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

Exploring with Purpose (3) with Dr. Jonathan Reams

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 302

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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

  • "Life will teach you better. The curriculum is all around you.”
  • “If your inner weather is turbulent, others can feel it. You can’t hide your state of being.”
  • “Leadership starts with regulating your own noise so you can notice the needs of others.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. 

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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Scott Allen:

Okay, everybody. Welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Conversation number three with Jonathan Reams. And excited for this conversation today, Jonathan. We are we are continuing forward. And I know that listeners are going to get a lot from this dialogue because I think we're kind of straddling the space of theory to practice. And in that practice, really, really, really focus on how we can be experimenting out there in the world so that we can do leader development, so that we can better prepare people to serve in these roles. But I want to continue the conversation and kind of hover at that theoretical. And then we're going to slowly, like a great rocket ship, bring it down to ground level. That's at least the goal for today. We'll see if we get there. How are you, sir?

Jonathan Reams:

I am good, Scott. I am looking forward because of course we've been uh going off on tangents as we prepared for this, but we have an outline to keep us grounded and focused. Yes.

Scott Allen:

Again, uh in theory, we do. Where do you want to start the conversation today?

Jonathan Reams:

Yeah, that there was something that we kind of left hanging that I think would be a good entry point. And and I say that because I think a lot of people are using the distinction between vertical and horizontal development a lot. You used it. And I want to say a couple things about. I mean, I'm one of those people who tries to avoid it, and unpacking why might be helpful. So, first of all, I'll start with why do I think it's useful? And I think it's useful because we have in an undifferentiated way talked about learning and development in ways that did not make a distinction between things that in Piaget's terms would be assimilation. We just take new knowledge and practices and skills and put them into the structure of how we know how to do things, right? It fits, we can figure it out, we know the basic infrastructure, and we can take and do it. Vertical is more like what Piaget called accommodation, that the new information comes in and it doesn't quite fit how we've been doing things. Oh, we have it, so we say, what do we have to build out to extend the structures of how we do things to be able to include this? And that is what you know people call vertical development, and all these you know, stage models and all these kinds of things. So, putting in a plug for ILA, I'm on a panel with Mike Mascelo and David Day and Becky Andre talking about, I think Mike Mascelo suggested, should we abandon stage models? And it's partly this thing that we then build a mental representation of these stages and attribute things to it and give values to them, but those are actually really fractional understandings and they miss a whole lot of elements. Then we get into how do we understand development through dynamic skill theory, for instance, which would say we learn something new at a new level in one instance. Somebody mentors us, we have a coach, we have training, and in that context, we learn how to produce widget A or give good feedback or do whatever skill it is, and we do it at a level beyond how we tend to do other things. Now, what happens is there's a principle involved in that, that we have accumulated a lot of building blocks that kind of have fleshed out the territory that allows us to chunk clothes together and use a shorthand that allows us to say, okay, oh, I know how to give good feedback now, and all these little building blocks and pieces are system one, they're internalized, and you can do them.

Scott Allen:

Give me an example other than feedback. Does this apply to athletics? Does it apply to performing CPR surgery?

Jonathan Reams:

I mean, I would say in all those areas, however, part of what we taught, I think we talked about before is that one of the challenges is learning sensory motor skills, the feedback is right away. Yes, you you see your performance or not. Yes. Um, if you're a surgeon in operating you're running the scalpel, you see what happens right away. Yep. When you get into am I doing transformational leadership? Am I being a servant leader? What the hell does that look like or mean? Right? It's it's more abstracted. And the people that maybe coined these terms or made these theories went through probably decades of process and experimentation, understanding and learning how to put language around it that ends up in this really dense abstract concept that means a lot to those who can understand and is intuitively interesting and resonates with people who then take the basic things and say, okay, I'm gonna do that, but don't necessarily go through the journey. So the horizontal part is how do you go through the journey and build up enough building blocks at a given structure of thinking and putting things together to enable you to kind of use that a shorthand term to do that? Now you could say that's a vertical, but the relationship between them is so much more dense. And you know, the notion of the connectome, how the the brain is interwired and is interwired with our environment and with other people. So the cool thing about dynamic skill theory is it understands that context matters in our performance. So we're not just performing based on our skills, we're performing in context. Okay, the more we can learn to vary. So back to my example, you learn the skill of giving good feedback, but maybe you're terrible about giving keynote talks. Yeah. Well, how do you transfer what you learned there in terms of expanding the structure of how you relate to giving feedback to take in all those building blocks and go through the same process in another domain, another skill, another task. But you can usually go through that quicker because you've gone through the process. You do that enough times in enough domains, and then people say, Oh, he's self-authoring now. He thinks for himself, he doesn't have a socialized mind, or you know, she's uh an opportunist now, she's an expert. And though those are simple descriptive ways to talk about this much more deep and robust process. So that's probably enough of that for now.

Scott Allen:

So, well, let's check something real quick. What would another activity that humans engage in be like leadership? What would be the closest thing you can think of? Would it be therapy? Would it be group therapy? What is something that humans engage in that is complex in the way to learn? Because piloting an airplane is somewhat of a closed system.

Jonathan Reams:

Yeah. Being helpful, you know. So Edgar Schein, somebody who really went deep and long into many areas, his second to last book was on helping. And what I found so fascinating about it is he had simple principles that you could tell were rich and robust underneath. So he uses examples of uh conversation where somebody stops on the street and says, Um, which way do Mass Avenue in in you know Boston? And he could give an answer, but instead he asks the question, Where are you trying to go? And then they gave a response. He says, Oh, well, you just head here and turn right and you're there. As where if he had immediately answered, he would have taken them in the wrong direction. So there's something about the skill of just being helpful for other people that requires a quietness within oneself, an ability to regulate your need to look clever or be right, or uh, that's my tendencies, right? Uh all these kind of things that are noise in us, how do we downregulate those to have the outward mindset and notice what are the real needs of others and actively inquire into it? So I think to me, that's a generalized thing that is close to leadership.

Scott Allen:

Get it. Yes, I love that example. Can you think of a role that we try and train people for that it has the complexity embedded in it of leadership and management?

Jonathan Reams:

I because I taught in a counseling program for many years, I think group therapy but even that is such a closed system of like seven personalities, which again are kind of infinite in and of themselves.

Scott Allen:

So I get that.

Jonathan Reams:

Well, so yes and no. I mean, yes, you can put boundaries on that. However, when you go deep into it, you see how are the contexts that each of these bring into the room affecting that closed system. So it's not so closed anymore. It's certainly there's all sorts of layers and of stuff that you can see actually show up in that moment, and that's why I find micro moments, micro development, micro skills, atomic habits, all these kind of things are pointing to the fact that in the tiny moments it's all there, yeah, it's all influencing it. Even back to the one-minute manager, you know, take one minute and you can have a big impact because all these things can be condensed into small acts.

Scott Allen:

Yeah. And I I guess what I'm trying to think about is just because I I agree with everything you've just said. And I'm I'm trying, and maybe there isn't, another thing that has the let's say I'm a CEO of an organization or an executive director of a nonprofit. I'm just trying to think of another role where a human is navigating that level of complexity, whether it's the context, whether it's the business, whether it's the team. Yeah.

Jonathan Reams:

I agree with that in the sense that we can make more visible and explicit many more considerations, constraints, pressures in a system that leaders in organizations have to contend with, and often don't, right? They just cut off the rough edges and focus on what they can keep in mind. Yeah. So maybe this is a transition into what do we do with all this? Yes, one way. And maybe it's an intermediate step. Yeah. And so I think about this in terms of my own journey of coming from a place of broad strokes of consciousness development, encountering adult development theories and practice, ego development, skill development, and so on. And then starting to get into what are developmental practices, and there's lots of them out there under many guises, and they're all to me attempts to address what we're talking about. How do you be helpful in guiding other people to learn and grow and develop in useful ways? Yes. And we can point to the limits of our education system or the way it sucks creativity and natural learning out of us. And a lot of one of the areas of my focus, let's say, is how do we reconnect adults with that natural learning cycle? So Theo Dawson, who you've interviewed to whose work I've gotten immense value out of, uses these virtuous cycles of learning. And playing with those over the years, and then talking to somebody else that you've interviewed, Mike Mascolo, who worked with Kurt Fisher a lot too. I started to experiment, and like anything, development happens through action, experimentation, and reflection. Yeah. What did we try? What did we learn? And how fast can you iterate that rather than build the widget, get attached to the way you colored it, you know, like Ford? You can have a car any color you want as long as it's black. Yep. Right? So, how do we do this in a way that allows us to iterate? So I've experimented. I got somebody I was talking to once, uh, said, Oh, why don't you just call them learning loops? And that stuck with me for years. And I, okay, so now how do we help people learn not by giving them content, but by saying, What is it that is in your environment that you're trying to solve, and how are you trying to solve it now? And where are you bumping up against brick walls? And how do you help them identify that? And that's a way to calibrate what's what's the goal then? What is what's the learning goal? Now, what I like to do next is experiment and say, okay, you see this goal because you already have several of the building blocks, probably, but not all of them. So, how do you break this down and make distinctions about, you know, you take a mind map, you know, what is collaboration? Well, you got to communicate, you've got to be persuasive, you've got to do all these things. Each of those breaks down. Let's look at that to see where do you feel you want to take a more granular skill and experiment by practicing in the context you're in. And then give people structured prompts for this, scaffold a little by giving them suggestions around okay, if this is your goal for uh asking clarifying questions. Yeah. Well, here's a list of clarifying type questions. Here's a list of opinion type questions where you're really just trying to, you know, prompt people to agree with you and help people make okay, which ones do I do, or which one, okay, I could practice this, and then give them some questions to help them reflect on it to prompt what they are looking at. And this comes from a lot of work around the notion of granularity. Rather than having an undifferentiated thing we're trying to get better at, how do we let the fog clear to see some details? Ah, we need to go there and not quite there. So I need, yeah, I need to fill in this gap. And you make those as small as possible. So a lot of the practice and experimentation that me and some colleagues are doing now is how do we design those types of learning loops? So we even built a you know, a document from several conversations from those of us who have practiced this more and say, what has become implicit for us? How do we think about the steps in the process? What are the types you design? How does the context play into it? How do you guide people into this and through it in a way that is more natural for people to learn from their everyday experience?

Scott Allen:

So give me a concrete example of this in action. How how do you see that, Jonathan? I'm I'm seriously, I'm super interested. Let's say it's active listening, ground level. So, how does this? I'm a human, I'm in front of you, I need to improve. Let's just something around listening, right? How do you think about that?

Jonathan Reams:

So, a simple way to do it is to calibrate where is a person? You know, they're asking the question because they know they have some blind spots or limitations. So we could say, okay, here's some simple distinctions. Are you listening to try and gather data to validate your own beliefs and arguments? Or are you listening to uh find fault and be critical or look for reasons to be cynical? And there's all sorts of other, you know, emotional baggage can be associated there. Or are you listening to learn? Like Keegan and Leahy's deconstructive criticism. Is it a stance saying, I know something about this, but what's the reason behind your thinking? Can we unpack what's implicit or what your experience is? And you can offer people these distinctions, and they say, Oh, okay, I see. And then you ask them to observe when they're asking questions and listening and what's going on. How would you categorize how you're listening? And of course, by just getting them to pay attention to that, they start to become aware of, oh, now I see I'm not so I'm good at this, but I'm not so good at this. Or in this context, I get triggered and I and then I'm not learning anything when I listen. Then it gives them clues about where do I need to focus my development, where do I need to practice something new and different. And you keep iterating this. You gather more data, you refine what you're focused on, and you keep going through that cycle.

Scott Allen:

Okay, give me another. Look, okay, so a lot of busy executives that I'm that I'm working with, uh just slowing down, being present, and because it's just one thing to the next thing, the next thing, and they just get sucked in. I think they have no clue how they're showing up, their energy. We talked about that a couple episodes back. So, what how do you think about that one?

Jonathan Reams:

Yeah, that this is a really common thing. And I actually had a student do her master's thesis interviewing some of the executives we had worked with around this. So we have one of these learning loops on when to think slow. And the context is those executives have developed incredibly good system one pattern recognition, and they rely on gut feeling or intuition to be able to read a situation and make a decision because they don't have time to stop and gather data and so on. That's what you're saying. They're busy, they gotta rely on that. The challenge is as the world's changing so fast, new novel contexts and situations come up more often where the pattern kind of fits but maybe doesn't. And you can make a gut decision that doesn't take into account what this situation needs, and it maybe works or maybe doesn't, or you know, doesn't fit well or creates backlash or whatever. So one of the applications we've built is to say to people, so great, gut gut thinking, intuition is fantastic, and it's limited. How do you have the kind of metacognitive habit to notice when you need to slow down and use system two in Kahneman's term and be explicit in what you're considering? What we'll do is invite people to say, well, look at some decisions you made and map them. How were you dealing with tensions or polarities between urgency and importance, or familiarity and novelty, or what was your emotional state? You know, were you calm and objective or experiencing strong emotions that could cloud your judgment? What kind of data do you have? And so we invite them to look at recent situations, try to map out what was going on in a given situation. And with that data, then the practice is over the next days, notice when you're relying on your intuition or gut feeling, and then list the kind of distinctions from the previous step that are factors that trigger gut feelings. And then the third part is when you notice the urge to make that stop and say, How would I decide if maybe this is a situation that warrants some slower thinking and attention? They do that just to gather data by observing their behavior and trying to reflect on what's happening. And then we give some coaching questions. What happened when you increased your awareness of triggers? What resources did you find most useful? What did you notice about the quality of these decisions and their outcomes? Yeah. And of course, that fee gives them feedback to start learning from their own experience in a habituated way.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, and I think I think it's I think it's brilliant. I think it's, I mean, what I'm hearing here. So again, I'm doing a readback, so you can let me know if I'm off base, but we're we're chunking it down to something that is important to the individual right now. That the this is something, it could be even feedback on a 360, or it could be, you know, but this is something that's important to the individual. It's fairly contained, it's a behavior they own, they have control over. And we're simply inviting them to begin to notice and be aware. And and there's some questions that we're asking that are hopefully triggering some of those insights that are occurring. And it's small. It's not. Hey, this is transformational leadership, which to your point from previous conversations, there are thousands, thousands of things. And and that's where I get a little bit overwhelmed right now is you know, we can just start going down the list of the thousands of things that ideally a great leader would know and do and have skill around. And so, you know, that's where my mind goes is are there some master micro learnings that will serve me in multiple domains?

Jonathan Reams:

I think there's there's two places I want to go with this. Yeah, one is the principle of how do we help people reconnect with their natural love of learning and development? Because many, and you know, I'm talking to somebody in a large consultancy saying we don't have a growth mindset. We know we need to develop our leaders, but we don't have a culture of taking time to grow and learn. And when I talk to some of those leaders, then you see that that is in varying degrees. Some of them have more interest than others, but when the culture doesn't support or reinforce it in certain ways. So the principle of if you can get people to reconnect with how did you learn to walk? How did you learn to ride a bike? You did stuff and you fell down and you got hurt, but your motivation to learn the thing was far bigger than the judgment about your failure. Yeah, it's when we get more developed egos that we tend to be more worried about our ego and looking bad when we fail, and then we don't learn as much.

Scott Allen:

So is it almost that we are teaching people to become aware when they're not getting the results they want, or when things aren't going well, or it's not working, for them to in some ways cut off some of those cognitive biases like self-serving bias, for instance, and get curious. And when they get curious, they start to observe and they start to to run experiments and they start to reflect. And if I have that master system in place, then really I can learn anything. Maybe not algebra too, but I can learn a lot of things.

Jonathan Reams:

But but this is uh to me, the principle is you know, life will teach you better. The curriculum is all around you. Yes, but you don't have the the principle. So you you describe that very well, and that's what we're trying to do by giving people instances of things where their the pain or motivation is great enough that they're willing to take the time to invest in what I like to call slow learning. Sure. This is not quick, right? Because we're both cleaning up and undoing, like you talked about, all the bad habits that we've accumulated in terms of cognitive biases and things that protect us in the world and protect our ego and so on. So there are all sorts of things for that, but and there's many ways we could talk about it, but I've been experimenting, let's say, for the last year in the back of my mind, saying, and to this, this was to the point of one of your recent podcasts how do we teach people basic blocking and tackling? How do we teach people the kind of uh fundamentals that we often skip over because it's cool and it makes us look good as educators or as consultants because we're saying something that people don't understand makes us look authoritative, and say, actually, let's start with some self-leadership. How do you learn to think clearly? How do you become aware of your cognitive biases? How do you notice yourself running up the ladder of inference and start building metacognition, an internal balcony where there's part of you that isn't caught up in the drama and the automatic thinking, but you start to build a more robust platform to observe yourself? Yeah, so that's one skill. How do you just think more clearly? And regulating emotions is part of that, all sorts of things you could go into. But then you could say, okay, now you've thought about stuff, but if it just sits in you, so what? You've got to communicate equally clearly. How do you use tools like Torbert's Four Parts of Speech or learn listening to learn or asking clarifying questions to understand that communication is a two-way street. You've got to calibrate what you're saying so that it lands and has enough overlap with how people are hearing it so that it connects and is more actionable for people.

Scott Allen:

But this is where, like, I can imagine large language models and AI could be so incredibly important because the AI could potentially then serve me some tools, some heuristics, some, you know, we were talking about the readback, right? That this is a very simple tool to ensure that that communication has we're on the same page, right? Wow. What did we just agree to? Say it back to me real quick. And you know, that saves lives in healthcare and disasters in in emergency services, oftentimes. And so it's interesting because and I think this is part of what you're building, correct?

Jonathan Reams:

Yes.

Scott Allen:

Okay, talk a little bit about that, and then we're gonna wind down, Jonathan. I know we have to eventually, right?

Jonathan Reams:

It would be really dangerous if I came to Cleveland, and we just have to it would be so uh that sequence uh it goes back to the phrase you quote me on leaders create the weather. And I said that, and then I've been trying to unpack. Well, what did he pick up in that? What's that about? Oh, how what are the metaphors? You know, if our internal condition, our thinking and feeling is turbulent, even if we're blind to it, others sense it. We can't hide our inner state.

Scott Allen:

No, no.

Jonathan Reams:

We think we do, but we're not. So there's a lot of work that goes on there to help leaders realize that you know the fundamental thing is lead yourself first. You are the instrument of your leadership, the the field you create, whether people trust you and lean in or all these things. So trying to break that down, thinking, okay, communicating, connecting. We know leadership's all about relationships. How do you start to seek perspectives, understand different uh value systems people are part of and influenced by and loyal to, and and really build empathy and understanding, which contributes to trust, which greases the wheels wheels of common action.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, and then and then my mind goes back to you know, um, is it as simple as going to the virtues and and starting there, right? As a as a as a place to begin of how do we help you know a good human exist? And then you know, the thinking is that that will generally bridge to uh a position of authority.

Jonathan Reams:

Well, I and I think it's not quite as simple as that, I would say. I I think but that but what your point to is that is the foundation. If it's not in place, then all the things you learn about um how to work in markets, how to deal with shareholders, how to create cultures in organizations or influence them and so on, all those things can be manipulated for you know all sorts of ways. So things I've heard about what happened with Enron was people were trained and rewarded to be very clever about these kind of things, but they were doing it in service of something fundamentally broken inside them.

Scott Allen:

Yep. Yep. Jonathan, I'm I'm I'm so thankful for our conversations. And and I I said it a little bit ago. I was I was joking a little bit, but it's true. My brain always hurts after speaking with you, but I love that. I love that, and I appreciate that because I think you're exploring some really, really cool things. And it's this type of thinking and this type of experimentation that we need to see if we can get further faster. I think we are spending billions of dollars on leader development around the world with very little ROI, at least that I've come across as far as studies and such. And, you know, on one level, I think our last three conversations have pointed to some of that complexity of why it's so difficult to do. I mean, in in some ways, it's how do we develop a well-adjusted human, right?

Jonathan Reams:

Well, and I think this is the point of why have we talked so much kind of geeky theory of which we've only kind of tipped the iceberg of. But it's to me to answer those questions of why is there a knowing doing gap? Yeah, why can't we develop leader development in better ways, other than how the military does it? Well, then we have to dig deep and question many layers of assumptions and practices and socialization and institutionalization of things to uncover. Oh, underneath that, there's actually maybe some things that could work better, but now we've got to figure out how to sift the signal from the noise, put it together in a way and put it out there. And I think there are many people out there doing this in their own context, in their own way with their own language, attempting to further this. We don't always see them or notice them or have an awareness of them, but my gut feeling is that there are an isolated many who are doing this, who just don't get the media attention or profiles that allow it to be a thing that's visible.

Scott Allen:

Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of opportunity. A lot of opportunity. Okay. You well. You well. Okay. What can I say that hasn't been said over three episodes? Actually, there's probably a lot more that could be said. But as always, Jonathan, appreciate you, appreciate your mind, appreciate your energy for the exploration. And I think we share some commonalities. How do we better prepare people to serve in these really complex roles and serve well? Thank you to you, sir, for giving us your time, your wisdom. And for those of you who have listened to all three episodes, thank you so very, very much. Take care all. Be well. Bye bye.