What is on your white board when you are leading change?

Pictures and profiles identifying key people? Lines and Arrows analysing systems?

I am intuitively the first. My white board is full of people.

Sarah Henry has been thinking a lot about being a member of

the expedition. And she took me on  “the way you think Julia sort of implies the problem is women, when actually its the systems that don't work. Or rather they do, because they were designed to work for men”.

So this podcast is devoted to systems thinking.

And then I spoke to Alia Whitney-Johnson and Melissa Kwee who have achieved so much in Sri Lanka, California and Singapore through smart systems thinking .

Their white boards seem to be a mixture of pictures and arrows. People and systems. They say the sweat spot is where the two meet. Sarah is right.

Julia Middleton 0:28

Welcome, welcome. Welcome to this eighth podcast. The expedition starts at the end of this month, at the end of May. Terrifying. The expedition, let me remind you, is to find an approach to leadership that resonates with women, so that more women say 'if that's leadership, I'm in'.

Julia Middleton 0:50

I promised you also that by the time we started the expedition, I would have introduced you to all 20 women on the expedition. I can deliver on one side of that promise. You will have met them all by the time we start, through these podcasts, as we interview and talk to so many of them, and all of them by the end of May. The bit that I haven't delivered on is that I've failed on the 20. The truth is that there are 24 women on the expedition. 24 extraordinary women and, and so important that we moved it to 24 because it has to include all ages, all sectors, all faiths, all geographies, all backgrounds, all beliefs. Not all. Of course not all. But many, many, many and 24 just felt, in the end, like the right number. And it's an amazing group.

Julia Middleton 1:41

Thank you all for your continuing ideas and feedback. It's enormously motivating, as well as incredibly helpful. Thank you for following the expedition, whichever platform you're doing it on. And thank you for listening and subscribing to these podcasts. And thank you for giving us your thoughts. In the old days, I think expeditions probably had followers who just sort of bought a map and put pins on them to figure out where people were. That's not what following is these days is it? Following is subscribing, getting in here. And then also giving us your thoughts and sending me the messages. That's so important, that's absolutely crucial. And I've received one fabulous message that I absolutely have to read out to you. It's from Lalima Khan, who's 17 years old and in Karachi in Pakistan. She says, 'I've been keeping up with the podcasts. And what I really enjoyed is the inclusivity of the different women, of the different geographical locations, different cultural backgrounds, different careers, different ages. It really shows that you understand that different parts of the world and different cultures have a need for different changes in their leadership.' But she then goes on and says, 'However, one question playing in my mind is that I haven't yet seen any opinions about women's approach to leadership from the younger perspective, my generation. I feel this is important because we, as young women, are going to grow up. And we're going to those future leaders. So I feel that we should have a say in bringing about this unique approach to leadership and women.'

Julia Middleton 3:22

Lalima you're right. Spot on. Can we talk as soon as we possibly can? I have a feeling that you are going to enrich the expedition. And I have an idea on how we might do that.

Julia Middleton 3:35

This episode is devoted to systems leadership. It'snot my expertise. Not my speciality at all. I learned a lot doing it. I was taught very, very clearly that leadership is... You know the expression 'fish go dead from the head'. If you get, you know, fish do... they go dead from the head and leadership is the same. If you get the right leaders, then an organisation, a system, a place, works and has a hope of succeeding and thriving. If the head isn't right, then there's a problem. And certainly, it makes no sense whatsoever that all the heads or most of the heads of most of the fishes are men, which is why we need an approach to leadership that resonates with women, so that we all say 'I'm in'.

Julia Middleton 4:37

Sara took me on in this thinking when I first met her and she kept on saying to me, 'the way you express it, Julia, sort of sends a message that the problem is women and the problem is not the women. The problem is not us women. The problem is the systems in which we operate and we need systems leadership, as well as the humanly leadership that you talk about.'

Julia Middleton 5:06

Sarah, you have the totally terrifying and daunting title of being the co founder of the Global Center for Gender Equality at Stanford University. So I think that is a pretty daunting title, probably to you as much as the rest of us. But, so let's go deep first, Go on, tell me, if you do something like that, you must have discovered while you were doing it, some dead end arguments and some breakthrough arguments. What are the ones where you want to keep away... that you know you're going down a dead end? You go in the shower that night and you say, 'Why did I let them bait me into going down that dead end? I knew it was a dead end.' So what have you learned?

Sarah 5:58

Such a good question. I think I'll get at it a little bit differently about when I, how I realised how to make the argument, because I think I spent a lot of time in a lot of dead ends. I kind of used to describe myself as being the queen of putting my hand on the stove and learning and then adapting. And I would think adaptation is one of the things that's allowed me to continue to not get frustrated, and realise that I can learn from the dead ends. But I think I realised really quickly a lot of the dead ends was coming at it... initially, because of where Icame from and working with the Gates Foundation early on. Always the argument started with 'show me the data and evidence that it matters. Show me the data and evidence that, by addressing the problem at a systems level, or taking an approach that's fundamentally coming from an approach of gender equality, or women and girls, actually leads to better outcomes and other things.' And I think when you start from the perspective of always having to make the case, I realised very quickly that if I'm starting from that place, and that you're always on your heels. So you're always saying 'let me show you the evidence, let me convince you that this matters'. And you know, data can be used in lots of ways and tell lots of different stories. So I realised very early that when conversations would start with that, with 'Sarah show me the data and evidence that this matters', and there was never a conversation around values, or what we were trying to achieve, and then it got into 'show me the six stops that you're gonna make', instead of defining what the end line was, I knew I was in a dead end race. Or I knew it was going to be a race where it was going to be herding cats, and I would have to constantly be 'come to the table, here's the data that matters to you. And here's how it relates to water and sanitation and here's how it relates to vaccine delivery.' And so I think what I really walked away from that was was, how do you make it... the argument very relevant for the person that you're talking to, and lead with a systems approach of how not only will their outcomes matter, for what they are trying to achieve, but show them their challenge or their opportunity in a bigger ecosystem?

Julia Middleton 8:12

What's the most irritating, tedious question you always get asked? And what's your best put down answer to it?

Sarah 8:22

I think it's show me the case for why this matters. And I think that, you know, I often say back, 'this is like, do you need the evidence to go to church?' There's also just a values aligned about the world that we want to believe in. So to me it's yes, it's important to have the data and evidence but this is also values for the world that we want to live in.

Julia Middleton 8:43

Absolutely. And that definitely leads into this issue of systems, doesn't it? Because the expedition is, is so much about about leadership. But you can be an extraordinary leader. If you're in a system that not only doesn't serve you, it actually counter serves you. You said to me, right from the beginning of when we met, that systems are the big problem. It's not women that are the problem. It's the systems that are the problem. You believe that deeply, don't you?

Sarah 9:16

Yes.

Julia Middleton 9:17

Why?

Sarah 9:18

I mean, because the world wasn't designed for women, let alone women of colour, women from different backgrounds, women with different access to education and the systems are intentionally built to be exclusive, privilege white men. We've been trying to take 99% of the world that has not been designed for and make them fit within this 1% And that gets into to leadership, right? Leadership usually has been defined by white male leadership models of decision making, etc. And so we put women and other gender diverse individuals of different backgrounds into a system that does not value their contributions or the way in which they show up for leadership. So we've done a lot of this work of empowering leaders, and then we put them back into a system where there is actual consequences. We've all heard it — 'she's bossy, she's really aggressive'. All of these deeply, deeply gendered words, because the system does not value those things. And so yes, it's really important to empower and to give people the skills to be able to step into their leadership style. But if we only do that, we're still putting them into a system where they are surviving and not thriving. And so inevitably, what you see is people quitting, giving up, the mental health burden for those individuals that are fundamentally... the system wasn't built to support them. And so for me, it's a dual approach. It's understanding again, the ecosystem and understanding that systems don't change overnight. But we have got to be reimagining, retooling and rethinking, and adapting the current system while we're building a new way of doing things.

When did you last feel that sense of enormous joy because you could see a system that was shifting,?

I wish I had more moments of those joy. A system that for me, very personal... a lot of joy is recently, I'm a single mom, of three very spirited young children, and I work full time. So I am a full time single parent. And the other day I realised — and the system is not built for, for single parents. And I saw the system change. We're launching a new organisation spinning out of Stanford, and we had the opportunity, we have the amazing opportunity to actually build different systems. And so my team had come to me, we were working, and they said, 'here's the potential structure for our HR system', right? Here's the categories. Here's what we'll do. And I was thinking about it. And I said, 'No'. What do you mean no? We've got to set up the system, and then people... and I was like, what if we flipped it on its head? What if we took this system that's inherently built for risk mitigation for companies and we said, the hell with it? What if we said, let's start with our values? Give me the statements from across our organisation and what do we believe?Right? So people came back and they made statements like we believe in people over production. We believe that capitalism is unchecked. We believe in lived experience is just as valuable as educational attainment. And then we said to the team, we said, we sat there and said, then how do we build our systems to match our beliefs and our deep values? And we came up with things like four day workweek, 32 hours. What does it look like for, you know, for working parents? How do we live these in the systems that we have an opportunity to build? And I got such a joy of flipping the system to say, what does it look like if it comes from core beliefs? And you know, so things like when when someone had put the belief we believe that capitalism unchecked, we so what does that mean, in terms of a belief structure. It's like, well, we're gonna have a minimum pay with full benefits. We're gonna have a max pay. So no executive will ever make two times or three times more than our starting pay. So it fundamentally gave me so much joy. And I can see I'm getting energised again, because it's a system that we that we passively adopt, I'm saying, for the most part, oh, this is how HR works. To just stop for a moment and say, how could we, which is a very simple question of, you know, what do we believe? And then let's build our systems based on our beliefs versus passively adopting systems. Then we have to constantly retrofit, make equitable, make just. It's the definition of insanity. It's like, you know, that's where I think the system part really comes into me, because I've spent most of my career retrofitting systems that weren't designed for that purpose. And we're playing on the margins, and the power of a shift in thinking to say, what does it look like if we actually designed it based on values to be a just system, rather than trying to retrofit the world?

Those words stick pretty fixedly in my head, trying to retrofit the world. Thank you, Sarah.

Moving very fast on to Alia because I think she brings a lot of this to life with her story, and I'm not going to introduce Alia because the story tells itself.

Alia, I was hearing your story over the last few years that really brought to life this expression, you know, it's not about women, it's the systems. And we need systemic solutions to problems. And so, if I may, I'd love to go through the chapters of that story you told me about you. If you'll live with that, I'd love to do it. Right. So to me, your story you told me sort of started with, I've got a picture of you as a young girl with straight A's in maths at school.

Oh, yeah. And some A pluses. It was very disappointing if it was only an A.

There's such things as A plus plus.

Right. No, it was like very, I'm very much, very focused on math, very focused on over achieving, especially in maths and science. Yes.

And it got you to MIT.

Yes, I went to MIT to become an engineer. I thought, technology and logic and rigour was how we would change the world and solve the great problems that our world is facing.

But that plan went a bit weird when you decided to go off to Sri Lanka.

Yes. Sri Lanka turned it upside down. So I went to Sri Lanka, the summer after my freshman year, to do originally just to do tsunami relief work. And I was there out doing solar lighting systems, water filtration systems, trying to do things that I thought I was going to be doing with my career as an engineer. And while I was there, I met an 11 year old girl who had a six month old son from her father. And I still remember the day that I met her, and not knowing how to even hold my face in this moment, and how to acknowledge her, everything that she had been through, but also her strength in testifying against her father. She had actually taken her own father to court. And I was so inspired by this young woman who was so small, and so brave, and yet up against a system where she wasn't allowed to go to school. She was taken out of her village and raising a child despite being a child herself. And, for me, it was the first time I had encountered something that there wasn't a clear science or math or technology solution that could just pick up the pieces of this girl's life and put it back together. And it was much more complicated. It was much more human. And it lit something inside of me that I had never tapped into before, that was much, much deeper, much more vulnerable. And I couldn't turn away from that.

And so I started going back in all of my breaks and eventually got some funding and took time off from school and moved there and started hiring a team and really digging into what was it that the girls wanted to see for themselves? What was the training that they wanted? Who did they want to be, long term? What kind of leadership opportunities do they want? What kind of transformation do they want to see in their communities? How did we give them the skills to really make the changes they wanted to see in the world? And ended up starting a whole organisation around that. But it all started with that one, that one 11 year old girl.

So you stayed running that organisation for what, quite a few years?

Yeah.

What made you leave? How many years?

Seven years. I wanted the girls to see themselves in leadership. I wanted it to be bigger than me as a founder. I wanted it to really be a Sri Lankan organisation that was rooted locally in a way that I would never understand, as an American woman, no matter how long I lived there. I wanted the girls to know that they could do this, you know, they often would look at me and and tell me things about how I was able to start this because I was American or because I was white. And I would tell them no like I was 19 and I came here and I want to do this and you can do this too. But I wanted them to see I wanted them to have a role model that they could really relate to, to see the potential in themselves. And that required letting go, which, which was, in many ways, heartbreaking, but I thought to enact the change that I wanted and for the girls to see the full possibility, that was really important.

And so that caused you to come back to the US and a very extraordinary move, which was to go and work for a global consulting firm.

Yes,

A well known global consulting.

Yeah.

How did that happen?

So for me, it was about getting people to take me seriously.

And you learned a lot.

And I learned a tonne, it was like, how do I basically it was like, I want to get my MBA, like I paid for it. And I also don't want to cut my hair, which people were telling me as a girl to be taken seriously, I had to cut my hair. And I was like, no, there's got to be a better way. And I was like, let's try this. So I was there for two and a half years. But a year of that, I was, it was called a secondment. I was kind of gifted, like loaned, to this business woman to support her and her foundation. So I was consulting for about a year and a half. And then a year of that was was working with a woman at her foundation, really on issues around women's leadership.

What did you learn, then?

What I found was that a lot of the academic research that's out there, and a lot of the programming that is out there for how women can lead focuses deeply on individual change, like what can women do to better fit into a world designed by men? How can we change? How can we fit in? How can we behave differently? How can we take up more space? How can we feel more confident, negotiate better, etc. And a lot of the conversation around women's leadership is really anchored at what I would call kind of the top of the pyramid, really thinking about within corporate structures, how do we get more women to the top? And like, how do we get more women at least into sort of middle management. And for me, my interest has always been in the ways that women lead very organically, in all spheres of life, like the women who've been totally cast out, the young women who I worked with in Sri Lanka, who literally all of society has turned their back on, and they're willing to stand up in front of their whole village in public court at age 11 with, everybody there, saying 'this is wrong and I don't want my sisters to go through it'. That is tremendous leadership.

So we move on from that, because that didn't last for a long time. But what was calling you was the Bay Area of California.

Yeah. Yeah. So this whole time when I was doing my consulting chapter, and working at this foundation, I was in the Bay Area. And what I saw was, there was a group of mostly young women, some young men, who were being trafficked for sex, right here in the United States. The Bay Area is a large hub of sex trafficking. And at the time, some of this legislation has changed, but the time we were incarcerating children for prostitution. And I had, for years with my work in Sri Lanka, been talking about the ways in which the girls I'd worked with there had to leave society for their protection. Like they would they would move into these shelters. The whole village was upset with them. And as I was looking around at what was happening here, I was starting to see this parallel where kids who are being repeatedly raped every night, instead of being offered services, and healing and support, which by the way, has started to change here in California, this was a little while ago, were being locked up and penalised for the trauma that they had been through. And I started to think that, you know, we can't... like we're going to constantly be pulling people out of the water, unless we start to really look at both the systems that have pushed them in but also the way that our systems respond to this because clearly, penalising people after they've already been through so much trauma is only causing more trauma. I mean, it's systemic violence. Like, what kind of world are we building for our children when we're locking them up? And this is right in the place that I used to fundraise for children in Sri Lanka, and they were outraged that we were locking children up in Sri Lanka, but we're locking them up right here. And so I left my job and spent a year just learning, just walking around and talking to youths on the street, talking to providers. And what I heard again and again and again, was not that we needed more direct services, we actually mapped it all out — we had at the time, and I'm sure it's changed since then, but at the time, we had 68 different touch points with these kids. But that there were these failure points where kids would, and the kids we talked to would describe them — where systems had failed them, despite them sending up flags. So for example, maybe they were in foster care, and they weren't being fed, and they weren't being taken care of. And they were telling their social worker and saying that there's this problem, and nobody listened. And so they ran away, because they couldn't eat, they didn't have food. And then the only way for them to survive was by selling their body. And then at some point, an exploiter picks them up and started utilising them. And why aren't we rewinding and saying, well, like, how do we have a system in place that doesn't let our children get fed?

I can hear the MIT brain going here. So the MIT brain and the management consulting brain was beginning to really get going around systems thinking.

Oh, yeah.

At this stage, big time.

I mean, you should see my wall, it was like, I have this huge bubble chart of how everything's connected to everything. We had multiple landscape maps. And it, it became this, it couldn't even be a two dimensional structure, it needed to really be a three dimensional structure. And I started to think about how I believe, for some of our most complex problems, we're never going to programme our way out of them. Like, that's not good enough, like, programmes are deeply needed. But it's never going to be A plus B equals C, which is I know what I loved about math, right? But every... we live in ecosystems. And so you have to think about how all of these different forces are connected, and which ones do you have leverage and power over? And which ones do you not? And which ones do you think you could maybe shift a little bit and which ones are just too out of our control.

So you spent the next few years doing that.

I spent the next six years doing that.

So another six years doing that, doing that very successfully. Alia's commitment is extraordinary. And it totally illustrates that systems leadership is a long, hard, committed journey. When I asked her what the next chapter of the journey would be, she looked very quietly at me, and smiled. And Alia has these absolutely huge eyes, that have an enormous impact on you. And as she smiled and kept quiet, it left me speculating.

nd then moving on to Melissa. Melissa, another extraordinary woman based in Singapore. One of the driving forces of Singapore, of the city of Singapore. One of the driving forces for change in Singapore. She used an expression to me, which to me caught the sort of sweet spot that we're on our way to finding, that somehow brings my very human approach to leadership together with the systems approach that both Sarah and Alia have been talking about. But I leave, I leave it to her to tell you the expression.

The quality of the intervention on the system, or in the system, is directly correlated to the quality of the inner life of the intervener. And essentially, that means that who you are, who you are in the system affects how you act and impact the wider system. And that just sounds like a really, maybe it sounds like an obvious idea. Maybe it sounds like a simple idea, but I think it's just endlessly complex. And I think...

It's like all the simplest... it's unbelievably complex.

Right? You could just meditate on it for years, I mean, for your life, right. And I think, you know, you talked about it as a sort of sweet spot, actually, you know, Otto Schwarber, talks about it as a blind spot. And actually that's true because so many of us are just active. We want to make things happen, we, you know, have ideas, we have goals, we're trying to move things. And then accidentally it can become about you, you know, accidentally it can become about you. And, actually, that's the blind spot, when you don't realise how you're acting on a system, how you're acting in the system. And in a sense, you stopped hearing the multiplicity of voices that are out there in the system, because there are so many, and they're so diverse, and with all the echo chambers, that we sort of do exis in, it's so hard to hear all the different voices out there, but with all the different voices out there, then and if we're only hearing our own voice, right? That's where that that blind spot exists.

How do you make that sort of, I'm gonna carry on talking about it as a sweet spot, because we're determined to get to it. How do you get that sort of yin yang? How do you get that systems thinking, and the human, let's say, thinking to sort of combine in a way so that you do get a sweet spot?

As we take action, having a sort of an inner stillness or an inner constancy, about who we are, about why we do what we do, about how we define our tribe, perhaps, even too, and I think that, I mean, if you asked me, what is it that I think we need to be effective in those interventions, I think we need a clear sense of our own identity and a very grounded sense of our own identity. I think there's a sense of belonging, like this sense of why are you here. Because you're acting in a system, but you're also part of the system. But I think there's identity, I think there's belonging, and I think there's purpose. I think as a leader in and of the system, it's really just having a purpose that is a grounding, mobilising purpose that is about something bigger than then ourselves, right, and being able to express I think, the link between why this matters to me, and then why this matters to us. And then having it be about us. The why it matters to me part is sharing with people what's at stake for you, you know, that this isn't just like a little hobby horse or soapbox, you know, that you happen to be on, but there's something that's meaningful for you. And, and I think if you think about a lot of women, women leaders and a lot of ways, they they come to a public issue, because of a private challenge, you know, whether it's the Mothers Against Drunk Driving or, or whether it's, you know, even issues around harassment and so forth. I mean, those those are because we have personal experiences that says I cannot let my private pain just end there, I need to make it a collective dream at stopping it, ending it, creating a different future for it, actually is the point. Right? So it's, it's connecting that personal to the broader public and political, I suppose on some level, too that's, that is that is so key.

So it's, that's really interesting. So it's got to have me, but it's got to have us, and then it has to be about us. Not me.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. The me shows what your stake is in this and, and, you know, and I think that's the important part here, too, I think is being able to tell our stories and you know, without shame or fear, even if they do sound a bit strange and weird, because actually, that's what humanises us, you know. It's what humanises the issues. And it invites people to come with us, you know, rather than rely on the superhero or the super human being or whatever it is, that's going to save us all, which I think is not the way that systems get better. And I feel like that more typically, I mean, of course it's not exclusive, but typically, you know, I mean women feel better doing it together too.

If you had a pinboard on your wall or on your screen, would it be a pinboard with people or would it be a pinboard of systems?

You know, people make up the system, right? So it's both, and I guess in that sense, it would be a pinboard of dots and lines connecting dots. It's networks, it's webs, it's flows. So it's not static. It's definitely dynamic.

And how do you spot the bits that don't work?

I guess they're very disconnected from everything else.

I'm thinking, you know, I developed a bit of a system, which is that my pinboard, it looks like a galaxy. Live with me. This sounds crazy. But it has the suns, the moons, the stars, the Milky Ways, the black holes — a lot. You know, the suns, the sources of power that light and guide and give energy and warmth to people. The moons — the sources of power that appear to be great, but actually, the truth is they're waning. The shooting stars — the people who are, they appear to be on their way somewhere, but actually, they will burn out quite soon. The Milky Ways — the ones where everybody is spending hours, you know, connecting each other. And actually, it's all about building networks, but nothing actually ever happens. And then, and then the black holes, the sources of power, that when you go into them, you sort of disappear, you know, you disappear into a puff of smoke, and you can't get back out of them. And it's, it's interesting, because it's both systems thinking, I suspectm and human thinking because, you know, there have been moments when I've thought of myself, and hope that I was being the sun and realised that I wasn't. I was perhaps even being a black hole. And then moments when I have charged behind and supported a shooting star, and then being left standing thinking what happened here. But it's also the ability to judge a system and to judge where to intervene. You must have learned that in Singapore.

You know, I love your Galaxy idea. The analogies to tell the team too, is you know, just don't push a rock up a hill, you know, you wait for the conditions, you know, such that there was a rock that is on top of the hill, you know, and you apply a little bit of pressure, you know, but there's largely just gravity that's gonna roll that rock down the hill. And, and you want to look at intervening in a system in a way that seeks to acknowledge the reality, their reality, the reality of the other players in the system, you know, actually too, and not force it so much as invite it, as create conditions for it. And I think that's what enables sort of sustainable change in a system.

Thank you, Sarah, Alia and, Melissa. This has been an incredibly useful podcast for me to make, at the very least. I've learned a lot. As we leave, I think I want to come back to my galaxy. You know, there was one I missed out. The suns, the moons, the shooting stars, the black holes, the Milky Ways, then there's just simply the star. And in any system, I always try to find the stars. They're not at the top, they're not at the bottom, they're somewhere in the middle. And they are quietly people who simply make things happen. And if you really want to have an impact on a system, or an issue, you need to find the stars. They are people who are deeply connected within the system, and they're deeply trusted because I think Melissa is right, but I think they're trusted because they belong to the system. They have purpose within the system, they've established legitimacy within the system, and they are connected to other people because other people on the whole want to help them to achieve the things that they achieve. For me, the really important thing of course, is to find the suns, but to find the stars too. They make things happen.

In two weeks' time, my second grandson is due. I'm thinking a lot about how we bring up our sons and our grandsons in this new world. And I'm hoping that one day they'll say too, 'if that's leadership, I'm in'.

Thank you for listening to the podcast. Your voice and perspectives are crucial to the success of the expedition. And we would love you to become a partner to Women Emerging. You can do this by subscribing to this podcast and joining the Women Emerging group on LinkedIn.