201. Innovative Leadership: Breaking Barriers and Nurturing Talent with Andrew Barry

Discover how to harness the untapped potential within your organization with Andrew Barry, the visionary CEO of Curious Lion. Andrew's journey from KPMG South Africa to leading a bespoke leadership development company is nothing short of inspiring. In our conversation, Andrew shares powerful strategies to unlock the capabilities of high-potential individuals, emphasizing the importance of adaptive intelligence and a growth mindset. Learn how Andrew's background, from teaching high school math to his expertise in leadership and executive education, has shaped his unique approach to training high-performing executives.

Curiosity isn't just a trait; it's a game-changer. Andrew explains how companies can identify and cultivate high-potential leaders by fostering characteristics like learning agility, integrity, and the willingness to learn from failure. We delve into the mechanics of talent reviews and the critical role of structured, community-based learning experiences. By offering personal development opportunities and maintaining open conversations, businesses can keep their top talent engaged and motivated. Andrew's insights highlight the transformative power of experiential learning and lateral moves within organizations to ensure continuous growth and development.

Andrew also sheds light on the profound impact of asking the right questions and embracing uncertainty. From internal rotations to innovative practices like manager swaps, discover how these strategies break down silos and promote diversity of thought. We touch on the interplay between curiosity, creativity, and AI, and how these elements can drive both personal and organizational growth. Finally, Andrew reflects on life, literature, and leadership, offering valuable lessons from his favorite books and philosophies. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone looking to elevate their leadership potential and foster a thriving talent pipeline within their organization.

🌐 Connect with Andrew:
• Website: www.curiouslionlearning.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realandrewbarry/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Unpacking Leadership Development With Andrew Barry
• 5:43 Identifying and Developing High Potential Leaders
• 8:56 [Ad] Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
• 9:44 (Cont.) Identifying and Developing High Potential Leaders
• 11:46 Maximizing Leadership Potential Through Development
• 17:49 Creating Cohort-Based Leadership Development Programs
• 24:39 Enhancing Development Through Experiential Learning
• 29:32 Developing Adaptive Intelligence and Listening Skills
• 37:28 [Ad] Virtual Rockstar
• 38:19 (Cont.) Developing Adaptive Intelligence and Listening Skills
• 38:34 The Power of Asking Questions
• 48:26 Reflections on Life, Literature, and Leadership
• 54:03 Communication About Future Podcast Episode

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

What is a Cassandra your organization probably has a few Cassandras, but you may not know it. In today's episode, I am joined by Andrew Barry of curious lion, we discuss how to develop high potential talent in your organization in a way that drives personal transformation and builds on their strengths and what Andrew calls adaptive intelligence, high potentials in your organization need to be seen. They need to know that you believe in them and that you are investing in them. Otherwise, they will soon start looking elsewhere for a company that will invest in them. Sit back and enjoy the show. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Andrew Barry. Andrew is the CEO of curious lion, an organization that specializes in bespoke leadership development for high potentials, and that's what we're going to talk about today. What is a high potential? How do you unpack the full potential of a high potential and develop them? And how do we grow as an organization around that? We're going to be unpacking some really curious topics, such as a thing called Cassandras and a topic called adaptive intelligence. So it's going to be wonderful conversation today. I can't wait to get into this content. Andrew, without any further ado, will you please introduce yourself to the audience, so give us a little flavor of your background and what inspired you into this work that you do today?

Andrew Barry: 1:34

Yeah. Mick, thanks for having me on the show. It's really good to be here. Yeah. So my career started in South Africa at a company called KPMG, and I so I'm a professional accountant by background, but I very quickly fell in love with a different part of that business, and that is the training and development of new trainees, new hires, new associates that were coming through. I was the benefit of those programs. I benefited from those programs, and then I had this opportunity to teach and deliver the training material as well. And yeah, it was an amazing experience. I got to travel around the country and three weeks in every month and teach people these auditing skills. And so from there, my career just took a different direction, sort of left accounting field, and went into teaching, really, which is actually funny enough. My first ever job when I left high school was to teach high school maths to the new high schoolers. And so I pursued that to America. I came here to develop the material that I had been delivering back in South Africa. And I got more geeked out by adult learning principles instructional design. I taught myself all of that, and eventually moved up into selling executives of education for KPMG, and that was where I really felt a niche around leadership training and developing high potential and high performing executives. And from there, I spent a little bit of time in a startup in the hospitality training industry, and then I started curious line, and that's just been our passion. You know? We We love developing people, we love helping people realize their potential, and we think we can do that really well by digesting content that's often just thrown at people and make it approachable in a way that they can actually transform themselves.

Mick Spiers: 3:28

Yeah, really interesting. Andrew, I'm curious to know, what did you learn about leadership yourself in that transition from, I'm going to say, high school teaching through to an organization like KPMG in the accounting world through to then KPMG leadership practice. What did you learn about leadership yourself in that journey?

Andrew Barry: 3:49

Yeah, I think for me, one of the biggest things is, is something I like to call high agency. It's not a term I invented at all, but it's something that really, for me, captures the thing that I realized most about what progressed me in my career was this ability to basically do the thing that people said was not possible or wasn't the appropriate path to follow. It wasn't the next step, and I found that when I followed my own curiosity, clearly, I think something we'll talk a lot about on this show today is when I would get the most, I mean, I would get the most interested in it first of all, but then it would lead somewhere interesting, if that makes sense. And I think I learned that, that if I followed my curiosity more, I would end up in places that I was happy I went to, you know, without sort of planning it out, like I'd done very early in my career. And so now, you know, that's one of the things we try and develop in leaders, and help people develop this ability to have high agency over your actions.

Mick Spiers: 4:50

That's really interesting. Andrew, that follows my career as well. Just a quick interjection there. When I was really young, I had this plan. I was going to do this by this. Age, and that by that age, etc, when I let go of that and I just followed my curiosity, developed a growth mindset to go just back myself, to try new things and learn new things. Greater things happen than what I could have ever have planned for myself. So sometimes you just have to be open to open to new opportunities and follow your nose. Now, high potential. Let's get into it more deeply. Let's let's start with this one. How does an organization identify high potential? I think most organizations have high potential programs of some description. They understand the concept. But what characteristics do you look for, Andrew Barry, to say that someone has high potential?

Andrew Barry: 5:43

Yeah. So I think agency is definitely one of those. But let's back up a minute. I think for those without perhaps the HR talent backgrounds, the way these things work is that a company will conduct a talent review once a year or once every two years, and what they're looking at is a very popular framework for this called the nine box. And so if you imagine a sort of two by two matrix, or, I guess, a three by three matrix, on the one axis, you've got low performance, so yeah, low performance to high performance. And on the other axis, you've got low potential to high potential. And so the performance one is fairly straightforward, right? Like everyone's been through performance reviews understands how that process works, whether you agree with it or not, and so you basically rate people along that spectrum. And then the potential one is, is where it gets, potentially a little tricky, because it's very subjective measure, and lots of companies do it in different ways. You know, I will ask, I will answer your question, like, how I look for it? For for my team at curious lion for me, potential is things like agency. It's things like the learning agility, right? Like a higher having a high rate of learning, a non fear of failure. I don't want to say like fearless, but someone that isn't scared of making mistakes and owning up for them. Integrity is also a big one growth mindset, you know, it's kind of a composite of all of these things. And so what you end up with is this, you know, chart of people on this spectrum and where we are most interested in with curious lion is that top right hand corner? So that's your high potential, high performance. People. Now here's the trick here, Mick, is that the part that we are interested in helping, and where we think the pain point is, is, what do you do next? Right now, you've done this exercise, and what do you do with the you know, typically, top 10% of people in your company? The first and obvious answer is, promote them, okay, but that's not always possible, right? That you can't promote that entire cohort of people right away, so you're going to promote a few of them. Okay, great. Now, what happens when you don't get promoted and you are performing at a high level and have high potential, right? You probably start looking elsewhere, right? So that's a problem for companies, that's a big problem. So what we help them do is, and a lot of companies do this, there's a lot of their their other alternatives, and I can talk to some of the ways that I see it done badly, but they'll offer them a program of development. And so as most data shows, other than you know, career growth opportunities, personal development is a big reason people join companies, leave companies if it's lacking that kind of thing, right? So they offer professional development programs, and the idea is that these programs will develop people, they will engage people, and then hopefully they will retain these people to the point that they can promote them. And it's obviously tied very closely to do succession planning as well. These are the future leaders of this company. They want to retain as many of them as possible and move them into the right senior roles as those open up in the company. So, I mean, let me, let me stop that, and if you have any questions on that, maybe then we can kind of talk through how companies currently approach that.

Mick Spiers: 9:35

Yeah. So, I mean, this is quite consistent with all of the organizations that I've worked in as well, Andrew, we've used the nine box, and this way, I think of it as well. Just to play back the way that you're talking, the performance issue is usually actually the one that's the easier one to measure. What did they achieve? How did they achieve it? And then when it gets to the potential, this is where you can get a little bit unstuck as to understand what are you actually looking for. And certainly some of the mindset issues are a big one. Do they have a creator mindset instead of a victim mindset? Do they have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset? Do they represent the values that you're looking to represent in the organization? Do they take accountability? You mentioned that one. That's a really good one. And one of the questions we often ask ourselves, do you see this person moving at least two levels above from where they are today, and if so, they're going to land in that ninth box? But the key is, what happens next? Because if you don't invest in them, if you don't have a comp. Conversation with them about this, by the way, and this would be a tricky part that maybe we should unpack as well. If you're not giving them opportunities to learn and grow, and you're not telling them, Hey, we believe in you and we're going to invest in you, they may find the door and go and find someone else who will believe in them and will invest in them. So tell us more about what you see organizations doing well and not doing well here?

Andrew Barry: 11:02

Yeah, I love that point that you make there, by the way, because that idea of having that conversation is probably the biggest thing someone can do who's listening right now is if you have those kind of people in your org, or you are that kind of person, to open up that dialog, because that's often one of the things we see missing, but it's not the thing we focus on. So we focus on the professional development piece. And you do that in a couple of ways, but what, what typically happens with these things is we find is they will a company will run a professional development program, but that program will consist of essentially a series of lectures with really great speakers, awesome topics. It'll get people really excited in the session. After the session, sort of continue to be excited for about a week or so afterwards, and then they go back to their normal jobs, and they tend to forget about it, right? And so maybe these are kind of dotted throughout the year, and you get this little bit of a dopamine hit, but you're not really getting anything substantial out of it. Sometimes that is paired with executive coaching, right? So a lot of companies will purchase credits for coaching from platforms, you know, like better up and platforms like that. And what we've seen with some of our clients is that people just don't use those credits, and I think it's because, you know, it's like getting a fitness coach, you know, like, if you have access to a fitness coach, but you're not, like, motivated to use that person and to actually exercise and all that. You're probably not going to reach out and say, hey, you know, let's, let's start this relationship and do this thing. And so people need coaxing or guidance, or Yeah, I like to think guidance to be able to do this, and then they need to be able to do the professional development with other people, because that's the other big part of it. So when you can do this as a community of peers, you develop a lot quicker, and that motivation factors a lot higher. So that's a big part of why I don't think these programs work. And honestly, one of the main reasons some of our recent clients have been bringing us in is they say, Hey, look, we've done these things. We've had these great workshops in the past, and it's been fine, but we're not seeing any real improvements in people. We're not getting that development, and it's the development that leads to the engagement, which leads to their attention. So do you have to get the development rights? And I think that's the part that we maniacally focus on, to make sure that every person that goes through it gets that personal transformation.

Unknown: 13:30

So there's a few things there I'm hearing Andrew. One is about the importance of the conversation, and I want to unpack that a little bit more before we go further. The next thing I'm hearing is around almost like making them feel there's a purpose to all of this, and bringing them into a cohort where they're learning and seeing from others around them that it's not just them off on their own. Here you go. Here's an access to LinkedIn learning, or, like you say, better up, etc, that there's, there's actually some kind of structure to it. Let's come back to a few things, and I want to unpack it a little bit deeper. So in that conversation, and I fully agree with you, and that is a good call to action. If you have high potentials in your organization, and they don't know that they're high potential, there might be a chance that they're looking elsewhere to get recognized, to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel like they're valued. So if you're not having those conversations, you're at great risk. How do we make sure that we have those conversations? Andrew in a way that sets the right expectations? Because if you go the other way, you can end up with a situation where someone thinks they're going to be the CEO by the end of next week, and then they get frustrated when it doesn't happen at the speed that they think it's going to happen.

Andrew Barry: 14:47

Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think the best piece of advice is avoid making promises. Right? Like any any kind of specific promise around future accolades, achievements, promotions and stuff is probably not something, it's not something you know, right? So, so don't go there. I think, I think the conversation needs to be around, hey, we believe in you, you know, like we see you first and foremost, actually, right? We see you. I think that's a big thing. It's just that simple, like recognition, to say we see you. We think you're high potential, we believe in you, and then we are going to show you we're investing in you, right? And that's, and that's and then actually show that investment. And I think that is consistently when we run these programs, when they bring the CEO in, you know, to come and talk to the group at some point during the year, that's the message, right? Like you are, and I don't say like most important people, right? But like you are. High, important people, and we investing in you. I mean, you know, these programs, are we talking about moving people out of the field to come and spend a week, you know, offsite, you know, not working, there's the investment of time for them. So it's a big it's a big commitment, but I think that's it, right? I think it's accept recognition, tell them that you believe in them, and show them you, you're investing in them.

Mick Spiers: 16:01

Yeah, I love it. So we believe in you. That's very powerful words. I see you sour Bono type concept, right? So I see you. I believe in you. I'm going to invest in you, but then the actions have to match the word. So I'm going to say another mistake that I've seen you do these talent reviews. It's on some kind of 12 month cycle where you pull out the talent review every 12 months, the high potentials have got a development plan every 12 months. But are you really putting rubber on the road? Are you following the development plan that you promised the individual? What happens in that 12 month cycle? Andrew, where we can show them that, no, we're actually doing this. We're not just talking about it. We're actually doing it.

Andrew Barry: 16:44

Well, yeah, so that's the difference between, okay, we're going to, we're going to get a speaker every quarter, we're going to do a workshop for you, you know, and then kind of, that's it. And here's a LinkedIn learning and a better up, you know, license and go for it. The contrast to that, and this is what we seek to build every single time, is a cohesive, connected program that lasts anywhere between six and 12 months, six and nine months, that involves touch points with the whole group, right? That deal that I think must hit a couple of key things for people of this growth mindset orientation and high performance potential. Already, you need some stuff on self awareness. And so we start all our programs with self awareness, and what we find is that people are craving for it like they don't. In my own business, I do an annual review every year, and I try do monthly reviews that's usually like every quarter, I'm constantly reflecting, and because I dictate my time, right? And not everyone has that luxury, and they find they just don't get time to actually sit and reflect and say, What am I good at? Right? Like, we do a lot of work on origin story and what, where do I want to be? A lot of work on vision story, and we get them to we create an artifact out of this, right? So people actually walk away. One company was a baseball card, right? It's like, it's got your origin stories and your vision stories and some other stats about you. And so there's, there's this identity and self awareness component to it, which I think is so key. Then you want to hit skill development, right? And we do thorough discovery with the company to make sure what are these people actually need, right? What's lacking right now? And so this could be anything from problem solving to decision making to communication, your your typical, you know, leadership topics, but it's got to be tailored and targeted. It's got to be something that these people themselves have said, Hey, we could do we could use more of this, right? That's a key part of it. And then I think the third component, which I don't see many people doing, but we do this a lot, and I think some companies are interested in just this part, is this idea of sort of a capstone project. And so if you've got, say, 50 people going through it, that's your top 10% you then break them out into small groups, and they work on a project. And we've tried lots of different ways to do this. Sometimes the projects get set by the company. Sometimes, you know, we come up with those. I think what works best is to allow the groups to come up with their own problem statements or questions. And so we've kind of broken it down to that. So people get to work on what question, what problem do I want to solve? And that's everything from, hey, I don't have access to this data, and you know, you do inside my company, right? So like, let's figure out a way to make that more possible. Or this data is not visual. That's another data example, talent pipelines. Like, how do we, how do we ensure we've got new talent coming in all the time, right? It's sort of these open ended, complex questions, and then they work on those questions, and they solve them during the course of the program, and they're applying the skills that they're learning in the main sessions. And then they're working on these, this group work together, and then they present it at the end of the year to leadership. And you can kind of gamify this. You can have, you know, prizes and that kind of thing. But what we find with this third element Mick is that people generate new IP, you know, they generate new ideas. And there's often these insights that people are having because they've been randomly paired together, or sometimes not so randomly. But, you know, they don't know each other from before. And there is a meeting of perspectives there that uncovers some kind of new insight at the company. And often those things can be quite valuable.

Mick Spiers: 20:27

Yeah, it's really, really good. Andrew, there's a few things I'm picking up there that I'd like to reflect on. The first one is tapping into the agency, the personal agency, one of the values that you were looking for in the hypertension. In the first place, then bringing them in and having that awareness and that self reflection of, what are you good at? Where do you come from? What experiences have you had up until this point? Where do you want to go? How are we going to get there? So there's a bit of a self awareness and a bit of guided agency in terms of their own personal development, then I'm hearing this cohort based and project based learning opportunity where they get to roll up their sleeves and do something, not not just learn something, but do something. And if you've architected those projects well, it will be a win win, because you might be uncovering and solving a problem in the business that potentially you didn't even know about, but they've seen it at the shop floor, and now we're seeing professional development, professional learning, and some kind of benefit for the company at the same point, how does that reflection sit with you?

Andrew Barry: 21:35

That was spot on? Man, that was spot on. That's exactly it.

Mick Spiers: 21:38

So let's tap More into this experiential learning, because a lot of people, when they go towards investment in someone, they do think about sending them on a program, or send them on some kind of educational program. What role does kind of experiential learning, or even lateral moves within the organization, play in developing that high potential?

Andrew Barry: 22:00

Yeah, that's the big one, right? I think this makes me realize there's another alternative we haven't talked about, and that is sending people to executive education programs, which is also something that they do, and they'll probably get that great personal skill development, probably maybe even the personal transformation piece, but you're not going to get that. Hey, this is everyone working together, you know, on our staff thing. And that's, that's the part that that may be missing there. But yeah, so I think the key thing there is that you've got it in house and having people moving in a direction that's aligned to the strategic priorities of the business. And, yeah, what was the question at the end there, Mick?

Unknown: 22:41

It's about experiential learning. Then. Andrew, so thinking about whether they might make a lateral move in the organization, they might might go and do a special project in sales and tendering department for six months, or something like that.

Andrew Barry: 22:55

Yeah. So we did some research a couple of years ago on learning culture and sort of what are some of the key elements that a company needs to have to have a strong learning culture. And internal rotations and internal promotions are two of the 40 things that we found were big influences. So I think that's a huge part of it. And one thing so that we were getting a little bit outside of the program here, which is not a bad thing, because there is a lot more you can do with these high potentials. And I think that is a very practical thing to have placements. Or I've even heard of companies that do, you know, kind of manager swaps. So you just, you end up swapping it leaders, like, if you're, you know, a new manager, your VPS might swap, and you now are led by a new person, which is another growth opportunity for people. And what I'll say, just to also round it back to the programs, is that you can get close to this without actually moving people in roles, and that is by having people cross, functionally paired and sharing insights and information with each other. We had just one example at a client of ours where someone was in a breakout room, right in a Zoom meeting, and he's an account executive, and he was talking to an account executive, but in a totally different function, and learned in the breakout room and insight that saved his client about$200,000 or something, right, like that. He was able to basically, just like, email off to his client and say, Hey, I thought about this thing. You know, maybe we can try this and save them 200,000 and he learned that from someone else in the business that he probably wouldn't have met if it wasn't for that program. So I think that's really cool, and provides, yeah, so much serendipity.

Unknown: 24:36

I love this on two levels. Andrew, first of all, the thing that you said about rotating the leadership team, that's a really interesting concept as well, because you always learn something new from a new individual, a new leader, a new person that you're working with. Then when you're talking about this pairing up with individuals from different departments, there's many things I'm picking up here. First one is the breaking down of silos. And I think if you talk to most organizations, Andrew, you talk to the CEO and ask them, What things would you like to address in your organization. I think in that first 10 minutes, breaking down silos is going to be something that they say, getting different departments to talk to each other, to develop that empathy, so that this department understands how this department works and how the other department works, and connecting those dots. And then the final part, then is the diversity of thought, because then once someone from outside that department looks in and looks at a problem that the department. Been having, and they scratch their head and go, oh, there's a solution to that. All of a sudden, you've got diversity of thought where you might actually solve some of the long term problems that the business has been holding. How does that sit with you in terms of this kind of diversity of thought, but also the breaking down of barriers?

Andrew Barry: 25:59

Yeah, I mean, these are the, like, two of the big benefits we talk about from our program. So you're spot on. I was just writing them down here because it's exactly, you know, these are exactly those two things, yeah, the breaking down silos. One of our most recent clients, a wholesale marketplace for independent retailers here in the US, approached us with one of that being their, one of their main objectives, we need to break down silos here so that we can the interesting thing for me there was that it's about making the decision making more rapid, you know, so people are getting kind of bogged down and stuck in they would see an issue on the platform, for example, and then would need to, there's so many people that have to weigh into that product and engineering and, you know, even legal and so like being able to understand the perspectives of all those functions is a facilitator and a quick decision, right? So that's that's huge, the breaking down silos and then diversity. Thought I just, I'm so glad you brought this up, because, to me, that's creativity, right? That's what creativity stems from, if you can broaden your ability to take more perspectives into account in any one you know problem that you're trying to solve, the more perspectives you can take aboard, the more likely are you going to come at an to an innovative solution?

Mick Spiers: 27:14

Oh, spot on. Andrew, yeah. So this is where we do need to make sure that we're listening to our organizations, that might be a good segue for us to go on to the other two topics we promised at the intro. What does Cassandras mean?

Andrew Barry: 27:28

Yeah, great segue. I got this idea from Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO, phenomenal writer, business thinker. He wrote a book, one of his books called the only the Paranoid Survive, and yeah, in the book, he talks about this concept of Cassandra's. Now he uses it because Cassandra was a goddess in Greek mythology. Apollo put a sort of a curse on her. She was blessed with the ability to prophesize, but no one would believe her. So she would see things and be able to predict things, but then no one would believe her, and that was her eternal curse. And so this idea of Cassandra's are, you know, and Andy Grove's way he talks about how, at his role in a CEO, he's got that overall, broad perspective of a company, but he has this, like, time delay in things, right? And he tells the story, fascinating story, with the battle with Japan with microprocessors. And, you know, the their switch from that to, I forget what exactly, what it was microprocessors to whatever they were doing before that. And so, you know, so there was this time lag, and it was people in a factory somewhere in Intel who saw in order volume that something was changing, right? And so they knew this long before it made it to corporate headquarters, to Andy Grove's office. And so he talks about that conflict, because if you just went and spent this time listening to every Cassandra in your organization who's telling you, oh, no, things are changing. Orders are down, you know, you would be completely overwhelmed as a CEO, right? So you can't there's a lot of noise in that as well, but there is signal in that noise. There are people who do know what they're talking about and are seeing things that may or may not predict a big event for your company. And that's fascinating to me, right? How do we surface more of those ideas in a way that they can be filtered and, you know, tested and all of that, and really just bubble up to higher parts of the organization, so people can make quicker decisions.

Mick Spiers: 29:28

So how do we identify that? Then it's a really good question. So you can have some people that are very close to the action. Their fingers are on the pulse. They can see things that you're not seeing, and if we're not listening to them, it's at our peril. But how do we filter the noise from the substance?

Andrew Barry: 29:46

Yeah, I think it goes back to the same sort of ideas we were talking about around the conversation with high potentials. Is to have that, that conversation around, you know, like getting to know people, getting to know what they know what they don't know. Really, really evaluating their ability on those performance and potential aspects to, you know, to kind of there's this thing of to know what to believe in this world anymore, you kind of have to know what experts to trust, right? And that's a whole nother topic that we could get into. But I like the idea of that, like you got to know in your company, who can you trust? Who knows what they're talking about. And sort of building that network of understanding, and then from there, listening to people, you know, just spending time to listen to people, and we don't, I don't do enough of this myself, so I'm not preaching from on high here, but we all need to do more, better at listening and really kind of understanding the story that people are telling. In us, and not the bias or assumption that we have about it, because that's often the barrier, right? That this person is saying something and you're just not actually hearing it. And so, yeah, I think we could talk about all you know, both of those things in a lot more detail. That's two rabbit holes up to you if you want to go there.

Unknown: 30:55

I think it's quite deep in both those directions. But I'll tell you what I'm taking away from it, and the word curiosity comes into this. So think about curious line here. The word curiosity does come in here to make sure that we do get curious when someone is being that lighthouse that is alerting us to something that needs our attention to get curious and then to deeply listen is what I'm taking away from that. Andrew and deeply listening means, are we just hearing what we want to hear, or are we truly hearing what the message is, and if we're just hearing what we want to hear, or we're making predetermined biases based on what we think of the individual before we hear we're not actually hearing the message anymore. How does that sit with you?

Andrew Barry: 31:44

Yeah, I think I agree with that 100% and I think as a practical call out for your audience, you do this really well. If you listen to this podcast, listen back to how at the end of every time I'm talking, make you summarize what you hear, and you repeat it back to me, and crucially, you ask, if you're on point, right? You are? You confirm. And that's the key thing, right? So, like, I think that's a very practical thing people can do is just like, repeat back what you think you've heard and ask the person, is that what I heard?

Mick Spiers: 32:14

Oh, thank you for noticing that, Andrew, that's what I practice. So yeah, that's, I think that's the key to this, because the person has the opportunity then, Andrew, like, they can say, no, no, you know, you missed the point. The most important point was this one.

Andrew Barry: 32:26

And crucially, right? Because then you're getting closer to the truth.

Mick Spiers: 32:29

Yeah, really good. All right, let's go on to the other one that we tease people with at the start of the show, which is adaptive intelligence. What is adaptive intelligence, Andrew?

Andrew Barry: 32:38

Yeah, so that's the name we've given our program, the flagship version of the program that we run. And to me, adaptive intelligence is this ability to think on your feet, you know, this ability to have strong opinions but hold them loosely, you know, in the sense of, I may be wrong, and I'm constantly looking for, you know, where I could be wrong, or what I could understand more about this, not thinking that, you know, everything, not being too certain, being able to lean into curiosity like we've talked a lot about, and creativity in this true kind of narrative sense to be comfortable with, you know, messy ideation and Thinking outside the box and coming up with wild ideas, trusting that you will eventually converge on a good idea.

Mick Spiers: 33:26

Yeah, that's really interesting. Andrew, so one of the things I'm taking away there is a concept that I've heard before, is about speak as if you're right, but listen as if you could be wrong. And what I'm hearing from what you're saying here is you need the courage to be able to have the idea pop into your mind, the courage to speak about it, but to speak about it in a way where you're actually following your curiosity to test your idea with other human beings. How does that sit with you?

Andrew Barry: 33:55

Yeah, that's exactly it, right? And testing your idea is the key part here, because that's what creativity is. That's what actually a lot of what we do is we test things. We're like as humans. We're these predictive machines. We're always trying to predict what's going to happen next. Naturally, our brains are like looking at a situation saying, is this familiar? What do I recognize? And trying to kind of infer what's going to happen next. And we can influence that as well, right? We can. We can take some kind of action to that outside world and change it. And so those are all tests. Those are all ways that we can test things, test hypothesis, see what works, get feedback and adapt, right? And it's that ability to constantly cycle through that, I think, is also so key right now, right? Because if you're still trying to keep trying to hold on to knowledge, as if that was the power, right, or information as if that was the power, then that's then you kind of faced a losing battle, right? Because you're going to be so far behind you are ready with AI, and so you have to find other ways to stand out. And if you, if anybody's used AI, you're going to know that the way that you interact with it, I think, is the way that we've been talking about is critical thinking. You've got to really think hard when you work if you want to get something useful out of out of an AI. And I think that's all tying to what we're talking about here, is that ability to think on your feet, adapt, test things, get feedback and change constantly.

Unknown: 35:21

Yeah, I'm really loving this term, Andrew, I'm going to bring AI into this reflection that I'm about to do. So what I've heard from you is about this ability to think on your feet, and then from that thinking, then even to prompt, which is what AI is all about, prompt engineering. You. Prompt another question, and from that other question, it might even prompt another question. But now you each time you ask those questions, you're getting a richer data set where you can make better and potentially quicker, but definitely better answers to the original problem that you're dealing with. And if I build into that thought that you don't need to know all the answers, but you do have to have the courage to ask all the right questions. So the curious mind would be, oh, that's really interesting. Andrew, tell me more about that. And whether that's another individual or it's an AI generative tool that you go, Oh, that's really interesting. What if? If that's true, what if, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden, you're off on a new chain. How does that sit with you?

Andrew Barry: 36:27

Yeah, that's exactly it, right? And it's and the thing is to be uncomfortable with that, because that is, you know, that would you just to have a question, and then for that to lead to another question, and potentially another question that a lot of you know, that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, right? That ambiguity, that uncertainty of, you know, like people want closure, they want to answer the question. And, you know, AI answers questions like you don't have to answer anything, right? Like you might be doing a disservice by stopping your your thought process too soon, you know. And so, so I think that's a big part of it as well. I think rejecting certainty is something that a lot of leaders could lean more into.

Mick Spiers: 37:45

Rejecting certainty. I love this. This is going to be really good rejecting certainty. Get more curious, ask better questions. That's the future. That's the future. It always has worked in a human to human world. It's going to be even more powerful on an AI world.

Andrew Barry: 38:00

Yeah, because you can augment that now with something that is way beyond our capability of answering things, answering concrete things, right? And this is the important thing you know, I think most people know about AI, is that you know all of its knowledge, and all of our human knowledge as well, for that matter, is based on the past, right? All of our decisions are set in the future or about the future, right? And so AI is never gonna be able to help with that. AI is only trained on the past knowledge. It can infer, and it can do it can, you know, make up stuff like, not, I'm not talking about hallucinations here, but it can infer things based on the knowledge it has. But that's incomplete. There's always new information, right? And we as humans are best equipped to take that information.

Mick Spiers: 38:45

I think we're tapping on to something really important here. The difference between artificial intelligence and true cognitive intelligence is that ability to extrapolate and to ask that what if question AI will only tell you something based on the collective knowledge of the world as it is today, and it'll do it at a speed that most human beings, I'm going to say, I think we're pretty close to every human being couldn't possibly match. But what it can't do is to go, oh, like I said before, if that is true, I wonder if that means that this is true, that that ability to extrapolate.

Andrew Barry: 39:23

So okay, this is fascinating, and I was going to save this. I might save the person's name and book for one of the questions at the end as a teaser for the reader, so for listeners. But yes, this is such an important concept and and it's sort of rooted in in narrative intelligence, or narrative theories of creativity, which is that it creativity is literally the ability to speculate on cause and effect, to go, you know, if this, then that, and to come up with and invent that next thing, right? And we have a sort of logical brain and a narrative brain. Our logical brain thinks in in abstract labels, categories, definitions, after the fact, it's the knowledge that has passed, right and it's useful, obviously, like, keeps us organized. It, you know, helps us take action, like we need that part of our brain. Obviously, the right side of our brain is actually the least used side in professional settings, is the side that can do speculation. It's the side that can spot exceptional information right, like our left brain is trained to think in, you know, this is the pattern, right? Here's the the bell curve. The right brain sees the things on the ends of the bell curve. You know, it's things like that and that ability, the what if sort of ability that you mentioned as well. Yeah, fascinating topic.

Mick Spiers: 40:39

Yeah, really good, Andrew. I'm going to give a little bit of a summary now, and we'll go to those final four questions. So for everyone listening today, listen to everything that Andrew and I have been discussing today. So you do have high potentials in your organization, and you do need the ability to recognize and to celebrate them and to invest in them. So high potentials. How do we pick them? Yes, they are the high performers. They're also the ones that have got the most potential. Can you see them moving forward in the organization? Do they represent the values that you're looking for in the organization? Do they have the right mindset? Then we need to tell. Them. We need to have that conversation with them so that they know that this is how that they're considered, that we believe in you, we see you, we believe in you, and we're going to invest in you. Then the actions have to match the word. And the investment can come in all kinds of ways. It can come in programs can come in, cohort based programs, project based work, sending them off on external programs if necessary, but giving them the experiential learning, where they can start stretching their legs and starting to understand more about the business and more about themselves, the more about themselves, is really interesting, because it's that self awareness to go. Okay, where have I come from? What's my origin story? What am I good at now? Where are my areas where I might need to double down on, where are the areas I might need to work on, like some weaknesses, and we have almost like a bespoke development plan for the individual so that they can stretch their legs. And if you do that in a clever way, you can do it in a way, particularly around these cohorts and projects, and buddying up with other departments, you might get some business benefits along the way, breaking down barriers, solving long term problems, maybe even some problems that you didn't even know existed. The Cassandra's element is making sure that we're tapping into and listening into those people in the organizations that are able to see things that you're not seeing, and making sure that when we listen to them, that we're truly deeply listening to them. And then this adaptive intelligence to be able to but have our antenna up and to be able to see and hear and understand what's happening in our business, and have the ability to ask better questions, whether that is with an AI tool or another human being. Adaptive intelligence is the thinking on your feet, but it's not thinking on your feet to think that you have all the answers and give the instant answer is to think on your feet and then ask better questions and follow your curiosity. Absolutely fascinating conversation. Andrew, really appreciate your time today going through that. Let's go now to our final four questions. Which are the same four questions we ask all of our guests? What's the one thing you know now? Andrew Barry, that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Andrew Barry: 43:33

Yeah, that's funny. I actually, I wrote this down before we had this conversation, and then it really kind of summarizes it. You don't really know what's going to happen, you know, when, when I was 2021, I thought I knew everything that's going to happen, you know, I just graduated high school, you know, I was in a I was in a business education degree. I was becoming an accountant. I thought I was going to be a CEO of a company in South Africa, right? That that was the goal. And here I am a CEO of my own company in America, and it's, yeah, not at all. It wasn't linear to get you, you know it was. It was very up and down. So I think that would probably be the biggest thing, if I had known that, then I would have been less stressed about getting everything right.

Mick Spiers: 44:15

I'm going to add something here, if you don't mind, I love this. You don't know what's going to happen, and that can either be scary or exciting, and you get to decide which one that is. You get to decide whether it's scary or exciting, and you create, yeah, very good. Love it. Okay, what's your favorite book?

Andrew Barry: 44:34

Yeah, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna use, so I was just referencing, now narrative theories of creativity. A friend of mine, an amazing professor at Ohio State called Dr Angus Fletcher, has written a bunch of books on that idea. And the one I'd recommend, the one I started with, and kind of got into Angus is thinking, is a book called wonder works. And what he does in this book, and it's very there's he's written other kind of, more like manuals and sort of scientific stuff. And for people who are not as geeked out about this as me, I would probably stay away from those go with Wonderworks, because Wonderworks is a book about he's basically his premise of the book is that stories are a technology we invented as humans to help us solve the most existential problems that we face. Right things like, Do you know, does God exist, right? Like, why are we here in this planet? You know, how, like, Love, Grief, you know, all these kind of things. And he breaks it down 25 different of these problems, you know, grief, love, all these different things and shows like, how story was sort of invented from, you know, way back when it was, when literature sort of first came about. So very fascinating. And then then the premise then becomes like, Oh, if, if that's what stories do, then what else can we use them for?

Mick Spiers: 45:48

I love it. This is really cool. I'm going to look into that one. I've not heard of it, so I'm going to look into that one. I'm going to read that one myself. Really good. What's your favorite quote?

Andrew Barry: 45:56

Yeah, I wrote it down here. It's two quotes that I think, speak to the same thing. So the one is, all models are wrong, but some are useful. You're smiling after you've obviously heard that one before, George Box, a British statistician, and then Alfred, Alfred kosipsky said that the map is not the territory. And both of these really speak to this idea that what we talk. About right? Like all our knowledge is based on the past, all our decisions are about the future, and we don't know what's going to happen. The stuff that's worked now, the rules and the frameworks and the maps that we have are helpful, but they're wrong. They're not reality. So there is a gap that we have to bridge, and I believe that that's adaptive intelligence.

Unknown: 46:40

Oh yeah, that's interesting. So the rest of the map has not been finished. You get to grab hold of the pen. You get to have a bit of agency and creativity here, and you get to help illustrate the how the story finishes. I love it. Well. Very powerful. Andrew. And finally, people are going to be really interested in this conversation, whether it's the things that we've been talking about at the end or the programs that you do for high potentials. How do people find you, Andrew?

Andrew Barry: 47:08

yeah, so LinkedIn is definitely the best way. I am very active on there. I if anybody wants to actually engage with me, just comment on one of my posts, and we can start a conversation, and then I will send you a link, Mick, and I'm sure anybody listening will find it in the show notes for an email course we created on adaptive intelligence. It's a free course. It's six emails, I think, and I'll give you a bit more in depth about what we talked about today.

Mick Spiers: 47:35

Outstanding. Thank you so much for your time today, Andrew, I feel richer for having this conversation. It's been really interesting. Thank you for allowing me to follow my curiosity in today's conversation to and to ask you questions about your work. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your time with us today.

Andrew Barry: 47:53

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Mick.

Mick Spiers: 47:55

You've been listening to The Leadership Project in the next episode, it will be a solo cast where I share my reflections of everything I learnt from Andrew Barry and my own reflections of where I see companies go wrong and sometimes very right in the way that they develop high potential talent in their organizations. Next week, I'll be joined by two amazing guests, Adele gambadella And Chip Massey Adele is a expert in crisis communication, and chip is an ex FBI hostage negotiator, and we're going to be talking about their book. Convince me. If you are enjoying our content, please do make sure that you subscribe to The Leadership Project Youtube channel and to our mailing list on the YouTube channel, we have weekly videos, video podcasts and live stream shows for you to take your leadership to the next level. And our weekly newsletter shares with you highlights from the world of leadership. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo And my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project, YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.