Not Simple

"What Books@Work has helped his team to do is separate the person from the idea." Ann Kowal Smith is the Founder and Executive Director of Books@Work. She talks to Wendy about how using the lens of narrative fiction and non-fiction can supercharge collaboration and inclusion in the workplace.

"People in poverty, people with addiction problems … there are assumptions that those people actually don't care for themselves and don't care for their life or their health." Stephanie Marrs is a nurse practitioner with a passion for public health. She joins Wendy to discuss how we oversimplify the choices people make about their health, which actually may not be choices at all.

"[It's] like the elephant has been named. And it's been claimed. And now we can do something with the elephant." Wendy is joined by her Cultivating Leadership colleague Akasha, whose work focuses on engaging across difference, to talk about race in America and the Caribbean--and the ways we do and don't talk about it.

"What we want to look for is those threads such as behavior that we can both use to forecast but also help seed--how do we help take that thing that we want to be true and help drive the market in that direction?" A year after she first appeared on the podcast, Elizabeth Mayo, Global Director of Solar Services at UL, returns to discuss how COVID-19 has changed risk in the energy industry and how those patterns translate to life in general.

"I'm thinking about this whole space the way poets think about a sonnet. There are specific constraints. Those constraints mean that most things are impossible, but an artist can figure out how to make great things happen inside the constraints." Guest host Keith Johnston has an "in house chat" with our normal host Wendy Bittner and Jennifer Garvey Berger about the challenge of helping leaders to learn in a virtual world. They explore what they have learned and the surprising discoveries that have surfaced over the past two months.

"When emotions are so big, the quick fix is to be violent, use drugs, be aggressive, escape . . . because those feelings are dangerous. And for most of the guys they never learned how to experience that." Wendy talks to Dr. Melissa Garber, a clinical psychologist helping violent offenders in a special treatment unit in New Zealand to prepare to re-enter society. They discuss noticing and reacting differently to emotions and environments--and how these challenges (and their solutions) are more universally human than they first appear.

"The really hard challenge when you're talking about empowerment is it's a fundamentally different conversation around the way that power is then distributed, the way that power is shared, and the way that power is exercised." Dean Parkin is a part of the Quandamooka people, an investment analyst with Tanarra Capital, and an advocate for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which addresses the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. He spoke to Wendy about the oversimplification of representation and empowerment of those who have been dispossessed.

"A reframing of what failure is, what it means, and the importance of it can completely transform the way a person understands themselves and the challenges in the middle of a complex situation." Denise VanEck is owner of Thought Design, author of Failure: Laboratory Workshops, a coach, and obsessed with failure. She and Wendy unpack this "juicy" topic and discuss how to better harness with this inevitable experience that our brains love but our egos hate.

"If we really want to build a web of trust it has to be built on human relationships." Richard Whitt, a fellow at Georgetown University and the Mozilla Foundation and founder of the GLIAnet Project, talks to Wendy about human agency in the digital era, the impact of technology in our daily lives, and the uneasy compact we make when we blindly exchange our data for access to unlimited cat videos.

"It's important to remember as adults that having been a student doesn't make you an expert on teaching. You should be careful about your memories." Katy Shrout, an 8th grade English teacher, sits down with Wendy to discuss the many layers of teacher responsibility, the pros and cons of standardized testing, policies and their unintended impacts, and a slew of other ways that education is not simple.