"It's Not the Place You Can Charge Into With Answers…"

16-11-2021 • 47 mins

"…Only the Place You Can Charge Into With Listening"—Dawie Olivier on dealing with crises, creating emotional safety, and fostering curiosity & creativity in a large corporate.

Also: full contact leadership, progressive learning mindset, reading widely, and journaling.

When we talk about experimentation with Dawie Olivier—an experienced leader, CIO/CTO, and an advisory board member to several tech firms—we end up talking about biases and how to deal with them, emotional safety, curiosity… and not at all technology. Find out why one set of these concepts is much, much more important than the other.

Last Episode, I did a deep dive into electronic decision markets and how they can help setting up experiments in your company.

Next Episode, we dive deeper into one theme from this week's interview.

Note: this is the contents of the full episode available on Business Games Premium. Public feed contains an abridged version.

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Introduction [00:00]
On Tragedies and Response [02:47]
On Corporate Might and Listening Before Acting [08:35]
On Strategic Effects of Crisis Response [12:57]
On Corporate Experimentation, Disruption, Fear, Anxiety, Risk, and Progressive Discovery
On Corporate Experimentation and Anxiety [15:00]
On Progressive Learning and Experimentation as Core Function of Business, Not an Add-On [16:58]
On the Value of Progressive Discovery in Overcoming Fear and Biases, and in Creating Fast Learning [18:52]
On Fear of Not Being in Control, and Making Bets in Ever-Changing Contexts [20:19]
On Problems to Be Solved and How They Relate to the Progressive Learning Mindset [22:22]
On History of Vulnerability in Leadership [27:33]
On Discomfort, Safety, and Creativity [30:07]
On Unlocking Curiosity and Its Role in Progressive Learning [32:19]
On KPI Versus Useful Measurement and Measures [40:16]
On Making Collective Decisions Around Senior Leadership Teams and Boards [46:21]
On Experimentation from the Senior Leadership and Board Tables [51:10]
The Homework: Read Widely and Do Journaling [54:55]
Rapid-fire Questions and Concepts [57:23]
Leadership BS [57:42]
Map Is Not the Terrain [59:08]
Gemba Technique [1:00:19]
Own Work of Dawie as It Relates to Corporate Transformation and Improvement, Leadership, and Board Advisory Work [1:03:37]