The Evolving Leader

This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to human rights barrister Dr Susie Alegre. Susie is a legal pioneer in digital human rights, in particular the impact of artificial intelligence on the human rights of freedom of thought and opinion. Without a moment’s pause, many of us will share our most intimate thoughts with the largest tech companies and in doing so make it possible for them to categorise us and potentially jump to troubling conclusions about who we are. In her new book Susie argues that only by recasting our human rights for the digital age can we safeguard our futures.

‘Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate our Minds” (Susie Alegre, 2022)

0.00 Introduction

3.18 Can you tell us about your career and what’s led you to your current focus?

5.20 You argue that the online environment undermines our independence of opinion and in your book you illustrate this by starting with a brief history of legal freedoms to both holding beliefs and their expressions.

9.44 I’d like to focus on this manipulation. It’s hard to keep up with what’s happening in terms of the speed and number of platforms that are spreading ideas. How do we balance the fact that this is happening with the rights to form our own thoughts?

14.18 This whole area must be incredibly challenging. Can you give us a sense of what you face in trying to move legislation around like this?

18.10 How do you feel about your own experience of being manipulated on-line?

19.47 Can we turn to AI and how technology is now thinking that it can infer what our inner thoughts and feelings are?

24.01 What are thoughts on big tech company’s approach to ethics?

26.06 How do you think organisations in the tech space are going to give the application of human rights more teeth?

30.05 What are your thoughts on how the Chinese and Russian governments are wielding influence over their populations?

33.55 If we take the GDPR digital services act as an example, we can see that it’s a tricky balancing act to introduce legislation to achieve those goals and engage the public and commercial sectors. Can we do a better job in capturing the public’s imagination in these things?

37.34 What are the implications for leaders and organisations as they increasingly become dependent on digital and social technologies to prosper?

40.10 What reaction have you had across the political spectrum to your ideas?

42.14 You talk about how nobody wants to be manipulated and nobody thinks that are being manipulated. How do people get more honest and take more inventory in the ways that perhaps they are being manipulated?

45.41 So thinking about the freedom to think for younger people, what advice might you give them?

47.34 What are the next set of challenges for you? What are you working on at the moment?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Back in 2020, we released a two-part conversation (S1 Ep15 and 16) with neuroscientist Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. We’re long-time admirers of Lisa’s work and were thrilled that she agreed to join co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender to discuss her work on The Evolving Leader podcast. It’s also clear that Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work is a big hit with our listeners as four years after release these two episodes continue to sit at the top of our listener chart, so here we’ve decided to pull them together into a special extended episode.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is profoundly changing our understanding of the brain and in particular, our emotions. Since the ancient philosophers, and into our last century of scientific endeavour, emotions have been seen as hard-wired responses to external stimuli, located in specific regions of the brain. Lisa’s work has over-turned this age-old model which shapes everything from our current beliefs about emotional intelligence to facial recognition software widely being deployed around the world.

Beyond this extended conversation, you’ll find more of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work in her two books, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020) and How Emotions are Made (2017), as well as hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:

Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
YouTube @evolvingleader

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Send a message to The Evolving Leader team

In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Sara Deschamps are in conversation with former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss. During his 24 years in the FBI Chris changed the game in negotiation from one of stoicism to one of tactical empathy, persuading kidnappers, terrorists, and bank robbers to see things his way, saving countless lives in the process. Chris has translated his high-profile experience and synergy of collaboration and empathy into his negotiation consultancy The Black Swan Group, where he and his team of expert hostage negotiators apply negotiation skills in business contexts to help their clients make better deals, develop new relationships, and uncover valuable pieces of information the other side is hiding.

Chris is a household name on the Masterclass platform where he’s garnered a following for his accessible courses that teach everyone how to better communicate using behavioural science and human nature. He is also a successful author - his book Never Split the Difference explores how everything is a negotiation, and how anyone can use FBI negotiation tactics to solve problems, get what they want and resolve conflicts in all aspects of their life.

Referenced during this episode:
The Edge negotiation newsletter: https://www.blackswanltd.com/the-edge
The Black Swan Group: Blackswanltd.com

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
YouTube @evolvingleader

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Send a message to The Evolving Leader team

In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Marianne Lewis. Marianne is dean and professor of management at the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati having previously served as dean of Cass (now Bayes) Business School at City University, London, and as a Fulbright scholar. A thought leader in organizational paradoxes, she explores tensions and competing demands surrounding leadership and innovation. Marianne has been recognized among the world’s most-cited researchers in her field (Web of Science) and received the Paper of the Year award (2000) and Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review.

Marianne Lewis’s book (co-author with Wendy K Smith) ‘Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems’ was published in 2022.

0.00 Introduction

4.36 Can you give us an overview of your work?

5.22 How do you distinguish between tensions, dilemmas, and the paradoxes in our lives?

7.16 Why is it so important to be working on paradox right now for leaders?

9.13 Can you walk us through the four types of paradox that you identify and how we experience them?

14.01 How does either/or thinking cause issues for leaders and can you give us some examples of how that sets us up to fail?

19.10 The trench warfare, or the war of defences seems to be prevalent in politics right now. What do you think is causing that either/or thinking?

21.26 You describe a pros and cons list as being one of the mechanisms that encourages either/or thinking. What other mental shortcuts are leaders and others taking that encourages either/or thinking?

26.05 How do we enable both/and thinking?

34.58 You mention that it’s not easy to look at the assumptions that we should consider if we want to build this paradox mindset. Why is that and how have you helped leaders find a different way forward?

39.48 Knowing that people want to move away from negatively experienced emotions, what other tactics or approaches do you take with leaders to arrive at this alternative approach without moving away from those negative emotions?

46.20 Organisations are designed primarily to align resources with their goals and minimise risk. Can you tell us about how your research and ideas can help leaders think about structures to stabilise the organisation in the face of uncertainty?

50.33 Can you tell us about the research you’re doing into how individuals manage building a paradox mindset?

54.19 Did you find a difference in motivations behind various people’s experience with either/or thinking?

Social:
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Twitter @Evolving_Leader

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Send a message to The Evolving Leader team

In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to future of work writer and speaker, business leader, best-selling author and podcaster Ollie Henderson. Ollie believes that work life balance is a myth, and instead sees career and personal life as two opposing forces. He argues that the secret is to design an integrated approach that allows them to work in harmony.

‘Work/Life Flywheel. Harness the Work Revolution and Reimagine Your Career Without Fear’

0.00 Introduction

3.54 It’s your birthday. Which musical artist (living or dead) would you invite to your party?

5.26 Tell us about your career to date?

8.56 You’ve experienced burnout and trying to understand what you’re feeling in that situation is difficult for a lot of people. What kind of consequences did that have on your life?

12.28 How long do you think were burnt out before you acknowledged it?

13.21 So you decided to leave your job and take up writing and at the same time a pandemic hit.

19.29 People are often afraid to make changes and you say that 75% of people are wanting to make big changes to their work lives. Why is that happening?

22.24 I’m interested in the data you collected. In the UK and many other countries there is currently a large focus on getting older people back in the workforce.

28.13 We’ve had lots of guests talking to us about various aspects of innovation. Is there anything that you’ve learnt about how we can get people to bring more of their creative and innovative self into our working environments?

32.21 Coming back to your three-year burnout, what have you adopted as practices to pay closer attention to what you are feeling and experiencing inside so you don’t find yourself going through another three year burnout before you acknowledge it?

40.17 [Ollie asks Scott and Jean] How much are people talking about the relationship between their work and personal life? Is this significant or are we reverting to how life was before the pandemic?

46.43 Where can people find the book and where can they find you?

Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
YouTube @evolvingleader2271

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Send a message to The Evolving Leader team