Dr. Marianne Roux has 30 years of global experience as an HR Executive, Future of Work Strategist, and Professor of Leadership. She holds a Master's degree in HR and Organisational Psychology and is completing her Ph.D. in Leadership in the Future of Work context. She runs Roux Consulting, a global niche consulting firm based in Dublin, Ireland, and regularly teaches at Business Schools worldwide.
She has worked for PWC, Accenture, Deloitte, and Mercer and held two HR Director roles in two countries—Woolworths Food South Africa and Cricket Australia. Her experience spans several industries, and she focuses mainly on the Future of Work Strategy, Leadership Development, Organisation Redesign, and HR transformation.
She has recently published a book on Adaptive HR and a Personal Agility reflection journal, Knowing Your Superpowers is the Key to Your Success in a Changing World, and she is featured in Maturing Leadership: How Adult Development Impacts Leadership.
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in 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
Dr. Marianne Roux has 30 years of global experience as an HR Executive, Future of Work Strategist, and Professor of Leadership. She holds a Master's degree in HR and Organisational Psychology and is completing her Ph.D. in Leadership in the Future of Work context. She runs Roux Consulting, a global niche consulting firm based in Dublin, Ireland, and regularly teaches at Business Schools worldwide.
She has worked for PWC, Accenture, Deloitte, and Mercer and held two HR Director roles in two countries—Woolworths Food South Africa and Cricket Australia. Her experience spans several industries, and she focuses mainly on the Future of Work Strategy, Leadership Development, Organisation Redesign, and HR transformation.
She has recently published a book on Adaptive HR and a Personal Agility reflection journal, Knowing Your Superpowers is the Key to Your Success in a Changing World, and she is featured in Maturing Leadership: How Adult Development Impacts Leadership.
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in 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.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I have a return guest, who has just published a book; she is currently located in Ireland, and this is Dr. Marianne Roux. Dr., with over 30 years as a leadership and leader development researcher and practitioner, Dr. Roux observed that, though there is a significant financial investment in leader development, results are lackluster. Development does not stick, behaviors do not change, and the quality of leadership does not improve. Leaders are increasingly overwhelmed and teams are burnt out and stressed. Her recent Ph.D. research focused on models of leadership and leader development that are a better fit for the complex future we face. She has used this research to develop six critical leader mindsets and practices any leader can develop over time, she has also developed an updated contextual approach to leadership development that delivers significant impact. To translate these mindsets and practices into actions, Marianne further interviewed several organizations and leaders that embody these practices, mindsets, and approaches. So this is all culminated in the book ‘Leadership Fit For The Future Of Work: A Leader's Guide to Navigate Increasing Complexity, Maximize Engagement, Drive Agility, and Achieve Both Horizontal and Vertical Growth.’ Marianne, welcome back. Thank you so much for being with us. What's new with you? What should listeners know?
Marianne Roux 1:41
Well, once I finished the Ph.D., it was really important for me… I'd been doing ongoing leadership development, but it was really important for me to continue to use… You'll see in my Ph.D., actually, there's a case study where I worked with 150 global leaders during COVID, all virtual, which was really tiring, using both models. The model of leadership and the model of leadership development. So the next step for me is really to make sure that I take this into more programs at business schools -- and I don't mean programs, I mean really ongoing development, a very different way of developing -- as well as get it out on podcasts and keynotes. So, there's quite a bit of that happening. I also have another book called ‘Adaptive HR,’ which is about all of HR transformation. So the same thing on that score. So, there's quite a bit happening. And the last thing I'm busy with is I'm doing a piece for executive women. I'm specifically looking at why, for every one woman, we are promoting two or leaving, and we are hollowing out that leadership pipeline for women. So, that's the third piece that probably will be another book in about a year we could talk about.
Scott Allen 2:52
(Laughs) Well, I really, really enjoyed our first conversation with Jonathan Reims, and so appreciated that, and I'm excited to jump into this book. And you kind of start at a really, really fun place, which has really captivated me for the last six or seven years, which is this whole kind of future of work context. And I just released recently, within the last couple of months, an episode with Jonathan Gosling where we really explore a number of different shifts that are occurring. Whether that is digitization, globalization, climate change, or geopolitical shifts, just the seismic nature of some of what's happening is really fascinating. And many of these shifts are converging at once. And so, I love the fact that you kind of bring us into this future of work context at the very, very beginning. We're not thinking about how to train people for what was or develop mindsets and practices for what was, but we're thinking about where we are and where we will be. And so, talk a little bit about that so listeners have an understanding of that future of work context. Critical topic.
Marianne Roux 4:09
Yeah. I think it's a very ill-defined future of work. I think it's very confusing. It's all over LinkedIn, but I think it was hijacked in the last few years by hybrid work. So as the future of work, instead of looking at it holistically and saying, “Let's make sense of the context for leaders and for organizations,” which is that, fundamentally, it was kicked off the future of work by Industry 4.0 in 2014. That's where it started.
Scott Allen 4:37
Yes.
Marianne Roux 4:37
Not the internet. It's automation, AI robotics, and the velocity, and convergence that come from those things. And we've just seen what chat GPT has brought into play, that’s part of Industry 4.0. Of course, in 2017, in Japan, people went, “Hang on, hang on, what happens to humans if machines do all of these tasks?” And that was Industry 5.0, they coined that Industry 5.0. I don't even hear people using 5.0 or engaging with it. So, you have to have a fundamental understanding and make sense for your organization, in your industry, and for you as a leader, what technology is impacting us and the work we do? And what does that mean for the humans and the people in our organization and the skills we need? The hybrid work, yes, makes it extra complex because where's the best work done now? How do we keep our people engaged and connected? Then, as well, there's a massive, massive ESG push; and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging push because people feel very differently about work now. And then, finally, the skills-based talent process has been going on for a very long time, and it's not well executed. So, one of the things I do first, before I even start with the leaders, is to write a future of work strategy for the organization. We have a point of view on it. NASA has one, there are a couple of fantastic ones out there, and the Canadian government has one. You have to have a point of view that's shared by the exec and the board, and understood by the whole organization before you even try and do anything else.
Scott Allen 6:16
Yeah. In the book, you mentioned NASA and Unilever as other options or other organizations. I think it's such an important way of beginning the process. Would you talk a little bit about that skills-based talent management that's a piece of this conversation? Because I think that's something I haven't… And I hadn't heard of Industry 5.0 either. We should come up with Industry 6.0, and we could become famous! (Laughs)
Marianne Roux 6:44
Yeah, let's do that. That'll be our next podcast. So, for me, skill space is really interesting because I still see very bad job descriptions out there that are outdated, that is absolutely unusable, and very fixed hierarchical jobs. If you want agile, adaptive organizations, which everybody's talking about, we really have to understand what are the skills that we need in this organization. Interestingly enough, who does that is actually irrelevant. It can be done by AI or by a human. First, we understand, in all the roles we have, what are the current and future skill requirements? And what are the priorities? Which skills are becoming obsolete, and which ones are new? And what are the priorities in that for us to rescale and upskill our people? If we understand the gap, that's my people's strategy. Am I recruiting for it because I can't develop it? Am I developing it because I can't afford it in the market? And, if then, how am I going to upskill and rescale? So, Novartis, for example, would spend 100 hours a year on rescaling and upskilling its people and building strong curiosity in them so that they're open to the actual learning because that's key. And if you don't understand that, the second piece, and now you say, how does that work? Well, if you look at [Inaudible 8:02] and what they're all writing, a world without jobs is coming thick and fast. So you need a skills ontology. I’m busy building skills ontology for clients all over the world. Then, you need to understand what your people have, what your gaps are, and how you recruit for it. Do you develop it? Then, you deploy it in your organization across projects like NASA. You have a talent marketplace. It's the only way you're going… And it’s tricky, but now HR doesn't like this very much because job descriptions go out the window, we can't job evaluate the same way, we can't remunerate. So, our leaders have to learn to work very differently than they've ever done before. And so, skills are becoming the commodity that people are trading in and the words that they have.
Scott Allen 8:46
So, talk about… I've never heard that phrase before ‘a talent marketplace.’ Would you talk a little bit about that, and then we'll move on to leadership?
Marianne Roux 8:52
Yeah. I love it. So, NASA, again, they've got the future of work. So, they said, “Look, we can only do so much formal development.” And also, we had very high levels of turnover because NASA used to be the only place you could work for space. Suddenly, there's a whole lot of other options and countries, so they were losing talent. So, they said, “How do we develop our talent, how do we keep them interested, and how do we make sure we've got the best skills on the best project?” So if you look at [Inaudible 9:18] to these types of systems, you'll notice the same, basically, projects of work or tours of duty, whether it's BAU or future based, is put on a system that everybody can see. And the skills are put out. It's whether it's hybrid, it's whether all those things, how many hours, and people can put up their hand and say, “I want to work on that.” So, it's a marketplace.
Scott Allen 9:41
Wow.
Marianne Roux 9:42
Now, leaders can also, obviously, ask people who like to go. And so, it's becoming more tours of duty, using my skill sets, and getting all this exposure, and learning happening, and all this cross-functional stuff happening, instead of sitting in a fixed role where I might become obsolete because of technology. I'm not really engaged. I'm not really learning because we're not learning; it’s the most important thing for people. Once they’re paid enough, maybe not the best, but enough, then learning is the next thing, Learning and development, especially younger people. And so, NASA has made a massive shift to this, and a lot of other organizations are doing it. Even if you look at governments, you're starting to see that kind of thing happening.
Scott Allen 10:23
Talk about that real quick.
Marianne Roux 10:26
Yeah. So, the United States government has got some really interesting things happening. They've got all these agreements with the private sector that people can go on tours of duty in and out of the private sector both ways, which I think is fantastic. Especially TakeTalent. They absolutely want TakeTalent. I think it's very good for people to shift across government, not-for-profit, and so on. So, these talent marketplaces are even becoming cross-organizational marketplaces, which is even better when you're reducing stuff, isn't it? Because I've got all these people with this talent, I put them in the talent marketplace, and whoever has a need for that talent can grab it.
Scott Allen 11:02
So, talk about this. And, for listeners, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of give you a general framework of the book, provide you a little bit of context. But then, our goal is that you are enticed to purchase the book because I think there are just some really, really interesting, fun, and innovative ways of thinking about this topic. And so, I think the next thing after we go to this, this space of the future of work context, you start talking a little bit about a new way of thinking about leadership, but then also leadership development. So, would you share some highlights there, Marianne?
Marianne Roux 11:39
Yeah. So, I was really frustrated. 30 years of competencies and traits I sunk my head in, and what also really, really freaked me out is the amount of money we spend, and the fact that every leader I work with has pretty much gotten an MBA, has at least had one or two coaches, and have done several executive development plans and are still woefully inadequate as a leader.
Scott Allen 12:04
Wow.
Marianne Roux 12:05
So, something's not working, right?
Scott Allen 12:07
Yes.
Marianne Roux 12:08
So, I just wanted to understand two things. I want to understand what leadership actually looks like in the future work context. So, I looked at everything that's ever been written, I kid you not, for six years about that topic. And also, everything that's ever been written about leadership development because they’re two different things. People mustn’t confuse it. You need to have a point of view on what leadership is, and you need to have a point of view on how you're going to develop leaders. So, I really found that there was like a 1.0 of leadership, which is the heroes and the traits of command and control. Then there was this fluffy, I'm gonna call it fluffy 2.0, 3.0 that went on, which was charismatic and visionary, but it was all the individual leader, right? Nothing was telling you that this leader is in a social process with people. It's also not an individual leader but a leadership system, shared leadership, that actually delivers things. It was all very individual. It's all about culture, and emotional intelligence. And none of those things are bad. And transformational, and all of those things. The thing is, they’re no longer valid for the future of work contexts. And I see it everywhere. I still see situational leadership. I still see behavior so much. And then, if you really start to look at what Joe Raelin says about leadership, it is a practice. And if you start to think about adult development theory, that it's actually about how I make meaning. And if you start to look at those things that were never included in leadership models, and even Keegan's Immunity to Change, why we don't change, and you start to understand how behavior actually changes and neuroplasticity, then you say, “Actually, maybe leadership is a set of mindsets and practices. And anyone can learn it. And it is shared because it's complex. And no one can be perfect.” So it is shared. It's a shared burden. And it is also very human after COVID. Everybody wants human leadership, they talk about humans. I say imperfect humans leading imperfect humans is kind of what we have here, right?
Scott Allen 14:16
(Laughs)
Marianne Roux 14:17
And when you go to leadership development, it's lifelong development. So, I love the idea of academies. I love what Madonna has done. where you can belong to, let's say, a senior manager Academy, and you may also belong to an R&D Academy. And there is just ongoing learning journeys developed for people over 12 months, which could be a job placement. It could be a podcast, it could be a session of work, an actual three-day session, but it's not, “Here's your program, you're done. Off you go, now you're a leader. Oh, dear, you're a bad leader. Let's give you a coach. Oh, random, it doesn't fit with anything else you've done. Oh, maybe we send you. Oh, you look a bit bored. An executive development program.” It doesn't work. And I think it's gotten multimodal because what I'm finding is people are not reading anymore. I do hope they're going to read my book, but they're not reading, so I'm doing a podcast series with the book as well because people are listening. So, do you have things like podcasts or keynotes? The other important thing about leadership development is I will never use a case study in my life. I do not use case studies. I use the real work in the organization.
Scott Allen 15:27
Yes.
Marianne Roux 15:27
So when I do complex problem solving, I'm like, “Bring your real problem. Okay, you want to…” I just had a client the other week, 100 million by 2027. You're at 50 million now; let's double the growth. Let's look at what stops you from growing. What will stop you? Tell me what the problems are that we need to solve collectively as a leadership team. Then, we start using the learnings and applying them. That's how people are problem-based learning, which we’re writing about right now.
Scott Allen 15:52
Yes. Well, it's such a fascinating puzzle, not only what you talked about with the current context, but then how are we defining leadership? And do we have a shared understanding? In some cases, this is being a little flip, but who cares? Just to be clear, intentional, and aware of what your paradigm is and how you're thinking about the concept of leadership. And then, from a leader development standpoint, how do we scale an experience, a learning experience that, to your point, truly has an impact? Because I think, if we were, and I've kind of picked on universities quite a bit in some of my writing, Marianne, where every university and every college of business is saying, “Oh, we develop leaders,” but none of them have reported any. If they actually were, they would be singing from the mountaintops because I haven't seen that report yet from the University of XYZ, that, “Hey, we actually did. Here's the validation.”
Marianne Roux 16:54
No evidence whatsoever.
Scott Allen 16:57
It’s a complex challenge. It's very, very, very complex to figure out how to do this work well. For listeners, Marianne suggested this a little bit with some of the adult development content, but at a really fun conversation with a gentleman named Peter Ray, who's at Parker Hannifin, a Fortune 250, 300 organization. And, yes, they've kind of boiled it down to "better humans, better performance." And so, they're focusing on the virtues and trying to scale that as a foundational element within the organization, but it's complicated. It's very complicated. But I love your thinking about the multimodal. How do we do this? Taking people offline for four days or six days and doing hypothetical case studies that have nothing to do with the work. I love how you're thinking about that because there are better ways to do the work.
Marianne Roux 17:51
Yeah. 100%. And you'll see in the book I talk about sprints. And, for me, the best way, if you're doing these learning journeys… Now, I broke the book so that leadership developers can develop people, but leaders themselves can also just pick it up and do their development, which I think is even better. And so, I talk about there's a few things: Choose one thing to work on. One thing. Choose to work on sensemaking. And then, for eight or 12 weeks, do some work with people where they’re learning 15 minutes a week. There's a podcast; there is a keynote. Maybe, at the end of the 12 weeks, there might be a day that you come together and unpack all the learning and apply it into your real context and actually write a future book strategy. It's got to be like that. And, at the start of it, before we even start, I put Bob Keegan's work in there, do an immunity to change map. Here's the thing I want to change. Here's the behavior I'm currently doing that’s stopping you from changing because you've got to unlearn some stuff as well. So, you sprint, and then you sprint the next thing, and then you sprint the next thing. And you do this year after year after year, but you try and be 1% better every month because it's not about cramming six days of concepts into your head, and then you walk out of there completely changed because that's not how behavior change works. Behavior is habits, mindsets, and practices. Practice means practice, practice, practice, like piano.
Scott Allen 19:19
Yes. And I will often say that many of us have this beautiful practice field to practice 40 hours a week in the United States, at least 40 plus hours a week. We aren't always viewing it as a place to practice. Optimism, emotional intelligence, navigating stress, whatever it is, we often don't view it that way. And I think we miss out on that learning because I think Keegan calls it the curriculum of life. There's a lot of curriculum right in front of us each and every day. As a parent, as an employee, as a leader, there's so much. And, oftentimes, life presents us with some of these as opportunities to grow, to develop, to practice those skill sets and those mindsets if we see it through that lens.
Marianne Roux 20:09
Yeah. And I think it's two-way. I think the organization has to create these academies and really work with it in terms of… And using technology. This is the next thing I was gonna say. If you want to scale it, you have to use a good learning experience platform and good micro-learning platforms that is easy. That comes, like we use search nine, comes into somebody's mobile phone 15 minutes a week. Here's a tool. Here's something. So, I will often do a program over nine months, and then I will send micro-learning of 15 minutes to people to reinforce it [Inaudible 20:46]. And it's not difficult to do; we don't even have to develop the content. I'm teaching people how to curate content because there's so much great content out there.
Scott Allen 20:56
Yes. I just started a newsletter in recent months, and that's really the goal of the newsletter. Is to curate some content that… Because, again, to the point you mentioned a little bit ago, that kind of trite. I get so tired of the statement on LinkedIn that has 30,000 likes. It's just some “Leaders never follow” or some simplistic overgeneralization that probably is not sending the right message, but it seems to be. That's what we need to do, Marianne, is just create a bunch of memes that are like a direct meme. (Laughs)
Marianne Roux 21:35
I’m telling you. I think the worst is when the thought leader puts their photo on it with a quote that's normally not even their quote, and that goes up every week. Oh, that's not leadership development.
Scott Allen 21:47
I want to make sure I capture this because you had mentioned a resource that you're using for the micro-learning, the platform. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Marianne Roux 21:54
Yeah. So, I work with a wonderful company called The Training Room Online. They actually do LXV. They do virtual reality and augmented reality. They can do animation. They're out of South Africa, and their partner was search nine. They did this wonderful project in Dubai, for example, at the Dubai airport, where they've got different sections of the airport competing with each other for how much people are doing it, and who's winning the quizzes, and so on. And it just drives customer service; it drives performance for over a week. And it goes to the mobile phone. So you pre-load what we call the learning retention pieces. So you'll decide, “I'm gonna do a quiz, I'm going to do a podcast.” So, you preload that all. And it goes out by mobile phone. 15 minutes, that's it. Done. You can also ask for a peer coach if you're struggling with something. You can go, “I need help with this,” and people start helping each other. You can also start to have… I love the idea of user-created content where, for me, as you're learning, there must be a space where if we're talking about sensemaking, and leaders are learning about that, they themselves are looking at more things and posting that for each other so the social learning is occurring. All those things have got to be tapped into.
Scott Allen 23:07
Well, I love the phrasing and the notion that we need to leverage technology. I think there's a fear of artificial intelligence, and large language models, and VR, AR, and all of these technologies enabling disruption. And I shouldn't say fear, but we oftentimes hear the worst-case scenarios. Again, the meme with the picture of the Terminator as it's talking about AI.
Marianne Roux 23:32
(Laughs) I saw that.
Scott Allen 23:34
And I'm not discrediting the need to have concerns and to be aware of, and I think there's a lot of opportunity. There's a company for listeners called Arist, which is short for Aristotle. But Arist is a text-based learning platform. So, to your point, you can create and design a “class,” quote-unquote, which is a daily text that people are consuming. You can embed links, you can embed keynotes, you can embed a TED talk or a podcast. And, to your point, it's how do we leverage some of this technology? Marianne, I've had some episodes on the podcast where, at some point, we're going to get to the holodeck. I'm going to be able to put on my AppleVision glasses and actually practice conflict with what feels like another real person in navigating a difficult conversation. I think there's a lot of opportunity there if we have our eyes wide open and we're taking advantage of it.
Marianne Roux 24:32
I love it. Even when I was a nonprofit board director, we gave virtual reality classes to our funders put them in a room, and took them across all our projects in Africa and Cambodia, and they walked through everything. And they literally have a visceral experience of the projects that we do that we can't fly everybody out to all the time because of costs. And we actually measured the empathy and the impact of that on funding, on giving. So, I'm working with an LND team right now. I'm restructuring them here in Dublin. We've taught them AI, and we've had so much fun. And they've got ethical guidelines, so we work very hard on that so they're not putting proprietary content in there or anything like that. But we did a skills ontology for them in one area of their business that they've been working on for probably a year now. We did that for them in probably about half an hour using Bard. And then, we took that same skills, ontology, and we put it into using AI. Something that took them another three months was that people wanted to know how to develop it and what development programs were available. we did the right little prompt, and within five minutes, we got them every single program in Ireland and globally, our way of developing. And then we asked for podcasts, and then we asked for books. And it just spat it out. And you could see the fear of, “What am I going to do now?” And I said, “What you're gonna do now is start to think about the future of work, the skills required. You're going to take this to the leaders, like, you're going to set up the academies, you're going to get the learning technology in place.” So, we're retraining that team, We're training them on curation of content. Now they're not sitting there for three months going through the internet trying to find… Phoning people. They couldn't believe it. They could not believe what we showed them.
Scott Allen 26:20
I was working with an organization, and we brainstormed. And I just put the question that the humans had been working on for 25 minutes, and I think each group came up with about seven or eight ideas. And I put the question I'd given the humans into chat GPT, and, in real-time, the system, I said, “75 ideas, one sentence each,” and it… (Laughs)
Marianne Roux 26:45
Yep. I know.
Scott Allen 26:48
Now, I always say this is the Internet, use with caution, etc.
Marianne Roux 26:52
Yeah. And quality control. Your job now is to look at quality, right? And relevance. Yeah?
Scott Allen 26:57
Yes. But it was an interesting juxtaposition because the participants were like, “Oh, my gosh.”
Marianne Roux 27:04
Yeah. 100%.
Scott Allen 27:06
“We have seven that just did 75.” And again, it's gonna take humans to work through, curate what's realistic, what isn't, but even that list could… If I've printed that out ahead of time, that can spark dialogue more quickly. Okay. So, I want to make sure we get to contextual intelligence because… So now, you've taken us through several kinds of beginning, foundational elements of the book. But then we have these practices and mindsets that you've identified that, from a future of work context, are going to be critical. And so the first one I want to get to is just contextual intelligence. Would you share a little bit about that?
Marianne Roux 27:48
Yeah. For me, that is the start. I say to people, “Don't assume that your simulators and your board and people like that actually understand the context of the future of work and what it means for us. So, I said to HR, and that's why I'm doing the Agile transformation work, “You need to help the organization make sense of the future.” But, for me, a leadership capability, a leadership mindset, and practice is I make sense of and act on the changes around me. And contextual intelligence comes from [Inaudible 28:18]. But, of course, the other two amazing thinkers are Deborah Ancona, with sensemaking and dynamic capabilities, and McGrath, with her book Seeing Around Corners. So, I really draw from that base. I've got two quotes in there, and I'll share with you, as Rita says, “In high uncertainty conditions, you need to plan to learn, not just plan to prove you have a right.” Stop pretending you know all the answers. Deborah says, “Do not simply overlay your existing framework on a new situation; it may be very different.” So, for me, it's going with a real open mind, a beginner's mind, and really looking at what this is telling us. I work with this amazing man called Mteto Nyati. Now, he is a wonderful man. He's a chairman of companies in South Africa. He's led several of his big companies there. And he says, “Context matters, and we are living in an environment today where there's so much rapid change in all dimensions of work and human life.” And he says, “There's a challenge for us, we need to move away from a lot of things we did before like emissions.” So, he talks about ESG, he talks about hybrid, and he talks about all those things. He says, “I call it dynamic complexity.” It's not static complexity; it's dynamic complexity. It's not detailed complexity. So, our leaders love, of course, they're very linear thinkers, aren't they? So, how do you work with dynamic complexity? Well, you have to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, and you've got to have sensemaking. So, like Rita says, “You see around corners.” You read. When I ask leaders, “What do you do?” Because they're all very busy, they’re constantly reading, listening to podcasts, or speaking to peers or the people on the ground. Constantly. And that is absolutely critical. So, for me, it starts with contextual intelligence because you don't get the context right, you won't apply all these competencies of change management, or whatever you learn, it's not applicable.
Scott Allen 30:19
And I think you used a phrase that I just love: that beginner's mind. I just listened to a discussion between Lex Friedman and Jeff Bezos, it was probably a two-hour interview that Lex had done with Bezos. I hadn't watched a lot of interviews with Bezos, but he is a fascinating gentleman when it comes to his process of decision-making. And in the interview I just posted on LinkedIn this morning, in the interview, he kind of talks about some of his principles that helped him avoid the trap of stepping into some of these cognitive biases. And it was just really, really interesting because he understands that the context shifts. He understands that some of the times he's wrong. He understands that he's not seeing around corners or making sense of something correctly. And I just really loved how he had kind of talked about operationalizing the awareness of the fact that he is subject to these cognitive biases and building in hacks to try and help. It's not always going to work, but to try and help him and his team avoid them as much as possible so that they can stay agile. Really, really interesting.
Marianne Roux 31:29
Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it's a really important skill set: sensemaking. And it's something I help people. We map the mess we read, I love mess mapping, it’s one of my favorite tools. We look for patterns, we look for paradoxes, we look for weak signals. We discuss, and we stand away, and we talk about how we feel about it. Are we scared? Because we can't be scared going into it. And you'll see these leaders. I'm just reading Amy Edmondson's book now, which I absolutely love, the ‘Right Kind of Wrong.’ They do experiments, they do pilots, these leaders, to test out. They do probes to test out the future and their understanding of it. They’re leaning to it, then don't walk away from it.
Scott Allen 32:08
Yeah. Well, for listeners, I hope we have given you enough of a taste of how Marianne is thinking about leadership and leader development. And I think it's incredibly valuable. It's an incredibly valuable perspective for you to have on your radar. So, I hope that you act on that suggestion and explore her work. And you've done a couple of things in this text that I really enjoy as well. Not only do you help us understand, in a very digestible way, that sensemaking and contextual intelligence are important, but you also then provide us with some resources and some things that you have found valuable to help the reader really explore that topic in greater depth. So, this isn't a thick read; it's a “Hey, here are some very, very important things to have on your radar. Here are some ways to go a little bit deeper in each of these areas and to do your own exploration,” because, as you said, it's a lifelong process. Staying curious and staying open is critical for each one of us. Anything else you want to say about the work before we begin to wind down, Marianne?
Marianne Roux 33:14
No, that was what was so important to me. And I could have gone and written all those things up for people, but I wanted them to understand, okay, so this is leadership, this is the context, this is what leadership is, this is what leadership development looks like in the future of work. Now, here's six months, it's in practice. That's what each one of them; this is what we know about them. Here's how you can set up a sprint for yourself. Start with these resources. Keep going. Prioritize it. I wanted anyone to pick it up and actually start their development and take ownership of it. I wanted to hack the current thinking a little bit, and I hope that it does make people think a little bit. Yep, I
Scott Allen 33:55
Yep, I think it does. I think it does, for sure. Well, you had just mentioned a resource, and I had not heard of Amy Edmondson’s most recent books, so that was great to hear about. Maybe you choose to talk about that, but I always ask guests what you've been listening to, or reading, or streaming. What's something that's caught your attention in recent times that you have found interesting? And so, maybe you can kind of conclude with that. What's caught your attention?
Marianne Roux 34:22
She's obviously written about psychological safety for quite some time. And I think psychological safety is one of those things that, again, is so confusing for people, and they don't really know what they don't know. It's a bit like growth mindset, everybody thinks they know what it is, but it's actually quite complex. And what she's done is she has really unpacked failure, and what it means, and why we're not comfortable with failure, and why it's so important for us to fail well in a complex world and how to actually fail well. And I think the book is a game changer. And she's literally on top of every bestselling list with this book because she deserved to be. And she really makes it very personal as well about all her own failures. But I think it's a much more realistic way for us to say, “You know what? In this future of work, I don't just have to be comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, but also with failure and experimentation.” But she also talks about not doing stupid things and common failures. Make intelligent failures. And she really talks about how to differentiate between the two, and I just have such high regard for her and her work. It's a beautiful book to read. Easy to read if people want to read it over the holidays.
Scott Allen 35:35
Failing well. If you're learning, you're failing, that's an indicator that you're working at your edge, or that you are advancing, is if you're failing, I think. If you're not failing, if you don't ever have that feeling of butterflies in your stomach of, “Oh, gosh, I don't know how this is gonna go…” It makes me reflect, Marianne, on when I became very interested in this topic of what we could call technologies enabling disruption. It was probably seven years ago, and I knew nothing about the topic, but I started to engage with experts. I started to learn alongside my students because I didn't have the expertise. And, over time, I've become more and more dangerous, at least when it comes to these conversations, and better understand some of the nuances and complexities of it. By no means am I a technologist, but I've had to put myself out there to be not the sage on the stage but the person literally learning alongside my students with the experts standing in front of us. And, there's some failure there in putting myself in situations where I don't understand half the conversation. (Laughs) That means I'm learning
Marianne Roux 36:47
Yeah. And I do that with my leadership development and my models. I develop them, and then I test them out on real clients, and I go, “Are you willing to do this with me?” And I'm like, “I don't quite know what I was doing.” And they go, “No, that's okay. We'll work it out together.” And I think I love working like that with my clients when things are more evolving, and we're testing a few things, and we're shaping it as we go, rather than, “Here's the whole thing we're going to do. And forever, this is it.” I think that time is over. I think we're in a time of procreation, learning, experimentation, scaling, adjusting, and measuring because we really should be measuring what we do to improve it. And technology can help us with that.
Scott Allen 37:27
Hmm. Well, my reflection for listeners, really quickly, is I was just in Copenhagen recently for the International Studying Leadership Conference. And, of course, Copenhagen is known for its fine dining, and I had not eaten in Michelin-star restaurants before, but I know the exact moment I became more appreciative of food and what can be done with food. And that happened in Copenhagen about a week and a half ago. And so, I'm listening to this book called ‘Unreasonable Hospitality.’ And it was written by a restauranter who had the best restaurants in the world, and kind of their approach to thinking about a service and how they think about that. And so, that's been an interesting diversion from leadership and leader development. But you know what? In some ways, there are a lot of similarities. And so, that's been a fun exploration. ‘Unreasonable Hospitality.’ So, I'm just getting into it now, but I'm seeing a lot of connections, and a lot of neurons are firing. (Laughs)
Marianne Roux 38:33
I think we have to read very widely because everything's connected. And it's fantastic when you read something, I'm like, I see things everywhere that I go, “Oh, that's that. And this is connected to that.” And I think [Inaudible 38:50] curious. And you're open, and you're willing to try things. That's when the insights, the connections, and the neurons fire in the mind and bolt into the brain.
Scott Allen 39:00
Well, there are just incredible museums in the city, whether it's the National Museum or we went to a fascinating exhibit on Pussy Riot at The Louisiana Museum. And that was incredible from just, again, looking at that from activism or from trying to start a movement to push back on what's happening in Russia. Fascinating. So, yes, we went to the Workers Museum, and that was really, really interesting to look at the history of Denmark from that perspective. And so, yes, in the curriculum of life, back to Kagan, it's right there in front of us if we choose to view it through that lens. Well, Marianne, I really, really appreciate your time today. Thank you for the good work that you're doing. And I look forward to our next conversation when that next book comes out. And we still have, in our first dialogue, you had kind of put something out about Mandela as an aside, I still want to get to that conversation as well, at some point.
Marianne Roux 40:01
Yeah. There's actually a big conversation we need to have because I'm working with two people now who run Mandela leadership programs, and I think we need to pick that up at some point. One person is doing it very much at a global leadership level, and she's trying to impact. They’re both South African. And the other one is very much about Mandela, who gave them access to all his writings and himself and wanted to be portrayed as not a perfect human, and not an icon, but somebody who made lots of mistakes, and lots of failures, and lots of learning. And it's called ‘The Champion Within.” And so, we could definitely have another conversation about Mandela at some point.
Scott Allen 40:36
We will. We will.
Marianne Roux 40:38
Okay.
Scott Allen 40:39
Yeah. be well. Thank you so much.
Marianne Roux 40:40
Thank you. It's a big pleasure. Take care.
Scott Allen 40:41
Be well. Bye-bye.
Marianne Roux 40:41
Bye.
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