Creating a School Culture Where Everyone Thrives - A Conversation with Michael Eatman and Joshua Freedman

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

For, for me, for 6 Seconds, social-emotional learning isn't a program, it isn't a curriculum. Yeah, it's not a box to check. It's a question of what is the context that's going to support great learning.

Hi everybody. Thanks for tuning in again to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week is a fantastic conversation I had with Joshua Friedman and Michael Eatman from the Six Seconds Network. Joshua is a leading expert on applying emotional intelligence to optimize performance. He's the CEO of Six Seconds, which is the world's most extensive EQ organization, now with offices and representatives in 25 countries. Josh works with leaders and teams around the world, helping them to use emotional intelligence to get better results. His clients include FedEx, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, all branches of the US Armed Forces, and the United Nations. Josh is the best-selling author of At the Heart of Leadership, as well as Inside Change, the Handle with Care EQ Activity Series, the SEI EQ Leadership Assessment, Organizational Vital Signs, and the co-author of The Vital Organization. Michael is an experienced inclusion strategist educator, and coach. He's the founder of Culture Seven Coaching, in which he blends expertise on emotional intelligence and equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging to build leadership capacity and organizational culture for diverse and inclusive workplaces. Previously, Michael was the Director of Community Life at the Pike School, the Director of Diversity and Community Life at University School of Nashville, and Director of Intercultural Programs at Spring Arbor University. Michael is a Certified Diversity Professional for Organizational Leadership an advanced certified personal and executive coach from the College of Executive Coaching.

It's an absolute pleasure to have you both with me, Michael and Joshua. Thank you so much. Welcome.

Thank you, Tim.

So I'm really excited to learn a bit more myself and just be able to share with the listeners of the Future Learning Design Podcast about 6 Seconds, um, the Oasis network conference coming up in October. So that's one of the reasons we wanted to share some things today, and so that we can, we can help to publicise that great event as well, which is coming up. So I'd love to start firstly just to understand a bit more about the origins of Six Seconds, because clearly, I mean, social emotional learning, more and more people are talking about it now, But this is not, you know, it's not your first rodeo, let's say. You've been, it seems from my research, you've been doing this for, you know, getting on for, well, more than half a century, perhaps. So if perhaps Josh could start with you just to give us a bit of background about Six Seconds and the work related to Nueva School and self-science. There's so much there, but if you just maybe some kind of a Potted history would be a brilliant place to start.

Well, if we go back to the year I was born, uh, Karen McCown was interested in starting a school, and she wasn't really quite sure what to do, and she was interviewing different people to get ideas. She managed to get a group of Nobel Prize winners together and to ask them, well, if you were going to design a school, what would it— what would you do? And one of the themes that came out was Luis Alvarez, who is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said, I would have studied math if I was on a desert island. I loved math. I was passionate about math. And all my life, people have nurtured my passion for math, but I never really learned about myself. And I think if I did, I would have been a better mathematician and a better human being., and this group of Nobel Prize winners strongly endorsed this sentiment, which led Karen to start a school where academic development and emotional development would be woven together. Now, at the time, there was this concept called confluent education— flowing together, the confluence of the affective domain and the cognitive domain— and the idea that if these two things flowed together, something would happen. And now we know what happens is hot cognition and neural activation and deeper levels of learning. We know that by looking at how the brain actually learns. Then they didn't quite know that, but based on that intuition, uh, they started this school and they decided to create a program called Self-Science, which was to be a scientist about yourself. And in 1978, Self-Science was first published In 1992, I started teaching at Nueva, which is the name of the school, and Daniel Goleman came and visited the school that year, and he told us, oh, what you're doing here is emotional intelligence. And we said, well, that's cool, we didn't know that. And he shared a little bit about work that was happening around the world, uh, people like Peter Salovey who were understanding really the neurological basis of emotion as a functional tool, that emotion wasn't something random or in the way, but emotions helped us think and learn and grow.

Yeah.

And from that, um, it led us in— in Goldman's book came out in '95. He wrote a chapter about schooling the emotions and talked about the self-science methodology as one of the two models for how you really develop these skills. And in '97, we decided to start Six Seconds. To teach people this methodology of how do you actually use and grow emotional intelligence. And now we have people in 200 countries, and we have 9 psychometric assessments. We have amazing partners like Michael all over the world who are applying this methodology in different spaces.

Fantastic.

That's the background.

That's impressive. I mean, yeah, as I say, a lot of more people are talking about it now, and it's just so— I love when I find out that there's this incredible work that's been going on for so long. And of for you guys, of course, you've developed a huge wealth of experience and understanding of what kind of conditions bring this about and allow and enable growth for young people and everyone, I guess, in terms of social and emotional learning. So perhaps maybe Michael, could I come over to you in terms of what are the conditions that bring, you know, that social and emotional competence development about? And then maybe if you can speak a little bit about the self-science content or, you know, what does that course look like for people to get there? It's around.

Tim Logan, thank you for inviting me to do that, and it's always fun to be on a call with Josh. So I've been in education, I was calculating it now, and so it's been 29 years. And so I look very youthful, and yet I've been in this, this work for 29 years. And so when you think about even the language that of education, so I relearned this idea of let's play together. Do my work with 6 seconds. And so just this idea that I can be learning and it be playful, even if it's difficult. And so when we think about the conditions that develop social and emotional competencies, I would say from my own perspective as an educator and also diversity strategist, that pressure and roadblocks have created the opportunity to do, to do this because my exposure to emotional intelligence came out of a diversity certification course that I was taking back in 2007 or '08. And I saw this EQ thing. I said, you know, I need to get done with the course. So, you know, Be Smarter with Feelings, or, you know, using your thinking and feeling. However, a few years later, when I bumped into some pressure points in my education work with an organization, I began to go, how do I— I have all of these emotions in me. How do I actually get them out? And so that's when I began to, this concept of this, the growth mindset, begin to seek out other opportunities to think about who else is doing work that would help me to find my voice as a diversity practitioner. So when we think again about the conditions that develop social and emotional competencies, for me, it was challenge, challenging situations that opened that up.

And so how do you then in like in Nueva School, for example, or in other contexts, what does that mean for young people in in a setting.

Well, Tim, you said all people, and I think that's, uh, quite important. There are a lot of programs now for social-emotional learning, and people are selling, you know, curriculum, and that's a very big market. And so I think that what happens with so many areas, so many disciplines, is it becomes productized For, for me, for 6 Seconds, social-emotional learning isn't a program. It isn't a curriculum. Yeah, it's not a box to check. It's a question of what is the context that's going to support great learning? What is the context where people can actually dig in and thrive? And so now we start to get to the connection with DEI. If people don't feel that their whole selves is welcome in this space, if people can't actually hear one another and see one another, they're not going to be doing great learning. Yeah, they're going to be guarded, they're going to be holding back, they're not going to take the risk to ask the harder questions, they're not going to be open to the new possibilities. So if we just think about kind of stepping back from kind of a specific process or methodology and we say, well, overall, what is an environment where people can really flourish? And, and I think that, um, you— Michael didn't say this, uh, but what I heard in what Michael said is he was looking for his voice. He was looking for a place where he could stand up and speak and share and feel connected and, and value himself and feel valued and to support a school environment where everyone in the school, whatever they look like, whatever they sound like, however tall they are, however old they are, how, you know, whatever orientation they have, that they could, they could have that experience. And just imagine a school where everybody who comes in walks in the door and says, yeah, this, this is my place. I'm here. I belong here.

Yeah.

Josh, Josh, just before you jump in, Josh, you're so right. And what's been powerful about the EQ work for me is that as a diversity practitioner, you learn when you see a barrier to either you break it down or you don't do anything. And so one of the opportunities that emotional intelligence has brought me in my I work as an educator. It allowed me to go to be in touch with my feelings and to know that my feelings weren't just about feeling touchy stuff, which is really important. I think it was really about data about myself that would guide me to say, well, if I'm feeling this as a Black man or as a woman, or as someone who's a part of the LGBT community, or as someone that's conservative or someone that's liberal, you know, what options do I have? And so it really opens up a pathway And the end goal is to say, well, what am I going to commit to? And so I so appreciate how the two have worked together because it, Tim, it helps to create an environment where we're doing, Josh and others in 6 Seconds talk about EQ for yourself, EQ for relationships, and EQ for leadership. So it's been a powerful dynamic.

Amazing. Yeah, Josh, about the kind of productization and the packaging up these things as kind of initiatives in education. And actually, what you— what I'm hearing from both of you is just a really, an incredible and a kind of open, rich, kind of relational environment which people create, right? I mean, it's not about exactly a curriculum, as you say, or some kind of intervention. It's about an environment that is created fundamentally by the human beings relating in that environment, right?

And that's rooted in understanding education as a relational process.

Yeah.

Yeah, as opposed to a transactional process. Tim, I'm just curious, in terms of your own experience as an educator, um, did you ever have a time and place where you were actively learning and practicing and being taught about your own emotions?

That's a good question. No, I've— I mean, I have developed developed to that kind of curricular environment for young people, but myself, no, never.

And so if you think about— come, just contrast that with your mathematics education.

Yeah.

And you think about all of that very intentional, deliberate training and practice and breaking down these big, beautiful concepts of mathematics into these really small incremental steps that you could learn.

Absolutely.

And then you can do that with others. I think it's awfully hard to teach things we have never learned ourselves.

Yeah. There is a part of it, which is about bringing this tacit stuff, which is relational, but yet out into the explicit and actually giving it a name and giving it some conceptual language so that we can actually talk about it and then instruct to pass it on to some extent, obviously. You've got to learn it by doing it, right? But also, as you say, it sounds like you've got to be able to name it and talk about it as well. Is that right?

Yeah.

So you said, and there's an explicit part which is about the curriculum, the lesson plan, the measurement tools, the vocabulary that we use, and there's the implicit part about the way we interact and the way— what we role model. Um, I don't remember who said this quote. It was something like 'Your behavior is so loud I can't hear what you're saying.' That the idea is there that like— Annabelle Jensen, the president of Six Seconds, say that kids will learn 30% of what you say and 70% of what you do.

Yeah, yeah.

And I, I think as educators, if we We get really caught up in the idea that, well, what I'm teaching is how to multiply fractions when what I'm really teaching is how to engage with a challenge and how to communicate and how to be a human being.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's that idea that the young people with us in the room, they're always learning. They just may not be learning the thing we think we want them to be learning, right?

Yes.

And actually, some of what they're learning isn't necessarily positive from our role modeling, right?

Unfortunately, that is often the case.

In many cases, yeah. What do you see as some of the areas that educators personally need to do in order to get to that point? And so where are there some challenges around that professional capacity and professional development work that obviously you're heavily engaged in? But where do you see the particular needs there?

Michael, you want to share a little bit about what we see with our school principals that we teach?

Yeah, absolutely. And so in a larger sense, so we do some work with Teachers College, their Principals Academy, and my mind is really going to some, some leaders that I'm working with right now who are principals. They have a lot of the long-term goals, yet the emotions that are embedded in them, we haven't created environments to share them. And so the idea of head head, heart, and hands is really important. And I think about some of the exercises that I do with folks in the very beginning. I might say, what's an emotion that you have difficulty with expressing as we talk about the difficulties in society today? So what's an emotion? Because we're having challenges in society and there's an emotion. So many people go to the challenge and we don't talk about the emotion. And so we're finding with the educators that we work with, is that there hasn't been an opening to share their feelings and that the feelings are data. And I know that's true because that's really how I came to the work and what Josh and I and Dr. Lilia Martinez have been doing with Teachers College is creating an environment where we're doing head, we need to do content. And at the same time, what's the underlying emotion that is there and how do we use those two, the head and the heart to create new opportunities and new perspectives. So it's a very powerful experience.

And Tim, I just want to add here that there is an important piece coming back to equity and emotions, and that is, I think we're all disconnected from our— well, most of us are disconnected from our emotions. Um, most of us have a hard time really articulating and expressing what we're feeling, and people who are in groups that have been marginalized just like they have less, uh, you know, resources, less space, um, less money, whatever kind of resources, there's also often less space for their feelings. And so as a white man growing up in California, speaking English, you know, reasonably educated, there's a pretty good amount of space I, I found it really hard to, to connect with my feelings and express my feelings, but there's a pretty good amount of space that I have available to me.

Yeah.

Um, somebody who's coming from a culture group where their voice is pushed down systemically, uh, frequently, persistently, they're told to be— there's no time for you, there's no time for your feelings. You don't matter, it just becomes exponentially more difficult to have that, that internal connection with self and that ability to, to, to actually share what's going on.

Josh, I would add to that. So it's so interesting, it's so wonderful to be in community because as a, as a Black man growing up in society, um, fairly, uh, well-to-do, my parents really worked hard and we had some opportunities for sure, In my work, I'm thinking about how do we hold space for people of color or non-white folks and white people, because I believe that we are intimately connected. And if you, if I, if there's no space for me to communicate, and as a person who identifies as white, you don't realize that you're not allowing yourself to release what's in you, I can't get space and neither can you. And so then we talk about this idea of compassionate engagement. How can I recognize that historically there've been some, um, just outright horrific things happening to people of African heritage and other, and other ethnic groups. And, uh, if we only center on that and don't say what's happening with, um, our white community members inside of each of us is something that's, there's something that's locked. And the reason why I love Six Seconds Process so much is they talk about how do we unlock it, not unlock Blackness or whiteness. How do we unlock that human potential. And as we do that, it really opens up what I would say the human spirit for us to begin to see each other more and what we need.

Amazing. Yeah, that's, that's so great because I think as you were saying about earlier about roadblocks and, and challenges, you know, just, just being able to commune and communicate with other people, you know, you have to be able to feel free to maybe sometimes get it wrong and say the wrong thing or, you know, not quite Sometimes I think a lot of this work puts people somewhat on edge, so they don't want to say the wrong thing, so they say nothing. But actually, we're never going to communicate if we do that. Again, it's about creating that space where people feel free to be able to do that to some extent.

I'm sure you've heard the term psychological safety. Yeah, trust, um, being able to trust ourselves, being able to trust each other. Michael and I were talking yesterday about how for a lot of folks it's really hard to have a conversation about what kind of ice cream you like without getting, you know, all heated and like, they're not listening to me. And like, we just— we can't talk about anything.

Yeah, you know what?

So then trying to talk about something really complicated Yeah, like inequity and my own role and complicity in that, and how I'm using my power. And am I, am I using my power to liberate myself and one another, or am I using my power to hold myself aside or put myself above or below? Like, that's a tough conversation if we can't even talk about, you know, which chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream we like better.

That's true. No, absolutely. Unless, Michael, you had anything else you wanted to add on there, I'd love to— if we can move the conversation slightly on.

Yeah, quickly, I'll just say that when we think about equity, we're not only talking about racial perspectives. I was thinking about how, again, EQ has been so helpful in giving me greater ability to communicate. I remember in the aftermath of the 2016 election, I had to work with a group of families and it was a parent day and I was asked to talk with a group of families. And so I said, oh my gosh, there's a segment of the country that was excited for the person who was elected. And there was a segment that was devastated for the person who wasn't elected. And so I'm standing in the room going, oh my goodness, where's Josh Friedman now?

Like, where's my friend now?

And what I ended up doing—

I was hiding under the bed.

And Tim, I got to tell you what I said was, I want you to go to someone in the room who's not, who you didn't come with. And I'd like you to share an emotion that you're having as you think about the recent election. And they did that for a couple of minutes. Then I said to them, now we'd like you to think about what are some options that you have with the feelings that you're having? You could get really angry and break things up, or you could try to have a further understanding. Did that for another 5 minutes. And then I said, well, what can we do now? And they had an opportunity to do that with a partner. So the emotional, the emotions of that moment, it didn't solve it all. But Tim Logan, you know, it took a room of people who were very concerned about having a conversation about politics. And at the end, there were people who had completely different perspectives around political perspectives. Who could hear each other just a little more. Amazing. And so the power of thinking, feeling, and acting, I gotta tell you, is— it has been a life changer in the work that I do with people around development.

Amazing. Yeah, that's brilliant. I like that phrase that I saw on your website, the heart work of equity. I mean, it is— that's exactly what you're, you're saying. It's really a beautiful thing. It's amazing. In relation to education, there's a lot of talk about assessment and grading and understanding, you know, quantitative, qualitative measures of different things. And I think sometimes that's what keeps us where we are educationally, is need to measure things. And I've noticed, and you've already mentioned that there are some of the work that you've done has been to develop measurements of of EQ and work around that, thinking about how in order to identify growth in emotional intelligence. So I'd love, I mean, I'd love to invite you as well to talk about that, both of you, but also one of the sessions you're running at the conference is thinking about measuring and norming inclusion. So this inclusive dimension as well. So perhaps Josh, maybe if we could come to you just to talk a little bit about that work, and then perhaps we'll go over to Michael for a follow-on.

I'm not sure this is the way the world should be or education should be. I think the reality is you get what you measure.

Yeah.

And if we have measures of relatively superficial, relatively transactional learning, um, you know, basic facts memorizing, you know, which term goes with which term. That's what we get in education. We get people who don't really think. We— there have been unfortunately quite a few studies that show that standardized tests that are used in most countries are anti-correlated with thinking and learning. They're more correlated with compliance and memorization. And to me, that's not what learning is about.

Mm-hmm.

So I was really resistant at first to get into this space of creating assessment tools, because I remember when I was a teacher, uh, students coming up to me saying, oh, can I have half a point more on this question because then I'll get an A? It's like, wow, that's not what I really want to be focused on. We've worked to develop measures, and I think I mentioned we now publish 9 different psychometric tools and for children and adults and teams and organizations in business and education. And what I found is that when you can put it in a graph and you can talk about it, it becomes real for people, and we can focus on it and say, all right, here's this concept that's important to us. We can measure it, and now we can really have a vocabulary for talking about it, and we can develop it and engage in it. And I think that the notion of formative assessment, the notion of assessment being a tool to guide instruction more than a tool to determine, you know, you are this or you are that, but really looking from a growth orientation to say, How are we doing as an institution? What can we measure about our outcomes? Yeah, how are the individuals here doing in terms of their growth in these different areas? And how can we support them to keep growing and, and using their strengths as well as the developing areas of weakness? And so it's not— it's, it's— there's two parts of this. One is how do we measure, and another part of it is how do we use the measure.

Yeah.

And for me, diagnosis is not super interesting, um, kind of saying you are this or you are that, or you can go left or you can go right, or you can fit in this box. That, that I don't think serves us that well. But I think being able to take these very abstract, complex ideas like how do we really tune into our own and others' emotions, and how do we use that in our decision-making? Like, that's hard stuff to grapple with. And if we can put it in a graph and we can define competencies around it, and we can then see whether our programs are advancing our learners along that path, I think that is a very useful guide to us as, as educators and as learners.

Yeah, but not an easy thing to do, right? As you say, like, these are complex constructs of different, you know, different skills, different competencies within the same thing, and you're trying to somehow boil them, distill them down into some, some essences in order to then measure. Um, that's, yeah, not a straightforward thing to do.

We've worked on this now, um, for quite a few years and spent a ridiculous amount of money on developing these psychometric tools. And what we've found now— we just are releasing the 2021 State of the Heart report. It's the world's largest study on emotional intelligence, spans 129 countries, and looking at different sectors, different generations, genders, you know, all kinds of different ways of understanding this data. Um, we I can say with tremendous amount of confidence that we have meaningful measures of emotional intelligence that are framed in a way that support people to grow and develop.

Michael, can I perhaps come over to you? Is there, as you said something earlier which I really appreciated about emotion being— emotions being data, but then, which is great. And so we're using that, but then also we're using this other data that we're developing to measure and norm this. In the conference title, you're talking about measuring and norming for an inclusive environment. Perhaps could you say a little bit more about the use of that data to then, yeah, achieve those outcomes.

Sure.

And a lot of it has been hinged— a lot of my work has been hinged on my diversity practice and with really enlightenment around emotional intelligence, because you— with the competencies, you— what I've been able to do is to look at a cultural competence framework of what awareness, attitude, knowledge, skills, and practices And actually Josh and I teach a course called, uh, SEE: Coaching Equity Essentials. And we've taken the cultural competence work that I do and, um, interwoven it with the emotional intelligence framework, which really helps us to be thinking about my cultural perspective as well as the emotions that are wrapped in them. And so even as we were talking just a moment about the tools and measurement, one of the ideas that I could use, I could say, as like, how would— Tim, how would you say you identify ethnically? Thinking about your identity, so see yourself as a white man. What's an emotion that you have when having conversations about differences?

Empathy.

Okay, empathy. And so what— that's one thing that you need to be aware of. So what happens in conversations around difference, sometimes it gets It's in— it's, I'm gonna shame you, you know, that's what happens sometimes. People are shaming each other, as opposed to saying, I don't know if it's simple, just from your silence, it was, it was a moment. And I wasn't trying to catch you off guard at all. But I'm going, how do I see myself? And the way I identify, and Josh has really helped me with this, because we've, we've not only talked about one's ethnicity, but we talked about the ways that you walk through the world. What's an emotion that you have when you think about the ways that you walk through the world? Right there, we're using the emotional intelligence piece of awareness, and then we're also using the cultural competence piece of awareness. So it's personal data, which starts at, we talk a lot often about emotions, EQ for yourself, because sometimes let's say we're presidents of companies, we're leading the company when we haven't had any personal work. And so we go EQ for self. How do I identify myself? How do I feel about topics of diversity or gender or politics? That's the self. And then we go, well, that's awareness. Well, how do I— awareness and feeling. Oh my goodness, two men, you know, talking about their feelings and that being okay. We can have a personal measuring of that. And so the EQ framework has really helped me to say, uh, If I'm knowing myself, what do I need to be aware of? Is it a pattern that I, that I can't talk about who I am? And I just keep using that EQ framework. We don't have the time to do it. It's a conference style, but we're giving people opportunities to see themselves and not be shamed as much as we talked about calling. Instead of calling you out, Tim, I'm just calling you up.

Yeah.

And that's so when I use the EQ framework alongside of the, my diversity cultural competence work, I use those together. And so if we have the 8 competencies that come up embedded in that are cultural perspectives of identity, of politics, of religion, of economics. And so we use to, to end, I will say we use the cultural competence work through the competency development. And it, it's a very beautiful partnership and, and not easy either. It's quite challenging.

Coming back to this question about norming, um, I was talking to the head of a wonderful independent school that has for many years been conducting a survey where they ask students and faculty and parents about satisfaction. And they thought they had pretty high scores on a number of these measures, but they didn't really have a basis of comparison. And so then they were very surprised when they discovered that there were some pretty deep systemic issues around equity in terms of race, in terms of gender, uh, ways that their culture wasn't supporting people to feel trust. And it was shocking to them because they're like, well, we've been doing this anonymous survey and I know people have had a chance to tell us, but you know, is a 4 on a— if you're 5-point scale, is a 4 really good or not? If everybody, you know, if you take the same question, you ask 1,000 people, if everybody says a 5 then all of a sudden a 4 isn't so good. And so being able to have measures that have a robustness from norming where you can look and see how— what does this really mean compared to other populations, compared to a norm group, and, and where do we stand, whether we're talking about individual psychometric tools or school or organizational tools. Part of the process of of having a basis of comparison, being able to look at this data and say, okay, we have some insight about where we are. How does that compare to others? What is the path forward? And I think a lot of tools that are out there in the space of culture and in the space of social-emotional development, they don't have this important combination of psychometric rigor and practicality. And so I think, you know, if we kind of look at it again, the kind of implicit and explicit, you look at what Michael's talking about, these implicit skills, these internal skills of what do we need to have a conversation, what do we need to be aware of, how can we connect, and then making it explicit in a way that's, that's normed and validated, that, that gives you a framework that you can really talk about it and, and have some confidence that, you know, okay, a 4 is better than a 3 and we need to move up in this area. I think, I think those kind of frameworks kind of approach, you know, both the rational and the emotional side of our capacity to talk about the, the environments that we're building.

Yeah, no, that— I think that's so fascinating because I think there's a there's almost— we're talking about psychological safety, but there's almost the safety, as you said, people enjoy being able to see something in some kind of simplified form, visual form or whatever, but there's almost the safety as well that comes with that, an ability to then somehow externalize something, speak about it, and then be able to kind of go deeper in a way. It's kind of a scaffold somehow to go a bit deeper with stuff because you then have that support of the data, which takes some of the heat sometimes out of some of these quite hot conversations, right?

Yeah, and people can look at this graph and go, okay, I feel heard.

Yeah.

We're literally on the same page. And that's challenging, but if we can get that sense of same-pageness, we can then move forward in a lot of areas.

Yeah, brilliant, fantastic, thank you so much. And then just lastly, just to wrap up, we, as the conference comes in, in a couple of weeks' time, one of the things you're looking at there is the life cycle of culture change. And I think one, there's a huge shift in a lot of what we've been talking about over the last And I'm just in terms of the amount of work, personal work, that needs to be done, but then also institutional and organizational work. And so what is it there that, um, just a couple of things just to finish on, perhaps as a little teaser for your keynote there at the conference, but what's the, yeah, what, what's that culture change piece and how do we How do we need to attack?

We wrote this article that's called, you know, What's Important in DEI, and more and more I'm using the article as I'm talking to leaders. And I simply say, many of us have the long-term, here's what we want to get accomplished and here's the actions. And I think too often we stop there. That's just one act. That's just a vertical axis. The horizontal is so important because we actually have the long-term vision and the actions have to go through people. And so the people into community is really important. So I think that it's important to realize that great work happens in leadership and it happens through people. And that framework that we have that looks at the four quadrants really talks to that. And then Josh will, he'll quantify it as we get ready. Nice.

Brilliant.

What does it take for a group of people to have the conversations that they need to have? What does it take to build that safety? So we can measure trust, and we do. What do the— what are the skills and awareness and the commitments, as Michael said? What, what, what do people need to bring to the table and develop inside themselves and collectively to actually increase that trust. And then, and whether we're talking about, you know, what we should be serving in the cafeteria, or whether we're talking about equity, or whether we're talking about, you know, other parts of school life, that we could actually have the conversation. So when we think about culture change in school, what we've seen is that very frequently there'll be a plan, and sometimes there's even metrics, although often they're not metrics, and there'll be actions that are being taken, but the human capacity, the relational capacity, the strengths that we need to develop internally and together in our relationships are often missing. And I just, speaking for myself, I was afraid to talk about race. I was okay talking about gender, but it was a little bit hard. I didn't really, I didn't, I didn't really want to engage in topics where I didn't know if I was going to say the right thing or how I was going to come across. And that means there's some things that I needed to learn, and some of that learning has been in this explicit domain, you know, and just learning about some of the history of racism, learning about some of the way that power structures work. But a lot of it is internal and it's emotional, and systems of oppression oppress all of us. Systems of oppression disconnect all of us from one another and from ourselves. So for me, in order to engage in conversations about equity, I needed to do some of that internal work. And I would say that we can extend this to all kinds of conversations, and we can— we can— like, how do we have a conversation about curriculum? How do we have a conversation about our budget? Like there are all of these kind of unconscious things that are holding us back from having the conversation that we need to have and coming together into alignment. And, and what happens so often in schools and other organizations is we say, we need a plan, we need to move forward, let's go, but we haven't done the work individually and collectively to be— to put ourselves into the condition where we can actually have that conversation.. And so that capacity building is the work that I see that's missing. And if we don't do it, if we don't kind of take a step back and slow down, we're going to be keep hitting that wall over and over and over. And I think unfortunately that's what a lot of schools are facing.

Yeah, that's fascinating. It strikes me the parallel between what you said at the beginning about the transactional the kind of curriculum or initiative of social-emotional learning. We like to be busy. We like to do busy work and just keep going and keep doing these, making these transactions. But actually, as you said, Michael, it gets messy and complex when you involve the humans. But that's where the real, the real good stuff is. If we, if we do take the time to develop the capacity. Thank you, Tim Logan. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Josh. Absolute pleasure. To have you both talking about this, and it's phenomenal work that 6 Seconds is doing as an organization. I look forward to reading that report. It sounds amazing, amazing achievements, but also a lot of work still to do. So I really appreciate you coming on and talking about it, and yeah, thank you so much for your time. Thank you too.

Thanks, bye-bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode episode, please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website, intrepidednews.com.