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We are skilled guides helping teams turn big thinking into impactful doing. By creating engaging, fun, and transformative experiences, we bring people together to connect deeply, work better, and grow more innovative.
During this podcast series we will explore programs to make collaboration meaningful, fostering cultures of alignment and continuous improvement that drive lasting results.
We envision a world where teamwork builds trust, drives growth, and creates lasting impact. Through carefully designed workshops, we spark positive, lasting shifts that unlock the full potential of teams and businesses. Serious work doesn’t have to feel heavy—we make it enjoyable and inspiring.
We value teamwork, continuous improvement, and meaningful connections. Great ideas and success come from bringing people together, thinking differently, and building something bigger. By staying curious and people-focused, we help businesses thrive through collaboration, innovation, and a culture of growth.
[00:00:00]
Why Speaking Changes Lives
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Arel Moodie: I am a big believer personally, by the way that professional speaking, keynotes, workshops, facilitations, are the fastest way to impact and change someone's life. Like a really good keynote can totally transform someone's perspective.
Podcast Host: The world is changing For most humans, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address financial and political uncertainty. Friction with back to office mandates and challenging hybrid workplace collaboration. Not to forget. Important environmental social responsibility and governance initiatives.
Combined with the rapid pace of digital transformation and the need for human-centered AI integration, change is happening and fast. This rapid change has highlighted the need for increased speed to innovation and long-lasting change adoption in [00:01:00] many organizations. Whether you are a startup working on agile process.
Or a mature organization navigating change within existing complex structures, the skillset and need to adapt has never been more vital.
Accessible Disruption Intro
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Podcast Host: The team from Strategy Table wanna help the wider world understand the need and approach to meaningful and impactful change management. Helping organizations navigate disruption and make change accessible, it often starts with a meaningful conversation.
This is accessible disruption.
Anthony Vade: Welcome to another episode of Accessible Disruption, where we put creative change management under the microscope to ask, why is change so hard? Why do teams. It become discombobulated when they get disrupted. And how can we align through a co-creative path to the most meaningful impact organizations can create?
Really excited to get into [00:02:00] today's content because we're gonna be exploring many different topics from both understanding what does it mean to truly engage with adults at an adult level. And how do we develop adults in a way that's not patronizing, but's really engaging. It can bring about positive change for those adults.
We have an expert on this topic that has done a lot of research into it, and not only just looking at how we can really push forward adult development, but also what does it mean to be a thought leader and how can we use these thoughts? We have these communities that we're part of to push forward positive change in the world.
So as is standard on pretty much every episode we've ever hosted of this, I'm gonna throw the first question to my co-host, the wonderful Tahira and Dean, of course, I, I always forget to introduce myself. I will get this right. I bet you by season six I'll remember to tell everybody that I'm Anthony Vade, one of the co-founders of [00:03:00] Strategy Table and Tahira, who is Arel to you.
Meet Arel Origin Story
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Tahira Endean: You know, this is a kind of a fun story. So I had been kind of stalking Arel for a while because, well, first of all, I'm saying his name wrong. So it's Elle a relative, I've learned. Um, so I've been stalking him for a while and talk it, dot and speaking that he does. And I was like, how can I get to meet this guy?
And then I'll, a message appeared in my LinkedIn box, because you had done a search for people you should meet in the event industry. And my name popped up. And so that is how we first connected. And then we've had one great conversation and by the end of that conversation I was doing what I do, which is inviting you to come onto the podcast.
Um, because we love talking to people who are curious and interesting. And you are both of those things. So now one of the, um, we always liked to start at the beginning. That's how we started the, you go back to our original [00:04:00] podcast, it's actually Anthony and Ryan and I talking to each other about our origin stories.
So you have a really interesting origin story. Tell us a little bit how you became to be an adult development theory expert. You can start as young as you want.
Survival To Research Nerd
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Arel Moodie: You know what was really unique about how I think I got interested in studying people is that it was, it was survival first. So I grew up in the inner city of Brooklyn and the projects I witnessed, people get murdered and shot and stabbed and robbed and all these things.
In my early days, I had to really instinctually understand patterns in people. When are people getting upset? Where should I go? Where should I not go? Why are jokes funny? How do you diffuse a situation? So a lot of my interest in understanding people really started out as purely survival mechanism 1 0 1.
And then as I got older and went to college and started exploring different ideas and modalities of thought, I started realizing that [00:05:00] that curiosity was not. Just a survival mechanism. It was actually a skill. So I got really fascinated in trying to understand what makes people tick and going into lots of different, lots of like reading every book that someone can tell me.
And then one day someone said, Hey, you know, you read a lot of books, but do you ever, do you know, do you ever read research? Do you ever go to what the books are actually? And I was like, no, I've never actually gone to where the books are actually sourcing their data from. I was like, well, I think you actually might find that really fascinating because most people actually.
Don't like to read research. Most people don't like to do that because it's not written for the everyday consumer. And that's how I got introduced to adult development theory and Eagle Development theory and understanding different stages of development. And I became wildly enamored with it more than anything else, than I've ever, ever consumed, ever.
And the more fascinating thing about it is. Most people don't know about it. They may have had like embers of it. They may have seen like different, you know, like probably one of [00:06:00] the most popular one of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. He's adult development theory, which answers the question, what do people need?
And I think by asking different questions and answering them, you can actually get a holistic picture of people and then understand, well, why does someone cause me frustration consistently? Why do I get upset? In certain things, what is that trigger? And then if you can look at it versus have it happen to you, you can be more, um, aware of how to affect change.
And it's been one of the most fascinating things and, and now a lot of the work that I do, how you apply that to team misalignment. Why do good teams get frustrated with each other? Why do one hour meetings last for four hours? Why do some people constantly rubbing their forehead in their meeting in frustration and just can't understand why other people don't get it?
And I think that when you can understand where these misalignments show up, you can do the work. And I think ultimately any organization wants people to just do the work and [00:07:00] enjoy doing the work. And so much of it gets bogged down by just human complexity. So I, I think it's a incredible view on how to simplify human complexity.
And I'm, I, I just, I'm just in love with it from a theoretical and practical implication.
Tahira Endean: I love that. And you're right, a lot of people don't wanna go back the research that is so interesting. So our other co-founder, Ryan, who's not here with us today, and I actually met when we were doing our Masters of Creativity and Change leadership, and he's as much as Anthony as a complete nerd on theory.
It's, which is, and it is it, it's so important to go back to the, the roots and the origins quite often and to get to where we're going. So of course, accessible disruption. This is what the podcast is called. Controlled Intentional challenges. Controlled intentional changes. Do you think that these can happen really at work?
And accelerate teams development? Or do you think that adult development happens more [00:08:00] just in the face of fire?
Stages Of Adult Development
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Arel Moodie: Well, it happens really, the question that we ask in the modality that I like is, how do I make sense of the world? That's the primary question that it answers. So there's stages that there's what's called conventional and post-conventional stages.
I spend most of my time talking about the conventional stages and a little bit of post-conventional, simply because about 85% of the population falls into these conventional stages. So it's happening in everything that we do. Um, so there's the self-centric stage, which kind of primarily asks the question, how do I get something out of this?
What's in it for me? There's the group centric stage, which is my sense of belonging, my sense of peoplehood, what rules, unwritten rules do I have that my people have. And if you don't, there's an us versus them. There's the skill centric where what I do and who I am is interlocked, and I'm looking for the most efficient, best, [00:09:00] most effective way to do something.
Then there's the achiever stage, which is more about how do we set big goals together and have more of a strategic philosophy towards the approach. Now, each one of these stages we're, some of us are ebbing and flowing through them throughout the day based on the situation we're in. Some of us are squarely in one stage, and the whole world is a nail, and we are a hammer, and we do things one way and understanding what stage.
One I am operating from, but two, what question are we actually trying to answer? And are we answering it from the same perspective? So whether we're aware of the adult development stages or not, we're living them, we're processing them, and whether it's with our spouse or with our coworker, they're showing up constantly.
Anthony Vade: Tahira, you did it again. How do you keep finding these people that I instantly fall in love with? Because [00:10:00] everything you just said, I now want to like unpack every piece of that fine detail. Um. And, and perhaps we'll do that. Could we, could we, could we take a step back and start looking at the, those individual elements?
Can, can you give us a bit more, pretend I've never heard of any of this stuff before, because there will be some listeners out there who a lot of that may be just, just flew past them very, very quickly. They probably as inspired as me, but can you break that down a little bit more? What does that individual side of things look like initially?
Adult Vs Child Development
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Arel Moodie: Yeah, so the way that it works is that we're all familiar with, uh, child development theory. That says, you know, is my child. You know, if I play peekaboo with someone who's zero to six months old, they don't have object permanence. So they think I've disappeared when I put my hands in front of our faces.
So if we look at child development theory as stages, that we walk through steps, if you will, if you just wait long enough, a child should, as long as everything is healthy and good, [00:11:00] move through each one of those stages of child development theory. Now, adult development theory is a little bit different.
We have these different stages. We move through throughout our lifetime. Now, these stages aren't actually like steps. They're more like those nesting dolls, those Russian nesting dolls where you take off one layer, there's one end, and then you take another layer off. So around 18 to 21 years old, we all typically, again, I usually like to use the word typically 'cause no one's exactly a hundred percent the same.
Deep Dive The Four Stages
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Arel Moodie: But typically we all start in the self-centric stage. We start our adult life. About how do I get the most out of it? Now, I might want to know what Tahira's interested in and what Anthony's interested in, but only to achieve my goals. How can you help me achieve what I want? And I might actually, oh, you care about helping babies read?
I care about helping babies learn how to read. I only care to the amount that I believe I will gain something from the [00:12:00] relationship and the moment's not interesting or I don't think it benefits me, I lose interest in that thing. So what happens is we start in this first stage, which is personal or what, uh, what many call self-centric.
It is about me. And everything that I do kind of revolves around how do I get as much things out of life? How do I achieve things as quickly as possible for my personal gain? Okay? Now what happens is I can spend my whole life, and this is called horizontal growth, what I'm referring to right now, and just get really good at being self-centric and get really good at caring about my personal needs and will I, and as long as I'm getting what I want outta life.
I will stay squarely in that stage. Okay, so that is the self-centric, and there's so many different, and I'm happy to go through it. There's a lot, there's like characteristics, strengths, fears, desires, and all that stuff that go with each one. But then what happens is if I'm not getting what I want outta life and I [00:13:00] start going, you know what?
I've been a one man wolf pack, a one woman wolf pack, and I'm just not achieving the things I thought I would achieve. I'm not as happy as I thought. Then we move into the next stage, which many call the group centric stage. I like to call it a sense of belonging. Now, this is where I wanna find people who get me.
I want to be around people that understand like what they care about, I care about. So you see this in politics, you see this in religion. You see this in sports. You see this in professions. You know, certain heart centric professions like say hospice care. Is a very different sense of belonging than investment banker.
There's different rules that make up typically the type of person that falls into it. And you want to be around the people that get you and, and, and you get them and, and you can live in this kind of squarely group centric life. So if you think about someone who goes into politics, you have your conservative, you have your liberal, right?
I have conservative [00:14:00] beliefs, I have liberal beliefs, and you're squarely in the center of those beliefs. And that's who, and again. You can horizontally grow your whole life and just get really good at that. As long as you get what you want, feel like you feel fulfilled. Now, vertical growth is when you move through these stages.
Now it happens when you are in the group centric stage long enough and you're not getting what you want outta life. You're like, I'm following all the rules. I'm doing what everyone's telling me I'm supposed to do. But you know what? I'm still not. I'm frustrated. So then what happens is we move to what's called skill centric, or what I like to call tactical.
This is where you start going, you know what? I've gotta get really good at something. I've gotta become an expert at something. I've gotta learn how to do a thing better than anyone else does it. And now I'm looking for the most effective way. And I, I believe there's like a. The best way to shave, the best way to drive a car, the best way to run a meeting, I'm constantly looking for the most [00:15:00] tactile best way to do something.
And again, just like the other stages, I can spend my whole life trying to maximize how to do things the best way or, or typically I find one thing that I latch onto and I wanna be the best at that. And that's how I add value and give. And then what happens? Again, horizontally grow as long as you on that stage, but.
The achiever stage, or I like to call the strategic stage, is typically the arch type of Western society. This is like the CEO mindset, the big thinker. You realize no matter how good you are at the thing, you can't do it all yourself. You, you need to develop a team, you need to get people around you, and you start thinking strategically and you start thinking big picture and long term.
And now what you care about is developing other people, setting long-term goals, building something much bigger. And then there's, there's stages after that which are post-conventional. [00:16:00] But I think I'll pause there 'cause I just gave a kind of a, a, a graduate level overview of, of it.
Stages In Team Misalignment
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Arel Moodie: But the, the simple idea is that each one of these stages are represented right now in any group of people.
Now the more that these stages best interact with each other, the more effective teams are. And the more that these stages conflict with each other, the more friction misalignment teams have. So being aware of these stages, we'll start making you go, oh, you know what? As an example, I'm strategic in my thinking.
So I talk a lot of big picture, big ideas, big visions, and I'm talking to a team member that's on that self-centric personal level who's like, how does this affect me? Okay, we need to make changes, but like. What, what, oh, what does this mean to me? And you're like, no, no, no. You're thinking too small, expand.
And now I'm just caring about how this affects me. You're trying to expand my, and then we're going back and forth and nobody's hearing each other. So there's lots of different ways that these [00:17:00] stages interact with each other. There's way that stages within themselves conflict with each other. Uh, so it's very, very fascinating.
But once you understand these stages. You start seeing your past history differently. You start, people typically see, Ooh, I remember when I was like that. I remember when I was like that. And you also start seeing like, Ooh, this person might be operating this way, which is different than me. And it, it, it creates an incredible doorway to better understand people.
Why Facilitators Are Mandatory
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Tahira Endean: Do you think that, you know, and I'm looking at this now from the work you do as a speaker, the work we're doing as facilitators, do you think that. It's beneficial for teams to have that external perspective to help guide them through some of that thinking and making some of those connections between where they are at and where they'd like to be.
Arel Moodie: It's almost mandatory, to be honest with you. The reality is, my job as a leader, I might be able to say things like, Hey, we're all [00:18:00] seeing things differently and saying it differently, but all in the same way. But when you have a facilitator, you know, like yourself that can come in and talk about collaboration and or, you know, Anthony come in and talk about these brain glitches and how they show up, you're, you're diving into this world.
You understand the nuance and their circumstances and how they show up, and ultimately you can always speak to them with a lot more clarity and you'll know the difference of talking to someone who has a surface level understanding of something and someone who has a. Deep understanding because they can take something, even though it may sound simple, it creates so much clarity in that simplicity.
And, and, and I tend to find that most leaders are good at what they do, but if there's a specific problem, they need to find someone and that that goes to that tactile expertise that's really, really good at it so that they can help them achieve their strategic goals. So I, I mean, I, I go as far to say it's, it's mandatory.
And again, I could read a book, I [00:19:00] could go to chat GPT and I can summarize everything I said, but. When someone brings out a circumstance and you don't know how to handle it, it's gonna fall flat.
Anthony Vade: Brilliant. I, this takes me back to a previous podcast where we were talking about the foresight preferences and how, uh, there's, in terms of thinking preferences and how some people have the preference for clarifying things, others have preferences for ideating. People like to develop those ideas and make them actionable, and then some people like to take those ideas and, and implement them as well.
And, and, and I think there's a lot of cross between those preferences that people have and then where they sit in these areas that you are talking about as well. Because the way that somebody who's individualistic will approach, uh, clarifying differently to somebody who is. Thinking more on that sort of team belonging sort of level of things.
If I was to throw at you, you know, we, we've got an organization gathered around the table with us. We've been disrupted by something. Um, I'll let you make up whatever the [00:20:00] disruption is to make it easier for you, but they've been disrupted by something and we have. A, a group at the table that's large enough that we can move them in a direction, but small enough that we can address them individually.
And you have a, a person who's trying to navigate this. In each of those buckets that you've shared, how might you as a leader of that team, help them see this situation, see this disruption and, and help them address it in a way that aligns them despite their differences?
Align Method For Disruption
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Arel Moodie: Yeah, so, um, I teach an, or I teach organization something called the align method.
And I'm a really, really believer, big believer that this is exactly how you handle disruption. What most people do is, Hey, there's a problem. Now let's go solve that problem. And I believe there's a couple of pre-steps that can take a few moments or could take hours depending upon how much agreement you have that are important.
So the first question you're supposed to ask yourself is. What problem are we solving right now? So something just showed up, so we all have to agree there's this big disruption. Maybe there's a new, [00:21:00] uh, legal change, or maybe there's a new policy change, or maybe there's a new elected official that doesn't have, you know, the same interest that you have.
Like, so we first have to define clearly, well, what problem are we looking to solve first? Once you decide that, then you have to ask yourself. Is it more important for us to solve this from a personal level, a belonging level, a tactical level or strategic level? We have to decide at what stage do we believe this problem needs to be attacked?
So I might go around the room and say, is this like we need to talk about big ideas? Is this we need to talk about? What specifically do we do? Is it, how is this affecting everyone? Or is this how, what does my job security look like? How is this affecting me? So you may start strategically and then work your way down.
You may say, Hey, this is all about. Personal and how do I feel about it and like, what's going on with you? The human. So we have to define like where do we think the biggest fire is? Once everyone agrees on what that fire is, then we have to say, can I operate [00:22:00] from that stage to solve this problem? So for example, if I'm highly emotional about something because it's personally affecting me and I'm trying to be tactical, maybe I can't, maybe I need to say, wait a minute, I need to bring myself to.
Be tactical right now, or maybe I need to say, I can't even go tactical, y'all. I'm being honest with you. I need to do a founder check-in because I'm super stressed out about my personal wellbeing and I can't handle it. So I need to align myself with the stage that the problem is at. Then I need to make sure every, do we all agree this is the problem, this is the stage, or we all in the same place?
Yes. Now let's go solve the problem. That to me is the work that most organizations don't have the knowledge or the skillset or, or the understanding 'cause I mean, how would they, they don't, they don't study this kind of work, but that framework allows us to align ourselves to solve the right problem.
Because if someone's talking about, oh my gosh, we're gonna have to let people go, what's Joe gonna think about it? What's Mary gonna think about it? And someone else is saying, yeah, but we have to hit our, like financial objectives. And someone else is saying, [00:23:00] but where's the company gonna be in five years because of it.
Now we're all solving a problem from a different stage or maybe solving different problems in the same neighborhood, and that just creates chaos and, and nobody wins.
Tahira Endean: Nobody wants, well, we say nobody wants chaos, which,
Arel Moodie: so
Tahira Endean: it's
Arel Moodie: much fun whether people admit it or not. We watch drama shows, not because they're not chaotic,
Tahira Endean: right?
So we don't want chaos in our own lives. We just wanna watch chaos. So, but sometimes there's also there, once pe, sometimes people are in so much alignment that nothing is getting done because everyone's so comfortable with the way things are. So.
Disrupting Comfortable Teams
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Tahira Endean: What might be some tools that leaders can bring using, you know, your thinking and the, your approach to disrupt a team that's too comfortable.
Everyone's getting along, but no one's challenging the ideas. You, we, I mean, we all know this scenario as well.
Arel Moodie: Yeah. So typically when you see a group that's like that, they're typically mostly operating from that [00:24:00] group centric belonging phase. Here's how we do things, here's how, and it feels really, really.
Like, we've got our rules. It's really comfortable. There was an organization that they spent so much time talking about each other's feelings that they weren't actually doing work. Now they, they happen to be the, this particular company, I'm think about, happen to be in a great place where they were so big that it's kind of like you're just, it's just working.
You know, you're too big to fail. But then new leadership came in and it's like we're having all these meetings to talk about how everyone's feeling about like society at large. That we're not actually doing the work at hand. So one of the things that you can do, well, one with introduction and knowledge of these stages is you can say, Hey y'all, we've been operating from this group centric belonging phase, which I think is great, but you know what?
Let's do a challenge and say, well, what are some tactical things that we should start doing? What are some, and then it becomes a invitation. So it's either two words, it's challenge or invitation, [00:25:00] depending upon the culture. Sometimes challenge is very exciting, like let's overcome it, and sometimes invitation is more inclusive and it brings people in.
So you know, knowing your group is important, but challenge or invitation or using both of those, our great ways to say how do we think tactically about. Moving forward. We've been thinking a lot about, you know, this kind of sense of belonging, but what could we do? Or you say, let's think strategically, which is very different than tactical.
So strategic is more where should we be in two years? What challenge should we solve as an organization that's just strategic. Tactical is, Hey, you know what? Maybe it'd be really fun if we solved this challenge. Okay, well how would we do it? Let's just brainstorm. And then we start coming up with ideas.
And then it starts becoming, okay, well who owns this idea? What metric do we wanna move? And you get into all the fun traditional KPIs and things that we get into that. Some people live in that world, right? But it's understanding, are we all tactical people? Are we all personal? Typically, [00:26:00] when groups get very, um, status quo.
It's there in a group centric where it's like, this is how we do things here.
Strategic Framing Change
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Arel Moodie: And then it becomes the leader's job, uh, to then challenge that by saying, well, let's think strategically, let's think tactically going to a different stage than the one that we're operating mainly from. And that will open it up so it doesn't seem so scary.
It doesn't seem so like a departure from norms, because whenever there's a departure from norms, what normally happens is that we create an us versus them in our mind. Are you a them? If you're a them, you're evil, bad, wrong, and everything you do is terrible. If you're an us, you're good. Wonderful. So if you're introducing a new idea, that might feel like a departure from norms.
Introducing it as a, well, let's tactically think about this. Let's strategically think about this. Introduces it like it's basically sugar to make the medicine go down versus just going, Hey everyone, let's do a randomly new thing, could freak everyone out. And then you get shut down and [00:27:00] nobody moves.
Anthony Vade: You are gonna really, you're gonna really enjoy my new book. 'cause there's, there's a lot of alignment here.
Honest Starts Brain Science
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Anthony Vade: I like that you started with the, you know, the whole concept of having an honest start and, you know, an, an honest kickoff point where you share, okay, where are we at with this? And, and, and, and you are applying a lot of the neurological science behind.
If we don't get this stuff out on the table, if we don't address probably some cortisol that's going on in the discomfort in our brains, it's often referred to as the amygdala hijack, where it stops your prefrontal cortex. You mentioned it actually, you said you're holding the front of your head, and when we hold the front of our heads, we're actually caressing our prefrontal cortex that's responsible for us understanding the world and feeling, you know, with predicting what might come.
So having that honest start to the thing to be able to put people at ease is important that we all agree, we are aligned and we manage our discomfort. Recognize that we can never remove any of the discomfort, but we, we mitigate its impact on our ability to see [00:28:00] possibility in the future. Um, I loved your point about the belonging sometimes becoming a curse because as much as we dislike the feeling of cortisol in our brain.
We love the feeling of oxytocin and serotonin and the feel good. Give me a hug. Uh, we all in agreement kumbaya. Let's sing a song and caress each other. That can, we could just swallow in that because when we're wallowing in each other's love, it feels good and we need to unlock the dopamine, which is the neurochemical, gets us to move and feel reward for progression as well, which kind of leads me in.
Into asking you to dig a bit deeper into, we talk about skills then developing and getting into that tactical, like where are we gonna take it? How does the individual take on board the need for that, and how might they bring that team, that the organization that they belong into, so that there is a culture of developing tactical skills in the direction of the strategy that the organization seeks?
Arel Moodie: Yeah, that's a great question.
Values As Written Rules
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Arel Moodie: Every [00:29:00] organization actually operates in the group centric stage. The key is to that every group centric stage, every sense of belonging. We have rules that are written and unwritten. Every single. You know, one of the things that I, I speak at a lot of conferences, and I say some conferences are handshake conferences, and some conferences are hug conferences, right?
You go to certain events, everybody's hugging, or people are handshaking. That's an unwritten rule. There's no rule that says if you attend this conference, you must hug people. But it's just how it, how it flows. So when you're looking at making people more skilled and more tactical, actually having that as a value, that's actually a written rule of what we do here is super important.
Most organizations, when they look at values, it's usually a, a, a frivolous exercise in these words that mean nothing. But if you actually live your values, what happens is if we say, for example. Our value is collaboration. [00:30:00] That's a very belonging phrase. Now, if you say we have a value of constantly getting better, well that's a tactical thing.
That's a very explicit thing. So then it becomes my job as a leader to make sure that the values that we say are actually our values show up. In our meetings show up in the way that we do things. 'cause most values, again, live on a website and a hidden page that gets no traffic and then it dies there.
But if I'm the leader and I say no, I actually genuinely care. You know, like one of the values that are within my company on the Talk a dot side is that like we care about the individual. If you work for us, we care about you as an individual. So that means we have unlimited personal time off. So if you have any reason you need to go off, no questions asked, we trust you.
We trust that you're not gonna. We, we trust that you're not going to abuse it. And again, so far no one that we've dealt with have abused it. And we also have to think about how do we serve the customer first? How do we serve the client first? So now when we have our meetings, it's [00:31:00] job. Our job is leadership, is are we serving the customers first?
Are we serving the clients? What's their experience? How can we lower friction? What are we doing to make sure that they're better? A situation gets brought up and it's a frustrating situation. If you go back to your values, well, how do we take care of the client first? How do we take care of them? And sometimes you gotta take care of them by doing the thing that they don't want you to do.
Because I'm also a big believer that when someone tells you that something is wrong, they're usually right. When someone tells you how to fix it, they're usually wrong. Um, so your job is to figure those things out. So your job as a leader is to bring those values. Again, if tactical and strategic or tactical or like very specific is a part of what you want.
To make it a written rule, to make it a part of who you are, because then you can always go back to that as well. This is who we are, this is our DNA, this is what makes us up. And if you don't like that DNA, it's fine. Right? But this is who we are.
Garden Not Net Hiring
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Arel Moodie: And I believe that as an organization, we sh we have two ways to build a good team.
It's the butterfly analogy, which I love. There's two ways to catch a [00:32:00] butterfly. You can either chase 'em with a net or you can build a beautiful garden that the butterfly wants to land on. So when you know what your values are and you live 'em out, you build a garden that people wanna land on. And if you don't, then you're constantly chasing, trying to get good talent with a net.
And it's usually harder to attract with a net than it is to attract with a garden.
Sponsor Break And Teasers
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Anthony Vade: You asked me when we're in the green room before we pushed record what was my favorite episode? It might've just happened, but right now we need to take a really short break to, uh, hear from some of our sponsors. But I do wanna give a shout out to previous episodes as well.
We were just touching on points around values. Our episode with David Allison did a deep dive on what are real values and how do they align, not just from a business perspective, but how do they align to individual values? What do individuals value, and what does that mean for business as well? Great episode to go back and listen to as well.
We're gonna come back after a short break and take a little bit more of a view into what does it mean to be strategic and what does it mean to be a thought leader. And I [00:33:00] think that's from a perspective of thought leader to an industry, to the business world, and even a thought leader within your own organization so that you can, uh, help to drive forward some of these initiatives.
We'll be right back after a very quick break.
Tahira Endean: We have so much aligned thinking that, that this has of course made it really fun for us, but also with some really, uh, great new points for our listeners, which we really appreciate.
What Talk Dot Is
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Tahira Endean: I wanna go back to how we met because you have a company, you are also a founder. It is called Talk dot, and talk dot has become an incredible speaker resource, you know, in.
The work that I do with IMEX and where we bring many speakers to our show every year, including Anthony, we are often sent by speakers who are members of Talk Dot and use your tool. I get many [00:34:00] post-conference for the hugging kind of conference. I get many co post-conference conference results of Talk dot from people who loved their presentations.
And so I would love you to tell us, just talk us through a little bit about what talk.is, how it started and where you're going. We can do that one at a time though. So tell us first what it is.
Arel Moodie: Yeah, so Talk Dot uh, originally was built as a tool for speakers to get feedback and data on their presentations.
Most speakers don't actually measure the impact of their work. They just kind of show up, do their thing, and then bounce and they go, I hope people got something out of it. And we thought that there's no data driven way to make decisions in the speaking world. It's all marketing, branding, reputation, gut feeling.
Maybe you saw someone and there's so many other industries that have created objectivity to their industry and our just hasn't. 'cause there's never been a central place. Most people who do surveys of some sort, they do an individual survey, it lives with that [00:35:00] organization and then it kind of dies on a digital shelf within their walls.
So we thought, well, if we could create like a Yelp of speakers, if we can actually get reviews of them, then we can actually start using data to help drive the industry forward. I'm a big believer personally, by the way, that professional speaking, keynotes, workshops, facilitations, are the fastest way to impact and change someone's life.
Like a really good keynote can. Totally transform someone's perspective. So how do we get more people into roles that maybe their marketing or their branding or their awareness doesn't allow them to be on someone's radar, but the data shows they'd be a really, really good fit. So we had to figure out how do we get all that data?
So that's what Talk Dot has been. And now like the big vision of it is how do we help event planners and organizers who are throwing events? Make more data-driven decisions in what speakers they choose, what content they choose, what topics they choose. And because we have so many millions of data points on, so, uh, we have over 12,000 speakers currently [00:36:00] using it, we now can help event planners find speakers based on what they're looking for or even give suggestions on what might be a good fit, and then match them to speakers that are a good fit because we have data on them.
Tahira Endean: And Anthony, are you gonna be 12,001? Is that true?
Anthony Vade: I've already signed up.
Tahira Endean: Excellent.
Arel Moodie: Hey, welcome to I started Unicorn Family,
Anthony Vade: everybody. I just started, uh, yeah, I started filling out my profile the other day as, as soon as we booked this podcast. So, yes, I, I've started populating my, my stuff in there, but, and it really resonated with me immediately because I probably speak at.
20 to 30 events a year. And what I find pretty consistently is I, I request some feedback from the ones that booked me and I get that,
Arel Moodie: yeah, everyone had a good time or
Anthony Vade: yes, it was well received. It's like, no, no, no. I, I wanna know what I could have improved or I wanna know which bits landed, which bits stuck and, and, um, you can build.
A landing page on your website as many of us have done, and you can have handout notes and all of those [00:37:00] things. But I, to be honest, after almost a decade now of speaking, I, I don't have a data set that has any meaning to it or that can really help me improve in, in any way. So thank you for creating this.
I'm very curious to see where it's gonna take me. Is, is there any early initial feedback or, uh, any learning that you've had from. Uh, yes. Initially from the speaker perspective, is there something that they've said to you or the data that you've, you've extracted that has been highly actionable for them that you can share?
AI Feedback And Resonance
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Arel Moodie: Yeah, so what we do with every single presentation that someone gives is, so let's say you have a hundred people in a room and they all give you feedback on it. Each report has an AI summary that scans all of the. Testimonials and all of the what could be betters, what did we like, the quantitative and the qualitative.
It creates a a one paragraph summary of here are your highlights from your audience. So that goes on each individual report and then on your profile. So every [00:38:00] talk about user has a profile. We scan, meta all of your data and then give you a, you know, so if you have, you know, a hundred people in one talk, what do these 100 people say then on your profile, if you've got 7,000 pieces of data, over 50 events.
We scan all of those and then give you a summary of, these are the takeaways, and what I find to be the biggest aha about the summaries that we do is you have a description of how you wrote your presentation, and then there is a summary of how people are receiving your presentation. My biggest aha is how much do those match up, because a lot of times what people could be taking.
And receiving is not actually how you're positioning or putting out what you're doing and being able to see that over each presentation you give and, and meta allows you to go, well maybe you know what I keep talking about brain chemistry and I keep talking about like the brain, but maybe what I'm really talking about, 'cause everyone keeps talking about resilience and [00:39:00] influence and I'm not even, that's not even on my radar because I'm talking about brain chemistry.
But everyone keeps talking about how this is affecting their chance of resilience and their chance. So it's a way of making sure the audio and the video match. And I think that's been something I'm really, really excited about. And I think that for those of us dedicated to the craft and wanting to serve our our clients at the best level, making sure that you're in resonance is like really important.
Tahira Endean: Yes, yes it is. But. I really like that. So you, uh, let's talk a little bit. We know we, we know that we know that talk.is providing a great service. It's giving us a lot of data. You have gone from it really serving the speakers. Which we know that speakers tend to, on any evaluation, you're gonna receive the highest and the lowest.
What we miss is a lot of median. So quite often, and I think the talk of DOT serves that purpose as well because it [00:40:00] really encourages more people at an immediate moment in time to provide. Evaluative results, so you're not getting the, a week later thinking you're not getting the only highest and lowest you're getting that nice rounded, you know, I had a, a gentleman who spoke once from years ago at an event, I'm talking years ago, as he was still using an overhead projector and writing notes as he was talking, but he was talking to a group of 30 CEOs and was an MIT professor and did a seven hour workshop.
At the end of it, he said, you know, like, please fill on this evaluation. And then he said, you know what we do at MIT? He said, at the end of the term, the professors in our department all get together and we have a, it's a $50 dinner. It's not a $50 dinners. Everybody puts $50 into the pot at the dinner. And what they do is every professor brings their worst evaluation from that [00:41:00] term, and the person with the worst evaluation wins the pot.
Because what they know as the highest level professors possibly in the world is there's always gonna be a student that doesn't like what you said, you know? So we can always expect there's gonna be somebody that doesn't like what we said as as a speaker. We always are gonna get somebody who's like, oh my gosh, that was the most amazing life-changing thing.
Hopefully. I mean, that's what we want when we speak. All of us are speakers. We all want to highly transform our audiences, and we want them to at least have a takeaway that gets them excited about why we spoke to them. Maybe we wanna be their friend ultimately, you know, because we're so aligned. But it's all those things in the middle, like you said, where you're finding that resonance of did what I said I was going to say, was that what they heard?
And did that match, and I think that is really important.
Founder Journey Iteration
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Tahira Endean: I would love to know how you have found this experience as a co, as a founder of it. Like what has been your journey on starting it up and having this idea and taking it to [00:42:00] where it's now successful?
Arel Moodie: You know, I, being a, a tech co-founder is by far the most, it, the best way I can describe it, honestly.
It's like parenting. It is the most challenging and equally most rewarding thing. That I've ever done. Like if anyone who is listening is a parent, you know how unbelievably difficult being a parent actually is and it's like the best thing in the whole wide world. So what's interesting about building a a tool, so we started out as a software, as a service, a SaaS tool, and now we're moving into what's called a, a marketplace right?
Platform for discovery. What's interesting about it is you have a lot of assumptions on, oh, this is gonna be great, people are gonna love this, this is gonna be easy. And everyone's gonna get it. And then you build it and then you're like, no one gets it. We're getting the same questions over, and then you've gotta iterate.
So what's different about being a service provider, you know, as a speaker is I am an expert and now I go out and share my expertise as a professional speaker with [00:43:00] others. So I'm distilling down my information to others. As a tech co-founder, you build something and then you. Feedback on what you built, and it's usually, it needs modification almost always.
Like I, I don't know if there's one feature that we ever released and then never looked at again. So you're constantly in this feedback loop of like, where is there friction? How do we make it better? And then you have to make, um, really difficult decisions on requests. This is one, one of the things that I find fascinating that I think most people don't talk about.
Enough is that you get all these requests from your users, we want it to do this, we want it to do that. Then you've gotta start going, no, we shouldn't do that. Like I know you want that, but like that's your unique use case and it doesn't apply across the entire group. And yes, I see why it's valuable, but it's gonna take us two weeks to build that.
And ultimately it's not gonna serve the greater good. It's just gonna serve. And I have to be able to tell someone like. Thank you. We're gonna like look at that, but I don't know if we actually can do [00:44:00] that. And that's challenging because whenever someone uses your tool, it's like, well, my, my scenario matters.
And early in the game we tried to, you know, be all things to all people and we wanted everyone to be wildly happy. 'cause we had that philosophy of like, we want our clients to win. We wanna take care of 'em. Um, but you have to start going, well, what's, what's the greater good for them? And that then leads into another thing that I think is really fascinating is that sometimes you have to make a decision.
Chocolate And Broccoli Adoption
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Arel Moodie: I'm, I'll give you a perfect example. Data I genuinely believe, and I still believe is gonna be the single most important aspect because that's gonna be what we can use to match speakers to event planners. How event planners can find people, like, I'm looking for someone on this topic, not, I believe this person is a good topic, but based on your audience, based on your goals, based on your budget.
These are the people that actually are a good fit. Like, that data's important, but many speakers in the beginning thought feedback was stupid. They, they were like, I don't care what people think. I just want more business man. I just want gimme more business man. I just want more business. So we had to build [00:45:00] in a feature that allowed speakers to not only get feedback, but if they so opted to, they can have people in their audience raise their hand and say, Hey, I'd like to work with you and hire you and pull those leads out.
So we had to add that feature, kind of like a, the chocolate, 'cause nobody wants the, the broccoli, right? So we had to add that feature to get our early users excited about the tool. Where now I think a lot more people are seeing like, wait a minute, this data is actually huge for me. Like, I can better serve my market.
I can better reach out to them, I can better get matched. But sometimes you gotta give people, uh, chocolate so that they'll, they'll take the broccoli.
Anthony Vade: I had love broccoli. I mean, I love broccoli and chocolate, so I don't have a problem
Arel Moodie: here. Hey, you're in a good place, man.
Anthony Vade: Please,
Arel Moodie: not enough broccoli, offic idols out there. A whole lot of chocolate offic idols.
Anthony Vade: Oh, I love it.
Calls To Action Wrap Up
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Anthony Vade: Should we, we're getting close to needing to wrap this thing up. I'll give you some, some time to think about the final response because we often throw it on people, and I don't wanna do that to you.
Generally [00:46:00] speaking, we ask each of us to deliver a call to action. To, you know, take some of this, some of this information and do something with it. 'cause that, that's the important thing. So, so I'll look to set that up. I'd love to offer you two call to actions, one based on, you know, what you speak about and, and all of that.
And then obviously talk adot as you know, to get people into the platform and get them using it. I will probably look, I'll start with you. I'll do a little preface and lead into it and ask you for your call to action. No, tell you what, actually I'm gonna go Tahira first. That'll give you a bit more time to think.
Arel Moodie: So here it just was like, wait a minute. I was in receptive mode. Gonna hear what he was gonna say, and now you put me in active mode. Come on now, making
Tahira Endean: my, that's right. My brain, my action. Today's call to action is if you are a speaker, and I'm gonna tell you I am guilty of this. I have a very incomplete talk dot profile.
Then it's just sitting out there. I have a lovely reminder from you today. Thank you. That was autogenerated 'cause you're should be on vacation. Uh, I would say that speakers who [00:47:00] are serious about speaking that talk.is an excellent tool that they should be looking to use. It works, you know, it's working.
So I would say the call to action if you are an event organizer, is look at Talk a dot for what it's now offering. You know, we are always looking for, there are so many things about being a speaker that are very difficult. People only, you know, are gonna hire you once every five years. You have spoken to too many of the similar places.
You don't know where to look next. Your, you feel like your, your network might be drying up a little bit. You have a great agent, but you've just run into all of those other things have you've been oversaturated. So this is an opportunity for people to have some fresh eyes. And, um, and good job for doing that.
Look at it.
Anthony Vade: There you go. Um, tehir so beautifully set up a, a call to action to talk a.as well, which means that Rol doesn't need to do that, uh, with within his piece. [00:48:00] But of course, I'll give you the opportunity as well. We've explored a lot in this podcast and I feel like we may need to get you back or hit you up in an event that we're speaking out together to, to unpack a bit more of this stuff.
But if, if I, if I was to force you to come up with a great call to action to our listeners out there, to, to con convalesce everything that we've explored in this episode, what might not be,
Arel Moodie: yeah, it would be that look for your consistent and persistent frustrations with other humans when, whether it's with your internal team, whether it's with family, you know, we all have consistent and persistent conflicts that show up and ask yourself.
Is this person being too self-centric, too group centric, too Skill centric, too strategic. Am I being too self-centric? Too Group centric, too Skill centric to where am I? Where can I, and ultimately, a lot of people like to point the finger at others. This person needs to do this. I actually always like the idea of you 0.1 finger out three or [00:49:00] pointing back at you.
So like always control what you can control. So ask yourself where I see consistent persistent conflict. Where might there be stage misalignment? Where might that be? And then just by giving it language, and as you know, the power of the brain, just by using words to describe something, it's less powerful, it's less emotional, it's less difficult, it becomes more powerful.
And let that guide your next meeting. Let that guide your next human interaction. And you know, if there's ever a chance that someone throwing a conference or an event and they need a speaker, and the information that I am sharing can help, please check me out. I'm the only Orel moody in the world, so, uh, if you can't find me, you're not looking 'cause I'm on LinkedIn and everything else.
Anthony Vade: And the good news is we're gonna share all of the links to all of your resources, your website talker, of course, in the podcast description, links, uh, wherever you are listening to this, and whichever platform is your platform of choice. I'll give you my standard call to action at the end of all [00:50:00] of these, which is head on over to the strategy table website, sign up for your seat at the table where you can, you can explore conversations like this.
Uh, you can listen into previous podcast extended versions that we've had. Uh, we talked about startup team dynamics and culture a little bit in there. David Becker had an amazing episode, season one, episode 10, where you can dig a bit more into that as well. And of course, you can also join the conversation with our community of people who are asking these kinds of questions and exploring what it means to create positive change in the world.
And with that, I'd like to thank, uh, Arel for being with us. Today on this episode. Thank you as always, Tahira for, uh, being the ham to my eggs. Is that right? I don't know. Anyway, uh, and we will be talking at you on the next accessible disruption.
Podcast Host: Accessible Disruption is written and spoken by Tahira and Dean [00:51:00] Ryan Hill and Anthony Vade. All content is developed in collaboration with the team at Strategy Table Podcast production by Experience Design Change Inc. Find more information@strategytable.co.