290 - Marvin Oka

Joel Monk: [00:00:23] So Marvin, good to be with you again. And we're going to talk about decision-making, coaching leaders around decision-making. I really enjoyed our last conversation. How are you first of all?

Marvin Oka: [00:00:36] Yeah, good. Thanks, and busy as always. Like yourself. And it was a great conversation last time. Lengthy, but it was great.

Joel Monk: [00:00:44] Yeah. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend people tune into that because you've brought in so many powerful perspectives and distinctions. So let me just give a quick intro to you and you can add anything I missed. But so you're an international consultant coach, speaker, thought leader, specializing in neurobehavioral modeling, which is a behavioral change technology. [00:01:11] and that can be applied to significantly improve human performance in different areas. You've been for over 40 years supporting organisations and leaders in complex environments, your clients have range from people like UniLever, Asia Pacific, yet Chrysler, and many government agencies as well, and you've also co-authored the book and Did I miss anything out there, Marvin, you want to add about who you are?

Marvin Oka: [00:01:44] Thanks. No, that pretty much captures a lot of things. The major focus of my work is around technically what's called second order, or more easily known as transformational change, whether that's whole system change, or whether that's within an individual. [00:02:01] Therefore known as what's called the vertical change or evolution of consciousness. And the ultimate goal, though, is to elevate wisdom of decision-making in society. So we just have wiser leaders, making better decisions that create a better future than probably where we're headed now, probably around the world.

Joel Monk: [00:02:19] Yeah. And we talked in our last conversation about second order change in more detail. And we related that to the world situation right now. You talked about how you can see that the world, the systems of the world are perturbed, which is creating intensity. It's challenging, but it's also creating the conditions for deeper transformation. So, the possibility for that. That's not guaranteed.

Joel Monk: So I recommend people listen to that and we'll probably touch into some of those ideas again today. Let me start by just referencing something you just said before we hit record, which was that you created an offering and you're initially going to separate out coaches and consultants. [00:03:09] But then you decided to keep them together and I think this is an important aspect of our conversation today that you know, coaches need to be to know about the outer work, you know, and consultants need to know about the inner work that's no longer sufficient, maybe to just focus on one or the other. What do you have thoughts on that?

Marvin Oka: [00:03:30] Yeah, exactly. Again, as we spoke about in the previous conversation, if we back up a little bit to first principles, first organizing principles, really what we're looking at is a function of integration of bringing things together. particular system. So the opposite to that to the integration is obviously separation or fragmentation or the classic tailorist reductionist approach will rebreak things apart. [00:04:07] And again, you know, in systems thinking that one of the common phrases is colloquial phrases is you can't cut an elephant in half and have two baby elephants. You can't just break it apart and expect to see Originally, I was thinking and creating a learning ecosystem for professional change agents of separating out consultants and slash senior leaders that are trying to lead systemic change within their organization. And then coaches transformational coaches and I would separate them out.

Marvin Oka: and then I was given some advice by some colleagues which made total sense after they set it. It's like, well, actually no, I should actually have them in the same conversation because they're bringing in two sides of tackling the complex issue. You can't fragment and go into reductionism and separate them out of separate things. That is important for transformational coaches to realize that when they're coaching, saying executive or a business leader dealing with complexity, [00:05:09] You know, goal achievement and it's not sometimes just rearranging a lot of their sense of identity or police, you really have to work with how they are making sense or what's commonly called in the trade sense making of complexity and because there's all sorts of dynamic complexity that's creating these pressures that. that are relatively, I won't say unresolvable, but are mystifying, given their particular perspective in World View, and the coach needs to know how the system is playing out. But on the flip side, consultants, systemic consultants, strategic consultants, as well as senior executive leaders. They need to know that you can't just...

Marvin Oka: you know, trying to create changes in a system without understanding the impact on the individual. And you have to understand what coaches have to deal with when they've got clients that are at the effect of some executives decisions. [00:06:04] And you know, the things that have to go on. So these things are two parts of the puzzle. And it helps when the conversations are there. So we have a more integrated conversation. So we can get a much more well-rounded multifaceted picture of us as to what is the complex complex issue that we're actually dealing with in most organizations.

Joel Monk: [00:06:24] I think that's a great kind of tear up for where we want to go around complex decisions and decision making and leadership. We talked a lot in our last conversation about your philosophy of transformational coaching itself. We might tap into some of those principles today, but we're going to focus on coaching leaders in making decisions. And so what I'm hearing is like, there's the inner, we could say, or the individual side of that, and then those, you know, the kind of more technical or out-of-world aspect of it too. [00:07:02] And so maybe we start with the inner side. I know you've spoken about, the importance of accessing more of our intelligence, then we may be normally do.

Joel Monk: How do you view decision-making and what makes it more effective? And how do you coach people? I mean, I'm teeing up a lot of things here. You know, on that individualistic side, how would you start to educate people, listening about that?

Marvin Oka: [00:07:31] Okay, it's a good question as to where to start because there's so many different entry points here. The first thing is let's just, you know, make sure that everyone appreciates that decision making is not one thing. There's many different types of decision making processes and They vary dramatically. So there's a difference obviously between a technical decision that needs to be made versus one that requires personal evolution as a way to respond. [00:08:01] And even then, when there's a personal evolution, we have to make a distinction between whether or not it actually is a decision. or we are now talking about choosing or choice, which is different than decision making. And then there's a difference between that and simply expression of authentic, behavioral expression based on what is your,

Marvin Oka: Your internal truth or internal perspective of the world and how would you just naturally express that and what you're going to do next, which is it's not really a decision and in many ways it's not even really a choice it's just natural expression of you doing you and so these are all very different things but coming back to your question from the practical side of things. The first question will be, what is the nature of the decision that needs to be made? So, if we're dealing with a senior executive in a large, large organization, for instance, and they're in a particular industry that has a lot of complexity to it, then we are dealing with a type of decision that has to account for, not just complexity, but uncertainty. [00:09:06] How do you make a decision in the context of uncertainty? How do you make it when there's a lot of ambiguity? How do you make it when conditions are changing? And so you're basically in a state of a poor area where you have to know that you don't know everything, but you still have to make a decision anyway. That's a different type of decision than a technical one.

Marvin Oka: technical one is there's a clear technical problem to be solved and if you've got enough expertise and knowledge and experience, well you can come up with a good answer and make a decision and implement. That's a totally different thing. In the context of your work, Joe with transformational coaches, I would imagine that the majority of time you're dealing with people that are not only dealing but they're also dealing with internal dynamics going on for them as well. [00:10:01] Most of the times, for instance, if they're dealing with a combination of how do I be effective in a business, what is going to be the most pragmatic approach to do, but at the same time, there's going to be ethical dilemmas that will come into play because of the people impacts or what it has to do with culture or things of the nation. I'm not going to go for the short-term return to shareholders for this quarter or I'm not going to look at the long-term impacts to the people that work here and the impact on their families because of their job situation to what arranged by the types of things and the person in that in a decision-making position is often wrestling the internal conflict with the external ambiguity.

Marvin Oka: And that's a completely different set of coaching needs at that particular point. So coming back to your question, what would I start? First step is what is the nature of the decision? what are there's always going to be as we spoke about in the last conversation there's always this interrelationship between the internal and the external. [00:11:04] They go together, you can't separate the two. So I have to know what that particular balance is. And then depending upon what the issue is, why can't they resolve this themselves will then determine what approach or methodology or process I would engage in next.

Joel Monk: [00:11:22] So, you gave some criteria there for the difference between technical and complex. And I think people get a sense of the, I'm also thinking of like the Cynefin model, Dave Snowden's kind of criteria for sense-making, what kind of domain are you in? So, yeah, if you were talking to a leader, trying to help locate what kind of, terrain this is, you know, how would you know from what they're saying that this is a complex territory.

Marvin Oka: [00:12:03] Okay, so again, if we if we just kind of clarify a few things for your listeners did that that may not be so familiar with with say the Snowden's kind of Cynefin model. So, you know, you've got to separate ways not the situation you're in is relatively simple or whether it's complicated, or whether it's complex or whether it's chaotic. And so we've got these very, very different scenarios that are in play, but let's just stay with complex for the moment, which is, you have many variables that are in play and the variables change, they're constantly changing. Nothing's stable, nothing's clear. It's what, you know, Ronald Heifetz from Harvard would have called the difference between technical versus adaptive challenges, and therefore a different approach will require for leadership, technical versus adaptive leadership, and so in an adaptive context where you're dealing with complexity, there's some key things to understand, one is, [00:13:00] no one will ever completely know exactly how everything what's actually going on is complex is dynamically complex. You can ask 10 people and you'll have 10 different views as to what's going on or even 10 different views as to what the actual problem is.

Marvin Oka: So the approach you have to now take is decision making that is not based on analysis and is not based on certainty. It's based on Now interestingly enough, thanks to behavioral economics, thanks to men and diversities where sometimes the word heuristics gets a bad name. Sometimes this thing's like, OK, if you're working from decision heuristics, it's prone to bias, is prone to error and logical fallacies. Well, true. And at the same time in complexities, the only thing you can reach for. You have to reach for heuristics, but you have to, you have to know that you're reaching for heuristics. You have to know that you're figuring things out as you go, which means your decisions have to be, has to take a no count, what you know, taking no count, what you don't know, which you have to try and make as explicit as possible.

Marvin Oka: [00:14:08] And then you're going to go for short feedback loops. And that's why Snowden talks about if you're going to create something where you're going to nudge the system to reorganize and emerge differently. You have to do little experiments. You have to try a few things out. Get really short feedback loops and then navigate differently as you go as things start to emerge in a particular direction. And so this type of decision making is based on uncertainty. it thrives in uncertainty. In fact, that's why you use that particular approach.

Marvin Oka: The challenge is most Western management. We are trained to value certainty. We want certainty and stability. We want to know. We want to be data driven. We want the facts. And in a complex environment, that's going to be close to impossible.

Marvin Oka: Many times people will argue what even the facts are. [00:15:00] And so to try and reach for certainty in a complex dynamicly complex environment is already fraught with danger. And as Ronald Heifetz points out, if you take a technical approach in an adaptive situation, not only is it doomed to fail, but many times you can make the situation worse. And so you really have to understand what the situation that that's that's in play is then therefore what kind of approach you want to want to use, but the what is class is a good decision or a wise decision that definition changes depending upon the context in which that decision is being made.

Joel Monk: [00:15:40] So how would you coach some a leader if they were in a complex environment. I'm thinking, you know, a heuristics like, is it the US army, you know, capture the high ground, you know, if things if they're in a complex environment and things are [00:16:01] and then not going to plan, it's like capture the high ground, remain in contact. I think there's a third one. You know, coaches rising, we've played around with creating our own heuristics as well. You know, to kind of moron, unless successful degrees, you know?

Joel Monk: And in a way, I think we tend to kind of have implicit curiosities as well that are kind of part of our DNA. But how would you, is it about coaching someone to create heristics? How would you coach a leader who was in a complex environment, you know, and yeah, what would you do?

Marvin Oka: [00:16:38] Okay, I do have here. Okay, this is great, because like, as we spoke about before, for me, everything's contextual. So you have to specify the context that determines what's going to be appropriate and not appropriate. If you're dealing with a technically complex environment or a wicked issue, a very complex issue, especially if you're a leader in a large organization, [00:17:06] step one, don't try and make any kind of decision as a leader by yourself. I guess you've got stakeholders in play. That's one of the things that makes it complex.

Marvin Oka: So it needs to be a group conversation process where they do a group sense making process to understand the complexity and why technical approach may not work. Now, keep in mind, a lot of adaptive responses require some technical decisions, but it's not solely technical if it's an adaptive issue. So you need to bring the group along. So essentially it becomes in the work that I will do with large corporates and leadership teams. It becomes group coaching. And in many ways, I have to teach them how to have a conversation that moves the group through complexity and arrive at a useful decision that has short feedback loops. I'll come back and explain that a little bit and it's related to the work that, you know, you were talking about you had a chat with Richard Haymes earlier with the work that Richard Haymes and I developed and originally we call that strategic navigation, which was based on heuristics, but I'll come back to that in just a moment. [00:18:08] So one part of the answer is.

Marvin Oka: working with a group to deal with dynamic complexity in their environment. If the context however is different, where we're now talking about a leader trying to deal with people issues, say it's a cultural issue or it's an ethical issue or whatever it might be. Well that's a very different process. It may involve the group or maybe solely based on stuff that they are particularly dealing with. And so, in that particular case, I might reach for things like as you were, you know, I were talking about before, before we started recording around some of the work my colleague and I had done many years back around working with multiple intelligences, not so much gardeners work, but some of the work we saw, we discovered through neuroscience where we started to find, we actually have three functioning intelligences or brains. With a head brain, a heart brain and a gut brain, and they are legitimate brains. [00:19:00] That's not a metaphor. It actually is quite literal.

Marvin Oka: And when things get aligned through the three, you're going to have a much wiser decision making when it comes to things like values, fix, or else, cultural leadership, things of that nature. So there's a very different classes, classes of decisions. So I don't know which one you want to go into.

Joel Monk: [00:19:22] Let's go. Well, you know, I can I definitely want to talk about the brains, but I think let's just stay on this kind of more, you know, collective sense making first. So, you know, you said, you first all don't make that decision alone. If it's about people, you know, I'm just thinking like if the topic is like, hey, You know, we feel we're in the world right now. Things are really uncertain. You know, our revenues kind of flatlined. It's going OK, but we feel like we need to innovate, but we don't really know what to create.

Joel Monk: [00:20:03] You know, we've tried a few things. It's not worked. Like, what are we gonna do? You know, something like that kind of topic. Would that be a collective sense making? Definitely.

Marvin Oka: [00:20:13] Yeah, definitely. Okay, great, great scenario that you've prepared. All right, a couple of things. As I said before, many, a few decades back Richard Hames and I, we developed a methodology. We call it strategic navigation, which is, how do you lead in complex environments, changing environments, with many different models, but two of them apply to what we're talking about here. So one is what we simply call the strategic learning spiral. It was based on a don't learning theory, but it becomes very practical. at the high level.

Marvin Oka: It's simple. Once we start borrowing down deeper though, it starts getting complex very fast. But for right now, let's just keep it at the high level, which is there's going to be four types of conversations that need to be had. Not necessarily in order and not necessarily [00:21:03] all done in one meeting, let's say. So first, there are sensing conversations. So sensing conversations is, for me to actually have any kind of intelligent processing of something that my senses need to come in contact with it, which means if there's an issue affecting this organization or industry or whatever it might be, somebody better show it to me or tell me about it or let me experience it. And this is where this is a scenario you exactly pointed out.

Marvin Oka: Oh, this is going on or it's getting harder or we feel like we should be doing something and that has to be floated. We have to kind of know what's going on in people's minds at this point. But then we now have to do some processing to make sense of it. So there's now a making sense conversation. These issues that are coming out, what do they mean? What are the implications for us? Then once we can understand it up to a point, we can't ever understand it fully if it's a complex environment, a complex issue. [00:22:02] But we understand it enough because we're gonna have to take action at some point.

Marvin Oka: We can't just keep navel gazing forever while the company's floundering. So we're gonna have to go into a designing conversation. Now, designing is not the same as problem solving. We're not here to solve problems. We're actually here to actually design or create a new capability for us to address this thing that we've made sense of. And then once we've designed something, then we're going to an action in conversation about who's doing what, when, and then we have a sensing conversation again, in a short, iterative loop. What has been our impact and how is that changing our conditions and therefore changing our internal adaptation responses, etc. So the sensing making sense designing, actioning cycle, it's key to applying through.

Marvin Oka: And again, there's more subtleties to it, but these are four big phases. But in the middle of that, while we're having this conversation, we have what we call levels of conversation. [00:23:02] So levels of depth. And at the most shallow level are going to be what we call issues, events, opinions. And this is where we got all this issue. This is happening. You know, this is a problem or these events. This occurred, this didn't occur.

Marvin Oka: or opinions. I think, well, I've got a good idea, whatever it might be. And if a conversation only stays at this level, your meetings will go around and around in circles because there's a thousand issues, there's infinite amount of events that haven't happened over the past week. Everyone's got their own ideas and you can't get anywhere further than that. However, it's an important entry point. It's exactly as you said. You know, I'm feeling this. It feels like we should be innovating something.

Marvin Oka: That's my opinion. All right. They were supposed to hit budget last month, but they didn't. And now we're about, it's like, okay, here we go. So you capture issues register. But don't stop there. You have to go underneath that and start talking about patterns and trends. [00:24:04] Start to go great.

Marvin Oka: These issues that is now capturing our attention. Are they increasing? Are they decreasing? Are these flat lining? Is this something new we've never seen before? Is it something that we had like you know six years ago and it went away and now it's come back? because that insight tells us something more that tells us more than just putting out the fires, we're actually trying to see, okay, something's occur, but so what? But if we see, look, you know, through a trendline, we can spot a boiled frog.

Marvin Oka: We can actually see, yeah, look, you know, it is getting warmer over the last 10 years. It keeps getting warmer, okay? We can't need to know this, right? Or we start to see, okay, wait a minute. You know, we're having a drop in income, but what is that? Is that this quarter or is that a trend line that's been occurring over the last three years, which means we're getting more and more irrelevant to the marketplace? We need to know this. But underneath that comes systemic structures.

Marvin Oka: [00:25:03] So this is where the systems thinking now comes into play. We have to know what's driving the trend line. So when we're having a conversation now about this as a group, You need it as a group because no one person understands the whole system. We need multiple perspectives. And when we use an approach, based on complex adaptive systems, when we start mapping the system as far as we can with the perspectives, we have access to, you're going to start to find like any living system. The system is self-organizing. These are some of the key first principles around system.

Marvin Oka: It's self-organizing. And it's revolving around a core set of feedback loops. It's less than a handful set of feedback loops. And you'll see it for the people that study things around living systems. You'll know that systems, complex adaptive systems, people as well as biologists all the way to chaos scientists, they've been studying things like what's called swarming a behavior in animals. [00:26:01] So whether you're seeing flocks of birds, like starlings, good things, amazing patterns in the sky, or you're watching schools of fish that are also me along and then also they all turn at the same time, and it's just like how, you know, bees swarming around. The bees keep swarming in a particular pattern and staying in a swarm.

Marvin Oka: How is that possible? How is it possible that you don't really have a manager, so to speak, but everybody's self-organizing to create this collective pattern that's in play. which by the way, maps straight across to how cultures were. A lot of people in the complex of data systems were never recognized, you know, you only need a handful of core rules to set up a handful of feedback loops to produce the whole swarming behavior. So things like, for instance, flocks of birds, let's take, you know, ducks, ducks fly migrating, right? There's only need a handful of rules, which is someone leads, and if they get tired and they fall back, someone take over, and it's like, fly towards the center of the group, but don't hit any other bird. [00:27:12] Keep a distance where you can stay close, but don't hit anybody. Keep flying in the center.

Marvin Oka: You only need a handful and you get this whole flock behavior. only a handful of things. And you can program it in to object or into program. You can you can program agents to use a handful of rules and look start producing patterns on your computer that look a lot like living systems like living, you know, of communities and it's quite remarkable. So part of it is looking at in a systemic structures. something like a culture, or, you know, why is it so hard to get a decision made and and stake holders neutralize it every step of the way or something like this should obviously, from an achievement framework, this should work beautifully, would fix everything, but yet it's so hard to implement. Why is that, odds are likely you have a living system that has these balancing loops that's neutralizing it, and unless you can adjust the core feedback loops, the system will [00:28:06] to homeostasis, back to status quo.

Marvin Oka: So once we do a systems map through group conversation, and we're talking about the connections and links so we're all upgrading between the years as we go, we're all evolving our mental models together. Then we start to identify what are some of the core feedback loops that seems that everything else, if we try and create a $1 million change project on the periphery, it's just going to get neutralized back to this core loop, because it keeps coming back to this. So how do we address the core loop? Sometimes you can go directly, sometimes not. Sometimes you have to go indirectly, but this is where you create now systemic change projects. And as Snowden talks about, they have to be little experiments, because it's not technical. It's not a formula. You don't know if it's going to work, right?

Marvin Oka: But your best guess right now, your best hypothesis is we can try this. [00:29:00] Let's do a short test. little time box sprint and let's try it and see what happens. Let's see what the system does with that. How does the system perturb and it's reorganizing because the system will try to rebalance itself. So these are different rules, right? You don't just implement. You have to kind of see how does the living system behave here and you're looking and use other language underneath systems thinking.

Marvin Oka: The understanding system spent on chart the next level of conversation down is, is looking at world views, paradigms, mental models, core assumptions, the beliefs, this is where, in a group conversation, you've got the safety of servicing those in the group conversation. But in a transformational coaching world, this is where you can go directly at it. So if you've got a leader that's frustrated, they've been trying, and now they're getting burnt out because the system keeps neutralizing them, and they don't know what to do, should they quit, but they love their career, it's like, okay, let's just go back and challenge some of your mental models, right? [00:30:02] Because one of the reasons why you're getting frustrated may not be what's happening around you is that you're working to a set of maps in your mind. that don't match the territory of what's going on, you actually think it should work like this when it doesn't work like that. That's why you're frustrated. So here's now where the upgrade occurs. But to be able to find all of that, you need at the bottom level of this levels of conversation, what we call meta language, you need to be able to have a wave talking about these distinctions.

Marvin Oka: And that's what the transformational coach needs, that's what I was mentioning to. Last time around, you need a good theory of change. Like, how do you actually think it works? What is your meta language to make distinctions most people don't make? And if you can make these distinctions, you've got more things you can have finesse with, and more subtlety with. And so when we start to see these core loops that are in play in a system, and we look for ways to have, we can nudge it. Then one of the metal language things we can look for, which is a mental model, which the metal language is shaped by our mental models. [00:31:05] I think I may have mentioned it last time.

Marvin Oka: I'm not sure. It's a distinction that comes from sustainable agriculture of all places, and regenerative systems. And it's a terminology called free energy and bound energy. Now, this is really useful language. So if you take a look at water running down a slope, right? What you're seeing, thanks to gravity, you're seeing free energy. The water is moving as it naturally would in relationship to its terrain, in relationship to its environment. And you see this free energy, there's energy there, but it's free, it's doing its thing.

Marvin Oka: But then you might see at some point the topography, the terrain changes. and the mathematics inverts and all of a sudden it goes from down to suddenly there's a it goes more concave and all of a sudden you start to see a pool of water. That's there. Right, I said, wow, that energy is now bound. That's bound to energy, right? [00:32:01] So if you're going to dig a dam, where would you dig it? Right, where the bound energy is? So it's already bound, that's really great.

Marvin Oka: If you need energy that you need it to harness, what would you do? Will you tap into the free energy? Where is the free energy? Now, in the context of change as a general rule, this is not a hard-fast prescription, but as a general heuristic, You try and look for, where is the free energy in the system? In other words, let's take a look at what are the themes and topics that the culture likes talking about, right? Or energizes the culture, find the free energy and bind it in a useful way. If this is what mobilizes the culture, well, then let's create a change initiative based on it.

Marvin Oka: Everybody will mobilize because the energy is already there, right? The flip side is fine. If you stock, find where is the bound energy and free it up. So someone goes, I'm frustrated, I can't get anything down. [00:33:00] Oh, great. Well, let's have a workshop that takes to look at everybody's frustrations. And let's talk about it and just free it up. And you might find some creative energy coming out of there.

Marvin Oka: So as a general, now you start getting really creative about how do I take free energy and bind it in a way that's useful and take Unusful bound energy and free it up where we can now utilize it because it's freed up to now for more creative purposes. But you need that language to see it. And when you have that language, it changes your mental models. We shouldn't change it the way you understand the system, which then tells you why the patterns and trends are going that way and therefore changes what kind of issues and things you want to actually respond to and not respond to. So these are things you can do with the particular group. And so these are the kinds of things of ways we can facilitate. Transformation via transformational conversations. There's ways to have conversations that probe people's mental models freed up, but it's all within a context of language they like, which is productivity, achievement, strategy, et cetera.

Marvin Oka: So anyway, it's a short, short thing to... [00:34:01] It's experiencing church trying to get across something a lot more deeper than that. But anyway, that's a story.

Joel Monk: [00:34:07] That was an exquisite sort of force through this process. Could you apply, I know you don't, this is an example I gave you of an organization, revenue kind of flat lines. There's a sense of like we want to evolve, become something different, innovate, not quite sure where, but there's certain impulses, but then there's also like it's not happening. Kind of keeps them doing the same thing we've always done. How would you, with that example, just to apply a little bit of what you just shared, these stages of sense making, designing, and then the levels of depth from the issues events level down to patterns to feedback loops and then mental models, how would you, How do you explain that example and what might be going on there? [00:35:01] Yeah.

Marvin Oka: [00:35:03] Okay, you get several things in play there. So one is, as you said, look, you know, let's say your things are flat lining. Despite your efforts. That's a sign that you have to see the organization as a living system. Okay, so this is, for I remind me, I have to come back to this point. The whole idea around the living system. I don't know if we spoke about this last time or not. So as you know, I'm very keen on looking at language and how it affects our psychology and neurology in a range of things.

Marvin Oka: And there is, this is part of what we call transformational conversations and transformational narrative and use of borrowing from Noam Chomsky's terms around transformational linguistics, but it's quite used in a different way. So, a middle language about language, right, is, and I don't know if I said this the last time as well. So I often, if I'm the keynote presentation, the groups are things along topics like this, I might open the conversation with this little anecdote or parable. [00:36:08] This is, you know, it's often been said there are three great mysteries in the universe. And the first mystery is to a bird, what is air? The second great mystery is to a fish, what is water? And the third great mystery is to a human, what is language? Now, language is what areas to the bird and fish and water is to the fish.

Marvin Oka: We swim in it, we fly in it, we create our realities with narrative. narrative being held up by the way we language things into existence in our mind, and it's so unconscious to us, we don't realize we're swimming in it or flying in it or things like that. And we can be trapped by it if we're not conscious of it. Hence, when the bottom of the level of conversation, Richard and I call it metal language, we need to have a language about language, you have to not using language. [00:37:03] One of these is what's called a paradigmatic metaphor. And so these are the metaphors we used to that our whole paradigm is based on. Now, these metaphors, again, barring a little bit from Joseph Campbell's work, where he's saying, if we say something like John runs like a deer, that's not a metaphor, that's a simile. Whereas a metaphor would be Johnny is a deer.

Marvin Oka: So if we now generalize that across, when people say things like I have a mountain of work on my desk, And if you look, go to their desk and you look, there is no mountain there. It's just the metaphor, right? But the metaphor is the thing. So it's not like I have a mountain of desk. I actually think it is a mountain. And if I use that language, what's my subjective experience? My subjective experience is overwhelmed.

Marvin Oka: because a mountain is too much. [00:38:01] And you're looking, it's not. It's a stack of files only so high. All right. And when someone says, I've got, I've got a tsunami of emails. And you look at Snota Sumami, Snota Sumami. Yeah, you've got a hundred emails, but that's not a tsunami. That's a lot, but it's not a tsunami, right?

Marvin Oka: But if you respond to it like it's a tsunami, you're gonna feel like it's out of your control. Now, if you look at things like finance, people who do a good financial thinking, there is a paradigmatic metaphor about how to think financially in terms of financial terms. And if you know the metaphor, you're thinking freeze up considerably. What's the metaphor? The paradigmatic metaphor is water. And if you think in terms of finance, we have cash flows. We're looking at revenue streams. We're looking at cash pools.

Marvin Oka: We put our money in banks. We got liquid assets. You have to think in plumbing. And you can see how money moves, pools, a drape, cash, drains, right? [00:39:01] You can see how it works. It's like, oh, okay, I see how this thing plays out. In the olden days, the paradigmatic metaphor for marketing was warfare. We had marketing campaigns, which is a military term.

Marvin Oka: We have target launches. We have to take the pistol approach. We got target markets. We got barriers to entry. And it was warfare. Whereas if you change the metaphor, Why isn't it that first we have to conceive of the product? Then it has to just state for a while.

Marvin Oka: And we have to take care of it until we can give birth to the new product or service. Then we've got to take care of it until it can grow up until we've got to feed it until it can feed itself until it starts running around by itself until it can grow up to become a young adult. Stand on its own. Then over time it couples with another product or service creates the next generation of offspring of a new product or service. If we thought about it that way, we'd approach marketing very differently. [00:40:00] Now, coming back to the point here, right around the different types of paradigmatic metaphors. What is the paradigmatic metaphor that Western management uses for business, for an organization? Despite the term organization, it's machinery.

Marvin Oka: They start thinking that it's a thing unto itself. It's even in our legislation that it's a thing unto itself. Now machines are owned by somebody who owns the business. Well, the shareholders, well, somebody had to create the machine who created it, well, the founders, well, machines have parts, what are the parts, the departments, or the divisions? Parts, you know, parts wear out or they break down. So what do you do? Well, you replace them. We just replace personnel or replace functions.

Marvin Oka: You can completely reconfigure a machine, take it apart and rejigate in a different way. Well, that's called restructuring and a stroke of a pen. We just do that. There's a lot of things over here. We've got this problem and XYZ department. [00:41:01] Somebody fix it. Like it's a machine to fix. The challenge is that an organization is not a machine.

Marvin Oka: It's actually a living organism. It's a community. There's people involved. Now, as soon as you treat an organization, which is a living organism, right? You start thinking about that way. As soon as you treat it like a machine, what's the first class of problems you're going to have? The first class of problems will be people problems. And what's the common complaint?

Marvin Oka: Culture, lack of communication, Ethics, it'll be all the people issues. Of course, because you're using the wrong metaphor to think about how to manage a business, right? Think of it as a learning community. So things aren't broken in the business. Human organisms, they learn. We adapt, we maladapt, importantly, but we can also helpfully adapt as well. And so when we treat it that way as a living learning organism, it becomes a very different approach from how you're going to be playing these types of things. [00:42:10] All right.

Marvin Oka: How do we go about this? Well, it depends. Let's take a look at. If we have a flatline issue, there's going to be a balancing loop somewhere in systems language, which means in the mental models of people, of humans. We have a set point. We have a standard that says this is the normal and everything will gravitate back to that and you can make all the changes you want. But if I don't change what my standard is between my ears, all my behaviors are unconsciously going to make everything come back to just where it is.

Marvin Oka: And so yeah, our business has flat line and we're trying all our efforts, but yeah, you know, unconsciously, everybody's still going to go back to the same mode, the same level of performance and outputs that we were previously. And if the world has changed around us and we haven't upgraded between our [00:43:02] This flatline could be a sign that we're slowly becoming irrelevant to the larger ecosystem and we're going to go extinct or obsolete, very soon, you know, depends how long we keep funding how long we can hold out. So that's a clue right there to say, what is the balance loop? What is it? Where is the bound energy that needs to be freed up? So we can re-bind it in a more healthier set point.

Marvin Oka: And this is where good executive coaching comes in. Sometimes that can be done with groups. Sometimes it has to be done individually. I remember one organization we worked with, I'll keep them nameless that Richard and I were working with. And we asked the head of this particular large, it was a large government organization. Do you have a vision of where this agency is going to go into the future? And this was back in the late 90s, and the person had a great view of with globalization becoming late 90s. [00:44:01] Now, so globalization will still still have a conversation topic.

Marvin Oka: And you're saying he needed to be insured as a government agency that his legacy was that he could set up Australia as a economic influence in a global economy. And that's where he wanted to contribute. It's like, great. So we said, have you shared this with the rest of your leadership team? And he said, no, he's just done his thing. I said, you need to share this, right? This is where the coaching with him individually, then went to the group conversation.

Marvin Oka: And I remember when we had Richard Hames and I were there and went, When he shared it with the group, you could see the whole culture and that leadership team just palpably shift. One of them that actually said, hearing that, he said, more than ever, right? He's committed to actually help this or going to help this agency who've made the kind of changes that it's new. [00:45:03] And until then, everybody in that room wanted to make a difference. There was the energy wasn't freed up where they could do that. They were just doing government things, administrative things, right? But as soon as he said it, as soon as the head of the agency said it, it then freed everything up where suddenly everybody could now go, well, if that's what's in play, they're in, right?

Marvin Oka: And it really captured the hearts and minds. There's so many, I was working with one other large organization, for instance. And they were I have to I won't I'll keep them nameless, but I won't mention that they they were bank and only because it's relevant to the example and they were trying to look for a a purpose organizational purpose The head of strategy came to be an ask me is for some help and he said you know what we're having a hard time we have a what we call a doughnut Which is, they surveyed everybody in the bank and asked them, you know, key themes that they were all interested in, etc. [00:46:04] And they had three big themes, but they were still a whole in the middle. And they said they could not articulate a purpose and I said, well, okay. For what purpose do you need a purpose? Like what's your point?

Marvin Oka: And it said, because they want to have a single thing that can mobilize everybody around. I said, well, you don't need to keep chasing the purpose. You're saying they've already told you what it is, because of those three themes, one in particular, had massive free energy, big free energy, and they lovingly called it doing the right thing, just do the right thing. And because they were the staff knew that the bank was charging all of these unfair transactional fees on people's bank accounts, the staff didn't like charging it when people complained, they actually could empathize with the customer and they knew these fees were unfair. And they said, do the right thing. This was a massive thing. And I said, they've already told you the free energy. [00:47:02] What initiative do you want to create that is about doing the right thing?

Marvin Oka: And so, the created one, particularly on the retail banking side. around the potential of dropping the transactional fees. And when they actually did drop the transactional fees, unfair transactional fees. The staff went, this is a jerk, they loved it, they absolutely loved it, right? Suddenly the free energy got bound into a useful initiative and everybody just mobilized and they're building from the bank was so huge at that particular time. Now granted, that only was on the retail bank side. So that lasted while they had a retail bank was there, right? And when she left,

Marvin Oka: thought of that initiative left as well. But that the idea is, you can really mobilize collective by finding what's there. And this is directly linked to what we spoke about previously where Noam Chomsky was saying, real leadership is a grassroots, starts from a grassroots movement. It starts from the collective and the leaders emerge out of the collective because there are some existential angst the collective is feeling. [00:48:02] and a person or group of people can put voice to that existential angst and people mobilize right behind it because it's already there in their psyche. And without using the metal language, he was saying, there was free energy, somebody finally put it into a bound form called language and everybody went, that's it and bang all their energy channel in that direction.

Joel Monk: [00:48:24] So let me just ask something, this is amazing. When you speak about metaphors, as well, I think about coaches rising. So I'll reveal something about coaches rising here, which was, we felt a while ago. We could feel our energy stagnating and through conversation, it felt like, we're like a launch machine. Yeah, so it's actually really related to the metaphor you brought in. It's like we're we're treating ourselves like a launch machine, you know. And it's like a pizza eating contest where the first prize is pizza. [00:49:05] So you do a launch and then the prize is you've got to do another

Joel Monk: You know, it also perceives the community who take part in what we do in a particular way. And so we came to this idea of a transformational ecosystem. So actually, that's what we want to be. Where every touch point is a potential for emergence and transformation to take place. And people felt very alive and by that, which then pathways of development opened up through both the offerings we create, but the ecosystem we create, including the different stakeholders, including the team, et cetera. [00:50:08] So I'm struck by what you share and how it connects to that new metaphor and the energy releases. I can feel how there are obvious free energy in places within what we want to do that we could tap into more. Maybe we could talk about the collective side of decision making and sense making.

Joel Monk: I do want to kind of bring in the inner side of it. I mean, what I'm sat with is just if I reflect on our conversation so far, you know, is that there's this. You can't separate out the inner and outer when it comes to decision-making. And that in complex environments, you do isn't certainty. So it's a collective exploration to kind of make sense of, at some point, take action experiments that reveal more information and that you can go deeper into these kind of feedback loops [00:51:16] and, you know, kind of metaphorical kind of the metaphorical energetic patterning of the organization and kind of surface that. So it's it's it's beautiful actually I just want to share that's really stunning. I think I do have a question about how do you define and evolve feedback loops.

Joel Monk: Maybe what would you say about that if you could say you know because I do want to give us good space for the the brain the different intelligence centers. But so if you could keep that pithy what would you say about how we can diagnose and kind of evolve the feedback loops that may be keeping us in homeostasis or help us shift.

Marvin Oka: [00:51:58] Okay, so there's a lot, so as you said, I'm not how to keep it pithy. [00:52:05] First thing, probably the first two things to keep in mind is feedback loops are what any part of the system, whether it's an individual or a group or whatever it might be, any part of the system is using to know whether to keep doing what they're doing or change what they're doing in a particular way, to achieve a particular outcome. And that's the second part, which is feedback is only feedback. If there is a feed forward. So you need to have a feed forward, otherwise there's no feed back. So without a some kind of a flag of better terms here, a teleology without some kind of end that you have in mind or goal or some reference point that you're trying to achieve with as a gap between where you are to where you need to go. How do you make sense of any data?

Marvin Oka: [00:53:01] What do you do it? You have to relate it to something. And for it to be feedback, which means this is telling me how I need to correct or keep going or whatever in relation to what? There has to be some goal, some standard, some reference. And so many times, what you're looking for is that, what is that reference point? What is that comparison point? So in classic systems language, that's called a balancing loop. But there is something there that is the comparator, or which balances everything out.

Marvin Oka: So in particular case, for instance, your autonomic nervous system is constantly regulating your body temperature. Because there is a range that's ideal. And that's the set point. And it's kind of like, well, great. If you two cold, then great, you'll put on some warm clothes. If you're too hot, you'll take off for an outer garment. But you're trying to regulate to some set point or set range. That is an ideal range for body temperature, or hunger, or thirst, or happiness, or whatever it might be.

Marvin Oka: Well, culturally, same thing. How do we know what is the norm that we supposed to be about, but what is that norm? [00:54:05] And so, so many times, I've seen people where they try and set, leadership, we'll talk about inspirational goals and things, and they'll say things around how we need to achieve X. A lot of times, all they're doing is either creating bigger cognitive dissonance to the point where it's to an extent where people get frustrated and give up. Or so so different, that it's unbelievable. Nobody believes we can even do this, right? And so they'll say things like, we have these high standards we want to achieve.

Marvin Oka: And often put out linguistically, this is bad language, is bad linguistics. And it's like you never achieve a standard. Standards are not things you achieve. Standards are the minimum you settle for. They're the baseline of which anything less than that you go to instant correction, because that's a standard. [00:55:03] It's not a goal, it's a standard. And a lot of the times, if you've got really low performance, The actual real leadership move is not setting a more aspirational goal.

Marvin Oka: Sometimes the real leadership move is raised the standard because right now you're willing to accept the lowest standard and if you're willing to accept it, that's what you're going to get because it's the standard. That's the comparison point. Change the comparator. That's the what you will and won't accept, right, the bottom line. So this important thing in terms of trying to see how to use the proper language on this, that's going to be related to in this particular context or your question, what is the feed forward we are after? Now, sometimes this is a trap between technical versus adaptive. Because traditional management is based on certainty, and predictability, and they want everything to be technical.

Marvin Oka: [00:56:02] For, in the past, leadership vision was prescriptive. It prescribes form. This is what we want to achieve. Well, in a dynamically complex world, like what we live in today, sometimes a prescriptive form is very dangerous, you know, and that best, it's dangerous, at worst, it's going to get you into a lot of trouble. Because you don't know, if it's going to take you two years to achieve this vision in a prescriptive form, you don't know what the world's going to be like in two years. You don't know if that form is going to be fit for purpose into how your business needs to actually be. So how do you now have a feed forward that is qualitative.

Marvin Oka: That is something that it's a quality of a future we all want to live into, or which the form is emergent. The form a lot, we can change the form as long as we have the qualitative direction. And at that point, then leadership becomes can be very mobilizing and very adaptive at the same time.

Joel Monk: [00:57:01] So, for example, we clarified recently, or I felt like what we create needs to have depth, alignment and coherence. That's a kind of, maybe get into that level of heuristics. The team felt like, if we get too busy, we lose the space for the magic, and that became parlance around the organizers. It was like, we need to give space for the magic, so we did, and people took action on it. It was like it came from, so this lines with that kind of, we want everything to have depth, coherence, and alignment. Now, as a standard, it's not something we're trying to live into, I guess I'm sharing that. And I'm wondering about the feedback loops, is like, how that connects to feedback loops, really coming back to that question of setting feedback loops that are generative.

Marvin Oka: [00:58:00] Yeah. Okay. So here we're going to have two sentences.

Joel Monk: [00:58:07] Because I want to go to the brains now, but I just think, yeah, thanks for giving me on track.

Marvin Oka: [00:58:13] This is really important. So maybe two things. So one is. When you mentioned the words what were the values you had, you had, there was depth, alignment, depth, alignment, and coherence.

Joel Monk: [00:58:29] And then there was this like everything we got to give space for the magic.

Marvin Oka: [00:58:32] Yeah, Jack, okay, those, those two things. So number one, when you say those qualitative words, right, there would be classes values or whatever it might be. The first thing is you have to realize, you don't use them as just words, right? They're their language labels that then get re-translated And if we spoke about last time, it's crispy said words have a kinesthetic impact, from meaning for words, for words have meaning, they have to be processed through the body. [00:59:00] And so the question is, but we don't know what form. But our body already has an intuitive sense as to what, you know, depth and coherence and what the was the other word, depth alignment alignment, what these things mean. So if we, in our language, if we denomeralize, if we turn them back into processes, not so much external processes, but how do we make those words, depth alignment coherence come alive?

Marvin Oka: How would we know in our body when this is happening? when the form is emerging in front of us, or we've touched on some interaction, and like that, that was it, right? That's what you want to track for, because you want it, it's kind of similar to Joseph Campbell's follow your bliss. This is the compass we're using, right, to emerge the forms forward. But you absolutely write that and need to have some magic, because as a behavioral model, my colleagues, and I were looking at a well of the generative power of we were looking at mystery. And it said, oh, mystery is really important. [01:00:00] Certain things need to be have mystery about them, which is we don't know how this works, but we don't, we know it does. Or we don't know what it's going to look like, but it's kind of like, you know, it's going to sound magically up here.

Marvin Oka: But as long as we're tracking for it, like our body is knowing what we're trying to track for, the fact that for us it's still magical and mysterious, which means we haven't locked it down into a prescriptive form means the free energy is open, it's free to reorganize and reconfigure in a way that will surprise even us because we're open to it, right? We're open to the magic and mystery of it all. Those words when processed through our body means, We don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to happen and we don't have to have the technical how and it allows the freedom for emergence and reorganization to actually occur. So, those two things come into play. So, come back to your question, how does it actually fit to a gender feedback loop? One is exactly that, it's not a feedback loop based on form, it's a feedback loop based on emergence, but it's not random.

Marvin Oka: [01:01:01] So we spoke about less amount of instructions. There's a structure. We're looking at instructions in this case of things like depth and alignment and coherence. What does that mean? I don't know, but I can intuitively get when that's gonna happen, and that's what I'm tracking for. And the magical will allow that to actually emerge. And as long as we're tracking for that to emerge, that's what we're going to unconsciously start facilitating to emerge. And so that's where you're going to get a far more generative style of a feedback loop, as it's supposed to a technical prescriptive feedback loop that says, right, right, wrong, right, wrong.

Marvin Oka: It's kind of like, it's not right or wrong. Ooh, figuring it out as we go.

Joel Monk: [01:01:37] Brilliant. Brilliant. So in a way like that does connect to what I was feeling, which is like, it has that heuristical field to it, where it's like, you know, you're sensing like, what might we want to create next? You know, what does the world want us to create? And then this sense of magic is part of that. And you know, we do that. [01:02:00] In meetings, we'll be like, hang on, hang on. We're talking about this thing.

Joel Monk: We want to create. The magic doesn't Exactly. Really nice sense of coherence. How come? So it wouldn't make it wrong immediately, but we would be like, well, how come it's not here? And then that would allow for the emergence of that, the answer to that. Yeah.

Marvin Oka: [01:02:21] So, then I think the principles of conversation will come in a play as well, right? So when you ask, you have to say, right, when it's not there, which is also useful feedback loop, but for it to be generative, when you kind of go, well, you know, how come it's not here? Sometimes it could be a technical problem solving issue. Okay, what's missing, whatever. But at other times, it's more like, what are we missing in our, in our worldview, in our mental models, in our assumptions, where we approach to that way? Yeah. Maybe there's something in the way,

Marvin Oka: we've oriented ourselves to approach it that way that doesn't produce the magic. How come? Right, and then that's where it gets really generative now because now you kind of go, all right, let me just question my whole paradigm, my whole epistemology and ontology about how I'm doing this. [01:03:05] Maybe there's another way to go about this from a way of being in this

Joel Monk: [01:03:11] Well, I think that let's, this is kind of, we're segueing into the different intelligence centers, you know, that there's the natural co-emergence between our sensing capacity, our embodiment, and our capacity to navigate to sense, making the outer world. What's important for us to know, where would you start when telling people about the inner brains and intelligent centers that you've been talking

Marvin Oka: [01:03:41] Yeah, okay. So a few things. There's two different levels of context I need to set up before I can answer the question. One is what are we referring to so the back in 2009, 2010, I was working with a colleague who's now since past away but it's colleague I had known since the 90s. [01:04:05] We would always get together and have dinners and talk about some of the latest research that each of us was doing and we share a range of stories. And over the years, he kept telling me about these types of findings he had in neuroscience, and they sounded fascinating from a modeling perspective, and we'd have these great conversations. And then one day it just suddenly struck me, lovingly called the BFO, the blinding flash of the obvious. I was just like, wait a minute, so I called them up right away and I said, hey, are you telling me that these dinners that we have were talking about these things,

Marvin Oka: science hasn't put all of this together like the fact the way that we're talking about it in our dinners that these are all in pieces and in different research papers in pieces and no one's put it together. And he said, yeah, and it said, well, we should do that. And so we spent the next few years pulling it all together. [01:05:00] We released a book on it in 2012. that's one part of the context. The second part of the context is, well, that piece of work still exists. There are people there. I've stepped out of that whole arena.

Marvin Oka: I think what we developed was fantastic and powerful. And I still use it to this day. However, it... turned into a I left because it was turning into an organization I was no longer congruent with so I just left it but the work itself I think is profound right nice and I still use it today so I don't want to look it up it's there but just know that there's there's and there's some great practitioners in it that I really respect and just know that I apply it differently, I apply the methodology differently. So we call it the research was actually showing. The neuroscience research was actually showing that we actually have three brains. The science neuroscience can actually prove that we have three brains.

Marvin Oka: Now that's not a metaphor in this particular case. It actually is literal. [01:06:00] It is a technical definition. For a brain to be a brain, there needs to be some technical aspects to it. Some of it is structural. There has to be neurons, as to be glial cells, astrocytes, etc. There also has to be a capacity where it is an intrinsic complex adaptive system or onto itself, which means it can operate onto itself. And then there has to be functions to it.

Marvin Oka: So a brain can take in information It can process information, it can store information as memory, it can recall information as that memory, and it has neural plasticity where it can modify that learning. So in other words, it has to be able to learn. And if you have something that can do all of that and has those structural elements, it is technically a brain. Now, neuroscience are shown. Clearly, our head brain is exactly that. It's a head brain. It's the one we're all familiar with.

Marvin Oka: [01:07:00] Well, we can also show that the heart Neural complex is also technically a brain, as is the gut. And in fact, Michael Gershon wrote over a book over a hundred years ago called the Second Brain. I don't know if to put the gut as the Second Brain. And he, his book lost out to Gray's Anatomy and it been so therefore we lost. We lost touch with that work for a hundred years and it's only within the last several decades that the work we re-emerge and we start to realize, yeah, the gut actually is a real brain. And hence why we now know your gut regulates your moods to a whole range of things. But through our neural behavioral modeling research, we also applied neural behavioral modeling to the science papers.

Marvin Oka: And we discovered the three brains are just three brains. They have different functions and they speak different languages. So what we call the prime function. So the headbrain is good for cognitive awareness for cognition. It recognizes things into awareness. [01:08:00] It also is good for all the thinking processes and analysis And it's also good for language. You're for meaning making your language centers or in your head brain.

Marvin Oka: So this is where our narratives come into play, our self-talk comes into play. Our heart brain does exactly what you think. Our heart brain is responsible for deep emotions. values, what's important to us, the processing of feeling the importance of something and relational affect. How we feel about relationships either with others or to objects or to tasks or whatever it might be. The gut brain has three functions. One has to do with core visceral identity, a core sense of kinesthetic sense of self is in the gut. Next we'll be safety and protection.

Marvin Oka: and third will be mobilization after not act. Now, if you just take these three functions, you can hear the neural linguistics how the our neurology shows up in our language patterns, because the language has to be congruent with our internal experience. [01:09:09] So when someone says something like, all right, right, we have to be logical and let's really think about this. But what is asking you at this point in time, how do you feel about it? Do you ask me how do you think about it? Right, but if you ask to someone, okay, I want you to think about what's really important to you in life. Where do you feel what's important to you? Nobody gestures to their head.

Marvin Oka: They all gesture to their upper torso, right? And you can just see it in natural language. Someone's going, oh, you know, I could really feel, and you can see them gesturing to their upper torso, because they're neurologists coming active, if your blood flow is going, and that's where they're feeling it. So the gestures go there, right? When some of us, oh, let me think about it. They don't do this. They go, oh, let me think about it, because the blood flow goes to the head, in this case, the prefrontal cortex. [01:10:01] Now, when someone says, ah, you know, I got, I was so scared I had all these butterflies in my stomach.

Marvin Oka: Why? Why does fear get processed in the stomach? Because it's about safety and protection, right? When someone says, ah, boy, you know, it's just like someone just kicked me in the guts. What does that mean? Because I took it really personally. Yeah, because your course ends of self, your visceral sense of self is in the gut. Right now, what's really interesting is, you know, we start to find all sorts of interesting things around how fear gets processed in the front of the gut, but courage comes from the back of the gut.

Marvin Oka: When people use neural linguistics around courage, they talk about being pushed into it. Right, and you hear it in language, you need to get some backbone into you. Why? What's in the back, right? And when people say, I can't get past my fears, like it's in front of them and they're behind it, which is really interesting. Right? And so you're hearing all in the neuralistic codes of things referencing this. Now, just because you've got these three brains, doesn't mean they're always aligned.

Marvin Oka: [01:11:01] You know, it was fascinating is when my colleague and I at the time, we looked at the different wisdom traditions and references to spiritual traditions, majority of wisdom traditions. In fact, we didn't find any exception. They all had breathing exercises, which help regulate the autonomic nervous system, but many of the traditions also referenced three souls. And it's like, what? Even Christianity. Three souls. And it's like, why would there be three souls?

Marvin Oka: Well, because the three brains have different intelligences. It's like there's three different parts of you talking. All right. All it wants saying different things. And they have different criteria for what they particularly process. And even if you take a look at yoga, a very comprehensive self-evolutionary system. It's in three parts. There's the physical yoga, there's a devotional yoga, and then there's the head brain rational base from Nanayoga, Turajayoga, right?

Marvin Oka: [01:12:03] You're a bhakti yoga, which is devotional, emotional, then you have all the physical yoga, right? Just like, well, that's really interesting. Again, you see the separating of the three. We see it in natural language. We talk about a head heart got. We talk about feelings, emotions, and body, right? And I'm sorry, we talk about thinking, feeling, and doing, or the body, it's like doing our action. It's like, we see as natural orientation.

Marvin Oka: Why is that? Because intelligence is our, or I've always been there. But they can be in conflict. So sometimes you will see that some people will kind of go, you know, it's like my head is saying this, and I know logically I should do this, but really my heart wants to do this. You know, but for some reason, my gut instinct is to do this instead and it's like there's three different parts of them pulling and it's like, yeah, you can you can think of them as parts or you can think of them as three aspects of a complete you right and the three aspects of you that might be in conflict because they are [01:13:10] So let's say someone falls in love with someone. And they go, oh God, you know, I'm so in love. I want to marry them, right?

Marvin Oka: And the head is going, oh come on, you know, think this through, right? And no, but the heart's going, no, but I want to marry them. And the gut's going, no way in hip. Last time you fell in love, you got hurt. I'm protecting you, no, absolutely not. But the heart's going to open, I really want to marry them. But the head's going, this makes no sense whatsoever. As you guys, three aspects of yourself all in conflict here, right?

Marvin Oka: So one is we have some processes for aligning the three, but let's now come back to leadership and decision making, which is where you wanted to go. Now, some of the ways that you can, what we call the wrong integrator constraints, some of the things that prevent these three brains aligning. And you talk about alignment, it was a major part of one of your courses of values in your business. [01:14:03] One of the things that prevents you from aligning is remembering that they aren't brains, they are neural patterning networks, complexed out of neural networks. Sometimes you can have one neural network that's used to the exclusion of the others. So some people make only their decisions off of their head. And as a result, they can rationalize all sorts of things that are unethical, because they can come up with a good story in their head, right? Sometimes you might have one of the brains starts to voice up through its intuitive signals, but the other brains override it.

Marvin Oka: Right, so the gut says, or maybe the hand says you really shouldn't be doing this is it's way too risky if you really calculate the odds, but the heart says, no, but I want to do it anyway. Let's go do it and it just overrides. And then you kind of want to, yeah, I should listen to my own, my own voice, right, or whatever it might be. [01:15:04] Sometimes you do have brains that actually do conflict with each other, like I said, sometimes the gut doesn't want to do with what the heart wants or vice versa, whatever it might be. Sometimes it's the wrong sequence. In decision-making process, you're contacting your brains in the wrong order of things. And my colleague and I we discovered there is a sequence that probably 80% of the time works better than other sequences. It's not for everything, but from most of the time this sequence works better than the others, and I'll explain what that is in just a moment.

Marvin Oka: Coming back to the point, we started looking at leadership, for instance, and at the time Bashar al-Assad was still running Syria, I had been to Syria twice, I knew that I knew what it would meant to be like to actually be at the effect of Bashar al-Assad running Syria. And what has to happen, it actually the second time I went to Syria and to Damascus, I left Damascus just 48 hours before the all the revolts in warfare started happening. [01:16:04] I got home, it took me 24 hours to get back to Australia. I slept for another day, I woke up, watched the news and I see all these fighting in the streets. I was just there. What's going on? But we looked at the neural linguistics of Bashar al-Assad and then you compared to say the neural linguistics of somebody like Nelson Mandela. And you can see in the language, Mandela had a lot of heart-based language.

Marvin Oka: where you talked about compassion and feeling and values. And this was a heart-based leadership. And we're not talking metaphor here. We are talking literally, biologically, a heart-based leadership is radically different than a gut head-based one. Where the gut is about protection, we'll be about greed and taking in for oneself, it's fear and safety. And then the head rationalizes what the gut reaction is. And as a result, [01:17:00] to humans, to other humans, with great rationalization when, in fact, it's driven by fear.

Marvin Oka: But what did that leader have to disconnect from? You have to disconnect from the intelligence of the heart, because the heart connects. The heart has relational affect, but I will feel about each other. And all you have to do is disconnect from the heart intelligence, and you can rationalize anything. Now, the leadership element comes back to what we call, when my colleague and I call of the foundational sequence, this sequence that works better, 80% of the time. Part of it actually is logic to it. Part of it is, we stumbled upon it by accident. Some of it, but part of it was not pure accident.

Marvin Oka: It was like we had some hypothesis behind it. And it starts, the sequence starts with heart-based intelligence. And in traditional Chinese medicine, they'll often talk about how the heart is the emperor. And the gut is a good general. The gut will do, but it has to be led by the emperor and the emperor is heart. [01:18:01] You look at a lot of spiritual traditions. Now, often talk about how, a lot of your spiritual consciousness first comes from the heart, heart-based connection. And so, why is that important?

Marvin Oka: Well, let's just take in the context of personal change, right? People have their stories about the challenges that they're having. They've got a gut-based reaction that's usually based on fear or past identity that they need to let go of, But if you can get them to do some autonomic regulation, some self-regulation, some coherent breathing, have them come back to a place where they can actually do some deep inner reflection and start with heart-based intelligence. And say regardless, it's like what we're talking about before, but not having a prescriptive form to a vision, but a qualitative based guide for your gender feedback loop, just start with regardless of whatever decision you want to make later. Regarding this issue, what is the most important set of values you need to stay connected with within yourself? and get them connected to their heart-based intelligence. [01:19:01] Now, for that, they need kinesthetic awareness.

Marvin Oka: They need to be in touch with their body. If they're dissociated from their body, you got some pre-work to do to help them get familiar with their body, right? Get them at home in their body. But when that happens, they'll hear from your heart. The heart won't speak in full sentences. The heart will speak in feelings. They might speak in some imagery, music, perhaps, but they'll be a general feeling of what the value is. Now, you have to intensify the feelings and send that up to the head, because the head can make up all sorts of stuff.

Marvin Oka: So you have to direct to the head. The head is a very, the head brain is a terrible master, but it is a really good ally. But if the heart can guide it and say, this is what's important to me. come up with scenarios, options that I might decide upon that's based on living this value coming from this value. [01:20:05] What are the value guides? What the head comes up with, because the head can be very creative. Then bring those ideas and options back down to the heart, because the heart is above those. The heart has to appreciate these ideas.

Marvin Oka: The heart intelligence has to be able It has to do that, because if the hard doesn't value the ideas, the ideas will come and go. Because the rest of you as a full organism, the rest of you doesn't care. I had a great idea, but then I didn't appreciate it enough. So it left my mind. But if your hard goes, no, this is really good. Send it down to the gut. So the gut now literally has to digest the idea.

Marvin Oka: Now, you're different brains by the way, have different speeds, okay? Your head brains very fast, your guts very slow. So your gut needs to digest, take some time, it might take a day or two if I take an hour, whatever it might be. [01:21:01] But your gut has to digest and assimilate the ideas and say, which one of these options of expressing this value in the most appropriate way works for me? This is now integrity and it's ecology. It's now your gut is saying, this will work, this won't work. Right. This is congruent with me.

Marvin Oka: This is this aligns with me. This doesn't align with me. All right. I can incorporate this and not. And when the gut decides, okay, this one. Yeah, sits well in my gut. This one I can act on, which is a gut gut doing. Send that choice back up to the heart and let the heart appreciate that and let the heart say, great, this is really good.

Marvin Oka: I value this, this choice, because it's a congruent expression of who we are at a de-level values. Let's do that. And when I take people through this coaching process, they literally will gesture, and I want to ask them, how do you feel? Don't even go, oh, I feel really aligned, and they will literally gesture a vertical line up and down their center line. [01:22:03] And you kind of go, yeah, now you've got head hard and got all lined. And this is really important when the decisions are about personal integrity and personal values. And this is what this is sometimes where it is, it almost doesn't matter what the external consequences are back to them because it is their truth and they can they cannot deal with whatever happens.

Marvin Oka: However, if it's a leadership position where the impact is with other people, you have to factor that in as well. You have to factor that in and it's okay. What is this issue? So what's important to us that's going to be true for us and at the same time, take care about their people. For that to happen, what is the most important thing we have to stay connected to within ourselves, and then the heart can come up with it. So you do, you give it the right instructions. So it can emerge into your awareness and tap into your own innate intelligence that way. And it's incredibly powerful.

Marvin Oka: I use it all the time with a lot of my coaching, come back to other question, which is how do you get that introduced. [01:23:03] I often have to take people through who are more head-based. I have to take them through the science behind it first. And once they understand the science, then they're very open to actually going with it. Yeah, I've not had anybody rejected what's I explained the science behind the three brands.

Joel Monk: [01:23:22] It's very powerful. That's a really beautiful process, you just outlined. And it speaks to me of coherence, really. We use that word earlier. There's a coherence, and that there is a kind of intelligence that's a kind of knowing that's available when we're coherent. For example, we might, I'm thinking for me like, generosity was an important value to play with. I gave something to someone. And I

Joel Monk: you know, it was like a little uncomfortable to give it, but because I had this value of generosity, I could, that voicing me that was like, whoa, that's a lot, you know, was able to relax because it could rest in this sense. [01:24:14] And then when it didn't come back, you know, there was an agreement in didn't, it was also fine because it was like, in a way the outer result matters less than that you acted from that inner alignment when you made that choice. And that was that's actually how I want to live my life. So I'm thinking as well of Nipun Mehta who wrote this piece about deep data and you know when as AI comes in AI is kind of handling like the domain of information and knowledge. But there's this deep, there's this capacity of coherence which wears where we access our wisdom and it's where we can align with what matters most to us. [01:25:04] What matters for us to attend to in this moment?

Joel Monk: And I think I hear that in what you're sharing with this sort of a lining that can take places that we're accessing a bigger range of of who we are and of wisdom to be able to then lead and act and make decisions.

Marvin Oka: [01:25:24] Yes, there's a, there's a model that, by calling it, I worked on. Oh, for like a better choice, we just lovingly call that the embed roadmap, but basically it's to go to what you're saying, it starts off first with autonomic coherence. so you don't need self-regulate, so you can get into a coherent state, and then it goes into communication with each of the brain. So let's say you're working on a particular issue or you want to set up a particular goal for yourself or whatever it may be. You need to tap into each of the brains separately to see what their perspective is on something, whether they try to tell you about it. [01:26:02] because they're coming from different worlds, or they belong to different domains of things. Then we have a congruence where we need to now use that process that's taking you through that foundational sequence, where you get all the brains aligned on something. Then we have what we call the highest expressions, which is when you're in deep coherent state,

Marvin Oka: And the brains are aligned and working together and communicating with each other, which by the way, the information highway, the communication highway between the three brains is the vagus nerve, which is why self-regulation needs to be is a critical component to everything. Then we start to find that while we can use different words, different normalizations, we just took a set from the Tibetan bond tradition. And where there's an old saying and it's a bitten bone tradition that said, a person can be said to have lived the good life, if they have lived the life of creativity, compassion and courage. And so we started to really we started looking at that because my colleague had this on a little posted next to this computer for many years and we were looking at that when hey actually that's each of the brains. [01:27:10] And then as we start to unpack that further, we start to realize, actually it's more than each of the brains. It's actually when each of the brains are congruent, aligned, coherent, working together than a new level of emergence occurs that we have these words. So some factors a little bit further. So you're hard, you know, what is compassion?

Marvin Oka: So we had to really explore a lot of this and saying, what's the difference between compassion and empathy and sympathy? Well, in one, you can feel for the other person, or you can step into their shoes, but what's the defining element of something that's compassionate? How do you know someone is compassionate? What's the evidence for this? And the evidence for this is compassionate acts. You see them do things to relieve suffering, to relieve suffering or to an or enhance joy and happiness. [01:28:06] It's mostly empathy or sympathy. You're feeling for the other person, but you're not doing anything about it.

Marvin Oka: If you really compassion it, there's a call to action, which means the gut has to come into play. However, we've been said, but also at the same point, Some Buddhist traditions have a distinction between wise compassion versus dumb compassion. And so for an example is, you know, let's say, you're in India and you have a child that's maimed and they come up to you on the street and they ask you for so many. And your compassion says, oh, you know, the poor child, let me give you so many. And it's like, well, you do realize you're feeding an entire business here, right? There's a whole business of people that will name kids so they can go out and bag and like, this is a job for the for the kid, right? This is not compassion at all.

Marvin Oka: This is this dumb compassion. Use your head a little bit and understand that, okay, wait a minute, right? What is truly a compassionate act? [01:29:02] When you've got someone that is not actually baking you because of need, they're baking you because they know how to manipulate you. to get money from tourists that don't know any better. So what is compassion here? You have to be now creative. So we looked at the head and went, okay, the head brain.

Marvin Oka: You know, in some ways, some traditions, they'll talk about how the universe is mental that has actually got to mind. And I say, okay, let's take a look at how that actually works. And you kind of go, look, the head is innately creative. It is a natural innate competency of the head brand or of a very nature, you know, whatever metaphor you want to use, the universe or God, it's inherently creative in the beginning God created the universe, everything was creative. So I would take people that, you know, when I was teaching Ambed, I always tell people, okay, just for a moment, you know, for the next 60 seconds, think of nothing, like nobody can do it. [01:30:02] like, even if you think of nothing, you have to create in your mind the concept of nothing and then think about that, right? But instantly thoughts start popping into your head, no effort required, you're just naturally, you created something out of nothing, right? And it's like big bang, there was nothing, then there was something.

Marvin Oka: It's just like, this is kind of like as above so below. This is kind of how he's banged, this is how it works. But the difference between creative meaning, lateral thinking versus real creativity, meaning something got brought into creation. Something got created, meaning you needed the gut brain. You need the gut brain to act to make it creative, to actually create something into the world. So, this is where you're going to need courage. Now, if you're coming from compassion or compassion, why do we feel for the other person? Because embedded within compassion is a state of oneness.

Marvin Oka: That's why I feel, I feel what you're, and I want to help you because you're me. [01:31:03] And it's context, right? Your experiences, my experiences were one in this context. So this state of oneness then creates the heart rate and intelligence of that's relating via compassion to do good work in the world. But you have to be creative about it. You can have dumb compassion. But you have to create something that you think makes a difference out there. And if it makes a difference, it means you're going to challenge status quo, which means living systems forces will rise to balance you back to home, you know, stasis.

Marvin Oka: So you have to have courage to be able to act. Now, when we saw a courage, and we knew that courage came from the gut, all of the nerd on goistics of whenever people reference courage, it was all gut-based language. But then we said, but there's one anomaly that we have to wrestle with, which is like, wait a minute, courage, that homology of courage is from French. It's on cool. It means from the heart. So how is courage not from the heart? [01:32:00] Then we realized, oh, okay. One of the things that differentiates courage from confidence is courage occurs in the face of fear.

Marvin Oka: Where's fear process in the gut? Of course, courage will have to come from the gut, but why would anyone fight against their own fear? Why would they ever do that? only because it was important enough at a core identity level for them to do that. Their identity said, this is so important to who we are. What determines it's important? The heart. So courage is a conversation between the heart and the gut.

Marvin Oka: Right? What's the difference between courage and bravery versus just out and out foolishness? The head, the head better have thought about that. It's kind of like the creative way to be courageous. Otherwise, there's no point charging in front of a stream of bullets thinking that's courageous. That's just dumb. So the highest expressions requires all three brains to be working together in a coherent online fashion. [01:33:08] That's what allows the highest expressions to actually be a full blown expression.

Marvin Oka: It requires all three of these. And when all three of these are in play, then we see an emergence of wisdom, of decision-making. So we call that a better terms of a road map to work from.

Joel Monk: [01:33:26] That's that's beautiful Marvin. Well, we're at time. I just want to say like it's been a real tour to force for me. I love listening to you and I just love the the breadth and depth of your mind and how it's connected all these things together, you know, into a living ecosystem of practice, rather than a mechanically, you know, frankenstein's set of ideas, I really feel that. So just could ask to you, Marvin, I'm really learning a lot from you and I'm sure people listening are too. [01:34:04] So yeah, thank you.

Marvin Oka: [01:34:05] Thank you. Thanks, George. Thanks. I love having deep conversations, and so like I think I told you last time, I don't know, I don't get the chances much as I would like to actually be able to talk with people that can talk deep and so I really appreciate these conversations too.

Joel Monk: [01:34:21] where can we find out more about your work, you know, we had two main topics today that fit together really well, like the inner and the outer of of of decision making, um, where in general can we find out more about your work?

Marvin Oka: [01:34:35] Yeah, yeah, the three big areas are one one is, um, really the headquarters of it all is my website behavioralmodeling.com and behavioral modeling spelled British style and then with the second order change work and for both coaches as well as consultants and executives. go to P.K. [01:35:00] and P.C.A.N. is stands for the professional change agents network. P.K.N. dot online. It's a placeholder website at the moment.

Marvin Oka: It's I'm trying to launch it within the next month. So it'll be a membership where it helps change agents of all types from coaches to consultants to leaders and various positions to learn about the ways of second order change and vertical change for coaches. And then for those that are interested in the coaching specific things, then there's Marvin Oka.com. It's where I offer coaching services for generative in a work, particularly when people going through big life transition stages.

Joel Monk: [01:35:37] Yeah, beautiful. Thank you, Marvin. Thanks, y'all. Here we are. We're at the end of the podcast. Just a heads up again. If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coaches rising.com, put your name in the sign-up box there. You'll also find some of our other offerings, our online trainings for coaches there.

Joel Monk: [01:36:00] And just want to end by wishing you well, and I'll see you again next time.