376 Leading Through Complexity: Becoming Courageous, Wise, and Steady in an Anxious World with Jennifer Garvey Berger

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Mahan Tavakoli: [00:00:00] Jennifer Garvey Berger, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Jennifer, I absolutely loved your insights when I first read. Changing on the job.

Now you're out with the second edition, new subtitle, how leaders become courageous, wise, and steady in an anxious world. And we do live in an anxious world, but before getting some of your leadership. Perspectives and insights. Jennifer would love to know a little bit more about you. We're about you grew up and how your upbringing has helped contribute to who you've become.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I love this question. . And as we were just saying, my mom lives downstairs, I was born in upstate New York in the US my parents are both incredibly brilliant people who couldn't live with each other, , my [00:01:00] father was a doctoral student when I was born, studying literature and bringing his love of stories into the world.

Both of them from big Irish Catholic families. My mother later got her PhD also hers is in psychology. She was captivated by the way the mind works. And she was a very early executive coach, very early into the field. And so my dad's love of stories and writing my mom's love of psychology. And trying to figure out how to help people live better lives came together in me.

And here we go.

Mahan Tavakoli: That explains a lot about both your storytelling. , your coaching and your purpose and leadership what a beautiful way for you to, , capture some of the best of your dad and your mom. Now in your book, Jennifer, you say in a simpler world.

Perhaps unilateral power held by a [00:02:00] single smart, capable leader could rule the day. In a complex world, it takes a collective sharing of power, creativity, and perspective to become agile and nuanced enough to lead into the uncertain future. My question about that is that makes a lot of sense to me.

However, whether it is in the political world or in the business world, the outlier, billionaire entrepreneurs we celebrate, they run counter to that. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Into every story there are exceptions, and I think it is true that right now we are in a moment where these strong, powerful, often male leaders who are pushing an agenda are successful.

 But often they're successful with a single dream in a single way, and I don't know that model is very helpfully replicated. And I don't know whether that model is going to lead to goodness [00:03:00] or not goodness over time. Because the same kind of, brilliance of a difficult Steve Jobs, can be the brilliance of a maniacal dictator. 

And people do love to follow certainty and stability. 

Mahan Tavakoli: In a world of uncertainty, we are seeking certainty and there are individuals who pretend that they have the answer and they have that certainty and there's a level of comfort for us in that part of what you had written in your original changing on the job. Is about the need for us to be able to deal with greater complexity. Why have you revisited and updated that in your second edition? 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: , I thought there was so much complexity when I wrote this book in the first place. We were at this huge, epic amount of complexity.

And I was just so wrong about [00:04:00] how much more complex things were going to get. And also, I've learned and changed a lot on my job. Somebody was saying to me today Jennifer, I think the thing that stands out most for me is we can really almost watch your development as a person, as a leader, as a thinker.

When we look at these two books next to each other, and I said, Can you imagine if I wrote a book called Changing on the Job and then I put out another edition 12 years later and they were the same? That would be very problematic. So I both know so much more than I knew them, including knowing how little I know, to be completely fair.

And also in the world right now, I think it's really pivotal that we think hard about how are we becoming better able to handle complexity. How are we working the muscles that [00:05:00] let us handle complexity instead of having it wash over us, make us depressed, overwhelmed hate each other. These impulses , are very real and they're in us. And so the question is what are we doing to intentionally evolve ourselves beyond those impulses? 

Mahan Tavakoli: So what can we do to that end, Jennifer, as humans. Our minds didn't necessarily evolve to be able to handle so much complexity. How can leaders develop more of the complexity fitness that you talk about?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: So I think the first thing is if we understand what, the lifting is that gets us more and more fit. Then we can start building. Doing that and engaging in that space. And in a developmental space, the rep, the thing that helps us grow is being able to take something that we [00:06:00] couldn't see before something that we're being without noticing that we are just inside and pull it out and make it happen.

an object of our reflection, something we can look at, turn around, make decisions about. So you asked me about my growing up. You can have some assumptions that are installed by your parents, when you're little, you should never talk about yourself or if you don't win, you're a loser, or whatever these like early assumptions might be.

And they might go so much inside you, you don't even know you hold them. You just operate out of those assumptions. I was talking to a leader today whose assumption was if I take pleasure in my own excellence, I will become arrogant. So now you've got somebody who's excellent. He's very senior leader.

He's doing super well, but he can't look at anything good about him because he doesn't He's [00:07:00] subject to this idea that if he took pleasure in his excellence, bad things would happen. And so the process of growth is to see if we can find what those assumptions are, and look at them, and then make choices about them.

And as we do that little by little. Little by little we grow

Mahan Tavakoli: that takes tremendous introspection, Jennifer, and one of the challenges I'm sure with the CEOs and executives you work with, I see it consistently is that there is such a state of overwhelm where they aren't taking the time or say they have the time to be able to do the kind of introspection that you talk about in pulling on some of those threats. 

 One of the great things about my podcast listeners is that there are people who prioritize their own development. And read books like yours, Jennifer, at the same time, it requires tremendous discipline. 

Now, [00:08:00] one of the things that you talk about, is that shouldn't be about more goals, but about changing how. Leaders hold their goals. What do you mean by that?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah we do live in a world that's fairly goal obsessed and fairly acquisitive, we want more and more stuff. We want more goals. We want more success. We want better titles on our business cards. This set of theories has us ask ourselves, is it that I need more or different goals, or is it that the way I hold my goals needs to change?

One of the questions we can ask ourselves is, where did these goals come from? Did I make them up? Is it something I actually want? So many people I work with, I don't know if it's the same for you, so many people I work with have never had the moment to ask themselves the question, Is this me that cares about this?

Or am I subject to? [00:09:00] something my parents wanted from me, something a professor once told me, something my first boss said, something that I've absorbed from my society in some ways. And it's actually not about what I want. It's not about what's good for the world at all. It's actually just this Like almost a compulsion.

And so the first question we want to ask is, whose goals are they? And how do I know whose goals they are? And then you can start to ask more granular questions. Are these the goals I want to have for now? Do they make sense in my context? But you can begin to interrogate your own goals instead of just, Okay.

It

Mahan Tavakoli: It's interesting, as you're mentioning that, Jennifer, I'm thinking about Peter Thiel and a bunch of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs loved Rene Girard's writing and [00:10:00] thinking about mimetic desire. And then the incorporation of that. In whether it's social media or other aspects of life, where much of our wanting is not our wanting is us wanting what other people want.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: So taking the time, therefore to reflect on that with the goals becomes really important, both in centering ourselves and then being able to lead others as well.  

Do you want your goals to be programmed into you from the outside? Or do you want to be able to pick up the pen in your own life and write your own story?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Who's writing this thing anyway? Is a question I think all of us should be asking, particularly as you say, when there are so many people trying to write our story, they're not trying to write our story because they like us. Want us to succeed. They're trying to write our story because they want us to buy stuff right or they want us to work harder for them, [00:11:00] that makes sense.

They have their wishes, and they're trying to get us to participate in their wishes. Changing on the job is just suggesting, you might want to think about that, and you might want to think about. Where are your wishes and do you have a sense of that for yourself? 

Mahan Tavakoli: , in doing that, you talk about the developmental stages that influence leaders and how they interact with the world 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: yeah. So earlier in our lives, we tend to be focused on our own needs. It's all about us. And some people think of, the sort of image that might pop into your head is Of an early adolescent who wants what they want, and they don't care what the family thinks about it, and they're slamming doors, and In that sort of a space and it turns out that kid is not just difficult, 

that kid can't yet take the perspective of his parents [00:12:00] or her teachers, that right now, I call it self sovereign because right now that person is the king or queen Of a country of one person, right? That's everything. That's everything they can get. And everything they're doing is trying to figure out how can my country succeed? Because of that, , they have often a fairly black and white. Me versus you us versus them. It's my way or the highway kind of way of thinking about the world. And for a long time, we thought this was a pretty adolescent way of being, but it turns out that you can live decades. into your adulthood and still have no capacity to take another person's perspective.

And it also turns out that when you're hungry or sleepy or mad, you might slip into that space anyway, no matter how many perspectives you could take [00:13:00] when you're well fed and well rested and content. In the moment when you're hungry and sleepy and mad, you forgot how to take everybody else's perspective.

. You're not just not doing it, you just don't know how, right? In that moment their perspectives don't exist. They've been wiped off the map. That's the self sovereign mind. Then over time, that mind, that being on an island of one is just too small to handle the complexities of the world.

And so over time you look around for buddies, right? Who's going to help me? Who's going to guide me? Who are my people? And what happens there is. We don't just know that they have another perspective, we actually take that perspective into our bodies, into our minds, into our own sense making. We breathe it in and it might be your profession, it might be a religious community, it might be your family, it might be it might be your place of work, right?

You can get [00:14:00] socialized into any of these contexts and as you're socialized into these contexts, you become the we. You become, you know what's good because they told you what was good, you know what success is because they told you what success is, you know whether you're doing a good job because they tell you whether you're doing a good job, and this we call the socialized mind and it's actually, A majestic human achievement, because it means that instead of me fighting for my little country of one, I am an us.

I will put down the things that are most important to me for what's most important to us. And probably most of human achievement has come through the greatness of our capacity to do that. But in a really complex world, in a really complex world, as we were saying, It's not just the village elder, [00:15:00] who you follow and who's looking out for you because the village elder is on your side.

It's Instagram, right? It's TikTok. It's, it ha it's whoever is running the company you work for, right? In that moment, those people may not have your best interest at heart and they may not be thinking about you much at all. And you might get really confused about what is it that I need to be focusing on in this moment.

How do I know, how do I know my boss tells me one thing, my religious community tells me a different thing, my, my culture tells me a different thing. I'm totally confused. Under those conditions, you pick up the pen and you self author, you write your own story. And we call that self authored because now you decide what your values are, you decide what your North Star is, you decide whether you're successful or not.

You take in information, you hold other people's perspectives, you have all of those capacities, but [00:16:00] they don't drive your car. You drive your car, and they're passengers in your car. And then at some point for some people, not that many people actually like less than 10%. At some point for some people, they start to think.

 I don't really do this on my own. I don't really self author this because the world changes me. I am changing all the time. And I'm changed because I'm in your company. I'm changed because of this context. I'm actually all these. things at the same time. And we call that the self transforming mind, because there you really are able to surf complexity by continually changing and evolving yourself, which becomes a natural part of your everyday world. 

Mahan Tavakoli: I [00:17:00] love the visual way you described how this is not necessarily a stairstep of moving one to another. We hold all at the same time. Now in doing that, you talk about self transforming minds and the fact that They're able to embrace paradoxes, which become really important in a more complex world.

 What is being able to embrace paradoxes look like? 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: It takes it as paradoxes not being a problem, not being fixable, solvable, the paradox is being a part of what it means to be alive right now, probably what it's always meant to be alive, but particularly in this moment, paradox is what we've got.

That is the core shaping mechanism of a lot of our experiences. And able [00:18:00] to deal with it and negotiate those paradoxes without having the tension pull us apart or have us polarize out in the world is one of the gifts of that mind.

Mahan Tavakoli: One of the challenges that I find is many of the CEOs and leaders I have conversations with is that they understand some of this requirement. Their perception is that their followers, people in the organization require for them to be more definitive, more certain.

So How do you recommend for leaders to balance that we're on one side, they recognize it's a complex world. There are lots of paradoxes. There aren't easy answers, but they say, but my team, my board, people around me are looking for me to be certain and definitive. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: This is one of the great Paradoxes of leadership in this moment, you've just named it.

And so how do we play [00:19:00] with that paradox is the question, one of the ways we play with that paradox is by knowing it exists and. Talking about it because if you don't talk about a paradox, then you can't help other people understand it. So talking the leaders I know who are great at this talk about how much they know people want certainty.

And they wish that they could deliver that certainty to them. One of the, one of the paradoxes of leadership is people tend to think that if you're not talking about something, it's because you know the answer and you're withholding it. As opposed to just saying, I just don't know. I just don't know. It's not knowable in this moment. No one knows. No one could possibly know. And so helping people giving them some handholds and saying these things are knowable, and I'm going to tell you about them. [00:20:00] These things are found out, find outable, and we're going to find out about them.

These things we're going to have to live our way into, and that can be uncomfortable. But we're going to be uncomfortable, we're going to help each other in that space. So I think leaders are really excellent leaders who handle complexity well, are able to set a context that their followers understand.

Mahan Tavakoli: Their followers understand that. And back to the nervous system, I think really good leaders in a complex time, help their followers settle, help them feel safe, help them feel seen, help them feel like they belong, help their nervous system settle. We can handle so much more complexity with settled nervous systems than we can when we're anxious and afraid. 

 As people are hearing this, the leaders that keep telling me, you know what people expect this certainty from me, they expect me to be decisive, but I know we live in an ambiguous world.

Mahan Tavakoli: I [00:21:00] don't have certainty about what's going to happen. What can they do to be able to balance this with their team? In addition to getting them to settle and feel more comfort.. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: So in a complex world, what are we guided by? We're guided by our principles, our values our goals, our destinations, right? The thing that we're all working towards. We, leaders can help others orient to those, we call them that we, they help us find our way and leaders can help people hold onto those very things that are so orienting to us in a disorienting time.

We have to and I think it's, I think it's a tricky thing to do, but I think it's a tricky thing that. Absolutely possible. And not just possible, so useful for people to get used to this idea of, oh, my values orient me now, right? Oh, [00:22:00] my hope for a better world orients me now. My love for my children and my grandchildren, even if they're not born yet, my love for these future generations, that orients me now.

Leaders can get us in touch. That's what leadership really is putting us in touch with the biggest part of ourselves so that we can work together for some shared goals. Those stay true, no matter how much the wind blows, that stays true for us.

Mahan Tavakoli: In order to do that, you also talk quite a bit about vulnerability and what I wonder and often hear from leaders is what is productive vulnerability in a leadership environment as opposed to what can potentially be Harmful oversharing.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: , this is another leadership paradox here. You're hitting on all of them, so I think that this is an important question. The kind of span I see of people getting this [00:23:00] one into unhelpful territory is , that people can either go into this kind of oversharing, which makes other people feel uncomfortable.

Or they can have a kind of practiced vulnerability story that, like I trot out this story about my grandfather in the snow. And I know that exactly when people are going to cry, because I've said this story 10, 000 times, it's fake vulnerability story.

I think the thing that we're actually going for is can we be humans together? That's not for me to be oversharing and tell you all the things that are troubling me, but it's also not for me to be defended and protected in some way from you, to be constantly trying to polish my image in front of you.

It's really, can we have the capacity to be ourselves with one another? And this means, as you say, as you said earlier, this means Making the time to understand who are we [00:24:00] in fact, who are we to be sharing ourselves with other people. I think that this is the thing we're trying to go for it not to be vulnerable for the sake of being vulnerable, but to be humans together who are less defended from the possibility that we might actually have a genuine relationship.  

Mahan Tavakoli:  These paradoxes and the way you talk about them, Jennifer, is one of the reasons I love your work it's a nuanced perspective as opposed to simplistic responses and simplistic answers. And part of what I hear from you, And part of what I hear from you, and I've learned from you is that's not the way to approach it in a more complex world. It requires digging a lot deeper. It requires reflection, and there are lots of paradoxes and lots of nuances. No simplistic answers.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: This is the reality of our time, I think. If we cannot grow ourselves into that space, we cannot tackle the [00:25:00] challenges we face. We don't stand a chance that the issues facing humanity are bigger, 

then humans have ever faced before ever. Simplistic is really not going to do it. Simplistic is going to put us at war with each other while the planet heats and our resources dwindle. This is a dystopian future. I don't want a dystopian future for my kids and my grandkids once, should there ever be grandkids, somewhere down the line, 

. I don't want that for anybody's grandkids. I want Us to be able to intentionally grow ourselves to be bigger than the challenges we face and I know as a developmentalist, I know we have that in us. I know we have it in us. I know that everybody listening can grow their way into being much more capable [00:26:00] of having nuanced, nuanced, nuanced.

Thoughtful, creative, connected responses to the challenges that we face. And so I am as you can probably hear, rather passionate about helping people live into that possibility. 

That's a beautiful and hopeful perspective and couldn't agree with you more, Jennifer. Now, one of the things that you talk about is a recurring theme in your work is the role that feedback can play as a growth tool.  

I was once suggesting that I teach feedback on a leadership program with these very senior leaders and somebody said, Oh, feedback is such a basic skill. And I said, it's a basic skill, like breathing is a basic skill, right? If you don't do it well, everything falls apart. And by and large, just like breathing, we could all use some lessons on breathing too, by [00:27:00] the way.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Because our breath controls our nervous systems to a great extent. By and large, we are. pretty terrible at feedback. And we're terrible, I think, for two reasons. We don't want to give it because when we give feedback, we risk breaking relationships. We risk defensiveness, conflict, difficulty. We don't like that.

And it's not just us that doesn't like it. , we have a whole embodied system that is designed for that to be unpleasant, really or has evolved for it to be unpleasant. And we don't actually want to hear things from other people, right? We don't actually want them to tell us things that unsettle us and make us feel uncomfortable or like we have to change.

And so we all have little walls around us from receiving feedback and little walls around us from giving feedback and it. It's no wonder this is actually very hard to do because [00:28:00] you have to ignore a lot of inner wiring. You have to grow yourself beyond it. So it's way more than just skills. It's mindsets, it's assumptions, it's ability to settle your own nervous system, and it's practice,

Mahan Tavakoli: as you said, it's like breathing and it's interesting. You mentioned that because I love podcasts and I was just listening to a podcast with Dr. Chatterjee, and I learned a new thing about breathing five, four, three three breathing in four, holding the breath and five breathing out. And that's something that I tried and actually it's powerful.

, Breathing is essential, but we can learn to do that better with feedback. As you say, Jennifer, I see it both in soliciting it effectively and in giving it effectively at all levels of organizations, leaders can do a much better job [00:29:00] in helping them and those around them grow. Now you've spent. A lot of your time thinking about and working in adult and leadership development.

We've been going through a transformation. I love a lot of the work Azim Azhar has done on exponential technologies, and he says AI is one of them. Wait until biotech and renewable energy, 3D printing, some of those things hit our world. But generative AI and AI has been transformative. So I would love your thoughts with respect to how you believe that will impact leadership, And adult development as a result of these changes that we're going through.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah I believe anybody who tells you they know how AI is going to change our world is just making stuff up, we're just all guessing because nobody even [00:30:00] the people who have spent their entire lifetimes working in this field, nobody saw coming what happened just to get us to today, right?

They would not have believed that today would be possible. We have no idea what next month, next year, next decade will be like. But I think that there are a few things that we could guess at, the computers are going to do a lot of our thinking stuff for us, they're going to be able to solve complicated, tricky, Challenges. They're going to be able to hold more in their computing systems than the smartest people we have ever known in our lives. They are going to outsmart us effortlessly. And so for many years, workplaces have been [00:31:00] places where people have been trying to be like computers, 

leave your emotions at home. It doesn't matter what happened to you on the way to work. This is an office. We're supposed to be professional, pull up your socks, sweetheart. And let's just think through these challenges in an unemotional way. The computers, they took all that, so they are, they're going to do all that stuff for us.

So what's ours to do? And I think what's ours to do is to be better and better versions of humans. As the computers are getting to be better and better versions of machines, let's see if we can figure out how to be better and better versions of humans. What do we do that I don't think computers are up for?

We emote. We fantasize about the future. We connect with one another and create create [00:32:00] communities that are bigger than any one of us. We care, we love, we grieve we make poetry, music, dance, right? We create, I think these are the things that we're going to be called on to do. And so leaders who are used to the call for being a little bit robotic, a little bit like a a smart thinking machine.

Who has a body to carry its head around from meeting to meeting those leaders are not going to be so effective anymore because the machines can do that. The machines don't have bodies. They have to carry on from meeting to meetings. They're done. The thing that's left for us to do is to connect better, create better, dream better.. It's 

Mahan Tavakoli: a beautiful challenge for all of us, Jennifer, in an age where, as you said, [00:33:00] Robots, pretty soon robots with the physiology of a robot, but at this point, the LLMs can do much of what was once thought as work . It's an opportunity for us to become more human, both as individuals and as leaders.

Now, you talk about the tension between clear direction and a certain level of outcome orientation, which has been part of much of leadership and much of how organizations operate, and the comfort with ambiguity, which Is essential in complex systems.

Would love to hear your thoughts on how we can make that transition because much of. Management thinking, leadership development, organizational structures have been focused on some of [00:34:00] that outcome orientation, 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: which is totally understandable, right? It totally makes sense that I'm your boss and I am responsible for doing these things.

So I get you to be responsible for doing those things so that I can be responsible for my thing. So I can get my bonus and make my boss happy, right? It makes total sense that we've thought of organizations as much as possible as machines, right? Where we can keep out too much complexity, too much interdependency, too much messiness.

It's so messy to be human, so messy. And I think that people are going to find we're already finding, and there's a lot of research about this, That as you set these kind of narrow goals or these narrow destinations you miss a lot. You miss a lot of what's possible. You miss a lot of what's actually game changing and I [00:35:00] think there's going to be a whole set of organizations who need to be focusing continually on game changing reinvention because the world is changing so fast.

This idea of reinvention is really important. And you can't have reinvention as a goal, right? There's no way to do that. Reinvention is an emergent property of a creative system. And so what we need is a creative system and leaders need to be able to lead creative systems to create the conditions for creativity to emerge from their system.

And as leaders think of themselves in ways that humans have thought of themselves for years as gardeners, as tenders, as child rarer, rearers, like all of these endeavors are about creating something that we don't know quite what it is yet, but we know how to pay attention to today in the hopes that a [00:36:00] better tomorrow arises.

This is what we have to do now. This is what leadership is.

Mahan Tavakoli: And in order to be able to do that, whether it is by unlocking the leadership mind traps or the experimentation that you talk a lot about, Jennifer, you've laid out how leaders can develop that. In this anxious world. So in order for the audience to find out more about your book, Jennifer, follow Your brilliant work, as I have done for a dozen plus years and learn from you, where would you ask the audience to go to?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I'm very lucky to lead a firm called cultivating leadership. You can see this idea of tending is important to me. I have. Spectacular colleagues were constantly writing, growing, changing [00:37:00] ourselves and trying to help leaders do the work that they need to do. I have the best LinkedIn community, I have to say.

And so join us on LinkedIn. We think together, we laugh together, we create together. , I have devoted basically my entire working life to helping people live into their possibilities. And I am here to tell you they're wonderful.

Mahan Tavakoli: And one of the things I love you mentioned this at the beginning as well, Jennifer, is that You have evolved your own thinking and you have developed and you have served as the kind of example that you tell other leaders they should follow.

So I really appreciate that. And I want to end with a quote. From your book that I absolutely love  the point isn't to be the hero and solve things. The point of the leader in a complex world is [00:38:00] to enable and unleash as many heroes and as many solutions as possible.

Thank you, Jennifer Garvey Berger for enabling more of us. To enable more people to unleash as many solutions and their potential as possible. Thank you so much, Jennifer Garvey Berger. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Thank you so much for having me. This has been a delightful conversation.