Today my guests are Lisa Kay Solomon and Chris Ertel, the co-authors of the powerhouse 2014 book Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year! I devoured this book 10 years ago and I think you might enjoy it, too!
Lisa Kay Solomon is currently a Designer in Residence at the Stanford d. school, where she teaches classes such as Inventing the Future where students imagine, debate and analyze the 50-year futures of emerging tech, and works closely with the K12 community to make futures thinking a mainstay of 21c core curriculum. She has also been named to the Thinkers50 2022 Radar List and is one of ixDA’s Women of Design 2020.
Chris Ertel is a managing director of Deloitte Consulting LLP with a specialist role designing and providing high-stakes strategic conversations for clients and priority firm initiatives, in the Deloitte Greenhouse® signature environments. Chris is an innovation strategist with 18 years of experience advising leading organizations. He holds a PhD in demography from UC-Berkeley.
We talk about :
What it really means to be a facilitative leader, and why it’s so impactful. As Lisa and Chris say in MOI:
“At these critical moments, everyone will be looking at you, not for all the answers, but to help them unearth the answers together”
The Five Core Principles of Moments of Impact, which can form a Design Process
Define your purpose (your design intent!)
Engage multiple perspectives (with your facilitation skills!)
Frame the issues
Set the Scene
Make it an experience (even an intense or challenging one!)
How designing conversations is different from facilitating them: Lisa makes it clear that Conversation Design is about intent and purpose while Facilitation skills are the tool that helps orchestrate those Moments of Impact.
Why Conversation Design isn’t taught to leaders but should be (Lisa also tells us why it’s so hard to teach, since it brings together strategy, psychology and emotional intelligence)
Why Chris always coaches leaders to condense and delete content from their strategic meetings (to 10 slides!) instead of making what communications expert Nancy Duarte calls a “Procument” (something that’s neither an easy to use and digest presentation or a leave-behind document!)
How crucial discussing decision-making rights are - as Chris suggests many leaders want to keep their options open and wind up creating an “air of democracy without the reality of it”
Why You should start becoming a junkie of learning theories
The importance of balancing humor and levity with challenging-ness and sparkiness to create productive environments
The importance of knowing that the “yeah buts” will come when we’re hosting challenging conversations as in:
yeah, but, that won’t work here! or…
yeah, but, what will we be able to report next quarter? Or…
yeah, but who’s budget is going to cover that?
And so much more! If you have Moments of Impact that you need to shape, design, and lead and you *don’t* have Moments of Impact on your desk - get it!
Links, Quotes, Notes, and Resources
https://www.lisakaysolomon.com/about
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/profiles/certel.html
A plan is not a strategy: The short video from Roger Martin we were talking about!
A.I. Summary by Grain
The meeting discussed the importance of conversation design and its interdisciplinary nature, integrating fields such as psychology and behavioral economics. Lisa highlighted the core principles of defining purpose, engaging multiple perspectives, framing issues, setting the scene, and making it an experience. Developing skills such as pattern recognition, signal identification, and communication requires dedication and practice.
Chris and Lisa discussed the importance of conversation skills for leaders and the challenges organizations face in rewarding discovery and awareness-building over quick answers. They also emphasized the need for forward-thinking strategies and creating impactful moments in workshops to ensure lasting impact on participants. Gaining buy-in from participants in meetings was also highlighted as significant.
0:46 We discuss the origin of their book, highlighting Lisa and Chris’ passion for bringing people together to have meaningful conversations.
4:59 Daniel prompts a discussion on the importance of conversation skills for leaders, contrasting it with the emphasis on content knowledge, and questions why this skill is still not widely taught.
5:30 Lisa discusses why conversation design is not taught more widely and how it integrates various fields such as psychology, emotional intelligence, and behavioral economics
9:49 Chris delves into the challenges organizations face in rewarding discovery and awareness-building over quick answers, stressing the importance of pausing to define problems and frame discussions effectively.
23:11 We discuss the evolving concept of strategy, moving away from traditional frameworks towards continuous learning, adaptability, and anticipation of future changes.
28:20 Lisa uses hockey metaphors to emphasize the need for forward-thinking strategies and the importance of creating learning journeys to enhance understanding and innovation. Lisa explains that strategy is not just about planning, but also about conversation and constantly learning and adapting to the future
30:44 Lisa discusses the significance of creating impactful moments in workshops by making experiences memorable, challenging, and engaging to ensure lasting impact on participants.
31:30 Chris delves into the importance of creating a balanced learning environment that includes struggle, sparks, and some level of conflict to facilitate effective learning experiences.
36:25 Lisa highlights the core principles of defining purpose, engaging multiple perspectives, framing issues, setting the scene, and making it an experience in both pedagogy and corporate environments
45:35 Lisa highlights the interdisciplinary nature of design and the need for dedication and practice in developing skills such as pattern recognition, signal identification, and communication.
49:07 We elaborate on the significance of gaining buy-in from participants in meetings to drive forward ambitious ideas and emergent strategies effectively.
More About Chris and Lisa
Chris Ertel is a managing director of Deloitte Consulting LLP with a specialist role designing and providing high-stakes strategic conversations for clients and priority firm initiatives, in the Deloitte Greenhouse® signature environments. Chris is an innovation strategist with 18 years of experience advising leading organizations. His national bestseller, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change was released in February 2014. He holds a PhD in demography from UC-Berkeley.
Lisa Kay Solomon designs environments, experiences and classes to help people expand their futures, adapt to complexities, and build civic fellowship. Her work blends imagination with possibility, building the capacity to take the long view when today’s problems seem overwhelming.
Currently a Designer in Residence at the Stanford d. school, Lisa focuses on bridging the disciplines of futures and design thinking, creating experiences like “Vote by Design: Presidential Edition” and "The Future’s Happening" to help students learn and practice the skills they don’t yet know they need. At the d.school, she teaches classes such as Inventing the Future where students imagine, debate and analyze the 50-year futures of emerging tech, and works closely with the K12 community to make futures thinking a mainstay of 21c core curriculum.
Named to the Thinkers50 2022 Radar List and one of ixDA’s Women of Design 2020, Lisa has also taught leadership and design at the California College of the Art’s MBA in Design strategy, was the founding Chair of Singularity University’s Transformational Practices effort, and has guest lectured at organizations and leadership institutions around the world.
Lisa co-authored the bestselling books Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change, and Design A Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset and Strategy for Innovation, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. Lisa created the popular LinkedIn Learning Courses Leading Like a Futurist and Redesigning How We Work for 2021, and has written extensively on helping leaders productively navigate ambiguity through teachable and learnable practices.
Full A.I. Transcript
Daniel Stillman 00:00
All right, well, then I will officially welcome you to the conversation factory. Lisa, Chris, welcome aboard. Thanks for making the time today.
Chris Ertel 00:09
Howdy, Daniel. Great to be here.
Lisa Kay Solomon 00:12
Super fun, super fun.
Daniel Stillman 00:15
So we were just pointing out, and I think it's just really important to get this out of the way. Your book is seminal. I read it a decade ago. It's been a decade. I learned a lot from it. And so I just wanted to say thank you for writing the book. I remember reading it and having my brain cracked open.
Chris Ertel 00:39
Wow. Thank you. It was really fun to do with Lisa, the two of us, and it's fun to reflect on it. It's been a minute.
Daniel Stillman 00:46
It's been a minute.
Lisa Kay Solomon 00:48
Yeah. And I just want to say, daniel, thank you, first of all, for reading it. That makes you, our family members, in good company. No, but all kidding aside, we wrote it, and we'll probably get into this for people like you that were excited and dedicated to bringing people together to have conversations that matter. And we'll talk a little bit more about the origin. But essentially, Chris and I love what we do. We love bringing people together, and we wanted to get better at our own craft of doing them. And we looked at our bookshelves and saw lots of books on adjacent topics, but nothing really geared towards someone like you that would say, this is the I've been looking for. You get better at bringing people together to have conversations that matter.
Daniel Stillman 01:33
Yeah, actually, how did you two become, for lack of a better term, conversation dorks? Like, how did you find your way to being. Cause not everybody in your book, you talk about this three way Venn diagram of strategy and design and conversation, and not everyone becomes sensitized to or aware of this precious thing that is bringing a bunch of people together to have a conversation that matters, that, like, will change the direction of a group, an organization, you know, the world or something. You know, nothing big, right? Like, some people care about it, and some people just think, like, oh, we're just having a meeting.
Lisa Kay Solomon 02:15
Yeah, I'll start and say, you know, we didn't have this conversations podcast for me to get into the Lisa childhood way back machine. But I will say, but that's what.
Chris Ertel 02:26
I do care about.
Daniel Stillman 02:27
Those questions.
Lisa Kay Solomon 02:28
I will say I was a conversation dork. I had no choice. In part. My mother is a psychologist and was a chief learning officer at a national landscape company for over 30 years. So even growing up, she was getting her PhD. It was really a PhD in people and counseling and relationships. And so our dinner tables were things about causal diagrams and the conversation is the relationship, and that all work gets done through relationships. So that was my very, very early childhood, and was kind of surprised that after college and then my early years, before I got the chance to work with Chris and many of our fabulous colleagues was surprised that that wasn't talked about more as a teachable and learnable set of skills. You know, I had grown up with it organically about its importance and sensitized to where it showed up in organizations and culture and leadership. But it really wasn't until I started working at Global Business Network and got to work with incredibly talented people like Chris, who comes to it with a social science background, to say, wait a minute, there's a real discipline here. There's really something that we can articulate and get better at. And so, you know, I just feel so, so fortunate to have that chance to learn with Chris, and then this book was a chance for us to then take it to the next step.
Daniel Stillman 03:47
How about you, Chris? What was happening at the dinner table for you?
Chris Ertel 03:51
Well, no, it didn't. I came to it later, I think, than Lisa. I came to it from a deep content expertise. I got a PhD in demography at UC Berkeley, and so I was very focused on research, very focused on content, and I came. I just stumbled into a job at Global Business network. Lisa, reference. That's where we met back in the mid, late nineties. And GBN, as it was called, was the show back then and futures thinking. It was Ted before there was Ted. It was led by Peter Schwartz, famous futurist, and a number of others. And I got there with. I got in the door because of my content knowledge, but I discovered there that they were doing something amazing, which was that they were engaging people with ideas in a very different way. And it was all about the interaction and that ideas don't do anything. They sit on paper, they sit in people's heads. They have to be engaged. And that's where I've really learned from Peter J. Ogilvy, Catherine Fulton and Kelly, just some real masters of this. And just. It just lit me up. And that's been a 28 year journey since then for myself.
Daniel Stillman 04:59
Chris, you bring up a really interesting point about content versus process, and I wanted to get to this later, but I feel like, why not start in the middle? And actually, now that I think about it in the introduction, you guys say this is the most important skill that for leaders, that is not taught at Harvard Business School or anywhere else. And maybe that's still true ten years later, which is shocking. There's this idea that content matters most and knowledge matters most and expertise is what's so the most important thing as a leadership skill. And then there's this other perspective that the ability to bring people together, to have impactful conversations, to foster all in participation to at these critical, as you literally say, at these critical moments, everyone's looking at you not to have the answers, but to help them unearth the answers together. Like, maybe there's two questions here, like, why isn't that still taught ten years later? And why is it such an important skill? Do you think Chris is saying they better if you're not watching the video? They basically played a game of not air.
Chris Ertel 06:09
No, it's a great question. I don't think. I mean, Lisa's in academe, she's at Stanford. I have less visibility in academe. I don't think feel it is taught hardly anywhere. I think it's the same situation as ten years ago. Sadly, in that way, we have at Deloitte, we have Deloitte Greenhouse, which is this capability. We have 125 person team that does nothing but design and deliver strategic conversations of the sort we talk about in the book. And that got stood up 1211 ish years ago. So it's relatively new. And this in the professional services firm context of Deloitte. Some other firms have similar capabilities. I'm not sure any are as built out as Deloitte's is quite substantial. So we've invested heavily in training cadre of people to do this. But in the world at large, are there a bunch of books that followed moments, in fact, I don't see them. Yours is an important one, but there aren't a lot. And I don't know of courses, Lisa, out there.
Lisa Kay Solomon 07:16
I would say, and this was a huge aha for me, Daniel, in both coming to GBN and then again, having the opportunity to work on this book with Chris, which is that what it's talking about really is design. And the good news is that the understanding of design has grown over the last few years. And that's, for me, this aha moment that conversations could be designed and that's different than facilitated. I mean, so I think that people learn facilitated facilitation skills, and that's really important about starting the meeting on time, ending, you know, getting different people, different modalities, but the taking a step back and leveling up to say, wait a minute, what do I want this conversation to advance? What do I want people to know? How do we want them to feel? What is discovered as a result of being together, which is different than an expert sharing their knowledge and pontificating. Right. What is the. What is the culture I want to build by the choices that I make? The fact that all of these could be designed was like a revelation to me. And so I think one of the reasons why it's not taught more readily is that it is interdisciplinary. Foundationally, it integrates some psychology, emotional intelligence, some from the field of now, behavioral economics. Right. Nudge theory about things you can do to get people in a different place. It does incorporate some core facilitation comfort to make sure that the choices that you make that you can then follow with. And it does take some content expertise, but done differently than in the way that we're taught. Right. As you said, we're taught to be experts. And you go deeper and you get masters, phds, and then a lot of times that content is almost used as proxy for answers. That's not what conversations are about. Our conversations are about questions. Our conversations are about socializing relational flows in different ways. And those harder concepts to really put in neat buckets like, hey, does your meeting start on time? Does it end on time? Does it get to next steps?
Chris Ertel 09:21
Right.
Lisa Kay Solomon 09:21
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about something much, much bigger.
Chris Ertel 09:25
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 09:25
Which is the. At the center of the design process that you have in the book, defining the purpose that seems to be part of the real design process. It's like, why are we having this conversation? And what do I really want this to get for us versus the how will I proceed once we are in the conversation? Which, of course, is a really important part of the conversation. No. Going to say conversation a lot. I wonder what the calendar is going to be by the end of this.
Lisa Kay Solomon 09:49
Yeah. And can I just say one more point on that? I'll be curious because I just want to really admire Chris's timeliness of joining Deloitte. Right. When this greenhouse capability was getting started. I'm sure it just accelerated because of Chris's work. And book. And the book. But if you think about it, organizations are not really designed to reward the first important purpose, which is discovery. Right. Building awareness, building understanding. We're awarded for getting to answers and next steps. And so first critical piece of, hey, we're going to get people together. And this is why we call it a leadership skill. Because in this volatile world that's filled with ambiguity and complexity coming at us faster and faster, next steps don't mean anything unless you've actually paused to say what is actually the problem that we're trying to solve. How are we thinking about it? How are we framing it? And so there is also an incentive system that's embodied that I don't think is called out enough within organizations, which says, we don't hire black belts to be discovery masters. Right. Like, if you think about the rise of six sigma and, you know, they were like, okay, you're going to reduce variance. Okay, that's a knowable thing. That's a measurable thing. What's less measurable is we're going to promote curious questioners that bring people together in order to sense and question the future so that the next stage around shaping options are really aligned with what are bigger goals.
Daniel Stillman 11:16
Yeah, well, I think it's. I mean, Chris, you kind of alluded to the ways in which you two have been, like, led to this work, but also, like, the different directions that you've been living the work for the last decade. And I'm, I think you, you called it in our, in our pre document indie versus big box rollout. Do you want to talk a little bit about maybe the sort of, like, why you two decided that you wanted to write this book and then how it's shaped the ways in which you've been doing it ten years? Ten years out?
Chris Ertel 11:58
Yeah. I mean, I had struggled with, after I got the bug of working in this way, high engagement conversations around content. I was looking everywhere for books to help me do that because I'm a book nerd. And there were a lot of, as Lisa said, there were a lot of adjacent things, but I couldn't find the book. And that's when Lisa and I put our heads together and started giving a few presentations and thought, okay, this is on us. To reiterate this book. So that was kind of the why of it. The rolling it out in the context where I've been over the last decade plus has been interesting because we, in a large, firm environment, you're always at the edge of customization. It's customized and standardized because you want to be efficient and be able to serve a lot of clients efficiently and effectively. And yet every situation really is different. And so that's, we're always at that knife's edge of efficiency and responsiveness to the specific situation. So that's what I feel every day. And then the kind of challenges, the kind of three challenges that I have that are just kind of my groundhog day that I'm always trying to struggle to get better at is first getting to a small amount of really great content, like people have a hard time letting go of all the details and knowing that you can have a really effective day, day long strategic conversation on one problem, on one topic with like maybe ten slides. Like, that's great if you can get to that, right? The ten slides that matter most. That's kind of all you really need. And it takes a long time for people to get there. That is not intuitive. Right. As a starting point. Second challenge that I encounter a lot is clarifying decision rights. Just being the leadership in the room, being willing to declare, here's the modality we're working in today. Like, either, are we asking for the group to solve the problem or asking the group for input? Is it that the group's gonna create options and these two or three people are gonna make the decision? Like any, pick your poison, that's fine, but just be clear about it. And I find that often leaders like to leave their options open and sort of not leave decision rights a little vague. And I'm always coaching in the direction of being more bold, being more declarative about that. Cause I think people deserve it and people also appreciate it if, you know, I don't have, you don't have decision rights to handle over this topic, but we do what you think. You're in the room with us because we need to have more people contributing to the solution. But we, the leaders, are going to decide, and that's okay. That's the way it's going to be. And most people can live with that. But you create an air of democracy without the reality of it. That's messy. And then just the third thing that I struggle with, and I don't know, Lisa, if you have this too, but I've learned over time that iterating on designs, iteration is so important to design and in other disciplines. When you think about it, you're building a house, you're building in architecture, you're building a building and graphic design, you're doing a poster, product design, you're doing iterations on a toothbrush or whatever. You go through varying degrees of refinement of the prototype, gets more and more real and more and more exacting, and you go from a sketch to a rendering, to a 3d prototype, whatever. And people can give feedback on that in designing conversations. The prototypes are all on paper. All you're looking at is paper and the ability or slides on a screen, and the ability of people to translate in their head how this is going to look, how it's actually going to feel like, what it's going to be like with this group of people on this day is it takes a lot of experience to run the translation function. I try to be as responsive as I can to feedback, and yet it's also hard because the people who you're seeking feedback from, they're often limited in their ability to imagine what this interaction is going to feel like on game day because I haven't been through it 500 times before like we have. Those are, those are the kind of challenges that I find myself up against every, every day.
Daniel Stillman 16:23
And, you know, number one and number three feel related in some sense, because in my experience, running that translation function, like, here's how I think it's going to go. The open, the explore and the close. And the reason I referenced you and Dave Gray and also Dave Gray's book is those are the you all and were the first people who sort of imprinted that as the fundamental model I have. Here's where we're going to start. This is the mess that we're going to try and sort through. And this is where we want to get to at the end. And some people feel like going back to the content question. We need to have 500 slides that takes us through every step and every question and to have it fixed, to have a real equation. It's like that famous far side quote where it's like, you know, step one and then a miracle occurs and then it's like, well, I need more information about step two. You may, in your translation function be like, I think I know how we're going to get through this. And somebody else is going to say, like, we need to have this nailed down because I'm terrified it's going to go wrong.
Chris Ertel 17:32
Yeah. I had this vivid experience recently, a very short story, but then we. I'd had this groundhog Day conversation about, that's too many slides. The slides are too dense. I love Nancy Duarte's concept of a "procument". Right. It's a document that's trying to be both a presentation and a document. So a leave behind, you know, a set of slides that can have 200 words on a page, that's fine, but a slide really shouldn't have more than 40 words on it for the conversation because people can't read and listen at the same time. Our brain doesn't do that. It just flat out doesn't. And if I could wave a magic wand over our firm and all of the business work environment out there, just know that you can't do that. And so I was having this back and forth with a presenter who wasn't getting the memo. And the day before we did the dry run, the day before game day, and we're sitting in the room, giant screen, a massive screen, and the first slide goes up and the presenter looks at it, and that person is sitting in the chair that the client's going to be in tomorrow. And looking at his own slide in the seat where the client's going to be tomorrow, he's like, oh, I can't use this. It's like, no, you can't. We've been telling you that for a couple weeks now. But, yeah, it's got 200 words on the page, and it's just too, too much you can't handle.
Daniel Stillman 18:55
Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Kay Solomon 18:57
There is this.
Daniel Stillman 18:57
Oh, yeah. So please go ahead.
Lisa Kay Solomon 19:00
I relate, you know, so much for what Chris is saying, in part because the prep and the design part, ahead of time is the thinking through part. And you know that you really need to get that, you know, clarity on the other side of complexity that we sometimes say in order to be able to be present in the room and in service in the room of the people in the room, not in service of the ideas that you want them to know and therefore agree with. Right. That's very, very different. And I think that there is a lot still of discomfort, and I think not getting easier as Chris and I talked about reconnecting, about just that the ambiguity and the complexity has actually increased since we've written the book, not less. We don't excel our way through that ambiguity. We don't data our ambiguity. Right. We have to be emotional beings through that ambiguity. And that gets to that training part that we're just not often prepared to practice. Right. So Chris and working with his clients, I imagine, is as much about. Has to be empathetic to. Like, why? Why is it so hard to let go of that overstuffed slide as it is about gently nudging to be like, you know, there could be a different way here. And if you don't have the cycles, it's that much more uncomfortable to let go. Right. You only know what you know. And so I think that for people that certainly I've had the pleasure of working with time and time again, you get into rhythm. You're like, oh, okay. I know what we're trying to do here. We're trying to spark joy. We're trying to spark excitement. We're trying to spark a little fear.
Chris Ertel 20:33
Right?
Lisa Kay Solomon 20:33
I mean, there's data in emotion that sometimes is way more powerful than all the words or charts or graphs. So it's interesting. And I'll just say, you know, Chris alluded to this. I don't, I don't design and facilitate that many strategic conversations these days because sort of since the book came out, I've been much more an accidental educator, first at the California College of Arts, in the MBA in design strategy, and for the last six years at the Stanford D school. I do the same process with my classes. Right. I don't lecture at my students. I create experiences that allow them to have those moments of discovery, those moments, aha. The moments where they may not even realize it until later, where they say, wow, that was a whole mindset shift, because if I came at them frontally and just like I imagine in, you know, boardrooms, my goal here is to have you shift your mindset. And I'm going to do it first by this and by this and by this. They're like, mm hmm. But if I instead start off with experiences or have them in conversation or have them, the crux of the class that I teach right now called inventing the future. We're now doing 50 year utopia and dystopia debates that are really designed conversations about the future. They're not meant to be debates. They're meant to be experiential visits to a time that we're not currently yet living in, but a way for them to feel that future so that it informs better decisions today. A totally different application of the principles we talk about in moments of impact, but no less striving for a moment of impact.
Daniel Stillman 22:06
Yeah, well, can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think the discipline of strategy can look like I forget who. There's a video about the difference between planning and strategy, and I'm blanking out on the who. You may have seen this, Chris.
Chris Ertel 22:25
Yeah, it sounds like Henry Mintzberg. I will dig it up.
Daniel Stillman 22:31
And this idea of planning being like, here's the things that I want to have happen, and this is how we're going to execute on a plan versus strategy. It's really conflated with what we're going to do versus what kind of future we want to create or what kind of futures we even think are possible. And it's a very, I would think that that's an opening and exploring versus a closing conversation. So in your. And I think this is a question for both of you, but Lisa, I was hoping you could just, like, double stitch on this idea of what strategy really is to you and your in your conception now, because it's not planning.
Lisa Kay Solomon 23:11
No, it's not planning. It's very. And I will say, full disclosure, I don't do that much strategy work. You know, work with my students, certainly not the way Chris does. And Chris is really has taught me so much about strategy, about, you know, how strategy has evolved within organizations. For me, what I'm helping my students do, and I have students of all ages, you know, from freshmen through executives. Right. I work in the executive boot camps and professional learning programs. It's helping change their capacities as leaders to realize that we're taught. Certainly when I got an MBA many years ago, that strategy lives in frameworks like Porter's five forces, or if you're a marketer, the four P's, or even if you're a chief finance officer, the strategy lives in the spreadsheets. Strategy is as much about the conversation, which means that you have to be in a learning mode all of the time. That doesn't mean you are groundless, that you don't have a direction that you're heading towards with clarity and rationale. But I think that this idea that we create a strategic plan for three to five years, and we spend a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of energy and often consultants to create it, is the pathway forward when again, the future's coming at you faster and faster. I think it sets you up to be on the back foot, to be diplomatic, first of all, versus surprised in the wrong way.
Daniel Stillman 24:43
And if you were less diplomatic, how would you put it?
Lisa Kay Solomon 24:45
Yeah, I mean, that you just feel. You just feel like you're playing whack a mole, that you're always behind, you know, versus, you know, coming up with a point of view about. About where. Where you think that you can, that you want to play, where what you think you know, the value you can create, what differentiates you from others in the market, you know, how you're going to have relationships with your customer in sustainable ways, how you're going to do that, you know, I think it's as much about a business model question these days as it is about, you know, your strategic vision, but that you're building in a capability to constantly be touching the future in constructive ways, that you are recognizing that this is in some ways a prototype of the present that has to constantly be fed through a learning lens about looking at how the future is unfolding and why, and that those are teachable and learnable disciplines as much as it was to help you create that spreadsheet to begin with. So I think the repetition that I keep saying with my students about, hey, look, how do we build anticipatory skills, how do we challenge assumptions? How do we look at change over time? How do we learn to spot signals, not so that it's one and done in a strategic planning, but that that's always available to them as they're navigating new complexities, as they're trying to build ideas to life.
Daniel Stillman 26:07
Chris, do you want to say a little bit more about strategy from your perspective?
Chris Ertel 26:12
Well its interesting. When we wrote the book we commented that strategy departments had been in large companies had been shrinking over time, and there was this evolution towards what I call small s strategy. So small s strategies, everybody needs to be strategic, but nobodys doing, or very few people are doing big s strategy. And I think that trend has by and large accelerated within the large business environment. That is, most business markets are oligopolistic in nature. Theres a small number of very large players, and then you have startups and theres an ecosystem and so forth. So a lot of the work that we dont do, a lot of corporate strategy at the super high level we do some, but it is more at the greenhouse, I should say. The firm itself has a strategy practice. So im more to our experience, we do a lot of just small s strategy means like like talent strategy for an IT function over the next five years, because you're hiring people and the people you're hiring are going to be with you five or ten years from now, a lot of them, and you don't know what skills you're going to need in five or ten years. So it's that kind of thing. But I think strategy in the kind of very open ended sense is a pure strategy in the way the strategists think about it, exists a bit more in the domain of the startups and the smaller firms, and it's like the three of us, our degrees of freedom are enormous as an individual, large companies have a more established playing field and even though the uncertainty is very, very high, it's all about, and his strategy is all about making choices at the end of the day, and you're making choices within, it's not within a portarian kind of framework where you can analyze your way through, because uncertainty is so much higher today than it was in the eighties, but it's also not like, you know, like just for example for a software company to go into products, right, is a non trivial lift. That is a massive, massive lift and it's very, it usually doesn't work. So then.
Lisa Kay Solomon 28:20
Yeah and yeah I could agree. So a couple things. One is Chris I got to give him full credit for this. Has this great quote in the book where he talks about where, you know, strategy used to be played like chess. Now it's much more like a fast paced hockey game. You know, where the puck is all over, and, you know, and then I think about it in the context of what I'm trying to teach my students, hockey metaphor of the great Wayne Gretzky quote of, you know, skating to where the puck is going to be, you know, and I love that as just a metaphor for, like, hey, how do you get ahead of it? But then when you pause and you're like, wait a minute, we're not Wayne Gretzky. I don't even know how to skate. I don't even understand the rules of Hawkeye. You know, you really got to break it down to be like, okay, how do we look at the trajectories with the information that we have now? And how do we learn skills around applied imagination or experiencing the future in different ways? And, you know, I want to say one of the conversations that we used to design at GBN were these learning journeys, right? They weren't done in a traditional way. When we think about conversations where you go into a boardroom and talk about important stuff, you say, let's go on a journey to learn together. Because when we are experiencing things proximately and we're having conversations in different, intimate ways, again, that piques our learning in very different ways. So I think this idea of strategy being one, first and foremost, of peripheral learning, that you can then come back to a point of view that you had to check in. Like, are these things still valid, yes or no? Again, episodic process that lives at a certain branch and stays there. And I will say also that the connection between strategy and innovation is so high, given the fact that things are moving faster, I'm not sure you can really separate those as well.
Daniel Stillman 30:12
I feel like we're coming back around to this question of learning versus knowing and the value. And I see, in a way, at least, the value that you've been living for the last ten years is around in that learning space, like, more explicitly. But, Chris, it feels like creating conversational spaces where a group of people can learn together is so valuable because why are we coming together if we know something?
Chris Ertel 30:44
It's actually my main orientation to the work that we do. I'm a junkie on learning theories. I'm always consuming learning theory, and it, you know, created. There was a really nice book, humor. Humor, seriously, by a former colleague of mine, Naomi Bagdonis, Jennifer Eckert at the Stanford Business School. And the appreciation for the role of levity. Right. Because a lot of creating the environment for learning for me is about you're always juggling structure and anti structure and also making people comfortable and uncomfortable, like in different doses. And you design it and then you facilitate it and you have a theory in the design of here we're going to really make them work hard here, we're going to give them a break, give them some fun. Because first thing from learning theory is you don't learn anything unless you struggle. Like struggle is required for learning. And, you know, an experience where you're sitting there taking in presentations, it's not a learning experience, as we've said, but neither is one where everybody's happy the whole time. Like, you actually need to throw off some sparks. And the way that you make the throwing off of sparks, you need some conflict in these conversations. And the way to make that palatable is to have some fun around it, too. You need to create, I'm not going to say safe space because I hate that term.
Daniel Stillman 32:14
You hate that term?
Chris Ertel 32:15
I hate that term. I'll see why in a second. But you need to create an environment where people are willing and able to open up, be a little looser, a little freer, and be a little edgier, too, frankly. And I don't use safe space as a facilitator. I will explain that because I can't provide that. I cannot guarantee that. If you're in a different organizational context and I'm your facilitator, I can create a learning environment. I can create a positive environment, create a thoughtful environment. If somebody says something in the meaning that's going to undermine their own career, I got no, I can't protect them. Right. So that's why I don't tell people I'm giving them a safe space, because it's not true. Yeah, the leaders can contend in the way they show up and in the way they express vulnerability. They can create a safe space and I can encourage them to do so. But I have no standing in that.
Daniel Stillman 33:11
That's fair. That's fair. Lisa, you're nodding. Say more.
Lisa Kay Solomon 33:15
Well, I am. I mean, you know, having the last six years of being in academia and creating learning environments is not obvious. You know, it's like I've really had to double down on the design aspect of the kind of classroom I want to create, the kind of culture I want to create, how I bring up topics. I so appreciate Chris's point. About how do I bring in productive struggle in a time, particularly when our young people are feeling so vulnerable and unhealed? I think still from the pandemic, worried about their future. So how do I both hold them accountable for their own learning and meet them in a place where they will rise to the occasion? And I'll just give you one new change I made this year that I'm going delighted with. Even after coming back from the pandemic, I found that students weren't really back. You know, they were coming in late. They were, they were masked. They were really engaged. And we're pretty high energy class. I mean. I mean, we really bring it. I teach with Drew Wendy. He's one of the foremost experts on bioengineering. And we're very vested and still, we just weren't getting it back. It was almost a nervousness to participate. One of my colleagues calls it a crisis of enthusiasm, which I think is nervousness. And so this year, we're lucky we're oversubscribed in our class, and we said, okay, in order for you to get into class, write a letter to your future self about how you got an a. Be specific. What did you hold yourself accountable for? Now, notice the design element. Right? What was I trying to get? I was trying to get them to articulate what they wanted at the experience, not what I was going to deliver to them, because I also think students on the whole are like, feed me, give me. You do this, I'm going to create the conditions. But in a class like inventing the future where there are no problem sets, it is up to you to take advantage of everything that we are doing. So I wanted them to really put themselves in the shoes of their future self and say, how did you do your future self a solid? What did you get out of this? It's made huge, huge difference in how the students are showing up just by that design choice. That was super, super intentional. And I'll bring it back. Midway through the quarter, I said, okay, go. Go back to your letter. How you doing? Again, not me being the homeroom murmur, like, you know, you came late five times. That's not my role. Right, your role. Guess what? My job here, your job is not to get an a. Your job is to practice for when you go and work for Chris or you work with. How do you want to practice? How you show up as a learner and a contributor. So, anyway, all of this is to say, I think, going back to moments of impact for me, I keep learning about how to take those principles, the core principles we talked about, and bring them to fruition in exciting and new ways. How do we, said, define the purpose building, understanding, or shaping options? How do we engage multiple perspectives in different ways, both perspectives in the room and perspectives, perspectives that need to be represented. How do we frame the issue? Such an important thing, particularly, as Chris said, to add a little bit of struggle, but not so much that people are completely overwhelmed, that they don't engage at all. How do we make design choices about the environments, and how do we make it an experience? Those are pedagogy for learning environments as much as they are corporate environments. I just find that endlessly exciting.
Chris Ertel 36:56
Wow, that was awesome. And it does tie back to this, a great TED talk by Daniel Kahneman on the difference between the experiencing self and the remembering self. And I go back to that one a lot because he talks about like a vacation in Hawaii, which done a number of times, and it's very pleasant, right? And you can do one week or you can do two weeks. And the things that you would remember from the second week of a vacation in Hawaii, probably pretty limited. If you're sitting on the beach, going for a swim, occasionally reading some novels, having some white ties, what have you. The second week and the first week, it kind of all mushes together into one very pleasant experience, but not necessarily a super memorable one. Right. And the vacations we remember are the ones where something surprising happened, where you missed a flight and you wound up somewhere you didn't expect to be. And it actually wound up being pretty cool and all that kind of stuff. And the workshops that we lead are similar. It's actually not that hard to deliver a pleasant experience, to have people feel good, if you know what you're doing, people feel good to have them feel like they've done something. But the reason it's called moments of impact and not moments of pleasant experiences is that impact is hard. Impact is really hard, and impact requires, it requires that things be memorable. So, I mean, I ask people, I do the thought experiment, like the last big meeting, you were at a workshop that lasted half a day or a day or more. Tell me, when was it? And tell me three things that came out of that. If it's more than a month ago, it's tough sledding, man. They're often not going to call up much. So that's what we're up against. The human memory is ruthlessly selective, and if you don't get people's attention, you don't activate them and really make them struggle in a good way, but then also let them, give them the recovery period and the things around it that make that palatable. It's very hard to get in there to make it stick.
Daniel Stillman 39:00
Yeah. So when we talk about your obsession with learning theories, what is the matroyshka dal underneath? That is understanding human psychology to be able to obviously manipulate it. When I look at the core principles from the book, and one of the first diagrams in the book, which Lisa danced through, define your purpose, engage multiple perspectives, frame the issues, set the scene, and make it an experience. Well, one at least. It's very clear that you're still using that in your context. And, Chris, what I just heard you say is adding sort of in parentheses, make it an experience, but probably an intense or challenging one, which might be edgy for some people. So I guess one of my questions is going back to my current acts that I'm grinding is when, in this skill that we don't teach often enough of being not just a facilitative leader, but a conversation design leader seems to imply the willingness to create discomfort and also to give away power.
Lisa Kay Solomon 40:13
That last one is huge. I'm just going to hop on there, you know, I mean, you had asked earlier, why isn't this advanced more? Why don't more people do it? It requires a huge amount of generosity, of service, of invisible labor, of the thinking and the doing that rarely gets recognized. And that means giving away power. Right. Like, most leaders get up there and say, okay, let me tell you what I prepared for you versus I've got a question, and it's going to take everybody here to help us think through. It's why? And it's still one of my favorite opening anecdotes of the book. And, Chris, you get it. I still get it. Like, every week where it's like I get a call and someone's like, hey, so listen, we have this really important board meeting coming up. It's next week. We have everybody flying in. We have the venue. You know, we have everything planned, but I just need some work on the agenda. And why is that the last thing you're thinking about, or I just need you to facilitate it? No, no, it's chewing. You know, you need. That's the first thing you need to be thinking about. Right. And you need to be thinking about it in a much bigger context. You need to be thinking about the organization or the group that it's being a part of, for the individuals that are coming together, for how the small choices that you're going to make are going to ladder up to people getting comfortable enough to be uncomfortable, but not feel put upon at a personal level, but feel motivated. It's all these tensions that you're managing are just critical to that. That is the design piece. That's the piece that takes lot of time to develop comfort with and even, you know, mastery towards and still learning. And you're still learning. And it will say this. I love it. Chris, here's our moment of tension. I will disagree with you slightly, and maybe it's just from my standpoint that, you know, when I think about my classes, because I'm like, wait a minute. Have I not made them struggle enough? I also power in the joy. Like, the other part is helping people. And I know. I know you feel that way, too, but, like, a big part of us is, like, my students, that they're capable of so much more than they even realized, and that also has an emotional zing that is very memorable. And so I can go more into that, but I think the core part is the emotion part. That is both the struggle of jarring that was hard and like, wow, I didn't know what we were capable of. It. Those are the things that leave people wanting more, and they often don't happen serendipitously.
Chris Ertel 42:43
Right.
Lisa Kay Solomon 42:44
That you have to kind of create the triggers, the nudges, the conditions, the moments where people are like, whoa, we all just experienced something together. Let's, you know, let's do that more.
Chris Ertel 42:55
No. And you're going to have to find something else for us to disagree on, Lisa, because that's. That's not going to cut it. We have a slightly different balance on this, probably, but. But we're in violent agreement on the general concept, which is you can't learn without struggle. And struggle by itself is not fun, people. You have to balance it off with, you know, Naomi's work, with the humor, seriously, the levity, but also the aspirational aspect that you hit on there. I also think there's, like. I think this. So the tension of, you know, structure, anti structure, you know, comfort, discomfort. You have one theory about that in your design, and even as a very experienced designer, very experienced facilitator, having it on paper and then having the humans in the room, you know, even if you've talked with them ahead of time, everything else, stuff happens, right? So there's. There's the balancing act that you've accomplished in your beautiful design on paper, and then you're in a room and real people show up and you gotta course correct. You gotta, like, oh, my God, we're like, I've taken them too far down. I gotta lift it back up again, or. Or there's too much happy talk going on. I've actually got to introduce more conflict, more. More struggle here. So that, to me, is the art of it and the bio feel of it. And when you ask, like, facilitative leadership, like, I actually think more people out there, in my experience, aspire to facilitate leadership than accomplish it. And a lot of the reason isn't mindset is part of it, but a big part of it is capability. Because what I, the balancing act I just described is very, very hard. If you're actually going to go into a room as a leader and open it up and say, we care what everybody thinks, have at it. Let's all throw our best ideas in the pot and really have at this, knowing that most of the ideas aren't going to get taken up. Right. And that's not always going to feel good and da da da. Right. And how are you going to synthesize, like, as a leader? You've got to synthesize the group perspective, decide on a path forward, and communicate it in a way that makes everybody feel genuinely feel heard and respected and as a contributor to the process, even if their ideas weren't taken up and doing that. Rely is a level of communication skills and authenticity that is not ubiquitous. Yeah.
Lisa Kay Solomon 45:20
And I just want to say that practice that, like, synthesizing, practice that, like, you know, again, we're talking about how. How this craft is really interdisciplinary. That's a whole, that's a whole set of skills of pattern recognition and signal identifying and being able to synthesize and communicate, that's one. Then they're, like, holding steady when things are falling apart. That's a whole other thing, right? Like improvisers and skydivers and, you know, like, and I work a lot with athletes in particular. Right. And one of the reasons why I love working with athletes is because they have so much practice at being uncomfortable at pushing themselves. And so, anyway, I just really want to highlight that. It's exciting when you realize that, again, these things that you can practice, they aren't just, like, people good in front of the room. People aren't. But it does take dedication. It's not like, oh, I just took a certification in meeting design and I'm done. And so, you know, but again, it's endlessly curious. It kind of reminds me one of my favorite. I just briefly mentioned improv. One of my favorite quotes on improv comes from Keith Johnstone that I think is relevant, Daniel, to a lot of what you're kind of poking at where he says the people that say no are rewarded by the safety they obtain, and the people that say yes are rewarded by the adventure that they have. There are more people that say no than yes, but you can learn to say yes. And I think it's done over time. Right. So take it out more broadly. Most people, I think, you know, look, meetings happen every day. Conversations have every day. We're not talking about some niche thing that doesn't happen. We're talking about stuff that happens all the time. But it's mostly designed around that first bucket of like, what do we know to be true? You know, how do we get to the safe place? I was taught to run meetings on time and this way and this way versus the like, hey, I'm going to let emotion in the room. I'm going to design. I'm going to think much more like a service provider than I am a strategic decision maker. So I think that there's a lot more room. And again, what gets me up every day is that the world is demanding that more of us learn these skills because, you know, I'm sorry, I know, I know that, you know, language learning model AI are very powerful. No math for this VUCA world. No.
Chris Ertel 47:41
True. Getting all the people in the world.
Daniel Stillman 47:42
In the room is the most important.
Lisa Kay Solomon 47:43
Part and humans can abdicate the responsibility there. But I don't think it's like do the thing from yesterday more, I think.
Daniel Stillman 47:51
So. One thing I'm hearing. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Chris.
Chris Ertel 47:54
I want to circle back quickly to what Lisa said about giving away power because there is, I have a nuance to that which is, yes, you're giving away power if you invite everybody in and say, help us solve this problem. But you are giving away some power to gain influence. So it's interesting when you're not a leader, you're trying to build influence to gain power. When you are a leader, you actually need to give away some of your power to gain influence because it's easy. You have the power to have the authority to make a decision, but you may not have the influence to have people follow through on it, what's called buy in. And so I find that edge kind of interesting to explore. One book I'll cite on this topic that I think is just super valuable is Doctor Keltner's the power paradox. It's just wonderful. He runs the greater good science center at UC Berkeley. And fascinating book about how power evolves with, with different roles in an organization. It's, it's genius.
Lisa Kay Solomon 48:54
I'll just quickly build on that. My favorite quote comes from David Butler on this topic, who used to be the chief design officer for Koch. And he said, you know, when you, when you're trying to, like, bring about these emergent strategies and these new ideas, he says, go for buy in, not credit. And I think, you know, when these conversations go well, more people are bought in. And you need those people to then bring the, as Chris said, the idea on paper to life. And just last week, I had Ari Popper as a guest in my class. He runs Sci Futures, which is all about using science fiction to help organizations imagine a whole new range of possibilities. And we were talking about this notion of buy in and how critical that is because, you know, particularly when, when you surface an idea that's ambitious and does not have best practices because it's new and novel. Right. You need that buy in because that buy in is going to, is going to be the thing that keeps people moving forward when the answer isn't readily apparent or you haven't yet reached your goal. I know we're running out of time, but I have to.
Daniel Stillman 49:58
Oh my God, we're getting so close. I feel like we're building up ahead of steam.
Lisa Kay Solomon 50:03
I know.
Daniel Stillman 50:04
2 hours with you guys.
Lisa Kay Solomon 50:05
Exactly. I've seen one more thing that really holds the test of time. In fact, more so. And those are the last two chapters of the book, which I think then comes back to what Chris was just saying about if you give up individual power, what you're getting is organizational power and capability. So the second, the last chapter is overcoming the yeah buts. And just a quick aside, when I first started talking about the book, I was like, I would go through all the principles as I do it, and I would find I actually probably wasn't actually doing the principles in the book because people like, that's so nice. But then when I started leading my presentations with the chapter called overcoming the yeah buts, as in, yeah, that's a great idea, but that would never happen here. And I would sort of open up the presentation. Like, how many people had this experience also never was like, yes, that's me. And it creates to the tensions that Chris started it. To the tensions Chris started off with is that every organization is battling the fact that we're all plagued by short termism.
Chris Ertel 50:59
Right.
Lisa Kay Solomon 50:59
It's hard to do these big conversations when you have people going, what did you produce this quarter? And did you hit your KPI's? So this near termism, this other idea that politics is very much in play, that people are protective of their budgets and the thing that they've invested in. And the third is the capability gap. Right. And when you have these big adaptive challenges come in, they hit these. Yeah. Butts, and they get, you know, it's rare that they get out, but if more people learn the art of conversations the way we're talking about it and all of us are about, then they can sort of frame it with a future orientation. They can create environments that are not ones but are sort of collaborative and constructive and generative, and you orient around a purpose that keeps people going even when things are hard. And so for me, I think of this again, not just when there's an interesting or challenging or high intensity or high uncertain challenge that's come this way, but how does it, getting back to what we were talking about earlier, how does it become a learning component of your culture?
Daniel Stillman 52:04
Yeah, and as we said, these are high stakes conversations when they come up. And it takes practice to master these skills, which is why, presumably, people bring in the pros sometimes, Chris, and we're at time, but I'm wondering, this is maybe a dangerous question to ask you, but what are the pros and cons of developing the skill yourself and rolling your own for everyone who's listening, who's got one of these coming up versus bringing in a team who is an expert at this?
Chris Ertel 52:42
Yeah. Look, any, like, specialized skill, when the situation is important enough, it's good to bring in folks who have done it a lot more times than you have. I we're going through searching for a college for our only daughter, and we're hiring a coach because this person has been through the process a couple hundred times, and we're going through it for the first and only time.
Daniel Stillman 53:07
You're right. You don't get a second chance at this.
Chris Ertel 53:10
Just going to add value. Yeah. And we're excited about that. That said, I mean, I wouldn't let folks off the hook and say, don't develop this skill because you can always hire it, because the people I know who've been trained in this and got really good at it and moved on to other jobs that were not about this all day, every day. They do see it as a superpower. Like, it's every meeting you go to. You can find a way to use some of these skills. And so I think what's a little bit of a challenge for people is to know, where can I get, where can I do the 80 20 rule on adding this to my toolkit. And I think even just starting with having a base course and facilitation, I see. I have a hard time understanding why any professional who works with other professionals, professionals wouldn't benefit from a three day, couple day course in basic facilitation. I think that's really helpful. That's the most obvious kind of general thing I would encourage most people to do if they can find the time and budget for it.
Daniel Stillman 54:14
I'm also willing to guess that.
Chris Ertel 54:15
What's up?
Daniel Stillman 54:16
Sorry.
Lisa Kay Solomon 54:16
I was going to say I'm still hopeful that every business school is going to have math camp and facilitation camp before they start.
Daniel Stillman 54:22
I think that's, and I'm willing to bet, Chris, because you talked about the challenge of running through a plan and having someone get it, and I'm willing to bet that your favorite clients are the ones who are able to think through it with you and be thought partners, where the design process really becomes collaborative.
Chris Ertel 54:44
It's certainly easier then, but you have to bring a lot of folks along for the ride. So my favorite clients are often not the ones that I think they're going to be and, you know, vice versa. So I. I don't know. I've had a lot of folks who are eager learners, who don't have the capability now, but are eager learners and so forth. It's. Yeah.
Daniel Stillman 55:07
Well, we have burned through our time extremely rapidly. I don't want to keep you past time because as a facilitator, I like to respect the agenda. But is there anything I haven't asked you that I should ask you or any parting thought you'd like to say before we close our time together? And I thank you profusely for your generous time and presence and sharing of your knowledge and wisdom.
Chris Ertel 55:31
I have a question for Lisa. When I think about the future of strategic conversations, like, we touched on a little, and I'm in violent agreement that, like, you know, it's going to enable the content better, but it's not going to. The human factor ain't moving fast. But what, the biggest question mark, I think, in the human factor is generational change. And I tend to poo poo generational change. As a demographer, like we always hear, the next generation is different. They're going to be so much better and wiser, and they're going to solve all these problems that we've left them. But, you know, Lisa, talk me down from the cliff. You work with these guys every day. Where's the next generation going to take us in all this.
Lisa Kay Solomon 56:21
Great question. Thank you for that. The next generation gives me huge hope. There are moments where I've just blown away by how they have taken their experience of being digital natives to the next level, which I do think is a game changer on generational change. I do think this generation is different because of that. So they do give me great hope in so many ways, and equally, they give me great worry. Great worry, because the kinds of issues that they're facing and experiencing and seeing on a spigot that they can't turn off, voices that are honed with phds and algorithms that get to the very core sense of who they are. So I see many, many that are struggling deeply. So I don't know. But there is enough of a kind of inspirational hope that I see whether it's students of mine that put on, just as an example, a thousand person fashion show in Memorial church at Stanford based on their own agency. And, you know, it's so much more than a fashion show. It was actually probably the most important community building thing that happened in the last eight months, where college campuses are getting ripped apart. So they still give me hope. As you know, I do a lot of civic work, particularly with student athletes, and helping them use their voice for helping raise all boats. So there's those moments, and then there's equal moments where I see that the destruction is happening way faster than we can repair. So both are true. But I will close and say, Daniel, a huge thank you, not only for having us on and giving us a chance to celebrate ten years of moments of impact, but for all the work that you're doing in elevating why conversations are the strategy and how we can all get better at them. So, so grateful for this opportunity, and, Chris, as always, to learn from and with you. Got more books to read. Got more things to try.
Chris Ertel 58:20
Amen to that. Love the pot. Love the pod, Daniel, and really appreciate your having us today.
Daniel Stillman 58:26
Thank you so much, y'all. Here's to another ten years of moments of impact. If you haven't read it, everyone, it's a cracker. All right, well, we're definitely over time. So I feel like I should call scene.