A new way to think for a new world

Hello and welcome to season four of my podcast, Stories of Success, your listening experience for personal development. It is here where I, your host Volker Ballula regularly interview high achievers, entrepreneurs, consultants, visionaries, coaches and mentors about their secrets and experience. Join me to learn from the best. If you want to find out more about myself or what Balluda Partners can do for you in the area of sales and strategy consulting, career and leadership coaching, or running workshops on mindfulness, for instance, Please go to www.BarLudePartners.com where you can find out more about what I do. If you enjoy this podcast, please share and give me a five star rating. And now lets welcome my guest and enjoy the show.

So this week's podcast is with Francis Choal, a global leader in creating social innovation for sustainable future. For him it is all about unleashing untapped potential, key to achieving a competitive advantage by using intuitive intelligence. And we obviously dive into all these words that are just read out so nicely and what it means for Francis. So he's a best selling author and he uses deep human learning and cognitive science to help leaders and organizations solve complex problems and thrive in disruption. So all of what he does is really very much science based, which is one of the reasons I wanted to invite him today and find out more what it all means. You know, basing basing, if I say the success in organizations and leadership on science and what he has discovered so far. So he's an international speaker, he has presented at Davos World Economic Forum, he has been on TET and I've watched the videos on TED and several universities, so Watson and Columbia University just to name a couple. He has a new book which is called Squircle A New Way to Think for New World. And it also comes with a test and stuff which we will talk about and it offers a simple yet unconventional science based model to make sure decisions in in an unsure world. And if we're talking unsure world, I think there's a lot of uncertainty in today's world and I'm sure we're going to touch on that as well. But before we dive too deep, first of all, Francis, welcome to my podcast.

Thank you Volker, very happy to be with you and thank you to your listeners as well.

So Francis, the introduction I just read out, I don't think if I say it doesn't do you any justice, I think it highlights obviously a lot of things you've done. But what does it all mean? Where are you coming from? What are you doing? Do you want to Maybe start a little bit with introducing yourself, and then we can dive into some of the things I read out. Because I think there's so much beyond all these words that I'm at least very curious about.

Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Volker. So in a few words. So I was born in Paris. I'm French, and I grew up in France and got educated there. I lived in Germany, actually, for a short period of time. Then came back to Paris and then move. Yes, in Frankfurt. And then I moved to New York to really take a break from an intense career in art book publishing. I was very young. I was 24 when I studied there. And in four years, I had a very intense, complete experience, actually, of two positions at the same time. One was managing partner of the managing director and partner of the publishing house. And at the same time, learning the craft of publishing art books, writing with authors, and the whole team that come together to produce a book like this. And after those four years, which.

You know, was kind of a meteorite journey, I felt had lived my life as a businessman. I had completed that journey and I came to New York to really take a year of sabbatical. Sabbatical year. And. And.

I did theater because I felt had developed myself enormously intellectually, but much less in my emotions and my body. Even if I had done lots of sports throughout my life, it felt like it was something I wanted to explore. So I thought stage was great, and I directed shows. I was publishing books in two dimensions. Paper, paper, you know, and then I was creating in three dimensions through stage. And then the one thing that I was really passionate about all my.

During my 20s, I started singing actually in the choir of my business school, was actually singing and singing classical music. So when I found myself in New York in that acting school, actually the one thing that called me more than anything was singing opera. So I studied music with a great music master who was a professor at. A teacher at Juilliard and a great voice instructor, worked with many stars on stage. I was very lucky and very low key as a person. So anyway, so that was my journey. The reason why I'm saying all of this is because I took really a departure from where I was supposed to be, you know, a leader in business. And that got me to look at the world very differently. And I was very concerned by the lack of sustainability of our world at the time. So we're talking late 90s.

And I was wondering, why is it possible that we were able to go to the moon as a species? So very intelligent and at the same time, so reckless when it came to our relationship to nature. And to me, it didn't make any sense because how. How can you be so sophisticated intellectually and so unaware of what supports you?

The planet, our ecosystem, so our environment. So I didn't have an answer to this question. But then a few years later, as I was a struggling artist in New York City.

I got to work for the CEO of l' Oreal on an assignment that was a side gig for me in. In parallel to my full artistic and renaissance life. And that was very interesting. It was, how do you manage creative teams? That was the big question on the mind of the CEO. And he understood that was really a key factor of success for his company. So I started to really research a lot. You know, l' Oreal does things very deeply, and so there's always a lot of.

Resources of what they want to crack open and understand. So I was really privileged to work with great people on a great subject. And I tried to do my best to come up with a solution on how to manage creative people, which have been my life as a publisher, owning a company, having to manage creative people, and then being on stage, being managed by directors or, you know, or conductors. So it really got me to think. And then that's when I came up with the concept of intuitive intelligence. Bringing the rational mind in synergy to work in synergy with our instinctual aptitudes. The manager, he or she engaged in the chaos of life and needs to make things happen in times, in budget, in goals.

And on the other end, you have. So they use. They rationalize things, they put processes in place, they optimize resources, they meet deadlines, and so on and so forth.

And then on the other hand, you have the creative people who actually, in the chaos of life, encounter new ideas and oriented themselves through instinct. They go with their guts when you interview them. Even the greatest, greatest scientific minds will tell you that the moment of breakthrough came after 40 years of painstaking research.

And studies and, of course, a lot of mind work. But at the same time, the moment of epiphany, the moment of breakthrough, was kind of elusive to their intelligence. It was much more coming from a deeper place. Their guts, gut feelings. So that's why I came. Intuitive intelligence. And then I got the answer to my question about the moon and. And our reckless relationship to our great mind that takes us to the moon and our reckless relationship with nature. I thought, okay, when you interview those creative people in organization, they said to you, well, we kind of suffer. Nobody really Understands our value system and how we work. We are always under the helm of budgets and deadlines and always kind of limited and pushed and shrunk, whereas we would love to be creating and managing our arts and creation from a different place. And so I thought, okay, that's interesting, because without ideas, there is no company. Okay? Everything starts with an idea, and then more ideas really will be the fertilizer for innovation. So it's a constant pursuit about new ideas and creativity. So why is it that the people who actually bring the gold nuggets of business are under pressure? And then I realized, because once you engage in life through the mind, the rational mind, the logical mind, you put everything in equation, right or wrong, shorter or longer, you know, rational or irrational. You put everything in binary terms, which is fabulous because you can evaluate and you can become efficient. But. But in this efficiency, there's a lot of reduction. It's very reductionist. It doesn't allow for the creative insights, because the creative insights at first doesn't make sense, okay? It's something that comes out of the blue, out of the left field, and sometimes you don't even know what to do with it. But if you screen it through rational, irrational, right or wrong, chances are you will lose the insights. It won't make sense. And that's how you deplete an organization of its ability to create.

And that dominance of the square logical mind.

Is actually what costing companies the ability to innovate and as a species, cost us the ability to tap into this other, deeper intelligence that can actually understand another way of doing things, another way of being which actually mirrors the way nature functions. And that's instinct in us. Instinct is simply nature in us. So if we're not able to honor instinct, its logic, its way of processing information, its way of adapting to situations, we're actually not learning how to engage with nature. And if we can't do it within ourselves, clearly we won't be able to do it outside of ourselves. And let me give you a very simple example to illustrate what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Plastic was born of rubber, natural rubber, a natural substance that lives in nature.

And we thought it was so practical that with the first industrial revolution and with the expansion of chemistry, we created plastic, something that reproduces all the benefits of rubber, but cheap, and that you can create at will and use at will. So from an optimization point of view, this is a real progress from rubber, but from a holistic meaning, taking the whole, and not only one segment of life, but the whole of life, meaning our Use of plastic, but also what it does in the rest of our life, meaning for nature. What does it do? You know, it serves us great, but how does it serve us? Well, in a way that damages nature. We have, you know, now our oceans are filled with plastic, and we don't know how to recycle it. We don't know how to dispose of it in a way that is compatible with nature. So that's a typical example where the rational mind looks at a situation, a challenge or problem, comes up with a situation, a solution that makes sense rationally, but doesn't make sense holistically. And instinct and nature are holistic, meaning the whole.

Bringing all the parts together and creating that whole is more than the sum of the parts. The rational mind takes the parts, analyze them, and play with them the way it wants, following its logic, but it doesn't look at the whole. All the parts coming together and creating more than the sum of the parts. And that's true in every creative endeavor. That's true of, like an orchestra. The orchestra is more than the sum of the instruments, players, okay? It's an experience of all people coming together, whether it's jazz or classical music. So here I got really the answer. Okay, well, there is really an opportunity for the world. If we are able to integrate the logic of instinct in. In the way we look at the world and make decisions, chances are we'll be much closer to come up with sustainable solutions. And now plastic has become bioplastic, where we use bio elements, biological elements from nature.

To come together to create that plastic that now can be disposed of and is degradable, biodegradable. So just to show you the progression of where we headed, we're looking now at solutions that are holistic, meaning that are not only taking us to the moon, but do it in a way that respects our environment. And that's what intuitive intelligence was designed for. So because I went to a business school in France, which is one of the top business schools in Europe, if not the number one, I was positioned to really have a leading voice in the world and have an impact. To me, to be a leader is to create value for everyone, for all stakeholders. And because I had this experience in publishing, where the company went super well from being in debt, highly profitable, to becoming the most profitable publishing house in all categories, whereas our book publishing is actually one of the least profitable category. And there was a sectorial survey that I read years later that showed me those numbers. I had no idea when I was doing it anyway. So coming from this Prestige Business School, which gives credibility to my word and hopefully the means to put this word into the real world, to the experience that I had where we had been really extremely successful in a short period of time. So something I was able to explain of why that happened or try to understand why it happened and share it with the world. And three, the project that I led for l', Oreal, which gave birth to seminars around the world on how to manage creative teams and creative and creativity in general. I thought I had the beginning of a story and that I could take that story to the business world, which obviously is a force of influence and a force of evolution in all regression in our world. So I thought, okay, let me prove that intuitive intelligence can help organizations innovate and succeed in this world where innovation is so needed. So that's what I did. I created the Human Company, my consulting firm, to help CEOs at the top level organizations really think differently. And I wrote the first book, Intuitive Intelligence, Another Path to Success. It's published in French originally, and in Portuguese, second and Brazilian, and. And it became a bestseller because I think the world was thirsty for a new approach. And people read the book in France who lived in the States and said to me, oh, you should really bring it to the United States. So I wrote a second book. French people like ideas, American people love solutions. So we're pragmatic. I developed a model, the compass, to actually help people make decisions that are holistic, that honor our rational mind, but also include our intuition so that we can actually bridge between reason and instinct in a seamless manner, which is what we do all day long. By the way, when you drive a car, you're irrational. You know that red means stop, you know that green means go, and you stop when you see the right side. You're rational. You're able to absolutely make decisions that make sense and are logical. And at the same time, you're constantly adjusting without being even aware of it. That's a heuristic process by which you take in information and adjust almost unawarely and continuously, you know, ensure that you are safe in the way you drive for yourself and for others. And by the way, this part of us, that deeper intelligence that's able to process all these cues, all these sensory cues, conscious or less conscious cues.

In a conscious or less conscious manner.

That ability, that variability, to navigate that complex, continuously changing environment that you find yourself in when you drive your car in the most mundane manner is the ability that every AI scientist at Tesla, or any other brand for that matter, are Struggling with is very hard to reproduce. That genius that humans have, that incredible capacity to make sense of almost an infinite amount of data coming at you all the time and function with it and function creatively with it adaptively. So now it brings us to business. So what we do is we show people that we are all natural complex problem solvers, that we are all natural adapters, that we are all capable of making sure decisions in an unsure environment. So I mean, all those words obviously ring a bell, I'm sure, because in an unsure world, we live in a complex world. We have to make decisions all the time in an environment that we don't control. So that's why what we do is.

You know, making big differences and are appreciated and sought after. And so the work I've done in the C suite.

Of organizations now we trickle it down throughout organizations with an academy called the Squirrel Academy.

Yeah.

Which brings to all layers in organizations to really shift the mindset from a logical mindset that's absolutely great at simplifying complications to a flexibility mindset, a simplicity mindset, which is not afraid of complexity, engaging complexity, because that's our natural way of being. We are complex beings in a complex environment. So it's like we're fishing water when it comes to complexity. So not running away from complexity and understanding that if you embrace complexity and there are ways to do that, and we'll share that later, when you embrace complexity, you come up with really evolutionary solutions, Real, true, deeper creativity for deeper innovation.

So that's what we do. And we see results. And we see results. People work more creatively, more productively with more well being and with a different state of mind. And teams function better, collaboration is easier, communication is easier, and adaptation is easier because we come from the fact that all of these are natural traits and aptitudes in us and there's nothing to learn but a lot to unlearn.

Wow.

That was, if I say, a long intro. That was a good intro. Thank you for that, Francis.

A lot of questions popping in my head, but I'm trying to think where do we best start? So I understand if I wanted to summarize that. So this intuitive intelligence is all really about almost unlocking creativity and intuition, which we have where we have to unlearn or we have to learn to let go almost to relax our brain, to relax, you know, if I say our mind in order to let things. Things happen. Or is that too of a generic.

Way of summarizing it?

No, no, this is what it is. It's actually quite simple. Yeah, in principle, so.

Principle. Yeah, yeah.

And that tell you how. No, and then. And then, of course, like any, you know, like sports, like, like, you know, like sports, like art. It's not. It's not easy. You know, it takes practice, but it's very simple to understand. I'm going to give you a little metaphor because that's what. That's what. That's why I designed Quirkle. That's why I wrote that book.

Yeah.

Sq UI rc, L E Square and circle coming together. Okay, so. Yeah, so.

We used to live on a golf course where the trajectory was pretty linear. You move from hole number one to hole number two to hole number three. Okay.

Yeah.

That's the world where you were. You. That's the world where we used to live. And you could have a strategy, you know, when you have a linear destination, you can have a strategy to optimize how to go through that journey. But today we left the golf course and we are now in the jungle. Anything can happen at any given moment. Everything is up for ground. It's disruption, technology, health, climate change, political, unrestricted, so on, you name it.

So in a world like this, where the trajectory is anything but linear.

Linear decision making doesn't work. You just cannot predict, think linearly and make decisions as if you were in a linear environment. So now you are making, you know, decision in a nonlinear environment. And the only way to do this, which we do very well because that's where we do what we drive. Okay, we're in a nonlinear environment. Everything is moving around us at any given moment. A car can bump into us, cross the road or whatever, cross our path. And we are, if we're present, if we focused, if we are comfortable, meaning relaxed with the fact of driving, we are in our potential, natural potential for constant adaptation to a nonlinear environment that changes constantly. And what we do is you are taking in your environment as a whole. You don't break things in pieces. You are able to actually see a car coming to your right and see the blinker of another car and feel the speed of your car. You know, you live in that environment and you take it as a whole and you make a decision from that whole. You don't analyze things, bits and bits and pieces. You are able to take all these bits and pieces, make sense of it and adjust to it. Sometimes things go wrong, but, you know, honestly, most of the time, things go well. I'm always amazed that people can actually. That we have so little accidents because we have this natural ability in us. But we've Been trained from a very young age. So just to finish. So in the jungle, as when you're driving, it's holistic decision making, looking at an ensemble as a whole and not trying to piece meal things and separate things. It's like Chinese medicine looking at the body as a whole, but versus allopathic medicine that will look at an organ and cure an organ without really looking at the other connection with the whole. Okay, so that's the domain. So the problem is, since we're young, we are taught tools such as calculation. 2 + 2 = 4. 2 + 3 equals 4 is not right. Okay, 2 + 2 equals 4 is right. So it's right and wrong. It's binary. Fabulous, fabulous tool. Give birth to science. We're all grateful to science. Fabulous, fabulous tool to produce knowledge, dependable knowledge to make life easier, safer, more stable. Fabulous. But it's a tool. There's more to us than the tool. When you drive, up to this day, a car, you're still a driver. You still call the shot. Okay? Even if you drive the best Ferrari, you still call the shot. You still have to make decisions. And even the best drivers will make the good decisions, and some will not make the best decision. So we still have the responsibility.

And there is a tendency, of course, to want the tool to be right. So we don't have the responsibility because it's so much more comfortable. So the problem is with this education, you know, we've developed kind of a lens through which we look at the world all the time. We are constantly looking at situations and information from this black and white.

Black and white lens. It's as if we had glued to a retina, a lens that is making us looking at the world in black and white, right or wrong. It's very hard for us to just take in things, be receptive to them, and see how we're being affected. That's what happens when we drive, of course, because you have no time to analyze everything, so you let yourself be affected by your environment and you respond to it in a holistic manner, in a heuristic manner. So, meaning you make sense of a set of data without having to go through all the data and you come to the right decision heuristic. But when it comes to analyzing a strategy, analyzing a market, making decisions, in business, we don't go with heuristic. We start collecting data and analyzing data and making comparison with the past and anticipating the future and so on and so forth. Why? Because we were in a linear environment. So that kind of thinking worked very well. On the golf course, that thinking is much less adapted, if not adapted at all actually to the new world. And what I help organization do is shift from this linear thinking which is imposed by financial metrics and Wall street evaluation and so on and so forth. So I get that, but not the prisoner of that thinking. Because what they need in the new environment is holistic thinking. So I tell them, your black and white lens.

Is absolutely great. But you need to be able to remove the lens, put it on a table, so that you can open to actually a world that's not black and white. A world that's filled with colors that combine infinitely and create infinite nuances. And in those nuances live your creative idea. This is where you can have access to insights in your set of data that you would not necessarily see otherwise. If you are keeping your black and white lens on. So that's what I do. Unlearn and relearn how to be receptive to environment. And that's a circle, circle attitude. Being in your emotions, in your sensations, in your intuition being receptive. That doesn't mean that what you see is right. It means that what you see is different from black and white. And as we know, diversity brings creativity, innovation and all sorts of things. So square and circle. The square is the rigor of science, of the rational mind, of the logical mind, dependable, logical.

Discerning, hierarchical. And circle is everything else, holistic, sensation based intuition, feeling. And science shows actually that when you open up that dimensions you become actually much more adept to make better decisions. There's a lot of research there by great minds such as Gerd Giger Heiser Gigan Reiser, the former director of the Planck Institute in Berlin for the psychological department. And he will and also.

Antonio Damasio, neuroscience researcher at University of Southern California usc, who's written many books from Descartes Error to.

Many others. I don't have the title right. It's sitting in front of me, another desk. Anyway, so there's a lot of research there. And squircle is the square and the circle coming together.

But not having the square domineering the circle, not having the manager domineering the creative self. Okay, the manager in us, domineering our part of us that knows better than being only black and white in life. So squircle, this is the synergy between the square and the circle. And I'm going to give you a simple analogy so that you understand what that black and white lens does this story. So imagine Emma, a little girl in her backyard at her parents home. And she's suddenly hearing a bird. It's a beautiful parrot, great, gorgeous colors. And the bird is sitting on its nest, in its nest, and she's like, you know, in awe, looking at the parrot. And suddenly the parrot takes off on the spider moment and disappears. And she's like, oh, my God, Wade's gone. And she's a bit sad. And the parrot is gone, and she's scared. Where is it gone? Is he going to come back? And she waits, but the parrot never comes back. So she waits for a long time, but then, you know, the day is nearing to an end. So she goes back to her home, and.

She thinks, I'm going to come back tomorrow and I will see my parrot again, my new friend. And she comes back the next day to a tree, and the same tree, and the parrot is not there. Third day, she goes back to a tree. The parrot's still not there. So she kind of gives up on the parrot. She's sad, and she's afraid that something happened to the parrot. One day, weeks later, she's in the backyard and she hears the parrot again. She runs to the tree, and here sits the parrot on its nest. And she's so happy.

She's filled with joy. But, you know, like humans, she starts thinking, but how could I make sure that the parrot is protected and always stays close to me? And comes to her the idea of changing the nest for a cage that sits in the attic of her parents. So she brings a birdcage, removes the nest, and she fills it with water and food. And when the parrot comes back without failing, the parrot goes in the cage, and what does she do? She closes the door. This way, the parrot stays where she is and is protected and is fed, and is fed, great. But the problem is, once you put a parrot in a cage and you fed him and you feed him every day, and it cannot take off and fly, it loses its natural ability to adapt and sustain itself and create resources for itself. So that's what the logical mind is doing. You know, it's inventing solutions that are unrelated to what it means to be natural. And that bird becomes an object of decoration. And that's what we've done with ourselves. We've put ourselves in the cage of the logical mind. We rationalize everything, we optimize everything. And we don't, which is fine to a certain degree, but we don't equally let the part comes and go out of the cage. The processes in business are great, but they are needed, but they limit ourselves. And bit by bit, we follow those processes and lose our ability to adapt to the unknown and create new solutions. So that's what it is. So what SQL does is making sure that any structure like a process, like the nest, remains a tool and never becomes dominant to the point that it limits the circle, keeps the bird in the cage, puts the circle within a square, and actually, on the contrary, allows the square to. Allows the circle to always comes out of the square and expand and expand and expand. And the more it expands, the more there are things to learn and understand and the more the square can expand. And that's the image of Squirtle. If you go to squircleacademy.com you'll see the image of the square and the circle interacting in a free manner so that. So that we can retain our natural abilities as much as we rely on our logical thinking, which is obviously very much needed and important and extremely useful. So I hope that clarifies a little bit the philosophy. It's with those two stories, you know, the three stories, the golf course in the jungle, the black lenses for a life filled with color, and the black and white lenses for the life filled with colors. And then finally the bird that's now in a cage and no longer a bird, but an object of decoration. But you can sustain and keep the structure, the nest, but make sure it's in service of the bird and not dominating the bird.

I love all these stories and I love the circle or the squircle, if I shall say.

I actually have a question for that squirrel. So in your TED Talk, and I haven't been on your website recently, but I reckon it's the same drawing, you have these four areas or eight areas, right? So you have like, reason, result, instinct and play. And obviously for the listeners, you can, you can look that up either on the TED Talk on the website, and then you have administration, sales, creation, and strategic planning. And if I say, are they opposites, is sales opposites of strategic planning or can it be the same?

No, it's a very good question, Volker. No, nothing is opposite. The model is a simple. The model is looking at things as a whole. But I have cracked open those different parts of value creation, administration, sales, strategic planning, and let's say, invention.

So that people can see that they interact with one another and that invention, reinvention, creativity, innovation can be very easily squeezed because it lives at the confluence of instinct and what I call play, meaning the ability to be active and engaged without any purpose, but just for the sake of the experience, the joy of the experience, the pleasure of the experience. But that's, you know, unfortunately is very much shrunk in business because we so much in our minds, so much trying to be efficient to the, even to the cost, that we don't have any more fun. And it can be weighing on us. And the more it weighs on us, the more, you know, we become drained. The more drained, the less imaginative, the less creative, the less risk taking, the less experimental. And that's when the organization stifles, loses its ability to rejuvenate itself. Same with the individual. And that's where burnout comes in. So, which is a pandemic, by the way. And now, you know, an illness that's recognized by the World Health Organization. Numbers are really fast growing. You know, all the information is online. I can't remember, but I think it's one out of four people I've experienced in the workplace, worldwide have experienced.

Burnout. So it's really.

It'S more than that, actually. The statistics are really, really, really enormous. I'm sorry, I don't have them with me. I apologize for this. But it's available online.

So to answer your question, those four quadrants work in synergy with the awareness that one of the quadrants is actually always in peril, always in danger of being dominated by the other three. Strategic planning, strategy, optimizing, administration, producing sales. Those are the three traditional quadrants. And a non traditional quadrant is creation, invention, reinvention, disruption.

Require a specific SaaS, a specific mindset and a specific attitude. And that particular model, the Intuitive Compass, which is also the title of my second book, is designed for the C suite. And I took that model and I simplified it and it's called a Squircle gps and it now turns the four quadrants into profiles. So it is the optimizer, the achiever, the envisioner, and the creator. And those four profiles interact with one another. And again, it shows how you can build a team with those four types of profile, how you can innovate better with those four types of profiles. We have a process for this process to build teams that are complementary. We have a process to bring executive committee to work better together, to be more focused on innovation and strategy than simply.

Getting things done. So really elevating and deepening the way the top tier of the organization work together to bring more added value.

And we have also a process using those four characters, those four profiles, to solve complex problems. And I can explain how we work with this more specifically if you want. So we get more into the actionability of the model Squircle.

Yeah, I mean, as you know, I've done the test. I don't know when we spoke last week, I don't know if you had a chance to look at my test. I'm happy if I say to be a guinea pig, but it says I have a relative preference for structure. Which if I say, doesn't surprise me because I say, you know, without prejudice, of course. But I grew up in Germany where everything is very logical, driven. Right. And everything has a certain order and a certain way of doing it. And I had someone on the podcast very recently who actually suggested given, you know, a disc profile he put together based on research that from a. If I say cultural background, it's not cultural background, but in terms of the way I act and the way I filled in the test. And my personality is actually more towards the uk, which probably explains why I'm here and based in the UK or similar to potentially South Africa or Australia. So it's quite interesting to, you know, if I compare that if I say his, his finding with if I say the Squircle test and then obviously other tests I do, I don't know. Did you have a chance to look at my test or not?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. You have slight square. Okay. You have a slight square preference. So. Okay, what does it mean? It means that your decision making style tends to be more structured than fluid when you're facing complex situations.

Yeah.

And that in general you lean toward a logical approach rather than an instinctive flowing approach or holistic approach. Right.

So is that very typical then?

Yeah, I mean, it is something that we encounter often in organization.

Because your strengths are the ability to balance between the two approaches with a relative preference for structure and.

That that ability that you have to function on both sides. So you said the more German structure and maybe the more creative, you know, or pragmatic and adaptive way of, of England, as you were saying, you know that that allows for powerful synergy that can help you in complex situations, but that only if you're really able to understand that your propensity to prefer structure, order and logic, deduction may limit your ability to adapt and improvise when you're in expected situation. So in other words, great that you have, you know, an appreciation ability to think logically, dependably, fact based and understand that it's not superior to something that would be less structured, less analytical. It's actually.

Something that would be best fed by an equal approach to things in a way that are less structured and less linear. So for you, there's you know, you're close to fluency in both. You know, I would say that you are fluent in both, but with a preference that can be detrimental to your ability to function in complex environments and disruptive environments. So that's just the awareness that you need to gain and observe that you do lots of things in your life without involving structure and analysis, and then you do them well and maybe you even perfected them. You know, if you play a sport, you know, at a good level, you realize that actually, you know, you're doing lots of things that you don't have to process intellectually when you play that sport. And it provides joy, energy, and results in a way that's not linear. I can give you an example here.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I find it fascinating.

Because, you know.

At the end of the day, we need to produce things, you know, we have to be productive. We have a to do list, we have things to get done, we have to manage a workload. And productivity is important, but again, the way we think productivity is through the square lens. So it's a true story of a Unilever executive that was sitting on one of my seminars with a diverse crowd of executive from diverse companies in New York. And it was an introduction. I was invited to talk at a recruitment firm, Executive Search, to a number of the clients. And so they invited a number of guests from their clients. So one of them is Unilever and his name is Philip. And Philip tells us this story as I'm hearing, talking. Oh my God. It reminds me of something that's incredible. And he tells the story that is he's a marathon runner, experienced marathon runner. And this year of the story, he had set his mind to run New York marathon once more time. So you probably know that it takes three months usually to train and you have to put a regimen, a number of hours a day or week, a number of times that you will run to prepare your body for that very strenuous long stretch of miles that you have to run in a marathon. So he was very happy with his training the first two months, but then the last month, October before the race, early November, he was not as dedicated to his training because he had a lot of trouble, a lot of jet lag, a lot of disruption in his schedule. So, and especially the last few days of the month of October, nearing the race. Yeah. So he was wondering whether he should be running because he was not well prepared. So he called his coach, her name is Jennifer. And he tells Jennifer exactly what I told you you know, I really wonder whether I should run or not. And Jennifer listens to him carefully, and then she says this to him. Hey, Philip, you know, yes, I hear you. You've not trained as much as you wanted to train, but, you know, you've been experienced, seasoned marathon runner, and you've trained quite a bit anyway already in that particular past three months. In those particular past three months. So if you were worried to hurt yourself, I would say, no worry. You can go and join the race, run a marathon in full safety, be careful, as always, but you're prepared. Now, I understand that you don't feel that you're prepared at your top, and you always want to outperform yourself. So I see the challenge here. So what I would like to suggest to you is something new. Why don't you go and run that race with two new things, new ways of doing things. One, never look at your watch. And two, during the race. And two, keep your focus on only one thing, your breathing.

Yeah.

Philippe hangs up from the call, and he's a bit surprised, because usually with Jennifer, it's all about goals. How much do you sleep? What did you eat? How many hours did you train?

What were your numbers when you were training and running? And this time was very touchy. Feeling like, you know, don't look at your watch, feel your breathing. You know, stay connected with your breath. So he's kind of surprised, goes to his work and forgets about it. And he said, you know what? I'll sleep on it and see how I feel the next day. And then the next day, as he's sipping coffee at the table, he.

He's thinking, you know what? I love running. I love running through Manhattan.

I'm gonna go and I'm gonna try what she says. After all, why not experimenting with something new? Since, anyway, I'm not prepared the way I wanted to prepare. So he does this, and at the beginning, finding it hard not to look at his watch, but he has the discipline to finally give it up and never looks at his watch. And because he's not looking at his watch, he's less competitive. So he has to put his mind somewhere. And he thinks, you know what? She asked me to breathe, so I'm going to really pay attention to breathing. So he spent actually quite a good deal of time really, really paying attention to his breathing and exhaling and inhaling properly. And the time goes on and the race goes on. And at the end, what happened? What do you think happened, Volker?

What do I think happened? He probably finished in A better time than he has ever done before.

Correct.

That's exactly what happened, is it's so predictable, the story. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. But that's not the way we. That's not the way we behave, you know, and that's not the way he was to behave two days before. So that's to say that, you know, that's where, for somebody like you, the slight square, it's going to be hard to depart from looking at your watch and optimizing your training.

Yeah.

We'll need the structure to the cost of something that's available to you, which is to let go of the objective, the outcome, be in the moment, connected to actually what's going on with your body, which is your vehicle at that moment. It's not a car, it's your legs.

Yeah.

And actually in that ability to be present, you access more capabilities to produce better. To produce more in a better way. Because he didn't hurt himself.

And told that story in many, many seminars. And lots of people have told me, oh, my God, that's. The same thing happened to me. I was already in my head. I wanted to break through. People were putting pressure on me, and I came out to the race with a certain score and I had my knees that hurt it for a month, blah, blah, blah. And my back was bad. And I've done the same race a year later, not caring about the result, just for the fun of the experience. And. And I performed better and didn't hurt myself. And that's a story I hear all over.

We often push ourselves too much. And I run the. Not the New York, but the London Virtual Marathon this year, and my legs eased up as well, although I was never better trained, I was never fitter, and there could be millions of reasons for it. But it's interesting actually to look at it from that point of view. And.

Yeah, so it's a little bit like the hair, the tortoise, you know. Yeah. The methodology of breathing, letting go of the outcome and everything may not work for everybody. May work one time, may not work the other time. And that you will only learn for yourself, specifically and uniquely for yourself as you experiment.

Yeah.

But through the experimentation, you'll come out stronger. It will not prevent you or save you the training for the three months before, but you might train differently and it will bring you different results. And whether it's quality of experience, whether it's monitoring your body better and not enjoying your body and maybe outperforming yourself, and I don't have a magic wand to tell you it will work every time. And the only one thing I can tell you is it's absolutely worth your while to experiment, because I've done it enough in business to see transformations in organizations that were in dire straits with failing business models, is failing in failing industries, in very difficult recession times. And I've seen those companies being able to reinvent themselves in less than a year from losses to profit, and doing that again in different divisions where we were hired by the same CEO to redo the same work with same approach in different divisions for different industries, and they saw the same success. So it's not a science, it's experimental. It's inclusive of science, but it's more than science. It's research. It's not simply duplicating science, it's evolving science, the science of productivity. And that involves the whole of us. W H O L E, you know, the whole of the person. And that's experimental and it's unique to each one. So that's, that's how you move from being a craftsperson to become an artist. You know, it's, it's.

I mean, there's so many things that, that pop into my head. I mean, the, the quote that just popped into my head is the old Buddhist quote, right? If you do what you've always done, you will get what you've always got, right. I think it's, it's, you know, it's associated to Buddha. I'm not sure, but I mean, we talked about that in the, in the pre call as well. I mean, you know, there's a lot of mindfulness principles in there. And you would know Victor Frankl, who many, many years ago, you know, after he survived the Holocaust, he says, between stimulus and response is this gap. And this gap is, you know, for us, a chance to respond the way we want to respond. And I'm sure you're familiar with George Mumford, the mindful athlete.

And he described it and actually very interesting enough I listened to George Mumford's book once. I was running or preparing for my marathon, and it's probably one of the best books I've read recently. And he described this gap that Franco described as the eye of the hurricane, the peaceful moment within us, or in sports, the zone. Right. So when you're running this marathon and you don't care about anything, you're just in this zone or you play basketball.

Whatever it is.

We often forget about going in there, right? We constantly pushing and pushing. Right. To your point, we're trying to achieve everything. We take everything of Our. Of our to do list, instead of going like, oh, wait a second, you know, I just take an hour and think about things. And I think that the challenge we have in organizations. But I'm curious what your take is. If I remember again, very vividly an example that must be 20, 25 years ago now, where I did an internship with Siemens Business Services in Germany, in Frankfurt, actually. And someone was reading the paper, and someone was going past an office, and the person was reading a paper, and I'm like, he goes like, oh, why can this person read the paper? Right? Is he not working?

So thinking and just sitting there and maybe reflecting on things, reading the paper or maybe, you know, scrolling through Instagram or going for a walk and having thinking time is not classified in our society as working.

But listen, okay, so, you know, in my first book, the On Intuitive Intelligence, the French book translated to Portuguese, I spoke about Viktor Frankl. So that response he's talking about is accessible to all of us at any given time. There's research there that, you know, from neuroscience to behavioral science, that there is an opportunity there, and we all know it from experience.

But again, in a linear world, a mechanical approach was fine. Terrorism worked, and that's how we've conceived our work life. So again, it's unlearning something that's. That's no longer working in the new environment so we can relearn what's natural to us. And there are very simple ways that you can bring people to that space. I do that all the time, and that's through breath work between an exhale and an inhale. Just like when you throw a ball in the air to serve in tennis, there's a moment when the ball is still before it comes back down. It goes up, stops, and goes down. In that moment of stop is the stillness, the moment where everything's possible. You can really.

There's stillness in the physical tennis ball and there's stillness in your body between the exhale and the inhale, between the inhale and the exhale. So you can. I do that all the time with clients, executives, and take them to that moment of breathing so they can identify that moment of stillness. And we have 20,000 breaths a day. So, you know, you remove a third of it, 7,000, you're left with 13,000 breaths a day. Because we sleep, let's say, a third of the time. Okay, eight hours out of 24. So now you have 13,000 opportunities to actually connect with that space, which is where we can have a creative response or circumstances. And that's something that you can train. And we take that exact awareness into a serious game that mirrors a complex challenge that people coming together needs, need to solve with a measurable goal coming out of the activity. So they need to solve a problem and produce something that's measurable and that's it. And they played. And now they turn that stillness into actually operational behavior to solve complexity together as a team, which is everyday's challenge. You know, you have to work with others on complex situations, and you need to produce things that are tangible, measurable, to meet a budget, to meet, you know, a strategy, whatever, so it can be totally operationalized. So first of all, you can experience it through breathing. Two, we take teams through a game that mirrors a business situation. And then we have designed a number of seminars, workshops, we call them labs, in which people can actually use this new mindset and this new attitude, which I call the squirrel mindset and the squirrel call attitude, to adapt, to communicate, to collaborate, and to innovate. And that's. So it's what I call making mindfulness operational. Yeah.

As I told you last week as well, when we caught up. So I'm teaching mindfulness, and I'm working more and more with leaders as well. If I say not necessarily to teach mindfulness, but, you know, looking at cultures and looking at, you know, how to improve, you know, the. The own personality, right? The inward journey that helps them then to connect on the outside better and then therefore delete more, lead more, not delete, lead more, you know, successful, successful teams. And I think there's a lot of truth in these programs. And it makes so much sense to me if I say I'm time conscious as well. But I have. I have one question around. Question and the reason I want to bring up Covid, and I think we all talked a lot about COVID I think from everything you said, right? I mean, Covid, you know, shows uncertainty. It shows problems with leadership. It shows we should be more mindful to prevent, you know, burnout, to prevent, you know, call it zoom fatigue, whatever you want to call it.

Right.

What if I say. What do you make of. If I say Covid in relation to human relation and motivation of teams, workspace setup, leadership. What are your thoughts on that?

My thoughts are exactly what you said. Between stimulus and response.

There is a space for creative design.

And so nature has shown us, for those who have not accepted it yet, that we don't have the upper hand with all our modernity.

And that's a great reminder and starts a new conversation within ourselves. Which is nature outside as the upper hand. So nature inside of me has the upper hand as well.

Yeah.

So let's design new solutions that really respect the true hierarchy, nature and our mind, and not the other way around, I should say. So what I do with clients under those new circumstances, which is obviously zoom based, you know, teams based, is we bring that back in more than ever. You know, we were doing this in the physical space, but more than ever, we do it in the digital space because people, some people suffer from the digital space because they feel like there's less connection, less proximity, more isolation. And, you know, all of this might be true. It's different for everyone. Some people love it, they don't have to travel, they're happy to be home. You know, different, different. Different takes for different people because, you know, we're 7 billion of unique individuals, so. But what's universal is that there's an opportunity for all of us to redefine the way we work alone and with others in a way that's respectful of nature, emotion, sensation, instinct, intuition. And that's a great opportunity, I think, to hone and own this intuitive intelligence that opens so many possibilities for so many new solutions that are pragmatic, concrete, honor our logical mind, but do not limit ourselves to what we know and understand, to open up to a whole world of nuances, as I said, and creative options. So I've seen personally in some companies, provided they don't want people to be productive in the same way as they used to in the physical space, but who are willing to consider how to be productive in a new way with those new instruments and new settings. I've seen great progress, you know, but all of this needs to be acknowledged, discussed. It's not forced, it's an organic process, you know, but when it does, I've seen much better meetings, long meetings with people when that is being offered and when we start from that root, you know, from that common root, we're all humans, we're all. We always have sensations and emotions. Let's hear each other, and from that space of reality, let's design solutions together. And I've done it over and over again. I've seen it work personally. Volker, I have to apologize, but I have to go now.

But thank you so much for your time. That was fantastic. I really enjoyed that. And, you know, maybe we can deep dive at a later stage again as well. Thank you, Francis.

You're so welcome. And thank you to our listeners. Thank you for the opportunity. I always enjoy sharing, you know, what I'VE seen work and, and offering new perspectives. You know, it's my joy and I'm grateful for this opportunity. Thank you.

Volker, thank you for listening to this week's episode. Did you enjoy today's experience? If you did, please leave me a five star rating on the outlet you're listening to. Do you have any ideas for guests? Any comments or questions, please email me to volkeludaludepartners.com and don't forget to check out www.berludapartners.com. and until next time, this is your host, Volker Balluda.