Inverted org charts and regenerative leadership with Dr. Kathleen Allen | Episode 88

Chris Lee: Hello, everyone. This is Chris Lee, the founder and co-host of the Parks and Restoration podcast. And this is another meetup with someone I am so excited to talk about. We've got Dr. Kathleen Allen on the Zoom call with us today. She is the author of the book. If you're watching this on the show, here it is. Leading from the Roots, Nature-inspired leadership lessons for today's world. But she's more than an author. And we're going to talk about that. She's a consultant and Got some pretty cool international stuff going on. So we're going to dig into all of that. ⁓ Dr. Kathleen, thanks for joining us here today.

Kathy Allen: I'm really happy to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Chris Lee: Absolutely. All right, so let's get some background. Give us the 50,000 foot view of your career path and how you ended up becoming an author of the book and the consultant that you are and that kind of stuff.

Kathy Allen: Well, kind of, my career started in higher education and ⁓ I was, you know, ended up for 14 years being a vice president at a couple of different colleges, one in LA and one here in Minnesota. And ⁓ I also along the way got my doctorate in leadership. And so I've always been fascinated in the space between the organizational space and how individuals and positional leaders show up and the kind of places that they create and design. ⁓ so I've kind of been working in the space of large scale organizational change, leadership and innovation and ⁓ always orienting towards ⁓ how do we develop organizations that ⁓ where both the individuals in the organization and the organization itself thrive into the future. And in 2000, I ran into Jeanne Benyus's book called Biomimicry, and I just was blown away by it. ⁓ I started, I tend to attract clients that are kind of on the edge of looking for the new thing. You know, they usually are extraordinarily good at traditional leadership and management, but they ⁓ experience something and then they discover that the way they're thinking about leadership isn't sufficient to meet the challenges or the complex world that they're leading in. And so they are seekers and they find me. And then together, we'd like to ⁓ see what we can explore and discover in the boundary of traditional leadership moving into the emergent future. So I was lucky because I had a whole bunch of people that, as I discovered, biomimicry said, ⁓ let's go play and see what happens in our organizations. And so ⁓ we started playing together. And after about ⁓ 18 years of that, I eventually wrote my book, Leading from the Roots, which was really a compilation of kind of a curation of the journey that we've been on together and what we've learned about leadership and organizations and transformation and regeneration. So I kind of think of Leading from the Roots as a of a roadmap. towards regenerative, just organizational leadership and design.

Chris Lee: Yeah. So I wanted, I'll dig into that regenerative concept here in just a second, but a little more in the background. did you have any sort of ecological bend or training prior to sailing across that, or were you an outdoorsy type person or what drew you into that?

Kathy Allen: Yeah, the outdoors, I've always loved spending time in the outdoors. even as a little kid, two weeks of camp was like the best place in the world to me. ⁓ And I would get camp sick instead of homesick because I just had this affinity for ⁓ being in the wild or semi-wild, I guess you could say. So I've always had that attraction to nature. I'm a big gardener. so having my hands in the soil, was something that was, it was a way for me to be completely present when my hands are in the garden. So, but so much of what nature, how nature works and is designed and how gardens grow, it was just, ⁓ ⁓ a ⁓ kind of deep knowing that biomimicry helped surface into a more cognitive framework. And it just leveraged all of that great life experience.

Chris Lee: Yeah. I love that because that, that, you know, it's kind of that epiphany story where we're like, you've got this, this concept that you don't even know you have until the right, comes along. It could be a book or an experience or something like that, that releases that. And you're like, ⁓ this is a totally new way of looking at things. And so it sounds like you came across that. And then you took this new way out into your consulting practice. ⁓ and we're lucky enough to find some clients that were willing to. to play and experiment, how did that kind of go and what did those experiments look like?

Kathy Allen: ⁓ Well, so a simple first step was seeing the people and the organizations I was working with as a living system instead of a mechanistic machine. And I was stunned at how easily and how open it made the people that I was working with because they They knew that I saw them as unique individuals who were alive and not cogs in a wheel or something like that, or something to extract or exploit. And so once you show up with a different intention, all of a sudden the whole relationship shifts. And so what, so the first kind of big lesson was how a simple way of how you show up and think about the people that you're working with changes the possibilities of what can happen. And then ⁓ one organization, it was a nonprofit, ⁓ kind of a community-based ⁓ human service organization. ⁓ And they were ⁓ going through their own transformation. I'd been hired to... helped them move from a strict, highly controlled organizational structure. The previous CEO had been asked to go by the board because ⁓ they started in a place where if you had to spend $50, you needed five signatures going up the hierarchical, ending with the CEO. Needless to say, it took days. to do something as simple as that. ⁓ But the new CEO, the new ED that came in wanted to build a more ⁓ networked and distributed leadership culture. So there was leadership and initiative happening at all levels of the organization. And one of the first things we did was ⁓ he invited me to do group coaching with the ⁓ the leadership team, he didn't show up, but all of the members of his leadership team did, you know, the finance person, the HR, the program person, the development person, et cetera. And we would just talk, they would share challenges and issues. And it was really a way for getting everybody on the same page and start thinking in this treating people as living organs. living individuals in a living organization, which of course, when you think about it, a living organization is filled with people and people are a lot for not, we're not mechanistic. So it just fit better. And so one of the things that we did in that conversation, so every month we would have this conversation for two hours together. We would they would bring problems and then we would ask the question, well, what would nature do or what would nature teach us or to say? And one of the things that we did in that conversation, those conversations was we redid the organizational chart. So like most organizations, people at the front line saw themselves at the bottom of pyramid, which is how most of us, you know, draw organizational charts. And the, ⁓ but what it created was this sense of ⁓ them and we and they, you know, it created more boundaries. And so we thought, well, if this organization was a living system, what would our organizational chart look like? And we decided it looked like a living tree. And so we put the leaders, the positional leaders at the in the root structure of the tree. We put all the backroom folks who often feel like second class citizens in the trunk because the trunk moves the resources from the roots to the canopy and the canopy and the photosynthesis brings the other resources down through the tree for health. And then we put our frontline people, the folks who are reaching out and working with all of the folks. that the organization wanted to serve in the canopy and in the branch structure. So they weren't at the bottom of the organization, but they were instead the photosynthesis engine of the organization translating the sun's energy and photosynthesis language. But this could be the external energy of the environment ⁓ and transforming it into life-giving nutrients. so that the organization could serve its highest purpose. And that visual image was just one of our experiments, but it fundamentally changed how everybody saw their relationship to each other, which is a nature thing, right? Nature is built on relationships. It's not built on hierarchies. And who's in charge of who? There's no CEO in nature. Nature organizes. by high purpose and self organization. And so that's what we were trying to unleash in the organization.

Chris Lee: I could see that being powerful on so many levels. ⁓ it's interesting how multiple people can come up with almost the same concept completely separate from each other. So prior to this, other than exchanging a few emails over the last few weeks, you and I have never corresponded. anybody that's been in any of my sessions and has seen this organizational ecology framework, it's overlaid on a tree. And it's exactly this, right? And it's got people at the top. the whole point that I make is in your organization, your people are your most valuable asset. There's a reason they're at the top of the canopy because they're the ones up there doing the photosynthesis and they create the actual thing that the organization does. That's fascinating that we came to that same conclusion. But it also does make sense because that is kind of the universality of the natural world. And we're just overlaying that onto our own human systems. So you've mentioned a couple of different things that I wanted to dig into. The regenerative system concept. ⁓ And then that's kind of parallel with this concept that I see so many times in organizations is that it's, of our organizations oftentimes are set up to be extractive. This concept of human resources where humans are the resource that you use and use up to accomplish whatever it is your organization wants to do. And that's. That's not how nature generally works. So I'd like to dig into that a little bit and this regenerative concept and this concept of ⁓ a, ⁓ what do call it in the book, a, ⁓ I keep wanting to say gratitude, but that's not the word, ⁓ generous, that's it, of a generous organization. ⁓ you know, lay out for me how those concepts and how those apply to organizations.

Kathy Allen: Well, so starting with regenerative, regenerative systems actually always pay attention to how the whole system is working as opposed to a part of the system. So we've grown up in a society and in a world where often parts ⁓ supersede the health of the whole. So we use proxy metrics like ⁓ profit or loss or activity or numbers or things like this as a measure for something that we really care about, but they're

Chris Lee: against some arbitrary piece of time too.

Kathy Allen: Right. regenerative ecologies are always orienting towards the whole. So if you orient towards the whole, then ⁓ things like extraction become a maladaptive response because you can extract from a part, but that might leave the part weakened and not able to perform its fundamental function in the ecology. ⁓ And in regenerative economies, know, the worldview is more about caring and sacredness because that flows through relationships. But we don't talk about organizations as sacred places or caring places. We talk about, you doing what you're supposed to do? You know, and we don't harvest our resources in a regenerative way. You know, we, don't know about how your system works, but the organizations I've been involved in, to get an extra person on your staff, you have to load up the job description to be about one and a half times the job responsibilities that you may need. You need one and a half people to actually do everything that's listed in the job description. We don't ⁓ think about developing job descriptions in a regenerative way. were... Thinking that way, we might want to actually build a job description based on 80 or 85 % of their time. So the next 15 % or 20 % of their time would have this space for what's emerging in the system and ⁓ space for rest rather than burnout. ⁓ So we would harvest their knowledge and expertise. would... Our purpose for our organization would be larger. It would be about social and ecological wellbeing. That would be a regenerative frame, right? And our way of leading and working within the organization would be more distributed and collaborative at its core. The culture would be collaborative because in nature, everything connects to everything else. It's deeply interdependent. So. you know, this idea that we're separate entities competing against each other to accomplish or rise to the top or that kind of stuff that that just doesn't fit with the nature or regenerative frame. So, so much of what we've been taught, so much of what I've been taught, I've had to slowly kind of keep letting go of and replacing it with new ideas. So for me, One of the ways that I think about ⁓ resources is through the lens of energy. So if you think of photosynthesis as an exchange of ⁓ free sunlight that gets transformed through a photosynthesis process into ⁓ life-giving nutrients that feed our whole planet, then you can ask if you're playing around in an organization and you get to ask, well, what's an organization's version of photosynthesis? And I think everybody that works in our organizations gets to wake up Monday morning and ask the question, what kind of energy am I going to bring to work today? Am I going to bring positive energy or negative energy or neutral energy? But ⁓ energy matters. And so I've been paying attention, well, what drains energy and what generates positive energy with the people that you work with? And the simple answers are ⁓ when they feel connected to a higher purpose that tends to bring more positive energy, when they feel authentically connected to each other, when they feel like what they're doing matters in the world, you know, that's that. another variation of connected to purpose. When they have a sense of reciprocity as opposed to rank ordering of who cares, who matters and who doesn't matter. But with reciprocity, they feel like they each bring something they're seeing, they're heard, they're respected as individuals. And ⁓ when that happens, ⁓ something happens in the way they work with each other and the teams, and then all of a sudden you have extra energy in your organization to transform, to emerge, to grow, to evolve. It seems to overcome fear, and then people kind of start leaning in and bringing their own ideas forward to make things better. But this is not the top down, control everybody underneath you, you're in trouble if you don't control people. And in order to control people, you have to create a closed system where they become dependent on you, because that's the relationship and management is, I'll protect you if you do what I say, is the deal that most organizations are built on.

Chris Lee: Yeah. Right. It's a tit for tat versus a true reciprocal system where giving is what is reciprocated versus a contractual basis where, OK, if it's conditional in so many organizations versus ⁓ in natural systems, you don't see that. doesn't give the acorns to the squirrels on the condition that the squirrel buries X number of those acorns in order for the oak's progeny to carry on. Like, you know, it just, it just gives it and, know, and then the squirrel gives back by planting some of them and then forgetting where some of them are, you know, and that you just, see that across all sorts of organs or systems and functions in nature. And, um, that's why I love that concept from the book. The other concept that I really, really liked was this concept of three levels of ecosystems and how the ⁓ third level is the highest functioning. so you talk about the one, two, and three. So give us a kind of a quick rundown of that. I thought that was fantastic. And it's absolutely true in what I see and has so many great applications to organizations.

Kathy Allen: So one of the things that you see in nature is that there's often patterns that help you understand the system. So instead of going down to the small parts to understand what's going on in nature, you go up to the balcony and see the pattern. So one of the patterns is how do ecosystems evolve? And they have a pattern for how that works. Some people use the three kind of phrases, which I'll talk about, but there are other visual entities of five where there's a transition phase for each or seven or whatever. But the simple thing is that the first phase is ⁓ actually what we would probably consider ⁓ poor soil that can only allow certain kinds of things to grow. so weeds tend to grow there or maybe annuals that can be receded. But their whole purpose really is to create ⁓ and amend the soil so the soil can grow additional things in phase two or stage two. So ⁓ over time, the soil gets better. It starts to hold more nutrients and new things can start popping up. So in the second phase, there's ⁓ or type of type two ecologies, this is where your ⁓ small shrubs start showing up, short-lived trees, know, like for us in northern Minnesota, would be, you know, the ⁓ spacing on that tree, but it generally hangs out for about 30 years and then starts to die off. But its purpose is to leave certain nutrients to fuel the next stage of growth. This is where your tubers and the roots, the perennials start showing up in this type two ecologies. It's where the plants and trees and bushes have enough of root structure that they can store some of that energy so it can come back after winter. into a next spring season. So these type two ecologies are ⁓ more diverse and they aren't like the annuals that hopefully can re-see but don't have any root structure that actually builds them into the next year. And then eventually you get to, ⁓ after you have that kind of in a while, you get to these old growth forests or mature prairies that we see. And the mature prairies are stunning for their design because they're highly diverse. ⁓ They have roots, you probably know this better than I do, but they have shallow root systems and medium root systems and deep root systems. So when you have a deluge of rain on them, they don't let any of that rain run off. But if you do that in a traditional monocrop culture, You know, it basically, the surface root structure can absorb maybe a half an inch or so, and then everything else is pounded down. The soil becomes hard and can't absorb the rain, and then it runs off. you know, prairies are designed to absorb fundamentally every single resource that's dropped on it, whether it's sunlight or water or whatever. And that diversity is really ⁓ something that's stunning in a type three ecology. is that ⁓ they are the most diverse. And it's actually in the diversity that more resilience for the organization shows up. Because ⁓ the first two type ecologies get all of their nutrients from the soil. So that's really the primary source. But in the third old growth forest, mature coral reefs, the resources that ⁓ happen and you get exchanged start happening because the diversity of species that work in that ecosystem start developing mutualistic relationships with each other. a resource that this bird or tree, mean, think of the serviceberry tree. ⁓ You know, there's lots of varieties of them, but basically the tree doesn't eat its own fruit, right? But the tree creates fruit so that whole bunches of birds and people and other species can find that nutrient. And in turn, the tree gets its seeds and its ability to spread because they eat something and then they... drop the seeds across wide swaths of land. And it's very mutualistic is my point. ⁓ you know, but organizationally, you know, we have versions of that, but we call them silos. And most of them have accidental adversarial relationships with each other. So we just don't really embrace the true mutuality of what a finance division or an HR division can do for a programmatic work or whatever. So that's another beautiful lesson from nature.

Chris Lee: Yeah, and I love that. And there's several levels to that. You look at these three types of ecosystems, and you compare it to, let's say, any sort of industry. So your earlier types 1 and 2s, I kind of view those as like the startup. They're extractive. They're constantly relying upon external inputs. And if those inputs dry up, it goes away. So it's like your annuals. Yeah. It's, you know, it's supposed to be like a startup company. the, the, investment money dries up, the organization probably ceases to exist. And at some point they hit some sort of critical mass where they're self-sustaining a little bit. And that kind of is parallel with your, perennials. And so they, they are going on and they're, you know, they're carrying forward, they're, they're sustaining on their own, but they still need outside inputs. Oftentimes if they're going to grow and expand, and then you get to your level three, which is your complete standalone ecosystem. And this, this, these things are, everything is interrelated. everything, it's functioning as an entire system, not as any one thing. ⁓ Competition now is replaced by cooperation. Cooperation is the name of the game from here on. And just like you said, the reciprocity and the generosity of everything within the system is what maintains the system. And so this is your longstanding organizations that you see giving back to their communities. change their focus from we've got to make profit at all costs to now we exist to make an impact. that is, to me, the more evolved way of looking at it. That's what, organizations, we have to be striving for because that's the natural way of things, right? And that's what sustains things in the long run. so I love that analogy because it fits on so many levels.

Kathy Allen: Nature would define profit as evolution of the system. So it's a totally different measure than we think about it. Because the whole system has to be healthy in order for it to continue to become more more complex. And type III ecologies are very resilient in the sense that it's the food web instead of the single food chain.

Chris Lee: All

Kathy Allen: So in a single food chain, you you just don't have enough diversity that if one species goes extinct and you're at the top of that food chain, you're going to go to the food web. There's always multiple options that provide nutrients in the system. I just think it's, it's, there's a powerful lesson in nature around how resilience and diversity go hand in hand. you know, we don't talk about ⁓ how monocrops create fragility in our farming systems, for example. But, you I've lived in Minnesota and in different parts of the state, some with high farming and ⁓ high wind and big weather extremes, but the, you know, if you have a tornado or a bad hailstorm and you're a farmer, it can be wiped out, your whole season can be wiped out. Whereas prairies have multiple peak seasons to harvest. Land Institute has been experimenting with the prairies, I think for close to 40 years as an alternative to monocrop farming. ⁓ And so if you have a hailstorm, it wipes out that crop, but there's another one three or four weeks later. it just, that's the resilience, the fundamental resilience versus the fragility.

Chris Lee: Yeah, yeah. It's funny how life works sometimes. I literally just had lunch with a guy. ⁓ He's kind of building an empire here in the community and he just agreed to sponsor a big thing that we're doing. But I was just asking about his background and stuff and ⁓ his grandparents came here from Ireland. And, ⁓ you know, and so he's literally just second generation off the boat. And he said, had the potato famine not happened, he wouldn't be here. And, know, and so there's an example of over-reliance on a single crop. And then I have, a lot of folks that work in, in, I'll call it the tree industry, but arborists and stuff, ⁓ that followed the show. I see it, the Iowa parks and rec association events and, ⁓ things like that. And, you know, we all know what, ⁓ Dutch Elm disease did for the urban streetscape. and our over reliance on a single species. And so now like here in Burlington where I'm at, our forestry department has done just an incredible job of diversifying our canopy. And because we realize that that's the resilience that you have to build as all the things are happening and there's always another disease or tree pest that's coming along. ⁓ But if you've got that multiple species out there, just taking those lessons from those level three ecologies. So from that, I want to spin off and kind of dig into your work now. ⁓ So we're talking about these regenerative systems. So you now are working with an organization that literally is bringing that on multiple levels, both in organizational operations and in the actual on the ground work. So tell me about this work that you're doing with this organization doing regenerative agriculture across the world, really.

Kathy Allen: ⁓ So for the last six years, I've been working with ⁓ a group from this organization. ⁓ It's Heifer International. ⁓ they're working in about 10 or so countries ⁓ in Africa across that kind of band. And ⁓ organizationally, about three or four years ago, they decided that they wanted to shift the model of international development from top down to locally led. And ⁓ they work with small farmholders in Africa, central and South America, in Asia, and also parts of the US. the idea is, and so they started, ⁓ they started moving. in that direction in practice. So all of the folks who are doing work with the farmers started figuring out, okay, how do I not come in as an expert, but come in as a partner and a co-creator with acknowledging and accessing the deep knowledge that these small farmers have about their place and their soil and their farm and knowing what grows there, kind of like how the soil knows what grows best. but we tend to wipe that out when we use fertilizer. So ⁓ the, well, certain kinds of fertilizer. So as they move towards this locally led development, it's unusual in the international development field, first of all. But they also were trying to get two ⁓ shifts going on with these farmers. One was to how to develop regenerative agriculture for their product. And the second is to help build a resilient and regenerative economic model so that they ⁓ aren't left with, they can turn their crops into something that brings us a livable ⁓ life for their family and their communities. But. My world is organizational and leadership. And what we discovered early on in this shift was that they, if they were working in a hierarchical organization, but trying to do this locally led partnership, they didn't have a model that they experienced day to day when they went to work. In fact, the model was antithetical to what they were trying to do in the field. And so we realized that the whole organization and its way of thinking about its leadership and its relationships with each other had to shift to this more regenerative frame. ⁓ Initially, we just said, well, we can't have top-down leadership and have the folks in the field working with our farmers have a lived experience of what that could be at multiple levels of scale. ⁓ All systems scale and that's very true for nature. So what you're doing at the local level or the individual level will scale to teams and scale to departments and scale to divisions and scale to the organization. So you're trying to grow a fundamentally different pattern. And the pattern was a different kind of relationship, not top-down, not exploitive or extractive, but literally in partnership with, in relationship with. and ⁓ reciprocal relationships instead of power relationships. And so ⁓ we started exploring distributive leadership instead of traditional top-down leadership. ⁓ And then we realized that to do ⁓ distributed leadership, we needed to develop individual capacities where, just like nature, people could initiate and organize their own work. just like a blade of grass, just like an acorn knows how to become an oak. You know, we as human beings, we're part of nature too, and therefore we can self-organize. The problem is, is we don't often bring it to our organizations. We do it, we reserve it for weekends or times after work or socializing with friends. And ⁓ so we had to then shift the organizational culture so that It was encouraging self-organization and we had to strengthen our language around what is the highest shared purpose of what we're trying to do. In this organization, they have a goal of transforming 10 million farmers' lives by 2030. They're a little over 6 million now. So they'll probably get to that goal. And this group in Africa is working with about five and a quarter million farmers right now. So it's within their scope, they had to change. This was, I thought, the really big thing, is that the leadership thinking has to change in order to support the work. It wasn't just knowledge and skills of the individual that made the farmer, the locally led goal real. They had to experience there. it there and then they had to experience it in their organization. So all of you have, ⁓ you have positional leadership in your work and your parks and restoration work is fundamentally regenerative. how aligned ⁓ or contradictory are your organizational systems? Do they support where you're trying to go in the field? do they give mixed messages to people? Because those mixed messages, if you experience it in your teams or in your territories that you work in, it will show up in the local level. The mixed messages will show up in the way they build relationships with farmers. we were applying nature's principles. ⁓ as a roadmap to rebuild and rethink their organizational structure. And I have to say that when you start moving down that line, these kind of deep transformational things are, they happen faster. They happen with active support and engagement by people. You don't have people hanging out resisting and pushing back because They're worried something critical will fall through the cracks. ⁓ It's really stunning what happens when you seeing the livingness of the system. The system and the people in it will help you. So we built capacity, we changed structures and processes. We looked at all of the processes and structures that had control as an unstated assumption and changed all of that to what can we unleash? relationships ⁓ and trust in the system because the speed of change flows down through relationships and at the speed of trust. so most of our organizations are so attracted to actions and outcomes that we've lost some of the importance of what I would call the soft things, something that nature never loses sight of, which is relationships. It's a relational system. And so you gotta let go of all of the tangibles. There are tangibles that are important, but there's a whole bunch of intangibles that are important too.

Chris Lee: Yeah, so in practical application, this transformation that took place, what specifically did that look like? Like in my head, I'm envisioning the top level leaders or the managers having to relinquish some semblance of control and then empower those below them in the, like if you just think of the typical org chart and empowering those down below them, like what specifically Might that look like?

Kathy Allen: Well, the distributive leadership frame would suggest that ⁓ you first of all want initiative and you want the full kind of knowledge at all levels of the organization to be present in the organization. So for example, there's this, ⁓ I think it's called the iceberg of ignorance. And which basically says that people at the top of the organization only understand about 4 % of what's actually happening on the ground. And it gets a little better in that director mental management area. You know, maybe we're up to, of 4%, they might have a sense of 20 or 25 % of what the real issues, but the people on the ground. They know what the issues are, but we don't listen to them because they're at the bottom of our pyramid, organizational chart-wise. But that's not how nature works. Very small things like bees, for example, have very critical roles and they have, and because nature is networked, everybody has different understanding of what the issue is based on where they sit in the network. So we had to build communication lines, for example, that invited and encouraged people to share their point of view. We had to figure out how to welcome resistance. Resistance in this sense, ⁓ by meaning people who have a different point of view of the system. And this is where the diversity of where they sit helped us understand the whole system. We're used to having our leaders be climbing up the top of a mountain and then that leader has a 360 view of the system, but nature doesn't work that way. And most human organizations don't have a single viewing point. When we brought technology into our organizational structures, we brought a network culture that rests alongside our hierarchical culture. And so our network culture is all built on relationships, but we often lead primarily through a hierarchy. So people even in leadership positions had to figure out, I comfortable without having a direct line of control? You if I press the button on my car starter, the car will start. We have made that as part of a criteria for leadership in human organizations. And so they had to go through this framing of instead of what do I need to control? What can I unleash instead of Who's gonna get this done? You ask what interactions will make this work. Instead of ⁓ how do I fix this person? You look at the ecology and say, how can we redesign this? We can design our way out of problems. That's what nature does. It's so extraordinary how it uses design. Like it recycles everything. ⁓ uses feedback to curb excess within the system. It runs on sunlight, et cetera, et cetera. There are design principles that we can intentionally bring in. So we had to develop the positional leaders, the front lines folks, all the folks in between. We had to build this self-organizing kind of framework. we had to strengthen the highest shared purpose and create a way for people to experience a shared purpose. And in Africa, it's interesting because they have a shared purpose around the organization that is about creating these regenerative agriculture and economic resilient systems for each farmer. But they also have ⁓ 30 % 30 % of or 70 % of the people in Africa are younger than 30. So the larger higher shared purpose in this organization with the people who live and grew up there and care about their place, they want the whole continent to transform. So they have levels of scale, you know, transforming the individual farmers, farmers transform their communities. But over time, the whole landscape of what's possible changes and it transforms the whole continent. So that's how purpose can be scaled as well. We have to think about purpose. Nature has a purpose. It doesn't have

Chris Lee: Yeah.

Kathy Allen: a voice to be interviewed in the local news, but the purpose, if you look at the outcomes, it's to create conditions conducive to the life of future generations. And ⁓ that's the purpose. And every fundamental species alive within the ecosystem is designed to support that. And we've lived through five mass extinctions, maybe in the start or the middle, depending who you talk to on the six mass. extinction, but life has been regenerated each time. So it is fundamentally designed to regenerate. And we just need to learn from that and then say, what's our organizational version of this?

Chris Lee: Yeah. Yeah. The, ⁓ so here in that makes me think of a of different, ⁓ examples from, from industry. ⁓ so one is, ⁓ so Steve jobs and Apple, you know, he can't be a leadership person if you don't invoke the name of Steve jobs, at least at some point. ⁓ but on his second tour with Apple, ⁓ you know, and he's famously known for being hard to work for. And you know that this guy was, kind of over the top intense. ⁓ but they developed, ⁓ and he would give this award. to people that stood up to him. And this is only after he came back to Apple and he realized that this diversity of thought and this challenging leadership thinking, challenging the higher ups ⁓ is a way to come up with better solutions and better ideas and better ways of doing things. And so he encouraged that, to just hear him browbeating some of the people around him, you wouldn't think that he was encouraging that, but ultimately, yes, he was. And then another example is with Captain ⁓ David Marquardt, ⁓ was, he inherited this ⁓ nuclear submarine and it was the worst performing ship. And he turned it around. And one of the things he did when he first started was he stopped giving orders. And that like, that seems completely counterintuitive, but he,

Kathy Allen: That's great stuff. I've seen folks use his all his videos and YouTube.

Chris Lee: Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. what leader. Right. Yeah. And that is perfectly parallel with what you're talking about here is, you know, you're, you're dissolving this whole concept of the leader knows what needs to be done. And, they dole out, ⁓ commandments like from on high, but the best organizations don't. And he turned that and he turned that ship around completely. It became the highest performing ship in the fleet. ⁓

Kathy Allen: They're training, yeah.

Chris Lee: And one of the things he did was he stopped giving orders. And then he empowered the people in the ships that know the job that has to be done to come to him and say, my intention is. as long as that was aligned with the mission, then absolutely, go for it. ⁓ And so there's so many parallels in how this works. I love this stuff. So in interest of time here, kind of the last one. So where are headed? Where are headed next? You you've got this book out. I know you've got an ebook that is available now. And what's coming up for Dr. Kathleen here?

Kathy Allen: Well, I'm starting to write my next book and I'm kind of, ⁓ I thought that I was going to write about resilient systems because they scale and there are ⁓ certain characteristics that make a system more resilient. And I thought it might be another way to language regenerative work because the overlap between resilient the characteristics of resilience systems and regenerative systems are similar. They're not completely 100 % aligned, but they are very similar. And that it might be another way in to help organizations begin to scale resilience, like creating critical redundancies. We're so attracted to efficiency that we think efficiency is defined as no redundancy. But if you... flying a plane, you like to have at least three ways to get the landing gear down into the plane. Or we have two nostrils and a mouth, so we have critical redundancy of how to get a vital resource into our body. So that's one possible path. I've also, my whole career has been about creating systems change, and I've been really good at it and have some examples of legacy kind of transformation that is still sticking with the work with the system 10, 20, 30 years later. And so recently I've been wondering, maybe, you know, we're in a time when a lot of our systems and our thinking in the systems are going to have to shift and be transformed. So I've also been thinking about maybe that's, so maybe I'll just write both of them and I just don't know what order I'm writing it. But that's ⁓ the fundamental ⁓ idea. ⁓ And I'm also going to continue to do my coaching work with people who are interested in creating these kinds of large-scale changes in their sector or their organization. Awesome.

Chris Lee: Before I wrap up, any questions, Ryan and Kelly? Anybody on the show with us here, guys?

Kathy Allen: Not so much a question, but I'm curious what her thoughts are on the unnatural world of AI and how that's going to affect leadership going forward. think the whole AI thing is going to be really interesting because on one hand, you can see that what might be happening over time, I don't know when. but we're creating another life form. ⁓ Kevin Kelly, who was the editor of Wired Magazine for many years, wrote this book called What Does Technology Want? And his list is exactly the same as nature. It thrives on information and feedback and things like that. but I think, and maybe not, but I think that ⁓ we're gonna have to be transformed as human beings and people in organizations along the way. ⁓ there's this AI, ⁓ you know, we could just accept the convenience of AI and not make AI a conscious choice and think about ⁓ where do we want to deploy AI and where. might it be inappropriate? I read a blog recently on the Dust Bowl and how the Dust Bowl was created by tearing up all these deep-rooted prairies. And they were asking the question, is AI the digging up of the prairies? So what is it fundamentally to be human? And what are those things that are important? I think AI will not do taste and it will not do judgment. ⁓ And right now it's still, it's resources. ⁓ It looks good because it's using all the right language, but we don't, it's not a generation of wisdom. Whether it will be in the future, I don't know, but ⁓ I think we have to be conscious in our ⁓ application and use. And some places it will be better than others. Does it code really fast? Yes. Does that save a lot of time? Yes. But what is it that really would be helpful for us and our organizations?

Chris Lee: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. That's a good approach. It's probably more questions than answers because it is very, very new. ⁓

Kathy Allen: I think the human way through this is stop, observe, notice, reflect, then launch an experiment.

Chris Lee: Yeah, very good. All right. If there's nothing else, Dr. Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us. This has been fun. I can't wait to see what's next for you and ⁓ whatever the next book is that comes out. I will certainly be looking forward to that. ⁓ what so last question, if someone wanted to learn more about you or get in touch in some way, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Kathy Allen: ⁓ I try to probably go to my website, KathleenAllen.net. Kathleen with a K, A-L-L-E-M, KathleenAllen.net. I do a weekly blog that is all about organizational nature and organizational applications either to us as individuals or our organizations. And it's a really nice bite-sized way to ⁓ stay engaged in the conversation. And it has a great search. functions. if you're looking for something specific, you can put a little search in there and see where it takes you. so that might be the best and simplest way. My email is keallen1, the number one, at charter.net. So you can also catch me there.

Chris Lee: OK, and ⁓ when this posts, I'll be sure to put both of those in the show notes so folks can find those. ⁓ you so much for joining us. Thank you for the work that you've done and that you're continuing to do. And I forward to seeing the impact you make on the world and through the organizations that you work with going into the future. Great. And for everybody listening, thanks for joining. And we will talk to you again soon. Take care.

Kathy Allen: Thank you, Chris.