SUMMER SHORTS: Ellen Langer (BONUS)

So, John, what are humans for in a world where machines can think?

Well, we'll find out on our new show, The Mindset Economy.

We will, coming January 2026, wherever you get your podcasts. So, John, from day one of The Evolving Leader, we've been exploring how our body and our mind should be considered an integrated whole rather than separate entities.

Yeah, we've had a diverse range of guests all pointing to the same conclusion that for centuries logic centered in the brain, that the mind has been the ultimate pinnacle of human evolution. But what that's all missing is the evidence that it's the body that was the original sensory organ, and it works together providing the brain with the data to make sense of things.

Yeah, and I'm thinking of many guests, but particularly, I'm thinking about Annie Murphy Paul and her work on the extended mind. I'm thinking about Lisa Feldman Barrett on how our emotions are constructed from the interplay of our physical feelings and our language and our memory. And this idea is really important for leaders because it opens up new ways of being and helps us to make better sense of the situations that we face.

And in this conversation, we're deeply honored to have a true pioneer in the field. Ellen Langer, for decades, has proven out the fact that the mind and the body are one integrated whole. How can leaders build more mindful organizations?

Yeah, okay, so let me tell you about the orchestra study because it had a surprise finding that I thought was relevant to leadership that I didn't realize until I wrote the paper up. So here we take many orchestras and we're going to have them be mindful or mindless. When they're mindless— and they're all going to play the same music and we're going to tape the performance. So when they're mindless, they're told, remember a time you played this piece and you were really happy with it and just replicate it as well as you could. The mindful musicians were told, make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know. And they're playing classical music, not jazz, so you can be sure The changes are subtle. All right. We record it. We play it for people. They overwhelmingly prefer the mindfully played piece and the musicians prefer playing it that way. So now I'm writing it up and I realize, wait a second, here we have enhanced group performance with everybody doing their own thing. All right. And that was because they were all taking their cues in some sense from the same ongoing situation. And so that led me to think that the major job of the leader is to increase the mindfulness of those being led. And also that, again, since everything is always changing, the leader needs to know that he or she doesn't know. And when you know you don't know, then you pay a different kind of attention to other people who might know. You know, I'm fond of also saying, telling this little story, I was lecturing in South Africa. And I took an afternoon off and I'm down in this fancy hotel at the pool, just resting, reading, whatever. And I noticed there was a massive amount of real estate that was not being used. It was clearly part of the hotel and it was not being used. And the only person who would know it was that lowly cabana boy. 'cause he was the only one down there. And so if we recognize, when we know that we don't know, it would be nice if we also knew in some ways that everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. And when you see that everybody knows something else, everybody becomes more valuable, right? And so if we mix and match many of the things that I've said, that you have your leader who's putting down John, John, he's just not, you know, he's just not doing what you want him to do. And if you said to yourself, his behavior must make sense from his perspective or else he wouldn't do it. And you figure out why he might be doing it. You feel better about him. He can feel that you're looking at him differently. Your relationship improves. He's going to be working harder, enjoying it more. And that's another thing. You know, there are people, I don't know, you know, somebody had said I must be from Mars. We have people saying seek work-life balance. No, again, you know, it's always— we're able to move things from bad to better. But there's always in my mind this even better place that we don't seem to want to get to. And that work-life balance is certainly better than work-life imbalance. But I think we should seek work-life integration. Be the same person you are wherever you are and don't be afraid to be that person. And so when I teach this, people think their work has to be hard, has to be stressful. Nothing is necessarily stressful. It shouldn't be stressful. There are ways, I know it personally, of living your life mostly without any stress at all. And so people think that there's a big difference between work and play. And I think that we should make everything playful. If you're going to show up to do it, if you're going to do it, you should show up for it. So there's this wonderful video. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Piano Stairs. And these people, I think in Scandinavia, in subways all over the world, apparently there's an escalator. And stairs. And invariably, except for the young boy, you know, who's running up the stairs because he's on his way from the gym or whatever, everybody is on the escalator. Then what these clever people did was lay down piano keys on the stairs. So as you go up, doo doo doo, you know, and it makes, it's great fun. And in almost no time, everybody leaves the escalator and everybody, no matter age, gender, is taking the stairs. And what I say to my students is, that's wonderful, but why wait for somebody to put these keys on the stairs? You know, I do it all the way anyway. You know, there's a way to make whatever you're doing interesting at least. And many of those things become fun. You know, so a surgeon, I don't think, you know, needs to be laughing while he or she is performing surgery, but maybe so. But at least make it interesting. Because if it's not interesting, you're not going to be there. And if you're not going to be there for it, there are going to be errors. And depending on which group you're talking to, Scott, you know, to improve their leadership ability, some of those errors can be very costly.

We hope you're enjoying the Evolving Leader Shorts that we're releasing before we start Season 7 in September. You can find the rest of this conversation and all of the Evolving Leader episodes on Apple Podcasts Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your favorite podcast outlet. I'll also put a link in the show notes.

So after 5 years of The Evolving Leader, I guess you could say our show is evolving.

Yeah, it's time to move forward after hundreds of shows with thousands of insights and some quite emotional. It's time to do something new, bring this chapter of The Evolving Leader to a close.

Yeah, this is very exciting. We've been talking about this for months now, and I can't believe we're here. Yeah, we want to do something in direct response to the changes in the world, which are significant, from AI to climate change and a whole host of new social and political and economic realities, all of which are setting the context for this new show.

So welcome to The Mindset Economy.

Yeah, we'll look at how to thrive in a world where machines can think.