The Evolving Leader

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?

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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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This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Adam Bulley. Adam is a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. In his research, Adam uses the tools of cognitive science to study the mind and human behaviour, with a focus on the evolution, development, and psychological mechanisms of imagination, foresight, decision-making, and emotion.

Adam Bulley’s first book ‘The Invention of Tomorrow’ which he co-wrote with Thomas Suddendorf and Jon Redshaw was published in 2022.

During the conversation, Adam also references the following books:

The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (Bina Venkataraman, Riverhead 2020)

The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (Richard Fisher, Wildfire 2023)

0.00 Introduction

2.58 Can you start by telling us about yourself and what led you into your research and career?

4.21 Let’s dive into your book ‘The Invention of Tomorrow. Can you give us your pitch for the book, who is this book for and what will your audience gain from reading it?

6.02 We take our ability to think about the future for granted, but how and why do you think this remarkable capability evolved?

8.56 What would have happened to our species had we not evolved this human foresight capability?

10.33 What role does memory play in foresight?

13.27 So let’s skip back to how foresight and innovation are intwined with one another. Can you bring to light some of the research and how you’ve come to understand how that relationship works?

15.32 What have you learned about how this ability impacts our morality?

17.27 As children we have amazing imaginations from an early age but our ability to envisage our responsibility takes longer to develop. So how do things like metacognition (our ability to imagine what that looks like from somebody else’s perspective) sit alongside foresight?

19.35 What have you learnt about our capacity to harness this and improve it? Is this a muscle that can be improved?

22.35 You mention short termism and our ability to ignore our foresight. What has your research uncovered about the profound mistakes that we can make when choosing to ignore foresight?

27.02 One of our former guests, futurologist Monika Bieleskyte believes that the role of the futurologist should be to try and create positive optimistic scenarios that we can get behind. How do you feel that our capacity for foresight works with that?

30.23 How much of our brain’s foresight is routed in our own subjective biased view of reality?

34.01 What have you learnt about foresight and wellbeing and what can we take forward from that?

36.33 How can we get more effective and efficient at testing our assumptions about the future and our ideas?

40.16 What are you working on at the moment? What’s next for you?

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and
.

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This is the first of a two part conversation that Jean has with tennis coach, Leon Smith. For the last decade, Leon has been the Great Britain Davis Cup captain and in 2015 he led the team to becoming world champions for the first time in 79 years.
In the first of these two episodes, Leon talks to Jean about what he's learned about leadership since starting coaching at 18 years of age.
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Have you ever wanted to travel through time and see what your life will be like in the future? While we want the best possible future for ourselves, we often fail to make decisions that would make that a reality. So why are so many of us so disconnected from our future selves?

This week on The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to psychologist Professor Hal Hershfield. Hal is Professor of Marketing, Behavioural Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and is committed to the work of helping people make better long-term decisions. In his 2023 book ‘Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today’ Hal explains that in our minds, our future selves often look like strangers. Many of us view the future as incredibly distant, making us more likely to opt for immediate gratification that disregards the health and wellbeing of ourselves in the years to come. He says that people who are able to connect with their future selves, however, are better able to balance living for today and planning for tomorrow.

This is a fascinating listen.
Referenced during this episode:
Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today

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 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