Ashish Kothari reflects on how origin story conversations at dinner made colleagues visible as whole humans. At a five-day retreat with 35 of 40 senior partners, curated external lives hid internal struggles, prompting a shift from performance metrics toward human flourishing.
One of the program. One of the key things in almost all the work I do is we have an origin stories discussion at dinner. And it's one of the most transformative, you know, events that we typically do because for the first time, people start to see the other person as the full human rather than the role or the colleague and, you know, the function or whatever stories we might hold about them. It was one of those moments that also shaped my decision to shift from performance and operations transformations to human and flourishing transformations, when I realized in a five day retreat, there were 35 of the 40 of the leading partners and senior partners in the firm. And everybody had perfectly curated external lives and internal lives that many were struggling with, but very rarely opened up to anyone.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
