Jennifer Garvey Berger | Unleashing Your Complexity Genius

Srini:

Jennifer, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. So you have a new book out called Unleash Your Complexity Genius, which I think is fitting, considering what a complex world we're currently living in. But before we get to that, I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping choices that you've ended up making with your life and career?

Oh my goodness

Jennifer Garvey Berger: so much . Oh, it's amazing. My father's an English professor. And from him I think I get my love of stories and of writing. He's an incredible writer and storyteller. My dad and my mom was actually one of the first executive coaches and she got me into this question of complexity.

Mom and I geek out and read complexity books together and she pushes my thinking around. And so in my case, my parents and their careers, like their fingerprints are completely on what I do for a living these days. Yeah.

Srini: What was the narrative around your house about making your way in the world?

My dad's a professor too especially in an Indian family, it's like you are headed to academia or some version of it. That is going to lead to a high paying job no matter what. And needless to say, I'm, the sorting error that God made by giving me to my family,

Jennifer Garvey Berger: the story in my family was, if you take an academic job, you're going to be destitute and grading papers all the time.

And so I was a professor I became a professor and I spent a lot of time grading papers. So the, yeah the advice my parents gave me was do the thing that you love. And the path I took was always towards how could I make a difference in the world? How could I make people's lives better or easier in some way?

And I kinda fell into this profession on that quest. .

Srini: Okay. You just mentioned that despite being told that you'd be destitute and doing nothing but grading papers if you became a professor, you did become one. Why?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Because I love it so much because I love ideas. I I love the power of ideas to change lives, and I love the power of education to open doors for people.

So I became a professor of teacher transformation to help teachers and then principals changed their schools in a way that made kids' lives better. And then over time, I, looking for leverage over time, I went towards leaders and their constituents because I thought maybe that was a more direct way to change lives.

and that's the niche I've found myself in. Also in there I stepped off the professor track because we moved to New Zealand. So I've also done a lot of finding my way through professions that allow me to live in the places I must wanna live.

Srini: Wow. Okay. W it's funny because every time I have an academic, I talk to them about how they would change the education system, and you just happen to be the person whose entire, work has been centered around that teacher transformation.

So I have to ask you, we've got a situation where people are coming out of school with mountains of student loan debt. Chase Jarvis said that basically we have an education system that is not designed to prepare for the people for the future. They're going into where they're going to have five jobs at the same time, and as a failed byproduct of an elite university.

I wanted to ask you, if you were tasked with redesigning the entire system from the ground up, what would you change and how would you do it? Which I realized we could talk about that for an hour, which I think is perfect because it'll make a great segue into complexity.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: We could talk about this for so much more than an hour.

I, I think that the, the education model is very old. It comes straight from a kind of elite idea about what are the subjects that the learned should know the kind of elite should know, and how do we segment those subjects into specialties that were divided a long time ago? The way the world works now there, there's no room for specialties like mine.

Like where does complexity go? Where does leadership go in, in these curricula? And and how do we get. Some of the emerging necessary skills and ways of being to be part of a curriculum. And you have to let go of traditional ideas of subjects to be able to do that. But to change that is really hard because actually parents do a lot of insisting that school looks recognizable to them.

And so I was in New Zealand, my kids were in school and New Zealand pivoted to a curriculum that looked to me to be really effective at if you dig into it at what people need to be learning in school. And the parents basically went ballistic and said, yeah, but where are my kids practicing long division?

Like I really wanna understand how other practicing long division. And so there, there's just a really interesting set of. Pushes and pulls that keep education pretty stagnant. .

Srini: Yeah. I've talked to so many people about this and from looking at it from different angles I think the thing that has always struck me, particularly based on my experience, was that I felt like going to college was like choosing items off a fast food menu, even though there's just this diversity of possible experiences that you could have.

And yet it's these are the options that are put in front of you. Choose them and ignore all the possibilities that surround you.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: It's exactly right. The most interesting, I think now my career has done a lot of this kind of banning, but for me, the most interesting questions are discipline banning questions.

And you're talking about fast food menu. This is like a, how do you become the chef of your own experience and And there are some universities that do this well, but by and large universities are tied to these kind of traditional pathways that are interesting and they have been interesting for others, but they are not keeping up with the complexity of the demands made on people as they graduate and as they join the workforce.

Srini: So one thing that I am very curious about obviously this is a book published by the Stanford University Press. So what role does status play in all of this? Because I think that, we've put these elite universities on a pedestal, and as a result, you have students who are willing to go to the end of the earth in hell even have their parents spend fortunes to, pay somebody to take tests for them.

When their parents are people like Lori Laughlin.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah. Yeah. The connection between status and American universities is just it's fascinating, right? My doctorate's from Harvard and I had my bachelor's degree from a really fantastic state school called St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Nobody cares about that degree, , right? As soon as you, as soon as you go to one of these places that got the big ticket name, that's the , that's the thing that matters most to folks. So that is a somewhat American, not Holy American, but it's a somewhat American desire to chase the name brand, I think.

That I see less in the other countries in which I've lived. Yeah.

Srini: I wanna bring back a clip from an episode that we did with Scott Galley, where he talks about this idea of educational institutions becoming luxury brands. Take a listen, despite the fact that the number of people going to college has increased dramatically the number of seats that have been offered by the top universities has stayed flat.

So Stanford's applications have tripled in the last 30 years, but the number of seats that they've increased has, they haven't increased their freshman class by anything substantial because we, as academics, and I include myself in this, have become drunk with the notion of exclusivity. And that is we no longer see ourselves as public servants.

We are see ourselves as luxury brands. And every fall, the head of admissions and the deans brag about how impossible it is to get in to the college. And you can't be at a party without someone joking that they could never get into their alma mater day. But that's a bad thing because on a risk adjusted basis, it's likely that your children will be somewhere in your weight class.

So as a Harvard alum, what do you make of that? I

Jennifer Garvey Berger: agree that this is a problem. The question is, do we want to make some of these institutions larger? Do we want to expand their footprint? Or do we want to figure out what's the value of a college education from, Iowa State? And how could we care more deeply about, about that?

Could we be valuing more than just a name brand? Could we be valuing like, what the education does? I taught for a while at a place called George Mason University, which is not a name brand school. But they, the reason I went there is because they had amazing redesigns. Of what a student experience would be for adult learners.

That just floored me in how sophisticated they were, how thoughtful they were. I think, rewarding what the universities are doing instead of the shortcut of rewarding the brand name of them would be exciting. That would be exciting. Now,

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What did you see as the differences in different countries compared to the United States? In terms of the way that the entire sort of structure of education is from, kindergarten to getting into college?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I've lived in places where the structures are really quite different, so New Zealand is the most. It's the most flexible curriculum in the world, and the way teachers enact that curriculum is incredibly flexible. All the way to, the way you get into university is more flexible.

Whether or not you need an undergraduate degree to pursue a master's degree is more flexible. So you have all of these lines that say there are a lot of ways to be successful here. Then you travel through the us come to England where I spent some years and where my son went to university in graduate school.

And there that system is actually pretty rigid. You take a series of tests as a teenager, like a 16 year old. And the choices you make on those tests pretty much lock you into what university you're gonna go to and what you can major in. So there, the choices get made really early, and so those tests become a driving force and just a complete set of misery and the lives of those families because so much rests on the results of those tests.

So I think there are lots of ways to do it. Like all things that are complex, how do we, how do we let people combine in a different way? How do we lead more flexibility of pathways so that we reach more people? I j I just think that there's a huge amount of human value that we lose when we don't have these systems designed well.

That truly we cannot afford to lose the contribution of humans to the collective challenges we face. We just can't afford to leave them out because they happen to be born in the wrong place, or they didn't do well in a test, or they happen to be the wrong race or gender to be considered successful or elite on their particular pathway.

, I think this is a really important thing to work out. Yeah. So

Srini: one question I realized is just absolutely ludicrous that we ask kids is what do you want to be when you grow up? Yeah. It's ridiculous. Wait a minute, you're asking me how I want to spend the rest of my life when I barely lived a fraction of it?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Ask the 40 year old that question they often can't answer, right? Why don't we expect a 16 year old? Why do we expect an eight year old to be able to answer this question? It's ridiculous. And I, my daughter came home from school one day when she was, I don't know, 12, and she was furious and she's mom, my teacher told me today that the job I'm going to have in my career probably hasn't been invented yet.

She was like, what are you grownups doing? That means there's so much uncertainty in my life. I'm like, yeah, that's, it's fair. And at the same time, why do we believe that we should be able to gap what our career's gonna be like when in fact we, we who have careers who are somewhere in there know that it's just been a series of this choice and that choice that has happened to open up a particular path that we've followed or hacked out of the wilderness for ourselves.

And we've gotta teach kids how to compile, how to create, how to craft a career as opposed to how to, follow a particular reign that gets you

,

in a particular job that happens to exist today, but might not exist in five years, 10 years. .

Srini: Yeah. I realized, people would make decisions like, Hey, I'm gonna be a doctor.

Have you ever set foot in a hospital? What do you know about being a doctor? This is very common with Indian people. It's wait a minute, you're going to college and you've decided how you're gonna spend the next 10 years of your life and you have no data points. And that was one thing that became very apparent to me as a byproduct of doing this work and talking to I, hundreds of people like yourself, where I realized Tina Cig said something to me that always stayed with me.

And that sh that was that passion follows engagement. And that was what I realized is like nobody tells you. Don't pay attention to the things that you find engaging. It's more, go do this and you'll get this job. Whereas there's no question of whether you're in the right job to begin with.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: No, I completely agree. This question of how do we use the things that we are the best at? How do we figure out what our strengths are, package those strengths together in a way, this beautiful idea about where my longing meets the world's hunger, right? How do we how do we help people understand that process instead of having people look at kind of the known careers at this moment and then try and get on a path towards one of those known careers?

I think a lot of people end up doing things they hate. Because that was what they knew how to do. They knew how to get on that path, and it's scary to not be on a path. And so they got on a path and if they happen to hate it, whatever. But I think that costs those individuals, but it also costs the world.

And what could those individuals have done if they were on a path that they were passionate about and that they were great at. .

Srini: I think that makes a perfect segue into talking about the book. So what was it that sparked your idea for writing this book about unleashing your complexity Genius.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: The book I wrote before this one which is called Unlocking Leadership Mind Traps, was about all the ways our body is mis programmed to, to help us in complexity or all these little traps we fall into because our bodily system is very often. Trying to shield us from complexity as though complexity is your enemy.

In fact, it happens to be true. I've discovered in the research for this book that your body metabolizes complexity as threat. And so it makes sense that we fall into these traps if what we are is feeling threatened by a fact of complexity. But I got really curious about what are our resources, right?

There must be a ton of resources. I figured what are they? Could I name them? And then could we expand them so that we could look at what would be great about ops and what we have at our fingertips? If we could just mobilize it. And this is where this book came from the opposite question of the book before it.

And looking at how could we craft our. Our momentary experience, our bodily state to handle complexity better. And then over time, how can we craft the conditions of our lives? If you buy the idea that your life is just gonna be complex, how could you craft the conditions of your life to take advantage of that complexity, to use it as a kind of force that propels you in a direction you wanna go in, as opposed to doing what our body does if we don't pay attention by default, which is be afraid of it, hide from it, be anxious about it, try to get away from it, try to oversimplify it.

So that's where that book came from.

Srini: No in the opening of the book, you say that we've set up our organizations, our schools, often even our families, to create predictable spaces where we mostly believe we know what's going to happen next. We've created systems and structures that allows to handle difficult situations.

What looks like a kind of predictable ease. All this uncertainty wreaks havoc on our systems, financial systems, political systems, social systems. But the first str se stress system that leaders must deal with is their own nervous system. We cannot handle the complexity outside us unless we are able to notice and ultimately change what complexity does inside us.

And when I read that, my first thought was thinking about this whole idea of uncertainty and complexity and how we do everything we can to increase simplicity and uncertainty in our lives. Like we resist uncertainty. And I don't remember which book it was, but I remember, seeing this sentence that uncertainty is beneficial cause it makes us feel alive.

And I thought to myself, yeah, if you didn't have any uncertainty, your life would be like, Groundhog Day would be pretty mind numbed.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: And most of the habits, most of the hobbies and things we do for enjoy. Are unpredictable. Sports are unpredictable. That's why we like them.

Movies, we want an unpredictable ending. We watch TV shows cause they have a cliff hanger or whatever it is, right? We read books that surprise us. So we really crave this kind of unpredictability and our leisure time if it's safe and fenced away from our actual, the actual conditions of our lives and in the actual conditions of our lives, we wanna know that our kids are gonna be successful, that we're gonna have an appropriate job, that everything's gonna go swimmingly for us.

Srini: Yeah. At laughing because I, I, at 44 there's only one thing I know for sure and that's that nothing in my life has gone according to plan.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And almost always, we look back on that and we say, and thank God. Yeah, thank God I didn't, because the plan I had was so much less interesting.

Than the life that I've ended up in. So if we could just harness some of that and understand the complexity is a force for creativity, innovation, newness. It's got all kinds of good features. We just have to lean into those as opposed to leaning away from them. Let's

Srini: talk about harnessing this because you say that one of the core paradoxes of complex systems is that a lot of effort can have no impact and a tiny bit of effort can have a lot of impact.

And of course, in complex systems, the bummer is that you can't know which until afterwards, right? So one, talk to me about why you can't know which it is until afterwards. And then with that in mind, then how do we keep ourselves from just spinning our wheels? So you

Jennifer Garvey Berger: can't know until afterwards because the nature of complexity is unpredictability.

Like it's very nature is there are so many. Moving parts, so many interdependencies that you can't know how this set of things is going to turn out. If you knew how it was gonna turn out, it wouldn't actually be technically complex. So by its nature, complexity is unpredictable. And yet we crave, we totally crave predictability, right?

Our our bodies actually are predictive machines. We have evolved to this place by predicting, in relatively straightforward ways, what things are dangerous, what things are not dangerous. Things that were dangerous yesterday, probably gonna be dangerous tomorrow. The modern world kicks a lot of that up in, in a new way that we have to teach our nervous systems to be able to handle.

Srini: I was thinking about this idea of, actions that have no impact and a tiny bit of effort can have a lot of impact. And my friend Julian Smith has been mentoring me, and if I were to identify one theme in our calls, it's not about what I should do. It's literally every week we talk about what I should stop doing every time I meet with them.

. So talk to me about that, because it, you're right, that is a paradox in that I'm actually in one way simplifying, but, trying to solve a complex problem and we'll actually frame this for, in something concrete once we go through these themes, but yeah, the, I, it just struck me that was so interesting that here I am, getting help on what to do and 90% of our conversation is about what not to do.

Yeah. It's

Jennifer Garvey Berger: fascinating. The. One of the quirks of the human psychology is that we tend to think in additive ways about improvement. Uhhuh . So if you give, most of the studies will show you that if you give somebody the chance to quote, improve something, you tell them that this is their goal. They'll only, no matter what the thing is, they'll almost always put something on.

We rarely think of improvement as taking something off, but of course, in complexity, we gotta try a lot of things to figure out where these high leverage issues are. And to try a lot of things, you'll have to give them up, right? You have to say, oh, this is the high leverage. I'm gonna stop doing that.

, I had it, it was teaching a bunch of leaders about experimentation, and one of the forms of experimentation I encourage most is experimentation about stopping things. And this leader I think she was the cfo, F And she found that her people were spending some huge amount of their time creating reports, financial reports of, somebody asks for a financial report, cut this way.

And so they make that report and then they make it next month and then they make it next month. And they were doing like, whatever, some huge number, 153 reports a month. And and she thought, what if people don't actually need these reports? Maybe they wanted them once and they weren't that helpful.

I don't know if anybody reads 'em. So she said, next month I'm gonna make all the reports, but I'm not gonna send any of them out and we're gonna see which ones get asked for. So she made all the reports, they kept them in a drawer and something like six reports got asked for that month. And so the next month they just made those six reports.

They let the 140 x go. And nobody ever complained. And she was like, actually, my people were spending half of their time doing things that were absolutely not adding any value for the organization. But it's super important for us to be able to cut things out and see, does this matter? Is this even a problem?

And oftentimes it's not a problem. Yeah.

Srini: I think that, speaks to this idea that, you say you talked about in the book where you say one of the most important ways to unleash your complexity genius is to notice this action urge, pause, stay with the discomfort you might feel, and then make a choice about whether to act or not.

And the, I don't know what it is lately, I feel like I'm reading books about productivity that are all about doing nothing. And I'm like, maybe this is a message from the universe to me to slow the fuck down. It's just okay I really, look, I've been thinking about that, and I thought to myself like, you know what, there are probably three or four things I do every week that are honestly impactful.

And then the others What if I did less of them? And I said, okay, these are the non-negotiables. The rest of them are optional and would anybody notice? And it's amazing because you are actually more effective, but quote unquote less productive. Because I think that what I noticed was there's this big difference between being effective and productive as we think of it in the modern world, which is just crossing tasks off a list.

And it was like, this is such a terrible way to measure productivity.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: And it's generally the productivity that you get from crossing tasks off a list. It is very satisfying, right? It feels delightful. We get a little dopamine hit when we do that, but it's almost always a diversion from thinking hard and creating new stuff.

And actually it's the thinking hard and creating new stuff that is most value adding. That's the particular gift we each bring into the world is what's the combination? Of our skills, our knowledge, our experience pushed up against the problems of the world in this moment. Do you really need to run this report or do this thing again?

That's been done a billion times. Probably not. Yeah.

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With mem, he doesn't need a hundred tags to keep track of his information, and he doesn't need to worry about the management and organization of his information. Mem takes care of all of it, and when Sam's ready to produce work, mem helps him to produce it. If you're struggling with information overload and wanna learn how to use mem to reduce distractions, increase productivity, and maximize your creative output, visit, maximize your output.com to learn more.

Again, that's maximize your output.com.

You talk about this moment, which I think makes a perfect segue to this next idea. You say, one of our favorite ideas from complexity is to remember that the seeds for the future exist right now. Whatever the conditions are right now, that's what you've got as ingredients to make the future. The outcomes you're getting today are the result of the way the context is working with right now.

So I think that really struck me because it's a paradox, almost a contradiction to this idea of, okay, pause before

,

you act. And I know you're not saying do nothing, although in some cases maybe it does make sense to do nothing, but there's this whole idea, right? Where people say, if you just keep doing what you're doing today, you're, today's gonna look exactly.

Tomorrow's gonna look exactly like today.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah the noticing where I am right now, which the human mind is not good at, right? The human mind is really good at re-lit the past. It's really good at dreaming about and often catastrophizing about the future. That's what the human mind really wants to do.

So paying attention to where we are now and thinking about what's a reasonable next step from this moment is that unlocks an unbelievable amount of possibility. As an example, we last year a bunch of friends and I bought a big house in the southwest of France and we live in this house. We live in community, in this house.

And when I tell people this story, people almost always day. Some people say, that sounds awful. I would never wanna do this. This is a, this is one of the reactions I get, but the other major reaction I get is, oh my goodness, I've been talking about doing that for years, but it looks so daunting. How did you get it right?

How, like, how were you brave enough to do that? How did you get all the pieces in place to do that? And I think what people mean is like, how did you get the first 10 years worth of things in place to do that? And the answer is you do not. You don't, you would never do it. The question of how do you get to the next feasible step in the direction of the life you wanna live in feels riskier to people because you can't see seven steps ahead.

But actually you can't ever see seven steps ahead. It's delusion to think you can see seven steps ahead. And so admitting that you can't, and then just. Taking a step and then another step, and then another step. Actually, we get more done if we treat complexity that way, but we do less of the kind of repetitive stuff, and we do less of the crossing every t and dotting every I on our way to the future that we can't predict anyway.

Srini: . Yeah. It's a bit like you're pulling out of your driveway expecting all the lights to be green from when you wanna drive from LA to Chicago. This is something that I realized. It took me a while to come to this realization. I said, it's like standing in two different spots in the same room.

If you change where you're standing, the view changes and you'll see things you can't see. Now is the only way to see those things is to take a step.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah. Yeah. The, and the reason why you were talking about stopping things. The reason why you'll have to stop things. Is to free up the time and space for you to be able to take a step and then notice what happened when you took that step.

A lot of us take steps without noticing and therefore without seeing the new possibilities that are emerging by virtue of the fact that we just took that step, a lot of us are, sleepwalking through our lives. Complexity, demand that we open our eyes and look around.

Srini: You say that we think we see the world clearly, but it turns out it's not as if you can see the world as it is. There's so many things happening all the time that to see it all would be crippling e if it were even possible. So we filter out most of the world and then try to make sense of what we filtered.

So when I read that, I couldn't help but think of the role that. Biases play in distorting our perceptions of reality. And, the choices we make. And I'll give you the most asinine example. So I have a a theory that I should not date women with small dogs because I've dated three and they were awful.

So in my mind, now that I've offended all my female listeners with small dogs, I think there are, and it's a joke. A friend of mine said one, your sample size is not large enough. And I was like, yeah, an economist named Allison Traeger validated my theory, and then my friend looks at me, he's you're an idiot.

He was like, you don't even like dogs that much. But the thing is that, and it's funny, like even though I know this is absolutely just has no basis in reality, and based on a sample size of three, if I'm on a dating app and I see a girl with a pitcher with a small dog, I swipe left . And God knows I may have missed out on some really amazing woman.

But the truth is that's my cognitive bias at work. Even though I'm aware of it, I still do that.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: This is why we have to notice. You might choose to do that. There might be enough women in the world that you could forego all of the women with small dogs and still find happiness , right?

Srini: Yes, exactly.

So now you just supported my, my, my decision.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: So I I am not gonna contradict your decision. Knowing that you have a cognitive bias gives you the chance to say, do I, is it, is this a thing I wanna be in or not? Do I wanna fall into this? We have biases about so many things we have to choose, which are the ones we want to overcome which are the important ones.

And you can, you could be running an experiment for the next year that, that your small dog theory, right? You might go with it as long as you know it's an experiment, you know what you're learning and you're open to change your hypothesis if the thing that you're learning is actually. The woman you fall in love with has a small dog or before you knew that she had a small dog or that you can, you don't like women with cats or whatever it is, , right?

Maybe you are like an antiel bias, I don't know. Yeah. But paying attention to what are our biases and how are they getting the way is really pivotal for us because our biases create our reality. And our reality has to be created by something. But the thing I learned more than anything else in the research for this book was that we spend so much of our lives on autopilot.

And autopilot isn't that good for the conditions of now autopilot has been very good, but autopilot is not that good for the conditions of right now. And so how do we decide which bits of autopilot to turn off without flooding our system so we can't turn it all off? Cuz we couldn't handle that. And besides, it's impossible.

How do we decide which bits to turn off and when and how do we spend more time creating the conditions we want for our lives instead of on autopilot, on default taking? What comes?

Srini: I think that, when you think about conditions, I think about the fact that, people spend all this time trying to figure out their values, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like if you can figure out the conditions, they'll reveal your values.

I

Jennifer Garvey Berger: think that the thing we wanna do is notice how much is revealed to us. I absolutely agree. If you find out, if you look at the conditions that you've created in your life, you can see what your values are, and if your values are different than that, then you might wanna think about what conditions do you need to change in your life.

Srini: . Let's talk about. The body itself, because one of the things that you say is the single most powerful communication channel we have for our nervous system is our breath. It's not only the way we can find out which nervous system is running us, it's also the way to switch gears. The genius of your breath, like other geniuses, is that is both automatic and an intentional processes in your body.

There aren't many of our vital processes like that. So talk to me about the role that something like breath that, most of us take for granted plays in your ability to handle complexity.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I have started to think of the breadth as the most underrated, underutilized leadership tool at our disposal.

Just because I see so many leaders race through their meetings, their days, their tasks on autopilot, not noticing what they're doing and. I noticed this particularly during covid, during the sort of most lockdown days of Covid, when I would, it would watch, I would watch executive teams at work or I would talk to leaders and I saw that they were rarely actually with us, right?

And leaders had this sense that they needed to be on camera all the time. But they were actually multitasking a lot at the time. . Which means you can be on camera and not be paying any attention, and we can actually walk through our lives that way. We're on camera without paying attention.

The breath helps us understand where we are, and it helps us return to this place the, this place where we are in this moment and actually be present in this space because one of the core. One of the core things we need as we're leading anything, as we're in a relationship, as we're leading a team, as we're leading an idea is our present.

And we don't actually come to presence very easily because we're either in the past or the future. It's not, that's not now. Our breath really links us to now, and it, as our breath changes, if we have any kind of status in the room, as our breath changes, it changes the breathing of others in the room as well.

And so we use this on purpose and not just breathe. Breathing is great. We need to do that also. But if we use our breath on purpose, we can change our relationship to what's going on right now. We can change what's happening in the nervous systems of those around us. We can change what's what, like what?

Cocktail of neurochemicals is flowing through our veins. It actually is a really powerful switch and and we have access to it a hundred percent of the time, which is just amazing. There are very few leadership moves we have access to all the time, but this is one.

Srini: I think that makes a perfect segue into the other one, which is sleep.

And you say that to enable us to see patterns, in order to address complex challenges, we need to be able to hold onto what we're seeing in the present sleep. Particularly the deep sleep that happens early in the night is astonishing at updating and pruning our memory as it moves memories from the brain's short-term storage area to the more stable and long-term memory space.

So talk to me about this because I think that all of us are aware that we need more. And most of us are hyper aware that we're not getting enough. Because I remember talking to my friend Anta, she wrote this a book about Avela, and I told her, I was like, we have all these sleep tracking apps. And I realized that at a certain point I was not getting enough sleep because I was so obsessed.

Not just me. Like I had a room who spent more time worrying about his sleep score than the quality of his sleep. And they're like, wait, who gives a damn if you got a great sleep score? And I read a New York Times article saying that this actually ends up being a huge source of anxiety for people who are tracking

Jennifer Garvey Berger: their sleep.

Yeah. I have tried to get people to track time in bed as opposed to the particular quality of sleep for this exact reason because oh my goodness, what you don't want is to take a thing that's supposed to reduce stress and make it into a thing that increases stress. But I think that if we understand how.

How much a part of our job it is to create the conditions for us to be able to sleep even if we're not particularly sleeping that night or that even that week. But understanding that there's some really classic things we can do, which I swear the number one role for me and that I try to offer to the leaders I work with is just watch when you schedule calls.

I have so many leaders who in, in the desire to have more quality family time and the desire to lead a global team, they'll do things like take calls with this part of the world before sticks because their kids get up at six and then they've gotta be with their kids for breakfast. Then they work a full day.

Then they don't take any calls after six, between six and nine because they wanna be with their kids. And so then they take calls only after nine. Now, this has extended the workday in the most ridiculous way, and it also extends the amount of time your nervous system is really activated, which means you won't be able to sleep.

. So a actually creating boundaries. This is more into what do I need to stop doing? Creating boundaries about what the workday is, creating boundaries about how am I managing, my, my needs, my bodily need. And and following those boundaries actually is transformational. I've had leaders who say okay, Jennifer, I'm not gonna take any calls before six or after.

And that's a win for them right before six or after 10 is a win. Okay, let's stop there and then let's see if we can even pull in the hours a little bit more.

Srini: Let's talk about emotion and curiosity. Curiosity is one of my favorite subjects, but let's talk about emotions first because I think that we spend so much time letting our emotions wreak havoc on our lives, and yet we also obsessively try to control them.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: It's beautiful, isn't it that they both flow through us like a tsunami and then we try to deny the

,

existence of most of them. I think it's a great human pattern. No, but my life was changed by this idea that emotions are the story. Our mind makes up about sensations and.

Our body. We experience sensations. We look at the context. Our, we make up a story and we call that an emotion. We say, oh, I'm sad. I'm angry. I'm disappointed, I'm delighted whatever it might be. And actually this idea is, so for me, this idea contrasts with the notion that we have these things called emotions.

These things called emotions arise in us as just fully fledged things. There's a thing called sad. There's a thing called disappointed. If you believe this this kind of constructive idea about emotions, we can begin to reconstruct our stories about emotions. And that reconstruction actually changes the emotions we're having.

And so it convinced me that we have a lot more power to reshape the the stories we tell ourselves about what we're feeling and therefore to reshape how we're making sense of ourselves and our interactions of the world in a way that's more helpful and more empowering for us. , curiosity

Srini: probably is one of my favorite parts of any story.

Everything I do is driven by personal curiosity. Every choice I make about podcast, yes. Every book I read, every creative project I work on, this is the driving force. And you say curiosity is a powerful antidote to the perils of certainty. Certainty is like a poison and complexity because it robs you of your senses.

You could become blind to new evidence, depth to the perspective of others, narrow in your view and your data. Curiosity as a self, we can apply over the poison of certainty and it works to open up that which was closed to restore our ability to sense into the unknown, to think and feel alongside others.

And, I can't help but think that this is something that just gets diminished with age. And I feel like part of that is because we are socially programmed to be less and less curious. If you ask you, you talk to a kid, every parent has had this kid ask them why, to the point where their only answer is because I only know this.

Because that, what I was told hundreds of times when I would

Jennifer Garvey Berger: ask why I think this is another piece of the education system the trial and the education system is that we begin to teach that answers are the important things and questions are annoying. And yet the minds that we are most drawn to excited by the things the engine that can power us to live a vibrant, creative life is curiosity.

And so when you say almost everything I do is influenced by curiosity this is an amazing engine for innovation and your own personal growth as opposed to a lot of people I work with have because society pushes it. And because there are certain career paths that push it.

They, the thing that they trade on is their expertise. And expertise is is a real double-edged sword in complexity. Expertise is your, if you can use it as a building block, it's incredibly useful. But if you use it as the thing you fall back on, like the thing that just is, then it blinds you to all kinds of possibilities.

The curiosity opens up. So the, this question about how do we deal with our expertise and how do we help stay curious anyway. I think this can be taught. I think curiosity can be is a force we can tap into this very often closed down by our schooling and by our early, the early part of our careers where expertise is the thing that wins us, whatever prizes we're after.

But it's curiosity won us the prizes we were after. I think people could do this and I think that they would love it. I think there's something incredibly satisfying and enjoyable about giving yourself over into your curiosity.

Srini: Yeah. It's funny because that just ties so perfectly to this other idea in complexity where you say, in order to thrive in complexity, we need a whole ecosystem of connections, deep and lasting connections.

We can widespread connections. And this means that creating connections of all varieties is profoundly important for any of us who are creating or supporting human ecosystems in an uncertain world. And it reminded me of something that Robert Green said to me when I interviewed him about his book Mastery.

He said, the analogy is biodiversity. He said, the more species you have in an ecosystem, the richer that ecosystem becomes. And that, to me was pretty much the foundation on which I chose every guest. That's how you end up with porn star's, drug dealers, bank robbers, and people like you on a

Jennifer Garvey Berger: podcast. Yeah.

Diversity becomes a diversity of connection. Diversity perspective becomes fundamental to flexibility to agility. Because the more unitary we are the smaller our capacity to take perspectives. The more similar to us, our whole ecosystem is the more fragile we are, like it, it might be pleasurable because there are things that are easy about it.

But it's a dangerous pleasure in a world that's advancing as quickly as our world advances. Yeah. And.

Srini: We're in a world that is becoming more polarized and divided specifically because of this thing. People tend to gravitate towards their own kind. Confirmation bias is rampant.

I feel like the internet and social media are breeding grounds for confirmation bias. And you talk about this idea that monocultures are brittle and they don't handle change and uncertainty well, and yet the way that we've shaped our political landscape or social systems, our economic landscape, are literally turning into the kinds of monocultures you're talking about.

That's terrifying.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I agree with you. And this is what an algorithm does, right? These algorithms are invested in giving and figuring out exactly what we like and giving us exactly that thing. It's Like the research that kids get sick more once they go to school because their parents have been more successful at creating charm free environments before school.

And so they have less tolerance. We have increasingly smaller amounts of tolerance for difference and increasingly smaller amounts of tolerance for people who don't think or dress like our little crowd does. And that I mean in complexity, diversity is one of the great strengths you have. And so how do we make sense of the sort of diversity that matters to us?

It doesn't have to be every kind of diversity. Diversity of shoe wearing probably doesn't matter very much, right? But there are some forms of diversity that really matter. How do we get access to those forms of diversity? I as the US becomes more polarized, it also becomes more ridiculously ungovernable, right?

There was something about the weaving together of the progressive and conservative perspectives that creates just a whole bunch of possibility. You segment those things totally away from each other and you say, there will be not one drop of those guys in me and not one drop of me in those folks. And then you get a really brittle system with very tight boundaries Indeed.

And you can't solve a new challenge as it crops up. You're paralyzed, which, many governments these days are.

Srini: Yeah. It's funny because I wanted to tie all of this together with a complex, with a concrete example, and there's something you say, which made me realize this would actually be harder than I thought.

You say. Our regular habits were probably imported from the complicated world where we could figure out the best outcome and build a plan to get there in the world. We could use our past experience to figure out the various steps to arrive at our desired end. In the complex world, that kind of step-by-step approach won't work.

And if I realized that this question would probably be ridiculous because it seems like it would be impossible for you to answer it based on me reading that, but I thought to myself, okay let's tie this all together with concrete example. So let's say somebody like me comes to me and says, Hey, I have a product.

I want to increase the sales of that product, which I've overly simplified everything now, ed, I realized my immediate thought was I want a step-by-step approach, which I realize you can't give me. . So since you can't give me a step-by-step approach, what would we do?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: So I, I think the first thing we do is we pay attention to what we know now, right?

We pay attention to the present. What are you learning about the product and what are you learning about Who values it? Who cares about it? Who, who couldn't, what markets you just completely can't enter into. And so there, there's this whole investigation of now that incom complexity really matters.

And if you can get there, there's the investigation of now with a team that's diverse enough to be able to notice the questions you're not asking. I worked once with a beverage company. They made alcoholic beverages and as they began to pay attention to now, and they began to ask their question was basically, who are we not, who are we not paying any attention to?

Who have we written off? And they realized, In something that felt like an epiphany to them. That might not sound like an epiphany, but they realized that they had written off those people who don't drink alcohol, right? They were like, oh, those are not our clients. But actually, what's the fastest growing adult beverage category?

It's non-alcoholic stuff, right? What things people wanna drink a grownup drink but don't want any alcohol on that grownup drink. When they included that, they found an incredibly fertile area, but they found that because they used a diversity of people not just alcohol brewers and sellers they used a diversity of people to ask these questions.

What are we noticing about the whole landscape now? So I think that's the first step. And then iterating your way. Finding ways to iterate more quickly and test and learn. Test and learn. For, we tend to be pretty good at putting some new idea in the world. We tend to be less good at noticing what we're learning from it and less good still at cutting our losses when it's time to cut our losses to stop stuff.

So those are the sort of things I wouldn't pay attention to. Yeah. What's now look like? What's the diversity perspectives you have on now and what can you try and how can you

Srini: stop? It just makes me think I did this survey of my audience for one of these products and just have her hearing you say that it, like my instinct was to immediately act, but I realizing I probably should spend more time just reflecting on the responses.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah. And seeing what surprised you. One of the, one of the interesting findings is that the most creative people are really oriented to Surprise. Yeah. But people who aren't that creative. Who don't go after surprise. We tend to pick up, because of our cognitive biases, we tend to pick up on the patterns we expected.

So we're like, oh yeah, that's, this is what I expected. So every time you'll put a question out and you hear what you expected, then you can ask like, how much of that is just my bias filtering out the stuff that's unexpected because it's in the stuff that's unexpected that the real possibility for growth and innovation lies.

Yeah. I

Srini: don't remember where I read it, but somebody said that, when the founders of Google came up with the paid drink algorithm, it was from noticing anomalies, not predictable things.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: Yeah. This is what we want. We wanna be tuned to that. Yeah.

Srini: A billion dollars later . I think that exactly you can say those results have turned out pretty well.

Jennifer Garvey Berger: It worked for them.

Srini: Yeah. This has been fascinating. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Jennifer Garvey Berger: I think being the whole of who we are is what makes us unmistakable, right? I think really developing the particular organism that is us and and valuing the whole package of our humanity the likes, the dislikes the quirks, the brilliance. Bringing all of that to the table, I think is what make this unmistakable

Srini: amazing.

I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, the book, your work, and everything else that you're up to? You can

Jennifer Garvey Berger: check us out@cultivatingleadership.com. And we have, because we believe in getting these ideas out there to change the world.

We have just a ton of free stuff, free resources on our website and on our YouTube channel for people who are interested in dipping their toes in and playing with these ideas, which we're, we're playing with and learning more about every day. That's our job.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

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