Exploratory Leadership and Big Bounds

Jen:

And hello everybody, it is Dr Jen Frahm here again with another Conversations of Change. For the listeners out there again, this is one that we are experimenting with and doing it a little bit differently and videoing it, so that you can find it on YouTube where we have been putting the Only Forward podcasts.But the reason for coming together in this episode was a couple of episodes ago, maybe three or four, I spoke with you about exploratory leadership. And as part of that I got a number of questions after that which was really about, tell us more about it and how are we operationalizing exploratory leadership in organizations. And those of you who are with me in my social channels, so Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, will be aware that I have partnered with Jillian Riley of Antacara Frontiers to deliver a number of exploratory expeditions which will really be around the framework of exploratory leadership.So to unpack that, I thought the best way I could do that was to bring Jillian into a conversation and also one of our former Conversations of Change guests, the extraordinary Celine Schillinger, one of the most downloaded set of episodes. Celine is known to both Jillian and I, and pretty much one of the role models that we think of when we think about exploratory leadership. So this is going to be probably about a 20-minute conversation where we just unpack a number of the concepts.To start with, Celine, welcome back. Tell us what you have been doing since we last spoke to you on the podcast.Celine:Yeah, thank you Jen. It's great to see you again. Of course, I never lose track of what you do and say thanks to social media, but it has been ages, it feels like ages, since we last talked. In the meantime I left the big corporation I stayed with 17 years, and I launched my own business, very, very happy to be helping more companies now with engagement leadership. So I help organizations of all sizes mobilize their stakeholders, mobilize their employees or mobilize their external stakeholders around a cause or in service of the business. My last work was with the British police! I get to intervene into very, very different type of fields which is absolutely exciting. We will talk about that later.

Jen:Tell me, because you are way too humble, the name of the business is?

Celine:It's We Need Social. Used to be the name of my blog and it is now the name of my business.

Jen:Okay, so if people are looking for you, they can find you on weneedsocial.com, correct?

Celine:Absolutely.

Jen:Excellent, lovely.

Jen:Jillian Riley, welcome to the podcast. Tell us, what are you doing here? Why am I working with you? What's going on?

Jillian:Why are you working with me? I think you're working with me because we both are interested in helping individuals and teams to realize their full sense of potential.Antacara means frontier in Sanskrit, I started it in 2018 with the intention of really helping, as I said, individuals and then groups too, to go to those frontier places in their lives and in their work. The place that's calling them, the place that excites them, the place that also scares them. So how do we help people to really unlock their own sense of possibility and talent and their values and their artistry in order to go to those most interesting edges in their lives? It is all about experiential learning and I think that is what you and I are doing together and are going to talk a little bit more about today, which is, how do we create experiences where people start to tap into the very, very best of themselves?I am super excited to be working with you on that, and specifically around the concept of exploratory leadership, because I think that leaders right now, under the kind of pressure that they are under, really need to leverage their own resourcefulness as much as possible. Excited to be looking ahead to ways that we can offer this kind of support to people going through what is obviously an incredibly interesting and challenging time in the world today.

Jen:Absolutely. And your background in the change sphere, that was more around social change that brought you to this space?

Jillian:Absolutely. I have worked across Africa and the developing world providing organizational support and individual support to mostly non profits, and my background is largely focused on, as you say, helping groups focused on health, HIV/AIDS, women's empowerment. That was a pretty intense classroom, if you will, around human behavior change and how do we help people to confront some of their biggest challenges, and at the same time how do we help them to really tap into their own capabilities in doing that. Everything I learned through a lifetime of that on-the-ground work has informed the approach of Antacara.

Jen:Fantastic. And the lovely nexus here as to why the three of us are here together was I met you through Celine. Celine wrote about one of your fabulous courage camps in Avignon and I was like, "I need to do this! I need to do this!". Sadly, I was booked to do it but illness got in the way, but we connected at that point. So, Celine, you're the one who actually brought Jillian and I together!

Celine:Oh, I love that! I absolutely love making connections.

Jen:It's good. So let's start with this broad term, "exploratory leader" or "exploratory leadership". Celine, perhaps if I can start with you. What does that term mean to you in context of your career or your life broadly?

Celine:You know, when I think about this, actually I thought about it yesterday. I was in the train, and the first idea that came to my mind was the memory of that person who joined the company Sanofi the same time as me in 2001, the same day. We were together in this newcomer meeting and it is now 19 years after, I left two years ago, and this person is still doing the same job. It does not mean that she is lesser, not as good as me, or she is of a lesser worth at all, it does not mean that at all, but it means we chose different paths.My path is really marked by exploration, by doing different things, by trying different things. It has been really the common thread across all my professional life, probably. While others choose specialization, which is good, we need specialists, but if you have an organization entirely run by specialists then you have people thinking in their own narrow world, if you wish, which is not adapted to the diversity, the complexity, the speed of change of the world today. So we need more people working with those specialists but able to cross boundaries, able to connect different worlds.You could speak of neo-generalists as per the famous book we have all read, but you can also talk about exploratory leadership. Going beyond some boundaries that are familiar, reassuring, testing new things. It is dangerous, it is uncomfortable. Very often when I was about to change directionI was challenged, I could not explain what I was doing. The consistency is often retrospective, but there is one, it is possible. It is such an amazing fuel, energy. It gives the sense of continuous growth, which is to me the essence of life, being alive.

Jen:Fantastic. Jill, what are your thoughts on the term? What does it mean to you in context of your world?

Jillian:I want to pull on that thread of the past because that is really for me the essence of it. I really think about it in an imagining myself as an explorer. Because I think we all have some visualization or some reference point for that term, of that person who set off, driven by a desire to go to someplace that had yet to be visited. To do that thing that had yet to be done. As you describe, Celine, to cross out of the familiar into the unknown, not just for the sake of it but in pursuit of a sense of possibility that maybe there is a better way.And that growth that you describe, Celine, that just keeps fueling that journey. For me, in terms of my own life, that requirement to do that and that desire to do that, as you described, to keep going into new places whether those are geographic or interpersonal or technical and ideas based or project based, that kept nudging us and edging us towards something better, obviously. I mean, that's why we do it, in work, because it is more impactful, because it is more efficient, whatever. And what are the capabilities to do that? The courage, the clear decision making, the continued growth and learning curation.I think there is a real specific mindset that drives that and enables that over time, and the reality of this year is that it is something we all need right now. I don't think we have the luxury to not have an element of that within our own toolkit as a leader, if you will. Path carving into new places that continue to drive our growth and our collective betterment.

Celine:What about you Jen? What does it mean for you?

Jen:This was a really interesting question for me. Because when I dug into this, I realized that a lot of what I would have described my exploratory leadership personally, was subconscious or unconscious. It certainly was not deliberate. For me, where I see its value of exploratory leadership, it is not about turning everybody into exploratory leaders, it is about diversity.You talked about the specialist mindsets in organizations, and I think about the leadership teams that I work with, and I think, they actually need one or two of them to be exploratory in intent. I almost feel like it would be very difficult to have a whole team of exploratory leaders. You think, gosh, what would that mean for the community that they are trying to lead? It would be quite chaotic. I think there is something in this for me around, sometimes it is just an attribute, that we go, "If we put on our exploratory hat for the day, how would we deal with this problem?" Or if we have to hire into this leadership team, we look at the composition, it is probably time we bring in someone who asks those kinds of questions. So that is where I see it coming into play.

Celine:While breeding this small exploratory leadership mindset in everybody, so that even the specialists can open up to new ideas, ideas coming from different worlds, can accept cross fertilization with very different environments. Yes, having a diversity of people with different mindsets, but also cultivating the curiosity and courage to explore even in the most traditional types of functions or leaders. That would be helpful.

Jen:And I think, if we tap into what Jill said about this current condition is why it's really needed, if you think about how many times people talk about, "We're living in unprecedented times". This pandemic, the energy behind Black Lives Matter, what is happening at nation-state level in terms of political systems, the environment, climate change. It is all unprecedented. I think to an extent we probably got away for quite some time without the need for exploratory leaders. But once we start using "unprecedented" as our adjective of daily choice, I don't know. I feel there is something there.

Jillian:I think an interesting point to look at different people and how this might fit, if you will, or how they might express it in their own way. Obviously, one of the limitations of recalling the explorers of before is there is a connotation of bold expansiveness. You have got to be the rogue going out with your big sword onto the high seas, and there are some people who go, "Wait a second, that's not me. Actually I like to sit quietly at my desk and live in a different kind of world, a more contained world of ideas".And I think that what is required right now is for people to go wide and for people to go deep. For people to be exploratory interpersonally, in conversations. You mentioned Black Lives Matter, an exploratory approach to conversations around diversity, around gender, that move beyond the binary into some new places.So I think that the opportunity that we have is to begin to understand that this curiosity and courage and learning approach that we are referencing is one that will be articulated by different people in different ways. Some of whom will lead people on big, bold journeys into new places, and for other people it will be a deep dive into new kinds of intimate conversations or new ways of looking at specific ideas.

Celine:It has been very difficult in organizations for the last decade or so because under the influence of modern management methods invented in the beginning of the 20th Century, our organizations have been run less by pioneers and explorers but more by engineers and finance specialists. It was all about control and being very much in control of how things would unfold. It was about rationality, leaving emotions at the door.What maybe COVID opens up as possibilities is that it has shaken a lot of certainties about work and how work should be done, et cetera. So some things that will grow from that are not great, I am fearing a disconnection and tensions and frictions between people because of the absence of contacts, but on the other hand, it may open up to possibilities of rethinking. Being full persons in the work, not just brains, those kinds of things. So there's hope, I think.

Jen:I think there is a lot of hope, and I guess that is behind this program that we are bringing forward, right? Because we see BigBounds as being this space for transformational growth, and you talked about it with your definition of exploration leadership, the possibility of greater change, and the same thing there. Can I just pause on that concept of the big bound or the big leap, the transformational growth opportunity. Is there something you can share that comes to mind of the big bounds you have taken in your career and how that ties into the explorer's mindset? Where you have had to leverage more experiences and talent and skills than the BAU.

Celine:I took a number of big bounds. I made a few of them in my career. The first one really took place when I was 23 and I moved to Vietnam, not knowing the country, not speaking the language, not even having a job. I settled in a Vietnamese family for six months and started to learn the language and looked for a job there. It was a very, very different experience and I eventually stayed four years in Vietnam. It was extremely fulfilling, it was a fantastic, wonderful opportunity for growth, both from a professional perspective but much more from a personal perspective. But at some point I felt, I don't want to be the person of single experience. I don't want to be a boring grandmother one day telling everybody about my Vietnam experience. I wanted to have a diversity of things so that this would not be the single element to define my identity. I wanted more.When you take a first bound, a first big leap, you don't know what is expecting you. You can be fearless. The second time is more difficult. Because you know how hard it is to be isolated, to be far from your friends, to be in an unknown place, to eat very strange food. But this is where it becomes really interesting, because then it is not just by chance. It is an intention. And you can build on that, because you can build this muscle of, it's not reducing fear but it is embracing it and making it a friend.So after Vietnam I took another job in France, and then another one in China, not knowing China, not knowing the field of work, having to manage a big team. Then after that, I moved back to France, joined HR in a big pharma company, not knowing pharma at all, not knowing HR at all. During my time in pharma I got involved into movements and social media, not knowing anything about that. And then two years ago, the last big leap I took was to leave the corporate world and launch my own business. For the whole time before I had been absolutely certain I would not be able to have a business, to run my own thing. I don't know what the next one will be but I hope this was not the last for sure!

Jen:Can I just check, the motivation. What motivated you if you think about those big bounds?

Celine: There is this sense of excitement for a new adventure. It overwhelms me and I cannot resist. Basically, when I have this opportunity to do something different, do something new, like when I was invited to join the quality department at Sanofi, not knowing anything about quality, I felt, "Wow, this is amazing!" I feel so lucky. Honestly, I am very privileged that all those possibilities have at some point showed up in my life. I also created that, of course, by being open and being on the look for making those connections with different worlds instead of retracting myself into my comfort zone. I find it just too exciting, it is like a drug for me.

Jen:Interesting. When I was thinking about this and BigBounds, I think I have had four big leaps, and maybe my normal steps are bigger than most, but four that I felt were big leaps for me. And two of them were geographic, so leaving home town moving to big city, moving from one big city to another big city, moving out of academia into launching my own business. And when I think about all three of those, they were really strongly motivated by pain. I just could not stand it anymore. And the pain was so great, and that is a very dramatic way of talking about it, but it was not about an exciting future.The fourth big bound that I think about that I have had was really much more the excitement. That was the decision to stop living small and to live into my strengths and my power and all the gloriousness stuff that is me. So it was a real personal transformation, where I went, "Actually, I could be doing so much better, bigger, different and being more authentic". You know, that search towards coherence. So that one was a real personal transformation growth moment, but that was not about pain, because I was pretty comfortable playing small. There was not much pain there. Which makes me wonder around motivations and why people come to a point to go, "Actually, I want to do something different, I want to learn something about how to do this".Jillian, have you got any thoughts, based on what you have seen with the people who have come forward to your physical... I don't know what we are calling it. Your real world, your Avignon, your Kenya.

Jillian:In person?

Jen:In person, yes!

Jillian:In person, before times?

Jen:Before times.

Jillian:I think listening to this and those experiences, one of the things that I have experienced myself and seen in others is what I describe, what I feel is like pushing and pulling. Being pushed into a new space, which is the pain, the "No I don't want that". And I think for a lot of people that "no" is the strongest driver. It is the way you say, the endings... And then I think for a lot of people we get then pushed into, "Okay, I don't have a firm 'Yes I want this'. I know I don't want that, but I really don't have a firm, 'Yes, now I know I want to do A B or C'". I think there are those people who are very pulled by "Yes, yes, yes I want a new physical place, I want a new job, I want a new relationship", but my own total anecdotal observation of those who have come through my programs is that oftentimes that "no" is a much stronger, immediate kind of motivation to move into unknown. I think for most humans, just chasing "yes" is scary, because there will be nobody to tell you that it is the right decision. Nobody is going to pat you on the back and say, "Absolutely, you are doing the right thing". Because you don't know.Whereas if you are in a bad relationship or a shitty job or whatever, everybody says, "Yeah, get out of that! No, that's terrible, move on". So I think that the movement into the new when that is a pull by something that you often cannot put voice to. It is hard to sit down over a drink with a girlfriend and say, "I have decided I am playing big now". Like... okay. What does that mean? What does that look like? What?So I think some of BigBounds, you mentioned a few minutes ago, Celine, honing the muscles and the ability to, even when you cannot describe it or make sense of it or validate it for an external audience, you listen to it. Not to go tumbling into some reckless and hugely risky situation where you bet your house on something, but to simply carry forward listening to that sense of, there's something other here. For me, often geographic. My own patterns, I am super aware that, like you guys, I leap into new places happily. Going to South Africa when I was 21 years old, much to my family's horror, was probably the biggest one and I learned a lot. Whilst in South Africa, taking every assignment I could get to go to places where I didn't have a clue what I was going to do was just this constant muscle building of, it's okay to step in, physically.And creative. I wrote a book, I have written a play, nobody knows much about either of them, nobody gives a damn really, I didn't matter. The point was I had something I felt I needed to express. So for me, geographic and creative leaps come really naturally. Other ones, interpersonal, relational, more practical, I am not as drawn into those. I think for me it is about beginning to understand how you operate and then helping yourself along on a path where you move a little closer and closer to what it is that feels right.

Jen:So, the way forward on this program is very much about experiential learning. I am wondering, Celine, your experience with experiential learning versus other modes of learning. Have you got thoughts on what has worked, what hasn't? Benefits or not?

Celine:At least for me, it is the best way of learning. I learn way more when my whole self is involved in the learning. My body, my emotions, what I eat, the efforts I need to make to learn a new language, for example, because otherwise I won't be able to find a place to stay. So experiential learning really involves the whole self, the rational, the emotional aspect of one's self, which makes it a more holistic experience but also it contributes to how you grow completely. Not just how your brain gets new ideas. You grow as a person, your understanding of the world, your ethics, you behave differently. Learning has too often been limited to books or online courses. It's very different, I believe. At least for me.

Jen:Jill, your thoughts on that?

Jillian:Yes to everything Celine said. I reference my work on HIV/AIDS and I think that's where my own beliefs around experiential learning came from, because it was exactly what we did not do. We lined people up and told them what they should be doing, and then we scratched our heads when it did not happen. So for me, my belief in experiential learning is born of many years of sedentary analytical change activities.I think the fact that we have reduced our capabilities so completely into this cognitive space that we have limited so much of the rest of ourselves is so unfortunate, because I think the two domains in which we actually begin to access more of ourselves are, as you described Celine, physical, what happens when I start to get in touch with my reactions, my emotions, all the things that are my internal guides to that pushing and pulling, that yes and no, my emotional self, and then my creative self. We are incredibly whole people until we sit down at a desk and start being tested for what we know. And then we take jobs based on what is usually a fairly narrow description of our expertise. And then we are encouraged just to stay in that space for a very long time, until it reaches a point where you ask an adult to do something creative and it's like you are weird for doing that. Like, why are you asking me to do that? As though it is a fourth arm that is dangling out there unused.So I think normalizing and fully bringing back into the fold as adults all of the capabilities that we have should be something that is regarded as completely standard, rather than a little bit wonky because we are not sitting there talking about big ideas. As you can see, I feel pretty passionately about it, and that passion is born of my own sense of all the stuff in my life that has not worked because it was just leaning far too heavily on cognitive solutions to things that were not cognitive challenges. They were much deeper than that and much more than that, and yet we never even got into those places. So I am super excited to be in this space now of frontier work around, how do we bring the whole self into growth and change? I think it's exciting.

Jen:I guess I have to say, that is my vulnerability in this space, right? Because I am really comfortable with cognitive thinking and cognitive assessment. In terms of experiential learning, I am really challenged by it from a time horizon perspective. There is part of me that wants to go, "Tick, done, learnt this, that's great". But what I know from experiential learning is that it can often be a couple of years before you actually embody that learning. That it takes time to take root and to seed and to transform, which is so frustrating for the control freak within, right? Because I would be much more comfortable if I could sit in front of you and you could just download the information that I need, and I would tick the boxes!But here is the interesting thing, which is the reason why we are still together, Jill, and it's okay and I am going to lean into the discomfort of this space. Over the last couple of years, I have picked up the paintbrushes and have been working in painting and life drawing and things like that. What I found was really interesting, I was chatting to a woman one night in art class, we were talking about our backgrounds and where we came from, and I said, "I've been doing this for six months now". She said, "Oh, that is really interesting, have you found that that has changed the way you work?" And I was really taken aback by the question, because for me, painting is just fun and it is just play. I do not have any other agenda with it, I go there to play. And then I stopped and I went, "This has probably been my most productive six months with new ideas, new products, new services and creativity". And I went, "Wow!" I hadn't even... That's experiential learning!

Celine:That's amazing.

Jen:If I actually look back, I go, "I wasn't doing this stuff 12 months ago". They were all good new products, new services, you know. They were all successful, they were all really well-formed, commercially-successful stuff I was doing. Isn't that interesting? As opposed to sitting in a three-day masterclass of how to create a new product.

Celine:You talk about time and the time it takes, and yes it is true, and at the same time there is a pivoting moment which is also in itself a bound, a big bound. Taking the decision to do something different. Even before this something is over, has been done, is completed. Putting yourself into imbalance for a moment and taking a leap, it can happen in a second but it is already a huge, huge change. A huge experience.

Jen:It's good stuff.

Jillian:I like that phrase, "putting yourself into imbalance". Because that feeling, if you can crystallize that feeling, is the place that most of us are deeply uncomfortable being. Obviously, because we are afraid, right?

Celine:Yes.

Jillian:I think that in some ways, and this, Jen, I am looking forward to continuing to explore with you in the months ahead, I think is the space in creative spaces we do without necessarily experiencing it the same way. You are constantly moving into something new and creating and there is uncertainty wrapped into the whole exercise. Imbalance [inaudible 00:38:39] dare I use the word "joyous"? It is so delightful to do it that you don't feel threatened by it, you simply feel, "Ah, this is what I am doing. I am simply creating something new". So how we begin to experience unknown, uncertainty, imbalance, in ways that don't threaten us but actually begin to exercise a piece of us that is there already waiting to be used in different situations, is what is really exciting.

Jen:Absolutely.

Celine:I just took a book from my bookshelf behind me. It is a book that has been with me for the long time, many years. I think I read it when I was in my early twenties. It's called Adventure: the Passion of Detours. Some of those sentences resonated with me so strongly, they have been with me for all this time. One of them says,

"Adventure takes place outside of routine or marked routes. The exultation it arouses comes from this razor's-edge path that gives the adventurer at all times an acute conscience of being alive". And it continues by saying, "Rather than an event, adventure is an advent in the sense that its duration gives birth to a new person transfigured by circumstances foreign to dullness".

This is it! Exploration and being alive. We cannot waste what we have, what we have been given by chance. We have only one life, we cannot waste it. It is our responsibility to explore it to the fullest.

Jen:I have goosebumps from that. It is not often that you can find someone who can quote whole paragraphs from a book they read 25 years ago, right? That is amazing.Okay, we need to wrap this one up, so for the listeners, if you are now curious about the BigBounds program, we are kicking them off September 30. The best place to go to is antacarafrontiers.com or reach out to Jillian or myself and we are happy to give you more information about it.Celine, perhaps your final thoughts on exploratory leadership and why we need it now.

Celine:We are all into this huge exploration of the pandemic and the new world and what to do with that, and the more we grab our past to give us answers about the future, the less we will be able to do something really useful and hopeful for all of us. There is no other way, we have to invent new ways. We have to be, I wouldn't say at ease, but less afraid of the unknown. It is a must for this new world and all these things that are happening to us. There is no other way. So let's take it joyfully, as you said, and creatively.

Jen:Absolutely. So on a moment of joyful creativity, Jill, what have you got to finish us off with?

Jillian:Yeah, what an exciting moment it is to be launching this in a world where, as you have just described, Celine, it gives us the opportunity to create these new paths. And those might be paths that are in our own lives, and no one else will know about them, but they will take us to a new place, or our family, or our team and our colleagues. Or, if we are operating on another scale, it might take us collectively into some new places that I think are just waiting there. I feel like we all have that razor's edge that you are talking about, Celine? I don't think you can be alive right now and not feel that. So yes it's scary, but it is also so exciting to think that if we leverage everything that we are capable of, do we have the opportunity right now to move from that razor's edge into some really exciting new ways of seeing and of relating to each other and of working and creating new things for ourselves, for our colleagues and for our families?I feel the moment, and I feel it pretty much on a daily basis. I think it is for us to take it, and to leap into it.

Jen:Excellent, excellent. Listeners, I hope that you have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I know I have, it has been a real treat this week. I will have in the show notes a number of the links and resources that we have talked about. If you are not connected or following Celine, please do. She is one of the most extraordinary leaders of change out there and never fails to bring forward content and real thought leadership in this place. Celine, thank you once again for making the time to chat with us. That's three times on the podcast, pretty special!

Jen:And Jillian, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Jillian:It's a pleasure, thank you for having me and great to be in conversation with both of you.