Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Exploring with Purpose (2) with Dr. Jonathan Reams

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 301

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Jonathan Reams, PhD, is currently doing action research projects exploring how to scale micro-skill development for habituating core leadership practices. He approaches this work drawing on experiences from holding a position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) from 2007 until 2024, serving as editor-in-chief of Integral Review from 2005 to 2023, and being chief creative officer at the Center for Transformative Leadership and Adeptify.

A  Few Quotes From This Episode

  • "Leadership isn’t about position—it’s about behavior in the moment.”
  • “We need proprioception of thought—awareness of our thinking as it arises.”
  • “The feeling of being time-starved is an interpretation, not a fact.”
  • “It’s not about a thousand skills to master; it’s about cultivating processes for clean thinking and wise action.”

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.


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Speaker 1:

Okay, everybody, welcome to Fornice's Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in. This is episode 301. If you have not listened to episode 300, you want to do that first. This is my second conversation, this time with Dr Jonathan Reams, and he is a curious soul out there in the world trying to make sense of, along with me and many, many others. You know, how do we better prepare people to serve in these really challenging roles of leadership. So we had this wonderful conversation, jonathan, and maybe you can summarize that, because I don't want to. You can summarize that and then maybe set the table for where this conversation is going to go.

Speaker 2:

Set the table for where this conversation is going to go Sure. Scott, thanks, I'm glad to be back and I would say that we started circling around some of these core issues. It started with the knowing-doing gap and Amal and Berndt's paper and interview you did with them. That triggered me and got us off into a lot of areas. What's the foundation of why training is basically done in a kind of reductionistic way? That works for some things tangible skills but when we get into these quote-unquote soft skills, more complex constructs of leadership, somehow a gap appears. So we talked about that. But then we also talked about what is the part that we need to clean up. We can think really complexly about bad stuff and justify poor behavior. And what is the need to help students or young leaders or whoever at any age understand the balance between cleaning up and growing up.

Speaker 1:

So that's kind of where we went. In a sense, it's so that cleaning up and growing up so that we're in the best possible place we can be, you know, developmentally, energetically, when we're serving others, right.

Speaker 2:

Yep.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

And this is back to your favorite phrase of mine, although I'm sure I heard it elsewhere too but leaders create the weather, although I'm sure I heard it elsewhere too but leaders create the weather, and it's just a good metaphor for saying that. No matter what context we are in and this is one of the notes I had made reading through the transcript from Amal and Berndt we are always following in some context. Even if you're the CEO of a large board, you have a large organization, you have a board to report to or shareholders to report to, you have government regulatory things, you have market. So you're not leading all those, but you are leading what you're responsible for, yes, what you're responsible for, yes, and middle managers are leading their teams, the people they're responsible for, but they're also following their bosses, their contacts, their peers. But on a much more micro level and this is something that I believe I'm all brought up in that conversation it's not just about position, it's about behavior in the moment. So the Center for Creative Leadership's DAC model you know the direction bring some alignment to things and get disparate points of view to see a little bit clearer or get people engaged and committed. That's an act of leadership, okay, so that also happens within oneself and it starts there. And it starts there.

Speaker 2:

So how do we, for instance, break down self-mastery, self-leadership? Yeah Well, it involves our thinking and our behaviors. It's informed by our values, yes, also informed by our biases. Yes, oh yeah, size enough that I could focus on it for a while and I'll use that just as a preview to enter into this domain of how do we use a combination of dynamic skill theory Kurt Fisher, mike Mascolo, theo Dawson, others have really understood which, to me, in its essence, kurt Fisher's genius was taking Piaget's understanding of how does our epistemology grow to take in more and more of the world, of how we know, and combine that with behaviorism, saying how does our performance get influenced by the context? How does the environment around it and circumstances affect what we're able to do? And it's a dynamic combination of those. That is what we're looking at.

Speaker 2:

So, if we take that, and then what is the natural way of learning? Little kids learn to walk by failing a thousand times, yes, and having this very rapid feedback loop, and they see that, okay, I fail and I learn, and I fail and I learn and eventually, oh, then I've internalized that and I don't think about it and one of the challenges that we touched on last time, and I think the term proprioception is helpful here. Proprioception allows us to have an immediate, felt sense and feedback of what we intend and how our bodies move and how we're moving in time and space, and that's very tangible. But how do we have proprioception of thought? David bone, the, the physicist who influenced people like peter singing and bill isaacs in the organizational learning field, talked about this the proprioception of thought. So we can notice it as it's arising, just like we notice our physical body moving as we move. Yes, that's a different thing that is much harder to be interoceptively sensitive to.

Speaker 1:

You're using $40,000 words here.

Speaker 2:

Well, Scott, when your stomach rumbles, you notice it. That's interoception you can notice a state in your body.

Speaker 1:

When I look at my daughter and say okay, just so you know I'm at five. Just just so you know, five out of ten, let's shift things up here. That's having propriocept. Is that it? Yeah?

Speaker 2:

right you're now. That's proprioception of your state okay so that you're letting her know don't expect the best performance from me in this moment. If you're looking to ask a difficult favor, maybe come back later, right?

Speaker 1:

Oh well, it yes. Okay. So my mind, my mind goes to how does it apply?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so part of what I would like to do is just lay out a little bit of kind of some building blocks or menu items, please, ok, yes, yeah. So one of the things that I've come to understand from dynamic skill theory is it's a way of understanding how do humans grow and develop, and it starts with infants learning reflexes. Humans grow and develop and it starts with infants learning reflexes. Okay, you learn to, you know, move your fingers and grasp something, all these kind of things, and then those combine in more and more complex ways until you can do sensory motor actions.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

Right, you can roll, you can start to crawl, you can coordinate. You know different things to get more and more complex, and a good illustration somebody gave once is, for instance, you maybe learn to brush your teeth. You learn to put toothpaste on. You learn at first to smear it all over your face, but eventually you learn to coordinate your cognitive bandwidth to be able to internalize those motions and the feedback to to brush your teeth properly.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and you learn to put your pajamas on and, and at first you put the bottoms on your head and you do, you know. Put them on backwards and whatever, but you do it enough times and you learn them on backwards and whatever, but you do it enough times and you learn that and it becomes routine and eventually you maybe notice that your parents are saying this word bedtime and you eventually make the association that, oh, all of these things brushing my teeth, putting my pajamas on, crawling into bed, doing you know whatever. Brushing my teeth, putting my pajamas on, crawling into bed, doing you know bedtime is a representation of a set of sensory motor actions.

Speaker 1:

Yes, Okay, gotcha.

Speaker 2:

So then you start building linguistic representations of things in the world. Piaget talked about concrete operations. Right, you can do logic with this, you can do arithmetic, you can actually think in these ways, because you are now not having to just do the thing, but you can have a shorthand.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Right, and that shorthand allows you to do some things. Now I'll give a concrete example. At some point you can say, well, that's the truth, right, and when you first use that as a child, you're referring to a specific concrete thing being the truth. Okay, now a little more complex formulation of that language is saying well, that's not the truth, because now you're coordinating not with truth. So you're actually making a more complex formulation.

Speaker 2:

Or maybe you say it's really the truth and that's actually a kind of system of representations that are put together. You know it's truth even then. Or it's a kind of truth and you're getting more nuance to it, and so you see how these representational things get more developed. But then you make a jump and you say, oh, what is it to be truthful? And that is a move to what we call abstractions. You take a bunch of representations and make an abstraction, because being truthful is a principle they're going to apply to many concrete instances. And then, of course, you do the same thing what's the whole truth or what's an ugly truth? And you combine two kind of concepts yep, a grain of truth. So when you're in this range, you're now coordinating two abstractions.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and that is where the majority of a norm of the adult population is and teenage kids get into this and this is kind of normative high school and sometimes earlier in normative high school and sometimes earlier.

Speaker 2:

What happens for some and you see most of the discourse in leadership and other places says what happens when we don't just have two things to coordinate but, like family systems theory or small group dynamics, you have a bunch of things to coordinate and actually also have relationships between them going on and wow, suddenly it's a lot more things going on. But that skill depends upon having a robust set of conceptual, abstract skills in this earlier level, where you're just building them and then coordinating them. So that's a quick overview of dynamic skill theory. It has a way of being able to map at a very granular way what are the building blocks and what is the hierarchical sequence, so to speak. Yes, so if we talk, then, about self-master or self-leadership and come back to what I was saying before well, being aware of our emotions okay, there's our emotions. We need to master those Well, we need to be aware of them and we need to regulate them Well we even need the emotional literacy.

Speaker 1:

Like what are they?

Speaker 2:

right. So so and this goes granular, out and out and out. So you've got to understand them, you gotta notice the effects of them, you gotta make distinction between what are adaptive and maladaptive emotions and recognize them. So these are all building blocks of self-leadership. Now you can apply the same thing to collaboration. Yes, right, we're going to have to work together to lead. Right, you've got to get your team functioning well. You've got to work nice with your peers, so you want to collaborate. Well, there's a lot of things that we can break this down into smaller chunks, but what often happens is leadership development and training will say okay, you got to collaborate, so just go do it.

Speaker 1:

It's all the things that are implicit yes, yes, jonathan, I mean it's like sitting here, it's. I hadn't thought of this way before, but let me know if I'm on track with you. It's like saying, oh, to be a great basketball player, you need to be able to hit three pointers, right, okay, we're standing up there proud of the fact that, hey, you know what You're going to have to hit three pointers, and I don't know enough about basketball to say like four other things that you probably need to do, but it's. And then we wonder why.

Speaker 2:

and then we wonder why people can't go and do it right I mean that's that's what's so amazing to me so when I read the uh talent code I think it was that book, dan Coyle he talked about John Wooden since you're talking about basketball and what made Wooden so great as a coach was that the way he coached was on precise, granular feedback, on minutiae that each individual person was doing or not doing. It was concrete, in-the-moment feedback. So, if we zoom back out, you're on the right track so you can take collaboration and say well, part of that is you've got to start with yourself, right, you've got to have that in order. Then you got to be able to communicate, and there's a whole world going on there about good communication. You got to be able to articulate, explain, describe, be clear, but you also have to be able to listen. Yes, you have to be able to listen.

Speaker 2:

To learn is the phrase that I've picked up lately that, yeah, it's not listen to reload, to defend, but it's listen to actually hear and connect. So then you need to seek others perspectives and you had to build trust for that. You have to clarify understanding. You also need to be persuasive, and that means having good argumentation. You also have to work with biases that you have, that others have. You have to seek perspectives. So all of these can be broken down and become the substrate or the building blocks that could be taught as leadership development.

Speaker 1:

Well, and so I'll push back gently because I agree 100% with everything you just said. Now I have a busy executive in front of me. I mean it gets to a point where it feels unrealistic. I'm sure people listening feel like well, when would I ever have that time? Who's even made sense of all of these subtopics that I'm going to have to master? So how do you think about that? Because I know you're passionate about this topic, like scaling, but I keep hearing the phrase and you've heard me use it before on the podcast time starved. When do people have to learn all of these things? I mean, it's tens of thousands of things that probably someone would have to have command of to be successful. So then it just feels a little bit overwhelming, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so two things. One is we were talking about what would we do to educate young people in leadership courses in college. What would we teach them to help them have the wisdom related skills to learn from their experience over time? Yes, and I think that that's what I would point out, you can use these things to help do that. Yes, for the time for the people who are already in the middle of everything, yes, who are time-starved.

Speaker 1:

I'm with them every day. Right, every day, that's right. If you get them into like a half hour or an hour or a half day session, shit's just adding up.

Speaker 2:

And of course, it always starts with the counterintuitive move. So when I've done programs like that, I would generally use a little video clip that I put on YouTube from David White, and he's using David Wagoner's poem lost, the salish indian teaching story. Young kids come to an elder and say what do I do when I'm lost in this climax cedar forest? Or you can't see any landmarks or anything and you know I I don't have it in front of me, but it's like stand still, the forest around you is not lost, it knows where you are. You have to stand still and let it find you. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2:

So this is the first move for the time starved executive. It's always like the momentum of the feeling of being time starved in itself is an interpretation of events. Yes, so how do you get on the balcony and regulate that Notice? Wow, I'm feeling pressured. I feel like my response to being pressured needs to be go faster and go harder. Yeah, hmm, is there another way? Yeah, and that, to me, is the opening to say okay, stop and just breathe. Yeah, the world is not going to collapse if you take a breath for 10 seconds and allow because there is a lot of research too, too if you take two or three deep breaths. It does stuff to the brain. It calms you down, yeah. And then you have more resources to manage and regulate and not be subject to the automatic patterns and habits that drive you down against the brick wall endlessly, yes, and get you into these situations.

Speaker 1:

Well, and the executives, I think all day long are being seduced into that. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Oh, all day long. It's back to part of this paradigm of our whole society and education and productivity and effectiveness. But productivity and effectiveness are downstream symptoms of moments of influence, moments of interventions that are high leverage, that generate those downstream benefits. So what I think is, if you then stop and recognize okay, I'm in the middle of everything, what do I do? Well, stand still, okay. Oh, I bet there is some lesson I can learn right now, in this moment what could I notice about what's not working and what I've tried and what could I try different?

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

And then it's not about building out this map of a thousand skills that I've got to master and build up, because inevitably you already have a lot of these. They are very human and you don't always know. So I'm all made up, it's a bad question, jonathan, I mean.

Speaker 1:

So that question is like a E equals MC squared Underneath E equals MC squared are just I don't know infinite number of things. I don't know, but you know. So I think what I'm so interested in and why I love this conversation with you is, you know, I think there's and I imagine you could do it what are the eight questions that are going to help you navigate? What you need to navigate? How do we get our thinking and the title is I had a guest on and he just talked about, like the people he's working with is that there's so much noise out there in the sphere podcasts, and this podcast has been a part of that noise, because my own thinking isn't clean, I'm not communicating it to others in a clean way and so it's just confusing. It's just more noise a lot of the time. And how do we get our thinking so clean that we cut through that noise and be of service, like literally right now, of service to these individuals and that right? There is one of those questions in my mind. Push back if you disagree.

Speaker 2:

No, and this is why I said that the primary thing is how do we move from a content list of things to attend to to a principled process?

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And so if we were to create steps in the process, the first is stand still. You know, breathe, stand still and that will reduce some of the noise. Yeah, right, just doing that. Then it say, okay, I'm going to apply this principle, that I've been doing things on a certain basis. Why did I do them? What worked, what didn't work? An after action review yeah, if it's a 30 second thing, no problem.

Speaker 2:

And what we're going to say then is that look around you. Oh, where you got off on this is where I said amal had pointed to that people have these things in them in some way, and what we want to do is trust that. People have foundational skills but they're confused by the noise, distracted by it, so they don't always trust or have confidence in those things, or they've had modeling that doesn't allow them to deploy that. So, no, you should do these things. Yeah, so it is a little bit of trusting in what. Where you're at and looking they hear them, is loaded by their experience, and the communication gap can be enormous and sometimes it can overlap. So what? How do we balance out better? We need to give some concepts and some things, but how do we balance that better with process. So what we're experimenting with in the kind of training we're trying to scale is what I say is more of pointing out instructions.

Speaker 2:

So what we start with is say what triggers you? Okay, just start noticing when you're getting triggered and for two weeks just notice yourself getting triggered. Yeah, then for two weeks just notice what happens when you get triggered. Yeah, and it's like what, what's physiologically going on in your body? What kind of felt senses or what kind of emotions do you make of that? What are the thinking patterns? Are you ruminating, are you catastrophizing? Are you making up stories justifying whatever? Just notice those things and kind of map them. Then you're learning from your experience, at your language, your level. Then we do kind of like we built this somewhat off of immunity to change.

Speaker 2:

Say, say, the reason you got triggered is something was threatened. Ok, so that's something that was threatened. How can you give a name to it? There's probably a belief associated with it and there's probably a fear that something is at risk here, is at risk here. Can you name that and make an object of it? So get a little bit of distance so that then all that that you've mapped out, you can say how can I take it and move it to the side and sit in the driver's seat now, without that automatic habituated response acting you know people talk about this in a thousand different ways just move into that gap and sit down and say what else could be going on, what else could I do, where else do I want to go? And do it at your scale, your level, your pace and habituate that, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And this is another one of those knowing doing gaps. That back to the paper. That kind of sparked this conversation in some ways. But I had a physician say to me four months ago hey, before you eat lunch because I can overeat, right, I want to feel satiated. They'll say, drink a glass of water. And I'll say, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. I'm going to drink a glass of water. Well, jonathan, 99% of the time I forget. I don't have a hack to help change that neural pathway in my mind.

Speaker 1:

So, then you get into, like some BJ Fogg or some James Clear, atomic habits or tiny habits, yeah, where literally we have to break, we have to create a hack Like what am I going to do? Like, maybe it's on my to-do list in the morning. It says drink water before.

Speaker 2:

Well, so how much pain do you so while I drink? Uh, I get hungry in the morning, but I'm trying not to eat so much in the morning and I'll have a glass of water with electrolytes in it and that I notice. Oh, I'm not hungry now and so it works what your doctor is telling you and I literally forget. I know. So part of why we don't pay attention and forget is because it's not emotionally painful or salient enough for us. Yeah, right, you've got to feel the pain to be motivated and you've got to feel the dopamine hit that hey, oh, I'm getting something from this. You know something's happening, and so this is why, in the way we're designing things to try and close the knowing doing gap, we're trying to use what triggers you, because that's important to you. You know you care about that. It's how Keegan and Leahy did the seven languages. You know it wasn't the immunity to change. Four columns, seven languages.

Speaker 2:

you know it wasn't the immunity to change for columns they started out with nbc nagging, bitching, complaining, yeah, and won't wound people down into saying you're nagging about those things because you care about something.

Speaker 1:

Now voice what you care about yeah, well, okay, jonathan, we have to wind down our time. Here we are, so put a button in this conversation now. We're going to have to wind down our time. Here we are, so put a button in this conversation now and we're going to do a third. So, listeners, jonathan just went. Oh no, no, this is critical. This is so important because I think we're getting to some core things here. But would you put a button in this conversation? What do you think and I don't even know if that's a real phrase put a button in it.

Speaker 2:

Well, wrap it up in a book you want me to you know, do what's the practical wisdom, so you don't have to do your reflection.

Speaker 1:

I don't want to think you're making my brain hurt.

Speaker 2:

You know, but part, and I get why it hurts, because I've spent decades learning from people like Keegan and people like Theo Dawson and Mike Mascolo and others Suzanne Cook-Greiter you know where I got to learn, not just from reading, but from hanging out and being able to absorb in a richer way the nuance of their being in relation to that body of knowledge, and it's vast and it's a lot to take in. And I think it's the job of those of us trying to close the knowing-doing gap, to be the editors of all of that, to produce something that people can access. It's like you say it's clean, it's clear, it's streamlined, and they say, wow, I get something from this, it's working, yes, yes and I think to get there.

Speaker 2:

We're laying out what. What do we know? For instance, I didn't even touch on all the stuff about neuroscience, about how the predictive brain and feedback models and how we metaregulate. That is what we're talking about as well. So there's lots of science behind it, but the end user doesn't want to know the science. They just want to say does it work and what do I?

Speaker 1:

do yes and and again. Like I said in our first conversation, we come up with the suzuki method and go and and really really begin to truly experiment and I don't mean that in a willy-nilly way, but we truly see if we can be of service. Because I think again a lot of these conversations and I like your framing of what is of service when someone's a youth, what is of service when someone's in college, what's service if I have an executive right now at 44? You know that amy elizabeth fox conversation where she's like, look, I want them to be performance ready. Well, okay, shit, you're in it. How do we help you right now, in this moment, be as successful as you can?

Speaker 2:

be right, and that's how do we help them clean up so they're not weighed down by baggage and therefore can't be ready to perform because their resources aren't available, and how do we give them resources?

Speaker 1:

Yes, and that might be, hey, the question you just posed, like literally 15 minutes ago, like questions like that as a flotation device to help them. Or it might be the recommendation of do you have a therapist or a coach that's going to help you make sense of what's swirling on around you? I mean, I'm really interested right now in some of those actionable ways that, given everything we know, I had an oral surgeon standing in front of me who was taking over a practice and he was scared. Great, oral surgeon knows nothing about leadership. So he said what do I need to do? And and I said you know what? Build relationships for the next three months. Get to know your team that's probably the best place Learn from them and build relationships and then let's communicate, let's talk, but that's a great and that's the type of knowledge that we need to be able to share with another human standing across from us who's hurting.

Speaker 2:

But your example is perfect because he's in the middle of everything, yes, and he is learning from the curriculum. It's right in front of the people there can teach him Yep, yep, so Oof.

Speaker 1:

Okay, till next time, scott. Okay, thank you, sir. I appreciate it, as always, jonathan take care scott.