EP10: Relationality at Work | Creating Healthy Culture

In this episode of FARSIGHT Chats, hosted by Farah Bala, founder and CEO of FARSIGHT, the focus is on creating a healthy work culture through relationality and relational intelligence. The conversation features Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene, who discuss the difference between relationality and relationships, and the importance of developing relational skills such as deep listening, curiosity, and pausing. They explore the impact of societal norms and structures on workplace culture and delve into their newest offering, 'The Relational Workplace.'

| KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED |

Relationality vs. Relationship:

• Relationality is presented as an ongoing process of relating, emphasizing co-creation and shared meaning in interpersonal and systemic interactions, while a relationship is seen as a more static construct.

Importance of Relational Practices:

• The conversation highlights six relational capacities for building relational intelligence in the workplace: staying playful, listening with curiosity, reframing stories, considering context, asking questions, and holding uncertainty.

Tackling Workplace Loneliness:

• The discussion touches on the epidemic of workplace loneliness and its negative impact on productivity and mental health, suggesting that fostering personal connections and belonging is essential.

Relationality and DEI:

• The episode explores how relationality supports diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts by emphasizing both structural and interactional dimensions of organizational culture.

Impact of Trauma and Power Dynamics:

• Insights are shared on how trauma, somatic responses, and positional power influence workplace interactions, stressing the need for empathetic and responsive environments.

Mindset Shift:

• Emphasis is placed on moving away from hierarchical, dominance-based structures to collaborative, relational approaches that prioritize shared understanding, adaptability, and humility.

| SHOW NOTES |

00:00 Introduction to FARSIGHT Chats

01:11 The Importance of Relationality in Today's World

02:01 Meet Our Guests: Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Green

05:05 Exploring Relational Practices and Masculinity

13:47 The Concept of Relationality

23:25 Relational Capacities and Their Impact

29:00 Embracing Uncertainty in Life and Work

30:23 Inclusive Pedagogy: A Case Study

32:06 The Importance of Playfulness and Curiosity

36:26 Navigating Difficult Conversations

42:06 Relationality and Trauma in the Workplace

45:42 The Role of Organizational Culture in DEI

54:17 Closing Thoughts and Future Conversations

| WORKS CITED |

1. 'The Relational Workplace: How Relational Intelligence Grows Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Cultures of Connection' by Saliha Bava, PhD & Mark Greene. Book. https://relationalworkplace.com/
2. 'How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain' by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Book. https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
3. How to Fix a Toxic Culture - https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-fix-a-toxic-culture/
4. Collaborative...

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Farsight Chats, your guideto navigating complex and important
conversations on society and culture.
I'm your host, Farah Bala,founder and CEO of Farsight.
We specialize in leadership andorganizational development, focusing
on equity, diversity, and inclusionas core leadership competencies.

(00:23):
Join us in these conversationsthat aim to foster understanding,
growth, and positive change.
Today, we focus on how relationalityat work creates healthy culture,
with our special guests, Dr.
Saliha Bhava and Mark Green.
In this episode, we explore the differencebetween relationality and relationship.

(00:45):
And the importance of buildingrelational intelligence through
key skills and practices like deeplistening, curiosity, pausing,
checking our assumptions, and more.
We talk about the role of societalnorms, systems, and structures
that either help or hinder thecreation of a healthy culture.

(01:06):
We originally had thisconversation on August 25th, 2023.
So why is it important today?
Because we are living in highlypolarized times where disagreeing
with someone has become so common andcan cut off a relationship for good.
Cancel culture on social media onlyexacerbates our levels of impatience

(01:27):
and intolerance of one another.
And if this continues, we run therisk of not being able to maintain
any relationships around us.
So as you listen today, we inviteyou to consider how do you show
up, Connect, and communicate inyour work and community spaces?
How do you navigate difficultconversations in these spaces,

(01:48):
especially when you are triggered?
Join us on this journey oflearning and unlearning in
today's episode of Farsight Chats.
Thank you so much for joining us.
You are also the authors of yournewest offering, the relational
workplace, which I am I'm veryexcited to ask you about in a second.

(02:10):
But first, I'm going tohand it over to both of you.
Yes, I have it here as well.
Saliha Baba and I amoriginally from India.
I've been living in the U.
S.
for nearly about The equal amountof time that I was in India, and
I came here for my PhD in marriageand family therapy so by training.

(02:32):
I am right now I'm a couples therapistand a consultant on relationships,
but by training is in systemicpractices and human development.
I currently teach.
I'm a full professor at Mercy Universityand I teach in the marriage and family
therapy program, which is within theSchool of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

(02:53):
And I run a lab that I startedcalled the relational play
lab, which is where we inquire.
into how we as human beings improvise.
How do we make up the world?
Like this conversation, as much as we haveprepared and talked about where it might
go, there's an element of improvisationhere that's going to come into play.

(03:17):
And so how do we do thaton a daily, everyday basis?
And in the process of doing it, How dowe create the sense of self, the world
around us, and the different context?
And so I study relational practicesin communities and families and I've
been in this work for 30 years or soas a relationship consultant and I

(03:40):
worked as a consultant both withinand from outside with organizations.
So traditionally what might wantone recognize it as organizational
development consultants.
So I've done a lot of leadership coaching.
Currently, my practice, I would say,has a lot of leaders from the financial

(04:01):
industry, because being in New YorkCity, I get a lot of clients from that.
And we go from everything from one'sidentity to how to position myself
as a leader, to talking about groupprocesses and where there are disjuncts.
So I do a lot of different things becauseI don't like to be boxed in, but more so

(04:23):
because I am an interdisciplinary and atransdisciplinary researcher because I
think the way we have created researchand the world around us is very boxed,
and we learn from stepping in and out ofthose call me a boundary transgressor in,
in, in academic discipline, very sense.
You know, not to live in, inthe liminal, playing the liminal

(04:45):
space of the in betweenness.
Because I think that's where wefind the richness by which what
we're going to talk about today.
How do we transition through challengesand pain points and identity and culture
conversation where There are a lot ofdifferences and power differentials.

(05:05):
My name is Mark Green.
About 20 years ago now, Ibegan writing about fatherhood
and being a stay at home dad.
That quickly became a strong interestin our culture of masculinity
what we call man box cultureor dominance based masculinity.
And I Have a significant amount of writingand publishing, speaking, consulting

(05:26):
and coaching around those issues.
But if you look at the challenge ofdominance based masculinity long enough.
You can pretty much find the sourcesof it, name it, define it, show how
it's showing up, but at some point thequestion became so what do we do about it?
And that led me to my partnership withSaliha Bava around relational practices,

(05:49):
which are the processes by which we createrelational spaces with others and grow
connection and equity and creativity andall of the things that we need to move
past dominance based hierarchical systems.
So that's what brought me into this work.
And that's what we've been doingfor the last few years is really
researching and writing about this.
My first question to bothof you is both of you.

(06:13):
You are very accomplished in your fields.
Both of you have had research out there.
You were published.
What motivated you to write this book?
Was it a conversation, an event anexperience of being boxed in and then
the process of, you know, writingthis book, The Relational Workplace?
Three things, primarily.

(06:36):
Experience, gap, and the time.
Thank you.
My experience, I think whenyou write a book, there is a
process by which you synthesize.
So I've been doing this work,like I said, for 30 years.
One of my first jobs, when I graduatedin India, was working in rural India.
with tribal, what we wouldconsider the tribal belt of India

(07:00):
or the indigenous population.
Now that's a very differentname, what it means in India
than what it means here in the U.
S.
when we say indigenous.
So again, another conversation foranother time, but as a urban woman
coming into rural, what does that meanto work in two different contexts?
And we were working in organizing.
working groups for you couldcall it human rights and land

(07:24):
rights and economic rights.
So we were organizing women andyouth groups for these rights, right?
So when I said I do organizationalwork, I consider that as organizational
work because we're organizing.
So this idea that organizationsare structures is something
that we understand as one wayof thinking about organizations.

(07:45):
My work has been in The activity ofmaking an organization, the activity
of organizing, which we tend to thinkabout, oh, that's community organizing,
and this is social organizing, andthis is organizations, and I blur
those distinctions because it'shuman beings organizing in different
contexts to give it different names.

(08:07):
and different functions thatare responsive to the context.
So that experience from there tilldate today, and at Mercy College
for the last two years, I've beenorganizing with my university,
with my organization as an insider.
I'm a full time faculty member, butI don't have an administrator role.

(08:28):
I mean, I serve on committees and I'm achair for administrator position for two
to three years or something like that.
But in terms of the initiativeI'm talking about at Mercy, we are
developing an inclusive pedagogy course.
So how do we do this course development?
How do we pull?
What are the values we value?
So we're trying todevelop the Mercy model.

(08:50):
Whose voice matters?
How do we bring in thedifferent conversations around
diversity, equity, inclusion?
Everything from practices to languagegets really quirky very quickly
because somebody's voice doesn'tmatter or gets sidelined, right?
So these are all ways by whichI've been in organizations and

(09:13):
writing a book is about makingsense of all that at one level.
What matters.
So, so that's experience.
And there's so much more, but I'mjust bookending the two experiences.
The second I said was gap as a researcher.
I think I have an inquiry mindset.
It's like, wake me up at middleof the night and I'll start
talking to you about research.
I was always the go to galon explain stats to me.

(09:36):
How do I do this research analysis?
I love being in inquiry.
One of the gaps that I was noticing,especially as More and more racial
and social justice has been since thestart of the pandemic, but even before
that, for those of us who've beenworking in the field, we know it's
been there for a long time that thesejustice movements have been in play.

(09:59):
There was, there's a particular gapthat happens when we do analysis
of injustice, and that is astructural analysis gets analyzed.
And the gap that I saw was there wasn'tas much conversation or language around
the discursive, which is what happens whenwe are engaging one another systemically.

(10:24):
What is happening, not justin our interpersonal, but
interactionally, what's happening.
So we'll come back to what'sthe distinction between
interactional and interpersonal.
But that gap is another thingthat this book led me to.
Which is, we need to speak, becausethat's a place of resourcefulness
that this country, this time,this culture is struggling with.

(10:45):
And that was a time, the time was callingfor how to be more resourceful, how to
be more responsive, how to be, In thesedialogues to create a different social
condition that not only writes thewrong, but also going forward, we don't
continue to replicate those injustices.
So how do we do this work in these timeswithout getting split by those divisions

(11:10):
and the divisiveness of these times?
I felt, I, I, the community I belong in,the social constructionists, I belong in
two networks, and we'll put the link infor you all for later, the Taos community,
Taos Institute, and then there is somelarger community called the international
it's an international network ofcollaborative and dialogic practitioners.

(11:32):
We have been swimming inthese ideas for 50, 60 years.
years or so, right?
And so how do we bring that?
And so all of that is what cameinto this being of the book.
I think what's important to understandis that the work that we do around
relational capacities is, has anoutward facing piece, but it also
has very much an a piece where it'smy own journey to try to understand

(11:56):
what as a man raised in white culturein America what I was taught about.
How to be successful and how tomove through the world and like
many men at my stage in life about10 years ago everything had fallen
apart one more time and I beganto ask myself, what am I doing?

(12:18):
And what do I keep doing over and overagain that's failing, that's problematic?
And what I discovered was, I really hadno fundamental understanding of how to be
in relationship with other human beings.
I mean, it comes down to that.
And I think that's what Manboxculture creates in our lives.
Dominance based masculine culturecreates for so many men, is this
sense that we're supposed to modelhierarchy, dominance, independence,

(12:40):
individualism, Toughness, power overwomen and girls be a breadwinner, not
a caregiver, don't show your emotions.
All this construct of being a manhad stripped me of connection.
And I always felt a deep seated anxietyabout Being a man that I wasn't doing it

(13:00):
right that I was going to get called outby the other men around me policed and
bullied and all that, but also that thatmy relationships always were a little
bit distant didn't last fell apart.
My friendships.
Yeah, I have friends.
When's the last time you talked to one?
Three years ago.
That's my good friend.
I talk everything like the wholeconstruct of masculinity led

(13:20):
me to wonder how I could learnbetter ways to be in relationship.
And that's when Sally has workaround relational capacities.
And we're going to go into somespecific relational capacities today.
But those, when they were explainedto me, I thought, well, that's,
that's simple and elegant andbeautiful, and I'm going to try that.

(13:41):
And I began trying these differentcapacities, we have them on our relational
wheel, and it transformed my life.
I
want to talk aboutvocabulary for a second.
We are very familiar with theterm relationship, building
relationship, deepening relationship.
Relationality is different.
You type it in to an emailor Google, it's going to have

(14:02):
that little red squiggly line.
It's still not, you know, because
it's
not part of the cultural discourse.
It's not.
It's not the
lexicon.
Yeah.
So let's start at the very beginningof foundation, I should say.
Can you help us distinguish,understand the distinction between
relationality and relationship.
I'll say that at the simplest level,relationality is a way of orienting to the

(14:27):
world and how we make sense of the world.
Where we center Relationships,and I'll talk about that,
and the activity of relating.
So, if you think about relationshipas two people coming and forming a
third entity, like when people cometogether and form an organization, then

(14:49):
the organization becomes an entity.
It's still an entity.
And then you get much more structuralwith it, you think in terms of roles
and responsibilities and structures.
Relationality takes us furtherinto thinking about how are we co
designing, co creating this thingthat we're calling relationships.
So we start orienting to theactivity or the process of relating.

(15:14):
And relationality, For theway I'm positioning it.
And again, as researchers go,we all love to say, what's
your operational definition?
What do you mean?
And that's why one has to bekind of thoughtful as to who is
speaking about it, for whom, andfrom where are they speaking.
So ask three different people inthis work, and we'll be all talking

(15:34):
about it slightly differently.
But part of the world makingprocesses, we try to elevate and
come up with a singular definition.
For me, that's part of the dominancebased hierarchy process that we're all
swimming in, by which we think therehas to be one way of talking about it.
Why?

(15:54):
The reason is so we can havesome shared understanding.
So that's part of relationality,which is, how do we create, through
this process, how do we create sharedunderstanding, shared meaning, and
shared ways of going forward, Whilerecognizing that knowledge, knowledge
making, and language is very social.

(16:16):
So relationality is a wordthat's coming into being.
Now Google it, and you'll find it'scoming into being more and more.
To put it simply, it'scentering relationship, and
the history of relationships,and the art of relationships.
Making
thing that for me that's reallypowerful about relational capacities
or relational ideas is that it directlychallenges, what is essentially a

(16:41):
socially structured reinforced cultureof individualism, especially in America.
And this idea of bootstrap pullyourself, you know anything that you
succeed at in this world you have todo on your own or you didn't do it.
Is actually a cultural inoculation doneby the Republican Party over the past
40 years, beginning with Reagan, whichwas designed to convince Americans

(17:06):
that, that we are all individuals, andanyone who needs help is relying on the
social net, safety net, and they wantedto get rid of that social safety net.
So, we, we've been told over andover again, this, this bootstrap
culture of individualism iswhat makes a real American.
That also ties directly into hierarchicaldominance based masculinity, where if

(17:27):
we're going to succeed in the world, wehave to dominate everyone around us, and
if we fail to do that, we lose status.
So, when we talk about relationality, Whatwe're saying is that it's not just that
we form relationships as individuals, butthat we, when we are in the process of
relating the moment by moment back andforth of expression of tonality of the

(17:50):
context of the conversation of our, ofour collective histories, something new
is emerging between us is getting created.
So if you want to think about relationalintelligence, you can think of it as,
Oh, I know how to do relationships.
Well, I have relational intelligence,or you can look at it as a much

(18:10):
bigger entity that when you have anorganization where that organization
is seen through the lens of.
a network of relationships, and thatorganization orients part of its DEI work
and part of its efforts toward growinga healthy network of relationships.
What comes out of that network is acollective relational intelligence,

(18:34):
and it shows up as innovation, itshows up as a sense of belonging,
it shows up as energy and creativityand better business outcomes.
So relational, relationality, Getsus out of the box of social isolation
and, and loneliness in America isnothing short of catastrophic, as

(18:54):
is loneliness in the workplace.
And I'll give you alittle bit of data here.
Cigna did a study in 2020, and whatthey found was that 62 percent of U.
S.
workers may be considered lonely.
In other words, taken as a percentage ofthe number of employed adults in the U.
S., there are 97 million lonely workers.
And they're estimating, Cigna, thatthis is costing American business 4.

(19:18):
6, or 406 billion, with aB, billion dollars a year in
productivity and lost time.
And when we, when Cigna did a study totry to figure out how to, how to counter
this catastrophic level of loneliness inthe workplace, which could be described
as disconnection, not belonging, all ofthe sort of suppression of self that that

(19:38):
shows up in some workplaces, what theydiscovered was personal connectivity,
being able to, and I'm quoting now,being able to share personal thoughts
and concerns with colleagues, feelingfree to be our true self at work.
Close quote.
That was one of the solutions tothis desperate level of loneliness.
And when we talk about relationalpractices, what we're talking about

(20:01):
is creating that kind of connection,creating relational spaces.
Belonging that people are looking forin the workplace, and that's why this
piece, if it is indeed 406 billion inlosses a year, it's not a nice to have.
It's crucial to businesses survival.
To attack loneliness at work isnot workshopping it or putting

(20:24):
another program in place.
It is attending to thenetwork of relationship and
conversations at your workplace.
And it is from positional leadersat the highest positionals to
functional unit leaders to everybodyas potentially a leader who can say,
I want to do something about this.

(20:44):
So relationality is really aboutattending to our interactions and everyday
conversation and how it is shaped by oursocial spaces and how the social spaces
and the scripts that we have get reshapedby these interactions and conversations.
So in the way we are talkingabout relationality is attending

(21:07):
to the flow of recursivity of themaking the process of how I made.
by this conversation andhow this conversation.
Is being made by me.
The back and forth of it.
On a larger level, that recursivepiece, the systems and structures
that make up an organization, wereoriginally born out of conversations.

(21:29):
The thing about relating andrelationality, is it's always happening.
It's not something you decideto do, it's always happening.
The question is, Whether we're mindfulabout what goes on in the relational
spaces that get created, or whether it'sjust going willy nilly along and often
going off the rails, or we fall into thepattern of seeking dominance in those

(21:49):
moments, or any of the many ways thatrelationality can either be conscious
and thoughtful and intentional or not.
And one of the things about ourrelational wheel and the capacities
on it, is we know from experienceand from conversation that people
recognize things they're already doing.
So what we're really saying aboutrelating is some of these things

(22:10):
are going to sound familiar to you.
All we're saying is, name them,bring them into the light, and
make them more intentional.
So when we get to those, we reallydo have a list of ways to do
this, to enter into that space,to begin becoming more mindful.
We have the capacity to be movedand impacted by what is happening
in a conversation, while atthe same time also having the

(22:33):
capacity to impact and, and move.
Others in conversation and theconversation itself, right?
And the, the nebulousness of it, thenon linear, the non concrete boxed
in space of it is where the magic,the improv, improvisation, the play
happens if we allow it to, right?

(22:56):
And then the, the other pieces, if we arethinking through ego, if we're thinking
through power seniority, that's whencontrol comes in and, and that starts.
Shifting and shaping things differently.
We've kind of created an umbrellaof what is relationality?
What is relational intelligence?
It's the, the moment to momentmicrowaves of how we, how I put how in

(23:19):
like bold uppercase underlined, right?
How we show up to one another.
So tell us, introduce usto your six capacities.
The capacities on the relationalwheel, and I'm just going to
name them in order real quick.
When we talk about stay playful,listen with curiosity, reframe
our stories, consider context, askquestions and hold uncertainty.

(23:41):
What we're doing is we're settingourselves up to be receptive and to
and to have a conversation in which wedon't have to have the answers and know
and understand the story of others.
And we can learn them instead.
These relational capacitiesare designed that you could
read about them in our book.
And try them right away,that it's not complicated.

(24:05):
And all the relational capacitieson our wheel relate to each other.
They interconnect thatyou can combine them.
There's a lot you can do with them, butthey're all complimentary to each other.
But one of them is calledlistening with curiosity.
And this is what we mean by that.
We all carry stories about people,let's say someone in our workplace
that we've worked with for a numberof years, someone in our family,
someone in our community, but we'refocusing on the workplace right now.

(24:28):
So we carry a story about someone andI'll say I carry a story about Frank
in accounting, and I have to go talk toFrank about a budgetary issue, and I have
a sense of, you know, who Frank is, andwhat his style of business is, and I sort
of have a sense of, you know, how he'sgoing to respond to this conversation.
So, um, If I instead say to myself,I'm going to go in and I'm going

(24:50):
to expect to be surprised and tolearn something new that, that
I'm really happy to have learned.
I take that mindset on.
I go in and I sit down with Frankand we start doing this exchange,
this conversation, this process ofrelating in the moment by moment.
Now, every conversation that we engage inwith anyone has multiple threads, right?

(25:11):
10, 12 threads, maybe a lot more.
One of those threads is going to bethe Is going to carry the thread of the
story that we have about that person.
It is a predictive thread.
It's a thread where we feel like, yeah,that's what he's probably going to say.
And I sort of expect that and so on.
So as the conversation proceeds,different threads are visible.

(25:33):
Some are very smallthreads, very new ideas.
Think of them as green growth, littlebits of green growth in the conversation.
Other parts will confirm that narrativethat we have about Frank in accounting.
If we ignore those little green shootsof change, and keep paying attention

(25:54):
to those statements that confirmour predictive narrative, then that
conversation is going to go prettymuch the way that we expect it to.
But if we instead say, Hey Frank, that'sa really interesting idea over there.
Can you tell me a littlebit more about that?
What we're doing is we're settingaside our predictive narrative and
listening with a truly open mindto the various ideas that come up.

(26:16):
And what we're also doing isacknowledging something crucial.
And this can be impersonal,Or business relationships.
People are not static.
People are evolving and emergingand changing all the time.
And if we try to keep thosepredictive narratives in place
about people, we will feel anincreasing disconnection from them.
So in relational practices, we insteadlook at the little green shoots.

(26:39):
We get new ideas.
We say, Hey, You know that Frankhas got some pretty innovative
ideas about how to go forward withthis or that aspect of a project.
I'm going to start leaning on Frankfor some more innovative ideas.
And in that moment, the story we haveabout Frank shifts towards something that
will make Frank feel more acknowledgedand confirmed and also allows me

(27:01):
to feel more connected with Frank.
So we grow the relationalspace with that person.
So I think even just the story, if wetake it up, is to consider context, right?
Where, what is my context withthis person with Frank, right?
Where does Frank come from?
So context is what situational,historical, social, and what we

(27:22):
are co creating with each other.
So the context is always emerging,but it's also there in how we come in.
Often at workplaces, we thinkabout context as project.
What's the kind of my role context.
Right?
And so it's this way of thinking aboutcontext has been much more broader.
When you think about listeningwith curiosity, part of that

(27:43):
is asking questions, which isone of the third practices.
Asking questions, a lot of peopleask questions sometimes to confirm
what they are already coming in with.
And we are saying, ask questionsthat allow for plurality of voices,
plurality of perspectives to come forth.
And what that means is, as we were talkingearlier, you had to let go of control.

(28:05):
So when you think about that, I'm notdriving this, are you saying I'm not
going to be taking this conversationin the direction of where we need to
create our project goals are there, wehave a timeline, you think from that
conversation for that moment, considersuspending that drive and be in this

(28:26):
place of co creation and co design,where you're asking questions to
which you don't have the answers yet.
You're asking questions so that you areallowing for what people will call as
divergent thinking to appear, right?
And what this way of being requires,and it is a way of being, it's a
practice, it's not a technique.

(28:48):
It's not like, oh, now I'mstepping in and asking questions,
now I suspend and I go away.
No, you're talking about making culture.
It requires getting curious about whatis your relationship to uncertainty.
Because what we are recommendingis you have to learn how to
embrace and hold uncertainty.
And I was just this morning ina conversation with a couple

(29:08):
of other, um, folks who, whoare relationship consultants.
And we were talking about howwe are not trained culturally,
socially, we are not trained.
We don't have the ethosof embracing uncertainty.
We are instead told to avoid uncertainty.

(29:29):
And yet all of life is uncertainty.
And if one thing has come out ofthe pandemic, it's uncertainty.
So use the next few, few years,months, weeks, whatever it takes
for you to start really exploring.
How am I relating to uncertainty?
And how can I see it as a creativeconstraint, something that I can lean

(29:52):
into and make with somebody else, right?
And part of all of this, when westart engaging in conversations, when
we engage in curiosity, when you'reconsidering context listening with
curiosity, we will find ourselves asbeing able to reframe our stories.
As a researcher of play, as a researcherof improvisation, I'll say it takes

(30:17):
the presence of being playful.
And what I mean by that isholding our ideas lightly.
So here's an example of an organizationalcontext where I'm going to talk
about how I engage my organizationin inclusive pedagogy, right?
I came in because they said, goahead, you be the faculty lead.
I came in with the modules.

(30:38):
You're going to have fouror five modules, et cetera.
And We have been working for three orfour, I would say, close to three months.
And then the director of of this she'sthe director of teaching and learning.
And I think she'll be okay with mesharing the story because we are going
to be actually doing a presentationon it in another conference.

(31:00):
She and I were socializing these ideas,meaning we were taking these ideas,
talking to other stakeholders in theorganization, everything, everybody
from the president's office to theprovost office, to other offices who
are functional unit heads who would haveeither input or be impacted by this.
I was speaking to my dean, for example,as an organizational head of my, my

(31:20):
school, and people were giving us ideas.
And in the process, my idea of whatwe wanted to do in terms of the
modules kept changing and shifting.
And at one point I looked at itmyself and I said, wait a minute,
are they taking me seriously?
They told me to come in.
I came in, now what's going on here?

(31:42):
And, and Mark will be aperson who can attest to it.
I took a few days to sit with that.
And I went back with curiosityand asked some more questions.
Help me understand wherewe're going with it.
What, what's going to happen here?
What about this?
But I went in asking questions, notto fault them, but to really learn and

(32:03):
listen for what is emerging for them.
And that's what I mean by staying playful.
I had to hold my ideas lightly.
I had to lean into myuncertainty of what might emerge.
And at the same time, I understoodthat our context is changing.
We have a new provost.
We have a new president.
We have lots of newness coming in.
And people are juggling multiple tasks.

(32:26):
I had to expand the context of whatour timeline is going to be and how.
So my story of what was going to be theproject of inclusive pedagogy shifted
of what it should be to something else.
I'm still the project lead, two yearslater, and we're getting ready to launch.
And it's really exciting.
So I hope this gives an exampleof how anybody can practice

(32:49):
these relational practices.
We said far out, like you weresaying, is it our control?
Is it our ego?
There are differentlanguages we can bring.
We like to bring this languagebecause I think it is, it's less
entity based and more interactivebased, if that makes sense.
I think we live in a worldwhere we make it I, me, myself.
I don't really blame us.

(33:10):
Or we blame the other.
And you're saying, no,these are processes.
These are not justpersonality driven events.
These are relationally co designedevents, including what is curiosity,
questions, you create a culture of sharedunderstanding of how to do inquiry.
In the way we all show up,
and I love that youstart with stay playful.

(33:33):
Ask someone whose backgroundis in theater, science of play,
tools of theater and improvisationand learning environments.
These are what, what thesepractices that, that you are
uplifting is the foundation, right?
Anyone you know, with our clients,sometimes I'll say, go take an improv
class, go, go do some storytellingbecause all of these different Aspects.

(33:55):
Just come to the fore.
How do you, you know, when you'reimprovising a scene, you don't
know where it's going to go.
I mean, there is no betterlesson in holding uncertainty.
And then listening with that, thatspace of and building with, right.
So in the improv world, we say, acceptand build with what you are getting.
And this example that you justshared, Saliha, is exactly that.

(34:17):
You came from your perspective.
It started going in a different direction.
it was still building with your idea,but it started looking very different.
And then it suddenly doesn't matterbecause it's still fulfilling a need.
Right.
The success of which theproject is still here.
It's still present.
You're still leading it.
And, and this, it doesn't have tobe all of what I say, but if it can

(34:39):
churn something there, if it can helpmove a conversation in a different
direction, have us think about somethingthat we've not thought of before when
we are about to create some policy.
We have to have space for this.
Right.
These six practices that y'all havenamed are so important, especially big.
It's when we start hearing people youknow, in that, in that graph that you

(35:02):
shared when you were screen sharing,it's okay that you get mixed messaging
sometimes from your organization.
It's okay that one group is sayingthis and the other is saying that
it's just based on their experiences.
But what, what can we learn from that?
What is a theme that we canbuild into a potential policy
or a system that allows both.

(35:23):
Perspectives to coexist together right toyour point of the living in that plurality
or surfacing plurality, normalizing it sothat it's not just one way of doing this.
For me, this is more about practicethan expertise and humility.

(35:44):
You have to have humility, quality ofhumility to, to be able to say, I'm here
and we will go somewhere in conversation.
We will still get to whereverwe end up getting collectively.
and, and I'm just, again, I might bereframing right to, to one of your
practices, but what the, the six arereally, really important to that,

(36:08):
that help us just sit with each other.
The other, the other piece,speaking of plurality, something
that you all talk about in, in thebook is how relationality helps.
It's almost like the antidoteto, or not, it builds a bridge
to connecting through difference.
So I'd like to move us into thatspace of conversation around,

(36:31):
based on the work that you've done,your research, your experiences
how does, how does relationalitybecome the superpower and having
the difficult conversations, how canrelationality help move us collectively
through a place of resistance?
If we're going to talk about difficultconversations, we have to decide what

(36:53):
our understanding of a conversation is.
If a conversation is something thatgets co created, and as I'm shaping the
conversation, you're also shaping it.
And in that moment, as I'mshaping you, you're shaping me.
It's a change moment.
It's actually an evolutionary process.
Individually, we begin to see Everythingis connected and the network is all

(37:16):
in because every conversation thatperson's had over the last few days
is going to be flowing through usand everything that we bring from our
own history is flowing through them.
And so this networkbecomes a living thing.
And in that context, we begin togrow our relational capacities
as intuitive and natural.
They stop being something.
Oh, I have to remember to considercontext and it just becomes intuitive

(37:40):
becomes part of how we relate.
So difficult conversations geta lot easier when we're there to
learn instead of there to explain orcontrol outcomes or what have you.
I know because I've messed enoughof them up to to feel that hot flush
of embarrassment and, and fear andanxiety and all the things that
get dumped on us, especially asmen to ever admit that we're wrong.

(38:04):
Or that we've mishandled something.
If I may, I want to play devil's advocate.
What do you say to someone who,you know, is, is coming into what
they perceive as being a difficultconversation, is very emotionally
charged with whatever the history is,based on what might have happened, or
what the topic of discussion is, andis, is only, comes from the mindset that

(38:30):
I have to focus on I and my message.
Because I have to, I have to getthis message across because difficult
conversations is where we are inour most survival headspace, right?
I have to get this out.
I, it's, it's less about, I need tobe heard, but I have to be right.
Right.
And that's when all ofthose reframes start.

(38:51):
Meshing into each other.
So when you're in that moment,right, you gave the example of
flushed with fear and embarrassment.
What can you do?
I have to
expand out of just that thisbeing an emotional moment.
You're not talking aboutemotionality, right?
Difficult conversations can be difficultbecause there's positional power.

(39:12):
Right.
There is social power.
Difficult.
It can be, I'm feeling uncertainbecause I'm a newcomer to this
organization or to this unit.
You've gotten into making meaning.
That's one of the things that we'retalking about that when we do work
and think about DEI, we are doingwork both at the structural level

(39:32):
and at
the discursive level.
And we have to attend to bothas if, if I don't know how many
people are DEI practitioners here.
And even if you're aleader, you have to be.
orienting to both.
So the word you're talking about asrelationality is a mindset change, which
is you want to notice what is coming intoemergence, how is meaning being made, what

(39:55):
language is being used, and how is allthis directing my interaction with you.
My masculinity work takes me onto socialmedia a lot, and I share a lot of theory
and ideas about dominance masculinityand about the need for connection and
all the stuff that I talk about, but itis not uncommon that someone will come

(40:16):
back to me on social media in ways thatare extremely aggressive and extremely
triggering and extremely triggered.
Now, What I find used to happen is I wouldget immediately get like again have that
physical that somatic response in my body.
I would get frustrated.
I would get afraid about whatcomes next now because I've been

(40:38):
in this relational wheel space.
And by the way, these six capacitiesare just six that we picked.
There are many, many more relationalcapacities out there and your wheel
might have different things on it.
But I immediately lean intothe question of context.
I say, Okay, what's going on forthis person in terms of what's
leading them into this moment?
And then I say, I go even furtherout and I say, well, they're not

(41:01):
wrong about what they're saying,but they're really angry at me.
If that's the case, then I say, I, theremay be some significant trauma in their
experience of the world about this issue.
At which point I back way thehell off explaining myself.
And I just respond to say,Okay, man, I hear that.
I absolutely hear that.
And I want you to know Isupport you on that frame.

(41:22):
That's a very importantpoint you're making.
We can, we can move and orient toour perception of the situation
without necessarily taking a stand.
Instead, we bring in all theseother factors and consider them.
And in a workplace argument, Ina family, a challenge, et cetera.
I find that I bring these relationalcapacities in much more quickly,

(41:46):
and they help me keep my breathrate at a reasonable place.
My heart rate comes down a little bit.
And I say, I think there's aconversation out ahead of me here.
I don't know what it is, but I thinkthat conversation could help both of us
grow our understanding of each other.
But I need to make spacefor that to happen.

(42:06):
This is so connected to ourevolution as a human being.
And we can talk about trauma andsomatic spaces and, you know,
how our body responds up next.
There is a space that if we are comingfrom a place of trauma and our specific
story that we are telling ourselvesand believe to be true, we don't have
the capacity to look at where theother person's coming from, right?

(42:29):
Our capacity for empathy to putourselves in their shoes is,
is just not there or minimal.
So as a
trauma therapist, I don't justlook at the trauma in the person.
I look at it in the responsiveness.
And that's relationality.

(42:50):
Our capacities ebb and flow based onwhat's going on in our environment.
This is why we look at toxic workplacesand say that stressors kill us, right?
It's not my resiliency is lacking.
It's the organization is expectingme to be superhuman while

(43:11):
they continue to dump on me.
That's what racism is.
I'm subhuman and you can continue to dumpon me because you frame yourself human.
And at the same time, you make me out asI'm not doing good enough to cope with it.
I would say we're fully aligned becauseit's in the responsiveness, right?
It's not in the trauma and howit's showing up for ourselves, but
how we're showing up to someone inhow we respond, in how we react.

(43:35):
How do we socioculturallyunderstand trauma?
What's left in andwhat's taken out, right?
So a lot of people are nowsaying, wait, adverse childhood
experiences as part of how we havecapacity or don't have capacity.
How we are socially treated.
If every day I have to come to work asa woman in India, when I used to take
the bus, I was a sexualized object.

(43:58):
If I'm coming to work feeling totallydumped upon and sexually reduced to this
object, you think I have the capacityto walk in and just come turn on?
That's what we're talking about.
Is the social relational way welocate our ideas and practice.

(44:19):
We cannot just individualize thatwhich is social relational in nature
and expect as an organization thatour people will do well by reducing
them to the people who make the changeand not look at our organizational
practices by which we engage every day.
And it can, it can sound verybig aspirational, but it's not.

(44:42):
That's why this work is gettingso important at this time, because
people in business are saying,we're not just cogs in the wheel.
We are social beings and it mattershow we show up and how you treat us and
how you show us dignity and respect.
And that's what I think if peopleare looking for research, I would

(45:04):
say check out the Glassdoor GlassdoorCulture 500 research from MIT.
And they talk about this as threefactors That are the most powerful
predictors of toxic behavior inworkplace is toxic leadership, toxic
social norms, and poor work conditions.

(45:25):
And when you break down poor workconditions, it's role ambiguity,
role conflict, workload, andlack of empowerment, right?
These are all social relational in nature,
but it's also organizational culture.
And one of the biggest challenges in,in In sort of dysfunctional workplace

(45:46):
dialogues is it comes in again fromthe masculinity culture side which is
to always know always have the answersalways be the person who's who understands
everything and often masculine stylebusiness dialogue collapses almost
immediately in a DEI context becauseThe very first thing that happens

(46:08):
is every assumption we carry aboutothers, instead of making inquiries and
holding uncertainty and listening withcuriosity and not needing to sound like
we already know, we start projectingideas on people that are insulting
to them and frustrating for them, andthat are debilitating and difficult to
dig your way out of once they happen.

(46:29):
The systemic and structuralDEI work, putting in place
those DEI systems are crucial.
To making DEI happen.
In fact, all of our relationalsupport for that wouldn't have much
of an impact if those systems andstructures hadn't been put in place.
The only other thing that we liketo call out here is that it took a

(46:51):
relational process to bring thosesystems and structures to come to
agreement to understand how to bestmake them written up and enforced and
offered and provided and, and so on.
So we're not saying this instead of.
The all the groundwork that's beenlaid what we're saying is that once
those systems and structures are putin place, individual employees are

(47:14):
bumping into each other in the hallsand trying to understand what it means
to be in a new kind of conversation tobe invited into something more because
originally we were never invited totalk about race or sexual identity
or neurodiversity or anything else.
In fact, it was prohibited inthe workplace, which is why.

(47:35):
One of the biggest challenges peoplehave in the workplace is, I don't feel
like I can show up as my whole self.
I'm doing the covering thing.
We want to create a culture wherepeople feel like they have the
ability to not mess the conversationsup, and people who look like me
are especially worried about this.
Like, I, I, I don't know how to talkto people who may be from a different
racial or a different religious or adifferent geographical background, so

(47:58):
I'm just gonna, you know, Be quiet.
And so what we, what we'resaying is you have the structural
policies and procedures, but alsowhere is ADEI work happening?
It's happening in the daily conversations.
So think of it as the structuraland the interactional meeting and
the interactional moving throughall these more complex interpersonal

(48:19):
interactions, including things likemicroaggressions status and power,
team culture, unconscious bias,all of those things get understood.
And get explored through theback and forth of daily relating
to underscore what he just said.
Mark said that these things comeout of our everyday conversations.

(48:40):
How should we do this?
Simple question that far was saying.
So how do you make it happen?
Right?
And so what we're going to offer aresome threads that I think they're
always already engaged in, but making itmore aware so that we're intentionally
engaging them so we are much morepresent to not just what's going on

(49:02):
for me, but what's going on for us.
What are we creating here together.
And it is, it, it is not to say thatthese things are not relational, it's
to say that often leaders are thinkingin terms of, so what, what HR supposed
to do, what's our policy supposed to be?
And leaders also need to be thinking aboutwhat is, how are we socially norming?

(49:24):
How are we thinking aboutbeing a team and a culture?
You have this great chapter in yourbook titled How the Body Responds.
Now, this is mental health.
The, the term trauma, trauma responsesall of this again, in this last decade
is gaining more and more presencemomentum in, in, and context and how

(49:45):
we are talking about oppression andThe antidote to where it's creating
more health within organizations.
Can you, can you tell us a littlebit, you know, based on your research
around this mind body connection, youalready talked about the sociocultural
impact on how one might show up right.
Through the example that you gave,let's dig in a little bit into a somatic

(50:09):
response that is either trauma based ornot, and how that impacts how we show
up, how that impacts relationality.
We are still caught up in this boundedbeing, that this is my body, this is my
emotion, this is my somatic reaction.
We can't see the network that's actingon me and how it's shaping my emotions.

(50:36):
Lisa Barrett Feldman, who doesresearch on emotions, uh, I would
recommend her book, Emotions Are Made,I think it's something like that.
And she's talking about howemotions are constructed.
The constructive theoryof emotions is her work.
And this classic idea of emotionsis that emotions are triggered.

(50:57):
They're just mine.
And so this is where EQ andrelational intelligence comes in.
Emotional intelligence is aboutrecognizing my emotions and
then learning to name them andlearning to soothe myself, learning
how to appropriately express.
I'm not saying that thereisn't a utility in that, right?
There absolutely but we hadto step back and say, how does

(51:20):
that emotion get triggered?
That word triggered is often associatedas it's internal rather than seeing this
loop that's deeply connected to, like,how come a word triggers somebody to,
and triggers within quotes, triggerssomebody to get so angry, right?
Because we're not seeing that Thereis words are windows into worlds.

(51:43):
That's what I often say thatthere are many more worlds
operating than just my reactivity.
And I do this in myorganization all the time.
I was a director of training andI have people working for me.
And when we were going to have ameeting, if somebody was upset or
looked upset, I didn't try to assumethat that was theirs to take care of.

(52:08):
I would say if it was Mark,I would say, Hey, Mark.
We have five minutes togo into this meeting.
You're looking really likesomething is challenging.
Do you want to talk about it?
That was the inquiry.
I didn't take it as a private thing, andhe, by the way, this was in the context
of a relationship where we had builtthat to talk about one's emotion was to

(52:29):
be in confidence, it was to not be likeyou will be penalized, so you have to
create a safe environment for that, right?
And he had the choice to say, yeah,but something is going on, it's
at home, I don't want to talk, orjust that expression, something's
going on, my kid's principal calledme, and I'm just preoccupied.
Okay.
That care, I can bring it into themeeting and I can say, Hey, Mark,

(52:53):
when we finish the meeting, take careof whatever you need to take care
of by tomorrow, get me the report.
And if you need more time, let me know.
The ways we talk, the ways weengage shows that we are caring
for something that is bigger thanjust someone's individual self.
You know, I also want to just notethat this relational loop is a

(53:13):
reminder for folks who may be much morecomfortable staying in the interactive.
To move into the rules to moveinto the systems and structures.
If I'm a white male leader in anorganization and someone says, you
know, you may think that this inclusionwork here is really successful,
but I'm here to tell you it's not.

(53:34):
I may be tempted to stay in thatconversation, in that, in that simple
process of relating, and not lookat the rules and the systems and
structures, which are clearly not beingshifted by whatever DEI process I'm
trying to put in place, because it'smore comfortable for me to think, oh
yeah, it's working, it's doing fine.
So in this way, We challenge ourselves tohold some uncertainty and some discomfort

(54:00):
if we have a high position of power inan organization by moving along that
loop and stepping into those other spacesand acknowledging for the people around
us that they're being impacted by thosesystems and structures all the time.
And that's the kind of transparencythat relational practices ask of us.
Thank you.
It's amazing how time flieswhile we are engaged in, in

(54:22):
deep, powerful conversation.
I just want to say a huge thank youto both of you, Saleha and Mark.
Thank you for putting thisbook out in the world.
Thank you for the work that you are doing.
thank you again so
much.
Thank you for listening to Farsight Chats.
I really hope that thisepisode is the start to future

(54:43):
conversations you have with yourcolleagues, family, and community.
We continue the exploration of identitythis season with our next episode.
Arab American heritage.
Subscribe now to Farsight Chats,wherever you get your podcasts.
And don't forget to follow us onInstagram and Facebook at GoFarsight,

(55:03):
LinkedIn at the Farsight Agency, andcheck out our website, gofarsight.
com to know more aboutwho we are and what we do.
Thank you for answering the call todo more, do better, and do different.
I