 Welcome, everybody. This is Rex Popup Call on Wednesday, November 28th, 2018. We have as our guest Samantha Slade, who will take us in horizontal directions, which are exciting. And as we know, Jame is giving the universal gesture for going horizontal. I like that. Estee, welcome. But we start, we tend to start our Rex meetings with a poem. And I have picked an old favorite from Mary Oliver titled Today. And it goes as follows. Today by Mary Oliver. Today, I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoo's of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must. The bees in the garden rumbling a little. The fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten, and so forth. But I'm taking the day off, quiet as a feather. I hardly move, though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness, one of the doors into the temple. Ooh, ooh, I like that. How about that? It makes you not want to talk. It makes you want, like we should all just sort of hang, can we turn this into a Quaker meeting, where we all just go quiet for an hour and every now and then somebody pops in and says something? That could work. Well hell no, I'm too excited about this. Samantha, I love this. Your book is just so great. I work with a friend of mine on a book he called The Connected Company, and we were grasping to what I think you've achieved in your book. So it's just fantastic to actually see it because I spent month and months researching zappos, you know, living systems, all that stuff that you can already see got there. And I love where you've taken us. And my wife also, she's a VP of HR for a bunch of companies, and now she's a president. And this is, I can't wait to show this to her. This is so exciting. Awesome. Wow, that's great to hear. So I'm not going to do a big intro of you, Sam. I think that this is already happening organically. Yeah. If you'd like to step in and just say a bit about how you got to where you are, that would be a good grounding for us. Wow. You're a bureaucrat. She didn't want to do it anymore. That's why I love it. I was a bureaucrat. I used for a few years. I love that take on it. Yeah, I think I just, I really became aware that we create the systems that we live in. There are human creations and we are free to shift them too. And we don't have to see these things as fixed. They've been created and iterated for decades and decades and we can iterate them in a different direction. And you know that this means I agree and this means I disagree on all that. Yes. And it does sound so simple. It almost sounds like duh, like you're going to write a book about that. And I realized that I needed to write a book when I figured out that so many initiatives that I was observing were coming at it from the angle of changing structures. Like if you change a structure, then hopefully things will change. And it's not because you change the organizational chart that people show up differently on Monday morning. And so then I observed so many different initiatives kind of just fumble and in the end fail because they were coming at them so structural heavy and not from the different practices and habits. And I thought, huh, why is this so hard? And then I started looking around and there's nothing really out there about that kind of detailed stuff. And then I realized, oh, right, on my background anthropology, I kind of dig out on this stuff. So maybe I should just start writing about it. It's funny. As context here, I think you'll find you're knocking on an open door in this group. The relationship economy expedition Rex is based on this notion that we fell out of relationships somewhere in the past. And trust. And trust. Trust. We shattered all those things. We basically shredded the fabric of society. And I blame in part, consumerism, which said, Hey, your only job is to go buy more crap that you don't need. And forget about all those things like society business is things society, you know, all those things don't really matter. And work work became the most hierarchical entity on the planet. Like, like, you know, they became autarkies or monarchies with, you know, CEO is King commanding that everything be done and so forth. And for a while, I guess that seemed to work, but with broke people because they had to leave themselves at the door. And that's somehow massively changed at this point, we're beginning to come back toward organizations as collections of humans and all of that. And so at Rex, we're busy talking about what does it mean to be back in relationship? One of the movements that are creating those relationships? How are those helping us reestablish trust? How did we lose trust? How do you gain trust? What are the actions that help you do that? Some of our heroes are people like Brené Brown, who goes and talks about vulnerability being the path to authentic connection and joy. And, you know, a series of other thinkers I can go through, you know, this kind of a little pantheon that I hold of these kinds of people that that are leading us into this way of seeing way of being this intention, right? So that's kind of the background for this group. So because you don't need to convince us that horizontal is good, I'd love to offer you to treat us as your thinking partners as a little little posse of people to share. What are your thorny questions? What are you trying to solve on this quest? And I think we need to get familiar with your quest a little bit more first. But treat us as co-investigators in this quest. No, I'm sorry, I'm going to take over a little bit here. Oh, good. Bo is apparently quite, quite, quite active on this. Go. I wonder how many people even heard the term excess management. Wow. There's something, huh? Who's even heard of that? That's really interesting. Tell me how you came to that. I'd love to hear that. And then I do have a, I just kind of came up with the grand theory of how this all happened. I guess I'm going to go through that. Since you're an anthropologist, and I love you. So when we were an aggregaring society, not that long ago. And when you were a farmer, horizontal, you know, even if you were a farmer in a manner or a state or something, you still had to get things done on yourself. So when we shifted to these hierarchical relationship, you know, management structures, let's think about it. I just recently read this book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. I remember one of the interesting things that she made a note of was how, you know, Henry Ford, the dominant like companies, if you think about mining and autos, we took those structures and applied them to everything. And so there's that thought. But I'm also just thinking like, yeah, because prior to that, aggregaring societies were much flatter. I mean, there was a bunch of individual units operating on their own. And the other thing, obviously thing is military structure, the corporate structure is a military structure. Okay. So we took that. So I'm, what I'm doing is I'm throwing things at your anthropology mind. And I can't wait for you to like come back at me. And then another thing I noticed, because you certainly mentioned patriarchy, but then I saw you notice parent child relationships. And I love that because I've noticed that leaders always get put in positions of parental power, because it's the original relationship. So anyways, I just I see this genesis of how we were flat in a lot of ways. Because let's face it, though, the people on the estates were farmers, they still had a parent, you know, the noble, right? So I mean, that's a big part of human history, right? But anyways, we've transitioned and then we took this old stuff and we're still carrying it on, we're still carrying the water. Okay, I can't wait for you now, Samantha. I'm done. I'd love to know what's your question you're holding with all of that. Oh, well, like, how did we get here? I mean, when I think about agro-garrant societies, we're much more horizontal. How do we get to extolling and revering hierarchy so much? The Industrial Revolution took us there. That's what I thought. Yeah. And, and, and I think like the way out is this path of practice, right? Because the whole thing I see, I get what broke my heart seeing people who are really kind of conscious of this, and completely excited about a new form of organization, a way of being in it. And the trip up point I kind of observe is people going, well, there's a structure part. And then after that, the part is, I'm going to help the other people change. And I had this illumination once when I'm at this guy, and he was like, I've been trying to get my whole team into feedback culture. If they just like start doing feedback culture, and I just can't figure out Samantha, help me get the team back into feedback culture. And I said to him, when was the last time you asked for feedback from your team? Anyway, oh, practice what you want, buddy. God, the blind spot like a super brilliant, sharp, heartfelt man had not seen that. And for me, I was like, wow, if like, that's the general oversight that's happening everywhere. On Sunday, I was in, I was in Belgium, and I was given one hour to introduce going horizontal. And if I want to think with you guys, I would love to think on this point, because the whole challenge is like, okay, you got one hour, you got a room, I had 100 people, right? And, and the idea is in one hour, how can I wake up people to the idea of this is about practice. So already understanding what is practice, right, which is in itself, not, not there for everybody. Practice starts with me, not my neighbor or somebody else, my colleague, it's me. And then here's a whole bunch of practices I can start Monday morning, so I can stop, you know, having excuses for I don't really know where to start, right? In one hour. So I have this idea that it should always be experiential. So what I did on Sunday was like a first go, it was like the practice of transparency default to open, everybody thinks they're open, everybody thinks they're transparent in reality, they're not. So I just had people to go into threes and share the price of their shoes, if they felt like it, the price of their part, their lodging, if they felt like it. And if they were really up to it, how much they earn. And just to come back and share how that was for the whole. And, and I was like, Okay, that was a one try on getting a feeling of like how it's about me and I need to be feeling uncomfortable to shift my culture. And I would love if you guys have other ideas on ways you can bring people into this kind of self awareness on practice. That's Samantha. Did you stage those questions? Or did you ask them all all three at once? Did you first get them to pair up and say shoes and then No, no, I said I hear here what we're going to do. If we we we're going to practice this and there's three levels. And I said, sharing your salaries is chili pepper level. And you're going to pick the level you want to go to. It's you managing your own comfort zone. Okay. And did you get any feedback on what levels they went to? Mostly everybody went full the way through and they explained that once one person in the trio went there, then the other two gave themselves permission. Interesting. Yeah. Took the first person to be vulnerable. And the shoes was a warm up. And then the lodging was a warm up. And then they were like, But they did say that this activity was maybe easier. And the fact that it was at public events, nobody knew each other. And they were they wondered what it would be like if they were with work colleagues. I wonder if there was a sense of social obligation with that as well, that once somebody in the trio did it, then by not doing it, you would be in essence shaming yourself, you would be not being as open and therefore, not living up to the to the implicit agreement that you that one person that that you've made, as soon as one person becomes open, anyone who doesn't is increased is intrinsically not living up to the bargain. Yeah, I'm so I wonder if there's that kind of implicit social agreement that's been made in that particular context. Everybody seemed to have fun. There was like the room was a buzz and people did say that they thought that this is funny for you guys. They were like, Well, we're in Europe and not in North America. We think this would be harder, harder exercise in in North America. In Finland, you can just go look things up. In Finland, all your tax information is freely open. Yeah. Yeah. And so it made me kind of curious, like, Oh, if I was in the States, would I try that? How would that go? How would you guys feel about something like that? Bo is still quivering from the fact about Finland. And in Finland, if you get a speeding ticket, the fine is proportional to your income. Oh, so if you're really wealthy, you could get a $5,000 speeding ticket. Yeah, it's just supposed to hurt. So they figure out how to get it to hurt. Exactly. And some people don't notice like, Oh, 50 bucks, who cares? So practice, practice starts with me. So you want us to I want to really understand fully your where you want to go. So yeah, how in like a really short amount of time, you can invite people to have like this, this, like it have an experience of practice, they won't taking it out of headspace and we're bringing it down to like an embodied experience. I want to do this stuff I want to do on like a stage that I should be able to have hundreds of people to do it. And so far I've experimented, it's new, right? So I experimented this one last Sunday. And two weeks before I was with the HR professionals. And so I was like, Hey, you guys are HR professionals, let's go into the conflict relationships one. That's like, that's your, you know, that's your zone. And they were like, Yeah, and I was like, Let's go really juicy. Let's just go do a trigger log. And they were like, Okay. And so the trigger log is like, you just you you share something that's triggered you in the past few days. And you will identify what was the context, what triggered you and what happened in you when you were triggered. And you share it to your trigger coach who once you shared that your trigger coach says, Samantha, what are you learning about yourself through this trigger? And we do it to each other. And it's just developing more awareness of how we're bringing all our personal patterns to work. And they're bumping up against other people's personal patterns and making a big relational mess every day. And because we don't allow ourselves to acknowledge that we're actual whole human beings, we don't even talk about this, let alone use workplace as a training ground to become more conscious and in caring around this. So I'm wondering, Samantha, do you and I see we have sort of a palette of exercises, tools, or if not, we can help sort of co generate them that lead toward the kind of places of vulnerability, openness, connection, trust, articles, sharing, feedback, all those kinds of things, right? You could you could have a bowl of fortune cookies in front of every table. And the fortunes inside could be one of those exercises, you know, reveal something about yourself you've never said, or and don't pay attention to it for a month or, you know, whatever it might be, but things that they could do. And people you could even sell these, you could go find somebody on Etsy who will make them, you know, bake them, make them and fulfill them and sell batches of basically going horizontal fortune cookies or this is just in the spirit of brainstorming, but something playful that that people could actually sort of go through a deck of decks of cards are very popular. But there's a lot of different means of transmitting this because partly people lack vocabulary, they lack they lack they lack the palette of options. And what an expert in the field can do is paint is is is equip that palette with the colors for whatever the new thing is, right, and then teach people how to mix the mauve with the teal and all of that, right? Absolutely. Trading cards game. Yeah. And like when I did the trigger long the other day, people loved it. And then when I asked for feedback from it, I'm so intrigued by the feedback. Listen to this. People go, Samantha, I was able to do it, but I can't imagine my colleagues being able to do it. And then they go, Oh, how are your colleagues different than you? And then they, hmm, well, maybe then. It's like this moment of like, just unraveling of these assumptions we're sitting with. Well, we I want to do something like what I'd love to do is do an exercise where you catch them. You leave them down the primrose past of doing what everyone does be a child, project your power, your autonomy and everything on someone else, the org structure, all. I mean, we make these gods up and we put infest them on all this power. And then we sit there in this, you know, child like, Oh, one day he's going to fix it. I mean, I literally like to lead them to let them go there and go, look what you just did. You do you like this world? Because you're creating it. How about so I've given myself this creative constraint to be only appreciative. And and so every time I've had a reflex to go down that path, I have I've gone and I tried to pull myself out of it. And so I'm going with this thing, you know, what you give attention to grows. And so I'm like, every time, given experience of the feeling of the other way, what is a parent, what an adult to adult feeling, what could it be like? Because that's the new one, we don't have enough experience. We don't need to reinforce the old one. Yeah. So that's what I'm really trying to be very, very deliberate about. It's the same thing as clicker training. In clicker training, you don't punish the animal or whatever you're trying to train, you basically mark you, you, you, you pair the clicker with a reward, a snack. And then you mark the good things that you're trying to get that dog or whatever to do. And when the dog does a behavior, click, we're like, Oh, how do I do more of that? But it opens a channel of communication. It's, this is maybe a very crude example of what positive feedback training is like. But, you know, it works. So in all of all of the stuff you guys have been doing and experimentation is even having in conversations, do you have any like little things that come to mind that could have potential? I'm thinking Dave, in the work in the regenerative economy, is anybody focusing on this side of, of that, of, of opening up the sort of paths of control and feedback, honesty, trust, participation, connection, the going horizontal parts of this? Yeah, I was really enjoying the language because it feels like it, it integrates really nicely with the kind of language I've been trying to think through for, you know, how do we create a regenerative world? And I don't, I don't, I mean, I, I had been really stuck with this idea that we diagnose environmental problems all the time, you know, climate change or toxic pollution or whatever, whatever. But, you know, they're really just symptoms of business problems. And somehow in our business world, you know, like we walk into our businesses and we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for environmental conditions. And I don't know, so it seems to me like one of the things you're kind of pointing at is a way that we can regain responsibility within the workplace for these things, where we've delegated away the bad shit to, to know we've thrown it away. It's a way. And so I think you're pointing at a way that, you know, corporate, large industry should take that responsibility back. We as people in our jobs should take this responsibility. We, you know, we shouldn't be not being shit out of the pipe. But for some reason, we, we draw a line and then we stop at that line. Well, I think it was, I was like, yeah, we were acting like children. Yeah, I think it was a very intentional, there was a quite intentional but distributed effort to make sure business didn't have to worry about the earth and community and things like that back in the 50s, 60s, 70s as business grows huge. And I'm sorry, Sam, you're about to jump in and say something. So one example I point to all the time is Milton Friedman's famous cover story of the New York Times Magazine 1970, where he basically says the only social responsibility of a corporation is to make a profit. And in the first five paragraphs, you see the title and you're like, well, this might be an interesting argument. But no, in the first five paragraphs, he indicts and convicts any manager who so much as brings social, you know, any kind of worry about the environment or whatever else into a board meeting or a business meeting, he's like, profit should be your sole guide. It's the role of regulations and so forth outside to make sure that you don't break things. But you should only worry about profit. And this this was a highly deeply influential article of all places, the New York Times. And it allowed a lot of other people to come out and say, yeah, we're doing that and profit maximization is the goal. And there's a whole bunch of really bad, stupid thinking that then couples up with Chicago School of Economics about, you know, Homo economicus and all this other kind of hunt, mostly, which is what's sort of scary is that it ate our it ate businesses brain. They're breaking up. Detox, like deprogramming. I don't how much how much of your work sometimes feels like like deprogramming. Yeah, I think that this is about acknowledging that that despite kind of ideas and notions we might have, we actually have habits, reflexes and behaviors that are not aligned with that, which is a painful thing to acknowledge, right? And that like, and I think it's so painful that when I hear people talk about this stuff, I think they like they separate themselves out. So they go, there's this, you do that, we do that. And I listen really, really intently and it's ever so rare that I hear somebody say I and start with an eye. And in the end, I was thinking it's all this stuff like we are the system. And if we can't start sentences with the eye for that and start changing just ourselves in the way we're showing up, then how can we transform the system? It's it's like, it almost feels like this first step is like I am the system. So or are the first step is to just identify this is with your system. I was thinking like, I very could see it right away in your intro, how your point you're making it clear something I've always thought like, hey, you spend a huge part of your life at work. Why is it you think it's fine to be at a place where what you think what you feel doesn't matter at all? Where it's kind of validation. It's like, I mean, you guys you caught that I spent 16 years in the realm of education up to the ministry, but it's like it occurred to me one day that a classroom is a really narrow place for learning that actually the workplace is like every single day it's fodder for learning if we could start approaching it is that it's like it's the best biggest training field that's offered to us every day. Actually, all these organizations where that happens, then this huge storehouse happens. And I know from what I've learned from my wife a lot of the times they don't these organizations don't realize the learning that's locked up on all these people. And then they often they can lose it, you know, they can destroy it, they can validate it. And that value is massive. That's that's one like little practice I've been searching for because in the learning and development domain of practice, the notion is learning and development could be self directed. Like I don't need to ask for permission to go and take a training class. I can show up and start like holding my own learning contract in my mind and heart. Like I don't have to have, you know, some program that's being put in place for me or some permission that I don't have to do. I can start applying my own training program for myself like here and now. And I was like, oh, isn't that interesting? It's like what's something you always wanted to get better at. We'll just give yourself a little kind of a learning objective and then you start it up. And again, that seems to me like so tiny and minute that I haven't even tried it when I've been doing a presentation. I was like, how does that sound to you guys? Like if I was going to say, what's one thing that you would like to to, I don't know if you want to if like we were going to take two minutes and give ourselves our own little learning intention. And then how we how would you track that yourself? And would you feel comfortable talking about it with your colleagues or something like that? I wonder if there's space for some kind of a trizz thing where, you know, you approach it from like if you wanted to make sure that no learning happened, what would you do? Kind of and see how many patterns people recognize in their own daily behavior. Is it the the liberating structures guy, right? I think isn't it called trizz where you'd be the opposite of what you're trying to get. Well, and again, that doesn't fit with my creative constraint, the way I'm applying, right? But I hear you like almost like, what are all the things we could be doing? So one of the things you're making you think is that I we have a bunch of barriers that keep us, you know, the I'm too busy thing, like where everybody's so good, which is an opera, which is a way we use to avoid kind of having to deal with these things. Right. I'm too busy to think about, you know, I can't take this responsibility to this. And there must be other walls that we use, but that's the one that I mean, I think the economic the philosophy, oh, it's not my job, we're just going to make a profit. You know, these are excuses in some sense for not taking responsibility and not taking responsibility. There's a lot easier than taking responsibility, I expect. So well, there's nothing more engaged than a worker who's learning, right? Like, we have all the proof for that. And so even if you just like I kind of think it's logically speaking, you can embed little rituals in an organization that that, you know, from deliberately develop and you guys read the book, deliberately developmental organizations. I mean, that's that's kind of interesting in a notion of way you embed it. And I mean, just ending, ending any kind of like you're in a project meeting, you finish a project meeting, and you're like, what's something I learned today, no matter how my unit is. And it's like, it can be about yourself. It doesn't have to be like information about the project or whatever. It's like, or what did I learn today about myself? Like that's very simple and nonconventional. I'm going to apologize because I'm going to share out my brain here on deliberately developmental organizations so that people can see what what this is and capture a couple of names of books and stuff like that. So it's very funny. My old friend Kaz Godz is involved in this. But there's a book in everyone culture by Lisa Laskow Leahy and Robert Keegan, which I think is sort of the famous kind of start of this, right? Keegan is an educator and psychologist at Harvard, part of the change leadership group. He writes about the five orders of consciousness. He's written a whole bunch of stuff. Basically. But he's talking here about organizations that decide to switch around so that they actually help people grow. So here's an HBR article. Does your company make you a better person that points to it, which was written by Andy Fleming and Keegan? And Lisa as well. He doesn't go into the power relationships or decisions sharing, decision making and things like that. He's really honing in just on the learning. Yeah. Here's one. Here's one of the things from that article in a deliberately developmental organization. The root causes almost always are about people's interior lives. It's super interesting. So I will stop sharing for now. But. So what if what if we started giving ourselves permission to ask questions like from the meeting today, what did you learn about yourself? Like, ouch. And you started just having the habits of that. And made permission for that, made room for that. But like maybe, I mean, maybe one of the things like a prototype, like the next time I'm doing a presentation is, you know, or, you know, what did you learn about yourself today? Or maybe we can finish our session with that today. I like that. I'm struck a moment ago when you were talking about, I think it was it was beyond that. But the sort of this tension between membership in a group and pioneering a new behavior. And I was just reading. Sorry, I wasn't just reading. I just watched the documentary White Right by Diya Khan, which in which a Muslim journalist, a woman born in Pakistan, who made her way out, whose biography is super fascinating. She goes and decides, screw it, I'm done with all these people sending me all these trolls sending me hate mail. I'm going to go visit them. And in White Right, she sits down with Richard Spencer. She sits down with a whole bunch of people whose names I had identified and put in my brain thing, because they were part of the alt-right. And she interviews them. And and strangely enough, they treat her as a friend. And there's this very interesting thing that that I think to me that the conversation a little while ago reminded me of racism, where I hate all ex-people, except you're OK because you've become my friend. And that doesn't mean that they're suddenly going to love all ex-people. It means their their brain is allowing them to make a little hiccup of an exception in this moment. And it doesn't mean they're going to try to convince their other people, because they know that those people will be very offended and probably really mad and whatever. It doesn't turn them into a sudden evangelist for changing their minds, although in a couple cases it does. There's a guy who used to run a skinhead band who has become an activist to try to stop people from being radicalized. He's one of her interview subjects and is really moving. But I think we're not too many steps removed from the sphere of racism out in our private lives. When we're talking about these changes about how business was supposed to be done back in the 50s, 60s to over generalize and how we're trying to draw people into more openness, more vulnerability, more trust that the other people are actually going to deliver something if we have communications, etc, etc. And I don't know if that's too big a jump for you, Sam, or not big enough a jump for you either way. So this one here is a really great one about conflict, right? And this idea that one of the things that's going on at work that's like exhausts workplaces is we want everybody to think like, I think right. And so one, if you can start letting just going in like openness and respect for other perspectives and really cherishing multiple perspectives and wanting to hear other perspectives and be learning from other perspectives, like, what about if this one here is like, what about if workplaces were also the training ground for being a more harmonious society? Like that's just, you know, beautiful and crazy so we could start welcoming in conflicts because there's show me a workplace without conflict. It doesn't exist. And whenever I talk to people about conflict, one, they wince and two, they like go straight up to management to sort out the conflict issues, right? Like what if communities of people and teams could could actually learn to embrace and welcome a conflict and work it through. And maybe what you're talking about there is like, what comes to me in that is just a moment of like deep listening to a different perspective and just from a place of like openness and at the end of it just be able to say thank you for sharing like nothing else just like a witnessing sentence and start practicing that like how can we how can we practice like living with multiple perspectives and not trying to convince each other. And a lot of those moments for Dia in the documentary and in her work are opened up by the fact that she shows up with maybe one crew member to do sound or something like that with her camera and goes to these people's homes and to their camps and other sorts of things. She makes herself really vulnerable and in in their mind must be running the little circuit. Isn't she scared? Why is she here? What is she doing? She she she's a woman. You know, she could be harmed and and then, you know, who knows what other narratives run through their hearts. But but I think that that to my mind sort of a gesture of vulnerability is a really good opening for all these things. This is this is why what I think like when I talk about practices, I talk about three levels of practices, right? Because we usually jump to number three. The first one is just this like personal practice. I can I can start doing something and it might surprise you because I'm acting differently and I'm probably going more vulnerable and I'm asking you to do, but I'm starting to practice that and I'm developing my own muscle of it. And then you go to like safe space practices. So I pick people can be work or or elsewhere, but where I know there's trust and mutual care so that together we can start practicing it and mess up and not like chew each other out and still be kind to one each one another. And then finally, I can go into my team and go, Okay, guys, what about if we try this this this practice out for three weeks or two weeks? And I know it's going to be bumpy, whatever. But because I've practiced it in those two other places, I can initiate it from like a, like go quite far in the vulnerable space on it when I anticipate it because I've practiced it so much and I've actually developed my muscle for it. And so I can open it up in a way that's more vulnerable than if I was just you know, coming from a headspace, Hey, let's try this out. And everybody's going to be a little bit self protected when they go in it. And there's nobody opening that space like that. Yeah, I noticed that I'm an open space facilitator. So in the first time I ever heard of anything like open space, I had everybody's reaction of what in, you know, your, your, your throat titans, your heart clenches, your sphincter titans, like the whole thing. It's like, Whoa, what? And then the first time I hosted one, I'm like, are people going to step up and start doing things? And then now it's like, you do these things, you mind the space, you pay attention, and then people show up. It's like, it's like you're opening a magic door for them. But your perspective on the whole thing switches from OMG, this is insanely risky and stupid and it could fail to, Hey, I'm doing these people a favor by unlocking something in their heads that's already there, that they'd like to go through. And once they've had a little taste of it, once they've, well, one thing I say to every open space group, once I'm done, it's like, okay, you are all now experienced open space people. You may not be able to run one yourself, but you could easily try, wouldn't be hard. Think about the other parts of your life that this, that this is sort of similar to, I mean, I try to do a little bit of like, by an analogy, look at other parts of your life where this could work. Because to me, things like open space are examples of the kinds of what I call design from trust that we need more of. Yeah, like agile, agile team meetings, right? I ran my first report workshop with high level management at the university this week, as an agile meeting, it was like a real experiment. It was like, okay, guys, you've all gotten the report. So like, there's, there's like 12 managers in the room, they've all gotten this report. And they're waiting for us to just like come on, explain the report, they're all just going to sit there and they're going to receive it. And I'm like, the report is about shifting differently. And we've just worked with a team and it's been like hugely successful. And it felt incongruent to, to do that way. And I kept, I was like, racking my head to how to do it differently. So we got in the meeting, did a little, I said, like, we're going to do a little framing right now, because always good to have the purpose really clear. And so really, I could, you know, we could be what's in the report, but we're not going to frame it this way. It's like, how is this experience in this one team? How can that benefit the rest of the library and the university community in general? So let's just like frame it up big. And they're like, whoa, okay. And it was like, okay, let's do a check in. And now we're going to do an agile agenda. And like, we put up like four categories on the board. So there's like announcements and information. And then there's questions and feedback. And there was co-creation doing work together and then proposals and decisions. So it's kind of like a little bit of a frame on an open space, right? So it makes it like a meeting, but it's, it's pretty much open space, just like, you know, in a different form. And it was like, okay, let's co-create the agenda together. And they're like, but you're supposed to tell us about the report. And I'm like, well, if you have a question, you should be running apart a point in the agenda. And so people got up and was like, I got this question, I'm going to take six minutes. And then they were like, but I was like, no, this is your point on the agenda. And they're like, oh, my God, this is a anyways, we ran it like that. And we even did a proper co-creation session where they went through a listening activity. And they designed who they could listen to. And then I said, okay, well, the next 10 minutes, you're going to leave the room and go listen to the people and come back and report what. And so doing this, like, like starting to actually bring in practices like that, where we are doing the trust and they're in a structured way and we start doing them like that, like, even me after 10 years of doing this, like, I'm only I did that as a first this week, where I started to think, oh, my God, I could even run a report with clients differently. That's really cool. Yeah, thank you for that. Well, are you asking for our help? Yeah, that's to go ahead. Yeah, I've been I apologize for odd audio or video earlier. And kind of reorganizing books. And you know what that's like. At the house at the house level, right, multiple rooms I was having a discomfort growing, and then a kind of aha emerging. So in the spirit of thinking together, let me if I can, I want to put out this kind of challenge, at least it was it's a challenge inside me. I hear Samantha, the three steps of individual practice. And then how did you phrase two and three? Like see space practice and then prototype your trial. And I start to get a little sphinctery building on Jerry's. And and I start focusing on the fact that nothing happens at the individual level quite literally. I mean, all of our expectations of behaviors, and beliefs and models come from those around us from infancy, right? We are social creatures, right? And and they change in a process of interaction with others in our environment. So I started to get like uncomfortable with this. We start with the individual because I think that is one of the big moves that happened when we went with the industrial hierarchical metaphor is that individuals became separate quanta that report up in kind of additive form up to the the the only person who's actually a full person is the guy at the top of the of the pyramid. And then I'm so I'm getting uncomfortable. But then I'm hearing us talk actually about having started with number three where you kind of in order to in order to continue our generations or our worlds, contribution in this process of culture, evolution, change, etc. We start at at at the third of a full practice, right? Somebody has an intuition somebody recognizes that they inside actually do it better whatever you start as an experiment at at three. So and the the a here is that this is yet another of those examples of we talk as if it's individualist because that's the framing. But actually when we're successful and the reason we're all here in this these kinds of forums is because we actually act from the full practice viewpoint. Anyway, I'm I was saving all this up while organizing books. So sorry for the blurt. I think it's interesting this this like this personal practice is I think maybe I should be really careful when I talk about it because in the end the personal practice just means it's like I don't need permission so I can show up and say to my colleague tomorrow, hey, in the meeting today, you were kind of observing how it was working. Could you tell me what you would like me to be doing more of for the next meeting or less of for the next meeting? Just ask for feedback, right? And that's how I'm going to bring in a feedback culture. Right. So it's personal and individual. I just didn't ask permission for anybody. And I'm not saying over all doing this now. I'm just I'm just trying it out. So there's like like there's like a level of giving myself agency and permission. Right. And so this is where the dance gets really treacherous for me and why we use the term we're celebrating vulnerability. Right. And when you don't don't ask permission, right, it's really helpful if you have access to what we're calling vulnerability because you chances are right, you're going to need it. Your that is you're going to get hurt. Right. And even if you're not hurt consciously, the big issue here is that you will be misinterpreted and socially demeaned and and marginalized, right, in stepping into that space between how others understand and you wish to behave, right, in creating change. And so not calling that out or something is to is to continue to not equip ourselves. You know, I I'm I for me the last couple of years have been this lesson in, yeah, you know, actually vulnerability is not a first world problem. It's it's a human daily issue, right. And I'll just say one more thing. I've been in rearranging all the books are going through them. I found what was the first study of women engineers and a tech company done in Boston in the 90s called disappearing acts. And it's a beautiful description. I mean, the fact that it was only in the early 90s that somebody thought to do that, right. But but the disappearing act, the title is that all of those actions, all of those intents, all of that difference was literally disappeared from stayed disappeared from the corporate culture and acts actually or the group culture and actually protected against. So, Jerry, it's great to have the title flashed in front of me on this iPad thing. So what I guess I'm getting at is that focusing on relational practice that is starting from the place where we are already where we are not hacking ourselves first, we are hacking the relational world we live in and equipping ourselves to do that, not just by saying, oh, I'm going to be brave and vulnerable and Renee Brown. You know, has marvelous things for me to come home and read with my glass of wine, which I do. I think what comes to me when I hear you talking about that, I was like, you know, what I'm saying this week, I'm going in front of like top management at the university and doing some crazy agile agenda with like a check in and I've innovated the purpose up to this bigger thing without asking permission. Like that is me giving myself that's like years of the practice showing up. That's right. It's just I'm reaping the benefits of the practice as I do that. Like I just did that really nonchalantly as it was no big deal, right? Because I've practiced it so much. Well, but also it works because you immerse them in the deep end or at least in the middle end, you know, where their shoulder, their immersed up until the chin, right? You can still keep your feet on the ground. And I think we're underestimating the power of that move, right? You are, you know, it takes a lifetime to accumulate what is required to make that work. But what you are doing, right, is actually putting people in the water, not at the shallow end and not kind of showing them you walking down the steps into the pool. God knows where these metaphors are coming from. Don't worry about it. It was like this. I had a real breaking point when I went to it was a call for tender and we were submitting something in and then there was this, you know, these juries and they're all just lined up on the tables. And they have like so much power and they have like, I've got my thing. I got my questions. I'm like taking notes on you. I'm not sharing and you're being like, you're just you're subjected to something that just feels awful. Like it's such a dehumanizing process. They have information. You don't have it. You don't get to ask questions. You just answer. It's like, we'll call you. And I had one like a couple years ago and I was like, I am never doing it again. And then I had this thought was like, oh, well, that's really going to hinder the business from growing if I don't do these juries again. So I sat there going, oh, my God, what do I want to do? And I found myself with faced with the situation and I met with a colleague and I said, how can we just hack this as a place of practice? And so we are not we are not running their thing. So can we just try it? And it was like, we're going to do we need to know who you are. I want to know who you are and why you're here and why this project you care about it. Like I need to hear you speak from your heart before I can start doing a pitch. And then we're going to do a pitch. I'm not even going to do a pitch anymore. I like to refuse a pitch. All I do is I'm going to say when we're going to do this work, we're going to do stuff that's going to be different than the way you usually see it. We're going to do if you accept, we'll just do an exercise right now and you can have a feeling of it. OK, let's run it through. And then we actually dig into like a little bit of the work. And when they're done, I'm like, do you guys have any more questions? And they kind of just sit there dumbfounded and they go, no. And every time I do this, we're winning the contracts right now. That's beautiful. And I'm just like that like I couldn't physically go into those experiences anymore. Like the I was I was in shock state afterwards, I think because I have such a practice of human ways of being together every day in our organization that the difference, the gap of it was just too much for me to live. And I thought that's really interesting when your practice becomes so so so like integrated, there's things you won't even tolerate anymore. That's right. And you offered an alternative that was, you know, shoulder covering shoulder height, water immersion. So that's that's the subtlety of like instead of going into the anger zone or the, you know, victimizing zone to be able to to to navigate that strategically into something. Todd, you want to jump in? Yes, boy, that's Sam that from the heart that is so inspiring. And I'd love to share something I've been experimenting with to get there over the last few years and sometimes not very effectively. That's working off the notion that for people to bring their full selves to work, we're very much culturally trapped in our rational intelligence. So what would it be like to move into a state of intentional discomfort or vulnerability with our bodies as as teammates as peers and that the three levels is fascinating because the first thing that I typically ask is for people to stand in a circle and start shaking and throwing parts of their body in succession. So shake your arms, shake your shoulders, throw your hips and you can see and with the principle of invitation and agency, just to the level you're comfortable doing and you can see the room start to shift a little bit as the exercise progresses. People start moving a little bit more as they feel permission and look around. And then at some point, moving to a second stage, where instead of inviting bodily participation, we're inviting eye contact from a distance, not close, which is too intimidating to stand in that circle, to ground in yourself and just see your teammates. And then moving what what I want by the end of the day is to have movement around the room where people are actually playing and dodging one another and playing little games and pairs and threes and they can feel what it's like to be on a team, not talking but on a team and playing off, being responsive to one another. And that. I feel like has added just a layer of effectiveness to the the talking through because even if we talk about our finances or our shoes or our titles or our fears. That still is, I think, for most corporate culture that's a safer zone than saying. I have legs, arms, feet and hands. And part of the way this connects to the heart is that. I believe that from moving to rational intelligence to whole body intelligence and getting to the heart, just finding ways to dislodge us from our head focus. Having vulnerable conversations can definitely move us into the heart. But if we just loosen up some of that energy, sometimes we can get there too. Yeah, and that almost feels like. If you do it for a little bit, the first time you feel kind of awkward in the second time, not so much. And then third time, it's just like, well, we're doing a shaky thing again today. Yeah. Yeah. You're back to that. Go on, please. There's this one thing that we've been trying out is using this notion of representation. I don't know if you guys know about constellations and stuff like that. Yeah. Raise your hand if you've heard of family constellations or other. OK. So, like, I don't really talk about it with the groups like the back end stuff. All I say is, OK, because what we have very little practices of dealing with conflict. And so one of the things that I bring in with groups, so maybe this, I don't know, like one hour it doesn't work with this. It's a little bit longer time. But basically, you you think of a conflict that like a tricky situation that's kind of grinding at you in your work space and that, you know, we don't really have skills how to think it through how to deal with it, how to get to the bottom of it and really kind of have spaciousness around it, right? We're mostly just kind of stressed about it, right? And so this one is think of it and identify a question that you have around it. So like you're giving a question framing and then you find a partner and you don't even say anything to your partner, but you look at your partner and you and you choose an element of the system related to your question, whatever is appropriate. Like the last time I did this, I had some question about a new hireee that we had at PerkLab and and like if we'd been doing enough and whatever for her on boarding. So I just like in my head, she was the new person that we've hired. So as right, but I don't tell her. And then I position her somewhere and then I just start. I just start moving close, far away beside and I'm just like quietly sensing how it feels for me in a moment. And so I'm just using this person as representing an element of the system and I'm holding a question which I'd like to have more clarity on. We do this in silence. It lasts 8 to 10 minutes depending on the mood I'm in. And at the end, we debrief and I'll be like, how did it feel for you? And the person will say, oh, when you came here and it just sounds like they're telling you random information and somehow every single time it illuminates some insight around the conflict. It's just like the weirdest thing ever. I haven't tried to like rationalize it, but it makes me feel like Todd, you're talking about this like, you know, body wisdom and and there's something about it. And I mean, the whole thing about constellations is, is, yeah, we're capable of carrying stuff and, you know, I don't know if you believe it or not. But either way, this kind of always is revealing somehow. And it helps to it just takes something that we have so so much up here and it releases it because it's coming at like random information you're getting into and you get unblocked out of the conflicts that's just been kind of tormenting you. We're headed later in the sequence of calls toward talking about Bessel the Endercox book, The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which is again, a bit of a giant leap from the present conversation. But I think pretty germane. You know, I I think that we're all of us are taking our personal patterns and traumas into our workplace every day. And there's such mess just coming up around that and so much distraction from it being a place that feels, you know, healthy and mutually caring and efficient and productive. And if we could start just like focusing on that a little bit, there'd be something, I don't know. There's also sort of institutionalized trauma. There's things about social social norms and the things we do all the time that we don't think about that actually sort of reinforce different kinds of long term trauma. And we're just not aware of them. So I think that that that sort of layers on top of or behind or however mentally you want to place it, the individual trauma that people have and makes it harder to to talk about to raise, to do stuff about. That's what I stuck a link in the chat about with Ezra Klein's interview with Jonathan Haidt about his new book, Timur What's Wrong with America or something like that. It's pretty much, you know, these damn kids are all ruined kind of thing. So I found it a little hard to swallow. But but maybe there's something there. But it seems like against them, you're kind of pushing at these things that would be would help. I mean, he's arguing that millennials are coming into the workplace with no capacity to cope. They want safe spaces. They're worried about trigger warnings. If somebody offends them, they go immediately to management to fix it, those kinds of things. And I don't really know if those are problems that are going on. But, you know, to me, they they represent the kinds of situations. I mean, maybe there maybe is an exaggeration of what we've been seeing in business forever. But he's saying that it's a particular problem now and that we're also seeing a lot of I think he was using like the number of girls who are cutting themselves as an indicator of trauma. That number's gone way up, not just in the US, but in other countries as well. I don't think this is the interview you're talking about, because this is Chris Anderson interviewing Jonathan right after Trump is elected before the inauguration. But I think a lot of the same issues come up in this one. And as you'll see, when I when I hit a video I like, I debrief into the brain. So so these are the notes that I took while watching that video. And this is a little people that we need to go right now, but all this stuff is available. And what I'll do is I'll I'll copy this link and paste it into our chat. Wow, that's sweet. So you can go look at it our own time. So this is going off in a somewhat different direction. But it's been gnawing at me for much of the hour. I can totally see and totally understand how these exercises and these models work with knowledge work and knowledge adjacent work. I'm just wondering how does this apply to the Amazon warehouse worker or the call center worker or the delivery driver or basically the Walmart clerk? Does this is this basically only limited to people who are in these relatively secure, relatively wealthy positions? Or is this or do these models have you thought through how these models and these ideas work for people who are more in the precarious? So I mean, my hypothesis is this is for everybody. This is just about human beings. And what I try to do with the book is and I walk I really walked it through with my editor every time we would walk through any of the practices and the idea of coming at these seven domains of practices is that they're pretty much common to everybody irrelevant of the kind of organization that you're in. True, some some professional fields means you're having meetings, you know, 10 times a day where as other fields you'll barely be having meetings. But if you start looking at what is a meeting is just, you know, even when I'm having my break and there's three of us having a conversation, that's a moment that's a meeting. So if you start like bringing in the thread of what we're doing at meetings is just an extension of when we're a family around the table trying to figure out our vacation and bringing that into work. And so how am I showing up in a way that like we're around the table, nobody gets to be the head and make the decisions for us all where I'm in the family. And so when I'm in other meetings, how do I bring that practice in? So I think every context is going to be completely specific to the individual to figure out what's what form those practices are going to take and what's going to be like their leveraged spaces that they'll meander through in their organization. And I really think that we need to kind of let go of this notion that horizontal is like a model. It's kind of like what I'm hopeful of is that we're only at the beginning of like a whole planet of all sorts of diverse forms of horizontal ways of being in organizations and some places we haven't really even seen them. And I think they're going to grow. And I don't think you can even imagine them now because it's like we have so many forms of the vertical and we have barely anything going on in the horizontal. And right now we look at horizontal and we go, Oh, that's horizontal. And for me, that's not horizontal. That's just the like the emerging tip of what horizontal is looking like. And this is whole, whole world of what it could be. And so that's, that's my hypothesis. So that's why I think it's relevant everywhere. And the more we take it into places where like the constraints meet seem to make it like, I can't really imagine it. I'll think that that'll be one of those places that a new form will emerge. Have you seen it applied in places like that? Yeah, because it is applied in factories and and plants like that, like the the biggest example is the Morningstar tomato production factory in California, right? Which is one of the biggest producers of tomatoes in the States, I think, entirely. And they're functioning and with these kinds of practices there. That's not at all like a knowledge worker kind of place. That's just a simple example. And I've actually got a an angle in this to answer Jame's question as well, which is that there's a bunch of research that basically says, and I'll point to spot in my brain that says this, that autonomy at work leads to better health and well being even to the point where if you can schedule your own breaks like like like we have constrained people so much. And now with technology, we can monitor every aspect of their behavior. And it seems like the people who are running Amazon and the people who are programming Uber and all these other platforms have no comprehension of this. And the shit is going to hit the fan because basically they're violating all these normal sort of facts of human nature. People are just like little puppets and robots in these systems. You're disposable. You're disposable and they have to pee into a bottle because you can't run across to wherever the restroom is. And all these terrible things and Uber is a fake marketplace. You don't get to set your price or bid on things. If you refuse rides more, you know, if you don't tick 90% of the rides offered to you, you get dropped as a driver and you don't know where the rides going to go when you press yes, right. There's so much information being hidden from you. And then Uber started splitting what it was charging riders from what it was actually paying drivers. They couldn't see one another's information. So that started getting meta compared by other people. And they're like, damn, Uber is just getting away with absolutely everything. And if this was a worker owned co-op on a different platform, which is a whole conversation of platform co-operativism, that would not be happening. But because Silicon Valley has basically eaten these businesses, Silicon Valley plus that green state up on the West side, where Amazon lives, they've kind of eaten all of this without paying a heck of a lot of attention to anything. But how do we get people to do the most work for the least amount of money? This is going to not end well. And we're already seeing tech lash, right. And I think that like if we want to get to those economic solutions that are more make a fair and more fair and equitable society, like these kinds of practices are helping us be more human together. And I think we'll grow to them towards that direction. So sometimes people say to me, oh, but like you should maybe start until like, you know, the whole organization has an organizational shift. And I'm like, oh my God, that's like saying, let's not save the planet until somebody gives us permission to save it. Like Or until all the fish are dead. Yeah. What are we waiting for? Like, let's just do it. And it's like, when you start doing this, you don't know where what you're going to be unraveling there, what's going to come with it. And I don't think we should even like try. It's just like start going there. You might unravel something in your organization, you might unravel some new opportunity for yourself. Like we don't know. But so a lot of this worker autonomy stuff goes way back. One of my mentors in in grad school was Russell Aikoff, one of the founders of systems thinking he had a concept he called the lower hierarchy. He said, you know, we have companies that are hierarchies. Why don't you just mentally flip it around and make it so that the responsibility for doing stuff is down here at the fingertips with autonomous work groups, and that the job of every every rank lower in the lower hierarchy is to resolve conflicts only those conflicts that the people at the top at the top at the fingertips can't resolve by talking to each other. And it's everybody's job to connect with all the other groups whom you were your thing to get done is going to affect. And the CEO should only be resolving the conflicts that make their way all the way down through the lower hierarchy. And that was something back in the 70 70s. I think this stuff has been around for like a long, long time. And like you see organizations that are doing it and there's books written on it. The thing that I don't see those most of the books are speaking to upper management and the leaders are not speaking to anybody and everybody in the organization who can start moving something forward. And I think that's they're speaking to the decision makers in in hierarchical organizations that need to need to change you're speaking to people who can actually make the change because you know the warehouse workers at Amazon and the call center workers they're not going to be able to make that change independently. But what's funny is as you're talking it strikes me that one of the biggest examples of precisely the kind of organization the lower hierarchy organization a lot of you're talking about flattened as semi horizontal you're talking about is actually the U.S. military the military the American military has done an outstanding job of pushing responsibility down you know down the hierarchy to the end you to the to those individual soldiers who actually have a lot more say over what they do and where they go and how they respond you know given the rules of engagement. It's actually not something that we eventually think of the military is classic hierarchy and it's not so really brief tangent and a little bit of military history but it's it's sort of amusing. I'm watching a series called Babylon Berlin which is a terrific terrific series set in post-World War one Germany which is a detective mystery and an espionage novel and whatever else and at one point there's a plot point that there's a pilot treatment school in the Soviet Union. I'm like what well it turns out that under the Treaty of Versailles Germany could not create a standing army and one of the restrictions was the number of officers per per soldiers and the size of the army all of that. This restriction caused the new German army being developed sort of by this secret little group of the Reichswehr to go develop extreme autonomy for the squads on the ground. They created something called reconnaissance pull which is really interesting in the middle of maneuver warfare inherits in 3334 starts in 23 and is probably one of the best armies ever on earth and our mental ideas of armies always being hierarchical and command and control is totally off. Occasionally they are. So the American army coming into World War Two is terribly hierarchical. The American army that hits World War Two is awful like everything. You disrespect an idiot that said something above you your court martial you're gone. German army one of the best armies ever going into World War Two sadly because that means they're just more efficient to doing really terrible things to the world. But but this sort of this applies in so many places it's crazy. Sorry for the war like a digression. Well I think the purpose piece is there a little bit within this also this shift to more horizontal organizations because as you go through this like as you go you go up and go into the horizontal stuff like at one point you you do get to issues of being open and transparent and sharing information and as you start unraveling that then we get to the things about finances and as you unravel that then you get to to business models like it's in the book I don't talk about this like let's just let's just start some really first level entry points. This is like a mainstream book it's really positioned as that there's a subversive nature to it that I can share with you guys because we're in we're in good company but like I really just think that instead of instead of being in a position of being angry or victimized this kind of place of beginning to take agency is a way for the whole thing to be unraveling and organizations is a great entry point but it could be community groups it can be anything and agency is one of the big words here in the recs conversation and it's one of the biggest words for me because part of what happened my own version of history when we consumerized the world is that we remove people's sense of agency because my only agency really as a consumer is to go buy stuff and I should be buying the stuff that's put on offer by advertisers and I shouldn't really ask too much about it I shouldn't ask where it came from I shouldn't ask if I can make it myself I shouldn't try to share it because that means we're going to buy less stuff in the economy we'll go down etc. And so we've effectively cut away most people's sense of agency the hierarchical nature of most corporations in the 50 60 70s did that you were not allowed to you had to swim in your lane and you were hired into a post that had very narrowly defined you know boundaries so we've done this to people for so long that we assume that that's what that's what it's supposed to be like and any other arrangement that relies on trust feels really dangerous and threatening and so forth and and I love that about sort of the working in the realm of trust and agency and and autonomy and interrelationships and all that because it's fun when you're involved in something where every now and then people get this like clenching feeling we're like no no no that can't possibly work and then they're like oh oh wait oh wait it's working yeah right I call it in a couple of speeches I've called it the the two oh shit responses the first response is oh shit this could never work and then and then you try it and some people bounce off it at that point that they walk away they can't deal with it but the people who try it and then see that it works are like oh shit this is working I'd like more yeah that kind of connects with the notion of practicing very much so one of my big open questions is how do we get more people to practice more of this stuff at any level so what I've been astounded by is that as I go out in the public and I've been I've made this promise to myself that I just say yes to any invitation I'm getting right now right like I'm practicing saying yes to invitations and I go on out and I'm like and I'm also every time I will make sure that when I when I when we start check in I'm asking people to start with is like what's the practice you have and I go super vulnerable and I share some practices that I have that like people you know to cut a laugh at me and then I also share the fact that's like the fire in my belly why this work is important because I have a hands on like a real life experience of falling into the human trafficking ring and being sold as a commodity myself and stepping out of it and being able to save and be here today and so I've got these two little kind of entry points that gets people's attention and shows my vulnerability and then people are going into this them sharing then they just they can't really say no and so then they go in pairs and they share their own little practices and they're kind of like why am I sharing that I practice eating strawberries every you know once a week like why am I sharing that and all of a sudden as I talk everything's landing personally and so for me as I just want to keep doing that more and more and and inviting other people who were talking about this stuff to come at it from that personal level and it feels as I watch like speakers and talkers going around I noticed that so much of it is like heady outside this thing you're looking at that it's outside of yourself how do we just be like bring that in so this is it's new for me and then as I look around I'm not seeing very I haven't really seen other models or speakers or going around from this like hyper personal level talking about organizational change yeah the person who joined our call because she had another call for the first hour is April and I'll mention that I think we're set to go 90 minutes if that's okay with you Sam I don't remember what we'd forget what we said I was going to ask yeah sorry I meant to say it at the top of the hour so that everybody would sort of know where we're going and April and I both do speeches and things as you do and I think that one of the challenges that April and I face is how to do what you're describing which is how to help people identify with themselves when they're sitting in an audience how to not be a mere audience that's why I teach these things all the time at least opens up a little channel of communication but how so that physicality that Todd was describing earlier also plays a role and I don't know I'm not very good at all these things but I think they're all kind of equally important because they all allow different parts of us to show up and once you can engage a couple of different senses I think the intellectual barriers that are going to be really good at resisting an intellectual argument even though it might be a pretty good one are confused and ground down and like all right all right so I guess this is about me yeah yeah and so when I when I'm finishing a talk like when I finished on Sunday I said like my intention I named it at the beginning was that you guys would leave this room understanding what practice is and that the practice starts with you and some concrete practices you can start with next week and like have we achieved this and showing hands at the level that you've achieved it everybody raised their hands and so it's like okay so we talked about price issues the price they're lodging and how much they earn was that enough to get like that feeling it's yeah I'm really playing around with this right now it's like completely experimental that's fun it would be fun to find a way to share experiments and outcomes and things like that and I'm trying to work as openly as I can in the world and share resources so there's you know liberating structures is a really deep well of group process techniques and resources I would love there to be resources like we're talking about here about things you can do with humans in a room that will cause them to connect with themselves that will cause them to have a felt sense of agency that will give them an experience of feedback or trust or vulnerability or whatever it is just so that we can you know have a wider range of tools to use in different situations yeah I try to blog about this stuff and make sure it gets shared out but that's not it's not a structured way of sharing like liberating structures but maybe it'll turn into something I'm happy to pursue that question with you in different ways and see what we can do so oh sweet we're nearing go ahead Estie I I just want to ask this collection of people and Samantha first magnificently you're in the center of my gallery view in Zoom so it's perfect so what are we doing we're just pushing aside the economics of the situation here I mean to put it crassly a number of people in a number of these rooms that were activating and changing could be fired not in those rooms right as as a matter of economic fact and right now we are in kind of boom times where there's generally more latitude right in but who knows so I'm just giving voice to the little things under me and are we anticipating that there will be change in economic structures or are we just or and that there's a step in this strategy that we're all inventing and enacting that takes that on anyway I think you got my my gist I'll mute myself so I think just two or three things one is I think that each person has to like navigate what they're going to be proposing in their work environments with their own level of risk taking really consciously right to not just be like who I read a book and I'm supposed to do this oops I got fired right and and I've been really careful throughout the book of like when my editor is like you got to put that again you got to put that again because you're really careful that some people might do that and I think that this is going somewhere where economics has has an impact right and like we live in a hugely unfair and unjust society and organizations right now are contributing to supporting that or not there are those that are conscious and they're shifting things and they're those that are not and I mean I I don't have the crystal ball so I don't know where it's going and I think there's all sorts of different theories around that but again we're coming from my hypothesis is the more we practice these practices of openness and transparency and all of these different things happening is that eventually you're going to get to financial transparency as soon as you start getting at financial transparency you get to this this these things about a more equitable distribution of resources right and that could lead to all sorts of stuff going on in people's lives and at the same time we're facing a socio-ecological transition that's going to come bumping us up in the face anyways and so yeah so I'm I'm hearing I'm hearing Estee bring into the conversation a fear that the quest for autonomy or experience of vulnerability and expressions of vulnerability could put people at risk in organizations that aren't ready for it and then partly from what you just said Sam and one of my realizations is this way of looking at the world can be seen as you know a flesh-eating bacterium to somebody who is in a hierarchical organization it has a lot of rank and seniority and would like to preserve that right so so what you do is you cut out the body parts that are infected you do whatever you need to do to stop this infection of autonomy and people who are actually authentically showing up to work and whatever and I'm I'm over generalizing here and I I don't know my felt experience is not that that's happening I've not run into a situation where I felt that was going on although I've seen a couple projects die because management just let something happen and then let it just kind of didn't get back it right because in some cases these initiatives need somebody's support to continue to take effect across a company but but we are talking about a large scale movement to change the way organizations think see and act right which is sort of what you just described and that puts a bunch of people at risk who have firing power over other people so I'm hearing sd is concerned pretty pretty loud and clear right there's a there's a power thing and and it may not even be only conservative power or you know preserving the status quo it may be gee it really isn't our interest to have more gig workers right less salaried workers more contract workers more mission oriented meaning short term deliver it's a it's not a job description it's a it's a gig description right I'll read Hoffman's book right all these ships in the structure and the contracting of work which um which happens you know we're talking about systems here I'm not a generally just for Samantha's sake I'm not I'm a humanist I actually believe in human beings great um but I'm also I also believe in systems and and uh and multiple competitive multiple things happening at the same time including which can result in some very strange adaptations depending on who has power that's the way we call it uh in in the human world um over over others and I know I I just feel like maybe it's my particular story but we have quite enough evidence and experience at this point to say the economic structures play an immense role here and yet I don't hear us um I I'm asking what do we have in mind there what is there if we if we zoom up or out or something and pose that question to us um so I go straight to the donut economics from Kate Raworth I love her which is seven you know different ways of looking at the 21st century economy economy and I and um I met with her on Sunday and talked about collaborating with her because the economic like uh perspective is is taking it at this really high level and without the cultural perspective you're not really going to get there and I really think they go together that's a good answer is is her is Kate Raworth yeah yes there's there's one other way I look at this esti um that this going horizontal is a aspect of a larger movement and that um the power issue reframing power is at the center of that movement um because we've been living with this notion of power that is is largely power over there are many people with power over us and I hate the word empowerment because I don't feel like that's that's not a part of going horizontal is saying I empower you that's saying that I'm more above you I'm give I'm granting you power books like going horizontal that actually start a power within that becomes a power with um I mean I'm an optimist but I do believe that if when people tap into their real power their real true power and connect with one another a lot of the structures that are holding us back will will topple under their own weight and that's the that's the belief I choose to maintain and and Todd what that brings up for me is I think we all just learned what it means when an actor in the play um empowers himself to do non-conforming things right who wins right who's and who's vulnerable right in those um and what and what structural systemic uh protections have we put in place I hear you I mean I I feel like my knowledge of very strange thing to have sorted all your books while the while California was burning and you couldn't go outside right so I'm I'm suddenly aware of all the of many pieces before I started buying Kindle books of my own um interest and understanding of history and we have many many examples of quite horizontal communities we have many examples of and and of epistemologies in ways we have many examples of different labor structures we have many examples out of Germany of all of these things right and of the pride of early 20th century Germans in their cultural superiority it was because they had all these um kind of lovely beliefs and culture anyway person playing by different rules or and and we're seeing right in this country that those rules may have no coherence they're just simply the ravings of a um well I don't want to say maniac but I can't sign another word right um when when those groups and it's the same with terrorists and other other fundamentalism that that that put other societies right on defense and then crumble and are we are we going to leave that aspect of the system design changemaking that we're creating out of our conversations and I really mean this is a question and we've run over our a lot of time so I think Sam I'd love to give you the last word it'll be hard to answer in a short period of time but if you want to just offer some concluding thoughts and then we can maybe pick this conversation up some other time well I actually love the practice of living in questions so I would just like to hear a question that's popped up for each of us as we as we check out I think for me it's very much the one I articulated a little while ago which is how do we leave the how do we leave simple things at hand for everybody that they might learn these practices and get a taste of more agency of more connectedness and so forth and I think that my own the belief behind that is this is pretty contagious and that that would be a really good way to transform organizations because it trying to convince the CEOs and c-suite people to make these changes is the long hard almost impossible slog yeah mine is probably related that and it goes back to the question that I asked earlier and that is how do you implement these kinds of ideas in the layer organizational layers that need it most and I don't and I'm not sure how to answer that anybody else why is my heart beating so fast and am I why am I on the edge of my seat for 90 minutes too much sugar yeah I guess I've been thinking about it in terms of the generations thinking about my kids leaving college you know and and going into these environments what's it going to be like and I guess watching them and the people they hang out with there's a ton of agency and I kind of wonder if in some sense they'll be carrying these messages you know so the Jonathan Haidt stuff is backwards in some ways but I guess we get to watch oh that's going to be my question too my daughter is a pilot and yesterday she picked up she's flying up today to her shift her rotation and she picked the book up and she's like mom is it okay if I take a book and I was like yeah and I'm kind of like what happens when like a new generation who's like an accomplished professional at a really young age reads a book like this like what what happens that's lovely uh bo april esti so when that book I so how auto companies and mining everything affected that what I loved in that book is it showed how we took those models and applied them to everything to government to our society and I think what we internet and what's happening and gig workers is causing a week in cultural wide already so I think that this book and this are these ideas are in the air because essentially when we were just talking about uber they're losing trust employees are walking out of these companies we often was talking about this yesterday not that he's a big seminal guy but what I'm saying is is that uh we I think like when you look at these companies you can see that they've yet to they're using the old paradigms but the new paradigm of the way these industries actually work is very different and much flatter so our society is changing and I have a lot of hope in that and semaph I love your work and your thought and your heart and your and in your joy thank you I'll jump in here I have um a 26 year old tech citizen right works at google and a 30 year old uh similar description different company um and um I think since middle school right it's been clear to me that they they are in a world that operates by principles that I still feel amazed privileged to have been able to discover in the workplace in the early from the early days of the internet which we're now seeing so I I really think it's I I love Dave where you started us right and Samantha where your daughter is all of all of that and they still don't get I mean we have these conversations over dinners about they'll blame me for the planet my generation and I say yeah but you guys are to blame for Trump because you didn't bother to vote and and I know what they're talking about what the accusation to me is I also know that they don't know anything about earth day right and all the all the other the the other side of that right but they really don't understand there's like a missing piece here about the politics and economics about should we call it citizenship democracy right um which which I worry about and as the parents that we are along and the and the writer of marvelous important tools for this um I worry that our work is not yet done thanks April you came in late to the conversation anything you'd like to add and we cannot hear you right now it may be that she is unable to access the audio um or that the the account is disgusting anyway any any last words you'd like to offer Sam no I just you know it's practice practice practice how do we bring that out as a as a an embodied message wherever we go um let me take us back out by rereading the poem that we started with and not everybody was here for the poem so the poem is today by mary oliver i'll post a link to it in the chat today i'm flying low and i'm not saying a word i'm letting all the voodoo's of ambition sleep the world goes on as it must the bees in the garden rumbling a little the fish leaping the gnats getting eaten and so forth but i'm taking the day off quiet as a feather I hardly moved though really I'm traveling a terrific distance stillness one of the doors into the temple Samantha thank you so much for your time Todd thank you for inviting Samantha to join us here everybody thank you for showing up and the awesome focus and questions and fun um and uh it's a wrap thank you guys so much it was really great thanks bye everybody bye bye