 There we go. Welcome to a Rex pop-up call on Thursday, January 25th, 2018. Our guest is Marty Spiegeland and our guest host is Todd Hoskins. I will turn things over to Todd in just one moment. But first, a little bit of framing and before that, as is our custom, a poem for the moment for the call. And today's poem is by David White, one of my favorite poets, and it's titled Sometimes and goes as follows. Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests conceived out of nowhere, but in this place they're beginning to lead everywhere, requests to stop what you're doing right now and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or un-make a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away. We're at a very weird juncture in history. Who knows? I, you know, when 2018 started, I was trying to do predictions and figure out what's going on and everybody's like, you know, hell, given last year, anything could happen this year. And in, there's a couple ways in which that's actually good, because I think that there's some cracks in the system at this point that are going to allow for things to happen that might actually be more productive than what we would have seen in an alternate universe that was a little bit more normal and not so deranged. So maybe there's more opportunities. Certainly there are conversations that the public is having now that we might never have had, had Trump not won the election, for example, and where things not progressing the way they are. But Marty Spiegelman has been one of the two original Rex Fellows, has been with Rex from the very, very, very beginning and represents in our small world, which is part of the larger universe, a perspective that I really treasure, a perspective that honors indigenous traditions, a perspective that is about seeing beyond these sort of current fixed economic realities that most of us are often stuck in and thinking about and trying to figure out what is a way ahead that actually honors all those forces that we all too often don't pay enough attention to. Todd Hoskins has likewise been with Rex from the very, very start. Without Todd, I'm unclear what Rex would be and where we'd be going and what we'd be doing. And it gives me actually a ton of pleasure to turn things over to Todd to take us into this conversation at this point. So after you. Thank you, Jerry. Well, I have known Marty for between seven and eight years now. And there has been numerous times in which we've been on the phone having a conversation. And we thought, I wish we recorded that. So we are thrilled that we have not only a recording of this conversation, but more participants than just the two of us. And Jerry, I loved how you introduced Marty. One of the things that I appreciate so much about Marty is that there's a likeness to her spirit, but there's always depth to the conversation. And I find that when we dive into a topic that we can dig down deeply and understand what is, what are the underlying principles at play here? What is happening? How can we understand this? And how can we increase our awareness, increased our understanding so that we can be more powerful in our actions in this world? So this is a public conversation regarding a topic that may have seemed a little abstract in the introduction. But I think that all of us have experienced it to some degree. The big question of why does movement happen sometimes and other times it doesn't even when it looks certain to happen? So in order to ground us in some reality here, I want to start the conversation with actually bringing a tangible example. In my days working in the corporate world and the startup world and running a consulting firm, there's often been times when it seemed like an initiative was underway and was destined to change the course of the company, sometimes the market and sometimes more than that. And so often something has stepped in the way that is indescript. It's more than politics. It's more than being written off as a bad idea or a poor business proposition. And so, Marty, I would love for you to just talk about what's happening in movement building when there is no movement. Yeah, such an important topic and thank you all for the beautiful comments you made introducing our conversation here. One of my roles, as I think Todd pointed out, is when we start talking about a particular situation, one of my roles is to drop beneath the surface appearances and start to identify energies like deep ocean currents, real energies that are on the move. And I think one of the things that we're going to have to talk about, if we look at a big movement that stalls, pick some recent elections or corporate situations, we have to look at at deeper currents of consciousness. And I talk about this in a lot of different ways. So let's, I don't know, I just have this image in my head. Let's say we have a chessboard and we see all the pieces and we have our moves planned out. And all of a sudden the pieces on the chessboard kind of by themselves seem to move into another configuration. And we can't make the moves we had planned to make because the whole scene is different. So imagine magnets underneath the pieces on the underside of the chessboard. And there's something down there moving the pieces through this magnetic pole, right? Yeah. And these are powers, just sort of see if you can drop into the language with me, don't get to try to define it too much, see if you can feel this. These magnets and the deeper poles that we can't see, these are forces of consciousness. And in modern people, our limbic system has an awful lot to do with this. So let me see if, stop me if I take too big a leap, Todd, so track me in this. So we've got our chessboard, we had everything set up and the pieces move and so we can't make the moves that we planned. Let's say we're in that corporate situation and we are all set to make a big change. And one or two people who have decision making power just bring it to a halt even though the day before they had agreed. What I would propose is those people who are in power, on day one, their consciousness was resonant with all the decisions that people wanted to make and all the moves people wanted to make. They were in a state of consciousness where their awareness was running in a particular way that allowed resonance. So they could say yes, right? But overnight, something that they're wired to, something they're attuned to, got triggered. We would say in neurophysiology the limbic system gets triggered. And when that happens, it pulls awareness not to possibility but to fear and survival and protection. And the minute your awareness is shifted in that way, that's a very powerful magnet in our brains, literally. The minute our awareness is shifted in that way, what happens is meaning changes in our brain, our awareness of meaning changes. So day one I might say, oh, this move to open our corporate culture is wonderful. It has really good value. It's meaning a good thing to me. If I get afraid of it, I'm probably not even conscious of that, but if I get afraid of it, the meaning shifts. And so the value of that new move shifts to a negative one. And that drives my decision. What happens in our brains is some piece of information in a context generates what we call meaning. Our brain's a sign of value. And based on that, we choose to act or not act. So when we see something moving in a direction and all of a sudden some power stops it, it means that somebody who has enough power has changed, has had a change of meaning in their own consciousness. And so they cannot take an action they had agreed to take. Now, when we're, oh, go ahead. So I, some of you know that I'm involved in personal growth retreats and helping lead them. And one of the things that we talk about during those retreats is that you're going to have an experience of expansion while you're here. And sometimes within hours and sometimes within days, when you go back home to your normal life, you're going to contract. And what that contraction means is that you're going to doubt the validity of your experience when you were in a state of expansion. You'll start to dismiss it. And you will slowly write it off as that thing that happened back then, rather than some new experience that you had. Are we talking about the same thing? We're talking about the same thing. Yeah, we're talking about the same thing. We are accustomed in modern culture, particularly in American culture, to looking for similarities. So if I go to a workshop, I'm in a field where everybody is opening and changing. And so it feels safe to me. So my limbic fear circuit doesn't fire quite so radically. And in that field of resonant energies, I feel protected enough to say yes to new ideas and have a new experience. When I go home, I go home to a familiar field that is not so open in general. It's not so open. And I begin to resonate with a more closed field. And all of a sudden in my brain, I get the signal that opening thing, whoa, can't do that here. That must have just happened there. Oh, well, you know, maybe next year. And it has an awful lot to do with our neurophysiology. It really does. And I have been saying for many years that if we could understand a little bit more about how our brains work, that we could solve a whole lot of problems in a whole lot of places. But yeah, we're talking about the same thing. And we're talking about resonance also. Resonance is an important topic. We'll try to open up a little bit. I think Mike is looking to talk, Brad. So just a little quick addition there to underpin your point. I'm pretty sure that what you've just said is how the executive team Nokia managed to take a 40% market share of telephone handheld telephone handsets and make it 3% in about four years. They all agreed they were going to do smartphone technology in an executive meeting. Yeah, this is the vision. This is the way ahead. And then they all went away and did nothing about it. I'm pretty sure that's because the limbic system actually said, oh, we're crazy. You're really, you're absolutely crazy. We've been doing this for 10 years. We've made billions of dollars. Keep on doing the same thing. Are you crazy? Yeah, exactly the same thing. And how we are wired in our limbic systems, if we have any power at all out in the world, we will affect other people. The ripple effect is enormous. Just look at our presidential election. But that ripple effect is very short-lived if people are generally jammed into a, let's just say loosely a smaller kind of consciousness or more linear consciousness. That open ripple effect is it's short-lived. So we can open to a new idea and we get slammed back into the old idea. Same thing will happen in a meeting where somebody's got a radical new beautiful idea and has explained it all. And the first comment you'll get is somebody saying, oh, isn't that like, and they'll say something familiar that's already been done because they can't encompass the new idea. Their limbic system is scrabbling for something familiar. And you know the saying if you're gonna, what is the saying if you're gonna do something, go someplace you've never been before, you're gonna have to do something never done before, something like that. If we keep allowing ourselves to pair new ideas to the already known, the new idea is never going to happen. We have to take a new idea and dive into the unknown, into the unfamiliar 100% in order to get new ideas to really take root and blossom. And the modern consciousness is just not attuned to that. We're so, we're living in a world of scarcity and the scarcity mindset is I need protection and I need to find something familiar and then I'm okay. But then I'm not open to a new thing. So Marty, it's one thing to be able to do that internally for ourselves. But how can we help others stay in a state of possibility rather than closing down? Yeah, well I have been thinking about that a lot because I can only train so many people. The technical answer is we get more and more influencers who are trained in the use of awareness and let that ripple effect play out in the world. But I think just to think about, I was thinking about like the women's movement, the the me too hashtag and things like that. And I think collectivity is an answer. States what's happened with women speaking up against abuse and abuse of power etc. What I think what happened was that the the big symbol of leadership began to appear very weak and so somebody with enough courage said I can speak up against that big symbol of leadership and not get knocked down. And then somebody else was at a tipping point and said literally me too and me too and me too and me too and pretty soon we had a field of consciousness within our old field of consciousness. And you could walk into that bigger field of resonance and say me too and not have your limbic system say you were going to die. But there's a similar story here about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yeah. Where once people realized that the guards were not going to shoot to kill if you walk through into the west. And a whole series of weird things happened in the lead up to it but once that happened suddenly like the morning the wall falls at six a.m. in the morning there's nobody in the streets. At nine a.m. in the morning there are one and a half million people lined up at the checkpoints ready to go. Yeah because they've heard that that the door's going to be open and they can they can walk through and then it happens right and and and swiftly people go for and the German military and the Russian military don't react by killing everybody which they could have. And suddenly we have a shift in consciousness of a you know very high magnitude. Yeah yeah and what I struggle with all the time is that we can point to these spontaneous shifts in consciousness. Let me to the Berlin Wall there's there's a bunch of others I'm sure. And I think the question we're all asking is how do we make that happen so to speak how can we take an action and keep on that path to make it happen instead of waiting for those spontaneous movements. And one of the things I think about is you know if I look at the Me Too movement that symbol of killer authority weakened you know our our blonde-haired person in the white palace is much weakened these days and I think that was a big a big player. But let's look at a at a corporate situation where you're really trying to to improve corporate culture but the people in the C-suites are kind of dug in maybe instead of going straight at how do we make change in the culture maybe we go a different way and look at the importance of hierarchy to us why do we need such rigid hierarchies what meaning does that have for us what value does a rigid hierarchy have for us and I think there must be other windows into the pieces of this puzzle that are worth looking at. At a certain level of consciousness hierarchy starts to dissolve and the importance of a role in a big system is what starts to emerge. Well partly the dynamics of Me Too and the whole post Weinstein movement followed a hierarchy in that women who had enough status celebrity status or whatever else to and then found the courage to stand up and say no this is real which many people have been saying for a really long time were suddenly heard and one of the things I love about the Times Up movement is that it's very explicitly women of high celebrity status coming together to protect women of no status and because they realize and I think most people realize that this could peter out pretty quickly without having any trickle-down effects and the maid in the hotel and the waitress in the diner might have no shelter from anybody because they don't have shelter from anybody because they can't lose that job regardless how abusive it might be because they've got kids to feed or whatever else and so I love the solidarity of it which then which even that gesture creates a different sort of resonant wave in the world of people starting to hear that that opens up new possibilities so it's interesting because I think one of the questions here is not only how do you provoke these things how do you cause these things to become movements or moments but how do you do this in the face of resistance how do you do this in the face of people who are trying to sabotage that moment and keep the status quo quote yeah take it take it back to status quo anti like like why can't we just have the victorian era again yeah so I think that all these things are playing out right in front of us as we speak yeah well one thing I love is I always say that consciousness with a capital C is on the move with us or without us and it will move through any human being that's even partway open and so with all this chaos in the world consciousness has moved through a bunch of really already open people which is why I think we have these very successful much more collective movements and that's a good thing because most people on the planet need to see an example before they'll step in it's like that old tv commercial you know does Mikey like it right and so now we have some examples thanks to the forces of the universe and I think what we're looking at is that people of influence and it doesn't matter what their profession is they could be physicists they could be Hollywood actors it doesn't matter if they have social influence now is the time for them to step up and create a force field with an idea create new meaning which has new value and and take the first action to model the actions other people can take and then they have to stay with it there's there's a this principle of continuity that modern people aren't very good at anymore you know we want the next glittery thing but if we can at least instill in our influencers the idea of continuity that we have to stay with these things we get the meat to movement going it has a peak it's going to have a trough it's going to have another peak and we ought to make it like a good stock chart so it overall has an upward angle and we don't mind the the trough and we love the peaks but we use the full wavelength of the experience things going so it strikes me that one valuable thing um for once that we have the awareness that the um the closing down the fear are going to arise um that there there is the potential for us to preempt it by warning those that we are working with um you know over the next couple days you may dismiss this over the next couple days um you may think that it's not a good idea uh that we shouldn't move forward and i i just want you to be aware of this moment when you do think it is a good idea mm-hmm yeah yeah yeah that would help i mean i i think um i think this is really good i mean if influencers understand that they can kickstart things and they understand what to keep broadcasting to their audience then then we will have more people who stay yes and can stay with it and i think the under one underlying thing i think is so important especially for us in recs to understand is is this business of how we decide to take an action or not take an action and it's happening right in our brains whatever we're working on or thinking about there's a context for it and whatever context our brain is accepting that creates a meaning so it could be it could mean a good thing for me to speak up it could mean a a mortally bad thing for me to speak up what's the meaning being generated in my brain and there's a value to that will i thrive or will i get killed and if i'm going to thrive i'll take the action if i believe i'm going to get killed then i won't take the action so this meaning value action is a really important sequence it happens in every single human brain and i think if our influencers understood that they would be able to guide groups of people in making change and staying with it that you know if we start and we say yesterday and we're terrified tomorrow it's just that we've allowed our brains to pick up the old context and we need a reminder of a new context so that's um that may sound kind of general but i think it's a seed for new kinds of collected conversations that we have to really be talking about meaning with people meaning and positive value and teach one another focus on that yeah or who are your favorite sort of meaning and context makers historically like who who does this well that that you've admired over time and maybe a little bit of how well that's a good question because i'm not sure i have an answer to that um i have to think about people that i um that i quote a lot of course i quote the mountain spirits a lot but that's a different story um i'm going to say something crazy i'm i'm going to bring up einstein per minute because um what he would do is to take a little bit of scientific data and put it into the context of life of human life and human experience and everything he said was based on scientific data scientific process but he would put it into the context of human life and therefore create a new meaning that touched everybody because that meaning related to every human and all the things we endeavor to do he talked a lot about his efforts and and his process in making discoveries um you know he said um that imagination is the most important thing and that the the the math and all that the technical stuff it comes later language comes later math comes later it's the imagination that's first and that that has to do actually with his process in making a discovery working in his physics lab but it it touches every single person because he put it in a human context so that that would be an example that comes to me i'm sure there are there are many others um my mind was going to two of the stereotypical people we talk about when it comes to social change martin ruther king and mahatma gandhi and in in particular one of the things that sort of moves me a lot when i think about it is gandhi's spinning his own cloth and wearing dotes that he had made himself and it's like oh okay so that's symbolic well partly what that symbolized was uh india before the british arrived was self sufficient for fabric and food india was india was doing just fine thank you very much the british made it illegal to own a loom in india because they wanted india to be a raw material source for cotton all have it shipped to england to the new factories and then have it manufactured into cloth which would then be sold back to india so they had to debilitate in fact destroy india's ability to be self sufficient and and so gandhi's gesture which seems like a light thing to an indian person who's just recently experienced all that is a is a radical thing and a physical reset of oh right there's this simple thing that my parents and my ancestors in memorial did that gandhi ji is saying we can all go do again merely by the doing of it in public and to me that's like a a really simple gesture in human life in the present that resets the context for the conversation somehow yeah yeah i think another thing that's really important is that that we're kind of too smart for ourselves these days and we have all these great ideas right if we oh let's do this and we should do that and they should do the other thing and we forget about a principle that comes straight from the andian lineages and it's the principle of fertility some some things might be good ideas but there's no fertile ground in which to plant the seed so if i think about corporate america i wish i could change it this afternoon but it's not a very fertile ground the structures are extremely rigid the training of ceo's etc the c-suite is very rigid those people who are in the mold of the c-suite we have these days it would take a tremendous amount of work to retrain their consciousness it's not a fertile ground so i think a fertile ground is entrepreneurship and and other forms of businesses so i think we should first of all use our intelligence to track fertility and see where we'll get a big bang for our buck if we invest our time in our ideas and that's that's really important i think there is a lot of time and effort invested in places where we don't get multiplicities of return and then we start to believe that it's too difficult and then we stop yeah so fertility is part of the context if that makes sense definitely yeah so i was on a call this afternoon with some colleagues um who are putting together a new service and near the end of the call there was this debate on how to sell this new service and essentially it came down to whether approaching organizations with the possibility of having a greater impact in the world or with the fear and shame that if you don't do this your competitors are going to do it or you're going to die in this fast changing world your business will go flat and it struck me how much selling always goes back to the fear and the shame as a means of getting people to take action will will organizations take action based upon possibility and not fear and i may be a little bit cynical about that but i want to believe it yeah well let's return to neurophysiology for a minute if i say you have to do this and if you don't you'll die and you'll be broken you'll be miserable i'm triggering your olympic fear circuit which draws all of your awareness into the linear mind is a very small part of our brain and if i get trapped in my linear mind all i have is wiring that goes from a to b to c if this then that if this then that if this then that i have no capacity to even consult other peers because my linear mind is not wired collectively or relationally it's just if this then that and i've already been given the message if this then that and that means to me oh my god if i don't do this thing i lose and my survival is threatened and i don't think we can underestimate the power of the survival drive in the human organism it's a tiny part of our brain it can capture our whole awareness but if you get a bunch of people who are trapped in that linear causal frame of mind the power of their consciousness can bring other powers to a screeching halt it really can i think that's what happened in the us election i really do there was so much fear and survival demand that certain people got sucked into it if this then that if this guy then we get the coal industry back see i mean we can really be drawn into believing things that are impossible because that's how powerful the lindic fear circuit is that's how powerful our desire to stay alive is but it gets distorted really really easily so i think let's go back to organizations yeah we hope that and dream that they will choose to do good things but i think what we're looking at is number one the cell needs to shift we ought to be more of us if we can selling and teaching people to sell not by threats obviously but by multiplicities of benefit not only do you benefit but all these other things benefit and just keep seeing it until it catches on because that's a collective outward moving multiplying process and if you want momentum for change that the multiplicities are what create the momentum yeah sorry go ahead go ahead i'll go on forever if i can draw out a little bit what you were saying a moment ago about the election cycle my own point of view on this is that putting putting the general public into a fear state was completely intentional and in fact at this moment in history is the only way that trump and the far right could come into power yeah because if if we were all having a conversation and using scientific evidence and thinking about stuff rather than just feeling stuff and letting the fear overwhelm us the the the far right wouldn't be in power because they lose most of the logical arguments yeah so so they have to disable facts truth safety all those things they must create these sort of demon images of what the terrible things that are already happening to us and how how horrible and untrustworthy everybody is and that has proven in fact unfortunately to be their past the power and we're seeing this arise around the world we're seeing other autocrats around the world use fake news strategies to try to disable their press we're seeing a whole series of things and and to just extract a little bit a little bit more one of my present worries is that that moment this moment of fake truth and sort of the falling apart of reason might last 200 years instead of just be a little blip a little historical blip of a couple years yeah i don't think it's going to last 200 years because of things like like me too right consciousness if you can get consciousness back to the collective state and everybody's resonating with moving forward then then we're golden but if we don't pay attention then it's the results are disastrous and i think that the spread of the of the fear-based approach to things that spread around the world i don't think people really know what they're doing i don't think very many people understand the physiology of the limbic system i really don't i think they're seeing yeah that really worked there so we're gonna do it here and will be even a little bit more evil i don't think they really understand um what is happening to human consciousness um if we do then we're golden yeah i fear that they know what they're doing and they're doing it intentionally and they're they're sort of breaking our sort of will to be in the cooperative space on purpose i don't know that neuroscientists have advised them yeah i don't pardon those are the outcomes but but i i think what i think what i'm saying is we have a lot more power than we might think yeah i love what you said about you know me too is basically a form of an antidote of taking us into a different kind of collective consciousness that's lovely yeah yeah and again the if we get shoved into the fear mode in a part of our brain that is not wired collectively it cannot connect to anything else it can only do what is similar so if you're afraid you only see other people who are afraid you do not see the positive and that's something that goes on in our brains and the sooner we get that the sooner we can break free of it it strikes me that there's an interesting possibility here which is that um as we appear to be entering a hockey stick of climate change much faster than than anybody thought yeah it occurs to me that that would be the kind of very real and and apparent fear around which people might actually congregate and a genuine threat to their survival collective survival which can only be solved through collective action very interesting that's very interesting yeah i like that so um we could turn that into a principle um looking for there won't be many but there'll be issues like climate change that are collective period and we can pop back into collectivity that way yeah so i'm wondering if if anyone else on the call has a story or situation or case that comes up as we move into this conversation um recognizing that this is a public forum uh it's recorded and will be posted publicly but wanted to make sure that people had the the option of of discussing um where they see movement stopping or where they see movement completely flowing i mean i can i can pitch in i guess by saying that i've been working with a whole team doing what i do which is actually almost completely about um teaching people to how to calm down the olympic system how to recognize a major responses when they're happening and how to deal with them we've been working with an entire team of people who are all focused in an innovation consultancy and the results that have been great they've been really really wonderful and they have been flying and each time they run into a big kind of oh wow this is actually pretty touchy territory because we're now walking into stuff where we recognize that there could be lots of threats for everybody because they're looking at like completely um flat and open self-management structures and stuff like that extremely difficult new territory but each time they get each time they get there they actually get over it and i and i'm pretty sure that one of the main reasons that's happening is because they are they have actually all become really good at saying okay it's time for me to take a five minute timeout take my three deep breaths float in nowhere space for a couple of minutes and then come back to what we're discussing because i actually first and foremost i trust all the people around me so that's been great that's really cool there's a bit of truth no i i love what you're doing mike it is priceless and it's a such a brilliant example of how training awareness in one way or another to training awareness to stay with the relational mind solves all the problems all of them because we are naturally collected we are naturally striving to succeed we're not naturally jammed into our limbic fear circuits and the work that mike is doing is extraordinary and you know it it changes the ideas we come up with we don't have to struggle for ideas or how or why we just start to experience and act and relate in the world in ways that are innovative and totally beneficial um kelly in in your work with a consortium can you think of of sort of moments where either like the executive committee got stuck and got unstuck or some of the case studies that you point to that sort of get written up by the consortium about the kinds of change that you're bringing because there's there's really nice parallels between the kinds of of dynamics that the consortium has been working to solve over the many years i've known you guys and the stuff we're talking about here the stuff that that's sort of involved in rex i am trying to think of a sort of a nice neat story um two things come to mind one is that one of the things that we've talked about over the last couple of years um one of greg's favorite um what does he call them better remember it's not important but um the we like to we like to poke at the fact that perhaps the hierarchy has outlived its usefulness because that makes everybody go wait what in corporate america how would we function without a hierarchy and i can see mike laughing um and so uh it has i've been mulling on this one for the last little bit because i think hierarchies can actually be very helpful right there are certain scenarios in which it's really great to be like oh that guy's gonna have to make the decision um and and so i am starting a very small movement around it's actually the patriarchy that's outlived its usefulness and what does that really look like and how how do we really dismantle um things how do we dismantle it right um and what is it what is it replaced with anything i don't know so um but the other the other things that comes to mind so we do a lot of talking about change management and and innovation and all these things and we have a meeting um once a year that is focused on the consortium itself so we invite all of our um sort of most involved members to come and talk about what they want to see where they want the focus of the consortium to be over the next year what you know what kinds of problems are they working on that we can help them with and this past meeting um it uh which was in december early december was so it was such an interesting and uncomfortable situation for me personally because it's very easy for me to sit in a meeting and listen to people talk about how they're going to affect big change and all these new ideas and totally stay within that relational mind and this was a bunch of people sitting around talking about how we were going to need to change our company and i was like this is horrible this is terrifying like i don't know how we're going to do this i don't this is so many things there's so many things that i listen to and we're usually so good about setting context and saying you know things are going to be you know things will be uncomfortable and that'll be okay and we're going to do sort of like that you know here's the divergent piece of the meeting and then we'll figure out how we're going to do it and come converge again and we we skipped that part because we know it all and it was so is horrible and hilarious right and so the the second day we kind of followed up with like oh that's right that's why i was so painfully uncomfortable because i completely just thrown everything out that we'd ever talked about in terms of getting into this space i bet it's hard for our members when we tell them what they should do so yeah all you have to do is like turn everything upside down and shake really hard and it'll all be fine it's totally fine oh it works everything falls in the right place it's really great um jerry it it brings to mind something that um that i talk about a lot with a quote-unquote conscious system um in a in an actual conscious system whether it's a business or a forest there isn't anything like a a western idea of a hierarchy nothing is actually above anything else um and so in a conscious system what is important is the the role that each element plays what is the contribution of each element and what do they need from the system to keep contributing in that way and that would be a really good reframing for any organization really you still have your CEOs and your um cleaning staff and everybody in between but every role has a value which is much bigger than if i put it in the hierarchy because if i put it in a hierarchy value is according to position to how high off the ground i am and we for some crazy reason put more value to the higher person forgetting that the person would be up there there would never be everybody underneath them so i think um you know the western idea is hierarchy based on position and that determines value but if we just take position out of it and and instead start thinking of role what is the function and value is assigned by function and then every everybody every part basically has equal value because the whole system couldn't work without all of those pieces functioning properly so it's a kind of a shift in how we frame things but if we could find a company willing to work with the team of us to shift their idea of how they operate that way i think we would see extraordinary i think mike is already doing that actually how terrified would they be if the whole lot of us were there right so it can be when you were saying that and this thought crossed my mind the other day when we're talking about organizational design and um and i was just thinking well hang on a minute we're talking about hierarchy between that holacracy this accuracy this secrecy and so on and so forth but i wonder if actually in actual point of fact what we should be doing is looking for the implicit structure which already happens to be there in that organization yeah of how people actually get stuff done john husband are pretty close to that with his idea of wire arcing which is really interesting and it doesn't assume that there is no that no one's got an overview or no one's doing strategy or no one can make decisions he does assume that there is a that there is a a kind of almost natural emergent structure there which which can be discerned and cognitive i mean it's like a human body everything has its role but nobody's president right any organism it operates that way yeah and so that was i really like the way you described all that yeah um two small things one is the first time i i started really hearing about these sorts of things uh oops i just added myself on video again that's not good um the first time i started hearing about these things was back in the 80s i i had a teacher and sort of mentor russell acoff who talked about lower archie and uh one of his interesting ideas for how companies might organize themselves is to flip the old pyramidal chart upside down and to basically said say look all of you who are doing work you get together in groups to do work awesome you get to do all the decisions you want you have to figure out what other units in the company or in the organization your project is going to touch and it's your job to go sort things out with them tell them what effect it's going to have and that you need their help and only when they when you two together can't sort this out do you go lower in the lower archie to somebody who can help you sort it out and make a decision so the only things that should come to the ceo at the bottom of the lower archie are the things that nobody else was able to suss out argue out debate solve by themselves but everybody at the fingertips has full autonomy to go do stuff and this was a long time ago it was a pretty radical thought back then i really liked it and then what you were saying also describes to me how children used to grow up in community which means kids are born curious and they just want to figure out what is their role in life what are they supposed to do and you know we give them graduated responsibilities first go get a cup of sugar from the neighbors next go tend the goats for the afternoon all the way up to go organize this event for the community festival or whatever and in that process everybody gets to know them they get to figure out what their special superpowers are and how they fit what is their best role in society and you can extrapolate this to borrow from meledoma so may you know the dagara tribe in west africa about which marty knows much more than i do but you know in a lot of african traditions the child is born with a gift for the village and it's the village's job to bring that gift out and make sure it's manifest make positive is manifest and the child's name is given by the village as a as a manifestation of that of that thing they saw that is the child's gift so it's super super interesting but we have so shredded all of these social ties at the local level that kids are no longer able to go do these small things we're sort of so out of so dislocated from these ancient relationships that we can't find our way into our optimal role and then work has replaced the finding your way into the optimal role with hierarchy and job description and and status and barriers and the wisest of companies are the ones like uh semco in semco or even netflix and valve and a few others that basically say come in here get a desk we think you are kind of people and we want you to figure out what we're doing enough that you tell us what your role is going to be you find your way to the best work google operates this way a lot internally where there's small teams that get together for projects and then disband and people find their way from project to project so and and low-archy wirearchy uh holocracy whatever our attempts to take parts of this and formalize it or describe it or put it in the world in a way that more people will use it and i think a critical look at those would be super duper interesting but but all of this it doesn't touch enough of the levels of consciousness that you're trying to bring into the conversation marty sorry go go no well i was going to say um that i just want to emphasize this and i think mike's examples are really good ones that we're trying to find the solution before we have fully shifted our consciousness and it's just not going to happen what needs to happen first is a bunch of influencers who are willing to shift how they use awareness and then the ideas will show up i actually completely agree with that that's almost exactly what i was going to say in a different way strangely you know goes bigger but i was actually going to say it occurred to me the other day when i was talking to my sister and she was talking about how you know from the point of view of environment and sustainability we have kind of woken up in the Anthropocene we have suddenly become aware that we are changing the planet around us which is interesting to me because pretty much the same time she was talking about that i've been toying with the idea for a while now that there's a lot of talk about how complex everything's become we've suddenly discovered complexity and it's likely to be completely new invention whoa everyone's complex oh my god look how complex and yet and yet we've been we've been dealing with complexity for like thousands and thousands of years and we do it quite naturally interestingly enough we do it when we get into daydream daydream is immensely powerful for dealing with this stuff and we ignore it so they are daydreaming but but actually what they're probably doing is cracking huge complexity equations exactly so yeah using that kind of consciousness yeah yeah and really it's um in really simple terms it's training people to get their awareness off themselves and off their ego structure because if your awareness is on you and your ego structure and your inner critic you are glued to your limbic fear circuit and that whole section of the brain is wired causally if this then that it is not wired to the outside world from that part of your brain you cannot sense the world around you or make a relationship you're sunk right so we have to get that our awareness out of that tiny little closet and that solves the problem right there solves the problem we're not going to know beforehand what it's going to be like we just have to do it I think of our guest of just a couple years ago yos de bloch joined us a couple years ago and to think that a healthcare organization went from six nurses to 15,000 in five years and still with less than 25 people who are in administrative positions and they're all technical and I go back to the design of that business so often not that it's a blueprint for everyone to follow but the fact that he said assemble teams of nurses to serve a community and those nurses can care for their clients as best they see fit and we're not going to build them based upon procedure we're not going to have a bunch of policy manuals it's nurses doing what they were born to do which is to take care of people and the magnetic attraction of that has happened both on the employment side of all the nurses wanting to work there and then on the patient or client side of people shifting to having Bersorg as their home healthcare provider yeah great great example great example yeah and you know there's one of the initial questions was what exactly is momentum and I think momentum is a little bit of magical energy flow that happens when you let a system be conscious it's it's the way Jocelyn his his business grew that's momentum you let a system start to function the way it naturally does it creates its own extra internal energy and that solves another host of problems that we worry about all the time the only problem for the capitalist world is that it solves that problem without generating a large pot of wealth that can be siphoned off into the pockets of the future oh no it solves the problem by generating wealth if it generates a very different kind of wealth exactly not necessarily not necessarily if we could get the the quote-unquote stock market to be conscious it would generate that wealth it would and it wouldn't be a bubble interesting so Larry Fink just from Black Rock Capital just issued basically threw down the gauntlet to the markets and said hey guys we we have six trillion dollars we invest in you and if you don't start having some kind of social purpose and he used a little bit of language that that Tom LaForge has used a lot in Rex which is if you don't try to renew your social license to operate we're going to cease investing in you and it was really like I think a lot of people noticed I don't know how many people are going to wake up to it is that one of the kinds of things that needs to happen to get us closer to what we were just talking about yeah yeah that is one of the things definitely but we have to be careful about this this little myth in modern consciousness that if we do the right thing then everything is going to be fine and we ask what what can we do how can we do it why should we do it and all those questions are pointless it's actually the state of internal being that generates meaning and value and action that will give us multiplicities of return including lots of money if we just decide i am going to do this because it looks more social that's going to collapse on us agreed mark mark you've put a whole bunch of interesting things in our chat during the conversation did you want to jump in and just comment on on where we've been um well actually the one thing that comes to mind is this idea of the limbic system and question is so you can begin a room and set up like a positive resonance and then you leave the room and whoops you're out of that context so how do you invite the triggers of the limbic system into that room well you know this is um this is sort of contextual it depends on who's gathered and why they're gathered with the with the the attracting um force of the gathering is in the first place there's no one principle that can be applied but you need one person at least let's take our general room you need one person at least who is in what i would call full consciousness who is not focused on themselves but is focused on the group and the relationships in the group and a larger purpose for the group and if that person is skilled and being in that state and conversing from that state then you'll start to shift the consciousness of the room if that person who's so good at all this leaves the room there's no guarantee that the field will stay because we don't know the state of consciousness of the people who are left in the room it's there's no in other words there's no immediate solution here are your three steps and if everybody did this it would all be great it's going to take some time to train influencers it's going to take some time for certain groups of willing people to get what it means to stay in a state of full consciousness to release the attachment to the limbic fear circuit it's it's not an instantaneous change and there's no immediate guarantees but if we get enough people working on it it will change um yeah one of the amateur things that i try to do toward what marty just said is for example the poem that i read at the start of our calls and meetings poetry if if you can kind of come into it in a way that that's sort of a bit grounded can change the the spirit of a room or a meeting it can make the the space beyond the threshold feel different than it was before so sometimes very very small things can make big differences when i give when i sort of coach other people in facilitating meetings one of the things i tell them is that every tiny thing you do actually matters a lot so noticing that somebody seems thirsty or tired and getting them a cup of coffee picking up the wrapper that's in the corner that the cleaning crew didn't get and putting in the trash the little things are noticed and create sort of the part of the spirit of the meeting and then how you invite and how you convene matter a lot and it's not rocket science how to do it better i think it's i think extremely skillful people do it several orders of magnitude better and that that's something i aspire to someday learn but but the simple stuff the the basic stuff isn't that hard to do reasonably well mm-hmm yeah in really simple terms in terms of convening a meeting or having those people in the room what what we're doing as conveners is creating a space in which everybody can be willing to focus on one thing for a little while and removing things that will start what's called the secondary process in the group removing things from the field that will draw people's awareness away from the purpose of the meeting so that that's definitely it's the beginning but i think you guys know i'm very interested in finding organizations who would be willing on an organization-wide basis to start to learn how to use awareness organizationally so things begin to change at all levels and you know that's that's a six-month year-long project for a company i think at least to get going but yeah these little things that it we we don't realize that our presence really makes a difference we don't realize if we're sitting in a meeting and we're not paying attention we're breaking the field of consciousness it doesn't take very much it really doesn't it's true the the things that workers are subtle and the things that break are subtle yeah and i also think that most people don't think they're valuable enough and that's why they don't pay attention in meetings so here's that that business of value they don't know what they mean to the organization and so they don't understand the value they have or they're not valued because the leaders of the organization don't think in these terms so again this business of meaning creates value drives action or not action that's really important i'm not sure we answered a question there but it was interesting well thank you marty yeah my pleasure and we didn't get to hear nancy's voice but we know nancy was there indeed sorry i was a little multitasking not a panna but uh but thank you yep i mean i have two thoughts just as you guys are closing off which i will say this idea that people don't feel worthwhile in a company or they're acknowledged in a company i will also say i think people look too much to the company to define that for them yeah part of what we also need to do is the resilience and strength inside people to be able to hold their own worth or or or path or whatever and when we were hiring for people for the artificial intelligence company that i work with self-awareness was like a really key element so it was like yes we need aptitude and attitude and ability to collaborate and blah blah blah but really it was like who has been through something that they understand who they are so they aren't so shaken and rattled by someone else's opinion ambiguity change etc etc so i feel like there's a whole kind of like working inside out piece and i will also say i feel like there's a right now a big too much emphasis on it's gonna sound oxymoronic but on the individual and there aren't systems set up to actually really support that person very well inside these organizations so incentives aren't aligned infrastructure isn't aligned there's a whole bunch of other stuff that the person feels like they're fangling because they're not changing quote-unquote are able to stick with it or their own limbic system locks in and i don't know that we have held them well to support that so somehow this like building resilience internally and building support externally is the work that i'm trying to preach more lovely thank you which yeah at least scaffolding until we can get to the conscious world you want marty that we all want that we want to see you know in the plan so anyway thank you for giving me it just helps me because i'm doing a lot of speaking and a lot of workshopping in the next few months and it just helps me to have better framing for it or vocabulary for encouragement for it so i appreciate it thank you yeah great and if i could just pop in one comment from nancy's comments so what she's really addressing is shifting the the juice of an organization to making everybody's role clear and valuing people for their role to the whole yes i totally agree with that yeah that's great very cool thanks mark thank you my good to see you thanks everybody bye thank you marty yeah my pleasure thank you marty my pleasure thank you thanks folks since modi good to see you speak soon i hope yeah absolutely bye bye