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 Barkel and his inspiring guest explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change.

Proof. You guys are going to love my conversation today with Keon 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 X Prize foundation and Singularity University, Kihan has coached the leadership teams of dozens of Fortune 500 companies on innovation, moonshot, leadership and the future of work. His latest bestselling author best selling book, co authored with Keith Ferrazi, 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 going to love this conversation. I know I did. Please enjoy it. All right, Kian, I want to know. You know, having, having probably heard your bio, heard your own introduction more times than 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, what's not a part of that beautiful introduction of you and, 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 I think that brings us to a place where we have the flexibility to learn constantly and to adapt and 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.

Yeah, interesting. Hey, you know what? Let's just jump right into what you. How do you define resilience? Because, as you said, I. I speak about it regularly. It's. 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. In their professional and their personal lives. So let's get right at it. How do you define resilience?

So maybe I can give in the context of how I. 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 2000 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 four key characteristics, and one of those was resilience. And what we found was that everybody comes to life with different levels of individual resilience. You know, some people have more financial resources to deal with complexity and uncertainty. Some people have more social and family resources. But 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. And so 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? And so those are all the things that I'm really interested in as it pertains to team resilience.

Yeah, it's so interesting that you now you threw me a softball. I'll tell you that, Keon, 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. Simple. It's rankmyresilience.com you can go there and take your own, get your own score. But I think it's really important. Thanks for the softball. That, 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 how you even parent or how, how well you communicate with your partner. Any of these things. I mean, those are more difficult to sort of measure in, 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, 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. And so 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 a360 oftentimes asking loved ones, trusted ones, friends, colleagues, you know, 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. It's 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, okay, now I see that I'm not so particularly good at this particular part of, you know, my life, but do I need to be good at it in order to achieve my goal? And so then the next question is like, well, where do I need to really improve upon in order to, to meet the goal that I want to have, rather than saying I need to increase my level of x on 10 different dimensions. And so the assessment is key, I think. And then prioritization of like, okay, where do I want to go and what's really important for me to get Good at. To get there.

Yeah. So, Kean, I want to, I want to kind of track two, two separate things that you said earlier with regard to developing resilience. So 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, and alluded to the fact that this is something that has to be learned. It's not something the team is automatically in 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, just more interested in yours. Can they learn to be resilient? Can they actually be trained to be more resil individually and then on a team side, sort of same question. But now you get a collection of five or 10 people together, like, how do you help them as a collective develop team resilience? So, two parts to that.

So 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. And so I don't have research back data to give you on the individual side, but I'll, I'll share you with you anecdotes about my own life and how things have made me resilient. And I think growth, personal growth, is 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. So just an example, I was 24 years old and, 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, you know, 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 this. 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, you know, 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. And 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, you know, 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 face me. And so 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.

Like. 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 and say, can you help us solve the problem? The reality is that's just not always possible. And over the last two 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. And so 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, that they're able to, 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. 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 in the 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. You know, Mary, Mary was typically like a 2. John was usually like a 4. And if 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. In this person's life, whether personally, professionally, that was a block. And so that was the first step, this assessment, like you, if you will. And the second thing is, all right, 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 de block and some of those challenges that we face on an individual level, on a team basis? And so 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, their individual challenges?

100%. I love that.

Wow, that's, I mean that. So let's, let's just unpack that a little bit because that's pretty, 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, I get my shit together. I mean that's what I work on myself. And you know, it's not easy, it's, you know, it's kind of ugly. But, but I come to work prepared to do, you know, 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 four other people on my team, I have to also make sure they've, they're, they're, they're, 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, on a team relay, whether it's like a track and meet relay or swimming relay or, or even if you're a double tennis team and you come to the track or to the pool or to a tennis court every day individually ready to walk, but your teammate has some challenges, you're going to 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 efficiencies that they might face that day, Whether they have a sloppy backhand or whether they are cramping in the pool or on the track. And so if you 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. And so it's not just the individual, individual capability that 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 this peer to peer coaching. So I wrote this book, competing in a new world of work with my dear friend Keith Farazi 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. Now that I think might be something that we 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, the psychological safety for us to be able to feel that we can share positive advice to help each other get better rather than, you know, 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 I just want to be critical. And so there are a couple other things you have to do before you start having this conversation of, you know, how do we get better as a team in terms of resilience. And so. But it's absolutely critical. But I'm curious, why do you think it's controversial that this is, this is what I just said?

Well, I mean, I don't know that it is, but I'm thinking, putting myself in the, in the, in the ears of the people listening to this or watching this right now and thinking again, this, this idea that, you know, I have enough on my plate just getting my own, getting my whole house in order, my life in order that added, you know, added responsibility might, might be, you know, not something I'm getting compensated for. You know, I'm going to be the, the Angels advocate here. It's one thing if you're playing for the New York Yankees or the Celtics or, you know, you're on the 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, 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 inter. Dependency and an 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, my own personal benefit from, from that, from that play, if you will, isn't, isn't the same as what they're, you know, the millions and millions of dollars that, that some of these other folks are getting paid. But this, this one Other thing that came up for me too, which is where, where I really went in my thinking, which is that, you know, a manager or even a senior level leader asking, asking their team for information about how they're doing, I think is in part an issue that, that is, that's going to drive this, this point. And then I want to, I want to ask you about it. So when you ask somebody how they're doing, I mean, I think for the most part you're, you're expecting to, to hear the, you know, it's almost like a social contract where I go, oh, fine or good or hanging in there and you know, hey, 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, there's a Jackson Brown 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. I just think that when we ask, when, 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, you know, your team members, how you doing? And they say something like, you know, I'm really struggling. I, I don't even, you know, I had trouble getting out of 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 like, my thoughts are going to some pretty dark places. You know, you ask somebody a question like, how you doing? And if what we're saying is that we're going to get involved in helping people to overcome their challenges and they're going to be transparent. Somebody might say, hey, I don't have any training to deal with that. With that question, somebody says to me, hey, I'm having trouble at home with my marriage. It's like what I, we're, you know, like we have 10 minutes between, you know, we got another Zoom starting in 10 minutes. We're just getting, we're just getting a coffee or a virtual coffee to get, you know, it's like I'm not prepared for that. What do you, what do you say to that team member who feels like they're in over their head or they're not, it's not their responsibility or it's too big a responsibility or you know, 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.

Yeah, those are great questions. I want to, I want to go, I'll answer both of them. Maybe you asked one question, but I want to comment on the initial, the first part which was the, the lower level of, of investment that everyday work has compared to a high performing team, whether, let's say it's an athletics or you know, the NBA or the Olympics. And all I can say is, isn't that just a shame? 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 on 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? And I think if, I think everybody wants to do well, everybody wants to achieve excellence. They just don't have 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. And it doesn't matter if you work at a small company or a small team, you'll still achieve a remarkable success. And so 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 two 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, you know, 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? And, you know, that's a. It's almost a throwaway. And most people just say, fine, I'm doing great.

Right.

And like, they just don't want to respond to that question any way that is transparent. So 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 interpersonal question at the beginning of a meeting. And people can answer this any way they want, personally, professionally. But the extent that they lean into it is the extent that they want their team to get to know them, how they're doing. And the question that my co author and dear friend Keith Rossi 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. And so 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 this people will require. This 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 back to me when we. When we talk about this in. 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, you know, how you doing? Question, which we all get, where that goes, kind of goes nowhere. And the. The object being to reframe it to find a better question. And what I love the questions that you pose. 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? They go, oh, what free time? And you're already into something, right? What are you doing that, that you enjoy outside of work? What are you talking about? I don't have any time outside of work. You know, it just leads in a different direction when you ask the what, what are you doing instead of how are you doing? And, and so that reframing, I think is really key. You, you were talking about creating a right environment for, for this kind of optimal performance. And, and I often speak about it. I was so happy to hear, hear you saying it, saying it back to me. And I got to play the, you know, sort of the, the one pushing back, let's say on, on I'll often ask people, look, what if you were, if you were going to compete in an Olympic event today, today, would you, what would you have done differently last night? What would you have done differently over the last five days? Right? Would you have eaten the crap that you ate all the sugar? Would you have gotten too little sleep? You know, would you have had as much alcohol as you had? I don't know what would, what, what might have done differently if, if today was an Olympic event? And so I think there is, there's an element of, of, you know, it's, it's inspirational or motivational to, to talk about it in those terms, but I don't know that everybody is, is wakes up in the morning and approaches their day the way they would if, if, let's say the stakes were as well defined. And, and I think so. My question, that's a statement, but my question is, so 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. And even the most high performing teams, athletes, heart surgeons, NASA astronauts, they trained 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. And so 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. That. That framework of trust and helping each other. I'd 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. The. 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. In deep exertion. During the actual time of the gym, your muscles grow when they are resting, following the ex. The exertion at the gym. So you need to have downtime to let your muscles recuperate and grow. And the same analogy applies in 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.

Yeah. The recovery is so key. In fact, it's. There's some really great research on this that came out some years ago. We talk about a lot that. Just that the. In many ways, the definition that people have about resilience is outdated. It's outmoded, because it has a lot to do with bouncing back and coming back from setback, 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. 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. In those regenerative stages that, as you say, we get stronger, we grow, our muscles grow, you know, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, all of those things grow. So that's just. That's terrific. I want to get a sense a little bit more about uncertainty. You brought that. You mentioned that word, and I'm selfish here. I'm owning it that 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, and resilience or anything else really that you want to bring into that conversation.

Yeah, I love that. So uncertainty is not a new concept, right? Like it's. Everything is uncertain always in human history, even before human history, because we don't know what's going to happen next. And so I think as a result of mass communication channels that have really exploded the last two, three 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, you know, 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. And so 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? And so the way I look at it is this key skill set of foresight. So I'm the futurist and the historian by training, and it 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 X Prize 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 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. And so 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 intern becomes. So 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. Right. And so, like, we know uncertainty, it's always going to be here. It's just. It's a known unknown.

Certainty is the new certainty, right?

Yeah, exactly. And so how do we, as individuals or teams, as an organization, develop the skill set 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, developing this foresight. And I think it's a skill set that any team can learn and something we talk about step by step in our book. But I think it's. 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.

Yeah, you do.

And that's an interesting, you know, thing when you think about what. How do you practice predicting an uncertain future or. Or even learning. Learning from the future that has not yet occurred. And. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I. I think that history, in many ways, is a great teacher. You know, and often it's. The cliche is sort of we don't. We don't learn from history because people don't read it, don't know about it. So then we repeat. 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?

You know, 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. And so we have to better understand the patterns that we've seen and then better predict what might happen in the future. So let me give you an example. Yes, we have to practice it on a consistent basis. And I'll give a very simple practice that your teams.

I was going to ask you to do that. So that's. Thank you. Perfect.

I'll show you an example, actually, from our research. So the San Jose Sharks is an NHL team, and when the pandemic occurred, obviously they couldn't 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 Becker 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 six months from now. And from those 30 scenarios, they voted together the five 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 five 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, on their predictions, they were able to develop action plans that they could execute and really pivot 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 five or six variables that impact your business, whatever they are. They could be technology variables, that 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 five 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, ask, spend 20 minutes, ask, 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 and this, this sounds a little bit wonky at first, but 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.

Yeah. 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, when on September 11th, they, they were prepared for the eventuality that, that we saw for, for what ultimately occurred, which would seem to be, you know, highly unlikely and was an event that many people never, 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 the, for that eventuality, that potential.

That's a brilliant example. Brilliant example. And I would say, you know, 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. When 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 too late. It's like resilience. People, folks will say, so when's the best time to develop resilience before you need it? Simple answer before you're going to need it next. Right, Exactly.

You know, in from our research, I think only 25% of Fortune 500 companies have this kind of foresight or future casting capability and skill set in house. Oftentimes they don't have it and they want to, they'll even 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, the, the method that I shared earlier was really just a simple way to get everybody to constantly thinking about this. So you're not just doing it when the 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.

Yeah, it is. It's. There's just nothing that's unpredictable. Anything that happens was not unpredictable. You know, it's sort of obvious, but, you know, these, these things that, that we're, that we're caught off guard by, I think, and 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, is, I think, greater than. Than it's ever been and will only get greater, only get faster. You know, you really do need to be able to see around corners. You do. You do need to be able to see through walls. And. And I think it is.

And you can get better at it.

And you get better at it, right? Because it is awkward.

It is awkward. It is awkward. And you can get better at it. And, you know, interesting. We, as, as, 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, 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.

Yeah, 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? You know, 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, and share it with others too. Problems are good. And you go, and our natural instinct is to say, no, problems are not good. 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. And I think that that is just. It's nailing something that is very nailing something so accurately that, 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, you know, maybe they don't feel like they have permission even.

That's right. That's right.

And that's structurally not. Not safe. As you said earlier, emotional safety is such a big deal. Psychological safety, so. 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 world. The leader is to really create those. Those guardrails of how we operate. And it's really critical. You know, one thing we haven't talked about in this conversation, which is, you know, the teams can do this or are. 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 two dimensions and you're seeing each other right now just visually, but you don't necessarily understand body movement sometimes or intonation.

Right. You can't see my. He can't even see my hands, like, you know.

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 when people do this. This is a little bit of like, I'm. I'm almost through now. You know, their hands go back here, and you think they're just stretching, but they're. Yeah, there's. 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. Right.

And so when. When we. 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 cues. We don't have those skills honed over decades of experience, centuries, millennias 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 in a way that everybody feels well and resilient and they're not completely exhausted from the experience.

Yeah. And it's. You know what? It's something really important, I think, that came up that I want to. 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. Not that I'm. I'm trying to, you know, pretend that I. I've got. I got this sussed out, because I don't. But I've led a number of teams, played. Played the many different roles within organizations, including ones that founded. And there's. There's a level at which a great leader, I think, is able to get past their own. Their own hesitation with doing something that feels awkward at first or even for a while. You know, I remember we. One of the companies I was with, we had, or we had organizational leadership in four. In four different. On four different continents spread out. And we were using Zoom early. We're an early adopter of it, and my wife, Randy actually had discovered it. She found it and said, this is so much better than Skype, don't you think? Like, yup. So we were using it early on, and we had a process where when we got this. This group of people, you know, usually around 11 or 12 folks together, we would do this process at the beginning called what I feel like saying. We call it Whiffles, what I feel like saying. And. And the way it would work is everybody would start, this is a. Doesn't matter what the meeting is. But we would begin with somebody going, what I feel like saying is. And then they would. They would speak for a minute or so, you know, and then when they were done, they 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 don't have a thing. And at first, and for. Not just at first, for a while. I mean, more than six months, at least. Yeah, it was so flipping awkward. And I was CEO at the time, so, you know, 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, you know, and it was. It was awkward.

That's right. That's. And what happened? I'm curious, how did that. Where did this evolve?

We did it for years and years, and we still do it, but with. With, you know, another company I'm with. But it took a lot of sort of just going, you know, the benefit of us being real with each other and. 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 the email they got or the phone call from, you know, home that the kid, you know, there's. Their son is, you know, got called into the principal's office. I mean, it's a million things, right? You found out your, you know, 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. Right. When you say Keon, we're bringing our baggage, bringing ourselves there and to not. To not acknowledge. 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. In that group raise their energy to outperform their problems, to be able to deal more effectively with. With life and. And also their business role, their job, 100%.

That's. That's why we come together as teams to accomplish things that we can't accomplish individually. And I. 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, it just becomes secondary to you, because when you come to work and when you come to a meeting, you're not just seeing people for workers as they are, but rather as people and as people. And we come 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. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is that we can, we can do a lot with greater, with greater awareness of where of. Let's say, as you said, you know, there's somebody that's having a. Having a tough day, then it's not just 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. So in any event, I love this conversation. I really have. Keon, you and I are playing in a very similar sandbox, which is also really, really cool. Yeah.

And I love your T shirt. Strong, vigorous, and healthy.

Yeah, I'm a talking T shirt guy. People know that's my thing. I just, whatever I can, you know, cascade the redundant message over and over and over again. Put it on, stick it on a T shirt or something.

I mean, I 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. That's way cool. 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 keep to the black shirt. Makes choosing makes you your wardrobe choices quite simple, Right. You don't have to take any bandwidth for that particular task, Right?

Exactly.

That's so funny. Keon has 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 Barazi 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 Keon or myself, please feel free share it with. You know, 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, lovely to get one of those five star reviews, but. But we, we value your feedback. It's like oxygen for us. So please feel free to do that and simple enough. Adammarkel.com podcast, you can leave a comment right there. That's always easy. And we'll see you soon. And just wishing you all a blessed and beautiful rest of your day. Well, I promised you you were going to love that episode. I hope you did. I know. I really love talking to Ion Gohar. I Mean, this guy is just. He's so. He's so calm, he's so settled. You can feel that. That. That he's just a. A very grounded person. And. And I think that's compelling, you know, when we can talk about complex issues and complicated challenges that. That we're facing both personally and professionally, globally, and talk about them in. In a way where we. 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. A great way that, that that happens is in. Is when a person can speak about those. Those difficult challenges with an element of groundedness, with a. With a sense that they're not emotional about it, not that we're 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. I mean, we'd be robots, right? We'd be. We'd be an algorithm if we didn't feel. If there was an element of. Of the feeling nature emerging in. In. In our thinking about things as well as in our discussions of them. So. But what I like very much about my conversation today with Keon 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. Having really got those things in. In their proper perspective, that. That the wind is being. Is being harnessed by the sailing, 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. Kihon is a futurist, so if you feel like 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 how 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 and 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 Kiyan Straight shared with us today about creating an environment of emotional safety, an environment where there's psychological safety that people can feel they are, are, are seen and heard and can trust, that they can be transparent. And it's in that trust in trusting environment that people are able to be more of themselves and be supported right where they are. Because not everybody's going to be at level 10 energy every single day. Sometimes you're going to walk in, virtually, figuratively speaking, or, or physically these days, back to work and be at a level three. And if they're at a level three, they, you know, it's going to be the job of other people on their team, according to Keon, to raise them up to see where they're at, to meet them where they're at and. 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 three, and some days we're going to feel like we're at an 8 or a 9 or a, a 10. And it's vitally important that we, 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 resilient team looks like 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 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 will 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, so that we can get through them. So that ultimately things that are awkward, like asking people what they're doing, how they're. 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 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 Keon today, we talked about this concept of foresight and how it is that we can develop foresight again through practice and through performance as well. That foresight is something that we can develop, we can future cast 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 Keon 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@adammarkelle.com podcast for more resilience tips and strategies, including support for for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChangeproof.