Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

You can learn more about Jonathan’s leadership initiatives on his website at https://www.jonathanreams.com/ and his democratization of leadership training at https://www.adeptify.co/.

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. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• Getting Lost in the Language of Leadership with Jonathan Reams
• Growing Up and Out: Development for Modern Leaders with Mike Morrow-Fox
• Working & Living in Joy with Pamela Larde, Ph.D.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Jonathan Reams is driven by an insatiable curiosity about the essence of human nature and how to cultivate this essence in the service of leadership. He uses various outlets for achieving this. He held a position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology from 2007 until 2024, where he taught and did research on leadership development, coaching and counseling. He served as Editor-in Chief of Integral Review, A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Praxis and Research from 2005 until 2023. He is also a co-founder of the Center for Transformative Leadership and the European Center for Leadership Practice. Jonathan’s Ph.D. is in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University.

Jonathan practices the cultivation of leadership through consulting and leadership development program design and delivery. He brings awareness-based technology to this work, focusing on how the inner workings of human nature can develop leadership capacities for today’s complex challenges.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready Today, Jonathan Reams, chief Creative Officer for the Center for Transformative Leadership in Norway will be helping us in this mission.

Jonathan, let’s jump right in. You have been a regular guest on our podcast and one of our top listen to guests, so you probably don’t need the level of introduction that others do Today we’re gonna be talking. About the field of leadership development and what your organization is doing to solve some of the challenges we face as leadership is changing across the globe, leadership development must also change across [00:01:00] the globe, and what you’re doing is helping to address the challenges.

Folks in the leadership development field and leaders who are trying to build their teams deal with succession. All of the things that we need to do to run our organizations face as the leadership development field transitions. So let’s start with why do you care and what are you seeing?

Jonathan: Thanks for that Maureen, and thanks for inviting me back. Um,

I find that your characterization is very apt and there’s two kind of trends that have really driven and motivated me. One, I. Is the growing awareness and inclusion of developmental perspectives. How do we actually develop leaders leadership in organizations?

And the second one is, how do we democratize access to this? How do we make it [00:02:00]affordable for organizations and scalable because. Prior, this has been kind of an expensive thing for an elite few in an organization, and the challenge is that one, many of the things that are on offer do not adequately address the kind of quality of character or inner work of leadership.

And I can talk about that in terms of cleaning up. how do we

help leaders?

Not create storms all the time around them. So one of the phrases a friend likes to use from me is that leaders make the weather, you know, and what kind of weather? So it’s a very open metaphor. So I see this going on, that

there are many things that are helpful, but there’s this kind of gap and lack in being able to scale and being able to focus on that kind of inner work of leader [00:03:00] development.

Maureen: You know, we talk about leadership being a focus on being relating and doing, being, being the biggest element and, and I realize for many people who initially come to us looking for leadership development of. Various sorts. They’re looking for the tactical, give me the list of behaviors and how do I change, how do I negotiate, how do I deal with conflict?

All of that is yes, important. And using the weather analogy, um, actually, I’m not gonna use the weather analogy, but the as as we’re in flu season, I would use the virus analogy that that bad leadership is contagious. That. Leaders who behave badly, influence their followers to behave badly, and the organization is infected.

It’s not just the, [00:04:00] the leader we’re part of the organization. It, it impacts every facet of the business.

Jonathan: It is very true, and I think what you’re describing is that people are socialized in to what the leadership culture in an organization is by what they observe from people who are in authority above them. And one of the ways I like to think about this, focus on more the being part is

It’s easy to observe the behaviors on the outside and try to change those directly,

but the higher leverage points is to go upstream.

Where are those behaviors coming from? What are the thinking patterns? What are the emotional regulation or not patterns? What is the, the deeper sources from which those behaviors come? And we try and target our work there.

Maureen: And so [00:05:00] it seems like in with things like mindfulness and a focus on resilience, this message is resonating.

How are you finding it resonating with your. Uh, people you’re working with

Jonathan: Very much around working with emotions. I think this has become popularized a great deal by people like Brenny Brown who has really brought. Motion work more into the mainstream made vulnerability actually a positive thing instead of a negative thing. I, I see that and a number of people in that field recognizing, you know, you could start with Daniel Kahneman, that we are not rational decision makers.

We actually are quite biased and emotional in those processes. Or Antonio Demasio, the neuroscientists saying, we we’re essentially feeling being to occasionally think, and the awareness of these things [00:06:00] is becoming,

Like you say, like mindfulness and other things, people are becoming aware this is worth paying attention to and trying to address.

The challenge is they don’t always have good models or tools or experiences to do that well with

Maureen: are. You’ve also talked about democratization, and I think that’s a really important facet of what you’re addressing, that it has often been the elite organizations who have access because working directly with you or with me.

Comes at a price and, and it’s, it’s more than $10 an hour. So, um, I’ll be interested over the course of our conversation to hear what you’re doing and also to share what we’re doing as we evolve our work. With the same thing in mind and, and frankly, you and I are doing it right [00:07:00] now by doing podcasts that are free to anyone across the planet.

If you’ve got internet access, you can listen to us and many others talk about things that matter.

Jonathan: I attended a conference on the International Study of Leadership, uh, in Copenhagen a year ago, December, and there was a workshop on using podcasts to disseminate kinne knowledge. Just because of these issues, it’s open access free. It’s more easily digestible. You know, people are listening to these things while they’re at the gym out for a walk on the drive to work.

So it is really a powerful tool for broadening the awareness of important topics.

Maureen: The other thing that would support that is the fact that so many people have [00:08:00]listened to your podcast and your YouTube video. I think you’re our top person on YouTube recently.

Jonathan: Well, that’s good to hear. I, I know another podcast that I’ve been on a lot too. I’m in the top 10 there as well. And for whatever reason, I think it goes back to me when I did my doctoral work, uh, at Gonzaga University.

1. I felt very much that I was out in left field. There were a handful of people that I could find studying kind of consciousness and leadership,

and

you felt kind of alone there.

But then you spend time in the territory and you get to know the other people there, the other pioneers. And as other people come, you can be a tour guide and you start to network people and help them understand what’s on offer and where they can connect. And. I think that is part of how I’ve understood this growing popularity of this kind of work.

Maureen: So [00:09:00] let’s leverage that point. You are building your new system with blocks. That you and I have both, most of which overlap for us, but which are also not common among leadership practitioners. So let’s talk about what are those building blocks and why are they so crucial now relative to the fairly standard building blocks that you may have learned about in in some of your earlier work?

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s a, there’s a long list and I, I, as I was preparing for this conversation, I had thought about, wow, you know, if I. Look back over the last 25 years, there’s all sorts of things that

I feel grateful to have encountered. People and processes and tools that tapped into this kind of broadly speaking [00:10:00] consciousness work.

So while there is certainly a growing popularity of mindfulness, I remember running into people talking about that 30 years ago where it was not popular at all

and all these things. Become variations on the theme, so to speak. So one of the things I came across early was adult development broadly, and I encountered that through the work of people like Robert Keegan or Bill Torbert, and it started for me with this understanding that.

Broadly speaking, there were different ways to characterize how we made sense and meaning out of the world. How did our self center, you know, tend to, um, organize meaning And being able to kind of categorize those and understand what impact those differences had. So rather than just talking about different [00:11:00] styles of leadership where a style can be better or worse in a given situation, we could say, Hmm, there’s another dimension, more vertical in some ways that people have talked about that actually makes a different kind of difference.

And very simply that. People can develop a more robust capacity to handle more considerations and relationships between considerations as these kind of things develop. And that led me from ego development models more towards dynamic skill theory, where we’re looking more specifically at hierarchical complexity of cognitive processes and structures.

There’s a mouthful.

Maureen: mouthful. There’s a mouthful.

Uh, and so for our listeners, other terms you may have heard referring to the ego development part, [00:12:00] at least our leadership maturity, developmental perspectives. Jonathan, what are some of the others? Uh, stages.

Jonathan: vertical development in general is a broad categorization in the market.

Maureen: So Terry o’ Fallon’s work. Susan Reiter Torbert.

And, and, and the reason I’m throwing those in is I, people are probably listening and saying, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. And, and yet many of our listeners have listened to Terry, or being a Sharma or others talking about vertical

Jonathan: Carl Kard is another one along with Keith Egel who’ve done decades of work in this area.

Maureen: And so, so beyond ego development, then you talked about the next one, uh, more skill-based. Can you expand on that?

Jonathan: Yeah, so. I, I did, uh, a course about [00:13:00] 12 years ago on the kind of history of developmental theory, and one of the things this helped expose me to was a kind of long lineage, going back to the 1890s, um, James Mark Baldwin, who influenced Jean Piaget, who may be familiar to many listeners who influence.

Lawrence Kohlberg Kohlberg’s Moral Development Theory was something I learned about in high school in Canada even. It was so influential. It was also influential in prison systems and other things. So that notion that there were kind of stages of maturity and moral thinking had traction, and there were many students of Kohlberg’s who moved in a direction of looking at.

How do we integrate what’s going on inside a person with how the context is impacting performance? So [00:14:00] dynamic skill theory, which comes from the work of Kurt Fisher, basically takes this kind of notion of neo Ian ideas that are ways of knowing mature in structured ways. Integrated that with behaviorism saying that how we behave is influenced by our environment.

We respond to the cues and clues that enable or disable our performance and put those together to understand how do skills. Evolve in different domains over time. What are the pathways of development? What are the types of ways we can assess that development?

Maureen: Beautiful. And that seems foundational then to how we as leadership development professionals do our work.

Jonathan: So [00:15:00] one of the stories that I could. Uh, give of that as an example is I did a presentation of this approach to the Society for Organizational Learning here in Norway.

And, uh, Peter Sge had been on through Skype and done a presentation, and then I did this. And what I helped them see was the way Sge talks about systems thinking and organizational learning has.

Chunked a whole bunch of very complex skills together in very high level ways, and that most people tend to structure the way they make meaning that doesn’t always take, have those building blocks or take those, that many things into consideration as a system. And I had somebody come up to me from a furniture manufacturer and he said.

Now I understand. We’ve been trying to implement this organizational learning stuff and [00:16:00] we tell our people all these things, use all the right words and processes and recipes, and they go off and do things and we don’t understand what they did. And I said, well, now we understood. He said, because the way they can operationalize is limited by those structures.

So they cut corners, they cut things off and make it fit. Or assimilated into their own structures and act on that.

Maureen: And we see that all over the place, right? That we think we were clear. We think we’ve equipped people and when they fall short, we think it is their fault or their problem, when in fact it was one, our responsibility to know the capacity of the people we’re leading and lead in a way that they can follow.

Jonathan: And this is where I say often to people that I’m [00:17:00] coaching. I say, look,

what I hear is you’re expecting people to read your mind

and to understand everything that’s implicit in what you’re saying.

And so a lot of what we’re trying to do is unpack these things to make them explicit and also help people understand, you know, when you talk about this, what history do you have?

What resources do you have that you load into these instructions that those people may not have

Maureen: it. It is hard for me, and I’m grounded in this work to be clear enough for other people, and I imagine for someone whose work is running their business, it can be terribly frustrating. When you think you’re clear, you just need people to do what you’ve asked and what you get back, even though the followers are doing [00:18:00] their best, is not what you had expected.

Jonathan: Yep. And this is why leadership is so challenging, because

the demands to be self-aware, to regulate your own communication, to understand the others at where they’re at. And build a bridge between those. That’s a lot of work and it’s not what people are taught and trained very often.

Maureen: And this could be a whole show. Um, let’s, let’s, let’s move on. Um, what else are you building on?

Jonathan: Well. I’ve been a fan of and using the Leadership Circle 360 for 20 years now, and one of the things that we have worked with is this notion of reactive tendencies, which is basically saying that [00:19:00] we often get triggered, and this going back to your point about the beingness, something inside us gets triggered by an event, a phrase, a person.

Something which leads to our performance dropping dramatically. Where what happens is self-protective mechanisms come to the foreground because we’re feeling some kind of fear or threat and to feel safe. We have deeply built in patterns to respond to those things, but they tend to be. The opposite of the creative capacities that we do have.

So we may have many skills in those areas, but the moment that we are triggered to be reactive, they’re out the window. And I would often say when running trainings or using this, that

there is a, a [00:20:00] cost for people when they get triggered to be reactive because it’s costing them energy. And time and the message is not getting communicated.

There’s a noise.

Other people don’t hear the words you say. They feel the the concern or the anxiousness that is the carrier wave, so to speak, of the content.

Maureen: I like that, that they’re not hearing what we say when we are reactive. And that gets back to a prior podcast again, which talked about the, the carrier waves that, that we convey the, the virus or the positivity. every time we interact with people and if we are not attending to the being. And so the being relating and doing is absolutely [00:21:00] aligned with the Leadership Circle work and that focus on I, when I am in a reactive spot, I’m doing not, I’m not consciously focused on my being

Jonathan: Well, you’re unconsciously enacting old habits and patterns to protect yourself as a being, and therefore the behaviors that come out. Are mixed. So very briefly, you know, in terms of relating, we are relating to other people. But the distinction can be between are you relating to try and meet your own need and therefore you always say yes.

You don’t set boundaries because you’re afraid. If you do, people won’t like you. And you relate in that orientation, or do you relate in a way that allows you to set boundaries and say yes and have difficult conversations, but still stay connected,

Maureen: [00:22:00] which is a beautiful distinction that staying connected constructively, even in hard conversations

Jonathan: And there’s two things that follow from this that we work with. One is, uh, I started using immunity to change as a follow up for this to give people a.

Process and tool to try to understand what’s going on with these reactive tendencies. Why am I doing this? And so very briefly, for people who might not be familiar,

we ask people to say what’s, what’s something that if you could get better at, would be really meaningful and impactful for you?

Okay, great. That’s the goal in the first column. Then list all the things that make this a goal, because it’s not what’s happening. What are all the things that go against that, that you’re actually doing?

or not doing?

And then we invite people to say, okay, [00:23:00] do a little kind of mind, uh, imagination exercise.

Put yourself in those situations

and imagine doing the opposite.

What goes on in your stomach? What concerns or fears or worries

Come up for you, you know, because there’s a good reason you’re doing the behaviors you’re doing, and you can take that underlying worry or fear and turn it into an understanding, oh, I’m protecting myself from something that in the last part you have an assumption that.

If I do X, these things will happen, and therefore I behave like this because I don’t want those bad things to happen. So this is a way for people to understand that there’s a legitimate reason for those reactive patterns of behavior.

The second part is we use the Arbinger Institute’s work a [00:24:00] lot. Uh, whether you call it being in the box or out of the box, or having a heart at peace, or a heart at war, or having an inward mindset or an outward mindset, all of these are pointing to this distinction between being reactive and being creative,

and this helped people understand what it looks like to kind of be clean.

Have the skills that you’re developing come to the foreground and have people be able to hear the message because there’s not noise in it compared to what are the variations of noise that we can produce.

Maureen: And I wanna go back to the Keegan piece. Um, the immunities to change. We refer to that as the competing commitment exercise.

So I think a lot of our listeners may have done that work. Um, I find that to be. [00:25:00] One. One of the most challenging exercises to not only do the first time, but to continue to work through, and I love that it gives us a practice to really get underneath what is holding us in those behaviors that we say we want to break.

Kind of moving past New Year’s resolutions or however you language it.

Jonathan: I, I can tell a,

Maureen: one of the most, sorry, go ahead.

Jonathan: I, I can tell a short story about that. Early on when I was doing this in the leadership course for the continuing education department at the university, it’s for mid-level managers around Norway. I had a person that I met the day after we did this exercise, and she, back to your virus analogy, she said.

I, I just can’t, it’s under my skin. I can’t get it outta my head to keep thinking about this because it does kind of infect people with a, [00:26:00] a way of structuring reflections on themselves as a system internally. It allows them to have a lens for kind of analyzing themselves to make it visible and explicit

Maureen: and that I love that because what we do see is it takes things that were unconscious, makes it conscious, and as long as I can make it conscious in a way that I can stand back and observe, then I can notice it in myself and I have the capacity to choose.

I may still choose the fear and self-protection, but I know I have a choice. And, and a path to change the things I say I really want to change.

Jonathan: Very much

Maureen: So then you had one other before we jump into what are you

Jonathan: Yes, yes. Well, so these things that, uh, I’ve been talking [00:27:00] about for a moment are a lot to do with the cleaning up. If leaders create the weather, then we don’t wanna be making stormy weather all the time. So we need to kind of clean up these reactive tendencies. We want to try and learn how to regulate our emotions.

And so these are things that I will talk about in a little bit about how we’re building programs using elements from these things. Not just those processes per se, but combining them in certain ways. The last part then is when we do that work, how can we then build on the skills we have to develop more mature or complex skills, the ability to perform better.

Once we kind of clean things up, and this comes out of the dynamic skill theory tradition, and we’ve worked a lot with a company called Lika, uh, Theo Dawson and her work,

[00:28:00] and I. That partly is about assessments. So we have like leadership circle or an LDF, uh, profile or stages profile, any of these kind of things.

There are ways to get feedback and data on how are you thinking about things. So Lika has these as well.

What they also have is a very simple learning model. This virtuous cycles of learning or vehicles. And it’s nothing proprietary necessarily, but what it does is give you a very simple way of understanding.

How do we learn naturally how as little children were our brains wired? That helped us learn to walk ’cause we fell a thousand times and yet we got up and did it again. What kind of process was going on that allowed us to observe something and kind of say, Hey, what if I could do that? I.

What do I need to figure out to try doing that?

[00:29:00] Practicing it and then looking back and reflecting and saying, okay, what did I learn and how would I then modify what I do next time? What the goal looks like?

So we’ve been taking all of these elements we’ve been talking about into trying to build

scalable tools to democratize leadership development opportunities.

Maureen: So now let’s shift to what are you building so that you can democratize?

Jonathan: I would say what we’re doing is

gathering a community of inquiry and practice, and we’ve created a little brand and a website to kind of anchor this stuff,

And really what we’re doing is then prototyping and experimenting as much as we can. So combining elements of all these building [00:30:00] blocks to create different kinds of programs that are online that people can go through, either self-paced or in a cohort with some facilitations.

So we’re kind of experimenting with. Self-paced, uh, only online or kind of hybrid where you meet every two weeks on Zoom or something and have a kind of peer check-in social learning. And in between you do kind of individually paced work, uh, and with also trying to structure that in a way that the average manager could facilitate it themselves.

So trying to make it kind of a very simple running.

Maureen: So is there a train the trainer or a certification, because as you’ve talked about the building blocks, things like ego maturity and immunities to change. This is a fairly complex basket [00:31:00]of, of underlying constructs. How do you ensure that the facilitator can deliver it? It with integrity.

Not that they lack integrity, but the program maintains the integrity you, you have built into it.

Jonathan: Very good question. We’re not far that far down the road yet in some way. So I, I would say on the one hand, the community of practitioners we’re gathering are people who are already kind of somewhat knowledgeable and have background in these areas. In terms of, um, one of the deployments we’ve done of one of the programs, we had a manager there and I just talked to him through it. The way that we did that was the instructions are meant to be as simple and clear so

that people can follow ’em. They don’t need kind of expert guidance[00:32:00]

And

So maybe what I’ll say is a little bit about this. So we

evolved a program that is now called Building Emotional Resilience. And how it came about essentially was working with the Leadership Circle for many years.

I saw that there was

a need to find ways to follow up to help people build these creative competencies. We can help them with immunity to change to kind of. Lessen the reactive tendencies, but how do you increase the skills

and

some research, uh, primarily that my wife did because she had been translating all their materials into both German and Norwegian and had a deep knowledge of it and was certified.

Said that, you know, it actually all hinges on, hinges on composure, and that led us to realizing this. The reactive tendencies that you get feedback on are [00:33:00] generalized patterns, but how do you recognize it in the moment? How do you help people understand when it’s happening so that they can step back, take a breath, and regulate it? So what we did was we combined elements of these virtuous cycles of learning where, for instance.

You invite people to start by just noticing situations where this kind of phenomena is happening.

So the first module we built, we said, just become aware of when you’re getting triggered.

And the point of this is we’re not trying to teach them a specific skill.

We’re inviting them to notice what in their environment is relevant that. Has an emotional pull for them. So they’re engaged. They find it’s, oh motivating because I’m annoyed by this all the time. So they choose the content of their learning.

We help them [00:34:00] work through this using this virtuous cycle of learning with a little bit of modification we’ve made,

and then we invite them to

take a moment to say, okay, now that you notice you’re getting triggered, what happens? What’s the physiological symptoms? And we invite them to make distinctions. We give them a list, pick from the list, or notice other things, but it stimulates them. What are emotional things going on? What kind of cognition is going on? What kind of thought patterns and beliefs are coming up for you so they get more and more familiar with themselves and what’s happening, which helps them notice when they’re being triggered more. Then kind of taking part of the immunity to change process, that worry box. Third column, competing commitment. We invite them to say, now that you’re noticing this happening,

what’s the underlying fear or worry?

Can you name [00:35:00] that? And we give them some distinctions to look at because what we found is that if you help people.

Take whatever kind of fuzzy phenomena is happening for them and get a bit more granular. Make distinctions about it. And this was an insight I got from Michael Maslow’s work that was really helpful in making this transition to

people distinctions to resonate with, which then they practice, they, they look for, okay, is it this happening or that happening?

What kind of fear is it?

When they can name that they’re making a micro subject object move, instead of it being something that’s just automatically triggering behaviors,

they can name it and look at it. And as you say, then start to make choices. So in the last module, what we invite people to do is replace fear with [00:36:00] curiosity, and there we incorporate the ladder of inference, for instance, a bit of that and say.

How can you climb down and look at what’s happening and see alternatives, see what else could be going on, and lean into that and be present with it and see what happens. We have a little exercise we walk them through that really seems to help people have a, an embodied sense of what else is possible.

Maureen: I wanna give a story from my own personal journey with immunity to change that will elaborate on that, because you’ve done a beautiful job of explaining the theory. Uh, my, when I started my company, I had, it was during Enron. I was working at a consulting firm. Helping set up training floors, uh, that business absolutely went away.

I was up for partners, so my job went [00:37:00] away, invited to exit, so started my company, but I had a really deep fear about not being good enough, smart enough, able to keep a job. And so my tendency. In constricting laws, I’ve gotta just work harder than anybody else, so they won’t notice that I’m not very smart.

And so when it was, I was on a consulting project, my own project, so I had just started the company, big deal, big company. And people would leave the office, you know, around five ish. And I would feel physically sick to my stomach. So that notice where you’re feeling something in your body, I would feel sick to my stomach and it was this, you can’t leave like they’re leaving.

You wanted to go to the, oh, and I was getting ready to climb Kilimanjaro, so I really needed to go work out so that I, you know, didn’t [00:38:00] make it halfway up and have to bail. So I’m balancing these things and yet this. Overwhelming you are not good enough. Message would hit me every day and I would find a project to start as people are leaving.

And similarly then first thing in the morning, I would feel the need to be there. So the physiological. A stomach issue at least gave me awareness. I still have this happen as I’m working at, you know, 10 or 11 at night, and I’m like, okay, other people are sleeping. It’s really time to get up and, and I can ask then like, what is the fear at this moment and is it rational now if I have something that’s due the next morning, clearly it’s, I’m not being irrational, but if I’m starting to organize folders at midnight, it’s irrational.

And I think each of us have those [00:39:00] competing commitments that we just go on autopilot. Back to the consciousness thing, I, I don’t even know if I’m being reactive. I’m just acting from habit. And I can go down that, that path. So this gives us a mechanism to be aware, and that was 20 years ago when I was, you know, cowering in my cubicle, afraid I’m no longer cowering in my cubicle, afraid.

but the habits and those underlying thought patterns are not entirely erased, and it’s easy to just like, as a kid, my mom would give me ice cream when I had a fight with a boyfriend. Now. There are times that Baskin and Robin still seems like a good I good idea. Or a hot fudge sundae. Those things don’t go away, even though we’re adults and we should be making smarter decisions.

So just as a way to elaborate and I know where, uh, coming Sorry, go ahead.[00:40:00]

Jonathan: Yeah, so I think that’s a great illustration and it embodies so many of the things that we’re working with in this program in particular in that

You make progress over time on being little by little more aware of the kind of system one, the automatic habits of behavior. You make them explicit so that you can say, Hmm, do they actually apply here or not?

So you have the option to choose intentionally whether to allow that or not. And I think it also illustrates the point that we’re not. Trying to solve people’s problems overnight. We’re trying to set them in a direction where they have practices that they can use over and over, like you display in your story.

By doing that habitually over time, you build more resilience.

Maureen: and more in, yeah, more resilience, [00:41:00] and I feel like I have more control over my world.

Which then is the positive reinforcement loop. So Jonathan, I realize we are coming close to the end. Uh, what are you looking for going forward?

Jonathan: We’re looking for partners to play with, so we’re really prototyping many things. So we have a platform, we have a demonstration of something we’ve built for a client. And we’re gonna build a sandbox where people can come and actually play with their own clients. We’ve built a number of these virtuous cycle of learning activities that people could try out with clients.

So we’re really inviting people who are interested to follow up and contact us and say, Hey, this sounds really cool. Can, can I learn more and can I try it out?

Maureen: Beautiful. I love your work and a few [00:42:00] things about it.

Are that you have packaged together such high impact tools and you’ve used them now for over a decade. So it’s not like, while I understand you are prototyping delivery models and you continue to evolve them, you are really a master of this craft.

Jonathan: Well, thank you. I will think about that later in life, whether I would agree.

I, I think what I have really taken to is this.

Psychical cyclical approach to learning. So it’s hard to commodify and commercialize something yet because we know we can do it better. And that will be one of the things we’re trying to gauge with people is, is this working to enough of a degree that we could try and package it more and go to market with it, because we’re still really. [00:43:00] Along with a number of other people that I know of trying to experiment in this space of, you know, simple apps, simple processes that you can go through. And for us it’s combining this ability to kind of clean up these reactive tendencies, go through immunity to change like processes with

positively developing skills that can be kind of calibrated to.

The level that works for a person. Back to the story of, you know, people that aren’t able to follow instructions, quote unquote. What is the leader’s role here to help people learn to cross that bridge, to actually be able to operationalize things in the way that is intended

Maureen: beautiful and democratizing that so that it’s no longer people who work for GE or elite companies, [00:44:00] but as the, as. The world of work, disaggregates, we need everyone to be able to lead, even though they’re not at the largest

Jonathan: Well, even in those largest companies. This kind of training is often only for executives, but there are many people throughout the organization who could benefit who for whom. Just being able to regulate their emotions a little bit better would help them get along with colleagues. We’re prototyping a program on relational resilience.

How can they use challenges in relationships to learn from how to make those better?

Maureen: Beautiful. Thank you. So how would you want people to reach out with you, out to you if they are interested in prototyping?

Jonathan: We have a website called Adeptly. Uh, I guess you can put a link in the show [00:45:00]notes, but it’s just uh, A-D-E-P-T-I-F y.co. And there we have, it’s just a landing page for now. It’s not fully fleshed out, but there’s some links where you can go try out some things and a contact thing and there’s a demo of stuff.

So if you go there and hit contact or my email will probably be in the show notes as well. Happy

to hear from people.

Maureen: Beautiful. And do you communicate on LinkedIn?

Jonathan: I do.

Maureen: Thank you. So to our listeners, thank you for your interest in innovating and updating how you lead, and we look forward to you joining us on ongoing podcasts.