Leading When Nothing Feels Certain With Scott D. Anthony, Lisa Kay Solomon, and Chris Shipley

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2:31Scott D. Anthony: I'm Maura Ahrensmele and welcome to The Anxious Achiever. Today I have a great treat for you. I've got three guests, which I think I've only done once before. And we are going to talk about human-centered leadership and futures-centered leadership. And I have to tell you, if you are a leader and you feel things deeply, which if you listen to the show, you do, and maybe you worry too, which probably if you listen to the show, you do. This episode is for you. I sit down with three of my co-contributors to a brand new anthology called Leading for Tomorrow. So I have Scott Anthony, who is a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and a longtime innovation consultant and expert, Lisa K.

3:21Scott D. Anthony: Solomon, who teaches futures thinking and design at the Stanford D School, and Chris Shipley, who is a fantastic leadership expert, the book's co-editor, along with Scott Barry Kaufman, and a veteran tech journalist and strategist. And together, we in this book, Leading for Tomorrow, are part of a group of 26 leadership thinkers, and including other heavy hitters like Amy Edmondson and Whitney Johnson, trying to answer one of the hardest questions of our generation and our moment, which is what does effective leadership actually look like when nothing is certain, when disruption, when the perma crisis are the status quo, right?

4:05Scott D. Anthony: So we talk about this, how to face this moment with clarity. You can have certainty, how to live with ambiguity, which is actually something that Lisa teaches students at Stanford, and why agency might be the thing that saves us. We get into personal practices for tolerating discomfort, how to play and have joy at work. It's such a great conversation. It goes in directions I wasn't predicting, like how a German stranger at a conference changed how Scott sees his entire identity. Let's get into it.

4:41Scott D. Anthony: I'm so happy to have you all. Scott Anthony, Chris Shipley, Lisa K. Solomon. Welcome to The Anxious Achiever. And we have so much to talk about. We couldn't possibly do it all in an hour. But one of the things I would like to offer today to my listeners, many of whom are senior leaders, who feel very deeply and maybe worry a little bit is sort of a roadmap for clarity and feeling a little bit more okay about this moment that we find ourselves in. How does that sound? Sounds like a plan. I think it's going to be challenging for us to answer that question. That could take the whole hour, but it's one worth trying to get to.

5:30Scott D. Anthony: But I do think that the word clarity is a really important one versus certainty. No one can provide certainty in a world that's changing as much as ours is. Hopefully, we can provide a little bit of clarity. We'll see. It's a high bar, though. It is a high bar. It's a high bar. But if anybody can do it, I know you can. And, you know, I think one of the questions that Leading for Tomorrow tries to answer, which is also a big question, is like, what is effective leadership going to look like in this new world. So I would love each of you, and I'm totally putting you on the spot, to give me your sort of one sentence best attempt at what you think effective leadership at its heart will be about in this new world.

6:15Scott D. Anthony: And I'm going to start, Chris, with you since you've edited, co-edited the book. Well, first of all, it's a real pleasure to be on with all of you and to even more so to have been able to get the first look at all of your work as the editor. getting to read you before anyone else did was a real thrill. So thank you for being part of this great project. It's interesting you talk about clarity. One of the themes, and it's repeated in several of the different essays, talks about leading through fog. In fact, we actually don't have clarity. We certainly, to Scott's point, don't have certainty. And I think that's kind of where leaders have to get comfortable, right?

6:55And I think when you can see in a leader, in your leader, I guess I would say bravery in uncertainty, bravery in lack of clarity, the ability to be vulnerable enough to say, you know, I really don't know what's going, but let's figure it out together and really embrace the humanity of the moment, which is one that's filled with a lot of, again, uncertainty, anxiety, fear, opportunity, engagement, collaboration, all those, the yin and yang of all of that, I think just reminds us that we have to kind of go bravely forward and that that's the kind of leader that people can get behind.

7:39Scott D. Anthony: So the courage to be uncertain and lean. I mean, Scott, that's very much what your chapter, I'll go to you next. That's very much a theme of your work and your chapter. No, absolutely. And I was struck, of course, by a lot of what Chris said. The yin-yang in particular struck me because I think a lot of what's required now as we are in, as Chris described, a very foggy environment is we have to go and act in ways that feel like they're paradoxical. So for example, one of the things I teach my students is in fog, you have to act when the data tells you not to. Because if you wait until the data are clear, it's too late to take decisive action.

8:21Scott D. Anthony: It's a paradox. So you have to go and get weak signals and make decisions even when the data are incomplete. You have to, as a leader, let go of things. It might be letting go of making decisions. It might be letting go of the heritage of parts of your organization. Whatever it is, the theme that runs through it is we are facing tensions that feel like they're polarizing either ors. we have to embrace new ways of thinking to turn them into empowering both ends. It's really hard to do, but there are great tools that can enable you to do it. I'm going to pick up on some tools later because I think, you know, the title of this show, of course, is The Anxious Achiever.

8:57Scott D. Anthony: And making decisions when you don't feel that you actually have enough to make a decision on can be really, really anxiety provoking. Right. It feels unnatural to many of us. Well, I'll jump in here, which is partly why it feels so unnatural is because we've never practiced how to do it. And to your point more about like why we're feeling so anxious is because we're constantly bombarded with new things that we feel underprepared and undertrained to manage. One of the things that we teach at the d.school, where I teach classes on futures thinking, is the idea of navigating ambiguity. And I'm often in front of groups, whether they're students or executive leadership, and I say, how many people have taken a class on ambiguity?

9:44And the answer is almost zero. You know, and I think like, what do we know for sure? Bringing back to Scott's point and Chris's point about we are navigating these tensions is that we're being asked to be experts in areas we've never had any practice in. And if you like pause and you think about like, no wonder we feel anxious, right? Who, you know, I wasn't born learning how to give a great presentation. Thanks to Nancy Duarte, I know a lot more about that. I certainly wasn't born knowing how to do a discounted cash flow or build a model for the future. But, you know, luckily I had some great teachers to teach me how.

10:17We're in a new era where the future feels like it's coming at us faster and faster. And I think this whole book is about offering a variety of ways of thinking about how to feel like we can have clarity amid all of the complexity. And in fact, I even quote Bob Johansson in my chapter, who used to run the Institute for the Future, where he says, the future will reward clarity, but will punish certainty. And I think if we've never taken the time to sort of make the distinction between those two, clarity of purpose, clarity of direction, clarity of point of view, flexibility on the how, you know, like recognizing that we are always going to be working with incomplete data and that is going to be uncomfortable and we need to make the decision anyway.

11:07So the question is, how fast can we learn from those decisions and incorporate it into our next plan, again, connected to the vision? And the thing that I really stress around your question about what leadership needs right now, I think we need optimistic humility. I think we need to still, amid all of this challenge that we're experiencing right now, we still need to develop a vision for the future that is one that pulls us there towards optimism. but to do so humbly, like recognizing it's not going to be that straight path. It's going to require multiplicity of thoughts, lots of experimentation, a willingness to try new things that aren't proven to be successful.

11:51You know, the last thing I'll say on this is that, you know, certainly when I went to business school and then worked in consulting for a while, it was like, let's look at best practices. I mean, honestly, actually, my mother was a total quality management consultant. Like that was all about, you know, reducing variance and, and look benchmarking around the best. There is no the best in this new environment, right? So that's also a mind shift change that we have to get comfortable with.

12:14Scott D. Anthony: There's no standard operating procedure, right? Well, Lisa, to your point, if I can just slip this in is that it's not only about no one ever taught us how to live and lead in uncertainty. It's that they actually taught us the opposite thing. You are the boss. You know, you've got a way, you've got to be able to do everybody's job better than they can. A boss once told me that's just not possible. And so if you have come to this place from that kind of a, this is what it means to be a leader thinking, you have to kind of wipe the slate clean and really recalibrate. And one of the chapters, Brian Solis writes a lot about the mind shift, but I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for so many people that is just, wait, it used to work this way and now it's not working that way anymore.

13:01But what? I don't have those, whether they're skills or biases to lean on, I've got to go do this other thing. And that means letting go of so much and starting to get comfortable being uncomfortable in this new world.

13:17Scott D. Anthony: Letting go of the need to know, as our colleague Charlene says. Scott, sorry, were you going to say something? Yeah, I was just going to pile on. I think to add, building on what Chris has said, adding to the words that Lisa offered, Lisa talked about humility and optimism, I would add grace on top of it because I think we have to recognize what Chris has said is exactly right. We have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. We have been taught one thing. It's not just that we have to learn a new thing. It's we have to unlearn the old thing. The metaphor I use in my class, there's this great program, Smarter Every Day.

13:50Scott D. Anthony: Destin Sandlin is an engineer that puts these things out. He has this episode that's now 10 years old. It is pure gold. Very simple. There's a bicycle. A welder makes one change to it. You turn the bike to the left, it goes to the right. You turn the bike to the right, it goes to the left. Pretty simple to ride a backwards bike, right? No. Sandlin says it's impossible to ride a backwards bike because it's all disappeared into muscle memory. He trained himself to do it, but it took him eight months of careful practice. Now, here's the thing. He asked his six-year-old son who had just learned to ride a bike to do the same thing.

14:24Scott D. Anthony: It took him two weeks because he had a lot less to unlearn, higher neuroplasticity, et cetera, et cetera. So the grace. When we're looking stupid, trying to unlearn how to do the old thing, let's recognize this is part of the journey these days. It's so funny because that really resonates a lot of work I do with neurodivergent leaders, right, is unlearning. is unlearning shame and old stories we tell each other and all of this. And I think what I hear you all saying is we have to all be a little bit unafraid to be new. You know, when I was a kid, my mom, when I was about five years old, she made me practice learning to take a no for about a year because I was that kid who if you told me, no, I would have a tantrum.

15:07Scott D. Anthony: And looking back, this was so brilliant. You know, she was really teaching me to be flexible, right, and deal with uncertainty. So I'm curious what your personal, you said, Chris, one of you, Lisa said, we've never taken classes in ambiguity. Do you have personal practices that you have undertaken to become more flexible, more comfortable with uncertainty? Lisa, I see you nodding your head. Why don't you Yes, 100%. Yes. I mean, this is the gift of improv, first and foremost. And I joke that I learn improv by reading about it. No kidding. Of course, you have to do it. I mean, the whole point is to make you unintentionally or intentionally a little uncomfortable.

15:49But when it's done well, it's in a very, very safe condition. And there's an improv teacher, very like mentor of mine named Robert Poyton, who actually teaches at Oxford, like imagine, You know, we do a lot of improv here and it's very much in a generative spirit. Yes, and is what people think of. And that's true. That's a generative stance towards improv that allows you to build new things that haven't been built before. But what Rob taught me was that improv can also help you become much more resilient and really navigate when you have to lead with incomplete information. And how I found him is really fun.

16:30I picked up his book at our local bookstore here in Menlo Park called Kepler's. It was called Do Improvise. This is over 10 years ago now. I read it in one sitting. The next day I'm cold emailing him and I'm just, you know, just professing my love for this book. And because I've been a facilitator for many, many years. That's how I've gotten into both design and futures. I facilitate conversations about the future through the lens of design. And so when I read it, I just thought like this is not just for coming up with new ideas. This is for how do you facilitate conversations? How do you become a better educator and honor what's in the room?

17:07And I'll just sum up his three practices that again are so simple, but doesn't make them easy. What he says is that great improvisers notice more, right? They're just like their peripheral is way open. They're not just noticing words, but they're seeing body language. They're experiencing the chemistry in the room, they use everything. So they're not narrowing their set of choices before they're looking at everything as an opportunity. And then the last one to your point is they let go. Let go of being the smartest, the funniest, the one with all the answers. So notice more, use everything, let go.

17:44In the middle, he says, is this idea of offers. Life is full of offers. And what makes his practice a little different than I think some of the ways that we're taught is that he says, you don't need to accept all offers, which is often a hallmark of improv, but you need to notice it as an offer. And once you notice it as an offer, well, that opens up your range of options. So that's one thing that I've tried to remember and incorporate into my work and teaching.

18:07Scott D. Anthony: I love it. Scott, what about you? Well, I have two different answers that I give to the question. I'm gonna go for the more joyous of the two answers. And that is, I spend time with my children. So I have four kids. They're 20, 18, 14, and nine. And I find one of the best ways to learn about new things is to just do whatever they're doing with them. So I learned about cryptocurrency from my 20-year-old. I learned about digital media from my 18-year-old. I learned about virtual reality from my 14-year-old. And my 9-year-old was the gateway drug to artificial intelligence because you get in there with kids and you screw around with them and play around with the technologies they're playing around with.

18:45Scott D. Anthony: They don't mind if you look foolish. In fact, they like it if you look foolish. They expect you to, yes. Yes, exactly. And it just makes it that much more fun. It makes it that much more disarming. So the advice I generally give people is if you have kids, spend time with them. And then I will give the advice that I give, recognizing what I'm about to say has some weight in today's day and age. I say, if you don't have children, find non-creepy ways to spend time with young people. Because the young people of today are the guides to the future of tomorrow. And the more we are playing around with the technologies the kids are playing around with, the less scared we are by all of it.

19:18Scott D. Anthony: So the joy, the wisdom of youth is a key enabler to me. Oh, I love that. Chris, how about you? You know, I go into most situations just assuming I'm going to be the dumbest one in the room. And I just don't know. And then it just opens up everything to curiosity and learning. And I think if you are in that headspace, like, geez, I got to catch up with these folks quick. Then you start looking around. You start learning fast. You start incorporating things and connecting dots and then you catch up, hopefully. And I think that kind of curiosity for me has been the way – two things about it. One is the humility to say I'm not the smartest one in the room.

20:00I can learn from other people. And, you know, I can – every conversation then becomes additive. So you need that humility with the curiosity, I think, to really create these learning situations that some people call collaboration. But I think ultimately that's what it is, right? We all come together and we figure it out. And that's, I think, the modality going forward. How do we just figure this stuff out with humility? Well, I was at a workshop just this past week with colleagues in mind that were exploring the future of AI and learning with a number of different tech companies. and they were using futures, simulations, portals to the future artifacts to explore like what might happen, right?

20:44Trying to rehearse the future before having it kind of smack us in the face. And my colleague said this expression that just captured my attention on this. She said, you know, this day is about learning, right? It's not about predicting and it's not even about problem solving. It's about learning to Chris's point of like, how can we learn together individually, collectively? And she said, I really want you to hold radical observation in your mind. And I felt like, whoa, that's such an interesting combination of words and things we might take for granted. We might be like, oh, I'm so observant.

21:17But the honest truth is we're also focused on this little thing called our device or the ding or the dong or whatever's coming our way that we're actually not really observing much. And we're certainly not observing with any kind of radical intensity. So that's a new thing I'm going to try out, radical observation. You know, it's funny.

21:37Scott D. Anthony: Go ahead, Maura, but I have a comment to build on. So you respond first so that I will respond after that, if that's all right. Sure. I was just going to say, you know, radical observation. I was going to share mine, which is mindfulness practice. You know, I have found that the only way for me to be able to deal with uncertainty is to get out of the future. Ironically, we're spending so much time talking about the future. The only way that I can face the present with courage when I don't know is to just be in it without my brain projecting negative, scary thoughts a million miles away. And I think that the observing of nature, of sound, of other people is one of the most powerful ways to practice mindfulness.

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26:44Scott D. Anthony: Scott, you were going to build something. Even better, I can now bridge between both comments. So one of the activities I have my students do builds on something I did when I was doing something that was a little weird. I was a 44-year-old that did an executive master's degree in a completely different field called system psychodynamics that we can talk about more later maybe. But one of the things that we did in that perm that I had my students do is a very loosely structured observation. the task. You have an hour, you have to watch something. It can be anything. The only rule is you cannot participate.

27:19Scott D. Anthony: So it could be your friends cooking dinner at your house. It can be a study group as long as you're not actively involved in it. It can be a bar, dining hall, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it is a place where you are practicing radical observation and you are out of your normal routine. So there's a little bit of mindfulness if you're doing it right. Students are perplexed by this. They're like, what does this have to do with leadership until they begin to see, once they turn off the device, once they turn on their senses, they start to see things that they would otherwise miss. They start to realize they were making assumptions they didn't realize they were making.

27:53Scott D. Anthony: They start to realize they're projecting themselves onto the situation. They start to realize there's so much more raw data out there. If we just stop, if we take a breath, if we just look, it is a very powerful exercise. And it's like it also has the benefit of it, like it suspends judgment, right? I don't have a role in this except for to be the observer. So I don't have to move anybody in any particular direction. I can just stand back and watch. And so my biases aren't really relevant to the observation. And I think that suspending judgment piece of it is going to become increasingly for a leader who's trying to like, again, we're all trying to figure this out.

28:32coming into that situation with prejudices about any situation is just going to make it harder to figure out. So I love that exercise. That's really great.

28:41Scott D. Anthony: I love it too, because also it takes away the pressure to sound smart or know what you're doing, right? You can simply focus on other people. I want to talk about agency. Agency is a big idea in the book. It's obviously a huge idea in leadership. It is something we fear that little things called lobsters and claws might be taking away from us. Agencies are really big. And each of you uses the word agency. Chris, you sort of describe it as something that shifted structurally during the pandemic and can't really be reclaimed by employers again. Like people now know they need to have agency over how they spend their time.

29:25Scott D. Anthony: And Lisa, you frame it, I think, a little bit as a mindset that people can learn, a really powerful one. And Scott, your chapter is kind of about organizational agency, like what a leader chooses to act on or let go of, right, in service of the broader purpose. I want you each to share why agency is a powerful concept for us to think about in the context of good leadership in this moment. And Chris, I'll start with you. Well, this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about lately. And I really believe that agency is the only thing that's going to save us as a human species. That so much of life, let's call it, let's use the pandemic just as a time marker.

30:17So much of education and training was almost about like removing agency, right? The boss, the company, the organization, they know how you should behave. And if you just follow those rules, you'll have a good and happy life. And what the pandemic did for us was send people home to work where they had to kind of figure things out and really own their own selves in the way that they showed up every day for work and for their families and for a community that was, we were all, you know, in this tremendously anxious and uncertain place. I think going forward, we just have to hold on to that agency and really begin to own it to understand that the power is something we give away.

30:55It's not something that's taken away from us. And that we all have the power and the agency to make things different and better. And with so much in our world that needs to be reinvented, and Lisa talks about this so well, the only way we get there is if we all kind of claim our space in that and work together to figure out what our new systems ought to look like. How will they serve us as humans in a more fair economy, in a more progressive, and I don't mean that in a political sense, but how do we educate now when we don't really know what we don't know? All of our systems really need to be rebuilt.

31:32And I think that it's going to take agency, an individual agency, and the willingness to step in and express that for us to get to better answers.

31:42Scott D. Anthony: How are you defining individual agency? I think it's owning your role in the world and owning how you show up and that you show up. where, and it's, it's, it's complex, I think, but it's like letting go of kind of the, the externalities that, that suggest how you should be, how you ought to be, where you ought to go, what you ought to study, what you ought to, where you ought to go to work, all of the external drivers that create a series of decisions that allow you to get someplace in your life and how the hell did I get here? I didn't plan for any of this. Um, because a little bit like self-actualization, you know, but it's, and so I think it's, it's just kind of owning and being, being responsible for yourself and your own curiosity and your own actions in a way that is, I think can be very empowering.

32:37Scott D. Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. Lisa, you want to go next? Sure. I just, This is so fun, Mara. Thank you. I'm like taking notes and learning so much. I'm so glad that you're pausing to actually define what agency is. I think it's quickly becoming one of those words that's being said a lot. And then everyone might have their own perspectives and definition and including me, you know, still working on a CRISPR definition. But I do, just building off Chris's point, you know, I think it is about both a belief and a set of practices that help you feel like you have choices over the future that both you are shaping for yourselves and for others.

33:17And for me, and I talk about this in the chapter too, I always, when I start my classes at Stanford, whether it's view from the future where we are bringing people that are pioneering the edges of their fields or inventing the future where we're teaching them practices to both imagine wider futures and bring them to life, I always start off and say, who shapes the future? Just who shapes the future? And I mean, you might imagine, certainly you're teaching at Stanford, the responses I get. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, sometimes as political figures. You know, it's why in the chapter, I wanted to highlight futurists that I think are shaping the future, Taylor Swift, the way that she went about her Aeros tour and the choices that she made at every step, right, to seek out, for example, a nonprofit in the city she was in, give it lift, give it joy, donate money, the choice to give bonuses to her team, you know, truck driver, like$100 ,000.

34:15Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, just that wasn't the status quo. She was like, this is what this was what feels right to me, you know, so that's also part of the chapter I talk about around, you know, abundance over scarcity, like how might we think differently about choices that we make that make the future better for ourselves and for others. And, you know, and I'll just give you, you know, one more example. And it's a little bit of what the podcast I started, How We Future is all about, is about stories of agency. And one of my favorites is Dana Cowan, who used to be the former editor of Food and Wine for 20 years.

34:48She knew every celebrity, in fact, she like invented the celebrity shift. You know, when she started Food and Wine, it was like a little brochure. She was like, why don't we put some stories around the chefs? And she, at the same time, cable was coming up and Food network and all these things. And all of a sudden now we have this industry called Celebrity Chef and Food Network. And so after she left, she did a number of other things and she really wanted to do something around climate change. And, you know, to your point, what a huge topic, what an overwhelming topic, like how easy it is to feel helpless on trying to make a positive difference on something as big as climate change.

35:21And she just sort of said, what could I offer that might make even a small difference? How do I shrink this down to something I can do. And long story short, for the last year plus, she's been working on an effort called Progressive Hedonism, where she's partnering with celebrity chefs to highlight plant-based meals that are delicious, good for the planet, something we can all enjoy, bring people together. And she's really then modeled not just with celebrity chefs, like potluck dinners. And she has this whole Progressive Hedonist potluck. And her whole idea is to bring people together as a community, allow them to learn from each other, perhaps even barter, oh, you have this, I have that, and remind ourselves that we can actually make choices that may not solve climate change, but can do better things for the planet.

36:09And I think just like we learned great research that suggests that when you are in a giving mentality, it's like good for your own mental health. Like when you do even small acts of agency, I also think it is good for your mental health. So a lot of the things that I do, I've been doing a lot of work around civic futures, like moonlighting and some of my things. The, I don't know, secret is it's like my own personal resilience strategy. You know, it's how I find agency and feel like I can navigate these complex times. Yeah.

36:38Scott D. Anthony: Scott, how about you? Well, first of all, I will say I am very happy to be the third person to answer this question because it brought me enough time to think of something that would be distinctive to say. Whether it's interesting or not, you will be the judge of. But where my brain went as I listened to the conversation is to a chart I saw about six years ago that literally changed the way I think about a bunch of things. The chart is from the work of Ron Heifetz, Martin Linsky, and others in the field of adaptive leadership. And it shows the relationship between discomfort and time. So here's the way it goes.

37:10Scott D. Anthony: You're doing a new thing. Your discomfort goes up. That's natural. You cross a line. That's a good thing. You cross a certain threshold. You're learning. You're developing. If there's no struggle, there's no learning. we get that. At some point, it's too much. You cross a tolerance level and you just can't handle it anymore. Now, if you're doing this on the athletic field, clear, you're going to stop, you're going to rest, you're going to recover. You get that. Here's the challenge. When that happens inside an organization, it shows up as anxiety. It shows up as emotional distress. You don't always have words for it, but you want it to go away.

37:42Scott D. Anthony: What do you do? The chart says you You do something called work avoidance. You give up agency. You quietly quit. You hire a consulting company. You set up a committee. You other the problem. You say, I wish I could, but I can't because the shareholders or Trump or whatever, even though the real problem is you are just emotionally just. I shouldn't downplay it. It's a big deal. The real problem is that you are emotionally dysregulated. The key thing here is recognizing it. If you learn to understand, back to what we talked about a few minutes ago, how to be comfortable being uncomfortable, you can be in a zone where you can be productive.

38:22Scott D. Anthony: Even though you've got that discomfort, that's how you have agency. That's how you drive change. First of all, mic drop. I have so much to say. I studied with Heifetz at Harvard. I have a lot to say on that. That was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my entire life. I have sat in, not with Ron teaching it, I've sat in other people teaching the class and my goodness, I have never seen anything like that before. I'm trying to try it here at Tuck. I'm not quite sure our students are ready for it. We'll see. You kind of need a little bit more of a holding environment. That is a whole other podcast I'd love to talk about.

38:56Scott D. Anthony: I mean, one of the things that I think is so important that you raise is I try to teach leaders the basics of their autonomic nervous system and how to understand when they're stressed and when they're sort of escaping that window of tolerance. Like we're getting a little bit dysregulated. We're getting a little overwhelmed here. We have so much stress in the workplace, Scott. How can leaders both care for almost the regulation of their people while pushing them towards innovation? Because you're right, sometimes it's hard to do both and it takes a lot of skill and understanding. And I think more you, what you said in terms of the classroom environment that Heifetz et al.

39:42Scott D. Anthony: set up, the word holding container, the phrase holding container, That to me is a key part of it, recognizing, number one, there is a lot of stress and anxiety, and you need to have the equivalent inside organizations where you just say, hey, let us acknowledge, let's create space, let's create an opportunity for us to just tune into these things. Because if we don't do that, you know, you've written about it, people will be overwhelmed by it. So that's step number one. Step number two is giving people the chance to pause, reflect, reset all the things that we've talked about here. And then the third thing, I borrow from John Haidt, who is also in the great book we've all put together.

40:20Scott D. Anthony: John Haidt, this is not in our book. This is in The Anxious Generation. Principle four from that book, return childhood to the children. So how do you fight anxiety among children? Encourage more free play. How do you fight it in adults? Well, we call it work. Why can't it be fun? So bring some joy and fun to the things that we're doing, because that will change everything if you're able to do it. Yeah. But work's not supposed to be fun. But it can be. It doesn't have to. I mean, it's a choice. Again, it's a choice. These are things that we say it is this way, but it is this way because a series of people made a set of decisions and then get reinforced.

40:56Scott D. Anthony: So, yes, of course, you still have – you have to make more money than you spend or else you don't have the right to have another day. But you can do that in lots of different ways. I love that. I often say, and you'll excuse the directness of my language, we made all this shit up. We can make up new shit. Work doesn't have to be miserable, right? Work doesn't have to be drudgery. It can be joy and discovery and curiosity. And that's what I love in all of this. Where, yeah, learning is going to be uncomfortable. But there's that point where you do have that breakthrough. And then it's just magic.

41:30When things start to work and you start to click with the people around you and the ideas that you're coming up with. And I think if we can get rid of the idea that our purpose at work is to bring all of the value out of every resource, including human resources, until they are dry and wizened and can be cast aside and we bring new ones in. and instead think about how do we create value together? How do we invent and build and create that kind of place where people can be their full authentic selves with all the agency that that implies? That's the kind of new stuff I'd like to see us be making up.

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46:25Scott D. Anthony: That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. Yeah, I mean, I just want to say hear, hear, and I feel so lucky working at the D school because we take play very seriously. Play is almost the precursor to prototyping. And in fact, one of my colleagues, Jill Violet, who actually started a company called Playworks, is all about infusing play back into schools, recognizing that that's where the accelerated learning happens. And, you know, increasingly, schools have gotten and so focused on measurable outcomes, things like recess have gotten shorter and cast to the side. And Playworks is all about using recess to be perhaps the most effective moment of learning, social, emotional, developmental.

47:09And so she taught a class called Designing for Play. And one of the rituals was you would have to design a playful entry into the classroom. And I think they start off with hopscotch. And I wish that we sort of don't wish, not really, but would have sensors on their brains to just see like, well, then how much more enjoyment and learning and fulfillment do they get out of the next hour and a half of being in that class just from perhaps a 90 second, you know, entry that was surprisingly delightful. And I think leaders can have an opportunity to rethink some rituals that they have, like why not start their weekly meetings with something that's a little bit more joyful.

47:46I'm not talking about unprofessional and I'm not even talking about silly. I'm just talking about something human. And I think, you know, more thanks to the great work that you were doing and Jonathan Haidt and others. Carolyn Webb, another fabulous contributor to the book, spends a lot of time thinking about neuroscience and leadership, you know, recognizing that play is not the opposite of seriousness, right? Like the opposite of play is depression and disengagement and nobody wants that. So I think that that's another opportunity to take a look at, first of all, doing something that, you know, maybe feels uncomfortable because nobody said, hey, you want to be an awesome leader, make sure you have a little fun like it's just and i think it's fun with the guardrails taken off i mean sometimes you think about well it's play and this is how it should work we there's a a new big investment has been made in in in doing a facelift to this county park in my neighborhood and they designed a playground that is unplayable because someone's when they do well we need to do it this way in the slide we'll put in this metal slide that will sit in the sun all day and burn the backsides of children.

48:47I mean, like everything about it was what somebody thought play ought to be and not like, hey kids, here's a sandlot with really cool things that you can build and move and do and experiment with. And so no one wants this playground because it's not play anymore. It's the set of rules that make it not work. Or I thought you were going to say, sorry, just real quick on that. I thought you were going to say it was, it was designed to be the least litigious place, you know, which is the other thing it's a right, like, which is all by the way, design choice. Like what are you optimizing for? And if you're optimizing for - Lisa, let's hit us right up to that stainless steel slide.

49:21Scott D. Anthony: Yeah, you lost me at the slide. Sorry, Scott. Lisa, I just have a clarifying question. This is a market research question. The hopscotch into the classroom, is it a classroom that is gradiated? So theater style that has stairs? Okay. There's always due. And I was thinking this would be really fun, but also back to litigious, I worry that that would not be a good thing to try. Wait, can I just say something back to environments and like, again, small things you can do I will often meet people, particularly over the summer when school is out, and they're like, oh, I did an executive program at Stanford.

49:50I forget if it was in the business school or the design school. And then I'll say, well, what was the classroom like? Did it have tiered? And they'll say, I'm like, you were in the business school. We are flat. We are wheels. You know, we were all about the vertical. And then, Scott, the last thing I'll say, I just, you know, I heard a colleague of mine said, you know, people always think of us as the post-it capital. We're really the blue tape capital.

50:10Scott D. Anthony: I think of you as post-its. While I've got three of the world's experts here, you know, I can imagine being a leader and saying, gosh, this sounds really awesome. I would love to interject a little joy. You know, what are your favorite? Coming back to exercises, Lisa, you gave us some ideas. was what do you recommend to leaders when they are feeling like they just need to interject a little joy, a little levity, a little sense of wonder and happiness back into a meeting or a work day? Well, I think one of the first things they could do is model it themselves. You know, be like, hey, something happened to me over the weekend that, you know, just made me pause for a little bit.

50:49It was a little funny. It was a little this, you know, just sort of taking the temperature down, that everything needs to be so ratcheted up and serious. And more to your point, like, you know, you want to be thoughtful, right? You don't want to unintentionally go so far overboard that you make people uncomfortable because like, oh, what do I need to share? Or, you know.

51:06Scott D. Anthony: Listen, I was in an icebreaker fight once where the question was, Taylor Swift is a terrible songwriter, yes or no. And you had to put your body in a certain place in the room if you agreed. And then you had to do a question about Beyonce versus Taylor Swift, who's the greatest. And I swear to God, I thought people were going to come to blows. You can't bury the, so which one did you pick? How did you answer the question? Oh man, I'm taking the fifth on that because I'm going to get haymail from my leaders. Although I think Taylor Swift is a great songwriter. Yeah. Well, it's interesting in that, like, again, what is the intent of the question?

51:46And as you said that, Warren Berger popped into my brain who wrote the book A More Beautiful Question. And those questions, that's the narrowing. Is there an answer? Yes or no, versus how do I learn about you? For example, one of our favorite icebreakers is you're introducing and you say, talk about your A side, what do you do during the day? And your B side, what excites you at night? Or what's on the other side? Just something a little light that says, hey, your full person is welcome in the room.

52:12Scott D. Anthony: I'll say another thing that I've seen that can be really helpful, that can be a two-for-one benefit. Susan Long, who's one of the thought leaders in system psychodynamics, talks about the importance of drawing. Like if you draw something, it often will express something that's at a deeper level in your soul that's hard to come out in other ways. Even if people are bad artists, which I would consider myself a bad one, just scribble something. You know, what's on your mind? Just draw something. What's the first thing that comes to mind? What do you draw and what do you see in it? And it is something that is a little bit of play, but there also can be some really deep things that come out when you ask people to draw things.

52:48Scott D. Anthony: I have, back in my old consulting days, it used to be a diagnostic tool that we would use. We would go and ask people on the front line of big change efforts, either draw or if you don't think you're a good artist, find a picture or tell a parable about what it's like. And I can't forget one of them. One of them said, you know, the innovators in our organization, they're all turkeys. Tell us more. It's like, well, life is good for them. People keep feeding them. They keep getting fat. Everything's good. But we know roughly the third week of November, they all disappear.

53:18Scott D. Anthony: So they had seen it again and again that there would be these movements where innovation would be a big thing and then it would disappear. So they're like, are we going to stick our necks out? No, of course we're not going to. You learn a ton when you engage in people in this way. Oh, I would never forget that either, Scott. Oh, wow. Turkeys. I think the thing I would add to this conversation is that you have to do this in a way that's authentic. And if you have been a stand and deliver kind of an organization to suddenly show up as the leaders, okay, today we're going to have fun. I want everyone to have fun.

53:50We're going to do fun things. It's like, what just happened here? And so you've got to think about how do you make that transition from, you know, kind of starched and stiff to more relaxed and engaged in a way that doesn't feel fake, right? And it can be something simple. We're going to move the chairs. You always sit there. I want you just to move around the table. And, you know, little things that can start to, you know, sometimes you have to break ice just a little crack at a time. And if you are not intentional on that pathway, then you get really, you know, people may already be a little skeptical, turn really cynical.

54:27And I think you've got to just do make that transition to fun, which totally you should do. But in a way that feels like a natural progression and not today we must have fun. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one thing it's not quite in the fun, but maybe it's moving towards that, Chris, like a little bit of small moves you can make that add maybe a bit of joy or a bit of appreciation. You know, I think, I think gratitude, right. Is another, a way to kind of take things down a little bit or just show that you are paying attention. And I, going back to Heifetz, you know, I, you know, the metaphor for me that I think about a lot in adaptive leadership is the balcony and dance floor, right?

55:08And those are really hard to hold on to when the future feels like it's coming at you faster and faster. Like, where are we? Whatever. And so if you're on that balcony and you notice good stuff happening on that dance floor, like I'm a big believer in noticing and like saying it out loud, being specific, calling people out. We have a Slack channel called Kudos. I'm like one of the most heavy users of that channel. I love appreciating when people are doing good stuff. Like whether or not it ladders up to a KPI or not, notice it, honor it, you know, let people know that you're paying attention. It's amazing what that does for the culture.

55:39Scott D. Anthony: It's amazing. What a simple thank you. You did a good job. I was so impressed with you in the meeting. Okay, I want to shift a little bit as we as we head out. Now, this question may not come across the first time. I'm going to be a little vulnerable here, but I'm going to trying to get at something. So I'm going to ask you to bear with me here.

56:02Scott D. Anthony: There's a theme in the book, And, you know, Chris, in the introduction, you talk about self-transcendence is a big thing for Scott Barry Kaufman, your co-editor, too. You know, the importance of self-transcendence connecting to something larger than yourself. And Lisa, you talk about having strong values, but loosely, I'm blanking on the loosely. So it was strong ideas, loosely held. So that gets into that, like, you know, in some ways, the humility of having, you know, not necessarily being able to predict. So strong ideas loosely held, but strong values strongly held. That's right. Strong ideas loosely held, strong values strongly held.

56:50Scott D. Anthony: We talked about clarity. When we talked about clarity, it was like you're kind of checking in with your values, right? Scott, you write about battles of assumptions versus battles of belief. I feel like all of all of you are asking people to try to find something steady to hold values purpose a model when everything else just feels so fluid and that's hard for a lot of people because you know when we feel anxious and things are changing too quickly right we just want to control we just want to like grip so tightly um How do you figure out sort of like, what's your steady thing worth protecting, your strong thing, strongly held versus like, maybe I'm just holding on out of fear and I need to let go.

57:44Scott D. Anthony: Does that distinction make sense? I told you this was a question that I was working on a little bit. Because I think a lot of people, they think, they feel confused by the difference. They think, well, maybe it's me. Maybe I totally have to change. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I've just got to start fresh versus knowing, no, I have a core here. How do I make this core into something that emerges in the future? Does that make sense? I think it does. And I think it kind of circles back to the idea of values and purpose and agency, right? And to understand, we all want to be able to control, right? But there are only so many things we can control.

58:29And so figuring out the difference between I can actually make a difference here or this is something that's happening to me versus this is something I'm happening to. And finding those lines and understanding that the things that I am happening to are things that I can control and should reflect. I want to reflect my purpose, my values, because that's kind of who I am in the world. and if I am too buffeted or wishy-washy and I'm going to do what this person wants or that person or what this moment says or now I've got to study AI but wait a minute maybe it's this it was like now I'm going to buy NFTs right I don't I don't have that's I think when I get I mean that's when I get anxious because I don't know who wants me to be what next right exactly if I can center on these are the things I believe and I and if I look back in my little life I I've believed in these things since the beginning.

59:26And then I can amplify that and I can build out from it rather than trying to be reactive and responsive to what I think other people want me to be. But man, that's a hard learned, hard fought lesson. And I don't think I even got it figured out yet. You know, this understanding who I am and who I need to be versus what I think other people might think I ought to be maybe, which is, I think, where we spend a lot of time getting ourselves wrapped around our own axles.

59:52Scott D. Anthony: Yeah, I think, Maury, it is a really beautiful question, a really hard one to answer. So I'll tell you my own perspective on it. I completely agree with Chris. You have to figure out what is the foundation? Who are you really at your essence? But that's a really hard thing to do. For me, when I was 47, where it finally became mostly clear in my mind, let me tell you a short story. I was at a conference in Switzerland, St. Gallen, Switzerland, and there was a big dinner before the conference began. I talked to this woman before the dinner and the conversation changed my life. So she was about my height, couple inches shorter, short, blonde, bob haircut, emerald green dress, very striking German.

1:00:28Scott D. Anthony: And the conversation went like this. She said, who are you? And this was a great question because I was just in the middle of a professional transition. I was going from being a consultant to being a professor so I could try on new clothes. I'm like, well, I'm Scott Anthony. I teach at, she cut me off. She said, no, I asked, who are you? I said, okay, She's looking for something personal. I said, I'm married. I've got four. She cut me off again. Who are you? I gathered myself. I looked up to heaven. I said, I'm Scott. I'm a consummate optimist that's passionate about spreading ideas. She was satisfied by the answer.

1:00:59Scott D. Anthony: She nodded, turned around, and sat down. I never saw her again. This is a true story, I swear. But I think she was put there to be an avatar to give me that moment of clarity that my profession doesn't define me, that my children and my family don't define me. It's who I really am at my core that defines me. And that has held since that conversation in 2022. So I don't know that you need a German avatar to answer the question, but something that forces you to get a little deeper and ask that question. Oh, maybe we should all become German avatars because that's a perfect, you know, we are trained to say, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up?

1:01:30And what are you studying? And what do you do for work? And none of those things are who we are. I love that question. Yeah, we sometimes a little riff on that. We sometimes will say like in a if we have an all day off site again This is a culture that's comfortable with each other. We will say how are you? How are you really? That's just like getting to that next level, but I love that story You know, I guess a model going back to your question more that comes to mind is one that my mom You know when you have a mother who's a chief learning officer when you're 15 You get books like the seven habits of highly affected people Even though you really want to be reading like sweet valley high teen edition or whatever But, you know, she she loved that was a book that was meaningful to her.

1:02:11And, you know, one of the great frameworks is your circle of control versus your circle of concern. And, you know, she would often talk to me about, you know, where are you putting energy? And it does feel like as these, you know, big audacious challenges, adaptive challenges, wicked problems feel so overwhelming. Our circle of concern just invades like where do we have control? And sometimes, honestly, at the most basic level, I think, particularly when I have a very stressful day coming up or a lot of uncertainty, I think, here's what I know. Day's going to start. Day's going to end. Something's going to happen in the middle.

1:02:46I'm going to try my best. And I'm going to try my best being as good of a human as I can be. And we'll see. You know, I just like taking them like all that pressure off. Like, what is fixed and what is loose? What is fixed is the day is going to start. The day is going to end. whole bunch of stuff's going to happen in the middle. And, you know, just along the way, you know, trying to make sure I'm having those micro moments of touching and asking people how they are, you know, sending, sending a text, you know, at the end of the week as a ritual to, you know, thank people for what they did for the week.

1:03:16Even in my, in my family, my daughters that are now out of the house when, when they were younger, our Friday night ritual was to talk about what we called Menchie moments. When were you Menchie to somebody? Like when did you show care and help? And when was someone Menchie to you? Because I think that's also important to recognize when someone is being kind to you. And I just think like over time, those are sort of ground, that's my practice of mindfulness. Like those are the grounded moments that help remind me that amid all of this, I'm just trying to be the best human that I can. And you never know when some of those little moments, you know, really matter for people.

1:03:55Scott D. Anthony: And I think what I hear you saying is that the act of investing and knowing who you are is one of the most powerful things that we can do. Scott, I'm curious if after you had that big moment with the German avatar, if you did any kind of self-discovery or if you were like, nope, that's who I am. I'm good. You know, if that spurred any bigger action for you. I mean, yeah. So I was in the middle of this big professional transition. So, you know, I was literally stepping from one world to another world. and it did change the way that I entered that world. It did make me very conscious when I was getting into the new world of teaching.

1:04:29Scott D. Anthony: How did I want to enter it? Who did I want to be? Who did I not want to be? What did I want to stop doing? What did I want to continue doing? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a much longer conversation that begins to blend a little bit into therapy if we keep going far enough, but there was a lot more that happened after that. That's wonderful. I want you to just take a minute as we close here. If a listener takes away just one practice from our book, from this conversation, to help them feel more clarity, what would you recommend they do? How can they start? Well, I said I benefited from going last for an earlier question, so I will go first if that's okay for this one.

1:05:14Scott D. Anthony: I'll go back to what we talked about, me spending time with my kids and learning from them. I would suggest people spend more time with young people and spend more time playing with technology with young people. It is a great way to build more instincts, more familiarity with the uncertainty of the future. I love that. I bet it's a lot more fun, too. Going back to what you're talking about. I think for me, Maura, maybe starting the practice is like part mindfulness, but maybe shrinking down, you know, the overwhelm a little bit. to wake up and say, what's going to make for a great day today? You know, if I'm going to do my, my future self a solid, but not future self, like 10 years down the road, but just even one that is just a few hours down the road.

1:05:59Like what's, what's some of the, what's the most important thing that I focus on today? And I think that could be really helpful in identifying what really matters, what contribution is going to matter. My guess is it's not scrolling, you know, somewhere to nowhere. You know, maybe a conversation you need to have or an outreach that you need to do or a question you need to ask or something you want to advance. But it just helps to kind of focus the attention on the important things. That is a freight question. I love it. Chris? You know, the word that just came to mind from, I guess, generated by all this wonderful conversation is forgiveness.

1:06:41And I think starting your day with, with preemptive forgiveness of yourself and with other people, some people call that grace, but I think giving ourselves the space to know that, and the forgiveness to know that we don't kind of know how the day is going to go. We don't know how technology is going to affect things. We don't know what we don't know. So let's just give ourselves a little bit of grace, forgiveness, other people, that same grace and forgiveness so that we can be curious and discover this stuff together. Because I think that's the best way through. I'm pretty sure my phone has never forgiven me for anything or, you know, as much as AI can be very placating, I don't think they really love me as much as they say.

1:07:24But I know the people in my life do. And so I want to be a better human for them. Beautiful.

1:07:30Scott D. Anthony: I will just add that my first step is to start noticing your body throughout the day. Body never lies to us. And so I would love you when you wake up, when you're eating breakfast, when you're commuting, when you're at work, or when you're sitting in your chair doing Zoom, is to just take a sec and scan your body and see how you feel. To me, that is a door opener to so much noticing and so much good stuff as well. You all are so smart. I could talk to you all day long. Thank you so much. Thank you. So much fun. I learned a lot from this conversation. This has been great. Thank you all.

1:08:15Scott D. Anthony: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.