172 - Encounters with Uncertainty and: How to Integrate Neurodiversity with Matthew Bellringer

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Miriam Hadnes, and with the Workshops Work podcast, I'm on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show is Matthew Bellwinger, and we speak about uncertainty as opposed to risk, about a safe enough space, and how to be inclusive to neurodivergent participants. So stay tuned. And by the way, if you don't have pen and paper at hand to take your own notes, scroll down to the show notes to download my free one-page summary. And now lean back to be inspired. Hi, Matthew.

Hi.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Yes, I'm— after our exploration call, which could have been an entire podcast episode as such, actually.

Yes, definitely.

I'm very much looking forward to explore the topics of uncertainty and save enough space and neurodiversity.

Yes, that would be great. Thank you.

Yeah. And before getting started, When did you start calling yourself a facilitator, and actually, do you?

It's an interesting one. I think facilitation has always been a part of my work. One of the interesting things about exploring framing work in my own terms is how much I've realized I've always done some of these things, and it's always been a thread in my work. However, even now, facilitation is a part of my work rather than the whole of my work. So It's a really interesting one, and I tend to— facilitator is part of a chain of things I describe myself as. But as an individual, and I have been doing that, including that in my description explicitly, for around 3 years now.

And when you facilitate, what do you do? What do you understand by facilitation?

So for me, I think of facilitation as a process of Creating a context where something helpful can emerge, and creating that context so that that thing is in a certain direction.

Mm-hmm.

And is in a way that is likely to be at an appropriate level for the people who are attending. So it's not going to be too trivial and too boring, and it's not going to be too much and too overwhelming. So it's a context and a calibration, I think, is probably the best way I would describe it.

And 2 words come to my mind. One is design work and design effort to make sure that you're walking this very thin path between too little and too much. And the other one is actually already directly hitting to our topic, which is uncertainty. Because you said that— how did you phrase it? That set the stage where things can happen, but must not happen. So it sounds like something that is out of control.

Absolutely. And I think this gets to the idea of control and facilitation sit very uncomfortably together. You can't facilitate and be fully in control.

Mm-hmm.

And the design— design is a really interesting word, because I think of it as an active design process, a co-created design process at that. Because whenever you're facilitating, you're not doing so in a kind of abstract space, you're doing so in relationship to a whole load of people responding and reacting in certain ways. And quite a lot of the skill is being able to listen in all senses to what's going on and kind of go with that or not go with that. And making those decisions is, do I want to kind of follow the— go with the flow of where everyone else is taking this, or do I want to influence and do I want to nudge this in a different direction? And for me, that influence, that nudging is The thing we have in uncertainty that is comparable to control when we have a deterministic space, a known space.

Mm-hmm.

Because I think one of the core fears of uncertainty is if we're in uncertainty, there's nothing we can do. We're kind of just completely lost in the flow of things, and there's nothing we And what we can't do is choose absolute, but we can have very significant influence.

And that's why uncertainty causes stress to many, because it's something that we cannot control as opposed to risk. And we discussed about this, the difference between risk and uncertainty in the exploration. And I would be curious before we talk maybe also about the difference, or maybe you want to share your thoughts about the difference of risk and uncertainty. And then maybe explain how, where you see the uncertainty, how to deal with the uncertainty, because there are 2 ways to look at that. It's uncertainty for the facilitator because you don't know what's going to happen in the space. And there's the uncertainty of the participants. And for both parts, it's uncomfortable very often.

Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think I will come back to that. Yeah, it will be really good to come back to a lot of the ideas around that. And I might appreciate you bringing me back to that if I don't get back there on my own accord.

Yes.

However, yeah, that difference between risk and uncertainty. So this came from my own inner exploration and some comparison with psychology literature really, and my realization that I've often been told I have a high kind of appetite for risk. I've never experienced myself as having a high appetite for risk. And that's not just a kind of calibration thing. That's not because I feel differently. I actually don't have a high taste for many of the things that people consider risky in the sense of there being a known thing at stake. So things— risk, a good example of risk is gambling in a casino. You know what is at stake, you know what the odds are, and you know what the range of possible outcomes are. So you've got all of those different possibilities. It's risk. I don't actually enjoy that very much at all. Also, don't like roller coasters. I don't have a high appetite for risk, but I really like uncertainty. I love spaces where we don't even know where this is going fully yet.

And what the odds are.

What the odds are, exactly. And you cannot know the odds in uncertainty. That's the whole point. That's kind of what makes it uncertainty as opposed to risk, is you can't quantify. Or if you do try and quantify, it takes you longer than it's either useful or by the time things have changed already. And quite often you see this in organizations trying to really pin down, when they talk about risks in project management, and they're actually talking about uncertainty. And then the whole project inception phase takes the whole time, and all the resources of the project, because it's trying to pin something down that can't be pinned down. And that's a really, really difficult kind of situation. So, unpicking this idea of what is risk, what is knowable, reasonable to know, And we can quantify it versus uncertainty, which is much more in this space of intuition and a felt sense of the thing. And for me, that's a much more interesting space. So I have a very high uncertainty appetite, but actually a very low risk appetite. So once risks are known and quantified, I'm very careful. Before they are, I'm, by most people's standards, downright reckless.

And I think that's important for the audience also to hear when we go further in the conversation that basically in a workshop, there are very few situations that are really risky in that sense, because we're not tossing coins, we're not gambling.

Exactly.

But there's a high amount of uncertainty where we're leaning in, we're exchanging information, we're putting all these brains and creativities together, and something may or may not come out of that.

Absolutely. It's absolutely about what emerges. It's this emergence from a complex interaction. And that is necessarily, by definition, if you're using complex kind of in its technical way, is unknowable before it happens. And so yes, it's absolutely the space of uncertainty.

And hence, I would assume that intuition, as you mentioned, plays a huge role. And there are some who feel more confident to follow and listen to their intuition than others. So this might be a proxy to an appetite for uncertainty.

Absolutely. I think there are those of us who have been led to this simply because of having a high interest. We become practiced at being in these spaces because we've always been led to them. I didn't even realize for most of my career that a lot of the things that I was doing weren't typical of people, because I have this attraction, I would always choose the really big, messy, difficult problems that everyone else wouldn't touch because they were really bad for your career in many ways. Actually, for me, they weren't because I had a different set of skills to work with. But for many people, they would be a real problem because they're already messy. And the work is to get to an understanding, get to a clarity, get to words, get to models that you can then test and see how true they are, rather than being able to take a known model and optimize how you solve that problem, which is a different way of thinking and it's a different domain. There are people who have skills across both, and it's really important to highlight that. But there are— if you have more skills in this kind of uncertain domain, then it's actually quite difficult to find really fulfilling work in normal organizations.

Very true. Unless you have the opportunity to work in this creative space, Where it almost— or the image that came to my mind while you were describing was that if we have an appetite for uncertainty, then we are more open to follow new ideas or path just out of curiosity. And then I think by definition, those who are open enough to follow that and then to be nimble to adjust are then also more successful in following this path. And the image that came to my mind was almost like when we're really cold, and then we tense our bodies, and then we feel even more cold. The only way to actually feel more comfortable in the cold is to relax. And then suddenly it doesn't feel that cold anymore.

Hmm.

And I think with uncertainty, it's similar. The more we resist and try to control, because we might confuse it with risk, the more we actually resist it and won't find answers or won't find a creative solution. Whereas when we let go and surrender, there's an entire world of opportunities opening up.

Absolutely. I think that response, how we respond in those situations is really interesting. I would say there is the vast majority of people narrow under stress. They become cognitively narrow. If you read the psychology literature, they'll say everyone does. I'm starting to wonder whether there are a smaller group of people, and this links us to neurodiversity, whose default is cognitive breadth. I'm probably in that group, and a lot of people who end up in facilitation are in this group.

Mm-hmm.

Partly because This quality of being in between and making connections is more important than any of the individual nodes, any of the individual things. If you're kind of given to this way of thinking, it's a different thing. And so when under real severe stress to make a decision, the majority of people will narrow down and will see a very, very narrow set of options. My experience is that under significant stress, I have a kind of freeze response because I see every possibility at once, and it's overwhelming to act upon. But it's kind of the same and kind of the opposite. So it's an interesting— the way that we're processing that and being in the space, and being in the space with others who might be doing it differently, is an awful lot of— there's a kind of Almost like a music to facilitation. That's part of the work and part of the skill. But it's also not quite like being a conductor because you're kind of there with people. So it's more like you're playing along with people rather than conducting and not playing at the same time.

So it's more like jazz.

Yeah.

And then I wonder, and I haven't forgotten the other question about uncertainty for the facilitator and the groups, I still wonder, how can you then provide or share the set of opportunities that you see with a group that most probably doesn't see that, but is prone or has an instinct to narrow down? So there's a translation effort, actually.

Yes. And this is why it is work. This is why it is a specific sort of work, though for many of us, it's work we practice just to get by. I think this is one of the interesting things is if we do experience the world differently in any way, to interact with the conventional world, we're always making that effort, and so we get very practiced at it. I think a surprising amount of the very highly developed professional expertise in a lot of domains comes from that. Having spent time in psychology and psychiatry and psychotherapy spaces, Very often, there's a very, very high degree of empathy that comes with a lot of those roles. For me, the need to develop that high a level of empathy doesn't actually happen for most people. It's something that most people are so highly— many people I meet who work in those domains are so highly developed in that capability, it can't just be professional.

Hmm.

It can't just be something they've been doing, like they started learning at university and they're just doing their day job. There is no way that is It's something that was already there. And for me, one of the really interesting things is, as an example, with empathy. When I'm talking about empathy, I mean the kind of somatic ability to kind of feel something the same as someone else is feeling it, rather than sympathy, which is being able to match my experience to someone else's.

Mm-hmm.

So they're kind of, again, similar, but also a kind of opposite. And the reason that we'd need a high degree of empathy in everyday life is if we are experiencing things somewhat differently to others. So we develop that capacity. And it's a very interesting thing to look at neurodivergence and look at the extent to which there are neurodivergent traits in in highly empathetic professions. Because it is, if you are neurodivergent or actually from any other different background, but neurodivergent, if you want to relate to people on their terms, to meet them that way, and there are strong incentives to do so, then developing a greater sense of empathy is one of the ways that you can do that. And one of the ways that you can stay safe in interaction. Because if you can read someone else's emotional state, Perhaps even more fluently than they can. You can edge into things that wouldn't otherwise be safe because you don't have a predisposed— you don't know how they're going to react because you don't share that common experience.

So if I understand correctly, you would then basically have to learn how to relate, how to be empathetic, how to read body language, facial expressions, and maybe even the tone of expression, like others would learn a new language.

Yes, on some level. I mean, I think it's more that when we're talking about hyperempathy, it's that the language underneath, the physiological language, is actually much more in common. So we do have a point at which we experience things on that fundamental somatic level. Our embodiment is similar enough. that we can relate on that level, but it's the other layers above. So it's that kind of language and how we're interacting level where that can often go wrong. So what we can do is we can then go back down to that base layer and keep monitoring that base layer where we can connect. It's just that most people don't have to do that most of the time. But if you experience the world differently, it can be a very helpful way of interacting and of staying safe. So the other group of people are people who've had to learn to do this in order to stay safe in their previous life. Because if you can monitor the other faster than they can, you can make sure that you never behave in ways that result in unsafe behavior towards you.

And therefore, also create Maybe a different sort of safe container for the group because you're more aware or you have actively practiced that.

Yeah. And the kind of fundamental underpinnings as to why you would get good at that are again sometimes because you had to learn to monitor that space previously. If you think about social situations and the difficulty of interacting in a group, For example, again, if you're slightly different and you stand out, you can manage the group in a certain way. You can see a lot of people who become stand-ups often have a similar— again, it's a way of managing the way that people are relating to you in a different way, but actually very closely related. So that way of, how can I integrate? And you take on some of the role that would, in an equally skilled relationship, be more equally located. And that means that you can take people to places that they haven't been yet.

Mhm.

So if you have a bit more of a capacity in a space, you can take people there knowing that you can hold this. Your senses are attuned enough, your skills are strong enough that you can take people a bit further than they are fully comfortable. I often use the metaphor of a Sherpa.

Mm-hmm.

It's like, I can climb— a Sherpa climbs very often with the— traditionally, with the kind of European white person, yet they've lived on the mountain all their lives, they've been up lots of mountains, and they're usually doing it carrying a pack, carrying all the stuff, they're putting the ropes in, they're doing it. But nonetheless, they are on the mountain with that person. So they are there and they are up to some degree of risk. And so their awareness, their embodied knowing in that environment is actually a good deal of what protects the other person as well.

Mm-hmm.

Because they're aware and they're like, okay, it's that thing of like, that just feels wrong, that sounds wrong, or that's like, so we won't go that way, we'll go this way. That embodied knowing is something that you really kind of, yeah, that is only experientially developed.

Yeah, definitely. And another thought that came to my mind is if the empathy part is a skill that you have trained and developed over time, but it's not inherent or that you didn't grow up with, it might even be, correct me if I'm wrong, it's just an assumption, in the role of the facilitator, more able to actually design for an entire variety of diverse, for instance, groups with diverse appetite for uncertainty, because you don't assume that everyone is like you, or you don't connect to one specific part. Everyone is just different, and there's a variety of difference, and you're aware of that.

Yeah, so, so there's 2 things there. I think what I want to be clear on is that there is a higher degree of empathy, not because it was learned necessarily cognitively, But because it just had to arise in some neurodivergent people. So yes, it's learned, but it's learned in the sense of the way that we learn things on a really fundamental level. So it's always been there.

So the survival instinct kind of learning.

Which is the way that most people develop. Development is actually about survival, and it's just that those were the optimal pathways. For some people. So they do have— this is to differentiate it from— there are certain neurominorities that are associated with a detail-oriented kind of observational way of understanding others, sometimes associated with autism spectrum because of the amazing capacity for detail that many people with autism spectrum possess. I'm not really talking about that necessarily, though that might be one of the pathways to it. I'm just talking about a very highly developed ability to read other people's physiological emotional state, however that arises. That said, the other part of this though is that where you were talking about being able to design for others, yes, there is significant truth in that, partly because when we experience the world differently, However, we experience the world differently. We regularly encounter reminders that the rest of the world doesn't. We have to swap our perspective all the time. It's what's called in neurodivergent spaces, it's called masking. In some race theory spaces, it's called code switching. It's this capacity to shift whole perceptive frameworks, really, like full context, and operate in a different context. And if you exist in an entirely conventional existence, you may never encounter that at all until that point. And you certainly, if you do encounter it, it's very easy for you to walk away if you don't fancy it that day. Whereas for those of us who are different, we don't have that. It's either interact in the conventional terms or do not interact. And so, but that gives an ability to kind of shift and play with perspective and almost a perspective on perspectives to be able to play with all of them. And that's a really interesting thing in the space. Yeah.

And I would be very interested, maybe A, for the audience and also for me to make sure that we really understand each other. What does neurodivergent actually mean, or what is your understanding of it when we continue speaking about it?

Sure. So I want to say this is my understanding, and the language around— like with a lot of difference, the language is constantly being changed and developed. The way I use it is that neurodiversity refers to the whole range of neurological differences, ways of being and experiencing the world. that span the whole of human experience. So that's across all sorts of different dimensions as well. So that's the idea of neurodiversity. And one of the things is people sometimes say someone is neurodiverse, but it's like, it's not really very helpful because every— in a sense, everyone is diverse in their neural makeup. So what we tend to prefer to use is neurodivergent. Which means the way I use neurodivergent is to qualitatively and pervasively, so on an ongoing basis, experience the world in different ways than the majority of others around you.

So this could be in the extreme cases of autism and Asperger's, but it could as well include ADHD, dyslexia, So the diagnoses tend to be called neurominorities.

One of the ways to refer to them is as neurominorities. Some of the ways of experiencing the world differently kind of cluster together. They don't cluster perfectly, which is one of the interesting things around this. So different people with a common diagnosis might experience the world in quite significantly different ways on another dimension. This is one of the difficulties, is there are so many degrees to which people differ that yes, there are these clusters and they kind of have some commonality of experience, but they also have quite big differences in experience. And some of the commonalities arise because they experience the world fundamentally differently. Some of the commonalities arise because when you interact with the world and you are just different neurologically, you have a similar experience. Even though there's nothing in common underneath. And so there's an awful lot to tease apart there. Very often they come together, and it's very common to have— I tend to prefer the word co-occurrence rather than comorbidity because it fits with this model, which is also related actually. You might hear me describe things as condition rather than disorder.

Mm-hmm.

Because I see these things when they are Well-developed, when they are allowed to develop well, when they have been given the right environment and nurture, I do not see any of these conditions as fundamentally a problem. They are just differences.

They can even be a gift.

They can be. In the right circumstances, they can be a gift, and in the wrong circumstances, they are the opposite. So in the right environment, these things can be a blessing, And in the wrong environment, they are undoubtedly a curse. So it's important to emphasize both of those things and that it's an environmental thing. The other part of this is that because the world is not designed for people who experience the world this way, many people collect trauma-related disordered behavior on top of the condition, and it then follows a relatively consistent pattern. So you can have the underlying predisposition and be completely well, but many people, because they're not given the right developmental opportunities, end up with certain patterns of behavior that aren't helpful.

That are then rather referring to a shared trauma than to the same initial condition.

Absolutely. And so the work is— and this relates to when we're talking about working with the condition is when we're talking about curing something or making it better, it's like, yes, we can address the disordered symptoms, but we're not trying to make the underlying functioning of a person different. It's not that you're experiencing things wrong, it's like, how can you do this skillfully to the extent that anyone can do this skillfully or to the extent that your capabilities And I would like to pick up the word design again and wonder, how can we then truly be inclusive?

So assuming— and I hear about more and more cases, and I'm not sure whether this is maybe a trend where everyone— where we tend to overdiagnose, or whether it's something that is now coming to awareness. So we spend more time to actually diagnosing But the fact is that I realized that it becomes more and more relevant to think of our designs of how we create group conversations and workshops from a perspective of inclusion to neurodivergent participants.

Absolutely. I'd like to say on the kind of diagnosis and growing, like, I suspect there are multiple factors at work here. We're getting better at spotting these conditions. We're naming them in ways that they weren't always named before. They were sometimes described as other things, sometimes positively, sometimes not positively, usually around intersectional power and the fact that if you were born an aristocrat, you would kind of be a creative free spirit, whereas if you were born working class, you would be indolent and work-shy. And now we might call both of those conditions something in the space around ADHD. So it's like how there's all sorts of— these traits have been around for a long time. This is always a story, it's always a way of describing, it's not the absolute truth. It's just a situated way of getting a handle on something that's the infinite complexity and wonder of human experience. So that's one part of it. Another part of it, I believe, is that There are certain social factors that increase the incidence of neurodiversity— oh, sorry, of neurodivergent existence within the range of neurodiversity. And I suspect that that seems to be correlated with social stress, social-level stress, societal-level stress. And because we are in a period of significant social level stress at the moment. It makes sense that more people are becoming neurodivergent. And I have a sense that on a functional level, there is a— it makes sense that if things are working really well, we don't need to change very much. Whereas if things aren't working so well as measured by physiological stress, then it makes sense to try different things. And in many ways, a lot of neurodiversity is more profoundly expressed traits that exist in the whole of society.

Can you give an example?

Yeah. So for example, the kind of detail orientation that often comes with autism spectrum condition is there in many people. It's just that it's more strongly expressed. And we all have some of it, almost all of us have some of it. It's just that it becomes such a big potent thing that you can't not do it. The kind of linking thought that often goes with ADHD and dyslexia to some degree, everyone can kind of make these thoughty linked thoughts, but the extent to which they happen such that they become overwhelming only seems to happen with a smaller group of people. So it's like these traits are already there, and some people don't really have them as problematic at all. Some people have them to a subclinical level, so they're just there and they're constantly below consciousness and they have a drag on their experience. And then some people have them all the way to the point at which they struggle to maintain functionality within a conventional And there are also those people who find that they bounce between being functional and not, and find it very exhausting, but can play the game or not. And that gets to, after a fairly long divergence, to answer another question, is part of the value of this from a design perspective is that one of the ways to see these things is as particular sensitivities. So you could see ADHD as a real high sensitivity to context, social and physical context. That's why it's distractible, is because if the context shifts, so does the attention. So you can see it through the lens as a sensitivity. Now, the thing about sensitivity is we often talk about sensitivity as a problem, very often problematize it, like too sensitive or shouldn't be sensitive to this. Whatever. Sensitivity well expressed is the root of all expertise. So one of my favorite examples is, who wants an insensitive surgeon?

I love that.

Yeah, we need high sensitivity to be able to do really fine work and to be able to work to a really high level and to be able to work safely at a really high level. So from a design perspective, this plays out as being able to work with problems that other people wouldn't necessarily be able to work with and resolve them. And in doing so, fix the problem for all the other people who have that trait, but just not that much.

And so what I— so much to unpack. You first said that a few of the conditions get revealed through the stress, the social stress we're going through, or maybe we tend to have these conditions, although we are not in the neurodivergent space. And the level of details or being absorbed by details, I think is a very good example because I think that's almost an automatic reaction of the brain when it comes to too much uncertainty, too much stress, information overload. And then it's easier, like a refuge to focus on the details. And the other thing was that you mentioned is about the context switching, that this becomes a problem. And I think both are situations that we face very often in workshops with our work, where I think of an exercise, for instance, where we take a problem to the moon. So how would we solve this problem on the moon, which is a very extreme context switch that works for, what do you call them, neuro-normal people?

Neurotypical.

Neurotypical, thank you, of course. Neurotypical participants, but then might, if I understand you correctly, really put off those who might have ADHD or who have a strong preference for a stable context to operate in.

I think you are more likely to, just to differentiate with ADHD because of that context switching and partly because of this capability that I talked about where you develop skills. It's actually radical context switches are something that people with ADHD get very comfortable with. It's why many people with ADHD find strength working in creative industries, in spaces where you have to Think completely on your feet, improvise, make stuff up, why they tend to be very good in a crisis, because where the existing rules don't apply. You're more likely to find that level of context switch to be difficult for people with more sensitivity to concrete thinking and literal thinking, which is more commonly associated with ASC. But you can also think about this, you know, in terms of Rather than thinking about just the spaces, if you think about a continuum and you think about the normal operating window of a neurotypical participant, that's going to be a certain width, right? We can all go so far into detail and we can all go so far into big picture connecting. What's interesting about neurodivergent people is they might have a really, really big operating window, but but it might be very much at one end. So it might be that they can go completely off into space. You might find if you do that thing, you'll find someone in there who's like, well, yeah, okay, the Moon. So what if we went to Mars? What if we went to Jupiter where the gravity's really heavy? What if we went to Venus where it's really hot? What if we did it on the Sun? What if we did it in deep space? I give an example because I can do— and who would just follow that thread instead of actually doing the exercise and get kind of completely derailed by just playing with the context. That's one example. Or you might find someone who has a kind of freeze response. It's like, I can't do that. I don't have enough concrete stuff to work with.

Or would ask many questions about the conditions on Mars to actually do the exercise.

Yeah. Or would want, yeah, can we look up Wikipedia and look at what it is like on the moon and go from— So the operating window might actually be really large, and the person who struggles with going to the comp might be really— be able to descend into details much further than everyone else. The difficulty is that if you work at either end, a long way at either end, it can be quite lonely because you're the only one that can go there. And so you're kind of constantly like you're being pushed up against not being able enough go at one end. You're like, okay, we can't. And then they're like, oh, shut up about the details, or, oh, stop talking about all the different planets.

Stop focusing.

It's that people can't go at the other end. So there's the breadth of the window, and then there's the placing of the window on the continuum as well, and they're 2 separate things. And if we mistake one for the other, we can make mistakes about people's capability.

And what comes up for me is that there is such an opportunity to integrate all these different views and perspectives, because at the end, that's what we want. And I know so many facilitators who complain that the ideas that are generated in a simple brainstorm are never creative enough, and very rarely people get out of the known to explore the never done before. So how can we tap into this potential Without falling into the trap to either overempathize or to even overlabel. So what are the tips and tricks to, A, discover whether there is such potential in a group? Can we actually ask the question, or is it inappropriate? And if so, how to deal with that?

Absolutely. I think this is often a question for facilitators as an individual. Is what level of work do you enjoy? Do you actually want to be doing cutting-edge work, or do you like doing something that's better known and kind of bringing people to a level of performance within that space? Because both are entirely really important and really valid. It's a question of personal preference. And also, you might, as an individual, know you have a bit of both of those, and that you want to schedule some of one and some of the other. And make sure that you're getting those needs met. Because I think if we talk about things not being creative enough in a workshop, when you're the facilitator, there's only really one person who's at fault there, though there are multiple ways that you can make that error. And one of them is just inviting the wrong people into the room. It's like if these people could not go there with you, then— They're not going to. And that's fine. And it's like, again, we go back to the Sherpa. If you're a really, really good mountain climber and you're there with a bunch of people just on the little hills and they're getting tangled up in the ropes and falling over, you're going to get annoyed if you want to be climbing Everest.

Mm-hmm.

And that's fine, but you need to know that about yourself and take that into account when you invite people into the room. Work out, you know, be clear about the kind of people and the kind of capability and the kind of work that you're planning to do in that space.

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