 So, ladies and gentlemen, now we're here again. Please give a warm welcome to Jonathan Rims. Thank you. So this is a little different going from one type of microphone to another. We'll adjust here. So that was interesting to get to make the last remark on the panel as a transition and this notion of skills and mindsets. I think it was helpful for me to be able to end the panel by talking about it's not just a skill, it's not, you know, we can have all the great skills but if how we are as a person is creating the kind of fear responses and triggering people's amygdalas as we've heard, then all the best skills in the world go by the wayside. So one of the things that I was trying to explore as I was invited to come here and speak with you is, you know, why is this important now? And most of us have gotten tired of the phrase it's a VUCA world. We all know about this uncertainty and complexity and volatility. And I've heard earlier today people talking about how a number of teams in the agile movement or community have had a lot of success and that's scaled a little bit but then you continually kind of bump up against ceilings in the organization where things aren't quite going as intended. We're going to hear after this from ING and this is one of these attempts. How do you scale this in a human way in a financial organization? And the lack of understanding on how to create agile organizations and support implementation is a question that everybody's kind of wrestling with and we've heard a lot of things that are relevant to it and what I'm going to try and do is maybe reinforce some of those things and maybe try and add something a little bit different. So the first thing I thought about is, you know, I'm not an agile guru. I know a little bit about agile, I've read a little bit, I've heard little things but this is not my field necessarily. But I've been trying to get my mind around it in the last couple weeks and I also want to be clear that I'm not talking about better software development. I'm not even talking about new forms of organization and I'm not going to necessarily try and touch on some of the key things that I heard in the talks this morning and on the panel this afternoon around emotion and its role around this kind of being able to deal with uncertainty. I think all those are really relevant and helpful and I'm going to try and add something different. So what I am talking about is to try and look at agile as a mental model, concept, or a mindset. And here's the mouthful one. I'm going to talk about cognitive development of core structures that operationalize values and principles. And I will elaborate on this a bit more as we go along but part of the idea here is that a lot of what we do and put our attention on is on the surface and there's things going on under the surface that are impacting that. And so we want to try and look at that a little bit. And we want to talk a little bit about what is leadership's role in this, what does leadership have to do with it. So there's implications and opportunities for this. So what does it mean to have an agile mindset? Here's some images that came to mind as I thought about this. Sometimes it's physical agility, right? These are the kind of images that can come to our mind. Being an agile athlete, a gymnast, or maybe it's this kind of guy. It's a doing agility, the ability to multitask. Or maybe it's collaborative agility. The ability to somehow network and connect in ways that are innovative. Sometimes it's even decision-making agility. So we went to see the movie Sully on Saturday. How many of you have seen that? One. Okay. So it's the movie about this. You know, Tom Hanks, always a good bet for a movie, plays Captain Sullenberger, who was the pilot of this plane that landed on the Hudson River. And being able to make agile decisions based on this kind of intuitive knowing or sensing and kind of being able to trump all the rational, analytical naysayers or decision-makers afterwards is an incredibly important skill. So I also came across this. I heard there's this thing called an agile manifesto. And it has a number of points to it, which I thought really we're trying to talk about agile as a set of values and principles. And that the impression I have is then that out of this community, people are saying these values and principles can scale to other parts of the organization. It would be great if the managers would listen and do things like this. So the challenge then in implementing agile as a set of values and principles is that we often see practice that isn't quite what we intended. So my first question is, you know, why do people interpret what being agile means such that it becomes something more like a recipe? Now, simplistic recipes have a place and they can improve performance in some situations for a given period of time. And the challenge is if we focus our attention, we've heard about this, you know, where we train our attention only on these kind of external surface parts of these practices, then we may be missing some of the implicit elements that are contributing to performance improvements. And this way, our interpretation of agile ends up focusing only on the tip of the iceberg. So for me, a key post-modern insight is that interpretation sits just below the surface and impacts implementation. Somebody was speaking about this earlier and they used a different term, but it's the same principle. It's how is our mind making meaning of experience? So if we want to look at how we interpret the concept of agile, what we believe about it, and a lot about beliefs has come up too, we're going to find there's huge implications. And so in this sense, interpretation governs implementation. So I want to look at a few of these kind of beliefs and things that are often getting in the way. So right, what we believe. Cognitive biases. So many of us that were in the other room earlier this morning heard about Daniel Kahneman. Many of you are familiar with his thinking fast and slow. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics for talking about how people actually make decisions, not how economists think about people should make decisions. But how do people actually make it? And he talked about system one is this fast processing kind of automatic algorithms or heuristics. And system two is this slow analytical thinking. We're going to get into how these work a little bit because we see that interpretation is also complex. It's not just a simple thing on this diagram online and there are many models that talk about all the phases and facets of interpretation. So in a way what we're saying here is we want to make this more robust or more coherent. Chris Argerus, many of you may have heard of him. He had this thing called the ladder of inference that shows how we make beliefs and they filter the data we take in and kind of create reinforcing loops. So the idea here is we're going to say that interpretation governs implementation. We want to see what is functioning in our interpretive worlds. So when interpretation is suboptimal or too diverse, what happens? This is what happens. Pretty much a train wreck. How many of you have been on projects where it was kind of ending like this? We see a few hands and nods. This one I'm going to let you read the next one here. I think it's big enough to see. When we talk about variability in interpretation and how that can spread through an organization and you get every different department, every different step in the process having a different interpretation, we see that things can go pretty wonky and cognitive biases are a primary source of this variation and what we can see that in some way here there's a role for leadership as a function to start to align interpretation, to allow it to converge to a sufficient degree so that people are not ending up with this kind of project delivery. So let's look at some examples of cognitive bias. How many of us recognize doing this? I got the better idea. Or we're all objective, aren't we? It's the others whose views are so selective. Or this is the source of great frustration for Al Gore. Everybody loves the reassuring lie over the inconvenient truth. And then we get into a series of very specific kind of cognitive biases that Kahneman has talked about. Confirmation bias. System one seeks coherence no matter what the belief. If we believe the earth is flat we will look for evidence to prove it and we will filter out any evidence to the contrary. Now the bandwagon effect, here is the big stapler but read latest iPhone, gaming device, whatever it is, that is the gotta have technology and we'll pay an arm and a leg for it instead of waiting for the next generation and the price to come down. What they call the availability heuristic. We will often make assumptions or beliefs based on available data. So second shark death in five years, headline in the newspaper as the guy sitting on the beach and he sees the people swimming and he think, my god they must have a death wish to swim in that water because we make decisions and judgments based on near available information. Or how do we frame things, right? It's exactly the same data here but the person that's saying, wow our aggressive stance on climate change means the government was reducing carbon emissions by almost five percent and the cheers go up and everybody's having a big party but the person who frames it is just 4.6 percent in the last five years nobody wants to hear about it. Exactly the same information. And my favorite for those of us that are consultants, the report we commissioned made excellent suggestions but do we really want some consultants telling us what to do? We'd much rather sit in our own stew sort of like we heard earlier, why do women who've suffered from abusive relationships go home? Because it's what they know. So now what I want to do is turn our attention to how cognitive structures can contribute to variations in interpretation. So we've talked a little bit about biases but now we're going to enter into a world that on first glance is maybe a little more fuzzy. And for me this has been a gradual process of coming to understand layers and layers of insights, data, research and realizations and this initial kind of being blinded by the light and not being able to make out details and the territory recedes and you start to see there's some interesting things about how we understand the world around us. So what I want to talk about here is how cognitive structures and that interpretation is also governed by these structures. And these structures may be simple or they may be a little more complex. Now how many of you can remember being four years old? No, some of you can't. We know that memory actually as adults doesn't often begin until four, five, six years old but somewhere in there what we remember or we know from kids is that how they make meaning of the world is magical and mythical. And if you try to teach a kid arithmetic who's four years old you can kind of do it in a rote way but it really doesn't make sense to them. It doesn't stick. But if you try and teach an eight-year-old arithmetic suddenly, wow, it's the coolest thing. You can do things with numbers and you can add and subtract and do it. Wow, this is so cool. But you don't teach an eight-year-old algebra because that requires another shift in the cognitive structure where they can now perform abstract reasoning and put any number for X. So these are examples of how we have all evolved through seeing the cognitive structures by which we operationalize and make meaning evolve. So cognitive structure is also to make a distinction. It's not what we think about or the content. So we've heard lots of great ideas and we've all read lots of interesting articles and research and hear podcasts and watch YouTube videos and TED Talks and all these things and there's a lot of cool content. But that's not what we're talking about now. Now we're going to talk about the structure. How is the content organized? And to be clear also, this is not in any way correlated with IQ. It's not about being smart. Cognitive structure is about the core operations of mental processes. So this is where I put my professor hat on and this is the one slide where I will give you a little bit of content detail. Many of you maybe have heard of Jean Piaget, a Swiss cognitive psychologist whose example about mathematics is kind of where this thinking comes from. He studied how do our structures of meaning making evolve and transform. So following in that lineage, Lawrence Colberg did a lot of work on moral judgment and how it evolves through stages. A guy named Kurt Fischer at Harvard picked up on that and built on Piaget's work and built what he called dynamic skill theory. And dynamic skill theory helps us look at what is going on actually, what kind of mechanisms of cognition are going on. And just to be really clear, one of the key mechanisms of cognition is emotion. How we relate to or regulate emotion that's been brought up before is one of these key cognitive skills. What we also learn is that variability is at the heart of things. So individuals performing a given type of skill in a given context, the generalizations take us away from reality more than towards it. So to simplify this a little, we could say that more complex cognitive structures are like lenses that give us more options for interpretation. So the development of these structures gives us the chance to be more agile. We have these different mindsets or lenses and if you get the right lens, the situation can come into sharper focus. So I've had glasses since I was seven and I can remember, you know, especially when I was a teenager, my sight would deteriorate rapidly and I'd go to the optometrist and get a new set of glasses and say, wow, there's leaves on trees. They're not just big green blobs. So being able to have the right lens to bring what we're looking at into focus to sharpen our perception so we can make meaning in a better way. This is important. Sometimes we need to zoom in and have a lens that lets us have a look at very fine granular microscopic details. And other times we need the agility to zoom out and take a big picture and sometimes we need to zoom all the way out to think about existential questions of purpose and meaning. So cognitive agility. What in the world is that? We talk about Daniel Kahneman and System One and we talk about making these automatic thought habits more robust, able to perceive and intuit and sense this notion of being able to sense when things are not right or in sociocracy or holocracy they'll talk about being a tension sensor. A lot of what we sense as being right or wrong has to do with these System One heuristics and if they're biased, we're in trouble. We can have a great intuition and go off the cliff. So to do this, we want to look at how can the structure and evolving or maturing this underlying structure become a high leverage activity. Now there's 130 years of research in the field of developmental psychology that we're going to draw on here to look at how does this play out for adults. So we interpret and we act on what we perceive. So these lenses that allow us to perceive in different ways govern how we interpret and how we act. Therefore we need better quality of thinking and this agility is about expanding our capacity to use a broader repertoire of lenses. We're going to now look very briefly at four kind of broad zones, four lenses that are typical in the adult population. Tomorrow in the workshop that my wife and I will do we'll do some experiential exercises to kind of give you a broader sense of that range of lenses and give you an actual opportunity to perform an online assessment that will give you a score that can help you see where am I, my thinking in this moment landing in this. And then we'll use working with that to build a learning practice to help you build this kind of skill. So the first zone that we can talk about is what we would call simplistic or advanced linear thinking. And I heard this earlier today too, you know linear thinking has been very successful and popular. Isaac Newton made a great living out of it. The industrial revolution, a lot of modern technology has come out of the success of going from kind of magical, mythical thinking towards more linear thinking. And what's in focus often here with this structure of mind is different individuals with personalities, skills, attitudes, habits, these are the kind of things we tend to look at with this structure of mind. So we might ask the question, who's to blame? And we might end up with this kind of diagram. So I heard somebody mention waterfall earlier, I found this diagram, okay, you've got this very linear thing. You get agile and you start to get some loops in there and it's less linear now. If we move on to what we would say is complex thinking in this zone we would talk about as early systems thinking. Then with this lens what comes into focus is more integrated groups of individuals with different roles and relationships. We might say that what emerges in the team is in focus. And what we're seeing now is rather than a black and white we're starting to see shades of gray. We're starting to see that there are more perspectives involved. And we can end up with diagrams like this. And we start to see a little more complexity come into the picture. And of course if there's early systems thinking there's advanced systems thinking. And this is highly complex. And what you can see with this lens is multiple integrated groups interacting with dynamic organizational systems. And what you have here is there are multiple right answers. And that you not only have a lot of perspectives but you can actually start coordinating them in useful ways. And then you might ask the question how is the context affecting us? And you get an agile diagram that looks more like this where maybe the previous diagram is contained here and suddenly there's a whole number of other contextual factors all being taken into consideration. I gave a talk a couple months ago for the Society for Organizational Learning and one of the things I was showing with this is that systems thinking is actually a structure of mind that has produced a set of ideas. So all of the things that came out of the fifth discipline and all of this kind of work in the whole systems thinking field are the result of people who had this kind of lens and looked at what's going on and how do we make meaning out and work with it. And yet we can also see this fourth lens called early principles thinking where we get the simplicity on the other side of complexity. An elegant simplicity where you can now see multiple dynamic organizational systems and they form marketplaces, they form entire economies and societies have much more high leverage impact. And the question here is, how do I serve the whole? It's kind of the wave of the future. Like I was saying, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. This is the wave of the future. So if we put all these up together, one of the things that we can say is there are multiple types of assessment instruments, all kind of broadly within this field of developmental psychology that can help us understand what is the demographic distribution curve around these kind of lenses? What portions of the adult population tend to fall in which zones? We could do one of these surveys now right and see what kind of bets you guys make on what percentage are in each area. But what we know from lots of research is that about 60% of the adult population is not necessarily using linear ideas, but the structure of their thinking has a linear pattern to it. The mechanisms that they can cognitively use to regulate emotion, to coordinate perspectives, all those kind of things have a linear structure to them. And about 30% of the population can do this kind of early system work, group dynamic work, family relations work, team building things, all these kind of things where more complexity starts to emerge. There's about 30% of the people who think like this in a natural way. If you never gave them any of the theory, they would still make use of whatever information in this way. And then, of course, we're starting to slide downhill now. We find that we only have about 9% that can actually do this kind of very complex systems thinking, and less than 1% at the early principles level. When I think about leadership and agility and cognitive agility, all these things, one of the things that we see is, of course, there is enormous complexity in the situations where we're asking people, and this came up earlier this morning too, we need to have compassion for these managers because their identity, their role, their process, everything's changing. And the situation is becoming more ambiguous and uncertain and dynamic. What is helpful if you're in that position is to have a little bit of headroom that you can actually see around that complexity. And if you're faced with a situation that is demanding you at this level, and you're thinking at this level, you're going to feel a little in over your head. Your amygdala is going to have a little bit of constant stress because you have this lurking feeling in the back of your mind, there's something I'm just not quite getting. There's something that keeps falling off the plate a little bit. Any of you recognize this feeling? It's very common. So, part of the challenge here is when we start looking at implications for agile leadership, we want to see that the implementation of these agile values and principles is governed by this cognitive structure, the lenses that we have available to use. And these are kind of a transcendent include. When you have the advanced linear thinking, it's very hard to think in a principled way. But when you have the principles thinking, you can use all of them. So, they evolve and develop. The kind of agility that we're asking of ourselves, of our leaders, of our people and our teams comes from having a structure of mind slightly more complex than the situation you're facing. And what I think is important here for leadership is that because of the complexity of situations we're facing, very few individuals will actually have this complexity within them. Collective intelligence and getting the most out of your team's capacity becomes much more the role of leadership to enable that collective intelligence to be more complex than the situation. The thing that we also know, and this has been throughout many of the talks too, of course, all this research doesn't go on just to depress us. Although it sometimes feels that way. But what we know is that we can explicitly support the development of this kind of cognitive complexity. And that's one of the functions of leadership. In my view, it's helping build this kind of robust thinking, a good quality of thought and supporting the kind of vertical growth that is about the development of more complex structures of mind. And of course it implies that leaders have some awareness of the concepts and ideas but also do the personal work to develop that kind of learning and capacity. And the thing I had said earlier during the panel, this is basically one of the key competitive advantages. If you can build in this kind of cognitive agility throughout the organization, and I was mentioning these deliberately developmental organizations, they are built to give people the practices to stimulate this kind of personal growth and development at the structural level, not just at the content level. The more you build that into an organization's practices, the more of a competitive advantage you have. And finally, I said, what are the new skills, right? So after talking about the quality of our presence and the structure of our mind, we know that there are some key skills. We're talking about, these are called plus seven, because there's seven of them in this list. And this comes from an organization called Lectica that has worked in this field of building assessments to help us understand these structures. And the first one is about reflectivity. And there's lots, I saw something come in out of Stanford recently, a big article says, you know, the number one key thing for leaders is to be able to reflect on themselves and their impact on others. Mindfulness and emotion regulation, self-monitoring, self-awareness. This came up, I think it was in even some of the text people said, we need an emotional regulation boot camp. Because this is a key skill that's lacking. How many times has your boss gone off? Boom. And for the next two days, you're kind of laying low because you don't want that to happen again. So these are skills that are highly important. But there's also skills for seeking information. A colleague of mine just did his PhD at the Fielding Institute looking at a large set of data that showed that one of the key factors for supporting personal growth and development was perspective-seeking. Not just abstractly taking them, but actually seeking those perspectives and learning how to evaluate them. There's also skills for making connections between ideas, informations, perspectives, and evidence. For applying what we know in real-world contexts. For seeking and making use of feedback and awareness of cognitive and behavioral biases and the skills for avoiding them. So we listed a few biases and there are skills for avoiding them and a lot of them have been talked about today already. And I said I was going to come in at about 34 minutes and I'm at 34.5. Okay. There's a workshop tomorrow where we get much more into this and you get to experience how to build learning activities using these skills and applying them to the workplace based on an assessment that would fine-tune the learning activity to your precise core structure of cognition. I have a question for you here. How do we develop more complex cognitive structures? Come to the workshop tomorrow. For those of us who can't. It really has a lot to do with leaning into the challenges that life brings us. So one of my favorite teachers has this phrase that I really like that life will teach you better. Life is always giving us challenges and the fight-or-flight response we want to regulate that and simply lean into the challenge. What is it telling us about our blind spots or growth edges and how can we learn from failure and experimentation? Those kind of things are probably the key to building this kind of capacity to grow. Perfect. Any other questions that you would like to raise? You can do it by hand, yes? Zones. Can you repeat? Sure. So the question had to do with on those four zones I didn't say much about early principles thinking because it's only like one percent of the population. So one way to go there or not how to go there but what it looks like often is you can take these very complex systems and when you have this kind of lens you're not mystified by the complexity. So what happens earlier often is you see so many options and possibilities it's hard to prioritize them and so you can put a lot of work into making decisions but still feel overwhelmed. At this level, at the early principles thinking you often can see in an almost kind of automatic way the essence of this what is the core attractor in that system the leverage point and intervene there rather than having this enormous complexity in view so here's the log jam undo that and everything flows again. So it's that kind of ability to see that beyond and an example I had when Peter Sange was giving a talk at this conference a couple months ago he talked about how a group of companies including Coca-Cola and Pepsi some other beverage companies they all realized they had a common challenge which is around water and water use and the regulation of that and together they worked on the system for being able to measure and regulate how do we kind of understand our footprint in terms of water usage and that became a global systemic intervention and those kind of things come from being able to think at that level what is the right question to ask that gives us something that changes the way everything is done. Okay, thank you so much.