A conversation with Nancy Giordano, Founder of Play Big Inc. and author of Leadering: The Ways Visionary Leaders Play Bigger
“That playbook is completely outdated, and it’s dangerous. If you applied a 20th century mindset to a 21st century world, we’re going to be much more hurt. How can we think about a way in which business and society can thrive together? We have to exist in a place of constant learning, a place of much more caring, and a place where we think about long-term value creation as opposed to short-term profitability growth.”
Nancy Giordano is a strategic futurist, an author, and the founder of Play Big Inc. Her focus and vision bleed into PBI’s own initiatives, where they focus on helping enterprise leaders meet the escalating expectations of a fast changing world.
In this episode of Control the Room, I speak with Nancy about updating strategic efforts, machine learning, and the tools meeting planners have at their disposal in bettering their teams’ success. Listen in to hear Nancy break down the importance of bringing a relevant strategy to multi-faceted, complex teams.
Show Highlights
[0:59] Nancy’s Experiences and “Why”
[4:15] Problem Solving with a Framework for Today
[9:25] Scalable Systems for Dynamic Environments
[17:13] Diversity of Thought with Regard to Design
[27:26] Power in Partnerism
Links | Resources
Nancy’s LinkedIn
Center for Partnership Studies
Leadering: How Visionary Leaders Play Bigger
About the Guest
Nancy Giordano, an author and the founder of Play Big Inc, joins us on the show today; immediately it’s clear that her years of experience in AI and working with various teams have contributed to her keen foresight. Her emphasis on evaluating partnership dynamics has led to revolutionary changes in the way teams and organizations alike work together.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
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Full Transcript
Douglas:
Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power. Leaning in and leaning out. All in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Nancy Giordano, strategic futurist and founder of Play Big Inc, where she helps enterprise leaders meet the escalating expectations of a fast-changing world. She is also the author of Leadering: the Ways Visionary Leaders play bigger. Welcome to the show, Nancy.
Nancy Giordano:
Well hello, great to be here.
Douglas:
Let’s start off with a little story from you about how you got started.
Nancy Giordano:
Yeah, it’s funny because I always try and contain this into a very short story, even though it’s got its own long twists and turns. But interestingly, I haven’t really changed directions. I have deepened my work, and found my way to unique expressions of it. But at the end of the day, it’s always started from the very beginning. I’m very interested in ideas. I’m really interested in releasing potential and imagination, and being able to create something that is really extraordinary. I’m always interested in getting closer and closer to the point of impact.
Nancy Giordano:
I think the thread in my work is that I get very excited about something, and then when I hit an impasse and I get frustrated, I go figure out how to go move that block and go create the next thing that needs to be created or put my energy in some place to relieve that frustration. That would probably have been the biggest guiding force to get to where I am now, which is that I help leaders and organizations and audiences around the world build the capacity to use their resources to build a better next.
Douglas:
I love that idea.
Nancy Giordano:
That’s why I describe my role as a strategic futurist, right? It’s not just about forecasting, it is about actually activating to build a better next. Right now, the work is really around helping people re-frame risk and become much better stewards of their resources in a way that they have more confidence moving forward.
Douglas:
I love that idea of better next. If we could only all focus on the better next.
Nancy Giordano:
Right? That’s the whole thing. It came out of this conversation, certainly spurred by the pandemic of how do we get back to normal. Like, why would we want to get back to normal? There were so many breakdowns that we hadn’t addressed. We have this opportunity now, and it’s really not just because of the pandemic, it has to do with the confluence of technological and cultural change that we will have an opportunity to rebuild almost every single system and every institution of which we have become overly familiar, and seen as not always working well for everyone.
Nancy Giordano:
If we have this opportunity to rethink everything from education to financial systems to the way food is grown and distributed to how things are manufactured, et cetera, et cetera, why would we not want to do it in a way that holds people better? We have this opportunity to build a strong and better next, in which everyone thrives, not just a few.
Douglas:
It’s funny that you mention that, because so often our clients would come to us and tell us they need to learn how to have better virtual meetings. The thing that we know is that the real problem is that they’re having poor meetings to begin with, and the technology’s just exacerbating those trends.
Nancy Giordano:
That’s right, yeah.
Douglas:
Because they got so accustomed to having these bad experiences that it was just normal. Then you go into this new environment, and they start noticing how dysfunctional stuff is, and they’re starting to critique it, right?
Nancy Giordano:
Exactly, and that’s the opportunity inside every organization. What we’re finding is, those that had actually invested in some of those good practices beforehand, whether it’s understanding their purpose as an organization, or really thinking about the communication inside their organization, and thinking about how they invested in strong values and communicated, again, those values throughout the organization are able to work in a distributed way much more effectively, than the organizations who didn’t invest in any of that work prior. It goes back to what we’re seeing is, it’s exposing practices that were really strong and making them even stronger, I think, in many ways, or exposing the ones that were weak, and realizing that they weren’t going to last much longer anyway.
Douglas:
Let’s talk a little bit about leadering and how some of your thinking and advice can help companies lean into better practices.
Nancy Giordano:
Well I just, again, as a strategist, I want to go solve problems. I get excited about the strategic opportunity that we have. We’ve worked with a lot of really big Fortune whatever, 100, 500, whatever they are, big, huge organizations to try and solve a strategic problem. We could see this amazing opportunity, as you look to the future. The question, really, there’s a two question compass that we use to do all of our strategic work, which is what does the future need and expect of you, and then what unique position you have to create and contribute to that. If you could just marry those two things together, it becomes really clear.
Nancy Giordano:
Instead of having a map to an outdated future, you’re able to use that as a compass to navigate a constantly evolving and changing future. But what we found is, when we went in and used that compass with a huge organization with tremendous resources, they still could not see the opportunity. It was really clear to us what the future needed and expected, and it was really clear to us what they were in a unique position to create and contribute to that, as a team, as an organization, even as an industry. But they couldn’t see the opportunity. I kept trying to figure out why. Why are people so stuck?
Nancy Giordano:
We could fly it in with a golden plane with a big, red bow and they still don’t believe it. I kept trying to work backwards to how do we build organizational capacity to be able to understand and take it and absorb new information and respond to it. Because that was really the breakdown. At one point, actually, I got so frustrated with existing organizations that couldn’t do that, that I jumped and leapt over to the world of high technology and I worked with an artificial intelligence startup here in Austin, five or so years ago, and really learned a lot about software, AI, a startup, and culture and talent, which is really the part that I was thinking about.
Nancy Giordano:
How do you build an organization for the future? How do you build a trillion dollar company that operates really differently? Through all that thinking, I just realized that there are ways in which we can just shift our mindset. It’s not about what we know, it’s about how we know. How we think versus what we think. I’ve just started talking more about that, and going around the world and speaking about it. Because there are so many things that we are unprepared for in terms of technological and cultural change, that is coming right around the corner. I’ve decided, how can I package that in ways that people can hear it?
Nancy Giordano:
Really, what it came down to is shifting our mindset from this idea of leadership as a noun that’s static and hierarchical and closed and designed very specifically to root out variabilities, so that we can consistently scale and get to quarterly profit goals, to instead think about it as a verb. Leadering, in which it is a dynamic mindset. It’s a mindset as opposed to an approach, and it is inclusive and it is caring and it is adaptive, and it is 100% focused on constant innovation, experimentation, in order to drive long-term sustainable value. We’re basically flipping it, right?
Douglas:
I love this idea of the verb is not static, it’s not this thing that is, it’s not a destination you get to, and you’ve now been given the promotion. No, it’s something that’s continuous and you invest in.
Nancy Giordano:
Totally. It’s not a playbook. Leadership was a playbook, and we had Six Sigma, and we had best practices, we talked about it in terms of an optimization playbook, in order to be able to optimize for efficiency and for scaling and for growth, and for consistent growth. What we’re seeing is that that is breaking down. A, it’s breaking down just in the 20th century. You can look at all of the externalities that have not been accounted for, whether it’s environmental or ecological or physical health, or constant and growing inequality. The playbook was already outdated, but then you throw it on top of the fact that we’re going to have these exponential technologies that allow us to play very, very differently, it’s a complete different physics in this new world we’re heading into.
Nancy Giordano:
That playbook is completely outdated, and it’s dangerous. If you applied a 20th century mindset to a 21st century world, we’re going to be much more hurt. How can we think about a way in which business and society can thrive together? And it is to be in a place of constant learning, and it is to be in a place of much more caring, and it is to be in a place where we think about long-term value creation as opposed to short-term profitability growth.
Douglas:
Yeah, that short-term thinking is super detrimental and especially when the more and more of a complex environment that we find ourselves in …
Nancy Giordano:
Exactly.
Douglas:
It’s like wow, if you optimized for the short-term, and you expect that to be repeatable?
Nancy Giordano:
Exactly. Well A, it isn’t, right? So you end up really frustrated and disappointed that you can’t be … Then again, when we do that, we don’t think about the externalities. Either that we want to make sure that we avoid, or that we can ensure in a healthy way. If you actually are trying to solve for some of the bigger, long-term issues, you actually have much more opportunity when you move ahead. So the idea is that you actually are thinking more long-term. That’s why I’m saying we’re flipping it from long R&D cycles, in order to be able to have short-term profitability, and only think about this in quarterly goals, to the idea that we have constant innovation and experimentation, in order to have long-term success, that actually thinks about it across generations, right? It’s not just for the next quarter, but it’s actually thinking about what the world will be like for our kids.
Nancy Giordano:
When you think about artificial intelligence, and all these really big bio-engineering, and really quite profound technologies will make possible, we need to think about it more long-term.
Douglas:
That’s interesting. I hadn’t realized that it’s actually flipping both sides. It’s not only saying, “Let’s not focus on these long projects. Let’s do the short-term experiments.” But that’s actually going to give us long-term results, rather than short-term results.
Nancy Giordano:
Right, yeah.
Douglas:
Yeah.
Nancy Giordano:
And it ensures our long-term viability.
Douglas:
The calculus makes sense.
Nancy Giordano:
Right? Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do, is flip all of the thinking. Again, I talk a lot about risk. At the end of the day, I think where people really get stuck is that all the practices, or not even practices, but approaches and structures that were put in place in the 20th century to mitigate for risk, and keep us safe and sound, are all the things that are making us vulnerable now. How do I shift that thinking? The silos, which we thought protected us, are now the thing that keep information from being able to flow, from incremental thinking, the idea that we just nudge things a little bit percentage at a time, is actually the thing that doesn’t allow us to see huge opportunities, and audacious places to play and to invest, that we think that the person with the most experience and tenure in the room is a person who’s got the most insight, which is how our board of directors are all structured.
Nancy Giordano:
The reality is that people who are closest to our customer or closest to new information, that could be very young and very new, who might have tremendous insight that we want to be able to act upon. All these practices, like I say, that we built in the 20th century to be able to mitigate risk are now the ones that are creating vulnerability and need to be rethought in order to keep us safe in a very different way.
Douglas:
I want to come back to a point you made earlier around how the advancements in technology, it’s changing the physics that we’re having to account for. It reminded me of something we spoke about in the pre-show chat around the physics that we are having to consider when we convene people, and when we design and prepare for collaborations. I’m curious to think about what physics are we concerned about?
Nancy Giordano:
Well I think that the physics on the technology side, is that things are happening so fast, and they’re so exponential, and we’re not prepared for exponential change or exponential impact. When you realize that all of a sudden you create something that a billion people can use in a very short period of time, you have to really think through that. Or you think about machine learning and how it takes in data and actually drifts and shifts as a result of what it’s learning, is that we have to really pay attention to that. It’s not just plug and play software.
Nancy Giordano:
Partly, we’re recognizing this stuff is just so much more dynamic and it sort of takes its own shape, and as these things become so big and grow so fast. That’s part of it. But because of that, people then feel so overwhelmed and scared of change and afraid of making a big mistake. Which is why, then, we brought them in to do these collaborative sessions. I think this idea of psychological safety has never been more important, right? For two reasons. One, again, that people feel really scared of change, they’re really worried about their impact. The second is that we’re bringing often more cross-functional players together, or a broader ecosystem together. We’re not just bringing the team that’s been together forever. We’re realizing the need for diverse thinking and diverse input.
Nancy Giordano:
How do we learn to challenge each other’s long-held assumptions? When we come from different backgrounds or different parts of the industry even. You have to create space, I think, for people to work together, where they feel safe being able to throw out ideas, feel safe being able to be seen, all that kind of stuff. And set the expectation that we’re not just doing it in the same old way. Because the other thing you have is skepticism. People have done this a million times, and the ideas never went anywhere. So why should I put it out there again, right? We really have to break through the inertia that people also feel.
Nancy Giordano:
When we’ve designed stuff like that, I think about every single touch point as a place to be able to invite people into a different kind of experience and different kind of conversation from the way the invitation is written, to I have designed completely crazy agendas that have one goal in mind. It’s to ensure that people feel like their time is going to be well spent, but it doesn’t in any way tell them how that time is going to be allocated across. We don’t tell them what’s going to happen at 9:00am and 11:00am and 1:00pm and at 4:00pm, in terms of the actual experiences, we just make sure that they know that we’re using their time very wisely and that there will be an output that they’re proud of at the end. Because that’s really what they care about, right?
Douglas:
Yeah, expectations matter, and people want to know how to show up, what’s going to happen, and where they’re going to be at the end.
Nancy Giordano:
Yeah, but we think that historically, the way many meeting planners have done that before, that means that we need to give them tons and tons of detail about everything that’s going to happen, so that people can presume to understand how the thing’s going to unfold. And the reality is, that’s not very useful. What they want to know is to your point, if they need to do any homework, what the kind of expectations will be when they get in there, when they can take a call if they need to make a call or not. And what the output will be at the end. But they don’t need to know exactly how the train’s going to take the ride.
Douglas:
That’s right. If you’re really embracing the emergent phenomenon, and leaning into what happens, you probably are deviating from the agenda.
Nancy Giordano:
Exactly.
Douglas:
There’s lots of attendees that don’t do so well with that, because they think that something’s going wrong.
Nancy Giordano:
Exactly.
Douglas:
If you don’t show that to them, they never know.
Nancy Giordano:
Exactly. But they do know that there are these goals that we’re trying to hit, or certain kinds of things that were going to be had, like this is a place where we’re going to have tremendous provocation or input, or I forget exactly how we named some of those things. But we work hard to ensure that people feel, again, secure walking in. We want them to feel safe and supported and well held walking in. Because I think otherwise, people are so on guard that they can’t let themselves actually go play. But we don’t give them every single step. Because exactly right, that emergence is hugely important, right, and things can go in completely different directions. Then this idea that you failed, as opposed to actually you’ve learned along the way how to do this more effectively, and how to get to the output better.
Nancy Giordano:
Or maybe, there’s a completely different output you realize halfway through the experience that you actually need, being able to be agile is part of it. Then I think that also, there’s a tremendous irony where people usually want to have these experiences, so they can have breakthrough ideas and learn how to be more agile, but they want everything spelled out in every single step. I run into that a lot. I have a lot of people who come to me and want to give a keynote talk about how to get people out of their comfort zone, but they would like to see the talk a week ahead of time. I’m like, “You know what? You guys don’t get to have any more insight than the people you’re trying to inspire, right?”
Douglas:
That’s amazing.
Nancy Giordano:
You need to live what it is that you are preaching. But again, I think that it’s just a natural habit, because we want to control the outcome. I think what we’re trying to help them do is learn that they can have confidence in the outcome without having to control the outcome. Those are two different things.
Douglas:
This reminds me of when we’re teaching agendas, one of the first things I tell them is so many meetings are agenda-less, and that’s a major problem. The common advice is, you’ve got to have agendas. But most of the time, those people are talking about a list of topics. Ideally, we’re not focusing on a list of topics, we’re focusing on how we’re going to get to point A to point B.
Nancy Giordano:
Right.
Douglas:
Then ideally, to dovetail on what you were talking about around these moments that you’re making them aware of, ideally those are assessment points. If these points that we need to get to along the way, how do we know we got there? If we don’t design then a way to determine that, then we’ll never know. We’re just kind of a finger in the air.
Nancy Giordano:
Well I mean, I just think about it this way, instead of having a vertical agenda that everything’s spelled out A-B-C-D-E, we actually have horizontal agendas that look like maps that take you on a journey.
Douglas:
That’s right.
Nancy Giordano:
I think that people then understand that just by flipping the agenda from a vertical to a horizontal already sends a signal that we’re approaching this from a different place, and that we’re going to hold you in a different way throughout this experience.
Douglas:
I love that. It’s like not only are we reframing it conceptually, but we’re going to visually reframe it.
Nancy Giordano:
Yeah. But that’s what I’m saying. Every one of those cues, Douglas, you know this, is the thing that then, you go to unconsciously that says, “Is this congruent with what it is that they’re asking me to do? They’re asking me to think differently, and they show me an agenda that looks differently, then maybe this is actually something that’s going to feel different, right?” Or again, there’s a zillion of those kinds of touchpoints that we can do. But I feel like each one of them signals in some way congruence around it, and builds trust around the outcome that we want people to have.
Douglas:
You know, in the pre-chat you were also mentioning, it’s not about the future of work, it’s the future of these kinds of moments and intersections and thought. It’s like the future of collaboration, and it just took me to really, a special place that I hadn’t thought about it in that way before. I think the listeners would find it interesting to just hear you elaborate on that a bit.
Nancy Giordano:
Well, I think that when, again, part of what I was saying earlier, part of the future of collaborations that we’re bringing in more and more diverse voices into it, so we have to figure out how do we build a sense of a personal safety when you have that many different kinds of people with different backgrounds who are challenging the ideas and the thinking. Just, it’s going to feel different. But then I go back to, again, how do we create confidence without creating this need to control? I’ll just give, I guess the best example which is that we designed a conference for community banks and credit unions with a company in town here called Kasasa who I love very, very much.
Nancy Giordano:
They’re really a software company, FinTech, MarTech company that’s designed to help empower community banks and credit unions to stay around. But these folks often have a built-in resistance around change, right? They’ve done what it is they’ve done for a long time, they’re usually in smaller communities, they don’t see the rate of change quite so quickly, they don’t realize how quickly mega banks are encroaching and building solutions for customers that are more tech savvy. So over the years, we kept trying to figure out, how do we really break through.
Nancy Giordano:
What we realized is the badge, like when you first show up to a conference, and you register, and you get your badge, that sort of signals that you’re there. We actually built a very distinct and strategic path to badge that you had to go through three stations before you actually got to your badge, right? One had to do with headlines that you saw from all these different things. One had to be a pledge where you actually put a sticker on a map, and the other thing you had to do something else, I forgot. One of them was information, one of them was empowerment, and one was sort of like a pledge.
Nancy Giordano:
By the time you got your badge, you were enrolled. You were part of the movement. You weren’t just passively going to be taking in more information. That felt very significant, right? That we were using that experience of inviting you into this event, again, as a strategic leverage point. But really, this idea that we were anointing and inviting you into the movement, and you were actively participating and saying, “Yes, I want to be part of it.”
Douglas:
I love that.
Nancy Giordano:
You know what I mean? You have a different relationship with the content from that minute.
Douglas:
Yeah, and the participation level is high out of the gate. You started it off with the intention and the purpose, and that was very clear in the opener. It’s like, it reminds me of the power of moments, where Disney studied how to calculate peoples’ impression of an event, and it’s the beginning, the end, and some peak moment. If you start off with something that captures their hearts and minds, you’re already …
Nancy Giordano:
You can imagine the difference, right, between doing that and having them actively experience something walking to the badge, versus having the opening speaker say, “It’s really important that we ask you to think differently about the category and the blah blah blah.” It’s just, yes, it’s the same information, but we made it very visceral and we enroll people in it, so that by the time they’ve sort of opted in for the event, they’ve already prepared for what the purpose was without having to express it in very traditional ways.
Douglas:
Amazing. I love this idea of designing the threshold, that’s really cool.
Nancy Giordano:
Yeah. Right? That’s a nice way of phrasing it. Actually, it’s a really beautiful was of phrasing it. But that’s the kind of thinking that we’ve done for all of the events that I’ve ever designed or been a part of, because I feel like that’s such an important moment. Like agendas, again, the invitation’s a really, hugely important part. And the agenda’s a really important moment, the threshold and the invitation, the waking in, too, if you get to do it in a physical space. We haven’t done any of that, I think, virtually, probably as well as we might imagine we could as we move forward.
Nancy Giordano:
One of the things I keep sharing with people is that we are in this moment right now where we’re adapting to video conferences and video events, and we’re really grateful that we have this opportunity to do this. 20 years ago, we would not have had this capacity. But imagine five years into the future, or 10 years into the future, even 20 years into the future, this will look so rudimentary, when we start to get so much better at being able to use these digital experiences with one another. Whether we’re doing it in virtual reality, whether or not we’re doing it with AR, whether or not we’re doing it with all kinds of ways in which we can engage each other. We’re going to learn so much.
Nancy Giordano:
This is a period of extraordinary innovation right now, because we’re grateful for what we have, but we’re seeing all the gaps that can still be filled. I’m excited to see what comes next.
Douglas:
100%. I’ve been comparing this to, I’m about to show my age here, but I’ve been comparing this to when e-commerce in the late ’90s, it worked. You could buy stuff. And lots of people started doing it. But man, nowadays, when you can order food on your phone with a credit card and have it show up at your door 15 minutes later, the world is completely different. I think you’re 100%, 5, 10 years from now, it’s going to be unrecognizable.
Nancy Giordano:
Yeah. Again, even if you go as far back as 20 years, where most of us on this call hopefully would be able to remember, prior to having cell phones, right? You imagine if the pandemic hit before we had cell phones or smart phones, before we had mobile, or sorry before we had cloud services, where we were able to share our files so easily, before we had video where we could connect with each other this way, or cheap, reliable, easy. Skype the first time that it was like magic when Skype came in. We were like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” Forget, before we could imagine what Zoom would feel like. We didn’t have social media to be able to share with one another, for better or for worse. All of those things have made it so that we can actually survive this moment quite effectively and still be very productive.
Nancy Giordano:
But I imagine 20 years from now, we’ll look back and think what the hell were we thinking that this was so great? There’s going to be all these ways we do this better. What do you mean it took 10 months to create a vaccine? We can do it now in 10 weeks. That’s what I get excited about. The way I talk a lot about it, and why I think leadering, again, is so important, is we’re leaving an industrial area and we’re moving into a productivity era. The productivity that will be created over the next, again, 5, 10, 20, 30 years will be phenomenal.
Nancy Giordano:
Our ability to be able to accelerate everything that we do, and the way that we do it will be so different. The way we, again, grow food will be different. The way that we manufacture things will be different. The way that we think about our clothing will be different. The way that we exchange value in money will be different. All those things are going to be so different and have exponential impact.
Douglas:
So the productivity and momentum are kind of two parts of the same thing. I’m curious, I’ve always been curious how to help teams maintain momentum. Because I see so often, especially when they’re working on innovation projects that are not part of the status quo, or the managed system, it can be often hard to sustain those things. In your work with lots of big companies, are there things that you’ve seen help teams maintain momentum, get unstuck, keep working toward the prize?
Nancy Giordano:
Yeah, I mean I think part of the limitation of being the consultant is that you get to come in and you get the memo that we’re catalyzing this, and getting people very, very excited. You don’t always get to see what it looks like a year later, and see if they’ve really continued to do that. But I think that what we have found, it’s really unlocking that bigger purpose piece. The best way I can describe it is, my favorite projects are, we got to work with Nestle Frozen Foods almost a decade ago now. The question originally was, how do we get people to buy more frozen food? What we found is there was a much more powerful way of framing that, which is how to rebuild trust in industrial food. Suddenly when you’re on that mission, it’s awesome.
Nancy Giordano:
But you’re very, very motivated then. What you realize, again, it goes across all the silos of the organization or departments, if you will. It’s not like you’ve got this manufacturing plant across the street that nobody ever goes to, you’ve actually got a giant kitchen in there that’s creating fresh food that’s frozen, and you start to imagine how the conference rooms are named, you start to think about how we have our relationships with our “vendors”, which are actually product partners. How we opened this vault of information so that people could see how much we’ve learned around nutritious food.
Nancy Giordano:
When we think about packaging, when we think about pricing, we think about the actual ingredients that we source. There’s all these ways in which we build this whole map about how if you think about the 10 or 12 ways in which we don’t just distribute the food, but we’re actually figuring out how to make the food more accessible to people. Just even that reframing, from the fact that we’re in a distribution strategy to we’re in an accessibility strategy, it suddenly opens up all kinds of capacity for people. I think that’s the kind of thing that keeps people motivated and excited. Yeah, they’re going to run into headwinds, and they’re going to run into some skepticism.
Nancy Giordano:
But part of it, we’ve got the whole organization to be on board, so that there would be less of that drag when you got to certain places.
Douglas:
It’s also, it’s intriguing, too, because there’s a point of view baked into that, too. Just saying that we need to sell more, there’s no hypothesis, there’s no point of view, there’s no identification of the real problem. It’s just this desire, this want that we have. If we’re always just chasing wants, it’s definitely harder to, use your word, enroll people.
Nancy Giordano:
Well that, and I think that there was also, missing from that was the responsibility. The idea is, we’ve pushed it all, how do we get them to do more? And not realizing, that the reason that they aren’t doing, is because they don’t trust us right now. That’s number one, right? We’ve been told that these foods are not made with healthy ingredients, so how do we actually make sure that we live up to that? And because they didn’t pay attention to the fact that there was this income bifurcation that was happening, so you had lots of wealthier people with a lot more disposable income that were buying really expensive frozen food at Whole Foods, right? And you had a lot more people that were on Snap that were told that these were not nutritious items.
Nancy Giordano:
We weren’t actually meeting the needs. We kept thinking that we’re still growing an accessible middle class, and that’s what all these products had been designed for. The reality was that that shifted, we hadn’t paid enough attention to it. It’s like, I think when you reframe it, it gives you an opportunity to have more agency to create more innovative and better solutions for people, that then people are very excited and drawn to. Right? As opposed to going and just being frustrated that somehow externally things aren’t working the way we want. Part of what we talk about is, we’re moving from this desire to control and to dominate, to really thinking much more about how do we empower and create agency?
Douglas:
Let’s talk a little bit about the work you’re doing around partnerism. I always love to ask people if there’s a meeting or a gathering, ideally meetings, because I like to really focus in on the atomic unit of teams coming together to work better together, or groups that share some common purpose, coming together to get work done. During our pre-show chat, it dawned on me that that’s the meeting that I wanted to hear about. I wanted to see if you could share with our listeners how you came together to convene those folks, and what kind of structures and methods did you use?
Nancy Giordano:
This is, I think, an opportunity for a real exploration of learning as we move forward, as we have more and more of these opportunities, that we could see on the horizon, and we want to be part of the acceleration of creation of how did these entities come together? There’s work that’s been done by Riane Eisler for decades. She is a socioeconomic theorist and author and attorney, and had created something called the Center for Partnership Studies, that I think is becoming the Center for Partnership Systems, as of January. But she has really been thinking a lot about power structures, and how to come up with many theories around the fact that we’re in this tug of war constantly between capitalism and socialism, but when you step back and look at them, they’re actually both based out of domination framework. It’s just a matter of who dominates whom and who’s got the power over whom.
Nancy Giordano:
But the fact is, it’s still about power over versus power with. So she’s been pioneering and thinking a lot about how do we build systems of partnership? Or what she would call partnerism. Which is a movement that I get very excited about and think, yes, that would actually be something. If we could actually reframe how we think about power and how we think about partnership, that would actually open up a tremendous amount of social capacity in our country or in our world, when we start to imagine the kinds of systems and the kind of thinking that will be needed moving forward.
Nancy Giordano:
But what’s interesting is that she has this very strong entity called the Center for Partnership Studies or Systems, but there was this movement that we wanted to create around partnerism. So a group of us were drawn to this work and came together as a team, to further the work. We’ve built a website called Partnerism.org, with CPS’s involvement and blessing. But we’re this unique entity, where we aren’t actually employed by the center, and we are just volunteers of the center. But what we really realize is that we’re investors in this movement. I think this idea that we’re moving from an old power structure where everything was neatly organized, and there was a hierarchal way of doing things, to something that is actually much more organic where people are just drawn to the work.
Nancy Giordano:
Then we get a different kind of reward for it, a social capitalism, a social capital that comes from investing your time and energy this way. But what we realized, in order for that team to work successfully, part of what has been drawn is A, we had a close sense of purpose, we really are drawn to this way of thinking, and we have very shared values about how we work. We were talking today about, no one came together when we did this, is that who’s the president of the group? And who’s the such and such of the group? We all just had complimentary skills, recognized how they could be put together to do this work, and had been very … We have a certain structure. I mean, we meet every week kind of a thing.
Nancy Giordano:
But other than that, really trust has become a really key part of it. I think it was, if you think about the train tracks are caring, and the fuel is trust, we are all very guided to building a movement that gets us to the destination in a way that involves more and more people. What we’re really trying to do is create more people to come to the work. A long-winded way of trying to answer that question.
Douglas:
No it’s great. I guess I’m curious, as you’ve come together in this loose way, are there norms or things? You talked about the caring and the trust. But I’m curious if there’s norms around the logistics or the physics, how you’re conducting the meetings.
Nancy Giordano:
I know. It’s a great, great question. We actually literally spent time today trying to examine it and trying to figure out what has made this work so successfully. I think that at the end of the day, it’s really shared values. Two things, I guess. We have a shared viewpoint about how distributed organizations can work. We have all come from various backgrounds that have given us some confidence and experience around that, and leadering actually has been written a lot to champion that. I think that we didn’t have to figure out how to teach each other that. We all had some sort of way of being able to have confidence around that.
Nancy Giordano:
I guess, this is the metaphor that I’ve been using is that CPS created this really dense, really brilliant, really heavy vehicle/object that sits at the bottom of a hill, and they just haven’t been able to get it up the hill because it is so intense and so dense. So along came us and we go, “Hey wait a second, we can build a much lighter car. I’ll bring the steering wheel, you bring the chassis. Hey, I’ve got some wheels. Hey, that’s awesome. Let’s make sure.” We altogether built this amazing, lighter weight, but pretty effective thing that gets it up the hill. What we’re going to realize at some point is, people are going to go, “Oh my gosh, that car is great. I want to be in the car, too.”
Nancy Giordano:
So we’ll pull more and more people. At some point they’re going to go, “Wait, actually we need a train.” And we’re going to, “Hey, cool, let’s have a train.” As I was thinking about that, I’m like, “Well God, do I have to worry about if the car has an accident? Does somebody need to have insurance for this thing? Does there need to be a legal structure for all this? Are we holding this thing with the right responsibility?” What I guess I’ve found from having been a part of the TedX world is that when you build something with such a strong sense of purpose and shared values, the community comes together to take care of it.
Nancy Giordano:
In the TedX world, yes, you have to be a licensee. But there’s not a big, strong rule book around all this stuff, right? And if things start to go rogue, the community actually goes and helps self police it, just like it does in nature. It kind of swarms in to say, “Hey wait a second, this is kind of an outlier, let’s figure out how to move the outlier.” And putting it back into the forum that is best for the overall system. What we’re finding is, what are the system dynamics that hold it, as opposed to the organizational structures that hold things? I think that’s the kind of literacy we all need to become much more fluid in, and we’re not yet. But we’re learning to.
Nancy Giordano:
I’ll just give one more shout out, I just did an interview for our Femme Futurist series, with an evolutionary biologist and organizational strategist. I love the fact that she’s figured out a way to combine those two things, her name is Tamsin Woolly-Barker, and it’s all about how adaptive systems from nature can teach us about organizational structures in our own worlds. So I’m a big fan of her book Teeming, T-E-E-M-I-N-G, and her work. Because we’re just about, again, at the very precipice of learning about how to do this more effectively.
Douglas:
Yeah it’s interesting, that’s a Biomimicry at a level that I don’t think I’ve seen explored before.
Nancy Giordano:
Yes. Yes.
Douglas:
What an amazing name for that unison of work, yeah.
Nancy Giordano:
Right? I do love it, it’s so good. She’s so great. She’s so down to earth and she’s so amazing, she just bought a nature center with 85,000 acres, where they’re going to be pioneering and showing and demonstrating a lot of this work in her space. It’d be a great place, actually, for these kinds of collaborative events. She wants to bring people to this space, in order to be able to demonstrate this way of working and thinking together.
Douglas:
Incredible.
Nancy Giordano:
I keep saying her name wrong, sorry, it’s Tamsin Woolly-Barker.
Douglas:
Tamsin Woolly-Barker. Awesome. And the book is Teeming. Well, before we close out, I did want to hear a little bit from you about Leadering. It’s come up a few times. But what’s the one thing that you think people should know going in, that they’re going to take the journey, take the leap, and they’re reading Laedering. What’s the one thing they should think about as the big takeaway, or how are they going to be transformed when they read Leadering?
Nancy Giordano:
I guess, here’s the invitation for the book, is that people, again, are looking for the new playbook. I get asked this all the time, what is the playbook for the 21st century? What is the playbook for AI? What is the playbook for tomorrow? The honest answer is that we are no longer in the world of a playbook, we’re in a world of practices. How do we build the practices that allow us, again, to be able to sense and respond more effectively? As I said earlier, how do I move away from a map that was prescribed to being able to use a compass and a north star, to be able to take in constant new information. The book is really a guide to be able to do that. It really offers a whole range of practices, and each one of the chapters is arranged around a different set of it, around the importance of wonder and curiosity, the wonder or the importance of connection.
Nancy Giordano:
The importance of building, again, these navigational capacities, or what we call adaptability quotient. The need to be able to think about things in a more audacious and less incremental way. We give very specific examples throughout the book of A, why that’s necessary. Then B, the organizations and leaders who are doing it really effectively. The subtext of the book is Leadering: how visionary leaders play bigger. It’s an invitation to play big and thrive, really. The thing is, it’s designed for thriving and moving from an orientation to just win, to an orientation to deep caring, which allows for all the growth and all the profitability and all the things that we want. It’s a shift in orientation, to be able to hold each other better in this future.
Douglas:
Fantastic. Well, Nancy, it’s been great having you on the show, and really enjoyed chatting with you. Wanted to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.
Nancy Giordano:
Well, we do invite people to go to Leadering.us to find out more about the book, and find out where you can get it. Hopefully, we’ll eventually build out more conversations there. Because it’s a constant practice. The hardest part about writing this thing is you’re writing a static artifact in a dynamic world. Man, that is hard. The other thing is to have more compassion for yourself as you’re going through this, because learning and leading simultaneously is really scary and really hard, but that is the necessary skillset that we need to develop, is that we don’t wait to learn, and then practice it, and then put it into action. We are actually doing it all in real time.
Nancy Giordano:
To realize that we can learn those capacities, and we can have more compassion for each other along the way.
Douglas:
It’s been really great having you on the show, Nancy, thanks a bunch.
Nancy Giordano:
Thank you so much Douglas. Good luck with everything this year.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. VoltageControl.com.
