Transcript – WorkTogether – Ep9 - Thrivable Organisations


Benjamin Ellis
Welcome to this episode of the Work Together Podcast.
I'm joined today by Jean Russell and it is my absolute pleasure to have you here.
And I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
And for me, one of the great things as we're kind of coming into the end of this series now and has been to have some playful and explorative conversations with people who and have exposed me to great ideas over the years.
And it I think you account for, I'm looking at it behind me, a good section of my bookshelf.
So, but anybody who hasn't come across you before, introduce yourself for our listeners.

Jean M Russell
Thanks Benjamin.
Very happy to be here.
It's an honour and a pleasure.
Umm, I guess I wanna start with at the place in my life right now.
I think of myself as an artist and you would recognize me as an author.
I published several books now and professionally I've worked as anything from a project manager to a COO, and my work has been focused on the concept of thrivability since about 2007.
And so I'm happy to talk about all the different ways that that manifests in the world.
One of my particular interests is organizations.

Benjamin Ellis 
Perfect.
Well, we'll definitely start there then.
So what? What is thrivability for people who've not come across that before?
What does that mean to you and mean in your work?

Jean M Russell
Yeah, I try to avoid overly defining it for people because it means a different thing in your context and with your background.
And so it's not like a super fixed concept, but I think we all know what thriving looks like or what more thriving would look like for us, for our families, for our organizations, for our society.
And so it's the general impulse to move in that direction to create more ways, more abilities to thrive.
And to thrive together.

Benjamin Ellis
So for me it's a concept that when I first came across I embraced because it encapsulated a lot of what I was trying to get towards in terms of my thinking with the organizations I was working with at the time. How did you get there?
What was your journey to arriving at the set of concepts at around it?
What kind of informed it and led to the journey there?

Jean M Russell
Yeah. Yeah, that's an excellent question.
There are many different stories that I could tell about how I got there, you know, from an environmental point of view I could say I grew up in the country and understood, you know, what thriving looked like in a wilderness context and in a family growing our own food context.
And so when people were doing things like ohh we need to recycle, I was like this is my entire life has been doing these kinds of environmental activities.
I don't even remember a life before that.
And from a like personal development or organizational perspective, I had been working in philanthropy and trained to think about how to shift the world from a philanthropist perspective like, OK, I've got some money to invest in changing the world.
How am I thinking about the levers that I might be able to pull and in the process of doing that had gotten engaged with coaching and realized that helping like one person think through their best self and their best outcomes was such a small impact compared to the broad impact of all of us thinking that way.
What is the thing that I'm striving for?
What is the life that I want to have?
What is the life I want my family to experience, right?
Like, how do I scale that outward to more people, more relationships, and so that was in the, you know, 2005 range.
And then I heard this word, and when that's the word that tells that story that says here's the umbrella that allows us to come together.
Umm, I also feel like I was raised in the Midwest of the United States, which is politically cross cultural, or something.
It's not the coasts.
And so when sustainability was coming up as a concept.
It felt very guilt ridden in a way that I knew was not going to go over well with my neighbours, who were much more in a like were in line with life, giving rise to life.
And so I held it as a concept.
That was very across the political spectrum.
People would be united by this concept.

Benjamin Ellis
So it's yeah, that's a really good insight into the foundation of that journey, and again for me, it's.
It's an interesting concept because they're watching a lot of organizations at the moment are arriving at the sustainable bus stop and and kind of restructuring their organizations around our.

We've got to be sustainable and it is very much that kind of must obligation and moral issue type approach and which and I have to take a little bit of deep breath.
You know there is that, but that's the beginning and you can move beyond that but it for a lot of organizations they're just like say arriving in that sustainable and like, oh, let's try and do this thing.

There's, a definite journey through to an approach that gives you that outcome, plus a lot more.
And there is a graphic you shared recently which I will include in the podcast resources for people who are pictoral like me and I guess having served my time as a management consultant, it being a nice kind of grid was like “oh yes, I can digest this” and but talk me through a little bit of the structure of that and I guess that journey to that thrivable approach that that starts from sustainable.

Jean M Russell
Umm well I was in San Francisco having a brunch with a bunch of friends and somebody was like, I don't know, Jean, this sustainability, you know, like, lots more people are interested in that.
It's a good thing.
Let's just like, stick with the word that everybody's using.
Move ahead and so a bunch of us had, you know, like hour long conversation and then started mapping out.
Well, what are these distinctions?
How are we talking about these different ideas and what does that mean?
And so the original graphic came out of that.
So what's the differences between sustainability, resilience and more recently, we've been talking about regeneratively and thrivability, and the thing that I really noticed as we were working on it was thrivability includes the things that you want to do for sustainability.
It's not trying to make wrong the effort to be sustainable.
It's trying to say there's a broader umbrella here.
The sustainability often is not including the arts.
It's more about moving away from the things we don't want to do rather than moving towards the things we do want to do and the vibration of it is, you know, the energy of it is you've been naughty.
And so how do we get to a place of antifragility where we're being creative and resourceful with each other?
Because that's the way our brains work, right?
Our brains, if we're in that like ohh I've been bad, then we're shutting down our creative zones, right?
We're getting into a protection, our bodies kind of curl up.
And so how do we like, open up to the creativity that we have within us?
And so that's what I was wanting was to allow that chart to come together so we could see the different steps and that they continue to expand outward.
Including more and more aliveness, yeah.

Benjamin Ellis
So in terms of characterising that, I suppose helping people explore that, I've watched a lot of organizations here on a journey from I guess we need to stop breaking things to we need to fix things to, we need to help things fix themselves and then it kind of goes steps beyond that which is really where you get into for me where you get into the, thrivable and I'm trying to think about how to, conveying that in. And yeah, speak speaking more to that journey.
I guess because the yeah, there's sustainable thing, people tend to be looking very directly, I guess at impact and it, kind of what I would call 1st order change.
So what?

What does that journey look like towards something that is a thrivable system, particularly from an organizational context as well?
I think because that, it's interesting as people are looking at sustainability, it's making people look a bit beyond the organization.
But it's a kind of 1 hot view or it's a supply chain view, whereas in embracing making things thrivable is quite, quite a dramatically different view that incorporates all of that.

Jean M Russell
Yeah.
So one of the lines of the chart is called level up and so you could say the sustainable is a level up from surviving right? Surviving is can we can we keep going, and is included in the original chart but the new chart just was like we don't even need to, that's obvious.
So sustainable is the able to endure a stable world, right?
It's sustainable is to stay flat and it presumes that like that flat is the appropriate response in that world.
But we're just trying to get to that threshold of like, what would allow us to keep that stable line and then resilient is to stay alive longer in the changing world, right?
The world is oscillating in different ways.
How am I able to stay with the curves and then I would say regenerative is a wholeness of fostering life, so it's starting to create more texture, not just ride a line and then thrivable I would say is living systems or learning systems and so it's like every perturbation in the system, every oscillation is information that helps the system learn together.
And so it's about gathering all of that information inside, outside the organization, inside the individual, between individuals.
How is all of that creating a learning environment that's not trying to keep a flatline, but is actually trying to explore a possibility space?

Benjamin Ellis
For me with the kind of leadership hat on, I guess some of that flow for me is and not just attitudes stored change, but how the systems are designed around change from change is something we don't want to happen to change is something we protect ourselves from, through change being a positive force, through to actually changes really exciting that's what creates the opportunity to move beyond into something different and something better is that a fair characterization?

Jean M Russell
Yes.
Although there's a way in which even when you say that it's, it feels slightly.
Umm 1 dimensional to me, change is always already happening.
And so the first one just feels like I'm burying my head in the sand trying to pretend that I can stop it from happening because it's already, you know, happening around us.
And I find actually that thrivability is closer to.
I'm more consciously holding stable things that helped me rather than just trying to batten down the hatches.
Right.
And so it's OK, the changes happening.
How am I engaging with that change?
Where am I welcoming change and where am I holding things stable and I think a lot here about Donella Meadows work on changing in systems and that you want to manage the oscillation right? Too slow of a change, too slow of a curve and you're having to do a lot of work to catch up. And too quick, and now you're just changing in response to change and you're not able to manage that flow.
And so you create too much oscillation and so when you're in a relationship with change in which you're being consciously engaging in how often are we examining this decision?
Not every day.
You know this level of decision making happens in this phasing and so we have a periodicity to it that feels solid and stable and helps ground us.
But we're also every time we're experiencing that period open to changing the answer that we've come up with.
And so it's a strange thing where the sustainable or survival is much more grasping on as if we could hold things tight where thrivable is much more.
How can I consciously engage in the flows of change that allows us to feel more stable even as we're engaging in it?

Benjamin Ellis
It's interesting.
One of the responses I've seen recently in the kind of sustainable umbrella has been, I think, what some have kind of called kind of and anti-growth mindset, not in the sense of like a campaign of anti-growth, but in terms of almost structuring things to make sure that things don't get bigger and the view that that that is a way to kind of prevent you know, the best way to prevent harm as a perspective or even to the point that are actually what we need to do is stop.
And I've seen some organizations go, oh, we've looked at our impact and we decided really the best thing here is we should just stop, we go, we'll give away all of our resources and we'll just stop being, which particularly some of the organizations have been ones that have made a dramatic differences kind of made me scratch my head a little bit.
Which again is why I really love this idea of the thrivable is that actually you can transform into something which isn't just, you know, stopping the impact or creating good but actually is this level of change of impacting on the system around you to what you were talked about earlier in the conversation.

Not just individual change, not just organizational change, but actually systemic change.
And I know that's something you've explored a little bit.
I'm probably gonna pause there and yeah, let you say your bit about that, kind of view.

How do you start to think beyond, particularly as an organizational leader, you know, tend to think about your organization.
You might think about the competition.
You might think about your supply chain and you might think about the local community around the organization, but that's still quite a restricted lens in terms of the possibilities of what you can do in the impact that you can have as an organization.

Jean M Russell
Hmm. Yeah.
Well, first I wanted to say something about the growth because I'm sure that you and I have experienced some of these growth issues where there's some story about like, oh, we should be scaling up, we should react rapidly, by doing whatever.
And then you do a bunch of hiring and can't manage all the people that have come in and suddenly that's affecting your project management and your ability to deliver and throwing more people at it obviously is not the way that that gets solved.
And so we need to continue doing lots of research about what are the ideal kind of numbers of people in a group.
What is this pace at which an organization is capable of doing growth and what are the like sweet spots where that works?
Because, well, sometimes decide not to do something because we're not in the sweet spot for, you know, like you've got 20 people and that's an awkward number and having 32 people would be better or having 12 would be better.
And I don't.
I'm not an expert in that in a way that I know what those numbers are.
I just know that one of the things that we have to be careful about is the rate at which we're changing the number of people involved in that change and being like giving yourself time to have the conversation.
What are the right adjustments to make before throwing the baby out with the bathwater per se?
Umm, I think the other thing that's been going on.
Uh, that relates to the question that you asked has to do with.
We spent many years optimizing the insides of organizations like let's create a solid wall here that barricades us against the outside world and will pull in the resources and we'll track the stuff that's happening inside and everything outside is almost like the enemy.
Or to be captured and that you just can't do that like it's just not sustainable to do that.
And it doesn't make you a good player in a broader ecosystem.
And so I feel like the last 20 years at least have been an exploration of like, what if that's a semi permeable membrane?
How are we working with what is outside the organization?
Where are our partnerships?
And I think that you're aware that one of my passions is getting people to think not about the competitive analysis, but about cooperative analysis.
You know, it's not who you're competing against that’s going to make you as successful as who you're cooperating with.
So if you do it like, oh, here's how we interact with other people in the ecosystem.
These are ways that those people, those organizations, are able to support our work and how are we feeding them in a way that's allows them to continue to do so.
And so you're right.
I've explored a lot about the how do we behave in that ecosystem.
Because that feels like where, where the society as a whole is learning to grow.
Like if we're trying to optimize the effectiveness of an organization, part of this last 20 years has been learning to optimize how we are in relationship to others.

Benjamin Ellis
And one of the things around that frame, another thing that we're coming across a lot and that's kind of in your diagram is resilience and where we, we've seen organizations have gone through challenge and their reaction has been, ah, OK, sustainable. But actually what we really want is resilience.
And but their frame on that has been very individual and very atomic.
How to build an individual supply chain, a resilient supply chain.

It's like looking at the individual suppliers and like you know, how do I stress test them and how do I make sure I've got an alternative supplier?
I could throw a switch.
How do I get people to tap into their resources so they can be more resilient in the face of the change impacting on the organization which and you know there, there is definitely some merit in there and I've seen some great things, but also find it slightly frustrating as an approach because it it's a missed opportunity and thinking about what you were talking about you know cooperation.

So actually resilience at a systems level is a much more interesting concept, much richer one.
How do I, you know, make it so that I'm not pushing that down to individuals, but actually enabling that to happen at a systems level and that can be a very practical thing as well in terms of like supply chain customers, employees, all of those sorts of things.

Jean M Russell
Yeah.
So in the resilience phase, we're being more clear about facing risk. And one of my concerns about the way that people face risk is they go OK, so here's the scenario.
We're gonna have this happen and then they design resilience to that particular problem, and the world is so full of those risks that we can just kind of keep biting off them one by one instead of going.
What's the overall thing that creates our ability to adapt to any of these things that arise, right.
And to me, that means being in relationship like resilience, the best resilience strategy is to be in relationship because then somebody has the resource, somebody in the network is the person to call not who I’ve already pre planned.
And I've made agreements with these particular allies about some preset outcome.
Does that make sense to you?

Benjamin Ellis
Yeah, it does.
And I an example, I think of my early career of kind of working in finance and building finance, IT systems, the resilience meant buying two of everything like we'll have, we'll have, we'll buy one and it might break.
So we'll buy 2 and then we'll buy some stuff to make it switch between the two things.
When one of them breaks and that was very much the for me, is a very visceral demonstration of like, that's a really expensive way to tackle resilience as opposed to saying, well, if we're going to take resilience as that means having some spare capacity in the system, why not put that somewhere that's perhaps more shared rather than it being double the cost and double the waste?


It's an incremental thing on top of what you do, at least that kind of takes it a level on.
But even that kind of misses.

The opportunities that can be created and you know if I kind of describe my journey I’m probably the regenerative stage at the moment, like working out how you build that into organizations cause that's, I should say different than the resilient.

But to what you're saying, you don't.
There is different.
It kind of encapsulates and, but it's a much harder thing.
I found it much harder thing to grasp like how does regenerative happen and what does that look like, particularly in an organizational context.

Jean M Russell
Umm. Yeah.
So you would just use the example of redundancy, right?
Like we use redundancy as a resilience strategy.

And so regenerative might say, well, I'll, I'll have priced out and be in relationship in some fundamental way with some of the suppliers so that I can purchase the things if I need them as they break right, it would start to spread that out strategically to be like OK, maybe I'm not buying redundancy on all of the things, but I could access it based on changing demands. 
And I just feel like thrivability takes that a little bit further and goes how am I working in a system with others consciously to create the kinds of risk approaches that are gonna work for me and others around me. 
Like, ohh. I'm gonna take up all the masks because suddenly I need to buy masks.
Well, then, nobody else has them, and that's gonna affect you badly as well.
And so redundancy turns out to also turn into hoarding, and the regenerative might get you the thing when you need it, but it's still not holding for system health and…
This might be a good moment to talk about this model that I have called the cookie model.
Have we talked about that before, Benjamin?

Benjamin Ellis
Always happy to talk about cookies.

Jean M Russell 
I drew this diagram and somebody's like ohh, that looks like a cookie and I was like, well, that's an interesting thing to bring to it.
But the idea of the diagram is just of course, like there's a big plate and then you have a set of cookies on the plate, and each of those cookies might have like chocolate chips in them.
And so the resilience of the plate is really important because all of the cookies are on the plate.
The resilience of each cookie matters to all the chips, but doesn't offset the plate and the billion.
The resilience of the chip doesn't really affect a cookie, right?
If I take one chip out of the cookie, it's still a good cookie and so understanding where things are in the system so that you're going, how are we taking care of the plate to make sure that the plate is going to support each of the cookies?
I'm probably a cookie, or maybe I'm just a chip, but anyway all of the chips are dependent on the cookies are dependent on the plate and so thinking about the relationships there and how can we foster the wellbeingness of the system would be a broader approach than just.
Can I get another chip in here?

Benjamin Ellis 
Yeah.
And it's it is quite a.
It's a big mental leap and I yeah, I use the example of redundancy.
That's like the crude technical solution.
I think a lot of what's been done under the resilience banner is almost the opposite end of that of like how do I make the one thing indestructible so that I don't have to replace it like to deal with incredible amounts of stress and bounce back.
And that's how we'll solve the problem.
Whereas for me, for my understanding regenerative, it's almost turning that problem around the said well, you know actually how do we build the system such that it can adapt to change.
You go well, actually, maybe what we don't need, we don't need more of that thing or we, you know, we don't need that thing to continue to supply what it was doing.
We can move into a different mode that supports it or changes it.
And again, microbiomes are really good example of this.
It doesn't solve everything with one mechanism.

It has multiple mechanisms that can be applied, so if the microbiome gets kind of knocked out of whack through antibiotics or whatever it is, that there are other, it can effectively reconfigure itself to get the job done that it needs to do to enable the system to build back to a healthy state and so it's interesting because it's a much lower cost mechanism than redundancy or resilience and it's much more adaptive, but it's a challenging thing about how do you build that into organizations, how do you take that and apply that into how I build or grow my team or how we work with our customers or partner organizations to create those regenerative opportunities.

And one reasons I quite like social value at the moment is it's a very practical way of saying let's in a very and deliberate way, explore the opportunities to create something worthwhile out of what we're doing and optimize the decisions towards that which is already quite a dramatically different frame than just a kind of P&L approach to things.
And it's actually saying well, where are the opportunities and actually that throws out capacity because you're creating things that wouldn't have been there before that then create new and additional possibilities.
For me, that's the exciting thing about that journey towards a thrivable organization is it comes up with things you wouldn't have even thought were possible before.

Jean M Russell
Yeah.
I really hear that. The other thing that I'm, I'm think I'm hearing underneath some of that is the we were doing so much work in organizations to create efficiency.
See.
And that that's part of why we ended up losing all sorts of redundancies and buffers in the system and we have to find the right place for a specific organization.
Uh to be efficient in some ways, right?
We can't just rampant inefficiency is not gonna work.
But what is the risk relationship?
Uh, what is sufficient to allow there to be enough creativity to adapt.
Uh, and also enough security and stability to be able to move consciously as an organization in a changing world.

Benjamin Ellis 
Yeah, it's that efficiency.
One is, it's an interesting lever because that was so much for the business narrative for a long while and suddenly people were so actually, yeah, you end up with an extremely efficient system that there is no resilience in it.
There is no ability to adapt to change like, well done you're winning at this race, but there isn't. There isn't another race you can go and take part in because you can do that one thing, and if that that sport goes away, then you know not only are you not well adapted for what comes next, do you have no mechanism to adapt to what comes next.

And again, it said it's it a challenging one in organizations of unpacking all over the those years of things that inherently were optimized towards oh let's make this really efficient towards oh actually, well again for a lot of people say well what is the other goal post I mean what you're gonna say, OK I  recognize this as the wrong game.

What am I optimizing towards?
Because clearly is the answer isn't massive inefficiency.
That's not the and not the winning game.
And I decide, well, how?
Yeah.
How do we rebuild these systems, I guess?
And how do we rebuild organizations away from that efficiency mantra and.

Particularly when a lot of the time organizations are still being judged on that efficiency mantra and being managed to efficiency mantra as well because they're people don't have a handle on another way of doing things.

Jean M Russell
Yeah, well, we've got lots of metrics for efficiency and particularly money ends up being a pretty good measure of efficiency.
And so what are the ways that we can look at the health and wellbeing and what are the measurements to be able to make sure we're getting it right like as you were saying like, what's the target and how do I know I'm getting there is an important thing for us to be able to have a shared understanding of.
And I think that that's also not something that there's a single answer that we all ought to be doing the same thing.
It's what is your value proposition.
What is the quality that you want to be delivering or is it more about you really want to be efficient on time?
I use that word efficient.
We want to be, you know, on time delivery.
Is that what it's more about?
Is it more about we take care of our people really well so that they can adapt to whatever circumstances arising and you see people out there in organizations choosing different things to optimize for and having good results from having done that thing.
And so I think that's a conversation that each organization needs to be having.
What is it?
That's our thing to hold so that we have something to push on for our decision making, because efficiency should not be the thing.

Benjamin Ellis
For the way that from SocialOptic point of view, the way that we operate or trying to operate.
When we hit on the decision that we're happy with, usually that is something that doesn't need to be measured to be obvious, that it's worked.
Let me frame that a different way for me when you get to thrivable, you don't necessarily need a metric to understand you've got there.

It's inherently obvious that you've got there was like ohh well actually this is, you know, this is the right path and we don't, I don't need a you know ROI spreadsheet to tell me you like my return on capital in in the 18 months and it's just a strange balancing act that in in getting to a place where actually you're probably not going to need that that measurement frame actually and that how decisions get made becomes much more about the culture making those decisions and the diversity of the culture making those decisions, but organizations have to start from somewhere of.

I guess I wanna talk a lot about building maps.
I understand it well.
What?
What is the organization's healthy rate of change?
That too slow, too fast.

Other things that I'm doing actually creating change or not, so you kind of end up having to measure things in order to get to a point where hopefully you don't have to measure things anymore and you're still always be measuring things.

But and yes in in that.
That's the kind of, I guess the jumble that I'm in at the moment of like had how do we yet to that point being accountable but actually getting to this model which is you know we've taught ourselves to spot the things that like, yeah, actually that's the way to go.

And yeah, we don't, we don't need to kind of measured in millimetres and to know that that's what we want to do or the decision that we should make.

Jean M Russell
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, when I when I first came into business, I was such an efficiency nut.
Ohh, just totally into it and I get really irritated with.
Well, why do we have to have all this conversation before we even begin?
Like, let's just get to the task and I was convinced by others to actually do a check in.
How are you?
What's going on in your life?
And realized that then when we got to the task, it was three times more efficient to get that work done because we were, I don't know in awareness of each other, and in a collegial atmosphere, and that that improved our creativity.
It improved our output and so I think you have to look for these kind of weird, nonlinear, unexpected and indirect relational things.
And I come at that as a, as a hesitant and recovering control freak.
Like it's just.
It's amazing to me how much creating relational fabric and conversation, and I'm aware of you're like, plan on the page thing.
That thing feels to me like it's so helpful in getting us to figure out together how we're going to move forward.

Benjamin Ellis
And for me, in kind of, I guess my, world of trying to get to thrivable is the fact that it is inherently relational and that's quite a step change.
And again, I think in some of the leadership cannon that's kind of kind of taken as obvious in a lot of kind of the management science world that just doesn't fit in with the shape of what that amount wants to be.
But I'm, from you particularly the trying to understand what does antifragile mean?
What does that look like?
For me, the journey to that has been understanding and embracing the relational and it's like it's not supply chains, it's supply systems.
And actually, it's not supply systems, you know.
It's there's a set of people working these different organizations who relate to each other through communities across careers, across, you know, these imaginary boundaries that people put around the organizations don't exist.
There is no boundary other than maybe the perimeter view organization that you know you swipe your key card to get in, and in fact you let people in and out that the whole time.
So you know, this idea of a company as a box or a circle, it's like that doesn't represent the reality of the situation. 
As an organization you are inherently relational.
It's a process of figuring out what, how do I support those relationships and what are the ones that enable the organization to grow and to create a healthy ecosystem for that organization as well.
And it's a very different mindset, I think and a very hard one to journey into.

Jean M Russell
But well worth doing.

Benjamin Ellis
So on that frame and thinking about your journey, where or how would you encourage people to start?
I guess how do you explore or play or start to structure this into?
Where people might be starting from.

Jean M Russell
I guess the place that I'm at right now is I'm circling back in on myself and going ohh.
I'm seeking to control outside me based on places I get uncomfortable inside me, and so how do I expand my own ability to be with my discomforts so that I'm not acting out as I interact with others and so that's I guess, the place that I'm at is like the I think the best thing that leaders can be doing is being with themselves.
And so maybe you have trouble being with anger, or with sadness, or with loss, or with conflict.
Like how can I continue to grow my muscles to be with things so that when those things arise in my environment, I can be gentle with them because I've learned to be gentle with myself.

Benjamin Ellis
That's really helpful that it's, it's that thing in the organizational context of realizing the impact of that.
And yeah, I thing that always sticks with me as I'm looking an organization that had grown and it incredibly and it was like the four or 5000 people and there was just there was dysfunction around product and product delivery and you know it took a long while like exploring that understanding systems and these sorts of things and eventually came down to actually the fundamental root of that was a relational problem between two of the leaders in the organization earlier on in the organization's history that stemmed from a frame that that they both had that was not compatible and where they just hadn't kind of sat down and worked through that thing, there wasn't just the relational thing between them it was actually an internal thing and that the impact radius of that was out to thousands and thousands of people because they were uncomfortable with a particular thing or particular way of doing things.

Yeah.
It's fascinating and I and I can't get to the end without exploring a little bit.
Umm, the agriculture angle just for a tiny bit. Because it's one that fascinates me in terms of the metaphors.
But I think almost more practically, it can be an interesting frame for looking at how to become thrivable.

Jean M Russell
Hmm. Umm yeah.
So before we jumped into the podcast, you and I were talking a little bit about my interest in agriculture lately, as a thrivable thing, and I've been exploring umm stuff like the micro microbiome, but also like what's happening at the edges of roots.
And I was just like mind boggling to me to come to the understanding that plants are always already in a relationship with fungus that are almost all plants are actually their soil.
Where they're interacting with the soil is fungus and go, Oh, there's always already this relationship.
That's a cooperative relationship between plants and fungus and their both benefiting from that, like almost all of life is in this relationship.
And yet we're operating with this metaphor of competition.
It's just, I mean, competition does happen.
It's just not the dominant thing in our, in living systems.
And so you've got zones outside the plant roots that are like how many kinds of life forms are within proximity to that and all in relationship with each other in different ways.
That's not to say that some aren't predatory, right?
Like there's but.
But when you're looking at agricultural systems from like a more thrivable point of view, you're looking at like, how are the Hawks doing?
Are the Hawks finding enough critters to eat?
Are those critters finding enough insects to eat?
Are those insects find…like the whole chain can be witnessed and it's health by looking at whether the top predator is able to thrive.
That means that all the, and the best way to like get rid of all of the the pest insects as to make sure that the predators of those pests are present right.
It's just, it's fascinating to see how those agricultural systems can be rewired to create health all the way up and down the ecosystems that are present there.

Benjamin Ellis 
And it's, I think can be an amazingly helpful metaphor, because the, you know, you look at biological systems, they are so complicated and just, you know, you, get a level of detail.
You think I've got this and then it's like there's a whole other level of detail as a whole other level of and you could never manage that.

That you can operate within it to create growth, to create fruit, to create food and and yes, interesting people talk about like high growth organizations like well that's really interesting, have you looked at how how like plants grow?

Ohh no, I wouldn't.
Say, well, that's there.
There's just so many and kind of learning through metaphor from actually just think about the resources.
It's got access to it.
Is the impact it's having on what's around it?
Is that gonna allow it to grow or is it creating an environment that it can't grow in?
Are you, you know what ecosystem are you supporting for your organization that's going to supply the future people who are going to join it, the future customers that you know, the supply chain for it.
All of these things and to the whole ohh we've got no competition.
It's like they're well.
There's no predator.
There's something wrong with your system.

You want to kind of back out here and rethink so and yeah, I love the examples of going back to nature and exploring that as a way to bring a lens back to.
Well, actually, you know your organization isn't a set of boxes linked by a lines.
It's this living ecosystem that has a lot of those same characteristics. Never gonna be able to manage all the complexity in it, but there are things that you can do that enable it to not just sustain itself, not just repair itself, but actually gets to the point where it can flourish and thrive.
Because that's built into the nature of what it is about and that kind of leads me back round to I guess culture and the role of culture in getting to Thrivable from an organizational context, I don't know whether you had any thoughts on that as we come to my last questions.

Jean M Russell
Culture and thivable?
So one of the frameworks that I've been using lately is personal relational organizational and systemic.
Umm.
And it's like, we can't think about organizational thriving without thinking about relational thriving without thinking about personal thriving without thinking about the broader systems.
And that kind of, you know, up and down like systems don't have clear edges, especially living systems.
And so it's.
It's broader than just is the organization thriving?
It's. Is it part of a thriving system? Is it contributing to that system?
Are the people within it thriving and that the wisdom I think we haven't even mentioned this word collective intelligence like the wisdom of knowing what thriving is.
I really trust that most of us have an image of that.
Umm, now I might pull in One Direction and the whole system needs to pull in a slightly different direction, so we need to be in conversation with each other, but it's often the case that the wisdom is right there.
One of the funny things that I've learned from reading about indigenous wisdom is that things like Poison Ivy often have their antidote right next to it.
So the things grow complementary to each other and I think that we often right next to an issue, we have people who recognize what those issues are and can express them and know what the next step is to create more health in that system and how do we allow that to surface that wisdom that's already present there.

Benjamin Ellis
I like that.
I in the in the UK we have stinging nettles and doc leaves and that again it's the same thing like where there are stinging nettles, you will find the doc leaves and they are you kind of rub them in and they take away the they take away the sting.
It's like the system has the solution within it for the problem that you've encountered.

Jean M Russell
Yes.

Benjamin Ellis
Wow, thank you so much, Jean, for sharing your thoughts and wisdom with us and being generous with your time.
I will share in the show notes some resources and kind of where to come find you and some more about the things that you're up to for people who want to explore that more and but yeah, thank you for that thought, for leaving us with.

Jean M Russell
Thank you, Benjamin.
Appreciate it.