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 problem was never that people aren’t resilient enough?
What if the real problem is that we’ve built a way of working that no human was ever designed to withstand, and then ask people to simply absorb it?
We talk about resilience as though it’s a personal quality, something you either have or need to go away and build by reading a book or doing a course.
But the goal is always to just keep going.
What happens when resilience becomes something we demand of people and end up making the cracks in the system their responsibility and not ours?
Welcome to episode 118 of Thai Unearthed.
My guest today is Kimberly Shaw, founder and principal of a change and transformation consultancy in Canada and someone who has spent 20 years inside the complex, high stakes organizational change.
Most of us only ever see the aftermath of mergers, restructures, system overhauls.
This is the work that looks clean on a slide but feels like whiplash to the people living through it.
Kimberly knows that world intimately.
She has the credentials you’d expect and track record of delivering change that genuinely lands.
But what makes this conversation matter is something she realized somewhere along the way, that in all our rushing towards speed and capability and results, the system forgot to consider the actual humans involved in all of this.
And that’s what we discuss in this conversation.
We talk about what she calls the bankruptcy of trust and safety.
What happens when organizations move so fast and design so poorly that people stop feeling any real connection to the decisions shaping their working lives.
We talk about resilience and how a word that was meant to describe care has been turned into a measure of compliance.
Kimberly shares a powerful metaphor drawn from her work with rescue animals.
What happened to a living thing when it’s denied exposure, stimulation and connection?
We explore why real, caring business isn’t the soft option at all and why people are not an add on to the strategy and what it might look like to build ways of working that regenerate people rather than extract from them.
So if you’ve ever felt the pull between the pace you’re being asked to keep and the human you’re trying to remain, then this conversation is for you.
Kimberly, welcome to Thai Unearthed.
Kimberly, thank you so much for joining us on Thai Unearthed from Toronto, the Great North.
I’m heading there in two weeks, actually.
I’ll be in Oakville and Hamilton.
I won’t actually.
Be in the road, Yeah, You’re in the you’re in the neighborhood.
The GTA ish.
Yeah, yes, exactly.
Gosh.
So to kick off, if you could just help us understand a little bit more about what your work looks like at the moment.
I’m founder and principal in a change in transformation consultancy.
So that’s what work looks like every day on the day.
And our work is really focused on hairy, messy, big change that tends to be really broad vertically and horizontally in organizations, very meaty assignments where we’re dealing a lot with a lot of cross functional requirements, a lot of leadership and stakeholder requirements, a lot of enablement needs that are broad, but in the workplace and also surrounded by lots of things that are happening outside the organization as well.
So lots of, you know, merger acquisition activities, lots of market pieces, lots happening as we well know politically and economically.
So it’s a pretty juicy place to be as far as work is concerned these days.
When we spoke, Oh my gosh, we could have spoken for five hours.
Very dynamic conversation.
You talked in quite a bit of detail about how you are working in this change and transformation area and it’s fast moving and high pressure.
At what point did you realize that something fundamental was being missed?
Yeah, that’s such a great question because I think we are at a very important and specific window in time, not just in relationship to change and transformation delivery, but where we are organizationally and as people, you know, in our world.
And what I mean by that is that given the size, scale and scope of the work that we do and all the factors that you just mentioned, you know, it’s at speed, it’s higher pressure, it’s demanding, we’re working with, you know, rapid decision making, not necessarily even always checking the quality of those decisions, which I I think is important.
What I’ve been seeing and observing, and this is I think part of the maturity of my own practice is that we are moving through a space that is designed to be capability driven.
You know, we’re here to enable skills, we’re here to drive knowledge and wisdom, but we’re also colliding with and maybe confusing ourselves with capacity and our ability to be able to perform consistently under these sort of circumstances and through these factors.
And it’s really giving me pause in terms of what we need to do not only from a practice perspective, but also maybe what we need to do just generally from a people perspective.
Yeah.
And that’s sort of one of the areas that I was interested to know your thinking because for many of the conversations that I have with the different clients that we work with, many times people turn around and sort of say, I know that we need to do this, but we’re just too busy and there’s just so much going on.
And the business as well just feels torn between having to work at pace and also just the tensions of sort of the quarterly results, but yet knowing hold on a second, but there’s real people at the core of all of this.
How do you approach those kind of conversations?
Yeah, that’s again, you know, you’ve nailed it.
There is this chasm, if you will, between, you know, that which we are.
And I think there’s an illusion in this too, and we’ll talk more about it, I know.
But there is discrepancy, right?
This gap, this chasm, as I mentioned, between organization and ironically the very people that populated, the very people that embody it, the very people actually that form it.
So I think what you’re calling out is this tension between that which we’re doing structurally, you know, systemically and organization processes and systems driven for sure in absolute increasing what I feel conflict with the relational structures.
The piece that you’re mentioning around people, right, the humans that actually not just do the work.
And I think there’s a key piece here in terms of how we’re treating people, but pulling those threats through the organization from decision, right, through governance, through innovation and ideation, through support, collaboration and cooperation all the way through to those ironically those results, right, those hard metrics that we’re driving at the end of the day.
And, and, and I agree with you, I think we’re prioritizing speed and results over some of those cultural components that are absolutely essential not just to individuals and teams, but to organizations.
Now it’s just sort of comment on that.
It’s, it’s interesting because sometimes the systems still haven’t built in the need for those pauses, for example.
And what we’re finding is it’s actually up to many of the people within the businesses to then build them in themselves to ensure that those pauses and that things slow down and build that into your calendar so that that can happen with more of these conversations and the work that we do, conversations that we have, it is actually also around, OK, how can you build that into the systems?
But if it hasn’t been built in yet, it’s a matter of, yes, you’re really busy, but how much are you actually taking control of that busyness and taking control of being able to slow things down, take control of it.
You don’t need to be a victim to that system.
Eventually, hopefully with sort of, you know, what you do and what I do, those systems can start to change, but we can also start to build in that space, I think.
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, there’s just so much that’s, you know, so wonderful in what you said there.
There is a phrase or a term we use in our practice called micro design.
And it really is honing in to that level of small intentional steps, small intentional changes, yeah, that we can take individually and even in the intimate teams that we work with to effect change.
And the beauty, I think in our work is that we do create or we have the opportunity to create these networks, you know, there are somewhat natural to the work that we do and can embody and influence those values and principles even at the level of that group or that work that we’re doing.
And there’s something interesting also in what you’re saying in the sense that, you know, in taking these steps and doing this level of micro design, I feel, and I’m curious, you know, what your thoughts are as well, that we’re revisiting elemental values and principles around trust, around safety, around some of the critical qualities and traits and right, the nature of the work that we do, but what needs to inform it in order to truly do it successfully?
And I have to admit that I am revisiting some of those assumptions because I am seeing in the networks that I’m working with that we do need to retrace steps.
We do need to take a couple of steps back and revisit our rules and revisit our ways of working and our desires and revisit those pieces that are so important in being human but also in moving us forward in the work again.
Totally trust is a huge part of what we and psychological safety and you know, it’s a big part of, of what we what we do as well.
You often get brought in when things aren’t quite going to plan, and I’m curious as to where do transformation efforts typically breakdown and what’s usually sitting underneath.
That, yeah, it goes back to this and you outlined it beautifully, where the priorities are.
You know, if you look at organizational priorities, they are very tied to performance and results that tend to be differentiated and divorced, I think from the people that are actually in the frontline or on the spots to deliver it.
I think it’s that relational component that we mentioned already.
Where the breakdown is, is that we are not truly keeping people at the center of what we do.
I think we talk a good game.
I think there’s some great language around it, but I don’t think that we are actually from the very outset, you know, at the at really at the in the heart, the nervous system of the organization pulling people through the org in terms of its changes, its transformations, its decisions, right, those results and outcomes.
And it also leans into that bankruptcy that we’re talking about, or what I’m calling is a bankruptcy of trust and safety.
We do have a deficit that’s been building and it’s almost biological, right?
We get a sleep deficit and then, you know, we think we’re going to sleep in on the weekend, right, and fill it in and going to fill that bucket up.
And it’s actually not that it’s much more detrimental if you really look at what’s happening within organizations, especially if you take a good look at what’s happening outside in our worlds, right?
What we’re coming into these organizations with, and I say we often live in the work we do at the initiative level.
What’s becoming more and more of a requirement, because we’re not looking at things relationally at the level of the work we’re doing is we’re having to spider out a bit more intentionally to really start having those conversations with the organization more strategically, have a better understanding of what’s informing the work of the values that we’re, we’re charting the results that we’re mapping, but also tying them in very much to what I call people metrics.
You know, those interactive collaborative, cooperative pieces that inform the work in terms of what we’re doing and are still as important from a capability standpoint as anything else that we’re doing.
Because ultimately where I go with this is we have to do it again and again and again, we have to build forward.
And that I think is not not necessarily what I think needs to or that we want to stop.
It’s how we are approaching it.
And to your point in slowing things down, if you will, slowing things down to effectively move forward again, to absorb change, to be able to try on skills, to be able to assess whether what we did is actually effective, to even understand what the outcomes might be in, in actions that we take that are unseen at the level of the work.
You know, we, we claim to have so much visibility.
And I would argue that when it comes to individuals and teams, it takes time.
We need that absorption.
Everything you might hear, you know, especially in our work is, is adoption, adoption, adoption.
And where I’m increasingly challenging that notion is, is qualities of adaptation and qualities of evolution that go behind that in order to inform the next thing.
Just to bring to life for our listeners who perhaps are running businesses or leading teams and we talked about trust a few times actually already and that being one of the areas that can really impact these transformation efforts.
Can you tell a story or bring to life kind of an example of what do you mean when trust breaks down?
So we work in as we said earlier some fast moving organizations and earlier when we spoke, we talked a lot about some of those trends.
You know one of them is M&A, what I call M&A mania and this is this drive to merge, to acquire, to become right, to actualize, to manifest, you know these views of organization that really are driven appropriately you would say from the decision layers in an organization.
So there is a lot that happens in those decisions.
And an example I’ll give you is where it’s not just a merger or an acquisition, it’s a series of integrations, it’s a series of cultural alignments.
It’s a series of process, right.
Let’s let’s do the listing.
And I’m sure people out there as you say that are in own own businesses recognize this, right?
There’s a lot of it happening and especially when a lot of our work tends to be enterprise level.
But what we have happening is that we have all of these activities, they are distinct, they’re investments, right?
They’re they’re created into initiatives.
They even form portfolios, even in programs of change and transformation.
But it’s still the same people that you see at the table every single time around around the same momentum and the same activities towards the same results that we’re driving.
So automatically what you see there is the reconstitution of people and talents and skills which are finite, required to continually return themselves to the work.
To me, what’s happening in that work is that there is so much of it happening and it’s happening at speed that we lose connection to the initial decisions that drive us.
There’s the complexity in the organizations which require acquire more and more those threads around transparency, visibility, communication, engagement and I mean the two way kind we know including feedback loops which again we keep coming back to this as well design, design, design.
So where there is a lack of design, I would correlate that to an increase in distrust because we have more and more spaces in which we have opportunities to disconnect, to misunderstand, to miscommunicate, to also be distanced, right?
We need to get further and further away from the heart and the brain of the organization.
So the muscle in my mind that’s required to bring people together is more important than ever, has to be strengthened and stronger than ever, right, To draw this mechanism, this Organism back in, regardless of where it’s manifesting, which is an important consideration that you know, we’ll touch on that too.
We’re really going back to your earlier comment.
There is that sort of question that I have about is it really the right direction in in all cases at that or at that scope or that size or that magnitude.
But where it comes down to capacity and capability as connected to what it is that we and I use, we very intentionally, not they, not I right.
We are trying to drive as an agreed and shared set of outcomes.
I think trust and safety absolutely have to be considered and that’s where I think the gaps are.
That’s where I think it erodes.
And to your excellent point, the more holes, the bigger the the holes, the more work there is to try and fill them again and make them functional again.
Yeah.
So this actually is a great segue to one of the sort of core themes that I’m wanting to unearth in my podcasts at the moment.
And it’s this talk about resilience in organization, which there’s two ways that you can see it. 1 is OK, we’re just going to get busier and busier and there’s going to be more problems and you just need to be resilient, which is not what we’re talking about when it’s being resilient.
That’s just not being human and not treating your people the way that they need to be treated.
My idea around and what I think we’re talking about when we’re talking about resilience is more about the landscape is just constantly changing.
And how can you as a leader, but also as somebody who’s working navigate this very a certain landscape that we’re just facing politically in our communities, in our work, et cetera.
But from the point of view of what you’re seeing, something isn’t quite working.
And I’m just wondering, you know, what is happening to people’s resilience right now?
Oh my gosh, I you know in resilience.
So I’ll take a step back and speak to my own complicit Ness and culpability in that because from a change transformation standpoint, we’ve been all about resilience for a long time and this idea of being able to build it as a capability.
And I’m going to go headlong into this conversation because I really am thinking that resilience is weaponized.
You mentioned and we.
Are here to look at.
Levels of individual and team empowerment.
You know, the micro or a design that’s needed, which I firmly believe in and and that I think is absolutely necessary because we’ve made resilience into I feel a compliance metric we have redesigned or I shouldn’t say redesigned, maybe bastardized, if I can use that word, resilience into an individual or a team level responsibility when in fact it is an organizational accountability.
So we are saying, I feel to people and I cannot wait to hear what people think about.
But where I’m digging in and digging in hard is that our work at the organizational level is about redirecting and reorienting this whole perspective.
We cannot from an organizational level, a leadership level, say we’re going to keep overloading you and your job is just to get better at taking it.
And we’re going to create because of our lack of, and I’m going to say great decisions, good planning, intentional design.
We’re going to create storm after storm after storm that you’re going to survive because you’re resilient, but we’re not going to take accountability for creating the storms to begin with.
So where I am really orienting and motivating forward around this notion or this sort of maybe toxic interpretation of resilience, because I do think resilience is a wonderful thing.
Is that it?
It is more about really great storytelling, really great transformational journeys, really great ways of working that sometimes go crazy and go wrong and sometimes can be amazing and go right.
But at the end of the day, it’s still about intentionally designing environments that nurture and support and more importantly, regenerate people.
It’s interesting, in a session that we had recently with one of our clients, a lot of it was actually focused on self-awareness.
And it was really great when one of the leaders, the team leader said, gosh, how incredible is this?
Because self-awareness has always been seen as something that’s just for the individuals and for the sort of self help area.
But this is actually one of the first times that I’ve seen this in a business environment.
And I feel like this is really filling a hole that has been missing.
And just from the point of view of resilience and just what you’re talking about, because so much of it is mindset.
Well, so much of it from the point of view of, yes, first of all, you need to get the systems right and you need to get the the way that you treat this right, 100%.
That’s a non negotiable.
But let’s just move beyond that because there’s always going to be challenges in our personal life.
There’s going to be challenges in our work life and so much of this rests in how we are able to embrace the unknown.
And even when it comes to things like curiosity, that is actually embracing the unknown and different people embrace it in different ways.
But so much of it is when something happens to you, there’s kind of 2 doors that you can open.
One is that of I’m a victim and I’m or I’m just not even going to open that door.
I’m going to close it and I’m not going to move forward.
And you know, I can’t move forward.
Another is OK, I’m going to open this up and see where this can take me.
I do think that there’s an element of you need to create your space.
Yes, it needs to be the systems.
And that’s another part, you know that systems change and that that needs to happen.
But even before then, our ability to know ourselves, know what is right, know what we’re going to take, know what we’re not going to take.
I mean, at the end of the day, if you’re working in a place that the people are not treating you like human beings and you are being exploited completely, having good enough self-awareness, this will allow you to then say I’m not doing this anymore.
This is not okay.
So I mean, the self-awareness is important to that point too, but being able to deal with the changes that none of us have control over, So much of that also comes down to self-awareness.
So anyway, just to sort of complement what you’re saying.
22:13
No, I think it’s a great, you know, you have me chewing here because there is a bit of a jolt here.
There is a bit of a poke.
And I think we’re recognizing it even in this conversation that we’re having, right?
Is this need to be able to be self aware, as you say, to create boundaries, to navigate and negotiate them.
The thing that I see as important with that and, and, and I bring it back to again, you know, going back to micro design and what we’re trying to do in the change networks that we’re creating is to remind people first and foremost that we can and should do that to create representation in an examples of how we might do that.
Because I think you raise a piece there that’s important is that when we are in the machine, I’ll call it, or when we’re doing this stuff over and over and over again at speed, at scale, we tend to also not practice certain muscles.
We lose our ability, we lose certain skills.
We don’t see representations of ourselves, we can shrink.
So to your point about curiosity and even just performance in general, what we’re seeing and what we’re trying to ignite or reignite is not only that’s how we would like to work, but these are ways in which we can do it.
And we’re, we’re creating safe and trusted spaces in which to do that, where at least we have a sliver of experimentation so that we can build the results and then demonstrate them outward and expand that view.
But it’s also because, you know, you look at, for example, not eating for a while and you’re starving, but you also are unable to eat a huge meal even if you want to.
So you have to take sort of these bites and it has to taste good and it has to incite you and it has to sort of whet that appetite.
And So what we’re seeing is just this need to kind of, again, like I said earlier, take a few steps back, reframe the rules of engagement, redraw them, re suggest them, keeping in mind that, you know, we’re still there to achieve results and and ideally more shared outcomes, that we’re there to do jobs, we’re there to do things, you know, with the organization.
But these are the calls to action that we’re trying to generate as we build into, as you say, you know, this increased awareness and then ways to apply it.
Yeah, when we last spoke, actually, I think we started on this conversation, which was hilarious.
I don’t know how we got onto dogs even before we got into work, but we did start talking about dogs before work.
I think maybe my dog barked or some your dog barked, I can’t remember.
Anyway, it was funny actually, because it it got us talking about a metaphor, how without exposure and stimulation and connection, dogs struggle to function.
And obviously you as someone who looks after rescue dogs, you see the results of of this abuse that dogs face and what happens as a result.
And I’ve also taken on board a dog that was also in a situation that was abandonment for and not treating the dog, how the dog should be treated and not leaving the house for sort of eight months.
And what happened to that dog?
And I’m still seeing the results of that.
And I’m trying desperately to kind of get this anxiety out of this golden retriever, which is slow, but it’s happening.
Where do you see that same pattern playing out in us as humans at?
You’re raising a subject and a topic and an activity that’s super close to my heart.
And I think that that does reflect really well in my professional life.
It’s also lots of work that’s close to my heart, you know, as far as people are concerned.
And when we were talking about this whole notion of rescue and where I build that alignment relative to practices, that the dogs that enter the systems that I work with and retrieve them, frankly, are already traumatized in some way, shape or form a little or a lot.
Some of them are even deemed unrecoverable, which I’m a firm believe.
I don’t believe in that.
So maybe that’s a bias as well that informs everything I do.
I just refuse it.
I reject it.
But I think where I would lean into this sort of metaphor is that I’m fascinated constantly that, you know, as dogs are quote UN quote sheltered, which I put in heavy quotation marks.
And I look at organizations similarly as institutions, as structures, right, as systems that are designed for our best outcomes.
But sometimes they’re not.
And obviously in rescue, there could be very detrimental outcomes that hopefully, you know, we don’t see happening in organizations.
But I think again, where I translate that experience is that I’m always amazed that when we rescue and in your case, you know, work to recover, these animals were always amazed that they’re not performing immediately, that they’re not turning around and becoming these ideal companions.
And these, you know, specimens right within, you know, and I think they use the 333 rules and I.
Said one year and a half, but anyway, yes.
And I think what we’re getting at, you mentioned the word slow is this tension between moving fast, delivering rapidly, thinking of organizations in this case, you know, achieving results with speed.
And yet some of the things that we’re necessarily working with at the level of people with dogs takes time.
It’s a recovery, it’s a restitution.
I use the word regeneration.
I really believe that we need room for regeneration in the work.
We need to integrate activities.
And I think it performs, it forms part of our our wisdom, frankly, and our integrity as beings.
You know, I think dogs can in this case even be be better.
So can we.
But I think it comes just back to the fact that we expect performance.
We expect, you know, from people who are in a deficit to be innovative, to be performative.
And that’s just not the case.
So again, back to these invitation.
And I think I think rescue has taught me that we can still be in these sheltering, you know, environments.
We can still be in these organizations and we can still be working for what works best for us and what’s good for us.
And it’s going to take time.
It’s so interesting because just a quick analogy still on this dog issue, just, but it’s, it’s for me.
I’m, I’m going to post about it at some point just because it’s something that was a real kind of aha moment for me, which shouldn’t have been because I mean, I talk about this all the time and it’s a big part of my book, but it’s rooted in connection and belonging.
So I, I have two male dogs, one who’s been with us for seven years and the other one that’s new and it’s this golden retriever who was abandoned and high anxiety.
So this dog arrived and was just a crazy energy and obviously, you know, marking territory all over the place.
As a result, we had to kind of keep him in the kitchen and then the other dog could be free.
But then automatically they’re being treated differently.
And the golden retriever who already felt abandoned, wasn’t feeling part of the unit, very quickly noticed that how he was being treated was different.
And I, you know, I’m so much training and even went away for training and then came back and, but still there were a few niggles.
The behaviour was very slow.
And then I had this realization because one, the dog that we had, he sleeps in our bedroom, not in our bed.
I’m not one of those people, but sleeps in our bedroom.
And so I was like, you know what?
I’m just gonna try this.
I’m gonna bring the other dog in to sleep in our bedroom as well and just see if that just fixes things.
He’s still high energy still, you know, there’s still a lot that we still need to do.
But the marking territory stopped the so much of the really anxious behavior stopped.
And I suddenly realized, oh, my goodness, that is the power of connection and belonging.
And it’s so incredible because the moment that people feel a part of something, their behavior changes.
And yes, it’s slow and that, you know, if you’re, you know, but I just for me, that was a huge.
And I mean, we’re all beings, right?
Not human beings, but we’re all beings and we all thrive in the same way in our personal lives and in our day-to-day lives.
And businesses shouldn’t be any different.
Oh my gosh, you know, as usual, you know, you say something and 100 things come to mind.
You know, wonderfully, you know, I really agree with you, this notion of connection.
I think fundamentally what we see is as again, we mentioned starvation earlier, right?
We’re starving people through the ways of working that we’ve described of meaningful connection.
And I think what you’re getting at too is, you know, the results of that healthy stimulation, problem solving, learning about our interpersonal dynamics.
There’s a lot of social education.
So you look at the offshoots of that conflict resolution, negotiation, navigation, a lot of the things that I really think are fundamental and by the way also a bit derelict in our working experiences, especially when you look at cross generational and multi generational pieces, the complexity of the environments we’re in, they demand connection.
Absolutely.
I agree with you.
And I think that, you know, we sit there wondering, you know, why, why is this happening?
I would argue that 99.9% of the time there is a human thread there, it’s typically interactive.
It’s at the level of communication and connection.
And it’s because of the deficits that are created by not doing these things, right?
We don’t have that understanding.
And I know, you know, your example is amazing.
Simple action.
Again, just an action that is just a well, why not?
What if could we?
And there you have it.
I think the room needs to be created, you know, in conjunction with being a little slower, it’s also being more intentional to create the space to be able to try things on, to experiment, to get to the results that, let’s be honest, we all want those dogs.
Our dogs want to be OK.
Nobody wants to be distressed.
We all want those things whether we even consciously or unconsciously admit it or not, because we see the results when it happens.
So I think there is a level of honesty, there’s a level of honestly fact checking, you know, that goes with this.
There’s, there’s a requirement for us to get to get real at the level of our work to really seize this opportunity, especially with the pressures of high tech.
And, you know, everything that we’ve mentioned that are that are influencing people.
Just want to add something else that I think plays into this is that we can’t have rhetoric around cultures of care and, you know, bringing your whole person to work without doing the due diligence as to what that really means and requires when we’re inviting worlds into our efforts.
It’s ridiculous.
And so it’s really again, back to that intentionality, back to that design, back to those gestures, trust, safety, everything that’s going on.
We can’t make at least these spaces where we spend so much time intimately working with people under great stress sometimes and great speed, as we mentioned.
Where are we doing it?
And and so to me, it’s become a bit of a mission, to be quite frank.
Yeah, you’ve reached a point in your career where there’s a certain freedom to say what others won’t, which I just.
It’s so freeing, isn’t it?
I mean, it’s just wonderful.
So let’s go there.
What are we not being honest about in business right now?
Yeah.
And I think we’ve been pretty upfront so far in a conversation.
So, so I love that.
I love that it’s foundational.
I think we’re not being honest about the fact that the current pace and type of work that we are undergoing is fundamentally incompatible with being human.
I think we are seeing it play out in terms of especially Wellness, welfare, those kinds of pieces that I think really confront us at the level of persons.
And if you see that playing out and you know, macro systems, politically, socially, etcetera, etcetera, there’s evidence all around us, right, that we have an issue there there.
So I, I think we need to stop pretending that we can have exponential growth, that we can play to constant transformation and have healthy people in our organizations all at once without changing how we operate, full stop.
I think that is a dishonest rhetoric that a lot of us and, and I hold myself also part of that in terms of what we promote, right, when we say, and it’s in our mission as part of our organization, you know, people are at the center of what we do.
OK, what does that mean really, truly, let’s let’s get down to it.
I guess what I think we’re lying to ourselves about is that putting people first, putting people at the center of what we can do can coexist, right.
With some of these drivers or some of these, and I’ll say lovingly, leadership requirements, but I would say dereliction of design in operations and organization.
So where I’m really being bolder, hopefully and more intentional our own actions is even in our ways of working to be less extractive, more regenerative and to actually keep calling into view what human centric leadership actually looks like and not have it be a theater.
It’s it’s theater.
Otherwise we’re just doing, doing, doing right and performing.
And we’re already seeing that that’s not not possible to sustain.
Yeah.
You’ve spoken about the importance of understanding the systems we’re a part of, not just operating within them, and we’ve talked about that already.
When you look at the world right now, what do you think we’re participating in that we’re not questioning enough?
35:16
Oh boy, that’s a mouthful.
And I’ll take a step back.
Another big part of of the work that I do is, is around DEIB.
So diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, which are also in my mind again revealing my own bias, fundamental to how we behave and engage and how we acknowledge people in each other.
And I think that we are operating in systems that are intentionally aggressive about removals, even at the level of language, you know, dysregulating and deregulating systems, challenging these notions of what it means to be human, but also to be respected, to be valued, to be understood, to be identified, frankly.
And it’s playing out, I think en masse in many places around our world.
So I think there is increasingly, and this is more going into my view of personal, even though I would argue that there’s very little that separates me personally from what I do professionally and especially as I get older, as we said.
But I do think there are important calls to action.
And, and I think because of how prevalent these challenges are, what I’m heartened by, what I think is a great opportunity is that there’s so many places to act.
You know, pick something, pick something that’s near and dear to you.
Maybe it’s dogs, maybe it’s something in the community.
And I am speaking, by the way, to a lot of professionals that are really reorienting back to their neighborhoods, to their blocks, to their people, to their tribes, and not in an exclusionary way, but making individual and local decisions about what’s important to do.
Again, these little acts of demonstration, these micro designs, these ways of doing.
And I think that can be translated as well to work.
We spend an awful lot of time there.
So maybe it’s something as compassionate as making yourself available for a certain amount of time per week to help someone if they want to know something more about what you do or what they need to know more about to do their work.
Maybe it’s something as simple as as creating a feedback loop in which, you know, teams can assess and analyze openly whether their ways of working are appropriate or not.
Maybe it’s giving grace when somebody needs a break and realizing, right, for whatever the reasons may be that they need to step away or step apart in order to rejoin you.
Again, I’m doing that myself.
Just putting on a different set of glasses, you know, using a new set of lens to be able to kind of see people as opposed to just acting with them or organizing with them.
It’s again the setting these standards.
This is what I value.
I would love to know more about what you value and how we can make this work together so that we’re achieving the things that we hope to do on behalf and with the organization.
But what, what do we want to get out of this?
But I think the macro is so interesting and I’m using that very neutrally.
But you know, to me, even concerning that, I think the micro level of our ability to agitate and represent is becoming even more important because we have more control over it, right?
We can do that.
You can embrace it, Yeah.
And, and actually, I think it’s really interesting back to what you did comment on earlier just about that intentionality.
And I think one, we have a lot of power, more power than we probably have been allowed to think we have.
And also live your life intentionally.
You know, you don’t need to wait for someone else to do something for you or for something to happen.
You can do what you feel you need to do and you can take those small actions.
And I and I just think sometimes we get stuck in that sort of the routine of life or in the sort of day-to-day.
And also just maybe we haven’t back to sort of the self-awareness, actually, we haven’t sometimes allowed ourselves to realize what is it that we want.
You know, we’ve kind of followed what our families have suggested we need to do with our lives or what work has suggested we need to do within work or what our culture has suggested we need to do.
But have we really stopped to think about what makes me happy, what makes me me, what makes me excited?
And you can do the things outside of work that can make you feel like that you can do things within work and be more intentional.
As you know, go to your line manager, say that you’re looking for whatever that might be to fill your cup.
So it comes to that intentionality, I think it’s so, so, so important.
It really is you know, there’s a piece in there that triggers is this idea of legacy as well.
You know, as I look at maturity and growth, we’ll call it maturity, at least aging because we because it’s inevitable.
But it’s this view also of not just looking behind you, but what do you want to represent?
What do you want to be known for?
If somebody were to talk about you when you’re not in the room, what are they saying?
And in my case, probably that’s consistent with getting older.
I care less and less about what that may be relative to what’s in front of me and how I know that I’m incapable and culpable of performing.
So I think it does start, I think you, you make a really great point, just recentering that self-awareness that that you referenced earlier.
I think there is an absolute requirement and need for an invitation.
I look at the word invitation differently these days.
It’s just what are we inviting each other to do and are we remaining open to the consequences of that?
We don’t always get what we asked for.
We don’t.
You mentioned the unknown, the unknown earlier in our conversation.
But remaining open and curious and hungry and trusting and safe, I think what we’re circling around are the requirements to actually get at the heart of what it is that we need to do to solve these kinds of problems that we’re talking about.
That’s it.
Can you leave people with a challenge or a truth about what it really means to put humanity back at the center?
Or a quote.
I don’t think it would be a quote.
I’m terrible at that.
I should be better at it, actually.
But what I would say is that a lot of what is informing this conversation and others that I’m having is this notion of care and that real care isn’t soft.
It’s not about avoiding hard conversations or lowering our standards.
It’s rigorous.
It’s intentional.
It takes immense discipline and work.
It takes investment and it’s about holding others while holding ourselves.
So my invitation, if we want to use that word or they’re my last thoughts would be let’s not equate this work, this human centric design or efforts that we do with a lack of ambition.
It might actually be the most ambitious thing we can ever do.
Oh.
My gosh, I love that.
Is there anything that we haven’t explored that you feel people need to hear right now?
I think we’re not add-ons.
I just want to, you know, the last thing I would say is that, you know, people aren’t add-ons.
We’re not just these cogs and you know, and gears.
We’re baseline requirements for everything and not just at work, but I think everywhere on the planet, on the globe, we are sustainability and our capability is everything that informs that.
So we’re not add-ons.
We’re at the center of everything that we do.
Thank you for joining me Kimberly.
I I could do this for hours and we will do it again.
I just really appreciate your time.
It is always so gratifying to speak to a like minded soul, so thank you.
Thank you so much for the invitation and and here’s to more.
Here’s to the work.
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.
