Leadership Unpacked:

• On Control and Leadership: "We increase our control by saying, even if I don't actually know what the right answer is right now, I'm putting in place a process to learn and see what's going on and to iterate my understanding that will get me closer and closer to something that works."
• On Vulnerable Leadership: "It's not about whether we've got it all figured out right now, but about having the confidence in the processes and tools and mechanisms and in our team that we believe that we will get there in time, even if we're not already there now."
• On Team Dynamics: "Ultimately, the biggest obstacle that I see in my practice, the biggest obstacle to greater impact, is teams and individuals saying yes to too many things and spreading ourselves too thin."
• On Trust and Collaboration: "I recognize that my trust is like part of my superpower in really enabling this kind of like unleashing of the potential of everybody around me."
• On Curiosity in Leadership: "Curiosity is a big one... the most powerful curiosity... springs from a sense of awe, a sense of wonder."

LifeSpeak

This is LifeSpeak, a podcast about well being, mental health and building resilience through knowledge. Here's Marianne Wiesenthal.

Marianne Wisenthal

I'm speaking today with strategic leadership facilitator, Dr. Brooke Struck, an expert in applied behavioral science, Dr. Struck works with transformative leaders, helping them to diagnose and address their most pressing challenges, focusing on organizations in health and well being, tech and innovation, and professional and creative services, Brooke helps his clients create meaningful results for their organizations, their teams and their clients.

Dr. Brooke Struck joins me today from Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Welcome to the LifeSpeak podcast.

Brooke Struck

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Marianne Wisenthal

You say, and I'm quoting you directly here, misalignment, confusion and competing priorities can stall momentum for even the most capable and well intentioned teams.

What do you mean by that?

Brooke Struck

Ultimately, the biggest obstacle that I see in my practice, the biggest obstacle to greater impact, is teams and individuals saying yes to too many things and spreading ourselves too thin. And that keeps us from loading up on a smaller set of things that we can do really, really well and that have this kind of like emergent, synergistic impact, which is more than just the sum of the parts. So that's what I mean about stalling momentum and kind of undermining teams.

And how can that happen in a context where people are capable, but capable and also well intentioned?

When we say yes to things, let's start with being well intentioned. A lot of times people say yes to things because they're trying to be helpful. They're actually trying to be as collaborative as possible and deliver as best of a service as they can to the people that they're working with and working for.

So it's not a lack of good intention and it's seldom a capability issue either. It's not that teams are not positioned to really do a good job on any of the single things that they're saying yes to. They actually have the skills to do basically all of them.

But what they don't have is the bandwidth to do all of them thoroughly enough to, to really derive the full benefit of doing that. And they're, they're also diluting their efforts with a lot of stuff that ultimately ends up being lower value because it doesn't fit into a whole portfolio of activities in an interesting way. And so that's to come to kind of the front end of that sentence, like misalignment, confusion, and competing priorities.

That's what drives us to say yes to too many things, to miss opportunities to load up on a few things that really create like this kind of escape velocity impact in our work.

Marianne Wisenthal

But isn't it up to the team leader in this situation to be able to identify that that's happening?

Brooke Struck

Yes, it's definitely up to the team leader to identify that that's happening. But the team leader can't be in all places at all times. So it's true that the leader has to identify the situation and then remedy the situation. But the remedy is not to provide really detailed prescriptive advice about doing this and not doing that. Ultimately, there are just too many things, especially in knowledge work contexts.

There are just too many unforeseeable situations. There are too many choices that can't be identified and made in advance.

So rather than giving this very kind of micromanaging detail about say yes to these things and say no to these things, embracing that those teams themselves, even way down the org chart, will always need to have some agency to make a judgment call about what to take on and what not to take on. And so rather than giving them that really prescriptive, detailed advice, it's actually making sure that they have the context to make informed decisions of their own.

Marianne Wisenthal

So the misalignment and the confusion in the competing priorities and the, as you said, spreading ourselves too thin, how can we avoid that?

Brooke Struck

The approach that I advocate and that I work on with my clients is something that I call collective leadership. And that approach basically involves opening up the strategy crafting process to a much bigger group of participants inside of the organization. And there are two, well, at least two impacts of that.

One is that people have more clarity about the strategic context and the strategic positioning of the organization more. That gives them the information that they need in order to make more informed choices about what to take on, what not to take on, how to scope the things that they take on and to kind of lean them into the strategy.

But there's a second element of that as well, which has to do with motivation. And here I'm really like tapping into my behavioral background. When we're involved in building something, we feel much more of a sense of ownership over it, and therefore we're much more motivated to implement it.

Marianne Wisenthal

So how does a leader do that?

How do you do you give your team ownership, while also, you know, you talk about collective leadership, which sounds kind of warm and fuzzy, and you're bringing in people who are on your team to help support the goal or the vision.

How do you do that while kind of as a leader also kind of maintaining control, I guess, for lack of a Better word.

Brooke Struck

So controls are really interesting thing in this. And one of the ways that control is often maintained is that information is controlled and kind of stockpiled. And so what information we have access to becomes a real source of our power.

The other thing is that we as leaders might obfuscate or not make it too clear how it is that people can influence our choices and our decisions because we don't want to be bombarded with people kind of pushing their agendas forward. And so the, the practical steps that I advocate are really centered around this idea of making your, your chain of reasoning as clear as possible.

As a leader saying, this is the information that I'm working from. These are the inferences that I'm making based on that information. Here are the values and priorities that are going into the choices that I'm making and really inviting others into that process to say, show me what it is that I haven't seen. And this comes from a recognition that every signal we're getting about the world out there is always a partial signal.

And so when someone comes with evidence that might seem contradictory or conflicting or these kinds of things, the reaction is not to immediately jump to the conclusion that this person is disagreeing with me, this person is in conflict with me, but rather to say they also are coming with another piece of the puzzle. And it's only in working together that we can make sense of and integrate everything that we're seeing into one coherent picture. And the more people who are involved in that process, the more pieces of the puzzle that we integrate into one coherent picture, the better resolution we will have on what is actually going on in the world outside.

Marianne Wisenthal

So there's a little bit of letting go.

Brooke Struck

Yeah, that's right. So it's interesting.

It's letting go of the insistence on being able to control the situation and recognizing that there are things inside of the situation that are going to be out of your control.

And so, yes, in that respect, certainly there's going to be a relinquishment of a relinquishing of control. But there's another aspect of this in which we are actually taking more control because we're making ourselves less, less brittle, less reliant on having the right answer.

Right now we increase our control by saying, even if I don't actually know what the right answer is right now, I'm putting in place a process to learn and see what's going on and to iterate my understanding that will get me closer and closer to something that works. So it's A shift of focus from, as Brene Brown would put it, a shift of focus from being right to getting it right.

Marianne Wisenthal

Oh, that's interesting. And speaking of Brene Brown, you and I have had previous conversations where we talk about how. And Brene Brown certainly promotes this as being a vulnerable leader.

You know, what. What does it mean to be a vulnerable leader? And how can we be a vulnerable leader? By saying maybe that we don't have all the answers or we're struggling with something, but we also have to be leading and being strong at the same time.

Because this is something that I think you hear with some of your clients.

Brooke Struck

Yeah, for sure.

Brooke Struck

There's definitely this tension that a lot of leaders that I'm working with are experiencing where they're getting these signals that they're supposed to lean into this idea of vulnerable leadership.

But at the same time, people want to feel confident under their leadership. So how do they manage that tension?

And the answer to that, once again, comes back to this idea that it's not about whether we've got it all figured out right now, but about having the confidence in the processes and tools and mechanisms and in our team that we believe that we will get there in time, even if we're not already there now.

And so where vulnerability comes in, there is to say, like, in order to fully embrace this idea that, like, getting it right is a process and it's a trajectory and it's an activity that means that I need to let go of this idea of the kind of, like, the steady state, the status of having it right right now.

And so that can feel very vulnerable because a lot of the ways that we talk about leadership and the ways that we have, like these. These culturally very well developed kind of intuitions about how we expect leaders to act and what counts as leaderly, a lot of that is built up around this idea that, like, leaders are the ones who already have the answers.

And in situations where, let's say, the market and the political context and the climate are more stable and there's less perturbation in the ecosystem, that makes a lot of sense. Because once you land on the right answer in a relatively stable situation, you can be confident in that answer continuing to be right for a relatively long period of time.

But as the ecosystem around us becomes more dynamic, as things start to change more quickly, even if you do have the right answer right now, the half life of that answer, the shelf life of that answer just becomes shorter and shorter. And so even if you are sitting right on that, X marks the spot Right now, you can't take it for granted that that's going to continue to be the right place to sit, the right kind of strategic positioning for your organization in the longer term.

Marianne Wisenthal

Leaders, obviously, and teams face conflict. There's people that don't agree with how other people are approaching challenges. And obviously you see this a lot. And I've heard you talk about approaching conflict. When somebody comes to you and says, you know, I don't like this or I don't agree with how we're going about that is to approach it with curiosity.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Brooke Struck

Yeah. So there are two things that I want to talk about there. One is this spirit of openness and curiosity which you mentioned.

And once again, I want to kind of echo that very like systems thinking driven perspective that I mentioned before, which is this idea that like any piece of evidence that arrives at your door, you know that someone that someone carries to you is an additional piece of the puzzle that helps to enrich your understanding of the entire context of what's going on. So that's part of it.

And then other is really structured tools to help to position different, different perspectives and pieces of information and stuff that that team members are bringing to you.

And that tool is something called the ladder of inference. This is not something that I created. It was developed, I think initially in the seventies by Chris Argyrus and Donald Shun. I believe it was also picked up in Peter Senge's work, the Fifth Discipline, which was published in the.

It's kind of had this thread through a lot of quite influential work in organizational learning. And the idea there is to really separate out your observations. So what it is that is kind of like jointly verifiable.

Did this person say this thing at this time from the interpretations that go onto that. So what did this person mean when they said that? What are the values that we're bringing into that interpretation?

What are the priorities to then the beliefs that are established on that interpretation and the actions that are prescribed on that basis.

So when someone comes and says, I think we should change X, my first question is going to be, okay, well, what is it that you've observed recently that makes you bring this to me right now? Like, why is it that now is the moment for you to come and talk to me about this as opposed to yesterday?

What has changed?

And that's usually a good way to get back to like, what is the new observation? Or what's the new piece of evidence that's jointly observable, that's at the base of this. Well, the reason that I'm coming to you is because you know this person.

Let's say it's something about interpersonal conflict, right?

This person disrespected me yesterday. Like, oh, okay, interesting. You mentioned that someone disrespected you yesterday. Like, what did they actually say or what did they actually do?

As you can see here, we're starting to tease apart, like, what are kind of the facts on the ground?

And then, okay, well, when this person said that to you, what made you feel that that was a sign of disrespect?

And there we can start to tease out some of the values.

When someone acts in a particular way, when someone ignores my intervention in a group setting and talks over me, that, for me constitutes disrespect. And. And we can start to tease those things apart.

So that allows us immediately to, like, start bringing the temperature down in the conversation by just working with someone to recreate kind of this. This chain of logic that got them from this thing happened to. And this is how I reacted to it.

These are new beliefs that I formed on that basis to this is action that I believe should be taken. And then we can say, okay, well, what else might also have been going on? Are there other interpretations for this situation?

Which is not to, like, undermine somebody's interpretation. It's just, again, to come with that spirit of openness and curiosity and to say, like, no single perspective on the issue is going to have the whole story.

So what are some other things that we can go and collect in order to understand what else was going on and to start making that story a little bit more kind of like thick and rich?

Marianne Wisenthal

And what would the person hope that the result would be? Like, if you're. Because we could look at this from both angles, right?

You can look at it from the angle of the leader themselves, the person that's coming to them, and then you can look at it from the angle of the person who experienced the quote, unquote, disrespect from someone else.

What would you see as a positive outcome?

Brooke Struck

Right. A positive outcome is twofold in my mind.

The first is what is it that we need to do to adjust the system to minimize the occurrence of these things moving forward?

So one of the things that I see really, really often in doing this work is like, you know, when someone comes forward and says, oh, this is an issue generally, it's not something that's happened once. It's had to be a bit of a repeated pattern before people kind of get frustrated enough to overcome the inertia, to actually raise something that feels difficult to talk about.

It's often easier to just like maintain this kind of smooth surface and just like swallow that frustration and let it boil a little bit inside. It's only once people have let that frustration, you know, boil enough that like, the pressure is built up that they actually need to release that and go and talk to somebody about it, in spite of the fact that that conversation is going to be difficult.

So looking at like, what are the systemic features that are leading to people misunderstanding each other or talking over each other or whatever it is that's kind of catalyzing the situation, but then also getting some clarity on like, what needs to be done to remedy this situation that's just happened.

It's not just about the future in terms of changing the way that we interact with each other.

It's also making sure that the relationship is strong and there's a repair for whatever it is that's already happened so that the people feel supported and respected in the work that they're doing and they have a strong rapport with their colleagues.

Marianne Wisenthal

Is there a way that leaders can encourage or promote that in their team?

Brooke Struck

Yeah, I mean, the very first thing is to just ask that question like, well, what is it that you feel you need in order to, to be confident that you can work with this person and not have ongoing kind of latent frustration and irritation with this person? Like, what's it going to take for you to, you know, to feel good about working in this relationship again? And engaging that question directly has a couple of effects.

The first is that it puts the people who are coming forward in a situation where they have more agency than they might have expected they were going to get out of the situation.

Often when people feel frustrated and have grievances, they're arriving expecting that they're going to have to fight for themselves. So turning around them and really inviting them into that process and giving them agency, giving them influence over the situation in a UX context, we might call that like an unexpectedly delightful experience.

Right. So when you're able to provide that to them already, like that's, that's a win in itself.

But there's the secondary effect as well, which is by inviting them into the process, you give them responsibility and accountability for making that thing happen. Like if they are responsible for co defining what the kind of like repair solution is going to be, they're going to have a role in that Also. It's not like, you know, this kind of infantilized situation where an employee comes to the boss and says, like, so and so did this to me and that's not fair.

And then the boss is going to go and be the parent and like wag their finger at the other kid and say, like, no, no, little Johnny, you shouldn't have done this is a much more like adult and participatory process.

Like, we need to fix things within our teams between ourselves and building that expectation within the team that, like, yes, I as the leader can help to mediate these things and facilitate these conversations. But like, at the end of the day, it's not solely my responsibility to make sure that there are positive dynamics between you. Like, I will help you two to sort it out. But ultimately it is your responsibility to maintain your relationship.

And in the longer term, that takes the leader out of a lot of situations where they end up getting stuck in the middle and having to arbitrate between people who have grievances on either side.

Marianne Wisenthal

So when you get brought in to an organization, things aren't working. There's potentially some conflicts and disagreement.

What kind of challenges do you face as someone who's a leadership facilitator and who's been brought in to kind of help support and make these teams run more efficiently and positively? What kind of challenges do you find? Is it easy to get buy in once you've had one conversation? Can it sometimes be a lot more difficult to get buy in from everybody?

Because there's always going to be people that are just like, I'm not doing that, or I don't agree, or I don't see how I can make this work. So what do you typically see in your work?

Brooke Struck

So typically it's the business outcome that is the catalyst for me being brought in. People don't bring me in saying, you know, we just have these bad relationships between people. Can you just help us all to get along a little better?

The starting point for the conversation is there are these things that we want to be accomplishing and they're not happening. And for me, that is an incredibly important starting point because in coming into an organization and convening a group of leaders to co define, like, where is it that we want to be and what do we think really are the obstacles standing between us and getting to that place?

One of the questions that I often like to ask is like, if we just did nothing, if we continued along our current trajectory with no interventions whatsoever, why would that not be okay? And that is a really powerful prompt to start to get people thinking about and defining together where they want to go and why they think they might not reach that along their current path.

And for me, that's always a super, super powerful touchstone, that definition of like.

This is the outcome that we as a group of leaders have committed to, and we are committing to the group as well, that, like, we're not only committed to the outcome, we're committed to each other to make that outcome come about. That's really, really important.

So that when we get into these spaces of interpersonal tension and friction and these kinds of things, if there are these roadblocks where people say, well, I just don't think I can do that, and you know, they're questioning whether they're really invested in the relationship work. One of the questions that I'm able to always bring this back to is like, are you saying that this relationship friction, this tension, this disagreement is more important to you than that collective outcome that we all committed to?

Like, are you willing to put this in the top spot and that collective outcome below it?

Or is that collective outcome important enough that you are willing to rise to the occasion and put in that difficult work to overcome this, to work through this, which is not to say to minimize it or brush it under the rug or just tolerate something that shouldn't be tolerated, but to go through the difficult work of actually fixing the situation so that there isn't an underlying irritant that needs to be simply tolerated moving forward.

Marianne Wisenthal

It's interesting because in some cases there may be people on that team who may say, no, the conflict or the challenge that I'm experiencing is more important. And if that's not going to be the focus of what we're addressing here, or there's not going to be more buy in from leadership to quote, unquote, fix this problem, then maybe I need to leave or I need to move to another team.

Because not everything can be fixed, right? And not everything can be fixed in a way that individuals want them to be right.

Brooke Struck

So there are three things in what you just said that really stand out to me. I'll start with the last one first.

What you just said there is like fixed in the way that they want them to be. That's something that comes up frequently. Here is like, it's much more interest based rather than position based negotiation.

Like when you arrive with a grievance, you might have some idea in your mind of like, and I want the kind of, when we're setting this grievance, right? This is what I envision that's going to look like. And often that's not what happens.

We actually co define as a group a different way that that situation is going to be repaired.

And so being ready to put your interests ahead of the kind of position that you've arrived with or the solution that you've arrived with, saying, and this is how I want my interests to be moved forward. That's a key part. So that's one.

Another is you kind of flagged along the way like, well, leadership isn't invested enough to fix this. And again, that's something like that's a box that I want to pull open. Like, you know, if someone has that, that assumption, like what have you observed that's making you feel that leadership is not committed to fixing this? And what would you need to see in order to feel that there was sufficient commitment?

What role do you think that leadership needs to play in resolving this? That's another question.

But then the third, and this one's really, really substantive, which is why I wanted to come to it last, is that as you say, sometimes there are just situations that aren't worth fixing. Maybe they can't be fixed at all. But whether they can or not, I think there's a more interesting and relevant question which is, is it worth fixing them?

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

We might say that there's some stuff that takes so much that even infinite work and effort could not fix. But more realistically, it's like we meet the threshold earlier of like, well, that's just not an amount of effort that I'm willing to put into this. And that also has to be okay.

And this kind of non judgmental approach to that to say like, well, someone deciding that actually they aren't ready to put in the effort to work towards this collective outcome, or the collective outcome is not defined in a way that like motivates them enough to stick through the hard miles, that doesn't need to come with a judgment of that person being, you know, not competent enough to keep up with it, not dedicated enough to keep up with it, too self interested to put the team ahead of their own interests.

Like, there's a lot of judgment that very, very quickly follows when we identify that like someone is going to be leaving a team and that's an important thing to address that like actually someone leaving a team can be in the mutual best interests of that individual and the team and its other members as well. Sometimes the most sensible resolution for a situation is that somebody just decides that they want to leave and that's okay. Recognizing that and actually supporting people in that decision.

Like, if you see that this really isn't working out, I want you to come and talk to me about that as a leader. Because if there's something that needs to be done, if there's something that's worth doing to fix the situation, I want to know that.

But also if, if that's going to be a deal breaker and we're not going to fix that, then we, and you also need to take certain actions in order for that to be like a healthy and smooth breakup, if you will. Like, we can still be adults about it. We don't need to be embittered, we don't need to be petty. Like none of those things are helping us.

Marianne Wisenthal

What do you think? Maybe this is too wide of a question, but I'm curious. Just you, Brooke, what do you think makes for a great leader?

Brooke Struck

Curiosity is a big one. And often what I've seen is that like the most powerful curiosity, and for me the most inspiring curiosity, is curiosity that actually springs from a sense of awe, a sense of wonder that a leader who looks around and says like, wow, this is such a, like such a neat and complicated and interesting thing, this world that I live in, this ecosystem around me.

And the more I scratch at the surface, the deeper I look in any particular place, the more new stuff I discover about it and the deeper my understanding becomes. So that curiosity for sure is a big part of it for me.

And as I say, curiosity driven by that awe and wonder is in my experience, a remarkably infectious trait among leaders and a deep care for people as well. So not just being interested and curious about stuff, but being interested and curious about people as well and caring about their well being, really wanting to position people to succeed and to succeed together. And recognizing again with this kind of deployment of curiosity, like I can't take it for granted that I know what success looks like for different individuals or the best pathway for them to get there. And wanting to tee people up for success, wanting to put people in a position to succeed and to really excel and to become this great version of themselves.

That's a second piece that I see to great leadership.

And the third is like a deep self awareness. And this comes back to the vulnerability piece. It's like self awareness and a confidence and a humility about myself, like I know myself, warts and all. And I don't feel the need to like hide what it is that I don't know.

I don't feel the need to front that I've got all of this knowledge and Understanding, it's like I can just be totally transparent about what it is that I know and what it is that I don't know because I trust in my ability to learn new things, to become capable at new things. I trust in my ability to collaborate effectively with others and to bring together teams effectively that like, I don't need to be the person who is the best at every function that's fulfilled in this team.

I can rely on the expertise and the knowledge and the deep experience of the people around me. And it doesn't make me unsafe to do that. I don't feel unsafe trusting those people to do the great work that they're capable of doing. In fact, I lean into that.

I recognize that my trust is like part of my superpower in really enabling this kind of like unleashing of, of the potential of everybody around me.

Marianne Wisenthal

It's interesting when you say all of this. It also makes me think about other parts of my life, you know, family life, and how a lot of what you're saying actually could apply to parenting, to being in a relationship with your significant other.

Do you feel that these kind of ideas of a positive leader can also apply to things outside someone's professional world?

Brooke Struck

Yeah, absolutely. And it definitely finds its way into my personal life as well. I'll share two very small ways.

One, when I'm interacting with my wife, for instance, like if I wake up in the morning and I've had a terrible night's sleep and I'm frustrated, I'm short tempered, like I have a short fuse on those days, just being transparent about that and saying like, hey, you know, like, I'm sorry that I'm sorry that I'm reacting this way. Like, I'm trying my best to manage it. And like, I just need you to know that what I'm saying, the way that I'm reacting is much more a reflection of where I am at right now and how I'm feeling than it is about what you are doing.

Things that are totally, like, totally acceptable, normal, reasonable, all these kinds of things that on any other day wouldn't provoke a reaction from me. Today they will. And that's because of me, not because of you. And so just asking for that support, like, can we work together today to manage my mood a little bit? That has been super helpful.

And my wife and I, like, we laugh about that often.

The number of times that, you know, we, we have these conversations of like, so today I'm going to be a bit of a train wreck and it's going to be a group project for that not to become a crisis. So that's one in terms of like my, you know, my romantic relationship with my partner and then similarly with my kids.

There was a podcast I was listening to a couple of weeks ago and the, the podcast guest was saying, you know, one of the hardest things in his experience about parenthood is watching your kids make their own mistakes and not leaping in and trying to make sure that they get it right. And the situation kind of unfolds optimally minute to minute. It's like, it's that moment when you know, your kid says, I, I'm, you know, I'm ready to take my training wheels off my bike.

I have a seven year old daughter, I'm ready to take my training wheels off my bike. Like, and you know, she does that or asked me to help her do that. And the entire time in my mind I'm like, no, you're really not.

Like, you are not, you are not ready to ride a bike without falling over.

And actually that's an interesting distinction. It's like you're not ready to ride your two wheeled bike without falling over. But that doesn't mean that you aren't ready to take off your training wheels. Like riding without training wheels and falling over sometimes is just part of the process of getting to the stage where you can ride and not fall over.

And if as a parent we like leap ahead into the situation and ensure that they never fall over, like finding the right balance in that gray area of like, I need to let my kids do a certain number of things and kind of a certain like, boundary of things that will have small harms that in the grand scheme of things are not worth caring about, but also enable learning while not going too far and overshooting and saying like, I am now also being a negligent parent, that's allowing my kids to do things that are manifestly unsafe and where the stakes are too high.

Finding that gray area of the mistakes that need to be allowed because they, they enable kids to learn and those mistakes that should not be allowed because they're actually too dangerous, even relative to the learning that you might gain.

In my experience as a dad, that's been one of the most challenging things. It continues to be one of the most challenging things of parenting my kids.

Marianne Wisenthal

Most people don't sort of, you know, when they're a little kid, they think, oh, I'm going to be an expert in behavioral science and I'm going to be a leadership facilitator when I grow up.

So tell me a little bit about how you came to do this work.

Brooke Struck

I did a PhD, and early on during my doctoral work, I recognized that I didn't want to continue in academia afterwards. I found the academic world very stifling. I found it very culturally conservative.

There was just too much kind of paying the tax of doing all the things that the system insists that you do in order to prove your worth to then maybe one day down the road, far down the road, and also with low likelihood be able to do the things that you actually think are important to do. I found that very frustrating.

And so I decided early on in my doctoral work that I didn't want to continue on in academia afterwards. Side note, that was actually one of the best realizations that I had.

I'm the only person I know in my PhD cohort, or the one above or below who actually had fun doing his work because I didn't feel this enormous pressure to prove my worthiness and run off in all directions doing a bunch of performative stuff to try to show up in the professional academic ways that one needs to in order to build an academic career.

And my, my first job POST PhD was working in the federal government here in Canada.

And once again, I found a very conservative culture that had really, like, intense strictures about what is and is not acceptable behavior.

And especially for somebody who likes to ask a lot of questions, I ran into a lot of roadblocks where it was like, well, those, those just aren't the kinds of questions that in a certain sense one gets to ask at your level. It's like those questions are above your pay grade. And I didn't realize it at the time, but if I could formulate it now for my younger self, I would say, but in order to do the task that you've asked me to do, I need to have the full context of why this thing is important, how it fits into this bigger picture. I have decisions that I need to make that have to be informed by that context. Otherwise I'm going to make suboptimal decisions.The work that I'm going to deliver is going to be less valuable to the organization because it's not going to fit in properly with the broader portfolio of work.

All of those things around strategy, you know, were already starting to crop up for me. And it, it manifested itself through culture. It manifested itself through and being blocked at these various junctures where I felt that I needed a certain. I needed clarity on a certain issue and I just wasn't getting it.

And when I started consulting in the private sector after working in the federal government. I saw over and over again within my client organizations for projects that they were running internally as well as for projects that they were contracting out to us. I saw this pattern repeated where people would get all excited about a solution and they would start to build some momentum and some alignment internally around like, yeah, we should really do something around, for example, AI, we should do something around big data.

We should be doing more innovation like insert your buzzword of choice and you know, they build up a head of steam behind it and people internally start to rally behind this idea and then they get a budget approved and there's a work plan and you know, if it's done externally, an RFP goes out and work starts.

And there's all kinds of great effort that's put into making sure that projects are delivered on time and on budget and to the specifications desired. There's a lot of creativity and dedication that goes into making sure that that delivery is done as well and as innovatively as possible. And then we get to this moment of the finish line when the project gets delivered and you know, the new program for instance, is being implemented and people look at the results and say, you know, that just wasn't as transformative as we had been hoping.

Like, we were really looking for something that had a lot of sizzle and was wowing and eye popping and like we're kind of underwhelmed with the results right now.

And you know, you look back into that and recognize that the scoping and selection of the solution at the beginning was never bolted onto an in depth exploration of what the problem is that we're looking to solve. People get excited about a solution and they, they get off to the races really, really quickly without slowing down to articulate what the problem is that we're looking to solve. And that's something that I saw over and over and over again.

And I found my way into strategy conversations because that was the place where many of those big decisions about what the problem is we're actually looking to solve. That's where so many of those discussions were happening. And so that's where I felt that I had the conceptual tools of strategy work to bring to bear there to improve those conversations.

But also the kind of leadership and cultural facilitation piece that puts people in a position where they can participate in those conversations in a really full blooded way. Like strategy conversations, when they're done properly, are hard. There are difficult truths that we need to share. There's a lot of kind of, in a certain sense, admission of ignorance about stuff. Like, yeah, we really don't know whether, you know, we have assumptions about whether this is going to work or not.

One of the things I like to joke about is like, if an entire strategy process goes by and nobody looks at, you know, no leader looks at another leader at the table and says, you know, we've been doing this for years and I've still never really understood why that's important. I will feel in a small way like this process has been a failure. Like at a certain point someone needs to say like, I still don't understand why that's a good idea.

And like, I've just kind of been floating along and letting it continue because I didn't have clear reasons for it to stop. But I still don't have a clear picture of the reasons that it is moving forward. So can we just take a second to pause and talk through that and figure out why it is we're doing this thing and what we're hoping to achieve with it, how it fits into the broader portfolio?

Like, to have that kind of conversation requires a, requires a very specific social dynamic and context inside of the organization. And to do it well also requires addressing the cognitive biases in addition to the social biases that will keep those conversations from being effective. Risk identification and management is one of the, like the kind of highlight areas for that.

We're just cognitively really badly set up to identify risks and take them seriously. So that's what I focused on in my practice is taking this, this series of professional experiences where I felt that I didn't have the clarity that I needed.

And I also didn't feel that I'd had the kind of socio cultural environment in which I could get that clarity. And trying to help people to build better working environments for themselves because those are the kinds of working environments that are good for teams and also really good for the organizations that those teams exist in. And like the organizational goals that they're trying to achieve together.

Marianne Wisenthal

What keeps you feeling joyful and optimistic?

Brooke Struck

I will add a minor footnote and say I'm not an optimist, nor am I a pessimist. I see that both optimism and pessimism have this shared assumption and that is whether it's going to turn out well or whether it's going to turn out badly. The fates have already decided that God has cast the dice and the numbers are already in. And the only thing left is for us to figure out what the outcome is. But we don't have any influence over it. And that's something that I don't get on board with.

I really think that the choices that we make matter, and we have a lot of agency in how things unfold. So in that respect, I would say. And I have a positive outlook. In that respect, I would say I'm not an optimist. I'm hopeful.

I don't take it for granted that the good outcome is assured, as an optimist might. But I do believe that we have a good crack at it. And also that regardless of how good or bad the chances are, there's nothing we can do other than give it our best shot.

Marianne Wisenthal

Dr. Brooke Struck,  thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Brooke Struck

It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.

LifeSpeak

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