This podcast episode elucidates the profound notion that chaos is not merely a disruptive force but rather a potential catalyst for enlightenment and transformation. In a compelling dialogue, I am joined by Chris Schubert of Human Sync, who shares insights on the importance of embracing authenticity, fostering human connection, and cultivating collaborative environments imbued with safety and kindness. We delve into the concept that chaos can unveil inefficiencies and hidden patterns within individuals and organizations, thereby facilitating growth and adaptation. Chris articulates the necessity of perceiving chaos as a teacher, one that illuminates pathways to understanding and improvement, rather than as a source of stress. Ultimately, we aspire to inspire listeners to recognize the value of navigating chaos with curiosity and compassion, urging them to dismantle their preconceived notions and engage with the complexities of their environments.

Takeaways:

1. Chaos is not merely a disruption but an opportunity for transformation and growth.
2. In chaotic environments, the initial step is to establish clarity and understanding among team members.
3. By utilizing tools like workflow mapping, one can illuminate hidden inefficiencies within existing processes.
4. Establishing safety and trust is imperative for fostering collaboration in chaotic situations.
5. Recognizing the human elements behind systems is essential for creating effective organizational change.
6. Approaching chaos with curiosity rather than fear allows for deeper learning and understanding of underlying issues.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. humansync.com
2. martinloveschaos.org

Audio used in this episode - License: Creative Commons 0 (unless otherwise noted):

1. square wave lfo controlled reality by gis_sweden
2. Shapes in the dark - background video music by gis_sweden License: Attribution 4.0
3. Sound for a poem 1 by gis_sweden
4. Sound for a poem 3 by gis_sweden
5. Electronic Minute No 348 - Almost a loop by gis_sweden

Foreign.

Welcome to Martin Loves Chaos, a podcast that explores chaos not as something to fix, but as something to befriend.

For this episode, I am joined by Chris Schubert of Human Sync, and they are unmasking authenticity, nurturing human connection, and collaboration infused with safety, safety, and kindness.

Thank you, Martin, and thank you for having me here today. I am a collective coach. I'm a trainer. I'm a facilitator.

I've spent over a decade working with teams, guiding leaders and teams towards greater impact.

And I do that through using tools like collective coaching, things like structural dynamics that help us identify communication patterns in teams and help teams to become collaboration, collaborative, and creating brave spaces where people and collaboration can flourish.

Before we dive in, I'd love to start with the heart of this episode in your life and work. What has chaos revealed to you?

In my life, when I think about chaos, what it's revealed to me is those inefficiencies, things that have broken down, that have been hidden. And chaos, when you pay attention to it, helps you to highlight those things and helps you to see what's not invisible to you.

I've heard you mention that chaos can be the doorway to flow. What does that mean to you?

To me, Martin, chaos is like this catalytic space where structures actually fall apart, and when those structures fall apart, that allows new alignments to become possible. Yes.

As I like to say, Cass is a bouncy thing that's happening.

Yeah.

And it's a lot of energy connected with it in many cases. So as you're working with that energy, it starts to drop into place if you just let it happen, is what I'm hearing that right?

Yeah. It falls apart first. It has to fall apart, and that's where people freak out. Right. But that's the necessary thing.

It has to fall apart before it can start falling back into place again.

One thing I'm doing in these podcasts is really important to me is the sort of background that people bring with them. This is your opportunity to share a little about who you are, what you bring with you, and helps you be where you are today.

And that I like to say is it's the ancestry, the lineage, it's everything that sort of happened to make it possible for us to be here. So to what extent do you want to share your story?

I'll leave up to you, but I'd love for you to introduce yourself to our audience and your background and your ancestry connected with that.

Okay. Thank you, Martin. So I have three siblings. I come from a large family, large in certain perspectives these days I have.

So I've got three other siblings. Our family of six was raised in a very small three bedroom, one bathroom house. When I was a child, my father was a police officer.

And I don't know if you've ever lived with a police officer. However, they bring an incredible amount of structure, boundaries, limitations. My father often had to work through the night.

He'd come home that morning and instantly go to bed. What do four children do when your father is sleeping? You be very quiet and you learn to be incredibly quiet.

My spouse defines me as being stealth because I can slip in and out of her room and she doesn't even notice it. Because I learned when I was a child to be so incredibly quiet. And I think that really has influenced the way that I see chaos.

Initially, when things would get chaotic, I mean, my heart just starts. Would start to pound because it was so unlike the environment that I grew up in. My environment was my mother.

She worked many jobs, but she also spent a lot of time at home with us and things were in their place. When you came home from school, you didn't leave your jacket, your book pack, anything lying on the floor. Just saying everything in its place.

That was my mom to a t. So I think growing up with parents like that really gave me a very uneasy feeling when I moved into these chaotic situations. I started my career with an associate's degree in transportation and logistics.

I did that because I was being discriminated against in the working environment. I was told I was still identifying as female and I was told I wasn't the right man for a job. Oh, you're not gonna tell me that again.

So I went to school and so I learned that when I would come up against limitations or just things, different types of boundaries, I learned to just take it on myself and figure it out myself. I'm an incredibly independent person. I think all of these things just really make me.

When I land in a chaotic situation, I immediately look for what's happening and how can I calm things down? How can I understand what's happening and bring things back into alignment?

Can I imagine police officer, father? I'm sure a lot of structure there and it makes sense. They need a lot of structure to be able to work in their world.

And then a mom also a lot of structure and expectation.

Do you have any stories related to your childhood or even going into your university years that when you saw chaos arise, I'm thinking when you're home and like things were not in their place, how. What was Your source for your first experiences with how to navigate those situations.

When I was a child, if things were chaotic, I think what my first reaction was just to try to understand what's happening and then try to very quickly resolve things.

If I knew that, oh my gosh, my father's expected home the next hour or so, I tried to quickly resolve it so that it wasn't any longer going into these environments that were new to me.

I'm sure you probably had the same experience where it's not just you doing the work or the assignment, but guess what, you've got to work with this group of people and you don't know this group of people and you don't know where they're from or their backgrounds. And so in those situations, when I would get into those situations, I very quickly want to establish, okay, so what are we doing here?

What's the goal and who's going to do what and how are we going to accomplish that? But immediately I would set some sort of a, like a format to figure out how are we going to make sense of this? That helped me feel more.

More comfortable and confident.

It sounds like you're making a little structure there in the chaotic situation to have things fall into their place in a way that works well. This makes sense. And we all have our ways that we engage in working with that.

And I do think a lot of things we learn through our family, through our community starts to build that. So I'm hearing this thread here, Chris.

And another thing we chatted earlier is a sort of your work at Honeywell and you have a story of where in your professional life where you had a situation that was very chaotic. Can you walk us through that moment and what did that chaos feel like when you first stepped into that situation?

Yeah, it was really fun preparing for this podcast because it really gave me the opportunity to reach way back into my career at Honeywell. I was managing a large logistics team and I mean, 60 hourly people, and Honeywell was a situation.

I don't know if people are familiar with Honeywell, but we made like parts for airplanes and stuff like that. A lot of military type stuff and a lot of it was urgent. There may have been an aircraft down at some airport or someplace.

And so the logistics department was critical in supplying parts and inventory in a timely basis. And when I stepped into this department, they were probably three and a half weeks behind. And talk about chaos. It felt hectic, it felt anxious.

Honeywell is an incredibly big organization and many powerful people. And if you look at that Ladder, you're at the bottom. So it felt anxious and it also felt fearful because there was just so much pressure.

What were the signals or early indicators that old processes weren't supporting the reality anymore?

As I started to get to know the people, really good hearted people, there were some career people who had been with Honeywell for 20, 25 years. And what I discovered was, boy, they had settled into some very old patterns and old behaviors that weren't helping the situation.

So Honeywell over time had evolved, become bigger, more customers, and the department itself hadn't actually grow to meet those needs. And they were doing things like, and this is still just surprising to me to think about it.

So I'm sitting here on a chair at a desk talking to you, which works right now.

If I was in a shipping department and I was tasked with packing orders and getting them ready to go, and I was sitting in a chair quite comfortably like this, how effective do you think I would be at getting what I need, managing inventory and trying packing things up? I simply asked the question one day, gosh, does everyone like sit all the time and do this work? How does that work?

People actually got angry when I suggested, gosh, why don't we replace the chairs with a small stool or something like that. So it was just, it was old, such old behaviors that, that people had just not even thought about.

And once I started talking with people and asking some questions, the pushback was defense because they saw me as, oh my gosh, here's this younger person gonna completely disrupt the way that we do things. And for all intents purposes, they thought the systems were working fine. And when I started asking questions about how are we shipping on time?

We're not shipping on time. I don't think they had the understanding or the realization of how far behind that department was.

So we just started with some very simple focus groups trying to understand where people were in their thought process of how do you really see what's easy to do, what's not easy to do, what bottlenecks do you see? And we actually started using value stream mapping and workflow mapping to try to identify where things got hung up and how long things got hung up.

What resistance did you encounter when you started suggesting changes, even small ones?

I think one thing that was really important for me was to build trust with them.

They were many people, like I said, they had been there for many years and I was this young kid coming in and wanting to disrupt what they were doing and many people weren't having it. So it was really A good exercise in trust building to be able to get to people, to even talk to.

Me in navigating that you're the new kid on the block, working with people that have sort of their comfort level, their habitual patterns, the things they're working through, and just doing it. Whether or not it worked for them, it clearly was not working for the system, for what was needed. How do you hold steady in that situation?

I did a lot of listening, acknowledging and really trying to create safety, trust, clarity, just really asking a lot of questions, staying curious and make sure that people knew I was listening.

Not just asking questions to be nosy, but to really understand where these things were coming from and to allow people to lower their walls and everything that was preventing them from being able to see something through.

Different perspective, to keep myself steady, but ground myself in the morning and just really make sure that I was asking questions and listening, acknowledging what I heard, recognizing that this is an incredibly difficult thing for this team to do, and just really making sure that I was trying to be clear with what I was asking, what I was trying to accomplish, what I wanted to understand.

It's also trust happens with you trusting them. They've been doing this for a while. You're new and how are you to tell me that sitting down is a bad idea?

And since then, I'm sure you've stepped into more and more chaotic environments. What is the first thing you look for?

What is the first thing that when you notice, okay, ah, a new situation, new chaos, or even it could be things going all smooth. What is it that you first do in your first way of engaging in this new environment?

Martin? I like to look for patterns, and I can often see them easily, so I look for patterns.

I try to feel where those tensions are, good tensions and not so good tensions. And I try to understand what type of chaos is happening. Is it a natural chaos, is it a human chaos, or is it social chaos?

You know, so really trying to understand what is it that's happening and from there we can figure out how to navigate it.

So natural, human and social. Can you give a little bit more description of what those are to you?

Absolutely, yeah. So natural chaos is something that emerges from like complex physical systems.

As an example, we all know there's this thing called global warming, right? So when a minor change like an ocean temperature can lead to a hurricane.

So it's something that, it's something that emerges from some sort of a complex or interdependent physical systems that would be natural chaos, weather patterns, ecosystems, those Types of things. Human chaos is something. It stems from individual cognition, emotion, or behavior.

So an example here would be something like a leader overwhelmed by competing priorities, or maybe a person who's spiraling between overthinking and impulsive choices. And the final one, social chaos, this is more of a collective disorder that emerges from interactions among people.

So it's not individual behavior, it's the interactions among people. And so an example would be something like social unrest, market crashes, a collapse of a public consensus.

It's an interaction among people that's causing the chaos. Yeah.

I could even think of the local. The work situation could be the environmental. It could be something that is changing your business plan because of the environment.

If you're thinking personal, what I'm hearing in that is it is an individual making a lot of decisions that require a lot of things to change. Whether it's good or bad, it's still a lot of change.

Yes.

The social is the chaos that exists between people because you have emotions, you have needs, you have situations that arise. And all of these things generate the sort of energy.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Energy is a good way to put it. Yeah, the vibe, whatever you want to call it.

You mentioned a little bit about workflow mapping and value stream mapping to understand what's really happening. So how do you use some of these tools?

Yeah, so margin. When a system like falls apart, people are often relying on assumptions, opinions, or fragments of truth.

And when we use tools like value stream mapping and workflow mapping, those things can actually help us cut through all that noise by making those things that are invisible become visible to us. In this situation where I was going to apply workflow mapping, it's actually sitting a group of people down into a room.

We've got a piece of paper, whiteboard, lots of sticky notes to teach this to people. We often do real simple things like think about getting yourself for ready for work in the morning. So what do you do first? Get up out of bed.

Well, does something happen before you get out of bed? Oh, yeah, you're right. Probably turn off my alarm. Great. I get up out of bed. What do you do next? I have breakfast.

Does something happen before breakfast? Oh, something does happen. I may use the restroom. I may get the coffee ready.

You're having a conversation with a group of people and you're walking them through a process step by step, and you're questioning each step of the way to say, wait a minute, how did you get that coffee cup in your hand? But it helps them unpack the entire process and really Understand? Oh, wait a minute, you mean there's a process for that?

I just thought I was doing it off of assumption or something that was ingrained. Then we can actually look at. Okay, so you're saying you gotta brush your teeth. How much time do you think you're hanging out there?

About five, ten minutes. So what's happening during that time? Are there some delays there? Are there bottlenecks there? It helps people understand.

Oh, gosh, every time I try to leave the house, I don't have my keys yet. Why not? Because I didn't put them where they're supposed to be.

So it just helps people understand all the different steps and where some of those hang ups or bottlenecks might be.

Probably doing it as a group of people. Correct. So some people might be doing the same thing.

Right.

But have different responses in their flow. And someone might go, hey, wait, why do you do that part? Or why, why does it take you 20 minutes to brush your teeth?

As opposed to this person over here is taking only two minutes. What's going on here?

Right. I use a electric toothbrush. Oh, I don't. I use a manual toothbrush. Just all different types of things like that.

So how do you navigate that situation knowing that people engage in systems differently and still get the good results in the end without it being like, oh, wait, why are you focusing on me? That takes 20 minutes to do this. How do you navigate that sort of social chaos?

Yeah, what's important for me in those situations of social chaos is making sure that people know that I'm not attacking, I'm not making assumptions. I'm simply trying to understand. Help me understand how you got there. Help me understand where that comes from.

And I think that sort of disarms people and it helps them to know that, oh my gosh, this person is interested in me, is interested in what I'm doing, what my thought process is.

And we're not saying that 20 minutes is wrong. It's not wrong, but what is happening so we can better understand how to help each other.

Yeah, yeah, we're providing that clarity. We're creating the clarity that really helps everyone get a better understanding of what's happening, what might be missing.

Another thing you mentioned that you enjoy engaging in, which I'm very familiar with this and I love doing it. When you're trying to get people to rethink things are the five whys. And you mentioned fishbone diagrams too.

So I don't know if you want to do them together or separate. But what are the five Whys?

Yeah, five whys. I really. That's one of my favorite tools. And it's so simple. You don't really need anything.

You need is people and maybe some paper or markers or something. But five whys is something where you're starting with a very high level question in my situation, why are the orders late?

And then you get responses from people and packing takes so long. Why does packing take long? Because the supplies aren't nearby. Why aren't the supplies nearby?

And so you keep breaking these things down level by level. And it really gets down to understanding. Gosh, it's they're over on the other side of the room because they've always been there.

And then we remodeled the room and we didn't move everything over to the other side. It really helps people break things down and understand at a different level.

A fishbone diagram works the same way so that you've got different branches. You're bringing up specific topics or issues and then trying to dissect them. So really helping, helping people understand.

Well, it's not just this, but there's something below here that happens. And not sure why this is happening, but if this would happen, then this would happen.

So it's really helping people to understand how we can break these things down and ask ourselves, not in a sort of accusatory way, but just trying to better or to further our understanding, why are we doing this? And sometimes it's just the answer is because we've always done it that way. Okay, why can't we do it another way?

I would love to not have to walk across the room to go get that tape that I need to get every 10 minutes and put it back every 10 minutes. I'd love not to do that.

But instead of breaking up the system or changing something or moving the tape into a better position, it's always been there. It's where it goes. It's everything in its place and keeping within that system because it's what we're familiar with.

Not saying that tape shouldn't be there. It might be in the right place, might have been at the right place at one point and now it's not.

Well trained people go over there to get your supplies, never questioning, wait a minute, do you know how long it's going to take me to walk all the way over there and back? It's just really interesting to think that, gosh, we train people this way.

We never ever stop, pause and say, wait a minute, is that really the best way to do that?

I so I worked in Fast food restaurants a little bit when I was younger and I loved finding efficiencies in an industry that is all about efficiencies. Has things done so well, everything all planned. And I would sit there and go, how can I make this better?

And I used to do things like move things around, put things in better places. Okay, this doesn't. This gets used a lot more. So I want that closer. The things that don't get used as more much, you put that up further away.

And sometimes it was laid out that way because that's how the previous person did it.

Hearing you tell some of this story reminds me a lot of my own background and had that little bit of questioning and trying to find a better way, a more streamlined. And yes, it is ultimately about me in those situations because it's like what makes it fast and easier for me. Right.

But it's about getting the things through and out as quickly as possible, breaking things down and getting visible. The habits that happen naturally is what I'm. Is what I'm hearing in there.

What's peeking in my head right now is this idea that, okay, this system becomes very efficient for me.

How do you navigate when you have a systems that is like many people engaging in that system, each person is going to ultimately have a system that works better. It might work better for everybody to do these things similarly.

But how do you, through these processes you shared, help create the space for individuality and working with the personal chaos and then the social chaos and then the sort of systems that you're trying to design?

You know, what comes to mind is making sure that everyone understands the why behind what we're doing and making sure that we're all working towards the same goal. We may outline a new process. It's going to be comfortable for some, it's going to be not so comfortable for others.

And along the way there, we're going to make sure that we're continuing to remain curious. We're providing clarity, we're asking questions. If that doesn't feel comfortable, why doesn't it feel comfortable?

And sometimes that uncomfortableness is a sign of, oh, gosh, it's because it's so different. It's something I've never tried before. I've never even thought about it that way.

So it's really helping us to refresh our perspective the way we look at things. And it's really a lot about naming what's going on.

Like, Martin, I know you've been doing this job for 22 years and I understand that this is really going to be difficult. This probably feels so uncomfortable for you. Tell me how it's feeling. Help me understand. Using that phrase once again, help me understand.

Like, what is it that's really difficult about it for you and really letting you vocalize. Gosh, this is just. I don't think that way. I think this way. From there we can have more of a conversation about. So what does that mean for you then?

Is there a better way, a different way that we can explain it or outline it for you that's going to make it feel a little bit more efficient or useful for you? We all are working towards the same goal. We will have different ways of getting there.

Overall, we're going to follow the same process with a little bit of personalization along the way for each person.

We're working with humans, the processes can be adjusted and changed. As long as we're holding the humans and understanding where they're at, connecting what the ultimate goals are.

And that's goals of individual goals of the social system and then the goals of the organization that you're ultimately trying to meet those expectations.

Right. Everyone needs to know that they've been heard and understood.

Any time I'm doing process work, any type of work with teams, I'm always really focused on helping people understand or feel that I've heard them, that I've listened to them, I've heard them, I've repeated back what I've heard, I acknowledged what I heard. And just really like you say, holding that human aspect, we're all human.

Now. Let's step out a little bit more.

We're going to get a little bit bigger picture since we've gone deep into the day to day of trying to navigate processes and people in our life, whether it's at home in work. And one of the questions that you hoped I'd ask, how can chaos be a teacher instead of a stressor? So how do you see that distinction?

For me, what I'm looking at is chaos, a teacher or a stressor? I can distinguish between how it feels, how the situation in the environment feels. Does it feel overwhelming or does it feel illuminating?

If it's a stressor, it's going to feel overwhelming. But if I'm looking at it as a teacher, it may be quite illuminating. Is it about survival or is it about curiosity?

And once again, that survival, if I'm in a sort of a stressful environment, I'm just looking at survival. But if I can change my perspective and just remain curious, come from that place of curiosity, there could be Quite a bit there that I could learn.

Even if you look at, like, in the situation I've been describing, people may feel stuck. Right? If I'm in a stressful environment, I just feel stuck. Are we stuck or are we looking for those hidden patterns? Right.

Or do I feel threatened in this environment? Or do I feel like there's information here for me to discover? There's information for me to take in and to learn from?

So it's really looking at those different perspectives of things overwhelming versus illuminating.

Going back to your story at Honeywell, and everybody was used to doing the things that they did, and new shipping was taking longer than it should. And what I'm hearing that is like, the chaos is there. It's creating stress. I can't do anything. This is how I've always done it.

Why is it a problem now? I don't know.

And instead of evaluating all the little steps, looking at everything and starting to pull things apart, you're sitting there thinking that I keep trying to do better, but I keep having the same issue. Because again, you're probably repeating that unless you inspect, step back, try to get outside the system and look at what's going on.

So again, back to your five whys. That's where as a teacher, I'm assuming that's where you're starting as a teacher is, okay, there's something not working.

We got to find a way to get outside of it. And what do we have to learn from this as opposed to staying in it? And then it's a stressor. So that's what I'm hearing in this.

Is this.

Is that matching?

Yeah, it is. And what's interesting about that is it's. It was that tension, right? People felt the stress. They felt, oh, my gosh, this is so overwhelming. Right.

But they didn't have that ability yet, or they didn't have someone there yet to say, wait a minute, what can we illuminate here? What's really happening instead? What they would fall back. I'm so stressed. I'm so stressed. So guess what I'm going to fall back into.

This is the way we've always been doing it. I've always been able to sit here quietly in this chair and just pack this little box.

And that, to me now, is going to feel comforting instead of taking a look at, wait a minute, what's really happening here? How can we actually improve this? What can we do differently? They fell back into their. Oh, no, this is. I'm comfortable right here in my chair.

Don't ask me to do anything different that's too stressful out there. So I'm going to stay right here where it's comfortable.

There have been a lot of great tools you've provided and some great experience and great stories. Let's say there's someone listening right now that's in the middle of their own little work chaos.

What's the first small move you'd invite them to make this week?

The first small move, I would say, is. To stop. And just think about, what's the goal, what am I trying to accomplish, and then just start breaking things down.

When we make things small, manageable, that can help us illuminate things, that can help us understand what's happening. But we're so caught up on the wheel, right?

We're going around and around, and we're not taking time to just say, wait a minute, what is it that I'm trying to accomplish? Sometimes the goal can just get so far away from us that we're not even understanding.

I may be going down a whole different path or doing something entirely useless.

So I would invite people to just stop, go back and revisit the goal and just start breaking things down step by step to understand, where's the disconnect? What's actually happening? What am I missing? What should I be seeing here?

What do you say for someone who goes, yeah, Chris, sounds great, but I have kids. I need to get to school on time, make their lunches, run off to work, do all the things my boss is telling me I need to be doing throughout the day.

I get done, get home, run home to get home before the kids get off the bus, making dinner, and then by the time I get to the end of the day, I just collapse and need to go to bed.

I totally get that. I feel that too on some days. For me, oftentimes during my workday, I just find it helpful to just give myself a break. I too, am a human.

And yes, I need to finish all of these things. But guess what? If I'm a few minutes late, it's not going to matter, right?

And if I'm not taking care of myself, I'm not bringing my best self into that next activity.

So I think we should be slowing down and we should be asking ourself these questions and taking care of ourselves in a way that makes us better equipped to carry on with the rest of our day.

Let's say someone is going into some meeting and they might have that preconception like, oh, this is going to be a chaotic meeting, or this is a meeting I just don't want to be in or whatever it may be.

What's a phrase or question or script that listeners could borrow and use in their next difficult meeting that they know it's going to be a mess, whatever it may be.

What are some of your thoughts of a way that they can go into that space feeling a little bit more settled, a little bit more structured, as you like to say?

It's a good question, Martin. When I think of myself going into what I know are going to be difficult situations, it's that awareness that, okay, so we're all humans.

Every person in that room is trying to be whoever they think they need to be in that situation. And for me, the perspective I often go in with, and I think it's very helpful, is this. Help me understand.

I'm going into it in a way that I want to know what people are experiencing. I want them to explain to me in their words. I don't want to make any assumptions in that room. We know what happens to people who make assumptions.

Right.

And I think going into it with that perspective or the goal of just wanting to understand who's there, what they're experiencing, what they're trying to communicate, I just think that takes a lot of that sort of that defensiveness out. When I'm not going to sell you anything. I'm not trying to pull you over to my side. I'm there to understand.

I'm hoping we can all listen and understand each other. To me, those two things are the most important in any situation. Understand what it is you're struggling with to help me understand what's going on.

It really just can kind of level the playing field a little bit so that we're all just recognizing we're all human. We're trying to treat each other as humanly as possible.

Starting with listening is always a great place to be. And curiosity. I heard that a lot in there, too.

And even if it is something completely foreign to you and makes the hair stand up on the back of your head, notice it, and then go, what is it? Instead of jumping back because it can be triggering. And even the most people are not going to give responses or meant to inflame and cause problems.

It will happen. People will have that. But if you start with just asking questions and curious, it will disarm a lot of that and allow them to share.

Yeah.

And that's because, like you say, you were saying this earlier, people like to be heard. People like to.

Yeah.

Have agency over their thoughts and ideas and Ways of being. And so coming in curious. Always good. I like that.

Yeah. And when you put it in a way that it's about me. It's not about you, Martin.

It's about me wanting to understand what you're trying to communicate, what's happening. And I think that takes the pressure off of you. Hopefully you're not going to feel attacked by me. If I'm just saying, Martin, help me understand.

I want to understand. Help me. It really helps people to disarm.

It lets me let go of whatever I'm holding on to too. Because then you're just sitting there.

If you try to be as present for whatever they're bringing to the table and someone may say something that triggers us. And what's important is to notice that when it's happening and try to breathe and then come back to be more curious. Curious to what it is.

Why would you say that? What is it that you're saying? Where is that coming from? I'm trying to understand another way.

Another thing you can do too, is to start asking yourself those why questions. Wait a minute. Why am I responding this way? What has that just triggered? So you're really understanding what's happening inside of yourself, too.

So now we're going to do a quick little assessment of where Chris is at in the chaos sphere. So on a scale of 1 to 10, working with chaos and flow, one side being chaos, the other side being flow, where do you feel you are right now?

In that chaos is one and flow is ten.

I gotta tell you, Martin, it feels a little chaotic. It really does. There seems to be, like a lot of natural and social chaos in the world in general.

And it's definitely reflected in my life and some of the things that I'm trying to accomplish and not getting so far with. So I do feel that I'm not really in flow. If I'm looking at a scale of one to ten, Gosh, I would say I'm probably. Four and a half, five.

I really don't feel like I'm not in a groove. Yeah.

Where do you feel you were 10 years ago?

Oh, 10 years ago. I was probably like an eight, I really. Yeah, I think. So.

If you had to name your superpower in chaotic situations, what would it be?

I think, gosh, that is such a great question. I love that question. And I think my superpower is just try to stay calm.

And I think what I do when I come in to an environment, I do think I have the ability to build that safety, to create that safety, and to Help people to open up and to unravel a bit. That's something that I really enjoy.

It's something that's really important to me, is to make sure that I'm creating an environment in which people feel that they can excel. And I think I can do that rather well.

Now, we've been talking a lot about the past, talked about where you are right now. What do you feel you're being pulled towards right now?

Whether that's work or experiences or what do you feel that you see arising in front of you that you're feeling like, ah, that is me working towards that flow.

I think there's so much chaos in our world today, and I do feel like that pendulum is going to start swinging soon.

And I think that many of our systems, processes, environments that have been disrupted, I think we're going to be in a position of rebuilding, reinventing, innovating things in a way that it's going to be better for more people than it has been in the past.

And I think that people that do the kind of work that you and I do, I think we can be instrumental in helping some of these systems come back bigger and better and more quality, just safer systems, a better place for people. I really believe that.

So how do you see these organizations evolving a bit more on a more concrete level in the next three to five years as people start to learn to work with this chaos because they're forced to deal with it? Right now, we don't have much choice.

The complexities that are happening in our world these days, the way that information and stuff is moving so much faster, people are more individual worlds and not always feeling community. How do you see organizations evolving as they're starting to figure out how to learn to work with the chaos instead of resisting it?

I think, you know, you're so right. We are such an individualistic world, aren't we? And I think that's definitely a weakness of ours.

I think if I were to go into an organization who's feeling chaos, I would really invite them, encourage them to remember that it's not just systems and processes. There's people behind those systems and processes.

And if we're understanding the people behind the systems, we're just, we're going to build better systems and better processes.

So I've always felt that when an organization loses its soul, loses that awareness that, oh my gosh, these are all people that are all here for the same reason, wanting to do a good job. When we lose sight of that and make it about it's about power and money, all bets are off.

Good things don't happen anymore when we're focused on power. I really hope that we can get back to a place where we care about each other, where we.

It's important to take care of people, especially those that are most vulnerable. I just want a world in which it's okay. And that's the expectation, the standard, that.

We take care of people 10 years from now. What would Chris say to you now? What would be their sort of statement to you now, looking back 10 years.

Into the past, probably something like, be sure to pay attention. Don't get wrapped up in the fire hose of things that are happening, but pay attention to what's happening.

And those things that give us comfort, don't lose sight of Everything is temporary. This is a temporary situation that we're in.

And if we can maintain that awareness that this is going to continue to change the chaos, it's probably still going to be chaotic.

And that's okay because we're learning, we're getting better, and 10 years from now, we're going to look back at this and think, oh, man, that was quite a ride. But, wow, look at where we are now. It was necessary for us to go through that.

So now we're coming to the end and we went through a lot of conversation.

What is the one thing you would hope that a listener hearing this, getting to this point in the podcast, would want to take with them, going forth and not lose amongst all the things we went through?

I hope that people can come away with this whole idea of dealing with chaos, knowing that it's healthy, it's necessary, it's illuminating, it teaches us, and it can help us transform. We just have to make sure that we maintain our humanness in it. And oftentimes we throw our hands up, I give up. I can't deal with it.

And we end up repeating those patterns until we learn from it. So I would hope that people listening to you and I chat today come away with, there's light at the end of the tunnel. And it's teaching us something.

We just need to be quiet and listen and pay attention to what's happening.

What it's teaching us, what's one experiment or practice or reflection you'd invite this listener right now listening to us to do within the next week, start with something super simple.

Start with how you get yourself ready for your day. Break down that process and just get into that habit of asking yourself, why?

Why?

And what are the things that. That I'm doing?

And just really break things down in a way that they're manageable and just pay attention, pay attention, but really just start with something small. Start with something very simple. I'm going to take the dog for a walk.

Let me outline those steps just to get me in the practice of understanding full processes and how to look at those processes and how to break them down. Washing the dishes. Something simple.

Chris, you've come to the end of this podcast. It was so great having you here and sharing all your stories and sharing some tools to help our listeners.

If anyone ever wants to follow up with you, what are the best ways that they can reach out to you?

Yeah, you can go to humansync.com and send me a message or you can find me on LinkedIn Chris Schubert or Human Sync. Either of those and you can send me a message.

Thank you, Chris. Thank you for joining us on Martin Loves Chaos.

I appreciate you so much and thank you for raising awareness around this idea of chaos. Appreciate the time. Thank you.

And with that, we come to the end of this episode on Conversations with Martin Loves Chaos. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others and subscribe on any podcast app that you use.

Or check out my website, martinloveschaos.org you'll find a link and information about the music on this, as well as links to Chris's website for Human Sync in the program description. Feel free to go there for more details. This is Martin of Martin Loves CAS signing off. Welcome to the Swirl.

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