The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Brené and Barrett on Building Brave Spaces

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Barrett and I invite you into some research thinking and dig into the latest data on how to build brave spaces with our teams — what gets in the way of people showing up, what gets in the way of doing the work, and how judgment is the primary killer of these spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone. I'm Bray Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. Today, I'm going to invite you into some research thinking. So Barrett and I are looking at data, and we thought we just share it with you in real time and kind of what we're learning and what we're thinking about. Nothing final, nothing permanent, but thought it might be different and interesting to invite you into something we're learning around creating brave spaces. for teams, for, it doesn't even have to be intact teams, for people to come together and have tough conversations and do some of the work that needs to be done around just really the rumble. I'm glad you're here. It'll be interesting and different in real time. What do you think, Barrett?

I think maybe we should have like, in real time, like flashing across the bottom. Oh, they don't see it. They don't see it to hear it. I'll just do it every time then, in real time. because I'm just really going to code some data with you here and think about it and let you see kind of part of what the process is. Welcome to Dare to Lead. Glad you're here in real time. In real time. That's good. We should be on Sports Center. All right. So let me set this up for you. When we go into organizations and facilitate the Dare to Lead training. So the Dare to Lead training is very specific. It's a courage,

building training program. It is about teaching the four skill sets that ladder up to courage. So knowing and living into your values, rumbling with vulnerability, how to recognize a vulnerability, how to lean into it when times are uncertain, we feel at risk or emotionally exposed, how to kind of be our best selves versus our armored selves in those times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, which I think are like for me. that's a 10-minute increment situation. Third is building trust. How do we talk about trust in a way that is actionable and observable?

And then the last one is resetting. How do we get back up after a setback of disappointment or a failure? So these four skill sets, rumbling with vulnerability, living into our values, braving trust, and learning to rise after failure, set back, and disappointment are the four skill sets of courage that emerge from the research Jesus, has it already been 15 years? I think it's been 15 years of research on this.

Yeah. Yeah. And so before we get started with the work, we have a setup where we try to build a room or a space or a table where there are ground rules where people can understand how they're going to lean into the work, we can understand what they expect, and we can kind of set the rules of the road.

And we call this container building, which is a very clinical term. How do you build a safety? container for the work. So in the last year or so, I have been really rethinking this idea of psychological safety, right? Is it been over a year probably? I was thinking it was maybe even longer, but yeah. And I think it came up from two spaces, Iko Bathia, who you've heard many times on the podcast. I think I did two-parter with her, a two-parter with Iko and Richiega Tulshan. So ICO is a dare to lead certified facilitator, and she has real expertise in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging work.

And so she's been really saying for the last, again, year, maybe longer, hmm, not sure about safe spaces. I wonder if we should be saying brave spaces. Then, if y'all remember, when I did the interview, when did we talk to... I think he was just a few weeks ago is when his book came out. Yeah, about The Persuaders. So Annen, Girdardis, has this great new book Out of The Persuaders.

We did a two-part special with him, unlockingness. And in it, he talks to, I would say, organizer, activist, and scholar, Loretta Ross. And I want to read something from the book, The Persuaders, that she's talking about.

She's talking about her work that she did as part of the movement to End Violence Against Women. She said, we may have made some over promises We told people particularly rape survivors that we could create safe spaces when in fact all we can do is create spaces to be brave together. To call people into a brave space was to summon everyone to try something together.

To promise people of safe space was to make everyone a promise about everyone else and that's impossible to keep. Onan writes, somehow Ross felt the idea of the safe space, the worthy idea of it grew out of the idea of social justice, work, by definition, should be a safe space. But do you think there is, and rightly so and smartly so, a shift from talking about safe spaces to brave spaces? What do you think? I totally agree. We were just doing a training last, well, I guess two weeks ago now, where you kind of explain the difference and how your thought has shifted. And just reading the people in the room,

it was really incredible because you can't guarantee safety for everybody. No. But you can ask everyone to show up in a brave way. And so I think it's so important and it's so right. And I'm just, even to see their reaction in the room cemented for me that is exactly the right conversation. I have seen a shift when I talk about brave spaces and not just when I talk about brave spaces, but when I think I compare them to safe spaces. because I, as a white woman, am not going to stand at the front of the room,

even as a very seasoned facilitator who's really comfortable with hard conversations about race and gender and disability. And I'm not going to stand up there as a white woman and say, listen, y'all, I've created a safe space. Like, first of all, I don't know what other people in the room are going to do. And secondly, safe for whom? Yeah. say for whom.

Like I go into these organizations. I facilitate something. I don't facilitate without leadership, but I still don't know when I leave what happens. And I still don't have all the history and context. So I am making this shift, committed to making the shift to brave spaces. I mean, one of the things that Ico always says that I think is true is when we talk about just the word safety,

even if we use the term psychological safety, ICO's, I think, very valid criticism of it is it doesn't take into account power. You know, and it doesn't take into account power over an invisible power. And so my motto is always under promise over-deliver. And when it comes to people's lives and their actual well-being, emotionally, physically, spiritually, but also financially your well-being and like, hey, why aren't you sharing fully? Why aren't you being vulnerable? I've created a safe space for this training, not knowing like a history of really terrible

aggressions and, you know, I don't know. And who silently holds the power in the room sometimes is like we don't understand that. I mean, a lot of times we do understand that, but I think, for example, the training we were at a couple weeks ago, not everybody was in the room. so then to ask them to show up in a different way with different people outside of who was sitting in the training with us, you can ask them to be brave, but there's no way of knowing who's safe and who's not safe.

No, and one of the things that I think we do well in terms of identifying the power in the room is we do talk to the people that have the least power in the room before we do things usually. And we don't do that in front of other people, you know, and we just say the new people, the people who identify as having the least power, sometimes the most skeptical people

and sometimes the people who are in fear about, okay, wait, you're going to come in and tell me to be vulnerable, you don't understand what it's like here. Yeah. And I'm like, great, tell me what it's like. You sure are. And then let's go. Okay, so one of the things that we do

when we're container building for this brave space is we ask a series of questions. And it's really interesting because the way we do is we hang large, poster-sized, post- notes on the wall. And then we have people fill out post-it notes for the answers to the questions and then put them up there. And we're really careful a lot of times depending on, especially if we're somewhere like very hierarchical, like the military or something, we'll have all the same color pins, all the same color post-it notes. Because we've had people looking back and saying, man, there's a lot

of bullshit on these blue post-it notes. Who's got those? I mean, I don't know, sir. No, no, no. No, no. We're not doing that. So we asked them to fill it out and then everybody puts it up there. then we actually give the sheets with all the data, all the little data on the sticky notes, two tables to synthesize using a grounded theory methodology, which means you've got a poster. It's got 40 different posted notes. One question.

Maybe the question is, what will get in the way of you showing up in this training? And you need to come up with three declarative, detailed buckets, no outliers. That's the best part is the no outliers. People will always, and they're like, are you sure? I'm like, yes, I've been a grounded.

theory methodologist. So they try like the semicolon and this, like, yeah. Yeah. They'll say everything fit into one of these three buckets except for this one. And I'm like, I'm checking everybody's pockets for posted notes. I want to know that everything has been analyzed. But it is a grounded theory tenant. And so, and it's helpful because it's really, I'll tell you, just you and me.

Yeah. And this one person listening. In real time. In real time. I do it because it also answers the question for them of how did you get this data. Oh my gosh. This is my most favorite exercise we do. You know this, right?

No. Oh, my gosh. It totally is because I don't want to spoil where we're going. But the magic. And when we first started doing this, do you remember maybe like 10 or 12 years ago? And we would do the silent walk. Oh, yeah. So everybody would walk around and read the post-its and then read how they were analyzed into three specific buckets.

Yeah, I'll say later what my favorite part is. We'll say what your favorite part now. It's okay. Spoiler alert. Yeah, my favorite part is that people, these sometimes teams have worked together for 20-something years and they see the ground rules or they see how everything synthesized or even in the silent walk. And they're like, holy shit, all these people feel exactly the same way I feel. Yeah. And then there's the magic of, I'm not alone in this.

How did we not know most people in the room were feeling this way? It's crazy. And I just want to be like, this. We do this on day one of a three-day training. I just want to be like, we're done here. Grab your shit. Let's go. Oh, yeah, because it always gets harder.

Day two is hard. Maybe we should just go after that. I'm telling you, I just love watching people's reactions. Because then you call on people to share their ground rules from each of the posters. And people are like, what? And they must just got mine. Oh, you mean everybody feels that way? Here's what's crazy.

So that's the magic for Barrett. And Barrett does get all lit up. we do this. So my magic is more from a data perspective, which is sometimes we'll have 80 people in a room. So we'll give two tables, all of the answers to the same question. So there'll be 80 people in the room, and we'll have two posters where people can put their answers up. What will get in the way of you showing up in this training. And so we'll say table one, you take this first poster, table two, and they're like, we're working on the same thing, right? And they're like, yes. And they're like, wow, this is going to be so weird. And a hundred times out of 100, what happens?

If you have the same question, you synthesize into the same ground rules for the poster. Verbatim. And they're like, how does that work? It's magic. It is. It's magic. It's just data. It's just, this is grounded.

I mean, it's just data. But it doesn't, but wait until we tell you in this podcast, what we're fixing to tell you. It's very much. You're reminding me of Harry Styles. What did you like about it? It was like being in a movie. It was a movie.

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because a lot of times we go into do organizational work and we're under an NDA. But just FYI, their answers are the same. But FYI, their answers are completely the same. They're just locked down. So the four data sets that we have is we have our own organization where we brought in external facilitators

to facilitate Dare to Lead with our own folks. We had hired a bunch of people. We were just coming back into the office from COVID. We had people that no one had met before that were hired during the pandemic. So we had two of our kind of senior Dare to Lead facilitators come in and facilitate Dare to Lead with our own team. We have 100 students in a University of Texas at Austin,

Red McComb's MBA course. So I taught an MBA course, and as the MBA course, I took them through Dare to Lead in more of an academic way. but we went through the training and we set it up just like that. Then we have Microsoft US, MSUS, an incredible experience and they talk about it openly.

We ended up taking 9,000 people through in MSUS, yeah. Incredible work. Oh, man. Yeah, amazing. And then two weeks ago, we had the, I mean, crazy, right? Yes.

The incredible honor of taking 42 astronauts, NASA astronauts, through Deerdelead. I mean, here are these incredibly amazing, badass scientists and pilots and and medical doctors.

Thankers. I mean, just who are all NASA astronauts. And then as if they're not being exceptional in doing incredible things enough, they're also like, yeah, but we're also human. And we want to build a culture where we do hard things. We have hard conversations

and we lean into each other and love on each other. And it was just like, yeah, it was incredible. And that's what I was talking about. When you were talking to the astronauts about the brave spaces versus psychological safety, I mean, their reaction I thought was just so beautiful because there were a brand new class of astronauts sitting in the room compared to, I think one guy had been there almost 30 years. Right. So it was like, it was really special.

Yeah. And just people coming together, and this is like a rarity for me, people. people coming together, especially when there's commercialized flight now, and people can go work a lot of different places if they want to go into space and they've got that skill set. But here's a group of people that have come together around one thing, and that is service, the exploration of space to further the goodness of humankind. And they are serious about that.

And it's, yeah, it was amazing. So we've got NASA, Microsoft US. We've got our organization, Brunei Brown Education Research Group, and we've got MBA students at UT Austin. And so we've already given it away that their answers are going to be the same. But I think the answers themselves are interesting. So when we ask, what do you need

to show up and dig into this work over the next three days? So judgment is judgment free? You'll see a lot of opposites because when we'll say what gets in the way and sometimes we'll pick up extra data, but sometimes we'll just get the inverse of these. But so we have answers like a commitment to each other into the process is something we need to fully show up and dig in.

Judgment free space to work the process. Intention to do something with the work we do here. Like intention to implement what we learn and practice what we learn. The time and space to do the work. Everyone participates and is fully engaged. I love the specificity of this one. But it came up so much that it was actually synthesized. in, be present, and then parenthetically, put on your do not disturb for work.

I know, I love that. Yeah. Make this a priority. I'm reading just across all of them where they synthesized. And I also, I don't know if you see this one, but stay in the hard part and not tap out. Yeah. I mean, I love that. And it comes up often. Often.

I would say that what do you need to show up and dig in would be brave spaces, understanding what we're doing and why. presence, and how are we going to apply the work and is there actually a commitment to do it? And would you put a judgment-free zone in the brave space? I would probably, where that shows up more explicitly is the next one, what gets in the way of showing up. And I think it's more important to talk about judgment as one of the things that kills brave spaces. It's certainly a safety killer. It is the primary safety killer. But the second question we ask is, what will get in the way of you showing up and doing the work? Number one answer,

across the board. I'm looking across all of this is judgment. Yeah. I mean, it's so huge. They'll describe it in words like fear of being judged, just in judgment. I mean, people just are very, here's something specific, and I like this, because this is from our organization where people have access to the language of Dare to Lead, people being knowers, not learners, people armored up, judgment, comparison, making assumptions, judging. So think about this. And think about this not because, you know, we're facilitators with the curriculum and doing something very specific. We're skills building. Again, remember courage is a collection of four skill sets, observable, measurable, teachable. But think about this just with your team at work. That judgment is the thing that kills any sense of safety, which I think we've agreed that we can't ensure. But any safety there is, it kills it.

It kills courage because it kills brave spaces. And it kills people's ability to show up and dig in. So man, and let me tell you, let's just pause for a second. We see it a lot, even after we set these ground rules, right? Tie this to believing people's stories. Tie judgment to believing people's stories. Yeah. So one of the things that we talk about, because empathy is such a big,

a big thing right now. It's kind of in the zeitgeist. And people are like empathic leadership and empathy. And man, empathy is hard as hell. Because empathy is actually another collection of skill sets. It's perspective taking. It's staying out of judgment. I'm quoting Teresa Wiseman's research here,

which we lean heavily into. So perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another, staying out of judgment, understanding the emotion that someone may be experiencing and communicating that understanding back. So it takes perspective-taking skills,

it takes staying out of judgment skills, which is a skill set. And it takes emotional granularity and emotional literacy to be really good. And we also add Kristen Neffs as a fifth requirement. She's a researcher at UT Austin, study self-compassion, awesome, badass.

We add mindfulness. And so when we talk about empathy, one of the ways that I talk about it a lot is when we're actively practicing empathy and actually compassion, different things, but when we're practicing both, we have to be able to hear someone's story and believe them

even when their story does not reflect our experience of the world or our lived experience. And we have to believe them even when believing them is painful and holds us accountable in some way for hurt. And so I think it goes back to the skill set of perspective taking, which is really interesting because the way I teach perspective taking, I've taught this way for 25 years in social work programs, is we all have this lens that we look through. And it's our age, our race, our ethnicity, our spiritual.

identity, our insights, our experiences, our knowledge. And so people think often when they come into social work programs to learn how to be clinicians or to learn how to be organizers or activists, they say, oh, so if Barrett's telling me a story, my job is to take my lens off and put Barrett's lens on so I can see the world how she sees it. And I'm like, that is really dangerous. Because the first step in real empathy is understanding that the lens that I use the lens through which I see the world is soldered to my head. I can't take it off and pick up your lens.

All I can do is listen and hear you tell the story as you experienced it through your lens and believe it as truth. Even though it bumps up against how I see the world. From simple things like hey, do you want my kid to pick up you and your kid and the rest of the kids. No, I don't think so. Why not?

I don't think it's a good idea for four kids to be in the car right now with a new driver. Why not? It's just not a good idea for my black daughter to be in a car full of kids right now at 16 or 17. Now, what I could say is, no, it's fine. Ellen rides with her friends all the time. Which friends does Ellen ride with? So my job is to hear your your story and acknowledge it as truth, even if it's painful. And even if it's got a jagged edge, which reminds me about the anti-racist work I have to continue to do. And so that's why this is hard. And I think what we know about perspective taking as a skill set is the whiter, straighter, more middle class, the more in the U.S. anyway, and this is true across every culture, the more, the stronger

you're standing in a position of dominant culture, the less likely it is that you've been taught perspective taking skills because you're afforded the privilege of saying, my perspective, is the perspective, helped by the majority of the people. That is the, no, it's just a perspective. It's not more truth than anything else. It's just yours. Does that make sense? It totally does. I asked you to explain that because for me, I feel like so much of the judgment in these groups can be tied to not wanting to share those experiences because not having a history of people believing when you share. 100%.

Yeah. I mean, even I've experienced that. It's not so much the case anymore, thank God. But I was the only woman in a lot of spaces, especially I was a very young faculty person. And so you would tell your story about how it felt. And then even becoming a qualitative researcher in a PhD program that was all quantitative. and they called the qualitative textbook, one of them, the girl book or the pink book.

Oh, no. Yeah. They still do that. I mean, some quantitative researchers still completely diminish the value of qualitative work, which now at this point I'm like, bring it. Come on, let's go. You want to go? Because I don't diminish the importance of quantitative work at all, but we need both.

It's the full circle of science. One without the other is not helpful. Yeah. The numbers matter, but the stories matter. Yeah. The stories matter and the numbers matter. But I remember when I would say something like there just feels like there feels like there's a lot of bias in this program, especially somehow you've gendered qualitative research.

Oh, come on, don't be so sensitive. Let me tell you the first thing I was told. This is true. Getting my PhD. I said this gender bullshit around qualitative and quantitative is completely unacceptable. And what I was told is, I think you're being overly sensitive. You no longer belong to social work. You may have your bachelor's and social work and your master's,

but now you're a doctoral student, and now you belong to the academy. So you need to suck it up and you need to stop looking at things through this lens of like gender disparity. That does not, you know, I was like, yeah, pale male in Yale. That's like, that was like, that's the academy. me so I can see how it would be inconvenient for us to talk about it. So I do think you're exactly right. And I don't think we'll ever say anything more important on this podcast than what you just said.

The reason people feel judged is they don't feel believed. And then when you don't believe someone and you don't want their story to be true, you invalidate, diminish gaslight, crazy make, eye roll. You know, and so, yeah. So judgment, what gets in the way of people's, showing up, man, judgment. And I'll just throw this in as a little research tidbit. The folks who study judgment, specifically like career long studies on judgment, are very clear why we judge. We judge in two areas. We judge only in the areas where we're the most susceptible to shame,

and then we pick people doing worse than we think they're doing in that area. And so judgment is armor. It's not daring leadership. It's the opposite of during leadership. judgment is armored leadership and just armored behavior. All right, the last one we'll tackle is what do you need from this group to be able to practice, to be able to show up and really do the work? What do you need? And so empathy, and then sometimes parenthetically people will write on their post-it notes. I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure we're going to need it.

Empathy, honest and open participation from everyone. And I love the safe place, brave place. it's a brave place to show up and practice these new skills that we're learning? 100%. Because these are skills. People are like, I don't know how to do this yet. I'm like, of course not. Because if all you've done is read a book on how to make a three-point shot in basketball,

then you go on the court and you take your first three-point shot. You're going to miss the first 400,000 of them. It's practice. And we have to, and we practice, and we do really awkward, like, practicing. Yeah. And people are like, shit, this sucks. And then we have to bring out the guide, the ground rules.

The ground rules and remind them. And no judgment includes self. Yeah. So we see things like give each other grace, being allowed to ask for what I need. Again, non-judgment comes up here. Giving me feedback. Don't make assumptions about me. Stay open.

Listen. One of the things that comes up a ton and variations of all three of these questions is do not advice give. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Do not advice give. And so someone will be like, I'm really struggling with this. And this was, well, you need to be doing more of this. Sit down.

That's a nice way to say. Paris got a lot of STFU in her. But we're really, we don't do that. But we think it. Ooh, I love this one too. Holding me accountable. Holding me accountable, holding us accountable. Yeah, I thought it would be an interesting podcast because I thought this is the way we're looking at things.

This is the way we collect data. It's a trillion in grounded theory. We talk about individual incidents being pieces of data. So all those posted notes. Can I say one more thing? Oh, my God. You can say a million more things. I was thinking back because we've,

I think we've taken like almost 700 facilitators through this curriculum who are now certified to do this. And as I think back on, we do this exercise with them, the container building exercise. Their answers are the same. 100%. Not intact teams.

not, you know, it's like, I still, even when we were at NASA a couple weeks ago, I was like, they're going to be the same, they're going to be the same. They're the same. They're the same. Yeah, it's just, I think what do we need to fully show up and dig in? We need space. We need commitment. We need intention. What gets in the way. I think the big thing is judgment. And advice giving is a form of judgment. It's almost like asking the same question three different ways. Hold on. What do you need to fully show up? What's going to get in the way

and what a support look like for the group? And then the same question. Yeah. We need to delete that because this isn't a really great exercise. I don't want people putting the same answer. No, I don't think they will because I think we can get more specificity,

but I think what we're asking ourselves is I'm going to be, I interviewed Bono last week. It's a two-part run unlocking us. But he said something so sweet, sweet about my work. He said, I think you write so beautifully on what we need with those of us who live untidy lives need in the world. And I think that's what's here. Like we're messy and perfect human beings trying to be better. And in order to do that, we need space, we need grace, we need

no judgment, and we need the ability to practice. You know, and I think that's it. And so courage building is not an easy, if it was easy, they wouldn't call it courage. It's like it'd be something else building. It's hard and you got to create the right intention and room to do it. And now, and with it, when, you know, you can learn these skills and you can continue to practice, it's the foundation for really all the other work you have to do. That's it. It is a complete springboard, right? Mm-hmm. All right. Container building in real time. In real time.

Wait, maybe we do it more echoing. You say in real time first. In real time. I don't know. Oh, we suck it. I just take to the container building. No judgment. Oh, yeah, no judgment.

I don't suck either. I don't know. We don't suck at this. I don't judge myself either. All right, y'all, thanks for listening to the Dairy League podcast. I love going to, especially on the Dairy Lead podcast, there's always such interesting conversations on LinkedIn. around the content.

Yes. Because a lot of teams listen to the podcast together over lunch and stuff and then they comment and they go back and forth. So I can't wait to hear your thoughts on

Brave versus Safe Spaces. Again, like some really important work being done by Loretta Ross, psychopathia. I'm on board. It just makes a ton of sense to me. It's spot on, I think.

And then also how judgment gets in the way of all good stuff that we need to be doing from empathy, compassion, strategic decision making, performance, it's the killer. And how we use judgment to self-protect. Like people who have a ton of grounded confidence are not judgy now. So, all right, you all right, you all day, awkward, brave and kind.

And out of, give me an echo here, judgment. Judgment. Judgment. Judgment. Real time. Bye. Dear to Lead is produced by Bray Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by The Sufferers. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Daredelead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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