Depthfinding Ep. 7: From Leadership to Stewardship
About this episode:
Original Air Date: April 21, 2025In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into one of the most pivotal (and misunderstood) aspects of the framework: stewardship. Depthfinding is built on the idea that organizations are like oceans, not aquariums. That means leaders have to show up in an entirely new way—not as a boss, a hero, or a disciplinarian, but as someone responsible for the ongoing health of a complex system.
Embracing stewardship can be an uphill battle thanks to the ghosts of leadership past and the inner work required to show up well in complexity. But when facing down uncertainty, building the conditions for resilience and learning to steward across each Depthfinding zone offers a new way forward.
Downloadable tools mentioned in this episode:
Mentioned in this episode:
“Henry Ford quote about hands”, from The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
Hey everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm Rodney Evans. And that guy with big old hair, according to him, is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hey Rodney. I think my hair looks pretty normal actually, so thanks for the call out.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, so it's not a stressful day then according to the hair meter.
Sam Spurlin:
No, it's pretty down. By the end of the day, it might be kind of up and that's how we know how my day went.
Rodney Evans:
That's how we know. Welcome back to At Work With The Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations in preparation or for the present future of work.
Sam Spurlin:
This is the seventh episode of our miniseries on Depthfinding.
Rodney Evans:
Is it really?
Sam Spurlin:
I went back and counted. I think that is right. Hopefully it is right.
Rodney Evans:
Oh my God, I love this.
Sam Spurlin:
This might be a failure of my ability to do that simple task, but I think it's the seventh.
Rodney Evans:
That's a lot.
Sam Spurlin:
We're on the back nine, as I say. And Rodney, what are we going to talk about today?
Rodney Evans:
I don't know. We're going to talk about stewardship, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
Stewardship.
Rodney Evans:
A word that has met with mixed reviews, which I don't care about the reviews. I love the word, I'm dying on this hill. We're going to talk about stewardship today.
Sam Spurlin:
Wait, is this episode just you yelling at people who have been giving you a hard time about stewardship?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. An important part of stewardship is listening to your customers, so this is where I get to respond to them.
Sam Spurlin:
Check.
Rodney Evans:
Before we dive in, let's answer one of Sam's famous check-in questions.
Sam Spurlin:
I wanted to go real hard hitting on the check-in question today, just to really meet the moment. So what is an underrated condiment?
Rodney Evans:
It's so hard because so many of the condiments that I love are very on-trend, like chili crisp and everything bagel seasoning and sriracha. But I think underrated is Old Bay. I fucking love Old Bay. I love Old Bay on popcorn. I love it on chowder. I love it on any kind of protein. I think Old Bay is a near perfect condiment and I don't think people use it enough.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. The pedant inside me wants to argue about whether that's a spice or a condiment, but that's fine.
Rodney Evans:
Oh no! It will perhaps not surprise you that I don't know the difference. I'm like, I don't know. It's something you put on food?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I don't know that I have a really crisp definition either, but in my brain I'm like, that's not a condiment. But you know what?
Rodney Evans:
Condiments come in a packet, like mustard.
Sam Spurlin:
You want to keep this thing going? I'm okay with that.
Rodney Evans:
You'll accept my answer. Okay, great because I don't have another one. I literally, it was a stretch to get to Old Bay. I don't know about food. I know about food, but I don't engage with food in the way that I might.
Sam Spurlin:
True. That's true. We defer into that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. What about you? What do you think is under... I can't wait. I feel like your answer is going to be Midwestern.
Sam Spurlin:
Nope, it's Canadian actually. Malt vinegar.
Rodney Evans:
Yuck. Why? Say more.
Sam Spurlin:
It's so good on fries. And it's so underrated that I forget that it exists and I never buy it for myself, but when I go to Canada or places where it is normal to put malt vinegar on fries, I'm like, this is so good. I can just buy this for myself if I wanted to.
Rodney Evans:
You could.
Sam Spurlin:
Maybe I will.
Rodney Evans:
It's literally in every store. Do you want me to get it for you?
Sam Spurlin:
No, thank you. I appreciate the thought though.
Rodney Evans:
Let me know if that changes because you shouldn't have to cross state lines.
Sam Spurlin:
Or international borders.
Rodney Evans:
You shouldn't need a passport to get malt vinegar for your french fries, man.
Sam Spurlin:
I think maybe that's keeping it special for me.
Rodney Evans:
Like if you had it all the time, wouldn't be... Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly.
Rodney Evans:
All right. That's really fun.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. I'm so checked in.
Rodney Evans:
Same. Hard same.
Sam Spurlin:
Let's do this thing.
Stewardship is how to put Depthfinding into action
Rodney Evans:
So today we're going to talk about stewardship. I've been reworking the Depthfinding talk because I have to give it a bunch and I've given it a bunch and now I have to fiddle with it, by which I mean change 80% of it. And a lot of what I've been trying to parse is what is it about how systems were designed in history and how leaders showed up to those systems in history and how all of that combined to impact the work experience that is important. And I've really been trying to parse this out as backdrop for stewardship because I have a really intuitive understanding of what stewardship is and means, and I know it when I see it. And I also think because it is a concept that's relatively new for most people in the world, it's important that you and I can explain it clearly. So that's what we're going to try to do today. Boom.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. Every episode I guess is a little bit like this, but this one maybe feels even more a little bit like a working session where we're going to hash this out a little bit more rather than we've got the thing figured out and here you go.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. This is one of those moments where we're going to learn it by teaching it to someone else.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Cool. Before we really dive into it, just to be really clear, so we've been talking about Depthfinding now for a couple of episodes. We've been going zone by zone. And you may think, well, that's the whole thing, right? You've got these different zones that help you understand what's going on in an organization. And that is the bulk of it, but there is this other component which is the stewardship side of things. So just what is the relationship I guess, between the zones stuff we've been talking about and this new kind of body of work that we're going to talk about today?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, great question. First question I don't have a clear answer to.
Sam Spurlin:
Great.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, great. So I think that if we conceive of organizations differently and we actually articulate and admit the reality of how complex they are, we necessarily have to think about our role in them and with them differently, and that's where stewardship comes in. I fundamentally think that part of why we have a business, but also part of why work is so fundamentally broken is because so many people in charge right now were taught a leadership playbook from a different age. And we're not taught about how to work in a complexity conscious way. We were not taught about what it meant to take care of an organization and steer an organization and evolve an organization.
We were taught about controlling an organization and about winning loyalty and about... We weren't taught to be designers, we were taught to be inspirational or great managers or great connectors or great disciplinarians or whatever. But the moves that we learned and that many, many, many people have spent decades honing aren't working no matter how well they're deployed. And so the idea of stewardship is what is the way of leading in the intelligence age if we can admit that the way that Jack Welsh led in the information age is not cutting the mustard, which is a condiment FYI.
Sam Spurlin:
Nice callback.
Rodney Evans:
Thank you.
Sam Spurlin:
I like that a lot. As you were talking there, I was thinking how would I answer that question? And it's not as good as what you just said, but the more general version that's bouncing around in my head is that if you engage with this Depthfinding thing that we've been talking about now for many weeks, it opens up a lot of potential paths, avenues for interacting with an organization in a different way. And I think stewardship is our answer for what does it mean to use the insights that you generate in Depthfinding in a productive better way that honors the complexity of the organization and the environment that you are in. It gives you some new mental models and actual moves to use as a leader, as a steward of an organization.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, totally.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. So I know you've been working on the talk, so that means you've been deep in the history of this. Do you want to do the super quick history lesson here?
Rodney Evans:
Here's how I think we should do this. I'm going to tell you about an age and then you're going to tell me how you see the ghosts of that age haunting us now.
Sam Spurlin:
Nice.
Leadership ghosts of the industrial age: Henry Ford and the org chart
Rodney Evans:
Okay, so I'm not going to start before the Industrial Revolution because I don't think that's so, so important. I'm going to start in the early 1900s with the industrial age. So if you think about the turn of the last century, I think an organization and leader quite emblematic of that time was Henry Ford at the helm of the Ford Motor Company. And that time was really signified by the advent of the assembly line. What was dope about the assembly line was that it was the first time we could scale production. It was the first time we could have consistency. It was the first time there was real efficiency. And for example, the production time of the Model T went from 12 hours to 90 minutes on the assembly line, which for the time, in particular, was truly mind-boggling.
The downside that we don't hear about quite as much is that veteran workers who were accustomed to assembling whole cars on a team now were meant to do monotonous singular tasks as fast as humanly possible. So the organization was run like a machine and it was fed basically by human beings. And Henry Ford, perhaps apocryphally was quoted as saying, "Every time I ask for a pair of hands, unfortunately has a brain attached." So the idea here was basically managers stand above or to the side, they watch the doers who are not meant to ask questions or huge judgment. They're just meant to go as fast as possible. The managers are meant to hold clipboards and stopwatches and tell them where they could be faster or better and never the twain shall meet.
And this is the time in which org charts are invented and which performance starts being measured. And so I say this as backdrop because even though now a lot of the OS trappings of that time are significantly more than a century old, I think we still see them. So when you think about orgs that you work in and around, including ours, what are some of the Industrial Age trappings that maybe are not so good for us?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, you mentioned a couple already. So just the idea of an org chart being the best way of visualizing how an organization works or exists I think is a ghost of that time. Another one that came to mind as you were talking is kind of this performance management as an individual-focused activity. So not really looking at it in terms of teams or how you fit into the large organization, but you as the human robot doing some sort of task. How good are you at doing that? And then just one last one that came to mind is that, and when I see efforts to get hyper specific about role clarity, I sometimes get flavors of industrial era organizations.
Rodney Evans:
Say more about that one.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, so can we take a role and get so specific about what it should and shouldn't be doing that starts to look a lot like, hey, your job here is to put that screw here and this screw here and don't worry about this other stuff. So there's obviously complexity conscious ways to do role clarity. We, I think, do a lot of them. But you can kind of follow that path all the way back to the 1900s and now we're just hands on an assembly line again.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I think that's right. I think the TL;DR that I've taken from this age is the idea that the purpose of a manager is extraction was born here, and that human beings are resources from which to extract value. That wasn't an idea in the artisanal or agricultural ages before the Industrial Age. That became an idea here, that a human being was something to squeeze juice out of and a manager's job was to get the most juice, and we still see that.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. I think the only wrinkle that I'll throw into the pre-industrial era that goes against what you just said, which I think we've maybe talked a little about before, is literally human slavery. There are ideas in human slavery-
Rodney Evans:
100%.
Sam Spurlin:
... That show up in industrial management of organizations that were pre the artisanal stuff and people who didn't have a whole lot of say in how the work was going. There's tinges of that in the early 1900s.
Rodney Evans:
It's a great call out. And the Gantt chart was born in the time of slavery. That was what it was created for. So it is a perfect call out. We should do more research as to the connections between that entire system and the assembly line.
Sam Spurlin:
Yes. Yeah, there are scholars who have made those connections that we could definitely dig into.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, so that's the industrial era. So we've got a bunch of command and control shit and just allegiance to the hierarchy, total compliance. These idiots just on the assembly line don't need to have their own thoughts. This is the prevailing wisdom of this time.
Sam Spurlin:
Can I just throw one word that is bouncing around in my head that I think really describes this?
Rodney Evans:
Yes. That's why you're a podcast host.
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly. Just to say the words that bounce around in my head.
Rodney Evans:
That's right.
Sam Spurlin:
Industrial era organizations and management of the organizations are like, it's all about certainty. I can predict exactly how much work you're going to do and we can optimize that. And Frederick Winslow Taylor is standing there with a stopwatch and we know exactly how everything is going to go and that's what we are optimizing for and I think we're going to see that certainty start to dissipate as we move closer to present day.
Rodney Evans:
It's a great point. And in fact, something that I was reading in doing this research for the talk was about the fact that any variation that happened as part of assembly was a bug, not a feature. And so the idea of experimentation or happy accidents or-
Sam Spurlin:
Evolution of any kind.
Rodney Evans:
... The kismet of innovation was to be squashed at all costs just in keeping with the theme of certainty. Part of the certainty was also in the quality of the product and the consistency of the product. It was very Conway's law straight through from how the humans behave to how the cars ended up. Dope.
Leadership ghosts of the information age: Jack Welch and the cult of personality
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Information Age. What's going on here?
Rodney Evans:
Part two. So look, I made up these ages' names and timelines based on how I see history, but I think that the Information Age came really to bear with enterprise computing. So I think that when we got to a point where essentially organizations had more data and more information than they had ever held in history, I think we saw this really shift. And I don't think that there's an organization that is more emblematic than GE under Jack Welch. I think he was sort of like the king of the Information Age, and what it gave us was strategy as a religion.
This was a time where if you had all of this data and all of the information, then the point of a leader is to make a plan to make use of that data that returns value predictably every time. And this is where we see the rise of things like succession planning, the rank and yank idea, I mean the Hunger Games like super heavy emphasis on peer competition, and essentially the idea that rather than making things, you're making leaders, and that the right leader with the right training and the right pedigree can do anything.
And so I think this was a real significant shift from the role of manager to the role of leader and rather than treating people as cogs in a machine, the Information Age asked leaders to treat people more like fish in a tank where the idea is to observe and analyze and tweak the environment to get the behavior that you want from people.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. When I think about this age, I think about basically just the fetishization of leadership, of the ego cults around leaders and just everything, all of the trappings that come along with that. And I think Jack Welch is probably the most emblematic of that era and of that kind of cult of personality that he was able to create around himself and I think was held up as what all senior leaders are supposed to be trying to do.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Which I think is bad for us.
Sam Spurlin:
Not great.
Rodney Evans:
I think that was a bad experiment. Did you read this article? Someone sent this around a while back. There was a study done where people with immense amount of explicit powers were put into MRI machines to basically measure their executive function and their judgment. And as it turns out, power has a neurological impact on the brain that is negative. It's just like you get dumber.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. It basically has eroded people's brains.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, basically. Outside power has eroded people's brains. And I think to your point, this sort of heroification of an individual over a system that is vast and interconnected and incredibly complex was one of the worst trappings to escape the Information Age and keep us infected now with the Zuckerbergs and the Musks of the world.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I mean inherently it's quite a fragile way to think about an organization. Basically we're going to create a system that hinges upon a single person or a small group at the top making the right decisions, at the same time preventing them from not getting that brain damage that you just talked about. We have all these systems in place to tell them what they want to hear and even when they're trying to not surround themselves with "yes people", it happens because that's how generally happens in hierarchy. So at the same time, we are relying on these people to make the right calls. We are making them less capable of making those calls.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And I think that in the Information Age, because of the attention paid to leadership development and the manufacture of high-performing leaders, we get a lot of OS hangover that is not fit for today. I have a real beef with succession planning. And the reason is not because I don't think we should think about the future. And certainly I think that leadership should turn over more often than it does in most places, but succession planning assumes in some ways that the work isn't going to change. And I just think that the 9-box grid came from GE, the 10% rank came from GE, the emphasis on executive succession planning. And those things all feel like very complicated frameworks for human complexity that often does not take the larger environment and the way that it's changing into account. And I would fundamentally say that the reason that GE fell apart is because the world started moving faster than strategy can, but it's for these other reasons, too. It's because you can't 9-box grid your way into an agent-human hybrid workforce.
De-centering individual leaders and re-centering the organization for the future
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Totally with you. Okay, so now we're into Intelligence Age and this is where the idea of stewardship is really front and center. What's the TL;DR on this? And then we'll dive into what stewardship might look like in more specific detail.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. So here's why I like this idea of stewardship. We moved The Ready into an employee-owned trust this year. And the idea of a trust is that it has beneficiaries and that the people who have control over the trust are meant to steward it for future generations. The point of the trust is to protect what's inside of it from anybody using it as an ATM machine effectively. And whether that's your family's fortune or that is a private park or that's a company, I like this idea that the job is to continue to evolve it, continue to steer it, continue to shepherd it so that it meets its purpose and so that it exists and so that it is something when you're gone, and not to just get what you can from it before you retire. I don't know.
A lot of the stewardship thinking evolved as we were going through this process and really conceiving of the difference between stewarding a trust and owning a company. Because the idea of ownership is very different than the idea of stewardship and American capitalism is based on ownership. And so really it kind of breaks your brain to start to move away from the idea that the only way to lead and prosper from and interact with a company is if it's yours.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly. What I was going to hop in there and say is what I really like about the idea is that it shifts the attention to the trust, to the purpose of the thing that we are trying to do and away from the person or the people who are stewarding that thing. And I think if we have limited attention to place on something, let's make sure it is focused on the actual intention, the actual purpose of the thing, and less around the personalities and the predilections and everything like that around the people who are surrounding it.
Rodney Evans:
100%. I think one of the things that I see leaders struggle with a lot is getting super crisp on what they're prioritizing. And sometimes that's short-term versus long-term, and sometimes it's revenue versus cost and sometimes it's growth or whatever. It's like life is trade-offs. It's hard. But I think what's very clarifying about stewardship is that you can get to some macro prioritization principles. And at least having gone through this process, the way that I see it now is the first principle is the purpose of the trust. So when we're having to make a difficult decision about something, that supersedes what clients want, it supersedes what individuals want. Sometimes it supersedes what's financially the smartest in the short term. I think part of stewardship is understanding what your first principles are and conceiving of something not as just like a piece of property is helpful in getting into that mindset.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, no, I like that. I like that a lot.
Stewardship in the Midnight Zone playbook
Rodney Evans:
So you started this by asking me a question I could barely answer about how stewardship works with Depthfinding, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut as a client of mine likes to say. Now, why don't you talk to us a little bit about what stewardship moves look like. If I'm a steward that's crushing it, what am I doing? Bearing in mind the how, the moves are in the Twilight Zone. The other things are not how, but we're going to give a little bit of a playbook for how to think about each zone as a steward.
Sam Spurlin:
Let's start at the bottom. Midnight Zone. All right.
Rodney Evans:
Let's do it.
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, hopefully you don't need a refresher because you've been listening to all these episodes, but Midnight Zone was a couple episodes back. So this is the internal why kind of the lived experience of people in your organization. So as a steward, what should you be thinking about, what should you be doing as it relates to the Midnight Zone? And I think it's important to distinguish your own Midnight Zone as a steward. What's going on for you as an individual from what is going on in the Midnight Zone of your team or other individuals in your organization?
So I think our episode about it talked about some of these things. What it's specifically not is you are not the therapist of your team. Your job as steward is not to kind of go person by person and help them work through their shit. So you can set that aside. If you are afraid that's what it means to be a steward, I think we can pretty definitively say that's not the realm that you want to get into.
On the individual side, on your own locus of control, on your own Midnight Zone and the work to do to make sense of that, that's probably worth doing and you should spend more time on your own individual Midnight Zone than others. What else is in this realm for you in terms of if you were giving advice to a steward of an organization, what are the types of things that you would be asking them to think about regarding the Midnight Zone?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I mean I am really an advocate for putting on your own oxygen mask and don't think that you can help anyone else if you're not emotionally regulated. And beyond that, we've talked a lot about leaders doing their own individual work on this show in the past, but something that I've been thinking a lot about lately because things have been stressful for a variety of reasons in the last bunch of weeks. And it's really easy under stress for anyone who has any authority in any system to regress. And regression usually is going to look like Jack Welch moves. It's regression to control and assertion or aggression or even just overwork, doing the things that lead to burnout. And I've had some interesting conversations with folks lately about what the counterweight to that is. And I'm going to just talk a little bit about my own experience because I think so much of having a healthy Midnight Zone as a steward is doing shit that is going to look counterintuitive to other people.
So when things are the hardest at work are the times that I prioritize stuff outside of work the most. Most leaders are like, why are we not pulling all-nighters right now? But the truth is that for me to show up with a clear head, be fully regulated, be able to be with people in hard feelings and hard emotions as their 401(k)s crumble and there's uncertainty in their projects, what that looks like for me is more swimming, more music, more time with my friends, less hours at work. And I have to fight my own demons around this because I am clinically over responsible and a perfectionist and it's really hard to just be like step away, more is not more. My work actually, my work, is not at work mostly. And I'm saying this not because I have any kind of formula that I'm sure is going to work, but because I don't think that a lot of leaders are particularly aware of their own state under stress and what it really requires in difficult or chaotic times to not resort to your worst behaviors.
Leaders need to model good Midnight Zone behaviors
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I love that and I think kind of connected to that, I'm thinking about how you not only do it for yourself and all of the reasons you just said, but also model that it's okay for others to do that. Because if you are the steward of an organization that is like most organizations, you are probably one of the higher paid people in your organization. So the out-of-touch version of that is like I'm over here busting my ass trying to keep this company going and our steward is off on her third meditation retreat of the month...like that's a thing to navigate.
Rodney Evans:
That's a bad look.
Sam Spurlin:
It's a bad look, but the idea is that this is true for everybody. That-
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
For everyone to be doing their own version of that.
Rodney Evans:
And to tie these points together, it's worth saying out loud that it's not that easy to always be supportive in the way that you're talking about. I do it because I understand, intellectually and emotionally, I get it inside of my body and yet in moments where someone is gone for a bunch of time that I want to talk to them or need them around or whatever because they're on a meditation retreat, I'm like fuck. And because I do my own work, I'm able in that moment to go, that's good, that's where they should be. We are all doing what we need to do to cope and steer and steward this place that we are all responsible for and her work looks like that and my work looks like this and us doing that work is equally important. And that's part of the Midnight Zone work, but I can't do that shit if I don't swim.
Sam Spurlin:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
Then I'm just mad because then I'm just at my laptop going, where the fuck is everybody?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And I know so many leaders who are just that way.
Sam Spurlin:
Just sitting there being mad.
Rodney Evans:
They're on Slack at 2:00 in the morning just fuming about why nobody else is up.
Sam Spurlin:
And feeling, I mean we could really get down a rabbit hole here, feeling unappreciated even though they probably make multiple of 10 more than the average employee at their organization, which is just, it's setting you up for really fucked up dynamics that are not helpful to anyone.
Rodney Evans:
Not helpful to anyone. That's right.
Stewardship in the Twilight Zone playbook
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Twilight, we're going to work our way up. We're going to get more buoyant as we go. So Twilight Zone is really where a lot of this stuff or most of the stuff that we're talking about even with the other zones live, but because this is the how of where are most of our operating system practices and patterns that we care about cultivating actually live. So when I think of a steward really sweating the Twilight Zone, it's creating the conditions and participating in the Twilight Zone as an equal. It's like showing up to the operating rhythm and participating. It is creating a expectation and an environment where we are experimenting, we are iterating. Nobody is supposed to get everything right on the first go because we know the way we create a healthy Twilight Zone is through that iteration and that experimentation. So I think a lot of it is like how do you hold the space for the Twilight Zone to even exist at all in your organization?
Rodney Evans:
I think that's right. And I remember in our default steward language at one point, this might still be true, I have to look, but there was a line in there that was basically like, the steward is responsible for effectively picking up the slack if there's a gap between roles and there's work that needs to be done for the purpose.
And I think about this a lot because to your point, Sam, it's like if what we're finding is that, take an executive team, that in the executive staff meeting people are not bringing topics. I expect the steward to bring topics not in a controlling, I'm going to take all the air time away, but in a way that's like, I am going to hold this so that other people can get in here and play. Not like I'm going to sit here with my arms crossed waiting for other people to step into the space. It's like it's this balance between being the one to go first if no one else wants to, making it the safest. Being the person who does the thing that is potentially embarrassing, potentially kind of cringe, potentially needs a lot of improvement not just as a modeling but also because you have the most power and the most privilege and so it should be you.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, no, I like that a lot. It makes me think about what I see happen in a lot of organizations, everything around empowerment, so a leader being like, oh, I've empowered my team and they're not stepping into it. And that's kind of where it ends in a lot of organizations that haven't really thought about this more deeply. What you're describing is, yeah, okay, people are empowered and also I'm not just going to sit back and wait for them to step into their empowerment. I am going to model, I am just going to do the stuff that needs to be done, while there may be this gap between people understanding that they need to show up in a certain way and actually doing that.
Rodney Evans:
That's exactly right. And I'm kind of over the empowerment word just because I think it's so overused that it has lost meaning. But the point that you're making I think is really hitting the nail on the head, which is authority isn't just about having agency or having power, it is about using it. And I think in the Twilight Zone is where there is an expectation that everyone is exercising the authority that they have and they're using their agency. But importantly, stewards have to do that, too. And I see leaders all the time go, "Well, I handed out authority like Halloween candy and nobody's showing up to it." And I'm like, are you though? Are you holding your own agency in a way that is vulnerable? In a way that is honest? In a way that is clear? Or are you like, I've empowered all of these people and I recuse myself from looking like an idiot? Because that's not what we're talking about. That's not helpful. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
No.
Rodney Evans:
I think this also just in the Twilight Zone, if you do think about your company or your team or your organization as a thing to be stewarded. Think about it like if you were the steward of a nature preserve. This is Twilight Zone stuff. If a wildfire tears through it, it is your job to go and figure out what to do. It is your job to hold the ways of working and evolve them and experiment with them as things change inside the nature preserve, neither to be an observer on the side like someone watching a fish tank, nor to just be someone inside of the preserve going like, "Shit, fire." It is your job to be paying attention to what's happening and changing the practices and the moves to deal with it.
Sam Spurlin:
To use that example a little bit further before we have to Sunshine Zone, in that case it may mean your work looks like organizing a fundraiser or it might be, get on the trail with a chainsaw and let's clear some of these paths. And it's not one or the other. It's kind of matching the action that is required with the moment as well.
Rodney Evans:
Absolutely. I think that's absolutely right.
Stewardship in the Sunshine Zone playbook
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Sunshine Zone, where all the visible stuff lives your strategy and all the plaques on the wall and all of those things. How does a steward interact with the Sunshine Zone? My first thought on this is the phrase like having a light touch, so not fetishizing anything that lives in the Sunshine Zone and holding these artifacts, these things lightly and kind of consistently asking, are these still serving us? Are these still right? Do they still match reality? That's my first swing at this. What comes to mind for you?
Rodney Evans:
I think that's right. And if we think about a thing that you shared that I think is really smart is if the default position of management was, "here's how to do it", and the default position of leadership was, "follow me", and the default position of stewardship is, "what does this system need?" Then to your point, Sam, in the Sunshine Zone, I think a steward's job is to go, "Are the things we look at...are the explicit aims and measures and assets of this organization getting us what we need?" And if your OKRs are getting you the results that you want, fantastic. If you're the edge case that I don't know about where the org chart is maximally useful to every person in your system and work can't function without it, print that bad boy out. It's like the idea here though is to not be wedded to any particular visible trapping of the Sunshine Zone. The steward's job is to go, is it working? Is this working for us?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And I think if the steward role in your organization has a correlation with tenure, which I think is sometime a reasonable thing to have happen. So if you've been around for a while, I think another role that you have as steward in the Sunshine Zone is to bring a temporal perspective to things. Basically help the organization understand why something was created at a certain time and whether the conditions around it have changed. Because for folks who are newer to the organization or who aren't thinking about these things or interacting with these things as much, it can be that you're just looking at it in a snapshot, you're missing the larger story about why something was created, what problem it was solving then and whether it's still appropriate for the current moment.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right.
Stewardship in the Sky Zone playbook
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Sky, we're looking at the Sky now. All of the opportunities and risks that are flying around our ocean. As a steward, what is your role in this similar to, I think we talked about this in Midnight Zone, there's a modeling aspect that is really interesting here. What does it look like to your own Sky practice to be transparent and really model the curiosity and the engagement, the earnestness that you need to have with the Sky to be able to extract any sort of meaningful information or patterns from it?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I think that the disposition that I've seen in the best stewards that I know out in the world are people who orient more to learning than to knowing, because knowing is backward looking and learning is not. And I'm thinking of one person in particular who I am still quite close with and worked with for a long time as a client, and she was just someone who always was paying attention to, wait for it, where the puck was going, right? Did I get that right?
Sam Spurlin:
Hockey metaphor!
Rodney Evans:
Hockey. And she was just someone who was looking at adjacent industries. She was paying attention to the market, she was talking to customers directly. She was a super nerd about technology. She was a Renaissance person in a very traditional organization with a very trad executive job. But I think what made her truly actually unique in this system was that she was a learner. And I think people like that are the kind of people who ultimately can kind of do anything because they're the kind of people who are so inherently not only curious, which I think is a prerequisite, but also have enough self-awareness. And I think the self-awareness to know where they are incompetent.
I think a lot of really wonderful stewards are sort of consciously incompetent about things and have a desire to close those gaps, and also candidly have the self-assurance to be in learning. Because learning is very uncomfortable and I think it makes most of our egos inflamed in some way. And so we have to have the skill of being like, that's normal. Learning is the thing and looking outside at diverging viewpoints, at data I don't like, at competitors that I find scary, at information that I find existentially threatening is part of the job.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And I think the watch-out that I would offer folks, the version of this that I've seen that looks a lot like what you just described, but is ultimately maladaptive, is doing all of that and then getting very grippy about your interpretation of what is happening in the Sky. So it's doing all of that and remaining whatever the opposite of grippy is around understanding in your hypotheses of what all of this means because as soon as you start to really try to get your arms around it and put stakes in the ground and build a case for various things, you start to get into the realm of, well, now I'm defending a point of view that I have, and I'm no longer in that more of a learning state.
Rodney Evans:
I have a really great example of this and I think it's been enough years that I can tell this story.
Sam Spurlin:
Is it about me?
Rodney Evans:
You tell me. No, I was working with a client and they had acquired a technology company that did something that was a very futuristic technology. Of course, they wanted the rest of the company, the acquiring company, to use that tech. The problem was the tech was garbage, and when people used tooling that was more effective, the CEO would get super pissed and effectively punish them and be like, "You're taking us backward. You're anti-progress because you won't use this shitty technology that I've acquired." He wasn't wrong about the direction, the direction that that technology was pointed at was right. His Sky sensing was right, but the application was exactly what you're talking about where he's like, "Well, I bought this lemon and now we're going to fucking drive it." And that's where I think to your point, Sam, we have to hold what we believe lightly.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I mean, you can hold it for sure. It's good to have a point of view, but also you got to be actively not just open to new information, changing your point of view, but actively seeking the information that you would need to see for your point of view to change.
Rodney Evans:
So we could talk about this forever. There's so much actually here that we didn't even cover, but we are at time. I have to go give this talk in four minutes. So one thing that Sam, you prepared for this, was a really elegant and I thought very spot on side-by-side of management versus leadership versus stewardship. We're going to link to that in the show notes so that everybody can pass it around, show it to some people, see how it relates to your own Depthfinding.
Sam Spurlin:
Awesome. All right, Rodney, should we wrap from here?
Rodney Evans:
Let's wrap it up.
Sam Spurlin:
Let's wrap it up. Hey everyone, please like, rate and review us.
Rodney Evans:
Yes please.
Sam Spurlin:
This was just another great episode. And if you agree, then you should give us five star rating on wherever, Apple Podcasts, I guess? And I would say more importantly, if you have a gnarly cross-functional problem that you would like to hear about on this show, you should email us at depthfinding[at]theready[dot]com. Somebody did that last week. It was an excellent email with a truly gnarly cross-functional problem that I'm excited to talk about.
Rodney Evans:
I love how you've become our primary hype person. You're like, here's a great episode on top of another great episode. Anyway, the music for this miniseries is Yaggadang by BG & Coyote Radio. This show and all the shows are produced by our friend, Jack Van Amburg and engineered by Taylor Marvin. Our team at The Ready makes it all happen. Thank you so much for listening.