A Radical Fireside Chat With...

Jose Leal (00:08):

And welcome to the Radical World Podcast. I'm Jose Leal, and today I've got Susan Basterfield as my person to talk to, which I love the idea of, because we've had a number of great conversations over the years, thanks to our great and wonderful friend Doug Kirkpatrick, who decided that we needed to talk some years ago. And I just wish we had more time and more frequency of these conversations because every time we've had an opportunity to talk, I've loved it. So thank you for joining us, Susan.

Susan Basterfield (00:47):

Yeah, absolute pleasure, Jose. I was thinking back and I, I, I did actually land back at Doug. And one of these, one of the things about I guess the world of work that we inhabit is the magic of the connections and the total generosity of, of most people who think and talk about the kind of, kind of things that we're going to be talking about today.

Jose Leal (01:11):

Absolutely. And thank you for getting up early. cause I know you're on the other side of the world and it's really early for you. So I appreciate you accommodating our time that that we do this here in California.

Susan Basterfield (01:23):

Thanks.

Jose Leal (01:24):

So, as I've said, it's a conversation. We've both been around this world of workspace for a while. I thought maybe we've kind of talked a little bit of history and then sort of what's been happening and, 'cause we've, we've both talked about the fact that there's a transformation happening within our space, not just around the world, but within the, the world that we've been sort of going around in. So, can you tell me a little bit about your history and, and what you've been doing in this space? And then talk about sort of where we're going.

Susan Basterfield (02:03):

Absolutely. Thanks for that. I never quite know where, where to start. I I grew up in California. I'm I've been a, a proud citizen of New Zealand for about 20 years, but I grew up in, in California and had a, a quite a traditional first career in the tech space. Very early days of the tech space left the US in 1995 for Europe and kind of had the I guess, you know, typical climb up the, the corporate ladder with multinationals like IBM and hp. And, you know, I, I always wondered why these incredibly nonsensical rules applied in even major corporations that somehow the good ideas could only come from people of a certain rank or level in the organization. When we arrived in New Zealand, it was the same thing. I kind of swapped from kind of traditional tech to telco. And it was the same patterns that kept on repeating. And I was going through a transformation of my own and figuring out how, with the power that I held to disintermediate this and kind of start to test some of my hunches around what it could be to create a workplace where everybody's you know ideas and thoughts could kind of feed into the mix of what we were trying to manifest in the world. And it would always, like, reach a certain level and then and then start getting slammed down. Because of course, as we know, people with the ultimate power and organizations don't have a compelling reason to change the system. And so about 10 years ago, I walked out of a corporate office for the last time. Just around the time that reinventing organizations had been published. I fell in with a group of really interesting social entrepreneurs here in Wellington called in Spiral. And you know, really challenged a lot of assumptions that I had around myself in terms of my willingness or not to be an entrepreneur but found that practicing with people who were trying to figure out how they could move from working for the man in order to do the work that mattered to them, to being able to do the work that mattered to them full-time and understanding, I think instinctively that organizing around that required a different set of skills, a different set of practices if we had any chance of creating what we were imagining without falling back into the old paradigms of command and control. So one of the many organizations sprung from the Inspiral soil, including the one that I am part of called Greater Than. We are a global collective of very, very passionate practitioners who work with organizations and leaders who want to do something differently, but maybe don't know where to start. Because even to this day, there aren't a lot of kind of great alternative examples in the popular zeitgeist. And what I've learned over the years is that there's no one way, and it's the courage to practice that is the linchpin to creating a possibility for what, for what might be. Well,

Jose Leal (05:57):

Thank you for sharing that. I, you know, I, I think about myself and it's about 10 years as well that, that since I've kind of, it, it's been longer since I've left corporate, but I've done a couple of startups in between and ceased all of that about 10 years as well. And you, you talk about the practices and so forth, and, and I think for most of us, that's sort of where we started, was how do we do things different? And over the last six months or so, Matt and I have really along with our community, have really started to, to realize that as much as those practices are the way we can do things different, that we're thinking that it, it, the practices themselves are seen differently depending on what your lens is. And that from a traditional.

Susan Basterfield (06:55):

Give an example.

Jose Leal (06:56):

Yeah. So, so we often talk about how people look at ownership of a, of a business as an example, right? And when you, when you're a boss, I've, I've owned my businesses many times, right? And your mindset is, this is mine, right? This is mine. And so it, working with someone, even when you have great relationships with your colleagues who are your employees you end up having this mindset that says, well, this is mine. I'm the one that has to protect it. I'm the one that needs to sort of guide all of this and, and so forth.

Susan Basterfield (07:42):

Absolutely. And I, and I've seen that shift slight just slightly to the, to the left or right, where all of a sudden the owner believes they become enlightened. And it's like, oh, no, I just, I, I want everybody to act like a boss. And I feel like that is also so disingenuous, right? Because you're asking people to, oh, act like an owner. Well, you're not the owner and you don't read the benefits of ownership. So how do we, how do we actually get real about this stuff? This is what I'm so fascinated about. Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan is a book that changed everything for me when I read it three or four years ago about how, I think what you are saying here, the water that we swim in is so transparent that we don't even notice it. And I think that one of the practices that isn't like a, a practice of transformation or prac a a practice of changing something systemically is how can we start to really notice that actual thing that's happening? Name it. Because when we name it and talk about it, it gives us actual options to, to decide to whether or not to do something with it.

Jose Leal (08:55):

And for us, that naming happened last year where we realized, I mean, it happened earlier when, when Matt coined it in the book radical companies. But, but it, it really took after the book, it real for us to realize that what we were talking about when we talked about the fiat world, the fiat lens, was that it was a world where the idea of control, of force of manipulation, of coercion are a standard thing. They're just normal. This is the way we live, and we've grown to accept it because every generation has been taught this is the way the world is. Yeah. Right. I remember as a teen saying to a colleague, 'cause I I, it was someone I was working for, and he was in his late twenties. And I said, but, but that doesn't make sense. Something, I can't recall the, the, the exact situation, but it was something in, in how the world works kind of thing. And he says, yeah, I know it doesn't make sense, but you've just got to learn to accept it.

Susan Basterfield (10:08):

It's so, and it's so, it, it works on so many levels that right. I, I think you know, one of the things that I, I have still, still I have never lost empathy for all those middle managers out there who are promoted to being responsible because they're good at something. They get promoted to being responsible for other people that are, that, that are, that are trying to do that. But what's never spoken is, and it's both your privilege and responsibility now to decide how much each of these people earn what kind of work they get to do, whether or not you're deeming them high performers. So they get to go on the, on the, on the learning track. That is, that is what the portfolio of l and d is doing. And that is, that for me is, you know, I feel it in my tummy right now. It's so coercive, it's so non-consensual, right. But it just persists and persists.

Jose Leal (11:08):

And we're so, it's so easy to see. When we started talking about the idea of force, we, we, people were saying, well, I'm not forced to, to do things right. I'm not for no, but because we are, it's a subtle form of force right here you've lived in, in the United States. So, you know, if you don't have full-time employment, you likely don't have health insurance.

Susan Basterfield (11:32):

Absolutely.

Jose Leal (11:33):

That's a huge form of force. Yeah. Right. And we don't think it of it as force, we think of it as just the way things are. Right. But it is a way of manipulating people's behavior. And whenever anybody talks about having universal healthcare in the United States, it's the companies that come up and say, well, yeah, let's not have that conversation because it is one of the things that causes people to work for us.

Susan Basterfield (12:03):

That had never occurred to me, Jose, but it's absolutely true.

Jose Leal (12:07):

It, and it's that type of, of manipulation. The same thing with advertising. I worked in media, advertising's doing the exact same thing but in an even more subtle way, because we, we know that advertising works, but what we don't really say out loud is that advertising is actually manipulating people's behavior in ways that they don't consent to.

Susan Basterfield (12:35):

Yeah. I mean, in, I agree with that. And in some ways it's, I have heard that much more often than I've heard these conversations about what's really happening in the workplace. You know, we talked about this a lot, you know, that why is it that, you know, I think this is Aaron Dignon who, who, who coined this, that you look at anything from 150 years ago, and it's fundamentally different except the org chart. And that persists to the, to this day, you know a form of cascaded context control privilege that is only there to serve the people that sit on top of that. Like you said before, we, everybody who enters the work force or workplace subtly consents to that. But is, is it actual consent? I don't, I don't think so.

Jose Leal (13:38):

Right, right. I, I don't think we, we realize how subtle that force is in that environment. And, you know, we, we see the, the spike of heart attacks and breakdowns and strokes on Monday mornings, right? Absolutely. Like why? Well, right? We, we know why it's happening, but we haven't connected the dot. And part of what we're trying to, the conversation we're trying to have is how do we flip the lens? And we, we use this as a, a little way of demonstrating it. Like the fiat lens is one of seeing the world as this place where we need to control Yeah. Where control must happen. Otherwise it'll fall apart. It'll be chaos. But in reality, what we have is, is a lens, a radical lens of seeing ourselves in a way where we all have needs, where we all need to come together, we all need to live our lives, and we all have a desire to make this world better. So how do we do that with each other? How do we serve ourselves and life together rather than working from this lens that we've been taught is the normal lens.

Susan Basterfield (15:06):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've got some hunches about that, that come from complexity theory and how Dave Snow Snowden talks about you know, the fin model and this I don't know if it's unwillingness or an I think it's an uncomfortableness of sitting in the space of complexity where just because something worked one way once is no predictor that it will happen that way again. And the way that we have managed that for ourselves over hundreds of years now is to codify it. Right? Right. If I can make it, if I can make it a process, if I can make it repeatable, then I can measure it and I can improve it. Yes. And the flip side of that is that how much innovation does that limit? How much potential does that leave on the table? How much pain does that cause? Because we are not willing to sit in the space of what is the unique thing that's emerging for us right now? And, and, and poking and prodding and experimenting in that space. It's rather, no, we need to put it over here because my head's going to explode, you know, probably the owner or the person with the most power. And if we put it over there, then everything will be okay. Well, well, it doesn't work that way. Right, right. Life, life and living systems don't work that way. Right. You mentioned like live living systems. How can we move from this lens of control to this lens of life giving. Right, exactly. It's, it's really fundamental.

Jose Leal (16:55):

And I, and I think that what I've seen as well, and you probably have, is that when we move away from this codified way of, of working, then we loosen things up so much that we we're afraid to codify again. And I, and I've seen so many groups fall apart because they're just sort of like, you know, everything's okay, everything's acceptable, everything, and we don't set up some basics for, for how to work together and some basics for what's acceptable and what's not.

Susan Basterfield (17:31):

I think even before that, Jose, it's, it's the, it's the basic practices. Are we listening to each other? Are we checking for meaning? Are we taking time as a group to actually ask each other what we're noticing in the system? Because nobody can see everything. It's these basic communication and listening practices that I think form the basis of the possibility for this to even happen. Because, you know, just because we say we're going to do something and, and, and use the same principles of the hierarchy to make that happen, it, it doesn't actually allow the system to speak to us if we are still imagining that we are the only person that it's speaking to. I know that that might sound a little confusing, but that's.

Jose Leal (18:28):

Yeah. I agree with you. I think the way, the language that I use is if you see things through a lens of control through the fiat lens, and it is a hard lens to flip, it seems so easy to just flip that lens. But it's a hard.

Susan Basterfield (18:47):

I do it every day, Jose. Jose in my life and my family and my work, there's dozens of times a day I just say, oh, just, I, I'll just, yeah, I'll just do that. I'll just control that. It's hard.

Jose Leal (18:59):

It's hard. It's hard. But once we start to see that lens, and once we see that what we're looking for is not bad behavior, it, what we're looking for is not someone's malice, that what we're looking for is an example of someone who's working through that lens best that they can. Yeah. And it's the lens that we need to talk about, not their behavior, not who they are as a person. And when we have that conversation about the lens, it gives us permission to connect with ourselves again, because I know for myself, when I was in corporate, I beat myself up every day.

Susan Basterfield (19:45):

Yeah.

Jose Leal (19:45):

Right. Why did I do that? That was so mean. Why did I do that? That was so harmful? Why did I, why did I just cut the legs out from underneath that person at that meeting? Like, that was not nice. But I knew that that's the stuff you had to do to survive in a corporate environment.

Susan Basterfield (20:04):

Yeah. And I mean, the system, system is created to reward that kind of behavior, right. The system is created to cause harm. And I know that that's quite a provocative statement, but I really, really believe it that, that that systemic infrastructure is there to make it essential for you to have done the things that you did that caused you pain.

Jose Leal (20:27):

And I, and I would say a little bit differently, because I don't think it's designed to cause harm. I think it's designed to increase control and it causes harm in the process. I did those things, not because I wanted to cause harm, but I was doing them, and the boss I had was doing them to me, and his board was doing it to him. Right. Yeah. And the investors were doing it to them.

Susan Basterfield (20:58):

And yes. And I'll come a little bit your way. I think that those systems are created to make it more likely for harm to be done.

Jose Leal (21:06):

Yes. Yeah. Yes. Well, and lots of it. So it, it's not to minimize the harm that happens. I think the harm that happens is huge. I, I suspect that most of the harm that's happening at the human level and at the risk of nature level is due to those things because we lose sight of what's important because we're so focused on control. And, and that's the conversation that I think we should all be having. And so the question that I have for you is, do you think that conversation is starting to emerge because you work in Europe, you work in, in New Zealand, you, you do work in North America, you have a breadth of vision, and we've both had the conversation about the fact that things are changing, things are, there's a shift happening. What's your sense of what that shift is?

Jose Leal (22:07):

I mean, I think that when reinventing first kind of spurred the kind of first wave of this being a little bit of a, of a more populist idea that there were two types of leaders who kind of got interested. One was people who just read this and, and said, thank goodness. I thought I was crazy. I'm, I, I know now that this is possible and I'm going to try. And there were other leaders that read that and said, oh, great. This is this is something that I can use to get rid of a layer of management to sell to the board. That there will be no managers. Everybody will self-manage. And we can you know, be more you know you know, our, our, our, our profit can, can, can, can go up. I think that in that conversation what's happened in the world in the kind of ensuing 10 years has been more evidence around the importance of talking about power, of talking about control, about talking about coercion. And I think that the leaders that I'm seeing now, okay, I'm going to be, again, provocative. The leaders in this new wave that I'm seeing are mostly women and, and, and mostly, mostly humans that are beginning to see that control isn't the point. So I think that that's the shift. I think it's the shift from, oh, here's a model that we can follow, again, back to the codification, right. To being more of a, a felt sense an embodied experience of, I, I don't have to control me. Trying to control is, you know, limiting the potential. I don't know how to not control, right? But I'm open to naming this and wanting to work with it and work within it. So that's the change that I'm seeing is that the, certainly the majority of the organizations that we're working with at the minute have leaders who have, I would say, a more mature and nuanced view of why why this work is important.

Jose Leal (24:53):

And when you see that they understand that it is, that it has been about control and that they're moving away from that, do you get a sense that they are having these conversations with their people at that level? Or are they talking about how we switch practices and how we, you know.

Susan Basterfield (25:19):

I mean, I think that, I think that the, the people that we're working with now probably have, have, you know, five or 10 years of different, different ways of experiencing this and experimenting with it and are kind of coming to the recognition that there are underlying promoters of, of this, right? So control can mean anything. It can mean you control through con through sharing or withholding context, do you control through sharing or withholding autonomy, you control through sharing or withholding you know, levels of transparency. And that, that starting to, again, slowly nudge these things out, and to a degree that they're not breaking anything, and you start noticing what it's enabling. I think that that's another thing that I'm noticing is that people are much more comfortable with the idea that this is not the work of a couple of months or a couple of sprints. It's the work of many multiples of years.

Jose Leal (26:36):

And are you seeing that, that, that do you see that as a, as a sort of a, a global shift? Is that kind of, you're feeling that happening throughout?

Susan Basterfield (26:51):

Yeah. I, I really, really think that I am. I think that, and again, it's industry agnostic, as we've talked about before. It's it, it really is the, the lens and the will of the person in the system with the most power. And that could be in a tech company or in a public service or in a you know, a, a school or university or whatever, right? And I do think that it's ubiquitous across all I would say the global north, right? I think talking about the global south is a completely different conversation. It has been very resonant for me in terms of yeah, it's another conversation, but yes. Well, actually that's normal.

Jose Leal (27:42):

I want to go there for a little bit because I've been working with folks in, in south America. Brazil not so much South America, Mexico, Columbia Venezuela. And, and I, I have this feeling, and it's a feeling not, I don't have any proof of this, but I have this feeling that they're ready to leapfrog us.

Susan Basterfield (28:14):

I hope so, that's, <inaudible>.

Jose Leal (28:15):

They have, they've never bought into the full control process. They've been inefficient corporations because the leadership and the workers have never bought into the same level of coercive. And so by, by American standards, we look at that and we go, ah, they're not as efficient as we were or as we are.

Susan Basterfield (28:47):

Yeah. I think that's awesome. And I think that there's other, like sociopolitical things that have happened over the last you know, five or six decades in South America that probably have created a level of possibility and I don't know belief around what a more you know, so socially equitable system could look like.

Jose Leal (29:20):

Was it yesterday? Yesterday met with a colleague a radical colleague from, she's from Brazil. She was here in the Bay Area. She's a lawyer. She set up a collaborative of three lawyers in the same building, working together and independently and working to bring this type of lens to the community there. I know I don't know if you know Kim Wright and the integrative law movement. You know, she's, she's also part of Kim's community. And, and that work I'm sensing is, is taking hold in a special way in, in Latin America as I see that kind of work, super exciting. And so it's, it is exciting. It's exciting to see. It's a exciting to be a part of, and it's a great place to learn because it's emerging from them in a way that is it's, it's not, it's not theoretical. It's not, you know, it's, it's not designed, it, it's not predefined. It's just this is what needs to happen, literally emerge literally emergent. So often we talk about emergence and then we go, well, here's how we emerged it . And so it's wonderful to see. So I, I look forward to, to seeing more of that. And, and hearing more. What, what in your mind is sort of the next thing that's happening for you for, for greater than where, where are the, these many groups that are doing this work? What's, what's breaking ground for you?

Susan Basterfield (31:22):

I think I was having a conversation yesterday and I'm, I'm very aware and very motivated to start to create the conditions or the opportunity for leaders themselves to begin learning from each other in a more meaningful way. It's all well and good to have us coming in, as we call it. We don't call ourselves consultants. We call ourselves accomp or accompanists, you know, we walk kind of side by side and don't, you know don't try to try to act in that normal consulting way. But I think that I'm very excited about reigniting my weaving capability because that, that's, that's how I got into this world in the first place, right? I, I think I, you know, I've always been a little bit brave that way. Like, if I see something that resonates with me, I'll reach out. I think I did that with Doug. I did that with one of my sadly passed mentors, Brian Ungar he of Urian and, and everyone culture, and just really getting more in that mode of being interested in learning from people on the ground that are doing it and bringing those people together. So I feel like that is the, the next thing that's energizing me.

Jose Leal (32:50):

And are you seeing that happening in, within your community as well? Or is that primarily you?

Susan Basterfield (33:00):

No, I think it's definitely happening within the community. For example, in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be heading to Vancouver for the Global Summit for an organization that I have been in awe of and supporting for some years called Corless. They were previously called CEO, and they're about disintermediating the, the traditional funding mechanisms for female led entrepreneurs. And that particular group is moving away from geographically specific perpetual funds to provide this alternative possibility to bringing things together globally, and having then more opportunities to spread this from the perspective of those more underrepresented areas or countries. So I am seeing a bit of like how the connection is manifesting might be differently different, but I think the people are really real reawakening from this. I don't think it was necessarily a slumber, but the disruption of the pandemic into, okay, what is possible now and doing that consciously.

Jose Leal (34:13):

I, I just, I feel like there's something that I want to touch upon, and I'm not sure how to get there, because the focus is so much for us to talk about existing organizations. And I have this sense that this change is actually really going to happen primarily with the founding of new types of organizations, the creation of, in a movement towards that. I, I use, you know, I worked in the automotive industry and the automotive media industry, and that understanding of what happened 124 years ago when there were 8,000 cars in 1900 in all of the United States, by 1925 to where 22 million cars amazing. That in 25 years, the world can change in ways that are almost unfathomable, because it wasn't just those cars, it was roads, it was signs, it was gas stations, it was mechanics, it was everything necessary to make that up. Government registration systems, licensing, I mean, in 25 years, right?

Susan Basterfield (35:38):

Amazing. Right. I mean, I've been trying, I've been, I've had that hunt for a while too, Jose, and tried a lot of different things and, you know, even wrote a few books like reinventing Scale ups and how can, how, how can this option or possibility be enlivened for people who are just starting things. And the reality, and I think that that connects to the story I just told about Coralis is that as the the current mechanisms for, for funding are reliant on traditional model of equity and control, it's really, really hard. It's really, really hard. And it's maybe even it's, it's a different scale, right? When you're in a startup, when you're just starting something, you know, when, until you get to about 20 humans, you know, if you're a good, if you're a good person and a good communicator, you can manage that not necessarily control it, but be able to see the system through the lenses of everybody who's contributing. It's, when you take that leap, it's like, that is the point where people fall off the cliff and just, okay, we just need to hire middle managers or put in some levels of control and management because this is just too much. And I think that it reaching organizations at, at that point where, but the pro, you know, again, I don't want to make this a, a negative thing, but you know, organizations that are growing, do they have time to invest in actually reinventing how they're doing things? And it's, it's going to take, it's going to take attention from a lot of different perspectives for that for I think for your dream to take hold. But all it needs is a few, right? All it needs is a couple of dozen who have done it, who can talk to others in their position about how they did it and what they did to start to create the conditions of, for that exponential growth.

Jose Leal (37:45):

And because there's a lot more companies, there are a lot more companies getting started every day, right? Absolutely. Than there are, you know, big corporations that we chase after as, as many consultants chase after. Right. we're kind of wrapping up to the end of our, our time here. Did you, is there anything you wanted to say that you thought, oh man, if I don't say this while I'm talking to Jose, I'll kick myself?

Susan Basterfield (38:17):

No, I think I'm good. I've really just enjoyed how we've just been jamming and going back and forth and I think that conversations like this are also incredibly important. And so I'm just so grateful for the invitation to come and share what we're seeing, because that's, that's really what we're doing doing. And I think the lens metaphor is a great one. And I'm going to steal it.

Jose Leal (38:40):

Don't steal it. Take it. It's, it's yours to have. It's, it's ours, hopefully ours to learn from and use that's, that's part of this conversation. I, I want to say something personally I've admired the work that you guys have been doing that, that you've personally been doing and, and many in, in our circles. I personally know how hard it is to do this work, because as much as it looks and sounds exciting there's a lot of times where we're struggling and we're trying to figure out how to make it happen. And I know you've recently had the loss of your mom over the last couple of months and, and the time that you spent with her. And I know that for us, balancing life and balancing work as this thing that doesn't really exist. But you know, that, that conversation, I think it's, it is due to people like you and the effort that you put in, into helping grow this, helping understand this, helping do this work, and doing the, making the effort that you do and, and putting the energy that you do. And I want to thank you personally for that because I think it's people like you that are changing the world and it's not an easy thing. And, and so that's why I would call you a radical just for, just for being that. And I appreciate that. Thank you.

Susan Basterfield (40:29):

Thank you very much. Can't wait to see what happens next.

Jose Leal (40:33):

Absolutely. And can't wait to keep talking more. So thank you very much, Susan. It has been a pleasure. I've enjoyed it. And we'll see you soon. Oh, okay. Next week. Carlos wants me to say about next week, I had closed the chat cause I wanted to see your face. So I'm going to have yet another wonderful conversation. And this time with someone from Mexico, what I was referring to about the work that's happening down in those countries. In this case it's an Angel Calderon who's a part of our community, and he's with Significados Compartidos. He's another Susan, but in Mexico and doing wonderful work down there and working really hard again to change the way things work is someone very much with a radical lens and doing the work of, of helping people lift their fiat lens. So I'm looking forward to that conversation. Thank you Carlos, for reminding me. And we'll leave it at that. Thank you.