Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Megan Reitz - I Explore Phenomena

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 242

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Dr. Megan Reitz is Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University and Adjunct Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School. She focuses on how we create the conditions for transformative dialogue at work and her research is at the intersection of leadership, change, dialogue and mindfulness. She is on the Thinkers50 ranking of global business thinkers and is ranked in HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers listing.

Megan has written Dialogue in Organizations and Mind Time and she has just published Speak Out, Listen Upwhich is the second edition of her bestselling book Speak Up, with Financial Times Publishing. Speak Up was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year 2020.

Megan is a contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. She has presented her research on the BBC, CNBC and Deutsche Welle and she writes for numerous academic and practice-based journals. Her research on employee activism was nominated for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award 2021 and her TED talk on the topic has been viewed more than one and a half million times.

Her latest research focuses on ‘spaciousness’; how, whilst attending to the task, we can also create, hold and value the space to innovate, reflect, learn and develop relationships, in workplaces that are increasingly experienced as instrumental and addicted to busyness.

She is mother to two wonderful teenage daughters who test her regularly on her powers of mindfulness and dialogue.

A Quote From This Episode

  • "Many leaders and managers I work with are lovely...but they've got these titles and labels that mean that they're intimidating."


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

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 so much for checking in wherever you are in the world today. I have Dr Megan Reitz, and is an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School Oxford University an adjunct professor of leadership and dialog at Hult International Business School. She focuses on how we can create the conditions for transformative dialog at work, and her research is at the intersection of leadership, change, dialog, and mindfulness. She is on the Thinkers50 ranking of global business thinkers and is ranked in HR magazine's most influential thinkers list. Megan has written ‘Dialog in Organizations’ and ‘Mind Time,’ and she has published ‘Speak Out, Listen Up,’ which is the second edition of her best-selling book, ‘Speak Up’ with Financial Times publishing. ‘Speak Up’ was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year in 2020. Megan is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. She has presented her research on the BBC, CNBC, and she writes for numerous academic and practice-based journals. Her research on employee activism was nominated for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award in 2021, and her TED talk on the topic has been viewed more than a million and a half times. I watched that today. Good work. Her latest research focuses on spaciousness. How, whilst attending to the task, we can also create, hold, and value the space to innovate, reflect, learn, and develop relationships in workplaces that are increasingly experienced as instrumental and addicted to busyness. She is the mother of two wonderful teenage daughters who test her regularly on her powers of mindfulness and dialog. It sounds like a laboratory, a simulation, a 24-hour, 365, 18-year simulation you've entered. 

 

Megan Reitz  1:51 

And I didn't sign up for it, Scott. Nobody told me. Nobody told me at the beginning.

 

Scott Allen  1:56 

I'm in a similar simulation, but it's just all about emotional intelligence. 

 

Megan Reitz  2:01

I gave up on that a while back.

 

Scott Allen  2:02 

Examples of her work and her details can all be found in the show notes. Megan, I am so excited to have a conversation with you, and I want to start in maybe a place that you even aren't expecting as I read the TED Talk statistic right there, a million and a half views, just congratulations. That's wonderful. But you had me on your website, and you are, in my mind, what we need as academics. I'm being very, very biased, and that's going to frustrate some people when I say that. But I have this newsletter and this podcast, and there's just incredible work that academics are doing. All of it is behind a paywall, and I can't find people. This newsletter that I want to put out every week, and listeners, you can find a link in the show notes; very few academics are active in blogging and posting their work in accessible places where the general public can find it. And what that does is it creates this vacuum, and it creates a space for places like Bain, or Gallup, or McKinsey, all valuable in their own right, but they're kind of commanding the space when it comes to setting the narrative around how business people learn. And so, I love that I can visit your website. There are some blog posts and resources. There's a lot there that I can grab, such as the TED Talk. Again, the work is getting out there to the public. So I would just love to start there a little bit because I think, for some listeners, especially some of the academics, it's not necessarily a comfortable, normal space for us. It's not the thing to kind of be out there on LinkedIn or the thing to be putting ourselves out there into the media, but I think it's critical. I think it's so important, and I love that you're doing that.

 

Megan Reitz  3:47 

Thank you. I'm not the world's best on social media by any stretch of the imagination. I can just about manage to be okay on LinkedIn, but I do use it, and I will be using it quite purposefully. I think the reason why I'm drawn to Ted, I'm drawn to blogs is because my method of choice, I suppose, for years and years, has been action research, and specifically, cooperative inquiry. So, I explore phenomena, but in inquiry and in dialog with others as co-researchers and co-participants. Therefore, of course, what I quite like doing is putting stuff out in a world that is not neat and not finished, and it's not at a stage of “Here's the answer.” It's always like, “Here's something I'm thinking about and something that's just happened to me. Let me put it up there and let me find out what you all think about that,” because that's my method. My method is in inquiry with others, and so if it sits behind a paywall where I don't get to see people's reactions to it, then I'm the poorer for it. So, it links, I think, very much to the method that I tend to use. 

 

Scott Allen  5:10 

Well, and of course, that method then also has you embedded; that might be the wrong phrasing, but you're engaging with people doing the work consistently. And we're not sitting in a building writing another paper about the Big Five Personality traits. We are actually interacting with individuals doing the work. And I think that's another thing that, at times, my personal biases were a little too far from it. Does that make sense? Do you agree or disagree? How do you think about that? 

 

Megan Reitz  5:39 

I am obsessed with impact, with seeing people experiment with ideas and learn with me, preferably, with my research at hand. And experimentation, learning, developing new things, and trying again. And that is my research as well. So, it's all sort of mixed in together, but it's vital for me that I allow people to think differently and point out things that they may not have looked at previously but then want to experience and experiment with, particularly in the workplace. So, how do we create workplaces that enable us to flourish? And we do some absurd stuff in the workplace, such as meetings. Most meetings are absurd. So, I want to be out there with people creating spaces where we can just pause and say, why are we doing this? What are the habits that we've got stuck in, and what might we reflect on that will enable us to experiment and then move forward and change things so that we have workplaces where we can be a little bit more human?

 

Scott Allen  6:55 

Yes. And workplaces that the individual, the human being feels… You had this beautiful phrase. One thing I've loved about this podcast is that, at times, people will make certain comments, or they'll have certain phrasings that have just stuck with me. And as I was doing some research for a conversation, you were being interviewed by a media outlet, and you made a comment. You said, “A question I like to ask individuals is, well, what happens when you speak up around here? What happens?” And it's just such a beautiful question because it's tragic when we have these environments where people don't feel like they can speak up. And, of course, you can talk in a couple of moments about some of the ramifications when people don't feel like they can, but we're kind of bumping up against some of that psychological safety literature, and we're bumping up against a number of different topics. But even when we have these environments where people don't feel that they can speak up, the waste, the drama, it's absolutely mind-boggling, and it's tragic in a lot of ways. So, your mission of how we create healthier workplaces is very, very admirable. “What happens when people speak up around here?” What are the answers you get to that question? I'm fascinated.

 

Megan Reitz  8:16 

I have to say probably a lot of negative answers, generally. It's an interesting one. It started 10 years ago pretty much; I started my research with John Higgins on a project called ‘Speaking Truth to Power.’ And, at the time, with the first organization that I was inside inquiring with, and I tell the story a lot, a leader had sort of tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Megan, we've got a bit of a problem. All these people over here, all these employees, the junior employees, are not speaking up.” And we need them. We need their ideas. We need them to tell us when they've messed up because we don't want to be on the newspaper's front page. VW Emission scandal had just happened and rocked a lot of major organizations, and they said, “So, Megan, they're not speaking up. Can you go and make them speak up?” And so I went, with my research hat on, I went over to speak to these employees, and it's a true story that, really, the first thing I said was, “So what happens when you speak up around here?” They said, “Last time somebody spoke up round here, they disappeared.”

 

Scott Allen  9:31 

Did they lean in and say it really quietly like that? 

 

Megan Reitz  9:35 

And I was like, “Right. In what way did they disappear?” And it was a true story. Somebody had challenged the chief executive in a town hall meeting. Actually, this had happened quite a long time ago, but the story was just so good that it was reverberating. It probably still reverberates in the same organization. And sure thing, the following week, this employee was no longer there. Of course, nobody actually knew whether the employee had already resigned and was leaving, and therefore said what they wanted in the meeting because they were going, nobody had checked out the story. And I think that's quite important, actually; the nuance gets completely lost in this. 

 

Scott Allen  10:16 

Oh yes, yeah, the narrative bias. We just fill in the blanks and create the story.

 

Megan Reitz  10:20 

Absolutely. So, what happens when you speak up around here depends, but a lot of people fear speaking up. Mainly, people fear being perceived negatively, or they fear upsetting or embarrassing the other person, and they associate speaking up with conflict, and they associate conflict with meaning that they won't be liked and they won't be in a relationship and that's a dangerous place to be in the workplace. But I think, actually, another response to that question, which people often mean but don't say straight away, is, “Well, what happens when you speak up around here?” “It depends on your status and authority. It depends on the way we perceive power in this particular system. And if you're perceived as powerful and as having status and authority, and the titles and labels that go with that, then your experience can be obviously very different if you don't have those labels. That really meant that John and I, over the last ten years, have particularly explored. I suppose you could say power is the architecture of our conversations at work. Therefore, if an organization needs to change what I call their conversational habits -- so, in other words, if they need people to say different sorts of things and they need to listen to different sorts of voices, then they've got to examine the way that they construct power, status, and authority, and they got to talk about it. But, beautifully, ironically, power is the last thing that most people want to talk about because it's all a bit awkward. 

 

Scott Allen  12:19 

Well, Megan, I was in an organization; this might have been four months ago, and the founder was in the room. And he kind of stood up, and he said, “Anyone in here can talk to me anytime they want to. I have an open door, and people have come and talked to me.” And I can just see the nonverbals of the room, “No, we can't. We can't, save us.” (Laughs) But it's so interesting too because I think, in his mind, he believed that. And even as he's saying that no one's willing to say.

 

Megan Reitz  12:51 

It's wonderfully, wonderfully ironic the moment when a leader leans forward and says, “Can you all speak to me? Do you feel comfortable speaking to me?”

 

Scott Allen  13:03 

“We’re good, right? Very good. Yes, we are. Oh yes, all the time. I talked to you two times a couple of years ago.”

 

Megan Reitz  13:08 

There are a couple of things here that really came up in our research and that are relevant to that. One really we all need to… Well, we need to engage with both of them, but the first one is something that we call the superiority illusion, and that is the fact that most of us, all of us, pretty much think we're better at listening than we're perceived to be by others. This is a very well-known phenomenon. We rate ourselves on our intent to listen, we rate other people on their behavior, and so there's a gap. And so, already, we're all thinking, “Well, I'm good at listening, and I'm approachable, I'm really quite lovely, so there won't be an issue.” And many leaders and managers I work with are lovely. They're lovely people, but they've got these titles and labels that, of course, mean that they're intimidating. And the second concept, if you like, that we look at is called Advantage Blindness. And when we have some of the titles and labels that convey status and authority in a particular system, we very often don't notice them. Whereas, in a system, when we have the lower status labels, it's really, really obvious. We can see the impact. So, your poor chief executive is sitting there. So, in fact, our first article for Harvard Business Review was called ‘The Problem with Saying My Door is Always Open.’ We have well-meaning leaders that think, “Well, I'm pretty good at this. I'm good at listening. People have spoken to me before; therefore, that proves the point.” They are well-intentioned, and they give out these invitations, but, of course, people don't want to upset them. If you want somebody to be able to disagree with you, to point out a blind spot, and you're in a position of authority, you're going to have to try really hard to help them to disagree with you because they don't want to.

 

Scott Allen  15:16 

Yes. And it's amazing because also another little nuance of this conversation, I had an authority figure once, this was in school that I worked in, we were doing a retreat. Very, very expensive retreat, one of these meetings where everyone's offline for a few days, expensive consultants, et cetera, et cetera. So, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars. And we're probably no more than maybe 40 minutes into the conversation, and, at one point, because the norms were created over, this is a safe space for us to ideate and create and build and c kind of explore. And I made a comment, and this authority figure looked at me and said, “Well, if we're going to be negative for the next two days, we aren't going to get very far.” And boom, literally, you could see that the thing was done in the minds of participants. And I gently pushed back. I said, “I apologize if that came off as negative. It's not meant to be negative; I just really hope we push new boundaries and get somewhere really, really cool because I think there's a lot of opportunity here.” And then there was kind of a gruff comment after that. And so, it was amazing. Everyone remembered that everyone witnessed that, no one else put themselves out there, and the retreat was basically then just kind of this person's agenda railroaded forward. And, ultimately, what then was invested in hundreds of thousands of dollars failed. And it's amazing because leaders also have to be so skilled, so skilled at, even if you do open that door of, “I want that feedback, let's have dialog,” they have to be so skilled at actually living into that because the memories are long, and it'll shut people down. And again, to your point, that fear, and some of that anxiety, and all of that kind of takes over, and it's tragic when it comes to decision-making in organizational life. 

 

Megan Reitz  17:13 

By the time this podcast comes out, this might have been published. I have an article coming out again in HBR with Amy Edmondson, who, obviously, is very well known for her work with psychological safety. And we look at exactly these sorts of what I might call conversational failures that people around can spot, but there's never a pause to kind of mend them, or examine them, or realize the implications of them. A lot of Amy's work is about intelligent failures. With this idea of if we're changing habits, if we're looking to be even better, if you like, at dialog, then just like anything else that we're trying to learn that we don't know yet, we're going to mess up, we're going to speak up, it's going to come out wrong, primarily, because we're probably nervous as well. And leaders will have the right intent, but they're going to send signals. They're completely oblivious to it; they don't even realize that they've just shut everybody down.

 

Scott Allen  18:19 

Totally oblivious. This person was totally oblivious. 

 

Megan Reitz  18:21

It happens all the time.

 

Scott Allen  18:22

Yeah.  

 

Megan Reitz  18:23 

This is the article that we've just written. How can we see these failures as failures that are to be expected and then learnt from so that we improve? As opposed to what I see all the time, it is a leadership team doing a kind of psychological safety initiative, if you like, and, “Right, let's make it safe to speak up.” And then there's this sort of underlying assumption that, now, everybody's going to do this really expertly, but of course, they're not. So, then, we need the spaces where we're able to identify things like that and learn from them. That leader needs the capacity for somebody to say, “You know that moment you may not have even realized, but the way you responded shut down. Now, what could we do next time?” And when you don't see that learning happening, it's a double whammy. I've got my head in my hands even more because there's no possibility of furthering and deepening that. 

 

Scott Allen  19:29 

Yes. Again, back to kind of, I don't know what the word I'm looking for here is, but the irony then is that even in those moments when that individual is messing up, they still are shutting themselves off from that feedback. They aren't aware of it, and they continue it. And so, it's so fascinating. It's just subtle. It can be nonverbal cues, like, “Come on, let's hurry up. You're wasting my time right now.” It could just be nonverbals. It can be verbal cues. But I love your phrasing there. I think Brene Brown calls it rumbling. How are we going to rumble? We're going to start this initiative. Do we have some norms? We are going to make mistakes, but when we do make mistakes, are we going to elevate those mistakes so we can learn from them? And there's some pre-work that probably has to be done before, just the obligatory phrase of “No idea is a bad one, let's have a great conversation and go,” and then all of a sudden, what happens is what I described earlier. We're going to mess up. We're not going to be perfect. There's going to be mistakes. And even when those mistakes are made, is the individual authority figure open to hearing that? And if they're not, we could go to the complexity and complex adaptive problems that organizations are facing right now, and you see this, you have leaders really making decisions in a vacuum because everyone's sitting in the room and they disagree. No one's saying it. The leader thinks they're walking out with a unified front. They don't have it. The water cooler conversation happens afterward. And again, time, energy, money, it's lost. 

 

Megan Reitz  21:08 

There's a sort of education process that I call the optimism bubble. When you're in a role like a manager or a senior leader, we tend to be in this sort of optimism bubble. We've done a very extensive survey with about 22,000 now employees around the world on speaking up and listening up. And one thing's fairly clear is that, as you get more senior, you are likely to think that people around you are speaking up more than they actually are, and you're likely to overestimate your listening skills and your approachability at the same time. So, all this means that you're in this lovely optimism bubble, whether you think that you're hearing what you need to. So, the very first point of the work that I do with leadership teams is to just burst the bubble. Just say, “No, you're not,” you so aren't hearing what you need to hear. Even if you think, no, we just had a very great conversation. No, you're still not hearing what you need to hear. And then, of course, then we go to how can we ask? Because there is an irony. You can't just sort of say, “Give me some feedback.” How do you get people essentially to disagree with you? How are you going to frame a question where people are able to do that? How do you look at whether… Who are the people that you go to for opinions and advice? Are you in a kind of echo chamber? And how do you respond when people do disagree with you? That is the moment. That's the moment to be mindful, and a lot of my other research is in mindful leadership. How can you notice and observe that in the moment, and then choose your response? And, of course, none of us are good at that all the time. We need a wingman or a wingwoman or two who’re there to nudge us in the ribs and say, “You've forgotten. Do that differently, and ask that in a different way.” So, we need to prepare to learn. We need to be able to spot things as they happen, and then we need to get better at learning all the time. And that's the other point in this article is we need to learn to learn. How are we learning? What do we need to improve in order to get better at that?

 

Scott Allen  23:19 

And so much then of this gets into how are we going to dialog? And, of course, that's another area of expertise that you bring to the table. How are we going to have these conversations? Bring forth multiple perspectives? And again, when it's these complex adaptive challenges, we could call them a number of different things, but when there's no authority figure we can call in the world to say, “Hey, how do we reduce our turnover by 5%? Give me the four things. What's the recipe?” That doesn't exist. It's a group of people co-creating their best guess as the next experiment or series of experiments that we run to see if we can move the needle. And that's going to require some dialog. And so maybe I think we could prop up another conversation for the future, but are there some things that are just critical when it comes to… You've mentioned mindfulness, I imagine this is in there, but what are some of the critical elements of then engaging in a healthy dialog to try and get to our best guess as to how to move forward?

 

Megan Reitz  24:23 

I'm going to say one thing that isn't practical in the sense that I'm not going to kind of narrow down and go for something really pragmatic because I want to just point out something that all of this is underpinned by, essentially, that's kind of our ontological perspective on the world. The work that I'm doing now on spaciousness is really a work in progress, and I would love to have another conversation with you about this. But we're looking at what we're calling the instrumental gaze in organizations at the moment, and that is this habit of seeing the world instrumentally. This is inspired by the work of Iain McGilchrist and Martin Buber. And there is a way of being in the world where we see ourselves as separate. We see utility. Our focus is narrow. It tends to be short-term, tangible, target-driven, and that is vital for survival. And there is another way, of course, of engaging and encountering the world there in our workplace, and that is when we encounter the world as emergent, systemic, constant change, interdependence, and relational, and we make fundamentally different choices depending on the gaze that we have. So, in terms of dialog, again, we could then debate what we mean by that word. but in dialog, I use Martin Buber's work, and I talk about our capacity to turn towards the person. He uses the phrase, “We turn, we attend fully to the other, and we enable that other person's voice in doing that.” Now, in order to do that, and in order to get into the messier world of complexity, we need to see the world in that way, otherwise, we immediately reduce and we get a conversation, we create a space where we have an away day. And guess what? Everybody just talks about operations, whether we're about to meet the quarterly target, and what needs to be done. Important, but only in balance. So, that's the first thing I would say around dialog, and we are obsessed with being busy, pathologically busy, I would say, in our workplaces. So, that's never going to enable us to have dialog. So, I think that's really important. And the other thing I would say, which will probably resonate with your listeners, is, of course, we've had a framing of leadership, of leaders, I should say, rather, we've had a framing of leaders forever, pretty much. Indeed, in management and leadership development, that identifies the leader as the person who knows the answer and needs to charismatically communicate that to persuade everybody that they're right and they should be followed. And that's really how we've taught -- I'm generalizing, of course, I'm generalizing, but we’ve taught leaders and managers to do that forever. By the way, sometimes that's still really important.

 

Scott Allen  27:40 

Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's a great nuance. Yes, sometimes that is important.

 

Megan Reitz  27:47 

Sometimes that needs to be done. Exactly. And sometimes we are engaging in subjects and topics that we don't understand, we don't know, feasibly there is no solution. And when that's the case, as a leader, your practice has to shift, and you have to enable people to disagree with you. And goodness me, is that a different practice from the former? So, both of those are fundamental to dialog, really.

 

Scott Allen  28:19 

Yes. And am I ambidextrous in my ability to know when it is maybe more appropriate to try and inspire and influence my vision and when it is more appropriate to slow down, pause, turn toward, engage, and look forward? And you know something else I'm seeing lately, you're seeing this as well. I'm very, very confident, I don't have a name for it yet, I haven't read about it yet, so maybe if you know this literature, that would be wonderful. But some of the leaders with whom I'm working go to bed tonight with thousands of questions. There are just thousands of things on their minds that subconsciously don't even know that are on their mind, but they're on their mind. And, at times, I see leaders spending their time and not elevating probably the most important questions for us to dialog about. They're elevating number 77 on the list and not really the heart of what we need to be discussing, whether it comes to culture, whether it comes to a high-functioning team. And also, they're elevating the pragmatic stuff, the dashboard conversations, and not elevating some of the most important. And I think there's an art form to that as well, especially in this place of complexity. Are we elevating the right questions? Because we could have a thousand different conversations. Yeah, we can. But time is a very scarce resource, and how are we using that? As a leader, not only are you ambidextrous in when to shift gears and engage in dialog and co-create with the team, but are you elevating the right questions for that team to work? Do you see that? 

 

Megan Reitz  29:55 

Absolutely. So, I prefer, and, at the moment, I'm thinking of leadership as the practice of leadership being around what we are attending to. What do we attend to, and what do we create spaces for in our organizations for others to attend to? And also, by the way, it was influenced by Baybaki's work. I was reading a paper again this morning on the difference between salience and relevance, which came to me when you were talking there. So, salience is the thing that immediately grabs our attention in front of us, and in the workplace, that tends to be, “Oh my God, what's the quarterly target, and have we made enough money?” And these pressing things. But, of course, they may not be what's relevant and what we actually need to look up, look out, and figure out together. So, part of our job as a leader is to pay attention to what we're paying attention to and then notice how we are influencing the attention of others. I was at a conference a while back with a really amazing chief executive and was speaking to his senior leadership team about how they use their time. And was saying, pretty much, “Come on, you need to be paying attention to different things. I looked at your diaries, and they're full of operational stuff, but we need to be more strategic. We need to develop our teams.” And afterward, I was speaking to him, and he was quite sort of exasperated by the fact that his team was paying attention to what they were. And I said to him, “Well, tell me, when you speak with them each week, what are the first questions that you tend to ask them? Let me take a guess. Are they about the operations, possibly targets?” He paused and went, “Yeah.” I know how it sounds. And we don't notice this as leaders; we don't realize that, of course, our gesture is creating a particular response. And, in that case, it was like, I want them to pay attention to this. But actually, I'm not giving those signals to them. I need to be coming into the conversation, and the very first thing I need to say is something like, “Tell me how you've really developed your team this week, and that way, you'll begin to influence. That way, leadership becomes a practice of influencing attention within the organization, and that's what I'm more fascinated by and excited about and haven't written anything on yet. 

 

Scott Allen  32:50 

Well, you made me think of a board that I sat on once, and so similar experience where it's a nonprofit board, and you get to the board meeting, and what do you get sucked into? You get sucked into all of the metrics and where all of that goes. In that organization, it was an hour and a half, and these were weekend-long meetings. We carved out an hour and a half or two hours, and it was a session called Big Questions. And we would choose two or three big questions, and we would just dialog. We would have a conversation, but it was always a little bit uncomfortable because no one knew, and we were wondering, and there were a lot of questions. And we knew that these were critical items for us to discuss and get somewhat of a shared sense of, but I think, at times, some of these leadership teams, I don't know. It's uncomfortable to wander around and ask, “Are we even looking at the right question?” It's uncomfortable to do that exploration. And so, Heifetz, I think, at times calls it work avoidance. We go back to what we know and what's easy. Well, what does the dashboard say? When we need to be carving out that time to do a little bit of wandering, it would seem.

 

Megan Reitz  34:01 

It brought to mind one of my favorite quotes over the last few months in our spaciousness research, and somebody in our inquiry group said, “If you open up space, you let in doubt. And who wants that?” Which I thought was amazing and, of course, directly related to dialog. If you create the space to consider these messier questions, of course, you are letting in doubt. You are loosening control, or the myth of control, anyway. And so, we are learning, and we're learning more and more the art of distraction, and the instrumental gaze is almost like a vortex. It draws, it draws our attention. The thing that scares me is that when we practice the muscles of the instrumental gaze, it is so much more than that of staying with dialog, staying with doubt. And I worry that we lose the muscles so much that we almost lose the capacity for dialog. So, that's almost the kind of meta-concern I have. Not only is there not enough, at the moment, not enough of these spaces, I think, but, at this rate, they're being extinguished, and that's the thing that keeps me awake at night.

 

Scott Allen  35:25 

Well, Megan, we are going to be working together in the coming months, and we'll see how that unfolds in our own dialog. Maybe we'll do that in public. Maybe we won't, who knows? But we're going to be working together at the International Studying Leadership Conference in December, and I cannot wait for that. It's going to be so much fun. And I'm just so thankful to have this opportunity to get to know you. Is there anything else that you want listeners to know about before we begin to wind down our time? Is there anything else you want to mention?

 

Megan Reitz  35:54 

I definitely mentioned… By the way, Scott, I am so excited. Donna Lavkin, shout out to you. Thank you for putting us together. And what I would say is, you see, my curiosity is now all about what's gone through the listener's mind as they've heard this conversation. And I kind of, “What did they know that I don't know?” I can imagine some of the listeners thinking, “Ah, I've just read somebody; I know somebody who's working in this area.” I would just love to ask whether listeners have been engaged with what we've been talking about, and they've got some ideas, or they've got some challenges, or some resources. Pretty much the only place that I managed to have a presence is LinkedIn, but you can find me on that, and you can find me on my website, which is meganreitz.com. I would just so much like to hear from you because there's that hidden opportunity of what do other people know. So, I guess, in the spirit of dialog and opening up a bit, please do reach out and contact me. I'd love that.

 

Scott Allen  36:58 

Well, the spirit within which you enter the conversation, Megan, is also something I very much admire because, at times, similar to what we were just discussing, leaders at times feel the pressure to know and not open up that space for doubt because… As academics, it's the same gig a lot of the time: it's, “Oh boy, I don't want anyone to know that I don't have all the answers, that this isn't airtight, that this isn't locked down.” And I think you model that curiosity and that vulnerability in a really, really nice way of saying, “Look, we are all exploring. We're all trying to make sense of some of these concepts and phenomena. What do you see? And let's get somewhere together and get to another different shared understanding. And you model that beautifully. So, I just wanted to say that I appreciate that for sure because I think we need more of that as well. Contingency theory, I think, had three meta-analyses supporting it, such as the bee's knees back in the 70s, but yeah, I don't know that it's really living.

 

Megan Reitz  38:03 

Thank you for those words, Scott. I think just one thing that maybe most people might agree on is that our leaders, all of us in our leadership practice wherever we are in various systems, have our work cut out at the moment. There aren't any clear solutions, which leaves us in a situation where, possibly, the most important practice to develop is our capacity to learn and experiment and have conversations about what we are learning together. So therefore, I hope that there are plenty of research projects and opportunities that are aimed at that kind of ongoing experimentation and learning and seeing action happen because we need it. 

 

Scott Allen  38:49 

Yes. Well, well, well, said. I always close out by asking what has caught the attention in recent times, and so that could be something we've just discussed, that could have nothing to do with what we've just discussed, but what have you been listening to, reading, streaming? What has caught your eye this summer that might be of interest to listeners?

 

Megan Reitz  39:09 

So, I've just read Jenny Odell's ‘How to Do Nothing,’ and I love it. I absolutely love her work. I’m hoping that I can have a conversation with her as part of my research, so maybe she's listening; you never know. And I have her next book here, which is ‘Saving Time,’ and she is coming on holiday with me next week. So, Jenny Odell's work is fascinating and very aligned with the research that I'm doing on spaciousness. I am listening to Tara Brach's meditations, and I always listen to my co-author and co-researcher, Michael Chaskalson. He has guided meditations that keep me on a generally sane-ish path most days. So, I am guided by them and many other people. That springs to mind; Jenny Odell and I listen to mindfulness meditations most days.

 

Scott Allen  40:09 

Wonderful. Well, I will put those in the show notes for listeners so you can access them. Megan, thank you so much for your time today. Can't thank you enough. And I look forward to our future conversations. Thank you for the good work that you do. I am going to be featuring some of your blog posts in my newsletters so that listeners can also access those there. And, of course, you'll have access to all of her resources in the show notes. So, until next time, thank you so much. 

 

Megan Reitz  40:37 

Thank you, Scott. I've had a lovely time speaking with you. Thank you.

 

 

[End Of Recording]