George A. Papandreou is the former Prime Minister of Greece (2009-2011) and is currently a Member of Parliament with the Panhellenic Socialist Movement/Movement of Change. As an MP, he represents the Hellenic Parliament in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and has led over the years the work of several Committees in producing recommendations for the deepening of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law across its 47 member-states.
During his premiership, he applied a series of structural reforms in his attempt to modernize his country whilst avoiding bankruptcy during Greece’s 2010 debt crisis. For his achievements related to government Transparency, he received the Quadriga Award in the category “Power of Veracity.. In 2010, he was named one of the Foreign Policy magazine’s TOP 100 Global Thinkers. In 2017, he was honored with the International Leadership Association (ILA) Distinguished Leadership Award.
Dr. Ron Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School where he has taught for nearly four decades. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership. His research addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership; and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation.
Dr. Cynthia Cherrey is President and CEO of the International Leadership Association (ILA), a global community committed to increasing quality research, teaching, and leadership practices contributing to the world's common good. As president of a multi-sector and global professional association, she promotes rigor and relevance of leadership at the intersection of theory and practice. Previously, Cynthia was Lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Vice President for Campus Life at Princeton University.
A Quote From This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
George A. Papandreou is the former Prime Minister of Greece (2009-2011) and is currently a Member of Parliament with the Panhellenic Socialist Movement/Movement of Change. As an MP, he represents the Hellenic Parliament in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and has led over the years the work of several Committees in producing recommendations for the deepening of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law across its 47 member-states.
During his premiership, he applied a series of structural reforms in his attempt to modernize his country whilst avoiding bankruptcy during Greece’s 2010 debt crisis. For his achievements related to government Transparency, he received the Quadriga Award in the category “Power of Veracity.. In 2010, he was named one of the Foreign Policy magazine’s TOP 100 Global Thinkers. In 2017, he was honored with the International Leadership Association (ILA) Distinguished Leadership Award.
Dr. Ron Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. Heifetz founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School where he has taught for nearly four decades. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership. His research addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership; and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation.
Dr. Cynthia Cherrey is President and CEO of the International Leadership Association (ILA), a global community committed to increasing quality research, teaching, and leadership practices contributing to the world's common good. As president of a multi-sector and global professional association, she promotes rigor and relevance of leadership at the intersection of theory and practice. Previously, Cynthia was Lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Vice President for Campus Life at Princeton University.
A Quote From This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Ron Heifetz 0:00
The current situation and the threats to democracy, how do you think about the regressions, the autocratic regressions that we're seeing even in democratic systems? Some of them young systems like Hungary. Some of them old systems like the United States.
George Papandreou 0:14
Yeah. [Inaudible 0:16-0:19] I've taken on this responsibility in the Council of Europe as always called the general rapporteur for democracy, I'm expected to be able to analyze or work with people who have analyzed where democracy is going, will be going, and what kind of remedies or what kinds of ways to support and strengthen democratic processes around the world, but particularly, in Europe since that's where I'm working. But I'll go back a little bit to the ancients because I think what we need to do is start thinking again about what are some of the basic tenets. Not everybody will agree with me, before I understand the basic tenets of democracy are, can see where we may have gone wrong. Because you did mention [Inaudible 1:02] democracy is not just elections, it's much more than that. So, if we go back to the Iliad, the Iliad was actually seen as the first anti-war book. It's a horror story of these macho men killing each other over a love affair, raping women, just ransacking villages, pillaging to stay for 10 years. But this was a book that was read by generation, after generation, after generation. And I think what some scholars have said, this actually started people thinking, “Hey, this is not the way to go. This is not the way to deal with conflicts. We should do it in a more mannered way.” So, democracy was, in one way, also a way to debate, to deal with conflict, which we have in[Inaudible 1:51] different views or different interests, but in a way which can be done through peace, peaceful means. And that's what democracy is, not only. That's one of the reasons why we had the Olympic Games. This is a way to build peace. Second issue which democracy had to deal with was we the people. We can actually decide our own fate. We don't have to have a dictator, we don't have to have a king, or high priest, or whatever. We can do it on our own. We can imagine it, but we have to find a way to… Two things. First, how do we collectively make these decisions? And secondly, how do we make sure that power is not usurped by somebody, somebody who gets into power and then holds on to that power or creates a situation where he concentrates power and then abuses power, which, of course, abuse of power is anathema to the gods. And there's one more thing. Yeah. Aristotle made sort of a survey of thousands of city-states of democracy because there were lots of civil wars. Scott, you're just saying this earlier that you're reading the book on how civil wars start.
Scott Allen 2:56
Yes.
George Papandreou 2:56
This was a big issue in ancient times because there were lots of city-states that went into civil war. And Athens also had it, and so Aristotle, Plato before, also, were very worried about this issue. He was not the deepest fan of democracy, but he did say that for democracies to be able to survive, there needs to be a sense of justice and equality. If you have high inequality, where the rich have hoarding, and the people that are very poor, first of all, you don't have time to democracy. You want people to participate if they have to be part of it. Secondly, there has to be a sense of justice. If you don't have that, you will get a sense of injustice, which then will be used by demagogues. Demagogues will polarize. Polarization will bring chaos, and chaos will bring tyranny. So, it's not so different from what we're seeing today. We have a concentration of [Inaudible 3:54] at a global level. People feel that, somewhere out there, there's a lot of concentration of power and wealth. And that ends up also capturing our democracy. So, I don't think our democracies are… It's not democracy to blame, it's the fact that democracies are not allowed to work as democracies because of this concentration of power. The sense of inequality that creates a sense of loneliness, of abandonment, of disempowerment, sense of injustice. And that's rife for demagogues. Now, if you add social media to that, but basically, the type of social media we have, it's not just social media, but it's the type of social media which is looking out for grabbing your attention and creating any kind of sentiment which will keep your attention, which then perpetuates hate speech, and whatever, and also the whole context of being somewhat divorced from direct discussion. In ancient Athens, you had to deal with your opponent in a certain space. He was there. There had been a [Inaudible 4:58] but there weren't loud, but social media allows you to divorce yourself a bit from this. And if you think about then all the new insecurities that people are feeling, whether it's climate change, whether it's the new technologies that may take their work, or whether it's the fact they don't feel to have much prospect, and the younger generation not feeling that they will do better than the previous generation, these are global issues. And the fact that these are global issues also makes it more difficult for local politics to deal with these issues. So, all that, I think, it gives a ground for demagoguery, and people saying there’s crises, we have problems, we're being threatened, our culture is going to be changed, we're going to have these refugees, this elite is taking over. And then, the demagogues come and say, “Yeah, I'm here to solve your problem.” What happens then, of course, is basically, polarized societies. And you don't give societies the chance to actually transform themselves and deal with the real crisis, and I think this is where leadership needs to be looked at. How do you create democratic leadership, which will see these crises in a way as an opportunity to make changes? But then you have to deal with a very big issue. I've been working on the issue of new forms of participation. So, going back again to ancient Greece, they used to have citizens assemblies. It’s a sortition, you choose by lottery, which basically is the representative group of your society or a certain group, and they will then deliberate to come up with ideas. Now, Ireland did this, the Irish Republic did this. And it did on a very controversial issue, which was abortion. They created a citizens assembly through sortition, through a lottery mechanism. Choosing from their population, people randomly. Sat them down for quite a few months, I think it was six months. And they discussed with experts; with legal experts, medical experts, social workers, and so on, psychologists, and these were representative of all walks of life of Ireland. And they came up with, finally, a proposal. Yes, that the constitution needed to change and abortion needed to be legalized. And they went to referendum and that result was confirmed. So, there are new ways of strengthening or enriching democracy, reinventing, if you like, democratic institutions based on the idea that people do need to participate, to have a sense of empowerment, have a sense of a voice, an equal voice in our society, and not power being hoarded by certain groups, which then end up creating, through injustices daily, a sense of injustice.
Ron Heifetz 7:43
It’s really wonderful. Before we finish and let you go, the Ireland example is really wonderful about a way to try to make democracy work beyond simply relying on the formal political system, particularly for issues that are deeply cultural, that are deeply embedded in people's identity. And if the culture is going to evolve, then people's sense of what it means to be Irish, or a citizen of this country, needs to evolve and that requires specialized additional processes in addition to the formal processes of politicians working with their constituents, as you've described at the citizens assembly. Is there another example you can give us so that we can just visualize those sort of adjuncts to democratic process beyond the formal political processes? You mentioned working with women's groups in Israel and Palestine. What comes to mind off the top of your head in addition to the Irish example?
George Papandreou 8:40
When we came back from exile, because we were on exile because Greece was a dictatorship, I had worked in Sweden, Canada, US, but also in Europe. And I learned a lot about continuing education, but also civic education. There's a whole movement coming out of the trade union experience in Sweden about citizens having a set of these study circles. So, I started civic education, working with civic education on Greece, and we set up circles all around Greece about what democracy was, women's rights, and so on. We had a huge turnout. And I think this is something that is missing today. So, civic education, I think, is very important. I have a friend of mine, he's from Oregon, Jim Ray, you may remember him, Brian. He was rummaging through his basement because they were moving to California, and he found his father's report card. I think it was somewhere in 1936. And the report card there, I can’t exactly read it, I don't have it in front of me, but it said, “We grade our students on two issues. The first is on their civic personality, on their personality, how much they understand, believe, know the principles of democracy, of civic participation, on which these values, our democracy depends. And the second issues are on the normal subjects.” So, they actually gave a huge emphasis on this, which I think we've lost in our education systems. We look at this professional training which we are supposed to be… Give us a prospect, we don't even know what jobs will be, but I think we need to bring back this, in many ways, at the community level, at the school level. To be able to have a conversation with our worst opponent, if you like, or the person we think is our worst opponent, or the person who is on the other side, but that means that there are certain basic values we do agree on, and we can communicate with. So, I think that's where democracy is. It's very important that you have these basic values. Otherwise, there’s a rift and then you cannot speak. Now, that's between nations, but it's also within nations. I think that bringing people together, and different contexts, is a way. There are other solutions, other ideas. So, going back to the [Inaudible 11:05] where everybody had to speak together, what I had started as a prime minister was the so-called wiki laws, I mentioned them earlier, that we asked our citizens to discuss our laws before we enacted the law, before we actually voted on the law. Could we create sort of an agora, an electronic agora? We're all citizens, but with one voice, without fake names, real citizens, sitting there, discussing with each other on a platform. Of course, you would have millions in a big country like the United States, but you would also have the possibility with this new technology to use algorithms, but use algorithms which are transparent, which people know what they do, and which actually help in the debate, but also in finding consensual solutions. And also, using that sort of electronic agora as a possibility for experts to come in, scientists to come in, NGOs to come in, different groups to talk, citizens assemblies, as I said earlier, citizens committees, so you can have as many different forms of new forms of participation. And I have written an article on creating a fourth branch of government, which would be called the deliberative branch of government, which we will be discussing in the consular your next few months, as an idea. So, I think there are ways we can rethink. And we need to reimagine because democracy, as I said, is a work under construction. Democracy has its principles, but we shouldn't just live with the institutional principles, which can change. [Inaudible 12:44-12:46] we pushed it just to have elections. We did not think of all the other things that should have been done to create the necessary culture, the necessary Institute, the necessary, grassroots, understanding. What does it mean? And so on, to how to democracy.
Cynthia Cherrey 13:06
I'm so enjoying this rich conversation, and I think we could go on. It reminds me, George, when we had dinner together in Atlanta, and thinking about the richness of the experience and so much that we can learn from you and from others. As you're talking about rethinking or reframing democracy, it reminded me of when I was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and when we were coming back and rebuilding, I would have dinners at my home bringing students together with the women leaders from the Ninth Ward and from the parish in general who will we're influencing and working to make a difference. And, at those dinners, they would share the experience on the ground level, but the implications of what that meant. But the key thing they would always say to the students, and also we brought in local leaders, is they'd say, “Don't do to us, work with us. We know what needs to change, but we need partners to help to make that. So, partner with us, but don't do to us.” That has stayed with me in terms of our work, and I think it just makes me think about the work that you're doing and bringing in this greater good, the collective for the greater good. So, I'd love to take it just to another level around leadership. And since we have one of our leading leadership scholars, Ron, on with one of our leading global leaders, thinking about this, Ron, as you look at this rich experience, what are the leadership capacities that you see that George has put into effector action, if you will, through his work that have been effective that we need to think about? And then, from both of you, I'm doing it part one and part two question too, Scott. I'm emulating Ron here. So part one about what has been emulated. But thinking in the future, what are the leadership capacities that are needed for us as a global society as we think and work towards a better future for all?
Ron Heifetz 15:31
Well, it's a great question, you're catching me a little off guard so I'm going to give you a spontaneous answer. But I don't know that I'll have a lot of confidence in it. Well, I think what George demonstrates, first of all, is respect for people. He's not enamored with his own brilliance and he's not taken with his own pedigree. His grandfather and his father were both Prime Ministers. Most of the people I know who have his pedigree, in one degree or another, are a bit overly enamored with themselves and have almost a sort of privileged sense of their location in the society. But there's a humility, not a false or over humility. I think George is a very confident person, but he listens to people. And you can't work a collective problem if you're not willing to, first, identify who are the key parties in the ecosystem of this problem. So, when George talked about the problem of Turkey and reframed it, he expanded the ecosystem. So now we've got Europeans involved. Or in thinking about the financial crisis, there were a whole variety of key stakeholders internally within the various publics in Greece, but there were also key parties within the European politics and financial system. And there was also the global financial system, which is why George spent time in Washington changing some of the policies because he realized that… So he listened, he had respect for different parties and their relevance to the problem. He also had a framework, which is, I think, perhaps one of the things that I wasn't enabled to work with him on in his days when he was a fellow at Harvard back in the mid-90s, which was a framework that would say that there are a lot of challenges that are technical for which you can look to experts to solve the problem. And where the responsibility for solving the problem largely falls in the lap of the authoritative expert. But there are a lot of problems that require the evolution in the hearts and minds of people, and where you don't really have a solution until this solution lives in the hearts and minds of people. And there are countless consulting firms, and also Harvard-trained experts, and people working in international development, who think that they have the solutions. And here's 200 PowerPoint slides, and isn't that the solution? And they'll parachute into a foreign country, leveraged with money, saying, “Here, I have the solution for you,” but without really understanding the local culture. And I think one of the distinctions that I think George utilized in his work that came naturally to him, I think, from his background growing up in politics, is that a lot of these real hard problems that we face are problems that fall across boundaries, and that require the engagement of the stakeholders themselves. You can't engage in a major strategic change, even in a company, if the people themselves can't own the problem and then be part of the solution. Because, with these challenges, which I call adaptive because I like the metaphor from nature, you're building capacity that builds from the capacity that’s there already, but also says, “Okay, well, what cultural DNA can we conserve? How do we build from what we've got?” But then, also, something has to be changed. And some innovation is required to take the best of our identity, and culture, and community into the future. And that model, which I think is beautifully illustrated in nature, requires one immediately to ask, “Okay, well, who is going to need to learn what? Who is going to need to work these questions of what to conserve, but what to discard, and what innovation shall we try?” And defining then that ecosystem of that challenge is, I think, came naturally to George. Okay, well, here the parties, and a good politician can think in those terms. Here are the folks that need to get involved. But then how does one mobilize the learning processes out into the periphery? Many times people think political leadership is simply how do you organize, and make trades, and bargains, and leverage amongst the elites who are in the halls of government. But I think what George realized is that the elites themselves are constrained by the degree to which people out in the periphery are ready to accept, and absorb, and own those changes. So, rather than get to only talking expert to expert, politician to politician, let's get out there and figure out how to mobilize the people. And he did that even when he was running for head of his party before he became prime minister, he changed the whole method by which the party leader would be voted into power. Instead of it being this closely held, behind closed doors, people breathing in a lot of cigarette smoke process, he opened it up and democratized even the process of party elections. So, I think that the deep democratic ethos was strengthened by some of the analytical framework that I think I helped provide in understanding that there are challenges for which you can put people to sleep and fix it for them. And I learned about those challenges, training, and surgery early in my career where the problems can be extracted from the people. But there are a lot of problems, and certainly, in politics, where the people are part of the problem. And the people therefore are also the solution. They are the substrate of the solution. And then coming up with mechanisms to mobilize their responsibility, their engagement, their ownership, their trade-offs becomes the nuts and bolts of public leadership or political leadership. So, it requires a stomach for conflict. A stomach for ambiguity. It requires the ability to realize that you might come up with a great plan, but the moment you start to move, you've got to deviate from the plan because plans are just today's best guess. Technical problems; you can create a critical path to a future and follow the plan. But adaptive challenges require a stomach for improvisation because leadership becomes an improvisational art because people are nonlinear systems. And you make a move, and they respond, and you realize, okay, now I got to make a different kind of move than I had planned. And that stomach for ambiguity, or creative engagement, moving with people at the rate they can stand in different ways, framing the issue as a response to all the listening you've done. Those are some of the capacities that leadership is required. A real willingness to get out there and engage with your people, to know your people. I've got students who are deeply frustrated with their governments like in Venezuela, and they spend all their time talking elite to elite elite. Elitely schooled students, or exiled person with exile person, but nobody goes out into the barrios, or into the villages, or into the neighborhoods to really understand the pains of the people, and how they think, and how they understand life that gave rise to a demagogue coming into power in the first place. And then figuring out how to renew that trust of people who felt forsaken by the elites before Hugo Chavez came into power or Maduro. But one of my students took the courage to go out there, and he spent 10 years now living in poor communities. He's feeding maybe 17,000 children breakfast and meals every day through the nonprofit organizing. And, in the process, he has come to know his people. He's done the fieldwork. But a lot of people in leadership think, “Well, I don't really need to get out there and really get to know my people because I'm smart, I'm analytical, I'm educated, I'm brilliant. Just let me solve the problems,” as if they could be a kind of philosopher king. But even Plato discovered, towards the latter part of his career, that his model of philosopher king was wrong. And he went on from writing the Republic to writing the statesman in which his metaphor for leadership wasn't the shepherd, or the doctor, his metaphor for leadership was the weaver because he realized that the philosopher king was dependent too much on the brilliance of a particular person and a society would always be vulnerable if it invested all of its intelligence in a single location. So, leadership requires then an inability to realize that, in the face of adaptive challenges, we are in over our head. My knowledge isn't going to be sufficient. I'm not smart enough to figure this all out on my own. I can't anesthetize my public, put them to sleep, and then fix it for them, and they can then just recover. But, unfortunately, we see a lot of people frightened and in pain, turning to the demagogues for solutions in the hope against hope that maybe there's somebody I can trust who's going to know the way out. And, unfortunately, there's always some person overly confident in their brilliance to believe that they actually do know the way out. “Just elect me and I know the way out, I'm your solution.” And then you get the blind leading the blind over a cliff generating disasters of various kinds. So, it's not that leadership requires humility in the sense of ‘cover your light under a bushel,’ but it does require a sense that we're in over our head. Now, I've just lived through this week of the president of my university, only six months into her career being taken down. Like nearly every head of state, or head of government, prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, the ones who know they're in over their head are in much better shape because they know how to call for help. Then they know how to rely on collective intelligence rather than just on the intelligence of a few experts. And that kind of humility in the face of the daunting challenges we face, that then looks to democracy as a source of collective intelligence, and wisdom. Not just to get people to buy in, but actually to realize that a lot of the solutions are going to be generated through local adaptations, to local environments, and countless different villages, and towns, or school systems. The pandemic is a good example. There was no demagogue who could turn off the virus. Every local school, every [Inaudible 26:37] every government. Well, we tried, some people tried, and the death rates soared in the United States because of the distrust. So, I think George illustrates many of the capacities that one needs for leadership today in appreciation for what one brings to the party, but also in appreciation for a lot one doesn't know, and therefore an ability to identify who are the parties that need to be engaged. And then coming up with structures and methods to engage them to deliberate on the problem so that you begin to develop collective capacity. And I think, ultimately, political leadership is about building capacity, not dependency. And I think George had that deeply in his own cultural DNA that enabled him to do what he did, and perhaps, is one of the points of contact between my conceptualizing and his practical wisdom.
Scott Allen 27:35
George, are you just gonna say, “Yeah. All that.” (Laughs)
George Papandreou 27:39
Yes, I agree with that. And, Ron, thank you for all your help because much of the framework that Ron has explained now was something that I learned from him during his time in the Kennedy School, but then also as from many meetings we've had after that in different trips [Inaudible 27:56] on other islands, and so on. And I think one thing I wanted to stress is how you relate to your power as a person is something that each leader should deeply think about. And there's a moral and ethical side to this. As you said, it's different to say, “ I'm the solution, and I'm the god,” or whatever. It's different to say, “I'm over my head, but I want to build capacity.” And that's very different. And how you relate to that is in also not getting stuck in holding up certain chair power, or whatever. People sort of feel that, at some point, that they own it, or that it's the right. Subconsciously, sometimes, not always consciously. And I think this is something one really has to deeply understand if you want to, in a more ethical way, deal with using power, wielding power. The second one, which you said, I remember the European Union basically was telling me during the crisis, the financial crisis, there's a technical solution, basically, or just cut through this. As a matter of fact, after me, we had a technocrat both in Greece and in Italy as prime ministers because that was sort of the idea that bankers will know the solution and they can deal with the issues. But it didn't work out exactly that way. It was much more of a deeper adaptive challenge where people had to be. That’s what I believed, and I think we could have done it in a much better way if we had had the agreement or the support from all the colleagues in the European Union to say, “This is a different type of challenge, and we're not just looking for some quick technical solution which will get it out of our mind and then it's done with.” I think what Cynthia also said, Cynthia, I think it's very important. What I saw, going back to the women in Palestine and the women in Israel, and I do hope that that peace moment again will rise on point, and be very vocal, and peace movement where they can be together in fighting for solutions. But what I felt is that, as Ron also said, they were not the elites, they were not the power holders, they were on the edge. They had a better understanding of the problems. They knew the solution. They were on the ground. Whether it's them, whether it's a migrant community, whether it's a community in poverty, if you will engage them and give them the responsibility to actually come up with solutions, they will come up often with things you would never expect. They would be so far ahead thinking, and innovative, which many politicians say, “I'm not going to do this because it's risky,” or, “I'm not going to do this because the polls say that this is not what the public really wants.” But the polls don't really have a dynamic, just sort of a picture. And I think if we get people involved… Now, this, of course, goes, again, back to ancient Athens, even if they were only men, actually, it was your responsibility to be part of democracy. You had to be active. It was funny. You were peculiar. You were a private person, which in Greek, the word is ‘idiot.’ So, you're a private person, something wrong with you, you're not really actively involved because of the responsibility to society. Okay, that was the other side of the coin, but leaders should actually promote this. Develop this. Help this so that people do participate. And that's part of the capacity building and part of what democracy is, should be. It's a way to learn. It's not theoretical, “Democracy is this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.” It is learning to discuss, learning to debate, learning to participate, learning the conflict, learning to deal with conflict, in a way which is democratic. So thank you, Ron, for that.
Cynthia Cherrey 31:52
Well, thank you, George. And thank you, Ron. We started this, Scott, talking about how rich this conversation was a few years ago. And it just, to me, we just picked up on that conversation, and deepened it, and broadened it. And what a phenomenal conversation around leadership and democracy, moving forward. And the other is I get the sense of the ILA is at that intersection of leadership theory and practice. And, oh my, if we didn't reflect that today in terms of someone who is a scholarly practitioner, George, and, Ron, in terms of your scholarship, and always taking that with a practical approach. I think, Scott, this really reflected practical wisdom, the theme of your podcast.
Scott Allen 32:50
Did you hear Ron drop practical wisdom a couple of times?
Cynthia Cherrey 32:53
I did. Yes. That was very astute of him and…
George Papandreou 32:57
Which is, of course, what Phronesis means. Yes.
Cynthia Cherrey 33:01
It’s what it means. yes. So, with that, Scott, thank you for convening us. And I'll turn it back to you to do your beautiful summary and wrap that you do.
Scott Allen 33:12
Well, something I love about this conversation is that I feel at times as if I'm at the foot of… Maybe not even to base camp yet of Mount Everest. There's so much to learn, and so much to take in. And this conversation will have me reflecting for some time. And I'm so appreciative, the two of you, for not only taking the time, but as much time as you have to really go a little bit more in-depth in this conversation. So, thank you so much to the three of you today. Have a wonderful weekend. And thank you for the good work that you do for our world. Thank you so much. Okay, everyone. So, the end of part two. To help debrief, I have brought in the ILA's CEO and president, Cyn Cherrey, to help kind of make sense of, actually, both episodes. So, if you've not listened to the first episode, please, please, please make sure you pause and go back and listen to the first episode that really props part two up in a nice way. But let's start with part one a little bit because, Cynthia, you were there to reflect with me after that first episode, what stood out for you after part one? And then we'll go to part two.
Cynthia Cherrey 34:28
Well, Scott, thank you and I have found both of these conversations absolutely fascinating. In part one, Ron Heifetz and George Papandreou have this conversation about democracy illuminated by the leadership experiences that George had as Minister of Foreign Affairs and as the prime minister of Greece. And it just sets it up nicely for part two, which we just heard, which is this deeper conversation. They really delve into democracy and leadership.
Scott Allen 35:07
Yes. And there are a couple of phrases that really stood out for me, especially in part two. Basic values we agree upon and a stomach for conflict. And at one point, I think Ron said, “Do you have a stomach for improvisation because people are nonlinear systems, and we don't know how people are going to behave.” So, those are some things that kind of resonated for me. I loved that segment where he goes into a kind of diagnostic mode. But what stood out for you in the second conversation? What else?
Cynthia Cherrey 35:40
Well, I really appreciated when we asked Ron to talk about democracy in relation to leadership capacities. And his first statement was, “Oh, I didn't prepare.” And I’m going, “Oh my.” For no preparation, it was so authentic and so real. And there were some beautiful pieces that he talked about around with the problems that exist today, and the complexity of our world, and the importance of, as you mentioned, the stomach to deal with it, and the uncertainty. I think it's a brilliant conversation and a question we should each address ourselves around the sense of when Ron talks about the difference between authority and leadership. And this conversation around being an active citizen of your democracy means you do need to think about your own relationships and how you relate to the power of others and the power of yourself. So, to me, this is a brilliant conversation on the issues that we are facing about leadership in this complex world of ours.
Scott Allen 37:03
Yes. And I think that's where we will leave listeners today. Not necessarily, well, there's all kinds of practical wisdom nuggets in those two episodes, but we're not going to tie it up in a bow, we're going to tie it up with a question, and I love that. Thank you so much, Cynthia.
Cynthia Cherrey 37:21
Thank you, Scott.
Scott Allen 37:22
Be well, everyone. As always, thank you for listening.
[End Of Audio]