Simone Cicero 

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations podcast. On this podcast we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-hosts Shruthi Prakash. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Hello everybody.

 

Simone Cicero

And we are excited to welcome our guest for today, Jennifer Garvey Berger. Jennifer is globally recognized for her pioneering work at the intersection of adult development, leadership, and complexity. She is the founder of Cultivating Leadership, a consulting and advisory practice that helps leaders worldwide embrace complexity in their style of leadership. 

 

And she’s also the author of many influential books among those we can mention, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps and Changing on the Job. Jennifer’s work explores how leaders can evolve not just by acquiring skills, but mostly by transforming how they create meaning in organizations, developing the deeper and more adaptive mental models that are required to navigate today’s crazy world, I would say. 

 

So Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Thanks so much. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Well, essentially, as a starting point, what I suggest that we explore as a kind of opening question would be for you to attack, let’s say, the key polarity that at least we have in mind when we think about leadership in organisations nowadays.

 

It’s this polarity between the necessity to, as a leader, to be more conducive, let’s say, to a complex adaptive understanding of an organisation. So letting the organisation evolve and co-evolve, I would say, with the environment, with a much more welcoming and open mindset and some kind of urgency that, especially in a world like the one that we living today, so complex, so pressing for organizational leaders to essentially be a bit more – strategic, intentional, I don’t want to say controlling or directive, but I would say more influential on how the organization transforms its strategic ideas into action, structure, architecture, and management. 

 

So that’s, I would say, maybe a good starting point for us in your experience to lay out a bit of your understanding of this friction, this polarity.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

I love that you’ve named that as a polarity. Thank you. Because I think you’ve just pointed to the biggest mistakes leaders are making these days, which is to lean all the way into one of those or all the way into the other one of those. Right. It’s very common for people to say: “we can’t plan anything. We can’t know anything. We’re sort of adrift right now”. And there are a lot of folks who are right now kind of a drift because it all feels so out of control. It’s like: “how could I ever do anything?”

 

And then the other impulse people tend to have is like to grab onto the wheel and to micromanage everybody because it soothes the nervous system to do that. And it feels like, that kind of feels like things will be more in control if I’m managing details really significantly and if I’m trying to really tightly control where we’re going. 

 

And as you suggested, neither of those is very effective right now. Right now, we have to get really good at that kind of surfing the wave of these two things and noticing that we need a direction. We talk a lot at Cultivating Leadership about not having a destination in mind during times like this, because you can’t know exactly where you’re going to get to. But you need to have a direction in mind – values, a compass, right? You’re not following a roadmap, you’re wayfinding. And to wayfind, you have to move and set off in a direction. You have to attend to the context and you have to be making decisions to be proactive again and again and again. You can’t just wait. Wayfinding is neither about following a set predetermined path nor about waiting until a predetermined path opens up for you.

 

Simone Cicero 

That’s great. I I have noted down this incredible succinct way that you had to, you framed it as a distinction between having a direction versus having a destination, right? It’s really spoke clearly to me. So maybe as a follow-up, what could be a set of, I mean, maybe we’re getting into the practical already, but what could be a set of skills or practices that maybe if we stay at the personal level first at the single leadership level, what could be some practices or skills or inclinations that a leader should develop to really start embracing this mindset, right? This new mindset.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

I mean, one of the things that you might notice about yourself and that pretty much all humans notice about themselves if they attend to it is that we spend a lot of time thinking about the past and we spend a lot of time thinking about the future. We’re not that good at noticing what’s actually going on. And there are all kinds of really interesting neurological reasons for that, like how the brain evolved and what it’s trying to help us with. 

 

But the truth is that paying attention to the present is an incredibly important task when you’re dealing with circumstances that are so changing. And not, I don’t mean by paying attention to the present, like following every news story, because there you can really get lost in the noise of today and lose some of the important patterns. So you’re paying attention to patterns in the present.

 

And those patterns in the present help you figure out, you know, kind of what do I do now? And then what do I do now? If we have too solid or too narrow, too targeted an idea about the future, our brains naturally segment out information that would otherwise get through. And so the more targeted our destination is, the less we’re able to see of the present. And in a time like now where agility is so important, if you can’t see the present, you can’t actually navigate very well. So I guess this is the first kind of, I don’t know, a counterintuitive suggestion is that as you are trying to move towards a better future, the thing you need to really do is use your direction and attend to the present.

 

Shruthi Prakash

If I can, you know, sort of, yeah, probe on that as well, right? A lot of this is obviously extremely subjective personal patterns that, you know, is dependent on one or a certain number of individuals. 

 

So how does that personal pattern sort of relate to larger complex ecosystems? And does the model also put onus on a single set of leaders or one leader or whatever, what comes first, it would be interesting to know.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Yeah, mean, certainly our personal preferences are always at play in what we notice and the decisions we make and the decisions we resist making, right? Like this is always going to be the case. The things that I think is also really interesting at a time like now is that our, some of the things we have in common, like a functioning primate nervous system. 

 

Those things are generally more heightened, more triggered in this moment than they are regularly. So there’s so much going on right now. There’s so much noise. There’s so much everything that conflict, news, attention grabbing stuff that our nervous systems are often really highly triggered and how people deal with that is kind of idiosyncratic, but that we all have to deal with it is very collective. 

 

And to your second question, I think that – more than ever, we have to be forming collectives that are really functional. Right. One of the things I am I am utterly convinced about the more I study complex systems and human behavior and neurobiology during times of great complexity, the more convinced I am that any one of us is too small or limited to handle it. The thing that helps us handle complexity is our collective nature and how we build strong, aware, healthy collectives in order to navigate together. It’s as if you can look at one part of the ocean and I can look at the other part of the ocean. Simone needs to look at a different part of the ocean and between us we can kind of scan, but any one of us would find the ocean too big to deal with.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

And if I can ask on that, right? Like, so obviously, like you’re saying as well, a lot of these are subjective, which means that development essentially is not necessarily slow, but very personal and uneven in its path. 

 

So maybe how can organizations create a space for that, you know, creating optionality in people’s sort of opinion practice and how does then an organization also operationalize a lot of these?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Yeah, those are big questions. I think this attending to the capacities, particularly the developmental capacities, all kinds of capacities, but the visible and invisible capacities of our organizations and attempting to grow them, like helping to create the conditions for people to be growing bigger and bigger capacities is mandatory right now. 

 

Humans are, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the only creatures on the planet who intentionally evolve themselves, who can choose their own evolutionary path. We’ve evolved ourselves. We know how to fly when nature didn’t give us possibilities to fly. We know how to move from place to place really fast. We know how to create heat and raise food, we do all these things in our external world that evolution hasn’t quite created the conditions for us to have in our bodies. 

 

And at the same time, we know how to evolve our internal world to be more able to handle complexity and the complex network of relationships that is necessary in complexity. And so now, all that’s possible then we just have to choose it and invest in it.

 

Simone Cicero 

I was curious because Shruthi kind of hinted into the question I was preparing on my side, Given that we are a bit of organizational geeks, basically. I’m thinking about, and I get that it’s a complicated question – very, you know, nuanced, requiring very nuanced answers, and not maybe not definitive answers as well. 

 

But I was thinking, what’s your experience in translating, because you mentioned these two dimensions, right? The leaders dimension, the single person dimension, and the collective, and you kind of said, you know, it’s really a collective thing, it’s increasingly becoming a collective thing, right? 

 

So what is your experience in how some successful visionary and embodied leaders have translated these into the organization from a perspective of management practices, cultural traits, and even if possible, architectural setups for their organization. what are they, and maybe they don’t exist, right? 

 

But if they exist, what are the common patterns that you have seen in organizations that have been able to embrace this capability to deal with complexity.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Yeah, so let’s play with that idea. First of all, I think that you said that I said that it was more, the collective is more important than the individual. And the thing I’m saying is that the collective is necessary, but individual development is necessary for us to deal with collectives. So we have again, this other polarity, just as the polarity we started with was kind of this planned emergence polarity, maybe we could call it. 

 

And this polarity that we’re dealing with is this individua-collective polarity. I think we have to very skillfully and carefully work on our own individual capacities in order to create really functional collectives. So not that you were making it simple, but just to make it a little bit more complex. I just want to add that in. 

 

Are there organizational practices? For sure. For sure there are organizational practices. There are practices of attending to teaming, for example. I am shocked at how many leaders have teams that basically they don’t attend to. They expect the teams to do work, but they don’t attend to that the health and well-being of the thing called a team. They don’t attend to the connective tissue between members. They don’t attend to the collective knowledge holding between members. They don’t give people skills and practices about teaming as if to work with each other during times of this kind of complexity were the most natural thing in the world.

 

It is not the most natural thing in the world. It is a significant organizational and individual push for us to be able to create really strong teams. Some years ago, there was all this push into agile teams. Agile teams are a great idea. They’re to form and break down teams as the work requires to figure out how to do that architecturally, that’s super useful. Avoids silence. You know, it has all kinds of good benefits. 

 

The humans often resist that kind of thing because of our psychology, because of our biology. And so we need to be helped in some way. We need to attend to the, just the process, the human process of teaming in a different way, I think, than we usually do. So that’s just the first thing I’ll say.

 

I could see many other things, but that’s the first one that comes to mind right now.

 

Simone Cicero

I’m curious to hear from you when you work with leaders in maybe need or large organizations. Is this necessity to engage everybody into this conversation coming up often and soon, or is it more a conversation you have with the leadership teams in organizations that sit there in the leadership group. 

 

Because you work with large organizations, very advanced organizations. So I’m wondering if when you work with them, it’s more about their core leadership team, or it’s more like an engagement that includes everybody in the organization.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Yeah, it depends on the organization. But I think, as you would probably guess, the organizations that are really invested in these ideas work not only with the leadership team, but with as many people in the organization as they possibly can. 

 

I think that the thinking of the organization as an ecosystem where people and collectives are developing and then thinking what features would you want to tweak in that ecosystem? You would want everybody to be growing in some way because if you have the belief that what the workforce of the future needs is people who have been, who are more able to handle complexity and more able to handle complex human relationships as well as complex thought patterns, you would want to start people as soon as possible on this journey and give them as much time as possible to grow.

 

I think organizations that are really committed to this process understand that they’re going to need to grow the future workforce themselves. You can actually rely on universities or business schools or other organizations to be growing the future workforce. They’re not doing that good a job of it. And so the organization that grows the future, that’s an organization that is not just innovating products, but is thinking about the innovators as well.

 

Simone Cicero 

I’m curious to ask you two things now and let’s see what comes first. But I understand from what you said that part of this work in the organization may be something that goes with certain architecture practices, but it’s very contextual to the organization. 

 

So I’m curious to hear if there are some recurring approaches, maybe I don’t know, related to storytelling or related to cadences in the organization or maybe related to certain roles you want in the organization, people that are strategically dedicated to nurturing these in the organization. So that’s the first thing, more practical thing in terms of how you can engage an organization into this journey. 

 

And then I’m curious to hear – What is the outcome on the actual “what” of the organization? So does an organization which is more complexity aware change what it does, what products, what customers, what needs, what priorities? Those are the two things I have in mind at the moment. So the how and the what.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Okay, so – The how and the what. The how, I think providing opportunities for people to bump up against themselves in some way in both their own thinking and in their relationships. Pretty much every organization that’s doing this work is doing something along those lines. That means helping people tolerate conflict and use conflict more effectively, helping people tolerate failure and use failure more effectively. It’s fascinating. 

 

Humans mostly need to be taught how to deal with conflict and failure. You would think that these two incredibly natural facets of human experience, we would be like just great at, but we are not great at them. And so those things need to be supported. And I think you can support them in both individual and collective practices.

 

How do organisations handle failure? Are there processes around learning from it or are there processes around seeking out the bad guys and punishing them? And I’ve worked in organisations that have different kinds of processes or architecture around kind of how do you handle failure. And they have really different complexity friendly responses.

 

Again, that’s some of the how we could dig into any of those pieces, but you’re asking big questions. So let’s say two of the pieces of the how, but you could, you can think about the architecture for that all the way up and up and down. You can think about your HR systems, like: “what is our process for supporting people to handle conflict well, or not?” “Do we have ways to support people to handle conflict well?” “Does conflict tend to be outsourced?” “Is there a person or a role that is supposed to handle conflict?” And if so, that says to everybody: “I don’t need to do it. He’s going to do it”. I don’t need to do it. Are there rules about it?

 

Because if there are rules about it, it probably means we’re afraid of it and somebody’s trying to control it. Or are people trying to develop habits or skills about it, which probably means that we think of it as a kind of an expertise that can be developed, which you can imagine is much more helpful. And then are we organized in such a way that reduces or eliminates conflict?

 

I worked with one executive team and basically you know, when I arrived on the scene, basically it seemed to me that the entire executive team meeting was designed to be a performance where no conflict could ever arise. It was like completely designed to be conflict free, where people would never kind of bump into each other or bump into having a real unplanned thought. And over time, they’ve dropped the theater and they’ve learned how to kind of bump into each other productively.

 

But a lot of that’s in the org design, it’s in the way the silos interact, it’s in how networked an organization is. And then it’s all the way down to how do we handle meetings? How do we handle agenda setting, for example? So it’s a fractal across the entire organization. That’s some of the how. 

 

What do I see as different? It’s funny, I tend to see organizations getting, more, I’ll say simple. I’ll say they, they, they figure out what their, what their guiding light is. You know, you, you don’t need a destination. You need a direction to have a direction. You need some light that guides you a value, a mission, a purpose.

 

And they get very, very good at saying, is this inside our purpose or not inside our purpose? Is this adjacent to our purpose or at the center of our purpose? And then they experiment like crazy inside that space. I watch them get, people often talk about how complexity seems kind of scattered, like you’re trying to do a thousand things at once. 

 

But actually, complexity with direction, if you take a direction into complexity, can get quite, you can be open to many possibilities and then figure out which ones are most aligned with your purpose and values and then you can simplify. A lot of organizations are unnecessarily complicated is what I would call it. And that complication tends to be designed to control and to manage reputations and to control, you know, am I gonna get in trouble and to protect my job and, you know, do all those kinds of things instead of actually being aware and attentive and experimental in the face of emergence.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

I’m just curious – What are the kind of companies that you have seen or organizations that adopt this? So, and in what way have these sort of taken shape? 

 

Because I can imagine if I talk about, let’s say, balancing your nervous system, things like that, it might feel very intangible, essentially, even though I know it very much is, you know, tangible and result driven. 

 

But I’m curious, how are organizations open to these kinds of conversations? Are they open? Is it very structural in process, or also experiential in process? I’d be curious to know.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

I think organizations are getting more and more open to these ideas. In part because people are crashing into their own limits and finding, you know, I think for, I’ve been in this business a long time and I think for a lot of it that there were still, you know, maybe 80%, maybe more of the leaders I kind of ran into figured that if they just did what they have been doing, but better or harder or faster, it would be fine. Like everything would be fine. Just do it better, harder, faster.  And so what they wanted was to get better, harder, faster. 

 

People that I work with across industries. So I work across industry. Now it’s true that people I work with want to work with me, so they care about these things. So it’s a specific set of folks. But the people I work with understand that doing what they used to do, only harder, better, faster, is not going to do it. That actually changing, and maybe fundamentally changing, not just what they’re doing, but the ecosystem that creates what they’re doing, the internal ecosystem and the external ecosystem, actually making shifts to those two systems is necessary. That it’s not just about dialling up efficiency or getting a little bit faster so you could do 20% more, that the old ways are no longer working. 

 

And I see that in some innovative organizations, big tech, small tech, startups. I see it in big pharma, biotechs. I see it in organizations that you would normally have thought of as very precise in logistics organizations, you know, and supply chain management organizations. Really, I am seeing it everywhere, everywhere at this idea that an evolution of not just kind of product, but of human and human relationships and human organization is necessary right now.

 

Simone Cicero 

I tried to articulate a little bit the conversation we are having because I think it’s going in a very crucial direction, right? I’m going to come back to some of the topics you mentioned for our listeners so that we can also kind of frame it a little bit. 

 

So one thing that you said is essentially you have as a complexity-aware organization, a good way to frame it is to both at the personal and organizational level integrate the concepts of conflict and failure. Which is, I think, like a big, big important key, important idea here. 

 

And that’s sparked an interesting beat for me because lots of the work we do is in transforming organisations from functional and industrial, let’s say, into post-industrial and decentralized, where you have a lot of small units and a lot of contracting between units versus typical management chains, right?

 

And this is very much about transforming, for example, typically the conflicts you have in functional organisations between two functions into an alignment of interests. So we tend to transform the conflict into what we call tensions. So you try to put these two nodes in the organisation that maybe have to collaborate into a positive tension so that they align their interests and they create this healthy market dynamics right into the organization so that you reduce the depth of the organization, both technical organizational skills and so on. 

 

It’s an organization that tends to be, let’s more meritocratic. Okay, let’s simplify it like that. And that’s great because I think a lot of the things you mentioned are also related to companies obliterating the idea of failure essentially is a way to obliterate the idea of impermanence in anything you do, right? That if it’s coming to humans, but also maybe failure and restarting a business with new premises because simply the idea you had, it didn’t work, right? It didn’t work for the customer and so on.

 

So I think the important and interesting thing that you also mentioned is, and where I find a little bit of friction, I would say here, is – when you say organizations that I work with, the ones that are really embracing these are the ones that somehow can identify their direction, their purpose, and I’m good to say this is not in our purpose, not in our direction. 

 

On the other hand, by the way, I feel like sometimes this idea of purpose may be quite misleading. What do I mean with that? At the end of the day, essentially, organisations exist to serve customer needs. I don’t want to talk about Peter Drucker, but essentially, that’s the idea, at least in a market. Of course, we can think of organisations that have deeper roots into a bioregional system. But these are, at the moment, really I don’t think they exist so far in the world. Maybe Patagonia a little bit, it’s really, you can count it on our hands, on the fingers in our hands. 

 

So typical organizations exist to serve the market, to deliver a customer value. Sometimes when we have these conversations around progressive organizing, there’s a lot of talking about, you have to treat people like adults, not like kids.

 

But treating people like adults also means they are accountable to the market, to the customer. So it’s not just about, for example, having the space to take certain decisions in the organisation. It’s also about basically justifying your existence in a complex set of nodes and chains that produce customer value. So that’s where the idea of purpose to me sounds a bit problematic, because people tend to attach purpose with – we are here for the purpose. 

 

And my answer is not really. You are here for creating customer value. how do you see this already as well in the organizations you work with? Is part of this process of becoming complex aware also a process of becoming aware that behaving like an adult, it means you have to justify your existence, you have to create the means for you to prove it’s not that somebody needs to come to you and serving it to you on a silver plate, right? 

 

That’s what I wanted to bring into this conversation.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

So if I understand you, the way these things go together is this idea of purpose seems a little detached to you from this idea of kind of serving the market. Like you have to serve the market and whatever your purpose is, if it doesn’t serve the market, you’re kind of screwed as a business because it’s not gonna work. 

 

And then on the other hand, I’m hearing you say something about being an adult, which is like also taking some responsibility for how you’re showing up. And I can’t tell whether you mean that on the individual level or as an organization has to take responsibility, but you might mean both.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, I mean, and I see increasingly this convergence. Because if you think about the organisation as a set of smaller nodes, and AI and other technological advancements as pushing this boundary even farther into smaller and smaller and smaller nodes, it’s really about you. 

 

For example, one fascinating thing I think about AI is that at the end of the day, it’s really a convivial technology. What do I mean with that? It’s an anti alienating technology, right? Because it’s really empowering people to do whatever they want to do. But this pushes the people to really think about what they want to do, what they believe it’s right and important to do. So to some extent, this boundary is, how can I say, it’s shrinking more and more, right? So it’s more about individual or small team responsibilities to basically produce value more than responding to certain purpose. 

 

So that’s the tension that I think we were discussing.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

So. I might not understand you well enough, what I understand, I’m going to push against some of what I understand. So this idea about serving markets, complexity tells us that there’s no, that causation comes in kind of loops, right? And you can’t tell where they stop and where they start.

 

So let’s take a social network company, maybe Facebook or name your own social, name your favourite Instagram, TikTok, name a social networking kind of thing. 

 

Is their job to create, to serve a market, is their job to create a market, is their job to simply get as many clicks as possible and to just generate revenue in this way, or is their job to bring something into the world that makes the world better? I think these are very different. I think these are very different conceptions of what it is for me to be spending my life force doing. And I think one the things we haven’t talked about right now is

 

the many generations that are in organizations right now. And I think the younger generations are not that interested in giving their life force to organisations that are dedicated to making money and trashing the planet, for example, or making money and making bad things happen in countries, for example, or making money in a way that creates the conditions for young people to be more depressed and anxious than they’ve ever been in history of the world. 

 

So I don’t believe that organisations can have as their North Star as something like serving customer needs, because I believe that organisations are constantly creating customer needs. And as they create customer needs, they are also creating society.

 

And unless they have a purpose that guides some of that creation, I think things get really, well, things have gotten really problematic without an attention to values and purpose. And I don’t mean the kind of crappy values and purpose that are put on posters in like the coffee room. I do mean the Patagonias of the world. 

I do mean organisations that say, I will, I am in the process of engaging in a social contract with the world to make a better world. And I believe that that is more and more the way that complexity-friendly organisations work. 

 

Because if you trash the very markets that you are trying to make money from, bad things happen. Which we’re seeing evidence of all over the world right now. The rise of the B Corp, the rise of socially responsible organizations, not as a box ticking device, but as like a real North star seems to me to be a part of, first of all, what it takes to capture the imaginations and the attention of the emerging generation who looks at stuff my generation did and says – Are you kidding? Are you actually kidding? You think I’m going to invest my life force in that? I think understanding complexity helps us understand ecosystems better and helps us understand how to contribute to healthy ecosystems which serve all of us. 

 

Cultivating leadership is a B Corp. This is like, I know a lot about what it takes to be a business person who puts values over financial gain. Several years ago, we gave away the organization. We created a foundation. We gave the organization to that foundation. The foundation spends our profits now. So, so I’m, I’m not kidding when I say that I think this is the way really complexity friendly organisations that understand a long future, engage.

 

Simone Cicero 

So if you want, I can capture this insight, I think, in a way that I hope fits also your understanding is that complexity means also that you have to be the one that defines the value. 

 

You as an entrepreneur, as a participant in an organization, you have to be involved in defining what’s valuable for you, why you’re doing this job. And it can be customer value, it can be other types of more embedded values, but at the end of the day, it’s a bargain, you setting your bargain between you setting your values and you executing your work into this kind of closed loop, right? And this closed loop in complexity and with technology empowering all of us, it’s becoming smaller and smaller. The scale of where this circle needs to be closed, this loop needs to be closed, it’s becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s the team, it’s even the individuals sometimes. 

 

And if you want, my perception is that the industrial organization is scrambling also because it cannot define any more value, as you said, the new generations. It cannot define more these monolithic ideas of value. 

 

It’s much more about people having to really engage with defining what’s available for them and transforming into a closer loop self existing system of where they give their contribution to generate some amount, some kind of value that works for them. And that’s how I be connected with purpose. So I mean, probably purpose needs to be really pushed to the boundaries of the organization. Everybody needs to find their own purpose in a complex organization.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

I agree. I agree. I think that we are constantly in, each of us individually and all of us collectively are constantly in a co-creative process about what value is. And it shapes us. How do the fires in LA change the way a supply chain company thinks about value? Even if the company has nothing to do with LA exists and it lives in our collective minds and hearts. 

 

And so the co-creative act of staying aware of what value we’re creating and what value we’re necessarily destroying right? Because you don’t create without destroying what things we’re using up in order to create this value. That thing moves. It’s moving around and it’s moving really fast. You know, how do we think about what AI can produce versus how much water and power it uses? You know, how do you think about what each of us contributes versus what each of us take up?

 

How do we think about what every organization is doing versus what every organization is harming? I think the thing that’s happening is we can no longer pretend to be ignorant about those things anymore. They are right in front of us all the time. And just because you close your eyes to them does not mean they don’t exist.

 

Simone Cicero 

Mm-hmm. Yeah Shruthi, I know you have one question, one quick point. It’s a fractal. You know, what you, you, what you, right.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

That’s right. That’s exactly right. I completely agree with you.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Yeah, no, I was going to say on actually Simone’s point of maybe creating, let’s say that technology like AI, et cetera, is creating the rapid amount of access. I think it’s also important to sort of see the other side, where while there is like a level playing field or an equaliser being created, like it’s important to sort of challenge that as well from internal aspects, like the amount of access that is being created is still power that’s sort of being centrally held. Right. 

 

So I see that a lot in, people working today as well, that they are willing to sort of challenge organizational structures, their intent a lot more in that aspect, even if the product they create is accessible or creating accessibility, the ownership is a good sort of topic to to keep in mind. 

 

So Jennifer, thank you firstly for, you know, this super engaging conversation. So towards the end of our podcast, we have a section called as the breadcrumbs where we ask our guests to share some maybe insights into books, other podcasts, maybe your music, anything that inspires you or something that, you know, our guests can pick up on some cues from with regards to the topics that you’re interested in.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Yeah, my temptation when you told me that there was going to be this question at the end, I’ve been thinking about resources. My temptation is to say now that we’ve had this conversation, like go walk in the woods. I think.

 

I think we know enough. I think the question is, can we access it? Right? I’m reading a brilliant book right now called A Brief History of Intelligence. I’m really enjoying it. You could read that book. It’s cool. 

 

And the other day, I walking. I live in this big property, a bunch of friends and I live in community in this big property, in the old property in the southwest of France. The other day, as a collective, we took a problem, we were having whatever problem it might be, and then we walked around through the woods and the meadows, wondering what ecosystem, the ecosystem in which we live has to tell us about our problem.

 

And I learned so much. And so I wonder about maybe the thing I would like to encourage your listeners to do is to slow down and listen more. 

 

And not listen to the things you normally listen to. You know, sometimes instead of listening to a podcast on a commute, just be, just listen. Instead of walking with a purpose, like walk endlessly. I think that there is an enormous amount of untapped creative potential that is in all of us that we are too busy to notice. And so this is my breadcrumb is go for go for a walk outside and notice how extraordinary nature, even nature in cities, is able to find its way and see what we can learn from that ecosystem that we are such a part of and yet we so often forget that we’re a part of.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Do you want to add a couple of bits on where people can connect with you or listen to your, you know, read your stuff or maybe new books coming up?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Sure, right now I’m just starting to work on a book about conflict, which makes sense, right? My books are published so far through Stanford University Press, so you can find all my books there. I have a website, cultivatingleadership.com. 

 

You can find me on LinkedIn. I put stuff in writing because it helps me think and I have an incredibly beautiful LinkedIn community and other communities around me to think together because my thinking will always be just such a tiny, tiny piece of what the world needs right now. But I’m pretty good at helping people think with me. 

 

So come, let’s play.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you. And I hope that was the case today as well, right? That we gave us a little piece of the picture. Thank you so much, Jennifer. It was a great chat. I hope you also enjoyed it. I guess so. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Yeah, was great. Thank you. I did. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed our conversation and you’re provoking and very interesting questions. Thank you.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Shruthi, thanks again for your participation again.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. Thank you so much, Jennifer. Thanks, Simone.

 

Simone Cicero

And yeah, of course, our listeners, you can head to boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find Jennifer’s podcast in the homepage and with all the mentions, they are the links that we mentioned during the conversation. And of course, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.