episode 251 | Jul 28, 2025 | 76min

Minding the Invisible

In this conversation with Gayle Karen Young we explore her work in helping companies deeply understand their culture, what kinds of questions she uses to reveal the culture, creating the container for sense-making, wellbeing within systems, balancing coherence and deviance and including cultural shaping technologies.
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In this podcast we talk about:

04:30 Introducing Gayle’s work
09:30 A lens on complexity
15:30 Creating a container for sense-making
21:30 Weaving the mythic and mundane
25:30 Balancing coherence and deviance
31:30 Wellbeing within systems
36:00 Fundamental inquiries
39:30 Exploring belonging in organizations
47:30 Experiencing a system
53:30 Allowing for complex, emergent systems
57:00 Including cultural shaping technologies
1:05:00 Unpacking founder influences
1:11:00 Attending to the visible and invisible

Resources Mentioned:
Cultivating Leadership 
Janine Benyus
David Whyte
Jennifer Garvey Berger
Dave Snowden
Dan Siegel

About the Guest

Gayle Karen Young

Gayle Karen Young is a culture-builder and a catalyst for human and organizational development. She comes from a multifaceted organizational consulting background with both corporate, NGO, and philanthropic clients. She was in process of becoming a Zen monk when she became an executive instead, taking on the role of Chief Culture and Talent Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia and its sister free-knowledge projects) until early 2015. Now she sits on the leadership team of the firm Cultivating Leadership and is a senior advisor for the Hearthland Foundation. Gayle works to create dynamic organizational cultures in which people can thrive and thus make greater contributions. She sits on the boards of the
Albert Einstein Institution and the Center for Humane Technology.

WEBSITE
Cultivating Leadership 
https://www.gaylekarenyoung.com/

About the Host

Joel Monk

Joel Monk is a leadership coach, educator and entrepreneur. He co-founded Coaches Rising, a company on the cutting edge of online coach training with a community of over 65,000 coaches. Coaches Rising programs regularly include participants from every continent on the planet and they have collaborated with some of the leading minds in the field of human development and coaching. Joel is also a leadership coach, coaching at companies such as THNK, Booking.com, Siemens and Naspers. Joel has designed and led several entrepreneurial and leadership development programs, at places such as Socionext, THNK and The Impact Hub Amsterdam.

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