Leadership as a Living System

And one of the most simple patterns will be your standard drama triangle. So all of a sudden you will go away. You'll see me as a persecutor and you as a victim. And then maybe a friend will try and come and help you and try and make you feel better, but you don't want to move from the victim space because that's kind of comfortable right now.

That dynamic has now been, you know that. And it's fueled by the response that you've not dealt with to the fact that I've used my power and control imbalance. Do that once, do it again, do it again. And all of a sudden that dynamic, right?

And in this instance, I'm just using the drama triangle of persecutor, victim and helper. And you move people around. That will start happening all around the culture and it will start moving around and moving around and moving. You know, we know things like misery, likes misery, and, you know, there's an in group and an out.

And remember what I said, the engine of us is perpetually self organizing because we're a living system. While there are power and control imbalances that will create responses. And if responses are not dealt with, they have to be dealt with so that we can readdress the power and control balance, right? If we don't, then they'll form destructive patterns as opposed to generative patterns in, in, in the way that the whole organizes, the whole organization is organized in terms of its culture, its processes, its workflow, and things like that, right?

And so. And that would just proliferate and proliferate and proliferate and proliferate. If all this power and control is happening at the biggest set, then when you come down into your smaller team, you will intuitively and unconsciously want to do something to readdress the balance of your powerlessness in one place. So you'll overextend in another, right?

You'll be out of control and powerless in one area. So you will need to exert power and control. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders, a podcast by Triple Goal. We share deep, transformational conversations around leadership and personal development to help you uncover the unseen facets of human growth and leadership impact.

I'm your host, Michael Bunting. Michael Bunting here. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders. Today we've got a fascinating guest, Bryn Edwards, and we're going to talk about why psychology is failing.

And we're going to look at how to change systems. For those of you who working at senior leadership levels, this should be a really interesting podcast for you, Bryn. Would you mind giving us a very quick intro of your educational background and what you do? Yeah, so I did a degree in psychology at university back in England, which I found quite underwhelming.

And then a couple years later I did a master's degree in organizational psychology, which brought some really interesting points up, but still sort of missed the mark a bit for me. And then from that I went into management consulting in a number of top tier consultancies for about 15, 18 years before sort of coming in a big full circle back to my educational roots, where I find myself now. When you say educational roots, what do you mean? What are you doing now?

So when I went out into the world of management consulting, it was almost like everything I'd learned in, in terms of organizational psychology and psychology was just in the background. Yeah. Occasionally it filter into what I was doing. Now it's very much in the front.

Okay, great. So, Bryn, even before we started the recording of the conversation, you were saying psychology is failing or failing us. Let's hear more about that. What do you mean by that?

Look, you and I connected from a post that I wrote on LinkedIn last year that seemed to go nuts about it. And I think some of the premise of that is that psychology has been captured with by science. And you know, science has its place and scientific methodology has its place, but science is very good at isolating parts. But we work as a living system and those parts, we need to understand how those parts will come together to form the whole.

You know, we are greater than the sum of our parts. We're a living system. And so, you know, even if we look across the sort of leadership, management, development space, you can have decision making experts, critical thinking experts, you can have emotional intelligence experts, all these different experts on individual parts. But it's how do they actually all come together?

Because you don't just make a decision and you don't just think, you think, you feel, you have beliefs, you have a core nature. There's things that you say and do and the decisions you make, and they all work together as one, a whole living system. And so for me, psychology is failing because it isolates things down into key parts and goes to town on it. You know, experts have their place, but experts, as we know, know a lot about small things.

But, you know, there's more to us than just individual small things. And so there's that coupled with the fact that, you know, we are seeing an increased rise and prevalence of mental health issues. And then if we look at the workplace, dysfunctional, toxic cultures. And you know, we're becoming aware of things like that.

But you know, where is psychology blending all of these together and you know, if more and more people are having more problems is good for the business of psychology, right? Because you know, you got increasingly number of customers turning up. But I guess for me, you know, my big part in this is that that's failing because you know, where are we looking at things upstream to understand how, how are we getting to the place that we've got to and what are the patterns that we recreate repeating that mean that we're seeing this increase and increase and increase of dysfunction.

So in our work we've got a three. I'm just going to. I'd love to hear your view on this and then because when you talk about systems are a living or living systems, I just love clarity on that. So let me just give you a quick struct of how we work and then I'd love to hear your commentary on that and what are we missing and where.

So when we work with organizations, we start with defining the outcome. I recently did a keynote talk where the keynote started with something like if you go onto Amazon and you look up leadership, you'll get over 60,000 book titles. To say it's overwhelming is insane. And every leader is this is the most important and that is the most important.

So it's very, very difficult to work it out. To your point, there's lots of deep experts and they all claim that they're seeing the whole elephant when they're seeing a part of the trun. We ourselves helicoptered back out and we said let's just ask a different question. What are great leaders supposed to produce?

You know, like a great football team wins football games. Okay, the definition of a great football team is they win football games. How they win their football game can be different to another game and so forth. So we start off with outcomes.

We always define outcomes. We say to the client, hey, what are you trying to achieve? And we think great leaders produce three things. Great outcomes, like as in performance outcomes, whether a charity or a for profit business.

They deliver what they are attempting to deliver and add value and make profit. The second thing they do is they deliver agility. It's not really a deliverable, but they agile, they learn. There's this consistent ability to learn and transform.

And the third thing they produce is joyful workplaces, great workplaces where people thrive and are whole and feel complete and they've got integrity and psychological safety and all those wonderful Things we call that in our work the triple goal. And they say, well, that's the whole. So what if I'm looking at my leadership, why I'm looking at it to try and improve performance outcomes, learning outcomes and happy people outcomes. And we've kind of got unanimous agreement on that role around the world with our clients, right?

Like, yep, we all agree that that's what it is. Then we look at behavior set, and then we look at two kinds of behaviors. We go, well, there's behaviors that harm those outcomes, all three of them, and there's behaviors that support those outcomes. So, for example, avoiding honest conversations would be harming the outcomes, and having aggressive conversations would be harming the outcomes.

Having constructive, balanced, direct conversations can help those. And then the third thing we look at is what we call the drivers of those behaviors. And then we look at that. That's where we look at the external system and the internal system.

So we go, what's the surrounding system, the routines, the rituals, the incentives, the beliefs, the collective beliefs of the group that are driving those behaviors? And then what's the internal system of that person? Their childhood story, their conditioning, their cultural conditioning that they carry inside them. So those Dr.

Collectively, individually and collectively inform the behaviors, and then the behaviors will ultimately determine a large portion. Our research has 45 to 50% of the outcome. Could you just share with me how you hear that? And when you talk about system, what do you mean?

Living system? Yeah, look, so let's start with the living system bit first. Let me. Let me give you a simple analogy, right?

If. If I was to bring a bicycle in here, right? We could take the bicycle apart, right? Look at all the pieces, put the bicycle back together and you could ride it, okay?

Because it's. It's an. It's an inanimate object, right? If I took you.

If I brought you in here and brought you into all your parts and tried to put you back together again, it wouldn't work because there's more than just your parts, right? If you tried to break up all of a company and put it back together again, it wouldn't work, right? And so a living system is something that's dynamic, it's adapting, it's ever changing, and it is an entity in and of its own, right? I mean, we're obviously an entity, but, you know, if you and I, Michael, hang out, we have a connection right now.

But if you and I hang out more, we develop a relationship. And that relationship would be inclusive of both of us, and that would become an entity in and of its own. Right, right. And that would become a living system in it.

You know, it would change and develop and adapt over time and reorganize. You know, one of the things. One of the things I have to get across to all my clients is that one of the features of being alive is that you're perpetually self organizing. And one of the features of being dead is that that abruptly stops.

Right? So now it's fun. But then it asks. It poses the next question of what are you organizing around?

Right? Because this machine, this. This engine of self organizing is happening all of the time. So what are the key organizing principles upon which that is happening?

So that's. That takes me into the three things that you've just mentioned. And interestingly for me, the thing that you presented third would be the thing that I present first, which is what are the drivers behind the behaviors? Right.

What are the dynamics that surround everything? Right? Because we like to think. Because we're all very isolated and individualized, right?

We like to think that the individual is all powerful and they can control everything. Right. But you don't. Right.

The bigger the space, I mean, I just talked about a relationship between you and me, right? That's a space that covers two people. But you go into, like a family is more than two people. It's, you know, the grandparents and everybody.

And then you go into a community group and that space is even bigger. And you go to an organization, particularly a corporate, and that's pretty huge. And, you know, they get bigger and bigger and what goes on in those spaces, you know, the bigger the space, the bigger capacity to influence what is going on inside of it. Influence the way you act, the things you say, the things you do, your thinking patterns, your feeling patterns, the stories you share.

And they can even get to the point where they interfere and disconnect with your connection to your actual core nature. Right. Your own individual core nature. Right.

So what's going on in that bigger surrounding set? What you call the. Was it the driver's set? Right.

Yeah, we think of it. I always try, and I'm trying to, like you, embrace the whole, but also make it simple enough to start dealing with pieces without mixing everything together so we can. So. So, you know, I mean, the most obvious thing, right, And I'll go a bit further, go a bit deeper into it, is, you know, the most obvious thing is that, you know, it's one thing saying, oh, we want you all to get work together in a team and be creative and harmonized.

Yet at the end of the year, you know, particular I worked in some American based companies, right, Like Accenture and Chevron and places like that. At the end of the year, you're being ranked against your peer group, right? Yeah. So you, you can say you want me to work in a, in, in a company, in a team, in a collaborative way, but when it comes to the business end of why I'm here, to make some money, because most people, like, let's just be blunt, most people are not doing the job that they really want to do, right?

They're doing the job that they can get paid for. And I did this just because I was good at it and got paid well for it. And to say I enjoyed it came at a massive toll. And so, you know, and we delude ourselves, like pretend that this stuff's not happening, right?

But the blunt truth is at the end of the year, like I want to get paid more because that's the name of the game, right? And if the way that that happens is that I have to appear better because I'm being, you know, squeezed into a bell curve ranking system, at the end of the year, I'll do all the things necessary Machiavellian to shit on the people behind me. So I pop up at the top of the ladder. So, so I get the above average score, so I get the promotion and the greater pay.

And anybody who thinks that, you know, we can dress it up in all sort of hr, corporate loveliness on top of it. Right? But the truth is, is that you're mugging yourself if you think that it's any different because that's the business end of what we're doing. Yeah, right.

So we have a. We have, we try to codify that and I'd love to hear your view. We have, we've posed this question to ourselves, right? There's a million things that can be external drivers to behavior.

But let's try and like codify the big rock so we can do something about something. At least one of those is what you've just mentioned. The incentive system, the reward system, promotion system. What's the business end of our organization?

I love that term used business end. This is the business end. And is that business end of why you come? Absolutely.

And so what we would say to our clients is if you've got some behaviors in your red zone, behaviors, we call them red and green on not helping the right outcomes. As long as those are incentivized, you can kiss any idea goodbye. That's changing. They're not another thing we look at is the rituals and routines of the organization.

So the way meetings are run, the way what's discussed in those meetings, for example, the annual global visit in the multinational, when the annual head office comes and then it's a show and tell, a whole lot of lying, a whole lot of presenting and faking. And meanwhile they say, yeah, we value honesty. Oh really? Well, every time that ritual comes along, once a year routine, you demonstrate very clearly you don't value integrity or learning.

It's all about looking good. So we say we think the rituals and the routines of the organization are a big deal. And the last one that we consider is role modeling of power. So when I look at people above me and around me, I go, how do they behave?

What gets ahead in you? And those three things, the role modeling of power, the routines and rituals, and the incentive reward systems are such powerful forces that if you ignore them or you don't deal with them and you think a training program with some nice internal motivation is going to change anything. You're joking. Like what, is there something we're missing?

What's your perspective? What are the big ticket system items that are driving those before those? So, so for me, you, you tipped into it towards the end of that. It's kind of interesting every time your third thing that you mentioned tends to be the first thing that I would look at.

Right, right. And look, for whatever reason I've been, I've been blessed with a very, you know, systemic view on things. And I tend to have to go to the profound depths of things to suss things out as just how I've always been. Right.

Which is why I struggled in management consultancy because we were busy doing stuff at the surface, but really when we look at those drivers, it comes down to the balance of power and control. Power is my capacity to generate something and my control is how I bring that into the world. Okay. Now I did this piece of work when I was at Chevron, where Chevron were building these really, really multi, multibillion dollar assets, liquid natural gas assets.

And while they were being built, my job was to look at the end to end processes of how the Australian business unit was going to run. And I sat there one day and sort of said to my manager, and then we went to see the director of ops and I went, well, we could just map it it all. And they were like, what? And I went, we should just map it all.

The process map of how the whole thing's going to work. When, when we in effect get the keys for these assets, they're like well that's too big, you can't do that. And I was like, well if you can't do that, that's a worry because it's not like you're doing anything creative. You're just bringing molecules up, doing stuff with them and putting them on a ship and monetizing them, right?

And you should be striving for this to be monotonous and boring and repetitive because that's the point, right? So I embarked on a seven month journey where the director of Ops gave me access to all the people underneath him. And we did this enormous down to level three, four, end to end process map of mapping how the whole business unit from an Ops perspective would work. Subsea exploration, maintenance, the whole lot There was like 19 swim lanes across plan, scheduled do and review.

It's pretty, pretty enormous. And what that demonstrated to me was that's actually how an organization works. That's actually how the organization works. And it was interesting because we started to identify pinch points, right, that a lot of people hadn't seen.

But yes, I had swim lanes of, you know, this is my department, this is your department. But that's how it actually works yet. Can you just repeat that? But you said plan.

It was plan, schedule, do and then review, right? And then the thing went back around, okay. So you know how you plan 5, 10, 12 years in advance, you know, looking at new gas fields to bring on supply to this facility through to schedule of who's going on an island, who's not going on a rig and is there planet, you know, beds and when are we going to do stuff and then actually doing, you know, and shipping schedules and all this sort of stuff. This thing was like, it was great.

I had to produce it on a plot of paper, plotter, printer to get it out, right. But the thing that I got across in that is that's how the whole thing actually, actually works. There's the end to end process map. Yet how do we traditionally organize workforce?

Well, we put them in this pyramid chart, right. What's the pyramid chart about? That's about power and control, right? And the further up the pyramid you have, the more power and control you have.

And the further down it, the less you have. And the reality is, is that everybody inside that pyramid has given up power and control to come and be into the pyramid, right? So as soon as you have imbalanced the power and control, you know, because if, if you and I meet and I, I don't try, you know, I stay within my power and control, my capacity to generate and my control over that. Right.

If you and I stay, you know, within our own power and control, Right. Then we can have a healthy, respectful, adult, you know, interaction. Okay. And maybe we create some stuff in our friendship around us to make sure that that stays in place.

As soon as that's imbalanced, Right. There is a reaction, Right. We have a reaction to. We have a reaction to everything that changes in our environment.

But we're. Particularly when there's an imbalance of power and control, we have a reaction to it. Right? We have a reaction as soon as I force you to do something.

Okay, got it. Yeah. You're taking away my power and control. Yes.

In favor of your power and control. Yeah. It's my agenda. Yeah, got it.

And being as I've got hierarchical power, hierarchical positioning. Yeah. You kind of, you know, it's baked into this. The space in between that surrounds us.

Right? Yeah. This, this space that we don't see but exists all the time. The space in between that surrounds us.

So as soon as I tell you. Yeah, yeah. Michael, I know you wanted to have next Friday off to go and hang out with your kids, but. No, because I need this report.

You're going to have a response to that, right? Yeah. And we don't deal with those responses. Right.

They need to be discharged. Right. When I was in a, when I was in an English boys boarding school for 11 years, like it was all contained until it wasn't. It got kinetic, right?

Usually fighting. Yeah. But it was discharged. Now, I'm not advocating fighting, obviously, right?

Yeah. But they, but those, those, that response will go somewhere. It goes into the environment. And, you know, the more we stick responses into the environment, the more that starts to develop patterns, right?

And one of the most simple patterns will be your standard drama triangle. So all of a sudden you will go away, you'll see me as a persecutor and you as a victim, all right? And then, you know, maybe your friend will try and come and help you and try and make you feel better. But you don't want to move from the victim space because that's kind of comfortable right now.

That dynamic has now been, you know, set, right. And it's fueled by the response that you've not dealt with to the fact that I've used my power and control imbalance. Right? Do that once, do it again, do it again.

And all of a sudden that dynamic, right? And in this instance, I'm just using the drama triangle of, you know, persecutor, victim and helper. And you Move people around. That will start happening all around the culture, and it will start moving around and moving around and moving.

You know, we know things like misery, likes misery, and, you know, there's an in group and an out group. You know, I do cultural audits and, you know, we'll have a high percentage of people saying that there's an in group and an out group. When I ask them who's in the in group and who's in the out group, they're not consistent. And that's, that's a key point because there is no in group and out group.

That's just what you're feeling and experiencing because you were in the space that's in it around, right? So while we have these power and control imbalances because of the way that we structure things, and remember what I said, the engine of us is perpetually self organizing because we're a living system, while there are power and control imbalances that will create responses. And if responses are not dealt with, they have to be dealt with so that we can readdress the power and control balance.

Right. If we don't, then they'll form destructive patterns as opposed to generative patterns in the way that the whole organization is organized in terms of its culture, its processes, its workflow and things like that. Right. And so, and that would just proliferate and proliferate and proliferate and proliferate.

And so then when you talk about, you know, behavioral set, which is, which was your second thing, things that things that, you know, help the objectives and what have you and things that don't. Right. Well, you know, if, if all this power and control is happening at the biggest set, then when you come down into your smaller team, you will intuitively and unconsciously want to do something to readdress the balance of your powerlessness in one place. So you'll overextend in another.

Right? You'll be out of control and powerless in one area. So you will need to exert power and control in another, which is why you might, you find yourself doing things that you wouldn't normally do, right? You'd end up doing the exact behavior that you hate having done to you.

Correct? Correct. So, yeah. And then you're showing up in meetings and you're doing, you know, your best intent might be, yeah, I really want to work with everyone, this, that, the other.

But then some reason you, you don't quite. And you've got this resentment or this animosity, right? That's happening. And so, you know, and we Got to remember that we're talking about behaviors, right?

Behaviors. And your top level of thinking is that that's the top level of consciousness. That's the. Represents only 10% of who we are and how we work.

You know, this deeper thinking, your emotional zone, your beliefs, and your core nature that all sit underneath that, right? And that's where all of this response to the power and control imbalances is happening. And so we create these maladaptive maladaptive response patterns to power and control imbalances, right? And then we just keep doing them, right?

And the daft thing is, is a lot of the reward systems within organizations will reward those maladaptive patterns, right? And so then when you get promoted and get pay rises for doing these maladaptive. Can you just for our audience, I understand what you're saying, but just. Just define what you mean by maladaptive.

Maladaptive. You don't mind. I'll give you a really simple one, okay? Is most of us would have gone to school in the early part of going to school, right?

And we would have turned up all of. All of ourselves, right? And then we would have stood in the playground and said to our friends, yeah, but I really like. Right.

And then more of your friends will look and go, nah, you know, that's a bit sissy. Or that's. That's this or that's. I don't know, whatever, put it down, right?

And in that moment, right, because the peer pressure is there and what have you, and you were only young and you didn't have all the tools to deal with it is you put that part of you to one side, right? So you have reorganized by separating and isolating a part of yourself out, right? Compartmentalizing, putting bits to one side. That is maladaptive behavior.

Because the way we truly adapt is allowing the whole of us to deal with the risk, to deal with the situation. You know, as adults now, we're all pretty fine in getting into a discussion and going, well, I really like this. And people go, I don't really like that. You go, well, fair enough.

You know, that's still me. We get. But at the same time, you know, there's. There's a big.

I mean, you think about going to work most days. Most people can't bring all of themselves. Bring weekend. You know, there's no way you can't bring weekend Brin into Monday.

Bryn. Right? Can I. Can I.

Can I test an example with you? A really, really simplistic example, like from a client quote, you know, whenever I Felt sad or I felt distressed. My mother fed me and she gave me food. Right.

So would be okay. So I've now learned a melo adaptive pattern as instead of just breathing and feeling my feelings and processing them, I just numb them and eat. And then that stays with me for whole life. It's a mal.

I'm adapting to my mother's needs. Right. For her not dealing with this stuff. But now I've got a pattern sitting in me that's no longer serving me.

Yeah. That's become somewhat maladaptive. Got it. Well, it's been fully maladaptive.

Yeah. And sometimes our protective patterns, they work for a period of time. But yes. We're not very good at realizing when something has run its course.

We like to hold onto things to the nth degree. Yeah. I love the expression from the Buddha where he said sometimes it takes a raft to cross a river. Once you've crossed it, don't pick up the raft and put it on your back.

Let it go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got. Can I bring you back to.

You were talking about the maladaptive pattern. So now we can't stand our boss's behavior, but now we're becoming our boss. We're getting rewarded for the very behavior we don't like, but we know that's what we have to do to get. And before you know it, we've become the asshole we couldn't stand.

But we don't even see it because we've numbed ourselves so much to it. We're not even looking and we don't want to look. And then other question I've got is when you talked about imbalance of power and control. So if I'm a senior leader and I don't want to press into my system maladaptive patterns.

Right. I don't want that to happen. But I still need to make decisions. I still need to make captain's calls at times.

How would I ensure that I don't drift into that rubbing people of power and control. But I'm still doing my job and making the calls I need to do. Holding people to account for maladaptive behaviors, for example, and role modeling good behaviors. What's your view on that?

What's your guideline on that? Yeah, look. So on one level, if you are the individual leader, even if you're a senior leader and you want to do this, the challenge is that you most likely be surrounded by an all pervasive culture that doesn't want to do that, right? Yes.

So there's your challenge right away? Yeah, yeah. One of the things that, one of the things that we're not getting when it comes to cultural transformation is that by removing some of the patterns from the space in between the culture that's been lodged over time and this idea that you can just knock out one CEO and put another one in and everything will be different is absolute folly because those patterns will stay there, you know, and some of them might be 20, 30 years old, right?

And they're just showing up in different ways. In different ways. But if you boil down, they're still there. So one of the most cost and time effective ways of bringing about transformation within an organization is, is to just clean up the cultural commons.

Right, but back to what you were saying, what does that mean, clean up the cultural commons? So look, we're all good at nowadays that when we drive down the road eating a Snickers bar, we won't throw the wrapper out the window, will we? You know, because we're all like, become aware of the physical commons and we don't want rubbish and litter. Yet when you get to the cultural, let's almost call it the collective emotional commons, we're just chucking shit in it left, right and center, right.

And that has consequence. And all the stuff we've thrown in it, you know, every time I tell you, you can't have Friday off to hang out with your, with your son, you know, type things, every one of those decisions, and those decisions are not just one on one, they're one on everyone. And everyone will have an emotional, you know, have a response of some description. All of that stuff goes somewhere and it goes into the cultural, it goes into the cultural commons, right?

And if those, you know, if you want to, if you want to call it, you know, it's the collective unconscious of the whole organization, right? And it is, it exists whether you think I'm talking with or not, right? And unless you go into there and clean up the patterns, they'll just proliferate and go round and round and round, right? And you know, for me, for me, what does a leader and an organization, what is the structure of it that you know, that we need today but isn't here?

So for tomorrow, it's a leader that understands how they themselves are a living entity, a living system. So that the more you can see into the complexity of yourself, the more you can see into the complexity of the system that you have a certain level of responsibility for. And then also is recognizing that when you have a group of people like that who can operate at a high level of integrity, you know, because one of the things you talked about was the ability to be agile. So reorganize.

You know, the challenge is, is that some of the creative emerging solutions. So I guess this is another thing you talked about. What are the outcomes right at the start? Well, often you don't actually know what the real outcome is.

You have to create space for it to emerge. Right. To define an outcome right at the start of an endeavor, you know something's wrong and you know that this is the direction you need to go. But to specify it means that you're just going to probably repeat what you've got.

Yeah, it's a funny one for us because we, we talk about three outcomes that a leader is supposed to produce and we can easily define performance outcomes in dollar figures or market share or whatever. Customer. Yes. Pretty easy to define happy workplace in terms of engagement scores, workplace psych safety assessments.

The hardest one we've come to realize is that the second one, agility in learning outcomes, is not an outcome. It's a process. And there is never an outcome. But it's something so fundamentally important that it's worth describing it as we need to have this thing that.

Where we can reinvent, relearn. I would almost say that it is a. How the organization as an entity and everyone within it. The organization as an entity is able to cycle through its sense of being, doing.

And then I refer to it as non being, which is where you shed the things that you don't need now so that you can continually refine. Yeah, we have a. We have an expression for it. It's we call harvesting.

Processing. And then, and then implementing. And then harvesting. Harvesting.

Understanding what's going on. Yeah, processing what's going on. Then re. Experimenting to try fix that or evolve that and then re Harvesting what's going on.

Again, we think of it like as a cycle, just like you're describing. It's like. Yeah. I guess the only nuance I would add is that if, if you had.

If you have a route to your sense of being, the organization has a root of sense to its being and it understands its nature, place and purpose in the space that it operates, then it's doing becomes clear and the shedding of things, you know, because startups do things that they don't need to do when they get to a certain place. Right. And you know, an organization will do something like now to accommodate for a rising fuel price. Right.

Which they may not need to do if the fuel price comes down. Again, right, Correct. Yeah. Most of us can remember what life was like flying on a plane before September 11th and afterwards, it's never been the same.

That's because we've not let go of anything since. We just keep adding and adding and adding and adding. So there has to be an active letting go. So there is that.

I feel like we were on a loop before that we've not. It's fascinating what you're saying because what we found in the clients that are most successful at reinventing and being agile is their first order of business is dropping stuff away. Because they do that. They get so busy into activity in the illusion of progress that our best case study we've ever done is they went from 22 priorities to seven.

And then they did proper discipline, learning cycles within those seven that they weren't doing before. But it took a whole bunch of FOMO and dealing with fomo. So I want to bring you. I know where we were before it was that the leaders of tomorrow will be able to deal with that letting go, right?

Because they know that come what may, you know what, what today is a sacred cow, may tomorrow be in the bin, right? And if you're not, if you're not rooted in yourself, in your, you're able to understand what this means for you as a living system and therefore the living system that you work in. Because if you think that you can just work in the living system that you work in and ignore the one that you are, you're mugging yourself, right? And so when it comes to the letting go of these sacred cows, you'll flinch and you won't do it.

You won't do what is required. And so therefore you close the space from which the real solution can emerge, right? And, and you know, there's a lot of things that we don't know, right? And yet in a pyramid of power, it requires us to pretend like we know everything.

But the reality is, is that we have to have a space for stuff that we don't know and we have to allow new solutions to emerge. And if we can't do that because of our own baggage, because of institutional baggage, then you're just going to go round and round, repeating the circle, repeating the patterns that you've done and new thing will not be able to emerge within it. Yeah, that makes so much sense. So I want to bring you back to as much as I would love to continue, there's a whole, I have a 40 year mindfulness practice and the whole premises of the deeper mindfulness practice is Tracking change and knowing instability and becoming at peace with change and instability.

Because when that happens, then the nervous system stops holding on. And when the clinging happens, freedom arises. When you become efficient at self organizing. Correct.

And then you're present, you're in the present, and you're in touch with reality, not out of touch with reality. Central organizing principle becomes life itself. Yes, very much so. Very aligned on that.

I'm just curious to bring it back full circle. You said psychology is failing. Yeah. Right.

And you talked about that. You know, it dices it up into the sum of pieces. Yeah. Is what you're saying.

If I'm working in an organization and I do a training program on delegating effectively, for example, but I ignore the whole system and the power controls and all the things around me, that that training program or that run by some psychologist on whatever they're doing is doomed to failure. Because the power system will always trump that. Well, there'll be two aspects that trump it. One is the.

Yeah, the power and control imbalance that's occurring in the culture. But also there is the. There's the response to the power and control imbalance, not probably just in this organization, but throughout life of the person that's sitting in the. In the training session.

Right. So to delegate means that, you know, I've got to cede a bit of power and control over a certain thing or I've got to ask you to do something that you might not like what you want to do. So it might get a little bit of conflict in there or something. And generally, because a bulk of us have been on the wrong end of power and control imbalances, we're really good at being small and being quiet.

Right. We don't take up the space that, you know, we don't take up all of our space. Right. We give it away.

It's easier for me to give you a bit of space and make you feel happy and people please you, because I might feel bad, might feel guilty about asking you what I really, really want you to do. Right. And working around you and pandering around you than it is for me to just turn up and go, right, Michael, I'm going to delegate this thing for you. Yeah.

And so it's not just what goes on outside, it's how those maladaptive behaviors have manifested themselves within the individual. Yeah. You know, most people don't. Most people don't like dealing with a bit of difference and conflict.

They don't want to go anywhere near it and they feel bad and so they'd rather be, you know, quiet and shrink. Like you said earlier on when, you know, we're all talking about honesty, but then. But then the, you know, the regional director turns up, and now we're saying all the things that we need to say. And that's another form of being quiet and being small.

Right. And so if. If that pattern in the individual as well as the pattern in the culture are both not dressed, all you're doing is just a bit of tick box behavioral sheep dipping to say, oh, we delegating. Yeah, right on.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and, you know, even if somebody comes from. From that training session and you've not addressed either end of that and they choose to do it, it'll be from a very mechanical point of view as opposed to doing it exactly as it should. And, you know, it's a bit I didn't get to earlier on is that if we can start to organize organizations around that bigger, bigger workflow.

It amazed me, the amount of clients that I have and had where I say, all right, show me the process map of how the whole thing works. I don't know. It's like, how do you know how it works? How do you.

Onboard new people, really? We want to be getting to a place where that is. That is the central guiding part. Right.

This is how we do what we do. Right. Yeah. And so I can see my part in it that I'm responsible for, but I also understand how my part plays a role in the whole thing.

So I have ownership in both parts. Right. So then when we talk about delegating, then it's like, well, I can talk to you about delegating in the context of the overall workflow thing. And then when it comes to making serious decisions as an organization, it may well be that the guy that traditionally would be at the top of the pyramid is not the best person to make that decision because there's some.

Because the issue is actually here in the workflow, and we should bring in all the minds that have a good idea of what's happening here. Yeah. Connection with everybody else to make sure the whole thing doesn't. So when I'm hearing you say.

And I'm like, it's kind of interesting. I love learning. Is that when we say the drivers of behavior, the external drivers, not the internal, adaptive from mom, dad, culture, society, you know, was listening to an amazing. Sorry to butt in, Mike.

That all comes to work, right? Absolutely. This idea that. That we get to the front door, wipe our feet, you know, and it's important to Add vice versa.

So the maladaptive patterns that I develop because I spend 40 plus hours a week in the purview of your organization, I also take home to my wife, I put on my kids and I put on my friends and I take into my community. Yeah, totally. I'm totally aligned with you on that. What's interesting to me is that, and the learning for me today is that we tend to think of it as what's external to me and not all my own baggage is, as this conscious parenting speak.

Beautifully said. She said, what's conditional into you before you're even born? It's like, wow, that's an interesting question. Right.

All the expectations, you're supposed to make your parents happy, you're supposed to make their insecurities go away, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So much conditioned, maladaptive conditioning. But what I'm interested is what I really found useful in this chat is you also need to look at the workflow. I love how you've talked about the workflow.

Not the hierarchical picture, but the actual flow of how we get things delivered. Because it's for me, on a very simplistic level. I noticed the other day that what is my workflow? My workflow typically is a talk.

Then someone asks for a proposal, and then I do end up spending an inordinate amount of time the proposal that then, you know, on and on and on. It was only when I looked at the flow that I went, that proposal process is ridiculous. Yes. It's just outrageous.

Like, we need to get AI involved in there and streamline things because then you can do really cool things when you understand the flow, then you can ask, then you can understand the rhythm that moves through the flow. Right. Because that, that's like even more important. But you'll never get to understand the rhythm of what moves through you, through your organization, if you don't understand the actual flow.

And it explains why. Why is it we keep having these problems like every six months is because there's a problem rhythm to it. Beautiful. So if you were just a simple.

Not simple is the wrong word. If you ran a small business and you were listening to this, you went in a big corporation and you said, look, I can't afford these guys anyway, that I was speaking on this podcast and I want to just. I'm not as expensive as you, probably. I don't want to just map the flow of my organization.

If you don't mind finishing off with this, is it just simply going, okay at the beginning of the process? Like, how would I help myself. Just quickly go, let me just map my little businesses process. Right.

I'll give you a super quick, simple way to do it. Yeah, right. Yeah. Is.

Is you go and buy a really bright colored, I don't know, let's arbitrarily say football, right. And you go and work out who's the first person who needs to hold it. Right. And then ask that person where they think it goes.

After them and then after them and then after them and then wherever it goes on a big piece of paper, right. Just go, just, you know, write. Put a post it note and goes. Well, it started off with Dave and Dave does this and then he handed it to Sharon and she does this and then she handed it to so.

And so you've got these post it notes, right? So you just watch where the ball goes and then you, you know, on the post it note who and what they do and then where did it go? Right. You know what, what?

You know, when the ball moved from one place to the other, how has it in theory changed? You know, what did Dave do it do to it so that it was different when he handed it to Sharon? Right. Arbitrarily.

Right. And then you write that up on a. You get a big piece of paper and you put post it notes on it where you've gone. And then when you finish that exercise, you go and find a big table, you roll it out and then you get everybody to look at it and go, is this what really happens?

And they all go, yeah. And then you say, where is it? Is it sticking? What can we do?

And get everybody involved and they might stick new post it notes in or move the post it notes around. The key thing is you have everybody involved in the whole. Yeah, right. And here's the thing.

Don't just go that way with it, go backwards with it as well. Okay. So this could be something as simple and the most simple system is final as traffic funnel conversion. Right.

That's a classic process on where do we get our traffic, where it's supposed to go, how does it. I mean, that's what the marketing guys have typically got that pretty well saturated everything. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And what would your advice be? Just to finish this podcast off, what would your advice be to that A leader is listening to this who's stuck in a maladaptive system.

They kind of recognizing what we call red zone behaviors is what you call maladaptive. Yep. What can they do? What would your advice to them be aside from leave, but like don't tell them to leave, tell them to do something constructive.

Well, no, it's somewhere in between the two, right? It's. If you are listening to this and you suddenly gone, shit, I'm surrounded by a lot of maladaptive. Yeah.

Things going on. And the next thing is what I want you to. You know, that's a brave step to acknowledge that this is occurring. The next part of the brave step is then start to write down how is that impacting you on your daily life and how.

How is that impacting those people who are most important to you? Right? Because one of the things that we're really good at is going, shit, this is. This is me.

And then when it comes to understanding the impact of things, we go, oh, I'm not going anywhere near that. Right? And that's one of the key reasons of how we keep trucking on and trucking on and trucking on. Right?

You know, everything's happening inside of you. Everything's happening within your experience. You know, all the workshops and work I do, you know, you won't find me with tons of PowerPoints presenting things outside of people. I help people to understand how it's all happening within them because that's where their experience is happening.

And that's where you need to explore. Right? So you need to explore what is the actual, real, real impact of what you've just noticed on you, how you're doing life, how you're doing work, how you're going home from work, how you're impacting those around you. And, you know, it's a very important step because from there you understand really, really where you've got yourself to.

And then from there, the next kind of questions are, can, you know, if you access your deepest knowing? Right? And people say to me, well, what do you mean by your deepest knowing? And I usually ask people things like, you know, people come to me and they say, oh, this is happening, this is happening, this is happening.

And she said, and he said, and this, that the other. And my simple question is, are you surprised by all of this? And that takes people straight to their deepest knowing. Because usually the answer is, no, I'm not.

Right? So by accessing your deepest knowing, the next question you ask yourself is, can you do anything about all of that? Will it change? Because if the answer is no, the next thing is, are you happy to carry this impact and consequence in your life?

If the answer is yes, you can do something about it, that's awesome. But if you can't, and you now understand the full impact that it's Having on you and your life, you now have to make a conscious decision where before you are making an unconscious decision. So I've made things really, really difficult for you now. But at least you'll get to a very honest, honest place.

Now, whether that includes leaving or not, I don't know because it's very, you know. See, the problem is, is people will get to a place where they go, I've just had enough of this. Right. And what that really means is, is that their emotional load has become at capacity.

Right. They're full of resentment, they're full of suppressed anger, they're carrying a shit ton of guilt and most of it's tipping into shame because they haven't dealt with with it. Right. And then they'll say, right, I've had enough of this, I'm leaving.

And then they'll go to another organization and they'll just do the whole thing again, Right? Yeah. So the first step is to actually acknowledge what you're carrying and what the impact of it is on you and those around you because that's where the cleaning up needs to happen. That's so beautiful.

I often say to clients, live your values. Try and live the integrity value first before you run from the organization and try and go back into another place. Because the dream that you'll find this ideal place where no shit happens doesn't exist. One way or another, you're going to need to deal with it.

So rather leave having had a red hot go at doing well, in our language, the green zone behavior in that red zone system and see what happens than just constantly looking for this kumbaya green zone environment within reason to your exact point. Within reason. Because sometimes you have to admit defeat. This place is just not okay.

Yeah. And you know, the scale of what has been allowed to proliferate is so big and there is not enough of us who are at the same place as me who can willingly acknowledge what's happening and talk honestly. And that's difficult because you've. Because you've been in a power and control imbalance.

You've. How to be small and quiet, right? Yeah, exactly. Bryn, thank you so much.

That's been very nourishing and worthwhile listening for me. I found it lovely to hear the way you express things and the clarity within which you look at. I love how you can express so clearly that we're wearing it inside ourselves anyway. We may not be acknowledging it, but we're wearing the consequences of that.

And as you also said, the looking at the impact can be really hard because it brings up so much distress in our system sometimes looking at that impact. So we would more often than not want to turn away in numb denial. But there's a huge consequence to that because we continue to live the misery and then perpetuate the very things that we not enjoying from others, we often perpetuate onto our children, our loved ones. That's profound.

Very last thing I want to say is that all of what I've spoken about may at this point, to a listener sound huge, right? Yeah. And you know, you realize that over years and years and years, things have been allowed to wind on and wind on and wind on. But it all can be unwound and it's not as difficult as you think.

Yeah. Thank you, Bryn. Appreciate your time today. You're welcome.

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