EPISODE #2.2:

When the Heat is On, Learn to Lead with Jerry Abrams, Envisioneer, Center for Creative Leadership  

Or listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Stressed anyone? Most likely, you like the rest of us, are experiencing some degree of pandemic anxiety. Yet these chaotic times provide us with unprecedented opportunities for learning, if we are paying attention. 

According to  Jerry Abrams, adjunct faculty and senior fellow at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS), and Envisioneer at the Center for Creative Leadership: 

When the heat is on, learn, learn, learn! 

These volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous circumstances we find ourselves in provide us with the perfect conditions to grow as leaders. 

In this episode, Jerry shows you how to become an “agile learner.” He provides you with a simple roadmap that you can follow in as little time as 10 to 15 minutes a day. 

By following this process, we can successfully weather our current storm and emerge stronger and better able to lead in an uncertain future. 

Let’s face it – our world is not  likely to return to normal anytime soon.  So you need to prepare for a new normal. And Jerry provides you with the tools. 

Here is a snapshot of a few topics we cover in this podcast…

• How you can grow professionally through heat experiences 
• Ways to deal with the complexity of the circumstances we find ourselves in 
• Mindsets that enable us to become agile learners in times of accelerated change
• How to build resilience under stress
• A simple and quick process to follow for intentional learning during this crisis 

If you are interested in more information, here are some additional links and resources related to this episode: 

When the Heat is On, Learn Learn Learn! 

What VUCA Means to You

Jerry Abrams on LinkedIn

About Jerry Abrams

Mr. Abrams is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Faculty with the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS), and Envisioneer at the Center for Creative Leadership. He received his Master’s degree in International Management, Finance and International Political Economy from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. He teaches courses in Leadership, Team Performance, Conflict, Influence, Decisions, Negotiation, and Collaborative Innovation. As a CLiGS Senior Fellow, he participates in developing strategic direction and educational programming as well as providing advice on business development strategy. He has publications on group decision processes in the Journal of Military Medicine and Phytopathology. His personal research interests include the intersection of neuroscience, social psychology, and leadership.

EPISODE #2.2 TRANSCRIPT

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Welcome to the Conscious Culture Café, the podcast that explores how you can lean into your purpose, live your values, and enhance your social impact through your work. I’m your host Kathy Miller Perkins. What are you learning from our current challenging times? Are you taking the time to reflect? My guest today is Jerry Abrams, Envisioneer with the Center for Creative Leadership and member of the faculty at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS).

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Recently, Jerry wrote a wonderful article about how we can learn from what he refers to as heat experiences. He’s here to tell us more about this topic as it relates to the current crisis we are all living through, and he will share tips on how we can take advantage of our current heat experiences to learn, and to become more resilient leaders.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Welcome, Jerry. Let’s dig right in. Can you tell me a little bit more about VUCA and heat experiences?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. So VUCA’s actually a relatively old concept to the military in particular, and it just talks about volatility, and uncertainty, and ambiguity, and these are things that they began to see, and began to plan for some years ago, and so they kind of coined this acronym. Basically, it’s just when things are going chaotically.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Okay. Well, that’s now.

Jerry Abrams:

A lot of uncertainty, and so forth, and ambiguity, and you just got to try to muddle your way through it as best you can, so that’s really what the VUCA’s about. And then, heat experiences, so heat experiences are those things where that kind of uncertainty is available to be used for learning.It is one thing that things are chaotic, it’s another where those things present the opportunity for learning.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

What’s the difference? What’s the difference between chaotic and opportunity for learning?

Jerry Abrams:

Well, the difference might be if it’s extraordinary, and you really don’t have time to pause, and reflect, and do some things then there’s probably too much stress, too much going on for you to actually have significant learning. The point is to stretch you, but not break you. And so if you’re to the breaking point it’s probably not time to use this for learning, but if you can step back from it a moment or two, and you’re not to the breaking point, then you can use it for learning.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Okay, so there’re probably some people who are at a breaking point, but there’re a lot of us who aren’t, so it’s going to be interesting to hear what, and how, we can learn from this experience.

Jerry Abrams:

Yes, so let me talk a little bit then about what a heat experience actually is.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Okay, great.

Jerry Abrams:

Right, so CCL did some work a while back, and we came up with basically three dimensions to what we call a heat experience. One of them is the challenge is unfamiliar, the challenge is complex, and it creates a fear of failure, or some sense of vulnerability in you. And so, these are the conditions where heat is absolutely, and then we said, okay, there’re sort of levels of these things, so not all heat experiences are equally intense.

Jerry Abrams:

So low level one heat is a known problem, and there’s a known solution. That’s probably not very hot in the sense of heat that we’re talking about here. Known problems, but unknown solutions, we would say that’s a level two, and that’s more heat. And then, the most heat, level three, is where there are unknown problems and unknown solutions.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Bingo.

Jerry Abrams:

You can imagine that’s a lot of complexity. Right?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, no kidding.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, managing that complexity is really what the opportunity for learning is.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

So where are we in terms of the levels now? What are the characteristics of the circumstances we’re facing now?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. So I think overall you could find examples of all three of these, so for some things we know what it takes to solve a certain kind of problem medically. We know what it takes to do certain things epidemiologically, and so forth. In other cases, we don’t know. We don’t know what the solutions are.

Jerry Abrams:

So we know what the problem is, the virus has certain impacts on the body, but we don’t necessarily have a solution at the moment, i.e. we don’t have a vaccine, we don’t have good treatments, but we have some sense at least of what goes on in the body. We don’t have complete sense. Obviously, there’s much more work to be done. Part of what makes it novel is we’ve not seen it before, but it’s analogous in some ways to other coronaviruses, and at least we assume it is.

Jerry Abrams:

And then, on the economic side we’ve seen downturns, and in fact if you go far enough back to other pandemic situations, which have existed, although nearly 100 years or more ago in some cases. You can look back at history and say, well, we’ve gone through something like this, but the lessons maybe are long gone in some cases.

Jerry Abrams:

So then, there are other things that are just unknown, like we’ve actually never shut down an economy that’s this interdependent. There’s lots of other things now that make … Even though we’ve done shutdowns before for different reasons this one’s different because the conditions in which the economy is operating is different.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Say more about that. What’s different about it? What makes it so unique?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. So again, I think the largest one really is the interdependence, and particularly in the supply chains, right?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, yeah.

Jerry Abrams:

Things come from all over the world, and so as this thing has unfolded in different parts of the world it’s had different impacts on different parts of the supply chains, and that then works down locally. You’ve got supply chain issues inside different countries that have different challenges. Then you talk about different categories of supply chains, food, medical, other kinds of device support, other things, so there’s just this really complex interdependent global … And then, you layer on top of that the political, right? Because there is not necessarily alignment between all the political bodies that own parts of the supply chain.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right.

Jerry Abrams:

Right, that supply chain lives and operates.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

One of the things you said a minute ago is we know what the problems are, at least to some degree we know how the virus affects the body, and so forth, but one of the things that’s been interesting to me over the last few days is that new issues seem to be cropping up. There’re new issues with kids for example, new symptoms that are cropping up, so I’m not sure that we know what we know, and what we don’t know, at the moment, which adds to the complexity I would think.

Jerry Abrams:

It does. And then, if you sort of zoom out for a minute, and say, okay, there’s a leader, there are workers somewhere in the world that may work for that leader in some way, and then there’s this third thing called social media.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, yeah.

Jerry Abrams:

And other media sources, which now are impacting beliefs, and values, and behaviors on the workforce, which the leader now has to respond to, and there’re politicians, and so it’s just gotten … All the lack of clarity and information, the misuse of information, the way in which social media has played into this, and it’s not that there was not misinformation in previous settings in other places, but the speed, and the amount of misinformation that is possible with the distribution systems that are in place around social media make this I think a more complex problem as well.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

How should leaders be addressing this, or even thinking about this? The level of complexity seems overwhelming. How should leaders learn? What should they be doing?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah, so again, some research from CCL, some of my colleagues there, and in partnership with Columbia University, and the teacher’s college inside Columbia University, spent a couple years studying this whole notion of learner agility, and how can you make people, leaders, better able to learn faster basically, and their thinking was then, even then before this grand crisis before us, that things were changing fast enough as it was. We didn’t need a pandemic.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Really? No kidding. Right.

Jerry Abrams:

You know, so we were going to look at what can you do in times of such accelerated change, and the term that came out of all of this was learning agility. Really that’s sort of a mindset, or a collection of beliefs, and some practices that reinforce agility, and then there’s one that kind of works against agility that they identified. And so, those four things really involved in this learning agility are innovating, which is defined as questioning the status quo, and challenging assumptions, to uncover new ways of doing things.

Jerry Abrams:

The second of the enablers was what they labeled performing, which is remaining present and engaged under stress, so you can see the relationship of learning agility to heat here, right?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, yeah.

Jerry Abrams:

And basically, you need to use keen observation, and listening skills, as well as the ability to process data quickly in that performing capability, or practice. Then there’s reflecting, which is basically being hungry for feedback, focusing energy on processing the information, and generating deeper insights. And so, you can see now there’s heat, there’s questioning, there’s reflecting where you’re beginning to transform some of that stuff into some insights.

Jerry Abrams:

And then, there’s this last one called risking, which is basically you have to put yourself out there. You have to venture into unknown territory. You’ve got to be uncomfortable with sort of progressive risk, and this is the stretching outside your comfort zone.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right.

Jerry Abrams:

And really, this is that difference between stretching yourself and breaking. You don’t want to go to the point of breaking when you’re putting yourself out there, but you do want to stretch yourself. And then, the last one, that practice that I said works against learning agility, is called defending. Basically it’s being closed, or defensive, when challenged or giving critical feedback.

Jerry Abrams:

So if you don’t take critical feedback well, or you get defensive when someone challenges your ideas, or you, and your position on something, that’s working against your learning agility.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

I can imagine. When I hear you talk about the four enablers there’s a lot of discomfort that comes with all of them, really, and for example in the performing one, remaining present, and engaged under stress, that takes a cool head to do that. That takes a lot of self-awareness and self-control. I would think that would be hard for a lot of leaders who are used to being in control, because in this uncertainty they’re really not in control, so it seems to me this will be a new experience for a lot of leaders.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

What do you think?

Jerry Abrams:

Yes. I think that’s right, and of course there’s a lot of research, some CCL’s been involved with, and others have as well, around resilience, how do you build resilience under stress, and prepare for stress, and so that’s really the kind of thing you could apply to develop some of that performing capability.

Jerry Abrams:

And you’ll see things like mindfulness, and meditation, other kinds of ancient arts, really, that have been around forever in certain places of the globe, not as much in the Western World recently. And so, those kinds of things, as well as some basics like eating well, sleeping, getting exercise, all those things help build resilience, and make you less likely to be stressed, and to respond to stress.

Jerry Abrams:

So again, in the stress literature you’ll see things call eustress, and eustress is good stress, and it’s about how do you transform things that appear stressful into positive events and energy for you.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Interesting.

Jerry Abrams:

And it’s about how you respond to it mostly. So you can find a lot of work that’s been done around stress, and how to prepare better for it.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

And so, is that research saying that this is intentional, that it needs to be intentional that someone who wants to become resilient needs to become more self-aware of when the stress is starting to make them anxious? What are the lessons for leaders?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah, I think that’s right. There’s a whole range of things that leaders need to do, and obviously beginning with paying attention to yourself, your body, what is your emotional response? How is that showing up in your physical response? And it turns out that we all have sort of a native baseline if you will to how reactive we are.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Really? Interesting.

Jerry Abrams:

You can change it over time, but if you were to measure it at a moment in time you’re somewhere along a spectrum from very calm and collected to very reactive.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, interesting, so individual differences. It’s very interesting.

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah, there are. Yeah.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

So why is learning agility relevant now do you think?

Jerry Abrams:

I think it goes back to what we were saying earlier, which is just that there’s so much ambiguity and uncertainty right now, and so where there is level two, and level three, kind of heat in the real world, that’s where you need to start learning, and in order to do that you can’t be in panic mode. You’ve got to be reflecting, you’ve got to be present, and paying attention, and then you’ve got to be questioning the status quo, so you’ve got to do these four things.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, there are these massive upheavals in the economies. There’s massive uncertainty around the health pandemic itself. And then, finally, there’s a lot of uncertainty in human behavior, so how are people responding to the information, good, bad, or truthful, or untruthful they’re getting and reacting to, and unfortunately for everything to happen, even under the best laid plans, you need something called compliance.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah. Something that we’re not very good at in this country sometimes.

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. So a lot of us have seen some videos of noncompliance around the country at different moments in time, and so you might have built a strategy, but if you can’t influence people of all ages, and purposes, religion, space, political orientations, or whatever you can imagine, to comply then that plan is compromised. There’s a lot of unpredictability here of course, and complexity, then around the human behavioral response, so any plan you come up with because of who they are, the information they’re using, the leash they hold.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, all of this complexity means you’ve got to be continuously learning and adapting from whatever baseline plan you start with.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

What a challenge. What a challenge. Have we ever seen anything like this before? You referred earlier to the fact that this is not totally unique.

Jerry Abrams:

I would say elements of it we’ve seen before. We’ve seen pandemics. We’ve seen pandemics more recently in other countries we can learn from. We’ve seen a major global pandemic of the greatest scale imaginable, I guess, in the early 1900s. And so, some things we’ve done. We’ve done shutdowns. We’ve done masks. We’ve done social distancing kinds of things, and we’ve seen all the noncompliant behaviors as well. I mean, a lot of the same things happened then as are happening now.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Really? Interesting. I didn’t know that.

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. If you go back and dial into the history of it you’ll see some of that. I think in some ways we’ve looked at economic turmoil before. We had the big downturn in LA. We’ve had other minor recessions, or major recessions along the years. We had The Great Depression in ’29, ’30, ’31, ’32, ’34 here and rglobally.

Jerry Abrams:

So we’ve had economic downturns of great significance before, and we’ve seen what some of the social implications of those downturns are, so we know from a health perspective, and a societal perspective what the turmoil can be there. But again, conditions are not identically the same, and you need to learn from that, but also modify your learning at the same time.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, so as you think back about those other circumstances like the ’08 recession, or The Great Depression, did we learn? Did we change? Did we transform as a result do you think, or did we go back to our old ways?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah, so I think a couple of things. There’s another period of time that people lived through of high inflation in America, so The Depression was one big area recently, if you consider 1929 recently, I guess.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, well, it’s all relative.

Jerry Abrams:

Then in the 70s. If you can find people who lived through The Depression that are still around, and talk to them, if you maybe had a grandparent, or a great grandparent who was around, and you remember, they were permanently changed in many ways. You will find that they would stockpile canned goods, that they would clip more coupons than you ever dreamt possible.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, right. Of course. Right.

Jerry Abrams:

They would reuse things far more often than you would today, we’ve become. And so, I would say that for a great period of time, maybe a generation, 20 years or so, that Depression impacted a large amount of consumer behavior. I would say in the ’70s when inflation was running in the 20s, in some instances, it affected whether people saved or not, because it was like there’s no point in saving, your money’s going to be worth less tomorrow than it is today, and you want to buy. You just got to spend, spend, spend, and you’re not going to be able to afford the house you want anyway, so you might as well spend it on other kinds of things, goods, consumer goods, and experiences, or whatever.

Jerry Abrams:

So yeah, I think certain social conditions can change the way we behave, certain values. I wonder about this whether it’ll cause value shifts, and if you look at value shifts generationally, were there values that were latent maybe in younger people that are now just being given more evidence for being expressed? Are there seniors maybe that are at a different stage of life that would go back to certain values, and say, maybe this, maybe that?

Jerry Abrams:

So I am curious about the impact on value shift by generational, and a lot of that has to do with what their socioeconomic status is at the moment. We know there are a lot of challenges with younger people, and advancement, and jobs, and all those kinds of things that are socioeconomic conditions, but all of these things are in the background, they’re latent, and they’ll find their way into the expression of values that are now given this challenge being revealed in different ways, and so, you can see these things showing up.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

It seems like all the people that I’m interacting with these days are saying this is transformative, we are going to be so different coming out of this, and yet I’m not really sure whether we will be.

Jerry Abrams:

Yes, so I agree, and I think we don’t know in what ways we will be, so I think this is the problem. Humans tend to over and underestimate.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, really. Well put.

Jerry Abrams:

In other words, if you look at the volatility in a stock market, it’ll have a great day, and then it’ll come back from that a little bit the next day. It’ll have a great day, and then it will come back another day. And so, there’s this tendency for people to not step back necessarily, and ground themselves in, okay, what’s really solid that I can base some judgements on, and what’s transitory?

Jerry Abrams:

And I don’t think at the moment we know yet, and a lot will depend on how this thing continues to play out. We could have another significant bump in the Fall, we could have another one in Spring, so you can imagine having not necessarily equivalent, but another cycle in the Fall, another one in the following Spring, and somewhere down the line maybe treatments, and a vaccine, or some herd immunity emerges from total exposure, and an unfortunate level of loss of life that by sometime mid, late, next year the economic impact is minimal, but then you’re catching up for all that lost time that the economic upheaval has caused.

Jerry Abrams:

Then you get to this new normal around work, well, yes. I think a lot of people, and a lot of companies, have discovered that more people than they ever thought possible can work remotely.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah. I know. Isn’t that interesting.

Jerry Abrams:

And that more people than they may want to admit want to work that way.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Really. No kidding.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, do I think that it’s going to cause a reset in points of view about remote work, and productivity of remote work, and a whole bunch of tools and processes emerge to support remote work that will make it better? I do. I do.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right.

Jerry Abrams:

I’ve been doing virtual group process facilitation, designing processes, using technologies, since ’97, ’98, so I’ve been doing a lot of virtual work over the years, and know what some good processes look like for asynchronous and synchronous work with groups. What it looks like for individuals trying to accomplish a task is a different matter, and it needs its own set of tools, and its own set of processes.

Jerry Abrams:

And then, there’s the figuring out what does the social aspect do, and of course we’ve been in this trend for a while, particularly in the IT space. They’ve sort of been the leaders of telework, and other kinds of remote work, but in some cases telework was you went to a workspace somewhere.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, right. Right. Not your home.

Jerry Abrams:

You had some social interactivity with other people because we need that, or some people need that anyway.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes.

Jerry Abrams:

I’ve been a telecommuter for eight years, and I would frequently go to a coffee shop and sit there and work, not because I was going to talk to a soul in there, but it felt better to be around another human.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

I saw, I think it was a joke, or a cartoon, somewhere that said something along the lines of, “Who knew we didn’t need all those meetings after all?”

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah, exactly. Meetings are a favorite topic of mine, and I know 100 jokes around them. I spent a long time focusing almost exclusively on improving group process, and so using technology to minimize the downsides of behaviors in meetings, and maximize the efficiency of tasks.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, maybe people will start paying more attention to that now. Let’s hope.

Jerry Abrams:

We hope.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership lessons. You argue in your article, and I think it’s based on CCL research, that the lessons of experience are more effective than formal leadership development. Can you tell me more about that?

Jerry Abrams:

Absolutely. So yeah, this is actually some of CCL’s earliest groundbreaking research. CCL’s got a long history of groundbreaking research, the first in the world to discover something about leadership and leadership behaviors largely, and this is one of those things that more than 30 years ago began, and has now been validated, and re-validated across a number of studies, and a number of cultures around the world, and just keeps showing up.

Jerry Abrams:

It’s basically this thing that a lot of people now know, at least in the HR world where CCL is well-known for the kind of work it does. But yeah, 70% of leadership development comes from the experiences leaders actually have.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

70%, really?

Jerry Abrams:

70%, yeah. It’s 70%. In some cases, it’s been a little higher, and occasionally it might be a touch lower, but on average, globally, across all these studies, and the rule that everybody remembers now we probably would have a hard time going back and changing it, because it’s out there in the culture, is really this 70, 20, 10 rule.

Jerry Abrams:

So yeah, 70% from challenging assignments. So again, going back, this links backed to learning agility, stretching yourself, right? Or going back to heat. All these things are related. This is why they all showed up in my article.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah.

Jerry Abrams:

Because of the links between all these different pieces that CCL and others have been involved in now over the years, refinements on, extensions of some of this stuff, and so some of the earliest work around this area is really in how the leaders develop. It’s a key question, obviously. You want to know how leaders develop.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, the last 10% it turns out is from formal course work, so it’s sending them to a program-

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Really?

Jerry Abrams:

-or putting them in a program, or whatever you want to think of it as, yeah. That’s the 70, 20, 10 rule, and of course what’s underneath this is this sort of core assumption that CCL has lived by from the beginning, and it’s really deeply baked in to every aspect of what CCL does. It is this assumption that leadership is learned, leaders are made, they’re not born. And so, that’s really a core belief that’s been proven by this kind of research here that it’s the right way to go, that you might not start out being a great leader, but you can become one.

Jerry Abrams:

And along those same lines are things like no matter what your personality might look like you can learn to be a good leader with that particular personality. Now, there are some, obviously, things that you can do that are so derogatory you just are not going to be effective unless you leave them behind, but in general there’s no right type for a personality, because you can learn to be a leader, and that means you can flex from wherever you are.

Jerry Abrams:

Now, is it harder from some places than others, or certain kinds of behaviors, or certain kinds of activities, and how do you do it? All those kind of things. Great. If you’re not naturally organized maybe you learn to use a day planner, those kind of things. If you like to have really open, longterm decisions that take forever to conclude maybe you learn to apply some processes, and criteria to that, to improve that process, so there are things you can do.

Jerry Abrams:

But basically, leadership is learned, leaders are made, they’re not born, and learning from challenging assignments is 70% of how they’re made.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

And yeah, companies spend millions of dollars on courses, and training seminars, to train leaders. Isn’t that interesting? Why is that do you think?

Jerry Abrams:

Yes. Well, because there’s measurable evidence that it works to some extent. You can control it, the timing of it. You can make it available to anybody, and everyone, so unless you create heat artificially, and believe there are ways you can do that in CCL, and others do that, so you can create experiences that turn up the heat for a week, or three days, or a couple of days in a training session, and people will learn from that. What the beauty of experience is, is that typically the heat lasts more than a couple of days. There’s more heat available longer for development.

Jerry Abrams:

But we use, and have used, forever simulated activities where you might be running an organization, or you might be doing something that is more abstract than that, but puts you in an uncomfortable place, creating heat, that then you can learn from. I mean, I would say that’s actually a core principle of any of our experiential activities is that we’re taking you out of your comfort zone long enough for you to observe yourself out of your comfort zone, and or observe yourself in your native habits, and then reflect back on that.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, that’s the use of experiential, whether they’re full-blown business simulations, which tend to be more extensive, and provide an opportunity for greater heat longer, or whether they’re a 30 minute exercise that can be intense, but it’s only 30 minutes.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, right, and how long does that last then when the person goes back to the job? That’s always an interesting question for all of us who do leadership development.

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. So really, the impetus behind the article was don’t miss this opportunity. There’s all this heat. Take advantage of it as one of these experiences if you can, if you’re not to the breaking point. Again, you’ve got to be careful that you don’t place yourself in this point beyond which you cannot come back, you’re not stretching, you’re breaking, but use this opportunity to learn. And it’s not only good for you, but it’s the kind of thing you would do to improve your organizational response.

Jerry Abrams:

In other words, what can we do better next time as an organization? So without even worrying about me developing, but just focusing at the organizational level, like what processes could we do better? What organizational decisions could we make better? Those kinds of things. Much less, my personal leadership behaviors, and my interpersonal relationships, and my decisions, and all those kinds of things that are more about my leadership. You could do both. You can apply this kind of learning to both, and it’s valuable for both.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

But it doesn’t happen automatically, right? We don’t learn automatically from experience, so what do we need to do to learn?

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. That’s been the great challenge for CCL, or anybody else in this field, is okay, how do we get people to learn?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right, exactly.

Jerry Abrams:

We know we’re having those experiences, they’re learning from them, and we all do. You stick your hand on the hot stove, you’ve had an experience, and you learn. Okay?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, exactly. Right.

Jerry Abrams:

We’ve had those, but most of us are not doing it very methodically. It’s kind of haphazardly, and it’s sort of intuitive. It gets baked in somewhere, and it’s back there, but it’s not very formal. It’s not very methodical. It’s not very efficient. And therefore, it’s probably not as quick.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yes, exactly. Right.

Jerry Abrams:

And it’s not necessarily documented, so you can refer back to it later, or some kind of circumstance comes up again, so there’re all these challenges around learning, and being mindful if you will about explicitly learning from experience. And so, that really was, again, there’s this opportunity, we’ve got a lot of heat, let me give you some ideas on how you can use the heat to learn.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Great. That’s exactly what we need.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, in between there’s all this other stuff about learning agility, and of course that being valuable, and its relationship then to learning from challenging experiences, so all these things are linked, but the bottom line is, okay, so what do you do? The heat’s here, I’m having experiences, and I do want to learn. I’m not to the point of breaking. I am stretched. I want to learn. I want to become more effective, and I want my organization to become more effective.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, I’m very familiar with an approach that began with the Army, and probably in the ’60s, basically, and this did this thing called an after action review. They would do it typically after any activity. It might’ve been they went out on patrol for four hours. It might’ve been a full day. It might’ve been several days. It might be a whole month, or more, in their case of things they were doing, and then they would step back, and go, okay, what was supposed to happen here?

Jerry Abrams:

So there were these sort of four questions they routinely asked themselves. What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? What were the differences between what we thought would happen, or what was supposed to happen, and what actually happened? And then, what can we learn, or what did we learn, from those differences?

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Wow. That’s wonderful.

Jerry Abrams:

What I did is I said that’s a great learning tool, and I’ve used it with teams forever. It’s a great way for teams to do for themselves collectively to get better at some period along the way. On a project team they might stop and do that after every major inch stone, or milestone, or however they measure progress. They might do it by whatever frequently it makes for their team, and what they’re doing.

Jerry Abrams:

So I’ve been using it as a team tool forever, but there’s no reason it can’t be used as an individual tool, that someone could use that same simple four question process to reflect with great periodicity, and then look back over some trends, and things like this with maybe less periodicity, and really be meticulous about learning, but short, because the other thing is we know you don’t have a lot of time. You don’t have an hour at the end of the day.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right.

Jerry Abrams:

You don’t have two hours at the end of the day to stop and try to figure out what the heck happened, not now, not in the kind of heat we’re in right now, and so it had to be short. It had to be easy to implement. It had to be something you could repeat, and simple, and so I converted those four questions basically into individual versions that someone could use, and they look like this. What did I plan, or intend to do, or accomplish today? Question one. What did I actually do, or accomplish today? What were the differences good and bad, and why?

Jerry Abrams:

So one of the things about after action reviews, you want to capture the good things as well.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Oh, absolutely. Sure.

Jerry Abrams:

Sometimes a difference turns to you got something better done than you expected.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah. That’s a good day.

Jerry Abrams:

But you did something different than you thought you were going to do, and the outcome was better, sometimes the outcome is worse, and so you want to capture both of those, so good, or bad, and then similarly what should I do differently, or similarly the next time? So just capturing these things, those four questions, at the end of the day takes maybe five to 15 minutes to do that.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Are you talking about writing it down?

Jerry Abrams:

Yes. I mean, writing it down whether you do it longhand in some physical book, or whether you do it in a space of some kind, on a computer, wherever you do it. Yes, literally. And the reason for that is that what you want to do now is at the end of some period, probably a week, whatever your work week looks like, sometimes it’s seven days, sometimes it’s less, but whatever that week is take a minute now and look back over what you wrote for those days, and just try to identify some things that are popping out that either look like themes, or stand out as being more important than the other things, because what you’re gaining over time is perspective, right?

Jerry Abrams:

What looked important today may not be as important tomorrow, and it might not be even as important later, or it might be more important, and so time gives you perspective as more experience piles in there. So at the end of the week stop and write down what you see after looking across those four questions. You don’t have to answer the questions again, but you’re looking for now what stands out? What are some trends? What seems important? What seems less important? And some why around that.

Jerry Abrams:

So this might take 30 minutes maybe at the end of the week, something like that, so not a ton of time. Well, I’ll do this again for another week, another loop through, daily capture at the end of the week, a look back, capture, and after a month worth of weeks, whatever that is, four weeks, five weeks, however you want to chop it up, stop now and look back across first of all the weekly summaries, and glance at the dailys. Sort of take a scan back across the entire month, and do that same thing.

Jerry Abrams:

What kind of trends are you seeing? What stands out? What’s less important? What’s more important? And capture that. And so, do this for X number of months, this cycle of daily, weekly, end of the month, for as long as you think you need to, to learn what you can learn from the heat that you’re in.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Interesting.

Jerry Abrams:

I can’t tell you whether that’s a month, two months, five months, or six months. I can’t tell you, because each individual’s situation will be different, and their heat will be different, and the length of the heat will be different, and what they’ve learned, and what they are no longer learning will change for each of them.

Jerry Abrams:

But the thing I will add to all of this is if you happen to be working with a coach, and can start to work with a coach, you could do something like share those things with the coach at the end of the day, or have a call with a coach once a day for 15 minutes. You’re capturing those things, and they’re listening, and they might interject a word or two to give you some advice, and so now maybe it’s a 20 minute process instead of 15 because you’ve got a bit of a conversation going with a coach.

Jerry Abrams:

Maybe you don’t do that every day. Maybe you only do that every third day, or maybe you only do it at the end of the week, or maybe you only do it at the end of the month. And so, another thing you can do is if you want to find a peer somewhere. And so, what we call these people, coaches are more than this, and they can do more than this, but an accountability partner that kind of holds you to your pattern. If you know you have to share what you’ve done with someone else you’re more likely to do it.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Well, and not only that, the other person sometimes can ask a question that will just really aid in the whole reflection I would think.

Jerry Abrams:

Yeah. If you’re willing to open yourself up to peer coaching as well, and it makes sense, and it works for you, that again may take longer, so all of these enhancements add a little bit of time, and you’re going to have to be your own judge on how much time, and who you could access for this, but yes, those would be the platinum versions of developing is to not be struggling just by yourself, but be getting advice along the way.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), and it’s a simple structure too. It’s a structure that anybody can use. It’s not complex. It may feel uncomfortable, but it’s a simple four question structure that’s doable, I would say, for anybody.

Jerry Abrams:

Right. That was the intention is that, again, I knew going into it that in these crises times, under these conditions, that it can’t be long, it can’t be lengthy, it can’t be an hour long process at the end of the day. It’s got to be fast, and sharp, and whatever comes to mind are the big things. What are the big things I intended to accomplish today, and what did I accomplish, and what’s different, and so forth.

Jerry Abrams:

And then, progressively spending, so spending five, to 10, to 15 minutes a day, not so bad, spending maybe 30 minutes at the end of the week. Maybe you spend as much as an hour a month, so I mean if you start looking at the amount of time you’re spending cumulatively it adds to something, but at any one moment in time it’s not overwhelming. And then, by the time you get to two months, three months, four months, you might be up to more than an hour. It might be 90 minutes.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, but still, for developing agility that’s not much time, really. That’s not. It’s doable.

Jerry Abrams:

And the value of course of doing it daily it you’re as close to the experience as you can get. When we run these things as simulations in the classroom we might interrupt and have you reflect after an hour. Well, you’re not going to do that in the workplace during these conditions. Now, under normal operating conditions we might get you to pause for 15 minutes a couple times a day, or something, but right now, no. That’s not happening.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Yeah, right. Right. That’s right.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

But I would think that this would be enormously satisfying, because I mean there’re so many things that are just plain chaotic, but to actually be able to step back, and reflect, and say, hey, I learned something, to me, right now, we all need that. We need that satisfaction that we’re getting something out of this horrible time that we’re in.

Jerry Abrams:

Right. There’s that additional benefit to it as well, right? That there is something valuable in it, and also just taking the moment to pause and reflect has inherent value, particularly with respect to, again, resilience, and other kinds of things. If you blend in some of those techniques as part of it there’s nothing wrong with it.

Jerry Abrams:

And so, you could imagine maybe doing five minutes of some kind of relaxation technique, or whatever, to kind of calm your mind, and clear your mind before you did this as part of your resiliency practice, and enter into this with a slightly calmer mind, I guess.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Right, yes. I can see all kinds of benefits from this. Well, Jerry, this has just been a wonderful conversation as always, and I want to recommend to the listeners that you go to the show notes on our website where you’ll find a link to Jerry’s terrific article that this conversation was based on, and I know that I’ve taken a lot away from the conversation, things that I can do right now that will be very satisfying, and I’m sure our listeners have too, so thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And your insights.

Jerry Abrams:

Well, thank you, Kathy. I appreciate you reaching out to me, and offering me the opportunity to chat with you. As you’ve mentioned, we’ve had a number of great conversations over the years, and I’m sure we’ll continue to have them.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

We’ll have many more.

Jerry Abrams:

Exactly.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Many more.

Jerry Abrams:

Exactly.

Kathy Miller Perkins:

Thanks for listening to the Conscious Culture Café. If you liked what you heard connect with us at millerconsultants.com. You can access the show notes, and receive our free materials. See you next episode.