Edgy Ideas

Gianpiero is an internationally renowned thinker in the field of leadership and learning in the workplace. He brings a clinical lens to his research and teaching, which he begun acquiring while training as a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, and refined in two decades of coaching, consulting, teaching, and researching people’s working lives.  At the heart of this conversation is the idea that humanising organisations requires revisiting our conceptions of leadership. ‘Caring,’ Gianpiero argues, needs to be put at the core of leadership thinking and practice, rather than kept at its periphery. He shares the idea that ‘we often make an instrumental argument for making humanistic organisations, and every time we do that, humanism dies from 100 cuts”.   Gianpiero invites us to consider how the current challenges that many organizations experience, such as a struggle with innovation or inclusion, might be side effects of our devotion to dehumanized models of organizing.  The notion of alignment, for example, often serves as a cover for the pursuit of conformity, which in turn undermines the desire for diversity. Among other wide-ranging topics, our conversation reflects on identity and what it means to be cosmopolitan in world that is struggling with helping people belong to a place and also be engaged world citizens. Enjoy this wonderful podcast!  Bio Gianpiero is associate professor of organizational behaviour at INSEAD. His award-winning research and teaching focus on what it means, and what it takes, to become a leader. He is particularly interested in the development and exercise of leadership in the age of "nomadic professionalism," in which people have deep bonds to work but loose affiliations to institutions, and authenticity and mobility have replaced loyalty and advancement as hallmarks of virtue and success.  Gianpiero's research has appeared in leading academic journals such as the Administrative Science Quarterly , Academy of Management Annals , Academy of Management Learning & Education.  He also writes essays regularly for the Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. His work has been featured in a range of media including the BBC , Financial Times , The Economist , The Guardian , New York Times , Wall Street Journal , Washington Post , Quartz , Vox , Le Figaro and El Pais , and he is listed among the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 .

Tara Nolan is fascinated by teams and has worked extensively with teams as a coach.  In this episode, Tara reflects on her work and her insights from interviewing experts and team leaders in her podcast ‘A Game of Teams’.   Teams are the heartbeat of organisational success and this episode Tara and Simon discuss team dynamics, team leadership and the changing nature of how teams are working in more fluid and virtual ways, and what this means in terms of containment, trust, leadership and performance. Tara Nolan is the host of The Game of Teams Podcast, a podcast that was born out of her fascination with teams, her work with teams as a Team Coach and her interest in exploring the thoughts and thinking of others who have a role in making teams great. Tara is a Master Certified Coach (MCC) and Systemic Team Coach and she uses systems thinking, team essentials, team structure, diagnostics, dialogue, group dynamics, emotional and social intelligences, mindfulness and reflective practices to inform her thinking and approach with teams. She is a facilitator and regular contributor to various publications and respected thought leader on teams.  Tara started her career as an Investment Banker working for Morgan Stanley in the City of London. She now lives in Dublin and has her own company called Tara Nolan LTD. Her websites: www.taranolan.ie and www.thegameofteams.com 

Chris Yates has travelled a big journey, coming from the West Indies to London as a child, brought up by a single parent, he has held some of the biggest 'people jobs' in the business world. Currently Chief Talent Officer at Ford Motor Company, previously General Manager of Learning & Development at Microsoft, Chief Learning Officer and Head of People and Organizational Development for Caterpillar Inc. and he served in senior roles at HSBC bank and American Express.  Chris is also co-author of two books titled Share and Rewire.   In this podcast Chris reflects on this journey, sharing how being in a football gang as a teenager gave him support and identity and what it means to carry a black body into all white boardrooms.  Chris's insights reveal how important it is to hold on to a very human identity in workplaces that consciously and unconsciously pressurise employees to conform to the norm, through dress and behavioral codes.   Chris shares his view that employee's need to be given permission to bring their individuality and their deepest human selves back into the workplace, if we are to create the 'good society'. 

Pooja Sachdev is a leading practitioner in the diversity and inclusion space. Pooja discusses with Simon the real challenges faced by organisations when working on diversity and inclusion. This conversation reveals how language can be used to silence people rather than open up discussions, and how we need to 'decriminalise bias' if we are to acknowledge our conscious and unconscious biases.    Pooja and Simon discuss their personal experiences of working with diversity; Pooja from a perspective of her 'hyphenated' Indian-UK identity,  and Simon as a white UK male.   They discuss shame and guilt, and how racism is often repressed but returns in different ways in each generation, the latest wave being the Black Lives Matter movement.   Organisations are often performative in the way they use woke-slogans to cover up hidden toxic cultures. A shift is needed from woke and blame cultures towards creating safe spaces that encourage curious conversations, which can reveal what's really going on, and enable positive reform and changes to be made.  Enjoy this podcast.  Note: Pooja and Simon will be leading a Webinar titled 'Diversity and Inclusion: Are you performing or reforming' on January 28th 2021 3-5pm UK time.  For more information contact simon@analyticnetwork.com     Bio Pooja is a business psychologist, organisational consultant and founder of Rewire Consulting (www.rewireconsulting.com).  Pooja is co-author of 'Rewire: A Radical Approach to Tackling Diversity and Difference', which was published by Bloomsbury in 2015 and described by the FT as "the most refreshing approach to diversity I have read" (Nov 4, 2015). Prior to setting up her own practice, she served as Senior Policy Officer at the (then) Commission for Racial Equality in the UK and as a Consultant in the Human Capital division at Towers Watson. In recent years, she has consulted with organisations such as Microsoft, Caterpillar, HSBC, Universal, Annapurna Pictures, Vice Media and Red Bull to help embed inclusive leadership and practices.  She has lived in three countries and is raising two feisty and fabulous daughters in London

Dina Hassan lives in Egypt and works as a clinical forensic psychoanalyst.   In a wide ranging conversation, Dina shares her experience of life in Egypt and her time spent studying in Ireland.  Dina is 30 years old and a few years ago chose to wear a veil and she shares her experience of how this played out with her peers and challenges our perceptions of what it means to wear a veil.  Dina discusses her love of psychoanalysis and how it sits culturally in Egypt.  She identifies as half Egyptian and half Scottish, who is passionate about her country and the food of the country.  Enjoy the listen

Professor Tatiana Bachkirova shares her deep knowledge of coaching and in conversation with Simon they explore some of the limitations of coaching practice today, and what can be done to change this.   Tatiana and Simon are both advocates for coaching and believe coaching to be a hugely important developmental practice, yet they see problems in how coaching is practiced today.  The mainstream coaching focus on positivity and positive psychology and the lack of criticality are central concerns.  The conversation explores how to develop a more critical-reflective approach to coaching that supports clients and workplaces to become more developmental, rather than simply develop resilience and try to promote positive thinking.  Bio  Tatiana Bachkirova is Professor of Coaching Psychology and Co-Director of the International Centre for Coaching and Mentoring Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK.  She is a recognised author, international speaker and an active researcher.  Her books include Developmental Coaching: Working with the Self (2011) and The SAGE Handbook of Coaching (2017).

Jeff is a sinologist and has spent many years working and living in China. He works as a leader in the world of technology and has worked in global tech companies and now is CEO /owner of a mid size tech company.   In 2018 Simon and Jeff presented together at a conference exploring how new technologies pull us in two competing directions, towards centralisation and to decentralisation. Techno utopians led us to believe that the internet and other technologies would lead to a greater democratization and egalitarian society, whilst techno-dystopians claim these new technologies increasingly centralise power and limit individual freedom.  Jeff discusses these issues and shares insights on how Chinese culture adapts to these pulls and compares his experience of how western culture addresses these issues. Bio Prior to becoming Dilaco's CEO in August 2019, Jeff served as a Senior Director for HP in Asia-Pacific and Greater China, the company's fastest growing region and one of its largest country markets. Before joining HP in 2011, Jeff was country director Greater China for Canon and Oce. He cultivates leadership through benevolence, righteousness, propriety, learning, and trustworthiness throughout his work.  Placing prime importance on inspiring and connecting people to take care of themselves and encouraging dynamic and positive collaboration within and across teams. Jeff is also very involved in growing the understanding between China and the West, comparing chinese and western societies from a historical perspective of human consciousness. Here he has a special focus on leadership, based on the belief that Chinese and Western principles and practice of leadership are largely complementary, and an understanding of both is required to be a complete leader. Jeff is a trained Analytic-Network Coach and co-wrote a chapter on Chinese leadership in Global Leadership Perspectives: Insights and Analysis (Western and Garcia Sage 2018) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdekleijn/

In this podcast I read a short essay that explores the art of living the good life through the lens of the thermos flask. Internalised as a childhood ‘good object’ that represented happy times- family holidays and mountain walks- and it produced ‘good things’ that comforted me; warm nourishing soup and hot coffee. It acted as a transitional object when I travelled, bridging home and my place of arrival, and it became a lost symbol when consumerism and the cappuccino cult seduced me and millions of others to abandon the flask. Covid19 lockdown closed the cafes I frequented and a ‘return of the repressed’ occurred. The flask re-emerged and ‘flask-time’ has once again become an important part of my life, in unexpected ways. Flask-time is a special time, a transcendent time beyond ‘ordinary time’. Flask-time by-passes consumerism, connects me to the past, present and future, and emancipates me from patterns I was previously entrapped in. I praise the flask, because it engages me in a slower and freer experience, it inspires a micro-resistance to consumer society, and it re-connects me to nature, home produced food and to what it means to live the good-life.  A print version of this essay can be found here: In Praise of the Flask 

Professor Jonathan Gosling has been working in leadership development across the globe and in diverse settings for many years.  In this podcast he discusses with Simon the pleasures of power. They reflect on their own relationships to power, those of leaders they have coached and the tangled collusions around domination and submission. Many leaders who seem powerful to others feel themselves to be trapped in organisational cultures that render them quite powerless in these totalising corporate systems.  Power can be harnessed for the benefit of others, and can give individuals meaning and a sense of agency and identity, and it can also feed ego and be coercive.  Jonathan offers the novel idea of "powering" turning power into a verb that opens up how power is used tactically in situations.  The discussion ends with reflecting on how power may or may not support the good life and good society.  Bio  Jonathan Gosling is a sailor, emeritus professor and consultant to OD projects in primary health services in southern Africa. He is also lead faculty with the Forward Institute to promote responsible leadership. He is director, Pelumbra Ltd, and was previously Professor of Leadership at the Universities of Lancaster and Exeter. His own troubled relatedness to power and the people who wield it has drawn him into most of his career-defining predicaments - in universities, community mediation, private equity firms, electronics companies, governments, emergency response agencies and more.

Michael and Simon, two white men, discuss whiteness as a paradigm. Their conversation draws on their personal experiences and addresses the wider systemic issues that are at play. They reflect on how white fragility plays out, and what it will take to enable people to move from being defensive, to engage with the vulnerable curiosity that is required to lead to change?     Whiteness is often referred to as a place of privilege and entitlement, as clearly it is in many social settings. Yet ‘whiteness’ is not homogenous, and there are millions of white underclass in the USA (referred to as 'white trash') and across Europe,  economically impoverished who have lost the dignity of work and class solidarity, and don’t feel privileged and entitled at all.  What can we do to address this aspect of ‘whiteness’ whose rage can lead to supporting populist and xenophobic right-wing leaders?  Acknowledging complexity, this conversation explores what can be done to challenge centuries of racial domination and abuse, and the endemic racism that still exists in society today. Questioning the whiteness paradigm is an important part of this process.   Bio  Michael Lindsay is a consulting and clinical psychologist practicing in San Diego, CA. He is interested in supporting the development of consciousness and courage in leaders, organizational cultures, and in society, using Systems Psychodynamic and Integral frameworks. Michael is serving his first year as an Internal Director on the Board of the AK Rice Institute. He is a member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. In addition to his clinical and consulting practices, Michael is an Adjunct Instructor at the University of San Diego in the Leadership Studies Dept. He has also been a yoga instructor for over 10 years and together with his husband, Michael is raising two boys, one 7 and the other 3, in a bi-lingual household.