Shownotes
Eight principles for leading in times of not knowing:
- Good enough holding of anxiety
- Causality uncertain
- Tentative Certainty
- Engage collectively to make sense
- Act in the grey (when not sure)
- Good enough (no time for perfection)
- Space for mistakes
- Plan differently
Chris Corrigan, The Art of Hosting programme.
Participatory narrative inquiry
Transcript
Kate: Hello and welcome back to Leading in Conversation. It’s great to be back with you again. Today Nelis and I are joined by an old friend of mine – less emphasis on the old there – Reverend Doctor Rob Hay, I should say. Welcome to the podcast Rob!
Rob: Thank you very much. Nice to be with you.
Kate: One of the reasons we’ve invited Rob to join us today is because as my tutor on the Masters program I did, Rob was responsible for my discovery of conversational leadership, which has been very significant to me, as you all will know. So we wanted to invite Rob along and hear a little bit about his own research and what he’s been doing since. So, Rob, give us an introduction, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are and what you’re doing these days.
Rob: Yeah. Thanks Kate. Currently, I live in Leicestershire in the UK, pretty much in the middle of England, if you want to get the geography there. I currently work for the Church of England, I’m an ordained priest and responsible for leadership development for the diocese, the area where we work. Before that, as Kate mentioned, I was in a college, both as principal and running the leadership Masters programme that Kate was part of. During my working life, I started off in retail on a management training scheme and then I’ve done a number of leadership roles over the years covering commercial, public sector, third sector, and also a couple of startups in there.
Nelis: Thank you. Yeah, this is my first time of meeting you and I am sure that Kate knows quite a bit about what I’m going to ask you already but I have no idea. So can you tell me a little bit about your journey of discovery into conversational leadership, dialogical approaches, CRPR? How did you discover that? What did that do to you?
Rob: Yes, I, like many of us of my kind of age, we kind of grew up as it were in leadership with classic approaches. Strong leadership. Leadership knows, leadership directs, it structures, it organises. And that had kind of been my life and experience, but increasingly I realised that an awful lot of what I was doing as a leader and what I was observing other people doing as leaders didn’t seem to have very much effect. And there was part of me that felt quite relieved about that and then part of me, though, felt quite disappointed. I couldn’t quite decide how I felt about it. But what I also began to notice was that some leaders seem to become really quite toxic. And, you know, when I’ve talked to people about toxic leadership, something I did a lot of work on in the early days, most people at a gut level know what I mean. Most people have been in some kind of environment. And so my Master’s work that I did many many years ago, was trying to look at why leaders became toxic. And there were three things that I noted out of that. The fundamental one was when they didn’t know what they should do. Or they didn’t know the answers for the questions people were asking of them as their followers. The second thing was, they didn’t feel they could admit not knowing because of the whole aura of leadership, the kind of heroic leadership model. And then what that meant was, that they covered up the lack of knowledge. They couldn’t admit that they didn’t know. And as soon as they began to cover up once or twice, it then became, if you like, a spiral of deception. You know, that sounds quite dramatic, it sounds quite negative. It was just their way of coping that, you know, and once you, try and give the impression you know, you have to keep on doing that. And so, there was this sort of toxic downward spiral. The encouraging thing was the very few people set out to be deliberately toxic. So it was often a case of feeling they weren’t up to the job, often a sense of imposter syndrome. So that was kind of the MA thesis, but then of course, well how do we work as leaders when we don’t know, when we have limited knowledge? And so that then became the focus of my research and I sketched out some ideas for a PhD, I began to think more deeply about it. And then I went to see a potential supervisor. We had a great conversation for a couple hours. He was really excited about the subject. And then with something of a wry smile, he handed me a book and said, “Go away and have a read of this. And if you still want me to supervise you, then I will”. And it was a very large book by a man called Ralph Stacey, who I think has probably been mentioned in previous podcasts. And I spent the next three months with a love-hate relationship with this book. There was a particular moment on the holiday where I think I had pretty much given up the idea of doing a PhD. I just concluded I wasn’t up to it because the ideas in this book, I couldn’t get my head around. And then all of a sudden there was a light bulb moment and his thinking is around, effectively his term for conversational leadership, complex responsive processes of relating (CRPR). But the fundamental bit that suddenly hit me and made perfect sense and has grown in in that, “Yes, this is obvious” ever since is the point that actually organisations in and of themselves don’t exist. They are just the figment of our imagination. Because what’s actually happening is you have a bunch of people having conversations. So if you think about it, an organisation can’t do anything. You know, you might register an organisation legally. It doesn’t suddenly bring it to life. It only begins to do things when the individuals within it start talking and so his a big idea was, the only thing that we can actually affect and work with is conversation. And for me, that was such a radical moment that it… I’ve described it as almost like discovering that gravity didn’t exist, the theory of gravity was wrong.
Kate: I was reading your thesis before and that really stood out to me, “as if gravity didn’t exist”. Yeah, and I remember having a similar moment. Rob, you also handed me that big tome and I also had that reaction: I am not worthy, my brain is not up to this, because Ralph Stacy’s writing is not the easiest to follow. But also that massive aha moment of “Oh wow”. It was showing me a view of the world from a completely different angle I didn’t know existed. An organisation is not a thing, a reified thing that exists in itself. It is actually made up of us as the people having the conversations. And I’ve seen subsequently explaining that concept to people that lights go on as well. And Nelis is nodding as well.
Nelis: Yes, I’ve talked about it to people even though I haven’t read the big tome yet. Yeah, I’m interested by your comments about toxic leadership and how that shaped your thinking. It comes actually from quite a different angle from the one that got me into it. It is actually the opposite side of it, not knowing was always pretty clear to me. And what do you do with that? I mean, what on earth does leadership then look like when you don’t know. That is what got me into it. From what you’re sharing, it’s actually the opposite, where you see people covering up and not admitting, and not knowing and that resulting in toxic leadership. I found that very interesting.
Rob: It’s probably the fact you’re a Dutchman and I’m a Brit, you see. You just name the reality much more readily than us Brits. I think the the commonality, if you like, in it was the toxic leadership was starting me from a point of dealing with the lived experience of the leaders and, you know, Kate will remember, one of the things that we’d often end up talking quite a lot about was just, “What are the realities going on, at any point, that we need to name?” And, you know, that’s become quite important as I’ve continued that journey. I do quite a lot of coaching now and often working with leaders, just to help them begin to name the realities, and the power of naming realities.
Kate: And something I picked up on Rob, was about paying attention to the quality of ongoing participation. And that’s everything.
Rob: And you know, I think I wrote my thesis on the challenge of paying attention. The way I approached my own research was particularly around what my experience as a leader was like leading a large change process. And then ethnographically engaging the leadership team, and gaining their perspectives and experiences. And, you know, it almost became the challenge of paying attention and keeping on keeping on paying attention. You know, there was that sense of yeah, I’m paying attention, but actually always as soon as I stop paying attention, something interesting, relevant, useful, is going to pop up that I need to pay attention to. And this whole approach contrasted so strongly with what many of us were brought up with on leadership. You know, you think of Kurt Lewin’s approach of doing this thing of “unfreeze, change, and refreeze”. Just seems completely bonkers now because nothing stays still long enough for that approach.
Kate: We’ve talked about that in previous podcasts as well, how change is our constant now, and constantly change is our constant.
Rob: And I think that’s why the contention of the ability to pay attention is something that I still don’t think we’re beginning to see enough of yet. You know, you’ve got hints of it in the leadership research going on, but what are the skills for paying attention? How do we enable people to do that better as leaders. And particularly one of my noticings, in my own research was, the hardest times to be paying attention and doing research on myself, was when stuff was so busy or manic, or it had been really difficult. But actually those, when you did manage to pay attention, they were the real gems that suddenly gave you a different understanding.
Kate: And those are the most critical times as well. And the times when I think we can slip most easily into toxic behaviours.
Rob: Well, they’re also the times when followers most want behaviour that I would say is toxic. You know, because if you think about even the last sort of 10 years of political leadership internationally, I can remember a time when I first started teaching leadership that George W Bush, we kind of held up as a toxic leader and that these days I hold him up as quite a good example of leadership. But there’s something about, when the world feels very uncertain, very fast, moving very changeable, we want the easy option of strong leadership. Knowing what we three know, from our experience in leadership, that strong leadership isn’t going to get us where we need to go.
Nelis: So, it’s interesting what you’re saying about toxic leadership, just going on a little bit more about that. It’s not just a decision of the leader to cover up. It is the pressure from the followers to not want to know all the complexities, to ask him to know that he doesn’t know. He often or she often isn’t given the option of admitting to not knowing. And so toxic leadership is a bit of the result of the pressures internal to the leader, but also, I think, external to the leader.
Kate: Almost a mutually agreed deception. “Let’s pretend that we know what we’re doing and where we’re going here”!
Rob: One of the things that I found… so over the last seven years, I’ve stepped into the coaching space as an add-on to some of the other areas I’ve worked in. And I would say, particularly working with very senior leaders, that pressure they feel from followers almost becomes the hardest thing that they have to work with. And meeting the expectations or finding ways of refusing to meet the expectations, without feeling as though they cease to be a leader.
Kate: That’s often a challenge of conversational leadership that people mentioned to us, particularly from more hierarchical cultures, that I am expected to lead, I’m expected to have the answers, but if I ask questions of others and invite their engagement, I’m seen as weak. And we’ve discussed that on a few podcasts as well.
Rob: Yeah, I was coaching somebody who is operating in a different cultural setup. Literally, just a couple weeks ago. And we were talking about this challenge but actually, as we reflected that we realised, that there was still a massive space for conversation, you know, in that culture. You’d never move away from the situation where the overall leader was the person that was going to make the decision. But actually there was lots of opportunity for them to sit with people, have conversations, listen. So I tend to challenge people with an assumption that it’s not culturally appropriate. Now, I think conversation comes into every culture. It’s just figuring out how it works.
Kate: So Rob, I was intrigued to see that your LinkedIn profile says “helping leaders navigate not knowing”. Tell us a little bit about that. How do you do that?
Rob: Yeah, and this arose from, as Kate and I have both hinted at, the fact that we both found Stacey fairly dense and theoretically exciting, and practically applied quite difficult. And so what I tried to do with my own research work because I was interested in the lived experience of leading was develop some practices that leaders could use to work in spaces of limited knowledge. And you know, there’s eight. I can run through them very quickly now and see what you make of them. The first is something you’ve touched on elsewhere in the podcast: a good enough holding of anxiety. I’m slightly unpopular at times because I actually think anxiety is healthy and we should never be without anxiety, because that’s stasis and stasis is on the way to death. But we do have to hold it at a manageable level and figure out how we do that. Secondly, just working with the fact that causality is uncertain. We’re often under pressure particularly when it comes to planning and donors and bids and those kinds of things to act as if A plus B equals C and we know it rarely ever does. How do we name that, work with it? Then probably quite a newish area, I certainly haven’t found much work on it, something I called tentative certainty. We don’t need to be absolutely certain. We just need to be certain enough to be able to take the next step. And tentative certainty is something that I’ve been doing quite a lot of work on more recently. Also beginning to apply it to what it might mean for faith, belief and conviction. Which is outside of the focus of this conversation but interesting nonetheless. So if we can be tentatively certain and that’s what we’re working towards, how do we then make sense? And I know again, you’ve talked about this, but actually, the ability to engage in collective discernment together. And again, the times that that is most needed are often the times where we face pressure to act quickly. And therefore we tend to make isolated individual decisions rather than engage collectively to make better sense. Fifthly, acting in the grey, just that permission, that the idea of legitimising leaders to act when they really are not sure, that’s you know, like walking in fog. George Carlin, the American comedian, says, “No one knows what’s next, but everybody does it”. And I quite like that, there’s a depth and a profoundness to that the longer you think about. Number six is ‘good enough’. What is actually needed? Not perfection, often, rarely ever perfection, and perfection is increasingly out of reach these days because of the speed of change anyway. Then the space for mistakes. Because, if all of this is tentative, how do we allow space for mistakes? I talk in some of my work about practising making mistakes that are not fatal.
Kate: I like that.
Rob: And particularly, if working with a leadership team, that’s one of the things that I spend quite a bit of time doing with them, to build confidence together. How can we actually collectively own some mistakes that we’re making? Just because, then when bigger mistakes happen, we can handle it. We can work together. And then, the eighth: and this is kind of where we realise that everything is turned on its head, is the need to plan differently. So again, sometimes the challenge is in a complex world, why bother planning, if causality is uncertain and everything else. I would say planning is even more important now, but it’s important because inevitably, very quickly, you’ll go off track. If you’ve done the planning well, you’ll be able to see the implications of that divergence from the plan, and then adjust the resources, the intentions, all of the other things very quickly. So those are just eight practices.
Kate: I love the list you’ve got there, you know, good enough. A good enough plan. I read a quote yesterday – forget who it was by – but it effectively said, “Plans are useless but planning is everything”. And that’s the same. You know, those plans will change but the process that you go through is invaluable. And I just wanted to say, we’ll post a list of those eight points, as well as Rob’s circles of leadership practice diagram in the show notes. So, if you didn’t catch all of those or you were scrambling to write them down, they’ll be in the show notes. Nelis, any reflections on what Rob has shared there?
Nelis: Well, first of all, yes, I recognise what you’re sharing and we’ve talked about several of those themes and I love how you’re coming at them in a fairly systematic way, which I think is really helpful. In some ways it’s a real step up – as much as we’re impressed by Stacey – from Stacey’s very theoretical and “So what?” kind of approach. So I really appreciate that. It gives it some practicality. One of the things I’m sitting with here is the moments you most need this, is also the moment it’s hardest to do. You’ve mentioned that twice now and the reality of the time pressures. When things are the most under pressure, the most complex, you have the least freedom to actually do this actually, when you most need it. So how do you handle that? Do you have advice or thoughts about that whole question, about that dilemma, that is constant, which I think we as leaders all experience?
Rob: You’re absolutely right. It’s the times when we are most expected to act by our followers, that we often most need to pause and pay attention. One of the other things I was absolutely fascinated about in my original research and work since, is what it means to act as a leader. And I think what I’ve noticed is, rarely do we understand the value of choosing not to do something or resisting, holding off from doing something. And that’s very much around this followers’ expectations issue. They’re feeling anxious, they’re feeling nervous, something’s happened. They want the leader to be seen to be responding. I have found – and actually write in my thesis – one particular example, but have seen it many times since, where holding off from making a decision meant that in the end, we made a much, much better decision that radically changed the course of where we were going. And that I think is something that we can play with a bit more as leaders. It takes courage. But the other key thing I would say is, we just need to normalise the not knowing. So noticing the not knowing in the daily leadership experience rather than just doing it at the big scary times. Kate might remember that one of the things that I would occasionally do much to the frustration of some of my staff at the time, was talk about all the things we didn’t know. We’d be faced with the decision. It might not be a massive decision, but I’d kind of sit there ticking off on my fingers all the things we don’t know. Actually that’s really quite an unusual thing for a leader to do. But the question of, okay, if we make this decision, what is the worst possible thing that can happen? Let’s talk about that. And then if we make the decision, anything else is a good outcome.
Nelis: Yeah, I appreciate that. And what you’re talking about and I think that’s very helpful to ask ourselves, can we not make a decision? Free yourself from the pressure of your followers. At the same time, some of those pressures are not necessarily even your followers, they are deadlines imposed by circumstances, realities, opportunities that go away, or whatever your context would be. And so I’m pondering, how do you act in those circumstances? And maybe there even, it’s admitting the not knowing. And asking yourself, so what would happen if we didn’t go for it, your worst case scenario may be helpful. So, I’m processing this, because that is where the rubber hits the road, where it gets really difficult.
Rob: It is, I think, it is where the tentative certainty context comes in. Again, what we can do is we can offer leadership but we can offer it in a way that is tentative and that allows us to do a couple of things. It allows us to move forward and as we discover more knowledge potentially make a 180 degree turn, and reverse and come back. And if we haven’t been tentative, doing that can be a very difficult decision. Often feels a bit of a crisis. The other thing of making explicit the tentative nature of our knowledge is it invites others into that sense-making process. So it might be, well, actually I don’t know where we should go but we’ve got to do something. Therefore because I’m the leader and no one else is offering anything, I’m going to suggest we do this. That’s a step forward. But actually, when we’ve done that step forward, let’s all sit together and see what we’re beginning to notice. What’s beginning to emerge? Is it looking like it has possibility as we head down that particular avenue?
Kate: And there’s a real honesty, vulnerability, transparency in that, which I love, Rob. And it’s not the traditional leadership approach where you are meant to be omniscient and omnipotent, etc. But it’s so much more real and authentic. And I think that the majority of people would really want that, leaders explaining, “Well this is what we know, this is what we don’t know. We’re going to try this”. I love that whole idea of tentative certainty because there’s so much we can’t know nowadays. I just wonder how in the last few years here, with the pandemic, how have you moved on in any way from where you were when you finished your thesis, submitted your thesis, or or have the events of the last couple of years just cemented that for you?
Rob: One of the interesting exercises we did which was pandemic-related, but bigger than the pandemic is , you know the challenge of working in the Church of England and working across the diocese is, you know, we have about 20, 000 regular worshippers who regard themselves as being part of the Church of England in this part of the world. In the middle of the pandemic, we had just begun before it struck, to name the reality that the pattern of ministry, the way we did stuff wasn’t sustainable, it wasn’t appropriate for the modern day. You know, things like geography, travel distances, all of those things were outdated, and that we needed to change it. How we do that with 20 000 stakeholders, which then got locked down – and Leicester was the longest single lockdown in the world, it was 15 months in one particular part of the city – was a real challenge. But I at that point engaged with the work of Chris Corrigan – I will give you the details for the show notes. Chris is based in Canada. We engaged with him on a course called ‘Hosting in Complexity’, about having large scale conversations. And it was so timely, because we did that course, two weeks before the pandemic.
Kate: Wow.
Rob: During the pandemic, we hosted 600 conversations across the diocese, most of which were online. But it used an approach called participative narrative inquiry, where we ask the number of questions to garner stories from people. And then we offered those stories back into focus groups and said, “Look, these were your stories. Does that make sense? Talk about them”. And it just took on my own thinking about the value of collective sense-making because they weren’t data that we had gathered. They could have been but we wouldn’t have understood them very well because we then handed them back and said, “Okay this is what we heard, what do you make of it?”. It then took us on so much further and has really meant we’ve had a much more participative change process going on. So that sense of collective ownership, deep engagements together and particularly- and Leicester is the most diverse city in the UK. It’s the first minority white city – just at that reminder of actually who’s telling this story and what I’m hearing is not what they are intending to tell me and therefore we’ve got to work together, to begin to hear one another, make sense of this together, in an extended conversation.
Kate: I love that use of stories. It’s something that we experimented with a bit as well because as you know my interest has been in approaching change as an organisation, how can we co-create that, co-construct that together? At one of our international conferences, we gathered most significant change stories and then used that as the body of data to reflect on together in the conference. In another event we invited stories – we were looking at mental models, shifts that we needed to make in the organisation to achieve the goals that we had set out for ourselves. And we invited people to share stories that reflected mental models that may or may not need to change. And we used that within an Open Space Technology framework. And again that was very powerful using people’s own data, own narratives as your data source. Yeah. Really interesting to hear that you’re doing that in that multi-faith, multi-cultural context as well. And especially the point you made about what you’re hearing, what you’re seeing in their stories, may not be what they intended, there’s a whole other topic to discuss there, but that’s very important as well, to remember in this world of conversations being everything, what are we hearing? Was it what people were intending?
Nelis: Can I do a follow-up question here? So you talked about that sense-making in a more diverse context. And I’m assuming that more diverse context is also more than multi-faith context, and how do you see that impact leadership conversation? And how is that different from your experience of a theological college?
Rob: I think one of the interesting things that I’ve seen in a multi-faith context… I’m involved in a leadership program at the University of Birmingham where we… it’s in faith leadership, and we have multiple faiths together. I think it’s taught me that we often make a lot of assumptions. That when we talk about… whether it’s faith, whether they’re values… is values-based leadership would take us away from simply defining it as a religion. But we often make assumptions about what our shared values or our shared faith means. And when we’re in a mono-faith context… and I suspect it’s exactly the same with a monocultural context, we simply make assumptions that we know what we mean as we talk together. When those conversations cross some of those boundaries and we take time to say, “Okay, I’m using this word, what does that mean to you?”. So when I sat with an Imam and listened to what he means by how his faith impacts his leadership, it’s made me reflect better on how my faith impacts my leadership. Whereas, if I’ve had conversations with other people who are Christian leaders, it hasn’t been as helpful because we haven’t named some of those realities and teased them out. So if you like, I think it’s partly about making the diversity that we have more explicit in the conversation, which is the helpful principle anyway.
Nelis: I find it interesting that that very deep diversity allows you to go deeper in your sense making, and I think that’s what you’re saying, because you easily stay on the surface because everybody knows this, so you don’t have to talk about it. And if that starts being challenged, you actually go a spade deeper or several spades deeper in your conversation, in your exploration of what’s actually going on. That may apply to leadership but actually to other things as well. And I think it’s not just religion, it’s values, it’s the things that everybody knows, and that can actually be cultural assumptions as well. It can come from different angles. And I think that’s a really valuable aspect where we’re often afraid of the ‘different’. What you’re saying is actually it adds an incredibly valuable component to the process and the conversation.
Rob: Yes. And You know, I think I’d link it to something else that we’re working on here and I think folks are in a number of places which is how do we deal with difference better? And so I was in a conversation yesterday, talking about how can we create cultural curiosity so that we can actually enjoy engaging across the difference. And you know, this was in a context where we were reflecting on a number of years where anti-racism training and conscious bias training has been offered and taken up. But almost that, if you don’t follow that up with something that helps people develop confidence and curiosity and humility in that space around engaging together, you almost just make it a higher mountain to climb because people are more fearful of creating a difficult situation, doing something that’s not appropriate. So I think there’s quite a challenge coming back to our original question of, you know, how do we engage across that diversity in a time that we have a healthy care for our words and awareness of one another’s feelings and histories are at play. But actually, the political correctness can inhibit conversation. And that’s really sad.
Nelis: Yeah, it’s when you aren’t allowed to ask questions of curiosity because you may be punished for it, then you’re in trouble.
Rob: Yeah. That’s a really nice way of putting it.
Nelis: I’d like to go back to our earlier conversation. We kind of skipped your actual writing of the thesis in the middle of a massive change process, as you describe it in your thesis itself, which I think at times was actually quite traumatic. Did you find any kind of limitations to the model? So I think it’s, you describe the strengths quite well, allowing to embrace that uncertainty together, creating a space for this to be able to be discussed, avoiding toxic leadership and I think these are all incredibly important, but I’m also asking myself in the process of doing that, that you come across some limitations as well, where you said, “Okay, well in certain contexts, I had to move away from the ideal because it just wasn’t possible or there are weak sides to what I try to do here. Any insights on that?
Rob: There were certainly times where it was very tempting to say “this is a luxury, I don’t have time for it”. You know, the attentiveness, the engagement, the collective discernment. I think I noticed that when I did weaken my focus on it and was tempting to do that, the outcomes were much poorer. So I think in many respects the challenge was about normalising the ideas in an organisation, so that collectively you can work together on it. So the more people that began to realise the conversation was the most important thing, the easier it became as the leader to work in that space, because other people were being attentive. Other people were saying hang on, “Who’s around the table? How do we get more diversity around this table?”. Because when it was just me in the early days, with some of those ideas, the sheer exhaustion of paying attention was difficult and just the ability, I think, to maintain that was difficult. But it was very encouraging quite how quickly my leadership team in particular felt it resonated enough. They didn’t need to know all of the theory but it made sense at a gut level. And you know, they would say, “Okay, well, actually that term is giving me a language to articulate what I know at a gut level.”. So I think that began to teach me something about how we make some of these things more accessible. I think the other really difficult thing is just how we pay attention to things and how we process them as humans. So you know we’ve talked about stuff being constantly changing. In our minds we make snapshots. So we kind of focus on something, we make sense of it. And the problem is as soon as we’ve stopped paying lots of attention to that and moved on to something else that needs to fit with it, that continues to move. And one of Stacey’s really profound pieces of work was around how we then abstract ideas from that. So if we make sense by saying okay, in the middle of this terrain that I’m looking at there, is this big tall tower. And it’s right in the middle. As soon as we begin to move to other stuff, it’s no longer right in the middle. But because we assume it’s there, we then begin to abstract that and make bigger and bigger errors, the longer we stick with something. So this is why tentative certainty became such a strong feature. It wasn’t just about recognizing that I didn’t know everything. It was about recognizing that I had to hold stuff constantly in a space of tentativeness. Because as soon as time moved on, I moved on, other people moved on, the situation changed. Does that make sense?
Nelis: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You’re touching on something that I’ve been wondering about: what is our human capacity for dealing with uncertainty, giving attention to everything? Your paying attention is a core concept. What you’re sharing really resonates with me. At the same time, we as humans pick up maybe 1 percent of all of our stimuli around us because we abstract for the rest as being a constant background. We assume we know that and what you’re saying that’s not true and it’s really helpful to be aware of that. At the same time as human beings, our capacity to process everything is extremely limited. So, I’m asking myself, realistically, how far can you go with this? And how far can you ask your followers to go in this? Because of all of our limited capacity to deal with uncertainty.
Rob: Two slightly different levels… I’ll attempt to respond to that. I do think we have to recognize that some people don’t want to engage with the complexity and that’s fine. You know, if you think of people in the organisation who have a particular job, they want to be able to turn up for it, do what you’ve told them to do, and go because they’ve got a lot of other stuff going on or that’s just where they see it. So you know there is something about saying, who needs to engage with this level of complexity? Who needs to engage with these realities? And one of the things that I use as a very crude definition of leadership, is that a leader’s job is to create the environment in which their followers can thrive. And for some that is a very contained environment. It pays little reality, little bearing to reality because that’s what they need and how they are going to operate. So that would be one thing I think to accept and to work with. Then, I think for the people who can engage and want to engage with some of the complexities and need the ability to pay attention, there are some things that we can do as we work in leadership development. And I think some of them, most of them, are very simple things and we often over complicate it. So one of the most powerful that I have used over the last six or seven years, here is a listening exercise where we get people to talk and listen in pairs. And you know, the first off they have to talk for a minute. And then they have to repeat in the next 30 seconds everything they’ve heard back to the person. Absolutely exhausting. Next exercise is talk for less time, brief summary of three or four headlines from what they’ve heard. And actually, people feel that they’ve been better heard, than the regurgitation. And then we get them to talk for the same amount of time, 30 seconds. And then the person just has to come up with one word, that is the impression they’re taking away from the person. And that is almost always the exercise where people feel most heard. So I think there are skills we can use as to how we pay attention and those are quite underdeveloped for most of us.
Kate: That’s a fascinating example.
Rob: It’s a real fun one to do. And effectively what you’re doing is, you know, if you imagine a sort of midpoint when you’re listening to everything, you’re listening to everything in that midpoint. Then you’re listening for the headlines above the line. And then you’re actually looking for the feeling below the line.
Kate: And that’s such a critical skill as leaders, is not only listening but communicating to people that they have been heard and understood.
Rob: Well and there we’re getting on to one other thing that Stacey was really hot on. And certainly the point that I first encountered this. You know, we talk about conversation. I’ve said conversation is what an organisation is. Stacey went further and said conversation isn’t words, it’s actually a gesture. It’s accepting that what I’m saying to you two this afternoon, you’re not hearing exactly as I intend it. And so we kind of gesture it back and forward and we make sense of what we’re saying together.
Kate: I have one more question for you Rob. And it’s about scale. When you discovered these ideas, CRPR, conversational leadership, you were working in a relatively small environment. You were leading a college, which was relatively small in terms of the staff team, and then students. And then you move to a diocese of 20, 000, I think you said? Talk a little bit about the differences in scale. What shifts, what doesn’t, what still applies? What doesn’t? What do you have to do differently?
Rob: In many respects I think the key change has been one of particularly enabling others to operate with our thinking, rather than us operating with it, first hand with a leadership team. I mean, obviously, we do that as part of it, but, you know, hosting large-scale conversations. We have about 300 ordained and lay leaders. Currently, I’m running a program to upskill about 400 to work with some of these things. Because obviously we’re moving into a reshaped ministry pattern. It feels very unfamiliar to people. It feels quite scary. We are trying to do it in a way that we prioritise local discernment and autonomy and agency. And therefore we keep having to say, “Well, we can’t tell you what that’s going to look like, because that’s yet to be discussed and agreed locally and it will emerge”. So helping those leaders to hold their own anxiety, to work with tentative emergence, to help others live with a level of anxiety. And particularly when you’re talking about ritualised patterns of thinking, of behaviour, of faith, of meaning-making, that’s really deep stuff and challenging for people. So it’s it’s those small challenge for each of the leaders to do that. But actually so many of the principles that we’re talking about in conversational leadership have come into play with what we’ve been doing in the program.
Nelis: Yeah, it’s interesting to see how you are able to bring it to the next level, different scale. What I found interesting in our conversation was, I went in assuming that we would talk a lot about limited knowledge. And we talked about that and you gave those eight angles for that and the system for it. But what I find interesting is that you quickly took it into paying attention and how important that is. And that was core to everything. You said it’s about paying attention, really constantly revising your own thinking, listening to others, bringing people into the conversation from different angles. And you challenged me through that as a core concept it’s not just about limited knowledge and about not knowing, it’s about paying attention, which makes it very practical. I think we can all embrace this idea of how do I pay attention on a more regular basis and more broadly. So I think that’s a great takeaway for me.
Rob: You’re absolutely right. I think for me it’s become the kind of key focus that leaders need to be having. But actually, it’s a key skill that we need across the board at the moment, as we’re engaging difference in every part of society, every part of our lives. You know, that ability to not jump to conclusions but to actually continue to pay attention, to be able to revise our thinking. Just so relevant for so many parts of our lives today.
Kate: And so many, very current examples in the news, I’m thinking, recently here in the UK particularly. But yeah, for all of us, as attention spans are shrinking due to the effects of social media, etc., something we can all work on is paying attention and the quality of our attention.
Nelis: Paying attention. That’s a great takeaway. So Kate…
Kate: Yes, it just remains for me to wrap things up, as usual. Thank you Rob for coming. It’s been fantastic to talk to you again and to see how your ideas have developed and grown since I last talked to you about these things. Thank you to our listeners for showing up again. As always, if you have any comments or questions, thoughts, we’d love to hear from you. Head on over to leadinginconeversation.net, leave us a comment or contact us on social media as well. Thank you both. Until the next time, Nelis.
Nelis: Thank you and see you.
Rob: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
