Creating An Environment of Failure with Karen Wright Gordon, CEO of 5 Dynamics
In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray engages in a compelling conversation with Karen Wright Gordon, CEO of 5 Dynamics. They talk about cultivating a workplace culture that embraces failure. They delve into the idea of "intelligent failure," where calculated risks and thoughtful experimentation are encouraged. This episode emphasizes that a culture that accepts failure can lead to improved business outcomes and sustained innovation.
Have a guest recommendation, question, or just want to connect?
Go here: https://www.harvardmurray.com/exploring-growth-podcast
Connect on LinkedIn:
Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehmurray
Karen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenwrightgordon/
#ExploringGrowthPodcast #WorkplaceCulture #Leadership #EmbracingFailure #IntelligentFailure #KarenWrightGordon #BusinessGrowth #Innovation #KarenWrightGordon #5Dynamics #IntelligentFailure #InnovationCulture #PsychologicalSafety
Karen Wright Gordon
00:00:00
Absolutely. It starts at the top. It starts with a leadership and it can't be something you're just giving lip service to. You have to follow through, and you have to give people the space and the grace to to fail and to help them to learn from that and move past that so that that's the first thing. Another thing you have to do as a leader is you have to model that behavior. You know, if I make a mistake, if I fail at something within my organization, I tell everybody I'm like, oh yeah, this wasn't the right choice. And here's why. What can we learn from that and how do we move forward with it? So if you're afraid to admit your own failures, don't expect that your teams are going to feel comfortable admitting theirs.
Lee Murray
00:00:40
All right. Welcome back to Explore and Grow. Today I want to explore the idea of creating a culture where failure is respected or even expected. My guest is Karen Wright Gordon, CEO of Five Dynamics. Welcome to the show, Karen.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:00:56
Thank you. Lee, I appreciate you having me here.
Lee Murray
00:00:59
Yeah. this. You know, this is a fascinating topic. and I think it will become clear to our listeners what we're really talking about here when we talk about failure. But, you know, it's not it's not natural for people to lean into failure. We've been conditioned from an early age to succeed at everything and honestly to to an unhealthy level of perfection. so I'm excited about talking about failure. as we get before we get into that, though, just kind of give us a quick background on, your company five dynamics. your role in kind of who you help and what you guys do.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:01:33
Yeah. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've had multiple businesses. My most recent is simplify, powered by five dynamics. I've had this one for 14 years. And what I love about it is that what we do is that we help people to get unstuck. We help teams to collaborate more effectively. We help them to understand what they see naturally, what they might miss, where they could use some outside support, and just how to value one another.
Lee Murray
00:01:58
Love it. That's great. okay, so let's, let's dive into this idea that we've been kind of chatting about offline and that is, creating an environment of failure. Okay, so at first glance, that's like, kind of counterintuitive because I think everybody, you know, has nightmares at night thinking that things aren't going to go the way they should go. And we get to this point of perfection, like things have to operate. We want more efficiency. We want better, more successful. So what does let's sort of frame this out. What is an environment of failure look like? I mean, if you were to create that for a company and have them start thinking about that, what would how would you direct them?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:02:40
It's really all about intelligent failure. So I wanted to define that early on. Amy Edmondson has a great new book. It talks about the right kind of wrong, and it looks at failure and one of the types of failures, intelligent failure, which is basically you do your homework and then you do thoughtful experimentation, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to innovate.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:03:01
You're trying something new. There is no data to support what you're doing. And so it just follows that you're going to have failures along the way. inventors, certainly they have failures. There's a famous quote from Thomas Edison that says, I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work, because that's how you get to something that does work, is that you iterate and, you know, fail fast. It's a mantra in Silicon Valley, overused, quite honestly, and not always followed appropriately. But it's about, you know, we're startups, we're aggressive, we're trying something new, we're building something, and it's better to fail fast and fail, you know, fail quickly so you can pivot and get to the right idea. And so you have to create a culture where it's okay to have those failures because and you have to learn from them. That's the second piece. You have to make sure that you're going back and you're reviewing, okay, what did we do? Why didn't it work? Or how are we going to tweak that? What are we going to try differently? So when I'm talking about failure, I'm not saying mistakes.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:04:04
You know, it's not about not looking at your data and just making lots of mistakes. That's not okay, especially if that happens over and over again. But it's about risk taking and innovating and being willing to try something that hasn't been tried before.
Lee Murray
00:04:18
Yeah. Okay. So it's more about experimenting as a philosophy then then being sort of, plan A is the plan.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:04:29
Right? Experimenting and knowing that failure is going to be a part of that and being okay with that. As a matter of fact, I mentioned Amy Edmonson, her first book, and what she's the most well known for is Psychological safety. And in the process of doing her research at Harvard around psychological safety, she went into hospital settings, and she felt like teams that had psychological safety would have fewer mistakes than teams who had low psychological safety, meaning they trusted one another. Yes, they were open. They were able to support one another. And what she found was just the opposite. And she felt like she had failed because she had taken off the time of these health care professionals.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:05:07
They had done these studies over a long period of time. She had great sponsors who had been supporting her, and then the data proved different than what she expected. But what she realized was not that they had fewer failures, but that they were more open and honest about those failures. So they learned from those failures. So the teams that had low psychological safety, they were afraid to fail. Well, what happens in health care environment when you don't tell others how you failed, what went wrong? It could be life or death. If you're not sharing that learning, you're not learning from it, then you're not moving forward. So it completely shifted her research when she recognized that, you know, no failure is a good thing. And teams with high psychological safety, they're willing to admit those failures and learn from them, which is much more important. So again, low psychological safety didn't have fewer failures. They just weren't honest about their failures.
Lee Murray
00:06:01
okay. That's a key point. and it's funny when you're talking about the health care, you know, what pops in my mind is, my wife and my oldest daughter have been, well, watching for my oldest daughter and rewatching for my wife, er, the series back in the 90s.
Lee Murray
00:06:17
And, you know, it's kind of like, I don't know, my wife's, like, rite of passage for my daughter. Like, she loved the show and she wanted to take her through it. And so I, I'm, you know, not big into it, but I'll sit in there every once in a while, hang out with them. And I'm watching a few of the episodes and they're good episodes. It was really good TV back then. And what stands out is, these instances that are scripted, but, you know, they're they're really kind of based on real life, instances in the air where someone is, is demonstrating that low safety, low psychological safety, where their their transparency is not there. And you can see the calculation that's happening in the drama where they're saying to themselves, okay, what action should I take now? Because if I do, if I go down this path, it's going to possibly result in getting fired. If I go down this path, it's going to be result in maybe being, you know, you know, some kind of regulatory action or, you know, up the chain or as a resident, maybe I won't progress on this year into the program.
Lee Murray
00:07:19
There's there's all these things going through their mind when they're trying to make a decision about a patient in the care they're giving to a patient. And I think that that's such a like interesting connection, because what you're saying is that if they had an environment where it wasn't it, it was more transparent and they were allowed to fail, obviously to a certain degree, because you can't take risk with a patient's life. But, you know, in the in the way you're doing your job and communicating with your fellow, you know, residents or doctors, I think there's there's room for for innovation to happen there. As well. but I don't know, I think the, I think the environment is very interesting because one environment versus another environment, you get two totally different. I mean, health care, which is, you know, historically slow and, slow to change and lots of hurdles and barriers. And then you have tech which is like kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, where they're always moving fast and breaking things, as you said, you know, you know, almost to, to, to their detriment.
Lee Murray
00:08:22
I think the environment, the culture that's built from the top, the, the leadership makes so much difference in the production of innovative thinking and, and, you know, sort of failing forward, you know, sort of, I don't want to say lifestyle, but just that culture of thinking in, in, in the company, is that kind of what you're getting at?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:08:45
Yeah, absolutely. It starts at the top. It starts with the leadership. And it can't be something you're just giving lip service to. You have to follow through, and you have to give people the space and the grace to to fail and to help them to learn from that and move past that so that that's the first thing. Another thing you have to do as a leader is you have to model that behavior. You know, if I make a mistake, if I fail at something within my organization, I tell everybody I'm like, oh yeah, this wasn't the right choice. And here's why. What can we learn from that and how do we move forward with it? So if you're afraid to admit your own failures, don't expect that your teams are going to feel comfortable admitting theirs.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:09:22
So you have to create that atmosphere that encourages that. You know, another great example of that, and this is a story that goes around, I don't know if it's 100% true or not, but apparently Tom Watson Jr, who was the CEO of IBM at the time, he had an executive who he failed at something and he lost a couple of million dollars and he was called into Tom's office fully expecting to be fired. And Tom said, hey, why would I do that? I've just spent $2 million on your education, you know? So let's learn from it and let's move forward. Right. And so it takes that type of leadership where you're willing. Now I don't know that I would do it if it was millions of dollars. But you know, certainly you want to create that type of environment where it's okay. But what's key also is that you have to make sure that you're not skipping that evaluation phase. You go back and you look at, okay, why did we fail? What can we learn from this failure? What can we do better next time?
Lee Murray
00:10:16
So okay, because that was my next question is how do you create this type of environment like a safe culture, a culture of learning.
Lee Murray
00:10:23
How do you do that? And you're what I'm hearing you say is leadership needs to demonstrate it from the top first. Because if and I've been a part of companies that are, you know, one one side or the other, and when it's demonstrated and they are okay with innovating, they're okay with with experimenting and failing and, and kind of being naked in front of the company and saying, look, I made these decisions and they didn't work out. And we're going to work through them. It empowers you, the lower level employee, to to do the same thing. So you know, when you get to the evaluation stage, what does that look like? Is it is it kind of like a process oriented, logistical type of thing, or is it more of just, I don't know, a point in the I don't know, really not really sure how to think about it.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:11:09
Yeah. Well, one of the ways that we do it is that when something goes wrong, we just pull people together and we say, look, we this is a no blame retrospective.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:11:18
We're not looking to find blame. We're not looking to point the finger at anyone. We're all trying to learn from this. Yeah. So then people are more open about putting it out on the table and really being honest about what went wrong. I think it's harder for some than it is for others. I know that it is based off of their energetic preferences, which aligns with our model. But you have to have that growth mindset. You have to be willing to learn from things and recognize that, yeah, yeah, I made a mistake. But you know, how do I how do I move forward from here? Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:11:49
Okay. Well this is great. I'm learning a lot here because I think that, culture really drives the majority of business outcomes. Honestly, I, I think that leadership and vision are two of the biggest components to, you know, leaders that actually have a vision they're going after passionately. And when they're doing that, they are breaking things and moving fast usually, and demonstrating, you know, failure, experimentation.
Lee Murray
00:12:19
that creates a culture. you know, I work with a lot of different clients, and I walk into these companies and I see their culture, and it's very much dictated by the CEO, generally or or a handful of executives. And it's it's kind of built around their personality. Like if you look at a small business owner and the business that they're running, if it never gets any bigger, their business looks like them. It's a, you know, it's sort of like their their family, their child that they're raising. when you get to the bigger level, the midsize, you know, second stage, the company looks like the CEO that's in charge. And you can see this, too, in the market when you have, like recently, the Chipotle CEO moved over to Starbucks. which is funny, I've seen some memes where, there have a Starbucks employee, this is someone on Instagram, a Starbucks employee, and say, okay, they just take you down the Chipotle line and say, okay, what coffee do you want? What milk do you want? You know, it kind of a funny, funny thing like borrowing from Chipotle is a process.
Lee Murray
00:13:17
But I think the culture of Starbucks is going to completely change because the CEO changed. Right. So I think that, it has to start there. But culture is really what drives a lot of the business outcomes. And so my question I'm kind of curious is to know when companies lean into innovation, they lean into experimenting. And this idea of failure, does that, does that positively reflect back on, you know, business outcomes like revenue growth or net profit?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:13:48
Well, yeah. you first have to look at kind of where is the company in its growth stage. So is this a young company? Is this a startup? Is this a new idea that they're working on? That's where I would highly encourage this culture of being able to fail and learn from those failures. Now you want to do that everywhere, but it's it's more important because you're at that stage where you're figuring it out. When it's a well-established company, then it's more about optimization. You know, you've already had the great idea, and I'll tell you what Google does, for example, is that they're obviously they're a behemoth.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:14:19
They're a massive organization. So when they have new ideas, they know that they're too structured, they're too, you know, process oriented. It takes too long. So what they do is they spin it off and they allow, you know, the leadership team of this new concept to be a startup. And then they buy the company back once they're successful. because it's harder for a large corporation like that to take a lot of chances. So let's let's pull it off. Let's make it something separate, which is kind of what we do in the software space, is that We take bets, but they're not massive bets. We do MVP's or minimum viable products. Let's try this. Let's test it with the market. Okay. How did that work? Oh, they didn't like that part. Let's take that out. You know. So again, you've got this culture of experimentation as you're trying to continue to build your business.
Lee Murray
00:15:06
Yeah. talking about the Google as an example, I, it makes me think of like maybe an other side of this coin, which is ownership, you know, I subscribe to the, Jocko Willink, philosophy of extreme ownership, where you, you know, as a company owner, leadership, CEO, whoever, you're owning, all the problems that are below you.
Lee Murray
00:15:28
And I think that by demonstrating again to your, your company, your people, that you're owning the problems. That's another way to to show them that, hey, it's okay to take these small bets but own the result. Right. And I think that can all play out in that evaluation stage Yeah.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:15:48
And you were talking about the leadership and how the culture tends to align with the leaders. And that is true without awareness, that's what happens. But that's actually when they call us in is because they realize, hey, maybe my way isn't the way. And I learned that lesson the hard way. And my first company, we had 100% growth in a three year time frame, you know, so we were moving, getting lots of contracts, growing very quickly, hiring lots of people. but I had my blind spots. And by the way, we all do. None of us come here as natural born leaders. That's a myth. None of us have, in our terminology, high energy and all of the dynamics that are required.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:16:26
And any leader needs to recognize, you know, where do I lean in? Naturally. What do I miss? And then what do I do about those areas that I miss? So, for example, for me, I'm a big picture thinker and I like to get things done. So I move quickly, I have ideas, and then I'm wanting to do it. But I know that when I have these big ideas I need to talk to those people on my team who are my thoughtful and my careful planners. In our terminology, our high examines because their gift is in finding what's wrong with something, and I want to talk to them. I don't want to talk to them when I'm first formulating the idea, because they're going to be negative. And, you know, it'll kind of shut down that expectation for me. But I do want to talk to them absolutely. Before I go to market or spend millions of dollars trying to develop a new product. Right, because they will see things that I didn't see, and I know that.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:17:15
And then I also know the other people that I need to lean heavily on are the ones who are great at getting the message out there. You know, that's not my forte. I like creating and doing and moving and going to the next thing. And, you know, but taking the time to make sure people understand what did we create? How does this apply to me? I mean, that's just not my natural tendency. So again, that's that's where you really have to look at your culture. It's not just about your way or the highway, but it's about okay, what am what are my strengths? What what's the matter? Yeah. And then where do I need support? And so it's not about putting people on your leadership team who are just like you. That's a recipe for disaster. You want those people who are very smart, you know, hardworking, willing to to lean in, but you're going to have tension and conflict in that room because you're coming from different perspectives. But that's okay.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:18:03
That's what makes great teams. Is that respectful conflict.
Lee Murray
00:18:07
So of these sort of quadrants that you're defining which of these is more naturally inclined to lean in to experimenting and be okay with failure versus not?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:18:19
Yeah. Great question. Let me just tell you what the the dynamics are. There's five dynamics as in the name. And the first is around ideation. It's called high explorer. People who have high energy and explorer are all about the big picture, seeing things that don't seem like they would be naturally connected. But you see, those connections make those connections. That sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's see two and three steps down the road, you know, and you're not risk averse because you like breaking things. You like trying new things, right? The second dynamic is called high excite. And excite is about the people and making sure that the people are taking care of, making sure that they have what they need, making sure the customers are taking care of, understanding what success looks like and how we're going to celebrate it.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:19:06
Those people, they care deeply and they have a harder time with failure. Not that they again, we can all learn this and build this muscle, but their natural kind of go to stance is that they have a harder time because they feel like it's a personal failure. They internalize it. I messed up, I let the company down. Whereas someone like myself, who I love, you know, just coming up with things and trying things doesn't ever bother me. I just move to the next thing. Yeah. And then the third dynamic is someone who's high and examine. These people rarely make mistakes. They are detail oriented. They are precise. They are deep thinkers. They're the ones When you walk in their office, you may be standing there for 15 minutes because they are so deep in a task they don't want to look up. You know, they're very, very thorough. They're slow to speak in a meeting. They only speak when they feel like they know exactly what's going on. But when they do speak, it's kind of like E.F. Hutton.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:20:01
You know, you better be listening when they do speak up. Not to show my age because, you know, that's obviously an old reference. and then the fourth measured dynamic is called execute. And it's about just getting things done, moving quickly. People who are high and execute, they're focused on don't put barriers in my way. You know, don't keep me from being able to get things done quickly. And so when they fail it's more about it slowed them down. You know, it's a little bit harder for them to accept that failure because it just made it harder for them to accomplish their goals. And they're all about accomplishment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what we teach people is this is what you this is your baseline. But now let's think about this differently. You know, we need to again flex those muscles as is speaking of muscles. I mean, elite athletes are great at this, if you think about it. You know, they fail more times than they succeed, but they learn from those failures.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:20:53
And so they're more comfortable with the concept of failure.
Lee Murray
00:20:56
Yeah. I mean, that's a great, great analogy. consistently failing and incrementally improving in those increments are so small. I mean, we just had the Olympics come through, and you look at how how small of an increment it was from the, the winner, who's the world champion that everyone knows now and the loser who no one has a clue who they are. there's a there's a funny Seinfeld bit on on that, where he talks about the winner is here, and then the loser, someone we don't know about is here. You know, like, just just a, you know, a 100,000,000th of a second, less. But I think that's that's very true. those those increments of growth and sticking to it, it being consistent about the work is, is very important. those are very interesting dynamics. I mean, I, I think I identify with a couple of them right off the bat. and it makes me think, yeah, okay.
Lee Murray
00:21:53
The natural next step is I need to put the other people that I'm not like around me and kind of have that rub. That's not going to be as comfortable because I'm not naturally inclined, you know, as they are. But I think that that would help me to build to build what I'm building.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:22:08
Yeah. And what you may have noticed is that I didn't talk about personality because that's not what we look at. It's about process. And so when I listed those four of the five dynamics, because four are measured, the fifth is evaluate and it's not measured. What we're measuring are the most efficient neural pathways in your brain. What do you go to quickly. What type of you trusted? What have you learned to trust because you've had positive feedback over the years? And when you look at the dynamics, it's follows the way that work gets done. Someone has an idea. Someone gets people on board with that idea. Someone creates a detailed plan and someone When executes now, it can be one person doing some of these things and others do and others.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:22:46
And sometimes we do things that aren't necessarily natural to us because we understand that it's an important phase, because all four of those phases are equally as important to success. We've proven that diverse teams outperform all others. That diversity of work styles, that diversity of thinking to make sure that you're addressing all of the elements, you know, the the market, what is the market, what is the available market, how are we going to get people engaged with this concept? What's the plan? So we can have an efficient and effective rollout and we've got to get this done. And so we all have different levels of energy for that, which is again, what we're measuring in three minutes or less is what are those preferences for you. And then sometimes we know our strengths can become our weaknesses if we overuse them. And perfect example. In my first company I did not have an awareness. I was in my early 20s when I founded the company went from just me to 50 employees in three years and I would go from idea to action to idea to action to idea to action.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:23:46
And it gave the employees whiplash. It was like watching a tennis match.
Lee Murray
00:23:49
Yeah, yeah.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:23:50
And I didn't give them time to understand. What's my part in this idea? What am I responsible for? What's the plan? When is this due by? And so it just kept everyone in this constant heightened state, which you'll oftentimes see with very entrepreneurial companies. Right. And so it wasn't until I had that revelation of, oh, this is why they're frustrated. This is why they're burnt out, you know, what do I need to do differently? That's huge. Yeah. And slow down. You know, just slow it down a little bit. We'll get there. But let's get there in the right way.
Lee Murray
00:24:21
Yeah, yeah. That's great personal sort of testimony of that, experience. And I think the opposite to be true, probably for someone who needs to speed it up, that maybe that deep thinker and needs a little bit more action, and less plan, less planning and less process.
Lee Murray
00:24:37
So then back to my question. I would assume that the explorer, or that first one you mentioned would be more prone to experimentation. But as I'm thinking through it, that deep thinker, the one that is more precise, I would think they would be less inclined for experimenting or failure, but and not to, you know, kind of take this meta, but like, you know, someone who thinks deeply has to be open to lots of ideas in order to get to that deeper thought and conclusion. So I would think that in a way that they're taking their own, maybe boxed in, experiments and failing in a certain way, but it just may be more internal versus being external. What have you seen?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:25:24
Absolutely. You're 100% correct on that. I have a gentleman on my team. He is a very deep thinker. He's the one that he's going to sit in for meetings before you ever hear a peep. And people are like, why is he here? You know, they're all trying to figure it out.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:25:38
And then on that fifth meeting, after he's gotten it all sorted and he's tested it and you know he's ready to go, then it's like, whoa, okay. Yeah, you're right. We didn't think of that. We all miss that, you know. Yes. And so it just takes them longer to get there. But yes, people with high explore energy. We're constantly churning with ideas. We're constantly thinking, I can't drive through a town without thinking, oh, they need this business or that business, you know, like I see opportunity everywhere. Yeah, but then I have my husband, who he's one of those that he's very high in examine. And so he's a great counterbalance to me. Yeah. He'll say okay, but is this a good idea because X, Y and Z, you know, and make me really kind of slow down and test things before I bring them to market.
Lee Murray
00:26:20
Yeah. And that goes back to, I think one of the first things you said about it being intellectual failure or intellectual experimenting, or I'm sorry, intelligent, experimentation.
Lee Murray
00:26:31
Because, you know, for someone like yourself, if you allowed yourself to just continue to be distracted by the shiny objects, you know, driving through the towns and just dreaming. Well, at some point you're not using wisdom to keep moving, you know, moving forward in an experiment, you're failing, putting failure behind failure. That's the same thing. so I think it probably would apply differently through the different types. But, I think there's some wisdom that has to be applied at some point, which starts with the thinking, you know, the intelligent part of it. It can't just be mistakes, as you mentioned before.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:27:10
Yeah. And there's also an element of resilience. You have to be resilient if you bounce back from these failures and keep moving forward. oftentimes people just want to if they fail at something, they just want to implode. Last night, I was actually on a call with a bunch of amazing women business owners and leaders, you know, VP level and above and major, you know, massive fortune 1000 companies.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:27:31
And there was one lady in particular that she just went through this process of having a startup and she got funded initially, but then she wasn't able to get the next round of funding, and so she had to unfortunately close down her business. But she was already on the call saying, but here's the new idea, here's what I'm going to do. And she had already thought it out. She had her pricing, she had all these things, and it was a great idea. But if she had just like, woe is me, you know, this is terrible. I failed at this. She wouldn't be able to move to this next great thing. And we know that all great creators, they failed many times. Abraham Lincoln I don't have all the dates and the details, but look him up sometime and look at his failures. You know, tried to get elected to so many things and wasn't and then finally became the president of the United States and his revered as one of the greatest ones ever.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:28:20
But it was because he was resilient and he just kept moving forward.
Lee Murray
00:28:24
Yeah. You look at most any stat, you know, golf stats or baseball stats or football stats and you see far much more failure than you do, success. And it's hard for us, in any domain or stage or whatever we're doing to, to to accept the fact that that is what is happening, but we're just seeing it play out bit by bit, kind of like watching water boil.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:28:47
Yeah, I saw it with two of my children when they were growing up as well. They were both athletes. One was a naturally gifted athlete. Anything she did, she just immediately excelled at it. The other, he was pretty good. But, you know, he had to work. He had to work really hard. And he ended up being recruited to, to play, you know, football at college level. He didn't do it, but he had plenty of offers and was able to do that. but the difference between the two of them and always said, if I could kind of mix them up and, you know, shake them up and split them apart, they would be like, you know, really fantastic athletes.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:29:20
But with her, it was because she was so naturally good at everything. She had the hardest time when she got to the highest levels because everybody else was just as good, you know? And so that failure of I'm not going to be the best at everything I do, and I have to get comfortable with that. And I just have to work harder. That has to fuel me, which is what happened with my son. It fueled him to get better.
Lee Murray
00:29:43
That kind of gets at another question I had for you, and that's how do people respond to failure. So let's say the stage is set, the culture is there, leadership is demonstrating, and they feel safe. You know, for the most part, even at that level, I think people individually have their own sort of battles that they're fighting, emotionally or mentally, to not want to fail. And, you know, and in each in each category, each of those types, I think it applies, what that might look like for reputation or what they might look like for their, you know, future prospect for that role or project, whatever.
Lee Murray
00:30:19
You know, how do people, typically get over that hump of being more comfortable with their own failure as they're experimenting?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:30:29
Yeah, again, it goes to resilience. As a matter of fact, I'm developing a program I'll be leading next week for one of our customers. That's about that very thing. Because, again, some of us have a harder time than others with it. But there are resilience. Again, it's a muscle. It's something you can build. It's not something that you just have to be born with. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I've had many challenges in my life. And the one thing that when you ask people about me, they say Karen is incredibly resilient. Like if anybody I've ever known, she is incredibly resilient and I've thought a lot about, is that natural or is that something that I learned over time and can I teach it to other people? Because I'm at the age where I'm kind of looking back at, how can I give back? How can I help young leaders? How can I, you know, help to to build them into greater leaders? And, and I really feel like that's a solid area.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:31:18
And so it's about first of all mindset. We talked about that a minute ago. You have to have that growth mindset. You have to be willing to learn and you have to have that. You know, that inner ability to move forward. You have to set yourself up for success, both individually and with a support network. So you have to have people around you who will support you as you go through that difficult time to help you get to the other side, your habits, your practices, those things set you up to be more resilient. Things like, for me, my goal is I walk an hour every single day and typically that hours used to learn something. I'm walking dogs, you know, but it's something that I need to keep me even, especially in stressful times. And sometimes if something really stressful is going on in the middle of the day, and I feel like I can't really figure it out because I'm overwhelmed by that, we're going to go on another walk, you know? I'll go outside.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:32:12
I want to get in nature. I need to think. And then I clear my head and I come back and I can do that. Some people meditate, you know, that's the way that they do that. Some people pray. I mean, it's just different things. But you have to figure out what are those things that you can do to set yourself up to be more resilient.
Lee Murray
00:32:28
Yeah. That's great. if we if we're looking at the simplify methodology, how in those the four different, kind of dynamics and you have the evaluation part, how does that align or, or I guess, how does it align with the disc, sort of behavior methodology.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:32:47
Yeah, I don't I'm not a disc expert. So I'll say that to start with, but it's looking at something different. Again, ours is based off of original research. It's based off of the way that people move through the cycle of experience from awareness to action. It's based off of Mike's terms, you know, 30 years of his life trying to develop this methodology.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:33:11
It's about energy. It's about which, ironically, when I first started the company in 2010, you talked about energy and people were like, oh, must be a California company. Woo woo. Right. But now everybody's talking about it because they recognize that it's a real thing. You know, if you think about the task that you do throughout the day, there are things are drawn to that give you energy and there are things that drain your energy. So it's a physical thing. So what are those things that give you energy. So we're looking at different things. You know they're complementary different views on what things are. You know what's what. But ours is also process based. It's about moving from one phase of work to the next. So it's it's not it's not personality based.
Lee Murray
00:33:52
That's right. You did mention the process part. And that makes a that's makes a lot of sense of how it differs. And I think that's probably some crossover, you know, maybe not lay right on top of each other.
Lee Murray
00:34:01
But the calculating on the disk is sounds very similar to an examiner. you know, someone that has to be precise and have their ducks in a row type of thing. So there's probably some some alignment there if companies are already using the disk. but I like that how it follows. It's the more the thinking is more process oriented, action oriented, movement oriented, you know, based around the energy of each type. I think that, is, is very unique. I think it's very unique compared to the other types of things that you take. Like Myers-Briggs is very personality driven. No. I mean, we're complex as human, you know, as individuals. And it's not you can't take one test and and have, you know, a good handle on someone.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:34:46
Right? Yeah. It's just a different lens. And it's again, it's it's process and it's applied. certainly early in my career, I had been exposed to other things and I was like, yeah, this is interesting. But then I would go back to my job and nothing really changed.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:34:59
But with this, it just gets into your soul, you know, it gets into the way that you think, the way that you work. My kids have often told me, mom, not everything is five dynamics. And I'm like, oh, everything can be equated. You know, you can look like.
Lee Murray
00:35:11
Well, you don't know because you're not old enough to know. But,
Karen Wright Gordon
00:35:14
Right, right. You know, I think about like, the movie Moneyball. Oh, right. Brad Pitt movie, you know, where they had this great idea? They had the statistics, they had the data. They were trying to move this new system forward. But what they didn't do initially was they didn't get buy in. So they had the explore, the examine and the execute. But it wasn't until the end that Billy Beane figured out, I need to get buy in from these players, and he went to them one by one. And guess what? It's now successful because now they've addressed all four dynamics.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:35:43
All four phases.
Lee Murray
00:35:45
Huge. Yeah. That's a great that's a great example of how to explain what it is that this is that made a lot more sense to me now that you said that. and I think it's so interesting because I think companies really could, be empowered by, this methodology, this process driven, because, you know, I'm thinking, like, when you said that, I just a couple ideas popped in my head about, conversations I've had with other colleagues and, and clients, about why things have stalled. And, and Buy-In was a huge piece of that. And I think it's not the only piece. There's other pieces, but it's. That's very intriguing.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:36:21
Yeah. You know.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:36:22
When I was with my first big company, I was on the Inc 500 list two years in a row. And I remember the first year that I went, I was in a seminar and because it was the Inc 500 back then, by the way, it's 5000 now. But I was in a seminar and they were talking about something, and a gentleman stood up and he was talking about his employee issues, and he said, well, what I did is I fired them all.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:36:45
I just, you know, cleaned house, started all over, and then the Inc people the next year they had him on stage talking about that. And I remember being at the time, even though I wasn't in the space, I just thought, well, if you had to fire everybody, maybe you were part of that problem and maybe you need to look at this a little bit differently. I think that's why I was so drawn to this, because it gives you in three minutes or less, it gives you simple answers. And so even today when I go into various organizations, people are complaining about their employees. And I just, you know, I want to say I have the answer. I can help you, but you can't do that in every situation that you're in. But to me, it's so simple now. It's just so easy. It's not about personality. It's like you're thinking differently than I am. You're wanting to move faster than I am, or you're wanting to move slower, or you're wanting to think about this idea for longer than I want to think about it.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:37:36
Or you want to make sure the people are taken care of, but it's understanding what is at the core, you know, what is that base desire? What are they optimizing for? And then how can you meet them in the middle? How can you meet them halfway and have better product outcomes because of it?
Lee Murray
00:37:52
Yes, 100%, I love it. This is great. Thanks so much for coming on. This has been such a great discussion and I think it's very important. and I can I think it would be very empowering for a lot of, a lot of companies. So thanks a.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:38:05
Lot. Well thank you. I appreciate you having me.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:38:07
I enjoyed the conversation.
Lee Murray
00:38:09
Now, if I want to send people your way, where do we send them?
Karen Wright Gordon
00:38:13
simplified. Com is our website.
Lee Murray
00:38:16
And that's with A5.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:38:18
Yes. Simply. And the number five simplify.com.
Lee Murray
00:38:23
Awesome. Great. Thanks a lot Karen. And we'll we'll we'll have you back on.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:38:27
Well thank you I appreciate it.
Karen Wright Gordon
00:38:28
It was a great experience. All right. Bye.