Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Maureen: [00:00:00] Today we are recording live from the International Leadership Association Conference in Atlanta, and I am joined by Mike Hardy. He’s the founding Director for the Center for Trust, peace and Social Relations at Cary University in the uk. So why does that fit in a leadership conference?

Mike: In my travels and in my passion to promote the issues of trust in the contemporary turbulence that we have.

I travel widely and, uh, we’re welcomed all over the place. And I traveled to Phoenix, Arizona and I met amazing Professor Mansour Vidan at the Thunderbird School. And we just spent a morning discussing how his work in cultural difference and global mindset in how people can be very, very closed in their perspectives and

Maureen: mm-hmm.

Mike: And my work. It just worked really well. And about, uh, six months later, and it happens like this, I had a call to say, Mike, you know, why don’t you have [00:01:00] a look at the ILA, have a look at the International Leadership Association. Get involved. We’d love you to, to think about being on the board. Well, this is really bizarre ’cause it, I’m not a leadership scholar, but you know what, um, I suppose the telling thing for me was that both Mansor and Cynthia Cherry, the president mm-hmm.

Which is very clear. We we’re interested in the ILA. In leadership. Mm-hmm. So we need scholars, we need practitioners, we need teachers, consultants, coaches, but we also need leaders. That was their sell. That was their pitch. Mike. They’re a great leader. Whether I’m or not is irrelevant. Well, you’re perceived by people in the field who of leadership.

Sure. And the more I’ve been involved now without savvy leaders, we’re stuck. It is going to be leadership, which changes. So the world we’re in, as I’ve said to you, and I get boring, is a real mess. And part of the reason for that mess, I believe, is that the quality of our leaders is, you know, just a bit lacking.

Maureen: We have the same mantra. Well, and for me, the [00:02:00] idea of innovating how we lead, yeah. We innovate our mass transit, we innovate our light bulbs, yet the people doing the work of leadership are not innovating themselves at the same rate. They’re innovating the stuff.

Mike: That’s right. And it’s not just big leaders Right At the top.

The, the notion and I’ve, I’ve learned very quickly. The ILA is really interested in mobilizing the concept of leadership at all levels. So lead self? Yes. So you are a leader? I’m a leader. Mm-hmm. But also our juniors are leaders. Mm-hmm. People of the new generations are leaders and we can empower small people.

Mm-hmm. Not pejoratively small, but small people, because short runs they’re to be leaders. Mm-hmm. To lead us after this mess. Then my good friend, um, Irish Sha, who’s also written a lot about followship. Mm-hmm. And how, you know, we need to take stock of how we follow as well as how we lead. Mm-hmm. And we’ve heard great keynotes at this particular conference, which is stress to us.

[00:03:00] The, the importance of, of listening, the importance of dialogue. And that’s, that’s mainstream, the work I do in my pre study center.

Maureen: Just thinking of, of followership and the idea that our model has seven competencies for leader 2050, and one of them is inspiring followership. Yeah. And part of that is knowing when I need to follow, right?

When I’m in a room with someone who’s significantly more competent in an area, even though I may be the formal leader, they step in and that’s as it should be.

Mike: But the power of that person is limited unless our followers. Enter this dialogue and enter the discussion. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Knowing they’re leave as leaders.

I have to say I disagree sometimes with Ara about the, the power of follow followship. I understand it conceptually. Mm-hmm. But I want us to move really quickly. We have in, in my center, I have 70 academics. We have a very flat structure. Okay. I hope I’m an inspirational leader. I. They give me the authority to lead because I deliver to them the [00:04:00] space to be excellent.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that relationship, but I don’t, I don’t see them as followers. I see them as leaders in their own. Right. Right. Yeah. And the, the best leaders are those who create other leaders. I. And who empower and ENT trust and so forth.

Maureen: Mm-hmm. Well, and then the other is we lead differently with different groups.

Mike: Yeah.

Maureen: So you lead differently there than you probably have in other places in

Mike: life. Yeah, I think so. And I think, I mean, when I was in the foreign service, I was in a bureaucracy of public. A public bureaucracy of civil service. Mm-hmm. Very hierarchical.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: Um, and it was really difficult to, to do what I’m describing.

Mm-hmm. This empowering, this entrusting, this enabling. Um, but we did it anyway because that’s, you know, because you do that well, what you let the, uh, the legacy of years of, uh, civil service get in the way.

Maureen: Well, a actually, I did an interview recently, one of the pieces of work I do, um, as a student of Jim Rican, he has a, um, he’s an adjunct researcher at Harvard and [00:05:00] we evaluate, uh, pockets within organizations.

And what we found is what we, he evaluates organizations large and small and, and my client was a small organization within a large one. Mm-hmm. And, and what we’re seeing is. Pockets led by people who are progressive can be highly vibrant, even if the organization is relatively sick.

Mike: Yeah.

Maureen: So let’s get to your passion though.

Okay. Let’s talk What? What do you

Mike: wanna share? When I entered this, this funnier world, that’s all. It’s very, you need to make a difference. Mm-hmm. You need to leave a summit implant, you know, it’s this footprint in the sand. Mm-hmm. And the sea comes very quickly and wash it away. Mm-hmm. What my passion is, is that that.

I believe that the 21st century is a relationship age. Okay? And that unless we look more carefully at behavior within relationships, we’re gonna miss several plots. Okay? So when I look at relationships, I analyze, I think this difference [00:06:00] between the forces of prejudice in the world and the forces for pluralism in a nutshell.

So I want to mobilize. Understanding mobilize scholarship. Mm-hmm. And practice that promotes pluralism promotes our comfort as people to live in complex, diverse communities and live peacefully.

Maureen: And why as a leader should I care about that? I have my own point, but I’m curious.

Mike: Sure. Because without these basic behavioral.

Things going on. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Without people stepping up and presenting themselves as comfortable in a difficult, complex, plural world. Mm-hmm. Leaders will spend all their time regulating, all their time policing, creating frameworks in which mm-hmm. They would set behaviors. Mm-hmm. So we’ll have a, a top down world of rules and regulations that keep us safe rather than that bottom up world of behaviors that keep us safe.

Mm-hmm. Now, which is gonna be the better and more effective. Which is gonna be the, the least [00:07:00] cost effective way of doing it. Basically, you and I have not met long, long time. We are very different people. We can sit and have a good relationship and you can start to be judgmental, to put up barriers to say, well, you know, she’s talks funny.

She’s got this funny accent, and she comes from this funny place called the United States and Mike’s very stiff and formal. You know, if, if we mobilize aspects of our identity mm-hmm. To create difference. Rather than to mobilize aspects of identity to be comfortable. Mm-hmm. With the space that difference needs when I’m a loser, basically,

Maureen: we both have an economics background.

Mm-hmm. So what comes to me is that by rejecting or distancing myself from people I go to diversity, but specifically a lot of what’s happening in our world right now, I’m limiting the number of perspectives I can accept into my organization. Yeah. So if we. Not that we can legally eliminate people, [00:08:00]but certainly through behaviors, either we don’t hire or we make people uncomfortable.

Yeah. And distance them, even if we don’t have policies. Those people that have different things on their heads or wear scarves or do something seems scary and. So we don’t include them then. My population is smaller. Yeah. And I’m eliminating a large percentage of the PO of the world global population.

Yeah. One of our conversations yesterday was with AJ talking about migration. Hmm. So, so as we’re having the conversation, I’m thinking more global. If a listener is sitting in Columbus, Ohio where I live, it’s also about do I reject people from Michigan, the other football team? Sure. And am I eliminating folks that are bright because they’re different either in the external physical features or something about their perspective?

Mike: So in your At the moment, we have what, what the media calls and politicians a crisis of migration. Mm-hmm. We’ve got a [00:09:00] crisis of refugees, millions of people, not small numbers. Mm-hmm. Fleeing the most appalling conflict. And doing what you and I would do, seeking safety for your family. It’s very, very simple.

A basic need. A basic need. Yeah. The consequence of which is that we now have a crisis. Now what’s the nature of the crisis? And it’s very interesting. The nature of the crisis is how do these million or so millions to 2.6, I think it is millions of people in Europe who arrived in Europe. This is just in Europe, not those that are still stuck in Lebanon or Jordan.

Mm-hmm. How do we. Integrate them. How do we accept them? Mm-hmm. How do we welcome them? When the world generally finds prejudice, much easier to do. Like these guys are taking my jobs, they’re taking my health services. Mm-hmm. They’re taking my school places. Mm-hmm. And it’s very easy for you to see how the forces for prejudice can be mobilized.

So the real crisis in Europe is not large numbers of migrants. It is, how do we cope as a people with absorbing, [00:10:00] with welcoming? How do we create the space in Europe, which we have to allow these people, uh, refuge? Um, do you know the research we’re doing in my center, the scholarship just to be boring with it?

Is one of the first major studies of discussions with led by Professor Crawley, who’s amazing. And what her project has done is spoken to five or 600 refugees as they arrive on beaches in Malta, in Italy, in Greece.

Maureen: Mm-hmm. As

Mike: they arrive with their cl into their families, they’re all their possessions probably in their hand and as they arrive, and they’ve lost people on the way because thousands die on the, on the travel.

So it’s a pretty traumatic. But she asked a question among many others in those interviews about what did you bring with you? Mm. When you left Aleppo. When you left Mosul. When you left Eritrea. Mm-hmm. And you got on this journey of securing safety and it’s really interesting. What would you think people would bring with them?

Family. Yeah. You bring people, you know, your kids, the door key. [00:11:00] Oh, wow. Big thing, isn’t it? So, wow. So when in Europe we worry about, as we should about how to accommodate how to mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Can we afford them realize these people aren’t coming as, as interventionists. They aren’t coming as, as migrants who tend to stay.

They’re coming because they can’t go out. And I think what we are learning is that. If we dealt with the drivers of the movement mm-hmm. Rather than the movement. Mm-hmm. What’s the causes of people moving in this mass transit way? Um, we’d be better off, and I think if we could solve and create safe communities, people would go home.

Just as I do, you know? Mm-hmm. Just as I go home, you know, I go home because it’s great. It’s my base and it’s safe, and it’s secure, and I can rest. And your people are

Maureen: there, right?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely.

Maureen: As a researcher, as someone who runs the center, what are the things that you want people to hear about how we create a more peaceful world?

Mike: It’s a really big ask. [00:12:00] Coming up with solutions is always hard, but I think there are a few simple things that mm-hmm. My experiences and my journey. You know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had a very mixed career and I’ve reached a place where some really strange people have given me the responsibility for developing the center for and being inspirational, but I think there are some really very simple wins.

Maureen: Okay.

Mike: Um, at the moment I’m doing research personally, and I’m writing more and more about identity. It’s about who I am, who you are, who you think I am, who I think you think I am. Mm-hmm. You know, this is because this is the business of relationships largely in our contemporary world. That we present ourselves in a certain way, in the way that we want to be seen and, and met.

Yeah.

Maureen: And that’s also, we present ourselves to ourselves. Yes. Right. I look in the mirror. Yeah. And do I see someone who’s kind, or do I see someone who’s just, and sometimes those go on the continuum of I’m protecting my family from those Yeah. Versus I’m [00:13:00] welcoming precious souls. Yeah.

Mike: So if you go back to, we talked about a minute ago.

Mm-hmm. I’m interested in this battle between the forces of prejudice and the forces of pluralism. I think we don’t help ourselves. By creating too much focus on who we are and our identity. So my campaign at the moment, and it’s very small and it’s very and so forth, is to say, can we not move from who I am to how I behave?

Can we not move you from who you are? And when you look in the mirror and describe yourself, yourself and get comfortable in yourself, challenge yourself about how you behave rather than who you are. So I’ve, I’ve looked a lot at the, uh, at the current understanding of identity.

Maureen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mike: The politics of identity, the power that seems to be pervasive in the literature of multiple identities.

Mm-hmm. So we have Irish Americans, African Americans, we have Jewish British, we have Muslim Europeans, we have European Muslims. And all these I find are [00:14:00] creating more problem for us mm-hmm. In this, in this great prejudice world that we find so easy. You and I talked yesterday about these, these emotional drivers that we have that you and I need to belong.

This is really powerful. Mm-hmm.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: But we also need to be different and it’s, those two things I think are at the source of difficult relations. And I want to change those to be part of peaceful relations if my need to be tribal and to belong mm-hmm. To a civilization that I present and show you.

I’m a white male, if that’s a problem, if I problematize it and create it as a difference to you. Mm-hmm. Because I’m a white woman from exactly a different continent.

Maureen: Yeah,

Mike: you are a former colonist, you know, so former colony. Um, yeah, you were the colonist, so, yeah. But, so, um, but you’re a colonist of different kinds now, so Yeah, so Exactly.

So the work I’ve done recently, um. Is to look at how I can challenge [00:15:00] this notion of multiple identities, these hybrid identities. That was the,

Maureen: put it, put the identities in the drink shaker and

Mike: yeah. So I’ve come, I came up with this notion of trying, how do you get quickly to the point, instead of being laborious, labor boring, A can be this notion of cocktail.

Mm-hmm. Identity. Mm-hmm. So when you go to a cocktail bar, whether it’s a cocktail or a mocktail, it doesn’t matter. You create a single drink from a multiplicity of bits and pots. Mm-hmm. And that’s what we are as people. So I can describe to you all the things, the, the clubs, the, the tribes that I belong to.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This notion of belonging. So I support Majesty United, the soccer team. I’m a white male. I’m a, I’m a, I’m an old fogey, you know, so I’m, I’m from a baby boomer times. Mm-hmm. And I have grandchildren. I’m an academic, I live in London. Mm-hmm. I live in the first world as opposed to someone else.

So I have a wonderful wife of, of many, many years. And so I have all these things which I can lay out. I. Before you. Mm-hmm. And you can be [00:16:00] comfortable with me if you are comfortable with lots of those things. Mm-hmm. If there’s a few that really make you uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. Like I’m a jihadist terrorist, for example, if that was on my label, or Yeah.

If you said terrorist, it’d be a different conversation, you know, all of a sudden. There would be the boundaries between us would, would be erected. Mm-hmm. And quite correctly, you’d be anxious because that’s your need to belong to your tribe. And this is really quite an alien guy that’s sitting across from me.

So how do we change that? Will we change that by my trying to present myself as Mike as a single complex? Person, not a multiplicative identities. I can mobilize some parts of which I go to a soccer match and I, I wear red and I’m y it’s this side, or mm-hmm. The other night it was the Cubs and the Indians.

You know, I became a Cubs fan because I was in a cluster of Cubs fan. Mm-hmm. And I thought, well, you know, if you sport the other side because you like the color of their shirt, then you might get into trouble tonight because, you know. But actually on a, on a serious note, I want to mobilize [00:17:00]our priority on how we behave.

Let’s try and shift the emphasis away from who we are to how we behave. I dunno, when you were a mum or when I was a dad, whether you had on, on the refrigerator door, a little chart for your kids. I don’t have children, so I I did not just, just go with, I’ll go with it. Yeah. So I’ve seen these, we didn’t use ’em at home, but there was these little behavior charts.

Oh, you know what I did, you know, and if you, if you’ve eaten your brussel sprouts or you’ve eaten your vegetables and so forth, you get a little tick, and if you’ve done your homework, you get a little tick.

Maureen: I actually implemented those with someone who I was helping raise a daughter, and because it, it helped us.

Reinforce behaviors and make visible exactly something that was otherwise not able to track.

Mike: So what’s, and this for me is a very simple sort of metaphor to use what’s on my behavior chart or yours. Mm-hmm. And what it should be. So let me, let me start by, when you meet someone new, do you [00:18:00] focus on understanding them or do you focus on making judgements?

You have a choice. Normally we are encouraged in our society mm-hmm. To take a stand, to take a position mm-hmm. To make a judgment. And normally our first judgments then are really, are reformed the more we get to know them. Mm-hmm. So the, and this is reinforced in the literature mm-hmm. Of course with work on psychology and ingroup and outgroups mm-hmm.

And how the ingroups create very strong boundaries. Mm-hmm. And how outgroups

Maureen: find difficult and so forth. So how much of that is ingrained. Neurologically, I see someone walking down the street. It’s late at night. I look to scan to see if I’m safe.

Mike: Well, the neurology is about self-defense. Yes. It’s about preservation.

Mm-hmm. It’s your instincts for that. You will protect your family or protect yourself and those that you care about. But socialization allows us to counter that. Okay. Allows us to learn behavior. Mm-hmm. That is more conducive to peaceful relations. Okay. So this is when you are on your soapbox Of [00:19:00] course.

So I want to encourage people to think understanding before judgment. Okay. The best lesson I had, which let, let me describe it to you and, and come with me. I know you’re not, you’re not a mom yet, but the great difference between my children and my grandchildren. I have one grandson, he’s five and a half.

He’s my best mate. And one of the reasons I analyze why is it that we have such fun together and we have a completely different relationship than I had with my children, who I also have very strong relationship with. Mm-hmm. Is ’cause I don’t need to have judgment as part of that relationship as much.

Mm-hmm. So we go and jump in puddles. We get into trouble with his mom together, you know, and that’s because we have a relationship where we are seeking to understand each other. Mm-hmm. That’s the priority I’m seeking to learn from him. He might be fine, but he’s an enormous resource. Mm-hmm. And clearly he can, he, he is always learning.

All the people around are influential. So we have a relationship that’s driven by understanding rather than by judgment. And I, it was very powerful to me. [00:20:00] So that’s the first behavior. How can you do that? Secondly, how do you cope with difference? Have you thought about this? Do you work at it? Many of us don’t.

There was a, a wonderful sequence in a very old movie, the first Star Wars movie that most people have seen, and in that George Lucas I think, had this amazing scene. They were in a bar. The context of the scene was this bar full of really strange animals. Oh. As you know, the scene. Yeah. And they were coming, they sat and they were discussing mm-hmm.

The next part of the scene. Mm-hmm. So the movie was actually focusing on their dialogue, but behind them was this plethora of really bizarre people. And difference wasn’t an important thing in that bar. It seemed completely ignored. Exactly. That’s my sort of thing. Mm-hmm. I have in this head. Can we get a world in which, when a black person, when an Asian person, when a hooded person comes into the room mm-hmm.

When a, a nikal, fully veiled Muslim woman comes in mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That we don’t take an intake of breath or win a beard or win a rock [00:21:00] sack or when, you know. Mm-hmm. And actually we, we look at coping with that difference in a different way. We don’t have to like people of difference. We don’t have to agree with them.

Mm-hmm. We don’t need to set out to persuade them to be like us. Mm-hmm. We don’t have to assimilate them, but we need to give them space. We need, we need the ability in our behavior to create space for difference.

Maureen: I have attended a Unitarian church for a time now and, and I should never quote religious doctrine ’cause we’ll get it wrong.

But what I took away and why I selected this space, and it may be just that church within the denomination is the, the mantra that we, we cannot have peace in the world until we learn to respect the other. Yeah. Understand and respect. I don’t have, to your point, I don’t have to like, I don’t have to convert to,

Mike: that’s right.

Maureen: But I have to appreciate that your view is different than mine and it is an appropriate choice for you. Yeah. And getting out of them that colonization. Yeah. Or [00:22:00] fear.

Mike: And it’s hard, you know? Mm-hmm. But if you ask me about behaviors, then I, I’d like to raise awareness about this so that we find it easier.

’cause it’s not, it’s very difficult. It’s tricky. And a lot of, uh, a lot of congregations in many different religions. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, they’re getting better and better as we, as we progress, but they are actually closed communities, A large number, you know, and that you belong to it. It’s very secure, very safe.

Your posture is amazing, mentor and helps you through the weak, but how much promotion is there? This notion that respect is a great word. Mm-hmm. I like that very much. Um. And it’s a, it’s a question of finding space for difference

Maureen: and this specific organization or, or, again, my little part of it seems to seek that out.

Yeah. It, it is. We have conversations with people who think differently. Yeah. And that’s the intent. Yeah. They’ve created a system or a structure around which differences are surfaced and are positive. Hmm.

Mike: We have to continually go, go [00:23:00] back to this notion that we need, we need. To belong, but we also need to be different.

But if you layer that in a world now in which, uh, mobility is normalized, and that’s, I think, part of the problem. We have not part of the, the nature of the challenges that we face. So now we live in a really connected and interdependent world. Mm-hmm. You sneeze in one country and you catch a cold in another, the internet.

Um, social media, low cost travel. Plus the crises, that that allows millions of people to just walk to another place that’s safer. Mm-hmm. Means that our communities are becoming more and more diverse. You can’t build walls to prevent that. You can’t create boundaries and barriers. ’cause as we’ve seen in the world, people circumvent them.

Mm-hmm. The power of self preservation they just die circumventing from Yeah. You know, the research that I referred to earlier that we’re doing in Europe on the refugee and asylum seeker crisis mm-hmm. European governments are generally of the view that there are people [00:24:00] smugglers, gangs of criminals that are fueling this problem.

Um, and the research is very clear. It’s actually the borders, the, the lack of porousness in the borders, which is causing the problem, not the people smugglers. Most of the smugglers. Do you know that, um, about 90% of the migrants that were interviewed in Europe will tell you that at some part of their journey, they paid someone to help them.

Make the next step. Mm-hmm. So there’s an industry who are the smugglers? They’re not mafia gangs and organized criminals they are as well. Okay. They’re largely people from within the community. Mm. That are trying to help. It’s not a criminalized smuggling Okay. Industry simply it’s just the, the underground railroad kind of concept.

Yes. So, you know, you just get together and this guy knows someone over there and he can do this. Who’s providing all the life jackets for the mass, the millions of refugees sitting in. Robert denies crossing the Mediterranean. You thought about that? Well, people don’t think these were being bought by in large [00:25:00] quantities from factories in China.

They’re bringing imported, sold to migrants. These are once use life jackets. Wow. There’s a beach in in Greece you can go to where hundreds of thousands of life jackets are in a big mountain. So somebody should reuse that or resell. I don’t think they’ve got the, they’re not, not high quality to be reused.

They’re for ones only. Okay. And they’re like five or $10 each, but five or $10 when you have nothing. Yeah. We have a globalized market economy, which somehow has created a supply chain for life jackets for people, specifically people being smuggled. Yeah.

Maureen: Uh,

Mike: in a sense. We have a world where these issues, the issues we’re describing, and these forces for prejudice and forces for polaria are more critical now than ever before.

Mm-hmm.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: So. I live in London. I’m, I, I love London. It’s great. 47, 40 8% of people who live in London were born there, you know, really this is a, a hugely different place. Mm-hmm. I was talking to AJ recently that our African Indian ambassador who [00:26:00] said that he arrived in London the other day and he couldn’t recognize it.

It’s a very different city,

Maureen: and I grew up in the DC area. Yeah. Again, it’s hard growing up in an area where there is that much diversity. I grew up with an expectation that people are gonna look different.

Mike: So our behaviors, if they don’t adapt, mm-hmm. We have problems. So what happens when the nature of our community changes, not by design?

You know, there’s this wonderful sociologist that I often quote because he’s been really influential in my thinking. Harmit Rosa. He’s a German, and he describes the modern world as characterized by. An acceleration of change, never before. Has the pace of change been so quick? So it’s actually not the diversity that bothers you,

Maureen: it’s the fact that it happens so quickly.

The one I quote is Ray Kurzwell from a different lens. Yeah. Looking at the rate of technology change, so 20,000 times as much technology change. So we get to this now, people aren’t gonna die. We’ve got replacement organs that come out of printers [00:27:00]

Mike: and you know, when you look at the data. 32% of the people that came to this conference mm-hmm.

Will celebrate their hundredth birthday. This is really,

Maureen: really has changed, isn’t it? Yeah. So what do we do with diversity and just feeding people and the social contract. Yeah. And how many people think they’re gonna retire at 60? Yeah.

Mike: 70% of the people who reach the age of of a hundred will never have lived in an age without the internet.

So there’s another statistic, you know? Mm-hmm. And I, I love these things because they feature in my work on, on identity. Our identity is. It’s challenged so much by these big changes. You know, 150 years ago, there were an absolute number of photographs of images. The equivalent number created every two seconds now.

Maureen: Wow.

Mike: So every two seconds more pictures are taken than actually existed in total 150 years ago. I think we took a bunch of ’em last night. Yeah. On our phones. They didn’t exist back then. That’s right. So 9,000 images every two seconds on Snapchat. [00:28:00] So what is this saying? This is saying that the boundaries between our private space and our public space are just collapsing.

And so you can find out about me without this conversation, which I’m enjoying by going online. Mm-hmm. By interrogating social media.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Mike: Or by becoming my Facebook friend. You learn not just about how I think, but who I am, who I’m related to, and so forth. Mm-hmm. It’s a scary world, and in that world, we have to do what we can to promote this notion of.

Of floral. I was

Maureen: gonna say some of, especially the technology. If my mindset is acceptance and curiosity, you become less other. Yeah. Because I can learn about you and then I walk in, and this is just my friend Mike and Chelsea talked all about you yesterday. So I knew something about you and you were presented as a good guy and a smart guy and a friend

Mike: versus some, the one who was, you are preparing yourself for the social relations.

Mm-hmm. That you’re gonna follow. Mm-hmm. And you’re preparing in a normal way. Mm-hmm. It’s one that’s actually fueled by prejudice rather than acceptance. [00:29:00] And what you’ve done is you’ve relaxed all these barriers. Mm-hmm. Because you’ve got. Validation from others that you trust. Mm-hmm. It’s interesting, isn’t

Maureen: it, not to make this personal, but how would you change my behavior?

People who’ve listened to me for a while. I’m, I’m a bit liberal. I go to this unitarian church, those things. I value diversity, I value acceptance. And yet you’re pointing to something that’s not favorable.

Mike: It seems that we are conditioned in a way that, uh, that makes us look at the barriers and the differences.

Mm-hmm. Rather than the common humanity and the common purpose. Mm-hmm. And very quickly you can remove these and we can become comfortable. ’cause you have validation. I have this view that there are two or three really big things in the world that we get, that we understand is important and therefore we work at understanding them better.

Mm-hmm. Let’s take absolute poverty. Mm-hmm. Doesn’t matter where you are from.

Maureen: Yeah.

Mike: We get the fact that it’s unacceptable in the world to have the levels of poverty that we do. So the campaign and the [00:30:00] fight against poverty is a given. Mm-hmm. We are quite relaxed about it. We get worried sometimes that this is taking a lot of our tax dollars and so forth.

Mm-hmm. And that, but there are very, very few people that will tell you that poor people are poor because it is their fault. Very few people, we get the fact that poverty’s a problem and I hope more and more we mobilize to, to fight absolute poverty. Secondly, climate change, whether we’re. Into denial or not, whether we are scientists or not, we know that something’s going on and that climate change will threaten human kind.

Mm-hmm. So these two things. Poverty and climate don’t seem to be challenged. They seem, we struggle with them, but we accept that these are big things. Well, my mantra is that cultural difference is a third leg to this story. Ah, got it. Okay. It just is, it just is so cultural difference unless we cope with it in the same way that we fight poverty and the same way that we analyze the problems with climate and our destruction, this planet.

Mm-hmm. We’ll come and consume us and [00:31:00] we’ll be the death of us as a, as a humankind.

Maureen: Okay. So that’s a huge statement. Yeah.

Mike: Right. Which is why you are

Maureen: dedicating your life’s work to it. Yeah. Right. If we don’t get this under control and we live through climate change, yeah. Then this ability to navigate difference will kill us and

Mike: it will be this.

For me, the single most important problem that will, will cause us conflict. Mm-hmm. And if you look around the world at conflict, we used to think it was all about resources. Mm-hmm. So in the old Imperial days, yeah. We’d go and bully people. Mm-hmm. We take their resources and bring them back into our factories and so forth.

We still think it’s about oil, it’s about energy. Mm-hmm. ’cause it’s a scarce resource. And to a large extent it is. But increasingly what we’re seeing is that conflict is about the problem of difference. I’m not like you. And actually you have to change to be like me and then

Maureen: we can be comfortable. And we do that in our relationships too.

Yeah. In our homes. Yeah. How do I make this concrete? So I’m [00:32:00] listening to this interview, we’re coming to an end. We’ve got a few more minutes. What can I do? As a listener, what can I do as the person interviewing? If you and I run into this conference next year, I wanna report back what I have done to make difference, not only in those people out there, but in myself.

So go do I change. So go to the theme,

Mike: and I’m a really passionate supporter of the ILA. And let’s relate it to that. There’s a theme of this conference. Mm-hmm. This annual conference. Mm-hmm. 1300 people and many more watching that couldn’t make it. Mm-hmm. Is there’s a single word that’s really important and it’s inclusion.

Okay. Inclusive leadership. Mm-hmm. This is the theme. This is saying we have to step up now as people of influence if we have any. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And be inclusive rather than exclusive. Mm-hmm. So how do we include people in this journey? We do it as we are doing now. We, we talk about it incessantly and we encourage people to think more courageously mm-hmm.

About these challenges. I was referring to someone yesterday, it may have been you, and forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but [00:33:00] the. 2011, the census, the population census in Britain. Every 10 years we’d go out and have a look at our demography. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it’s really fascinating to look the fastest growing statistics.

Fastest changing statistics are mixed marriages. So these are new families being created by people of difference. Joining and having babies, and their babies will have babies. You know? So hopefully there will be a process of, uh, of integration of inclusion, which isn’t driven by leaders, but we can’t wait for that.

Mm-hmm. We can’t wait for, yeah. That’s generations out. Yeah. And, and younger generations find this space for difference much easier than older generations as well.

Maureen: So I’m in the spirit of making it concrete and making a public commitment. So you and I meet in Brussels next year. Yeah. Yeah. As a board member, you’re probably showing up.

Yeah. My commitment is to. Find in myself where I’m excluding. Hmm. When I see somebody and immediately make the assumption [00:34:00] I have to check and make sure they’re safe. Yeah. Within reason, I’m still gonna, when I’m walking down a dark street, not go hug the scary looking man down the way. Yeah.

Mike: But I have the same challenge in, in Brussels in London as I had in Atlanta here.

How many people are homeless? How many people knock on your car window asking for something? Mm-hmm. And how often do we prefer to keep the window up? Now, I’m not suggesting that we embrace all this openly without thinking because if you roll the window down, the security issues and so forth, but don’t pass a homeless person.

Don’t exclude in that way. Don’t make judgements.

Maureen: Mm-hmm. In fact, which we do. I used to live downtown by a park and I knew my homeless people. Yeah. And I would shop for them. Yeah. I, I wouldn’t give them alcohol, but I would give them food. Yeah. So I knew which ones preferred and, and I’m probably not balling that way.

So we have a difficult world, you know, in,

Mike: in mm-hmm. 2015 in the United Kingdom for the first time, the International Red Cross distributed food parcels. Mm-hmm. [00:35:00] In the uk. Oh, wow. What does that say? That says, somehow our system has excluded people. If we go to the voluntary sector to feed people, what on earth are we doing?

This is Africa, this is Asia. This is other places, not your mm-hmm. Your hometown. Yes. Yeah. It’s happen. And we, you know, the fastest growing industry in the United Kingdom in 2016 are food banks.

Maureen: And we’ve got a bunch of

Mike: them too. And you’ve got ’em too. So, so

Maureen: let’s we bring it back to closure. ’cause I want people to walk away with something concrete.

What can I

Mike: do? Self-examination. When you look in the mirror in the morning. Obviously worry about how you look ’cause that you know that will make you feel good. Good for person, yeah. Person self-esteem. But think also about how you and your behavior and your relationships might exclude. And then ask the question, why am I excluding?

And you, nine times outta 10, you won’t have an answer. It’ll just be because, well, that’s how we always did it. When you get into a lift, do you talk to people? Mm-hmm. Or do you look at [00:36:00] them and make judgements about them? Or do you, are you interested in them? It’s a hugely difficult transformation that we’re talking about.

Maureen: Well, on the lift, it’s safe, right? Yeah. They’re not gonna mug me. Yeah. We’re, we’re in a Hyatt, this is a start. Yeah. Right? For each of us changing one behavior. Yeah. The multiplicity across 7 billion people that matters

Mike: and recognize that the more. You seek to understand others. The more you understand how you exclude, the more influential or the better person you’ll be.

This is about making the world a better place after all.

Maureen: Thank you, Mike. This has just been a delight.