Aaron's Laptop

One of Shaw's baby birds deals with theft while attending an Ivy League school. Scott and Shawn talk about generations.

What is 2 Parachutes Podcast?

The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!

Scott: 00:03

Hey, Sean. How's it going?

Shawn: 00:04

Hey, Scott. It's going well. How about yourself?

Scott: 00:07

Oh, not too bad. Excellent. Nothing, nothing, huge today, but we'll we'll see how this goes after we jump out of the plane. I was Yep. Concerned about Aaron a little bit.

Scott: 00:19

Aaron is, your baby bird who's been helping us launch the podcast Yeah. On the tech side. And understand he he had his laptops laptops stolen over the weekend. How's he doing?

Shawn: 00:31

Yeah, well, that's a great, yeah. So he is a terrific kid and he is a wonderful, helper to us. And in addition to that, he wears another more formal hat, as my nonprofit coalition's, 2025, 26, emerging practitioner and international security fellow. So, and of course he just started his, freshman semester at Penn, University of Pennsylvania. So, we have a Wharton, gentleman among our ranks now, which is an impressive thing for him.

Shawn: 01:04

But yeah. So as it turns out, he, had a little bit of subterfuge over the weekend and it seems his laptop was stolen. Imagine on an Ivy League campus even, at least that's not fair to Penn. I don't know if it was on campus. He could have been in a cafe a 100 miles away for all I know.

Shawn: 01:25

So, yeah, so he's juggling a lot. And so we're just kind of working through how as a young person who's adjusting to a couple of new environments, you know, how do you What's the expectation for communication and transparency and time sensitivity, like learning all of those professional protocols and expectations and within the different ecosystems in which you're sort of operating, I think, is is probably gonna be a very interesting, skill for him to build in this this first year.

Scott: 02:03

Yeah. How how old is he?

Shawn: 02:05

I believe he's 18. I mean, he's fresh out of high school. He graduated with my my baby bird nephew who they were in the same graduating class of high school in Nevada. You know, so that's how Aaron came to know us. But yeah, so they're just, you know, of course, think of my nephew is a wee baby.

Shawn: 02:20

So it's hard for me to like wrap my brain around that I have to treat this young man as a young professional you know not just like you know this tiny little baby bird that needs sort of you know nesting.

Scott: 02:32

Yeah and it's I just it always makes me smile when you say baby bird because it's such a wonderful label and you do all of these label things and everything has more than one label and it's just the way that your brain works and it just makes me so happy to hear how interface with the world. So that's why I'm laughing. But I've met him once now. He does not impress me as being 18. And it's a really interesting sort of dichotomy when you're looking at a person.

Scott: 03:08

But maybe it's across the spectrum. And it's fascinating when you're interacting with somebody like that who has moments where they are sort of presenting well beyond their years, but then they have those snapbacks because they're still 18 and there's something that comes with time and grade.

Shawn: 03:34

Actual age, Yeah.

Scott: 03:37

It's an interesting thing. What it triggers for me a little bit is when you're on the other end of the age equation. I mean, you're 50, I'm 60 And I think it's really easy when you're that age to say, well, you know, that this kid just, you know, needs to learn things. That generation just has its problems. And I just I don't think it's generational.

Scott: 04:09

And the more I interact with people who aren't me, don't think that it's age either. But I get tripped up when this sort of when I hear myself saying things to people who are decades younger than me that I just hated hearing when I was their age, and it really sort of stops me. I just wonder how you And keep if you do keep that in your forebrain when you have this wonderful team that you've built, but they are people who are emerging. So you're getting that freshness of thought, but, you're also dealing with, know, answer my email. It hasn't been two minutes.

Scott: 04:54

It's been two days kind of thing.

Shawn: 04:56

Right. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's a great, dynamic to ponder as a professional. As you said, people who are in their 50s and beyond years now are sort of, you know, seasoned, you know, sort of veterans in the workforce. We understand, you know, what life is going to throw at us.

Shawn: 05:16

For the most part, we've seen a lot, maybe not all of it, but, enough to know that expect the unexpected and, you know, it generally benefits you if you're able to, respond to that in an effective way because your peers, your subordinates, your supervisors and leaders, everybody benefits when, you know, based on your response to a situation that's dynamic changing or even if it's like a crisis. I try to remember, and I'm not always perfect at doing this and that's why it comes to the top of my mind, is, you know, young people who you surround yourself by who are beyond their years, in wisdom or incompetence, I think there's usually they're the ones you run the biggest risk with because, the instinct is, oh, I can trust this person. They're smarter than the average bear. Like, you know, they need less, you know, sort of sort of handholding through the process. I can throw a big task at them and they're gonna handle it.

Shawn: 06:20

And I'm also when you couple that instinct, right, which is a very natural reaction because, you know, human beings are designed to mirror to what they are receiving. And so, you know, I all of a sudden forget that they're 18 or 22 or whatever the case is. And so what I have to do is just be cognizant and self aware that like, is what I asked of these individuals commensurate with what the expectation should be as opposed to what it can be. You know, they may be able to give me a better product than I need, but should I expect that? Because then if I do and then they don't hit that mark, it's difficult to hold them accountable to that.

Shawn: 07:05

And then you're left with your reaction, which because I didn't manage my expectation, you know, now a little bit maybe more frustrated or just kind of fussy about like, oh, I really needed that. And then I have to step back and be like, but was it fair to want that? And then the second piece of that, again, this is all shining a light on the leadership who is kind of working with these types of young people in their workforce is, are you or am I or are we providing them with the structure that they need and the tools that will enable and empower that natural aptitude? Because in the absence of a clear structure and clear guidance or a clear tool that you want them to work with, they will not be able they're going to kill themselves, first of all, trying to get you a great product, but they're ultimately at risk of not doing so because you haven't provided them with enough structure to facilitate their free sort of expression of creativity of thought or of aptitude by applying the skills that they know they have that they can do really, really well.

Shawn: 08:18

An example of that is one of our project associates who's also on the younger end of the professional spectrum, so 22, 23 years old, I think. She is, you know, I'm trying to help her build out a project Gantt chart. I don't know if you ever did project management type stuff, but there's, you know, there's a whole certification for it. You can keep project management professional certified, PMP certified, and, you know, you go through a course, you learn how to use, you know, software tools like Microsoft Project and build really sophisticated flowcharts and workflow charts Gantt, which is called a Gantt chart in project management terminology. Well, we are not PMP certified professionals.

Shawn: 09:03

A lot of us have had a lot of that training, but never maybe tested out. We don't, have Microsoft projects, so we're not using that software tool, so we can't really teach it. So we're kind of like, we know enough to engineer the plane, but it's kind of a janky little plane, right? It's not Boeing. You're like, well, maybe Boeing's a bad example in this particular moment in time, but it's not an So Airbus or something, when I asked her to kind of build this Gantt chart for this particular project we're doing, which is complex and has a lot of moving parts, what I realized as she was going over it with me today was like, oof, I did not set you up for success on this because I didn't give you a tool that you could actually wield in a useful way.

Shawn: 09:45

I didn't really set clear parameters for how I wanted you to organize the information by task or subtask and what else goes along with that deliverable or outcome, length of duration time it takes to do the thing, etcetera. And so then I just realized, I was like, oh, this is a phenomenal disaster because like she probably wasted a bunch of her time. Now we're not gonna make the most out of this meeting and now we're set back by a few days because, you know, so anyway, so whether it's don't overestimate them to the point where you set them up for failure by asking them to do things they can't reasonably do, even with the best aptitude on earth. And focus also on, for me, it's just effectively communicating, like what's gonna keep them on on a good trajectory and pace for success. And sometimes that's just like communication.

Shawn: 10:39

Just be like, hey, like you said earlier in the conversation, two minutes to them is maybe two days in the real world, you know? And so I need to make sure that, like, maybe what I do is say, hey, guys, like, let's talk about deadline setting. Let's talk about, like, reasonable response times. Let's, you know, so then they have a blueprint. And again, that's a structure, right?

Shawn: 11:00

So whether it's the project management tool, you know, in clear parameters for how to use it, or if it's just a communication protocol that you adhere to and that you all agree to, That structure is gonna really then that your rock stars are gonna just take off out into outer space because now they're really set up for success. So that's just a little, you know, cliff note wisdom for the day.

Scott: 11:21

Yeah. Yeah. I I love that. And and in our inimitable style, you've you've packed so much in there. You know, we got four hours of of rabbit holes to go down.

Scott: 11:34

And so I'm I'm gonna struggle a little bit to just pull on on one, maybe two threads, but it's Yeah. It's it's funny listening to you always trigger stories. And, you know, I hope everybody who's jumped with us today, it's triggering stories for them, and folks talk about this stuff. But I wanna tell you an old story about when when I was a brand new agent on a counterintelligence squad in New York. I I was an FBI agent as as most everybody knows.

Scott: 12:04

And so we're we're operating against a foreign intelligence presence in that that is in The United States. And part of being able to be effective is going out and interviewing people. And a lot of the people that we would go and interview had English but not good English and so there were some agents on the squad who spoke the foreign language and I'm not going to say the foreign language because I don't want to get into, you know, the the specifics and If I do, then I'll start treading down stuff that is probably still classified. Anyhow, I was tasked to go on an interview that was going to be conducted in this foreign language with a very senior agent. I had probably a year and a half on the job.

Scott: 12:52

He had twenty five years on the job at that point. And so my task was to go along with him and to watch how he conducted the interview because he was considered to be, you know, a great interviewer, a native speaker of this language. But as I got to know this guy more, I I began to see just how much he was an old guy who was mailing it in. And in this particular instance, we get in the car and we're driving out to this place. And about halfway through the trip, he he's driving and he looks over at me and he goes, so you're going to conduct this interview.

Scott: 13:30

And I look at him and I'm like, I I am not prepared to do this interview. I learned about this forty five minutes ago when the squad supervisor told me to accompany you. I I actually can't do this interview. Oh, yeah. You'll you'll be fine.

Scott: 13:46

I'm like, no. I I've and, you know, here I am arguing with a senior guy, I think I'm gonna get in trouble. And I just said, no. I I can't I I don't know what to ask this guy. I'm probably not even gonna understand what you're talking about because you're gonna be speaking in a foreign language.

Scott: 14:02

And he got a little annoyed and I realized that he hadn't prepared for the interview and he was dumping it on me. And so we got there and he did the interview, but then and and it was all in a foreign language, so I didn't understand it. But I'm, you know, observing body language, his and the, and the other guys. And so I'm I'm learning what I can. And we get back in the car, and he's, like, kind of proud of himself and being the senior guy.

Scott: 14:28

And so this is gonna be a teaching moment. And so he looks over at me before we got too far he goes so what did you learn today and I was screaming in my head what I learned today is you're an asshole and you don't want to do your job and you want to dump it on the junior guy that's what I learned today

Shawn: 14:45

I learned

Scott: 14:46

today that I do not wanna go out on an interview with you again. I didn't say any of that, and I I sort of came up with something. But I think the reason that that story came back to me is from from the the senior perspective to the junior perspective. We, you know, we we wanna help. Most people wanna help.

Scott: 15:10

But I I think we can get really wrapped up in here's a teaching moment. I'm gonna show this new person the ropes. What did you learn, kid? I'm gonna show you this, that, and the other thing. And what it illustrates to me is not everything is a teaching moment, particularly in a in a business world.

Scott: 15:31

And it and it's not that you shouldn't learn things. Yeah. It's that in in the course of conducting business, you don't have to stop and go to school and and have a a pupil teacher sort of relationship. And what I hear you doing with with your young folks is is really kind of an interesting balance of that. I mean, you're you're expecting them to learn things.

Scott: 15:58

Yeah. But the focus of your of your nonprofit is not to teach young people how to do stuff. Mean, they learn how to do stuff, but I have found over the course of a couple of different careers and learning how to do things that the way that I learned and the way that a lot of people learn is here's a task, figure it out. And your phrase of setting them up to succeed, you're not going to sit them down in class and train them how to do something and then say, okay, go do that. That's there's a lot of that in the world, but that is very rote and they're confining.

Scott: 16:43

So if you train somebody to do a thing and then send them to go do that thing, you're not tapping into anything that's them. You've created a robot and you're expecting the robot to perform the functions that it's been programmed to do. You're not tapping into their creativity and their way of doing it. So if we circle back around to your example of, you know, tasking someone to do a Gantt chart that they don't know how to do, from a business standpoint, okay. You you didn't get the thing done that you needed to get done, and you're, you know, recognizing as a boss that you didn't set them up to succeed.

Scott: 17:20

But you didn't really set them up to fail because you're you're you're picking good people, and you're you're putting them in these little tiny crucibles. And my guess is she didn't come back to you a day later and say I can't do this you didn't teach me how she came back to you and said you know this is this is where I got to what do you think this is the best I could do even if she didn't use that language Yeah. What do you think? And so the learning is there without us putting this label of learning on. Yeah.

Scott: 17:54

And I think, you know, I I have always distinguished between people who have twenty years of experience and people who have one year of experience 20 times and and you can see those people and a lot of times the people like this senior agent are the the ones that want to stop and teach, want to stop and have a teachable moment, want to stop and and you know dispense wisdom. Those are the people who have one year of experience 20 times and the reason they're stopping to to teach or to dispense wisdom is because they don't know what to do to move the Yeah. Task or the job or the goal forward. And it's it's not it's not a surface management thing. It's a it's it's a deeper thing that, effective organizations do, and a lot of times they do it, without really realizing they do it.

Scott: 18:54

But there's there's there's sort of the classroom style of training and then there is this you know what you learn when you do something what one of my one of my favorite quotes and I used to use this when I was doing leadership training actually comes from Nelson Mandela the South African and he goes I never lose I never lose yeah I either win or I learn. Yeah. And what a great way to couch what other people would consider failure, falling short, as not a loss but a valuable thing. But I think that I sort of stretch it further, and that is learning self development, getting better at stuff, doesn't require training and doesn't require a classroom and it doesn't require us to stop and say, okay, now we're transitioning from doing our job, whatever our job is, being a part of something greater than ourselves. We're going to step away from that and go into this different mode of learning.

Scott: 20:13

And maybe this even pours into this what I consider to be a false notion of work life balance. You have life, and there are the things that you do in your life, and some of it you might label work, and some of it you might label family, and some of it you might label a bunch of different things. But if we get caught up in, I need training, I need certifications, I need letters after my name, I need this, I need that, Okay. You know, maybe Airbus and Boeing know how to make planes and smaller companies that don't have those reputations don't make the same kind of planes. But you know at the same time I can go buy a Ford or I can go buy a Koenigsegg and you know Christian von Koenigsegg is this sort of self taught engineer in Sweden who makes hypercars and they're you know if they're available for sale they're 2 and a half million bucks and they go 200 miles an hour and you know to say somebody like that doesn't know how to build cars because he's just a guy that sort of sat down and figured it out.

Scott: 21:39

Henry Ford sat down and figured it out so I don't know. I don't know if that shakes anything loose.

Shawn: 21:46

Yeah. Well We

Scott: 21:47

could probably talk for another 25

Shawn: 21:49

Well, because this is really I know that this is a this it it does fall really nicely into your wheelhouse of of leadership training and what does that look like in different environments? And one of the things that you were describing is sort of this notion of like learning from imperfections. So that is, I think, what I took from my interaction with my colleague this morning was that it broke open because we both sat and just looked at this mess of a Gantt chart and we're just like, what are we gonna do with this? Just such a nightmare. It was kind of like garbage in garbage out, I told her.

Shawn: 22:27

I said, Because the original scopes of work were not well designed. So I said, The reason why we're having this sort of tension with creating a good workflow sort of document is because the original inputs were not designed in a way that was sort of synchronous or harmonizing with what that workflow product is designed to do. And also because I didn't give you very helpful parameters for what you were supposed to do, that was also on me. But what I saw her do was through that process, she was asking better questions and she was also making sort of revelatory statements that were like, oh, like, yeah, if this other gentleman in the organization who has pretty good mind for this kind of thing, maybe if he put together, because I offered, I said, well, let's have Terry look at it and see what he recommends because it may just be that he has a more simplified, you know, kind of direct way to do this. You know, she's like, yeah, I learn really well from watching others do a thing.

Shawn: 23:35

So like if he does it, then it'll help reinforce my learning because then I'll kind of see and then something will click in my brain that allows me to then be like, oh, okay. So so one, people learn in different styles. And and when you are faced as you're going to be, because no organization is perfect, no process is perfect, certainly no people are perfect. You know, the key then is to have that Mandela moment, which is like, am I learning from this imperfect situation or this imperfect outcome or deliverable, you know, and then utilize that imperfection to fuel your next success and, you know, to sort of learn about yourself and how you work or learn about others or learn about your organization or processes. So I thought that that was really important.

Shawn: 24:24

The other thing that kind of resonates with me that I think is there's something there, there, maybe you can help tease it out, is that I'm very, very attracted to the sort of simplicity and the practicality of material services, meaning like, you know, it used to be that in the old days, you know, we had a lot of heavy industry. It's like, you know, a Smith Smith, a baker baked a, you know, you know, whatever your sort of cottage industry, you know, description is and a cobbler cobbled or whatever, right? So what I think is because we deal in the twenty first century and probably for the last fifty years increasingly sort of intangible service rate or intangible products and services where it's like intellectual property or intellectual productivity, it's a little more difficult to, or it takes a little more effort to kind of lay those parameters and structures out for your disciples or your, you know, in the case of the EPIS program, I mentioned that Aaron is an EPIS fellow, which is again, this emerging practitioner in international security. Well, that model was we envisioned that model from the beginning as a modern day apprenticeship.

Shawn: 25:43

And it was for that very reason of that practicality that I'm very much attracted to, which is like, you know, you put somebody side by side with you. They they don't just shadow you. They apprentice with you. They are watching, they're doing, they're testing, they're failing, they're practicing, you know, and they're really engaged in learning the tradecraft, whatever that is. And so what I wanted to do is create a model for emerging practitioners.

Shawn: 26:13

And that doesn't, by the way, mean just young people. I mean, I could be in a career twenty years and all of a sudden have to make a career shift. Shout out to the federal workforce right now who are all in that current position, many of them, right, is, you know, people, I think, would benefit in the professional sense from going back to some of those apprenticeship instincts where it's like, you know, you build a vehicle that can kind of bring people on and give them coaching without sort of any relative, you know, hierarchical, you know, mean, yes, by default, an apprentice is somebody who is new, but it doesn't mean they're unseasoned or they're unpracticed in particular things, it just means that whatever you're asking them to do is new to them at that moment, but there is a lot of skillset that can kind of carry over and is applicable, I'm sure across disciplinary fields. I'm going through that myself as I sort of chart my next path, you know, forward in in the Sean three point o, I guess, now career. Right?

Shawn: 27:16

Like, you know, life after coalition potentially for some of those federal workforce reduction, you know, kind of dynamics that are transpiring currently. So, you know, so yeah, so I just think that a lot of what we can also do is just help to simplify, clarify and create mechanisms to learn from what doesn't end up being perfectly constructed, and realizing that there's there's power in that and there's there's opportunity, more importantly, in that. So, yeah, that's what I was thinking about.

Scott: 27:50

Yeah. And that's, you know, again, there's there's there's so much there, but the the the main strand that I wanna, tug at a little bit is is, you know, understanding people and understanding the person that's sitting across from you because not everybody is good at everything. I don't mean not everybody's good at being a blacksmith and not everyone's a good cobbler and good at making shoes. Not everyone's a good cooper and can make good barrels. But to me, one of the one of the first forks in the road is do you have a person who's fundamentally an innovator?

Scott: 28:41

Yeah. Or do you have a person who is fundamentally not an innovator, somebody who can focus on a repetitive task and do it over and over and over and refine it, refine it, refine it. So the way that I'll try to illustrate this point and people in the food industry are going to start yelling at me because maybe it's not a good illustration. But it's the difference between somebody who is developing new complicated dishes with layers of flavors. I went to the market today and the tomatoes and the bok choy were in season.

Scott: 29:30

And so I'm going to create this thing because these are the ingredients that I have. That's the innovator mindset. The other is, you know, the person that is cooking a steak or making sushi. There's there's no magic in either of those things. I mean, a steak is a slab of meat that you're putting heat into, and you're either good at that or you're not.

Scott: 29:56

Sushi is rice and a bit of wasabi and and a a piece of of some sort of seafood, meat flesh. But you you have people that have dedicated lifetimes, decades to make perfect sushi, the perfectly cooked steak, and it's not that one is a rule follower and the other is not. There's a component of that. It's not that one loves tedium and one wants to be unshackled, but there's a component of that. And it's matching people with the jobs.

Scott: 30:38

We're starting to come back around in the leadership and management cycle to the point where we're saying, have to identify who you have and make sure that you have the right people in the right job. You talk about setting people up to succeed. I use a metaphor of a soccer team. If you have somebody who's going to get the ball and try and score, you don't want to put that person as a fullback because they're not going to stay there. Right.

Scott: 31:06

They're always going to go forward and it'll cause frustration for you and for them if you're the coach and you put your natural striker as a fullback. Yeah. And that's as an aside why I've always hated this concept of we have to cross train everybody in every job because you need to understand what everybody else is doing. No, you don't. Yeah.

Scott: 31:29

If if if you're a striker, don't need to know what it's like to play fullback. You just need a good fullback who's going to feed you the ball. Yeah. And so it's it's who loves that. I know exactly what to do and how to do it and I'm going to refine and refine and make it better or I know what the standard is.

Scott: 31:50

Yeah. You know, I take stuff from the inbox, I put it in the outbox, and at the end of my day I'm done. Yeah. And you need people like that, but you need to understand that person. And then it's the person that's the designer, or the innovator or the creative.

Scott: 32:06

And that comes with challenges as well, because they're going to go down their own route. But it fundamentally comes back to understanding people and you know my opinion is you can't find fulfillment and satisfaction in life if you don't spend some amount of time trying to understand the people that aren't you. It can be very mercenary. You need to understand the people around you so you can succeed in your job. Know, have whatever success means to you.

Scott: 32:45

But I think that there's something fundamental that comes from when you look at your baby birds and go, oh, you know, I got this, but I needed that. And what I see in the conversation you had this morning is that you both were looking at this Gantt chart project and this project management, tasking as something to be figured out. Yeah. Which is you you got the right mindsets there. Yeah.

Scott: 33:15

I can hear you say that, you know she came to you and said well I didn't get this done because you didn't tell me what to do and there are a lot of people who will do that and yeah and it's funny because what we see in management is oh well you know the person came and you know said that it was my fault because I didn't tell them what to do and you know they they came and brought me a problem without a solution yeah and I've always come back to that and said you know those are your op center people Yeah. Those are your dispatchers. Those are your organizers. Those are the people that are going to come in and make sure that your structure is good. They're not the people that are the pointy end of the spear, but the pointy end of the spear can operate without that infrastructure.

Scott: 34:06

So you need those people. You need by the book people who generally frustrate me. And you need people who, know when to break the rules. Not randomly break the rules for the sake of breaking the rules, but, everybody is fundamentally different. Yeah.

Scott: 34:30

I don't know if that

Shawn: 34:32

Yeah. No. Well, and you hit something that really resonates with me, which is that, you know, there is an equal responsibility on, you know, the two people in the equation, right? So you can have somebody who's a delegator or a senior leader or, you know, even a peer. Sometimes you get tasked, you know, you can task other people at your sort of pay grade level or functional level.

Shawn: 34:57

But, you know, the really outstanding people are going to be the ones who, if they're on the receiving end of that tasking, right, they're the delegated to individual. It's so refreshing when you get somebody who is able to critically think and even anticipate a little bit, you know, even if it's not a lot, even just anticipating a little bit where the delegatory or the tasker is going with this, because then you're in a collaboration, because then you're able to say, you know, I think they want this, I'm gonna give them this plus, or I'm gonna give them this, but then I'm gonna pause and ask, you know, because I want to make sure that the compass is pointed in the, you know, most optimally right direction, you know, that that it can be. And that's extremely, like I said, refreshing when you come across that. You do get a lot of the people who are just sort of like, you know, this was my scope. You told me to do this.

Shawn: 35:55

I didn't have the tools, ergo, I failed or I didn't, you know, wasn't able to succeed to your expectation. And you're going to get a lot of that too, because they're just every single step needs to be dictated to them without any ability on their part or desire maybe, to to preempt. You know, I certainly have come across both types in the world. I've come across people who are who deliberately don't preempt because they want to keep this out of their they don't they're they don't want to let me put it this way. They're anticipating mission creep, and they don't want that because they are already overwhelmed or they already have so much on their plate.

Shawn: 36:33

And we saw a little bit of that in Baghdad actually when when you and I were out there. I saw this sometimes with, you know, my military colleagues who God bless them. I, you know, absolutely understand, you know, totally appreciate the those guys are generally the most overburdened, you know, in a in a situation like that. Now, I wish I had had somebody who was mentoring me back at that time who could help me understand that Department of Defense culture at that time, that army culture, that air force culture, whatever, whoever I was dealing with at that moment, because that while I was never disrespectful at all and I totally respected their sort of boundaries, it would have been amazing if somebody had been there to be like, hey, let me explain to you what a day in the life of this guy looks like. So, you're right, I don't need to know their job.

Shawn: 37:25

I need them to just do their job. But it does help if you at least can appreciate, like, the role that they're playing, because then you know where you fit in and then you can. And this goes back to your point about understanding people. The better you understand your colleagues, the better colleague you'll be because, you know, you don't need to go into their whole life story or anything like that. But if you can at least appreciate if we're going back to the soccer metaphor, I might be the striker.

Shawn: 37:55

That dude might be the fullback. If I at least understand what the burden placed on that fullback is, I don't have to do his job, but I have to at least appreciate it and and the function it plays because there are moments where there's going to be overlap, maybe not a lot with the striker per se, but like the halfbacks, right, or the keeper, you know, where you are going to have that overlap in your job duties. And sometimes you're going to have to run forward because there's a gap there and you got to do it. So, you know, maybe not total cross pollination and cross training, but like as a unit, you all need to understand it benefits you to understand how you all operate together and what your individual lanes are and where, you know, there are gonna be times when you might have to cross over just a smidge to keep things to distinguish you from from, you know, an elite team from an average team.

Scott: 38:47

Right. Right.

Shawn: 38:48

So

Scott: 38:49

Yeah. And that's, you know, the it it's, you know, it's it's shared intention. You know?

Shawn: 38:57

There you go. Yeah.

Scott: 38:58

I'm a I'm a forward. You're a half back, and it's very easy. And this is the checklist mindset. Well, I did my job. You didn't do your job.

Scott: 39:11

That is a very narrow mindset. But if I know my role, I know your role, and together, we have this shared intention that, you know, we wanna win the game, which means scoring goals and preventing goals from being scored on us. That that now takes you to a different level. But it, you know, you're reminding me of some of the interesting challenges I faced when I was middle manager in the FBI assistant special agent in charge. So I was I was managing squad supervisors, managing managers, not a senior executive, I was never that, but not just a team leader.

Scott: 39:50

And I remember certainly in the intelligence world one of the conversations that I had so many times and every time it surprised me was when I was working with supervisory intelligence analysts. And I was, at the time I was involved very early on in the FBI's building out the intelligence capability it has today. I was one of the very few credentialed agents, special agents that actually supervised supervisory intelligence analysts. And they, as a group, had this attitude of, well, can't manage a person unless I know how to do their job better than they do. So I am a all sorts analyst, but now I have a reports officer.

Scott: 40:35

I can't tell that person what to do because I I don't know how to write reports. And they couldn't get their brain around this the notion of the coach. Mhmm. You know? The coach, whether it's professional sports all the way down to little league, the coach's job is to win the game, but the coach can't play the game.

Scott: 40:53

And generally at the professional level, the coaches are not capable of playing the game at the level that the athletes That's the point of having athletes and the point of having coaches. And they couldn't make that transition to my job as a supervisor intelligence analyst is to produce the outcome and I don't need to be better than everybody on my team. I need to make sure that my team performs at the level that I'm required to perform at. And Yeah. In business in general, you know, if you're the lead salesperson and you get promoted to be the regional manager, you still think that you're better than everybody else at selling.

Scott: 41:38

And you're not gonna succeed as a manager if you don't understand that you're no longer a player. You're not even a player coach. You're just a coach. And you succeed if you can get the people below you to to be better at selling or better at writing intelligence reports or better at this, that or the other thing. But part of that comes with I mean, you don't have to be friends with people to understand this is a person who needs a to do Yeah.

Scott: 42:09

And so I need to slot them into that portion of my entity. This is a person who is going to ignore the to do list and do something crazy, so I need to steer them in a direction that harnesses who they are in a, you know, productive way for me. What a goalie does and what a striker does not only fundamentally different types of physical behaviors, they're fundamentally different mindsets. And everybody can understand another person's mindset. Sometimes it takes a while to penetrate, but it it it is a human skill.

Scott: 42:55

The the difference between, you know, people who are, you know, behavioral analysts or, you know, do these sort of cool police investigative things. It isn't that they somehow have some skill that the rest of us don't have. It's, you know, I was an interviewer interrogation instructor at the FBI, and all of that training was was taking all the instincts in the back of my brain and pushing them to the front of my brain so that when I was assessing a person I was aware I was doing it. When you talk to a stranger in line getting coffee you are assessing that person. Most people aren't aware that they're doing it.

Scott: 43:33

They just come away going, yeah, was a boring conversation. That was an interesting person. But they're still assessing the person. And I think everyone is better off when they take that from the back of their brain to the front of their brain. It's very human.

Shawn: 43:47

Yeah, absolutely. Boy, isn't that the truth? You just take any, the minute you walk into any social situation, right, and tell me you're not assessing the whole situation and individuals, you know, I know at like a dinner party or like a happy hour or something, you know, I feel like it's those movies where you see the graphs appear and like the dot, I'm like, okay, who do I stay away from? Who do I go to? Like, you know, where is my spot?

Shawn: 44:13

And yeah, it's like all these little micro assessments that you're making, proximity to the bathroom, to the bar, to the noise level, does that person, are they known to chat too much and I'm gonna get stuck in a conversation? Is there someone specific that looks appealing or interesting, you know, that I I'm trying to get time with? Yeah, we do it all the time. We just don't take the time to break down what it is we're doing.

Scott: 44:37

Yeah. And we we don't we don't have that awareness and it's. Yeah. It's it's wonderful that it's instinctive, But I you know that for me, the message is, you know, don't fool yourself that you you can't do this because you haven't been trained. It's it's how the human animal, regardless of, you know, if you're a repetitive to do list person or a creative, you know, designer developer person, you're still interacting with other people and you can you can still do it because you're we're all hardwired to do it.

Scott: 45:18

Yeah. And it's it's it's funny now because we're we're dropping into our last few minutes, and I know we're going to be a little short today. Yeah. But I really thought this conversation was going to go into the difference between how people are at any given age and the perceived differences that we we see in generations that aren't ours. And we didn't get there at all.

Shawn: 45:49

No, it's not. Well, that's the shift of the wind is you, after the jump, we got a current that kind of took us in a different route. But, you know, that is a fantastic topic to explore. I think we should absolutely do it. We'll have, of course, plenty of opportunity to do that in future sessions because it is also a thing I think you and I both had a lot of experience with and and could maybe share some exchange some ideas about, and, you know, I'm sure that the rest of anybody who's viewing this at some point will it will resonate.

Scott: 46:21

Yeah yeah I think so and that's something that we need to make sure we do as well is we always talk about that would be good for us to talk about and I you know we need our own Gantt chart to

Shawn: 46:34

I know know boy isn't that the truth next steps yeah

Scott: 46:40

definitely we'll get there All right. Well, I think we both gotta run, so maybe we can, sign off a little early today.

Shawn: 46:49

Yeah.

Scott: 46:50

We'll see everybody on the next one of these.

Shawn: 46:52

Yeah. Thanks so much, Scott.

Scott: 46:54

All right. Talk to you later.