We love things where we don't know what's going to happen next. That's the point of much of what we do for fun. And then we have this idea that we go into organizations and all that stuff should go away. And the thing that we should have is like these set pieces. And yeah, I don't think in a complex world that's going to actually take our organizations where they need to be. Welcome to Changing Conversations, the podcast where we bring you insights on how you can harness the power of conversation to make change happen. My name is Katrina and I have Stee here. Hi. And today we're talking to Jennifer Garvey-Berger. And we're going to talk about the mind traps that hold us back in making change happen in a complex world. So Jennifer is here. She's got a background in adult development and she spends a lot of time working with questions like why working in a complex environment is so counterintuitive to us. And then rather than being trapped by that, how can we thrive in complexity? So welcome, Jennifer. Thanks for having me. And she has a huge fan base, right, that we know of. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Including me. Including me. All right. So let's start out with what is a mind trap? So a mind trap is for most of our human history and for most of our contexts, a mind trap is actually a good thing. It's kind of a shortcut our mind uses in order to clear out the clutter get rid of the things that we're going to be. Get rid of the things that might be distracting and let us move into action. It becomes a trap when we're dealing with complexity because what our mind is basically saying is don't you worry about all this complexity. Just make things simple and act fine if what you have to do is run away from something that's chasing you, but not good if you're faced with a complex decision or in the context of a complex conversation. These simplifying techniques are going to be a complex situation. These simplifying techniques our brain has actually become traps. And because we don't notice them as traps, we just dig ourselves deeper and deeper and deeper. Exciting. So before we get into these different mind traps and try to understand them better, how do you think that knowing about these mind traps will help us in transforming our organization? Or making change happen in contexts that we might be in our companies? Well, the thing is, if you don't know that you're in a trap, you can't get out of it. But if you do know, then suddenly you can begin to be aware of the choices you're making. These are instincts or impulses that arise for us. And when we understand that sometimes it's better to not just automatically go with our instincts, then we can make different choices. We can be conscious and we can make choices that allow us to actually take in the context that we're in and what goals we have and then move forward with that in mind instead of kind of going on the autopilot that might be steering us wrong. All right. So let's get into them because then we're going to explore a couple of conversations that I've asked you to bring, Stee. But first, let's get an overview of, you called them instincts. Some of these instincts that kind of want to take us over sometimes. Can you give us a quick intro? Quick intro. There are five. There are probably 10,000, right? But the thing that I've seen and the leaders and the leadership teams I've worked with is these five are the ones that are the most dangerous when leaders are dealing with complexity. Yes. The first one is we get trapped by the sense that we're right. Right? We tend to believe, humans tend to believe that we're right most of the time, even on issues we have no business thinking we could possibly be right about. Right? And when we believe that we're right, we close down conversations, we start trying to convince people, we stop listening to what's going on with them. And we do a thing that psychologists call strengthening our cages. Right? We actually, use other people's ideas to use other people's ideas to make us believe more that we were right when we came in. And you see this in all kinds of different ways. Right? That's the first one. The second one is, we get trapped by the simple stories we tell ourselves. Our mind is a simplifying device and also a narrative creating device. We have heroes and villains. We make our minds up about those very quickly. And then we reinforce those ideas. And we kind of believe that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end. And we're always trying to figure out where are we in this story, in this change process. Are we at the beginning? Are we at the middle? Are we at the end of this change process? Can we go back to normal? You know, lots of people said, like, are we at the beginning or the middle or the end of COVID? Right? It's kind of not the right question. That's us being trapped by these simple stories. Yes. The third one I talk about is that we are trapped by our desire to agree with each other. Right? Humans, as it turns out, humans love agreement. It actually feels pleasurable in our bodies when we agree with each other. And it feels painful when we are socially isolated in some way. In an fMRI, you can't tell the difference between physical pain and a sense of social pain or isolation in the brain. So actually, we orient towards figuring out who our people are, and then agreeing with what they say. And at the same time, polarizing against those folks who are not our people. And you get this terrible waste when that happens, because actually, good ideas are born in difference. And so if I release my difference with you, then we can't have good ideas. And if we can't have good ideas together. And if we polarize against each other, we certainly can't have good ideas together. So this costs us quite a lot. The fourth one, humans love to feel like they're in control of things. They love to put their hands on things and make them happen. And one of the distinct features of complexity is nobody can put their hands on it and make anything happen. It's not makeable. It emerges. And as we try to make things happen, and control them in a complex world, we tend to have all these terrible unintended consequences that we could all tell stories about, right? That we don't notice. We tend to double down on trying to control more, instead of understanding that the thing that we need to do is create conditions for good things to happen and think about ourselves as condition creators. And then the last one, the fifth one is kind of the master switch of them all. We are attached to our own egos. We're attached to the way we like to be seen by ourselves and others. And the person we have been up until now very often gets in the way of the person we could become next. And so we grab onto, have a sense of ourselves as like, now I am finished. I've worked really hard to get here. And then it's really hard for us to kind of relinquish who we've been and risk becoming different. Those are the five. Thanks. There's so many as you go through them that I'm already like, yep, me, yep, terrible. But what we thought we'd do with these is I've asked Steve to come up with a few specific conversations that he's witnessed, I guess, throughout your experience of lots of different organizations and lots of different contexts. And you might call it like a broken conversation or some kind of conversations that's not working for us in moving stuff forward in organization. Yes. So I hope you've got some. I have three and it was not difficult to find more. So, but yeah, so what I'll do is I'll try to describe a certain conversation that I am often in and hopefully they resonate. People can recognize parts of it and then I'll play them to you. And then you, with your mind traps, maybe you can give some insights as what's the what could be at play here. So the first broken conversation that I sometimes experience is when you have a leadership team that have recurrent meetings, they're meeting every two weeks, four weeks. And the meeting feels like a set piece, a corporate theater going on every time. And there's a part of me that like I'm dying when I'm in those because I feel that everyone is just playing their role. I feel that everyone is just playing their role. There's a visionary in the group. There's a pragmatic person. There's a person who is very concerned about everything. There's a customer centric person. And very often I feel that you know exactly what who's going to say when. And they are kind of, it's almost as if they're in the conversation and they have consciously or subconsciously, made a deep promise to have a certain perspective on everything. And they feel that they are dying or the organization is dying unless they fight that battle again and again and again. And, and, and then they will just repeat. They'll kind of go over it and over it again and again and again. I've seen it play out. I've also seen that some people have been able to break that pattern. But could you say a little bit about when you have that feeling of, we're going through something again and again, we're going through something again and again, and we're not creating anything that wasn't there before. There is no art coming out of our conversation. It's shallow. It's predictable. I love this idea of organizational theater. I've seen this so much in the work that I do as if you could just hit play. Yes. And the same sentences would happen next week and the week after. Yeah. So I think there are a couple of mind traps probably at work there. Um, the biggest one I hear is this ego mind trap, right? I'm playing my role. This is who I know myself to be. I am the one who manages risk, right? I am the one who doesn't think about risk at all because I'm so visionary, right? Whatever it happens to be, I am producing my character and I'm producing my character. I'm producing it in a way that, uh, my biggest hopes are for you to describe me in particular ways. And my biggest fears are that you would describe me in other ways. And when I kind of stay inside the track of those hopes and don't get anywhere near the fears, there are only certain sentences I can say under those conditions. Yes. And I've actually experienced that when someone has the courage to break that and, uh, used to be most concerned person suddenly don't take that role. He also, or he or she sets the other people free to also be less stigmatized and play another role. And something very, very beautiful very often happens. I think it is. It's one of the reasons I've really enjoyed using mind traps with teams is because they'll, one of the exercises I have them do is think about what are the, what are the things I'm trying to produce for you? And what are the things I'm afraid of producing for you? And there's a way that once I acknowledge that to you and I hear what yours are, it gives me a little bit more freedom or flexibility because now I've said, this is what I'm doing. I understand that it's kind of a trap. And so it gives me a little bit more freedom or flexibility to wander off script. Like how concretely would you do that? So let's say I'm going to one of those meetings and I've just realized from listening to this, that I'm playing a certain role. What could I do? Cause, cause I don't know, is it strange just suddenly, well, I guess it's threatening to suddenly start acting differently. Is there some concrete thing I could say or a question I could ask myself that could help me get out of that? I find it really helpful to say out loud, you know, I've realized I've been trapped by this thing that I've been trying to do. And I didn't even notice it today until I was listening to this podcast. And suddenly I realized like I need to be the visionary all the time, or I need to be the one with all the right answers. And I can't say, I don't know. I'm afraid of saying, I don't know. And I'm going to try a little experiment in our meeting today where I'm going to try to do something a little bit different. And I would love your feedback about that, but I want you to also know, I might not be that good at it because I'm just doing it for the first time. I'm on like day one of this possibility. And I think that when we alert each other that we're growing, it does give other people the permission to also grow. Yes. And it gives us a little bit more flexibility because otherwise people are going to kind of try to be putting us back in our box. Okay. Do you want to stay with this one or do you want to go to the next one? No, we can, we can, I can throw out another broken conversation. So, so here's one that I often see, and I'm also victimized of, of, of actually shaping conversations like that myself. And, and, and the, the, the, the, the, the, the conversation I'm, I'm thinking of here is that you go into a meeting with a couple of other people. And it's actually a little unclear to all of us. What is it that we're trying to create, but the meeting starts, it runs and it ends. And it's, and, and, and everyone knows that we didn't talk about the real problem. We talked about something right next to it that felt a little more comfortable than actually having the courage to say, Hey, you know, what we ought to talk about was this. And, and, and, and, but we just, we just scratching the surface and we all know it, but we keep doing that. Also knowing that we're not really progressing to the extent we could. So there's an alignment that beats progress. So what, what, what mind traps are at play here? Like, and, and what can I do? I love, I see this one all the time as well. I also participate in it all the time. Um, and, uh, and you, you kind of know that you're in this one, if there's a meeting before the meeting, and then there's a meeting after the meeting. And the only thing that actually happens in the meeting is you have to set a date for another meeting, right? These are, this is why meetings have a bad, awful. Reputation, right? Actually meetings are great. As long as we don't do this thing that you're talking about, in which case they're just a waste of time. I think this is probably mostly the agreement mind trap, right? Where we want to look, you, you just, you just said alignment takes over progress. I started when I was writing the book, I started by calling it the alignment mind trap, because there is a sense that like, if, if the conversation is going one way, we don't really want to be the one who says this is the wrong conversation. So even though we're all thinking this is the wrong conversation, there is something in us, uh, and neurologically, it actually is two features. One of the features is our brain actually distracts us in the moment from knowing it's wrong. So we might not even know until we leave or until we look at our watches and we realize the meeting's almost over. We might not even allow ourselves to know that we're doing the wrong thing. Right. There's, there's actually a kind of a blindness that happens to us when we are kind of in our tribal state in this way. And we, we might also be, uh, fearful in the sense that what's at risk. If I had the courage to really name what is, and it turns out that this is so severe that, you know, there is no real solution to this. There is a conflict that is so deep or there's something we can't solve. So I, it could be that I'm just also scared from actually looking into that. So I'm, I'm just avoiding, I don't know. Or it could be, I'm the only one who feels it. Yeah. Right. And this is, this is the other path of wondering whether doing this is going to have me get cast out in some way. Remember for most of human history to be cast out was to die. Right. You just couldn't make it by yourself. And so we have a, an epic. Yeah. Existential fear. Yes. Of being cast out. And so standing aside when it looks like everybody else, this is why we need the meeting after the meeting. Like, Hey, did you think that that sucked as much as I thought it sucked? Oh yeah. Oh, I feel so relieved. We didn't do anything about it. Now we're going to waste more time, all this kind of stuff. But as long as I know I wasn't alone, I feel better. Yes. And so this question of, can I recognize that what my body is telling me is I'm going to die in a way I'm going to die. If I stand. In a different place from where it looks to me like the group is standing and I need to say, you know what? It's like the Tuesday morning meeting. Nobody dies after this meeting. It's okay. And, and is, is, is the, the antidote to this trap? Is that as simple as actually having the courage to start any meeting? And it's actually you who coined this, Katrina, but have the courage to start every meeting with, what is actually the conversation we should have. And then when we get to it and then we have to courage to say what else? And then you get into it. So is that, is that how you get out of that trap? Or what would you say? The thing that you're describing there are, are what I think of as scaffolds, like ways that we can get to work together that hold our capacity to disagree or to steer in a different direction or to say an uncomfortable thing. And I, I think we need to build those into our conversations in these kinds of structured ways. I think there are, you know, there are probably a hundred questions you could ask that are good ones, but not asking any of them is a bad idea. Cool. The third broken conversation. Um, okay. So you, you go into a meeting, someone has prepared it. They've prepared a deck, a slide deck, a slide deck, which means that, you know, there are these five things we're going to cover and they have supporting slides to each of them. Sometimes I feel almost like a physical pain knowing that we have to go all through all five. And, and, and there is no invitation. Absolutely no invitation. It's, it's all set. But part of me also wants to honor the fact that someone put a lot of hours into doing this. So in most cases I shut up and we go through it. And from the get go, I knew that we would have a better outcome from having a real conversation before we dived into parts of the, but it would be heartbreak for the person who prepared it. Yeah. I think this is a, this goes into the organizational theater space. I think really one of the questions we want to be asking ourselves is how much organizational theater do we want to participate in? And most of the time, if somebody shows up with a slide deck, they're preparing for theater, right? They're in the rightness mind trap or the simple story mind trap. They've synthesized. They're trying to control the conversation. They're doing all the things because they think that's what's expected of them. And they are showing up, you know, with their, with their part ready. Um, and I think I, I, I worked with one, one leader, a chief executive who said the only way I'm going, the, the first way I'm going to experiment with this is to let people know I'm never going to look at their decks. You can make one, but I'm never going to look at them. And that changed the conversation a certain amount. And then he said, forget it. Forget it. Just don't make them right. Like no, no more decks, like a deck free zone. And, um, and instead come in with one or two conversations that you think are the most important for us to have. And instantly the quality of conversations changed because instead of people making sure all their fonts were just right, they thought, what's the conversation that's the most important one to have? That's the thing I'm on the hook for now is a, a thing that's real instead of being on the hook for a piece of theater. Yeah. Real, but also out of control. Yeah. That's exactly right. Since it's a real conversation, you have absolutely no idea where it'll go. And obviously that's, that's not nice. Yeah. It's scary. It is scary. And especially if there's power in the room, uh, you, you, you, you feel that there's a lot at stake. Yeah. It's scary and it's exhilarating. I mean, this is the, these are the things about the mind traps. They, they, they, they keep us safe in a way, but they also bundle us away from real human exchange. And actually we love real human exchange. We love surprises in movies. We love roller coasters. We love sports. We love things where we don't know what's going to happen next. That's the point of much of what we do for fun. And then we have this idea that we go into organizations and all that stuff should go away. And the thing that we should have is like these set pieces. And, um, yeah, I, I don't think in a complex world, that's going to actually take our organizations where they need to be. I need to just ask one addendum to this last, um, point. Um, so I've just been tasked with making the 50 slide, slide, uh, slide deck that, um, Steve doesn't want to have a look at, but I'm, you know, somebody's told me that's my job. I have to do it. Or, or you thought that was what you were told. I guess it depends what kind of organization you're in, because if we were in our organization, yes, then maybe I could more easily speak out, but let's say that there was a little bit more hierarchy in place. What can we just give one idea to, to that person who's been tasked with making all those slides? I mean, I, I, I think that a lot of these, the, the biggest of these changes need to be signaled from people with more power to people with less power, right? I think that that's the job of the people with more power to make it safe for people with less power to do that. If you are the person with less power, I think the thing you could do is actually make a great presentation and a great presentation is not actually the kind that makes you die inside and show shows every single thing. Like we know what a great presentation looks like. There's still room for telling a great story for making a great argument and then for opening up to a fantastic question. The problem with these, um, organizational theater pieces is they're, they're mostly not done very well and they're closed so that not, you're not supposed to do anything with them. They're just supposed to sit there like a crystal ball, right? You're not supposed to be able to actually interact with them. So, so, so you're basically saying, correct me if I'm wrong here, that in many cases, when we do this game or theater, it's actually like we are without being conscious about it. We're actually hoping that when we present something, the feedback is just people nodding. Yes, that's right. So, so, so if we turn that around and with whatever we're presenting, we force ourselves to say, what am I teeing up? And if I'm only teeing up a hope of people saying, yes, that's not good enough. There has to be a curious conversation around any point, uh, for this to actually, so it, and I, is that correct? That's right. That's right. That the, one of the arguments I make in one of my books is that at every conversation we have, everybody should be learning something. Yes. We don't all have to be learning the same thing. We don't all have to know what everybody should be learning. Yes. Everybody's learning in this moment. But how many times do you walk out of a room and you think, oh, for that last hour, I learned nothing. We should not have any hours at work where we learn nothing. Yeah. That's just depressing. It's depressing. Yeah. We are only just scratching the surface of how many interesting things there are in this book. So I'm just going to say the title is Unlocking Leadership Mind Traps, How to Thrive in Complexity. Um, if, if anyone has been listening and wants to know even more. Um, so, So, I think it's been super interesting to, to go through these examples that you've brought, um, Stee and, uh, thank you for taking, pulling them apart together with us, um, Jennifer. So we'd love to round off this conversation with just a balcony moment of reflecting on, based on these, uh, short 25 minutes we've had together, what might we bring into the next conversation that we each go into? Um, so, um, so I think maybe I'll just start off by saying that, um, I will bring, um, I, I really resonate with the agreement mind trap. Maybe if the, if you have personal preferences of those, then that's mine. So, um, I'm going to use that as an invitation to, to be aware of when I'm, when I'm doing that and, uh, and try to lean into it. I'm going to do a little bit of more difference to see where that takes me. What about you, Stee? I think, uh, it's, it's probably two things. One is, is, uh, allowing myself to connect to, or get on the balcony and, and just ask myself before I go into a conversation. So what is it that I don't see? Like to, to tickle my own curiosity going into a meeting. Uh, I think that's, and, and, and then, for me, I think the control thing is, is, uh, I, I tend to fall in love with my own ideas and, and then I'm, I'll be too forceful, uh, in trying to drive it there. So there's something about holding it a little more lightly, uh, which plays into the, to the control mindset, which is helpful for me. I think, I guess, I hope. I love this idea, um, that there are these set roles that we are playing in the system. And I wondered whether on my next leadership team meeting, maybe I would ask people to name the set roles they think they're playing and then the set roles that other people might think that they're playing. And then let's see if we can just, just kick them around, you know, just, just have fun with it. A lot of the antidote to our mind traps is laughter, right? When we see ourselves as, as filled with foibles and quirks as humans, and we can laugh at it, it actually makes everything more bearable. And so some funny, playful way to play with this idea. I'm going to try this at my next team meeting. Humor is actually cool in that sense because humor is allowing a perspective that says that whatever I'm doing is ridiculous. That's right. Also. That's right. And that's kind of healthy. That's right. Super helpful. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jennifer. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Thank you.