“That is one of the most difficult things, especially in a corporate environment, I think to get people to have that zone of safety. A lot of times when we talk to people within our organization like a Nelnet and we ask them to come up with a brand new idea, we try to protect them as much as possible from having to present their idea until they have some evidence around it. And have them think differently about that early stage so that they can explore and go in a different direction than...

“I think I was lucky to be a teacher of very young children as my first career. They taught me so much about the joy of teaching and learning. Within the first few months of teaching it was clear to me that mutual learning created authenticity and trust. We had wonderful fun together growing with and for each other. Many of my current ways of thinking and acting developed during those few years with these young minds. I left the formal classroom 50 years ago taking with me new ways of...

“I've come to believe that trust is an emergent phenomenon. You do not have to go in trusting the people that you're engaging with. What I do believe you need is a shared question and it acts as a strange attractor. So to get at that, back up a sec and say my entry point for engaging was really a breakthrough kind of insight, which is that all change begins with disruption. And if you think about it, it makes sense because if things are going smoothly, there's no reason for change. And so for...

“Yeah. And it's crazy because you hear that... Well, we always hear the adages, this generation is soft. I got bullied when I was a kid and it was like, pause for a second. Can we acknowledge that just because it happened to you doesn't mean it was right and that someone else should have a similar experience just because it happened to you? I was in a bad car accident. I don't feel like every driver should have to experience a bad car accident to be considered an efficient driver.” - Dethra...

“Teams might be better able to own things if we adjust the boundaries or might find it really tricky because the cognitive load is too high. So suddenly we're talking about stuff which is not just technology, it's about making a viable organization effectively. We're thinking about viability, the ongoing ownership of different streams of change on an ongoing basis. That's a healthy conversation to have for any organization to be honest.” - Matthew Skelton In this episode of Control the Room,...

“I think this aspect of psychological safety is probably one of the most interesting that I think about in terms of psychological safety. So first of all, most of us learn management from our managers. We learn what management looks like, we learn what management is through our own managers. And because of the way time and careers work, most of the managers that we have, certainly early in our career, are themselves fairly inexperienced, fairly junior managers. So there's this sort of...

“People are so concerned with this innovation piece, this collaboration piece. How are we going to get more products out the door? How are we going to serve more people? How are we going to be CX/UX design premier to make sure we meet people where they're at and our customers are satisfied? But if your workforce can't even speak up, or feel comfortable or don't feel like there's that psychological safety where they can voice concerns or they see a red flag they're able to speak about it, it...

“So we know that, that's how we create our shows at Second City. We have a 12 week process, we develop in front of the audience, and we know the first four weeks there's going to be a lot of seemingly garbage, but we allow that seemingly garbage to surface because there might be a gem actually inside there, especially when sort of looked at a different way.” - Kelly Leonard In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kelly Leonard about his three plus decades...

“I think it's really important to understand the difference between safety and trust. So safety is actually a state of our nervous system. It's a neurobiologic process that happens for human beings. Trust on the other hand is how we relate to each other. It's a way to have relationship. So I can trust you maybe to complete your work and say you're going to do what you said you're going to do, and the extend that I trust to you, that's a way to relate to you. Safety is I feel I can have...

“Yeah, he's been doing some amazing things in his organization. One is that he's been talking about personality as a place to welcome diversity, that everyone doesn't have to be nice all the time, that people who are fractious or have personalities that are annoying, that you can be actually radically inclusive of those personalities. I'm not talking about people who are racist or sexist or those kinds of things. I'm actually just talking about people who always are a little sour or who...

“Well, I do think the first step is for Managers to understand change management, because everybody's talking about this and it may seem too difficult to apply, so they can be resistant about what is change management, but the first step would be educate them about the whole theme.  And we act as coaches, as partners of the leaders on those projects, because of course they will go through the situations and we'll have to best support them. And often I offer myself just to be there with them,...

“There's this old phrase, 'Culture eats strategy for breakfast.' I'm a firm believer in that one. I learned it the hard way. When I first started my career, I was a consultant. When I jumped off into startups, I honestly really struggled. The first couple years were pretty bad, because I was not a very good manager. It took a while to realize that the needs of people from different backgrounds and different skill sets, even different functions, were vastly different, and that if I wanted my...

“We need more people being of service. And it's not just the appointed tech host, it's their responsibility. You could have teams of people where they know all of these skills, they're going to function better as a team because they know how to behave this way. But I think still there aren't enough tech hosts or service-minded people in these meetings to be able to do that.” - Heather Martinez In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Heather Martinez about her...

“Winston Environments tell us how to behave. Others in the environment reinforce the messages given by the physical space.” -Rob Evans In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Howard Kincaide about his long career in Product Leadership.  He starts with how his nature to always be making things served him throughout his career.  Later, Howard discusses his long journey introducing teams to Lean Product Development Methods.  We then discuss using cultural values...

“Winston Churchill said something like, "We create our buildings and then our buildings create us." So we are deeply influenced by our environment. This species didn't evolve except by paying very careful attention to what's going on around us. Because we're not that fast, we don't have good teeth, we had to be pretty attentive to our environment to even survive. Well, we're still those creatures. We're still very attentive to even subtle cues in our environment. Environments tell us how to...

“When you look at what's happening with the population, boomers aren't getting any younger and they've got plenty of discretionary income and a lot of the solutions that are out there aren't very friendly feeling to that population. And it's hard to design for a group that you've never been a part of or that you don't know anything about. It became really important to me to be part of teams where there was a wide variety, not just of backgrounds and races and genders and that sort of thing,...

“Wherever you go, there you are. You're always bringing your family dynamics into it, so you just have to figure out who's who in the dynamic of whatever you're experiencing in the room, and then once you know that, you'll understand what's getting triggered, and you can work together to move through it.” -Patti Dobrowolski In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Patti Dobrowolski about her career helping teams navigate growth and change.  She starts with how...

“And so the more that I looked at people outside of the ideal, this ideal that we should fail forward, this ideal that we should pivot forward, I became and remained fascinated with the notion of in that moment, when we have some kind of a catalyzing disruption or interruption, how do we get our bearings? How do we understand who we are in that and then how do we determine how we want to move forward? What are the actual steps that we take? What are the approaches that we use? What are the...

“But the thing that I hear the most from the students is that they're afraid that they're not going to know how to help. They're going to stand up in front of their peers and say, "I'm here to help you guide you through this, A3 problem solving workout or this kaizen, but at the core of it, I'm really just got this structure that I'm following. I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a robot or I'm going to be like, 'We are in current state. We are in root cause analysis'." Because they're...

“But what we don't realize is that it's actually our job to help manage change. And it's our job to give people a vision that helps them get to the other side of change. So, so often we just tell people, you need to change. We never tell them why. And we don't give them a vision for the future. And we don't ask them to come alongside of us and help build that future together. We oftentimes, change feels like it's happening to me and change imposed is changed opposed. So we're going to oppose...

“You know, there are so many different forms of discrimination and prejudice. But I thought, when you write a book about leadership, what is there that hasn't been written yet? And so for me, leadership is about perspective. Finding different ways of looking at things to solve problems. To be creative and to innovate. We need to look at problems from different perspectives. So we don't ask the right question, do we get to the right solution? And so that's some work that Thomas...

“It's so interesting because I think in the process of documenting things like asynchronous workflows and some of the really hot ticket items that you hear about remote work, we've gotten to pull out stories from different people's lives and how that plays out. It's really what kind of brings this work to life, because it shows you how something like being able to work a non-linear work day enables someone to spend more time with their kids, or pursue a hobby that they love, or just have time...

“Absolutely. And that's what's so cool about people. And I think bringing people together is those moments of like, "Oh, I was thinking about it in this way. And oh, your lived experience means you're thinking about it in this totally different way." And how exciting as a facilitator to kind of be in those moments where your assumptions are challenged or where all of a sudden you have this whole new metaphor to view something in the world.” -Elizabeth Weingarten In this episode of Control...

“ I did this project at one point when I was a teacher with my students where we built these dual compost in the trees. I came back a year later and one of the families that received a dual compost in the tree, and they helped work on it as well, they were using it as a closet.  Another family that had received one and worked on it as well were using it as a bathroom only for very, very important persons. So I was like, "Wow, we built this thing. It was technically correct. It worked. It...

“The main objective is to drive economic impact for our city, for our province, for our country. So, we need to give a platform to entrepreneurs to have their brand shine, but we also need to architect them meeting people. So, how do we source the audience? How do we create moments of connection throughout the experience? How do we hype people before the event to come and discover these talents? That's really kind of what's driving the whole vision. That's how we're thinking about designing...