Because there's a way in which a lot of what we're doing in the everyday domain is invisible, so we think it's magic. But actually, I think it might just be things that we take for granted, or tacit knowledge, or a simple everyday things that humans just in fact can't help but do. Like we all know how to listen in some functional way, we don't necessarily know how to listen to each other deeply, or to listen as a kind of leadership responsibility, or to listen from a perspective that you cannot take yourself. So you and I, I think we're different racial identities, think of ourselves and somewhat different ways, and it can be pretty hard to understand the experience of someone who has a different demographic identity than you do. So one of the things that happened over the summer, and this is my way of answering some of the questions in the chat, is that there were companies and individuals who were kind of caught on their heels, sort of saying, why are we so surprised by what happened with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? Why are we so surprised? Why are we not more prepared? In some ways, for those of us who are old enough, that kind of conversations around Ferguson weren't really that long ago. So if it's the case, that practice helps prepare us and maybe makes us a little bit wiser, shouldn't we be a little bit wiser? And many companies especially finding themselves not wiser at all, not able to react, pretty caught off guard. So part of the idea of the leadership gym is to keep you in good shape, right? So if you went to the gym during Ferguson and you didn't go to the gym since then, you're probably in pretty bad shape. And I think that's actually a fair comparison. So if you talked about race six years ago and then you didn't talk about it for six years, didn't think about it much, didn't think it was relevant, it wasn't really in the news cycle or in your organizational conversations with urgency, it wasn't about this quarter, it didn't get your attention or the metrics or the measurement, you're probably out of shape. And when you're out of shape, it's hard to run, and we had to sprint this summer. >> Yeah and I think something that came up in the article that I want to talk about, so this is a good time, we seem to be allergic to discomfort, to feeling discomfort in this country, and we talk a lot at the Center about becoming more comfortable with being uncomfortable. And these conversations, the conversations about black lives matter, about even about going back to school, and what's going to happen with racial justice, racial injustice when we go back to school, they're not comfortable conversations? >> No. >> You cannot use, you don't have strategies if you haven't used the strategies in six years or you never had them to begin with. Well, one now is the time to get them, and urgently. But you're not going to be able to step into that conversation because you actually don't know what you're going to do. And even if you have the courage to say what's on your mind, you get up the courage and you make a statement, you don't know what's going to come back at you. And then, and then what? And how you can manage it. So I think people avoid that also because even after an encounter that might be authentic and full of curiosity, and might even go well, then there's tomorrow. And when you're in that same conversation with that same person, but it's a day later, and you had realized you've been vulnerable. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the good news and the bad news that there's almost always tomorrow. It's really that you are accountable for your actions tomorrow should be part of our context of working together, so that it's not the case that you can just say any old thing out of reactivity and then pretend the next day that it didn't happen. I mean, you can do that, but it's a certain kind of organizational culture and context that allows that. And it usually only allows it for certain demographics, both in gender and race. And so there's usually a little bit more of a kind of punishing or a certain kind of accountability for demographics that are in the minority. They just can't get away with as much stuff, so how do we kind of build a culture that could work? So part of it, I think, is to use your term, getting getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. You really can build familiarity with doing difficult things. We can do difficult things, we're doing difficult things right now. And many people were quite surprised how quickly we moved into work from home mode. You might have seen the company plan for this for two years if it had been a kind of planned transition, we can do much more difficult things and we can adapt to circumstances that may surprise us. So if there's a kind of silver lining to this entire period, for me, as someone who believes in the power of experiential learning, we have a kind of the perfect platform for experiential learning. We have deep opportunity now to get wiser about how we can adapt, how we can actually have conversations that we experience initially as difficult, and these conversations are going to keep coming back about race.
