Col Matt Horner, Lt Col Matt Orlowsky, Dr. Daphne DePorres, Dr. Dave Levy - Every Interaction is an Opportunity

Colonel Matt Horner, Ph.D., is the Director of Staff of the Dean of Faculty and was recently nominated for the role of Permanent Professor for Character and Leadership Development at USAFA. He has served in multiple administrative and instructor roles in the Directorate of Athletics and is an Assistant Professor of Management, teaching courses on organizational dynamics and leadership. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and served as a mobility pilot on active duty. He received his doctorate in sport management from Florida State University. 

Lt Col Matt Orlowsky, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Management and teaches courses on organizational dynamics and leadership.  He is a graduate of USAFA and served as a force support officer on active duty.  As a human resource professional, he has held responsibilities at tactical, operational, and strategic levels and has held assignments all over the globe, including the United States, Korea, Germany, Iraq, and Qatar. His doctorate is from the University of Denver, and he explored how leaders translate experiences into insights.  

Daphne DePorres, Ed.D., is an assistant professor at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), where she teaches organizational behavior and organizational development, as well as a management consulting capstone course. In addition, she has over thirty years of experience in Organization Development and Change. Before her academic career, she spent nearly a decade consulting with large and small, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, working with them as they developed strategies, pursued organizational goals, analyzed and changed their cultures, and developed effective teams. 

Dr. Dave Levy is a Professor of Management at USAFA and teaches courses on leadership, power, organization development, and change. He is a USAFA graduate and served as a security forces officer on active duty. After leaving the military, he worked as an organizational change consultant for Grant-Thornton and KPMG. He received his doctorate in organizational behavior from Cornell University and is the author of several books, including The 52nd Floor: Thinking Deeply About Leadership, Attitudes Aren’t Free: Thinking Deeply About Diversity in the US Armed Forces, Echoes of Mind: Thinking Deeply About Humanship, Evolution of Government Policy Towards Homosexuality in the US Military, and The Line: A Very Short, Short Story.

A Quote From This Episode

• "Every interaction is an opportunity to go ahead and fulfill the needs of agency, efficacy, and belonging."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Article: Lens X: A Practical Approach to Taking Care of Your People
• Links to other resources in the transcript

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

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About  Scott J. Allen

• Website
• Weekly Newsletter: The Leader's Edge

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 to

Chapters

• 0:00 Leadership Development in Changing Contexts
• 9:00 Fulfilling Psychological Needs for Organizational Success
• 18:06 The Power of Micro Exchanges
• 26:51 Scaffolding Leadership Development in Organizations
• 37:04 Navigating Evolving Leadership Challenges

Transcript

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  0:01 

Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in today. Today's a special day. It's the first time I've ever recorded outside, so that's going to be a little bit interesting. You might hear some birds in the background. Who knows? We'll see how this goes. But it's such a beautiful day in Northeast Ohio. I said, “You know what? I do not want to be stuck in my basement. I want to be outside and enjoy the sun, the wind, and the birds,” so we'll see how that goes. We have four guests today from the United States Air Force Academy, and I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation. Dave Levy and I have been friends for some years now and have been involved in the Collegiate Leadership Competition together. And he had written a paper, passed it along to me, and said, “Hey, check it out.” And then I said, “This would be a great podcast episode.” So, we have four scholars. We have Daphne DePorres EDD. She is an assistant professor at the United States Air Force Academy, where she teaches organizational behavior and organization development, as well as one of the management consulting capstone courses. We have Lieutenant Colonel Matt Orlowsky, and he is an Assistant Professor of Management, teaching courses on organizational dynamics and leadership. We have Colonel Matt Horner, and he's the Director of Staff of the dean of faculty and was recently nominated for the role of permanent professor for character and leadership development at the United States Air Force Academy, and we have Dave Levy. He is a professor of management at the United States Air Force Academy and has been teaching courses on leadership, power, organization development, and change since his arrival in 2002. Team, thank you so much for being here today. I'm really, really excited for this conversation. I would love for each of you, just in a word or two, what else should listeners know about you? Dave, maybe we start with you, sir.

David Levy  1:50 

Just absolutely passionate about transformation regarding the way we see leadership today. I think we take a very micro stance, and we need to look more at the systems level.

Scott Allen  2:05 

Oh, I love it. I love it. Matt Orlowsky, sir.

Matt Orlowsky  2:09 

And I think this dynamic team has been working on that element as well, trying to put some meat on the bone, specifically about the systems, trying to help bring that into our leadership curriculum, specifically about how leaders should be thinking about resources, strategy, culture, structure and the relationships that they're creating within that system.

Scott Allen  2:31 

Matt Horner.

Matt Horner  2:33 

Well, great. I love what my colleagues said. Besides being passionate, I think we're also open-minded. So, we love the place that we work, and we're passionate about the systems that are in place, but we're also open-minded and critical, I think, in a good way, about what change we can instill to drive us toward a brighter, more optimized future.

Scott Allen  2:56 

Awesome. And Daphne, is there anything else you want to add before we jump in?

Daphne DePorres  3:00 

Yeah, one of the things I'm passionate about is, as academics, we like to dabble in theory. Well, we're really passionate, and I'm really passionate about how do we bring some of these theories that the general public never sees, how do we bring them to life?

Scott Allen  3:16 

I love that. I just did a really, really fun episode with a couple of physicians from the Cleveland Clinic. And it's so interesting because, in that context, obviously, you know the theory, you know medicine, and you're practicing medicine, and you're close to the work. And what I love about the four of you, and your lens, your perspective, is that not only are we in tune with the theoretical, but we are actually practicing, actually developing leaders and preparing them to serve in the military. And so, you have this really, really unique environment, this is a laboratory in a sense of that's great that that's the theory, but, in practice, here's what we're bumping up against, or here's what we really actually need to do to prepare these individuals to serve in these very, very complex leadership challenges and situations at times. And so, that's why I'm so looking forward to this conversation today. You all are close to the work. Not only are you informed on the theory, but we're actually trying to put this into action, and develop leaders, and prepare individuals to do the work. So, where I would love to begin the conversation today is Matt Horner, maybe just a little bit of the impetus for this project. Can you give us a little bit of background? For listeners, we are going to have links in the show notes to this article so you can access it, but Matt, maybe you can give us a little bit of background. 

Matt Horner  4:47 

Sure, absolutely. And thanks for the opportunity. So, first off, I'll talk a little bit about maybe what brought us together. So, I think, initially, you all heard, in some form or fashion, that we teach in the Department of Management, so we're proximate to each other. We all teach leadership and character. And I think what you heard in our brief kind of intros there was that we're all passionate, so that's what brought us together, and maybe the timing of it is also important as well. So, at the Air Force Academy, which you might hear us refer to as USAFA, sort of colloquial term. So, we speak about USAFA, it’s United States Air Force Academy. But it's a period of unprecedented change. We're currently undergoing in the midst of a campaign where we're taking a hard look at our culture, and, at the same time, we're trying to re-optimize for what's been termed great power competition, where we have been focusing, in the last 20 or so years in the Department of Defense, US military, on counterinsurgency. And now we're looking more at a near-peer fight and contesting that international space. In order to do that, we need the most from everybody. We need to ensure that our training programs are completely optimized, and as we recruit from a diverse population across the United States, that everyone is able to leverage their talents and abilities to contribute to that high-end fight. And our old systems of training, which are wonderful, and they're part of our tradition, and there's good reason and rationale for the foundation of our developmental programs, but as I mentioned, we've started questioning, “Are we able to optimize the development of our cadets in those old systems that have been developed, really, on the backs of the West Point model and implemented over 60 years here?” So, as we've taken a close look at that, we've, and you'll hear from some of my colleagues, thought about, well, what are the ingredients to thriving, and how does an environment that's still hard, difficult, and challenging, how can we create environments where cadets can maximize their development through an environment where they're holistically engaged and are able to move the needle in their development in ways that we haven't even imagined? So, really, it's a re-optimization that we're looking at, kind of brought us together. And we hope that that model creates a tangible and a practical way, this is the lens-X model, to start to do that.

Scott Allen  7:32 

Well, I love how you're speaking there because, just a few weeks ago, I had Barbara Kellerman on, And, of course, she has her leadership system. And you have leader followers contexts. And if you think about how the context has shifted, even in the last two decades, whether that's issues around digitization, we can go to global geopolitical shifts, we can go to any number of different shifts. And so, I love that you all are focusing on, okay, re-optimization; what's relevant today? What do we need to be preparing individuals for? And maybe some of those old models we hold on to, and what do we need to shift, alter, adjust, add, and potentially, remove, given the new context? Because, wow, just as we… I was in a conversation the other day, and someone was talking about BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates) and the possibility of BRICS developing their own currency. Well, that all of a sudden shifts everything very, very quickly. And so, are we prepared and are we ready to do that? So the paper is called ‘Lens X: A Practical Approach to Taking Care of Your People.’ Matt, maybe a little bit on Lens X, would you kind of bring us into that as we begin to jump into the paper a little bit?

Matt Orlowsky  8:53  

Absolutely. And again, thank you for the opportunity. As we think about this big context, and we go ahead and we, as Daphne said, we want to make this ultimately practical for the cadets that are going through this developmental experience, and certainly ourselves. We have a lot of famed, and a lot of people with authority, and a lot of heady responsibilities that come here, and they talk to us about, “Hey, what it is about being a military leader?” And they often say, “Well, all you have to do is take care of people,” and that's a complex question. So, how do we go ahead and ultimately tease that back and make it practical? When we talk about the model, there are really two dimensions or lenses that we talk about. Those are the needs and the narratives. First, we start off with the psychological needs of every individual within the organization. Those are agency, efficacy, and belonging. And, as we mentioned, not only are we practitioners, but we're scholarly practitioners, and again, we try and pull this out. This directly leans on and thinks about Deci & Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory within the organizational context. How do you make it real for the individuals within that? That's our first lens, and it has a leader focusing on fulfilling the needs of the members of the organization. But building upon the phrase that Matt Horner mentioned earlier of thriving, creating that culture isn't necessarily enough. What are the elements that hold people back from being engaged? And that's where this other lens of narratives really pulls us in and starts to think about how we, as a leader, help to think about the subjective well-being and the engagement of all those members. Their experiences are basically filtering the way that they think about all their experiences and the experiences that are happening within the organization. Those narratives, ultimately, can come from the individual, but they could be organizational, or as big as societal. The way that we think about this in the Lens X model pulls us into it is how you bridge the gap between the needs and the narratives. And what we propose here is the micro exchanges. The micro exchanges, ultimately, to get at this idea of culture, are the foundations of and are the most tangible and changeable elements of climate and culture. So, ultimately, Lens X is it makes every interaction an opportunity. Every interaction is an opportunity to go ahead and fulfill the needs of agency, efficacy, and belonging. And what we'd love to do is just kind of dig into that model just a little bit more and go from there. 

Scott Allen  11:57 

Yeah. Dave, so talk a little bit more about needs. Talk a little bit. Let's go a little bit deeper in that domain. We've got belonging, agency, efficacy. Needs. 

David Levy  12:07 

Yeah. My pleasure, and thanks also for the opportunity. I think what you're doing is absolutely amazing, and just thrilled to be connected to you in a small way. But I'm brought back to August of 1990; I was a security policeman in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, and I was with the F117 stealth fighter. it had just come out of the top secret world and was being seen for the first time. And because it was being seen for the first time, all these generals from all the different services were coming to visit. They wanted to check on the morale of the troops, but really, they wanted to see the 117. And I remember lining up with my 44 security policemen, and this general, his name was Stormon Norman Schwarzkopf. He was nicknamed ‘the bear.’ Just this gigantic monster of a person. I've got these little dainty hands, and he shakes my hand, and he says, “Lieutenant, take care of your people.” And, “Yes, sir.” And that was it. And it resonated with me for decades, “What the heck does it mean to take care of your people?” And, as academics, we're nerdy. We looked and explored, and we came across self-determination theory that really does, I think, a pretty darn good job of helping us understand what the innate psychological needs are for human beings in order for us to experience subjective well-being, just to feel good about being alive. And so, we modified them for the organizational context as belonging, agency, and efficacy. And we started out with that as a hypothesis, and said, “I think this is it. If a leader can come in and fulfill these needs of belonging, agency, and efficacy for their organizational members, the employees will be happy. They'll be positioned to thrive.” And we weren't sure, that was our kind of proposition, but we started using this in class. And so, we would talk to our students, who we teach mostly as seniors, and say, “You know what? You've had lots of leadership experiences. You've been on lots of teams. We want you to pair up and just share with each other the most positive work experience. It's not like a good hour meeting, this is something that you've been involved in for many weeks at least, share that with each other.” So, they do that for a few minutes. We bring them back together and then say, “All right, who wants to share what you talked about?” And so we get a whole bunch of the teams to talk about their most positive experience, and there are things like, “My commander handed me this project, we had this little team, and we really had no idea what to do. We thought we were all going to get fired from this. They're going to take it away. But, you know what? We got together, we worked really, really hard, and we achieved it.” And I'm like, “Well, how did it feel working with that team?” And they’ll say, “You know what? It felt like a family.” And so, what they started doing in their descriptions in the classroom of their most positive experiences, they started telling us, belonging, agency, and efficacy over and over again in different words. Efficacy isn't about being handed something easy and then just doing something easy from day to day; efficacy really is built and fulfilled when we're challenged, and we're able to rise and achieve that challenge. And belonging, it's not just sitting with four people. It actually feels like that safe place, “I can be who I am with that group of people.” And agency, they'll describe in their discussions about, “Yeah, we were just thrown this stuff. The boss said, ‘I don't even have any advice for you, just go figure it out.’” So, they were given a tremendous amount of agency. Just for the heck of it, early on, we said, “Well, let's flip it. Get back with that pair and pair and share the most negative experience you've had.” We didn’t even preempt them and say, “I think you know where we're going with this, but please share.” And sure enough, they would share. And I don't know whether to feel good or bad about this, but the energy level when they're sharing their negative experiences tended to be higher, because now, it's very emotive. They're angry about that negative experience they had. And to a person, when they're describing those negative experiences, it was a lack. Maybe not all three, but certainly one or two of those key elements. It's like, “You know what? I felt completely disconnected. They told me I shouldn't be on this project. It was a disaster,” or, “They handed us this thing, and they wouldn't actually let us do it. We had no agency. They told us to do it exactly like this. Well, you don't need me, you need a robot.” So that was attacking, yeah, it was attacking both the efficacy and the agency. But really, extremely powerful conversations about both what happens when these needs are being fulfilled and what happens when they're not being fulfilled. So, we really felt like, “You know what? We're on to something.” And so our brain operates with heuristics, and we take the easy way out. So, if you want to be that great supervisor and you want to be viewed as someone who's taking care of your people, just think about belonging, agency, and efficacy. I'll stop there. I get excited about this. 

Scott Allen  18:23 

We need to get you a tent, and you need to go out on the road. People should come to the tent.

(Laughter)

David Levy  18:29 

I don't have a tent, I just stand on my driveway and I just start screaming. 

Scott Allen  18:35 

I'm motivated. I'm in. Let's go. Well, Daphne, okay, that was a beautiful explanation of the needs component, and how about the narratives now? We have societal, organizational, individual, and I'm interested kind of to go a little bit deeper here as well.

Daphne DePorres  18:54 

Yep. So, the leaders understand belonging, agency, and efficacy, and they're all gung-ho, and they're like, “Okay, I'm going to help everybody achieve these states to the fullest.” But to unlock that door, we have to understand that each person comes to the table with a whole boatload of life experiences, programming from society, from their families, and from their own experiences. And you think about the 4,000 cadets that are here at the academy; they come from all corners of the world, all quarters of the United States, from different kinds of families, and from different kinds of educational systems. So, what we need to do is have a better understanding that each person comes to the table with a way of seeing the world that is influenced by thousands of variables that, guess what, the leader will never know. And as a matter of fact, the individual often is unconscious of what their narratives are. If you say, “Hey, Scott, what's your narrative?” You'd probably go, “What, huh, what?” And on any given day, any given moment, you may have a different story through which you are seeing the world. So, what we want to bring into this to help unlock the ability of leaders to help people fulfill their needs is an awareness that we are all coming to the table with lots of different narratives. And as a leader, as a teacher, as a manager, as an officer, we will never know another person's narratives, let alone probably our own. So, that awareness helps us to think about how we can tailor our interactions with each other, and that involves a lot of experimentation, so we do recommend that, but that awareness is going to help us be better as managers, and leaders, and teachers, and officers.

Scott Allen  20:50 

I love how you phrase that. I had a guest on the podcast, Mike Mascolo. He's at Merrimack, and he had this phrase that's just really stuck with me, “Each person is an infinity,” was his phrasing. Each person is an infinity. We bring these to the table, these experiences, our lived history. Would you say a little bit more about how we help make that explicit, even in the individual? Have you all been experimenting at all with some of that work?

Matt Horner  21:24 

Yeah. So, I don't know if I'll answer your question directly, but I think both Dave and Daphne kind of did a really great job of explaining the Lens. But then, the challenge is, what do you do with it? So, if you understand that you yourself have your own psychological needs, and you're trying to connect with someone else who has the same needs and that you know and you have an awareness that their narratives dictate how they're showing up in that given moment, well, that can also be intimidating. Now, I think, along with how Dave described our approach to self-determination theory and going after those nutriments of thriving, we've also had a suspicion that the most influential moments in our own development have been through micro exchanges. The small interactions that really seemed insignificant at the moment and probably didn't require a lot of effort on those we were interacting with, or maybe taking that initiative to connect with us might be highly influential in a way to connect our needs and to connect on narratives. So, that's what you'll see in the paper, is the way that you connect to the lens is through micro exchanges. And we do that by introducing it as a point of entry to maybe deeper communications, but initially, there's a low barrier to entry and a high, high impact. So, as Dave was talking about our experiences in the classroom and the lesson that we do, we asked the cadets to pair up and to talk about their best and their worst interactions, really, with an open-ended… It could be anything, they most often, 99.9% of time, will touch on a psychological need, or a lack of validation of their other narratives, but it was also a very small touch point. And It's unfortunate that this happens, but it's real in the negative experiences and the things that these cadets and ourselves in our own storytelling will hang on to were actually inflicted in a micro-interaction. It could be a small careless discussion or just a comment that really assaults one of those nutriments of belonging, agency, or efficacy that sets you back and carries you forward. And it can have bleed-over effects into other relationships. But then, I think you'll hear us be passionate about this, is that also opens the door for amazing positive interactions. That it actually doesn't take all that much to really fill someone else's cup. And we use the phrase “Tend the garden, the psychological well-being.” If you can validate someone's, your relation with them and their belonging, or you can give them autonomy, or provide them an opportunity to apply their competence and their skill to make them feel like they have efficacy, that's the magic ingredient to thriving.

David Levy  24:39 

Yeah. Because, as Matt was talking, I started thinking about some of those examples. And I remember I was doing a workshop for some NCOs, Non-Commissioned Officers, and we were asking about their positive and negative micro exchanges. And this one tech sergeant, probably been in 8 to 10 years, or so, in the enlisted force. There are two structures, there's the enlisted, and they generally work for the officers. We're at the Air Force Academy, we produce the officers. And so, you can have someone with 10 years of experience working for a young lieutenant who was just commissioned two months ago. And so, this tech sergeant described this micro exchange where he was sitting there working in a deployed location on something, and this first lieutenant walks in and just says, “Gee, I wish I had a cup of coffee,” and walks out. And the expectation was that he wanted the tech sergeant to drop everything and make this officer a pot of coffee. And he said it was so small, just one sentence, and walked out. And here it is, eight years later, this guy is still talking about this thing. So, it's not an exaggeration to talk about how every interaction is an opportunity, and they really do matter.

Scott Allen  26:13 

I love how you all are framing this because I couldn't agree more. My mind right now is in even emails. You receive an email, you go above and beyond for someone and send them a note, and you never hear back. A quick “Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time,” just in response can frame up everything. And I've been reading a little bit lately about narrative bias, where to your point is, if we have maybe a couple of interactions with someone, and they really aren't all that positive, well, we kind of fill in the gaps in our minds. We create the story, we create the narrative, and that can have a drastic kind of impact on an individual's ability to influence the team. And, again, I might be complying, but am I committed? And I think where you all are headed is this is what… We're seeking a cadre of individuals who are committed because the relationships exist, and even in these very small ways, we've made those deposits into the emotional bank account versus the withdrawals, to go to a little bit of covey here for a moment. Please, Matt. 

Matt Horner  27:21 

Yeah. I think everything that you're saying is really resonating. It's true. But I think it's also important to recognize that none of us are perfect. So, we might believe in this model, and this approach, and we are actively engaged and trying to tend that garden, but, inadvertently, we'll mess up. And we'll forget to say thank you, or our body language will communicate something. But the good thing is that we can just reset and do it again. You can start with an apology, or listening, or just another email, and say, “Thank you for your efforts, I really appreciate.” So, that's the beauty of micro exchanges, is that you can just keep on going. 

Daphne DePorres  28:07  

And also, within the context of a relationship, you exist within a field of micro exchanges, as these two guys are talking about. And from the perspective of the recipient, the one who wants their needs fulfilled, if I have a bank, as you said, of positive micro exchanges, I can give grace when Dave is busy, and he gives me the evil eye, which really isn't the evil eye... 

David Levy  28:32 

I'm sorry Daphne, and that’s just ahead of time. I'm sorry [Inaudible 28:36].

(Laughter)

Daphne DePorres  28:37 

But it may not be personal. It probably isn't personal, and I can give him grace, and we can go on. So, it's a two-way street. It isn't just the manager or the leader as the only person who is generating the positive field that we tend together, it's both sides of the relationship.

Scott Allen  28:57 

Please, Matt. 

Matt Orlowsky  28:58

And just one thing that we talked about those personal experiments in your life, and obviously, we try and bring this to life in the classroom, but it's real when we're bringing it to life in our real relationships. Just a quick story. As a father, I had a son who was ascending, and he was going to be the wrestling captain, and he was the only senior. And he was kind of questioning whether he should go in because a lot of his fellow members, the people that he belonged with, had stepped away from the sport. So, he was like, “Hey, what does this really look like?” And I was like, “Well, if you go in, you have to have this idea of you have to commit your words.” And I said, “We can't walk away, you have to stay with it.” And in my mind, I'm bringing this model to life, “Hey, I'm giving you agency to go ahead and choose.” And it comes a month into the season, he's hard time getting up for practice, I'm like, “What is this? What's going on?” And a lot of back and forth, we end up walking into his coach, and he's like, “Coach, what the matter is I don't feel like I'm getting better. I'm plateauing.” I'm focusing on, “Hey, I gave you a one-time choice at the beginning of the season.” And really, what he's saying is, “My efficacy is eroded because there's not as many people around that are sharpening my skill to go ahead and go forward to it.” And I'm like, “I gave you a choice up front.” And again, it goes back to the phrase that Matt Horner brought up, is this tending that garden because you're always going to have to be going on, and you don't know which one is at play at the moment?

Scott Allen  30:40 

Well, yes. As a parent of three teenagers, I see a lot of connections here. And those micro exchanges, at least, how I'm thinking about it through the lens of parenting, it can be very easy to have those micro exchanges be those withdrawals versus deposits. Well, okay, as we begin to wind down our time, you all, is there anything else you want to say about the model that maybe we haven't covered yet? Is there anything else that comes to mind for any of you?

Matt Horner  31:15 

So, I'll just offer one thought right now. So, this model's been in work, and we've been experimenting with it for a couple of years. And it's matured in our curriculum, but it really is just… The way I look at it as a starting point. As we just described, this model is not something that mature leaders can only apply in a complex organization. You can do it with your spouse, you can do it as a parent, or in any relationship. So, what we've seen as we've launched this and experimented within our courses is that we're doing it way too late. That we need to push this down and offer it as a tool to cadets as soon as they arrive here. And that really goes towards our idea of reoptimizing, so we want to provide these tools that cadets can practice. Our most sacred gift at the Air Force Academy is that we have 47 months, almost 24 hours a day, with cadets. So, the earlier that we give these tools, the more time they have to practice them. And then, that shifted our focus to, “Well, what's next?” If we can provide these tools where we can improve relationships on an individual level, and then also tie that into how they lead their teams and their organizations, then we can expect more on the higher end as they, hopefully, assume more responsibility throughout their cadet experience, and are responsible for more people, more complex teams with more complex outcomes. And that sort of yielded and been the point of entree for some other work that we've done, one of my colleagues might want to talk about that.

Matt Orlowsky  33:03 

And I think, as we do that, the biggest thing we're trying to do with leadership, so many people walk in, and the candidates that we have here are absolutely amazing. They've been team captains, they're scholars, they've performed well. Some of them have run nonprofits. They have amazing leadership experiences, but they look at it, as Daphne mentioned, from the lens of their experiences. And what we're trying to do is, oftentimes, people will write off leadership and say, “No, it's simple.” And what we're trying to do is embrace the complexity of leadership. And as we think about the curriculum as a whole, how do we help them understand the system that they're a part of, one, diagnosing the fact that the culture that they're a part of, but help them and give them a lens so they can think about creating and shaping the culture that they're a part of. And again, arming them with the lens of resources, strategy, culture, structure, in shaping those relationships by the organization that's going on. And then, most importantly, what we're trying to do as someone that's trying to shape leaders of character, are we bringing these values and mobilizing them through our organization, through our strategy, through the culture? Are those interactions not just individual, but with the bureaucracy, where they don't bemoan the idea of bureaucracy, but, “Hey, this is a technology that we're actually motivating and bringing our outcomes to bear in the way that really, really matters.”

Scott Allen  34:40 

Well, I enjoy how you're thinking through how we scaffold this. I've been in a lot of conversations recently where I think it's kind of a little bit of it's like we were running a messed up Dojo where some of the time our learners come in and we start off with complexity theory. It's like we're talking Black Belt type level discussions, and we're doing that with sophomores when we haven't even scaffolded it up, hey, active listening. It's kind of an important building block. And so, how you think about scaffolding the learning and placing the learning, I think, is so critical as well, because it is. It's complex. It's very complex. But sometimes, I don't think our thinking is clear enough as to how we scaffold this in a way that really makes it the most useful. What really matters is the learner. And actually, the learner changing their behavior and using this, again, kind of where we started, to do this really complex work that they're being asked to do. Well, to the four of you, I am so thankful for your time today. I always close out our discussions by asking guests what they've been reading, listening to, or streaming. Something that's caught their attention in recent times. And so, I'd like to start off with that. And Daphne, maybe we can start with you. What might listeners be interested in that's caught your attention in recent times?

Daphne DePorres  36:06 

Sure. I'm going to take a risk here and name a book that I just found out about and haven't read, but the question that the author is addressing is one that I'm passionate about. The book is ‘Only Connect’ by Belle Zars. One of the questions that she's trying to answer is how individuals come to consider the well-being of the whole and practice for the common good. And I'm very interested in the notion that we obviously are not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps all by ourselves, we are in community. And so, if there's anything to simplify the complexity of what we've explained, I think there are two things. One is the term that Dave coined, which is ‘every interaction is an opportunity,’ and we are in a community with each other when all is said and done.

Scott Allen  37:04 

I love it. Matt Horner. 

Matt Horner  37:08  

All right. Well, yeah, thank you for the opportunity again. I've enjoyed the time with you. I will do a shameless plug right now. So every summer, the dean will appoint a One Book, One USAFA. I just got done reading it, ‘The Cellist of Sarajevo’ by Stephen Galloway. I think really great and timely book, if you haven't read it, to kind of understand some of our conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza right now. So, I'll go ahead and throw that out. And, yep. Thank you. 

Scott Allen  37:39 

Okay. Matt, how about you?

Matt Orlowsky  37:43 

We're actually trying to do the same thing. Like you talked about, we're a part of a powerhouse team, and I've been working a lot with Daphne, and we're trying to think about, hey, if every interaction is an opportunity, how do we deliberately build this into our culture? And the interesting element that we have right now is we have a department head who's departed after 10 years, and we all love our culture, but we're trying to go, “Hey, what actually makes this real?” And we're trying to be deliberate about passing that culture off to each other. So, Daphne has me digging deeply into Schein's Organizational Culture and Leadership.

Scott Allen  38:23 

Little Edgar, going on for your summer reading. (Laughs)

Daphne DePorres  38:25 

Right. Beach reading.

Scott Allen  38:29 

Well, I think that's a really, really important point. My mind went there. If you're in a position of authority; a coach or a teacher, a parent or a leader, a manager, a dean, are we modeling what we're talking about here? And the students, especially if we're pushing that earlier into the experience, the students are going to notice that quickly if our faculty are not modeling some of what we're promoting. So, I love that. I think that's incredibly important and critical: how do we shift our own culture so that we're modeling what we're asking of them? And are we skilled at these micro exchanges and really building those relationships with intentionality? Sir, Dave, take us home. 

David Levy  39:12 

Hey, thanks again. So, Ken Wilber has been around for a long time, and he talks about stages of consciousness. And one of the key components of stages of consciousness is once you move on to the next stage, that new stage transcends and includes the previous stage. And so, when you talked about scaffolding, I think there just may be a similar approach when it comes to leadership. So, if we start looking at the essence, the first stage of leadership being instinctual, it's that alpha male wolf, that's dominance through aggression, all that. Then you move to traits, then maybe behaviors, and then maybe to collaborative, then to systems, and kind of labeling this final stages, kind of a quantum. When you engage in dialog, when you start talking complexity theory and trying to take on a systems approach to leadership, and you're talking to someone who's operating from an individualistic stage of leadership, they're not necessarily going to understand that. And so, you really have to be aware and recognize that the scaffolding may be related to what stage of thinking a person is in regarding leadership. So, that was my reading over the weekend. I'm not sure if there's anything here, but I think there is, and I think it's going to be really cool. Thanks so much, Scott. 

Scott Allen  40:50 

A little light reading of Ken Wilber.

(Laughter)

David Levy  40:55 

I'm broken. 

Scott Allen  40:57 

No, you're not. Well, okay, so we can go to some really fun conversations there with Bill Torbert's work and Robert Keegan's work. And, yeah, developmentally, what are learners ready for, and how do we enter where they are? And I think that's on… 

David Levy  41:13

You want to play

David Levy  41:16 

You want to be on the team?

Scott Allen  41:17 

Yes, yes. I'll raise my hand. Well, to the four of you, thank you so much. I have a bird behind me who wants to be in the podcast today. You might hear her as we begin to wind down our time, but thank you for your incredible work. Thank you for operationalizing some of this. And I love some of the words that you use throughout the paper, one of which is experimentation. And if we're going to get somewhere new, we're going to have to run some experiments. We're going to have to try some new things. The context shifts. How do we stay relevant? How do we stay ahead? And how does our thinking evolve so that we can prepare these individuals to do the work that they're going to do? Can't thank you enough. Take care, you all. We'll do it again. Be well. Have a great day. 

David Levy  42:05

Thank you.

Daphne DePorres  42:05

Thank you, Scott.

David Levy  42:06

Bye-bye.

Scott Allen  42:07

Bye-bye.

[End of recording]