Why Training Doesn't Change People (What 13 Years of Harvard Research Found Instead)

I'm Janet Macaluso, the author of the best-selling book Beyond Business as Usual, and today I'll be talking with Tom Palmer. He's the founder of the Developmental Leadership Institute, and both Tom and I were fortunate and blessed enough to learn directly from Carol Sanford, who was one of the great— and founders, I believe— of regenerative business and that paradigm where we're developing your people, your places, and your causes through a regenerative lens. Some of her work people would call dense and not too accessible, but Tom and I have found our own way to navigate through that. And what we're going to share today is the ABCD Effective Change Framework, and I will confess some of the mistakes that I have made before I learned the regenerative paradigm. So forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. You'll hear that part. And if you appreciate us creating this type of content, please gently tap that button and grab your coffee, your tea, or drink and join us. Tom, it was great talking to you, and I was telling you that I had written my book Beyond Business as Usual, and then we realized That was such a great conversation. Why don't we have a chat on this, especially since we've both experienced and learned from our late mentor Carol Sanford. And so I'm not you, you're not me, how you interpreted and processed whatever you learned. I took my learnings and put it in a very basic book here, but I thought that's what we would have a conversation on, given that we both have that as an experience and we both in learning and development and work in business. I'll stop that and see if you want to add anything about yourself before we dig in.

Yeah, well, first off, thanks, Janet, for having me. I'm excited to have another conversation here. And I know Carol was a big influence on both of us, and I'd love to dig into that a little bit more today as well. And learn more about your experience with Carol and how it led to this book in particular, because I've started reading the book and I really enjoy it so far. I think, as you know, Carol's work can be challenging, and I think you've done an amazing job of kind of distilling it down, making it accessible. And, you know, I think that's— of course I'm a little biased, but You know, I believe this is really essentially important stuff and the world needs it.

Thank you for acknowledging. Someone else said that they liked it, that it was pretty basic. And the feedback I got that was like an upgrade was a little bit too much like McLearning, McNuggets, a little bit too much on the McDonald's metaphor. But other than that, you know, it's been getting some good feedback and I thought we will keep it simple in terms of just trying to— like you said, Carol's work can be pretty dense. So in fact, I thought that this first conversation we would talk kind of under the hood about Carol's research that she did. She called it the Harvard Change Pentad, and she shared with us as part of her learning community a research paper that she wrote, and it was based on a longitudinal study at Harvard with the departments of— I think at the time it was management, psychology, and education. And they took the most intractable cases, so people who maybe were in jail, people who had addiction problems, alcoholism, some type of problems, and they somehow intervened, but they followed them over 13 years. And what came out of that paper that she shared with us was the findings of what she said real transformational change means. In the book, it's actually on page— of the hardcover, it's on page 19. So I might refer to that. I called it, to simplify it back to what you said, as the ABCDEffective Transformational Change. And I did that because I wanted the leaders I work with to have something that they could share, understand, grasp, and make sense of versus something too complicated. Do you remember that study that she shared with us?

I do. Yeah, yeah. And I love your kind of reframe of it with this ABCDEffective. It definitely resonates a lot with my experiences working in learning and development as an instructional designer, as a performance consultant. There's a lot of elements in there that I think are often missing in my experience working with, with different organizations. I think you, you have it kind of framed around this myth that information creates transformation, creates transformation. Exactly. Which I see that assumption. Very often, and these kind of one-and-done interventions that are really about kind of programming people with knowledge, with information, and assuming that's going to change everything.

Yeah, cultural change. I'll be— I have to say, let's see, I'll use a phrase from my childhood vernacular: forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Okay, I'm going to acknowledge my mistakes that I made that I won't make anymore. But I did those things, lunch and learns, and okay, oh, we're going to do this transformational culture change, we're merging two companies together, or divesting and restructuring. And then they would ask— I want to hear your experience too, but What I did was, okay, I'll do a half hour, half a day, half hour type of session, check the box and be done. I'll give myself credit that I tried to work on the head, the heart, and the hands, but it was an event, a siloed kind of fragmented piecemeal event that we could check the box. And that also, I was the head of learning and development and talent management, all of this. And if a vendor would say to me, "Oh no, that one-time deal isn't gonna work," even if it's a 3-day workshop, I would say to them, "You're just trying to make more money from us. You don't really need that." I see that I was wrong there. I see that learning and true transformation requires a gestation period and an environment for growth. So I was wrong. I'll be curious if your world and the people who hire you, Tom, if they expect the same. But that's where I've changed after my experience. Learning from the great Carol Sanford.

Yeah, you know, I had a, I had a somewhat similar experience. You know, I think when I look back onto my early career and before Carol, and even in the early days of Carol before I started to understand some of this stuff a little better, yeah, you know, I, I very much did buy into, I think, the idea that, you know, people can be— people's thinking can be quickly and easily changed, you know. And I think that's, from my perspective, that's kind of the big, uh, false assumption there, you know, that— and I know, uh, also in your book you talk about paradigms, and, you know, for example, the machine paradigm. And I think that's, as Carol talked a lot about as well, right? And I think that Understanding how, where this stuff comes from, you know, that, you know, treating people like machines to be programmed and reprogrammed, which is often, you know, where we're coming from, whether we realize it or not, with a lot of these types of initiatives, right? We assume that people's thinking can be changed like we're updating the software on a computer.

Open up the head, replace the batteries, put in a new operating system, whatever.

Exactly. And the reality is that people just don't work that way, you know, or we're full of, you know, we're full of stories that are, you know, it's much more complex. We're complex living systems and we're— we have competing narratives in our heads and we have competing beliefs and a lot of unconscious stuff going on. And, you know, it's not that easy. It's not that quick and easy to change how somebody is thinking. It takes time. And it takes a lot of work.

Right. And that what you're saying about the competing commitments and how it takes time to grow and change. The mistake I have seen is that leaders will say, the business leaders will say to HR where I worked, we need to replace this person, like the interchangeable cog on the wheel, and replace them with someone else. We bring in a new person, but there's still this complex living system with desires and motivations and competing commitments that— and maybe a high-strung nervous system that is too reactive. And if we're not addressing that, the cycle just keeps continuing.

So yeah, absolutely. And, and also they probably, uh, were performing to some degree in their interviews, and they're, you know, um, we see a certain side of them as we're hiring them, but we don't see the whole, you know, we don't really know them. And so You know, it's hard also to hire for a certain mindset or certain way of thinking because again, I think another assumption is that we are, you know, our views and our thoughts and beliefs are consistent. Back to, you know, back to that idea that we have conflicting beliefs and we don't always We're not always in one particular worldview. We bounce around and there's part of us that sees things one way and part of us that sees things another way. And so, yeah, thinking that you can hire for a certain worldview is, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding.

One of the things I've come to now call a premise is we are verbs, not nouns. But we think in nouns. We think in, "Oh, did you talk to procurement? Did you talk to finance?" Like they're a thing, an object. But we are more like verbs and we can evolve, maybe regress, and then evolve again. But yes, That— so it seems like we've both been restrained by the thinking that, oh, people can— we want you, learning and development, HR coaches, consultants, to come in and either fix them, develop them, do your magic. Check the box. And this is why— let's go back to this ABCD: effective, transformational. And I'm going to go through each letter and see what you think, and if you, if you used it or not in your work. First one is A for active. And so this is really when folks go and learn something, and I'm not talking about a new technology from the neck up. I'm talking about a new way of being. It might include, oh, we have a new policy, oh, we have to call the call center instead of calling Joe over across the cubicles next door. We have to call like a remote call center. That's a behavioral change. It's a systems change. It's an emotional change because I like talking to Joe. He was my guy. All of that. So, and if we're learning something new, what the A stands for is actively baking it into our daily practice. And the research that from the Harvard Change Pentad was no more than 10 to 20% of your day. So don't go like wild and say, oh, I'm gonna learn this and spend hours. And it reminds me of learning Spanish, that just a little bit each day is better than a weekend workshop. So that's the active blending. Wondering what's your experience with that and using it and maybe what your clients think about it.

Yeah, well, you know, I think this is a big one, and I think there's, in my experience, there's kind of there's two, at least two levels to this, right? Sometimes, you know, that active piece will get implemented within an event, but you're still, it's still maybe a single event, right? Where, okay, there's a push towards getting people to do something rather than just sit there and taking in information, which it's better than just taking in information, you know, some kind of hands-on activity. But I think often the edge that a lot of that often still gets missed, right, is Well, how, how does that learning and development kind of happen outside of the formal event? Right. And that's been something that's been very, very much of interest to me since early in my career of, right, how do you kind of embed that continuous learning and development into the work itself? So it becomes more of a way of working than something that happens off to the side as kind of a separate event from the work itself. So, you know, I think that's often missed. And then even when it's— the idea is there, the implementation is often fragmented, let's say, in terms of, well, what does that actually really mean? You know, okay, you can give people job aids that help them or give them time to, you know, experiment with certain things and stuff like that. So there are these kinds of, there's a lot of like fragmented initiatives that kind of aim for more active learning, active experimentation. But of course, I think also as we start going through the rest of this and thinking about the bigger, the whole here, the active doesn't really stand alone, right? It's—

right.

None of this does.

It's hard to, I'm explaining it one by one, but it is. A system, and there's probably more even than what I have.

Yeah, but let's see how kind of how these things connect and build on each other.

They do, they do a lot. Even when I had the insight to say, we're going to get together now, then we're going to get together here, and then we'll follow up, what I found was if you don't have a leader who is— and this gets maybe to the E for environment— that is actively sponsoring the learning, that then they get pulled into different directions. I'm talking about the learners, and they don't show up because the boss said, "Oh, I, you know, I need you here instead of going to continue your learning." And so this is why it's a system, and you have to— otherwise, because I've tried this, continue pulling the golden thread, but if you don't have the sponsorship, it gets frayed. That's my experience.

Yeah, I know. That's— and that's the, that's the big one that, you know, it's not so easy to answer because it's, you know, how do you, how do you get that buy-in on the, on the level you need and and that support, because it's— otherwise things get kind of collapsed into very functional, you know, well, we got all this stuff to do and we just need to get it done, and we're not really thinking about learning through that process, you know. And so I'd be curious, like, how do you— when it comes to that active piece, I mean, I'm thinking back to when I first started learning about experiential learning theory, for example, which is one of the things, one of the experiences for me that kind of turned me onto this whole field because I was really, really found it fascinating. And this whole idea of learning by doing really resonated with my own experience and frustrations with, with education and training. But anyway, I'm curious, like in that theory, One of the complements to the active experimentation is the reflective observation. I'm reminded too of a quote that I've referenced quite often, which is from John Dewey, which is, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. So how do you, how do you see that, that reflecting piece going along with the active piece?

Well, I think I would say, choose your clients wisely. And I think I'm a better fit with what I call conscious leaning leaders. Leaders who know the value and they're willing to do the work and actively, let's say in their team meetings or maybe it's a retreat that they have every quarter, monthly, whatever it happens to be, but they're the ones that are advocating, role modeling, and they know the work. We don't know their actual work. Where I've seen, I believe, a mistake in folks who are seeking to regenerate the work, they're using regenerative is now like a big buzzword, I see them talking about nature and save the whales and the— I'll say it wrong— the mycelium root system of forests and all of that. And that's beautiful, I get it. That doesn't really apply to the work that folks are doing in their specific departments to move the business along, whether it is in operations or customer-facing. And so I think that the reflection that John Dewey talked about, if we can reflect on the work that we're doing, and that's where I think the— I found so much value doing this work with Carol because she talked about value-adding processes. And of course, now I grew up in business and we called them value-added processes. And Carol would then correct me and others who said that and said, "Oh, that was because we..." In her good work, I think this was with P&G, they had academics coming in and doing writing-based case studies about that good work they were doing. And they reduced it to simplify it to value-added. Well, value-added seems like one time I add value and it's done, fragmented and piecemeal. And what she was saying, continually adding value, and then once you maybe you have results, you upgrade the whole system again and continually adding value. And so the reflection back to this is how can we And this really goes to, I'd say, the coaches, consultants, HR people. How do we upgrade our game so that we're asking questions about real work that they can appreciate and value instead of they're going off, they're gonna go in the mountain and see nirvana and all this, and now the real world. No, we wanna embed learning in the flow of work. And for us as consultants, I think it requires us to create these Socratic questions that are holistic and nudge and maybe disruptive, but that's what creates the motivation, if you will, and the will, like, oh geez, this is what I'm doing. Because the reflection process brought that out. And if we can create those questions and ask folks to answer them with ruthless rigor, you don't need an expert, a 360-degree feedback or best practices to tell me the answer. I'm internally shifting and while I'm working on my work. Long-winded, but reactions to that.

Yeah, you know, I think one thing coming up for me as I'm, I'm listening to you, you know, I think it's, it's, it's interesting because I know you kind of come from a business background and I'm kind of coming from an education background. And, you know, we both have this experience in organizational learning and development, but one thing that I'm seeing more clearly is So from the education side, often there's a disconnect from any kind of value-adding process, right? As a student, as a learner, you are really more of a consumer, right? And maybe you're studying for some future career, or— but you're not really engaged in a value-adding process as clearly— at least you could argue against this, of course— but as clearly as you are when you're working in an organization, right? And you have customers and, and, you know, stakeholders. So, you know, I guess that what I'm— one pattern that I, I just kind of lift up here is that a lot of times we come from this experience of learning as something, again, disconnected from that value-adding work. And even when there is reflection, it's often— it's not reflection on the external system of stakeholders so much as usually that reflection is in very, very inward and kind of disconnected from the larger system. So, you know, I think we carry some of those patterns with us even as we go into the organizational world about what learning and development is. And we still, I think, unconsciously kind of have that disconnected view of it. So when we think about reflection, we don't really often think about reflecting on our customers, but reflecting on the system, you know. And I know that self and system piece in the book as well. So it's kind of— it's not saying that we'd throw away the, the inward reflection, but, uh, I think for many people, just the concept of reflection is only focuses there. And that maybe that's part of the reason why, right?

And I mean, I used to do that. I'd I did a lot on emotional intelligence, and that's the self. And I think it's really important to have self-awareness and self-managing capabilities. But what we know, not from the mechanistic or the behavioral or even the, the do-good sensitive, um, human potential movement, that we are now in the paradigm of a living systems economy, meaning that I am a dynamic living system, together we are a living social system, and we're talking, and we live in our communities and in the world, and this past weekend, I'm here in Boston, and This past weekend, I couldn't really go out because of the smoke and pollution from Canada. They were having fires. Those fires in their country, because it's a dynamic system and nature doesn't create boundaries, that's a human thing, though the smoke and the pollution was coming over and the air quality was really bad. So we do need to— I think it's an unnatural event if we isolate the learning and just say, "Oh, it's only about me." And Gurdjieff would call it internal considering, because we can't separate ourselves from the system that we're nested in. So I think that's important. And again, I don't know that much about— well, I have a master's in education, but I've used it in in business. But I would even— and so the business folks, I would ask them a lot about who's your customer, who are they seeking to become in the world. Not did you create this to the specs and the recs, the thing— that's a noun again— but who is your customer seeking to evolve into verb into the world. And if we can, whether they're children and we're trying to help them grow and evolve in their nested system in their world, then you think about what they'll need. But in business, you also do that with your customers. And I believe that if we can think this way, that our clients would be non-displaceable. Because most folks are thinking in silos and saying, Here's the fragmented, the work, the task. I did it. Check the box.

Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. You know, I think the other thing too is that view of these kind of complex and co-evolving living systems, right? So I think that's another pattern. That's another pattern too, is this kind of very fragmented approach to learning and— you use the term siloed, but, you know, we're really kind of trying to isolate something, again, reprogramming it or, you know, upgrading its software. But oftentimes, you know, that happens without a lot of context, right? It kind of disconnected from that systemic context. And I think what was missed there, right, is that we don't develop in isolation in reality, right? We, we develop in our places and our unique places that are calling on us uniquely to become, become some— something, or to contribute in, in our own unique way within that value-adding process that's already happening. So again, yeah, that's And, you know, again, coming from the education world, which in a sense we all come from, right? It's like the standardization of education, right? Where it's very hard, even very well-intentioned teachers who might even understand this, they can only do so much because they have this standardized curriculum that doesn't really invite people into you know, the unique context of their place.

No, it's the, the teachers have to teach to the test. And what I understand, the value of having certain measures and criteria, yet we, the, what is lost is understanding the unique essence that every child has and trying to evolve that inherent potential of the child, it gets— they don't have time in school to even look there. And that gets to be for becoming, because the becoming, we're circling around that. I have two areas for that. One is instead of seeing just teaching for the test from the neck up, that education and development is the whole person. So certainly their thinking, but also their state of being, their emotions and their self-awareness, their spirit, whatever that means for them. So their psychology, all of that is what I mean by becoming a whole dynamic person. And then also my work in talent management was all mainly, it's like I have a budget and it all goes to the top. When the cream rises to the top, those are the, that's the word that was used. And we allocated most of the budget to those top performers and the others got whatever was left. And I'm now calling it in the book, developmental, all people, all the whole person, all of us, but also the whole organization. Why just stop with the top? Why not develop those top people to develop the whole organization? So that's, I just thought I'd weave in the developmental piece since we're circling around it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that resonates with my experience as well, you know, in terms of most of the people kind of get neglected in that process. Or again, I think, you know, often leadership doesn't see, I think, the potential in most of the people. Right. Again, kind of goes back to that assumption that capacity is kind of fixed. And, you know, we get into this cycle of trying to hire high-capacity people, but we can only afford so many of them, or that kind of thing. So yeah, I just think it's a blind spot. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know how that shows up in your experience though, of like, how does that How do you break that pattern in an organization?

That's why I think I like working with more senior leaders who have the influence to actually— and they believe this and that they're willing to apply this because they believe it so much. If you have a more junior person, and I find the more junior people love this work, that they don't have the positional power to make it happen. That's where I think maybe that's a restraint for me, or why I work with the more senior folks who can do that. Because this, the B is about becoming, and where this is the whole person, the whole organization, not just a certain amount. So It's for ambitious change leaders who really want to work and see holistically, I guess, see in systems, and are willing to invest time, money, energy, not just lip service. Because they'll all say, "Oh yeah, systems thinking is important." But it's something else to actually invest what it takes to do it. And that's— you don't see that as much. So when I talk to newer people, I'm just— who maybe are interested in my work, I will share one slide about this ABCD and say, this is how I work. So there's— they're not surprised. And if you want me to come in to do one little workshop, no, it— I don't want to. It Waste your time and money. It will feel good. It'll give a sugar high, but then a drop. And I want more, and I think that you and your people deserve more. And so if I— sometimes folks will actually agree, and that will work. I don't know any other way. I'd be curious. I know, I think you were just recently doing some training or some, some type of work with the client. Are they— do they have an appetite for this systemic becoming and what it takes, or they just want to check the box, more mechanistic?

Yeah, you know, for me it's been a mix because I've, you know, worked with very diverse organizations, but certainly I've seen a lot of the more mechanistic thinking, right? So, and, you know, I think that's— it's understandable in a sense too, and, and I think it's, it's You know, it can be a little bit different in different industries. For example, like recently I've been working in with some government agencies and emergency management, um, in the United States, right? So, okay, you know, these are, these are people who have very serious jobs, right?

Life or death.

Yes, life or death jobs, very dangerous. You know, they all have, they all know people who have died. You know, it's like probably the closest thing to war outside of real war, almost, you know. So it's, you know, you can kind of see like how that kind of leads to somewhat of a very kind of standardization. And, you know, things have to be kind of tightly controlled and, you know, maybe there's, you know, they can't afford the luxury of taking a step back, or in their minds anyway, right, taking a step back and reflecting on the bigger picture, or, you know, how the, the system as a whole is, is in a process of becoming. But even, even, even saying that, you know, I think there's— you really have to kind of meet people where, where they are and and try to understand their world, you know, and for me, that was a new world coming into that emergency management space. And, you know, I think as, I think if you, if you do that, you do start seeing that even underneath some of the veneer of the, which can, which can appear very mechanistic in a sense, right? There's also, I think, openings to, uh, help people reflect on, you know, and, and I, I think now too, like, in general, I see a lot of people starting maybe to think more about— just because I think we're in this period of such transformational change already, right? It's, it's not that we're looking for transformational change, we're in it. Whether we want to be or not. And, you know, I think there's going to be resistance to that. But also, I think more and more people are starting to ask bigger questions because that's just the context of the world. Like, you know, we don't know, you know, in most cases we don't know how our industry is going to be transformed in the next 5 to 10 years, but we know it probably will be. And we don't know what kind of jobs will be available and we don't know you know, how this new technology is going to impact our roles and all these kinds of things. So I think right now we're in a unique moment where people are naturally gravitating towards some of these bigger questions that maybe didn't get asked very often not so long ago.

It's beautiful. It's the liminal space I think we're in now, like the butterfly is still the caterpillar. Not a caterpillar, well, in a chrysalis, right? And that is the most fertile time for learning. I get it. And I think the right thing to do is when there is a crisis, you don't have time to sit around in a circle and journal or reflect, which are some of the practices we've used. But I have dear family members who've been in the military, and I know they use after-action action reviews, certainly in sandboxes and all of these things because they want to learn. So there are ways. That's the C for cadence. What is the cadence of learning? Instead of just, we did it and, you know, we wrote a report and we're done, that if the expectation is that this is C and D, there's a cadence, and D is duration. This is over time because that chrysalis period, the gestation period for real change, even in your work or in the military— and I mean what your clients work of in life and death disaster situations— is to have the embody the knowledge that you need. And there's some muscle memory that needs to happen. So there needs to be some learning in that. And so learning and reflecting, I think that's something Dewey would have talked about as well. I had some circle, but I don't remember it.

Yeah. And I think that's— I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, I think in some ways this space I'm talking about is very similar to the military and you know, after-action reports is a very common thing, right? So they have some of the structure. And I think it's, you know, of course it's different in different industries and organizations. But I think like in that, in that particular case, I think that would be one of the opportunities, right? In terms of, well, you have— you already have an existing structure. Where's the opportunity to, let's say, deepen the reflection, or, you know, where it's, um, and, and I think maybe I'll tie this back into what I think is important here too, from my perspective on becoming and, and seeing this as a bigger process. And, you know, I think, and I know you write about this in the book as well, is this kind of shift from problem solving to potential. And, you know, and that was, as you know, a big part of Carol's work. And, um, and, you know, I think that that's an important thing too, right? Because again, the nature of the reflection could be grounded in problem solving, and it's like, okay, well, what, what were the mistakes we made and how do we fix them? And so, but, but when you make that shift to potential and what, you know, what is this becoming on every level right, as does the organization, even bigger as the industry, the organization, or the team, all the way down to the individual. How are all these things in a process of becoming together?

Beautiful.

And how does that relate to potential? Then you start asking different questions. And even that same structure can start to catalyze a different quality of reflection.

It's so well said, Tom. And again, it reminds me of the importance that I've talked to a group of consultants and coaches and said, we need to up our game. So the folks we're talking about, whether in the military or in the government, in working on life and death situations, for example, they have these Routines, a cadence of routine already in place. That's great. And then are they asking the questions? Are they just, to your point, plugging the hole and reacting to the hole? Or in the book, I call it whack-a-mole. A mole pops up like in that game and you just hammer it down, but then now another one pops up. I've seen organizations that actually reward people for that firefighting culture. And what we're asking is, yes, we do need to solve the problem. Yet if that's all we're fixated on, we're leaving potential, leaving learning and potential on the table because someone has to be thinking about potential in the next stage of potential. But if all we're focusing on is that, we're not going to evolve. What's your thought?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I was just thinking about, you know, I think maybe it's especially true in like a dangerous situation. I don't know, but I think probably true in most situations now in, in the sense of this idea of— well, I think when you're in this problem-solving mindset, for example, it's all about speed, you know, and it's— and you, you get sucked into, you know, oh, we got to move fast and we got to solve problems fast and kind of stay out ahead of the problems, you know. So of course there's, there's anticipating problems and things like this too, but I guess I was just, just thinking a little bit about how the shift to potential relates to slowing down, which I think is kind of counterintuitive in a world that in some ways is speeding up. And, you know, but I also think there's something important there in terms of our capacity to manage this rapid change and increasing complexity, how that capacity relates to our ability to slow down and to see potential instead of just trying to go faster and faster, trying to stay out ahead of change. So I'm curious what you—

Yeah, thank you. Maybe in another conversation we'll talk about frameworks because they play such a critical role. But what we learned in terms of these systemic thinking frameworks— I have this on my table, I often share, it's a paperweight— and what I say, these kind of ancient geometry, geometric shapes that we have learned, um, they help us see through different angles. So we're getting a systemic picture. And so that could be something we talk about, but it's a way to to organize and order complexity. And so that is something. And it also— what I've been doing more and more of is bringing in the somatic, the body that we kind of don't pay attention to. We pay more attention to the thinking and the doing, but that the, the body is kind of, uh, we get fixated on something. And when we're fixated, our eyes kind of narrow and our focus sharpens on some point. I wrote about this in my master's thesis on airline pilots in a cockpit situation. And when you're so focused on the light that's blinking and it shouldn't be blinking and what's that, they lose the system's view And they end up, in this case, crashing because they weren't paying attention to the fuel gauge. But so what I have my leaders do when they're talking about something really fixated, let's look, step back and just move your eyes left and right, left and right, or up and down and make a big circle. And what I'm doing somatically is that in the jungle, And prehistoric man would be fixated on running away from the tiger and wouldn't be looking around at the forest and the trees and the mountains. But if we can tell our bodies by looking around, you're safe, you're lowering that nervous system anxiety. And I'm using those little practices that— there's a lot of this. I mean, now If you think just about the dopamine fix of the phone and that how many times we are all just— we're in a line or in a shopping, shopping, or in a red light, we all grab our phone for a fix. And what I'm saying is instead get a perspective, a wider perspective, that versus that narrow one, because that will help us have a systems view. I don't know if I made any sense there. Tom, help me out.

No, absolutely. I mean, I can reflect on my own kind of personal practice. For example, one thing that I find very helpful for me just in general managing my energy and so on is using a timer when I work and taking short little breaks, stepping outside, scanning the horizon. Even if it's just for, you know, a few seconds, 30 seconds or something, you know, getting kind of a rhythm of doing that. And then, you know, maybe at some point during the day, get some exercise, take a walk. But even those little— like that, that little practice in— for— in specifically has made a big difference for me. And I find that the quality of my energy throughout the day, if I do that, is so much better than if I just kind of plow through the day and, you know, grin and bear it.

Yeah, work on Zoom, and I'm in my basement, have a little bit of light here. But yes, those— and what I try to focus on, what are the transition moments, uh, waiting for the coffee to brew or in between meetings where you can take a breath, center, take, uh, get some sunshine, those types things to recalibrate, recalibrate the system, center, find your presence again. Otherwise, we're just that mechanistic rat on the wheel, right? And then finally, this gets to— wanna just close it— is environment. And that, that, that's the E. And the environment is that this is really hard work, but I think it's worth it. And having other folks, you and me and others, who are willing to do the hard work and reflect on ourselves, take time, think differently, having, you know, I've heard this line, you are the average of the 5 folks you hang out with in weight or income or or intellect. So having those folks around, which also in business means the team needs to be going through this. You can't have just one person, you know, reading the book, learning, practicing, doing all this, going certain reflection things, and then they're all alone. It takes a whole system. And so how do you see that happening in your world?

Yeah, you know, I think, as you know, a core premise in, in this work we're talking about is that it happens in community. And I think my experience is that definitely confirms that. I mean, you know, I've had periods where, like, just speaking personally, you know, where I've kind of tried to go it alone. And I think what I've learned from that is compared to working in a community, it's very easy to fool ourselves, you know, even, even if, even if we're reading, journaling, and meditating, doing all the, all the things. Yeah, it's still very easy, I think, to fool ourselves that, you know, we're making progress that we're not actually making, um, or that we're kind of more awake than we actually are. And I think And when you do this work with others, you get reminded of all the ways that, that you've been fooling yourself. And that's— it's a very hard thing to do for yourself, right? It's, it's, uh, in this work, as you know, one of the terms is conscious shock, right? As a really fundamental requirement for, for actually developing in this way. And typically that conscious shock is coming from others that are, you know, helping you to see the ways in which you're, you're actually still very mechanical in, in the way that you're doing things, or you're, you're asleep. Or again, you, you may even be, you know, using this work in a way that is actually not really serving your higher self, but Yeah, using it for the wrong reasons, right? Things like this. I think, again, one point I want to emphasize there, right? It's, as you know, working with Carol, it can be very uncomfortable, right? And that's why we avoid, you know, we're going to avoid that discomfort. We can come up with very clever ways if we're left to our own devices to avoid that discomfort. But when we're with others that are capable of reminding us and helping us to see certain things, and also that have the will to make us just uncomfortable, like Carol did very well, you know, it's another level of care, right? To be willing to disrupt.

It's easier and safer to keep the harmony then be disruptive, unless that's your natural Buddha nature, like it was for Carol. But for most of us, we've been in— the culture has been ingrained in us, and she was more of a norm buster who would not follow the flow so easily. So she would often disrupt our comfort. You know, this is reminding me, years ago I got certified by this meditation teacher as a meditation teacher with, it was originally Google's program, Search Inside Yourself. It was a meditation program. And one of the things I remember was this kind of two ways to meditate. One is called dedicated practice. It's kind of like go in the sofa or on the cushion and you meditate for whatever amount of time. And then the other kind is integrated, like those little transitional periods. And what I found was that I was so a wonderful meditative person while I was on the cushion, and only till I'm engaging with the world, did I get— I found learning opportunities. And so how do I be on the cushion, if you will, and become my next stage potential in the world? That's where it does. And I'm glad we're together having this conversation and thinking it through, because it's hard, but the world needs conscious change agents more than ever. Any last thoughts? It's been fun. I really enjoyed this chat with you, Tom.

Yeah, me too, Janet. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, I appreciate the invitation to come have a chat and would love to do so.

Have another one if you're willing.

I, I would be willing. Yeah, this has been engaging and valuable for me, really helping me Well, again, you know, back to that environment and the relationships and the dialogue is a big part of that in this work. You know, that's how it happens, I think, most clearly. And so that's a— feel very much in a process of— a developmental process as we talk this. Yeah.

Well, thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Janet. Thank you.

All right. I'm going to— no, stay on. I'm going to stop the recording. Recording. So let me just say stop, maybe click stop recording.