Dr. Bruce Avolio has published 12 books and over 150 articles on leadership and related areas. In 2012, Bruce was identified as being in the top 25 management scholars over the last 50 years regarding scholarly citations of his work. In 2017, Bruce was recognized as being among the top 70 most highly cited researchers in the United States in Economics and Business and among the top 3,000 across all sciences around the globe (Thompson Reuters). He was listed this past year at the #18 spot on the all-time most highly cited industrial and organizational psychology researchers over the last 100 years. Dr. Avolio has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the globe in the design and delivery of transformative leadership development systems. Bruce was named a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology, and Gerontological Society. His latest book is Organizational Transformation: How to Achieve it One Person at a Time.
Learn More About Bruce's Work
Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Connect with Your Host, Scott Allen
Dr. Bruce Avolio has published 12 books and over 150 articles on leadership and related areas. In 2012, Bruce was identified as being in the top 25 management scholars over the last 50 years regarding scholarly citations of his work. In 2017, Bruce was recognized as being among the top 70 most highly cited researchers in the United States in Economics and Business and among the top 3,000 across all sciences around the globe (Thompson Reuters). He was listed this past year at the #18 spot on the all-time most highly cited industrial and organizational psychology researchers over the last 100 years. Dr. Avolio has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the globe in the design and delivery of transformative leadership development systems. Bruce was named a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology, and Gerontological Society. His latest book is Organizational Transformation: How to Achieve it One Person at a Time.
Learn More About Bruce's Work
Quotes From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Connect with Your Host, Scott Allen
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody today on Phronesis, we have Bruce Avolio. And this is a conversation that I have been looking forward to for a long time. A Bruce in front of you right now I have leadership development in balance I have full, I'm gonna go back back to the day for leadership development. And if I could be in the room with you, you would see my dog ears and my posts and my markups. And you are an individual who has for decades now just been incredibly prolific. And so I am so excited to have you with us today. For our listeners. Bruce is at the University of Washington. He's a professor of management, and he is the Mark Pigot chair in business strategic leadership. So Bruce, I'd love so Akron, right, I'm in Cleveland. And so I don't know what was going on in the water in Akron, but maybe it was the water Bob Lord was was having you drink but David Day, Bruce Avolio, Bob, Lord, I mean, so much incredible thinking has come out of that program. I would love to hear a little bit about that, if possible. But how did you develop this interest in this passion for studying leadership? Could you take us back?
Bruce Avolio 1:17
Sure. Well, I was born in New York. Okay, not that far back. Okay.
Scott Allen 1:25
Mama always said on the playground.
Bruce Avolio 1:28
That's it. You just have to have a good mother.
Scott Allen 1:33
Father, we're gonna go Zeleznik (Abraham).
Bruce Avolio 1:36
As fathers were vestigial structures, you know, we can hang around for a while. But we're like the appendix or the tonsils. You know, eventually, if you get rid of them, you could still move on. If I go back to graduate school action will be for graduate school. I wouldn't say that you know, I had this passion all my life to study leadership or observe leadership. But I did find as I was interested in early in high school pi before High School, and reading things about people who have taken Nations and other organizations and organizations and directions that I would hope we could not see happen. But does. Yeah, in particular, you know, my parent, my mother was from Poland and Jewish and they immigrated to the United States. And like a lot of people that went through that experience, I just had Linda Trevino actually in my class talking about both of her parents are Holocaust survivors. My grandparents came to New York, you know, and I grew up in that tradition, even though my name is Vallejo. And that's the other half is my Palermo, Father Italian sought the Southern Italian. Yeah, but I was very interested in you to know, how to how to places go wrong, you know, in terms of the following leadership in these directions, that oftentimes lead to destruction. Yeah, I started reading that stuff. And then I just, you know, didn't think about leadership for a while. When I got to college, I didn't major in anything until my senior year because I really wanted to just explore things and didn't have any particular interest. And then my senior year, I took a course industrial psychology. And I thought this is interesting. You know, I think this is something I might be interested in pursuing. My girlfriend broke up with me, I think all the time that led me in my great career plan to the University of Akron, which was the only life applied to two places I got in both, but it was a last-minute decision. And I got on my 65 Rambler Classic. And I drove to Akron, Ohio, when I started there. And what was interesting about that is in many ways, I was very lucky because the people that had gotten there, some of whom had come from the University of Rochester because the University of Rochester had shifted from being more behavioral to much more of an economically focused Business School. And that has relevance because people like Gerald Barrett and Ralph Alexander, later Bob Lord came on board from Carnegie Mellon and others, many others. When they left and went to Akron, they decided that they were going to become the number one industrial psychology program. Yeah. And for the next five and a half years, we all went through the pain of doing that. You know, if you're gonna get to the Superbowl, you know what, it's gonna be a lot of work. Yeah. And it was an incredible experience. And I wouldn't say I was interested in leadership. At Akron, I was actually interested in development. Okay, so is David and many other people because at Akron there was this quirky professor of I love by the name of Harvey Stearns and Harvey Stearns came out of Morgantown. And this whole lifespan initiative.
Scott Allen 5:15
Yes.
Bruce Avolio 5:16
K. Warner Schaie and Paul Baltas this and others. And I was like, fascinated, in my first class to hear that as you get older, you get more different from each other. Yeah. So yeah, people who run marathons that are 95 years old and disappointed they didn't get a good time. And you got people who can who are not even ambulatory? Yeah, so I never realize that until that moment. And it triggered me an interest in looking at development. And that that kind of just incubated until pretty much my last year at Akron when I decided to go come back to New York and work at SUNY Binghamton. And Bernie Bass was there and Bernie Bass was actually Rochester. So this is a long, roundabout way. Oh, really saying that Bernie Bass went to Binghamton, Barrett and others went to Akron. And when there was a job opening there, Barrett had contacted Bernie and said, You know, this guy Bruce Lavoie coming out, he's really interested in lifespan development, would you be interested in Bernie was, and so I ended up getting a job there. When that started the beginnings of being interested in leadership. Well, story.
Scott Allen 6:36
No, I love it. It's fun to hear that story. And I didn't realize that bass had been at Rochester at Simon and...so that's really, really interesting. And this, you just triggered something in me because you had had an interest early on. Also, it was it in gerontology? And I might go, am I grabbing that from some unknown place? Or is that accurate?
Bruce Avolio 6:58
No, well, you've now brought me out into the open. Because I've been very fortunate to work with some really great people my career, and I've won certain awards, you know, from the industrial-organizational psychology from American Psychological Association. And a lot of times people refer to me as an industrial psychologist, which is complicated enough for most people to understand because psychology and industry go together. Just make people happy, right. But I'm actually was the first industrial gerontological, psychologist to come out of the first program focused on that, that I jointly developed never do this as a doctoral student, because I said five and a half years, and it was actually six. Because we created a program that combined everything between lifespan development, and industrial psychology. So that's really what my degree was in. So I'm a complete fake. I'm not an industrial psychologist. But who cares at this point, right? It's time, Scott, it's time to come out. But I have to say, it really benefited me because I had a very different frame of reference in how I looked at leadership, and you know, people like David Day who was a little bit behind me, not much, you know, he had the same reference and, you know, a lot of things that I've read of his it's like, man, I remember that discussion. And, you know, we're hearing that from some of the developmental people on our faculty, and also the industrial they actually, it was a good, good linkage there.
Scott Allen 8:50
Well, it that interest that shines through in leadership development in balance, right, where you're talking about live stream, and how do you reflect on some of that content? Now?
Bruce Avolio 9:05
It's more complicated than I thought. It deals with, you know, it gets down to the neuronal level. Today, you know, looking at how the brain you know, matures and how it develops and what experiences shaped the way we process things. And we still know, a fraction, you know, people who really know this stuff that neuroscientists know some more about it than we do, but we are going to discover some things there that I think is pretty powerful, as well as the heritability and genetic part of it, which is still from all the data, not the majority, actually probably a third at most, and even there, the geneticists say it's crazy to think about genetics separate from the engagement and environment and evolution. Evolution is another piece of that, that we tend to see in people, things that have been put in early on, before they existed those individuals, so we can go back through time and see how some of these things get transported into our heritable/genetic structure. And then eventually, you know, we see it as that's how you behave. That's how you think that's how you emote. So it's more complicated, and then I haven't really included the context. And that has been more of a revelation even since writing that book. That the context is so important to how people evolve and engage, we got to do is see what's happened in this last year, we have had this grand experiment, and we don't know yet what the outcomes will be, we don't know what's gonna come out of this team's zoom, WebEx, whatever environment and end up in the same room together. And so things like this have happened throughout history that is kind of jolts, that's a whole nother level of complexity to this whole process of development. So it's, it's more complex. Although some things early on, I have to say that I remember being in a meeting with the head of IBM training, which happened to be near Binghamton University. It's where IBM had its training facilities at the time. And I made the comment, why don't we start leadership training with the followers? Wouldn't it be easier for leaders if we train the followers first? That he didn't quite ask any follow-up questions of me after that, but frankly, that has become a significant part of how we look at the whole development process of leadership. You know, the three-legged stool, the leader, the followers, peers, and context. Yeah, so that's what I mean by it's more complex. Yeah, definitely more complex.
Scott Allen 12:03
Well, Kellerman calls it, she calls it what the leadership system and I think we could, I don't know, disagree with this if you do, but we could probably go back to Fiedler, where he's starting to look at, you know, a few different dimensions of everything. The end. And so, I've noticed that you've added in some in some of your more recent work, some work on the context, and also some more interaction with followers, right. Yeah. Yeah. Talk a little bit more about about the complexity, the individual what I would love to do one of the papers that you wrote, and I asked you in passing at a conference once, it was Avolio & Gibbons, but you all go deep into, you know, some keygen, and adult development? And how are you thinking about some of that work? Do you get into the Kuhnert, and Lewis, and some of that work? How are you thinking about some of that today? Is that more complex too?
Bruce Avolio 12:57
Well, it was complex, when even early on when I read Kegan's book, I've gotten to meet know a little bit through some conferences at Harvard. And he's, he's a great scholar. I'm really a fan of his Immunity to Change work to some really smart stuff about how you think about changing organizations. But in this book, In Over Our Heads I love the, in the beginning, he has a comment from his mother is that she's just basically who can read this. I didn't know this is what you wrote, but who could read it?
Scott Allen 13:39
A little bigger?
Bruce Avolio 13:40
Yes, a little thick. So it started out complex, but it's dealing with what I would consider. Maybe still the holy grail, you know, around leadership development. And that is our perspective-taking capacity. And the way we construe things and, you know, you look at, you know, Bob Lord's work in the arc of that over time, and how much of that has gone into Now, those areas, including around identity, and people look at moral identity and all those sorts of things. So I think, for me, that has been set a pivotal, and as always kind of worried me that, you know, we're training at a level that might not be really tapping into that sort of underlying, you know, the operating system that really, you know, we can change behaviors, that's there's no doubt we can change people's behavior. But to change that level, at that level, that changes everything the choices people make, or you know, the decisions that they pursue and going back to when I first started, you know, how do people construe creating a society where everyone but a certain group is the only group that's relevant, you know, and we've seen that throughout history. We're seeing it unfold. Today in the world in so many different places that create conflicts. So to me, it's, it's, it's a really important piece that the challenge has always been how to measure it. And that's really tough. I've, you know, Karl came to Nebraska and trained us on the subject/object interview. It was very enlightening. I started, you know, going into meetings, judging people based upon what stage they were at.
Scott Allen 15:28
Your at stage two!
Bruce Avolio 15:30
That wasn't yeah, I thought you were in stage three for cripes sake, I guess not!
Scott Allen 15:37
Fair/Unfair. Right/Wrong. Good/Bad, right?
Bruce Avolio 15:39
Yeah. Yeah. But I've you know, it's, it's really always it's affected my thinking about when you go back to the hard stuff, the complex stuff. That's one of the complex, really complex things is, how do you develop that not just moral framing, but the way people frame things, and where does that come from? And there are all sorts of places, it comes from, like, sometimes it's just serendipity, someone drops in and says something to you, and you go, "Wow," and you think about it, and it's 20 years later, and you're still thinking about what that person said to you. I use an example where I met a person at a conference with Desmond Tutu. And afterward, I walked out and never met her again, only met her because I was sitting next to her. As we walked out, she said, that was really amazing. There was so much love in the room. And she said, "it's a really good time for me because I'm recovering from cancer." And then she turned to say, "but cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me." And then I and then she left, the crowd kind of enveloped her. And I was like, "What?" And I've heard people tell me that many times, actually, that there are certain things like that, or cancer that people have gone through. And if they survived that, they said, "it's one of the best things." And I'm like, "God, can't leadership training be easier than that?" I mean, but it does change people's frame of reference, it rocks the world.
Scott Allen 17:09
Yeah, I watched a TED talk (Keith) Iger the other day, and I'll put it in the show notes. But, yes, it's that some of those moments that facilitate what Mezirow would call it maybe a disorienting dilemma that can trend can that can foster or facilitate some of these transitions in levels? And, you know, back to the context thing, I'd never thought of it this way. Before, I'd just love to get your, your thoughts on this question. But when we think about the context, I had a really interesting conversation with a gentleman named Jonathan Reams. Jonathan is the editor-in-chief of the Integral Review, and he's at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. And we were talking about some of the differences between the states and his experience in Norway. But he was talking about a pretty intense focus nationally, on developing the moral character of the citizens in some of these schools. And that really struck me, when we think about the context about how even our environment is training us to be seeing the world and viewing our experiences. It's starkly different than maybe what your average US citizen experiences. So does the context in some ways, facilitate or stunt our progression through those stages? And I think the answer would probably be "yes." I mean, that's possible, at least, how do you think about that?
Bruce Avolio 18:49
What, you know, when I've been asked, How much time would you like to, you know, to invest in, like, we're going to have brought you into the leadership train with some would you like to invest in in the training part? And I would say, "how much, how much time can you afford?" And they would say, Oh, I don't know, today would be maybe, you know if you say "a day or two, it's a long period of time. "I said, "Well, I would like to have that day or two in short segments over a year. And my reason for saying that is because I think the context is so important to how people actually their trajectory of development unfolds over time. So I think the context is really rich, in my former doctoral students from Nebraska published a paper and can imagine review looking at how people development is shaped by how you look across boundaries. And you know, one good example that is, I think that there should be a requirement the United States that people get a passport, as well as have a birth certificate and a driver's license and there required to go up to other cultures at least once a year, to see where we are right now in terms of the arc of our development, and understand that different cultures have very different ways of framing. And, you know, what Rachel wrote about was that this is cross-boundary experiences, just like the trigger event I gave you, that's, you know, it's kind of thinking outside of my boundary, really shape our perspective in fundamental ways. And somebody, I don't know what the percentages were pretty high in our country where people have never traveled, other than going to a wedding in Mexico somewhere, where they're inside a, you know, Walden resort and they're interacting with all their family and friends, and not really interacting at all and the culture. And I think that's a great example of how you kind of shape people's perspective in terms of the context. Role models and all the Bandura's work about, you know, vicarious learning how much vicarious learning accounts for how much does leadership development can be attributed to vicarious learning? I think a lot, I think a lot, especially if you have one thing working reflection, where you stop and think about something.
Scott Allen 21:26
Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it makes me think of the statistic I'm not sure if this is accurate, I'll put this in the show notes as well, I think the average US citizen gets to just four states, let alone different countries. Right. And there's opportunity there because that leads to a very secluded existence, in whatever context we're embedded in. And, and so I think, let's talk a little bit more about time. Sometimes when I think about this work and leader development, and you gave a beautiful example of, you know, a company that says, Well, we have a couple of days. And sometimes when I step back, and I think about what we're trying to accomplish in leader development, it, we approach it at times, like it's a cooking class, like, we're gonna have a two-day cooking course. And all of a sudden, we're gonna have a chef after that's done. And most of the course is sitting in a room talking about cooking, and knife skills, not actually practicing knife skills, just talking about the knife skills, and the importance and the history of knife skills. When you think about how we approach leadership development, not having a practice field much of the time, or at least a practice field where we can receive coaching, if you go to some of the Erickson you know, deliberate practice type work, it's, there has to be a better way, there has to be a different way. Have you? Have you been thinking about this work in new and innovative ways that have struck you in recent years? Or are you still struggling with some of that puzzle of Geez, how, you know, the military is probably the closest, where you have people embedded in this context for decades? And, you know, they're continually in this place of growth, depending on rank. But when you step back and really think about what we're trying to do, time is a variable that we haven't necessarily figured out also, because it requires that time. How do you think about that?
Bruce Avolio 23:30
Well, I think about it in several ways. I'll give you one way as I think there's a lot of potentials here for innovation, some of it coming from other areas, or fields. But you know, one thing is like looking at this from a historical time perspective, right? I remember somebody in China telling me back about 15 years ago, you know, we've been out of it for about 300 years, but we're back, you know, and when you think about 30 years, in our country, it's like, well, that's about all we got. But when you have that, that the benefits of iterations of time historically, it gives you some perspectives that I don't know, if we're around in 1000 years as a country. And given the way the world has evolved the mature, that is going to be the case. But we'll say that we're going to have a different perspective about things will have gone through multiple iterations of events and situations that hopefully have involved us, you know, into some something like a more perfect union, so to speak, as we talked about here on our country. The innovative part, so I think the historical context, I think my own personal history, history. You know, it's like I have this narrative and I think I've lived in this channel and it doesn't include yours. Till today. So I don't know what your historical context is and how they overlap with mine. And ours are both construed, right history is construed. It's not as it happened, it's the way we've interpreted it. And then I look at, you know, kind of the present time context and what's happening right now. And you know, developmental psychologists talk about event-dense periods in history, right? You know, so in the 60s, there were a lot of things that were happening, that were impacting institutions and the way we saw things and so forth, and so on in the 70s. And then we had bell-bottoms in the spinners. And that was about it, no, and then we go, and then the 80s, you know, that was pretty good. Well, they were around the 60s too, but you know, it just led towards these periods of events that the time is almost compressed like it's happening at you so much like, this year, okay, we've got pandemic, we've got multiple social injustice movements happening at the same exact time. And then in the last month or two, we bring in the Asian American experience, which has not been a very good history for us, nor for them in this country. And rightly, so it's coming, all these things are happening in this period of time, and the bifurcation of the political system, and etc, etc. So I look at this and so if I were to create a game, what would it be? And how could I get everyone playing the game? Well, the game right now is the world we're in. Right. And we're all players in that game. Some of us have more resources than others, and we could do things to make an impact. What if we created something that was a simulation of that, but still had the basic principles of gaming? So if I were to create what I call a "gamulation," for engaging people in their own development, what would that look like? It would be a series of scenarios and challenges. Now to go from pie in the sky dreaming, which I was always accused of in my elementary school high school, that I was dreaming that paying attention. But now dreaming is considered a strength. And I envision a world in which we can teach people through gaming principles, how they might be able to engage challenges, working sometimes with not a few players, but 1000s of players, millions of players. So my and this is not pie in the sky. We got an NSF grant National Science Foundation grant built an entrepreneurial gamulation. Taking people through the typical founder's dilemma is that entrepreneurs love to regale you with Oh, I have failed three times in my you know, and like, did you do the same things the same way each time, like having one, you know, a company with your friends and the second company with your friends. And a lot of times I make the same mistakes in typical mistakes. So we developed that we've developed now three or four of the five now, for different companies. And we've, we've deployed them in universities, we've got one called Liberty air, which is really based on Alaska Airlines' experience going through a complete transformation as an organization. And we modeled that, and then we say play it, they wanted to see how other people would play the game. They've actually played in reality, the real leaders of Alaska, and we made it into a game and you end simulation. So that's one of innovation if we can create the kind of stickiness that games create for education, and it's being used in other areas, as well. It's being used in health. I mean, if you think about our lives, right, a lot of things are driven by games, like, you know, earning points for flying. And I've had people say, I'm going to Spokane, this weekend. It's like, Where are you seeing a family of friends? No, I'm just going there because I need one more leg. In my, I get MVP goal.
Scott Allen 29:22
If I did that, I'd take a flight from Seattle that's supposed to in Seattle, Spokane,
Bruce Avolio 29:29
beautiful Spokane, and then come back just because they can do that and get extra. So we've been looking at how to use gaming. In fact, before he came on with this interview or podcasts. I was writing, finishing, you know, it's a 10-page paper that I'm using as a basis for discussion. We have a Naval Command here. Just north of Seattle, it's well aware of a lot of our nuclear subs are based and so forth. And they're doing a conference on mental health and It's part of Dr. Biden's initiative to bring wellness and mental health to helping families and service members. And so we're having a conference and in that, I'm talking to them about some work we were doing on recovery from addiction. So here I am this industrial psychologist, but really a gerontologist, lifespan development. Interested in gaming, that knows hardly anything about addiction. But now I've spent a lot of time and I was actually you mentioned Mezirow have this book grabbed my desk, because I've been looking at transformative learning in contexts where you're dealing with addiction, suicide, things like that, because the mental health field is overwhelmed, to say the least, and there's no way we can produce enough mental health experts. So one of the proposals we have is that we have had in the works is to look at how we can use gamulations to bring in all of the stakeholders that can help that individual work through probably one of the most challenging things that people can work with getting off of some of these incredibly powerful drugs that are is ruining lives is causing high rates of community challenges, homelessness, people dying, it's just you know, so I look at that and say, could gaming isn't that kind of silly to talk about gaming now? I mean, gaming is, is something that is good, it could be a good addiction, not a bad addiction. So that's one example.
Scott Allen 31:44
Well, well, it resonates with me, in a lot of ways. So a passion topic of mine and people who listen to the podcast have heard me say this before, technologies, enabling disruption, so that we could go down that whole rabbit hole, right. But outside of where I am, right now, I'm in my basement, and my son plays, we have two hours a day. Right? That's, that's the limit on fortnight. And so is two hours a day. Well, what is he doing? He's putting on a headset. He's talking to five of his friends. And they are working as a team to accomplish some goal. And he has a couple of other games that he's playing. But they're teams of five. And literally, he's not playing right now. But I can hear him from here, coordinating strategizing, planning, saying a good job. I mean, if we could harness that, I don't know if u dub has a gaming team. But it's really fascinating because I think that's an area. So your notion of gamification. I see it, I see it very, very clearly. Because I think you're exactly right. And I co-founded a leadership competition about wells in 2015. And this spring, we had 33 teams from across North America, get online 310 people, two judges per team, that one judge was both the judges were looking at the process we did the ever simulation Roberta and Edmondson. And so we had a team engaged in that simulation, they had a process score based on a rubric we'd kind of developed based on the curriculum, and you would be just it smiling how into this experience the students get because it's immersive. And because they know that they're competing with other schools from across Canada or the US. And it's pretty fun. So the gamification, yes, I get it. And why do people practice? I think an Achilles heel of our work is that well, where do people practice leadership practice? You have, you have people in organizations leading right now. But oftentimes, if we go to the Eric's and stuff, they aren't necessarily getting coaching and feedback. They might be practicing the wrong stuff over and over and over, and not getting that that data and that feedback. So we're trying to create a practice field. And what does it mean to coach leadership? or What does it mean to practice leadership? So we're dipping our toes in that, but the gamification Why do people practice to compete or to perform? That's why I practice the cello. That's why I practice football. And when we think about the time that people give to football versus really developing their leadership skills, it's what 1000s of times more time so I love this whole stream, and, and how can technology and how can we leverage technology to help facilitate that learning? Right?
Bruce Avolio 34:51
Yeah. So can we make it as sticky as Fortnite? The answer's yes. we've demonstrated them in Sim City is an example. For example, as one example, in fact, one of the people who develop that with his friends. His name is called AJ. He works with us on these gamulations. He also worked with Lucas Films, on the ranch on Star Wars, rejoice in some of that. And he also worked at Microsoft. And he was the head of Xbox in Asia. So he brings together he and some of the other people I'm working with, they bring together a wealth of experience that allows us to say we bring constructs to interplay, and they put the context into perspective. And then you pull those things together and try to keep it interesting. You can reinvent just about everything related to assessment and development. For example, certification exams, which just every year, like a real estate broker has to do a certification exam. And they hate them. What if they said I can't wait to do this year is to see what it's like? Yeah, this is kind of, you know, doing what we say all the time in business schools to be disruptive, in terms of industries with this could be very disruptive at every level. And I think it's gaining more traction, you know, you're seeing that in use with kids on the autism spectrum. Now, in terms of using gaming, and other approaches, we have something that was developed here, serendipitously called snow world for a burn clinic. Where when people come to this clinic, usually we're one of the first we're the first in the world to create a burn clinic among a lot of other firsts at the university's med school. And when people come there, one of the worst parts of it beyond being horribly burned is when they have to take the bandages off. And they have to give people morphine because it's so painful. Someone got this idea based on a sort of distraction theory, if someone was playing a game, while that was happening, I wonder what the experience would be in terms of pain. And so snow world, if you look it up, is a game that people can play. So they could be playing hockey or throwing snowballs. And in that environment, they're imagining a whole different, not the heat and all the things that went along with the burns, but a completely different environment. And they've been able to reduce the morphine levels in patients, which actually helps them recover more quickly, to get them off that. And so that's an example of you know if you went in and set a game for that this was a serious business. But you can gamify anything.
Scott Allen 37:55
Yeah. Yep. And we could align with things that already have a lot of energy. But I but yes, I mean, you add a VR or an AR component to that experience for the students or for the not the students, but the burn victims? Who are in that and all of a sudden, yes, that distraction.
Bruce Avolio 38:15
This is it is a virtual experience for them. It's an embedded experience. Our stuff is not yet. We're trying to keep it really simple and accessible to people because we don't think that technology that technology is there yet to be able to do that. Although I've talked to a lot of VR and of course Microsoft's heavily into the augmented that I think that's probably going to be the way it's gonna go. The RBA kind of the stepping stone to that.
Scott Allen 38:41
Well, when we get the holodeck, that'll, that'll be, that'll be awesome.
Bruce Avolio 38:50
Yeah, it's coming. I'm sure it's probably here already. We
Scott Allen 38:53
know. Bruce, I want to honor your time, and we've been going for about 40 minutes. So thank you so much. I always end off the podcast by just asking guests, what they're listening to what they're streaming, what they're reading. It could have to do with leadership. It doesn't have anything to do with leadership. What has caught your attention in recent months?
Bruce Avolio 39:15
Well, I'm uh, now I'm a blink addict. So I've been listening to blinks. So a lot of different books. The series I listened to a couple of days ago at the gym was about totalitarian societies become totalitarian. And what they do is they do like a three-minute synopsis and there are six or seven blinks where you cover maybe three or four different books, or other areas, you know, domains and knowledge. So I've been really interested in that and then reading about it since I lived in Akron, Ohio, and I came from New York, Bruce Springsteen, the two places he was probably most popular were either New York, New Jersey, or Cleveland. Yeah, he was, yes, very, very popular. And we've always been big fans and but reading his biography, so I read a lot of biographies of people because it's interesting also colleagues at door Institute down at Rice University, they just put together a book called The leadership reckoning, which I think is going to it's getting a lot of, say press, like, national press, but it will because it's challenging the assumption that we actually develop leaders when we say it's in our mission. And so all you know, it's like, prove it. So I think I'm on the faculty advisory board for it. And I've always been a proponent for you know, if we say we're doing we should be measuring how we're doing it. And that's, that's Tom Cole. That's who I had met at West Point, actually, when he was there in the behavioral science department. But so it's the kind of thing I'm looking at right now.
Scott Allen 41:08
Yeah. And I think I took a look last summer for a paper it was 23 of 25 of the top business schools. So you know, that we develop leaders, it's in the mission vision or their core principles. And I haven't seen the data yet from that's, that's backing up a lot of those assertions and how it's defined even right. One class really that one class develops the leaders. Wow, that's great.
Bruce Avolio 41:37
Usually, what the deans when, you know, many of them are admitting this, you see, what they will say is, this is what we offer, whether it has the effects we think, has, by the way, it's not just the business goals, it's also the universities, most universities say that they in their mission to developing leaders. And that may be true, but in what ways and, and so and they're taking a slice of it at Rice, and the door is john and Ann door. So there they have endowed this initiative with quite a bit of money. This is one of many things they're doing actually, they're taking a coaching approach. Yeah, I read that. So it's about a third of the students now opt into coaching and opt-in is important because they want to do it or they want they feel it's important to do for whatever reason.
Scott Allen 42:28
Yep. Well, Bruce, thank you so much for your time today. I hope you come back. We can talk. We can go deep into gamification, literally as we are finishing this podcast. My son has gotten downstairs, he started his two hours. And he's now coordinating teams in the other room and I kid you not. I mean, talk about sticky that is sticky. And if we could combine that with some learning, and some intentionality around how they're behaving to coordinate their teams, that would be really cool stuff. That'd be really
Bruce Avolio 43:00
cool. No one in the house had to tell him to do that.
Scott Allen 43:04
No, that was it's 3:19 pm. In fact, he's a little early because it's supposed to start at 330. Yeah,
Bruce Avolio 43:10
I'm sure he's like that around his homework as well. Right.
Scott Allen 43:13
Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, thanks for all you do, sir. Thank you for the influence you've had on me that you've had on on scores and scores and scores of scholars and your work is just it's, it's wealth, it's a wealth and I just really appreciate that.
Bruce Avolio
Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai