KF #14. Values Differences Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Anjali, welcome!

Anjali Sharma
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat storytelling. And I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us humans and story over the course of the last 20 years.

Anjali Sharma
I think the most wonderful thing about storytelling is that, no matter where you go, there is room for storytelling everywhere, whether you go into someone’s life, whether you go into someone’s work, whether you go into relationships with your family, but the most effective storytelling is the one that actually really deep dives into a particular domain.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that what I used to think, roughly about 12 years ago about storytelling is, storytelling is everything, it’s everywhere, and that was the beauty of it, but it was also the disadvantage of it, because you could start telling stories to people who work in corporations, which is where I largely kind of played the work that I do, and they would be like, “Yeah, it’s a great story, but how does it matter to me?”

So, I think the hyper-target-ness of the story is what makes it resonate, where people listen to it, and go, “Oh, my God, that’s exactly what happens to me.” That thing that people say can only come when you really target the story to the audience that you’re telling the story to. Stories are great, but the best storytellers know how to flex their narrative according to who they’re telling the story to. So, I think my biggest discovery was that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us a really quick example of what’s a generic story that’s not really going to “wow” someone versus what is that same story sound like in a micro-targeted way?

Anjali Sharma
Okay. So, I think I’d like to sort of make a little correction to that because, even though the story can go “wow,” we don’t tell just for them to be like, “Wow.” We want people to get up and take an action, and it is not necessary that whatever I will say “wow” to, I will actually act upon. I’ll demonstrate this to you.

So, say I want people to challenge the status quo for better innovation, and I say, “You know, we must challenge the status quo,” and I tell them the story of the founder of Body Shop, Anita Roddick, and Anita Roddick tells this story. She’s no more, but when she was around, she told this story to a magazine interview in which she says that, “When I was all of 12 years old, I remember the day when my father passed away, and my mother, in the house, was cleaning the floor, and there was this bucket of dirty water next to her.”

“And she looked quite sort of anxious and stressed, but a large part of her anxiety and stress was coming from the fact that my parents didn’t get along with the local priest, and she wasn’t sure that my father was going to get a Catholic funeral or not. And a few minutes later, the doorbell rang and my mother opened the door, and the priest was standing there. And the priest looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re very lucky. We’ve decided to give your husband a Catholic funeral.’”

“And my mother picked up the dirty water and splashed it onto the priest. Now when you’re brought up with a mother like that, you would challenge status quo.” Because for her, as a Catholic, it was right to get her father to get that funeral. It wasn’t a favor that the priest was doing.

Now, a lot of people get moved by that story, and they go, “Wow,” and “Amazing.” But as soon as you walk out of that place where I have told you the story, you’re walking out with a colleague of yours, you would say, “It’s a lovely story, but if I did that to my boss, I just, you know, I don’t think I’ll have my job. I’ll lose my job,” right?

So, a lot of the stories get, like, “Amazing,” but they don’t get an action in the right direction. Therefore, you have to choose the story very, very correctly because a job of a corporate professional is to remember that, more important than the re-marketability of the story, that this is an amazing story, is the resonance of the story. Resonance of the story will drive an action. Remarkability will give you claps.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That’s a really handy distinction, and I think it’s possible to go a whole lifetime without making that distinction because the claps feel good, you say, “I’m a master storyteller. People, they cry, they applaud, they tell me I’m amazing.” If you’re a speaker, they keep telling their friends, “And I keep getting booked.” But in terms of, if you’re being after a specific activity or action from your audience, that’s not adequate.

Anjali Sharma
Certainly. So, my success in a corporate world is not determined by the amount of claps and tears I get in a boardroom. It’s determined by how I moved people to take the action in the right direction and how much innovation we get, how we enhance the productivity, how we motivate people to come up with the best possible campaign next. So, I think that’s a very important distinction. You’re absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I guess, specifically that context, in terms of if you’re just looking to make phenomenal content that gets a lot of podcast downloads or even if it’s like a full-blown movie or something, then a wow can be fine. But if we’re after a particular action on the part of the people we’re telling it to, then, yes, that’s one key thing to look out for, is, “Can they receive that? Is it relatable?”

So, lay it on us, how do we go through a process by which we can craft stories that are effective at bringing about the action-taking we’d like from the people we’re telling the stories to?

Anjali Sharma
So, we’ve kind of, over the last 12 years or so, tried to make this approach extremely practical, simply because of the reason that, if I walked into a corporate boardroom and I asked people, or into any workspace and asked people, it’s like, “What is it that is your biggest challenge?” almost everyone will say time, right? 

The really traditional format of story and the creative format of story that actually relies on high character, high emotions, kind of built over time, you write, you go away, you let your creative juices flow. In corporations and workplaces, we don’t have time. So, the way I look at it is like this. Before even you tell a story, I say to people, the audience that you’re talking to, first determine, “Are you influencing them or you are inspiring them?” Those are two very different things. I mean, if I’m going to be speaking to the board or I’m going to be speaking to the senior leadership team. I need to influence them. But if I’m speaking in a town hall and getting 450 staff members to join an AI-upskilling program, then I need to inspire them.

So, the key way to differentiate whether I’m inspiring or influencing is, “Am I asking these people to take an action that affects many people? Or am I asking them to take an action that just affects them?” If it is affecting many people, like, “Let’s adopt that, buy that new technology,” it’s going to affect many people. That’s an influence decision.

But if I’m asking people to go and join this one-week upskilling AI hackathon that we’ve got, then that’s an individual’s decision that I’m going to go and join it, right? It’s a little bit like getting people to be fit, getting people to read more. These are individual decisions. I’m not disrupting an ecosystem. It’s my individual decision. Those are primarily inspirational messages.

So, very simply, “How do I target the story right?” You first think, “Am I influencing? Am I inspiring?” If I’m influencing, I’m asking people to take an action, make a decision around things that sort of influences, has an effect on many people. But if it’s an inspirational message, it’s likely to be an individual who’s going to have to take that action.

Okay, once I’ve determined that, very simply, I go, “If it is inspiration, then I have to give them a nudge to a new identity.” Because what we often do is we give people goals, but I learned this from James Clear in his book, the Atomic Habits, and then I’ve brought that learning into storytelling.

When we talk about goals, for example. Writing a book is a goal. But why do people write a book? Because they want to be called authors. That’s a new identity they want for themselves. Running a marathon is a goal, but being called a marathoner is an identity. People want to be known like that.

So, when you are developing an inspirational message, you have to give nudge to a new identity. If I bring it down to the corporate world, I’ll give you another example. When I bring it down to the corporate world, we worked on a program back in 2016 where we were asked to build a story around a factory that was going to become a smart factory with automation, robotics, etc.

And the whole proposition of that story was productivity, and I was like, “This is not going to work for people on the ground. This is not inspirational for them,” right? So, we built a new identity for them – supervisors of robots. Because somebody’s got to program them, somebody’s got to charge them, somebody’s got to roster them, and “Do you want to be the supervisors of robots?” And that was inspirational for them.

So, that’s how you kind of look at an inspirational message. And then when you come towards the influence style of messaging, I think your hyper-target-ness comes from, really, looking at three areas. Most messages that are influential have a story that anchors on time, which is efficiency. So, can you make a proposition for being more efficient? Or, they come to an image or a reputation, which is, “Can this story help build better image or a reputation?”

And then, lastly, if you’re working for a profit-making company, which most people are, “Am I able to, through this story, save money or make money?” So, I often joke around and say, “What is the TIM you’re angling?” T-I-M, you know, time, image, money. So, if you want influential stories, story that influences, then time, image, money are my anchors. But if I’m building an inspirational story, then a nudge to a new identity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is a fantastic distinction between inspiring or influencing. And I’m reminded of, I think in my early days, I was doing consulting for a strategy consulting firm, Bain, and we would make these slides that were so dense with numbers, numbers, data, charts, all this stuff, and effectively we were influencing corporate executives and boards in terms of, “Take this course of action and you will see tremendous profit.”

Like, that was always, we talked a lot about our story, “What’s our story?” And, basically, that was always the story, like, “Hey, do this thing we say and you’re going to make a lot of money, if you boil it down.” And so, those slides had a whole lot of data, a whole lot of charts to paint a compelling picture that was, “Hey, here’s the proof, here’s the evidence, here’s the argumentation like a debate, that this is, in fact, the optimal pathway relative to your alternatives.”

But then, at the same time, on my downtime, I’d be watching TED Talks, and I think, “Man, their slides look so much cooler and more beautiful and inspiring than what we do.” I felt like we were sort of we spent all the time with these slides, and I thought they don’t feel as awesome as the TED Talker slides, “What’s up?”

And I think this is a really handy way to think about it. It’s like, we are attempting to accomplish completely different objectives. If you trot out 20 fancy data charts to your TED audience, they’re like, “Yeah, okay. That wasn’t very much fun for us. Thanks.” And vice versa, if I just showed a picture of a seed in a hand to a board, it’s like, “All right, I hope you’ve got some data coming because this isn’t going to cut it for long.”

Anjali Sharma
Exactly. Oh, my God, you sort of distilled it beautifully. And I love the fact that I have taken you back to some time in your career because that is exactly what resonance is. I’m reminding you of an experience you have already had. And when that happens, you know that what I’m saying is resonating with you. So, you’re absolutely right, the objectives are very, very different, and that’s where the hyper-target-ness works really well.

I’ll add one little piece of information. There’s always this sort of war between the technicality of what we do and the emotions that are embedded in the way we communicate. And what I have learned is that time, image, and money, although seems like a sort of a very transactional way of influencing. In fact, rooted in it is an emotional thing.

Look at that boardroom and see all those people who are seated there. Their next career move depends on whether they are making that company efficient, whether they’re making that company profitable, which is money, and whether they are protecting the reputation of the organization or not, or they’re building the reputation of the organization or not.

So, I used to think, “Why is it so transactional and so dry and distilled in influence area?” But then when I started looking at the people sitting there, I was like, “No, this is also emotional because their next career step is dependent on those three things. So, their connection comes from that.

Leaning upon the definition of connection from Dr. Brene Brown, the exchange of energy that happens when people feel seen, heard, and valued.

When those people sit in that boardroom and you tell them a story that anchors itself on time, image, and money, they feel seen, heard, and valued, because that is what their job is all day in and out, to make more profit for the company, to enhance the reputation image of the company, and to make sure they’re efficient all the time. An inspiration, a nudge to the identity, new identity, is what’s the connection for the person who’s listening to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonant. And it’s funny, like if you apply the same sort of debater, data-driven argumentation approach to be very compelling about a thing they don’t care about, and I’m not making value judgments either way, but if a board doesn’t care a hoot about climate change or whatever, and you have just fantastic statistics about the carbon emissions of a thing and how this pathway will be so much better, you may have proven that point excellently in terms of that’s a rock-solid, logical approach, but you haven’t hit upon a thing that they’re emotionally invested in, you’re not going to be successful in your attempt to influence.

Anjali Sharma
Hundred, hundred, hundred percent. You know, Pete, you’ve taken me back to 2018, when I went to Hiroshima, Japan for 18 months to make another semiconductor factory have increased level of diversity. So, Japan, obviously had a huge amount of skill shortage, I mean, still does, but that was becoming a huge issue at that time. And this factory was originally owned by Japanese owners, but an American company took over.

And they soon realized that, “If we don’t get more foreigners working here, if we don’t get more women working here, and if we don’t get younger people working in here, so it’s diversity of three different lenses, we’re not going to have any people, and the factory will have to shut down.” So, there was this whole proposition, imagine, that homogeneous culture of Japan, this proposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and everyone used to just kind of roll their eyes and they were like, “Yeah, whatever.”

And I had this vivid memory of one conversation between two senior leaders that I just happened to hear, who said, “Great, now we can make a compelling case of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we still don’t get what is its connection to the performance?” And I realized, “Oh, my God, like, what they really care about is the performance of the factory,” and then we have to find a way to connect the DEI proposition to the performance of the company.

And when we started to kind of figure how diversity, equity, and inclusion will help the performance of the company, every boardroom eye was curious, eager, willing, because it connected with them, and there was a direct correlation. We just needed to surface that and anchor the story in that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I’ve learned that lesson a few times in terms of, “No, this is what you should care about. This is what is right and good and proper.” Like, that really falls flat, it’s like, “Okay, well, now I feel judged and I guess I don’t, so I am bad,” and I’m thinking about another manufacturing situation.

I was once doing a Myers-Briggs training for some executives. I was very excited because, like, we had these executives. There was their big meeting where they had flown in from multiple continents, and I was a part of it, like, “Oh, wow, I feel like I’m big-time now,” kind of early on when I was independent in my career.

And they had this situation, they manufactured like sausage casings. And, apparently, one of their major production facilities was having a real big problem at the moment, where there were sausages exploding left and right, which I thought was sort of a funny thing to imagine, “Oh, another exploding hotdog!” you know.

And so, they were all kind of consumed with this mentally, and I was like, “You know, isn’t that kind of a manufacturing issue. You should just kind of let them handle it. This is, like, your big executive meeting. This seems weird. And I feel inconvenienced because I’ve trucked it out here and I’m ready. I’m fired up and ready to go.”

And I thought it was so brilliant the way their VP of Human Resources reframed it for me, she says, “You know, this stuff here that we’re doing is important, and I really want to make sure that the whole team has all of their attention and focus on this, as opposed to this manufacturing issue. So, it’d be great if you could come back in two hours and then we’ll have it as sorted as it can be, and we’ll be able to give you all of our attention.”

I thought, “This woman is a master, because I’m annoyed, I’m frustrated, I don’t like rescheduling the thing. I’m fired up, energized, perfectly caffeinated, raring to go.” But then she turned it around to the thing that I cared about was having a productive, engaged, transformational session, and, “How, in fact, if you just do this thing that we want, then you’ll get that.”

And I heard a quote, which I love, which it said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, she just did that to me.” And we had a great session and the sausage factory, I guess, got sorted out, all is well. And so, you nailed it. Like, if you are making a super airtight logical case about a thing they don’t care about, you’re not going to get very far.

Anjali Sharma
And the tricky part is to really figure out “What do they care about?” Because, in your head you can think, “Oh, of course, everybody should care about DEI and climate change, and it affects our planet.” Yeah, sure, everybody should, but tomorrow morning when they get a call from their boss, nobody’s going to ask them about the diversity level. They’re going to ask about, “Where are we sitting in terms of performance?”

Like, even with the whole ESG bit, I have to be very honest. Every time I work on a narrative, and we come to the S part, which is the social impact part, the reason why the teams are really motivated is when they recognize that they’re not going to get investors if they don’t work on this. So, in some ways, it is an institutionalized forced change. So, how good it is that we have to think about diversity under social impact of ESG, the S part, because now, if we don’t have a good ESG report, we’re not going to get investors?

So, it’s like, there’s this term I heard many years ago, intrusion of inclusion, like you really make sure that it happens by systematically creating things that are institutionalized. You cannot escape those. So, I think more and more that I do this work, the more and more I realize that, yes, we all want to be good, but what we’re worried about is just getting through today. And if we want to get through today, in the way the ecosystem is built, then we have to really find the right framing and the right positioning and the right target of the story, or else it would fall on deaf ears.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so understood. And so, we have a huge distinction about “Are we trying to inspire or influence?” And we got to really get after a thing that they care about. So, can you walk us through sort of step-by-step or what are the key actions or processes we go through in order to do just that?

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, so I’ll pick it up from before. So, you sort of think influence, inspire, you think, “Okay, I need a story that I can anchor on time, image, money, or I need a story that can actually invite them to being, have a nudge to the new identity.” Now, here’s one thing I want people to remember is that, for a very long time, what we have understood for storytelling to be is either a marketer’s take, or a very big sort of stage sort of style of storytelling.

But when you are standing in the boardroom, the kind of storytelling that works in corporation has to have a little bit of a journalistic take into it. So, my invitation to all people who work within, who are actually trying to use stories in day-to-day work is to have a slightly journalistic take of storytelling. Now let me elaborate this for you, and then I will demonstrate for you.

So, what do journalists do? They go into the ground, they find the stories, and then they bring them out, and then they tell you, and then they make a point, or whatever is happening, they bring that out into the open, they bring it out to the surface. Now, a lot of people will try to find stories on the internet, from TED Talks, and try to tell all these really big types of stories which will never work.

Journalistic storytelling requires for you to actually get your hands dirty, go in, into the grounds, the coalface, and actually find stories that can actually help you make a point that you want to make, or sometimes they even change the point you want to make. You think that’s the point you want to make, and when you start having those conversations with people on the ground, you realize, “Oh, my God, what I thought was all along wrong.”

So, here’s an example of a journalistic story. So, once I’ve said that my audience are inspirational, so I will say, “You are the workers in this factory that are going to become a smart factory. I invite you to become the supervisors of robots.” Now at this stage, they’ll be like, “Hmm,” so it’s relevant for them, but it’s not yet resonant for them. It’s, “Okay, here’s something for me. You’ve opened with that positioning. I like it, but tell me more.” It’s not going to stop at that. A nudge to the new identity is the beginning of it.

Then, when you tell the story, here’s the story I found from the ground, and I built it for a CEO president, and he told: “Now, what do I mean by being supervisors of robots? Now, many of you in the audience today actually work within the factory, helping with taking things from one end of the factory to the other end of the factory.”

“Let’s take Maria, for example. Maria has been with our company for about eight years now, and Maria is in the audience. And when she joined us eight years ago, her job was to take a trolley, put in the semiconductor chips, and move them from one area to the other area.”

“Now, this may sound simple, but we all know this is a highly sensitive product, and it has to be done very, very carefully. So, it takes time and she moves the products carefully to the other side and downloads them for whatever other activity that needs to be done with them before they’re ready.”

“Now when she joined us eight years ago, she would on an average do eight rounds in an eight-hour shift. She’d go from here to there, here to there about eight rounds or so. Now, today, it’s the same Maria, it’s the same factory, but she’s having to do many more ups and downs, close to 24 ups and downs in a day. That’s three times more. Why is that? Because the demand for semiconductor chips has increased.”

“Semiconductor chips are everywhere. In our passports, there’s a semiconductor chip. When there is a finger scan somewhere, there’s a semiconductor chip everywhere. They’re everywhere. So, the demand increases, our workload increases.”

“Our workload increases, we are not allowed to have a bigger factory, we are not allowed to hire more people. Within the same factory size, within the same number of people, Maria is now being asked to do a lot more. And this trend of more and more and more and more will not stop. So, what are we going to do? What we are going to do is we are going to tell Maria to stop doing this work of picking up products from one end and moving them to the other end.”

“Instead, we’re going to get an AGV vehicle, which is like a robot, to do that, and Maria’s job is going to be the supervisor of that vehicle and make sure that it is rostered, it’s charged, it does the work that it does.” Now, this is a journalistic style of storytelling, because I’ve gone and found it on the ground, and when people are listening to the story, they’re going, “Yeah, exactly. That happens to me all the time. I have to move things so many more number of times. Like, I’m a human. How much more can I do?”

It reminds them of their own experience, so the resonance starts to happen here. The positioning and the anchoring of supervisor of robots brings relevance. It does not bring resonance. It’s when the combination of relevance and resonance happens, influence takes place. So, what is journalistic about it? Journalistic is that I didn’t get that story by just sitting in the boardroom and having a conversation. I got the story because I went on the ground, I chatted to people, “Talk to me about your day-to-day work.”

I can’t even tell these people, “Tell me a story,” because if you ask people, “Tell me a story,” then people think that I’m asking them to be Clint Eastwood. So, you have to have a very specific style of getting moments out of them and then be able to sense-make and put them into a structured way and give people who work in these organizations, who need to inspire or influence people, a language which will move people into the right direction.

Now, this is not a story which will make people go, “Wow, what a story!” What this would definitely do, it’ll remind many of those people who are sitting in the audience going, “That’s exactly what happens to me. That is so true.” That is so true doesn’t mean it’s factual. What it means is, “It resonates with me.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I like that journalistic frame, because that helps a lot with regard to, we’re not trying to blow minds, necessarily, by making like a James Cameron epic film situation, so it’s not the Hollywood style, nor is it are we trying to be sort of the great American novel style but we’re being journalistic. And just the same way that we have a fascinating, riveting, impactful sort of news article or documentary, that’s kind of what we’re going for here with regard to our actions, our discovery, our presentation.

And we can feel great about the success if they are nudged toward that identity, as opposed to they are telling everybody they have to check out your YouTube channel.

So that’s a great lens, the journalistic lens. Tell us, do you have any top do’s or don’ts in terms of executing this in practice?

Anjali Sharma
I think the first thing is that, whenever you stand in front of your audience and you start speaking, you have to have earned the right to be there. This is not, “I’ll get GPT to come up with something for me.” I mean, of course, you can take GPT’s help to refine it, but the moment I start speaking about Maria’s story, straight away, the audience know that I have done the due diligence of going to them, at the coalface, chatting to people, and finding out what’s going on.

So, I always say to people that, “Don’t sit in the boardroom and just don’t chat there. Don’t think you know what it is. Get down, and talk to people and figure out.” I think that’s the first thing.

The second thing I would say to you is that please relieve yourself from the pressure of trying to come across as an amazing storyteller, because people are not interested. In fact, if you get told that you’re an amazing storyteller, then that’s the wrong outcome of your communication. What you have to be able to hear from people is, “You made a very relevant point. I’m going to do what you said. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

Moving people in the right direction to take an action is a better judge of how effective you were versus the claps that you get and versus how you get. If you get complimented on your being an amazing storyteller, that means the focus was you and your flamboyancy, not the point you made. So, if someone says to you, “What an amazing storyteller you were,” like, “Thank you. What did you get out of that? Like, do you think you’re going to take the action I was asking for?” Figure that out. So don’t feel that pressure.

And I think the third thing I would say to you is. When looking for a story, yes, you have to be journalistic, but also remember the kind of story that works in a corporate space is a story that happens all the time. In other words, a high-frequency story, not a low-frequency story. So, a pilot lands a plane in the Hudson River has happened. But if I told that story in a corporate boardroom, then people would be like, “That’s great. Never going to happen to me.”

But if I told a story about us not using a tool that we have to update our learning and development plan, and then not getting the promotion that we wanted because, on the dashboard, it didn’t seem like you were updating that so people didn’t know you’ve done all these things, all these courses and workshops etc., then a lot of people will go, “Oh, my God, that happens to me all the time.” So, high-frequency.

The founder of Google said this, “If you can find a problem that people face multiple times a day, you have a billion-dollar business.” Now when you take that saying and put it into the world of storytelling, if you can find a story, the problem that you talk about in that story, people experience many times, you  have a story that will resonate a lot.

So, resonance is more important than remarkability of a story. So, don’t pressurize yourself at trying to find a story that is amazing because, most likely, that will get you claps but will not get you the action. So, look for a story that happens all the time. So, I think those three are probably practical ones to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really doing the trick. And you’ve finally put to words why I get a little bit skeptical and I don’t tend to dig presentations or stories that lean a lot on legends of business, like, “Here’s what they do at Amazon and at Disney and Netflix. And Steve Jobs said and did this.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Sure, these people are genius, high performers, and they did a cool thing, and maybe there are some things we can learn from that. But it doesn’t resonate with me much,” and I think it’s for these exact reasons.

One, they haven’t journalistically done the work to see, “What are we actually struggling with here?” And secondly, they’re low frequency matters, like, “Yes, introducing the iPhone was really cool. That was a historic technological moment, and that happened, and now it doesn’t happen that often.”

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think it’s just, you know, resonance only happens with things that happen all the time, because those are our daily experiences, things that kind of resonate with us. Yeah, I mean, like, we love Steve Jobs, and we love his ability to orate, but, you know, it’s available, but it’s not accessible. His style is available for us to view, but it’s not accessible for us, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally, “Just be like Steve Jobs, guys. That’s all it takes. Come on!”

Anjali Sharma
“What’s wrong with you?” Yeah, so that’s the hyper-target-ness. So, everything we’ve spoken about is about that really, that hyper-target-ness of a story, really looking at it from that lens of critically thinking it through and really trying to understand that it’s so easy to become a victim to this big style storytelling, “When I was born or when I started my career, oh, my gosh, you know, it’s like…” nobody really cares about that. Only your mom is really interested in listening to what happened to you, but we don’t really care about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anjali Sharma
I can never say the full thing because it’s really long, but I’ll tell you which one it is, and you’ll be able to find it very easily. I think there’s this quote, where it sort of says, “When you lose the grip, you slip into a masterpiece,” which I really, really like. But the reason why I love that quote so much is because, after working in this space for more than a decade, my style in the beginning of working was very systematic, it was very structured, and it was very effort-filled. And then came a point somewhere, three, four years ago, where that system, that structure was like that intentional approach was so embedded in me that if I sort of knew the direction.

I could kind of maneuver within that, but that’s the only part. To become effortless, you have to put in the effort first. And telling someone who’s just, like, a couple of years into a certain domain, a specific domain, to just lose that grip is not the right thing.

But I think there comes a point where you start experiencing the magic of all that is in your subconscious, all that is embedded. So, I think that’s one of my favorite quotes, to put in so much effort into what you do, that it becomes so effortless. 

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Anjali Sharma
So, if you are interested in storytelling, learning how to be better at it in a corporate space, the thing that helped me gain mastery in that, more than reading, writing was actually the fact that a system, a system for success that actually forced me to do the necessary work in this space.

If you want to gain mastery, then make a decision on what are you going to not just do, which is within you, but how are you going to put yourself out in the world in that domain. When you do that, you actually start becoming really, really good at it, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog every week, whether it’s a little thing you’ll come up with. If mastery in this domain is your aspiration, then a promise to the world that I will show up in this manner every week is what you need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Anjali, this is wonderful. I wish you many beautiful stories.

Anjali Sharma
Thank you for having me and having this wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed how quickly you grasped everything I talked about, distilled it, and repeated it back to me, which was really nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome!

Robert Fersh
Thanks, Pete. Nice to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some of your goodness here. And I’d love it if you could start us with a juicy, dramatic story of a super difficult conflict that you mediated and how you ended up resolving things.

Robert Fersh
Well, thanks, Pete. There’s a lot of stories to tell, but maybe the most dramatic is the one that opens the book that Mariah Levison and I have written called From Conflict to Convergence. And it was really my maiden voyage in trying to be a bridge-builder on big national policy issues. So, I had an idea back in the early 2000s that if we could only bring together all of the people’s disagreements that stood in the way of extending coverage to millions of Americans that didn’t have it, that there’d be an opportunity to potentially create a breakthrough, because at that time, 40 to 50 million Americans were estimated to be without healthcare coverage at any point in time.

And also, this was just a few years after, in the Clinton administration, an attempt to reform healthcare led by Hillary Clinton, failed miserably and divided the entire healthcare field, and people opposing and supporting their ideas. So, we actually pulled together, all the leading stakeholders on healthcare. And they agreed, left to right, that people ought to have healthcare coverage. The disagreement was how to do it.

So, we brought together the hospitals, the insurers, the pharmaceutical companies, consumer groups, unions, you name it, people who are all influential stakeholders in healthcare policy in this country, and we attempted to break this decades-old gridlock on how to cover the uninsured.

Well, this group met 12 times over two years in an attempt to try to break the gridlock on how to cover the uninsured. And, eventually, they came up with a series of ideas that formed the basis for expanding coverage to people in the United States based upon shared values. We had the Heritage Foundation, a very conservative foundation was at the table, US Chamber of Commerce, various unions and liberal advocacy groups and so on, but they all came together to design what became the architecture of efforts to improve healthcare coverage in the country.

And I think my favorite story out of that is, as I said in the book, there was a representative of the American Medical Association at the table by the name of Carla Willis, who was their chief economist, and she’d been very outspoken in early meetings trying to forward the ideas the American Medical Association had developed.

But I noticed, over this two-year period, Carla had gotten quieter and quieter. And, finally, at the 11th meeting of this group, where they actually looked like, that day, they would seal the deal on the design of how to cover the uninsured in a way that bridged the divides across the left and right, Carla came up to me at a lunch break and said to me, “Rob, you have ruined my life.” But she said it with a smile, and I responded in kind, and said something like, “I hear that all the time. How, in particular, have I ruined yours? I do have four kids after all.”

And she said, “I’ve been sitting here for the last two years. The AMA and I had come up with very thoughtful proposals. I thought I understood all the issues and all the different approaches and our ideas were best. Now I’ve been sitting here for two years seeing all these intelligent, well-meaning thoughtful people say things I never thought of, and I can’t see the world the same way.”

And in a sense, she was saying, even though the final proposals included some AMA ideas, she epitomized what we’re trying to do in this work, which is to have people who have disagreements on how to solve problems expand their worldviews, not relinquish their principles, but begin to see ways to have their underlying interests met in a way that might be different than what they’ve, you know, were positioning themselves to support, but in a way that did not sacrifice the principles and the values they had.

So, that was a pretty dramatic opening act for me as a bridge-builder to help pave the way for multiple pieces of legislation that expanded healthcare coverage in this country.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, that sounds amazing to hear anyone say that. That’s about as much as you can hope for, I suppose, when you’re doing this kind of work. So, that’s powerful. And can you share, what do you think were some of the core principles that made that possible?

Robert Fersh
Thanks for that. The essence of the work, and it’s interesting. Well, one of the participants at that table came from the Heritage Foundation. His name is Stuart Butler, very much someone who wanted private solutions, not so much government solutions. But having been born in Great Britain, he also believed in universal healthcare, so he was an interesting person to have in the room.

And here’s what Stuart would say, he said, “Look, I’ve been battling people for years on healthcare. And what was different about this process is that although we thought we knew each other, we really didn’t know each other. So, this process, which allowed us to understand the values, concerns, and interests of people underneath all the different positions they take, to allow people to go deep and to understand how they came to believe what they believed, and to feel a sense of shared mission, which they did have to solve problems was really important.”

So, some of the key elements of this process are to, A) at least have a shared vision, and there was that, and this group said, “We’re going to cover as many as possible.” That was agreed upon. No one said it has to be single-payer like Canada or Great Britain. No one said it had to be every last person but as many people as quickly as possible. The second piece was to build relationships across people so they understood each other deeply. And with that comes trust. Trust that the intentions of other people are things you can work with.

In most cases, people want the same things, disagree on how to get there. And that process actually demonstrated that building relationships with trusts could break through decades-old disputes some people in the room had with others. And many areas of common ground that were significant, even though disagreements remained, and, in fact, some of the ideas that eventually became law were not necessarily fully included in our consensus.

But what we did was to move the ball forward to get people much closer to the point where they were very near agreement on how to cover the uninsured in this country. And in fact, what we did design was what people call the architecture of what became the Affordable Care Act, even though the Affordable Care Act went a little further than what our group recommended.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that does sound novel, as opposed to how do we normally go at it when we have different viewpoints on a matter.

Robert Fersh
Yeah. So, what’s normally done, and I was part of this in the Washington culture, is that people who disagree get invited to all sorts of webinars and seminars, and people set them up for debate, and then everybody unloads about what they believe, and they may be polite or they may be impolite, and people then summarize what the disagreement was. But it’s pretty rare that people take the time to go underneath that to understand what drives people, what life experiences led them to believe the things they did, and to understand what their underlying interests were.

And this is an idea that Bill Ury and Roger Fisher and others, Bruce Patton, in Getting to Yes, distinguished a long time ago, which is the difference between positions and interests. Positions tend to be hard and fast ways that people want to solve a particular problem, but underneath that are your interests, your needs. And what we’ve done is, I think, allowed people to have a conversation which almost never starts about debating positions about how to solve a problem and getting underneath it all.

“What are your values? What are your interests? What are your concerns?” And when you begin to identify them, and there’s usually any number of pathways that can satisfy interests, and our goal, different than many other political battles or other discussions that go on, was to try to meet the widest range of interests, create the so-called win-win solutions for people.

Again, not necessarily requiring everyone to agree on everything, but to find wide swaths of agreement that have people leaving whole, feeling their needs are being met, and to understand that just for their needs to be met, other people do not necessarily have to lose, that you can set up situations where multiple people and multiple groups’ needs can be met. So, that is what distinguishes our approach from a lot of the normal give-and-take, and Washington, and the State houses and other places around the country.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see, the United States health insurance coverage is among the most complicated things on the earth today. So, perhaps, could you give us a nice illustrative example of this positions versus interests, and going deep to unearth them, in perhaps a simple example that we can all understand, like, “Oh, okay, that’s a position, that’s an interest, and I can see how you’ve crafted a thing that’s meeting people that have almost the opposite, it seems, positions, are getting a win-win in terms of their interests being fulfilled”?

Robert Fersh
We have an issue in the United States, which is called long-term care, which is the non-healthcare-related services that you provide to elderly and disabled people who cannot take care of themselves. And we do have a crisis in that many people only rely on family members to take care of them, can’t necessarily afford coverage.

So, we were approached by a group of leaders in that field to convene a group. And the position of some people was that, “It’s got to be a private sector response. It’s got to be insurance. And that’s how we’re going to get home. Let’s keep the government out of it.” And then there were people who said, “You know what, long-term care is a terrible issue. It’s bankrupting families. The needs aren’t being met. Let’s move to some massive new government program, a la Social Security, tax everybody, create a huge program on how to cover people who face this crisis. It’s not everybody, it’s not even a majority of the public.”

And so, you had two very opposing points of view. One was market-based solutions only, and one was government-based solutions only. So, their positions were, “Yeah, for some people, let’s set up a new Social Security type of insurance for the entire country.” And the other people said, “No, let’s just tweak the private insurance system.” And so, we were at loggerheads for a while, and then we took a break, and other groups working on this, and helped design a study that Milliman, an actuarial group, and the Urban Institute did together.

And the study showed that private insurance is never going to make it happen all the way, and that there were some issues with going public all the way. And eventually these groups found a way to combine a mixture of public and private approaches to allow people to get long-term care coverage as they needed. These ideas are still panning in Congress, they haven’t yet moved forward, but there’s a lot of attention to it.

But underneath it all, people found, based upon studies and information they had, that each of their own solutions weren’t sufficient. And it set the stage to find compromises to take the best from private insurance to try to make that stronger, and to also have the government help take care of the catastrophic costs that make the private insurers more viable and also to provide coverage to people through the public as necessary.

So, I hope that was close enough to home to make the case for the distinction between positions and interests.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, there it seems like you had some progress because you had some independent research, which said, “Hey, see how neither one of you are really going to get where you want to go by doing just your position.” So that’s handy. Although, I imagine it takes a little bit of prep work in order to get folks’ hearts and minds to even be receptive to facts or research or data of any kind that is unfavorable to themselves. So, how’d you get there?

Robert Fersh
Well, this was a number of years ago before I think the loss of confidence in institutions and the debate about what’s facts and what’s alternative facts was as ripe as it is now. I think we honestly got there because people realized, in this particular debate, they were missing information. How effective, and with modeling, and again, by lining up two groups, one that leaned left and one that leaned right, to do the research that was trusted by people of all sides?

There was a sense that they wouldn’t be able to go further until they had more information. That’s not true in all the work we do. Some cases, people feel they have enough information and have enough agreement on facts that they can go forward even if they don’t agree on all the facts. So, in this case, I think people just felt frustrated that they needed more information. They got curious and they helped themselves design the study so that their various needs could be met and the questions they wanted answered could be met.

So that’s an unusual intervention but it’s also an important one, given what we have today, which is a lot of disagreement on facts, a lot of people feeling that the other side isn’t as honest or as forthcoming as they should be. So, to the extent groups that are coming together to solve problems can agree upon trusted sources or help put together facts that they can all rely upon, that’s an important step toward progress and agreement in any particular process.

Pete Mockaitis
And if your counterparts are not feeling curious and rather sort of dug in and solidified, or you yourself are not feeling curious, you’re solidified, dug in, what are some of your perspectives on how to stir up that helpful curiosity?

Robert Fersh
Well, I would say a lot of people enter our rooms where they’re sort of, maybe shoulders are hunched, their arms are crossed, they’re defensive. Many enter our room not in a collaborative frame of mind. To be honest, some come for defensive purposes. We did a huge project on K-12 Education, where we had the current president of the National Education Association, she was vice president then, and a woman on the West Coast who ran a conservative foundation, who was known as a critic of teachers’ unions and a supporter of more computers in the schools, which some people thought would take some teaching jobs away. And especially she was an advocate for school choice.

And the woman on the West Coast, who was a conservative, basically said she came to the table not thinking much would happen. She’s a woman of action, didn’t believe in gabfests, as she kind of called them, and too much talk and not enough action. But when she got in the room and began to hear people as human beings and create relationships that weren’t just about debating the issues, breaking bread with people, hearing their life stories, I think it opens your hearts to understanding other people.

So, part of the way I think to foment curiosity, if you will, is to have people feel a connection to each other and to take an interest in each other. Beyond that, I think the process itself works that way. If you bring together people who can interact in goodwill, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get tense, it doesn’t mean there aren’t fierce debates at times, but who begin to see that they share values and they share goals, which is how we start out, and oftentimes they develop some principles by which to guide it, then people have a greater propensity to get curious because they’ve come to the table because they agree there is a problem that needs to be solved.

And once they begin to also open their hearts, the way Carla did in healthcare, to see that they didn’t have all the answers, that no one perspective or no one individual has all the wisdom, and they get that, and that happens almost automatically, when people are in the room and there’s skillful facilitation of conversation across differences, usually, it tickles something inside of them to want to learn more, not just to oppose blindly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, could you perhaps walk us through maybe a step-by-step, in terms of, okay, we got two folks, they have wildly different positions on a matter, and we want to have some of those delightful breakthroughs, transformations, feel goods that you’re describing on the other side? It seems like we’ve got a couple principles to work with, with regard to shared vision, shared values, as well as coming to some personal connection pieces and understanding the human and the what’s underlying stuff. But could you share with us, maybe, as much as it’s possible, a generalized framework or step-by-step, “When you got conflicting positions and want to find some convergence, here’s step one, step two, step three”?

Robert Fersh
I mean, the first step is to clarify, “Is there a shared goal to begin with?” It’s very hard to have people work together if they don’t have a shared goal. But the fact that they share a goal, even if they disagree on how to get there, is a very important starting point for people to come to the table.

So, at least, and even that, Pete, begins to build a little bit of trust that you’re not at odds with someone about how the world should look. You just disagree on how to get there. So, having a shared vision, a shared goal is a very important first step for people who seem to be in disagreement.

After that, as we’ve talked about, having them get to know each other a bit, having them understand each other’s values, their own life stories, what led them to believe what they believe is really important, and beginning to assemble some basic guidelines or principles by which they could potentially agree on, even though they continue to disagree.

So, we had a project on economic opportunity and mobility where we had the Chamber of Commerce and we had unions at the table. But they developed a principle that said, basically, if you work full time, you should have a life of dignity, and basically not live in poverty.

Robert Fersh
And yet, underneath that, there was disagreement because people on the left, in particular, wanted more higher minimum wages, in fact, a big national minimum wage, and the Chamber and other business leaders said, “No, that doesn’t work for us. Too many regional variations. Too much difference.” But they also signed on to the principle that if you work, you shouldn’t be living in poverty or should at least be living in dignity.

And that meant that they also, if they weren’t going to do that solely through putting the costs on the employer, that they would be open to governmental changes, including things like the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Care Tax Credit, other things, because to adhere to that principle, they needed to do something besides just saying no to the minimum wage, and so there was some movement there.

So, to review now, have a shared goal, begin to build relationships of trust, begin to understand each other’s underlying values, and then engage in a conversation where you begin to go deep on the issues themselves, and ask people to keep a mindset of curiosity, ask them to keep a mindset of giving others the benefit of the doubt, develop a mindset where, in some ways, you internalize that.

Even as smart as you may be, or as well-informed as you may be, just develop a little humility that you may not know everything, and you begin to engage people in respectful conversation about different ideas that help meet the goals and the principles you’ve already established. And our experience is that, when this is well done, people can then push each other’s thinking to a higher level. As William Ury said to you in his podcast, he said, “We don’t have enough conflict.”

And I don’t know if I agree with that fully, but my point is that conflict can push thinking to a higher level, and bringing out better solutions than any one party had to begin with, and that’s our experience. So, that’s the basic process to try to promote relationship, promote trust, promote curiosity, engage in respectful dialogue where you don’t ever attack the person or their motives.

You have ground rules by which you observe confidentiality. You allow people to make mistakes knowing it’s not going to go out of the room. And you try to listen in a way that really leads to constructive results and the full expression of different points of view as people push each other’s thinking to a higher level and become attuned to understanding how they might meet each other’s needs.

There’s an acronym in our book called OPTIONS, I never quite get it right. But it’s really “only proposals that meet others’ needs succeed” is the thrust of it. And when the whole group, whether it’s two people or other people, become committed to not only meeting their own needs, but seeing that their needs can be met and others’ needs can be met, you have an opportunity not only to solve problems better, but to create relationships that radiate over time constructively.

People leave our processes often working together better for years to come because they now see each other and understand each other at another level.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. And when it comes to the understanding of individuals at a deeper level, with regard to, “Why did you believe…?” or, “How did you come to believe that thing?” and understand who they are as people, are there any super powerful questions or exercises or activities that you engage in that helps unlock some of this interpersonal magic?

Robert Fersh
There are sort of two key questions you can ask when someone else is talking is, basically, “Did I get that right?” and, “What am I missing?” So, you can internalize that. Using curiosity is a hugely important tool. And as I often kid, curiosity is not well expressed when you say to somebody, “I’m curious, how the heck could you ever come up with that point of view to solve the problem?”

But if you can ask authentically curious questions of another person to learn, not to debate, to hear them out. You can always debate. You can always walk away later. You can always disagree vehemently. But if you can develop enough personal relationship, where it’s sort of natural, you get curious. Often people develop bonds of affection in the room, even though they used to be sworn enemies. Some of them go to ball games together or call each other up when they want to make sure they’re not just hearing from their own side in a way that blindly misses the other points.

So, this is the practice of curiosity in a skillful way, where people begin to see that they can, despite they’re maybe being upset about what they’re hearing, go to another gear, go to what Bill Ury calls the balcony to kind of look at this more dispassionately, and not to get triggered by what the other person says, but committed to wanting to learn something. So, that’s a very important skillset for people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, a poor question is, and that’s not real curiosity, is, “How the heck did you come up with such a stupid point of view?” Could you give us some illustrations of what a few good, quality, authentic, useful, genuine, curious questions look, sound and feel like in their verbiage?

Robert Fersh
It would be something like, you know, someone says, “I think the only way to provide healthcare coverage is to go Canada as its single payer, and everybody’s covered, and the costs are down, and so on.” And you could respond from the hip saying, “You know, that’s not an American way. It’s going to stifle innovation. It’s going to give the government bureaucracies too much,” you know, you could go after them that way.

But you could simply say, “Okay. What has been your experience with that particular approach? And why is it that you favor that? And is it something related to your own personal experience? Or is it more a philosophical point of view? Please, I’m very curious about how you came to that set of beliefs and why you believe that.”

And if you just ask that authentically, you’ll learn something. You may still disagree with it totally, but you won’t simply just go into a pitch battle of government, not government, private sector, not public sector, whatever. You begin to get into what we call complexifying an issue, and that’s really important to begin to disrupt a little bit the sort of tightly held views people have.

Again, not asking them to compromise their values or their principles in any way, but to see the issues a little more complex once they fully understand how reasonable people could take that view. And that’s kind of how, because I’ve done this work the last 25 years or so, I go through life now. Whenever I read an article that I either immediately disagree with or agree with, my first thought is, “Let me read something that’s the opposing side there. I’m sure there are reasonable people who disagree. I’m sure this isn’t the full answer.”

And if you can internalize that, at any given moment no one has the full answer and there’s always something to be learned, then that’s an important move forward in your mindset to be a collaborative problem solver.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that notion a lot, the complexifying, because I think the human brain tends to like and prefer simple. We tend to like clear-cut, black and white, “But, of course, this is how it is.” And yet, if, in fact, reasonable people do have a differing point of view, then there is naturally going to be some complexity there.

And if it feels simple in your brain, then perhaps it is indeed the case that you are missing something and there is some complexification that is necessary for you to enter into in order to get to that place of understanding, “Oh, okay, so that’s why you think that.”

Robert Fersh
So, Pete, that’s exactly right, but let me also, for your listeners, because I think these ideas apply to businesses and nonprofits and philanthropies, and certainly on the academic campuses, widely. But I also want to make clear there, and this approach we move forward, doesn’t mean you necessarily talk to everyone about everything all the time. Sometimes there is not time for leaders to make decisions by consensus. You can have so-called death by consensus, drive itself nuts.

And there also are people in groups who are so ideological, so wed to certain ideas, or may have some views that are so extreme, whether that be on race or other things, that they cannot necessarily come to the table, cannot open their heart. And you got to that a little bit to begin with. So, that’s where you have to have a shared goal. If you don’t have a shared goal, like I used to say, not that I would ever have been called upon.

I wouldn’t have suggested that Martin Luther King sit down with the then, you know, I think he was the sheriff or that law enforcement officer, Bull Connor, in the South. If what King wanted was integration and economic opportunity, and he was facing a segregationist and there was just no room, then you can’t necessarily pull people together when people are so extreme or so convinced they have the full truth.

On the other hand, I would also say to you, that really tough issues, when you know there can’t be agreement, you can still use these processes to form relationships of trust and do some things that are just adjacent to the disagreement. So, I have good friends who worked on the issue of abortion. And one friend had convened a bunch of people who are anti-abortion and pro-choice, and it was understood to begin with that, on the fundamental issue of when a woman would have a right to choose, there would be no agreement.

It was a position of deep religious belief on one side, in particular, but also a deep principle-belief on the other. But these people were convened at a time when bombings were going on in abortion clinics and people were dying and tensions were running high. And the idea was to understand each other. And in the case of my colleague, Mary Jacksteit, as I understand it, she brought together these people on the auspices of Search for Common Ground.

They began to understand each other. They began to understand that principled people could stand on either side, and that, at least at a minimum, they stopped demonizing each other as inhuman or not in touch with the fundamental needs of others. And then, in some cases, they actually found they could work together on things they shared, like teenage pregnancy prevention, and better foster care and adoption systems should be brought to terms.

So, even though they didn’t reach agreement on the fundamental issue of abortion per se, they were able to develop respect for each other, and live more civilly with each other, and not live as if they’re at war with each other, and then define areas they could work on together, which they thought were socially positive. So, I think that contributes to a more civil and effective society, where we can bridge those divides, even if it’s not solving the entire underlying problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s a cool example in terms of, perhaps, indeed, the foundational viewpoints may be irreconcilable, like, “This is a human being in the womb,” or, “It is not.” It’s like, “Okay, well, I don’t know what we can do with that when we have the opposite views. But maybe there are some other shared goals that we can rally around,” and away you go.

Robert Fersh
So, we talked earlier about values and shared goals and listening and trust, but beyond that, when we do our work, we urge people to do their homework. And that’s true if you’re in a business or otherwise. Make sure you understand who the key players are, who you need to include, and get the best possible answers. And we’re all for inclusiveness of all the voices that are important, not just influentials and experts, but people with lived experience.

So, mapping, what we call mapping the terrain, understanding who believes what to begin with is really important, and doing your homework to understand who you need to convene. Then comes what I’ve already said, nurturing trust in the room, and we do that through a series of exercises. Never start by debating people’s positions, but to understand each other.

And then it’s really important that everybody be heard and really deeply and listen to respectfully. And that’s what we reinforce that by what some of us call ground rules where you don’t go after people’s motives, and you give people equal time or as much time as they need to be heard and so on. And then with skillful help often, but this can be done within organizations, you ask people to begin to generate what we call options for mutual gain. And that’s really an important part of the process. Yes, continue to forward things that are in your interest.

I’ll tell you one quick story, which may surprise people, when I did my maiden voyage on healthcare in 2000, really, 2003 to 2006. We had an executive from a major pharmaceutical company, and there were people in the room very skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, writ large. But this gentleman, who was one of the top officials of this pharmaceutical company, earned the trust of everybody in the room by making, I believe at the opening, making a statement that says, “My company has a huge interest on how we cover the uninsured. I know there’s 40 or 50 million people in the country without insurance.”

“But let me just say on behalf of my company, let’s have a conversation about the best way to cover people. And let me worry about later, what that does to the financial underpinnings of my company. But I really want to have a conversation in which we’re part of a community trying to solve the problem in a way that does the most good for the most people. And if we need to fight it a little bit or demur or we need to tweak it, let’s come to that later.”

But he set a tone there, and this, I think, is a sign of great leadership that said, “I’m open. I’m not going to be defensive. I want to listen. I want to learn. And, hopefully, we’ll come out with solutions that work for everybody.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that principle a lot in terms of the deferring, it’s like, “Yeah, you all know I work for a pharmaceutical company, and we’re going to have to go ahead and maximize profits for them shareholders. That’s sort of what we do, but we’ll figure that out later. For now, let’s see what the theoretical ideal is that we can all sort of move toward.”

And, yeah, you know, you may, afterwards, need to do some negotiations, some give and take, some horse trading, whatever, to make that workable for all of the parties. But to start with an initial goodwill commitment to get somewhere, and then finetune later, I think, can be very helpful in many contexts.

Robert Fersh
Yeah, and again it’s, in this case, I think, in light leadership by this individual, who seemed to be a very wise man. Let me tell you just another story. The first project, pretty much, I ever did at Convergence, was on nutrition and obesity. And it was interesting because we had difficulty assembling a table. We got a table of public health and consumer groups and some major food companies.

And about a week before the first meeting, which was pretty highly charged because a lot of these people had already been in prior discussions. As one food company executive said to me, “I’ve never been in discussion with the consumer groups where they didn’t walk out in protest against big food.” And he represents a big food company.

So, we assembled this group, and about a week before the first meeting, a leading voice on the consumer side wrote a blog or an op-ed basically saying, “You know, those of us who want to diminish and fight obesity and diabetes in this country, need to stay pure to our principles. Of course, we need to talk to food companies because they’re part of it, but let’s make no mistake. Their interests are,” exactly what you said, Pete, “is to maximize shareholder profits, and so they can never be full partners.”

So, fast forward, so immediately, my inbox filled up with notes from outraged food business people who were coming to the table, saying, “Is this guy really coming to the table? Does he understand how insulting that is that we can’t be part of a solution like we don’t share goals to diminish obesity and diabetes?”

So, we convened people who were very highly charged in the room, and for a while pretty tense. But eventually, as we went around the room, I’m not here to blindly defend all food companies. Some are better than others in terms of their public spiritedness.

But one after another, food company representatives said, “You know what, we do have obligations to shareholders. On the other hand, we’ve got employees. We have family members. We have people who have lost limbs to diabetes and people who have terrible health problems. And we have healthcare costs for our companies that go up because people’s diets aren’t so great. We can’t unilaterally disarm selling our products and just take away all our profits.”

“But if we can make it so that serving healthier foods could be more profitable and marketable, then we would love to join as partners with other people, and we’d also love it if consumer groups would stop attacking us every time that we try to do the right thing. Because whenever we do it, you’re just skeptical and you come after us.”

So, what happened was, over the next 36 hours, there was a remarkable level of frank dialogue about what were the needs and interests of companies, and what were the needs and interests of consumer groups. And, eventually, within a year or two, we did come up with a series of recommendations. But by the end of that meeting, the leading voice for the food industry, representing an umbrella group, said that she had learned a lot, and that she really hoped to be able to work together with the group.

And the fellow who had written that op-ed that had stirred people up said, “You know what, I’m not conceding anything at this point, but this conversation is going to make me think afresh about how to partner with the food industry. And I look forward to doing that.”

So, this is about what it does when you understand and you complexify, and know that, just because someone works in a corporation doesn’t mean they’re evil and selfish. And if someone works in a consumer group, doesn’t mean they don’t care about the thriving of corporations that help make services and goods available to people in this country.

And to the extent we can complexify their views of each other and make them a little less ideological in an honest process, not by lecturing them, but just by learning and experiencing, you open doors for levels of collaboration that normally are not thought possible by a lot of people who think that we are divided everywhere into us and them. And that’s not necessarily true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rob, in our last couple of minutes, could you share any top dos or don’ts for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs and thinking about some conflict things?

Robert Fersh
Well, I think the top do for me is, no matter where you sit in your job, you can be a collaborative leader, whether you’re the boss or not. You can always be a voice for saying, “You know what, this is a tricky problem. Let’s get everybody who’s got a stake in the outcome in the room, let’s try to listen, let’s try to push for ideas that work for as many people as possible.”

I had the great honor of working with Stephen Covey quite closely for a number of years. He was the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and probably the greatest promoter of the term win-win, which some people dismiss, I think, too easily.

So, I think, developing a mindset of, “For me to win, others don’t necessarily have to lose, that no one person or group holds all the answers, that there’s always something to be learned. And if I can learn to be curious, then I think there may be ways to get through things that are really important.”

I think the don’ts, are to check your ego at the door. Make sure that you’re as centered as possible, that’s another do. When you’re interacting with other people, take care of yourself, and make sure that you are not as reactive as you might be when you’re meeting people who disagree with you.

So, don’t take the bait. Don’t get reactive. Do be passionate about your views, absolutely. But don’t make the assumption that just because someone disagrees with you, that they’re not a good person, don’t have good values, don’t have important things to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, thank you. This has been enriching, and I wish you much pleasant convergence.

Robert Fersh
Thank you very much, Pete. A great pleasure to be on. If people want to know more about our work, please look at the book, From Conflict to Convergence. And also at Convergence, we’d love to have people involve with us. We are doing problem-solving ourselves, and then we have a whole new learning lab where we are.

And the book is part of that where we’re trying to inspire and equip people to be collaborative problem-solvers. And we have an online training program coming on in the next few months, where I think people who really want to pursue this can, in addition to reading the book, find ways to collaborate more effectively no matter what they’re station in life. So, thank you for this opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
David, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

David Livermore
Thanks, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom of your book, Digital, Diverse & Divided: How to Talk to Racists, Compete With Robots, and Overcome Polarization, to help folks become more awesome at their jobs. But, first, I want to hear a cool story from you about maybe a time you and a friend had some opposite views but came to a really cool mutual understanding.

David Livermore
Oh, wow, we’re going right in, right? Yeah, so there are many. I’m thinking about a conversation that I had with someone right after the first Trump election, so to jump right into politics. And without me really getting too far into the weeds of it, we voted differently, and we were having lunch together the next day, and kind of started around, like, “I can’t believe this,” and, “What, because you didn’t get your candidate to win?” And so, we were kind of bantering for a while.

And then we started to talk about, “Okay, let’s put everything on hold here for a moment. What’s most important to you and me?” And we were both dads – we are both dads – we started to talk about that. And, thankfully, by the time we ended the conversation, I think we both decided the world wasn’t going to come to an end, though we still retained some of the concerns that each of us had related to our politics.

So, that was the first of many conversations with him and other people about kind of my feelings about politics and issues related to diversity, reproductive rights, and on and on, the list could go.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you remain friends to this day?

David Livermore
We absolutely do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. What I found troubling during some of those contentious elections were the proclamations, like, “If you voted this way, then you can unfriend me right now because we have nothing in common.” I was like, “Ooh, that feels like the opposite of what we need to do here,” is kind of my intuition. It sounds like you’re on my wavelength.

David Livermore
Yeah. And, Pete, name the issue of the week, we kind of get some kind of that. I’m watching it right now as we’re…watching, at least the time of recording, the atrocities going on in the Middle East, and it’s the same kind of rhetoric that’s been there, “Just unfriend me now if you believe X.” I’m like, “Okay, how does that help any of us move forward?” So, yeah, I think you’re right. Our unwillingness to even be “friends” on social media with someone who has a different viewpoint is clearly a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Well, to counterpoint that, David. The social media friendship is one of the most intimate and sacred relationships that we have, so, in all fairness.

David Livermore
No, fair enough that you say that because when the book first came out, people were often asking me about, “How do you work through some of these, like, conflicts you have with people?” And I’m like, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not on social media.” And I swear, a couple weeks later, I suddenly found myself in a very cantankerous debate with someone on social media, I’m like, “I just violated my own principle.” So, yeah, you’re absolutely right. Part of the problem is if we assume there’s going to be meaningful constructive debate on social media, we’re probably already off on the wrong foot.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, maybe before we get too much into all these fascinating alleys and corridors, could you make the case, David, for why does understanding this stuff help a person be more awesome at their job?

David Livermore
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because most of my work has actually been oriented around how it helps people be awesome at their job, and then I kind of backward-designed it into how does it also relate to personal relationships. So, a little bit of context to that, that response. Most of my work is in the field of cultural intelligence, so, “How do you understand people who come from different cultural backgrounds?”

So, in the job context, usually what that has meant is, “Hey, you are part of a team that’s scattered across Europe, Asia, and the US. How do you just deal with some of the frustrations of not only time zones but different ways of getting work done, etc.?” And the longer that I got engaged in that work, the more I was observing, just at a personal level, some of these increasingly polarizing conversations that happen in our own neighborhoods, maybe even in our own extended families.

So, I started to say, “How can we actually use some of these same principles that you might work in the work sphere in personal relationships?” So, I would say you’re hard-pressed today to be engaged in a work environment that isn’t going to be working with people who have different viewpoints than you and different backgrounds than you.

And we can try and stuff it for a while but, particularly under stress and time pressure, it’s going to start to surface. And the better that we learn the skills for how to actually lean into our differences and use those rather than ignore them is going to be helpful for all of us to become more awesome at the work that we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take in terms of these sorts of conversations, if they are a political or other sort of hot button or divisive controversial matters. To what extent ought we not talk about them at work, versus, absolutely, engage, bring your whole self, your whole person? How do you think about that ball of wax?

David Livermore
Yeah, I’m a classic academic so I’m going to say it depends on the situation, because, in part, we’ve been told, particularly in US work culture, more the first point, like, just leave it alone, don’t go near politics, don’t touch. But that’s become harder and harder to do, particularly when some of the politicized issues are around unionization, or around reproductive rights, or whether or not people should be working from home or not, etc. So, it’s not realistic to say that this is never going to come up.

And in the wake of some of the atrocities that were happening after the George Floyd murder, like, sometimes people of color were sitting there on a Zoom call, going, “Everybody’s asking how my weekend was. I don’t even know how to engage in this conversation because I’m still reeling emotionally.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. It’s like, “Well, this thing happened and it was horrifying for me. Am I supposed to say that or am I supposed to not say that?”

David Livermore
Yeah, exactly. So, I think it comes down to what a lot of our friends in the DEI space say of creating psychologically safe environments where we’re not walking on eggshells, where it’s okay to voice our viewpoint but being mindful that there may be someone on the other side of the table who has a very different opinion, and it takes a special kind of leader to know how to create awesome teams who can handle that kind of intellectual honesty with each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now we settled that. Thank you. So, can you share with us any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries that might be sort of counterintuitive as you dug into this work and put together the book?

David Livermore
Yeah, a couple things. So, the first would come more from our broader realm of research in cultural intelligence. One of the things that was surprising to me is sometimes those who know a lot about the other side, whether the other side be how a German works versus an American, or whether it be a Republican versus a Democrat, actually, sometimes do worse than those who don’t know a lot.

And what emerged in the research in that is if I think I know a whole lot about you, then that can tend to make me arrogant and close minded, and think, “I already know how people like you think.” So, it was a bit counterintuitive for someone like me who’s in academic to go, “Actually, knowledge by itself can be dangerous.” But when combined with the other facets that we look at in cultural intelligence, “To what degree are you open and motivated? How do you actually strategize? How does that actually help it?”

The one that was more specific to the book in looking at, “How do we actually use these ideas to help us around some of these polarizing issues?” was surrounding an issue that we call, in the academic arena, perspective-taking. So, your listeners can certainly wrap their minds around it pretty quickly. Perspective-taking is just when I stop, and say, “Let me see this through your point of view.”

And so, there was some interesting research where Adam Galinsky at Columbia University, a colleague of mine, wanted to look at what happened when he asked a group of students to examine an elderly gentleman sitting outside on a chair in New York City. And the first group of students, he just said, “Write what you see.” The second group of students, he said, “Write what you see but avoid negative stereotypes.” The third group of students, he said, “Write what you see but I want you to write it in the first person as if you’re the elderly gentleman.”

And what happened? The first group of students with no parameters, they wrote all kinds of stereotypical things about this poor dithering man who’s been here and he’s losing his mind, he’s lonely.” The second group of students, it was relatively clinical, “He sits here every day. He’s been here for lots of years.” The third group of students who were asked to view it through the first person, they wrote the most humanizing, positive view of, “Ah, I’ve had such a rich life, and I’ve watched some of the same kids grow up on these blocks, etc.”

And so, it became a very useful kind of somewhat surprising finding of a simple trick to say, “What if I actually enter the mind of someone who views vaccines as the best or worst thing ever, and start to think about, ‘Could I argue their point of view from their perspective?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really is powerful for just about any issue in terms of…because it’s easy to judge, to demonize, but then if you put yourself in a position of a mother, had triplets, they got vaccines, and then they all developed autism days afterwards, like, what is she to conclude? What is she to think? And she’s terrified, and so that’s going to be the perspective she’s going to have. It’s like, “Hey, vaccine is horrific.”

David Livermore
Great example. And shouting at her with the science isn’t even addressing the fear that she feels at that point as a mother.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

David Livermore
But it’s also super hard, right, because the minute we start to view that other viewpoint, we immediately start to, “Yeah, these clueless sheeple who think blah, blah, blah.” Like, “Hang on, just you’re them right now. How do they view it?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, “I’m a clueless sheeple.” That’s not what they’re thinking.

David Livermore
Right, probably not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then lay it on us, is there a key theme or thesis that enables us to both talk to racists or compete with robots and overcome polarization? Is there a master key, David? Teeing you up.

David Livermore
Well, thank you for that question, Pete. I would say that one of the solutions to it is coming at it through this research-based work that I’ve done on cultural intelligence, and that is if we were to exercise with our racist uncle the same kind of perspective that we might exercise being with someone on the other side of the world, maybe we would get a little further along. And to be a bit more concrete about it, the first thing we know about just being more effective when you’re traveling or working with someone from a different cultural background is just openness, “Am I open to considering a different way of doing things?”

So, one of the tangible things that I suggest to people in the book, but just more practically in my interactions with my own friends and people that I’m working with in organizations, is if somebody has a strong opinion that differs from yours, like my friend did, related to the example just a few minutes ago, just simply asking the question, “Are you willing to consider a different perspective?”

And very rarely will someone go, “Hell, no.” And if they do, then there’s really no point in going any further because if someone has just said, “No, I’m absolutely closed-minded here. Anything more you have to say?” then don’t waste your breath. You might actually make it worse. But if there’s at least, “Okay, sure. I’ll, at least, listen to a different perspective,” that’s kind of an inroad. And, of course, coming back to the perspective-taking, it requires that I’m willing to do the same, “Am I willing to do that?”

And then the other key thing I would say that really try and bring out in the work that we do with people to be awesome at their jobs, and the kinds of things I write about in the book, is to find a shared problem that we both care about. Like, if it’s in the work setting, we both have to meet this deadline for this client. So, you might think the best way to go about is A, and I think it’s B, but, at the end of the day, we got to figure out how to get this done so that they’re pleased and they want to continue to do business with us, etc.

So, zooming wider than a my-way-versus-yours, to, “What’s the shared problem we’re trying to solve?” and then actually trying to use our different viewpoints of, “Can we actually come up with a better solution by both of us contributing to it?” Found that that can be a way that helps unlock people’s kind of close minded nature toward it to actually getting fixated on something that’s a little bigger than just our individual differences.

Pete Mockaitis
And, David, could you share a cool story of some teams, some folks in the workplace using some of this stuff to have some cool breakthroughs?

David Livermore
Yes. So, one example that comes to mind is we did quite a bit of work for a while with Goldman Sachs, and, in particular, there were many of their individuals in their Asian offices in Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, etc., who felt like they were continually being passed over for promotions by people in London and New York. And so, they were hitting what often gets talked about as the bamboo ceiling. They weren’t being assertive in the way that perhaps their Western counterparts wanted them to do so.

So, we began to design a whole four-month program that would talk about, “How do you take on a different perspective? How do you kind of change the way that you voice things?” And so, a really concrete way that we worked with them on it is they had to leave a voicemail leaving the same information for three different individuals, sort of the caricature of somebody who was in New York, the caricature of someone who was in London, and the caricature of someone in Japan. Same information but how do you communicate it differently?

Of course, we cautioned against stereotyping and all that, but then gave them some feedback on, “Okay, if I’m your stereotypical New Yorker, here’s the way I heard that message sound.” So, this goes broader than just the, “How do you work across polarization?” but how do you actually develop this skillset in your job to be able to more effectively communicate in ways that people are going to hear things differently based upon their background and perspective?

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, in this exercise, they were delivering it in a way they were imagining a stereotypical New Yorker or Londoner would want to receive it.

David Livermore
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m just hearing accents in my head as I’m imagining such and such. Can you share with me some actual content? Like, what might that sound like and how that difference goes?

David Livermore
Yeah, no, fair question. Well, I’m speaking more about the words that are spoken and the level of assertiveness. So, with New York, no surprise, it’d be very direct, to the point, succinct, get the word out quickly. Whereas, in the UK, London, still not overly obtuse but perhaps a little bit more deferential, showing a little bit more respect for authority, and then all the more so with the Japanese example, all kinds of deference, more indirect.

So, it was more than nuance of how you communicate this in a way that you would be perceived to be competent, confident, assertive, and all those kinds of things but not over the top, or like, “Who is this dude that’s leaving me this voicemail that sounds like they’re arrogant or something else?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m thinking about your magical question there, “Are you open to considering another perspective?” And I can hear it’s rare they’re going to say, “No way, no how, not ever.” Although, I think if I’m being honest and I’ve got a good relationship with someone, I might say, “You know, I’d rather not do that today. I’m not in that space today for that.”

David Livermore
And I think that’s actually a super mature response in some cases, like, “Yes, some day but today is not a good day for that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Do you have any other favorite or least favorite words and phrases that are very productive or very destructive in these contexts?

David Livermore
Yeah, another, well, least favorite but then I’ll counterpoint it with what I would add to it. The minute you say, “That makes no sense.” Like, that’s just derogatory. It’s dismissive. And so, I just encourage people to say, just add “To me.” Like, “That makes no sense to me.” We don’t need to be super, like, we’re walking on eggshells, and, “Oh, Pete, I’m not sure I entirely get that.” But, like, it gets fair for us to banter then, “That makes no sense to me. Help me understand it.” But to just, “That makes no sense” sound like, “You’re not logical,” “You don’t make any sense,” etc. So, that’s another one that I like.

I think I already said this in our interview earlier but another favorite phrase of mine, and it’s one that I’m often known for, is “It depends.” When somebody is, “Should it be this or this?” “Well, it depends on so many different factors.” I think it’s fair for people when I’m facilitating a session in the workplace or something for them to say, “It depends on what?” Like, it’s not fair for me to just walk out of the room, and go, “It depends.”

But there’s far too much of our workplace advice, our advice for how you overcome polarization that’s super dogmatic, and it’s like, “What’s the nature of the relationship?” You just mentioned it. You said, “Well, it would depend on the friend and the relationship I have with them.” Exactly. There’d be some individuals where you might say, “Not today. I’m not open, okay? I’m shooting straight with you. Like, this is not a good day for me to enter the perspective of how you’re feeling about this.” So, those are a few of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And so, generally speaking, cultural intelligence, what are your pro tips for how folks go about cultivating it and improving in this set of skills?

David Livermore
It won’t surprise you that there’s no substitute for developing cultural intelligence other than direct experience, so actually interacting with people who have different backgrounds than you. And so, to come back to your example, when we unfriend someone, whether virtually or in real life, just because they have a different perspective, like there’s very little hope we’re going to develop the skillset if we don’t purposely put ourselves in places where we’re interacting with people who are different.

We could say that when we’re talking about the more full-on cultural standpoint. The same would be if I’m not interacting with people from different races, ethnicities, as well as people on other sides of the world. Along with that, there is all kinds of research that says that formal education. We tend to see that as people get engaged in higher-level thinking in that, that it actually does have a link to cultural intelligence.

Many of your listeners may be very familiar with the idea of emotional intelligence, that is the ability to monitor and detect my own emotional state and the emotional state of another person. We know that that’s a key part of how you develop cultural intelligence because if I’m not, first, self-aware, or aware of the emotions of people from similar backgrounds, there’s very little hope that I’m going to do it with other individuals.

So, those are a few that are there. One more that I should just mention, obviously, absolutely key, is just starting with a self-awareness of, “What’s my own identity? What’s my own ideology? Can I transcend a little bit, again, engage in a bit of meta cultural intelligence, if you will, to take a look at myself, and say, ‘How am I, myself, shaped by my background, my upbringing, the profession that I’m in, the people I hang out with, etc.?’”

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious to hear your perspective when folks, they hear, “Yeah, that probably is a wise move to talk to people who have the opposite point of view than me and some things?” And maybe they’ll make the determination for, “That’s kind of too risky to start at work,” or with this team, or with this individual. But if there’s a sense of terror associated with putting forth a perspective and hearing another person’s perspective as the opposite, like, “I actually think that abortion is murder.” It’s like, “Okay.”

If people feel terrified to voice their view, or the opposite view, it’s like, “I think that is oppressive to say abortions are forbidden,” then how do you recommend folks dip their toe in? Like, I think in some ways, these muscles, these skills have sort of atrophied in recent years as folks see the fireworks fly, and they shrink from that, say, “Okay, duly noted. That results in very spooky conversations and consequences. I’m not going to go there.”

And if we want to develop the cultural intelligence, it sounds like go in there is part of the game. So, how do you recommend we do that in a way that seems lower risk and higher safety?

David Livermore
I think one part of it is realizing we can’t go there with everyone. So, because someone just says it in line in the supermarket behind us doesn’t mean that we’re not being true to our convictions if we don’t engage it. And a more realistic example, like you said, just because someone might quip about that in a team meeting, now may not be the time.

So, it’s kind of say, “Who are the people with whom I really want to engage in this?” And then it’s probably an offline conversation, “Hey, let’s grab a drink together. Let’s have a meal together, and I’d love to talk about this further.” And this is where I would suggest we take on some of these tools that I’ve mentioned throughout of, “Okay, would you be open to considering a different perspective rather than just automatically assuming that it’s oppressive or assuming that it’s murder?”

Could you voice a perspective that somebody who is religiously similar to you and has a similar view of life, how they could actually arrive at a place that makes abortion legal as compared to you? So, sort of coming at it that way of forcing each other to not go to these soundbites. So, I realize it’s easier said than done, but I think finding a few individuals with whom we can go deeper on is probably going to be a lot better than us thinking that, on an offhanded comment or a quick social media post, we’re really going to get people to either change their perspective or get us to rethink ours.

Pete Mockaitis
And what sounds so powerful about this in terms of the cultural intelligence, if you engage in this practice multiple times, then you’ll have a greater confidence, courage, capability to disagree with folks about issues that may not be hot button cultural issues, but just like, “You think your boss is absolutely headed down the wrong path with this initiative.”

It’s, like, you have developed some reps of going there with folks in terms of saying, “Hey, are you open to considering a new perspective on the trajectory of this project?” And then a lot of that emotional stuff you’ve worked through a number of times.

David Livermore
I love that example, Pete, because I think that does bring it closer to home because, for many of us, it may feel daunting to dive into the deep end of reproductive rights, or Hamas versus Israel, or whatever the timely issue is. But clearly starting with some kind of, “Hey, on a team when we have a different view of how quickly should we be out to market, or how much time shall we spend consulting with 75 other people before we decide which campaign we’re going to roll out as a marketing team,” practicing some of these within a team on lower stake in terms of emotionally lower-stake issues is a great way to think about it.

And, to your point that the two are connected, that’s why I talk about cultural intelligence, which may seem a drift to people, of like, “Wait, why are you talking about Germany versus Americans at the same breath as you’re talking about Trump versus Biden, or January 6?” Well, some of those same muscles get exercised of, “Okay, I have a very different perspective that I’ve been socialized into seeing the world, as do you. How do we use some of these same kinds of techniques that can be used whether we’re talking about cultural issues or whether we’re talking about ideological ones or political ones?”

Pete Mockaitis
And, David, zooming into the heat of battle, if you’re hearing some things, or having a conversation, and you can feel yourself getting riled up, your defensiveness or judgment, “This guy is an idiot,” like whatever that internal voice sounds like, do you have sort of a stop-drop-and-roll or an immediate prescription for when you’re in the moment, and you’re starting to feel some intense feelings that are at risk for derailing your logical thinking abilities, what do you do?

David Livermore
A couple thoughts. One is, this is why I said emotional intelligence is a piece of it, is I do have to know myself enough to know, “Am I going to be able to engage in this in any kind of constructive way?” And if my heart rate is going, and I’m starting to think about four-letter words that I want to call you, then probably better to be, like, “You know what, kind of back to your strategy, now is not the day for us to talk about this, but I’d like to engage it.”

The other thing I think is really important for me to acknowledge, people can’t see me, but if they look me up at all, I’m a white, straight, middle-age guy. And so, some might say, “Okay, fine day for you to say that I should confront a racist bigot or whatever else. But what if you’re the person who’s continually on the receiving end of discrimination, bigotry, bias?” I absolutely give people an opt in or opt out of saying, “Hey, it might not be your job to say ‘Today is the day that I’m going to school the manager on how what they just did is a microaggression in that.’”

So, I think this does need to be something that is opt-in. I’m not campaigning for everyone that you all need, every time you hear something, you need to come up and challenge it, and have a culturally intelligent conversation. There may be times where any of us are not in an emotional state to do that, and all the more so if you’re somebody who has a very visceral reaction to this because of something in your own identity or a personal life experience. You may need to opt out and let someone else be the one who jumps in and takes the flak for it.

Pete Mockaitis
And, well, I was just going to ask, if you are on the receiving end of some, I don’t know, just rude, ignorant, discriminatory just bad news comments, what do you recommend you do in response? It sounds like it depends. But if you could share with us maybe some of the different contexts that suggest different responses.

David Livermore
Quick story, if you will, and I’ll come at it that way initially. So, a number of years ago, the university where I was, I was on a taskforce, and one of my colleagues also on the taskforce was a woman who always advocated for the importance of opportunities for women in leadership, staff, faculty, students, etc. And this taskforce I was on, the individual chairing the meeting, he knew that that was sort of Cristy’s, like, hobby horse even though it wasn’t her formal role.

So, he was just making every sexist statement in the book to just sort of push her buttons, “Oh, Cristy, why don’t you take the minutes for us? And how come you didn’t bring us cupcakes today?” And I’m just like, “Dude!” And she didn’t say a word. So, kind of coming back to, “What is your response?” She engaged in the meeting professionally in light of her role at the university but she didn’t engage in this banter at all. She’s a pretty good friend so I walk out of the meeting with her when it’s done, and I’m like, “Cristy, I can’t believe you took that.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I was hoping you would say something.” I’m like, “Duh!”

Yeah, so now I feel a little defensive, I’m like, “Wait a second, how is that not like the white male riding into, like, ‘Dude, don’t say that to my friend Cristy.’” She’s like, “No, I didn’t need you to defend me. I needed you to speak up on your own behalf of how you feel about that kind of banter and the role of women, etc.”

And so, it was a real reminder to me of when we hear all this buzz about allyship but that was a moment of what allyship would look like is, hopefully, there’s somebody else who can speak up. And it shouldn’t have been on her to have to speak into it. And sometimes people will say to me, like, “Isn’t it a little awkward being a white straight middle-age guy talking about all this stuff?”

And I’m like, “I don’t pretend for a moment to know that I have the lived experience of many of the groups that I care passionately about, promoting inclusion and equity for, but there’s a role for me to play, leveraging power, etc. in ways that others might not have it.” So, I guess it’s to think about that you’re not in it alone. Who are others that can help you with it?

And if you’re on the receiving end, it’s back to where I go. Opt in carefully. And if your mental health can’t handle it, you have my full support if you say, “It’s not on me to challenge the bigotry that’s going on right now. I need to just protect my own sanity in it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose then, in that context, there’s multiple ways that you can engage that challenge. You might bring that up right then and there in the meeting, or you might chat with the boss afterwards, like, “Hey, the cupcakes stuff is, like, some people will probably think it’s funny but other people would really don’t, so just heads up.”

David Livermore
I think that’s a great point. And I would say my preference overall, based upon my personality but also what I think helps people be awesome at work, is to do it offline rather than shame them. I guess the counterpoint I would offer to it is there’s also a message that’s being sent to everyone else in the group. If perhaps I was the leader and somebody else on the team was doing that, I think there would be some. And not necessarily shaming but some kind of intervention that’s needed right in the moment that demonstrates to the team, “This is not the kind of behavior that we want to be part of what we’re doing.”

And I think you could still do it in a way that isn’t like, “Shame on you, individual,” but, “Hey, we might all, like, be tired and sarcastic, and think we’re doing funny but we’re about an inch away from when it’s funny and when it’s actually offensive to people.” So, to your point, it depends as there are myriad ways you could confront it. But for those of us who at work are in leadership roles, I think there’s a different level of responsibility on us to call it out even publicly for the benefit of what everybody else is observing and learning from them.

Pete Mockaitis
And, David, if you do feel sort of excluded in the sense that it’s clear that your views or identity or whatever is not welcome or respected, I guess there are some environments where it’s just sort of like, “Don’t you dare wear a MAGA hat in this room,” or the opposite, “Don’t you dare wear a Biden shirt in that room.”

So, I guess I wonder about the extent of, and it probably just varies person by person, like, is that just sort of okay or should we speak up, which is like, “Hmm, something that I believe strongly is completely unwelcome in this room, and that’s just how it is, and I’m just going to live my life, and not bring that up”? Versus, do you think we miss out on a lot of good people engagement, whole self at work stuff when we’re in that vibe?

David Livermore
I think we do miss out. Like, I realize it’s idealistic for me to say that in every case you ought to just speak up, and be your whole self, and be authentic. And there are certainly cases where I would say if you don’t have the right power or if you just feel like this is just going to be misconstrued and it’s pointless, I give people all kinds of agency to figure out what bringing their whole selves to work is.

But I do think the team and the organization is missing out because the example you used, the Biden and Trump, look at the polls. Regardless of whether or not you think they’re legitimate, the fact that we can even be close to a margin of error of 50/50 on Trump versus Biden shows that if we have a whole room of people that thinks somebody of the other perspective is not welcome here, well, then we’ve just cut off half the country.

So, wouldn’t we be better to somehow be informed by that perspective, whether it’s from a business idea, whether it’s a way of developing a better product for people, or whatever it might be. So, I’m going to very much lead on at least the ideal is it’s better if we can speak that up, at least in certain cases. But I recognize that, as individuals, we have to pick our battles wisely, and may say, “I just don’t have the energy to go at this again if I’m the lone one on debating this with everybody else.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think you brought up a wise point there with regard to the 50/50, is I guess I’m surprised at how often people seem to say things, which suggests they’re assuming everybody in the room holds their same views, or they don’t care at all, and they’re just going to say it loud and proud and deal with it.

David Livermore
I think of this often even, which no surprise, but even when you hear it on media interviews, “Americans want…” Which Americans? But then, likewise, like sometimes even I’ll meet a stranger in an Uber, the driver, or on an airplane, and the assumptions that they’re making of me, after like three minutes of talking about my presumed agreement with them about their political perspective, I’m just like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

So, it’s actually one of the things I’ve mentioned to you before we started the interview, I recently moved to San Diego, and I came here from the Midwest, a very conservative sort of community, politically conservative, and I think everybody there was like, “You’re moving to the left Coast. Are you ready for this?”

But San Diego actually has quite a bit of political diversity, I think, because of the military presence, and it’s actually one of the things I’ve really enjoyed here is most social gatherings, as well as professional that I end up with, you can’t just assume that because someone lives in this town, they vote one way or the other, or even because they’re military that they might feel one way or the other about Trump or Biden.

So, I think we’re richer people, communities, and workplaces when we create space for that, but I’m with you. It’s amazing to me how a lot of people just…you couched it by saying either they think that or they just don’t care. And I think both are probably viable hypotheses of why individuals do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, David, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

David Livermore
I think I would just encourage people to have the difficult conversations because I think we learn so much from that and it’s much easier to just default to people who think, believe, vote the same way we do but there’s this vast fascinating country, or world, that’s out there. So, have a conversation with someone who views an issue differently than you and see what comes of it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Livermore
So I’m going to have to use one that I actually used at the very beginning of the Digital, Diverse & Divided book. It’s from the great Martin Luther King, Jr. who says, “People fail to get along because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” For me, that kind of says really well what I’m after. A lot of this is driven by fear, and fear of people that we don’t really know at a deep level because we aren’t talking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

David Livermore
For someone like me, a favorite bit of research is a tough question, but one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is there’s this whole body of research around you see what you pay attention to. And so, just this kind of idea of I’m paying attention to certain things in my life, and that directly impacts the way I view life. There’s all kinds of research on if you pay attention to negative things, you tend to have a more negative orientation. So, that field is outside my own expertise but is one that really fascinates me.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

David Livermore
So I’m actually going to say Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone which is just a brilliant novel that I love.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

David Livermore
I am an obsessive journaler, and it’s something that I do almost every morning. It’s the way that I work through problems. It’s the way that I reflect on things, make meaning out of things. So, for me, journaling is an absolutely essential skill for both productivity and just making sense of my life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite nugget you share, something that really seems to connect and resonate with folks that they quote back to you often?

David Livermore
I think I would say that amid all of our differences that I’m really keened in on helping people pay attention to, but that, at the end of the day, we’re all human beings. And so, calling people to our shared humanity, not instead of our differences but alongside our differences, that’s something I found that has really resonated to people.

And polling from the Human Genome Project that tells us we’re 99.9% the same DNA, I find that that, in the space of talking about differences, polarization, diversity, and working around the world is a piece that really sort of resonates with people, like, “Oh, yeah, as Livermore says, we have the shared humanity that needs to shape the way that we interact and live.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

David Livermore
DavidLivermore.com is the easiest place to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

David Livermore
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s really great to be able to interact with people who are thinking deeply about how they just do their work better and live better. And my challenge is going to hearken back to what I said to you earlier. Have a conversation with someone who has a different opinion to you, and see what you learn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, David, thank you for this. I wish you many enriching conversations.

David Livermore
Thanks so much, Pete.