The Future of Work Needs Compassion: From Extractive to Generative Organizations

0:02 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. 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, Dr. Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of 2015. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. Most organizations are sitting on untapped human energy and capability, and I help them unlock it by developing teams, leaders, and culture.

0:51 I'm an organizational psychologist, logotherapist, workforce advisor, and the founder of the Gusto Now Movement. But the title I live by that is much simpler, that's one of my favorites, is I Just Simply Traffic in Energy. Not the service level or motivation or another engagement initiative kind, but the deeper force, what I call gusto, the life force for performance that drives commitment, perseverance, and ownership of a shared mission. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at gusto-now.com or my personal website, elisecortez.com. Getting into today's program, we have with us Carson Kelly. He's the founder and CEO of Compassion 2.0 and flourishingly, where he is focused on building AI-informed organizational frameworks and leadership systems that help organizations better understand the relationship between culture, leadership, behavior, team dynamics, and business performance.

1:35 He is riveted on. Scaling compassionate human experiences and frameworks of flourishing through product and organizational culture design rooted in science. His work emphasizes the measurable value of care-based cultures, demonstrating how compassion and care can directly influence organizational performance and outcomes. He joins us today from San Francisco Bay Area, Kirsten, a hearty welcome finally to Working on Purpose. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Absolutely. We've been talking about this for a while and we're finally making it happen. Yeah, absolutely. So I have to confess. You know, when I was doing some research for what we would talk about on the show, I didn't know about your personal origin story, what happened. To you at age 17.

2:15 Can we start with that and then hear how it made, what it awoke in you and how did it maybe send you down this path that you're on today? You've been on a spiritual journey, you've been on technology journey. You've been on a very robust journey since that time. Yeah, sure. Happy to. So when I was 17, I went on a river rafting trip for my first time with a girlfriend and her parents who had done extensive rafting trips. And they took us on a class four rapid here in Northern California. That was the plan, which is a very difficult level of rapids. There's, I think, a total of five plus five plus, which is basically unnavigable. And when we got there, the guides decided that they wanted to have a little bit of fun. So they changed it and they put us onto a class five rapid. And it was, needless to say, somewhat irresponsible because I had never been rafting before.

3:07 And within the first literally 90 seconds after receiving the safety protocols, the the boat tipped over and it just so happened that everybody fell on me and pushed me into the bulk of the rapid and everybody else got out immediately. So I wound up swimming a class five which again was very difficult and not something that I expected to do and during that time I basically started to drown and as a part of that process there was a time in that experience where I had this visceral feeling that I could choose to no longer stay in my body, if you will, that the muscular skeletal meat sack of the body would continue down the river and I, whatever that was, would persist and transition to some other place. What that place was or what that means and so forth, that's been something I've been....

4:07 On a path to inquire about. But I did know that I had a sense at that time, at least, that it wasn't lights out, so to speak. So when that happened, needless to say, I went into the river as one person and got out of the rapid as another. And when I, at that point at 17 years old, it just so happened that I was becoming a senior in high school, second semester, and had a new English teacher who then turned me and several of others of us on to Taoism and some other kinds of eye-opening kinds of spiritual awakening sorts of things. So from that point forward, I began a spiritual path. Wow.

4:48 What an early catalyzing experience to have as a young man. And of course, now I'm interested to understand if there is a thread to that, Carson. Is there a thread to what you're really focused on today around compassion, human flourishing? Organizational work. Yeah, there is. Originally, I thought I was going to go off to college to do film at USC. By the time I got there, I had a change of heart and started studying Eastern philosophy. I learned very quickly that I wasn't interested in doing that in school, so I transitioned to Western philosophy. Essentially, I became very interested in systems of ontology, namely It's kind of a nerdy philosophical term for the study of being. So what does it mean to, how to say, be alive and to do so in a way that's authentic in whatever model is being offered? So the philosophers have different models, the spiritual teachers have different models, and so on. So I found myself interested in those questions for many, many years and thought I was going to become a professor and then eventually thought, okay, and was actually a book publisher for a little while. And then the dot-com world took off where I was in the late 90s. So in 1998, 99, I joined a startup, my first one, Internet 1.0, and just was doing focused work on bringing a bunch of merchants online to sell through eBay, which is a new sales channel at the time.

6:14 And we did that for a while. And then I transitioned and went into enterprise software. And then I had an opportunity to travel in 2018 or 2019, rather, to go to India where I was able to meet the Dalai Lama with my wife. In the class that she teaches at a particular school. She teaches a philosophy and ethics class, and His Holiness had invited the class to his private residence to talk to him about that. And so it was, of course. An incredible opportunity and went and did that, went to India for the first time and came back and then transitioned and changed my focus from my enterprise software sales days to founding a company called Benevolently, which was a platform for acts of altruism. So I had that going and then we had the beginnings of a pilot at LinkedIn and we were just about to consider one at Google and COVID happened. So we had to shut the whole thing down, at which point I was invited to join a startup that involved a woman named Dr. Tanya Singer, who's a renowned German neuroscientist who's done work on understanding where empathy and compassion exist in the network areas of the brain.

7:27 They're different things. They exist in different places. So working with that team, we set up a company to bring that practice. That was the basis of her research to a larger commercial audience. So I did that for a number of years. And then at which point I transitioned from that and went into founding Compassion 2.0 to do the work that I do today, which is related to the ontology of authenticity, I guess is a way to say it. Man, that was about as succinct of a journey tracing as I've ever heard, Kirsten Kelly. Not surprised to hear that it came out of your mouth. I was just telling Juan, my producer, before he came on, this man is articulate, he's wicked smart, and he's got depth.

8:09 You just illustrated that. Yes. Well, it's just calling a spade a spade, my dear. Okay, well, now then, that allows us then with that platform to then talk about this idea of compassion. You know, obviously in my work, we do a lot around empathy, kindness, psychological safety, and caring leadership. These are all components that end up showing up. However, you and I have done work together. I'm certified in some of your content. For our listeners and viewers who don't know about this, what's different about compassion and how you're teaching it and rendering it? And then I want to get to the 2.0 piece to what that means. Sure. So Compassion 2.0, our mission is to scale compassion. I had this realization about my own personal mission about this a few years ago. Just being very clear, that's what I'm going to do with the rest of my professional career.

9:00 And said another way for Compassion 2.0, what we want to do is scale compassionate human experience and its architecture based on products and organizations that have scientifically informed or validated principles to them delivered through our construct of flourishing. Now, that's a lot to say, and there's a lot to unpack, but said yet another way, Compassion 2.0 is in the business of scaling parasympathetic nervous system state availability, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system of scanning for threat and responding with fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, which is very predominant all throughout society and organizational culture today. So we believe that in the age of AI, where AI will commoditize as much work as it can, that organizations, when they want to create value, they have to, of course, go to where it has always been created, which is from humans individually and collectively. And humans that are in a sympathetic nervous system state response of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn because they feel like they're under threat, can't at the same time be creative and be in relationship and have empathy and come up with novel ideas and complex problem solving and all of the things individually, let alone as a group, they can't do that. So our goal is to say for organizations of the future, that

10:34 if you want to be competitive, you can't do so by having commoditized work that AI does. You have to have teams of amazing people and everyone is amazing in their own way. operating in a space where they feel safe and these good things can come forward and they can, with gusto, deliver on the value of what they can offer. That was gorgeous. And of course, I know that because we've been doing a lot of work together over the months too in the certification process. So I know this, but really wanted you to share with our listeners and viewers. And that was gorgeous. And that takes us to the next level here of, you know, the way that you communicate around this work that we're all doing with us together is this notion that you make that provocative argument that compassion isn't simply a leadership virtue. Now you're talking there's like a centrality to it, right? There's like a fulcrum element to it.

11:26 Yes, and that's why we call it Compassion 2.0. And Compassion 1.0, in my own studies over 35 or so years of looking at various philosophical and spiritual systems, compassion is a through line through every single one of them. And oftentimes compassion is thought of as a virtue that is taught in a non-secular framework, often by a spiritual teacher, to be brought to all aspects of your life, which of course is a beautiful thing. The reason why we call it 2.0 is that pioneering. Neuroscientists, such as Dr. Tanya Singer, who I mentioned, or Richie Davidson, or many, many others now, have been using MRI machines and other scientific methods to identify and teach compassion in a secular way that comes from a validated basis.

12:21 Now, the validation is arbitrary. It doesn't matter because. non-secular teachers, spiritual teachers, be it a priest or a monk or whoever, any sort of spiritual guide, the teaching of compassion is just as valid. So I don't want to confuse that. But from the scientific framework, we now have language and understanding that circles back on what monks and priests and spiritual guides have known for thousands of years intuitively. Instead of it being an individual virtue, Compassion 2.0 sees it as a group organizing principle because it is ultimately tied to our autonomic nervous systems. Even though we all have different lived experiences in terms of our embodiment, our language, our skin color, the culture, the systems of power that we find ourselves within, either advantageously or disadvantageously.

13:14 All of those things are very true. And at the underlying principle of it all is an autonomic nervous system structure that we share, and different signal comes in, regardless of the culture and how those signals show up, they still come in and they still ignite these autonomic nervous system responses of either parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous system response. And that, and which means we're all, of course, I mean, we already are unified and we all have the same experience at that level. So Compassion 2.0 is to honor that, to recognize that, and again, to say in a future that we see, a future that right now looks very challenging because of a lot of difficulty that's happening in the world, a lot of very extractive forces that are happening in the world. So I think it's hard to see at times, but we believe that there is... certain amount of, how to say, I don't want to use the word waking up per se, but something along those lines where people are starting to understand that I think there is greater opportunity for us to be working collectively and more of a mycelial network for the long-term benefit of our children's children's children, et cetera, and the future of the planet than it does in the short-termism that extractive or greedy thinking will have a result for us.

14:34 I don't know if that made sense, but. It did, but I want to take it one step further, Carson. For people who have never heard this language, extractive versus generative organizations, can you distinguish those a little. Bit more quickly for us? Yes, of course. Absolutely. I apologize. No, no worries. So extraction, in the way we see it at Compassion 2.0, there's one of the frames that we see the world is through extraction versus generative orientation. And extraction is... You can think about it in the way that people see the world, myself included. I don't take myself out of this. I'm working on it, but I'm definitely there. You can look at the world and people and things in the world to extract from. Namely, what can I get from this, from this relationship, from the environment? How can I monetize this?

15:21 What can I get and take? And how do I accumulate? Which, in my understanding, is a direct response, accumulationism in particular, is a direct response to fear-based scarcity. So extraction is the framework and the wheel, the flywheel by which extraction generates more fear and more scarcity and more accumulationism. And we can see that playing itself out. Generativity, not regenerativity, but generativity, and not also in the same concept as generative AI— we' re saying that either— But generativity is when you look in the world in particular and you see other people not as objects to take from, but as other subjects like yourself that you're in relationship with. And when that happens, the first move is not, what can I get?

16:08 The first move is, what can I give? What can I offer? And it's a generative act to do that. And in my, again, limited understanding, it is also what the Tibetan Buddhists call bodhicitta. in the sense of how do I show up in a way that's oriented towards, and it's not just limited to Buddhism by any stretch of the imagination. That's just one particular phrase that I'm using as an example. There's lots of these other traditions, Christianity and Judaism and Islam and so forth. All of it's present in many and they're beautiful traditions, but it's this notion of compassion and giving that I show up and offer as opposed to show up and take. So the extractive world really is showing up pretty substantially in our modern economic systems and what's happening in the world of business in particular and its relationship to the environment and to people and the growing wealth inequalities and all those things. It's just extractive forces getting more and more extractive because they're getting more and more powerful, and it just feeds itself. So generativity is its inverse at one level, and it's how to give and to support.

17:19 Beautifully explained and well worth the extra dig, Carson. Let's let our listeners and viewers consider that as we take our first break. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with Carson Kelly. He's the founder and CEO of Compassion 2.0 and Flourishingly, where he is focused on building AI-informed organizational frameworks and leadership systems that help organizations better understand the relationship between culture, leadership behavior, team dynamics, and business performance. We've been hearing about the foundation of the work that he's doing and why it's so important to him. After the break, we're going to get into this notion of the ROI of care and how we can actually measure compassionate organizations. We'll be right back.

18:09 Dr. Elise Cortez 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 Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at EliseCortez.com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with Dr. Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise, A-L-I-S-E, at EliseCortez.com. Now, back to Working on Purpose.

19:01 Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. As I, too, am dedicated to creating a world where organizations thrive because their people thrive. They're led by organizational and inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness. And we do business that betters the world. I keep researching and writing my own books. So one of my latest came out. It's called The Great Revitalization, How Activating Meaning and Purpose Can Radically Enliven Your Business. And I wrote it to help leaders understand today's very discerning workforce. What do they want and need from you to give their best and then stick around? And then I offer you 22 best practices to equip it for them through your leadership and your culture. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site, EliseCortez.com. If you are just now joining us, my guest is Carson Kelly, who was riveted on scaling compassionate human experiences and frameworks of flourishing through product and organizational culture design rooted in science.

19:50 His work emphasizes the measurable value of care-based cultures, demonstrating how compassion and care can directly influence organizational performance and outcomes, as we've been talking about. So now that we've queued this up here, Carson, I love the whole phrase. It's just sexy and compelling, the ROI of care. So let's talk about how we can actually measure compassion in organizations. Sure. So the ROI of care principle. Ties back to what I was saying earlier around parasympathetic nervous system state availability. And when people are in that state of what's also called rest and digest, they're in a state of our natural state.

20:34 It's the state of... of just being. And the sympathetic nervous system state is in response to threat that's scanned for and identified, and then we respond in a way. And we have fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Our focus changes, the pitch that we're listening for in the ear changes, the heart rate changes. There's a bunch of things that are happening. And when we're in that space, we're totally focused on that response. parasympathetic nervous system state, again, is what we're in all the time. And when we're in that space, our sphere of concern moves from just myself when I'm in a threat response state to moving for the totality of. The group that I'm involved with. And the concern is expensive.

21:16 It's not me. It's everybody. Now, again, I also want to be clear. I'm not a scientist. And some of the things that I'm speaking to are things that I've been taught by people who are much smarter and more capable than me. So forgive me if I make some of these, some things are not totally precise and clear, but generally speaking, this is the correct frame. So when people are in those states and they're relaxed, they're able to access greater capability in their brains, or I don't want to use the word brain, but the totality of their system, right? They're relaxed. They feel good. Ideas can flow. They can access the deep relationality and a sense of safety and concern for others. And then when groups of people are doing that collectively and everybody feels safe together, then you have a magical thing that's available to you. And it's out of those states where the optimal ideal can come from in the sense of producing value, right?

22:14 All organizations that exist. as I understand it. Are collectives of one or more people on a common goal of some sort to produce value for some other entity. And that value can be for another person. It could be like a consumer. It could be for another business or an organization. It could be for the larger social good. It could be for the environment. It's any number of different things. But everybody has a shared goal to achieve something. And everybody participates in some way to that shared goal, depending on how complex that is or how many people are involved and so forth. It can be that simple. So when people are in their parasympathetic nervous system states and they're also working collectively towards a goal, then the value that gets originated in that state for that effort is translatable into performance.

23:06 And we believe it can be measured. And we believe that it can be measured and then assign a financial value to it. And as a result of that, we call that an ROI of care. Namely, what is the investment return when care isn't intentionally brought in to design for organizations for people to be in those states? How does that then show up in benefit? What's happening today is that most organizations, they define value just as a pure ROI, namely a return on investment for the investor. So they're focused on outputs. They're focused on things that are in the marketplace. What's their market penetration?

23:49 What are their sales? What's their margin? How can they create and extract out cost and expense to create more efficiencies, to create more outputs of profit for some other investor or whatever that's And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But what isn't measured is not managed. And so what's not being measured is the relational side of the effort while execution is happening. What is the human relational framework that's happening simultaneously that's, in fact, the thing that's powering the execution? And if you invest in that and make that expansive and beneficial, there will be a return on that investment of care. Mm-hmm. Okay, now you said something in there that I think now my next question that I want to select from my list here that I think makes sense to post to you next then, because you're really talking about an overall system here, and really an organic system of sorts, as opposed to what we often hear about, which.

24:48 Is just culture. So you're really distinguishing really the culture work to more organizational design. Yeah, culture work, as I understand it, has been cool. And I have the good fortune to know some really great people in that space. I've always had a challenge with it, though, because I don't know what culture is. I don't know how you design culture. It's like saying, I want some trust. I want trust. Give me trust. Or someone said, it's like going to the grocery store and trying to buy delicious. You know, there's... There's this cadence, this impedance mismatch in the sense that we believe that you have to design both conditions and choices because the variable.

25:37 In there is the human experience. So culture is a result of something in some way to define some other thing where people have chosen something and have expressed their taste, I guess. I'm not quite sure of my words here. For us, organizational design means that you're designing for capacity. You're designing for people to make choice, and you want to give them what we call the invitation. You want to give them invitation for opportunity to better themselves in some way, be it maybe they want to improve their leadership skills or their communication skills, or they want to improve to get more skills on their emotional coherence and self-regulation. But those are all invitational.

26:22 The individual has to choose to do them or not. And then the other component to all of this is designing what we call the container or the conditions by which those choices are made within a context. So perfect example of a container idea is that there are explicit and implicit rules in a container in our definition. An explicit rule is everything you'd see on the wall, in the lunchroom, in the employee manual, on the website, et cetera, values, vision, policies, all those things. And you might have, say, in a software company or some other company, you have unlimited PCL. That's a container definition. However, the implicit rules of a container are such like, oh, wait a minute, you work for the FEP, you don't get unlimited BTO. The book says that, but that's not what's really happening. So the container has to be defined and the choice has to be made available. And to me, those two things are the things that come together to manage and develop what we call resonance. Now, some people might say that's exactly what we're doing with culture work. And if that's true, then that's cool. It's just not language that we're currently utilizing.

27:28 Fair enough. Now, so since one of your other operations or organizations. Is Flourishingly, let's talk about, which is how I found you. Remember that how I found you is I did a search on LinkedIn for the word flourishing, and I wanted to see who was working in that space and what were they doing. And I reached out to you earlier this year, and that's how we connected. So for our listeners and viewers who are not familiar with that, I know you have three dimensions that you focus on to create a flourishing organization. So let's talk about those. Sure. Yeah, so for us, we are, just to build on what I was just saying, what I was just describing is what we call the resonance axis of our model.

28:11 The other model, you can imagine a two-dimensional graph where you have the Y axis is performance and the X axis is time. And organizations go up and down in time in terms of their performance. Things happen. COVID happens. You know, things get disrupted. And that's how most people think about organizations and they think about the output. That x-axis of time and organizational execution is one of the things that we're looking at. And the other that we're looking at is what we call the resonance access or the Z-axis, which says that while organizations are executing, there's this human resonance component that's either narrow because everyone's contracted in a threat culture, or it's expanded because everybody's expansive in a safety culture and they're feeling safe, so they're expansive. So as the organization is executing, this access is also moving depending on what the organization is doing in terms of providing threat or care signal for people to respond to. So those two things that come together, ultimately, the resonance is what feeds the execution. And we think that's done through a metabolic activity. We don't know all of the definition of it yet, but we think there's a metabolism function that's happening there where the organization executionally is metabolizing the input of how people are feeling and in relationship to themselves and others. And when that happens, the organization does better. And then finally, the totality of all of that all at once, when you look at how well an organization is executing and how people feel as they do it, we call that the field. And

29:42 every organization has their own field. So the ROI of care and our flourishingly platform is designed to measure all of those things. So how do we look at an organization's execution? How are we looking at their resonance? How's the metabolism working? And ultimately, how does that show up in the field? So one of the things that I was so compelled with your work, and part of the reason that I chose to work with you and become certified in some of your programs is, and I'm not sure where we are with this just now, but using the AI sentiment read, the SAS sentiment read to be able to track and to keep a finger on the pulse- Of how people are talking to each other, relating to each other. So you can see, literally measure that sentiment.

30:28 Yeah, I can. And it's actually very interesting because I've also been learning some things recently around very, very real concerns around privacy and surveillance and all of those things. Because, of course, I don't want to be surveyed. I'm sure you don't either. But there are tools that are very helpful that can do exactly what you just described. So we have a number of partners that we're working with that have developed ways to measure those kinds of things, sentiment through conversations and through other ways that we then anonymously can ingest into our system. We don't know. We never know who the people actually are. They do, but we don't. But there's so much tech. One of my favorites is something called Valence Variance, and it's a tool for people. It's a plug-in to Zoom, and it acts like a closed caption function in Zoom that's only displayed to the people that are using it for folks that are on the autism spectrum spectrum.

31:29 Autism spectrum. And so for those folks that don't necessarily have some of the nuanced skills or capacities to hear a tonality or emotional expression, valence variance does. And it can say things like, as you and I would be talking, I might see on my screen, oh, Elise is expressing happiness right now or expressing frustration or what have you. So I can get some additional cues that I might not otherwise gain as a result of that particular tech, which I think is It's just brilliant. There's similar things too around looking at tonality, around printed communications or typed communications, Slack messaging, anything written, conversational stuff, et cetera. And you can extrapolate from that, particularly over time, you can identify pattern if tonality and conversation, how to say, from one person changes. It sounds like you're expressing greater frustration, This seems like this has been building over months, et cetera.

32:29 You know, is there something that we can do to help you? And, you know, is something going on? And if so, would you like to get some of these invitations, as an example, to help you with whatever might be on your mind? Like our partner's life guides that provide. A person that's gone through a difficult life experience with someone who's about to go through it. So anyway, there's just different, many different examples on how that can work from an interventions perspective. Beautifully explained. And I think that really adds also such an accessibility to something that could otherwise still seem very conceptual and abstract from this conversation. So I wanted to be sure we got that in. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, for sure. Let's grab our next break here. I'm your host, Dr.

33:13 Elise Cortez. We've been on the air with Carson Kelly. He's the founder and CEO of Compassion 2.0 and Flourishingly, where he is focused on building AI-informed organizational frameworks and leadership systems. that help organizations better understand the relationship between culture, leadership behavior, team dynamics, and business performance. You've been hearing a lot about the beautiful, very thoughtful methodology that's underneath the systems here. After the break, we're going to get into the notion of creating what's called a chief flourishing officer for your organization. We'll be right back. Thank you.

33:56 Dr. Elise Cortez 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 Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at EliseCortez.com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with Dr. Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise, A-L-I-S-E, at EliseCortez.com. Now, back to Working on Purpose.

34:48 Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I am your host, Dr. Elise Cortez. If you are just now joining us, my guest is Carson Kelley. who is riveted on scaling compassionate human experiences and frameworks of flourishing through product and organizational culture design rooted in science. His work emphasizes the measurable value of care-based cultures, demonstrating how compassion and care can directly influence organizational performance and outcomes. So as I mentioned just before the break, and of course I see this every once in a while, but not very often, the title of Chief Flourishing Officer. And I love that idea. Of course, you know there's a whole reason that you and I are connected anyway, Carson. We think very similarly. We're doing similar kinds of work from a different angle. But let's talk about what is this role actually responsible for in an organization?

35:34 What does it comprise? Sure. I think, to your point, there are a lot of different ways in which this could be utilized. We have a very specific idea of for it, which is to do several things. It's first and foremost is to be able to understand how to calculate or measure resonance in an organization, which is what we were talking about with the container, with the invitations and so forth, and ultimately something that we call the elements of flourishing. And so the chief flourishing officer can understand how to kind of get the pulse, if you will, on those human relationships. The second thing that the chief flourishing officer does is they understand how that translates into the ROI of care. Namely, what is their organization's reason for being? What is their value proposition? How do they deliver on that value proposition in terms of producing the value that's then conveyed and offered?

36:33 So they understand that, and they understand how the resonance may or may not be translating into the best way in which to develop that or to deliver on that value proposition. And as a result, then they can understand the financial implications or other, not just financial, but the value benefits of having the ROI of care analysis and the actual numbers. So you can say things like, wow, if we cut off this particular team or we let this particular person go, there will be implications around our ability to ideate around new products, and that's going to drag on the organization, for instance, for at least a quarter or two, and we should expect these things.

37:13 Et cetera. So they translate resonance into execution and understand the financial value of it, and they can communicate that to other management team members, be it at the C-suite or all throughout, to say, this is not, these things, these investments that we're making in this design for care is not aspirational, it's not fluffy, it's not designed to make everybody feel good in and of themselves for having done so. This is strategic and tactical in terms of why we're doing this and to explain that and to be able to give the numbers to back that up and then work with other leadership to be able to improve that area of the organization's operations towards their combined and shared effect on the value delivered. And then finally, the chief flourishing officer is the one that can select and deploy the interventions that are appropriate to help strengthen the overall organization where there might be considerations that there needs to be greater strength. That might be around, say, relational repair rates.

38:15 It might be around, say, creating greater trust in other opportunities or helping people skillfully develop their own self-emotional awareness and regulation. Any number of things. So what we call the CFO, the C-F-L-O, not to be confused with the C-F-O, we call it a CFO. So the CFO is really performing a very critical function, we believe, in the age of the future of organizations. And that can be by name, it could be full-time or part-time, but that function needs to be represented. And what I'm wondering now, and I'm sure some of our listeners and viewers are as well, is if this role replaces like a chief people officer or a chief human resource officer or is in addition a complement to it?

39:03 Yeah, I think the answer is yes. all around. I think it's complimentary. I think it could, you know, depending on the kind of organization, depending on how much, how, how to say front and center, the volume of the people in the organization are relative to the development and value of that organization. I mean, all people are important, but some, you know, there might be more manufacturers, for instance, where there's processes that are more important. I think it just depends on what's going on. I think a fair number of organizations will actually utilize different consultants to be their outsourced chief flourishing officer, where they can bring someone in to complement and support. A chief flourishing officer, for instance, is not a chief human resources officer. Those are very different functions, and in some ways not at all the same as a chief people officer either. It depends on how the organization wants to define those functions, but I think it's all complementary. We believe, for instance, in a startup, scaling startups, which is the sector that we're focused on, the CEO will actually function as a chief flourishing officer functionally because they understand the strategic importance of scaling organizations with the right design to begin with.

40:14 This is so exciting, Carson. It's just so elevating, and it's just so next right for me. I hope it is for our listeners and viewers as well. Okay, so I would be remiss if we didn't talk about this idea of, you know, practicing care without care washing. Or, you know, in my world, we hear a lot about purpose washing. Oh, yeah, we've got a purpose. It's right over there on the wall. We don't know anything about it, but it's over there on the wall. So let's, for the organizations that are like, oh, yeah, we're doing all this stuff, guys. We're good. We're doing this care stuff. How can leaders tell the difference between this genuineness of what we've been talking about here in organizational care and what we might call this care washing? Sure. It's a great question.

40:55 The fundamental difference, as far as I can say it, is that the answer is to talk to the people. Because, for instance, I look at my daughters. I have three daughters, 21, 26, and 29. And they are so much more sophisticated than me when I was that age than they are. They have the ability to just see through all the nonsense and to really understand what's going on. Because the world is more complicated that way. At the end of the day, we're talking about parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous. System state responses are not of the mind. They're felt. They are genuinely felt. And it's about feeling embodied, safe, and good. And you can't have a policy or you can't point to a piece of paper and have people feel safe and understood, particularly if they're younger and they can see through the nonsense. The best leaders, as I've understood and have read about them over time, have intuitively understood all of the things that we're speaking to and may or may not have articulated them in the way that we're designing them. I mean, there's so many different ways to approach this. But they felt it and they know this from their bones. And the good leaders are the ones that show up and people feel that they feel that way about them. There's an authenticity to the felt experience that no one can hide from and no

42:26 one can deny. That's why people follow people into battle or they follow people into very difficult situations or work extra or do all the things that are necessary because it's felt. So if an organization says, you know, hey, we've got this, check this off the list and so forth, what they're doing is they're moving into, like you said, care washing, which is an extractive orientation towards the commoditization of these ideas, and they're missing the point fundamentally. So for us, for instance, we know that we're not going to go out and sell all of our products and services to everybody in the world right now. We know that.

43:09 It's going to be a very small, few people that we're going to be working with. I mean, few relatively speaking. Targeted people that we want to work with who already intuitively understand what it is that we're doing. And they've been doing it in their own way. And they're much more interested now in figuring out how to scale that and to bake it into their organization so that the organization can have it at a level that is beyond just them being able to provide it personally. So the bottom line is, is you can't fake it. And if organizations don't want to do this or they don't understand, then unfortunately... the people who work for them will leave. And in the future, the competitors, the competitive, the greatest competitive entities will be the ones that genuinely show up with this felt sense and they're holding a container for the people to come into and work in those organizations where they feel held by that container.

44:09 You can't fake it. And once that's achieved, progress. Combined with ever-increasing capacities around AI, the combination of those things, oh, my gosh, the value production is going to go next level, just like it went from the agrarian world to the industrial age and the industrial age and to the information age. We're going from the information age to the flourishing age where AI is. But that's our thinking about it. That's the formula of the future. Mm-hmm. And I really love that. It is the formula for the future as far as I can see it as well, because you and I are very aligned on many things. And because I am out to try to elevate more humans, you're talking about being able to immediately. Access a fairly small portion of the population. But just in case, we can get a few people on.

44:54 This session today, this episode today, that maybe don't naturally sit in that space. So for those people that are thinking about what this looks like in their organization, maybe a CEO is listening tonight. And he or she is like, you know, I believe you. This all sounds really good. But I have a team of 500 people. I have quarterly targets that I have to hit. I have an exhausted management team. I have an AI transformation underway. Where do I. Start with all this? Yeah, it's a great question. And all of those things, believe it or not, I would say that the extractive knee jerk response is not going to work. It's not going to get you through what you've just described. You're going to have to pivot and you're going to have to embrace an additional way and your orientation towards your organization. And what that is going to mean is the ability to slow down and speed up at some level. So what we can do is we would come in and we would have a discussion and understand why is your management team burned out?

45:53 How are people responding to your AI initiatives? We are now, there's preliminary evidence from several organizations that I know of, one of which says that there's five basic responses from people now to AI at this point. And it's mostly coming from fear. So if you want to adopt AI, then what we ought to do is think about how we can identify those folks, what their concerns are, and support them so that they choose to embrace it because they're sovereign individuals making choices and you want them to choose to do that. So let's figure out how to create the conditions and the support so that they'll do that because you can't force it onto them. Again, same kinds of questions, same kinds of principles.

46:34 Why are they tired? What's happening here? So what we would do is we would begin a discussion and we would do a diagnostic to understand exactly what's going on in your organization. And our goal would be to stand up the first version of the ROI of care dashboard for your org so that we can have a baseline and we can understand how we can further help you. Well, hopefully that brings in a few more people in the fold than we originally thought that we might actually connect with. Okay, so just to finish this here, I would also love to hear your perspective. This show is called Working on Purpose. It's been on the air for 11 and a half years. I'd love to hear from you, from your vantage point, what does it mean for you to work on purpose? You mentioned you were going to devote the rest of your life to compassionate sort of behaviors and such. So what does it mean for you and what becomes possible for humans and organizations ultimately when people design work around human flourishing?

47:27 Well, that's such a profound question. I would say that the philosophy and student in me comes back out, and I'm happy to chew on these bigger ideas. At the end of the day, we have a finite amount of time, and there's just no two ways around it. And what we do with the quality of our time is critically important. It took me a long time to learn that money is in service to time. Time is not in service to money. So if that's true, which it is for me, then purpose is a direct equivalent of the highest expression of the use of time.

48:08 Which is not necessarily... to achieve anything per se. I think for me, it's being able to actually be deeper into the present moment in different ways. Um, so I would say my, to, to answer it from a purpose perspective, the question, the answer for me is how do I facilitate greater and deeper moments of presence for as many people as. How to say that? Not that I could do that, but I can help create the conditions that they can find that for themselves without them necessarily knowing. Who I am. Carson Kelly, I am so glad to know you and share you with my listeners around the world.

48:49 Thank you so much for being you and coming on to Working in Purpose to talk about what you're doing. Yeah, thank you, Elise, for the opportunity. Amazing. Listeners and viewers, you can see by now that you are going to want to learn more about Carson Kelly, get connected to him, the work that he does at Compassion 2.0 and Flourishing. I suggest you do a couple things. Start by visiting Compassion2. com, to the number, Compassion2. com. I would also encourage you to find him on LinkedIn as well, very accessible. Now, last week, if you missed the live show, you can catch it via recorded podcast. We were on air with Jason Wild, a strategist, advisor, and growth executive. We talked about the book he co-authored, Genius at Scale, How Great Leaders Drive Innovation. He shared how the three critical roles of architects who build community, bridgers who build partnerships, and catalysts can be developed and leverage in organizations to drive dynamic innovation and systemic cultural transformation. It was a very, very dense but accessible conversation. If you're interested in innovation, grab that episode. Next week, we will be on air with Dallas Chief of Police, Danny Como, talking about his new book, The Active Sport of Leadership, Discipline, Culture, and the Responsibility to Lead. You will be delighted to learn how he weaves so much of his leadership philosophy from all the years he's played baseball growing up.

50:04 See you then. Let's continue leaning into discovering how to elevate your operating system as a leader and create destination workplaces where legendary business takes place. Let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in to Working On Purpose, featuring your host, Dr. Elise Cortez, each week on W4CY. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires in passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there. Let's work on purpose.