Listening for Value: The Leadership Skill That Changes Everything | Dr. Casey LaFrance | #iolglobal

What happens when leaders stop listening?

In this episode of the Lead with Legacy™ Podcast, Amanda C. Chambers, Dr. Jim Chambers, and Sloane Lott of IOL Global sit down with Dr. Casey LaFrance for a powerful and deeply insightful conversation on leadership, communication, and the true cost of not listening.

Drawing from real-world experience in government, academia, and organizational consulting, Dr. LaFrance introduces the concept of “Listening for Value”—a practical and strategic approach to leadership that goes far beyond surface-level communication.

Together, they explore:
• Why organizations lose their best, mission-driven people
• The “law of increasing conservatism” and how it impacts leadership
• How generative AI is creating a new “printing press moment”
• The hidden cost of miscommunication across systems and teams
• Why veterans don’t lack skill—but often lack translation into civilian language
• How failing to listen can lead to massive organizational mistakes
• The role of grace, humility, and vulnerability in leadership
• Why not every problem needs a solution—sometimes people just need to be heard

This conversation is both deeply human and highly practical—offering tools, frameworks, and mindset shifts that leaders can apply immediately.

If you want to lead with clarity, build trust, and create lasting impact—this episode is for you.

🔔 Subscribe for leadership insights, honest conversations, and practical wisdom you can apply immediately.

🌐 Learn more about IOL Global:
www.iolglobal.com

Connect with Dr LaFrance on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-casey-lafrance-8a2045337/

Learn more about Dr. LaFrances' work at:
www.agil3enterprise.com

Support the Lead with Legacy™ Podcast:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2600300/support

Contact our team to book a time to be on the Lead with Legacy™ Podcast:
https://iolglobal.com/podcast

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Lead with Legacy, the official podcast of IOL Global. Here we will explore leadership that outlives titles and trends. Through conversations with faith-based and marketplace leaders, we will discuss integrity, conviction, and purpose. To learn more about us, visit us at iOL Global.com. Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Lead with Legacy Podcast. We are so honored today to be here with Dr. Casey LaFrance. We also have Dr. Chambers, the founder of IOL, and Sloan Lott, our director of operations. We are super excited about this conversation. This is a little bit different conversation that we've been having with everybody else because we're doing some pretty fun stuff with Dr. LaFrance. So I am going to start by letting him introduce himself, who he is, a little bit about what he does, and then we will have some fun discussion time.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Thank you so much, and thanks for having me here. I really enjoyed working with IOL on this project. And I'll tell you a little bit about why I chose IOL and why I started the project. But before that, I'm Casey LaFrance. I'm a professor and program manager in the Department of Political Science at Western Illinois University. I'm also an Amplio Consultant Educator and I'm a sustainability champion for the PMI GPM joint venture. So I have some experience in nonprofits, public sector organizations. And most of my work has focused on decisions and how we lay out priorities and compare those priorities between rank levels or between subject positions. And this book takes it a little bit further. We're not looking at the aftermath of those decisions. Instead, we're looking at more of what goes into the beginning. And we're going to talk a little bit about relational value streams and understanding how to create communication and ways that that mimics a lot of uh lean and value stream principles and eliminating waste and rework and miscommunication. So we'll get into that, but that's who I am. And I have a one-year-old. Today's her birthday.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

Yes, and we love pictures of Letty too. We always like wait for them to see them. So I'll tell a little fun story. Dr. LaFrance and I had been connected on LinkedIn for a long time and we started chatting back and forth. And he had sent me a picture of Letty and when she was just born. I mean, it's it's been, I guess, like a year ago, because she wasn't very old at all. And I said, Oh, she looks just like a little cabbage patch baby from the cabbage or Babyland Hospital. And and Dr. LaFrance said, Oh, that's where I used to live. And I said, Oh, that's where I used to live. And so we got to talking about that. And then we both have late-in-life babies. And so we got to talking about that. And so that's kind of generally how we got connected and started to talking back and forth. Um, and then when we launched IOL, he immediately contacted me and said, Hey, I want to do some stuff with you guys. I have this stuff going on. Um and so we are currently working on a book of yours together. So I'm gonna let Dr. Chambers talk a little bit about that, and you guys can have a little conversation back and forth about the book and what we're doing with that and why.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah, it's great. It's great to have you on here, Casey. It's such a joy. I've been working on looking through the manuscript, doing some editing with uh Dr. LaFrance's new book, Listening for Value. It's a tremendous book. I can't believe how much just going through the manuscript originally brought me back to all the years of my consulting. Of course, my my focus was on the organizational development of different uh groups that I worked with. And then all the Six Sigma and the Lean and the project management and all of that stuff was all around the kind of work that I was doing. So when I was going through this initially, I was just blown away by how much I wish I'd have had this resource with me during those times, especially working with really large global organizations and military kind of things. One of the things that came up right away, this need for relational value systems. I was doing some work for the nuclear navy off and on, and um that that would have been absolutely invaluable in a military type of setting, in a shipyard and revamping how we deal with our warships and so on. Let's just start off talking about how the book came about. I know there's a whole background, backstory of your experience as well, but just talk a little bit about how listening for value came about. Is that from your academic work, your consulting directly, or a combination?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

So it's uh a synthesis of my experience, my writing, uh, the research I've done, the teaching, the training. But um I think to start, just starting at a really small slice before we get into the bigger, more uh it's not overwhelming, but it's just bigger. And before we get there, think about the military. I serve as vice president of an organization called the Veteran to Project Manager Mentorship Alliance. And uh, our focus is training military folks and military spouses into civilian careers as they transition from military life. And uh what I'm finding is things like uh ISO 45,000, they know things about occupational safety and health because they've been exposed to OSHA and it overlaps considerably. What they don't know is the civilian language, how to communicate with civilians in uh in a way that gets the point across in a non-military kind of setting. So the thing about listening for value is it doesn't give you things that you don't already have. It helps you to tap into attributes, qualities, and skills that anybody can develop. You don't have to be born with these talents, you don't have to be chosen or uh or selected, right? Uh you're not limited by the traits that you had as you grew up. So all the stuff that we've learned about leadership historically, we uh we have we're able to set aside. We're able to give it a little bit of context, but we're able to say we are not locked into making decisions. We can always learn, right? And we listen so that we can learn. And I think when we think about listening, we think of it as kind of squishy and soft. And I'd be lying if I didn't think that there's a warm kind of human element to this, but it goes beyond patting people on the back and making them feel good and squishy bunny stuff because when you create the conditions where people believe that what they say is going to influence your decisions, they're much more likely to share that information. So that's a tactical, that's a strategic decision, not just one that's human-centric. And oftentimes what we find is that the right thing for our organization is also just the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Yeah, and I, you know, again, back to the sort of application. One of the things that stuck out with me in here where you're talking about this we relation, my my first experience with the nuclear side of the Navy was to go in and try to rethink how leadership development was being trained and processed, mentoring and so on. And the one thing that stood out right from the start was that the because the command structure in a military setting changes every few years, new people come in, they bring in new programs, sometimes they bring in the same old program with new people or new ways about doing it. And I was I was really amazed at how much they did not listen to the line staff, let's call them, the people that are out there doing the actual work, because the administrative or leadership level would change out every two to four years. And so they just would come in and assume that they understood what needed to be done, let's say with lean or six sigma or one of those kind of things, and they wouldn't listen. I've got a great story of that is when uh they were doing some lean work, there was a a a very large metal object sitting in the in the boat yard. And uh so the new administration, along with their lean advisors, wanted it removed and taken to a scrapyard. It was massive. It took uh a complete rail car and a crane to lift it. It weighed thousands and thousands of pounds. Well, no one asked anyone about it, it was all rusted up, it looked terrible. I saw it, I wouldn't have known what it was either, but they wanted rid of it, but they didn't ask anybody what it was, they just got rid of it. Turns out it was designed to take the propeller off of an aircraft carrier, and there's not another one in the world that we know about. And so when an aircraft carrier came in, the Eisenhower, I think it was, to have retrofitted work done on it, there was no way to take the propellers off to do that work because this is the machine that did this is the tool that was made many, many years ago when they c crafted that ship. And so they had to go find this thing. They had to go back and find they had to pay the scrapyard to get this thing back. In discussions that I was having with some workers, I can't tell you how many of them said, if they would have just asked me, I would have told them. So they sold this thing for no telling how many millions of dollars and had to buy it back because no one bothered to ask. No one bothered to ask a question. What is it? Is it important? Should we keep it? So when I was going through the this uh your part of your book about we relation, can you talk a little bit about that? Because I felt like you know, I had a relation with the relationship with the leadership. I'm trying to listen to what they want. I've got this relationship with these shipworkers, these builders, but they're not talking to each other. They have, I mean, they have a relationship, but they're not listening, they're not talking to each other. So millions of dollars goes goes spent on something that shouldn't have happened just simply because no one's listening.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Absolutely. Uh so to get to the relational value stream, a lot of the stuff that led me to think it up and and to write about it is uh lived experience. So the first part of that lived experience uh I can think of is working in mental health with severely emotionally disturbed children and adolescents. And uh, we worked on a 12-week program that was funded by the state's version of Medicaid in Georgia. It's called Peach Care. And the idea is you get 12 weeks, and at the end of that 12 weeks, you have to fill out an inventory called the Child and Adolescent Functioning and Attitude Survey or the CAFUS. And uh in essence, it's uh for conceptual clarity, it's a liker scale, a one to ten scale. And the idea is the kid can't be too highly rated because the state will say they're cured and cut their services. They can't be uh their progress can't be rated as too low because it reflects poorly on you. And so uh I saw that cause people to consistently, uh, myself included, circle numbers in the middle, right? Because that was what we were forced into. We were given a false dichotomy. And I think we we approach a lot with those false dichotomies in mind. In that same job, trying to coordinate with state agencies, the Department of Family and Children's Services, police, courts, they all had different language, they all had different uh criteria, they all had different majors, and so um when we needed a kid removed from the house, DFACS had to go through their policies, then call the police, and they had to go through their policies, and uh a lot of times that would result in a mandatory family court appearance 48 hours later, and the kid would go right back to the abusive household. Um, and that happened one time in particular, and I don't want to get into to details, but it was awful. And uh and the kid was returned to her home, and I didn't go back to that job, but I took a lot of it with me. Um previously I'd worked as a deputy sheriff in Habersham County, uh small county in Georgia, and uh in that context, I I worked for a sheriff who has since passed, who had uh come under scrutiny and litigation for illegal strip search lawsuits. He lost those. And um, it really was a refusal of him to listen to the county attorney about updates and case law changes and the need to uh, you know, uh he said, Hey, this is my jail, I run it how I want, that kind of thing. And so I I think ego gets in the way and and I think just to maybe a little bit of coldness. Now I I'm feeling this in my bones because I live uh in Illinois for some reason. And my mom says it's because Bozo was on TV when I was five and she wouldn't take me to go see him, and so I'm I'm spiting her by spending the rest of my life up right. And uh, if this is what spite looks like, man, I'm earning it with all this snow shoveling. But I'm up here and uh I was out shoveling and I noticed when you come in and you try to warm up, it hurts at first, right? As your capillaries expand, blood comes back in. And I thought, man, what an amazing metaphor for for life, right? When we're out in the cold and we experience the coldest parts of life, right? Hatred, alienation, isolation, mental illness, when we experience those things, right? The total absence of God, the total absence of hope, the total absence of something to look forward to, we come in, and even if we're intending to warm up, we can still hurt ourselves if we try to do it too quickly, right? Um, I put my hands under the scalding hot water and I'm numb, so I can't feel, and I end up uh burning my hands with the water. And I think that's a where listening for value really comes in is we jump into action before we even know what the other person wants and what the implications are, what the basis is. And I'm the guiltiest of this because I want to help people, right? And so my immediate go-to is let me give you all this unsolicited advice. And in doing so, I'm imposing my values, my will on you, right? As opposed to let me listen to you, let me understand where you're coming from. And it may be the case that you just want to vent. It may be the case that you just want to express yourself and you get something out of that. It may be that you don't want a solution, you just want to share something out loud to help you think it through. And then when it comes to the actual content that we're talking about, this is where the we relation as a dyadic relationship between two people emerged in the literature. And the idea was we create understanding through a series of exchanges where we refine so that we make sure that when we use a term, we are using it in a way that is compatible, right? Which is really, and you think about everyday applications, whether it's something like a must-have appliance for a military vehicle or uh a must-have policy, we think about those as uh as being things to get through, things to check off. But if we spend a little more time thinking about the value that's added by creating that uh that system of communication and that relational value stream, what we see is first off, people are cast as active and social, right? They're active, they uh have agency, they have choice, and they're social in the sense that they work in groups with one another. And that flies in the face of some other perspectives we've seen historically. Uh, the first would be social behaviorism, George Mead's work, where he says we're all lemmings, right? We just act in groups and respond to stimuli and we don't have anything going on in here. B.F. Skinner said the same thing, except he said, we don't operate in groups, we operate as individuals, but we can be operantly conditioned, right? He says, give me a token economy and I can run the world through rewards and punishments, through operant conditioning. And he says, and think about this, this guy was the president of the American Psychological Association, and he said, the mind is a black box. He literally said, the mind is of no matter to me, right? Because he says, we just respond. And then rational choice comes in the mid-20th century, begins to heavily influence social science work, management literature, and what we see there is people are agentic, they act uh with agency, but they're very selfish and self-interested. They don't atomistic, they don't operate in the context of groups. So with this relational value stream is based on the idea that we are social, we operate as groups, and we're also active. We have agency, we have the ability to make choices. And I think when we uh when we realize that that goes across the organization, not just from one role and certainly not down, it helps us to remember that the value stream runs this way.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Can you just, this may be off script a little bit, but can you talk a little bit about passive-aggressive behavior when leadership doesn't listen for a period of time, let's say, you know, over a long period of time, and then the workforce itself, it could be any, I'm thinking more of a couple of banks that I work with, large banks, where people did not feel like they'd ever been heard or listened to very much. So they developed this sort of passive aggressiveness. It wasn't overt at first, but it came out. Can you talk a little bit about how that happens and maybe why it happens or what what could we do about it?

unknown 16:50

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Absolutely. I think a lot of that's rooted in the work that we have on agency, especially as it relates to learned helplessness. And a lot of that work comes out of uh first with animals, with dogs. The idea was we would apply shocks, not we, but the researchers would apply shocks to the dogs, and they would try to bust out of the cages and gnaw through them and whatever. And eventually they just laid down and took it, right? They said, this is something I can't escape. And I think we do that a lot of times with our work, with our relationships, and it takes uh it takes our optimism away, and as a result, our motivation suffers. And we can learn that from things like expectancy theory or motivation hygiene. But if we don't feel like we're getting something that's adding value to our lives besides a paycheck, our incentive might go down. If we feel like we're not being valued, that might affect our level of efficacy, the belief that we can affect change or that we are competent. And it can certainly affect our ability to relate as a community. And that's what the literature calls cognitive social capital, the idea in your mind that you belong to something larger. And uh, and I think that has some implications because again, going back to being uh social creatures, if we believe that we're part of something larger, then we might be more willing to uh expend effort to see how that plays in. And I think what we what we do a lot of times as leaders is we say fall in line, find your role, but we don't do anything on the front end to understand what the person wants to get out of it and how we can uh cater those choices. So uh when it comes to passive aggressive behavior, uh I like to think of it in uh the same kind of camp as resistance. A lot of times we talk about resistance being the ultimate impediment to change, but I don't think it's resistance. I think it's wanting to know exactly what's going on, wanting to be involved in the change, wanting to help shape it. So uh it's less about resistance and actually more about please put me in and give me more of an ability to shape this. And when we don't see that, we take the lesson to mean that we're not welcome. In the same way that we've created structures in the public sector, right? There's a reason we have public budget hearings at seven o'clock on a Tuesday night, right? Only certain people are gonna be able to attend those meetings, and eventually what happens is nobody does. So if you go to a public budget hearing, you'll you'll see that it takes place one night a year, and it's the night that the budget's going to be voted into law. So anything you say isn't going to be incorporated into any meaningful revision of the document. So you're taught to stay home. And when you go to a budget hearing, you don't see anybody except maybe a person that wants like a stale donut and some coffee, right? And so I think what we're talking about here, Jim, is in the literature there are two views, two perspectives. One is the working, shirking, and sabotage view. And this comes from new public management. And the idea is in response to frustration, and this is really what Maslow would say, right? If we're not meeting a need or fulfilling it, we're regressing. And so they say we regress by either diving into work, becoming very focused on our work. And sometimes what that comes into being is we're very busy, but we don't really add value, right? We're utilizing our employees, but we're not really adding any value. And we're mistaking utilization and busy work for producing value in the same way that we mistake adding features for adding quality, right? Uh and so that could happen. Uh, it could be that we see sharking, and that's where people start to maybe not put as much effort into their work. They might quiet quit, or even worse, they might begin to lapse on their responsibilities as a way to kind of express their dismay or or uh disgust with not being heard. And then sabotage, right? Outright sabotage. And we can see things like that. There are rumors, if you've seen in the news, Amazon was going to uh plan later this week to lay off 16,000 people. An administrative assistant sent a calendar invite to uh a team and accidentally included a draft of that email. So you could see how that could be problematic. Right. So sabotage, I think, might event itself in the same way that if you're a kid and you're frustrated working at Dairy Queen, you might start giving away uh ice cream cones or throwing away food or I don't know. Um, but it could be that you actually feel antagonism toward the uh the organization.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

And I I saw that, and so back in my early days, I worked on the road as a musician, and uh, but I had an apartment in the city where I lived with a friend. We shared an apartment so that when I'm gone, he was there and vice versa. And early on he worked at a a uh popular hamburger place, I don't think it exists anymore. But when he did not get a raise, he was a manager, like the night manager kind of thing. He didn't get a raise that he expected, uh that was promised to him. And so I remember coming home off a tour and our refrigerator was full of hamburger patties. And I'm like, wow, we got some hamburger here. And he goes, Yeah, you know, I they promised me this raise, I didn't get it, so you know, I helped myself to a couple cases of hamburger. What was interesting in that conversation was the owner of the the restaurant itself refused to listen to anything that people had to say. He had his way of doing it, and he's gonna do it that way. And he didn't really care. And so it always stuck out to me that his lack of willingness to listen to his employees. I mean, let's face it, it's a hamburger place. He didn't, he wasn't hiring uh road scholars or anything, but these are sharp people, and uh most of them college students. But this one guy, my roommate, he just retaliated. He got his raise one way or the other. And I wonder how many times that happens in corporate work, in academics, you know, working. You you and I both have worked in colleges and universities. I wonder sometimes how much loss there really is when people get passive aggressive. They're going to, if you're not going to listen to me, I'm going to get my way one way or the other.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Right. And the other side of that is how much value are we losing because we're not hearing from those people.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Exactly. And that's that's the other side.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

And uh I think there we see exit voice and loyalty kind of events themselves. Uh people either get frustrated and they leave. They try to express themselves and see if it works, or they become entrenched to the framework and the way things are doing, and uh, and that leads to goal displacement and kind of blind allegiance, right? So Anthony Downs says what happens in organizations as a result of that is over time they become more risk-averse, less willing to innovate. He calls it the law of increasing conservatism. And this isn't political conservatism, but what he's saying is the zealots, the people that want to affect change and have a mission-centric sort of view, they become frustrated with bureaucracy, red tape, waiting, delay, right? They leave. A lot of them might go work for advocacy organizations, work for think tanks, that kind of thing. Your climbers are the people that just want rank and status. So they don't really care. They will leave the organization, go somewhere else to get more rank and gradually build up uh clout. And that leaves us with conservers, the people that don't want to uh to do much beyond the marginal adjustment. It reminds me of the old uh Jiffy Lube slogan some people want to change the world, we just want to change your oil. So these marginal incremental adjustments every year keep us in some ways they're they're great in terms of keeping us from having to fight old battles or when there are actual sunk costs that we don't want to have go to waste. That's important. But it can also blind us to future opportunities because we're looking at the back, right? The rear view mirror is smaller than the windshield for a reason. And it can also put us in a position where we escalate commitment instead of rethinking our strategy, we double down and say, more money, more man-woman power, more technology, more resources. And uh, and that's the sunk cost fallacy, right?

SPEAKER_03 24:35

I can speak to a little bit of that too. Like talking about, you know, back to Maslow, you know, I'm the type of person like I just want to do the job and I want to do it well. And if I'm put in the environment that I can do that and that I have the resources given to me, I'll I'll give 180%. But when you don't listen to me, you don't hear what I'm trying to say or what my needs are, what my resources are, then it's really hard for me to do the job that I've set out to do. And I've I've faced that throughout my career and had really good leaders that that learned and and understood that about me, and that it was a lot of self-actualization, like it was, you know, that was my need. But then I had some leaders who didn't see that at all and didn't want to listen because they were they were, you know, maybe I would be smarter. And and one of my things, and we've talked about this in some of the other podcasts, I want my people to be smarter than me. I need them to be smarter and ahead of me. I need them to tell me what do you need, what do we need to do, what do I need. Because it there's no value in in trying to stifle um the talents that people have. So I think in the listening for value, it's really important as leaders that we we take a lot of the or all of the concepts really and we become better listeners because sometimes we're just so caught up in it, right? I have a million things to do. But if Sloane's trying to tell me, hey, hey, my computer's not working, I need help with my computer, and I'm like, hey, I'm too busy, you know, let me know later or whatever. Well, she can't do her job, and I'm failing her in that. Um, and that could be in any situation. So I think that's really good info. I am going to, I'm gonna let her have the floor a little bit because she has some questions for you. You guys have have built a good relationship together as well, and um, I want her to be able to ask a couple questions and and see your take on those.

SPEAKER_02 26:23

So as I'm reading through this, one of the the biggest thing that I'm focusing on is readability because I'm not a subject matter expert in this information that you're presenting, but I have worked in libraries. I am a classically trained librarian. I just finished that master's and and being in public libraries, I've seen yes, I've seen what people pick up, look at, check out, or drop in that didn't want it banned, right? And I think a lot of when you're looking at nonfiction work, a lot of people pick something up, they read a couple and they're like, this isn't for me. This is not for me, this is too technical or or this isn't my expertise. What I love about this is this is for anyone who needs to listen or wants to be listened to. And that's not limited, right, to a certain sector, public, private. It's that's not it. It's not um a certain career path, right? We all have to listen to one another, and and sometimes we need to be listened to. So this is something that everyone does need to read and everyone does need to put into daily practice. So I just want to talk about that for a moment. When you were writing this, did that stay in in the back of your mind that this is a skill that everyone needs to do well? And how can I get this point across to everyone?

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Um I mean, uh I'll be candid, it it absolutely did, but the genesis of it was much more personal, right? Um a lot of the work that I produce is uh, and I haven't realized that until very recently, but a lot of the work that I produce is me working through uh my own lived experiences and some of the challenges that I encounter in leadership, right? Um just to give you an idea of a situation that I would deal with in a given day. So uh Friday afternoon, I get an email that says two of my students are uh over-enrolled in online classes and they have to take an in-person class to keep their F1 visa so they're not deported. My department has four people because we've been trimmed down from 15 since I first arrived, uh, as our enrollment has steadily uh bottomed out. And so what uh what we're faced with is we have to have students in classes, but we have to also comply with federal law. Now, some students signed up for this class as an online only class, right? They're working, they don't have time to attend, but I've got to find a way to offer it as an in-person version to meet the federal requirements, and it has to be something that's open invitation to the rest of the students without altering their education experience. Uh so yeah, what do I do? Uh, I find out how to comply with those F1 visa regulations in the least disruptive way and try to integrate those. But if I'm not listening to the students telling me, hey, this is what's going on, this is what I need, if I'm not listening to the registrar, and if I'm not trying to, I think where we get in trouble is we're taught to compromise. And it means like, hey, wait your turn, somebody has to win, somebody has to lose. We think so dichotomously, especially in politics, political science, right? That's a whole other animal. With gun control, I think about it. It's so funny when we ask a question with uh a dichotomous response option, lo and behold, we get a bimodal response distribution that has uh two means or two modes, right? If instead we ask a question with more nuance, we get a normal distribution like we would with any other uh facet of human behavior. And I think we forget that because we get caught up in having a label and being right. And I think uh what we could do is ego check ourselves, first off, and realize that what we think of, our perspective is one story in a library of other stories, right? And if I don't like another story, I don't have to trash it or burn it or throw it out the window. I just move on and and try to find ways to connect my story to other ones. And so a lot of this work has been on, hey, Casey, shut up. And uh right, I told you I I try to give advice. The other thing that I hate about myself, and I hate seeing it in other people too, right? Because we tend to do that, the things we don't like in ourselves. But when I find myself waiting to speak instead of listening to the other person talking, oh my goodness. And uh so some humility, right? And uh, and I think if we approach this, I think in one of the blogs about this book, I'd started with Proverbs 1 as kind of an orientation, but the idea uh not to be afraid of God or not to be afraid of what you don't know, but to uh to be reverent to the idea that you have a very small slice of the world in your mind.

SPEAKER_04 31:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

Yeah, that's excellent. And and yeah, we've talked quite a bit about that. Casey has several blogs on our website, so you can go over there and check those out. He's got some already published on there, he's got um some new ones that are coming out. Dr. Chambers has some on there, Sloan has some on there, um, and there's some really good information there, and we can just learn and grow with each other.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

So here's some great stuff, Amanda, from the other contributors too.

SPEAKER_03 31:27

I've seen it has um some blogs on it. It's good, it's good reading material. It's not just fluff, it's not AI, it's not, you know, we worked really hard to build into that and give people some good content to read. Um, so and we've gotten good results from it. So this this question I have for you is not on the script, but you know, it's probably the politically correct question to ask at this particular day and age. When when we're talking about for listening for value in the age of AI, how is that going to help people in relation to that?

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Sure. So uh it's funny you asked that. I just put something out this morning that talked about listening for value being part of a larger approach that would include some perceptual elements from the system sensorium project that I published with IPM, and then some work that uh Al Shalloway and his aces are doing on overcoming learned helplessness. But the idea is what we're seeing is uh three cycles that sort of repeat themselves historically. Herbert Kaufman wrote about these in the 60s. So we have a desire for first off representation, and that means our voice can be heard. And with generative AI, right, we're seeing that kind of like the new version of the Gutenberg printing press. Everybody can write a book, everybody can write an epic tome or a poem or a play or whatever. So it's easier to express your voice. But as we do that, uh just like anything else, quality tends to go down as our work and progress increases, as our batch size increases. And so we have to find a way to allow access and uh and get people to communicate, but also be able to determine what's useful and what's not. With agentic AI, what we're seeing here is the need for rules and uh and compliance sorts of focuses, but that comes at the cost, right? Specialized, neutral, competent knowledge in an area, but that comes at the expense of collaboration among those agents across the organization, getting them to talk to one another outside of their specialized silos, which is not new to human beings, right? If you've ever been to an academic uh campus, right, you've seen that firsthand. And then the final area, I think, is with scaling, with enterprise adoption, digital transformation. This is what Kaufman would say. So we talked about representation and neutral competence. He would say this cycle would be focused on executive leadership and reform. And when he was writing, he said these happened with a certain periodicity from like 20 to 30 years. With uh the 24-hour news cycle, Web 2.0, AI now, I would imagine those cycles are compressed so much more closely that they might be closer to running in weeks than years or decades now. And so our problem is needing to be in a position where we can get those signals early to understand what the shifts are so that we can be responsive. And there are a lot of tools. That's the coolest part about listening for value, is it's not just all here's what you ought to do and figure it out yourself. There are tools throughout the book that you can apply. There are metrics, there are uh planguage definitions and operational definitions and impact estimation tables that I borrowed from the work of Tom Gilb from Evo and Success Engineering Success, I think was the book that he had first articulated Planguage in. So even if you're not a big softy, self-helpy uh pat yourself on the back kind of person, you want to improve your team, you want to improve value, ROI. I think these tools will put you in a position to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Yeah, I want to dive in. I I like the fact that in the book, at the end of each chapter, you offer not only some real practical ways for application, but also links to the other tools, which are which is useful. And I I think for even me, I've looked up quite a few things that I had forgotten about, some things I didn't know about in this field. It's been really interesting. So I think people buying the book and reading it, no matter whether it's for personal or for you know leadership management kind of thing, they're gonna find a lot of resources there. I want to ask you a question. In the book, you talk about uh systems. This caught my attention really early. Systems are always speaking, they're always there's always something coming back. If we would listen, can you address the issue of what do you mean by that when you say, let's take a just uh a corporate environment, could be anyone, but you say you make the argument that all your systems, your your IT systems, your human resources, your manufacturing, all of these kind of things are always speaking, but we're not always listening.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah, I I think we can see that in when we continue to see the same problem with a handoff or communication between departments. And we just accept that as that's how it goes, right? That's uh and we do that. We do that because it's much easier than having a conversation because a lot of times we're afraid of confrontation. And the reason we're afraid of confrontation is we're making it about the person, right? Mary Parker Fowler said a long time ago, the situation should dictate our response. And we ought to have enough trust in our employees to believe that they can see the situation and respond to it in a way that reflects judgment and competence. We don't have to micromanage everybody, right? We don't have to breathe down people's necks to rob them of their agency. But uh, I think we should create conditions where we can look not just at the words that are being said, but the outcomes or the outputs that we're seeing. And we can notice things like drift and uh going back to neutral competence, executive leadership, and representation, we can notice drift in those as being defining features or central characteristics that people care about with and respond, I think, in a way that's going to put us in a position to be more proactive. So the idea is we never solve anything. And I think this isn't new. This goes back to deming. This is the quality management system, the PDCA. We never get to the end of the PDCA. We're always trying to incorporate what we learn into future iterations, experiments, learning opportunities. And I think really what it comes down to is if we communicate that that's something we as leaders are willing to do, it requires us to be vulnerable. It requires us to face our fear. But I think a lot of times what we find with fear is the fear itself is greater than the event or the experience. And then the very last thing I'll say about this, and this is kind of off base, you may think I just like went to Mars and came back this morning. But if you've ever read the book by Emma Donohue Room, they laid it, they made it into a movie. The the plot is uh essentially around 15, 16 years old, this lady is abducted and locked into an 8x10 shed by this uh really nefarious, awful guy who uh assaults her, impregnates her. She has uh a kid. And when we start the book, the kid, the first line of the book is my name's Jack, and I'm five today. So he's lived in this room for five years. He's never been out of it, he's never seen the outside world, and he's had to make sense of all the things around him as the world, right? The universe is in this room. And so you think, gosh, this book's gonna be a their harrowing escape. 30 pages in, they're out. They're safe, they're back home with her parents, and you think, well, what the heck is the book about then? And that's when we discover it's about, hey, uh, it's not just about getting out of the prison, the learned helplessness, the I can't. It's now that you can, what are you gonna do? And in trauma recovery, right? I go to uh trauma recovery meetings every day and talk to people about blood and guts and awful stuff. But the first question that they ask you isn't, isn't, hey, uh, you're in danger. It's what are you gonna do if you live? Right? What if what if all this awful stuff doesn't happen? And right, uh, if we build our life around fear and what could happen, we're missing out on what is happening. And we're missing out on our ability to contribute to that, to be present. And I think that's a big lesson, right? It's not about becoming uh a psychiatrist or becoming uh uh an audiologist, it's about becoming more of a human being that's vulnerable and willing to show that vulnerability because that's what trust comes from.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

That's excellent. In the book, you use several examples of how systems break down and then there's a disaster, national disaster, used NASA, used other examples of how when we don't listen to what's happening around us, we become vulnerable, we become victims of some catastrophe. It's happened historically over and over and over again. But I thought one of the real interesting things for me reading the book was talking about these particular kind of disastrous situations that occur all because someone wasn't listening, the system was talking, it was telling us this is not working, that something's gonna go wrong, but people just block it out and they're kind of in a silo of their own. They're not they don't want to listen to that. That brings up that issue you mentioned earlier of resistance. Do you think there's just a natural resistance in us to not speak up when we don't feel like what we're gonna say is gonna matter to anyone? Or are we just conditioned that way? Is it you know, it's is is it internal built into us, or is it something we've been conditioned in over time because people don't listen? If our parents don't listen, our boss doesn't listen, our teachers don't listen. What's your take on that? Where where's the real core of that happening?

SPEAKER_00 41:13

I think there's some nature nurture, but I think it's mostly nurture, right? I I think there are certainly some people who are predisposed to be more introverted, right? Or to be less confrontational or less expressive or open, but I think a lot of that is indeed conditioned by how we've seen other people's efforts to make change or to express themselves met, right? If we've seen those met with dismissal, right, or we haven't seen people be uh taken seriously, that might send us that signal too. Again, I don't think it's I don't think resistance comes from people wanting to stay. Nobody wakes up and says, I want to be exactly the same, right? What they want is familiarity and comfort. And uh sometimes that comes at the expense of sticking your neck out a little bit and trying new things. And I think in organizations, we have become so focused on avoiding type one errors that we lose a lot of value through type two errors when things really are making a difference, but we're not willing to give them proper credit because we're afraid. And a lot of that comes back to how efficacious do I feel? It's not am I right or wrong? I think we have to move past there is right or wrong, and there are different nuances. So when you talk about disasters, the Challenger is a great example of that. Ramzik and Dubnik tell us that it wasn't just that there was political pressure from the media, elected officials, they'd had to delay this launch. There was pressure from professionals that knew about the O-rings and how they would perform. There was uh pressure from the SOP manual that said don't do this. And then there was pressure from legal liability, right? The the families of the astronauts and other people could now sue NASA for making these decisions. But uh, that's a good case study where when we're doing something wrong, sometimes it's because we're trying to do something right. Like when we're trying to manage one set of expectations, it's going to come at the expense of others. Our job is to find that balance, right? Because we treat it as a zero-sum game where for somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. Maybe we can think beyond that. And I'm back to Mary Parker Follett. So she's sitting in the library studying at Johns Hopkins University, one of the first women to ever be admitted to a PhD program. She's studying with her colleague. It's really hot. She pops a window open because she wants a breeze. The breeze blows her colleague's papers all around, and so her colleague is a little bit dissatisfied. A compromise would be they either leave the window open and the colleague deals with it, or they shut it and Mary deals with it. What do they do? Instead, they open a window in an adjacent room and then the door to that room, so there's airflow, but it's not direct, gusty airflow that's going to disrupt the papers. That's what Don Kettle calls rocket science. Coming up with not Non-routine solutions for non-routine problems, not applying non-routine solutions to the routine problems we've already solved, right? That's wasting our effort. My postal worker doesn't need to come up with a new route every single day, right? On the other hand, if I try to approach a non-routine problem like a 9-11 or a Hurricane Katrina or a Challenger by looking at the past and how we've approached things using procedures and policies, what I'm going to do is waste my effort and commit resources in a way that's not going to bring any value. It's going to bring me comfort, right? In the same way that when my car doesn't start, the very first thing I do is try it again. Right. But that's false comfort. And if you've ever been stuck with a car that won't start, there's only so much comfort you can get in trying it and hearing the click.

SPEAKER_03 44:44

That's very true as well. I've been there. It's not fun. Um, I so before we wrap it up, um, so you lead Agile 3 Enterprise Coaching. Um, and you do this with your wife, Kristen. And so we had a we had a question for you. What's it's like building and practicing the work with your wife together?

unknown 45:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

So uh Agilla 3, and I know it's so hard to pronounce, uh, it's the dumbest name in the world, but look at me setting it up. That's what we're trying to we're trying to go with there. But so Kristen is, I don't know, I mean, if there's somebody who's like responsible for this way of thinking and way of living, man. I wish you hadn't asked me about her.

SPEAKER_04 45:26

Oh, I'm I'm glad I did.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

I think um what I see from her, so Kristen's autistic and she's a trained sign language interpreter. And so when it comes to like and she works at a library, right, with kids, and uh just that perspective, right? The curiosity from working with the kids, the uh the ability to translate into different languages, and uh it's not just like communication, talking it she gets up and does children's programming, like the entire Christmas program she has to sign. And if you've ever had to sign the Grinch, right? Where the words are nonsense and she just has to do like decorations, decorations. So um, but I think that's where I grew up, it was uh it was tough, man. We um we didn't have a lot, and I think when you don't have a lot, you think what you have is really valuable and you want to fight people to keep it, right? You're always afraid that somebody's gonna take something from you. You always have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder. And when you grow up poor, you can have a full belly, but you never forget what it feels like. And uh and that can turn you into a callous, untrusting, kind of uh closed off person. And I think that was that was probably a lot closer to who I was before I met her. And think when when I think of Grace, I think of my wife, I think of her ability to respond with kindness and dignity to any situation that she ever experiences. And the thing is, she doesn't ever have to do that at the expense of another person. She doesn't ever have to hurt somebody, she doesn't ever have to hold a grudge, right? Like I've never seen her like walk around and talk about, man, I gotta get this person back. And it's just it's so refreshing, right? Forward focused. And what can we do? And and seeing things that would traditionally be considered challenges as opportunities, right? There's just there's not enough time, but uh Well, we have a lot of learning from that too. As a business partner, that's just so cool because yeah, she's incredibly smart, right? She's detail-oriented in a way that I'll never be. And uh we we're both neurodivergent, but we have very different brands, and so we compliment each other a whole lot there. But uh, yeah, it's just incredible. It's really cool. And uh hopefully Letty will take this over and make us rich.

SPEAKER_04 47:49

That's right. We're we're written for her, too.

SPEAKER_00 47:53

Sorry, sorry, I broke down there for a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 47:56

That's the beautiful thing about this. We've had such good conversations with people, and you're not the first one to cry. So it's not a bad thing. I think it's really beautiful, and I think it's amazing what we're doing here and having these conversations, and they're all so very different. Um, and you are so very brilliant, and there's so much to learn from you. And so we're excited that we get to have some more conversations in the future as well. I'm gonna hand over. So we have two questions that we ask everybody on the podcast. So I'm going to let Sloan ask you the first one, and Dr. Chambers will ask you the second one. I'm gonna divert to the two of them today on the questions.

SPEAKER_02 48:34

Name a leader you admire and tell us briefly why why you admire them.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

Wow. Um, I've talked a lot about Mary Parker Fowlett today, and I think uh her influence is pretty, pretty apparent in my work and uh and in organizations. So yeah, that that'd be a great one. But if I'm thinking more recently, man, I just think about all the veterans that are coming out and transitioning into this whole new world and taking it on just uh without reservation. And uh my students who show up when it's 14 below to learn, you know, I think that's the the thing is like heroism is something we produce together by creating the environment that that we want to live in.

SPEAKER_03 49:14

Good answer. I like that question. Well, I like both these questions because no one ever answers the same, and so it's really interesting to hear what everybody says. All right, Dr. Chambers, will you give us the next one?

SPEAKER_01 49:23

Yeah, it's great. Uh it's so great to talk to you, Casey. It always is, and uh today has been sp specifically helpful for me personally. I always learn more about these things by listening to what other people are doing and what what they have to say. I guess look, you know, because it's a we're talking about the legacy that we leave as leaders, which is I'm just I'm listening to you talk about your wife, and I'm sitting here on the screen looking at my daughter because our organization was started by my wife and myself out of a real desire to help people who needed help organizationally. And now, you know, my son has worked for the company off and on, and then our daughter now leads the whole thing. I'm looking for that rich paycheck. Well, we're talking about lasting legacy. Well, what are you hoping to leave behind as a legacy for your family and maybe for other organizations and colleagues?

SPEAKER_00 50:21

I I I think there are a couple things that come to mind. Uh I want my daughter to uh to be able to look at my work, you know, when I'm gone and be like, hey, uh I knew this guy, and um, I want her to be able to find me my voice and uh find her dad in there, you know. Um if she ever wants to talk to her daddy, I want her to be able to find him. Um I think longer term with with with legacy, gosh, um I think of this book that I read that's called Accidental Saints, and I talked about it with Tony Hammock on his podcast, but the author makes this interesting point. She says, What if instead of trying to be the blessing, we instead try to be a vehicle for the lesson, right? So we surrender our will and give in to flow and we follow the voice that's telling us what we need to do. And uh for me, that's that's not about coming in and saving people, it's about uh using being useful to people. And I think that's if there's one lesson, right, and this isn't mine, this is uh the legacy of community-based participatory action research. And I learned this from Helen Lewis, the grandmother of Appalachian Studies, 25 years ago when uh used to sit and tell dirty jokes with her. She was a bawdy old lady. Uh, you know, she all of her research was in Welsh and Kentucky mine camp. So, you know, she talked like a miner. And uh but uh that's what I learned from her, man, is like she would show up in like a Maxine. If you remember Maxine, the uh the old like angry lady that would wake up and they always have a bad morning. She'd show up to a formal dinner in a Maxine shirt, and she could because of who she was. And I think just being authentic, and uh and she didn't do that to be uh uh contrary or to be a rebel necessarily. She did it to blend in so that her ideas would stand out. And that's what it's about, man. Is uh it's not about my ideas or me, it's about creating conditions for better ideas to come and replace these.

SPEAKER_03 52:20

Very nice. Thank you. I like your answers. I knew you'd have good answers. I'm pretty sure we could sit here and listen to you for a long time because your intelligence level is is ridiculously high. And every time you and I talk, we I learn so much. But we can't stay on here forever. We can have you on again, though. And we will. So we are currently working on the book. It's very likely that by the time this episode of the podcast comes out, that the book may be out. Um, that's what we're shooting for. And then also after we get the book done, we're gonna be making some courses, which is gonna be pretty fun. We're gonna make some courses on the book, which will be on our learning platform. So we're we're really excited to have you on as our one of our partners. I want to thank you again for just being a part of what we're doing and for supporting us. You've been a great support for all the work that we're doing and and always so willing to jump on a call or or to do something crazy that we want to do like this podcast. And and so we're really, really grateful for that. So we are going to, when we release this, they'll have all your information at the bottom of it. I'm gonna let you say the name again because I'm gonna botch it again.

SPEAKER_00 53:20

Agila 3 Enterprise Coaching and Value Stream Solutions.

SPEAKER_03 53:24

Yes, and so we're gonna have the website on there for you. People can connect with you there. They can also go to our website, which links directly to yours. So they can find you there. Um, they can also find you on LinkedIn, which we will link below. Thank you so much for being with us today and for all the work that we're doing together. Thank you, Dr. Chambers and Sloan, for being on with us.

SPEAKER_04 53:44

Absolutely. Thanks all.