October 8, 2025 • 42 mins
Jonathan Reams, PhD, is currently doing action research projects exploring how to scale micro-skill development for habituating core leadership practices. He approaches this work drawing on experiences from holding a position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) from 2007 until 2024, serving as editor-in-chief of Integral Review from 2005 to 2023, and being chief creative officer at the Center for Transformative Leadership and Adeptify.
A Few Quotes From This Episode
- "You may think your inner state is invisible, but you can’t hide it.”
- “The success of the intervention is primarily due to the interior condition of the intervener.”
- “Resilience isn’t about bouncing back to normal—it’s about expanding your capacity.”
- “Leaders create the weather. Your energy is the signal everyone else reads first.”
- “Knowing about something isn’t the same as learning how to do it.”
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
- Article: Amal and Berndt’s paper on the knowing–doing gap
- Book: An Everyone Culture by Kegan and Lahey
- Book: The Outward Mindset by The Arbinger Institute
- Book: Theory U by Otto Scharmer
- Organization: HeartMath Institute
- Tool: MindLog by Theo Dawson
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
- The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!
About Scott J. Allen
- Website
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- Blog
My Approach to Hosting
- The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis Podcast
Practical Wisdom for Leaders.
Thank you so much for checkingin wherever you are in the world
Today.
This is episode 300 andprobably 301.
And I'm so excited for thisconversation because I have a
guest.
He's probably been a guest anda co-host more than anyone else
in the world and that's JonathanReams, and he is a curious
(00:25):
seeker and has recently leftacademia and is now doing work
with organizations around theworld and he's a bit of a mad
scientist.
He's building something.
We don't yet know what it is,but he's building, building,
building.
He showed me code the other day, so it's going to be cool.
It's going to be very, veryinteresting.
But we both have this passionfor the puzzle of how we better
(00:48):
prepare people to serve in thesereally challenging roles.
What do we do?
How do we do that and how do wescaffold that learning?
How do we approach thatlearning theory?
And today we may geek out alittle bit on some of that
theory, but the search here iswhat do we need to do to make it
(01:13):
actionable?
And ultimately, again, how dowe better prepare people to
serve in these roles and be ofservice to those individuals?
Use that theory to informpractice.
Jonathan, thank you so much forbeing with me today.
I don't know exactly where thisconversation is going to go,
but I know it's going to be fun.
You are one of the only peoplethat I know that has said you
know, I've listened to everyepisode, and so you reached out
a few weeks back and said hey,I've got some things I'm
(01:35):
thinking about.
You know, and I'm excited tohear about your thinking.
So how are you, sir?
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I am fine, scott, I am really excited about today's
conversation.
It came about when I was in thegym as I often am when I'm
listening to your podcast andyou were talking with Amal and
Berndt about the knowing-doinggap in the paper they'd written
on that.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
And that sparked so many associations.
But I was in the gym and I sawI had to really listen to it,
download the transcript, startwriting responses in the
transcript and really for meit's ever since I read Keegan
and Leahy's and everyone culture.
Yes, this question of how do weenable developmental processes
(02:28):
and we mean something specificby developmental but that they
are clear and simple enough toscale easily in organizations.
And I would say over the last10 years I've made lots of
different experiments withdifferent programs, platforms,
processes, trying to explore thesame territory that Amal and
(02:53):
Berndt were talking about, andso I wanted to kind of build on
and take off from some of thethings they laid out and explore
those with you, yes, yeah,let's do it.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Let's do it.
I'm excited.
I will follow your lead, sir,so let's jump in.
What are you thinking about?
Where do you want to start?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Well, I'm trying to go in a semi-organized way here.
Yes, and you laugh knowingly.
Yes, and you laugh knowingly,so let's maybe start early.
One of the things that Amaldescribed was the challenge of
(03:34):
training transfer.
When looking at the literatureabout, what do we understand
about?
What helps leaders is we sendthem off, we run them through
trainings and they go back tothe organization.
What happens?
Well, there's all sorts ofthings around how the culture is
ready for that, how the peopleare prepared, all those kind of
things.
(03:54):
But she was pointing to thatmost of the literature is in
more the behavioral sciences,training transfer issues and so
on, and I think that there's anumber of things that come up
from that One.
We're all practicingphilosophers, whether we like it
or not, and what I mean by thatis we may say, well, we just
(04:20):
use the data, or we just, youknow, focus on empirical
evidence.
All the choices that we makehave implicit, unrecognized
paradigms behind them.
We may have been socializedinto, trained in a discipline,
in a profession, that, wherepeople in the past have made
(04:44):
choices about how are they goingto approach it.
Are they, you know, using aconstructivist platform or are
they using an empiricist one?
Are they using apost-positivist paradigm or that
you know there's all thesedifferent things that have
implications.
Yeah, so there was a phrase inone of my methods courses in my
(05:06):
doctoral program at Gonzagathere are no innocent numbers
when you're talking about surveyresearch, because there are so
many layers of choices behindhow questions are framed and
posed and scales designed andwhat statistical things are done
.
And it's the same way intraining and development there's
(05:28):
no innocent setup.
So I think what Amal ispointing to in what she
describes represents reallydecades of a positivist, kind of
reductionist paradigm aboutwhat training is?
You train behaviors and it'sassuming surface-level
communication of informationthrough words and that that
(05:51):
would adequately convey sharedimplicit understandings,
resources and all of that.
It would just be a given.
If I tell you, you will getwhat I mean.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yes, and I think that exists in academia, right, I
mean, where it's it's.
And you're going to have tosteer me a little bit as well,
jonathan, here, because I thinkI could take the conversation
off track as well.
But I think in some domainsmaybe that's okay If I now have
(06:28):
to go and use a machine or Ihave to know that's going to be
a part of my daily work and I'mgoing to be held accountable to
knowing exactly that information, and then it's kind of
interesting, but oftentimes inleadership that's not the case.
Well, that's, you know, it'skind of interesting, but
oftentimes in leadership that'snot the case.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, that's.
You know.
It's like you're reading mynotes in front of me on the
screen, which you aren't, butyou have perfect setup here,
because where I pause, the nextthing I wanted to go into is for
training sensory motor skills.
Those kind of things workreally well, you know.
(07:07):
It's observable, you can kindof measure the performance more
easily.
There's lots of things that itworks well for.
The challenge is, as you say,go into leadership skills.
You start getting into more andmore internal processes.
(07:28):
So the phrase you quote me onleaders create the weather.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Well, that's a very densely chunked construct that
has implicit in it a whole bunchof things that are relatively
subtle.
They're not things you're goingto measure in the same way.
We can break it down more andso on, but that's a different
thing.
So the challenge that you bringup is, yeah, we can
(07:57):
behaviorally train and simulateand measure working a machine
the right way or doing someother concrete things.
But as we get into more complexconstructs where, as you said
in the podcast with Berndt andAmal, you know, when you're
(08:19):
trying to give students LMXtheory and transformational
leadership, those are conceptsthat are a result of people
doing decades of work and arehighly packed and chunked with a
whole set of building blocksthat those students you can't
(08:40):
guarantee they've encounteredthem or have them to work with.
And so they often the phrase Ilike is they will downwardly
assimilate what you tell theminto what they already
understand.
They will cut off all sorts ofnuances and edges and bring it
down.
Okay, that's what I think he'stalking about and that's what
(09:03):
I'll work with.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Yeah Well, and you know, back to kind of like a
developmental perspective, thatthat content, that same content,
can be internalized very, verydifferent.
Oh, this is how I can get themto do exactly what I want them
to do.
Or, you know, it can be, it canbe internalized.
Let's just take the topic ofinfluence tactics.
(09:27):
I mean that can be internalizedvery differently depending on
the developmental stage of theindividual learner.
And so I've said it a couple oftimes on the podcast and again,
this is where you're going tohave to lead me.
But I wonder sometimes there'sthe notion of vertical and
horizontal development, and so,for listeners, just a very, very
(09:49):
quick way of defining thatJonathan, please push back on me
if you disagree.
Are we helping the humandevelop cognitively, increasing
their kind of cognitivestructure and moving through
those stages, torbert or Keeganand horizontal being more of the
(10:11):
content, and that would maybebe what transformational
leadership is, or activelistening?
Those might be topics, but arewe starting in the wrong space
when we do leader developmenttoday?
Is it more about the habits ofmind and the ways of kind of
making sense of the world andwhat's happening around us?
(10:33):
Is that almost as important aplace to begin than any of the
topical things we begin withoftentimes.
So how do I reflect?
What are the habits of mind Ishould have as an individual to
facilitate that lifelonglearning that's going to help me
(10:53):
make sense of what's happeningaround me.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Well, that's a lot to unpack.
So I will say that thedistinction of vertical and
(11:26):
horizontal is used a lot, isconvenient for some things and
often misinterpreted orappropriated.
So I would say that theunderstanding of those
distinctions makes sense incertain contexts but not in
others.
Okay, and let's put a pin inthat and maybe come back to it
later.
Sure, the point about are westarting in the wrong place?
(11:47):
Is a lot of people come thereArbinger Institute, you know and
their model of an outwardmindset or being out of the box
or having a heart at peace.
They say you start with mindset, yes, the ask model, you know.
Attitude, skills and knowledge.
You can give people knowledge,you can teach them skills, but
(12:10):
attitude, you know.
So that's higher leveragethings.
The, the leaders create theweather.
The weather is often created bythe leader's internal state,
their emotional you knowenergetic vibrations they're
giving out that people aresensitive to and reacting to.
(12:31):
Yes, so those kind of things aremore foundational in a way, but
also subtler and harder to pindown, to put in a curriculum, to
teach in a course or even teachin a, you know, delivery to a
(12:51):
client.
So I think that there's and partof this is if we think about
the notion of training as aconcept, or um consulting, you
know, workshops, all these kindof things, they're all kind of
(13:11):
informed by our moderneducational system and people
like Ken Robinson, you know,were very, and many others Paulo
Freire and Parker Palmer andothers are great at showing that
there are assumptions builtinto that system and Theo Dawson
(13:59):
is very good about this latelythat you know.
It is pointing the educationsystem towards the end result
from natural play andexploration and experimentation
by children to also then learnhow to critically reflect on
what they've done and is it fitfor purpose or not, or what is
the impact socially on otherswhen these things want.
Those kind of things are less apart of the modern educational
system.
So what we end up having thisidea of is that knowing about
something is learning how toactually do it.
(14:22):
And the idea is we know aboutwalking, but we learned how to
walk through doing it, notthrough an abstraction about it.
And I think at a deep levelwe've transferred this
assumption that concretebehavioral skills can be done in
(14:43):
the same way as more abstractconcepts of leadership.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, and with leadership there's an infinite
number of variables, right?
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yeah Well, so let's talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, what is the complexity ofleadership as a concept?
And of course it becomesempirically hard to define.
People want to pin it down andsay well, and then you have all
(15:15):
the proliferation of theoriesand models and all these kind of
things that try to look atwhat's observable.
But I always I like the quotefrom Bill O'Brien that Otto
Scharmer used in Theory U, thatthe success of the intervention
is primarily due to the interiorcondition of the intervener is
primarily due to the interiorcondition of the intervener.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Say more.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Well, this is, leaders create the weather.
There is something about oursensitivity.
So now I'll go off piste a bit.
Heartmath, for instance, hasdone a lot of research in the
field of neurocardiology, andmore than them.
There's lots of research thatshows that there's neurons in
(16:01):
the heart.
They have a modality of sensingand energetically projecting
related to things you canmeasure.
So the coherence of our heartrate variability, combined with
our breathing and our attitude,can create different states that
can be felt by others.
(16:21):
By others.
You can, they, they say theycan measure it like 10 feet out
wow, you can physically measureit.
And, of course, people.
You know.
You kind of have a sense.
You interviewed Mark Bowden awhile ago.
Yes, I've watched some of histalks and listened to his
(16:48):
podcast.
He's tapping into this area.
People trust or don't trust.
You lean in or defend based onvery subtle clues almost
instantly, and some of those arevisual and behavioral, but some
of them are energetic.
Yeah, so how you feel inside.
You may think is invisible andyou can hide it, but you can't
(17:11):
no, no.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
No, no I have a gentleman who's in Scotland and
he's, you know, as you know,I've been exploring on LinkedIn
quite a bit and he's pushingpretty hard on this kind of
notion, that, and he's writingquite a bit on this topic and
but it's, it's hard to fake yourenergetic state.
Yeah, exactly, and your signalis communicating, whether you
(17:40):
like it or not.
And so you know, are you atleast how I understand his work
is are you kind of in a healthyspace or in a solid space to be
of service to others?
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Because it's hard to fake that to be of service to
others, because it's hard totake that.
So you can learn all the rightthings to say and all the right
models to use, but the I thinkthe concept of authenticity gets
misused a lot, but I think thisis what we're talking about in
some ways yeah if people have afeeling that, hey, even if
(18:14):
they're making a mess of things,their heart's in the right
place, and there's somethingabout that that allows you to be
more flexible and lean in andengage in a process.
And I think this idea ofengaging in a process is, you
(18:35):
know, one of the notes I madepreparing for this came to the
point of saying hmm, actually, Ithink the essence of this is
how can we shift from acontent-based learning about
leadership to a process-basedlearning?
Okay, say more leadership, to aprocess-based learning.
Okay, say more.
Well, let's circle back beforeI say more, because we're
(19:05):
talking about how do we unpackleadership as a concept?
So we can break it down verysimply.
There's task and relationshipright, we can break these down.
But what's task about?
Well, you can take some modelsthat say it's about having a
sense of why, a purpose andvision.
It's also about developing astrategy to execute on that,
making decisions on that basis.
(19:26):
But you've also got to be ableto kind of read the context,
analyze the system and all thesethings, and then, once you have
all that, you have to haveskills to execute on the tasks
and do things, and for leaders,that's often communicating all
this clearly enough so thatothers can actually execute In
(19:47):
the same way.
We can take relationships andsay, well, we need to be able to
show genuine care for othersand say, well, we need to be
able to show genuine care forothers.
A phrase I heard is I don'tcare how much you know until I
know how much you care.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah.
But I think what's interesting,Jonathan, is like the four or
five things you just talkedabout strategy.
You just talked about vision.
I think sometimes you takeKuz's and Posner, which I love
right, I love that work, butlet's pick on it for a second,
just for the sake of aninteresting conversation.
Inspiring a shared vision iswhen I am 45 to 50 to 55 years
(20:32):
old.
For most people Now, that's nota hard and fast truth.
What should we be teaching themwhen they're in college, when
they're in high school, whenthey're in their twenties,
Because many of these peoplewon't necessarily.
I mean, we could teach them toinspire a shared vision with
their team and why that'simportant.
(20:53):
But implicit in inspiring ashared vision, it's, to your
point, a whole bunch of things.
Oh my God.
So we simplify it, you know,down to inspire, challenge the
process.
Well, okay, so you know, itseems to me, are you starting
(21:16):
with a human being that is inthe process of becoming as whole
as possible, and that statement, in and of itself, is the work
of philosophers the first.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
So there's something really interesting I want to
come to with that, and how Iwant to get there is to say that
, you know, we can equally takeall those things and break them
down endlessly, and that'sactually becomes very important
to do when we want to understand.
What do we teach collegestudents?
We can break relationships down.
Yeah, we need to care, but wealso need to be able to learn
how to play nice with each other.
Yes, you coordinate others toplay nice, having social,
(21:59):
emotional intelligence, and alot of this goes to the thing of
self-leadership.
Yeah, now, that's a wholedomain in itself too.
But one of the things I foundinteresting my wife was doing
some research on wisdomliterature and one of the things
(22:19):
she found was that while thereis this sense that wisdom
accumulates with age, there'sanother sense and research
behind it, that wisdom relatedskills are actually most
developed between the ages of 18and 25.
And what I take from that in myown way and I'm not trying to
(22:44):
cite the research here oranything is that this is this
socialized mind period wherethere's a real openness to be
informed by what's the rightthing to focus on, and if we
train students at this age tolearn to notice, take action, do
(23:11):
stuff and reflect on it andcritically analyze it and cycle
that.
Yes, if we teach that, thenthen the next 20 years of
experience to when maybe theytrying again and doing all these
things and have a little bitmore wisdom yes, which enables
(23:46):
people to have a felt sense thatthere's something to what
they're saying and it's not justthe latest kind of spiel going
out Well okay.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
So a nook and cranny of this conversation wonderful
dialogue with Ron Riggio I thinkit was our last conversation we
had where we got into parentingin the home, right, and one
little nook and cranny of thisconversation is let's talk about
resilience.
Okay, if you choose to lead,you're.
One little nook and cranny ofthis conversation is let's talk
about resilience.
Ok, if you choose to lead,you're going to fail.
(24:17):
If you choose to lead, there'sgoing to be setbacks.
You're going to make mistakes.
You're putting yourself outthere into the unknown.
So my wife and I work hard tomodel failure and setbacks as a
part of the normal process ofdoing things Right.
So when our children don'tachieve something they'd hoped
to, we process that.
(24:38):
We have a conversation, we helpthem reflect a little bit, but
we also model it ourselves.
So I just had a paper rejectedby Sloan Management Review.
I talk about it with my kidsand that's just part of the
process.
And okay, I'm going to comeback and we're going to try
somewhere else.
And that's the work.
Dad at 52 is failing sometimesor not getting what he'd hoped
(25:00):
to.
So when they're not getting apart in the musical or the play
or my son maybe didn't play asmuch baseball as he had hoped to
in the spring.
They have a frame of how tonavigate that and kind of a
larger picture of how to makesense of some of that.
It doesn't destroy their world,so to speak.
It's a part of the process.
So I think I'm reallyinterested in yes, what are
(25:27):
those?
Because I think it's happeningtheir whole childhood.
What we're modeling, optimismor any other, you know what I
mean.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And I looked at Ron's paper that you talked about
where they looked at, you know,leadership in the kindergarten
playground.
Yes, how are these things beingdeveloped there?
And so it is much earlier inlife that these things start
being modeled and internalized.
If we're mindful being modeledand internalized, if we're
(25:58):
mindful To the point aboutresilience I was writing
something because my wife'sdoing her PhD on this program we
build around building emotionalresilience and we are trying to
clarify that what we mean byresilience is not coming back to
a homeostatic norm.
That's actually not what isreally meant by this.
The idea of resilience to me ishaving an inherently
(26:23):
developmental approach, so thatwhen something doesn't go as you
planned or imagined, you don'tjust cut it off or say it's a
mistake, I'll try again.
You say what was it that I didthat led to this?
What do I need to add oraccommodate?
You know, to grow the horizonsof my understanding, to include
(26:48):
some more perspectives, so thatnext time I actually can notice
those things earlier or see that, oh, in that context it works
differently.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yes, yes, and that habit of mind or that skill
seems to me that it would be awonderful place to begin at
least one of the primary topicsthat if someone wants to be, you
know, a coach, an athlete, youknow a healthy human, they have
(27:21):
the capacity to engage in thatwork right.
Otherwise, as a human, I sufferfrom self-serving bias oh, it's
their fault that I didn't getwhat I wanted.
Oh, you know, and it gives awayand I miss the opportunity to
capture some of that learning orto process some of that
learning right.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Well, and so now we go off a little bit too.
But another plug for TheoDawson is she's developed this
MindLog program and it'sespecially designed for young
students.
And what it does?
It allows them to journal abouthow they're thinking about a
given topic and it shows theirprogress.
(28:01):
It's like a game Can you get tothe next level and you go up
and down a bit, but you know,can you get a trajectory and
helps them reflect on oh, I see,now I think like this, and it
allows me to do these things,and they have a metacognitive
kind of feedback mechanism tounderstand oh, these things are
(28:22):
helping me grow.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So what are those 10 things?
I mean, you know, again, that'swhere we should be starting is
building the habits of mind thathelp an individual navigate the
world.
And again, I think philosophershave been struggling with this,
Theologians have beenstruggling with this.
Again, we probably could justgo to some of those individuals
(28:45):
and there's probably some reallyreally good clues all of our
folks in character and suchvirtues.
So maybe it's just that, Maybeit's as simple, Maybe we have
Oprah complicated it, Jonathan,and if we just focused on the
virtues.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well, I listened to.
The other podcast I listened toall of from the beginning is
the Philosophize.
This Stephen West, and hislatest one was on Marcus
Aurelius yeah, and talking aboutthe meditations and how it
relates to stoicism more broadlyand stoic ethics and so on, and
(29:22):
part of that, I think, goes towhat I come across in lots of
different areas.
There's some fundamental thingsabout kind of cleaning up, so I
think, and other people havemore things, but there's a
simple thing you clean up andgrow up and they run
(29:45):
concurrently and part of youknow what I had here in relation
to some of what I think Amalhad sent, or maybe Bernd at one
point.
They talk about, well, how do weget leaders to reflect?
It's important to have themreflect, yes, but what is the
thinking used for?
(30:05):
Are they trying to justify baddecisions and choices and think
more complexly about that, orare they critically looking at?
What assumptions was I going byhere?
Am I really attached to beingright here and, if I step back
and allowed myself to admit somefailure or being wrong, have
(30:27):
some epistemic humility?
Am I?
a failure Is my identity crushedthat my failure is my identity
crushed, right.
But those kind of things aboutidentity being attached to
rightness, yeah, to knowledge,to performance, those are things
that can be cleaned up so thatyou know the notions of
(30:53):
self-awareness, for instance.
This came up in thatconversation, it always comes up
.
This is a key skill.
So Cardin et al did somethingin the Journal of Management
Education two, three years ago,really looking into
self-awareness in relation toadult development, relation to
(31:17):
adult development.
And they looked at many things.
But a simple way to look at itsay there's a purpose for
self-awareness.
Why would we want to develop it?
And we can have all sorts ofgood reasons, because if we
don't understand ourselves, wedon't understand the impact we
have on others.
We're creating the weather andwe're blissfully ignorant of it
and project out and blameeverybody, yep.
But then there's also thecomponents of self-awareness.
(31:37):
There's intrapersonal thingswhat do we notice about
ourselves and our thoughts andour feelings and so on?
And intrapersonal, we getfeedback from others that help
us, maybe course correct.
But then what are the processes?
How do we become self-aware?
How do we evaluate those things?
What kind of processes?
How do we use attention andmetacognition to have a balcony
(32:03):
where the self is on the dancefloor and we can notice it and
not be caught up by it.
Yeah, yeah.
Now how do we train you know,those skills?
There are ways and there aremany ways, and so I think what
you're pointing to is there's awhole field in terms of
(32:23):
leadership development broadlythat really needs to look at how
do we undo things we'veinternalized that maybe don't
serve us now.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
yes, yes, I mean, and , and I, I, I think that is ever
, that's a that that is everunfolding as you encounter new
experiences in life, whetherthat's transitioning from being
single to married, married tohaving children, different
(32:57):
stages of life.
I mean it's just, it's everunfolding, that learning about
self in these new contexts, inthese new situations, it never
ends.
And so it seems to me and again, this is just very simplistic,
I'm kind of coming back to it,this is just very simplistic,
I'm kind of coming back to itwhat are those eight or ten
master lessons that, if we canteach a human and build the
(33:19):
habits of mind they're, they'regoing to better navigate a
number of different situationsthat they will confront, versus
teaching them north houses?
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Sure, and if we took that and turned it again and
come back to saying what are theprinciples and processes we
teach students so that theyrecognize life lessons that are
littered all around them all?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
the time.
Yes, the search for thelearning.
It's there, it's right in frontof us, there.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
So rather than prescribing what they should pay
attention to how do we teachthem to pay attention to what's
all around them?
Trying to teach them all thetime?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yes, I'm not getting the results I want.
This didn't go how I hadplanned, this I didn't achieve
this and then having that innermechanism to and the resources I
mean again, I've said on thepodcast a number of times I have
a therapist.
I've been with him 17 years,had therapists before that for
five and six years.
That's part of my system ofprocessing, of making sense, and
(34:30):
it's been incredible.
I mean it's been so beneficialfor me and mentors and
conversations like this theyhelp me make sense of right.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Well, it's like you talk about.
The podcast may have started asa COVID project, but it's
become.
How can Scott learn in public?
Yes, how can scott learn inpublic?
Yes, as messy as that is, but Ithink it's that authentic
richness and messiness thatmakes it attractive for people.
(35:04):
Yeah, yeah, because because itit's, it's, yes, it just okay
I'm mindful, though, thatthere's a whole nother layer of
this, that maybe we need anotherconversation for.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Well, intrigue me, and then maybe we can come back
to that.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Well, we've talked in some ways about how do you make
this training, transfer andbreak skills down to a level.
There are ways to talk aboutthat and ways to break them down
that we haven't really touchedon or gotten into yet and that
is kind of the area I've beentrying to really explore and
(35:46):
understand.
That is kind of the area Iorchestrate conflict and manage
(36:19):
tension and create a holdingenvironment which are really
highly chunked, masterful kindof acts of leadership, that the
building blocks and experiencesalong the way to enable that
capacity is more explicitly andconsciously cultivated.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yes, yes, 100%.
Now for me, put a button onthis conversation.
What's the practical wisdom inthe conversation we've just had,
Jonathan, Because I'm afraid todo that.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yeah.
So this is your post-reflection.
You're saying no, no, let's doit now.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yes, I'm thinking about your energy thing.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I'm thinking about that, I think yeah, the
practical wisdom is, in a sense,that it starts with us and it
starts with getting our ownhouse in order.
And you know, when you startedquoting me on leaders create the
weather, I started, oh, I gotto unpack that more and there's
(37:29):
a whole lot that I realized thatcan be unpacked from that and
we can talk about that more too.
But how do we take somethingthat's soft and fuzzy, so to
speak, like that it's verysubtle in a sense and bring it
down to the level ofscaffoldable skill training that
(37:51):
builds leadership capacities?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
And for me, one major , significant, perhaps most
important domain is do I have ahuman that is the best possible
version of themselves in thismoment, and they've cleaned up,
and they've grown up and they'rein that continual process to be
(38:20):
of service to others?
And if I'm not, then thatenergy that shows up, if I'm not
, then that attention that showsup, that Well.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
So I'll give you a simple example, because I used
to do the leadership circle,training and certifications, and
they talk about the reactivetendencies coming out of Karen
Horney's work.
What are the ways we makeourselves safe in the world
early?
What are the strategies?
Do we comply with others?
Do we protect ourselves bybeing right and distant and
(38:53):
critical, or do we use powerover and control and be
ambitious and autocratic?
And what I would often say isthere's two things going on when
that underlying strategy istriggered, your energy is hooked
by that and it creates noise.
(39:16):
So what gets communicated isthe underlying fear energy that
drives those strategies.
And so when people are hearingyour message, you may have good
intentions and brilliant thingsto say, but what they hear
starts in their heart with thenoise and it makes it hard, and
then it filters the actualmessage.
(39:36):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
So let's pause there for now.
I think listeners have plentyto think about, jonathan, as
always.
Thank you, we're going torevisit this.
We'll do a part two.
So, for listeners, if this isyour first episode, look forward
to next week, and if this isthe well, this would be the
(40:00):
first episode if they'relistening right now.
So then, if you're listening tothis in the future, there is a
second episode and a secondconversation, episode 301.
Everyone, as always, thank youso much for checking in.
Thank you, jonathan, thank youScott.
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis Podcast
Practical Wisdom for Leaders.
Thank you so much for checkingin wherever you are in the world
Today.
This is episode 300 andprobably 301.
And I'm so excited for thisconversation because I have a
guest.
He's probably been a guest anda co-host more than anyone else
in the world and that's JonathanReams, and he is a curious
(00:25):
seeker and has recently leftacademia and is now doing work
with organizations around theworld and he's a bit of a mad
scientist.
He's building something.
We don't yet know what it is,but he's building, building,
building.
He showed me code the other day, so it's going to be cool.
It's going to be very, veryinteresting.
But we both have this passionfor the puzzle of how we better
(00:48):
prepare people to serve in thesereally challenging roles.
What do we do?
How do we do that and how do wescaffold that learning?
How do we approach thatlearning theory?
And today we may geek out alittle bit on some of that
theory, but the search here iswhat do we need to do to make it
(01:13):
actionable?
And ultimately, again, how dowe better prepare people to
serve in these roles and be ofservice to those individuals?
Use that theory to informpractice.
Jonathan, thank you so much forbeing with me today.
I don't know exactly where thisconversation is going to go,
but I know it's going to be fun.
You are one of the only peoplethat I know that has said you
know, I've listened to everyepisode, and so you reached out
a few weeks back and said hey,I've got some things I'm
(01:35):
thinking about.
You know, and I'm excited tohear about your thinking.
So how are you, sir?
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I am fine, scott, I am really excited about today's
conversation.
It came about when I was in thegym as I often am when I'm
listening to your podcast andyou were talking with Amal and
Berndt about the knowing-doinggap in the paper they'd written
on that.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
And that sparked so many associations.
But I was in the gym and I sawI had to really listen to it,
download the transcript, startwriting responses in the
transcript and really for meit's ever since I read Keegan
and Leahy's and everyone culture.
Yes, this question of how do weenable developmental processes
(02:28):
and we mean something specificby developmental but that they
are clear and simple enough toscale easily in organizations.
And I would say over the last10 years I've made lots of
different experiments withdifferent programs, platforms,
processes, trying to explore thesame territory that Amal and
(02:53):
Berndt were talking about, andso I wanted to kind of build on
and take off from some of thethings they laid out and explore
those with you, yes, yeah,let's do it.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Let's do it.
I'm excited.
I will follow your lead, sir,so let's jump in.
What are you thinking about?
Where do you want to start?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Well, I'm trying to go in a semi-organized way here.
Yes, and you laugh knowingly.
Yes, and you laugh knowingly,so let's maybe start early.
One of the things that Amaldescribed was the challenge of
(03:34):
training transfer.
When looking at the literatureabout, what do we understand
about?
What helps leaders is we sendthem off, we run them through
trainings and they go back tothe organization.
What happens?
Well, there's all sorts ofthings around how the culture is
ready for that, how the peopleare prepared, all those kind of
things.
(03:54):
But she was pointing to thatmost of the literature is in
more the behavioral sciences,training transfer issues and so
on, and I think that there's anumber of things that come up
from that One.
We're all practicingphilosophers, whether we like it
or not, and what I mean by thatis we may say, well, we just
(04:20):
use the data, or we just, youknow, focus on empirical
evidence.
All the choices that we makehave implicit, unrecognized
paradigms behind them.
We may have been socializedinto, trained in a discipline,
in a profession, that, wherepeople in the past have made
(04:44):
choices about how are they goingto approach it.
Are they, you know, using aconstructivist platform or are
they using an empiricist one?
Are they using apost-positivist paradigm or that
you know there's all thesedifferent things that have
implications.
Yeah, so there was a phrase inone of my methods courses in my
(05:06):
doctoral program at Gonzagathere are no innocent numbers
when you're talking about surveyresearch, because there are so
many layers of choices behindhow questions are framed and
posed and scales designed andwhat statistical things are done
.
And it's the same way intraining and development there's
(05:28):
no innocent setup.
So I think what Amal ispointing to in what she
describes represents reallydecades of a positivist, kind of
reductionist paradigm aboutwhat training is?
You train behaviors and it'sassuming surface-level
communication of informationthrough words and that that
(05:51):
would adequately convey sharedimplicit understandings,
resources and all of that.
It would just be a given.
If I tell you, you will getwhat I mean.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yes, and I think that exists in academia, right, I
mean, where it's it's.
And you're going to have tosteer me a little bit as well,
jonathan, here, because I thinkI could take the conversation
off track as well.
But I think in some domainsmaybe that's okay If I now have
(06:28):
to go and use a machine or Ihave to know that's going to be
a part of my daily work and I'mgoing to be held accountable to
knowing exactly that information, and then it's kind of
interesting, but oftentimes inleadership that's not the case.
Well, that's, you know, it'skind of interesting, but
oftentimes in leadership that'snot the case.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well, that's.
You know.
It's like you're reading mynotes in front of me on the
screen, which you aren't, butyou have perfect setup here,
because where I pause, the nextthing I wanted to go into is for
training sensory motor skills.
Those kind of things workreally well, you know.
(07:07):
It's observable, you can kindof measure the performance more
easily.
There's lots of things that itworks well for.
The challenge is, as you say,go into leadership skills.
You start getting into more andmore internal processes.
(07:28):
So the phrase you quote me onleaders create the weather.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Well, that's a very densely chunked construct that
has implicit in it a whole bunchof things that are relatively
subtle.
They're not things you're goingto measure in the same way.
We can break it down more andso on, but that's a different
thing.
So the challenge that you bringup is, yeah, we can
(07:57):
behaviorally train and simulateand measure working a machine
the right way or doing someother concrete things.
But as we get into more complexconstructs where, as you said
in the podcast with Berndt andAmal, you know, when you're
(08:19):
trying to give students LMXtheory and transformational
leadership, those are conceptsthat are a result of people
doing decades of work and arehighly packed and chunked with a
whole set of building blocksthat those students you can't
(08:40):
guarantee they've encounteredthem or have them to work with.
And so they often the phrase Ilike is they will downwardly
assimilate what you tell theminto what they already
understand.
They will cut off all sorts ofnuances and edges and bring it
down.
Okay, that's what I think he'stalking about and that's what
(09:03):
I'll work with.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Yeah Well, and you know, back to kind of like a
developmental perspective, thatthat content, that same content,
can be internalized very, verydifferent.
Oh, this is how I can get themto do exactly what I want them
to do.
Or, you know, it can be, it canbe internalized.
Let's just take the topic ofinfluence tactics.
(09:27):
I mean that can be internalizedvery differently depending on
the developmental stage of theindividual learner.
And so I've said it a couple oftimes on the podcast and again,
this is where you're going tohave to lead me.
But I wonder sometimes there'sthe notion of vertical and
horizontal development, and so,for listeners, just a very, very
(09:49):
quick way of defining thatJonathan, please push back on me
if you disagree.
Are we helping the humandevelop cognitively, increasing
their kind of cognitivestructure and moving through
those stages, torbert or Keeganand horizontal being more of the
(10:11):
content, and that would maybebe what transformational
leadership is, or activelistening?
Those might be topics, but arewe starting in the wrong space
when we do leader developmenttoday?
Is it more about the habits ofmind and the ways of kind of
making sense of the world andwhat's happening around us?
(10:33):
Is that almost as important aplace to begin than any of the
topical things we begin withoftentimes.
So how do I reflect?
What are the habits of mind Ishould have as an individual to
facilitate that lifelonglearning that's going to help me
(10:53):
make sense of what's happeningaround me.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Well, that's a lot to unpack.
So I will say that thedistinction of vertical and
(11:26):
horizontal is used a lot, isconvenient for some things and
often misinterpreted orappropriated.
So I would say that theunderstanding of those
distinctions makes sense incertain contexts but not in
others.
Okay, and let's put a pin inthat and maybe come back to it
later.
Sure, the point about are westarting in the wrong place?
(11:47):
Is a lot of people come thereArbinger Institute, you know and
their model of an outwardmindset or being out of the box
or having a heart at peace.
They say you start with mindset, yes, the ask model, you know.
Attitude, skills and knowledge.
You can give people knowledge,you can teach them skills, but
(12:10):
attitude, you know.
So that's higher leveragethings.
The, the leaders create theweather.
The weather is often created bythe leader's internal state,
their emotional you knowenergetic vibrations they're
giving out that people aresensitive to and reacting to.
(12:31):
Yes, so those kind of things aremore foundational in a way, but
also subtler and harder to pindown, to put in a curriculum, to
teach in a course or even teachin a, you know, delivery to a
(12:51):
client.
So I think that there's and partof this is if we think about
the notion of training as aconcept, or um consulting, you
know, workshops, all these kindof things, they're all kind of
(13:11):
informed by our moderneducational system and people
like Ken Robinson, you know,were very, and many others Paulo
Freire and Parker Palmer andothers are great at showing that
there are assumptions builtinto that system and Theo Dawson
(13:59):
is very good about this latelythat you know.
It is pointing the educationsystem towards the end result
from natural play andexploration and experimentation
by children to also then learnhow to critically reflect on
what they've done and is it fitfor purpose or not, or what is
the impact socially on otherswhen these things want.
Those kind of things are less apart of the modern educational
system.
So what we end up having thisidea of is that knowing about
something is learning how toactually do it.
(14:22):
And the idea is we know aboutwalking, but we learned how to
walk through doing it, notthrough an abstraction about it.
And I think at a deep levelwe've transferred this
assumption that concretebehavioral skills can be done in
(14:43):
the same way as more abstractconcepts of leadership.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, and with leadership there's an infinite
number of variables, right?
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yeah Well, so let's talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, what is the complexity ofleadership as a concept?
And of course it becomesempirically hard to define.
People want to pin it down andsay well, and then you have all
(15:15):
the proliferation of theoriesand models and all these kind of
things that try to look atwhat's observable.
But I always I like the quotefrom Bill O'Brien that Otto
Scharmer used in Theory U, thatthe success of the intervention
is primarily due to the interiorcondition of the intervener is
primarily due to the interiorcondition of the intervener.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Say more.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Well, this is, leaders create the weather.
There is something about oursensitivity.
So now I'll go off piste a bit.
Heartmath, for instance, hasdone a lot of research in the
field of neurocardiology, andmore than them.
There's lots of research thatshows that there's neurons in
(16:01):
the heart.
They have a modality of sensingand energetically projecting
related to things you canmeasure.
So the coherence of our heartrate variability, combined with
our breathing and our attitude,can create different states that
can be felt by others.
(16:21):
By others.
You can, they, they say theycan measure it like 10 feet out
wow, you can physically measureit.
And, of course, people.
You know.
You kind of have a sense.
You interviewed Mark Bowden awhile ago.
Yes, I've watched some of histalks and listened to his
(16:48):
podcast.
He's tapping into this area.
People trust or don't trust.
You lean in or defend based onvery subtle clues almost
instantly, and some of those arevisual and behavioral, but some
of them are energetic.
Yeah, so how you feel inside.
You may think is invisible andyou can hide it, but you can't
(17:11):
no, no.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
No, no I have a gentleman who's in Scotland and
he's, you know, as you know,I've been exploring on LinkedIn
quite a bit and he's pushingpretty hard on this kind of
notion, that, and he's writingquite a bit on this topic and
but it's, it's hard to fake yourenergetic state.
Yeah, exactly, and your signalis communicating, whether you
(17:40):
like it or not.
And so you know, are you atleast how I understand his work
is are you kind of in a healthyspace or in a solid space to be
of service to others?
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Because it's hard to fake that to be of service to
others, because it's hard totake that.
So you can learn all the rightthings to say and all the right
models to use, but the I thinkthe concept of authenticity gets
misused a lot, but I think thisis what we're talking about in
some ways yeah if people have afeeling that, hey, even if
(18:14):
they're making a mess of things,their heart's in the right
place, and there's somethingabout that that allows you to be
more flexible and lean in andengage in a process.
And I think this idea ofengaging in a process is, you
(18:35):
know, one of the notes I madepreparing for this came to the
point of saying hmm, actually, Ithink the essence of this is
how can we shift from acontent-based learning about
leadership to a process-basedlearning?
Okay, say more leadership, to aprocess-based learning.
Okay, say more.
Well, let's circle back beforeI say more, because we're
(19:05):
talking about how do we unpackleadership as a concept?
So we can break it down verysimply.
There's task and relationshipright, we can break these down.
But what's task about?
Well, you can take some modelsthat say it's about having a
sense of why, a purpose andvision.
It's also about developing astrategy to execute on that,
making decisions on that basis.
(19:26):
But you've also got to be ableto kind of read the context,
analyze the system and all thesethings, and then, once you have
all that, you have to haveskills to execute on the tasks
and do things, and for leaders,that's often communicating all
this clearly enough so thatothers can actually execute In
(19:47):
the same way.
We can take relationships andsay, well, we need to be able to
show genuine care for othersand say, well, we need to be
able to show genuine care forothers.
A phrase I heard is I don'tcare how much you know until I
know how much you care.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah.
But I think what's interesting,Jonathan, is like the four or
five things you just talkedabout strategy.
You just talked about vision.
I think sometimes you takeKuz's and Posner, which I love
right, I love that work, butlet's pick on it for a second,
just for the sake of aninteresting conversation.
Inspiring a shared vision iswhen I am 45 to 50 to 55 years
(20:32):
old.
For most people Now, that's nota hard and fast truth.
What should we be teaching themwhen they're in college, when
they're in high school, whenthey're in their twenties,
Because many of these peoplewon't necessarily.
I mean, we could teach them toinspire a shared vision with
their team and why that'simportant.
(20:53):
But implicit in inspiring ashared vision, it's, to your
point, a whole bunch of things.
Oh my God.
So we simplify it, you know,down to inspire, challenge the
process.
Well, okay, so you know, itseems to me, are you starting
(21:16):
with a human being that is inthe process of becoming as whole
as possible, and that statement, in and of itself, is the work
of philosophers the first.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
So there's something really interesting I want to
come to with that, and how Iwant to get there is to say that
, you know, we can equally takeall those things and break them
down endlessly, and that'sactually becomes very important
to do when we want to understand.
What do we teach collegestudents?
We can break relationships down.
Yeah, we need to care, but wealso need to be able to learn
how to play nice with each other.
Yes, you coordinate others toplay nice, having social,
(21:59):
emotional intelligence, and alot of this goes to the thing of
self-leadership.
Yeah, now, that's a wholedomain in itself too.
But one of the things I foundinteresting my wife was doing
some research on wisdomliterature and one of the things
(22:19):
she found was that while thereis this sense that wisdom
accumulates with age, there'sanother sense and research
behind it, that wisdom relatedskills are actually most
developed between the ages of 18and 25.
And what I take from that in myown way and I'm not trying to
(22:44):
cite the research here oranything is that this is this
socialized mind period wherethere's a real openness to be
informed by what's the rightthing to focus on, and if we
train students at this age tolearn to notice, take action, do
(23:11):
stuff and reflect on it andcritically analyze it and cycle
that.
Yes, if we teach that, thenthen the next 20 years of
experience to when maybe theytrying again and doing all these
things and have a little bitmore wisdom yes, which enables
(23:46):
people to have a felt sense thatthere's something to what
they're saying and it's not justthe latest kind of spiel going
out Well okay.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
So a nook and cranny of this conversation wonderful
dialogue with Ron Riggio I thinkit was our last conversation we
had where we got into parentingin the home, right, and one
little nook and cranny of thisconversation is let's talk about
resilience.
Okay, if you choose to lead,you're.
One little nook and cranny ofthis conversation is let's talk
about resilience.
Ok, if you choose to lead,you're going to fail.
(24:17):
If you choose to lead, there'sgoing to be setbacks.
You're going to make mistakes.
You're putting yourself outthere into the unknown.
So my wife and I work hard tomodel failure and setbacks as a
part of the normal process ofdoing things Right.
So when our children don'tachieve something they'd hoped
to, we process that.
(24:38):
We have a conversation, we helpthem reflect a little bit, but
we also model it ourselves.
So I just had a paper rejectedby Sloan Management Review.
I talk about it with my kidsand that's just part of the
process.
And okay, I'm going to comeback and we're going to try
somewhere else.
And that's the work.
Dad at 52 is failing sometimesor not getting what he'd hoped
(25:00):
to.
So when they're not getting apart in the musical or the play
or my son maybe didn't play asmuch baseball as he had hoped to
in the spring.
They have a frame of how tonavigate that and kind of a
larger picture of how to makesense of some of that.
It doesn't destroy their world,so to speak.
It's a part of the process.
So I think I'm reallyinterested in yes, what are
(25:27):
those?
Because I think it's happeningtheir whole childhood.
What we're modeling, optimismor any other, you know what I
mean.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And I looked at Ron's paper that you talked about
where they looked at, you know,leadership in the kindergarten
playground.
Yes, how are these things beingdeveloped there?
And so it is much earlier inlife that these things start
being modeled and internalized.
If we're mindful being modeledand internalized, if we're
(25:58):
mindful To the point aboutresilience I was writing
something because my wife'sdoing her PhD on this program we
build around building emotionalresilience and we are trying to
clarify that what we mean byresilience is not coming back to
a homeostatic norm.
That's actually not what isreally meant by this.
The idea of resilience to me ishaving an inherently
(26:23):
developmental approach, so thatwhen something doesn't go as you
planned or imagined, you don'tjust cut it off or say it's a
mistake, I'll try again.
You say what was it that I didthat led to this?
What do I need to add oraccommodate?
You know, to grow the horizonsof my understanding, to include
(26:48):
some more perspectives, so thatnext time I actually can notice
those things earlier or see that, oh, in that context it works
differently.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yes, yes, and that habit of mind or that skill
seems to me that it would be awonderful place to begin at
least one of the primary topicsthat if someone wants to be, you
know, a coach, an athlete, youknow a healthy human, they have
(27:21):
the capacity to engage in thatwork right.
Otherwise, as a human, I sufferfrom self-serving bias oh, it's
their fault that I didn't getwhat I wanted.
Oh, you know, and it gives awayand I miss the opportunity to
capture some of that learning orto process some of that
learning right.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Well, and so now we go off a little bit too.
But another plug for TheoDawson is she's developed this
MindLog program and it'sespecially designed for young
students.
And what it does?
It allows them to journal abouthow they're thinking about a
given topic and it shows theirprogress.
(28:01):
It's like a game Can you get tothe next level and you go up
and down a bit, but you know,can you get a trajectory and
helps them reflect on oh, I see,now I think like this, and it
allows me to do these things,and they have a metacognitive
kind of feedback mechanism tounderstand oh, these things are
(28:22):
helping me grow.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So what are those 10 things?
I mean, you know, again, that'swhere we should be starting is
building the habits of mind thathelp an individual navigate the
world.
And again, I think philosophershave been struggling with this,
Theologians have beenstruggling with this.
Again, we probably could justgo to some of those individuals
(28:45):
and there's probably some reallyreally good clues all of our
folks in character and suchvirtues.
So maybe it's just that, Maybeit's as simple, Maybe we have
Oprah complicated it, Jonathan,and if we just focused on the
virtues.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well, I listened to.
The other podcast I listened toall of from the beginning is
the Philosophize.
This Stephen West, and hislatest one was on Marcus
Aurelius yeah, and talking aboutthe meditations and how it
relates to stoicism more broadlyand stoic ethics and so on, and
(29:22):
part of that, I think, goes towhat I come across in lots of
different areas.
There's some fundamental thingsabout kind of cleaning up, so I
think, and other people havemore things, but there's a
simple thing you clean up andgrow up and they run
(29:45):
concurrently and part of youknow what I had here in relation
to some of what I think Amalhad sent, or maybe Bernd at one
point.
They talk about, well, how do weget leaders to reflect?
It's important to have themreflect, yes, but what is the
thinking used for?
(30:05):
Are they trying to justify baddecisions and choices and think
more complexly about that, orare they critically looking at?
What assumptions was I going byhere?
Am I really attached to beingright here and, if I step back
and allowed myself to admit somefailure or being wrong, have
(30:27):
some epistemic humility?
Am I?
a failure Is my identity crushedthat my failure is my identity
crushed, right.
But those kind of things aboutidentity being attached to
rightness, yeah, to knowledge,to performance, those are things
that can be cleaned up so thatyou know the notions of
(30:53):
self-awareness, for instance.
This came up in thatconversation, it always comes up
.
This is a key skill.
So Cardin et al did somethingin the Journal of Management
Education two, three years ago,really looking into
self-awareness in relation toadult development, relation to
(31:17):
adult development.
And they looked at many things.
But a simple way to look at itsay there's a purpose for
self-awareness.
Why would we want to develop it?
And we can have all sorts ofgood reasons, because if we
don't understand ourselves, wedon't understand the impact we
have on others.
We're creating the weather andwe're blissfully ignorant of it
and project out and blameeverybody, yep.
But then there's also thecomponents of self-awareness.
(31:37):
There's intrapersonal thingswhat do we notice about
ourselves and our thoughts andour feelings and so on?
And intrapersonal, we getfeedback from others that help
us, maybe course correct.
But then what are the processes?
How do we become self-aware?
How do we evaluate those things?
What kind of processes?
How do we use attention andmetacognition to have a balcony
(32:03):
where the self is on the dancefloor and we can notice it and
not be caught up by it.
Yeah, yeah.
Now how do we train you know,those skills?
There are ways and there aremany ways, and so I think what
you're pointing to is there's awhole field in terms of
(32:23):
leadership development broadlythat really needs to look at how
do we undo things we'veinternalized that maybe don't
serve us now.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
yes, yes, I mean, and , and I, I, I think that is ever
, that's a that that is everunfolding as you encounter new
experiences in life, whetherthat's transitioning from being
single to married, married tohaving children, different
(32:57):
stages of life.
I mean it's just, it's everunfolding, that learning about
self in these new contexts, inthese new situations, it never
ends.
And so it seems to me and again, this is just very simplistic,
I'm kind of coming back to it,this is just very simplistic,
I'm kind of coming back to itwhat are those eight or ten
master lessons that, if we canteach a human and build the
(33:19):
habits of mind they're, they'regoing to better navigate a
number of different situationsthat they will confront, versus
teaching them north houses?
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Sure, and if we took that and turned it again and
come back to saying what are theprinciples and processes we
teach students so that theyrecognize life lessons that are
littered all around them all?
Speaker 1 (33:50):
the time.
Yes, the search for thelearning.
It's there, it's right in frontof us, there.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
So rather than prescribing what they should pay
attention to how do we teachthem to pay attention to what's
all around them?
Trying to teach them all thetime?
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Yes, I'm not getting the results I want.
This didn't go how I hadplanned, this I didn't achieve
this and then having that innermechanism to and the resources I
mean again, I've said on thepodcast a number of times I have
a therapist.
I've been with him 17 years,had therapists before that for
five and six years.
That's part of my system ofprocessing, of making sense, and
(34:30):
it's been incredible.
I mean it's been so beneficialfor me and mentors and
conversations like this theyhelp me make sense of right.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Well, it's like you talk about.
The podcast may have started asa COVID project, but it's
become.
How can Scott learn in public?
Yes, how can scott learn inpublic?
Yes, as messy as that is, but Ithink it's that authentic
richness and messiness thatmakes it attractive for people.
(35:04):
Yeah, yeah, because because itit's, it's, yes, it just okay
I'm mindful, though, thatthere's a whole nother layer of
this, that maybe we need anotherconversation for.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Well, intrigue me, and then maybe we can come back
to that.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Well, we've talked in some ways about how do you make
this training, transfer andbreak skills down to a level.
There are ways to talk aboutthat and ways to break them down
that we haven't really touchedon or gotten into yet and that
is kind of the area I've beentrying to really explore and
(35:46):
understand.
That is kind of the area Iorchestrate conflict and manage
(36:19):
tension and create a holdingenvironment which are really
highly chunked, masterful kindof acts of leadership, that the
building blocks and experiencesalong the way to enable that
capacity is more explicitly andconsciously cultivated.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yes, yes, 100%.
Now for me, put a button onthis conversation.
What's the practical wisdom inthe conversation we've just had,
Jonathan, Because I'm afraid todo that.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yeah.
So this is your post-reflection.
You're saying no, no, let's doit now.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yes, I'm thinking about your energy thing.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I'm thinking about that, I think yeah, the
practical wisdom is, in a sense,that it starts with us and it
starts with getting our ownhouse in order.
And you know, when you startedquoting me on leaders create the
weather, I started, oh, I gotto unpack that more and there's
(37:29):
a whole lot that I realized thatcan be unpacked from that and
we can talk about that more too.
But how do we take somethingthat's soft and fuzzy, so to
speak, like that it's verysubtle in a sense and bring it
down to the level ofscaffoldable skill training that
(37:51):
builds leadership capacities?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
And for me, one major , significant, perhaps most
important domain is do I have ahuman that is the best possible
version of themselves in thismoment, and they've cleaned up,
and they've grown up and they'rein that continual process to be
(38:20):
of service to others?
And if I'm not, then thatenergy that shows up, if I'm not
, then that attention that showsup, that Well.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
So I'll give you a simple example, because I used
to do the leadership circle,training and certifications, and
they talk about the reactivetendencies coming out of Karen
Horney's work.
What are the ways we makeourselves safe in the world
early?
What are the strategies?
Do we comply with others?
Do we protect ourselves bybeing right and distant and
(38:53):
critical, or do we use powerover and control and be
ambitious and autocratic?
And what I would often say isthere's two things going on when
that underlying strategy istriggered, your energy is hooked
by that and it creates noise.
(39:16):
So what gets communicated isthe underlying fear energy that
drives those strategies.
And so when people are hearingyour message, you may have good
intentions and brilliant thingsto say, but what they hear
starts in their heart with thenoise and it makes it hard, and
then it filters the actualmessage.
(39:36):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
So let's pause there for now.
I think listeners have plentyto think about, jonathan, as
always.
Thank you, we're going torevisit this.
We'll do a part two.
So, for listeners, if this isyour first episode, look forward
to next week, and if this isthe well, this would be the
(40:00):
first episode if they'relistening right now.
So then, if you're listening tothis in the future, there is a
second episode and a secondconversation, episode 301.
Everyone, as always, thank youso much for checking in.
Thank you, jonathan, thank youScott.
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