Intuitive Leadership
Vision, Mission & VUCA
I’d like you to meet Dean Newlund, founder of Mission Facilitators and author of THE BUSINESS OF INTUITION. Dean, welcome. Why don’t you tell our listeners a bit about yourself, your firm and how you're doing today.
We want to be working with companies that are bravely and boldly focusing on the future
Thank you, Carlos. We've got a company that's based in Phoenix, Arizona, we've been around since 1992. We've worked with mostly medium to large scale businesses locally, nationally, and some internationally. They hire us to do strategic planning, large scale culture, change work, teamwork, the things that you do: leadership development. And I think that really what we're focused on right now, as I think about the whole pandemic and how the changes are affecting businesses, is those organizations who are really wanting to focus on the future and bravely and boldly move into that space. We want to support them in being able to reach those larger goals. It's not to say that we don't work with organizations who are holding back, but we find ourselves very interested in very purpose-centered teams and organizations who, quite frankly, are trying to change their own world. Within the world at large, it's a lot more fun to be playing with people who are doing some really big stuff. That's what we like to do.
The Business of Intuition
Like you, if the work’s not interesting, if I’m not growing why am I here? Now, about your podcast, The Business of Intuition: That’s a great title. Why did you choose it?
I'm always trying to get intuition out of the closet and into the boardroom. That's why I wanted it to be called that. But this has been on my mind for a long time: I've noticed in team meetings, board meetings, executive meetings, that there's usually people who speak up a lot and say things because they have facts and information to back up their ideas. We have guiding principles in organizations that say fact-based decision making certainly makes sense. And certainly in scientific organizations, that makes a lot of sense.
But I also noticed that there's a lot of people holding back their ideas, their perspectives, their gut sense, because they've not been able to say, I am basing this idea on a fact. It's just a hunch. What I understand is, the higher up you go in an organization, the more important intuition becomes because it makes you a better listener, a better strategic planner, a better problem solver. We don't necessarily allow the entire rank and file to tap into that intuitive side. When we do we start seeing more engagement, better ideas, better creativity.
So fast forward, I was able to do a TED talk on that topic of intuition in Bend, Oregon about a year and a half ago, and it was such a fun experience. I thought, I want to keep this conversation going forward. That's why I decided to do a podcast on that topic. We've had just about 40 to 50 different guests, you being one of them. They're all talking about their experience around intuition in business and decision making. And it's just been fascinating. I've learned probably as much as everybody else has.
decision by intuition.
So that we’re all working from a shared understanding, how do you define intuition?
It's hard to define something where the experience does not reside in the part of the brain that brings out language. It's really at cross purposes. When you look at the brain structure intuition does not reside in the language section. So, we're left with having to define something without the tools in which to do it. The way you would say, what is intuition: it's a feeling. It's a knowing, it's something that some sort of a little light bulb goes off and goes, I don't know what this means, but it feels right, or it sounds right. That kind of inner knowing is what intuition is. And if you can trust it, and apply it, and your ego isn't running the show, you're not just doing it for your own purposes, but it really feels like something has just sort of landed in you. I have noticed CEOs talk about that process, and they make a decision. “Yes, well, we will refer to our spreadsheets and our strategic plan and all of those other things: bottom line and scorecards.” By the end, these people normally make those big decisions based on gut.
Even with all the data and research available on decision-making, studies consistently show that even big decisions are made based on intuition or gut, or – I like your phrase – inner knowing.
And the tough thing is as we know, Carlos, is that intuition has this bad rap. It doesn't have anything that we can hold on to we think it's flaky. We think it's not business, like it's non-scientific, it doesn't have any history involved with it. But if we're going to be recreating our world here, if we're going to be charting a new course, as we start to come out of the ashes of this, we will not go back to the way things were. We are being forced into transformation, whether we like it or not. Businesses are having to transform. And if they're not now they will be. Therefore the old style of thinking that was successful in 2019 is not going to be the same sort of thinking that needs to take place in 2021, we need to increase the metabolism of our thinking. And I think intuition is going to play a role in that.
Will Artificial Intelligence eventually replace intuition?
I attended a conference a few years back where several speakers posited that Artificial Intelligence was already capable of taking on basic management processes. Not just where people are and their hours worked, but things like decision making. So all that’s left to us humans is our intuition.
I was talking to another person on a podcast episode a while back, and I just sort of came into this term where as we're sort of getting to this process with AI, where you could almost call it “reverse anthropo-morphization”, meaning that we are now putting technical terms to define human behavior. And we're now expecting people to behave in the same way in which we would want our technology to behave. I mean, for example, you want to send off an email to somebody, our expectation is we're going to get a response pretty darn quick. And part of that I think, is very encouraged by our cell phones and so forth, that are so quick in its ability to get an answer back, we're now expecting that same sort of speed with people. That's just one example. There's this talk about a singularity where human beings and technology sort of become indistinguishable from one another and if that's the case, is this then the last generation of what it really feels like to be “human”? And if that's the case, is not intuition, something that can never be replicated by a technical device? And is this something that we should be holding on to and cherishing as our human-ness so that's the stuff that I'm thinking about.
You’ve been in this field for over thirty years. What got you into consulting?
It wasn't the route that you would think. Let's get an MBA, let's study up on business theory, let's go get an internship, let's work for some large company like Accenture. That was not my path. And in fact, it was anything but. I was an individual as a young lad trying to find himself. I was a writer for a while. Then I got really involved in theater and I thought theatre and acting would be my profession.
How studying theatre evolved into learning and leading
I have an MFA in theater! Did we discuss that on your podcast, The Business of Intuition?
Well, you touched upon it, but we never dug into it. But I know that we have this connection.
I really got an interesting education in acting. And there was a program out of the University of Washington, it was a PATP program called the professional actors training program, there were only a handful of those around the country. It just so happened we had a school at the time that was sort of rated number three in the world of the country. And, and, and I was very, very fortunate to be hanging out with these people for three years in boot camp, right? So what does that all mean? It means that I got to learn about myself, and I got to learn about motivation, and what drives people's behavior, because it wasn't just a theory, okay, let's read a book. Let's read Lencioni whatever. But we had to put on the coat of motivation by acting it out. We were in the sort of the Stanislavski perspective, it has to come from yourself.
This was not the British perspective, the “Well, my dear boy, just put on the coat and act as if you were.” No, you actually had to feel your own intuitive and motivational inspiration for putting words out of your mouth. And they had to make sense. All of a sudden, I got three years of understanding motivation. I got three years of understanding character development and what makes people tick and what are the problems and so forth. Teamwork, my God having to be in a play with a team for two months putting it together. It's intense. And it's dramatic, in the truest sense, but also in the metaphor works.
As a result of that, I learned a ton. I started doing some teaching to be able to make money for all of these expenses. I was teaching undergraduate students. Something about the teaching process scared the crap out of me, because I realized that I was more prone to teaching than I was to the theater. And I didn't want to pay attention to that.
Eventually, I got basically a year-long certification in being a coach back in the day when coaching was not even part of our lexicon of business practices. It was still seen as only a reference towards sports. So I, after I got this certification and went through a lot of training and coaching, I realized theater was gone, but the teaching and the coaching, and really the facilitation is what I found myself to be so passionate about, I always wanted to do Romeo and Juliet and say, “Okay, now that we’ve done the play, all that you out of there stay in your seats. So, let's sit around and talk about it. What did you learn? What did we learn as actors?” That's what I always wanted to do, but then they would leave and I thought, “Oh, big opportunity missed!”
So that's what started this. Once the coaching practice got off the ground in Seattle back in ‘92, it just grew. It grew into other things, I learned more and I got more training and so forth. But that was the impetus and there's still a through line for everything that I do that goes back to those early days.
Your description of your acting journey resonates beautifully. Theatre tells a story, and each team has a story to tell as well. So, I consider it my job to help teams tell their story.
lasting concepts about leadership
Leadership development wasn’t discussed until sometime after WWII. The Tavistock Institute, National Training Labs, Deming, etc. Around the 1960’s it really caught fire. What are some of the old nuggets of knowledge from those days that you think are still relevant and important today?
Mission statements: still relevant after all these years. So I'll tell you a quick story. I was doing some facilitation with the group of executives with Weyerhaeuser many years ago, somewhere on the west coast. These are the people, the guys and gals that had all of the budget, all the resources that could possibly want, there was no reason why they couldn't do a new program, a new training, they had it all. By the way, this is just about a team development to get the executive team, the group takes her to get to know each other better, and to build some alignment. At the end of this day, the top guy stood up and said, “Tthis was really great. I really appreciate this, we did a lot. But I still don't know what business we're in.”
And I went, Oh, my gosh, if you guys don't know what business you're in, does that then mean other people don't know as well? So, I started going on this little quest around mission statements, because it seemed like it was a mission question that he was asking: “what are we really doing here? What is our North Star? Do we have alignment and clarity and buy-in and commitment towards what are really our purposes with respect to this company or this team?”
Of course, mission statements have been around for a long time. But I don't think that we do them well. I think that we are still so short term focused around this quarter and that quarter, and getting our numbers met, that we don't ever take the time to ask these questions.
The 5 questions that lead to a mission statement
There are five questions that make a mission statement really effective.
Simple, it's sort of like your old journalism classes.
Who are we?
What do we do?
For whom do we do it, i.e. our customer? It's amazing how many people don't really know what that is, or they think they know, and other people think it's something else.
How do we do it? And then
Why? which is sort of the why of Simon Sinek’s - the Golden Circle.
If we can answer those five questions, and we get everybody to come together and really understand what those five questions mean through some facilitation, and they get into that clarity, then strategic planning becomes much more effective. We're not trying to do a strategy or achieve a goal without having those foundational questions answered.
I often get into planning sessions and find out, wait a minute, this is not really a strategic planning session, or also we were a mission-creation session. They haven't even answered these basic questions here.
What I try to do is find a way to simplify it. Make the experience something that doesn't make people feel like they're going to the dentist to get a root canal. That is an engaging, useful process. I think that we can use the mission statement as the foundational hub of our planning, and refer to it on a regular basis. Not just once and done, and it gets dusty, and we put it into an annual report. No, this is a real living document that helps guide our decisions and our planning. Then I think we have alignment, we have effectiveness, we have productivity and can find answers to all those basic questions.
Team mission statements
While I work with senior teams, my greatest satisfaction comes from working with a level or two below the top team where they are trying to make sense of what the heck they’re supposed to do, to create value. How do you feel about teams having a mission statement?
Absolutely, if you go by the premise of the mission statement, answer some bedrock questions, like who are we? What do we do? for example. Well, let's just take that first one, who are we? And then what do we do? If I'm in marketing, who we are and what we do is different than what the research and development people do. So we can have subsets. It's like the town you live in is a community, and it has a focus and a purpose. Hopefully it aligns to and connects to and supports the state. And the state connects and aligns theoretically to the country.
So, the same premises, the same ideas, the same clarity, the same engagement, the same focus is needed on the local level as it is on a larger level. In fact, maybe one could even say more so because they're the ones who actually have to implement the vision. They're the go between. We're taking the CEOs’ ideas and translating them into reality; we’re the alchemists who have to make all these ideas work. We have to get real clear about what we do, how we do it, all of those basic tenets that make a good mission statement good.
Vision statements vs mission statements
And what about vision statements? Many people conflate the two concepts, mission and vision; I see them as different in important ways so I’m curious - Why did you choose to discuss mission statements instead of vision statements?
Well, I just think that the mission is getting a little bit closer to operationalizing the vision. In my mind, it's almost like you come into a community, you have to know what the language is. How do we then communicate with each other? And since we use words like vision and mission and values so ubiquitously, let's just don't assume that we know what we're talking about.
For vision, I think a vision is a battle cry. And I mean to use necessarily a violent term like something to do with war. A vision statement says this will probably take two or three lifetimes for us to ever achieve. It focuses our attention, it makes us realize that this is really what we're about.
For example, at one point, I think the vision for Microsoft was to have a computer on everybody's desk.
Coca Cola’s was to have a Coca Cola within arm's reach of every human being on the planet.
One of our clients, Goodwill of central and northern Arizona, has a vision to end unemployment.
Now, is that possible? Heck, no. That's not going to be something that they can do. They're going to have to collaborate with a lot of other nonprofits and government agencies, and will probably take lifetimes for them to achieve. And even then it seems a little bit ridiculous to think that that could actually happen. But it focuses people's attention.
We are all about putting people to work. Right? So a vision statement’s clarity really gets us to that. That to me is a vision. The mission starts bringing it into a little bit more clarity around things that have to do with how we then implement it given today's environment, whatever that might be. That's my distinction between vision and mission.
Team vision statement
So, if a team is mid- to upper level, say a functional group, should that team have a vision statement, too?
I think it can, because it does add clarity, again, on a more aspirational level. If it is useful for the organization to have a vision, why wouldn't it be useful for a team, two or three steps down from the senior team? I don't see why that couldn't be valuable.
It's also a way of branding. I don't mean let's all go wear t-shirts and have our vision statement, although there are teams that have done that, but it serves the same purpose. It says basically, this is the accentuation of why are we doing what we're doing. It's that fifth question in the five that I was stating, it's the Why, what's this all about? And then if you can align the individual to that, “What’s my Why, what am I about, what am I supposed to be doing? What's my purpose? Can I find that and do I get a chance to express that in this team, and in this company?” Well, then now we've got almost like an electrical current, a flow between individual team and organization and community, and then back again, that's where things get really exciting.
New inspiring idea: the Neuroscience of influence
So, your favorite “old” idea is mission statements. What new-ish idea inspires you today?
There's one I'll say and probably like you, Carlos, there's never a want for new ideas that are interesting, because that's part of the world in which we live. But I think the one that I choose to talk about is neuroscience. The neuroscience of influence. I'm not a doctor, I don't understand it to the degree that many, many do. But the stuff that I'm reading is fascinating. In 2008, David Rock brought out the SCARF. It's a way to be able to help us understand the way the brain perceives information.
SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others." SCARF stands for the five key "domains" that influence our behavior in social situations. These are:
Status – our relative importance to others.
Certainty – our ability to predict the future.
Autonomy – our sense of control over events.
Relatedness – how safe we feel with others.
Fairness – how fair we perceive the exchanges between people to be.
As I understand it, it gets down to the unconscious brain either sees a threat or a benefit. That's it. It doesn't care about your goals, it doesn't care what you look like going to a dinner, it just wants to know, is this a benefit that I should be moving forward with in alignment and in partnership? Or is this something that is a threat, Friend or Foe that I should be pushing my way out away from and getting away from?
And so that has been fascinating to me, because it's starting to get people, executives in particular, to realize they have to be cognizant of how they communicate in such a way that hopefully won't trigger that threat response. Is it about fairness? Is it about relatedness? About autonomy? So that is what I'm finding currently interesting.
I just presented this idea to an executive team yesterday, and they really took to it. As they are going through the beginnings of thinking about a post-COVID world, they know that they have to realize that we've been in a threat mindset for a long time. And that even scientifically speaking, that the brain even in good days, still perceives an individual or a situation as a threat five times more than a benefit. So we're already predisposed to see the negative in situations. We're sort of hardwired that way.
The prime directive of the brain, the subconscious brain, is safety. That reptilian brain that says, “Okay, I'm in a cave, I've got to be careful of those saber toothed Tigers out there.” everything is caution. That's how we're made to think. That's on THE top of my mind.
Where can we find more on that topic?
DavidRock.net The Neuroleadership Institute. The neuroscience of influence talks about the SCARF model. It's not a long article. It doesn't take a PhD to understand it. But we can certainly send that to your listeners .
SCARF Takeaway for a mid-level team leader
Is there a practical concept from the neurology of leadership that a director-level or even manager-level team leader could use with their teams?
Certainty. That's one of the things that the brain is seeking to have. Regular updates. There was a healthcare organization I was working with that has regular updates around what's going on with COVID, and the vaccines and so forth. That has made a huge difference in the culture of that organization, because they're taking care of the people's need for certainty, being able to understand what's going on. I may not like it, I may be afraid of it. But at least I know.
Without certainty, our brains make up stories to fill in the blanks.
The brain creates all sorts of wonderful stories when we don't know something for certain. Those stories can be compounded if wrong information is presumed. If we give people that clarity of information on a regular basis, we don't withhold that, that's important.
I think that the word transparency is another one of those words we use a lot, pushing the boundaries around transparency even more so than what we think. I know that there are human resource laws around not revealing why a person was fired. I understand that. But to the degree that you can, the more transparent you are, you also then start evoking vulnerability.
Evoking vulnerability can build trust
Some of the things you're being transparent about may not necessarily be in your favor. When you open up yourself to vulnerability, people begin to trust you. You actually are fallible just like I am. So going back to the SCARF model and neuroscience, with the VUCA world that we’re in, a team could be transparent and give people regular updates on what's going on. But we're running so fast, we're just trying to put out fires. We're in crisis mode, and we forget people don't know what we know, and they want to know it.
VUCA
That acronym VUCA stands for…?
It came from the military a while back, Volatility Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. It describes a world in military terms where all bets are off. If you watch some of these old movies, about wars that were fought 2, 3, 400 years ago, it was pretty certain about how your troops would move. Now it's just like guerrilla warfare, and you can't be certain of anything. That term became very popular in business because the world is in such an uncertain time of transformation, that we have to adapt different ways of adjusting to that world. I think that's where it got popularized.
The future of work
Okay, If all goes well, we are looking at herd immunity from COVID-19 sometime in late 2021. What does your intuition tell you the future of how we work will look?
Oh, good one.
It's hard to answer that because there's a desire for something, And then there's what really will happen. I have a desire to travel again. I have a desire for all sorts of things like going to restaurants, as we all do. I have a desire to see my mom after a year. All those are strong desires. But what do I sense may happen? I don't really know.
Somebody once said that after we have this COVID thing under wraps, it's going to be sort of like the roaring 20s where we're just going to go out and party and drink, and fornicate, and have fun and travel. It's going to be an all out Mardi Gras. So that's the extreme of one person's idea, right? I think there's a possibility for that, certainly.
But I also don't want to underestimate the downstream effects of the year of depression and loneliness and fear. There was a guy that I talked to recently, he said, “Dean, I don't even know how I'm thinking right now. I don't even know where I'm at.”
And I said,”When we got back from Vietnam, nobody knew of that type of stress and what it meant. Later we called it PTSD. At some point, we will have a phrase for this kind of stress, we will call it something. Somebody will write a book about it. It will become a process. Right now we don't even have that. I think we will have that. And I think there will be different ways to treat people and to behave with people in a way that is representative of this sort of subterranean long term stress that we've been going through.
Returning to entrepreneurship after the stress of COVID-19: let’s boldly plan
I also get sort of concerned that we've lost our edge, call it the “American way” or the spirit, whatever it is. But it's that entrepreneurial risk-taking, bold thinking, part of our national identity that a lot of companies feel that they have. I want to make sure that I think that that's a possibility. That could take a while to retrieve because we're still anticipating when the other shoe is gonna drop. Is there going to be another pandemic that will come up?
So, are we going to play cautiously, or are we going to boldly go where no person has gone before, and then adjust as needed? My point of view is, let's boldly plan. Let's don't be putting our heads in the sand. Let's be very, very aware of what's needed now. But let's continue to plan. Let's continue to move forward because that's how we get our economies back; how we get our mental health back; how we get our lives back.
Thank you so much for sharing these fascinating and useful insights.
You're just a kindred spirit and I so appreciate your work and all you've written about. I feel like we're distant brothers from a different mother.
When all this is over, I truly look forward to sitting down to coffee with you and meeting face-to-face. And thank you, brilliant listeners.
Take care.