Episodes

  • Tyson Yunkaporta on indigenous thinking and why you can't improve your "self"

    Tyson Yunkaporta on indigenous thinking and why you can't improve your "self"
    Nov 1 2021
    In this episode... 

    We speak with Tyson Yunkaporta about indigenous thinking and why paying attention to pattern and context matters. Tyson is an indigenous academic, researcher and carver of traditional tools and weapons. 

    Who is Tyson Yunkaporta?

    Tyson Yunkaporta is an indigenous academic, researcher and member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne and also carves traditional tools and weapons.  

    Tyson is the author of Sand Talk: How indigenous thinking can save the world, in which he uses sand talk, which honours the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground, to bring clarity to complexity. He asks: what happens if we bring an indgenous perspective to the big picture - to history, education, money, power? Can we, in fact, have proper concepts of sustainable life without Indigenous Knowledge?

    Tyson is also the host of The Other Others podcast, in which hosts wide ranging and always paradigm-cracking yarns with a diverse bunch of thinkers and doers.

    You can also follow Tyson’s work at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyson-yunkaporta-04a9b969/

    A few things you’ll learn about in this episode
    • How humans are contextual beings and how our cognition depends on context, relationality, place and story.
    • How the best outcomes can’t be planned.
    • Why attention and responsiveness to the pattern of relations you live within is important
    • How the indigenous idea of wisdom or knowledge is so closely related to listening/observing, and what that means for those too married to a specific outcomes.
    Please follow The Work podcast

    We hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. Get in touch with us via our website, LinkedIn or Facebook, if you’d like to say hello, dish out some high praise, or suggest a guest for the show.

    Episode keywords

    Culture, complexity, leadership, sensemaking, indigenous knowledge, indigenous wisdom, systems thinking, pattern mind


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Dave Snowden on culture as emergent and why it can't be "built"

    Dave Snowden on culture as emergent and why it can't be "built"
    Aug 3 2021
    In this episode... We speak with Dave Snowden about how we can better understand organisational culture through the complexity lens. Dave is a pioneer complexity thinker, Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, and the creator of the Cynefin Framework.Who is Dave Snowden?Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the University of Wales. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making.  He has pioneered a science based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.He created the Cynefin Framework, which is a sensemaking and decision device that is used globally in everything from business management, military affairs, emergency management and software development. His paper on the topic (co-authored with Boone), A Leader’s Framework for Decision-Making, was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year.Dave’s company Cognitive Edge exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants. He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management. Dave previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity. During that period he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a world wide advertising campaign. If you want to get a quick idea about Dave’s approach to managing complexity, watching his hilariously smart Children’s Birthday Party story is a must.You can follow Dave’s work or get in touch with him at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/snowded Website: https://www.cognitive-edge.com/Blog: https://www.cognitive-edge.com/blog/?_author=17 A few things you’ll learn about in this episodeCulture is an emergent property of interactions over time, and how you can’t “create” an emergent propertyWhy narrative matters, and how to understand culture as a body of storiesHow engagement questionnaires are flawed, and why self-interpretation is necessaryWhy effective change depends on finding the lowest energy pathway to the “adjacent possible” stateWhy breaking rules is necessary in organisations, and how you can create enabling constraints around beneficial rule-breaking behavioursHow rituals can help more than rulesHow pushing individuals to change in organisational contexts may be unethical How you can recognise complexity in organisations, and how to best work with itPlease follow The Work podcastWe hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. Get in touch with us via our website, LinkedIn or Facebook, if you’d like to say hello, dish out some high praise, or suggest a guest for the show.Episode keywordsOrganisational culture, culture change, employee experience, employee engagement, complexity, leadership, systems thinking, narrative, narrative landscapes, cynefin, cognitive edge, emergence, adjacent possible, energy gradient, exaptative innovation, enabling constraints, ritual, sensemaking, change management, indigenous decision making, sensemaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    45 mins
  • Ben Smit on how tech can be a team leader's wingman

    Ben Smit on how tech can be a team leader's wingman
    Jul 13 2021
    In this episode... 

    We speak with Ben Smit about how leaders can use tech to help grow high performing teams from the bottom up.  Ben is an entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Teamgage, software that enables team collaboration, wellbeing, and continuous improvement. 

    Who is Ben Smit?

    Ben Smit is an entrepreneur and highly skilled at growing scale-up companies and leveraging technology to solve human problems, with a focus on engaging team members to own and advocate the improvement process. Ben is part of the husband and wife team responsible for founding Teamgage, software that builds employee engagement by regularly collecting workplace feedback while empowering teams to take action on their own results and select metrics that are relevant to the team at the team level. The system measures behaviours and sentiment aligned to the strategy of the organisation and drives teams and managers to action their own improvements in real-time. Ben and Teamgage are taking on the worldwide market, and it has grown to service clients across Australia, Asia Pacific and North America. Ben recently won a 40 under 40 award for his passion, vision and achievements as one of SA's finest entrepreneurs under the age of 40.on their own results and select metrics that are relevant to the team at the team level. 

    You can follow Ben or get in touch with him:

    LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ben-smit-2594b321

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/ben7smit 

    Website:www.teamgage.com, www.code360.com.au

    A few things you’ll learn about in this episode:
    • Thinking about culture and employee engagement as a bottom up dynamic
    • Leadership setting principles, teams being enabled to deliver
    • Explosion of HR tech
    • Making space for failure and learning  
    • Innovation culture
    • The role of trust in team performance
    • Applying agile thinking to culture and staff engagement
    • Continuous improvement and how it can be applied to team performance
    Please follow The Work podcast

    We hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. Get in touch with us via our website, LinkedIn or Facebook if you’d like to say hello, dish out some high praise, or suggest a guest for the show.

    Episode keywords

    Organisational culture, culture change, employee experience, employee engagement, complexity, leadership, human resources, people matters, hr technology, continuous improvement, agile, teamgage, teamwork


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    44 mins
  • Joan Lurie on organisational transformation through the systems lens

    Joan Lurie on organisational transformation through the systems lens
    Jun 24 2021
    In this episode... 

    We speak with Joan Lurie about how the systems lens can fundamentally shift the way we think about organisational change. Joan is an organisational ecologist and the Founder and CEO of Orgonomix

    Who is Joan Lurie?

    Joan Lurie is the Founder and CEO of Orgonomix, an organisation strategy and leadership development consultancy she established in 2008 to help leaders and organisations develop, perform and transform. She is a Fulbright Scholar with a Master’s Degree in Adult Education and a Master’s Degree in Developmental Psychology.

    Joan works with boards, executives and leadership teams to help them to develop systemic intelligence and to design and lead complex adaptive change in their organisations with turnaround results. Working together they emerge new cultures, operating models and organisational forms.

    Joan applies the OrgonomixTM methodology she created which is most often referred to as ground-breaking. It’s a novel theory and practice for organisations which integrates strategy, systems thinking, complexity and adult development theory. It provides an ecological

    ‘map’ for leaders to navigate the unique challenges they face and be fit for the current complex landscape we are in. It enables leaders to fundamentally shift how they take up their roles; reframe their assumptions, mental maps and ways of knowing and repattern their organisational systems for new ways of relating and operating to achieve higher order functioning.

    In a nutshell, Joan’s work enables leaders and organisations to liberate themselves from the constraints and patterns which no longer serve them, but in which they are stuck.

    You can follow Joan’s work or get in touch with her at:

    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Website
    A few things you’ll learn about in this episode:
    • How organisations are complex systems
    • Why individual behavioural/psychological and technical analysis of organisations can’t fully explain organisational dynamics
    • What the systems lens is, and why it matters
    • How culture is the emergent property of the relationships between role and role, role and system, and individual and role.
    • Why coherence of mental maps between individuals within a system can reduce noise
    • How boundary maintenance is is system maintenance (is organisational maintenance)
    • How behaviour of individuals in systems can change for the better without trying to change the person
    • How the systems lens can relieve leaders of having to play the change agent hero or fixer
    • Why the boundaryless organisation isn’t a good idea
    • Why “breaking down silos” doesn’t work, and how the systems lens can enable better collaboration across boundaries
    Please follow The Work podcast

    We hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. Get in touch with us via our website, LinkedIn or Facebook, if you’d like to say hello, dish out some high praise, or suggest a guest for the show.

    Are you enjoying The Work?

    We don't charge for the content we create, but if you feel you received value from listening to The Work, then we gratefully and graciously accept your support.

    Support the creators of The Work podcast for the price of a coffee per month.

    Episode keywords

    Organisational culture, culture change, employee experience, employee engagement, complexity, leadership, systems thinking, family systems therapy, systems lens, repatterning, mental maps, boundaries, systems change, organisational ecology, diversity, transformation, enabling constraints



    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Karen Sobel Lojeski on Virtual Distance & the art of staying together while we're apart

    Karen Sobel Lojeski on Virtual Distance & the art of staying together while we're apart
    Jun 19 2021
    In this episode...We speak with Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski about the role of technologically-mediated communications in the workplace and the impacts of Virtual Distance. Karen is the Founder and CEO of Virtual Distance International whose thinking is a rare blend of computer science, applied mathematics and the humanities.  Who is Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski?Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski is the Founder and CEO of Virtual Distance International (VDI), an executive advisory firm specializing in Hybrid and Future of Work.  Her software and consulting services are powered by her award-winning discovery of Virtual Distance – the growing sense of disconnection resulting from computer mediated communications.  Since Covid-19 began, Karen’s work has become ever more prescient and is leveraged around the world to solve the most significant work shift challenges.Some of her clients include Bank of America, the U.S. Navy, The World Economic forum and other large organizations in governments, healthcare private sector, non-profits, academic institutions and more; the list growing as institutions seek her out to help them navigate hybrid work with human well-being in the digital age and pandemic era.Karen is also the author of three best-selling books: The Power of Virtual Distance:  A Guide to Productivity and Happiness in the Age of Remote Work (Wiley, 2020), Leading the Virtual Workforce and Uniting the Virtual Workforce. Karen has been showcased in the NYT, WSJ, CNBC, NPR and other global outlets.  She is a highly sought-after motivational guru and international speaker on hybrid work, The Future of Work,  Human Experience and Well-Being in the Age of Digital Everything, and related topics.You can follow Karen’s work or get in touch with her at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drkarenlojeskivirtualdistance/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/virtualdistance/ Website: https://virtualdistance.com/A few things you’ll learn about in this episodeCommunication using digital technology has unintended consequencesWhy direct experience (versus tech mediated experience) is important, and how our we’re losing touch with direct experienceWhy you should be sceptical about “experience management”How technology is evolving to decrease our access to disconfirming information, and how that negatively affects the way we relate to one anotherWhat Virtual Distance is, and how high Virtual Distance can negatively impact organisational cultureWhat the impact of remote work is on Virtual DistancePhysical distance is the least important element that contributes to VIrtual DistanceHow deliberately switching between different modes of communication (i.e. in-person, audio, video, written) can build richer understanding.Why “Culture change” initiatives don’t work, and how thinking about “layering” culture is a better approachWhy embodied cognition matters for greater depth perceptionStuff we referred to and further reading/listening:A Virtual Distance 3 minute primerVirtual Distance: An origin storyDr. Lojeski’s article in the Harvard Business Review, The Subtle Ways Our Screens Are Pushing Us Apartwww.thepowerofvirtualdistance.comCUBE interview with Dr. Karen Lojeski, Virtual Distance InternationalSummary of Dr. Lojeski’s latest book, The Power of Virtual Distance. A recent interview with Dr. Lojeski with Journal: Technology Is Not the Real Problem HereVirtual distance: technology is rewriting the rulebook for human interactionSoul-Based Leadership: A New Way to Lead in a New World of WorkThere is No Such Thing as AITED Talk: The Threshold Generation: The Last to Understand Real vs VirtualPlease follow The Work podcastWe hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. Get in touch with us via our website, LinkedIn, or Facebook if you’d like to say hello, dish out some high praise, or suggest a guest for the show.Are you enjoying The Work?We don't charge for the content we create, but if you feel you received value from listening to The Work, then we gratefully and graciously accept your support.Support the creators of The Work podcast for the price of a coffee per month.Episode keywordsOrganisational culture, culture change, virtual distance, affinity distance, operational distance, physical distance, remote work, digital technology, embodied cognition, depth perception, unintended consequences, hofstede model, technology mediated communication, disintermediation, computer science, empathy, employee experience, experiencemanagement, imagination, complexity, cynefin, neuroscience. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Jim Rutt on radical intellectual honesty & the Game~B organisation

    Jim Rutt on radical intellectual honesty & the Game~B organisation
    Jun 7 2021
    In this episode...James speaks with Jim Rutt about how organisational cultural change happens, why radical intellectual honesty is so important, and the emerging new ‘social operating system’ called Game~B. Jim Rutt is a serial technology entrepreneur and complexity thinker, and host of The Jim Rutt Show podcast. Who is Jim Rutt?Jim Rutt is the host of the Jim Rutt Show podcast series. He is former Chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. The New York Times once referred to him as “the Internet’s bad boy” due to his reputation for creative mischief. He was CEO of Network Solutions, which operated the .com, .net, and .org domain namespaces on the Internet, which he sold at the peak of the Dot Com boom. Jim was the first Chief Technology Officer of Thomson-Reuters, and was Chairman of the computer chip design software company Analog Design Automation until its acquisition by Synposis in 2004. Previously Jim either founded or played a key role in several significant information services and network companies including The Sourced, THE SOURCE, Business Research Corp., and First Call.He was Researcher in Residence at the Santa Fe Institute from 2002 to 2004, studying the application of complexity science to financial markets, and evolutionary artificial intelligence. He was Executive Producer of the awarding winning film "Zombiewood."  He is a co-founder of the Staunton Makerspace, a membership maker shop and hacker space.   Jim is currently a Santa FE Institute Research Fellow working in the scientific study of consciousness and evolutionary artificial intelligence.  Jim received his B.S. degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and is a member of MIT's Visiting Committee for the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences. Jim is also a key thinker within the Game~B universe and convener of the online Game~B community.You can follow Jim’s work or get in touch with Jim at:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/memetic007 Twitter: https://twitter.com/jim_rutt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimrutt/Medium: https://medium.com/@memetic007 A few things you’ll learn about in this episodeWhy organisations that don’t operate at 100% radical intellectual honesty are running sub-optimally by definitionHow physics and complexity science can help us think about culture as a ‘basin of attraction’.Why brute force culture change could be appropriate in some contexts, and totally wrongheaded in others.That successful entrepreneurs are necessarily good at navigating complexity, and why organisations need to cultivate entrepreneurial mindsets.How the Game~B community is working on a new ‘social operating system’, and what it means for organisations.Stuff we referred toThe Jim Rutt ShowSanta Fe InstituteSanta Fe Institute Applied Complexity programThe Story of Game~B (with Jim Rutt and Bret Weinstein) on Rebel WisdomIn search of the 5th attractor: Complexity science thinking about real change for the betterGame~B communityPlease follow The Work podcastWe hope you enjoyed this episode. We'd love to hear what you think. Get in touch with us via our website, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram if you’d like to say hello, dish out some high praise, or suggest a guest for the show.Episode keywordsOrganisational culture, culture change, radical intellectual honesty, Santa Fe Institute, complexity, human resources, basin of attraction, the fifth attractor, distributed decision making, horizontal communication, applied complexity, entrepreneurial mindset, Game~B, Game~B organisation, hybrid cooperative, fitness landscape, strategic audit, culture as protocol, role-based leadership, employee ownershipAre you enjoying The Work?We don't charge for the content we create, but if you feel you received value from listening to The Work, then we gratefully and graciously accept your support.Support the creators of The Work podcast for the price of a coffee per month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    56 mins
  • What is The Work?

    What is The Work?
    Jun 3 2021

    The Work is a podcast for curious explorers blazing new trails for the way we work.


    We explore the subtle forces that shape our experience of work, and the big ideas that are nudging it somewhere better.


    In this brief intro episode, co-hosts James Allen and Angelo Saridis give a quick breakdown of what The Work is all about and what listeners can expect in the episodes ahead.


    Because workplaces and the way we work matters.


    We’d love to hear what you think. If you’ve got feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or even be a guest, please get in touch at contact.theworkpodcast@gmail.com, or via Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.


    Subscribe to The Work.


    Support the creators of The Work podcast.

    We don't charge for the content we create, but if you feel you received value from listening to The Work, then we gratefully and graciously accept your support.


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    5 mins