The Truth About Facing A Challenge

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. So if you've not yet discovered your why, go to whyinstitute.com, take the why discovery, and then come back and listen to the podcast because it'll have much more meaning for you when you know your why. So if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why and how has played out in their life. And so this week we are going to be talking about the why of mastery. It is the most rare why less than 5% of the population has it. Now, people with this WHY seek deep amounts of information over a broad variety of topics. They will pick a specific subject and begin to learn about it, often for the sheer joy of curiosity and learning something new. They gather and retain substantial knowledge in different areas and typically viewed as experts in numerous disciplines by many, they will insist that they have yet to truly master them. They are fearless about new subjects or ideas. In discussions with a person with this why, you might hear them say, wait, we need to think about this first. Now, my guest today is Michelle Walker. She is the founder of Gray Rhino and Company. They help leaders, organizations, and communities to identify and strategize responses to Gray Rhino risk risks, those that are obvious yet neglected despite, and all too often because of their size. She has three decades of experience in strategy, economics, finance, public policy turnarounds, and crisis management, as well as media and think tank management and content creation. She also has a broad background in behavioral economics, organizational dynamics, risk, geopolitics, and economic analysis. Michelle has delivered keynote speeches, presentations, and workshops around the globe. Her work has earned her recognition as a 2009 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008American Council on Germany Young Leaders, and a 2010 Women's Media Center, Women Making History, among other honors. Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much. I'm here.

So let's start with what is a Gray Rhino? I see it on the board right behind you too.

Yes, I have a friend who's got a communications background and she wouldn't stop yelling at me until I stuck that up on the wall. But I was actually very lucky. The wall was already painted red, so it matched. So the gray rhino is a metaphor for the big thing that's coming at you. It's pointing its horn right at your way. It's snorting, it's pulling the ground. It's getting ready to charge. It might have started charging already. And it's a way to remind us how likely we are to get trampled by the big, obvious things that we sort of assume we've got a handle on, but we don't. It's related to the elephant in the room, which by definition, nobody does or says anything about, which I don't think is okay. Gray rhino is the thing that people often are talking about, but still not enough people are doing something to deal with. And it's also a counterpart to the black swan, which any of your listeners with a finance background will know as the thing. It's so improbable and unforeseeable that nobody ever sees it coming. And this is a thing that people do see coming, but they don't necessarily do anything about it. And it's been getting a lot of attention amid the crisis we have right now for precisely that reason. All the warnings about pandemic and financial fragilities and things. So it's very much a metaphor of the moment.

Yeah, it's taking life right now. So the gray rhino is the obvious. It's that thing in the room. We're all looking at it, we're all seeing it right there, yet nobody wants to tackle it.

And what's interesting is there are a very few people who. Who do usually starts out with a few, and they multiply. And it's much more dynamic than the elephant in the room, which by definition just stands there. This is something. It might be far away, it might be closer. And in fact, I've developed a framework to think about where the rhino is in relationship to where you are and what you can do about it. So that dynamism is something that the elephant in the room doesn't have and that often there are people who are doing things. And the book really started with the question of why do some people see the big thing coming at them and do something? And why do other people just freeze and not do anything? What makes a difference? And what can you learn about those differences to apply to the gray rhinos in your own life?

So what got you interested in this whole concept of gray rhino? Take us back A little bit. Why do you care about this?

Well, it's interesting, my own understanding of why I care about this has evolved quite a bit over time. It started out with finance geekery. My career started as a financial journalist. I was writing about the restructuring of all the defaulted debt from the 1980s. And in 2001, I was spending a lot of time in Argentina, which I love. I actually used to dance the tango quite seriously. About nine months before Argentina's default in 2001, everybody looked at the numbers. They were like, debts going up, economy is going down, reserves are going down. The math was pretty simple. And about nine months before the collapse, some of the smartest people on Wall street came up with a proposal to reduce the debt by 30%. The banks would take what they call a haircut or write down and that they thought would get it back on track. But of course, Argentina didn't want to lose face. And the bankers said, look, why don't we just restructure it and get a lot of underwriting fees and push the problem towards the future? It didn't happen. Long story short, Argentina collapses. Most investors lost 70% of their money instead of 30%, which was not great math. So you fast forward 10 years, and I saw Greece with very similar dynamics. Debt going up, economy going down. And at that point, the euro was at stake. So a lot of people said, if Greece goes under, the euro's going to collapse. So I wrote a paper. At the time, I was running the World Policy Institute, a think tank in New York, and in partnership with New America, we had a World Economic Roundtable. So I did a paper from the World Economic Roundtable and published it with New America called Chronicle of a Debt Foretold. Little nod to Garcia Marquez saying, hey, Greece, look at what Argentina did. You can do better. And what was very interesting was, in contrast to Argentina, when I wrote about this proposal and all these bankers called me and said, we think they need to write it down, but we can't say it in public or we're going to be fired. CNBC invited me on to Worldwide Exchange as guest host, and we talked about this proposal. And that actually got people talking about it all over the world, you know, investors, policymakers. And it took, you know, many months. But the following spring, Greece and its creditors agreed to restructure the debt. I mean, they. They still lost money, but it was not a chaotic default. And, you know, Greece slowly did better. They made a lot of hard decisions, but it was the least worst of the options. And so that that spring, I was sort of dealing with some gray rhinos of my own. I was, you know, burning out on the job that I had. And I took an executive education course at Harvard, at the Kennedy School, and SAT and really thought, you know, what's important to me? Where? What do I want to be doing? And I realized that I hadn't been writing and that needed to be the focus going forward. And that was the question that came to me. What made the difference between Argentina and Greece? What's the difference between people who see the gray rhino charging and do something and the ones who just let themselves get trampled? So it was sort of a, you know, a big professional question about gray rhinos that helped me to deal with some personal gray rhinos. And the more I've talked about the book around the world, the more I've discovered, to my great surprise, how much it resonates with people on a personal level.

Yeah, I could see that. So the personal led to the professional. Well, actually, the professional led to the personal. And now back to the professional.

It's like the chicken and the egg. And actually, as a dentist, you will appreciate this. I always get asked about gray rhinos in your own life. And I have celiac disease, which my dentists have all told me does a number on your teeth as, as well as, you know, autoimmune problem. And you know, all the time when they say, you know, you tell your patients all the time, you know, come in every six months for a cleaning and, you know, they never do. I was that person for many years, with apologies to uncle dentists out there. And then I ended up having, having to have a gum graft, which only took part way. So I had to have two gum grafts. And several years later I had to have yet a third gum graft on the same tooth. And so I go every three months for my cleaning now, like I don't leave without making the next appointment. And I have all these little dental things, the inter dental brushes and gum stimulators, all these things I didn't know anything about before. And I actually wrote about that in the book. It's because, you know, I came up with a proposal with the metaphor as a way to talk about these big policy things that I dealt with professionally. But it's so relevant in your personal life. There are all these things, you know, you have to do, you know, you have to deal with like, you know, floss your teeth every day. And it's not until you have a crisis that you finally say, oh, maybe I should have been Paying attention to this all these years.

Yes, exactly. Now, it sounds like you've got a lot of knowledge on world finance and that it was your thing, and you went to a pretty deep level as far as understanding with that, do you?

Very much so, yeah. And it's totally geeky, and I understand that, But I got that, you know, not everybody gets excited about, you know, sovereign credit risk the way I do. So that's why. That's why I felt that I needed this, you know, the metaphor that really humanizes it. I mean, you know, Aesop knew what he was doing when he came up with all those fables with animals. You know, it really helps us to relate to things on a much. On a much broader level. And working with finance and policy all of these years, I'm happy as a clam with a spreadsheet, you know, thinking deep thoughts, how all these parts go together. But I get that most people don't relate to that, that you really need the emotional component. And so that was really the big breakthrough for me is that you need to be able to tell a story. You need to get people to gasp. Often when I'm doing speeches, I'll show a video of a rhino, you know, charging at you. And it's great when there's a really big room, you can just hear this collective, this huge gasp at the rhino. And that's what I want people to think of. Even if it's a small thing in your life or if it's a, you know, a big thing at your job, think of the things that you're not dealing with, and then conjure up that image of a giant rhino coming at you. And all my friends send me videos now every time they see a rhino smashing a car, things like that. But it really works. It gets in your head.

So when you. When you took the why Discovery and it came up with the why of mastery, how did that feel to you?

I went, man, this is spot on.

You know, I read a lot, you know, every. Ever since I was a kid. And I think of things in complex systems. You know, it's. It's. It was hard for me to pick a major in college because I wanted to know how this, you know, how this economic concept related to this concept in anthropology, in history, in sociology. And in fact, I've been described probably as a psychologist, an economist, an anthropologist, a historian, a sociologist, which, you know, I've had training in all of those. But I, you know, I wouldn't presume to say I am any one of those. So it really made a lot of sense. And this complex systems thinking, I think is so important. I spent a lot of time in Asia where there's been a lot of research that shows people think in complex systems much more than in the West. And the gray rhino caught on in a very big way in China, you know, much before it's caught on in. In the States. I mean, right now it's getting a lot of attention because of the. The crisis. UK publication just called it a metaphor for our times. Really is this complex systems thinking, the mastery of not just one topic, but others and relating them to each other, it's hard. And you have to do it in such a way that people can relate to it, which is, you know, it's not easy. And some people have said there's just so much going on. And I like to think of my superpower is pulling together a lot of different threads and making a tapestry, because for me, you can't, you can't solve economic problem without also thinking about the emotional and the psychological components of it or, you know, how it works in society, what people believe. So everything really is a very intricate mesh of different issues. And there are some gray rhinos where you can't solve the problem unless you deal with the gray rhinos around it. And if people want to call me a linguist, actually, which someone did recently, Fast Company magazine, the zoologically correct word for a group of gray rhinos is a crash.

Interesting.

Can't make that up, you know.

Yeah. You know, what's interesting to me is that you have spent so much time gathering so much information on so many different areas that your friends call you experts in those areas. I know you don't feel that way, but before you had the metaphor of the gray rhino, how effective were you at communicating what you know and what you see versus after having the gray rhino?

It's definitely helped me to reach a broader audience. I mean, within. Within finance or policy communities, you know, people who spoke the same language. You know, I had a very easy time doing that, but it was, it was a conscious decision when I was writing the book, you know, how do I take these complex high finance topics and make it relevant in such a way that, you know, other policy issues can use it or that companies can use it for their strategy? And the biggest surprise to me was in summer of 2017, right after the book came out in China, I was in Shanghai to do a reading and there'd been these turn terrible thunderstorms that made me have trouble actually getting to the reading. And they had to start it late because people were having such a hard time getting there through the storm. And this young guy comes up to me, you know, 20 something with a black T shirt, super hip, and he gives me the book and asks for an autograph. And he says, you helped me so much with my life and the decisions I needed to make. And that is still the happiest moment of the entire book launch. And there have been some really happy moments. And it just. And it's actually led me to the work that I'm doing now, which goes much deeper into some of the psychological and cultural reasons why we deal with gray rhinos or not. But that was really the moment that told me this metaphor is working. You know, Aesop would be proud.

What did that mean to you? What did that moment mean to you personally?

That someone is taking these ideas and it's helped them, made their life better. When I started out, my early training was as a journalist. And they all teach you. You know, you're just there to tell a story and you don't get both sides. And it was well into my career where I started realizing that what I was writing was having real world effects. I wrote an op ed about the Dominican Republic elections in 2004 that led the United States government to change its mind about whether it was going to send election observers, and it wasn't going to, and it decided to send them after all, because I said, hey, there's going to be some really bad stuff going on if you don't. And it literally changed the course of a presidential election. And that blew my mind. And I started to think a lot more about. About impact, you know, what are people going to do differently because of what you write? And I've been including a lot more analysis in my writing than, you know, as a young journalist. In fact, I don't think of myself primarily as a journalist anymore because it's so much broader. I taught writing for a while at Columbia University to master students, and it was all about this whole impact question. You know, what do you want people to do differently as a result of what you're writing? And I got my students to think about storytelling, that, you know, here's a policy you want people to have, because these are all very intense policy students. They were very, very serious. I said, okay, if the government does what you want, how is that going to change people's lives? And then what's that going to lead to. To think of this sort of causal chain of. Because one person does this, somebody else does that, and somebody else does the other. It's a big Rube Goldberg machine. So this question of impact is so important, but I'd always really thought about it in terms of policy decisions or investment decisions or corporate strategy. And the fact that a person was using it in this very personal way to them, it made me think of the impact that I was having in a completely different way, and I felt really good about it.

Why do you think what you're doing is having the effect that it's having? Why do you think that people connect so well to the Gray Rhino?

It's interesting because different people connect to it in a different way. There's some people, and this, particularly in Asia, when it came out, there's like, this is something we've been thinking about. We just didn't have an easy way to talk about it. And then there are other people, and particularly in the west, who resisted it a lot because they don't want to look at these things. And they get very defensive. You know, they say, well, if it's obvious we're dealing with it, and they don't want to accept that, they're not dealing with it. And I've changed my messaging because of this, because I want people to realize that it's not necessarily a criticism that people don't recognize the obvious thing. It's a very human trait that we all share, that we're vulnerable, we're humans. You know, here are these things in a little cognitive bias, Gremlins, they're running around in all of our brains. But that once you recognize that vulnerability, a tremendous strength comes out of that. And when you're able to look at that, you can ask yourself what you can do differently, how you can change things. And it opens your eyes. You're able to see things in a way that you couldn't before. And because you realize that if you want different results, you've got to act differently, it gives you a path forward, this willingness to open your eyes and to realize you. You can't see, but that's okay. It's like, I've got glasses. I got really bad eyes. And it's. You know, when I have friends who are not wanting to do something to fix a problem. I quote something my best friend said to me once. She's like, do you have, you know, do you feel bad that you have to wear glasses? I'm like, well, I wish I didn't, because, you know, I don't like bumping into things if I'm not wearing them. But she said, you know, do you feel like You're a lesser person because you have to wear glasses to be able to see. And this is very much like that. Once you recognize that these little gremlins in your brain make it harder for you to see things that you should, you can come up with your, you know, figurative glasses. And once you do that, you can see better than everybody else around you.

So let's, let's go with an example. So if so I've got a gray rhino. Is that how you talk about it? I've got a gray rhino sitting right here in the room with me.

What's your gray rhino? What's your gray rhino? What's the big thing coming at you?

And then once you realize what that is, so you verbalize it, what are the steps that we go through? Take me step by step through what I'm supposed to do about my gray rhino. Because we all have one, right? There's nobody immune, and we've often got.

A whole bunch of them. So the first step is really write down your gray rhinos. Just write them down, recognize them, and then you can pick the top one on the list. Sometimes you can't just deal with one, you know, that one might be related to some of the others and ask yourself, what am I doing about it? I've actually got five stages that you go through and you figure out what stage you're in. Once you've written it down on a piece of paper, then you're probably not in the first stage anymore, which is denial. Muddling is the second stage where you're, you know, it's there, you've recognized it, but you come up with a thousand reasons why you can't deal with it. The third stage is a mindset shift. It's diagnosing. It's when instead of coming up with reasons why you can't fix it, you ask yourself, what do I need to do to fix this? Who do I need to help me? Whose buy in do I need? What kind of resources do I have? And if I don't have them, what do I need to do to get those resources? You know, what does this gray rhino look like? You know, does it have cousins all around it? Can I solve this one by itself or do I need to solve something else as well? Is it running around in a group? How fast is it coming? You know, how big is it? How do I prioritize it against the other gray rhinos? The fourth stage is panic. And I encourage people to think about it as urgency. You know, panic is a stage where, you know, that Great. Edvard Munch painting the screen like. And people are running around saying, do something, anything, just do something. And that's the time when people are going to act. But they're also much more likely to do the wrong thing if they haven't thought about it ahead of time. I was doing a workshop with a trade group not long after the book came out and we had breakout sessions around the tables. And this one guy raises his hand and he says.

What if panic is the first stage?

What if you really haven't been looking at all, that's the first stage. Unfortunately, that's true for a lot of people. That's why you want to ask what your gray rhinos are much earlier on. But you know, you want to create a sense of urgency and hopefully by that point you've gone through diagnosing so you can shove a plan in their face and they can make the right decisions. The final stage is action, which usually starts with few people who get it and are doing what they can. And what you want to see is, you know, who's already doing something. How can I join my efforts with theirs? How can we get more people to come along with us? And the other part is tracking your progress, you know, are your effort, what are you doing? First of all, you know, it's like if you're trying to lose weight, you know, I have a Fitbit, you know, count your, check your steps, you know, look at your diet, look at all the things you have to do. Are you making the changes you need? Then how are they working? You evaluate yourself every so often as you're moving forward to see if you need to switch the steps along the way. So it's really a question, you know, what's my gray rhino? You know, what am I doing about it? What stage am I in? How do I get the resources and the allies that I need? And then how do I track myself and make sure I'm getting results that I want? And then there's, there's a stage that's important, is that once you think you've, you know, you've got it pretty much under control, circle back every so often with yourself. I have this problem with health issues, my gray rhinos, that I tend to overwork to the point where I'll exhaust myself. That's why I have a dog. She controls my schedule, make sure I take a walk. But earlier on there were times when I would forget to do that little check in with myself and then would start getting exhausted again. And so you want to set up, sort of a regular check in with yourself on that particular gray rhino that you think you've solved. And then when you've got that one, you know, move on to the next one. You know, just go down your list and solve them, but circle back with yourself from time to time to be your. Be sure that you're. You're still on it.

Do you always pick out the biggest, baddest rhino first, or do you sometimes start with the little one and work your way up to the big, big one?

Not necessarily. One of the things that this part of diagnosing stage is asking yourself how likely you are to succeed. You know, do you have the resources to solve the problem? There are some things that I call Gordian knots where it's just like, there's no good solution. You know, in the policy world, I look at Syria and sometimes you have to realize that if you put all your efforts towards something that you're not going to be able to solve, those are efforts that you're missing out on applying to something you can solve. The other thing is to look at how an issue is related to, you know, to other things or, you know, job is a. Is a big part of this. You know, people, you know, there's this one young man who was doing a workshop of mine who was talking about how he had time management problems at work. He would procrastinate, and he really thought that this was his problem, it was time management. And so I asked him, what do you do about it? And so he talked about creating an app because he didn't like any of the time management apps that were out there. And he talked about when he was working on this app, he was just. He got lost in time and he was just really into it and going forward. And it occurred to me that his gray rhino was not time management at the job he was in, which was so boring, I don't even remember what it was. His gray rhino was that he was not doing something that he cared about and was making an important contribution to. So that's important. And it's also important when you're, when you're figuring out which ones to deal with or even which ones your gray rhinos are, is to have a good group of people around you. You know, that the chatty best friend, the Joan Cusack character, and all those rom coms, which I realize is maybe dating me. So, you know, the Awkwafina character in Crazy Rich Asians is probably a little more contemporary. You know, do you have a chatty best friend who's gonna say, don't you wear that dress to go meet your boyfriend's family? Who do you have.

The things that you don't want to hear? Who are the people you bounce things off of? And if all your friends are saying, dump that guy, maybe you should listen to them.

So it's who's around you who can help you to make sure that you're dealing with the right one.

So if you were to take the concept of gray rhino and put it under one category, would the category be problem solving? Would it be decision making? What is it that it's best used for?

Well, that's a tough one because I see decision making and problem solving as so closely related, it's hard to pull the part. But, you know, I do get a lot of questions about decision making, and I think that's. That's part of it. But, you know, it's also a matter of executing, you know, once you've made the decision, how do you. How do you carry it through? It's certainly a sort of, you know, risk. Risk management tool. It's a. It can be a personal growth tool. Like, is it. It kind of depends on what angle you're looking at it from. And that's maybe appropriate because, you know, when people talk about gray rhinos, it's so important for everybody to identify it themselves because a gray rhino looks very different from, depending on your perspective. I talk to a lot of family companies where the younger generations are worried about the company being obsolete and not being able to grow into the future, and the older generations are worried about preservation of capital and family harmony and things like that. And what helps sometimes is if you can get the older generation think about why those things are important to them. Like, why do you want to preserve the capitol? Well, it's for the future generation. So there's definitely an intersection between those different sets of worries. And people sometimes will come to me, they're like, is this a great rhino? Is this a gray rhino? And there's certainly things that people talk to me about as gray rhinos. And once a year, I do a big roundup of all the top risks and predictions and forecast lists and do sort of a meta analysis of that. You know, what are the things that keep people up at night? But other. Other times people will say, you didn't say this was a gray rhino. You didn't say this is. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's because it's most useful if you. If you pick that out yourself. In fact, there's this One guy on Twitter who was like, if you don't start talking about this is a gray rhino, there are going to be consequences.

You kind of missed the point. I'm not like the big, you know, gray rhino spotter in the sky. I'm the person who helps people to ask the right questions, to open up their eyes, to see them so that they can do something about them. Because, you know, I'm one person. I don't have the power to fix all the gray rhinos in the world. I do have the power to give people the tools to do that themselves.

So one of the things that's interesting about people with the why of mastery is that they take the simple, make it complex, versus other people take the complex and make it simple. What I mean by that is, you know, maybe for me, cooking a scrambled egg is three steps. I crack the egg, I put it in there, I cook it, I'm done. But for somebody with the why of mastery who has studied scrambled eggs, they've got 28 steps to this process because they know everything about every single step. And so what I'm hearing you say is that if I were to lump it into one category, if I had to say, what is this gray rhino thing? I would say that it helps you solve the problem of worry. Because there's so many things that we worry about. Whether that's a problem, a decision, a risk, whatever it is, there's worry there. And you've taken this concept of worry and you've delved deep into it, and you've created a metaphor around helping me solve my worries, and you do it with the gray rhino. Does that make sense?

I love the way you've put that. And it's interesting to me that actually this. This. This question of worry has to do with. With control. And I think a lot about predictions and why we make predictions, because often they have very little to do with what really comes out. And making a prediction, you know, naming something is a way of feeling you have a sense of control over it. So even just saying this is my gray rhino and this is my plan is actually a way of asserting control over it, which is a way to help you to manage your worries. So I love that you've described it that way, because it's given me a whole other insight into my work that I didn't even realize in the first place.

Well, that's typically what happens with somebody with your why is. They take.

Whatever that thing is that they know so much about and they have so much depth into it, they know all the steps for going through it, because you've probably gone through it yourself in your own life, with your own worries. And you're like, how am I going to solve this? I've got these concerns about whatever it is, your health, the world, finance, whatever subject or topic you're currently or involved with, it creates angst and worry. And then you're like, okay, this isn't good. I can't make a decision. I can't figure out what to do when I'm so worried I can't even function. How do I stop the worry? How do I figure out what the actual problem is? How do I actually make a decision? How do I know what the risks are? And then how do I solve this? Right, so you developed a series of questions to help people overcome worry.

Absolutely. And the other part about thinking about risks is that many of the risk management systems out there involve making a huge risks of lists and then evaluating how likely is this? How likely is that? A very good friend of mine, very smart policy person, said to me over lunch recently, he said, I don't understand this probabilities thing. He's like, either something happens or it doesn't. So you can do all this analysis of this is x percent likely to happen. But like rain forecasts, people look at it at the weather and either it happens or it doesn't. And then they get mad at the weatherman if they said 10% chance of rain and it actually rain or if it says 90% chance of rain and it doesn't. So humans have a tough time with probabilities and figuring out what these things are. And I've been looking a lot at risk management and there's going to be a huge rethinking of it after this crisis, you know, as we get out of this crisis. But a lot of the issue has been not necessarily identifying possible risks, but better understanding how we respond to them. Because there's a whole array of way that people deal with things. Some people are anxious and, you know, they're like the Chicken Littles, they freak out over every little thing. Some people are so calm that they don't get nervous enough about problems. Some people make decisions on the fly very impulsively, other people will be very methodical. There's actually a wonderful tool out of the UK called the risk type compass that helps you to measure all of these things. It is, it's like a compass, you know, there's the four poles and there's the points in between that help you to understand how you approach Risks and why. And then once you understand your process, you can figure out who to bring around you, who to use as advisors, who to ask to help you so that you can make sure that they're filling in some of your shortcomings. And understanding your own response and why you respond that way helps you respond better, but it also helps you to be kinder to yourself. I always ask people how much time they leave to go the airport. And it's really funny talking to couples because they just. They laugh. They just start yammering on and on and on because it's such a sensitive topic. You know, one person wants to leave extra time, the other one wants to rush there, you know, and, you know, race the clock. There was a fantastic article. I leave the extra time, but I also have TSA pre. And the extra time for me is because I live in Chicago, and Chicago traffic, it's completely unpredictable. And so I've started taking really early in the morning flights to make the traffic more predictable. But this article in the Atlantic that went viral last year was very interesting. It said that a lot of the people who leave it till the last minute are not necessarily worried about missing the plane than the other people, but they want to feel more control over the situation. So this bravado, this sort of blustery, I don't need to leave extra time is actually a way for them to feel more control over the situation. It's their mechanism for dealing with it, where, you know, obviously the people who are leaving more time are exercising control in a different way. And if you have to travel with someone with different ideas, showing some empathy, realizing the other person needs something different is so important. I read some very interesting articles around the time of the 737 Max crisis came out after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. And there's this one guy who wrote about it. He's a travel industry journalist. So he read all the information. The more information we have, the more control we feel we have. And he felt comfortable flying on one of those planes. And he was actually booked on a plane to go home. His spouse, his family, they were freaking out. And he actually changed the flight to a different model of plane because he knew how much it freaked out his family. And that recognizing that other people deal with problems in a different way is so powerful. And we're seeing it in people's response to the. To the pandemic with this whole sheltering in place, staying at home. So many people have this hubris. They're like, well, I'm not gonna catch it or If I do, I'm young, so I'm fine. Those sort of people are much more likely to stay home. If you put it in terms of, what about your grandma? You know, what about your mom? What about your friend with asthma? Or autoimmune stuff? That sort of messaging that, you know, you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for someone else completely changes the way they think about that risk. And, you know, each one of us tends to feel like we're better off. You know, we're more likely to make a good decision than other people. It's like the, you know, Lake Wobegon effect where, you know, everybody's child is above average. And, you know, people, when they're thinking about themselves, they're often likely to overestimate how good a driver they are, for example, or any of that stuff. So, you know, when you realize this little gremlins in your head, those little biases, you can change your behavior that in a way that'll make you safer, but that also the people you love will appreciate, too.

Mm. How important is self awareness? In the process of figuring out the gray rhino that you want to attack or tackle, how important is self awareness?

Very, very aware. And I stay away from attack. One of the things I've worried about with writing about rhinos, it's like, they're so endangered. There's a whole chapter about the rhino poaching and the rhino endangered. So every time I see a headline, there was one that came out in Uganda a week or two ago saying, get out the spears. No, leave the paretos alone.

For sure.

Yes. But, yes, self awareness is so. It's so important. And some of it goes to this awareness of vulnerability and acceptance of it, as I was saying before, and it's. I think it's helpful if you can be self aware not just for yourself, but the people around you. And then on the other hand, people. A lot of people like it if somebody can identify something about themselves. You were like, a couple years ago, all those Facebook quizzes were such a big thing before people realized they were just trying to harvest all your information. But people loved it. You know, I'm this city, I'm this drink, I'm that. People love that kind of stuff. So if you can talk about the kind of awareness in that way, it helps. I actually developed five gray rhino personalities, you know, after this. This guy in Shanghai talked about his personal life because I was struggling with, how do I relate this to a personal level? So I came up with a dozen really simple questions. You know, what do you have for lunch? And, you know, how often do you change oil in your car? And things like that. You know, if someone tells you your boyfriend's cheating, what do you do? And they very roughly correspond to these stages that I mentioned before. And I found this wonderful cartoonist to represent these personalities. You know, the pancake completely flattened, and he made this adorable little face on the rhino going, oops, I feel guilty. I didn't mean to squash you. So you have the pancake, you have the ostrich with the head in the sand. That's the, you know, the person who just ignores it. You've got the tourists on safari, the people who are looking for the rhinos, but they know they don't have all of the skills, so they've got the tracker and the driver. It actually came from when I went on safari on research for the book, which my accountant was totally fine with me deducting it. We're driving up the mountain and the driver says, oh, you know, look at that. You know, look at the kudu and look at that, look at that. I'm like, I knew I needed to update my glasses prescription, but I didn't realize it was this bad. And it's. Of course, you know, Mother Nature has all this camouflage. I mean, you actually have to learn to see past the camouflage of the animals. That night, we went on safari with a German family who'd been on safari for like, three weeks. So they're really good at this. This kid points, he's like, look, there's 20 elephants. Of course. I said, how can I not be seeing 20 elephants? You have to train yourself. So that's the tourist on safari. You have the game warden, they take care of the gray rhino when it's still a cute little baby rhino. And may I highly recommend baby rhino videos? There's one right now about a rhino that sees his. He's a caretake taker and does zoomies just like Mike does. And then there's the chicken little. It's kind of like the panic one, you know, it's the person who freaks out inappropriately over all the little things and misses the big thing. And people love these personalities. And when they can relate to that, once they realize, okay, this is how I deal with things, it helps them to understand better how to relate to people who deal with things differently. So that self awareness is something that I make. It's very meta. When you're aware of how aware you are, it makes you better at dealing with things.

So one of the Things that we often talk about is, you know, in terms of self awareness is when you know your why, what you do has more impact and it has more meaning, it has more focus. And so from that perspective, the book and the information that you have comes from your ability to have. When you seek mastery your entire life, like you have, you've now been able to assimilate it into a form that's simple and easy for the rest of us to use. So you're bringing your experience, your knowledge, your depth, your writing, all these things that you've done your whole life together in the form of the gray rhino so that we can actually do something with it, right? So that we can use it for something of value versus just being in your head. And hey, she's really smart. Well, that doesn't do the rest of us much good that she's got all this knowledge or people think of you as an expert. But if you can't do anything with that, right, what uses it for the rest of us.

Yeah, it's true. And I get really self conscious whenever my friends say, oh, you're really smart. You know, I get very self conscious about it. I was always the super, super nerd.

Terrible, super shy, super super nerd. It's so important. And you know, your why concept reminds me of a huge trend going on in business right now, which is people talking about purpose. Why are we doing what we're doing? And there's research showing that millennials and Gen Z want more purpose in their company. And you know, not just what problem is the company trying to solve, which is of course what, you know, every, every entrepreneur and design thinking person in the world wants you to deal with. But also, you know, what's it their purpose not to do? You know, they want to make sure that the company's also, along with the good things that they're doing, is not necessarily doing dastardly things. And that, you know, why are you doing what you are. And I'm also reading a lot during this crisis. I don't know if you're like me. You've probably seen a gazillion emails come into your email box with the word uncertainty in them. All of how do you manage through uncertainty? Well, purpose, you know, why am I doing what I'm doing? Where am I going? I have a couple of friends who have a company that has a waffle waffle truck, Waffles and dingus, which is waffles and stuff. And they of course, all of a sudden their whole business disappeared. People can't go out to eat anymore. And they had another business which was a Venezuelan thing, Pedro Yas hot dogs and stuff, which had social mission of helping with hunger in Venezuela. So what they've done is they've switched a lot of their business to online. And they're also asking people to buy extra waffles that they're going and donating in New York and Denver, going and taking to. All of the healthcare professionals love it. And it's just this wonderful combination. I mean, that helps. The hardest thing for my friend was she was saying, all these people working for us, we don't have money to pay them, but we don't want to let them to go. What are we going to do? So this actually helps support the employees and the healthcare workers, and it helps them to feel like they're doing something useful and their purpose. And I mean, I just love that my friends are. They're that kind of people. But I wish that every company was out there doing that kind of thing.

Purpose. You know, again, when you know your why, what you do has more impact, more meaning, more focus, more direction. And. And the other question that it helps to answer is, Michelle, why should I pick you? Why should I choose you? Why should I listen to you? Yes, I get what you've done, and I see it here in this book, but again, why should I listen to you? Are you just somebody that, you know, sat home for a second and thought, hey, maybe I'll come up with this rhino thing? No, that's not you. You've had a lifetime of being a master from our perspective, mastering many different things, that many at such a deep level that what you tell us is truth. Right. It has been proven over and over and over again. And you've just put it together in the form of a book called the Gray Rhino. But it's not so much what you've done, it's why should I listen to you. Once I know the why, then I'm okay with the what until I know the why. Ah, it's a concept. All right, whatever. Does that make sense?

And if there's someone whose why is, I just, you know, want to write a book. Gimmick to make a bunch of money. Yes, they're in the wrong business. They think that a book's gonna make them a ton of money, but it's important. One of the big challenges that I found throughout my career was that if I was doing something that wasn't what I deeply cared about, I would find myself getting ill and distracted and, you know, physically sick and so for me, it's. It's a constant process of, am I doing something that I love and that other people love? Am I doing something that makes the world a better place? In fact, during this. This executive education course that I told you about, we worked with Bill George's book, True north, which also had a little workbook as part of it. And so every morning, we'd meet for breakfast and go through another chapter of the workbook. And a lot of that was really figuring out why we did what we did, you know, what we really cared about. And I went back to when I was young. I was mentioning before I was a complete nerd. When I was a kid, I read books. I skipped a couple grades, so I was younger and smaller than everyone else, and I was like, the worst kid on the worst soccer team in all of racy in Wisconsin. It was terrible. I got so much teasing. So I was this just kind of shy little kid, and I didn't realize that I had important things to say. And there was this moment where a very close friend of my dad's, who was the only Jewish socialist, philanthropist, multimillionaire in Waco, Texas, who actually called me into his office one day when I was in high school. I'd done a letter to the editor in the local newspaper. It was about the economy at the time, about people having a hard time getting jobs. And, you know, he said, look, you have something to say. And it was way before I knew what the term mentor was. And that, I think, was the turning point. And I didn't realize that until I did this exercise with Bill George's book, with the True North. And I realized at the time I was running a think tank that was helping people who, you know, were journalists coming up in the world, wanting to have an impact. I was trying to help, to give them a lot of the knowledge and skills that I wished I'd had at the beginning of my career. And I realized it was about helping to give other people their voice, to give them skills. And that's part of what the Gray Rhino is. It's helping people to solve a problem for themselves. And in the volunteer work I do, one of my favorite things is as a mentor editor for something called the OP Ed Project, which helps people to find their sense of expertise, their voice, and to get out there writing for different publications. So it's once I really connected with that sense of purpose. That's what made me realize I needed to go back to writing, and I needed to make those ideas central, because I had stopped Writing for a while because I was so busy running this organization, and I thought, how can I, you know, in good faith be a mentor and inspire other people if I'm not making central to my life the thing that I'm teaching them to do? So that was in 2012, eight years ago. Hard to believe.

Is it more important when you're mentoring somebody to teach them what to do or to help them figure out why they're doing it?

The why is so important. I asked them a number of questions at the very beginning when they're assigned to me, and it's what do you want people to do differently because of what you've written? You know, what do you want the impact in the world to be of your ideas? And then I also ask them, what about your expertise makes you the person to say this thing? And, you know, who's your target audience? Who do you want to do what differently? And those are all really why questions. What's your why?

Sort of. They are. They're more focused on what you're trying to accomplish than who you are and why you do everything you do. So it's not your why of seeking mastery has very little to do with what you're doing right now. It's been with you your whole life, since you were a little kid. Right. And when you were a little kid, you didn't know you wanted to be a book writer. You didn't know you wanted to be a TEDxB or TED speaker. You didn't know any of that stuff. Right. You were just gathering information and knowledge and diving into books and reading. And you were way ahead of your time because you couldn't stop yourself reading a lot.

I thought it was just because I was shy.

Yeah. And so. And maybe that was part of it, but essentially you were seeking mastery and seeking knowledge and gaining information just for the pleasure of it, probably. And then now you've assimilated it into a way that you can use it. But your entire life, you've been somebody that's been soaking up so much knowledge at a level that none of us will ever do. Right. There's very few people like you that will do what you've done your whole life and seek as much knowledge as you have. And so if you can help those young people discover their why, not why they're writing and what they want to accomplish with it, or why they do what they do everywhere they go, first you'll figure out, are they in the right profession? Will they be able to live their why doing what it is they think they want to do, or is this just something that somebody told them they should do? And third, why they're. Why I should choose you and listen to you.

Right.

Is that making sense? And so if you can help them. Yeah.

Although it is part of it. The question about, you know, kind of, you know, you know, what's drawing on your expertise. It's very much about that. You know, why. Why should people. Why should people listen to what they have to say? I encourage them to. To draw on some of their own stories and their own experiences. And it's related to. One of the first assignments I used to give my students in my writing class was about me. Not just the typical, you know, there's where I went to school, here's what, and, oh, I'm passionate about economic development, blah, blah, blah. It's. It really is about some of that storytelling, you know, why are you passionate about economic development? You know, tell me about the, you know, the kid you met in Zimbabwe or whatever. But it's, you know, really trying to get people to that at the beginning of their writing process that, you know, why do you care about this? You know, what's their own personal inspiration, but then looking forward to what do they want, the effect of what they're to be and not just in a tactical way, but in, you know, what changes are important to you in the world. What do you care about? Which is. Which is very much. Why.

Last question. Because I know we're already over time. Why do you care about worry?

It's interesting. When I was growing up, people in my family had very different things that they worried about, and I was sort of caught in the middle. And I tend to worry very much about practical things, things that I can change. And some people worried about, you know, if you take a shower during a thunderstorm, you're going to get struck by lightning or, you know, if we might theoretically move to California at some theoretical point in the future, even though nobody's talking about moving to California, we might die in an earthquake. Which, which are not the kind of things I tend to worry about. I tend to worry about very, you know, practical things. So I was caught between two very different ways of worrying and have forged my own path during the middle of it. And, you know, I've seen that, you know, not paying attention, not worrying about the right things can create catastrophic consequences. And we're seeing that in the world around us right now. So whether on the personal level or the, you know, the career, work, organizational level, or society, like what the planet is wrestling with right now. It's so important to worry about the right things and do something about it so that you don't have to worry about it anymore.

Awesome. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for being with me today. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and all your information about the Gray Rhino. If people are listening to this and they say, man, I want to talk to her. I want to ever come speak at our event. I want to have have her work with us. How should they get ahold of you?

Best way is my website thegreyrhino.com G R A Y rhino.com I'm on Twitter W U C K E R. I'm also on LinkedIn. I've got a mostly weekly, sometimes it's three times a month depending on how busy I am, but have got a column that goes up there every week and that gets posted on thegreyrhino.com as well.

Awesome. Well, Michelle, this is a big time for you with all the stuff that's going on and thank you for taking time out of your day to be with us and I look forward to staying in touch as we both move forward.

Likewise. I enjoyed the conversation so much. Thank you for such thoughtful questions.

Thanks Michelle. Take care.