Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bytes podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people as they've had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co. dot UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.

So plug any headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 100. Yay. 100. With the title power reimagined. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Jason Patent. Jason describes himself as a Global Leadership and DEI consultant and coach. When I asked Jason to describe his superpower, he said, persistence, finding solutions, growing in partnership with others.

Wow. Hello, Jason. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Joanne, I'm really happy to be here with you and have the chance to talk about some topics that I know you and I both care deeply about. So thank you so much for inviting me.

Absolute pleasure. And it's really great for Suzanne to introduce us as well, and that's really good. Thank you. So, Jason, power reimagined. Tell me about power.

I feel like any conversation about making the world better for more people has to start and end with power. And I also feel like, and I'll speak really now, I think this does apply beyond the borders of the United States, but I don't want to overstate the case. And I was born and raised in the United States and while I've spent about ten years of my career also living and working in China, really, I mean, the United States and American Us american culture and language and all of that is what I'm most familiar with and what I live and breathe every day. So that's sort of a caveat to what I'm about to say, which is that I think that we don't have that many tools for meaningfully discussing power and having it be front and centre in conversations. And there's a couple of reasons for that. I think. One is generally the people who have the power set the conversation topics, and when we have power, we generally have a harder time recognising that we have it. And when we do, we don't want to talk about it because we're afraid someone's going to come and take it from us.

And then also, and this, I think, is very much not unique to the United States but a huge part of our culture here is we like to think of ourselves as really egalitarian and equality minded. I don't think that the behaviour of the nation state really bears that out. I don't think that the structures in the way that systemic oppression still happens every single day in the United States really bears that out behaviorally. But we don't like talking about power here because there are these myths that we've built up around meritocracy. To the extent that we have merit and ability, we can create the future that we want for ourselves, irrespective of our membership in identity groups, irrespective of history, et cetera, et cetera. So all of that to say, in answer to your question, we have to talk about power because it is the central reality of humanity and we're really not good at talking about power.

Yeah, power, privilege, these are all words that Dei professionals like ourselves talk about all the time. Yet when you try and bring them into the conversation with people who maybe are not HR dei orientated, they feel there's a threat. I think you mentioned it. People feel that you're taking something away from them. You mentioned egalitarian and this belief of meritocracy. If people believe in the meritocracy, then they believe that everybody has a fair chance. But what they don't often see is the power and privilege imbalance in the meritocracy that they swim in all the time.

Exactly. And those feelings, we're also not really good at talking about feelings. It's considered quote unquote soft, not businessy. And that's another skill set that we have to develop collectively, is emotional intelligence, recognising what our feelings are, naming them, dealing with them, and also recognising their origins. And what I mean by that is I'm a cisgender, heterosexual, able bodied white man. The country that I grew up in, the society that I grew up in, really, in a lot of ways, the world was kind of built by people like me, for people like me, which means that I am not immune to those same emotional reactions. There are times when I'm reading something or hearing something, and I can feel myself bristling and getting annoyed when somebody questions something I've considered to be fundamentally true. And the feelings aren't going to go away because they've been burned into our brains by the systems that we have grown up inside of and that we still continue to live inside of.

So I think that right out of the gates, one thing that can stop a conversation, really, even before it gets started is these feelings of defensiveness, protectiveness, feeling like somebody is going to take something away from me. That's one piece of it. And then another piece of it is I can feel as if my identity, who I am, is being challenged. What kind of a person I am is being challenged. Oh my gosh. If I have a racist thought, I must be a bad person. There's a very, very steep and slippery slope from if I have this kind of thought to therefore I am this kind of person, that I definitely know that I'm not. I know that I'm a good person.

And the system's context can be extremely helpful because it kind of frees us up from having to blame ourselves or feel badly about who we are. And it helps us set, I think, a much more really kind of scientific and objective. I mean, I don't believe in objectivity. That's a whole philosophical conversation we could have there, right? But we do have science. And I think if one were to take as close to an objective look as possible at the world, the world is structured by systems that power is distributed unequally. This is all true as far as I'm concerned. Why would I expect that I somehow am free from all of the biases that the unjust and unequal power systems I've grown up inside of have burned into my brain. Of course I'm not free from those.

It doesn't mean that I'm a bad person because I have a particular kind of thought. I have a particular kind of thought, say a racist thought, a thought that is disparaging of an entire group of people based on race, which, as we all know, is a fiction as well, human created fiction? Why would I expect that my brain wouldn't be polluted with all of these negative biases if the systems around me that I grew up in and continue to live inside of have burned them into my brain. It's just a fact. So if we can begin to have to look at ourselves with a certain kind of objectivity, I think we can also look at ourselves with a certain kind of compassion as well, and understand. Look, I'm stuck in this muck along with everybody else. How can I begin to develop a set of tools and skills to deal with it every moment of every day so that I can deploy the power and the privilege that I have into something that is closer to inclusion and belonging and equity and equality than if I don't have that awareness? Because if I don't have that awareness, I'm just going to roll forward and do what humans do, which is generally use the power that we have in order to keep what we have and keep others from getting it. So roundabout now, several minutes in, I think that that's when we talk about power reimagined. We're talking about something like that.

Yeah. It's interesting you brought into the conversation of social constructs. This is the rule set we invented over generations, hundreds of years, thousands of years, whatever it may be, as a society, that we've decided these social constructs are the rule set that we must all live by. And if you don't conform to those constructs, you get policed either out of your society or you get forced back into the box where you come from. And I know it's quite a well worn cliche, but it's basically the premises of the film. Matrix is all around understanding the world of social constructs, how it's been designed and being able to step out of that rule set and see the world differently. It's literally taking the two blue pills, isn't it? Because once you've stepped outside and see the world through constructs, you can't unsee them.

I've used that metaphor in conversations and specifically, actually in coaching conversations before, the blue pill, red pill metaphor from the matrix. And isn't it exactly what you just said? Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. And it can be daunting, it can be frightening. But I also feel like if we really mean it when we say that we want to create a world that works for everyone, if we want to create a world of genuine belonging, if we want to create a world where we're not really creating needless suffering and death every day, if we really want to boil it down, we don't really have a choice.

You mentioned another word, oppression. And you mix that with power, you mix that with privilege, you put oppression in there, again, another triggering word for many people. I'm not oppressing anybody. But again, when you think of that, of the dynamics of systemic and social constructs and how we've built society, the inequities that are inherent in it, it's again, hard to see how I as an individual have oppressed anybody. But I recognise that I benefit from a system is inherently a construct. Disadvantages many, yes.

And I'm going to pan out for a moment because I think one of the things we've gotten into pretty quickly in this conversation is some of the limitations of the human brain and how we evolved and what we evolved to be successful at. There's a phrase that I doubt that I invented. I did some googling to see if I could find it out there. And I didn't see that anybody had used this before. But then I'm still kind of testing it out to see if it sticks and if it's helpful for people. But essentially, the workplace is the modern day savannah. And what I mean by that is no specific savannah, but the savannah of the imagination, where it's a struggle for survival, scarce resources, there's danger, life threatening danger around every corner. And humans evolved inside of this context.

It's kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, the law of the jungle. And our physical brains and bodies exist and are configured in the way that they are so that we can succeed in that kind of an environment. Take that and throw that into still, I guess. I guess it's still the early 21st century here and now in January 2024, and we're recording this episode. And there's all of these ways in which it is absolutely necessary for the survival of our species that we be able to collaborate well with people who are really different from us. To unleash their talents, to have them feel like they belong so that they can unleash their talents. And I don't mean this in the instrumental, extractive, capitalist sense of get stuff out of people. I mean.

I mean this in kind of the highest sense of, like, let's deploy our humanity in the most effective way possible for the betterment of our species. So you take this very understandably terrified, frightened animal brain and you throw it into this current context and this need to collaborate effectively. And it's a real mismatch. We're really not very well equipped at the most basic biological level. We're not well equipped to meet the challenges of the moment. In other words, we've got a really long way to go because of this fundamental mismatch. I'm trying to remember now that this whole sort of panning out context and savannah context. Do you remember the last question you asked me a moment ago? I want to tie it back to that.

It's around the systemic oppression and the social constructs and how we benefit from. Without realising.

Yes. So the broad context is our brains and bodies aren't equipped to think in certain ways. And one of those ways is we're not really equipped. It's very difficult to think in these macroscopic, big picture, systemic terms because we evolved in this environment that was extremely local. We form in groups and out groups. Right. It's not like every individual is struggling against every other individual. Groups are struggling against groups.

We have in groups and we have out groups, and we're really good at understanding the interests of our in groups, those who are nearest and dearest to us, the people whose interests we perceive to be aligned with our own, and then everybody else whose interests we perceive to be not aligned with our own, and sometimes often directly conflicting with our own. Hence, intergroup conflict, war. So all of this points towards a need for us as human beings to try to look at ourselves in a more objective way to understand what our limitations are. Because if we don't understand what our limitations are, we don't really have a chance. If we do understand what our limitations are, then we can start to work with those limitations, address those limitations, and build up sets of skills that we can then deploy that help to overcome those limitations.

Yeah, because our in group out group biases are so ingrained in our prehistoric brains. I live in a commune. Anybody who comes from over the hill is only coming over the hill to attack me or do something bad to me. Therefore, I trust people who are in my in group. I distrust inherently anybody else who's not like me. So it's the affinity bias out group stuff. So it's so ingrained in who we are, in our biases, our protection mechanism, our vagus nerve is straight to our adrenaline gland, kicking us into action or kicking us into hide. You see it in the animal kingdom as well.

We have an inherent distrust. So if you think about that as a fundamental survival bias, no wonder people who are not like us, people who have different values or different systems or different language or different skin colour, whatever, or sexuality, they may become outgroup. And it's really hard to let our brains encompass them and bring them in unless we find an affinity.

Yes, absolutely. And I think if it's okay with you, I'd like to give a. I love this. And it's all extremely. This is context. Would it be okay with you if we move into something a little bit more practical and applied?

Okay, go for it. Yeah, please do it.

I'm wondering if your listeners just like, okay, great. What am I supposed to do?

Solution is good.

Yeah. I have a book and I write about this in the book. I'll just give an example. And when I talk about global leadership and global Dei, there's a fairly specific way in which I mean that and the whole global piece. The reason I put that in there, first of all, it's because my career has been global, but also because differences that when we're talking when we're in a global context, we expect difference to show up. And there's a whole field called intercultural communication, intercultural leadership that has a rich set of tools to offer us for looking at difference and changing the lens through which we see difference. And so to give a specific example, what it helps us to do is focus on behaviours so that we're not jumping immediately into identity, we're not jumping immediately into power, because it can generate these shutdown reactions from people. And you can't get anywhere if you start there sometimes, right? So if we start with something behavioural, behavioural, I think we all are familiar with differences in, say, communication style.

Individuals have differences in communication style, and differences also pattern across cultures. From the standpoint of communication style. One of the big adjustments that I had to make as somebody born and raised in the United States and trying to work effectively inside the chinese cultural and linguistic environment was different communication styles. I was trained know, say what you mean, mean what you say. Direct communication was really the only way to communicate. And then I found myself in a situation where the dominant, which is not to say that every individual conforms to this, right, this is patterns. But broadly speaking, my direct communication style was not going to be successful, it wasn't going to build trust, it wasn't going to help collaboration. And so I had to do some adapting, or the term that I use is bridging.

I didn't admit the term bridging. It comes from the intercultural field. But even when we're not talking about international borders, one of the stories that I tell in the book is about a colleague that I had who had a very different communication style from mine. And she has the pseudonym Anita in the book. And she was one of my direct reports, and she was kind of a dream colleague. She was so good at her job that I never really felt that I had to manage her. She just got her work done extremely effectively. We would meet, I always met with my director reports, one on one every single week.

And when we would sit down every week, what I wanted to hear from her was because I was busy. I was moving a million miles an hour, trying to accomplish way too much. What I really wanted to hear from her was whatever she needed me to hear so that I could help her do her work more effectively. Instead, what I got was a story. Every single time we'd sit down and she would say, we've exchanged pleasantries, and then she'd get out her list and start going through all of the things that she's been doing. And then before long, she would start telling me a story. And it really bothered me because I just wanted her to get to the point. And one day she caught me looking at my watch in the middle of our meeting and stopped talking immediately.

And I knew exactly what had happened. And I was like, oh, she got me. She caught me and she said, do you need me to stop talking? And I said, anita, I'm sorry, no, please continue with your story. And she did. But it felt a little bit different. I kind of spoiled the mood, I think, with my checking of my watch. We got through the meeting, it was fine. And it was an important moment for me because I recognised a couple of things.

One was that she really needed to tell me these stories. It wasn't a question. There was this part of me, this voice inside my head, that I felt like she was wasting my time and wasting our time. And so it got me thinking more about what else could be happening here. And I had already been trained. In fact, one of my jobs at there was actually was directing a centre for intercultural leadership. So it's not like I was new to this whole topic, right? I just wasn't applying it to myself in this particular relationship at this particular time. And it's communication style.

This colleague of mine is a high context communicator. That's a term in the field, and it's a term in the field for a reason. And I'm a low context communicator. What that means is, as a high context communicator, she needed to provide enough context to understand what she was doing inside of a larger context. As a low context communicator, I'm just like, let's boil it down to what we need to know, because efficiency and transparency, those are the values that are driving, that are most important for us to honour here, where she is more concerned with values around relationships and a sort of more holistic approach. What I was eventually able to do in that relationship was a little bit of fake it till you make it, which is to say, grit my teeth and listen to the stories until they were done. And then I found, over time, that I was actually enjoying the stories that she was telling me. I feel like it helped us to, over time, to build trust and actually kind of ironically, to get more efficient in our work.

So I feel like I'm so concerned with efficiency. Like, tell me, get to the point. But the rupturing of trust could actually lead to inefficiencies in the long run. Whereas if I could flip this viewpoint in the ways that I've been describing to you, we actually might have a more trusting relationship that could lead to longer term efficiencies. So that's one example. Now, if we get into identity and power there, I'm the supervisor, I'm a man, she's a woman. English is my first language, it's not hers. She's an immigrant, I'm not.

There's a massive power imbalance in that relationship. What normally happens in the workplace is we're not aware of the power that we have. And when I say power, I deliberately include privilege in that as a specific form of power, the norm is to keep rolling forward. I'm not aware of the power that we have and just expect other people are going to do all of the adapting, code switching, accommodating, assimilating, integrating. And when we talk about power reimagined. One of the key things, behaviorally, that we're talking about every single day in the workplace is the folks with more power need to be doing the adapting, which is what in the book I call bridging. And again, not my term, but I apply it in a particular way in my work that was pretty long. I hope the listeners are still with us.

One area that I've come to realise is when we talk about different groups, intergenerational groups particularly, it's incumbent on the older generation to bridge down because the younger generation won't bridge up. They may have an appreciation, but it's incumbent on us, Gen X's or other generations to learn about Gen Alpha, Gen Zenz and learn about how they're interacting with the world because they will not show any interest in what we're doing. So in order to create that bridge, as you called it, we have to bridge downwards. They will never bridge up. So the power imbalance, if you like, in that scenario is actually from an age perspective, the power is with the younger generation because they are setting the new communication styles. And if we, as older generation want to keep relevant, even in business, we have to bridge down and understand what's coming, not trying to force the younger generation to live in our world.

Yeah, generation is a particularly interesting example because there's a really interesting how generation interacts with age. They're closely related, but not synonymous. But the fact that people in a given generation are going to age up into a cohort where they're the ones setting the standards for everybody else. I think you make a really valid and important point there that there is a power, but they don't have that power yet, right? We're still the ones in charge. And so often we feel like we can just go ahead and dictate our way, when in fact, as you point out, I guess the power is kind of latent, it's nascent, but there's no question it's coming right.

I had to learn that as a parent. I thought the power laid with me, but I learned that I had to be a negotiator, I had to be an adapter, I had to be the one who gave to ensure the relationship was productive, because I can assure you, my children were, whilst they're fantastic children and superb young adults, or your adults now, I realised that me saying I'm old, I know better is no way to communicate. You have to learn a different set of skills to communicate with younger people. And as like, being a parent really taught me that.

Yes. And I think I appreciate the application of this power reimagined concept to generation. I think one of the important differences between generation and a lot of other identity categories is exactly what I was saying a moment ago, which is they'll age up into positions of power, but if we're looking at, say, for example, race and really just about any other identity category, that doesn't hold. So we're talking about a lifelong condition of being marginalised, of being unseen, of being forced into situations where I have to change who I am every single day and suffer indignities every single day just in order to get by.

Also to avoid standing out, being different, being accused of being troublesome or argumentative or bossy or whatever other negative words we could throw at people. You say the code switching, the masking, the covering, is a survival mechanism to survive in a world where you are not the majority, because the majority set of rules, you have to play by those rules, even though they don't necessarily work for you.

Exactly. I want to clarify one important distinction, which is, and I touched on this a little bit earlier in our conversation, but this whole, the idea of collaborating effectively together, to me, is we can and should be thinking and talking about that in human terms. And what I mean by that is, what is it like to be a person, a human being who feels seen, who feels included, who feels like they belong, and then to be able to contribute their talents and energies accordingly? We do function inside of an extractive global capitalist system. That's a fact. Right. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. It's not like we're going to snap our fingers and have a set of systems that are going to be more focused on humanity. I mean, the extractive systems that we function inside of are not focused on humanity.

At the same time, it's possible, I believe, to function inside of these systems in much more healthy and humane ways than we currently do. And that's also just fundamental to the work that I do, is this belief that we have a lot more wiggle room than we think we do, especially when we have outsized power and outsized privilege. And so much of the challenge of leading inside of these inhumane structures is finding where that wiggle room is. Where do I have, where can I bridge where? And how can I bridge such that in my spheres of influence, however big or however small they may be, can I carve out spaces where people feel more like they belong?

Isn't the pace of change, though glacially slow and frustratingly slow, so much so sometimes you can't even see change occurring because it's those micro kind of increments? World Economic Forum, their gender equity report, I think last year said that we're not going to achieve gender equity in the western world for another 7500 od years. And globally, it's more like 250 years. When you think about some of the Far east and other parts of the world. And who wants to wait 75 years for gender equity to start occurring? Who wants to wait half of that time, a quarter of that time, a third? Whatever fraction it is, it's like anything. We want it now. How do we get it now? How do we keep patient that long?

Well, that's a great question, and I don't think we have a choice, which is to say each of us has a certain amount of agency. And I think my work is predicated on a belief that, let's just say, let's snap our fingers and fast forward 10,000 years, presuming that we're all still around as a species, right, and that we haven't completely destroyed life on this planet, or maybe 1000 years, whatever, just some very long time into the future. And let's say that there's still an awful lot of nastiness going on. I still believe that inside of our spheres of influence and the relationships that we have with other human beings, it's meaningful. This work is still meaningful because of the impact that we can have within our spheres of influence now. So that's the worst fallback case, right? So in the very, very worst case, we're still having a positive impact if we're doing this work mindfully, intentionally, persistently. I also happen to believe that the more skilled we can get broadly speaking, doing this work, which has many, many aspects to it, and we've touched on a few of them in this conversation already, that over time we've got a better and better chance at transforming these larger structures and these larger systems in more meaningful and more impactful ways, so that the actual impact of the work that we do extends beyond our immediate spheres of influence. We can't know, there's no way that we're going to know what that impact is.

It's very mysterious. So there is a faith aspect to this work as well, I suppose. And the longer I'm around, the more I recognise that my time on this planet is really limited. And in my lifetime I'm only going to see so much change. And then I look at my. I have two grown daughters and I think about them, they may have kids at some point and I'll be thinking about them as well if I'm still around. And my hope is that when they leave this earth, that we will have progressed in some meaningful way towards this better future. I don't think there's a finish line, I should say that.

I mean, I think because of how we're wired, we're not going to change human wiring. That is how it is. We just have to get better and better at managing our limitations, at overcoming our limitations. But there's no shiny future where we're born. We come out into the world and it's like we're all one big happy family. No, but through education, et cetera, the future can look a heck of a lot better than it does right now. So, yes, we want it now. And not only do we want it now, to the extent that one belongs to identity groups that are historically and currently still very much marginalised.

And I boiled it down in a really stark way earlier, and I'll say it again, suffering and dying, they need it now. And I guess that's part of what motivates me and keeps me moving forward with this work, is like I can sit here on my high horse in my incredibly privileged life and say, some distant day, things will be better. Well, okay, great. But people are suffering and dying now. How okay am I with that? How much do I really care? And how much is my caring about that actually going to motivate me to take action? And then what sorts of action am I willing to take? Those are questions that I think we all need to be wrestling with every single day. We're not going to live up to our own standards every single day. We might be really lucky if we have a day where we feel like we live up to our own standards, but I feel like those are questions that we have to be asking and responding to in our action.

Yeah, it occurs to me there's this massive disconnect between society at large and the corporate world that we breathe all the time. Where in most companies, sizable companies, global organisations, there's DNI teams, there's people worrying about equity, inclusive recruitment processes, there's lots of people focusing on this as a job. But you step out of corporate America, corporate Europe, corporate UK, corporate wherever, onto the pavement, who is thinking about equity in the same way? Because you can say, well, our government are know you look at, we've got elections coming up in the US, we've got elections coming up in the UK, we've got elections coming up in five or six other countries around the world that will put potentially different governments in the next twelve to 18 months. And those governments, a lot of them, have a different view on human rights and equity. And without naming any names, so are we regaining and then getting pushback? Because woke has been weaponized as something that's used against people who are trying to create positive change where people can thrive. We talked about the pushback, the power privilege, people feel losing something. The white man is feeling marginalised now and the governments are reacting to that feeling. So say there's this disconnect between corporate motivation to be inclusive and societal and the world at large.

There's a disconnect there. How do we rationalise that? I appreciate that. That's a change of the world question, isn't it?

That's pretty big question there, but happy to indulge and explore it with you. I haven't thought about it in those terms before. Well let me focus in on one piece. I don't know if this is actually going to get at what you're trying to get at, but let me focus in on one thing that you said, which is this whole idea of the white man feeling marginalised. Tim Wise, who is a white male author, an activist, long time, decades long activist on race based in the United States. I attended a webinar of his and he said the following. He said, let me make sure I get the words right. What was the one word? When you're used to privilege, inclusion feels.

Like oppression or something like that, isn't it?

Yeah, something like when you're used to having power. That wasn't his exact words. But when you're used to having power, pluralism feels like oppression. And what I appreciate about that observation was it's an effort to get inside the mind of this quote, unquote, marginalised white man. I think there's some real truth in there. The reaction, and I'll just use white men as cisgender, heterosexual, able bodied white man, is a shorthand now for certain intersection of identities, where there's sometimes a shared sense. And I think the election, I will name names, the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and Trumpism, which has exploded in terms of its visibility and its influence, certainly in us politics and elsewhere around the world, it seems as well, is a global. What's the word I'm looking for? It's a global phenomenon that stems from, I think, a human reaction that we shouldn't be surprised about, based on the wiring of the brain that I was talking about earlier.

Having power feels good, and it grants us access to scarce resources inside of a system that has trained us to think in terms of scarcity. We tend not to notice power when we have it, we tend to notice it more when others have it. And if we get the slightest sense that somebody wants to take our power away, it's terrifying. There could hardly be anything more terrifying than that. And I think that's fundamentally, that's what's going on. It's going on at a micro level and a macro level. And of course, people are exploiting this tendency in order to gain power for themselves, but I think fundamentally that's what's happening. I don't think it ties into your question about the disconnect between corporate approaches and societal approaches.

So my apologies for not connecting it back to that. But that's where you got me thinking with your question.

Yeah, I think it was just an observation that the corporate organisation, or organism, if you like, is developing a more inclusive culture that isn't necessarily married or mirrored outside of their front door. And often we see corporate culture influenced by the wider outside. But I now see corporate culture as being a safe space from the outside world where you can get dignity and respect, a level of equity, a level of protection that you may not get outside of your company, which creates another inequity in society, where if you're working for a large organisation, you're far more likely to succeed and be respective for who you are. If you're working for a small organisation, a local organisation, in a local town, where there's going to be a massive disconnect between the experience of people from an inclusion, from an equity, from an opportunity perspective, once you get inside the door of a corporate, then you're more likely to succeed again. That's a privilege, I guess there's power and privilege to get a role or a job in a large organisation.

Well, I will defer to your expertise on that simply because I haven't ever worked for a particularly large organisation and I don't have any large corporate clients either. So I don't have that kind of a window into that.

Okay, yeah, let's go to another attack. We talk about equity, and people often assume that equity is going back to breeze. Conversation is about giving something up so that other people have more. Because it's kind of a human nature, isn't it, to want better for yourself, betterment. I wanted my children to have something I didn't have. I'm not going to walk away from an opportunity where someone says, here, have this role, this job, this assignment. I'm not going to say, no, you give that to somebody else. And that's not.

Equity is about. It's not about taking things away from people or asking people to step back. It's trying to recognise in a society, people need to be given more tools to allow them to get to the start line.

Yes. I feel like scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset is, for me, anyway, it's been an extremely helpful frame going back to the savannah. We evolved in this environment of scarcity. One way to look at the global systems, the extractive global systems that still dominate work in the world, is just an extension of that savannah mentality. And so we tend to think of things in terms of scarcity and zero sum. If you get something, that means I lose something and everything that I'm sharing with you and everything that I'm saying, I want to be really clear with your listeners about this. This is stuff that I'm struggling with in my own mind every single day, right. My mind is polluted in the same ways that everybody's mind is polluted, right? There's all kinds of really nasty stuff kicking around in my brain all the time.

I struggle with this stuff. It's really hard for me some days. Some days it's easier than others. But generally speaking, it's really hard for me to genuinely feel a sense of abundance about the world. Like I say, some days are easier than others, some days are harder than others. But scarcity has been burned into our brains through our evolution and through the ongoing existence of these scarcity based structures that we all function inside of. So it's a natural reaction to feel like, you get something, I lose something. I once had the opportunity to listen to the president of Ireland give a talk.

And he said something that really stuck with me. And he was talking about, I guess the United States as kind of the worst offender in this category, but this also being a global phenomenon as well. But he was talking about an ethos of insatiability. There's never enough. We always want more and more and more and more and more understandable inside of a scarcity mindset. If resources are scarce and everyone's looking for the same resources, I need to hoard those resources. I have to, because otherwise someone else is going to get them and I'll have less. And then what he said was what he would like to see is a shift towards an ethos of sufficiency.

Can we all just please have enough? And we can take any resource and think about any resource. I think in those terms, you can start with the basic material stuff of life. Food, water, healthy, unpolluted food, clean water, decent shelter, clothing, like the basics of human existence that are lacking for an embarrassingly, horrifically large percentage of humanity. Start with that. Can we just please have enough? And from there we can get in. We work our way up to the amount of power we have inside of our organisations, the amount of influence that we have over others to change policies and build. If we get back to equity, creating laws and policies that distribute resources in ways that are more based on human needs, then I guess all of that. To say that I have found this notion of trying to think in terms of abundance and trying to think in terms of sufficiency as a baseline as opposed to the scarcity insatiability approach that we are still functioning very much inside of today.

I appreciate this next thought I have is probably outside of your kind of everyday comfort zone. But I'm thinking as you're talking is there is no profit insufficiency. Our capitalist society is about propagating the scarcity model. We look at environmental issues. People don't want limitless renewable energy. They want fossil fuels, because fossil fuels is power. Fossil fuels gives control over things. We don't want to cut our pollution because China won't cut theirs.

It's all about protecting ourselves and hoarding what we have. And that seems to be the capitalist model at the moment. I was listening to you. I'm thinking I can see where we're going wrong as a society because we're not geared up, as you point out, for sufficiency.

Yeah, I agree. And that's also a reminder to me that there's a caveat that I want to throw into this conversation as well, which is I think it can be very easy for us if we're lambasting the excesses of capitalism. It can be helpful to remember that there's nothing wrong with commerce, right? And there's nothing inherently wrong with markets. To me anyway, there's a real beauty in you and I coming together. You need or want something that I have, and I need or want something that you have and we're able to make as free individuals choose to engage with each other in commerce. I think that's actually potentially a beautiful way for humans to interact. Now, if that's the basis of everything, no, right? But to me, there's nothing inherently evil or wrong about that. It's when capitalism is that just run amok, where it becomes all about hoarding resources and power.

And to me, that's what fundamentally we need to work on changing over. You know, folks can get very defensive, know, and say, what are you, a communist or something? Capitalism, everyone knows that free markets generate wealth, and Adam Smith and a rising tide lifts all boats. And I think it can be absolutely true that markets in certain ways allocate resources more efficiently, as the economists like to say. And it can at the same time also be true that we've gone to ridiculous excess as a species as far as how this is playing out around the world and the dire human consequences every single day of that. Which also reminds me, since I said we can think this and we can also think this, this is another skill set that we have to build as human beings, which is the ability to hold multiple truths. We have to get better. And I say this with such emphasis because I'm really yelling at myself because this is something I'm really not very good at and I'm trying to get better at because my brain always wants to go to the, listen there, I just said it right there. Always wants to go to the binary.

That's actually not true that my brain always wants to go to the binary. But I just gave you a binary lot there, right? So frequently my brain just wants to just separate into yes or no, good or bad, right or wrong. That's because, that's because I'm a human being. That's my inheritance as a human. My brain is limited in that way. Okay? That means I just need to direct more of my focus towards holding multiple different truths at once. It's another one of the skills, another one of the tools in the toolbox that we need to get better at. Recognising and using as human beings is much as my brain might want to simplify into right and wrong? Yes.

No. We have to get better at holding multiple truths and seeing things from multiple perspectives at once, or at least switching more fluidly between realities.

And I think it's not necessarily multiple truths, it's recognising that one truth is not the only truth and it's perspectives are key. Being able to step back or step one pace to the left or one pace to the right, you see something different. And I think that's the hard thing. And I'm a great believer in perspectives and multiple views, but I'm also quick to jump to the binary. You have to slow your thinking down, step back and say okay, that's my view. It's just my view. Okay. There are other views, those views are different.

And I think it's just a habit. You have to learn to override your default thought and be able to press pause for a second and just ask. Hear a different story?

Yes.

It doesn't mean they say they're right or you're wrong, it just means it's a different view. Yes.

And I think you hit on two really key skills and these are real skills and that's another thing. These are actual skills. We're trained and hired in a set of technical skills, but there are these human skills and you just pointed to two of them. Pause, ask if everyone could get a little bit better every day at pausing and asking. That would take us pretty far.

Some of the basis of emotional intelligence as well though, isn't it? It's recognising your own sense of self, your own interaction style, the needs of others, and starting to connect with a bit of compassion and empathy there. Yes.

And I think that if I'm sort of reframing that in terms of the work that I try to do with folks and what I'm trying to do in my book, it's essentially, yes, emotional intelligence is the foundation of it all. And then what I try to do is provide frameworks and contexts and related skills to apply every single day. So like the communication style thing that, the example I shared with you about my colleague who told the stories, right. It was really helpful to me that I could recognise that the function of my discomfort was a difference in communication style. And communication style is just one among many, many different kinds. Behavioural differences in the workplace. There's a whole world of what we call cultural dimensions. So risk orientation versus certainty orientation status orientation versus egalitarian orientation, there's a whole big list of those.

There's different conflict styles, there's different leadership styles, there are different ways of giving and receiving feedback. And so we've got these sort of big picture, fundamental background skill sets around emotional intelligence and managing our feelings. And then there's the very specific applied skill set of self awareness. So this is how I think the world should be run. These are my preferences, other awareness. My colleagues have a different set of behavioural preferences based on values, maybe a quite similar value set, but ordered or ranked a little bit differently. And then a set of skills for bridging the whole intercultural field is based around this self other bridge model. And I get into that a lot in the book.

And all the work that I do with clients fundamentally is around this self other bridge model and framing it in terms of this shared meta language around cultural dimensions, conflict styles, leadership styles, et cetera. And then the rubber meeting the road in all of this is bridging strategies. What can I do differently every single day as somebody with more power to move towards somebody with less power and the way that they go about their business? So what I'm really trying to do in my work is take these really, we've talked in this, we've gone pretty deep and pretty broad in this conversation around these big picture questions, around human institutions and human challenges. I really try to boil that down into specific actions that we can take every single day. And so ultimately we could talk all day and then some about these big picture questions. But if we're not able to, in a really practical way, advise people on what they can do and what they can try, then I don't personally see, like, I wouldn't be interested. To me, that's fundamentally the impact that I want to have in the work that I do, is equipping people with a very concrete set of skills around bridging to people with less power. And if we get back to this whole notion of power transformed, that really is what I'm talking about.

Anyway, you're right, and you're right exactly in what you said. We could keep talking about this all day, and I've absolutely loved chatting to you for the last hour with the record button on and 20 minutes or so in the green room beforehand. And no doubt we'll have five or ten minutes before we hang up after this recording. So, Jason, it's been absolutely an honour and privilege to have you here today. How can our listeners get hold of you? What's the best way to keep in touch? Tell us about your book.

Well, for keeping in touch, I guess I'm a Gen xer. I'm an emailer. Jason@jasonpatten.com. That's the easiest way to drop me an email. Jason@jasonpatten.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm there. That's really my only social media is LinkedIn.

I haven't found the bandwidth to do Instagram, Twitter, so you can find me on LinkedIn. Jason patent. So if you want to get in touch, please do. There's lots of different ways that we can engage, and I'd love to have a conversation with you. If any of this piques your interest, drop me a note and or search up my book. Humanly possible, a new model of leadership for a more inclusive world. It's almost a year old now. It's going to have a birthday here at the end of the month.

It's a short read. You could read it in an afternoon, and I would encourage you to do that. If this conversation has piqued your interest, go pick up the ebook or the paperback and just give it a read. I think you'll find it interesting. The feedback that I've received from readers is they really like the stories. Everything is grounded in stories. So I don't talk about any concepts outside of the context of a specific story. Some of them are my stories.

They're mostly stories about mistakes that I've made and tried to learn from. But there's also a lot of stories that don't involve me at all. But they all tie back to these questions around power and how we can use power as a force for inclusion.

Fabulous. Is that on Amazon? Can I jump on there in a minute and get a copy?

Yes.

Brilliant. I'll do that. I'll go and cheque it out on Amazon, and I'll put the link to the book in the show notes so that anyone else who's interested in following up can hunt it down.

Thank you, Jamie. Thank you. You're welcome. And there's just one more piece I want to add to this, which is, I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't fundamentally optimistic. I get into this in the introductory chapter of the book. I feel like right now we're at the very, very leading edge. We're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do as a species in this realm of creating a better world for everyone. And I think a lot of it has to do with the things that we've learned.

And we're talking, you're talking about the vagus nerve, and we're talking about the brain and the body and the amygdala. This is relatively new that humans have had the knowledge that we have the understanding that we have about ourselves as organisms and how we function, that we can contextualise ourselves, put ourselves into this larger context, understand our limitations, but also our potential. And the two are just two sides of the same coin, our limitations and our potential, and we can really start to realise more of our potential to the extent that we're able to recognise and manage the limitations that we have. So I have no idea what kind of a listener experience this episode is going to create. I think there's moments where we got kind of heavy with stuff, but I wouldn't be doing this work if I didn't have a really foundational optimism about what human beings can accomplish and also just a real excitement about where we could potentially be headed as a species.

I concur, and I think you said something very early on, that we can't change the entire world, but we can change ourselves, we can change how we show up, we can influence others. And that's why I do it as well, knowing that the power of one, it's exponential when all the people who do care get together and we share that care and we start making a difference together. So you have to have faith. It's exhausting, but it's rewarding when you see small gains. And thank you, and I've enjoyed listening to you, I've enjoyed recording this with you. I've learned an immense amount and contextualised a few other things as well. So it's been really good. So thank you very much, Jason, and a huge thank you to you, the listener.

I appreciate you getting to the end. Tuning in. If you're not already subscribed, please track us down on Spotify or iTunes and hit the follow or subscribe button. Leave us a comment, give us a rating. Give us five stars, Gordon. Give us five stars. I dare you. And please keep a lookout for next week we'll have another episode of the Inclusion Bytes podcast.

That's B-I-T-E-S. And of course you can share it with your friends and colleagues if you've enjoyed this episode or others. I've got a number of other exciting guests. This is episode 100. Yay. Woo. We've got another hundred to go, I'm sure. At least there's another hundred to go, so I'm sure you'd be equally inspired by those guests.

Of course, if you'd like to be a guest yourself, you'd like to have a conversation. You don't have to have a book out, you don't have to have a deep study of anything. You just have to have an interest in making the world a better place. Come and join us. Send me an email jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk and finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast with you today.

Catch you next time. Bye.