Triple Bottom Line
Adaptive Leadership, AI Ethics, and Sustainability
Marisa Zalabak, founder, educational psychologist, adaptive leadership coach, TEDx speaker, researcher, author, member of MIT's U.Lab, and AI Ethics educator. Marisa focuses on the human potential for sustainability, regenerative businesses, while keeping her eye on the future. She's also a co-chair on a committee expanding global AI ethics education with IEEE.org, and serves on multiple global leadership teams for the advancement of the UN sustainable development goals and peacemaking.
See our private video lessons, join our mastermind and see how our bots profit in bull/bear markets.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Marisa Zalabak, founder, educational psychologist, adaptive leadership coach, TEDx speaker, researcher, author, member of MIT's U.Lab, and AI Ethics educator. Marisa focuses on the human potential for sustainability, regenerative businesses, while keeping her eye on the future. She's also a co-chair on a committee expanding global AI ethics education with IEEE.org, and serves on multiple global leadership teams for the advancement of the UN sustainable development goals and peacemaking.
See our private video lessons, join our mastermind and see how our bots profit in bull/bear markets.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
[Upbeat theme music plays]
Female Voice Over
[00:00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!
Taylor Martin
Welcome back to the Triple Bottom Line. I am so excited today because we get to talk to Marisa. She is an educational psychologist, TEDx speaker, a member of MIT U-Lab and an AI ethics educator. Wow. That’s a lot to put into one person. So–
Marisa Zalabak
[Laugh]
Taylor Martin
Marisa, please tell our listeners a little bit more about your background, and how you kind of pull all that world together.
Marisa Zalabak
Well, they may seem disparate, but in fact they are very connected and tied. Beginning with how people learn and why people learn. So that’s even why I became an educational psychologist. I do care what people learn, but I actually was more interested in the why and the how. Right? So, how are we reaching people and communicating? In the years that I ended up moving from that, I shifted into the psychological aspect of learning. Which involved social emotional learning. And involved other elements in learning that really connected to our humanity. Right? Who are we? And that lead me to studies of philosophies. And that lead me to studies of research and creative thinking. There are many ways in which this is kind of filtered. And we’re talking about over 40 years of professional life. So, it’s many many paths.
And eventually, but kind of by happenstance in some ways—Although I’m not a big believer in coincidence. I think coincidences are somehow aligned. I ended up being invited to an AI for Good conference at Google headquarters. And met people. And I was not an AI ethicist then, I was not in technology then. And had very little knowledge. But I asked a number of questions. And the questions they were talking about AI for good and they were talking about, what are AI ethics and how do we apply that? And my questions began with, whose ethics? Whose ethics are we talking about? How and why. From there it led into other conversations and was invited to a working group with IEEE, which is the largest organization for engineers, working on AI for humanity. And I ended up becoming part of a working group that worked on recommended standards the design of AI.
Through that, I combined with other work that I do which is also in leadership coaching. My leadership coaching has always had something to do with healthy organizational culture and healthy organizational climate. Because climate and culture are two different things. And then eventually as the world has moved, you know, because of this show and your audience, has moved into sustainability, moving into the regenerative movement, and those things are very aligned with first of all, AI ethics. Because whose ethics? What is the purposes on the designs that we are designing?
It also dovetails with the work that I was doing in social emotional intelligence and creative thinking. So, there are things that I have combined. So, part of the work I really focus on right now is adaptive and regenerative leadership. And how do we transition businesses that are really having to pivot? And the other is on the AI ethics, and how are we expanding AI ethics education? And that’s about reaching as many human beings as we can possibly reach. I’m in the new committee that’s expanding AI ethics education. The first purpose and the first goal is to reach engineers who are designing AI. And what’s surprising to some people, it was to me; I could be quite naive in the beginning. It was surprising to me that engineers had not had AI ethics education
Taylor Martin
[00:04:35] Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
Informal education. If they have had some, it has been minimal or perfunctory. A few places not. And it is growing. So now Oxford Institute and MIT are all beginning to now really imbed it. But it really needs to go beyond just the big think tanks, to across-the-board education. The second level is reaching the non-formally trained engineers. So, we know that so much of our AI is, basically AI or AIS—so it’s autonomous intelligence systems, is being designed by people who are not going to a traditional school. Or going through formal education. We have 14-year-olds around the world that are [Laughs] developing systems that are being bought, used, developed, where there has been no guidance on the ethics. Right?
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
There’s two half ways very often. One, is out of need. We’ve got things like AI that’s being designed or systems that are being designed by someone in the middle of somewhere where they need something for agriculture, or they need something for electricity. So, it’s out of need.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Or the desire for profit. Or strictly the desire for profit.
Taylor Martin
Uh-huh.
Marisa Zalabak
And where AI ethics come in, is really asking those good questions that align with sustainability and regeneration. Which is, is the design of this going to be harmful? Is it going to be harmful to the users? And one of my other favorite phrases is, users and unintended users.
Taylor Martin
Ahhhh.
Marisa Zalabak
So, there’re many people in the design of these products that are not directly using. But they are the unintended users because they are affected by it.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Right. And AI systems, automous intelligence systems are everywhere. It’s our phones, it’s our computers, it’s Alexa.
Taylor Martin
[Laughs]
Marisa Zalabak
It’s Siri.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
And there’s very serious issues that even in those things that are very well established and part of our zeitgeist. Really need to be rethought.
Taylor Martin
I think it’s kinda interesting you’re bringing up this point that there’s no one with the ethics education, whether it’s formal or learned in some fashion. We constantly see all of these futuristic movies about how AI is going to take over the world and everything. [Laughs] Well, this kinda seems like this is how it’s gonna happen. Is because the people [Laughs] that are making the AI aren’t really thinking about the ethics that are involved with it and the effects of their work like in a totality holistic kind of way. So, that’s kind of scary to think about. So where do you see it changing now? Do you see a lot of people start to, you said like some organizations of a high level or larger organizations with AI, are baking in the ethics as part of it. But is it holistic? Does everybody A-Z get the ethics education?
Marisa Zalabak
[00:08:07] Right. Well, this is the point of the committee that I’m on. We’re starting with the engineers, the designers. Then we want to go to the developers. Because we have businesspeople. In every business who say, we’re not really using AI or finding you should talk to my IT people. [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
But the people in charge, the people running the companies, very often are not asking those kinds of questions as well. So, we want to go to the developers. Then we want to go to the people. People. Us. Adults who use this.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Adults who make the choices to purchase it. And eventually – Now this is a huge scaffold. But we’re starting with the engineers, both traditionally and nontraditionally trained. Then we go to business. Then we go, hopefully simultaneously, we’ll do more on expanding it for all of us. And then to children K-12. Because if we can teach children, I love the example, if we can teach children to build a Lego building, in the instructions we can say, if you’re gonna build a building consider how it would affect the people living there [Laughs] and the animals, and the planet. Right? We can actually begin to build those things in.
Taylor Martin
Build the end in mind.
Marisa Zalabak
The good news, because I don’t want it to sound all dystopian and you know, hell. Although I use hell for a different thing, I’ll tell you about that. I use hell for a different thing. But the reason I got into this in the beginning, was discovering all these people who were doing good stuff with AI.
Taylor martin
Oh.
Marisa Zalabak
Really good stuff. Like phenomenally good stuff. The crisis hotline is probably one of my very favorites that has been around now for a little while and has been saving thousands and thousands of young people’s lives.
Taylor Martin
That’s fascinating. How does that work?
Marisa Zalabak
It’s a triage system. So, you know, if you go into an emergency room you’re gonna get triaged. Who’s in most danger? So, it’s a system. And in many schools across the country, you’ll see crisis text hotline. Posters for them. And young people can text, anonymously, to say that they’re in trouble. To say that they’re in a crisis. And this was prior to the pandemic.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
And now it’s even grown much bigger as we can imagine. And I’ll call “the pandemics” because we have four pandemics. And I can get into that another time. In any case, they text the system. The system has a triage algorithm, that can tag in multiple languages even, can flag pace, cadence of the text, terms used, emojis. So that what they are doing is they are flagging who seems to be in the worst danger in the moment. Everyone gets a response. But if that text has red flags to it, it bumps it to the next level of triage. At that level of triage you are now talking about another system of algorithms that are now going to comb through it again, and keep responding.
Taylor Martin
Mh-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
But with those red flags, and that goes to a second system. And then once it gets, I think it’s to the third system, if I recall, it may have changed by this time, it goes to a panel of human beings who are trained to now respond.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? And that response can take it even further to eventually reach out and say, do you need help? Do you want us to help? Do want us to come to you? This was three years ago, I think, they had saved 36 thousand lives. So, at this point, it’s got to be exponential.
Taylor Martin
So, they had backlogged data leading up to that? So, they could see the increase?
Marisa Zalabak
Yes.
Taylor Martin
[00:12:14] Wow.
Marisa Zalabak
And it’s extraordinary. Stop the Traffic was an AI application, that was helping to reduce human trafficking. There are IAIS systems cleaning the oceans and dealing with malaria. So, there are systems that really are extraordinary. And at the same time, we’re not looking at all of the ethics. There was the big tsunami in Indonesia several years ago. There were AI systems that were in place to help warn. The problem is, there were some fail safes that hadn’t really been checked all the way through. And because there was no human backup, no “old tech” [Laughs] backup.
Taylor Martin
[Laughs] Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
Cuz technology is a bolder and a stick. Right?
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Because there was no old tech backup. There were actually many more casualties than there needed to be
Taylor Martin
Yeah right.
Marisa Zalabak
And so, we’re not thinking. That’s not for any horrible reason, that’s because sometimes we get carried away with, this is the system, this is exciting, we want this to be modern, ee think we’re gonna do better.
Taylor Martin
Uh-huh.
Marisa Zalabak
And then of course there are nefarious folks out there, the “doctor knows”, from my generation, who are out there who want to use AI for greed; want to use AI for power. That’s the privacy stuff. But there’s a lot of things that just haven’t been thought through. And one of my favorite examples is, Alexa and Siri. There’s a reason you don’t hear them commenting when I say their names. [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Is because they are turned off.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Actually, I don’t use them. Because when we consider the fact that we are having children give orders to an adult woman’s voice.
Taylor Martin
Wow! Okay.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? Let that drop in.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
And the thing is, a lot of people say, it’s just a machine. The thing is, first of all—a woman’s voice was chosen for a reason.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? There’s a reason we don’t have male voices. I mean, you can choose to do that programming. But people tend to not. They tend to want to order a woman’s voice around. Or ask a woman for something. Those are actually ethical considerations. Privacy. This is where when we go beyond engineers—And stop me at any point here, because I’m going on. We go from engineers, to nontraditionally trained engineers, to business developers and producers. Because they’re mobilizing it to us, because we are buying it. We have power. We have more power than we think we have. But we need education to make us aware. So, when we’re dealing with biases, cuz everyone has biases. Right? That’s implicit bias. Every human being has biases. Where it becomes explicit, we get a choice. And this is where it’s completely dovetailed with my work of social and emotional intelligence. And, in social equity. I have a huge background in social equity work. Once we know our biases, now I can make the conscious choice that I either want to keep it [Laughs] or I don’t.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
[00:16:08] Now I get a choice. And this is where ethics education gives people that choice. Let’s begin thinking about what our choices are. And some of it are things that just are paradoxical, that are human. Right? So, we have things like, there’s the privacy paradox. The privacy paradox is where our phone and our computers go accept and we go yeah, I’ll accept. And sometimes we go should I really accept it? [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Hell Yeah. I think about that a lot.
Marisa Zalabak
And we all do it. We all do it. And we go, you know what it’s just too difficult right now. It’s gonna be easier. So, we press yes. Now, where this is really an important thing about education, is the more of us who understand that can begin to demand that the producers do not make – What we’re getting popped up right now, the reason we just press accept is because it’s 4 thousand pages long.
Taylor Martin
Always.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? [Laughs] Right? And it’s in some kind of legalese that you don’t really understand.
Taylor Martin
Yup. Foreign language.
Marisa Zalabak
Right. There’s absolutely no reason for that. And in fact, there are models, there are really effective models that combine visuals, a visual acceptance, with the written acceptance because of course you have translation issues.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
We use visual signs for driving, right? We use visual signs for all kinds of things. There’s a beautiful combination of things that can be used, if companies want to use them. And if we demand that we use them. If everybody starts to write to Google and says, we demand. We don’t want to buy your products.
Taylor Martin
I think that does happen sometimes. But it’s usually just something that’s just so egregious that it poses that. Typically a lot of companies will just push a long what is beneficial to them and this product that they’re offering. But some of the more egregious ones, I think those do get flagged usually by some sort of group and then, you know, rallies the troops in the community to then sign a petition or something or some sort. I wanted to talk about your ethics part of AI, but I also want to talk about your adaptive leadership that you do. Because you talk about how that and regenerative businesses and sustainability all works together. Can we transition to what it is that you do and what adaptive learning is? Or, you know, leadership.
Marisa Zalabak
I would love to. It’s something I adore talking about. Adaptive leadership, the term adaptive leadership was coined by Ron Heifetz and Martin Linsky. I think it was originally from Heifetz at Harvard. And there is a whole study, a whole program, of adaptive leadership. And there are four pillars. When I discovered, first of all, things I had been doing. And I discovered that there was this lovely coining of this model that was beautiful. Which includes emotional intelligence, the second pillar is organizational justice, which was completely aligned – I’d been doing trainings in social equity for decades now. So in organizational justice people sense a fairness.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? The third pillar is what they call development, but what they mean by that is lifelong learning. For a leader to say, oh we should all have a growth mindset. And to just say that is one thing. But for a leader to say, you know what, I’m taking this class right now and I’m just learning this. That’s modeling lifelong learning. Right? And so that’s really what they refer to as adaptive leadership. You really have to be walking the walk on this.
Taylor Martin
[00:20:16] Yeah. I agree.
Marisa Zalabak
And the fourth, and that’s me. I always joke I’m the poster child for lifelong learning because I keep going back to school. And the fourth element is character. And what they mean by character, they have a number of ways of looking at it. But it aligns with something I had been teaching for a very very long time. Which is something called one good thing. Which is about really developing the skill, and it’s a skill, and an ability of awareness. It combines with emotional intelligence, but to identify which strengths you need in the moment. So we all have, I don’t know how much you know about character strength core, but there’s a whole array, an index of characters strengths. There’s honesty, integrity, there’s lifelong learning, humor, right? But there’s all of these characters strengths.
Taylor Martin
Mhm.
Marisa Zalabak
Character traits. Right?
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
And in really effective analysis of them you constantly retest yourself because we all have tons of them. But whichever ones we need at the moment will tend to float to the top. So for a perfect example, is after the first year of the pandemic the rise in the people saying, patience was not one of my better characteristics. [Laughs] It was in there, when I had to be.
Taylor Martin
Mhm.
Marisa Zalabak
But it has floated to the top. So I may need from this idea of character awareness, do I need patience and humility in this moment? Do I need humor and discernment in this moment? Which characteristics do I need today in this moment that are appropriate? And it goes away—I’m sorry there’s noise, I live in Manhattan.
Taylor Martin
That’s okay.
Marisa Zalabak
I really pull away, I don’t like saying anything is wrong. But I pull away from this idea of, there are five main characteristics of a good leader. There are three main characteristics of a good employee. That kind of stuff moves completely away from adaptability. I mean Darwin changed his theory from survival of the fittest. To [Laughs] survival of the most adaptable.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
Adaptability is everything. So I have added two pillars of my own to the original adaptive leadership. Which to me, incorporates my work. And the two pillars I have added to that are, AI ethics, because it is part of our life and that’s not going away.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
And that’s in every area of our lives. That’s leadership in our homes. That’s leadership in our businesses. That’s leadership in our communities. So our awareness and our ability to ask good questions. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s philosophy really. Which it has a bad rap, but it’s basically philosophy. Can we ask good questions? And the second pillar I add is, sustainability and regeneration. And I say both sustainability and regeneration even though, as you know, they’re not the same things.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
Because I want to make sure that we keep the invitation open to people who are saying, we were just starting to talk about sustainability now we’re talking about regeneration. I want to leave the door open. I want to say, if we can move to [Laughs] sustainability if we can even move there, then we can move us to regenerative leadership. But we have to at least begin moving ourselves in that direction. And that again is something that’s not going away. That issue, that need, is not going away. And so to me, I feel that they require two very specific pillars of attention.
Taylor Martin
Uh-huh.
Marisa Zalabak
[00:24:25] And so my organizational culture work is all of those six pillars. That’s what develops your culture.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
If we’re thinking ethically, and if we’re thinking regeneratively, and we’re using emotional intelligence, and learning, and character strengths. We’re doing all those things. Think about the culture that creates.
Taylor Martin
It sounds wonderful. Sign me up! I love it!
Marisa Zalabak
It’s a gorgeous culture. And the thing is, the culture of an organization creates—well it’s interesting, because it’s the chicken or the egg. It creates the climate. The climate and the culture are not the same thing. The climate of an organization if we think of it, we compare it to the literal weather. If I live in the North Pole my culture is going to be affected by that climate.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
But also, my culture may affect the climate because [Laughs] if I’m destructive—
Taylor Martin
That’s very good. I love that analogy.
Marisa Zalabak
I’m gonna be hurting the climate.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? I’m also great a fan of, fan is the wrong word, of indigenous beliefs and indigenous practices. And this idea that in many indigenous cultures certainly in North America and in South America, in many places in the world. This idea that we are completely interconnected with nature.
Taylor Martin
100 %!
Marisa Zalabak
And the idea that we would separate ourselves out is a very strange detachment. Is a very odd detachment. And so how we operate in our businesses, how we operate in our homes, effects the climate. If we recycle it effects the climate. [Laughs] In our home, if we [Laughs] recycle in our business, it effects the climate. I really work, as much as I can, toward the, well we should and we need to, right? I don’t know about you but that’s never worked for me.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
[Laughs] When somebody tells me what I should do.
Taylor Martin
[Laughs]
Marisa Zalabak
Is the invitation. Can we really make these invitations? People want to leave a legacy. People go, do people really care about leaving a legacy if they don’t have kids? And I’m going, are you kidding me? Do you know anybody who says, I have no desire to be remembered? [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
No one.
Marisa Zalabak
Right?
Taylor Martin
No one said that.
Marisa Zalabak
Right? No one said that. I mean, maybe. But that person might be having other struggles. Right?
Taylor Martin
Yeah sure.
Marisa Zalabak
So the thing is, we all want to leave a meaningful legacy. And some people get caught up in power and they think that somehow that’s gotten worked into, that’s gonna be their legacy. But can we rethink it? I want to continually ask even those people, who is your best self? Because you know your best self, you do. And asking it again and saying, well it may feel uncomfortable right now, that’s okay. Go take it away, you don’t have to answer me.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
This is a question for yourself. Right? This is where the emotional intelligence is really important. Cuz people equate emotional intelligence with social intelligence. They are intertwined again [Laughs] like nature and humanity. But they are not. They’re different elements. There are differentiations. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand ourselves. Really understand ourselves and be connected to ourselves. To understand our emotions, to understand our way of thinking, to understand our triggers of how we react, and to be able to manage ourselves when we do have reactions. Right? Social intelligence is what we do with other people. Social intelligence is how I take my emotional intelligence and apply it to how I operate with other people.
Taylor Martin
[00:28:38] Yeah exactly.
Marisa Zalabak
So really, understanding the differences here. And they are connected, because we apply emotional intelligence. People go, I think I’ve got great social intelligence, but not such great emotional intelligence. Well then they don’t. Sorry, they kinda don’t. There is no base then. And I’m very fond of this, I said this in my TEDx talk, nobody gets a certificate of completion on emotional intelligence. I mean I’m really sorry to disappoint. People are like, what do you mean? I have high emotional intelligence. Well you might, but you’re not done. I’m not done. And I’ve been teaching it for a long time. It is something that we adapt, right? So I might have some trauma that happens. I might have a situation that occurs. It might alter my self-awareness. For whatever number of reasons
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
My ability to come back to myself. It’s kinda like a testing thing. I’m not big on the testing thing. Most testing is not formative. In educational psychology the gold standard of testing, is formative. We test as we go so that we see what we need to learn. Like ice skating, an ice skater does that, right? But that’s not how we do this in education. Test after the fact, then we get the results by the time we’ve already changed. And then we try to apply old [Laughs] information—
Taylor Martin
To a new problem.
Marisa Zalabak
And it’s not to say all testing or assessment is wrong. But I call it friendly assessment or friendly evaluation.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
Friendly evaluation is where I say, what don’t I know?
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
What do I need to learn? I’m writing a book called, Unlearning our way to the Future. Because I think that that’s—
Taylor Martin
I like the title.
Marisa Zalabak
That’s kinda where we are headed.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
In fact, I don’t think it’s new. I think that this was probably true of early people. Right? Of early humans.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
They had to unlearn. That’s what children do. I forget the exact number. Children learn 50 new sounds a day when they’re in early infancy. Think about that. 50 new sounds in a day. And parents will know. You’ll go, wait a minute they knew this yesterday. Somebody asks them to do something, or asks them something and a toddler will go, I don’t know. And they’re going, but they knew this. It’s because in order for them to keep taking in new stuff, they have to weed some of it out for a while and/or they have to put some of it in storage so that they can absorb the new stuff and then bring back whatever it is that they needed before. And we do the same thing.
Taylor Martin
I do the same thing right now! [Laughs]
Marisa Zalabak
We’re doing the same thing right now! My mother had a fantastic phrase growing up. At night she would say to me, what did you learn today?
Taylor Martin
Oh. That was the best one. My favorite one was, what was the best question you asked today? That’s my favorite for a kid. To ask them when they go to school. What’s the best question you asked today?
Marisa Zalabak
It’s fantastic! And the thing is, it values questions. For me, it valued learning. And she would even say sometimes, really? Go take a look in the dictionary. And the thing was, she was somebody that had not been well educated and highly educated.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
[00:32:35] She educated herself. Both my parents grew up during the depression. They had to leave school. They eventually went and got their GED’s when they were in their 70’s.
Taylor Martin
Wow.
Marisa Zalabak
[Laughs] Which I love. This idea that we should be learning something new everyday cuz we can. We can—there is no excuse. Well there is, people have all kinds of reasons. I don’t want to vilify. That we have every reason in the world to be learning every day. I was referring to hell before. I have something call the human arts lab. And that’s a several month project that an organization or a group can come and develop all of these kinds of skills as habits.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
Combined with creative thinking.
Taylor Martin
Habits are, I think, so pivotal for our adaptiveness; adaptive leadership, adaptive learning. Because once you set up good habits, they can take you anywhere you want to go. And of course, push away the bad ones and rearchitect the good ones into you. I’ve been doing that very mindfully over the last so many months and it is having a big effect on the trajectory I guess you could say?
Marisa Zalabak
Mm-Hm.
Taylor Martin
Where I want to take my life. My business. My family. My everything.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah.
Taylor Martin
So I think you nailed the head on the nail right there.
Marisa Zalabak
I also though want to encourage people to not get stuck in the, these are the three habits.
Taylor Martin
Oh right. Of course.
Marisa Zalabak
In the same way that, these are the three characteristics, right? I mean, it’s mind-blowing to see. Again this was in my talk, I’m forgetting the number now, but the exponential jump in people doing mindfulness.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
The mindfulness apps that were bought. It was something like 300 thousand. It jumped by 300 thousand in a couple of months or something like that. It went from 10 thousand to 300 thousand or something. I have the numbers off, but it’s in my talk. Cuz I put the accurate numbers in my talk. [Laughs] That jump was because that’s what people needed.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
At that moment. Now, are those habits that will serve them the rest of their lives? Probably. It’s funny because my original professional background was in the arts. And I was a performing artist. And people very often refer to performing artists as being kind of flaky. And the reality is that it’s one of the hardest things to do. Because you have to build really strict habits and structures. So it becomes the foundation. Anyway. These are subjects I could talk about forever.
Taylor Martin
[00:35:31] Well I think that pillar three that you mentioned, development? To me, I think that is like a foundational pillar for me. As opposed to a pillar, it’s more of a foundation beneath all the pillars. Because its always evolving and learning to create that adaptiveness in all the different pillar categories.
Marisa Zalabak
Mm-hm.
Taylor Martin
I feel like that is one that, I think, is completely overlooked.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah. Well it’s funny. One thing I learned just this last week. I read and read and read about AI because I had to do a fast catch up when I first got involved. [Laughs] I dived into the deep end of the pool and I really needed to learn how to swim right now.
Taylor Martin
[Laughs]
Marisa Zalabak
So I did. And that’s actually something I do often. That’s a habit for me.
Taylor Martin
I do it too.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah. Some people don’t like that, that’s too anxiety producing. For me, actually it’s invigorating.
Taylor Martin
Mm-Hm.
Marisa Zalabak
I had heard about it, but not the extent, the carbon footprint of emails.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
The carbon footprint of our phone use. And we all think, well I’m not sending paper anymore, right? I’m saving the planet by not sending paper. That’s moving in the right direction [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
[Laughs] That’s like the sustainability to regenerative. It’s moving in the right direction. But in fact, there are formulas that will tell you that this many emails equal this many plane trips in first class.
Taylor Martin
Yeah. The type of size of carbon footprint. I get it. Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
And the thing is, so many businesses go, oh this is all so great. Because now I can send out four thousand or four million messages in a day, and I only used to send out so many in paper. Now I can send out a million because it doesn’t matter. Now this is saving the planet. It’s is making us greener. That’s what it always says, right? When you go to press the button. Do you wanna go paperless and save the planet? [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
[Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Right
Marisa Zalabak
[00:37:32] And it does. And it does. But it’s how much it does.
Taylor Martin
Mm-hm.
Marisa Zalabak
Now as a business owner, do we want to think about how many we send? Those are tough choices. That’s another thing that Heifetz is very clear about in adaptive leadership. This isn’t just gonna make leadership easy.
Taylor Martin
I was gonna say, about adaptive leadership. The thing is that the leadership has to learn these pillars. But don’t they have the learn to teach them? You know? To their team --
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah.
Taylor Martin
Members. Because they’re gonna be the leaders of tomorrow. And they’re gonna be leading the business in all different directions.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah. And it’s the willingness. There’s a phrase in creative thinking. I did a lot of research for compacities for imaginative learning. Which is part of Lincoln Center’s model for teaching through the arts. And there’s a phrase– Howard Gardner uses it multiple intelligences, but it’s called Tolerance for Ambiguity.
Taylor Martin
Mmm.
Marisa Zalabak
And tolerance for ambiguity is an extraordinary ability. And it is an ability that we can develop. For some people, they’re like, I have a pretty high tolerance for not knowing. Right? There are some people that that is true. But the majority of people that’s not true. We want to know and so we stick with what we know. Conformation biases. That just formalizes it. But we stick with what we know. And the thing is, for an adaptive leader to be able to say, I’m not sure if we’re gonna fail here. I’m not sure. And these are the risks that not just I’m taking. These are the risks we’re all taking, and these are the reasons we should do it. These are the pros these are the cons. Everybody come on in let’s talk about this. But we will need these skills more and more because the world is filled with what is referred to as wicked problems.
Taylor Martin
That’s a terminology? Wicked problems?
Marisa Zalabak
[00:39:40] That’s actually a term. If you want to read about it, John Elkington has a fantastic—
Taylor Martin
Oh.
Marisa Zalabak
Book. Green Swans. Which is about you know green swans, black swans, grey swans. Which ones are disastrous choices, good, bad choices? But in the emerging future, especially as technology has become more advanced, and it’s not just but for other reasons. Each solution to a problem is very potentially, if not guaranteed, cuz these are complex problems, to create a new problem. That solution may be creating a new problem. It’s an iterative process. And then you have to go back and go, it’s learning the skills to say, it wasn’t a failure. This thing about it failed. And it uncovered this new problem. But those are wicked problems, right? We use emails to [Laughs] deal with paper and then all of a sudden that the emails have carbon. Right? So that’s a really pretty minor wicked problem.
Taylor Martin
Yeah. I know.
Marisa Zalabak
But there are other wicked problems. Wicked problems, if you look it up, wicked problems is a thing that’s been around for a while. Which I didn’t know about. I learned about it because of both getting involved in B-Corps and the Triple Bottom Line.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
People are looking for solutions that very often uncovers new problems. [Laughs]
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
And the more we can tolerate, that’s what made me think about it, is the tolerance for ambiguity. Because if we’re going to have wicked problems, can we build a tolerance to go, Ah! We got another wicked problem. [Laughs] Do you know what I mean? And say, okay that’s a challenge today. That’s the challenge. And it becomes a process, right? I did a presentation at the Cybergenetics Conference in 2020 on transdisciplinary collaboration. And transdisciplinary collaboration, people don’t use the word very often. It was coined, in the science of team science. But it’s this idea that in order to really solve the most complex problems in the world, we’re gonna need more than just multi-disciplinary. It’s when it’s additive. I say I’m gonna use this discipline plus this, plus this, plus this. Then there’s cross disciplinary that goes to transdisciplinary. Transdisciplinary is where we can pull so many different disciplines, and some disciplines we didn’t even know that was a discipline. It’s just new perspectives, right? We’re gonna bring all of those together and we’re gonna make something new out of it. We’re not just adding them together and we’re not just looking from each other’s perspectives, which happens in cross. We’re actually making something new. And that’s going to become more and more needed. The ability to facilitate transdisciplinary collective work. Cuz that’s really collaborative work a whole other level; on a meta level.
Taylor Martin
[00:43:13] Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
And it’s exciting. I mean, I love it because I think of myself as a polymath cuz it so resonates with me because I feel like I am only as good of an educational psychologist cuz I do the other things I do. All of those things that I have done have turned into what is me now. It’s a whole different thing. Each one of us is that way, by the way. I have a talk I did recently on the uniqueness of human potential because actually, there are no two of us the same. It’s real.
Taylor Martin
I could go down that conversation rabbit hole for hours. [Laughs] I’ve had this conversation with so many people.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah. So, there’s something called phenotypic plasticity. I mean, watch my talk, it’s a fantastic talk. It’s about the science of, we literally are made of stardust. There are no two people who are alike, not even identical twins. No two people are the same.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
And so when we begin thinking that way, isn’t that exciting? Right? If everybody were the same, the world would be God awful boring. Right? First of all.
Taylor Martin
Absolutely.
Marisa Zalabak
And then we wouldn’t find new solutions. So it’s this idea of, it’s not just about rehashing. I understand people want formulas. If I find the formula for it [Laughs] then we’re gonna fix the problem. We may need to develop the skills, not need to be or have to be. We may want to develop the skills to be more flexible than that to see where we can head. And where/how can we begin to explore, and get comfortable with exploring?
Taylor Martin
Yeah. I mean, there’s so many things we could unpack out of that conversation we just had about being flexible and adaptable to all the different things that are gonna come at you. Getting a bigger team than you think necessary for a problem, a wicked problem. How those create new ones.
Marisa Zalabak
Mh-hm.
Taylor Martin
I mean, it sounds to me more like we’re more aligning with just how evolution works. You know? It’s just so—
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah.
Taylor Martin
Complex. But so innate in us. Because we are part of the collective. Right?
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah.
Taylor Martin
So we literally could talk about that for hours. But I’m gonna have to cut us off. I’m gonna have to be the adult in the room here and cut this off.
Marisa Zalabak
[Laughs]
Taylor Martin
[Laughs]
Marisa Zalabak
I love it. Yes. I know you and I could probably talk about these subjects for a very very long time. And I’ve just so enjoyed it. Because it’s something I think the world should be invited to consider.
Taylor Martin
Yeah. For me I think, as business leaders, I think they’re the ones that are in a position to really make bigger changes. By having a boss, manager or director, leader, whoever is in your organization that can take these things into account; digest them, understand them. And then help you learn them. As opposed to kind of holding you down in your holding position. It’s gonna help the team, the organization as a whole, the community that has built up around us, as well as the products and services that your company offers. There’s just so many incredible that can come out of it. And that’s really, I think, the heart of what attracted me to talk to you about all of this stuff. I just see that business leaders can learn so much from all of these things.
Marisa Zalabak
[00:46;49] And also, aligning with who they are as a human being. This business of, I’m one person at business and I’m another person in my life, you know? The thing that drives me, my drive; I have a 22-year-old daughter. That is my sun and my moon, my absolute world. I adore her. I’ve been a teacher for so many years, I’ve taught thousands. I love children.
Taylor Martin
Ah.
Marisa Zalabak
And whether I had my own, or I didn’t. The idea of them not having a full life is— I feel like that’s kind of at stake if we can’t begin thinking in ways that are more collective. So that’s my driver. It’s always gonna be my driver. I wanna see them live these beautiful—I’m gonna live however long I’m gonna live, you know? Regardless of all kinds of the anti-aging thing.
Taylor Martin
[Laughs]
Marisa Zalabak
But I’m gonna live however long I live. But I really want to see our younger generations thrive. Not just survive but thrive.
Taylor Martin
Wholeheartedly agree.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah. And I think we can do it. I do. I’m a dedicated optimist.
Taylor Martin
Yeah.
Marisa Zalabak
Not an optimist in the way of, I’m gonna be positive regardless of anything. No. There are sometimes it’s like, things suck at the moment. [Laughs] But I can still be optimistic that I’m going to find a way.
Taylor Martin
Right.
Marisa Zalabak
I can still be optimistic that we can find solutions. And that’s where the dedication to it comes. You know, falling out of the boat in the middle of the ocean. If I can find something to hold onto to get to shore then– sometimes that is what it requires. So.
Taylor Martin
And never losing sight of hope.
Marisa Zalabak
Yes.
Taylor Martin
Yes.
Marisa Zalabak
Yes.
Taylor Martin
Beautiful.
Marisa Zalabak
Yeah.
Taylor Martin
Marisa, how can people get in contact with you? Or follow your work and what you do? Find you on TEDx?
Marisa Zalabak
Fantastic. I have a TEDx that is out that is called, Fire Drills for Flourishing. My talks are on YouTube, I have one that’s on the unique role of human beings and AI. I have a talk that’s on the unique potential of human beings. You can find them just under my name. You can get ahold of me at my company, which is OpenChannelCulture.com One word, all in one. Openchannelculture.com Or you can contact me directly at MZalabak@openchannelculture or LinkedIn is generally such a fast and easy way. So, those are all the options.
Taylor Martin
And when should we expect that new book that you mentioned earlier?
Marisa Zalabak
Oh.
Taylor Martin
No pressure. No pressure. No pressure.
Marisa Zalabak
From your lips. So I’m hoping to have that out in a few months, but you know, I’ve got a lot of projects going on. So I’m just gonna see. If I can get it out by the end of this year, I know that would be a great goal reached.
Taylor Martin
[00:49:53] Well let me know when it does, cuz I would love to read it. Marisa, thank you so much for being on today’s show I [Laughs] really enjoyed this conversation. It’s gonna have me thinking for hours today [Laughs] about –
Marisa Zalabak
[Laughs]
Taylor Martin
All of the different things we talked about. So thank you again for being on this show, and I really wish you well on your new book and all the work that you’re doing.
Marisa Zalabak
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Taylor Martin
It was our pleasure.
[Upbeat theme music plays]
Female Voice Over
[00:50:14] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.
[Upbeat theme music fades out]
