Radical Curiosity with Seth Goldenberg

Today co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are in conversation with Seth Goldenberg. Seth is a designer, activist, author, curator, and entrepreneur who harnesses the power of questioning to catalyse innovation and cultural change.  He is the founder and CEO of Curiosity & Co., exploring, designing, and building flourishing futures through a design-venture studio, an experience laboratory, Ideas Salons as thought-leader retreats that tackle the essential questions of our time. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Wired, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Providence Journal and the Boston Globe.

Seth’s book ‘Radical Curiosity, Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures’ was published in 2022.

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)


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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Transcript

Jean Gomes: 0:04

Hi Scott. This was a fascinating conversation, wasn't it?

Scott Allender: 0:09

It really was. Seth is he's just one of those people whose enthusiasm is infectious. It was one of my favourite conversations. I didn't quite know where he was going next. But that's exactly what you want and would expect for this topic.

Jean Gomes: 0:25

Yeah. So for our listeners, we should say that in this show, we're talking with Seth Goldenberg, about curiosity, what it is, and why we need to develop it as leaders.

Scott Allender: 0:37

Yeah, he is, he really is, to me the personification of a curious mind. And in this conversation, he was able to highlight areas where we tend to be complacent, for example, even in something simple, like travel and vacations, how we can get into a comfort zone and not necessarily expose ourselves the way we should to the reality of different cultures.

Jean Gomes: 1:01

Yeah, we became aware of Seth through his recent new book called Radical curiosity, which is really great. I really enjoyed it. And it's not just, you know, the typical business book provocation. There's loads of practical tools and ideas about how to create value. So he's not elevating curiosity. Beyond the pragmatic, it really is something that he believes in applying to helping me to solve big problems.

Scott Allender: 1:27

Yeah. And it's evident throughout this conversation. His questions are very powerful, really helps everyone listening to shift their perspective. And the heart of his thinking is getting deeper into what creates impact and value. It's not equating urgency with performance. Yeah. This is an important conversations. So take a breath, get some coffee or tea, sit back and let these ideas and. Hey, friends, welcome back to the evolving leader podcast, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender.

Jean Gomes: 2:27

And I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender: 2:28

How are you feeling on this Friday Mr. Gomes?

Jean Gomes: 2:31

I'm really looking forward to the weekend. I'm depleted. I am. I've done a lot of stuff this week. That's required long hours, and I am travelling over to see you actually, this weekend.

Unknown: 2:46

I know.

Jean Gomes: 2:47

I'm really looking forward to that. But I need I need some recovery. So I'm, I'm looking forward to that. How are you feeling Scott?

Scott Allender: 2:53

Get your energy up. I expect a full you know,

Jean Gomes: 2:56

You will get it all, don't worry.

Scott Allender: 2:58

I'm feeling a mix of things. Today. I'm feeling a little depleted because I've been dealing with this head cold a little bit and feeling a mix of emotions. My daughter's 13th birthday is today I just dropped her off at school and feeling excited but nervous that she's 13. I have a teenager now. And so I'm a little overwhelmed by that. And I'm also feeling a lot of gratitude for a good week. And I'm feeling curious as I know our guests would like us to feel today because today we are joined by Seth Goldenberg. Seth is a designer and entrepreneur who believes in the power of asking good questions to solve big problems. He's the founder and CEO of curiosity and CO a purpose driven design, business and Innovation Studio, propelling cultural change. Curiosity and CO has tackled a series of high profile projects to solve some of the most ambitious economic, public health and environmental challenges with Fortune 500 clients such as Apple, American Express, and Pepsi Co leading nonprofit organisations and regional governments, curiosity and CO also hosts ideas salons, custom designed exclusive retreats and conferences attended by Nobel Prize winners, senators and executives from a wide range of organisations. He's the author of the book, radical curiosity, where he presents a framework for individuals, businesses and communities to thrive. During a time of significant reinvention. He shares his strategic inquiry based methodology to answer some of our most complex challenges and argues that because we value knowing, above learning, and prioritise doing overthinking, Curiosity has become an endangered species. Only by rediscovering the power of questions, can we hope to rewrite the community held legacy narratives that no longer serve us and to remake our organisations, our politics and our lives? So Seth, welcome to the Evolving Leader.

Seth Goldenberg: 5:02

Well, thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

Jean Gomes: 5:06

Welcome to the show. Seth. How you feeling today?

Seth Goldenberg: 5:09

It sounds like this weekend in Tennessee, everyone will be repleted rather than depleted, so I'm chartering a bus I'm going down.

Scott Allender: 5:20

Nice. So Seth, as I said in the intro, you believe that curiosity is an endangered species. And you begin your book with Apple's former designer, Jony Ive and his op ed in the Wall Street Journal talking about Steve Jobs, exceptional curiosity, and how this frames our discomfort with not knowing Can we talk about the impact that this is having on our imagination at a time that you call a cultural interregnum? I know that there's a lot in there, but perhaps we can start with why you think there's a decline in curiosity, and why is it so important that we be talking about that right now?

Seth Goldenberg: 5:59

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's absolutely a great deal in that opening frame. So let's maybe pick it apart. So Jony, Ive is kind of a curiosity icon. Of course, I'm biassed because we come from the design field. And one of the things that Jony is known for is advocating for simplicity. And that, that sounds simple. But imagine creating something that fits in your pocket that used to be a 100 acre studio in Hollywood, right, but it's wildly complex. And I think that one of the things we learn from great design minded leaders, is the sense of curiosity to ask questions about everything, in order to not kind of fall into the automation or the autopilot, that so much of the capitalist, and 20th century Corporation has taught us routinized works, that much of our day is filled with moving the integers inside of a known perimeter and rearranging them in ways to get get greater efficiencies. We've become business leaders, and tirely, evaluated on the management of the known. Right, I mean, think about it, how many for every CEO, there's 10,000, middle managers. We've all become managers of managers. And I think there's a funny dynamic where we kind of accidentally eradicate, questioning the brief, we forget to go further upstream, to ask the questions of why. And it's not that we forget, as though we have no memory. It's that we've institutionalised forgetting, because it's not often the power or authority we have. And so we become extraordinarily good at operating existing integers, rather than questioning the entirety of the frame. And Jony is an incredible example of this. Right? In design and creative spaces, when we're makers and inventors and kind of future producers. We just wake up every morning saying, but what if? What if there were no rules? What if gravity didn't exist? And when you do that, it tends to be that there's refuting the constraints allows you to question if there were ever constraints to begin with. And it's actually a space where some of the greatest invented value resides.

Jean Gomes: 9:02

So before we get into all the ideas in this brilliant book, what you've just said to the typical corporate leader will infuriate them.

Seth Goldenberg: 9:14

That's good, proves they're listening.

Jean Gomes: 9:15

Yeah, but can you tell us because that one level, you know, there's nothing you could argue about? That is not true, but at the same time, they will have an immediate rationalised response to why that is not something they can then listen to. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you get past that initial resistance

Seth Goldenberg: 9:36

Can you help me zero in on the 'that', that you think that that

Jean Gomes: 9:41

Well the 'that' is, you know, like the fundamental assumptions that limit or delineate the status quo and the situation you said, Well, you know, we actually questioned those we might find they were never really true in the first place, but we can't see it because we built this thing based on those assumptions. And those assumptions are actually what we got paid. need to keep in place, you know, as a preserver of the status quo and exploiter of the value that have been created in the past and so on. So you're kind of appending, a worldview, and identity and status and all these kinds of things. And so I'm just really curious about what's your first move? To get people past the kind of reaction they might feel towards that?

Seth Goldenberg: 10:25

It's, I see what you mean. Now, thanks for unpacking that a moment. You know, I think I think it's interesting to use analogues and case study examples that we've all lived through, right? I mean, how many conversations have you had surrounding the experience of living through the pandemic, and that we could never have conceived of the 33, things that were normalised during the pandemic, I mean, the ideological or normalised narratives of what schooling is where we work, how economic transactions unfold, all of these things became strained momentarily. But surprisingly, the world did go on. And in many places, it forced an experimentation in which we thrived in different domains, that we never gave ourselves the chance to try out the Challenger model inside a corporation, right? Finally, we you know, after millions of hours of debating a work from home policy, when it was no longer a choice. Turns out, we had the courage to go prototype, but it's not so terrible, right. And I think it's an easy, you know, meta existential example. But it is, it is an interest to your point about identity. Human beings tend to find comfort, I mean, you opened with it, Scott in your, in your reframing of my, one of my guiding principles, if you will, we are not comfortable not knowing we're not comfortable with uncertainty, we're not comfortable leap, leaping off a cliff into a domain that has not been proven out and documented with metrics and perfected for success. And yet, that is often the source of where all progress comes from. And so it's this funny human nature that we put up idols and icons like we we look at speaking of Apple, we speak of Steve Jobs, like a kind of demigods spiritual leader, but this is a person who built the model for killing an old product for the next product. I can't tell you how many Fortune 500 companies, I've worked from that in the same sentence, idolised Steve, and then could never imagine doing any actions that they so applaud. Right? So I think I think the pandemic is an easy example. Because for all of you know, it's in the education field, right? We talk about, you know, all the metaphors of reengineering the train while it's going on the tracks, or, you know, changing the plane while it's in flight. And there's never the right time, there's never the right budget, there's always too much risk, but when the conditions of the field have been lightning rod charge, and we have to turns out something good might come with it.

Jean Gomes: 13:39

So in in this great book, you provide the reader with a really comprehensive way of thinking about how to increase their curiosity, can you set out the underlying framework for your methodology?

Seth Goldenberg: 13:52

Well, I think there's there's two types of maybe curiosity that I want to engage in with, there's that just in a very pragmatic, individual scale, things that we can do in our day to day lives that at least get us more familiar with the prior conversation more familiar, more comfortable with not knowing or literally physical experiences, such as the classic history of walks and walk about as spaces for literally biologically and ergonomically getting into a discomfort in order to find comfort. But I think at a more meta business and society level, you Scott opened with the cultural interregnum that you referenced. And I appreciate your courage and in pronouncing interact. Now.

Scott Allender: 14:50

I don't think I did it well, but I gave it a go.

Seth Goldenberg: 14:53

It was great, I was singing your praise brother. You know, a interregnum typically. So the way I have thought of it as interregnum is historically a kind of government terminology that represents the transition between states or leaders or parties, right? From, you know, one era to the next era of leadership. But it's it's almost like an institutional kind of concept in government. But cultural interregnum might imagine that not a person or a political party is in power, but that certain values are in power. And that I believe that we are in a transition state, between eras of values that our values are transitioning, right. And so there's a kind of diagram in the book, what we describe as the descending power of what I call, Legacy narratives. Legacy narratives are the stories we tell ourselves, the values that were embedded in society, historically, that are no longer relevant, or no longer flourishing, or offering the equitable opportunity that we maybe originally envisioned them to be. We as in society at Century scale, right. And as they're descending as those challenger narratives are descending, what is emerging is, those, those legacy narratives are being challenged by challenger narratives by new emerging narratives. And I think we're living in a time where they're kind of criss crossing almost at the same time. And what we're experiencing, sometimes we read in the news about a situation or an event, or we're often seeing, it's not just that that event is unfolding, but that we're feeling the growing pains, the birth stretch marks of two different values, kind of duking it out, sometimes violently, sometimes in policy, sometimes in the way people vote with their wallet economically, right. But there are different values that are kind of constantly in dialogue. And over time, some of those challenger narratives are going to indeed, to cease and go extinct and quiet down. And some of these challenger narratives are going to succeed. And they don't happen at the same rate either. And they don't happen geographically, in an equitable distribution, either. And so I'm sharing this because I think, once we may be kind of, perhaps acknowledge that there's a much greater anthropological sociological, critical and cultural shift happening, we may better understand how to ask questions and interrogate what we're experiencing to map ourselves, oh, I'm having this, this interaction with my co worker, or this conflict. And a project or a decision might actually be mapped across this kind of cultural interregnum. And it will help me understand that it's not just what I'm directly experiencing that's in play. But I can be curious to ask questions about a much broader set of inputs that are conditioning, my experience.

Jean Gomes: 18:20

Yeah, that makes total sense. And I guess we're experiencing a lot of those at the moment with the trans movement and other cultural gender issues and race issues and so on. But if you could, if you could just give us an example of how you see that playing out in your work.

Seth Goldenberg: 18:41

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, you name a good one, right. So on, I speak about it in the book. But, you know, if you are an active social media user, let's talk about your example of gender. I mean, I think Facebook has exceeded more than 350, gender and sexual identities that you can register in your profile. Right. Now, if you imagine that over the context of time, like, like our grandparents, were raised in a time where there are boys and girls. It's very, very clear, very black and white. There's a dichotomy, right? Today, there's Wait, there's, I'm sorry, there's 372 identities. I'm confused, right. And so in some ways, one of the powerful things I think we started to map out the team of researchers and thinkers I involved in the book project is that time is actually a really interesting way to map well Oh, fascinating. The legacy narrative of a very stringent bifurcated model of gender or political party, or right and wrong, like we have lived in a bifurcation of left or right on so many issues for so long, that it's even a challenger narrative to consider the complexity of diversity of ways of being in the world. Right? And it's just kind of very empowering and freeing to say, oh, there's not left or right, one or two, you know, this sort of that, I think that that's been a powerful experience. Scott, it looks like, you

Scott Allender: 20:31

know, I just, I'm just sorry, I'm, I'm having facial expressions reacting to what you're saying, because so much, so much is swirling in my head. And I'm, I'm just thinking about what I'm observing in that. So legacy narratives being challenged. And I see the beauty of when people get really curious about, Okay, help me understand more about your gender identity or expression, or whatever the topic might be, right. And there's a curiosity and a learning that happens. And then I see a great deal of what feels like, more doubling down on my certainty, right on that sort of legacy for a group of people that say, No, it is this way, this is how my brains made sense of it. And it seems to be pushing left and right even farther apart, where curiosity about the others position is largely collapsing in the middle. So I've just been curious to get your thoughts and yeah, no,

Seth Goldenberg: 21:22

I love that. It you're, you're reminding me of. I mean, here in the States, at least, I'm sure you have global listeners. But in the States, it's I've been excited by Jon Stewart's return to The Daily Show, just in time for the election. He did a funny piece the other day. And, you know, he was speaking with, I think it was someone from the Economist magazine. And they were talking about some of these dichotomies. And it used to be that the paradigm was, in the context, they were describing capitalism versus communism, or these kind of different economic models. And what you were just saying, Scott made me think he proposed that there seems to be at least in the US, and we're seeing, of course, show up and other cultural regions around the world and its own local expression, but a kind of, he used the term woke versus not work. And I think what you're describing makes me think a little bit about, it's almost like the snap back to the extreme of legacy narratives is its own final resistance to the dying of that legacy narrative. Wow, we made so much progress on racism. We have President Obama as our leader, it's extraordinary, and everything starts to retreat to the private domain. And then with the potent timing and the visual, and the just tragedies of police brutality, everything comes back out, we respond with Black Lives Matter. But then you also see the response from the other side. And suddenly, with Trump's rhetoric, we see even more courage to return to a racism that maybe we thought was gone. And so it's interesting, it's almost like some of these legacy nerves you think have gone away, but they're just privatised, or they're just being cloaked or camouflaged. And it's like this kind of, you know, almost like, you know, the, the old kind of thing pendulum. Yeah, they used to have like, on your desk of the of the thin kind of wire with the heavy mirror balls that are kind of bouncing back and forth. And we see up nope, racisms over boom, no, it just shows back up. And it's like the last dying breath of old legacy ideas, morphing and finding new ways for their kind of last stand. And it takes the Challenger narrative and the extraordinary response of Black Lives Matter to say, no, no, we're going to stamp these ideas once and for all. But again, both things are happening simultaneously. So you're living in that interregnum, where two parties to stakeholders, two canons of thought, are coexisting in the same cities, in the same communities, the same businesses and the same organisations simultaneously. They feel like they're from different eras. It's not that they're from different eras. They're from different sets of values. But unless we ask questions, and we find ourselves what I call radically curious, right, so it's not just passive curiosity, I think, in some of the conversations I've had that have been so wonderful, stemming from the book, there's a kind of passivity of curiosity, but we call the book radical curiosity is radical really means from the Latin root of the Latin terminology of getting to the roots of things. So it's not like, Hey, I wonder where that you know, Oh, where'd that cloud go? It's not it's not a kind of just all taury or sensory curiosity. It's a kind of detective investigation into the various sensual undercurrents of things like, Well, why is this happening? What am I experiencing? Are these specific to this place, this time this organisation? Or is there a larger framework that I can place my experiences with them and play a role in challenging those roots and deciding how I will contribute to which new challenger narrative replaces the legacy?

Scott Allender: 25:47

How far upstream do we need to go culturally this this question might be taken us down a trail that we don't need to travel but you know, I'm, I'm thinking about especially in the West how education itself prioritises knowing versus curiosity, right, our kids go to school, they're tested on memorization and knowing we even had Professor Ellen Langer on the show a few weeks back, and she talked about an example of, you know, you go to school, you learn one plus one is two. If the child says, well, one plus one what, right? So because one cloud plus one cloud is still one cloud was her example. Right? And not only would that not be a welcome, they'd actually maybe get some kind of disciplinary response to it. Because that's not what they want. Right. So I feel like it's ingrained in us from the get go that we are supposed to know things. How do we how do we, this is so big, how do we begin to think about it? How far upstream do we need to travel or can we travel? Yeah.

Seth Goldenberg: 26:48

It's great. Yeah, I love the cloud example. That's a fun one. Yeah, I think. I mean, I think your first prompt was, how far upstream Do we go? And I think if we believe that we are in so one, one other shorthand we use to talk about the cultural interregnum is sometimes we just talk about it as just as our computer has an operating system. And every now and then, you know, the next OS system is updated and refreshed and rebooted. I believe that society has a kind of values, operating system reboot. Right. So we're, if we're so another way to talk about the cultural interregnum is to say, well, we're experiencing from safari to Yosemite reboot right now. It just takes takes a minute. You know what I mean? And I think if we believe that we're in that transition, and it's not that this transition is, perhaps, and we could talk about that as well, but any different than any other reboot, but a reboot doesn't happen all the time. And some reboots are fast, some reboots are slow. But if we're in a reboot, it does question or it does invite us to question to your point, some of the most fundamental assumptions that we have, I mean, I know, you know, I love hearing you and I know you've had other education thinkers on your show. And education is an easy one, because it goes right to the heart of what we value and what we care about for both ourselves and our, our children and the way we continue to educate the leaders that are the next, you know, wave of the future, right. But imagine an education system that, you know, I was thinking about this and this light. If you ask anyone, at least in the US, well, I'm sure it's perfect for you, Jean, and I'm sure I'm sure it's perfect in London, so I will, I won't say I won't comment. I'm sure it's perfect. But in the US if you ask most people, not saying everyone but most people. Is your son, your daughter, your loved one your own was your own learning path. K to 12. Higher Ed, wasn't it perfect? Oh my god, they'll pin you against the wall and tell you all the things that went wrong, what they would have done differently. Oh, I have so many. It gets right to the passionate people, right. So imagine if the vast majority of all of us not only have a problem that we'd like to fix. We I might even say most people say it's broken. It's a failure. I mean, we go right to the extremes, right. So imagine could it be simultaneously true that a nation that believes that its education system is broken? Also will throw you into jail for not attending? Welcome to truancy. Welcome, welcome to button see So, I mean, so what happens is we have these like systems implanted on top of systems. It's a kind of paradoxical conjunct conundrum we've, we've constructed for ourselves. And so when you say how far upstream? I mean, I don't know, should should we gut check the many paradoxes of the values that are in conflict with how we construct a thriving society? Right? Yeah.

Jean Gomes: 30:29

I've had to reframe parts of my education as post traumatic growth. That's a

Seth Goldenberg: 30:35

good that's so so London's not perfect yet.

Jean Gomes: 30:38

I know. No, it's not. There's.

Seth Goldenberg: 30:44

So I know you're kind of starting to flirt with the theme of education. But maybe this is just like a mood boost to get into what you're inviting Scott, which is just our Are we are we ready and willing to throw so many core assumptions into this conversation? Right. It's like, I am not interested in incremental ism in any fashion. Nor am I into interested in manicuring, a tactical, evolutionary growth update. I mean, even it's interesting, right? I mean, just because I'm looking, I don't know if this will be visual or not, but just seeing you, the evolving leader, like, do we believe that businesses, organisations, communities need leaders that are evolving? Or do we need a kind of urgency to, like, do we need the interventionist leader? I mean, like, obviously, as you said earlier, Jean, it's, you know, I have a little bit your, like, remind you like, remember, there are people who would not believe what you're saying? You're saying earlier, it's like, there's there's a lot of questioning of tradition, and, and the core identity. But I think if we begin to give ourselves the space, to ask these more radically curious questions, we've, we've designed ourselves into quite a twist into complexity and conundrum that is self designed. This is what I mean about, we ensure there are some sciences that are fairly consistent, like gravity does exist. But most of our lives, and the biggest frictions that we navigate are self designed by us, we can some group of our evolving leaders, in some part of time, got together and agreed to instal these designs, we can also get together and agreed to D instal them and upgrade this system.

Jean Gomes: 32:50

Well, this is front and centre for us, you know, in terms of the agenda for the show. And so yeah, we are trying to set out a very diverse range of progressive ideas, disruptive ideas, ideas, that might be unpalatable to quite a lot of people listening to them for the first time. So absolutely, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not looking at incremental, but we're also trying to meet people where they're at, and according to, to be able to absorb new thinking in a way that makes sense to them. And I'm particularly interested in, you know, the kind of conformity aspect of organisations in that, you know, people surround themselves with people like them, they hire people like them, even if even if they say they're diverse, the diversity of marginal, and you talk about, you know, the greater exposure to diverse experiences, and how people will benefit from people and cultures that are really unlike them, that don't just in reinforce your existing biases and prejudices and ways of thinking. So can we unpack that in terms of, you know, how do you how do you go about doing that in in your everyday life? That isn't just an exercise? And how do you also deal with the feelings of vulnerability when you're with people who are not like you, and you just don't know how to engage with them?

Seth Goldenberg: 34:11

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. That trajectory. I mean, I think this came out of it came out of a kind of research fact that we found in the US about how few Americans truly travel abroad. And then when they travel, are they selecting countries or cultures or contexts that are familiar, versus less familiar? And all that that means religious, spiritual, food, race, all the things right? And I think, you know, there's so much conversation Question about the kind of echo chamber and the extremism that we're facing that that kind of snap back to grid, you know, that we were talking about earlier, that it's no surprise that we tend to find ourselves most comfortable hiding inside of ideological systems that reflect our own. And so I love your question, because it says, it's almost as though Well, we presuppose that what I call extending your radius of exposure, quite literally, and metaphorically that you would physically enter a domain that you have not been but also emotionally, socially, culturally. And you can do that even in your own city, you don't have to travel halfway across the planet to do that. And I like what you're what you're teasing out that, you know, it doesn't have to be a spectacle. That can be how you self disrupt your own routines. How you challenge yourself, to thrive in being uncomfortable, or in not knowing. I mean, I've talked to people who just said, you know, once a day I go to a restaurant, I've always been I order something I've never had, I mean, there are these like mini wins, that that are not, I mean, they're not that profound leaps forward that I advocate for. But I think finding rhythms that put it into practice is quite, quite wonderful. Right? And many wins are cumulative to big wins, right? I think the question for me, it was, Do I even recognise where the boundaries of my comfort begin and end? So am I aware of my own radius of exposure? Do I can I even literally map, the kind of Protractor the circle that I, that extends, you know, in my world, and it would be helpful for people to it's almost like you remember the movie, The Truman Show? Where it's the sky, and then at one at that beautiful, iconic moment, the ski like knocks on the sky, and it's metal, right? We sometimes don't even know that we've reached the end of our Truman Show dome. Or we think it goes on forever, but it's an illusion. And it actually is metal, not a beautiful one plus one Sky Cloud. Right. So I think it behoves us to almost be the adventures of our own life story. To be the, to be actors in the love story of our own, you know, picture our own film, to be the actors that are asking to meet new actors to find subplots to find new scenes, right? To seek out where that perimeter edge is and go up. Wow, nope, haven't seen this one before. Right. And I think your point about being vulnerable is to kind of treat it like an adventure treat it like a detective to seek out and maybe almost constructively set up a method or a process or an interface by which you can find all the treasure that it may teach us. I mean, if if it isn't like I'm putting you know, if you approach it as I'm putting my pinky toe in the water, and oh my god, I can't look No good will come from this welcome to manifest destiny. But if we find a way to not only embrace reactively but proactively seek out the field trip to go beyond the current radius and double its diameter maybe we can treat it as a reconnaissance mission a a Sherlock Holmes novel A a way in which we are this is better than any college course I've ever had. And that doesn't have to be physical travel it can just be about beyond what I what I know to be true.

Jean Gomes: 39:22

Well, can you give us an kind of an instance of last time this happened to you were you were you kind of you extended your boundaries

Seth Goldenberg: 39:33

Yeah, I I tend to be a very social person. I find even just there's so much social code in whom and how we speak to one another. I imagine asking the name of the waiter or waitress serving you. If they don't introduce you, and how it immediately for you and then you intervenes in the script, that is the autopilot of the roles we're playing in the show, I tend to find an excuse to interrupt those memes and engage in conversation with individuals that maybe we are not set into the course of tradition to bring in in a more intimate fashion. And there's rarely a time it does not yield them then pulling me into an element that I did not pre suppose I think this is what I mean. But it doesn't have to mean, you know, travelling to another continent that you can interrupt the expected flows, even that is a radius a radius of exposure is I'm not supposed to know anything intimate of the person giving me my coffee. And it leads to a kind of openness, I mean, radical Curiosity has two important kissing cousins, imagination, and openness. And I think if we want to extend our radius of exposure, living through the lens of openness is a fantastic kind of, you know, gateway drug.

Scott Allender: 41:21

I love that. And it reminds me, you know, this idea of moving from autopilot, you know, learning new things through these new experiences and breaking sort of just normative behaviour that we don't really think about also includes a notion of unlearning. And there's a quote, in your book that Jean and I both love where you said, metacognition is the most important skill of the 21st century. So can you unpack that a little bit further for us?

Seth Goldenberg: 41:52

Yeah, absolutely. So the way I mean, there's a great deal of discourse around I am by no means an expert, but the way that I've kind of comfortably sat, even the term metacognition is really thinking about how we think, as just a kind of basic definition. And, and because of your point, right, what much of education is about knowing and memorising that one plus one is two, and the cloud example is a delicious one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold close to that one. So thank you for the gift. You know, I think that what it calls into question is, ah, is one plus one, two, based on the mental model of Western canon of logic mathematics? is one plus one equal two, does that hold up in regenerative ecologies in which exponential combinations are yielded? Well, the question is, by what way of thinking, Are we pushing the noun that we think of facts are objects that are just nouns we move around, but the way we think about those objects are verbs. And it turns out, in as as the world becomes flat, and all of human knowledge is a hyperlink away? Turns out facts aren't so dependable, actually. And that indeed, a higher order cognition of how are we even assuming a taxonomy of knowledge to begin with, informs how we approach any situation, or the object hood of fact or knowledge? So for me metacognition is this like, wonderful Renaissance, in which people, especially leaders, and businesses and organisations, it very could be that the most important skill to be a leader in the 21st century, is to understand that ways of thinking are not singular, but wildly diverse and complex. And your job as a leader is to conduct the orchestra have multiple kinds of fingers, right? Cue percussion, cue cue brass cue strings, that teams of teams are hundreds, if not 1000s, of people who are working out of fundamentally different mental models. And so your job as a leader of human beings, is actually to understand the metacognition of the communities that you're interacting with internally or externally to your organisation.

Scott Allender: 44:42

Gosh, that's so good. You just gave us a good pullquote for promoting the show for sure. That's gone. That's getting written out.

Jean Gomes: 44:49

Yeah. We are very interested in medical condition as

Seth Goldenberg: 44:54

I can imagine. Have you have Have you all in your Conversations found a particular AHA that has really stuck with you in that domain? Well,

Jean Gomes: 45:06

quite quite a few. In fact. I mean, one was we had Steve Fleming, who runs one of the world's leading metacognition labs in London. And he had done some research looking at polarisation. And the correlation between metacognition and polarizations. Kind of two things that tease out this very quickly is one is that the cognition is independent of intelligence. And the second was that people who are highly intelligent, and have low metacognition, in other words, they don't know when they're wrong. And when they're right, you know, they always believe that their whatever they think is right, or the most likely to confuse knowing and doing. And then the second thing was the correlation between poor metacognition and polarisation that people who sit on the spectrum of extreme beliefs, religious, political beliefs, also have very low metacognition because they're unable to update their beliefs in light of new information. They really do not have that ability to think about how they're thinking.

Seth Goldenberg: 46:19

It's interesting, I love the way you're, you clearly know your subject, because you're that's very beautiful the way you're simplifying a la Jony Ive. I've right down to the core. I think this is why our studio, my core company, curiosity, and CO, when curiosity is the anchor capability, it allows us to work across any sector or industry. Our knowledge is not about this is how healthcare works. So we work in healthcare, our knowledge is that process based knowledge for discovering and inventing new models and new values, new value, for that matter, no matter what domain and we as a studio almost have a kind of institutional capability now that comes from traversing all those domains, right. There's the language that our financial services sector, or the language that climate science or the language that education or retail speaks. It's not just that it's a language, it is a way of thinking. And so there are all these dialects, that the more that we traverse, allows for a kind of multidisciplinary, kind of portfolio of mental models. And that has served us quite well. And I think I imagine that as you talk about, either the consultant who maybe is the Nomad of different domains, or as you are sharing in your case, or your listeners who are living in any particular leadership position, I would say that one of the ways to increase metacognition is, it's counterintuitive to the modernist agenda, have, I spent 40 years in this sector, and I'm the best of that. But to see your resume as a kind of zigzag across unexpected domains, today that makes you like a Navy SEAL Samurai, then has the capability to blend ways of thinking and knowing that are rare to be able to duplicate.

Jean Gomes: 48:44

If you're enjoying the show, you might also appreciate Scott's new book, The Enneagram of emotional intelligence, which provides simple, powerful tools to help us better understand ourselves and others available online at all major retailers. You've raised? I mean, we've had a great conversation about your ideas and the philosophy that underpins what you're you're talking about in your work, it'd be great to hear if you're happy to share a couple of examples of the kinds of things that you're helping organisations to do and find these future values that they they need to embrace. Yeah, if that's a good conversation to have.

Seth Goldenberg: 49:28

Yeah, absolutely. Well, the kinds of clients or leaders that wind up coming across our design studio, are the conditions are pretty specific. There, they tend to be either in Crisis or the conditions for a crisis seem to be on the horizon. Right? It's never just easy, good times, right? People come to us when there are a existential questions, and they might not be immediate, they obviously have an economic success that they can invest in preparing. But anytime you're asking what is the future of my industry, what is the future of my organisation, we are pivoting, we're changing our value proposition or changing what we see the field to be. We often that's the, that's the kind of conditions for an invitation that we receive. So and that's that's seen everything from, you know, we've done, we did a huge amount of work in the oil sands in northern Canada. When the question became, you know, how can we become not the, the example of the worst offenders of climate change? But how can we deal with the energy that the world needs and find a way to be sustainable in our leadership decision making at the same time, and it's quite complex, right, you have the indigenous leadership who own rights to land up in the northern northern Alberta, you have oil companies, some of which are nationally owned, there's nationalist interests at play. There's tax infrastructure, there's people who have jobs, I mean, what we just find is that even in the most tense issues, we try to seek out the radioactive ones, by the way, right. But even in the most radioactive nuclear questions, it sounds as though human beings are waking up in the morning saying, I can't wait to harm the world today, I, this is gonna be great. Let me just screw it up for the rest of us. You know, what winds up happening is, leaders just are embedded inside of a set of systems and conditions that are much greater than themselves. And they're looking for tools to create meaning and value inside of those common constraints and construct contexts. So we spent several years bringing together all the stakeholder groups in northern Alberta, whether it was government, NGOs, activists, working with the Athabasca tribal council, folks up there, you know, we tried to create a language and an interface for a multi stakeholder cohort that could imagine the future through the shared values and shared interests that everyone had. And, you know, that's that's a tightrope walk, but it's worth working on. There's, you know, something like several trillion dollars worth of resources. But we haven't figured out through science, how to truly extract those resources safely. That doesn't degrade the ecosystems. We're getting better every day. And some of the results become I mean, not that we were responsible for it. But we became a participant in how do industries, how do sectors? How do multiple organisations choose to cooperate on things that rise in their interests beyond themselves. I mean, if you want to take on the epic challenges of the world, you can't do that alone. And one of the things we observed and understood is, you know, all of the energy and oil and resource sector up there, in northern Alberta, they decided to sign this extraordinary agreement at the time that we're working up there, where they said, we can compete on brand, we can compete on talent, we can compete on everything, but we shouldn't compete on our relationship to the planet. And they wound up creating a system where they shared intellectual property for any patent engineering, knowledge, IP, that enabled their systems to better perform on environmental outcomes. So imagine Conoco Phillips and Exxon and sunoco Suncor, imagine these huge, you know, multinational conglomerates agree or agreeing to share hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of value, if it had to do with the issue of the environment. And imagine the infrastructure, the leadership and collaboration, mental mindset to say this is ours, not mine, or this is the environments not ours, right. So it's really interesting to imagine, what are the it flows back to your question, Scott, like how far up do we need to go to ask earlier? It's a really interesting way of working and you know, I owe a great debt to a lot of the evolving leaders that I learned from up there, but is profit, more important And then planet is our competition more important than our cooperation is our Do we have a social licence to operate, we may have a legal licence to operate, we have a social licence to operate. So there's these underpinning concepts that really change the conditions by which leaders and decision making business models thrive. And, you know, to be in a room with at times 50, or 60, people from 25 different organisations, being very, very pragmatic on how to advance the relationship with the environment is not based on the business models on the values that maybe many of the MBA programmes espouse. Yeah, I don't know if that helps, Jean? Yeah well, I mean, the summer time isn't, is our enemy here, because there are so many kinds of very valuable aspects to this. And one of them is you talk about the death of dialogue, being one of the enemies of curiosity, and also, your ability to actually ask the kinds of questions that open people up in that dialogue is amazing. We took we kind of end our conversation, just sharing a little bit of an insight into how do you get that dialogue going, particularly when there's competing interests? And how do you find the questions that are going to do that? Yeah, I mean, I, I owe, I owe a lot a great deal to my upbringing to my my parents and my team, the wonderful people that are surrounding me. And I think that I've learned, you know, my mother was an educator, but also an educator of a kind of set of emotional and social high needs individuals. And so she navigated a kind of patience and care, that was quite a beautiful thing to learn from. And my father was a social worker and a philosopher and was very patient also, but a big thinker. But he was also he is still today, a comedian, and a very funny, joyful man. And I think we've created a culture in our studio that, you know, tries to combine deep care, with the humanity of humour, that really uses social, it's like, the medium and currency is social, like, no matter what all the overthought academic and training and skills and leadership, propaganda there is, like, We're all just trying to make it through the day, right. And I do think that kind of pressing mute on so much of the burden that I think of but much of us feel, I mean, both of you open by talking about feeling a little bit depleted, we have found if you kind of open yourself and work to use triggers of care and humour and the social human relationship, that it has become a way to maybe take on some of the hardest questions, the hardest issues we can face. But it being generative in its energy, we find it very energised, as I'm sure you do, I'm not I'm not comparing them. But I think that we always say the process is the project, like how we go about them, is also embodiment of the values we seek. And so I don't know how to fit more hours in the day, but I think we're constantly trying to fit more humanity into the way we go about it. And that is, that has worked well, for us, we have pierced through the armour of senators and CEOs of the highest order just to be human together, you know.

Scott Allender: 59:02

So thank you for spending some time with us today. I could talk to you all day, but Jean has to go pack a suitcase, apparently, plane. So it's amazing. I really, really appreciate it and folks, do yourself a favour and stop whatever you're doing right now to order your copy of radical curiosity. We've just scratched the surface even with this very in depth conversation. So you will, you will be glad you got the book. So thank you again, Seth. And until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you