Learning To Adapt To The New Normal w/ Francis Cholle - 176

Hi, Peter Balka here and welcome to today's edition of the Transition Guide. Now joining me in the studio today for today's edition is Francis Scholl, author of the best selling book. Now when we talk about best selling, best selling on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, the book is called Squircle. Welcome, Francis. Tell us, tell us about Squircle. How did you come to ride Squircle?

Thank you, Peter. Thank you for having me. It's a delight to be talking to your audience. So Squircle is simply square and circle coming together. So in a world where we say we left the golf course, where you know what the process is going to be, moving from hole number one to two to three to 18, and having now joined what I call the jungle, where everything can happen at any given moment and there's no scripted process, everything needs to be almost reinvented from a step to the other. We have to rely on something else than linear logic that's no longer working, neither in terms of performance or neither in terms of making decisions. So in the jungle, what do you need to do? Well, you certainly need to keep your ability to think rationally, but that's not enough. So you need to rely on your experience, past experience, and also being fully present to the moment so you can adapt as you go as things change around you. So Squircle is your logical mind and your instinctual aptitudes coming together, working together. Thanks. Your intuition and enabling you to really develop the mindset that is the new skill set. Adaptation.

And I think, I mean, that is just such a great topic and it's very topical right now. And that's why I was really excited to get you onto this episode because the reality is, look what's going on around us. We have literally been taken off the golf course. And with the pandemic and a global lockdown, which we've never experienced before, a global lockdown. And we've just been thrown into the middle of a jungle and it has been literally, it's like the rule book has had to be rewritten. Right?

Correct. Correct. And the fabulous thing is that people have adapted. I mean, you know, of course, a lot of people have suffered, you know, tragically.

So I want to empathize with this. But as entrepreneurs, you know, who lead a business and a P and L and to keep the cash flow and better vendors and make sure there's money on the bank, in the bank, we had to adapt. And, you know, I work with big corporations and that translate directly to my business as an Entrepreneur. I talked the other day to the chief of staff of the chro of a global bank, hundreds of thousands of people. And bank is highly regulated. So people tend to be routine driven because they want to make sure that they respect regulations, of course, so little risk taking, little invention, little change. Making sure that you do things properly so that you actually respect regulations. And then he told me, in this world where people are very confined by regulation, you saw an ocean of adaptation happen overnight. People suddenly found a way to operate their departments, their teams, remotely, globally, with no real prescription because no one had the time to write the script. You had to figure out the path as you went. And they did. So he was really amazed at this. And, well, okay, so here comes Squircle.

Imagine a wild bird. A wild bird adapts, is agile, finds food, you know, deals with the weather changes and the predators and everything. Okay? So they are fantastically adaptable, just as we are when we drive. We constantly adapt to the environment, changing environment, the car passing you, the car cutting your road, whatever, you know, we constantly adapt.

The car crashing in front of you, maybe, yeah.

Then whatever, you know, and you have, you have to just be on at that moment. So just like animals, we are creatures of agility and creativity and resilience.

Right?

But, but square, the logical mind is such that we've been trained to engage with every situation with a good capacity for critical thinking. So we immediately evaluate whether the situation is good for me or not good for me when right or wrong, it's going to bring a lot of money, not enough money. So we always constantly judge what I say. We look at the world with a black and white lens sewn to our retina and we don't even realize it. And that's the biggest cognitive bias that we have because in doing this, you take away the ability, the innate ability that we have to be agile, creative, adaptable and resilient. So squircle is simply this image of circle is our ability to thrive in chaos, intuition, instinct, emotions, sensations, perceptions. And square is the logical mind. So now imagine the circle confined within the square, so limited to the logic of the mind, which is not the logic of instinct. We fall in love beyond reason. Okay, so imagine this. That's, that's, that's the state of our culture. Whereas our humanity is really the square inside the circle in the sense that the square is that to support your experience as a human being, your ability to feel life, to intuit, to imagine and take yourself beyond what you know. So squirrel is liberating that capacity in us. That innate capacity in us from the confined of a logical mind.

Right. So here's a question for you. This is interesting because you take the pandemic. If we look at the pandemic as a storm, we are all in the same storm. Why do you think it is that some businesses have been able to better weather the storm than others? From a Squircle point of view?

Yeah. That's interesting. So the clients I work with, I can take an example of one company. It's a global beauty company.

One of the leading brand in the world. So we're talking about billions of dollars of business. And they've done things which were actually really about respecting their people, empathizing with them, being sensitive to their fundamental needs as human beings. So fundamental needs is connection.

I need to feel. I need. I need to feel like I belong to a community of people. So, you know, in English, in America, we say, oh, thanks God, it's Friday, tgi TGI Friday. Okay, same here. So he invented, thanks God it's Thursday because the week was so long and so exhausting, you know, so he was already celebrating the end of the week on Thursday, which was, you know, a humorous thing. And he would put all these people around the world on zoom and it would bring inspirational speakers. So I spoke to them one Thursday morning so that everybody had a sense of togetherness and a sense of possibility brought by those thought leaders that were representing, you know, reality in different ways and possibilities and so on, so forth. And then curiously enough, so now, you know, it started end of February, early March. By mid May, he had not done this with his own direct reports. So I said to him, hey, what happened with your direct reports? Have you got together with them like beside those TGIT meetings? He said, actually, no. So I said, okay, well, that executive meeting will be very different from the one you've done before. You know, I think you need to respond real time on listing each one of them. And the meeting was a surgical session about the future of beauty, how what's happening will change behaviors in the business and so and so forth, consumer behaviors in the business. And.

I cannot tell you how long it took for everybody to actually said what they had to say. So one had a mother in chemotherapy and she couldn't see her. Another one had seen with his wife, the financial advisors, two months ago. Everything looked peachy rosy and everything suddenly goes down. So, you know, there were lots of. And then another one had her kids at including work as well. So so many things to adjust to and process. So people shared one by one. Okay, I'm going to tell you, I was impatient. It took like an hour and 15 minutes for 12 people to say what they had to say. But then the next hour was the best hour. I had never seen that team to come to in terms of insights, tragic thinking, creativity flow in the conversation. It was, it was remarkable what came out of that session. You had to lose time to gain time. So you had to lose time to gain time.

I was about to say, what created that switch then?

Well, the switch was that the, the owner of the experience, the leader, had accepted that he was dealing with human beings with feelings rather than high performing machines, who they are, by the way. And he had switched gear. He had said, we are in exceptional times. We need to really care, show care. Because if there's no care, there's no community. If there's no community, there's a sense of belonging. There's no sense of belonging. You know, you're not, you're not there, you're not fully there, you're not fully committed. It's been researched. Yeah.

Do you know what, it's interesting you're saying that because this was probably the biggest, this was the biggest challenge we've had because the majority of these big businesses were set up during the period of industrial age thinking. So it was literally leading through management, leading through disability watching people. And if people didn't turn up on time or wasn't early, they weren't committed. All of a sudden, all those traditional metrics that we've been operating to over a sustained period, and we're literally talking 40, 50 years of conditioning was taken away overnight.

Absolutely. But that's the old terrorism heritage. And what Squircle does, it tips performance on its head. You don't get people to perform better by putting them under a set of constraints only. And if you put them under a set of constraints, you'd better discuss them with them. I cannot tell you how many top executives in this creative age, creative industry, say, creative economy, say, listen, yes, I've got KPIs, but I just put them aside. I do my job, I do my job. And chances are, because I've got some experience and I'm fully committed, I meet my numbers, but I don't monitor my numbers every month. I cannot tell you how many executives do that. And yet they will still impose the KPI to their teams because that's the rule of the land. So there's a dichotomy here, you know, and so that's the courage, that's the courage of the leader today as entrepreneur to say, look, that's by the book. But this by the book has really been, you know.

You know, challenged enormously. Because in times of crisis, the human experience is more important than the idea that you have of it. You know, going back to driving, you know, you have an idea of the journey, but actually the process that what's going to happen between where you are and where you're going to go, you know, an hour later, you know, that hour is going to be a surprise. Can be an adventure. We hope not to. Not too eventful, you know, but you will constantly adapt, constantly adapt, and you're fine with it.

How do you deal with the. Okay, so I get the change and I can see the change, but I know a lot of people that are listening in, in the back of their mind, they're going to say, that's all okay, but we are waiting for things to get back to normal. I cannot begin to tell you, Francis, how often I'm hearing people's conversation, oh, we can't wait till this ends and we can get back to normal. And it's like they expect that rubber band to just go back to where it was.

Yeah.

What's the danger to the businesses with that thinking?

You know, it's a conservative approach to things.

Everything changes all the time. So I think the beauty in the disaster that happened for so many is that we've been able to discover new capacities, new capabilities inside of us, and. And that's what the learning is. You know, it's like to want to go back. Yes, it's a normal human need of feeling safe. But again, if you admit that we have now entered a jungle and more than ever things are destructured and disruptive and disrupted. It's a very dangerous way of thinking. You know, it's a legitimate feeling, but it's not a feeling to be trusted. You know, you need to accept it's going to get raw and raw.

If we measure it to the old system.

But in the new system, that bank has discovered that its employees, their teams are actually much more agile than they were able to enable them to be. So I would say, what have I been able to do in the past year that confirms that I have what it takes to weather even the hottest of the of storms.

So that was lesson. And I think what's interesting, Francis, is you're right, we've been thrown into the jungle.

But that jungle is also five years ahead of where we are. So it's not only the fact that we're in A different sort of landscape, but also time has moved on massively. So it's like we've moved on. We've been thrown five years into the future.

Yes.

And what I'm finding is so many people are struggling to get up to time. So not only are they operating on an old set of rules, they're just out of time and they're not seeing actually where we are now. These companies, if these companies and individuals cannot catch up and cannot catch up quick, surely then their chances of weathering this is going to be next to zero.

Yeah, it's compromised for sure. It's compromised. And today the game is tight. So you want to unleash as much potential within you so that you can inspire people around you in your companies to actually unleash, trust that there is more. There's a simple image, you know, I happen to sing, you know, on stage, and there's more air in our lungs, for God's sake. There's always more air than we can ever siphon out, breathe out.

Okay, yeah.

That's the same with resilience. Okay? Now, burnout is a reality. So you can't just always push, push, push, push, push, push, push, push, because you know you'll get sick. But you need to trust there is more than what you need at any given moment within you. And then if you trust that, then you will also have the ability to say, okay, I can rest. Because when I have to weather the next storm, I will be able to find this capacity in me that's innately there. I have to work for it. I just need to be prepared. I need to be trusting. I need to be willing to go to those ends, confront myself and confront my fears. And then you rest, and then you go back and then you rest.

I suppose that's. Then that's such an interesting. That's such an interesting point. And I think what I've heard from a lot of entrepreneurs, though, is that They've spent the 12 months since the pandemic started in terms of lockdown, probably resting the least they've ever rested, working the hardest they've ever worked to stop going backwards or at best, stand still. There have been businesses out there that have absolutely thrived during the pandemic, but for so many, that's not been the story. And actually they're coming out of the pandemic more tired than when they went into the pandemic. What kind of advice could you give business leaders, employees in this situation?

You see, when we scared, we want to control, and we got stiff okay, so that's the image that we all unfortunately have suffered. You know.

It'S an unfortunate conservative way of thinking, or we're reacting that we all have, we want to control. And the way we control it, through the mind, we think, okay, if I do this, I will get this. So I'm going to stick to this strategy. And when you do this, you stifle. And it's not when you breathe best. This is not when you move best. You know, if you think of tennis or if you think of.

Scuba diving, you know, if you tense, you know, when you scuba dive, you will use more gas, more oxygen, you know, than if you're relaxed. And to relax, you have to be okay with the fact that you don't know what's going to come next. You have strategy or strategies, you've done scenario planning, but you need to relax in the fact that you don't control. We don't control anything fundamentally. Okay? You don't, you just don't. Everything can happen, so for God's sake, we'll be healthy throughout the end of this show and for the rest of the next 10, 20, 30 years. But, you know, something can happen physically, you know, and you're okay with that. And you take an insurance to protect your family and, you know, you do the reasonable things around it, but you're willing to walk into life not knowing what's going to be the end of the day, you know, or what may happen during the day. So, you know, that mental state leads to a more relaxed emotional state, which then leads to a more, a better management of physical resources. When you hit by something that's kind of traumatic as what we went through, you know, we tend to stifle tense and that's okay, but you need to be aware, that's what you do, and find a way to relax into the unknown so you can be really accessing your full potential. So it's, you know, it requires a bit of effort, but once you've changed your perspective, saying, okay, well, nothing new, you know, I still don't control probably. I feel like I control less and I have to reckon with that fact. And you have to relax in the process. You can be actually more sensitive to environments, more able to react to environment, not from a reactive place, but from a real response place. Just like, you know, golf is relaxing, people love it for that, for that matter, and the jungle is not. But you have to find a new way of, of being so you can optimize your way of doing so.

What we're so what we're saying with all of this is that the end goal is still valid. So what you want to achieve out of your business or your life, the destination is probably still valid. However, the journey to that destination is probably going to be changing more now than ever. And what we've got to be is we've got to be open to the adaptation that we're going to be taking different roads to get to that journey.

Correct. You know, I mean, all the clients I work with today are under pressure of performing more and delivering higher results either to catch up on last year or to build a competitive advantage. Building on last year, you know, it's like the always. And the demands are higher and higher and higher. So I say, okay, well, you know, the world of business is competition. So you can't negotiate the fact that you have to perform endeavor results. What you can negotiate or what you can ponder is the how. So it's exactly what you're saying. The how is your leeway, the how is your creative opportunity. You know, and in that meeting that I was saying, you know, we spent more than an hour to listen carefully, patiently to 12 people and once they felt heard, they were willing to contribute their best because they were enthusiastic about the fact that they were in a group that was caring about their reality at work and outside of work. And that made them better professionals, at least for that following hour. I had never seen them as creative thinkers, passionate and coming up with great solutions. And by the way, this company delivered double digit growth in Q4, 2020.

So it just goes to prove that we do have to change. And I like the old saying, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And what you've just said in that story clearly demonstrates that. So if you were to, if you were to leave the audience with one piece of advice for the next 12 months, what would it be?

Yeah, you know, in creativity in creative sessions, we say trust the process.

And more than ever we have to trust the process.

And be students of the process and be learners of the process so we can discover new mindsets that will lead to new skill sets that will lead to new ways of succeeding.

And I think the common theme there is new. Everything going forward is new. And we've got to be prepared to accept new as being our new norm.

Correct.

Fantastic. You know, it's been an absolute pleasure having you onto today's episode. Thank you so much for making the time. Now if anyone wants to get your book, I'll take it. They just go to Amazon in whichever country they're in. It's available.

Yeah, it's absolutely squirrel called S, Q, U, I, R, C L E. And my name, Francis Scholl. And then there is a website, first Name, Last Name, FrancisChurcholl.com where they can go find business cases, information and they can come in contact with me, me. And there is squircleacademy.com where they can take a first simple assessment and start their Squircle journey of self discovery for themselves and for their team. And that's free. So they can gain lots of insights about themselves and their teams on how to adapt this new mindset of that new normal and embracing it and not trying to go back to an old way which is gone.

And the one thing I would say, thank you so much for sharing that. And it's free, so it doesn't cost you anything to try. And that's one of the main reasons why I bring on these great guests, because they've got access to different tools and you just never know what outcomes you'll get by going through and using these tools. So please head over to the website.

Give it a try, and if anything resonates with you today and you want a bit more information, you can always head over to bulko.com and get in touch. Well, Francis, thank you very much. Thank you very much for today's episode. And remember, everyone failing to learn is learning to fail. Please stay safe.