Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about Jonathan and his work on his website, https://jonathanreams.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. 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 insightful episodes you’ll enjoy:

• Getting Lost in the Language of Leadership with Jonathan Reams
• Reality Lost: How Disinformation Shapes Your World with Tara McGowan
• Forecast Isn’t Fact: Building Strength from Uncertainty with Paul Gibbons

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 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] Welcome to Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, CEO and founder of the Innovative Leadership Institute. This episode is produced in collaboration with the International Leadership Association, where I am a fellow. 

 So here’s a pattern. Your leadership team identifies a problem. The signal arrives too late. The decision sat too long. Everyone left the room agreeing, and then four different things happened. Then the same problem comes back wearing slightly different clothes. . We describe what has to happen for an organization to move as six practices: we call that the Innovative Leadership Decision Velocity Model. Jonathan Reams arrived at almost exactly the same six functions from an entirely different direction. Jonathan, absolutely welcome. I’m so delighted to have you back. 

Jonathan: I’m so happy to be here, Maureen. 

Maureen: A [00:01:00] leadership leadership team redesigns something, and two quarters later or some future time, the same failure comes back in a slightly different costume. You’ve been looking at that pattern for more than 20 years. What are they actually not fixing as they fix a process? 

Jonathan: Themselves. 

Maureen: Ha! 

Jonathan: So to unpack that a bit, it’s almost impossible to look at our own logic, and especially to see the structure underneath it. It’s like trying to look in the back of your own head while you’re looking forward in a mirror. And it isn’t because we’re lazy or not willing. It’s a structural thing. 

It’s the lens that we’re looking through, not what we look at. What you’re able to notice about what’s going on out there, how you interpret it, make sense of it, is constrained by what’s going on inside you, [00:02:00] how you access it, how it’s organized, how you deployed, and how you feel about it. 

So you fix the outside, run it back through the same filter, and get this variation on the same result, as you said. We did a study in a large organization where we were doing a lot of coaching with, and I interviewed nine of the coaches, and one of them made a really good observation. They said the clients would tend to argue their way around their self-observations. So they could notice things about themselves, but they would justify it or argue about it. 

And they said, the more you try keeping them in this kind of emotional space where it’s uncomfortable, the faster the solutions and quick fixes come. And that’s the reflex. We reach to fix what’s making us uncomfortable. 

 And it’s the same reflex that then redesigns the process. It’s not a decision. It’s a way of [00:03:00] getting rid of an uncomfortable feeling. 

Maureen: The term we’ve used in the past is meaning-making. In our decision velocity, it’s sense-making. Presented with the same set of data or same situation, if we put a group of several executives in a room, we will certainly make sense differently based on our life experiences. That is a given. But the level of maturity is the facet we often don’t index on. 

Jonathan: Yes. There is so much that we assume that others share our world and the way we see it, how we make sense of it, and we basically expect others to read our minds, and we think we’re reading their minds, and the degree of actual shared meaning is generally less than assumed. 

Maureen: Elliott Jaques made the [00:04:00] argument about putting decisions where they belong. The decisions may be placed where they should be on the org chart, but the humans occupying those roles don’t have the capability that you’ve talked about.  

Jonathan: Part of the question is, how much time do you invest in adjusting what? Because it’s self-serving navel-gazing if all you ever do is try and improve yourself. You need to also look externally and do things in the world. And one of my phrases for a lot of this work is, well, regime change begins at home. So if you want change in the organization, in your team, in whatever, go first. That’s what leading is. And going First often means some hard work about questioning your own assumptions, questioning how you make sense. But [00:05:00] it can also be that you may have gotten into the position you’re in and have the responsibilities you have without encountering the prerequisites that you needed to build the sub-skills. 

I listened to another podcast this morning, and this person did very similar work to what Eliot Jacques did, and he said, “Yeah, if you don’t have the experience in a given domain and then you’re promoted and have to coordinate with people in those domains, you tend to oversimplify the complexity of what they bring to the table and try to make it fit in your needs.” What else are you gonna do? You haven’t been in their shoes. You don’t know the richness of their world and all the complexities of it, so you make shortcuts. You haven’t built up the robustness of sense-making about what are the connections between how does what marketing knows that the [00:06:00] consumer wants affect production and how you’re building the widget. 

Maureen: Let’s take the five failures senior leadership teams actually complain about: the signal nobody saw; the leadership team that agrees in the room and diverges; the decision that escalates a couple of levels beyond where it should sit; the multi-year problem being run as a quarterly clock; and the review meeting that produces no learnings. You said that each of those has a developmental signature underneath. 

Jonathan: Yes. Let’s take a deep breath because I had a lot of fun digging into these and looking at how the dominoes fall, let’s say. And you start in the right place, signal blindness. Brene Brown quotes Wittgenstein, ” The limits of your language are the limits of your world.” The signature of this blindness is what I would call undifferentiated perception. You have a [00:07:00] rich environment of signals, but you notice certain ones for a variety of reasons. You could say, “The client is upset.” Okay, a not uncommon thing. But that’s a single label, and that word “upset” is doing an enormous amount of hiding. Are they frustrated with their own limitations? Are they angry because you missed an expectation? Are they anxious about something upstream in their world you know nothing about? Are they ashamed? 

Those are four different types of situations that need four different responses, and “upset” gives you none of them. So you respond to the simple story, the quick label that, ” Okay, I’ll do something about it.” And I think about this with an example from popular culture and my own experience. 

So I’ve been enjoying watching Clarkson’s Farm. Jeremy Clarkson was famous from “Top Gear,” the auto [00:08:00] show, but he owns a farm in England, and one of the top shows on Amazon is about him on his farm. I have a farming background, so I could relate a lot to this. Now, Jeremy Clarkson is very intelligent and very confident in his domain of cars. And he walks onto his farm, and he has a farm manager, Caleb, who is a local guy who just kinda showed up and they say, “Oh, hey, do you want this role instead of somebody else?” They’re a great character pair. But Jeremy Clarkson walks onto the farm and looks at things, and he has cool ideas, but he doesn’t actually understand what’s going on. Caleb sees nuance. He sees small signals. Jeremy’s not stupid. Now, I spent 20 years around pigs. I could notice something, a person looks in and says, “Oh, that pig doesn’t look right.” I could say, “Well, the ears are [00:09:00] sitting strange,” or, “Look, it’s laying funny,” or, “Its breathing is weird.” Those are different responses that allow me to intervene in more specific, contextually appropriate ways. So this isn’t just about being intelligent. It’s about building distinctions by noticing things from experience over years. So every leader is like Jeremy Clarkson somewhere, and often this is in places where it matters: reading the room, reading the team, reading a client, reading those subtle body signals and the energy in the room and making it concrete and distinct, so they can walk in with real authority and confidence. 

But confidence isn’t a substitute for being able to see distinct signals. They see the team’s a bit flat or the client’s gone quiet, and they act on that label at scale with authority. So if you’re not making distinctions [00:10:00] and differentiating things, you can’t act on a more rich understanding, and you’re taking a big sledgehammer to something you need a fine-tuned fork for. 

Maureen: That sounds like it coupled both sensing, “I notice,” but also sense making. So that pig looks sick, but I can say, “Here are the distinctions about sick that are relevant.” 

Jonathan: Yeah. I did a lot of, workshops with clients, and you’re in there in a room, and you can think, “Ah, I’m noticing signals.” You know, We took photos once of a group, and somebody was sitting there with his arm back , and we were talking about body language, and we put it up, and everybody laughed. 

“Oh, he’s disengaged.” But he said, ” Well, actually, I was highly reflective, and my modality for being reflective is to pull myself in and reflect.” And so how we made sense was by a [00:11:00] stereotype. If people have closed arms and are leaning back, they’re disengaged. No, that was actually misreading, misinterpreting, and not making the right sense, so the action we could have taken would’ve been wrong. 

Maureen: I often sit with my arms back and above my head. That actually means I’m paying attention. When I’m looked forward, I may be multitasking.  

Jonathan: Now, that’s one type of example, but there are hundreds of signals that leaders are being asked to pick up on, and if you have very coarse grain filters for what gets through, then you can miss those kind of weak signals that are really important. 

That’s the first one. The second one then is this misalignment, and the easiest way to look at this, for instance, is one leader in the room be looking at the situation saying “There’s a tension between three different [00:12:00] departments, and I see how the policy and incentives and culture and structure are all shaping this tension.” And another leader in the same meeting is looking at that and saying, “Who made the mistake?” Neither of them are stupid. They’re not disagreeing about facts. They’re attending to and making sense of different objects, and those facts don’t resolve it. 

So the cost is people may end up using language that allows them to agree and take action, but they turn around and operationalize it according to their own sense-making. 

Maureen: One of the phrases I find helpful is Kegan’s “over their heads.” We may talk above people because we have an area of expertise. 

Jonathan: In relation to Kegan’s notion of being in over our heads, so you talk about escalation bottlenecks. A decision may exceed what the owner of it [00:13:00] can hold. They can be in over their heads . They’re asked to coordinate three different parts of the business into a synthesized thing and report up to their boss and give them the quick, simple answer that they can act on. It’s not that easy. So people can be overwhelmed by how many considerations, but also by the politics or by their own second job, as Kegan and Lahey talk about: self-protection. So there’s an internal job going on. How do I make sure I don’t look stupid or I please the boss? And then escalation: it’s a rational response to that overwhelm. It isn’t weakness. It’s offloading and saying, “You haven’t given me the adequate support or understanding to actually make this decision.” 

So we did this whole session for these clients where they were given strategy from the CEO and [00:14:00] told, “Okay, how do you make this operational for your team?” 

Wow, did people struggle with this. Because you are having to translate, and so that translation takes time. One client we have has tried to address this with behavioral expectations to guide managers. It’s a very sensible thing to do, right? So one of them: take smart risks. Wow, who’s gonna disagree, right? Let’s unpack it. Smart according to whom? Risk of what kind? At what level? Who carries the burden if it goes wrong? There are so many implicit expectations, relationships, of sets of skills buried in three words. So the team spends two weeks trying to figure out what it means in their context, and little by little, it gets drifted up, and the decision and execution delays because people need time to figure out, “What are we [00:15:00] supposed to do and how are we gonna be okay with it?” 

Maureen: And back to your self-protection. I want to do a good job. Yeah.  

Jonathan: And another example is: decision velocity. Enable impactful and fast decision-making. Great behavioral expectation, but it’s two constructs, and the word doing the work is fast. 

Because fast means you’ve gotta stop seeking consensus. You’ve gotta stop doing alignment. You’ve got to take the risk that I know enough when you know you don’t, and of course, that’s what leaders are often say we’re paid for. The trade-off that is consequential is the decision is a hit in the dark. Even when there is an error, how do you sort the signal from the noise? 

So what you do is you learn from the noise. So the whole thing circle back all to this sense-making of what signals can we perceive? What distinctions can [00:16:00] we make? 

Maureen: So Selecting the right signals, ’cause we’re surrounded by way too many signals.  

Jonathan: And several distinctions and perspectives that need to be coordinated, the synthesizing. But integration cannot outstrip differentiation. If you cannot make a distinction between things, you can’t synthesize them. 

You can’t put them together. 

What I see often is there’s this undifferentiated sense of something that you give a label to and try to take action on or whatever, but what you’re really doing is oversimplifying and downwardly assimilating, because somebody clever used a word for that, and you picked it up in a journal or an article or on a podcast like this, you didn’t do the work of building all the things that term actually means to work properly. It resonates, it fits, and it names something [00:17:00] relevant, but it’s really hard to act on. So what happens is you often cut off all the edges of things you don’t know, and you grab the part that you can fit. You assimilate it into your own sense-making and act on it as if it is what you make of it. But it actually means something much more. 

Maureen: And that’s really hard to navigate ’cause we also have to do that to a degree or we would never get out of bed in the morning, right? There’s just too much to think about, and even with AI, there’s not enough hours in the day to plug all this stuff in. now let’s shift gears. How do we measure this? I think we all have a sense, but again, our sense isn’t always accurately tuned, and you’ve done extensive research on measurement. 

Jonathan: Yes, and that’s such a can of worms to open up. One thing I would say is, of course, the urge to [00:18:00] measure in itself is a decision and a choice that carries costs. 

Maureen: Ja 

Jonathan: So a quick story. A, a colleague of mine was taking one of our assessments and reviewing it with a person, and this person was asked, “Well, have you ever been asked to do more complex work?” “No.” ” Well, maybe then your thinking hasn’t developed in these ways because nobody’s ever given you the challenge to do the work that would develop that.” So that’s one caveat around this. The next is one of the things that we’re doing is looking at giving this as feedback, not as measurement. 

What we’re doing is training agents to interview a person. We’re asking a person, “Describe your role. Is it a good fit for you? You know, are you bored, stressed, adequately stimulated? [00:19:00] What’s something you did that you’re really proud of? What did you learn from it?” It’s psycholinguistic. It’s you trying to observe behavior by how are people talking about what they think about, what they would do. 

So what we’re able to do is say, “Here’s your baseline of where you function at, and maybe under stress, how does it vary? And here’s the peak. Here’s the strengths you have emerging.” And we can do this across all the different rubrics so that what people can get is: here’s your peak strengths that you can start building on. Here’s maybe some blockers. And then support them with learning loops, we call them, structured ways for them to work on that skill in their everyday work. So 

Maureen: Why now? 

Jonathan: Yeah. I did this article a long time ago for a magazine in Australia. It’s like: take time to make time. Meg Wheatley actually said this [00:20:00] once, ” When everything is the most hectic and most chaotic, our urge is to fight the fires,” right? We gotta put ’em out. 

The most important thing to do: stand still. 

To show clients David Wagner’s poem Loss. “Stand still, the forest knows where you are. It find you.” 

And this is back to the first issue of not having this signal blindness, is when there’s all this pressure and all these things, the fog rolls in. 

We’re stressed. We can’t hold things adequately. Our emotions are churned up. We look for the simple solution. And so even just taking a breath. One of your questions, what would a leader do? What’s one simple thing? You’re not gonna run out and do an assessment right away. My advice would be next [00:21:00] time you’re in a situation like this, stop and ask one question that you don’t already know the answer to, and then stop talking and don’t rescue the silence. 

Maureen: So that is for our leaders, what do I do in the next 30 days? 

Jonathan: Look upstream. Before the next redesign, spend a session on how did we get to where we are? Because we’ve become the prisoner of our own thinking. It’s not that we did things wrong, But we made judgments. We made decisions based on limited information, and we didn’t have time to stop and bookmark those things to circle back to. it’s critical. If you don’t circle back, you’ll make the same mistake again. 

So looking upstream is saying, “Yeah, why are we sorting out all this garbage in the river here? Let’s go upstream and see where it came from. Maybe there’s something simple we can do there. [00:22:00] If we just try to look at the symptoms now, we’re just gonna create more complicated machinery for it.” 

Maureen: I absolutely agree, and one of the pieces I am continually reminding clients now is we have had so much change that what made sense even two or three years ago doesn’t apply right now. 

Jonathan: No, and so this is where Scharmer’s presencing, pre-sensing what wants to emerge from the future was based on exactly that, that as things change faster and faster, being able to develop strategy by taking the momentum from the past and projecting into the future, that breaks down. 

So how do we get past our signal blindness, our own biases, our limits of our perception, and open up to be able to hear more from more people, hear different perspectives, and question our assumptions, question the filters that we’re using to run things [00:23:00] on? 

Maureen: Questioning our thinking, questioning our filters. So what you’ve described today is uncomfortable for many of us, including me, because it means more change internally while I am paddling as fast as I can to deal with the external. 

Jonathan: What we’re not trying to do is help people feel better. What we’re trying to do is help people be better at feeling. Able to sit with and be present to that discomfort will allow you to learn from the signals it’s giving you. 

Maureen: I love that because if we are paying attention for most of us as senior leaders, it is really uncomfortable a lot of days. 

Jonathan: And being able to get past the initial reflex to lower the discomfort, to offload the work, to do whatever. When we do that, we get signal blindness because we filter out all the [00:24:00] data that’s available there. 

Maureen: So it is sensing and sensemaking both. We’re coming back to those. The decision velocity work looks at sensing, sensemaking, sense giving, how… 

Once we’ve made sense of it, how do we share that with others? 

Jonathan: How do we have the adequate language to communicate and translate at multiple levels of understanding? 

Maureen: Which I think is crucial. It’s not just telling or even having a session, but it is acknowledging that different people in the room will have a different capacity and addressing those gifts and limitations concurrently. 

Jonathan: Different histories and associations that leads them to interpret the meaning and sense of a term differently. 

Maureen: Then from there we share a sense of something, then I make decisions, then I act and execute, and then back to that learning and [00:25:00] adaptation, building the learning loops that people can actually learn from. 

Jonathan: And this is the phrase from Alex Pattakos wrote the book ” Prisoners of Our Thoughts. ” You’re acting and executing within the prison of your own sensing and sense making. 

Maureen: And the invitation then is how do we expand our own limitations? 

Jonathan: Yeah. How do we get out of jail? 

Maureen: And most of us don’t feel like we’re in jail. How do we just transcend where we are? 

Jonathan: We bump against the bars and walls of our cell when things don’t go the way we expected, basically. and that every time that happens, it’s a signal error, and it’s information that we can learn and adapt from, but it requires building the skills and habits to do that so that it becomes second nature and natural, and the [00:26:00] institutional support systems and norming of those kind of behaviors. 

Maureen: Yes. Your organization and our organization exist to help leaders, leadership teams, and boards find where in the cycle they’re losing ground. Because for each of our listeners, there’s gonna be a different place, and then design systems that restore the quality and the speed of their decisions and their capacity to act and their learning from that action. 

Jonathan: I spent two and a half days with a group once, and they had four tasks to do. And we spent all but the last two hours not doing those tasks. Doing the sensing and sense making and aligning and deep and widening their perspectives. And when it came time to act, it fell out like that. It was clean. It was clear. 

They knew what to do because they’d [00:27:00] done that. So we think we’re wasting time on all this stuff, but actually it makes it so much more efficient and effective because you’re looking at the right things and all the noise is sorted out. You’re working on the signal. 

Maureen: Thank you, Jonathan, for sharing your wisdom yet again. I so appreciate both Jonathan and our listeners who find this both intellectually interesting, but are also thinking about how do I put this into action in my organization today. So thank you for listening, and please like and share us. 

Jonathan: Happy to be here. Thanks, Maureen and Dan 

Maureen: Thank you.