← Work For Humans
Work For Humans
Leadership Beyond the Individual: Relation in the Space Between Us | Jim Ferrell
01:01:12
Loading summary
Transcript110 lines
- [00:04]
A
After a game, after a good win, and a coach is asked, so what went well for you guys tonight? They'll often say something like this. We had great connectivity out there as a team. I mean, you see it on a soccer field or on a basketball court. You see the connectivity happening where you're sort of functioning as one unit. You don't have a person over here wondering whether he's touched the ball enough, and this person over here counting how many points he has and all that. It's not that. No. It's one organism filling in all the gaps, and that's connectivity. So that's what's happening. The higher you climb in the levels of relation, you're getting better and better at connectivity, until when you get to compounding, you're really deeply connected as a team or as an organization.
- [00:47]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Most of the time, when we think about leadership, we focus on the individual. Who am I? How do I show up? What do I do? But what if the important thing isn't in me or even in you, but in the space between us? My guest today is Jim Farrell, leadership consultant, founder of Withy Leadership, and author of youf and We A Relational Rethinking of Work, Life, and Leadership. Jim has spent nearly 30 years working with leaders and organizations, and his latest book grew out of a single sentence he rediscovered in philosopher Martin Buber's I and Thou. That moment led him to rethink decades of his own work and see leadership in a new light. Jim and I explore what he calls the four laws of relation, including that everything we observe is relation, that how we interact is who we are, and that progress comes not from sameness but but from uniting across difference. We talk about why relation is not the same as relationships, how leaders can shift attention from individuals to the between, and what it means for organizations to integrate differences rather than erase them. This is a conversation about leadership, but it's also about what it means to be human, to recognize that there is no separate self, only I in relation. If you enjoy the show, follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, here's my conversation with Jim Ferrell. Jim Ferrell, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:29]
A
Thank you, Dart. Great to be here with you.
- [02:32]
B
So I will tell you I have had to really expand my mind to read your book, you and we. And that's because it is recommending a very fundamental paradigm shift. And it's not the kind of paradigm shift that's out in the world like we're going to change how car manufacturing works or something like that. It's a paradigm shift that changes how people interact with each other. And I love the feeling, I love the feeling of trying to wrap my mind around a very different look at the world. This one in particular. I categorize it as a foreground background shift, which is that we tend to focus on people as individuals. And this wants us to look much more at the space between individuals and relationships. So you've been in leadership consulting, leadership training for a long time.
- [03:22]
A
Long time. 30 years almost. Yeah.
- [03:24]
B
And you've written a lot of books, best selling books.
- [03:26]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [03:27]
B
But you were rereading part of Martin Buber, right? And you found a sentence that launched this book. What was it and why?
- [03:38]
A
I was actually on a flight when this happened. I was flying to Europe and I packed a couple of his books. I talked about him and his work for years. I had been. But it wasn't until I read this sentence. And this sentence then caused me to go back and reread and rethink everything I thought I knew about him. I realized I'd been misreading him all these years. And that had caused me to have some misunderstandings too, that had actually been blocking me and my work. So it was a particular sentence. Here's what it is. It's actually in the book called I and Thou by Martin Buberitz's most famous work. And here's what he wrote. I'll read it and then I'll explain why, for me, it rocked me. So he writes this. I perceive something, I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something, I feel something, I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. This and the like together establish the realm of it. But the realm of thou has a different basis. Okay, now let me explain why. For me, that rocked me. So I'd spent years, decades actually, in the middle of this idea. And it's a very helpful one to sort of shift how we're seeing other people, how we're thinking about other people. So shift from seeing others as objects, for example, to seeing others as people. I've written books about this, best selling books, and it's a really helpful shift. And I always thought, oh, okay. What Buber was saying was shift from seeing people as objects to seeing people as people. So see them differently, think about them differently. So now when I read this, he says, again, I'll read it again. I perceive something, I'm sensible of something. I imagine something, I Will something, I feel something, I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. This and the like together establish the realm of it. I'm like, wait a second. You're telling me thinking something, perceiving something, willing something is the life of it? It's the life of objects. I'm like, no, what if I'm seeing someone else as a person? That's not the life of objects. But what I discovered was, according to Buber's work, yes, it is. Here's why. If all I'm doing is I'm thinking about you in my head, I might be thinking good thoughts about you in my head. It's still in my head. Okay. It's still in me. And Buber is inviting us out of our heads. Don't just think about others, or other things too, for that matter. But let's keep it on people don't just think about other. Don't just perceive. It's not just that. How do we get out of our heads? How do we get into the relationship between us in the immediate now? Between us? That's what Buber's work was primarily about, and I totally missed it. I just thought he was talking about shifting about how we think about other people, and he was after something much larger than that.
- [06:32]
B
So I tried to relate this back to Immanuel Kant, and I tried to relate it back to his point. And by the way, this show is very much about this, which is that we should stop looking at people as means and things and start looking at people and companies as humans. And what Kant said was, it's okay to recognize people as means, but always also recognize them as ends.
- [06:58]
A
Yeah, right.
- [06:59]
B
And so that's the simple way of reading Buber, but the truth is, that's not what he's saying. And this is what you're pointing out. The way I read it is break down individuality so that you can see you and somebody else as we.
- [07:14]
A
Yes, that's right. In relation. And it's that connectedness between us where actually the action is happening. Yeah, exactly.
- [07:21]
B
And that's the foreground background to me, which is you and I are talking. We can see each other on the screen. We can see each other as two individuals. Or we can pay attention to the connection. We can pay attention to the thing between us, and we can recognize it as something with a sort of ontological reality. And not only that, I think you go as far as to say, that is the reality.
- [07:44]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [07:45]
B
So let's start into this what are the laws of relation? And we're going to spend a lot of time today talking about that thing between us. What are the laws of relation?
- [07:56]
A
So you and we. I wrote it in four parts and it's written as a story, as you know, it unfolds as a story with characters that I think are really rich and feel real. And they are on their own journeys around these ideas. So part one is about waking us up essentially to a reality we're just not thinking about, we're not realizing. It's a bit like waking us up to the reality of gravity. We all live within gravity, but we're not thinking about it on a day to day basis. It is what's keeping our feet on the ground. But I mean, that's just not in our consciousness. We live in the middle of another reality that's actually forming everything. And because it's the water we swim in, as it were, we're not realizing it. And that's the reality of relation. And so I go through in part one what I call four laws of relation, which are really looking at, trying to uncover, okay, what do I mean first of all by relation and how is it that we're governed by this thing called relation? And by the way, I'm making a distinction too between relation and relationships. You and I can have a relationship. We can get close to people or closer or less close. Those are relationships. Relation is just this basic reality of we live in this relational fabric. It's just the way that it is. And so the first law, actually in the book, you discover it sort of an interesting way you discover it through a tic tac toe game that a couple of the characters play. Tic tac toe is a simple game, but what it illustrates on this score is that everything we're doing is in relation to something else. So you'll do a move, I'll do a move in response. I'm anticipating what you're going to do. So no move stands on its own. That's a reality for us as well. There's no self sufficient, something that's there in and of itself. Everything is born of relation and is developing within the context of relation. So even for example, so here we are in this podcast together. I'm looking at you, Dart, you're looking at me. And I might think, well, there's Dart, you're looking at me. Well, there's Jim. And yes, that's true, but I'm actually not seeing you the way that I think I am, because what I'm not usually aware of. But I'm the one who's seeing you. So it's not like there's dart all separate over there. No, I'm seeing you, so I'm in the way that I'm seeing you. So what that means is that I'm not seeing some separate dart over there. I'm seeing relation itself. I'm seeing our intersection together. And that's true of everything. It's inescapable. Everything I see is relation. And that's law number one. I go through four laws, that's the first of them. And I introduce them in different ways through different metaphors. In earlier drafts of the book I got very scientific. I took deep dives and I had to back away from the science. Even though I love it all. I stead introduce them through metaphors that people can grasp more easily. Because this is difficult stuff. When you get in it, everything starts to shake a little bit of what I thought might be the case. Like you said, it's this shift of this foreground background and you have to hang with it.
- [11:04]
B
It's a lot like looking at the optical illusion in Necker cube, which is you can see the cube in one orientation or you can see it in the other. You can't see it at both at the same time. It's very difficult. And so I felt that like I had to really stare at it to flip. And there's four laws of relation. The first one is the one you said which is all we see is relation. Everything is built by relation.
- [11:29]
A
Yes.
- [11:29]
B
The third one is how we interact is who we are. And the fourth one is we progress by uniting. And I'm going to pick on maybe one or two of those to go deeper on.
- [11:43]
A
Great.
- [11:44]
B
The third one, how we interact is who we are. It reminds me very much of a quote from, I think it's Stafford Beer, which he said the purpose of a system is what it does. And so it's this idea that the system is nothing but what it does. And so what it says here is how we interact is who we are. What does that mean?
- [12:04]
A
So I introduced that law actually with one of the most famous scientific experiments ever run that's been rerun many times over now. And it's just astonishing in its implications. And we don't want to believe it actually when we first stare at the science, but that's the famous double slit experiment with light. And the question that's getting at is what's the nature of light? The same way we're talking what's the nature of a human being. What's the nature of light? Is it in this case, is it a particle or a wave? And the experiment is set up, it'd be able to take a look at and see either of those possibilities. And it turns out that the answer to that experiment, to that question, is light is both a wave and a particle, or it's either a particle or a wave. And that depends on how we're interacting with it. Which is very unsatisfactory as an answer for a lot of people. Like, no, tell me what light really is. And we're always trying to escape out of this relational reality to get to the platonic forms, right, if you will, that the thing itself, what it really is. But all the science has shown over and over and over, you actually can't get to a thing as it is because we're always interaction. The only way we're getting any information about anything is through interacting with it. Everything we see again is relations. So in relationships, you can think about it this way. We have a lot of different relationships in our lives and we're different people in a lot of them. I'll give you an example. My wife and I joke about this. I'm a different person at the airport than not at the airport, okay? That person's called airport gym. Okay? So there's airport gym and airport. Jim is very concerned about making sure his carry on bags have room in the overhead bins and all that stuff. Airport gym is different than airplane gym, which is different than both. So you change the context, you change the set of relations that I am within, and I show up differently. An easy way to see this in our lives is you can pick a really great relationship, Then you pick a relationship you're struggling in. And if we were to describe ourselves in both of those relationships, those descriptive words would be entirely different words. In this relationship, I'm X, Y and Z. In this other relationship, I'm A, B and C. And then the question is, well, who are you, Jim? Are you X, Y and Z? Are you A, B and C? And the answer is I'm both. Because we're groping for the answer to who am I? But this is part of Buber's point. Buber says there is no separate I. All there is is I in relation. It's I hyphen others. And so the better question is asked, who am I in this kind of relation? Who am I in this context? Who am I with these others? And I show up differently, which means that I have the capacity to be a Lot of different kinds of people. And I might have, over time of interacting through my lifetime, have developed certain sort of personality kind of ruts in the way I'll show up in different circumstances. But those ruts have been developed in the context of the various relations I find myself in. They're relational by nature.
- [15:10]
B
Yeah. Some of that is between people, and some of it is the frames that we walk into, how we frame the situation. I'm a different person in a hospital, and it's because of the frame of the hospital. Even if there were no people in it. Oh, I might imagine the people in it.
- [15:25]
A
Well, look, these are all profoundly important points, I think, that go really to everything. But let's think about work for a moment. So my company's called Withy Leadership. And at Wythe, we spend a lot of time with leaders like executive teams and these layers of leadership, because a lot of what's happening across an organization are actually reflections of the way these leaders are showing up, how they're engaging or not engaging. For example, it's not that you have the leaders separate over here and the middle manager separate over here and the frontline workers separate. We're all part of a system together that's showing up the way we are, in part because of the way we each are showing up in the context of each other. And so if we can help leaders to be different in relation, we give other people a different leader to be in relation with, and you end up getting different. Different things back. So other people, in one way or another, they're mirrors of ourselves. That doesn't mean that they just reflect us. It just means that we're in other people and in what's happening to the degree that we're often not aware of because they're in response to us.
- [16:34]
B
Yes. And seeing the relation as the third thing in the room between two people makes it possible for us to pay attention to it in a way that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
- [16:43]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
- [16:45]
B
And what this point number three is is that that relationship is. It foregrounds the relationship as opposed to the individuals, and that makes that third thing more present. And the fourth point is we progress by uniting. And before I get into that, I actually want to talk about the problem that's being solved here and the problem that is caused by the opposite of focusing on relation. Can you describe the state of nature when relation is not foregrounded?
- [17:23]
A
Well, yes and no. I can give you a description of it, but it's going to be a false one. Because even the individuals are arising out of the relation.
- [17:31]
B
So I need to say it differently than I said it when we don't recognize it.
- [17:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:37]
B
In other words, the state that I might be in as a leader, if I am not foregrounding relation, I'm going.
- [17:44]
A
To posit foregrounding relation as you're putting it on the one hand, versus individualistic approach to a situation on the other. These are different approaches, and the individualistic approach is by far the more common one in our culture, our modern culture, by far. And so in the individualistic view, for example, in an organization, let's put it, if there's a problem, I'm going to look around for who's at fault here, because we're all separate things, and some separate things are at fault and others aren't. The game is identifying which are those faulty parts and either switch them out or you can do that and you can make some progress too. But the challenge with that is you are missing the biggest driver of all, which is the relationality of the whole thing. To the extent I'm as a leader in the center of the problem, for example, I can switch out the faulty parts and they're still going to be in response to me. The new part's going to be in response to me, just like the old part was. Because what's really going on is we're both taking initiative and in response to each other in all directions. So if you take your mind off of that, you get this. Really what ends up being, in my experience, the most expensive way you can actually try to solve problems is by try to go piece by part by part by part by part by part. Instead, if you put your finger right in the center about it, it's like, what's the level of our relational field? This gets us into part two of the book. But if you can start to see what's happening in the between and you can quantify it somehow, and you can say, actually this level of relation isn't going to cut it. It's going to generate all kinds of systemic problems just because we're all influencing and being influenced by it, then you can solve all kinds of things at really hyperspeed in comparison to try to do the part thing, both because that's expensive and time consuming to do it one by one, and also because that's ignoring the whole influence of the system that you're not getting at simply by.
- [19:37]
B
Focusing on the parts, especially if you're not replacing yourself.
- [19:40]
A
Exactly. That's the person I never think to replace. That's exactly right.
- [19:47]
B
To some extent, this seems like an antidote for narcissism. And one of the things it does is sort of. That's really funny. One of the people who came on the show, Peter Lyldal, has redesigned instruction in math and he talks about defronting the room and that how the teacher steps down from the front of the room and everybody is participatory. But it's almost like defronting the room where I'm the front of the room and it's like one of those changes. But it seems to take you away from ego to say we are the company and I am not independent from it.
- [20:28]
A
Right. So ego shows up in a certain kind of a way. When I have put myself in the front of the room, Right. When I think I'm separate, others are all separate. And by the way, I'm the better of the separates. Okay. I'm sort of first place here. That generates some kind of ego. But what I'm talking about here is not the obliteration of self. It's the understanding that there's not a separate self, it's I in relation. So there's still a me there, but it's me that's in connection. And when you see that, then, yeah, ego has a very different role. It's not a separating role. It's not a trying to make myself better role. It's that, no, I am in relation. We're in this connection in various ways, either better or for worse. And that's an entirely different way both to experience in myself and other people. For sure.
- [21:12]
B
And the fourth point of the law of relation is we progress by uniting. And for me, it's the most important of the four, which is that when we take an individualistic view, we automatically see ourselves as separate and often at odds. A lot of your story includes several politicians who are talking across the aisle and who are seeing themselves in opposition, where one can't win if the other one wins. But this argument here, we progress by uniting. To me it's the value statement of the first three laws of relation, if you can see them.
- [21:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, I get that.
- [21:50]
B
Right. And so how do you describe that? We progress by uniting.
- [21:56]
A
So there's a really fascinating body of work that deserves to be more well known. It's by Pierre Teilhard Desjardins. He was a French paleontologist, also a Catholic priest. He was dual hatted. But on the professional side of his life, he studied evolution, he studied the origins of life and pre Life right from inorganic stuff, matter, to up through life and through the development of human thought, even. And what Teilhard uncovered is this pattern. And it's a pattern that holds at every level of development, which means it holds for us as well. And it goes like this. It's that progress happens this way. You take separate things that are different, and they. First thing that has to happen is they compress against each other. That's why he said, as a paleontologist, he says it was really important that life here developed on a finite globe, because if this was infinite space, the differences wouldn't bump into each other. They just remain in their state that they always were. It was actually the finiteness of the space. As things propagate and whatnot, same things propagate, they start to bump up against other things that are different than them. He called that first stage compression. So the first thing that needs to happen is differences need to compress against each other. Now, then, if those differences open themselves to each other in a particular kind of a way, they now can. This is stage number two, can converge. And if these differences converge, then you have the emergence of wholly new things. This is sort of what you might think of vertical development. Now, let me give you an example of this. And I use this example in the book. In fact, I use it as a metaphor in the book that carries through the book. Let's think about water for a moment. So let's say you are a hydrogen atom and I am an oxygen atom. That's just fine. The world needs hydrogen and the world needs oxygen, and we can just continue being those things. That's terrific. But if these differences come together, now, in your case, you'd need another buddy hydrogen atom. But if the two of you get together with one of me, so this is Teilhard's compress first, then converge. If we open ourselves to each other, this happens chemically with water. But if we open ourselves to each other, then you have the emergence of an entirely new thing that I could never dreamed of as oxygen, you could never have dreamed of as hydrogen, because it's different in kind. And that's what we know of as water. So that's, for me, a really powerful example of how progress actually requires differences coming together. And unity is not a call to sameness. It's actually a call of differences coming together, but coming together in a way that they stay open to each other. So that tension of difference, we can hold it at the same time. And if we do that, then you have the possibility for entirely new Things to be discovered that couldn't been discovered by one side of the aisle or the other, or one side of the chemical entity or the other. And in fact, if I went around, if I'm oxygen, I'm like, I think what needs to happen is every atom should be an oxygen atom. I got to go convert Dart. And hydrogen's just wrong. I'm going to convert Dart to oxygen. Well, okay, but there's going to be no water there. No water. And if I did that, when we're in union and I converted you to oxygen, the water molecule would do disappear in an instant. So this is something that I think actually is really critically important wherever you find people, certainly important in organizations to be able to actually. Differences. And the tension that comes about from differences is actually potentially incredibly powerful and helpful thing. Only though, if you go. That's the compression point. Only if you get to the second stage, though, where you can begin to converge, open yourself to each other. It's certainly, in my view, mission critical for society that we figure out how we can do that as well. And one of the lines that Boover said was that a lot of times we go around trying to inject our rightness into other people, to inject our oxygenness into other people and make them like ourselves. That's a way of not really being in relation, because sameness isn't in relation. It's just same. It's just the same stuff. It's difference that comes in relation, valuing that difference, valuing that space, that distance between us that allows real relation to happen and the new developments that can come out of those differences to also emerge.
- [26:14]
B
I really like that description. It's very explanatory for me, because the fear is that we're going to be a company of clones. And it's actually the opposite of that, the opposite of that, which we're going to be a company of differences open enough to each other that we become a new thing.
- [26:33]
A
Exactly. I mean, one of the characters who's a CEO of a quantum computing company, his name is Zane, he actually, at the beginning of the book, I think, does come in with that belief. I want a company of clones, namely people who are just like me and think like me. And he finds his way through that, he discovers a very different reality than that. And when he discovers that, new possibilities open for his company as well. That wouldn't have been possible if he just had a bunch of Zane clones.
- [27:00]
B
So in the book, you describe the different levels of relation. And I don't want to spend Too much time digging into what they are. I want to say the lowest and the highest, which is the lowest is division. People see themselves as individuals. They are obstructing each other. Then it goes to subtraction, which is there's just resistance. It's not division, it's not obstruction. Then it goes to addition. Addition is interesting because addition is just. We're working together, it's parallel play. But we're not multiplying each other at all.
- [27:34]
A
Right, exactly. Yeah. It's siloed. Yeah. Heads down. Doing my own work, my own thing.
- [27:40]
B
Yeah, yeah. And then it goes to multiplication, which is now collaboration. And then it goes to compounding, which is integration. I do want to ask what is integrated integration? Like what's going on when two people, and maybe we've already said it, but who are integrated? What do I see, feel, hear?
- [28:00]
A
Let me give you an example. In fact, I'll give you two. I'll give you an interpersonal one and then just a really quick structural, organizational one. So working with a sales leader, this is a company. It's one of the companies in the world that basically everyone on the globe knows. So working on the sales side with sales leaders of this company and the way the company was structured, it was structured on the sales side by segment. So you have the sales team that's serving the financial industry, for example, the sales team that's serving the manufacturing sector, serving governmental, et cetera. At the bottom, you've got this small and medium business sales team which basically is handling any kind of organization just while the account's small and that kind of thing, if it grows and crosses a certain threshold, it gets kicked to one of the specialized sectors. So that's the way it run for years and pretty standard too. So I was working with one of these specialized sector leaders who received a new client coming from the small and medium business sales sector that they grew this account. Now it's going to be his. His teams, which is good news. That's great. But as he was thinking about it, you can think about these all divided little units and. Okay. But he wanted to take it deeper than that. He thought, wait, so my colleague over there, let's call him John. John, the head of the small and medium business sales unit, they just lost a great account. I mean, this is now coming off of their bottom line. It's not going to show in their results anyway. They just lost that. That's a bummer for them. That's great for me. I'm happy. But I mean, I wouldn't Be happy if I was, John. And so we thought, I wonder if there's a way that we can reflect more equitably the contributions everyone's making and tie this up a little bit more then instead of just lobbing things over walls the way we do oftentimes. So he called John, and first he thanked John for the accounts and great job. Thanks for the information. We're going to try to get on this and do at least as good of a job anyway that you guys have done. And then he said, but I've been thinking about it, John. I wish there was another way to do this. And I'm wondering, is there a way that we can continue to reflect all of your contributions? So, for example, maybe for some period of time, we split revenues on this. I'm open. Let's just talk. Let's think about it. So they put their heads together, oxygen and hydrogen, started thinking together, and they came up with a way with, wait, you know what? Yeah, I think we could do it like this. Which they did. Now, you can imagine what happens now in the small and medium business unit when they're growing an account that potentially would go to this particular sector, say a leader that's like, yeah, this is great, let's grow this. Because there's sort of. This deepened sort of teamwork that's happened. So there's a lot of ways to talk about that kind of change between these two sales letters. But one way is this, that they're not making quite the same kinds of distinctions between themselves as they once did. And that actually the other person's success is as important to them as their own actually, too. And that should be reflected in how we're working together. We're cheering each other. Your success, I'm going to cheer your success, just like if it were mine, et cetera. And if that's true, that requires more than just better attitudes together. That means there's probably some structural changes we might make, there's other systems changes that might need to be made to reflect that, et cetera. That's a way you integrate across divides. Now, you see this if you watch sports, for example, coaches in team sports environments are all keyed into this because they know it's mission critical after a game, after a good win. And a coach is asked, so, what went well for you guys tonight? They'll often say something like this, we had great connectivity out there as a team. Connectivity is a word that we often use in our work with organizations because people kind of get it. You can see it. I Mean, you see it on a soccer field or on a basketball court. I mean, you see the connectivity happening where you're sort of functioning as one unit. You don't have a person over here wondering whether he's touched the ball enough and this person over here counting how many points he has and all that. It's not that. No. It's one organism filling in all the gaps, and that's connectivity. So that's what's happening. The higher you climb in the levels of relation, you're getting better and better with connectivity until when you get to compounding, you're really deeply connected as a team or as a organization.
- [32:18]
B
Hey, everyone, I want to let you know about some upcoming speaking events. If you happen to be in the Great Lakes area. On September 30, I'm keynoting the HR track at the UWEBC 27th Annual Emerging Best Practices and Technology Conference Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The conference pulls in some fabulous speakers to discuss topics across all of business, not just HR. Also in Oakland, California, September 17th and 18th, two of our past guests at Work for Humans will be speaking at the Responsive Conference. Brie Grof will be talking about her sparkling new book Today Was Fun. And Simone Stolzoff will be talking about his next book. So check it all out@revolutionive.org use promo code 11fold. That's 11fold to get a substantial discount. All right, hope to see you there. Now, the path to getting there and what I want to get after is essentially what are the practices that one might deploy to start to move up the scale of connectedness? And I like Buber's thou. And later on in the book, you talk about the German word du, both of the familiar yous. And it's interesting that in English, we've lost the familiar you.
- [33:37]
A
We've totally lost it. In fact, we flipped it. The old familiar you has become deified, really. And it seems so separate and apart and abstract.
- [33:44]
B
Yeah, thou sounds weird.
- [33:46]
A
It does.
- [33:47]
B
But it's a really good word. It's a really, really good word.
- [33:51]
A
That's true.
- [33:52]
B
So what are the practices one might go through to start bridging? And actually there's verbs that go with each of the level, which is at the bottom. It's breaking, then blocking, then bonding, then bridging, then expanding. And so I'm interested in the practices one might follow to take those steps.
- [34:11]
A
Yeah, there's so much that could be said there, but I want to make one distinction because there's sort of two sides of the street that in my experience need to be paid attention to. Here one is, and it's because it's a relational question and it's a relational issue, like all things are. And that is so for thinking about in an organization, for example, the influence of the system, of the structures of the systems and processes, for example, has massive relational impact. So the one side is to think about on the group side, on the collective side, there are things we need to be thinking about to free up the individuals in our organization to be able to connect more fully. Right. More deeply. So there's that kind of work then on the individual side, which is the interpersonal work between a person and another person or groups of persons, there's that side of the street as well. So when I get into Buber's work, his insights are really applying to the individual side of the street, not the collective side. But they're both important. We need to pay attention to all of those. In fact, in the book, I talk about these four dimensions, these four quadrants that all need to be attended to. There's the individual attitudes, need to be attended, individual behaviors. These all have an impact. On the collective side, you have the structures or systems or processes of a place, and then the community of a place as well. All of these dimensions are important if we're going to raise the relationality across the system. Now, having said all that, let's come to the individual side, because you were pointing us toward the Buber insights.
- [35:32]
B
And the reason I point us toward that is mostly because it's something that is most directly in my control.
- [35:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:38]
B
It's not because I think it's less at all.
- [35:41]
A
Got it. Totally, totally get that. And that's true, by the way, in organizations, if I'm new or lower in an organization, I don't have much influence on the collective side, the systems, processes, structures, and community of a place. As I get more and more senior, though, of course, I actually have a lot of influence over there. And that should be a large part of what I'm paying attention to on the interpersonal. So this move to. What does it mean, first of all, to start bridging. So the bridging, that's the move up to multiplication on the relational level. But that means these are now differences reaching across and least sort of opening to each other. But then we expand. We can become larger than we currently are by acquiring more concerns, more perspective, understanding more different perspectives. All of a sudden we grow in our perspectives, we grow in our considerations, and that's the expanding that happens. The self if you will, the self in relation becomes larger. That's what happens at the personal level. So here's how Buber describes that he makes this distinction. He says, first of all, there's no such thing as a separate I, right? There is no such thing. It's only I in relation. And there's these two basic modes of relation, if you will. And those two are I can be I hyphen it. That is, I can be an I that's connected with the things around me, including other people in a way that they're more like these sort of it things, objects, if you will. I'll come back to that because this was part of my earlier misunderstanding of his work. The other way is to be connected. Depending on which of the translations of his work you read in an I thou way or an I you way. Okay? And the big distinction, I used to think this is where I got in the trap earlier Dart. In earlier years, I thought, oh, I it versus I you. So what I need to do, what Buber's telling me is I need to stop seeing people as objects and start seeing them as you stop seeing them as. It's seeing them as you. On its face, it looks obvious, right? But when you dive into his work, he's actually saying something much bigger than that. Because he's saying that if all I'm doing is taking in the world, including experience of other people, and they're in my heads, even if I'm seeing them as people, seeing them in a really nice way, but it's just in my head, that's what he's saying is the realm of it. He's inviting us out of in our heads regarding the stuff around us, which is a very separate way to individualistic way to encounter and to step out into what he called the between. So now we're in this dialogue, this back and forth. So within ourselves, is I it between us, is I you? That's one of his core insights. And the question is, well, how do we get between us? Right. How do you step out of the head?
- [38:25]
B
Especially because seems bi directional. Can one person do it or do both need to be participative? I don't know. So yeah, how do you do it?
- [38:35]
A
On that question, you were just saying, I'd say, yes, it is participative. That's why he said it's an act of both will and grace. My part is by will, but whether it happens the other direction is by grace. I don't control that. The realm of control is a very individualistic sort of way to be approaching things. It's the realm of influence, is a different thing altogether because we all have these relational influences. So this idea, and this is what gets lost in translation into the English, and it's a shame for us, we've lost something in English. It used to be that we had different versions of the word you. There's you and thou, for example, in German, there's du and there's sie. Sie is the formal form of you in German, and du is the informal form now in English, although almost no one knows this, you is the formal form of you, and thou is the informal form. It feels exactly opposite from what we would think, but we've lost that conception altogether. But here's what it means in German. It means that there's sort of a threshold at which a relationship enters kind of a do state, where you're not a Z to me in German, you're a doctor.
- [39:47]
B
Du is spelled D U.
- [39:48]
A
D U.
- [39:49]
B
It's helpful to think that, because otherwise it sounds like D O when you're saying it and it can get confusing in a sentence. So just imagine it D U.
- [39:57]
A
D U. That's right. So let's say we get to know each other. We've been on a Z basis. We call each other that at some point we can cross the threshold to the do basis. But this is where Buber says, this is an act of both will and grace. Because I can't decide that on my own, because it's a relational thing. You have to offer me your due, you have to give me permission. Essentially. I can't think in my head. This was one of my prior misunderstandings. Oh, well, Dart's a person to me now, so he's now due. No, actually, because that doesn't have anything to do with Dart yet. That's still just in my head. That's about me. Even the concept of what a person is is a concept in my head that's not yet out in between in relation. So at some point you can offer me your due, is what they say in the German. So in the book, in part three. Part three is entirely about how do you access this top level of relation? How do you get there? How do you get to the compounding level? How do you actually expand as a person of relation? And really, it builds to this point of offering your due. So how do you offer your due? There's a lot of different ways that you can put these. All of which can be misunderstood, by the way, because remember to really offer your due is to get out of our heads. It's to leave our heads and actually get in between in relation. So if we turn any of these things I'm going to mention into purely. Just a concept that will stay stuck in our heads around. We're still stuck in our heads around that now as a concept. So these are ideas that are intended to invite us out of the restriction of mere conceptions and concepts and boot us into real relations. So one is that in moments. And you can just think about this Dart in your own life, in your moments of high levels of connection. But I talk about in the book that they're horizontal moments in the sense that there's no one up and one down in these, for example, it's no, in the moment. We're right here together, these beings together, human beings. But it could also be. It doesn't have to be human. It could be me with a horse. I mean, it could be whatever. It could be relationally. I'm not making this vertical distinction of worth between us. So it's horizontal.
- [42:05]
B
Is this about knowing or is this about feeling? Is this an intellectual activity or is this also an emotional activity?
- [42:15]
A
Yeah, I'd say it's both of those and it's beyond both of those. Because depending how you think about it, the knowing and the feeling are both inside of me still. It's bigger than that. Right. It's outside of the inside of me only. Right. It's in the between. And these are ways of thinking that I've found in helping people that are really helpful to boot people out of the restrictions of our own heads. So one is that it's going to be horizontal. The other is. We talked about this just a little bit ago, but you have to allow space and difference between me and the other person. Buber called this the primal setting at a distance that I don't have a need or even a desire for Dart to be collapsed into just another version of me. No, I've got to be totally alive and value that difference, that distance between us, the difference there. So that there is a do, there to be a do. Otherwise, it's just a version of myself, some version in my head, for example, of myself that I'm more comfortable with maybe than others. So I need to allow for space and difference. When we engage, it's going to be horizontal. And then this next one for me has been really key because for years, my big move was I need to shift how I'm seeing other people from seeing as an object to a person. And I don't want to denigrate that because I think that's actually a really positive move. I think that's a move that can help you all the way up to multiplication, but it just lacks the power to get you further.
- [43:44]
B
And that's the one that we're working for on the show.
- [43:46]
A
That's the one we're working for.
- [43:47]
B
Basically, the idea of multi sided management is recognize employees as humans. That's why this is called work for humans.
- [43:54]
A
Yes.
- [43:55]
B
And that's where we're going. We're trying to instantiate that in business models. And you're taking a step further. That's one reason why whenever we get to this step, my brain just goes, yikes. Because some of the things you say, they're like, I don't know how to do that.
- [44:08]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So here's for me what was super helpful to invite me out of the limitations of my own seeing. There's something key in the story of the book about this. I'm not going to give it away here. There's a facet of the book that really is instructional to sort of get inside this difference, but the way the story itself unfolds and the physical environment in which it happens. But it's this difference, and I want to paint this difference with a story that I actually share a piece of this in the book. So I was at a magic show, this was in Vegas, and I was sitting there. I was blown away. Now I know it's all illusion. I know that nothing I'm seeing is actually real in the way that the magician's making it seem like it is. And I'm the guy who's always looking for the other hand. What's happening in the other, this space that I'm not looking at all that stuff. So I'm looking at all this, but I'm mesmerized. I mean, what's happening in that room? I actually end up giving up the project of trying to figure it out. Just like swept up into this experience. Like, wow, are you kidding me? So a word that I find helpful to sort of discover that kind of experience, which is way more than just seeing. I didn't go and just see a magic show. I'm just sitting there sort of passively taking things in my head. It's like, no. The word I use in the book is I behold. I'm like beholding. It's like I'm being assaulted almost with wonder and surprise. So to be open to wonder and surprise is just allow that. So I'm not bringing the sort of preconceptions I'm bringing in regarding another person or situation or whatever, to be wide open on that and to behold the other. For example, is I found an idea that's super helpful to kick me out of my brain. And people can also. That can be a trigger to help. Oh yeah, that's right. Seeing. That's great. Seeing better is a good thing. It's not bad. And by the way, I'll mention here, being in our heads isn't bad either. There's a lot of good stuff that happens in our heads. Thinking is a really productive project. It's just saying that's not the same thing as relating in the moment with a person. And it's helpful to make that distinction and understand the difference. So now if I'm beholding, I'm going to allow space and difference. It's going to be horizontal in the way we engage. There's no one up, one down. And I'm not just seeing the other person, which is, which I can do from a distance, right? I can observe someone and see and all that stuff. It's not that I'm beholding. I'm being surprised and open, at least to surprise in many ways. And then the final one, which is also critical, which is that I have to be open to being changed myself. Now that change can take a lot of forms. It might mean, oh, maybe I could see a little bit of a different viewpoint, or maybe there's a little something new here I can learn, or it might be hugely monument, it might be a total shift in perspective or whatever. Or it might be that I'm changed in the sense that I feel something differently now than I did before. There's a new emotional experience because of the way that we've opened up somehow in this experience. So I'm open to being changed. Which by the way, is something I think that in organizational, as leaders, very often we go into situations explicitly without that. In fact, we don't want surprise, we don't want beholding. I mean, I want to see it, have it locked down, have it all figured out in advance. I don't want surprises and I certainly don't think I need to change, but I certainly pretty sure how I know you need to. And can you run a business that way? Of course you can. People are doing it all over the world, but you're not going to actually connect that way and you're going to foreclose from the possibility of what can happen on the other side of actual connection, which is the emergence of Bigger and better things than we've thought of before. That only comes out of openness to difference.
- [47:51]
B
Yes. And I can get totally on board with that in a company. And I started testing it for myself, trying to expand in that way. And I found, for instance, I am not willing to bridge or expand with white supremacists.
- [48:07]
A
Yeah.
- [48:08]
B
Because I am unable to say, yeah, no, you, be you.
- [48:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [48:13]
B
In that. And I do want them to become more like me.
- [48:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [48:19]
B
But I'm willing to consider the fact that that's a weakness on my part. But I'm not willing to do that.
- [48:26]
A
Got it. I could say the very same thing about myself. But also, there might be certain people in your life or situations like, I'm not going to bridge there. I just can't go there now or yet or maybe even ever, I might think in my present moment. So I think that's true for all of us. But I think. So if I'm opening myself to another and even opening myself to being changed, that doesn't mean that I'm opening myself to, oh, maybe I need to become a white supremacist, for example. It might be. I think this could be helpful in political space, for example, I think it would help to become open to. What is it that happens in the life of a person or of people that would invite them to arrive at whatever views they have, what's going on, what's behind that? That would be helpful to understand. There might be a lot of things to learn about that. And to the extent I'm willing to learn about it, I actually might be more effective in being someone that other people would also then open up and listen to. Because here's what happens. If I come in already with a position, with zero openness on any level. I'm inviting exactly the same thing from the other side. I will get how I'm showing up because it's relational. We're reflecting each other and in response to each other. So there's a gentleman, by the way. I don't want to dive too much into this rabbit hole. He's an African American gentleman who spent many years helping Ku Klux Klan people to leave the Klan. Daryl Davis is his name. Really remarkable person. So there's a guy. He's not going. He's not like, oh, maybe I should join the Klan. That's not what is open as in. But he is open at a deep level about understanding who they are and why in a way that actually opens a space between where the other people can start to reconsider things that they maybe have never reconsidered at all. And that's a very powerful place. And it's a very powerful way to be where we can pull that off individually.
- [50:20]
B
I can see that. And I was doing this mental experiment. Can I expose myself to somebody's ideas in an open way so that I can hear and reserve for myself hating their guts? I decided that that's probably not the best. But I like that example. I think that's a really good example, which is that if you're not talking, you're not bridging. That's for sure. You're not expanding.
- [50:46]
A
We've become fragile. I mean, I think you've seen this. It's one thing that I think people have thought about what's been happening in universities over the years. There's sort of fragility toward different kinds of thinking. It's like, no, actually, we need to build, as some writers have talked about, anti fragility, where we can actually be in the presence of difference and not shy from that. And what might happen as a result of being in the presence of different. We might even become more convinced of our own views relative to that issue because we're more exposed to other views. It's like, you know, I was sure right about that, but there's still. There are deeper levels of right and wrong than simply the external. For example, this is a totally different kind of example. But this gets a little bit. At that point, I'm making. So with my oldest, I've got five kids. With my oldest, I was this hyperactive parent. Where you would read those, you know, those books that would be at 30 days your child should be doing this, or at 60 days your child should be doing this, or at 6 months, your child should be doing it. So I would read those books and I would just divide all those timeframes in half because I'm like, this is my child. It's not the average child. So they're way faster than that. So I would always put pressure on my kids to sort of be progressing. So in the context of that, I'm driving with my oldest when he was young, I think he was five years old, four or five. He's in his car seat in the back. I could see him in the rearview mirror. And we're having a conversation about arithmetic. So we're doing math while we're driving errands. And I'm quizzing him. I'm sure every child would love that. And I'm quizzing him now this four or five year old on multiplication is what we're working on. And so I say, so Jacob, I said, what's three times four? And he says, 11. And I'm like, come on, look, Jacob, look, we've worked on this. It's multiplying. Just a quick way to add. I mean, three times four is stack four, three fours on top of each other, add them. Four plus four is eight and another four is 12. I mean, three times four Is 12. It's not 11. I mean, come on. Okay, so I'm a bit agitated. So then I say to him again, okay, let's do it again. So what's three times four? And I look in the rearview mirror, puffs out his chest, and he says, 11 is what he says now. So look, you can look at the surface level of that on the arithmetic, who's right on the math, or who's right on whatever issue you want to be talking about. There's right and wrong about a lot of those things. And you could say I was right on the math, but that doesn't mean I'm right here. I mean, there's all kinds of relational levels where I'm going off the rails here. And it's at that level in the presence of difference, where, yeah, look, I think there's rights and wrongs on all kinds of things and all kinds of issues and things that I'll battle for like crazy. The world doesn't need people who aren't willing to talk about their difference. The world needs people who can talk about difference, but also listen to difference, too, and consider and be in the tension of that together and do that in a way where, okay, we have differences of opinion on the math, but I want to be deeper than just the math here. And we might leave and we'll disagree on the math, but if there can be something deeper going on that gives us a chance to do better things than just three times four. And without that, we're kind of stuck where we are.
- [54:03]
B
Yeah. Which is that if you look at the attributes of the relation there, the way you played it anyway, there was contempt.
- [54:12]
A
Yeah.
- [54:13]
B
Built in.
- [54:14]
A
Yeah. Oh, dang, that hurts to hear.
- [54:16]
B
No, no, but you just played it. But I get it that way you played it.
- [54:19]
A
Maybe there was, though. Yeah. It's like, don't waste my time kind of a thing. Like.
- [54:23]
B
Yeah, well, that sort of thing. Right. And because of the charge of the looking at that, you can say, yeah, so there's just so much more to talk about and we're not going to have time to talk about all of it.
- [54:35]
A
Yeah.
- [54:36]
B
And this is the sort of thing that takes practice. It's not something where you hear it once. And we've gotten a long way. And I do have some closing questions that I ask everybody. And I will tell you that a part of the nature of the closing questions is to get out of the idea that everybody's the same in terms of what they want from work, and that those differences are actually very valuable to a company. So it's aligned, I think, a lot to what you're talking about. And the first question is, what do you, Jim, hire your work to do for you?
- [55:13]
A
Oh, that's interesting.
- [55:15]
B
So people who hire you, hire you to do something for them. What do you hire that work to do for you?
- [55:21]
A
DART I think my career has been all along sort of a single arc in a way. It's about overcoming divides and bringing people together. And so for me, I think that's the work, too. It's overcoming divides and bringing people together. I'll give you an example of this personal one. So I have six sisters and me and really had, in my experience, an idyllic childhood. My parents are amazing. They're incredible. My sisters are all incredible people. I just thought this is like, perfect family. This is like leave it a beaver kind of territory. But it turns out it was that way and sort of a surface way in some ways, that I wasn't alive to. And it all became more clear after my mother passed away young. She had a brain tumor and she died way too young, barely over 70. And on the other side of that, there was a fault line that opened in my own family where family divided. If you'd asked me a few years before that, I would have thought that's impossible. But no, actually, there's fissures and fault lines all through our lives, in our personal lives, too. Some of those that we cover up. We don't want other people to know the fault lines. I've had my own challenges in my life. I don't want anyone to know about them. Right. So we put on our own happy faces, which is fine in a lot of ways, but in other ways, we can keep ourselves stuck. And we can also keep ourselves from really connecting with others, too, because in some ways, we're not totally showing up authentically. I'm not saying we need to be bearing our souls to everybody, but I'm just saying if we're systematically covering up certain parts of ourselves to make sure no one else knows about them, that's going to always have a Relational impact on the people in our lives. So for me, I think my work, and certainly this work now, with the leadership and with you and we, it's the progression of all of that to more powerful and helpful ways to break through the ways that we keep ourselves stuck. And that's keeping myself stuck. So I've got this cast of characters in you and we, and to one degree or another, I'm in every one of them. Right. There's pieces of me in every one of those people in the book. And the challenges they're having, the questions they're having, I mean, they're mine. I mean, that's why I know about them. That's why I can write about them. And you'll feel when you read them, because they're not made up. It's a real thing. So for me, that's what my work does for me, and hopefully it does the same for other people.
- [57:43]
B
What does your work cost you?
- [57:45]
A
What does my work cost me? I never really think about it in that way. Everything feels like such a gift and a bonus, even all the hard stuff. And we get in the middle of all kinds of crazy situations that we're brought into the middle of. But I suppose this somehow seems like it's just a surface level answer to that question, I think is probing deeper. But I'll start at the surface level, and that is that it costs me time to get away and chill a bit, get space, just personal space. And there are times when I certainly could use more of that, I think, and the people around me could use me getting more of that as well. So I think that it cost me that at times.
- [58:28]
B
I will tell you that people who have a lot of ability to design their own work answer more like you than people whose work is designed for them.
- [58:38]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [58:39]
B
Founders like me. What does my work cost me? If the show were about me, I might answer that, but the answer is a lot less than it did when I was having to do my work in the context of a larger company.
- [58:53]
A
Yeah. Because you're choosing to do what you're doing. Right. They're your own sort of choices you're bringing forward. Right.
- [58:57]
B
Yeah. You choose largely, and you've chosen something that's very close to the core of your values.
- [59:03]
A
Yes.
- [59:04]
B
And so every day you get to push the ball down the field on something that is very deeply valuable to you. And I've never quite thought it before, but it does remind me that that's why people like autonomy at work. Lack of autonomy is one of the costs of work. And because you've designed work with a lot of autonomy, you've designed work that's perfectly suited. And so it makes a lot of sense. How can people learn more about you? How can people learn more about your work?
- [59:35]
A
There are multiple One is read the book. Of course, if you dive into you and we you'll learn all kinds of things and I think it'll really fascinate you and I think you'll find a lot of help in it as well. You can also find me online. So my company's website is withy leadership, but it's just withy.com, it's withy with three eyes at the end. Actually like a single person I in the middle of with and three people eyes at the end, the individual in the group. Withy.com or you can go to youandwee.com, which is the title of the book's website, or find me on LinkedIn. I post regularly on LinkedIn and you can DM me there as well.
- [60:07]
B
Look up Jim Farrell, two Rs, two Ls and you. And we thank you very much for coming on the show today.
- [60:13]
A
Pleasure, Dart. And thank you for reading deeply and considerately in preparation for this. It made for a really rich discussion, I think.
- [60:20]
B
I recommend that people pick up this book and spend some time with it if you really want to try on a different mental model. It really makes you stretchy. So thank you very much.
- [60:34]
A
Yeah, pleasure. Thank you Dart.
- [60:38]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person, person you think would get value from it. Believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.