Leading Through Complexity: Rewriting the Narrative of Work w/ Graham Abbey

What if the way we talk about work is limiting how we lead it?

In this episode of Relationships at Work, host Russel Lolacher sits down with Graham Abbey—Chief Executive of Farleigh Performance and Professor in Practice at the University of Bristol Business School—for a deep dive into complexity in today’s organizations. From metaphors that reveal our worldview to the mechanical mindset still dominating leadership, Graham challenges how we think about control, purpose, ambiguity, and personal growth.

Together, they explore:

• Why leadership isn’t about control—but about creating the conditions for emergence
• How metaphors and narratives quietly shape relationships at work
• Why organizations may be capping our growth instead of nurturing it
• The generational evolution in complexity thinking
• A practical acronym for building complexity capacity: H.A.R.D.

If you’ve ever felt like your workplace is running on outdated metaphors or you’re stuck solving the same problems over and over, this conversation will reframe how you see leadership—and what’s possible.

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Transcript

 Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Graham, Abby, and here is why he is awesome. Long pause. He is the chief executive of Farleigh Performance, creating the conditions for organizations to learn. He's the director of Executive Education and Lifelong Learning and professor in practice for the University of Bristol Business School.

He's also on the external advisory board for the NYU stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing. This is a community of business scholars, leaders, and thinkers who seek to advance the understanding, discovery, and pursuit of authentic purpose. He also is brainy. He pursues a doctorate or he carries a doctorate, not pursued.

It's established. A doctorate in Philosophy for organizational change. Welcome to the show, Graham.

Graham Abbey: Russel, thank you. What an intro.

Russel Lolacher: I am squeezing all my coffee energy out into the, that bio. I tell you, sir. It's a, but it's a lofty one. I wanted to give it. Its due.

Graham Abbey: Thank you. It's early morning for you, sir.

Russel Lolacher: It is, it is. Super interested in complexity. Super interested in... i, I talk to a lot of guests that talk about infinite goals, but then we need these finite goals to get to those infinite things, and I've got so much I wanna dig into.

But first, sir, you're not off the hook. I have to ask you the one question I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?

Graham Abbey: I mean the two come to mind, one's best, one's worse, and and they're both to do with bosses I think I notice when I think about that. And the contrast of these two bosses, one who was. I found controlling, bordering on a bully. Really. Yeah, quite nasty. I think actually now I think about it and but done in a very sophisticated way.

So not easy to call out or not easy to catch. And I, what I noticed there was how quickly I thought it was my, it was me. Somehow I'd, I lost confidence. I wasn't able to function I was in over my head, I'd taken on too big a job. All those kind of questions. So the self-doubt that comes in when you're not managed well and the complete reverse where someone who really gave me space, showed that they cared, allowed me to follow my own path, but not too far.

Really seemed to care about me, built relationship with me. And there I felt big. I grew. I felt, more than, rather than less than.

Russel Lolacher: I noticed you jumped in and said bosses. You didn't say leaders, which I thought was really interesting just from a phrasing standpoint. So outta curiosity, and I get that first one. So I'm gonna assume the negative one happened before the positive one because we seem to really understand what's good only after we've seen what's bad.

Graham Abbey: Yeah, that's true. And that is true. They were that they were definitely that way round. They were definitely that way around, and I think both have been quite influential in, the way in which I pursue my own leadership. And running a small consultancy and trying to create the conditions in which everybody can flourish.

And the degree to which I mean, tasks need to be managed, but people generally don't, right? We don't have a manager in our lives, as it were. Somebody telling us what to do or to keep us in check and so on. We're grown-assed adults mostly. I think that ability, I think the thing that I really learned about that was the importance of being able to create the conditions where people can feel they have agency.

Russel Lolacher: I think that's one of the bigger challenges all industries face right now is the confusion between what a manager is and what a leader is. Because we're very quick to label managers, leaders based on their title. Oh, they're a manager, they moved up, they're an executive this, the executive that. Chief this. They must be a leader. No, they're managing. There is a big difference but we're so quick to flip the framing of that to, to your point, I mean, you talked about two bosses, and I'm sure in those organizations, those were leaders, but one of them was, and one of them was not.

Graham Abbey: Yeah, no, I think that's spot on and I think it's also, it gets interesting 'cause I think those two things also relate to complexity and the nature of the problem. And I think we've grown up in a, in organizational environments that want to simplify. They want to make things routinized.

They want to progress things from being difficult and unpredictable to being predictable and repeatable. And of course, if you're running a manufacturing line, which I have done you, those are all the things you want, of course. But that tends to spill over in the way in which we then think about managing people.

We, we turn people into processes. I mean, I, I've got a dozen or so years as, as a human resource director. I often introduce myself. Yes, I chose to, I chose to go into HR because I mistook it for being about people. And so often because of how we think about organization, it isn't about people. It's about process. It's about, controls, it's about a lack of trust and putting systems in place in order to build those things. Whereas leadership for me comes out in the much more complex, when you realize the world isn't just a complicated machine, it's actually something that is, fundamentally different from that. It is a complex system. System in which things emerge that you don't expect to emerge. Things where there are no simple answers to the questions and actually trying to be reductive to reduce them to those simple answers simply, gives you a bit of a mess as it were.

Russel Lolacher: This is gonna be fun then. 'cause I wanna ask you to simplify something.

Graham Abbey: Yeah, no.

Russel Lolacher: Defining no, things has become such a staple of the show because it's what are we even talking about? So to start this off, can you sort of from your own experience and your own approach to these things, define what you mean by complexity?

Graham Abbey: I love, and I first heard this from a Texas professor Mary Albine, who made this distinction between jumbo jets and mayonnaise. And she described jumbo jets as being complicated. In that, and I, yeah, I am, I was an aeronautical engineer, was my original qualification. I worked for an aircraft manufacturer.

I got to go to Seattle, to Boeing, to, to sit on, to be on a jumbo jet when it's being constructed. And it's an amazing feat. The millions of parts that go together, but they only go together one way. And they do come apart again, and they'll go back together again. And if one part of it isn't working, you can take that part out and you can put a new part back in.

And that's become our dominant metaphor. I think that mechanical metaphor for how we think about our organizations, how we think about people, right? How we think about that team member who doesn't seem to be working so maybe we need to switch them out and put a new part in instead, and we think about them as being separate in some way from everybody else in the context they're in and so on.

However, she then described mayonnaise as being complex. And it's beautifully counterintuitive, but what happens with mayonnaise, you take two or possibly three ingredients. You've got a bit of skill and the right temperature. Suddenly this third thing emerges, or this fourth thing emerges. This new thing happens called mayonnaise.

The eggs and the oil come together and mayonnaise are, yeah, appear, appears. And it wasn't there. You couldn't find the mayonnaise and the eggs or the oil, and you can't now find the eggs or the oil in the mayonnaise, so you can't go backwards to reduce it back to its original parts. So there's this idea of emergence.

So for me, the fundamental definition of complexity is to do with emergence. And that in human systems particularly, and definitely in business, many of the things that we want in life are emergent properties. They are things that aren't directly within our control. They are products of some sort of apparent magic that happens that leads them to appear outta a set of conditions.

So if you think about trust or any form of performance or engagement, if you want to go there, or leadership even interestingly, these, you could say are all emergent properties from a complex adaptive system.

Russel Lolacher: So as a leader in an organization, how do you approach complexity? As to your point, you wanna make things simple. You, we all do as human beings, we wanna categorize things. We want you, your this type of person, and you're always going to be this type person. It's just, or this is your job and that shall only always be your job. Or expertise, subject matter expertise is always a big one too, that I find it's like you shouldn't know.

You know this one thing, you'll never know anything else. You'll always be that one person unless you move to another job. Communication seems to be one for me that I always note that, oh, you're a communications guy or a gal. Okay, but you can't be anything else. Even if you move up, you're still, oh, weren't you the communications... like it's almost minimizing their growth and their, they can't be a complex human, basically.

Graham Abbey: And it's it's that that machine metaphor at play again. It's like you can't be, you don't put a battery into your watch or whatever. I don't think you put batteries in watches these days, but anyway, you don't, you don't, and you don't expect that same battery to then be something else as well.

It was a battery today and it's going to be a pen tomorrow and this, and we do the same with people, right? We say you are that I've now understood you as a part and as a part in my machine. Woe betide you do something that's not that because the machine isn't designed for that. You're not going to do that. You're going to do this. And I think, I mean to your original question before I rudely interrupted you around, what does a leader do in complexity then? How do you lead in complexity? I think the first thing is around that sense of mindset, and noticing how deeply embedded it is, and how deeply embedded is in our language.

We like to drive performance. We're not driving anything, there is not, there is, but again, it's a very mechanical metaphor. And the more you start to look at those, the more you start to see how caught up we are in that thinking. So there's a shift there in our own inner world about how we think about things as a leaders. More practically, there's a need to let go of I guess before that I'll just put a caveat on this. Not everything is complex, so not everything in your organization is complex and therefore there is a choice to be made around the nature of what it is that you are leading or managing, because we still need some management, right?

We need management of tasks. Particularly we need management of processes. There are places where processes are really helpful, particularly when you're trying to get consistency and repeatability and so on. Th, this day and age, the more where those things can be automated and they're increasingly automated, the more so. And clearly AI, AI is going take us even deeper into that territory. So you don't approach everything this way, but you've got any significant people component, if you're in any form of knowledge industry and increasingly, of course we all are, there is something about the way in which you have to let go of the notion that you have got a simple cause and effect going on here. So you can't determine your outcomes in the way in which you'd really like to, and the way in which, again, we've set up our organizational systems to expect, right? So we like to put K we like, we love a KPI, we love a, we love a measure.

And that's very machine-like again, right? Isn't it? You need a dial, you need something to tell you how hot the oil is or whatever. So you know, we desperately want to be able to be pre, predict things. We wanna put plans together. We want budgets, we want to say, we want estimates, we wanna predict all of these things. We want to act as if the world is predictable. And unfortunately it's not. Now that doesn't mean you don't have some, a sense of direction and so on, and we can talk more about that but actually for me, the very first thing is coming to terms with the fact that you are not in control.

Russel Lolacher: And I wanna talk about sense of direction because I see that complexity, but we're complexity on complexity on complexity because, for example, there's a lot of mayonnaise out there to be, for lack of a better metaphor. And, but it's also the mayonnaise of today. But you were talking about things of AI. We also have future complexities.

So we're so busy trying to simplify the experience now and try to make it make sense for us within the world. 'cause most leaders aren't trained. They're doing the best they can. They're just managers that have moved up in the organization. And I feel horrible for lot of leaders being in those positions.

But not only are they not prepared for the complexities they're in, they're even less prepared for the complexities that might be down the road, five, 10 hell a week from now with AI. So how do you, how can you be prepared for complexities now and then and still not be prepared later?

Graham Abbey: I think what, I mean, what, it raises the question, what do you do? How do you lead? And I think one of the ways you lead is through purpose, is through a sense you and I use purpose deliberately rather than vision or strategy 'cause again, these are ideas that suggest that we can know where we are going to, and then we can, we, and that's the classic formula, right?

Work out where you want to get to, work out where you are, figure the gap out between the two. Put action plan in place. Put it on a Gantt chart. Job's done right. It just runs like a machine. Oh no, it doesn't, it isn't. Having a sense of direction becomes really important. Having, I mean, you use different metaphors.

Having a North Star, you'll hear people talk about, something that feels like a fixed point in the, in some sense, in the distance or in your heart. Something that is close to really bringing meaning why we do something. And then we've seen, an increased interest in that, in, in organizations in life in general I think. And I think partly that's because we're, we are recognizing and seeking to embrace more of this complexity. So in this choppy sea of everything that's going on, having something that's a light to guide us or something to grab hold of at those difficult moments is extraordinarily helpful.

Then I think you have to start to think about what can I do? And I think what you can do is you can, begin to think about what are the conditions that are most likely to bring me success? What are the conditions that I can sort of, I can create in my organization around me, my team around me, whatever it might be, that from which what I want is going to emerge.

So if you start to accept emergence, an interesting question. This is a Nora Bateson term. What is the submergence? What is it that we're submerging now in order that the thing that we want can emerge? Or what are the conditions for performance or whatever it might be that we think are going be important in this.

I think to try and to try and bring it to life, a really nice example of it. Farley Performance, you introduced us at the beginning of the show. We are strongly associated with a professional rugby team here in the uk. One of the top 10 teams in the country.

And it's been fascinating watching their performance over the last three or four years and essentially watching them go from the bottom of the table to, fingers crossed where we are at the moment, at the top of the table. And part of that has been a shift and change in the director of rugby.

The head, the, the head person on the, sports side of the organization. A South African Johan Van Graan has come in and I think for me, has typified many of the things that I'm talking about. He's come in with a sense of vision and he's, he has both held a vision for himself and really questioned that and built that with, with the team, and the team includes not just the players, but also the full support staff around, around them. I'm properly questioned that properly, 'cause if you've been, you've spent the last two years losing every game, it's pretty hard to convincingly have an ambition that is to, be the best club in the world and for it to be authentic for you.

So he's worked hard on that. But what he is also done is he's articulated the ingredients that he sees in that vision, and it exists as a sort of slightly dodgy piece of PowerPoint, that's got lots sort of pieces to it and levels and words and so on. And in many ways the words aren't the important thing here, but there's a, there's an articulation in his words, in his sort of African's English of what he sees as being vital ingredients, and this is a thing that's now plastered on the wall. It's, it's referred to at pretty much every review session each week and after training and so on as a touchstone. But what where I think he's been smartest is a real recognition that whilst these maybe the ingredients, you don't really know how much of each of them you need at any moment in time.

So the pathway to bring these ingredients to life depends what happens. So you've gotta look at your situation and decide. So one of these ingredients, as you might expect, is about physical conditioning. So you know, we are going be the fittest strongest, that it's humanly possible to be.

And I think coming in his view was that the team was way below par and in fact, I've heard him say he felt the entire English premiership was way below par. But that, and that's been, and still remains a core activity and focus he gives. He's creating that condition and maintaining that condition, but then bringing others in and focusing on some at certain times, some on others, depending what's, depending what, what's happening. But there is a, as a consistent sense of what those ingredients are, and everybody can see those ingredients. And yet we are flexible in the way in which we act to strengthen those depending what emerges, depending on the emergence that we're seeing, we are flexing those ingredients. I dunno whether that makes sense as I've, as I've tried to sort of give words to something that's very visual in a, in, in, in a way.

Russel Lolacher: It did. You brought me back to a part of the conversation I wanted to get to, which was we, we wanna simplify things, really complex things, and sometimes we wanna over complex things that are super simple. So it gets back to the idea of control, what you can control. And I know when we pre-talk before we got into the show, we were talking control what you can control. And that becomes short-term approach to some of those long-term benefits. Because I've had conversations recently, I mean, we hear from Simon Sinek. I had a great chat with a gentleman named Anders Inset. Anders Inset recently, where it was all about the infinite game, right?

It is the things never end. There is no end. We are just investing our time. That's complex. That is, if there's no end in sight, that is mind blowing to a lot of people that's not how their brain works. So as a leader coming into an organization trying to get to complexity, I hear where that sports example is literally doing that. They're better understanding what they can control. Conditioning that is very a short term approach. How do we do that in the business world?

Graham Abbey: I think there's a number of ways to come at this. I think there's a very pragmatic way to come at it, which is, and I see this in sports too, which is, I remember having this conversation with Johan when the team were losing the best way to win the next game is to win this game.

Winning is the best way to win, right. So it's the same I think in business that we need to build momentum. We need to build confidence, we need to solve some of the stuff that's going on, right. I mean, if you can't dig yourself out of the problems you are in, then the long term doesn't matter.

And we're in context now that throwing up all sorts of challenges all the time. So there's something that really always draws us to today. And I, and this is a Gervase Bushe idea that the, all the solution to today's problems contain the seeds of tomorrow's, which is slightly depressing at one level.

But given that, I mean, we will always have problems to fix, right? We'll always have challenges we'll be facing. So the question for me becomes, how do we approach those today's challenges in a way that build our capability? Build our capabilities such that the problems we're wrestling with tomorrow are more complex problems, because that's where we're much more likely to be matched to a complex environment. That's where competitive advantage lies. Actually, if it were all simple, right? We'd all be doing it. So we need to take our businesses into the trickier territories because if we can master those trickier territories faster than others, better than others, that's where competitive advantage comes from, and also that's where, general progress comes from. So yeah, we need to evolve ourselves as organizations and leaders within those to be able to work with increasing levels of complexity as we've defined earlier. So how we go about solving the what of the problem is really critical.

You, so how do we, think about the way we are going about the problems that we've got, and why we're doing it. So I think there's a real temptation. You get stuck in a fix it mindset, which is a little bit like a sugar rush, it's, I've got a problem. Fixed it. Wow, that feels good. Oh, insulin's kicking in. It's not so good anymore. Oh, another one feels good back again. And we get that. And you see that so often, that it's the highs and lows, and you get those fixes. You get those organizations and those leaders that are seemingly running from crisis to crisis. So how do we think about, how do we step back from that and say, what's going on here?

How are we approaching this? Can we approach this in a way that's going to build our capability? And whilst that starts to feel slower, how do we accelerate that? Then how do we give that energy? And I think that's where purpose comes in. Purpose, and that higher calling to what we're doing gives us energy to handle something that's already becoming more difficult because we're not only thinking about today's issue, we've gotta think about what's this leading us to learn? How are we learning from this? If I try and make that more concrete it's what I was thinking about is I've been having a conversation.

I, yeah, I gotta a ride home with somebody from our Christmas party, and they were asking me about my career and what I'd done and and I was telling the story of how I got into, how I went from being an engineer to to being in HR. And so this is an old story, but what, but the organization I was with at the time, which was an aircraft manufacturing business, recognized there was a real energy built around new purpose, and it was a purpose of survival. They were sitting in north of London on a big site that was worth a small fortune, and actually, if they weren't super efficient in what they were doing, it was going to be a compelling reason to shut that, move the work, work elsewhere, sell the land.

And that produced this real impetus to, to shift and change what they were doing, to solve the problems that they were facing. But rather than just go after the problems, what they did was to. Seek to hire this they got some consultants. There was some big work to be done. They recognized there was lots of activity to do in making this transformation that they wanted to make.

They couldn't afford to have a consultant to do it all, so they went out and hired, it was about 20 people into this from non-traditional backgrounds who had the perspectives that they wanted and that they would learn through the transformation process all about. Our business and that then the idea being that these would then be the future managers and leaders that as a new organization emerged, they would feed into.

So we've got a set of problems, some whats to deal with. But there was some real strategic thought gone into how do we go about that in a way that once we've solved those, and by the way, they found a much more cost effective way of doing it, where we will leave ourself in a better position, we will be able to handle more complexity.

And how do we use the impetus of a strong sense of purpose to really drive us through that? 'cause it feels, in the first instance, a more complex way of going about it.

Russel Lolacher: Can something be too complex? Can something be beyond purpose? Like you're, whether it's within a work organization or basically yeah, any organization. If you're looking at something going, we can handle this. You know what purpose is just not going to be enough. Maybe there isn't, but I was just curious if that something can be just basically too much to handle?

Graham Abbey: Yeah, I think it's an interesting, an interesting question, isn't it? That a different way of thinking about that would be to say where is the complexity?

Russel Lolacher: Right.

Graham Abbey: And how do we know something is complex?

Russel Lolacher: Right.

Graham Abbey: And a sense that complexity is actually in the relationship that exists between us and the thing, or us and each other and so on.

So I mean. Can we... I mean, it's an odd way to think about it in the sense that we're trying to make things more complex, but more complex in a way that we are then able to see and handle that. So we are trying to build our capabilities, as actors in this, as leaders in this to hold things that hither to would've been more complex.

And we know this in life, don't we? I mean, if we think back, I've got a... so my 19-year-old son at the at the weekend who's in his first year at at university in the great city of Manchester. And, I mean, he thinks he's solved the world's problems, right?

He knows it all. We thought that at that time, right? And he's, he is, he's a sophisticated young man. He's, but if I look at him now and where I was, and he's definitely more sophisticated than I was at that age. But and it would seem that our increasingly complex context is leading to that, right.

So they're growing up in a more complex world, and therefore they're complexifying themselves more quickly. But right now, as you mature, as you grow, as you have life experiences, you know what used to be complex is run of the mill now. I'd almost frame the question the other way around. I think a criticality for us as a race, if we want to go, go big on this is that we continue to increase the degrees in which we can hold complexity. Because this, the unintended consequences of many of our actions is leading to things that we don't understand how to deal with. And the only way we're going to get to understand those is our willingness to step into those things.

And we will be stepping into things that we don't understand. We don't know. I think there's a different element to leadership here, which is the willingness and the ability as an individual to properly step into something that, we fundamentally don't know what's going on. And I think if we can't continue to build our capacities to do that and then respond in that kind of world, we're in trouble.

Russel Lolacher: Two things come up for me in, in, in what you brought up. One is the generational difference. And their ability to approach complexity because as you've said, you've got a your son is more complex himself, but also no life experience. Like he's coming to this with a lot of ambiguity, but his own perception is, I got it all done. I got this figured out. Meanwhile, we've got generations of the Boomers who are basically going, oh, I have it all figured out with no interest in being more complex 'cause then that's having to learn something new. So it's almost this complete... so how do we as leaders, ourselves tackle these inabilities or different perceptions generationally at complexity?

Graham Abbey: Yeah, no, it's, that's a really great question and I wish I had a great answer to go with it. The thing that came up for me in that is, is why are the Boomers so sure? And I think part of that is because we have created organizational contexts that that value certainty and value simplicity.

And in some senses I, my hunch is that we have arrested people's development, if you like. That natural complexification that goes on in, in adulthood has reached, has been stopped by organizations that say you need to know the answer. You need to be on top of it. You need to hit your key KPI, you need to, sort it out or we'll find somebody else to sort it out. All of that sort of certainty driven, complicated rather than complex thinking, that machine metaphor, again, has sort of capped, almost like a generation. The generation coming through as you are alluding to, as we're both alluding to, isn't going to play that game. They're entering a very different world. And, they're looking forward and saying, you guys have screwed this. I was going to say something else there. This, these guys have screwed up, screwed this up, this screwed this up for us. We are going to do something different here. Now, I think there's a, as you're saying, there's this really interesting tension that they're definitely holding much more complexity. I mean, I look at my, I've got a 16-year-old ne who, you know, even between the difference between her and Dan at 19, her lived experience of the sort of different gender, the understanding of gender her, in her experience, the number of non-binary friends she has. The, this is a whole, I mean, this go back to our upbringing, that wasn't, we wouldn't even have understood. It was not understandable in any sense. Very natural for her to even, it's even different, and she's been exposed to that sooner than Dan has. So there's all of these things that, that are leading to us developing more capacities earlier, I think, which is fundamentally a good thing. And to your point, we need to continue, we now need to match organizational life that can and can use that, but bring real world experience to it to build judgment that goes with that. So it's possible to be able to hold and operate in a way that holds more uncertainty. But if I come back to Johann Van Graan at Bath Rugby, he's making calls based on very subtle judgements around what's going on in the context in terms of do we put push here? Do we push there?

Do we pull back on that? Do we move this? What do we, now that comes from experience. So I think that we've got interesting times ahead, and but I, there's a bit of me that's really optimistic about this generation coming through, right? It's not a, it's a generation as every generation has its challenges, but but it's it in itself is a complexity, right?

Which I think is partly what you're getting at. We are now running, we're now in businesses with multiple generations and we're trying to lead multiple generations.

Russel Lolacher: I think, and to your point, ambiguity I think is probably one of the biggest roadblocks to tackling complexity because to your point, we are being asked for people to be decisive. We have budgets based on milestones, not on ambiguity. So we have to make these decisions because that's what the project demands and that's when it's delivered. And it has to be on time and on budget.

But within a complex world, it's a little more complicated that because you have to make decisions while being comfortable with ambiguity.

Graham Abbey: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Because complexity doesn't come with these answers. I don't. What would you recommend leaders start paying attention to, to prepare themselves? Because I mean, as much as we're talking about how to approach complexity, there's this, all this work that we need to pre-do before we become leaders to be put in these situations.

Where is this development? Where is this learning? Do you think that people should be paying attention to?

Graham Abbey: I think I, it's that's a great question. And there's, I'll attempt a couple of forms of answer to it. I mean, 'cause it's a question we've asked ourselves in our consulting work, as you sort of wrestle with these ideas and you get to, and you think, oh my God I've seen the world in a different way.

That's really how, and then you think, oh shit, how do we actually make that useful and helpful? One of the things that we've focused in on is a little acronym H.A.R.D. Because this tends to get talked about as being the soft stuff, right? And it, it doesn't feel that way at all. It's the hard stuff around

A shorthand for what are some of the critical conditions. So if you say, look, it's all about creating the conditions in which, performance can emerge well, what are some of those conditions? Higher Purpose. We've talked a bit about that. Agency. And we started with that with my own experience. Relationship. It's quite dangerous to have agency without relationship. You need, you need those two things together. And then Disruptive Learning. How do you respond to disruptions to learn from them, but also once things settle, how do you disrupt again, in that, so those become, one of the ways to prepare for this is you start to think about how am I leading in a way that is enabling those conditions in my organization, in me?

And quite a lot of that is then about the interpersonal world, leader's relationship with themselves. I think that, I mean, again, if I stick on this sports thread, we've seen increasing acceptance of the impact of mental skills, in what's often been a very physical world. And the mental game has become a significant source of advantage for teams that embrace that. And I think it's absolutely the same in leadership in a, in business and organizational leadership that, we as leaders have a responsibility to understand more deeply our own drivers, our own histories, our own hangups. There's a Ken Wilber phrase. He talks about I need to clean up, wake up and grow up. We need to deal with our histories. We are all shaped by our upbringings. We're all shaped by things that have happened for us in the past. That is that, if we're going to lead into really uncertain spaces where levels of stress are going to be high, that stuff is going to get triggered.

That stuff is going to come back and bite us, right? So we've got a responsibility for cleaning that up. We need to do the work to understand who we are and what's got us where we are. Wake up, increasing our consciousness and noticing what, what's happening. Being able to take in more of that complexity, and then being able to grow up and show up I think is another, probably another I don't know whether that was Ken's one, I think, but that seems to ride quite nicely. But there's that sense of actually this is a continual process of evolution for us as individuals, as it is for organizations.

So how do we continue to grow? I. Do we understand what growth is? Do I do, how clear are any of us in knowing what our own models are for our own growth? And then how do we put it out there? How do we show up? How do we find the courage to step into all these things that we're talking about?

Russel Lolacher: In your experience working with organizations, helping organizations learn to learn and so forth, what have you felt is one of the most effective tipping tipping mechanisms or aha moments? What is, what has been really effective in your world of going, oh, this is how sort of, I guess, putting the light bulb on for people who don't understand complexity 'cause they're sitting in the jumbo jet and they're just replacing cogs in wheels and you're trying to explain the mayonnaise.

What has been instrumental in getting peoples to shift their thinking to this other way of approaching work?

Graham Abbey: Yeah I think what come, a couple of things come to mind. What, one of the things is our ability to unlearn or to be disruptive. I think that's why that, other than trying to get an acronym that had a D in it. I think that's, there was a real reason for having disruption in that formula or in that acronym. Because we like certainty, we, particularly if we are already in a leadership position, we got here by doing certain things. We think we've understand the world.

We've built a narrative. We haven't talked much about narrative. That would be another framing for all of this. That, we've built our own story. So that tipping point often is about some form of disruption. How do you help people see that the world, the way in which they're seeing the world, the story they're telling themselves and others isn't the full story.

There is another story or there's other possibilities. How do you disrupt like that? I and there's a number there's loads of ways to do that, right. But I mean, so some of the stuff that we've done is, is taking people into a different context. It's one of the ways we use sport.

It's also, taking people into sectors other than their own. Taking corporate, big corporate businesses into small charitable organizations, right. And one of the phrases that often comes to mind for me then is that you, you see ostensibly ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

And I see these executives in, organizations who you might think of as being quite extraordinary, people actually doing relatively ordinary things. So, the, seeing what is possible with so fewer resources than you have, for example, both personally and, financially and structurally and all of those sorts of things.

And what are you doing with that? I mean, that becomes a real, that's a really disruptive element, and you have to sit with that long enough to see past all the obvious blocks. So that, to give it a little bit of theory, there's this idea that which I think comes out the Centre for Creative Leadership, Nick Petri, of heat experiences combined with colliding perspectives, combined with enhanced sense making.

So how do you make something meaningful? So again, the meaningfulness might come often, tipping points for leaders is when something goes horribly wrong, right? So suddenly it's meaningful, there's a heat experience, there's a colliding perspective. I thought this was going to happen and that happened.

Or if you are creating that, and as a learning environment, how are you bringing disparate and different voices in? How do we bring a more diverse set of voices into a particular issue? How do we see this from the completely opposite perspective? And then how do you make sense outta that? How do you support people in not just dismissing that. Well, this is not what my business is about, or this is not who I am.

I wouldn't do that. To really holding, both holding sort of feet to the fire of seeing that, but really making sense of that. Rewriting your story, rewriting your narrative.

Russel Lolacher: So you're saying it's complex. Graham, I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much for this really appreciate your ti, appreciate your time and your brain. Let's wrap it up with the last question I asked the guests, which is, what is one simple action, Graham, people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

Graham Abbey: I am going to go for, I'm going to go... we talked quite a bit about metaphor, didn't we through this? I'm going to go for people really noticing the metaphors that is in their language. Almost keep a journal, right? Almost notice it in the moment in terms of how you know how many times we talk about something as if it were something else?

And just to become aware of how often we're doing that and then just to look at the metaphors we're using and say what are these have in common? What are these say about my worldview? What do these say about my relationships at work? Am I, if I'm holding a whole load of very mechanical functional, black and white. Metaphors and I've got a team of people, I've got a set of relationships where they're all very transactional and I don't really feel I've a good relationship. I mean, no shit really. I mean, what were you, what are you exp I mean, if that's your dominant way of seeing the world, you are not going to build relationships that are meaningful and connected and so on.

So it's, metaphors are often a window into a deeper sense of the worldview that we're holding. So, start to notice them. Start to wonder about what that says about the way you are seeing the world and wonder about what other metaphors you might you think in, or could we try and think without metaphor?

What if I saw this as a full, fully fledged person rather than a, a person in a box?

Russel Lolacher: That is Graham Abbey. He's the Chief executive of Farleigh Performance and he is also the director of Executive Education and Lifelong Learning and Professor in Practice for the University of Bristol Business School.

Thank you so much for being here. Graham.

Graham Abbey: Russel, thank you. I really enjoyed that.