Podcasts built around an upcoming event tend to become promotion with a microphone attached. So when Anne Van Leerdam invited Stephen and me on ahead of the IAF Oceania conference, where we are running a session later this year, I was not sure how it would go.
To my pleasant surprise, it was warm, honest and free flowing. We spent most of it on facilitation and agency rather than on the conference. Refreshing. The whole thing is embedded at the bottom of this post, if you would rather listen than read on.
What keeps holding
Stephen is a colleague and an old friend. He also hosts a superb podcast, Forks In The Road, with Anne Boland. Give that a listen too.
Stephen and I met at an IAF conference years ago. He was wearing a shirt full of flowers, blooming on his sleeve, and impossible to miss in a Mumbai hall. I will let him explain that himself.
We have been working together since. So much for flowers.
Anne asked what stays constant across the industries we work in. Software, hospitals, pharma, education, law, insurance, wood panels. We deliberately refuse a second client in the same segment for three years, which keeps forcing us out of comfortable ground.
The answer came out quicker than I expected. Where people have a sense of agency, things change. Where agency is missing, or people believe it is missing, change work stalls no matter how carefully it is designed. Multi billion dollar multinationals and six person founder led teams alike.
Then we wandered into the part I enjoy most. Every engagement starts the same way. Someone tells us they are different, that our experience elsewhere will not apply here. We say thank you, we have never heard that before, please tell us more. Then we get to the ground and find people who can work it out for themselves, given some competence and some freedom to experiment.
This matters more now. In a world where the answers arrive instantly, the harder question is what to do with them. That decision gets made by people, together, in spaces safe enough to disagree in. Facilitation is how those spaces get built.
What I have not worked out
Then we hit the business of busyness.
One hypothesis I hold closely and cannot fully defend. Busyness is an invention. We keep each other busy to feel relevant and to avoid the parts of ourselves we would rather not face. I keep seeing evidence. I have not worked out how you would test it honestly.
And a question underneath it. If agency is what moves organisations, why do so many leaders instinctively withhold it? Fear is the easy answer and it is not enough.
Just under thirty minutes. Have a listen, then tell me what we got wrong. Or right. Either is useful, and one conversation has a way of starting the next.