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.
