Provocation as Leadership. A conversation with Michael Johnstone and Maxime Ferm

Provocation is a critical component of a leader’s toolkit.  To disrupt the system, and challenge the status quo is essential if we are to adapt to new and changing realities. In this episode Gerard is joined by Michael Johnstone and Maxime Ferm to discuss their new book Provocation as Leadership: A Roadmap for Adaptation and Change.  

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Transcript

Gerard:

Well, welcome Michael and Maxime. It's absolutely wonderful to be able to speak today with you about your new book, Provocation as Leadership. Thank you very much for joining me.

For our audience who haven't encountered you previously, how would you describe who you are, and importantly, what your interest in leadership is?

Maxime:

Gosh, where to start? You know, I position, because the question is big, I do have a habit of saying that my work is to interfere in other people's business and somehow get paid for it. And I think that throwaway is about the fact that For us, the boundaries of leadership work are quite hard to define as is their impact. So broadly, I think we are leadership educators. If such a thing is possible, we're in the business of helping others understand more about the potential of what real leadership is. and what it can achieve and why it's absolutely essential.

Michael: 

And another take on who we are and why leadership, I think, has a slightly more personal angle or perspective to it, in case it's not obvious, because this is audio, we're a working couple and a life couple. And we have been, we actually met running groups. Several decades ago, I should say, rather than the specific date. But we were group workers working in community health. And we were counseling psychologists and systems family therapists. And we worked for an organization internally offering counseling services, psychological services. And discovered that disproportionate number of the so-called personal problems that people brought into the room were in fact systemic issues to do with how the organization ran itself and the way managers operated and the way that people in authority roles thought they should run the organization and so we began to pipe up and slowly started to offer more um, relational and systems-wide interventions. And so our interest in the connection between human growth and well, well-being and human individual welfare, um, and an, and organizational welfare grew. And that organization in a way helped us, trained us by, by its, the experience we had to think more widely, um, and the kind of interest in collective work, what we now would call leadership work, and grew from there. And the fact that we've done it together over 40 years as a couple, has kind of informed a lot of how we think. Because in a way, everything that we do in our work is informed by who we are as a couple as well.

Gerard:

Hmm. And I have a strong urge to ask you a question about the exercise of leadership with each other and what you've learned about that through the journey. But perhaps I might come back to that one later on, if it's okay, after we cover a bit of territory around the topic of provocation as leadership. Your new book is called Provocation as Leadership. What do you mean by provocation? and how does it relate to the exercise of leadership.

Maxime:

So we worked hard on the title, if you like, what is, trying to identify what is the heart of the work we want to make available. And to provoke is to bring forth, looking at the origin of the word. And By provocation, we are really talking about recognizing a system, usually of people, that is holding something in place that they say they want to move on from. And yet, usually present to us in so many ways demonstrating how they're actually holding on tight to what is, rather than going to what they say they want. And therefore to provoke, to bring forth, either by poking a little or surprising a lot, in some way to move around to perturb the system that's holding a problem in place, is what the work is about. and again to provide perspective on that kind of framing that Maxime has given. We've always been involved with and had a fascination for what we describe as a book as provocation, right back to our work as family therapists. And in fact, we learned a lot, and we speak about it in the book, from our work in family therapy, which in a way is about helping systems, small systems, a family, get sufficiently unsettled so that they can break the leashes of what's holding them in place.

Gerard:

Hmm.

Michael:

And many of the founders of family therapy, including those we work with, like a guy called Frank Farrelly, who wrote a book called Provocative Therapy, say that when families come in crisis, what's needed is not... to reduce the crisis, but to induce a different kind of crisis. The difference between what's presenting and what's underneath it, what's holding the system in place. And so family therapy for a long time, systems family therapy for a long time, has been about disturbing the kind of status quo of those families. And so we brought that into our leadership work and noticed as we started to work with Heifetz and Linsky at Harvard. 25 years ago, how much in their teaching, both the provocative methods of how they teach, parallel what's required to do the adaptive work that's required to help a system move forward. And so there's a connection between our early history, the work we did and what we learned from Heifetz and Linsky through our work at Harvard, and how we've translated through our experience what's in the book.

Gerard:

And that notion of, so what I'm hearing you talk about is this notion of disturbance in the system, provocation as a, as an active intervention, productive, an active intervention into the system to create some kind of productive disturbance that allows that system to adapt or evolve to something which is either more functional or helpful, or just to whatever it needs to become next rather than being stuck. in the status quo. So when you talk about provocation as leadership, what would be an example of provocation as leadership in a setting for which many of our audience would recognise when we talk about leadership per se?

Michael:

So again, in order to give an example and respond to that question, it's important to frame that many people have a skewed idea of provocation as being something big, loud, nasty and terribly uncomfortable, maybe bordering on rude and aggressive. What we try to outline in the book is that there are many ways to disturb a system. many ways to help open up the status quo to bring more forth, to bring more enabling behaviors, more innovation, more new ideas forth. And so we provide in the book many case studies which illustrate that range. And one good example from a corporate environment, we have a case study about a North American bank, and it's a really good example of... more gentle forms of provocation, but that are nonetheless for that system, deeply disturbing. And so, the new CEO and his colleagues found themselves in a very unsettled place after the death of the founder of the organization, as well as the deputy CEO who was going to be the new CEO, both died. So there was a... period of deep disturbance about who were in the senior roles. Rene Jones took over. And just his presence in the bank in itself was provocation. He's an African-American man and a man who's got a quiet demeanor. But he introduced ways of operating into the bank over a period of two or three years. That unsettled. the very predictable, staid, and conservative way that this bank had operated. Very successfully, we should add. For instance, He changed the way in which the executive team met monthly from transactional kind of updating of information to what he described as more strategic conversation. And he set the ground rules that there were gonna be three rules only. A, you must turn up and must do so in person. B. These are only strategic conversations about our future, and see all opinions are possible. And it took six months for this executive team to figure out how to make this work for themselves. You know, they literally kicked and screamed for six months because it was deeply uncomfortable for them. Now on the surface, that doesn't seem particularly provocative, but in a system that is conservative, that's not used to that way of operating, His provocation was not just the early intervention of saying this is how we're gonna do it, but holding steady over six and 12 months, holding his colleagues only to these conversations, always bringing them back to the nature of what he wanted so that new capacities could be developed and old ways could be discarded. Now that's an example of a much gentler form of provocation.

Maxime:

And you know, you said something that people could readily understand in their own experience. One of the simplest provocations might be, for example, provocation as leadership, might be working with a team at work, might be about planning, might be about problem solving. And to hope... the conversation and be able to say quite simply to a group, you've said that one of your core values is recognition of difference and diversity. So how do you account for the fact that every time Mabel, the only woman in the group, speaks, no one responds to her directly? To what extent is that? assisting you and to what extent might that be holding you back? And it's on the surface, it's a very simple and obvious question. And yet, in our experience, people find quite deeply provocative and is an act of leadership because it holds the promise, again, as Michael said earlier, of disturbing what has been an invisible status quo. and preventing people working more robustly and fully to the things they say they care about.

Gerard:

And so the examples that you've shared, you know, the sort of words that might come to my mind are, I would say gentle, inviting, reflective, persistent. So when we use the language of turning the heat up, regulating the heat, creating productive disturbance, it's sort of, they're not the immediate ramping up massively of heat. And then it kind of also, and you said you were very careful to say that, most people's minds when we think about provocation pretty quickly go to those more jarring, either aggressive, disturbing, almost violent. And in my thinking, in my mind, as you were talking, I had the, you wrote this lovely article about... that you put into LinkedIn, which you talked, and you took an excerpt from the book and you talked about Hannah Gadsby and what she was doing in terms of, as an exercise of leadership through her program, Nanette. And I, again, was struck and I watched some of that was that she was inviting people into something. She, they were authorizing her in some way to have a conversation. with them or with us. And I contrast that though to, let's say, a very different image that I see on the TV, Extinction Rebellion, and the significant disturbance that they create within the system, and would seem to me a very deliberately to do so. And it seems that there's quite a range therefore of provocation in terms of its amplitude and its impact that could be exercised.

Maxime:

Yes, indeed. I mean, those two examples are good illustrations of the kind of range. And that felt to us like one of the important things to reinforce, amplify repeatedly in the book, because we start off by saying we want to resurrect the idea of provocation, because it has, particularly in the last few years. it has had and have got a very bad reputation with presidents and various other senior political figures and other figures kind of distorting the use of the productive use of provocation. And so for people who are exercising leadership, for people who are managers who want to do more on their roles or team leaders, for people who are coaches or educators. Our proposition is that it's very hard to bring about change, if not impossible, without creating some kind of disturbance. But in order to do that, the skill set, the kind of interventions one would make, have to be varied. And it's important to have a stomach for doing the, being able to... act and intervene at the extension rebellion extreme, but also the Renee Jones, the more gentle extreme, so that you've got a range that you can tailor to the circumstance. And it's not an accident that people who are political and social activists often use extreme measures because it's very hard to get attention to issues early in the piece. and in part that's why they do so. And maybe a distinction that brings leadership into this discussion about provocation is the extent to which it's possible for someone who's intervening to pay attention to a couple of things. One is what can people take? What are they up for? To what extent can you push and prod or provoke and have them stay open? And what is the risk of people closing down against the thing that you are trying to make happen? So, you know, a principle that's useful in this work is that what are people up for, what can they take? And then secondly, as a person offering leadership by provoking, to be able to keep purpose in mind. Now, I'm sure the Extinction Rebellion people are very clear on their purpose, but at times they may have let go or be prepared to give up on how receptive any audience can be. And I think there is room for a wide range of interventions. We happen to be in a particular camp where we are hoping that we can keep perspective on what is purpose, what is capability in any audience, and what does progress look like? So we think we are being measured and at times that may not. look as if we are, but this is a discipline and a skill. And that's the contribution that we're hoping to make, because that is something that can be learned, even though it's not always easy.

Gerard:

And I love that language of discipline and skill. And when you talk about purpose and the idea of the act of leadership being purposeful and intentional and choiceful. Yet at the same time, an act of provocation, um, and the, and the courage that's requisite to exercise it may have its roots in a commitment. or a conviction associated with a particular purpose, a vision or a set of deeply held values and these are things that the provocateur cares deeply about and can therefore experience very strong emotions around. How can these very deep personal commitments help or even hinder therefore a person's capacity to provocate effectively?

Michael:

Well, it's a good question. I'm reminded of a question someone asked us in another session we ran in the States a few months ago, where the woman who's very active in community-based activist organisations said, what do you do when you're working with a group of people, all of whom? are deeply committed to a purpose and by the nature, that everything they do, including with each other, is provocative. How do you get them to see? And I think that your question sort of relates to that. And I think it's a very complex question because it's both a practical one, but it's also a diagnostic question. So, just. connect this with your observation about Hannah Gatsby. What Gatsby did I think was extraordinary because as she said, she broke the contract. In other words, she broke the rules of comedy and brought in big social issues, which is not uncommon in comedy, but that are very personal. And therefore the distribution of the distress was much wider. She insisted that her audience felt things deeply. And by breaking the rules of comedy, she was forcing, encouraging, in inverted commas, the audience to figure out where they sat on something. But has the uncanny skill of a good comedian to regulate the level of disturbance. And if you watch her, she will, you know, tell a personal story, she'll make a pretty outrageous statement that's got a kind of a comedic hint. And then she will lower the heat by making a joke, something that lightens the mood. And then she raises the heat again. So she's constantly watching, as a good comedian will do, and I think we can all learn a lot from that, about the capacity of the audience to stay with her. and sees her job as building the audience capacity to tolerate more and more of what she wants to offer. When you talk about Hannah in that way, I think the essence that we can learn from her is that she stays in relationship with people and she uses such a wide range. She's friendly, she's seductive, she's teasing and we learn our own range. around her and then she leads us, almost when we least expect it, into getting a sharp flick. And we don't quite know what to do with ourselves and we are disturbed. It's a wonderful kind of systemic interaction to unpick and learn from. And I think that for me the essence is staying in relationship. And that's the distinction I would make between leadership, provocation. as leadership and other forms of provocation. I think another element of this question, Gerard, because it's a really big one and it's one that people ask, you know, that a lot of people say, look, I don't, I'm not comfortable with too much disturbance myself, so how can I provoke? And what happens if I go too far and other people are really uncomfortable? So a really founding principle that we operate on is something we learnt from Frank Farrelly. the therapist who we train with, is the idea that the vast majority of people, and he developed this principle in therapeutic settings with people who were pretty unwell at times, the principle that people are actually much more emotionally resilient than we give them credit for. Then the question is what are the conditions that help maintain that? sorts of things that Maxime was talking about.

Gerard:

The words you used, I mean you were describing Hannah Gadsby, she was at times friendly and seductive and inviting and then she would give a sharp flick. And this was part of what she was able to do to maintain a relationship. And when I think of maintaining a relationship, we're talking about sort of the exercise of leadership with people that were attempting to mobilize or influence. We're talking about remaining engaged. We're engaged with them, they're engaged with us, we're engaged together. And what we know, and the research is very clear on this, is that the highest levels of willing engagement, discretionary engagement comes when leaders simultaneously exercise these two things. And this is an avenue of, in interest that I've been pursuing for a period of time, which is about these, what role the characteristics of power and love. or strength and warmth play in the exercise of leadership. Because it's pretty clear that to lead effectively and to maintain engagement, we need to have both of those things together. And to paraphrase Martin Luther King, who acted in many ways provocatively in a context in which he wasn't authorized by the system. And his language was, he'd come to the conclusion that power without love, is reckless and abusive, yet love without power is sentimental and anemic. So I'm kind of curious, what is that dependence of effect of provocation? What is the dependence of it on the exercise of both power and love?

Maxime:

I think you've just identified, if you like, the boundaries around the work that we are trying to articulate. Because at least in my work, I often find myself having worked deeply with a group of people, a group of executives, of saying leadership is love. You cannot do leadership as... we would understand it, working towards adaptation without a profound respect that becomes an acknowledgement that feels a lot like love in the room. And then the power that one must feel and take and be in order to have the chutzpah, the arrogance to step in to other people's. lives and ambitions and hopes and struggles is an equal part. So, your description fits perfectly with how we would see going about making this work be useful, have a place, make a difference.

Gerard:

With that in mind, my experience of both of you, because I had the pleasure and the privilege of participating in a program at Harvard where both of you were facilitating, I got to see both of you do work, and both of you had interactions with me which had an effect. And my experience of you both is that you have different styles and seem to vibrate at different frequencies when you're doing that work of developing leaders. And I've been really curious about how does that affect your different approaches and tolerances to provocation. And to what extent do you take up roles differently in that context and complement each other to achieve outcomes?

Michael 

Well, as our colleague and friend Marty Linsky loves to say, we'd be the last people on earth to know the answer to that question. It's always hard to know that truly. Look, I think we've learned over the years, a how we do take up different roles and complement each other, but how we can flex across that spectrum. So I know that. People often say that Maxime creeps up on people, and then all of a sudden they're deeply surprised by what's happened. I might not be as subtle as that, but I think we've learnt to kind of blend across those spectrums. But the question of power and love. Probably the most meaningful feedback I can remember, I think it was two, both of us were working together, was someone said, and I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact words, but something along the lines of, there were times when I really didn't like, even hated what you did. But I really have a strong sense that I benefited from it, and I knew you had my best interests at heart. And that seems to capture the essence of that question about you know, power and love, because there are many different ways to use power and there are many different ways to express and show love. Yeah. It's interesting, Gerard, that you would mention the Harvard experience because for us it was a very important part of being in this work. but also very tough and demanding. And we came during those years, I think we did that work there for 15 years, to recognise the importance of our relationship in holding us together, probably making it more likely that we made a better contribution than we might have done as individuals. There's no way of knowing that, but

Gerard:

Hmm.

Michael and Maxime:

it was... it was then and this work now remains a really important part of our lives together. And you might say we're sad puppies because we're forever knitting this stuff and being fascinated by it. And we do have really different perspectives and both quiet and heated discussions about the work, its impact, what next, how to do it. All of that.

Gerard:

Hmm. Hmm. The, the, um, my experience of the act of provocation as leadership is that you, you can release a maelstrom, a response in the system and the system will often, can easily send you signals that you're no longer approved of or liked or, or worth something or welcome or whatever it may be. So it can feel quite risky, um, at times. And, and, um. And I was curious about how important was, has that relationship, your relationship been in being able to sustain you through those courageous acts? And what other things have you found to be helpful to sustain yourself when doing that work of provocation, when you step beyond the boundaries of what you're being authorized to do?

Michael and Maxime:

I think one of the things we rely on is obviously we can absolutely trust each other to either say you were off in that moment or you know that was ugly but it was really the best thing you could have done. So we have guided each other. I think we've made each other better along the way. And I got so involved in that I've forgotten the second part of your question. Maybe I'll have a slice at it because it's a really juicy question, both at a personal level and I think more generally for people who are committed to bringing about change, whether they call themselves leaders or not. So the parallel between what we do and working with groups of senior people, because that's mainly what we've done in the last 10 or 15 years, who want to exercise better leadership and who want to have, bring about, make their organizations the best they can be is... To do what we do, you really have to have a deep commitment to, a kind of contradictory one, to caring about people as they are, loving them as they are, with all their flaws, but having an equal commitment to how they can be and helping them hold those two pictures of themselves and doing so yourself. And... I think we've learned over the years that inevitably we, as someone who's exercising leadership, will go too far, or not far enough, but go too far and temporarily cause some unnecessary damage. And the capacity to know, to hold, the idea that this is exactly what this person or this group or this system needed at this point in time. And at the same time, you have to take a one down position and say, I probably screwed up and this is exactly what they don't need at this point in time. And having, being able to hold those two attitudes, two places, kind of allows you to recalibrate and to, you know, take in, we've seen that in the people that we spoke to in the book. We're all in... some of them more than others, but deeply, deeply committed to a particular purpose, but constantly could recalibrate it if they went too far. The case study about Chris Sarah, indigenous headmaster, is perhaps one of the best ones because his caring, his love for the kids in that disadvantaged school was just palpable, drawn on his own experience. And at times he went too far. And yet it was exactly what that system needed. but he needed to recalibrate each time.

Gerard:

Thank you. It feels to me like a wonderful place to finish this conversation, I'd love to keep on going with it. And perhaps we can talk about whether we can continue this conversation in a future episode. There are so many different aspects of this that I'd love to explore with you. But for now, I'd just like to say thank you very much. Michael and Maxine for giving generously of your time and your experience and your thoughts and your insights and giving us a little bit of a sneak peek into some of the ideas that are in your book. And so if people want to go and buy your book, and I know we were talking about our own personal reluctances around self-promotion earlier on, but this is an opportunity for you to share with the audience, where can they get your book? What's the best way for them to get access to it?

Michael and Maxime:

Well, they can go to our website, both Vantage Point Consulting or Provocation as Leadership, two websites, but they can go directly to Amazon, to Routledge, to Dymics online, and the book is available in all of those places. But if the first port of call would be to take a look at our website where we outline more about the book and where all of the places you can buy it are available.

Gerard:

Terrific. Well, thank you again, Michael and Maxime, and really looking forward to sharing this episode with our audience.

Michael and Maxime:

Well, thank you so much, Gerard. It's been a very interesting conversation from our point of view. And I think I could say for both of us, we really appreciate the opportunity to explore something that is dear to our hearts. And who knows, you know, provocation part two might happen down the track.

Gerard:

Indeed. All right. Thank you.

Michael and Maxime:

Okay, thanks, Gerard.