Building Human Connections: One Story at a Time with Ann Kowal Smith

So what we know about the science of empathy is that we tend to have empathy for people who look like us or for whom we already know. And if we can expand the circle of people that we begin to understand, then I think by definition we can expand the circle of people for whom we feel empathy. So those five skills together are really critical and you can begin to see, and we talked about it already, why they drive collaboration, why they drive inclusion, why they drive innovation, why they drive productivity. But this is a space to practice it.

Hey there friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than the star combo of Ashish Kothari and Anil Ramjiani, who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. Get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the squad.

Hey Happiness Squad. It's great to have you back with Ashish and I as we continue to discuss with our guests who are industry leaders on how they truly hardwired their organizations for human flourishing and connection. When was the last time you took time out, picked up a book and got your team together out of your normal context and leveraged that story to find a path to truly drive inclusivity, collaboration and understanding within your professional team? This is the CornerStone approach of ReflectionPoint, a firm that focuses on creating healthy human connections as the bedrock of the organization. Our next guest, Ann Cole Smith. She's the CEO and founder of ReflectionPoint. She's a former lawyer, adjunct professor and consultant. Reflection Point builds communities of openness, respect and belonging by creating the conditions for that genuine human connection at every level of the workplace, for team building, leadership development, and more. As a client once quoted to Ann, you can't hate a man once you know him. Now that we know each other, there's not a problem we can't solve together. That's right. This unique usage of literature stuck with the client and he quoted Steinbeck, this is the power of human connection. When we understand, we grow. When we trust, we grow together. Please join Ashish and I as we welcome Ann to the Happiness Squad and and rewire for Happiness Together. Hey Ashish.

Hey Anne.

How are you both doing?

Good. Lovely to be here, Anil.

It's nice to see you, my dear friend. I like your background a lot.

Thank you. It's good to see you as well.

One of these days I might have to ask Ashish one of the books on his shelf and one of the books on your shelf just to take. It's. It's amazing to see it.

Hey.

I was going to say. And when we typically start our conversations with our guests, there's one that resonates with Asha Shanai, and that is happiness. What does happiness mean to you and has it changed since your younger years until now?

So I think happiness is at a macro level, a really hard thing to get your head around. It's certainly elusive and it involves a fair bit of privilege in that I think for every one of us that can spend time thinking about what happiness means, there are countless others who just don't have that luxury. But if you push it down into the micro level, and I've been thinking a lot about happiness at the micro level, then I think it's about those little moments that really leave you with deep meaning. So whether it's, for me, the smile of a child that you love that is so deep and so genuine that it can't help but warm your heart. The first snowdrops that come up in winter always make me smile and think of my kids who couldn't, who were just beside themselves when they would see them. And so as soon as I see them, that gives me a spark of happiness. I watched my husband just beam when he saw a recipe that was in his mother's, his late mother's handwriting. It gave him this real pleasure. And it makes me think of the author Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, who once said, from tiny experiences we build cathedrals. And I think that these micro moments of happiness are the ways in which we build our cathedrals. And if we think of happiness that way, it's a lot more human scale and something I think that can be readily accessible to anybody.

Yeah, I mean, and, you know, I think there is so much beauty. I love that. Can you repeat that quote again? Oh, my God.

Like from tiny experiences, we build cathedrals.

From tiny experiences, we build cathedrals. And, you know, there was so many underlying elements behind what the different examples of those tiny moments that you shared, like, in terms of underlying qualities. And one of them was actually presence, being in the present moment. You know, I can think about how many of those moments of that giggle of the smile or the snowdrop. I mean, you know, it snowed like 7 inches here a couple of Days ago. And there is this magical, you know, snow filled playground in France. I've got this birds, literally four birds actually eating out of the bird feeder. There is such magic in the moment. But you know, we, so many of us are searching, pursuing happiness out in the future. And so I think I wanted to just highlight that, that like, you know, in every one of those examples you get, there was this moment of be in the present and be in the present. And you will notice so many micro moments of happiness that are unfurling. But we are focused on that one moment of suffering or whatever we need to do or the pursuit of something big. That's going to happen eventually. But if we actually enjoy the journey, I think we can actually truly be happier and more appreciative. So thank you for sharing that. I'm going to write that quote. Oh my God, like, it is such a beautiful quote to start this podcast. I don't know, Anil, what do you think?

But totally agree, man. Reminds me of the story that we talked about with cathedrals. But yeah, keep going.

Yeah, I know, I love that too. And I think, Ashish, the way you describe it as presence is really true, but I wonder if there isn't a bit of a yin and yang, right? So you have to stay present to notice those moments, but when you catch those moments, they also call you into presence.

Yes, that's very true. That is very true. You know you need a receiver and you know you need the plus and the minus. Right? And in the end, once you have that, they attract. But unfortunately we let so much of the world around us get in the way, the buffer and it's all our mind.

I agree.

So, my friend, we spent a bunch of time together at McKinsey. Your husband Felix was at McKinsey, started the operations practice. You were an expert. And I am curious, Ann, around how walk us through and walk our listeners through the journey that you had. And frankly, what. What was the pivot that inspired you to actually start Reflection Point? Because that wasn't the work you were doing at McKinsey at all.

No.

So please share that. And I know you told me that you're still figuring out your story and kind of all of that, but just like what was the inspiration behind Pivot Reflection Point? Because it's such beautiful work you do.

Thank you. So the journey is interesting because unlike many people that I know who've had this wonderfully straightforward path, mine has been a curvy one. I started out as a lawyer, as a practicing lawyer, but without ever really Losing that passion in my heart for the humanities. I have a master's in art history. I've always loved the creative world. I love art. I love music. I love, obviously I love literature. We talk about that later. But I was a lawyer and was quite happy being a lawyer. And I've done lots of different kinds of client service. And I think as the years went on, what I started to realize was that the, the learning curve was what was really energizing about client service work. That you never go to the same office twice, you never do the same work twice. You know, as, as the philosophers are fond of saying, you never step in the same river twice. But boy, my career felt like it resonated that deeply. And then I realized what a privilege it was to be able to learn and, and to continually be learning and growing in my work. And some years In, I think 20 plus years into the equation, I took a bit of a turn and decided I wanted to go back to school. And so after having done a master's and a law degree in the early part or in the normal part of my life, I went back in my late 40s and did a doctorate in organizational learning, a doctorate in management. And in that journey, I was really interested in how we learn, how we grow, especially in the context of organizations. At the same time that I was doing that work, I was asked to lead an initiative in the region here in northeastern Ohio, where I live, that was looking at lifelong learning more broadly and how we could, as a region, think about the learning system in a different way, one that could make it a more community oriented system. So talking about the learning system, they were talking about education writ large. But what I realized when I took on this project was that we do a lot of things in the world to support kids going into school, to keep them in school, to help them to graduate, to get them to college. But that once people leave the system, there's. It's very rare for you to get to kind of continue the learning journey. Many people leave this system undereducated, not because of ability, but because of access, because of cost, because of other responsibilities. I had this brainstorm that it would be really interesting if we could bring some of the best of that educational learning sort of moments, which to me was always the seminar, because that's when you get a group of people together and you can take something apart together. So I thought, what if we took this seminar, which was the crown jewel of my learning, and brought that out into the world in some way? And the most logical Place to me seemed to be the workplace because that's where pretty much most people were. And so that's how the idea was born. We started about 11 years ago. We piloted the program with food service workers at a local college where we had college professors come into the food service workplace between the lunch and the, and the dinner service, and they started to read books together. And in the process of reading books, what we discovered, and I took this very evidence based approach to it right from the get go because I really believe that you interview, you ask, you figure out what's happening and that's the only way you're going to learn and grow. So it's both, it's an iterative process and it's an improvement process. But what we discovered was that for a lot of people, nobody asks them what they think, nobody asks them what they feel, nobody says, how do you bring your life wisdom, your personal experience forward as a lens to sort of see what the world looks like? And, and I mentioned at the outset that I never lost my passion for the humanities. I think the humanities is really the study of the human conversation. But we've somehow closed the door and made it only some people in conversation. And I think one of the things that makes Reflection Point really special to me, and we've changed a lot, we've grown a lot since those early days. Boy, have we grown a lot. But I think at the end of the day, if we can bring everybody into the human conversation, then we only enrich that conversation and learn more from each other and with each other than we ever can if we try to do it by ourselves.

You know, Ann, what you're saying there about enriching the conversation by bringing people in, earlier you mentioned you were a bit perplexed that nobody asks what and how the people are feeling. I mean, that's really powerful. And when I hear that, when I was looking into Reflection Point because it's the first time I'd heard about it and I was really trying to understand it, you know, I know that the language really resonated with me. And you were talking about how you really want to help teams listen to each other, be more inclusive, be more innovative, be more collaborative, because that unlocks their potential. Could you please maybe share with us, you know, what inspires you to do that? Because I don't feel that that's. Maybe, you know, people may not see that as, sorry, some people may see that as important that we should do it, but they may not prioritize it. So what inspires you to Help teams prioritize that in their organizations.

Well, I think you're spot on that many people don't prioritize it because they don't always fully understand the power. But I think if. If you think about true teamwork or you think about, you know, solving a really gnarly problem, that we pretty much know that we're better together than we are apart. That if you bring multiple perspectives to the table, that it's very. You see the problem in a whole different way. And as a result, you're able to sort of tap into solutions that one person can't see. And I think maybe that's the key, is that by helping people come together to look at problems, to try to figure out how to work better together, that what you're doing is you're enabling them to reframe problems in a broader, more expansive, you know, more varied kind of way. And I think we know from the design world, for example, that, you know, when you can expand the set of questions you ask, then you exponentially expand the set of solutions that you can find. Right. So we know collaboration means we have to work better together. And we know that innovation is when your idea and my idea come together and we make something bigger than either of us could do ourselves. You know, we know that inclusion is about hearing each other and being open to other perspectives. All of those things wrap around a set of skills that have to do with how we engage with each other. And those skills are really at the core of the work that we do and are really at the core of why. What energizes me, you know, when I see them happening, every time I see it, I think, okay, we're on the right track, you know, and you keep going. So it's not that I had this wonderful moment of, wow, this is the energy, and it takes me forward. It's this constant sort of journey. Maybe it's those little micro moments of realizing that you're doing something that could work, and so it kind of keeps fueling you forward. I don't know if that answered your question or not.

No, you absolutely did. I think it goes back to those tiny experiences.

Yeah.

You know, it's also like. It's funny, like, you know, this response also brings me back to the conversation where we're having before the podcast. So our listeners, Ann and I got off on a. Ann started the podcast with this whole notion of doing and being. And, you know, she's talking about how, you know, she's busier than ever as she gets older. And I was reflecting a bit on the same, on that. And I was like, yeah, you know, you're so true. That's so true that we always struggle about this doing and being. But in this just answer of yours, Anne, I think I see the same things play out. Right. What inspires you, what energizes you along the way is by having them engage in an exercise that by having them do the story and reflect and share their perspectives, fundamentally, you are changing their way of being. And that way of being around, truly being able to listen deeply, to be able to take the other's perspective done in such a safe way. Because it's an abstract story. It's not about how you and I work every day. It's about, you know, a completely different story. But that change in being then fundamentally has them do different things than they came into the meeting. And I love that because, you know, there is so much programs on inclusion, diversity, equity, esg, what have you. Where so much of the focus of those programs in us telling people what to do, hey, don't be biased, check your bias outside. But very little of them actually are about supporting people into transforming their ways of doing. And so I love that and I just wanted to kind of share that back. As I heard you, as I heard you talk about what inspires you.

No, I really thank you for that and I really appreciate it. And I'm sure you're like me, the fastest way to get somebody to not listen to you is to tell them what to do, right? So. But by allowing people the space to discover on their own, it's amazing how much different that is. But it also makes me realize too, from what you just said, that it's doing its being. But maybe there's a seeing component, right? Because I think the other thing that reflection point does, and we can talk a little bit about how it works, but the other thing that reflection point does is by starting in a story. It by definition invites people to look through the lens of their own stories. And when people see each other through those stories, they see each other in a different light. And I always say when you see something, when you learn something about somebody, you can't unlearn it. When you see something new, you can't unsee it. And so those moments are so transformative precisely because they, they bring in an element of surprise. They let people's hair down and let the guard down and allow people to do something, as you said, in a safe space. Maybe they can do it with a colleague who is your boss's boss's. Boss's boss. It doesn't matter because you're in this level playing field and you can just engage as human beings.

It's beautiful. It's beautiful. So along this way, reflection point, right? I mean, we are so busy in this world and I am sure your conversations, as you got this thing going and started engaging with leaders to say, hey, we're going to use stories and we're just going to talk about this stuff, right? So we're gonna find 90 minutes, 12 people, and we're not even gonna talk about your story and what you're struggling with. We're just gonna talk about like this random story. And it's not random, it's picked in context of yours. But it's still a. For an organization. I'm playing the devil's advocate, you know, the, the hard, the hard ass who's sitting on the other end. We're just gonna piece a random story, we're gonna have a conversation somehow that's supposed to change my people. So share with me a little bit around some of those initial setbacks before you had all the data and all the evidence, intent. Here's all the evidence. The first or second or third client, when he first started having these conversations about using stories and reflection as a way to shift their way of being and also fundamentally bring into light a different, you know, a different way of seeing each other. Talk to us a little bit about how, what were some of the setbacks and how you overcome them. How you overcame them.

So, you know, the first question that people say is, you want us to do what? We don't have time. We can't afford this. And it's not about the money. We can't afford to take the time because we're so busy doing, doing, doing. To your earlier point, we don't really get it. What are the five takeaways? What are the three things you have to do tomorrow in order to be better and different? I mean, these are all these sort of action oriented kind of responses we got right from day one. The other response, and we used to have a different name. We used to be called Books at Work. And one of the things we did was change our name in part because we were going down the wrong path with people. They would say, ah, I get it. You're like a book club.

Yes. I was going to say, oh, you're a book club. You want to start a book club at our company? Wonderful.

No, we're not a book club for a million reasons. Like, number one, there's no Wine. Number two, it's not, you know, get together and talk about the book for three seconds and then talk about everything else. And number three, and most importantly, most people, people's book clubs are self selected with people they already know, whose views they already understand. This is about bringing people together who are very different. So I think I got horse saying this is not a book club. And oh, my personal favorite was, I get it, this is like my wife's book club, which was even worse. Right? That was the case of that. So, But I think so those early.

There's no biases there and there's no triggering moments. Hearing that coming from another man to you like, ah, it's like my wife's book. Let me connect you with her. I think this shit would be fantastic.

Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, that is the kiss of death. You know, you're done. You might as well just say okay, bye, because you're finished. Right? But we learned a couple things along the way. So one of them was you. No matter how much I explain this work, I can never explain it as well as it explains itself, right? So I think you even had that experience, Ashish, because you've experienced it. The story tells a much better or the, the experience tells a much better story than anything I could possibly say. And even, even if I were a marketer, I think anything that I could possibly say. So we tried to get as many people exposed to it as we could. The other thing that we learned is that we needed again, going back to this evidence based model, we needed to think about how to share with people what it was we were actually doing. Right. So it's not a book club, but what is it? Okay, so it's actually an exercise in deepening and building collective intelligence. It's about creating a space where people can build the things that help them work better together. Their connections with each other, their ability to take perspectives, as you said, their ability to wait their turn and to. And to find ways to be open to other perspectives. And what we realized over the years, and we've done a lot of research, I think we have just shy of a thousand transcribed interviews. We have lots of survey data. And what we discovered was that there were really five skills that were at play and that what Reflection Point was doing was actually a fairly sophisticated way of modeling and more importantly, practicing five skills which we call the skills of collective intelligence. These five skills are definitely ones that you recognize listening with humility. So listening and understanding that what somebody else has to say can actually enrich us Asking good and curious questions. So questions that are not gotcha questions, but questions that indicate our true desire to learn something from somebody. And embedded in that is admitting that you don't know, otherwise you wouldn't ask the question. The third is challenging your assumptions. So we all go through life with a set of beliefs that are grounded in our education, our background, our perspectives, our personal experiences, and we don't know what we don't know. And so unless we're willing to suspend our own beliefs for a little while to start to understand what other people know, then we're not going to be able to really connect and work with them in a meaningful way. So challenging our assumptions is really important. The fourth is disagreeing with respect and without retribution. So that's the one where this very important concept of psychological safety comes in. We need to be able to create spaces where we can give an opposing point of view without feeling like our job's on the line or we're going to have a problem, or that we're going to get into some kind of a fight, or that somebody's not going to cover our back if, if we don't agree with them. So disagreeing with respect and without retribution is a really important piece of grappling with problems. So it's a huge element of working together. The fifth, and probably it's kind of a catch all, but it's also a fifth, is this idea of widening the circle of empathy. What we know about the science of empathy is that we tend to have empathy for people who look like us or for whom we already know. And if we can expand the circle of people that we begin to understand, then I think by definition we can expand the circle of people for whom we feel empathy. So those five skills together are really critical. And you can begin to see, and we talked about it already, why they drive collaboration, why they drive inclusion, why they drive innovation, why they drive productivity. But this is a space to practice it. And I'll often say to people, we would never ask a professional sports team to just go play and never practice, but we ask business teams to do this all the time. We never let them practice. And a safe space in something that's adjacent to work, it's around a story that enables the CEO to talk to an operator. And at the same time, those are the spaces to practice. And then those skills trickle into the way we do our work together every single day.

You know, and as I, you know, and as I reflect on, even just, you know, I've heard you so many times, on this, including the. When we connected with one of our joint clients, you know, for our listeners, you know, who might be wondering, wait, I tuned into a happiness podcast. Why are we talking about inclusion and collaboration and diversity? Like, what's the connection? Friends, let me just share this with you. Look, if you think about creating cultures of flourishing, if you want to create cultures where people feel happier, any culture where you don't feel included, any places where you don't feel psychologically safe, any place where you don't have the skills or the organization invests in helping people develop the skills. Because none of us naturally grow up with these skills of around, you know, how can we really challenge our own assumptions? How can we really ask good questions? These are the skills that allow us fundamentally to connect deeply with each other, to not make everything the same, to not kind of if you will fit in, but truly belong. Because we can see each other's perspectives and we can create something that is more beautiful than any one of us. We don't need to conform. We can actually innovate. We can create beautiful things together. And I think that's why these skills and these elements are actually at the heart of the work, right. That happiness squad that we are doing with companies. I always say you want to create a culture of flourishing, you've got to, number one, create awareness around what's in the water, right? Challenging assumptions. You've got to be able to infuse meaning into what people are doing again, which means you have to ask them, what do you care about asking good questions. You have to be able to kind of truly invest in their well being. You have to invest, again, asking right about how they're doing financially, physically, mentally, spiritually. Belonging is a big part of that. You have to be able to create belonging. And belonging comes fundamentally from ability to listen to each other, ability again to build psychological safety. And the last is, you know, we talk about creating positive spirals of energy which are all about. It is not about touchy feely, feel good. And I'm only going to say yes and I'm not going to kind of, you know, frankly oppose a point of view. It's about how we learn to disagree with respect versus be passive aggressive. And also how do we truly widen circle of empathy. One of the key elements that Ann mentioned, how can we truly learn how to be empathetic? Not pity, right? It's not about pity. It's about truly be able to feel with the other person what they're feeling to be able to create the space for them we don't need to comfort them, we just need to see them. We need to see them and we need to make them feel seen. So that's the connection. Really, really excited. I'm going to pass it back to you, Anil, to take us deeper into some of these skills and kind of the nuances behind them and also, Anne, to you to bring them life with some real stories because I know you have so many stories.

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Ashish, I love that and I think maybe this is a good opportunity and for helping our listeners visualize and maybe bring these skills of collective experience to life. Help us understand the approach that you take and maybe if you can, like I think back to the last training I was in, right? And I was given a narrative, sat across from a colleague, he was given a narrative and we basically reenacted the narrative. Now I can't say to you right now, hand over heart, I recall what came out of that. That's a, you know, so maybe if you can talk us through, like take as we go through the five, can you give an example to our audience of how you take short form stories and actually cultivate these skills of collective experience? Maybe start if you want to. You can go through them one by one, or we can kind of go through them together. To help me understand how the system works that you, that you, you guys follow.

Well, it's probably easier to think about it in a totality because even though there are five sort of individual skills, no one of them is sufficient. I think these are highly dependent, mutually interdependent sort of skills. So I mean, even just thinking together about sort of how they come up, but you know, we get a group of people together, as Ashish mentioned, and you know, somewhere the ideal number is like somewhere between 12 and 15. The max is 20. You really want it to be as small group. And you know, prior to the pandemic, we always did it in person. Now we do a lot virtually, but we're sort of balanced and do a little bit of each. And we pick a story that is interesting, engaging, maybe has characters that can be perceived as both good and bad. Maybe the story relates to something that the organization that we're working with is particularly interested in exploring. It could be related to, to company values. It could be related to an issue around inclusion and belonging. And the most important piece I think is that we bring a facilitator and we work with facilitators to really help to engage people in that conversation. So we're not asking that large group of people to sort of read a story and then talk amongst yourselves. But what we're saying is through a series of well thought out, open ended questions. So therefore a curriculum that's based on inquiry, then we begin to explore or to unpack what some of those stories offer. And I think what's really fascinating is that the facilitators that we work with, many of whom are college, most of whom are college professors, but some of whom are not, and all of whom are people who are much less interested in being a sage on the stage and really interested in learning alongside the participants. So they're really eager to take their time and go into different kinds of spaces, different kinds of organizations. We work with manufacturers, we work with professional service firms, we work with tech companies, we work in the community. So all of these locations are places that a lot of people haven't really had exposure to. So they're excited about learning alongside the participants and through that set of questions they begin to model some of these skills. So they'll ask a very open ended question. They'll get people thinking, often the stories, because they're not about the things that people encounter every day. They force you to challenge your assumptions right off the Bat. So they, they ask you to, to recon, to reconfirm things that you might be assuming. And I can give you. I'm gonna tell you through a story because it'll be a little bit easier, actually.

Ann, can I ask you to tell me. I. And there is one story that I want you to, because I think it's so relevant for. I mean, you know, we have this huge divide right now between. Is the purpose of the. I was. I've been reading all this work around conscious capitalism and healing organizations, and there is this fundamental disconnect. 80% of the people, when you ask them, they say the purpose of the business is money, profits. And some people say, well, maybe the, the outcome of the business should be. One of the outcomes should be money. But isn't the purpose of the business really about people and unleashing the magics? And there's this huge debate, you know, and we can have debate one way or the other, but there was a story that you had mentioned about these two shops, if you remember, and kind of, you know, what ended up happening. Can you use that story and just bring to life, you know, the different perspective? I mean, it's just a beautiful story. I think it resonates so many with so many folks who are here.

So what you're talking about is a short story called the Hardware man that was written, oh, I think in the 1950s by an American writer, John O'. Hara. And it takes place in a very small town in Pennsylvania, probably the sort of based on the town that he grew up in. And it's about two competing hardware stores. And one hardware store is very old fashioned. They do things the old fashioned way. They would never raise prices. They're very, very careful. The other hardware store is acquired by a young man who's very aggressive, who is determined to do well, who really wants to reframe the way the hardware store is run. But at the same time, he's also really engaged and good at listening to his people. And he gives people a lot of Runway. He's got some dicey parts of his personality, but he's actually quite good too, in some ways. So both characters have positives and negatives around them. And when we do this story with people, it's really interesting because they take themselves out of their own space. They go into the space of these hardware stores and then they find themselves trying to figure out, okay, well, would they rather work for somebody who looks like Tom or would they rather work for somebody who looks like Lou? And is there good or is There bad. And it's really interesting. I remember doing. We did this story with a company that spends a lot of time thinking about people as well as profits. But they were very torn because they realized that the two. It's not a dichotomy, right? It's of these things that have to kind of continually work together.

That is not a dichotomy that without.

Profits you can't help people, but without people, you can't have profits. And so it's not an either or. And it comes up very clearly in this story in a really interesting way. The other way we've used this story, the same story, is with groups of people who are just starting the journey on diversity and inclusion, where they just have trouble seeing a lot of diversity in their own space. And so we worked with a company in middle America that was predominantly white and predominantly male, and they were acquired by a company that was really interested in sort of upping their game in terms of diversity and inclusion, both in their hiring, but also in their attitudes. And it was really interesting because through this story where they could see these very different, very diverse perspectives of these two hardware store owners, they were able to start to see, see for themselves that in what looked like a pretty homogeneous population, they had so many diverse points of view that they were not tapping into. And so the diversity doesn't necessarily limit itself to populations where people have different skin color or different religions or different genders or sort of the more overt markers of diversity, but actually the diversity of life experience that we don't get to tap into because we never stop to ask, right? And so in the process of taking apart that story with interesting listening and good questions and shock, shock at other people seeing things that you didn't see, all of a sudden you start to learn and grow a lot about, you know, to understand more about how other people in your organization are thinking.

So, Ann, what I would love to hear is, I'm sure you've got many stories, but I would love to hear maybe one that's, you know, really memorable for you from your experience with a client, you know, that would really inspire our listeners to understand and see, listen and see to the impact that the work that you've done. You know, maybe an example where, you know, they, they did something, you saw the shift. But more importantly, how did you know after that this really stuck and really made a difference in their organization.

So I think a really good example comes from already some years back when we started working with a company that's an engine manufacturer. They make large stationary engines that get used in power generation and in defense. And they had a team of workers on the shop floor who were in charge of fuel injection. And this was a smallish team, about five people, led by a woman. And they wrestled with each other. I think they had personalities that were sometimes at odds with each other. The company had gone through a lot of changes, and we started to do this work with them. We read books and stories with them pretty much on a regular basis over the course of several years. And what they found was that through these books and stories, that they started to get to know each other in a more meaningful way, that they gave each other the benefit of the doubt in a more authentic way. And they learned about each other things that they had never known. So one, for example, one worker was. He worked there by day, but he had an art dealership, and he was a writer, and he had all kinds of hobbies that they didn't know anything. He owned a restaurant. He was really dabbling in the creative in every other aspect of his life, all the other times that he wasn't at work. Another guy who was on the team was a very, very young man. Most of these. Most of the team members were in their late 40s, early 50s. But one of them was very young, probably in his mid-20s. He was a lathe operator. They called him the Kid. They discounted him quite a bit. They didn't take into consideration that he might have any sort of personal wisdom to share because he hadn't been, you know, he didn't have the years in grade that they did. But as they started to do these things together and they started reading, several of them told me that it really changed the way they worked together. The woman who ran, who was sort of the team lead, said, we read Hemingway stories, and Hemingway was famous for not telling you the whole story, that you had to devise what was happening by what wasn't being said. The facilitator helped us to understand that. She said, I began to realize that when I talk to people, both on the team and in other parts of the company, that if I focused more on what they weren't saying, that I could have a much more meaningful conversation with them than if I thought about only the words that they were telling me. And so Hemingway taught me how to think about kind of the positive and the negative in the sort of photographic sense of all the information I was receiving. And it made me a much more effective team member. So that was one insight. Another person on the team said, I felt valued for who I was. We had a conversation she shared with me. We had a conversation about a science fiction story where we all ended up on a desert island and people had to bring their sort of raw skills in order to be able to survive. And I laughed and said, I don't think I have any skills that I could help us survive if we all ended up on a desert island. And so it was through how other people got to know her that she began to realize that she had a lot of skills that she could share and that were integral to their success. But she hadn't thought of herself that way. So she changed the way she saw herself. So the first one changed the way she saw others. She changed the way she saw herself. But the most, probably the most powerful moment was when I talked to the kid, the young 20 something year old lathe operator, and I asked him if this work had made a difference because they were working better together. Their past dues had gone down. They were, they were actually producing a lot more productivity as they were working together. And that was coming clearly from the company that they were doing much better. And so I asked him whether or not the work that they were doing, reading stories and pausing to reflect with each other, was making a difference. And he said to me, oh, absolutely. And I said, well, tell me how, I mean, tell me the ways in which that matters. And he said, you know, I could answer you, but I'm going to let John Steinbeck do it. Steinbeck said, and this was from one of the stories they read. You can't hate a man once you know him. You can't hate a man once you know him. And he said, now that we know each other, there's not a problem we can't solve. And to me, I think that the evidence that this work is working as you asked, is not whether or not some switch changes the next day or whether or not you can point to a specific metric and say, boom, there it is. But it's about this sort of change in the way people are able to work together because they now give each other the benefit of the doubt. They see each other as human beings and they know exactly how to navigate the world that they find themselves in, which is different every single day.

Yeah, I love that. And, and you know, this notion of, you know, Anil and I talk about this, right? Anil and I, many people who kind of hear us think we've known each other our whole life, we haven't. We actually met for the first time this summer, actually in, in July we had talked a fair bit before during the pandemic, but we had just met. So we're just trying to, like, you know, figure out, learn, build something together. And I always say this, you know, with Anil and I, we say, you know, we always judge others. We judge ourselves on. We judge others on behavior. And I think I always say, right, so just assume I'm telling you, and over time, you'll get to know it. I'm going to assume positive intent. You should assume positive intent. That's a little bit like you see the person. So if there is a behavior, don't create your own story about why that person is acting that way or make a villain out of it. Just know that that intent is to grow together and. And, you know, we are all human at the heart of it. So, you know, I think it's. It just. You highlighted that point for me, which is, you know, individually, you can do this work. And, you know, we can do this work because we've both done a lot of development, but through stories, you can actually try and build that skill at scale and organically rather than sit and tell people, well, you know, you judge somebody by their intention, not their behavior, or you can have stories, and that just emerges naturally because they see the other person and they find similarities where they want, you know, and what's nice.

Is I think these are the skills that are the gift that keep on giving. Because in many ways, the skills deepen the connection, and then the deeper connection intensifies the skills. So they. They build each other in very circular and iterative ways that really allow for an exponential kind of growth because, you know, every day is a new day with a new set of issues and a new set of challenges. And so each of getting through each of those moments only intensifies those skills if you start to focus on working together on them.

And I'm just curious about this program that you ran with this company. You said you've ran it for, you know, multiple years. They were working with you. Just tell me a little bit and tell our listeners a little bit about how big was the company, how many employees, how frequently did you all meet, and, you know, how soon did the impact start to appear?

I want to give you accurate.

Just ballpark is fine.

It was a company with about four or five hundred employees, and we started to work at both ends at the same time. So we worked with this team I was describing to you, but at the same time, we worked with the senior leadership team and then a whole bunch of teams in between. So teams at every level, engineering teams we worked with, administrative teams, with hr, with teams, literally teams at every level of all demographics. Some of them were all men, Some of them were men and women. We even did several safety trainings. They used to do safety trainings in their plants. So we did sessions where I would read a story out loud to 350 people in a factory, and then we broke them up into groups and each had their own facilitator and they discussed the story. And so we really worked with that company through and through. It's probably the company that we did the most fulsome work with across the board. And I think different teams saw different changes at different times because we tailored them for the group. So the leadership team met once a month, and they would embed a reflection point, discussion into the first part of their meeting. And what changed for them was. And their leader, the president, was very clear on this. What changed for them was an ability to separate their ideas from their egos, right? So they learned through the stories, and this gets at this skill of disagreeing with respect, right? They learned that they could have very different points of view about the story, and that through those two different points of view, they could. That they could come to some place that neither of them had gone to individually. And they began to realize, and he said it himself, that they would take an idea, they would put it out there, but then they would disconnect their ego from that process so that they would allow others to build on that idea. Right? So that was one of the outcomes that the leadership team found. I shared with you some of the other teams, but I think what we discovered was that it became kind of part of the common language. And there were a lot of stories that a lot of these teams had all read. And so they became part of this sort of shared experience set that enabled people across the company to have a common starting point for different kinds of conversations. And some of these stories became like almost like mantras or phrases for things like, you know, don't, you know, don't be the bad guy in a particular story. Or you're like this kind of a person. We've got to be careful about what that means or, you know, how to think about these things. So, you know, we have a story that we use a lot. That's a Chinua Achebe story. Chinua Achebe was a famous Nigerian writer, and it features a young man who goes to Innovate a school in Nigeria in the 1940s. He's got so much zeal and so much effort that he sort of bulldozes things. And he doesn't. He's not good at understanding that the change that he's seeking may not be the change that people want. And his name is Michael. And so, you know, many people would say, oh, we're being like Michael right now. We have to take a step back and ask ourselves whether we're doing this right way. I mean, so stories became a kind of language for the company to be able to engage in in addition to the language of their culture. And so I think that the power, it's. It's diffuse and it really, It. It really expands. I think people from a quantitative perspective.

The.

The number of people that found the program worthwhile and wanted to do it again was in the high 90th percentiles. 90th percentiles, like 95, 96, 90, 97%. The number of people who found that they could. That they could report feeling more willing to take a risk or more willing to say something even if they knew others disagree. Those went up markedly as well. So you have those metrics of evidence that it's working. But I think it's also about a way that people talk to each other and the fact that they can give each other grace and assume positive intention, which I think is a lot of what Ashish was getting to, that those are outcomes that are tough to quantify but are really, you know, when they're there and, you know, when they're missing.

You know, I'm, I'm. I'm. I have to say I was taken aback when you mentioned that you read the story to that large of a group of people, and then obviously you broke them into smaller groups to discuss it. I mentioned earlier a narrative that I did in a training course, and I completely forgot the outcome and what I was meant to take away from it. But I do recall from school that we talked about a group traveling, and, you know, this one kid was. Was the slowest one. And, you know, eventually they realized, you know, let's take the backpack off him and. And then we can maybe move faster. And long story short, the name of this character was Herbie. And the Herbie was meant to reflect the bottleneck. And so I can tell you Hannover Hart. That stuck with me. So I love how you said, you know, people go, oh, you know, what would Michael do? Or, oh, we're being a Michael. So this, this. The power of what you've just described is the first time I've heard it apply to the scale that you. I Just want to say it's incredible and how you are drawing and driving human connection across these organizations, I think is truly beautiful. I think before we part, I think just to wrap up from your side and I just want to first off say thank you and is there something, one, two, maybe three tips that you would love to leave with our listeners, things that they can start to practice to unlock their skills and collaboration, inclusion, diversity, and just creating that human connection either within their family organization or even just amongst themselves.

So obviously my first tip would be call us and we'll help you. Right. I would love to show you what the program is like and what we can do. But mindful that that's not always possible, I think what I would encourage, let's say a leader of a team who would like to create moments like this to help the team sort of see each other in a new light. I think tip number one would be to craft a space like pause, right, Pause and say we're going to take a little bit of time and we're going to make a space to practice. Acknowledge that practicing together is going to be what allows us to work better together. So that would be one. And really carve out that time, not try to do it in conjunction with something else. I think so many times when people try to change, it's like changing the wheels on a moving bus, right? We got to stop the bus and then let's sit down and think about this. So that would be one. The second would be find a way to get out of your regular context. I think that when you're always in the context of work, hierarchies come into play. You know, the order that you speak speaks to the sort of, you know, who's got different ideas about different things, what roles, what functions they, they play. So get out of context altogether. So whether it's watch a movie together or pick up a story or listen to a podcast, you know, there's, there's a way in which you can just take yourself outside of the normal space. So that would be the second, the second thing is to do that. And the third would be encourage each person to just ask one question, even if it embarrasses them a little bit of the others that would help them to understand something that they don't fully understand themselves. Right. So that if you can encourage people, people to ask a really good open ended question and to listen to how other people frame the answer, that even that alone is an entry point to a more open, engaged and authentic conversation than the conversations that we tend to have in the workplace where we are performing and showing what we know and waiting for our turn to speak, etc. Etc. So I think those would be the sort of three things I would say set aside to do. And I think they'll see value immediately.

And I love that. I especially love the first one. Okay. And I'm going to highlight this because there is so much. And look, I mean, for the listeners who might not know, right. I spent 12 years doing operations work helping and seeing how companies fundamentally get so much out of their industrial assets. And look, you know, we can debate which ones are doing it really, really well and which ones are kind of lagging, right, in a classic, you know, lower quartile, mid quartile, upper quartile. But regardless of where they are, one thing they consistently do at least once a week, if not once a month, step back and look at the system and say, what's working and how can we improve it? Okay, this is hardwired into every industrial operation. We can say whether they're a level one to five, five on a lean capability or a one, it doesn't matter. It's the first thing. They're always looking at the system. But you know what? We are in a digital economy. Information work is where we do most of our work collaborating with each other. My invitation to you is to consider the following question. When was the last time you actually took a timeout? You stopped the bus and you just reflected on how are we working as a team? How did you then take it out of the context, out of the egocentric? If I am not, if the team is not doing well, there is something to blame in me as a leader. It's my job to fix it. When was the last time you took yourself out by using a power of a story to step out of context where we are all equal, where it's not about us, but it's about something else? And I invite you to consider that and think about when was it that you did it and if it has been a long while, which I'm sure for many it's been. Never consider calling reflection point. Consider taking this approach because what you might find is it allows you to fundamentally start to bring the power of how you know how to manage industrial assets to bring it into your workforce, to truly unleash the human magic that becomes possible when we see each other as humans, when we connect, when we learn the perspective to listen with humility, be able to take different perspectives, challenge assumptions. And this has been such an amazing conversation and I'M already so excited about even more places where we collaborate and do this work together. But thank you for sharing this wisdom, this amazing life work with our listeners on how they can truly hardwire their organizations for happiness, starting with the fundamental building block of human connection and belonging.

Well, thank you. Thank you. It was wonderful to talk to you and you've given me lots of ideas as well. So thank you very much.

Thank you both.

Take care. Bye.

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