The Breakdown with Chris Clearfield: Recent Episodes
Chris Clearfield
Today's guest on the podcast is Diane Chadwick-Jones, a safety executive who recently retired from her position as BP’s Human Performance Director after 30 years at the company. She was appointed the Director of Leadership and Culture at BP just days before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Regular listeners and those who have read Meltdown know that Deepwater Horizon was pivotal for me. Before it, I tended to think about complexity in the context of financial systems and global markets. After it, I saw clearly what kind of impact complexity can wreak on the wider world.
Diane and I don't talk about the Deepwater Horizon accident, and that's very intentional.
But we did get a chance to talk about her approach to safety, what it means to be a systems thinker, the problem with (some) incentives, and building a culture of learning without scaring people off.
Listen to the interview here.
Today on the podcast, I speak with Amba Gale, the owner of Gale Leadership Development. She has run leadership development programs for some of the world's biggest companies for the past four decades—something I find incredibly impressive.
A previous podcast guest, Bill Weymer, recommended that I speak to Amba, who has worked with Bill and his team at Town & Country Markets. If you listen to my interview with Bill, you’ll gain a sense of how Town & Country Markets has built a culture of participation, sharing, creativity, and collaboration—and Bill told me that Amba was instrumental in creating a cohort of leaders there who grew that culture.
In our conversation, Amba shares her thoughts about leadership (particularly the nature of leadership in the modern world) and talks about how to support leaders and transform organizations in an intuitive, human-centered way. We also talk a lot about vulnerability and the art of listening (really listening).
I felt very present and grounded in this conversation, and it was an impactful conversation for me. I hope you take something from it, too.
Find more about Amba Gale at https://galeleadership.com/. You can register for her free course that introduces her work: https://galeleadership.com/next-opening-intro/. Read about her upcoming class called Crossing Thresholds: A Conversational Bridge to Your Next Opening: https://galeleadership.com/the-next-opening/.
Today on The Breakdown™, I speak with Bill Weymer, the humble, thoughtful, and down-to-earth president and CEO of Town & Country Markets, a flourishing family-owned grocery store chain in greater Seattle that’s been around since 1957.
We talked about a lot: what it was like to run a public-facing retail business during 2020, why Bill and his leadership team lead with humility, how to develop a companywide culture and shared sense of purpose amongst workers, and the importance of listening to, caring about, and investing in workers both during peacetime and COVID-19.
Bill and I also talked about the way that, like every part of our world, technology has become a huge part of the grocery business, an industry where margins are tight and relevance is fought for.
Today on the podcast, I speak with Rani Olson. We talk about the food system, as well as different economic systems. We discuss the cost of those systems, as well as the cost that fully buying into the system without awareness can bring—not just for us as individuals, but for us as a society.
Olson is an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Arizona, where she also coordinates the Nutrition and Food Systems Degree Program. Throughout the course of her career, she has worked in virtually every corner of the food industry, most recently as a chef and a farm-to-table coordinator for Tucson’s largest school district.
How can organizational change actually be successful?
That’s what I’m talking about today with my guest Elsbeth Johnson. We discuss concrete steps that senior leaders can take to ensure that their efforts work out.
Elsbeth was the perfect conversational partner to discuss organizational change with: she is an MIT Sloan professor and the author of Step Up, Step Back: How to Really Deliver Strategic Change in Your Organization, published last year. She has also worked as a change consultant for at least ten years.
Among other things, we discussed:
- Elsbeth’s articles “How to Make Strategic Choices in Uncertain Conditions” in People + Strategy Journal and, with Fiona Murray, “What a Crisis Teaches Us About Innovation” in MIT Sloan Management Review
- Using the Cynefin framework to help with decision-making
In this episode, I speak with Nippin Anand, a master mariner and safety expert. He is the founder and CEO of Novellus Solutions, a consulting firm that helps organizations build cultures of safety and learn from accidents. Nippin and I talk about how cultures of safety are created (and destroyed), the importance of cultivating psychological safety among employees working in high-risk industries, and why managers are often not-so-great listeners.
In the episode, we talked about:
- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
- Innovation in knowledge-based companies vs. high-risk industries
- How unsafe conditions are worsened by managers’ inability to listen to line workers
- The role of psychological safety in high-risk organizations
- Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture by Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick
- How managers’ urge to seek consensus and solve problems can cause more problems in the long run
- How the urge to blame managers (instead of line workers) springs from the same place as the urge to blame blame line workers (instead of a managers)
- Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster by Lee Clarke
- Faster, better, cheaper, safer—is it possible?
David Gagnon is a researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the director of the learning research lab Field Day at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Over the course of our conversation, we hammer out a definition of learning, discuss David’s work creating educational video games for elementary school students, and talk about how to create environments that foster experimentation, curiosity, and, ultimately, growth.
During the episode, we touched on:
- Learning—what is it? What isn’t it?
- Dave’s social constructivist approach to learning
- Literacy—what does it mean today? And the New London Group's multiliteracy manifesto
- Using video games for learning (e.g., Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case created by David’s research lab)
- The desire—in business, in education—to be right all the time… even when being “wrong” fosters learning
- The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (2011) by Eric Reis
- The humility that can come from having an understanding of complex, complicated systems
- If it’s possible to go overboard with radical transparency when working with outside partners?
- Deschooling Society (1971) by the radical Catholic priest Ivan Illich
- Attending to participants’ feelings when navigating organizational change… and how artists and storytellers can lead the way
In this episode, I speak with Jennifer Riel, a writer and strategist, and the global director of strategy at IDEO, a global design consultancy. With Roger Martin, she is the author of Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking, a Wall Street Journal bestseller. We talk about design (what it is, why it’s important), creating resilient organizational strategy, the future of work, and the value of developing a growth mindset.
In our conversation, we talked about:
- Design—at its most basic form, it is creation with intention
- IDEO’s commitment to human-centered design
- How design doesn’t just apply to physical objects—organizations, services, and strategies can be designed, too
- Designing organizational structures that support organizational strategy
- How the best strategies are resilient—neither static nor reactive
- The Good Job Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits (2014) by operations management professor Zeynep Ton
- Major takeaways from Jennifer and Roger Martin’s 2017 book Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking
- Applying psychologist Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” to the corporate world
- How there are very few “right” answers in complex social systems
In this episode, I speak with Laura Gassner Otting, an executive coach and speaker, as well as the author of the 2019 book Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life.
This episode is a little bit different. Instead of interviewing Laura, I asked her if she would be willing to give me an executive coaching session, which we would record and share here, on the podcast. She was game.
During the course of the session, Laura asked me tough yet insightful questions about my work history, my career trajectory, and my hopes for my business in the future—questions designed to help me identify any gaps between what I do and who I am.
It is Laura’s belief that real success comes from achieving consonance—harmony between what we do and who we are.
When this harmony occurs, Laura argues, a limitless life is possible.
In this episode, I speak with Amy C. Edmondson—the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard School of Business—about the concept of psychological safety, which she explored in her 2019 book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. We also discussed the importance of proactively eliciting feedback from colleagues, coming to terms with our fallibilities, and discarding outmoded management behaviors that should be left in the twentieth century.
During our conversation, we talked about:
- The renewed interest in the concept of psychological safety
- J.D. Thompson’s notion of “reciprocal coordination needs”
- How knowledge work does not produce objective or mechanical feedback
- The effect of anxiety on knowledge workers’ performance
- Amy’s Harvard Business Review article “Speeding Up Team Learning”
- The mechanical language of management (which hasn’t caught up with the nature of work today)
- Henry Ford-like management behaviors that are outdated but, nevertheless, still used
- How to understand psychological safety by practicing it (instead of just thinking about it)
- Coming to terms with our own fallibility
- Amy and Chris’s appearance on For the Love of Work podcast
- Learning to “listen up,” not just “speak up”
- Applying the concept of psychological safety to parenting
Ep. 17 – Jim Riley – Are You as Good as Jim Riley at Dealing with Disruptions? by Chris Clearfield
Ep. 16 – Misha Glouberman – Why You Suck at Listening (and How to Improve) by Chris Clearfield
I’m really excited to share my conversation with Michael Bungay Stanier. Michael is a really thoughtful, humble and impressive guy. He lives in Toronto and founded a company called Box of Crayons, which helps organizations transform from being advice-driven to being curiosity led.
His two most recent books, The Advice Trap and The Coaching Habit are both really practical and fantastic tools for leaders looking to ask better questions and use those better questions to have a real impact in the quality of work that people around them do and the quality of solutions to problems that they arrive at.
Michael is just himself a curious and delightful human being. We have a really interesting and—as many of my conversations end up being—pretty wide-ranging from poetry and literature to what it really means to have impact in the world and how we can really make meaningful change.
So, without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael.
I am excited to share this interview with my friend Oscar Velasco-Schmitz. Oscar is an entrepreneur and one of the owners of Dockside Cannabis, a cannabis retailer here in Seattle.
We chat about his business and the history of political change that led to recreational cannabis being legalized in Washington State—something that is expanding across the United States and world.
But I was also curious to talk with Oscar about how he connects with the mind of his customer, how he deeply empathizes with his customers’ needs, and how he uses that empathy to build customers experience.
Dockside Cannabis serves all kinds of people. It was fascinating to hear Oscar talk about that and also to hear him share his philosophy of providing excellent customer service, even as he engages in what he calls an “industrialized act of civil disobedience.”
I am so excited to share my conversation with my friend and mentor, Roger Martin with you. Roger is the former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, which is the business school at the University of Toronto. He has also been named the world’s number one management thinker by Thinkers50.
My coauthor András Tilscik, who also teaches at Rotman, introduced us. Over the years, Roger has been a real guide for me as I build my own practice and thinking around systems.
-NOTE FOR CLAIRE: or… “I got to know Roger through my coauthor…”
Roger has written 11 books, a lot of which are about systems thinking and unpacking very hard problems into palatable and digestible and, frankly, actionable pieces. They’re all great.
Two highlights are Creating Great Choices (with Jennifer Riel) and Playing to Win. If you listen to my conversation with David Burkus, you’ll hear us talk about Roger’s playing to win philosophy as applied to our own businesses.
In this episode, we discuss his most recent book, When More is Not Better, Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency. It’s basically a way of thinking about the broader economic-political system in terms of systems.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
I have a fun and special treat for you this week. It is certainly different.
Today, I am sharing a podcast with you that I was actually on. It’s David McRainey’s fabulous podcast, You Are Not So Smart, which I was a guest on over the summer.
And, man, do we get to it…
We talk about toilet paper shortages, why people join social movements, we talk about my book Meltdown, and his own upcoming book… I know I use the phrase “wide-ranging” to describe these conversations I have… but it was a fun and extremely wide-ranging conversation.
It’s a 1hr 53 min. listen and I am really delighted to deliver it to you today. It’s Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. when this is dropping, so you might have an hour and 53 minutes while you putter about the kitchen chopping vegetables and brining your turkey (if that is a thing you do). Otherwise, I hope you use this hour and 53 minutes of thought injection from David and my discussion. Please enjoy.
How do you scale your business when you’re the linchpin and can’t break away from the day-to-day?
This is a tension that many of us feel.
You should be able to take a vacation without worrying about what’s happening in the firm, right?
It’s a challenge to get yourself removed from all the pieces of the puzzle. It can be done, but it’s the interim that’s tricky.
This is a question that I’ve been working through with a lawyer-client of mine and he was nice enough to let me share part of his process with you here on the podcast.
I was so excited to chat with my friends Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick. They’re both thoughtful folks who work with technology—but through a very human lens that I appreciate. They’ve written a book called Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture, which is both fun to read and extremely useful.
What’s most interesting to me is how their ideas apply outside of technology. I use a similar approach with my clients who are searching for ways to better work with change (and their colleagues).
I hope you enjoy our conversation, and I can’t recommend their book enough.
David Burkus is a writer who has written for years about really interesting things: creativity, networking, and what it means to be a leader in our modern times.
I think many of us are just now catching on to something that David has been thinking about for a long time: how the nature of work is changing.
In the podcast, we talk about David’s work and background, and we also discuss how he works with teams to help them improve.
Join me for a conversation with entrepreneur Andy Singleton. Andy is a programmer who has been starting, running, and selling companies for decades.
He’s also a deep thinker and a student of innovation. I hope you enjoy our wide-ranging discussion—from how Amazon innovates to what evolution can tell us about how the airplane was invented and refined.
Gary Wichansky is a friend of mine who runs a company called Hotopp Associates, an experience and entertainment design firm. After working at the firm under its founder, Michael Hotopp, Gary became the CEO in 2013.
Gary and I talk about making tough decisions, Gary’s philosophy of obstacle-based design, and what the show Game of Thrones can teach us about the art of the possible.
For more on our discussion, and to check out the work Gary and his team have done to help the National Hockey League redesign its approach to hockey in the time of COVID-19, check out the show notes at www.chrisclearfield.com/podcast.
David Sax is a journalist and an author who’s written about a ton of different things, but his most recent book, The Soul of an Entrepreneur is all about the way that small businesses don’t just drive the economy but also really knit our communities together.
It’s a look at entrepreneurship that’s really far from the Silicon Valley kind of myth, the Silicon Valley sort of ethos of scaling and user growth.
The way I think about it is, it’s not move fast and break things, it’s more like, move fast and bake things. In his book, he profiles lots of really interesting businesses and the way that they also help communities of color, particularly immigrants, arriving in a new place really get their feet under them and create something that helps them rewrite and redefine their stories.
David is also an entrepreneur whose book launched smack in the middle of the Coronavirus lockdown. We talk about what that’s like and what it’s like to adapt to all the changes that COVID-19 has brought. So, without further ado, I hope you very much enjoy.
Join my conversation with Laura Huang, a Harvard Business School professor and the author of Edge.
Laura and I chat about how to make decisions in environments with little data, what Venture Capitalists can teach us all about making decisions, and how small firms can be more agile in the face of major disruptions than large companies.
David is the founder of the Lavin Agency, an intellectual talent agency that represents speakers, authors, journalists, researchers and, in general, super quirky people. Full disclosure: David is my speaking agent, which is how I know him.
We’ll hear David’s story of how, as a twenty something, he talked his way into millions of dollars of advertising from Canada’s biggest newspaper. How he spent 30+ years building his business by pursuing what he thought was interesting and how COVID-19 took his entire industry apart in less than three weeks.
Welcome to The Breakdown with Chris Clearfield. This is a space to connect with fellow business owners and the experts that can give us insights. We’ll be tapping into perspectives, things that we can learn from different experts who have thought about everything from resilience to what it means to be an entrepreneur.