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A RopesTalk podcast series—a collaboration between Ropes & Gray's Insights Lab and Front-Line Anti-Bribery—focused on the data and behavioral sciences approach to risk management.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Welcome back to the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, the podcast that gives you new perspectives on legal, compliance and regulatory challenges faced by organizations and individuals worldwide. The clue is in the title—culture is at the heart of everything. It’s the endlessly shifting patterns that govern our environment and behaviors. The magic is in amplifying certain patterns and dampening others. Let’s see if we can pique your curiosity, get you to challenge some of your perceptions and give you space to think differently about some of your own challenges. I’m Nitish Upadhyaya, and I’m joined today by Amanda Raad.
Amanda Raad: Thanks, Nitish. It’s great to be back. I just quickly wanted to recap my last great episode that we had here with Stephanie Niven from Ninety One. We heard such great tips about how Ninety One is using corporate culture and assessing corporate culture to think about the real direct impact that it can have on business performance, particularly in the investment space. It was a great discussion. Unfortunately, we are missing one of our fellow podcasters, Richard Bistrong, who’s not feeling well today, but we will do our best to hold the fort down. We have such a terrific guest that we’re joined by today—Nitish, I’ll hand it over to you for that introduction.
[01:20] Getting to know Brennan
Nitish Upadhyaya: Our guest today is Dr. Brennan Jacoby, a philosopher, thought partner and a friend—and founder of the intriguingly titled Philosophy at Work. Welcome, Brennan.
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Hi, Nitish and Amanda. It’s excellent to be here.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I know you’ve been on a journey, and you’re really on a journey at the moment. Tell us where in the world you are?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Yes, I am currently in Porto, Portugal—more specifically, for people that know it, in Gaia. We’re on an adventure. My family and I are usually located just north of Oxford in the U.K. We decided to take a year to, I suppose, do a lot of things, but chiefly, I think, in my mind is challenge ourselves—develop our character as a family, as individuals, and just bed down in a few different places around the world and see what it’s like to try to live and work there. So, we kicked off in August, and this is where we are.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Incredible. I am looking forward to hearing more about those adventures as we dive a bit deeper into your work and your background. I think before we turn to the discussion—I know you pretty well from many years working with you and doing sessions—let’s do a bit of a rapid-fire round and help the audience to get to know you. Give us three things we should know.
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: I grew up in Michigan, Detroit originally, and then further a bit out in the countryside in a place called Jackson, Michigan, nearby Ann Arbor. I studied in Australia, in Sydney, and there I did my PhD on the philosophy of trust. I’m really interested in not just the philosophies of the world, but philosophy—the pursuit of wisdom, and how people really think: How ideas and wisdom is woven into our day-to-day life. That work around trust really, I think, was formative in that, because it wasn’t just logic and logic crunching, but rather, where do these ideas come from? What goes on? I suppose the third thing is that, in keeping with the adventure that my family and I are having right now, part of that is home schooling. I was also home schooled from year two right the way through, and I say that because I think that shaped my thinking—certainly shaped some of how I approach things. I’ve been really curious and felt like I don’t quite fit in, perhaps because of that experience, but hopefully, it’s been useful to some of the groups that we get to work with.
Nitish Upadhyaya: You mentioned curiosity, and I suspect you’re curious about lots of things, but what’s one thing you’re curious about?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: One thing that I’m curious about quite often is how we think. If I sit down to try to think through something, I’m really curious to know, “What is actually going on there?” I suppose to use some terms, I’m curious about subjectivity. I’m curious about reflection. I find it really interesting to try to capture what goes on when we think—not just at a narrow scientific level, but at a level of inspiration and ideation. What happens—as individuals, as groups? I think that’s really exciting stuff, and so, I’m often curious about that.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I can attest to that first-hand in terms of the workshops that you run and bringing some of those teams together to think independently, think as individuals and think as organizations, and hopefully we’ll get into that a little bit later today. The last question for you to help everyone get to know you is one that’s a human question, because our guests are amazing, as are you, but they can be surprised. What’s the last thing that surprised you?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: I think something that surprised me authentically, is how challenging it can be to develop our character. As a philosopher, as someone that’s studied philosophy, I’ve been really interested in the human side of philosophy, so that’s probably roughly in the area of ethics. That PhD I mentioned about trust was in a sub-discipline of ethics called moral psychology, and so, it’s always been a very human, relational, fleshy philosophy. That’s meant that I’ve studied a lot of character development ethics—as in, maybe how Aristotle would think about ethics in terms of developing virtues and good character and things. I’ve been really struck about, I can see where I want to go to in terms of, let’s say, my focus, my parenting or my ability to fall asleep when I want to or something, and maybe that’s behavior rather than character in some cases, but I think it’s involved in how I respond to those things is my character. Am I getting frustrated? Can I focus? I can see where I want to get to because of the work that I do with businesses and how they think. I’m reading all the research around these things, I have the head knowledge, and yet, it seems like character development just has its own agenda, it has its own pace, and we can cultivate habits, but actual maturation takes longer maybe than I would like. That’s kind of been surprising for me recently.
[06:30] What is philosophy
Nitish Upadhyaya: Pulling back a little bit, the philosophy, I think, sometimes conjures these images of lots of time thinking and pontificating, and what these old people would do. One of the things I love about working with you is that you have a wonderful way of making this come alive. So, from what we were just talking about, why is this relevant? Why is philosophy even a thing for organizations and individuals?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: I think it’s really important to distinguish between philosophy, philosophies and philosophers. Philosophy at Work is the business that I head up, and we’re a small collective of people, like me, who have backgrounds in philosophy. We have one behavioral scientist as well on our team. We go into businesses and firms, and deliver sessions that are training in critical thinking, strategic thinking and curiosity—and so, on the face of it, we are helping individuals and teams, and thereby businesses as well, pick up these skills that are needed. And in that, we’re focusing on philosophy, rather than philosophies and philosophers. So, we’re really interested in helping people.
When I say “philosophy,” I mean the love of wisdom. Going back to the ancient Greek etymology, philo means love, sophia means wisdom, and philosophy, by that I mean philosophical thinking—ways of thinking—the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and that kind of stuff. “Philosophies” are, you could say, rules of the game—a set account of what it means to be wise—and we have a whole range of those from all around the world. “Philosophers” are just the people that have been credited with coming up with those things. So, we don’t really teach philosophies, and we try not to talk too much about philosophers, because we’re not chiefly concerned with people just being able to talk about philosophy. Again, that goes back to that point of what I’m curious about. I don’t want to just think about philosophy—I want to do philosophy. I don’t want people to leave our sessions just being able to go, “Let me tell you something good about Socrates,” or “Let me tell you how to think critically.” I want us all to be that bit faster at asking our own questions, pausing in conversation, going, “Hang on. Actually, have we missed a trick here?”
When I set up the business, I thought what we were trying to do was give people those skills. I think that is what we do, but the more and more I do this—I’ve been doing this work for about 12 years now—I’m realizing, “Yes, that’s useful. We’ll get to those tools.” But a lot of times, actually what’s adding value is just carving out the space to go, “Right now, the agenda is for you to do some good thinking. The primary focus is not busyness, budgets or politics—right now, we get to play with the quality of our thinking.” A lot of times, I see people in the room relax into that and go, “That’s nice. We don’t often have time to think.” So, that’s good, and it is all, of course, joined up with real-world thinking about budgets, internal politics and all those sorts of things.
I think philosophies and philosophers can be interesting and useful, but philosophy as a way of thinking is useful because we all do think, but we think better to a degree when we are conscious of our thinking, when we’re aware of the moves we’re making, because then we can spot assumptions, biases, logical fallacies in our thinking, different things like that, and also because part of it is just cultivating a practice of thinking. And so, philosophies can be useful, but I think philosophy is really helpful when we’re trying to think through anything, but certainly complexity and uncertainty—all the things that are characterizing the world at work these days. When I started doing this work, as I said, 12 years ago, I would talk to people, and they’d go, “Wow, that sounds really interesting. I’m not quite sure how we would use you, but it sounds good.” Whereas, I think nowadays, there’s so much more pressure on not just what we think, but how we think, that if we recognize philosophy as that area of the humanities, an area of life that cares a lot about that, then right away we can go, “Actually, that should be doing something useful for us.” So, that’s why I would say philosophy is helpful, and hopefully not just thinking good thoughts, but doing good work.
[10:50] Tools for thinking about ethics
Amanda Raad: I was struck by what you said when you said we often don’t have time to think. It’s so true, and it ties so much into the complexity and the uncertainty, and everything that you talked about at work. The demands being pulled on everyone are so high, and only getting worse, I feel like, and just to call out that’s kind of the reality that we’re all talking about, I just think it’s really important. I think a lot of times, we don’t acknowledge that as the starting point that almost all of us are working in, and what we do about that. So, I’m jumping in off that point because I think it’s really important, and underlines so much of where there’s room to grow here.
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Yes. I think you’re exactly right, Amanda. We don’t often have the time. I think some of us, we don’t make the time, because we’re not sure what we would do with it when we had it. So, I’m trying really hard to give people tools so that they go, “I could do that. I’m going to set aside ten minutes for that then.” I think that will help us also make a bit more space for it too.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Is that where the Ethics Lab comes from? We talk to our clients quite a lot about ethics, compliance, and what “ethics” even means when people talk about what’s doing the right thing in a specific jurisdiction—everyone’s focused on their code of conduct. Talk to us a bit more about how you’re giving the space for people to engage in a concept like ethics, away from their day-to-day operations and activities that everyone has to do.
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: The Ethics Lab is a workshop environment where we’re wanting to support people who care about ethics, want to do good things, but not necessarily feel like, “Gosh, there’s this really wooly thing we need to think through. We really want to get this right, but where do we start? And how do we do it?” When there’s an appreciation that the answer to that is not just writing a policy or having a set of standards—those are, I would say, necessary conditions. In complex organizations, we need compliance, rules and guidance—they’re necessary, but I don’t think sufficient. One of my colleagues was an ethics manager, and sometimes, it would seem that all the ethical responsibility would be pushed to their desk. We want, in our Ethics Labs, to equip people all across the organization to be able to say, “I feel comfortable talking about ethics. It’s not this big scary concept that I feel like I haven’t got enough education in to talk about.” In those labs, we’re helping people understand, “What do we mean by ethics? What does it mean to think through some ethical considerations?” In the hope that that’s useful for people that are concerned with and have the remit of compliance to then use that thinking to inform their compliance, but also for people who that’s not on their plates, but still want to have a good handle on good ethical thinking.
Actually, it came about because I was realizing that the work we were doing with helping people with thinking skills could potentially enable someone to be a really clever knave, like, “If we help you be a really critical thinker, great strategic thinker, asking good questions, could we potentially help someone do that to poor ends?” I guess for a long time I thought, “No, it’s okay, because if you’re asking the right questions, it should hopefully correct towards goodness.” But I don’t think that’s always the case in practice, and so, we wanted to also come up with a lab that wasn’t just around the mechanics of good thinking, but also helped people do think their best in terms of “thinking good,” if I can say that grammatically incorrect phrase. And so, that’s where the Ethics Lab came from—we wanted to help people not just think mechanically correctly, or think well in that sense, but also come to good ends.
Nitish Upadhyaya: To marry that up with, I think, what you say is that you’re a “reluctant ethicist”—where does that come into the picture?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Where that comes from, being a “reluctant ethicist,” is when I was doing my master’s and my PhD—they were in the areas of philosophy that was in the ethics area—I was told, “When you graduate, you could be an academic or you could be an ethicist.” And that sounded great. When I looked into ethicist, a lot of what that involved was sitting on boards writing up rules, and I think that’s a necessary role, but I don’t think that’s where my strengths lie. I was really curious more in what is good. How do we understand people making tough choices? One of my favorite books is by an author named Rushworth Kidder, called How Good People Make Tough Choices, and it’s that, again, very fleshy approach. I used to teach ethical leadership to university students, and we would use that book. It was very much about, “It’s not that you’re a bad person and we’ve got to try to put a fence around you.” It’s much more, “You’re trying to make the right choice, but there’s competing priorities, and an ethical dilemma is a messy thing by definition.” So, how do you do that? I didn’t want to badge myself an ethicist and go into that line of work, because I thought, I don’t know if I’m the right person for that job, but also, I didn’t want people just to go, “Great, you’re the person that’s always going around with the clipboard checking are we being good. You’re the person that we straighten up and stop whispering when you come down the hallway, and you’re concerned about us following the rules.” But, actually, that’s not reality, and I didn’t want to just do that. I still think goodness is really important, and so, that’s why we’re doing ethics in the Ethics Lab, but as reluctant ethicists—not because we’re reluctant to get into ethics, but because the brand of ethicist, I think, sometimes has connotation of just being a moralist.
[17:00] Picking apart an ethical dilemma
Nitish Upadhyaya: So, how do you pick apart an ethical dilemma? If someone listening to this podcast either comes across them or their stakeholders come across ethical dilemmas all day, how do they begin to interact with them and come to an outcome—it might not be the perfect outcome, but what do they do?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: First of all, I think we have to say, “Am I looking at an ethical dilemma? What am I dealing with?” One thing that I learned from that book by Rushworth Kidder is the difference between ethics and morality. A lot of times, in day-to-day work, we use these terms interchangeably. We want to be ethical; we want to be moral, but actually, they’re distinct things. If you just search online for some definition of “ethics,” if you go back to the etymology, it technically means “the science of morality.” If ethics is just morality, then we have not only redundant terms, but almost everything becomes relative, because you have a morality, I have a morality, one firm has a morality, one country, etc. Moralities are just rules of the game that cultures have created, and if that’s what ethics is, then we’re stuck having to say, “Who are we to evolve our morality? I certainly can’t come up and say, “Can I help you sharpen yours and you help sharpen mine?” because the morality is just set.
We need the concept of “ethics” to be something that almost steps outside of morality and can do the science of it and can do the critiquing of it. And so, if we understand the difference between ethics and morality—morality are rules of the game; ethics is the philosophy, the science, the art of morality—then ethical dilemmas are when the rules of morality have run out, and actually, now, we’ve got two things that our morality says are good, but we can’t do both of them. So, a colleague, we discover, has done the wrong thing, they’ve broken a rule, and yet, we know that they’re in a really stressed state and they had a lot of things going on. We know their character. We know that they didn’t want to do that thing. On the one hand, our morality says, “You shouldn’t break the rules. That’s an important rule that got broken.” But our morality also says, “We should be understanding, and we should be a good colleague,” or whatever the principle might be. Our morality now is telling us to do two things, and they’re in competition. Unless we can find a third way and everything’s lovely, a lot of times, that doesn’t happen. So, that’s an ethical dilemma, when we have two good things that a set morality, which we subscribe to, has said we should be doing, but—the reality of life, the practical hours in the day, budgets or whatever else—the practical factors say we can’t do those two things, they’re in conflict.
To spot ethical dilemmas, we should say, “When are there two goods/two rights that are in tension? I’ve got an ethical dilemma.” A lot of times, that’s just really useful, because actually we might go, “Is it that? Oh no, it’s not. Actually, I’m just feeling tempted to do the wrong thing. Okay, I guess I’ll just do the right thing.” That’s hard enough, but I’ll just do that. But if I’m saying, “No, actually, I’ve got two right things/two good things,” now, I’ve got an ethical dilemma, and that’s something to work with.
[20:10] Skills needed to tackle ethical dilemmas
Amanda Raad: I want to take what you were just talking about, and also circle back to some of the things you said earlier, which I loved. Part of that is making sure that you try to find some practical application. We talked about everybody’s limits on time and people not making the space, maybe because they don’t know how to use the space, and everybody’s got all this different push and pull. Some of the trainings that you do, to the extent you were to go and work with the compliance team on some of the skills that they need to be able to use and some of the important skills that you really need to train them on, can you just talk to us a little bit about what those skills are and how to put them into practice?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: I think there’s two things that might be useful to say here—the skills, specifically to your question, certainly, but then, also, once we’ve identified an ethical dilemma, how do we think around it? If ethics is standing outside of morality, then there’s not going to be a clear-cut answer to, “Here’s how you just parse out an ethical dilemma and do this or that.” I would say the skills that are needed are curiosity, critical thinking and how we communicate our ideas. I think a lot of excellent thinking gets lost at the point of communication, but also, something that runs in the background of a lot of our sessions and has been there for a long time. Philosopher Julian Baggini, he said, “A lot of philosophy starts with attention—how we attend to things.” We don’t do a workshop on attention, but I think curiosity, critical thinking and communication, some of these things that are skills that are really important to things like ethics and compliance: they don’t get off the ground if we’re not attending to certain things. Again, if an ethical dilemma is that there’s two goods that are in tension, I might miss that there’s a dilemma there if I’m only attending to one horn of the dilemma. I might say, “No, all we’ve got here is that piece,” and I’m not even noticing the other half, so I’m missing that there’s a dilemma there. So, I think the first thing is looking at how we are spending our attention, I suppose, and when we are doing our compliance work, are we noticing—what are we doing to be consciously attending to salient factors, and how do we make sure we spot everything? And then, things around curiosity.
A lot of times, when we do curiosity workshops, we’ll be talking about the practice of asking great questions, and how not all questions are created equal. There might be questions that are actually opportunities just to show how clever I am, right? But actually, great questions are those that are honest, bold, vital, and they’re non-judgmental. If a compliance team is approaching their work saying, “What questions do we want to bring to this project or to this set of standards we’re developing?” If we think about the quality and the types of questions we’re asking, are the questions that we’re using to drive this honest? Are they coming from authentic curiosity or are they just because we think it has to already be like this? Are they bold? They might be contentious, but do we think they need to be asked? Are they vital? That’s an example of some of the kinds of things we might do. There’s a lot more that we could unpack, but I think those key skills of curiosity, critical thinking, communication, and then, starting off with attention, are pretty important.
[23:40] Exercises in attention
Amanda Raad: The starting with attention really resonates with me. Do you have any tips or tricks that you think you could throw out there on that? I imagine it’s attention of everyone. If you have a team, it’s not that you just need the trainer to have attention—somehow, you have to get everyone pointing in the same direction, which is really hard. So, any tips on that?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Yes, there’s a couple things. I’ll give one really quick thing, and then one thing that is a bit more of a group exercise that we do in the lab, and that might be useful in this context. The one really quick thing is, sometimes, I’ll just start a session with this if I know that people have literally just been dashing into the session, whether it’s virtual or in-person, from a really full day. Grab a Post-it and everyone just writes down on the piece of paper, for their own eyes only, all the things taking up cognitive bandwidth at that moment. So, things from the previous meeting, things that they thought they should have said differently before they left the house that morning, or whatever it is. Write those things down, and then fold it up into how many little pieces you want, because that can be quite cathartic, and set it to one side for the session. There’s something quite powerful about offloading what is in your brain onto the page, but then, really importantly, folding it up is we’re exerting our agency over it. That is telling our own psychology, “I can choose where I give my focus. I am choosing not to focus on those things I wrote down right now. I’m choosing to focus on this session,” or whatever the thing is we’re doing. “I’m going to set this over here, for better or worse. Those things are still there—when we’re done with the meeting, we can pick them back up.” That’s a really quick, really tangible thing that I’ve seen work well for making space for attention as individuals, and also, as a collective, if we’re all to do it as the meeting started.
The other thing that we do in the Ethics Lab is we have this grid that we’ve created. In the middle, it just says, “How good are your options?” It’s a two-by-two quadrant. Around the outside, one area it says “Virtues.” The other side it says, “Care.” Another side it says, “Rules.” And then, the last side, it says, “Ends,” as in, what are the end results. As a group, if you’re thinking through an ethical dilemma or a tough choice, and you want to give attention collectively to it, the way we do it is we say, “Everyone write down on a Post-it what you think the group could do? What maybe should we do as a next step?” And then, we gather those together and we go, “Which quadrant should it go on this two-by-two?” So, if we’re thinking about one end that says, “Virtues,” that’s saying, “If we were to do this thing that’s written on the Post-it, what kind of character would we be developing? As a group, as a person, as a company, do we think it would be developing good character?” If so, we put this Post-it towards that direction on the two-by-two quadrants. The “Rules” side: Are there any rules that we should make sure we’re considering or that we’ve missed, maybe, when we’re thinking about this idea? “Care”: What should we be caring about? Who should we be caring for? What does it mean to care around this project? Then, the last one, “Ends”: what’s the utility of this thing that we’re trying to work on?
Essentially, when I was studying philosophy, I was told you had to choose if you were going to be a virtue ethicist, a utilitarian ends-based ethicist, a rules-based deontological/Kantian person, or a care-based ethicist—you had to choose, and that was the work you were going to go into. With this we’re saying, “No, you don’t have to choose, but allow those four schools of ethics, those four schools of thought, to make sure that you’re not missing anything—you’ve considered all the main areas of thought anyway.” We find that when people do that, as a group, it helps them attend to lots of different things. And because you’ve got a diversity of thought in the room, you’ve got different people, they’re coming together and saying, “Actually, do you know what? Yes, I think we missed that we should be caring about that.” You have to talk through it, and so, it makes the group attend more deeply, I suppose, and with more breadth than they might have otherwise.
[27:35] How can compliance teams generate trust?
Nitish Upadhyaya: Those are such great practical exercises for folks to do with their own teams, and potentially, legal teams and compliance teams as they’re thinking about some of those difficult challenges or communicating “why” behind certain positions. Something we often get is people don’t trust us. We’re trying really hard to support them. We’re trying to be business-centric and to understand what the business is doing. But we’re often the evil police. We’re often the naysayers—the, “No, you can’t do this.” How do we work on trust? And how do we get people to think about trust in a different way?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Maybe this is also part of the reason I’m a reluctant ethicist, is because when we’re doing ethics, we’re trying to develop ourselves, we’re trying to do the right thing, and that’s hard, because sometimes it’s really tempting to do otherwise. So, I really appreciate that. I think that’s where if there’s someone who says, “I think we should go in this direction. This is better—this is more good,” then how is that not going to be received as, “Who are you to tell us what to do?” And I think that’s where we need trust. There’s a lot that we could say about trust, but the way that I think about trust is as confidence that someone else is also aligned with what’s important to me in that situation. If you think about a time where you say, “Do I feel safe with this person? Do I believe what they’re saying? Do I feel like I can trust them? Can I count on them?” I want to know that they’re competent to do the thing we’re counting on them for, but that’s just the start of it. Certainly, in the legal space and compliance space, the people you’re working with have loads of competence, so that’s not usually the issue. The issue is, “Do I know that you’re motivated to use your competence for my good, or for the good of other things that I care about, or do you just have your own compliance agenda?” I wonder if that’s where sometimes it can break down. “Are you just caring about that, or do you also appreciate what I’m trying to do over here?” And so, if we can communicate to our colleagues, “I see you. I see what’s important. I get it,” and compliance aligns with that, then I think there’s a greater chance of having that trust. Trusting means opening ourselves up to letdown and betrayal, and that’s really risky stuff, but that’s also what makes trust valuable and beautiful. But that’s not going to get off the ground unless we can show others that we’re empathizing, we understand what’s important, and we’re going to elevate that over and above other things that are also what we are usually really concerned with.
Amanda Raad: I think trust, psychological safety, the ability to feel safe to be curious, think critically and communicate honestly, all the things that you’ve been talking about—I don’t want to say aspirational; I think it’s so important—has to be earned over time, too. I think it’s a little bit about making sure that the experiences people live then live up to that safe environment that you just described, which is, it takes purposeful effort. I think we don’t always get it right—it doesn’t have to be perfect. They remain our core values and something we strive to, but I would think that that’s something over time you really have to build.
[30:50] Thinking about trust
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Definitely. I think probably about six years ago, I was given a book about systems thinking, and it really changed how I think about trust. That’s because in systems thinking approaches, they’re all about feedback loops, and having a store of something that you care about. When I thought about, “What happens if we think about trust in terms of systems thinking?” It showed me that you don’t have to be perfect to build trust. In that book, they said the bathtub is a good example of a system. Say that you have your water in the bathtub—that’s your stock. You want to have water in the bathtub. But you’ve got a crack in the bathtub—that’s imperfection. So, you’re leaking, you’re dripping out bits of water, slowly. You’re losing some of your stock. Now, a non-systems thinker, the book would say, would go, “Oh no. The only thing we can do is fix the bathtub and have it be perfect.” But a systems thinker would go, “There’s other ways you can solve this, actually. You can also have feedback loops and you could turn on the tap so that to the same amount that’s dripping out, you’re dripping more water in.” Now, that’s not good for sustainability, but what it tells me about trust is if I want to maintain a good amount of trust with my colleagues, and I know I’m not going to be perfect—there’s going to be a proverbial crack in the bathtub—then I can’t fix the crack. I can try to repair broken trust, but in our story, fixing the crack is me being perfect, and I can’t do that, because I’m a human. Instead, what I’m going to do is turn the tap on and make sure that I’m feeding what we could call relational stock into it. So, that means listening well, looking out for what my colleagues are really saying, and finding ways to show them that I’ve heard them. I think you’re right—it’s a slow build—but if we’ve been doing that for a while, then when we inevitably do make a mistake, people are much more understanding and forgiving. They go, “I’ve been around the block enough times with Brennan to know I don’t think he meant that. That’s not really who he is.” And it’s reciprocal—we do the same going back that way too. So, yes, I agree—we don’t have to be perfect. I think it’s all about, again, are we attending to each other? Are we looking out? Are we communicating? That yes, we see each other. We care about each other.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I think it’s such a good way of talking about embracing uncertainty, and letting all of these different factors that influence trust—knowing that you can’t influence everything—and also, I think, appreciating that there isn’t a direct causal link. If you do one thing it’s not going to necessarily link to another. There are multiple things that are playing around, and we do a lot of this in the science of complex adaptive systems.
[33:30] Takeaways from the conversation
Amanda, why don’t you give us your key takeaway from our chat with Brennan today?
Amanda Raad: There’s so many, but I think the attention focus, and how do we attend and set ourselves up for success, is really important for me. Attention and that we don’t have to be perfect, is really important, because I think a lot of times people throw up their hands and think, “I can’t get to the perfect scenario, so I’m just not going to try.”
Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you so much. Brennan, my final rapid-fire question is one I’m personally interested in: Where next on your family adventure?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: When we leave Porto, we’re coming back to London a week or so. I’m going to do some work with firms there and connect with family and everyone. Then, we’re springing back off, heading over to Sri Lanka. So, putting ourselves in a different situation again, and really looking forward to that.
Nitish Upadhyaya: I am jealous beyond belief. Thank you so much for a really fascinating conversation. We talk about ethics a lot, but we don’t often stop to think about what it means and how we should think about thinking, which is probably my big takeaway from what we’ve discussed. Before we leave our audience, where can listeners find out more about you and your work?
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: I’m, of course, over at LinkedIn at Dr. Brennan Jacoby, and online, Philosophy at Work is www.philosophyatwork.co.uk.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Fantastic. All the best for your ongoing adventures. I hope that the journey of growth and character development continues apace. And I’m excited to see the family in a year’s time, and I wonder where you’ll be.
Dr. Brennan Jacoby: Me as well—I’m very curious about that. Thank you so much, Nitish, and thank you so much, Amanda. It’s been a real pleasure.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you all for tuning in to the latest episode in our Culture & Compliance Chronicle series. For more information about our series and any of the ideas discussed today, take a look at the links in our show notes. You can also subscribe to the series wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Amanda, Richard, and I will be back very soon for our next chapter. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or novel perspectives you want everyone else to hear about, get in touch. Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful day and stay curious.