Michael Spayd: How Destiny Brings the Best Teams Together

Richard:

Hey Michael, thank you so much for being here today.

Michael:

Hello, Richard. Thank you for having me. I appreciate your invitation and chance to sit down like this.

Richard:

It’s a pleasure. Every time I have a chance to chat with you, it’s awesome. It’s mind expanding for me. Is there anything else you would add on to that intro, anything else that we should know about you?

Michael:

Well, I founded the Agile Coaching Institute with Lisa Adkins in 2010, as most people know. And I finished the book Agile Transformation, that I was writing for eight years and my co-author Michelle Madore really helped in that. And we started a company together, and then more recently I’ve started the collective edge and that feels like it’s going to be, you know, I’m in the age range where I’m not going to start another company where, you know, this is the last, this is the last purpose. So I want it to be, I want it to be good and I want it to be, you know, part of my legacy and the mark that I’ve tried to make on the world.

Richard:

All right. So, the Collective edge, I was just looking at the website. It looks really cool. We’re definitely going to hear more about it. And you just listed at least three teams that you’ve been part of, this is the podcast about teams, and we ask every guest about the best team they’ve ever been a member of, of their life. And when we say team, I often use a really generalized definition of team, any group of two or more people that have a shared goal. This could be a work team, this could be a non-work team, any kind of group of two or more people with shared goals. What’s the best one of your life?

Michael:

Well, I was thinking about this Richard and, I don’t know that I could pick the quote, “best team.” It’s not how the world occurs for me, but I did think of three very strongly. And one of them, the first one, the first real team I would call it, you know, best team, I don’t know, but best team at the time actually was back in the mid 90’s and it was, we were working in a really big telecom and trying to get records, drawings of buildings and stuff that they had, they had thousands of buildings. So, it was a lot of stuff and get them all available electronically basically, to, you know, to their architects and, you know, their building planners. And this was a group of five people. And we just really gelled in just this really beautiful way. And perhaps the single most important thing I learned from this group was that, one, everybody’s contribution on a team is decidedly not equal. I mean, we have this harmony thing that we want to act like everybody’s, you know, has an equal contribution and that’s just ridiculous. That’s just almost never true, but at the same time, everybody’s fulfilling, their piece was critical. So, it’s not like you can have slackers on a real team. One of the people was, did sort of a different kind of a function, but that function was for her to rise up to her own capability was like critical. And it sort of supercharged the team for everybody to be doing their best, even though that was not the same at all, it was different. That definitely left an impression on me. The second team I thought of was at Azure coaching Institute and, you know, Lisa and I were the core of that, but we added Michael Hamman and Leslie Riley and David Chicot and Cynthia Lloyd Darsh, a couple number of other people. And we just had a, we had a simpatico with each other in a flow. We could finish each other’s sentences. I mean, we did that regularly in teaching and we made a really big impact, I feel like, you know, on the Azure coaching world, and it was from some kind of, I don’t know what to call it. It was some kind of stickiness or some kind of… We were aligned around a purpose. And we had tremendous fun doing that. It was a real joy. And the third one is me and my COO of the Collective edge, Marie Murtagh. And you know, I’ve never had a partnership where somebody could completely get past my defenses, like just bypass them and tell me, you know, all the honest things without me feeling defensive about it, particularly, I mean, I feel resistant sometimes, but there’s just an honesty and a straightforwardness about, you know, I can be a very strong-willed and persuasive person, and it’s easy to get bold over by that. And Marie doesn’t do that, you know, and she respects me at the same time, so there’s this kind of, you know, this, I don’t know what to call it exactly. There’s this flow or this interdependency.

Richard:

Yeah.

Michael:

That’s just really cool.

Richard:

All right. So, three best teams ever. This team from the 90’s, this Agile coaching institute team and the team you’re part of right now at the new company. I don’t know if you want to pick of those teams or take the three of them in aggregate. What one word would you use to describe best team of your life? You know, like if you meditated on it, if you really felt these teams or one of those teams within yourself, what would the one word be that describe the sensation of that best team?

Michael:

Well, I haven’t thought about this before, but what just came up when you asked that was destiny.

Richard:

Destiny? What a cool word. What do you mean?

Michael:

Well, the way I would talk about it, is most people in the earlier part of their life, they follow their conditioning and their social upbringing and their ego, in some sense, not ego in a particularly negative sense, but in the story that we create about ourselves, right? And as we get older, many us, not all of us, surrender more to, like what the world wants of us, not what our ego wants, or, you know, whatever, but like, what does the world actually want from us? What does the life force want from us? And that’s surrendering to our destiny. And so there’s something about that with teams that, you know, to be really great, there has to be some kind of destiny together, not just a random mix of people somehow.

Richard:

All right. I love this. I’m going to learn something about myself.

Michael:

Me too, learn something about myself.

Richard:

Because…

Michael:

Wouldn’t have thought I would’ve said that, but, sorry, sorry, go ahead.

Richard:

This has been on my mind, because right now I’m thinking about my little boutique training consulting company, and somebody’s asking me to do something else and somebody else is asking me to do something else. And, you know, wife is kind of nudging me to do one of these things, and I’m definitely resisting. You know, there’s my ego blocking in the way. I’m not sure where we’re heading. I’m not sure what destiny is going to bring me.

Michael:

Yeah. It’s a developmental progression. You know, that we talk about a lot from being socialized mind, what Bob Kegan talks about, a developmental psychologist, is socialize mind or authored by other, that other are conditioning authors us, or creates who we are, right? And then we progress to self authoring mind, which is authored by self. And then some of us progress. It’s more rare, but can progress to just being authored, or I say authored by spirit, where it’s not. I mean, that’s the destiny, right? That’s surrendering to the destiny. It’s like, you know, why should I think that my tiny little ego is the most important thing to decide how I do stuff? It’s not that I’m not following a compass, it’s not like I’m, you know, letting the winds baff at me, that’s not it at all. It’s there some, you know, pull that’s being used well.

Richard:

Yeah. I love that. This is also why I love about chatting with you, ’cause it’s, we’re talking about some deeper ideas than, you know, like what’s your scrum team’s velocity, right?

Michael:

It’s not those are not critical perhaps, but they’re not, yeah.

Richard:

This is a little different, right? I don’t know if we, I want to talk more about this idea of destiny, how does destiny happen? Where does it come from? How does it find me? How does it find you? Is this like the idea of Darma or is this related? Is it different?

Michael:

It’s like that. I get it I think most purely from doing systemic constellations in that whole methodology, which is, you know, setting up a living image of a system, a family, a team, an organization, and you have people represent different roles or different elements in it. And there’s a, well, you acknowledge what’s true in the system. There’s basically two steps the way I do it, you acknowledge what’s true in the system. There’s an impasse between these two forces in the system. They’re at odds or they’re not paying attention or they’re not in alignment at all, they’re in conflict. And then there’s a natural movement in a system to health, to reorganization. It’s actually not, it’s not scripted. And there’s just this sense in constellations, you know, there’s thousands of practitioners for some really great teachers. And there’s just a sense that when you really work with a system deeply, sorry, I’m going afield here, but like, I can’t remember the woman’s name, she used to be the editor of the Harvard business review, said that, “that trying to change a system is like dancing with an elephant.” Right, I mean, you’re not going to win. I mean, at best you can influence. So, if you find it’s like finding the dow of a given system, you know, what’s the natural path that it wants to go and how can you help expose that? You don’t do anything. You mainly, you get out of the way. So, that philosophy for me is and they use the word destiny, certainly sometimes. That there’s something, you know, in who you are uniquely and who your ancestors were. And there’s just being in harmony with that or not, it’s fighting that, it’s allowing the life force to flow through you or it’s blocking it.

Richard:

Right. All right, fascinating. Fascinating stuff. And I want to keep going. One of these three best teams or all three of them in aggregate. Subjectively, how do you know these were great teams? What are some, I don’t know, qualities of these teams that helped?

Michael:

The passion that I felt in relationship to them. The passion I felt from other people. The dedication to holding an objective, there’s something transcendent about being on a real team, right? When you’re on a blocked team or whatever, it can be really unfun. And you feel stifled, right? When you’re on a real team, you might feel really challenged or it might be tough at times, but you feel held together by a purpose of some kind, right? And you’re willing to let go of some of your own preferences in service of that purpose. You know, again, a kind of surrender to a transcendence, to a, you know, a higher level, holon from individual to a team holon. To like let the force of that, the spirit of that guide and there’s something that’s just for me, it’s sublime. When people do that together, it’s a beautiful, it’s a magical thing. You can, you know, I’ve asked when I’ve taught about teams and classes, I ask people a similar question to you, you know, who’s been on a real team? And just ask them to describe like a few, you know, just what you’re doing, a few attributes or whatever, and you can feel them light up, right? Whatever they say, like they come up, so to speak. They’re not dead or just telling a story or something.

Richard:

Yeah, it’s like, what was your best team? Tell me about your best team. And it’s like, blah, blah, blah, blah, but what you see them communicating is I was alive. And I’m alive again, as I talk about it. I’m totally re-animated in that sense of, I don’t know what the Latin root is, but animate, like you have a spirit.

Michael:

Yes, yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Yes. Yeah, you’re animated. Because of that term is sort of bastardized because of the cartoons, I think, but yes, animate, yes, is the root. Yeah, exactly.

Richard:

Is there anything objective about these teams that people outside the team could see or observe or measure?

Michael:

I mean, like my observation and what I teach people when I do that is, you know, you can feel from the outside that you better not mess with the real team. I mean, they’re a force of nature. They’ve got a super humanness about them and you know, with a divided team or whatever, you can manipulate them or do, you know, manage, quote, “manage them,” or, you know, whatever, if you’re superior to them in the organization. With a real team, you better get out of the way, ’cause you’re going to screw, I mean, and you’re can feel that, you know, do you know what I mean? So, I don’t know if that’s exactly objective in the normal sense of the term, but you can certainly experience it from the outside. You can feel their, you could sense their connectiveness and you can sense their dedication to that purpose. And they’re not going to let anybody get in the way of that.

Richard:

And this isn’t something that you could read off the numbers on some team survey, some team, you know, some measurement instrument. You sense it, you observe it as somebody from the outside.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you might be able to see it in the open comments, let’s say of a survey, but yeah, I think the numbers would be, there certainly might be some statistical correlations if you dug deep enough, but I don’t think it would be easy to devise a survey that would really fair that out.

Richard:

I don’t think I’ve read anything in, you mentioned Harvard business review. I don’t think I’ve read any business school studies or psych studies that were like, “the one thing you need for the best team ever is this sense of animates and…”

Michael:

Right, right.

Richard:

I don’t know how we it’s said in English. Animates, animation. It’s a sense of something, it’s not really like quantifiable the way we’re talking about it. And yet it is a objective, ’cause you can sense it.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s like a charismatic leader to some extent, right? You can feel something coming off them, almost. I mean, and I think real teams in general, I’ve never thought this thought before per se, but seem like they’re charismatic, sort of naturally.

Richard:

I was just thinking the same thing, yeah. We’re aligned on that thought. Yeah, it’s like there’s a team charisma emanating from them.

Michael:

Yes, yes.

Richard:

Like outward from the team.

Michael:

Yes. To me that’s spirit. That’s the expression, you know, One of the things Marie and I are into is science and consciousness and the way that consciousness can actually affect the physical world, you know. I mean, established completely beyond any scientific doubt. Reductionistic science doesn’t want to see it and tries to outlaw, oh, that’s not it. We can’t even look at that, because it’s not a valid, it’s impossible. So, we’re not going to do an experiment. What? I didn’t think that’s what empirical thinking…

Richard:

‘Cause we don’t have an instrument that can detect it, it’s you know…

Michael:

But they do, I mean, there’s Princeton engineering anomalies research lab, you know, did it for 28 years and they completely established that you could affect, that humans can affect random event generators.

Richard:

Okay, tell me more, what is this all about?

Michael:

Well, it’s not a Newtonian view. We have a Newtonian view of the world in, you know, not in physics so much, but there’s a Reductionistic view in science that certain things are impossible, and therefore, we shouldn’t even talk about them. But you know, I mean this group at Princeton did, you know, research. They created a true random event generator, that did coin flips, the equivalent of coin flips, so that, you know, it would track along a center line like that, right? And they have a machine that shows you the upper limit and the lower limit of where statistical probability is, right? And they have people try to influence where that coin flips go, essentially. And you can do it, there’s no question. I mean, people aren’t able to control. They’re not able to have a massive effect, like they can always do it or they can do it in huge amounts, but a person can definitely go say, “I want to go up or I want to go down.” You can think that and you can get better at it or worse at it, obviously. And groups can do it incredibly powerfully when they’re aligned. And actually a team would almost certainly be able to. If you investigated a team with this research, you’d almost certainly see that.

Richard:

Okay. Now, how would that happen? How would a team be that aligned? That together? That tuned? Maybe is a good word.

Michael:

It’s a mystery. To quote Shakespeare in love. If you can quote Shakespeare in love, you should definitely do that.

Richard:

Okay.

Michael:

I don’t know.

Richard:

Then how about…

Michael:

Go ahead.

Richard:

How about one or more than one of these three teams we’ve been chatting about? What are some of the concrete behaviors they engaged in that made them the best of the best teams?

Michael:

Challenging each other, calling each other forth without it being like a personal attack or criticism with it. So, you can call somebody, it’s not easy to challenge somebody on their weakness, but it’s a lot easier to challenge somebody on their strength, right? You, you know, what if you slowed down while you’re speaking right now? You’d be even more powerful. You know, that’s challenging a strength, not if that makes sense. So, and that’s what I think, real teams do is they in the service of not, “I want you to be different,” but in the service of, “we need you on this team and if you don’t raise your game, we’re not going to accomplish our goal.” That’s a very different place to come from, right? Than, you know, “I don’t like the way you style your hair or, you know, say certain things.” That’s an ego thing, it’s an ego clash, right?

Richard:

Was that an example or you actually talking me?

Michael:

We’re talking afterwards, right? No, I was totally making that up.

Richard:

Any other concrete behaviors on these teams?

Michael:

Yeah, I mean, treating each other as people, not as just cogs, you know, some kind of real appreciation for somebody else’s strengths and what they bring. And like really, you know, acknowledging that with each other. That’s all that comes to mind. I’m sure I’ll think of more right after you ask the next question.

Richard:

Well then, how about the next question? How about advice for listeners? How could they reproduce some of the success? Get some of this for their own teams?

Michael:

Well, I think they have to like really uncover what’s the real purpose of this team that, you know, creates some level of transcendent quality. Like you know, getting the sprint goal done, each iteration is not a purpose. You know, it’s not compelling, right? You know, creating a world class app of something in a certain niche, might be a purpose. Transforming the lives of some of the people that we serve with this, could be a purpose. So, you know, I think one thing would certainly be to try to uncover that and challenging that, if it’s not clear. Like not just, you know, we got to get it done, because the boss says, that’s just not a purpose.

Richard:

Right. Our purpose is to make the boss happy. Our purpose is to help the boss get their bonus this quarter.

Michael:

That’s not very motivating. It’s constraining and it may be a constraint you have to deal with.

Richard:

All right. Any other concrete behaviors, any stuff you did on any of these teams that people could try to reproduce? How would they reproduce it?

Michael:

Yeah, I mean, we do a collective sense making. So, like exposing how your mind works in a given situation. Like, what you perceive and how you interpret that, what you make up about that and being transparent about that. It takes things out of the realm of being just personal again, and my preference against your preference. It exposes how we each make sense of our world and potentially how we make sense of our world together. You know, what biases do we have? What assumptions do we have that we don’t question, perhaps? So, being willing to develop each other. Not just accomplish the task, but also help each other grow in some way.

Richard:

This collective sense making, exposing to each other, how we make sense of the world, how do we do that?

Michael:

Well, the three things you need in a container like this, that is tools like practices. Like deliberate sense making, a sense of support for each other, a container that creates support and a container that creates challenge. If you just have support, if you’re just trying to make each other feel better, that’s, you know, like the idea of psychological safety, is potentially really useful, and it’s potentially slightly dangerous, ’cause it’s like it can easily go into, we can’t say anything that might upset somebody, sorry, that’s just not going to work. I mean, that’s not the way the real world is, it’s not the way you’re going to get. So, we can create a certain level of safety with transparency, with ground rules, with being able to be willing to look at our biases or whatever, but it can’t just be support, that doesn’t create growth. It has to include support, it can’t just be challenge either. So, some kind of, some kind of creation of a container that has those qualities. And then, like I say, exposing how we’re interpreting the world, how we’re making things up about other people’s motivations. It becomes transparent, like a deliberately developmental environment. Bob Kegan and everyone culture, when we’re doing our job and we’re developing each other, both.

Richard:

Okay. Creation of a container that has these qualities. I’ve been asking partly for myself and partly for listeners and viewers, what do you mean when you’re talking about a container? Creating this container?

Michael:

Like what you do in facilitation, in facilitation, when you’re the facilitator, when you’re really being neutral, you’re not trying to drive the content. You’re not quote, “leading the meeting”, you’re facilitating the meeting. You help create a container, you do that by ground rules, you do that by having a sense of people and what their purpose is or what the purpose of the meeting is. So, there’s clarity around that and you design it in a collaborative way and whatnot, and when I create a container, I mean, I use myself. The most important tool of transformation I have is my own self and my sense making complexity. If I have a black and white world, that’s not very complex, internally. If I can understand paradox and different points of view, and I use that by modeling it, you know, in a container, disclosing about myself, exposing my own, you know, how I’m interpreting what’s happening, how I’m sensing what’s happening. My willing to be vulnerable in that way, creates safety in the container. It starts to at least. You know, not being attached to a specific thing, not capitulating. It’s not just do whatever the team says, that’s also a mistake, I think. It’s not like it’s, you know, as a facilitator, I don’t just ask the group to vote on everything, how we do a process? No, I’m a process expert there, you know, that’s what I’m bringing. I tap into, I probe in the group. I get a sense of what resonates with them. It’s not like I’m doing it in my mind, but also I’m not putting it to a vote, particularly.

Richard:

That is very, very helpful. Yeah, yeah. What else you been thinking about lately? What else have you been doing? Is there anything else you want to add on to all this conversation about teams? About anything at all?

Michael:

Well, you mentioned the integral model before and that’s certainly very important to me.

Richard:

I think I first learned it from you. I know it’s not the only thing that you share with people. I know you didn’t invent it, it’s something you share, but you’ve also brought it to a different, a different level.

Michael:

I applied at first to the agile world and, you know, created a framework there, the agile transformation framework, that encapsulates that. And the whole premise of that is that to really deal with a complex world, we need the ability to take multiple perspectives because no perspective is right. There’s no such thing as God’s perspective or the one true perspective. There’s only different perspectives. And the thing that you can say about them in general is that they’re right, but they’re only partial. You know, like Orics says, “everybody’s right, but only partially.” That’s such a different position to take on the world, right? And integral helps us see different perspectives; like the four quadrants, , like the altitudes, you know, Amber, Orange, Green, Teal, those are all different perspectives. Like Holons, those are different perspectives; individual, team, program, organization. And so it’s like a certain kind of fluidity or a certain kind of, it’s almost like Aikido or Jujitsu or something. Where we, you know, like in Aikido there are no attacks, there are only defenses. ‘Cause you’re not trying to start trouble or something, you’re trying to end trouble and you take it by, you have to take in the person’s energy. You don’t go hard against them. You take their energy and use it in a different way. And it’s like, there’s something for some reason, I just thought of that with, in this conversation, that perspectives, there’s like an Aikido with perspectives. You don’t have to fight them. You don’t have to decide whether they’re right. You have to dance with them. Does that make sense? “Oh, that’s interesting. If I saw the world that way, I’d do exactly what you’re doing.” I don’t see the world the way you do exactly. But if I did, I could, I’d totally get that. That creates a different, you know, it creates a transparency or something.

Richard:

Yeah, it’s agile. And I love the Aikido, Jujitsu metaphors. I practiced Taekwondo for a long, long time and we did a lot of sparring, okay. So, this is like combat practice without hurting each other, right? The sessions where I felt the best and we felt the best, it was definitely like we were dancing. It was definitely like we had a destiny or a shared purpose. It felt sublime. I would leave the session feeling totally animated. All the stuff we’ve been talking about.

Michael:

Yes. Right. Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Richard:

We weren’t opponents, it was like, we were just doing something really cool together.

Michael:

Yes. Right. And if somebody tries to throw you or whatever, it’s like, you surrender to that. Oh, they’re in the right position to be able to do that. And so that’s part of the dance is to have a good role. I mean, I remember, you know, in Aikido I had the same experience. We call it Ron Tori in Aikido of sparring and usually five people or four people attacking one person, which is a really interesting kind of game. There was, you know, like when you get thrown, there’s huge energy in that. It’s just what you’re saying, it doesn’t feel like defeat. It feels like dancing with energy and it enlightens you, almost more to be thrown than to throw.

Richard:

For sure. Anything else to add on? Anything else we should talk about?

Michael:

Well, I would be remiss to not say, I don’t know when this will be coming out, but we have this program, a five day program, called Master camp, which is for people wanting to move into enterprise coaching space. It’s a really cool, it really is a cool program. It’s really challenging to people, in surprising ways. And it just, it shifts them in fundamental ways. And then we have a Transformation mastery, an eight month cohort program to become more in mastery of, to actually demonstrate competencies, not just knowledge. So it’s a, you know, it’s a very in depth program and that’s cool too, the Collective edge…

Richard:

All right, these sound great. And what was it again?

Michael:

The-collective-edge.com. Thecollectiveedge.com…

Richard:

With hyphens. Awesome. So, we’ll put that in the show notes. There might even be a QR code popping up right now. Did you see it? I don’t know where it. Okay, so we’ve got the-collective-edge.com. Is there any, if people want to contact you personally, is there a way they can do that?

Michael:

Yeah. Just on the website info@the-collective-edge.com.

Richard:

Well, awesome. Michael Spayd, thank you so, so much for joining us today, this has been such a fun conversation to really look…

Michael:

Yeah, I really enjoyed talking to you, Richard. It felt very generative and, there was a delight in it. So, thank you.

Richard:

For sure. Definitely on my side, absolutely. It was destiny.

Michael:

Barely.

Richard:

I mean, for real, for real. I guess that might be what generative means. So, we had some destiny here, yeah. All right. So, we’ll wrap up now. Here’s the standard wrap up, and remember listeners, viewers to support this podcast, visit my website kasperowski.com. We’ll see you next time.