In this episode, Trisha interviews Mikkel Olovsky, a diversity and inclusion professional, with extensive experience as an HR consultant working within organisational cultures. They discuss the significance of metacognitive aspects of Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and explore how Mikkel uses games and engaging activities to help organisations understand and apply CQ strategies. Mikkel shares personal experiences and methods that highlight the emotional and cognitive shifts required for cultural adaptability. He also talks about his innovative approaches to training and his plans to make his games and training methods widely available.

You can connect with Mikkel via Linked in

[00:00:14] Trisha: Hi there everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness.

[00:01:23] Trisha: And all four of these capabilities can help us to be effective in situations of diversity. And in this podcast, we're focusing more on the metacognitive aspect. So we're thinking about our thinking and it's called CQ strategy. Today's guest is another CQ fellow, this time from the 2024 cohort. Mikkel Olovsky is a diversity and inclusion professional with a specific focus on integrating D& I into HR processes in global organizations.

[00:02:21] Trisha: And I have it on good authority that he is keen on football as It's great to have this time to talk in depth about CQ training and helping others to build their cultural intelligence. Welcome to Mikkel Orlovski

[00:02:36] Trisha: It's wonderful to have you here. I should probably add that Mikkel is originally from Denmark. He has family from the Balkans and he's lived and worked in France. So, uh, bringing a lot of cultures here to the picture. Um, I'm really curious today to unpack the CQ training that Mikkel delivers, what makes it powerful and how he helps people shift in their thinking.

[00:03:08] Mikkel: Well, it's, well, basically, I think we can start with the surname, because, you know, you, you, you aced them both, both the first name and the surname. Very nicely done. They're from two very, very different cultures. So the first name is Mikkel. It's, it's very Danish. The surname is, is Orlovski, which is very, Macedonian.

[00:03:47] Mikkel: in where I want to work in my consultancy because being an Orlovski is so much more exotic and interesting in Denmark than being a Kristensen. So, you know, that was my first culturally intelligent move. I think strategically there. But I think that that, That's actually not even the first place. I think that there's a couple of situations, I think, in terms of really embracing a new culture, that, that is obviously it.

[00:04:31] Mikkel: So, and I think one of the places or one of the feelings that I started having with this North Macedonian family and what it kind of means to be a part of a much more, uh, collectivist type of family than the individual types that we have up here in the, in the cold north that I've really brought in, even to my consultancy is the way that they embrace family members, you know, the way that they just immediately say you're part of the family because you now not only are you married, but you also, you know, you've taken the name even.

[00:05:18] Mikkel: All of these things where you kind of feel that you're not just being taken care of, but you feel as if they, you know, they, they think that you're the most interesting person that's ever been born. And, um, up here in the North, we are very much the opposite. We feel that any type of formality or any type of, you know, putting people up on a pedestal, Is awkward and uncomfortable and weird and strange.

[00:06:01] Mikkel: because I want to take away all formality.

[00:06:23] Mikkel: When you meet somebody new, do something that makes them feel welcome and interesting because we don't do that instinctively.

[00:06:29] Mikkel: think that's probably the biggest one, but I think that when I was a kid, I grew up in this city that for, um, that is, that is, you know, it's in Denmark, it's, it's the city with the highest level of, uh, of, of people coming with other cultural backgrounds than Danish.

[00:06:56] Mikkel: So I just remember this. For me, it was fantastic seeing all these different names and skin colors and languages and foods and and um, yeah.

[00:07:22] Mikkel: in a different way than, you know, than my family would, would, would do with my friends.

[00:07:36] Trisha: I love that. And how lovely to marry into a culture that you learn to love. I think, yeah, that's Really special. So can you tell me about a time when you experienced a shift, you know, when you suddenly became aware of a new perspective?

[00:08:14] Mikkel: So a story that I sometimes tell in terms of a cultural shift, the first time I met it. It was when I was eight years old and I went to a birthday party with one of my friends. His parents were originally Pakistani and had moved, of course, to Denmark, you know, maybe some years after he was born or, I don't know, you know, when he was young at least.

[00:08:50] Mikkel: So they had heard these things, but they hadn't quite, um, been told what the structure was. So they had taken this birthday cake, this layer cake, and then chopped up French fries and sausages and put on top of the layer cake, which looked strange. But I just remember the feeling of thinking, this is.

[00:09:43] Mikkel: If they hadn't kind of mixed these cultures up, these, these things. So that was probably the first time that I remember it just clicked in my brain that other people do stuff differently, and that can be interesting. And then I started really looking for it, you know, and it's the same when I look at, you know, for instance, my surname.

[00:10:26] Mikkel: And I just remember that as a kid, I would walk around and try to guess where people were from. And if I could guess where people were from, I would know a little bit more about what type of behavior might they have. What would they probably prefer in ways of talking and discussing and kind of, yeah. So that was my first, I think, shift.

[00:11:09] Mikkel: But about 200 people. But not everybody was able to join us up here. There's a Macedonian church in Malmo in Sweden, just across. the, the bridge there. So, so we went to Macedonia also to have a little celebration and we had invited everybody to meet us in the restaurant at seven o'clock. And at seven o'clock, my, I was there, my wife, father in law, mother in law, sister in law.

[00:11:39] Mikkel: with absolutely no guests and I, that photo is taken at 8 45, so almost two hours after we had invited the guests. Now, as a Danish person, I just remember this idea, a complete panic, you know, after, after five minutes, I'm thinking, you know, Oh no, the food is going to get cold after 10 minutes.

[00:12:19] Mikkel: So I'm starting to think it must be because they're protesting this wedding, you know, they're demonstrating their, you know, they don't want this weird Danish guy in their family. They're all of these things coming. Yeah, absolutely. And then a few minutes after I take that photo, I, I, and I take the photo because I'm panicking.

[00:12:49] Mikkel: And then I go into the kitchen again, just to pretend to do something, walking around a little bit. And I noticed that there's nobody in the kitchen either. And the staff, obviously they don't know who I am. So why shouldn't they be there? So go out and, you know, as you mentioned in the intro, I've studied intercultural psychology.

[00:13:27] Mikkel: There's nobody's going to be here for at least another half hour. And then, you know, nine 30, two and a half hours after that, I thought we would have been sitting down eating. The kitchen staff shows up, starts cooking at about 10, 10, 15 family starts dropping by coming in, sitting down, giving me a huge hug and, you know, asking me all of these questions and just making me feel really, really, you know.

[00:14:08] Mikkel: It was a beautiful evening, but I just remember that panic

[00:14:27] Mikkel: So, you know, all those feelings just completely over, is it overrode? They, there was a, they didn't matter.

[00:14:53] Mikkel: So you have to kind of figure out a way of getting those two. So that was probably this, the biggest shift for me was the, the idea that, okay, people are very different. And the most important thing for me is not learning about other cultures, it's learning to figure out myself first. And then how will I react when I'm in that

[00:15:13] Trisha: and taking notice of that. And also when we often talk about, you know, that strategy component and metacognition, we talk about it as I defined it, which is thinking about your thinking, but in reality it often shows up as feelings like you said. And so it is also taking notice of your feelings and unpacking those feelings and recognizing what's going on from both an emotional as well as a cognitive perspective.

[00:15:40] Mikkel: Yeah,

[00:15:43] Mikkel: it is. It's not, but it's fun.

[00:15:45] Mikkel: best part.

[00:16:00] Mikkel: I think, um, so I've been. I've had a different focus. So as you mentioned, I've been studying intercultural psychology, and I think that first and foremost, that put me on a path of trying to understand what is the differences between the feelings that we have around having a personality. Most of us have a personality somehow, and we, we feel that that personality is basically what dictates our behavior.

[00:16:39] Mikkel: So that's always been my interest. So I started out relatively early doing, um, cultural analysis for organizations to trying to figure out, do the things that we say we do, do they match up? With the things that we actually do and even more importantly, how do they then match up with the strategies and the goals that we have and, you know, and, and, and discussions about employee wellbeing and so forth.

[00:17:25] Mikkel: And in that process, I interviewed everybody in the organization and we tried to figure out what's going on. And I actually use, so the CQ model, the four different components, they use those to both analyze the individuals, but even more importantly, try to figure out what goes on with the organization.

[00:18:12] Mikkel: So they had a huge. desire to hire people that were different. So out of, I think there were 50 people there, probably 35 different nationalities. No one really had any majority, even not, not even the Danes. I actually think that there were more probably Italians or Iranians at some point than there were Danes.

[00:18:42] Mikkel: get.

[00:18:43] Mikkel: So I wanted to track that and figure out what was going on and what I found out drive was extremely high.

[00:19:06] Mikkel: Helping people out, you know, getting, getting to their offices and finding a place to stay and making friends, all these things, there had so many things also just day to day, they had, figured out a way of making everybody feel, included and, you know, the, on the first day you were in a meeting, the top person in the hierarchy, even though we don't talk a lot about hierarchies here, but they had understood that many people from the outside.

[00:19:46] Mikkel: It doesn't matter how old you are, if you're a first year PhD, or if you're a, whatever it is, it's about feeling that you're recognized and valued. So all of these things that we're doing great. However, it also turned out through the analysis that the knowledge and the strategy was basically, it wasn't really that developed.

[00:20:23] Mikkel: And they very specifically didn't want to use knowledge to plan for how to do things because they were afraid that they would be stereotyping people. If they said, well, you're from South Africa, that means that you probably have these preferences. They were so keen. On making sure that people didn't feel as if that they were being stereotyped that they kind of scrapped everything that had to do with knowledge and strategy.

[00:21:03] Mikkel: It's actually quite a difficult process.

[00:21:30] Mikkel: So that's one thing you need to have at this open forum where everybody can say exactly what they're thinking. But on the other hand, you have so many different ways of handling conflict because there's so many cultures. That people actually felt a little bit, they didn't know what to do with this.

[00:22:03] Mikkel: They were, uh, for Christmas lunch, which is a big thing up here. They would invite a dance teacher to teach everybody how to

[00:22:12] Mikkel: dance, and you would have the professors dancing with the PhDs and all of those things. So it was very important for them that they mixed up all of these things, which to a great extent had, you know, fantastic results and is something that I'm kind of pushing into other organizations now as well.

[00:22:35] Mikkel: that they didn't want to have. They didn't, they didn't dare start up any conflict. So they would rather either keep it, keep it to themselves. Were kind of gossip in the corners. And, um, so we decided that we wouldn't, we wanted to, you know, basically tackle these issues to make sure that the culture that they had included all of the things that they've, that we've, and they felt was necessary.

[00:23:15] Mikkel: How does communication styles, trust building styles, power distance, how do all of these things factor into the ways that we handle conflict? And when we had a set of insights into what are the different styles that are represented in in the group, we could then say, okay, what we need to do is to get somebody in who is a conflict management professional and then teaches What are the steps for a productive, constructive way of handling conflicts, you know, though understanding that that would be kind of a westernized idea, but still people would then just need different learnings to get to the same point and everybody felt more comfortable when they had a specific style.

[00:24:18] Mikkel: With science and research, they are so used to working with their brains

[00:24:42] Mikkel: And, um, but I also knew that, especially when it's a field, such as, you know, within culture, had it been psychology as well, it's, it doesn't really have any impact if they don't feel

[00:25:03] Mikkel: Science as well that says that, you know, within the first hour already within the first hour, you forget about, you know, at least 20 percent of what you've just heard the next day, it's up to maybe 75 percent and then if you ask again after a month, it's maybe there's maybe 10 percent that they still have.

[00:25:24] Mikkel: not just to be in kind of short term memory space, but actually getting into the more of, you know, the more, the bigger areas in the brain. So where it actually would stick. So I devised, some different games where I put them into a position where they would actually feel how it feels.

[00:25:58] Mikkel: and it's a very short one. So it's not even, it's not because it's, it's not like I bring out this big board game and say, okay, so, you know, like Monopoly style, it's like, individual little games that last somewhere between five, 10 minutes maximum.

[00:26:34] Mikkel: So the culture that you want to create. Together, you're not, you're not, you know, you're not just the sum of the different cultures that you represent. You have the opportunity to build your own culture. So how do you want to do this next

[00:26:47] Mikkel: And that had, that turned out to be, uh, an approach where They would remember much better what we was, what it was we've been through, and they would much more openly share what went on with them when they were in that situation.

[00:27:04] Mikkel: that I'm doing.

[00:27:28] Mikkel: Right? Yeah, I am. And I think, so I'm glad you said roleplay because that's probably the scariest thing for many people. To be, you know, to be seen. And I, and I think, you know, I, I'm, I'm quite introverted as a person. I'm, I'm actually a little bit bland. So, you know, also the reason why I usually wear, you know, I'm sure this is a podcast, so they can't

[00:27:49] Mikkel: but this I'm wearing a very

[00:27:58] Mikkel: right. And I do that to basically, it's like a peacock, right? I need to do something because my personality is so bland that I need something else now. But anyway, it's, um. What I try to do is I try to tell them that even though now I'm a consultant and I come in from the outside and I know that they think that all I'm about is like role play and just, you know, throw you out of an airplane without a parachute and see where it lands.

[00:28:24] Mikkel: So as a participant, I would dread having somebody coming in with flowery shirts and just pulling out one role play after the other. So I give it a lot of thought, how do I make this as comfortable for them as possible? As, as, As fun. And also learning so that it actually provokes that shift, as you say, but, but not in a way where they kind of said, I don't want to be a part of this is too scary.

[00:29:01] Mikkel: to everyone in the house, anyone in the room, and then we get some evaluations and feedback.

[00:29:29] Mikkel: And then I did my pitch with the spinach between my teeth and I made sure to smile very much and very broadly to everyone. And the funny thing was that, as you know, this room is made up by people from all over the world and they had very different reactions to my spinach in the teeth. The Americans would be sitting there trying to get eye contact with me and kind of, you know, tell me that I had spinach in my teeth.

[00:30:06] Mikkel: And the Scandinavian, there wasn't any other Scandinavians, but we had a Dutch person. She actually told me after a few seconds, you have spinach between your teeth.

[00:30:20] Mikkel: You'll remember the spinach for the rest of your life. And I associated that with the differences that I then had of reactions in the room. And I said, the reasons why we have this reaction over here is because in indirect cultures, They want to not embarrass you by no, but by you knowing that they know that you have spinach in your teeth.

[00:30:48] Mikkel: the

[00:30:50] Trisha: Mm.

[00:31:05] Mikkel: My time in the, in the spotlight

[00:31:07] Mikkel: you know, a Dutch person doesn't care about the context at all. They just said, you have spinach in your teeth. And for me, that was exactly what I need people to feel. I need to get them in touch with how does it make me feel that this person has spinach in their teeth and how do I then react to it?

[00:31:43] Mikkel: so so yeah, so that's, that's how I do it. And then, I then ask people afterwards. So, for instance, if they have, and this is actually one of the games that I do, I, I tell them half of them. And that's the only role play I have is that I tell them half of them. You have, you notice that your colleague has a piece of spinach between their teeth, um, and you want to help them out, but you can't say spinach.

[00:32:08] Mikkel: So how will you do it?

[00:32:41] Mikkel: They just want to kind of, they only trust a person if the words coming out of their mouth represents what's going on in their brain. Um, whereas from, from the indirect and especially from the very hierarchical places around the world, you see just this fantastic repertoire. Of ways to explain that something's going on that you need to take notice of.

[00:33:27] Mikkel: Because that is such a strange request. That just, the strangeness of it should get the other person to think maybe something is wrong, maybe something I should just go check, maybe I should do something. Um, so there's all these different mechanisms. So, the way that we then debrief is to say, okay, how do you want this person to tell you next time?

[00:33:53] Mikkel: That they can then attach not only to the spinach, which they will always remember, and everybody in the room, after I've done this exercise, we'll spend the rest of the day trying to get spinach out between their teeth, even though it's not there,

[00:34:12] Mikkel: Okay. This strategy will belong to people from this part of the world. This strategy is really good for people in this part of the world. And then the, they understand intentions better. so

[00:34:34] Mikkel: Yeah.

[00:34:38] Trisha: Yeah.

[00:35:02] Mikkel: If you're not saying what you're thinking, then we have absolutely no methods. To figure out what it is that you're trying to do. So if you're talking Not nonsense, but if you're like small talking at a, at a, you know, at a time where we're in a rush, then we don't, we don't start, you know, analyzing that, you know, maybe, maybe something's going on.

[00:35:30] Mikkel: Yeah.

[00:35:31] Mikkel: And we want to just give ourselves the time to just count to three and then ask that very good question. Is this cultural and then make some analysis. Um, but it's, but we need to get across the kind of the initial emotions that, that we're left with in that situation.

[00:36:00] Mikkel: yeah,

[00:36:09] Mikkel: and that they didn't necessarily know where we were going.

[00:36:21] Mikkel: But I don't explain. I don't explain it in so much detail that they start dreading what's going to happen.

[00:36:36] Mikkel: And I would say, especially with, uh, like most of the organizations that I work with are, you know, professional, big private companies with a lot of it's, you know, it's usually people that work with, you know, knowledge.

[00:37:02] Mikkel: um, on an intellectual level. And all of the games that I've devised are not necessarily, you, you don't, you can't, you can't see where the culture is.

[00:37:29] Trisha: okay. So it's not, um, a lot of the people listening, I think, Actually, I'm not too sure who listens, but you know, are uh, cultural intelligent people or, um, interculturalists. And so it's not like Barnga Barnga, which, you know, lots of people know about where there are rules established and you set up two different fake cultures.

[00:37:50] Mikkel: no, not at all. And I'm not asking him to play. And I, especially, I think also to your question about role playing, I very rarely, unless I know that it's a group that already worked with culture in some way, already find it super fascinating. Um, because many, I would say like 80, 90 percent of the groups that I meet, it is the manager or the company or HR that have, you know, asked me to come and do this workshop for this group.

[00:38:24] Mikkel: are

[00:38:26] Mikkel: yeah, what, what does this then I know, and they don't know what cultural intelligence is. It's it's, you know, somebody's either read a book or met me somewhere and then we've talked about it.

[00:38:58] Mikkel: uh, for at least for a little bit of time.

[00:39:27] Mikkel: In a room doesn't matter if you know, even if it's just you and me, there's still diversity because even though, you know, imagining that we came from the same country, then there's either the age difference or the personality differences or something that means that we're, we're different and you can use CQ for that and you can become even better.

[00:39:56] Mikkel: So I play a game, I debrief it using their words and asking them, how did that feel? I tell them that everything that they've just told me, I can predict using cultural values and cultural intelligence.

[00:40:20] Mikkel: you know, there are strategies that you can develop. That means that if you sit down, you predict, you plan, you are aware enough that a person also has a personality.

[00:40:39] Mikkel: I know it's it's a little bit I think almost there's a little bit of uh, illusionist mentalist like magician sometimes in this it's I think I provoke the same feeling sometimes I think I provoke this feeling of Why did this guy know exactly what was going to happen?

[00:41:15] Mikkel: You can predict what's going to happen in a meeting with people that are culturally different from yourself. So spend the time. And then I tell them, um, so on this. next 20 minutes. So that's the 20 minute block of learning, you know, feeling and learning. And then I give them maybe 15 minutes, either in pairs, depending on the exercise or in a bit bigger group to analyze what is it that we do together?

[00:42:02] Mikkel: It feels as if they're actually, they've done something. So the action becomes easier as well,

[00:42:07] Mikkel: you know, and I think that you and I could probably also go into a big discussion about the leap from the metacognition, you know, developing strategies into actually acting on them and adapting behavior.

[00:42:18] Mikkel: the next big shift.

[00:42:38] Trisha: So you got swung back to the drive and increasing their motivation to learn. And to be able to, and then that second process where you got them sitting, working through things would be building up the plan so that they can become actions. I'm, I'm wondering, do you know anything about what's happening in the brain as people do this?

[00:43:18] Mikkel: And that. For that, I've added a couple of educations or a couple of places where I've done, you know, behavioral economics and behavioral design. So actually, you know, nudging, figuring out how do people, how do I get people to do things without them knowing that they're doing it? That's, that's one place of inspiration.

[00:43:53] Mikkel: So I'm very much into that, you know, that process facilitative part of it as well, figuring out what actually needs to be done, but yeah, so I think that within, within that, I've figured out that we as biological beings. Have a brain that tells us do something that feels as natural and as easy as possible. And it has very much to do with the fact I have this, you know, if you and your listeners want to do a fun little exercise, you know, you can just write your name real quick, you know, to an autograph. And then look at it, you know, very beautiful. It looks perfect. And then you take the pen and you put it over in the other hand.

[00:44:32] Mikkel: And that's, that's the feeling that I've, it's one of the places that I start just to tell people, I say, okay, we've done this little exercise and say, that's one of the challenges that I'll give you today. Is that working in a very, in a more culturally intelligent way to become more efficient.

[00:45:06] Mikkel: You're slower. You don't feel that you're as productive and you can also look at the result and say, I don't think the performance was as good as it was before.

[00:45:26] Mikkel: And you, you know what I do? I, I give them, um, to be really just put everything on the spot there. I, I give them a name tag. And then the, the other hand. Autograph is their name tag for the rest of the day.

[00:45:42] Mikkel: It's just because I want to get, I want to get people to laugh and they, everybody can laugh at that.

[00:45:58] Trisha: I like that.

[00:46:13] Mikkel: And then short term memory basically also has a very big Influence on what is our, where's our attention focused? Where is it that, what are we looking at and how to react to it? And most of us actually on a day to day basis, we kind of enjoy being in that short term memory space where we can just basically react to things.

[00:46:54] Mikkel: And they would listen to what I was saying, but because it was all lodged in the short term memory,

[00:47:18] Mikkel: There's a lot of the stuff that we talk about that resonates with them. So they, you know, it helps them understand something. So that will stick. But for people that don't instinctively have an issue, it just kind of flies in one ear and out the other. Um, so

[00:47:34] Mikkel: yes.

[00:47:41] Mikkel: Exactly. So they, they very heavily rely on, you know, everything that has been kind of, uh, logged into the, the, the long term memory, that place where, you know, where your routines and your habits and everything is, is kind of stored. And then they use that, um, and it's very difficult to change those habits and those routines, unless you actually get people to change, you know, neurological pathways in their brain, do something different.

[00:48:30] Mikkel: And that really helped me understand that if I want people to actually adapt behavior, change the way that they think, change their, you know, the ways of doing things, I need to get them to a place where I start moving their focus and what they do when I train them from the short term place to the long term

[00:49:12] Mikkel: So I have a specific exercise, for instance, on, well, feedback is a big thing in many organizations, and especially, you know, You know, feedback is associated with cultural preferences in terms of, you know, the, uh, power distance, who can we give feedback to and context? How do I give feedback? And there's so many of these cultural values that has an effect on whether we give feedback and how we give feedback.

[00:49:36] Trisha: and it ties back into what you were saying before around the context communication. So the high context communication,

[00:49:43] Trisha: the Dutch person in the, in the spinach. So direct.

[00:49:47] Mikkel: yeah, but then again, only directs in a negative way, because there's also the idea that especially maybe not the Dutch as much the Dutch do like a

[00:49:57] Mikkel: of

[00:49:58] Trisha: They are comfortable

[00:50:10] Mikkel: And we're setting ourselves up on a pedestal and saying, I'm, I know something that you don't, and we don't like that. So we actually say instead that the lack of feedback is praise, because if I don't tell you that you should do things differently, then just go ahead and continue doing what you're doing.

[00:50:47] Mikkel: We only kind of correct miniature mini things. Um, where in other places you would give, you know, go to the U S and you would get constant praise and

[00:50:56] Mikkel: of this very positive feedback. And then that would hide little nuggets of negative feedback in there as well for you to find. Which a person like me would never hear. Now,

[00:51:20] Mikkel: So, I do a game with them, which is a very short game.

[00:51:42] Mikkel: And then I say, well, thank you so much for completing this task. And, you know, we have a winner and we all applaud and blah, blah, blah. And then I say, now, please sit down. And give each other feedback 1 at a time. So everybody can hear on how did they do in this specific challenge. And then they give everybody gives each other feedback.

[00:52:20] Mikkel: actually completes the task of giving individualized feedback. Almost everyone else, 80 percent of everybody else in the room, they start doing a bunch of other stuff. So you would have the anti authoritarian Scandinavians who would just start, you know, they thought the exercise was so fun, they want to try it again.

[00:52:52] Trisha: It's a bit uncomfortable

[00:52:57] Mikkel: We don't know how they will react if I tell them what I think. So instead we'll joke, Oh, this was so, what a fun game. Or, you know, I want to do this with my team. Or they start. Going for coffee, something completely different because they want to kind of either build some chemistry before they can actually give feedback or they just say, okay, five minutes and that is not enough for us.

[00:53:47] Mikkel: I have that on a slide and I show them this is exactly what will happen if you just give, ask people to give feedback because there are so many different ways of doing it and it requires something first. So now please sit back down, turn to the other person, to the person who just was supposed to give you feedback and tell them, what did you think of the feedback they gave you?

[00:54:27] Mikkel: quick reaction in your brain.

[00:54:44] Mikkel: So that also, you know, is stronger.

[00:55:07] Mikkel: And then I'll forget it next time I have a cup of coffee and move it from those two areas and then get it lodged in the, uh, in the big long term memory bank that we have.

[00:55:38] Trisha: I think that was part of what you were going to be proposing. so tell

[00:55:41] Trisha: us just a little bit about that and then how people can connect with you.

[00:55:49] Mikkel: Yeah. And then I think, uh, my. My, um, the games that I have, obviously I use them for myself, but I've now since started with the fellowship or the, uh, uh, you know, talking to peers and being really nerdy and always going over time as every time I have a meeting with somebody is that I hear that there is a great interest.

[00:56:10] Mikkel: these things. So I started to write them down. I've started to create instructions. And, uh, the next step is for me to, to basically create a product around training people, how to do. The trainings that I do. So getting the games out there, the next element after that will probably be some kind of, uh, you know, an actual virtual game where people can sign up either with their own teams or just because they think culture is fun, and then I'll guide them through.

[00:56:46] Mikkel: So that'll be the next element. But I think everybody can reach out. They can borrow and steal and listen into the stuff that I use now. I'm a very open source kind of person.

[00:57:00] Mikkel: LinkedIn and I'll answer some ideas.

[00:57:21] Trisha: So thank you so much.

[00:57:25] Trisha: Thank you. And so everyone, if you've been listening, please make sure that you have pushed follow on your podcast app so that you can get the next exciting episode that will be coming next week for The Shift.