Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

The Leadership 2050 book is available in paperback on Amazon at https://amzn.to/4gkuOHk. Susan, Mike, and host Maureen all contributed to it.

To learn more about Susan’s coaching and consulting work, dive into Vollett Executive Coaching’s website at https://vollett.com.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. The Kindle version is available at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Susan Cannon, PhD, is a professor at Fielding Graduate University, and on faculty with the Conscious Business Coalition. She’s a partner with Vollett Executive Coaching, as well. As an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner, Dr. Cannon brings 30+ years to innovation, learning, and change in human systems. Her work brings recognition as a pioneer in women’s integral leadership development, founding Kore Evolution. Work history includes engineering/senior executive positions, and patents. B.S. Engineering Physics, Texas Tech University; M.S. Chemical Engineering, Purdue University; Ph.D. Integral Studies, California Institute of Integral Studies.

Michael Morrow-Fox, MBA, EdS, has over 20 years of experience in leading technology and human resources operations. Michael has served as full-time university faculty at Capital University winning a Department of Education FIPSE Grant and George Mason Program Excellence Award, as the Director of Technology Strategy for the OhioHealth Hospitals, as the Vice President of Operations for a technology start-up serving American Express, as the Vice President of Talent Management Training and Development for the American Heart Association, and the Manager of Organizational Education for the City of Greensboro, North Carolina. Michael has held Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification since 2002, has worked on Six Sigma Black Belt initiatives since 1999 and has been a Six Sigma Green Belt since 2006. His Bachelor’s degree focused on Industrial Psychology and Employee Counseling, his MBA focus was on Organizational Leadership, his Educational Specialist Degree is in Educational Leadership, and Michael holds a Doctorate in Educational Leadership.

Transcript
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Unknown Speaker 0:07
Today we’re going to be talking about leadership 2050 and our guests are Susan cannon, renowned futurist and leader, and Mike Morrow Fox, experienced executive and consultant. Why do we care about leadership 2050 that seems like a long way away, and for some of our listeners, they’re going to be retired by then. 2050 seems like a long way off, but really it isn’t, especially if you have a role in an organization that you want to be thriving. So back in 1984 William Gibson, who’s the author of newly prophetic sci fi novel Neuromancer, said something that I find really true. You said the future is already here. It’s not very evenly distributed, so we’re already being impacted by 2050 it’s all around us in pockets. It’s just going to be a while before most people catch on. When we were doing the research for leadership 2050 I looked at five recent global studies on organizational leadership needs for the future, and they all generally concluded that our leaders just don’t have the higher order skills and capacities that we need to meet the complexity of today’s challenges, not to mention what’s going to happen in the future. For example, we’re going to have to be able to manage and build partnerships across cultural and geographic boundaries, to turn on a dime, to make decisions about hardly any data connect deeply on a human level, even a spiritual level, to inspire followers, read the subtleties between the lines and in the room, tame our egos while holding and sharing power, and be able to play basically on this three dimensional chessboard that’s 20 years out, and continue to be a constant fund for learning and innovation. So if our organizations are going to continue to be relevant and even survive, you know, we’ve got to be cultivating leaders now that have 2050, capacity. Where do we start? Well, the good news is that through the study of how humans and cultures evolve over time, we know already there’s a small but increasing percentage of the population who already have the mindset and capacities with the complexity and the nuance that we’re going to need for 2050 they’re offering a kind of a Blueprint we want to encourage, and we’ll come back to that a little bit later. But what I’d like to do is give you a feeling for how different 2050 can be by looking at the change over the previous 30 years. So in 1984 Gibson coined the term cyberspace and describe what it was like to live on what seemed like a fantasy reality back back then, when very few people had access to computers, especially personal computers. Yet here we are, 30 years later. We’re spending so much of our lives and work immersed in cyberspace and in billion dollar post modern information age companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, we can just name a whole rash of them, have gained economic dominance over the modern industrial age behemoths. And remember, 1984 was the year that Yan upstart Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh, how a form of cyberspace actually existed back then. The Cold War, the Soviet Union was coming to a climax, and I was working as an engineer in advanced weapons systems, so I was living that part of reality because of darkness. On the other hand, my father in law at the time was CEO of mobile oil Europe, and he was a sophisticated, powerful leader who I very much admired, but he clearly couldn’t imagine a 24/7 world of constant connection and disruption. Nor was he anticipating a world where global climate change would be a transformative political topic, or where asymmetrical warfare in a multi polar world is going to allow entities like ice to be controlling oil fields. His linearly planned command and control mindset and skill set, which was normal for a successful 20th century executive just really wouldn’t make it today. And I can tell you that the next 30 to 35 years is going to be even more dramatically different than the last four. I’ve been keeping my eye on inventor Ray Kurzweil for the past 20 years because he’s been incredibly accurate in his technology forecast. Now he’s director of engineering at Google. No small thing, and he predicts that a comparative rate for technological change in 2000 the baseline the 21st Century is going to experience 20,000 times more change than the 20th century. So that’s a lot to be adapting to, and I can barely wrap my head around that. And that’s just one sector technology.

Unknown Speaker 4:23
So what other kinds of change are we facing? Scan the current literature in the features and foresight studies. Look at professional scenarios, government sponsored research on global trends. It’s pretty sobering. Among the more likely trends include systemic trains drivers such as abrupt climate change and sudden global financial disruption. Those are two I consider the almost the biggest, also the possibility of unsustainable levels of production and consumption reading reaching a tipping point that will rapidly deteriorate the biosphere. One away, pandemics are a threat. We could even see more dramatic spread of oncoming.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Conflict, failing states, terrorism, potentially with mass weapons of mass destruction and catastrophic water sort that in other really large parts of the earth. Those are just a few of the probable drivers. Who knows what wild cards are out there? Any of these trends could be driving a host of secondary trends like mass working gene migrations, which we’re really seeing an upswing now collapse those urban population centers, because food and resource supply chains get disrupted. And we can go on and on. But former Vice President Al Gore, who’s clearly a prescient guy on top of things, recently wrote a well researched book called six drivers and global change, and he concluded, and I’m quoting here, there is no prior period of change that remotely resembles what of humanity is about to experience. And in the book Gore, talks about a vacuum of leadership, and he clearly supports the view that we need some radical new plan in leadership development. But the bottom line is, the fair is just overwhelming evidence that we’re already in a perfect storm of increasing complexity, accelerating change and pretty much near constant uncertainty that is exceeding the mental and emotional capacities of most leaders now, not to mention the future. How do we get business leaders to pay attention to this and do something beyond their normal work?

Unknown Speaker 6:20
The problem is that human nature to tune out what we don’t want to hear, especially if it conflicts with our beliefs about the world or it constructs our security. So back in the late 1990s I did a scenario study of the US in 2020 as my PhD dissertation. And 2020 think so far in the future back then, and you might remember those were the heady stock market days that Alan Greenspan described as irrational Uber and one of the key trends that emerged from my 2020 study with the strong possibility of a major global economic shock, some defining event that would have a really powerful impact on cultural values and our way of life to be a lot of change. And people really issue with that. They refuse to believe it could happen. But what I’d like to impress that 2020, is almost here. And look, we did have a global economic shock, and now we’re on an exponential, or even what might call a doubling path, on many fronts, approaching what we envision call a hockey stick in the technology world. Ray Kurzweil called it the singularity shooting up the faster really can’t predict what’s going to happen. And this acceleration isn’t this happening in technology. It’s also happening in culture and consciousness. So we’re passing through an historic window, a kind of transition from one major state of culture and consciousness to another, and it’s not something to fear, and that’s what I try to let business leaders know, it’s actually good news that we can harness to Now historically, whenever the pressure of wise condition begins to threaten our existence at this kind of level, a new and more complex state of consciousness, and you can call it a mindset with a corresponding cultural shift has emerged. And in fact, we are forced to evolve, forced to innovate and transform ourselves for our own good. Do we know how many times this has happened in the past? Yeah, nonetheless, generally agree, there have been about five to six of these major shifts in human history. So they’re like operating system upgrade in human culture and consciousness, the new mindset that emerges, strange shift is more complex, and it can see things the previous lines that couldn’t be just for example, one day, everybody thinks the world’s flat and full on monsters, and the next day we’re looking through telescope. What happens click? The new mindset is able to plan across a wider span of time than the previous. For example, one time we thinking about thinking in terms of five year plan, and then the next it’s more really living a 20 year vision. It’s normal. So each successive mindset feels really immediate concern for beings that are more and more distant from it. One day we’re deeply concerned with family and country. Next day, we care deeply about the oppressed on the other side of the planet and all the animals and endangered species. So what’s also interesting that along with that new, upgraded mindset, always comes a shiny new I call techno economic paradigm, kind of new economy with a lot of technology, with some very important technological innovation that include the important and larger, more diverse group of people than before. So I love the idea that it’s an operating system upgrade. Makes it sound like something we can at least manage. Can you give some examples of how that has worked in the past? I’ll give you a little quick thumbnail on it. We early, early. Guess could we started with archaic culture. We had nomadic clan to hunt and forge that was their technology or their economy. Then we then next came tribal culture. The invention of horticulture and hoeing and digging allowed us to settle down in tribes and villages. And then warrior culture set out to conquer and build city state empires, and we use slaves to establish an early agriculture.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Cultural practices like irrigation, then traditional culture in kingdoms and monarchies and serve them to find the late agricultural era, and then modern culture in the industrial scientific era lives, mostly in democratic nation states. And then finally, post modern culture and the information age and virtual transnational networks, they can see that it keeps getting further and further out, more and more diverse. And so that’s where we are now. Yeah, post modern culture is just now coming into full force and displacing modern culture as dominant regime, you might say. And if that wasn’t enough, on the nearest horizon, something new is on the way. Before I get ahead of myself here, I gave you a lot of dark scenarios earlier, and I just want to emphasize there’s also a lot of positive trending look at the evidence for positive culture and mindset shifts Creating Change all around the planet right now, women’s empowerment continues to spread, which has great benefits for everybody. Literacy rates are up. More renewable energy is becoming freely available, and a lot more is going to happen there. Extreme poverty in the developing world is decreasing because a middle class is growing there, and the convergence of the digital revolution in the life science revolution is expanding our lifespan, and as Al Gore calls it, our health span, we’re going to be healthy longer. So is this due to the emergence of post modern consciousness and culture? What’s causing it? Yes, the emerging post modern culture is associated, among other things, with green values. So we see movements like transition towns that are resilient and self sustaining, that could meet the challenge that’s under these darker scenarios that comes past there’s a lot of trending towards sustainability, things like conscious capitalism, movements, green MBA, I actually taught in one just in the last 10 years, I’ve seen a huge change in that direction. Another key theme of post modern culture is the rising of feminine values and qualities, not in the sense of gender, but in the universal sense of being more sensitive to humans, all humans, more compassionate, wanting to restore and care for the earth, to protect the weak and oppressed. A lot less focus on material success and more on humanity. Just think of Pope Francis and Lisa encyclical. He’s the first post modern Pope. What a difference between all the other folks that I’ve known in my lifetime. So this trend for feminine values is something I saw coming out of my 2020 study back in the 90s that I did back in the late 90s, and I can see now that this is continuing to grow. It’s going to be a very long term trend. I also concluded that, from that study, that two of the most powerful levers would change toward a positive future. We’re going to be the institution of business, especially as conscious or enlightened capitalism continues to emerge, and I strongly agree, but will and then women leaders. So that’s a lot of context. I explain all this because the majority, a major part of my work in leadership involves studying and applying frameworks for how people, especially leaders, evolve and develop increasingly more complex, effective, nuanced capacities over time, as I said, So, I’m very interested in what capacities we’re going to meet. Need to meet the challenges of this world that I’ve been describing. And from that and Maureen, you’re very accomplished in this how to create specific methodologies, tools, practices, day to day, practices to actually help leaders cultivate the more advanced mindset in higher order capacity. Thank you, Susan, actually, my innovative leadership field book was used in one of those green MBAs, so it was for me very rewarding to write something that goes into the world and is being used to move our very conscious leaders forward to the next level. So what kind of things have you been doing? Susan,

Unknown Speaker 13:42
among other things, I’ve done a lot of leadership development work with women over the past 15 years, mostly as university certificate programs. And I’ve got a book coming out this year with my co author, Suzanne Anderson, that describes the emergence of what we’re calling a new kind of women leader who has some very high order capacity that are ready made from the challenges of the 21st Century. And the book is called The Way of the material woman re evolutionizing The Way We Live, Love and lead. And the book’s going to include our leadership development process and philosophy in detail. But I also got to wear my future hat, and so the final chapter give some insight onto what to expect when this more feminine force begins to stabilize on the planet. You might be surprised. What was one of the surprises that was most resonant with you? I’ve been talking a lot today about accelerating change, but the full story is that the feature is actually going to be very paradoxical. Not only will things be changing quickly and getting more complex, but we will simultaneously have a trend towards slowing down and restoring restructuring, and this is going to result in the post modern values and sustainability and care being installed into our main infrastructure and institutions in ways of life in the.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Societies include sustainability for humans too, and as we begin to recognize that we need to slow down, and all of us, pretty much have been burning ourselves out for years, modern culture’s institutionalized overwork is, in some ways, I believe, a sophisticated form of slavery and serpent and I project that as post market culture, stabilizing the economic system is going to change toward a form that will benefit and nourish and include nearly everyone in a way, more humane way, and also benefit the planet. So that sneak preview, you’ll have to read the way the mysterious woman and leadership 2050 to find out more. Thank you for sharing all of that. I’m really looking forward to reading the way of the Mysterio woman, and actually, I’m wondering if I can get a preview copy. Let’s transition now to Mike in with that amount of change as our context. What approaches get us from here to 2050 and what can we do to develop leaders through that process? Given that we’ve talked about only a small percentage of our leaders actually are developed to the level that we need to make the transition. Wow. First of all, I need to say what great conversation we’ve had so far, really getting me thinking about a number of different things I’ve appreciated very much. And I think about Susan’s comments and her discussion about how change is accelerating as I apply it to what’s going on right now. If you think about it, if you had a program on July of 2014

Unknown Speaker 16:25
one year ago, and you asked, What’s it like to be in law enforcement one year later, how different would that program be today with the events of the past year? And what we’re seeing is for information exchange and the availability of information and the interactions that you can really see how Susan’s view of the future and how all of this is really coming together, and meaning that we really have to be phenomenally adaptable and a little bit different than we have been before to be able to keep up with what’s coming. I’m going to start on a little bit different level, if I can. Maureen, yes, thank you.

Unknown Speaker 17:04
Start at the micro level here, and I’m going to tell you my very favorite business and leadership story and and then transition that into what we put into the book. But my very favorite story is, is that there’s a consultant, and it’s a beautiful day, and he decides to have lunch outside, and he sits outside, starts having his lunch, and up, drives his truck, and two guys jump out, and they are very professional looking guys. And they get to measuring free lawn and lining up tools. And the next thing, one of them is very vigorously digging a hole. And he does a really good job of digging this whole thing, focused doing the measuring. And then he goes off and he does some more measuring. And the second guy goes and builds in that hole. And the consultant watches this for about 35 minutes, very focused, very hard working guys, one digging a hole, one covering the hole. And after his watches 35 minutes, he walked up to the guys. He says, Excuse me. Can I interrupt you for a second? First of all, I want to tell you, I’m really impressed with how hard you guys are working. And second, I got a question for you. You seem to be digging a hole, and you seem to be filling the hole, and I’m not sure what you’re trying to do. And the guys laughed, and they said, I know it looks silly today, but the guys who usually puts the trees in a hole without thick

Unknown Speaker 18:24
and I tell that story in a lot of my workshops. And what I do is I ask people at the table, if you have a story like that from your workplace, grab it so that we don’t know who’s involved, but tell me what’s happened. I’ll tell you one of my favorites as a consultant, and that is that I work with an organization, and we came up with a way for a new hospital to be able to save two and a half million dollars for the overall hospital system on buying a piece of technology. And we went into a meeting with the finance organization and a bunch of the presidents of the different hospitals, and we said, if you buy this as a group, if your hospitals all buy this as a group, you’ll save two and a half million dollars over buying it individual, piece by piece. And one of the hospital presidents said, I’m not bonused on what the system makes. I’m only bonus on what my hospital spends, and I don’t feel like we have the money this year. And the Senior Operating officer said we only had 10 minutes for this on the agenda, so I’m sorry, but we’ll have to move on. And at the end of the day, the hospital system spent two and a half million dollars extra. It was like the vice president of holes saying, You know what, I don’t care how many trees go in. I just care about I committed to 3600 holes, and my guys are going to dig. If it wasn’t a world where there are so many workers who say, I do stuff and it’s just not smart. Or so many people in politics who say, I wish we were doing something more productive, but I got to do it this way, then we wouldn’t worry so much about the leadership trends and the social psychology, which we can talk a little bit more about at some other time. But what we’ve done here in the book is we’ve outlined a performance system.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Information that will help those in leadership positions start to really be able to impact those that are getting the stuff done in a different way, as well as putting in place a performance system that will help those folks that are getting stuff done stop checking things off of their checklist and start questioning whether or not there may be a bigger picture, and that’s really what it’s about. Thank you for giving us some stories about leaders in the less effective way. Now let’s shift gears as you’re ready, and tell us, what do we do?

Unknown Speaker 20:32
My answer to that comes from an assignment that I was given on another project, and I was asked to help put together a performance system or a way that an organization can a framework for organizations to develop leaders and also to move their culture around. What’s the behavioral vision of the organization, so that leaders can lead that way and the culture can move that way. And it’s embarrassing what my conclusions are, but I went through a lot of the literature, and it took me really several weeks to go through and see what competencies are major companies using, and how are they developing their cultures and their leaders? And what I found was that what was coming up in the literature, starting with Jim Collins, Good to Great in 2001

Unknown Speaker 21:16
and then going through rokin and torber and some of the stuff that was in Harvard Business Review Forbes, and some of this stuff that was really interesting going on is that, and this is the simplest thing. It’s silly that it took me two weeks of reading and researching to find this out. We have this divide. A lot of what’s happening for those people that are having difficulty adapting to the new leadership paradigm today are those people who are learning techniques, skills, how to do stuff, whereas what’s happening. And Susan talked about this ability to really be able to be effective in real time, who you are matters, and in particular, who you are when you’re under stressed, really matters. And when we take a look at all that and I pull that together, it only makes sense when we think about our bosses and our leaders and the folks that we’ve interacted with, if they’ve gone to a workshop and learn crucial communication skills for about a week and a half, would probably see some sort of change. But boy, if you put somebody under stress at the end of the fiscal year or or you put somebody in a situation a month out from that workshop, they tend to go back to who they were. So the question is, how do we get them to be in such a way so that they really have advanced their capacity to respond in real time with a broader vision and a greater ability to have sustaining behaviors. And so I went and then combed through the literature and found that developmental theorists had come up with this, what they call post conventional profile of maturity. That comes up actually, it’s really neat, because you can’t measure what you can’t manage, what you can’t measure, and it comes up in some of the really good work that started with loving your assessments and broke out from that. And for those post conventional leaders, they tend to be really effective right now at being transformational, helping organizations, as Collins looked at go from good to great and from here to there. And the competencies that they had are not intuitive, and they’re also not those sorts of things that you can learn. I love Goldman saying that you emotional intelligence is something that that you can learn, you can learn, but can’t be taught. And it’s similar to that a situation where what you really need to do is be in a situation where your metal is tested and you advance developmentally. And what we found is the competencies are things like being professionally humble. Those leaders that care about getting it right ahead of being right is one of the competencies. Those leaders that test that way tend to be more effective in today’s world and tend to have the type of competencies that tend to have the type of abilities that going forward look like in 2050 will be very important competencies as uncommon, unwavering commitment to right action, someone who’s unstoppable when on a mission, someone who is intellectually versatile, really has developed interests, expertise and curiosity beyond the job and the organization, and someone that it’s highly authentic and reflective, that’s not constrained by personal appearance, but it’s highly focused on personal behavior, someone that is able to inspire follow up shift and is innately collaborative. That’s what we’re looking at. And so if we have those out there as competencies, and put them into what we call a performance system, this is what we’re trying to get, is leaders who are professionally humble and reflective and collaborative, and we’re really pushing those behaviors for leadership development. And through an entire culture, what we’re going to find is that culture is able to be more responsive, that culture is able to be more effective, and the workers within.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
That culture, are able to make it in real time, as are the leaders, and that tends to, as Susan has brought out. Interesting the future is now. It’s just not as broad. And so right now, in smaller pockets, those organizations that are thriving have leaders that test with those sorts of competencies and show those sorts of abilities.

Unknown Speaker 25:21
How do we help them get there? What is it? 1% 4% of leaders are actually at these levels.

Unknown Speaker 25:30
Yeah, and I think it’s low now, because right now we’re in the This is business mentality for business leaders and for politicians. This is business as well. We’re watching on a lot of different fronts, how people are still stuck in the old style, testosterone type driven behaviors of I’m a leader, so you got to listen to me, sort of thing. And what you have to do when you when we talk about performance systems, is, and this is the hardest part. You have to get people who take a look at the literature and then make a commitment to things like professional humility, things like commitment to right action, things like intellectual versatility, things like authenticity and reflection. And when you get a commitment toward that at the top level of the organization, and you start to have the organizational development folks really push that through. That’s when you can start to see people developmentally maturing. In addition to that, when we look at programs like this, and I think that’s part of what you’re getting at, they look different, because, again, if I can go to a crucial communications workshop that they have very set of skills in it, if they’re wonderful workshops, they’ve got a lot of good stuff, but if I want to actually change who I am developmentally, I’ve got to get out of my comfort zone. And so I have to get to a situation like you talked about, I’m going to have to go to Costa Rica and put on a pack that’s too heavy to carry, and in real time, really start to take a look at of my view of what it’s like to be Costa Rican and what it’s like to

Unknown Speaker 27:06
to have to deal with someone who’s in pain, or be in pain myself and still give or who I thought someone who had 22 children was and who they really are when I spend time with them on their porch. It is those sorts of experiences that actually push the developmental maturity, that help really gain a true authenticity, a true professional humility, those sorts of experiences that we have to integrate into politician leadership programs and into organizational development programs and business leadership programs that really make a change. So that’s going to look totally different than sending me off to a hotel someplace to go to a two day workshop. It depends on the hotel.

Unknown Speaker 27:52
There were no hotels in Costa Rica, by the way, where we were.

Unknown Speaker 27:57
That’s right. It’s very hard in the confines and comfort of a nice, air conditioned hotel room to get the type of changes that are going to actually help me change, and I know that and Susan can maybe talk a little bit about this in the certificate work that she’s done that really it’s getting people to reflect and go to areas that they’re not used to doing where they sometimes even younger folks will say, I don’t understand what this has to do with sales.

Unknown Speaker 28:27
That’s those are the types of programs that that really help change who people are and bring them towards this developmental maturity that allows them, in real time, to be those collaborative, effective leaders. I’m going to make an observation and then pass to Susan. I taught a leadership development workshop recently, and most of the feedback was amazingly good, except one participant who said I didn’t think I would have to do any kind of reflection or talking about myself. I just wanted those skills that make me a better leader, discounting the fact that being a leader is about who you are, not just what you do. So I think we’ve got some folks who are not yet recognizing that who I am is fundamental to being effective. So Susan, what are you doing through your program to help people make those major shifts?

Unknown Speaker 29:18
Yeah, you lied about going off into very foreign and strange environment to prompt you into a transformative shift, but with the right kind of design and holding, you can create a similar environment right here in our backyard. Some of the things we would we’re doing with our successful women’s university certificate programs would be to start off with an intensive retreat somewhere out in nature. And these are nice retreat centers nonetheless, but creating an environment that’s time out of time and away. And also we use the power of the collective of the group. There’s a way in which when people come together and they’re given a safe space to share and.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
They begin to open up, and they begin to see that’s normal to reflect, and they start to learn from each other. And there’s things they begin to see about each other that they cannot see on their own in just a one on one coaching situation, although that can be very good, there’s a way that this kind of group experience, similar to what you had Maureen on on your backpacking trip, really intensifies the transformative power. And then we would continue with a very elaborately designed online learning space where people have very specific, reflective and experiential exercises and practices they were doing that they would report on and interact with each other, so that there’s a way in which we just keep the pressure on and keep people recognizing and learning about who they are and where they are trying to move, because we would have people take these tests assessments, and we would recognize and understand where they were in terms of their own leadership and security, and help them take that very next step that they needed in order to develop the next level of capacity. So it sounds like a data focused experience in that I identify where I am and where I need to go, and then a very intense emotional and sometimes physical experience to accompany it, as well as the intellectual rigor of developing cognition as well as experiences? Yeah, absolutely, we have to. You have to do the full court press on all those different dimensions of self health and other internal, external, emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, physical, all of it. I think the key is that whether you’re in an air conditioned retreat center or whether you’re in Costa Rica or wherever you’re at, the key is that the focus is that there’s got to be some way that you can stretch and really learn. And the learning is not about necessarily a skill set. Now, how do I do better, better spreadsheets, or how do I communicate differently? That the learning really is, who am I? What are my values? How do those make sense? And the more that I interact with other folks and other conditions, and the more I can really start to grow. And it’s I think most people who’ve gone through those experiences are very surprised at how much growth that they can get. I know that on a personal level, I’ve been and other people have talked as well. So whether I go to a certificate program like Susan puts together, or whether I go to on an adventure tour, or some of those things, the more that I get the opportunity to really question who I am, who’s somebody else, and what can I learn about myself as an instrument, that’s where the growth really comes in. I love the idea of myself as an instrument. I’m not just building a skill like working on a spreadsheet. I’m actually fundamentally changing. I’m upgrading my operating system. It involves me changing how I look at the world. Thank you, Susan and Mike for being here and sharing this wisdom. In closing, consider the impact innovative leaders make on the world, and imagine yourself being one of those leaders. What can you do to make the greatest impact and leave the greatest legacy?

Unknown Speaker 33:21
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Unknown Speaker 33:52
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Unknown Speaker 34:32
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