Candid Craic

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Brian Henderson about his experience of struggling with his psychological and physiological wellbeing in a senior leadership role, and how he is using it to help inform current executives just how harmful at individual and organisational levels the experience can be. Brian explains his reaction on realising he was experiencing all the signs of poor wellbeing, and why others in the same position might be equally likely to shrug it off just as he did; how he finally came to terms with what he was going through; the clues and signals that one might be in the early stages of a mental health challenge; and the organisational conditions that contributed to it. He explains how he coped with stress prior to that moment, and learned to cope in a more holistic mind, body and spirit manner afterwards; and how that embodied, whole self contrasts with the fragmenting self he was experiencing as the workplace pressures starting ramping up. Reflecting on the irony of his colleagues best intentions arguably making things far worse, Brian explains how he is employing his leadership experience to help executives think more deeply about wellbeing beyond current practices; how and why design thinking can help that process; and how and why leaders, HR and business schools can contribute to creating future organisations that place wellbeing at the heart of work.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Colin Newlyn about his mission to decrapify work. Colin explains how, despite the rhetoric, we seem to be moving away from the trust and autonomy of the working conditions he experienced in his early career to a more command and control structure, often infected by bullying and toxicity, and replete with technologies, practices and processes that seem to hinder productivity and innovation. He explains how he has begun to take the concept of self-organisation increasingly seriously, seeing it as a holistic toolkit that can create better organisations if only we could work out a way to strip away prevailing power dynamics. He further explains how he has taken up the role of an "agitator from the margins", trying to translate and interpret complex ideas into more digestible forms that people find engaging and useful. We then take a fascinating journey into the golden age of pirates, with Colin explaining how they perhaps invented the democratic-participatory organisational form; why recreating it might not require the complex overthinking that dominates the market; and how simple truths and human-centric skills might be more than enough.

In this Candid Craic, Gemma Jiang talks about her role as a catalyzing and unifying presence in the massively transdisciplinary research on the circular economy; how she employs a range of facilitation techniques to hold transformational spaces in which pluralistic solutions get generated via civil dialogue between experts in different domains; and how she operates in the enabling spaces between adaptive entrepreneurs and administrative bureaucrats. Gemma explains how adaptive facilitation works in practice, providing two concrete examples; talks about the struggles she has faced and still faces in getting traditional institutions to take seriously adaptive facilitation methodologies; and how egocentric posturing from subject-matter experts can suck the air out of even the best intentioned discussions without facilitation. We close with a deep exploration of why so few organisations take such methodologies of working seriously; why it is vital for them to start doing so if we are to move beyond the linear, scarcity-focused, industrial models of work; and what the world might look like if we could do so.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Serene Seng about how she is working with Singaporean companies towards the delivery of a conscious business philosophy in the city. After Serene explains what she means by conscious business and why it isn't anti shareholder value, we find out the four ways in which conscious business practices positively impact organisational performance. Serene and Oscar then reflect on the level to which companies in Singapore and Hong Kong are (or are not) embracing the concept, and explore whether those failing to do so will struggle to attract or retain future talent. The Craic then takes a long tangent into the educational challenge in the region, as Serene laments that Singaporean education is producing great production workers when it needs to be producing great knowledge workers. We discuss where the future talent for Singapore and Hong Kong is going to come from; why Asian educational systems need to support and embrace ambiguity, sport and arts; how and why the current models are failing to help children discover their talents, and possibly delivering a life of poor mental health along the way; and how a conscious awareness of business and self might start addressing this issue. We conclude with a dive into the future of work and leadership in the region, with Serene suggesting that the guild model might re-emerge in the Singaporean gig-work ecosystem, and exploring how leadership might need to be reimagined alongside such a development.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Martha Underwood about the experience of being a black, female leader in the Deep South of the USA. Having been presented with a Leadership in Diversity award by Birmingham, Alabama, Martha explains the role she and others are playing in changing perceptions of the city, and the increasingly integrated plurality of the community. She talks about the origins of narrow perceptions about black Americans, highlighting the incessant negative imagery that has characterised the presentation of black lives in US print and media, from stupid illiterates in the 1930s to gang members, drug addicts and welfare queens in the late 20th Century. She goes on to outline numerous ways in which she helps young, black Americans overcome related perceptions of their abilities in contemporary society. We explore even deeper roots of racism and how even Enlightened Abolitionists contributed to "scientific" denigrations of the character and ability of black Americans, before turning to the tactics, stories and discourses that are generating hope for a more pluralistic, egalitarian future. We look at how grassroot change is developing better complexity of thinking in many young people of all races; how the emergence of female leaders can help shift outdated, narrow and problematic leadership discourses; and how the future might be so bright we'll need to wear shades. We highly recommend you watch the video on EQ Lab's YouTube channel to check out Oscar's hair!

In this Candid Craic, the tables get turned, and Richard Claydon gets grilled on his work by two previous interviewees, John Dobbin and Geoff Marlow. We explore how Richard employs dramatic metaphors and insights to explain the conditions of contemporary knowledge work, why, thanks to neuroscientific findings, it is becoming an increasingly relevant way to sensemake organisations, and why it is more useful for delivering value-creating diversity than the mainstream D&I discourses. John tests Richard on the relevance of the work, asking why the CEO should care about a dramatic interpretation of organisational life, leading to an examination of the dimensions of knowledge work: an exploration into why so few people are being productive in digitally-transforming organisational conditions; and a call for greater levels of collective organisational play. We then look at how people perform the various roles they have at work and beyond, including the challenging ambivalence they experience when role expectations clash, how irony can be employed to mitigate the experience, and how people behave and act differently when performing front and back stage organisational roles. This takes us into a deep dive into the dimensions of the organisational self, in which Richard argues that personality traits have been massively over-emphasized in mainstream organisational thinking at the expense of role adaptability and storytelling, to the point that people are frantically trying to hold onto a limiting, static sense of self rather than fluidly developing multiple versions of self that can perform multiple roles with elegant sophistication. Geoff probes Richard on his experience designing the tactics module for the PC game Football Manager, and how that has extended into the collaborative practice at EQ Lab. We close be looking at how leaders can adjust their performance to ensure the best ideas are never missed, and how much extra value could be added if organisations fully embrace the potential of the dramatic lens and improvisational performance.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Meirion Gravell about his experiences as a Chief People Officer and his mission to make HR practice more contextually relevant to the work being done. Drawing from his experience running HR for the most hated workforce in the UK - Traffic Wardens! - Meirion explains how he adapted Dilts and Bateson's Logical Levels of Thinking into an impactful organisational form. He especially focuses on trying to strike the right balance between areas of convergence that glue the organisation together, and areas of divergence in which contested ideas and constructive disagreements enable better decision making throughout the organisation. Meirion looks different ways of approaching organisational development - at the individual, team and organsiational level - and his bias for the former. He examines how he shifted away from the simplistic notion that there were people who were bad fits for the organisation towards one in which diverse characters with different beliefs were a strength. He focuses on how he worked on enabling biodiversity via the surfacing and discussing bad behaviours at leadership level and within teams; how that ensured that bad behaviours that shut down different opinions and ideas could get called out; why not doing so can prevent people from growing and stop organisations from becoming adaptive; and how HR needs to become more confident that this process can develop contextually-appropriate practices that can generate real value in the organisation (rather than buying in best practice solutions that are often based on pretty simplistic, contextually-inappropriate ideas).

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Antony Malmo about his mission to create proactive mental health practice in organizations and society, and his deep wish to design organizational and sociocultural practices informed by evolutionary psychiatry. After discovering why Antony thinks mainstream mental health is so reactive, we hear how his team creates spaces between home and work in which mental challenges can be discussed and acted upon in a non-clinical, non-ego-threatening manner. Moving on from Antony's business interests, we take a deep dive into evolutionary psychiatry, framed by questions asking how and why depression and anxiety might have evolutionary benefits for humans, and why treating them as pathologies to be cured might be self-defeating. We look at how today's sociocultural and organizational conditions might be overwhelming what were once highly beneficial survival behaviours, and making them the dysfunctional core of modern human existence. After Antony explains how these kinds of insights are being employed to help new mothers overcome post-natal depression, we move away from pathologies of the wounded self, and discuss whether it is possible to be too positive and optimistic, and what evolutionary disadvantages that might entail. We look at whether it will be possible to create in-between spaces in which something different from depression/anxiety and manic positivity and optimism might have the opportunity to bloom, before turning to the nine trillion dollar question, which takes us on an unexpected, deeply insightful journey into East African urban and tribal life.

In this Candid Craic, Nidhi Goel, a Medical Futurist and psychiatrist practicing in New York, looks at the rising levels of poor mental wellbeing across the globe, and discusses just what we might be able to do about it. Initially, Nidhi tells us about the state of the mental health profession, outlining the already troubling shortages in psychiatric support globally; looking at why it is likely to get worse; and explaining why the rising reported instances of poor mental wellbeing are making her increasingly worried about the future. We learn how Assistive Intelligence (AI) can make a major difference in this space, helping psychiatrists with the time-consuming evaluatory aspects of their work, leaving them with more time to diagnose and treat patients; and how it can help people beginning to struggle with their mental well-being self-manage the conditions before they become serious enough to need professional help. We also hear about the discussions she is having with organizations about taking mental health seriously, and about why she has to take a cost-reduction rather than performance-enhancing approach in these discussions. Nidhi closes by outlining her vision for delivering a collective awareness of mental health across the globe and health equity for communities across the planet.

In this Candid Craic, we hear how Neelam Harjani emerged from the deeply ambivalent experience of working on the trading floor in the financial markets to craft out a career helping people to live more meaningful lives in the relentless hustle and bustle of today's action-based organizational world. We hear how meditation can enable the dual states of self-awareness and high energy; why oscillations of fear and greed are leading to a state of existential emptiness in many of today's executives; and how rediscovering the spirit of being in a world of incessant busyness can lead to higher performance and work and better relationships with self and meaningful others. Neelam takes us through some simple steps towards rediscovering our spirit and revitalising our energy levels; explains why yoga, when combined with an unconscious competitive instinct, can lead to less than ideal outcomes (and how to avoid this); and how regular practice can lead to moments of exceptional insight and ideation in the eye of the storm of even the most complex and toxic projects. We close with a discussion on the experiential nature of her work, before imagining what the world might look like if we took mental hygiene and seriously as dental hygiene, and how that could create more healthy and fulfilling futures.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to Alexis Niki to learn about the differences between narratives and storytelling, and how an explicit awareness of both can positively impact leadership and organisational performance. We explore the many dimensions of narrative intelligence, in which Alexis draws from her colorful, multicultural upbringing to explain how story became so central to her work. In doing so, we discover how and why she employs archetypes to free people from self-limiting narratives; learn why mind/body integration is central to high performance; and take in a deep dive into the necessity of developing an integrated character in a fragmenting world. After a little side-step worrying about whether we are moving towards a dark and dystopian future, Alexis leaves us hopeful that a world populated with narratively intelligent people is a real possibility.

In this Candid Craic, we learn how Geoff Marlow has combined an engineering background with a deep interest in human behaviour and Eastern philosophies to craft out a career developing organisational cultures in which curiosity and cognitive diversity flourish in the pursuit of rapid-delivery innovation. We hear how and why Geoff, almost accidentally, shaped his career this way; see just how a seemingly simple insight can result in rapid-moving cultural change (and how an equally simple-sounding good-intention can produce rapid-growing toxicity); and discover how hybridity, curiosity and cognitive diversity can liberate talent across the entire organisation. We look at how you might scale ego-free cultures across large, mature, complex organisations; discover how and why the mechanics of traditional organisational structures can get in the way of achieving this; and peer into the dark ethical complexities that can emerge out of even the greatest of success stories. Hosted by www.eqlab.co - learn a new way to lead.

In this Candid Craic, we find out how Mark LeBusque's exploration into his own dark and messy organisational existence - he was once known as the baby-faced assassin - led to a deep examination of self and a "spiritual" journey of self-awareness and high performance. We look at how Mark provokes leaders and teams into examining the self they bring to work, and how an unexamined version of that self can stop things from flowing effectively. We look at how vulnerability, compassion, courage, kindness and self-forgiveness play vital roles in the development of good leadership, and how the leadership journey is comprised of many micro-moments of realisation, awareness and reflection that, over time, combine to produce holistic and sophisticated leadership abilities. We hear his answer to the nine trillion dollar question, learn how he has constantly experimented with life and work - and how those experiments changed in nature as he matured - and probe his thoughts about the future of work. Hosted by www.eqlab.co - learn a new way to lead.

In this Candid Craic, we hear about Becky Andree's double-passion - developing the complexity of thinking in leaders and employees so they capable of the cognitive challenges related to the WEF's future of work skills lists, and creating environments in which regular high-quality connections energise people to successfully pursue and achieve this developmental goal. After defining these two core aspects of her work and research, Becky takes us on a swirling journey of discovery, examining whether we are creating or destroying workspaces which support these practices; exploring the difference between Eastern and Western patterns of connection; explaining how we could create practices that rapidly accelerate the development of future-ready leaders; and outlining why enabling elders coaching and mentoring teams is central to success. We close with a brief segue into VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), wondering whether organisations and technology are changing rapidly, or whether people and society are, and how that might shift our attention. Hosted by www.eqlab.co - learn a new way to lead.

In this Candid Craic, we talk to John Dobbin about his ongoing attempt to demystify the language of complex adaptive systems to help contemporary executives transform their organisations into agile powerhouses. John helps us understand the difference of scale between agile and adaptive work, how bureaucratic structures can inhibit the success of agile practices, and the tactics he employs to help teams become more agile and organisations become more adaptive. We look at how middle-management might be re-imagined as core to good adaptive work, learn how Haier has become the great success story for the movement, and explore how rationality and faith need to interact with good intent for high performance outcomes. We close by looking at the impact remote work might have on adaptive practice, and imagine what a world full of complex adaptive organisations might look like. Hosted by www.eqlab.co - learn a new way to lead.