The Salience Podcast

On todays episode, we will be discussing what it is like to support the transformation of a 100 year-old institution with close to 100,000 employees across different countries. With me today is my friend Ian Macdonald. On top of being an amazing person to work with, Ian has over 25 years of experience in areas spanning entrepreneurship, communication, leadership development and strategy. He also has several creative specialties such as advertising, photography and design. Ian is currently part of the People Management area at Itaú Bank in Brazil where he is Head of Applied Complexity in the internal Transformation Consultancy.Ian is also a bi-lingual executive coach, consultant and facilitator in complex adaptive systems. Based physically in Brazil he has worked with a wide range of individual students, governments and corporate organisations from varying sectors and sizes in Latin America, United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Ian is a digital complex facilitation wizard, and also contributed to the design and implementation of the Itaú Complexity Lab where he now works.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

In this episode, we will be discussing what it means to facilitate strategic dialogue to work on intractable problems. With me today is practitioner of strategic dialogic methods, Marco Valente. Marco is currently a Consultant and member of the executive team at Cultivating Leadership. In this role, he is working primarily as a coach with both individuals and teams, and as a facilitator of executive teams to help them make meaning of their most pressing challenges. He uses a complexity-informed lens to tackle these challenges more effectively, and to create better team cohesion and social capital. He has also worked on multi-stakeholder dialogues with a diverse range of partners: from municipality planners across Europe, to LGBTI communities worldwide, to nanotechnology scientists at Harvard, and more. He describes his work as providing teams with formats to improve their capacity to make sense and skilfully act on complex challenges. His work is informed by complexity theories, a decade of experience in facilitation, and over five years as a university lecturer in “Leading for Sustainability”. Marco also blogs through his LinkedIn page, and his writing can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-uncertain-lets-embrace-its-promise-delight-marco-valente-yeede/ For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this week’s Salience Podcast, we explore anthropology, sensemaking and complexity.Our guest is Ellie Snowden. For those familiar with the Cynefin framework and its developer Dave Snowden, well Ellie is his daughter. Apart from an enormous requirement for personal resilience being Dave’s daughter, Ellie has developed her own deep competency in the field of anthro-complexity and sensemaking. Ellie leads the Cynefin company's work on health and healthcare with her experience of supporting centre members in their use of SenseMaker® and surrounding methods. In this episode, we talk about the importance of narratives in expanding our world view, and how surfacing multiple voices can help cultivate culture. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the Salience Podcast, we turn our attention to the relationship between human factors, systems, and analysis of safety incidents and accidents. As you might imagine, a company with a name like Frontline Mind is intimately involved with frontline action. The agencies and people we specialize in work in fast-paced, complex, and at times high-risk environments. Inevitably, there are near misses, incidents and accidents. How we best learn from these is not straightforward. In fact, when we work with agencies for the first time, we find that most after-action reviews or operational or cold debriefs have made matters worse. Partly, this is because there is an unrealistic focus on events that emerge and are only visible in hindsight. This is partly because there is a strong focus on errors and what went wrong. We can see and hear this bias in a deficit-based language where there is a focus on what went wrong. Now, I'm not a fan of an exclusive focus on what went well either. The danger of overdone positivity or staying in happy, clappy land is also unhelpful and is just as much of a concern as an obsession with what went wrong. So it's this use of language and the way we can direct attention that we are going to focus on today. And to help us unpack, how we can learn from near misses, incidents and accidents without falling into a judgmental binary of good and bad. we are joined by Dr. Steven Shorrock from Eurocontrol, where he works to support aviation throughout Europe with human factors, applied psychology and systems thinking and practice. Steven is a chartered psychologist and human factor specialist. He is editor in-chief of Hindsight Magazine and adjunct associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast Center for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the Salience Podcast we return to cross-domain mapping, exploring how tactical leadership and decision-making taught in the military can be applied to start-up and scale-up challenges for business and as a way to accelerate change in frontline agencies. One of the biggest challenges for military-trained leaders is adapting to the radically different power structure of civilian organisations. For starters, command and control just doesn't work the same way.I often see veterans appointed to civilian leadership roles and the civies just don't respond at all well to being told. I've seen the opposite where veterans really do lead adaptively using a range of leadership approaches that suit the situation. So today I want to tease apart the difference that makes a difference in effective leadership and decision making through that military lens. Today's guest is Ben Ford from Mission Control.Ben is a former Royal Marine and uses what he learned in the Defence Force to help veteran entrepreneurs develop a competitive advantage in business. I first came across Ben through LinkedIn where I noticed his posts about OODA, John Boyd's Observe, Orient, Decide, Act decision-making framework and how to apply that process in tech.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we explore risk and decision-making and consider what we can learn from fatal mistakes. In a number of our interviews, we have stressed the importance of safe to fail experimentation. This is of course the preferred way to learn. However, we can also learn from critical incidents that are not fatal to us. In today's interview we discuss one such profound experience that inspires me to remember some important aspects of human factors in decision making. Today's guest is Ken Wiley. Ken is a mounting guide by training, although he is known globally as an author, an engaging public speaker, and through his company Archetypal, he is an advisory and human hazard management educator. In 2003, Ken survived an avalanche that resulted in fatal consequences for seven guided clients.In a very humble way, Ken acknowledges he was part of a professional team whose failure to communicate and work together with mutual respect resulted in the fatal avalanche. Ken has detailed the background to the tragedy in his best -selling book, Buried. I recently had the privilege of listening to Ken's story at an avalanche conference in New Zealand. There are many similarities with what we teach in Frontline Mind. So I was inspired to reach out to Ken to relay his story on the Salient's podcast and pass along some of the most important lessons to our listeners.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the Salience Podcast , we are exploring feedback and feedforward in the complex space of policing and investigations. We are joined in this episode by Lou Hayes, who is a 26-year veteran Police Officer & Detective for a suburban Chicago police department. Some of his assignments have included: Patrol, Field Training Officer, Criminal Investigations, Firearms & Tactics Training Unit, Crisis Intervention Team, and SWAT. His current roles are with a regional homicide unit, with a passion for multi-agency intelligence & technology.Lou has also developed and pioneered The Illinois Model - a non-linear, problem-solving process for police officers. The model prioritizes life, Constitutional objectives, incident strategy, and tactics in rapidly changing and high-stakes circumstances. Since its development, The Illinois Model has expanded greatly to serve as a pathway to human and organizational adaptability.We chat with Lou about and feedforward loops, and how these are important when training teams and conducting investigations.http://www.theillinoismodel.com/p/what-is-illinois-model.htmlhttp://www.theillinoismodel.com/p/the-illinois-model-summary.htmlFor more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we return to our origins unpacking the patterns of behaviour of extreme high performers, learning what we can to apply in everyday life work and the rest of life. We are joined by Sara Stone. Sara is a professional sailor, and has sailed everything from dinghies to ocean racing yachts. She is currently in Barcelona preparing for the women's americas cup later this year.Our interest in Sara though is as much about her high level sailing as work experience - in a former life Sara was an epidemiologist and emergency response professional. So today I want to explore the similarities and differences between different facets of Sara’s experiences. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we explore feedback and feedforward in the context of design and innovation. We are joined today by Tom Kerwin. Tom has 25 years of experience as a leader in design, research and innovation. He’s co-founded two successful startups and worked both agency-side and in-house, coaching cross-functional teams to innovate. Tom is also the author of Innovation Tactics, the deck of cards from Pip Decks that’s packed with pragmatic methods for making things people want.   Since running his first usability test in 1999, Tom has been obsessed with adaptive sense-making. To quote from Tom’s bio “how do we continuously make sense of the world so we can act more effectively in it?” And that’s really at the heart of feedback and feedback and what we are exploring in this season’s Salience Podcast. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the Salient podcast, we journey into the world of mapping and explore the role of feedback and feedforward in navigating complexity. We are joined by Marcus Guest. Marcus is originally from the UK and is one of the small number of people actively developing adaptive strategy using Wardley maps.What's interesting about Marcus is his solid grounding in the science of complex adaptive systems. In his past life, Marcus worked in organisations in Europe and Asia, overseeing the rapid expansion of operations and as a strategy director in a leading consulting firm. In addition to the competitive use of Wardley maps, Marcus has a unique perspective on Eastern and Western approaches to strategy and complexity. Amongst all of these broad experiences,I want to challenge myself in today's interview to really zero in on the role of feedback and feed-forward within a mapping and adaptive strategy approach in business.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On This episode of The Salience Podcast, we journey into the world of superyachts to continue our explorations of feedback and feedforward. We are joined by Amanda Hewson-Beaver. We met relatively recently after Amanda reached out to collaborate on Resilience training, and we’ve just started a joint venture together. Her story of adventure on the high seas reads like an inspirational novel. Amanda literally ran away to sea as a youngster, before sailing the 7-seas in everything from small dinghies to 200 ft super yachts.Join us as we unpack the importance of feedback and forward in preparation at the elite end of Sailing.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On The Salience Podcast today, we continue our explorations of feedback and feedforward as a means of learning. Today I am joined by Joe Byerly. Joe has had a long career in the US Army, he’s an active duty Battalion Commander, he was a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and has provided strategic advice on warfare. Joe is also Founder of From the Green Notebook, which is where I came across Joe.The background to the green notebook idea came from Joe’s desire to create a place where leaders could share their experiences and help each other along the journey. He started looking in the place where he captured his own lessons and ideas for the future – his green notebook. That’s what I find inspirational, the discipline to keep a learning journal.Each month, Joe Byerly shares his reading journey with other leaders who are interested in finding books that will help them become better leaders and better people, and he interviews prominent leaders, especially military commanders, for his podcast. My inspiration to interview for this season of the Salience Podcast was to tease out his learnings from all those great leaders he has interviewed. And the very concept of using a notebook to reflect on feedback and project into future action is both simple and effective.https://fromthegreennotebook.com/podcast/?utm_content=cmp-trueFor more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On the Salience Podcast today, we are exploring feedback and feedforward in the complex space of international development. Joining us in this episode is Milica Begovic, the Head of Strategic Innovation at the United Nations Development ProgramMillie and her colleagues are pioneering new ways of doing development that build countries’ capacity to deliver change at scale. She has been involved in a number of bold initiatives such as the Accelerator Labs (which recently grew to 90 countries globally).  And this on top of a number of ongoing activities at the corporate and the regional level. Today we will be learning more about what strategic innovation means, and the feedback and feedforward loops, as well as innovative monitoring, evaluation and learning approaches and critical competencies that are important for organisations who want to adopt this bold approach to social innovation and change that matters.We learn from UNDP’s decade-long journey of strategic innovation that has been tested and scaled across 51 countries, whilst prioritising local impact, and transforming the organisation to create the right conditions to support beneficial impact for all partners involved.UNDP Strategic Innovation Medium sitehttps://medium.com/@undp.innovationBooks mentioned in this podcastInnovation in real placeshttps://global.oup.com/academic/product/innovation-in-real-places-9780197508114Seeing like a Statehttps://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-state/The Uncertainty Mindsethttps://uncertaintymindset.org/Organisations who inspired UNDP’s journeyhttps://www.climate-kic.org/https://marianamazzucato.com/https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/ucl-institute-innovation-and-public-purposehttp://www.corafoundation.org/https://ddc.dk/https://www.agirrecenter.eus/way/https://rodingenoff.com/https://www.vinnova.se/For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the salience podcast, we continue to explore feedback and feedforward. Feedback is the flow of information about past events. It is the opportunity to review and learn from decisions and actions.  Feedforward is the anticipatory preparation for future events, it is the opportunity to orient ahead of time and to set up to test assumptions and biases through observations in real-time as situations unfold.  Both feedback and feedforward are central to taking a strategic approach to our endeavors, be that in business or those aspects of life that we prefer to not leave to chance, although living life as a random walk through curiosity space is a legitimate choice too. Our guest today is JP Castlin. JP is a strategist, author and provocateur. Join us as we discuss how we can effectively use feedback and feedforward in the spectrum of approaches between orderly well-planned strategies, complex adaptive strategies, and what seem to be random walks through curiosity space. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the salience podcast, we continue to explore feedback and feedforward. There are several different ways to create an effective feedback-feedforward loop, especially using different patterns of visualisation, with deliberate use of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives. As I started reaching out to various experts to interview for this season, I realised that no one uses 1st, 2nd, and 3rd better than my co-author of our book Resilience by Design and guest today Mike Weeks. Mike and I co-founded Frontline Mind together in 2017, and grew the company until 2021, until Mike left America to move on to environmental projects in Indonesia and the Middle East and I continued with Frontline Mind.Before coaching, Mike was a professional free climber, where he pushed the boundaries of free soloing and hard bold climbs. I suspect that such risk-taking, with deadly consequences for getting things wrong, redefines what most people consider to be risky. join us today as we discuss anticipating risk and the benefits of using 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives and the use of feedback-feedforward loops when doing so.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of the salience podcast, we explore feedforward. A form of preemptive scenario testing and preparation to avoid events going wrong and to develop systemic resilience ahead of events going wrong. In a return to learning from military leadership, I am joined by retired Navy Commander, Brady Turnage. Brady had a 20-year aviation career that culminated as the Commanding Officer of a carrier-based jet squadron.Currently, Brady is an instructor at ‘The Program’ - a US veteran leadership development and team building company and he is a high school head lacrosse coach. Join us as we explore feedforward loops through the lens of military planning and lacrosse.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

Today, on The Salience Podcast we begin Season 3 with an in depth exploration of feedback and feedforward.Feedback is the flow of information about past events. It is the opportunity to review and learn from decisions and actions.Feedforward is the anticipatory preparation for future events, it is the opportunity to orient ahead of time and to test assumptions and biases through observations in real-time as situations unfold. Our guest today is Murray Hopkins. Murray has over 35 years experience as a facilitator and coach in leadership development Working with individuals, teams and organisations through his business Curiosity Skilled the Cat.Today we will focus on personal feedback into feedforward and what many people regard as ‘difficult conversations’. We prefer to reframe such conversations to “coaching with curiosity”.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

On this episode of The Salience Podcast, we conclude Season 2 with a deep dive into quitting. Our guest today is Annie Duke. Annie is a former world champion poker player and the best-selling author of Thinking in Bets, How to Decide, and her most recent book, Quit, the Power to Know When to Walk Away. Tune in as we discuss managing exit risk from sticky or downright deadly situations when attempts to Quit could have major or even fatal consequences. These are the sorts of choices that frontline workers often have to make, it’s the challenge of quitting crappy jobs or a bullying boss when we might have to accept a reduced salary and less favorable lifestyle, and it’s the daily reality of people, mostly women, who live in abusive relationships.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

In today’s episode of The Salience Podcast, we explore more of the tough topics of surviving workplaces with a deep dive into office politics. Our guest is bestselling author Niven Postma. Niven is an expert in organisational politics and the author of “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you – A guide to navigating office politics ethically and successfully”.She is a visiting lecturer at Henley Business School and a Harvard Business Review Contributor, and has had a wide and varied executive career across multiple organisations and sectors.In today’s conversation, Niven draws on her experiences and offers some practical tips for dealing with office politics.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614

In this episode of The Salience Podcast we explore risk and culture and consider what we can all learn from the avalanche forecast industry..Our guest today is Drew Hardesty. Drew has over 20 years experience as a backcountry avalanche forecaster at the Utah Avalanche Center, and 15 years experience as a Climbing Ranger in Grand Teton National Park. Drew is widely regarded as a thought leader in the industry and his philosophical musings in his newsletter Life, Not After Death, But Before are relevant to anyone who is interested in culture, risk and living life to the fullest.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614