Shownotes
Peter Block’s three characteristics of powerful questions: personal, ambiguous and provoke anxiety.
Adaptive/ technical problems – Heifetz & Linsky
Steve Cuss : Managing leadership anxiety, theirs and yours.
Jim Wilder, neuropsychologist
Kegan and Leahey “Immunity to Change” framework – one explanation
David Erlichman, Impact Networks
Contact Dano: Dan@focusdconsulting.us
Transcript
Kate: Hello, and welcome back to Leading in Conversation, to our sixth episode of season 2. And we’re really happy to have another guest with us today, Dano, and I will let Nelis introduce him to you.
Nelis: Well, I will actually leave most of the introduction to himself, Kate. But it’s kind of nice to show the connection. Dano and I have gotten to know each other in a leadership training course and really connected on a number of fronts around leadership experiences and leadership hopes and also collaboration between organisations. And we wanted to make that concrete by doing leadership mentoring together. So we had a cohort of leaders that we mentored jointly, and it was great fun to work with him on this. And that’s when we really wrestled with a lot of the kind of issues that are so related to conversational leadership. So I always wanted to bring Dano onto our podcast at some point, because he’s got a lot to contribute. So here you are. Welcome, Dano. I’m really excited for you to finally be with us. And why don’t you introduce – a little bit more – yourself, your background, so that our listeners have an idea of who you actually are.
Dano: Thanks, Nelis, and thanks, Kate. I have been leading in numerous settings for over 25 years, in business and nonprofit segments while I was still living in the US. And then my family moved to India in 2008, and launched a number of different businesses. I was in the manufacturing field, and also education. And the challenges and the dynamics of business in South Asia, in a very emerging market, it punished me in many ways, but it also grew me up. And I think in the midst of that, after I
ended one of those businesses I felt like… coaching… when, while I was still running with the manufacturing, I got involved in coaching, got some coach training, and it was so transformational to realise the power of a question. And the capacity, what had to happen inside me? My interior life, to be able to listen, actually listen to people. I think it’s Peter Block. He says. Great questions have 3 components. They’re ambiguous, personal, and they evoke anxiety. And I love that dimension of a really great question, and I think I’m always on the hunt for an elegant and beautiful question at just the right moment.
Kate: Can I ask you to repeat that quote again from Peter Block? I love it.
Dano: He said, great questions have 3 components. They’re ambiguous, personal, and they evoke anxiety in the listener.
Kate: Really interesting, isn’t it? Especially if you think about using coaching, aiming to achieve those kinds of goals in the business environment, work environment, because we don’t tend to invite ambiguity, anxiety, or personal things into our work. Can you expand a little bit on how you have worked that out in your leadership experiences?
Dano: Yeah. Block is certainly a thought mentor for me. And of course, actually, I’m always trying to
create psychological safety and manage my own anxiety. But there’s something about a question when you are hoping to help the whole system be engaged, when you’re inviting everybody to bring their best, and to not just verbally talk about, “Yeah, I’m in this. I’m with you. I’m committed”. But these 3 key elements or essential elements of a great question, they cultivate ownership.
Block would also say that these kinds of questions are this kind of attitude or mindset pushes creativity to the bottom and the edge of a given system. And I think that describes a lot of what I try to accomplish in organisational spaces is cultivating, unleash, unleash everybody, so that the people at the edges, people far away from the centre, maybe far away from whatever is perceived as the top, feel like they are living an expression of what’s becoming a passion, or a calling, or a sense of like ownership. Some people call it ownership. I’m not sure I love that word exactly, but it communicates clearly what people oftentimes are doing.
Kate: There’s a sense in ownership of, there’s that danger of kind of like, “Here’s our vision. Now we want you to own it. Here’s the thing we want you to do. Now you own it.”. That’s what the word ownership evokes for me, and that, of course, is the antithesis of what we want to achieve in conversational leadership.
Dano: I feel the same way about the word empowerment. Empowerment feels like, “I have the power, and I’ll dispense it wherever I want. I have all the power. You don’t. So I’m gonna empower you.” But it’s actually quite patriarchal, and it’s a word that I’d never wanna use. I recognize when people use it, they don’t always mean that. But the intent gets too mixed up in the idea that I hold all the power, and I’ll give it to you as I plead.
Nelis: So, you talked about ownership and about empowerment as two of those concepts of sort of traditional management speak and you’re contrasting that with another approach. And I think I’ve heard you talk about co-creation as the alternative to that. And that’s what we often talk about in our podcast as well. So I want to come back to that with you. But before we do that, I’d like to hear a little bit more concretely about those questions about those anxiety, inducing questions, personal, ambiguous. And because can you give some examples to that? So that we’re not talking just theoretically, but also make it concrete for people, and maybe contrast that with the types of questions we don’t want to ask.
Dano: Yeah, I love that, that you want to get serious about and concrete about them. So an example of a great, a personal and ambiguous and evoking anxiety kind of question might be, “Where are you at on the crossroads of your life? And maybe you know, if there’s 2 signs, just tell me the 2 signs that you’re at.
Kate: You immediately take it really, really deep, really personal.
Dano: And what I like to usually say is, now you can just throw a fluff thing out there. You can just kind of be fake, but everybody’s going to know it. And I think we’re going to be really honest right now. So I’m going to invite everybody to another level of honesty. And so what that does is it’s ambiguous like, there’s no right answer. I wonder what he wants me to say?
In South Asia, in quite a dominant culture… and of course I came in as a non-Indian, and Indians are always navigating with me: “Okay, do I wanna get something from him? Do I need to respect him? Do I need to put him down?” The nexus of power in that cross-cultural setting was confusing, because many of them hadn’t worked with an expat before. The idea of ambiguous is, “Well, what is the right answer? I need you to tell me what the right answer is, so I can give you the right answer.”. And so that’s why I like to cultivate ambiguous questions. And then take time and be really patient, because it is for someone coming from a background that, there was a very clear right and wrong, and you were acknowledged or approved, or given some kind of benefits that came from complying. It takes time to work that muscle. So that’s what I mean by, as an example. Another example is, “What part do you play in how our organisation got to the place it’s at?” And so it’s just especially in the moment when there’s like lots of squeaky frustration or “things are bad”, or “they did this” or “hear what they did again”, especially if you hear it, like, I hear that going on over here, it’s a great time to raise it in a group setting. And once again, “What part do you play?” says I acknowledge that other people have a part to play. I took on a new leadership setting and we would usually say, “I inherited a bunch of problems. But by about 18 months they’re my problems”. I can’t blame anybody else for them. So I try to cultivate those kinds of things in these kinds of questions.
Kate: I love it. I know that you’ve worked with Josiah who we interviewed, I think it was the first episode of this season, and Josiah is another master of the question that takes you immediately bypassing levels 1, 2, 3, 4 of conversation from the superficial right into deep and meaningful questions. It’s definitely a superpower you guys share. So how do you use these kinds of questions in your work?
Dano: Well, I do a lot of executive coaching, C-suite coaching, and so maybe I’ll start there. Getting to know someone and having them tell their story, but not tell their story from the perspective of trying to earn something with me or prove something to me. You have to change the kinds of questions that you ask, and so usually… actually, this is a good moment to mention, you know, Nelis also asked, what are some bad questions? Those kinds of people oftentimes want to ask questions like, “Why aren’t we getting those kinds of people in the room? Or why don’t we have better people? Or how do we get those people to change?” And it’s very reactive. And it’s a simple path toward getting things fixed. And so I oftentimes will want to ask, like C-suite leaders, what’s the question that you know what’s the question you need someone to ask you right now. And whenever they ask it, then I say, let’s let’s massage that question. Let’s make a better question. Because, just because someone got into senior leadership doesn’t necessarily mean they ask good questions. They might just be getting good results. But they haven’t cultivated an interior curiosity that unleashes flourishing for everyone, and they have a lot of assumptions that come along with that. Yeah, I like asking powerful questions there and then also, you know, using, “Tell me more”. So it isn’t a question, it’s a way of double clicking on something someone said. I think, being, you know, immensely curious. When people aren’t used to anyone being curious around them, it strikes them, some people are afraid of it.
Kate: It can feel very threatening and puts you on the spot. But there’s also something like, “This person is interested in me”. I’ve done some coaching training recently, and just when the coach, the trainer, asked me questions about my life suddenly it takes you into a whole, another domain, a whole nother realm, doesn’t it? Of focus and interest? And wow, somebody’s actually asking about me. And this is serious. And this is gonna help me. Yeah.
Dano: And I think, too, that’s something that right now, I think across the corporate world, I mean, that’s the real integration of whole life, the spiritual life in the sense of my deepest values and the things that matter to me, who I am, when no one’s looking, my values and my integrity. When you invite people to explore those dimensions, it can be a little scary, but they are bringing them to the workplace. They just don’t know it. They think they’ve kind of compartmentalised that. And you wanna call them out and say, “Are you kidding me? You are lying to yourself, and therefore you’re lying to other people, and we can all see it. You’re only hiding from yourself. You’re not really hiding from anybody else”. That isn’t normally what people want to hire me to do.
Dano: But the result, when they see a greater sense of integration, they appreciate it, or I’ve also had somebody who paid me upfront for 10 coaching appointments, and constantly gives excuses and doesn’t want to do anymore. I’m just glad they paid upfront. So, yeah, well. But it wasn’t really what they wanted, or they’re not sure now they really want to enter that again. And I mean, I have to balance that.
Nelis: When you’re not in a coaching environment, but in a leadership environment, do you get those negative reactions as well? Or is it generally people are ready to bring their whole selves
to the situation?
Dano: Well, you can’t make adults do anything, but you can create environments and you can ask permission. “I’d like to ask permission to do something that’s probably gonna feel very uncomfortable and challenging.” “Do I have permission?”. So I use a permission question that gets there. And then in group settings, I allow people to opt out. But those people that opt out don’t have a voice in contributing. So I was in a gathering of large, probably 35 mid-level leaders that would directly relate to the international director. And we were doing – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Keegan and Leahy’s “immunity to change”? – So we were doing immunity to change framework at an individual level with the hope to do it at a group level. We needed to do an individual level. Then, maybe 6 months later, we were hoping to do a group level or a whole team level. And I had given my own map, which is uncovering of some deep assumptions that underpin my life, and it was quite transparent. I felt like I was being as transparent as I could possibly be.
Kate: And you have to be when you’re using that tool. Otherwise it doesn’t work.
Dano: No one will believe you if you don’t.
Kate: You have to lead as you want them to participate. Yeah.
Dano: So I could see his eyes as he was reading my map, and we were talking about it, and there was a feeling of real uncomfortableness in the room. Meaning like, you’re kind of exposed, and I don’t know how I feel about you leading up front now that you’ve been authentic about what have been some things inside you that have happened. And he just basically opted out. At one point I came back and I said, “Hey, I noticed that you haven’t connected, haven’t paired up or connected with anyone”. He goes, “Nah, I’m good. I don’t need this. It’s like, okay”. And I realised from that point forward, danger, danger, danger, someone that wasn’t willing. He didn’t say for any other reason. “You know, I don’t really need this, I’m good”. And so finding ways to ask questions but then also creating a psychological safety. So for him, there was nothing I was going to do that was going to create enough psychological safety to enter in. For others a degree of sharing authentically at certain levels before you go straight to, you know, the deepest assumptions that are going to expose you. You know, staging that. I think also pre-work. I noticed that some pre-work can do work like that. So having them ask powerful questions of others. Or maybe do an appreciative inquiry of another person coming to the meeting, and you say to them, “You’re going to be telling their story and so be ready to tell it like you’d want someone to tell your story”. So there’s a sense of empathy that’s cultivated. I think those, Nelis, are ways that I found to do that.
Nelis: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I think that element of permission and gradually easing people in. I think those are. Those are really helpful concepts to go deeper and to really tackle things more profoundly, because if you throw people in at the deep end, you may get that reaction of that
leader that you just talked about like, “Whoa, I’m I’m not ready for this”.
Kate: We’ll definitely put a link to that particular tool you mentioned – immunity to change – in our show notes. I did it last year sometime, and it was incredibly powerful for me in overcoming a real blockage in my leadership. Nelis is nodding, people can’t see it. He actually worked through some of it afterwards with me, working out the implications for how I show up. I did it as part of that Use-of-self module on the course we’ve all taken, and was very, very powerful. And I’m still, I think, reaping the benefits of that so definitely, let’s share that in our show notes.
Nelis: And it’s fascinating. I haven’t thought of it in that terms – I came across it when you introduced that, Kate – to do that at an organisation level. I’ve been aware of it as a personal tool, but as an organisational tool I find that a fascinating idea. What would it take as a group to look at this? What is our organisational assumption? Deep assumptions that we have?
Kate: That block us from reaching the goal we want to reach.
Nelis: Exactly. And how do we, as an organisation, tend to respond or want to respond? And why? So yeah, that would be fascinating.
Kate: I rocked up to that session, thinking it was about immunity to change, “How can we get these people to change?” and realised, “Oh, wait, the finger’s pointing at me”. You have to start with yourself and work through this, and be willing to look at your deeply-held assumptions and blockages and things like that, and I think that’s the best way around to do it.
Dano: I don’t think I found another tool that surfaces hidden, of course it’s hidden commitments, hidden assumptions. I don’t know. There’s another tool that surfaces it faster, and I don’t say fast, like fast as the goal, but efficiently. I mean, if somebody went into therapy for a year, they could probably surface some of those things, but high cost, not easy to disperse across a whole organisational setting, doesn’t deal with the whole system. So it’s very powerful in that way. And I think too, then, I would also say appreciative inquiry. “Who are we when we’re at our best?”. “What is us? What is the sense of us-ness?”. Again, cross-culturally, this can be very challenging. In one way, there’s an advantage cross-culturally. But if you have people who come from individualistic and collectivist cultures, they can sometimes mean different things. And yet that’s one of the most beautiful moments of making meaning of what it means to be us or who we’re at when we’re at our best. That surfaces a different kind of thing. But it’s a really positive and an encouraging thing. That also is a great moment to contrast. Who are we at when we’re at our worst, or even, I’m gonna jump in too quickly into another kind of mental model. But there’s some neuroscientists that talk about fast twitch and slow twitch brain activity, and how being able to cultivate joy and express empathy, and renew the connections in our brain toward joyful experiences. They give us a greater sense of trust, relational trust. I can believe you. I don’t assume the worst, and that most of us are at a joy deficiency. And so they had some very simple practices that are really powerful. And I’ve done it in lots of different settings. And it’s almost like it renews the circuitry in the room. Another way to describe it would be, it softens up the soil of the ground that the whole group is working in, and everybody’s just a little more soft toward each other a little more. It doesn’t mean that they’re just limp and unengaged. It means there’s a sense of empathy and psychological safety that pervades the space. Jim Wilder is one of the neuroscientists that I follow. And I’m just totally fascinated by that as anxiety reducer that doesn’t attack anxiety or try to address the anxiety. But instead, it says your anxiety is coming from a place you don’t really know about. We’re going to work on cultivating some of that space and the soil of your life, and then the soil of our whole system. And what I’ve been saying these days is good soil, bad soil will kill the best seed. Doesn’t matter how great your idea is, if you have bad soil, if you don’t have psychological safety, radical trust, a shared sense of empathy, and a meaning-making mechanism between you, your best idea, your best seed will just be eaten up. But if you have good soil, even a below average seed can grow, and it could improve because there’s a capacity to renew. In my organisational design work I’ve been spending a lot of time on “what’s the soil like?”. And as a leader, don’t focus on a great idea, a great seed, or trying to get everybody to move in your direction, focus on creating great soil. And then, everything that’s happening will be more positive. There’ll be more progress, less resistance. You’ll retain more people. There’ll be a sense of continuity. Yeah, I could keep going. But you get the point.
Kate: That’s really interesting. Dano. That sense of the soil is what’s important. You can have the best strategy, the best idea, but if the soil’s not ready for something to grow in it, then you’re not going to go anywhere. How would you go about working on the soil, in an organisation, for example?
Dano: Well, I like to ask many leaders. I’m gonna touch on co-creation, which maybe we’ll get to later, too. But I like to invite a team of leaders – that’s a mixture of upper level and mid-level leaders, and maybe even a couple people that are more like line workers – to join a co-creation team which could be, you could also call it a change agent, team, or kind of change work. But sometimes it’s connected to an event. And sometimes an event is a great catalytic opportunity for more extended change, because you’re going to see everyone face-to-face. I always ask each of them. “Hey, we’re gonna do lots of survey work. So how about everybody does 5 interviews? Not the same people, and try to get out as wide as possible and ask questions like the questions I mentioned earlier about you know where you’re at in the intersection of your life, or what part you play and how we got to where we are. Those kinds of survey questions, they cultivate empathy and they also require the co-creation team to carry the voice of another, and so they don’t just summarise when they come back. We’ll oftentimes use a mural board, so we can visualise all that’s happening, we can see it more clearly. And so we capture the different post-it notes that go on to a mural and that means that the co-creation team doesn’t just bring their voice. We don’t just want them to be the change agents. We want them to amplify the voice of the people they interviewed. And they have a much deeper sense of compassion and empathy for those people. Some people really got hurt, or have really been marginalised or don’t feel like they’ve been heard. And so both that happens. And then especially for emerging leaders who’ve maybe not been invited to this space before. They realise it’s not about me trying to drive my outcome. It’s way bigger than that, and so… trying to find ways to get them to listen well, and then to bring that together and interpret, like, what are we sensing is the – I like to call it – the inner voice. What’s the, if it’s the personification of the organisation, if the organisation was a person, what would they be having nightmares about? What would they be saying to themselves, what’s the internal dialogue that’s happening? So we’re trying to surface that for the whole and then pay attention to it. Like, really, listen, you heard somebody really hurt, or really in a lot of pain. You heard someone that felt like they were thriving. How do we put all that together? That’s how real humans are. We’re almost schizophrenic in that way. One time we can have great experience, and we can have a terrible one the next day. And then we’re still the same person. So trying to navigate and manage and make meaning of that together, and then let that work of kind of observing and interpreting lead us to action. Or sometimes it’s just experimentation, let’s try something. But oftentimes it’s just saying it’s not good enough to assume we know what they want, but we need to listen and do a better job of listening, and then bring that into whatever the next season might be characterised by, or whatever the event might be characterised by. And then, use quotes and things like that from those people. That makes the co-creation team, I think, on a different posture. They’re not trying to drive their own outcomes, but they feel like they’re carrying the voice from the edges. At the same time, sometimes there’s a leader there that can say, “There is a future” and they’re trying to interpret or understand the future that maybe some people at the edges might be feeling they want, but still be able to cast a vision, for there is a future. There’s hope. We have a direction we’re going, and we need to be living out this way. But it doesn’t ignore any of the edges, and it really to me it creates a lot of cohesiveness and I found I can’t trust anybody on a co-creation team that hasn’t done a lot of good survey work and doesn’t feel responsible for carrying the voices of the people at the edges for the the main purpose of the work that we share together.
Kate: There’s something really important there about authenticity and integrity, I think, at the start of a process which really resonates.
Nelis: Yeah, I love how you bring together the collective part, the organisation as a person, and I really like that sort of image. What would the nightmares be? What is the internal dialogue? What is? If you imagine the organisation as a person, what does that tell you? So that’s a very collective way of looking at it, and then at the same time saying, okay, but it’s not just all collective. There may be a leader who can tell “There is a future”. There is an individual responsibility. It’s not just passive, the organisation thinks this because there is a need for, yeah, stepping up and sometimes being that different voice. So that individual versus collective tension that you described there I find fascinating. And I think that’s part of where our conversations about conversational leadership go, isn’t it, Kate? Where you talk about okay, there is a huge collective part, and conversational leadership is not 1% at the top knowing everything. But there is still a leadership role. And what is that leadership role? And how do you manage that polarity?
Dano: Yes.
Nelis: So I am not sure I followed you a hundred percent on your fast twitch versus slow twitch image. The image you created there is about, I think, the quick bursts of action, the things that need immediate resolution versus the long term things that you talked about. This joy, the context that allows you to go for it in the long haul, and I think the picture is athletes who can do 100 metre dashes versus the marathon. The marathon needs slow twitch, the fast twitch is the 100 metre dash. Is that correct? And how are you using that in your leadership experience?
Dano: I don’t know how it works exactly in athletics, but in terms of the mental, the neuroscience, the neuroscientists are saying these days, we respond out of a deficit for joy, or out of a deficit of a feeling of being heard, or a feeling of safety and the immediate thing, it’s not something we think about. It’s not actually part of our cognitive process. It’s a collection of our woundings and trauma. And we react oftentimes. This is another book by Steve Cuss, Managing leadership anxiety, yours and theirs. He talks about, in a moment of uncertainty, what do you need to be okay? In a moment of uncertainty what do you think you need to be okay? In a trauma unit he was a chaplain in a hospital, and saw 250 people die right before his eyes in a 2 year span. So he would just be like, he showed up, and the person just died, and the whole family’s there, and they’re expecting him to say something. Really scary. And, what do you think you need? And I had to come to realise, I think I need to be in control. Others I know, they think they need to be able to be responsible for everything. Others, they want to punctuate that sense of anxiety or uncertainty with humour. Other people demand respect. You can have the whole gambit of potential things. Those are the fast twitch. We don’t control it. It’s the overflow of the condition of the soil of our life. And if our interior life is riddled with wounding, with pain, with betrayal that’s unprocessed. We might have all those experiences, but if we’ve worked through it, we can actually respond and not react or not want to fight instead, we can come from a different source. I think that’s why leaders need to cultivate a really healthy interior life. But then also be able to cultivate organisational health in the whole system or the whole landscape can be characterised by a greater sense of health in the soil, and it shows up like a sense of mutuality and respect and empathy and less “I’m trying to drive my outcome” and how can we be the best version of who we are. And even accountability is a great example of this. Accountability in this setting says, “Kate, I noticed that you showed up this way. That isn’t like us. I felt like you’re not being us”. Or maybe even, “ I noticed you weren’t being yourself in that moment. But you, I want you to say, it’s tough for me, because you’re also not being like what we committed to. We committed to being people who do the… whatever it is. And I noticed you didn’t do that and I want to call you back to your best self. I want to call you back to who we agreed on being together”. There’s an example of cultivating great health and not saying, did you check it off the list, or did you do the right thing or demanding allegiance, but more like drawing you back to the sense of that collective calling that we agreed to. So it has to be a moment of calling where we collectively share, “Yeah, that’s who we’re going to be”. That’s an example of accountability that works when someone betrays the deepest values.
Nelis: I love what you’re saying there, and that’s quite hard. We’ve had conversations recently about people or about issues. I think we all know those, where there’s an unhealthy soil and unhealthy environment, either at an individual or at the organisational level. And the question is, do you let it go because that is so much easier? Or do you find a way to confront it? And my experience is that if you don’t find a healthy way to confront that, to help see a healthy soil, it always comes back to bite you in the long run.
Dano: Mhmm.
Nelis van den Berg: But that’s hard work, because it doesn’t always get a positive response.
Dano: No, and people aren’t expecting that’s what leaders are going do.
Kate: I’m just thinking of my last annual review with Nelis. Nelis is very good at pulling me up on stuff like that. I hate it at the time, but it always yields growth. It’s horrible when it happens, when someone has the courage to challenge you and say, “You know this thing you do, or the way you show up, that’s not helping us”. He doesn’t use the same language as you, but you know, as my supervisor, he’s been very good at that over the years. And it’s tough to do but you have to do it if you want people to flourish and grow in their roles. And if you want the soil organisationally to be healthy, I mean particularly as leaders. It’s that use-of-self, that self awareness, is so critical.
Nelis: It’s massive. I’m just thinking back over my conversations in my regular leadership today and yesterday. And this kind of issue has cropped up 3 times, and 3 times the question is, do we drop it or do we address it? I think my consistent response was, let’s address it. But woah, this is hard. This is really hard, how do we do it? What’s the best way of engaging with that? So yeah, I really appreciate that.
Dano: The leaders that want to, that choose to ignore this and just drive toward organisational outcomes… I don’t know if you call them, you know Level one leaders, or something like that. They could get pretty high up in the organisation, but all they talk about is outcome, outcome, outcome. They are the leaders that drive organisations into the ground. And it requires another bridge building, healing leader, to come after them, to recover from the pain of drive, drive, drive, drive, drive. But there’s, I think, a kind of leader, and I would call them another…. I don’t know what you call them, maybe they’re deeper level. Maybe they’re not. They’re not actually ascending the ladder to try something different, but the ones that cultivate this interior life, that cultivate the soil, that want to see flourishing happening, all at the edges, not just at the top, those are the kinds of leaders that oftentimes, I think, actually, the results in those organisations of larger health and wider health, those are the kinds of spaces where other organisations come and go. We heard about some good stuff that’s happening there, can you tell us more? I think they’re deliberately developmental, to use a Keegan and Leahy. They’re spaces where people thrive and where individual contribution is actually eclipsed by the collective, like a comprehensive and collective capacity to do really hard work that is not just defined by the outcome that the organisation might be going after. I do think they make money. They’re successful. They thrive. But especially in this environment, when retention of employees, managing stakeholder outcomes, just creating health everywhere. It’s a surprising antidote to the kinds of corporate anxiety that I think, drive a lot of organisations and burn people out. To me it’s inhuman, and I feel like as a leader, I can’t do that. I’m not. It’s just not part of how I’m wired.
Kate: I think it’s a great antidote to where we find ourselves in the world right now. I was just talking earlier with someone about change fatigue and recognizing that change isn’t something that has a beginning and end anymore. We’ve said this before in the podcast, we’re in a state of continuous change, and we’re moving into that chaos zone we talked about another podcast. We’re living in the volatile, uncertain, complex. ambiguous, is that right? And it’s a difficult place to navigate these days and leadership within that. I think you just look at our newspapers, television screens to see how our politicians are navigating that not well, in many cases, and across the board, across the world I think we have a real crisis of leadership, because I think we’re being called to lead in an environment that is so VUCA, that is so challenging. And I love what you’ve been sharing here, I was thinking this feels a little bit like leadership therapy or something. I think this going back to the soil, the health of the organisation, getting real with people is something I’m going to be chewing over for a while.
Dano: Well, I also love that you mentioned politics because the autocrat loves to say to the masses, “If you vote for me, I’ll keep you safe. I’ll give you a predictable future. I’ll give you certainty”. Those are all lies. But the courageous leader, the empathetic leader, says “I don’t know what the future holds, but together, if we learn to trust each other, if we learn to create space where we actually share meaning, and we stand side by side, we can endure a future that’s unknowable”. And that’s so much more authentic and honest and not manipulative. But I don’t know, have you seen a politician do that?
Kate: I don’t know how you begin to achieve that across a nation? I’m sure there are leaders that have done that. I’d like to think about how you even do that in an organisation with 4,000 people. Can you tell us some examples from your context, how you create that, or how you would go about creating that environment of safety?
Dano: Well, I was on a recent co-creation team in a large organisational setting, and we prepared for maybe 9, 10 months to head into a large gathering. We did a lot of survey work about the theme. And when we asked people questions, there was a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of like, “Well, what else can we do? We’re just kind of stuck with the model we have, and we can’t reimagine it”. And so as a co-creation team we spent a lot of time at the beginning, like listening, listening to each other, telling stories, surfacing metaphors. One of the activities we did was, what’s the metaphor you bring to, I think it was oversight was one of the themes, and so it was lovely to hear the Argentineans talk about this tree that’s down near Patagonia, whose roots get connected to each other, and it was interesting to hear another Brit tell the story of how the metaphor they used was like a Indian train station. I mean, it’s fascinating to see what creativity surfaced. Another one did something about the solar system, it was very lovely. And then we spent time gallery walking, looking around, watching, what stood out to you? And then we did some work around adaptive challenges, identifying that the challenge in front of us wasn’t just a technical challenge that if we just applied a solution, it would be fixed. Instead, as Warren Bennett says, what you resist persists. So it’s a persistent problem. We keep attacking it head on, and head on is not going, it’s just getting stronger, we’re just reinforcing it. And so. The next day, when we went after an activity that comes from the book Impact Networks, by David Erlichman. Fascinating book. One of my favourite books.
Nelis van den Berg: I love it!
Dano: David has an interaction that he recommended roughly, that essentially has 3 rounds. We said to them, we’re gonna do a social experiment. And we divided the group by their last names. And the first group, we said, “All right, who’s someone that’s had an impact on your life?”. We had 3 questions, and so you reached out and connected to them. And then there was another question, and it was a different kind of dimension question. It might have been like, “Who have you learned the most from? So then, you and the person that you’re with would go and connect with the other person. But that other person might be connected to someone else’s chain. So there’s this emerging network or chains of people that start to form. And so the chains got very interconnected of course. I personally underestimated how even at a senior leader level how sensitive it would feel to not be picked. I was really surprised. For me, I just thought of it as a social experiment. I probably could have chosen some questions that were a little more benign. What I was hoping to accomplish was, “How well networked are you?”. Change flows through people who are connected and have capacity for depth and are doing the interior work. But a couple of people didn’t get picked, and they felt upset by that. And then a few people heard that someone was hurt, and then they got more hurt for them than the people that actually got hurt. So I had to stand up at the end and apologise. I said “I apologise, and never intended for anybody to feel excluded or left at the edges”. It was dicey, and I overestimated the capacity of this group to endure ambiguity and to do a real experiment on how well connected you were. I have not had this much negative feedback from my leadership, I don’t know ever. It was pretty rough.
At the same time one of my partners… we borrowed a ladder from the conference centre, and he was taking some video on the ladder, a 25 foot ladder… And he said, he helped us see it. He said the amount of chronic anxiety in this room full of senior leaders was striking. One of our insights was that in the conference before – this is like the post conference – in the conference before these were the leaders that people came to for answers and direction. They stood up in front. They had a microphone in their hand. They had the marker, the whiteboard marker in their hand. They were the ones rolling out, and then in this setting, they were all completely just, they were just equal, and if your influence, or your willingness to coach or contribute to others, if it wasn’t apparent, then it showed up.
So I think we were talking about adaptive challenges going into this, but I would say I didn’t mean to create quite so much anxiety, but in reality, I think what happened was we made that anxiety more apparent. We just surfaced what was already there.
Kate: It’s there, and I think across the board, I think we have a lot of leaders who listen to this podcast. And I think they probably will be nodding their heads, saying. “Yeah, there’s anxiety there. This world is a hard place to lead in right now”. Really interesting to hear that story. Thank you. Thank you for sharing vulnerably, honestly, about something you received a lot of critique for.
Kate: Nelis, can you just summarise for us a couple of things that you’ve heard Dano sharing?
Nelis: Yeah, I really appreciate what you just shared too, Dano, and what I’m hearing you say is, get beyond the immediate results, get beyond the delivery of quick outcomes, and really go deep into what is the organisational mindset? Where are the individuals? Where are we as leaders at? And how can we bring out the best we could be as an organisation and as people. And so, yeah, you talked about that from different angles. And I think that’s a challenge that I’m going to take home and again work with, in our different organisations. How can we be the best we can be? And how can we create that future together in a way that challenges, in the way we talked, started our conversation with the right kind of questions, exploring. That’s exciting. I appreciate your insights and your vulnerability in sharing here. So thank you, Dano.
Dano: Thanks, Nelis, thanks for the invitation. Thank you, Kate.
Nelis: It was wonderful to have you on our podcast.
Kate: Yes, thanks so much, Dano, for sharing. I’m looking forward to chewing over what you have shared, I think it’s really relevant, really helpful at this time. As always, thank you to our listeners for showing up, and do head over to leadinginconversation.net if you have any comments, thoughts, questions, or if you want to check out the show notes for resources that Dano has mentioned. See you next time. Bye.
