0:05
Welcome to the show where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the global North or the Global S, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White and welcome to Thai Unearthed.
What if the tools that got you to the top of your field are the very things now holding you back?
Not because they were wrong, but because what’s being asked of you now is something different entirely.
Welcome to episode 118 of Thai Unearthed.
My guest today spent the early decades of his career learning to think in systems, first as an engineer, then through philosophy, then urban planning.
Each step deliberate and each one adding a layer that the previous couldn’t quite reach alone.
Philip Vandenbrook is a strategist, researcher, writer and photographer based in Belgium.
He is the founder of Shift NA Consulting Network with 30 years of experience helping organizations navigate complex strategic questions.
He lectures at ETH Zurich, where he teaches imagination as a predesign practice, and he is a doctoral researcher whose work sits at the edges of architecture transformation and what he calls silent urban change.
But he arrived at this conversation well, at least in part, through a walk through a small Alpine village called Tenna, through a poem, through 40 years of reading Frederick Holderleem, a Romantic poet whose work found him when he was young and never quite let him go.
What Philip found in Tenna, or what found him there, is at the heart of what we explore together, and it raises a question that feels increasingly urgent for anyone in a position of leadership right now.
What if the organization we’re leading are asking us the wrong questions?
Not because the questions are unimportant, but because the question we are able to ask, the one the system permits, is not yet the question that matters?
We also talk about the romantic periods response to the Industrial revolution and why he thinks we may be living through something similar right now, about why imagination is not a luxury but a precondition for genuine change, and about his suggestion that perhaps resilience is no longer the most honest guide.
Perhaps it’s joy, curiosity and love that might serve us better.
So if you’ve ever sensed that the questions you’re being asked to answer are somehow smaller than the moment you’re actually in, and if you’ve sensed that something in the way we’re leading just needs to shift but you’re not quite sure toward what, this one’s for you.
Philip.
Welcome to TIE ON Earth.
Hello, it’s so wonderful to have you with us today.
How are you?
Hi, Philippa.
I’m well, I’m well.
Thank you.
Calling in from Belgium.
Yes, I was going to have.
Rolling hills.
So really happy to be here and to be, you know, invited as your guest.
Thank you.
Yeah, I can picture it.
It sounds absolutely gorgeous.
Is it a sunny day?
It’s a variable day, you know, it’s blustery and we have had some serious rain showers here, but now blue sky and.
Oh, nice.
Yeah.
Well, interestingly, we’re entering into the rainy season where I live on the northeast coast of Brazil, just below the equator.
And this morning I went to the gym and as I was driving, sort of looked and you know, when you have those clouds that it’s, they’re, they’re almost blue.
They’re just so angry.
And I was stretching and I suddenly heard this extraordinary sound.
And I looked out the window and it was just torrential rain.
And when I came back home, it was so much rain in such a short amount of time.
Everything was flooded.
It was extraordinary.
So we, we also have, but it’s, it’s nice now.
So also variable.
4:19
Following a Hunch: The Poetic Journey to Tenna
Philip, I would love to start in Tenna this story.
I read your piece that you sent me and I’m so happy that you sent that to me because it was just so rich with so many layers of so many things that we can talk about that I’m so interested in.
And I’m just really looking forward to this conversation.
You weren’t there for work or research, from what I understand.
You arrived curious and looking for beauty and poetry, and it was a walk inspired by Holderling.
What did that experience reveal to you about that relationship between imagination and place and how we care for one another?
Well, the, you know, for those not in the know, and I suppose you know, most of the listeners won’t have an idea of where tenor exactly is, but it’s a very small village in the Swiss Alps.
So if you look at the map and you kind of squint at the Swiss map, you know, it looks like kind of diamond shape.
Then you put your finger in the center and then you move to the right, to the east.
Then you get more or less, you get into tenor.
So it’s a very small village, and it’s positioned high above the Rhine valley.
It’s actually quite close to where the Rhine, you know, the kind of majestic Rhine finds its source.
So that’s quite special.
And in a way, it’s also related to the kind of story that’s behind my presence there.
Because indeed, as you say, I was retracing the steps, hypothetical steps, to be sure, because we are not quite sure whether that poet Friedrich held it.
Lien, German poet, lived late in the 18th century, early in the 19th century, whether he’s ever really been there.
There is a hypothesis that he might have been there.
And there’s really interesting story behind that, but we’ll go into that.
Basically, my presence in tenor was a result of being in love.
And what do you do when you beat?
When you’re in love, You know, it’s not something you really think about.
You know, you try to go after the source of your inspiration or adoration.
And in this particular case, I’ve been, let’s say, Adoring held it Lean and his work for about 40 years.
Wow.
I know I wrote it into the book that I received from my then girlfriend.
You know, what kind of an anthology of Hilderlin poetry.
And I, I was hooked and I’m still hooked.
So one of the things that I like to do is to give those kinds of kind of historical presences texture and body by following in their steps.
And so to travel in search of what inspired their poetry and landscape is important in Hilderlin’s work.
There’s one poem in particularly, and it’s called the rhyme.
Oh, interesting. 201 It’s very early in the 19th century.
And that’s the poem that inspired me in a way to go to that particular place.
And I will read you the first line, please.
I was sitting in the dark Ivy at the gate of the forest, just as the spring was visited with the gold of noon pouring down the steps of the Alps, which I call the fortress of the gods in the ancient sense, architected by the heavens, and from which many decrees are still mysteriously handed down to men.
There, against all expectations, I grew aware of a fate, even as my soul, lost in its own conversation in the warm shade, had already wandered off to Italy and beyond, to the shores of Maria.
And Maria is an old name for Greece.
Greece was, in that particular period, the kind of an idealized vision of what a society could be.
And so there you have Alderlin dreaming about Greece and then suddenly becoming aware of a fate.
And that fate is the fate of the young Rhine, which is actually kind of thundering in the Canyon below his feet.
That’s why I went to that particular place.
And Tena was not my destination at that point in time.
My destination was a very small village.
It’s a hamlet, It’s called Scardinal, and it’s actually on the shoulder of the valley opposite of Tena.
So when I walked up to Scardinal and then beyond traversing the whole Ridge towards the north to the big peak bevering, I became aware of this really marvelous jewel like little village which you could see from the rich and appearing down into the valley.
You could see it on the shoulder.
And I thought, wow, this is so beautiful, I really want to go there.
And so that image jewel like of tenor kind of floated around in my mind for these years until a couple of months ago.
You know, I had a free weekend in between my teaching duties at the university in Zurich.
And so I had a kind of a 2 day window and I thought now’s the time to go to Tenna.
That’s how I ended up in Tenna.
So this is, in a way, love.
It’s about an infatuation.
It’s about, you know, following that hunch.
It’s about cultivating also that beauty, that beautiful image that kind of continued to float around in my mind and to animate me.
Yes, that’s that’s why I was there.
9:32
Why Organizations Struggle with Humane, Imaginative Projects
It’s so beautiful just picturing all of it in your writing, this sort of this idea that some of the most humane and imaginative projects often struggle the hardest within these existing systems.
And I just wonder if you could bring to life, you know, why do you think our institutions so often resist the very innovations that could make us more human?
Yeah.
I, you know, from my point of view, in my experience, I would say the reality in our organizations and institutions is very often not so poetic.
I think we have to face the reality that organizations haven’t fundamentally changed beyond where they were let’s say 250 years ago.
So they’re still fundamentally kind of Taylorian oriented, scarcity driven or scarcity based, basically still fixed in what I would call a managerial kind of fix almost.
And it has advantages.
Make certain things possible and other things, you know, less likely and less possible.
I think it’s a stark reality in organizations that are driven by an economic purpose.
But I think it’s even true beyond that, you know, in society at large.
Even yesterday I read a really interesting number in a report that was published by Demos in London, The state of our democracy and what we can do to repair democracy.
And the number was 1.5% of all our time is devoted to political civic action, meaning 89.5% is devoted to keeping the status quo or incrementally bettering that status quo.
But the conversations that happen about the conditions within which that status quo inches towards that improvement, you know, that’s in the 1.5%.
And so these are the conversations, I think that, you know, we need to have conversations about values, about the moral dilemmas that are embedded in, in change with the winners and the losers.
And it’s just that organizational kind of reality that we created for ourselves is a reality that keeps these kinds of conversations from happening.
And that’s unfortunate.
And it’s all to change, I think.
11:57
Philippe’s Path: From Systems to Art and Academia
When we spoke a little while ago, I found your background and the various different areas that you’ve worked in absolutely fascinating.
And my next question is around sort of the decades that you’ve spent working in systems thinking and organizational transformation.
Before I get to my specific question, I just wonder for our listeners because it’s so varied, but it’s so important I think right now to have of the mix that you’ve had to help us reflect on where we’re at right now.
So you’ve been on a bit of a journey and you wouldn’t imagine going down that route.
But actually it’s so important, I think, which also has so much to do with the reason why you were in Tena.
But can you just bring to life your background?
Sure.
You know, there’s a couple of things maybe we’re sharing about that.
One is that I’m originally from a worker kind of background worker family, and I was the, you know, the 1st in my family to obtain an academic degree.
And so in a way, I, I grew out of that kind of environment.
And still, of course, I’m kind of wedded to it.
So that in between position between being from that setting and environment and then I’ve having been growing out of it is something that I think has been quite decisive in the way that I am in the world, so to speak, in terms of, let’s say, training.
I did indeed collect the kind of idiosyncratic mix of degrees, so to speak.
You know, I started out as an engineer, as an agronomist actually.
Then soon after, and actually in parallel with my engineering studies, I started to study philosophy because I’ve always been attracted by both humanities, arts and, you know, more scientific and technical subjects.
So at that point it was really difficult for me to make that choice.
And you know, I followed my inclination to engage in kind of more philosophical reflection.
So I did, I obtained my master’s in philosophy and then later on I did a degree in kind of urban planning, urban design, which does not make me a designer, but it opened the window to me to another way of dealing with complexity.
And so, you know, in hindsight, this was an interesting mix.
It equipped me quite well to do the kind of work that I’ve been doing makes both conceptual thinking, solution oriented thinking, and then the designerly approach.
That’s an interesting kind of field in terms of competencies and skills and types of knowledge to be basing the kind of practice on that I’ve been developing over the last say 3 decades as a consultant in the office that I found at 30 years ago.
Shift M And then beyond that, I’ve been picking up academic work again.
About four years ago, I started the PhD, which I’m now in the final stage.
It’s in urbanism, affiliated with the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich.
And that research is very much in the tenor spirit, I would say.
That’s, you know, the power of places in a way to bring new things to life.
Yeah.
Apart from that, I mean, maybe worth mentioning as well.
I’ve always continued to, you know, be interested in art, and I also developed an artistic practice.
It’s particularly rooted in photography and in writing.
And I’m increasingly meshing these different kind of media and ways of expression.
And I think I’m at a point now in my life where the academic, the professional, the personal, the artistic is all flowing into one another to form in which, you know, I don’t either how to describe.
To be determined.
15:25
The Ontological Shift: Mastering Mess to Being in It
But that’s the beauty of all of this, right?
That brings us to my next question really, because increasingly, as you’ve just said, your work does seem to be moving beyond just systems when you think of where you were and now much more towards imagination and images.
And as we’ve just said, even the unnameable, right, it is to be determined.
And I’m just curious, looking at that journey, what shifted for you?
You know, I’m entertaining this idea of developmental ladder, so to speak, that moves from systems thinking to what I call systems tinkering to systems being.
And it’s basically a kind of a journey from mastering certain tools that help us to clean up messes to and that’s the tinkering, then staying with the masses or staying in the mess.
And that’s the being then to accepting our own mess or accepting our own role in other people’s masses.
I think that’s basically what I mean with this development trajectory from thinking to tinkering to being the way I’m presenting it as a ladder, as a journey through stages is I think a valid way to look at that.
Although some people may enter into this kind of developmental cycle in a very different way.
They may have certain gifts which which allows them, you know, to enter at the being stages, so to speak.
So that’s a caveat.
You know, I don’t want to present it as a kind of an fixed framework, but it’s fits in a way my own developmental trajectory and dynamic.
I got acquainted and exposed to system thinking ideas long time ago.
And then through practicing it professionally, using it, working a lot with important mentors, I grew into way of practicing it that is really about staying with the trouble, so to speak.
Is Donna Haraway, for instance, you know, talks and writes about it.
I think I’m now most of my energy is now going into this transition from tinkering to being.
And again, I’m not claiming any sort of mastery here.
This is a trajectory that’s full of pitfalls, requires a lot of humility.
There is a shift, you know, that involved.
And I think it’s an ontological shift, you know, to use that kind of philosophical term.
I think when we move from the the tinkering to the being, we enter into some kind of a different world.
That’s what I mean.
The logical shift.
And curiously, you know, we started with Helderlin.
Helderlin as a Romantic poet.
The Romanticism was an important kind of juncture in time.
Why?
Because you have to picture that late 18th century, the industrial revolution was in a way, you know, quietly coming to, you know, gaining momentum.
The world was changing before people’s eyes.
Enlightenment project started to become visible and embodied in the in the kind of environment people lived.
That’s where the romantic reaction came.
They wanted to in a way re sanctify almost the world.
So what they did was they connected to a much older way of looking at the world.
This is what I call an expressive ontology.
It’s not about us being in the world as separate subjects, looking at the world, standing in front of it and saying, you know, we’re going to intervene, control, master it.
But it’s much more about how we become part of an unfolding process.
And that’s a very old idea.
This goes back to, you know, late antiquity, Neoplatonists and so on.
But there’s an unbroken line of intellectual kind of development that’s mostly been in kind of in the shadow of the Platonic Christian orthodoxy, later, of course, scientific orthodoxy.
But the Romantic poets picked it up again.
And I think today we are reconnecting back to those ideas.
Totally.
And it’s so interesting because, you know, the Industrial revolution was obviously, as you say, before people’s eyes, just the world was just changing.
We’re in a similar moment right now, right?
And so we’re in a very similar moment right now, and no one knows where things go.
But I think I think you and I probably have a similar opinion about where.
And it’s so fascinating how you say during that time, people went back to what fueled humanity, and there’s similar murmuring and sort of ripples happening now.
And you just think, God, it’s an interesting moment that I don’t believe it’s going in the same way that Samuel Altman is thinking it will.
And Elon Musk, I really don’t, you know, just listening to what you’re talking about, the human being has a very visceral response.
To all of this, and it’s fascinating that we have been there before.
Let’s talk about the being.
20:21
Cultivating Joy, Curiosity, and Love in Uncertainty
And you wrote something really beautiful about sort of creating the path by walking it right.
So again, it’s this is embodying change or the future that you want by making it part of you.
And in a world where leaders are constantly being asked for certainty, how do we learn to move forward when the way only emerges through action itself?
Well, what you’re articulating there, Philippa, is exactly that ontological shift.
Yeah.
That’s the shift from standing in front of a system wanting to intervene in it versus being part of it and the partner or a Co creator in its unfolding that that’s a fundamental difference.
That’s what we call philosophically an ontological difference.
So the question you’re asking is how do we make that transition, which is not an easy question or?
Exactly because I feel like this is where because I’m I’m also trying in all of this craziness that’s happening.
And also on a personal level, I’ve been through so much and I just resilience is something that really fascinates me and different people’s response to the current moment in someone’s life that is moving.
Now, when we’re talking about resilience, I’m not talking about companies putting a whole lot of pressure on people and telling people to be resilient.
That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the world shifting the ground, moving from beneath our feet.
There’s so much uncertainty.
What is, what is the next five years going to hold?
And it’s as a leader, how does 1 embrace this?
My proposal is to shift the discourse from resilience, which to my ears sounds rather kind of stiff uer lip to joy, curiosity and love.
We’re back to held Italy.
We’re back to the jewel like image of tenor.
That’s what needs to animate us and something that really or a set of ideas that really kind of resonated with me and I think it may resonate with a lot of people that you know, may find this talk about kind of joy and and love and maybe too fluffy is the work of management scholar Saraswati.
She did absolutely extraordinary work on what she called effective actual entrepreneurship.
Saras was did their PhD with Herbert Simon.
Herbert Simon, one of the kind of luminaries in the systems discipline, Nobel Prize winner economics, one of the fathers of AI and so on and so on.
So did amazing work on trying to understand how, say, entrepreneurs create something from nothing.
We found out was, you know, this is has nothing to do with business plans and she came to some sort of model.
It’s a set of things you do, hands, activities.
It’s a coherent set of things you do that bring to life new things.
What are these things?
It’s very simple and I think recognizable for everyone.
First you start with what you have.
So 1 bird in the hand is more important than 10 in the sky.
What you have when you get to cooking in the evening, you know, preparing dinner, you open the cupboards, you see what kind of what’s.
Yeah.
The spirit, that’s one.
The second is you have some kind of idea of what animates you.
You know what triggers your desire in right, You know, try to get that more or less clear, more or less than there’s a really important thing which is about assess affordable risk.
It’s not about the managerial logic of this is where we want to go and this is these are the resources we’re going to invest to get there.
No, it is about if I’m going to take the next step in this uncertain context, what am I prepared to lose?
That’s the question.
And if you take those 3, this is what I have resources, this is what I prepare to lose, and this is what I’m animated by, what I desire.
You start to move out into the world and you start to build connections and interactions.
And from those connections, other commitments flow or grow.
And those commitments, they’re going to, on the one hand, give you access to more resources, but they’re also changing your understanding of what it means, what you, what you’re actually really wanting.
And that’s a learning cycle.
All kinds of new things emerge, whether it’s a product or whatever or a company or a piece of art, it doesn’t really matter.
And it’s so simple, but it’s not driven by certainty.
It’s not driven by the desire to create a very specific thing.
It is driven by what you really long for.
Yeah, Isn’t that extraordinary?
And it’s so interesting because there’s some professions, for example, are very analytical.
And so as people, that uncertainty is very difficult to sit with.
If you think of the professions, I mean, engineers actually, you know, engineers or analysts or you know, researchers or whatever, they need that certainty.
And so sitting with that uncertainty and being able to sit with that discomfort is, is so hard.
And their response would be to shut things down by OK, no, no, no, we need to find the answers.
No, no, we need, we need to because inside it’s a very uncomfortable feeling.
But it’s so it’s so important to know that about yourself actually.
And then to be able to say, OK, I know that this is really uncomfortable, but actually in order to get past this, we need to sit with it.
We need to be curious, we need to ask the questions, we need to be vulnerable.
We need to say that you don’t know and that’s OK, but it’s really interesting from a psychological point of view.
Some people it’s easy.
So you know, some people, the entrepreneurs, for them, this is something that fills their cup.
I’m an entrepreneur.
So for me, taking risk isn’t that it’s calculated risk, but you know, it really motivates me and I, I get quite excited and I, and when there’s sort of uncertainty, I sort of, oh, this is, this is quite fun.
Let’s see where this goes.
And it’s quite exciting.
But there are some professions and there’s some types of people where that is really not comfortable.
And it’s just, it’s fascinating, right?
Because it’s something that self-awareness as well, I think is just so important because everything that you’ve said, leaders actually really need that self-awareness piece.
They really need to understand themselves so that they know how best to move through this moment.
Actually, it’s so interesting.
I mean, we can’t kind of short circuit that kind of psychological and temperamental factors.
You know, the shift is really from thinking in terms of what hanging on to certainty, avoiding, so to speak, vulnerability, to embracing that uncertainty and desiring to be vulnerable because you’re animated by something, you know, that draws you further.
Yes, yeah.
And you actually, if you think about it, you can’t actually have that curiosity and that creativity unless you are willing to sit with that uncertainty and to embrace that vulnerability.
Because at the end of the day, to be curious, you need to be vulnerable enough to say, what is that?
I’ve never seen that before.
It’s that certainty that not having any doubt that I know everything, it shuts everything down.
And then you try sort of really hard to kind of control things, which obviously isn’t possible to do in many cases.
One interesting twist maybe is the following, you know, when you reason in terms of risks and costs that that threatens to paralyze you.
But an interesting question and it’s about halfway house for me from the making the jump to the, you know, to the joy and the risk you want to embrace.
But halfway house is to ask the question or reframe the question from what’s the cost to what’s the opportunity cost of not doing something that’s an interesting.
Question you.
Know it’s going to cost us, you know, to innovate, yes.
But if you don’t innovate, what will be or can be, you know, the ultimate costs, That’s the opportunity cost.
And that’s a really interesting question.
And I think it’s from a kind of a managerial and even from, let’s say, a governance point of view, you know, a board ought to ask that kind of question all the time.
So good.
We spoke about young and synchronicity and the idea that symptoms can be expressions of something deeper trying to emerge.
29:10
Uncovering Deeper Layers: Jung’s Systems Thinking
How has that changed the way you understand organizations or even society itself?
Yeah, the, you know, the idea of a surface and depth is a persuasive idea, and I remain wedded to that.
I mean, it has strong analytic potential.
I mean, there’s a fixture in the system’s thinking kind of toolbox, which is called the system’s iceberg, where you have, you know, it’s a metaphor for demonstrating or alerting us to the fact that what we see happening around us in the outside world is symptomatic for forces and developments which are, so to speak, under the water line, some more structural, invisible.
And they help to explain what we see.
You know, when we open the paper or when we look at follow the newsfeed, they help us to explain.
So it’s question of why and when, when we ask that question, we get to put progressively deeper layers of explanation, so to speak.
It’s a persuasive way of reasoning.
And I mean, Young was an amazing systems thinker.
What I discovered a couple of years ago, a colleague of mine came back from when they spent a weekend in London and just offhandedly mentioned that they visit the bookshop and bought a book by Young.
And I thought Young, I started philosophy, but I never read anything about Young.
I thought it was a crackpot or something.
And but that kind, you know, it was a small signal and I decided to hang on to it.
So I became, I’m not interested in young, but I thought I have to pay attention to that.
And so one day I drove down with my kids at the time, you know, to Switzerland.
We were going on summer holiday and I had an audio book, an introduction to young speaking.
Can you imagine which your which?
Your children loved listening to On the Way.
Yeah.
They would have loved that.
Yeah.
We had.
I was totally fascinated by what I, what I what I heard.
And then I read is, so to speak, autobiography, an amazing book which immediately confirmed to me the stature of Jung as a major systems thinker.
And there is such a beautiful passage at the at the very end of the book.
And he says, I’m astonished, I’m disappointed, I’m pleased with myself, I’m distressed, I’m depressed, rapturous.
I’m all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.
I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness.
I have no judgement about myself and my life.
There is nothing I am quite sure about.
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.
Yeah, this is goose pimple stuff.
But I mean, that’s so neat because that is young as well, right?
Because it’s all about the Ying and the Yang.
You need to go through the difficult moments and you grow.
But then it’s that push and pull, right?
I mean, that’s so much of what he talks about.
And it’s such a beautiful explanation actually, of life is that, and it’s being OK with that.
It’s the pinnacle of systems being from my point of view.
It’s the point where you’re unable to articulate worth or worthlessness.
I can sense that is the apex.
It’s not that I’m there, but it struck me as so unbelievably wise.
You know that that’s that’s where all the categories that we’ve built up about and for ourselves.
You know, yeah.
Right.
They just disappear that they dissolve.
And actually, even with how we are right now, with everything that’s going on, is it worthless or is there worth it?
Where is everything going?
Yeah.
So what I wanted to express is, yes, that idea of depth is a persuasive 1, but I’m also wedded to the opposite in a way, due to the idea that, you know, there is only surface, there is only images of jewel, like villages in the Alps, or, you know, it could also be a shantytown, you know, for that matter.
Whatever in a way exerts a fascination on us and invites us then in an effectual like process of discovery, and then where’s the depths?
I wouldn’t know.
I think that’s also very union.
There’s a line in your writing that stayed with me.
Some people sense that the question they are allowed to ask is not yet the question that matters.
And I just wonder, what are the questions that you think organizations and perhaps society more broadly, are still afraid to ask?
Well, what I’m sharing there is an observation.
It’s the observation that those questions aren’t being asked and it goes back to the 1.5% that I mentioned earlier.
Honestly, I’m not in a position to say what those questions are or ought to be.
That all be the kind of focus of our conversation and and to see what emerges from that.
What I tried to do in my work is tinkering with ways to create a space for these questions to find a legitimate expression in a way, and that that’s what my systems practice is about.
You could phrase it in more technical terms, in terms of the viable systems model.
For instance, Stafford Beer, he says, and again, it’s one of those kind of beautiful almost his pocket knives, intellectuals, his pocket knives.
He says any system that is viable, you know, that is able to maintain its integrity and existence in a in a changing environment needs to have a certain minimal set of functions.
It’s actually quite similar and with what Sarah is saying in a very different register, but and one of those functions is what he called the identity function.
The identity function is the place where we are able to ask those questions.
It’s the place where we really interface with the world around us.
The identity function is not only populated with people from within the organization, but also from outside of the organization.
So typically a board for instance, but it can also be other organizational forums or embodiments.
So a lot of my work is to convince clients that they need this kind of function and to help them to create the infrastructure to host it and to expand the language they are using to be able to ask those questions.
That’s the contribution.
I’m not asking the questions, I’m merely incentivizing them and sensitizing them to building the infrastructure to do so.
That’s basically what my work is about.
35:46
Building Works of Peace Through Trust and Vulnerability
And a lot of your work also seems connected to the idea of works of peace rather than domination, extraction or control.
So what do you think it means to lead or even live in a more life giving way today?
Well, the the expression works of peace is is when I borrowed in the in in in the in the piece that I wrote on Medium and published on Medium from Ottmar.
Ottmar was somebody I’ve met at this little village tenor.
He’s an amazing guy, but what he’s doing now, it is in his late 60s, you know, he’s running an elderly home.
To put it simply, it’s just beautiful social innovation project and he calls it Friedens Arbeit.
That’s the German word for works of peace.
I think it’s really beautiful.
From my point of view, what is really constitutive essential for works of peace is trust.
But, and that is something we have to acknowledge, the trust is always fragile.
That’s inescapable.
So if you want to hedge against opportunism and breach of trust, you already have crossed into the other side.
We can’t do that.
We can’t guard ourselves to being bruised, bruised in the experience of working in trust.
So that’s the kind of fundamental vulnerability I think that accompanies and that’s interpersonal in our relationships with other people.
But I think it’s also, and I mean, it’s not only I who think that, you know, there’s a, there’s a Italian philosopher, Federico Campagna, he wrote a book about 3-4 years ago.
It’s called Technic and Magic.
And there he argues that the vulnerability is ontological, is foundational for the way things work is belongs to the order of things.
And why that is.
That’s really an interesting question.
That is something that keeps me busy and I want to spend some more time on, you know, try to understanding that.
Yeah, Oh my goodness.
We have actually come to the end of our podcast.
But I before we do finish, is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you feel is important to say right now?
Maybe just a motto or something that struck me at some point about think about two years ago or something.
And I would express it as follows.
We’re not in control.
We are not thinking the ideas.
The ideas are thinking themselves through us.
That is an experience which I’ve been sensitive to.
That’s really beautiful.
So interesting.
And this is what I was going to say when we were talking about the synchronicity part of young just as we’re finishing as you were talking about Tena and as you were bringing to life the jewel like imagery.
And I live in Olinda and there’s all these churches all over the place.
And I often have podcasts at this time.
And usually the bells chime at certain times, but they chimed for so much longer today and they chimed at different times, which is so there must be something happening at the church.
But it’s so crazy because for I don’t think you could hear them because Zoom shuts this down.
But for about 20 minutes, the church bells were ringing at that time that you were talking.
And I know that that’s just so, but it’s it’s just that for me, just brought to life as you’re bringing to life this jewel like imagery.
And just, and then suddenly this outside force started coming in with these church fells.
Anyway, on that note, just to say it’s all.
Gosh, it is so incredible to chat with you.
Thank you for this energy.
I feel like I’ve just been injected with something to keep me going for the rest of the day.
So thank you for that.
Absolutely fascinating, really beautiful.
Yeah.
I hope we can do this again sometime soon.
To join you and engage in conversation with you and hope to continue it.
Me too, until next time all.
Right.
39:42
Wrapping Up: Book, Services, and Podcast Credits
Hey everyone, it’s Philippa again.
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now if you’d like to dive a little deeper, why don’t you check out my book Return on Humanity Leadership Lessons from all Corners of the world.
It reveals how putting people first is actually the smartest, most competitive business strategy of our time.
And if you’re ready to breakthrough disengagement, spark innovation and build agile, purpose driven teams.
Let’s talk.
Whether it’s workshops off sites, keynotes, or full scale leadership programs, we’ll shift paradigms and create the change you’re looking for.
Visit philippajwhite.com to learn more or get in touch.
A huge thanks to Benna Vieira for the music and to Pete Morgan for his help with the editing.
Until next time, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.
