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By Jonathan Kahn | lucidplot.com
Published: May 12, 2014

Jonathan KahnIn Episode 23 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Judith Glaser and Whitney Johnson about collaboration, listening, and finding meaning in our work. You can follow them on twitter @CreatingWE and @johnsonwhitney.

To learn more about these themes, come to #dareconf: people skills for digital workers, 22-23 September 2014 in London.

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Read the transcript

Jonathan Kahn: Today I am talking to two guests, both joining me from the east coast of the USA. They are Judith E. Glaser, who is the CEO of Benchmark Communications, and chairman of the Creating WE Institute. She’s written six books, including “Creating WE” and “Conversational Intelligence.”

And, I’m really excited to welcome Whitney Johnson, who is cofounder of Rose Park Advisors, which is Clayton Christensen’s investment firm. She’s the author of “Dare, Dream, Do. Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare To Dream.”

Judith, and Whitney, welcome to the podcast.

Whitney Johnson: Thank you.

Judith Glaser: Thrilled to be here today.

Jonathan: Starting with you, Judith. We want to talk today about collaboration, so can you talk to me about why this theme of collaboration keeps coming up, and why it seems to be so challenging for us?

Judith: First of all, I’m seeing the world — and I think we’re all seeing the world shift from an I-centric world to a WE-centric world. It’s happening around us by the technology that’s bringing everybody together. We have no choice, however, it’s a bigger thing than that. It seems that our brain is designed for collaboration.

The highest powers of our brain, where we have empathy, and connection, and integrity, and trust, and we work together to partner, that part of our brains is still growing. It seems to be growing in tandem with this very big shift in technology.

Collaboration seems to be on everybody’s plate right now. People are wondering, “How do we do it better? How do we do it differently?”

I’d love Whitney’s thinking about this, too. I’ll share a definition in the dictionary which really alerted me to this big shift needing to be done in a different way. That is “collaboration” in the dictionary means “cohorting with the enemy,” if you can believe that, Jonathan.

Whitney: Wow.

Judith: [laughs] And Whitney.

[laughter]

Jonathan: In France, they talk about collaboration in that way. The Vichy Regime was the collaborative regime, wasn’t it?

Judith: Yes. [laughs]

Jonathan: Whitney, what do you say to that?

Whitney: First of all, I love, Judith, your insights. For me, anything really big that we want to get done in the world requires that we work with other people. Working with other people is hard.

It’s the grand human predicament at its simplest. You think about the family. When it doesn’t work, it’s a misery. But when it does work, it is the most deeply satisfying thing that can happen. I think there is that piece of it.

But then, also, we’re increasingly in a world of free agents where people are doing independent work. Whereas, in organizations where people work for a company, you could cover up the fact that collaboration wasn’t working well, because people were still getting paid. But now, when you have the independent ranks of swelling, and people understand.

Even, for instance, this podcast that we’re doing today. This is very much a microcosm of that. In order for this to happen, we have to be willing to collaborate and find ways to work together even if there isn’t necessarily money changing hands.

There’s this need for people to learn how to do it, because out of necessity we have to do it. The beauty of that is as we do it successfully, we’re finding that our work-life is increasingly satisfying.

Judith: Absolutely.

Jonathan: Can you speak to where this challenge of collaboration comes up? Either in your writing or in your consulting work? Either of you.

Judith: A couple of years ago when I started the Creating WE Institute, I decided that I was going to bring together, everybody who wants to be part of the institute and ask them to write with me.

I thought it would be a great way for us to learn how to share ideas together. A lot of times when we’re just in conversation with people, we fall into an old habit which is what we see in companies, and we see in collaborations that go bad. That is what I call “Level two conversations.”

In level two conversations, we’re very positional with people, because we’re stating a position. If you think about the many courses around negotiations and it’s a lot about advocating your point of view, and inquiring into the other person’s point of view.

That’s the dynamic, yet that dynamic is very positional. A lot of times we advocate our point of view, and then when we inquire, we try to move people over to our point of view. That’s not the same the thing, because that ultimately could end in a less collaborative experience. Somebody wins, somebody loses.

I had started a project where people could write together with the idea. Whitney, this is a little bit of your work on innovation. I wanted people to get out of the idea of holding a position and into the idea of sharing their positions to produce something that’s different in vigor than either of them have thought about before.

They have to let each other into their minds, into the wisdom — part of their mind, which again, is that prefrontal cortex-heart connection and start to explore things. See if that would create a whole of different set of contexts around which collaboration, which I’m now moving into co-creation when I do these exercises where co-creation takes place. I’m curious. Does that resonate at all?

Whitney: Yeah. What’s so fascinating about that, Judith, is that as I think about this idea of collaboration, one of the things I talk about is that we all know that we need to collaborate. We all know that it’s very risky to do, instinctively.

One of the things that I really recommend people do is that they start small. If you connect with someone and you really click and you think, “I really want to work together.” Sometimes we say, “OK, let’s start a business together or let’s write a book together.”

In fact, you don’t know if you can yet work together. The very easy way to figure that out is to do project like you just mentioned of — writing a Harvard Business review blog together. What is so fascinating about that is that I’ve found I will suggest to people that we do that, and there have been all sorts of varying degrees of quality of collaboration if you will.

It’s been a great litmus test for both me and the other person to figure out, “Yeah, we absolutely want to work together or we don’t.” I would say that one experience that I’ve had in collaborating on HBR was a piece that we wrote called “Throw Your Life a Curve,” was with a fellow by the name of Juan Carlos Mendes who is an MIT-trained systems engineer and computer scientist.

That was to me one of the best collaborations I’ve had in terms of both the output and the experience because he and I both approach the world very differently and as Judith said, it was like I was on one side of the divide and he was on the other side of the divide and we both could not bridge that divide, unless we reached out and tried to learn. We had to reach to each other in order to make that happen. Because we did that, then something very magical happened in that we wrote a piece that neither one of us could have written on our own.

Jonathan: Right, and that involves you letting go of control. When you don’t go to that position.

Whitney: Absolutely.

Jonathan: There’s a couple of things that, listening to you guys speaking is reminding me of, one of them is I learned this framework from a friend and colleague who gave a talk at my recent conference about facilitation. She talks about positions. If you stick to your positions you can’t find common ground. But underneath positions there are interests, and underneath interests there are needs. If you can figure out a way to kind of go together to discover those, when you both understand what your needs are, you may then be able to find a ways forward that you can act together on.

Judith: That’s really great, that’s beautiful.

Jonathan: The other thing that it made me think of was you were talking with Whitney about co-writing, both of you were talking about writing together as a way of small collaboration to learn from. I think that I’ve used…that I’ve learned a huge amount from is doing improvisation, like theatrical improvisation, which is this idea that you do a sketch together in front of five people or something like that. It’s amazing how similar that is to any type of collaboration, because my instinct will be to control the situation, and yet to work with someone else I have to not control the situation.

[laughs]

Judith: Very interesting.

Jonathan: Judith, go ahead.

Judith: I was just thinking that underneath this we’re learning that there’s a part of the brain called the “like me/not like me” part of the brain. As we get to know someone, it tries to sniff out in some way, almost like an animal it sniffs out, is this someone that’s in my heritage or not? Is this someone that I can really connect to? Is it really part of my being?

Because when people are more like us, somehow it also opens up that brain to say, “OK, I trust you. I’m not going to screen it out, I’m not going to judge you, I’m just going to let it flow.” Like you were just describing Jonathan, that kind of let it flow thing, and the control happen, yes, it’s like this magic that happens. Whitney, you call it magic too, that happens between people where trust is really high and fear is low. Then it goes to places in our brain that we didn’t even know existed. That’s really exciting when that happens.

Whitney: Judith, as you just said that I had a little bit of an epiphany. This fellow Juan Carlos I mentioned that I collaborated with on the face of it, it would seem that we have actually there’s no “like me” there. He’s an engineer, I’m a musician, he’s a man, I’m a woman, he’s from Latin America, I’m from the United States. But, when you said that I realized that because I’ve spent so much of my career in Latin America, and I’ve spoken Spanish almost my entire life, and I served a mission in Latin America,

I actually have a very high degree of trust for people that speak Spanish and are from Latin America specifically. I wonder if that actually contributed to that sense of “like me” that actually allowed us to sort of find all the common ground but even though on the face of it, it wasn’t there. It’s very interesting.

Judith: Wow. I think what happens is that our bodies sense in 0.07 seconds more information about another person than we could even put in an encyclopedia. That’s how fast our brains respond to that “like me/not like me” part of the brain. Also about some of the other things, that as you were talking with him about your ideas, you also jump from the physical “like me” to the spiritual “like me”. Like you were describing. I lived in another world, and I bet you on some level your worlds were connecting and it created more “like me” than “not like me”, if that makes any sense.

Whitney: Yeah, it does.

[laughter]

Jonathan: I’d like to talk a little more deeply about this idea of listening. I know, Judith, your book, “Conversational Intelligence,” seems to talk about listening quite a lot. What, specifically, can you tell us about listening and how that relates to collaboration?

Judith: I’m going to share something with the two of you that I haven’t shared with anybody except my husband, last night, as I had this epiphany. [laughs] It’s hot off the press. I hope this makes sense. He always thinks I make sense even when I don’t, this is a real Litmus test for me.

What I started to think about with listening was the following, there’s a giving and a receiving that takes place between two human beings. We’d written it out since the beginning of time. It’s in religious spiritual books. It’s in everything that we do, that giving and receiving.

Giving, when it goes sour, can become telling people what to do. It can become ordering them, controlling them, all these kinds of things you’re talking about. Receiving is not like taking from someone. Receiving is being open to receive that person in their fullest, without judgment. One is giving out their ideas and the other is receiving the other person’s ideas.

Listening is a piece of this, where we’re open to receive someone without judgment, for their fullest, without anything that stops them from enabling the real self to come forward to us. Listening has a piece of that accepting another person for who they are.

When we listen with that level of depth, not to judge but to connect, and I now have a phrase called “listening to connect,” that activates the brain to be open and trusting of the other person, and creates a whole different environment to receive what they’re saying to us. Does that make any sense?

Whitney: It does. In fact, Judith, earlier you talked about level to communication, of it being positional, and I wonder if, in most of our brains, we think of listening as, “I want to hear what you have to say so that I can position myself advantageously or somehow persuade you to think what I’m saying.”

Jonathan: Or, to protect myself.

Whitney: Yes. Exactly. To protect myself. Actually, you’re talking about the listening where you’re receiving and you’re just open, and there’s a vulnerability to that. Again, going back to these initial steps that we talked about is, “Can I work with someone at a very basic level to see what happens? Do we position or are we willing to start being open to their ideas and to receive or listen”? That’s really powerful. It absolutely makes sense.

Judith: I’ve come to call that level three conversations. The first part of it is just what you just described, Whitney, as being willing to be influenced by the other person, to be open, to receive them like you’re picking up a channel on the radio and you want to get it right. You don’t judge it, it doesn’t get to the left or to the right, just to that person.

There’s something that we now know in the brain. When that happens, and two people are talking with each other and they’re in level three, they’re open to receive and open to connect. It activates a thing called the mirror neuron system inside of people. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that before. Have you, Jonathan and Whitney?

Jonathan: Yes. It’s related to empathy. It’s a sciency way of talking about empathy, as far as I understand it.

Judith: Yes. It’s a little bit more.

Whitney: Keep going I want to hear.

Judith: Yes. This is more. I’m speaking. This is my language. This is what they call “Judith’s world,” where I go off into my interpretation of 50 years of trying to make sense of all this. It is different than empathy. Empathy is connected to our feelings and emotions. We say, “I really understand how you feel.” It’s acknowledging another person’s feelings.

Mirror neuron and using that part of the brain is where we actually map another person and open up the space in our brain to map them. By mapping the brain does it automatically. It’s only when we block it that it doesn’t do this. I now have a place in my brain for Whitney, and every time I connect with you, Whitney, that part of my brain, because I trust you so much, opens up and I do it, I mirror neuron wherever you are now in your life, and I bring it in.

That is more than empathy. It’s, fully, stepping into each other’s shoes, living inside of your world, seeing it from your perspective, not judging you and not just saying, “I really care. I’m sorry you feel bad.” That’s a lower level. This one is getting you and holding you. When I leave you, I have a presence of you in me. There is a mapping in the brain that’s taken place, we now know that.

For every human being we just add to that part of the brain so there’s a Whitney spot, there’s a Jonathan spot, I even have a dog spot, a Corso spot. That’s what happens when we really mirror neuron. Then, we connect at a deeper level without judgment. It’s a fascinating new science. We’re just learning it. It’s 10 years since we put the word mirror neurons to this. It’s an amazing mystery.

Whitney: I’m just wondering then. How do we help a person do that inside of a larger organization? Or we don’t necessarily. We start with individuals and help them learn how to do it, model for an individual how to do that. Then, as people learn how to do that at the very individual level, they’re able to start bringing it into their organizations. It moves up from a grassroots level. What are your thoughts around that?

Judith: I have two different directions to go with this. One is that I have spent the last 30 some years in my business doing global transformational projects, where it requires not just the one on one. It requires the one on team and it also requires the one on organization. I can give you examples of how to do it. In fact, I have one now in a school system, which is unbelievably exciting.

The one on one is the easiest place to start because if you, as a leader, decide that you’re going to connect to people and listen without judgment, then you’re going to ask questions for which you don’t have answers. That’s the non-positional question, where you are exploring and discovering another person in many different dimensions, or ideas in many different dimensions.

This is why I came up with the term conversational cocktails. I, literally, had people say to me, a day after a leader shifts into this behavior…they call up and say, “What did you give my boss to drink? He’s a different person. I feel the difference and it’s so radical that it makes an impact on me.” That’s a beautiful thing and it happens at the one on one chemical level.

In addition, you can bring leaders together in teams. I’m doing this with a company with 350,000 people. We did it at the leadership level where we worked on a team of 11 people, to learn to go into level three conversations with each other. They have people that have come to them and said, “Can you mentor us in whatever your team did to shift”? it creates a provocative reaching out to the people that are shifting and changing. Being open in level three is actually causing people to come to them and say, “Mentor me, teach me how to do this.”

Whitney: That’s interesting. You are seeing it. You can do it on the individual level, but you are finding that you’re able to implement it within an organization, to the extent that you have a core group of people or cohort that are willing to do that. It’s great.

Judith: Exactly. In fact, there’s a school in Boston that we’re doing it, Whitney, right now, your homeland.

Whitney: Interesting. I have wondered or thought, Jonathan, I know you probably want to go to another question, but the thought that’s occurred to me is…a lot of people now are talking about meditation and how important meditation is. I actually took a meditation class just last year from Deepak Chopra’s sister-in-law. It was really quite wonderful, but what I thought, as you’re saying this, I’m thinking, “You know what? I think one of the reasons why people are so inclined toward meditation at this point in time, is that they’re saying to themselves, “I want to learn how to listen.”

Meditation, at its simplest, is listening. It’s interesting to me that this sort of zeitgeist is coming together are people saying, “I don’t know how to listen, but I need to learn how to do this, because I need to feel connected.”

Jonathan: It’s funny. It’s what I wanted to ask you anyway, that second, which was, Judith was repeatedly saying that in order to do this level three, you have to listen without judgment.

One of the challenges that coming, that I’m seeing in this when I talk to people who have collaboration challenges is, If we are constantly judging ourselves, with the self-judgment, one of the reasons we are often so defensive or positional is because we feel insecure.

We have these nasty things going on inside our heads, towards ourselves. If that’s happening, we can’t be open and be in a non-judgmental to others. My question to you, Whitney, was you’ve written about going for your dreams, daring, all this kind of thing.

You must have come up against this question of, How to help people to stop judging themselves and still believe in themselves, and that pre-requisite to really working with somebody else. What have you found can work to help us get out of those negative self-talk and situations?

Whitney: That’s a great question. I’m going to give you a very tactical one. This often applies to women, but I think it actually applies to men as well.

One of things that happens, is that oftentimes when someone is thinking about a dream or even not thinking about dreaming, because they don’t think it’s their privilege to dream.

What’s happening is that, they’ve been socialized to believe in, this is especially with women. We’ve been socialized to believe that our dreams, ambitions, or gifts aren’t that important, and that women are only feminine within the context of a relationship, and if they’re helping someone else.

Either they’re giving them praise or they’re giving them time, etcetera. What that then means, is that if a woman has a dream, because a dream is by definition, “Something that she wants to get done in the world,” whatever it is.

Then she’s actually taking resources, not giving them. One of the first things that I do when I find people saying, “I’m not sure that it’s actually my privilege to do this.” I try to make them aware of this societal thing that’s happening, so that when they start to feel like, “Oh, I shouldn’t do this, because I’m naughty.”

Maybe they’re naughty, but usually they’re not. It in fact, that there’s a societal thing telling them, “Your dreams aren’t quite that important.” Just that simple awareness, can make a big difference for people to start shifting.

There are other things that are going on. Sometimes, people just don’t feel good enough, period, which is another thing that has to be confronted. I think at that very basic level, I try to get people to think very tactically, so that when they say, “Oh, I shouldn’t do this, because I’m bad.”

In fact, it’s just society saying, “You shouldn’t do this, because if you do this, you’re being selfish. When in fact, you’re just doing something that will make you happy, and if you’re happy, then other people around you…you’ll have that “Knock-on” effect in bringing more happiness.”

That sounds very “Pollyanna. Its springtime, sort of thing,” but I think, it’s absolutely very true.

Jonathan: What I’m hearing is, you’re drawing people’s attention to some of the factors that may have got them into the situation where they’re telling themselves that they shouldn’t, or they can’t, or it’s not their place, to go for something that they believe in.

Whitney: Yes. That was said so much more succintly, thank you, Jonathan.

[laughter]

Whitney: I appreciate the summary. Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying.

Jonathan: Judith, how does this self-stuff affect our ability to listen?

Judith: I want to respond in two different directions, one to your most immediate question. I have mapped out listening in four different levels. This is where you’re talking about the level of what I call, “Level zero,” which is “Noise in the attack listening.”

That means that stuff is going on in your head. You’re judging yourself. You’re judging others, and it’s interrupting your ability to connect. That’s the minus almost, place to be. Whitney, you were talking about, “It gets in the way of people tuning their instrument, and being able to use meditation to be non-judgmental.”

Each one of the other levels of listening moves up from there. I have to match up with the Conversational Intelligence. I have level one, level two, and level three.

Level one, is what’s called “Face value listening.” That’s where you think that you’re hearing facts when people talk. You’re taking everything that somebody says for its apparent superficial truth.

I say, superficial, because what we discover is that everybody has…In fact, it’s like an illusion. Everybody has definitions and meaning in their head that are not necessarily the same. It gets back to the idea that we live in different realities.

Level one, is where you all of a sudden have that, “Ah-ha,” that you have to listen differently in order to go beyond the surface, and start to engage in discovery with people to find out what they really mean. That’s an insight that takes people further into a better listening place.

We also get stuck in level two, which is, “Positional listening.” Where we’re listening like both of you described where we listen to take somebody to a certain place, to our position. We’re not really engaged in opening up a place for them to be “listened to.”

Then, of course, level three is the big one, where we’re in transformational listening, and we’re navigating with each other, into each other’s realities, to appreciate where each other comes from. This is where we touch on the aspirational piece, because what I’ve learned is, human beings were designed to aspire, and we’ve ignored that.

Aspire means, “To breathe.” When two people aspire together or talk about their dreams together, we “breath” life into the dreams. We put words to the dreams. We move from dreams to reality. We actually start to help each other achieve our dreams, which is the highest place that we could go with another human being.

I think the taboo, Whitney, that you talked about. As I heard you say that, my body had a little quiver. Saying, “If we’ve pulled each other back to a place where dreams become a taboo, then we’ve taken away the life’s blood for human beings.

We’ve taken away what really inspires us to grow and live longer, is the dreaming part of our brain. I’d love to hear more from both of you about this.

Whitney: One thought that I had is that I love that you just said this. I wrote it down. That, “Human beings are designed to aspire, which means to breathe life into something, and to breathe life into dreams,” really, really moved me. It made me realize why I love…Oh, I’m crying a little bit.

I just love to coach people, because I find that when, for me, that one-on-one conversation of helping breathe life into their dreams, it is one of the most deeply satisfying things I could ever do.

As you just said, whenever you’re coaching someone, if you’re coaching them well, that is entirely a co-created conversation. Right? Am I…?

Judith: It is. First of all, I have to say, thank you for sharing your vulnerability on this phone call, and for sharing how you’re feeling. It is just a beautiful thing. It’s your book. I mean, that’s what you’re book is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

It’s helping people, story after story, realize that people can have dreams. They can live into them. To coach people out of that horrible thing that happens in life where people say, “That’s stupid. That’s too big, you can’t do that. What would make you think that, that’s part of who you are? You’re not that person.”

You’re coaching brings people out of those negative, judgmental bits of feedback that we get, left and right, in our lives, and helps release that spirit again. I want to send both of you a poem. Maybe we can send it out to people.

My daughter wrote about, “There once was a boy with a dream all his own. To go to the moon and invent his own phone. He had such big dreams that spread far and wide, that nothing could hold them, because they came from inside.”

“Then, one day, the boy’s thought’s started to stray. All he had was a job with high pay. All those dreams that he had collected were no good now, and simply rejected. The man sat for a long while, getting much less bolder. He didn’t talk much, but because when he did, his bones creaked loudly, not much like a kid.”

Then it goes to, “Then one day while that man was sitting in his chair, he remembered the very, very, rare dream that he had while around the age of 10, and suddenly the old man became a young boy again.”

Whitney: You’re daughter wrote that?

Judith: When she was 11 1/2 years old.

Jonathan: Oh, my goodness.

Judith: Yeah…

Whitney: Wow…

Judith: …she…

Whitney: …yeah, please send that to us.

Judith: She put it out there that this happens in life, and we don’t even realize it. She saw it, and she inspired me, and it brings tears to my eyes every time I think how young she was, when she “got it.”

Whitney: That’s amazing. Jonathan, what are your thoughts?

Jonathan: I’m fascinated by this conversation. It’s fantastic. My thoughts are, as we come to the end of this podcast that, I run an event about collaboration called, “Dare Conference.”

People come to the event, because they have struggles with getting appreciation, and getting buy-in for their ideas, working with other people. If you ask them why they’re coming and why they need help, there’s this sense that they’re trying to get a piece of work done.

Finish a project, or finish a creative endeavor, or create a website, something like that. It’s like we need to work together to make this happen, because that’s so complicated, right?

What I’m hearing from you guys speak is that, and what it’s making me realize is that, a lot of time, one of the things that’s really challenging about the type of work is, we’re trying to connect other people. We want to find meaning in our work.

What that means, is the ability to make our work bigger than ourselves. Although, we don’t realize it, one of the things we’re missing and that we need is that connection or that spirituality or whatever you want to call it.

Whitney: Yeah, that’s great.

Jonathan: I guess in terms of a question to you, Whitney. You’ll work in trying to help people try to follow their dreams. Like, where do these kinds of practical skills of collaboration, and looking after yourself come into that for? If I come to you and say, “Help me achieve my dreams.” What are you going to say?

Whitney: Right. Yeah. That’s interesting. It’s funny, because I’m putting on a conference in August as well, that’s basically, “Dare. Dream. Do. Disrupt,” which is meant to facilitate. It sounds like we’re on both side of the pond, doing somewhat the same things, which is fantastic.

Yeah, you’re right. One of the things that I find is that, I can coach people and say, “OK, where are you today? Let’s figure out what it is that you really want to do, not what you think you want to do.” Then, come up with a strategy and then tactics.

The real secret sauce I’m finding, more and more, is this collaborative piece of being able to say, “OK. I want to connect you to this person. You to these three people, and they’re going to help you forge ahead.”

Just that one-on-one conversation is enough to open the door, but it’s the connections you make with other people that allow them to actually walk through the door.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Judith: Beautiful. Helping people feel open to the support of another person isn’t being weak, because that’s the old model.

Whitney: Yes.

Judith: It’s really how we achieve our dreams. I finally realized I’m working with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. We’re in our 12th year. In the beginning, the leaders that we were working with didn’t want to accept help from others, because they looked weak.

Now, they’ve decided to institute. This is a global norm that managers will help the people that report to them, but they will also become the funnel into which they can access others in the organization, given it’s a global organization. Like, PWC is, access others who can help them enter into parts of the world that they never would have thought of going before.

Whitney: That’s fantastic.

Judith: It is fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we’re getting rid of some of these old taboos about what’s male and female, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s weak, what’s hard, and coming up with a new language. Like co-creation is a new word. It’s different than collaboration. If we go back to where we started. It’s really different.

Whitney: Especially, Judith, if you go back to the definition of collaboration, right? Collaboration is cohorting, or cavorting with the enemy, and co-creation is creating with a friend. They are in really important juxtaposition. Huh.

Judith: Yeah. We’re inventing new language right now to support our aspirations.

Jonathan: This has been a fantastic collaboration. I’d like to say a big thank you to Judith Glaser and Whitney Johnson for your time today, and for really being open, and sharing your ideas, and making that something bigger than any of us could have done on our own.

Whitney: And for you holding the space for us, too, Jonathan. Holding that space open.

Judith: Yep.

Jonathan: My pleasure. Thank you, guys.

 



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