GA 640 | Optimistic Fear with Cornelia Choe

One of the greatest dangers we can have is to stop mapping. And it's so hard to know exactly what's happening in the world with every change that confronts us. But we don't have to get everything 100% right. But when we stop updating our map, that's when, especially in a world that's going to continue changing and changing even faster, that's a grave danger.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Cornelia Cho to the show. Now, so Cornelia and another gentleman recently wrote a book called The Panoramic Leader. And so today what we do is we sort of dive into some of the key principles that the book is speaking on, and we sort of open up with the whole idea of change. And obviously the world is constantly changing and lots of things are moving all the time. And so we sort of explore the idea of like, well, what do you do as a leader and how do you sort of move about about that, that environment and how do we make better decisions in that constantly changing environment. We then get into kind of the whole idea of mental maps. I love the idea of a mental map. And, and so we talk about what they are and then also why it can be dangerous for leaders because sometimes, not always, but sometimes we are prone to outdated maps. And so there's a danger in that. So we sort of get into that. And then we spent quite a bit of time on something that they call the Gemba method, GEM. And so we sort of walk through what the— what that is and why that's such an important idea behind leadership. And then sort of wrap things up, we get into the whole idea of what they call optimistic fear. I thought that was especially interesting. So one of the questions I had was, why not optimistic courage? Why did you call it optimistic fear? And so really interesting thoughts on that. So again, a really fun episode. I really enjoyed this one. Show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. Just look for episode 640. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 640. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Cornelia, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm doing great. And you, Ron? I'm so delighted to be here.

Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun. Where are you calling in from?

I'm in close to Geneva, Switzerland.

Oh, wow. Switzerland. That's fantastic. How long have you been there?

About a decade. And I came from London, so I saw how different life could be. But we are really loving it here.

Nice. I'm curious, not to be nosy, but like, what made you move there? Like work or something else?

My husband and I have always wanted to live in a French-speaking country. We both speak French, so we decided it was time. So it was either Paris or Geneva, and we had a 2-year-old at the time, so we decided Geneva would possibly be better.

Okay, well, fantastic. Beautiful part of the world. So, all right, well, so Cornelia, I know you know how the show go is we like to begin all of our episodes with a quote. So what do you have?

One of my favorite quotes is from the client of my co-author of a book I recently wrote. My co-author's name is Marshall Goldsmith, and the quote goes, "Achievement is all about me, but leadership is all about them." Hmm.

Oh, that's a good one. What's that mean to you?

For me, it's really about the focus of where we put our attention. And being seen by people is so important in the world. We care about whether we're seen by the people around us and especially by whom we differentiate the importance of who we're seen by. But this really helps us focus on what's important. And to be able to distinguish between achievement and leadership. A lot of times we confuse the two and it really helps me stay focused on what's really important and on others and understanding them. So I just, I love that quote.

I'm interested to, you said something that was interesting to me, something about people wanting to be seen. How do you see that playing out? No pun intended. With the whole idea of just like one of them, I think of my children. I have one. I have 7 kids, but one of them in particular is very strong extrovert, just loves the people and life and talking and these types of things and just won't be quiet. Okay. And I have another child who is really the opposite and just an introvert and loves to read, loves to be quiet, loves to be still. Um, um, and I, I guess I'm thinking about my introvert, like, do they want to be seen? It's like, what do you think about that when you, when you, uh, you have maybe different personality types and things like that playing into, um, you know, do they want to be seen or do they want to just be left alone with their book?

Well, it comes to really down to our understanding of what it means to be seen. Does it mean that you recognize and respect them, or does it mean that you have to talk to them and interact with them and expect something in return? Or is it an understanding that you have? And depending on your definition, it can change the answer. But I, I do think that introverts want to be seen. They want to be, they want to belong. They want to be recognized and to be part of a community as well. That may not be the same way as your more extroverted child may see life, but I do think they have a need to be seen and to be heard.

Yeah, in their own way, right?

Yeah, exactly. Part of family.

And I agree. I agree. I was just curious to get your thoughts. So, okay, well, good. All right. Well, so tell us about your book and I One of the things that I'm always curious to ask authors is like, why did you write it? Like, what problem are you trying to solve?

Absolutely. As I mentioned, my co-author is Marshall Goldsmith, who is a wonderful friend at the same time. He's a leadership and executive coach and an advisor to a lot of people around the world. But he and I continuously got a request to help people deal with change. And if you look at change today, um, the nature of it is very different. It's continuous and change, um, up until now it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And today it's continuous because before one process ends, another starts. You have the changing tariffs, you have wars, AI changing our lives on a daily basis, um, inflation and The question is, how do we deal with all of this without either falling into the fear of the unknown or staying on autopilot and denying all of this and saying, you know, I'm just gonna carry on with my life. And in this new world of continuous change, we need to operate differently and we need to change our leadership process. And so this book is helping people and shares our experience successfully helping people deal with more change. And one of the biggest problems of continuous change around the world is that it's coming from all different angles, and it's affecting our supply chains and the world around us in different ways. So, different people in our companies and different people in our processes are living different realities. And so, it's no longer enough to be right. Because our understanding of the world is splintering and polarizing. And so in addition to understanding your part of the process, you also need to understand the system as a whole. And so this book helps you understand and put together really a 3D understanding of the system around you by putting together the perspectives of different stakeholders around you, upstream, downstream, in adjacent teams, for example, and to be able to put together perspectives, even ones that may be contradictory or ones that oppose your own. And how do you do that successfully to help you make better decisions?

Well, speaking of that then, and also the name of the book, The Panoramic Leadership System.

It is a tongue twister, yes.

Yeah, tongue twister.

Yeah.

Okay. So I want to dig in a little bit more on the whole idea of of constant change, unpredictability, and leaders needing to be able to— it's like, what are some practical tips or ideas that the listeners can sort of consider? Because you're right, we are dealing with constant change and lots of chaos, if you will.

Yeah. So we have a process called GEM, and it stands for 3 parts. G-E-M. Get up close to your stakeholders. Establish meaningful bonds with them. And map your evolving perspective. And in a nutshell, this means get up close to the people around you. And this includes the people you may not be familiar with, but who can still affect the processes you're in, the teams you're in, the work that you do, or the companies that you lead. And so that's the first step. Get up close to a wide range of stakeholders. And that's a great first step. But in order to really understand their perspectives and to get a— accurate and honest perspective from them, it's important to establish a relationship where you have trust and where you are able to mutually share information. Because the higher up you go in management, the harder it is to get honest and good information. It's more likely that we'll hear what people think we want to hear, which is, also informative, but it may not really be an understanding of the reality that they're going through, which will really help us understand more about what's happening around us. And then the last step—

one quick question before you get to the last step. Is, um, is there an order of operation? Like, does G come before E, or can E come before G? That sort of thing.

G needs to come before E because before you can deepen your relationship, you have to go up to them. And it takes, it takes courage to get up to people, get close to people who you may not be either familiar with or who may have a very different opinion than you do. But I find that when you talk to someone, for example, who sees the opposite of you, they're looking behind you. And so they can see your blind spots. So that can, if you can create an environment of trust, it can be extremely helpful. And we have another tool that we use called optimistic fear, where you recognize the risk, but you use fear to fuel yourself forward. So you lean in instead of shutting down, which we call pessimistic fear, but using optimistic fear and getting closer to situations, to people, and to ideas, you're able to see more options and to use your courageous curiosity to get closer.

What's interesting about your model so far is within our— most of the listeners, we practice some, you know, lean manufacturing or lean thinking. And one of our core concepts is is going to Gemba, Gemba being the Japanese word for the place the work is done, right? So, like, go up and see Genchi Genbutsu, like, literally get your boots on and go and see with your own eyes what's actually happening at the Gemba, the place the work is done, right? And yeah, so I feel like there's beautiful harmony between what you're saying here and what we're talking about in Lean.

Yeah. To go and see is, it's very close to this idea, but panoramic leadership adds one more important layer, which is going up to see, um, and getting an idea of what's happening, but also getting different interpretations of what's happening. Because today change is coming from a lot of different directions and it can affect different people in different ways. So, um, hearing one perspective or even two may not give you the whole story. If we try to get multiple perspectives or even opposing perspectives, we'll get, um, a better, idea of how people really think and the why behind it so that when change does affect our team again, and it will, we'll be able to have a better idea of how to see around corners and understand how people will react. So it builds upon Go and See, which I think is really great and so helpful. But in this world of change, we need one step further to be able to see around the corner and to understand the people because they're being affected. In different ways.

Got it. Got it.

Okay. And so just to share a quick story about that, I was working with a regional manager and he had about 5 country managers under him and/or working with him. And 2 of them weren't really getting along. And he went to go speak with them. So he went to go and see. And they both told him that there was no problem and that things were fine and that, you know, it was just the initial, you know, contact between them. But operations weren't going very smoothly and they were having a lot of hiccups, a lot of miscoordinations. And so David went to join one of our leaders groups where we bring together leaders who think differently. And someone mentioned perhaps the problem is the structure you've placed in your team. And David, you have a good relationship with all the country managers, but you haven't given them a chance to create a good relationship amongst themselves. And for some reason, he was so busy getting the work done and moving forward that he hadn't thought of the importance of getting them to bond between each other. He thought either that would happen naturally or, you know, that didn't have to be intentional. But once he did that, he was able to understand a lot more about the different, you know, In this case, it was different loyalties, different historical backgrounds about different countries. And so this is a situation where he went to go and see and he did his job, but he still didn't get a good understanding of what was going on because different stakeholders were changing in different ways. So the last part of this process, of the GEM process, is map your evolving perspective. Because once you get up close to your stakeholders and you understand how they're really thinking and you get their perspective, what do you do with all these perspectives? How do you integrate them? And, uh, we have a concept called your internal map, and this is kind of your internal operating system. It's like the story you tell yourself about how things work in the world, and everyone has a different way of seeing the world. And what we do with these perspectives is to kind of put them up to our map in our mind and say, do I agree? Do I not? What am I learning from this? Is this disproving something I've learned before? And so the question, the ultimate question is not, do I agree? That's an intermediary one. It's, did this teach me something new? Do I want to revise my way of seeing the world? And today, with the amount of change that we have in our operations and in travel and everything else, it's extremely important to be able to question our mental map and adapt it constantly so that we're keeping up with the world. And so this last step, Map Your Evolving Perspective, is really helpful in helping us understand an accurate view of, what's going on so that we can make better decisions.

How do you do the mapping? Is there— are there— is it like a thought process or is there like a literally a— are there, I don't know, forms or templates or like how are you— how are you helping people sort of get the ideas in their brains out into the world?

It's— it's up until now it's been a thought process and we're thinking about maybe making a workbook or something like that. But it's— it's questioning your values, questioning what you've learned from your successes and your failures. And so many times what got us to the position that we are, we're in, and what made us successful then changes later on. And so it's a question of asking yourself, is it, are, are the lessons that I've learned still valid? Is this the same way I want to handle my team, or is this how I want to pursue new opportunities? What is my operating philosophy? Mm-hmm.

So I'm curious, you and your co-author, like, how did you come up with the ideas behind this, this panoramic leader? Is it driven by sort of like personal experiences or past lives, or how did you kind of come up with the framework?

Marshall and my co-author and I work a lot with executives and their stakeholders. And Marshall, many decades ago, started a process where he helped— he worked with executives and the people around them to coach the executive. So instead of executives meeting with one person from outside of their company who would be their internal coach, they would meet with people within their company. And these people would say, OK, I'm happy to help you work on this skill or on, for example, being more patient at meetings or being more open-minded to suggestions that are changing the way we work. And they would take 6 months, for example, to begin with and check in with the people around them and say, how am I doing? Do you have any ideas? And, you know, let's discuss this. And that has been extremely helpful. At the same time, I was working with executives to bring them new stakeholders. And this, this process I lead is, I call them leader circles and I interview leaders and then match them together into groups of 8 according to how they think and their backgrounds. And I pair people, I, I match them up with people who think differently. And the beauty of this, Ron, is that when you bring up your problems with people who see with different perspectives and think differently, for example, with, with this region manager, you're able to see ideas and options that you wouldn't have been able to come up with on your own and to see that much more. And this is where we really came up with 3D thinking, being able to see from all angles, including from behind you when you talk to people who think very differently from you or the opposite. And this has been extremely helpful in breakthroughs because thinking harder with people who are aligned with you is not always the answer. A lot of times we need to talk to people who are in opposite positions. For example, we paired up a founder of a company who had just left their company with a CEO who was having problems with a founder who had just left the company that she was now the CEO for. And this meeting was instrumental because up until then, the CEO was very angry at the founder for interfering with operations. They just had a really hard time letting go of operations, and they had a very close relationship with some of the other leaders in the company. So after meeting with another person who had just left their own company, she was able to understand how important it is to be able to— to respect the loss that someone else has and to handle this with sensitivity. Through that, we were able to get the founder to really let go, and the company went on to enjoy extreme growth after that. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So this is really the power of seeing in different ways and seeing around corners.

Yeah. Yeah. I want to maybe circle back a little bit and go a little bit deeper in the whole idea of mental maps. And in particular, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, I don't know, sort of like the tendency for leaders to not always, but sometimes have sort of like a, you know, an outdated map, if you will. And first of all, do you agree with that? And then tell us a little bit more about your ideas on just mental maps in general.

Sure. And I absolutely agree with that because a lot of times in our youth, we're very curious to learn more about the world, and we try new experiences, and we work very hard. And once we get to a place of success, we're able to say, "I've made it. I'm going to sit back and finally enjoy the reward that I deserve." And that's the most dangerous place to be in because then at that point we're working on autopilot and we, we have our foot on the gas and we're looking in the rearview mirror. The problem is that, you know, autopilot is good for conserving energy because the brain takes up 2% of our body weight, but 20% of our oxygen and our energy. And so it's, it's great for saving us a lot of trouble, but it only works in a time of stability when you are on the highway and everything is very predictable and, you know, very prescribed. As soon as you introduce a lot of change in the system around you, then that becomes extremely dangerous. And today we're not on the highway anymore. A lot of our major institutions and the way the practices we have in business, for example, have changed. And so our lane markers have disappeared and we're no longer on the highway, we're on open road and on, you know, on grass. And so, when that happens, we can no longer count on the rearview mirror. We really have to turn our head and look around and see who's next to us and what they're thinking. And that's when we talk about getting up close to stakeholders so that you can adjust your GPS, your mental map, and say, "Oh, I got it. There is now a danger zone to the right." there could be another path to the left because the highways disappeared.

Mm-hmm.

Got it. So, and I would even go as far to say that one of the greatest dangers we can have is to stop mapping. And it's so hard to know exactly what's happening in the world with every change that confronts us. But we don't have to get everything 100% right. But when we stop updating our map, that's when, especially in a world that's going to continue changing and changing even faster, that's a grave danger.

Mm-hmm. What is, maybe first a definition, and then I'm just curious of like, what is it and why do you think it's important? Is the whole idea of optimistic fear.

Yeah.

What is it and what's the power of it?

Sure. So optimistic fear is a very powerful tool that we can use in a lot of different situations. And building on what I said before, where we use it to fuel our actions moving forward and to help us lean in into situations that are confronting us, optimistic fear can really help us whether it's at work or with a family, get up close to problems, to situations, instead of assuming we know what's happening or being afraid. So those are—

Where does the fear part come in, I guess, is my— why wouldn't you call it optimistic courage versus fear? Like, talk about that.

Yeah, fear is, it has a very bad reputation because it's, we equate that with perilous fear, but a lot of danger that we have today and our daily stresses are not perilous in the fact that our lives are necessarily at risk. And, but there is a certain risk there. And so fear is an indication, but it is not necessarily, doesn't mean peril. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fear is in there because, It's not just courage. Optimistic fear is a mentality where you recognize that there is risk. Courage is more, you know, just going forward. We're weighing the risks and we are saying that, you know, there is a reason to consider being afraid and to recognize that, but to still move forward despite the fact that you may be afraid. Afraid.

Yeah. Even in like religion, like I'm Catholic, so like fear of the Lord, right? Like, well, you don't—

Yeah. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, is it— it's not like you should be scared, you know, or whatever, but it's, you know, having a sort of a respect, you know, if you will, towards what you're dealing with here.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and there is a lot of unknown around us. Before life was at different times a lot more stable than they are today, or they were perceived to be a lot more stable than they are today. And so we have so many perceived threats in our lives today that it's good and it's helpful to have an operating system where you're able to say, okay, I'm not gonna be overwhelmed by all of them. I'm going to find a way to be able to handle them all. With confidence. And one of the biggest differentiators between optimistic fear and pessimistic fear is the confidence to say, you know, there will be a solution to this. I am, or I'm going to see many more options. Something good will come out of me getting up close and to have that belief. Yeah.

Ah, good stuff. Well, this has been a fun conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. Do you have maybe any, I don't know, sort of final words of wisdom? And then if people wanted to connect connect with you and get the book and all that, how do they do it?

Sure. I have a set of 3 questions I often ask myself, and a lot of the people we work with have adopted this as well. And this is helpful to unblock us from situations and to get up close to other people who think differently. And the 3 questions are, who's not at my table? And to say whose opinion haven't I taken into consideration? And this really helps take me out of autopilot because I of course am on autopilot sometimes as well, more than I should. Everyone needs a bit of autopilot, but it's the question of how much. So the question is, who's not at my table? Who am I not consulting? Whose opinion have I not understood? Who's important and what might I be missing? So what could I have learned from them? And then the third question is, how would that change my actions or the actions of others? And so that's really moving me from an autopilot to action. And I found those three questions to be extremely helpful and very quick to do. And I just want to end with the message that your decisions are only as good as the world that you can see and that your team members may be able to see from each other. And so it's no longer enough to be right. We have to continuously update our map. And I would love the process to be fun. I have made so many good friends from getting up to people I didn't know. And there is so much So many wonderful people and good, interesting things to learn. And I hope this is helpful and that it becomes a very enjoyable process for you.

Great, great. And if people wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

Sure. They can contact me on my website, which is Cornelia Cho, C-O-R-N-E-L-I-A C-H-O. And our book is called The Panoramic Leader. Or you can try to connect with me on social media. I'm on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Got it.

Got it.

All right. Well, thanks again for coming on, Courtney Lee. This has been a lot of fun.

Thank you so much, Ron, for this, this wonderful conversation. And I just want to say, feel free to reach out to me. I love hearing from people. And, and continuing the conversation. Thank you.

All right. Thank you.

Take care. You too.

Bye-bye. Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training, but to be your partner in problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first steps or leading a global transformation, Our goal is to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, we're here to coach and guide you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for a live training to get that immersive hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.