Season 2, Episode 8

Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation, Season 2, Episode 8
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Transcript

Kate: Hello, and welcome back to Leading in Conversation. We’re really excited to have with us today, Dr. Michel Kenmogne. We’ve been trying to get him on our podcast for years now. We’ve worked together in our leadership team for the last 9 years, Dr. Michel has been our boss, and Nelis and I are really excited for this conversation with him today. Welcome, Michel!

Michel: Thank you very much, Kate. Morning, Nelis.

Nelis: It’s great to be with you, Michel, and, conversational leadership has been part of your journey of leadership in the last 9 years as we engaged in leadership you were an inspiration in that. You helped do it in practice. And one of the things we’d like to hear from you is, how did you develop that leadership style? What are the sort of foundations for that for you? What’s your story, when you talk about conversational leadership?

Michel: I think I can talk of two basic places of inspiration about conversational leadership as it applies to me personally. I think the one inspiration I would mention is actually the context and the situation in which I had to take the leadership of our organization. I remember being at the Board meeting, following my appointment, and trying to discern where the Board was seeing the organization going into the future. I can tell you that I saw the board heading into at least four directions at the same time, and I felt like, “Wow, where is this organization headed?”. So that was a first observation. And secondly, I tried to look at the organization, which is global in nature, I mean spreading all over the world, with various contexts, various different realities. And I started to ask myself, “How do I lead these people? How do I lead people who are so diverse in terms of their context, in terms of their understanding, and so on?”. And at the same time that people were different in terms of what they believed or thought the organization should do, or where the organization should go, I could at the same time realize that, always speaking from a place of deep motivation and a deep sense of commitment to the organization, so it was not like there are some good people who think the good things, and there are some wrong people on the other side. So I started to ask myself, “How do we blend all the perspectives that are here?”. I started to ask myself, “How do we help people who speak genuinely, maybe from their context, from their experience. How do we help people to hear the various experiences and contexts that are around the room or within the organization?”. So all of these things caused me to feel like, even as a leader, I cannot just stand and make pronouncements and tell the people what it should look like, because whatever I say, would be based on my own perspective and my own view, which can never represent the views of everybody. 

Nelis: So is that also partially because you were new in the organization and felt you needed to first listen and then talk? Is that… because otherwise you could have said, “Well, I know the organization. I can tell you what we need right now.”. 

Michel: Partially. Yes, I was new, and there was a need for me to learn and I was actually learning a lot. I read a lot of books on the history of the organization. I went to former leaders to just talk with them in order to understand who they were and what the organization really was. But also I would say that was the aspect of being new to the organization. The other reality, which was really really important, was the fact that the context and the realities we had engaged with in the past had shifted so much, so that it was not possible to just think that we could just carry on our business as usual. So, it’s a combination of both.

Nelis: Yeah, yeah. How does that connect with your leadership experience from before? You were a leader in an African context, an African organization, then you were coming to a global organization. How does that compare? And how have you seen that transition for yourself? 

Michel: I think your question actually gets me to the second aspect of what I wanted to say in response to your 1st question, and it has to do with the cultural aspect that I bring into this as well.

I happen to have grown up in a typical rural African context where I observed African leadership for what it is. Probably not a fancy description of that leadership in terms of maybe the theories, and of this and that. But I did observe leadership, the way it applied in my village context, for example, and if I would tell you that leaders appear or are thought to be very autocratic in the African context, but when I observed the dynamics in our larger family setting, or even at the village level, I could observe that leaders were very respected, and when leaders said things it was like, “Oh, they just say it, and people obey”. But that was not the case. The reality was that leaders were having various spaces where they had conversations with the people like the chief of the village before, when there is an issue, he would make sure that he listens to the people, he would make sure that he hears the perspectives of the people and forms an opinion, and often he will even test his conclusion or his perspective with the people before he stands out to give the final say. So when he says it and people kind of agree, and nobody questions or challenges it, it doesn’t mean that they are just submitting without any discernment. It is actually because the conversations have happened. It is because people are in tune with the leader. And I can even go ahead and tell you something, an anecdote from my village. People may say, does anybody ever challenge the leader in that kind of context? And I tell you, people don’t know, but leaders are often quite, much, challenged by the people they lead. But the thing is that again, you have to have the right space to challenge the leader. If you challenge the leader publicly and you shame the leader then you are definitely in trouble, and it’s not even the leader who will rebuke you. It is the other people of the community who rebuke you because you’ve done the wrong thing. But take in my village, for example, when the chief has done something really unacceptable, something that is wrong, there is a specific room in the palace where the notables who represent, like the leadership team of the chief, they would respectfully say, “Hey, Chief, we want to meet in that room, in that specific room”. 

Nelis: And then he knows he’s in trouble? 

Michel: Exactly. So when he’s invited in that room, he knows he’s in trouble, and in that room what happens is that the lights are off. Nobody sees the face of any other person, because it’s a shame culture. And when they are in there people would really say, “Hey, Chief, when you behave in such and such a way, when you do this or that kind of thing, that really does not honour us. That really is not what we expect of you as our chief”, and so on, and the rule in that place is that the chief does not respond, and the chief does not rebuke anybody from saying that. And the chief does not.., the chief just has to listen. And the rule is that once they have left that room nobody talks about it again, and the chief has heard, and the people know they have communicated to the chief, and everybody is supposed to behave as it is appropriate.

Kate: That’s a really powerful and fascinating insight into a shame culture, and how through conversation you manage saying the difficult things. I love that story. Thank you. So, looking back at the start of your leadership in our organization, you began conversationally with something that you called “Remembering our journey”. How did that come about?

Michel: Yes, as I indicated before, when I saw the organization speaking in very many different voices. I started to ask myself how we could draw the people together. And when I heard the people speaking in different voices, I could feel that people had joined the organization at different times. There were still people who were thinking with the mindsets of maybe the 1970s, or thinking the organization was still there. Others were thinking, maybe with the realities of Gen Zs, and differently. So I was asking myself, “How do I help the organization, how do we learn about where we’ve come from, where we’ve been, what we’ve been through and where we are today?”. And I felt like the best way to do that… I could not, there was no way I could do it just on my own to say, “Oh, this is our journey. And this is what we have to remember”. No, how could I do that? So I again – and this is about conversational leadership – I invited a group of very diverse people. It was a team of 15 people. And among the 15, I had 5 who were people who had been in the organization, even some from the 1950s. And I got some people who were like part of the current leadership and administration, and I also got 5 people who had joined the organization from very unconventional or unusual paths. Bringing all of those people, I knew that there will be a very divergent, there will be a huge divergence of perspectives around the room. And what I did was just to say, “Hey, if our organization started in 1934 and we are here in 2015…” And I drew a line from 34 to 2015. And I said, “Think above the line, think of, what was the war like in 1934, and underneath the line, think about what was our organization?”. And I asked the people, as you think about the world, think about the sociopolitical context of the world, think about the economic realities, think about mission and church. Think about all of this. And I asked the people and people started to describe, “Oh, yeah, 1934…”, people say, “Oh, yeah, we were just coming out of the Great Depression, and economically it was very hard”, and so on. People were still remembering all the consequences of the 1st World War and all of that. And we started to get sticky notes and we put them on the wall to just capture those things. And we said, “Okay, how did that reflect on the organization?”. And some people started, “Oh, yeah. The first people who joined our mission were people who had been at the war front, and they had then joined the mission, and they were really very pragmatically approaching things like in a military conquest”, and all of that. And we started to gain insights into how we went about things. But then we continued in the history, and we went to the sixties, for example, and people said, “Oh, yeah, many African countries became independent, and there was more assertiveness happening in those countries and could no longer be as usual”. And so on, and we started learning and growing along the years. And then, with all of the data that we had put on the wall, people started to say, “Hey, we have been changing. We have been evolving. This organization has never been the same, from 1934 to 1960s to 75 to 2000s, and then to 2015”. So it was the people realizing that we have been changing. It was not somebody telling them, “You have to change, or… ”. 

Michel: Exactly. And that was really the point, because often we think that documents or products, as we often create them, we think that those products are what matters. No, the product in itself is not what transforms the people. It is the process that you use to create a product that is actually transformative. So with that document, and also coming back to your point, Nelis, about me being new to the organization, actually, I found that document to be very inspiring and insightful and informative. But I just said to myself, if I just go out there to tell the people, “Hey, I have seen the light. This is what you need”, nobody would listen to me. People would say, “Hey, you are just so new here. What do you actually know?”, and so on. I said to the group, “Hey, I’m a new guy here and I’m learning certain things, and I want us to learn together. Please teach me and let’s learn together”. And then I submitted the essay to the people, and said, “Hey, let us let us reflect together”. And actually it turns out that there were many people who were learning and discovering the history, although they had been in for many, many years, and of course there were some good insights that were given, and that also enriched me, and even enriched the essay because there were several iterations of  improving that essay and at the end of the day it was a serious learning process which was not just about learning about the history and being maybe experts of history, of the history of our organization. It was actually about understanding that we have been on a journey of change, and that we had come to a new place where we had to reassess how we go about our mission if we wanted to stay relevant and meaningful in our new context. And that is what we wanted to see to do through that “Remembering our journey” process.

Nelis: I’ve observed that, and often reflected back on how foundational that was to the change, because it’s doing a few things. One is reaffirming our identity. This is, change has been part of our story all along, but the foundation stays solid. So this sense of appreciation, the sense of a solid identity, that change isn’t going to take that away. The sense of appreciation for people throughout history, that when we change, it doesn’t mean that we’re rejecting people. And those kinds of things are, I think, so essential in conversational leadership, when you embrace change, that you first have a foundation of understanding where you stand, and that the choices you make are not a rejection of the past, or something like that. I think that’s really essential. 

Michel: Yeah. And that goes back to the point that I made initially about the fact that all of our people, they are people who are here because they are motivated by the deep beliefs that they have, and they believe in the change that they want to make in the world. They really believe. And they are volunteers. They are not motivated by the income that they receive from the organization. They are here because they are deeply, independently motivated.  And that is why I thought that leading change would not be a matter of telling the people this is the best strategy, it would be about helping the people to see how the realities and the circumstances are changing so that they can change in order to respond to the changing realities and circumstances as well. And that is how, I believe change leadership and change management should happen, because, especially in nonprofit and voluntary organizations, we have to inspire people through the way we invite them into change rather than impose decisions on them. 

Nelis: Kate and I were just talking about that today, when we talked about change in a volunteer organization, how different that is. Yeah, Kate, any thoughts? 

Kate: Well, I was just going to say, that “Remembering our journey paper” that was written, that was co-created, back in 2015 and refined, and added to through an iterative process, is still bearing fruit ten years on. I recently shared it with a group of 30 young leaders who we gathered together in Kenya last summer and we asked them to read that paper, and they came back saying, “Now we understand our organization. Now we understand why things are the way they are”. So it’s still bearing fruit. And I think I’ve said to you before, I’d love for us to write the next chapter, you know the chapter that we’re living in right now. It’s probably not ours to write. It will be written retrospectively by others, perhaps. But yeah, it was a great process for us as an organization.

Kate: So organizational culture change seems to have been a significant part of your leadership. Would you talk a little bit about that? How you experienced it, and how you’ve done that in a co-creational conversational way, and led others in that. 

Michel: Yeah, yes, you know, organizational culture change, people go about it in many different ways. There are people who think that change should simply happen as a matter of changing the structures, and then people will just adapt to new structures, and then they will change. I think you can change structures and have people walk through new structures. But you will not, you cannot guarantee that internally and deep in the hearts and minds of people that they have embraced the new reality you want to enforce. That is why, for me, organizational culture change had to do, not just with addressing the surface level issues, it had to do with addressing the deeper level issues, addressing the core narratives that can actually drive the organization. Because when you shift those narratives you can be sure that at the surface level things will also change. And that is why my focus on organizational change was about shifting the narratives. And actually, when you go back to the “Remembering our journey”, from the essay, we teased out some of the stories which kind of describe the narratives that that kind of drove the organization, and often narratives are things that people cannot just stand up and articulate and say, “Oh, these are the… this is what is driving us”, but when you shift and you talk, you touch those narratives, you can be sure that you will shift the culture. And in order to do that, one of the things that was very helpful for me was again in alignment with the fact that I want the people to participate and to own the change that they are invited into. One of the things was to adopt the double loop learning, and by double loop learning, I mean that often when we plan in an organization, we are always going from the assumptions that we have to derive the strategies and then the actions that lead to results. But often when we don’t get the results that we expect, we generally review our strategies to say, “Hey, what strategy do we need to change in order to still be effective?”. But there comes a time when the circumstances have changed so much so that tweaking the strategies does not help anymore. And at that time you have to not just review your strategies. You have to go all the way back to reassessing your assumptions to see if they are right. And that is why the double loop learning was so important to us, to rethink what are the assumptions that we hold in the place of ministry. And thinking about the assumptions, we had to realize that our ministry was started in the earliest 20th Century and we were here in the early 21st century. So our assumptions, even about the people, the context, the methods, the approaches that we had to use in the 20th Century could no longer be the same in the 21st Century. And that is why the double loop learning allowed us to assess the new assumptions and realize that some of our assumptions were outdated, and once you shift your assumptions, you can be sure that your strategies are going to shift, and also your actions and whatever follows. And that is how we went about it.

Nelis: Yeah, I, and I’ve seen you do, that sense of the assumptions is not something you tell people “These are your assumptions”. This is something that is really again a co-creative process, because it’s like an insult when you tell somebody, “This is the assumption you’re going from”. But when you do it together, yeah, you can actually go through the sometimes painful process and then wait a second, we’re operating from those assumptions. And they’re kind of scary sometimes. 

Kate: And they’re outdated. They were once valid assumptions. But, like you say, the world has changed. We’re still operating based on those assumptions, and that’s why it’s not working. 

Michel: Exactly. And I think this is where you get to the heart of conversational leadership, which is primarily about asking questions. Asking questions. Why do we do this? What informs our choice to do it this way rather than in a different way? So by asking the questions you actually help the people to think through, and to discover the assumptions that are often really just deep seated in their hearts and minds. But they don’t, they’re not always aware of those and and asking questions is actually, very, very important in the context of conversational leadership. And not only asking questions, but also framing the spaces for conversations to happen, so that it is not, it will not just be an individual process of thinking about MY assumptions. But it’s also about thinking about our shared assumptions, and to discover our shared assumptions we have to do it through conversations that help us to feel like, “Oh, yes, so this is how we do it, because we believe in this or that”.

Nelis: I really appreciate that sense of you’re touching on some key tenets of conversational leadership, of framing, of asking questions, of co-creation, of the reality of structures not being the core of how it works. But what I find interesting is that you talked also about this togetherness and I’ve heard you rant almost around the individualism in the organization and in our culture, and how you are looking for a more community sense. And Kate was obviously part of that when she got the charge to work on helping us to be a community with God, with each other and with leadership, and and building those connections. Can you say a little bit more about that community aspect, and how that shapes conversation and conversational leadership and change? 

Michel: Yeah. And by the way I will always premise that, thank you to Kate, because, yes, I still remember when we started this process and just saying, how do we move forward together? And I remember charging Kate back then to say, “Hey, your job is to help us all, to draw closer to each other and to together draw closer to God”. And I believe this is really at the heart of what God has called us to do, this is really at the heart of who we are, I mean, my desire was for us to draw together closer to one another, because together, of course, we are stronger. Together, we are successful. Together we are, our impacts can be greater. Whereas when we are divided and we go at different ways, of course, our impacts can only be very minimal, or actually our impact would even not be visible. So, drawing together and also drawing together closer to the ideal, to the vision, to the mission that we hold together. So that was the calling. And I also realized that this togetherness was so important because none of us… we often claim individualism, but none of us thrives individually. We all are relational people. We all thrive as we connect to other people, and even look at working in environments wherever you are, and look even at how the training of people in universities and so on is happening more and more. People are trained in teams, in cohorts, in groups, because it is understood that nobody works in isolation. And for that reason emphasizing the notion of community within our organization was so so important, because already the nature of the work that we do is one that invites us to collaborate and cooperate with others, and therefore working together in community and growing that sense of community was so critical in order for us to be effective. 

Kate: Definitely. Yes, I see my son, who’s just started at university studying architecture and all of his assignments are done in pairs, in groups and teams, because as an architect, you will never be working solo. You’re always working with clients or colleagues or teams. So reframing the identity of the organization in the 21st century was a key aspect of your task. And what you have achieved as we look back. We developed a new vision and mission and goal statements that we call transformation statements. How did you seek co-creation around that? Could you tell us a bit about that, as one example of how you led. 

Michel: Yeah, it was all about co-creation from the start, because the process of the “Remembering our journey” that we talked about initially led to the question of what is our identity and purpose in the new context in which we find ourselves. And that question of our identity and purpose caused us to realize actually our identity, our deepest fundamental identity has not changed. We remain the same organization. But while we remain the same organization, we need to find new ways of stating and expressing who we are so that we can be understood, and we can be meaningful to the people of this generation. And that is why we had to really set a process that involved all of our staff to input into that process. It involved our Board. It involved, of course, the leadership that was acting as an integrator of all the voices and perspectives that we gathered. And the perspectives we gathered were sent back to the staff to the board for people to bring inputs into it, so that at the end of the day, when the Board made the motion to adopt a new set of vision mission and goal statements. It was not like the Board is telling the people “Oh, we have seen the light just informing you about…”. People who had been part of it, and people could say, “Oh, yeah, this is our vision”. And people could know why they were adopting that vision, and it was not even something that I, as a leader, would just say, “Oh, yeah. I’ve created a new vision”. There’s no way I could do it on my own. But all of you were part of it. All of us in the organization were part of it, and the Board was fully part of it, and that is about the co-creation. 

I find it interesting when you’re talking about that, and my memories go back to that as well. It’s like how you talk about both the continuity and the change aspect. So we’ve changed. We need a new vision, a mission. But at the same time, there’s this strong sense of continuity in that. And it’s the continuity part that could easily get people to reject a new vision and mission. And I think many people organizations have seen that there’s a new vision that just doesn’t resonate because it doesn’t connect with the past. And I remember when we started, there was a sense like, “Oh, can we really touch those?”. And in the end it didn’t create much push back at all, which is sort of a testimony to how conversation leadership can even touch on almost sacred things. 

Kate:  I think we had, of our 4,300 staff in those days, we had over a thousand staff actively contribute to that conversational process. Not everyone wanted to. People weren’t required to. But we invited everyone and kept inviting feedback. We had multiple stages of refinement where we invited people, and I was really happy that we had over a thousand people actively contributing. Hopefully a representative group of people. And I think that’s part of the reason that it did go so much more smoothly than I had expected,

Michel: I think, especially in large organizations like ours, you can’t expect everybody to speak up. Some some people who are motivated, and people who feel like speaking, they need to realize that there is a space, and there is an opportunity to speak up and when you do it, though even those who do not speak actually are satisfied, because they know that the leaders are indeed listening and hearing their perspectives, and even if some do not participate, they do value what the outcomes of the processes are, because they know that those processes were thoughtful, they were consultative, and they really allowed many inputs and insights to be provided.

Nelis: It almost reminds me a little bit, that process about the dark room. We, as leaders, weren’t telling you this is right or this is wrong. We were just listening, and almost in that dark room, hearing all the voices. It was not to be a rebuke, but it’s good, this sense of withholding responding.

Kate: It’s important to be willing to be rebuked, isn’t it? And I think, as leaders, you have to be open to that, and staff have to be able to bring their fears to us, their concerns, and really ask the hard questions. And if you’re not that kind of leader that is that approachable, then you’re in trouble. 

Michel: I think that some of the tragedies that have been observed especially in leadership in our century, is the fact that leaders have built like some ivory towers in which they hide themselves. Nobody can talk to them anymore, nobody. They are immune to any criticism and as a result of it often people just watch the collapse of the leader because they could have been struggling with issues or… and generally, and even in our modern stories, when leaders have fallen, people have said, “Oh, yeah, I had seen this. I had observed that”, and so on, but often, when there is no way to to speak up, when there is no way, when there is no loop through which the leader can listen to the people then actually he becomes a god. But are our leaders gods? I don’t think so. 

Neli: They’re normal people!

Michel: And that is actually the genius of conversational leadership. The conversational leader is not just the one who always leads from the front. It is the leader who often leads just from within the crowd. It is the leader who also even leads from the back, allowing others to step forward. And that is all part of the modes of conversational leadership. And often it can be very challenging to some heroic leaders who have taken leadership as “Okay, I’m always going to be in the limelight and wherever I go…”. But no, humility is actually at the heart of conversational leadership.

Nelis: That’s definitely a quotable quote. Humility is the heart of conversation leadership? 

Nelis: So we need to start to work, going towards wrapping up. You’re at the end of your time as leader of the organization. In a few months you’re stepping down and we’ve been talking about conversational leadership. When you look back, what are some of the key lessons learned for you personally, and maybe for us as an organization?

Michel: Yeah. I think the first lesson I can mention, touching on conversational leadership: I think when an organization faces adaptive realities that it needs to address, really conversational leadership from my experience is the way to go, and that is one lesson I have learned, and I’m convinced about it. And it seems to me that in this 21st Century many, many organizations are in that place of needing to review the way they go about leadership. And I would suggest, offer, that conversational leadership can help and could help many organizations as they approach change in leadership, change in change management and organizational change. More so because when you face adaptive issues, you don’t only need the leaders to work on it, you have to let everybody, all of those who are involved with the issues, be part of seeking the solutions because they will have to live with the consequences of the decisions that are made. So that is one lesson that I learned. A second lesson that I learned is that conversational leadership is actually, it requires a lot of trust. Trust, not just in our own power, but trust in the community, trust in our colleagues and staff. It also requires much trust in God, too, because to really not hold to one’s view, but lead open-handedly. You have to trust that your colleagues and the group are able to do the right things, and you have to trust that ultimately God can work through you all together in order to do the things that matter. So that is another key lesson that I learned. And the third lesson that I learned is that when you lead conversationally – and that is my feeling at this time – even at the end of your time, you don’t feel like regretting, or whatever, because you have been transparent from the outset to say, “Hey, here are the issues. How do we deal with those?”. And you also provided the space to hear all the inputs and the perspectives that would allow us to make the best decisions possible. And because of all of that, I feel like conversational leadership actually, I would say, saves the leader, and allows the leader to have even a next step after they have completed their current job. Like in my case, I feel like, okay moving into the next season, I feel like what I had to do in this season has been completed, and I don’t feel like there is something I needed to do which was not done. Not to say that all of the organizational issues have been addressed, or that the organization is perfect. No, there is so much, so much to still do. But I feel like, as to the part that I had to play during this time, I feel like I’ve played my part, and it is up to the following leaders to take it to the new places and to the new dimensions where the organization needs to go.

Nelis: I love what you’re saying there about trust, and about no regrets and doing your part. It also is linked to this sense of when you’re stepping down there are all these people, are still there. The people in the organization that you trusted, that you worked with will continue to carry it. It’s also an expression of trust when you’re thumbed down.

Kate: and the conversation continues.

Michel: And the conversation continues, of course. And yes, and the conversation needs to continue.

Kate: Michel, thank you. This has been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed listening to you, looking back  and hearing your perspective on the years that we’ve lived together so intensely these last 9 years. It’s been a joy to have you on the podcast.

Michel: Thank you very much. Kate. Thank you. Nelis. It’s been nine full years. It’s been nine very exciting years, and I would say, probably the most exciting years of my life, because I mean, we’ve been through so much. And I hope that for you it’s not, it was all joyful, I mean. Not that we didn’t have tough times. I trust that at the end of the day you still count the best moments to outweigh the ones that were not that good.

Kate: Absolutely!

Nelis: Absolutely, definitely. Thank you very much. And it’s as we said, it’s been a joy.

Michel: Yeah, thank you very much, Nelis. Thank you, Kate, so good. 

Nelis: And the conversation continues.

Kate: Yes, thank you, to our listeners, the conversation continues. Although this is the final episode of Season 2. We hope to be back in the future, but we will be taking a break. Thank you for listening.

Nelis: Bye-bye. 

Season 2, Episode 6

Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Season 2, Episode 6
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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.

Season 2, Episode 5

Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation, Season 2, Episode 5
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Transcript

Kate: Hello, and welcome to Leading in Conversation. We are happy to have two colleagues with us today, Anthony and Heline, both from Africa, and I will let them introduce themselves in a minute. They were facilitators at an event that Nelis and I attended in November, and we really liked what they did with the facilitation to generate free, flowing conversations. So we’ve invited them to share with us and with you today. Antony and Heline, welcome.

Anthony: Thank you. Kate it’s really an honour for us to come and join you and Nelis in this part of the conversation and podcast. My name is Anthony Kamau. I am born and raised in the city of Nairobi. That’s where I am, born, raised and working in the city of Nairobi all this while. I work as a special programs coordinator within our organisation and really in a nutshell what that means is my work is to help all the countries that we work with to find innovative ways of resourcing our work, either with people or funding, and training the people that we bring on board. So once again, thank you for having me on board.

Kate: Great to have you with us. Heline.

Heline: Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Nelis. My name is Helen Kimbung, I am glad to be with you on this podcast today. I am Cameroonian, and I serve and live in Cameroon, precisely, Yaounde. My role is in human resources. So I am leading the human resources effort within our organisation here in Cameroon, which entails basically finding people who are passionate and called to be involved in the work we are doing, and then supporting them as they do their work, so that they can thrive while at it.

Kate: Brilliant. Thank you.

Nelis: Yes, thank you. And just as Kate said, we were impressed with the way they both led and organised facilitation of an event. And I’ve been impressed with both of them before, just observing their leadership and their desire to pick up new concepts, to run with them. And that sense of innovation is something that I really see in both of you. So it’s exciting to see that. And we’ll come back to that sense of innovation. So, we met together, as Kate said, to brainstorm together, to look at our strategies in Africa, and to really look at, how do we connect the strategy with the reality on the ground? And that’s what we wanted to explore with people rather than just throw things at people. Because, as we’ve said in this podcast before, that just doesn’t work. And it was really fascinating to see how Anthony and Heline tried to culturally adapt that, to make it work in the African context. So I’d love to hear some thoughts from you on what drove you in those adaptations. So what are your initial thoughts? What comes to mind when you say, okay, yes, when we took those concepts, here’s what we thought. So, what were your ideas? What did you immediately run into, like, okay, we need to make some changes here?

Anthony Kamau: Thank you. Nelis. The idea of running meetings within big organisations has always been either you pick something that is really working very well and ensure that it is implemented all across like a straight jacket. But when Heline and I and the team that we were facilitating the meeting together with, we were asked to lead this, we sort of asked ourselves, what is our audience in this meeting, and what is the goal that we are trying to achieve? And really, the goal that we are trying to achieve is to help people participate in a meeting actively, and we wanted them to feel that there is a level of inclusivity that is included. And at the same time we wanted to come out with actionable output out of the meeting. And so, yeah! So when we thought about the model of open space technology, we said, this is really great. But hey, open space technology has some few risks that we are aware of, and we wanted to mitigate those risks because you don’t want a meeting whereby, because the conversation is loosely guided, the conversations become messy, confusing and frustrating because a lot of input is coming from everywhere. And we sat down and asked, how can open space technology be an African open space technology? That’s where the conversation really started and it flowed on and on.

Heline Kimbung: Yes, and I can add that the idea of having free, flowing conversations, albeit with specific goals to achieve in mind is not a concept that is completely foreign to our context. It helped that the facilitation team was diverse, and we could really ask ourselves what works within our wider African context. We asked ourselves what would be a good, meaningful conversation with what could happen with the leaders that are gathering together at this meeting? How can we make it our own? How can they make it their own? And as we thought about that we considered typical conversations that happen within our different communities, and the whole idea of fireplace charts came up, which which we we thought, this is really typically our thing. People would gather around a fireplace or gather around a meal in the kitchen to have conversations and people who have the liberty to share what was on their mind, to build up new topics and then to let the conversation flow freely. So that’s how we got about fireplace chats.

Nelis: So is that just a name change? Or was there more to it?

Anthony: Well, it’s not just branding, really. It’s both the technique and the brands were a little bit different. So it was a hybrid system, I would say, because what we did is we took all that we love about open space technology. The idea of, you know, ensuring that participants have full control of the meeting, and the experience they have and the outcomes of that whole meeting. But the same time taking something else that we love that is so African, conversational leadership, where people just meet and then there is a specific person who is hosting a conversation, and everyone is feeling free to participate in that conversation. So yeah, good things in open space technology. So it’s not just a rebranding, but taking advantage of that and making it African, and ensuring that we have someone who is identifying, framing, hosting the conversations, the discussions, so that they mirror in a way, those conversations that are happening every day in the villages in Africa. 

Kate: That’s really interesting. I didn’t realise that, the mirroring what happens in African communities, anyway. And tell me more about the role of the host, the person who’s sort of coordinating, loosely coordinating, not controlling.

Heline: In the context of the conversations that we had, the host typically would be, or was the person who received as many people as were interested in a given topic which had been previously framed by the group, by the people, and the hosts would help allow the conversation to happen, and then frame or the host would help get the conversation going, ensure that everyone had a chance to share asking questions, by asking questions. For example, the host could ask, are there other things you would like to share? The host would also be conscious of everyone that was around that fireplace, and having chat, and then inviting voices that were a bit more silent or helping really those that were that had more ideas to also be conscious of everyone else that was together around the fireplace. And hosts also had the responsibility to see that the main takeaways from that conversation were being captured in such a way that they would be beneficial for that group afterwards, but also for the wider group, following those conversations.

Anthony: And one more thing that it’s good we mention is that typically conversations can go on and on and on and on. And it can take different tangents. And what we wanted is the host of that fireplace chart to really ensure that discussions still remain on the topic. It’s good, Africans love to talk about the weather. Africans love to talk about their family members. How is the extended family doing? All those things are good things, but given the time frame, we wanted the hosts of the conversation to also ensure that the discussions are kept on the topic, and that was one of their big roles.

Nelis: So you identified those hosts ahead of time, didn’t you? 

Heline: Yes, we found that it would be helpful for us to identify a discussion facilitator hosts ahead of time. Because then it would give us it would help us save time. So we didn’t have to ask for volunteers on the spot and it’s to see if someone was willing or we didn’t want to have the same people, just the same people doing it over and over. We felt that identifying hosts ahead of time also gave us a chance to  invite leaders that way that way, newer or that way emerging, if you may, to participate in these important conversations by hosting. So we went ahead and identified people, emerging leaders. For the most part, and then we give them the chance to host conversations around the fireplace.

Kate King: That’s really interesting, because I didn’t realise at the time that you had chosen people beforehand. I somehow missed that in the process. So that’s an adaptation of open space technology which says, you bring the topic. And you host. Or maybe people, bring the topic and then we ask, who would like to host this conversation? I should probably add that one of the other aims of this event was to develop emerging leaders. So they were invited along. And it was seen as a development opportunity. So that’s a really good way of giving people that opportunity to try out facilitating a small group. Less threatening in that small group context. I remember the first time that happened to me at an international conference. It was terrifying, but it was a great experience. So tell us, how did the topics emerge?

Anthony: So we wanted it to be very natural. And so how we had designed the facilitation style was, we have one of our global leaders presenting something to do with the global plan. And then, after the presentation, we will solicit responses from the people, and then we get to ask them, “in your table groups just talk about what is your highlight? What are the questions that are emerging out of this?” and then we would collect all those questions and insights in a way and hand it over to the synthesis team. This is a group of guys who are really bright and analytical. They are able to see the big picture out of the messy many ideas that are coming up and then they will summarise for us quickly that these are the main topics that people are really highlighting. And voila! There came our topics, and then we asked people. Now, which topic do you want to talk about?

Kate King: And that was done amazingly quickly. I was really impressed at that because I was sitting right next to the Synthesis team’s little area with their flip chart and their posters on the table, and there was just a buzz of people scurrying around and connecting ideas. And while they were doing that there was something else happening in the room, wasn’t there? There was another session, so it wasn’t even during a break. 

Anthony: Wasn’t it? We intended, intentionally made sure that there is no gap when the synthesis team is doing their work, and we did not want it to feel mechanical. So what we did is ensure that, oh, yeah, someone else is there for 15 min taking us through another session, which feels very natural.

Kate: Yes, it worked very well.

Nelis: Yes. And I think that you touched on this with the hosts as well. And this topic did the same thing. Is you created a way that it is not the same people who always bring up topics, or who end up being the hosts of conversations, so that it really is a collective process for the whole group. And you get a diversity of voices in there, and really create a way that everyone could participate. Everyone co-owned the topic, and it wasn’t your usual, often Western people who ended up volunteering all the topics or being hosts, because I’ve seen that before, and that there is that risk. So I think you really overcame some cultural issues that way.

Heline: And just adding that even the table, the discussion host, the host had the chance to pick the topics that they wanted to host by themselves. So we didn’t just hand topics to different hosts to say, “Okay, you are hosting this discussion around this topic”, but they had the chance to choose the topic that they wanted to host the conversation around. So it allowed for them to be comfortable and to feel like they were on top of facilitating the conversations that were happening around the table.

Kate King: And two things that I noticed were, if there were a lot of people who wanted to discuss one topic, you actually split the group into two, so it was a decent size. And I think that was a really good decision, because if the group gets, too, some people automatically sort of just start to sit back and opt out. 

Heline: We had previously decided that for a good conversation to really happen within the time that was allocated. It would be helpful to have a certain number of people, and so we kept our eyes in the room, and when we saw that there was interest in one topic, and we had more than the maximum number of people going towards that group. We had numerous hosts that had already been pre identified. We just went ahead and split the group, and a different host picked up the topic so the same topic could be discussed at 2 or 3 different tables if there were more and more people that were interested in that conversation.

Kate: And I think that worked well, for another reason is that a previous event I had attended one topic really touched everyone, and there was a huge group at that table, twelve people, I think it was. And then some of the other groups just had a couple of people, 2 or 3, and it had that feeling of, I think people were like, oh, what are we missing out on that table? Why is everyone on that table? Oh, this topic is more important to people. The way you equalised the group sizes, actually, I think, had that really positive effect on the dynamic for the rest of the groups. I noticed that there weren’t any groups that just had 2 or 3 people. Actually, it spread quite evenly.

Anthony: Yeah, that was something we had not planned for. We had hoped that as people raised the topics, you know, the synthesis team, if they do a good job, how we will know is the manner in which people will be distributed in those groups. And so because sometimes you might have a synthesis team that comes up with topics and people are not gravitating towards those topics, and having people in one group might represent that that’s a topic that is of interest for most people and needs attention. But it might also indicate that the synthesis team has not really captured the individual topics that are there. So that was something that we found out as a, you know, a reward of having good synthesis team members working with you.

Kate: Now in pure open space technology, there isn’t a synthesis team. It’s actually individuals who put their hand up, and they come to the front, and they write their topic on a piece of paper and say, Who wants to join me? And using that method, you often end up with a couple tables where actually, there isn’t much interest. Only a few people go. And so you don’t have such good conversations. And I think the synthesis probably ensures that you’re bringing together several ideas around a similar topic. So there are naturally going to be more people interested in joining that group. Just a small thing that I observed, but I think it was really helpful.

Nelis: There was another element that you introduced that isn’t pure open space technology. And that is what you call clan gatherings. So can you expand a bit on that? What was the thinking behind that? And how did that work?

Anthony: When you have a team of people who are coming from about thirty-four countries, and you have operations in most of those countries, you want to ensure that at the end of the day people who are coming from the same context can come together and say, “Hey, guys, this has been a good strategy meeting that asks us what we need to do in order to serve the people that we serve”. So the clan meeting really naturally came out of that because we wanted to ensure that we give opportunities for people who are coming from the same country to just sit down together and discuss, “What are we hearing? What are our actual commitments that we are coming out of this meeting with?”. So that it’s not one of those feel good meetings you’ve come to and “Oh, yeah, we experienced this new fireplace kind of thing where ideas were coming up. But is it leading to actionable outputs that are contextual?”. So that’s why we put together the clan meetings. And the interesting thing is again we are looking at, this is Africa. Where do we find the most equalising and the most agreement of things? It’s really within the clan, because it’s where people come together and say, “Hey, we heard about this. But does it really work in our context? Does it really work in our village? Or is it just something that really happens broadly but it can’t take place in our context?”. So that explains the clan meeting.

Heline: Right, adding to that, while the Fireplace Chats gave everyone in the room, every leader in the room, to have conversations around topics that interest them so they could go as they wanted to, the clan meetings now gave them the chance to come back home, bring back what they’ve been hearing, be it from the fireplace chats that happened with leaders from other countries or from other contexts. They could now come back with their own immediate team, their clan, as Antony was saying. “This is what I’m hearing. This is a success story from country A. This is a challenge from country. B. How does that really apply to us?”. “What action steps can we take from these things that we’ve been hearing from others, that we would bring back home and try to contextualise it?”. So it was really a time to bring back home what leaders have been hearing from everyone else that was in the room.

Kate: Yeah, I think that was such a brilliant move from the facilitation team and achieved that cross fertilisation that we’re always looking for when we hold these international events or area events so that you may, you know you may be stuck on one particular thing in your own country. But then, when you meet with others who actually have similar challenges, and you see how they’re tackling them. You can learn something and contextualise it and apply it in your context.

Nelis: Yeah, I agree, that I loved how that worked together. And it’s this sense of inspiration and an application. So you go from inspiration to application. You go from cross fertilisation to bringing it home, like you called it. And it also has this sense of collective responsibility. It’s not just about the individuals. And I think that is one of the African cultural contexts, of course. You’ve got to co-own. It is not about me owning it, it’s about us owning that. And that’s where the clan, I think, is absolutely essential. So I really like that sense of bringing it home, of ownership as a group. And then, a sense of okay, what are we going to do with this? So how are we going to push this forward and that bridges that gap to making it actionable, that you talked about Anthony early on.

Kate: And that’s often a criticism of conversational leadership. People say, “Oh, it’s just talk. And then what do you take away at the end of it?” Well, I think if a generative process, conversational leadership is done well, it’s done exactly how you did. You actually had people make commitments at the end, and stand up and share them with the whole room, which I thought was very brave. But  it really does sort of start to cement that into reality. You’ve got to think, well, what are we going to do? And now we’re going to tell people about it, and that introduces an element of accountability as well.

Anthony: Yeah, and on top of accountability, what that ends up doing is when people know what you are committing to, they know how to support you, be it leaders who are at the area level or global level, or people who are within your context. When they hear you as the director or one of the individuals in that country saying, “This is what we are committing to”. They start thinking, “Okay, this is how I can reallocate my resources to come alongside you to help you to be successful”.

Heline: Right? And I think it was also really beneficial for leaders present that we could have those clan meetings while together, because sometimes you could say, Okay, you go into into meetings, and then you take your own notes, and you take your own ideas and you take your own possible action points, and then you go back home and try to see what to do with it or not. So being able to have those clan meetings, while together, was also really showing evidence of us wanting, wanting the leaders present to start to together with their clan see what they could do, and how they could bring it back home. So it was happening while they were still together within that atmosphere, in those meetings and not just “Okay, we went to these meetings, and we came back. And what can we remember from our notes? And what can we do?” So it was, I think, that it was also beneficial that we could have those clan meetings happening following conversations, while still in that atmosphere of those meetings.

Anthony: Yeah. And I just wanted to mention that, you know, one of the things about those commitments is, I was talking to one of the leaders just this week and I was asking him, “How are you doing with your commitments?” He said, “Oh, yeah, you know what I need to meet with my larger leadership team, apart from the people that we had invited, so that we talk more about that and see how to move forward”. And, one of the emerging leaders that he had invited was on his case, asking him, “What are we doing about these things that we talked about, or are there any plans for us to move forward? Or was it just a paper that we wrote to show, you know ,the people who are in the meeting that we are committed to something?”. And that in itself really gave me joy, because this emerging leader is a young lady who is not yet 30, but she is really looking forward to her contribution mattering in the organisation.

Kate: And that, I think, is so key. When you use a participatory process like this, people see their contribution mattering, and it energises them to continue afterwards. They were part of creating those commitments, and they want to see them developed. I think, particularly if you bring younger emerging leaders in, they’re not so consumed with the overwhelming burden of running an organisation like the senior leaders are, and maybe they have a little bit more space, a little bit more energy to be part of pushing those things forward. Love it, it’s great. So, looking back now, a month or so on, how do you feel it went overall? Is there anything you’d do differently next time? Anything you learned in the process?

Anthony: Yeah. Just recently we met together as a facilitation team, and we were drafting our report that we want to send back to our leaders and we asked ourselves, when we were thinking about the recommendation, what would we have done differently? And what will we tell our leaders, top leader, to implement differently? And obviously, one of the big things is the tension of when you want people to discuss, how much presentation do you want to do? So, striking that balance between a plenary session where someone stands and they are talking to you about a specific aspect of the global plan versus sitting down in your groups and having conversation. That balance is still one of those things that we are thinking, “Oh, yeah, we are not sure whether we got it right”. We are not sure whether we would want to go with either. So it’s one of those battles that is still going on, and still unresolved in our report.

Heline: Yeah, I can add that one lesson, or one, I wouldn’t say it is something that could have been done differently, because I believe that as we were planning those meetings, it became clear, is that when you have a mandate or when you have a responsibility to facilitate a meeting, such important meetings, and you do not really, you get to really understand what the objectives are, what your responsibilities are, it can be a challenge. I found that the leadership that gave us responsibility to  facilitate those meetings, to plan and facilitate those meetings, communicated very clearly with us, and the communication was clear, not because we had this one time clear conversation. It was clear eventually, because we, as we met with the leadership ,as we asked questions, and as they told us, painted a picture for us. It became even clearer what the responsibility was, and I think that helped a great deal. Another thing I can share is that even though the leadership had an idea of what they wanted the meetings to be like and what the goals were for the meeting, they gave us some liberty to be able to contextualise those meetings and make it ours for our context in Africa. And I think that’s really key. Because that’s why the tools that were proposed to us, we had the chance to understand a bit more, especially with Antony on our team, who had also not, just understood, rather experienced the use of other tools, particularly the open space technology tool for facilitating meetings. It was helpful that we felt that there was a degree of liberty that was given to the team to contextualise things. So for us to be able to say, Okay, how can this be meaningful in an African context. We felt that the team had communicated clearly, and we could actually do that or meet the goals that had been previously communicated to us. So let’s say, that was really really great, and it helped us a great deal.

Nelis: I would like to ask a more broad question. So you’ve been familiar with conversational leadership for a while. And now you have led this at this kind of level with a large group. So what are your additional learnings around conversational leadership? What works and doesn’t work, as you look back?

Anthony: conversational leadership, let me start by saying, Nelis, it’s not really

something that is foreign to the African context. That’s one of the things that I’m starting to see. Africans lead by conversations a lot. You find very easily, leaders want to identify an issue and frame it in such a way that they can invite people to speak into that issue in a clear way. So that’s one thing that has been solidified in my mind that conversational. But something that probably I learned is, it’s very easy for the leader not to participate in the conversation when conversational leadership is happening, because it sort of feels like, “Oh, I have framed the issue. Now, guys, come and talk about it, and then, when you’re done, you let me know.”. And it puts leaders as outsiders. And I think this is especially me and other people on the facilitation team. We did feel like we were outsiders to this conversation. So really we were not going to the table discussions. And probably sometimes it’s because we are following up with other things. But for the majority of the time it’s because we felt our work was to ensure that we are framing these issues and the conversations and allow people to talk. But we ourselves and other global leaders, a few who attended, sometimes I did notice, it’s like we are pulling away from those conversations and waiting for the reporting to come back. And it is something that I need to work on, and we need to work on as an organisation.

Kate: I will say, having done facilitation at other meetings before we learned about conversational leadership that just does happen if you’re a facilitator. I remember coming away from one of our international conferences, saying “I’m actually not aware of what emerged really or what happened in the sessions because I was so focused on running the sessions, the activities, the different outputs, etc.”. I didn’t really participate. And in those days I wasn’t a leader. I was just a facilitator, it didn’t really matter. But I see what you mean. If you have leaders who are part of the facilitation team, then they are missing out of being part of the process. And there’s a real challenge of being a participant facilitator. And I think we have to just be really careful about that. I also noticed that I and other global leaders were often hanging back from the group, because we were told, we committed as a group of global leaders coming that we weren’t going to dominate, that we were there to listen, to learn and to let the people on the ground really contribute and take things forward. It’s quite easy, if you come in as a global leader and you speak, nobody wants to really challenge you. They’ll just sort of nod and repeat what you’re saying. But actually we wanted to deliberately hold back, so that that may have been some of what you were seeing.

Nelis: But it’s a good challenge, because as Anthony is saying, there is a risk in that, so it’s finding that balance of really feeling you can participate without dominating and creating space and that’s very tricky, because you often fall on one side or the other. You end up dominating anyway, or you end up not really participating, and neither result is great. So that’s quite an interesting challenge. Thank you for raising that.

Anthony: To put it in the African lenses, Nelis, is what the global leaders were doing really, is to prepare a good meal for their visitors, if you may, but then they are not joining them in celebrating in that meal, you know, just putting it for them and telling them, “Hey, enjoy!” And you are not eating with us, then we are not in one spirit, if you may, we are not walking together in this. You are just inviting us to your table so that you show off and put your table there, and then you leave us. 

Kate: Wow! When you put it like that Anthony, it’s so powerful and I feel terrible. Thank you for explaining it like that. Yeah, I can see that now. We had good intentions in holding back, but actually interpreted, perhaps from an African perspective, that was negative. Definitely something for us to think about. Heline?

Heline: Yes, another thing I can share, just going back to the question Nelis asked about having co-facilitated these large meetings, and what one would say from the perspective of conversational leadership. One thing, I realised again, is that conventional leadership really can be very uncomfortable because, even though the leader or the leaders were there to frame the big issue, in reality, they do not have control of how the conversations were going to go and what the outcomes of those conversations were going to be. So that can be uncomfortable. And it’s really like being in a vulnerable place because you’re not sure, you know, what people are taking exactly what taking out of those conversations, and if it’s away from what you intended or not. But I think it is very freeing when we are able to do that, frame the bigger issue and and and let people take the conversation around that big issue, or within the scope of that big issue as they would choose, because they are thinking about how that works for them, how that applies for them, how that is a challenge for them. So I think at the end of the day, when you look at it, despite coming from a place of being uncomfortable, it can be very rewarding. Because then what comes is not what the leader is saying, “Okay, this is what has worked for for Côte d’Ivore, so bring it to Cameroon, it’s going to work. This is what has worked for Kenya. So let’s take it to Uganda, it’s going to work”. But really people are hearing, and then they are trying to bring it home by themselves. So that’s one thing I really saw that I think is powerful when conversations are facilitated in a way like what we had.

Nelis: Thank you. I really appreciate those takeaways, two massive takeaways from both of you. One is the challenge of real participation, not preparing a meal and then not participating. And, secondly, the power of letting the uncomfortable happen so that people can take it home themselves. Another quote I remember from both of you, is this sense of, conversational leadership fits in Africa. You didn’t say it exactly like that. But that observation, I think, is quite powerful. So we need to come to a close. Are there any other things that you would like to say, there’s another takeaway I want you to, or our listeners, to take home from this?

Anthony: For me, it’s just to mention that when you invite us to this podcast, of course, the assumption is that two of us really worked very hard on this. But in truth, the facilitation team was made up of a multicultural, multi-generational kind of team. And the impact that this brought was that we are having people who have a rich history and experience, and they are bringing it as part of the tools that we are using. But at the same time we are having people who are coming from diverse contexts and they are bringing it to the table. And so, in order to put together this as a success, we really needed that aspect of multicultural teams, but also multigenerational, because together we do better. And that is what Africa believes in.

Nelis: Great.

Kate: I love that there’s still space for oldies like Nelis and I.  Heline, any last thoughts from you?

Heline: That’s for sure. There is space, there is actually space for everyone, and that is very, that’s really African. It’s like cooking a good pot of soup. Usually we have all kinds of spices that go into it, and they come from all kinds of places. Some come from the ground, others come from the tree, some it’s really just the flower of the tree, some is the seed, it comes from from all kinds of places. And I think that, like Anthony was saying, what we had, we are getting a sense that it was a good pot of soup, that was prepared, and it involved the participation of everyone. Again, it’s been served. It’s a process that takes time. We usually cook for hours and hours. We usually have conversations for hours and hours. We don’t know how to really just do very quick, you know some of our quickest meals would still take an hour. So that is what we were finding with those meetings, and that is what we believe that even coming away from that, we need to continue to promote. Give it the time. Let the conversation flow, and then let’s see what we take out of it. Our hope and our desire is that we would all be able to attend the goals that have been set and just feast from this good pot of soup that we’ve been cooking, or we’ve cooked together.

Nelis: I love that image and that festive sense, the sense of it being a meal, a real gathering, the multicultural aspect of that. It’s actually fun to see how you guys also made that physically a reality. I mean the multicoloured cloth, the African sort of decoration, all of that. Going into that room you had that sense of we’re gonna have this time of festivity together, conversation, a good part of soup, basically.

Kate: I love that. I’m now going to think of conversational leadership as that pot of soup bubbling away for hours while people mill around the fire talking, celebrating, being together. It’s really moving away from the task focus that those of us from the West are often guilty of and to the relationship, the process. I love it. Thank you, Heline, for that image. That’s it. I think that’s a very generative image. And we’ve talked about that in previous podcasts. So we’ll see where we can take that in future. Thank you both. This has been an awesome podcast, really enjoyed hearing your really unique perspective on conversational leadership. And I think there’s a lot for us to take away and chew over there.

Anthony: Thank you very much for inviting us. Yeah, we appreciate the time and we hope that you know, learners, listeners, are learning, and we ourselves are learning through these conversations. Really, thank you.

Kate: Thanks.

Heline: Thank you.

Kate: Thank you to our listeners for joining us again. As always, I’ll say, head over to leadinginconversation.net if you have any comments, thoughts, questions to share as a result of listening to this podcast. Thank you everyone. See you next time, bye-bye.

Season 2, episode 4

Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Season 2, episode 4
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Transcript

Kate: Hello and welcome back to Leading in Conversation, and also a very Happy New Year to you. We’re kicking off our first podcast of this new year 2024, with a special guest, our colleague, Andreas Ernst. Welcome, Andreas!

Andreas: Thank you, Kate. Good to see you.

Nelis: We’re excited to have you here. We have touched base from time to time from many years back to very recently in a hotel, but there’s also years that we don’t see each other. So it’s good to have you here. But our guests don’t know you, so why don’t you share a little bit of your background and what you do, where you’re from, etc.

Andreas: Thank you. Yeah. My name is Andreas Ernst. I’m an MK, for those who might have heard that term. It means missionary kid, which means, basically, I’m confused, lost my identity. No, it just means it takes a bit of a while to explain my identity. But I was born in Cameroon, grew up there, with parents who were involved in language development work. I’m currently working with SIL in media training, coordinating media training. And, yeah, I love what we do in media today in SIL, and I’m glad I have a chance here to talk to you two about what this conversational leadership look like might, what conversational leadership looks like in the context of community development. 

Kate: So Nelis referred to a hotel. We actually met up with Andreas and his wife for dinner in a hotel in Budapest, when we were there a couple of months ago, weeks ago, our leadership team was there, and we touched on the subject of conversational leadership. And Andreas’ eyes lit up. He was like, “Oh, I’d love to talk to you some more about that.”. So we said, “Well, how about you do it and we record it for our podcast?”. So thank you for being a willing victim! So tell me, Andreas, how did you first hear about conversational leadership or get interested in it?

Andreas: I think the first time I actually heard that particular term used was probably during one of our SIL Leadership training events. We have this foundational course that you both know and are part of building and teaching, and it’s called 4 Pillars. And during this time leadership was talked about a lot in terms of how you can bring different cultures together. How do you work in cross cultural settings, and especially the need for that sort of leadership style to be very inclusive and and very much based on conversations and dialogue. And that’s something I’ve always been fascinated with and loved. So it attracted me. And also, just because of the way I grew up living in different cultures, I’ve often found that I’ve had to sort of be a chameleon, adapting to cultures and always asking lots of questions to gain trust, to bridge, I found myself sometimes between African cultures and Western cultures. And I’ve seen that’s actually something that gives trust and safety so that you can work together more easily with other people. So when I studied literacy program development, I got very interested in all the participatory methods. And yeah, so that’s where my passion comes from.

Nelis: I find it interesting what you’re saying here, Andreas, because you, at the start you said being a missionary kid means I’m basically confused. You said, that’s part of my identity. And then you took it right into this conversational leadership concept about listening, about being in between cultures, about not always being sure building bridges. It’s kind of fascinating. You’re bringing your identity into actually this topic. Am I reading that correctly?

Andreas: Yeah, and you know, for me it’s been an ongoing battle in my life to know, who am I? I have always found myself between different sort of cultures. So you know my parents, you know  they’re from a Western background but serving in Africa for over many years. But then me having been born there and growing up, going out with my friends and setting traps, and hunting with slingshots, and fishing in the rivers, and playing soccer, and learning the culture that the way you live as a community of children. And then the uncles and aunts you have in an African village – it takes a village to raise a child, as they say. So I always had all these different cultures around me. I realised there are these clashes between different world views, and I often found myself in between, because I could kind of sense the differences in expectations. I remember one particular moment when I actually decided not to join a group on a trip, because I was embarrassed.

Because I felt like you know, I’m not sure how this is going to come across. And that’s just because I was immature, didn’t really know how to handle those differences. But yeah, it’s that clash of different cultures and worldviews where people are doing the best they can to communicate. And yet I’ve always felt there is that need from both, from whatever side one comes from, culturally speaking to find a meeting ground somewhere, also in terms of how decisions are being made. In terms of verbalising expectations, and not assuming too much. So I think that’s where my interest comes from all the way back to my roots.

Kate: Obviously, you said, you’re interested in how we can use conversational leadership in community development. And you’ll have a natural inroad there from your childhood, growing up in an African village culture that will probably, I assume, make it easier for you to have those conversations and culturally appropriate ways in Cameroon because you grew up in that context?

Andreas: In some ways, yes, I have had the privilege of growing up with those different cultures. The other side of it though, too, is that because I can switch, I sometimes don’t behave the way people expect me to behave. So, just to give an example, somebody might think I have a certain mindset and I come to a project and just because of the colour of my skin they might think “Well, this guy’s gonna throw money at things just the way the other person did before them or somebody else, or some other organisation has been doing so let’s expect them to do that”. And that has a big – I would say – almost negative impact on how community development can be developed.

Kate: That’s a really interesting point about the expectations that are there even before you arrive in a given context to start a conversation. You’re up against people’s expectations of you, based on your culture, the colour of your skin, etc. They will make assumptions about you.

Nelis: Yeah, but I think that’s also one of the strengths you bring. You’re more aware of your assumptions and your worldview than somebody who hasn’t been in multiple cultures at the same time. And I think what you’re saying and I resonate with that is, so much of conversation and conversational leadership depends on unearthing assumptions, unearthing expectations. Otherwise you talk at a surface level, but you never get to the real issues. So from my perspective, you do have a leg up there and I think it’s one of the reasons you’re so interested in it because it helps you bridge those different sort of realities. So can you say a little bit more about how you’re practically doing that? So when you are in those kinds of contexts, how do you bridge gaps and expectations? How do you help people understand one another?

Andreas: Well, I guess through trial and error. It’s making a lot of mistakes in learning from them. Yeah, I mean, I’ve been involved in a couple of different community-owned projects. And I’ve come sort of to the conclusion that it’s a lot to do with just taking the time. You know I do have some Swiss blood in me, being half Swiss, and having been professionally working in Switzerland as well and also the kind of organisational structures, and planning, impact planning and what not that we do typically in organisations can kind of make us be focused on intermediate goals and short-term goals that we need to measure. So I have also been involved in development projects like that where I’ve probably tried to move ahead a bit more quickly than I should have. But one thing I’ve just learned is just how precious it is to be on the ground. Just to give an example, I was working in an area in Cameroon where we had a very clear task given by the organisation, which was to promote literacy to promote the use of mother tongue in the local churches and we were even as people on the ground, being fed very specific things that we were supposed to be doing and even there already the conversational leadership between us who were on the ground and the higher up leaders of the organisation wasn’t always running smoothly. There was sort of the idea that you were being told what to do, because others knew what that community needed, because they had researched it and planned the project. But then, as I was working on the ground, I realised that the felt needs of the community were very different. And if we were going to achieve anything in that community because they were so closely such a close community, and everything was controlled by the sort of traditional leaders, we were needing to get some trust from the leadership, from the local traditional chiefs. So that, for example, even the Muslim community there would not really accept what we were doing, would not accept us, would not understand the reason why we were there without that. And so I would just regularly go and visit the chief. He would invite me to come and just chat with him because he was lonely, you know, he felt that me as an expat, I was sort of approachable and safe, so he would just want to have long conversations about his religious beliefs, and so on. And then, with the trust that came over time, he started asking me to go. He said, “Okay, it’s all very nice what you’re doing, and I’m supporting. But can you help us find water? That’s the biggest problem we have”. So he took me up to the mountain with all his advisers, and we went up there several times, and then we started looking into partners who might be able to drill a hole. Get that water flowing back down to the village. And it was through that conversation that we gained the trust, and then, later on, we were able to start a reading centre in that village, and he made a decree that the different schools, the different religious communities, that everybody should contribute a certain number of bricks. And even the schoolchildren were making bricks for us to build the building. He gave us land for it. And actually today that project might become a radio station. I think, for me, it was a lot about having conversations, so that we know what people want, and so that people know that we have good intentions, that we care, that we are flexible, we’re serving. And then out of that grew what became a reading centre. And again, our plan had been to say, “Okay, let’s have some books and reading materials available for the youth there”, because a lot of kids were studying at secondary level. But then, when the project evolved, it actually became a reading centre for kids who came and they had solar energy in the evening, so they could do their homework, they have all the books available there. That was not planned. That was how it evolved. And then, I still remember when the chief reached out to me and said, “I’d like to thank you, because this year we got the best results of all the schools in the area thanks to the solar system and the centre that we had built”. 

Nelis: It’s fascinating what you’re touching on. One is taking time. And I think that we have touched on that in other podcasts as well, the importance of taking the time. The importance of building trust. And flexibility. And I think that last point of, just, it’s going to evolve into something different from what you expect is, I think, a key part of conversational leadership. We talk about this whole uncertainty, and you can’t plan it all out and it’s kind of exciting to see how you very practically do that at the local level, and what the results then are. That’s encouraging.

Kate: So my question is, how much were the people in the community involved in coming up with the solutions and what was needed? You said at one point that the chief made a decree. That’s not what we consider conversational leadership but we’re dealing with very different cultures here.

Andreas: I think that the fact that the chief made that decree was not to say that there wasn’t a need for us to have lots of meetings, so we had very regular meetings and we made sure we chose kind of a neutral place and we we kept sending invitations to the Muslim community, different church communities, different political leaders, and they’d show up, and there’d be lots of plastic chairs out, and and then also for me, it was very important that right from the start, when we were leading these meetings, I wasn’t the one always talking, so I had by that time I identified some local Christians that I trusted in, with whom you know I had been sharing the idea. They had already inspired the idea through what they saw as the need. And so it became our kind of vision to explore. And then, as we invited these communities, we kept having to have meetings because it wasn’t just about what the chief had decreed, but it was  to help people understand what this might look like, what are the practical needs? And then there was the eternal hunger for people to know who is going to own this? Generally, people want to know, who’s going to own this? Who has the power in the end?  That’s how people understood, you know what it might look like. And they also felt like we were building into what they were saying, the concerns they had. So, for example, we built a committee of people who were going to manage the construction site itself and we made sure that every community had a representative in that structure and so forth.

Nelis: I love what you said about the ownership question. We haven’t explored that deeply in this podcast, but I think it’s on the minds of a lot of people when actually, decisions are made, who owns it in the end? Do I have a real say, or is it just show? Is it just a sense of, yeah, we talked to you but in the end the decision is actually somewhere else. That sense of real ownership, I think, is a core point. And I see how that worked in the community and how you created symbols around that, that it’s not just what you do. It’s also putting some flag in the ground, basically saying, “Well, we’ve got a representative on the committee that won’t guarantee that real ownership, but it’s a symbol of it”. And I think that those are helpful concepts to keep in mind.

Andreas: And one thing we felt that we talked a lot about during those meetings with the different communities was not just about who might do what and how we could share the load. But also what types of people are needed. You know, people, sometimes, they might say, “We need an imam, we need somebody religiously positioned to have power”. Or they might say, “Well, we need people with MA degrees”, or politically favoured people and that sort of thing. So it was also talking about, are we sure we want this? What would it look like? What are the ups and downs of these types of people and then defining together…that was very interesting. What should be the moral characteristic that we’re looking for in these people? And also that conversation actually ensured that people were trusting each other more because they were realising, “Okay, we are making consensus on this. You know, the Catholics are not saying the Pope has to be in charge, or it’s the Pope’s”. I mean, that’s exaggerated. But you know, it was kind of becoming clear that we want to keep it at a humble level, where we want people that we trust, that are serving, so that afterwards we don’t start accusing each other of abusing power, or trying to benefit personally or as a separate community from the project. And yeah, so it was that moral side of it that we could have a conversation about with everybody. So that was interesting as well.

Kate: Dialogue is such a key thing when you are bringing together different faith communities, isn’t it because you have to spend a long time talking to build the trust, to make sure you’re all on the same page. And it’s great to see that demonstrated in your project.

Andreas:  I think for me also, one thing that I struggled with at times was to just say, “Okay, I don’t wanna be the one leading it. I can be there to assist. I can bring in a lot as a neutral person, but the local people are facilitating that conversation”. You know, sometimes you wonder, okay, why didn’t they also ask this other thing? Or why did they push back so hard on this thing? Or you know, sometimes you wish people had a bit more experience in long term exposure to this sort of conversational type leadership. But you don’t, or you can’t always assume that people have that. And yet they can learn it through the process. And then to say, okay, that is in itself a goal worth pursuing. And it doesn’t mean one has to jump in. But it’s also something they learn, and also to realise that people tend to belong to one community or another. No matter, you know, how much they want to bring in consensus, and they will be seen through the eyes of what group they belong to. They may not have the sort of neutral sense of trust directed towards them from other communities simply because they are being categorised. And so when they speak, they also have to make sure they represent that particular, those particular roots that they’re representing. And I think to be honest, I think that’s where we, as you know, neutral facilitators from the outside, do have a role. I do think that you know any development agency organisation has a huge moral responsibility to be involved in community development and conversational change simply because we have on our side managed to be a little bit more neutral if we will accept it and work with that. I’ve heard it said that we Westerners shouldn’t be involved in community development because we don’t know the culture. We don’t really know what’s going on and over the years I’ve seen that I’m not sure it’s always true. I’ve seen some Westerners that are very good at knowing the local culture, very good at asking questions, at bringing consensus and also some local facilitators who are maybe using a model of  leading change that is very top down, even though culturally acceptable. And that doesn’t always work simply. So it doesn’t work just because they are from that community or may know the community. So anyway. But I don’t know. That’s something I actually would love to hear what you two think about, too.

Kate: Yeah, I think we definitely have a role. I mean someone coming in from the outside to a situation where there’s a lot of vested interest, and you want the whole system represented in the project. You want to know that you’re hearing the views of different communities, different sub-communities within the bigger project community. That we can perhaps bring that neutrality that is helpful sometimes. Nelis, you’ve worked in Cameroon specifically, any thoughts on this.

Nelis: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, there is that possibility. And I love the way you put it as almost a moral responsibility. But it’s also very tempting to forget that the real ownership lies with the people themselves, because you so easily as a development person with relative power, relative money, sort of take on the Savior complex. And secondly, I was really convicted myself that it is very easy to see how other people should solve their problems. Because you don’t know the nuances of it. So you don’t see how hard it actually is. So, as an outsider, you always think that the problems of somebody else should be easy to solve. But you know how difficult your own are. Well, if we come with that humility, and really recognizing the ownership of the local, to really recognize the complexity and and often really good reasons why it wasn’t solved up to this point. Then you can, I think, have a valuable role as an outsider, whether that’s coming from the West or from within the wider culture, or whatever. But there’s a commitment to humility and listening, and not taking up the ownership or taking it away from the people, I think, is going to be key in that. And interestingly enough, that I think is, it applies actually to wider conversational leadership conversations in general. So I see a beautiful sort of overlap with what we talked about in other contexts.

Kate: I don’t know if you listen to the podcast we did with Peter Van Dingenen? I loved how Peter described the way he went into the villages, and kind of acted a bit dumb and just asked questions. So what do you mean? And tell me about this. He went with the assumption, they have all the information needed to solve the problem, and in this case it was latrines, installing latrines. The one installed by an NGO just kind of collapsed and wasn’t appropriate, and he was there to try and help solve the latrine problem. But he just went in asking questions and kind of playing a little bit dumb. Like, “You tell me how this works”. That’s connected to what Nelis is saying about humility, not going in with all the answers. You have to hold back as a facilitator, even if you might have more information, if you want a solution to emerge from the people, from the community, they have to be the ones to bring the solution, to bring the answers.

Andreas: Yeah, I really like that reminder also. The fact that the way that people might sometimes expect somebody who’s a facilitator to act in a certain way can also kind of create that idea in ourselves that we think, oh, we are, we do have some answers. And oh, these people are expecting a solution. Particularly in some African context where you know it’s the elite, or it’s the person who is well positioned financially, or whatever politically, or from the outside. Typically there is a certain expectation that they come in, and they solve the problem as a sort of Messiah. And so it’s not just being very much aware of what we don’t know when asking those questions, but also when people respond or interact with you as if you are that sort of person to say, Okay, this is a trap. I am very basic here. I don’t really know what’s happening, and I am allowed to ask questions that make people think, even though I know that what they would probably answer would bring it back to me again. And so it’s that sort of that sense of playing dumb that can sometimes break up the notion that people have that they can’t do anything, or they don’t really know, or that they shouldn’t be talking because somebody else should be talking. Even asking specific people that are not used to being asked can be one way of breaking that up and bringing that wise input from a particular person or other, and nobody can tell you. Hey? Why did you ask that woman to say something when the village chief is present because you’re just a naive Western white man, so…

Kate: You can use that to your advantage at times. I recently did some coaching training, coaching not to become a coach, but to help me become a better supervisor. And I was really struck by the emphasis on shifting away from yourself. It’s not about you. Even the information you want to find out about, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s all about the person you’re supervising or coaching their agency, their ability to do things themselves. You shouldn’t be telling them, you shouldn’t even be asking leading questions that take them to the conclusion you want them to reach. Really challenging for me, actually. And there’s a whole sense of sort of emptying out of yourself when you are entering into a facilitational role like this. You’ve got to leave yourself and your preferences and ideas at the door. Now it’s different if you’re a participant facilitator, which we often are in work situations, you know we are part of the solution as well. But if you’re coming just as a facilitator to a community, and actually you won’t be living in the community and living with the solution that is developed, you’ve always got to empty yourself and to give the community agency to come up with the answers themselves, the solutions. Yeah. I thought that was really challenging for me, actually.

Andreas: Yeah, I think that is very true. It’s so challenging to make sure we empty ourselves. And I think it’s particularly difficult, too, because we in some sense, to build a change or to bring innovation there are things that maybe an outsider brings in, in terms of the know-how or advocacy, that can take root, that people may not know about. So in some ways you have to know what it is you offer and be very clear about it. But by doing that right away you also influence how much responsibility or expectations, how many expectations come your way in terms of what you’re going to be doing. So I think that’s also a really very big challenge. And if I compare, for example, this project I talked about earlier, where something came out of it that was quite shaped by the different participants in terms of location, the books that were available, and so forth. With when you want to maybe start a radio project. Again, you might know who could be technical partners, financial partners. What sort of process is needed to have the licensing from the government? You may be in a position to be an advocate for a project like that, and, or to find other local people who can do that. And so giving that information, but doing it in a way that the people receiving it own it, that you say, “Okay, this is what you could do or do you have more questions?” but being courageous enough to own what it is that we really can bring to the table, and also what we can’t and constantly renegotiating, re-clarifying that. And the other thing I find very difficult is just to refrain from intervening when something doesn’t move forward. To just say, “Okay, this meeting last time, this last meeting didn’t take place, or they haven’t yet collected this amount of money that we had decided we would collect” and then just wait on it, even if it takes a couple of months. So that people see, okay, this is really not going anywhere if we don’t do anything, and to be okay with that. And I think long-term it does pay off. 

Kate: The problem is, if you play to heavy-handed a role when you leave, inevitably, as the ex-pat, what’s going to happen? The aim is for a sustainable product, a sustainable library, or whatever it is that you’re building. And if, if you are too involved, then things may not last beyond your presence, but also what’s produced may be something that works for you as a Westerner, but doesn’t work in the local context. Therefore it’s not sustainable in the long run, either.

Nelis: And that needs to be balanced with still wanting to see change. And actually, people looking to you to help bring that change from both sides, actually from the agency that sent you and from the community. And so I think that’s the art, isn’t it? There isn’t a recipe as such. It’s knowing when to keep pushing, and when to really step back and just wait. And really allowing that ownership to be real, but still play your role. I think that comes back to the question we always ask ourselves: so in conversational leadership, how do you play the role of leader well enough? Because there is a leadership aspect for this. And so I find it’s fascinating to keep wrestling with that. I think that’s what we all need to do to learn that.

Andreas: Yeah. And just to give an example, recently, I realised that sometimes you’re kind of stuck between two worlds. Recently we started a radio project and this partner gave us the whole studio equipment, the antenna and everything and we got the licence from the government. The community worked really hard. They mobilised funding for a lot of the aspects of the work. And then, because of safety reasons they were still afraid of starting the broadcasting and it was just delaying and delaying, and they had also outsourced some of the practical work on the antenna to somebody. And then there was a kind of a dispute with the technician and what not. And now that the partner wrote to me and said, “Well, if you guys are not broadcasting very soon, we think we might need to take away the whole station and send it somewhere else”. And you know I kind of diplomatically tried to write back to them, say, “Well, thank you for your patience. It’s taken more time than we maybe we were planning for. But you know…”. So I just realise there’s also that side of realising that you’re not just communicating to the community, you’re also protecting them, and being okay with that.

Andreas: And also, I think sometimes, as Western ministries, we realise how much ownership is important. And we even, for that, we have a plan. We say, “Okay, we’re, gonna spend 5 years or or 2 years or 3 years on this. And after that we’re gonna, that’s it. No more. Nothing. We’re not gonna help”. But during that intense time we may be intervening in a way that creates dependency on us because we’re trying to speed things up. And so I think it’s also bravely considering, what does it mean, actually, to own something locally by the community? And at what point can we say, “Okay, we’re done”. And how do we discern what role we have in the future? And I think that, too, it should lead us to really integrate everybody from the start. But maybe not be too systematic about the way we time and define what it means to not be involved anymore. 

Kate: I think learning to become more comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing is a big part of conversational leadership. You can’t control everything. You can’t plan everything. You may start reality. You may start a conversation or a process, thinking you’re heading in one direction, but then, if the real issue emerges, you may want to go in another direction. And sometimes it’s quite hard as leaders involved in conversational leadership, to let go of that outcome you had in mind and actually go with the other solution that’s proposed. Nelis any thoughts around this?

Nelis: Yeah, I’m just thinking, that’s hard, because you’re always driven by the reality that solutions are expected, your finances depend on success. If you don’t deliver the project is probably gonna stop or fall apart just like you described. So it is that fine line between flexibility, listening, letting the real issue emerge, but not losing sight of the outcomes that together you aim for, or the direction you’ve set, and that is such a tricky interplay. And doing that well, I think we constantly need to challenge each other on that: “Hey, guys, we need to be more flexible” or “Wait a second. Are we losing track of our objectives here? Are we letting ourselves be sidetracked too far?” And it’s that interplay that I think we need each other to hold each other accountable to that. In practice, Kate. I see you and I actually do that in our work as we go, as we lead, in our leadership team. Sometimes we say, “Well, you’re saying that, but is this still the right thing? Is this truly conversational? Have we asked the right people or….”.

Kate: Or have we slipped back…

Nelis: into “top down”, yeah? 

Nelis: I think we can start to wrap this up. What I really loved about this back and forth is, is around ownership and flexibility, and then holding each other accountable to that. And as we started wrestling around that, I think that is something we can take forward and actually think about in our work with communities, but also in any kind of leadership role: Am I taking on too much ownership? Am I emptying myself out enough? Am I listening enough? Am I interested in the other rather than in my goals only? So I think that is something that I’m going to take away from this conversation is a really helpful concept to move forward.

Kate: Thank you. Nelis. Thank you, Andreas. It’s been good to have you with us. And let’s keep talking, keep thinking about these things. That’s all from us today, and, as always, do hop over to leadinginconversation.net, if you want to comment, ask questions, or even just look at the transcript or the show notes. That’s all for today. Thank you. Bye.

Nelis: Thank you. Bye, bye.

Season 2, Episode 3

Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation
Leading in Conversation, Season 2 Episode 3
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Shownotes

Ralph Stacey Matrix

Leadership Centre graph

see: https://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/artofchangemaking/theory/complexity/

transcript


Kate: Hello! And welcome to “Leading in Conversation”. We are going to try something a little bit new today, aren’t we, Nelis?

Nelis: Yes, we are, and it is quite a challenge, because I have no idea where we’re going to end up. We are going to explore verbally, just chat about this topic without exactly knowing where we’re going to land.

Kate: So this is a little Christmas treat for you, something different. And we’ll see where it goes. So let me start out by explaining how this topic came about. I’ve been doing a leadership course recently and one of the things we looked at in our last residential was this matrix by Ralph Stacey. Now, it will probably help you to see this, and there are two ways you can do that. You can either visit our website leadinginconversation.net. Or you can Google “Stacey matrix”. We’re going to talk about the version of it that’s on our website. You will get slightly different versions if you Google, there are lots of different versions out there, but it will help you to be able to visualise it. Nelis. Why don’t you describe the matrix, first of all? 

Nelis: Yes, let’s describe it. And people who are just listening will still get the gist of it. So the matrix basically has two axes. So one is the level of certainty. Are you very certain or very close to certainty? Or are you very far from certainty?

Kate: And that’s along the bottom. The certainty axis is the horizontal.

Nelis: Yes, and then you’ve got the vertical axis which is about agreement. Are we close to agreement? Does everybody basically have the same opinion about it? Or is it far from agreement? Are there a lot of different opinions around it? And people go in every direction about what the solution actually is. So when you visualise that, certainty versus agreement, when you are in the bottom left area where most people agree, and most people are pretty certain about what’s going to happen. Then you are in the zone of control, and that’s indicated as the “Control” zone where you just need to do a good job in executing. When you get into the region where that is much less the case, the whole middle area, that is the area where it’s complex. where agreement is not a given, the outcomes are not a given, and you’ve got to work together to find ways forward. And that is described as the area where you want to convene. Now, there’s also a third area, and, Kate, why don’t you describe that?

Kate: First of all, I’m going to say, you what we’ve been talking about in this podcast – Conversational leadership – is what you do in that central zone where it’s complex when there’s not total agreement, not total certainty. Things are complex, not complicated, and various graphs, the charts that you’ll see online, have “complicated” between “control”, the control zone and the complex zone. But in that complex zone, in a sense that’s what we’ve been talking about, how to convene, how to gather people together to get input, the diversity, hearing from all voices. Because when you’re not certain, and when you don’t agree, it’s really good to get together and discuss things. Now, I was all very happy looking at this chart and thinking, “Yeah, that’s where we are. That’s where we do convening, conversational leadership”. But then, if you go further up diagonally up towards the top right corner, you enter what’s called the chaotic zone and this is what caught my attention recently, because I have been sensing chaos in our work. We have been in a complex zone for a long time, and are getting probably quite comfortable with living there, with medium amounts of agreement and certainty. But it seems in our work particularly right now, we are entering into this space where there is not a lot of agreement, and there’s not a lot of certainty about things. And I wonder if that resonates with other people, as well. In the world around us things are happening so quickly. Things are emerging that we don’t know much about, like AI, is changing the world of work, the world for all of us. We’re not necessarily in agreement on how to use it. We don’t really know how to use it, and things are changing all the time. So keeping on top of that chaos in that chaotic zone. And the leadership approach that Stacey recommends for that zone is called “sense and act”. So you have “execution” in the bottom left corner, you have “convening” in the middle and you have “sensing and acting” in the top right.

Nelis: Yes. and we want to explore that area today because it goes against what we’ve been talking about for the last two years. And sometimes you need that. And it’s good to challenge ourselves. How do you act in a place where agreement is just not going to be possible. You can convene all you want but people are going to go in every direction. The polarisation is so strong that convening won’t be enough and the outcomes are so uncertain that you can talk all you want, but you’re not going to get to a place where everybody’s reasonably comfortable, that this is the right direction. And that is this zone of chaos, that as an organisation you want to avoid getting into, but sometimes you can’t. But it’s also the place where new things happen. It actually can be an exciting place.

Kate: Yes, so actually, on the version of Stacey’s matrix that we’re using, the space between complexity and chaos is called the zone of innovation. And if you’ve done any reading about complexity science, the edge of chaos is where there is great productivity, novelty emerges. And we won’t go into that in any depth now but that’s where innovation happens and happens well. If you try to innovate in the control zone it’s not going to work. You’ve got to be on the edge of chaos for it to have the right environment for new things to emerge.

Nelis: And there’s another version of this model which the Leadership Center has brought out, which, as the first part of that area, says “saying yes to the mess, experiments, uncertainty”. And I find that interesting. So to what extent are we, as organisations, able to say yes to the mess? And how do you deal with that? What kind of leadership is needed in the mess? And I find that a quite invigorating kind of topic to say, “Okay, what does that mean?” And how do you avoid becoming too sort of dictatorial because somebody will need to make decisions, and there’s no agreement. How do you then have healthy leadership patterns in that zone?

Kate: And I think that the version of Stacey’s matrix that the Leadership Center has put out is really helpful, actually Nelis. Maybe we’ll put that onto the website as well. It contrasts the bottom left corner which it calls “ordinary management”. It’s where, it’s that technical rational decision making simple structures, effective procedures, monitoring coordination, providing direction. It’s all the things we’ve set up over the years to make a business or organisation funtion well. And that’s fine when you’re close to agreement and near to certainty. But when you’re in the top right, far from agreement, far from certainty, they describe it as, that’s when leadership is necessary, or “extraordinary management”. Ordinary management won’t suffice when you’re in that top right space, and I think they merge complexity and chaos there more than we would. But, as Nelis said, they list things like “saying yes to the mess, experiments, uncertainty, encouraging connectivity, conversation, building networks”. I think that’s all things that we’ve talked about as part of conversational leadership. But then those adaptive issues, wicked issues, that are the ones that you can’t just rely on your ordinary proven approaches to solve. You have to find different solutions and bring different people in to try and work out what they are. An interesting one listed there also is challenging habits and assumptions and containing anxiety. Nelis, what does it feel like in the chaotic zone? We’re kind of entering it a little bit. Which is why this resonated with us. And we decided, “Hey, let’s do a podcast talking about it”.

Nelis: Yes. anxiety is a good word there. And the interesting part of that is you need to contain it as a leader in order to not communicate angst to your followers, because if there is, if your leaders are giving a sense that they’re lost, total chaos emerges. And so how do you enter into the chaotic zone while… and as a leader feel anxious and and still communicate a sense of control or a sense of yeah, being on top of things. Trust is key. So personally, I resonate with a sense of anxiety. I have no idea where it’s going to go, and sometimes it feels quite overwhelming, because there’s so many things coming at you at the same time. We’re talking about our partnership environment. We’re talking about technical developments in the whole AI space, the whole area where we’re working in is changing dramatically. Our financial models are starting to fall apart or need to be replaced. All of those things. 

Kate: There are a lot of new new partners emerging, new players in the field and we’re trying to figure out, “Well, okay, how do we fit here?”.

Nelis: And in some ways that is complex. But it gets into this area of chaos where there’s so much uncertainty, so much disagreement, that you’ve got people going all directions at the same time. And for me as a leader, it is that sense of “I have no idea where it is going to go”. At the same time holding on to certain key beliefs. And I think that is key in that. So you’ve got that sense of uncertainty. You’re not sure yourself. You certainly disagree with a lot of others about it. But at the same time that is when you need to hold on to what you really believe in, and that’s spiritually, but also practically, what are your core values? And anchor your actions and your sensing on that. And I think that is one of the things that comes to mind for me primarily. I don’t know. How do you feel about that?

Kate: You know that I don’t do well with chaos and disorder! I think those who work with me will know that they’ve seen me…Holding anxiety is not one of my gifts. I think you do it quite well. But I’m a very expressive person. I’m a very emotional person. What I feel is usually very apparent to other people. So this is an area I need to grow in if chaos is going to be somewhere where we’re living a lot more. Let’s talk about sensing and acting. I’m very comfortable with convening now. Executing, fine. Sensing and acting to me sounds a little bit contrary to some of the stuff we’ve been stressing about convening. You know, you get the right people in the room. You get diversity. Everyone has wisdom. Does that all go out the window, do you think, when we’re in this corner where Stacey’s saying, we need to sense and act? What does that mean to you?

Nelis: And that’s where we get into the unpredictability of even this podcast because…

Kate: We’re in the chaos zone.

Nelis: This is a chaotic podcast! I think the key here is in some ways bringing those two things close together. You can’t get agreement in the sense of what you normally do in the convening zone. Looking for ways to move forward with the highest level of buy-in you can possibly get. But there is still a need to get the wisdom from more than one person, because sensing to me is not just an individual thing. It’s not about me sensing as a leader and just doing it. The systems that we talked about in all of the other podcasts, the wisdom of the group, bringing in new ideas, new perspectives. That’s still going to be important, 

Kate: …hearing from all parts of the system. 

Nelis: Exactly. So the challenge is, of course, that the changes are often so fast that you can’t do it. You can’t expect the same outcome of full agreement, but you still need to pattern your response on the same kind of ideas. And that’s why I think the merging of the two is not bad. It gives you tools.

Kate: So maybe it will help us if we contrast sensing with knowing. And that’s when you don’t have the certainty. We don’t know, necessarily, what the right response is going to be to the next decision we have to make. Say, on the situation we’re facing currently, we can’t know exactly but what does it mean to sense? There’s a tentativeness, isn’t there? There’s a – and I like how you said – bringing those two closer together. Sensing and acting, experimentation: “Well, let’s probe. Let’s take a step in this direction. See what happens. Okay. That’s not going to work. Take a step back. Let’s try another”. I don’t know, I’m just exploring, obviously. We always say to each other, “I’m verbally processing right now”. And that is totally what we’re doing here. 

Nelis: Yes, and I love that.

Kate: And we’re not feeling anxious at all, are we?

Nelis: But I think it actually touches on something that I think is important. We have enough trust, and we have enough patterns to fall back on in our podcast, trust between us. Key things are in place that allow us…

Kate: We have signals that we use when we want to speak, when I want to tell you you’ve gone on for too long. 

Nelis: Exactly.

Kate: We have a history. We have patterns. We have expectations of how this is going to go.

Nelis: And that allows us to go into that chaotic zone with some sense of trust that will go well. It’ll all be well. And I think that organizationally actually works as well. If there is enough trust in leadership, if you have patterns of convening and sharing with people sometimes, when that’s not possible, you’ve got to make snap decisions. You can’t come to agreement. You have a leader who basically is going to say, we’re going to do those three experiments. And I’ve got no idea whether any of them will work. There is enough trust in the system , enough patterns to fall back on that you’re okay. And I think that is going to be key. So trust, relationships, are still going to be absolutely important.

Kate: I think that’s a really key point. But how can we prepare ourselves? Just as we were preparing for this podcast, we were talking about borrowing from other domains such as crisis response. We talked about how people working in crisis response, in medical emergency response, have scenarios, they have templates, they’ve prepared for different scenarios. And I’m not sure that we could actually do that. But, knowing your systems well enough that you can actually improvise, thinking through what are the kind of crises that we could anticipate. And I think we’ve done that a little bit in the past, around issues that come up, we might have media exposure coming. We’ll prepare press releases, we’ll make sure we know who our spokespeople are in those scenarios, and who our spokespeople are not. And you know, those are some chaotic scenarios that we have prepared for in the past. 

Nelis: Yes, and I think that what you started saying here is really important. So when you look at crisis response, the three Ps that you’re referring to – plan, prepare, and practice – still apply. So you don’t know what the situation is going to be, it’s completely chaotic. The unpredictability is the norm in some ways. At the same time, if you have a foundation of elements that you are agreed on, you sort of deconstruct it. What do we agree on, and what are we ready to do? What are we ready to practise? So that when the chaos ensues we’re ready to deal with that. I find that a really helpful concept. Because at the higher level, to reiterate what we do believe in, the kind of leadership we want to provide. Having the practice of quickly convening on the things we can convene on is going to be key to actually survive. And that preparedness, the sense of having practised that, having done that enough, having planned for the unplannable, I think, is going to be really helpful when you enter into that zone of chaos.

Kate: I think, looking back at the pandemic is quite interesting, because that was chaotic at the beginning. We had to pivot very quickly on a number of things and because we had already practised convening quite a lot, because we had already moved into hybrid events, into

Zoom meetings, I think we were able to pivot a lot more quickly than other people.

and I think that relational foundation of trust that we’d spent quite a long time building…

Our relationships were good at that point, and I think when the chaos hit, I think that helped us to move quite swiftly. For example, pivoting our international conference in 6 weeks from an in person meeting in April, to a hybrid event. No, not hybrid, to a completely online event.

Nelis: Yes, I love that, what you’re saying about relationships. And often we equate relationship with agreement. And I think they’re completely different things. And so you can have complete disagreement, but have really strong relationships. And I think that is going to be key to survive the chaotic zone well, because you are allowing yourself and the group to do the give and take when you disagree, because the relational foundations are in place. So I think that is, that’s actually as we’re talking, I realise how important that is to disconnect agreement from relationship.

Kate: That’s really interesting. And I know that you and our colleague Karsten, as fellow Dutch men, often say that you agree to disagree. That’s always been a good example to me of how you can be really good friends with someone, even if you disagree with them on a given matter. And I think, you know, the thing we have certainty on is that we are committed to the cause. We are committed to good relationships. We are committed to trust and seeking to understand and walk forward together.

Nelis: Yes. And I think that is another part of what we are discovering together as we talk about it. So in some ways you need to disentangle or analyse what is it that we have low certainty and low agreement on? And what is it that we actually have lots of agreement on? And what are we certain about? And pulling that apart and saying, yeah, it’s not everything. It probably is only certain things. And that allows you then to actually have a foundation of agreement, certainty, execution, that helps to survive the chaotic parts.

Kate: Yes, I really like that. I wonder if that’s something we need to do as a leadership team-  around this current situation that we’ve been discussing – is actually get together and state the things that we are certain about, the things we have agreement about and in a sense doing the planning and the preparation, putting that foundation in that, these are non-negotiables for us. In whichever of the multitude of ways this situation may unfold, here’s our sort of bedrock, these are the things we agree on. These are the things we’re committed to. And that will provide us a bit more certainty and agreement actually, from which to operate.

Nelis: Yes. And I think if you do that, you allow the trust to stay intact. And actually, if you disentangle what is chaotic and what is complex, you also continue to have the right kind of leadership approach, convening people, having the right kind of dialogue that shows people that you haven’t abandoned that. You are still committed to your principles. It’s just on certain things, something else is needed. 

Kate: And it’s really important to stress, I think, in a time of chaos and crisis, it’s important to stress those fundamentals, to reassert the things that we hold to as an organisation, our values, you know, our mission, our vision and say, “We’re still about this, even though all of this is changing. This is who we are. This is what we do. This is where we’re going”. And that’s part of holding the anxiety, is giving people that security and stability.

Nelis: Yes, because people need that. Because we had earlier in our conversation, some people like change, but I don’t think anyone loves chaos, and if you sort of contain that by showing, “Okay, this is the chaotic part. But here is what we do control. This is, yes, this is complex, but we have a handle on it”. You allow yourself to contain it and not give the impression that the whole world is falling apart. Which is what happens when people panic, they hone in so much on the not-knowing that it feels like everything is falling apart, which may not be the case actually.

Kate: And so as a leadership team, we need to do our planning, preparing our scenario planning, etc., so that we can lead confidently into the unknown, and yes, be there for our staff.

Nelis: Yes, and be able to have enough of that trust that you’re going to make the highly unpopular decisions that half the group disagrees with. Because you need to be able to do that.

Kate: Well, Nelis, I think that we have not only a plan for one of our future team meetings there, talking about this. I think we have a podcast.

Nelis: I think we do. One of the things we didn’t discuss is how speed relates all of that. 

Kate: Oh yes. Do you want to just talk about that before we wrap up?

Nelis: As I was looking at this whole matrix, I realised that speed is not one of the axes. And at the same time, when you think about chaos, speed is so much a factor in that, because change happens so quickly that you don’t have time to convene and decisions are needed now, and they change every two months. And that kind of situation. So it is interesting that a lack of certainty and lack of agreement sort of has as a by-product the speed of change, because things go in different directions very suddenly. So it’s just an interesting observation that when you get into that mode you also need to have, you need to be ready to turn on a dime, and do a quick turnaround, pivot very quickly. And again, I think that crisis preparedness helps you to also deal with the question of speed. And one of the things that I was thinking about is in the chaotic zone, do you actually have data to do sensing or is… if your data is always 3 or 6 months old, it may be completely irrelevant. So I think as a leader, you need to create systems – and that’s again planning and preparing and practising – that the data you have is actually up-to-date, so that you can make quick decisions.

Kate King: So I think that’s a wrap for today, Nelis.

Nelis: I agree. And I’m excited about this. Actually, there are more outcomes than I expected. It is actually quite actionable. We have some ideas that you can actually take into leading in chaos. And I hope that our listeners find this helpful as well.

Kate King: And just linking back to conversational leadership, I think what we’ve done today is, we started out with a topic, we started out with a kind of stimulus, this matrix from Ralph Stacey, and said, “Let’s have a conversation about this, and see where it goes”. And actually in building off each other and having no boundaries for the conversation, and just yeah, bouncing off each other’s ideas we’ve actually come up with some actionable steps for ourselves as a leadership team, which is kind of good, kind of shows…

Nelis: … that conversational leadership actually works!

Kate: Sometimes when we’re facing big new things like this, we just need to clear some space and say, let’s just talk, let’s have no limits on this, and let’s just brainstorm together. See where it goes. Thanks, Nelis. This was fun.

Nelis: Thank you, Kate. And I’m looking forward to our next one with, I think, a guest again.

Kate King:  Yes, we have a couple of guests lined up. So that’s going to be fun. Happy Christmas, and best wishes for the New Year to you all.