Welcome to my interview with Aviv Shahar who is Founder at Aviv Consulting. Aviv helps leaders create new futures by unleashing strategic innovation. He is also the author of Create New Futures: How Leaders Produce Breakthroughs and Transform the World Through Conversation.
Welcome to this forum Aviv where we are uncovering the footprints that lead to the forward thinking human and workplace.
Bill Fox: I read your book to prepare for this interview, and the depth and coverage on conversations were impressive. When I started this interview series, I had this idea to ask a series of questions that could help us create a better workplace, but I didn’t fully appreciate the powerful role of conversations.
One big learning I’ve had from this interview series is the power of conversations. Several executives and CEO’s who I interviewed have gotten back to me after they were observing what I was doing and said we need to have this conversation in the workplace. I think as you know, there’s a wonderful marriage of what you’re doing, and what I’m doing.
Aviv Shahar: That’s great. That’s really the right kind and the delicious response you should get from CEOs in these dialogues.
Bill: Yes, exactly. This interview series started as an experiment. I really wasn’t sure CEO’s would answer them. I got a lot of positive feedback from some top CEOs, which really gave me the momentum and energy to keep doing more.
Aviv: That’s great Bill.
Bill: So Aviv, thank you for your courage and willingness to take on these questions. Not everybody I ask takes up the challenge, so you’re in a special category right from the start.
If you’re ready, Aviv, I’ll ask you the six core questions before getting into additional questions I came up with from reading your book, Creating New Futures.
How can we create workplaces where every voice matters, everyone thrives and finds meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally?
Aviv: Let me for a second or two just turn the tables around and ask you first back because I know this is the core of the first question you ask people you’ve interviewed.
It is important to ask you, what was the genesis of this question in you? What was the trigger that catalyzed it? And then I can try to thread my way through this compound question.
Bill: That’s a great question and I love starting with your question. I’ll try not to go back too far because there are a number of places to start, but really it started 10 years ago when I was leading a transformation project. For the third time in my career after getting a transformation project to a great point of success, new executives take over and all the work that was done just falls away. So that’s when I set an intention to have an impact on how organizations transform.
I left that job without a job in hand, and my intention seemed to set synchronicity in motion. One of the first things I came up with was an interview series called 5 Minutes to Process Improvement Success. The leading question was, “What is your best Improvement strategy that has worked really well for you?”
From the beginning, I rarely got an answer about process improvement. It was always something deeper. It was all about trust, understanding the status quo, and things of that nature. It was surprising to me (and others), and that ignited an inner leader journey for me as I started to look at the deeper side of things.
After I did 50 interviews, I felt this was never about process improvement, and it was silly to go on in this direction. I set it aside to see if something new would show up. A year and a half later, these new questions came together.
Aviv: I’m glad I asked you. Would you mind restating the question one more time? Then let’s see how I can best approach this delicious inquiry.
How can we create workplaces where every voice matters, everyone thrives and finds meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally?
Aviv: My experience and sense with powerful questions like this, in the context of the background you offered, is that they often emerge from a place of want and lack.
Therefore, such questions often are not optimally conducive or attractive to bringing forward the intelligence and the energy we hope will help us redress and sufficiently address the want. I prefer to reframe your question just slightly to help me find a different entry, one that can provide for both of us an elevated access. Here is how I will reframe the question.
I would say:
Imagine a workplace where every voice matters, everyone thrives and finds meaning, and change and innovation happen naturally. Imagine such a workplace. Now tell us please what had to become true to enable such an emergence.
It’s the same question just restated, and this is a formulation that provides a faster entry and a life-affirming path because it is anchored in the desired state rather than in its absence which is a place of want and scarcity.
Two Short Answers and One Longer Answer
To now attempt to respond to that question, I’ll say there are two short answers I can offer and one longer answer. The first short answer is interior focused, so when I imagine a workplace where every voice matters and where people thrive and find meaning and change and innovation happen naturally, I imagine a place where we have made a leap forward. A place where we’ve evolved as people.
Actually, we’ve evolved as a species where sapient sapiens is not merely a name but an actuality.
That’s the short inner or interior answer. Now we can then talk about what had to become true to enable that outcome and that would naturally lead us to the longer answer.
The second brief answer is more exterior, outward focusing. Here again, the short version is that when I imagine a workplace where people thrive, and where they find meaning, and where change and innovation happen naturally, and where the reciprocity of work and its benefits bring the replenishment and the enhancement to all people involved.
I can envision a place where the entire socioeconomic framework and the capital system were transformed.
This is a future enabled by a transformational shift from the short-term extractive bias that governs many companies and organizations today to a more sustainable and even life-giving seven generations forward orientation. That’s the second and the more exterior leaning framing of the answer.
The third longer answer, which will build on those two, is that when I imagine a naturally arising and evolving workplace where people thrive by bringing forward the best ideas and best contribution and where the economic framework is aligned to help facilitate and bring forward the organizational and social equities that people want to cultivate and build and is aligned with the entire ecosystem emergent purpose and health—when I imagine that kind of ecosystem, I envision that we have overcome at least seven blockages. You can call them seven evolutionary or developmental blockages or stop situations.
Note: This is a preview of the full interview. The complete interview was selected by Apress for publication and continues in The Future of the Workplace.
Get your copy today!
Editor’s Note: Learn more about Aviv’s Create New Futures in our conversation that continues at How to Have Conversations that Trigger Game-Changing Results.