Mary Gentile- Giving Voice to Values as a Reality that proves Possibility

Most of us underestimate just how many choices we really have—especially when it comes to acting with integrity in complex systems. 

Mary Gentile reveals how understanding our deep human desire for meaning and belonging can unlock the courage to voice our values, even in the most intimidating environments.

Through powerful stories from classrooms, boardrooms, and global crises, Mary breaks down how small shifts—like rehearsing your response or reframing the narrative—can transform moral dilemmas from impossible to inevitable opportunities for impact. 

You'll discover: the neuroscience behind ethical action, the role of storytelling in changing perceptions, and practical tools to build confidence and community around doing the right thing. She shares examples from fraud prevention in Moscow to healthcare innovation in Massachusetts, illustrating how ordinary individuals become extraordinary moral architects. 

The stakes are clear: ignoring this capacity for moral action leaves us disempowered and disconnected. But embracing it offers a path to collective resilience, trust, and a more humane future. 

This episode is essential for leaders, educators, and anyone committed to transforming moral intent into decisive action. If you believe that doing good is possible—even within imperfect institutions—this conversation will inspire you to see ethical choices not as constraints but as the very foundation of a thriving human society.

Mary Gentile is the founder of Giving Voice to Values and a pioneering advocate for reimagining ethics as a practiced, empowering skill. Her work combines insights from psychology, neuroscience, and real-world stories to show that moral action is accessible and essential in shaping a better world.This episode challenges you to see the moral universe not as a fixed set of rules but as a landscape of unlimited choices—if only you know where to look. 

Perfect for leaders, students, and anyone eager to bridge the gap between values and action. Hit play to start reimagining what’s truly possible when ethics becomes your everyday practice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

This is a reality improved possibility of an exploration of human ingenuity. Welcome. I'm Michael Pearson, and I have the pleasure and honor to be here with Mary Gentili, the founder of Giving Voice to Value and a longtime collaborator and friend. So thank you so much, Mary, for being here.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

I'm very honored to have you here as a really like an example also of reality proves possibility in the way that you have been a pioneering thinker and educator around how we can transform education, leadership, and really the potential for humans to do quote unquote the right thing, to do the thing that actually allows the possibility of, I think, a world that works for everyone. And by training people in all kinds of institutions to give voice to values, right? And you've helped students and professionals around the world to move beyond the question, what is the right thing to do, but really ask the more practical, courageous questions, how can I act on my values effectively? So your work speaks directly to the heart of reality proof possibility, that when people find the language, the confidence, and the community to bring their deepest values into action, even within imperfect institutions and complex systems, there is a lot more that we can achieve. And there are proven pathways from the neuropsychology to biology to the ethical actions that we all say we want. So I thank you so much for coming here and inviting us to see ethics not as an abstract piece, but really as a learned practice and a way of preparing ourselves to speak, lead, and organize with integrity. So thanks, Mary, uh, for your work. And my starting question is oftentimes just like reality proves possibility. We can do better than this. What's your reaction?

SPEAKER_03 2:15

Yeah, I love, I love that title of your series. Read it the first time I saw an email with you were promoting this. I read it several times because I wanted to make sure that it said what I thought it said. I it's it's totally aligned with the work that I do. And that's why I'm so happy to be able to have this conversation. You know how when you give a talk or you give a program, a presentation, and often at the end people will say, Well, what's the one thing you want people to remember? You know, what's the one thing that you want them to walk away with? And I always used to say, I still say often, um, I want people to believe they have more choices than they think they do. And I think reality proves possibility is is another way of saying the same thing, you know, because part of what I part of what drove me to create giving voice to values was the fact that in business education where I was in MBA programs, there just seemed to be this sense that when we talked about ethical challenges, values, conflicts, students would just say, you know, I know what you want me to say, but it's not possible in the real world, you know? And they just didn't believe that. And so what I wanted to do was to be able to raise up examples and also just let them know that it's impossible if you think it's impossible, you know. But you you never know what you can do until you try, you know. It's like when you talk to wonderfully successful people, especially entrepreneurs, you know, and they'll, you know, they'll always they'll often say, you know, we had no idea whether this was going to amount to very much, you know, and you just don't know till you try.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Yeah. And that's, I mean, that maybe also is is sort of a good starting point for the conversation because I remember you sharing that that personal development on your end, but maybe you want to go a little bit further back. It's like what got you to creating giving voice to values, but also what was your fascination early on? Like what what is sort of what are some of the formative moments in your life that maybe you don't oftentimes share, but that are really key to understanding you and your work?

SPEAKER_03 4:28

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So I have the story I tell about why I created Give Me Voice of Values that came out of my experience, my professional experience uh teaching, but there's also a more personal story. Maybe I'll start there. I think that's what you're asking. When I was a kid, when I was a little girl, I had this aspiration. I thought, what I really want to do. In fact, I find it's useful to ask people, what did you want to do or be when you were young? Because even if it's not what they become, it often suggests something about the way they work in the world, the way they see themselves in the world. And when I was a kid, I had this aspiration. You know, I went through several aspirations. I mean, there was a time when I wanted to be uh I wanted to be one of those St. Bernards that puts, you know, brandy around his neck. I was a very imaginative kid. There was another time when I wanted to be a comedian and I would try to wake up every morning and make up a joke. They were not very funny, so that didn't work out. But the but the one thing that kind of stuck was that I thought, I really want to grow up to write a book, and I want it to be a short book, and I wanted to have a lot of white spaces, maybe some pictures, and I want it to be a book that tells everybody in the world how to be happy. That was my aspiration. And so then, you know, fast forward to when I finally wrote the Giving Voice to Values book. I mean, I've written some other books, but when I wrote the Giving Voice to Values book, there was an organization called Change This, and they would approach authors of new books and they would invite them to uh write a little essay, not an excerpt from the book, but a little essay informed by the core ideas in their book. And the premise was think about, you know, X number of years from now, knowing what you know and believing what you believe in your book. If you could change something, how would things be different? And so I remember reflecting back on that aspiration as a child and realizing that in a way that's what I had tried to do with giving voice to values. I I called it reinventing ethics, so that it was not about thou shalt not. It was not about constraints on your action, it was not about keeping us from doing what we really want to do. It was actually about trying to understand what our deepest aspirations were and finding a way that acting on your values actually serves that and makes you happy. So, so in a way I felt like, oh, I I did it. And you know, it's a little longer, it didn't have enough white spaces, there weren't any pictures, but you know, it was it was basically the idea. I guess the the other story, the kind of flip side, maybe a little less happy story, is what I experienced when I was, you know, working in MBA programs. And, you know, I was I had been asked to help at Harvard Business School to help them develop their first required curriculum on ethics. And and it was disturbing to me, it was depressing to me that there were clearly students who thought they had values and they often knew what they thought a better way of being in in their business lives might be. But when we would share these case examples with them, it was clear that they felt in many cases, you know I would feel often most cases kind of disempowered and really as if, yeah, that's fine, but it's just not the way the world works. And they were so disempowered that was uh that was disturbing to me. And so that was, you know, the other impetus for the work.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

So that's sort of like uh a story of reality proves possibility at first. The other one is reality proves impossibility, right? It's like whichever you choose.

SPEAKER_03 8:14

Yeah, well, or or the second story, it's it's not necessarily reality. I mean, you know, reality is what we choose to make it. I always tell people, you know, people talk about virtuous circles and vicious circles, you know, and you know, you make it true or you make it false.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

Right. And so I think there is enough. That's why this show, and what's why some of the films, etc., is like, hey, there's so much that actually humanity has already done. We have all the things that we need to create a better world, a happy world, happy lives. We may just not choose it or see it as a possibility, right? And I think I I I remember you also sharing that typical ethics courses aren't about the good life, right? They aren't about happiness, the eudaimonic Aristotelian, Nicomachian ethics, where it's like, hey, that's really one of the foundations of ethics, but then we made it this utilitarian approach to decision making, or the deontological approach to decision making, or maybe now virtue ethics-based something, but it's sort of codified in so many ways that it's losing sight of what you're mentioning is actually an enabler of the good life, the happiness, the deep down we all want, right? This is a fun human option. And and right now, I think in education, we're not really pulling that option. In in in general society, we have lost sight of it. We think it's something else that provides it, and and we're in this collective misery. Anyway, I keep talking a a lot because I feel so moved by your framing there, but can you just provide it also? Like, what did you see in the classroom? What do you see happen as sort of an ethics approach? And and what is your deeper what is your what is your discovery? What is the discovery that got you to do the work that you have been doing?

SPEAKER_03 10:08

Right. So I I'll tell you two stories, if I may, because I think it's a good way to illustrate it. The the first story is, you know, kind of how and why I developed GVV, but the second story is I think getting at the heart of your question just there. So I just want to jot it down so I don't forget. So the first story is, you know, I I was I I call it a crisis of faith. I was despairing. I was I was discouraged because of what I just described, that that students just didn't seem to think it was possible to do anything else. And I thought, oh, gee, maybe they're right, you know. And it was very depressing. And I thought, well, I want to do something that feels like my life has some sort of meaning, so I'm gonna go do other kinds of work. And and when I did that, I I started to I stopped working on the ethics program and um I got some consulting work. And I was doing a consulting project at Columbia Business School, and while I was there, there were a group of faculty, senior faculty in finance and business government relations, economics, accounting, bus uh a variety of of core fields, who were all still looking at this question about how do you bring ethics into the MBA classroom. And they knew about the work I had done previously at Harvard, so they said, Will you take a look at what we're doing? It was their idea, not mine, what they were doing, and just tell us what you think. So their idea was to invite all of the incoming MBA students at Columbia during orientation to answer one question. And the question was, tell us about a time in your work experience so far. Most of these folks already had a few years of work experience, when you were explicitly told or or implicitly pressured to do something that conflicted with your values and how you handled it. So they wrote these little one paragraphs, right? And uh so these faculty had thought this was a cool question, but then they weren't sure what to do with these stories. And so they asked me if I would take a look at them. So I read hundreds and hundreds of these, well over a thousand over a few years. They had six hundred students in a cohort at the time. And um they were really interesting because we saw that, you know, the the majority of them, a little less well, not the majority, but the largest group of them, a little less than half, basically would tell a story and and conclude, but you know, I I didn't think I had a choice. So I just did what they asked me to do, even though it conflicted with my values. And there was a small group who said, I couldn't I couldn't bring myself to do that. That was just wrong. But they also didn't think they had any options. And so they just removed themselves from the situation, got a different job, different work group. But there was about a third of the whole group said, you know, I want to try and do something. And a small group of those tried and said they failed. And about a quarter of the whole group said they tried and they were successful. And so we thought, well, this is interesting because they're describing very similar circumstances. They're often working at the same kinds of companies, sometimes the same companies, and yet some of them were able to act on their values effectively and so many were not. And so we we brought in a researcher to, you know, sort of slice and dice the data. It wasn't empirical data, it was self-reporting. But it we thought it might be helpful for pedagogy. And, you know, we couldn't in the end, we couldn't say that one group was more morally troubled, because they all started from the point of something that bothered them. And we couldn't say some were just more sophisticated and you know politically savvy, because some of them did, in fact, come up with very clever win-wins. But but a lot of them were kind of clumsy or naive in the way they did it. So in the end, the only thing we could say is that the people who did this effectively at some point started to talk about it. You know, it might have started out talking to a spouse or a partner or a friend, but eventually it got into the organization and changed the trajectory of things. So that was kind of a a trigger for me. I started thinking, well, that's that's really interesting. You know, we don't really give people that opportunity to to think about it in that way. And so I went back and, you know, started to do some research. I I looked both um, you know, sort of uh collecting stories, uh kind of qualitative research. I did a lot more interviews. I already had those Columbia stories, but I did a lot of personal interviews. But then I also looked at, you know, work from social psychology and neuro cognitive neurosciences and a lot of different research. And it was all suggesting, I can go into more detail if you're interested, but it was all suggesting that if you really want to have an impact on people's behavior, that rehearsal and practice and prescripting and peer coaching are the most effective strategies. Uh uh the research that that really triggered the whole thing were two different scholars, Douglas Hunnickey and Perry London, who were looking at the Holocaust. They wanted to do research on what they were called, they these were two different people, separate studies. They didn't this was not a joint effort, but they did something similar. They wanted to explore moral I think they called it moral conviction. And so they wanted to talk to people who had acted uh on their values in times of really high stakes, high risk. And they both identified independently uh rescuers from World War II as people to interview. And they tried to see what did they have in common. Again, it was qualitative research, and they found a number of traits. But the one that really stuck with me is that they said they all reported that at an earlier point in their lives they had had the experience with someone more senior to them, so a a boss, a teacher, a mentor, even a parent, of that senior person saying, What would you do if, and then rehearsing out loud, you know, what they would do and say. So they had both a cognitive experience of naming the value that mattered to them and putting an articulation to it, a script, and the behavioral experience of voicing it out loud to someone who stood in as proxy for the kind of person they might need to speak with in the actual circumstances, and then a kind of coaching conversation. So all of those things led me to think we need to give people the opportunity to work collectively, you know, collaboratively, because they need to talk to other people who are like the people they would need to talk to in the actual circumstances, to literally pre-script and anticipate what the objections will be and then script answers and to action plan and to look at examples of people who had done this effectively and see what they could draw and identify, you know, I would do it very differently than you, because I'm it, you know, I'm an introvert, I'm, you know, I'm um not I don't really enjoy arguments, you know. Maybe I'm a little more risk averse than some of the MBA students, you know. So people do it differently, which is what we learned from gathering these stories. So that you know, that was kind of the story of how and why we created it. But then I can tell you a different story about why I think it's so powerful. I got invited to share this with an MBA program in Argentina, and it was kind of a setup in the beginning. The professor who invited me was teaching a corporate governance course, and the class wasn't set to start until like three or four months later, but they could only get me to come uh come there with something about their scheduling early. So the, you know, students were a little annoyed to begin with because they were required to come into something that they weren't even in a class yet, right? And most of these students were older, they were, you know, in their mid-30s, I'd say on average, and working. They were it was an executive kind of group. So they weren't really thrilled to have a conversation about ethics, you know. But so what happened is I gave a talk about what giving voice to values was, and then I opened it up for questions. And as soon as I opened it up for questions, one guy's hand just shot right up, you know. He was you know, he was right there. And he was annoyed and he just thought this was stupid, you know? And he was kind of saying, You can't do this, you know, why do you think this would ever work? Why would anyone do this? You know, all of those kinds of questions. And so I tried to answer his question, and as soon as I finished answering, he he followed it up with but, you know, and and sort of pushed back. So I tried to answer again, and as soon as I finished, he did it a third time. And so I said, and nobody else's hands were up, right? And so I said at that point, I said, look, I will answer your third question here. But before I do, let me just say that this exchange that you and I are having is part of the reason why your faculty don't usually talk about these issues, because it it's going to be an argument about whether it's possible rather than an exploration of how it could become possible. And, you know, so what do you take away from that? That's not a learning kind of conversation. And so that kind of confused him when I said that. He sort of paused for a minute and his hand didn't go right back up. And what was fascinating to me is that as soon as that happened, as soon as there was a pause, all these other hands went up. And it became clear that there were a lot of people in the room who would have liked to find ways to act on their values and who wanted to believe it was possible. But what we typically see in these classroom situations, and I think it's very uh comparable to what you what I see when I go into businesses, is that that other voice kind of drowns out the possibility of people getting to explore how you could do it. So I think those are two sides of that of that question.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

Wonderful. And uh I don't know. Did you answer the question that you note it down just to make sure about the ethics and the good life conversation? If you wanted to respond to that specifically before we move on, but I I I I can see what you're describing is sort of a general classroom setup where it's oftentimes a man trained in thinking about reality as a very limited function of options and basically no option, and having all the energy go into rationalizing this subset and then basically faulting everybody else for ever thinking or wanting to go outside of that framework, but deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply desiring, maybe being frustrated at such a deep level that they have bought into this limiting belief about reality as this impossibility. So I don't know if that's sort of something that's corresponding, but I I think that's where your work is so powerful, where it's it's just shifting that.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Yeah. Like that's that's exactly right. I I remember I was doing a program with a group of financial managers in Singapore, right? This is not my field, so I was a little nervous, but I'd been working with the team. We'd identified the kinds of ethical challenges that these individuals would face in doing financial management in Asian uh countries and with in the kinds of individuals they were working with, high net worth individuals. And there was one gentleman in the room who was clearly really bright, really smart, and very articulate. And he was very challenging, you know. He really, you know, this is not this not going to work, and this is you know you can't do this. And he made all those arguments, just like the guy in Argentina. But it was interesting because then with this group, we then turned, after I'd kind of reframed the whole question the way you were just describing, we turned to some scenarios that my my hosts had identified as realistic for this group. And because we didn't ask what's right or what can you do, instead we asked, we they were, as one dean put it, there were post-decision making. We had an actor, a financial manager in the case who knew what he thought the right thing to do was, and the question was, how could he get it done? That gentleman, the one who'd been the most skeptical and the most combative, came up with the best ways of reframing and addressing the challenge because he was a really smart guy, you know, but nobody would ever ask him to use his intelligence in the service of getting the right thing done, you know. It was just as you said, it was like he limited himself before he even began. He he just kept himself in that box. And we asked him, just what if, you know, just think about maybe it's not possible, but what if, you know? Um and it was it was a it was a great moment, you know.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

Yeah, and I think that it's so so simple that people look at it as potentially trivial and then dismiss it, right? But I think Ellen Langer and her work on mindfulness, oftentimes like the description is I love her work, yeah. Can can a guy in a wheelchair go up Mount Everest? It's like, no, no, no, right? That's the framing. The question is like, how could he get up Mount Everest? It's totally shifting the neurons, the pathways, and people start thinking about this is actually a possibility. And so that's exactly, I think, what you're able to do with the work is shift the possibility or option space, if you want to call it that. And then people can use the intelligence and their and and their natural talents in many ways differently, where it's like, wow, yeah, all of a sudden reality is possible, right? This is possible. And so I wanted to just see what are some of the most powerful examples that in your long career now doing this work, right? I mean, I'm old. Yeah, and I think we're all getting old in a way to sort of like do the same thing over. It's almost boring, right? But like it's still so necessary. What are some of the things that you've seen in the past that really give you hope and and maybe affirm the power, just like the Argentina story, but other things where it's like, hey, this is actually a real pathway for transformation. Because I know that you're working a lot with companies too, but uh other organizations. Anything else to share?

SPEAKER_03 24:54

Yeah, yeah. So I guess a couple stories come to mind. Um this one's kind of counterintuitive, but a number of years ago I got invited to share GVV with a group of certified fraud examiners in Moscow. So think about that, you know. This is this is not an audience. And and they were all working for one of the major big four accounting firms. And they had set it up as an evening lecture and discussion. So it was after work. I didn't think people would show up, you know. But there was a a large group who came and I thought, well, I'll give a talk for 45 minutes, there'll be 15 minutes of questions, and everyone will go to dinner. It just kept going. And it was really interesting because it was probably of all the audiences I've spoken to, and I've you shared this now all over the world in lots of different businesses and industries, and it was probably the group that was the most combative, you know, the most pushing back. But what was interesting about it is they were combative because they wanted it to be true, but they didn't want to be suckers, you know? So so it was if they if they just if they just thought it was crazy, you know, and they would have left. They stayed and they just kept asking and and and you know, we kind of felt like it built a kind of camaraderie in the group, you know, because we were trying to work through this real sense, you know, that we really can't do this, can we? But could we? You know, and and they really wanted to have that conversation. Similarly, I I did a program in uh Shanghai, and it was interesting because the it was a group of business school professors from all over China, mainland and Hong Kong, who were all teaching the the central government had told them they all had to incorporate ethics into their MBA program. So the central government designed the curriculum, right? You gotta do ethics, but they had to figure out how to do it. And so it was like a two-day conference. There were um over a hundred faculty there who were from all over China. And um, you know, the whole thing was with simultaneous translation, you know, they had the earplug, earphones in. And so they were sharing what they were doing, and it was a traditional approach to ethics. It was pretty similar to what I had seen when when we were first creating the course at Harvard. They were, you know, looking at society, organization, and individual, they were looking at, you know, awareness and analysis, you know, all the typical kinds of approaches. And then it I was sort of at the end. And so I gave my talk, they all had their ear ear translation, earphones on, and when I finished, there was not a single question. Nothing. It was just silent. So I thought, well, that didn't go. Either they didn't know what I said, you know, maybe the translation, or they just it didn't go over it well. But when it was done, my handler, the woman who was sort of taking me around, who was Chinese but was fluent in English and was a lawyer and had worked uh internationally, and she came up to me, and the first thing she did, she gave me a little piece of chocolate. She said, You just you you earned this. And and then she said, How do you think that went? And I said, Oh, well, I don't think it went very well. I said, you know, people didn't seem to be engaged, they didn't ask any questions. She said, Well, let me tell you two things. She said, The first thing I'll tell you is they all understand English. They didn't need the earphones. They heard what you said. They just wear them for security. And I said, Okay. And then she said, and the second thing is they actually were quite interested, but they didn't want to talk about it in this group, in this formal group. And so they approached me and they asked, the conference was going to end like at noon the next day. They asked it that if they were willing to change their travel plans and stick around for the following afternoon when the conference was over, um, would I be willing to stick around and have an off-the-record conference? And so I said, Well, of course, you know. So, so we did, and and it was great, you know, and it wasn't like there were easy answers to anything, but it was clear they really wanted to figure out how to do this, you know, and they just didn't want to have it in this formal setting where there were people listening that they want they didn't want to express their questions in that context. And I found that very encouraging too. So those are but those are academic. I could also give you corporate examples, but I'm not sure which you're more interested in.

SPEAKER_02 29:46

I thought they were academic or they were they sounded corporate. They sounded like financial and and accounting.

SPEAKER_03 29:51

Well, that's true. The Singapore one and the Moscow one, the China one and the Argentina one were academic.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

Okay. So yeah, and then I mean that's I think ultimately speaking to a bigger question, which is what is universally true about humans and human beings, right? And I think the the big mis myth that we have is that we're not moral, that we're amoral. But what you're unearthing here in those different examples, different cultures, different industries, is that there's a deep yearning. And basically what Darwin wrote is like we are a moral species, but nobody knew of nobody knows that Darwin wrote this. I didn't know it. But it's like it's yeah, everything else makes sense when you see ourselves as trying to grapple with these questions as how can we lead the good life together. Because that is making us safer, that is making us procreate better, that's making life better, that's evolutionary advantageous. Somehow we have lost complete sight of this simple insight, and we we teach ourselves that these kind of values are secondary, they're they're they're unimportant when they're actually the reason we as a species have survived, that we are ultimately not necessarily very good at giving voice to values in some way or or acting on those, but that it's a deep, deep human desire, as the desert would call it, I believe. So I'm curious.

SPEAKER_03 31:21

What use what yeah, what what that what's well and I think research in is what's interesting is that as you're just pointing out, you know, it's coming out of, I mean, biology, you know, there you know, that there are these the there are these human tendencies that are what enable us, have enabled us to survive as a species, you know, and a lot of it is this interdependence. And um, you know, and that's at heart, that's love, right? I mean, it's uh it's it's a it's a it's a value of of community. Um so it's not and so so it's interesting you use the word moral because I was really struggling with the language when I was creating giving voice to values because I'd been working in business schools and we were calling it business ethics, and everybody saw it as a set of rules and constraints, and you know, business business school students and business people, you know, they're not thrilled with constraints, you know, they want to build things, they want to make money, they want to be successful and have these careers. So I wanted to frame it in a way that it was more aspirational than than, you know, constraints. And so I ended up deciding, well, ethics, they think, you know, you think of code of ethics, you think of these external set of rules. Um, and I wanted to think of something that felt like it was coming from what I want, from who I want to be. And so that's why I used the language of values. Now, of course, values is an overdetermined word, right? You can say, I I value country and you value city, you know. It can be and so I shareholder value. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I decided, you know, I I have to sometimes clarify, I'm really talking about moral values, and that limits it to, you know, what the philosophers would call hypernorms, you know. So it's a it's a much shorter list, it's a much higher level list, but it's also a much more universal list. So I think sometimes that that language was really important um for pe to get people to realize and connect with what you just described, you know, that that this is about something that I want that's coming from me. It's the way I want to live my life. And what I think is really interesting right now is that I think this is at the heart of the challenge around AI. Um, because, you know, we're talking about AI is going to replace all these jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, a lot of the the things that I've been reading and the talks I've been going to about this is, you know, trying to really pay attention to what is it that we as human beings, you know, bring that is different than computation, that is different than collection of knowledge, that is different than even um a kind of dry problem solving, but that really has to do with that sort of human judgment and and human connection. And so, you know, I think that question is becoming hugely important if we're going to figure out how AI can be a force for good rather than the opposite.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Yeah, and how we can manage so that we create a world that works for everyone. You could call it as Buck Winston Fuller, I think it describes the design aspiration of management, right? And it's like, but we've oftentimes reframed it and lost it. And it's like we're not even caring about what works.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

And and and maybe what works for us individually, but even that pathway has been so uninspiring, right? That it's like, oh, if it works for me, it should be okay, it should be successful, but people get lost in that space too, and need drugs and need all kinds of other substitutes to elevate themselves in terms of their happiness, despite this.

SPEAKER_03 35:14

And I think some of that is because they believe they're alone. They they don't believe that other people have that same aspiration. And that's another sort of side effect of what I'm trying to accomplish with giving ways to value is that you know I focus on the action, the competency, building the skill and the capacity, but I do it, I want them to do it in a group, you know, because I want them to recognize that they're not the only ones who want to do this, you know.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

I think that's really the the biggest lever of transformation is getting people to see their humanity and their own, but that of others, right? And that I think we have successfully un-educated ourselves, right? We've been providing this myth where we can be very limited and constrained, human in the function of what you're describing, the Argentinian student and the other student. You know, that's that's like a legitimate way of being human as a professional, and it's so depriving, it's creating the zombie like way of of life, right? And so I think there are all these other side effects of what you're what you're doing, what you're enabling in that conversation is unearthing a deeper human possibility.

SPEAKER_03 36:30

Yeah, I love the phrase you used about we're un-educating ourselves because that was the other thing that I observed. You know, you'd be in a business school, you you see this at Fordham, you know, we teach all these different disciplines and lenses for looking at at the business world and and management and organizations and people, and also tools for thinking and problem solving. So, like, you know, problem reframing and power and influence and negotiation skills and communication skills. We teach all of those things, but then when we apply it to an ethical challenge, it as you say, we uneducate. I would say we dumb ourselves down because when we apply it to an ethical issue, it's it's like, well, we can't use all those skills to make it possible to do the thing that it feels like is so challenging to do. And that's the other thing. I feel like there there really are no new tools in giving voice to values. I'm just borrowing from all of these other uh approaches and tools and lenses and disciplines that we already are teaching, but that somehow we feel like, oh, but then we can't apply it there. You know, so I love that phrase. I'm educating, that's really I'm trying to reverse it.

SPEAKER_02 37:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh then in that context, what gives you the most energy right now in the work that you're doing? Because you said you're officially retired, but in the end, that that is not the tirement is not really an option for you. So what is sort of reactivating or activating or keeping you alive?

SPEAKER_00 38:03

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

What can you share about that? That sort of maybe other people can also connect with.

SPEAKER_03 38:08

Yeah. Well, so so I've I've been adopting the language of I'm not retired, I resigned from the university because I still feel like I'm working pretty much full-time, but it's all on my own agenda with giving voice to values, which is a joy, you know. I mean, you talked about what's your greatest achievement. For me, working on giving voice to values is and so having an opportunity, um and and continuing opportunities to share it in different contexts, to see people who want to apply it in different ways. I'm working now with the hospital system here in the Boston area that has decided to create a cohort within their medical college. It's a partnership between the hospital and medical college here in Mass, uh, Massachusetts, where if you're applying to be a a medical student to become a physician, you can choose if you want to apply to a particular track, and it's the I think they're calling it leadership uh physician leaders in a particular cohort, and they're teaching them a whole set of skills alongside the medicine skills and knowledge, and GVV is one of them, is one of the core ones, and that's been really fun because by working with them to think about what we're gonna do with the students, it's meant that I've now had the chance to talk to the physicians who are also the faculty. Um then they get interested, and it's meant that those students start saying, Well, we want to think about applying our you know newly honed medical skills to underserved communities. So that means we've had to involve the senior administration of the hospital because they have to start thinking about what are the the legal and the economic implications of designing a program that will be pro bono and going out to underserved communities. So it's it's been this really interesting mosaic and applying in a different to a wholly different group. Similarly, I've I've done some work recently with engineering students, and then there's a group of faculty in Europe who want to think about w actually how we might use, you know, in G V V we don't ask the students to role play where they are the negative voice. Everybody is trying to do the right thing. They have to an anticipate what might be negative, but they themselves aren't making that argument because I don't want them to rehearse that. So these faculty in in Europe who've been using G V V for a while thought, well, maybe we could create an AI agent, you know, an agentic bot that would be the bad guy rather than having the students do that, but they can then practice responding and getting feedback and going back and forth. So so they're sort of exploring that. So I feel like I'm at this point where I can just sort of apply it wherever I want. Wherever someone's interested. And that's so gratifying, you know, because there's so many different audiences that see this. And and the same thing with companies, you know. Uh I did some work a few years ago when COVID started, uh KPMG wanted they had they'd gotten into trouble, and so they were trying to do some new training programs, but COVID started, so they had to do everything virtually. So they found a number of people, I think they had Daniel Ariali and a number of people who had different interesting approaches and ideas to do online programs. And and they asked me to do one on GVV, and it kind of caught uh interest. So then we built on that and we did a a subsequent program where we brought in a group of senior leaders at KPMG and we coached them, and they ended up sharing stories of experiences they'd had earlier in their careers where they faced values, conflicts, and they presented them not as, oh, I was a good girl, I was a good boy, but rather this was really tough, and I felt really I really struggled, but then they showed how they worked through it. So they became both teaching stories but also inspiring because these were people who tried to do the right thing and they ended up going to the top of the organization. You know, they it didn't it didn't mess up their career, you know, which is what all the students anticipate. And so we created that, and then they said, well, let's do more. So then they created a a program, they called it the KPMG GVV Master Facilitator Program. And we had groups of uh senior partners and managers who volunteered to be part of this multi-week multi-week program where I would teach them GV, G V V, they would practice with it, then they would work in pairs to create a G V V style scenario that was real in their work, whether it was tax or audit or consulting, and then they would practice teaching it to each other and we would coach them on that. Once they'd gone through this program, they both understood GVV, they had a library of KPMG-specific scenarios and solutions. They had learned how to lead those discussions. So now when if you work in tax and you're doing a continuing education program there, they'll ask one of these master facilitators to to jump in and do lead a couple tax-related G V V scenarios within the tax program. So it's not like time out for ethics, it's really just part of developing your competency in this particular field. So that was very cool. I mean, that was very satisfying, you know. I mean, I still see online someone will be from from KPMG will say, I just let a G V V case, and you know and so that's that was rewarding. So I guess I would just say I'm at the point now where there's so many ways this can. Expand and grow. And it's kind of just a gift for me to be able to sort of, you know, plot myself into different places and be helpful if I can. But it's work that they're doing, you know. I'm just there to give some input if they want it.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

Wonderful, wonderful. I want to put a pin in there because a colleague of mine and I, we just finished this textbook. We also at one point talked about, right? And I think now that we we want to have these cases ideally connect to some of the that. And so anyway, that's that's just a reminder. And also for the ready.

SPEAKER_03 44:38

We'll talk.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

The humanistic leadership academy. I think people that are uh going through it, they they are very open to this as well. So we talked about this, but I just want to put this also out there again, because that's a real, I think, transformative tool that isn't as intimidating as it sounds, you know.

SPEAKER_03 44:58

It's not hard.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it it is something that I think we need to pay attention to with intention. And uh and and I think our current education system is paying a lot of intention to absence, I think. Otto would Otto Sharma would call it, right? It's like, hey, get you disconnected, get yourself disconnected, feed yourself even more rationalization about all of that stuff, and then use your intelligence to disconnect, to absence. Yeah, yeah. And uh I think that's the reconnection possibility that that is tapping into.

SPEAKER_03 45:36

But there's another piece too. I mean, you asked about what's on my mind now, and I'm also feel like the challenges that our country, and this is we're in both in the US, but also the world are are going through right now. There's some real threats, uh, you know, existential threats, you know, certainly climate. Certainly we talked a bit about some of the technological threats with AI, but also threats to uh basic democratic principles that I I believe are inseparable to functioning markets, to have the stability, the predictability, the long-term sustainability that that businesses strive for. And, you know, I sort of feel like, well, that's not what GVV is about, you know, it's about, you know, don't pay the bribe or, you know, don't abuse your workers. But, you know, that feels a little hypocritical. I mean, these are core values that we need to think about. So that's the other thing I've been thinking about. I've written a couple blog posts about, you know, how does this GVV thinking fit into the challenges that we're facing, you know, and and one of them had to do more with just how do you talk to people and and find just as I tried to focus on those hyper norms in business, what are some of the shared values around our our national structures. And and then similarly, w I wrote a piece, a blog piece for senior executives because I realized they didn't I figured they don't need me to to encourage them on how to talk to people because they either have that skill or they have staff who do you know, who know how to communicate. But but they need to feel like they want to and they can. And so for them, uh what I wrote was a set of self-reflection questions, a kind of personal audit to think about how do you make these decisions because I'd been getting I had gotten a consulting gig at NASA and you know they it was before the huge budget cuts that came down on NASA, but they knew they were coming. And this was a group of senior scientists who had all applied for this leadership program. It was very competitive. The people they accepted were people they thought were going to become senior leaders at NASA. And the fact was that they knew that a significant number of them might not have been around in a few months if the budgets went cuts went through. And so I realized I needed to think about not just presenting GVV, but helping them think about how does that h resonate with what you're going through right now? Because I think, you know, the challenge that in so many organizations is between anticipatory obedience, as Timothy Schneider would call it, on the one hand, because they're trying to ride under the radar, or somehow capitulating because they want to try and, you know, uh reap some benefits, you know, or trying to resist, but then not knowing how to resist and how to be effective at resisting and not to re and to resist in a way that doesn't destroy them. And so those are, I mean, I don't have the answers to those, but I think those are hugely important questions, and that we can apply some of the same thinking that we try to apply with GVV to those questions. So I'm also doing some thinking about that.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

So yeah, so that is actually leading us back to reality-proof possibility and at the point. Yes, that is that option, right, that we have to go back to these foundational hypernorms, values that we actually all share as human beings, right? This is not something that is uh coming from the outside, somebody invents it. It's actually more of a rediscovery of a deeper truth that actually allows us to connect more effectively, collaboratively to address the challenges. And I think the big breakdown is that we're getting into this isolation, disconnected from ourselves, others, the the big the nature that we're part of, etc. So uh, in that sense, that reconnection as a possibility, I think, is what I also want to keep working with you on and just figure out like how can this be strengthened, connected, etc. So I just want to make sure that we have follow-up conversations, and I I think I would like that.

SPEAKER_03 49:58

I mean, I actually read an article recently that really triggered some interesting thoughts that in a way that the challenges that we're facing right now with with data centers, the big data centers for AI, that in a funny way that could be a way to cross those differences because communities that are pushing back are often red and blue, you know, and in US terms, you know, right and left, you know. Um and and so it wouldn't it be uh kind of ironic if it was that issue that actually allowed them to find that common some common values. Anyway, I read a great article recently in The Nation, and it was about um it was about again, it's because I've done this work with teaching around the Holocaust, but uh it was about this research that had been done about what happened um with the Danes during during World War II, and that they were, you know, I guess the only country, I think, that you know, were occupied and kind of expelled the Nazis. And one of the things that they talked about is that at the time the Nazis who were occupying were sharing this narrative about Jews, and that the Danes, unlike many other populations, it just it was not they just didn't buy the story, they wouldn't accept the narrative. They they these were their neighbors and their friends and their colleagues, and you know, and they just wouldn't accept the story. And that they said interestingly, that both led the occupation to to you know fail, but also they said some of the occupiers were persuaded. And it was a fascinating article, you know. I'd never read about that before. And I thought, how powerful, because a key part of giving voice to values is storytelling. I mean you can tell in the way I talk, that's all I do is tell stories. And and they were that was part of the argument they were making about what happened with the Danes during that period, that it was it was about narrative, which I think is really interesting.

SPEAKER_02 52:14

That opens up so many more.

SPEAKER_03 52:16

I know, I know.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

But then I I do want to um sort of bring this part of our conversation to a close and and and have follow-ups for sure. I I ask you a number from one to thirty-five so I can give you a question from Michael Proust's questionnaire to his friends. So one to thirty five.

SPEAKER_03 52:34

All right. I'll say thirty-five.

SPEAKER_02 52:37

Thirty-five. Okay, let's see. What is your motto?

SPEAKER_03 52:41

My motto. Oh, that's interesting. Well, I have a new one. For a long time, I would say, you know, you have more choices than you think you do. But I read uh an article by Carl Weich, the organizational psychologist and theorist who I just learned has recently died. But um he has this line in his art, there's an article, uh, essay article he wrote called Small Wins, which is about how do you create change in large social systems and social problem complex problems. But at the end of the article, he's trying to anticipate all the objections to this argument he's laid out and and to respond to them. And one of the objections he anticipates is that people will say this is naive. And so he ends up, rather than saying it's not naive, he ends up doing kind of a defense of naivete, kind of a redefinition of naivete. Um, you know, and that really all it is is by is the idea that you can imagine other facts being important or other interpretations being feasible. And when he tells us, he has this line where he says, see if I can get it right, we justify what we do not by a belief in its efficacy, but by an acceptance of its necessity. I thought that was really great, you know, because it doesn't mean that you don't care if it works. It just means that you know that it is the process of trying to do that, that is what we we want to be as humans. We want to be in that journey, you know? And so I've been using that one a lot. The other one I've been using a lot lately. Some I can't remember who told me this, but it was they said uh they thought they were gonna they thought they buried us, but they didn't know we were seeds.

SPEAKER_01 54:28

So I like both of those. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 54:33

Well, Mary, it's been a real privilege and a pleasure, and it's a great, great illustration of reality proofs possibility, right? And and all the the motto is also it's like, yeah, we have more options than you think. We make those rationalizations or the justifications for what's necessary, if I understand it correctly, right? And it's it's a seed, and Otto would say it's the seed that sprouts and what we pay attention to, which works. So, what and how can we shift our attention to those kind of possibilities? I think that really can enliven us in in many ways. And so I see that with you, and it it's inspiring to me. And I I love that you resigned.

SPEAKER_03 55:14

I know, I know, and uh to be continued. This has been fun, thank you. Thanks, Michael.