04:48.254
We may have been socialized into, trained in a discipline, in a profession, that, where people in the past have made choices about how are they going to approach it.
00:04:48.254 --> 00:04:54.230
Are they, you know, using a constructivist platform or are they using an empiricist one?
00:04:54.230 --> 00:05:00.319
Are they using a post-positivist paradigm or that you know there's all these different things that have implications.
00:05:00.800 --> 00:05:23.994
Yeah, so there was a phrase in one of my methods courses in my doctoral program at Gonzaga there are no innocent numbers when you're talking about survey research, because there are so many layers of choices behind how questions are framed and posed and scales designed and what statistical things are done.
00:05:23.994 --> 00:05:30.348
And it's the same way in training
Load full transcript
and development there's no innocent setup.
00:05:30.348 --> 00:05:43.047
So I think what Amal is pointing to in what she describes represents really decades of a positivist, kind of reductionist paradigm about what training is?
00:05:43.047 --> 00:05:57.372
You train behaviors and it's assuming surface-level communication of information through words and that that would adequately convey shared implicit understandings, resources and all of that.
00:05:57.372 --> 00:05:58.906
It would just be a given.
00:05:58.906 --> 00:06:01.648
If I tell you, you will get what I mean.
00:06:02.711 --> 00:06:10.384
Yes, and I think that exists in academia, right, I mean, where it's it's.
00:06:10.384 --> 00:06:21.913
And you're going to have to steer me a little bit as well, jonathan, here, because I think I could take the conversation off track as well.
00:06:21.913 --> 00:06:43.550
But I think in some domains maybe that's okay If I now have to go and use a machine or I have to know that's going to be a part of my daily work and I'm going to be held accountable to knowing exactly that information, and then it's kind of interesting, but oftentimes in leadership that's not the case.
00:06:43.550 --> 00:06:45.500
Well, that's, you know, it's kind of interesting, but oftentimes in leadership that's not the case.
00:06:46.319 --> 00:06:47.221
Well, that's.
00:06:47.221 --> 00:06:47.983
You know.
00:06:47.983 --> 00:07:03.555
It's like you're reading my notes in front of me on the screen, which you aren't, but you have perfect setup here, because where I pause, the next thing I wanted to go into is for training sensory motor skills.
00:07:03.555 --> 00:07:07.860
Those kind of things work really well, you know.
00:07:07.860 --> 00:07:12.350
It's observable, you can kind of measure the performance more easily.
00:07:12.350 --> 00:07:16.370
There's lots of things that it works well for.
00:07:16.370 --> 00:07:21.699
The challenge is, as you say, go into leadership skills.
00:07:21.699 --> 00:07:28.033
You start getting into more and more internal processes.
00:07:28.033 --> 00:07:32.987
So the phrase you quote me on leaders create the weather.
00:07:33.428 --> 00:07:33.670
Yes.
00:07:34.170 --> 00:07:43.394
Well, that's a very densely chunked construct that has implicit in it a whole bunch of things that are relatively subtle.
00:07:43.394 --> 00:07:46.622
They're not things you're going to measure in the same way.
00:07:46.622 --> 00:07:50.552
We can break it down more and so on, but that's a different thing.
00:07:50.552 --> 00:08:07.552
So the challenge that you bring up is, yeah, we can behaviorally train and simulate and measure working a machine the right way or doing some other concrete things.
00:08:07.552 --> 00:08:43.563
But as we get into more complex constructs where, as you said in the podcast with Berndt and Amal, you know, when you're trying to give students LMX theory and transformational leadership, those are concepts that are a result of people doing decades of work and are highly packed and chunked with a whole set of building blocks that those students you can't guarantee they've encountered them or have them to work with.
00:08:43.663 --> 00:08:53.370
And so they often the phrase I like is they will downwardly assimilate what you tell them into what they already understand.
00:08:53.370 --> 00:09:00.313
They will cut off all sorts of nuances and edges and bring it down.
00:09:00.313 --> 00:09:04.660
Okay, that's what I think he's talking about and that's what I'll work with.
00:09:05.140 --> 00:09:17.691
Yeah Well, and you know, back to kind of like a developmental perspective, that that content, that same content, can be internalized very, very different.
00:09:17.691 --> 00:09:20.393
Oh, this is how I can get them to do exactly what I want them to do.
00:09:20.393 --> 00:09:24.336
Or, you know, it can be, it can be internalized.
00:09:24.336 --> 00:09:27.018
Let's just take the topic of influence tactics.
00:09:27.018 --> 00:09:34.666
I mean that can be internalized very differently depending on the developmental stage of the individual learner.
00:09:34.666 --> 00:09:38.879
And so I've said it a couple of times on the podcast and again, this is where you're going to have to lead me.
00:09:39.000 --> 00:09:55.889
But I wonder sometimes there's the notion of vertical and horizontal development, and so, for listeners, just a very, very quick way of defining that Jonathan, please push back on me if you disagree.
00:09:55.889 --> 00:10:17.308
Are we helping the human develop cognitively, increasing their kind of cognitive structure and moving through those stages, torbert or Keegan and horizontal being more of the content, and that would maybe be what transformational leadership is, or active listening?
00:10:17.308 --> 00:10:25.413
Those might be topics, but are we starting in the wrong space when we do leader development today?
00:10:25.413 --> 00:10:33.388
Is it more about the habits of mind and the ways of kind of making sense of the world and what's happening around us?
00:10:33.388 --> 00:10:42.495
Is that almost as important a place to begin than any of the topical things we begin with oftentimes.
00:10:42.495 --> 00:10:45.346
So how do I reflect?
00:10:45.346 --> 00:10:55.523
What are the habits of mind I should have as an individual to facilitate that lifelong learning that's going to help me make sense of what's happening around me.
00:10:57.508 --> 00:10:59.491
Well, that's a lot to unpack.
00:10:59.491 --> 00:11:29.832
So I will say that the distinction of vertical and horizontal is used a lot, is convenient for some things and often misinterpreted or appropriated.
00:11:29.832 --> 00:11:36.868
So I would say that the understanding of those distinctions makes sense in certain contexts but not in others.
00:11:36.868 --> 00:11:43.130
Okay, and let's put a pin in that and maybe come back to it later.
00:11:43.410 --> 00:11:47.400
Sure, the point about are we starting in the wrong
place?
00:11:47.400 --> 00:11:59.179
Is a lot of people come there Arbinger Institute, you know and their model of an outward mindset or being out of the box or having a heart at peace.
00:11:59.179 --> 00:12:04.797
They say you start with mindset, yes, the ask model, you know.
00:12:04.797 --> 00:12:07.222
Attitude, skills and knowledge.
00:12:07.222 --> 00:12:11.337
You can give people knowledge, you can teach them skills, but attitude, you know.
00:12:11.337 --> 00:12:14.302
So that's higher leverage things.
00:12:14.302 --> 00:12:16.667
The, the leaders create the weather.
00:12:16.667 --> 00:12:30.820
The weather is often created by the leader's internal state, their emotional you know energetic vibrations they're giving out that people are sensitive to and reacting to.
00:12:31.340 --> 00:12:51.923
Yes, so those kind of things are more foundational in a way, but also subtler and harder to pin down, to put in a curriculum, to teach in a course or even teach in a, you know, delivery to a client.
00:12:54.145 --> 00:14:00.259
So I think that there's and part of this is if we think about the notion of training as a concept, or um consulting, you know, workshops, all these kind of things, they're all kind of informed by our modern educational system and people like Ken Robinson, you know, were very, and many others Paulo Freire and Parker Palmer and others are great at showing that there are assumptions built into that system and Theo Dawson is very good about this lately that you know.
00:14:00.278 --> 00:14:07.537
It is pointing the education system towards the end result from natural play and exploration and experimentation by children to also then learn how to critically reflect on what they've done and is it fit for purpose or not, or what is the impact socially on others when these things want.
00:14:07.537 --> 00:14:12.303
Those kind of things are less a part of the modern educational system.
00:14:12.303 --> 00:14:22.407
So what we end up having this idea of is that knowing about something is learning how to actually do it.
00:14:22.407 --> 00:14:33.261
And the idea is we know about walking, but we learned how to walk through doing it, not through an abstraction about it.
00:14:33.261 --> 00:14:47.082
And I think at a deep level we've transferred this assumption that concrete behavioral skills can be done in the same way as more abstract concepts of leadership.
00:14:47.806 --> 00:14:53.442
Yeah, and with leadership there's an infinite number of variables, right?
00:14:54.363 --> 00:14:59.090
Yeah Well, so let's talk about that a little bit.
00:14:59.090 --> 00:15:10.876
Yeah, what is the complexity of leadership as a concept?
00:15:10.876 --> 00:15:12.278
And of course it becomes empirically hard to define.
00:15:12.278 --> 00:15:23.051
People want to pin it down and say well, and then you have all the proliferation of theories and models and all these kind of things that try to look at what's observable.
00:15:23.051 --> 00:15:39.961
But I always I like the quote from Bill O'Brien that Otto Scharmer used in Theory U, that the success of the intervention is primarily due to the interior condition of the intervener is primarily due to the interior condition of the intervener.
00:15:39.980 --> 00:15:40.241
Say more.
00:15:41.043 --> 00:15:43.225
Well, this is, leaders create the weather.
00:15:43.225 --> 00:15:47.831
There is something about our sensitivity.
00:15:47.831 --> 00:15:54.813
So now I'll go off piste a bit.
00:15:54.813 --> 00:15:59.365
Heartmath, for instance, has done a lot of research in the field of neurocardiology, and more than them.
00:15:59.365 --> 00:16:01.914
There's lots of research that shows that there's neurons in the heart.
00:16:01.914 --> 00:16:10.889
They have a modality of sensing and energetically projecting related to things you can measure.
00:16:10.889 --> 00:16:21.844
So the coherence of our heart rate variability, combined with our breathing and our attitude, can create different states that can be felt by others.
00:16:21.844 --> 00:16:23.027
By others.
00:16:23.027 --> 00:16:28.979
You can, they, they say they can measure it like 10 feet out wow, you can physically measure it.
00:16:28.979 --> 00:16:31.881
And, of course, people.
00:16:31.881 --> 00:16:33.384
You know.
00:16:33.384 --> 00:16:35.205
You kind of have a sense.
00:16:36.005 --> 00:16:41.171
You interviewed Mark Bowden a while ago.
00:16:41.171 --> 00:16:48.865
Yes, I've watched some of his talks and listened to his podcast.
00:16:48.865 --> 00:16:50.190
He's tapping into this area.
00:16:50.190 --> 00:16:51.956
People trust or don't trust.
00:16:51.956 --> 00:17:01.182
You lean in or defend based on very subtle clues almost instantly, and some of those are visual and behavioral, but some of them are energetic.
00:17:01.182 --> 00:17:06.933
Yeah, so how you feel inside.
00:17:06.933 --> 00:17:12.882
You may think is invisible and you can hide it, but you can't no, no.
00:17:14.124 --> 00:17:33.146
No, no I have a gentleman who's in Scotland and he's, you know, as you know, I've been exploring on LinkedIn quite a bit and he's pushing pretty hard on this kind of notion, that, and he's writing quite a bit on this topic and but it's, it's hard to fake your energetic state.
00:17:33.146 --> 00:17:41.247
Yeah, exactly, and your signal is communicating, whether you like it or not.
00:17:41.247 --> 00:17:52.289
And so you know, are you at least how I understand his work is are you kind of in a healthy space or in a solid space to be of service to others?
00:17:52.434 --> 00:17:59.058
Because it's hard to fake that to be of service to others, because it's hard to take that.
00:17:59.058 --> 00:18:29.018
So you can learn all the right things to say and all the right models to use, but the I think the concept of authenticity gets misused a lot, but I think this is what we're talking about in some ways yeah if people have a feeling that, hey, even if they're making a mess of things, their
heart's in the right place, and there's something about that that allows you to be more flexible and lean in and engage in a process.
00:18:31.038 --> 00:18:52.690
And I think this idea of engaging in a process is, you know, one of the notes I made preparing for this came to the point of saying hmm, actually, I think the essence of this is how can we shift from a content-based learning about leadership to a process-based learning?
00:18:52.690 --> 00:18:53.951
Okay, say more leadership, to a process-based learning.
00:18:53.951 --> 00:18:55.090
Okay, say more.
00:18:55.090 --> 00:19:07.380
Well, let's circle back before I say more, because we're talking about how do we unpack leadership as a concept?
00:19:07.380 --> 00:19:08.643
So we can break it down very simply.
00:19:08.643 --> 00:19:11.230
There's task and relationship right, we can break these down.
00:19:11.791 --> 00:19:12.914
But what's task about?
00:19:12.914 --> 00:19:20.000
Well, you can take some models that say it's about having a sense of why, a purpose and vision.
00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:26.119
It's also about developing a strategy to execute on that, making decisions on that basis.
00:19:26.119 --> 00:19:48.036
But you've also got to be able to kind of read the context, analyze the system and all these things, and then, once you have all that, you have to have skills to execute on the tasks and do things, and for leaders, that's often communicating all this clearly enough so that others can actually execute In the same way.
00:19:48.036 --> 00:19:56.184
We can take relationships and say, well, we need to be able to show genuine care for others and say, well, we need to be able to show genuine care for others.
00:19:56.184 --> 00:20:01.431
A phrase I heard is I don't care how much you know until I know how much you care.
00:20:02.894 --> 00:20:03.135
Yeah, yeah.
00:20:03.135 --> 00:20:09.467
But I think what's interesting, Jonathan, is like the four or five things you just talked about strategy.
00:20:09.467 --> 00:20:11.029
You just talked about vision.
00:20:11.029 --> 00:20:21.023
I think sometimes you take Kuz's and Posner, which I love right, I love that work, but let's pick on it for a second, just for the sake of an interesting conversation.
00:20:21.023 --> 00:20:32.701
Inspiring a shared vision is when I am 45 to 50 to 55 years old.
00:20:32.701 --> 00:20:37.890
For most people Now, that's not a hard and fast truth.
00:20:37.890 --> 00:20:48.106
What should we be teaching them when they're in college, when they're in high school, when they're in their twenties, Because many of these people won't necessarily.
00:20:48.106 --> 00:20:53.146
I mean, we could teach them to inspire a shared vision with their team and why that's important.
00:20:53.146 --> 00:21:01.102
But implicit in inspiring a shared vision, it's, to your point, a whole bunch of things.
00:21:02.144 --> 00:21:04.027
Oh my God.
00:21:04.027 --> 00:21:08.997
So we simplify it, you know, down to inspire, challenge the process.
00:21:08.997 --> 00:21:36.115
Well, okay, so you know, it seems to me, are you starting with a human being that is in the process of becoming as whole as possible, and that statement, in and of itself, is the work of philosophers the first.
00:21:36.135 --> 00:21:45.795
So there's something really interesting I want to come to with that, and how I want to get there is to say that, you know, we can equally take all those things and break them down endlessly, and that's actually becomes very important to do when we want to understand.
00:21:45.795 --> 00:21:47.578
What do we teach college students?
00:21:47.578 --> 00:21:50.384
We can break relationships down.
00:21:50.384 --> 00:21:55.042
Yeah, we need to care, but we also need to be able to learn how to play nice with each other.
00:21:55.042 --> 00:22:04.546
Yes, you coordinate others to play nice, having social, emotional intelligence, and a lot of this goes to the thing of self-leadership.
00:22:04.546 --> 00:22:09.538
Yeah, now, that's a whole domain in itself too.
00:22:09.979 --> 00:22:37.994
But one of the things I found interesting my wife was doing some research on wisdom literature and one of the things she found was that while there is this sense that wisdom accumulates with age, there's another sense and research behind it, that wisdom related skills are actually most developed between the ages of 18 and 25.
00:22:37.994 --> 00:23:15.385
And what I take from that in my own way and I'm not trying to cite the research here or anything is that this is this socialized mind period where there's a real openness to be informed by what's the right thing to focus on, and if we train students at this age to learn to notice, take action, do stuff and reflect on it and critically analyze it and cycle that.
00:23:15.385 --> 00:23:56.477
Yes, if we teach that, then then the next 20 years of experience to when maybe they trying again and doing all these things and have a little bit more wisdom yes, which enables people to have a felt sense that there's something to what they're saying and it's not just the latest kind of spiel going out Well okay.
00:23:56.576 --> 00:24:14.625
So a nook and cranny of this conversation wonderful dialogue with Ron Riggio I think it was our last conversation we had where we got into parenting in the home, right, and one little nook and cranny of this conversation is let's talk about resilience.
00:24:14.625 --> 00:24:15.076
Okay, if you choose to lead, you're.
00:24:15.076 --> 00:24:15.694
One little nook and cranny of this conversation is let's talk about resilience.
00:24:15.694 --> 00:24:17.663
Ok, if you choose to lead, you're going to fail.
00:24:17.663 --> 00:24:20.303
If you choose to lead, there's going to be setbacks.
00:24:20.303 --> 00:24:21.306
You're going to make mistakes.
00:24:21.306 --> 00:24:23.102
You're putting yourself out there into the unknown.
00:24:24.055 --> 00:24:33.356
So my wife and I work hard to model failure and
setbacks as a part of the normal process of doing things Right.
00:24:33.356 --> 00:24:38.421
So when our children don't achieve something they'd hoped to, we process that.
00:24:38.421 --> 00:24:44.740
We have a conversation, we help them reflect a little bit, but we also model it ourselves.
00:24:44.740 --> 00:24:48.469
So I just had a paper rejected by Sloan Management Review.
00:24:48.469 --> 00:24:51.861
I talk about it with my kids and that's just part of the process.
00:24:51.861 --> 00:24:54.847
And okay, I'm going to come back and we're going to try somewhere else.
00:24:54.847 --> 00:24:56.922
And that's the work.
00:24:57.134 --> 00:25:00.905
Dad at 52 is failing sometimes or not getting what he'd hoped to.
00:25:00.905 --> 00:25:08.586
So when they're not getting a part in the musical or the play or my son maybe didn't play as much baseball as he had hoped to in the spring.
00:25:08.586 --> 00:25:16.028
They have a frame of how to navigate that and kind of a larger picture of how to make sense of some of that.
00:25:16.028 --> 00:25:18.262
It doesn't destroy their world, so to speak.
00:25:18.262 --> 00:25:20.122
It's a part of the process.
00:25:20.122 --> 00:25:27.388
So I think I'm really interested in yes, what are those?
00:25:27.388 --> 00:25:30.824
Because I think it's happening their whole childhood.
00:25:30.824 --> 00:25:34.103
What we're modeling, optimism or any other, you know what I mean.
00:25:35.375 --> 00:25:41.768
And I looked at Ron's paper that you talked about where they looked at, you know, leadership in the kindergarten playground.
00:25:41.768 --> 00:25:45.003
Yes, how are these things being developed there?
00:25:45.003 --> 00:25:51.827
And so it is much earlier in life that these things start being modeled and internalized.
00:25:51.827 --> 00:26:12.766
If we're mindful being modeled and internalized, if we're mindful To the point about resilience I was writing something because my wife's doing her PhD on this program we build around building emotional resilience and we are trying to clarify that what we mean by resilience is not coming back to a homeostatic norm.
00:26:14.126 --> 00:26:17.411
That's actually not what is really meant by this.
00:26:17.411 --> 00:26:35.806
The idea of resilience to me is having an inherently developmental approach, so that when something doesn't go as you planned or imagined, you don't just cut it off or say it's a mistake, I'll try again.
00:26:35.806 --> 00:26:39.603
You say what was it that I did that led to this?
00:26:39.603 --> 00:26:43.132
What do I need to add or accommodate?
00:26:43.132 --> 00:26:59.141
You know, to grow the horizons of my understanding, to include some more perspectives, so that next time I actually can notice those things earlier or see that, oh, in that context it works differently.
00:26:59.481 --> 00:27:23.415
Yes, yes, and that habit of mind or that skill seems to me that it would be a wonderful place to begin at least one of the primary topics
that if someone wants to be, you know, a coach, an athlete, you know a healthy human, they have the capacity to engage in that work right.
00:27:23.415 --> 00:27:29.217
Otherwise, as a human, I suffer from self-serving bias oh, it's their fault that I didn't get what I wanted.
00:27:29.217 --> 00:27:38.759
Oh, you know, and it gives away and I miss the opportunity to capture some of that learning or to process some of that learning right.
00:27:39.721 --> 00:27:43.269
Well, and so now we go off a little bit too.
00:27:43.269 --> 00:27:53.000
But another plug for Theo Dawson is she's developed this MindLog program and it's especially designed for young students.
00:27:53.000 --> 00:27:54.343
And what it does?
00:27:54.343 --> 00:28:01.922
It allows them to journal about how they're thinking about a given topic and it shows their progress.
00:28:01.922 --> 00:28:22.888
It's like a game Can you get to the next level and you go up and down a bit, but you know, can you get a trajectory and helps them reflect on oh, I see, now I think like this, and it allows me to do these things, and they have a metacognitive kind of feedback mechanism to understand oh, these things are helping me grow.
00:28:23.394 --> 00:28:24.939
So what are those 10 things?
00:28:24.939 --> 00:28:35.528
I mean, you know, again, that's where we should be starting is building the habits of mind that help an individual navigate the world.
00:28:35.528 --> 00:28:42.278
And again, I think philosophers have been struggling with this, Theologians have been struggling with this.
00:28:42.278 --> 00:28:51.297
Again, we probably could just go to some of those individuals and there's probably some really really good clues all of our folks in character and such virtues.
00:28:51.297 --> 00:28:58.344
So maybe it's just that, Maybe it's as simple, Maybe we have Oprah complicated it, Jonathan, and if we just focused on the virtues.
00:29:00.476 --> 00:29:01.617
Well, I listened to.
00:29:01.617 --> 00:29:06.648
The other podcast I listened to all of from the beginning is the Philosophize.
00:29:06.648 --> 00:29:29.529
This Stephen West, and his latest one was on Marcus Aurelius yeah, and talking about the meditations and how it relates to stoicism more broadly and stoic ethics and so on, and part of that, I think, goes to what I come across in lots of different areas.
00:29:29.529 --> 00:29:54.340
There's some fundamental things about kind of cleaning up, so I think, and other people have more things, but there's a simple thing you clean up and grow up and they run concurrently and part of you know what I had here in relation to some of what I think Amal had sent, or maybe Bernd at one point.
00:29:54.535 --> 00:29:57.525
They talk about, well, how do we get leaders to reflect?
00:29:57.525 --> 00:30:05.307
It's important to have them reflect, yes, but what is the thinking used for?
00:30:05.307 --> 00:30:16.361
Are they trying to justify bad decisions and choices and think more complexly about
that, or are they critically looking at?
00:30:16.361 --> 00:30:19.248
What assumptions was I going by here?
00:30:19.248 --> 00:30:28.909
Am I really attached to being right here and, if I step back and allowed myself to admit some failure or being wrong, have some epistemic humility?
00:30:28.909 --> 00:30:30.435
Am I?
00:30:30.537 --> 00:30:38.257
a failure Is my identity crushed that my failure is my identity crushed, right.
00:30:38.257 --> 00:30:54.661
But those kind of things about identity being attached to rightness, yeah, to knowledge, to performance, those are things that can be cleaned up so that you know the notions of self-awareness, for instance.
00:30:54.661 --> 00:30:57.603
This came up in that conversation, it always comes up.
00:30:57.603 --> 00:30:59.003
This is a key skill.
00:30:59.003 --> 00:31:17.457
So Cardin et al did something in the Journal of Management Education two, three years ago, really looking into self-awareness in relation to adult development, relation to adult development.
00:31:17.457 --> 00:31:18.098
And they looked at many things.
00:31:18.118 --> 00:31:19.565
But a simple way to look at it say there's a purpose for self-awareness.
00:31:19.565 --> 00:31:20.709
Why would we want to develop it?
00:31:20.709 --> 00:31:29.016
And we can have all sorts of good reasons, because if we don't understand ourselves, we don't understand the impact we have on others.
00:31:29.016 --> 00:31:34.367
We're creating the weather and we're blissfully ignorant of it and project out and blame everybody, yep.
00:31:34.367 --> 00:31:37.664
But then there's also the components of self-awareness.
00:31:37.835 --> 00:31:44.767
There's intrapersonal things what do we notice about ourselves and our thoughts and our feelings and so on?
00:31:44.767 --> 00:31:49.685
And intrapersonal, we get feedback from others that help us, maybe course correct.
00:31:49.685 --> 00:31:52.001
But then what are the processes?
00:31:52.001 --> 00:31:54.207
How do we become self-aware?
00:31:54.207 --> 00:31:56.156
How do we evaluate those things?
00:31:56.156 --> 00:31:57.259
What kind of processes?
00:31:57.259 --> 00:32:10.229
How do we use attention and metacognition to have a balcony where the self is on the dance floor and we can notice it and not be caught up by it.
00:32:10.229 --> 00:32:12.759
Yeah, yeah.
00:32:12.759 --> 00:32:15.505
Now how do we train you know, those skills?
00:32:15.505 --> 00:32:35.829
There are ways and there are many ways, and so I think what you're pointing to is there's a whole field in terms of leadership development broadly that really needs to look at how do we undo things we've internalized that maybe don't serve us now.
00:32:36.150 --> 00:32:58.603
yes, yes, I mean, and, and I, I, I think that is ever, that's a that that is ever unfolding as you encounter new experiences in life, whether that's transitioning from being single to married, married to having children, different stages of life.
00:32:58.603 --> 00:33:05.885
I mean it's just, it's ever unfolding, that learning about self in these new contexts, in these new situations, it never ends.
00:33:05.885 --> 00:33:29.522
And so it seems to me and again, this is just very simplistic, I'm kind of coming back to it, this is just very simplistic, I'm kind of coming back to it what are those eight or ten master lessons that, if we can teach a human and build the habits of mind they're, they're going to better navigate a number of different situations that they will confront, versus teaching them north houses?
00:33:30.544 --> 00:33:50.019
Sure, and if we took that and turned it again and come back to saying what are the principles and processes we teach students so that they recognize life lessons that are littered all around them all?
00:33:50.039 --> 00:33:50.582
the time.
00:33:50.582 --> 00:33:52.345
Yes, the search for the learning.
00:33:52.345 --> 00:33:54.615
It's there, it's right in front of us, there.
00:33:54.736 --> 00:34:03.202
So rather than prescribing what they should pay attention to how do we teach them to pay attention to what's all around them?
00:34:03.202 --> 00:34:05.550
Trying to teach them all the time?
00:34:05.832 --> 00:34:07.957
Yes, I'm not getting the results I want.
00:34:07.957 --> 00:34:21.206
This didn't go how I had planned, this I didn't achieve this and then having that inner mechanism to and the resources I mean again, I've said on the podcast a number of times I have a therapist.
00:34:21.206 --> 00:34:25.563
I've been with him 17 years, had therapists before that for five and six years.
00:34:25.563 --> 00:34:32.483
That's part of my system of processing, of making sense, and it's been incredible.
00:34:32.483 --> 00:34:42.409
I mean it's been so beneficial for me and mentors and conversations like this they help me make sense of right.
00:34:43.556 --> 00:34:44.637
Well, it's like you talk about.
00:34:44.637 --> 00:34:48.967
The podcast may have started as a COVID project, but it's become.
00:34:48.967 --> 00:34:50.981
How can Scott learn in public?
00:34:50.981 --> 00:35:00.277
Yes, how can scott learn in public?
00:35:00.277 --> 00:35:04.606
Yes, as messy as that is, but I think it's that authentic richness and messiness that makes it attractive for people.
00:35:04.606 --> 00:35:17.851
Yeah, yeah, because because it it's, it's, yes, it just okay I'm mindful, though, that there's a whole nother layer of this, that maybe we need another conversation for.
00:35:19.737 --> 00:35:22.628
Well, intrigue me, and then maybe we can come back to that.
00:35:23.630 --> 00:35:33.905
Well, we've talked in some ways about how do you make this training, transfer and break skills down to a level.
00:35:33.905 --> 00:35:47.523
There are ways to talk about that and ways to break them down that we haven't really touched on or gotten into yet and that is kind of the area I've been trying to really explore and understand.
00:35:47.523 --> 00:36:40.204
That is kind of the area
I orchestrate conflict and manage tension and create a holding environment which are really highly chunked, masterful kind of acts of leadership, that the building blocks and experiences along the way to enable that capacity is more explicitly and consciously cultivated.
00:36:40.530 --> 00:36:43.376
Yes, yes, 100%.
00:36:43.376 --> 00:36:48.646
Now for me, put a button on this conversation.
00:36:48.646 --> 00:36:54.722
What's the practical wisdom in the conversation we've just had, Jonathan, Because I'm afraid to do that.
00:36:55.710 --> 00:36:55.990
Yeah.
00:36:55.990 --> 00:36:57.775
So this is your post-reflection.
00:36:57.775 --> 00:36:59.398
You're saying no, no, let's do it now.
00:36:59.840 --> 00:37:06.012
Yes, I'm thinking about your energy thing.
00:37:06.373 --> 00:37:17.945
I'm thinking about that, I think yeah, the practical wisdom is, in a sense, that it starts with us and it starts with getting our own house in order.
00:37:17.945 --> 00:37:34.617
And you know, when you started quoting me on leaders create the weather, I started, oh, I got to unpack that more and there's a whole lot that I realized that can be unpacked from that and we can talk about that more too.
00:37:34.617 --> 00:37:54.184
But how do we take something that's soft and fuzzy, so to speak, like that it's very subtle in a sense and bring it down to the level of scaffoldable skill training that builds leadership capacities?
00:37:55.771 --> 00:38:21.139
And for me, one major, significant, perhaps most important domain is do I have a human that is the best possible version of themselves in this moment, and they've cleaned up, and they've grown up and they're in that continual process to be of service to others?
00:38:21.139 --> 00:38:32.590
And if I'm not, then that energy that shows up, if I'm not, then that attention that shows up, that Well.
00:38:33.092 --> 00:38:44.329
So I'll give you a simple example, because I used to do the leadership circle, training and certifications, and they talk about the reactive tendencies coming out of Karen Horney's work.
00:38:44.329 --> 00:38:47.820
What are the ways we make ourselves safe in the world early?
00:38:47.820 --> 00:38:48.650
What are the strategies?
00:38:48.650 --> 00:38:50.197
Do we comply with others?
00:38:50.197 --> 00:38:59.358
Do we protect ourselves by being right and distant and critical, or do we use power over and control and be ambitious and autocratic?
00:38:59.358 --> 00:39:16.619
And what I would often say is there's two things going on when that underlying strategy is triggered, your energy is hooked by that and it creates noise.
00:39:16.619 --> 00:39:22.815
So what gets communicated is the underlying fear energy that drives those strategies.
00:39:22.815 --> 00:39:36.643
And so when people are hearing your message, you may have good intentions and brilliant things to say, but what they hear starts in their heart with the noise and it makes it hard, and then it filters the actual message.
00:39:36.643 --> 00:39:38.385
Yeah, yeah.
00:39:39.465 --> 00:39:42.056
So let's pause there for now.
00:39:42.056 --> 00:39:48.034
I think listeners have plenty to think about, jonathan, as always.
00:39:48.034 --> 00:39:51.181
Thank you, we're going to revisit this.
00:39:51.181 --> 00:39:52.090
We'll do a part two.
00:39:52.090 --> 00:40:02.221
So, for listeners, if this is your first episode, look forward to next week, and if this is the well, this would be the first episode if they're listening right now.
00:40:02.221 --> 00:40:10.829
So then, if you're listening to this in the future, there is a second episode and a second conversation, episode 301.
00:40:10.829 --> 00:40:13.536
Everyone, as always, thank you so much for checking in.
00:40:13.536 --> 00:40:16.262
Thank you, jonathan, thank you Scott.