Control the Room Podcast
Episode 46: The Mindfulness Check-In
A conversation with Jade Duggan, Strategic Counselor & Cultural Design Guidance at Mindbody Leadership & Wellness Organization Structure Expert
“I realized…that I could teach people [leaders in organizations] to pay attention to their own body all day and all night, but that doesn’t change the system unless that person has a motivation to look outside themselves and make a change with the people around them.” -Jade Duggan
Jade Duggan is the Strategic Counselor at Mindbody Leadership, a Communications Culture Design expert, and Wellness Coach in Holistic practices. She inspires organizations to lead in mindfulness & self-awareness as the foundation of their company culture. She is committed to establishing healthy practices in business rooted in sensory skills & the intentionality of leadership in organization structure. From her early holistic roots of acupuncture in the family business, Jade began to recognize its connection towards social reform. Jade continues her mission towards social change in organizations through transformative leadership and unleashing the power of listening to your own body.
In this episode of Control the Room, Jade and I discuss locating your sensory skills as humans through the “light-switch hijack,” navigating facilitation through mindfulness, applying the skills of self-awareness in leadership towards organization infrastructure, and the evolution of the micro-habit practice. Listen in to hear how Jade is inspiring her wellness expertise through organizations to reestablish company structure in mindfulness & self-awareness.
Show Highlights
[0:54] Jade’s Start in the Family Business
[6:03] Navigating Facilitation through Mindfulness
[12:58] The Light Switch Hijack
[18:35] The Willingness to Change Business Infrastructure
[26:28] The Micro-Habit Practice
[34:00] Jade’s Final Thoughts
Links | Resources
Jade’s LinkedIn
The Duggan Method
Human Wellness
About the Guest
Jade Duggan is the Strategic Counselor at Mindbody Leadership. Jade’s passion began with her family business in acupuncture as they opened the first acupuncture school in 1980. She continued its foundation towards social development and explored executive coaching in organizational principles. Jade specializes in change management, executive coaching, strategic planning, team building, human resources, and organization redesign. With a previous background as the Founder of WisdomWell, a wellness center for corporations to rediscover sensory skills, Leslie continues her wellness approach at the Duggar Method through consulting organizations to reimagine company infrastructure and empower leadership to grow in self-awareness and mindfulness.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
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Full Transcript
Douglas:
Welcome to the Control of The Room Podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power leaning in and leaning out. All the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today I’m with Jade Duggan at mind, body leadership, where she provides strategic counsel and cultural design guidance for leaders upending industries. Welcome to the show, Jade.
Jade Duggan:
Hi, thanks for having me.
Douglas:
It’s great to have you. So to start things off, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got your start in this work.
Jade Duggan:
So interestingly, it’s actually a family business. I grew up in an acupuncture and leadership graduate school. So I don’t know how much of the story you want, but essentially my parents started an acupuncture school about 1980. They were already connected in with organization development, the early stages of what would later be human resources and big part was social movements in various regards, but early on in the acupuncture clinical programs, some of the other people in the leadership world came to them and said, “You’re doing something and we want to learn how to do it.” And so they began a program that later became I think the first master’s degree in transformative leadership and social change in the US.
Douglas:
Wow. Very cool. And so what was the connection to acupuncture? How did they make that transition from acupuncture to transformative leadership?
Jade Duggan:
So interestingly, I don’t know that it’s so much of a leap. So organization development has a lot of, I’m a history person. So it actually has a lot of roots with the human potential movement and other things that actually have a lot of Eastern if you want to go appropriative maybe influences in it. And my parents came across acupuncture actually, as they were traveling the world and had had a couple of different physiological ailments and got sent to a guy in rural UK, actually who treated them. But more importantly said to my father, “Your hands are very wise. They were protecting your heart,” and the idea that the body was wise really got my dad’s brain going because he also had a mentor named Ivan Illic who is a social critic historian of the 14th century, really interested in how Europe became a colonial force in some regards via the church.
Jade Duggan:
And so interested in why do we do the things we do and how do we make up these ideas? And so since perception is something that changes with each technology we intervene with. So long story short, my dad heard when this man said to him, “Your body is really wise,” he said, “Okay, if that’s true, and that feels true to me, then almost all of Western paradigm is upside down,” so that was actually what my parents started with. They didn’t really care necessarily about the acupuncture at first, they later did because of course you draw in all of the different people. And they actually became the first boards of acupuncture in the US where conferences that they pulled together centrally around the time that Korean acupuncturist in California started being arrested for technically practicing medicine without a license.
Jade Duggan:
So I don’t know if some doctor decided that the turf was being stepped on or something, but that was when they realized they had to actually integrate with a Western medicine model to some extent in order to continue to be able to practice. So they were actually instrumental in getting a license in all of these states, so acupuncture was one thing, but actually acupuncture is a vehicle for social change and social reform thinking, thinking about the body as a wise as a wisdom teacher for life, because the other piece of that is interesting was that he said to my dad, “Your hands are protecting your heart,” and hadn’t said anything, but felt three weeks later, there was an article in the New York times that the medicine my father had been given for the century was being pulled off the market because it was causing heart attacks, but the acupuncturist hadn’t known anything about that.
Jade Duggan:
So they actually then just insisted that he teach them, but really what he was teaching them and what they realized he was teaching them was stay in your senses. Don’t make up a lot of stories, right? All of this. And it was pretty classical, a version of acupuncture that had been largely actually destroyed via communism in China. So what was often practiced by that time in China was a more modern version of medicine that was actually intended to get people back on the line, back to work very quickly. And so what he was teaching them was actually something that had been kept on the side between Japan and France. So all of this comes back to essentially in 1983, The Rouse Company is a developer coming to the acupuncture clinic because they’re all in this plan city of Columbia, Maryland, which is also an interesting socio economic, ethnic, idealistic, really a plan city to try to right some of the wrongs in the world.
Jade Duggan:
And they came and they said, “You’re doing something and it’s not really about the needles and we want you to teach it to us because if you don’t teach it to us, you’re doing the world a disservice,” and so out of that first started a program called Sophia and it was about five elements and it was about the seasons and it was still very like a hippie and a little bit inmeshed in the acupuncture world and conversations to some extent. And I still think that way actually when I practice, I think I’m teaching leaders mostly to be the needle in the company.
Douglas:
Interesting. I want to come back to the wise hands and this notion that the body is perhaps an antenna or an instrument that can help us see and feel things in ways since it’s sensory organ and it’s something that we talk about a lot in our facilitation training. So I think that’s might be a really interesting angle to explore with you given your history there. So how can leaders tap into this, this ability to use their body as an antenna or a way of sensing what’s happening?
Jade Duggan:
Well, maybe the best way to do that would be, tell me a little bit more about how your facilitation training currently works or maybe even something… I do a fair amount of facilitating myself and it’s, at some point, something will come up and you know that you have to train your facilitators to navigate that moment in a particular way. And so is there one that’s like a common one or that came up recently for you in something?
Douglas:
Well, the way introduce it is through a bit of mindfulness, just taking a moment at first, just check in, like are you feeling hot right now? Do you feel a little, is there a little sweat in your armpits or what’s your body doing right now? Like let’s check in with it. And after experiencing that moment, actually have a little debrief and discussion with them about how often do you check in with yourself before you walk into our room that you’re about to facilitate or a Zoom that you’re about to facilitate.
Douglas:
How often have you walked in feeling like your heart is racing or that it feels uncomfortable or on edge, or you already know, or in your head, you’re already convinced that everyone’s thinking in a certain way, because of some feeling or some energy you’re bringing into the room. And so tapping into that is, A, the first step. And usually the second step is asking the room or asking yourself, is this something I’m bringing in or is this something that the room is doing to me? Because if it’s something I’m bringing in, I don’t need to dump that on everyone. If it’s someone that’s already in the room, I need to A, not let it influence me. And then also find out what it is because my assumptions on what it is might be incorrect. And until I ask, I don’t know.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. So essentially you’re already doing a lot of what I’m talking about and what I often am doing is actually taking it the next few steps, which is how do I recognize? And I don’t think in terms of causality. Causality is a modern Western idea. Mutual arising is an older construct in which this happens here and this happens here, almost like entanglement, actually. And what that does is it also allows me to recognize that no one’s doing it to me and I’m not doing it to someone else. And so it gives me a little bit of space then to say, huh, I have this sensation in my body.
Jade Duggan:
And then I can say anybody else notice that they have a sensation in their body? So I can check it out without it having to be an idea that I’m making people feel a certain way, but it still honors the fact that I don’t know how much you’ve talk about resonance or when you play a violin string over here, if you’ve got a guitar that has the same or another violin nearby, that same string will re will vibrate. Do you know this is construct?
Douglas:
Oh, yeah. That’s one of my favorite innovation stories, actually. There was an innovation challenge and a chip manufacturer, potato chip was wanting to make a fat-free chip. And they were like, how do we do that? And they’re trying to get the oils out of the chip. And the winner was a violin player. They said, resonate the chip at the resonant frequency of the oil and it’ll just jump off the chip.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. Right. So you get that that happens. And most people don’t know how to tune their own resonance, right? So they don’t actually know how to play the violin that they are. I actually think it’s sometimes I talk about this as like knowing where the light switches, it’s actually the name of the first in my series of things that I teach often is finding the light switch. Because essentially, can you imagine walking in your house and it’s dark and you don’t know where any of the light switches are? But then somebody else walks in house and turns the light switches on and off all the time or somebody in another house is turning your light switches on and off all the time. It’s what it’s like living in a body where you walk into a room and suddenly somebody else can say how you should feel. Like somebody else is in charge of the light switch that is your body.
Jade Duggan:
So the first place is to just find the vocabulary you already have, right? You already have a vocabulary. Most people at this stage have been around long enough will say, “Oh yeah. I always, when I get tension, it’s always in my neck or it’s in or get stunned. My stomach feels a little uncomfortable or, right? So you’ve got a little bit of a vocabulary. And the danger I think is that we can tend to want to standardize that and say when you feel this it’s this, or when you feel this is this, but actually each of us is unique. And to honor that we can actually realize, got a whole language that our body is constantly doing. Is it this kind of a sensation your body? Or is it this kind of sensation? Like for me, the difference between I have something I just really want to say, and I have something that’s a little scary to say, but will land powerfully and effectively.
Jade Duggan:
And it’s important to say are very similar sensations in my belly, but distinct and the only way I know that is through practice a lot of rigorous practice of checking, that kind of checking in that you’re talking about. So often. So even with your facilitators, I’d probably say, “Okay, it’s one thing to check in before you go into the room to facilitate. What if you put a little reminder somewhere on your wrists or your hands or someplace where you’ll see it and it’ll interrupt your visual field 20 or 30 times a day? And every time you see it, you check in. So you’re almost preemptively just finding out more about your wiring, honestly.
Douglas:
That’s cool.
Jade Duggan:
Then when you have that, when you have that vocabulary, you actually can begin to design the music that you want to play and thus the music that you want everybody else in the room to play.
Douglas:
That’s awesome. I love commitment devices like that or like just put something in somewhere. So I remember that I want to do this thing. And specifically something that’s helping interrupt these conversations we’re having to work when we’re collaborating and we want to realize, well, how’s this impacting me or how am I even perhaps coming across right now?
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. And when I think about work, it’s not just at work, right? Diplomacy is the same practice. How can I actually see whether or not my body is tuned to something that creates possibility between us and the so-called other, or is my body tuned for, yeah. Am I still tuned to some other fear frequency or some other sensation? I don’t like the word frequency because I like to stay in the realm of phenomenology because it keeps us out of our biases to an extent.
Douglas:
So you caught me with this concept of someone else turning the lights on and off. And I wonder, even if you understand your light switches, is it still possible for someone to hijack?
Jade Duggan:
Oh yeah. All the time. I think when you’re no longer in conversation with other humans and you’re no longer able to have some sensation, we’re built for seeing and hearing each other and for this kind of resonance, we are. So I think the day that you no longer have access to that, you either turn into ether. I don’t know what happens. This is enlightenment maybe, or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s death. I don’t know. But my practice is always that I would like to be fully present even in the moment of my own death. And I don’t know when that will be. And the question is when somebody else has hijacked my system, I’m no longer fully present to my own senses, which also makes me very ineffective with whomever I’m with. So in the moment of my dying, if say one of my children is present, I’d love to be as fully present with them in that moment as I possibly could be.
Jade Duggan:
And that’s going to require me not to be hijacked by my fear or any other sense, some idea of how the world ought to go. And, just in day to day, I mean, over these past few years I had numerous clients who would turn on the news. I mean, even now. I was watching some news earlier today and I was feeling for these babies in Palestine. And I don’t want actually for anyone not to feel that. What I want is for us to have some choice in now. Where do I go? Where do I go from here? Do I get stuck with the child or do I think, okay, well, where can I make an intervention so that there might not be a next child? Because when we get stuck in that place, we are no longer effective and moving into the next step.
Jade Duggan:
So it’s almost like actually feeling it so much, but I can see what the gift is in actually or having an honestly blade switches a little, right? It’s a little facile for the analogy. Because also to me, all of those symptoms are teachers, all of them. So when somebody has hijacked my shoulders, I can guarantee you, my value system is being checked somewhere. Something that matters to me in the world is showing up missing. When I am tense, I can guarantee that.
Douglas:
Do you think there’s room or need for folks to realize how they’re impacting others, or is that the sole duty of the individual to check how the world is impacting them?
Jade Duggan:
No, I actually, for me, and this is how come I worked specifically in leadership because I did work as a clinical practitioner for a number of years predominantly with a little bit of organization stuff on the side. And one of the things that I realized though was that I could teach people to pay attention to their own body all day and all night, but that doesn’t change the system unless that person has a motivation to look outside themselves and make a change with the people around them. And so in a system where that expertise is used specifically for what it’s really needed for when I would see childhood illness, oncology or whatever, that’s a good use of me in a space with an individual who needs some skills like this.
Jade Duggan:
But other than that, a better use of me is to have this with somebody who’s making a lot of impact. And so can not only train a lot of other people to notice it, but for the sake of noticing it so that we can communicate and become more effective. And because all of these skills, just like all of the other emotions are contagious, right? So when a leader actually can keep playing with the edge of becoming self-aware in that way, what they are also doing is showing everybody else in their room how to do it, right? So think about this even politically in the US if you think about or you should think just into art and right? Like you go, “Oh, wait. It’s not a complicity or a complacency. It’s, but a willingness to keep getting present, which is different than if you have somebody who’s in power, who’s raging and both of those things are contagious.
Jade Duggan:
So yes, I think it’s important for individuals, learners, especially important for individuals in positions of power to also recognize that that requires their own humility to do. And it also changes the dynamic of how we develop power with each other and the networks that we build around it. So the system, and that’s how come I always end up with a system and it’s why I won’t work with any leaders who are not willing to do the infrastructure change as well, because this is why I used to work in corporate, right? And I would do these skills, amazing amount of money made, gotten back, whatever from these big companies.
Jade Duggan:
But in the end, I was making life better for maybe a few thousand employees at a time, which is fantastic because these skills really do ripple out very, very quickly. It was actually really fascinating and beautiful to watch. However, having thousands of employees who feel better in themselves supporting a company that doesn’t do things in the world that are what I say matter and who in the end, they’re not really going to find much purpose in that other than with each other. Yeah. I know, definitely a duty.
Douglas:
So you mentioned the importance of working with leaders that are willing to make the infrastructure changes. And I’m curious what that looks like. How does that play out? And as it related to the work that you do around business model innovation.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah, absolutely. So I find that when a business model evolves thoughtfully from the toddlerhood of a company. When they’re in high growth, early stages, if they are really thoughtful about how the business model impact looks like, then you don’t have to try to retrofit infrastructure change later. I spent a number of years looking at how do we change infrastructure. And you can do it in a division in a bigger company, but it essentially often isn’t going to change the nature of the outcomes at large for the company it can and especially with a leader who’s willing to make big infrastructure changes or at least model and play it out and let it run. But when you have a smaller business that’s growing fast and has the capacity to disrupt an industry, which is where my current focus is, that business when the model is designed really, really thoughtfully, you don’t really have to deal with infrastructure change later.
Jade Duggan:
And you also don’t really have to deal with a lot of HR issues. You don’t have to deal with, actually I like to call a restore humaning rather than human resource, because I think humans are not resources. But you preemptively change the dynamic, right? The reason you have to do so much of what consulting really is often, especially in the HR realm is we didn’t create habits early and often around how we be human together. And we didn’t create our infrastructure with that in mind. I mean, just even some of the simple stuff about scaling. I watch companies. I was actually watching this with Clubhouse as this growing really fast, but not recognizing how human nature really works.
Jade Duggan:
And so when you do that without a grounded view of how humans actually interact with one another and what you need to put in place in order to have them do that in a particular way, you end up essentially replicating the world you’ve already got, right? And most innovators are not looking to do that. And they’re actually looking to do something different to disrupt the market. But you run the risk of creating the same world when you don’t from the early stage. Actually you should really and structurally, right?
Jade Duggan:
A lot of the stuff is very structural. I think about hiring policy. When you hire somebody and you’ve got a contract and it’s got a non-compete in it, right? You’ve essentially said we own you and your ideas. It’s a very different philosophical place to start from then. Actually, nobody owns any of this. You do what you want with it. We’ll do what we want with it, right? And then you have to deal with a financial question of it. But they are intertwined and they are also very… Right. They will impact how that human gets to function in the world also going forward.
Douglas:
There’s a question about structure and infrastructure, reminds me of Conway’s law and the notion that any system built by an organization is destined to repeat the structure of the organization that built it and so if this organization created itself in toddlership and through adolescence and maybe teenagehood, when it was tweening, it created some questionable culture or built out some habits, then that’s going to influence everything they create and all they come together, how they collaborate or to use your word, which I’m falling in love with how they human together. That’s fascinating. So some of the things, like not everyone gets the luxury of just starting fresh. People have these things established. How do they start to break down some of these infrastructure issues or where do you start?
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. It really depends on the size of the company which is, I’m always looking for because I do think in systems, I’m always looking for like where’s the place for me to go in and have the most leverage. And so that really, for me right now is between three to $12 million, but in a growth stage, which is also of course when a time, when a leader is totally overwhelmed and doesn’t really want to take the time to do any of this stuff, but it’s the best time I think, structurally wise, because they can see the impact that it has on their capacity, on their team and on the world. But also they’re all close enough to each other that they know each other’s families names, right? Maybe not everybody knows everybody, but there’s still that feeling.
Jade Duggan:
And these are the sides of businesses that actually use to create local stability in economies. And now we’re creating an interesting network of non-local, but still integrated economies of right, it’s still a community and in a way that it creates, but it also, because it’s non-local can create more equity if you hire somebody. I know there’s this thing where smaller companies tend to hire somebody in the Philippines because it’s cheaper. But actually if you pay them as much as you would, somebody in the US, you actually begin to change the infrastructure of a globe. And most people at that stage are thinking of themselves as a global company. And yet they have contractors all over the world, right? Because even the structure of employment is breaking down because it’s so nationalized, right? Most people can’t even figure out companies until they’re really large.
Jade Duggan:
Can’t even, even then they don’t really want to figure out how to employ people who are living in different nations, because there’s so many different the hoops to jump through. So we’re pushing the border of a global economy in so many different ways, but a bigger company who wants to do infrastructure change has to start with one person. The higher up in the company you go, the more influence you’re going to have. So that’s how that works, but you can do it in a division where first you begin and simply the first simple thing is to create this self-awareness practice, where you have five or six skills. You teach people how to notice when they get a little upset and how to find their way back to their body and how to help each other create that feedback loop with each other.
Jade Duggan:
And then you have a few other skills that you actually keep recognizing as embodied habits, acknowledgement, making clear requests, knowing the difference, right? These are some of these are pretty, well I wish they were standard. They’re not really standard. But when you do that, then you can actually begin to look at how do you create an infrastructure change? So one of my clients, I have a few clients who are still in bigger companies, and one of them is looking at how does she change ethics in medicine and research? And it’s actually has a lot to do with her willingness to just keep finding the openings, which requires her to have a skill set, to keep finding the openings and to stop getting caught, right? A tree seeks the sun no matter what. It doesn’t get caught, right? An iron railing can be there and it’ll just keep going.
Jade Duggan:
So it requires one leader with that level of commitment to the outcome, right? And then her case, she knows that the community is not involved in the research. So first, she’s going to restructure the board, but in order to restructure the board, she’s got to get some other pieces moved around in the organization, but her commitment to doing it and to not getting stuck on her own ideas about it or what they will or won’t let her do. She just finds a way. And so that’s the way the infrastructure actually changes. And it’s also the way it’s built. It’s actually individuals decisions and capacity to keep finding a way through.
Douglas:
Yeah. You mentioned something earlier in the pre-show chat around micro habits. And that really struck a chord with me around this idea of we have to create wins that we can recognize as wins. And we’re not going to jump around that iron obstruction and the day, but if we make a little move and another little move and another little move and we get there.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. What I really love about micro habits, it’s such a funny term, but practice is what it would have been called in any ancient tradition. But the thing that I love about these little micro habits is that they give you and people, right? This is how humans work. We need the little hit of when. Oh, I did that. I managed to side step that place where I normally would have gotten upset today. And that you get that little hit of my body feels easier now when it did. It was another reason learning that vocabulary is to go, oh, you know what? I used to get tightness in my belly every time I had to figure out what we’re going to have for dinner. And I don’t have that anymore. I didn’t have that today. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Easy peasy.
Douglas:
I was also really fascinated about this notion of observation, but then using observation as a way of recognizing potential interrupt points, where then we could create little experiments and say, what if I poke at this? Like what happens? Hmm. Okay. It really reminds me of the types of strategies that they talk about in complexity theory where let’s probe and try to make sense of what’s going on, but it’s like different language, which I found fascinating.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. It’s interesting. It told you the K I’ll spend on, would come up many times constipator door who used to run the Max Planck Institute for High Energy Physics was a colleague and he used to come and teach with me and he used to carry one of these triple pendulums around, but there are a lot of dovetails, right? Complexity theory is also essentially, for me, it’s fascinating to watch science, figure out things that ancient cultures have been trying to tell us. So it’s fascinating to watch 50 year old science proof thousand year old practice. I find that even as teaching people that have micro habits of the awareness, even though I say upfront, don’t try to change anything yet. We’re just collecting. It’s just impossible not to begin to go. Actually, that’s, doesn’t feel good.
Jade Duggan:
I feel like this right now. And the power of micro habits, the power of micro habits is actually, it’s fascinating. I’ve been really paying attention to, and I don’t have real study. I’ve been looking for somebody who might want to do some study on this, but there’s some that like neural networks or mirror neurons, or I know there’s not technically mirror neurons, but that the way we do this actually works asynchronously and over technology, to the extent that a group of women in say a Facebook group who interact regularly will end up on a same similar cycle, right? So there’s a hormonal, right? And so I got really fascinated with this, that one of the first projects I did big corporate projects, which is why I asked where in Southern Virginia. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say the company name, but let’s just say was a big food production company.
Jade Duggan:
And they were buying another production company at the time. And I went to do a site visit in this tiny little town in Southern Virginia. And the town essentially was just made up of the one company who had hired me and the other company, right? The two plants and the other one that they were buying. But one was in the more of the health field and the other one was known for sugary things. And so the margins also were different. So one was making a lot of money, totally different management style, right? Totally different. And essentially, it was like, how do you get this change management, but how do you get these people who are already actually having fights in their families because of this disparity to come together. And what I ended up doing was a training for all of the plants on the east coast, just the plant managers in there sort of semi-annual gathering.
Jade Duggan:
And I taught them four or five skills. That was it. And I found out later, I mean, it was amazing. The experience was just amazing because of the way things went down and the amount of emotion in the room, the amount of, of people who had been with the company for literally 40 or 50 years and saying never been in such a powerful place because they’re tangible, practical things that they could go implement. Then we have them go do it right away. But the really powerful thing was that I found out later, a year over year, the accident rates on the plant floors went down 50% year, over year for two years, straight in every plant, except for the one plant whose manager was not in the room.
Douglas:
Wow.
Jade Duggan:
I didn’t teach anybody except for the 12 people who were in that room. But this was across 1,000, 1,500 employees, at least. Six hours.
Douglas:
I think there’s some power in the simplicity of just five things too, right?
Jade Duggan:
Yeah.
Douglas:
How do we focus on like, “Hey, here’s the essential stuff. Want to make sure you really get this? And like a, the number five is pretty magical. Disney did some research, right? It’s like, you don’t want to get more than five options because then people will get overwhelmed. So three to five is the magic territory. So I think that’s pretty smart just in its simplicity. Plus if you’re at the stuff you’re giving them is powerful, they’re going to be more likely to put that powerful stuff to use because it’s simple. They’re going to remember it. That’s amazing. Wow. Did they get the other person trained up?
Jade Duggan:
No. Because what had happened was that person was leaving to go to another company, had gotten poached I think to go to another company. And so they were halfway out the door and that’s why they didn’t show up for the training.
Douglas:
Wow. I mean with the lack of safety improvements in that factory, you’d think they would want to get after that.
Jade Duggan:
So you know what really happened? And this goes to the infrastructure question, and this commonly happened to me in these corporate situations. The leader I was originally working with is now a VP of that company. So she got promoted within a couple of months of that project because it changes all of their numbers because the self-awareness, right? Mindfulness training, all of these things, they just increase engagement, they increase effectiveness, right? You hit your quotas and you get your number, your KPIs just go out through the roof. And so people come and they say, well, what are you doing? So we were in conversation with spreading that across another segment, but then she got promoted and moved to another country.
Jade Duggan:
And now she’s VP of that. It’s a fortune 50 company and she’s the VP of it, but she has to then go to the next place. So the contact then changes, which changes the dynamic. So whoever of those managers are still in play may still be doing some level of the work, but this is also why a lot of corporate training just doesn’t work because they just don’t build and follow up. And it’s actually another one of the reasons why I prefer to work with the smaller companies where I can say, I refuse to work with you if you won’t commit to six months.
Douglas:
Yep. The coaching, the follow-through, the after touchpoints. So, so critical.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. Yeah. I want to know what’s different. I don’t want to know that you checked off the box on leadership development.
Douglas:
And also the thing is, is like, I think Ed Morrison has a really interesting analogy or model with his strategic doing framework. All of the stuff they talk about in the framework draws on this river rafting metaphor. So it’s like you have a guide, right? Like a river guide. And it’s complexity informed in the sense that like, sure they might’ve gone down the river, but the river is not going to act the same way every time you go down, right? And so I can teach you how to go down a river, but you’re not necessarily just going to go down it by yourself after sitting here, maybe go within a few drills, right? And so I think that’s the thing, like when the reason that they extended coaching works so well is because once they encounter the real live situation and they go, oh, what do I do now?
Douglas:
We get a lot of questions from folks that have attended various trainings around collaboration or design thinking or whatever it is. And they say, “I’ve reached master Excalibur level in this training or whatever, but I still don’t know how to use it. It’s like I got all this information, but when it’s time to run a meeting with the CEO, I clam up because I don’t know what to do. So if you’re not there in that moment, when they’re freaking out and clamming up, those are the real moments of transformation and learning.
Jade Duggan:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. It’s like, is it really a tool or a skill if when the thing really hits the fan and that’s is also what I love about the micro habit way of doing things is what I think about is like I’m creating the conditions under which, when something really hits the fan, my body is already trained to know that I have the tool in my pocket. And so it’s like, I don’t have to practice on the big rocks. I get to practice on the little rocks, so this is so powerful, I think to have the skills be that use that way.
Douglas:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. I love it. Well, gosh. I didn’t think we would go from acupuncture to micro habits and extended coaching programs for retention, but here we are. And I think that brings us to a nice place to close. So I want to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.
Jade Duggan:
I’m aware of the word, use the word facilitation, and I’m aware of the word facility and both how that works as a place, right? That’s an infrastructure, sometimes a facility, but also that becoming facile with something, it means that it’s easy, right? It’s easy. It makes it easy for us. And I would have that for not just our personal lives, but for our social systems and lives to have some facility and some ease. So that’s what I’m doing.
Douglas:
Awesome. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, Jade. Thanks for joining the show.
Jade Duggan:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control of The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe, to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.
