Podcast appearances and mentions of david kantor

Interviews include Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore, David Kantor, Michael Winner and Isa Dick Hackett who is Phili K. Dick's daughter. Plus actor Liam Cunningham who stars in the episode, Human Is. Special thanks to New York Comic Con and Amazon. New Edited Version Subscribe To Sci-Fi Talk Plus For A Low Locked In Forever Price This Episode is Only Available For Thirty Days 

Mastering High-Stakes Conversations for Corporate Innovation In this episode, we dive into the essential techniques for leading high-stakes conversations to secure senior-level commitment to corporate innovation. Our guest, Alexander Pett, an expert in executive team dynamics, discusses the crucial concept of 'productive tension' and how recognizing and addressing disagreement can lead to authentic agreement and commitment. Pett outlines practical strategies for effectively framing issues, maintaining engagement, and navigating political dynamics in boardroom settings. Tune in to learn how to prepare and communicate strategically, ensuring your innovative ideas gain the buy-in they need to succeed. 00:00 Introduction to High-Stakes Conversations 01:31 The Importance of Productive Tension 05:23 Pre-Work and Stakeholder Engagement 07:12 Creating and Maintaining Productive Tension 08:44 Communication Skills and Self-Awareness 18:30 Frameworks for Effective Dialogue 20:55 Final Thoughts and Advice Corporate Innovation, Senior Team Engagement, Productive Tension, Executive Leadership, Alexander Pett, Aidan McCullen, Corporate Explorer, High Stakes Conversations, Leadership Strategies, Boardroom Dynamics, Effective Communication, Innovation Leadership, Pre-Meeting Preparation, Organizational Change, Executive Buy-In, David Kantor, Group Dynamics, Empathy in Leadership, Political Savvy, Agreement and Advocacy

I began my life's work in two communities on opposite sides of Boston, one predominantly Black, the other predominantly White, both made up of hard-working, low-income families. For twelve years, I worked alternately as a community organizer, a journalist, and a counselor alongside people struggling to navigate circumstances largely stacked against them. Where they went, I went—to their homes, theirschools, the streets, the courts, even prison. The experience was a master class in hard-earned resilience on the one hand and learned helplessness on the other.That experience eventually led me to return to school to figure out how to inspire and empower people to create systems that work for them, not against them. As an undergraduate at Boston University and as a doctoral student at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning from and working alongside some of the world's best thinkers on how to navigate conflict and effect change in all kinds of systems from families(David Kantor) to organizations (Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, Ed Schein, Peter Senge) to nations (Howard Zinn, Roger Fisher).For the past 40 years, I have led long-term change efforts in some of America's most iconic businesses and cutting-edge nonprofits. Along the way, I discovered that it is possible to turn intergroup conflict into a powerful force for constructive change. Out of this fundamental insight, I developed an approach to conflict and change called Leading Through Relationships (LTR)TM with frameworks and tools captured in my own and others publications and used around the world by my colleagues and students.In addition to dozens of articles, I am the author of Divide Or Conquer, The Elephant in the Room, and Remaking the Space Between Us, and the co-author of Action Science with Chris Argyris and Robert Putnam. As a partner at the Monitor Group, I chaired Monitor University, and as chief executive partner at New Profit, I led a culture change effort that readied the firm for future growth.I share my life with negotiation expert and Getting to Yes co-author Bruce Patton, my husband of 30 years, a rambunctious border collie rescue, and a junkyard mutt.

Are you ready to transform your team's communication dynamics? Dive into this episode of the Agile Uprising podcast, where host Andy Cleff explores using David Kantor's four-player model to cultivate continuous improvement in high-performing teams. In This Episode: Overview of the Four-Player Model: Learn about the mover, follower, opposer, and bystander roles and how each contributes to or hinders team collaboration. Interactive Team Exercise: Andy walks through a retrospective exercise designed to help team members identify and adopt different communication styles, enhancing understanding and flexibility. Sustained Improvement Strategies: Gain insights on integrating these concepts into your team's daily interactions through deliberate practice and feedback. Whether you're leading a development squad or coaching an executive leadership team, understanding and applying these concepts can lead to more effective and collaborative environments. Key Takeaways: Balanced team dynamics lead to better decision-making Conscious role adoption can build empathy and self-awareness Continuous practice and commitment are crucial for lasting improvement Ready to Stretch Your Team's Communication Muscles? Give the retrospective exercise a try and experience first hand the impact of balanced communication styles. Deeper Dive into the Four Player Model and Full Retro Details: For info on Kantor and his body of work, see   About the Agile Uprising If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review, a rating, or leave comments on iTunes, Stitcher or your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps others find us.  Much thanks to the artist  from  who provided us our outro music free-of-charge!  If you like what you heard,     to find more music you might enjoy! If you'd like to join the discussion and share your stories,  please jump into the fray at our  We at the Agile Uprising are committed to being totally free.  However, if you'd like to contribute and help us defray hosting and production costs we do have a .  Who knows, you might even get some surprises in the mail!  

Introduction:  Dr Laura McHale (PsyD, CPsychol) is a consulting leadership psychologist, executive coach and writer specialising in Leader Development, Team Psychology, Communication and Organisational Culture, Laura is the author of the acclaimed book: Neuroscience for Organisational Communication:  A Guide for Communicators and Leaders. Podcast episode Summary:  This podcast explores and explains the impact of communication in organisational life employing the lens of Neuroscience and Psychology of Communication.  Topics covered include Gaslighting, Absentee Leaders, The use of Pronouns, Weasel Words and Communication Practices that undermine employees. Laura sheds a light on a discipline that is often unspoken. Points made across this Episode:  o    Laura can you share a bit about how you got to where you are today? Laura is now a Psychologist and in her mid-forties she made a radical decision to go back to school and take a doctorate in Leadership Psychology. Prior to this move Laura was working in major international investment banks as a Corporate Communications Specialist. In 2010 Deutse Bank moved her to Hong Kong to head up internal communications for the Asia Pacific Region. Laura loved her career working with International Banks & she was really curious about human behaviour at work and wanted to go deeper and in particular understand the mysterious process we call Leadership. o    There were a number of reasons that prompted Laura to study Psychology including several transformative experiences with psychotherapy,  She was curious about the way we frame and talk about work and the psychological injury experienced at work. o    What inspired you to write your book? The book happened organically. As part of Laura's Doctorate she had a required course on the Neuroscience of Leadership. Laura was fascinated by the discipline and had a sense it would become a big part of her intellectual life as well as her career. She noticed that nobody was talking about organisational communication and neuroscience and Laura wanted to close the gap with her book. o    What are the salient messages housed in your book that explain Neuroscience and Psychology at work? There is a natural interest in behavioural science. It is often hard to make the link about how the science can impact a leaders presence or choices in communication. There is a fundamental tension between the promotion strategies employed by internal communication teams and the prevention strategies they employ. In promotion strategies communicators are very assertive about the companies value proposition, what it offers and its unique differentiator's. A prevention strategy often results in very cautions communications, judicious and a little bit like politicians the communications are somewhat evasive. Whilst understandable it can be a slippery slope and sets off all kinds of triggers with employees. The tension between promotion strategies, a desire to be open & transparent and prevention strategies can be tricky to navigate. It is often a schizoid perspective where communicators are trying to toggle two different strategies. o    The Psychology of communication is also important for another reason. It is a very difficult time for communication specialists. The scope of the role in the last five years has changed dramatically. Corporate affairs, ESG and Government affairs are rolled up into the typical role of a communications department. This is leading to increased stress. If you add AI, chat gpt and other generative models can pose an existential threat to these groups and teams. The changing nature of the role of communication professionals is also one of the reasons Laura wrote her book to help make sense of the changing landscape. o    The Neuroscience or physiology of behaviour is a bit different. Insights into neuroscience can shed light on how and why we are showing up at work. Understanding rewards and threat centres in the brain, knowing how we use pronouns and its impact on others is fascinating and can be leveraged to be more effective in our communications. o    How do leaders and internal communications understand the paradigm from which they are operating? Important to understand the paradigm you are speaking or when you are moving too quickly between the two. Employees smell spin from a mile off. Internally it can be tricky for executives to  over relying on prevention strategies in their communication. There are a lot of traps Leaders can walk into, sometimes unintentionally or at least unconsciously. Knowing about human needs can really help leaders be effective communicators. o    What are some of those traps that Leaders walk into, maybe unintentionally? Some of it is structural. Pronoun use for example. I and We pronouns can signal more or less personal involvement in any given situation. Pronoun use can also reveal the many assumptions a leader is living. It can also give potent signals about who is in or out or who has a legitimate stake in an organisations success or failure. For example there are two different kinds of We, the inclusive or exclusive We. Senior Executives are often confused about which We they are in and how they are communicating exclusion or inclusion. This sends messages to the brain to trigger threat responses whether we are part of the in group or out group. If in the in group we get a dose of dopamine from the brain & if in the out group we can experience significant amounts of pain. I pronouns are also very interesting, some are cultural, and a really high proportion of I pronoun use can trigger a threat response in the brain. There is also an assumption in organisations that communication needs to be sanitised. This can infantilise employees and does an injustice to the complexities operating in an organisation. o    What is your advice to executives and leaders who erroneously practice sanitising their communications. One of the biggest pieces of advice Laura gives is to speak the truth. Laura references The Loughran-McDonald sentiment analysis research to explain why telling the truth can be so instructive. The two financial researchers used sentiment analysis or the use of positive versus negative sentiment and modal or weasel words. The research showed the lengths that organisations go to obfuscate the truth or to describe adverse events. In fact many of the negative words were couched in positive words that the messages were almost impossible to work out. Curiously the negative words used were very weak words or weasels like impairment, disappointing which suggested something was bad but it was never clear. The companies using negative words more creatively had negative stock performances. The researchers noted that companies use of words in their corporate communications could be used as a smart investment strategy.  o    How do Leaders manage the responsibility they hold to use language appropriately and not Gaslight or cause unintentional emotions at work? Organisations are like people using all sorts of defence mechanism sometimes very elaborate ones to avoid difficult and painful emotions. It important to understand why we are using these words, weasel words. It is because of an environment that lacks psychological safety, where we are not allowed to fail, or ask a question that might be interpreted as stupid. Is it an environment where people get punished for taking risks. Laura does not wish to come across as the language police she also uses weak modals and weasels in her communications too, because they have a purposeful use to indicate uncertainty. None of us can speak in with absolute clarity all of the time. o    The link to absentee leadership is for Laura an interesting link. She imagines that weak leaders, or those who are unable to fulfil the core functions of Leadership, would employ weasel words quite a bit more than strong leaders. o    In 2022 Laura read a “cracker jack” of an article by Robert Hogan who mentioned this phenomenon called absentee Leadership. Laura was struck by the idea that absentee leadership is an epidemic that nobody had ever named but that most of us have experienced in one form or another. It speaks to the idea of people who occupy an authority position of leadership and fail to fulfil its core functions. Laura refers to those functions as giving direction, protection, role orientation, conflict resolution and setting and establishing and protecting group norms. The interesting thing about absentee leadership is how common it is. It is reported 7 times more than any other destructive leadership behaviour. Because it is so common and can feel so mild it can go unnoticed and is experienced as neglect. o    Gaslighting surfaces when someone is at the mercy of an absent leader they can be blamed or they blame themselves for their inability to cope with whatever is occurring. One of the things that inspired Laura to write this article for the psychologist was because of her many conversations with coaching clients. Many of her clients were  being given feedback that they were having trouble managing ambiguity. Managing ambiguity is becoming a core competency. The issue with managing ambiguity is that almost everyone struggles with it. Laura knows this from Neuroscience, it is a known stress trigger. This is a universal biological phenomenon albeit some people can handle ambiguity better than others. Laura wanted to highlight the subjects of Gaslighting, Absentee Leadership and emotions at work in her article in the Psychologist, to shift attention from blaming people for their lack of this competency as a  subjective fault to an understanding of the human needs within all of us and our need for Leadership support. o    The fundamental attribution error is yet another trap that Leaders and executives can fall into. o    What are some of the Villains of Communication, Threats and Triggers you would like to see squashed? The rapid communication of bad news. Communicating bad news badly. If bad news is not communicated in an open and transparent manner it can infantilise an audience. This tendency is really prominent in politics where there seems to be a tolerance for misinformation and it is seeping into the fabric of organisations too. Laura is not trying to malign all politicians but recognises that politicians regularly protect themselves against the loss of power and influence and often engage in this form of communication. This perpetuates cynicism and mistrust that Laura hopes we do not want to dial that up in our organisations. o    The Corporate Communications Reset Workshop is a  new workshop and is really the greatest hits from her book. Her workshop helps corporate communications professional access more joy at work by reclaiming their mo-jo and about being  more strategic in their work, whilst being cognisant of the changing landscape and being able to fend off some of the threats posed by Chat GPT and other generative language models. A lot of comms people are closeted behavioural scientists and this workshop gives them a taste or a lot  taste for Psychology and Neuroscience understanding. Included in her workshop is the methodology called Structural Dynamics, the building blocks for how we communicate and don't. o    Structural Dynamics is a methodology created by David Kantor. It is David Kantor's theory of interpersonal communication dynamics. It is a very interesting theory to describe the patterns that emerge when teams are together. There are a few different levels to this theory and the ones that are most often used to explain team dynamics and patterns are what David describes as the action mode, the operating system and the communication domain. The least discussed is the last one called the Childhood Story, work made infamous now by Dr Sarah Hill and her work. o    Structural Dynamics at its essence gives people a vocabulary to describe  what's happening in a room & a roadmap for how to change those patterns to develop a more balanced behavioural repertoire.   Resources  a)       Neuroscience for Organisational Communication: A Guide for Communicators and Leaders by Dr. Laura McHale. b)        www.conduitconsultants.com c)       The Loughran-McDonald Master Dictionary Sentiment  Words list d)       David Kantor www.kantorinstruments.com e)       Ronald Heifetz, one of the world's foremost authorities on Leadership https://hbr.org/2002/06/a-survival-guide-for-leaders f)        Sarah Hill and her book Where did you learn to behave like that? g)       Corporate gaslighting, absentee leaders and the emotions of work – 07 November 2023, The British Psychological Society. h)       Robert Hogan: https://www.hoganassessments.com/research-project/absentee-leadership/      

Samenwerken, vergaderen, goede gesprekken voeren; we doen het allemaal. Maar we leren nergens hoe we dit moeten doen. Terwijl het essentieel is om succesvol te zijn. In deze aflevering bespreken Jeanne en Jan-Peter, samen met gast Mireille Beumer, een manier om beter te leren samenwerken. Hiervoor duiken zij in de theorie van de Structural Dynamics van David Kantor. Je hoort het onderzoek, welke rollen er altijd aanwezig zijn in een gesprek en je krijgt van Mireille 5 handige tips om beter te worden in gesprekken. LinkedIn van MireilleWebsite van MireilleKijk hier voor meer informatie over deze podcast:https://www.brainbakery.com/brainsnacks/goede-gesprekken-voeren-zo-belangrijk-en-we-zijn-er-vaak-zo-slecht-in---5-tips-met-mireille-beumerOp https://www.brainbakery.com/brainsnacks vind je onze blogs.Wil je meepraten, laat een voice berichtje achter:https://www.speakpipe.com/brainbakerySupport the show

Bio Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership   development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change.  She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Riot Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha's unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication  that  get  in  their  way  of  high  performance.  She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilist. She is the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyse clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others.  Interview Highlights 04:15 Having effective conversations 04:45 Move-follow-bystand-oppose 09:30 Functional self-awareness 15:50 Build Your Model for Leading Change 18:00 Articulating your own model for change 26:00 Collective alignment 27:20 Getting messy 30:00 Making space for open conversations 35:40 TeamCatapult    Social Media  ·         LinkedIn: Marsha on LinkedIn ·         Website:  www.teamcatapult.com ·         Twitter: Marsha on Twitter    Books & Resources ·         The World of Visual Facilitation ·         The Art & Science of Facilitation, Marsha Acker ·         Build Your Model for Leading Change, Marsha Acker ·         Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders, David Kantor ·         Where Did You Learn To Behave Like That? (Second Edition), Sarah Hill ·         Coaching Agility From Within: Masterful Agile Team Coaching ·         Making Behavioral Change Happen - Team Catapult ·         Changing Behavior in High Stakes - Team Catapult   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. In this episode, I have Marsha Acker, the CEO and founder of TeamCatapult. Marsha is a respected and sought after leadership development expert and her team, or her company organisation, TeamCatapult, focuses on equipping leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change. So this is the second part of my conversation, the second and the last part of my conversation with Marsha. And in this conversation, in this part of the episode, we talk about, or Marsha talks about having effective conversations, functional self awareness, what does that mean? She also talked about how one can articulate one's own model for change, and the need for getting collective alignments and the fact that it's not easy, sometimes it gets messy, but it's important to make space for open conversations. I found both the part one and this conversation, which is the final part of my conversation with Marsha, very insightful, and I hope you get something useful out of it as well. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Marsha Acker. Marsha Acker I'm very focused on behavioural-led change at the moment. And so in that behavioural-led change, what I place at the centre of any change is how are people communicating with one another? Are they able to actually have the real conversation? Is there enough awareness in the system that they can kind of catch sight of when the real conversation starts to go underground? And can they actually have the muscle, the range in their leadership to catch sight of it and then bring it back in the room? Change doesn't happen until people feel heard and understood. I think one of the biggest questions that I think we help leadership teams look at is how do we work with difference, and actually welcome it rather than try to minimise it, because I think that's the rub where, if we don't have skills to work with it, we tend to minimise it or send it out of the room or suppress it. Like we say, you know, we don't have enough time for that, or, gosh, we've got this deadline, so we've become super deadline driven, and I think sometimes at the expense of having a real conversation with one another. And I don't know that I could find you an example of any organisation that I've worked in, including my own TeamCatapult, where something that we're trying to do or accomplish or move forward doesn't meet a roadblock when some aspect of our conversation isn't fully online or we're not fully having the conversation that we need to have. So you asked how would I do so how, one of the ways that I would do that today is, first, whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change and just noticing like they're trying to level up or there's something that they're wanting that they feel like they're kind of capped at is I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation, because I think in the conversation there are lots of indicators about how that conversation plays out and are people really able to say what they're thinking or do we get stuck in some common dysfunctional patterns that can show up? So one example of that would be, we use a sort of a technology for looking at conversation and there are four actions that happen in all effective conversations, a move, a follow, an oppose, and a bystand. So a move sets direction, a follow supports it, an oppose offers really clear correction. It says, no, hang on, wait a minute. A bystand offers a morally neutral perspective, so one way is to help a team onboard that, but there are common patterns and one of the common patterns that will come out, particularly in tech teams where there's pace and we need to move things forward, is that they can get into this pattern of someone makes a move, and everyone else just sort of remains silent or, so something to the effect might voice ‘sure, you know, that sounds good.' So they start to fall into this pattern of move and lots of follow. And what's missing often is the voice of bystand, which says, hey, I'm wondering what's going on, or I'm wondering what we're not saying. And then really clear opposition. So the ability to bring pushback, constraint into the conversation. So if you go back to that original leadership team that I was telling you about, you know, way back when, I think one of the things that was going on in that team is they weren't, no one was able to say, this is an incredibly difficult decision, and I don't think I can make it unless I have these things answered. So they kept making it about the process and it wasn't really about the process at all. It was really, it had a very personal component to it that wasn't being discussed, and so the inability to discuss that really created the drag. So the way that I think about helping any team work through any change is, helping them onboard the skills of being able to have, we call it bringing, it's a principle that we hold about bringing the real conversation in the room. Can you bring the conversation online versus offline? So the other flag that you might have for when your conversations are going offline is, if you feel, I often think about if I leave a conversation with you and I, for example, if I left this conversation and I went off and I felt the need, or I was compelled to one of vent or complain about it to someone else, that's my kind hazard flag. But, there was something that I was holding back from in this conversation that I didn't say, and that's my signal to actually circle back around. And so maybe, maybe I need to check in with myself, maybe there's something that I left unsaid. Ula Ojiaku That's so insightful. I've been making notes, but the question I have, one of the key ones I have right now is based on what you've said, you know, if one is to go out from a conversation and realise, oh, there's something I'm needing to vent, which I didn't say, you know, in front of the people or the person involved, as a facilitator or coach for that team, how can you help them to, because there could be several factors. It could be that they don't feel safe, they feel that they might be punished for actually saying what they have in mind. So what would be the process for addressing it, such that people can actually say what they actually feel without feeling that they would be punished or side-tracked or ostracised for it? Marsha Acker Yeah. I think there's two things that will be happening, and so when we are working with leadership teams, we're often helping them onboard these skills collectively. And that does take a process, right? So I think there's a piece around helping them build a container. So when I say container, I mean we're talking about the four actions, we're talking about the value of the four actions, we're talking about kind of normalising that oppose can feel really scary or difficult, but that'll very much be based on the individual. So we're working at both that whole team or system level, but also at the individual level, because for me, you know, in my own behavioural profile, oppose can be low, and there are really good reasons for that. Like I grew up in a household where it was rude to oppose an adult, so I've got that, you know, childhood story about why I would not want to oppose. I've got other stories that have happened along the way that sort of started to build this kind of old internal narrative for me about, ooh, it can be dangerous to oppose. So I think there's some individual work that all of us, you know, when we're ready to engage in, can do around noticing when I might hesitate to do that, what's the story? What's sort of the old narrative that I'm telling myself about that action, and what has me hold back in the current space today. So there's that individual component of growing what David Kantor calls functional self-awareness, so the ability to sort of catch sight of my own behaviour to also be able to grow my own behavioural range. But then Ula, you've, like, you very much are naming, there's also a system level component to that. So if I'm on that team and if I'm sort of in a positional leadership role where I might hold some kind of authority over people get paid and I'm responsible for those performance reviews that we seem to do only once a year, like I need to be really aware of where I might be, even unintentionally, really closing off those conversations. So how willing am I to put out an idea and have someone offer an oppose? Or am I not comfortable with that? Like, I don't like it when someone opposes, and so how might I be consciously or unconsciously kind of squelching that? So there will be that role and then there will also be the role of the team. Teams that have this, I call it sort of the foot tapping, like we need to get things moving or rolling or we only have a 30 minute time box for this meeting. It's not that you'd never have 30 minute meetings, but if 30 minute meetings are all you ever use to meet, you are really missing an opportunity, like there are places where I think we have to slow conversations down in order to create the space for people to really be able to think together and to take risk. But if there's never any space for me to take risk, I'm just not, you know, it can be scary enough to do it, so I think there are multiple things that you have to attend to at multiple levels. I think there's an individual level, I think there's a whole team level, a system, I think there's the positional leader or whoever's in authority or sort of whose voice carries a lot of weight in that team. All those things will be playing a part in whether that conversation can fully come online, and I do think it takes work. So I'm just a big advocate of work on how we communicate, because if we can equip everyone in a team to be paying attention to how we're communicating and we sort of have that range in our behavioural ability and our communicative competence to kind of bring all those things online, then I would hold that there aren't many things that we can't work through. But when we just attend to the process first, without having some of the skills about how to engage in the conversation, I think that's where we get really stuck and then we just start searching for other process, right. It becomes hard to have a conversation and I know I need to have a conversation, so I go looking for the new facilitation tool or I go get my, you know, bag of stickies and markers and I'm like, we're going to, and I just, I think sometimes we can become sort of over-reliant on facilitation processes and look, I'm the first proponent of facilitation processes, but sometimes I think they actually, we lean so heavily on them that they actually might be hindering the real conversation coming in the room. Ula Ojiaku What you've said so far, Marsha reminds me of, you know, the values in the Agile Manifesto sets people and individuals over the processes and tools. It doesn't mean the process and the tools aren't important, but we're dealing with human beings first and foremost. And my philosophy as well is about winning hearts and minds, because that way you can go further with people once they, like to use your words earlier on, they feel heard and listened to, rather than imposing something on them and what you've said so far as well, reminds me of in your book, The Art and Science of Facilitation, this is gold dust. Yes, I refer to it almost every quarter since I got it. I refer to it in, you know, to just sharpen my myself. And you said something on page four, in other words, facilitation is not just about what tool or technique you're applying, it just as much, if not more, it's about what you believe. So you did mention something about the self-awareness and functional self-awareness and proposed by David Kantor. So it's not just about what you, you know, it's about what you believe, who you are being in the moment, and what you see and sense in the group. We could go into this, but I am also mindful of time and I'd really like to dive into this book, your latest book, Build Your Model for Leading Change. I thought, like you may have mentioned before we started recording, it's not something you'd read over a weekend. I opened the first page and I was like, no, I have to slow down and think about it. So what got you on the journey to writing this book? What was the intention? Marsha Acker You know, so I was mentioning earlier, I did several coach trainings, individual coach training, systems coach training, and then I got introduced to David Kantor's work. So he wrote a book called Reading the Room, and it was through my introduction to his work and meeting Sarah Hill and Tony Melville, who run an organisation in the UK called Dialogix. But it was through meeting them and David and really starting to understand structural dynamics that I got introduced to the concept of model building. And that does come from David's research around face-to-face communication and what it looks like for leaders to be able to bring clarity to their work. And I remember along the way, one of my first conversations with Sarah Hill, you know, I had, so I had a whole background in facilitation, what it looked like to facilitate groups, and at that moment I was really kind of struggling with what's the difference between team coaching and facilitating, and I was having this kind of personal, what I realise now, I was deep in building my own model for what team coaching would look like for me. But at the time it felt like a bit of an existential crisis or a midlife crisis, or something that I, because I saw difference between the two, but I was really confused as I onboarded all of the different tools and models for how to coach about the difference between the two. And I remember one day Sarah looked at me and I had shared with her a perspective that someone else had shared with me about what happens in team coaching, and I was really confused because it really conflicted with what she was saying to me, and so I went up to her after we'd done a session and I just said, so I really want to talk about this. You said this, and then someone else said this and it just makes no sense to me, and she just looked at me and she said, well, they have a different model. And I thought, okay, well, which one is right? And she was like, neither. You know, neither right nor wrong, just different. And boy, I walked away and I just couldn't, I don't know how many years, it's probably been at least 10 years since we had that conversation, but it really stuck with me and I think in my own journey I've gotten so clear about the value of being able to articulate your model for leading change, your model for looking at behaviour, your model for leadership. And boy, you know, one of the things that I value the most about that is David's stance that we all have our own, and that is some of our work to do, is to define our model and that there will likely be a phase where I am taking in other people's models and I'm learning how they talk about it and I'm learning the language and so there is a version of that where I'm kind of imitating others like, you do it and I'm going to do it just like you did it and I'm going to follow the language. It's one of the reasons that I published the first book around facilitation, like, that is how I think about facilitation and the facilitation stance, but I also hold that at some point, it's intended as a guide, and, you know, there are a couple of ways of thinking about just getting started and then developing and then mastering, but it's when we get to mastery that essentially the job becomes to build your own model. So there will be parts about even that facilitation book where you might find along the way, Ula, you're going yes, that's my, like, that's totally in my model too. And then, hey Marsha, you know, this thing where you talk about this, like, I don't know, it's just, it's not for me. So, I'm going to discard that, it's not here. And then there's this new place, like I do this really differently, so I'm going to start to invent, you know, this is a place where I'm going to do some model building of my own, where this is going to look like a new part that very specifically becomes mine. And David would've said that models are our picture of the world, and our map of how we intend to go about working in the world, and so much of what I see when it comes to change is that I just think we're not really uber intentional and thoughtful about how we want to go about change. And if you go on LinkedIn at any given day and just search on Agile and you can find all kinds of social media debates about, this is the way it needs to be done, and someone else will chime in, and I think that's baloney, this is the way I think it should be done. And what I would love to say to all those people is it just means there's difference, right? And I think the work to do is to be really, really clear about what is it that you are trying to change. So you've heard me say like I'm about changing behaviour first, like really focused in on using conversation as a way for that behaviour change to happen. And then I hold and trust and I've seen years of evidence of once that gets ironed out, once we're able to have more of that communicative competence in a team, that the other things become less of an issue and we're able to navigate that, but that's me, and that's my model. That doesn't mean, that doesn't make me right or wrong. It doesn't make me the only way to go about change. I think there's so many other different ways. So others listening to this podcast might have a place where they put process in the centre, and that is their focus, and that gets to be okay. So I'm just a real advocate of being clear about what is it that you're trying to change and how do you go about making that change happen in the world. Ula Ojiaku What struck me is you're saying the need to be clear about what you're trying to change, what you're trying to, if I may use the word, achieve as a result of the transformation. Would there be a place for the why? Because you might, and if so, how does that weave into the whole picture? Marsha Acker Well, I think in the process of building a model, you get clear first about how do I believe change happens? And then it becomes, okay, so what would I do to bring about change? So even if you think about leadership, what do I think about how leadership should, in my world, you know, should behave or act? How would I grow leadership? How would I grow leadership in others? And then what are some of the things that I would do? Where might I take action? And then why would I take action in those places? The same thing with change. I'm really clear about conversation and behaviour and helping people look at that. And so there are certain things that I would do in the room with a leadership team, and there's certain things that I would not do. And I'm really clear about why, like, because I hold, like what you'll hear is that phrase, because change doesn't happen until people feel seen and heard. And that's a real key, becomes a guiding North Star and I think it helps me navigate difference. So when I run across someone else who has a really different model than me, there's a version of myself years ago who, you know, it's kind of like the example that I gave of saying to Sarah, well, let's, you know, let's debate this out about which one of us is, you know, right or wrong. I don't actually think that's our work to do, but I do think our work to do is to just be really clear. So can you name what's in your model? Can you name what it is that you're trying to change? And then you and I could engage in a, what we would call, kind of a cross model conversation where it's not about beating the other down or making either of us wrong, but we can be really clear about, oh, well I would do this because this is why, this is what I believe about how change happens and this is how I'm helping the team change. And you could say, actually, I see, you know, my focus is a little bit different and here's why, and here's what I would do. And now, gosh, that's a learning conversation to have, that's not a debate. In leadership teams as leaders are trying to lead change in an organisation, I think this is the conversation that doesn't get had almost ever is how do we believe change will happen, and what are we going to do to bring about change? And even if there are ten people in that team and we each might have a slightly different personal view about how change happens, we have got to come to some alignment around how we are collectively going to look to bring about change, because if we don't, it's going to feel really dispersed and really challenging as we try to move forward in a large scale change, if we've all got ten different versions, we've got ten different models on how change happens. Ula Ojiaku What I think I'm hearing you say, Marsha, is, as a leadership team, it's really about taking the time to be aligned on what you're trying to do and also, presenting a united front, because the whole organisation will be looking up to you, so you need to be saying the same thing. But this is now me extending, extrapolating, not that you said this, but within, you should also be able, within yourself as a team to have those difficult conversations. You know, you could make your move, or follow, or oppose yourselves, but come to a conclusion which you present as a united front to the organisation in charging it forward. And there's something else you said in your, well, it's a quote in your book, Build Your Model for Leading Change, which said that leadership is being in the mess and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Do you want to expand on that please? Marsha Acker I think it's so true. There's, it's in the space between us that I think gets messy and having, we were just wrapping up a cohort program for a group of internal leaders, just recently and I watched sort of the thinking and the shift in mindset happen over time. Like I said, I have a lot of compassion for leaders that there's a ton of pressure and expectations, you know, from bottom side, up, across and I think in those moments, some days it can be just really challenging to navigate which end is up. How do I manage through that? And I'm responsible for all of this out in front of me, and yet the propensity, like the compelling, I think, reaction is to just keep moving things forward, like the go faster. Just go faster, get through the meeting faster, get the things done, delegate it more, and that, it's not that that's wrong, and it's really helpful, but there just sometimes needs to be space where they slow it down and they actually create space, and I think that's the messy part. Like if I were to, you know, if I were to even channel what I would describe if things get tense or if I feel like somebody's possibly going to be disagreeing or not cooperate in the way that I want them to, I sometimes think the propensity to just keep moving forward and step over it or go past it is what often plagues us and the path of like, let me just slow down, I think it feels messy, I think it feels uncertain. It lacks a little bit of clarity about how, okay, so if I open this up, if I give voice, or I allow someone to give voice to a different point of view or a different perspective, am I going to be able to clean it up and move us forward? And for me, that's part of what I mean by the messy part. Like, it's unpredictable and yet I watch, I've been in a room to watch it, I've experienced it myself, there's such a gift when you do just slow down a little bit. Like, there's misunderstandings get cleared up, assumptions that are not correct, get corrected. They, people who are just really charged up and have a, they're making up all kinds of stories about why things are happening, like the pressure valve gets released off of that and then, and the anxiety comes down, like I've just watched it happen over and over again. So I just, I think there is the things that we tend to want to stay away from because they're not comfortable, I think, are the things to find a way to make space for. So it's messy, it's uncomfortable, it's feels like it's going to take more time. It all the kind of negative talk that I hear leaders say or navel gazing, that's my favourite one, it's going to feel like navel gazing, but yeah, I think we have to create space for some of it. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Marsha. And there might be some listeners who, like me, are saying, okay, so in practice, how do we create the space? How do we go slow? Because in my area, in my field, I'm just quoting, you know, things seem to be going at break neck speed and there's never, things are never going to slow down for me. So how do I intentionally slow down or create the space to be able to do this? What are the practices, should we go on a retreat? Marsha Acker Yeah, well, I'll give you an example of at TeamCatapult. So, while we recommend this to all leadership teams that we work with, back during the pandemic, we, early on in the pandemic, I started to notice that we had grown, things had changed even for us internally. And so I made the decision to actually, even though we're all coaches, we brought coaches in to help us for about a year. And one of the things that we started to do for ourselves that we often recommend to others is carving out time once a month to create space where we would work on how we worked together. So, I don't, I'm not a huge, I think offsites and retreats are great, we do them, we have one coming up, we're all ridiculously excited to go to it, but we can't accomplish everything that we need to accomplish once or twice a year. And so we started to, given our size and our pace and kind of how we work together, the once a month really made sense for us. So we carve it out, it's the first Thursday of every month, it's for three and a half hours. We worked with a coach in that time night, right now we're not working with a coach and it's agenda-less. It's really an open space. It's not open space, the technology of open space, it's just an open conversation without an agenda. It's an invitation into dialogue and it is the place that we, I know that it's on my calendar, it's reserved, I don't have to, we can go at a pace in other meetings, but I know that we have that space and it's the place where we just show up, we all show up differently, we give time to actually surface the, sometimes maybe the things that did get stepped over intentionally or unintentionally across, you know, the last couple of weeks. And we have some of the most difficult, challenging, real, honest conversations in that space that I've ever experienced in my professional career, so it definitely also I've learned to try to block my calendar off after those calls to, you know, just to create a bit of processing time. So that's how we do it. I just recently, a couple months ago, interviewed someone on my podcast and he talked about, I loved this idea, of two week sprints and a one week retro. And so that was his way of really, intentionally carving out reflection time and really placing the value on catching sight of things, slowing down. So I think we need places where we're creating variability in the kind of meeting we're having, and I think when we're working at a really fast pace, just having, for me, I love knowing that it's on my calendar. I preserve the time, there's very little that will take precedence over it other than, you know, being on vacation or something, but, yeah, I really value it. So I think it will look different for every team, depending on the frequency and how often you meet and how much work is being done. Ula Ojiaku And would you say, because you know the one about blocking out the time in people's calendars as a team. What about as individuals, people as individuals also taking the time to do that for themselves? Marsha Acker Yeah. We are, you know, so in TeamCatapult, I think most people also work with individual coaches, so I think we all have a practice of doing that. When we're working with leadership teams, we often recommend both so that there's a carved out space on a monthly basis to come together collectively, and that they're each getting individual coaching as a way to help work through those things. Like I was saying, I notice when I show up in that space, my oppose goes silent, or I don't always bring my voice in, working one-on-one sometimes to help become more aware of why we're doing those things really helps us show up differently in the collective space. So yes, whether you're working with a coach or whether you're just carving out the time to do it yourself. And you asked me, you know, why I wrote the book, the Build Your Model book. It's partly that just wanting, it's a guided reflection workbook, and I really wanted to find a way to help people do this work on their own, with some handholds or some guidance around what it might look like. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. And is there, on TeamCatapult, is there any program that could be, for example, I want someone to guide me through the process, is that available? Marsha Acker Yeah. We have two public programs, where we lay down kind of the technology that I've been describing and help you think about your own model for how, so there's two versions of that, there's one path that will lead you to thinking about your model as an agile coach. And there's a second path that will lead you to thinking about your model as a leader, as an interventionist. So, kind of two different programs. So the Path for Agile Coaching falls under a program we call Coaching Agility From Within, and that's a cohort program. It's about building your own model for agile coaching. And then, if that's not of interest, we have two other programs. One's called Making Behavioural Change Happen, which is part one where you sort of onboard the technology of structural dynamics. And then the second part is called Changing Behaviour in High Stakes, and that's where we go a bit deeper into helping you think about how you would intervene in behaviour and in conversation, both at an individual level, but also at a system level, so how you might map the system. So two different paths, and very complimentary in our Coaching Agility From Within program. There's also a thread of structural dynamics, it's underneath of that and how to coach a team using structure. So yes, a couple of different ways. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. And what, I mean in addition to your fantastic books, and I'm not saying it just because you're here, what other books do you find yourself recommending to leaders? Marsha Acker Yeah. Well, I referenced one a little while ago Reading The Room by David Kantor. So all of our work really is informed greatly by that book. And my book Build Your Model for Leading Change, is based off of a lot of some of the concepts that David introduced and his book captures kind of in a narrative format, the story around it. And I would say mine is much more the workbook of how to onboard the technology of looking at behaviour and then the guided reflection of creating your model. The other thing that I am super excited, so my colleague Sarah, just re-released version two of her book. She has a book called, Where Did You Learn to Behave Like that? And I am deep into reading the new version. So it's top of mind for me. It further takes you down the path, like if you're hearing me talk about my childhood story and why I hesitate to oppose, Sarah's sort of the expert in that space around childhood story work and doing it with leaders. So her book is all about some stories around leaders who have done the work on childhood story, how it's really impacted their leadership, how they make space for difference and where they notice some of the kind of high stakes behaviours they may have as leaders. So yeah, if that's of interest, that's a really great resource to check out. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that. It'll be in the show notes and so that the audience can get it. And any ask of the audience before we wrap up. Marsha Acker Yeah. You know, we've covered a lot of topics today and I think what I would just say in summary is an invitation to anybody to kind of be on a really intentional journey about what do you think about leadership? How do you go about leading in the world? How do you believe change happens? You've heard me share some examples today, but I think there's a calling for all of us to do some of the work because I think in the doing the work, and getting clear for ourselves, I do think that's the place of clarity and competence. I think that's where we learn to kind of find our feet when the pull, the gravitational pull of the real world kind of gets in our way. And we're all dealing with that in many ways. So that's what I want people to think about and whatever shape or form that looks like for folks, that's the big thing. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that, Marsha. And if one wants to get in touch with you, how can they reach out to you? Marsha Acker A couple of ways. The best way to just connect with me will be on LinkedIn, so you can find me at Marsha Acker, and just, you know, when you send me them, I get tons and I don't say yes to everybody, so it's just really helpful if when people connect, they just tell me a little bit about how they're connecting. How they managed to get there, so that helps me do the sort and sift that I know we're all doing these days. The other place would be buildyourmodel.com so you can find kind of a free download there about model building, so if you're curious about that. And then our programs, you can find at teamcatapult.com. So the Making Behavioural Change Happen starts this fall and there's a Changing Behaviour in High Stakes program that starts in February, and the Coaching Agility From Within program starts in January next year. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. So the programs you mentioned that can be found on TeamCatapult, the one starting this Autumn is Autumn 2023 and the February and March dates are in 2024, just for the audience clarity. Thank you so much, Marsha. I wish we had more time, but I do respect your time and for me it's been really enriching and enlightening. And I do want to say thank you again for making the time to share and impart your knowledge, your wisdom, your experience with us. Marsha Acker Yeah, thanks a lot. I really appreciate being here. Ula Ojiaku Likewise. Thank you again. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership   development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change.  She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Riot Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha's unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication  that  get  in  their  way  of  high  performance.  She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilist. She is the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyse clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others. Interview Highlights 02:30 Background and beginnings 03:35 Reaching a cap 08:50 Working with difference 10:45 Process-centred focus vs people-centred focus 15:50 Behavioural-led change 17:25 Having effective conversations Social Media LinkedIn: Marsha on LinkedIn Website:  www.teamcatapult.com Twitter: Marsha on Twitter  Books & Resources Making Behavioral Change Happen - Team Catapult Changing Behavior in High Stakes - Team Catapult Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku Hi everyone. My guest for this episode is Marsha Acker. Marsha is the Founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, and she is a respected and sought after leadership development expert, and her firm works to equip leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change. This episode is the first of a two part series, because there were just a lot of nuggets to get from Marsha and in part one, we talked about Marsha's background and beginning, how she got to a cap and she knew that she needed to break through a certain ceiling to get to more, to achieve her potential. She also talked about process-centred versus people-centred transformation and the differences and where each one might be considered. Of course, there is a bias for, and I am biased as well towards the people-centred focus, but there is a place for process and how you might go about implementing a behavioural led change. Without further ado, Part One of my conversation with Marsha Acker. I hope you find this as insightful as I did. I have with me the very one and only Marsha Acker, who is the founder of TeamCatapult and a coach, facilitator, much, much known in the Agile coaching discipline and beyond. Marsha, it is a big pleasure and an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you. Marsha Acker Thanks a lot. I'm super excited to be here with you today, so thanks for inviting me. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. So, Marsha, could you tell us a bit about yourself? Marsha Acker Yeah, well, I often say my first career was, you know, two degrees in software engineering and I spent some time working with developers, sort of bridging the gap between end users and developers. And so that was my first start, it's actually where I learned about facilitation, was trying to bring whole groups of users together to align on what they wanted in terms of requirements. So it was back before we talked about Agile, it was back before any of those methods and processes had made their way. But that's really where I got my start in facilitation. And then, yes, towards what I call my own retooling around my career, was when I, I actually went to look for professional coaching as a way to up my leadership. I didn't have a desire originally to become a coach. I wanted to do and learn coaching because I wanted to up my leadership, I just, I had reached a point where I was really challenged in my own leadership and so the very short version of that much longer circuitous path was, I found that I did go through coactive coaching. So I started in that space. CTI (Coach Training Institute) had a huge impact on me personally, it's responsible for many life decisions that I made coming out of that program. But that was where I got my certification in professional coaching with individuals, and then I went on to do ORSC from CRR Global, and then I went on to do structural dynamics and that's where I met the work of David Kantor, where I met David Kantor. And we can talk more about that, but that's certainly changed my whole view of how we enter interpersonal relationships, how we have conversations with one another, it gave me a lens for sort of looking at even some of the previous coach training that I did. So yes, I have, I often say I sort of have two backgrounds that I think the tech side helps me just stay connected to a, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for techies and people who have a lot of technical and scientific knowledge. And then I often say I learned a lot about process improvement and automation and making things effective and efficient, but I think one of the things that I really lacked in the first part of my career was the human skills, like how to work with other human beings. And I would say the second half of my professional career has been, yeah, how to work with others. It's a big thing. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, Marsha. Something you said about the second part of your career has been focused on working with humans. Well, I have a technical background in Electronic Engineering, Bachelor's degree, a Master's in Computer Science. And at the beginning of my career, it was more of, okay, what could you do? You know, what's your technical understanding? But as you move on, it's really more about how, you know, work well with people and get people to do the best work together. Would you say that's a general trend that you've also observed apart from your own personal experience? Marsha Acker Yeah. I don't know if it's, sometimes I wonder, you know, it's maybe just the lens that I look through or it's the organisations and the kinds of leaders that I somehow attract into my sphere. But I do find myself working a lot with technical leaders and I think one of the things that happens, technical and scientific tracks, you know, we move forward in our careers, we get rewarded for knowledge, for having the answer, for being able to connect and do things quickly. And I think in that career progression, we get really good at knowing the answer, having the answer, you know, we're working with things that we feel like are discreet, you know, we can own them in some way, but as we move up, and I think many, you know, I've talked to many a developer, engineer who, you know, sometimes reached that cap, and then the next step is to lead people, to lead others, and to, you know, to be the senior architect, to be the senior engineer, the Vice President or the Director. And you know, it's that famous saying, what got us here won't get us to the next level, and so I think there are those moments, I certainly experienced that, that was one of the reasons I went off to coach training was I just, the metaphor I use often is that I was out over my skis. I knew something was, like I was trying to make something happen or I was trying to get things to happen, and my only model for that was because I said, so, like, please do this, because, I think this is the way. And I just, I really, I started to realise, I felt like I was running on a hamster wheel some days, and I'm like, this isn't working and I feel like I'm missing something. So I often do find myself working with leaders or leadership teams who are, it's not that they're underperforming, it's just that they've reached a cap. The place where all that they know and all that they have, have served them really well, up until this point, and then like what's required to go to that next level or to be effective and efficient in a different kind of way. It's sort of when our focus starts to come off of the very discreet task and it becomes more about how do we create an environment, a space, a container for others to be their best, so it's no longer going to be, you know, me making all the decisions or me moving something forward, it's that we need to work together. And boy that we space is tricky. Yeah, we are going to see things differently and there's going to be conflict and there's going to be difference of opinion. And then, you know, ooh, how do I work with that in a way that's, I just, you know, I think one of the biggest questions that I think we help leadership teams look at is how do we work with difference, and actually welcome it rather than try to minimise it, because I think that's the rub where if we don't have skills to work with it, we tend to minimise it or send it out of the room or suppress it. Like we say, you know, we don't have enough time for that, or, gosh, we've got this deadline. So we've become super deadline driven, and I think sometimes at the expense of having a real conversation with one another. Ula Ojiaku Gosh, I have so many questions. I don't know which one to ask, but I'll just go with the last, based on what you've said, the last few sentences in terms of not having time, you suppress the conflict or the differences or the disagreements, because we're always like on a deadline or we don't have the time for this. So how would you get these leadership teams to step back and say, you know what, we have to deal with this elephant in the room, otherwise it's going to get bigger, fester, if we were to use an analogy of the wound on it, you know, if you just cover it up with a band-aid, it's not going to get better, sometimes you have to treat the wound, get the scab off so that it can heal wholesomely and you move forward. So what's your approach for this, please? Marsha Acker So I can tell you how I would've approached it early in my career, in a version of myself that really led with process. So at that time, I had a model for change that was very focused on ‘know the process', like document the process, define the new process, get people to follow the process. And I definitely, I kind of laugh about it now, but I, you know, it's not wrong, I mean, it worked, but this is very early in my career, early 2000, because I just began to work with agility. I had left one space where I was a part of a small startup and I was heading up all of our programs and we had really started to use extreme programming. So I'm sort of fresh on this, on this thinking of, okay, so there's different ways we can begin to work. And I'd gone into a smaller organisation, it was a consulting firm. We were leading process led change, and we were working with a leadership team who was really charged with a huge internal transformation effort. And at that time, working directly with that leadership team, I would've said we took a very process-centred focus to that, we documented the current process, we helped them. It was  over a year of working with this one leadership team, and then we started to help them craft, okay, so what's your desired change and what would the process under that look like? And as we got towards the end of that transformation, one of the things that I started to notice is that the process-led decisions that the leadership team was being asked to really make some decisions about, had a huge impact on people, both them and the staff and the people that they were managing, they cared greatly about their culture and the people, and they reached a place where they just, to describe it, they just dug in their heels and progress wasn't moving forward. And I remember thinking, we'd been on retreats with them multiple times, and it was in that moment, that was the moment where I learned and had the insight, that there was way more to change than just the process. And what I can tell you now that I couldn't quite articulate back then was that we were missing the people part of this equation. And what was starting to happen is that as the pressure increased and the leadership team was being asked to make decisions that were truly going to impact not only them personally, like where they lived, where their children went to school, you know, family impacts, but that was also going to have an impact across all the folks that they managed. And so they were reaching a place where they just couldn't make that decision kind of collectively. I think one of the biggest mistakes in that particular process was that we were so process led. And what was missing from it was a coaching perspective and a way to help them have the real conversation because the real conversation actually started to go out of the room. And I was certainly playing a part in, potentially a little unaware at the moment that in favour of wanting to push things forward and get things done in my process-led change model, they were really needing to have a different kind of conversation that wasn't about the process at all, but that had since become the undiscussable topic and it didn't get brought into the room. So we sort of, we left it out. So that's an example of an earlier model for change that I had, and I didn't have a way of bringing that conversation on mind or really even paying attention to it. Now you asked for how would I do it today? Ula Ojiaku Yes, because you've said the process-led model for change, I'm excited to know what the next one is. Marsha Acker Well I want to be really clear, I don't think that that's a wrong model. But I think for me, I learned that it was missing something, and I can reflect back now and tell you that, but I don't want your listeners to draw any wrong conclusions. That wasn't an overnight insight, that definitely took a little bit of time. But what I would say now is I have, you know, in my model for leading change, I think process is important, but it's really not at the core of how I think about change at all. I think in my model, it's definitely a sub-task, but I would say I'm very focused on behavioural-led change at the moment. And so in that behavioural-led change, what I place at the centre of any change is, how are people communicating with one another? Are they able to actually have the real conversation? Is there enough awareness in the system that they can kind of catch sight of when the real conversation starts to go underground? And can they actually have the muscle, the range in their leadership to catch sight of it and then bring it back in the room? And so, I place conversations and behaviour kind of at the core of change, and I hold a perspective that change, that no one will change, change doesn't happen until people feel heard and understood.  And I don't know that I could find you an example of any organisation that I've worked in, including my own TeamCatapult, where something that we're trying to do or accomplish or move forward doesn't meet a roadblock when some aspect of our conversation isn't fully online or we're not fully having the conversation that we need to have. So one of the ways that I would do that today is, first, whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change and just noticing like they're trying to level up or there's something that they're wanting that they feel like they're kind of capped at is I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation, because I think in the conversation there are lots of indicators about how that conversation plays out and are people really able to say what they're thinking or do we get stuck in some common dysfunctional patterns that can show up? So one example of that would be, we use a sort of a technology for looking at conversation and there are four actions that happen in all effective conversations, a move, a follow, an oppose, and a bystand. So a move sets direction, a follow supports it, an oppose offers really clear correction. It says, no, hang on, wait a minute. A bystand offers a morally neutral perspective, so one way is to help a team onboard that, but there are common patterns and one of the common patterns that will come out, particularly in tech teams where there's pace and we need to move things forward, is that they can get into this pattern of someone makes a move, and everyone else just sort of remains silent or, says something to the effect might voice ‘sure, you know, that sounds good.' So they start to fall into this pattern of move and lots of follow. And what's missing often is the voice of bystand, which says, hey, I'm wondering what's going on, or I'm wondering what we're not saying. And then really clear opposition. So the ability to bring pushback, constraint into the conversation. So if you go back to that original leadership team that I was telling you about, you know, way back when, I think one of the things that was going on in that team is they weren't, no one was able to say, this is an incredibly difficult decision, and I don't think I can make it unless I have these things answered. So they kept making it about the process and it wasn't really about the process at all. It was really, it had a very personal component to it that wasn't being discussed, and so the inability to discuss that really created the drag. So the way that I think about helping any team work through any change is, helping them onboard the skills of being able to have, we call it bringing, it's a principle that we hold about bringing the real conversation in the room. Can you bring the conversation online versus offline? So the other flag that you might have for when your conversations are going offline is, if you feel, I often think about if I leave a conversation with you and I, for example, if I left this conversation and I went off and I felt the need, or I was compelled to one of vent or complain about it to someone else, that's my kind hazard flag. But, there was something that I was holding back from in this conversation that I didn't say, and that's my signal to actually circle back around. And so maybe, maybe I need to check in with myself, maybe there's something that I left unsaid.   Ula Ojiaku So there we are, this is the end of part one of the conversation with Marsha. In part two of this conversation, which is the final one where we are going to talk about having effective conversations, what functional self awareness means, why it is important to slow down conversations in order to get results, as counter-intuitive as this might be, and many other things, so stay tuned and watch out for part two of my conversation with Marsha. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!     

“Leading change is high stakes, but we don't spend a great deal of time focusing on conversation and creating space to engage in real conversation." Marsha Acker is the author of “Build Your Model for Leading Change” and the host of “Defining Moments of Leadership” podcast. In this episode, we discussed building our own model for leadership and leading change. Marsha first started by sharing the concept of a model and some of the common challenges for organizations in making changes. Then we discussed David Kantor's theories on structural dynamics and functional awareness for understanding behavioral model, which include the concepts of leadership range and communicative competence. Marsha outlined what makes communication so challenging and what we can do to achieve a more effective communication. Towards the end, she shared the three different models that leaders need to think about, i.e. model for leadership, model for living, and model for leading change.   Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:03:54] Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast - [00:10:14] Building Our Model - [00:14:11] Challenges for Making Organization Change - [00:19:48] Behavioral Model - [00:23:57] Structural Dynamics - [00:27:30] Functional Awareness - [00:33:01] Communication Challenges - [00:38:12] Model for Leadership - [00:40:55] Model for Living - [00:44:12] Model for Leading Change - [00:46:10] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:44] _____ Marsha Acker's BioMarsha Acker is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha's unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication that get in their way of high performance. She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilest. She is the author of The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams and Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyze clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others. Follow Marsha: LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/marsha-acker-3486a72 Website – teamcatapult.com Twitter – @marshaacker _____ Our Sponsors Miro is your team's visual workspace to connect, collaborate, and create innovations together, from anywhere.Sign up today at miro.com/podcast and get your first 3 Miro boards free forever. Like this episode? Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/151 Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Buy me a coffee or become a patron.

From 2017, Interviews include Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore, David Kantor,Michael Winner and Isa Dick Hackett who is Phili K. Dick's daughter. Plus actor Liam Cunningham who stars in the episode, Human Is. Specual thanks to Prime Video and New York Comic Con. 

Amy Elizabeth Fox is a senior leadership strategist with two decades of experience consulting to Fortune 500 companies on issues of human capital, organizational health and leadership development. She is the Chief Executive Officer of Mobius Executive Leadership, a premier leadership development firm with offices in Boston and London. Since 2005, Ms. Fox has served as one of the lead designers and lead faculty members in Mobius transformational leadership programs offered globally. She is also the founder of the Next Practice Institute, a professional development arm for coaches and facilitators and has helped build a global firm with over 200 practitioners and long standing relationships with some of the world's most innovative companies. Mobius services include top team intervention, multi-client CEO sessions, executive coaching and business mediation. Its signature offering is a cutting edge contribution to the field of transformation through the design and delivery of bespoke and immersive leadership programs for senior executives. Mobius enjoys a privileged partnership with Egon Zehnder as well as with numerous boutique firms promoting the work of its prestigious Senior Experts including Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, Bob Kegan, Ron Heifetz, Linda Hill, Tom deLong, Amy Edmondson, David Kantor among others. Mobius operates as a consortium of practice across an expert network of coaches, trainers, and facilitators and brings customized programs to clients in the public and private sector. Prior to her Mobius, Amy was a senior trainer for Vantage Partners anchoring their corporate education delivery of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most in both private and public sectors. Before that, Amy was the Director of Training and Organizational Development for Wellspace Inc., a health care start-up. She served as the Associate Director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an educational initiative headed by Paul Gorman, Vice President Al Gore and Carl Sagan. She was Special Assistant to the Dean of Education, City College and Education Director of an in-patient alcohol rehabilitation hospital. Amy is a psychotherapist who received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her master's in Counseling Psychology from Lesley College. Amy is certified as an executive coach in the area of Emotional Intelligence by Hay/McBer and Associates, and as a trainer in the System for Analyzing Verbal Interaction by SAVI Communications.   . Additionally, I'll be donating to and raising awareness for the charity or organization of my guest's choice with each episode now. This episode, the organization is called The Pocket Project. Any and all donations make a difference! You can connect with Amy on: Website - Mobius Executive Leadership LinkedIn Listen to her Keynote presentation at Next Practice Institute Follow her sister, Erica Ariel Fox, on LinkedIn Follow Erica Ariel Fox on her Website Follow Erica Ariel Fox's contributions on Forbes   To connect with me: Interested in working with me as your coach? Book a complimentary 15 minute call here. LinkedIn Instagram Website Subscribe to my weekly newsletter YouTube Please leave a review for this podcast on Apple Podcasts!   Resources/People Mentioned: Difficult Conversations - Doug Stone, Bruce Patten and Sheila Heen Winning from Within - Erica Ariel Fox Amy Edmondson, and her work on Psychological Safety Joseph Cambell - Hero's Journey Yotam Schachter Thomas Hubl Lynda Caesara Neem Karoli Baba

Producer, writer and director of the 2014 film Reimagine Jesus, David Kantor joins us to talk about the early days of the revelation, his personal journey, his film projects and along the way, we discuss the history of Christianity, the Atonement Doctrine, how religion has changed, neo-modern challenges and the important of relationships as they relate to personal spiritual growth and happiness. Music credit: Pieter Bourke/Lisa Gerrard, Sacrifice Pato Banton: Last Words of Comfort --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/james-watkins/support

From 2017, Interviews include Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore, David Kantor,Michael Winner and Isa Dick Hackett who is Philip K. Dick's daughter. Plus actor Liam Cunningham who stars in the episode, Human Is. Special thanks to New York Comic Con and Amazon.

From 2017, Interviews include Executive Producers Ronald D. Moore, David Kantor,Michael Winner and Isa Dick Hackett who is Philip K. Dick's daughter. Plus actor Liam Cunningham who stars in the episode, Human Is. Special thanks to New York Comic Con and Amazon.

Part of David Kantor's Structural Dynamics which suggests there are 4 main speech acts in any conversation.

We’re finally on Dune!  Moving 25,000 years in the future is like moving today; boxes, who gets what bedroom, decisions where to hang things, and disagreements.  In this episode, Mike briefly revisits chapter 6 briefly to mention that Leto informs Paul that he’s been groomed to be a Mentat and we otherwise get right to it:   We break down psychologist David Kantor’s concept of structural dynamics from his book “Reading the Room.” Leto uses “closed power” when talking with Jessica about where the painting of Leto’s father and the bull that gored him to death. Understanding structural dynamics is a great way to improve your outcomes in life and business so there’s some really good stuff in here if you join us for the “and more” aspect of us covering “Dune and more”. Chakobsa “hunting language” and the use of secret codes in warfare such as the 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu naming system--if your opponent can’t understand you, you have an advantage.  The nature of the Missionaria Protectiva as a way of a Bene Gesserit in distress accessing help from the natives. Jessica and our first encounter with a Fremen (the Shadout Mapes) Nifty crysknives and why the word “Maker” is so important.  Structural dynamics David Kantor book: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Room-Dynamics-Coaches-Leaders/dp/0470903430    Sami People: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people    Nutti Sami Sida ecotourism in Arctic Sweden - https://nutti.se/    10th planet jiu jitsu: https://www.10thplanetjj.com/    A thread about 10th planet names: https://www.reddit.com/r/bjj/comments/7cxvw8/whats_up_with_those_10th_planet_technique_names/ 

Introduction: Tony Melville is co-owner of Dialogix with Sarah Hill his business partner.  Dialogix facilitates powerful conversations across boundaries working with top teams globally. Tony Melville is a former Chief Constable of the UK Police Service  where he spent 34 years of his career. In 2010 he was chosen to lead the National Transformational Change Program for the entire UK police service. Tony is skilled  in behavioural change and organisational interventions, hostage negotiation and crisis management. Podcast episode summary: Tony appreciates the skill inherent in productive conversation and how being unskilful as a Leader working in organisations can lead to harm. This conversation ,by way of understanding Structural dynamics and dialogue , deconstructed & demystified the often-nebulous nature of our conversations to provide a lens for seeing what is or is not taking place. Tony described the first level of structural dynamics and explained dialogue to show that in combination we can have very different conversations on teams.    Points made through the episode:  As a hostage negotiator Tony valued the importance of face to face communication and more importantly skilful communication  He also realised the harm unskilful communication can have on organisations and the people who inhabit them  Important to grasp insight on self, your behavioural repertoire, adopting a mindset that allows for the collective wisdom to shine and the nature of complex systems  Structural Dynamics helps a person understand their preferences in communication, what they might avoid and why and where that story started.  Structural Dynamics reveals, by way of the four levels David Kantor describes in his theory of communication , the structure of what is happening in a conversation.  It is a complex theory, but it is also easy to comprehend. Level one comprises four action stances, Making Moves, Follow, Oppose and Bystand. All four are necessary in a productive conversation and the use of one or two can lead to inaction and worse dysfunction on a team  Being able to read the room, decipher what is happening, notice what is missing, see where participants are getting stuck is a fantastic skill for a leader /team member to possess Dialogue is a shared enquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together where people suspend judgements, voice their ideas and respectfully listen. It is infinitely more generative than debate, winning or being preoccupied with solo runs or monologues.  Dialogix approach is to conduct behavioural profiles with individuals on teams, interviews and interventions that typically run over a period of time to allow for real behavioural change Useful resources to consider as a leader/team member include David Kantor's book “Reading the room” Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs and The Tso of Dialogue by Sarah Hill and others just published.  Leaders need to unlearn the habitual use of skills and practices that got them to their new role and instead focus on what the organisation needs of them now. Leaders need to develop and grow to fulfil needs of new roles.  Tony gave examples of what he had to unlearn, skills that proved very effective as a detective & hostage negotiator were not the same skills required as Chief Constable  Important to recognise there is always a hierarchy in systems and organisational life no matter how seemingly flat.  In Policing it is often much more evidenced by way of for example the symbol of the police uniform. People can and were extremely deferential. To get at more oppose in the organisation , necessary for the order of change required Tony and his top team needed to change and create a safe place for people to feel OK to challenge.  Fear is real in a hierarchical situation and important that fear is addressed, and safety is cultivated  Get practiced at noticing conversations, start noticing your own team meetings, who is making moves, who is following, who is doing the oppose and is there anyone offering a bystand? Notice the quality of the conversation when any of these actions are missing. Adust accordingly and notice the results.  At its simplest if anyone or everyone could grasp the concept that in any conversation having these four action stances improves the productivity of the conversation in terms of decisions, discussion and alignment.  Find the time to pause and slow down to get perspective  Quotable quotes “Finding the way to bring the stakes down for you & others is likely to lead to better interaction, decision making & productive conversations”     Resources: the following include the resources we alluded to over the course of our conversation   Kantor, David. Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders  Isaacs, William. Dialogue and the art of thinking together  Hill, Sarah ,Lawrence, Paul. The Tao of Dialogue  https://dialogix.co.uk 

En esta ocasión una transmisión junto a nuestro amigo Agustín Arellano para hablar sobre el próximo Encuentro Internacional Urantia a desarrollarse próximamente en Monterrey México! Aquí más información sobre el congreso: * ¿Cómo registrarse? Es muy fácil: ve a www.orvonton.org y haz clic en congreso 2020, allí encontrará un botón PayPal la página donde usted puede pagar con tarjeta de crédito o débito. También puede depositar en el banco BBVA Cuenta # 0456589839 a nombre de Agustín Arellano Tirado Número de cuenta 007451340456589839 Clabe 012580004565898397. Para pago en OXXO 4152 3133 1348 2064. * ¿Cuánto cuesta? Es de $ 2000 pesos para los mexicanos y 200 dólares para los extranjeros y la mitad de ellos se utilizan para pagar los honorarios del congreso y la otra mitad para llevar a los líderes latinoamericanos que trabajan en las áreas más pobres que de otra manera no podría hacer al congreso. Desde hoy descuento del 50% en la inscripción al CN20 para los chicos menores de 20 años y a los mayores de 75. * ¿Qué incluye? Incluye: 1 Carpeta profesional, 1 Mochila, 1 pluma, 2T-Shirts, un sombrero, UB, trabajos secundarios, un folleto, un DVD, una noche de gala, materiales para los talleres, la traducción al inglés o francés, paseo en bote, visita a 3 museos, su compañero Monterrey y Coffe Break continuo. No incluye comidas. * ¿Cómo puedo llegar a Monterrey? Hay muchos vuelos en el aeropuerto internacional de Monterrey, puede elegir el mejor precio visitando www.cheapoair.com , www.kayak,com, etc.MTY es el código del aeropuerto. * ¿Cómo puedo llegar al hotel? Usted puede tomar un taxi desde el aeropuerto es por debajo de $20 dólares para un máximo de 4 personas (viajar con una maleta, las cajuelas no son tan grandes). El nombre del hotel es el Antaris Cintermex, ubicado en el Parque Fundidora, la dirección es: Retorno, Av Fundidora 400, Col. Obrera, código postal 64010 Monterrey. * ¿Cómo puedo reservar mi habitación? Puede hacerlo en línea puede por el chat de WhatsApp agregue el número +52 81 1538 9152 usted tiene que decirles que usted es parte del grupo del Congreso del Libro de Urantia o escribir un correo cintermex@hotelantaris.com También, por 180 pesos puede obtener desayuno, comida o cena. Puede aprovechar el precio del congreso al máximo llegando antes y/o saliendo después simplemente pida a la persona que responde la llamada respetar la tarifa convenio del congreso. *¿Cuál es el cronograma de actividades del congreso? Empezamos el jueves por la tarde, la inscripción al Congreso a las 3 p.m. hasta las 6:00 p.m. en el vestíbulo del hotel. A las 7 nos reunimos para tener un briefing sobre Monterrey, qué hacer, ver, visitar, etc. a las 8 vamos a la primera actividad Cinema Urantia en la que disfrutaremos de Reimaginando a Jesús un filme de David Kantor. El viernes empezamos a las 7 de la mañana con una meditación guiada por Sandra Naranjo del Ecuador, luego desayuno y a las 9: 30 tenemos la apertura del congreso, en total tendremos 4 talleres interactivos, incluyendo a Jaime Rodríguez el ufólogo más importante del Ecuador y nuestro viejo amigo que nos ha ayudado a llegar a más de 25.000 personas tanto en sus presentaciones como en la radio y TV, en sus presentaciones el estará presentando su ponencia diplomacia extraterrestre, Patrick Yesh y su taller de arte espiritual y las 5 revelaciones trascendentales, luego 5 Xóchitl Quintero con una visión feminista sobre la revelación, difusión y servicio en acción para el Apocalipsis, y, finalmente, Agustín Arellano, con un taller sobre el uso de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación en la divulgación y la creación grupos de estudio en línea. Junto con el programa presentaremos 12 locutorios o charlas interactivas de 25 minutos cada uno sobre diversos temas, incluyendo el ajustador y yo, el gobierno de la humanidad, Pulsión de muerte - pulsión de vida, Trabajo pionero en el Ecuador, Servicio en acción, EmotionArt, etc. Viernes y sábado. El viernes por la noche después del taller una soirée sociale con Er Ik y el sábado por la noche una cena baile con tema urantiano personajes del Lu, disfrazándose como su personaje favorito presentado en el libro, habrá premio al ganador. Música y celebración. NO DEJES DE PARTICIPAR!

Introduction: Sarah Hill is the co-owner of Dialogix and she describes herself as a dialogue facilitator and behavioural dynamics interventionist. The focus of her work is on tackling some of the toughest and most demanding behavioural challenges. She works with CEOs and senior leaders from a range of different cultures and countries.  She designs & delivers accredited training programs on structural dynamics, generative dialogue and childhood story. Sarah is the Author of “Where did you learn to behave like that? A coaching guide for working with Leaders. She has also co-authored the book The Tao of Dialogue. Sarah holds a PhD and has published articles on collaborative research working with invisible realities & issues of integrity through the lens of Structural Dynamics. Sarah's ambition as a thought leader is to help Leaders recognise that their unresolved childhood stories not only adversely impact themselves but the teams and whole systems of which they are a part.    Podcast episode summary: This episode explores the methodology of Structural Dynamics and Childhood Story. Sarah explained how the behavioural components of structural dynamics can help a team understand their communication patterns and resolve some stuck patterns. She distinguished between the 4 levels of structural dynamics and how practical a model it can be for teams. She also explored the very real invisible realities of childhood story and how shadow behaviours in high stake situations can impede constructive dialogue. Between us we shared our own childhood stories and the work it takes to re-narrate internal narratives.    Noteworthy points of discussion Sarah ‘s interest and passion for change and generative dialogue came after a chance meeting with an organisation called Prison Dialogue. There she witnessed the power of these processes to exercise change even in tough cultures.  Exposed to the work of David Kantor and her PhD “Separate Lives silenced voices” is a theme through all of her work  Sarah referenced the podcast I had with Dr. Paul Lawrence, episode 13 where he explored Structural Dynamics with me  Sarah illuminated the 4 different levels of Structural Dynamics Level One: speaks to our action propensities in conversation through four different acts, the move, the follow, oppose and the bystander Level Two: These are the operating rules governing our behaviour, open, closed or random Level Three: describes the communication domain we use or attend to and they include, Power which is about action or task, Affect is about intimacy or a focus on relationship, Meaning is about sense making, thought or knowledge    Level Four: relates to your childhood story that is often invisible If I were to self-assess using this model, I might consider that I am naturally inclined towards Move/Random/Meaning/ Sarah shared her story about being uncomfortable with oppose having been in a family dynamic where oppose was used and where for Sarah as a child it was dangerous to oppose or be opposed. That was her internal narrative  In high stakes we can react in ways that are embarrassing & shaming. Often something else is playing out behind the shadow behaviour, a fear or old narrative that is now not helpful The work involves understanding what happens in high stakes, what are the triggers that induce shadow behaviour? what are the themes or fears that lie behind our behaviour in high stakes? what are some of our formative experiences? The work is not to dwell on the story but to recraft a new narrative, knowing that the story does not change Structural Dynamics helps to make the invisible visible. It provides a way to understand what might be appearing in conversation and why often there exist model clashes between individuals on teams or in organisations  Structural Dynamics is very proactive. It equips teams to change the nature of their discourses by having a common language to explore together.  Sarah is of the mind that the work of Structural Dynamics and the associated behavioural change work necessary is still not central enough on teams  Sarah appreciates that to do the work teams need to slow down to speed up.       Website:www.dialogix.co.uk The Tao of Dialogue by Paul Lawrence and Sarah Hill  Reading the Room by David Kantor   Dialogue the art of thinking together by William Isaacs  Where did you learn to behave like that? A coaching guide for working with Leaders by Sarah Hill  Where did you learn to behave like that Podcast series on itunes 

This week on UX Cake I had a chance to catch up with David and Mary Sherwin about their new book, Turning People Into Teams. I love this topic — how do we go from being just a bunch individual people with different motivations, attitudes, working styles, communication styles, into a team where the whole is better than the sum parts? It’s about redesigning the way we work together. And the exciting thing about it is that it can happen in small incremental ways; it doesn’t mean a big re-org or overhaul. This is great for all kinds of working collaboration with very practical techniques you can put into place. David and Mary Sherwin are co-founders of Ask The Sherwins, LLC, a consulting and training firm that helps organizations around the world develop the capabilities they need for stronger teamwork. They have coached product and service design teams and developed innovation training for organizations such as Philips Oral Healthcare, Google UX Community and Culture, and Eventbrite. The Sherwins have collaborated on three books, including the bestseller Creative Workshop.Show Highlights:Mary shares a short synopsis of Turning People Into Teams. Teams have the ability to improve any aspect of their working process by creating rituals to create the outcomes they want. Teams have the power to create change without waiting for a budget, a great mandate, or another person in leadership. David defines what they mean by rituals and routines, for the purpose of the book.Mary shares how the new book can be useful to managers who want their teams to use the book, but may also be used by individuals on a team can benefit from the ideas in Mary and David’s new book.David elaborates on a section of the book dealing with when teams are stuck and offers useful tools in a “stuck” situation.Mary says teams need to acknowledge when they noticed something going wrong.“It’s really easy for a team to develop a robust vocabulary around all the crap that’s going wrong, but it’s difficult for them to talk about what is going well in a way that’s meaningful.”David shares that teams need to figure out where they are in a project and what the expectations are between the manager and the team.“If you’re going to have leaders participate in one of the rituals, everyone needs to have equal time and equal voice in sharing what’s needed throughout the ritual so that there won’t be a power imbalance.”Mary discusses the 4 Player Conversation by David Kantor which was referenced in their new book. This can can help individuals understand the differenent roles in team conversations.Getting the team to test an aspect of the ritual and sharing the data as proof of success can be important.Resources:The Sherwins The Sherwins on TwitterArticle about rituals Their new book Turning People Into TeamsTurning People Into Teams ToolkitDavid Kantor’s book, Reading the RoomYou can now support the future of the UX Cake podcast and be a part of the UX Cake community at Patreon.com/uxcake Connect with UX Cake!Twitter FaceBook Instagram www.uxcake.co See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is your conversation lens? How do you even see what's happening in a conversation at work or at home? How do you know it's going well or awry? How do you get conversations "back on track"? And how do you see and *shape* how *you* show up in them? How do you know what you bring into the room, good and not so good? Conversations impact the outcomes we get: Conversations propel people  and organizations forward, or they get stuck: The groundhog day conversation! Marsha Acker, the CEO of TeamCatapult, sat down with me to talk about her unique view on these things and much more, along with her passion for ending stuck conversations in organizations. Marsha has over 22 years of experience designing and facilitating organizational change initiatives and TeamCatapult has been helping develop leaders and transform organizations since 2005.  Meeting someone with a *totally* different "heritage" who has come to some very similar conclusions about the nature of conversation design is truly delightful! What I loved about chatting with Marsha is connecting around a sound that's deepening in me: That facilitation is about being conscious  of what conversational  tools you pick up: Knowing where and when you're stuck and picking up the right tool for the moment, instead of the habitual one. The Structural Dynamics concept of a conversational operating system is deeply resonant with the three creative energies of Open, Explore and Close that I sing about non-stop  and it was amazing to get her take on the Four Conversational Actions, which give a better shape to idea of "threading" in a conversation than any model I've encountered yet. It's really profound to see how each time someone speaks they are shaping the course of the conversation, helping it to slow down or speed up. I geeked out pretty hard with her...nevertheless I think you'll find a lot of amazing tools to bring into your own work! I'll link to some of her upcoming workshops in the show notes: Her company offers a host of amazing experiences, from a 2-day Advanced Facilitation workshop to a 5-day Agile Facilitation and Coaching Intensive with several dates coming up in May and June. Do check out the show notes, where I'll break down some of Marsha's points on Structural Dynamics and share lots of other links.   You'll also learn about: The Facilitator's Stance: Finding another place to lead from. The "front" of the room is familiar to most, but facilitation can increase your "range" of leadership capacity. Developing a shared "pool of meaning" to help people get to the same "place" together Setting agreements with your group: Asking people to  say what needs to be said *in the room* so it can be processed and worked with.   Marsha's Three key takeaways to transform conversations at work: Start with the Tusks: Find the conversation that matters - the critical or most stuck conversation. Start where it's hot. Go to the elephant in the room! Look at how *you* show up...how you are is how you'll facilitate. Bring Your Authentic Voice: Find your natural stance and work from there, instead of trying to imitate someone else's.   Structural Dynamics in a Nutshell Action: A move (sets direction) A follow (continues)  An Oppose (offers correction) A Bystand (morally neutral comment) The Language or communication domain is where we're speaking from or our goals in talking Power: Using language in order to get something done. Meaning: Asking for evidence and action that can support their desired outcome. Affect: This is about using emotive language to affect feeling and to develop connection and intimacy with others. The Operating System: Open Random Closed   Advanced Facilitation: Self-Mastery and Reading Group Dynamics is June 27-28, 2018 in Washington, DChttps://teamcatapult.com/workshops/advanced-facilitation/. Sarah Hill and I will be co-leading this workshop. You will learn about your own model for communication and how to shift the nature of the discourse in conversations and how to work more deeply with group dynamics to become a more confident and effective facilitator.   Reading the Room by David Kantor. This books tells the story of a coach working with an executive team and how they learned to see and shift the structure of their conversations https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Room-Dynamics-Coaches-Leaders/dp/0470903430   Where did you learn to behave like that? by Sarah Hill. https://www.amazon.com/Where-Learn-Behave-Like-That-ebook/dp/B076NTJXY5/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524220764&sr=1-1&keywords=where+did+you+learn+to+behave+like+that In the fourth level of structural dynamics is the important role that childhood stories play in how we behave in the room today. Sarah tells many stories, including her own, of how she worked to become aware of the story and change the narrative.   Diagnosing and Changing Stuck Patterns in Teams https://teamcatapult.com/2016/08/   What to do when change requires a new operating system. https://teamcatapult.com/what-to-do-when-change-requires-a-new-operating-system/   Big Apple Scrum Day, New York May 11, I'm giving a talk on Diagnosing and Changing Stuck Patterns in Teams. This is a brief introduction to the model of Structural Dynamics https://www.bigapplescrumday.org/speakers   Marsha's Full Bio and Additional Links Marsha Acker is a leadership and team coach whose passion and expertise is helping leaders and teams identify and break through stuck patterns that get in their way of high performance. Marsha is the CEO of TeamCatapult, a leadership development and organizational change firm, founded in 2005. She has over 22 years of experience designing and facilitating organizational change initiatives. She has served for six years as the track chair for defining the ICAgile Coaching and Enterprise Coaching learning objectives and is currently a member of the ICAgile Agile Coaching Expert Certification panel. Marsha is a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF), Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC – ICF), Certified Interventionist in Structural Dynamics and Changing Behavior in High Stakes (Kantor Institute and Dialogix), Organizational and Relationship Systems Coach (Center for Right Relationship), Certified Change Management Professional (CMP), and an ICAgile Certified Expert Agile Coaching. Website: www.teamcatapult.com Twitter: @marshaacker and @teamcatapult2 Facebook: @teamcatapult2 ­

In episode 17 of the Synergen Leadership Podcast, Julian speaks with Warwick Sommer, Chief Operating Officer at Ampcontrol. Ampcontrol is a leader in electrical and electronic engineering across a range of industries, delivering integrated electrical, electronic and control solutions to improve safety and efficiency in mining, renewable, infrastructure and industrial applications. Warwick has an intriguing and unique journey through leadership which has seen him move from an engineering role, into a commercial legal role and now back into a more generalist management role of Chief Operating Officer at Ampcontrol who employ approximately 800 people and turnover in excess of $200 million dollars. Of particular interest in Julian’s chat with Warwick is that he shares his success implementing the Kantor Structural Dynamics Theory – a model based on David Kantor’s theories of Model Building and Structural Intervention as a means to improve the performance of individuals, teams and organisations. Go To: Warwick's LinkedIn Profile Ampcontrol website

This is from 2015 too, and a deceptively useful model for having skillful conversations in facilitated sessions, coaching or even real life! In this Trainer Tools Essentials episode, I talk to Catherine Thomson about David Kantor's theory of Structural Dynamics. In the podcast, Catherine explains how this theory of communication is applied to conversations in training and coaching.

Most of how we engage with other people in the workplace, on training courses, or in coaching sessions, is based on having conversations. The quality of these conversation directly impacts our effectiveness, and as educators and coaches, our ability to have powerful conversations that help to create insight and learning is a huge part of how we succeed.In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast, I talk to Catherine Thomson about David Kantor's theory of Structural Dynamics. In the podcast, Catherine explains how this theory of communication is applied to conversations in training and coaching.

Spirit Talk January 2014 The Urantia Book (sometimes called the Urantia Papers or The Fifth Epical Revelation) is a spiritual and philosophical book that originated in Chicago sometime between 1924 and 1955. The authorship remains a matter of speculation. Chris interviews Paula Thompson-Director of the Urantia Book Fellowship in Broomfield Colorado and David Kantor the […]