From Artifacts to Action: A New Leadership Paradigm | Sean Stewart | 583

Can thought leadership be something physical and tangible, something you can actually hold in your hands? All too often we think of thought leadership as abstract, an idea that's encoded in some way, whether words or a diagram, an image, or every consultant's favorite, the 2x2 matrix. I want to take a look at how thought leadership can be encoded into physical objects, expanding your audience's perspective and reminding them when they need the idea the most. We talk with Sean Stewart. He's trained as an archaeologist and historian. He now works as an executive coach and keynote speaker for Past Forward Talks. In today's episode, will explore the concept of encoding ideas into tangible objects to help make ideas memorable for your audience. Shawn will also share how, as an archaeologist and maritime historian, he found himself in leadership development. Finally, we'll talk about how artifacts can become a silent coach.

I'm Bill Sherman.

This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Sean.

Thank you very much, Bill. Happy to be here.

So today I want to explore with you something that you and I have had a conversation around, this concept of object-oriented thought leadership. How do you change people's perspectives through not necessarily the written word, or even a framework, but an object. And to start down that road, I believe you were trained as a maritime historian and archaeology.

How do you get into thought leadership from that?

That's right. Well, I did indeed get my start in maritime history and marine archaeology. And I suppose the thought leadership transition happened when I realized how useful and interesting objects are to people. And I understand, I understood quickly one thing, which is that when you are dealing with people, whatever problems they have or issues they're facing, circumstances they're in, whether business or personal, people tend to get lost in their own head. They get too focused inward thinking through the problem, the thinking and thinking. What an object does, so to speak, is it's objectifies the problem. So I'm removing your thoughts from in being overly inwardly focused. And we're looking at the object. And the object now represents a point of view. It represents, in the case of historical objects that I use, it represents a historical experience. So the object has a kind of authority, it has a backstory to it, and you are now thinking through not my problem, my issue, what do I do, but oh, what is this object saying? What is this object telling me? And so now what you're doing is you're stepping outside yourself a little bit and you're able to get some perspective, but you're doing it in an interesting way. So you're not just talking about some theory or framework like you said. But you're talking about comparing your issues or your situation now with what might have happened in the past or what the object represents. And so you essentially end up being in a dialogue with the object, which is another way of saying you end up being in dialogue with yourself.

And I want to dig deeper, but I want to, before I do that, go back to something that you talked about, the ability to interpret an object, right? Now that's something that you've been trained to do. And there's an entire field of interpretation of whether we went out into the field and uncovered literally something or brought up to the surface in the case of marine archaeology. But what goes on in that process of interpretation? Because it's an artifact that is found or recovered but is not created by the individual. And so if we get into that conversation with the object, there's a creator or a user of that object separated from us in time, right?

Correct. Correct. So what I do is I suppose the art of interpretation is there is a certain skill to it. There's a certain experience that you gain, but it's essentially an art. What you're looking at when you're dealing with interpretation is looking for meaning. So as a historian or an archaeologist, you're looking at an object and saying, okay, how does this object fit into a timeframe? Based on that, what can we, what deductions can we make about what people were thinking 2,000 years ago, for example? However, what I've done is just pivot to the modern, right? And just say, okay, this is an object. How does it relate to our story?

Right?

So for example, uh, I have in my possession here a copy of a, uh, 7th century BC, uh, sculpture of a horse. So it's very small. You can hold it in the palm of your hand. It's stylized. It's almost an impressionistic piece. So the artist was not making a copy of a real horse, a real named horse that appears in the wild, as it were. But it's a stylized horse. So its waist is very, very narrow, wasp thin. Its head is exaggerated. Its tail is exaggeratedly long. So yeah, we could look at that object and say, well, what does that mean in terms of its place in history as an offering to a temple, as an offering to the gods? You know, to what extent does it encapsulate divine meaning? But now you can take a look at that and say, well, clearly this object was embodying ideals that were considered noble, and we know that because it was placed in a temple. And in terms of interpreting what that means for us, you say, okay, well, what if I postulated just for the sake of fun that this horse represents a model of ideal leadership, right? Mm-hmm. So you could say that the wasp waist reminds us, for example, that it a good leader has the potential to be flexible. I can move left, move right, respond to the situation, right? But because the horse's four legs are planted solidly on the ground in the sculpture, it also reminds us that the opposite point is equally valid, right? A good leader might just stand in one place, rooted to the ground, stubborn, holding the ground. And it's up to you, symbolized by the long nose and the big head and the big brain that that implies, it's up to you to discern the difference., right? And you think, okay, well, that's quite straightforward and simple, but sometimes I have to say even very often, the simple thing is what's going to help you out the most. The simple aha, the moment of clarity. You don't have to think 15 levels down. You just say, well, is this a situation where I need to be flexible essentially? Or is this a situation where I need to be stubborn and stand my ground essentially? And why? Now you're in conversation with the piece and you're interpreting this piece against your own life story. And sometimes I find that it's just that little nudge, just getting out of your own head even for a couple of seconds that will help you clarify things and simplify things, I suppose.

Well, and there's a couple pieces. One, you can take that sculpture of a horse, put it on your desk, whether it's a home office, in the background of a Zoom background, or at work and people will see it as an object and decoration, but you have a layer of meaning that you've encoded into this. And so, it's there as a tangible reminder for you.

Correct, correct. And sometimes that's all you need. And you can imagine very easily on a phone call, Zoom call, and you're becoming frustrated or something's happening and you start to get really laser-focused on the problem. And then your eye just falls on the object and you think, ah, it's like, well, usually I'm too stubborn. My coach has suggested I might be too stubborn. I've had feedback forms, whatever. And I'm now looking at that wasp-like waste on the course like, ah, yes, maybe I should be a little flexible. And that's something, that's all it means. Just a little jog at the crucial moment. And it might help you say, well, what if I were flexible here? What would I gain from it? And then you do it and voilà, look at what happens.

A couple other pieces that in this object-oriented, I want to call out, not only is it visible, it's tangible. And a lot of thought leadership is not tactile or tied to something that's tangible. Yes, you could draw a 2x2 matrix with its elegant simplicity on a whiteboard, but how do you put a 2x2 in your hands? That's a tough question where you can run your hand over the figure of the horse.

And the other thing though as well is you can look at something like a sculpture, an object from many different angles. So it's not just looking at it from the one angle. Like when you look at a painting, you're looking at a painting from the perspective that the artist wants you to see it. So you have a viewpoint and you're looking into it from that viewpoint, right? With a sculpture, you can walk around it, you can turn it upside down, you can say, okay, look, It's this thing now, and it's that thing in another situation. And leadership is like that. It's very context-based. It's very much dependent on what you're facing now. Just because you led well last week doesn't mean you're necessarily going to lead well in a different situation this week. So you have to change your perspective and become, you know, conscious of the context in which you're leading. And having that three-dimensional element to a sculpture or an object helps to put that in your mind. To remind you of that.

Absolutely. And it also evokes a sense memory as well, which is different. And so what I want to ask you is a little bit of the story, because it feels like there's an aha that you had at some point. We have you with your training as a historian and archaeologist. We also have you doing leadership development work. When did you decide to merge the two? When did you first bring a horse or a similar piece into your work?

Well, it evolved reasonably slowly. I wouldn't say there was one aha moment. There were a series of small ones, but I can give you an example of one place where I really had a spark. If you've ever been to Athens, and if you haven't, I recommend a trip to the Greek capital. Everybody goes to see the Parthenon and the Acropolis and so on, and that's great. However, there is back behind the Parthenon, uh, back behind the Acropolis, I should say, the foundational remnants of a 5th century, what we would call Byzantine church. They didn't call it that, but anyway, let's go with that. And in the base of that church, there is a broken mosaic, right? And it's a mosaic of a laurel wreath, right? That the Olympic, the victors had in, in the Delphic Games. And it's now actually been moved to the museum. Um, and I was looking at this thing and I thought, you know what? This just reminds me of like, oh, how could I use this? So like a broken mosaic of a of a laurel wreath. And I thought, you know what, most of these people problems, you know how they could be solved, um, is just consider what your terms of victory are. So a laurel wreath is a symbol of victory. So when you get into a conflict with somebody or your disagreements or whatever the case is, people tend to go down the rabbit hole and they start to fight the battle for the battle's sake and they get distracted from the terms of victory. So if you have that, I hadn't made a copy of the mosaic and it hangs on the wall. And if you look at it, you think, okay, whatever is happening right now, I have to ask myself always, what are my terms of victory? Not for this little particular contest I'm in right now, but overall, what are we trying to achieve as a company, as a department, as a person? And how is this argument subtracting from that or aiding to it? And the key point here is that if you are engaged in a conflict or a disagreement that is aiding your progress towards the goal, fine. If it's distracting, it becomes the proverbial pissing contest, drop it. It's not a fight worth winning. It's not a fight worth pursuing. And that big laurel wreath there just kind of sits right on the wall and it's always looking at you. What are your terms of victory? How do you know when you've won? What are you trying to achieve?

And it invites metaphor to build because you pointed out it's a mosaic, right? Yeah. It's not that there is one, you know, painting on stucco, but it's an assembly of little pieces that come together for victory. How do those parts fit together? Either within me as an individual or me and my team or my whole organization. There's an extension of the metaphor that's natural, which doesn't feel strained.

Right. And to answer your initial question, I finally just, I was helping somebody else actually, and this object just popped into my head. I said, you know, and I just used that phrase, terms of victory. What are your terms of victory? And it really helped this person, uh, to get some clarity. And I thought, you know, there was another one. I was lightbulb. I said, aha, you know, this actually is proving to be useful for people. But, you know, it's interesting. It gets them out of their self. It objectifies their problem and they can work through it with much greater clarity. So that's when I started to design these, these, these courses and these, this, you know, method of Coaching, I suppose you could call it, to sort of see problems and to see issues and opportunities through the objects like that, that just get back to core essentials, really. And about your point about the mosaic is well made because there's a little corner of that mosaic which is broken off and it's lost in antiquity. And it made me think, you know, you could run with the metaphor even farther and say, usually our terms of victory do tend to get broken, right? There's the, you very rarely totally complete entirely to perfection what you set out to do. And so, you know, life happens to our goals. Right?

Right.

However, if you substantially have achieved your terms of victory, you have substantially achieved what you set out to achieve without allowing yourself to be distracted unnecessarily and so on and so on, you consider yourself successful.

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So this journey, obviously for you, if we talk about terms of victory, right? You've been working one-on-one with individuals, one-to-small group. How do you get this idea of conversation and dialogue through object out into the world? And how do you get people thinking today? And where are you thinking taking this? Because I think it's a different approach certainly to leadership. How are you getting this idea out into the world?

It's a process, you know, it's a process of going from the small to the large. And the idea here is to give presentations, again, just a little 20-minute presentation to a large audience, you know, to a TED type seminar perhaps, or a keynote speech or something like that. And you're reaching 300 to 400 people. And what you're trying to, because the idea is so elegant, simple in its essence, you don't have to have the objects that I have. What you have to do is just think along those lines, keep it simple, you know, what we've just discussed. And people can start to bring, uh, one of the things I do in the workshops to tell people to create your own objects. Like think about what you are, what's, what's a known weakness in your style of leadership or people have pointed out to you and what object will symbolize a potential way forward.

Right.

So it could be anything. It doesn't have to be an ancient artifact. It could be anything to say, oh, this object will remind me. Not to be unnecessarily unduly stubborn, for example, because I'm, I know I'm prone to be ill, for instance, right? So I think that it works quite well if you could take one object, uh, stand on the stage, deliver the message and say, look, this is the example of how it works. And then for example, one object that you, for me, like using an object that's quite easy to understand is an essential part of it. So I have a Mycenaean sword, 12th century, no, actually it's 15th century BC sword. And I can talk about the sacrifice that Agamemnon made when he killed his daughter in order to sail to Troy. And the thing I talk about with that presentation is knowing ahead of time what you're willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals. Because he didn't want to sacrifice his daughter to be able to set sail from Aulis, right? But he had to. Odysseus basically talked him into it, right? So I go through the story. But then what was the result of that, Bill? He was successful. He sacrificed his daughter. He sacked Troy. And then his wife killed him when he comes home.

And yeah, Clytemnestra is not at all happy, right? About this, right?

So you think like, that's an ancient story. And so what were the ancients trying to communicate, right? So what we can take the essence of that story, and I would say to you, when you start your business, you're working in your department, be careful, know ahead of time what you're willing to sacrifice to achieve those goals. We just talked about certain victory, know ahead of time what you're willing to sacrifice and whether it's worth it for you. Because all too often—

Yeah, to make sure that all of your stakeholders are aboard in that conversation.

Exactly. Exactly. Now you see what you're doing right now, but you're engaging with it and looking at something—

Oh, absolutely.

—at this moment. And you think, oh, look, that's just get all my stakeholders on board. And I say, oh, that's for you. And immediately—

Well, and for that point, we're touching across a story that has been told millennia quite loudly, right? Yeah. And whether or not you have encountered it, your reading, your education, et cetera, it's one that can be shared. And there's a little bit of a shadow of Joseph Campbell and the ability to plug into those stories that resonate with us for different reasons. So one of the things that I love about this sort of object-oriented approach is that you could take that sculpture of a horse and you could talk to young teenagers who were having their first taste of peer leadership, captain of a sports team or something like that in school, all the way to senior leaders who have been leading large organizations for decades, And the same object can speak to each of them and it can evolve with meaning over a career. And I think there are very few things that have that level of elegance and relevance at the same time.

And it stays with us because these are shared human stories. For example, we talk about Ukraine a lot, right? So people are now geared to Here's things about Ukraine. Well, I have some many years ago, a traditional Ukrainian mace. So it's a spiked ball with a handle and it's a symbol of authority in Ukraine. It comes ultimately from Cossacks and so on. So Cossack, the word Cossack is Turkic and it means free. And so the word Kazakhstan is the land of free, literally. And so these were merry bands of robbers, some tough guys living in a tough neighborhood, right? But here's an interesting thing, Bill, about their way of appointing leaders. These were people who had a flow of authority. So it wasn't a chaotic organization, right? They had a power structure and so on. Mm-hmm. But they elected their leader from within their own rank, right? And when they appointed him, this is the interesting thing, they had a ceremony. They stood the person that they appointed Hetman, the leader, in a place, and then his peers surrounded him, and his peers then pelted him with rotten fruit and vegetables and insulted him for 10 minutes, right? Then they bestowed on him the symbol of authority. And to me, I look at that and say, what were they trying to do with that? And you think, well, it's pretty clear. It's like, you are not bringing power to your position, right? Your position is, is you're, you're serving through your position. You're serving the position. Position isn't giving you power. You didn't bring in something inherent to this. Your position is what gives you power. And so when the Cossacks did this, they were basically making the point, don't let it go to your head. It's not you, it's the position, right? And I think that's a lesson that has to be learned time and time again, especially in today's world where, you know, we have too many senior people taking advantage of their perks and their privileges and so on and forgetting that they are serving the position. Position is not serving them, right?

Well, and I hear echoes in that the theory of the king's two bodies, right? Right. Yeah, exactly. Where there is the physical body and then the political body. And it's interesting how your example of, you know, pelting a leader with fruit and vegetables before taking on a role. Maybe it's not, you know, the HR-sanctioned promotion track, you know, welcome to the town hall, we're going to introduce our new CEO.

But yeah, exactly, exactly. But what's interesting about the story is once you encode that story, once you learn the story and you say, okay, I can buy myself a cheap copy of a Ukrainian mace, put it on your desk. And the thing is, you will now remember that, that it's not you. Like, remember Caesar, thou art mortal, right? Right, right. You will remember that, that it has meaning for you. And somebody could come in and take away the mace. And then who are you? Right? So if you're not serving the people through your leadership, you're not a servant of the people through your leadership, that mace will, and was in the past, taken away. And I think that's a timely reminder for people to get their priorities straight in terms of why do they, why are you, again, in terms of victory, why are you in this leadership position? If it's just the money and the perks, well, you know what I mean?

This too shall pass. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Sean, if I remember correctly, you've got a book in the works. Yes.

I'm just in the process of editing it now. So I'm basically giving like a kind of vade mecum approach, you know, so little chapters of varying length, I suppose.

So is this in some ways around the world with objects and a view of leadership through object?

Yes, exactly, exactly. It's showing people the merits and the opportunities that this approach has. So I start off essentially laying the groundwork and giving examples of how and why leadership has to start with a sense of ethics and morality. And if you don't have a sense of ethics and morality, then your leadership is probably going to fail. And then once you have established that foundation, then we move on to certain techniques like the horse and the whistle and the sword that I just was talking about now. The things that you might pick out of that and choose to remember or, you know, get objects yourself that tell those stories. Yeah, and then carry it with you, as you correctly said, the next 30 years of your career.

You know, it'll always— Exactly, and it could be something that you hand off to a protégé. Or, you know, winds up having a generational piece as well, right? Right.

Speaking of generational pieces, I was just talking about a stone that a Roman woman called Julia— no, Claudia, pardon me. Claudia. We know nothing about this woman apart from the fact that she had this name, and it was written in stone just what she had done. So she was a joy to speak to. She made wool and, you know, nothing shocking to us, but that's what she wanted to be remembered as. And so I thought, you know, here's a recent idea I had come up with was to say to leaders, write down privately at first what you would like your professional epitaph to be. What do you want people to remember about you as a professional, right? So probably you're not going to write down he increased sales by 4% in the third quarter of 2022, right? It's going to be something inspirational, something that you can teach the ages. And I said, now here's the trick. Pay $100 or whatever it is to have a professional calligrapher write that on a piece of parchment, right? And then hang it over your door of your office. And even if you're really daring, try this as a thought experiment, hanging it outside in the corridor over your office door from the outside. So now the whole world can see what it is that you value in your own leadership, right? It's not a hidden secret thing. It is there. And now you will be tempted to live up to it, not because it's a corporate motto or something in the corporate handbook. It's you. Talking to yourself, like, this is what I want my leadership to be remembered as. And if I'm not living up to it, I want like people to come in the door and say, listen, what are you doing?

That's the idea. And that's powerful in a different way because you're holding yourself to your own words, right? Right. And I like that idea of creating your own artifact, right?

And also Billy could live. We know everything we know about the past comes from the fact that objects or writings have survived. So there's no reason this object that you create now won't still be here 300 years from now. Maybe that's the only thing about your life that survives, you know, found in some dusty cupboard 300 years from now and it becomes the subject of somebody's PhD and they're trying to figure out what this person thought and that, you know, but why not?

I mean, that's, that's— What was life in the 21st century like?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

What was this object here? Yeah. Yeah.

And that's what happened with this woman, Claudia. We wouldn't know anything about her at all if it wasn't for the chance survival of that stone, you know, with that inscription on it. So why shouldn't it happen to you?

So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask a meta question for you. So there are a number of people who listen to this podcast who practice thought leadership. Okay. Often through writing, through speaking, et cetera. What advice would you give them if they were thinking about incorporating an object into their work? Where do they start with that process of interpretation, storytelling, recognizing they don't have the training you do, but what's a step or two that they could take?

You know, it's a skill that you develop just by practicing it. So I'll say take an object, right? Here's a thing we do in the museum, right? Because I mean, the collections you have in museums are by definition random. It's just random with survivability. So what I'd like you to do, or to any of your practitioners who are listening, is just take 4 absolutely unconnected objects. So an empty bottle of pills, a computer, a chair, and a pillow, for example. And I want you to use those objects. I want you to tell me a story about what life was like in the early 2000s. Right? And you're going to have to tell that story to people that you're not in trouble. So you're going to have to arrange these objects in a way that makes the story clear and consistent. Now what you're training yourself to do with that exercise is to think about what connects objects to each other and what connects objects to the people who are looking at them. What are the common denominators to start with? And once you develop that technique, you can now take any 4 objects, you just walk down the street and look at 4 random, first 4 things you see when you walk out the door, spend your commute making a museum exhibition. So, and then change the theme. What do we know about life in this era? What do we know about, you know, what would somebody in the future make of it? What does it mean about morality? Like, choose a theme every day, choose a different theme and choose the first 4 objects you see and you'll become good at it pretty quickly.

That's a great piece of advice, Sean. And a powerful way to start thinking about the curation of not only objects, but ideas. How do these intersect? How do I present them to an audience that may or may not have the same knowledge, cultural background, experiences, and perspective that I have? So how do I make this accessible? What can I assume and what do I have to make explicit?

Yeah. And I think the idea is first start with what unites us as humans across centuries, across cultures, across languages and so on. The Iphigenia story that we were talking about is still being told today, not because we're Mycenaean Greeks, no, because the story has fundamental things, elements that we all can relate to. What is the nature of sacrifice? The horror of sacrifice. When is it too much? So you, at what point does sacrifice sacrificing become so much that even though you've earned your success, you've achieved your goal, it's not worth having done it. So that's a human story. So I'm telling it through a Mycenaean sword, right? You could tell the same story through any number of things. And that's what I mean, like practices. How can you tell the same story using a glass, an empty vodka glass? I'm sure you could make your story about this. You probably could. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the point.

So Sean, I want to thank you for joining us today. This has been a fantastic exploration into the intersection of ideas and objects, and I really appreciate you taking time for this conversation.

My absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me though. I appreciate it and enjoy the talk very much. Okay.

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