– Welcome everybody to today’s “Building My Legacy Podcast.” I have with me today, Jim Tamm. Jim is fascinating to me because he has spent a great deal of his time and his career in collaboration. He was senior administrative law judge with the State of California where he was tasked with working with disputes, especially within education by bringing various parties together and looking at, how do you deal with this in a healthy way and get a result that everybody can live with and work with? He has written a book called “Radical Collaboration” where he really spells out some of the steps that go into collaboration. And we’ll put information about that in the show notes so you can all get a copy of that book. He has also been faculty of the International Management Program at the Stockholm School of Economics Executive Education program, NASA’s Management Education program, Leadership Academy of the University of California Santa Cruz, and the list goes on. So with that, Jim, I wanna talk about why radical collaboration, what got you into that? And let’s start there. And I want to know, radical, why radical?

– Well, the level of collaboration that we were advocating when we first started this, I mean, now people realize that effective collaboration skills is not just a way to thrive, but it’s a basic survival skill. I mean, if you can’t collaborate internally, you will never be able to compete effectively externally. But people sort of recognize that now, but back in the late 1980s, early 1990s when we were first talking about this, the level of collaboration that we were advocating was in fact, pretty radical. And we found that organizations that were good at it produced pretty radical results. And so we thought, yeah, this is a pretty good way to describe what we’re talking about, it’s-

– I wanna just pause there. When you said they produced radical results, what does that mean?

– Well, for example, in the State of California, we reduced the amount of measurable conflicts like the number of unfair labor practice charges, the number of requests for mediators or fact finders. And we reduced that by 70%, 67% in almost 100 different organizations.

– Wow.

– That saved the state of California so much money that the state legislature created a nonprofit foundation to keep offering this in the public sector. I mean, this was a project that was born out of a collaboration between the State of California and the Department of Education and a couple of foundations, the Hewlett Foundation and The Stewart Foundation where we were trying to reduce the level of labor management conflict in school districts. And so, you know, it produced those kinds of results. Trust went up, conflicts went down, saved money, built better relationships. And I think it not only was more effective for the individual school districts that we were working with as far as improving the lives of the employees there and the administrators there, but I think that trickles down, and I think that made a huge difference in the effectiveness of the education that hundreds of thousands of kids got so it was pretty radical.

– Oh, I think maybe it’s gonna be radical going forward because we sure have a lot of vitriol right now amongst ourselves.

– Yeah.

– And you talk about five essential skills to overcome defensiveness, defensiveness, overcoming that being part of trust, I think, collaboration and some of the other pieces. Tell us a little bit about that.

– Well, yeah, we came up with what we believe are five skills that are essential if what you’re trying to do is create a more collaborative environment, a more collaborative culture within an organization, or if you simply want to become more successful at building collaborative relationships, just as an individual. And it’s both a skillset and a mindset.

– Okay.

– It’s a set of attitudes and a set of competencies that you can learn in what we believe is a fairly short period of time and apply almost immediately. The first skill we call collaborative intention, and that’s more the mindset. It’s being able to stay focused on mutual gains in your relationship when somebody hits a speed bump, you know, when somebody makes a mistake or does something that you don’t understand. Can you stay in a collaborative mindset and get curious about what happened, or do you get furious about what happened? The second one is openness because there’s just a huge amount of research showing that one of the more important things you can do to improve the effectiveness of any organization is generally increase the level of openness within that organization. The third one, self-accountability. This is helping people within organizations see what kind of choices they’re making. Now, a lot of times people feel powerless in organizations like they don’t have a choice. And so if we can get people to examine their own mindset, their own belief system about how much choice they have and move up the scale just a little bit, even, it can be very empowering to organizations and to the individuals themselves. The fourth one is self-awareness. And here we focused on a couple things. One was how people behave in relationships with other people around three key behaviors that have a lot to do with compatibility. Inclusion, control, and openness. How much they want to work together or apart, how much control they’re willing to give other people and take themselves and then how much self-disclosure they want. So we try to help people get a better understanding of what their own preferences are regarding those three behaviors and then develop some flexibility in that so they can operate more effectively with people who have a different preference on those behaviors. So that’s one thing. This comes from a work from one of my mentors, a fellow named Will Schutz called FIRO Theory. He, many years ago, his research was from the military, and he created something called the Element-B and the FIRO-B. It’s a psychometric that’s been used millions of times all around the world.

– So it’s an assessment tool as well.

– Yeah, yeah.

– Okay.

– The second thing that we focus on in self-awareness is helping people get a better understanding of their own defensiveness. Because if you’re trying to build a collaborative culture or solve a problem or build a relationship and you start getting defensive, it’s like pouring blood in water to a shark. It’s just gonna create a feeding frenzy. And I’ve seen more people in high-end leadership roles be derailed by getting defensive than any other factor that I’ve ever seen in the 50-plus years that I’ve been working with people and organizations. So if we can get people to spot their own defensiveness at an earlier point in the process before they’ve done damage, that can be very empowering for them. And then the fifth skill is negotiating your way through conflict and differences that are inevitable in any, especially long-term working relationship. You know, if you don’t have any conflict in your working relationships, it’s probably not as productive a working relationship as it could be ’cause it’s, you know, you’re not having any stress points there to juice the creativity and things. Either that or you’re not paying attention or overly medicated or in denial or something, you know? So if we can get people to become more skillful on those five skills, it’s made a huge difference to the effectiveness, the collaborative effectiveness in organizations.

– I want to come back to becoming aware of defensiveness.

– Yeah.

– Because that’s a tough one. And especially if you’re a leader, a CEO of a large organization. Doesn’t matter, could be small. Your ego is really what’s at stake with defensiveness, right?

– Yeah.

– So when you find yourself working in a dispute and you’ve got one party that’s defensive, generally the other one will start getting defensive, too, often, I think.

– That’s right.

– What do you do? How do you do a time out and get people to pause and take a look at what’s happening so it doesn’t escalate further?

– Well, the first thing we try to do is get people to understand what their defensiveness is about. See, most people think that when they’re getting defensive it’s because someone is attacking them and they need to defend theirselves from that other person. That’s not what’s really going on when we get defensive. There are bad people out in the world that we need to defend ourselves from, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about when we get defensive, what we’re doing is we are behaving in a way to let stay unaware of fears that we have within us that are driving us. Three big fears that come up all the time are fears about our own significance, our competence, and our likability. Let me give you an example. Say I have some fears about my competency for doing this podcast today, and say I’m doing a bad job. You know, maybe I was up all night and traveling back from Europe and I’m jet lagged and taking things out of order and not making sense. That could cause me a lot of discomfort. So one of the ways that I could reduce the level of discomfort that I’m feeling, ’cause I don’t, I mean, I like feeling competent, you know. I don’t like feeling incompetent. So one of the ways that I could feel better about that is I might start blaming you or blaming the audience. You know, you’re not asking the right questions. This is your fault, you know, and you should have given me more warning and… Now, it might seem like I’m defending myself from you, but what I’m really doing is I’m behaving in a way that lets me stay unaware of that fear about my own competency. So if we can get people to understand what’s going on when they’re getting defensive and then give them an early warning system to tip them off that they’re getting defensive at an earlier point in the process before they have done the damage, before it’s too late to change any behavior, then they have the opportunity to do something about that. So we try to give people an early warning system for when they’re getting defensive. And in the “Radical Collaboration” book, we’ve got a list of about 50 different signs of defensiveness, like sudden drop in IQ, flooding with information to prove a point, always wanting the last word, you know, sarcasm, withdrawal into deadly silence, you know, whatever it might be. And they go through and they try to get a better understanding of what their behavior is as they’re starting to get defensive. Because the fears that we’re dealing with when we get defensive are all unconscious kinds of things. And our outward behaviors are usually easier to spot at an earlier point in the process. So for example, for me, I notice over the years that when I start getting defensive, I tend to be breathing faster, talking louder, talking faster, maybe feeling misunderstood. So if I’m in a room filled with people and I’m getting some feedback and I notice that I’m talking faster and louder and breathing faster, since I know that those are my behaviors as I’m starting to get defensive the alarm bells can go off, you know, ding, ding, ding, Hey, Jim, pay attention. You’re doing that thing again. Then I can take some action. So once they spot their defensiveness, then they can do things like trying to acknowledge that they’re getting defensive. Now that, just, they have to notice it. Now, that may seem like it’s not a big deal, but that’s a huge first step. So you notice it, then you can take some action. You can try to slow down your physiology. You can try to, when we get defensive, oftentimes part of our brain shuts down, our prefrontal cortex and we start getting tunnel vision and we start obsessing over things. So if you can reengage your brain by looking around the room, seeing how many different colors you see, how many different sounds you hear in the room, that can reengage your brain. Then look inward to see if you can figure out what the fear is about. Pay attention to your self-talk. And then we try to give people an action plan that they can implement when they start seeing their signs of defensiveness. For example, say you have a sudden drop in IQ when you get defensive. I mean, you just become stupid. Maybe you can go hide in the bathroom for five minutes and let your brain catch up with the rest of your body. If it’s fast heartbeat to sweaty palms, fast breathing, maybe you take a few deep breaths or get some mantra that you can keep repeating to just calm and relax yourself. If it’s always wanting the last word or flooding with information to prove a point, maybe you’d just be quiet for 30 seconds or so, just shut up. So if you can identify your signs of defensiveness and then have an action plan and then practice doing the action plan as soon as you see those signs, that can help you get through that moment. It’s like first aid in a situation. And then if you can start paying attention at an earlier point, you even have a greater likelihood of dealing more effectively in that situation. And then over time that’s gonna help. But over time you really need to pay attention to what that fear is about. Where does that fear come from? And if you can do that, you’ll make substantial headway about dealing with your own defensiveness.

– Okay, so you deal with very, very disparate groups when you’re, right? In a negotiation.

– Yeah.

– You’ve got high, high levels of emotion. The stakes are high for both parties, usually. So collaboration, speak to how you do collaboration in that very tense setting.

– Well, we categorize the attitudes that people have. We talk about creating a green zone, which is a more collaborative mindset as opposed to a more adversarial red zone, you know, where people wanna fight and argue and it’s very aggressive or a more conflict avoidant passive-aggressive pink zone, which is, you avoid giving any corrective feedback. You avoid having any arguments. If you go into a pink zone meeting, everybody’s going, “Oh, mm-hmm, okay, sure,” you know? No one stands up and says, “No, that’s a bad idea,” you know? So if we’re working with groups trying to get them to be more effective in collaboration, the first thing that we would try to do is get them back into a green zone. Get them to be paying attention to what their own mindset is. Because if you pay attention to what your mindset is over a period of time, you’ll be much more effective at maintaining a green zone attitude and a green zone self culture, so to speak. So if we can do things to help people feel safe, that’s a good start. Then from there, once they’re feeling secure, then get them to try to understand the other party’s point of view. So if I were doing a mediation, I’ve done a huge number of mediations in labor management disputes. In fact, I think I’ve mediated more school district labor disputes than anybody else in the United States. And oftentimes I would work with the parties individually to try to get them to calm down, move back into that collaborative attitude. But then when I’d get ’em together, I wouldn’t let them go on to try and find any solutions until each side could articulate the position of the other party to the other party’s satisfaction.

– Oh, interesting.

– So I might say, you know, “I want to learn all about the union’s position, but I don’t wanna learn it from the union. I wanna learn it from management. So management, you try to explain it to me.” And they’d try and they’d get it wrong. And the union would educate them a little bit more and they’d try again. They’d get a little bit closer and we’d go back and forth for quite a while and then finally at some point, the union would say, “Okay, they understand our position now.” And then we’d reverse the roles and I’d say, “All right, now I wanna learn about the other party’s position from the opposite side.” And a lot of times people are hesitant to do that for fear that being able to articulate the other party’s point of view is a sign that they agree with it. And it isn’t. It’s just understanding it, You know, you can say, this is what I understand your position is. And then I articulate it and I can say, you know, is that right? Yeah, that’s right. Okay, now I have a different point of view so now let me explain my point of view. So it’s getting them in the right zone, the right mindset and then getting them to understand the other party’s point of view. If you can do that, then you’re gonna be making much easier progress by actually trying to solve problems.

– Can you give us an example of one of your best experiences in collaboration when collaboration just really worked well?

– Oh, well, there was one particular school district that I worked with where I had mediated a strike, and we did quite a bit of training with them, both labor and management together. And then the next year they invited me back to their labor negotiations again. And if you didn’t know who the parties were, you couldn’t really tell who was representing labor and who was representing management because everybody in the room, they were sitting together. They weren’t sitting on opposite sides of the table. They were sitting in a semicircle mixed in together. Everybody in the room was concerned with, how do we improve the situation for the teachers? How do we improve the situation for the district? How can we get more money? How can we build a bigger pie? What can we do to improve the situation for the students? They were all trying to take care of each other’s interest. It was something you don’t see very often in labor management negotiations so that was a pretty good feeling to see something like that, such a dramatic turnaround from a really ugly strike to a really strongly collaborative working environment.

– What’s the worst collaboration you ever saw or a failed collaboration?

– Oh, it’s the lack of collaboration. There was one, oh… I’ve had some failures. There was one particular organization. I won’t even say what kind of an organization it was, but I probably over a several year period when I was an administrative law judge. And by the way, I was just one of many senior judges, not the senior judge. But I probably spent over a several year period 30 to 40% of my time in that one organization trying to resolve conflicts. And we just made no headway at all. Their negotiations seemed to get worse and worse. And finally someone said, “You know, you need to go in and train them better.” And my attitude was, you know, I’ve done what I can do. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a bad example around. So then I could go around to other groups and say, you know, if you don’t get your act together, you’re gonna be like that one. So it was just unproductive. We couldn’t, you know, sometimes the best you can do is to slow down the killing and you just have to accept-

– You have to want it to be different, yeah.

– Yeah, yeah.

– It’s true with so many things. So there are people who are collaborators and there are people who aren’t. So when you look at people, who do you see as a collaborator?

– Well, I think to be effective at collaboration, you need to have some self-awareness. You need to have fewer blind spots. People that aren’t very good at collaboration oftentimes have huge blind spots, especially driven by their ego. And so a lot of times people say, “well, what does self-awareness have to do with collaboration?” Well, you know, it’s because if you don’t have good self-awareness, you’re constantly gonna be stepping into a difficult situation and making things worse because you’re operating from your ego and trying to protect yourself and you’re just constantly undermined by blind spot. It’s like walking through a minefield and you never know when you’re gonna blow up or what’s gonna happen, you know? I would say that’s the biggest difference that I see. If people have greater self-awareness, I would rather have somebody that has more self-awareness and the right attitude than someone who has all the skills. Because we found when we first started out, one of the mistakes we made when we went out in the pilot program in California, this was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the mistakes we made, or at least I made was when we went out to road test it, we went out looking for the most screwed-up, dysfunctional, highly conflicted organizations we could find and so they had a lot of conflict. And I kind of thought, well, if we just teach ’em how to negotiate their way through conflict that ought to solve their problem. And what we learned over the years was that we could teach people the best negotiating process in the world and if they came to the table with a bad attitude or they got defensive, they were gonna screw up any system that we could teach ’em. So gradually over the years, we’ve had to reverse the amount of time we spend on the negotiating skills and spend more time on collaborative intention and to creating an open, safe environment and self-awareness and self-accountability because it’s these first four skills that make the fifth skill work, the negotiating and problem solving. Now it looks like all the work is being done down when they’re negotiating their way through the conflict, but you can’t do that effectively if you can’t stay in this with a green zone mindset. You know, if you can’t create an open environment where people feel psychologically safe, where they don’t have to defend themselves from saying what’s on their mind. You know, if they don’t have the self-awareness, if they don’t have the ability to think about the choices they’re making, you won’t be able to solve things on a negotiating scale.

– You know, I think, so we talk about collaboration. Well, I collaborate. I work with so and so, right? We use the word many times very glibly without understanding what really makes collaboration work. And part of that is also, there’s a certain amount of permission that has to come from the responsible parties to allow it, right?

– Yeah. But, this is a big but. It is possible to collaborate with people that you don’t trust.

– Okay, and how do you do that?

– You have to change the nature of the negotiations. There’s one little exercise that we did where, it’s a negotiating exercise and the parties, they have the opportunity to compete with each other or collaborate with each other, comes from game theory. And we were working with a group and they were, this was at the International Management Program, at the Stockholm School of Economics. So these were managers from all around the world, and they knew that if they collaborated, they could make much more money. The object is to see how much money you can make for your organization, but they didn’t trust each other at all. So when they had a chance to put a deal together, you know, one of them looked at the other guy’s very expensive watch and said, “Is that the real one?” “Yeah, it is.” “Well, mine’s real too, and it’s also very expensive. You know, I’ll tell you what, I’ll put up my watch and you put up your watch and if we don’t do what we say we’re gonna do, we’ll tell the professor here to give him my watch.” So they didn’t trust each other at all, but they were able to build in an insurance policy to their negotiation which made it more likely that they would both do what they say they would do, but you need to change the nature of the negotiations in order to do that away from what are we gonna do to also, how can we make it more likely that we’ll do what we say we’re gonna do? You know, how can we build at least an artificial level of trust into our transaction to make the transaction successful, even though we don’t trust each other? It’s like, trust but verify if you’re talking about disarmament stuff, you know? Yeah, you want to go into it with positive attitude, but you’ll also want to have inspectors in looking at the weapons and make sure that they’re disarmed.

– I appreciate that, Jim, because I think so many things that we do, we say it starts with trust. You look at Lencioni’s work, which I love, absolutely love what he’s done, it starts with trust. However, there are organizations that will never have trust. And how do you begin to help them move in a new direction? And so what I hear you saying is you can put some building blocks out, some safety nets out that allows them to take those all steps as they move forward.

– And we always encourage people, move towards people that are moving towards you. You know, look for other people who think like you do regarding collaboration, not necessarily think regarding the substantive issues, but regarding collaboration and try to build alliances with them. And if you can build those kinds of relationships within an organization, if you can eventually get to the point where you have a critical mass of people that are like-minded in trying to solve problems and stuff, that helps an organization very much. Typically though, if you’re gonna try to change the culture of an organization, we found that if you don’t get the top folks on board, you won’t change the culture of the organization. You can change a team. You can change a division or a product line or something along those lines, you know, one plant or something like that, but if you want to change the whole nature of the organization, you’d better get the executive team on board, too. So when we first started out, we wouldn’t take anybody into this project unless they sent a critical mass of all the top leadership in the organization. So we that we were working with people who could make a difference. We had a lot of money then. We could make it very attractive. You know, a lot of foundation money and state money. We don’t have that now. So now we tend to be invited in, you know, someone is a plant manager or manages a particular team. So we go where we’re invited now, and we can work with that part of the organization. But if you really want to change the whole culture, you’d better get a critical mass of everybody important on board.

– Jim, there is, well, let me ask it differently. Is there a difference in how people approach collaboration in the US versus Europe versus Asia? You’ve worked all over the globe.

– Yeah.

– What do you see are differences?

– I see some differences. I see more similarities than I see differences, but there are some differences. I’ve spent a huge amount of time in Sweden. In Sweden, they love collaboration just for the sake of collaboration. They think it’s a good thing. And they’ll sit around and talk an idea to death to make sure everybody’s on board just because that’s what they like to do. When the book first came out in Chinese and I spent a lot of time in China, I saw it was very different. I mean, they couldn’t care less about collaboration for the sake of collaboration. Their interest was they could see very easily that the fastest, easiest, quickest, least expensive way to become more competitive was to be good at collaboration. I mean, they really got that kernel that you can’t compete externally if you can’t first collaborate internally so they had very different attitudes about it, but they were still very interested in it. So there are some of those differences like that. I mean, there are other cultural differences too. Like you mentioned earlier that you’ve done a lot of work in Japan. And I worked for a Japanese company for a while also. And, you know, just getting people to be open there is more difficult than in some countries. Some countries are very open and what you see is what you get. And in Japan we’d ask a question and everybody sort of looks to see what the boss is gonna say first before. And to get someone to say, no, that’s a bad idea is not an easy thing to do. And sometimes the closest we would come would be a comment like, “Well, that might be difficult under these circumstances,” which is translated into, that isn’t gonna happen in a million years, you know? So there are cultural differences like that that have an impact on collaboration, but I see a lot of similarities. In fact, the five skills that we’re talking about with radical collaboration, I think those are skills that help organizations overcome those other cultural differences. If you can get people to be focusing on what their underlying interests are, if you can get people to be paying attention to their own attitude about is it a collaborative attitude or is it a defensive, conflict avoidant or a more aggressive, hostile attitude, that’s a big deal. That’ll make a difference, those kinds of things.

– Jim, most of your work is within, well, you work across groups when you work with labor and teachers and government.

– Yeah.

– What are some of the challenges that you’ve seen when its companies with companies coming together and working if you’ve got several of them coming together? Some of the same issues, I’m guessing, of individuals are there. What keeps us as businesses from doing more of that?

– I think a lot of times organizations don’t realize that they pay more attention to internal collaboration because that’s where they see results better. But oftentimes they don’t realize that they have a relationship with other organizations. So if we can get ’em to do that, just have that awareness, that’s a big deal. And we’ve had, I remember we had one, a big toy company where they were struggling with a relationship with one of their suppliers and they were thinking about ditching them as a supplier. But instead we were gonna be doing some training internally with the toy company. Instead they sent a letter to the president of the other company, their supplier, and said, “Listen, we feel like we’re struggling in our relationship. We want to have a good relationship. We don’t want to look for a different supplier. We’ve had a good relationship in the past. We’d like to rebuild that. We’re doing some training. We’d like you to come join us.”

– Oh, wow.

– So they mixed together. It’s like when we were doing labor management stuff, on all the exercises, we wouldn’t have a management team and the labor team, we would mix them together so they’re building those personal relationships as well, as well as organizational relationships. So if they can start looking at the impact that a good relationship or a bad relationship with some other organization is gonna have on their success, that’s a good start ’cause a lot of times people are oblivious to that. And then, all right, so what would you like it to look like? And once we get an idea of how they can tell that it’s not working well, we have some factors that you’d like to change you know, what can we do? What skills are gonna require us to work with in order to change that? Then we can help get them on track in that regard.

– So a large part of it is really looking at, it’s that openness again, isn’t it? And it’s that transparency, willingness to be transparent. Companies that can’t collaborate, are there such things?

– Companies that can’t. Well, companies that won’t collaborate, yeah. Typically they’re red zone environments, these more hostile, conflicted environments or the conflict-avoidant environments. I find that the conflict-avoidant environments now are becoming the most predominant one, and they’re more difficult to deal with than the more hostile red zone environments ’cause in the red zone environments, you can see where the conflict is. It’s on the surface and you can deal with it. In the pink zone, everything’s underground, you know? So there are organizations where the culture, I think, is so messed up because either the leadership is messed up that it’s, you know, it’s like, ah, I’m not sure I really want to put the effort into trying to change them there, you know? So I’ve seen some organizations like that. It’s good to have some bad examples around, but I haven’t found, it’s been a very small number of organizations that we’ve gone into that I would say have not been able to make headway towards more effective collaboration.

– Jim, some of the-

– Maybe just a part of that organization.

– Some of the people listening to this will be interested in your training program. What does that look like?

– Typically, and this varies a great deal, but typically the radical collaboration workshops that we do with a team or an executive team or as part of a longer ongoing leadership program would be a three-day program. Sometimes we do three-day with longer periods of follow-up. We’ve got some online follow-up stuff and then we’ll go back and work with them over time. In fact, when we first started the organization in California, I mean the project in California, I mentioned we wouldn’t take a group in unless they sent a critical mass of their leadership.

– Yeah.

– Another thing that we required is they had to let us do at least one year’s worth of follow-up with them so we could make sure that they were able to stay on track. And this wasn’t a huge amount of time. It was only like three or four days spread over the year, and they could use that time any way they wanted. And I was assigned to do all of the follow-up program for about the first three, three and a half years of that project. And sometimes I’d go in and I’d train new people. So they had people to fill in when someone left, succession planning. Sometimes I’d do more training with the people we originally trained. Sometimes I would just sit in their meetings and give them feedback or individual coaching, you know, whatever was gonna be helpful. And I got off thinking about that and I forgot what your original question was now.

– Oh, the training. What does your training look like?

– Oh yeah. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. So sometimes it was much longer than three days. Sometimes it’s a little shorter than three days. When I’m doing work in the longer ongoing training programs, usually a high-end leadership program, sometimes I’ll come in and do two days as part of a six-month program, something along those lines. But basically I would say it’s a three-day, very hands-on, very active interactive program. Typically we’d have, oh, I would say between 16 to 20, 24 people maximum in the training program. Preferably if we can get ’em offsite so they have time in the evening to get to know each other better, build those relationships, but it’s very active. We go through all the five skills. It’s some lecture but very little lecture. Mostly it’s interactive exercises and then strong debriefing sessions afterwards. You know, why did you make this decision in that particular instance? How does this show up in your own organization? You know, things like that.

– Jim, any last words that you want to leave with the audience on what your work is and about your Radical Collaboration program?

– Well, a good start is to take a look at the TED Talk about defensiveness.

– We will put a link for that in the show notes so people can get it, and you’ll get a wonderful view of the green zone and the red zone from that so yes, and your book.

– Yeah, that was before we added the pink zone, but yeah, that’ll be good. That’ll give you a quick hit. It’s only 14 minutes or so. The book is also, we’ve come out with a second edition now, and it’s been a very pleasant surprise to me. It’s been on the top seller list in about six different categories on Amazon for about 16 years so it’s a good help to people. And then we have the Radical Collaboration website as well. There’s information on that. So if anybody wants any more information, it’s easy to get.

– Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today and for talking about-

– My pleasure, Lois.

– All of what you have gathered of this wonderful knowledge. Thank you.

– It’s been a pleasure for me. I am passionate about talking about this so thank you for giving me this opportunity.

– Oh, you’re so welcome. And those of you listening to our podcast today, thank you for being with us as well.