Episode 3
3. Avoid the Mundane, Quieten your Cleverness, and Practice Hosting as a Potent Form of Leadership | D.K.
How effectively can you bring out the best in a group of people?
We can often get trapped into thinking that it’s our role to be the ‘hero’ for a group, where it’s likely that you can be way more effective by being the ‘host’. This episode will help you get out of your own way so you can unlock the potential that exists in those you lead.
Today I’m talking with creative producer and speaker coach D.K. about:
- Why avoiding the mundane and embracing creativity is essential for effective leadership
- How the role of a pioneer involves venturing into unexplored territory and creating space for others to follow…
- …and the role of a host involves facilitating meaningful experiences that fully involves others
- Why empathy, voice, and participation are essential elements in group settings
- The power of grace in communication and the significance of quieting one's cleverness
- The power of simply sitting and being together
You can find D.K. at https://justadandak.com/
Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/
Subscribe to my newsletter (https://www.digbyscott.com/thoughts#subscribe)
Follow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/
Transcript
DK, welcome to the show.
DK (:It's great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity, man.
Digby (:I love it. I love it that we, we are on the other side of the world from each other. And it does feel like we pick up where we left off, even though we don't speak that often. And, a question I want to lead off with on your website, there's this lovely statement. You're, you're drawing a line in the sand, I reckon. And it says, I don't do mundane. I don't do mundane. And.
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:It just grabbed my attention. I shall reckon was by design and I'm, I'm wondering where does that come from?
DK (:It is a very recent thing, as in literally in the last few months. And without going into too deep of the story, especially as someone asked me to do something mundane. And it was quite a shock because I didn't expect that because I was doing something different, I thought, with them. And then they said, we'd like something mundane. And I couldn't help but be audacious or arrogant.
them on which one and just make that statement of, I don't do mundane. And it felt cheeky when I said it out loud, but equally I thought, hmm, there's something there that I want to keep. Maybe it's an essence, maybe it's a brand thing. Maybe it's me just being like I say, Odessa slash arrogant, but I was like, nah, I don't do mundane. Hence why it's now on my website.
Digby (:You know, it sounds like it was almost you didn't pre think that right. It came up from somewhere deeper. And and I wonder, I wonder what it was that got triggered there for you, because I, you know, I've known you a little while and I would agree with that statement. And I reckon the way you choose to be and live is definitely not mundane. And I've known you probably a decade. And so it's interesting you find.
DK (:Mm -hmm.
DK (:Hmm.
Digby (:It was more of a recent realization for you. I'm wondering, I'm wondering about what shapes the the decay that goes, that's not me. And whether it was something that was a realization you were ready for that or was it something that's always been there that you've just kind of consciously thought of? What do you reckon that's coming from in terms of from a history point of view or a shaping point of view?
DK (:Mmm.
DK (:It's a good one, right? Because we can go really deep into this, make it a therapy session. You know, when I was a kid, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, but I suppose you're right in terms of it was a natural reaction, but it's also many or two words are spoken in jest, but also many or two words are spoken when your back's against the wall. And it was one of those negative experiences that I look back at and already am looking back at, even though it still smarts a little bit. As no, that was a gift.
Digby (:Let's do that. Well, we could go there.
DK (:Someone really put me in a position I weren't happy about and I reacted accordingly, hence the statement and hence what I'm now kind of trying to figure out, which is my next steps. And then looking backwards a little bit further, which goes to your question. yeah, I don't really do a lot of mundane things. So in my career, if we can kind of put an inverted commas around it, the career, the portfolio career.
Digby (:Mm -hmm.
DK (:that I think we grownups talk about, which is basically you've done a lot of different things. That's what portfolio career means. It's like, I can't peg you down. But my first grownup career was youth work. Our leisure development in councils, so local government. But then I became, after the first number of years, a chief executive in a council in Somerset when I lived in England, took a liking to me. And I was working a lot with young people and found I could do that, which it is a trick to do.
Digby (:Hmm.
DK (:work with young people in a good way. And made a job for me. They wrote, it was very Italian style. They wrote like a title on a piece of paper and turned it around and slid her over the desk towards me. It's a beautiful, fun little story. And it just said corporate youth officer. And I was dumb and I was like, I don't know what that means. And he was like, would you like to have a go at your JD? And he was offering me a job, you know, and to go down into the chief executive department and have this new job that he was trying to craft for me. Cause he saw promise him.
He saw I was a bit bold and bucking against the trend, but he liked that. And that's something about leadership there, where you create space for other people to shine. And I didn't realize that at the time, right? And fast forward to now where I am now, when I think about don't do mundane, it's like, right, maturity gives you the permission to make those bold statements about yourselves, but also...
when you look back at your through lines going back in my career. And after that, I started a company which totally failed and a second company which did quite well around emerging technologies and then working with leaders in that space, then business designer, then doing event design and then speaker coaching and there's through lines to all of it. And mundanity is not one. I've always tried to look at the blank or white space, I think we call it. Yeah, white space. What's not being done?
less play in that arena or the blank sheet of paper I delight in, whereas other people, I don't like that. And I found myself constantly being in those spaces of delight and surprise and being comfortable with that versus where I look around most people and they like tradition. They like being them before. They like systems and structures. I don't mind them at all. But if we are trying to do something different, then we have to do things differently.
Digby (:Mm -hmm.
DK (:Boom, there we go. And that's where creativity comes in, right? If you want to call it by another word, kind of a softer word, it's creativity.
Digby (:Yeah. If there was the opposite of mundane, it's probably creativity. And I think you just coined the phrase mundane itty. So let's own that. All right. Coined it right here. I love that. I love that. And I think this question, what's not being done? It's an unusual question, right? What's the stuff that's not being done as opposed to looking around at all the stuff that is being done? And I let's go there, right? Because I think you and I both look at the world and we go.
DK (:Mm.
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:There's a lot of stuff being done right now. There's a lot of stuff being done. And one of the questions we explored before we came online was what does the world need? And the other question was, what does the world not need right now? And there's a lot of stuff that's being done that might not be needed to be done. What's your take on that?
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:Mmm.
o I started a company back in: rmation super highway, right?: Digby (:Back in the day.
DK (:edit boards and all these things that you could join communities. That was massive. But what it gave you was, and this leads to your question and some kind of answer to it, was context. Because you were connecting with other people, whether it be around the world and you never met them before. And it was weird to say that, is I have friends who I've never met before. Nowadays, we call them engaged citizens or whatever, or people in my follower list, right?
into photography back in like:2001, but a specific type of photography with old Russian cameras called Lomo cameras, Lomography. And you could buy them on eBay for like 40 pound and they were made in Ukraine. And they were small little beautiful cameras with beautiful lens, glass lenses. And they create like burned out shots in terms of color and stuff. And you can do cross processing with them. And in other words, put a slide film in and then get it. And it just blows out the color in a beautiful way, all the greens and the cyans.
ur own profile. Remember it's: Digby (:You really are a geek on this. It's awesome.
DK (:into something called albums. And then you also had a diary, which is like a blog on there. But then you could follow people and like people and you could leave people messages on their photos. That's not weird, obviously, now describing it. But back in 2001, that was radical. That was cool. So now it's connecting to people globally on this hobby that I had. Remember hobbies? We don't talk about hobbies anymore, but hobbies are things you like to do with no hustle involved.
Digby (:Yeah.
DK (:So that's what I mean about context is we've kind of bastardized all these kind of ideas of just connecting and belonging with stuff like hustling and engagement and, you know, I've got to get my followers up and all those other things. So that's content versus context.
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:That's so helpful. You know, where my mind goes is there's something about the word meaning to, you know, when you talk about a hobby and regardless of whether the technology or the internet was the world where it was there. There's this conviction, there's this passion, there's this curiosity that's there around this thing called Loma Loma ,ography and the. It.
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:It was, that was the kind of the grounding force for you. Like that was the things like it's about this for me. And if there's other people are into it too, very cool. And let's make some connections. Whereas what I'm hearing you say is, I don't know, Insta or any of those stuff. Like, so where's the underlying meaning and depth that is the kind of the original wellspring rather than just go to the content first. Right. That's what I'm, it's kind of flipped itself.
DK (:Indeed, and the bigger companies have really turned onto this, you know, the Metas slash Facebooks of this world, which now owns Insta and all these other platforms. A few years ago, you could walk into that company easily as an engagement officer or engagement engineer if you had a PhD or a master's in addiction. And there was a reason why they were finding people with...
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:Hmm.
DK (:understanding how to create algorithms slash visual UI UX experiences to hit the dopamine trail is because that leads to kind of addiction. It's an addictive thing. How do we get our kind of parasympathetic and kind of sympathetic responses go in and our psychological needs met from just scrolling that scroll, but getting those hits of the likes and stuff. And it's weird because I started in that space trying to get people online.
Digby (:Hmm.
DK (:You know, 2006 right through to 2011, we basically were a training company where we built capability and capacity within organizations and we were teaching them how to use the web. That's what we went around and did workshops in how to sign up to MySpace, how to blog on Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal and all these other places. And we were teaching people how to do that. And now I'm kind of going, have I created a monster here, getting people addicted.
Digby (:Wow.
Digby (:You you are I was saying, I bet you're not doing that now, right? You know, the image I get right is something like the first explorers in a new land, right? It's not the ones who hear about the land from the first explore. You're not one of them. You are. It feels like you're one of the ones who gets off the first boat and you're like, right, what's here? And, you know, so this we're talking about pioneering spirits in this podcast, right? And and it.
DK (:No.
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:feels like you're at the Vanguard you were back in the day with the web. And, you know, let's get online. There's so much promise here. What's that like being in that space? Like, what is it? What is it like to be one of the very first? I don't know if that's an easy question, but I'm curious. Like, what's it like to go where stuff isn't being done? It's kind of like the vacuum, right? Terra Nullis.
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:Again, if you like being, if you like, let's rephrase that. If you're comfortable with being uncomfortable, if you don't mind not knowing, if you relish in what you're describing, which for most people, they're not comfortable being in that space. Again, back to the white piece of paper. Most people want some lines on it.
You know, most people want to know what the next step is. And it's OK. And again, with maturity, I'm OK not knowing now in a professional context, definitely. But here's the I think the big key thing that I've taken away when looking back at that time is I was lucky enough to have, I suppose, inbuilt skilled, learned skills around translation. It's no good being the first.
in anything if you can't translate it back to others to encourage them. So there's a great talk online, which I use now in my master classes, because now I'm doing master classes around speaking, public speaking and storytelling. But there's a talk I use from Derek Sivers and how to start a movement. Most people know this little talk because it's brilliant, because it's three minutes long. It's an old Ted Talks old being I think it's like 12 years old now, right?
Digby (:Yeah. Yep.
DK (:but it's the idea of he's got a video of someone dancing on the side of a hill. And we're all focusing on that kind of crazy dude just dancing by himself. And he uses that as a bigger metaphor of, no, just watch for a minute because there are people that join him. And then the more they join him, the more safe it becomes to join him. And you end up watching this video and there's loads of people on the side of a hill dancing in crowds. And that wouldn't have started without that bold person being.
the crazy one going first, which is your, like, what's it like being first? The most interesting thing about that talk is he likes, it's not that person dancing that's crucial. It's the first followers that are important to create the movement. But you've got to be that translator, right? You've got to be good enough to go, this space is safe. I'm first, so it's okay. You don't have to break the bubble.
Digby (:Yeah.
DK (:I'm here so you can leave whenever you like, because I'm already spearheading or beachheading if you want to use that language. I know other organizations do. And that's when we get into innovation models, which I know you're aware of. Someone's got to try first, but it's got to be safe. It's got to be within constraints. And we talked just before we started this about constraints and kind of guardrails, if you like. There are some, when you're going first, you still need to have some...
semblance of safety around that. You've got to look backwards to go forwards and all these other ideas. You've got to go, okay, I'm putting myself out there first, but I'm doing it with consideration of my own wellbeing and all other things. If you want to extend the analogy of being pioneering spirits and being on the first land in a big commerce. But again, you've got to translate back very quickly. It's like don't go down that route or this is really good because of this, this, this and this. And then you've got to...
Digby (:Mm -hmm.
Digby (:-huh.
DK (:the next bit you've got to, I suppose, exemplify or make it easier for that person to step in there with you. That could be a wrong language. That could be around exemplifying it through, look, look, I'm doing it and it's fine and it's safe here.
Digby (:Yes.
Digby (:I think I think you're onto really I'm just reflecting on my own experience, too. I think I've got to a stage in life where I've had enough scars and wounds and burns from going first, but not really considering that I need to look after myself. So I'm doing that because, hey, I'll be right on bomb proof, you know. And then as we get older, we realize we're not. But secondly, I love that second point about making it.
DK (:Mmm.
DK (:Mmm.
DK (:Yeah.
Digby (:easy for others to join you. And I've never really until recently thought about that as my role, that there's this hang on, hang on. I've always thought recently, I mean, the last few years, I've been, you know, I need to bring people with me, have the movement. And I've got to thank Derek's talk for that, because, you know, that's, that was definitely a springboard for me. But it was kind of more about the thrill of being the pioneer. Right. It was the
DK (:that's interesting. Mmm.
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:My partner says to me, we walk around Wellington and, you know, and I'll look at a interesting, there's a lot of interesting buildings and doorways and alleyways and I'll go, wonder what's down there? And she'll just laugh at me. We had this little saying, Digby always says, what's up those stairs? And it's kind of like, I want to go and find that. And I'm kind of driven to go and see what's there, but I'm not really thinking about how do I make people easy for people to follow me?
DK (:Hehehehehe
Digby (:And I think that's really critical.
DK (:Braystead.
And I said that was interesting because I see you very much as someone who has really considered the act of creating space so people can step into that with your change makers programs and your other things that you do. It seems to me, as someone who's contributed to those sessions and been lucky enough to be involved on the peripheral, seems to me you're deeply intentional about that, creating space.
and holding space, and those are often too often used words now, but physical space, metaphorical space, you know, kind of emotional space as well. You do that so well and you create that sense of belonging if we can use those words again. So being a pioneer, I suppose, in this context is, yeah, you've also got to embody safety and you've got to exemplify an opportunity for others to then...
join you but not, and this is where risk profiles come in, I suppose, around here, which is like how risky it is for someone else to join you up those stairs or down those alleys. In other words, are they gonna follow 10 paces behind or one pace behind?
Digby (:Yeah, that's it. You know, you're getting me thinking we are both, I think, very into an intentional about what I call facilitative leadership. It's the the leadership piece is the moving forward into the white space, the blank page. But the facilitative piece is that we're it's about creating the space for others to be and to grow and to connect and all of that. And I reckon we want to double down on that for a moment, right? Because.
There's something for me about the pioneering piece feels very individual, as in this is about me. And I think it's actually about me discovering me. Like, what am I capable of? Right. And I'm, I'm, I, I yearn for that. You've said a couple of times, most people don't like to go there. And one of the big things for me in my work is about, well, let's find out how we can help you go there because there's a world of discovery.
out there for you if you want it. And I feel like that's there for me yet. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I'm a big believer in that we have too much hero leadership and not enough host leadership at the moment. And the hero is the let's go follow me. I know where we're going. Whereas the host leadership is I'm going to create the space. I'm going to host some experience with you where we all get to.
DK (:Mm.
Digby (:make sense of this and we all get to be the crazy dancing people on the hill. Right. And I see you, you know, you were the former curator of Tedx Wellington for a long time and the we've had some conversations about the design of that. When you think about hosting, you know, in your role as a host, what? How do you think about that?
DK (:I really like that language, hero versus host, because it's new for me. And definitely I can draw a line back to what you just mentioned about TEDx and how do we go about designing and becoming intentionally hosts? I suppose now that I have that language, it's new, but I was always coming from a human -centered design approach with the TEDx experiences. And for context, for new listeners, TEDx, TED is the big.
Big Ted, as we call it, is the big event that the TEDx program is that you can apply for a license and you can run a TED style conference in your local region and you have a license for it, but you got to do it by making no money, so it's all voluntary. So you can't make money as the licensee and I was the licensee slash curator slash speaker coach for it for nearly a decade long in the capital city of Wellington, Europe, in New Zealand. So, but we became known as someone who always tried.
push the envelope. If you're ever bored, type in TEDx and rules and check out the amount of rules and governance around, and it's fair enough, the TED puts on the licensees. If you're gonna run an event under the TED brand, you have to adhere to all these rules and it works, right? Because it keeps that quality up and it keeps the TED brand out of the headlines and sometimes, you know, they fall into it, but most of the times they don't, and it's brilliant. It's a brilliant program.
And I also meant that the TEDx's licensees as well for a number of years, because Ted got to trust me because of the things that we did. You're right, it was very host because it was a design -centered approach or human -centered approach. And I was always thinking about, and I think I've already used the words, how do you surprise and delight an audience? How do you create space for them to digest the TEDx experience? Now,
For anybody who's been to a TEDx experience, you know that thematically it has usually general themes, because under the TEDx rules, you can't have a specific theme around a specific topic, such as you can't have a theme around education or fishing. Those are too specific. You have these general themes like connecting hearts and minds. That was one of ours. Trust was one of ours as well. Change was one of ours. Really broad themes.
DK (:Because of that then you're going and you're listening to random talks. You might have someone talking about the plight of penguins in Wellington. We had one of those. Right through to how to design your own funeral. We had one of those. Right, don't sit very well on an agenda and normal conference. So you have to then consider, okay, people are coming to this and they're getting hit by all these different language sets and these different topics. So you have to create a sense of,
of connectiveness through all that. And the way, there we go. Now we did that through the design of the delegate experience, which most people, and I found out later on when I become an event producer and a creative producer where I create craft delicious learning experiences for other people. And I've worked with lots of New Zealand government organizations and bigger organizations outside New Zealand and brands as well, where I crafted these events for them.
Digby (:Yes, there's got to have a red thread, right? Running through it. Yeah.
DK (:is most people don't come through the delegate experience lens. They don't start there. They do the inverse, which is go, we got these speakers and we need to find a venue. Now, from an event producer perspective, that's the logistics. That's the kind of meat and bones, that's fair enough. But when you come through the delegate eyes, you then become a host. Coming back to your language rather than a hero, because if you're a host, what you're trying to do is make...
Digby (:Yes.
DK (:the experience for the people attending, whatever it is that you're crafting, best for them. So we used to design all what's called in marketing touch points. What are the touch points for every experience of TEDx for the delegate? And most people think for an event or any experience, the first touch point is when they arrive. No, it's the first time they have that email or see the website or get that boom. So we think about,
Digby (:100%. It reminds me. Yeah, just to jump in on that one, Priya Parker, who wrote the Art of Gathering, and I said to someone today, actually, in a conversation that, you know, we were talking about her work and the event starts when people become aware of it. That's your first touch point, right?
DK (:that please
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
DK (:There we go.
Now, the end touch point as well is when you send a final email that says the videos are now live after it. So think about Buckends now. That's a lot of time in between. And think about a nice, I suppose, curve, bell curve. That's the best way to think about it. You know, you.
you kind of have a graduation up to then the experience starts itself. So then when you're turning up or in theater terms, darling, is when we call it crossing the threshold, which is a lovely term also used in the hero's journey is when someone crosses into a new space where they got to deal with new consequences and stuff. But in a theater terms, you can apply it to when you went to an old school theater.
Digby (:Yes.
DK (:It was very different, right? You would walk in, the lights were different. It was usually marble or granite stone with a sweeping staircase and the lights felt different and everything felt velvety. And you'd go in big, and there was a reason for that, because they were trying to design a space where you suspend your belief of realism. Because you were sat then in a stage experience where you could look and you had to imagine the world that was being created for you in a theater, because you could.
depending on where you sit, you could kind of glance in the wings and see the next person waiting to come on and boom, your reality was suspend, gone, right? Reality was broken, sorry. But what they're trying to do in that experience is design the idea of you're crossing into a different world here. And I think...
Digby (:And what does that do when you when you cross into a different world? What's the what's the intent behind that for the for the person having the experience?
DK (:Again, if you think about now the modern society, we bring so much of ourselves, sorry, so much of the world to an experience before we even start. So what does it do? You're trying to create a space where you kind of create boundaries of experiences. So for example, when I do my master classes, I always do some priming experiences before, priming activities before we start with the content. What I'm trying to do there is break you away from...
You just traveled in on a bus or a car or whatever, and you've already done like half of these emails on your phone and you were catching up. And you're already thinking about when you get out of here, you got to send that report off, but you got to make sure you text that person to make sure blah, blah, blah. You're always battling with life encroaching on the experience that you're creating. So as event creators, we got to, we got to intentionally and with deep design and heartfelt design, break that cycle.
Digby (:That's that's OK. You know where my mind's going is a lot of people listening to this won't identify as a primary role as an experienced designer. Yet they were probably some sort of maybe they're in a leadership role or management role or the need to as part of some of their job, bring people together for whatever purpose. Right. What advice would you.
DK (:a little bit.
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:give or tips or ideas that from that large scale thing like a TEDx event that could be applied in a meeting at work. Right. And what's transferable into that kind of world do you reckon?
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:So I'm going to use an often used word now, which is empathy. You know, consider the groups that you're gathering, all the multiple experiences that they're having in their day and being empathetic about that. And then be considerate around being specific about what they're doing there. And that could be as simple as making sure that everybody's arriving, knowing why they're arriving, being considerate that make sure that meeting.
slash gathering, whatever you're doing, can't be replicated as an email. Because let's be honest, most meetings we go to, like, it should have been an email, man. I'm just listening and not being contributed. So unless I'm participating, this is a reason to be in that room. Again, being considerate and empathetic to people's time, their emotional journey towards that, try to build into my highs and lows, try to create some participation elements that they can contribute.
Digby (:Yeah, that's right. Yep.
DK (:have voice and by having voice, a lot of, especially engagement events, which I've done over the past, people talk about, we need stakeholder engagement events, for example, I've run many of those for organizations. And I always think having voices, sitting around a table, just having a chat and speaking. And I always challenge people, so what if someone's nonverbal? You know, because some people, I don't mean literally can't speak, but some people can't, of course.
But I mean just non -verbal and they're not confident enough to speak and have voice. There's other ways they can still contribute. And what's the inverse of that as well? What if you have a loud Henry? And let's be honest, it's usually a pale, male and stale. Someone on the table that is loud, and I mean loud in terms of volume, I just think they hold space too much. Again, do you have the facilitating chops to go, thank you, Henry, really appreciate your contributions, but there's seven other people around the table. I don't really wanna create space for them. And I know you're...
Digby (:Hehehehehe
DK (:You just, you know, you're so enthusiastic. We've got your conversion and please keep them coming. Maybe write them down so we can create space for other people to have voice here. And again, if it's not voice, maybe, and some of the stuff I do is physical, right? So where do you stand? One of my favorite, and I'm giving away some really cool secrets here, which I don't mind because I stole it from someone I'm sure, or I've seen it somewhere else. One of my favorite activities to do in a stakeholder engagement event or some kind of experience is draw a line with some tape.
down the middle of a room and put on one side, yes, one side, no, just as a sheet of paper, right? And then you say to the participants, right, we're gonna do an exercise on literally where do you stand on these topics or statements, right? And you put statements up and you can physically stand if you agree or say yes, or don't agree, say no, and you move between the polar opposites, right? And you start nice, you say, you know, cats are better than dogs.
Digby (:Love it.
DK (:and straight away you all get a split in the audience and they stand, yes cats are better than dogs, no. And then you throw in some cool stuff like look here's a joker card, you can only stand on the line once and there's eight statements coming up that's going to challenge you and your industry. Right and then you throw up a statement that's really polar opposite. But for then the audience can see where everybody's at and it's not about being challenging and that but you're not trying to create argument or division.
Digby (:Let's go.
DK (:But if then what's following our speakers relating to the topics that have been thrown up, they know where the audience is at on those things and they can speak to it. And I did that recently with a New Zealand government organization before I emigrated back. And that really helped the speakers to position in terms of language and story and everything else to go on into the event because they knew where everybody was at.
Digby (:So there's a with a hero mindset. It's really about me projecting my stuff with a host mindset. It's about involving and responding to the stuff that's in the room. And. Yeah, and and that feels like I think for many people, quite a challenge, right? Because it's like, but isn't my value about what I share and what I know and isn't that my job as a leader? You know, and what I'm hearing?
DK (:Beautifully summarized, yes.
DK (:Hmm? Hmm.
Digby (:from you and I, I did, there's something very deep here about how do we get out of our own way, right? To, to enable the higher reason for us coming together, right? It's not about broadcasts. It's about connection, right? And I love the way you talk about not just that exercise, but the principles behind it, right? You know, as I was running a workshop today, it was all about leadership and change. And there's a bunch of leaders in the room.
DK (:Ooh, okay.
DK (:Mmm.
DK (:Hmm.
Digby (:And I thought, I'm going to try and model a bit of this stuff. And we were talking about the idea of what, what, what's eternal? Like what are in, in all change, this stuff that doesn't change, what, what do people always need? And the common thing that came back was the need to belong, the need to feel seen and to be part of something and be seen to be part of something. And I'm going to model that. So I just, most of the sessions about four hour session.
All I was doing was asking the questions, getting the talk with each other, and then having a conversation with the group about what they were talking about and acknowledging it and maybe challenging it occasionally and exploring it with them. But it wasn't necessary about me saying, here's what you need to do. And yeah, go.
DK (:Sorry to cut across, can I ask you a question about that?
Is the role in leadership generally then and in these leadership sessions that you create, would you say it's more about revealing what's already there and giving, again, coming back to space, giving us space for comfortability about going, I kind of know this stuff, I'm just not doing it.
Digby (:Yep.
Yeah, 100%. There's a, I did some facilitation training years and years ago by with a lady who became a good friend. She, she unfortunately died. Her name was Roberta Meade in Perth. And this is saying that she had, which is the wisdom of the world is in the room. In fact, I used that saying today, we started the session with a conversation about.
What's our experience of going around the sun a few times, meaning experience of life taught us about change? I had two questions. I said, one is, what have you learned from when you've initiated change yourself in your life? What have you learned about the process of change? What helps you navigate it, et cetera? And what have you learned when it's been initiated by someone else? It's kind of like you're being done to, if you like. And we had we did some reflection on that and then we had some.
small group conversation. And that took us half an hour or so or more, maybe. And out of that came the vast majority of the answers for what we need to do when we're leading through change. And I said the wisdom in the world is in the room, right? They're like, yeah. So revealing the other word I would use is reminding. And I think I think for leaders and leadership is often about that. It's about reminding people of
DK (:Mmm.
Digby (:what's in their toolkit, what's in their experience bag. And you said it before, it's like it's shining a light on someone and reminding them that, hey, you've got this, you know, was it Marianne Williamson? You know, remember you've got brilliance and paraphrasing that, but it's, I think, what if we can just do that more, right? And less of the need to be the hero out the front, right? Which is interesting because when we're talking about pioneering spirits,
DK (:Hmm. Hmm.
Digby (:It feels like there's a polarity. It feels like there's a polarity between the drive to move forward and the inner spirit you have for that. And that's what a change maker, I think, needs, right? That sense of conviction that this stuff not being done, to use your words, that needs to be done. Yet I also need to be the person who creates the space for others to make sense. And I love your word translator.
DK (:Hmm?
DK (:Mm -hmm.
Sure, yeah.
DK (:Hmm.
Digby (:You know, in fact, I want to look right back to you, something you didn't mention about Derek's talk. Right. Sidebar, Derek also lives in Welly and something cool about this, like there's a invisible trio here. Hey, Derek, if you're listening that that but his role is often underplayed in that talk. Right. So when we think about that talk and it's a pretty well watched talk.
DK (:Mm -hmm.
DK (:Mm -hmm.
Digby (:We think about the crazy dancing on the hill as the hero in that talk. Yet. It's only made possible by Derek being standing on the Ted stage, being the translator of the ideas in that talk without him there, it would have been an abstract idea, or if that of some hippie people dancing on a hill at a concert. And he's being the translator, but not being the spotlight.
DK (:So there's something really important you touched on there, which is the idea of the unseen pioneer or the unseen pioneering elements slash skills, whatever. And I would group translation definitely in translating back. That's often what you don't see in the pioneering effort is you have to translate back. There's also what you just touched on with Derek. He's a narrator.
He's a narrator and an analogous kind of narrator there because what he's doing is he's showing a video, he's diverting attention away from him to the video and he's narrating over the top of it and it's beautiful. And I show that video in my master classes, in my storytelling master classes because I wanna give people an example of if I'm not comfortable being the one seen speaking but I have a story to tell.
Here's another way you could do it. Throw something up, the attention is on that, you narrate, you extract the metaphor from it and on learning, boom, job done. That's what he's done there, right? So a storytelling model, but narration is important. And then there's also something there, another skill which I'd love to highlight, which is the idea of the curator. He's curated a piece of content.
Digby (:Hmm.
DK (:And he's also curated a metaphor that goes over the top of it. And if we come back to that translation piece, you kind of got the, and I'm thinking on the fly there, a triangle of narrating, translating and curating. And let's TM that right here, right now as a Digby DK thing under the TM. And we're going to go off and do a training program all around that. And that, and we're going to call it the Pioneering Framework.
Digby (:There you go, beautiful alliteration, mate.
Totally get it down now. Love it. Love it. Yeah.
Hahaha.
Digby (:Beautiful. This is co -creation on the fly.
DK (:Boom, see, this is how things happen. But some, exactly, but what I see that leads to those three things, what I have seen that embodies those three things was about 20 years ago, I was lucky enough to work in the educational space. I've done a lot of those social media trainings for teachers because they were at the forefront of the youth.
development and youth intersection. And yeah, I was going into schools and teaching them how to use the web. This is back when mobile phones didn't have it, right? So you had to use interfaces like a computer, for example. And I saw a lot of pedagogical language or heard a lot of pedagogical language during that time.
And what I delighted in was this idea of, and it comes back to you, but in different words, and you've already positioned it, but I'm gonna use different words, is that instead of being the sage on the stage, you become the guide on the side, which is your hero versus host metaphor as well. And what I like there is that different industries have different language sets that actually provide reinforcement.
Digby (:Yeah. Yeah. Yes. 100%.
DK (:across all these industries and I'm sure the government sector has different ones and the engineering sectors have similar ones as well. But we're moving away from, I suppose, a top down led idea that someone has all the questions and they distribute that out to, hey, I have the skills to curate, to narrate, to translate. And I've been there to the top and back, but I'm going to be the guide on the side to see if you want to go there.
Digby (:Yes.
DK (:with me versus I'm on the top, I got a flag, come on up, the weather's lovely, you know, and just stand there and that's it, that's all you do, you just say, come on, you invite versus you go back down into the trenches and you see if you can activate, yeah. And it might not be your way up and it might be off to a different lands, but you've activated that and that's where I've become more and more interested in.
Digby (:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:And I'm curious about you mentioned a few times here, like people don't tend to like that pioneering blank space. And the word invitation is a powerful one. I come with me. So we're on a leader in organization and I'm thinking about translation, curation and narration and inviting people and come come along for the journey. Yet what do I need to understand about people who might not be as.
DK (:Mm -hmm.
DK (:Hmm.
Digby (:Pioneer at the moment as me. How do I how do I use the word empathy before to what what's the empathy I need that makes the invitation work or stick or resonate for me? Do you reckon?
DK (:Are we going to come back into like the soft skills, right? Which is horrible that they called soft because they're so hard to do. And it does a lot of people. It's matured into them because whether they have kids or whether they've been in tough situations, all those things breed empathy and compassion and consideration. And then you're more open and.
Digby (:huh. Yeah.
DK (:understanding that you can fall over at any time, so a bit more kind of forgiving and all these other things, right, through maturity. And then there are some people who are just born with it, right. But I think those are the elements to be, and I love that you've also coined the word, pioneer -y. We're going to put that under Digby Scott as well. Pioneer -y. So how do you...
Digby (:hahahahah
DK (:Yeah, body there for people. It's tough. I'm still figuring that shit out. I think I've got a natural affinity because of my hearing impairment that I lean in and I listen deeply. And a lot of people have said that to me, you're such a good listener. And only in the last five, six years have I talked about my hearing impairment. And I realized, shit, people think I'm a really good listener. All I'm doing is listening really hard. Now there's a difference.
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:It's pure selfish, right?
DK (:Yeah, there's a difference there. However, because I listen really hard and because of my hearing impairment, I see the whole person. And what I mean by that is I have to sometimes read lips. I have to sometimes read physical cues, body language, right? To get the general gits because I'm not quite catching from an oral perspective the words. And again, I've had to mature into that and I didn't realize that because I've had...
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:I love that.
DK (:you know, early day one I've had hearing impairments and I have speech therapy as well. So I'm very considerate about my words because I have to think about how to speak. Literally, I think about where my mouth is going even today, even though I had like speech therapy when I was like from four till about 10, something like that in my formative years, because I couldn't hear the words, so I couldn't speak the words. So I still today can't quite hear certain things and I have to think about how they go in my mouth.
Digby (:what what are some of the can you give us an example of what might be difficult to hear?
DK (:But that's a very end of...
DK (:like a K or an NG sound and that's why I try to make my K sound like because I maybe over -enthusiast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's mad, right? But I remember as a kid, I couldn't hear milk very well, so they came out as milch. It was a softer thing and that's just a hearing thing and a bit over the years, you can train yourself to hear these things.
Digby (:Which is fascinating given your name is DK.
Digby (:Huh.
Digby (:Yeah.
DK (:And I've changed, my hearing impairment has changed over the years anyway. Like the top end has dropped off. If any hearing specialists know, you know, you lose the top end anyway, but I've really got a deficit in the top end. So some people have higher pitched voices I really struggle with, but I also have really bad sensory hearing. So if I'm in a room with a lot of other sound, I'm really struggling to hear the person speaking to me, even though they're so close. I'm hearing everything. I can't zone in.
Digby (:Okay.
Digby (:Yeah, right.
DK (:But what's mad is I've got good bone conductive hearing, because you hear in two ways. I don't know if you know. You hear through the air, which is reverberation on your eardrum. That's what most people know, the sound waves. So you hear in your ear. And that's because I've had lots of operations on my eardrum and perforated eardrums and skin grafts and all these other things. I haven't got good air conductivity of sound, but I have good bone conductivity. That's how you hear through your bones.
which is really weird. Your whole head is like an amplifier for sound. Yeah, yeah. It is. So I got bone conductive headphones on, right? So they don't go in my ear, they go in front of my ear and I hear the sounds in my head through my bones versus through my ears like you've got, which is really trippy for some people to figure out. But I've got good bone conductive, but the problem is when there's lots of sound, it doesn't differentiate.
Digby (:Your whole head is a receptacle. Huh.
Digby (:Wow.
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:Yeah, it becomes white noise. Yeah.
DK (:It's just a lot of sounds, so I struggle. Which comes back to that listening and I've had a life of I don't know different because I listen very well, I can pick up little things and they're more considerate about communication and everything else and trying to be heard and hearing of other people.
Digby (:You know, your timing's impeccable. The blog I posted today was called fine tune your listening. And I talk about two types of listening. There's horizontal listening, which is listening over time or through time, as you would say, a melody of a song, right? You hear the first note, the second note, third note, that's horizontal listening, like music would be written through, you know, across the
the tablature or the bars, but then there's vertical listening, which is the different instruments that are being played at one time. So there might be the guitar or violin and the drums and the bass or whatever. And, and when you have a score of music, they're all vertically stacked, all of those different instruments and the music for them. And to me, it's an analogy for what are you listening for? And I often run a session in a workshop where I'll
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:Mm -hmm.
Digby (:play a piece of music that's got a number of instruments playing and I'll ask people to listen for how many instruments they can hear. And then we have a bit of a play with that. And they will say, well, what's this an analogy for? It's like, well, yeah, that question about when you're listening, beyond the words that you're saying and they're saying, what else are you listening for? And I suspect you've developed the skill of vertical listening.
in a way that perhaps is giving you a superpower because you can hear things like what's not being said. What's the meaning that's being made out of this conversation? You know, what's the tone? You know, it's those sorts of things that will often maybe intuit, but not consciously process. What do you think of that? Am I kind of, does that make sense to you in terms of your own lived experience of it as a listener with a superpower around this stuff?
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:Yeah, I'm smiling hard here for those who can't see me because it taps into the stuff that I'm doing around speaker coaching now and the framework that I've built around how I coach people. My coaching comes from the TEDx Wellington experience. We put our speakers through a five -week coaching experience before we put them on the red carpet. So I had a lot of many number of years and then I suddenly found, I could do this, taking my training.
Digby (:Hehehehe.
Digby (:you
DK (:modality into the speaker coach and arena and I know how to help people learn and all those other things be considered. But the framework, one of the three pillars and coming back to the three ones that we've had before, but the three one, if I just run through them quickly, it's grace, credibility and resonance. Resonance being what the people are feeling in terms of the audience, in terms of what stories and how you're telling the story. Resonance is what you leave in the audience with that feeling.
Digby (:It's nice.
DK (:Credibility is the stuff coming out of your mouth. Do you have the credibility to tell that story? And the story models, in which, because we've talked about story shapes before and stuff like that. But the grace, which is what you've just tapped on, is not what you're saying, it's how you were saying it. That's your whole physicality. That's your emotion in your face, what your hand's doing, where your feet going, and where the pauses, the pregnant pauses that you're doing, that's not what you're saying, that's how you were saying it, how you were leaning in.
Digby (:Yeah.
DK (:You know, there's a bit of NLP, some scary stuff in there where you can nod and try to get people. Yeah, which I feel a little bit dirty on at times. But but but generally, yeah, but generally the grace is is an interesting one because it's such a soft word. It is, but it's so hard to get right again. Soft versus hard, they're soft skills. But grace, when I look most of the coaching I do with leaders or my master classes.
Digby (:Neuro -linguistic programming, you mean there? Yeah. A lot of people do, I think.
Digby (:It's a beautiful word.
DK (:Grace is something they never thought about, for one, and it's the one they can accelerate quickly in as a learned skill. And by the way, okay, well, it could be as simple as, do you realize you do this with your hand? You know, every, correct. And most physical, when people stand and speak in a public arena, whether it be that they're presenting to a.
Digby (:How do you do that? How do you accelerate grace?
Digby (:So there's a feedback that has to be there, yeah?
DK (:department head or department, sorry, or they're speaking on a stage with a thousand people in an industry. So there's the two ends of the spectrum right there. They very rarely consider how they are speaking and how they look when they speak. And for most of them, they don't have the haptic feedback going on. What I mean by that, they don't feel how they're speaking. I mean, physically in their body, they just don't consider that their legs are doing that.
or their hands are doing this, or their face is doing this. And we've all seen nervous speakers who just smile all the way through. They're speaking, but they're talking about climate change and how terrible it is. And they're smiling, and there's this offset, you know, between, and from a storytelling perspective, you need to emote the emotion that the audience should be feeling, as well as telling them what you're telling them to create that feeling. But if you're not emoting the same thing,
Digby (:There's an incongruence, right? Hmm. Hmm.
DK (:which is that gracefulness. And if you're doing it at a pattern that's really, really fast and you're just breathing in when you can breathe and just speaking, speaking, and it's just the end, trying to get the end, because you're really, really nervous. Boom, that's a grace thing as well. And that comes back to it's just the breathing that's the problem versus the speaking that's the problem. And it's a body thing. Yeah. So once people get into their body, yeah, once people get into the body, you reintroduce a relationship with their body.
Digby (:Yeah, not just a words thing.
DK (:And that could be mindfulness, that could be breathing, that could be, hey, I'm gonna roll up some sticky tape and stick it on the bottom of your shoes because you're a walker and you don't realize it. And walking isn't bad on a stage, it's just the problem is when you walk, you look down where you're walking and the energy in your story is going to your shoes and you're not looking at the audience to see what they're telling you. Because it's a dialogue, it's not a monologue, right? They're telling you shit even though they're not speaking. So again, looking is a part of gracefulness.
Digby (:Ha ha ha!
Digby (:That's cool.
Yeah.
Digby (:It's it's it's who you who you're being speaks louder than what you say. It's that kind of thing, isn't it? Can I ask you, I want to come back to the idea of grace. What if we had a bit more grace in the world? If we if people just decided to focus on being a bit more graceful in the way that you describe it, what do you reckon that would do?
DK (:Mmm. Yeah.
DK (:Mmm. Mmm.
DK (:Mmm.
DK (:Can I answer a slightly different question? What do you reckon that would look like first? You know, because it's like,
Digby (:OK, well, let's go with that, because I'm imagining it's not all about. Yeah, we're not all dancing around on our toes, right? It's not about that. But what is it?
DK (:Yeah, because I just think I thought you were going to ask me what would that look like? This is what would it do? Right? No, no, because I stood away. I hadn't answered to that because I thought it was a great talk by a guy called Duke Stump. Great name. Duke Stump. He was like the head of marketing for a brand for Nike and Lululemon for a while. Right. So he knows words very well, but he came up and there's a talk online about quietening your cleverness.
Digby (:That's probably a better question.
Digby (:Cool name.
DK (:So when it comes to grace, I think they need to, and I'm the worst at this because I'm an auditor and I love to speak because that's my medium rather than right or do anything else is that quieten in your cleavage, the quiet more, just sit and be. And that's something I've been playing around with because in Wales, there's something called the Icedeadford. Now I just returned to Wales after 12 years being away. And there's the Icedeadford in my local town here. Now the Icedeadford, nobody would know outside of Wales, but Icedeadford is...
been going on for nearly a thousand years and it's a gathering every year of people around Welsh culture, Welsh song, dance, music, poetry, all these other things and it's a celebration of Welshness and it's called Eisteddfod but most people don't know that Eisteddfod is two words, right? Eistedd and Fod. Eistedd means to sit. Fod means to be. To sit and be. All right?
Sit and be together, right? Because the original intention I set for it was not just for Welsh people, it was bringing people from all over Europe. And it was the bardic traditions back then. Come, sing, drink, be merry, and just learn from each other. And it was a festival over a week, and it was just some prince having a bit of a jolly. But over time, it's become this Welshness celebration, which is great, don't get me wrong. But the idea of sitting, being, and quietenin, our cleverness to learn, right, from other people.
And there's something in there that I've been playing around with, which then the world needs more of is not division. If there was more grace in this world, we'd be like, huh, okay, I don't agree with that, but I hear you. And how can we work together to move forward? Because we realize that the world is full of disconnect, but we still have to exist within it. And I think that's what gracefulness sounds slash looks like. Maybe.
Digby (:Beautiful.
Digby (:Yeah.
Digby (:That feels like a powerful place for us to pause, I reckon. I have a final question. I'm really curious. What have you learned through our conversation?
DK (:Hmm.
DK (:That you ask great questions, but I always knew that. I knew that. That's not something I know. Well, again, coming at what we're going to TM, right? The curation, translation and narration. That there's frameworks out there that you can only discover through conversation. There's connections to ideas that can only really happen when you
Digby (:What's come up for you? What's new? What's new for you? But thank you.
Digby (:Run with that.
DK (:Quieten your cleveness, you listen to another and then you fold in your experience with another person's experience and there's language sets that overlap and connect and through that kind of new things are born, which is what creativity is all about. So when you take two things, you combine them and it's a new thing. That is what creativity is. Simple as is that combination of things. And even though you have a blank sheet of paper, you're never starting from nothing.
you bring to it something and you bring another thing to it that's never been there together. Boom, you have something new slash creative. And that's what we found here. In this conversation, we found something new, new language set. And yeah, it's fun, right?
Digby (:I love it.
I love it. And I've learned about what Eisteddfod means. Amongst a million other things that are all over my notes pages right now. DK, this has been fascinating. And inspiring. How can people learn more about you connect with you? What's the best way if they want to just follow your journey and be a part of what you're creating in the world? Well, how do they how do people connect with you?
DK (:Yeah, thanks for the opportunity for giving my blog a shout out slash website. You know, I'm on justadnk .com, but that's spelled out J -U -S -T -A -D -A -N -D -A -K.com, justadandak.com. And I still old school blog there. I'm on LinkedIn, but I don't use it. I used to be on Twitter, I'm off that now. So I kind of have retreated back into my own little space, which is my own site so I can own my own audience and write my own stuff without anybody saying you can't do that.
And that's the best place to reach out and see what I'm up to. And I've got a contact page, obviously, on there and you could just hit me up with anything. And yeah, there's all links to my box and links to my TEDx talk and some other talks on there, definitely.
Digby (:There's so much rich stuff there as this conversation is just evidence of that. We feel like we've scratched the surface, my friend. And so it's suspect there might be a part two coming up. But for now, thanks mate. And we will see you again soon.
DK (:Mm.
DK (:Thank you and thanks for doing this. And when I say doing this is again curating, being that translator and providing a space for people to narrate their own journeys and in that extracting wisdom and putting out in the world. So thank you for doing it.
Digby (:Thanks, my friend.
