Oli Raison & Boris Maguire on Leadership Beyond the Boardroom | EP 703

27:18And their leadership shows up in that. Yeah, for them, what is their average lifespan? Yeah, I don't think it's much shorter than ours. We've met people who are in their 80s in the Sanbaru Society. seen? Yeah, I'm not sure what it is. From the data I've seen, though, you have a higher level of childhood mortality, infant mortality, with a lot of indigenous tribes. And I believe Bill von Hippel talks about this in regards to the Hadzaba as well. High levels of infant mortality, and that is largely driven by nutritional challenges, right? This is not a farming community. It's in a very arid, beautiful, but challenging area subject to droughts and floods and the rest.

28:02The nutritional challenges often affect maternal and infant mortality levels, but after childhood, average lifespans, the likelihood of a 18-year-old to get to 80 is actually pretty similar to any other society, but it is a much more, yeah, there are higher rates of mortality in those younger years.

28:24So I understand that one of the things that you do while you're on the excursion itself is that you incorporate daily walking tracks with Samborough elders, using movement as a vehicle for learning and reflection, but also having the elders paired up with those who are on the journey. How do these walks and talks differ from sitting in a typical classroom or conference room that so many of these leaders are accustomed to doing? Ollie, maybe you can take that? I think one thing I would talk about is just the challenge. We're in an area of the world where there's a lot of uncertainty. We can be traveling, we can be trekking up a mountain.

29:10We don't know how long it's going to take. One journey that we recently took people on, there'd been a lot of rainfall. That meant there was a lot of growth. These are forested mountains surrounded by desert. It's really quite a remarkable part of the world. But we got to the top of the mountain and we had to really bushwhack our way through with pangas or machetes as you would probably know them and that slows everything down we don't know when we're going to get into camp there's a lot of uncertainty and that creates an opportunity for a lot of coaching moments because i think that in the west we we are over scheduled we expect that okay well by this time i'm going to be in camp and by this time i'm going to have my dinner and by this time and etc etc and that's just not how things roll necessarily in these rural parts of Africa.

29:56So I think that's an aspect of it. But also, I think that just, it's really remarkable seeing the strength of the relationships and the friendships that grow out of bringing radically different people from completely different cultures together, and seeing them connect on a really human level. I think that's that inspires people and causes them to reflect on what are they doing to foster human connection in their teams? What are they doing to create work teams or workforces that are really flourishing? That's the most satisfying thing of what we do, in my opinion. Okay. And Forrest, I'm going to turn this to you.

30:37We talked a lot about the Samburu concept of community and identity and core values, but in their worldview, what does it mean for them to live a good or successful life. Because in the Western world, if we had to wait on that track to become an elder and then a senior elder, it's counterculture. So many, and I am living proof of this. We strive for success as quickly as we can possibly get it. We push the limits to get to things much quicker than we often should. I know for me, getting to those places so quickly, I sometimes wish in retrospect, I had a longer time to wait because there were critical skill sets and learnings that I wish I would have made that happened after the fact.

31:26I'm really curious about this. What does it mean for them to live a good life or a successful life? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's one of the fundamental points of differentiation, maybe. And I guess if I could summarize it, a good life is a life of a Samburu. And that sounds like a non-answer, but it begs the question, what is it to be a Samburu? And we've often said, would you rather, or people have asked our elders, would you rather die or would you rather no longer be a Samburu? And like to a man, to a woman, the answer has always been death. And I know that sounds quite morbid, but it speaks to the importance of identifying with the collective, right it is not about Bill von Hippel had spoke about this balance of autonomy and connection and there are elements of autonomy but connection to the tribe and being of service to the tribe and to the community rise above almost any other any other thing short perhaps of the family unit of having a family so to be a Samburu is to have a family to create more Samburu but also to fulfill your role and purpose to serve your community.

32:34And in almost everything that people do, one can never see someone doing something solely in service of themselves. Even parenting is collective. We always say it takes a village, but in the San Buro community, this is true. And children are literally considered the children of all. And likewise, leadership to become an elder comes with no material reward. There's no bigger salary, car, off corner office, watch. There's the title, I suppose, of being an elder, but that's not seen as a reward in and of itself. It's seen as a responsibility, a cultural responsibility to serve the community and make good decisions for others.

33:13And through those good decisions, the collective, the group, the tribe flourishes and continues. So yeah, I think that's the answer. And our insight on that really comes to resilience. What is it to be strong? Is it to be resilient? Is it to be gritty, to power through, to wear the heavy crown, so to speak, to blaze your own trail or whichever metaphor you want to pick that you might be familiar with? None of them really apply. To be resilient is to be supportive, to be served by others and to serve others. And it's only in my observation, and I think Bill von Hippel's research would support this, that the society flourishes and the society is inherently resilient because they are so supportive of one another.

34:00I could talk for days about that. Can I just add one thing? Because you mentioned about time. And I think in the West, we are obsessed with time, right? And we're obsessed with who's first and who's the youngest. We can all name entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg who became billionaires at 19 or 20. There are many successful entrepreneurs who build multi-million dollar businesses but they don't achieve it until they're 50 or 55 and that's just not interesting to us. It's not sexy. It's almost like we're over we fetishize this idea that speed is the most important thing and I think it speaks to the fact that in the West, we are destination driven.

34:43Whereas the Samburu, it's much more about the journey. It's the life's path and how you get there is more important than where you end up. I've had the opportunity of spending some time with Native American tribes. And as I'm hearing you talk about a lot of the Samburu culture, a lot of this really reflects also on what Native American tribal life was like for centuries, and in some reservations, what it's like today, especially as they're going through the rites of passage, the role that elders play, how they hold their elders in such high esteem. One of the things I was wondering, though, about is spiritual beliefs and connections to nature, because those two things play a huge role in Native American life, I'm wondering what type of role they play in Samburu life.

35:42I think that with spirituality, they have a belief in God, Nkai, they call, is their God. But Nkai is represented in nature, and he's also represented in the past and in the future. And they think on a much longer term basis. They believe if they don't live a good, wholesome and respectable life the ramifications of that are not going to be visited on them as individuals but rather possibly their descendants they want to live a good life because they want to set their descendants up for success and so they take a much longer term view and I think that again is something that we can learn from in the west I think that again it goes back to time, it goes back to everything being in a hurry.

36:30A CEO is judged on the next quarter's profitability. A president or a prime minister is really judged on what they can achieve in the next four or five years. And that's not necessarily conducive with making the smartest long-term decisions. And so I don't know whether that answers your question, John, but I think that They think much longer term than we typically do in the West. Well, another thing that you guys were talking about earlier is how the Samburu make choices. And you were saying that it really comes down to community decisions are made amongst the tribe. As you've seen this compared to how hierarchical Western systems are, how do they differ?

37:20and why have you found the Samburu community decision-making to be successful compared to some of the hierarchical systems that exist in other parts of the world? And maybe Boris, you can take that. Yeah, sure. I feel to some extent, yeah, this theme of time comes back. And you mentioned the walk and Ollie just mentioned the role of time and kind of spiritual thinking. And one of the things that our elders always say, and they often tell the clients, particularly when clients are a bit worried that the walk might be taking long and do we have time for this? And one of them, Stephen, always says, in Samburu, there's always enough time.

37:59And people laugh, but that does reflect a philosophy that there isn't a rush. There is not a rush to reach camp, to get through our program today, to have dinner, or to have any kind of conversation along the way. So your questions about what do we get out of the walk and spirituality and living a good life as a Sembru, I think does in many ways come back to this fundamentally different perspective on time. And again, we never expect that people are going to just fully adopt this philosophy towards time and in their Q3 reporting say, oh, there's always going to be enough time. But it does enable a mindset shift when you start to see this, you start to see this kind of applied and you see it in decision-making as well.

38:36So the elders do not have either kind of a pure authoritarian structure, nor a purely democratic one. I would describe it as consensus driven. So the idea is really like a decision can be made and can become final when no one is really dissenting to it. And so there isn't a clear kind of, you've got to reach a 70 % threshold or anything like that. But it requires a real super majority of the elders. And the elders can convene in different kind of sizes. Typically at a village level, this might be a dozen men or a few dozen. And fundamentally, if someone is not happy with the direction that the decision is taking, even if it is two of the 12, then the meeting is adjourned.

39:21And there is a chance for private conversations to take place and for the group to re-adjourn later down the road and see if either everyone is now bought in or whether a different decision needs to be made or of more time needs to be taken. And I think, you know, again, that doesn't work perfectly in a business context, but if you can extract a theme from it, for me, it's prioritizing harmony over dissent. I think we have all, I recall in school or at least in college being graded on participation. And so feeling like at the end of a class, I had to raise my hand and disagree with someone just to have the teacher check a box.

39:58And there's great, and that reflects our focus on autonomy. And there's great value in that for sure. But one is more judicious in their dissent when you can be the lone outlier and that can delay the decision from being made. So I think it's a slower process for sure, but it's one that prioritizes harmony. And again, when you have a society living and really facing real constant challenges, harmony is really important. And I think there's something to be said in a business context for that as well. So, Ali, I've got an interesting question for you. If you did the reverse and you took a group of Sanboro elders to visit London, what aspects of Western life do you think they would find most confusing or surprising to them?

40:47I think probably the hierarchical nature of things. Just having one person who ultimately is accountable and gets to make the final decision would be the most alien thing to them that they could possibly imagine. I also just think, and maybe we're repeating ourselves here, but the obsession with getting everything done quickly. I think speed is overvalued over making the right decision. And maybe that's because we live in such a competitive context, but I think they would struggle with that. Okay. And I did want to ask just one more thing. Homelessness as well. Oh, homelessness. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

41:31So obviously, yeah, obviously their life is dependent on the terrain that they occupy. how sacred did they hold the land and tending to it as part of their culture? Like how does that play? They're not agriculturalists. So it's not necessarily the land that is their way of life. It's very much their livestock. That is everything. And it's not just a source of wealth. It is a source of wealth, but it's not just that. Their livestock and sacrificing livestock is a key part of their ceremonies. they give livestock when somebody gets married and but they share it openly like one of the things that we maybe i'm deviating a little bit from your question here but one of the things that we found most surprising is the samburu are incredibly resilient people we've already talked about the environment that they live in is very harsh they're very marginalized they're very poor and yet they're incredibly resilient and incredibly happy and the source of that resilience is a dependence on one another this interdependence on one another and I think in the west when we talk about resilience that word is quite often considered to be synonymous with toughness mental grit broad shoulders pushing on through and actually in the sunbury culture it's really quite the opposite.

43:01They have this kind of quiet confidence that if they were facing hard times, if there was a drought, then their neighbor would step in and their neighbor wouldn't resent them for it. You know, we've even had stories of one of our team, actually, a guy called Stephen. His brother-in-law had a really difficult time and lost a lot of his camels and was told that another family who he'd never met was actually gifted 13 camels by his great-grandfather. And so he went off and said to this family, I've heard that my great-grandfather gave you some camels. Would you return them to me, to my family? And they said, yes, no problem.

43:43Because they had been told in turn this story that when they were having, when their family was facing hard times four generations ago, they were gifted some camels. And so they returned the favor. So it's very reciprocal. I can't imagine that happening in the West. This idea that somebody that you've never met before would just turn up on your doorstep and say, hey, my great grandfather gave your great grandfather some camels. Would you return the favor? But that's how these people operate. They take it on face value and they support one another. Boris, I'm going to switch directions here. You both run workshops and everything from harmony and dissent to resilience and cross-cultural communication.

44:25Can you share a story or a moment in one of these workshops where one of the leaders' perspective shifted dramatically and how that unfolded? Sure. You really put me on the spot. Let's see. In the moment during the trek had this kind of revelation. Like a powerful transformation that you saw happen. Maybe someone talked to an elder, you did a workshop, and they had just like a light bulb moment where how they'd been operating changed. Yeah, sure. You can talk about the cow game that we play, Boris. Yeah, let me let you talk about that. I'm going to give two examples of an individual. So as much as this is principally, we talk about leadership, it's leadership development, you know, who we are personally and what we're going through outside of work directly impacts how we show up at work, right?

45:21We don't believe, I don't really believe you bring your whole self to work, but you try to bring your best self to work. And to be your best self, it depends on your whole self. And so people often get very deep and vulnerable into their personal situations, not just what they're experiencing in the office. And there was a woman on one of our trips who during her journey line had spoken to having been in what she described as an emotionally abusive relationship. And that didn't seem to us initially connected to her work, which we had learned a lot about during the discovery process. So I wasn't necessarily sure how that was going to show up during the experience.

46:00And at one point, she's told us this and talked a lot about it in a testimonial, I believe as well. She was walking and she enjoyed walking alone and used that as a chance to reflect. But one of our elders approached her and said, you are always looking at your, you're always looking down. Why are you looking down? There's so much beauty around you. And this kind of ties into your prior question about nature. There is great reverence for nature in the Sembru culture. And to kill and eat a wild animal under any circumstances is to bring a curse upon your family. So there are like cultural tenets and spiritual beliefs that necessitate protecting the resources around you.

46:36Because while they don't farm there, they do depend on the land for their livestock. And our elder said, look around you, there's mountains, there's desert, there's trees, why are you looking down? And it sounds like a very simple thing. But what she had said to us is she felt that she was inclined to look down for different reasons connected to the relationship that she'd been in, and that this showed up and how she showed up as a leader at work. She was in a very male-dominated industry, and she tended to, as she's described, absorb negative energy from others and just carry on. The classic woman working in a very masculine field, not wanting to rock the boat or disrupt things, but actually, and therefore taking a lot of crap maybe.

47:17And this was something she talked about every day in the rest of the trip and every day since. And I think, and has had this, she has described a total transformational impact on how she shows up with her family, with her friends and at the office. And that she seeks connection, not to absorb negative energy, but to deliver positive energy and to see the purpose in others and find the good and connect and keep her head up and look for beauty, not to look down to avoid kind of negativity. So that's always struck me because it's so simple. And one might think that you could get that insight anywhere and anyone could give you that, you know, keep your chin up kind of insight.

47:57But I think the Sambru, this lack of obsession of time and rushing and goal orientation, this feeling of connection to others, to nature, to the past, to the present, and to the future allows for that kind of perspective to be there always, whether in a time of challenge or emergency or what have you. And it's had a truly life-changing effect on this woman. I have another example, but I feel like I've talked too much. I'll stop there. Yeah. Ali, did you want to give the other example that you were thinking of? Sure. I'm cautious of going into too much detail just in case somebody listens to this and then decides they want to come on one of our experiences.

48:36But one of the workshops that we do, we play a game where we break the participants, the clients, into different teams. And we give them instructions. They each have eight cows. And without going into too much detail, the goal of the game is to maximize the herd. and you maximize the herd by grazing the appropriate amount of cows. If you overgraze, if you send too many cows out to graze, then you risk actually causing the grazing area to deteriorate and that reduces your herd, the size of your herd. And it's very interesting because once you split people into teams, they typically start thinking in a, we're going to win.

49:20We've got to maximize our herd for our team. and the instructions that we give are deliberately vague. It's quite ambiguous. We just say the goal is to maximize the herd. And the catch of the game is you can't win the game, right? You can only really maximize the herd if you work collectively together as teams as a whole. And that kind of aha moment that even though we didn't say the goal is for your team to win, that's the mindset that people enter into the game with. And I think that's quite a revelation for people. And then I think a program like this, I always think knowledge is important, but applying that knowledge is the most important aspect going forward.

50:04So I understand that you have a capstone called the commitment to action exercise. And I was hoping one of you could walk us through that. Do you want to take that for us? Yeah, sure. So the last night, the core kind of five to six nights is trekking through an incredibly remote and beautiful part of the world. And it's very comfortable, but it's certainly not luxury. We are camping. It's a sort of glamping experience, perhaps. But the last night we typically spend in a much higher end, nicer community run lodge or camp somewhere where we have hot showers and things. And so it's at that dinner that we typically, we give people a form to fill out, to think about, and that kind of hours before that dinner.

50:48But at the dinner, we ask people to share out to what have they reflected on in those final kind of 24 hours as they say goodbye to the elders, as they say goodbye to the mountains, and they start this process of reintegration. And what are the things that stay with them? And so it's not particularly any more sophisticated than that. But we ask them to fill out their forms, to share out with us. We take notes. We collect those forms. And then we use that as the basis for coaching down the line. Okay. And then, Ali, for leaders who might be watching this, or maybe they bring this up to their organization or a manager about bringing the whole team, what's the best way to engage with you or explore Saffarini leadership in more detail?

51:36Sure. We have a website, SaffariniLeadership.com. We have an Instagram, Saffarini Leadership. We have a YouTube channel, which is also Saffarini Leadership, where particularly on our YouTube channel, there's a number of short sort of 90 second snippets of client testimonials talking directly about their experience. But our principal sort of social media is LinkedIn, which again is Safarine Leadership. People can find out a lot of details there. Our emails are obviously on our website. We're very open to talking to anybody that may even just be curious. We don't give anybody the hard sell. It's really important that anybody that is thinking about coming away with us has a really good understanding that it's the right fit for them and that they really think that they can work with us because they're going to be out in the bush with us for six days.

52:31That's important. So yeah, any one of those social media platforms, they can learn a lot more about what we do. Okay. And maybe what is the typical team size that goes out with you on one of these tracks? It's quite a minimum of six and really a maximum of eight. We can take more than eight people, but we have to change how we operate a little bit. What I mean by that is it's quite a heavy undertaking. We fly people way up into the north of Kenya and then we embark on a six-day trek where every day we're moving, we're setting up a camp, we're cooking lunch, we're cooking dinner, and then the following morning we decamp and we move again and again.

53:15So logistically, it's quite an undertaking and we need to keep it to a very small group. So maximum eight clients plus myself and Boris plus our three Samburu cultural co-facilitators. So that's 13 people. And we actually really like the intimacy that small group creates. People really do foster very strong relationships over the 10 days that they're together. Well, Boris and Ollie, thank you so much for joining PassionStruck. It was such an honor to have you on today's program. And I'm so intrigued by what you both are leading here. Thank you for having us. Yeah, pleasure to be with you. We appreciate it.

53:55That's a wrap on today's conversation with Ollie Raisin and Boris McGuire. And what stayed me the most from this episode is this truth. Becoming doesn't require more information. It requires a different environment. When we change that context, we change what becomes possible. Here are a few reflections worth carrying forward. First, leadership isn't a position, it's a responsibility to the collective. Second, speed is not the same thing as progress. And wisdom doesn't always come from the newest framework. Sometimes it comes from the oldest ones. The Samborough elders don't rush decisions, they don't lead alone, and they don't separate success from service.

54:33That's a powerful mirror for the world we're living in right now. If today's episode expanded your thinking, please share it with someone who leads or wants to lead differently. And thank you for helping this season of Becoming reach more people than ever before. If you wanna go deeper with these ideas, join me at theignitedlife.net, where each episode is paired with reflection tools to help you integrate what you're hearing into how you're actually living. And next week, we continue this journey with a conversation I'm especially excited about. I'm replaying a live conversation that I did with Joshua Green, the Harvard moral philosopher, and Rick Hansen, my friend, psychologist, and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley for a powerful dialogue on expanding the circle of moral concern.

55:19In the conversation, we explore why humans divide into us and them, how moral reasoning shapes conflict, compassion, and cooperation, and what it takes to widen our sense of who belongs in leadership, society, and everyday life. Because becoming isn't just personal, it's collective. All living systems are built on a combination of cooperation and competition, right? So cooperation at multiple levels means starting with primordial soup. You have molecules come together to form cells, and cells come together to form more complicated cells and colonies and individuals with organs that work together in complementary ways.

55:57And then we have individuals forming small-scale societies, villages, chiefdoms, nations, and sometimes even united nations. And all of that works because the parts are able to accomplish more together than they can separately. And so they form a whole. I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck. Until next time, keep choosing growth over comfort, connection over certainty, and live like you matter.