Josh Klein, Connector of Things and People at Group of Humans: Hacking Systems & Driving Change

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: The easy ones.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Hi! I'm Shannon Lucas, one of the co-ceos of catalyst constellations which is dedicated to empowering catalyst to create bold, powerful change in the world.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: This is our podcast move, fast, break, shit, burn out where we speak with catalyst leaders, about ways to successfully lead transformation in large organizations. And today I am super excited to have time with Josh Klein. I'm sad for Tracy that she couldn't be here today because this conversation has already started off with a bang. Josh is a hacker who speaks, who specializes in translating technology, insights into actionable strategies, go catalysts.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: He advises and consults to senior leaders at businesses from the startup down the street to the biggest multinationals on the planet, focusing on using new and emerging technologies to create exponential improvements, using the recently possible. And I also just have to call out 2 Ted Talks, one of which is on how we can make crows catalysts for change. Welcome, Josh.

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Josh Klein: Thanks, so much.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Okay, so that's just a tiny snippet. There's so many threads to pull on. But I just want to hear from you a little bit about your journey, and you know how you can help us see your catalytic nature through your journey.

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Josh Klein: Yeah, okay, I mean, when I 1st heard about what you were doing, it sounded a lot like, Oh, yeah, these are my people, right. The the ones that get up in the morning. They can't quite help kicking over the anthill, you know, like, Hey, there's something broken over here. Let me. Just give it a shove and see what happens like that. That, I think, has been the charting North Star for most of my career, and it's taken me in a variety of weird places.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Can you give me some examples? And like, when did you realize that maybe you were showing up differently than those around you? Because catalysts often don't realize that they're really different. And then some moment, they're like, Oh, wait! Everyone doesn't think that way. And then maybe some ways that you've driven change.

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Josh Klein: So in terms of like the ways that this was pretty apparent to me really early, like I remember distinctly being in middle school. I was in the class that was being held back, for you know I wouldn't say disabled, but that's what they called it at the time, and then I was also in the advanced class for advanced students. Right? And this is because I was staying up. Really, I was failing my math class because it was too boring, and I was staying up at night.

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Josh Klein: breaking into the university to study crypto and then slagging off on the algebra. But the English class was interesting. So I was getting top grades there. And so at the time I was like, Okay, this is a system, and it's broken. But all right, we'll work with it.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: You started systems hacking in middle school. I love it.

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Josh Klein: Yeah, no, no, you know, I guess that was just a framework that worked for me that then went on, and and

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Josh Klein: like this kind of progressed like when I got into college. One of the 1st things that I did is I managed to get a full ride scholarship for the 1st year. But then I was like, Well, how am I going to afford the rest of this? So I started interviewing

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Josh Klein: different. I interviewed a teacher, and then I used that to interview the principal, and then I interviewed the president of the University. None of them gave me any money, but I ended up, taking those notes, writing them up and putting them into a booklet, and then I went to all the labs in the university and printed them out and handed them out at the University bookstore. And this was before rate my teacher. Right? So after the 1st semester I was like, well, I'm halfway through the school year. Don't know if I'm going to be able to come back.

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Josh Klein: I'm not sure what I'm going to do, and I got a call from a professor who was like, you know, my tenure is based on the number of students that enroll, and all the students are reading your booklet. Can we talk. So I published that thing every semester, and graduated in. I think it was 3 and a half years, so like that systems approach like kept coming back again and again, that, like most people, operate within systems just within what they can see. And if you step back and take a larger view, there's so much leverage.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And so I'm curious how you see the intersection. I mean, it seems like, for the most part you've been working with large organizations, but mostly on the outside. Is that is that fair?

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Josh Klein: Yeah. For the most part.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: For the most part. And so I'm wondering. You know, the intersection of the systems hacking your catalyst sort of deep nature. It sounds like, and how large organizations are dealing with change.

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Josh Klein: Yeah, I mean for me, it always comes down to the fact that large organizations for the most part are designed to mitigate risk.

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Josh Klein: and yet they operate in the market, and the market is extraordinarily dynamic, riddled with risk, and it's designed for 1st mover advantage. So within that construct you've got a real conflict of interests that's systemic. And so, being able to come in from the outside means that you can provide the leverage and the insight and the motivation to realign both of those forces.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: We were talking earlier about some of the the work that you've been doing to help organizations get views into the culture and it, you know, I think this dovetails nicely with what we were talking about, which is like there's the you have to keep the lights on, so you don't want, like all of the problem solvers, you know, on the whole bunch of disruptors in the organization. So there's the keeping the lights on. But then there's also things like AI is about to eat your lunch.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: and the executives may be like, well, we rolled out copilot, and now we're done so. I'm just wondering, if you like, how you think about helping organizations. Be that ambidextrous, or, you know, organization culturally.

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Josh Klein: Well, I mean, as we were talking about earlier companies are different, right? Like, as you said in in the Nordics, it's highly consensus driven. And you know, in California, for example, it may be a little more competitor competition driven. So so the answer is kind of like it varies. But

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Josh Klein: One of the things that I've I've seen happen

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Josh Klein: in a lot of these companies is that if you can figure out what the primary outcomes you're looking for, or you think you're looking for are. And if you make sure and include learning as part of that, then you can create a little bit of a competitive framework that's suitable within the culture of the organization that can drive you in the right direction. And one of the things that and I don't know if you've seen this, but but my experience has been that success is highly directional

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Josh Klein: as opposed to target right like that. You don't. Everyone likes to say, this is where we're going to be at Q. 4, and that's what success will look like. And then Q. 2 happens. And you're like, Oh, dang, you know. Scrap the plan, scrap the plan, you know. So it's a lot more in my mind, at least, around creating frameworks that allow you to be responsive, and to steer in the right way, and creating increasing alignment as you go.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Totally. So. We have the catalyst Leadership Trust, which is ex, you know, an executive mastermind, where they bring us questions, and in like 2022, maybe they were like, okay. The executives all understood more or less after the pandemic and the shutdown that, you know, change in the accelerating pace of change is the new normal. And then this one person was like. But we went back into the business and the chief strategy officers like, Okay, we're going to go back to our 1, 5, 10 year

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: plans and like that just doesn't work anymore. And so I'm wondering if you have advice to catalysts who have to help their organization, like even catalysts, can struggle with the amount of noise like. They may be more comfortable with the pivoting, but everyone else is like. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do anymore.

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Josh Klein: Right. I mean.

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Josh Klein: my 1st instinct is to say too bad. But that's not very helpful. I think. What I've seen, what I've seen that has been successful is a lot more around again, sort of that directionality, right? Like we as an organization, are moving towards being more nimble. Well, most of the company's members don't want more nimble. They want to know what their job is supposed to be and what they're doing this year, and what they're going to do next year. They don't want to have to sit down every week to rejigger their career path in light of what the Kpis have done

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Josh Klein: become all of a sudden like that's disruption that most people do not find really comfortable with.

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Josh Klein: But if you can pick a larger north star, so you can say, Hey, remember, last week the product that we're building looked like this. Now, it looks like this, but it still fits. It's still aligned. We're still safe. It's still okay.

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Josh Klein: That helps some people be more comfortable with it. It's is it smoke and mirrors? I don't know maybe a little bit. But I also think it's a matter of framing.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, say more about that. How should catalyst frame it so that people can? They can bring people along on the journey with them.

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Josh Klein: I mean. I wish I had a perfect answer for that right.

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Josh Klein: I think it has a lot to do with. We're pivoting towards success. Right? So in my own work, one of the things I really try and do is get metrics early on.

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Josh Klein: So you can say, All right. This is scary, and it's not what we talked about, and it's outside of our wheelhouse, and we're taking on more than we can chew. And all those things are true. And yet the metrics for success that we designated early on indicate we're going in the right direction. So we're mitigating risk. The best way we know how we have positive indicators that we're going in the right direction. Let's, you know, keep the faith that we're not going to crash and burn.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I'm wondering, too,

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: like as catalysts. We can also, because we're comfortable with change and because we may even pivot in terms of like, how we're gonna help our team get there. We can actually add more noise into the system sometimes. So I'm wondering if you have advice for the catalyst leader where you're like. It's it's, it seems, clear to you. But you also might have changed your mind and not brought the team along. Yeah. Any thoughts on that one.

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Josh Klein: Well, I mean, this is one of the things that Steve Jobs was famous for. Right is that he would be super strident and push people super hard, and then he would decide that he was wrong, and everyone hated him. When he did that.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Let's.

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Josh Klein: I mean, it's the right thing for.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Ample. Yeah.

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Josh Klein: I mean, I think that's just true. Like people don't want. They want you to be confident. They want whoever's driving the bus to not stand up and say, actually, I don't know how to drive the bus anymore. Like that doesn't make anybody happy that

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Josh Klein: yeah.

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Josh Klein: Time for everybody. Yeah. But again, you know, back to earlier in the conversation. That's the reality of the market today.

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Josh Klein: more and more all the time. So

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Josh Klein: I mean again, I don't have an answer for this one, either, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would think it had to do a lot with trust and a lot with the the culture you are operating within.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Talk more about that. The importance of trust and culture, you know. I I feel like also sort of post pandemic. It's we can talk a little bit more about the soft skills like mental health and inclusivity and psychological safety. Obviously, trust is the foundation around that. How should organizations think about that today, especially when they can, the cheese can keeping it like there's rifts going on. There's changes in the organization. Yeah.

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Josh Klein: I mean, there's different ways to slice that particular cake right? Like trust in many ways, means the accumulation of social capital within a particular group, but it also means your reputation, you know. Like, How are you more broadly known, or which values are you pushing forward? And how well do they align with the group at large, so I don't think I have a straightforward answer to it, except for the fact that almost all the successful executives I know, have cultivated trust from the beginning.

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Josh Klein: Without it you can't leave for very long.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: You can't lead totally. I want to pivot. You have a organization, a company that you're working with. Is it indigometrics? I want to get the word the name right. And you said, this is looking at sort of culture and behaviors which I think relates really deeply to like. We actually can measure some of those things in terms of effectiveness and behavior. Chef, so tell us a little bit more about how you're helping organizations navigate that.

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Josh Klein: So this came off my last book, Reputation Economics. And the idea there was that broadly read social software was allowing the algorithmic extension of social capital, as we broadly understood it, where it took me, though, was walking backwards into an entire domain of expertise that I knew nothing about going in. It turns out that Hr. Was a far removed domain from from where I had originally worked. But the assumption that I started with

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Josh Klein: was, We can measure some of these soft skills, these soft elements, the behaviors, and that doing so is useful. And along the way I was challenged with that many, many times, because a lot of folks want to believe that this is a mystical magic sauce that you can't quantify these things, and that trying to do so dissolves the value, and to a degree that is a fair critique.

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Josh Klein: But it's kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What we found was by dissolving a series of measurable behaviors. So let's say that within a company you've got 5 or 6 values, you could have 5 to 10 measurable behavior statements of observable behaviors for each of those, and over a period of time, without causing fatigue in your employees, without causing the survey, fatigue, or rejection, or anything else

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Josh Klein: it could become an indispensable tool for people to understand where they stood in their social group.

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Josh Klein: It turns out that this is what human beings are hardwired, for we are social creatures, giving us feedback about where we actually stand, what behaviors are being accepted and what isn't is catnip like this is it's high school right? Anyone who's ever been in high school is going to recognize this has high value.

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Josh Klein: So being able to do that, even though it's an imperfect lens, and it's not all encapsulating, at least allows you to create a ton of momentum around consensus for what good looks like, and without it all you have is a bunch of individual managers who are reporting up and saying, this is what my group believes, and it turns out that's really crappy signal.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: And one of the things that you were talking about earlier is, it's like, it's 1 thing. Okay, so we can identify the people and the behaviors right now. But then, how do we potentially leverage that to, you know, from an employee, retention and engagement, and also knowledge, transfer across the business, like keeping people engaged in different parts of the business

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: can have huge upside for the business, but it doesn't always mean that it's successful, either. It's like, you can't always just pick this behavior up and put it in another environment and have it have it succeed.

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Josh Klein: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we learned early on was that a lot of companies would come to work with us and say, look, we've got a behavior problem here, or a mismatch for Kpis there. Or you know, we want to get an overview in this section. And as we started working with them, they would increasingly say, Well, but wait a minute. 6 months ago we decided these were the behaviors, but now they're changing.

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Josh Klein: make it stop. And so we had to put in whole new sets of processes to basically say, it turns out your corporate culture will evolve. And that's actually a good thing, and so, as long as behaviors are evolving in a way that's useful, you can then use that in a helpful way. So, as an example, we have had companies who, for example, have put in innovation initiatives. This is something that obviously, you know a lot about.

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Josh Klein: and they have done all the like song and dance with the training and the messaging and bringing in thought leaders and all that stuff, and they very quickly get feedback, that in this division. This sort of engagement causes good results. Or.

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Josh Klein: conversely, maybe these types of people are clicking on a lot of videos. And that's causing results. Or these kinds of leaders within this band of the organization are causing good results. And so you kind of have to mix and match to steer the company as a whole. And eventually you get to a point where people improve and you have to decide what to do about it, because you've got the data to see these people improve these people didn't. This part of the organization is where we want it. This one isn't. And then you have to react to that.

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Josh Klein: And it's funny because a lot of companies in when they're given this information kind of say, okay, yeah, we

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Josh Klein: he kind of like to not know about that and rights.

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Josh Klein: Yeah, like, it's that. That means I have to be responsible for managing this change. Why don't we just put that off until the end of the year, and we'll do a 3, 60 and decide whether we passed or failed, and not a big win.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah. The note that I wrote down as you were talking landed exactly there, too. Which is, it's a question. And it sounds like this is what you're seeing like when we go in. You know, we work with organizations in a similar way to identify catalysts who have these behaviors and make sure that they're appropriate for that particular culture. But one of the things that we're trying to help organizations understand as we're doing this is like, if you have a normal distribution of change Curve and the catalysts are on the front end. It's like the whole, like

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: X access is gonna shift like you're gonna shift. You're gonna you need less laggards and the laggards that you need need to be more change friendly. But organizations haven't historically been using these tools as they think about the employee who's who they want to retain. And I and I wrote the note down. It's like, it's almost like a product end of life. It's like this kind of employee served us really well for a really long time, but that kind of persona or behavior is no longer in service. But that's really uncomfortable for organizations so like.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: do you have advice? What are they doing? What are the good ones doing.

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Josh Klein: Oh, my God! So I would add a add some nuance to that.

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Josh Klein: and I'll do it by way of example. One of the companies that we worked with had was using our platform for a good long while, and they had a solid baseline, and they were pleased with the way that they were learning to manage with the tool.

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Josh Klein: And then all of a sudden, we thought our model had broken, because one division, keeping in mind that the way the platform works is that people anonymously evaluate behaviors in peers, and we do it with a distributed methodology. So it doesn't wear people out. You don't get identifying information, etc. But all of a sudden one division just fell off a cliff.

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Josh Klein: Everyone in the company hated everybody in this division vehemently, essentially overnight, and we were like.

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Josh Klein: that doesn't look like a human thing. So I think our behavior is messed up, and we called the client and had to explain this. It was an uncomfortable conversation for the 1st 2 min until they started laughing, and they said, Oh, that's super funny! That's our finance division. We've started a huge M and a activity. And we told everyone that we were telling everyone in finance to stop answering emails and stop responding.

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Josh Klein: But it looks like they're really mad that they're not getting their paychecks or able to find out what's happening with anything else related to finance. And we're like, well, yeah, yeah, they're upset. They are upset about that.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: So.

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Josh Klein: The reason I bring it up is at that time strategically, that was the right choice, right? This was a significant strategic move for the company. They didn't tell us about it in advance, so it was a surprise, but it was something that it made sense for the company to do.

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Josh Klein: Moreover, the people in that particular division were not the highly innovative drivers that they were looking to cultivate within the rest of the company. And again, that was fine like that was the staff that they needed at the time, and just because they weren't like knocking it out of the park in terms of the growth rate for those behaviors was okay, because it wasn't especially tangential to the role.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: yeah, that's I. I love that insight. And it's like, you know, I just want to be clear, like we are not advocating for having a coal catalyst or catalyst majority company. That would be. That would be disastrous. But I love the insight about, and and I'm wondering how you help leaders even think a little bit proactively about this part of the organization. I mean, I think there's some defaults right? Like you want your finance people to be more risk, averse your legal people to be more risk averse? But

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I haven't talked with a lot of executives who are thinking about outside of like really obvious ones, innovation on the other side. Yeah, we want a lot of catalysts and innovation thinking about intentionality, about some of the behavioral traits that they want, and the different lines of business is that is that a conversation that you guys have had.

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Josh Klein: I'm well, I'm having it a lot these days, mostly because of AI,

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Josh Klein: and that's because it turns out that to be good at using these new AI tools. You need to be pretty intrinsically motivated.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah.

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Josh Klein: Not everybody is. The other part of it is the big insights that you get out of using generative AI broadly are independent of role, they're much more individual. So you might have someone who's a junior person in marketing or a senior person in finance, or wherever in your organization happens to be using this tool, and good games, and all of a sudden are having insights, because the liminality

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Josh Klein: that it gives you traction within means that they can produce something that's really valuable well, beyond the confines of the role that they've got. But that is a really thorny proposition for any leader, because it essentially means you need to hedge your bets. And how do you do that when you can't even say our individual department is over here. Go invest in that behavior. There.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: So how are you helping organizations find those those you know, sparked action, oriented curious learners.

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Josh Klein: I'm advocating for a few different things. One of them is to make the tool more broadly available and then study the traffic

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Josh Klein: so like early on in generative AI. One of the things that a few of my clients did was they. They made these accounts available on request, and then they just looked at the amount of traffic used right. And a lot of people were, you know, wanted to be seen as being interested, and they'd go get an account, and then they wouldn't use it for the 4 weeks that they had access to it, and some people would get it, and they would be on it every day for hours. And so it turns out, if you go and interview those people who are on it every day for hours, you get all kinds of insights

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Josh Klein: which may be really useful in understanding that this is talent you want to cultivate, because

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Josh Klein: most of the time, because that person is probably having some useful insights around the tool that you can then apply elsewhere in the organization. So that's 1 broad, you know method that I've used.

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Josh Klein: Another thing is to create a culture that celebrates innovations, using the tool to have small competitions around it, to take the tools or take the suggestions that are made, and fund them within the organization to tie them to incentives or tie them to promotions. I mean, there's all the usual kinds of things that you can do to

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Josh Klein: to promote certain kinds of thinking or certain kind of behaviors. The the big problem, I think, is that generative AI offers so much advantage when you don't tell people you're using it

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Josh Klein: right like. Oh, now I can take Fridays off because all my end of week reports are being automated. Why would I tell anyone I'm doing that right, or Hey, I'm now producing twice the output that I used to? Because I'm using generative AI. Why would I tell anyone that when I'm getting all the credit? So you really kind of have to work twice as hard to get those people to want to share.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, what is that? It's like? It's not perverse incentives. Reverse. Like, yeah, it's a it's an interesting like, why would I? Why would I shine light on that so moving a little bit sideways, I'm wondering if there are other challenges that you're seeing catalyst executives or experiencing yourself in the marketplace, and maybe have one or 2 examples on how you might solve them.

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Josh Klein: Oh, goodness,

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Josh Klein: I mean, it's a really interesting time to be an executive right now. You know, we've had 40 years of unexpected stability. And now that's stopping right like

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Josh Klein: the stagnant economy and everything. By stagnant I mean the rate of innovation and everything else has been relatively stable, even though the whole way along we've been being told that this is a period of radical innovation. Now, we're actually getting back to radical innovation. And it's very disruptive. And it's happening along with geopolitical instability. And you know, there's a climate issue like there's a lot of stuff that's shaking the nest. So

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Josh Klein: I think that that's both an advantage and a challenge for executives. It's an advantage, because if you are a catalyst, the way that you've described, you are perfectly positioned to respond to this environment. You have the natural attributes and the insights that are necessary to actually function in this environment. Because if you don't, it's going to be a lot harder. On the other hand, it means you're one of them.

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Josh Klein: You're one of those people that are causing this problem. In the 1st place by talking about more change. Right? And so what a lot of the conversations I have are around. Okay, we need to take all these brilliant new ideas that you're having and trial them and get data and like.

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Josh Klein: build up evidence that it's working and explore the green field. Like all the stuff, all the great stuff that catalysts do. And also you need to make a case for how you're diminishing the rate of change, how you're mitigating risk, how you're causing more, you know, creating more confidence. And

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Josh Klein: that's it, you know. Doing those 2 things at once is hard.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's so hard, and it's such a super interesting insight. And I think it's such a.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's it's not something that we've talked about in terms of

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: helping catalysts, especially at that level. Understand that this small investment in of change potentially is going to provide more stability, or, you know, remove some of the swirl in the organization.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I think that's super super interesting. One of the challenges that we see, because, you know, I believe we do need more catalysts at the exec level, and probably even at the board level, so that they have, you know they innately understand some of this, and they bring in outside thinking. But along the way some of the things that make us really good at that also don't haven't historically been valued

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: at the C-suite table or higher. And so I'm just wondering how you if you have advice for how to articulate. You're like, well, obviously, that they we need more cattle like you have the skills to do that. But you know, if we're labeled as too disruptive, or the positive troublemaker like those names weren't always given to us out of a sense of generosity. Right?

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: You're just disrupted.

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Josh Klein: In the worst possible way.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yes.

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Josh Klein: again. I can't speak for everyone on this. I can only speak from my personal experience, and where where I have found best results around that particular topic is in knowing what I don't know, and and saying I was wrong, right? So like.

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Josh Klein: Hey, I think this AI tool is going to be enormously impactful in the financial services industry. And this organization needs to invest heavily in it. And I have no idea how much you know.

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Josh Klein: Nlp, we're actually using, or Ml innovation we've actually deployed, or what this you know, the you know, the state of the art is for those tools who here can get me up to speed, so I can bring my insight into the tech to bear on our re the reality of our organization. And

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Josh Klein: usually when you're when you're having those conversations you've already proven. You're not an idiot.

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Josh Klein: People just need to know what kind of idiot you aren't right. And if you're clear that. Okay, I know a lot about this stuff. And I think that maybe this has impact in this space. Who can help me figure that out. Then, all of a sudden, it's an opportunity right like then, hey? You know what I've been working in Fintech for 25 years. I've been managing the finances side of the house. I'm the head of audit, you know. Whatever it is, I can tell you you're wrong about this, this, this, this and that. Okay, great, what about this? This and this other thing

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Josh Klein: hadn't thought about that?

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Josh Klein: Let's figure it out.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, that's a super interesting one. Sort of 2 follow ups, because, like

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I remember when in my career, I became comfortable. Admitting that I didn't know something, because I think in early stage career, and I think it's legitimate as you're like trying to develop like a t expertise like

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: if you're getting hired to build out the network. And you don't have network engineering skills like you know, or whatever I mean. And but as we get more mature. We can sit in the confidence of. I know what I know, and then I can say what I don't know, so I'm wondering if you have advice for sort of early, you know, earlier, earlier stage people about when they might feel comfortable doing that.

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Josh Klein: I don't, because what you're saying is right. You know, human beings. The way that we're designed is. And unfortunately, I think this is where a lot of

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Josh Klein: a lot of the the questions around like Dei come out right where? Okay? Well, who's the old white guy in the room? They must be the boss, and we'll listen to them

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Josh Klein: like that's not right, but it's the case a lot of the time. So how do you get outside of that I'm not sure. I do know that figuring out who your allies are playing to your strengths. Admitting when you're wrong, asking questions like these are all things that anybody can tell you, but I think that they're probably the best avenues towards it. That, and don't work with jerks.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: That's a good one. Yeah, life is too short to work in toxic environments. So the other follow up because we work a lot with organizations. And and, you know, metabolizing the speed of change. And organizations are more like, Okay, we'll fail fast. And yes, we have to learn. But we're celebrating failure and all of that stuff, because you're like, admit when I was wrong

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: like. But how do executives communicate? What kind of fails are acceptable? Or how is, you know? Emerging catalyst leaders doing navigate? Again that challenge of but which one can I get wrong? And how? How? Where can I fail? What magnitude.

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Josh Klein: Yeah, again. That's how long is a piece of string? But I will say that that something that I always do is if I'm going to tell someone I have failed. I will also tell them what we learned.

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Josh Klein: because otherwise there's just no value there like I failed horribly, and we learned these things which have a serious impact for our strategy going forward. Okay, I failed horribly. That's too bad. Not not so good.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah. And I think, tying it back to what you said before about like having the metrics around it. It's like, you know, start small like, hey? We only we only lost $10,000 on this one prototype. Here's what we learned like. I can rationalize, rationalize those things.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I could talk with you for hours, but I'm going to move us to our final question. And I'm so curious. Who is your favorite inspirational, catalyst

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Pastor Present? And why.

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Josh Klein: So this I'm worried. This will sound like a humble brag, but it was really meaningful to me that I don't normally get starstruck, but I was starstruck. Once I was invited to sit on a panel opposite Sir Tim Berners-lee.

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Josh Klein: and it was that was a big deal for me, and it was in New Delhi, and my wife and I showed up, and we dropped our bags in the hotel room, went downstairs to the lobby, and he was checking in. He and his wife and I was trying to figure out, how do you approach this person? And he saw me and beelined over and said, I was just reading about your website on the way over, I have so many questions. Can you give me 10 min to drop my bags and we can have a glass of wine

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Josh Klein: right? And so we spent a couple hours chatting and whatnot. I have never met a more humble, kind, insightful person any question I had. He was right there to get into it. He had questions of his own. There was no ego there at all. He wanted to make the world a better place, and I got the feeling that had always just been the case. And it it changed my life in that all of a sudden I was like.

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Josh Klein: I can't really imagine achieving a higher apex of career than this man has done, and if that's what success looks like, I'll take it.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: It's so great to find those role models where you just like are so deeply inspired, by the way, that they're showing up so authentically like that. Yeah, we need more of those in the world, too. That's an amazing story. Congratulations like he wanted. He was following you.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Yeah, that's what place to be.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: I am also excited to have connected with you. You are an amazing role model, all of the like. The fun ways that you've navigated the fun things that you have done in life. So keep doing that, keep helping us create positive change.

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Josh Klein: Absolutely you too.

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: Thank you

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Shannon Lucas - Catalyst Constellations: and to our listeners. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more about how to create bold, powerful change in the world. Be sure to check out our book, move fast, break, shit, burnout, or go to our website at catalystconstellations.com. And if you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please take 10 seconds to read it on itunes, spotify stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcast. And finally, if you have catalysts in your life, hit the share button and send a link their way. Thanks again.