The Wisdom Wall

“I, I know so many leadership development programs where people are trying to get folks to kind of name their personal mission, or name their values, or be their own boss, or whatever. Thinking that that's kind of a, I don't know, like an information thing, like a thing you discover, like a thing that you Um, you just…”

“It actually means being able to see a world that's filled with grays and operate in that world anyway, and that's a developmental demand. It's not a skill. It's a thing we grow into.”

“Anybody who tells you they know what's going to happen next with the media or with professional services firms or in the tech industry or the insurance industry or whatever, like, those people are delusional. We don't know what's going to happen next. The thing that we know is it's going to be different from now, and…”

“You can see that you could switch out a whole bunch of people in the team and the disposition wouldn't change. It's not actually, um, any one person that brings that in. It's the, the collective of us and the way we engage.”

“Our general desire to collapse those two into one right answer, actually in complexity is unhelpful. We don't know what the right answer is until afterwards. We want to cultivate those two different perspectives. Let's hold on to both of them. Let's not resolve them.”

“A charismatic leader, when he walks into the room, or she walks into the room, makes you feel good about her or him, right? Like, I walk into the room, and I'm a charismatic leader, and you think, wow, and you think about that person. A great leader, I think, you are, that great leader walks into the room, and you feel…”

“The more sure you are as a leader about exactly what's right and what's wrong, exactly where you're going, the less open you will be to hearing that you're wrong until it's too late. Whereas a leader with Um, more curiosity, more openness to other people's perspective, which can be totally cultivated, right? You don't…”

“Which, which involves being not so rock-like, but not so, so much humanity that people think, oh my goodness, like, this leader's losing it. Like, this is all this very, very delicate dance, and maybe it was always delicate, but now it's delicate in a supercharged way.”

“I just have, um, have this idea that a lot of the time we're listening for a purpose, and mostly that purpose is, um, hidden from us, but if we were to really think about it, our purpose is to win, to convince the person of something, to convince them that, um, in this case, it's that they don't need to be so sad, or…”

“when somebody comes to you in pain, it's, it's almost never, um, I'm worried about this one thing. It's really like my world is falling apart and I'm terrified.”

“But actually, it's completely unhelpful. That comparative, you shouldn't feel this way because other people, like, this is a completely unhelpful self-talk”

“without understanding that this thing right now is a really big deal, um, they can't, they can't go to the next place. Like if I try to say, oh, you're not really upset about this. You're really upset about that other thing. It's like, screw you, mom. No, I'm really upset about this right now.”

“They never go back. Nothing is going to go back. Like there, but, but history never goes back. Like when huge things happen, we don't go back. We go forward. And something new, something dies, and something new is born”

“This, this doesn't change the direction. It just changes the volume.”

“As we're having so much of the control of our lives out of our hands, the things that we can control, we're going to control harder, I think.”

“I think a piece of it is for leaders to manage their own anxiety. Not try to get the company to produce things for them that makes them feel as anxious, like more reports and more predictions and more scenarios.”

“I think it's just a shocking amount of the safety we feel is by getting the actual full presence of other humans who are not, not distracted by another screen or half present, but who are actually there.”

“it's at that place that leaders have this bigger perspective of A capacity to kind of look across multiple stakeholders and create new solutions, new possibilities that people who are more stuck in their own perspective can't see.”

“So in the self sovereign form of mind, which is early in our adult lives, and most people outgrow it, not everybody, but most people, other people's perspectives are just unachievable, right? You just can't take and hold somebody else's perspective if it's different from yours.”

“And that's the socialized form of mind, where you're kind of Your sense of self-esteem and right or wrong comes from outside you and is imported into you, um, kind of without your, without your say, right? And without your ability to, to have edit rights on those ways you are being written by the world around you.”

“I will begin to make sense holding both my perspective and your perspective simultaneously. And I will hold across perspectives so that I can I can not just work with what's inside me, but also work with what's outside me and hold them both. I can be the writer and the written at the same time.”

“And I think it's true that from people who like the, the farther along this path you walk, the more the earlier stages are kind of in you and, um, familiar and revisitable, you know, like they, they arise in a different context or at a different time of day or whatever. The, the thing that's less common is that when…”

“A charismatic leader, when he walks into the room, or she walks into the room, makes you feel good about her or him, right? Like, I walk into the room, and I'm a charismatic leader, and you think, wow, and you think about that person. A great leader, I think, you are, that great leader walks into the room, and you feel…”

“a leader who feels certain cannot be learning from other people. So the more sure you are as a leader about exactly what's right and what's wrong, exactly where you're going, the less open you will be to hearing that you're wrong until it's too late.”

“The soundbite that tries to put in a, a sentence or a phrase, um, the complexity of an actual issue is necessarily misleading and partial, and the more addicted we get to soundbites, and the more hyped up we get by them, then the more simple our leadership will be, as opposed to the more complex.”

“It both creates development and requires development to take other people's perspectives, to take the perspective of Someone with whom we disagree, right? It's easy for us to take the perspective of others who are like us. That's super easy. We do it all the time, but our natural kind of response to somebody who's…”

“Um, we tend to be looking for the root cause of something, but like in complexity, there's no root cause. There's no root cause of a hurricane, right? There's no root cause of a tsunami. There's no root cause in nature. There are just many forces that interact together to get you a particular effect.”

“In complexity, you can look back at it and get most of the patterns of it. Like, why did the culture of this organization go in that direction? Oh, well, we can trace that back. But then if we want the culture of the next organization to go in the same direction, we can't just do those things as though they're now a…”

“In the complex space, one unit of effort might lead to nothing, or it might lead to huge rewards, right? This is the unpredictable space of orchard growing and not shoemaking, right? It's a place where we just don't know what's going to happen next. And so in that space, you're always kind of feeling around, feeling…”

“I think that means that the core attribute is not how much you know, but how much you're willing to learn and how much you're willing to question what you know. If what we want is, is stuff that's known, Google will do that for you, right? Like, like you don't, we don't need to hire somebody to do that.”

“Actually, organizations are disposed to be Conservative, right? Once you have something to protect the organism, the organization goes into protection mode, which is not a creative mode. If you want an organization that's disposed to be creative, you have to fight some of those kind of conservative pulls to protect…”

“the three habits I've talked about, the seeing systems and taking multiple perspectives and asking different questions, those are that the natural habits of people who are farther along in this adult development path.”

“And it's probably the reason that organizations, companies tend to die instead of evolve. Like most companies die and they die relatively early in their potential lifespan. And I think we do that because change is demanding and unsettling and destabilizing and, um, stability feels good.”

“I think this new world that we're in right now skims 30% of the energy off just for living in this world that we're living in. Like, that's just gone.”

“There's a way I feel like parents don't usually get to reap the, the total harvest of their hard work, because as soon as the kids are self-sufficient, they go.”

“If we, if we ease into it, our mind is just going to reinforce what we expect to be happening, and so this is this whole mind trap idea, right? Like, that our mind is always Just looking for evidence to prove its point. And so being in the present is an act of effort, courage, will.”

“So it's certainly been my experience that this, this sort of progression of wisdom over years of experience, wisdom that can be accelerated, um, but that takes some work that doesn't come for free and doesn't come automatically, that it's, that it's that sort of Showing up in the world in that more wise way that leads…”

“basically the idea here is that over time we develop an ever-increasing view of the world, that those things that earlier in our lives we took for granted or we could not see become objects Of our reflection so that we can make more choices about it, and those things that were kind of the lenses we looked through…”

“one of the things I teach my clients is to notice what certainty feels like in your body. Notice that. Like, what does it feel like to, to know that you're right? Now, when you have that feeling, take one more step and question it. How could I be wrong? What do I believe about this, and how could I be wrong about that…”