In this episode of Innovators Inside Podcast, Ian Bergman and Layne Fawns sit down with John Michael Schert, founder of JMS & Company, to explore adaptive leadership, creativity, organizational change, and what it really takes to lead when there are no easy answers.
John Michael brings a rare perspective to leadership and innovation. His background spans professional ballet, nonprofit leadership, entrepreneurship, Harvard-trained adaptive leadership, and years advising organizations through complex change. That combination gives him a practical and deeply human view of what leaders, founders, and operators face when old systems stop working.
The conversation focuses on a challenge every organization eventually faces: how do you keep creating, adapting, and leading when the very things that made you successful may now be holding you back?
Here are the five key takeaways from their conversation:
One of the most important ideas from the conversation is that resistance to change is often misunderstood.
John Michael explains that people are not necessarily afraid of change itself. They are afraid of what change asks them to lose. That loss might be status, identity, influence, certainty, a familiar role, or a way of working that has brought them success in the past.
For founders and innovation leaders, this distinction matters. If a team resists change, it is easy to assume they lack ambition or creativity. But often, they are protecting something that has real value to them.
Effective leadership requires naming that loss honestly.
When organizations skip this step, change becomes a threat. When leaders acknowledge what people may need to let go of, they create space for a more honest conversation about what can emerge next.
John Michael’s own story offers a powerful lesson for founders and operators. After building a successful dance company that performed at major venues around the world, he reached a point where he realized success itself had become a burden.
The same pattern shows up inside organizations.
A product, strategy, team structure, or metric that once created growth can eventually become the thing that keeps an organization stuck. The danger is that these things often still appear to be working. They still generate revenue. They still earn praise. They still protect existing incentives.
That makes them hard to question.
For innovation leaders, the challenge is not always identifying what is broken. Sometimes the harder question is: what is still working, but no longer serving the future?
John Michael frames this through a practical 90/10 idea. In many moments of change, most of the system may stay the same, but leaders need to identify the 10% that must be released so something new can grow.
A major theme of the episode is the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges.
Technical problems have known solutions. They require expertise, resources, time, and execution. Adaptive challenges are different. The problem is not fully understood, the solution is not obvious, and the people inside the system must change in order for progress to happen.
This is where many organizations get stuck.
They throw technical solutions at adaptive problems. They reorganize teams, add tools, create new metrics, launch innovation programs, or bring in experts. Those steps may help, but they do not solve the deeper issue if the organization is avoiding the human change required.
Adaptive leadership means helping people stay in the discomfort long enough to understand the real problem.
For founders, executives, and operators, this is a critical lesson. Not every challenge can be solved by moving faster. Some require better diagnosis, deeper listening, and the courage to question the assumptions behind the current system.
John Michael challenges the idea that some people are creative and others are not. Instead, he argues that creativity shows up through creative choices.
A creative choice is often fragile at first. It may not be easy to validate with existing metrics. It may not look impressive in the beginning. It may even seem risky, inefficient, or uncomfortable because it does not fit the current system of rewards.
This is why creativity is so difficult inside established organizations.
Most companies are built to validate what already works. They reward certainty, efficiency, performance, and proof. But new ideas often emerge before the proof exists.
Innovation leaders need to protect that fragile stage.
That does not mean ignoring business realities. It means creating room for experiments, learning, and uncertainty before forcing new ideas to meet old metrics too soon.
One of John Michael’s clearest pieces of advice is that anyone trying to create change inside an organization cannot do it alone.
Change requires coalitions. It requires trust, listening, social capital, and the ability to work with people who may see the problem differently. Leaders need to move beyond the hero model of leadership and create conditions where teams can diagnose challenges together.
This starts with listening.
John Michael points out that many failures are failures of diagnosis. People rush toward solutions before they truly understand the problem. They act on assumptions, personal perspectives, and existing incentives instead of making the problem visible enough for others to examine together.
For founders and operators, this is a practical reminder: before pushing harder for change, spend more time understanding the system.
Who benefits from the current model?
Who feels threatened by the change?
What incentives are shaping behavior?
What hidden values or fears are influencing decisions?
Where is the organization saying one thing but doing another?
Better diagnosis leads to better experiments. Better experiments create better data. Better data gives teams the confidence to let go of what no longer works.
This episode is a powerful reminder that innovation is not only about new technology, new products, or new strategies. It is also about the human capacity to let go, adapt, listen, and create under uncertain conditions.
John Michael Schert’s perspective brings adaptive leadership, creativity, and organizational change together in a way that is especially useful for founders, executives, operators, and innovation leaders navigating complexity.
The core message is simple but difficult to practice: real change does not come from pretending to have all the answers. It comes from staying close to the uncertainty, diagnosing the real problem, building coalitions, and creating enough space for something new to emerge.
Have a question for a future guest? Email us at innovators@alchemistaccelerator.com to get in touch!
Timestamps
🎙️ Introduction to John Michael Schert 00:00
🏛️ Building and Leaving a Successful Company 04:58
🏔️ Success, Identity, and the Second Mountain 06:07
🧠 Systems Thinking and Adaptive Change 10:56
🎨 Creativity, Uncertainty, and Creative Choices 15:05
🔄 Why People Fear Loss More Than Change 20:40
🛡️ How Leaders Protect Teams Through Uncertainty 25:06
🏢 Leading Change Inside Complex Organizations 29:54
🔥 Letting the Threat In 36:16
📊 Incentives, Metrics, and the Innovation Trap 38:32
🧭 How Much Change Can a System Handle? 43:00
🤝 Why You Cannot Lead Change Alone 45:15
🎭 What Business Can Learn from Artistic Practice 50:39
🌱 Staying at the Edge of Competence 53:16
👏 Closing Thoughts 55:38
00:01:19:18 - 00:01:36:03
Layne Fawns
With a background that spans professional ballet, nonprofit leadership, and Harvard trained adaptive leadership. This conversation explores what really takes to lead when there are no easy answers. John Michael, thank you so much for joining us on Innovators Inside.
00:01:36:05 - 00:01:38:12
John Michael Schert
To be Here. Thanks for having me.
00:01:38:14 - 00:02:07:06
Ian Bergman
Yeah. Welcome to Pod, John Michael. We're excited. To get us started with this wonderful, you know, introduction. You've got a diverse background and you've done some really interesting things. Do you mind just kind of telling us, you know, how you came to be sitting, in this conversation today? Just tell us in your own words a little bit about your journey and how you came to be sort of a thought leader and advisor on topics, like leadership and innovation.
00:02:07:09 - 00:02:11:03
John Michael Schert
Yeah, those were just always so funny to me. Thought leader and advisor.
00:02:11:03 - 00:02:14:21
Ian Bergman
And it's I mean, how many buzzwords can we throw out today? Let's do I.
00:02:14:21 - 00:02:35:12
John Michael Schert
Mean, people will often give us the labels, right? Like rarely do I think we label ourselves. Of course we have to at times for our LinkedIn profile, put it into the language. But how did I end up being a thought leader advisor? Recently someone called me a leadership artist, which I thought was really fun and a nice merging of worlds.
00:02:35:12 - 00:02:59:09
John Michael Schert
So I'm probably going to use that one. You know, as long as it's half, life is worthwhile. I began as I and was sharing in the intro and thank you for that. Lane as a ballet dancer, and it was both truly, I think, my calling like my my life's purpose, but also circumstantially I grew up in South Georgia.
00:02:59:12 - 00:03:20:11
John Michael Schert
My mom had been a dancer, so she was smart enough to put me into some classes. But the family mythology is that the local dance studio one and one of my older brothers to be in The Nutcracker because she needed a, you know, some more warm bodied boys. My mom, I don't think the older boys are interested because they were playing sports football, basketball, baseball.
00:03:20:13 - 00:03:40:14
John Michael Schert
So I think my younger son would be. And the mythology is that on the one of the first days of rehearsal, I went up to the dance teacher and said, when are we going to dance? I didn't I didn't come here just to stand around. And I think that kind of way of being I was precocious in my youth, maybe even more ambitious in my youth.
00:03:40:14 - 00:04:03:08
John Michael Schert
But I've always tried to focus on like, what's the work like? What are we here to do? Not necessarily the trappings of the the form or like ballet is highly regimented, as we all know. It's such a rarefied art. It's super specific, and I love that. But I wasn't one of those people that fell in love with becoming an expert, like being the best.
00:04:03:12 - 00:04:27:10
John Michael Schert
But my trajectory led me to boarding school. University of North Carolina School of the Arts, which is a university. But I was there for high school, so I was a high schooler with a bunch of college level folks. Side note I'm now a trustee of the school, and it's a place that gave me huge formative and foundational education, not just in how to be a ballet dancer, but how to be an artist.
00:04:27:10 - 00:04:58:00
John Michael Schert
And also just how to be an entrepreneur, how to be a person, a thinking citizen. And then I got to start my career with American Ballet Theater, which is in terms of at the top, you know, big. It's like joining McKinsey right out of school, like a big machine. Beautiful place. But I quickly realized I also didn't want to be in a company that sold a bit to me, like a museum company recreating works of art from, you know, pop culture, Tsarist Russia.
00:04:58:03 - 00:05:20:16
John Michael Schert
I wanted to be creating, and so I started my own company, Trey McIntyre project, with my partner at the time, Trey. And it was pure happenstance or not even so much happenstance, just necessity. In addition to being a dancer, in my early 20s, I became an executive director and started having to raise millions of dollars was a booking agent.
00:05:20:18 - 00:05:44:05
John Michael Schert
I was booking the company to about 4050 tour cities around the world. And so my, my, my business training was just completely on the job. Like, how do you manage a staff of 20? How do you manage an international board of directors? How do you build relationships and, narrative and, you know, a public persona for this endeavor?
00:05:44:07 - 00:06:07:05
John Michael Schert
And it was beautiful time, but I spent my 20s being very responsible for other people, and I didn't necessarily get to do some of the things that 20 year olds do, like mess around and find out, I kind of just had to get it done, right. As I was leaving the company that I co-founded, which is we can get into this later.
00:06:07:05 - 00:06:26:05
John Michael Schert
But, you know, for any founders out there, how hard it is to leave something you've built, how hard it is to exit, how hard it is to let something go. We don't talk enough about that. We talk about startups. We talk about building things. But how do you lovingly complete the cycle of the birth, of growth, of excellence?
00:06:26:05 - 00:06:48:15
John Michael Schert
You know, at the peak of my company, we were performing at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall and theaters around the world. We were featured twice, and the cover of The New York Times and PBS NewsHour came into the piece. It's like everything was success. And how do you walk away from success, and how does success also become one of your biggest burdens?
00:06:48:18 - 00:06:58:06
John Michael Schert
Because then you think you have to keep recreating that success and it can become so derivative. So I'm opening up a maybe that's where we might go down in a moment.
00:06:58:06 - 00:07:18:08
Ian Bergman
We might, because it is it is something that is, I think, actually a very fundamental question. Right. How do you lovingly complete the cycle? How do you let something go and how do you leave on top rather than feeling trapped? So I do actually want to get there, but it sounds like you actually had a little bit of a, self-reflective moment.
00:07:18:09 - 00:07:19:25
Ian Bergman
Yeah, at some point here.
00:07:19:25 - 00:07:41:13
John Michael Schert
Self-Reflective, but maybe again, necessity. There was a moment where I looked around and I was like, I'm supposed to be enjoying this more than I am. And that was the same way I felt when I was at American Ballet Theater. You know, in my early 20s. We were on tour in Athens, Greece, performing at the foot of the Parthenon and the Herald Atticus, other parts of the Acropolis.
00:07:41:13 - 00:08:01:18
John Michael Schert
And I looked around like I should be enjoying this more than I. And I knew I had to leave, and I went on the office the next day and said, I'm leaving. And they said, where are you going to go? I said, I don't know. And it was the same with my company. It was such a beautiful moment and we had such investment and love from hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
00:08:01:21 - 00:08:21:21
John Michael Schert
But there was a moment where I just said, this is this is not enough anymore, and I don't mean enough in terms of I needed more, I needed something different. But in a strange twist of fate, I was approached by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. You know, we're fun. Goes to die. Here home of Milton Friedman.
00:08:21:24 - 00:08:41:06
John Michael Schert
And I was approached by some of the leadership there and they said, we have a problem. A lot of our MBAs are not. We're told they're not creative enough when they graduate and go out into the world and against. Yeah. Fantastic analyst. Brilliant, brilliant. You know, an MBA from Chicago booth or some of the best analysts in the world.
00:08:41:08 - 00:09:09:00
John Michael Schert
And they said, could you come and help us with that? And so then I was offered this really strange like, you know, pseudo faculty position. My title was visiting Artist and Social Entrepreneur. And this was 2013, where the term social entrepreneur was all the rage or like, what does that even mean? So I had four years then to play in this very foreign land of free market capitalism, which was not the world I had come from.
00:09:09:02 - 00:09:41:10
John Michael Schert
But to your point or your question in like, what is the self-reflection and what is also listening to something like a higher purpose? And I don't mean in terms of a, deity or. Yeah, like a higher being. I mean, like your own higher purpose. Like, what are we here to do? And that second mountain theory by one of the brooks was that David Brooks or Arthur Brooks, who talks about climbing the second mountain, the first mountain in life is climbing, success and performing and all the sort of codependent ways that society tells us to be successful.
00:09:41:12 - 00:10:06:23
John Michael Schert
But the second mountain is when you really start to live into your own, deeper purpose and your own wisdom. But but something I often say to my clients, now, you can't jump from one peak to the next. You have to come down. And the the coming down is, is it's sad, it's destructive. You're walking away from the apex and that's the completing of the cycle.
00:10:06:24 - 00:10:25:18
John Michael Schert
We can think of a cycle. We can think of it like mountain peaks. We can think of it like wavelengths. Like you go up and you come down so you can go back up again. But I think we don't focus enough on that letting go, that coming down identity shift that's required to truly recreate, allow for creation to happen.
00:10:25:20 - 00:10:56:19
Ian Bergman
One that is really fascinating. And so do you feel like you I mean, this isn't, a theory that you had going into a complete career change with Booth or elsewhere, I assume. Right. And so do you feel like you sort of discovered this in parallel to, you know, David Brooks writing? And, and what does that mean for others who are maybe thinking, oh, like I'm supposed to be enjoying this more than I am, and they're not.
00:10:56:21 - 00:11:16:08
John Michael Schert
Yeah. I had no theory of change at this moment. It wasn't until later, when I was a student at the Harvard Kennedy School, that someone said to me, oh, you're a systems thinker. I hadn't realized it at the time. When I was at Booth, I didn't. I was seeing systemic change in myself and in the world, but I had no grand theory of change.
00:11:16:10 - 00:11:37:14
John Michael Schert
I though realized that my time at Booz that I wasn't alone. You know, that we're all stuck in these cycles of success, and we we might read about it or hear about it until you're experiencing that sort of ego death, of letting go of your greatest accomplishments so that you can become something new, you don't really know what that looks like.
00:11:37:14 - 00:11:58:26
John Michael Schert
Feels like I now coach people on that. I now help systems navigate massive change. That's what I do for a living now and I but I only thing I can do that because I lived it. And that's also something I encourage a lot of my clients. Don't be afraid to live in moments of doubt and uncertainty, because doubt precedes courage.
00:11:59:02 - 00:12:03:24
John Michael Schert
Like, you can't be courageous unless you first have had that deep questioning.
00:12:04:01 - 00:12:27:26
Ian Bergman
I think that's I mean, that that feels fundamentally true. But there's something really interesting here on this, on this pod. We talk a lot about organizational change and transformation. We talk a lot about adapting to new context, about taking risk, about, you know, the things that sort of feed to innovation. You are taking this to a very personal level.
00:12:27:26 - 00:12:50:10
Ian Bergman
You're you're you're you're taking it down from the abstract organization that needs to adapt to the individual. And, you know, a I think that probably resonates with a number of, of folks in the audience. But is that a unique approach in your mind, like when you're when you're working on organizational development, is is is this new?
00:12:50:12 - 00:13:21:27
John Michael Schert
I'll say two things. I don't think it's a unique approach because I think it's almost just sort of naming the elephant in the room that we already all, on an individual level, are experiencing that. And yet we subjugate or we sort of push down or personalize experience because we think it's not professional or shouldn't be present or we're just horribly inarticulate in articulating what is happening in ourselves and in systems and teams and groups, just as you were just saying, there's plenty of theory.
00:13:21:27 - 00:13:45:06
John Michael Schert
I mean, like you can read by on and Fisher, you can go deep into hyphens, you can go deep into all these theories, but you have to practice them and love them. And so the second answer to your question is I don't think it's you need to in communities of artistic practice to use this pursuit, using yourself as data, like, what am I experiencing?
00:13:45:09 - 00:14:09:25
John Michael Schert
This is very much what I learned as an artist. I like to listen to that intrinsic and then to filter it through the extrinsic demand. And this is then what I learned at Booth, that a lot of methods are taught just to only look at the extrinsic, the external, what you're required to be, the KPI, the, the, the what you have to perform and the key performance metrics.
00:14:09:27 - 00:14:35:18
John Michael Schert
And I think we've done a disservice to a lot of people in our education system and in our professional systems, where we set goals outside of them and expect them to meet them, and we don't necessarily use the individual and, the self as the data and then tweak how do you get there? And so again, as a coach, as a systems change consultant, as an advisor, now we have to do both.
00:14:35:21 - 00:14:58:13
John Michael Schert
We have to look at the macro like the system and understand where are we going and how do we do that and how do we measure up and how do we create. Strategies are still hugely essential work, but a lot of times we're not doing the other part of it. It's called double loop learning, like doing the thing and then learning about ourselves, doing the thing and then doing the thing and then learning about ourselves, doing the tinkering.
00:14:58:15 - 00:15:05:08
John Michael Schert
I would say I learned that primarily as an artist, and but I think it's human.
00:15:05:08 - 00:15:28:25
Layne Fawns
Yeah, I was actually that's really interesting to me because you would think, as you know, an entrepreneur or a business person, you do have to think creatively to a certain extent in terms of like, I'm building a solution. How am I going to solve this problem? What's the most efficient way to solve this problem? So what's kind of the difference there between being a creative and being maybe someone that's more logical or technical?
00:15:28:25 - 00:15:39:16
Layne Fawns
What's that blocker that's keeping them from tapping into that sort of intrinsic, intrinsic mentality that you're talking about? Is that just conditioning?
00:15:39:18 - 00:16:07:16
John Michael Schert
I think it's conditioning. I think it's codependent systems, meaning I'll quote some more theory. That's a fantastic theory. Professor, that I studied with Robert Keegan, who talks about socialized minds and we're just so socialized to think in a way that gets you reward. The incentivization for it. And, to your question, I mean, like an ordered or they're said in order to be courageous, you first have to have Dao in order to be creative.
00:16:07:23 - 00:16:46:21
John Michael Schert
It's a prerequisite that you have to have uncertainty like you, by definition, you can't be creating if you're only working in a derivative system, and you're only continuing to deploy yourselves and perform in ways that are already rewarded, you're going to just keep delivering very similar outputs. And so there's there's there's a necessary stepping out into the unknown, into discomfort, into moments, periods of life or periods in a day where you're not just trying to perform in the socialized mind, to live up to the expectation of your investor, of your customer and your peers.
00:16:46:21 - 00:17:08:04
John Michael Schert
You know, we all know startups, innovators. They're more influenced by their peers. And like the group, think of what's good or not real innovators. And I think real people that are truly living in a creative process are willing to not know and to not know for longer durations of time. Because out of that not knowing comes the innovation.
00:17:08:12 - 00:17:12:01
Layne Fawns
Yeah, an ability to sit in discomfort, if you will.
00:17:12:03 - 00:17:12:23
John Michael Schert
Yeah.
00:17:12:26 - 00:17:36:03
Ian Bergman
And it it's really interesting. I want to I want to talk about an organizational perspective in a second. But first I want to stick with the human perspective. I think, you know, certainly, you know, I think the common perception of successful artists is that they are outliers sitting in discomfort, doing things that, you know, others are unwilling to do.
00:17:36:05 - 00:18:03:14
Ian Bergman
I don't know if that's true. Not being much of an artist myself, but there is something there, that I feels very, almost in some ways, the polar opposite of, driving conformist success and organizational success. Is this just all about learning from the attributes that make artists successful, or is there actually something deeper going on here?
00:18:03:21 - 00:18:20:03
John Michael Schert
I think it's about learning. Learning the attributes of humanity that have made us successful. I think artists play a role in society to keep us at the edge of our competence, or to keep us experiencing the aspects of society that we don't want to face, like that's that's often the role the artist plays. And it's similar but different way.
00:18:20:03 - 00:18:41:28
John Michael Schert
It's also the role of activists to push us to see something from another perspective. But I think it's actually incredibly human because it's a hallmark of humanity that we have used tools to evolve faster than almost any other vertebrate like we actually, it's a hallmark of what we do, that we sit in uncertainty and creativity and keep changing.
00:18:41:28 - 00:19:08:09
John Michael Schert
We we use our post childbearing years to continue to innovate, unlike almost every other species. So is it something we just learn from artists? I think artists can be a great case in point to look at and be like, okay, how do we learn from that? How do we study? But I'm not I'm not a there's a camp and it's a field of study where it's like the artists come down from the mountain and teach us how to be.
00:19:08:09 - 00:19:31:08
John Michael Schert
I don't buy into that. I think it's a and I'm also not of the camp. I think these camps are great, but there's also a camp. It's like we're all artists just fine. Your artistry inside the Gloucestershire, we often confuse the artistry with artistic practice. Like I'm also not someone's like just by learning how to dance ballet. You two can create a startup like I.
00:19:31:12 - 00:19:55:06
John Michael Schert
That's not the solution. That's a technical solution for an adaptive problem. But I think we're really getting at is as humans, we all sit with adaptive challenges. And just for the listener right now, this is borrowing from adaptive leadership, which is a framework that I use. I did not invent it. A technical challenge has a known problem, a known solution.
00:19:55:08 - 00:20:16:22
John Michael Schert
The experts in the authorities need to figure it out. And time and money needs to be allocated. And then you deploy. That's most of the problems on the face for our planet. It doesn't mean, people stuff to learn and change and grow, but an adaptive challenge. No one really knows fully what the problem is. There's no known solution.
00:20:16:24 - 00:20:40:16
John Michael Schert
You can throw all the technical solutions at it, and it will chip away at the problem, like climate change. But in the end, it's not. It's not a technical solution that's going to fix it. And it's not the experts and the authorities that can solve the problem. And yes, time and money experts, authorities are needed. But in the end, we all have to change because we all own a piece of the problem and we all own a piece of the solution.
00:20:40:18 - 00:21:11:26
John Michael Schert
So humans are actually quite good at adaptive change. But yet humans keep telling this intersubjective narrative that we're really bad at change. And there's a there's a line that I use a lot, which is people are not afraid of change. They're afraid of loss because in change, some a lot is kept. But something has to be let go so that you make space for that gain, that new, that emergent.
00:21:11:29 - 00:21:24:00
John Michael Schert
And also the thing that has to be like, go to sort of take us back to this success loop that keeps us stuck is the thing that has to be let go, is often the thing that got us the most reward the last time.
00:21:24:00 - 00:21:59:11
Ian Bergman
Yeah. And what's really interesting, John Michaels, I think that connects back to tool use and measurements. There's a we've had a number of guests on this pod come and talk about the dangers that come with all of the infrastructure that we put in place to help us be successful, the tools that we use, you know, atrophy our brains and our creativity, the systems that we put in place to measure our success and promote it and bring people along along for the ride, turn out to be, you know, major friction points to, you know, adapting to a new reality.
00:21:59:11 - 00:22:22:14
Ian Bergman
And so you argue a lot that the notion of creativity is not just a nice to have. It's an absolute critical lever for system change. I wonder if you can start to break that down for us. How does creativity actually help organizations confront complexity, and how how do you even start? How do you recognize when this is necessary?
00:22:22:16 - 00:22:47:09
John Michael Schert
There's a brilliant scientist, social scientists. I got to work with the University of Chicago, Howard Nussbaum, and he said something really fascinating. He studies wisdom and he said, there's no such thing as a wise person. There's only wise choices. And we have to, I think, shift that that shift of the wisdom is not a thing. It's are you making wise choices and there's conditions for what is a wise choice.
00:22:47:09 - 00:23:10:03
John Michael Schert
And they and for wisdom, it requires epistemic humility, like choosing to be humble, choosing to not know a wise choice can't be again, cannot a derivative as layers of creativity. And it has aspects of pro-social reality, like doing something that's good for the greater good. That's wisdom. I borrowed that from him and said, I think there's also no such thing as creativity, and there's no such thing as a creative person.
00:23:10:03 - 00:23:41:06
John Michael Schert
There's creative choices and a creative choice also has certain hallmarks. Is it novel and does it have a certain level of utility like it's it's it's going to do something for us. The fragility of a creative choice is that it can't be validated or verified quantitatively while you're in the process of making it so what happens in a lot of institutions, corporate structures, organizational structures is the creative choice is very, very vulnerable and fragile when it's emerging.
00:23:41:08 - 00:24:03:03
John Michael Schert
And people so quickly when it talks these metrics of success like you're quoting a moment ago and we validated all these ways of proving what when something is worthwhile and how much money should we invest? How much time? Well, the creative choice rarely is going to be seductive at first. It's going to look pretty ugly. It's going to require loss.
00:24:03:05 - 00:24:25:27
John Michael Schert
It's going to require change. If it were to be implemented, whole systems of people are going to lose something. Status. If you're on a team that's been building a product and and the product is currently dominant in the market, but you know, it's losing its power and validity, and you need an emergent new product to emerge. And you're but you're on the team.
00:24:26:02 - 00:24:46:12
John Michael Schert
Your product is rocking. You don't want to give that up. You don't want to allow for now, again, a wise person, a creative person. I just have this interesting as a creative person or a wise person, a wise choice or a creative choice would be, yeah, we have to let some of that market share go so that this other new thing can begin to find its place.
00:24:46:15 - 00:25:06:06
John Michael Schert
It is a place of, perceived weakness by certain systems. It's not posturing. It's not proving and validating itself by known metrics. It's actually saying we don't yet know the metrics of success for this. That's scary. That's scary for a lot of people to embrace.
00:25:06:09 - 00:25:22:17
Layne Fawns
So from a leadership perspective, I think it's one thing if you know that or you think you're making the wise choice or the creative choice, how do you lead your team through that uncertainty and get there by and get them to come on that journey with you?
00:25:22:19 - 00:25:41:24
John Michael Schert
You asked a moment ago just about, do we look to the artist to tell us or guide us? Do we look to authorities to sanction and say, yes, I'm going to create protection for you while you go down this path you need at all. You do need executives and authorities to protect your team while you're going through it.
00:25:41:27 - 00:26:01:18
John Michael Schert
So different organizations have had different methods. You create a skunkworks team. You know, you create like an innovation team, and it's got some protection as it's developing. But that's very specific. We can look to cases and point like an artist or innovators. And you know, I also make a living people bringing me in to give presentations to tell them how to be this way.
00:26:01:18 - 00:26:31:17
John Michael Schert
So I'm not trying to downplay we still need role models. But your question laying I am of the belief that humans, groups of humans, form their own meaning and we actually do arrive at what is our purpose. Like, if we are on a team that's trying to innovate and we're trying to build something that the world has never seen before, we have to hold that purpose at the center of what we're trying to do, and there will be so many and adaptive leadership.
00:26:31:17 - 00:26:56:03
John Michael Schert
We call this work avoidance mechanisms, work avoidance. Keep taking you away from the deeper work. You got to do that. You got to hold that space to say no. We're focused on this purpose. The work points mechanisms will look like quarterly reports, like are you validating quick enough? Are you proving yourself to your investors, to other teams? Are your peers thinking that what you're doing is worthwhile?
00:26:56:03 - 00:27:16:14
John Michael Schert
Are you getting undercut? And we don't protect that space to stay in that uncertainty, in that creativity. So when leading, if you are in a position of leadership and you're leading a team, maybe it's a five person team, a 50 person team, a 500 person team. Through this process, it's not about knowing like it's not like I know what we're going to do.
00:27:16:14 - 00:27:40:10
John Michael Schert
Follow me. I'm going to lead us to the promised Land. It's a it's a knowing of we have to keep holding at the center that we are here to create something that the world has never seen or that we have never seen. Now, that's a big, bold statement. And the work avoidance again comes in to say no. But if you don't prove yourself in the short term, we're not going to support you in the long term.
00:27:40:10 - 00:27:44:06
John Michael Schert
So this gets into long termism, short termism. So how do you.
00:27:44:06 - 00:28:05:07
Ian Bergman
Feel so different. Doesn't this get in and excuse me for interrupting. It doesn't doesn't this get into the question of are we actually all here for that purpose? I can walk into a lot of organizations where probably 70, 80, 90% of the people, would not, necessarily agree at first blush with that statement. Yeah.
00:28:05:10 - 00:28:23:25
John Michael Schert
So do I walk into those organizations all the time. We often then wait as humans for a forcing function. We wait for the purpose to be decided for us. We wait until systems are collapsing or a product is failing, and then people are willing to often put that purpose in the center. And I'm often brought in at that point.
00:28:23:25 - 00:28:43:17
John Michael Schert
Sadly, I don't have a panacea or an antidote for how we can get ahead of it. But I do believe that if we could sooner get to that shared purpose, we would have a lot less pain and destruction. But then there's the theory of like, maybe we need that destruction for the new to emerge and so on. You know, go ahead.
00:28:43:19 - 00:29:27:13
Ian Bergman
Well, I was, I mean, I yeah, I, I really do wonder about the necessity of pain, of being backed into a corner of friction, whatever it is. But, but I was going to actually ask about sort of like, culture and power dynamics within organizations. Right. Because once, once you're no longer building a startup, once you're sitting inside of an established enterprise or, you know, a governmental organization, whatever it is that has had its purpose for some time, it seems to me that it's unfair to expect the majority of the rank and file to push for or desire change, at an organizational level, maybe at an individual level, they can.
00:29:27:16 - 00:29:54:18
Ian Bergman
And so it also seems unfair to expect a single leader to, you know, point in everyone to, to march in lockstep in their direction. So how can a good leader understand the dynamics of setting culture and a desire to think creatively in, to make creative decisions without a crisis being imposed from the outside?
00:29:54:20 - 00:30:18:28
John Michael Schert
Well, good news is crisis processes are aplenty right now. So pick your crises and you can use them as a force and function. And, as there is no such thing as a wise person or a creative person, I also espouse the belief that there's no such thing as a leader. I think there are people in positions of authority who have certain authorizations they have to make, and they have certain people that are responsible for it.
00:30:19:00 - 00:30:42:08
John Michael Schert
But leadership is a verb, and anyone can practice and exercise it. So what is the act of leading people from the status quo and to the adjacent possible from business as usual? It's not everyone's job. To me, it's a choice. You're talking about bureaucracy. We want bureaucracies to work there. Their purpose is safety. Their purpose is things working.
00:30:42:08 - 00:31:02:20
John Michael Schert
You want your government to work. You want fire and police departments to do their core function. Nothing wrong with that. We can talk about innovation and highly bureaucratic systems. Maybe another pod, but I think it's a valid topic. I think change and cycles of creativity, they come in cycles. And so you also have to wait for it to ripen.
00:31:02:20 - 00:31:27:20
John Michael Schert
You have to wait for it. Like, is this fruit ready to pick or is it going to be ready? You can get ahead of it. Now back to the question or the reason I make that that clarification is sometimes we think it's the person in the authority position whose job it is to lead. I think this is a huge paradigm shift we're seeing in the world the hero myth, the hero journey myth, I think is being bit undone.
00:31:27:22 - 00:31:52:16
John Michael Schert
It's not going to be singular figures anymore that guide us into the promised land. We've had thousands and thousands of years of that, and I think it served us. But now I think we really are looking at collective, collaborative models of leadership. We have tools like the internet, like social media, like where is it being connected, not allowing us as a humanity of systems, of teams to better communicate.
00:31:52:16 - 00:32:15:26
John Michael Schert
But that's a tool. That's not the solution. So how do you, as you're asking, lead in a moment of culture shift? How do you allow people to align, that that core purpose? And as you said, you work in a walk in the most organizations that there's no clarity there. They're not like we all agree. Sure. That's also enough of of oneness.
00:32:15:26 - 00:32:45:08
John Michael Schert
Let's just all be together and agree. I think when you're truly allowing, a lot of hidden, hidden values and hidden motives and hidden needs to emerge, and then you work with what's really there. That's leadership. And it's not necessarily even having vision is important, but it's not driving towards that vision unilaterally. It's really allowing a system, a team, an organization to to choose.
00:32:45:08 - 00:33:11:26
John Michael Schert
We're going to do this together. So yeah, I hope a very quick story and this feels a little out of left field, but something it's popped into my head. Years ago I was in Colombia, Bogota for a fellowship, and I was meeting with the Wall Street Commerce Tribe. This is an indigenous tribe that for years, for decades, have been overtaken by paramilitary groups and forced to grow heroin poppy.
00:33:11:29 - 00:33:35:20
John Michael Schert
And it destroyed the fabric of their culture. But it, people that resisted were murdered or just killed outright. Many of the women in the village became prostitutes for the workers that were coming in. Some of the men joined the paramilitary. It was really destroying the fabric of a culture, a people, and over years and years, but finally the tribe as well.
00:33:35:21 - 00:33:55:00
John Michael Schert
And when people go out there and try to resist again, they would get mowed down. And they finally said, what we, the entire village of like 500 people went out and burned poppy fields together. And they said, if you want to stop us, you have to kill us all. And they they all chose to sort of step forward at this one moment, in lockstep.
00:33:55:00 - 00:34:13:07
John Michael Schert
And it was a this was like a purpose, like, we're not going to do this anymore. Fast forward. It's a it's a very popular story in Colombia, to my knowledge. They now grow like award winning coffee. They're not not without danger. But there was this there was this decision that we're all going to step forward and change together.
00:34:13:09 - 00:34:36:10
John Michael Schert
We sometimes think that it's the individual gang leader or a select group that's going to make the change happen on behalf of everyone else. Taking it back to organizational culture, leadership is helping the system really diagnose itself, really look at itself and say, what's the gap between how we behave and what we do and what we say we are and say we do.
00:34:36:12 - 00:35:06:27
John Michael Schert
And there's a gap between the reality and the aspired reality, and some of the method that I use and preaches leadership is helping people move, that aspire, move towards that aspire reality. It's also helping us change our aspired reality and say actually, those KPIs are aligned. Actually, our metrics of success are keeping us stuck, and we have to let go of 10%, 20% of the narrative we tell ourselves about what success looks like.
00:35:06:29 - 00:35:20:18
John Michael Schert
That then frees up, more bottom up level of co-creation, not top down decision making. So that was, the long monologue of how we get up.
00:35:20:19 - 00:35:45:03
Layne Fawns
This this sounds a lot more complicated in terms of like an organization, or some sort of like corporate structure, because if my personal culture or my identity is being threatened, it feels much more incentivized to me to go around to other members of my community to say, hey, I am under threat. Let's go together and change this.
00:35:45:05 - 00:36:16:12
Layne Fawns
So I think I still comes down to like, what's the incentive within a company? And and so if we're not using the word leaders and we're using leadership, how can authoritative figures in organizations incentivize the culture of their organization to, to sort of, cultivate that kind of desire to create change within their own organization?
00:36:16:15 - 00:36:46:09
John Michael Schert
Yeah. And one method is you let the thread in, like whatever the thread is, you're a car company who really banked on expansion into China, and it's not working because you were selling European cars in China. And there's a real threat. They're a threat to the core of the company. It threatens the values. Let's let's say it's a German car company, and it's like the word Germans, we make for the best engineers in the world, and our cars are superior.
00:36:46:11 - 00:37:10:15
John Michael Schert
It's a real threat to say, not in China. Like people don't really want to buy your car. So how do you let that threat in to land? You're asking like if you are in a position of authority, do you hold true at that moment to like your deepest value set of like what you think your product is, or do you allow the whole company to feel enough of that threat to say, we have to change?
00:37:10:17 - 00:37:47:05
John Michael Schert
So one of my one motivation is we have to change. I'm not telling you to change like the forcing function is there, another set of methods is people get really entrenched in their roles and responsibilities. The identity of like one, the CMO. I do this so cross cross learning and even this is a nifty trick like, you know, making people step away from their fixed role and having to look at the problem from a different angle, even within the same company, because it's not for lack of, these are all good people.
00:37:47:05 - 00:38:13:27
John Michael Schert
Like they really care about their job, their company, but they get in their own way. They start to see the problem through their perspective, and they get entrenched in seeing the problem repeatedly through where they. So if you're the authority, role person, the CEO, your job is to disorient, to allow some disorientation and roles, responsibilities. And that gets back again to incentivization.
00:38:13:29 - 00:38:32:05
John Michael Schert
So you can change some of the structures to say, we're not going to incentivize you to keep performing the way that we've been performing, because that's only going to keep getting us to the same types of outcomes. This is where you can easily get neutralized if you start to mess with people's incentivization. Right.
00:38:32:07 - 00:39:07:06
Ian Bergman
Well, I mean, this is like classic innovator's dilemma friction, right? That we're talking about here is messing with incentives and the like we get into. There's something really interesting. So we we've had another guest on the pod very recently, who is making some very bold statements in a new book, and they're statements that basically all of the, measurements in the systems that we have put in place, around, let's call it corporate structures, are actually the exact things that are making it impossible to make creative or wise decisions.
00:39:07:06 - 00:39:50:07
Ian Bergman
And he talks about things like measuring profit. He talks about things like, the, the focus on accountability to shareholders as being a thing that makes us feel comfortable and makes us feel wise and makes us feel like good capitalists, but actually leads to, uncreative destruction of everything that we've built. And I think that's actually a very interesting statement, especially in today's world, where we see things like the, the corporate board fight around OpenAI and a nonprofit entity controlling something that's generated a half trillion dollars in value, theoretically.
00:39:50:10 - 00:39:57:27
Ian Bergman
But man, if this is true, we've got a lot to unwind as, society and as an economic system.
00:39:57:29 - 00:40:29:02
John Michael Schert
Earlier on, this product said, I was dancing with American Ballet Theater. Beautiful company I love I still love to go watch classical ballet, but it's upholding values and esthetics and whole like, you know, narratives from Tsarist Russia and the French courts of Louis the 14th. And we Revere it because it's considered rarefied and beautiful and valuable. At one point in time, there was these moments of enlightenment where we developed these ideals.
00:40:29:02 - 00:40:55:18
John Michael Schert
And then but we're now we're sort of performing in these derivative structures. And I think everything you just articulated about a lot of the ways we have validated, verified corporate systems of reward are based on mindsets of the past, and we're still trying to recreate like a golden age of capitalistic America. And we're ignoring some of the truths of now.
00:40:55:21 - 00:41:18:29
John Michael Schert
And I think the again, this is what's so scary. I think if you're in a position of leadership or a position of authority right now in a corporation is you can't keep playing to the game that what the rules have changed and we haven't rewritten rules and we're honestly not even really listening to what the new rules are.
00:41:19:01 - 00:41:40:06
John Michael Schert
A simple heuristic 90, ten, ten like in any given moment of change, about 90% is going to stay the same. We think changes everything gets thrown out. But no, actually it's incremental. The trick is what 10% is no longer serving. As soon as I said earlier on this podcast, it's usually the thing that used to really, really work.
00:41:40:08 - 00:42:03:18
John Michael Schert
And are you willing to let it go and that make space for what could be? I don't want to be theoretical about I want to be super practical about it. What was working that no longer works, but it usually has a half life. It seems like it's still working. It seems like it's still selling. It seems like. And then here's the other part that we were getting out earlier.
00:42:03:22 - 00:42:32:22
John Michael Schert
So many people in that corporation have engineered their life and their livelihood to keep supporting that metric. So this is not without human loss and pain to say, yeah, we're going to stop incentivizing that way of of operating. So your form of podcast, you know, guest I think there are I think they're right. But not that we throw it all out at what pace of change can you do this?
00:42:32:22 - 00:42:53:04
John Michael Schert
And this gets back to we often are waiting for the forcing function, the crisis to change. If we could get a little ahead of it and start to let go of 10% in this cycle, and then 10% in the next cycle, and then after ten cycles, 100% is changed. But we're not allowing ourselves always to be iterative in that process.
00:42:53:06 - 00:43:00:18
Ian Bergman
Yeah. Mean what percentage of a typical organization needs to be thinking like this?
00:43:00:20 - 00:43:25:03
John Michael Schert
I think if you are a bureaucracy and your purpose is safety, the pace of change should be less. And that's part of my my personal perspective. We we took a, an ax to our federal government recently, and I think that's that's seriously a problem now because I think our federal government was operating perfectly before, but because the pace of change right now is too much, we don't even know what all the losses are.
00:43:25:03 - 00:43:46:19
John Michael Schert
We're all about to go file our federal taxes. And is that system even working right? So I think if you're a bureaucracy and there's many bureaucracies out there, not just governments, the pace of change should be less because it's about stability and security. If you're a startup, the pace of change is more like 50% or more. Everything's changing, changing, changing because you're trying to find market signal.
00:43:46:19 - 00:44:26:13
John Michael Schert
You're trying to find your minimum viable product. You're trying to arrive at like the thing. But if you are, I think earlier, you're asking, okay, you're past the startup phase. You're an established phase, mid mid-cap, mid-sized company. I think a safe level of change is around 10%. And these are just heuristics. We're throwing numbers out here. It's more the mindset that the change is constant, that you don't do a sprint and then rest on your laurels, that you have to actually be entertaining a level of discomfort, uncertainty, doubt on the daily, but that seeing it as an asset, not as a weakness.
00:44:26:15 - 00:45:12:29
Ian Bergman
Well, you are absolutely. I think, preaching to the choir for many of our audience members, right. Audience members who are sometimes agitating to think differently within their own organizations, who are trying to understand, you know, the changing context that we're all operating in. But the the antibodies, the structures that exist sometimes feel absolutely insurmountable. So, you know, if you had 1 or 2 nuggets of wisdom for, you know, somebody who wants to not just, you know, make creative decisions, not just make wise decisions themselves, but kind of like, you know, throw the, the, the pea under the mattress and start to agitate around them.
00:45:13:01 - 00:45:14:27
Ian Bergman
What would you suggest they do?
00:45:15:00 - 00:45:35:17
John Michael Schert
I'll give three. But number one is you can't do it alone. Like there's no way you can do this alone. Nor should you think you can. You know, you have your personal work to do wherever you're positioned in the company, your rank or title, your status, not your formal authority, but you also have informal authority. And formal authority is trust.
00:45:35:17 - 00:45:42:18
John Michael Schert
Respect, love like, you know, loyalty. And a lot of times I think people start to agitate and they think torture.
00:45:42:18 - 00:45:44:06
Ian Bergman
These are emotional words.
00:45:44:09 - 00:46:09:21
John Michael Schert
And your social capital, so many people that are that realize they are awakening to like, oh, this has to change. But they, they, they go to lone or they think that and they do it out of good intentions. Often they're trying to protect other people or they're trying to protect, again, like people's livelihoods, and they're willing to put themselves in a position of discomfort, but they're not willing to actually build a coalition.
00:46:09:23 - 00:46:30:08
John Michael Schert
And part of what I do as a consultant is help in a in a non-normative way. It's not good or bad, right or wrong, but can we really name the problem right now, and are we really all willing to engage in it? And we have to do that together, that that requires a level of psychological safety and trust.
00:46:30:10 - 00:46:54:04
John Michael Schert
There's real methods to do that. So the first is to to the listener right now you can't go it alone. The second is you have to begin by listening. 80% of failure is a failure of diagnosis. You think you see the problem. You think you also know the solution, and you jump too quickly to what you think the solution is, and you don't spend enough time diagnosing.
00:46:54:07 - 00:47:15:21
John Michael Schert
You know, a patient comes in to see a doctor and the doctor looks at the symptoms. It's so easy to be like, well, yeah, here's a drug for that. Are you really looking at the underlying problems? Are we spending enough time looking at the environment, the macro environment, the systems around it? Are you really looking at, the interpersonal level of decision making within a company?
00:47:15:23 - 00:47:36:18
John Michael Schert
We think that we're clean machines, right? We think the, the logical human, homo economicus or whatever the term is, we think that we make logical decisions. We don't. So many decisions get made in the company are based on peer pressure or how the thought of by each other. So are you really able to subject object? It's not.
00:47:36:18 - 00:48:00:09
John Michael Schert
You're not the subject. Make the problem an object that you can all look at and study together. And that begins by listening and spending way more time in the diagnostic. And then the last that kind of touches upon them both is we're we're interdependent to each other. Earlier I talked about socialized minds, codependent systems where you just you do what's expected of you.
00:48:00:10 - 00:48:25:19
John Michael Schert
You get rewarded for that reinforces that loop. You just keep doing it. Then there's a phase that Keegan talks about of moving towards self authoring minds, of being independent, having your own ideas and your own ability to perceive and see the object. That's that's I think a lot of the listeners that you're quoting right now in our are in are in that or moving into that self authoring mind.
00:48:25:19 - 00:48:47:06
John Michael Schert
They're seeing the problem or the and they want to work it, but they maybe get stuck in their own independence or their own self authoring. And it's not their fault. Again, we we've had a hero worship type of culture for a long time, especially in corporate settings, especially in startup settings. The goal is to move towards into interdependent ways of working.
00:48:47:09 - 00:49:11:08
John Michael Schert
Being a self transforming mind, like seeing a system, being in the system, but not of it. My faculty advisor in grad school was Cornel West, and he would always say be in the system, but not of it. But he was quoting Jesus Christ like, how do you step into something but not let it so overwhelm you that you just buy into the again, the metrics of success?
00:49:11:08 - 00:49:38:03
John Michael Schert
You're you're able to step out of it and then build coalitions and ideas and movements and also partner with your quote unquote enemies, like partner with people that think differently. Find true like part bipartisan if there's politics ways of approaching the problem because the more like sets of different thinking we have addressing it, we're going to go to a much more robust diagnosis of what it is.
00:49:38:05 - 00:50:03:07
John Michael Schert
And then lastly, at some point you do have to act. You can't just stay and analysis paralysis. You can't just also keep getting pushed back by failure. And dominant culture is reinforcing. You have to allow that space for emergent culture. But then you also have to at some point say, okay, let's run some experiments, but let's actually try this.
00:50:03:09 - 00:50:39:12
John Michael Schert
And of course, classic startup mentality fails itself. You know, early fail first, like run some low cost experiments tests. And I'm talking about cultural experiments within a company. Shifts of again changing incentivization structures, changing behaviors within meetings, changing how reward and psychological safety is rewarded. These are real, tangible tactical approaches. And then once you do that, you start to then get data from your experiment and then you say, okay, well, now let's revisit the problem with this new set of information.
00:50:39:14 - 00:50:58:27
John Michael Schert
This is all theoretical, but it's practical. But I'll draw it back to my own experience. This is exactly what it feels like to be a ballet dancer. And you come off stage and you just put a product out in the world, but the next day you have to receive notes and critique, and you have to revisit the same.
00:50:59:04 - 00:51:16:26
John Michael Schert
You're going to do the same ballet again tonight, but a living, breathing thing, it's never the same. And so what are you allowing to change? You still have to do the choreography. You stuff to do the steps. You don't get to change at all. But what you're tweaking is how you interpret those steps. What experiments do you want to run around?
00:51:16:26 - 00:51:39:10
John Michael Schert
Pacing, timing, sequencing. That's what I learned as an artist, and I think it's fully applicable in corporate organizational systems. How we're generating in this space in between the fixed points, that's where art is made. That's where innovation happens. And then every now and then after you've run enough experiments, you can say, okay, we can let this pillar go.
00:51:39:16 - 00:51:49:28
John Michael Schert
We have enough proof from the validation now that we can let this pillar go. But don't start with saying we're going to cut this pillar out. That's usually destined to fail.
00:51:50:01 - 00:52:18:24
Ian Bergman
Absolutely. Not only beautiful sentiments there and some frankly poetic language job, Michael, but, I think some really important reminders, right? We live in a world where, it feels like we have to use the sharp elbows to create space and time to listen and ask questions. And it feels very difficult sometimes to run experiments, especially on culture, like it's one thing to, you know, prototype a piece of code and throw it out there and see what happens.
00:52:18:24 - 00:52:49:06
Ian Bergman
But to run experiments on people. But I like the the point that you make that even the most refined art forms. Right. Art forms that may harken back to Czarist Russia and beyond, have, you know, almost a requirement in them to, to listen, to adapt? I actually think that's really, really interesting. And then I think the other thing that's really interesting is we can't be trapped by these forms.
00:52:49:08 - 00:53:11:21
Ian Bergman
Right? I've heard you say, tell me if you think I'm wrong, but, you know, I've heard you say that, you know, this form is static. This form does harken back to another era, and it is a refined art form. But perhaps we need to use that as a launchpad for some new form of creativity, some new thing that that we do, I think I think these are really powerful lessons.
00:53:11:21 - 00:53:16:09
Ian Bergman
And, and, John Michael really appreciated internalizing them with.
00:53:16:09 - 00:53:41:03
John Michael Schert
Yeah. What what do we keep or do we let go of and what do we what do we gain? What do we innovate on and I, I can't stress enough that you can't do it alone, because you have to truly listen and you have to pace it. You have to figure out what can the system handle. And then you got to keep the system responsible and accountable to stay right at the edge of its competence.
00:53:41:05 - 00:53:47:08
John Michael Schert
But if you let it slip back into comfort, too often it's not learning, it's not changing.
00:53:47:11 - 00:54:05:05
Layne Fawns
So, John, Michael, we're we're just coming up to the end of our time here together. For folks that are, interested in connecting with you and learning more about what you do, where can they find you? Are you on LinkedIn? Do you have, you know, a website? What? Where where you chilling out these days?
00:54:05:07 - 00:54:31:11
John Michael Schert
Yeah. LinkedIn, I think professionally is is the best and strongest. Can always Google. I've got a lot of content and performances and presentations I've put out there. But in terms of reaching out, I've built up a network of about 30 collaborators, consultants around the world who do incredible things. And when clients reach out, we create customized teams to really go in and help them.
00:54:31:14 - 00:54:53:04
John Michael Schert
And I'm super proud of the work that my team and I do. And so we're always looking for new challenges. But also the challenges are not always new. They're getting replicated and you're opening and showing up in Asia. And part of our job is to help create this through lines and help, help realize that what we're facing right now is on a human humanity scale.
00:54:53:04 - 00:55:09:01
John Michael Schert
And how can we help? How can we be a guide where as someone, as I said recently, called me a leadership artist? Our job is not to do the work. Our job is to help you do the work, but our job is to hold you in that and to give you tools. Yes, but also to teach you those tools.
00:55:09:01 - 00:55:34:13
John Michael Schert
But then to like a coach or a gym trainer make you do the work, like give me ten more pushups. You got it. Okay. Here. We talked about it with your eyes. It. Now go do it. Go run that experiment. So I think LinkedIn is great. And I'm, I'm always excited to work with people that are right at the verge of change, and they just don't know what to do because they're facing an adaptive challenge.
00:55:34:20 - 00:55:37:27
John Michael Schert
And that's where I think my team and I are most most helpful. Awesome.
00:55:38:00 - 00:55:51:09
Ian Bergman
Incredible. What John Michael, founder of James and Company, thank you for coming on Innovators Inside. This has been super fun and I can't wait to continue the conversation at some point in the future.
00:55:51:09 - 00:55:52:27
Layne Fawns
Thanks so much for joining us.
00:55:53:00 - 00:55:55:24
John Michael Schert
Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be a part of this world. Thanks.
00:55:55:29 - 00:55:57:03
Ian Bergman
Catch you next time. Cheers.