L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Regenerative Systems: Doing Work and Living Lives That Reveal and Embrace Our Essence

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

What if addressing the many global ills we face in business and society today–anxiety, complacency, insecurity, even inequality and injustice–required us to approach our work and daily lives with an entirely different frame of mind? What if our calling, our “essence” as components of a greater whole, was far more grand than the jobs we do, or the problems our organizations solve for others? This week, Carol Sanford demonstrates how questioning everything we know is the only way to do the work we were truly meant to do.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This episode, I'm speaking with Carol Sanford. Dear listener, this is a special episode for me. Carol and I have worked together several times over the last five or so years. She is a widely sought-after advisor who has helped countless Fortune 500s achieve demonstrable ROI,

and many of her seven books, including the latest No More Gold Stars, which we discussed today, have been bestsellers. But ultimately, all this authority and social proof is secondary to what she and I hope to achieve. I firmly believe that Carol is one of the most important theorists, not only in the world of business and lifelong learning, a phrase which she actually rejects, as you'll hear, but in terms of self-development and societal healing as well. I don't usually do this, but I implore you to read her work and to do so thoughtfully. It is deep and academically rigorous, challenging even. Nonetheless, the overarching ideas are, in my opinion, imperative for addressing

many of the ills we collectively face. From widespread economic woes and dissatisfaction at work, to inequality, discrimination, and injustice, I genuinely believe that Carol's evolutionary observations represent revolutionary hope. Now, Carol has ALS. For those of you that are unfamiliar, that is a neurodegenerative disease affecting the muscles. And you'll notice that right away, it affects her speech. The ideas are still there though, as she puts it. However, her time to share those ideas herself is sadly limited, as she estimates she has a little over a year to live at the time that we recorded. So again, please listen, and do spend time with Carol's work. It is contrarian, and it asks us to challenge

what we know, which you will hear in how I hesitate and in how she occasionally pushes back as we talk. But most importantly, her work is thoughtful and no doubt comes from a place of love. So let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Carol Sanford. Carol, it's an amazing pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thanks for inviting me, Tyler. Glad to be here.

So we've worked together a handful of times now over the years. I think we've spoken about at least four of your books now. This might even be the fifth. You've written, I believe, seven now, so you have an incredible body of work. And I genuinely believe that you are one of the most important theorists in modern, I guess, business literature, even though what you do goes well beyond, you know, business literature and into lifestyle and just well-being, everything. And I just had to have you on this show, even though we've worked on different shows in the past. And thank you so much for joining. I want to start off with one of the core principles that goes through a number of your books. Actually, two of the books are more or less titled after this, but it's the regenerative concept. And I just want to ask you very simply, what are regenerative systems? Well, and I want to remind your audience that I have ALS. And so you're going to hear a little bit of slurring, but my mind is fine. So

we'll hope all the words work. So regenerative as a concept is really about a paradigm. You're seeing a lot of people write about it as though there's a list of things regenerative businesses do. I would say the regenerative is really about getting off automatic, waking up, and you do that by evolving your capacity, not by getting a list of new best practices. So regenerative comes from the idea that there is something you can reference or go back to. And in my case, that's a capacity building of individual and unique system essence, which we'll probably talk about also. Yeah, let's talk about that essence. It's, again, one of the themes that runs through your books. The way I understand it is it's more or less the goal that we should be

striving toward as individuals and also as organizations teaching their individuals that seeks to more or less maximize our capacity as human beings. And there's many different ways that you talk about what that capacity represents. We'll probably go into things like the long thought questions and larger ideas. But this essence, it feels abstract, but it's so critical. I'd love if you could try to define it for me. So first is not about striving to be something at all, not even related. So let me back up a little.

In the Western culture, and most learning and development and organizational change are seen to be about some generic thing you want to get to, things like competencies and practices. But in the non-wisdom world, like in indigenous communities, in wisdom traditions, even in quantum, the idea is that every living entity is singular it is one of one it is that it doesn't try to be that it is so for example you know me well enough to know now that you could call me a contrarian my most favorite words is that's right, or that's not what I mean. And my grandfather said when I was very young, there was a positive contrarian, and he meant that's in your essence. That's how you came in. That's how you relate to everything.

And this was like when I was five years old. In other words, I'm not like anybody else. He would show me pigs he raised and have me learn to see how unique each of them were and how a place along a river in a watershed, or what I call a life shed, had its own character. I call a life shed, has its own character. And so essence is something that really emanates from an individual living process. And friends of mine, Regenesis, do essence work for life sheds. So anywhere on the earth, you can see if you know how to look,

these life sheds are unique and it works in a different way. So the word Tomasins is really about learning to see the working of a living system as a whole and what makes it what it is. Now, one of the things my grandfather taught me, by the way, who was half Mohawk Indian, as Westerners call tribes, he said, you can't understand a bear or a fish without understanding it's a dinner table. Now, think what that evokes in your mind. A fish in the water with kelp and all the living things around it so do bears they find their fish there and he would say you can't study or speak about trees without looking at their home now what he's talking about is how it all works in a reciprocity where everything is dependent on everything else and it must do its work in the

system to get a right to be there. But humans don't see it that way. We see a life shed as rivers and forests chopping it up like we did a frog in biology. So essence is about that which emanates and gets revealed, not strived for. You are it every minute, all the time, but we don't make that known or help discover it. And I do that with the company which starts with finding the essence of the company, revealing it. And the only part of striving that fits here, your words,

was that we have personality which get overlaid as we grow up. People try and make us certain things, or we try and compensate, and we lose touch with our essence and instead become followers of some developed personality, which is all externally imposed. So essence is getting back to what's at the heart or core or key to each entity that when it lives from that, it's in a kind of sync with what it can do well. My, essentially, my grandfather said was disrupting certainty. And so everybody I talk to, I will say everything in a slightly different way,

depending on what we need to disrupt for them. How's that? That's good. Thank you, first of all, for them. How's that? That's good. Thank you, first of all, for immediately saying that's not right and pointing out that you are a bit of a contrarian because that is ultimately what I love about your work the most. For those listening, I think it's worth pointing out that I would argue at least a lot of what you vouch for, Carol,

is a pretty serious disruption of business and industry as we know it. In many ways, a full reconsideration of how businesses are organized, what it is that they hope to achieve. As you just said, you know, really coming to the essence of a business, what that means. A lot of companies are very simply hierarchically organized. And I mean, virtually every company that's this is really how business works is there is a top down sort of authoritative expert authority engine behind it. Everything is operated by the experts at the top. And this is something that you largely say that we shouldn't follow anymore. And that's kind of what the essence comes down to is, as individuals, we need to reveal that within ourselves. And that should ultimately be what we contribute

in a business sense, but also in a grander sense. Is that a fair assessment of what it is that you're getting at? Yeah, I would say a little bit differently, which is nobody works with me, unless they're already seeing all that. You can't recognize how well what I do works and how it would make democracy work better. We'd get over our racist and biased tendencies if we could work the way I'm talking about. The people who find me are 90% by referral. A few find me through my books and podcasts and other things, but they're searching. I mean, how many people do you talk to that know that hierarchies are not great, but they don't have an alternative? So I have an alternative that's been tested for over 100 years.

I'm not the first in my lineage. I'm standing on other's shoulders. And so once they're exposed to it, it still takes a while to shift gears because we're so culturally conditioned in this culture to look to authority, which only started about 100 years ago with behaviorism, which, of course, is a lot of what I critique in this book. But you still take, it takes quite a while to shift into being able to see the paradigm. But let me give you one reason people come look. It turns out, and this is written for them in Harvard Business Review on websites all by my clients. I still work with every executive I've ever worked with. They're still continuing to learn and engage and share, but they all make 35% to 65% revenue growth year over year for at least the first five years.

And then it settles down somewhere between 10 and 20, which if you look at most businesses, high tech even has a hard time doing that in the first five. So it's very profitable, but it's counterintuitive. Almost everything I say, as you know, Tyler, also in my books, are counterintuitive. When people read them, they can feel that there's something there, and they're all based on actual case stories. And you can call and talk to any of the executives, and they'll tell you. In fact, they usually write the forward and say this changed my life it changed my family it changed my way of living and it changed the results of my company so contrarian but very wise one of the most important things about your most recent book, the book that we're mostly discussing now, is that you have sections called intermezzos questions or frameworks. And the goal is to

remind readers of one particular thing. I actually, I want to maybe even quote how you say it, but you don't want people to just dogmatically listen to the things that you say and then apply them and share those concepts. Even the things that you say, you want your own work to apply to, which means that the knowledge shouldn't be borrowed by the readers or the listeners of even this podcast. And instead that we as listeners and readers and consumers must develop our own ideas. Sure, we can learn from you, but ultimately we can't just sort of take this and run with it. If you could just give kind of a statement on that and sort of how the intermezzos reflect that, I'd love to go into that a little bit. Yeah, every time I write a book, I do it with great trepidation, because I know that the primary way we're taught to learn

is to get the whole of a book. People say, I want to read your whole book in a hurry so I can see the whole, and then I'll go back and do those after chapter in a bit, because I want to get the whole, I want to underline and get the high point. And I cry, and it gives me pain, because I know they're working the wrong way. And this book is about how behaviorism taught us to do that, that I'm being made an expert, and your job is to learn from me. Now, what I mean by don't borrow

is I mean don't borrow unexamined. I mean, if an idea, you see what I say, don't accept it on its surface. Here's a way that I suggest with my students and also members of my communities. First, you wake yourself up. And that means you don't do what you automatically do about how you learn. People who say to me, well, this is how I learn, I say, yeah, that's a problem. This whole idea of you learn by underlining. Instead, I would start, it's one of the 24 practices I offer, is I start by an exercise which has

people get their own thoughts in their own head before they hear mine. And therefore, it creates a bit of resistance or restraint, which can up level how you take in what I'm doing. Then go try it out. Now, the inner muscles are quite a bit about trying it out. You're now awake. You can read something, but try it in your own lived experience in a new way. Don't refer back to your understanding necessarily before we started, but make sure you're trying

it in your life, and then reflect, and reflect on what's different, what can you feel that's different, because if you don't look for the new, you probably don't even get what I'm saying because the other problem is people use their existing ideas to translate what I'm saying. Like you did, excuse me, I'll use you as an example. You're saying striving to live a certain way. That's probably how you face the world. I strive to be able to be something. Well, you will read something I write,

which means the opposite of that, but translate it. And that's so usual. Most people can't let go of their current interpretation. So I invented this idea finally in my sixth book of inner methods because I looked at how it works when people are in the room. And I did it to disrupt them, underlining and adopting, keeping track of what they were learning from me and return them to themselves. But you have to go through that process of waking yourself up a bit, trying it in your life in a new situation, in a new way. Reflect on it. Look for the new.

And now you can go to the next chapter. So people tell me it takes them about three times longer to read this verse. And I'll say, good, it's working. That's true. Yeah, the intermeters are such a critical part because that is ultimately what you're talking about here. It's questioning. At one point, you say in the book that in most of learning and education, we're generally focused on knowledge building and sort of like banking or gathering and collecting knowledge, whereas your goal is to never do anything or think anything the same way twice. Is that how you put it? Yeah, that has multiple purposes. The key is that I try and make it really hard for people to take what I'm saying straight in because they'll say, well, what do you mean by this word and that word?

And I'll give them an exercise to explore in their own life and come up with their own thought. And I have the principle never do anything the same way twice is when I formed, I don't know, 40 years ago when I watched a couple of people I highly respected who I kept thinking they were changing their answer.

Didn't they know the answer? And it suddenly occurred to me they were really making sure I didn't write down their answer and get stuck on it. They were preventing me and themselves. So the other thing that I do that for is we, through our lives, tend to be accumulators, as you said, and then transferers of knowledge. So we pass along something we think we have the right answer to, and we were trying to do that by taking tests.

And you were probably arguing with professors somewhere along the way. But you'd had another teacher who said it in another way, and you should get credit. I watched people do that. And the thing is, it's what I call the long thought process. It's the reason for never doing anything twice, which is I try and help my students in universities and even high school. So I think about what do they think are the big questions that their life might be dedicated to, like why do we have racism and how do we change it?

Or why do people do things that will harm themselves and can't see it? Or why do we do things we know harm our mother and can't see that we're doing that? That becomes a long thought question where if I every year say, well, what have I not been thinking about on that question? What am I leaving out by becoming an expert as early as I can and then transferring my limited thinking? But if I every time, so I don't have any PowerPoints I go back to. I don't allow myself to go look at earlier answers to a question like regeneration you asked me when I'm writing a new book. And so I'm constant.

I'm keeping everything the same. I require myself to generate it alive again from my now 81 years of experience. So teaching myself not to get attached to an idea I had once, but to keep thinking about, I don't even use the same exercises. I can't get, I don't allow the same speech. I make myself, every time we're going to talk like this, go right out or develop my new current of all thinking. And I encourage my members to do the same thing because that's how we'll get to really big ideas about the big questions. I want to take a look at the way that you start the book. Chapter one. I'm going

to go ahead and read it because this is so important to me. Have you ever wondered why in a culture that celebrates its work ethic, most people hate their jobs? Why in a democratic society, people dislike and distrust their government? And then there's a few more similar questions a little bit longer, so I'll stop there, but, you know, listeners more or less get the point. And the answer, as you've already alluded to, is largely thanks to behaviorism, behaviorist psychology, which goes back about a hundred years, about a generation of research and sort of psychological research that sought to answer questions about the way that we behave or to give a knowledge base about those questions. You know, why do we act the way that we do? And it sought to rein all of that in. And those researchers seem to have done a pretty good job according to your

coverage. And what has happened since then is a lot of society has developed in accordance with these behaviorist tendencies and beliefs, such as the way that we develop our children, the way that we raise and parent them, how we teach them through punishment and reward and that sort of thing, conditioning, all these sort of things that were popular psychological experiments that were done on animals were more or less applied to humans as well because, hey, we're animals too. And then, of course, in business, the way that we lead people and the way that we determine hierarchies and the way that we pass down knowledge. And all of this is very much sort of taken from this behaviorist tradition, as you point out at length in the book. But very importantly, you say that business, despite the fact that it is very much subject

to all of these things and many of the things that you've been more or less speaking against, business is still an important and critical space for learning. And I'd love for you to just explain why, if you don't mind. Well, one of the couple of things about all the research I did, I went back and found out how we got into the mess we did. And it was because the behaviorists wanted to be able to get rats and be well-known like the physical scientists. They were not respected as psychologists, and so they had to prove they had a scientific method, and they borrowed the one from the study of things and physical objects and animals,

none of which was ever really tested on humans. So I did a lot of exposing all that kind of work and how it got transferred, how they made it a campaign to cram it first into schools. Schools were being made mandated across all states, across the nation. And so pretty soon it became very ingrained. Now, one of the people they did that with was business. And I was subject to some of this myself as a kid.

And I saw the damage to me a little later. So you need a place. It's very hard to take on a campaign like the behaviorists did. So the real reason is business is one place where everybody goes to work. Everybody has a job, and it can be a not-for-profit or a newspaper, something of a variety of industries. But every one of them do training, and every one of them set up infrastructure. And so it occurred to me when I was in my 30s that if I worked with business, I thought at the time all businesses, but I now know it probably will only take 10% of business shifting to a new way like I write about the book and tell all the case stories, then we could change because we would teach people to question, to reflect, to be engaged in a process the behaviorists got rid of, including inner development, the ability to see my own character, my own effects, to reflect, which the behaviorists said we can't do. And so now everyone who works in a company

learns that humans can't think for themselves. They have to have feedback. And I wrote another book called No More Feedback showing some other case stories. So if we want to bring about the changes, we've got to have some institution that is likely. I used to think it was education, but the reason businesses are better is I can show them how much money they can make ethically, practically. I've got over 100 CEOs now whose stories are in my books, whose forwards are in my books,

who say, if you change this, you don't have to trade off losing money, which they're afraid of. It sounds do-goody, but it's very hard. It's not do-goody. And so what I'm after is an equal and more powerful process that the behaviorists use, which is really shift a sector or an industry or an arena like higher education. But to be able to do the work long enough to see the results. And if we get enough of them, we might wake people up. So in trying to understand the sources and structures of our own knowledge, epistemology, you discuss this at length in the book as well, and just the importance of actually reflecting

on our own knowledge. You say that we rely heavily on mental models and you give a handful of examples of those as well, but you prefer to utilize frameworks. And one of those that is a tool and theme utilized throughout, especially in the intermezzos and then toward the end of the book is the tetrad, which goes through ground, goal, direction, and instrument. Can you explain the value of frameworks and specifically that tetrad as well? Can you explain the value of frameworks and specifically that tetrad as well? Yeah, just give people a bit more about what I mean by a mental model and a framework. Mental models are things that are seen as generic answers. So if any of you ever studied Michael Porter's Five Forces, what he said was, you know, there are five things you have to question every time. I've forgotten what they all are. I think it's like your bargaining power of buyers and suppliers. And the new people entering the market, competitive rivalry.

And he said if you figured out those five and the answer to those five arenas, you would make money, you would innovate. And of course, if you look at it, and many people have, it's very incomplete. And the problem is this generic base on a few companies, he looked at extrapolated to all companies and all people. Frameworks assume that there are questions will help you more than answers. And so what I provide, like you just said, the ground, goal, direction, instrument,

you would go into a company and ask what is its ground and subject. Not generically, the ground isn't the same in every place. So frameworks teach you to think for yourself. Mental models come from society and experts, authoritative people, and we just adopt them. So I teach people thinking through teaching them how to generate questions that are a better fit for discovering what's going on with their organization. And the book uses one to be able to talk and have people see it.

And the intermissions are based on frameworks where people generate questions. They're based on the belief that there's nothing standard. There's nothing generic. Remember the essence. It's singular, one of one. And so frameworks let you look at different scales. Now, I'm sure all that's not completely clear because there are frameworks and sub- frameworks in all these cases.

But I give people something that gives them a way to take it at different scales, different industries, and generate their own question, not adopt that of, quote, experts. So the four and the common one in your book, ground, goal, direction, and instrument, could you do a brief definition of each of those four components? Well, see, that's the problem. You can't do a brief definition. I could if I made it into a model. But what I'm doing is, it's on first, it's on a graphic. It's on a diamond laying on the side.

And a ground has something to do, and I don't ever say this the same way twice. It has to do with what's the highest potential place to start or what is it that could be offered that we could build on. So we don't give a definition of ground. We have people use it and come up with their own definition and then develop their own questions and get an understanding. So if they have a project, you would begin to ask yourself, what would be the ground and how are we doing on that? What would be the goal and how are we doing on that? None would be the goal and how are we doing on that?

None of that tells you that it's things in the world. It may be an emotional or a historical thing that said, that's what's driving us now as a goal. And direction is coming from something higher that we aspire to. And then what are the instruments? We don't have tools. Tools are mental models that are ingrained in us culturally. They're answers we got from our church or the military or school. So you can't define a framework. The words are there, undefined, on purpose,

because the way the mental model, if you think about Michael Porter's, was they're pretty instantly graspable. There's no conversation needed, no interaction, no dialogue, no creating a context. So we not only teach a framework, but they're kind of minor because what we want is people to understand the working of frameworks, not the template that Porta gives you.

It puts people to sleep. Think about a model airplane. You build it the same way every time. With a framework, you don't have a definition. So you learn how to think using framework. And you will not be able to do anything I just told you because it's not happening experientially. And everything we do is in a situation where people are applying it

to their organization in real time and coming up with new thinking. And it's not that easy. It takes a while. So the last four chapters of the book are a series of practices. You refer to the self-determination theory of knowledge, TETRAD. And now we're getting into talking about how we can essentially achieve all these things that we've described before maybe achieve is actually the wrong word you know the things that we can actually do and each chapter has six practices that are based on the different components of the tetrad that we just talked about and the first is systems intelligence practices if you could just kind of discuss these maybe broadly and if we have the time we can jump into

them individually but i'd love to hear what you have to say about those 24 practices. Yes. All right. There are four guidelines about considering these practices. One was individuals cannot do them, nor can a team pull them out and do them. They only work if you have the entire organization working and not doing training around them, building a developmental organization and the infrastructure and the culture. So you can't mix and match paradigms. You can't take a few of what I say and add them to what you're currently doing. It won't work.

People will think you're nuts. And it would be done within the hierarchical structure. You can't pick and choose. So it's a whole system, these 24. And they didn't even all of them. And so once I thought I could help lay out the book, which is pretty hard to do. So it can be a leadership thing. It to be 100% of people ultimately doing this over three to five years. So no individual or teams making this theirs without the whole business and maybe a whole company. You have to build a developmental community that's working on developing function, being, and will. I talk about that in the book.

Function is action. Being is who we are. Will is what really motivates us in terms of what we care about and think is right. So this is a big deal. It's taken the research we developed this off of, was done at Harvard by one of my mentors while he was a postdoc, and found that it took three to eight years to make these kind of changes. So this is not a list of practices.

That's why they're in for a part of a system of six in each location, but you need all of them. So now having said that, there's a couple of things that I think are a big deal. The idea of system intelligence you mentioned. A system has its own intelligence, you mentioned. A system has its own intelligence, like my grandfather said, with the canceled trees, without understanding the home, and that's beyond the forest. That's all the animals and humans and biota that live there, and you understand how that has its own intelligence and how we need to engage because we have a role in that. Some people think if we got rid of humans, we'd be fine. But that's not the way a living system works. Everything has a role, including humans.

And in order for us to play our role, we have to learn the way intelligence works. And that is not easy because we're taught right now, based on biological fragmenting, city, river, separate from wetlands even, but also the natural system of animals having food, humans, I rename watershed into life shed. That's a system intelligence idea. Life works together. So one of the practices you have to have is a way of helping develop that for people. You don't just train them.

We do no training, because training means generic conditioning. So we have people working to understand the working, like in seventh generation, you look at how you, it is the life-sham plane, which is where they live, how it works and what is distinctive,

and how the business and where it sits on the soil affects everything that's happening in that life-shed. And then go do the same thing with where your suppliers are working, what's happening with how that life shed works and educate your suppliers and then I have how people educate your customers on what happens with waste water and particularly laundry

water and what's the difference so if you become a system intelligence person you do a lot of work at having the teams that are in market build teams and task teams do this kind of discovery and engage people in being able to image it at work and everything they're doing, the effect of it. So that's part of system intelligence. And it means that there are some kind of imaging people have to learn to do.

And they have to adopt a new language. Because right now the word watershed, airshed, foodshed are all fragmenting ideas. They plant the mind in the idea that my food comes from, and my water, well, it's not yours. So I made up the word life shed, and it's a semantic term. So it invites, and then you don't tell people, but it means you don't define it. Instead, what you do is have an experience and come up with their own definition from the experience of doing it. So which other term would you like to think about? You mentioned a couple more.

Yeah, I think the concept of developing a semantic language intrigues me as well. Yeah, you don't necessarily develop one. If you're like me, I grew up with the grandfather who spoke differently because he was speaking about how things work. You don't have everybody develop a semantic language. You find one because the world is full of them. If you're in an indigenous community, you'll discover if if they're not heavily colonized, that they speak differently. And the speaking is designed to evoke different images.

And so our school that I have members in, first thing when they come in, they keep saying, quit using words we don't know. I say, quit having ideas you don't understand. Because the real problem is we have language for what we already, quote, know. Maybe not even understand. But the idea of helping people explore, like, function, being, and will. Now, that exists in your experience, but I doubt that you were ever taught to watch it and say, oh, what I do and how I'm doing and how I talk is one thing,

but how the state of being I'm in, how it is I'm experiencing and imaging, and the will that I have or degree of agency and where it comes from and can I learn to see that. That's semantic language, which means experiencing and seeing a whole and having language for that which you are having in your life which you've never examined it. So developing is not the right verb. It's revealing and experiencing communities,

even wisdom tradition. Like if you went and lived in a Hindu community with Hindu teaching, it would be a very different language and different frameworks. All those are designed to move your mind in a way that you change what you're seeing that's really there, versus using language like parts and pieces and fragments, which are all made up words and not about reality. So, as I mentioned before, as we think about implementing all of these things and hoping to achieve our essence, hoping to come into our essence to reveal our essence, hoping to regenerate, you know, become regenerative, a lot of change needs to happen. A really large amount of change needs to happen. And ultimately, I'm going to say again,

I don't usually do this on the show, but I'm going to encourage listeners to read as much of Carol Sanford's literature as you can get your hands on, especially No More Gold Stars, because a lot of change is required. And the people that we're speaking to right now, largely learning and development folks, those in HR, those that are just business leaders, sometimes they're coaches. And a lot of times their goal is to help people achieve more in the prescribed roles that they're in and to advance themselves and in many cases to feel better also. That's a really important part of learning and development and human resources is to make sure that people are feeling good, that they're doing well and that they are happy. But at the end of the day, I think that what you prescribe and what

you're teaching here would result in all of those things tenfold. But at the end of the day, I think that what you prescribe and what you're teaching here would result in all of those things tenfold. I really think that's the ultimate point. So what are the first things that we can do? Is there such thing as a first step with your work or is it really just a paradigmatic evolution that we need to achieve? Well, the reason it takes really years

is there are phases you go through. Well, if you as an individual HR or L&D person are interested in this, then I say the first thing you do is join a developmental community where you can help shift yourself. Because we will continue to try and create what we have because it's familiar. And even if we're slightly unhappy, we don't change a loan. And my several hundred or thousand members, many of them work in teams and come or they are inside companies and come and bring a series of what we call resources.

And because you have to fundamentally see and aspire to something different, and it has to be attractive to you. So many of your listeners are perfectly content, would like to improve on what they already do. But what I know is that the people who work with this get well. Many of them are sick going to work.

They're exhausted. They're burned out. And a big part of that is you're working in the wrong way to teach people to get approval, do well with their leaders. And so the best thing to do is first get yourself in a community which would work out this. And we have some who come and say, I can't figure out how to apply this.

And that'll be true the first year. It'll be so hard. But eventually, like we have people in Microsoft and T-Mobile and other people who have, we let Lowe's and Nordstrom supply hardware it took a while but what you want to secondly do is find a leader of a whole a pnl whole that would like to really explore i've created workbooks for every book because one of the things people can do once they find a leader, they think, well, as a piano, can go together and form a book club among people. And so I'm talking about building an audience for this kind of work.

And it takes talking about it and being in a community because you can't do a pilot with this work. You have to do a change effort with a whole community. I've done them inside of Google where you take a group who is producing a particular technology aspect and they have their own P&L. They've done a workbook and then begin to evaluate. When they evaluate their own work against the things that are offered, it wakes people up. So that's probably the biggest first step.

Go to a development community yourself, beginning to use workbooks and you have to buy books in bulk to get the workbooks. That's perfect. And speaking of which, I think we can just about wrap up now. Can you let people know how they can do that? Where they can learn more about your work and what it is

that you're doing and what you've done in the past as well? I have carolsanford.com and that's all about me, right? My books, my podcast. I have a sub-stack called The Positive Contrarian. I have a Medium channel, which I publish not only my own, but many of my members and students work as well and how they're applying it. If you go to the book page inside of carolsandford.com, it'll show you that there is a great deal of bulk buy options. And one of them has to do with buying books to get the workbooks. I have an agreement with my publisher. I don't sell them separately because I don't want people thinking

the work week's a standalone. So there we go. And on the bottom of carolsanford.com, it takes you to my membership communities at seed-communities.com. I have Carol Sanford Institute, but I'm not sure how long it'll run because ALS is a terminal

degenerative disease. But I've got hundreds and thousands of people who've been studying with me for almost 50 years, and they'll still continue and evolve the work. And that's exactly what I hope to do, and that's the reason that I had you on the show today, Carol. So thank you so much for making the time and for putting up with me for this about hour that we've been recording. I greatly appreciate it. And for everybody listening at home, thank you so much for joining. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating,

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