YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Garvey Berger

lines on the record: 103
first: 2018-10-16
most recent: 2018-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thanks so much for your great questions and your companionship here. And I hope you get some of these ideas into the world where they grow and thrive.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And love them because this thing is going to change, right? Like that as a developmentalist, the thing I knew is that this thing was going to change. If you love it today, it's going to change. If you hate it today, it's going to change The way they are today is not going to be the way they are tomorrow. So there's sometimes when as a parent, I would be thinking, oh my God, you know, he's so selfish. I'm raising a selfish child. No, he's six. Like that's what six-year-olds are like. Like, it's okay. It'll change.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't pretend to be an expert in it. I only pretend to have deep admiration for all of us who try each day to do a good job with it.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you think is going on outside of this issue in the whole classroom, in the whole system, in the whole village? So those are totally questions that we can ask and they become habits that I see both of my kids, my son's about to start university and my daughter's in university. Both of them are psychology majors. So in different ways in different fields with different with a different focus, but both of them all their lives, they've been with somebody, both my husband and I are incredibly interested in the way people think and be in the world. And now they're interested in that too because it's incredibly interesting. So if you notice it, it's like super interesting. So other than that, I think parenting is the single hardest thing to do on the planet.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we practice those habits actually. Those habits are psychologically spacious. They can be used with people, whether they're five or 105, right? These are brain-shifting habits no matter where we are. And so that was always a thing we practiced. What would be a different question you could ask about that? What's a different perspective you could take there?”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As opposed to trying to understand them and trying to understand them actually is just a great practice ground. And sometimes they change and sometimes I change. But it meant that we could be having a whole different experience of one another instead of me assuming that I knew what needed to change because I was annoyed or irritated or felt righteous or something like that. And my kids are fabulous company for me and for others. And so that practice, and my kids are really good listeners. That practice of listening becomes contagious too.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. What do they mean when they say that? Why is this thing so important? Like one of the things I practice with myself is when my kids really frustrate me, which happens much less now that they're older, but it used to happen a lot when they were little, when my kids were really frustrating to me. I would be trying to change them, right? Like my habit was you're doing a thing that annoys me. Therefore, you need to stop that.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel like one of the ways I've most used these ideas is with my kids actually. So the first one is, oh my goodness, our children are the best practice ground ever for our own curiosity. Yeah, I love to experience.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's on that category for me. Yeah. How do we respond to a world that's changing around us, not by doing what we used to do, but by creating new ways of being?”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business models are slipping in and out of being if we're not willing to take the risk to change, to grow ourselves, to grow our possibilities, to question those things that were unquestionable. If we're not able to do that, I think we won't make it, right? We won't make it in companies. We won't make it in countries. We won't make it. We've got to figure out how to keep ourselves growing and alive and curious if we're going to solve the really significant challenges that we have created.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we are drawn to keeping things the same. We have a kind of, as you know, we have this loss of version. We are in many ways inherently conservative. And that has been really helpful to us as human beings on the planet. It's really helped us create and sustain wonderful things in the world. And when the world is moving really fast, it's a big problem. And it's probably the reason that organizations, companies tend to die instead of evolve. Like most companies die and they die relatively early in their potential lifespan. And I think we do that because change is demanding and unsettling and destabilizing and stability feels good. And in a time where things are moving so fast, in a time where markets are shifting and entire business.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have just been wrong so many times. I think the more often you're wrong and can recognize you're wrong, the better you get at really saying, okay, so let me see whether I actually understand what you're saying there because the assumptions I'm making, like I totally get what you're on about. Now I'll just go to the next thing, it's harder and harder for me to have those because I've just been wrong so much.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am continually surprised by the power of genuine listening, right? I know it sounds fairly simple, but people who are led by their curiosity and who genuinely listen to the perspectives of others, they learn like crazy. And it's the simplest thing to talk about. It's actually really hard to listen deeply and well to another person without having the chatter in your own head of what am I going to say next? What do I think about this? Like the chatter that's so you focused drown that out. But actually, listening is one of those habits that when we can achieve it really changes the way we show up and the way other people experience us and how much we learn.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm feeling certain I'm off the rails. Like, that's the wrong place to be. Therefore, how can I recognize that in myself and be able to take a perspective of somebody who disagrees with me? Like we teach leaders in meetings. If you're dealing about a complex topic and you find somebody who disagrees with you, that's fantastic because now you have two possible ways to proceed, right? Our general desire to collapse those two into one right answer actually in complexity is unhelpful. We don't know what the right answer is until afterwards. We want to cultivate those two different perspectives. Let's hold on to both of them. Let's not resolve them. And so paying attention to those kinds of the kind of habits we have now and the way they work in a predictable world helps us stretch into how can we have them work and how can we have different things.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I love basic questions, right? I love questions like Am I sure that this is really a repeatable thing? When I have the thought, oh, I've seen this before, have I really seen it before? Like I'm almost always wrong. When one of my clients brings something to me and I think, oh yeah, I've seen that issue before. I don't think so, actually, because their businesses are moving so quickly. I haven't seen exactly this thing before. And so recognizing your own cues of I've seen that before or I know how this ends or I know what to do next or any of those things and asking, okay, so there I'm in this certain place. Am I in, am I dealing with something predictable? In which case, if you're an expert and you feel certain and it's predictable, go for it. Like you didn't need to ask different questions. Just go. You know which questions to ask. If I'm actually in an unpredictable place.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the way he got to different questions was to ask what am I curious about? And he needed to actually learn how to recognize his own curiosity, which we all have, right? It just gets papered over by our certainty. And once he could do that, he became a guy who was curious. He had one leader who told us that you could tell who had been in one of our leadership programs, even in a really large room by the quality of the questions they were asking. And it's not like we taught people to ask particular questions. We just help them remove some of the gunk that was separating them from their own curiosity and then different questions arise.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had one client who was working on asking different questions. And the thing that he noticed was actually that he was asking questions that were so typical for him that he wasn't even listening to people's answers. Like he already knew the answer to the question when he asked it. It wasn't even really a question he was curious about. And he started to be able to notice his own mind wandering. Like it's as if you were asking me questions. And as soon as I started to talk, you start to think about something else totally. And he started to be able to catch himself not listening. And he enlisted those around him. Like if you see me not listening, I want you to call me on it because this thing's important to me. And so with his own efforts and with the efforts of the people around him, he started to catch himself and to then ask himself, what am I actually curious about here?”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other previous habit of just taking your own perspective. And as you get clues, or sometimes people get those clues from Falling into an argument with somebody that's the same argument they've had a billion times or repeating the same sentences that they've just been saying or whatever that is as you get those cues that you're falling down the wrong path, path you don't want to be falling down, you can make a shift and try to do a different thing. And over time recognizing, oh, this is the thing I'm doing. I recognize that I'm doing it. I can have some distance and make a choice. Then I can start doing this new thing. And then there's a kind of a reward for doing the new thing, which generally with these habits anyway is kind of growth and creativity and connection. As that reward comes, then that habit becomes self-reinforcing and becomes a thing that you just do automatically and you don't think about it anymore.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that people are finding about habits, and you're right, habits are like I'm not suggesting this stuff is easy to do. I'm suggesting that as we begin to do some of these things and we get positive results, they become reinforcing. So if I have a habit of not taking anybody's perspective and like that's my way, I worked with the leader once who said, Jennifer, I just don't I've just been in this business long enough to know that my ideas are right and other people's ideas are wrong. It's like if that's your habit, then you cannot learn to take somebody else's perspective, right? But over time, if you want to change that, if you want to believe a new thing, you can start to notice how that feels in your body, what sentences come out of your mouth, and you start to get clues that you are falling into this.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing I think about really deep learning is it actually changes the structure of your brain, right? You are breaking an old pathway and creating a new neurological pathway, which is what a habit is too, right? It's a thing that happens without our noticing it. And the three habits I've talked about, the seeing systems and taking multiple perspectives and asking different questions, those are the natural habits of people who are farther along in this adult development path. And so if we can encourage ourselves to develop some of those patterns in ourselves, and we can be learning those things in ways that create new neural networks, then suddenly we are living our way into these kind of more advanced forms of development as we are just going about our daily lives.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little tiny interventions, all of them take a kind of a courage and a resolve to break out of the pattern and see if I can coax a new pattern into being.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, one of the things I love about complexity is it can change from anywhere, right? You can change a system from anywhere. You don't actually need positional power. So somebody who's locked in one of those patterns could begin to imagine ways to shift, even if I'm just shifting my part of the pattern. You know, what if I decided that the sort of talk I'm going to do outside of meetings is going to be all praise for one another? How does that shift the system around me? Or I'm going to say something brave in a meeting and I'm going to enlist a friend to say something brave in that meeting too. How does that shift around me? Or I'm going to come out with something vulnerable and personal about myself in order to increase trust in the room, tell a personal story about something that matters to me and ask for help in a different way. Like all of those are”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feedback loops that feed on themselves and keep us locked in a state we don't like, breaking some of those patterns helps get us into a new basin where if we can just learn to say what's on our mind in the meeting in a way that we can be heard and a way that supports and engages one another respectfully and humanly, then we can start to create the conditions for those out of meeting conversations not to happen for the behind-the-back talk not to happen. So we're creating a new set of feedbacks, a new attractor basin that can hold us in a system of trust and creativity and collaboration, which is just a much nicer basin to be in.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then they go after the meeting and they do a lot of politicking after the meeting and they talk about each other behind one another's backs, then they continue to gossip in that way, which other people then hear about, which means the next time we come together in a meeting, we're less likely to deal with the real issues and the system gets worse, right? And that becomes an attractor basin.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so as you look at dispositions, you can pick patterns and then make shifts in them. So it's just a really useful way to get a handle on things so that you can have experiments. And the other thing you asked me about as attractors, those are the sets of feedbacks that give rise to patterns, right? So if the disposition is for us to not trust each other, what are the things in the system that are creating the feedbacks that are kind of creating these basins of attraction we call them like locked together sets of feedbacks that we have trouble escaping from? So, you know, one set would be one set of kind of attractor feedbacks that creates a particular basin is we have a meeting. Nobody says what they think in the meeting because they don't trust each other.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dispositions can be shifted. And so if you see, oh, actually, the disposition of my team is towards competition and a lack of trust, you can start to take experiments, make moves to see which of the pieces you want to amp up and which ones you want to amp down so that you can create a new disposition so that the system automatically produces the thing that you want. People are always talking about innovation, right? And organizations aren't innovative. Actually, organizations are disposed to be conservative, right? Once you have something to protect, the organism, the organization goes into protection mode, which is not a creative mode. If you want an organization that's disposed to be creative, you have to fight some of those kind of conservative”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So one of the questions that seeing systems helps us ask is it asks it helps us ask what are the patterns we're seeing here? And another way to ask that is what is the system disposed to do? Like what are the patterns that are automatically unfolding? So I ask leaders, what is your team disposed to do? Is the disposition of your team towards kind of creativity and trust and psychological safety? Is the disposition of your team sort of in a kind of fear and competition and mistrust of each other? You can see that you could switch out a whole bunch of people in the team and the disposition wouldn't change. It's not actually any one person that brings that in. It's the collective of us and the way we engage.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how much are you willing to question what you know? If what we want is stuff that's known, Google will do that for you, right? Like we don't need to hire somebody to do that. We can get at information faster than anybody's ever been able to get at information, the history of the human race now. This is the height of that time. If what we want is knowledge, we have a whole different thing to do.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think knowledge workers more than anybody are paid to be curious, right? I think that expertise more and more. I was talking to Nick Petrie who's at the Center for Creative Leadership yesterday about this. And we were talking about the redefinition of expertise. Expertise used to be, could you repeat this thing again and again and again? And we used to think, and workers needed to do that. Knowledge workers those people are paid to actually be curious about the world and to be learners. And in order for us to be really knowledgeable, for us to change information into knowledge, we have to be open to recategorizing, recombining, learning new things, having our mental models retested and retested again. And I think that means that the core attribute is not how much you know. But how much you're willing to learn”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think so much. I think writing that book and this next one that I've just finished really, really help keep me grounded in these ideas. And they help me remember that this thing is always going to be a series of practices, that life is a series of unfolding new ways to learn, new ways to see. And it helps me in those moments when I am so tempted to go certain and small and black and white. And no right answer can be found, but geez, I'm going to try like hell to find one. In those moments, all this writing and research and practice I've been doing for these years helps me take a breath and kind of center into myself and into a place that says it's okay not to know. You can move forward in not knowing. You don't have to pretend to know and have everything closed down. You can not know and also move.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just learn a little bit more because even when we're holding on to an idea that's mostly right, in the world of organizations, in the world of business today, in the world of families today, in the world of friendship today or politics today, we are rarely 100% right because that rarely exists. Trying to figure out how can we be open to new possibilities even when we experience ourselves as right as a habit.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a practice, right? It's a practice of not believing our own press, right? Not believing our own brains because our brains are designed to simplify just without our noticing it. One of the jobs of the brain is to simplify a totally complex set of inputs so that we can make sense of them. But the brain does that by convincing us that the thing that we believe we're seeing is true and doesn't give us a lot of room to play with that. And so having it be a practice to notice one of the things I teach my clients is to notice what certainty feels like in your body. Notice that. Like what does it feel like to know that you're right? Now, when you have that feeling, take one more step and question it. How could I be wrong? What do I believe about this and how could I be wrong about that thing? And who might I listen to?”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feeling like, oh, when I have the thought that won't work, or we tried that before, or this will work for sure, or whatever that is, we believe that as though it's true. But it's not true. It's just a thought. And we really struggle to find the difference between what we think and what's real. And in a brain scan, we can't tell the difference. Like you can't tell the difference in a brain scan between somebody having an opinion and somebody remembering a fact. Our brains think they're the same. And so we have to get really careful with what we think is an opinion and what we think is a fact.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. I think we need to open ourselves up to our not knowing. I'm working on a book right now. It'll be out early in the next year where I talk about the traps we fall into as we are just going about our lives. And these traps, one of them is this trap of feeling like we know stuff.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Office, his new office, he was a new chief executive in this place. And he had a kind of a glass office and it had curtains down to make the glass not glass anymore, really. And he thought, you know, this is just too dark. I don't like it. And so we pulled open all the curtains and suddenly he was kind of much more in the organization, much more visible. People experienced that move. People talked to him about it for months afterwards, about increasing transparency, about having a sense of him as a person. It changed the way people were talking to one another. The fact that he opened the curtains in his office, like it's these little moves that lead to big cultural differences, those are the ones that I get attracted to.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super conservative, super afraid of having of getting anything wrong. And you just can't do anything, right? In a complex world, you can't do anything if you can't get anything wrong. You just get tied up. And he started telling people, I just want you to try stuff. I just want to loosen things up and I want you to remember that news cycles are short and newspapers today become birdcage liners tomorrow. And he just kept saying that and really very fast, the organization started to behave differently. And so it's these little shifts he could have, I had another client who, another chief executive of another place, who was trying to tell people about an open door policy. And one day he went into his office.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think you see them. There are stories about new products that take over. There are stories about a skunk work that was developing one thing or another. And suddenly that becomes a market leader. You look at Google was developing a way to help people think about a way to help people kind of codify their search results for hotels and travel sort of stuff. And then suddenly that springs into its own business, right? So from these small experiments can come whole new businesses or business models. But I think the ones that I really enjoy are the stories of people who are making small differences in the way they treat one another and finding the way that changes an organization. I had a client once who was in an organization that was”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investment. And that's why you need to do a bunch of these little things instead of trying to figure out what one or two massive things you want to do.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. And the hope here is so in a predictable linear world, one unit of effort should get you one unit of return. You know, you make one pair of shoes, you spend the time to make a pair of shoes, you have a pair of shoes at the end. You do one tax return and you have one completed tax return at the end. In the complex space, one unit of effort might lead to nothing or it might lead to huge rewards, right? This is the unpredictable space of orchard growing and not shoemaking, right? It's a place where we just don't know what's going to happen next. And so in that space, you're always kind of feeling around, feeling around, feeling around to see which one of these is going to have this outsized effect for a relatively small.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's the difference between treating something like a pilot that has to work for everybody and treating something like an experiment that can work for some people and then let's see how it moves the system. And there's this like realization that it's not the thing you do. It's the thing you do plus how you think about what you're doing.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change the culture a little, a little, little in a way that ultimately those silos were not so strong, not so big anymore, and they made millions of dollars and new work happen. And they were learning about the system as they went. Now, I once told this story at a different organization than that organization was having trouble with silos also. And when I told this story, somebody said, you know, we tried exactly that thing. And in our organization, it so happened that about 30% of people took us up on this offer and actually did this thing with some other kind of social event. But it was basically the same. And when we saw that only 30% did it, we killed it. We said, oh, that's.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And go have a beautiful meal and talk. If you're going to spend $100 on lunch, it's going to take a long time, right? And so these people would spend several hours together in the middle of the day and at first it was awkward, but over time they would start to talk about things because they were there for, you know, a couple of courses. And as they did that, they started to know each other a little bit. As they started to know each other a little bit, not only did their sense of mistrust go down, but actually they began to see possibilities for building more work together. And as they built more work together, then the silos themselves started to shift. So even though it was never more than about 30% of people who took the organization up on this offer at all, that 30%”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And undermining each other, right? So it had gotten really ugly. And the thing that they thought was maybe the root cause was like the REM system and how people were promoted and rewarded and how bonuses worked. And they had fiddled around with could they make bonuses more contingent about the success of people across the silo. But you can see how something like that might just amplify mistrust and dislike in a system. And so they were getting nowhere. So they decided to try to experiment with it using these kind of complexity principles to learn about the system. And we were trying to do something kind of light and”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I'll give you it's actually, I'll give you this example in two parts. So I was working with an organization on these ideas and they had a silo challenge in their organization, as many do. And the silos had gotten pretty ugly about one another. It had turned into a place where people in different parts of the company were talking bad about each other in the marketplace to their customers.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And so we have to find a way to harvest what we learn from them, or else they don't really count as safe to fail experiments. They're just another pilot that we're hoping will work out”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hear whispers of things, the whispers of things today are really useful to pay attention to. So in complexity, you're trying to find out how can I get a good sense of what's going on right now and then figure out which of those things I want to make more of. What do I want to amplify? And which of those things do I actually want less of? Which ones do I want to kind of try to dampen down or move the system away from doing all together? And then you because you can't know exactly what things going to happen next, you devise a series of what Snowden calls safe to fail experiments. These are experiments that you don't know what's going to happen, but they're going to help you learn. Sometimes Keith and I talk about these as safe to learn experiments where even if it doesn't go as we thought it would go, that's actually okay because nothing breaks and I learn a lot about the system.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great. So Snowden would make the distinction between a thing that categorizes and a thing that helps us make sense of something, right? So the issues we deal with in organizations and in our lives probably have some blend of all of these features, right? So we can't necessarily categorize them in one place or another, but we can make sense of them in these different ways. We can say, what's the bit that experts really can solve? And we can pluck out that bit and give it to an expert. In complexity, the thing that we want to do is pay really close attention to what's going on right now in the system because right now, in this moment is where the seeds of whatever's going to happen next live. And earlier I was talking about how leaders that I think are a really outstanding leaders, those leaders are able to kind of pay attention to the system in such a way that they can”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to solve these problems this way. So the framework itself helps me ask a different set of questions and therefore take different kinds of action.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then his fourth distinction, the fourth area is this chaotic space. And in chaos, there's no connection between cause and effect, either in the moment or afterwards. We just can't tell. It's like stuff is happening and it leads to other stuff that's happening, but we feel kind of lost and confused. And that's a time. It can be a time of great innovation and it can also be a time of just like massive confusion and terror. And he says that for most of us we spend most of our time in this space he calls disorder, which is a space of not knowing which of these domains we're in in the first place. And there we tend to act out of our own preference. Like I'm an academic by training. And so there's a piece of me that just wants to sort and solve stuff. I want to use my expertise and be able to predict and control things in a kind of complicated way. And probably if you just let me at it without any of these frameworks, I'd still be.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, is it noble why it happened? So, some things are never knowable. He calls those chaos, right? That's where things are moving around so quickly. There are so many pieces you actually can't tell cause and effect. It's too unpatterned for us to be even able to draw that out. In complexity, you can look back at it and get most of the patterns of it. Like, why did the culture of this organization go in that direction? Oh, well, we can trace that back. But then if we want the culture of the next organization to go in the same direction, we can't just do those things as though there are now a laundry list of steps to take because the next organization is going to be contextually different. It's going to have a different set of issues, a different set of people. And so we can't follow the same steps in a complex space that we would be able to if it were just merely complicated.”
2018-10-16 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #43 Jennifer Garvey Berger: The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT