Ambition. Unleashed.
Ep4. From Knowing to Curiously Learning - with Beatrice Bigois

Transcript

Introducing the shift: "Knower" > "Learner"

[Sara] In this episode of Ambition Unleashed we’re going to explore why endlessly cultivating curiosity, in yourself and - if you are a leader of people – in your teams, is critical to unleash ambition and be successful in bringing to life a seemingly impossible future, idea or innovation you may be dreaming of creating.

[Wayne] Many people listening may have come across American Psychologist Carole Dweck’s seminal book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” in which she popularized the notion of honing a “Growth Mindset.” If you haven’t read this book – it’s a must read, and we’ll leave a link in the show notes.

[Sara] Carole Dwecks central premise is that the constant practise of flexible, adaptable thinking, relishing challenges as learning opportunities and being always curious lie at the heart of vibrant and effective leadership in all walks of life. And we couldn’t agree more. And so do many of our clients in Wayne and I’s day job, consulting with leaders around the world.

[Wayne] But, paradoxically, the moment having a growth mindset becomes a goal in itself, its very power is undermined. A growth mindset is not a destination, but a journey. If it becomes ‘the way things are done here’ in organisations, or a requirement or preferred characteristic it is in danger of becoming a ‘fixed’ attitude – the antithesis of growth. So in this weeks episode we’re going to look at the Breakthrough Thinking successful leaders use to experiment, explore and commit to impossible goals and to constantly refresh a growth mindset. And crucially we’ll explore the common ‘knowledge traps’ that can constrain ambitious people and leaders, and curtail breakthrough achievements.

[Sara] and in some ways, What you know as a leader at work or in life has less significance - what you are willing to learn has everything. And we’re delighted to be joined later on by Beatrice Bigois a female Chief Executive in the male dominated wholesale energy sector who has made this belief core to her leadership philosophy to deliver phenomenally successful business turn arounds.

[Wayne] I hope a pretty universal experience for anyone listening is that at some point you’ve sat around a camp fire with friends or family and talked long into the night, or as you heard the crackles of the wood igniting, spoke with strangers but because there is something so levelling and inclusive about a camp fire that under the stars you chatted deeply, warmed by the fire and perhaps with a beer or hot chocolate in hand.

And with a camp fire it’s a brilliant picture of collaboration – everyone goes to collect sticks and fire wood, and brings it back to the collective, and creates something bigger than was possible by themselves. And community and conversation is created as a result.

Imagine you’re sitting there now, around a fire. Would you be thinking…

• I hope everyone’s noticed my stick. It’s a really good stick or

Would you be saying…

• Has everyone noticed my stick please? Is that my one or is that your one? Hang on, which ones burning brighter – who brought that stick? Why is everyone looking at that stick and not mine?
• I think my stick was critical in the success of this camp fire and I knew that would be the case because I’ve always used sticks like that wherever I’ve worked before and in fact my stick would have been enough – we didn’t need all the others.

Why is it when we ask those questions about a camp fire it’s funny or absurd or nonsensical, but when it comes to working with others and collaboration and the great of exchange of ideas that every day has to be, we can easily fall into the conventional thinking of wanting my stick to be the stick, my ideas, my knowledge, my ways to be THE way.  

[Sara] Our assertion is that a powerful context for personal leadership and a necessary context for leading others is to be the first to say ‘I don’t know and let’s find out the answer.’ Why? Because from a Breakthrough perspective, knowing is not just accruing more and more information. No – real learning is when you can produce a result you were unable to achieve before. A breakthrough. Which is always in the territory of discovery and curiosity. Which requires a very different kind of mindset than most of us grew up with…

Most of us grew up in an education system where there was a right and a wrong answer. Can you remember putting your hand up and how high you’d try and reach – practically dislocating a shoulder – if you were confident you had the answer, praying the teacher would pick you. Or how small you’d shrink if you didn’t know the answer – please don’t let the teacher ask me…

That extends into higher and further education in many disciplines where you need to know the right answer

[Wayne] I remember being at theological college and a classmate who was a medical doctor said how unprepared they were for debating open-ended theological ideas, because they said medicine had drilled them into being able to know an awful lot, but not the muscles to explore ideas. And then beyond education we move into many jobs and roles that have a well-established right vs wrong skill, which is then noticed and rewarded by promotion and bonus.

All this to say that the knower mindset is well established, from a very early age.

But to operate from or find safety only in a knower mindset means that you’ll only set sail in familiar territory where you can show up to others as a knower, but what you’re really doing is protecting yourself and your ego so you don’t look or feel caught out. Which is completely understandable given the route many of us travelled through our lives or careers – but in this episode we want to create a powerful new context for learning, so that there is an alteration in who we are being to create results we didn’t think were possible, which comes with an internal freedom that not knowing is part of the game and is ok, and the game of ‘I need to be seen to know the answer’ has been replaced with a new freedom and ability to create with others the answer that maybe doesn’t exist yet.

[Sara] Being a curious learner is a journey, not a destination. One of the risks of the passion and energy around growth mindset today in leadership books is that it becomes a new dogma and judgement we have to use against others, ‘they need a growth mindset… like me.’ But of course on this mindset shift, like many of the shifts, as soon as we speak like we’ve arrived, the game is up and we’ve been hooked again by conventional thinking.

Stephen Hawking said ‘the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.’ This is the great irony and danger of the limits of the knower mindset  - those things we are being so right about are actually getting in the way of possibility and discovery. What we’ll hear in this episode is that the speed and complexity of life requires a posture of learning, and that far from reducing credibility as a leader, it is a muscle that is required so that you create a culture of learning around you that can grow stronger, more influential, and more able to adapt to change.

[Wayne] The Greek philosopher Plutarch said ‘The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.’

Our guest this week lives this personally and has led this publicly – in an industry of unbelievable change where what we know today might be outdated tomorrow… a few weeks ago we chatted to Beatrice Bigois former CEO of EDF Energy’s Customers division – where she delivered an extraordinary business turn around – and current CEO of EDF Trading – a wholesale energy specialist and we began by asking her to tell us a bit about the ahhah moments she’s had that have got her where she is today.

Interview transcript coming soon

Post interview analysis

[Sara] Great conversation with Beatrice hearing her really practical experience. And really struck by how grounded Beatrice is in this shift knower to curiously learning.

This will be so applicable to all industries, we are all facing the complexities of unpredictable change and disruption.  The energy industry especially is right there at the moment!

[Wayne] Its long been known that culture eats strategy for breakfast, but I feel Beatrice talks about the focus on culture with such clarity and how it really must be a priority for leaders.  And this shift from knower to curiously learning at the heart of it.

[Sara] I think on the surface most people would appreciate they don’t and can’t have all the answers to drive success in todays climate.  Whether it’s solutions to new problems we haven’t encountered before, customer demands that don’t exist yet or the speed we need to move and adapt, but don’t you think the more difficult thing is, as Beatrice said is to truly – ‘question what you know’, consider that everything that got you to where you are now, may not now be sufficient.

[wayne] This reminds me of the article with Gary Kasparov, the Russian Chess Grandmaster.

He held the Champion title for 15 years

Its reported he played very uniquely and creatively

In this interview he was asked which was the hardest…. Not the first…nobody knew what I was doing, not the second…fluke, people just couldn’t work it out,  but the 3^rd and 4^th were tough – I had to unlearn everything I knew because they’d wised up to his strategy. There is a Fine line between experience and baggage.

[Sara] This redefines leadership so clearly for me – it isn’t only the leaders that have the greatest experience and expertise that can lead, yet this credibility is the career path of so many.  But leaders can emerge from anywhere, with vision and courage to bring great people together, the right experts, and hold people in the right questions, the difficult questions, the paradoxical questions of how we achieve it all. 

The simplest example of a paradoxical question I can think of at the moment is the age old conundrum of do we want cost or quality, you know where is the compromise?  More often now there isn’t a compromise anymore, we need both – we need healthy food for the growing population but we can’t harm the environment doing so or have prices sky high, we have digitalisation but we need to keep employment high and take care of our communities.

Its these questions that leaders at all levels are having to organise themselves around.

[wayne] There are 3 winning moves we want to bring out today that is what we think is at the heart of this shift.

Firstly, overcome the fact that you don’t know everything!  So you can authentically engage with others, different points of view and learn – asking a lot of questions

So what we are really saying here, is that this has to start with us personally.  A knower believes that others need to change or I need to convert someone to my view.

Someone who is curiously learning is saying ‘I’m open to change my ‘doing’, the predictable actions I take, I am open to changing my way of thinking, even though I have proven success and ultimately I am open to understand how I occur to others and whether I have blindspots and is this helping them to be curious learners.

[sara] Someone I was coaching, going through some significant changes at work, didn’t realize that who they were being in the team was ‘closing everything down’, closing possibilities down, suggestions of benefits, ideas people had to work differently.  They had decided unconsciously that this change was a threat and not good for the future.  They were in ‘protector’ mode, fiercely maintaining the status quo. He had decided, as I said unknowingly, without exploration with others.  Interestingly his team mates knew he would respond this way, they were anticipating it, it’s the way he is!  In one of our 121 conversations we looking into this, about what he was afraid of? Through several experiences he had had, not particularly harrowing, he had honed this unconscious way of listening to change, as risky – what is the risk to me? We uncovered that that’s where he was listening from and referencing everything from not only in this instance but in many things, his career, work, and even his family and children– and in examining it further, bringing the conclusions and assumptions closer to facts,  the risks actually weren’t as threatening as first thought.  This created a freedom from something that was constraining him and he could then create a new way of being sourced from a future he wanted, his commitments and ambitions – opening him up to exploring and learning more from his colleagues!

[wayne] Beatrice shared her experience about starting in a new role and asking a lot of questions and not always being able to answer questions from others.  The permission and relief a leader can give others through saying I don’t know, really does have the opposite effect than ‘the knower’ think it might have!  This doesn’t necessarily mean people lose faith in their leader for not having the answers but actually feel valued, feel empowered by the fact they are needed and have a contribution they can make – failure will be tolerated, its about stepping up and working it out together.

[sara] This has to be authentic though, as inconsistent behaviours from the leader can undermine this dramatically fast!

This, i think defines the real challenge – can I be a leader that doesn’t have the answers and isn’t concerned about whether they will look uncredible in front of others – or are you more concerned with looking good, getting the acknowledgement, being the hero that saves the day, or simply just making sure you are a ‘somebody’.  At some level we are all concerned with these things, nobody I have ever met doesn’t want to make some difference in their lives.  But our ability to achieve this is no longer through the methods of knowing, being great experts as to the most part it is insufficient to be successful given the needs of today.  I think the challenge is to be able to rewrite the narrative of our identity, who we are, what our values are and the impact we want to have in the greater big picture – all of this bigger than ones ego to fulfil ourselves.  There is a later podcast on this to come.

[wayne] The other ways of cultivating this is in both our way of listening – what do you listen for? – and our way of speaking – how we create safety for ourselves and others to explore and the questions we ask?  We have all honed a way of listening that is works for us – if I listen for the big picture, I know I will be able to make this work, or if I listen for what is needed, I know I can focus on the right solution quickly, but we have honed other ways of listening that limit curiosity such as is this something I know how to do? Or is this risky? Do I agree? Has this been done before? and if so this can dimmish curiosity and who we are being.  You can increase your awareness of what you commonly listen for by noticing what question is in your mind during a presentation, conversation or meeting, what you write down as notes and what you choose to contribute in the conversations.  You can reduce your knowingness and increase your learner mindset through purely becoming aware of where you listen for.

[sara] The other aspect within your gift is your speaking – choosing your language and specific words can make big shifts in how you show up in other peoples minds as authentically wanting to learn.  Expressing fixed opinions, judgements, “shoulds” , what is right and what is wrong, this is bad etc. displays a knower mindset, yet expressing vision, possibilities, using words such as ‘I have a proposal’, ‘can I make an offer’, ‘my invitation is’, ‘can I share a possibility’ ‘can we consider’ - or simply just being more factual – are all words that allow others to be empowered and open up genuine room for different points of view.

Trying out these new phrases and words can feel inauthentic at first and also seen that way by others – but could lead to changes in our thinking – when new ideas come you weren’t expecting!

[wayne] In a team environment, Beatrice talked about setting the direction/tone very clearly – the how we will work, not necessarily the what – how we will approach this ambition or job we have to do – with a trusted space, not knowing the answers and no time for feeding the ego! She lived it personally, but made sure the organisation focused on this too.

So that’s the first point – overcome the need to know everything

2.

[sara] The second point we want to make the importance to ask questions, the difficult questions.  Not just to find the answers, new solutions but to create a culture of learners, expand the minds of the people around us – taking people with you on this challenging journey.  Its not until those questions are asked that people start looking broader than what they already know, and see that you are serious about solving the big challenges.  I remember Beatrice saying that this begin with one team with an ambitious budget – normally that budget would have been adjusted 3 or 4 months into the year and the team knew this, this was normal, conventional practice, the status quo of you like!  When there was a realisation that we weren’t going to do that this year, we were going to do what we said – but that she didn’t know how to either – then the real challenge and transformation of that division began!  The team pulled together like never before, knowing they needed each other to solve this.  This truly did set the new ‘how we are going to be successful’.

This highlights the need for us, those of us listening to unleash our ambition (!) to make sure there is space for those exploratory conversations.  These often don’t come in timetabled fashions, but they emerge when we least expect it, when diverse people don’t feel pressured or focussed on operational matters about the objectives in front of them.  We often are working with teams to hold the space for possibility, thinking and reflecting to inquire into what is our ambition?  What is the thinking, the habits, the ingrained assumptions we have applied or even inherited that don’t allow these possibilities and opportunities to even breath let alone get off the ground. 

[wayne] These inquiries are vital for leaders who want/need to transform results.  These are not free for all’s, or spending lots of aimless time waiting for something to emerge.  The leaders role is to set the vision, the disciplined boundaries, organise the team around the right and difficult questions and then focus on the environment of safety, openness and trust – normally through leading by example and demonstrating their own vulnerability in the ‘I don’t know, and don’t have all the answers’.

[sara] So the second point, the importance of asking the difficult questions, setting those difficult questions for others, getting out of your comfort zone

3.

[wayne] The third winning move at the heart of this shift, is the need to surround yourself with diverse people.  People who do not think like you!  It is so common for leaders to realise they have been hiring people just like them, often it makes life easier, they are easy to work with, and validate our own thinking -and perhaps what we know!  I think thankfully is a growing focus on diversity and inclusion today in our organisations and yet still a long way to go - its value is being recognised beyond token measures.  Beatrice spoke about the goal being a diversity of thought - which is much harder to see and ensure beyond gender.

The opportunities and answers to these challenging questions we all now have, have a much great chance of success with those diverse thoughts and ideas which come from people challenging the ‘existing knowledge and logic’ within the organisation. 

[sara] This is not necessarily the easy path for ‘just getting things done’ but we are way past this, if we want to be successful. Spaces, forums, agenda slots where possibility can be explored, feedback can be proactively sought and the difficult questions raised – with diverse groups of people – are essential as we have already said.

The takeaway actions 

[wayne] SO some takeaway actions for you to consider this week…  

1. Notice your habits

Do you close down things?  Do fight new possibilities? Do you believe you have the right way? What do you listen for in conversations?  That little voice in your head – there will be a common one for you.

You could ask 5 trusted people who aren’t afraid to speak the truth to you – do I show up as a ‘knower’ and ‘learner’?

2. Second takeaway: Challenge yourself, does that way of listening serve your future commitments? Does that way of being progress them?

Maybe you challenge yourself about what are you afraid of? What is the risk?

[sara]

3. Third takeawy. Take some action, change your action – do something different. Tell people you don’t have the answers? Ask more questions of others…And see what happens

4. What are the challenging questions that you need to ask yourself and the people around you? Perhaps you have dismissed these questions in the past, written them off as impossible. Can you start a conversation with others about this?

[wayne]

And a quote to end this week’s episode. From Einstein.

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.’ ― Albert Einstein

Or as Plutarch said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” 

C’mon Sara, let’s go and start a camp fire…

[sara] as long as you acknowledge I bring the best sticks Wayne!

Introducing the next episode

[wayne]

Thanks so much for listening. As always, we hope what we’ve discussed here starts you thinking about unleashing your own ambitions. And we’d love to hear your stories, personal aha moments and reflections  – as well as answer your questions. To do this email us at ambition@achievebreakthrough.com If you can, please give us a five star review to help others – perhaps someone with a big un realized ambition - find us.

Looking forward to the next episode, where we’ll explore the natural tension we all hold as humans between staying safe and striving to act in line with our higher purpose.

For more information on this episode, there is a link in the show notes and to our website. Don’t forget to press follow to catch future episodes.

See you next time

Transcript

Introducing the shift: "Knower" > "Learner"

[Sara] In this episode of Ambition Unleashed we’re going to explore why endlessly cultivating curiosity, in you...
 Read more