Shelley Alward-MacLeod 0:00
Hello and Welcome to Season Two of within our reach, a podcast all about accessibility, inclusion and leveling the playing field at work and in our community. I'm Shelley Alward McLeod, and I'm joined by my co host, Blake Hunsley, and today we're joined by Kathy Jourdain of world view intelligence to talk about the future of work, specifically looking at the adoption of AI and how that's happening in the hybrid work environment. So, Kathy, thanks for joining us.

Kathy Jourdain 0:27
Oh, it's my absolute pleasure to be here.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 0:29
Wonderful. So why don't we start by you telling us you know about your company, sure, and the work you do, and what's world view. I've had the I've had the fortune to be able to read your website, but people, our listeners wouldn't have,

Kathy Jourdain 0:47
well, I really appreciate the question. So the company is worldview intelligence. It's a small, two person consulting company. I'm here in Halifax, and my partner is in Minnesota, and we've been developing this body of work for about 15 years, and it partly originated through his PhD dissertation, where he was looking at world views, and he was specifically looking at whether or not there's this self organized network called The Art of hosting conversations that matter we're both part of that. That's how we met, and he was wondering, does the art of hosting have like a singular worldview? And the soon as we started working together, he started to bring this notion of we all have a worldview. Worldviews are the lenses through which we see and experience the world. They're different for each of us. They influence how we act in the world, and then how we act in the world gives us information about our world views. He started introducing that in the trainings that we were doing, both open enrollment and in our client work, and people were immediately attracted to the idea that if we understood that we each see and experience the world differently, that it might change the nature of our conversations, and so we invite people to bring curiosity to that, and it opened exploratory conversations like we hadn't seen before, even when we said to people, what is your worldview, and how do you know? And most people were like, I have no idea. Deer in the headlights. No idea at all. So we proceeded for a couple of years, asking that very, very big question as we develop training and other models around it, and one day we said to ourselves, there must be an easier way into this conversation, and that took us to his research for his dissertation, where he had come across a framework that had six dimensions in it. So it's the worldview, intelligence, six dimensions framework, and it's really simple to understand. It's coherent, and most people haven't organized their thinking in that way. So it's reality, which is, what are our day to day experiences, history, what are all the things that have influenced how we see and experience the world future. How do we interact with the future, or think about the future? And just as a side note, if we have people who are in poverty or who are dealing with daily experiences that have a profound impact on how they show up in the world, their sense of the future might be tomorrow versus someone who's quite well to do where their sense of the future might be 20 years down the road. So those three then we have values, which is pretty self explanatory, practices, which is, how do we bring all of our worldview to life? And I think about them as being intentional and habitual. And then there's knowledge, which is, what are the sources of knowledge that we trust. Knowledge, if we look at media, sources, will influence and shape our worldview. And sometimes we know we have some very different realities depending on what sources of media we rely on. And the other one around knowledge is, how do I how do I know what I know, and how do I know that each of my answers to the other dimensions? How do I know that that's true so and the other, one other thing, because I could talk about world views for days, but the only other thing that I'll say is that our world views are closely related to our sense of identity. And the psychological research tells us that when our identity is threatened or challenged, we respond as if our very life has been challenged. And so the more our world views are reinforced, the more we believe that our world views are the right world view, or the right way to see and experience the world. And yet, when our worldviews are challenged, that's the perfect opportunity to be curious about what else is going on there, and maybe we talk about expanding our worldviews. So how do we expand our worldview perspectives, right?

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 4:54
I thank you very much for that. It's very interesting. It's, you know, in the field that. You know, we're in really, it's another way of looking at bringing culture diversity lived experience, sort of the whole when you know some buzz words, as we've been, you know, on this, dei, EDI, all the different acronyms for it. But, you know, people talk a lot about, like, unconscious bias, and that I find, you know, people are threatened by that because they don't really understand what that the way that you've described it. Everybody has a different worldview, and coming from could be their lived experience. How do I have that knowledge, how you've broken it down. I find that was very, very interesting,

Kathy Jourdain 5:46
yeah, and it's so like, it's so understandable, like it's easier to easy to get our heads around it. And we're not a dei firm. We would never claim that. However, we have been invited to work with clients to support their dei goals and objectives, because worldviews feels like an invitation into that conversation. And the first invitation invitation is, what is my worldview, right? And if I become curious about that, then, then that creates an opportunity to be more curious about what your worldview might be.

Blake Hunsley 6:18
I'm very curious. What sort of answers do you get when you approach people and ask, what is your worldview? Because I would be a deer in the headlights if you approach me with that right out of the gate. I don't know if I would say anything at all. So I'm curious, do most people react that way, and have to give it a lot of deep thought, or do people, do some people really have a sort of self identified worldview right out of the start?

Kathy Jourdain 6:37
So it I think that's such a great question, because even when we were asking that question, I was like, I don't know if I can answer that question. And we've been working with it and the world world view. When we started working with that word 15 years ago, you hardly saw it anywhere. And now you see it everywhere. And when people use it like you might say a certain thing, and people will go, well, that's your worldview. And yet, we're not uni dimensional as human beings. We're multi dimensional, and so being able to understand the components of it makes a difference. But we started to see the thing that most intrigued me around those early conversations is people would talk about power and privilege in a way that and we created really supported spaces for these conversations, anyway, but it went to a whole new level of depth with world views. Because, partly because, instead of saying, well, that's just the way I think, or why do you think that way, it's like, well, from my world view, so it depersonalized the conversation, and that that's what we were we were noticing. One example is we do these open enrollment art of hosting trainings. And we were in the US, in Minnesota, and we had often, at that point, collaborated with an African American man and woman who were really good friends and colleagues of ours, and we showed up to an art of hosting training one day in a facility and you couldn't get into the door till, like, almost the start time, and when we get in there, the rooms were not suitable for what we needed. So we spent the first little bit, just moving everything around. And people arrived, and they started to pitch him and our friend Dave, he's like, six feet tall, 300 pounds, wears a ball cap backwards all of the time. And so he was doing all of this. So we finally get started. We start in circle, and we did the usual world view teaches. And at the end of the day, we did a World Cafe format where people got to interact. And we asked this question about world views. And she this young woman, sat next to Dave, and she goes, I just have to tell you something. She said when we arrived into the room and you were moving chairs around. And all she was, I thought you were the janitor. And then she said, when you sat in our circle, I realized that you were one of the participants. And then when you started leading the circle, she goes, I'm shocked at seeing my own worldview brave of her to admit that it was, yeah, brave, yeah. It was a very and my partner, he's a six foot tall white man. There is no way anybody would ever think that he was a janitor, ever. And so those were the kinds of things that we started to see illuminated just by using the language of worldviews.

Blake Hunsley 9:42
Okay, I can see what you mean about it. Depersonalizing then too, because you're not necessarily going to feel like, oh, this was my opinion, and what a terrible opinion. Why did I arrive at that? You're going to think as my worldview This is rooted in so many things that I've been through, so many things I've been taught, so many things I've experienced. It's not that it's. Not my responsibility to work on that worldview and update it, but it's not necessarily my fault, for lack of a better word, exactly. Okay, interesting.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 10:08
Interesting. I love that approach, and I keep thinking, because one of my sort of views, if you will, is when everybody started talking, you know, the world started talking about dei diversity, equity, inclusion, and we were spending, you know, a lot of time talking about, like, specific groups or specific communities. And I, you know, became more and more frustrated, you know, mostly because of the work that I do with reachability, and I also said on a couple of other boards that we were really not focusing on inclusion, right? And this is really what you know you're talking about, is like having a conversation that's inclusive to everybody. Nowhere does it say that, you know, maybe you're invited to different communities, right, but you're really looking at having conversations that include everybody, like that. The world needs to be accessible and include everybody in the conversation and hear their voice and so that, because those are some of the most powerful learning you know, like when that, when that woman came into the session, and as Blake said, I agree, very brave to have that conversation about, when you create that space, those are lasting, like, that's going to be a very huge learning moment that'll follow her for the rest of

Kathy Jourdain 11:37
her life, right? Yeah, I

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 11:39
think about inclusion,

Kathy Jourdain 11:40
right, right? I think that's true. And oftentimes, when we're doing a training, whether it's with a client or it's open enrollment, one of the exercises that we do, right off the bat, is around history. So we invite people to reflect on what are the historical influences on their worldview. And that includes people. It includes where you grew up, all the life changes that have happened. But it also includes large events like 911 in the US impacted a lot of us. The pandemic impacted our worldviews globally in various directions, but so and it could include books that you've read or movies that you've watched, anything that's had some kind of profound effect on you. So we invite people to reflect on their historical influences, jot down some notes about it, and then we ask people to go into groups, usually of three, and talk about their historical influences. And what we've noticed the pattern over time is that people will often connect on things like it's common people will go, my parents had a big effect on my worldview, but how they affected it might be very different in those conversations. So then we noticed that when people find points of connection, they're able to go to differences with a very different energy and perspective, whereas if we start with differences, then we amplify the differences, and then it's harder to find a path forward that brings all of those views and perspectives into that conversation to move it forward.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 13:11
Very interesting. I it's a very interesting, very interesting approach and and I was disappointed, because I've lived in Halifax for a lot of years, and that you and I hadn't come across each other before, right? That was very when, when Tova gave us your contact information, I was like, Does she live here? So that that?

Kathy Jourdain 13:38
Yeah, exactly. It's a small world and not at the same time, absolutely.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 13:45
So you so one of the things that you know, when we're, you know, we're thinking about, you know, the the world views between leaders and employees, and I know, you know, we're often talking about the adoption of AI and the physical setup of the of the of the work, and they seem to be, right now, two pretty hot topics. If you look at any employment conference, yeah, great. Any health and safety conference, anything really to do with the workplace, there's going to be some session. Even, like in the alternative dispute resolution world, there's a stream always talking about AI, right, right? And, you know, and the hybrid remote, yep, in person,

Kathy Jourdain 14:33
those are two hot topics. Why start

Blake Hunsley 14:37
with something simple, exactly? I'm actually curious. Are those from my perspective, and Shelly and I have talked about this, but those seem to be two of the biggest and growing divergences between I like the term worldview, so I'm just going to keep using it here, between leaders, employers and employees. Are we right? Are those two of the biggest issues causing division in the workplace today? Or is there something that we're missing that's that's kind of creeping up underneath, and it's possibly creating even

Kathy Jourdain 15:04
more divergence? So I don't know about division in the workplace, like it's gonna have to parse it out a little bit. So when I'm just gonna back up for a step here, which is when we talk about world views and worldview and worldview and tell like when we say worldview intelligence, people go, Oh, well, what's that? And my partner and I took a step back a bit ago, and we kind of went all of the work that we do goes through working with teams so that they're better performing, or working with organizational cultures so they know how to have difficult conversations, or they create alignment across departments, or whatever we went really, what we're talking about is workplace culture. And so we've everything we've created is the foundation now for workplace culture. We've just reoriented our thinking about it, and so with that particular lens, then we're saying to ourselves. So what's going on right now that's affecting workplace culture? Artificial intelligence, and I would call it the back to Office mandates, is what had our attention. So in the fall, we talked to business leaders in small and medium sized businesses about their experience with artificial intelligence. Because, of course, we're hearing everyone's gonna lose their job. Entry level jobs are going to disappear. Our brains are going to turn to mush because of artificial intelligence. And my thing is, well, if entry level jobs of one sort are disappearing, that doesn't mean they're gone. There's always going to be an entry level job of some sort. So what does that that mean? And our curiosity really was, is what we're hearing in the media, what's really happening on the ground, and it's not so much like it's not as divisive as we might think from the conversations that we had, because mostly we were hearing, yes, we're using artificial intelligence. Everyone talks about, what are the guardrails you need to have in place? What are the AI policies you need to have in place? And also, there's risk frameworks that should be in place around that. But in any given organization or team, you're going to have the whole spectrum of world views about AI adoption everything from I don't want to use it, I'm never going to use it, to if we're not on this bandwagon, like we're going to be left behind. And AI is here. It's not going away. And what we heard from people in every sector, it was really amazing to hear how people were using artificial intelligence is, we're using it to reduce repetitive tasks so that human beings can do higher value work. So it's a win win all around but if we don't communicate it appropriately, then we're going to get the division and the backlash around the use of it, and people will be saying, well, am I just training AI to do my job, and everything that we heard from the people that we talked to is that was not the case. But if you don't have a culture change strategy or a change management strategy that goes along with AI adoption, then you're going to miss some of the key pieces around that. And they talked about making it okay for people to talk about how they're using AI, yes, because we know from this, from the media articles that are out there, lots of people inside of organizations are using AI, but they're doing it on the sly. There's almost shame

Blake Hunsley 18:36
behind it, behind admitting that you're doing that. I'm going to tell everyone in the room right now, I do the social media for reachability and when I need to find the hashtags that will work best on Instagram for a particular post, right? Do you think I'm going to Google and searching out every other agency that looks somewhere like our profile and looking No, I'm going "ChatGPT, What are the best hashtags that I need? Thank you for taking that grunt work off my plate"

Kathy Jourdain 18:59
Yeah, no, exactly, and that's how most people are using AI inside of organizations. And they also find if you make if you make it, make AI usage transparent, then people learn from each other. So what you just said, Blake around, what hashtags should I use? I'm like, Oh, that's a good tip that I could be prompting AI in that, in that way, and so, so I think it's less divisive than what we're hearing, okay,

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 19:30
on the media. And I like how you swung it back. Well, you kind of swung Blake's original question back about, but you swung it back to workplace culture, like in the kind of the why, right? What have we been doing? Why are we adopting, AI, you know, why are we adopting a four day work week, right? Why? Like, you know, and you know, you've been in this business a long time, so have I? It's not that the idea was a really bad idea, right? But does it actually fit with our culture, right? And, or are we just doing something because we think the rest of the world's doing it, or we heard like our competitors are doing it, and we better do it, right? We've not set it up properly. So, you know, that's very interesting that you said that about AI, because, you know, two, two thoughts I have. I have a client who put all the framework around, and they were very skeptical, but they they're, you know, you know, their staff were talking about, oh, this person was using it. This person created this with it, and it was like, almost like, shameful, or should they be disciplined? But then they real. They started to do research. So they put some frameworks around, and then they started talking about it, and they started listing, you know, here's what you can do it for. Here's, you know, how it could be helpful. All of a sudden, now it's this, you know, lightning, you know, lighting rod, like, oh, you can use it for this. And, you know, I'll be honest until, like, you know, some of my clients really started having conversations of things that they were doing with it. I had not used it right, because I was like, like, honestly, how could it do anything I wanted to do right? Like, that's kind of your thought, like, right? And then so I, I had, you know, some downtime and just played with chat GPT, like, you know, without fear of reprisal. And I was amazed. Now, there does have to be some parameters around, and I think that's where, you know, leaders were concerned that documents are going to be released without review, you're just going to have AI. It's kind of like the robot car, like it's going to be a while before I'm going to get in a in an Uber that doesn't have a driver in the front, right? But I think that you know from a workplace, the culture, I like how you brought it back to that. So on that same note, when we're talking about the going back to the office and the legislation, so what are you what are you hearing about that? How's that affecting? Well, that's

Kathy Jourdain 22:13
the the question was guided when we did the conversations around AI, and we discovered that what is actually happening on the ground in small and medium sized businesses was different than what we were hearing that sparked this curiosity, partly because we're hearing mostly from large organizations, or we're hearing from governments about back to Office mandates, and I have three sons, they're all in small, smaller organizations here in Metro and in HRM, and they all have flexible work arrangements to one degree or another. So I'm like, Hmm, so Well, we find something different than what we're hearing and what's been interesting. I don't have I've been doing these conversations now. I've talked to dozens of people and in all kinds of work environments. I don't have the report yet. That's like the next thing on my to do list. But I've talked to people in fully remote environments, where it's been remote from the from the beginning of the organization. Not everybody is suited to work in fully remote I've talked to people in hybrid organizations, like this one, and it's it varies quite a bit about what that hybrid looks like, everything from two, three or four days in the office to mandated days in the office to people can figure it out on their own. So all of all of that it so I'll come back to that in a second. And I've worked, talked to organizations. I have talked to federal government, people who are subjected to the back to Office. And I've talked to organizations that have been in office the whole time, not a mandate, but an expectation that they they would do that. So whatever original expectation I carried into those conversations has expanded. And one of the things that is really clear is no matter what kind of work environment you choose, it's the clarity of what does that look like. And it comes back to leadership, like you were talking about earlier. So what? What is the leadership saying about what the requirement is going to be for work? So one of the questions I ask pretty much everybody is, what about relationship building? So organizations that operate fully remote, they have strategies in place for building relationship along the way, and it includes things like, if they're using a platform like Slack, they've got their project channels and other channels, and they have social channels around that, and they create social times in their virtual meetings, and that kind of thing. With hybrid work environments. One of the really interesting things that came out of that, for me is I had been thinking about pandemic, everybody in an office needed to go back and work or needed to work remotely. And I thought we're so innovative and creative in this, everything's going to be different post pandemic, because we're going to learn from that, which is why the back to Office mandates hit me very curious, like, what is going on with that? And in talking to people, they're like, if you didn't have an intention to be hybrid or remote prior to the pandemic, then you don't have that purpose and intentionality going forward, and that partly contributes to the back to the office. So I thought that was really fascinating. And one of the challenges around some of those back to Office mandates is they don't actually have the space for everybody, yes. And so when we talk, you were talking about inclusion earlier, people don't feel very included or like they belong, if they have to cart all their belongings back and forth every time they have to go back to the office, or if they don't have dedicated space, or, you know, just things like that. So, so that's that's a challenge. And if part of the back to Office mandate is beyond the office in that we want to revitalize our downtown areas, that might be a political motivation for back to office. But as a worker in that environment, people are kind of resentful

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 26:43
the workers and the leaders, so, right? Like the whole teams when it's and I'm glad that you hit on that, like the political piece, because that's kind of outside of their control. They're mandated at a much higher level. So teams now have this lack of motivation, maybe that. And I have been to, I've also been talking to people and hearing that some of the teams that were working had hybrid or working remotely, they've been mandated back, and they have are very successful teams. So, right? It's like they're being punished, right, right, which is something that's not, not okay. Whereas you have the, you know, you have some of the other messaging that we're hearing that's not political, okay. But the reason that people are coming back to work is because, you know, managers need to be able to manage, and that, to me, is a cop out, right? Because, in fact, right, your managers, okay, why? It's the age old, right? Let's just, you know, redo everything, because we have five out of 150 managers that need to be performance managed, right?

Kathy Jourdain 28:00
Well, and this is I've always, I've felt this for a very long time, that too often people are managing for time and not for outcomes, right? And if we were managing for outcomes, then a lot of those other things wouldn't be an issue. So a couple of things about people who want to be in the office, generally, more senior leaders and CEOs want to be in the office, and I think that's partly a function of they also tend to be older, and it's part of their pattern, but also because they want to be accessible to people, which I thought was that that makes sense. And the other group of people who's more likely to want to be in the office are younger people, and part of that is because they want that social interaction. They want that guidance from other people who might be in the office. And one of the things that I've heard is that if you're in the office and people see you there you are, you have a greater likelihood of being promoted than if you're right. I hadn't considered that, but that makes complete sense, so I thought that was that was interesting too. And people who have a high need for social interaction, they're more likely to want to be in the office. And then there were people like even in back to Office mandates, or fully, fully in the office organizations, there are exceptions that are made. So I've talked to people who have accommodations and they are not required to go into the office as a result of those accommodations. So I feel like there's some degree of flexibility that can exist out there. Most of the smaller organizations I've talked to have talked about it being a competitive advantage to have some kind of flexibility or hybrid nature to the work environment, because most people don't actually want to be in the office five days a week for whatever reason. And one of the other reasons some people think remote work is not. Not good is because people will take advantage of the time by doing the laundry or starting the dishwasher or whatever. But like somebody said to me, work force people taking advantage of time in the workplace didn't start with remote work exactly

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 30:20
like, remember, I can remember, like, way before the pandemic and people were forced to go home, where there would always be complaints about, like, the amount of people like, who are standing in the coffee coffee room or lunch room, gossiping and doing whatever, right? Well, that's a waste of time, right? I say yay to those people who work remotely, who can actually get their job done right, get supper on the table, get their laundry done. Like, that's good time management. Like that's good organizational skills. And you know the employers who and this, you know, this doesn't go for every single job, because depends on what the role is and when they have to there, is that what they have to be if their client, if they're going to be client facing? I mean, you can't actually call your client at midnight, right? But I think, you know, there we, you know, I've heard, and this is aligning with what you're hearing. I've heard a lot of the fact that people who work remote, okay, have less sick time, right, right, right, less absenteeism, and sometimes less innocent absenteeism, because they're able to run off to their doctor's appointment or run off to the grocery store or run that errand, right, but still get all of the work done, like all of the and this in it kind of goes back to the thing that you said, the difference between time versus outcome, right? So if these, if this is the job they have to do, and even if they have to make, you know, 500 calls per week, right? If that's getting accomplished, they have a budget and they're meeting that budget? I guess my question is, does it really matter, right? Right? That's not always a popular, popular

Blake Hunsley 32:13
view, but I want to challenge to something you said about the people hanging out in the lunchroom at the office, about that being a waste of time or doing laundry at home and working remotely as well. I would argue, neither of those are a waste of time at all right, hanging out in the coffee room. That's just team building. I mean, we built that into our schedule here at reachability, we have set times in the morning where it looks like we're being profoundly unproductive, but we're really just getting everything off of our mental plate to each other, finding out what resources people have and where you're going to be during the day, and just lowering the temperature, lowering the pressure a little bit, if I can have my laundry running in the background while I'm searching up the appropriate hashtags to use to promote this podcast, I'm a lot less stressed at the end. I'm going to be much less likely, like you said, to take a sick day the next day, because I've already caught up on some of the things in my personal life. I don't see that taking away from my work and from my job at all. If anything, I see the complete opposite. I'm very curious, since this is a lovely benefit to finally have someone, a researcher, in the room, who actually know the answers and have the evidence. So bless you for being here. Thank you for that. I'm very curious where you think these worldviews come from, where we have the two things, the shame about AI and the hiding or usage of it, and also the assumption that people, when they're not working right in front of you, are not working. I'm wondering where those come from. I also do appreciate that those aren't quite the way the media might portray it. It seems very black and white. Both of those issues, I really like that you're painting a much more complex more complex picture that I wouldn't have thought that young people wanted to work in the office. I was surprised by that too. Yeah, I'm very intrigued by that. So, yeah, I'm curious what you think the origins scene or world views of those things are from what you've spoken

Kathy Jourdain 33:55
to people about. So we're still working in an industrial age model of working nine to five people need to be present. It's a mechanical worldview, orientation about parts. And so I think that that's some of the need to be in the office so that we can keep an eye on production, and I think that some of that is some of that is changing. I'm not I don't really know what the future of that's going to be, but I do know that I've saw some research where which also prompted this curiosity, where some of the larger organizations with the back to Office mandates, they're losing people, people at a higher rate, and those positions are harder to fill. So for the organized like maybe for a really large organization, it doesn't matter, because they have more resources. They have more people, but for smaller and medium. Sized organizations that becomes a real factor in terms of recruiting and retaining people. So I think that we'll see some changes around that and in the desire to hide AI usage or anything else like that, I come back to this great term psychological safety, which is a relatively new term. I just did some respectful workplace sessions for a company, a local company, and that was part of the thing. And I kept saying to people, have you heard this term? And most people, they haven't heard the term at all. But it really is this idea that I can show up at work, I can say what I need to say without fear of being reprimanded or disciplined, that it is welcome. I can challenge things. And in so doing, we all learn we're all in a we're all in a more inclusive space of belonging, and we recognize that our decision making is better. So I think you mentioned earlier about intentional workplaces when we talk about workplace culture, like, if you're not intentional about it, you get what you get, and you might not like what you get. And I think that's a part of the I'm afraid to tell people that I'm using AI, because it's not. There's no policy, there's no leadership on it, and I don't want to stop using it. And there's some research. We didn't come across this specifically in our conversations, but there's some research that says I don't care if I'm using it wrong, I'm still going to use it. And so one of the reasons leaders want to be clear about their policies. It's not just about protecting the organization. It's also about protecting people who are using AI, and if they're using it inappropriately, they could somehow put themselves at risk as well as the organization. So so there's some of that. And so the I think it's not specific to AI, I think it's specific to the quality of the workplace culture. And if that workplace culture is not inviting conversations around any idea around conflict, then people are going to have more of a tendency to hide their usage.

Blake Hunsley 37:19
This is very interesting. I think we're a bit of a bit of an example. Of this here, because, I mean, with the clients that we work with, psychological safety is the number one priority coming in the door. It has to be. But the nice, kind of knock on effect of that is that there's a lot of psychological safety for the staff, right? Personally, this is probably the first job I've been here for six years now, and there's a reason for that I feel, I mean psychological safety in the workplace, not a thing I have felt profoundly in the past when we started. And I'll use the term playing around with AI, because I loved I read your report, and you're talking about they had sandbox days companies where everybody on the team was just really just playing with that to figure out what they could do. And I thought that was fantastic, that that was implemented as a strategy, because that's something we just did sort of by accident. Here at the staff, everybody started using chat GPT around the same time, and we're just going into each other's offices, including the CEO's office, and getting excited about the different things that we can do. And I think that that's got to be exactly why is this is an office where you can also come in, and if you're having a particularly bad mental health day, without making it everybody's problem, you can have a quiet conversation with your supervisor, with your boss, with your co worker, and feel perfectly safe about that, because that's the nature of this organization. So that's very interesting. That does explain, I think, why we haven't felt any of that right shame or guilt around around using it

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 38:40
here, yeah, yeah. It's, I think it's about setting up the culture. I do like the fact that you drove it back to the culture. Like, what's your culture? What are you going to be intentional about? Like, that's the

Speaker 1 38:52
big way too. Is intentional because you're right.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 38:55
You intentionally at reachability has intentionally set up, okay? Psychological safety, okay to be sort of one of the top like, from the moment people walk in the door, like, do they want to step further into that door? We've had some guests on that talk about the fact that, from an accessibility point of view and accessibility could be for mental health, physical any, any reason that often it's they get right to the place and it's that 15 feet out, Okay, yeah, that all of a sudden they realize "I can't be here." Huh? Interesting.

Blake Hunsley 39:44
I can get to the building, I can get in the building, and then everything in the building is not made for me, right?

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 39:49
Yeah, right, you know. So if you take the, if you take that thought process for you know what reachability has done is that, you know, the moment the door opens, okay? It, oh, it's a welcoming it totally is.

Kathy Jourdain 40:02
I completely felt that when I walked in

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 40:05
here, right and right, yeah, exactly so. But that's that was in, that was intense, that was intentional. Didn't happen by happenstance. It was intentional. And I think that's, you know, for our listeners, that's a really good you know. Point is that these things have to be intentional. It's when they're not intentional when they're there's no real parameters. There's no real discussion. It hasn't become part of the workplace culture that then everybody starts bringing their own opinion, own world view, right? Okay? And then they start clashing, right, right?

Kathy Jourdain 40:45
And when we talk about world views, we don't talk about everybody having the same world view, right? We're really talking about, how do we bring in the multiplicity of world views, absolutely, so that we can have a much broader experience. And when we talk about culture, many people will say that culture is intangible. And I would say, Yeah, and it's not that intangible, because it's like, what you just said, I love this. I can get to the building, I might even be able to get to the door. And then I'm like, because we've it's, it's in the field, and there's research that tells us that too, that our our workplaces are it's not the workplace the people in it emitting these electric electromagnetic fields which communicate our emotional state. And if you've got a whole bunch of people commuting, communicating an emotional state that is on edge or not healthy, we all feel it.

Blake Hunsley 41:40
I use the term the vibe, but you can, you can 1,000% feel the vibe when you walk into a work Yes, and everyone is on edge. No one is comfortable saying that they used AI to get something today. No one is comfortable saying that they spent 10 minutes in the lunchroom chatting, even though it made them feel

Kathy Jourdain 41:54
better about the entire day. Well, there is the Heart Math Institute in the US. I can't remember where, but they actually research all of this. So the Heart Math, yeah, totally looking this. Yeah, that is fascinating. It's a real thing. And they'll measure the electromagnetic field around each of us, six to eight or 12 feet out. And so we right now, sitting in this room, doing this podcast, we're in each other's electromagnetic field explains the cheerful vibes, by the way, and we're influencing each other consciously or unconsciously in that way. In the same we always say, you walk into a room and you can cut the tension with a knife. It's because that's the vibe that is in the room, and it's a real, tangible, measurable thing.

Blake Hunsley 42:43
Now I've got to ask, because unfortunately, we have to wrap this up, despite the fact I'm kind of into sitting here for another two hours talking about this, if you walked into a workplace, and now you very kindly, when you walk into this workplace, you said many lovely things, which you sense repeated on the podcast. Thank you extra for that too. But if you walk into a workplace, and you get that sense that there's tension, that there's discomfort, that there's a lot of maybe discordance in the world views present. What are some of the basic first steps you would recommend for the leadership in that organization to take to start to correct that?

Kathy Jourdain 43:18
So you've kind of hit on the biggest challenge of all, which is,

Blake Hunsley 43:23
with five minutes left,

Kathy Jourdain 43:24
why not? Well, there are lots of organizations that could use this work, but if they're not open to it, then it's a non starter, fair. So there's that. But it all starts with the leadership in an organization. So if you've got leaders who are committed to being intentional about their workplace culture, then they can begin with themselves, with their leadership team, and then think about what are the engagement strategies that they want to use throughout The organization to spread the intentionality of the workplace culture that they they want to have in the organization. But if that, if they're not demonstrating it, if they're not role modeling it, then they're going to get what they role model. Because what we do speak so much louder than what we say.

Blake Hunsley 44:18
Tova, our CEO here, is a big fan of saying the fish stinks from the head, which is her, which is her somewhat pithy way of saying that in few words, yes, but it's exactly that is that it's got to come from the top down. It has to be actively modeled every day,

Kathy Jourdain 44:30
openly, right? And it is possible, but it will take, especially if there are challenges in the workplace. It'll take some time, because people won't believe it right away.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 44:43
I'm wondering if, on that line when you talked about the starts at the leadership and I totally agree, if leaders haven't, haven't bought in, but I'm wondering if you're seeing something that I'm seeing like you know, many years ago, it was always very difficult for the small. Possible to mid size businesses to get training, you know, in development, you know, lack of funds, right? It wasn't always seen as a priority, right? Big organizations trained all the people had like in most cases, have their own training and development department. Imagine, right? Whereas nowadays, I'm really seeing the small and midsize businesses stepping up to some of these conversations and having the dialog about, what can we do about workplace culture, whether it's retention, whatever the things are, because they're realizing that they need to retain their staff and it is difficult to recruit people. So how do we make our workplace better and more inclusive? And I'm finding that's happening a lot, and I was a bit blown away by that, by the number of like small organizations that we're doing that, versus, like, larger or larger organizations that are doing it, but then it can't get implemented, right? Because department X does it, and they're all excited about it, but up here saying, Yeah, that's not going to be our culture here, right? Yeah. I mean,

Kathy Jourdain 46:15
certainly in large organizations, we'll see that departmentally, depending on who's leading a department, right? So you can have pockets inside of an organization that operate differently. And I think for smaller and medium sized organizations, information and training is so accessible now, yes, some of it's free, some of it's all online, self paced, and when we offer a whole range of that, from free resources to online and all of that. So I think that anyone who has a commitment to the workplace, because even as a leader in a small or medium sized organization, what happens in that environment is my responsibility as a leader, and am I going to enjoy going to work if the morale is low, not so much. So there's an incentive, I think, a personal incentive, as well as a leadership incentive, to want to create an environment where people want to show up, to say nothing

Blake Hunsley 47:13
of the fact that a lot of those small and medium sized enterprises may not be able to pay at the scale that the large ones can, right? So you have to compensate by having a work culture that does make you feel like showing up to work every day.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod 47:24
Yeah, which is, which is why you know, and I always you know. And of course, we're an NGO, not for profit, reachability that you see people working in these organizations, and they're not the top paid, right individuals, like compared to corporate counterparts there. Some of them are working on, you know, year to year contracts based on on funding, okay? But they're there because they're passionate about the work that they do. They're there because they totally believe in the values of the organization. And there's things in the organization, like at reachability that offer some flexibility, right? Whatever that you know, you can't always put a price tag.

Kathy Jourdain 48:09
Yeah? So, and that's what I've also heard in the people that I've talked to about workplace environments.

Blake Hunsley 48:16
Nice, yeah, if somebody out there is listening to this and thinking, Oh my I really need Kathy's expertise at my workplace, because the vibes are terrible, and I really need help with AI adoption and all kinds of other things and flexible work. Where is the best place they can reach out to you? How can people find you?

Speaker 2 48:32
So my email address is Kathy with a K at worldview intelligence.com but also we have a website called worldviewprograms.com which also has contact information and describes a range of the different offerings that we have, and I'm on LinkedIn and so like, please connect with me there, because we are often doing stuff on workplace culture world and world views there.

Blake Hunsley 48:58
You have lots of video content on your website as well. I would highly recommend people check that. Thank you very kindly. Brought us your books, so I'm going to plug your books as well. We have building trust and relationship at the speed of change, which sounds like the speed that you need to build that. And we have embracing the stranger in me, a journey to open heartedness. So you can check both of those out. Kathy, thank you very much for bringing those to us. This was fascinating. Thank you. So today, oh my goodness, please reach out every time you do research and find out something new and exciting, because we're gonna want to have you back on future episodes. Shelly, I'm not going to make you do the outro today, since I just had to listen to myself poking fun at you on the last episode to make you do it, I apologize. It's very mean of me. I'll handle that today. So thank you for listening to within our reach. Season Two of our podcast is made possible thanks to the support of the Province of Nova Scotia and the support for Culture Program. If you have feedback on an episode, an idea for future episode topics, or if you're interested in appearing as a guest, write to us at withinourreach@reachability.org, thank you both very much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai