The System Is the Problem: Rethinking Business at the Systems Level | Sandra Waddock

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "The System Is the Problem: Rethinking Business at the Systems Level"

Work For Humans with Dart Lindsley | Guest: Sandra Waddock
July 29, 2025

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Overview

This episode tackles the foundational myths, constraints, and mental models driving today’s business systems—models that perpetuate a high-stress, profit-above-all environment, often failing both people and planet. Host Dart Lindsley is joined by Sandra Waddock—Galligan Chair of Strategy, Boston College, and preeminent scholar on system change and sustainable enterprise—to discuss why “the system is the problem” and what it takes to catalyze transformation at the whole-systems level, not just within individual organizations.

Key topics include the failure of shareholder primacy, the critical myths underpinning management, principles of system change, netweaver leadership, paradox navigation, emergence, and the enduring impact of intellectual “shamans.”

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Limitations of Corporate Responsibility and Shareholder Value

• Sandra Waddock’s journey: From corporate responsibility research to system change advocacy. She discovered showing that “doing good is good for profit” wasn't enough to spark wide-scale change ([04:42], [06:52]).
  • Quote: “My theory of change at the time was...if you show the financial community and companies that doing good means doing well financially, then everybody will change. Bingo, right? ...And nothing has changed.” – Waddock [05:53]
• The systemic pressure for shareholder value maximization overrides other aims, anchoring companies to short-term interests even when evidence shows benefits for broader responsibility ([06:45], [10:44]).

2. Mental Model “Lock-ins” and the Purpose of Business

• Intellectual lock-ins: Powerful, often unexamined narratives shape behavior and block change. For example, profit maximization as the ultimate business purpose, derived from neoliberal economic dogma ([10:44], [11:46]).
  • Quote: “Is that an example of that kind of lock-in? That there’s something locked in intellectually in the mental model?” – Lindsley [11:46]
• Waddock suggests reframing business purpose toward creating well-being for all stakeholders, including ecological health ([11:46]-[13:00]).

3. The Need for Whole-Systems Transformation

• “Large” systems change means change at the ecosystem level—beyond any single organization ([08:15]-[08:45]).
• Waddock’s recent work finds 10 principles emerging from alternative economics, emphasizing holistic, socially-embedded, participative models ([08:45]).

4. Changing Narratives and Historical Precedents

• Successful system change often comes from shifting public narratives (e.g., Mothers Against Drunk Driving, same-sex marriage, tobacco regulation) ([17:11]-[19:51]).
  • Quote: “They made drunk driving to be a bad thing... a deliberate way of reframing an issue that had been accepted as a norm and making it an unacceptable norm.” – Waddock [17:19]
• The rise of neoliberalism itself was a deliberate, decades-long and well-funded narrative strategy ([20:07]).

5. Techniques and Tools for System Change

A. Managing Paradox in Change

• Netweavers/Transformation Catalysts: People who convene diverse system actors, cultivate dialogue, and bridge differences ([23:19]-[25:18])
  • Quote: “Netweavers are these change agents who bring together people from multiple different organizations or entities or sectors or whatever...the transformation catalysts who understand enough...to get people together to talk in dialogical processes.” – Waddock [23:32]
• System work requires holding paradoxes:
  • Harmony and Disruption: Welcoming conflict as a generative force ([25:51]-[28:06])
    • Notable Moment: Waddock cites a facilitator absorbing conflict to enable deep change ([25:51]).
  • Cohesion and Autonomy: Shared vision plus the recognition of independent actors ([28:54]-[30:27])
  • Reflection and Action: Iterative cycles, not a one-off process ([31:27]-[33:13])
    • Quote: “All of these processes...are iterative, not once-and-done kind of things. Because if you’re talking about system change, you’re talking about a process...” – Waddock [31:27]

B. Making the Invisible Visible

• Surfacing hidden mental models—like the assumption that endless growth is possible—so new assumptions can be consciously adopted ([34:03]).

C. The Power of “Kairos”

• Introducing the Greek idea of kairos (“the moment of opportunity”) as a crucial period for seizing change ([36:26]-[37:43]).
  • Quote: “When the moment of opportunity happens, that’s when you need to move...that the system may reach a tipping point, and if you recognize it, you can step in.” – Lindsley [36:26]
• Analogies to martial arts: Using the tension and imbalance in systems as energy for transformation ([37:43]-[40:00])

D. The Role of Intellectual Shamans

• Intellectual “shamans” are those who serve the world through healing, connecting, and sense-making ([40:52]).
  • Quote: “These are scholars...who become fully who they must be and find and live their purpose to serve the world through three healing, connecting and sense making.” – Waddock [40:52]
• Examples include Peter Senge and Ed Freeman, who “cross boundaries, connect disciplines, and help heal organizations and social systems” ([42:33], [43:20])
• These individuals take risks, often have a sense of calling, and tend to be boundary-spanners ([44:44]-[47:39]).
  • Quote: “There’s almost an element of calling...Shamans are often called to the work...they are drawn into it in some way.” – Waddock [44:44]

E. Practices for Change Agents

• Transformation catalysts rely on:
  • Personal reflective practices (e.g., meditation, being in nature)
  • Relational practices—connecting with others who carry the “light” ([49:20]-[51:13]).
  • Artistic or creative pursuits, as sources of resilience and openness

6. The Transformation Process

• Waddock’s framework: “Connecting, Cohering, Amplifying” ([51:18]):
  • Connecting: Convening diverse system actors, collectively mapping system boundaries and dynamics.
  • Cohering: Co-creating shared visions and identifying “leverage points” for change.
  • Amplifying: Experimentally propagating and iterating successful practices—attending to fractal patterns (emergence at all scales, [53:33]-[54:06]).
  • Quote: “If you’re working in the state level, do you need them at the local community level?...So that you’re making those kinds of linkages and amplifying that transformative process.” – Waddock [54:06]

7. Embracing Emergence and Unpredictability

• Real system change is emergent and iterative—not fully predictable, not scalable in a cookie-cutter way ([54:06]-[57:35]).
  • Quote: “They are by definition, if they’re complex systems...they’re not predictable. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t patterns that we can work with...” – Waddock [55:42]
  • The focus is on guiding principles and adaptive capacity, not deterministic formulas.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Narrative Change:
  “They made drunk driving to be a bad thing. So it was a deliberate way of reframing an issue that had been accepted as a norm and making it an unacceptable norm.” – Waddock [17:19]
• On Systemic Lock-In:
  “What if we defined the purpose of business as creating well-being for everyone, including the natural environment?” – Waddock [12:19]
• On Paradox:
  “If you want to really achieve change, you need to bring people in. And you’re never going to do it with a top-down paternalistic or authoritarian type of model because people resent that.” – Waddock [14:58]
• On Kairos:
  “When the moment of opportunity happens, that’s when you need to move...that the system may reach a tipping point, and if you recognize it, you can step in.” – Lindsley [36:26]
• On Intellectual Shamans:
  “These are scholars who become fully who they must be and find and live their purpose to serve the world through three healing, connecting and sense making.” – Waddock [40:52]
• On Emergence:
  “We live in emergent systems all the time...all living systems are complex systems. By definition, they’re not predictable.” – Waddock [55:42]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:42] – Sandra Waddock’s shift from corporate responsibility to systems thinking
• [10:44] – Mental model lock-ins and the problem of shareholder primacy
• [17:11] – Example: Mothers Against Drunk Driving as deliberate narrative change
• [25:51] – Netweaving, harmony & disruption paradox in system work
• [36:26] – “Kairos” and seizing system opportunities
• [40:52] – Intellectual shamans: definition and role
• [51:18] – Transformation process: connecting, cohering, amplifying
• [54:06] – Systems as fractals; amplification and emergence
• [55:42] – Embracing unpredictability in systems change

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Final Reflections

What Waddock wants from her work:
“…making the world better. Doing my little bit to make the world better. And that started out with CSR… and now it’s got to do with transforming whole systems… so that everybody has a place… and we recognize our interconnectedness with the rest of the world.” ([58:25])

System-change is slow, multifaceted, and non-linear, but new narratives, collaborative structures, and resilient change agents can tip the balance—if we’re willing to examine our “lock-ins” and embrace a truly life-centric vision for work and enterprise.

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Further resources:

• Sandra Waddock, Boston College (Google Scholar: open-access papers)
• “Catalyzing Transformation” (recent book & open-access article)
• Donut Economics model – Kate Raworth

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Transcript

[A]

We need to begin to think differently about how businesses operate. We currently have a very linear top down framing of how organizations ought to be managed, even though that has shifted as organizations have flattened over the years. Still, many managers want to tell people what to do instead of assuming that different set of assumptions. Like, hey, if you give people the resources that they need to do the work that you're asking them to do and you let them do it, they'll actually perform. And that would make people a lot happier because they would then see more meaning in their work. Which I think part of what you're talking about is a crisis of meaning. System change or effective organizations happen when everybody works collaboratively together for the greater good because they can see what the greater good is and they buy into what their greater good looks like and they know that it will impact them and arguably their kids and their grandkids.

[B]

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley.

[C]

This episode is part of a series on large systems change. Because to grow companies that build and deliver great work is going to require us to transform how businesses operate as a system. My guest today, Sandra Waddick, argues that the current model, focused on growth control and short term profit, is no longer serving people or the planet. And instead of fixing symptoms, she's asking us to rethink the deeper assumptions that shape how businesses work. And through her research and practice, she has identified principles of large systems change. Sandra is the Galligan Chair of Strategy and professor of Management at Boston College. She's one of the most respected thinkers in systems change in the world and sustainable Enterprise, with over 180 papers and 16 books on how businesses shape and are shaped by the world around them. In this conversation we talk about the myths that drive our current system, the limits of control, and the power of new narratives. We explore leadership as sense making, how small actions can shift big systems, and what it means to build organizations that support life, not just profit. As always, be sure to subscribe if you'd like to hear more conversations like this one. Now I bring you Sandra Waddick.

[B]

Sandra Waddick, welcome to Work for Humans.

[A]

Thanks. Glad to be here.

[B]

This conversation with you is a part of what I'm starting to see as a series of episodes and a series of conversations. And they are conversations about how to transform systems. And for the most part, the systems that I talk about are companies, but not just individual companies, all companies. So it's larger than just the change management that you might see inside a company. You are an expert in large systems Change. And I don't know how new it is as a field, but I noticed that you were able to in your works reference a lot of other works on it. So how new is it? How emergent is it?

[A]

Well, it's very much emergent. So I'm a management scholar. But most of the literature that I've looked at that talks about systemic change, whole system change, comes outside of the management literature, coming from a whole variety of different fields. And there's a lot of information about it. It's about, I'd say 20, 25 years old at the most. In terms of anybody really thinking about whole systems change. I know I got drawn into, I mean, I've always thought about that and I, at first I too also worked at the level of the company and now I'm working at the level of the whole system. I don't consider myself an expert by any means. I think there's so much more to know. But I've worked with a variety of different folks over the last several years thinking about what whole system change could look like. What are the processes that we need to think about if we're going to engage in whole system change. And what I've tried to do in my recent book, which is called Catalyzing Transformation, is to put together a process for thinking about how to bring about whole system change that can be adapted to different levels, different kinds of contexts, different sectors. And I think it could also be applied within businesses if you really wanted to transform businesses as well, because it's a generic type of process.

[B]

A lot of your early work is about corporate responsibility. What was the path that you walked to lead you from corporate responsibility to large systems change?

[A]

So I've been doing this work for more than 40 years now. I started out looking at public private partnerships and then I got explicitly into corporate responsibility and was lucky enough to get access to some innovative data pretty early on in my career that would allow me and a colleague to look at the link between company performance and social performance, financial performance and social performance. And that set me on a path for many years of dealing with what I ultimately called corporate responsibility, which is not just the add on do good stuff that many companies do, but how the business model impacts different stakeholders in the natural environment. And 10, 12 years ago I really was thinking this is not getting us anywhere. I had a theory of change early on. So the big paper that I published with my colleague Sam Graves was in 1997 and that's gotten a lot of citations. It's the link between social and financial performance stuff. And it was the first one to use this set of data. So it's central to a lot of questions. And my theory of change at the time was, I guess, something like, if you show the financial community and companies that doing good means doing well financially, then everybody will change. Bingo, right? It'll happen. Well, that showed. And it showed in not just my study, but literally thousands of other studies that have taken place since then. The relationship is positive and it's pretty clear at this point, and nothing has changed. So about 10 years ago, I realized, yeah, that's not happening. And a friend of mine said, I'm going to do some work explicitly on large system change. And about that same time, I had been invited to write an article for a change management journal. And I said, I looked back at my publications and I said, looks like all of my stuff has really been about that at some level. And so I started with that initiative and with writing that article and then thinking about the role of economics in all of this, I started to really think about the whole system and recognizing that businesses are just doing what the system is asking them to do. They're not inherently bad or anything like that, but they're under a lot of different pressures. And one of those pressures is to quote, unquote, if you will maximize shareholder wealth. And as long as the system expects them to do that, they're very good at saying, yeah, we're going to do that. And so they will adapt to whatever pressures they see in their environment and do what's asked of them. And so it became increasingly clear to me that corporate social responsibility wasn't going to get us where we need to go. And that in order to get companies to change, we really need to change the ecosystem or the context in which they operate. And so that's been my agenda and a bunch of other people's agenda ever since then.

[B]

It's very similar to the discussion that we're having on this show, which is lots of research has shown and supported the common sense idea that companies do better when the people who work there like their work.

[A]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

And lots of additional research shows that we're not improving the quality of work. And the question has to be why? Which is how far back do we have to walk from this dead end to get to a place where there's a different road? And how do we walk the system back? I suppose that a lot of large systems changes. How do we punch a hole through the end of the dead end and go someplace different? We don't necessarily need to back up. So let's talk about large systems change. What does large mean?

[A]

To me, large means whole system change. And let me just see if I can start to look at the question you just raised, because I think it's really important. One I think you need to think about how do you define the purpose of business? If you'll see on many business websites, our purpose is to maximize shareholder wealth because they've absorbed that from the neoliberal economics that we have. So this whole context of what economics expects of business is important. That narrative influences how businesses behave. Other pressures around continual growth also derive from that. And one of the things that we need to think about is how are we framing economics? Because we need economics, we need businesses, we need the kinds of goods and services that businesses produce. Humans can no longer live without that kind of enterprise. And so we need to begin to think differently about how businesses operate. And one of the things that has just happened this week actually, is that a paper that I've been working on with a global group of authors headed by Jasper Kentor at York University in England just published, and that's a scope review of the quote unquote alternative economics literature. And it draws out from that literature 10 principles that are very different from economic principles that are very different from the ones that you see in the current economics. And they involve holistic thinking, they involve ecological embeddedness, they involve social issues, and they involve political economy, which says basically we all need to have voice and active roles in making decisions in our economic lives, but also in societal lives and also within companies. We currently have a very linear top down framing of how organizations ought to be managed. Even though that has shifted as organizations have flattened over the years, still many managers want to tell people what to do instead of assuming a different set of assumptions. Like I'm just talking about a different set of assumptions for economics, a different set of assumptions about people. One might be, hey, if you give people the resources that they need to do the work that you're asking them to do, and you let them do it, they'll actually perform. And that would make people a lot happier because they would then see more meaning in their work, which I think part of what you're talking about is a crisis of meaning. If you're sitting there making widgets and you don't understand where those widgets are going or what they're used for or how they benefit people, then yeah, and people are telling you what to do and monitoring your every move, you're miserable. Rightly so.

[B]

There's a weird gap that I'm hearing and it's that companies are organized around shareholder value, also known profit. We told them that they would produce more shareholder value if people at work liked their work or if they exhibited social responsibility. So that's a known thing. It's not a mystery. Lots of data supported. And yet if that argument doesn't win the day and doesn't transform business. You used a term in one of your papers which was intellectual lock ins. There's something that is not just about the question of whether profits should be the highest priority because there's evidence showing that corporate responsibility and creating work that people like will do that. But somehow that argument, that evidence doesn't. Is that an example of that kind of lock in? That there's something locked in intellectually in the mental model?

[A]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's a really good observation. And if you are a leader in an organization, you think you have to tell people how to achieve that if you are working at the more systems level. Partly, as we live in this ethos of the way companies always operated and the way the economic system is expected to operate, we often don't question the assumptions that are driving the way we make decisions. And so if you think, well, I'm the boss and I have to tell people what to do, or I have to know as much as I think I need to know so that I can tell everyone what the best thing to do is, or if you're not understanding sort of interrelatedness and interconnectedness of what's going on within companies, but also with companies in their broader environment, including the natural environment, and most people are somehow not thinking that systemically, they're thinking as here's the lock in. It's much more narrowly focused in some ways than it would be. What if we defined the purpose of business as creating well being for everyone, including the natural environment, what would that do to the way people have to think about how they're going to achieve that kind of goal? Now, that doesn't mean profits go away, it just means that they're part of a bigger set of indicators that businesses have to meet. Good jobs would be one of it. Happy employees might be part of that. Ecological regenerativity might be another part of it. So it'd be a whole bunch of different things that businesses would be expected to achieve and that societies, because you move that up away from gdp, you'd have a broader set of indicators. GDP measures only economic activity, positive or negative. Well, some of that economic Activity, clear cutting a forest, blowing the tops off of mountains. Got a lot of devastating impacts that don't get counted. But it's great for gdp.

[B]

I think people underestimate how lagging an indicator profit is. It's a lagging indicator of a lot of other things that need to precede it and hold a very naive model of the system and what the precursors are to real health. So that makes a lot of sense to me. You have a two by two in one of your papers. It's in your paper Large Systems Change in emerging Field of Transformation and Transitions. And there's a two by two there, which one axis is forcing change and on the other end is supporting change. And then the other axis is paternalistic change to co creating change. And each quadrant has a definition of what that looks like. And there is sort of an authoritarian idea of change, which is the big man version of change, which is we're going to force. You call it paternalistic, I'll call it authoritarian. We're going to force change from above. Does it work? No, because a lot of your work is about something else.

[A]

I think if you want to really achieve change, you need to bring people in. And you're never going to do it with a top down paternalistic or authoritarian type of model because people resent that. They don't feel that they have autonomy or agency to do the kind of work that they want to do. So that's a very masculine model. You're describing what George Lakoff calls the good father. I am the good father and I will tell you what to do. And if you're not me, if you're women in particular subordinates, that's everyone else, right? Obviously. And if you don't look like me, you better be obeying me. And people aren't happy generally in those kinds of circles. Some people want to be told what to do, but many people want to have their own agency. I guess my belief, which is probably a more feminine take on this, is that look, if we co create how our organization works, if we co create how we want the system to look, the whole system to look, if we work together on that and we have input and we somehow find a way to have everybody's voice be heard and listened to, and doesn't mean we all agree all the time, but we come to a good enough decision about how we move forward that we can all go along with it at some level, then I think we have a far better chance of working together. Because system change or effective organizations happen when everybody works Collaboratively, together, for the greater good, because they can see what the greater good is and they buy into what their greater good looks like and they know that it will impact them and arguably their kids and their grandkids.

[B]

Yeah, the disciplinarian father or the.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, the disciplinarian father versus the nurturing father. The nurturing parent, which is both parents. Right. And supporting their kids. So it's that supportive and co creative approach. You know, we're going to acknowledge that we all have humanity, we're going to acknowledge that we all have worth. We're going to acknowledge that you might be younger than me, but that doesn't mean I can treat you with disrespect.

[B]

Do we have examples, historical examples of large systems change that worked?

[A]

You have examples of large system change that were not deliberate. So what we're talking about here is deliberate system change. So I think about Mad Mothers Against Drunk Driving. So when I was, I'm not young and when I was a kid, drinking and then driving wasn't something people thought about. They just did it. Someone's standing on the, this is the example I like to use this. Standing on the table with the lampshade on their head and really drunk and then gets into their car and drives home. And then Mothers Against Drunk Driving happened because some kids took on that role and got killed. And so these mothers said, this is not right. And they made drunk driving to be a bad thing. So it was a deliberate change, deliberate way of reframing an issue that had been accepted as a norm and making it an unacceptable norm. And you can say the same thing about in the US about same sex marriage. My colleague Steve Waddell and I, he's a big systems thinker. He's the one who drew me into the large system change work originally, the explicit large system change work. And he and I wrote an article on gay marriage that was a deliberate change. It took 30 something years from the time that I can't remember the name of it, but the nightclub in New York, the riots took place in, I want to say the 70s till 2015. And there were deliberate strategies, all kinds of strategies, many of them the kinds of strategies that involve people collaborating with each other, reframing the narrative. So deliberate expression of I want to be able to have sex with anybody I want to originally, sort of the way of thinking about that to wow, marriage is about love and companionship and children and commitment. And that was a deliberate narrative reshaping that happened in the early 2000s. It took another 15 years before the Supreme Court ruled in the United States. But that reshaping of the narrative enabled many people who otherwise might not have come on board with this new way of thinking and new way of being in the world to be able to accept that, yeah, this is about people loving each other.

[B]

We had Nat Kendall Taylor on the show who's the CEO of the Frameworks Institute. He cited the reframing of tobacco as a personal choice problem to a corporate malfeasance problem.

[A]

Yep, that's another example and how that made a change.

[B]

And I think when I think of examples of large systems change, those are sort of point issues. But I think John Maynard Keynes, he changed the understanding of money and how it worked and changed the economy.

[A]

And now what you see happening in a number of quarters is people trying to change economics. And this is the paper that we just published says, look, the principles on which economics is currently based are not working. They're not working because they're foster linear, take, make waste approaches to production and extraction very extractive. They don't take into account anything about social impacts or natural environmental impacts of production activities. And we need a new set of understandings that reshape economics with those embedded ecological and social and political economy assumptions that would change economics. Now this is not going to happen overnight. Obviously economics is highly deeply embedded in the way we think about it. But that was also a deliberate strategy that started right after World War II with a group called the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of economists, including Milton Friedman and others, based on the work of Hayek and others, to get together in Mount Pelon, I think it's Switzerland, and come together to frame what we now know as neoliberal economics and to deliberately and explicitly create a strategy outlined in a 1970 document by Justice Powell called the Powell Manifesto or something, which outlines its strategy. Create think tanks. This was a well funded movement by the way. Get into the conferences where anything about economics is being discussed, get into textbooks and influence judges so that they understand economics is only this way. And that has been a 70 plus year now strategy. And it's been extremely successful because the messaging is consistent, it's sufficiently the same over time, yet allows for different expressions. And it has been very skillfully promulgated ever since the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in 1980 who really articulated it publicly. So that we feel like we're embedded in this way of thinking about economics. Most of us can't see beyond it. It's really hard. Isn't this what the way the world is well, no, this is the construction of the world. And it's an understanding that got promulgated and we could change that if we thought about it and wanted it bad enough. That's what the transformations group and literature is all about. I happen to focus on economics, but there's other aspects of it that are important too.

[B]

So let's talk about the tools and techniques. And I was particularly interested. There's two big areas that I'm really interested in. One is managing paradox. And the. I can't remember if I think it's the name of the paper or it might just be a sentence in the paper. How do leaders of translocal networks harness paradoxes to generate and scale innovative sustainability solutions? Okay, I'm going to unpack that a little bit. Trans. Local. When you're talking whole, it probably means.

[A]

Global across multiple localities or levels.

[B]

Okay. And generating and scaling innovative sustainability solutions. And a lot of this particular paper is about netweavers. What is a netweaver?

[A]

That's work I did with Bruce Goldstein, who did the fundamental work on netweavers. So netweavers are these change agents who bring together people from multiple different organizations or entities or sectors or whatever. So let's say you pick a system, say it's the food system. Who would you want to bring together to change the food system? Well, you might want food producers, you might want farmers, you might want the middle people who distribute the food, and you might want some retailers, and you might want some consumers. These are groups or people with very different understandings and interests. So the netweaver would be the. I would call them transformation catalyst, and we'd call it that in that paper too. These are the transformation catalysts who understand enough about each of. They're not experts on all of it possibly, but they understand enough to get people together to talk in dialogical processes. Not us, them conflictual processes, but dialogical processes that can generate new solutions. And they understand the differences and they understand these different views that people might hold. It might create tension or paradoxes or conflicting points of view among them, and they're willing to stand in the middle of that tension and help people. And they have the skills to help people work through those differences in some ways. And there's any number of techniques and approaches you can use. I talk about this in the catalyzing transformation work. There's any number of techniques you can use to help people work those differences through. That doesn't make it easy, but it does make it feasible.

[B]

And there are a set of paradoxes that netweavers catalysts need to understand and work with, live with and work with. So there's harmony and disruption. Yeah, cohesion and autonomy and reflection and action. And I want to go through those each on the harmony and disruption topic. There's an ability to cultivate disruption. What is that?

[A]

That is when you explicitly bring in a conflict or you explicitly allow a conflict to emerge. Let's say the goal is to bring about harmony and synthesized perspective and some sort of agreement among the various people you've brought together to move forward in a certain way. But in order to get there, sometimes you have to allow for a certain amount of conflict to happen and be willing to let people share and air their differences. I was watching a webinar just last couple weeks ago that Ralph Hammond from South Africa was talking about his work with the Food Lab in South Africa. Ironically that I picked food actually. And in the course of that the presenters talked about the fact that at some points pretty radical conflict broke out and they stood there when the woman who was, I can't remember his co author's name, but she stood there in the context of as the facilitator getting beaten up by all these people and was able to absorb enough of that conflict somehow that it allowed people to start to talk to each other in a different way and get past their differences. If it goes back to my Pollyanna notion of that people want the best things. If you're working on system change, you want a good system, you want something to change in a positive way. And if we can hash through that disruption, then we can get to the more harmonious part where we can start to work together in new ways or understand that you're going to work your way in, they're going to work their way and I'm going to work my way. But we all have that hopefully broader agenda in mind when we're doing it.

[B]

I recognize that from large multi day meeting facilitation inside corporations where you're bringing together people who disagree. And my technique was always to give them an analytical problem that they needed to solve together that was hard enough that they couldn't game it and then bring those people who disagreed into subgroups so those people who are farthest apart get them to rub together. I can't do it. But they can, through friction with each other, start to understand each other.

[A]

Yeah, and I think that's exactly it. You take your ego hat off and you understand I don't have all the information here. It's embedded in these people that are coming together well, and even if I.

[B]

Did, if they don't agree, they're not.

[A]

Going to do anything.

[B]

They're not going to do it. I mean, you want to have all these weird metaphors, get the iron filings to align sort of thing. You know, this idea that if they can A, start to see each other as human and B, start to see each other's perspective and see what they share in common, that they can start. But I agree that it doesn't happen without bringing people into that moment of friction. So then there's a tension between cohesion and autonomy.

[A]

Yeah, and that's actually what I was just alluding to. Without.

[B]

Yeah, you're right.

[A]

Explicit about it. So if you're thinking about canalizing transformation, it's that you're bringing entities together who come from a system that is what could be called under organized. It's not an organization where I have control over anything. I can manipulate the reward system or something. So if it's a bunch of nonprofits that you're bringing together, they have no reason other than their shared agenda to work together. So the shared agenda becomes the cohesion element. And at some point we have to understand it in the whole system change context. A little less so in environmental and organizational context, but in the whole system context, entity A, civic organization A and nonprofit B have their own agenda and their own way of doing things. And they're still going to have that because I don't have any control over them the way a manager does in an organization. So we can agree about the shared agenda and we can possibly agree about some actions we're going to take together and recognize that we're still going to go off and do our own thing with the same agenda in mind, probably, but we do it our way. So that's the autonomy part and the cohesion part is this shared, you know. And that's why some sort of visioning processes become really important, because the visioning processes, which have to be participative in that everybody's voice gets heard, are important.

[B]

On Work for Humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn [e-mail], that's one one f o l d dot com. Well, and that leads to the next paradox, which is the reflection in action dichotomy, which is it's not good enough to think, think, think, think, think forever. It's not good enough to act without thinking. And probably I would imagine it's reflection in action forever. It's not a one time thing.

[A]

Yeah, no, it's iterative. Yeah. All of these processes, by the way, are iterative, not once and done kinds of things. Because if you're talking about system change, you're talking about a process and the process does not happen instantaneously because system change. I was just involved in a transformative change assessment by the IPBES group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Just published recently. Actually our whole document isn't yet published, should be coming out soon. And the transformative change assessment defines system transformation as fundamental changes in views. So how we think, the narratives, we were talking about earlier structures, so the institutions that we have and how they relate to each other and practices or processes. So we have to think about how we relate to each other. This is a very relational kind of way of thinking about things that understands complexity and understands connectedness. And there's a huge and growing literature on the need for people who are doing the work of what I'm calling the transformation catalyst to be reflective practitioners, what Chris Argrists called reflective practitioners, but also to be able then to act. So the link is that it's not enough to just think or to just be aware. Oh, be in bliss and you know, go out and meditate all the time. The key here is to be able to be in the real world and act in that real world to bring about the changes that you'd like to see happen. And how you do that, you know, how the catalyst in my view does that is by bringing lots of people together and allowing them to co create what they see as important.

[B]

Yeah. And you just listed some things that I recognize from John Kania and Peter Zenge. Structural change, relational change, transformative change. What was interesting about those levels for them, structural change includes policies, practices, resource flows, relational changes, power dynamics, relationships and connections. Is that as you get toward mental models, the thing that needs to be changed is, is subliminal. They're implicit. People don't know that they're holding those mental models and so making those mental models explicit. It's what you were saying about economics. We assume that economics is physics and.

[A]

We'Ve been told it's the physics we've.

[B]

Been told it's physics, right, and it's a mistake, but we think it is.

[A]

A lot of this work is about making the narrative, the understanding of what the system looks like explicit. So I'm going to use neoliberalism because that's the one I'm most familiar with. But that model assumes a linear trajectory. The world is linear, the world needs to be observed. It's the positivist scientific point of view. It's that people, the assumption about people is that they're self interested profit maximizers. And if you extend that to organizations, then so are they right that endless growth is possible? All of these things are implicit and we don't understand that they're implicit. So one of the tasks that I've taken on, along with a bunch of other folks of course, is making those assumptions explicit and then making a different set of assumptions that are based in current understandings of physics, ecology, geography, a whole bunch of disciplines, complexity science. Making that set of assumptions about the real world, which I think is more realistic, if you will, to the way the world actually operates, making those assumptions explicit and building those into an understanding of economics that could go forward into the future because that would give us a very different way of understanding. We operate in a physically limited world where humanity is already pushing on planetary boundaries, this geophysical planetary boundaries that if we transgress them are going to cause unintended consequences that we can't predict, we don't know what they are. And if you look at Kate Raworth's donut economics model, then there's also a set of social foundations that we need to pay attention. And Rayworth draws this work from a number of other well known scholars. But people need social boundaries too, need sufficient housing, water, work, relationships, all of those things. How do we ensure that Both the geophysical and Rawitz model is a beautiful diagram of that. The geophysical biogeophysical constraints on the outside in the shape of a donut and on the inside the human constraints, the social constraints.

[B]

Whose model is that?

[A]

Kate Raworth.

[B]

I tell you, I need to hear all this right now.

[A]

It's a brilliant depiction of it. And she's in, well, the donut economics lab I think is in Amsterdam.

[B]

Oh yeah, I have run across that term before. Yeah, there's a term that was raised in the paper on paradox that I really liked. It opened a door for me to a whole analogy. It's the word kairos, which is an ancient Greek word that means the moment of opportunity. And so it kind of stands Close to reflection and action, which is reflection, reflection, reflection. But when the moment of opportunity happens, that's when you need to move. And I never heard it before. And what's made me wonder if complicated ideas don't get passed on from the Greeks and simple ideas do. But. But, you know this idea that the system may reach a tipping point, and if you recognize it, you can step in.

[A]

Yeah, I think so. You know, Malcolm Gladwell called it the tipping point.

[B]

The tipping point.

[A]

It's the same thing I've always experienced. You know, I'm working on something, working on something and think I'm so original or whatever. And then all of a sudden, when I'm trying to publish it, so are 25 other people. Because ideas have a time in which they're ripe to come forward. And that is the moment of kairos. It's ideas. It's also actions, I think, that take place.

[B]

The door that. That opened for me, which I think might actually be a profitable exploration for people in large systems change, is I did judo for many, many years. And Japanese actually has a language for the same things that are not ancient Greek.

[A]

I think it's aikido, where you.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Where you. You don't resist. You just let something happen.

[B]

Well, interestingly, this is actually a really important insight I got from your work. And it was partially the word kairos, and it was partially this idea, which is that a lot of times systems are traditionally modeled as stocks and flows. And what you have foregrounded is tensions, and that the people who are these netweavers are aware, and it's probably the tensions in the paradoxes, but they're aware of the tensions, and that's a very foregrounded idea for them. And that what they are working with is how to use those tensions for energy or movement.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And in judo, kuzushi means breaking balance. And unlike aikido, aikido entirely uses your motion. Judo actually helps you to make that mistake. It pushes you out of balance. Also, interestingly, American judo is more likely to use force to push you out of balance. Japanese judo is a little bit more likely to let you force yourself out of balance. But it is very much that idea of creating an imbalance, which is conflict. Could be conflict, and then debana is the instant of opportunity to attack. That's kairos. It's the moment when something's out of balance. You step in and kake take action. What's interesting about it is there's. This is me, I'm just going off on my own hobby horse here, but there's 50 identified judo throws and they fall into categories. And this is a whole vocabulary of creating tensions and using it to change the system.

[A]

Yeah, that's a great observation. It's just another way of thinking about what you're trying to do. I did martial arts for a few years, but I don't think I had very good training, so I didn't learn a lot of those concepts. That was kind of what I was looking for. I think implicitly I didn't know what I was looking for, but I had.

[B]

A very good instructor. He was both an abstract expressionist painter and The Japan Korea 1969 champion in judo. He's an interesting guy. So you have done a lot of work on intellectual shamans, and I do want to raise that and discuss it for a second. These are scholars, and to quote you, who become fully who they must be and find and live their purpose to serve the world through three healing, connecting and sense making.

[A]

They're very much the same people as what I call transformation catalysts.

[B]

As transformation catalysts, there's other terms here for them that I think others might have coined, which I like. All of them?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Wayfinders, Edgewalkers.

[A]

Yes. Judy Neal talks about edgewalkers. Wayfinders is a Maori expression that Kelly Spiller has written about a lot. These are people who walk between boundaries, but the shaman in particular is a healer. In conventional or traditional societies, it's the shaman who is the medicine person. Right. Could be a man or a woman. And the boundary spanning activity is the connecting activity. And that means that they, in the traditional societies, they will go to spiritual realms, gather information. You can do that in a variety of ways, none of which I've done, by the way, and bring back information that then helps them to heal the community or the person who is ill. And they do that through sense making processes. Well, that's what I found, this group of intellectual shamans, and I think there are many of them. I happen to study 28 of them in my field, but they're in all fields. They do this intellectual work that's particularly a sense making capacity, because as a scholar, you are either teaching or writing or researching and helping people to understand things in new ways, hopefully. And these are the people who are doing that on the cutting edge of whatever field they might be in.

[B]

What's an example? I know that you cite a number of intellectual shamans in the book. Are there ones we might know or do we need to reference people from history that we could cite as an example of an Intellectual shaman.

[A]

I didn't get to interview him, but Peter Senge is a clear example of someone who is an intellectual shaman. His original book, the Fifth Discipline, was Pathbreaking. It was one that completely blew my mind open, which is why when you mentioned him earlier, I said he's my idol. He thought about the world in a very different way and he offered a very simple framework for us understanding what it takes to make the kinds of changes to bring about a better world. So the agenda is healing. Healing. In his case it was organizational systems for the most part. But later on, other, bigger systems, like food systems and the like educational systems, it was connecting people. So that's the catalytic function, bringing people together in new ways, connecting across boundaries. That's what the intellectual shaman does. Brings information from multiple disciplines together or from practice into theory, or vice versa. So crossing from sector to sector, crossing those types of boundaries, intellectual boundaries, and then helping people understand it. And Sange is a master of that book was just a masterful way of putting things that are very, very complicated because he really introduced systems theory to management and he introduced personal mastery, which is the awareness stuff we've been talking about in ways that people could understand. And wow, to be able to do that, to me, that's just genius. So he's someone that a lot of people will have heard of. Another person in the book is Ed Freeman, who's introduced the idea of stakeholder theory. He found it, he brought it into a book on strategic management in 1984 and he has shared that idea broadly around the world ever since then. And it seems like a simple concept, but making it work in practice, not so simple, but he's made it accessible to people.

[B]

How do intellectual shamans arrive? Oh, I don't know if that's been much of your work to actually look at that.

[A]

Yeah, well, in some ways they come that way, but in other ways I think there are people who are willing to take risks or they've been mentored in such a way that taking risks was okay. And they have models of people that they see doing the kind of work that they want to do. So take someone like Stuart Hart. Stuart Hart was an early on ecologist in management disciplines. He and Andy Hoffman both were following similar kinds of trajectories. We're told don't do work on ecology, no one. Sustainability, now we call it no one cares. In business. I was told don't do work on corporate social responsibility, no one cares. But something in them and me said, oh no, no, this is the work that's important. It doesn't matter to me whether, I mean, yeah, it matters to get published or whatever for my career, but let me do enough of that work that I can then do this work that I really want to do, and I'm feeling compelled to do so. There's almost an element of calling in it. Shamans are often called to the work or they're chosen by someone. They don't necessarily want to do that work. They are drawn into it in some way. So yes, I think in some ways it's made. You're born to it. And I think you can put yourself in a position where you're more open to it. And I think you have to possibly, probably engage in some sort of practice. You talked about martial arts earlier. That's one practice. Meditation is another. Being in nature is another. Doing something that fully engages you. Csikszentmihalyi talks about getting into the state of flow. Any activity that gets you to that place I think can be very helpful in terms of opening you up to possibilities that go beyond what everybody expects you to do. Because these intellectual shamans take the risk to go beyond what everybody expects them to do, because they see work that's more important, that needs to be done. And so I talk about the process of allowing. They allow themselves to do that. Just as the transformation catalyst allows the conflict and allows multiple perspectives to be in the room at the same time and allows him or herself to take their ego hat off and let the voices of other people be heard. So there's this beyond the self kind of orientation. And I don't know that you get there unless you have some of these kinds of practices. Martial arts is certainly one, music is another. Actually, I think that's interesting.

[B]

If you look at the great authors, all of them spoke two languages. There's this idea that if you're going to be bigger than your discipline, you need to stand outside your discipline. If you're going to be bigger than your language, you have to stand outside your language.

[A]

An early mentor of mine said, read outside your field. That's where the interesting stuff is. And so I've always done that. In the 80s, I was reading complexity theory and chaos theory, which had just coming out at that time. And I was reading them, obviously not the mathematical versions of it, but the popular versions of it. And I've always done stuff like that. And these people that I study do the same thing. That's boundary spanning. That's stepping outside your field.

[B]

I interviewed somebody who I think you will find very encouraging. Her name is Anthea Roberts. And she is assembling essentially choruses of AIs where each AI takes a very different perspective on a problem and creates a cubist view, essentially a multi sided view of a problem space from all the different possible perspectives you can take. And she's finding it to be very bridging, that it can make it possible for sides that are very far apart to come together. Her original study was comparative international law, which shouldn't exist because it's international law, it should be the same. And she found that people were coming at it with such different perspectives that there actually was not one international law. And now she started building that into AIs. It's a very interesting. Absolutely new.

[A]

Yeah, that's way new field of endeavor.

[B]

Yeah, she's in Canberra. So how do shamans and netweavers endure? What I mean by that is they must often be quite alone. Not netweavers, maybe, maybe not netweavers.

[A]

Yeah, they're alone. But my friend Jim Walsh, who was one of the intellectual shamans I interviewed, said, you know, the other people he looks for people who have a certain light in their eyes or a light emanating from them, you can kind of see it. And my teacher, my shaman teacher, I've been working with a shaman for the last 25 years now. He talks about the fact that the shamans all know each other. So you gravitate to people who have that light. I'll use Jim's term because I like it. And those are the people you find at common. So I can identify people that I gravitate towards because they have that kind of light. And I think finding those people with sort of the common fire within that helps keep you going. And I also studied a group of people I called difference makers back in the aughts and similar kind of people. But also they had all the characteristics of the intellectual shaman boundary spanners. And one of the things I did with them and worked with a former graduate student on who's now a professor, Erica Steckler, we looked at the practices that those people had. Did they have practices? And they had three kinds of practices. One is sort of the individual meditation types of practices we talked about earlier or nature, or walking in nature or maybe hobbies. So they could be artistic practices. But one of the important things was they all had relational practices. So they identified people that they could relate to and talk to and engage with. And I think that in large measure is what kept them going. And then some of them had more artistic practices. Not all of them, but every one of them had the relationality built into their lives in important ways.

[B]

So your absolute, most recent work is on transformation process. What is it?

[A]

So I talk about it as catalyzing transformation, which, you know, we've been talking about these people who are not necessarily the ones who are going to go out and do the transformation, but they're the ones who bring people together in new ways. And I talk about them engaging in three kinds of main processes. Connecting, cohering, and amplifying. And the connecting process is bringing those people together and trying to understand the system. So you have to have some understanding of the system you're trying to deal with, which means you put a boundary around it. Food system, economic system, local, some community system, organization, whatever that boundary is, helps you define what's relevant and what's not, and who you need to invite in and bring them together and try to develop a shared understanding of what that system is and who's in it, who's out, what the dynamics are and the like. Now, these are complex systems. You're not going to understand it all, but you can understand patterns in it. And you can understand enough that you can get people enough on the same page that they can work together. And then you do the cohering process, which I like to think of as visioning. And there's any number of visioning approaches that are participative and allow people's voices to be heard and to collectively create a set of shared aspirations. And then collectively and independently, that sort of tension we were talking about earlier, make plans to figure out what needs to change in the system. What Donella Meadows called the leverage points for change in the system that we could tap. And what actions can we take to make the. Just to bring about the systemic change that we need to happen. And then the amplification process involves actually trying out, probably experimenting with those plans, seeing what works and what doesn't, and recognizing that systems are embedded. They're what complexity people call fractal qualities. So there's the big system. So think of a tree. A tree has a general shape. Leaves often follow that general shape. And then each leaf has shapes within it, that sort of model, that bigger shape. So you've got subsystems within the bigger system that look similar. They're not exactly the same, but they look similar. So do you need more transformation catalysts? If you're working in the state level, do you need them at the local community level? So, okay, who can we find in these local communities to act in this role for this community? Who in this organization can we find to act in this way in this organization, then come to the bigger, and then come to the bigger so that you're making those kinds of linkages and amplifying that transformative process.

[B]

That's a very powerful idea. The idea that the parts are fractal pieces of a larger whole that has a similar structure. And it raises a question for me that I've been struggling with recently, which is, how do you deal with emergence? And so the idea that the pieces don't actually add up to the whole. And let me explore this a little further, because this is such a new idea to me. It's not that new an idea. I've always wondered about how to manage guided emergence, which is, how do you get a system that is truly complex and has emergent properties to create new ones or different ones? And the way I was raised as a process person was Y equals F of X. Right. Which is if you know what all the inputs are, you know what the outputs are, you know what the output is. And what I've recently realized, I was thinking of getting this as a tattoo, actually, is Y does not equal F of X. This would be my only tattoo. Let me say I just threw a bunch of complicated things your direction.

[A]

Yeah. So, you know, we live in emergent systems all the time. Your family is an emergent system. You can't predict what your kids are going to do or what your wife is going to do. They're independent entities. They're doing that all the time, doing something that you might or might not agree with. And transformational change is. Or any complex adaptive system is similarly emergent. We like to think it's linear and, you know, the X equals F of X, Y equals F of X. Whatever. You just.

[B]

Y equals F of X. Yeah.

[A]

That's not how actual systems operate. They are by definition, if they're complex systems and all living systems are complex systems, by definition, they're not predictable. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't patterns that we can work with. We just talked about fractal. Fractals are a pattern. They represent patterns. And so there's some consistency in those patterns that we can tap into and draw on. We can understand enough about the people we're working with to know how person A works and person Y works and whether they're likely to get along together or not. So we can choose the ways in which we relate to them, the ways in which they interact, but we're not going to be able to if we're really Working with dialogical processing and emergence, we're not going to be able to absolutely predict what's going to come of it because it's hopefully if it's transformative, it's new. I didn't think of it. You didn't think of it together. We thought of it. Wow. Right.

[B]

And it's iterative.

[A]

And it's iterative.

[B]

Which is iterative. We don't expect to do it once and know what the outcome's going to be.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

We're going to guide it over time.

[A]

Yeah. And you know, it's also experimental and that's really important to understand. So a lot of transformative change is about trying this over here and seeing whether it works and then trying it over there. Recognizing that over there is not the same as over here. Because again, each system, each little part of the system is unique. And so we can have processes that we think that work and are helpful and those are the ones we have to draw on. But to expect scalability, change theorists often talk about, we're going to scale this, we're going to replicate it. No, you're not. That's not possible. Because that system is not the same as the one over here. And so let's take the principles that work and let's take the ideas that work and see how they apply in this context and what can happen with them.

[B]

Yeah. I think a lot about contagious systems change. The idea that you might be able to produce something that can out compete everything in the environment. Like introducing an invasive species. I try not to pitch it that way.

[A]

Well, hopefully it's more positive than an invasive species.

[B]

No, it's like a positive invasive species. I have a friend who actually has been working on a paper on the invasive species that communities depend upon.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Ireland and the potato or whatever. And how some invasive species actually become load bearing in the environment. It's a totally different topic in the environment in which they land. I ask a few questions at the end of every show. I don't think I prepared you for them. So your work asks something of you. What do you want from your work?

[A]

Oh, that's a very difficult question. But I think my work has always been about, you know, this is grandiose, but making the world better. Doing my little bit to make the world better. And that started out with CSR because I thought that would be how it would get better. And now it's got to do with transforming whole systems too, so that they're more life centric. I think as we were just talking about so that everybody has a place and everybody has a place to belong and we recognize our interconnectedness with the rest of the world. So I ask my work to help me do that to the extent that I'm capable of doing it.

[B]

What does your work cost you?

[A]

I don't take a lot of vacations. I do play music and I do go to music camp. And it costs my attention. It costs. I don't know, I love my work. So I don't view it as costing in the same way that you're talking.

[B]

About it sometimes it's just. It's opportunity cost.

[A]

Yeah, it is. But you know, I have everything I could have ever wanted and more. And I don't feel like I'm giving up anything to do my work. I'll be 78 next week and I'm still doing this work and I might not be doing it forever, but I like what I'm doing and I don't view it as costing me. Yes, I'm sure there are other things I could do, but I don't know what they are.

[B]

Let me tell you a story about how your work is making change. I know people in large companies who are figuring out how to measure the company's impact, their environmental impact. And they're really smart, they are well funded and they're serious. And that is a descendant of corporate responsibility. It started there, but it became. I mean, these are whole departments and they are looking at the impact of the company on the environment and then looking for ways to diminish it.

[A]

I get that. One of the things I did early on was thinking about multiple bottom lines that's evolved today to these more holistic ways of thinking about indicators and metrics, some of which exist in the world now. It's just that they're not yet mainstreamed.

[B]

No, but if the big companies develop them and share them, which they will because it's not a competitive practice, it's a collective practice, it can make a really big difference. And so it's interesting. I've lived in a corporate responsibility aware environment inside companies for most of my corporate career, which started fairly late. And so those ideas are really durable.

[A]

Well, I think, you know, goes back to my belief that people want to make the world better. Most people want to make the world better. They have different ways of doing that. But yeah, company people want to do that too. And the whole idea of sustainability has multiple possible definitions. I would use the term flourishing, but sustainability has got implications for sustaining the company and having it survive as well as the ecological aspects of sustainability and social aspects.

[B]

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show today.

[A]

Oh, thank you for inviting me. It's fun.

[B]

Absolutely enlightening. Where can people learn more about you?

[A]

I am a professor at Boston College. You can Google me and find my Boston College website. And if you want to get in touch, you can email me.

[B]

A lot of your papers are not paywalled and so people can go to Google Scholar and can find your work.

[A]

Yeah, especially my recent work. I'm trying to do what I can to get it open access.

[B]

Yeah. And what's the title of the recent work?

[A]

There was a paper called Catalyzing Transformation that's based on my book, which you have to pay for, but by the same name. If you're interested in being a change agent, that's what I recommend. But the economics works. The 10 principles paper, that's open access.

[B]

Well, thank you.

[A]

Oh, thank you.

[B]

Really appreciate your time. Great to meet you.

[A]

Thank you.

[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 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.