Network

Kelly sits across the table from Robert Bordone and Dr. Joel Salinas who have written the new book “Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In.”  
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My guess is that you weren’t surprised to learn that Second City has worked with folks in the hostage negotiation space. 
“Improv is just a great way to give people an opportunity to rehearse skills and also to be able to go through the mental processing and the emotions that can come up. You know, the more vivid they make it, the more powerful the exercise is. But the more you&#8217;re able to rehearse a skill set or a situation, the more brain pathways get to form and create and get those right connections that when you&#8217;re in the situation, you&#8217;ve got a path to walk on as opposed to having to blaze a whole new trail.” 
 
You saw first-hand how folks who were supposed to be learning the skills of having a difficult conversation avoided it. 
“I had been teaching negotiation and conflict resolution, and this was an advanced class and part of the idea of this class was to train lawyers to help facilitate really hard conversations across lines of difference. But what I discovered in this class, despite a huge amount of energy and effort to give skills to facilitators to sit with the discomfort of the conflict, at the end of the class, what I found most of the students doing was ensuring that as soon as disagreement came into the room, they steered it away to something that was more comfortable. And what&#8217;s interesting is that although folks had signed up to come in for the hard conversation, in the moment it was happening, they became complicit with the facilitator and then later on would report that they were disappointed that they never got into anything. So, all of this made me hugely fascinated with what is going on in this moment when even when we&#8217;re supposedly willingly signed up for something challenging and we&#8217;re trained to do it, we don&#8217;t do it.” 
 
Joel, you saw this play out in the hospital where you work. 
&#8220;I’ve always been very avoidant when it comes to conflict and seeing in the hospital setting, not just in myself, but in colleagues, on patients, nursing staff, consultants, situations escalate pretty quickly or progressively get worse due to people avoiding too much or like steamrolling through the conflict. Like, it&#8217;s this way and that&#8217;s the only way. And I think if we would be better at being comfortable with sitting with and being with conflict and learn that skillset and that mindset, we&#8217;d be so much better equipped to exist as humans. And I think the last thing I&#8217;ll say about this is just the fact of the matter is if we&#8217;re really looking for connection, you really can&#8217;t have connection without conflict. Without conflict, there&#8217;s no connection.”

Robert Bordone & Joel Salinas: The Improvised Art of Negotiation

Steve Magness was one of the whistleblowers who brought down Nike&#8217;s Alberto Salazar. It was a decision that would cost Steve a decade of his life. It also led him to study the true science of great performance. Kelly talks to Steve about his terrific new book, “Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform.”<span class="EOP SCXW200398353 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335551550&quot;:0,&quot;335551620&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559739&quot;:0}"> 
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You went from being a guy that let Nike executives experiment with your own body to being a whistleblower that helped change that culture. And that’s important to understand you are the same guy who did both things.<span data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335551550&quot;:0,&quot;335551620&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559739&quot;:0}"> 
“What I try and get across from this is that if we live in fantasy land, where it&#8217;s good or evil, then we don&#8217;t ever deal with the actual nuance and substance of real life. We don&#8217;t wrestle with the fact that I was the same person who had a liter of substance injected into my body and I’m the same person who blew the whistle and led to people getting banned from sport for the betterment of sport. And overall, I think a very good thing is that those people are the same. And in order to deal with that, you have to understand that messiness is something that is fundamental to all of us. But if we ignore it and we avoid it, I don&#8217;t think we ever get to the point where we can display our courage because we&#8217;re stuck in protecting this fantasy of good versus evil.” 
 
It’s also important to understand how the stories we tell ourselves effect the story of our lives. 
“Absolutely. I mean, humans are storytelling machines. It&#8217;s what made us great and different from everybody else. But I think what happens is when we feel anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, you know, maybe not like we belong in places. What happens is our stories get simpler and simpler. It&#8217;s stress narrows us. And what happens is we cease to see that struggle is often where the meaning is found. The discomfort is often the thing that leads to perspective. But when you&#8217;re in the thick of it, when you&#8217;re in the midst of it, your brain essentially simplifies.” 
 
Ultimately, you’re talk about returning to a place of internal motivation – which includes a sense of exploration and play. 
“I&#8217;ve got a toddler. If you look around, what is she a pro at? Exploration. Because all it is is figuring out a world. And if she fails, she gets up because she doesn&#8217;t understand that failure is ‘bad.’ It&#8217;s just like I stumbled, brushed myself off, and I go explore something else or explore it again. And I think as adults, what happens is we get these protective mechanisms that tell us to avoid failure because it represents you. And when we live in that space, we stop playing, we stop exploring. And there&#8217;s all sorts of research that shows this from whether we&#8217;re talking performances like yours, or if we&#8217;re talking sciences, we&#8217;re talking athletes &#8211; we tend to narrow, narrow, narrow as we grow older. But what we often need is to go back to that exploration mode, not just for creativity, but also because exploration is at the heart of developing intrinsic motivation. Play is by definition intrinsic motivation. It&#8217;s what we did as kids. And if we lose that and we don&#8217;t keep stoking that fire, then what ends up happening is our motivation shifts over the long haul to be more about those external things. But, If it&#8217;s too much about the external, then every audition becomes that life or death moment or every improv situation becomes like, did I nail this or am I complete disaster? And no one performs well in that situation.” 
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Photo Credit: Hillary Montgomery
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Steve Magness: From Whistleblowing to Winning

Kelly connects with Daisy Auger-Dominguez who once held the position of Global Chief People Officer at Vice Media Group. Her new book is called, “Burnt Out to Lit Up: How to Reignite the Joy of Leading People.” <span class="EOP SCXW218383821 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335551550&quot;:0,&quot;335551620&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559739&quot;:0}"> 
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HR is a hard gig, but you were head of HR at Vice Media, which had to be an incredibly difficult gig. 
“We keep on promoting people and we keep on sending people to these training courses that kind of take the humanity out of this work. And we keep on thrusting folks into situations that are untenable. And also, Kelly, part of the challenge of all of this, this was already hard work to do in the first place, but this is also the most messy, challenging time that any of us have ever experienced. And so, a manager now doesn&#8217;t just have to deliver on outcomes, right? They have to be cultural architects; they have to be change management experts; they have to be DEI specialists; they have to be influencers across meta communities, not just their own community; they have to do all of that while also managing a workforce that is increasingly exhausted, disengaged, and untrusting of leadership. It is really hard.” 
 
There&#8217;s been so many articles written about burnout, books written about burnout, and that hasn&#8217;t seemed to convince corporate America that they should be paying attention to burnout. 
“It&#8217;s really fascinating that you say that because I just read a report by care.com that essentially says burnout is quietly corroding our workplaces. And there&#8217;s over two thirds of employees that say they&#8217;re at high risk of burnout, and fewer than half of the employers don&#8217;t even recognize it. It is wild to me. I did not know that burnout was going to have the moment that it&#8217;s having right now when I wrote the book, to be fair. And in many ways, I wrote it because I had been so deeply burnt out and I needed to find answers to all of these questions that I had about this work. And I really do fundamentally believe that leadership in today&#8217;s workplace needs to really focus on wellness and on how do we do this work better.” 
 
I’m curious what you think of this push to get people back in the office 100% of the time? 
“I call it holding onto old relics of performance and work, right? It&#8217;s it&#8217;s these assumptions that if people are in the office, they&#8217;re going to work harder. And it fundamentally comes down to control, right? It is about controlling the workforce in a way that has become outdated. Because if employees feel that their supervisors don&#8217;t understand their motivations or don&#8217;t care about the impact of return to office mandates on their lives; their sense of autonomy; their sense of agency, and frankly, their ability to get work done, you will lose them, right? You will lose them either through attrition or you will lose them because they will no longer trust and believe and be engaged in the workplace. But it is holding on to these old forms of what management used to look like.”

Daisy Auger-Dominguez: Burnt Out to Lit Up

Kelly has a fascinating conversation with University of Toronto professor Christopher DiCarlo where they discuss his new book: “Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.” <span class="EOP SCXW191869651 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335551550&quot;:0,&quot;335551620&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559739&quot;:0}"> 
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This book is a warning about where we let AI go if we’re not more careful. Why? 
“Once it becomes super powerful with this AGI capability and we decide we&#8217;re just going to let it feed back onto itself and become more and more and more powerful, we have no idea what&#8217;s going to happen at that point. And if it develops into the final type of AI, which is ASI or artificial super intelligence, that&#8217;s when it becomes godlike and we have no idea whether we&#8217;ll be able to control or contain or stop this thing.” 
 
You write about the fact that there is a way for us to protect ourselves from this technology. 
“If we all cooperate with AI and we&#8217;re all transparent and we&#8217;re all fair in our dealings with AI, everybody does better. It&#8217;s a prisoner&#8217;s dilemma. It&#8217;s part of game theory. Everybody does better. If you get one dissenter, one country, one company, one individual saying, I want more for myself. This isn&#8217;t enough. I want more. That single defector could ruin it for the rest of us. It is a time in our existence where ethically we&#8217;re going to have to grow up super-fast and get it through our skulls that cooperation is the key to our survival.” 
 
Why isn’t the government doing more about this? 
“When I give public lectures on this topic, without question, the two most common questions I get are, ‘Why are we just finding out about this now?’ And, ‘Why isn&#8217;t the government doing more about it?’ And it&#8217;s like, well, that&#8217;s my job is to try to let the public know so that they can let the politicians know and so we can vote for the types of governance we all want that&#8217;s going to give us the very best that AI has to offer while mitigating the very worst that could possibly happen.”

Christopher DiCarlo: The Ethics of AI

Kelly welcomes renowned playwright, poet and teacher Sarah Ruhl back to the podcast. Sarah is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship. She has a new book, it’s called “Lessons from My Teachers.” 
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You offer a wonderful idea in the book that will never happen and that’s funding theatre artists out of the public health coffers. 
“Well, certainly not at the moment. Maybe if we had a different administration, it could have happened. But I truly believe that it&#8217;s medicine. I think theater is medicine for loneliness and for the malady of not being able to be present. So, yeah, maybe at some point when the NIH replenishes itself, we can go back there. And I increasingly think that actors will be these strange avatars who are some of the few people who know how to be present because they are able to react in real time without digital distraction for two hour stretches. And what person can say that about themselves anymore?” 
 
I speak about improvisation at a lot of future of work conferences and it’s really a fraught but fascinating place for artists and technologies like AI. 
“Right. Yeah, it&#8217;s all fascinating. My husband for Mother&#8217;s Day thought it would be funny or interesting to put in some prompts to AI to write a poem for me. And he had AI do it in my style and mention all my children and my dog. And it wasn&#8217;t bad. The poem wasn&#8217;t bad. And so, then you think, okay, so has the collective unconscious just become more available digitally? I mean, is there any positive way to view this in terms of access to the kind of collective mythic mind and all that humanity has known stretching back to the beginning? Because my first impulse is really terror.” 
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You have a beautiful essay about a piano teacher who taught you to play through a mistake. 
“It&#8217;s an incredible lesson and I see it with my own kids playing instruments now. I mean, the impulse I had when I made a mistake in music was to stop and start over again, stop and start over until I got it right. And she would teach us how to move through the mistake, especially in performance, to move through the mistake. And what an incredible lesson. I mean, I see it with students now. I call it Penelope Syndrome sometimes when they can&#8217;t finish and they undo their work because of a perceived mistake. I call it Penelope Syndrome because of Penelope in the Odyssey, unweaving what she weaves every night. But of course, she was doing that purposely. But I see students who are perfectionists do that sort of not purposely, but they&#8217;ll write, they&#8217;ll get to a point, they&#8217;ll stop, they&#8217;ll judge themselves and then they&#8217;ll start over again and that just keeps happening instead of pushing through the area of difficulty or the area of where they&#8217;re judging themselves. And I do think that&#8217;s where improvisation comes in too as a technique that you keep going forward, you keep playing.” 
 
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Photo Credit: Gregory Costanzo
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Sarah Ruhl: Lessons from My Teachers

Kelly opens the door for Rosalind Chow, an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. Her new book is called “The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace.”<span class="EOP SCXW39501833 BCX0" data-ccp-props="{&quot;134233117&quot;:false,&quot;134233118&quot;:false,&quot;335551550&quot;:0,&quot;335551620&quot;:0,&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559738&quot;:0,&quot;335559739&quot;:0}"> 
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Let’s start with the difference between mentorship and sponsorship. 
“When you think about mentorship, the person who&#8217;s being asked to change is actually the mentee. Oftentimes when we think about mentors, it&#8217;s a senior person who&#8217;s trying to help coach, guide a more junior person. You give them feedback on areas of potential growth. You coach them through politically perhaps tricky situations, or you just give them general career advice. But all of that is meant to try and get the mentee themselves to change something about them. Sponsorship is asking a completely different person to change, not the person who&#8217;s being sponsored, but the audience to whom the sponsor is sponsoring the person to. It&#8217;s this third party who&#8217;s being asked to be changed that they actually see the protégé or behave differently toward the protégé than they had before.” 
 
You link the idea of trust with gossip, and that’s not something you hear connected very often. 
“You know, we all have a negative impression of gossip because we&#8217;re quite frankly afraid to be the target of gossip. And it&#8217;s typically because when we think of gossip, we&#8217;re thinking about negative gossip. And the people who are negatively gossiped about are typically the people who have violated some norm that is deeply held by the group. And so obviously, we don&#8217;t want to be targets of gossip for that reason. And I think that&#8217;s why gossip has this negative connotation. But the flip side is that we all benefit from gossip as well, because what gossip allows us to do is not have to learn from personal experience, who&#8217;s not to be trusted.” 
 
It’s also worth noting the difference between power and status here. 
“The difference between power and status is that for the most part people see them as interchangeable, but they&#8217;re not. Power refers to control over resources. So, if I control some resource that you want, to the extent that you can&#8217;t get that resource from anywhere else, I have a lot of power over you. And so, I can get you to do things that I want because you kind of feel like you have to do what I tell you to do because otherwise bad things are going to happen to you. Status operates differently. Status is when people do things for you because they want to, because they like you and they trust you. And so, if you tell them to do something, they&#8217;re like, &#8216;Well, Kelly told me to do this, and I trust Kelly.&#8217;” 
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Photo Credit: Christy Filkins.
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Rosalind Chow: The Doors You Can Open”

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