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Hey look! I had an AMAZING interview with Jason Cavness!
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 A recent article in Forbes Magazine quoted Amazon's CEO Andy Jaffey as saying, "The day a leader stops learning, he cautions, is the day they begin to lose relevance—and with it, their capacity to drive future growth."
Jassy also champions intellectual humility as a defining trait of strong leadership. Being right, he says, isn’t about asserting dominance. It’s about discernment, active listening, and the willingness to rethink. “The best leaders want to hear others’ views. They don’t wilt or bristle when challenged; they’re intrigued.” This takes a level of learning to listen. Luckily, there is a book on Amazon that can help: a.co/d/bgQ2FzQ  The World Economic Forum has listed the top 5 skills workers need by 2025:
- Analytical thinking - Active learning - Complex problem-solving - Critical thinking - Creativity & initiative There’s a powerful skill behind them all: the ability to listen. Listening builds trust. It fuels innovation. It helps us lead with clarity and empathy. In a world that’s changing fast, communication isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s the foundation of everything. 🧠 Want to future-proof your skills? Start by listening with intention. https://www.improvmindset.com/listening.html. Active listening is more than just hearing words—it’s understanding customers’ needs and expectations.
Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, went undercover as a driver. His experience of lsitening to customers led to cultural shifts and better support systems through listening and genuine empathy. Here's how: 📢 Communication: Championing 'Silence Breakers' Encouraged speaking up about concerns, ditching the old "bro culture". No more sweeping issues under the rug, but encouraging open conversations and healthy conflict, leading to 🤝 Relationships (Psychological Safety): an environment where trust trumps fear, fostering genuine collaboration across teams. 🎯 Alignment (Culture and Purpose): establishing a Corporate University get all the employees on the same wavelength when it comes to mission, culture, and values - but making this a permanent and iterative part of the organisation, not just a tick box 'event'. 💪 Execution: From "Move Fast and Break Things" to "Do the Right Thing" Shifted focus from growth at all costs to responsible, purpose-driven execution. 🚀 Capacity: Empowering everyone to own the culture. Embedding silence breakers through the company, and creating a long standing learning culture for everyone recognising that culture isn't just top-down – it's everyone's responsibility to build and maintain. The result? Uber are finally returning a profit - and will have reduced their staff churn, sickness rates, have stronger resilience and will be spending less on crisis-management-PR.. Listening is the key to all of this. It is your superpower. It's time to hone it. #ListenWithoutAgenda #ImprovMindset  As AI and automation reshape the workplace, empathy and human connection are more critical than ever.
AI can process data, but it can’t pick up the subtleties and nuances of what is really happening. People are like icebergs: What we see and hear are the 10% above the water. The 90% below the water is the part we have to listen for. Leadership training must prioritise deep listening skills. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSG2F9WC  It's not just about HOW you listen. It's about how you RESPOND.
A 2020 Qualtrics study found that 92% of employees believe it’s important that their company listens to feedback—but just 7% said their company then acts on feedback well. However, engagement among workers whose companies acted on feedback more than doubled. If you want to learn more about effective lsitening and how it can improve your employee engagement: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSG2F9WC  There's a Starbucks on I-5 headed south out of Seattle, near Dupont. It's our go-to spot for a quick coffee on road trips. Our dog can sense it too - as soon as we're within ten miles of Dupont, he starts shaking and drooling in anticipation of his pup cup. It's uncanny how he knows we're close to Dupont, almost like a sixth sense.
But the truth is, it's just a learned response from repeated patterns. Despite being a rescue dog initially scared of car rides, he now associates them with the joy of a pup cup. It serves as a reminder to pay attention to the habits we've formed and how they impact us, whether positively or negatively. Developing new habits is simply a matter of consistent practice. Perhaps the positive reinforcement of a pup cup can be the key to solidifying a new routine.  Many years ago I had a chance to tour Newgrange in Ireland.
If you don't know about it, Newgrange, is a 5,200 year old passage tomb located in the Boyne Valley. Above the entrance to the passage there is an opening which allows sunlight to penetrate the chamber for 17 minutes at 9am on only ONE day of the year, Dec 21st, the winter solstice. The accuracy this time-telling device is remarkable when you considers that it was built 500 years before the Great Pyramids and more than 1,000 years before Stonehenge. For me - it is always a reminder of new beginnings. The year is over, and starting again. Like New Year's day. Fresh beginnings. From Dec 21st on, the days get longer. The sunshine lasts a little more (which is Seattle is a necessary thing...) It's also a great reminder of letting go of past mistakes. That workout program didn't stick last year? Try a new one! That business venture failed? What's next? It's all cyclical - and it all starts over again. My friend Armaund in DC has a Solstice party every year where people can write notes about things from the past year, they put it in a ball, light it on fire and roll it down a hill. (it's more like a ramp in his backyard...) The idea is still sound. It's time to release those things and start over again. So what will you light on fire today? Happy Solstice.  I grew up looking at this sign often and I never realized how funny it is. It was just some thing that was always there. Street Rd. Nothing special about it, nothing funny about it, it was just the name of the road. This is a Road named Street. Street Road.
It wasn’t until I took my wife to visit the area where I grew up and she looked at it and said “Street Road. That’s funny“. Suddenly, I saw the name in a new light. Why would you name a road Street Road? Sometimes you overlook things that are right in front of you, because they blend into the everyday surroundings. This is why it never seemed funny to me that near where I grew up we have a road named Street Road. (The word road is beginning to look like not a real word.) I always told new employees in my company that I really valued their input and questions when they started working. They were the only people who didn’t have the rose-colored glasses on, so they could see things that I could no longer see - for me, it was all normal. I had to rely on the newcomers to let me see things in front of me that maybe needed addressing, or changing. But it had become so familiar to me, that my eyes just glazed over when I saw it. There was an exercise I did in graduate school to help with noticing things as they are. It involves touching objects — calling them by their name, then moving to the other side of the room and touching a different object, then calling it by its name. As in, I would touch a chair and say “chair“. Then cross the room and touch a backpack and say “backpack.“ The second step is starting to move faster — touching objects and calling them by the names of things they are not. Example: I would touch the chair and say “orange juice.“ And then cross the room and touch the backpack and say “vacuum cleaner.“ The goal of the exercise was to disconnect the defined name of an object from the object itself, so that you stopped ignoring something because it had a specific name (and therefore a finite and specific value) and started focusing on objects for all the value they had. When you looked at the chair, you didn’t see all of the detail, or dirt, or scratches. You just acknowledge the “chair” and then moved on. This exercise helped me to focus on the specifics and the details of objects by disconnecting the object from its predetermined, and agreed upon, name. In business, we can potentially get ourselves in trouble if we use the same solution for every problem. We ignore the details in front of us, keep the status quo, because change is scary and difficult. But what if we challenged ourselves to see new solutions? New options for situations we have looked at every single day? Well then, the possibilities are endless. We can look for our own personal Street Road. (Still funny.)  Whether we like it or not, there are a lot of things happening in our world right now that we cannot control (or even fully understand). The one thing we can control is how we react to what is going on.
A practice I do at each of my workshops is a quick check-in: How are people feeling? This is sometimes done as a virtual exercise or as an in-person discussion. Everyone gets a chance to be honest about how they are feeling and share it with the group. It allows us to be vulnerable and open with each other. It also allows us to be honest with ourselves. How are we feeling? What is keeping us from being present in the room, available, listening and focusing on how to support the group? Once we can identify these things, we can begin to accept those distractions and allow them to exist. We can accept and build on (yes, and…) what is happening to us in a positive way. I know I am feeling excited, a little overwhelmed and slightly anxious about the new year. As my schedule is filling up, and I am planning activities, I start to feel anxious about how I will be able to manage it all! Going forward, my question to you is: How are you feeling? Let’s embrace the messiness of life and start to figure out how to take what we have (whatever it is) and make something amazing. Happy New Year. I can’t wait to see what we can do together. |
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April 2025
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Mission: To create interpersonal environments where humans learn to be fully present in their possibilities, communicate in more authentic ways, and experience their limitless opportunities for innovation.
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HoursM-F: 7am - 9pm
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