Navigating Uncertainty: Team Resilience And Foresight With Kian Gohar

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

You guys are gonna love My conversation today with Kian Gohar. He is a futurist who inspires organizations to harness the power of possibility and innovation to build transformative futures. A former executive director of the XPRIZE Foundation and Singularity University, Kian has coached the leadership teams of dozens of Fortune 500 companies on innovation, moonshot leadership, and the future of work. His latest bestselling author— bestselling book co-authored with Keith Ferrazzi, Competing in the New World of Work, reveals the most effective hybrid team leadership strategies of the pandemic era. He is the co-founder of GeoLab, an innovation research, coaching, and leadership development firm. You're gonna love this conversation. I know I did. Please enjoy it. All right, Keon, I wanna know, Having probably heard your bio, heard your own introduction more times than you can recall, I'm always curious what's not written in the bio and that you'd like people to know about you. So that's my first question for you is what's not a part of that beautiful introduction of you and things you've done in your life that you would love for people to know about you at the outset?

Well, thanks so much for having me on the show, Adam. That's a very kind question to lead off with and maybe a softball. I think what I'd say probably is that I have been too courageous for my own good throughout my life. And what I mean by that is I've taken decisions and gone in pathways that go against the typical career grain and have oftentimes found myself in fascinating stories that I'm grateful to have lived to tell the stories about, but don't always necessarily in retrospect seem to be the smartest thing to do. So from traveling to over 100 different countries, from North Korea to all across, camping across Africa, to deciding to go against the grain in my career and my choices. That has been a wildly rich life, and I'm very grateful for that, but an unusual one. And that brings us to a place where we have the flexibility to learn constantly and to adapt, in your language, to be resilient whenever we face adversity. And that's something that I'm very proud of, but oftentimes gets skipped in the bio.

Interesting. Hey, you know what? Let's just jump right into how do you define resilience? Because as you said, I speak about it regularly. It's kind of my bag. But why we have this show, at least in part, is because we want to get a sense of how other people have really defined it for themselves and developed it in their professional and their personal lives. Let's get right at it. How do you define resilience?

So maybe I can give it in the context of what I think about resilience is I wrote a book earlier this year called Competing in the New World of Work, which was looking at the best leadership practices that the most successful teams of the pandemic era demonstrated. So we interviewed over 2,000 teams from across the world, and we were trying to better understand what were those characteristics that allowed them to thrive in a world of uncertainty. And we pattern matched them into 4 key characteristics, and one of those was resilience. And what we found was that everybody comes to Life with different levels of individual resilience. Some people have more financial resources to deal with complexity and uncertainty. Some people have more social and family resources. What matters in, at least in the team setting, is the level of resilience that the team has together to be able to overcome obstacles and cross the finish line together. From a perspective of accomplishing great goals as a team, how do you do that? I think resilience is something that is learned over time. It's not something that you can instantly learn, but it is a practice that people develop after, I guess, many years of putting themselves into growth opportunities. But one thing that I think is really clear is that you have to learn how to measure resilience. And unless you know how to measure it first, then you can't really improve it, whether it's your own state of mind, or whether it's your teams, or whether it's your organizations. And so being able to identify how do you diagnose and measure it, And then how do you model that kind of behavior? How do you reinforce it? How do you incentivize it? Those are all the things that I'm really interested in as it pertains to team resilience.

Yeah, it's so interesting that you threw me a softball. I'll tell you that, Kian, because we have a resilience assessment tool that we've used for a bunch of years and had a lot of leaders, thousands and thousands actually globally, take this resilient leader assessment. Takes like 3 minutes, 16 questions. For those of you You don't have to wait for the show notes. It's simple. It's rankmyresilience.com. You can go there and take your own and get your own score. But I think it's really important, thanks for the softball, that we have a baseline to sort of work from. Because if you're trying to improve anything, it doesn't matter whether it's your golf score or it's how well you play the piano or even parent, how well you communicate with your partner, any of these things, I mean, those are more difficult to sort of measure in a really objective way. But if we start with a baseline, if we start Knowing where we're strong and where potentially we're weak, I think we're starting with more awareness to begin with, self-awareness, and then we can do something about it. Do you agree with that?

100%. That self-awareness is critical. And oftentimes in our own lives, we have blind spots into how we operate. We can see how others— we can observe very powerfully others, whether it's family or loved ones or teammates or colleagues, but it's really hard to have that level of self-observation. Having an assessment like you suggest is a great way to unpack some of those blind spots. And the second way I really like is doing like a 360, oftentimes asking loved ones, trusted ones, friends, colleagues, what am I really good at? What am I not good at? And asking them maybe even to write that up even anonymously. And so being able to really better see sort of like where our blind spots are is really hard for us to do. Yeah. And so having some sort of measuring diagnostic like you suggest, like an assessment, Is a great way to figure out where you're at and where you need to get better at. And sometimes I think the answer is, now I see that I'm not so particularly good at this particular part of my life, but do I need to be good at it in order to achieve my goal? Then the next question is like, well, where do I need to really improve upon in order to meet the goal that I want to have? Rather than saying I need to increase my level of X on 10 different dimensions. The assessment is key, I think, and then prioritization of like, okay, where do I wanna go and what's really important for me to get good at to get there?

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other Free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Kiana, I want to kind of track 2 separate things that you said earlier with regard to developing resilience. You said that there's sort of individual resilience and some people are born with some added resilience, let's call it. Maybe they've got Wealthy parents that might help them to be resilient. We know that money actually can solve a lot of things. Can't solve perhaps the most profound issues in our lives. We find that out for sure, but it can make things go away. It can pave a road for sure, literally and figuratively. So there's that individual resilience. And then there's team resilience where you talked and alluded to the fact that this is something that has to be learned. It's not something the team is automatically endowed with, let's say. I would like to get more specific about both of those things. So with respect to individual resilience, what has your research suggested about what makes people resilient or not, more so or less so? Can they, in your opinion— I have my own, but I'm really more interested in yours— can they learn to be resilient? Can they actually be trained to be more resilient individually? And then on a team side, sort of same question, but now you get a collection of 5 or 10 people together. How do you help them as a collective develop team resilience? So 2 parts to that.

I'll answer the first one, the individual resilience question, from a personal perspective, because all my research around the topic has been around the team focus. I don't have research-backed data to give you on the individual side, but I'll share with you anecdotes about my own life and how things have made me resilient. And I think personal growth is in putting yourself in situations where you're constantly going outside your comfort zone. is an area that gives you flexibility, adaptability, and stronger individual resilience skills. I deeply believe in that. That's sort of like what stretches us and allows us to accomplish great things in life. Just an example, I was 24 years old, and one of these decisions I alluded to earlier in the podcast was I was deciding to go to business school and had received an amazing opportunity. I was admitted to Harvard Business School, and I turned it down. And everybody thought that was the craziest thing one could possibly do because so many people's dream is to go to Harvard Business School. And I thought, well, actually, I think it'll always be there. It's been there for, you know, a couple hundred years. It'll be there for a few more years. And I had received this other opportunity. I had won an international fellowship by the Henry Luce Foundation to spend a year living and working in China. This is in 2002. So 20 years ago, China was still evolving and developing from a century of growth and really becoming the economic powerhouse that it is today. So it was a very dynamic opportunity to spend a year living and working in China. At the time, I was working in venture capital and I was a faculty member at a local business school. So this opportunity came up and I jumped at it and everybody thought I was crazy to turn down Harvard. I said, well, actually, this is going to help me grow more than going to an academic institution, which will always be there. And what I learned was when I was in China, I really struggled because not many people at the time spoke English. The firm I was posted at for the year, nobody spoke English, and so I had to learn Mandarin. And I felt for the first time my entire life as a white person living in a billion-three country of Chinese people that I was the outsider. And so learning how to overcome struggles and daily challenges and shopping and putting myself in a very foreign environment really stretched me. And I'm grateful for that because it taught me how to be able to accomplish even minor daily tasks that might completely go upside down and not let that faze me. This is just a personal example of like a decision I made to really grow individually, and that was early in my life and early in my career, and I think it's kind of hardwired my brain for how I approach decision-making. So that's sort of like on the individual side. On the team side, resilience really is critical to helping everybody overcome obstacles. Like I said earlier, you come to work with different levels of resilience. Some people are doing great one day, and next day, You know, they're not doing well. And how you feel at a work setting on a daily basis is different than how your colleague might feel. And so we typically, in leadership settings and team settings, rely entirely on our manager to help us solve problems. If we can't solve a problem, we go to them and say, can you help us solve the problem? The reality is that's just not always possible. And over the last 2 years of the pandemic era, we realized that everybody struggles in different ways. For the first time in our lives, we were able to see, really see into each other's living rooms like you and I are seeing right now. in a work setting and see sort of what's going on in the background and not have this veneer that's sometimes superficial in the work world. And we were able to see what was really a struggle. The key learning we had was that team managers and team leaders have to become really good at making sure that the team is resilient. No matter what comes at them, they're able to help each other, coach each other to success, to accomplish the goal. That's what great teams do. Let me give you an example. And there was this woman by the name of Crystal Zell. She was the chief customer officer of The Home Depot, and she had a team that she was managing. And early in the pandemic, she realized that people were really struggling emotionally for all the reasons that we know about. And she came up with a very elegant solution, an assessment, if you will, but a very virtual, easy-to-do assessment to try to better understand where her team's level of resilience was. And she would ask them on a Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low, 10 being high, to just type into chat on Zoom, what's your energy level today? And over the course of a few weeks of doing this, she started seeing patterns emerge from her team members. Mary was typically like a 2. John was usually like a 4. And in the event that one week that assessment by Mary spiked from her baseline of 2 to like a 7, that led the team manager, Crystal, to better understand that there was something going on. In this person's life, whether personally or professionally, that was a block. And so that was the first step, this assessment, like, if you will. And the second thing is, how can we now try to coach each other to try to solve that problem? Because I, as the team manager, can't help solve every single problem. How can we help each other to really develop the skills to help deblock and some of those challenges that we face on an individual level on a team basis? I think this is a very, very powerful tool to think about. How do we think about, A, measuring diagnosis in a very casual way, much more casual than an assessment that you suggest and trying to better understand what's going on in people's lives and then try to unblock that. Because that level of team resilience is so critical to accomplishing goals that if you're not able to figure out how the team can challenge and really solve those problems, you'll get stuck in the muck.

I'm curious and fascinated, actually. Are you suggesting that in order to create team resilience, that the team members have to be actively engaged In helping each other solve their individual challenges.

100%. I recently—

I love that. Let's just unpack that a little bit. 'Cause I mean, I think that's actually pretty controversial if somebody's on a team and they're listening to this and go, well, listen, I get my shit together. I work on myself and it's not easy. It's kind of ugly, but I come to work prepared to do whether it's virtual work or hybrid work or in the office, but I show up ready to play, ready to go. So you're telling me that even though I have my shit together, I'm supposed to— there's 4 other people on my team. I have to also make sure they're ready to go.

Absolutely. That's what makes high-performing teams high-performing. If you take this analogy and apply it to athletes on a team relay, whether it's like a track and meet relay or swimming relay, or, or even if you're a doubles tennis team and you come to the track or to the pool or to the tennis court every day individually ready to rock, but your teammate has some challenges, you're gonna suffer. So it doesn't matter how good you are as an individual. It matters how good the team is. And so how do you make your team stronger to overcome those deficiencies that they might face that day, whether they have a sloppy backhand or whether they are cramping in the pool or on the track? Think about how we try to win as a team in athletics. It's always we're trying to lift each other up and we're trying to help each other get that best part of us out. It's not just the individual capability. That's sort of like baseline, necessary but not sufficient. And we really have to go out and be able to help our teammates do their best as well so that we as a team can achieve. And that's really the key, is peer-to-peer coaching. So I wrote this book, Competing in a New World of Work, with my dear friend Keith Ferrazzi, and he's interviewed thousands of teams, high-performing teams, to better understand what were the things that really mattered. And this key component of peer-to-peer coaching to help each other overcome individual obstacles is critical. That, I think, might be something that might be more comfortable with in an athletics analogy, But in a corporate or team or business analogy, how do we do that? How do we create the psychological safety for us to be able to feel that we can share positive advice to help each other get better rather than thinking that this is potential criticism? And the first step really is to develop that level of psychological safety and trust and deeper relationships to know that people are coming at this from a good place and they're not just gonna be critical. Right. There are a couple other things you have to do before you start having this conversation of, How do we get better as a team in terms of resilience? But it's absolutely critical. But I'm curious, why do you think it's controversial that this is what I just said?

Well, I mean, I don't know that it is, but I'm thinking, putting myself in the ears of the people listening to this or watching this right now and thinking again, this idea that I have enough on my plate, just getting my whole house in order, my life in order, that added responsibility, Not something I'm getting compensated for. I'm gonna be the angel's advocate here. You know, it's one thing if you're playing for the New York Yankees or the Celtics, or you're on an Olympic team or something, and the stakes are high and the reward is tremendously high. These are multimillion-dollar athletes, or there are multimillion-dollar opportunities for a personal brand or team brand, team recognition, et cetera, et cetera. And so to perform at a high, high level, in a relay race in the Olympics or to play in the NBA Finals, you understand that there's this interdependency and interdependent responsibility that's also being rewarded in a particular way. I think in the average workplace, that may not be the perception that that's the case, that the stakes aren't as important or as high. And certainly my own personal benefit from that play, if you will, isn't the same as what the millions and millions of dollars that some of these other folks are getting paid. But there's one other thing that came up for me too, which is where I really went in my thinking, which is that a manager or even a senior-level leader asking their team for information about how they're doing, I think is in part an issue that's going to drive this point. And then I want to ask you about it. When you ask somebody how they're doing, I mean, I think For the most part, you're expecting to hear the, you know, it's almost like a social contract where I go, oh, fine, or good, or hanging in there. And how you doing? You go back and forth, but nobody's really transparent about too much. Nobody's really revealing too much. And not because we're not interested. There's a Jackson Browne line from one of his songs that says, maybe people only ask you how you doing because that's easier than letting on how little they could care. Now, It's a beautiful line. It's a bit cynical. I don't believe that's the case. When you ask somebody, let's say you're a manager, you ask somebody on the team, or you're just a member of the team, you ask somebody else, one of your team members, how you doing? And they say something like, I'm really struggling. You know, I had trouble getting outta bed this morning. I'm getting up in the middle of the night. I can't get myself back to sleep. You know, I'm having anxiety. I'm, my thoughts are, are going to some pretty dark places. You ask somebody a question like, how you doing? And if what we're saying is that we're gonna get involved in helping people to overcome their challenges and they're gonna be transparent, somebody might say, hey, I don't have any training with that question. If somebody says to me, hey, I'm having trouble at home with my marriage, it's like, what? We have 10 minutes between— we got another Zoom starting in 10 minutes. We're just getting a coffee or a virtual coffee together. It's like, I'm not prepared for that. What do you say to that team member? Who feels like in over their head, or they're not, it's not their responsibility, or it's too big a responsibility, or like I said earlier, maybe they're not even being, don't even feel like they're being compensated enough to take on anybody else's problems.

Those are great questions. I wanna go, I'll answer both of them. Maybe you asked one question, but I wanna comment on the initial, the first part, which was the lower level of investment that everyday work has compared to a high-performing team. whether let's say it's in athletics or the NBA or the Olympics. And all I can say, isn't that just a shame that we have such low expectations of how we show up to work and show up to treat each other? And even if we are not in the Olympics, but we are in the Olympics of work on our team trying to achieve something great, isn't that just a shame that we have such low expectations of ourselves and our colleagues? Everybody wants to achieve excellence. They just don't oftentimes the right environment or the tools or the skill set to be able to do that. But imagine even if at the everyday workplace, your team shows up and you're committed to each other's success, you're committed to each other's well-being and kindness and excellence, and you show up every single day with that mindset. It doesn't matter if you work at a small company or a small team, you'll still achieve remarkable success. I just really want to help everybody who's listening or watching this to think that This isn't about being an Olympic champion or being an NBA player championship team. It's the NBA of your team. And how do you every single day show up and make sure that you guys are committed to each other's success, whatever that, as you might suggest, a smaller task or goal may be. Now, to your point about not being prepared to be able to challenge or be able to deal with some of these blocks that people might suggest, I think I'd say 2 things. One, Listening is just as important as having a solution. Oftentimes hearing your calling out is a very therapeutic, empathetic situation, and they're more likely to just want to have themselves heard rather than having a solution for you to offer to them. So even if you don't have the skill set to be able to, say, deal with a particular personal challenge that they might be facing, just being there to listen is something that is very powerful. The second thing is I'd say is that the right question matters. Asking the right question matters. You said, how are you doing? It's almost a throwaway, and most people just say, fine, I'm doing great. And like, they just don't wanna respond to that question any way that is transparent. I think as a team manager, thinking about how do you ask that question to develop an aperture to how your team is doing is really critical. One tool that we use in our work is an interpersonal question at the beginning of a meeting, and people can answer this in any way they want, personally, professionally, but the extent that they lean into it is the extent that they want their team get to know them, how they're doing. And the question that my co-author and dear friend Keith Ferrazzi came up with is this question of what's sweet and what's sour in your life right now? And what's sweet is something that is lifting up your energy level, and what's sour is something that maybe isn't going as well as you had hoped or up to expectations. Asking that as your team, what's sweet and what's sour, or a different way of asking it is what are some roses and thorns in your life? Roses are things that smell good and thorns are things that prick your fingers. And people will answer this in any way they want. And it is a very powerful tool to get past the unwillingness to share and also just the easy response to say, I'm fine, everything is fine, because these people will require teammates to just spend a minute thinking about it. And again, this level of transparency is a learned behavior that the better you get at doing it, the more honest and powerfully communicative you are with your teammates that develops that level of really strong team trust, which then allows you to really accomplish really hard things when the going gets tough.

Yeah, I so love that. And I'm glad I get to have you reflect it back to me when we talk about this in organizational work that we do, or when I'm doing a keynote or something like that. Sometimes I'll, I'll put that question out there, this how you doing question, which we all get where that goes, kind of goes nowhere. And the object being to reframe it. To find a better question. I love the questions that you posed. One of the questions we use is, what are you doing? Instead of how are you doing, ask what are you doing? More specifically, what are you doing in your free time? And they go, oh, what free time? And you're already into something. What are you doing that you enjoy outside of work? What are you talking about? I don't have any time outside of work. It just leads in a different direction when you ask the what, the what are you doing instead of how are you doing? And so that reframing, I think, is really key. You were talking about creating a right environment. for this kind of optimal performance. And I often speak about it. I was so happy to hear you saying it, saying it back to me. And I got to play the sort of the one pushing back, let's say, on the concept. Because I'll often ask people, look, if you were going to compete in an Olympic event today, what would you have done differently last night? What would you have done differently over the last 5 days, right? Would you have eaten the crap that you ate, all the sugar? Would you have gotten too little sleep? Would you have had as much alcohol as you had? What might you have done differently if today was an Olympic event? And so I think there's an element of inspirational or motivational to talk about it in those terms. But I don't know that everybody wakes up in the morning and approaches their day the way they would if, let's say, the stakes were as well-defined. So my question, what's the responsibility of a leader, whether it's a mid-level leader or even a senior-level leader, To get their team on board with just how important it is that we produce that widget today, or whatever it is that is the equivalent of the gold medal pursuit.

I think one thing we have to clarify is that not every day is an Olympic day. Even the most high-performing teams, athletes, heart surgeons, NASA astronauts, they train for many years for these high-performance, very critical days of activity that they need to be just beyond excellence. And not every single day is that, even at the workplace. I think responsibility of a team leader, team manager is to recognize that not every day can be like that and not everybody has that same level of energy every single day. But again, I might show up to work one day with low levels of energy, but my team is still dependent on me to accomplish what I need to get done that day. And so how do we create that framework of trust and helping each other? I like to use this analogy of crossing the finish line together because every single day we do that. We need to do that in order to get our work done. But the point I want to make here is that every day is not an Olympic day, and the team manager has to recognize that. And so we have these peaks and we have these valleys of resilience in our everyday lives. And so how do we make sure that some days we really have to perform? We have deadlines, we have goals, all of this has to get accomplished. But as soon as you cross the finish line, or as soon as you get to the top of the hill, you need some downtime to recover. When you are an athlete and you go to the gym and you lift very heavy to train your muscles. Your muscles don't actually grow when they are in deep exertion during the actual time at the gym. Your muscles grow when they are resting following the exertion at the gym. So you need to have downtime to let your muscles recuperate and grow. And the same analogy applies at any kind of team setting or work setting. If you're accomplishing really great things and you're working really hard to get to a particular goal, you must have some downtime on the other side in order to Recover and recuperate and be able to refresh yourself so that the next time you're climbing that really hard hill, it's an easier climb than it was the first time around.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the The unifying thread in spite of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient.

In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 5 minutes. Less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

The recovery is so key. In fact, there's some really great research on this that came out some years ago. We talk about a lot that the In many ways, the definition that people have about resilience is outdated. It's outmoded because it, it has a lot to do with bouncing back and coming back from setbacks, taking the punch, taking the hits, and getting back up. When resilience is really born out of recovery, it's really born out of the times when we are actively resetting, restoring ourselves, regenerating, which is a word that you used just before we hit the record button today. And I was fascinated about that because it's in that regenerative stages that, as you say, we get stronger, we grow. Our muscles grow mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. All of those things grow. I want to get a sense a little bit more about uncertainty. You mentioned that word, and I'm selfish here. I'm owning it. I'm curious personally because I have a book that came out earlier this year called Change Proof, and the subtitle is Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience. I want to get your sense of the relationship between uncertainty and resilience or anything else really that you want to bring into that conversation.

Yeah. Uncertainty is not a new concept. Everything is uncertain always in human history, even before human history, because we don't know what's going to happen next. As a result of mass communication channels that have really exploded over the last 2, 3 decades with the rise of the internet and also new technologies, we are seeing more change happen faster. And whereas change happened at a slower pace earlier in history, now it's just happening more quickly and impacting more people. And there are more people on the planet to make that change happen. How do we as individuals, as team leaders, as business owners think about managing with uncertainty, knowing that it's a constant, it's not going to go away? The way I look at it is this key skill set of foresight. I'm a futurist and a historian by training. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I studied history early in college and grad school, and I'm a trained futurist because I Spent many years as an executive director of the XPRIZE designing futuristic solutions to big problems. And I think actually that we can learn to look around corners and become better prepared for an uncertain future if we are able to practice the skill of foresight. And foresight, all that it means is being able to have a set of perspectives to understand what are the variables that are impacting your particular situation, whether it's your business or your team or your environment. And then tracking those variables and then seeing if there are any blips or changes in those variables in the short to medium term and how those blips might potentially significantly impact your organization or your team or your environment. And then having an action plan to deal with that potential change if it does actually come to fruition. We wrote about this in our book as foresight being one of the key skill sets of successful teams. to really better understand what are the variables that are going to impact their environment, understanding those, and then developing an action plan and developing this muscle for radical adaptability. So regardless of what the future brings, whether it's a technology shock or an economic crisis or a biohazard, that you have the capability to constantly build that muscle to be prepared for whatever uncertainty comes. I love how you brought up this idea that You know, uncertainty and resilience really are kind of the yin and the yang to each other. We know uncertainty, it's always gonna be here.

Uncertainty is the new certainty, right?

Yeah, exactly. How do we as individuals or teams, as an organization, develop the skillset and be prepared to challenge whatever comes up because of new times? And so I think they're really critical. And from our research, there were some teams that were really good at it, at developing this foresight. And I think it's a skillset that any team can learn and something we talk about step by step in our book. It's super important knowing that we won't know exactly what the future will bring. Even if a futurist like me tells you that, you know, X is going to happen, don't believe them because we don't have crystal balls, but we can get better at predicting the general direction of how things might go and then getting ourselves ready for those potential situations.

And it sounds like you have to practice foresight. And that's an interesting thing when you think about how do you practice predicting an uncertain future or even learning from the future? that has not yet occurred. I want to get your thoughts on this. I think that history in many ways is a great teacher, and often it's the cliché is sort of we don't learn from history because people don't read it, don't know about it. So then we repeat a lot of the same mistakes, but to some extent, history can get in the way of foresight, don't you think?

It's interesting. Cicero once said, to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to always remain a child. And I don't think history repeats itself, but I think history does rhyme. We have to better understand the patterns that we've seen and then better predict what might happen in the future. Let me give you an example. Yes, we have to practice it on a consistent basis. I'll give a very simple practice that your team—

I was going to ask you to do that. So that's— thank you.

So I'll share an example actually from our research. The San Jose Sharks is an NHL team, and when the pandemic occurred, obviously do their business, which was have people in the stadium or sell food concessions in the stadium. And so their business model went from successful NHL hockey team to nothing overnight. And the CEO, Jonathan Becher, is a friend of mine. He wanted to try to obviously figure out what the heck is going on, how he can better prepare for what future might come. And if you remember back in the early days of the pandemic, things were changing so quickly week to week. And so he asked his team to identify 30 possible scenarios that might happen 6 months from now. And from those 30 scenarios, They voted together the 5 most likely and impactful situations that they thought that the environment might occur. And then how would an NHL hockey team react to that? And for each of those 5 scenarios, they developed a one-page action plan. And so that if this scenario were to come to fruition, we would do X, we would do Y, we would do Z. So we're not going to get caught flat-footed as a result of whatever the future comes. And while they weren't exactly 100% correct on their predictions, they were able to develop action plans that they could execute and much faster than they could if they hadn't even thought about this. Now, for your listeners, here's what I would recommend. Identify, let's say, the 5 or 6 variables that impact your business, whatever they are. They could be technology variables, they could be socioeconomic, they could be financial, they could be environmental. Futurists, we use this framework called STEEP, which stands for S-T-E-E-P, and there are 5 different variables that we can look at to see how the environment is changing. And ask everybody on your team to become a mini expert on one of these variables over the course of the next few months. And what I mean by that is ask them to follow experts on Twitter or follow experts on that topic on LinkedIn and just become better knowledgeable about that one particular variable. And then at your existing monthly team meeting, spend 20 minutes asking everybody, have you heard of a potential blip in the variable that you have been following that you think is very important for the rest of our team to know about? And if so, just give us a 2-minute overview what that is. And then together as a team, you can decide, is this potential early signal something that is going to be very impactful and very influential and very likely to our team? Then if so, let's set aside a separate foresight planning conversation to better create an action plan for that one particular early signal. of change. And so every team can get better at this. This sounds a little bit wonky at first. You get better at it, and it's become a very powerful tool that some teams are very, really good at doing. And I highly recommend it because it's— it helps you rewire your brain as to what is possible about the future. And even if you're wrong in your prediction, it creates the capabilities on your team to think through different variables and be able to scan the environment more effectively.

It's reminiscent too of something I read about the Coast Guard and how it was that the Coast Guard in the '90s, early '90s actually started future casting, started creating these very unlikely scenarios, black swan scenarios of things that might occur in the future and prepared for a number of them to the point where when on September 11th, they were prepared for the eventuality that we saw for what ultimately occurred, which seemed to be highly unlikely and was an event that many people never thought they'd ever see. We all saw it. We all were in disbelief. Many of us were in disbelief. I think many people in government and even in the military were caught off guard, were in disbelief, but the Coast Guard was not because they had future casted for that eventuality, that potential.

And that's a brilliant example. And I would say in some mission critical, organizations, those organizations can be very good at future casting or foresight. Most often in our research, we found that foresight and future casting only happens in crises. Companies and teams are like, oh my gosh, what's happening? What do we do? How do we think about the future? And by then, it's too late.

It's like resilience. Folks will say, so when's the best time to develop resilience? Before you need it. The simple answer, before you're gonna need it next.

From our research, I think only 25% of Fortune 500 companies have this kind of foresight or a future casting capability and skill set in-house. Oftentimes they don't even have it, and they want to only think about it in crises. But the reality is this has to be part of your ongoing team analysis of the environment and scanning. And so the method that I shared earlier was really just a simple way to get everybody to constantly be thinking about this. So you're not just doing it when a crisis happens, and not every single day is an Olympic day, but it's part of your practice to scan and see things that are around corners.

It is. Anything that happens was not unpredictable. I think it's sort of obvious, but these things that we're caught off guard by, I think in a business world, certainly in life, but in a business world that is disruptive to the degree that it is where the velocity of change is, I think, greater than it's ever been and will only get greater, only get faster. You really do need to be able to see around corners. You do need to be able to see through walls and you can get better at it, right? You can get better at it because it is awkward.

And you can get better at it. And, you know, as we, as futurists, we sort of, an analogy we use are hurricane tracking maps. And so if you remember hurricane maps, you sort of know where the hurricane is somewhere like, I don't know, in the Atlantic. And then you have projections of where like the hurricane is likely to go and sort of like what is the cone of probability of where this hurricane is going to go. And that's sort of like what you're tracking. And I think our responsibility is to get better at seeing what that cone of plausibility is for our own lives and our own teams and our own organizations. And it's wonky at first, but you can practice it just like any sport or any skill, and you can get better at it.

I'm really fascinated by what you said earlier about energy and just the idea that checking in with people to also see where's their energy at, where is it and why is it that that's the case because when it comes to any of this stuff, any problem, and someone once said, and I wish I knew who said this because it just, I repeat it often to myself and share it with others too. Problems are good. And our natural instinct is to say, no, problems are not good. No, we don't want problems. I certainly don't want any more than I already got. But problems are good, this guy said, because they show you where your problems are. I think that that is, it's nailing something. That is nailing something so accurately. As you said earlier, it's our blind spots that are the most challenging. So when you work in a team setting, one of the great aspects of that is that you don't have to have blind spots. But you do have to be transparent. And you do have to be willing to be vulnerable with people, to be honest, truthful about where you're coming from. Because otherwise, maybe they don't feel like they have permission even. That's right. It's structurally not safe. As you said earlier, emotional safety is such a big deal, psychological safety. So that people can feel comfortable in reflecting to us.

And that's the role of the team leader, is to create that safety and to create the structure and the environment so that these kinds of conversations can be had. First, inorganically, because they tend to be led by a leader, but then organically between team members over the course of time as they become more trusting and more vulnerable and more comfortable with providing that level of feedback. And so The role of the leader is to really create those guardrails of how we operate, and it's really critical. And, you know, one thing we haven't talked about in this conversation, which is teams can do this, or we have a lot of experience doing this in person. We have less experience of doing this in a virtual component, even though we've learned over the last couple years, and even less so in a hybrid world. And in a world where you're not— you're in 2 dimensions and you're seeing each other right now just visually, but you don't necessarily understand body movement sometimes or intonation.

He can't even see my hands.

It's like, exactly. Yeah. You're fed up with my conversation already, but you're holding your hands underneath the table so I can't see them.

It's like, right? So this, I want this body language and people do this. I'm almost through now. Their hands go back here and you think they're just stretching, but they're, there's a lot of that that we are not trained.

That's right.

Right. And you're missing a lot of those cues that you would otherwise have if you're in the room with a person.

When we are working in this virtual hybrid environment on Teams, we have to be very intentional about how we approach it because we don't have those skills honed over decades of experience, centuries, millennia of human intuition. And so we have to be a lot more intentional and purposeful around how we design our work and our interactions to make sure that we have that level of safety and space and trust and belief that we can really accomplish great things and do it in a way that everybody feels well and resilient and they're not completely exhausted from the experience.

Something really important I think that came up that I want to underscore here is that there's awkwardness. And almost always, there's going to be some awkwardness, especially at first. And so not that I'm trying to pretend that I got this sussed out because I don't. But I've led a number of teams. I've played the many different roles within organizations, including ones that I've founded. And there's a level at which a great leader, I think, is able to get past their own hesitation with doing something that feels awkward at first, or even for a while. I remember one of the companies I was with, we had organizational leadership in 4 different continents. I mean, spread out. And we were using Zoom early. We were an early adopter of it. My wife, Randy, actually had discovered it. She found it and said, this is so much better than Skype, don't you think? We're like, yep. We were using it early on. And we had a process where when we got this group of people, usually around 11 or 12 folks together, we would do this process at the beginning called What I Feel Like Saying. We call it WIFLS, What I Feel Like Saying. Mm-hmm. And, and the way it would work is everybody would start, doesn't matter what the meeting is, but we would begin with somebody going, what I feel like saying is, They would speak for a minute or so, and then when they were done, they'd say, and that's what I feel like saying. And they would turn and go, and Kian, what do you feel like saying? You would go and do the same thing. And when you were done complete, you'd ask somebody else until we went around the thing. And for not just at first, for a while, I mean, more than 6 months at least. It was so flippin' awkward. And I was CEO at the time, so people weren't necessarily telling me that they were opposed to it, but I was hearing little chirps. You know, I can't believe we're wasting our time in this meeting. We have so many meetings already. Why can't we just get to the point? It was awkward.

And what happened? I'm curious, where did this evolve?

We did it for years and years and we still do it. Another company I'm with, but it took a lot of sort of just going, the benefit of us being real with each other and being present because we're all coming to the table, coming to the meeting, whatever it might be with The last meeting we just were dealing with, frustrated by, or email they got, or the phone call from home that their kid, their son is— got called into the principal's office. I mean, it's a million things, right? Yeah. You found out a family member needs to go in for surgery. It's like you come to this meeting and we're not a blank. We're not just a clean slate when we show up. Wouldn't you say, Kian, that we're bringing our baggage, bringing ourselves there, and to not acknowledge it. And I think this is Why I'm thinking this is important to say is because of what you said earlier about how the purpose of the team, the strength of the team, the resilience of the team depends on each member of that team being willing to help other people in that group raise their energy to outperform their problems, to be able to deal more effectively with life and also their business role, their job.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

That's why we come together as teams, to accomplish things that we can't accomplish individually. And I coach a lot of leadership teams across the world, and one team that I'm coaching right now initially said, you know, we are wasting our time having this conversation around energy and what's going on in our lives, or wiffle, as you suggest. And I said, I know this is awkward, but this is a practice that you'll get better at, and over time, becomes secondary to you because work— and when you come to a meeting, you're not just seeing people for workers as they are, but rather as people. To work every single day as people first. And if we can see that, put that in the context of then how we are performing individually and as a team, that will allow us to see our blind spots and see our team's blind spots. And as team leaders, hopefully then try to be able to solve for them.

Exactly. I mean, that's the thing is that we can do a lot With greater awareness of where, let's say, as you said, there's somebody that's having a tough day. Empathy is really important that we have that. And there's also support. What does support look like? Well, if you don't know somebody's really struggling or what they're struggling with, it's tough to support them. In any event, I've loved this conversation. I really have, Kian.

Me too.

And I think you and I are playing in a very similar sandbox, which is also really, really cool.

I love your t-shirt. Strong, vigorous, and healthy.

I'm a talking t-shirt guy. People know that. That's my thing. I just, whatever I can cascade the redundant message over and over and over again, put it on, stick it on a t-shirt or something.

I mean, I sort of have the same thing, but mine's a little different. It's not a t-shirt. It's something on my wall.

Oh yeah. I saw that and I love that. It says, make the impossible possible. I think that's t-shirt worthy, man.

I'm kind of like Steve Jobs. I'll keep to the black t-shirt, but I'll put my— keep to the black shirt. Makes you—

your wardrobe choices quite simple, right?

Yeah, exactly.

You don't have to take any bandwidth for that particular task, right? That's so funny. Uh, Kian, it's been a pleasure. There'll be full show notes, everybody. Of course, you can find out more about the work that Kian and his team are doing, and his new book with Keith Ferrazzi is spectacular. You got to get your hands on that as well. And of course, we'd love to hear from you. So if you've got questions for us, for Kiana or myself, please feel free. Share it with a—

this episode I think is really important for a lot of folks. So share it with a friend, share it with a colleague. Let us know what your thoughts are, your comments, your review is always lovely to get one of those 5-star reviews, but we value your feedback. It's like oxygen for us. So please feel free to do that. And simple enough, adamarkel.com/podcast. You can leave a comment right there. That's always easy. We'll see you soon and just wishing you all the best. Thank you. Have a blessed and beautiful rest of your day. I promised you, you were going to love that episode. I hope you did. I know I really love talking to Kian Gohar. I mean, this guy, he's so calm, he's so settled. You can feel that he's just a very grounded person. And I think that's compelling. I mean, we can talk about complex issues and complicated challenges that we're facing both personally and professionally and globally. And talk about them in a way where we can feel something new emerging.

There's some insight that we didn't formally perceive that we were maybe even having a blind spot to. I think a way that happens is when a person can speak about those difficult challenges with an element of grounded, with a sense that they're not emotional about it, not emoting, because I think we have to, and that's part of our nature. In fact, it's one of the most beautiful parts of our nature is that we are feeling beings. I can't even imagine we'd be robots, right? We'd be an algorithm if we didn't feel, if there wasn't an element of the feeling nature emerging in our thinking about things as well as in our discussions of them. But what I like very much about my conversation today with Kian is the sense that he's both passionate about the things that he's speaking of That we're having a conversation about. There's emotion there, but there's also the sense of just having really got those things in proper perspective, that the wind is being harnessed by the sail, that there's that sense that there's control in the midst of all uncertainty that is imaginable and even much of it that is unimaginable. Kian is a futurist, so I'm getting into that etheric space. It's because the future is something that we have to think about. We have to plan for. We have to be learning from— if you can imagine that— learning from the future and how it is that we can see around the corner. We can see through walls. Can we do that? What's that like? How do we do that? How do we predict the unpredictable, quote unquote? That is just a small sampling of the kinds of things that Kian and I discussed today. We talked about resilience. We talked about team resilience. We talked about individual resilience. We talked about Now, resilience is really everybody's business.

In order for a team to succeed, we all have to, we have to have each other's backs, truly have to do that.

When I am myself speaking to organizations, either as a keynote presenter or in consulting work, we're often talking about the kinds of things that are challenging individual team members right now. Mental health challenges, work-life balance issues, stress management, challenges.

These are things that are ever-present in a world that is more and more diverse, a work world that is properly focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, things like that. How is it that we develop more resilient teams has a lot to do with things that KeeAnne shared with us today about creating an environment of emotional safety, an environment where there's psychological safety that people can feel They are seen and heard and can trust that they can be transparent. And it's in that trust and trusting environment that people are able to be more of themselves and be supported right where they are. Because not everybody's gonna be at level 10 energy every single day. Sometimes you're gonna walk in virtually, figuratively speaking, or physically these days, back to work. And be at a level 3. And if they're at a level 3, they— it's gonna be the job of other people on their team, according to Kian, to raise them up, to see where they're at, to meet them where they're at, and to help them in that moment, even if that help is nothing more than listening, nothing more than holding space, if you will, for that person on that particular day.

Because according to Kian, again, our resilience fluctuates. Each day.

Myself, I'm a resilience researcher and having spent so much of my own career focused on how is it that we can leverage our own adversity and our own uncertainty and the uncertainty that's all around us to be more resilient. I think it's evident in my research that not every day is created equal. We're not going to feel the same way every day, mentally, emotionally, physically, even spiritually. Some days we are going to be at a 3, and some days we're going to feel like we're at an 8 or a 9 or a 10. And it's vitally important that we have a baseline, that we understand where we are in any given day and at any moment in time.

And then not only be able to recognize that maybe we need some support, but to know that we've got people around us that will provide that support, that people around us will have our backs. That is what a resilient team looks like. And resilient leadership is being the sort of the conductor of all that, the orchestrator of it, the one that oversees and looks after it to make sure that people do feel safe in that environment and that that environment is in fact designed to assist individuals in being at their best as frequently as is possible. Similar to the way a coach or a manager would help a sports team and the individuals on that team to be at their very best the day that performance is expected, or even on the days when practice is what ultimately provide for that higher level of performance later on. So we had to practice resilience. We've got to practice living in uncertainty. We've got to practice being okay in awkward conversations and even practice how we feel in those conversations so that we can get through them so that ultimately things that are awkward, like asking people what they're doing, how they're really doing, and what they're doing in their lives, doesn't have to feel awkward for long because we've practiced it. And then ultimately, it's that practice that leads to greater proficiency.

Again, resilience is something that we have to perform. And in order to perform it, we've got to have these moments to practice.

And I thought it was also really cool that in speaking with Kian today, we talked about this concept of foresight and how it is that we can develop foresight, again, through practice, through performance as well. That foresight is something that we can develop. We can futurecast in order to develop that greater ability to see the future, predict it, but ultimately plan for almost any imagined future. Those are just, again, some of the tiny little nuggets that we got at today. And I so enjoyed our conversation, and I know that you have as well. Feel free, of course, to leave us a comment. Let us know what you thought. But this episode with Kian Gohar was one of my favorites.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. /becomechangeprueb.