Meltdown 2024? Not if Leaders Rethink Risk Management and Embrace Complexity with Chris Clearfield | S2, Ep1

Today, we're exploring the fascinating world of complexity, risk management, and trust with our guest, Chris Clearfield. He's a former derivatives trader, commercial pilot and co-author of "Meltdown," a book that delves into the collapse of complex systems. Chris brings a unique perspective to the table, combining his diverse background with a sharp understanding of the intersection between humans and machines.

We discuss the power of curiosity and the importance of feedback loops in decision-making. We also explore the transformative role of trust in the financial market and business consulting. Chris helps us understand the need for leaders to take a fearless approach to consulting, breaking away from traditional models.

In the latter half of our conversation, we delve deeper into the books that have shaped our professional journeys. One such book is "The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures," which challenges conventional wisdom on decision-making. We also dissect the role of psychological safety in the workplace and highlight the pivotal role that human connectedness can play. Tune in and join us in this enlightening journey, packed with invaluable insights and knowledge.

Clearfield Group
Chris Clearfield on LinkedIn

Books mentioned:
Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It
The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation 

AGLX Confidence in Complexity short commercial 

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Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:57

All right, chris, you have a background in derivatives trading. You have a commercial pilots license, or at least a rating. You're the co-author of Meltdown back in 2018. You looked at things like McConnelwell, columbia, challenger, air France 447. You looked at quite a few things to understand how complex systems fail and then recently I discovered you became familiar and excited about John Boyd's Observe Oriented Decide Act Loop. So my question to you is why should anybody any business leader, any safety leader, any sports coach, anybody listen to this conversation about? A person has a derivatives trading background, biochemistry degree and physics degree from Harvard, who's a pilot, wrote a co-author to Book Meltdown. Why should they listen to you? What message can you bring to folks that is so darn important today?

Speaker 2: 1:56

Well, I mean, my honest answer is I don't know if they should listen to me. I mean, that's kind of where I'll start as a baseline. But the thing I always invite people to do is just to try stuff on. I mean, even when I am in the seat of the expert, you know, at the front of a room doing a keynote or whatever, my invitation is always, you know, hey, let's just try this on, let's just see how this lands with you and try it out. So that's kind of, you know, without trying to be cheeky, that's really my first answer here. So that's, I guess, what I would invite people to do. I will, you know, you can listen, you can tune out at any time, right?

Speaker 1: 2:39

right. There's no requirements for survival. That's what I tell folks, so you have an opportunity to listen or you can go do something else. There's no requirement to actually survive and thrive in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. So, with that said, you started looking at the Oodaloop, I believe, in the last year or so. What brought you to that and how are you using that right now?

Speaker 2: 3:01

Yeah, so you mentioned being a pilot. So I'm a flight instructor, so I teach people how to fly. That's not my primary thing and I usually don't teach primary students. I usually work with folks who are sort of more advanced in their training. But what you know for me, oh so the short answer to your question is somebody who is at my flying club, somebody who's at my flying organization.

Speaker 2: 3:26

They recommended the. Who is it? John Corum, I can't remember his name, the guy who wrote the biography of Boyd. They recommended that book to me and I read it and I was like man, this is pretty interesting. And I reached out to my cousin he's actually a pretty senior in the Marine Corps. I talked to him about it. He was like, oh yeah, like we love this stuff.

Speaker 2: 3:51

You know me and my peers in the Marine Corps like this is kind of how we think about things these days. So for me you know Boyd and the Oodaloop it's a paradigm shift, right. It is kind of a shift away from planning, a shift away from the kind of static, declarative nature of the world, the nature of nature of strategy that many people take on, to a method that is responsive and iterative. I mean, in some sense I think about it, as you know, as kind of waterfall development is to agile development in the software world, right, the you know kind of planning. Strategic planning is to the Oodaloop in the kind of broader world of decision making and you know you won't be surprised. You mentioned meltdown. Meltdown's all about how the world's getting more complex. We need not just new tools, we need a different paradigm to deal in this complex world. That's kind of how I think about it.

Speaker 1: 4:46

Okay, so you got a nice little connection back to aviation and the Marine Corps with Job Boyd's, observe, orient, decide and ACLOOP. We could spend more time on that, but there's so many more things we can discuss today and I want to get back to your cockpit time to understand a little bit of what you brought lessons that you learned from the cockpit and bring them over to the business side. So what are you able to bring over from flying?

Speaker 2: 5:07

Yeah. So you know, I guess the first thing to say is, when I was learning to fly, I took a sort of Hades in the middle of my flying journey. So I started learning in 2006. My, I then moved with my company over to Tokyo and you know, there's really there's no flying in Tokyo, there's just, it's just not. It wasn't a possibility, but I still was engaged. I still wanted to be engaged.

Speaker 2: 5:34

So I started reading a lot about accidents, about accident. You know accident reports, what went wrong, and at the same time we were just coming up on the financial crisis. And so you know the arc of aviation, the arc of safety. And aviation is this arc of really like starting to learn. It's kind of about going from declaring that things are this certain static way to learning from accidents, learning from incidents, learning from near misses and using those things to really drive a culture of a culture of safety and a culture of excellence. And and it's also this story of recognizing the importance of culture right, so you get to something like crew resource management, cockpit resource management. It's all about how do you communicate with people.

Speaker 2: 6:18

And when I started to get interested in particularly as the financial crisis hit and I sort of had a front row seat to that. What I started to get interested in was what, what's the like, what is the relationship between how leaders, the culture that leaders create, and their, the capabilities of their teams? And I think the seed for me for that question really was an aviation. And then, as I started to see it, first on Wall Street where I was working, and then and then Deepwater Horizon blew up, we had the Maconda Well, you know, loss of containment, so I then realized it was much bigger and it was really that that planted the seeds for this exploration of complexity, this exploration of of kind of, you know, what was, of what, what meltdown is about, and and and, to some extent, what my work today still sort of, still sort of touches on.

Speaker 1: 7:06

All right, you brought up crew resource management at Charm School I think you wrote about it in your book and you heard about the same thing and team of teams from Stanley McChrystal, john McChrystal. There's something very important about aviation CRM that we've talked about on the show. We've had people that actually worked on that years ago and right now we know it to be the foundation of team science. So you have an example of how do you use CRM in a within a dental space, right. How a dentist can use it or a dentist's office can use it. We've been talking about this for years. And you brought up Maconda. Well, I don't think a lot of our listeners they may or may not know that back after Deepwater Horizon, there's a series of accidents in 2007 to 2011 where the international oil and gas producers looked to aviation crew resource management and said this is what we need to do on our rigs to make sure we have safe operations. You know social, technical systems, safe operations. What's been excluded is the rest of the organization, right.

Speaker 1: 8:09

Everybody looks at this and goes that's only for those people at the edge that are actually doing the work For us in the business, working in downtown Houston, in Dallas, we don't need to know how to work together as a team, and that's bullshit, right yeah. So I think you did a nice job in bringing that into your book. And again, my background is in fighter aviation, naval aviation. We see that connection, but I just want to thank you for making that connection in your book. It's pretty solid there. How about derivatives trading? What did you bring from that space? What did you learn about? Maybe, risk management and things like that?

Speaker 2: 8:41

Yeah, it's interesting. So the firm I was at was I was at a proprietary trading company, which just means they traded for their own, they own the money, basically. So one of the partners of the firm and I didn't really think about this until years later but one of the partners of the firm he was an ex-nuclear Navy guy and I think one of the concepts that he really brought that was in the culture was two things. One, it doesn't matter the level of the person that is there, right, the operator, the person in the seat they make a call, even if they've been in that seat for six months. If they're the person in the seat, they're the person making it.

Speaker 2: 9:26

It's not that you don't question their decision-making in a constructive way. You recognize that seniority experience like it's this concept that David Marquette has. I love the way he articulates you push the context down, you don't bring the decision-making up. So I really like that. So that was really one of the contexts they took. And I think as part of that context is I was at a place that really the leaders really model the speak up and a listen up culture. So they would talk about their own mistakes. They would praise people for talking about mistakes. That was huge. That was a huge, huge thing, and I think it was part of what made us good as an organization.

Speaker 1: 10:11

And that came from the nuclear side of the Navy right.

Speaker 2: 10:15

I think it came from that and I think it came from the real experience that these guys all had as and I say guys, because they were all guys as kind of operators who they weren't necessarily good at nuanced communication, but they did want people to speak up and they knew, when people spoke up, that it was important to listen to them.

Speaker 2: 10:36

So that was kind of two things that I took, and then I'll bring this cultural element in. When the financial crisis started so late, late 07, I was actually splitting my time between Tokyo and New York at the time and one of the things that I remember thinking, I had this thought like wow, some banks, some organizations, they're going to be way better at managing this to risk than others. And I couldn't really figure out why I thought that. But I didn't have any inside information about these places. I knew people there, kind of socially, professionally, but it was like, oh, bank A, they're going to do a better job of managing this risk than Bank B. And I didn't like write down that hypothesis and kind of like track it over time, but it made me curious. It made me curious of like what's this connection between kind of organizational culture and the ability to manage these big, big risks, and so that for me was that's really the question that kind of probably about 10 years later, led to the publication of Meltdown.

Speaker 1: 11:58

So what is that secret sauce, then? And I have an idea I want to hear from you what allows an organization to manage risk in a complex environment? And I know we can't manage risk that we can't see, but what, in your opinion? What is that?

Speaker 2: 12:13

I think one thing is this is a good question. I don't know that I've parameterized this recently in these ways, but I think one thing is just everybody feeling like it's their job right. So it's not like, oh, that person's doing their job, this is my job, I'm going to stay in my lane, I'm going to stay in my silo. It's this kind of spectrum of, okay, everybody sees that it's their job, the success of the enterprise is their job and the risks, that's their job too. So I think the idea that there's a kind of yes, you can have second line risk functions, controlling functions, et cetera, but they're always going to be less effective as the kind of primary decision makers seeing the spectrum of their job broadly.

Speaker 2: 12:55

And then I think, in addition to that, you minimize sacred cows, right? So you discuss the things that are undiscussable, right, you focus on the process. You talk a lot about how you work. You talk a lot about what's important about the work. You continually ask yourself are we focusing on the right thing? Right, that's this kind of idea, that sort of you know the double loop learning, right, like, does this still make sense? Are we still focusing on the right thing? And then you know, I do really think that there is an element of being able to communicate and being able to say, hey, this doesn't feel right to me, and that being a way to sort of slow down, that being a cue for people to slow down.

Speaker 1: 13:38

And what I'm thinking about now is the time in the cockpit where we had the opportunity to speak up, even though we're a junior to a senior pilot. We had that. We create that environment through team science or crew resource management, creating a psychological safety, a culture of debriefing and things like. There's so many things in there that we do, but that allows us to say something when we see something and just hey, yeah, I remember when I was going through flight training, I saw a firelight while we were on deck and, you know, went through the emergency procedures and the 04, 05 I was flying with the Marine Corps 05, backed me up. He's like, hey, you know he went, you know the ensign, went through all his procedures correctly. He had a firelight, did everything right. You know, do we have a fire? No, but we had a firelight which gave me yeah, and he knew that, hey, this guy is going to go through his process that he's supposed to go through in a time of extremity. So there's so many valuable lessons from the cockpit that you can come over.

Speaker 1: 14:33

And then we're looking at Wall Street too. A question that I have about Wall Street when you're managing other people's money or not just you, but anybody? Are you connected to that money? I mean, because you look at what's going on now and you look at what happened in 2007, 2008,. We have a runaway market right now. I don't say a runaway market, but a market that's doing some things that we may not agree with, but the market's never wrong. Right, right, right it's.

Speaker 2: 15:04

It might be wrong, but it's hard to bet against right.

Speaker 1: 15:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the market's not wrong, you're wrong, right? That's where I've been taught. So when you look at managing money other people's money or watching others manage money and managing that risk, are they connected to that? They have a sense of purpose? Do they feel like it's their? I mean, how do you, how do you trust people to do that?

Speaker 2: 15:27

Yeah, that's a great question. So it's interesting, right? So I was talking with somebody about this the other day Because my first really exposure to the markets as a young adult was on Wall Street and was seeing, and the place I was at I would say it was we did statistical stuff, we did arbitrage. This wasn't a place that was doing analysis and picking companies because of their business models or whatever. But the thing that I really take away from that is, man, if you think that you are somebody who is clever and you're going to beat the market, you really have to understand the amount of work that goes into people seeking out advantage in the capital markets and the amount of work, the amount of money and things like that. So that goes back to me.

Speaker 2: 16:22

The book I read that most influenced my personal approach to this stuff is A Random Walkdown on Wall Street by Burton Malkiel, which was published in 1950, 1960, something like that, and it's the genesis of index funds. And to me, that's where. Am I always perfect with this? No, do I react in ways that are all too human? Yes, absolutely, but part of my approach is to actually we can have as few people involved as we want in this process. Now I think I'm actually just transparently at a moment where I'm thinking about this right now because the Wall Street part of me is like man, don't pay anybody any fees to manage your money, to do anything like that. The business owner in me is like every moment that I'm not focusing on my business for something that's not in my zone of genius. I want to get that off my plate. So I actually am at this interesting point of tension In terms of how do you trust somebody?

Speaker 2: 17:29

Here is a place where I think regulation is not perfect but it can be helpful. I'm much more likely to trust a fidelity or a vanguard than I am to trust some very small place. So if I'm working with somebody who's not a major operator, not a fidelity or vanguard like boy, I want the back end to be fidelity and vanguard, and I want to be able to see that directly. So it's interesting because one of the things we talk about in Meltdown is transparency as an antidote to complexity, or transparency as a kind of balance for complexity, and so this is one of the areas I think about that. I want as many direct touch points. I don't want to have to be getting statements with my money manager's letterhead on it or whatever. I want to be able to log into Fidelity site and know that. Okay, I am backed by all of Fidelity systems in terms of believing that those ones and zeros on the screen are actually ones and zeros that I could use at some point if I wanted to.

Speaker 1: 18:30

All right, this triggered something. I'm not sure I'm going to get this question right. I'm going to give it a shot. So the market's a complex, adaptive system. We trust Fidelity and vanguard there. Right, our business, you and I run small I wouldn't say small. We run consultancies where we help organizations. Yeah, we're boutique. I like the word boutique. Yeah, we're boutique. So we compete against McKenzie, all right. So in your context you just shared with me about vanguard and Fidelity, let's trust in them. They're operating as complex environment, then why should anybody trust Clearfield? Why should anybody trust what we do? Why shouldn't they just go to McKenzie? Why shouldn't they just go to Accenture to navigate this complex world?

Speaker 2: 19:08

Yeah, well, that's a great question, and actually I mean I'll go back to my first answer, which is you shouldn't trust me, right? So, out of the gate, are you trusting me? No, I would hope you're not. Why are you and I having this conversation? Well, because I've put some stuff out there that resonated with you, right? You've read stuff of mine that landed for you. In a certain way. The thinking has been helpful.

Speaker 2: 19:34

The way I try to earn people's trust is by offering them value. So, whether that's through things that I write, through content I produce, or through getting on the phone with people and just talking with them about their leadership challenges, the first thing I'm always doing is offering people value, helping to reframe what they're saying, helping them to see things in a different way, helping them see, maybe, a different set of things that are possible if they're able to shift in a different way. And then the reason I have success with my clients is because I don't pull McKenzie. I have a lot of friends at McKenzie. I respect those people a lot. I respect some of the stuff McKenzie does. So I don't want this to be seen as bad-mouthing McKenzie or bad-mouthing the big four, but I do think, or I'll say, and I do think that the model of producing a nice report that you or a comprehensive deck that you present to a client, I really think that model of intervention is dead because it's not effective. So, for me, I'm effective in the way I work because I'm helping the leaders I work with build their own capacity as leaders and the capacity of their team.

Speaker 2: 20:54

I want to make myself obsolete. That's always my hope with a client. I don't want to be working on the same problem over and over again with them. I want to solve something or support them in solving something and then move on. And it's really that it's like the way I work with people is. I am not the sage on the stage offering them wisdom. I am not at the front with a PowerPoint deck If I am sharing what I'm seeing.

Speaker 2: 21:21

Let's imagine a 90-minute meeting where I'm presenting results from some of the work we've done. It's like 15 minutes, or me talking about the results, 60 minutes or them reacting to it, and then the last 15 minutes or the last 30 minutes, whatever it is, are okay. So how can I support you all in moving this forward? What are you going to do next? I think that trust is earned. My model is also. It's pretty fearless. I'm constantly telling my clients I don't know the answer and I think that's kind of anathema to a place like McKinsey or Centra or wherever, where the whole notion is that you're the expert and you're coming in and that has its place. Expertise has its place and it's not enough. And the more complex the problem is, the less valuable. Expertise is to first order.

Speaker 1: 22:10

Absolutely. Let me repeat back to you what I think I'm hearing, and that is you help organizations and leaders build a higher quality, observable-oriented side act loop. The tools and techniques, the methods. What's in your toolkit come from lessons from the cockpit. It could be aviation career resource management, which helps out in communication and teamwork. You also examine things from failure Macondo, Well, Air France 447,. You look at these things and go what can we learn from that? You're exapting lessons from other domains and then you're also taking lessons from risk management, maybe an investor mindset set, optionality, things that some people don't really understand, like how options market work and things like that. How do you buy and sell something you don't own and you're bringing that over to help them improve what they need to do to operate better and survive, thrive in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. Is that true?

Speaker 2: 23:07

Macondo. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm kind of absorbing your framing and there's parts of it that really resonate with me and parts of it that resonate a little bit less with me. So let me just process that for a minute, not a minute a moment. I'm just going to think for a second. So one thing I'll say is I never so you talked about you know you dropped the Oodalooop in there, right, and you and I are here we're kind of nerding out about the.

Speaker 2: 23:28

Oodalooop. I almost never talk with my clients about the Oodalooop because I'm always talking in their language. You know what I mean. That's my goal. It's always to sort of see things in their language and support them in their language at least initially right.

Speaker 2: 23:44

I will introduce things as we go on. So that is one of the things that I got curious about Do I frame my own work in terms of the Oodalooop? I think I do sometimes and sometimes I don't. And then the only other thing that I would add is you know one of the insights, so Meltdown came out in 2018, I started working with people kind of more and more.

Speaker 2: 24:04

You know consulting capacity, coaching capacity, working one-on-one with leaders, working with their teams. You know helping them with ambitious projects, and one of the things I realized was that it took me a while, but to melt down is all about the catastrophic downside of complex systems. It's granted one way to frame it. What I realized is oh, the same things that create the same interactions. The same complexity that creates catastrophic downside also makes teams much, much less effective. So that, I think, is, in many ways, how I see my thinking. Now. I'm still dealing with complexity. I'm still supporting people working in complex systems. The challenge I'm going after now with most of my clients is not the challenge of how do you avoid catastrophic failure, but rather the challenge of how do you be performant. How do you be performant in the modern economy, whether your business is your $700 million law firm or your a multibillion dollar multinational oil company, the challenges at the center of that are the same.

Speaker 2: 25:18

That's what I think is pretty interesting.

Speaker 1: 25:21

You and I are on the same page. We could talk about complexity, all the background behind complex adaptive systems. We could talk about the Oodleoo with our clients. We could do that. But at the end of the day, it comes down to, in my view, the way you work. We have to give them those tools.

Speaker 1: 25:36

You go back to David Marquet mission command that we've learned from the military. That's actually built into the Oodleoo we show folks. Hey, let me show you how to mitigate cognitive biases. Let me show you how to perform as a team. Let me show you how to do effective communication, which you have a great example in your book. I actually been using something like that for a while. That we borrow from TeamSTEPPS and Aviation True Resource Management. We show them these things To your point.

Speaker 1: 26:02

It's fractal, right? We can talk about fractality and all that. What happens on an aircraft carrier? The way they operate is no different than the way a software team operates. They're still humans working in a complex sociotechnical system. It's just interactions that matter. That's what we want to focus on. I agree with you Many times over the language of complexity, some of the things we show folks. I think you studied a little bit of neuroscience, we get into the free energy principle and how we minimize surprise and how we actually perceive reality. Sometimes people are like, oh, that's great, I don't need to know this, but can you show me how to do an effective planning process with a team? So yeah, I'm with you. Let's talk about complexity for a little bit. You've been at this for a while on the complexity side of the house. What are you doing now to help leaders understand what complexity really is? What kind of methods or techniques are you using with your clients?

Speaker 2: 27:02

I love that question. I think what I have found here's what I have found that giving people a little bit of scaffolding goes a long way. So giving them a little bit of language that they can apply to their own context goes a long way. I just had an oil and gas leader that I worked with for many years now. He just wrote me. We were just kind of emailing back and forth about Thanksgiving and what we're going to be up to in the next year together and I said how was your Thanksgiving? He said it was great. I said but I can't help think about the Thanksgiving story and meltdown and how to make my Thanksgiving not complex and tightly coupled, because he used that as one of the examples. I got such a kick out of that because that's a story, that scaffolding that he can hang so much on. He's kind of joking with me about hanging his Thanksgiving dinner on it, but he's thinking about his work on it. He's thinking about how to make their process she's more effective, more reliable, safer, all of those things, because he's got that knowledge in the background. So that's one thing, just a little bit of scaffolding, I think. But the other thing that I don't know if I would have answered. I don't know if I could have articulated this connection before you asked that question, so I'm going to try this out and we'll see how it lands.

Speaker 2: 28:28

So the other thing I spend a lot of time doing, a lot of my energy doing, when I am consulting in particular, is being curious. So I'm always asking questions. I'm not thinking anything is a given. I'm always asking questions about how this works, how different parts of their organization work together, how people feel about the work, how they feel about their jobs, all of those kinds of things. So I will do a lot of interviews in my consulting process, which is not so far out of the ordinary, but what I will give, almost regardless of what the problem is if it's helping an innovation team set up their strategy or helping a leader reorganize her leadership team. So much of what I'm doing is I'm absorbing their organizational culture and then reflecting it back to them.

Speaker 2: 29:17

And the way I reflect it back to them is I reflect back hey, here are a set of things that you're very, very strong at, and here is the shadow side of those things. So if you're really, really good at producing excellent, high quality work, that sounds like a great feature and it is a great feature. You want to be part of an organization that can produce high quality work. The shadow side of that is it's harder for you to be agile. It's harder for you to produce crappy work. That gets you some insight about what you need to be working on.

Speaker 2: 29:50

So I'm often presenting to leaders, to a leadership team, this kind of view of their organization and how they're working, and then getting their reactions, seeing how that lands for them. And it's interesting because, almost regardless of what the content of what we're working on is, they find that process very, very valuable. And I have a client who I'm thinking of right now. I did this with earlier in the year and every time we're talking, they're constantly talking about the Clearfield Nine Box Matrix, which is just these observations about what are they very strong at and what are some things that they could benefit from exploring. And then I'm supporting them in that exploration and I'm helping, using that to help them raise their awareness of the waters that they swim in. And as they're making decisions about things like a leader reorganizing a CEO, reorganizing her leadership team, for example, I'll be offering them feedback Like, hey, do you see how much you're caring for people in this discussion.

Speaker 2: 30:47

It's really good to care for people, and you know that this change is going to have an impact on people. So how can you manage that impact? Instead of preemptively caring for people, you can care for people by managing the impact, not by avoiding the hard thing. So maybe that's my answer. I'm constantly trying to support people by holding up a little bit of a mirror to what I am seeing in their organization. And it's not like here's a mirror. This is right, it's like here's the mirror. What do you all make of this? Because that's the most important thing.

Speaker 1: 31:18

Right. It's the whole idea that we all perceive reality a little bit differently, so we need to have those feedback loops from each other.

Speaker 1: 31:26

That's absolutely critical. There's so much more. There's the what's happening now. I think we want to touch on that here in a moment. Before we get into that, I want to take a look back at some of your influences. I know you had Daniel Kahneman in the book. You had Daniel Pink. You had a little bit of the US Navy in there. You had some accidents that we're very familiar with Challenger Columbia, air France 447, which is a great story to talk about. That's five, six years in the past. What are your influences now? What are you reading? What's helping? You maintain we're all professionals, but we're always students too. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2: 32:03

I love that question and in fact I'm tempted to go over to my bookshelf and just pull some books. Sure, I sort my bookshelf by book last pulled, so there's a kind of a sort of frequency bias to it. But I happen to have one book here on my desk that's the surprising power of liberating structures.

Speaker 1: 32:20

Do you know this book? Absolutely, that's Red Teaming 101 right there. That's foundational, yeah.

Speaker 2: 32:26

So this is such a great book and I love it philosophically and I love it practically too. So philosophically, basically, this book says the world of top-down decision-making, the world of presenting out to people, is just not as useful as you think it is. And so so often when I'm working in an organization, I remember working with an engineering leader at an organization once and he was going in to do a big presentation and I was like you know, let's call him John. I was like John, how many minutes you got here? He's like 60 minutes.

Speaker 2: 32:59

I was like how many slides you got? He was like 85 slides. I was like John, you get to use five slides. Like this isn't about you pushing information out to them, this is about you creating the conditions for an emergent discussion to happen, because, a that's where you're going to get other people's wisdom and B that's actually how you're going to convince people. Like you're not, I actually don't even like that's where you're going to influence people. You're going to influence people by showing them that you too are willing to be influenced, and a book like this is just such a great, great resource for that, such a great way to kind of think about structures like that.

Speaker 1: 33:33

I got to get Keith McCandless on a show. He's up in there. I think you're up in the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 2: 33:37

Yeah, he's in Seattle too, I think.

Speaker 1: 33:38

Yeah, yeah, so I got to meet him when I was living up there. But liberating structures are you using those techniques now with leadership All the time.

Speaker 2: 33:46

Okay, I use them all the time.

Speaker 1: 33:48

Yeah, this is what I said about mitigating cognitive biases and enabling critical thinking. The red team manual that we use from the UFMCS, from the military, is built on liberating structures a lot of work from Kahneman, a lot of work from Klein, but that is foundational. I'm so glad you brought that up. I didn't know you were going to bring that one up, but that is central to everything we do. Pretty central.

Speaker 2: 34:08

Yeah, it's not an accident that it's on my desk, because I was recommending it to somebody yesterday. I mean I really, I really reach for this book all the time.

Speaker 1: 34:16

No, that's great. What else? What else is on your bookshelf? Let's see.

Speaker 2: 34:22

Let's take a wander over with me Pong. So I've got a couple here that I think are pretty interesting. This one, I think, is this is probably of what I pull. This is probably the most useful to line leaders. It's called Beyond the Wall of Resistance. It's written by a guy called Rick Maurer he is.

Speaker 2: 34:43

So the school of coaching and consulting that I am grounded in is called Gestalt, which is kind of all about seeing what is and supporting people to experiment with new ways of being. So the coaching I do I'm not a performance coach. We're not working on speeches or kind of how you're getting nervous or whatever. The way I work with people is we work on an existential level. So what is it about who you are that makes this challenging? What is it about who you are that's really valuable? That's kind of the concept. Like you know, this is back to this strength shadow side. So a lot of what I do is help people see their strengths and, in seeing their strengths, support them in getting curious about other ways of being, about other ways of kind of trying things out.

Speaker 2: 35:36

So this book, beyond the Wall of Resistance, is about organizational change. It's about stop seeing resistance as the enemy and start to see it as data about your problem. It introduces a model called the cycle of change, which I use all the time with my clients, almost regardless of the problem we're working on. I mean, everything involves change and it's a really, it's a great book.

Speaker 1: 35:57

You brought up something there and see in what is. And then to us, when we talk about complexity, we start with the current condition. Where are we right now? Right, so we can't just come up and go. We want to be over there, because in a complex environment you can't really define that state. But it's easier to start. It's not easier. We should start with what is right. What is happening? What's happening on the external environment, what's happening inside, what is? Use multiple and use liberating structures. I'll use that or red teaming techniques to leverage multiple perspectives to understand what is what is happening right now. Let's start there, right, okay, is that? Is that very aligned to what you're working? Or the Gestalt approach?

Speaker 2: 36:34

Yeah, so, so, yes, it is, and the Gestalt approach also posits that there's a value in what is right. There is a value in the way you're operating now. So you know to, to, to, to back to these organizational kind of uh overviews that that I was talking about. You know there's really a value to to being a perfectionist. There's really a value to producing high quality work. There's also a cost to it. So, but until you recognize the value, it's very hard to change something. So until you recognize what is now and why it is, what's the value there, it's hard to change. Um, you know, uh.

Speaker 2: 37:12

Another thing I like is, you know, psychological safety, right, disability for people to speak up, felt sense of candor is is how I've heard Amy Edmonds and describe it very succinctly Um, if you're on a team that that does not have a felt sense of candor, like, it's very easy to say we want our team to, to be psychologically safe. I want my people to feel psychologically safe and, as you said, like, sure, that's a great plate, that's a great desire, that's a great, that's a great wish, but that is not a change strategy, right, you have to understand now. Why aren't your people speaking up? What is the value that they get from not speaking up Right, and it's often a sense of self-protection, it's often a sense of actually not wanting to harm your ego as the leader, right? So, if you right.

Speaker 2: 37:56

So, so that's. Yeah, I think we're kind of on the same page. We're sort of converging about, like what is what is happening now and what's the value of it? How do we get here? That's always that's gotta be the starting point, otherwise you're kind of you don't have anything to push against. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 38:09

There's an interesting connection between crew resource management and psychological safety. When I had a discussion with a doctor I've been sent a few years back when I was working for the Navy, I asked her that question Were the teams that you looked at the surgical teams you looked at? Were they trained by aviators? And guess what?

Speaker 1: 38:26

The answer was yes, so that's kind of cool. So when we learned about psychological it's funny, I was living up in Seattle years ago we were talking about psychological safety seven, eight years ago, right before the Google I forget the name of the Google thing came out, but Aristotle, probably Aristotle, yeah, thanks. And I remember as an agile coach back then. Here I am, this young agile coach, talking about psych safety, and these people are looking at me like these other agile coaches that are certified and they these long alphabet suit behind their names. They're looking at me like what the hell are you talking about? I'm like what do you mean? And of course, here everybody, today's everybody, is like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, psychological safety expert.

Speaker 2: 39:02

I'm like I don't think so.

Speaker 1: 39:04

Yeah, and let me tell you this is important, coming from aviation, and you've learned a little bit about the art and science of effective debriefing. Um, debriefing is or after action reviews, or or uh yeah, uh, some marine community calls and critiques from David Marquet. That's the most powerful way, uh, if done effectively, to create a psychologically safe environment is have a leader show some fallibility, right, how do you get leaders to stand up and say, hey, over the last two weeks or week or whatever, I failed this, right? Yeah, immediately, boom, you start to create that psychological safety. Uh, so, yeah, I really appreciate that, that, that insight there on on um, both liberating structures and psych safety.

Speaker 2: 39:46

Yeah, and two, two things there that I think one is kind of just a funny story, one is uh, one is uh um, kind of a more, a more, a more serious take on on what you just said or kind of building on what you just said. So the funny story is I like, hey, I said you know everybody's an expert in psychological safety now, because it is really interesting to see kind of this idea catch on. And I was actually I was with Amy Edmondson and um Roger Martin and some other folks at a, at a dinner where Amy won the, the what I think they called it the breakthrough idea award or something like that for her, for her work on psychological safety, and she was sort of chagrin because she said, you know, it's a breakthrough idea.

Speaker 2: 40:27

That's been around for 25 years or whatever it was. So it is, it is interesting. I mean, it's kind of, you know, the classic adoption diffusion question, just sort of where we're seeing it kind of lived out, right. Um, so that's, I think, like a sort of a funny thing on it that I'm I'm with you on. It's interesting to see sort of how it, how it is sprouting up and for the for the better, right, I mean, thank goodness people are talking about this stuff now, right, because before you didn't again back to that scaffolding, you didn't know the scaffolding or the model for people to kind of just sort of connect with it.

Speaker 2: 40:58

Um, but the thing I wanted to to to build on about the debriefs. So so I have this um, I have this, this program I've just launched which is called the, the clear path to executive leadership, which is clear as an acronym, um. I won't go into depth now, but it's kind of these, these pillars, that I think I see leaders, um, especially as they get more senior and they can rely less on their expertise, they sort of. They need something to replace it. And so clear is um, curiosity, listening, empowerment, accountability and results. And I've got this program. It's a 12 week program. It makes a kind of content and coaching and group coaching and things like that. It's great.

Speaker 2: 41:35

I can I can talk more about it, but one of the things I was talking with one of my, one of the participants, about earlier this week was that the power of building a container so a debrief and after action review is a container? It is. It is a strong container with a specific set of rules. Here's how we talk about things, here's how you know, here's. Here's what we're focused on. Um, one of the rules basically is you don't hold what people share in this container. You don't hold that against them in the container or outside the container, right? So there's just kind of like rules. You think about the liberating structures.

Speaker 1: 42:10

Right, we call that. We call that the. You know Las Vegas rule. What happens in the debrief stage of debrief yeah, totally. Totally.

Speaker 2: 42:17

So you, so you've got this really strong container. Liberating structures is all about building strong containers, right. It's all about okay, here's the specifics of how we're going to operate in this moment and, depending on the kind of organization, confidentiality right, there's all sorts of stuff that can go into that. I don't think that most leaders understand, a how to build containers or, b the power that crafting a container like that has, and so this is actually part of what I'm teaching in this course. This is part of what I'm offering in this course because it is so powerful. I can, you know, I can work with a very, very senior leader who struggles to do these kind of retrospectives, or struggles to to put into place a kind of learning element, and it's like man. You just need to understand how to build a container, how to bring people into it, how to run it and then how to let people out of it and boy your effectiveness. When you can build a container, it's like it doubles instantly. It's pretty incredible.

Speaker 1: 43:12

There's something on when you brought up clear and accountability and the discussion we just had. So a container, you put a container on them and you build a cadence and we call it a cadence of accountability, really, yeah, for us, we use accountability as the ability to recount what happened right. So it's going back to is like what's happening now and what happened in the past, right, and when you look at Meltdown, you actually look back at the what happened in the black box of the cockpit voice recorder. That's a what happened right. Yeah, it's not the attitudes and beliefs about what should be better in the future.

Speaker 2: 43:45

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 43:48

Cool, hey. So on the topic of Meltdowns, so much has changed in the last five years doing math and public since 2018. Here we are in 2023, about to go into 2024. What are the big concerns right now? What are you seeing as a tightly coupled systems moving forward with going into 2024? It could be AI, it could be quantum computing, it could be, you know, offshoring. What are you seeing out there as a major threat?

Speaker 2: 44:15

no-transcript. Yeah, I mean, boy, ai is fascinating, right? I mean just AI is fascinating because to me there's a part of AI that we were talking about adoption, adoption diffusion, a minute ago. There's a part of AI that just breaks the adoption diffusion model, because at some point I'm making this up right now, by the way, ponce, so I'm not very confident about this thing, but I'll offer it and we can tease it apart. If you are the professional services firm, if you are the law firm, if you are the ex-firm that figures out how to harness AI to do the work of 10 times your current workforce at a tenth of the cost effectively, or at least effectively enough for most of your client problems, suddenly it doesn't matter if the rest of the industry adopts it, because the rest of the industry is going to go away very, very quickly. I think, just from a business perspective, there is a really, really interesting phenomenon here that the scalability of this stuff is just built in from the start and it doesn't have to be adopted in the same way that other technologies get adopted. I think that the ratchet, or the push to push this stuff forward Admittedly, I'm kind of grounded in the legal space a little bit.

Speaker 2: 45:34

I'm grounded in the professional services firms. I do work with those kinds of folks, so there is probably a bias to my thinking in that. But boy, I do think that that's so interesting that, yes, there's this idea of the singularity what happens? I have no idea what happens. I don't know that. Anybody knows what happens. There's a couple of different camps. I mean pretty interesting to follow from afar. But when it comes to how this is going to affect the world of work, I also don't know how it's going to affect it, but I feel pretty confident that it's going to affect it. It's affected my work already and we're in the baby steps of this whole thing.

Speaker 1: 46:09

So, as I look back to, like Air France 447 or I forgot the Eastern Airlines 401, and then you look back to the 737 MAX. So you have automation coming into the cockpit, right, human capability goes down and you have I don't know if you call it a tightly coupled system. It might be there. It kind of has unknowns, known unknowns in there. Now we're putting humans in a situation where we're becoming more dependent on technology, right, or could be. To me, that becomes a threat to seeing another Macondo, well, another plane crash. So that's how I'm thinking through this right now. There are lessons we learned already over the last hundreds of years from accidents that we should be bringing forward into this world of AI.

Speaker 2: 47:00

Yeah, I'm with you on that, and I think one of the challenges I think is basically most of us, most humans, we're not very good proofreaders, right, we're not very good. We're not very good at catching small mistakes inside larger things and with our complex systems, those small mistakes can really matter. Right, those small mistakes can spiral into bigger things. So one of the things that I think is pretty interesting about AI from this kind of complexity perspective is how there's just no insight into where anything came from. You can type in something into chat GPT. It gives you a very comprehensive response. You actually don't know how that response got constructed. You don't know where that response came from. Now, you also don't know where the response from another human came from. So there's an element of that where there's a lot of back explaining of our thinking and reasoning and things like that. But that's where I think it's like.

Speaker 2: 48:04

Like with automation, you can talk about sophisticated automation you can talk about, but even just I'm sure you know that video the children of the Magenta line, right, it's like the American Airlines training captain I don't remember his name, but this was 25 years ago saying hey, as aviators, we've got to be able to maintain situational awareness and pay attention, without all of this automation. As soon as we start believing the automation, you know there's kind of there's something wrong, right. So I don't know how we think about keeping humans in the information loop where it matters, because it's. You know, these technologies are so much more capable than us in some things, except in some sense in recognizing their own fallibility, right. So it's a paradox. How do you think about that?

Speaker 1: 48:55

I'm struggling with it right now. You know, a lot of predictive maintenance, predictive capabilities are being brought onto companies at the moment and what I see there is, hey, remember the pedostatic tubes on the Air France 447 freezing up. Or look back at the Burdell light bulb of Eastern Airlines Flight 401. People lose situational awareness, they lose capability. You look at probable, plausible and possible in risk management, the fat tail approach. How is that system going to pick that, that fat tail up? That I guess it's plausible. You know, how do we, how do we pick up those things in a complex system? In my view and this comes from a lot of it comes from the work in with Dave Snowden is you need a human sensor network to understand what's going on. Right, ai is going to be part of that.

Speaker 1: 49:45

And think about this AI could work quite well in a checklist world right, the things that we know. And so if you got through your flight, your checklist in the cockpit, you have to do these things right. There's no way out of them right. And if you fail to do them, you're going to you may see a disaster or a crisis and it'll be temporary. So AI could help out in that space. So more on the ordered system. Part of the space that's how I'm looking at is humans are going to be pretty darn good on the complex side. Maybe that artificial intelligence will free us up to think a little bit more clearly. I think what's more important now is the use of things like liberating structures. That is technology, that's like liveware technology right, yeah, that's what we need you and I need to be focusing on, instead of going off and telling folks hey, you need to automate this and that it's. Hey, yeah, I have to bring your human capability up to actually survive and thrive in this environment. That's kind of how I'm thinking through this.

Speaker 2: 50:40

Yeah, I love that. That brings to mind something I wrote probably a couple of years ago. I see a lot of leaders that talk about data driven decision making and they need more data and they need to understand more, and my response that is Most leaders do not actually need more data, right? Because it's such a complex system that the data is not that helpful in many, many instances, unless you've kind of prescribed a very specific experiment and you're very clearly testing a specific hypothesis. That's when data is useful.

Speaker 2: 51:14

The thing that I think that leaders need to be able to do more and more is pay attention to their feelings and pay attention to the feelings of others.

Speaker 2: 51:21

It's like the felt experience of being with somebody man, that gives you so much data about how something is going. You can pay attention to your own reactions to an idea. You can lead yourself and manage your own reactivity If you can really learn to listen to people, right. So the idea of this curiosity and listening pair that I have in this leadership framework is expertise isn't enough anymore. We've got to let that expertise kind of rest in the background. It doesn't mean get rid of your engineering credentials. It doesn't mean shred your books on software engineering, but it does mean that as you get more senior, so much more of what you do comes by building relationships with people, being curious and really being able to listen being able to listen and understand what people are saying and that act of listening creates a container where people get to do their best thinking and they go out and solve those problems. That's how I think about it.

Speaker 1: 52:19

Yeah, no, that act of listening piece is in our book, the Flow System as well. You brought up another thought here. I read the Extended Mind by Annie Murphy-Paul like a year ago. One of the things she pointed out this connects back to Wall Street and what you just talked about. What makes a good trader is the inter-acceptive skills, their connection to the world. How are they connected to their sensations of the external world? That's what you're talking about here is how do we create that within an organization? How are leaders connected to their people? How do we sense each other's emotions and things like that? How do we create that mental health? But how do we attack well-being and this connects back to psychological safety as well as this is what we're going after. That's why I think you and I are kind of aligned in this conversation is this is what matters not so much the technology, but it's the liveware approach to things.

Speaker 2: 53:15

Yeah, and I got a quick story about that which I just love. So this is kind of like a hard-nosed engineering team at an oil and gas company that I've been working with for a couple of years and they are working differently than their peers, they are working differently than the rest of the people in the organization and they are bringing that different way of working to the rest of the people and meeting a lot of resistance as doing it. And so I've worked with them over the years on kind of this idea of how do you earn the right to be right, how do you earn the right to not show up with the data and kind of bludgeon people with it, right, like bring out your data sticks and sort of whack people with it. But how do you do that? And the thesis that I have and what I have brought to them is you do that by building relationships, by listening, by the way you're influential is by also being willing to be influenced, and people deep down they know that they resonate with that.

Speaker 2: 54:08

So one of the guys on this team I've worked with for about a year. He and his boss and a couple other people from the team are in a meeting. It done a lot of prep work to get to this point. They've got this thing that they want this very senior leader to sign off on. They've done all this work with his staff, his team, other people, lots of stakeholders. They're pretty sure that they're on to something. They're pretty sure that they're on to something because they've gotten a lot of feedback about it and they know that this guy has resistance because he's expressed it through subordinates. He's expressed it in different ways and one of the things I worked with them on was how do you think about resistance, how do you categorize resistance in different ways and how can you work skillfully?

Speaker 2: 54:45

So the story I heard I wasn't there. The story I heard was this guy let's call him Jed Jed's going into this meeting. He's leading the meeting off. He spends like a couple of days before this meeting studying this taxonomy of resistance that I've given him. He's thinking through it. So he goes into this meeting and he says hey, josh, I've got a deck that I'd like to take you through and I'm happy to do that. But before I do, I just wanted to know would you be willing to share some of the concerns you have about this program that we're talking about and it just opened the floodgates.

Speaker 2: 55:18

It was like this guy just hit all this pent up energy. He had all this pent up resistance and he just shared. And Jed, my client, he's kind of managing his anxiety, a little bit like, oh, I'm not going to get this stuff, but he kind of knows he's sort of a believer, he's trying this out, so he just stays with him. And what his boss shared with me later is he said I've never seen anybody bring up so many objections and talk himself out of them so quickly. So it was like all this guy wanted he just wanted to be heard.

Speaker 2: 55:49

And there is just such a deeply human level of we just want to be heard, we just want to be seen, we just want to be understood. We really deep down we are social primates. We just deep down want to connect with people and somewhere along the way in our corporate world that has gotten lost Like that, as the underpinning to how we work together has gotten lost. And it's not to say that the other stuff isn't important, it's not to say that data is not important, it's not to say the effect of it is not important, but what it is, what I am saying and what I see over and over again is that when people just loosen their grip a little bit on those things, the things they're comfortable with, their expertise, the things they're familiar with, their effectiveness goes way, way up, because suddenly they are relating to other people as humans, as the humans that they are not, as the kind of work there's probably a term we could coin here.

Speaker 2: 56:47

So there's Homo economicus, there's like Homo jobbists or whatever. We imagine that these people at work are not humans because we carve out such a narrow slice for them to show up as and no, when you can learn to relate to people as humans, when you can use curiosity and listening as your tools of engagement, you are a hundred times more effective because you don't get caught in resistance Right.

Speaker 1: 57:11

Right Now. Speaking of human connectedness, I just want to thank you for coming on the no Way Out today. This has been amazing. I've been looking forward to connecting with you for many years. Let me tell you some background on that before I turn it over to you. So, 2017, mishaps at sea we had the USS McCain USS Fitzgerald running to each other ships at sea. 2018, I came back in the Navy. We went pretty deep with complex adaptive systems, psych safety, condiments, work, even liberating structures, red teaming things A lot of things that we've already talked about today. About a few months after that, I think your book came out in November of 2018. Is that about right?

Speaker 2: 57:44

It came out a little bit early, I think in March, but I don't remember. Yeah, mark.

Speaker 1: 57:49

Yeah, if I remember right, I was reading it and like this is what we need to put in front of military leaders right now, because it has everything that we were talking about. It's like everything that, by the way, I was the only aviator on the team of surface warfare officers, so I'm like talking like, hey, this is what we do in aviation. Like, well, that's not going to work here. You're human, right? Yeah, I'm sure. Well, I doubt that now, but and I'm leaving the Navy here in a few months anyway, from the reserve side, so, yeah, so we, you know, I'm reading your book on. This is awesome. This has everything that we need to discuss or we needed our leaders to learn about. So I highly recommend military leaders not just military leaders, but anybody who's interested in what complexity is what we can learn from failure?

Speaker 1: 58:33

I'm a count of well, air France 447. There's some. Go grab that book now, go read it. Reach out to Chris, reach out to any of us to go, hey, help me out. And how do I implement this type of thinking in my organization? So, Chris, I want to thank you for that, but I do want to turn it over to you, to you know, how do our listeners get in contact with you, and what do you? What are you doing next? Are you writing another book?

Speaker 2: 58:54

Yeah, it's a great question. So I'm I've got, I've got. Well, right now I'm focused on, on, on creating this leadership, this leadership program that I've been talking about, the clear path to executive leadership and I stood it up just a couple months ago, been in development for a while, kind of laid the groundwork and then we're sort of building it, building it on the fly, got a lot of real. I did about I don't know probably about 30 interviews with different leaders all across different sectors as part of kind of really seeing what the universal challenges of of that people are facing in terms of leading in in complex systems. So I think probably next for me is a book that is more about the leadership side of this. So it's more about kind of you know, meltdown is about the system side of it and there's leadership pieces in there that I think are really effective and there's a real gap between you know what we recommend to meltdown and sort of how do you bring these practices to your team, and I. I recognize that gap, especially as I started working with folks after the book came out. So I'm really proud of meltdown. I think the next book will be something that you know somebody can take and work with, very work with, very practically the thing that I want to offer people is.

Speaker 2: 1:00:04

So I've been talking a lot about curiosity, I've been talking a lot about expertise and we've been talking about kind of you know, what are the limits of expertise? How do you kind of, how do you work around that? And I actually I'm sharing one of the videos from my program about curiosity for free that folks can go and download and can join my mailing list and kind of get in touch with me that way. So to get that, you can go to clearfieldgroupcom, slash expertise, and then that'll bring you to that video. You can, you, can, you know, put in your email address and download that. And I think that's actually a great place to start the conversation in many ways, because you know, I'm not offering tools. I'm, I'm, I'm, there's, no, there's no. I mean, I do offer some tools, I do offer some tips, but like, really what? What I'm offering people is a different paradigm and an entry into a different way of thinking and a different way of working, as you and I have talked about. And so my, my hope is that this video is a useful way for people to start to get in touch with that and start to kind of connect with that and sort of see, you know, see, see what, see what that is, see what that can look like for them and how they can apply that in their leadership and actually inside this program too.

Speaker 2: 1:01:14

We are talking explicitly about paradigms. How do you see the paradigms that you're currently operating in, your team are currently operating in, and how can you be thoughtful about that and sort of keep what works and change what doesn't, so so, so there's a whole element of that. So clearfieldgroupcom slash expertise that's a really good way to, you know, to kind of start our relationship. And then, you know, there'll be a chance through that to book a call with me, to chat with me, that kind of thing. I love talking with people about their, their leadership challenges and then, other than that, that's really the best way. I also I do a lot on LinkedIn so people can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm not so active on X slash Twitter anymore for obvious reasons, but, yeah, linkedin, and then clearfieldgroupcom slash expertise.

Speaker 1: 1:01:58

Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time, Chris. We'll talk to you soon and we'll see you. Hopefully we'll see you again here on no Way Out, maybe in about a year or so, to talk about hopefully we're not talking about a massive meltdown, maybe something else.

Speaker 2: 1:02:09

Yeah, let's stay positive. Yeah, no that I'd love to come back. And yeah, thanks for the invitation. Thanks for the great conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:02:17

It's really fun. All right, all right.