This is the 8th and final installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
Whether or not your household went through the annual back-to-school ritual, most of us are hardwired to shift into a mix of melancholy that summer in the rearview mirror and excitement that a new season has begun.
I know I am.
One way to renew your energy through this transition is to slow down and reflect on when you were most engaged through the summer months.
Was it:
Spending time outdoors?
Socializing and renewing connections?
Traveling to new destinations?
Learning or improving your skills in an activity or topic that brings you joy?
With your answers in mind, consider how you can carry the energy of these experiences into your new season.
Whether or not you joined me in my #SummerOfLearning series (and you can revisit the entire series here) you can start your new season with renewed energy and commitment to growth.
FIRST, this is a great time to create, review, and revise your Competence statement (download a fresh worksheet here).
If you drafted a competence statement for the summer, ask yourself:
Is it still relevant to the challenges and opportunities on the horizon?
How might you refine your focus based on what you have learned?
How can I infuse my growth with the energy of my best summer learning experiences?
NOW, ask what resources and relationships you can tap into to help you sustain your agile learning habits more effectively.
NEXT, generate ideas for how you can engage and inspire your colleagues or team members to practice continuous learning and become more agile learners and leaders.
Guided by these questions, I’ll continue to connect with colleagues who share a passion and curiosity for staying learning agile. Whenever possible, I’ll be connecting in person and even better, while walking. In our current landscape, I’m also participating in and creating spaces for understanding differences of perspective and finding positive ways forward in uncertainty and volatility.
This is the 7th installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
I couldn’t have scripted this past year if I’d tried.
While training for my reclaimed passion for alpine ski racing in Colorado, I had a particularly harrowing crash and blew out my knee (ACL, MCL, tibia fracture—the works).
It happened almost on cue—just days after I had submitted the final manuscript for my book, Staying in the Game.
Even as I lay there on the mountainside waiting for what my fellow racers cheekily call the “meat wagon,” the irony wasn’t lost on me: Just as Staying in the Game was launching, I was pulled out of the game!
While none of us sign up for big setbacks, they often end up being opportunities to step back, regroup, and repriotize our energy and resources. Setbacks are also fertile ground for new learning and growth.
Here are a few of the biggest lessons I learned to help you turn your inevitable setbacks into even stronger agile comebacks:
Progress, Not Perfection
Thankfully, I found inspiration to start my comeback by reading the final proofs of Staying in the Game:
The director of the British cycling team, Sir David Brailsford, is legendary for his focus on “marginal gains.” He discovered that he and his team could exponentially improve results by making—and celebrating—1% improvements in a wide range of variables that impact performance. These have included sixteen gold medals in two Olympics and seven Tour de France wins in eight years.
If I made a little progress in some area each day or week (compassionately allowing for setbacks), I knew I would eventually achieve my goal of returning to snow.
Adopting a “progress, not perfection” approach to learning will help you maintain a growth mindset.
As you continue your leadership agility journey, continuous engagement is more critical than any illusory destination.
I say illusory because now more than ever, we know that whatever destination you set for yourself (e.g., understanding and integrating AI into your work) is like a mirage on the horizon—it will only change or move farther away as you get closer.
Celebrate Small Wins
We all need to see and acknowledge progress to stay engaged. This is especially true for long and complex endeavors that will likely include their share of setbacks.
“In their research of individual contributor and team engagement, Harvard’s Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found that even incremental progress toward shared goals and acknowledgment of accomplishments can make the difference between perseverance through obstacles and demoralized derailment.1 Acknowledgment of progress not only amplifies the meaning and purpose of our efforts but also makes it more enjoyable, two critical ingredients for long-term engagement.’ —From Staying in the Game.
The brain needs positive feedback to stay engaged. To support our learning success, the hypothalamus in the brain rewards us with a dose of dopamine, sometimes called “the happiness hormone.”
Find Hope in Other People’s Stories
On days when I was flagging or experienced a setback, I took heart in hearing and reading other people’s come-back stories.
I found inspiration in the queen of comeback stories, Olympic and World Cup Champion Lindsey Vonn.
Hearing the stories of other masters athletes who had recovered from far worse kept me going. The same applies to the inevitable obstacles and setbacks you will experience in your learning journey.
3 Ways to Make and Celebrate Your Progress
Ask for Help: When you encounter an obstacle or need a resource or sounding board, phone a friend, email a mentor, or post on your team platform. Not only will you benefit, but you will also give others permission to do the same and foster a culture of collaboration.
Make it Meaningful: Celebrating progress can be as small as raising a glass with a friend, announcing your milestone on your team call, or posting your success on LinkedIn. Most importantly, do it meaningfully while inviting people to cheer you on.
Pay it Forward: Now that I am fully recovered, I am keenly attuned to others in the rehab stage. If I see someone wearing the tell-tale post-op knee brace, I make it a point to engage and encourage them. Keep your eye out for opportunities to do the same for your colleagues. There’s nothing like hearing “it gets better” from someone who’s been there.
This is the 6th installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
One of the challenges in helping leaders develop the 3Cs of agility (Competence, Capacity, and Confidence) is that the emPHAsis is often on the wrong sylLAble.
In workplace learning and development, the primary focus tends to be skills and knowledge or:
Know Whats
and
Know Hows
Skills and knowledge are key aspects of competence development; however, without Relational Knowledge, there is a good chance your new competencies won’t translate into improved performance. This is particularly true in volatile conditions requiring novel approaches and learning agility.
Why 50-90% of Change Initiatives Fail
One of the principal reasons 50-90% of mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings fail is the lack of understanding and respect for the relational knowledge embedded across organizations.
In the rush to realize short-term gains, organizations often overlook relational knowledge’s role in how people make sense of complex situations and get things done: with and through other people.
Relational knowledge is unique because it can’t be stored in the cloud, accessed via AI, or acquired through a training program.
Relational Knowledge: What It Is and How You Can Develop It
Relational knowledge is unique because it involves our experience with other people. Unlike “know-hows” and “know-whats” this type of knowledge cannot be passed from one person to the next.
Me and Judy at Our Annual Brunch
For example, I can spend hours telling you about my favorite teacher from 8th grade, Judy Schneebeck (whom I visit each year; see photo), and how she impacted me. While you may know more about her, you won’t have gained relational knowledge. That kind of knowledge requires direct interpersonal interaction and is co-created.
Relational knowledge builds trust and shared engagement at the core of sustained performance in dynamic conditions.
While skills and informational knowledge are as essential as ever in the AI era, success in learning and leadership development depends on how we make sense of and make decisions based on that information—in other words, how we interact with it and each other.
When things don’t go as planned, your relational knowledge can ensure success.
To develop and sustain relational knowledge, the best approach is to learn with and through others. Many of these strategies overlap those for developing your learning agility because they help you get out of your comfort zone and build your confidence in unfamiliar situations:
Three platforms for building online communities and fostering relational knowledge:
Ning(a robust platform I have used for building and sustaining learning communities)
Newer on the scene for community engagement is Mightynetworks
Patreon(geared to creatives who want to build community among their followers)
There’s Still Time! If your colleagues and team members could use a boost of inspiration, please share the #SummerOfLearning “Learning Letter” sign-up link:Share SOL Newsletter!
This is the 5th installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
Embarking on any new endeavor can feel risky and scary. Fear of failure, looking stupid, not fitting in, and more keep many people from venturing out of their comfort zones.
Over the years of facilitating agile leadership events around the globe, one thing stands out:
Meaningful and transformative learning is relational, not transactional.
This is especially true when we are stretching to be more agile.
Whether responding to the unexpected and unplanned or tackling a new opportunity, we are entering new territory.
To be effective when we experience uncertainty and its companion, anxiety, we must challenge ourselves to become more comfortable being uncomfortable.
Research and your own experience show that one of the best ways to accomplish this is by venturing into new territory with a trusted friend or colleague.
If you have ever been lost traveling far from home, you know a fellow traveler can make the difference between an incredibly stressful experience and a delightful adventure. The same is true when we navigate the uncertainty of new territory in our work: Find a fellow traveler or learning buddy to reduce uncertainty, share your discoveries, and grow your confidence and engagement.
The Superpower of a Learning Buddy
After years of helping others take such learning risks, I wrote about the power of finding and participating in Community, in Staying in the Game.
The people in such communities can be your learning Superpower.
Find the Right Fellow Traveler for Each Trip
As I embarked on my Summer of Learning, I’ve paired up with my longtime friend and colleague, communication coach, Mari Pat Varga.
With her ever-evolving work in business and social impact, she is the perfect learning buddy for the journey into the world of AI.
Once again, I’ve found the value of not going into uncharted territory alone.
With my fellow traveler, getting lost is simply part of the adventure. We each have someone to ask “dumb” questions, share the results of our latest experiments, and attend workshops, and debrief.
Four Learning Success Strategies
Whether or not you have joined me on the #summeroflearning or simply want to renew your commitment to being learning agile, here are four reminders to support your success:
1. Find a fellow traveler who can be your learning buddy.
2. Commit to regular check-ins to swap discoveries and stay accountable to making progress.
3. Review the competence statement you drafted at the start of your journey (here is the template if you missed it).
4. Use the Embodied Reflection and Action framework to help you translate your insights into action (complimentary with your copy of Staying in the Game).
Bonus Resources
Here are a few more resources to help you build your learning agility:
My piece on the value of Tapping Your Relational Web to reduce uncertainty and boost your agility capability.
Interesting research showing how interpersonal relationships can affect perception (for example of how steep a slope is), with insights into how fellow travelers can help you be more effective in stressful situations.
Restoration and Inspiration. I’m a huge fan of sculpture parks to spark awe and wonder and renew my faith in humanity. My favorites so far are on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands and Kistefos outside of Oslo, Norway. Here is a list of 10 More to Add to Your Bucket List.
If your colleagues and team members could use a boost of inspiration, please share the #SummerOfLearning “Learning Letter” sign-up link:Share SOL Newsletter!
What are your sources of inspiration and restoration?
This is the 4th installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
Witnessing my mother’s resilience shortly after my father left was one of the biggest influences in my life.
Note My Mother Wrote to Inspire Herself
My brother and I were both teenagers and my mother, knowing she had many productive years ahead of her made a radical choice for the time.
Her prospects were limited because she had been out of the workforce for most of her adult life.
Rather than react out of fear and take the first job she could get, she chose to do something for which she had no role model.
At a time of incredible financial stress, and in an era when it was rare for adults to return to college, my mom dove into the uncharted waters of graduate school.
I watched as she carried her books back and forth to the library, pre-internet, and set up shop each night on the kitchen table with her Underwood manual typewriter.
On the home stretch, as she researched and wrote her graduate thesis, she posted a note on the bulletin board above the kitchen table to cheer her on, “Three pages a day!” it read.
The number was substantial and yet manageable.
I watched each night as she set herself up and clack clack clacked out those three pages.
And, when she finished, I cheered the loudest as she crossed the stage to accept her diploma and continue to a thriving professional career, that demanded two major geographic moves in midlife.
My Mom, Thriving After Grad School, and Me
Years later, after she passed, I came across the “Three Pages a Day!” note again when packing up her house.
I’m sure she never imagined that it and her example would cheer me on to be resilient and persevere in my own learning and writing, three advanced degrees and five books later.
Perhaps not by coincidence, I have spent many years working with clients across industries, and mentoring adult graduate students as they chart their course through scary and rewarding new beginnings.
Whether or not you were lucky enough to have someone model learning agility, you can learn to make it a habit today.
Whether it is committing to your own “Three Pages a Day!” or any other seemingly small steps toward building your agility capability, trust they will add up to a big impact for yourself and those who share a stake in your success.
6 Ways to Build Your Learning Agility Habit
Learning and adapting in unfamiliar circumstances is the very definition of learning agility. It may seem counterintuitive to make a habit of learning agility, a capability we tap in the midst of the unexpected. However, as learning becomes a habit, your confidence in your ability to continue learning as conditions change will grow, too.
The manual Underwood typewriter model my mother used
Whether or not you were lucky enough to have someone model disciplined learning, you can be that person for yourself today. Here are a few lessons I learned:
1. Name and Claim Your “Why?”
Our ability to name and claim our purpose as humans guides us through our most challenging times and can keep us motivated through disruptions large and small.
When your commitment to your learning flags, pause to reengage with your reason for doing it in the first place. Your initial reason could be pure survival (as it was for my mother when she returned to graduate school). And it may also evolve, as I have seen happen for countless agile learners as they continue their educational and professional journey, who discover that the intrinsic joy of learning motivates them to keep going.
2. Make it a Priority
It’s as simple as that. I interviewed masters athletes to find out how they stayed healthy and fit enough to continue to compete long past the time their peers had retreated to the couch. The answer was simple and consistent: “I make it a priority.”
3. Focus on Manageable Chunks
For example, Three Pages a Day was a small enough number to be manageable for my mom while writing her thesis, and yet they quickly added up. Determine what is manageable for you. Is it a set amount of time, a specific skill or topic you want to cover, a set of exercises you want to practice, or other experience you want to incorporate into your life?
4. Block Learning Time on Your Calendar
Treat your learning time as important as your other commitments. I set a reminder that ensures I am available for my blocked time. It also gives me time to reschedule my learning block if something urgent needs my attention. The point is not so much when you keep you keep your commitment, but THAT you keep it.
5. Visualize Success
Your rewards may be extrinsic or intrinsic, or some combination. They could be as spectacular as walking across the stage to receive your diploma to the cheers of your family and friends, or as humble as being able to find your way while traveling abroad. They could be measured in the bottom line or in the positive energy in the lunch line. Visualizing the value of your learning and growth can keep you going when your commitment falters.
6. Celebrate Your Progress—Grow Your Learning Agility: Learning agility, or the ability to learn and adapt in changing circumstances naturally grows as you build your confidence in your ability to learn and adapt. Confidence grows over time, through incremental successes. It is important to recognize and celebrate that progress. This might mean mastering a new skill, building a new relationship, successfully navigating a challenging project, or overcoming a setback.
What ways work for you to make learning a habit and to build your learning agility confidence?
Bonus Resources
Here are a few resources to help you build your learning agility habits:
What is Learning Agility (and how can you develop yours)? Click the button to read my short intro to learning agility.
How to Develop New Habits: A recent Washington Post article on how readers develop a wide range of new habits.
If you want to leverage the power of streaks to develop your learning habit (or any other), the app Streaks allows you to set your goals and track your progress, with helpful reminders to keep you on track.
If your colleagues, and team members could use a boost of inspiration, please share the #SummerOfLearning “Learning Letter” sign-up link:Share SOL Newsletter!
This is the 3rd installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
For many years, I taught a business creativity course to adult undergraduate students at DePaul University. In addition to learning various creativity theories, I devoted half the class time to improvisation games and eventually fully improvised scenes. The class allowed students to develop a pre-defined competence of “Can apply the theory and practice of improvisation to enhance workplace creativity.”
These sessions first taught me the importance of naming and sharing your learning goals and, more importantly, the value of holding your goals lightly and leaving some room for surprises.
The Value to Naming and Sharing Your Learning Goals
Research shows that committing to specific goals AND sharing them with others greatly enhances your likelihood of achieving them. Your chances of success are even greater if you share those results with someone whose status or authority you respect (e.g., a manager, mentor, or colleague you admire). This is particularly valuable when venturing into new territory demanding learning agility. For workplace learning, it can be especially effective to:
• Draft and share your learning goals.
• Keep a learning journal or other record of your experiences and lessons learned throughout your endeavor.
• Share your progress and learning outcomes with a trusted friend, colleague, or mentor and, ideally, with a broader community, such as your team, or at your next Lunch & Learn session.
To get started, draft a short competence statement before you embark on your new learning adventure. You can download a competence statement template and example in the Summer of Learning Framework.
Distinguish Between Process and Performance Goals
As important as drafting learning goals is recognizing the learning that happens along the way to developing competence. These include expanding your network, becoming more comfortable learning in a new way, and even discovering talents you didn’t know you had.
In contrast, performance goals are the projected outcomes and impact of your learning. For example, will your new skills and knowledge help you increase sales, improve teamwork, or reduce time to market? In other words, “How will your new competence generate value for you and your stakeholders?”
Leave Room for Surprises
The growth that happens on our way to developing new competency is sometimes hard to predict, and these surprises can be the best part! Over the years teaching my creativity course, I witnessed and heard so many stories of transformation that I centered my doctoral research on the question, “What happens for people as they learn to improvise?” The findings inspired my book, From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing Through Dynamic Engagement.
Success Story: How Starshine Got Her Groove Back
One woman’s journey stood out as especially surprising. In her first learning journal (which she permitted me to quote from using her nickname “Starshine”), she wondered why she had even registered for a class that included improvisation in the description. She described herself as “shy” and someone “who gets nervous in front of people” and “rarely speaks in class.” She lived into this identity for the first few weeks of class while still dutifully participating in all the class exercises, however uncomfortable they were. Then, one day, about halfway into the quarter, she was in a scene with two classmates, one well over a foot taller than she was. The improvisation scenario was a robbery taking place within a shoe store. Starshine, astonishing herself and her classmates, leaped into the scene with an imaginary gun and pulled the much taller male “shoe salesperson” into a playful headlock. The short scene quickly unfolded to peels of laughter as the formerly retiring Starshine took total control of the scene and “robbed” the improvised store of all of the latest styles in footwear.
In her journal that night, she described feeling “physically and mentally open for anything to come my way” and leaving the class with “a feeling of sureness, freedom, and optimism about me.”
In the following weeks and months, Starshine’s confidence within and beyond the classroom only grew. She later reported that she was now speaking up and sharing ideas more freely at work. She had joined Toastmasters and was even standing up to speak to her large congregation on Sundays, something she couldn’t have previously imagined.
Why It’s Important to Hold Your Learning Goals Lightly
While Starshine demonstrated the pre-defined course competence, I share her story as a reminder of the value of setting learning goals; we should hold those goals lightly. By that, I mean that if we only focus on our pre-defined destination, we might miss all the additional ways we are learning and growing along the way.
In addition to “enhancing her workplace creativity,” Starshine deepened her relationships with her learning colleagues by becoming willing to share more of her playful self, encouraging them to do the same. She became a valuable faith community member by speaking up and inspiring others. And perhaps most importantly, she found her voice and developed confidence in her ability to think on her feet and contribute positively even in unfamiliar settings.
It wasn’t an explicit learning goal, yet the most valuable aspect of Starshine’s experience was the confidence she developed in her ability to learn and adapt to new and changing circumstances: her LEARNING AGILITY.
Pro Tip: This is an important reminder for my talent development colleagues as they measure the impact of their L&D strategies: Be sure your evaluations include open questions to discover the unexpected aspects of the learning experience. They may end up being even more impactful than your planned outcomes!
Bonus Resources
Here are a few resources to help you craft and refine your learning goals:
If your friends, colleagues, and team members could use a boost of inspiration, please share the #SummerOfLearning “Learning Letter” sign-up link:Share SOL Newsletter!
This is the 2nd installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
When I returned to alpine ski racing after a few decades of hiatus, I was instore for a big surprise. For starters, I was nervous that I would be one of the oldest racers on the hill. It turned out I was one of the youngest! Many of the racers out there were still going strong well into their 60s, 70s, and even 80s. That’s me on the left in the photo with my friend, Karl Landl, still racing at age 87.
This discovery sparked my curiosity. I wondered what kept these hardy souls coming out weekend after weekend, year after year, in all conditions to compete on our tiny Wisconsin race hill and countless others around the country. As you likely know by now, this curiosity led me to a years-long inquiry, and the discoveries I made resulted in my latest book, Staying in the Game.
Leading with Curiosity
From interviewing masters ski racers and other business leaders who embody agility, I soon discovered that the starting point of any successful and sustainable learning endeavor is to Lead with Curiosity.
Whether they are curious about how to increase their edge angles on steep turns or how to better navigate the twists and turns of a volatile market, the motivation is the same: continuous improvement and expanded understanding.
If your fast-paced life has crowded out space in your brain for wonder, this might be an excellent opportunity to slow down enough to ponder what you are curious about. Give yourself room to consider what is truly meaningful to you rather than everything you think you “should” be learning.
Curiosity is the secret sauce that helps all Embodied Agile Leaders stay motivated and relevant throughout their careers.
One of my favorite examples of curiosity from Staying in the Game is the career of renowned theater and film director Peter Brook. The New York Times called him “the greatest innovator of his generation” who pursued his passion with “relentless curiosity” throughout his life.
Brook led with curiosity starting at age seven, staging a four-hour production of Hamlet in his toy theater. This quest continued to his final production, aptly titled, “Why?” which opened in the fall of 2019, just months before the COVID-19 shut-down and less than two years before his death at 97.
The secret to his success?
It’s simple, he shared, “Never stop asking questions.”
Here are a few questions to get your curiosity wheels turning
Think about recent conversations, articles, shows, or podcasts you’ve been engaged with. What has stood out to you? What piqued your curiosity?
What new trends are getting your attention?
What are you hearing or reading about that you want to learn more about?
What challenges and opportunities are your customers grappling with?
What other questions do you have?
Use your answers to refine your learning focus in the coming months, with the Summer of Learning Framework as your guide.
Here’s where my curiosity has led me so far:
I promised to share my SoL process with you, hoping it keeps you engaged, but also to hold myself accountable.
Because I work with leaders and teams in various industries, from pharma to finance and beyond, I’m curious about how AI trends affect their businesses and how they work.
In addition to reading countless articles, participating in numerous webinars, and listening to more podcasts than is legally allowed, I am taking my inquiry to where it matters most: my clients.
In our conversations, I’m asking: “How is AI affecting your organization and team and your customers? How is it impacting you, personally? How are you using it? What are you learning? The answers I hear are as varied as the organization, specific team, and individual.
However, two themes are emerging:
Almost every business is integrating AI into their products and services to improve efficiency and customization, particularly for their customers. Some are much further along than others.
Employees are increasingly using AI to augment their work processes, but they must do so within strict company guidelines and follow necessary security protocols.
If you are interested in this topic, here are just two resources that I recommend:
Another great resource, especially if your work includes learning and development or coaching, is the Training Magazine Network. It has been offering several excellent webinars on AI learning trends and strategies.
In addition to learning about AI trends and resources, I have been experimenting with various AI features in the platforms and applications I already use. Here are two short insights from this past week and one lesson learned:
1. So far, my favorite feature is the Zoom Workplace AI Meeting Summary. Just turn it on, and it emails you a summary of your discussion, along with your agreed-upon action steps.
2. After several experiments with ChatGPTthis past year, and more recently with Google Gemini I’ve concluded that, as a writer, I’m just not comfortable having someone or something else put words in my mouth. While sometimes more efficient, the results don’t sound like me and often bear little resemblance to what I was trying to say. At the same time, I am finding they help generating things like subject lines and headers and even to create summaries for longer pieces. You can also have some fun with it by doing things like playing the improv game, “One Word Story.” I’m also experimenting with Google Gemini’s image generator, which, so far, is less than impressive and doesn’t compete with Canva’s.
NOTE: Review the privacy statements on any AI app you use. With all AI products, it is wise to avoid entering any personal, proprietary, or confidential information. Many enterprise security systems have a firewall for GenAI sites.
Lessons Re-Learned: Progress, Not Perfection
I have been teaching and writing about this for years: Learning can be uncomfortable, messy, and sometimes even challenge our sense of ourselves as competent, capable people—especially in the workplace where the pressure to appear competent and in control can deter us from enthusiastically venturing into new territories.
Embodied Agile Leaders (EALs) model learning agility by courageously embodying the learning process. They don’t wait until they have attained a level of mastery to share their learning. Just because I know the discomfort of new learning in my bones doesn’t mean I’m immune to the temptation to defend myself against it.
One of the biggest challenges I am experiencing as I play with GenAI tools and new digital engagement strategies is not the actual technical learning or the “how-to” aspect. It’s that venturing into new territory in a more visible way feels a bit vulnerable and challenges my identity as someone who is fluent in all that is latest and greatest. This is an uncomfortable and wonderful experience to have as it is essentially what I ask the leaders I work with to do as they develop their agility capability. I’m learning to give myself some grace to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable in my own learning process, and I hope you do, too.
Don’t Miss Any of My Summer of Learning “Learning Letters”! You can subscribe here and have them delivered right to your in-box most weeks all summer!
In Staying in the Game: Leading and Learning with Agility for a Dynamic Future, I share the lessons I learned from some of the world’s most agile leaders across sectors. Based on this work, I introduced a new type of leadership: Embodied Agile Leadership. Embodied Agile Leaders (EALs) embody the values and practices of agile leadership and are attuned to their bodies and environment as a source of agile learning feedback, energy, and resiliency.
In this month’s spotlight, I’m honored to shine a light on Bryan Davis, ChFC, CPCU, an inspiring leader who is constantly innovating within the constraints of a highly regulated industry. In this spotlight I draw from a few brief excerpts from Staying in the Game and share some fresh inspiration from our recent conversation.
••••••••
Leaders who stay agile and innovative are keenly attuned to the market’s needs and the competition’s activities and offerings. However, even more than attuning to external threats, Embodied Agile Leaders (EALs) consider themselves their most formidable competitor. Bryan Davis, ChFC, CPCU, Executive Vice President and head of VIU by HUB, an innovative digital insurance platform, is this kind of leader. His passion for continuous improvement and innovation makes him a top leader in the highly competitive insurance industry and beyond. Among top honors awarded throughout his career, Bryan was named to Savoy’s 2024 list of Most Influential Executives in Corporate America.
Never resting on past achievements EALs like Bryan Davis are motivated to do just a little better each time out of the gate.
Even in a highly competitive business, such as financial services, when progress can be measured in relation to others, EALs stay in the game by raising the bar even higher. No stranger to the constraints and competition in a highly regulated industry, Bryan Davis learned to set the bar high early in life when he quarterbacked teams to success from grade school through college. He shared the philosophy that guides him:
I want first to play my best, and in the process, I want to win at the same time. My perspective is that you never want to base your standards on the environment you’re in. Your standards must be higher and bigger than that. And to me, that’s what I do in leadership. That’s what I do in sports. That’s what I do in business. Set your standards high because you can sit here and say, “Hey, I’m at organization X. They used to be mediocre.” So I can come in here, be a little bit better than mediocre, and be great. That’s why I’m always trying to push myself to higher standards, if possible.
Tapping the Power of Intrinsic Motivation
When your most worthy competition is your past performance, coupled with the innate pleasure you derive from continuous learning and improvement, you are propelled by an infinite energy source: intrinsic motivation. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, psychologists and social scientists at the University of Rochester renowned for founding self-determination theory (SDT), discovered the power of this magic combination when they expanded on their initial research with their colleague Christopher Niemiec.
Looking for factors that support sustained engagement, they studied college students in their first year after graduation. They discovered that recent grads who measured their success solely based on the achievement of extrinsic goals reported overall poorer psychological well-being. In comparison, those whose goals were intrinsically focused reported better psychological well-being.[1]
Similar studies in populations of all ages in business[2],[3] and education[4],[5] reinforce the value of finding a sustaining intrinsic aspiration to motivate you to stay in the game. Of course, you don’t need to be a psychologist to know the importance of finding intrinsic motivation for continuous improvement; you have experience to guide you. If you have ever used achieving a specific goal or reward (e.g., losing fifteen pounds by your high school reunion or winning the top sales award) as your motivation, you’ve likely experienced that motivation wane soon after the goal was achieved. When our primary focus is the external reward, our source of energy and engagement is also largely out of our control. A variety of factors can impact your performance on any given day. If you are motivated to continue only if you consistently step on the podium, you will soon be derailed by the inevitable setbacks.
Competing for Learning
The intrinsic value of learning and improvement is at the heart of Bryan Davis’s practice of Embodied Agile Leadership. He shared that “this is where the great leaders separate themselves from the average or even subpar. I would say to my
Bryan Davis was named to Savoy’s 2024 list of Most Influential Executives in Corporate America.
organization at this stage, ‘we’re not failing enough.’ And so, when I do performance reviews, everybody will tell you what they did well.” To shift the focus, Bryan starts his performance reviews by asking his leaders to “tell me what you messed up. Because if you haven’t really disrupted anything and had setbacks in something, you’re probably not trying hard enough.” At the same time, he emphasized that this doesn’t mean, “Okay, well, I don’t have to have any accountability. I can just go mess up something. We’re all kumbaya, and this is not a big deal.”
Throughout his impressive career, Bryan has observed and studied many leaders. He discovered, “The great leaders know how to find that balance between one extreme and the other. As a leader, you promote this environment of ‘How do we find the positivity and accountability in failures?’ And accountability could be like, ‘Man, what should I learn to do differently?'” It takes both courage and humility to model the continuous learning of Embodied Agile Leadership. EALs know this because they don’t expect or invite their colleagues to venture into new territory they don’t explore themselves.
Leading with Intentionality and Patience
Two years into launching their innovative new division, I asked Bryan what new lessons he was learning. While operating as a startup within a long-established organization, his team were early adopters of agile ways of working. Bryan shared two critical insights relevant to leaders across industries who are guiding agile organizations:
More than the Agile techniques, success depends on an agile mindset. This takes an intentionality. It is not something that is natural for some people. You have to be so intentional about calling out the small things to create the environment and culture that you want. And that’s something that I’ve observed now, two years in, that it’s so easy to creep back into a waterfall [traditional project management] mindset. And so the leadership challenge is not necessarily saying, “Hey, we want to be agile.” The leadership challenge is being able to see the small things that create the end game that you’re shooting for.
Bryan’s insights are particularly relevant for the majority of companies that adopt Agile frameworks or undergo enterprise-wide agile transformations and are driven by the promise of improved speed and efficiency. This is because those who focus solely on speed rarely achieve the true benefit of becoming more agile: maximizing stakeholder value. Achieving this result requires something that is seldom talked about in Agile circles: patience. It takes a seasoned and visionary leader like Bryan to practice it. He reflected that,
It takes a lot of patience because you have to let some things burn. You have to let some things burn to get to the overall place you’re trying to get to. You lose some battles to win the war, and you can have a team fighting it out, and they’re fighting for their lines in the sands of waterfall silos. That’s what they’re fighting for. So, I can be the parent that goes and puts the pacifier in their mouth and babysits them, but then we never grow and mature. So, I might’ve put that fire out, but it’s going to be another fire. It’s going to be a forest fire. The fire’s going to keep getting bigger.
Bryan added that he takes inspiration from the Navy Seal credo that “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” He shared the paradox of this approach, “It is patience in the beginning so that you can go fast.” There is no prescription for the intentionality and patience of Agile leadership, Bryan reflected, “That’s the art. That’s the art. That’s my day job, honestly.”
References
[1] Christopher P. Niemiec, Richard M. Ryan, and Edward L. Deci, “The Path Taken: Consequences of Attaining Intrinsic and Extrinsic Aspirations in Post-College Life” Journal of Research in Personality 43, no. 3 (June 1, 2009): 291–306, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2008.09.001.
[2] Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2011).
[3] Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2018).
[4] Carol Dweck, Mindset – Updated Edition: Changing The Way You Think To Fulfill Your Potential. (New York: Hachette, 2017).
[5] Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael R. Matthews, and Dennis D. Kelly, 2007. “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 no. 6 (2007): 1087–1101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087.
This is the 1st installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
A friend shared that she and her team have dubbed the season their “Summer of Learning.”
She works in an industry that is typically slower in the summer months. Rather than simply using their extra time to catch up and get ready for the fall season, they are taking advantage of this opportunity to understand the latest industry trends, learn new technology, develop new skills, and—most importantly—share their discoveries with their colleagues and deepen their culture of learning.
Invitation to Join the Summer of Learning
As we kick off the official start of summer in the northern hemisphere, my friend inspired me to embark on my own Summer of Learning, and I want to invite you to join me!
You don’t need to wait until summer to start your journey. Your season of learning can begin anytime!
If you are like me, you may have at least a few new trends you’ve meant to explore more deeply, skills you’d like to build or refresh, books you want to read, and likely relationships that need some time and attention, all of these can be part of your Summer of Learning!
In this spirit of furthering my journey of learning:
I’ve begun a deeper dive into AI resources and trends, especially regarding leadership agility and talent development.
I’ve also blocked out time each week to reconnect with friendships that hibernated over the winter.
And, I am planning to brush up on my Spanish with 10-20 minutes of Duolingo daily.
My Summer of Learning also includes exploring ways to improve the value and engagement of this newsletter for you and your team by sharing more fresh ideas for you to share with your team as you tackle increasingly complex issues and prepare for an increasingly dynamic future.
Commitment
In this endeavor, I am learning the same lesson the Embodied Agile Leaders I wrote about in Staying in the Game taught me: good intentions don’t always translate into action. It takes Commitment.
If you want this summer to be different from your past summers, which went by too fast, I hope you’ll join me. I could use some learning buddies!
Get Started with the Summer of Learning Framework
It’s simple to get started. Download and review the four-stage Summer of Learning Framework Worksheet, inspired by my 20+ years teaching in the innovative competency-based program at DePaul University.
To maximize your impact and chances of success, I encourage you to share it with your team members, colleagues, and friends. It will be a great springboard for future conversations and help you stay accountable.
If you haven’t already, please sign up for my Summer of Learning email series HERE to receive regular prompts and ideas to spur your learning and imagination throughout the summer;
Abbie More, Product Group Manager, Friesland Campina and Level 3 PSIA Ski Instructor
In Staying in the Game: Leading and Learning with Agility for a Dynamic Future, I share the lessons I learned from some of the world’s most agile leaders across sectors. Based on this work, I introduced a new type of leadership: Embodied Agile Leadership. Embodied Agile Leaders (EALs) embody the values and practices of agile leadership and are attuned to their bodies and environment as a source of agile learning feedback, energy, and resiliency.
In this month’s spotlight, I shine a light on Abbie More, a leader in another dynamic industry that depends on Embodied Agile Leaders at all levels to adapt and innovate in response to constant change. I also draw from a few brief excerpts from Staying in the Game while sharing some of Abbie’s inspiring, actionable insights. I’ve been lucky to learn from Abbie’s wisdom on and off the mountain over the last several years. Through countless conversations on chairlifts and après ski beverages, training camp meetings, and Zoom calls, we have explored how the mountain is sometimes more than just a metaphor for the unpredictable terrain in business.
To be effective in an ever-changing landscape and ready for a dynamic future, EALs have learned to shift from planning to preparing.
As Product Group Manager at Netherlands-based FrieslandCampina Ingredients, Abbie More has made this shift throughout her career. In addition to leading a cross-functional team of scientists and product specialists in an ever-evolving arena, Abbie taps her experience moving through to the highest ranks of professional ski instructing and race coaching. The goal in both, she discovered, is not to ignore or be without fear when the stakes are high. She shared, “I have had several instances in my ski life when I’ve been terrified.”
The key is to realistically assess the barrier and transform it into an opportunity. Abbie had a breakthrough at the top of a particularly challenging run that has guided her success ever since. While trying out for the Development Team of the Professional Ski Instructors of America, the next level for advanced instructors, she shared: “I saw a catwalk, and I thought,
“I could just bail. This is too scary. This is too hard for me. What if I can’t ski? What if I can’t turn my feet? Let me just do that. Let me just take the easy way down, and we’ll forget this ever happened.” Then I said, “Yeah, right, and you look at yourself in the mirror tomorrow morning, and you’ll be really disappointed. Just stop it and do it.” I did, and nothing bad happened to me. I had an awesome run. I felt great about it. I got really good feedback, so I try and remind myself of challenging points like that when something was scary to me. It was a risk. Yeah, I had to put myself out there that day. Seven or eight examiners had their little cards in their hands, and they were watching me and taking notes. They were watching my every move, and I had to challenge myself to make a shift. Your head wants to say, “They’re going to watch for mistakes.” But I was able to turn that around and say, “They’re going to watch for your good movements.”
Assessing the situation through embodied reflection and shifting her mindset has translated into Abbie’s leadership role. For example, when she delivers her quarterly report to the global organization, Abbie reminds herself, “You got this. You know what you’re doing. They’re not looking to you for mistakes. They’re looking to you for information to help the organization. Just drawing from those experiences, turning my mindset around has really, really helped me get through some hard things, some challenging things.”
Abbie More Practices Continuous Improvement on and Off the Mountain
Embodied Awareness and Reflection
For EALs like Abbie, embodied reflection means going beyond cognitive awareness and understanding. It is rooted in attunement to what is happening in the body and discerning the messages found there. For this reason, embodied reflection starts with embodied awareness. With awareness, we can learn and adapt to our current reality, often in the present moment. For example, if you have ever presented in front of a group and become aware of your mouth getting dry, your face flushing, and perhaps speaking so quickly you are running out of breath, you have experienced embodied awareness. With embodied reflection, you might have chosen to pause, catch your breath, and take a sip of water to regroup and reconnect with yourself and your audience. Without embodied awareness or reflection, you might have found yourself ignoring these signals and motoring on, missing the opportunity to make intentional shifts.
Embodied reflection can be especially helpful for EALs who are leading with learning and have an intention or outcome in mind. Intentionality provides a focus so they can translate their embodied reflection into specific action, whether it be going faster, engaging an audience, or improving business results.
Agility and Action Through Embodied Awareness
Abbie’s experience on the mountain and leading her team demonstrates that we don’t need to be hijacked by our nervous system’s well-meaning but clumsy attempts to preserve our safety. With self-awareness, we can recognize the signs of negativity bias and intentionally shift to overcome it. The first step is being mindful of and understanding our embodied experience in high-stress situations or even as we anticipate venturing from the safety of our familiar surroundings for a new challenge or opportunity. Persevering also means not waiting for someone else to inspire or motivate you. Abbie More shared, “In business, you have to take responsibility. If you have a challenge in business, if there’s an account you just can’t get into, take ownership of it. Don’t sit back and say, ‘Well, they won’t take my calls.’ Figure out how to make it happen.”
Embodying an Agile Mindset
Mindset plays a critical role in fostering and inspiring strength and resiliency. Abbie shared how she carries her agile mindset and mental toughness from her regular morning workouts into her workplace for strength and resiliency.
Two of my workouts are circuit classes with ten stations set up, and we do five rounds. It’s 30 seconds of work at each station and 30 seconds of rest. I have a friend who comes to these who’s a retired state trooper. He will typically be at the station right next to me, so either I follow him or he follows me. Besides all the banter back and forth, it’s funny because we’ll get to a station, and maybe there’s a burpee station or another tough station. Whatever the station is, he approaches it like, “Ugh, I gotta go do this one.” I’m like, “Really? That’s my favorite!” I remember one the first times we did this. He’d get to each station and say, “Oh, I have to go to this station.” I was like, “That’s my favorite!” All the way around. Suddenly he looked at me, and says, “I know what you’re doing.” I said, “You have to make each of them your favorite. You have to look at them as, ‘I’m going to have fun here. I have to have fun for only 30 seconds, and I’m going to make the best of it.’” Let’s face it, do you really think burpees are fun? Nobody does, but if you tell yourself, “This is my favorite. I am going to have fun with it,” then you can find something positive about it. It’s the same with work. “Hey, I have a challenging issue ahead of me. It’s stuff I really don’t like dealing with. It’s not sexy. It’s not fun. But it’s necessary. I’m going to make it my favorite, too.
Abbie describes the kind of intentional mindset shifting as the hallmark of EALs who can stay strong and resilient. Rather than give in to the first impulse to resist tough challenges or simply “get through them,” EALs actively choose a positive mindset and find the opportunity within them. By doing so, they find and create energy rather than become unnecessarily depleted. This is why people love working with (and working out next to) EALs! And who knows, maybe you will learn to love the burpees in your day, too.
The Value of Holding Your Goals Lightly
I recently caught up with Abbie on the slopes of Colorado to hear her latest insights. In our first conversation, she shared lessons she has learned about holding your goals lightly — on and off the mountain:
With an agile mindset and a readiness to adapt to improve results and generate more value, leaders like Abbie More inspire us to lead and learn with agility when conditions change.
Thankfully, I found inspiration to start my comeback by reading the final proofs of Staying in the Game:
We all need to see and acknowledge progress to stay engaged. This is especially true for long and complex endeavors that will likely include their share of setbacks.
On days when I was flagging or experienced a setback, I took heart in hearing and reading other people’s come-back stories.
One of the challenges in helping leaders develop the 3Cs of agility (Competence, Capacity, and Confidence) is that the emPHAsis is often on the wrong sylLAble.
Embarking on any new endeavor can feel risky and scary. Fear of failure, looking stupid, not fitting in, and more keep many people from venturing out of their comfort zones.
As I embarked on my Summer of Learning, I’ve paired up with my longtime friend and colleague, communication coach, 
This is the 3rd installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
Success Story: 
Why It’s Important to 
This is the 2nd installment of Pamela’s Summer of Learning Series.
Here are a few questions to get your curiosity wheels turning
Progress, Not Perfection
