Nippin Anand 0:01
Okay, yeah, off you go with your story. Jen,

Jenny Krasny 0:05
so I was working out of a country in Africa and

Jenny Krasny 0:11
and I was blown away with an initiative that one of my customers had introduced, and he was very proud of the initiative, and the initiative was as simple as working from heights. He had sent a bunch of people on a course to learn how to work from heights only the week prior. And I get to the operation, and I’m working out of an office that was overlooking the area where trucks get loaded and unloaded. And as we were looking down, it was just in a break, we weren’t observing their work per se, and all of a sudden he says, Oh my gosh, Jenny, there are people here working at heights, and they’re not following process, because what we had was a bunch of very proud workers with a glossy harness, you know, a beautiful harness, brand new, shiny. It wasn’t dirty yet. It wasn’t tattered, but they weren’t tethered to anything. And he said, Oh, I need to go and tell them off. And I said, Hang on, let’s have another look. And then we saw another worker doing exactly the same thing, and then another worker doing exactly the same thing. And he looked at me and turned white, and he said, Jenny, this is very embarrassing. And the issue was that the workers were wearing their harnesses, but there was nowhere, nowhere that they could actually tether this thing off. So if they did fall, it was nowhere, you know, there was nowhere to go. And I remember retelling that story to my manager at the time, and he said, See, this is good, Jenny, this is why they need you here. These people are taking taking risks where they really shouldn’t be taking risks. And I remember saying to my manager, well, I’m not sure about that, because on the way to the facility we passed by, I’ll call it accommodation that people were living in, and the accommodation was probably the size of my desk times two, so not very big. And that accommodation was being guarded by someone’s child while mum and dad had gone to work to earn for the family, and this child was guarding the accommodation, either with a fairly large knife, a machete That was about as tall as them, or or what was even more confronting for someone like me, a string of bullets hanging across their body, and them holding a gun and and I said to my manager, you know, the average age for someone, the average lifespan for someone in that particular country, is 45 if they’re lucky, if they’re lucky. So I said to my manager, who was who had just turned 45 at the time. And I said to him, do you think you would live your life differently, knowing that this might be your last year of life, compared to our environment, where people might live to 8590, if they’re blessed that way? And he said, Well, yes. And I said, So would that change the way you see risk? Because right now, someone falling off the back of the truck that might only be a meter and a half off the ground is not the worst case scenario for them at all. You know, not being able to feed their family and having to protect their family by using one of their youngest children. Yeah, life’s a bit different, risk, risk awareness, risk tolerance. Call it what you like is different across the globe. And as you were saying, You know what? What might feel appropriate in some of our Western countries, doesn’t always apply in the same way in other countries. You know, context is everything.

Nippin Anand 4:29
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what a beautiful story. And maybe this is a good place to begin to say, Welcome to embracing differences. And instead of starting off with that, you know, typical ritual of introducing people and boosting egos around it, I’m joined by Jenny Krasny, a good friend who I met through Rob studying social psychology of risk. Jenny, what a beautiful story, and maybe a few words about yourself. And then we. Will dive a little bit deeper into this story. Oh, gosh, okay.

Jenny Krasny 5:04
Well, by background, I am a registered organizational psychologist. So for me, my interest is very much, how do I go into a work environment with the goal of not only introducing greater productivity or efficiency, but also, how do I do that with people in mind, in an environment we find ourselves today in that is surrounded with automation, AI digitization, everything feels a little bit more removed, and sometimes we forget about the person in the process. So my interest in life is giving people a voice and letting people be seen. That has been something I’ve been doing ever since I can remember. I come from the first generation of my family who are who migrated to Australia, and I can I know what it’s like, and I know my story is not everyone’s story, but I know what it’s like to be the person who sits in the playground by myself being the person that someone will point at and laugh at because I was different. I didn’t fit into the norm, and it reminded me of a story that I remember at one organization I visited, someone had approached the person I was talking to and handed in their resignation. And that particular individual was shocked that this individual hand in their resignation, and I remember very profoundly. The individual said, for 35 years, I gave you my hands, my head and my heart, and for 35 years you took my hands you had no interest in my head or my heart, what I knew and what I believed. And I remember that story as if I was hearing it again just today. It It gave me goosebumps, but it certainly brought me back to when, when I was a child and and witnessing people who were different not being included in a conversation, because, for some reason, what they believe and what they feel was not something people were willing to entertain. So that’s very much. What I’m interested in is, how do I bring the voiceless to the table? How do I bring the invisible into the visible landscape and have those various views and opinions heard, recognized and embraced. That’s what I’m about.

Nippin Anand 7:45
It’s the first time, after so many months, maybe years, that I’m hearing something so authentic, so spontaneous, so original, wonderful, just wonderful. Yes, and Jenny, how do you Let’s go little bit, little bit into this and see. How do you do that? Because I think it’s, it’s difficult for my lived experiences.

Jenny Krasny 8:19
Yeah, it’s, it’s a fascinating question, because some sometimes things like this come somewhat naturally. I don’t, I don’t really have a method. I’d love to tell you that I follow a four step process, or I adhere to some Venn diagram or some triangle or, you know, I don’t. I don’t. I simply sit, sit with an individual and listen, and I create space for them just to express themselves, and when they hesitate, I ask further questions, or I hold space for that hesitation to either emerge or clear itself up, and I just sit, I take an interest in what that individual has to say, and sometimes in doing so, I might share some of my story, but again, I recognize that my story is not everyone’s story, but sometimes by offering a little bit of yourself or myself, I realize I get more from another individual than otherwise I might. So it is very much just about holding space for people and giving them the place and the voice where otherwise they don’t get it. For me, it’s that simple, Nippin. I don’t, I don’t know that I have a formula.

Nippin Anand 9:48
Well, if you did, we would probably be having a very different conversation. Then you’re so right. You know, I just the. Something very fresh on my mind right now is why my son is 10 years old, and he asked the question that that, why is the plasters, you know, the week, some people call them the band aid, and why are the plasters white in color? And I was shocked and just completely taken aback by it. And I went online to see if there are plasters of other colors. And I found something on Amazon, Etsy, a couple of websites, and I brought him in, Nihal, I’ll show you there are some very nice plasters of different colors, red, yellow, orange, green, purple, whatever you like. Happy. You know, he left. The next day, I had a conversation with a very good friend of mine, and I said, Tanya, look, I this is the conversation I had with my son, and he she’s a safety manager in one of the companies. And she said, Nippin, don’t tell me anything. He said, I tried to introduce colored plasters in our first aid boxes, and I was told off by one of the the employees to say, this is racist. I was like, what? And funny enough, Jenny, maybe. About a week later, I was talking to my to my mother in law, my best friend in this world, and we were having a conversation, and she had a plaster on her, on her forehead, and I could not unsee it, and I had to ask the question. I said, Mom, why is it that this plaster, of course, you know, we speak our native language. I said, Why is the plaster white? Why is it not of any other color? She said, Don’t you know why? I said, No, she’s so annoyed with me. And you’ve done a PhD, and you don’t know these things, you know, she always pulls me on that. And I said, No, I don’t, she said, Because? I said, What? Because when it gets dirty, you know, when it’s dirty, and you peel it off and you can throw it away. And I said, how nice. I said, isn’t it? Isn’t it? So, so that’s, that’s metaphors we live by, you know, the one of the first books we read in social psychology of risk.

Jenny Krasny 12:08
Very much. So I love that. Oh, I love that. And I also just love the various perspectives people bring. And I have to say, when I was a child growing up, the honesty of children hurt because in many ways, they were directed at me. But you know, now that I’m older and I’ve had my own children, I do like to pursue that childlike curiosity and that childlike observation, the fact that, you know, I still remember when my my little boy, when he was little, I just saw the same world in such a different lens, like the fascination with a leaf and the shape of the leaf and the feeling of the veins that run through the leaf. And I thought, Wow. You know, that thing that I’ve just become completely blind to suddenly is alive and living in a very different way, and just like your son sees this thing that over time, you and I just accept it, well, I guess that’s the way it is. And someone that just allows you to see the world in another way and say, Wow, actually, yeah, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Nippin Anand 13:19
And the interesting thing is, I just look at myself and say, I’m trying to prove him wrong by saying that there are many other colors. The world doesn’t work that way. So very, very Yeah, it’s it’s very interesting, because at that stage, and you know, maybe this also ties into our previous conversation, that you’re not bounded by any kind of attributions you’re not bounded by, you know, making those strong causations between white and plaster. Plaster has to be white and, you know, and then reinforced by white ambulances and white health care systems and white everything is pure because it’s white and everything is bad because it’s black. You don’t have those causal connections, still, and how interesting to look at things from a child’s perspective. I was fascinated by a chaplain, a friend of mine, who lives in Aberdeen, and he says that whenever there is an accident, I go on board the ship, and I ask a completely different question of questions, and I come up with the best possible responses, but I’ve never invited into shipping company, I said, because you don’t fit into that causal connection, yes, but it’s so interesting. And I always say that to people that you have an accident, send a chaplain, send somebody who send an innocent child, because they are not bounded by those

Jenny Krasny 14:42
places they’re not and they’re also not bound or tainted or influenced. But try and find a more positive spin on it, on a method, on a method I remember distinctly the same organization. Actually where I had someone I was visiting and someone had resigned, and, you know, made the comment of for 35 years, I gave you my hands, my heart and my head, and for 35 years, you took my hands and didn’t think and care about what I had to say or what I had to feel. And I was going somewhere with that point Nippin, and I’ve totally forgotten what I was going to say. Remind me what we were saying.

Nippin Anand 15:34
Well, we were discussing the leap between see it and say it. You see something, but how difficult it is to put it into words. And I think the conversation then went in the direction of your story that used to share in the beginning,

Jenny Krasny 15:59
I promise you there was a profound story I wanted to share, and I’ve just totally forgotten it.

Nippin Anand 16:04
That’s fine. It’s fine. We’ll come back. Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. And, you know, I find it so fascinating that the industry pays so little attention to intelligibility, for example. And how do you find words? How do you even find words to express what you want to say? It’s hard you want to say something.

Jenny Krasny 16:32
No, you certainly make me think about many, many years ago.

Jenny Krasny 16:39
One of my challenges I have Nippin Is that I’m described as an empath, and what that means for me, at least, is even before I’ve come into a room, I can feel the energy of the room. I can connect with the energy of another individual, and I ride the roller coaster of the individual, and certainly in the jobs that you and I have, we spend a lot of time in conversation. Then when you put the whole emotional piece into the picture, not that I try and put it there, it just comes. The net effect is, as that individual rides their emotional roller coaster, so do I, and I can walk away from a conversation both enlightened and buoyed and at the same time exhausted, because I’ve been on that ride, and I remember it led me to need to see a psychologist, and I’d never seen a psychologist for my own reasons before, and I remember I was, I was put through a process of cognitive behavioral therapy, and as we, as we did the work, or as I did the work, all of A sudden, I was struck with a dilemma, because now we were getting into, let’s identify where that thought pattern maybe began. Well, it makes sense from cognitive behavioral therapy that you need the thought pattern in order to then challenge it and find alternative responses to it. But what happens when some of the ways that we work and I work actually occurred before I had language, and to try and manufacture a language so then I can apply a therapeutical technique to it wasn’t quite hitting the mark. No amount of words at the time in my now grown up state, in my adult language, could even come close to what was going on for me before I had speech. And so you’re right, sometimes accurately. Being able to convey how you feel and what’s going on in a way that is meaningful, particularly to the audience you’re trying to address, can be challenging.

Nippin Anand 19:15
You know, many years ago I was I was doing an exercise on framing questions. And how do you frame questions when social psychology of risk, we call it workspace, headspace and group space. You give people a situation, and you say, what questions would you ask on this situation? And people will typically give you an answer in one of those three categories. And as I was leaving the workshop, there was this one particular man. He said that, Nippin, I think I don’t know what you do, but you need to figure out what you do, because I have done it many times, but I can’t get people to talk. I just can’t. And they. A there’s something that there that you need to to figure out and document it and put it across and and that would be, you would spend your lifetime doing this work. Then, you know, you awesome for you to do that. And I just thought about it, and I came back home and thought, How do I? How do I, how do I even make sense of any of this to say? Or how do I help this person understand that? What is it that makes people, brings people together and have a conversation? There is so much that happens even before you start a conversation. There is so much in that space that that resonance. There is no technique to it. I have had situations where there are people sitting 5000 miles away from me, and first eye contact, and they want to share everything about their lives. What is the recipe for that? I don’t know. It’s such. You know, there are all sort of constructs these days, psychological safety, just culture reporting culture, but so little time is spent on understanding exactly what you said that how do people even create that trust between themselves? When do they actually decide that I want to give you the language of my soul, right? There isn’t a recipe for that. And I’m sure there are people who are trying to make recipes of this and making a fortune out of it. I don’t have a problem with that, but what a, what a,

Nippin Anand 21:39
what a thing that you know you have to, you have to give me a recipe for, how do you do you get to the language of the soul or the spirit? There is none. What do you think? What do you think?

Jenny Krasny 21:50
Jen, oh, I think I totally, totally agree. As you were sharing, my mind was also racing to various examples where, yeah, to try, to try and put a label on or a process to what that is. I don’t know. I’ve always like you. I’ve always had this challenge. Sometimes it’s a gift, and sometimes it’s not, and that is for some reason, people will just come and lean on my shoulder and tell me their life story. They just do. I don’t invite it consciously, that I know, but I obviously create some vibration, some aura, some atmosphere. I don’t know what you call it. That signals that here’s someone who will just hear you out and take you for you are, and not make a judgment call about you, but just hear out your story.

Nippin Anand 22:58
Three or four years of age, my daughter is told she’s a she’s like me, a brown skinned girl. Well, Brown is another word we should talk about that. But she tells me that that dad, at 14, after 10 years of this experience, she’s sitting in the graveyard with me, and we are having a conversation between us. He said, Daddy, you know, I was, I was there was this girl in the class, four years old, and we used to hand, hold hand and walk together. And she said, I would never want to hold her hand. And I said, Why? Because the same girl who would publicly call me stinky girls, you stink and and you stink and your food stinks, and you don’t know how to eat because you don’t eat with a fork and knife. And I kept hearing these stories from my children, and it’s took her 10 years to find words and actually find the courage to say this to me, there are two aspects to it. One is that she’s found the words. The second is that she actually believes that somebody will believe her when she says this. Now, what’s interesting in all of this is that if you now take this to to the workplace, Jenny and you you think about all those people who are doing all the improvisation in the world. They’re applying a certain talk to the machinery. They’re greasing in certain parts. They’re moving around in a certain space in ways that they shouldn’t move. And coming to now explain the language of intuition to somebody who only understands process, who only understands KPI, who only understands rules? And I think we have a problem with stupidity of words, like just culture, because one, that language is not intelligible. It cannot be put into words. Two, you’re talking to somebody from another subculture who. Answers to a completely different tune. So there is no dance between two people. There is no resonance. And in the end, you know, the one who is more powerful will always prevail. And I think that’s fascinating to think from what we are talking I know I’ve took the discussion to the work, but it’s a thought that keeps bothering me all the time, to say it’s not just children, people from another culture, people who are one layer below us, and we say that very proudly. You know, frontline people, sharpen people, those people down there. But how do they? How do you, how do they, first of all, find a language to communicate what they actually do. And would you actually believe them? What did they say? Well, yeah,

Jenny Krasny 25:40
and, you know, I wonder if, I wonder if part of the formula you and I have, without it being a formula, is that the only agenda that we have is to listen to listen to discover, to learn, to understand, whereas maybe the agenda of people in organizations, that’s not the agenda. The agenda might be to meet a preconceived idea or to listen, to fill in a box without really listening to understand. I, you know, think the first time my eyes were really opened in another way, because even in my family, we weren’t incredibly well to do no job was too beneath us. And yet, even in a not well to do family. There is still a pecking order of society. It’s, it’s, it’s interesting that, you know, and I remember one of my first roles was working in a manufacturing company that made cans of which, you know, our tomatoes and our baked beans go into food camps, and I wanted in the role that I was doing. I wanted to understand how the business worked, but also the roles that people had, so then I could advise accordingly. And I remember saying to the customer contact, I’d like to be on the shop floor. I’d like to see the process, and I’d like to meet the people who do that process. And I remember her saying, Jenny, this is their job description. What more do you need to know? And I said, Well, I can read, but I want to experience it, because I don’t know what it’s like over in your part of the world, Nippin, but I’m pretty sure where it’s common whereby I haven’t met one person whose job description is an exact replica of what they do every day. It’s not so I wanted to understand, let’s see how this job description comes to life. And she said, Jenny, it’s not much. They don’t do that much. I mean, these, these are uneducated people, Jenny, don’t, don’t expect very much. And, you know, I spent six hours, so half a shift on the floor with various people as they conducted their various parts of the process. And I was most touched by an individual towards the end of the process. And this individual would look at the quality of the cans coming through, and with the most seasoned eye, like a hawk. Eye. The ability for him to be able to see from a distance that can is imperfect, and he could pick it out, and he would hold the can with quite a lot of love and say, oh, you know what we can we can just fix this one and put it back on the line. The the interest, the affection, the connection he had with a can. Gosh, it put it put that role into such a new light. For me, this wasn’t just a quality assurance person, this was someone who had some affinity and pride in the work that they did. And even today, you know, I’ll go through the supermarkets and stand in the aisle with all these cans that I can’t help but think of that individual, and think of the many individuals who who do that work. Yeah, but I went to listen, I went to understand, I went to appreciate. I didn’t go with any more than that as the agenda, and maybe that’s the difference Nippin that, yes, yeah.

Nippin Anand 29:46
And now going back to what we were discussing earlier, that you know, we have, we have a problem in today’s world where there are at least three sides to and we should build on this in the next podcast that we do. There are three sides to every organization. There is the display side of the organization that wants to do certain things, because there’s an expectation from the shareholders, from the investors, and there are multiple and competing expectations. And it’s not simple to come out and do something that would please everyone, and the easiest way to appeal to everyone is to to to be very esthetic. Be very esthetic in what you do. So this is the side of the organization that that does a wonderful job in that space, looking good. Let’s call it looking good. I just want to be looking good. Very esthetic values. We, but we, we quickly figure out that, you know, when we come to the line management and the middle management of the of the organization, that none of this is real. None of this is real. We have to put on this show, but none of this is real. The reality is production, sorry. The reality is efficiency, not production. The reality is efficiency. We must be efficient, and we must be able to measure each and everything so that display side of the organization, the reception of the organization, slowly starts to decouple, because the lies that they tell themselves, and they keep telling those lies until everyone around them starts to believe that this is reality, and they maintain that, that that that persona so beautifully well then comes the side that has to deliver results and financial, the profits and the revenues and so on. They they know we have to stick to this bureaucracy so that the the God in that part of the organization is efficiency, KPIs and so on. And then comes the so that’s the formal side of the organization sitting in between and totally decoupled with the top and I, you know, when people talk about senior executive, senior leadership, senior leadership doesn’t listen senior leadership. I think it’s many ways, it’s they have no interest in any of that. A lot of them, they’re their goals are very different. The bureaucratic side or the efficient side actually has created such constraints that it’s it’s now caught up in this narrative that everything has to be measured, if not, it simply does not exist. And it works to that kind of worldview. And then comes the informal side of the organization, which is what we are talking about here, that the God in that part of the organization is, is production? Is, is we have to just produce at whatever cost you give us a rule, and whether it is working for or against us or even causing accidents, we still have to keep going. The show must go on, kind of a slogan. And so I think the real struggle is, I just don’t think that the senior executives and the management even has an interest in this kind of a conversation. But the real struggle is between people who are caught up in this efficiency narrative, which which Rob calls, techniques, kind of work, and then the opposite side, which sits and actually does all the stuff, keeps things going, but has no language to explain any of this. And I think that’s a that’s a this is the thing that you left me wondering last time, when you tell the story that you know, when you when stuff happens, when things go wrong, how do you then find the language to actually put it across to somebody? One, first of all, one you, you, you find the right words for it that don’t exist for whatever you do to, you know, to run the show. And then the second part is that who would believe you anyway? And I think this is a conversation that needs to be, needs to be, needs to be had in in workplaces, say, and I’m coming back to what you were saying, this kind of a conversation is only possible, and the initiative must come from the powerful one, which is the formal side of the organization. Say, I actually want to go and listen until you have this ability, this unique ability, to listen without putting your own meaning to it, and let the story go wherever it you know has to go or wants to go, regardless of whether it ends at the at the workers you know, within the confines of work or outside of it, maybe a family trouble,

Nippin Anand 34:40
whatever I think many of us are afraid of that conversation, the nature of the conversation, I think maybe, and I’m speaking to him realizing this, maybe that the trouble lies in the lost art of a conversation that we do not even know what a conversation means. Worse still. Technology today has changed the meaning of conversation completely. That’s another conversation, but, oh my god, isn’t it? But I think maybe the lost art of conversation should be our next podcast. It will be such a wonderful thing to say that let’s explore between the two of us to say, what is it that we have learned through our lives, that that maybe we can share between us and with others, that what exactly is a conversation? What does it take to have a conversation?

Jenny Krasny 35:32
Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh. I really like that. I really, really like that. You know, what was ironic in what you’ve just said is when I was completing my master’s qualification, and I had to, obviously, do a research piece, and I was doing a literature review, and I was drawn to this. I’m old enough that most of the resources I was using were actually physical books, not, not, you know, nothing on the internet. And I remember being drawn to this book in the library, and it was, it was a book that had this beautiful, old, old smell to it. The cover of the book was this material cover. It was sewn together to the pages of the book like it just had something about I drew this book out, and I opened, I opened this book randomly, and there was a line in it. And this book was written in the 1880 something. I can’t, I cannot remember. I’m not, not that good at detail, but I remember it was in the 1880s something. And this line that jumped out at me was along the lines of the greatest difficulty, challenge facing organizations today is communication. That was in the 1880s right? Someone, someone made that observation and and I thought, boy, you could take that out of that book and stick it into any publication today, and it it still holds true. And in some cases it’s even worse. As you say, we are now of a generation that we, in theory, are more connected than we have ever been, and in some ways we couldn’t be more disconnected from each other as people. So yeah, I think it would be a wonderful conversation to to have in continuing sessions. I think so.

Nippin Anand 37:40
I think so let’s Well, I think this may be a Is there anything else you want to say before

Jenny Krasny 37:45
we stop? Then I just wanted to fill in the blanks for anyone who might be listening as to when you said it had you thinking from our last conversation. And so what prompted that conversation was I was telling Nippin about one of my one of my many customer adventures. And I remember the marketing team had approached me very proudly with a new campaign that they had launched in the name of safety, of course, and they reveal this slogan. And the slogan is something that we’ve all seen before. For those of us who travel a lot, you would have seen it. For those of us who maybe work with a legal department, we would have seen it. And it was four simple words, all beautifully starting with the same letter, looks wonderful for marketing campaigns. And it was called, see something, say something. And this, this team was just delighted and overjoyed and willing to share it with me. And I said, it’s beautiful. And they say, What do you mean? I said, Well, it’s beautiful from a marketing perspective, this goes back to the perspective taking that we were sharing earlier. I said, from a marketing perspective, it’s neat, it’s stretchy. It resonates on the surface. It makes a lot of sense. It’s very logical. It looks lovely on a poster, on a t shirt, on a, you know, on a cup. It looks great. It’s memorable. It’s wonderful. I said, Jenny, you’re cynical. I went, well, that’s also the that’s also my degree. I have a master’s in cynicism, or specifically in cynicism towards organizational change, but masters in cynicism, I’ll take it. So they said, What? What’s the cynicism? I said, Well, you do realize that the statements see something and say something as simple as they are to say, the reality is quite different. The fact that I can you and I can see this the same landscape, and we will see different things. We just will. Yes. And so how do I then know if what I’m seeing is what I should be seeing, and you’re seeing what you should be seeing, in order to say something about it, to bring it up, to raise my attention. And then if, in fact, I am seeing something worth raising attention to, yes, I might move my mouth all day. I might get hate to even do that, move my mouth and make some noise and something comes out. But actually saying something is far more difficult than we give credit for. You know, one Have I got the right words? Am I going to put it in the right order or formulation that people need to hear. Is it going to resonate in the way that I need it to land if I say something? Am I even the person to be saying it is the person that I’m raising it to someone who even is interested, and if they are interested, are they going to take it with the trust and the credibility I want them to or are they going to mock me for it, or are they going to forever bring it up publicly and make make a joke out of me because I raised something that really isn’t a big deal, You know? So that’s what prompted the comment that for those of you listening, heard Nippin say this beautiful slogan, see something say something beautiful, powerful, but the depth and the meaning of it is lost on people.

Nippin Anand 41:36
And I’d like to leave the listeners with this question. Sid, what does it take to go from see something to say something? Think about it. You.