5.23: Outside Tues + Tim - Choose your own Change Adventure

Show Notes

For the final episode of Season 5, Tues and Tim chat about the mosaic of this season’s podcast guests who pushed, expanded, and made them think differently. Change is on and we are all adapting, as the circumstances around us shift. Anyone who clings to a simple answer risks getting lost along the way. Tune in for some great reflections and ways to forge forwards in the midst of uncertainty.

  • Tuesday: Welcome to the final episode of Season 5 of Find The Outside: The Podcast where Tim and I are back together. We're back to wrap up the entire season which has been awesome.

  • Tim: The Learning & Evaluation spotlight mini series has inspired how we might do the next season. We're really cooking on Season 6 folks so stay tuned because it's gonna be exciting. We're either going to run 3 blocks with a theme to each block or we're going to have a theme that runs through the whole season. We're gonna do the same thing - we’re gonna bring in like amazingly cool people - we may even bring some people back from previous seasons on particular themes. So, we're pretty excited as we're beginning to kind of rethink and reinvent; you know because that's what we like to do! The mini series was a really nice experiment for us and has really influenced how we go forward because it's been so successful… and it’s about learning and if we aren't learning what are we doing, you know?!

  • Tues: That's right. It is amazing how different these seasons have been. I have really enjoyed this past season. In Season 4 we got to talk to a lot of people that we know well, in the field, like Adam Kahane and Meg [Margaret] Wheatley. This season we certainly had friends and colleagues, but some people we didn't know nearly as well which was just great. It felt really expansive. Every single person we talked to had a very different viewpoint than what we carry - and were close to our work but not exactly -  folks like Richard Beard, for example.

  • Tim: Yeah, that was cool. I was literally on a call yesterday, and we say this a lot in our work, but the idea that you actually want to get multiple - often conflicting perspectives -  so that you can see a bigger picture that you wouldn't ever see on your own and you wouldn't ever see otherwise that then enables you to make smarter, more strategic, more deliberate choices in your life. It’s like we design the pod a little bit like how we design our work. We're bringing all of these different pieces in that are adjacent to - or connected to  our work - and it sheds new light on things. It helps us see a corner of the puzzle we hadn't seen before or how a puzzle piece might fit in and I love that because that's literally how we host process, and in a funny way, it’s ended up being how we host the pod too.

  • Tues: Right? That's been true for me this season. I feel like when we talk to people we have enough of a shared language and enough of a shared viewpoint - when we talked with The Wellbeing Blueprint around how they're making change in the world based on well-being or Andrew Grant-Thomas, which is talking about kids and race or Quanita and Tenneson talking about how they do this work. It was like enough of a shared language to get their work but they also really pushed me and expanded me and made me think very differently and I hope it did for listeners too! There were just like pieces of every single episode that I'm going to carry that with me.

  • Tim: Years and years ago, Juanita Brown, one of the founders of the World Café, used to talk about this idea of a central garden. There’s got to be some kind of central garden where all of these traditions that are working for change, from somehow the same fundamental principles or the same kind of architecture, but they manifest in the world. So where's the place that they meet? I feel like there isn't one place. There's lots of central gardens. I hope our podcast is one of those. I hope it’s one of these places where lots of these different places and practitioners and people intersect and then somehow collide and learn something and then move out again.

  • Tues: I love that because I think that people can listen to the two of us, take some of our online courses, and they might be fooled to think that this is the way to do change… and I'm like well, not only do we change our thinking about the way to do change a lot but I feel like the podcast this season has provided a way to look at the ways that different people make change -  all the way from folks who are very rooted in the individual work to folks who are like, Zaid Hassan, who are looking more about how you're going to change big systems.

  • Tues: What we're talking about today goes back to some of those early things that you and I articulated, named, noticed, felt, learned through with the Art of Hosting community which is, you actually don't have to choose. It actually is about your individual expression -  and it's for the common good and it's a collective and that individual expression feeds into a collective expression. One of our most popular podcasts is our Neutrality podcast where basically we were like we don't believe in neutrality. I don't think either one of us tend to work with people - either in our individual coaching or in our work together as The Outside - we don't do work that isn't actually about advancing the common good.

  • Tim: If you think about the teaching or the training that we're giving; one of the core messages is: Understand the need. Build a shared understanding of need and get to work. Understand your own need but also understand the needs in the world, and the community, and the people, and then design your work around it.

  • Tues: You have needs and other people have needs and the space you're working in has needs, the issue has needs… and I was just thinking about our interview with Báyò Akómoláfé. One of the things that he says is, “the enemy of my ancestor is also my ancestor.” There isn't a place where understanding needs doesn't also mean looking at our needs, at the needs of those who we identify as “with us" but also the needs of those we identify as enemies or against us or whatever language or different from us or whatever it might mean. We're still in this whole ecosystem of need. We kind of ignore that at our peril. I think we see the ignoring of the needs of our “enemies” right now in the USA in our political system. What's happening is we're getting further and further apart in all of our collective work. It's failing all over the place.  Even if a forest burns everything to the ground, everything that sprouts up is still actually from that same system, right? So how do we begin to actually work with that knowledge instead of pushing it away and pretending something else is true because we don't want it to be true. It's not a question of acceptance of the impacts of the past system. It's actually an acknowledgement of the influence and that's actually the reality that we're working with today and so how do we move from what's real?

  • Tim: Thank you, podcast listeners. You're awesome. It is such a gift to be able to turn up in your ears and your life as we do and be part of your world. Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you've got ideas for Season 6, especially as we're beginning to really explore themes that could roll through the podcast.

Resources:

The Outsideshared work, participatory leadership, systems change