This episode is a conversation with Johnnie Moore about his inspiring work as a facilitator

Selected quotes

I don't suppose any young boy growing up has any aspirations to be a facilitator - I wanted to be a train driver

I was going to networking breakfasts and finding them excruciating because they seem to mostly consist of mostly white middle-aged men interrupting each other with lots of facts and opinions ... and I wanted to have a different way to have conversations with people

I'm often thinking: I don't know how to help; I don't know what to say; I'm not sure what's to do here. But I've learned to ... say as little as possible

Johnnie Moore - Bio

Johnnie Moore is a great facilitiator. He's written two books about it - Creative Facilitation and Unhurried. More here: johnniemoore.com

References

• Creative Facilitation - Johnnie Moore and Viv McWaters
• Unhurried - Johnnie Moore
• The Halo Effect - Phil Rosenzweig

Transcript

Mark (00:04): Hello, I'm Mark Foden and welcome again to the Clock and the Cat, a podcast of conversations about complexity in organizations. The clock and the cat explores the emerging science of complexity ultimately to help you to be more effective. Whatever you're involved with. This is episode 11, and today I'm going to be talking with Johnny Moore, but at the risk of detaining regular listeners, if this is your first experience of the podcast, it might help if you go back to episode one for a seven minute introduction by me, of course. We'll wait for you

If you went away, welcome back. I'm with Johnny Moore. I've known Johnny for over 10 years now. We've got a good deal in common in that we're both facilitators. He is by many nautical miles the best facilitator I know. He's been a huge inspiration for me, by which I mean I relentlessly and serially nicked ideas. His and Viv Waters book about facilitation is for me the book to read on the subject. It's called Creative Facilitation. Get it now: it couldn't be more relevant to complexity, so I'm so looking forward to this. Johnny, hello. How is Cambridge this morning?

Johnnie (01:11): Well, it's considerably brighter for having listened to that wonderful introduction. Mark, it's cheered me up no end ... your kind words.

Mark (01:19): I'm very glad. So what I always ask people when they come on the podcast is how did you get interested in complexity? How did you come to it?

Johnnie (01:29): I feel like I've got two competing answers. The first slightly more rational one is I think I first got interested in it when the dreaded Dave Snowden wrote about the difference between things that are complicated and things that are complex. And I think that's the first time that I really got an understanding of what complexity was as distinct from merely complicated. So that was kind of the intellectual point at which I started taking complexity seriously. The second more mischievous answer is, well, all human beings are very good at understanding complexity if measured at a practical level because all of us are capable, for example, of closing our eyes and bringing one of our fingers and touching the end of our nose without being able to see, because our bodies are operating in complexity all the time, and most of the time we don't even have to think about it.

Mark (02:19): That's a splendid answer. I think we can pack up and finish now actually. I mean, I was the same. The first time I came to complexity was Dave Snowden's stuff, which kind of got, it answers a lot of questions that I think I had. It kind of crystallized things for me anyway. So let's talk about you and how you got into your current work, which is, well I think it's principally about facilitation. So just tell me a bit about how you got to be doing what you're doing at the moment.

Johnnie (02:52): I think in truth it happened by accident. I don't suppose any young boy growing up has any aspirations to a facilitator. I wanted to be a train driver. Probably about 30% of boys my age would've done that too. And my first proper career was in advertising, which I did for 10 or 15 years, and I had no plans when I was doing it to become a facilitator, although I suppose I often did run focus groups as part of my job, which is a kind of low grade bastard form of facilitation. But two things happened somewhere in my mid thirties. One, my advertising business collapsed because I got into a painful dispute with the guy I was running it with. So that put a stop to the advertising part of my career. Plus I think at about in your mid thirties, I think a lot of us start to wonder if there's any meaning to our work.

In the early part of my career, I wasn't that bothered, but I got to a point with advertising where I started to realize it was a slightly foolish business. So I was getting a bit tired of it as well. But that sort of emotional crisis of the business falling apart kicked me out of one career, tipped me into doing a lot of work in group therapy and I started to realize that what was going on in therapy groups was becoming a lot more interesting to me. The dynamics of people working in relationship to each other was more interesting to me than the size of the logo. So I got interested in what was going on, and so I found myself saying to people when they asked what I did, oh, I'm a facilitator, because that felt like what I was more interested in by that point in my career.

Mark (04:35): So that's really interesting. I mean, don't talk about it if you don't want to, but you said you'd had this kind of disruption in your life and then you did group therapy. Why did you decide to do that?

Johnnie (04:49): I think I realized that the chaos I felt about what was going on, although I wanted to blame idiot lawyers and insert adjective here, business partner, I think I had some sense, but there must be something I'm doing as well. What is it I'm doing that's drawn me into this chaos? And I must have, I think a friend of mine had been doing therapy and he started to nudge me towards going to a therapy place to do some work on myself. And so that was the motivation to go and do it. That sense of, okay, I quite like to blame external circumstances for my predicament, but clearly I'm doing something and I wonder what that is. I think that was the motivation to go and do some work.

Mark (05:37): So that was kind of lucky, I suppose, that it led you on a different path, that you were quite grown up and thought, oh, well maybe it's not the world that's to blame. Maybe it's me or at least me. Partly.

Johnnie (05:52): Yeah. My guess would be that I think most beings in crisis must have some sense that they've got something to do with it. However much they may want to blame others. There must be that little kernel of self-doubt. And I think because I suppose I always used to think of myself as quite an anxious and neurotic person. I kind of had some sense that I needed help. I wasn't so confident and self-assured that I thought I don't need help. I knew that I did, and I was fortunate enough to have a couple of friends moving around me who'd been through something of the same journey and could give me a couple of pointers on places to go.

Mark (06:34): So this is interesting for me in that I think if you are going to be helpful in complexity, you've got to have a good sense of yourself, how you are and how you affect other people, which I think because I'd had a crisis of sorts I suppose, and really changed how I looked at the world. But for instance, I was in the Army and crisis decided to leave. I ended up taking interest in why I was like I was, so I ended up in a similar, so maybe that's why we have something in common, perhaps. Johnny, you sound quite unhurried.

Johnnie (07:22): I didn't even have to pay you to say that, did I? Because I guess you're alluding to this project that I started quite innocently about 10 or 12 years ago when I first moved to Cambridge where I started hosting what I started to call unhurried conversations. And the origin story was, well actually a bit like the other story, two things happened at the same time. I'd moved to Cambridge, I wanted to make some connections and I was going to networking breakfasts and finding them excruciating because they seemed to mostly consist of mostly white middle-aged men interrupting each other a lot with lots of facts and opinions, and it didn't feel like a very convivial environment. And I wanted to have a different way to have conversations with people. And so I revived a process that I've occasionally used before in facilitation, essentially a talking stick process where you sit usually in a circle, not always, and you just have a ritual where the person who wants to holds some object to designate them as the speaker.

And the rule is that everybody else has to listen. So just a simple talking stick. So I started doing this, I didn't call it an unhurried conversation the first time I ran it, but the inspiration for that, which was happened at about the same time. And I remember having coffee with my friend Anthony Quinn in Cambridge, and we were talking about improv theater, which we were both fans of, but we were both admitted that improv theater is great when it's great and pretty excruciatingly bad when it's bad. And we'd both been in performances where we died a little on the inside because they weren't actually very good. And he said very innocently, he thought the difference between good and bad improv theater was the good stuff was unhurried by which he meant the actors aren't fighting for attention with each other and aren't interrupting each other, but are building off each other in what he said was an unhurried way. And as soon as he said Unhurried, I thought, Ooh, that's a good adjective. I want to use that more often. And so I thought, oh, that'd be a good name for these conversations because talking stick conversations doesn't sound very attractive, but Unhurried conversations does. And that was the beginning of me using that adjective.

Mark (09:38): So I do remember, I mean the Talking Stick conversation thing, I've done them lots before and I've been involved in Unhurried conversations with you a few years ago, and they were quite different to the Talking Stick conversations that I've been in before. And I think it's down to the way that you, I was about to say managed, but I don't think I mean that, but just how you were actually did make people genuinely listen. And there were long pauses between people speaking, which I've not really experienced before. So it was something you did there. The reason I'm saying this and the reason why I asked you to talk about Unhurried is because I think it's really important when you're coping in complexity because it's really important to listen to folks and understand where they are, where the gold is, I guess.

Johnnie (10:38): I think so I think what I managed to do with Unhurried conversations that maybe made them a bit different from your other experiences of Talking Stick is that I think with a talking stick, it's quite easy inadvertently to make it all sound a bit heavy. And this is an ancient stick that had been passed down my family for three generations and it symbolizes blah, blah, blah, and it's very important to speak from the heart, yada, yada, yada, long rather self-important explanation, which makes people feel like, Ooh, this sounds a bit dangerous. I want to know what's going to happen. Whereas what I try to do with unhurried is make it as sort of informal and casual as possible. So instead of a talking stick, I usually use a sugar bowl in the coffee shop that I'm in if I'm in a coffee shop, just a very ordinary object, not full of deep symbolism, but just a very pedestrian thing.

And I think what I learned from doing this is that you often get the best conversations when you don't try too hard to be deep. So you allow the conversation to be quite light and gossipy sometimes as long as people are sort of sticking to the protocol or not interrupting. And then you find that the conversation itself can go deep kind of when it's ready to and into depth, then up into lightness again and down into depth. I think it's in the spirit of unhurried, it's quite important not to try too hard. So it's opening a slightly cliche bow talking about it is I think it opens a bit more imaginative space for people than they get in a regular conversation.

Mark (12:11): So many of the folks who listen to the clock and the cat are people working in government organizations where they're extremely busy. Things are very complex, sometimes quite difficult. So, can you talk a bit about your experiences of working with people who are in that kind of environment and how being unhurried helps?

Johnnie (12:42): I suppose the first thing that comes to mind is if I'm working in those contexts, I don't immediately arrive and say, right, well the solution to this is an unhurried conversation. That would often be a really bad idea. I think you have to choose your moments when you think they might be up for it. So I guess you have to join them where they are, not where you think they ought to be. That would be the first thing I would say. Second thing I think I've noticed a lot is that although people in a rush look like they're very attached to continuing to spin the hamster wheel with ever increasing frenzy, actually just below the surface, most of them could do with a break and would actually relish a bit of care and attention and time and space if they could get some. So perhaps the starting point for me is to try and embody the spirit of unhurried without trying to impose it, if that makes sense on others.

Mark (13:39): No, I get that. My experience oftentimes, especially when I got later in my facilitating career, I got more confident about what I was doing. And actually the thing that made the big difference was not saying very much and just giving people the chance to talk. And oftentimes I wouldn't have the faintest idea what they're on about, but I could see that they were engaged and something was happening. I didn't know what it was, but it felt valuable. I guess You see the same,

Johnnie (14:23): Yeah, it's something I experience when occasionally I do coaching one-to-one coaching. I nearly always find in the first session that when the person talks for the first half hour or so, I'm often thinking, oh, I don't know how to help. I don't know what to say. I'm not sure what to do here. But I've learned to say almost nothing really to say as little as possible indicate that I'm listening, but let them continue to talk and wait until something in what they say catches my attention in a particular way. And then I feel like I've got something to respond to. So it's a little bit like the idea of being the change. I think it's to arrive in that space. I think people who are in a hurry do value being listened to. And I think perhaps what can happen for them is that when they are allowed to talk and they're really being listened to and they're not being interrupted, they start to hear themselves in a slightly different way. I think we often find ourselves when we're running too fast, we don't actually quite realize how fast we are going or how rapid our thinking is, and sometimes we just need enough space to kind of unspool a bit. And that sometimes just giving people time to talk does that for them so they can hear themselves.

Mark (15:44): Yeah. So I'm going to introduce the L word Johnny. Can this be a model for leadership in complexity doing the sorts of things that you are talking about?

Johnnie (15:58): I was getting anxious for a second. I thought L word, he's not going to talk about love is he? Goodness me, leadership. Oh, that feels a lot safer. Oh,

Mark (16:05): Maybe it is. Maybe that's what it is.

Johnnie (16:10): I think it's interesting you talk about the L world because I think it is a very loaded word, isn't it? And I often feel a bit ambivalent about using it because it so often seems to a kind of heroic Christ-like version of leadership where a brilliant person sets out a vision and leads their followers. Whereas I think the only practical way I think to think about leadership is to see it as more a challenge of influence than of control. And so I would say that in facilitating a meeting, I'm doing a kind of leadership, it's a very understated form of leadership. I used to say, and this is putting it probably a bit facetiously, that sometimes it's occupying the chair of the leader, but failing to lead by which I mean not doing a lot of the things that a leader feels obliged to do, which usually I try and pushing things too fast, trying to control things too much, trying to do the thinking on behalf of the group, whereas the think the skill in this is to evoke the thinking of the group and not do too much of the thinking for them.

And I think that is a kind of leadership, it's not the leadership that many airport books get written about, but I think there are people who lead in an unhurried way who are good at listening and aren't as heroic or extrovert or demonstrative as the cliched model of leadership might suggest.

Mark (17:44): Well, just thinking about the cliched model of leadership, it is been pretty successful looking back over the last 30 years or so. I remember when I left the army, I did an MBA course and there were lots of books written by quite sort of barnstorming leaders about how to do it. And seems to me that quite a lot of money has been made out of being that kind of leader. It certainly makes that kind of leader rich in our environment, particularly in the US where they get massive amounts of money. So I dunno whether that leadership actually works, but Well, tell me what you think. I mean, why are those people successful and are things going to change?

Johnnie (18:34): Well, first I think in a way, you get what you pay for. So if you highly reward the appearance of heroic leadership, then that's the kind of leadership that people are going to try and do, isn't it? Because if you're going to be paid inordinate amounts of money to pretend to be that kind of brilliant visionary leader, then that's what people will try to do. I think our financial system tends to reward that kind of performance. But the second thing is, I think the term for it is survivor bias is that we identify, oh, I don't know what are the usual suspects? Steve Jobs, for example, as, oh, we look at what Steve Jobs did, he did all these things, he set the vision. That might be true of Steve Jobs, but what about the hundred other people who thought they would be like Steve's job, Steve Jobs, and never got anywhere.

There's an awful lot of people who try to be heroic and fail spectacularly. So I think the notion that it always works is probably not backed up by the evidence. And I think a guy called Phil Rosenweig wrote a really brilliant book 10 or more years ago called The Halo Effect that really investigates how easily this myth gets perpetuated, but isn't actually backed up by the evidence that actually it's not. Although we can think of the odd example of a heroic leader who's succeeded, it isn't necessarily the reason why most business success happens, which I think is, you won't be surprised here. It's actually a much more complex process that gets post hoc rationalized as the vision of the leader.

Mark (20:15): Yeah. So that resonates for me for sure. I dunno, what I sort of think is that because principally of what's happened with the internet connecting things together, that our world is getting much more complex than it has been historically. And I think that this sort of heroic leadership that we've been talking about is going to be less effective. Do you think the world has really changed?

Johnnie (20:47): I suppose the jury's out, isn't it, on whether our world is more risky and complex than it was for our ancestors in medieval times when you might die of the plague and child mortality was 10. I mean, there's a whole argument that it's not, I think predictions are very difficult to make. I mean, who knows? I mean, maybe the cult of leadership will continue to generate these kinds of myths.

Mark (21:11): Predictions are everywhere. People sort of making some judgment about what's going to happen in the future. You see it all over the news. You see it in organizations where folks are, I don't creating the annual budget or whatever it is. And actually that's imagined. And in a complex world it seldom comes true. So I think if you're basing an organization on that, you're sort of building on sand. And we managed to convince ourselves that it's the way to do things rather than being more spontaneous or improvised about the way that we do things. So I use the word improvised in an advised way because that's something you are interested where you talked about it earlier. Shall we talk about improvisation?

Johnnie (22:04): Yes. I mean, I suppose part of what I want to say is we live in a world where these predictions are made, where plans and strategies are created, and then that's not going to stop happening. So the choice, I guess the choice we can make is do we want to spend our lives investing in those predictions? I don't particularly want to put my energy and attention on those. I'm more interested in the moment by moment interactions because I actually think the future is being created in our present moment interactions not according to our grand plans. I'm with John Lenon, John Lennon, wasn't it? Who said something like, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. And I've been interested in improv for a long time, and I think for a while people thought that, well, principles from improv theater, you could take them from improv theater and you could try them out in the rest of your life.

But I think what I would want to say is no, I think the reality of life is that it is always being improvised. It's just that we are often not paying attention to it because we're too busy making plans. But every interaction we make is shaping the future and not in a way that we really can control and plan. And I find in my work, the more I bring my attention to what's happening in the room, the more connected I feel, the more influence I think I can exert, the more help I can be to people. And I guess if there is a sort of a strategy in what I'm saying, and I slightly hesitate to say is if the biggest challenge facing humanity at the moment is climate crisis and running out of resources, it seems to me that we need to get better at finding satisfaction in our relationships so that we don't have to be busily rushing about and consuming as much stuff and flying around as much as we have been able to do. And that means that we have to get the satisfaction from our moment by moment interactions with each other.

Mark (24:13): Just sort of going back to the improv thing, could you just say a little bit about how you go about using the improv ideas in an organizational context?

Johnnie (24:26): So I think a lot of the time it's just being a good improviser in what I do. So I might not even mention improv to people, and I might well not choose to talk about improv principles or play improv games. I will just be improvising. So I will be present to what's going on and I will adjust what I do as I go. And I think when I'm facilitating, I'm acutely aware that I think compared to most facilitators, I'm changing my mind about what to do based on what I'm seeing in the room as I do it. And I will sometimes pause and rethink an activity almost in the middle of the activity. I might even say, I'm just pausing for a second here. I just want to think about what I do next so that people can see that I'm thinking carefully about what I do and making some deliberate choices.

If I said I'm going to improvise, that might set up a whole different set of expectations and not necessarily very good ones. So some of it is just being attentive to the moment. It's a kind of quite ordinary level of care and attention. And then there are some contexts in which I would talk about it and I would use activities from improv theater to illustrate some of the principles if I think that that would be useful to people. So I wanted to sort of focus on when I've been doing good improv without actually telling people that's what I'm doing. And what comes to mind is I was running a facilitation training in the Netherlands a few years ago, and the highlight of the two days was I was demonstrating some activity to them. I was setting out the rules. And for this activity, there were quite a few rules and I was slightly laboring the point.

And then someone in the room said, wouldn't it be better if we did this in that way? And they wanted to propose a different to the rules. And I said, no, no, I think we have to do it the way I said, because then it will work. And then I stopped myself and I said, oh, wait a minute. No, I think I'm making this too complicated. Why don't we go with your suggestion? And then there was this in the room as if something dramatic had happened. And I said, what was that? And they said something like, what did you just do? And I said, well, I just said I got it wrong, and I thought we'd go with your idea instead. You can do that. They more or less said, I said, oh, yes. And I suddenly realized, oh, that was the most useful thing I could teach them about facilitation.

And I wasn't trying to teach them anything. I was literally just noticing the energy in the room, dropping my plan in favor of their plan, and just going with where I felt the energy lay. And I think that's what I think good improv is. It's not some theatrical performance, it's a genuine response to what's happening. And I'd inadvertently probably made that was inadvertently the highlight of the whole two days for them that see, oh, so you can be facilitating a meeting, admit you've made a mistake and change direction relatively gracefully. And it's not a big deal. And I think that in a way feels like the best encapsulation of what I would call is the deep wisdom of being an improviser. And I suppose I reached for that story rather than there are plenty of others where I brought in an improv form and it really reenergized the meeting. There were stories like that as well.

Mark (27:48): I remember a number of occasions where I've been facilitating a session and it's gone quite wrong. It was clear we were doing the wrong thing and there were people getting grumpy and arguing with each other. And I suddenly realized that there's an issue here. What we're doing isn't going to work. And so I can remember a couple of occasions where I said, oh, hang on, wait a minute. This isn't working, is it? And silence. And I think what we should do is stop and talk about what we're doing here and why we are feeling like we are and got folks talking. And actually that for whatever reason, sparked a discussion that I didn't really understand, but something changed and they thought, well, let's stop doing this. Let's talk about this. They started talking about this and things got better, and there would've probably been quite a lot of wreckage had I not done that. But it takes quite a presence of mind just to say, this is not working. I know. I appreciate I'm responsible here in part, at least what do we do about it?

Johnnie (29:14): Yeah, I find myself saying quite a lot these days that it actually, it's more interesting when things go wrong. That's where the gold is when the job becomes really interesting. Lately, I've been saying to people when they ask how my work's going, I say, oh, it's been really good because it's been difficult and interesting, and I kind of need it to be both those things quite like it when things go wrong because it's really, we could say things have gone wrong, which usually means, oh, it's not going according to my plan. But it's also a sign of life in the room, isn't it? When someone crosses their arms and looks angry, it's like, oh, there's some life there. There's some energy in that. So-called resistance, let's look at that.

Mark (29:58): Yeah, I've said it's where the gold is a couple of times, but when there's a bit of friction, when there's a bit of energy, it's a great big signpost saying, Hey, there's something we need to deal with here. And as a facilitator, if you can help people have those difficult conversations and make it easy to provide some kind of a safety net for a difficult conversation, that's really helpful.

Johnnie (30:27): Yes. I think the way I sometimes put it is the trouble with the word facilitation is people think that what it means is making difficult things easy. But I prefer to say no. I think what it is is bringing a sense of ease to difficult things. So instead of running from difficulty or fixing difficulty, it's just slowing down, pausing and being interested in it, instead of trying to fix it in a way, focus on it, pause it, examine it, take a closer look. And I think what I've become better at with lots and lots of practice is not panicking when things don't go to plan. And I think conveying to people, oh, he doesn't seem to be panicking. Maybe it's all right that this strange thing is going on. Oh, well, then we can have a look at it and be interested in it.

Mark (31:17): So you should have put the words, don't panic in neon letters on the front of your creative facilitation book.

Johnnie (31:24): Somewhere in that book, I think there's a section in it. It might be that it was in the first edition, not the second, but a friend of ours called Andrew Rickson wrote a great chunk of copy for us about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy being the ultimate facilitation guide for that reason.

Mark (31:44): That's interesting. That really is. We've got, as far as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I'm kind of thinking this is a good place to stop.

Johnnie (31:53): There's something I often do when I feel like a thing is over. I go, it's probably over. But what if we talk for another five minutes just in case? Then maybe there is one more thing because we've got nothing to lose. You can always edit it out later. There's something about the principle of sticking around and waiting that I think is important. And I think it's something I've got, again, I think relatively recently got really paying attention to the skill of waiting. Actually, you've caught to mind a very funny story. It may or may not really belong here, but a friend of mine told me his secret for when he had to go to conventional networking events and how he as an introvert managed it. He used to find them, as I always do, quite excruciating. And he said what he decided to do was to find one person was on their own gently start a conversation with them and then not end it, let them walk away if they were bored, let them stop if they wanted to, but just stay present with them and kind of wait.

And I tried it out at a thing a few weeks ago and I thought, oh, that's really good. That really suits me because actually if you wait, usually something else interesting will happen. And I think in the spirit of unhurried, I think I'm paying more attention to, well, what if I stay with this sometimes slightly uncomfortable experience and just wait to see what else happens? I think we live in a world that where we feel like, oh, right, mustn't waste any time, must move on to the next thing. And I suspect that a lot of the talent for facilitating well is quite conspicuously practicing, not hurrying, hanging around a little bit longer to see if anything else might happen.

Mark (33:34): So the acid test is there 30 seconds of silence and nothing happens. And that's the end.

Johnnie (33:48): I'm going to interrupt that 30 seconds with one more thing actually, which is the most ... Another thing that I think is very interesting that I've been doing lately is a friend of mine has been hosting events on Zoom where we hold intentional silence for 10 to 15 minutes, once or twice during the call when we are meeting to talk about a subject. He says, we will begin with, let's say 10 minutes in which we stay on the call. We don't close our eyes and meditate. We stay available on the screen. We don't have to stare at the camera, but we have to be in the zoom meeting and we're going to sit together in silence for 10 minutes. And that sounds completely bonkers, but there have been some of the most satisfying things I've done in the past year. When you choose to be silent together, what you realize is all sorts of interesting things happen to your own thinking.

And it allows one to think about the topic of the meeting in a very fresh way. It actually does more for my creative thinking about the subject than any amount of clever things other people say or clever things I say, because I think in that silence, my personal experience is that I start to start to more fully arrive to this meeting with other human beings and have a sense of, oh, human beings, aren't they amazing, rich, complex creatures. Here we are just sitting and not saying anything and stuff. Interesting stuff is happening to us. And I think it would be a really good practice for people actually who are interested in complexity because I think the danger with complexity is we get very excited about it and inadvertently treat it as if it's complicated and behave as if it's a complicated thing that if we explain it and talk and say enough, we can grab it and hold it. And I think the practice of sitting with the slight discomfort, oblique excitement of sitting in silence together might be a really interesting gateway to feeling if you like the complexity of a human system.

Mark (35:54): So there must be a new book there, Johnny. Shut up: A Guide to 21st Century Leadership.

Johnnie (36:03): Well, I hadn't thought of that, but maybe there is. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.