Mark Divine  0:02  

Coming up on the mark Divine show, we know that this is true that for a child to be successful, that child needs to be growing every year. It needs to be learning, reaching beyond what they could do last year. It’s just as true for us as grown-ups. But we have this idea that we’ve arrived someplace. Or we have this idea that our business card defines or describes us in some way. When groups begin to take collective responsibility for the development of the group. Amazing things happen. Amazing things happen.

Mark Divine  0:40  

I’m Mark Divine and this is the Mark Divine show. On this show, I explore what it means to be fearless through the lens of the world’s most inspirational, compassionate, and resilient leaders. guests include folks from all walks of life, including motivational scientists, nutritional experts, peace crusaders, and leadership experts and coaches to CEOs. Today we’re going to be talking to one such guest, Dr. Jennifer Garvey Berger, who helps CEOs unleash the complexity genius of their teams and their organization. She is the co-founder and CEO of cultivating leadership, where they blend deep theoretical knowledge with a driving quest for practical ways to make leader’s lives better. She coaches CEOs and their executive teams and designs and teaches high-end leadership programs and has written three highly acclaimed books on leadership and complexity, which helped us navigate this VUCA world that we live in. Jennifer’s newly released book, Unleash Your Complexity Genius: growing your inner capacity to lead, is out now. And she lives in the French countryside where she bought a house with 11 friends, they live in community and they have 21 bedrooms. Incredible.

Mark Divine  1:51  

Jennifer super stoked to have you on the Mark Divine show. Thanks for joining me today. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 1:54

Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here. 

Mark Divine 1:56

Yeah, ya know, I’m excited to talk to you and jumping through hoops trying to get our tech to work, it was fun to learn about your new living arrangements. Tell us about that. I’m really excited about that my wife and I have been toying with the idea of buying a house and Geoff and I’ve talked about it too, about buying a house over in Italy, you know, and fixing it up and something like that. But you’ve taken it to a whole nother level.

Jennifer Garvey Berger 2:14

It was during COVID. And we all, um, you know, I was sitting around with friends as you do.

 

Mark Divine 2:20

What you had to do during COVID, stuck in

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 2:22

stuck inside. And I had a friend come and stay with us for like a month because you know, you couldn’t move around very much. So she came, she stayed. And we were talking about you know, what, what would our dream living situation be? And you know, there was a bottle of red wine involved and some cheese probably. And so we got around to thinking that our dream living situation would be to buy a big place in the countryside in France, and live there together with our favorite people. And so we were like, that sounds like a fun dream, that’ll probably power us through the rest of COVID. Right, just to have this dream would be great. But we got a couple of people involved who don’t just believe in having dreams, they believe in realizing them. And so before we knew it, we had a little band of folks who are interested, I am the Chief Executive of my company. And I knew it would be kind of weird dynamics if I invited some people and not others. So I invited everybody, anybody who wanted to come live with us could come live with us. And we got 10 now 12 People who said yes. And here we are a year later, 

 

Mark Divine 3:32

So, where did the actual finding of this 21-bedroom, family resort? Enter into that whole equation? Did you find a broker? Did you just stumble it on with an internet search?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 3:43

We just spent so much time on the internet looking at French castles. And this is so much fun.

 

Mark Divine 3:50

That is fun.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 3:51

Text each other, you know images of castles and to imagine living in this one or that one? The one that we ended up in is not a castle, but it was a resort. It’s just been kind of dreamy. 

 

Mark Divine 4:00

Are there a lot of these places like on the market? Like could I go buy a French Castle tomorrow if I had the money? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 4:06

You could buy a French Castle tomorrow and you would need very little money.

 

Mark Divine 4:10

Is it like a formal relationship where you have like, like an operating agreement and rules and expectations? And you know you’re shopping on Wednesdays and you know I do the gardening on Tuesdays kind of thing or what? how’s this working? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 4:23

Yeah, so we believe in complexity and about leading our way through complexity, right? So we are founded on complexity principles. And so, we figure things out, we notice what patterns are emerging. And then we amplify the ones we like, and we try to kill off the ones we don’t like. And so that means we didn’t make agreements beforehand. We moved in we saw how we were living. We said oh, these things are working really well. Let’s do more of that and see how we can ritualize that. Oh, these things we don’t like that much. Let’s see how we can figure out how to let go of some of those. Bit by bit. We found our way.

 

Mark Divine 5:00

And do you think this is going to be a long-term thing? Or is it just a fun? Well, we did that for a couple of years, check the box, and everyone go back to your onto your own ways.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 5:08

Now we talk about growing old here. My son, I have a 21-year-old son, he was talking about, you know, in my generation and his generation, what’s going to happen with this place? And how is that generation going to deal with the sharing?

 

Mark Divine 5:23

Yeah, that’s a whole nother level of complexity, right? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 5:26

This is a whole nother level of complexity. 

 

Mark Divine 5:28

This is so cool. I’m so stoked to have met you and just learned about that, because it really just opens up my mind about, you know, possibilities. And it’s a really interesting world, and things are changing so fast. And that’s why it’s so interesting to be talking about complexity today. It just seems like, it’s so much more complex. And that might be an appearance, right? But it just seems like because of the explosion of technology and changing demographics and geopolitics in the world, between you and me, unless it is gonna be look, it’s gonna look really different in 20, or 30 years than it does right now. People have no idea what’s coming. Right? No idea.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 6:05

We can’t begin to predict right? And any predictions would be ludicrous, would be laughable for us.

 

Mark Divine 6:11

The only prediction that would work would be that things will be really different. And you’ll probably be pretty accurate there. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 6:16

That’s exactly right. 

 

Mark Divine 6:17

So before I, I want to obviously, you know, the focus of our conversation today is complexity and your new book, Unleash Your Complexity Genius. But I want to learn a little bit more about Dr. Jennifer, like, how did you get interested in this? What were some of your early formative experiences that shaped you as a person and then as a professional, you know, to get you know, your your academic work, and etc? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 6:38

So I’ve always loved stories. I love humans, I love their stories. I was an English teacher for a while, then I went back to school to get my doctorate in adult development, which is our story.

 

Mark Divine 6:51

That’s in the field of psychology, right? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 6:53

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And for me, the question that became really interesting is how do we grow better able to meet the demands of our world, which is complexity, basically. 

 

Mark Divine 7:05

And adult development really is growing through stages of complexity, transcending, including, and, I’m very familiar the work of adult development psychologists like Susan Cook Greuter, and Jane Levenger, and Federer Graves, and Ken Wilber, and those have been had big influence on my life. The interesting thing is, around this idea of complexity that I want to hear how you applied it to your life is how do you find simplicity, inside the complexity? Because you just described one way you do it with your living arrangement. But I think that’s a really cool place to start. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 7:36

The question about complexity is how do we work with it and not against it? Right, which is basically your question there. If you’re trying to figure out how do I build something that keeps the waves from making me wet? Like you have to deal with storms and weather, and you have to think about every possible thing if you live at the seaside? If you think to yourself, how do I work with the waves, and do something cool with with what’s here? It’s a totally different task, and in many ways, much simpler. So this has been my fundamental question is how do we recognize complexity and then work with it, harness it in some ways to create the lives we want to lead.

 

Mark Divine 8:14

Did you ever work as a psychologist or did you parlay your Ph.D. into this leadership development work right away?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 8:21

I started as a professor and then began to work more and more in the leadership field, and then found myself being incredibly curious about how it is leaders who are now faced with jobs that are basically inconceivably complex, right? You can’t even get your head around them. How do they get big enough to not only handle those jobs but to do what I think organizations need to do, which is work together to change the world? 

 

Mark Divine 8:48

I love how you frame this because, you know, I’ve always thought one of my heroes, of course, Steve Jobs, like he’s just one of those really, really interesting cats and who, you know, really believed that simplicity was the key to genius or it took genius to find simplicity and an unlock genius. And so, so he was all against complexity. He thought that was the like, the death knell of a business is like we’re dealing with that actually, in our own businesses, too many too many products, too many services, too many different types of customers. And yet finding your way through that navigating that and finding the the essence of what it is both the why, and the how and the what of what you’re all about. That’s genius, right? And then that gets to the simplicity, right? I’m curious, like, how did you make this leap from adult development to genius and complexity? And like, where did the puzzle pieces fit together for you that led to your current vein of work that you’re exploring? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 9:43

Yeah. So I’d like to make a distinction that I’d have loved to talk to Steve Jobs about, which is the distinction between things that are complicated. They have a ton of moving parts, they’re 20 sectors, they’re just a lot of pieces, and things that are complex, which are interdependent, and have their own kind of energy, their own kind of emergent properties. I think that we often confuse those two things. Businesses are often too complicated, right? And we often are trying to think everything through and make a Gantt chart for this or that, or the other thing like this is very common. But Steve Jobs was great at understanding the complexity, the interactivity of the world. 

 

Mark Divine 10:24

So do you think they’re they’re qualitatively different things? Or is complexity just more complicated than complicated?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 10:30

I think they’re qualitatively different things. 

 

Mark Divine 10:32

Ok

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 10:32

Complexity theorists, Dave Snowden, would say that complicated things are solvable. 

 

Mark Divine 10:38

There’s cause and effect relationships, right? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 10:41

Yeah. Cause and effect relationships, and you can solve them and complexity, you can’t now, so they emerge. And so instead of being able to plan and control and contain, which is what most leaders most of us have been taught, we ought to do in complexity, we have to explore

 

Mark Divine 10:56

Right

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 10:56

connect, learn, and experiment. 

 

Mark Divine 11:00

Well, I think that the during the, you know, industrial age, all the way up really until the internet, and maybe beyond even into the first decade of this century, we had the appearance that things had a linear cause-and-effect relationship. It’s, it’s not actually true, I don’t believe but it had the appearance because it seemed like things moved a little bit slower so you had time to like, you know, get feedback loops and plan and do the kind of the OODA Loop thing. And then things just started to speed up. So it seemed like, oh, wow, we’ve entered a different era. Reality is complexity, and complicated coexisted all along, right? People just focused on, we had the time to do the planning and the iteration. Now they don’t. So it takes a new type of thinking.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 11:42

Yeah, we had the the tools and the capacities to tame a bunch of the things in our world to kind of keep them inside a particular box. And we could make that happen. And now we can’t. 

 

Mark Divine 11:55

Now where do we start and trying to understand complexity, like if someone’s new to this, like a listener going, Oh, this is really interesting. Jennifer, where do I? Where do I? How do I start to cultivate the capacity to deal with complexity in my business? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 12:07

I think the first thing we need to do is recognize what our body does. When we’re faced with complexity. Our body recognizes complexity and uncertainty and unpredictability as threat.

 

Mark Divine 12:21

fight or flight boom. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 12:22

It’s scary

 

Mark Divine 12:23

right, 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 12:23

That’s exactly, Exactly right. So it activates our nervous system. And just as it activates our nervous system, it has us want to command and control, to narrow our focus to put our hands on things and force them to happen, to protect ourselves. All of these things are understandable but not helpful in complexity. And so if we can understand the signals our body’s giving us, then we can start to say, oh, wait, thank you. But maybe I should do something else. 

Mark Divine 12:54

I think like the body of an organization has that same reaction.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 12:58

for sure. 

 

Mark Divine 12:59

So you can have an organization’s went into fight or flight, you know, certainly during the pandemic, and if you weren’t able to get out of that quickly, then you didn’t survive. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 13:08

Because you needed to innovate, right? Protecting actually is not innovative at all, right? Protecting is very un-innovative. And in a really fast-changing world protection is not going to get you where you need to be. 

 

Mark Divine 13:22

Okay, so that makes sense to me. And that’s kind of in alignment with what I teach Special Operators; like first, pause and breathe, right, nd that resets your nervous system…And also create a daily practice, we use Box breathing, to essentially train your body to be in a de aroused, rest and digest state calm, from which you can make better decisions. So So let’s assume we’ve done that or we train someone to do that. And you’re working with the CEO and now what’s next. Like still there’s, there’s this insane cacophony of information and interrelatedness and the VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world is right there in front of me, but I’m calm. So now what do I do? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 14:05  

This is a huge advance.

 

Mark Divine 14:06

It’s a big step forward, but I’m still not sure what’s next.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 14:11  

It’s huge, I mean, one of the things I think people need to recognize in that state is they can’t go it alone. 

 

Mark Divine 14:16

It’s impossible for one individual to figure things out, yeah.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 14:18

You can’t go it alone, you need to understand how do we as a collective function, and how do we as a collective function better and better over time. So it means that it’s not just your nervous system, you have to calm it’s the nervous systems of those around you too, right, you got to take care of your own body, but you’ve also got to be managing what’s going on for others because you need them and they need you. And so then the next step, I think, is to create the conditions for those people to build incredibly strong bonds together to trust one another, and then to be able to activate those things that make us awesome at complexity and which I call the geniuses right, that help us handle complex beautifully as humans have also handled complexity beautifully for 1000’s of years. 

 

Mark Divine 15:04

You get the body of the organization calm and collected. And then you work on teaming. The, we call the three foundations for a great team are courage, trust, and respect; which require a lot of emotional awareness and emotional development. And you know, what Brene Brown called vulnerability and really recognizing that oftentimes, it’s our own projections and judgments and perfectionism and righteousness, that is what gets the energy of a team stuck. So clearing all that. So the team has this team mind, a collective mind, that’s free of the ego. So from then now, you’ve got 10-20-30-50, hundreds of minds that can fuse together to create, you know, the genius-level mind. That can creep in and come up with solutions that are far, far better than any individual.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 15:52

I love that you’re emphasizing this way we’re connected, which is incredibly important. And we also have to be diverse, right?

 

Mark Divine 16:01

Yes, I love that.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 16:01

We have to be different from each other. And we have to allow for our differences. And we have to actually amplify and use our different perspectives in order to see into corners that other people might not see into. If you take an incredibly diverse set of people, you get them to function as a really highly effective team. But they think that they can’t use their diversity on that team. You’ve just lost a lot. So here we, we get them to make good use of their diversity. And I think the other thing we, I believe we have to do is we have to laugh. We have fun together, we have to figure out how to lighten lighten our spirits because it’s in that place of play. The creativity really lives.

 

Mark Divine 16:46

Right. Creativity is a positive process. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 16:48

Right? That’s right. 

 

Mark Divine 16:50

It comes from a positive love frequencies doesn’t come from fear and contraction, yeah

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 16:56

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And teaming is that way as well. Right. 

 

Mark Divine 17:00

Yeah, right.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 17:00

Teaming comes from this desire to be bigger together than any of us are by ourselves. 

 

Mark Divine 17:08

Okay, so we’re calm or connected, we’re inclusive, or we’re diverse. We’re amplifying our differences de-energizing things that get us stuck. And we’re doing that with a lot of play and laughter. And then, now what? What’s next? This is so cool. I’m like. Literally, it’s all falling into place, in my mind. I’m like, this is really cool. I love this roadmap you’re drawing here. Yeah. But that’s a lot of work, though, what you just described? Like, that’s very, very uncommon, by the way, right? Most people are thinking, wow, I would love to have a team like that. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 17:38

Indeed, which is why I think that a leader, a leader’s job is really to amplify the conditions that make this more possible, right because as you said earlier, humans get into groups, they have their perfectionism, they have their contractions, they have their egos, they have their stories, they have all these things that get in the way of what we are absolutely wired to do, which is connect with one another, play, create. A lot of leaders think my job is to solve problems and to enable other people to solve problems. It’s not wrong, right? But it’s small. My job is to create the condition where problems are solved. So what is that? How do I create the condition? So the solution to problems just starts to pop like popcorn? Oh, well, I need to figure out what that takes. And this is what my focus should be, and creating that that surround so that solutions happen. 

 

Mark Divine 18:37

So what are the some of the best ways to create the conditions for problems are spontaneously solved? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 18:42

So, I think that there’s a lot for us to be thinking about as we think about welcoming humanity into our workplaces. Workplaces have, basically, for the last 100 years or more, segmented, chopped, removed, kind of tried to take as much as possible, the human out of the workplace.

 

Mark Divine 19:06

Factory settings, human resources…

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 19:08

That’s exactly right, to emphasize the machine like capabilities and to try to define your job really narrowly, so that it doesn’t touch to the job of the person right next door, you know, so that so that we can as much as possible, control the hell out of everything we’re doing. So creating the conditions is about releasing that idea and to say, okay, so what are what are the conditions for human thriving, and how could I make that in my workplace? So how do we start with connection, not connection as an afterthought, not connection as an icebreaker, but connection as the fundamental ground on which we exist? 

How do we then add purpose, the fundamental human need to do work that’s meaningful, purposeful, because then now you have connection, your purpose, you add in this idea of diversity, and being able to really see across differences and use our differences. And suddenly, you have popcorn, right? And suddenly, you have a place where solutions happen.

 

Mark Divine 20:10

I love that, can you talk about operating at the intersection of inner and outer complexity, how do we find that intersection? And what are some tools that you work with your clients to unlock that capability, or capacity?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 20:24

I think the thing right at the intersection is our body. Right? It’s right here. Because there’s the complexity of the world out there. Then there’s our psychology. And then there’s the body that mediates those things. And so I think, box breathing, for example, is a tool I, I also use this to be able to be at that mediation space, so that we will be able to handle the complexity of the world. Then you need tools to make sense of that. Because humans don’t automatically make sense of complexity, we’re not good at that. Our brains don’t work that way. So we need tools like polarity management, or tools that help us listen in new ways to each other, or tools that help us get a handle on what kind of problems this is, and therefore what should be done with it. So there are ton of tools that help us in the world out there. And then there are these tools that help us in the world in here, with our development, as you were saying earlier, with our capacity to regulate our own nervous system, and also with our capacity to regulate the stories we tell ourselves that are feeding our ego, and then create defenses.

 

Mark Divine 21:34

The inner development we work a lot with, so that makes a lot of sense. And then I think what is unique about your work, and we’re starting to head, is they become a team process, right? So the idea of the deliberately developmental organizations like, you go to work. It’s not like, all your development is on the yoga mat or the meditation bench, you know, or the park bench breathing and taking in sunshine and listening to birds, but you come in, and together as a team, you do box breathing. And as a team, you practice mindfulness. As a team, you work on your listening and, you know, communication skills. And that’s like amplifying what’s working at the individual, you bring it in, you amplify that, and then just really opens up kind of the team inner dynamics in a healthy way. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 22:19

And it helps us understand that for me to be doing my job tomorrow, I need to be growing today. And for us together to be successful in our enterprise next year, we have to grow into next year. And we know that this is true of children. We know this is true that for a child to be successful, that child needs to be growing every year and needs to be learning reaching beyond what they could do last year. It’s just as true for us as grown-ups. But we have this idea that we’ve arrived someplace, or we have this idea that our business card defines or describes us in some way. When groups begin to take collective responsibility for the development of the group. Amazing things happen. Amazing things happen. 

 

Mark Divine 23:10

You’re right. I mean, statistics on adult development aren’t pretty, or they haven’t been pretty in the past like most adult adults pretty much, just stop. They slide into what Carol Dweck would call that fixed mindset. And I think I remember reading somewhere that like only 5% of the world is, is got a growth mindset or something like that. That just sounds extraordinary. Like a low percentage, I don’t know what your thoughts are on that. Because I know it’s becoming more and more prevalent to kind of unlock growth and adult development, is started to really grow exponentially in the last few years. So it’s probably not 5% anymore. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 23:4

Much to my surprise, until I have to say, this question about how do we create the conditions to help people grow on purpose has been the question that I’ve been carrying for basically my whole career. And how do we specifically do that at work? How do we help each other create the conditions which require failure, stumbling, humanity, grumpiness? Right, like annoyance, bad feedback, you know, all these parts of being a human that we don’t like as much, and so we try to wash them off or not show them that work required for us to grow and we need to believe that the whole thing is allowed. 

 

Mark Divine 24:27

Yeah. And that the emotional development there is just to get over this idea that there is some sort of perfect way to be. And because perfectionism for leaders, especially male leaders who think okay, and like you said, if you get the title, boom, you think, Well, I must have been perfect in order to be CEO. So I’ve got to protect and protect that image. And that’s disastrous because there is no such thing as perfect. And failure is not such a you know, we said in the SEAL teams, their failure is not an option. It wasn’t because we couldn’t fail is because the idea of failure was anathema to us because we knew that we were going to fail, practically at everything we tried. So we embrace it for the learning that it would bring to us. That’s what that saying meant.

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 25:07

This idea of failure means there’s one, one objective, and we either make it or we don’t. The one thing we’re sure of is we’re gonna die, right? Like this is the one thing that’s super clear to all of us. This is not the thing we’re barreling towards and trying to succeed at, is that. Everything else is uncertain. Everything else? And so, how do we live our lives in a way that takes advantage of that uncertainty instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or wishing it away or feeling stressed out by it.

 

Mark Divine 25:36

I want to get into just two specific things you mentioned, managing polarities as like an external tool for, for helping with the external complexity environment. I’d like to talk about that. And then I would like to talk about the tool that you’ve had the most success with, perhaps in helping to navigate the internal complexity. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 25:55

So one of the tools my clients like the best is a tool developed by a man called Barry Johnson. On this managing polarities question. And basically, Barry has created this unbelievable simple tool for us to deal with things that feel irreconcilable. The contradictions in our life that feel like so opposing, and we we really struggle with them. Like, if you have a big organization, do standardize or do customize? Your question right now, that you might be facing in your organization is, do you diversify? Or do you simplify? These are tensions that live in opposition to each other. When we’re in one of these questions, do we do this thing? Or do we do the opposite? Then the answer is almost always yes, you do both of those things.

 

Mark Divine 26:45

Both, yeah. That’s interesting

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 26:46

And so then the question is, how do you navigate that, and Barry’s created a tool that lets you map, these are the benefits. And these are the things that happen when you overemphasize one of these things at the expense of the other. And then from there, you can begin to take groups through kind of understanding the map of the complexity of the world they live in and then making specific choices. So basically, all of my favorite complexity tools are mapping tools of one kind or another because maps help us simplify, help us handle put our arms around the complexity. So it’s not like just wandering around in this aimless way. But they focus the the mind; they focus the attention on particular aspects of complexity so that we can then move forward. And polarity management is one of the best of all of these tools, I think.

 

Mark Divine 27:40

That’s so cool, I want to investigate that further, and I agree with you maps; you have to know the terrain. So you have to be able to put the, you know, the elements, in this case, complexity or the polarities, on to the map, so you can understand the terrain, and then you can map your way through it and navigate it more effectively. It’s similar in therapy of just objectifying the underlying issue so that you can so you can work with them, but you can’t objectify them, name them. How do you work with them? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 28:05

That’s exactly right. You got to put them out on the table. So you can walk around, look at it from different aspects and then make choices. 

 

Mark Divine 28:11

Okay, so what about inner complexity? What’s a tool that is really effective there? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 28:15

I gotta say, it’s a map. You talked about Suzanne Cook Roiter’s work. I love Suzanne. I studied with Bob Kegan. So the the map I use most often is Bob Kegan’s map. But this idea that there’s a map with recognizable places, and that we can make sense of our lives,  we can say, oh, that’s what was going on to me right there. That was a time when I was so made up by other people that I couldn’t decide for myself. That makes sense to me now. And I could grow from that place into a place where I could make those choices on my own. You know, they’re just some gentle definitions in this map. And I have seen this map change the lives, oh, geepers of 1000’s, and 1000’s of people 10’s of 1000’s of people that I’ve worked with. Just knowing oh, there is something I could grow into. It’s different from now. And some of the pain that I’m feeling is actually not the pain or the discomfort. That kind of is just like a blister on my shoe. But it’s actually the pain of birth, right, like it’s the pain of gestation. It’s the pain of bringing into the world the next iteration of me, and that next generation is going to be bigger, more complex, more capable than what I’ve been up until now.

 

Mark Divine 29:36

I love that. I totally know what you’re talking about. I’ve done, you know, the Cook Roiter leadership maturity assessment and the ability to see well here I am at self-actualization and yet my leading edge is in heading into unitive or you know, whatever for whoever is taking but also the awareness that working on the leading edge isn’t going to get you there. Often it’s working on the trailing edge and overcoming the blockages and the shadows that are, they’re like, like a rubber band holding you back. Like you can’t spring forward until you get rid of those things that are blocking the energy. What’s the assessment that Robert Keegan uses or that you use for this?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 30:10

I use this thing called the growth edge interview. It’s an interview to figure out what what these blind spots are. Right? What are these things? I can’t see about how I make sense of the world. 

 

Mark Divine 30:19

Do you work with individual leaders or companies or groups, teams? And how do you actually do the work? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 30:24

I do all those things and coach individual leaders. We work with teams, leadership teams, we work with whole organizations and design leadership programs to help organizations have more of the mindset that helps them grow the whole, the whole enterprise. 

 

Mark Divine 30:41

That’s awesome. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 30:42

And, all that stuff .

 

Mark Divine 30:43

It’s fantastic work. I really I’m really stoked to learn more about it today.

Your company’s called Cultivating Leadership. Is that the website like cultivatingleadership.com? Or what’s the website and your book?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 30:53

That’s it.

 

Mark Divine 30:53

And, your book, Unleash Your Complexity Genius: growing your inner capacity to lead. Is recently published, right? 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 31:00

Just this month that came out, Yes. 

 

Mark Divine 31:02

That’s what I thought. Where else can people or where would you prefer people to hook up with you? website, social media?

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 31:07

Come to the website. I’m on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. I live in all these places. 

 

Mark Divine 31:13

Jennifer, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been very enlightening, and it’s going to help a lot of people find their genius in this complex time that we live in. So it’s important work. 

 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 31:22

Lovely spending time with you, Mark. Thanks so much. 

 

Mark Divine  31:23

Yeah, thank you. Hooyah. What a fantastic interview and very interesting person. Dr. Jennifer Garvey Berger is, loved talking about complexity and Unleashing Your Complexity Genius, the principles in her newly released book and love talking about her French Chateau, 21 bedrooms, I want to go over there and meet her and hang out. Fascinating, fascinating, great, great conversation. Thanks so much, Jennifer. Shownotes and transcripts are up at markdivine.com. And as usual, video is up at YouTube and our YouTube channel MarkDivine.com/youtube. You can find me @Mark Divine on Twitter, @real Mark Divine on IG and Facebook, and as well on my LinkedIn channel or page, a quick plug for Divine Inspiration, our new newsletter which comes out every Tuesday, which has a synopsis of the podcast, my blog, and other interesting things that come across my desk that I think you would find value. So go to markdivine.com to sign up. If you haven’t subscribed, a special shout out to my amazing team, Geoff Haskell and Jason Sanderson, who helped me produce this podcast every week and bring guests like Jennifer to you. Reviews and ratings are extremely helpful. So if you haven’t done so consider doing that I very much appreciate it. The goal is to get 5000 5-star ratings, at least to Apple, and it helps other people find the show and gives us the credibility to keep doing what we do. Thanks so much for being part of this show and for sharing it with your friends and family. And recognizing that we can navigate this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world that we live, we can unlock our creativity genius, but we’ve got to do the work. You got to do the work, to unlock our own growth, to be great leaders and teammates, and to be the change we want to see in the world at scale. So keep it up. We’ll see you next week.

 

Transcribed by Catherine and https://otter.ai