388 Mastering Uncertainty: Lessons from Former Navy SEAL Commander Rich Diviney on Leading Yourself and Your Team When Nothing Goes as Planned

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Mahan Tavakoli: . [00:00:00] Rich Dini, welcome back to Partnering Leadership. I am absolutely thrilled to have you back 

Rich Diviney: thanks for having me back. It's good to see you again, my friends, so thank you.

Mahan Tavakoli: I can't believe it's been three years. Rich episode 1 24. I'm almost coming up to episode 400 now. Wow. Attributes as drivers of optimal human performance. Believe it or not, rich, it's still one of my top recommended books, in part because so many of my clients and organizations I interact with.

Don't understand the value of attributes and still prioritize experience, skills, competencies, yeah. Over those attributes. So I would love to get your thoughts a little bit about that before we transition to your newest book, Master of Uncertainty. How have you seen attributes. Gain traction, both as a concept and a book.

And I know you're doing a [00:01:00] lot of training around that for organizations as well. 

Rich Diviney: Yes, we have. We have. But we've been building the, the attributes We've been building the attributes incorporated around this concept of going in with teams and organizations and helping them understand a, the concept of attributes, but b more specifically where their attributes lie.

And so we actually it since we talked last, we developed a. Full 41 attributes assessment. So it's the list has increased from 25 to 41. And we have a full assessment that we can go in and individuals can take and teams can start to understand a, how they individually show up and then how those attributes start to je gel and mesh as a team.

What's been really great for us is that is that wherever we go around the country, around the globe. We've been to almost every continent with this stuff. It's, what we're finding is it's very ubiquitous. The ideas, the concepts are really very human. And people they listen to it and they hear and they say, no, this makes total sense.

This is in fact what we have wanted to judge performance by. We've just never been able to put words around [00:02:00] it or a system around being able to do that. So it's continuing to resonate and we're quite happy with it. And I'm really. For me, it's really thrilling because as, and I know we'll get into the new book, attributes is a part of mastering uncertainty.

And and so being able to have built that attributes piece, which is a fairly big piece prior to releasing this book, was really both lucky and advantageous for us. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Before talking about Masters of Uncertainty. Rich, I. It is the Navy SEAL way to turn stress into success for you and your team. One of the challenges that I run into and questions I get from podcast audience or sometimes CEOs and executives, they say I understand.

I totally respect and love the military, Navy Seals being the best of the best. You spent over 20 years. Including as a leader in the SEAL team, six more than 13 overseas deployments, 11 to Iraq and Afghanistan. So lots of [00:03:00] kudos and admiration, but they say, wait a minute. I run a team or an organization of volunteers who might show up one day or not show up the next day, or they get a better salary offer somewhere else.

They leave. They don't wanna come into work when I say return back to office. So how does the Navy Seals experience, in your view, translate and transfer to organizational leadership? 

Rich Diviney: And the answer I think is actually quite simple and that is I will say intensity of environment. And what I've found is that we are able to learn lessons and develop these.

If you're paying attention, you can learn some lessons and develop some techniques and tools quite rapidly if you are placed into very intense environments where the learning is quite rapid and I think the experience in the SEAL teams all. And again, when we talk about teaming iss human, it has nothing to do with just seals or whatever teamings human [00:04:00] but all the the credibility that comes with having been an Navy seal really should stem around the fact that we were able to, and I was able to understand and learn this stuff and develop it from.

From some of the most intense environments out there. The good news is the lessons and the tools and the learnings are again, ubiquitous. They're translatable across context. So whatever you're, whatever team you're in these tools, techniques you are, they translate very quite beautifully.

You don't have to be in a SEAL team. And in fact many of these things are actually just quite human. In other words, this is stuff that we do. Without thinking about it, we just, what I always been interested in doing is articulating that which we do without thinking, because if you can do that, then you can begin to practice it and repeat it and get better at it.

And find yourself in a position where some stuff that you were just doing without thinking once in a while, you can actually deliberately do and literally become masters of it. So that's, I think the biggest reason. 

Mahan Tavakoli: A couple of thoughts on my [00:05:00] end, rich.

First of all, from my understanding, seals do a fantastic job of studying human physiology and psychology, and many of those lessons, as you mentioned, transfer to organizations and you have been doing that for the past decade or so anyway. Now, while you were at the seals, you also helped create the seals Mind Gym, and I wonder what that training focused on and how that helped prepare seals for uncertainty.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, so the mind gym was simply a project where we felt like the next level of performance for us was not going to be lifting more weight in the gym or running the mile faster. In other words, the physicality was there. But we all know and any seal who's been, any seal, just because we've been through the training, knows that.

Physicality all starts in the brain. And [00:06:00] so if we could develop a better working relationship with our brain and our physiology, that could actually enhance performance in ways that we hadn't maybe yet experienced or even in some cases, just define neurologically and physiologically what we do that allows us to succeed.

And so that, that was, it was really an endeavor to start looking at tools and technologies that were. Really burgeoning at that time. There, some of them are quite common now. But experimenting with some of these tools and technologies that allowed the operators to begin developing a better working relationship with their brain and their physiology.

And to understand that at a level that now you could, again, like once you understand it and you can talk about it, you can now begin to train to it and manipulate it and and and do it more deliberately and on, more on demand. And so that was the project. I, I don't know where the project.

Has gone. It was, we were experimenting with a bunch of stuff throwing stuff against the wall and seeing if it worked. When you're in the military, you're typically in charge of something for, at most two years before you have to move on. And it's really up to the next person's enthusiasm as [00:07:00] to whether or not certain projects will continue.

So I'm not sure where it stands, but but rest assured, the seals, the current day seals are. Are much smarter and stronger and faster. And part of the reason is because the mind movement has actually been such a driving force over the last decade. Plus we've just, we're just, all of us are just more comfortable and more knowledgeable about our brains and what our brains do.

And when it comes to our own performance. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So as we do that, rich , in thinking about uncertainty and we're living in a world that for a whole host of reasons, people talk about greater and greater uncertainty. Yeah. I'm a big believer in the impact exponential technologies. I a great conversation few years back with Azi Mahar who wasn't talking only about AI's impact, that now we are starting to see.

But biotech, renewable energy, a lot of things that will change the world around us really fast. Yeah. . So when you think about mastering [00:08:00] uncertainty, is it something that we can.

Prepare for 

Rich Diviney: yeah. It's a great question. And then the idea is mastering uncertainty , is in essence the ability to not be paralyzed when these events or environments strike us, whether they be un unplanned and unannounced or.

Whether they be deliberate we deliberately stepped into uncertainty just because of something we're working on. And I think , one of the keys in this whole endeavor is to, in fact keep our conscious mind and our frontal lobe or decision making brain engaged. So that we don't panic or we don't procrastinate to, oftentimes what happens is when we drop into, or we're dropped into uncertain challenges, stress, and we hit that autonomic arousal that is either giving us amygdala hijack or autonomic overload.

Our limb our frontal lobe is starting to take a backseat or has taken a full backseat to our limbic brain, our lizard brain. And so we are acting without thinking IE panicking or procrastinating. While that's very handy for things like getting out of the way of a moving train or [00:09:00] running from a bear or pulling your hand off a hot stove, it doesn't come in very handy for 99% of the other things that happen where we actually need to.

Make decisions and consciously think through our environments. And so part of the part of the process of mastering uncertainty and the mastering uncertainty method is what are those things we have to recognize and do so that we can keep that frontal lobe engaged and begin to step more effectively through these environments, whether deliberately or whether it just falls upon us.

Mahan Tavakoli: So is that something we can train ourselves on? 

Rich Diviney: It absolutely is. Once you know the techniques and know what the neurology is, you can absolutely train. You can. And by training what happens is you get better at those times when things just happen and you, they're unanticipated.

But more importantly, if you get really good at it, you begin to deliberately seek uncertainty. And we all know that growth happens outside of our comfort zone. And so , to grow as humans, we must. Deliberately step [00:10:00] into our discomfort, step into uncertainty and grow. And so this gives you the tools and the confidence to do that.

Mahan Tavakoli: . I have to tell you, rich, I believe that I say that, but it is really hard to do. Yes. It's really hard to do. Now, one of the things I see with a lot of leaders I interact with, it's the desire to plan and now access even more data to try to minimize uncertainty. 

Rich Diviney: Yeah. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So where does planning all of that play a role in being able to handle uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: So yeah, to be able to do this does not preclude , the necessity for planning. Planning is always good, but what we have to understand about planning is we can't plan for everything. It is always recommended. Even as seals, we would go on a mission and usually our missions would be broken into five.

We'd break it into five different phases, part. Phase one might be we're infiltrating an environment. Phase two might be we're inserting into a target area. Phase three might be actions on the target and then exfiltration extraction. [00:11:00] But every phase we would look at and we'd say, okay, what are the one, two, or three things that could go wrong?

During this phase, and we come up with plans for those contingencies, contingency plans, but we wouldn't over plan because we would know that you can anticipate everything and you can actually, in effect, experience paralysis through analysis if you try to plan everything. So plan those things that are more common.

And what you'll do is you'll mitigate some of the uncertainty, because if that happens, you know exactly what to do. But also train and understand that and have the confidence that if something happens that you didn't plan for, I'll figure it out along the way. I'll make it happen. And so that's the balance.

I can't, I could never dictate to anybody what's that specific balance for whatever they're doing would be in terms of how much planning, how much just, we're just we'll figure out on the way, but typically the military was like that 80 20 rule. You're never gonna get.

A hundred percent of the intelligence. So if you get 80, then that's pretty good. But honestly, there are some missions where we had 50%, or [00:12:00] 40%. It really depended on the urgency and the importance of the mission. So that's a risk assessment that every, everybody has to do. But there has to be a balance, and you can't paralyze yourself with planning because you won't go anywhere.

You won't get anywhere, and , when uncertainty hits you, it's gonna be something you didn't expect anyway, 

Mahan Tavakoli: it is becoming a lot harder. Again, there is a ton of data. There is value to the planning, but it is becoming much harder to make predictions based on that.

Therefore, that ability to deal with uncertainty becomes more important. Now you say that can be developed, and on the other hand you also say that traditional training methods focus too much on skills development that don't. Transfer well under stressful conditions. So how can executives view then, their own development or their team's development in order to be able to handle uncertainty better?

Rich Diviney: The simple answer is inflict uncertainty into the process. The typical limitation of [00:13:00] training. Especially skills is that you are practicing a rote task. Do this and this happens, do this and this happens, which is great. We have to do that with certain things. And I would also submit that there are certain skills that you want to actually train in in such a way that you actually master it so you don't have to think about it.

So in the SEAL case, like we were trained with our weapons so that we didn't have to think about. How we're drawing our weapon and aiming and hitting a target. We did that. We did it so much. We trained to a level of proficiency that we had unconscious competence in that skill, which eliminated our need to even think about it when we're actually in uncertainty, which is great.

'cause now you're opening up your brain even more so there's nothing wrong with training. But just know that training for skill is going to develop those types of tasks effectively. It's only however, when you begin to throw uncertainty into training environments. You begin to actually train in uncertainty.

And so all the time in the SEAL teams, we would be in a training evolution and the trainers if I was [00:14:00] being trained or if I was the trainer we would throw a contingency, something that they didn't expect into the environment, see and see how they handle it. And sometimes they would get it completely wrong.

But that nec that wasn't necessarily the point. The point was are they working through the processes of how they effectively deal with. Uncertainty when it actually hits. And and focusing on the right things and moving, doing the right movements. So there is a balance. I, I would never again detract against skills training or skills-based training.

I think it's important but a lot of times we over index on that and we think we're okay. But that doesn't check the uncertainty box. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So you do a lot of work with organizations, rich, both talks, training, . 

 How do you train within an organization to get the executives to become more comfortable with dealing with that uncertainty? 

Rich Diviney: One of the things we do is we try to keep it subjective to that organization.

So that's the first thing., it'd be very easy for me to. For me to throw Navy seal level uncertainty into an environment, but that [00:15:00] would not be contextual or meaningful for the group. So what we'll do is we'll work with a group to figure out what lives inside their environment and then begin to figure out ways to drop uncertainty.

It doesn't have to be Machiavellian though. You can throw people in uncomfortable situations and have them trained this, you can tell someone who is really afraid of public speaking to give a presentation. That is an uncertain environment for that human being, and that person is going to have to train and figure out and use the techniques to move through that environment.

So it does, so it can be fairly simple. It doesn't have to be extreme. And it, but it should be contextual to, to a degree. But really what the other thing we do is we make sure people know, and I'll just say this for the whole, for all of the view all of the listeners, is that every single one of us as human beings has uncertainty happened to us.

All we have to do is pay attention and pay attention to what we're doing in those environments. 'cause that's training, that is literal training. So if you're going to work one day and there's a car accident, you have to make this meeting. And in a car accident there's traffic, you've just been thrown into [00:16:00] an uncertain environment, now you can start using these techniques to start training.

Or at least using this techniques to get through that environment. So good thing about these techniques is you can use them, you can train to them, but you can also just start to apply them. To myriad events in your life that are in fact uncertain whether to a high degree or to a small degree, and just see how they're in fact working.

Make conscious notes as to what you're doing and what's effective, what's not effective. And , that is training. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So a level of self-reflection and self-assessment is important. In that case. How do you approach it yourself, rich? And how do you recommend for people to approach it?

Is it. Like a journaling practice, a meditation practice where you're reflecting on these things? How do you approach it? 

Rich Diviney: It certainly depends on the individual. Writing things down helps me in terms of a personal debrief. But sometimes I don't need to, sometimes I can just think through it and just walk through steps, I'm.

On a run or something. I just have that time to process it. It certainly does, in every case, require a [00:17:00] reflection back on the events so you can reflect back and say, okay, what did I do? What were those things? If, sometimes you can actually reflect in the event. You can see, you can, if you're cognizant enough, you can actually.

You can debrief yourself as you're moving through it. But that aside, it takes an ability to, once the event's over take some time, look back and say, okay, how did I do? And be really honest with yourself. It, you're gonna have to inject some humility here because, 'cause you have to be honest with yourself.

And I would say humility in the sense that it's not biased towards negative and it's not biased towards. Positive or pessimistic, optimistic. In other words, we can sometimes be overly hard on ourselves and we can sometimes be overly soft on ourselves. So try to take an objective view of your own performance and say, okay, how did I do?

What are the things that seem to work? What are the things that didn't work and what can I do next time? But ultimately the idea would be once you understand these techniques as soon as uncertainty hits. Your job is to immediately manage your autonomic arousal so you can begin to understand your [00:18:00] environment using these techniques.

If you do that simple thing every single time, just work to do that. You will be, you will begin to develop mastery. This is what happens with Navy seals. Now all of us who go to SEAL training have to have a level of this to begin with, just to make it through SEAL training. But what happens is it gets hyper developed over time.

And so we are individuals who. Who we just, we don't even think about it. It just happens. And a funny story about this as an example. I live here in Virginia Beach and my, and we've been in the same house for 20 plus years. Across the street from me, there's a Navy seal down the street to the right, there's a Navy seal down the street to, there's, to the left.

There's a Navy Seal, right? And my wife, I remember saying one day, she said, I'm really glad these guys are in the neighborhood because if something bad happened, I could go to them and they'd act like you act. And I said, what do you mean by that? She's because as soon as the, what hits the fan, all of you guys just calm down.

You calm down, you begin solving the problem. And that this is that's mastery right there. It's just as soon as stuff hits the fan, we calm down and we say, okay what needs to happen? Boom, boom. And we start going through these [00:19:00] techniques quite deliberately.

Mahan Tavakoli: What a great example of, , when you reach that mastery, then the chaos and the uncertainty doesn't arouse you to the point that you just over rely on, over hyped gut instinct. Now, you talk also about understanding the raw self. How does that relate to this rich? 

Rich Diviney: Part of mastering uncertainty is to understand those drivers that we're bringing into the equation.

In other words, there's there's certain things about us that we're bringing into an uncertain environment that's driving our behavior. So there's three things specifically. So one is our attributes. To understand our attributes is to understand us at our most raw. So that's the how we're going to behave.

The how's and these things that could break into the the how's, why's and what's, so there's the how's, and that's the attributes. If we understand that, we understand how we're gonna be behave, then there is the the why. Okay? The [00:20:00] why has to, is centered around the objectives that we bring into it in a certain environment.

In other words, whenever we're in a certain environment, there's. There's going to be something, there's gonna be some sort of end goal end state that we are heading towards. That is your objective. Okay. That is going to drive us. In terms of what we're doing. So for example, when I was in SEAL training, my objective was to become an a D Seal.

Obviously one of those sub-categories was make it through SEAL training. And even though I even though I didn't necessarily think about. That all the time. That was still driving my behavior constantly. And so understanding what our objectives and turning our purposes into concrete objectives really helps.

We have to bear in mind that once we do that, we still have to be able to let that go to a degree when we're in uncertainty, challenges stress, because that objective might be way too big. For us to effectively focus on. It might be too long. I know we're gonna get into the, to the neurology of this but so for example, I couldn't when I'm in, in Navy Seal Hell [00:21:00] Week which starts on a Sunday afternoon, right?

You start on a Sunday afternoon and you go from Sunday afternoon all the way to the following Friday, and you only sleep for about two and a half hours that entire week, okay? And you're wet and sandy, you get most people quitting during that week, during hell week. If I think about, if I thought about Friday, on Monday, I would quit.

Okay. It's way too big. And but Friday was the objective. Rest assured, so understanding the objective is important. And then finally there is the the the what's, what drives us and the what's are centered around our identities. Identities. We also bring into the equation.

And one of the things we have to understand about our identities is that we as human beings. We in fact collect identities. We collect, I ams, and I always say I am, are the most two powerful words in the human language, because whatever you put after those two words is what shapes your behavior and identity.

But we collect a series of I ams throughout our lives. And some are quite powerful, some are fairly benign, right? We have, I went to this high school. I am a lacrosse player. I'm a Navy Seal, I'm a husband, [00:22:00] father I'm a motorcycle rider. I'm a Metallica fan, whatever it is.

Okay. We collect a series of these and every one of these, I ams comes with them a series of conditions and rules and biases that define behavior in that identity that is driving our behavior. Rest assured, that's driving our behavior and in deep uncertainty challenges stress. We're going to actually behave towards whatever identity we're prioritizing in that moment.

Okay, and so understanding. Identity we're prioritizing can be very empowering because either it's the exact identity we need or it's not the identity we want at all. When I was overseas, so two of my most powerful identities was Navy Seal, obviously, and then husband and father. Okay. When I was overseas, of course, Navy Seal was my priority identity.

That was my primary identity. But sometimes the environment would shift in a way that I'd have to prioritize husband and father. Maybe we'd have to take care of some civilians on the target or whatever. And suddenly that'd shift. So we get. When I'm at home, you wanna put away that Navy seal and husband and father has to be primary.

Okay so we have to understand these identities that we're carrying into an environment because [00:23:00] that's driving our behavior. So those are the three driving factors that we have to understand about ourselves that will define,, help us define our performance in these environments. 

Mahan Tavakoli: That is beautifully stated, rich, and I would highly encourage people to read the book and also re-listen to the past three, four minutes and reflect on what you just mentioned with respect to these three elements, including identities that are so powerful.

Now, one of the things you touched on briefly, I want to highlight, you also talked therefore, about the need and the ability for that compartmentalization. Yeah. You mentioned, for example, the identities where , when you were overseas, maybe the Navy SEAL identity was more prominent at certain points, and then when you are back or at certain points, the father husband identity would be more prominent for you. How can we compartmentalize in a way that is not [00:24:00] disengaged or disconnected, but.

Helpful to us being able to deal with uncertainty 

Rich Diviney: well, so . Therein lies the secret. Okay. And so we can get into the kind of the first part of the book where I talk about the neuroscience behind. Stepping through uncertainty, challenge, and stress.

And so what we have to understand about our neuroscience and our physiology is that when we are in an environment, our brains are seeking certainty. Our, as human beings, we love certainty. We want to, that certainty. Certainty is comfortable for us. And so our brains are tr are constantly trying to seek certainty by asking questions about our environment.

Three primary things that our brains are always trying to figure out about an environment we're in are. Duration, pathway and outcome. So in other words, DPO, so duration, how long is this going to last? Pathway? What's my route in, out, or through? And then outcome. What's the end state of this?

Okay. When we are in absence of one or more of duration pathway outcome, we begin [00:25:00] to feel anxiety and stress in our system. Okay? Our autonomic arousal rises, right? Here's an example. Okay so maybe we get, maybe you or me we get strep throat. Okay? Strep throat is a known sickness. It's, it has a known cure.

There's antibiotics for strep throat. And so in that case, we are in, but we don't, if you get strep throat as an individual, we don't know exactly how long it's gonna take, how long the antibiotic is gonna take. 'cause it, it is different for every human being, but we are in absence of only one of those three, we have a pathway.

Antibiotics and we have an outcome. We know we're gonna get better. Okay? What we don't have is duration. So we have a mild level of anxiety and stress. Now imagine we have the flu, okay? Flu is is, it's a known sickness. And we know that most people, as long as you're healthy, you're not gonna die of the flu.

But there's no real medicine you can take for the flu. And you don't really know how long you're gonna have the flu, right? There's some techniques you can do, but there's no real medicine. So when you have the flu, you're in an absence of pathway. [00:26:00] Duration, but you know the outcome, right? Is that right?

Am I correct? Yeah. So your, yeah, your absence of duration and your absence of pathway, but you do know the outcome. So your absence of two, of the three. So our anxiety is a little bit higher. It's moderate to too high. Now imagine we're back in 2020 and a virus hits, okay? And we, no one's heard of this virus before.

There are people dying of this virus. There are also some people who are not dying. There's no known cure. There's no anti, there's no vaccine or whatever. And we don't know how long this is gonna be. We don't have a pathway. So we're absent pathway, we're absent duration, and we're absent.

Outcome, we're absent all three, which is exactly why when 2020 hit, we were all thrown into a quite high level of stress. Okay? All this to say the secret to managing uncertainty and in effect, compartmentalization is a technique I call moving horizons. When you move horizons, what you're doing is you're in essence, picking something in your horizon to focus on and [00:27:00] creating a duration pathway outcome.

A DPO. I'll give you a quick example. In SEAL training, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big, heavy boats on your head. Okay? You're, and it's in hell week. You're always running with these things. It's miserable. I remember being in hell week. It was three in the morning or something.

We're on the beach. We're running with these things. We've been running for hours. It was, we were just, we were sick of it. I was miserable. And we were running next to the Sandburn, and I remember saying to myself, you know what? I'm just gonna focus on getting to the end of this sandburn.

Now what I did without knowing is I created a i, I picked a horizon, and in essence created a DPO. I created a duration from here to end of sandburn or from now until end of Sandburn pathway. From here to end of Sandburn and outcome, end of Sandburn. In doing that, I took control of my environment. I created A goal, and I proceeded to execute that DPO.

Once I hit that DPO, once I hit that goal, I got a dopamine reward. I got a reward for that, which allowed me to come back out and pick another horizon. So all this is as a matter of neurologically picking horizons. Now these [00:28:00] horizons we have to understand are subjective to the individual and the experience.

All right? You have to the meaningfulness of the horizon matters because you have to pick a horizon that's not too far, not too big, or else your dopamine will run out along the way. And you all, or you have to pick one that's not too short or, because if it's too, if it's too short, you won't get the dopamine reward.

So often it has to do with the subjectivity and the intensity of the environment. Often more intense environments require shorter DPOs. An example in seal training you're thrown in the surf zone and you're freezing for hours. And I remember just being in that environment.

It was very cold, very intense. And I remember saying myself, I'm just gonna count five waves. That was my horizon in the moment. Sometimes when my horizon was, I'm gonna make it to the next meal. Sometimes I was gonna, I'm gonna get to the end of the sandburn, but. But it's a matter of moving through uncertainty and compartmentalization is a matter of understanding what you have in front of you.

Asking yourself, what do I know and what can I control? Picking a horizon, in essence, creating a DPO, executing that DPO, and then once that's executed, using that reward to come [00:29:00] back out and pick a new horizon. This is compartmentalization in a nutshell. This is the neurological equivalent of eating the elephant one bite at a time, and this is the secret to moving through any stress, challenge and uncertainty.

Certainly any uncertainty. 

Mahan Tavakoli: That's beautifully explained and really powerful. Now, one of the things I wonder, rich, is for a long time the leaders that have succeeded most in organizations have been people that have tried to stay focused on a much longer horizon. I wonder if that runs counter to some of what you talked about is required when the level of uncertainty is higher.

Rich Diviney: So this is where roles and teams matter. . Because what the CEO is doing, what one of the jobs of the CEO is to maintain focus and visibility on the objective. But the CEO, if the CEO is smart or worth anything, will know that the team that's working on that is going to have to break that.

Project into [00:30:00] smaller bite-sized chunks. They're gonna have to, he, they're gonna have he or she's going to allow the team to create their own horizons, create their own DPOs. So in teaming, you must be cognizant of the fact that people's horizons are gonna be different for different different positions.

And if you're on a team that's working on a project together, when what happens there is you have to allow the person who's closest to the problem, and in charge in the moment. To set the horizon in essence, set the DPO and everybody kind of moves to that. But in any type of business environment or teaming environment, it's really most effective for a leader to say, listen we're gonna set some ear marks or some flags, and we're gonna plant some flags.

And those are gonna be some mile markers or some horizons or DPOs. But inside of that, feel free to create your own. CPOs, you may have to, depending on what you're working on, the accountant might have to make different horizons than the marketer or whatever. And everybody should be encouraged to use these tools to set their own horizons.

Ultimately, though, keeping the objective in [00:31:00] mind 'cause the objectives in mind, and that's what the CEO O can. Can keep a thousand or 50,000 foot view and watch all the pieces and kinda get a sense, okay, are we actually as a group moving towards the objective or are we starting to shift?

And then if there's shift going come in and just redirect that's the job. That's where roles matter. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So it's a great way both for you to manage your own uncertainty and lead your team or guide them in a way that they are able to handle that uncertainty better. Now, one element that goes along with that bridge, I find that in many instances I.

When there is uncertainty, the leaders that I have known over the years and now I'm dealing with as many of the organizations that are clients of mine are dealing with great uncertainty is the balance between control and trust. When there is greater uncertainty, I find leaders grab on tighter and want a lot more control.

Yeah. Where do you see that balance in navigating through uncertainty? 

Rich Diviney: [00:32:00] So it's certainly a balance. One of the ways I describe the high, the highest performing teams in terms of the way they task organize, and I talk about it in the book, is this idea that the highest performing teams, they task organize in a way that if you were to visualize it, it'd be a blob or an amoeba.

Okay? And what that blob or amoeba means is that the team understands that challenges and issues and problems can come from any angle at any moment. When one does, the person who's closest to that problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead and everybody follows, okay, we call it dynamic subordination.

And then the environment shifts and someone else steps up and everybody follows. So it's a dynamic swap between leader and follow, or I also call it alpha hopping, where the alpha position hops to where it needs to be. And so on the best teams, what that manifests as is that a team from the leader. So first of all the important thing is our position on a team.

It has nothing to do with our hierarchy or our rank. It has everything to do with what we're there to contribute to the team. Okay. And so I think our responsibility as leaders is to [00:33:00] create that dynamically subordinating environment so that in uncertainty, challenge, and stress, we don't find ourselves grabbing control.

The reason why people grab control is 'cause they don't have trust or faith in the people underneath them to do it. Okay. Guess whose fault that is? It's not that person's fault, okay? It's that leader's fault. That leader hasn't developed that environment, or the leaders tried to develop and seen that it's not proven out and not replaced that person, right?

But that's the leader's, that's the leader's fault. So the leader is responsible for developing that environment. Again, listen, I will say this. I will concede that when a leader has, when a leader takes charge and manages it, that does work. It really does. It just doesn't work as fast and it doesn't work as efficiently.

If you want to be a fast moving, efficient, high performing team that is moving at supersonic speed through uncertainty, you have to create a dynamically sporting environment, and that'll mean building trust, understanding each other's attributes, understanding what you're bringing to the team, and then for the leader to allow.[00:34:00] 

For the team to develop that environment. And the one key thing I'll just finish up before I shut up is the leader must must create opportunity for team members to step up. So part of creating training for a team is to create opportunities for people to step up and in some cases fail.

Because guess what? You're gonna learn more failing than you are gonna succeed, but you're creating that confidence. So when it happens, for real. You have someone who can actually step up and do it. And if that hasn't occurred, that's the leader's fault. That's not the person's fault 

Mahan Tavakoli: That is an outstanding perspective. Rich, and we talked about it some last time as well, that dynamics subordination and it's interesting that most of the organizations that I see leaders have a very hard time with that, where the. Reliance on hierarchy and titles is a lot more than in many instances.

People assume in the [00:35:00] military or in the seals, typically. A lot of times people who don't have military background or experience assume the military is very hierarchical. In some instances it is. Yeah. But. I find that leaders, , have a harder time with understanding and then effectively implementing Yeah.

What you are talking about right there. So it is a big challenge that I see. 

Rich Diviney: You're right. And people tend to look at the military and they assume this hierarchal I say you do mentality, which is which it does occur, especially in the conscript, the case of the word or if it's a very.

Young or not knowing units, sometimes it would say, Hey, just do what I say and, but more more often in modern warfare, which is asymmetrical. So that model worked very well in symmetrical warfare, and that was when tr when armies were lining up across from each other in fields and marching towards each other and fighting that way.

Once war became asymmetric. That didn't work anymore. And so asymmetrical warfare requires dynamic subordination because you don't know, as the leader, you [00:36:00] don't know as much as the person out there in the front. In the front, right? And so you have to develop a system that allows them to decision, make and also communicate, right?

You need to get because you because 'cause what that person knows is important for you to know as well. In most cases. So we just have to, and people assume that the military is a symmetrical thing but warfare now is quite asymmetrical. And so that's why and even technology makes things asymmetrical to a degree.

So , I think the military has actually moved more towards business in terms of that. 'cause business is never very symmetrical. It's quite asymmetrical. If the military has actually moved more towards business than business needs to move towards the military in terms of or seemingly if they thought symmetrical stuff.

So anyway, it is an interesting observation as I've moved through the career. 

Mahan Tavakoli: It is and as the military has evolved, organizations also need to evolve a lot faster to that same level, in that at a certain point, it was easier for knowledge to be concentrated on the top, more [00:37:00] experienced, more knowledge, more data.

Therefore the decision making being done. Top down. Yeah. Now that is dispersed. Everyone has access to much of the knowledge, much of the ability for decision making, and therefore the people closest need to be able to make the decisions and act. Yeah. So the organizations need to be more in the shape of that amoeba and decision making a lot more than they were in the past industrialized era approach.

Rich Diviney: I agree, and I think it's interesting that , there's been actually a shift it seems like, whereas the, back , in the times you were talking about knowledge was prioritized as the most important thing. And I think that's changed. I think the most important thing in now in, in today's environments is is perspective and visibility.

That those with the best. Most valuable perspective are the ones that we need to listen to in the moment. And that could be in the moment the leader with a 50,000 foot view, but it also could be in the moment that person on the point who's saying, Hey, I'm seeing this and this needs to be taken care of.

So [00:38:00] now in the optimal cases and the best teams, they work synergistically. That, that word is coming from those points to the 50,000 foot view and that 50,000 foot view says managing say, okay, this looks good, or, no, I have to do a little bit of shifting, but. But what that person at a 50,000 foot view is not doing is reaching all the way down and saying, Hey, do this, do that.

, it's really more about let's make sure we're taking in information, so we're working as a, again, like an amoeba or a blob less than a pyramid. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Now being able to do that, you also highlight the four elements of trust, which is critical. You mentioned competency, consistency, integrity, and compassion.

I wonder, in your work with organizations Rich, where have you seen the biggest challenge or shortcoming in trust and how can they address that? 

Rich Diviney: It's a great question. I think where you see it most commonly when you look at those four elements, competency, consistency character, which I, which is also integrity and trust.

Okay. Or and [00:39:00] compassion. The competencies do the thing, right? Consistency is do the thing right over time. Okay? Those first two are in fact quite visible and I will concede quite skills based. And so that's where we see most teams and organization over index on that. They base trust based on that.

The problem is you're missing two very important elements when you get to character or integrity. It's you. So you have competence, do the thing, right? You have consistency, do the thing right. Over time, integrity, or character is do the right thing and then compassion is do the right thing because you care about being as a human being.

Those two elements are very important in building that trust factor with any human being, with any team. Because if a team or a human being or an individual does not feel like they're cared for, they're not gonna produce much as a team member. Even if they're highly skilled and they can do the job right, you're not gonna have a good team teams.

The highest performing teams rely on the interaction. Between the members, not necessarily the skills you bring to the team. A [00:40:00] great example was a guy who I I researched years ago. His name was Russell, and I mentioned him in my first book, but Russell Kouf used to do lectures. He's deceased now, but he used to be in front of a lecture audience.

He used to say if I took the best parts of every best vehicle in the planet. So say one, one vehicle has a best engine. Another brand has the best suspension, another brand has the best car. I took the best parts of the best of every best vehicle on the planet. I put 'em all together in the center of the room.

Would I have the best vehicle on the planet? And the answer is no. You wouldn't have a car because the parts wouldn't fit together. And what you used to say is, a system is never the sum of its parts. It's a product of their interaction. A team goes the same way. A team is never the sum of the parts.

It's a product of their interaction. If you are. Creating a team based on the best skills. That team's gonna do great when things are going great, but as soon as things don't go great or the plan doesn't go as expected or the, what hits the fan, that team's liking a turn, turn toxic. 'cause you haven't focused on the interactions.

So we have to focus on interactions that's the glue. So the compassion and the character piece focus more on those [00:41:00] interactions than just the consistency and the competence piece. So you have to focus on all four. 

Mahan Tavakoli: That's a powerful point and a great analogy with the car as well.

Rich. There's a CEO I'm working with now is remade the leadership team by recruiting. Top caliber members of the leadership team, and it is a very toxic environment. It's interesting what you mentioned, you can't, whether it's a football team, a military team, or an organizational team, in this case, you can't just recruit the best CFO, the best CMO , a great CHRO, pull people together and expect for a high functioning team.

Rich Diviney: That's right. We've seen it in the athletics and athletics. I would concede as a very skills-based endeavor. But even in athletics sometimes we've seen teams where they get the best players, they put 'em all on the same team, and they're miserable because they can't get along, they can't work together.

So it really is, , it is the critical factor. 

Mahan Tavakoli: So now I wonder as the audience is listening to this, rich, , what might [00:42:00] be some practical daily habits that can help them handle uncertainty better?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I would say first be aware and conscious of your own autonomic arousal. In other words, when you begin to feel. Anxiety and fear and stress bubbling up. Be aware of that and use some of the tools to bring that down. Okay, so I talk about some of these tools in the book but some simple tools are like, a visual tool is called Open Gaze.

Open All Open Gaze is if you're staring straight ahead, you're staring straight ahead, but not staring at anything. You're just you're, it's a soft vision. So you're noticing peripheries, that's called Open Gaze that has been known to. De-stress our nervous system to, because when we're, because when we're stressed, we tend to focus in, okay, so a visual tool, even breathing tools blowing us a physiological sigh is basically a breathing technique where you're blowing out carbon dioxide.

Very simple. You breathe in as much as you can all the way to the end. Take another deep, take another breath on top, and then do a very slow [00:43:00] exhale. Okay? That's a physiological sigh. You're blowing out CO2. So you do that a few times, you start to feel calm. So every day manage that, look at that and feel how that feels.

And then as you begin to calm. Ask yourself questions, what do I know? What can I control? What do I know? What can I and start to pick things to focus on and hit those goals. You'll begin to inadvertently, or even quite deliberately, practice moving horizons and practice D ping this stuff, right?

And you can do that every day. You can do that for little things. You can do that on the way to traffic on the way to work when you're in traffic. You can do that. You can do that when you're, putting together a PowerPoint presentation at work. Say, you know what I'm gonna, I'm gonna do I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna spend five minutes looking at graphic designs , that'll be my horizon. And then once I'm done that I'm gonna shift to something else and you can actually just make a game of it and just practice this stuff and it'll come in handy. I promise 

Mahan Tavakoli: it will. And it's interesting, 

that , as the level of uncertainty picks up, as the technology around us becomes better, AI becomes better. I revert back to something Yuval [00:44:00] Noah Hara also says, which is the need for us to understand ourselves better. You talk about that. Self understanding and the need for that, and the need for us to be able to control our physiology rather than let the external environment control our physiology.

Yes, that helps us take a big step toward mastering uncertainty. Now, rich, how can the audience find out more about your book, follow your Work, and your writing? 

Rich Diviney: The best place. One-stop shop is the attributes.com, our website. There you'll find both books. You can get both books and all of our consulting , and our assessment tool.

You can check out our assessment tool. What we can do for your audience is we can actually give you a code. We'll give you a code so that if your audience uses the code, they can get a 25% discount on the assessment tool if they'd like. And yeah, the attributes.com is the best place.

And of course I'm also on Instagram and LinkedIn and things like that too, so you can check us out there. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Absolutely loved the attributes [00:45:00] and masters of uncertainty as well. Rich attributes is essential when leaders are looking at their teams, but also as you go into in this book, in understanding ourselves better, understanding our attributes plays a role, and then we live in a very uncertain environment.

So knowing how to handle it better ourselves and how to help our teams handle it better becomes essential. What an absolute joy. Getting a chance to learn more from you. Rich, thank you so much for this conversation. 

Rich Diviney: Thank you. It's, it is a pleasure to be here. I always love talking to you, so thanks again for having me.