Harnessing the Hive Mind: Lessons from Bees to Unlock Group Intelligence in Business

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity.

0:49 In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen, test Town. In this week create to have you. I'm your host doctor at least Cortes. If we have not met before, you don't know me. I'm an organizational psychologist and logo therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enlive and in fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose. Did you know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.

1:32 In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line. You can me more about us and how we can work together at gastadashnow dot com or my personal site at least Coortes dot com. Heading in today's program we have with us Today. Shavn Michale who helps people lead change and her why today is better workforces, better workplaces. She has worked across four continents helping thousands of leaders to create more agile and productive workplaces. She also has been on the inside as the executive in charge of Culture Chain and a series of large multinational organizations. She is the author of The High Mind at work harnessing the power of group intelligence to create meaningful and lasting change, which we'll be talking about today. She joined it today from Melbourne, Australia, where I believe it's ten a m.

2:14 Wednesday and it's five pm Tuesday for me, Shavon A hearty welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you very much, Alise, and a good day from Melbourne, Australia. It's wonderful. It's so wonderful to have you. I terribly enjoyed reading your beautiful book, and I really have a suspicion just how much work and effort this put in. All of your acknowledges. Acknowledgements told me, of course that you had a lot of support, but I really want to applaud you for creating such a beautiful, well written book. Well, thank you so much, and I hope you enjoyed it and. That it's helpful. I did. I gleaned a lot of things from it, and one of the things I want to open with I think it's pretty fascinating. I love your whole how you situate the whole book. Of course, in the Wisdom from Bees, you got to think about bees, I got to think about owls, so could you talk about your fascination, Where did your fascination come from with bees and kind of a little bit of how you're leaning on it, especially for the work of this book.

3:15 Sure, lis So, I grew up in Ireland and as a child I was fascinated by the bees as they swarmed in the orchard of my family's farm. And this fascination with natural ecosystems actually led me to a path, a career path studying human ecosystems. So I'm really fascinated by how groups operate, not just individuals, and this led me into a career path as I call an insider. But yeah, this fascinating fascination with the bees actually led me into a career in psychology, organizational psychology, and eventually to become an insider, the executive in charge of change in a series of multinational firms.

4:02 As you mentioned, I. Really appreciate an alignevon with this idea of really relying on and shall we say, drawing from the wisdom of nature. So there's a lot we can talk about it, and I will be weaving some of your concepts that you got directly from really understanding bees as we go. And let's next take it then. To you have this this idea here that you've developed and you draw from when you implement change and help others do the same. These nine laws of group dynamics. I don't really know that we need to go through all nine of them, but it would be nice maybe to help give a flavor to our listeners and viewers as to just maybe what a few of those laws might be and indicate just how they really are situated from the wisdom of bees.

4:43 Yes, well, at least most people when they think about change, they've been given what I call an interpersonal toolkit, so they're looking at change from an individual perspective and how individuals behave. But we need to add to that picture with what I call a systemic lens and under standing of how complex human ecosystems operate. And we can learn a lot from the. Bees in terms of how bees swarm and how bees operate when they undergo change, and from examining bees and examining. Human groups or human ecosystems. Over in many decades, I've formulated these nine laws, and one of them, for example, is the law of role.

5:26 So often we're taught that human behavior is governed by personality, and yes, personality has an impact on our behavior, but so does roll and the role that we take up in any group or in any system. If you like. Beautiful and then if you could speak to maybe embeddedness, I find that one really really fascinating. Yeah, the law of embeddedness is really about how sticky change can be, because when you do things for a long time in any group setting, it becomes embedded. And that is about how it's deeply wired into that organizational system or into that workforce to do things in a certain way. So in order to change, you've actually got to rewire that. We've got to physically rewire how things are done, and that is often painful because it means rewiring the neural pathways in our brains. So you've got to understand how embedded the change is. And the more embedded it is that behavior, the more difficult it will be to bring about change.

6:39 So beautiful explained. Then just finally one more, how about pattern blindness. Yeah, Passions are the hidden agreements between different parts of a group, and these hidden agreements often capture us. So we walk into any group very quickly we are caught by the patterns in that group. So I often explain it in this way. In a family situation. You know, if you're in a new relationship and you bring your new partner into your family for the first time, they can often see things that you've become blind to. That's just the way. Things are done in our family. Isn't that the same in all families? Well, actually no, it's not. But because we are part of that family, we become blind to that pattern. It becomes norm the norm, and the same things happen within the workplace. We are captured by these patterns.

7:36 They become the norm, and we actually sometimes overlook the fact that they are maybe dysfunctional, are no longer serving the organization optimally. And that's one of the many things that really struck me about your book, Shavin. And certainly I could relate doing it also helping organizations to transform culture. Right, we're doing the same thing. We're helping to be able to hold a pedal. But these are in the mirror above this. These are the patterns that are running your organization. As you would say, they oftentimes aren't aware of those, And so I thought there was so much that we could take from these different laws. And as we go along and talk about examples of different companies. I think it will really help our listeners and viewers really also start to get the AHAs for themselves. So we'll carry on now what I'd love to do here. This is so interesting too, also as somebody who helps spirit change, not on the same level that you do, but I appreciated that you said that change failures usually stem from two conventional ways of thinking about transformation. Can you situate those two conventional and then we'll talk about the way you do it.

8:40 Yeah. So the conventional ways of thinking about organizations are firstly, that organizations are machines. And this really stands from I suppose in you Tonian thinking in the sixteen hundreds, where we see organizations like clock like mechanisms where you can pull a leadver oil of ratchet, drive change all of these. Even the language that we use would indicate that we see organizations often like machines and in that machine metaphor, humans are our mere cogs in the machine that can be manipulated. So that's one lens on organizations, and it impacts how we drive change and fix things. The second lens is that we see organizations more as social networks, and this emerged from the thinking of Ja Bynes, who is an anthropologist studying a village in Norway, and he began to map the influencers in that village and he described them as nodes in the network. And the people who had more influence had bigger connections, more connections, and we can see the influence of this very much an interpersonal lens. So in the social network, you need EQ are emotional intelligence in order to have influence, and the influencers could help garner or create change, and that is another lens. But the third lens that I'm introducing is

10:13 an ecosystem lens, which is that organizations or groups are ecosystems where each part of that ecosystem has a critical role to play. It's not about IQ in the machine, it's not about EQ in the social network. It's more about group intelligence in the ecosystem. I appreciate that. So the first one, the sixteen hundred early more logical, functional rational, of course, being the IQ space, the sort of nowork being the EQ space. And then of course you were distinguishing yours as the GQ space, which I think is fascinating. And you know, when we get into this next example about Coke. I don't know if you know this or not, but I don't even know if it's still around. But we had a very popular magazine here in the United States called GQ, and it was really it was really do you know this? It was you know, it was about kind of sex appeal and such, and so it didn't speak to group intelligence, but it certainly would be an attractive sort of way to talk about, you know, the idea of harnessing group intelligence through a GQ kind of lens for at least Americans as well.

11:23 Yeah, I've heard of that magazine, but. It's not right right, kind of has a nice little fun flavor to it though, Chian right, Okay, speaking of flavor, let's talk now this. I was really compelled by all of your business examples that really showcase this this these kinds of different ideas and frameworks that you have developed, Shaman, and so the idea when you were sharing in the book about how I think it was Coke wanting to move into the UK with its you know, non flavored or non colored water or something like that, Can you share that that case and just why that case study and why it went so a right, Yeah.

12:04 So, as you mentioned the hard mind at work is full of these sort of case studies, practical case studies. Because I'm an insider, I'm less interested in theory and more interested in practicality and how can we really bring about change? And one of the case studies, some of them are from my own experience, and some of them are from research on big companies where change failed miserably, And one of those was Coke where it was introducing DESIGNI into the UK market with a view to expanding into nineteen countries across Europe. But that failed miserably because of well, initially it was because of what I call the order giver pattern. So there were order givers in the Atlanta head office of Coke that were giving the orders of the instructions to the order takers in the UK.

12:56 And basically the pattern, or the hidden agreen and between the head office and the regions within Coke at this time was that you take orders from the order givers. So nobody questioned the orders and everybody just went along on the tried and tested method of introducing DESIGNY into a new territory and assuming that it would be successful. But actually the case study goes into a lot of detail on this, but the UK consumers did not see designy in the same way as the US consumers, So context is everything, and seeing the pattern and not being run by that order taker pattern was the big lesson.

13:40 But as change practitioners, it's. Really about not being caught by these patterns a lease, really seeing the pattern and being able to rewire that pattern before it takes you down the wrong track and in Coke's example, losing multi millions of dollars on a failed product launch. Hmm, I want to sprinkle on a few more details that I think really bring this home for a chauven that I took from your book. I am. I am a researcher, and I read your I read my guest books cover to cover. As you can see from the outside I sent you I I that's how I prepare for the show. One of the things that struck me is that you also talked about how you know. The Atlanta marketing team broke the law of multiple perspectives again when it used the same online ad campaign that it had run in the US without testing it testing the tagline water with spunk. Now in the United States, spunk means something pretty playful and fun but in the UK you go on to say that spunk actually means semen seme e n quite a bit different meaning, right, and and so you go on to say that you know, Coke must at some point have said to themselves, are you kidding me? How did we miss this? That's a pretty huge glaring miss.

14:56 Yes, yes, absolutely a list. That was a glaring miss. And when you think back to the root cause of that mix and miss. You come back to the pattern. If you are an ordered taker in London and you're just being told what to do, and you're just accepting the rules and the instructions from head office, you're not going to. Question that advice. You're not going to say, well hang on, people here might think that spunk has a very different meaning. So that. Pattern was really one. Of the root causes of that failure and failure to recognize a different context and to tap into multiple perspectives in different regions.

15:41 So beautifully explained Chevan, All right, let's take our first break. I'm your host, doctor Rele Scortas we were on the air with Shavon McKiel, who is an expert in helping people lead change. We've been talking about her beautiful book The Hive. Sorry I didn't write it down. Of you, I've got to say the Hive mind at work. I love the example of Coke. After the week, we're going to kick off that segment talking about the example of Pfizer. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a a Lis at a Leastcortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

17:12 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes, as I am dedicated to album creator world where people realize their potential at work and are led by inspirational leaders that help them find their greatness while we do business at Better is the World. I continue to research and write my own books, So my last one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically enliven your business, and I wrote it to help business leaders understand just how much the world has changed, what the workforce wants and needs from their work experience, and what you can do to supply that through twenty two best practices in your culture. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site at least Coortes dot com if you are just now joining us. My guest is Jevon McHale.

17:52 She's the author of The Hive Mind at Work, Harnessing the power of group intelligence to create meaningful and lasting change. Next, I really have to showcase and celebrate, of course, Thefisier example. I think many of us may have had some idea of some of the workings that really helped to bring the co coviineteen vaccine to life, but the way you describe it, and this to me, this is just also just really I have to celebrate the leadership behind this. So would you talk to us about that case study? Yes. So another case study in the book is the Fiser example where Albert Borla was appointed as the new CEO to Phizer just before the outbreak of COVID, and rather than being caught by the system as I talk about, he actually took a step back and he started to examine how is this ecosystem working? And what he discovered was that researchers and academics were all working, even the big farmer companies, all working in silos and he started to see that he would have to break down that siloed pattern if he was going to accelerate the development of a vaccine for COVID. And the previous development of a vaccine for months had actually taken four years to develop, and Borland knew that he couldn't afford to take four years to develop the COVID vaccine. So he introduced a

19:25 five point manifesto, and one of those five points was the need for collaboration. And that started to. Rewire that siloed pattern, and people started sharing online in online repositories. They started sharing news of their findings or breakthroughs of research. And because of that sharing and that collaboration. Nine months later, Faiso was the first company to bring the COVID vaccine to market. So an incredibly visionary lead who saw the pattern that was running the system and who intervened in the system in order to bring about rapid change and a dismantling of that silo pattern.

20:12 So a great demonstration release. Of what I call in the book group intelligence and group intelligence is this ability to be able to understand complex, dynamic human ecosystems and to intervene in those ecosystems in a way that brings about successful change. And just to bring home just really what a sheer, monumental effort that really was. The numbers are pretty astounding. You say in your book that Albert Borla had enabled that hive mind, but this is among seventy nine thousand employees infiser in more than one hundred and twenty five countries, and so of course embracing the idea of the intercompany corporation liberated from breoucracy, and most of all hard work to produce this honey of a success. As you say, I had so much fun with how you played with all the b metaphor in your book.

21:05 It was just fun. It was delightful. I'm glad you enjoyed it, and we can learn a lot of your bees. I know clearly your whole book is just delightful. Well, let's do this. Let's go ahead and introduce. You have a process to harness the power group intelligence in your four step process that you call the hive lens. Let's share that with our listeners and viewers. Yes, So the book goes into a lot of detail on the HIVE lens. And it really is as I mentioned, alease moving from this interpersonal lens or this mechanistic lens that really has run change. If you think about change management, it's a lot of it has been about.

21:47 You know, you have your Excel spreadsheet, new project. Manage it and you develop into personal skills using EQ and your change will succeed. Well, actually, those are necessary but not sufficient. In today's world, where change is escalating an ever more complex you need this GQ lens, which is this group intelligence lens. And I give people a methodology in order to develop their GQ. The first one is really and I call it the high lens. So the l in lens is about looking beyond. You've got to look beyond the presenting problems, which are often not your problems, and look for the underlying issues. In ninety ninety five percent of cases, the presenting issues during change or when you're trying to drive increase performance, they are not the actual issues that you're facing. So I give you tools to look beyond to see the patterns might be running your organization. The E in the lens is about experimenting, and I give lots of examples of how you can experiment.

22:55 We're not living in a black and white linear world anymore. You've got to be able to set up experiments that can test your hypotheses and that can lead you ever closer to your success in terms of your delivery objectives or your change objectives. N is nudging. You've got to learn how to nudge for change, not drive for change. And ecosystems cannot be fixed. You cannot drive hard for change that produces what I called unintended consequences. And lastly, learn how to strengthen, strengthen the emerging change so that it becomes more embedded. Beautiful, and to recap them. The lens model so L for lenses, look beyond ees experiment in his nudge and as his strengthen I just I think there's a lot of power in having just a very crisp sort of acronym like that, so it just works in all of your whole again, you know you, I know how hard you worked on this because of the acknowledgment so you put forth and have some idea because of the books that I've written. But I really appreciate how how well organized and tait it is Shoulan.

23:58 It's just beautiful. Yes, thank you for that. And because I am an insider and a practitioner I think, and the executive in charge of change, I realized that things have to be practical. You know, I'm not an academic, and that that lens is very valuable, but I come from that perspective of wanting to make theory. Like you can have a theory, but when you're actually in the trenches working in an organization, and sometimes the theory doesn't stack up. So you need practical tools and you need simple you know, you need the complex made simple for sure. Absolutely well. And to that end, I have to say once again in your book, I was really riveted by how you explain the Lehman Brothers downfall.

24:42 So crisply. You know, there's been a lot of conversation over the years about that big bohemoth disaster, but I've seen very little commentary that, so crisply explain just how it happened. Can you share your perspective on just how it is that Leman came down? Yeah, So that is another case study in the hive mind at work, and it's really another illustration. Often in these complex cases, we get lots of commentary, and there was a lot of commentary on how did this downfall happen? And some people would have blamed the CEO. Other people might have blamed the compensation or remuneration, other people might have blamed the market conditions. So lots of analysts, lots of commentators dissecting that case study, but very few with what I call a systemic lens, and the systemic lenses really understanding how the whole ecosystem operates and the role that different parts were playing in co creating that disaster.

25:46 So I take that systemic lens and I look at each of the parts of that complex ecosystem and how they stepped into a different role. So investors, for example, stepped into role of demander, demanding Ever more higher returns from Lehman Brothers and other banks, and the executive team and the board stepped into role of endorser of the executive remuneration that encouraged short term thinking. The executive team itself stepped into. The role of short term thinkers, so they were really only thinking about the next year and the next year's profits.

26:31 And then the accountants stepped into the role of window dressers, really just covering up for some of. The misalignments and the practices. That were not meeting the guidelines, the regulated guidelines. So together they were creating what I called the short termism pattern. And this was really about the hidden agreement in the system that we chase short term res als to the detriment of longer term considerations. And that pattern was just running Lehman Brothers and in fact probably the many of the financial institutions at that time, so it was systemic.

27:14 It was a hidden agreement in. The system, and we need to see those hidden agreements in order to be able to successfully rewire them and bring about lasting, sustainable change. We've had a couple of guests on this podcast over the year, Shavonne talking about the problem of you know, running running a business by the quarter system and how limited that really really is, and of course being somebody who champions purpose, purpose is playing the long game. So I really found that that that pattern that you had, you had explicated the short term short terms and made a lot of sense to me, and all the roles the different groups played so beautifully explained. And then if we go on to the next one we talk about what happened at Ford. One of the things that I think is really important about what you're going to share here is this is a problem that you're going to talk about that lives large in so many companies I know you know as well, And that's the idea of you know that the punisher mentality and punishing mistakes and punishing when people don't know things. And so if you could share that example of what was going on with Ford and how they were trying to test new patterns as well.

28:22 Yeah, So when Alan Malally joined Ford in two thousand and sixty, the organization was in deep trouble and was facing the worst profit results and the biggest profit loss. In its over one hundred year history. So Malali was bringing his executive team together and what he was noticing was that every update when he brought them together on a weekly basis in his Thunderbird headquarters room, and every update that they were giving was a sea of green. He had developed this traffic lights where green was okay, you know, on track and amber and red.

29:04 Many people would have seen this tracking mechanism, but he was just facing a sea of green every week after week, people saying it's green, it's green, it's green, it's everything's on track. And he called them on it and we said, well, how can it all be green? And we're making you know, we've just made the biggest loss in our history. I want to see more more color. Basically, I want to see more transparency. And the next meeting, one of his executive basically started to say, there are problems with one of the one of the products that was bringing to market. There are some problems in production, and. You could have hear you know, you could have heard a pin drop when he admitted that. There was just silence in the room because people were used to very negative consequences if they had admitted failure on mistakes. But Malali actually clapped and said, thank you, thank you for that transparency and for bringing that to light. And for sharing that with us, and now we can all help work on a solution to that problem. And that was the beginning of a shift in what I call the punishment pattern at Ford, where managers had stepped into role of punishers and employees had stepped into role of fearful ones.

30:21 And I talked to earlier about role, the role that you take up. This is the systemic role that they were taking up, and the hidden agreement are the pattern between those parts as we punish those who make mistakes. And I call that the punishment pattern, with different parts stepping into different roles, a fearful one if you're an employee, and punisher if you're a manager. So mistakes were not tolerated whatsoever. And forward but Malali, a very insightful leader with group intelligence, could see this pattern and rewire that pattern, and that was the beginning of an incredible turnaround a forward which I go into in a lot more detail in the book. But that case study is another example of over thirty big patterns that are often invisible to us that I walk through in the hive mind of work that can help leaders begin to see and rewire these often dysfunctional patterns.

31:17 And The reason that would really stuck out for me, Chavin is that you know, in my work helping leaders to develop and transform their cultures and their leadership, oftentimes because I'm the outsider, I can walk right in for the first time to an organization and I can smell the fear that lives in an organization. Right, You're not going to innovate, You're not going to perform in an organization like that, and your sures heck not going to speak up if you think something might be going awry here. And so I really felt like that was a really important case study to talk about because so many organizations fall preate to that, unknowingly unintentionally, and it's such an important problem to get to get to the bottom of and to start to free up and move or set free.

31:58 If we will to use more of your analogy. Yeah, absolutely, And I think what the high lens, what I try and do in the high lens is move away from the blame around that because often these patterns emerge for very good reason and they have helped us as an organization to survive and thrive in the past. So maybe at one stage, this focus on getting things right and perfection and making sure everything was done properly was actually serving the organization very well, but over time it became dysfunctional and it ended up being the punishment pattern. And because people become blind to this. You know, you step into an organization and literally within weeks, you are.

32:46 Captured by this pattern. Yes, this is the way things. Are done around here, this is the norm, this is what we do, and so often you can't even see it. Which is the benefit that Malali brought was she was new, he had a different perspective. Outsiders can bring that fresh perspective or that new lens to an organization and help you to see what you've become blind to, which is the great benefit the least that you and other consultants and external advisors can bring to a company. Indeed, essually went informed by some of your practices. That's part of the reason that I host the show, because I keep learning from amazing people like you. I'm You're welcome, I'm your host. Doctor Eli's Cortees. We were in the air with Shavn Mikhale, who's an expert in helping people lead change. We've been hearing about some of the beautiful case studies in your book that really showcase the value and practicality of her work. After the break, we're going to talk about a little bit about how leaders can become even more efficient in utilizing these kinds of practices, and also hear about what happened what was underneath the NASA make a disaster.

33:55 We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A. L Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

35:03 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, Doctor release Cortez. I mentioned in the last break that my book came out about a year ago, the Great Vitalization. What I did for you is I created a three page, very simple assessment that you can fall off my website. It will help you understand the extent to which your organization is meeting the discerning needs of today's workforce, and where you're strong and where might you want to shore things up. You can find it at Gusto dashnout dot com if you are just joining us. My guest is Shawn McHale. She's the author of the High Minded Work Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create meaningful and lasting change. So I have to tell you I was completely blown away by how you described just what happened with the NASA Mega A disaster that I remember when that happened. I'll let you just paint the whole situation, because you do it better than I do, but if you could, and then I'm going to sprinkle in the parts I found particularly interesting and worth focusing on for me.

36:01 Anyway. Yeah, So, one of the things I talked about in the hard mind at work at least is the need for proper measurement during change because often we you know, often we forget, we forget where we started the journey, we forget the progress we've made along the way. But you need to measure and measure accurately. And one of the examples a give of where there. Wasn't this accurate measurement was the NASA story of their Space Mars orbiter that actually. It was a complete. Disaster and it missed miss Mars completely and is now lost in space literally because there were two teams working on this spacecraft and the mission, and one was the engineers based in Denver.

36:55 They were using. English measurements, so they were using for example, theme and inches, and then the other team in California and Pasadena, they were using metrics, so they were using centimeters and meter measurements, and they didn't ever align with each other. They didn't share that they've made some assumptions. And because of the fact that they were using two different measuring sticks, literally this space orbiter missed its target and just it never landed and now literally was lost in space and disintegrated in orbit. And it was just such a classic example for me because what I was looking for in writing the book relice with these really practical examples which showcased the theories and brought them to life all of these things that I know from being a change insideer, being a practitioner bringing about change over the last two decades as the executive in charge of change, is that you need practical measures. You need case studies that showcase when this does not happen and what are the consequences. And that was one of the ones that really stood out for me, which really illustrates the importance of measurement and making sure that you have accurate measurement in place right from the beginning of your change.

38:22 That would have to be another one of those examples where once they really understood what happened, it would have to be one of those oh my gosh, how in the world could this be so right? How could we have missed this? And yet it's so natural and normal, It's so human. You know, we run organizations by humans and by very are very nature. We're very messy, and so there's I want to extend so much empathy to that because I have to imagine just how painful that realization must have been. Absolutely always, what I talk about during change is often we face in complex dynamic ecosystems, we face unintended consequences, which is why the machine metaphor of organizations doesn't work.

39:06 Organizations are not machines. They're not clocklike mechanisms. You cannot you know, we have this view that change. You know, you go from A to B to C in a linear logical fashion. But it's never that simple. And in fact, I talk about the analogy, it's more like a spider's web an organization and you look up and you see the thread of you know, there's a low engagement over there, the thread of customer dissatisfaction. Over here, there's a thread of quality issues. And down below you you might have board a case of forward within the organization. And which thread should you pull?

39:46 You know, you know, the more you pull these threads, the more tangled up you seem to get. And it's really about. Seeing how that whole ecosystem is functioning and rewiring or repatterning that web in to create more. Functional and more effective organizations. Beautiful analogy. Well, we can't release let you go without talking a little bit more about really some of the role of leaders and how they're successful and sustainable businesses. Step into four. You talking about four critical roles depending on the task and also the timeframes. So I think it's useful for you to share those four roles. And I also recognize that you say that, you know, we don't just play one of them. We need to decide when and how we're going to play all of them.

40:34 What are they before? Yeah, So I think one of the key things in the book is talking about role and reframing your role depending on the circumstance. And often we think of our behavior as being set by our personality, but actually our mental map of our role governs or. Behavior in a very powerful way. So I give leaders a framework for that, and I talk about four big roles that we take up. The first one is delivery leader. You know, you've got to deliver on your imperatives in the business. In order to gain credibility, you've got to deliver on your promises, and usually those promises are to your customer in the first instance. But that is a really important delivery lead role that each of us play as leaders.

41:20 The second is a business strategist. It's not enough just to keep on running running your business. You've got to have a clear strategy about where you want to take your part of the business. And then there's a performance coach. So really focusing on how you can help your people to deliver on what their imperatives are. And then the last one is a change leader. And often this is one that we forget, and you've got to play your part and change. And sometimes leaders forget that. They delegate change to the experts. So they're the IT experts, they're the digital experts, so they're the experts on employee engagements, so it's their problem. But actually, as a leader, you must always see and take up your unique change role.

42:11 I think that's really incredibly useful. Again, to be so specific. I think anybody who just heard you say that can get their head behind. Oh, I can see myself assuming that role. I know when I need to step into that role. Just so useful. Now, the next thing that really blew me away. I have to say that I was rather gobsmacked by this. You go on to say in the book that this is about reaching critical mass. You say, seasoned change leaders know that you must arrive at the key tipping point within eighteen months of embarking on change or risk confirming the group's cynicism. That's fascinating. That's an interesting number. I don't think I knew that number before. Yeah. Well I learned this when I was the head of Change at b A and Z Bank, one of the major banks in Australia, and we had been embarking of a transformation of the bank, which was the lowest performing bank in the country and had.

43:07 The worst customer satisfaction. And the CEO. Was liaising with other CEOs and banks across the country and he had agreed with them that they would stop closing rural branches branches in the country because they were really needed by people in rural areas. But one of the other CEOs broke rank and decided, no, we're going to shut down fifty four rural branches. We don't need them. They're not making enough money. And that same day the CEO of AY and Z, John McFarland, announced to the marketplace, that he would buy those fifty four branches. Well, now that did never actually eventuate it because there were a whole lot of regulations, but just him doing that saying listen, this isn't good enough.

43:55 I'm going to stop this. I'm going to buy those branches because the public is sick and tired of banks behaving badly, and our employees are also disengaged. That one act of saying. I'm going to buy those branches actually caused a tipping point in the change that he was trying to introduce, which was this much more customer and employee centric organization. So people began to move from cynicism to thinking, well, this is a person that maybe I can believe in. This is a change that perhaps is worth investing in. This is a journey that perhaps I can join, and I can be purpose driven in that. And overnight, almost that reached a tipping point. And you can see this.

44:39 And leaders with group intelligence, I explained in the book, have a way of understanding how to intervene in complex human ecosystems in order to reach these tipping points faster and not get what I call unintended consequences. So I talk a lot about how you do that reach those tipping points, like all m foland did at the A and Z Bank. Really it's incredibly alluring. I do want to read this other passage that I think also really supports what you were saying here. You say, leaders who grasp the power of group intelligence focus less on the mechanics and more on the vision to reach the tipping point sooner. They focus on how accomplishing the change will make people feel, rather than the step by step process that will get them there. Their storytelling toolbox usually includes powerful symbols that capture the imagination and help trigger the tipping point from the work that I do.

45:33 Of course, that's essential parts of what we teach as well. I just thought that was really powerful that you really focused on the vision, how people feel, and of course the symbols. And then you also go on to say that smart leaders know how to nudge a group toward these critical junctures by deploying stories, symbols, and rituals that facilitate a viral change. Leaders with group intelligence intervene and complex ecosystems to move the group from chaotic calling individuals to a collaborative force for change. All of that is just really speaks to me of really I would say, very highly nuanced leadership and communication and group intelligence skills.

46:13 Yeah, so I think this is the rider list because people have been given EQ skills, and EQ is fantastic in terms of interpersonal skills. It allows you to understand your own emotions and to understand the emotions for the people. But that, as I say, is necessary but not sufficient. In dealing with complex human ecosystems or groups or organizations, you've got to develop GQ, and GQ is the ability to understand how these complex ecosystems are functioning and to be able to intervene in those complex human ecosystems in order to help them to deliver, to grow, or to adapt.

46:57 And those intervention points are critical, and we're not taught how to do that. Nobody is teaching us yet about group intelligence. When you talk about it seems so sensible and it's so logical, but yet we're not taught. We're taught EQ, but we're not yet taught GQ, which is this much more systemic way of intervening. Why we need you. We really just touched on just a few of the many, many points we could have spoken about in this book. There are so many other things, and I just pulled out the things that really kind of resonated with me. I think you might know that this shows listened to my people around the world who are trying to either create a better workplace for them themselves, become better more inspirational leaders, and ideally health organization do business in a way that betters the world. What would you like to leave them with.

47:45 Yeah, I would like to leave them with the thought that IQ and EQ are no longer sufficient for the complexity we're facing today and change has become a tsunami, and really to step into their role to start to equip themselves with group intelligence or GQ, and to start applying a more systemic lens to our workplaces, and hopefully the hive Mind at work can start you on that journey. It does require a rewiring of your brain and it is I've been on this journey for over two decades now. It is a learning process, but it is possible to develop your group intelligence and definitely worthwhile journey.

48:29 I think your book has taught us a lot, and so is this conversation. Very happy to know you, Shavn. Very grateful to have learned from you, getting to share you with my listeners and viewers around the world. Thank you for being on working on purpose. Thank you so much, Elise for all the work you do and the difference you're making. Thank you, listeners of viewers. You are going to want to learn more about Shabon McHale the work that she does helping people to lead change in her book The Hive Minded Work The best place to do that is on LinkedIn. You can find her there. Let me spell her name for you. Chavn is actually spelled siobha n. He last name is Mikhail mcha l E. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch every recorded podcast. We were on the Eric Carla McLaren talking about her empathic approach to emotions reevalu in them, even for the most negative emotions that open startling new pathways into self awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. We learned about the wisdom and anger, for example, anxiety and even shame, among so many other pearls of unusual wisdom.

49:34 Next week, we'll be on the air with Janet Ioli talking about her work helping leaders to create their most powerful, impactful presence. See you there. Remember that work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C. Why Together We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion. Performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there. Let's work on purpose.