Reframe Your Company’s Future with Aviv Shahar

//Aviv Shahar enables Fortune 500 companies to create purpose-inspired visions that bring out the best in their people and catalyze growth. As the President of Aviv Consulting and the author of Create New Futures, Aviv guides executive teams at companies around the world to dramatically accelerate the achievement of their business results.

In this “Greatest Hits” episode, Aviv discusses key elements of a growth mindset for forward-thinking leaders.

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, we have with us Aviv Shahar.  He enables Fortune 500 leaders to create purpose-inspired visions, which we love here at the Voice of Influence podcast, bringing out the best in their people and catalyzing growth.  As a president of Aviv Consulting and author of the book Create New Futures, Aviv guides executive teams at companies around the world to dramatically accelerate the achievement of their business results.

Aviv, I am really excited to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Aviv Shahar:  Great to be with you.  Thank you!

Andrea:  So, your book is called Creating New Futures.  Let’s start with what are new futures?  What does it mean to create a new future?

Aviv Shahar:  Well, every day of the week, people get up in the morning and they struggle with problems right in front of them.  And more often than not, they drill back and rewind themselves back to the same problems time and again, instead of discovering that whether it’s in your personal life, whether it’s in your professional life, with leading your teams,  and your company.

 Actually, the smarter, better, more effective way is to solve the current problems in the context of creating in a new organizational future and a new business future and whatever it is, you choose to focus on it.  It could also be your own, in terms of your personal growth, in your relationship or in your family.  I’m essentially proposing – and the book, describes many real examples and my in the trenches experience with senior teams in Fortune 100 companies – how we can architect and choreograph the journey to embark on creating a new future for us as individuals, as teams, and as leaders of small and large organizations.

Andrea:  So, it sounds like when we’re stuck in the same problems, it’s almost like a cycle of being stuck in the same problem, which, I assume, means that we would have this sort of normal future, a future that’s similar to what we’re experiencing right now.  And so, Creating New Futures throws a wrench in that and turns the page onto something new and different than it sounds like.

Aviv Shahar:  That is correct, Andrea.  What I discovered, the inquiry that guided my effort, was that I found myself at the table with groups of very smart people only to discover that they were perfectly capable, as any other group, in producing collective stupidity and therefore delivering very mediocre results.  And I got annoyed and disturbed by it, and I said, “Why is it?  What is it about the way people operate?”  And I found that people don’t listen to each other, don’t know how to engage in real conversations.  And because of that, we tend to produce collective stupidity.

And so, my inquiry led me to the discovery of how do you enable these groups of smart people, senior teams, to not only unleash new possibilities, but to completely re-architect and reimagine what they can be tomorrow or in the three-year horizon or in the five-year horizon?  And there are a number of practices or disciplines that I brought to the choreography of those endeavors, not the least of which is the idea that we begin by developing high velocity learning culture, high velocity learning organizations.  And I brought to that the ethos of my experience in being trained as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, where the rules that I call defined from that experience was –  I call it the air force rule –  is,  “a non-debrief action is a wasted action.”

Andrea:  Oh, hold on, hold on.  Just say that again.

Aviv Shahar:  “A non-debrief action is a wasted action.”  If we just spend an hour doing a dog fight, practicing a war game two against two, we just spent in that hour many millions of dollars.  And if we cannot come down and immediately walk into the debriefing room and discover what we did right, and what we did well, and where did we follow and execute the plan,  and where did we fail to follow and execute the plan, and why, and what will we do differently tomorrow?  Unless we can develop those open, transparent conversations, be grounded in the data and the rigor of that and then engage in that with the inquiry where becoming better tomorrow is a much higher, enticing goal than protecting my ego.

I’m more interested in that context in discovering next week how stupid I was two or three weeks ago.  That is a greater gratification than feeding my ego about how smart I am.  That’s not what I’m interested in.  I’m interested in refining and developing and evolving my craft.  When we are able to build and cultivate that kind of ethos, and that kind of culture with teams, we help them pivot from the entrenched issues of today to looking at the kind of problems they have through a new lens, rearchitecting ultimately new kinds of conversations that lead to unleashing new capabilities and new outcomes in the new futures that they create.

Andrea:  Umm.  Now, maybe you just answered this.  You certainly answered it in part, but why do you think that leaders aren’t good at these open transparent conversations, these debrief conversations?  Why aren’t they doing it or why aren’t they good at it?

Aviv Shahar:  Okay, great!  So, we are shifting to the why questions.  In my map of choreography, “why” means a very specific, we’re going now up, we’re elevating the line of inquiry.  There is the “what” conversations, the “how” conversations, and you are rightfully so leading us into the “why” conversations.  So, I appreciate that very much.

Let me frame another question and answer your question by answering that question, which I will frame in the following way.  What are the challenges that leaders in medium and in large companies face every day?  Well, if I were to map these in four quadrants, I’d say that on the exterior, in the upper right, we are now operating in a VUCA world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.  And the result is we are forever saturated and immersed in a cacophony of noise.  And it’s very difficult to actually adhere and move on to the upper left challenge that you will find on the inside.  We find it very difficult to listen inside to listen inside in the middle of that cacophony.

And so that’s the reason leaders find it difficult to listen to each other because they have been so well programmed to respond to the next stimuli from the outside.  And they are so much in a reactive mode.  You know, when I start my workshops, I often place a slide that shows essentially, I say, “We call ourselves the sapiens species.”  Actually, we call ourselves the sapient species, by which we mean we are aware of our consciousness.

But in reality, we often are the dumb and even dumber specie, because these last three decades of the computing revolution, now the internet revolution,[we are]  often so bombarded with noise that we forget to remember to listen on the inside.

So, it’s not just that people don’t know how to listen to each other, they don’t know how to listen on the inside, and leaders are forever distant from themselves.  They try to say what sounds right, what somebody else told them that is right.  This is where the journey on the inside to find your own authentic voice.

And when I say authentic, I mean two layers of authenticity, okay?  I frame authenticity one and authenticity two.  Authenticity one is, are you true to this moment, to what you feel, to what’s arising in you?  Can you, actually, bring that voice to the table?  If you can’t, I don’t know that you can have a Voice of Influence because you’re distant from yourself.

But when you bring this voice, can you also reach out to authenticity two, which is being authentic to your potential, to where you see you can grow to, into the “more” that you are able to envision and embrace?  And if you do that, the challenge at the lower left is, can you cultivate and integrate a culture where purpose and values and leading from the inside out and bringing, you know, voices of different voices from all around the table?  If you can do that, then you will be differentiated.

Let me give you a quick story about that, because I know people listening to your show, they appreciate the stories.  I was with a team three weeks ago in Geneva, a senior team: 40 senior leaders in a Fortune 100 company.  And we are on day three of the strategic workshop.  And I say to the leader of the company, I say to her, “Can I share with you, confidentially, what I told my wife last night when I spoke with her, she was back in the U S?”  This is me jokingly saying that because there were obviously 40 other people in the room.

She said, “Yeah, sure.”  I said to her, “The strategies this team is developing,  they are compelling and they are cutting edge. But strategies you can quickly try to emulate and copy.  There is something else here that is not easy to emulate in your industry in an operational team: 40 people in the room, half of them women with assertive voice, with business acumen leading and shaping conversations.  I don’t often see that kind of diversity, that kind of balance, let alone other backgrounds.  It is that kind of richness around the table that truly defines competitive advantage. “ And I think when as leaders we can promote that culture and also hire that kind of talent, we are creating a winning formula that will be very difficult to emulate.

Andrea:  Hmm, because of the diversity around the room.

Aviv Shahar:  That’s right.  And to be tidy with my mind, I’ll share the four quadrants of conflict.  The lower right, I’ll say in this quickly shape-shifting environment, the challenge is building processes and structures that are adaptive, that are resilient, and that enable growth and development of all people.  If people show up to work and they are only there merely to deliver results for customers, which is great, but they cannot engage with a work experience through additional lens of “how will I grow and evolve as a professional and, as a human being through the work experience,” then they’re not fully engaged because this is the environment we are in.

So, the millennials, they want to engage in the work to deliver high performance, to deliver results, to produce the outcomes that we need to deliver, and also, at the same time, learn and develop and evolve as a professional and as a human being.  So you as a leader, unless you can consciously focus on those objectives, you will not be in a position to listen, to engage openly, to engage transparently.  And the core, the essence of open, transparent engagement, to answer full circle back to your “why” question, is that you are prepared to recognize that leadership begins with leading yourself.

And I tell my clients, people are  – consider that everybody working for you, they are highly psychic, highly clairvoyant.  Not only do they read the gap between what you say and what you do, they actually read the gap between what you think and what you say.  So, you must do the interior work, the inward work of leadership to make sure that you are able to bring the Voice of Influence, the voice of charisma, the voice of impact in such a way that you are whole, that you are one, that you are integrated inside out with your message, or else people feel the gap and you’re not as strong and not as effective as you can be.

Andrea:  That requires, it sounds like, a good deal of introspection, listening to one’s voice, being able to hear one’s voice, that inner voice that you were talking about.  And do you have a way that you help people to do that, or do you have a recommended process that they go through?  Or how does that work when you are incorporating that into your training or coaching?

Aviv Shahar:  Yeah, I have.  It’s just been the project of the last 40 years of my life.  So, I used to from the late 90’s and early 2000’s, this used to be the central piece of my work.  I used to take leadership teams into three-, actually, at the time four- and five-day retreats type settings, where I will lead them through a process where they discover the core values in life.  How they act their values, we used to call those “value in action”, via  – that’s how you bring the values to life.  And it was an introspective journey that enabled them to find the core purpose, the passionate purpose in life.  And I could do that because I came out of a, by that time already 25, 30 years of personal inquiry into purpose.

I made two important decisions when I was 16, 17.  One was that life was purposeful, that I am purposeful, that you are purposeful – so that we all showed up here with a purpose.  I didn’t know at the time what it was.  But when I finished high school, I wrote a dissertation.  The last year of my high school, back in Israel, I made an agreement with the principal of the school.  They left me free.  I could sit alone in the library and I could write my dissertation with philosophical, psychological, spiritual inquiry, integrated inquiry. And I decided that life was purposeful.

And the second decision I made was and I, actually, wrote in the introduction back when I was 17, I said many people feel powerful things when they are in those ages 16, 17, 18, all the way to 21, 22, 25.  And they then forget to remember later, when they come to adulthood, what they felt and how important these ideas were for them.  And I write this work; .  I wrote “as an oath and as a message to myself to remember – to remember.” And I didn’t forget in the entire 40 some years that followed that.  I was 60 a couple of months ago. It was a continual- purpose journey.  So I made that determination, that life was purposeful.

And the second decision I made was that I was not going to veer away.  I was going to journey and do whatever I do, always with a “purpose inquiry” in mind.  In other words, I was not going to let that passion get diluted.  I was going to follow that drive, that impulse through the journey of my life.  And I told my wife when we were in our 20’s,”That is the leading violin of the orchestra of my life, and the material question will answer itself later as an outlay of that.”

And then what happened, I never made a financial issue the central issue of my life up until  41, 42.  At which point, I told my wife, “I will now do in 10 years what other people sometimes do in 30 or 40 years,” and the rest is history.  That’s what I’ve done.  But it was that experience that enabled me to lead these problems.  And so, people used to come through 12-day journey with me along a year, three sessions of four days all around those kinds of inquiries, plus a series of coaching modalities and personal growth and personal development modalities.

And then around 2007, ‘08, ‘09 around that crisis, more and more leaders said to me, “Can you come do this magical thing you do with our teams, but also help us build our strategy and build our innovation?”  And that’s what essentially happened. You know, whenever you get a question from a client, “can you do, can you help me,” the answer is always yes, even if you have no idea how you will do that, because by saying, yes, you’re not cheating anybody.  You’re simply summoning your creativity to bring forward the new way you will solve  that [situation].

And I developed a practice which was anchored around this idea of strategic innovation. And the strategic innovation allows me now, when I work with teams, Andrea, to bring those three value propositions, three capacities.  And there is your strategy and innovation expert because I’ve developed a whole set of practices around that and there is the team effectiveness, team  and organizational culture and impact expert because I’ve done that for 20 years.  And I’m also your trusted advisor/CEO coach – and I bring these three together.

So, today in the high-level work I do, the work I described that I was doing more in the early 2000 is still very present.  But I use it more as props rather than devote full programs.  It is curious that now I’m at this point, I’m looking to, maybe, in some way, circle back because my current interest is to find the 20-year-olds and the 30-year-olds that I can actually transfer my work, to teach them what I do, so they can do what I do.

And I’m going, in a few weeks, just launch the first workshop, which we call the Reframe Workshop that will give people some insights into that.  And that all happened because a young person approached me and said, “Can you teach me what you do?”  And he got me inspired.  But that’s how I would answer your question as to how do we actually help people.  It’s a lifelong journey and people need to commit as leaders that interior growth and growing as a whole person as a whole leader is part of what you must do if you are to be the most effective leader you can be.

Andrea:  Do you think that there are people who meet you or come across your work or your book who may not already value that, who may not already see how important it is to be self-aware and take the time to get really in touch with their purpose and things like this?  And then you are able to help them to see that, or do you feel like people are already converted, if you will.  They already see it and you just take them to the next level, or are you also helping them to understand why?

Aviv Shahar:  Well, it’s a great question, and you’re absolutely right.  Most people, I don’t know if most, but a good six, seven, out of 10, they don’t necessarily maybe even an eight out of 10, they don’t necessarily show up with that proclivity having been engaged already with the interior inquiry.  Even though, I would say, in many large companies, you do have people that either are engaged with some modalities or some practice or have worked with a coach, or just had the natural inclination to probe in that direction.

So, here is how I would actually map the landscape.  Let’s describe three attitudes towards personal growth in the workplace.  So, I think there’s these three buckets.  On the left, I’ll say, this is the bucket of “coasting and reacting.”  These are people that are not at all looking to grow and evolve.  They’re either happy where they are or they’re more in a survival mode.  They’re probably not listening to your podcast because people that are coming here are people that are interested in new insights.

Andrea:  Yes!

Aviv Shahar:  But I would say, there may be four out of 10 broadly when you describe their workplace that are in that space are not inclined to inquire into personal growth.  That’s the “coast” and “react” buckets.  The second bucket in the middle is the “grow-from-strength bucket,” both because the strength focus modality has been around for a good two, three decades.  You know, it was Peter Drucker who coined the idea that it’s much better to take somebody who is good at something and make them outstanding, rather than try to take a mediocre player and make them okay.

So, what you have are the other five out of the 10, in that second bucket.  They are, to a degree, aware of the strength and they want to lean in and do more and build on that and grow from the success to do more, either grow horizontally or vertically.  By which I mean, horizontally expand the range of what they can do; vertically, I increase the impact of what they already are doing.

But then you have the bucket to the right.  For now, in this approximation, I’ll say it’s the one out of 10.  These are the people that are prepared to go beyond the strengths-based approach and are essentially saying, “I intend to challenge myself, to proactively and strategically seek opportunities that catalyze growth and development, and I’m going to be out of the comfort zone.”  I know it’s not going to be easy, but I cherish that and I thrive when I work with these people and sometime, and often actually in my presence, because there is zero cynicism in my presence, I get people in that second bucket who either, situationally or even in a sustained way, migrate and convert from the second bucket to the third bucket because they get excited about the more, the bigger leader they can become.

Andrea:  You know, I bet that some of those folks would, if they just knew that it was possible.  Their minds have to be opened up to the possibility that they could grow in that more exponential kind of way.  And then when they see that, when you tell them that, they probably are ready to step into that.

Aviv Shahar:  So people step into that because either there is a crisis – they hit the wall face on; or they were promoted to a responsibility where all of a sudden, they cannot continue to be the jerk they used to be; or something happened, health-related, relationship-related, or financial-related that drives them into an inquiry that was suppressed before.  I always encourage people, “You don’t have to have a health crisis or financial crisis or relational crisis to begin the inward journey, your better bet is to begin it on the basis of success.  Don’t rest on your laurels and be so over excited about your own egoic success. Put yourself in situations that will expose blind spots, that will make you vulnerable, that will allow you to grow from the inside.”

Andrea:  I would imagine that when they’re thinking about their purpose, if they can connect that to the need for growth, and they feel like there’s a purpose in there, the pain that they’re going to go through, then they’re probably more likely to do it.

Aviv Shahar:  Well, that’s exactly right.  And it does include, let me give you a concrete example again, because your audience, they appreciate stories.  I’m in a workshop and this is actually a webinar with 250 women with a fast-growing company in the Silicon Valley.  And there is a question from one of the managers in the room and she says, “What do I do about the following situation?  I tend to present myself in an assertive way and my superior, who is a man, says that I’m too assertive.  And I get upset with that because he would never say that to a man. How should I respond?”

And instead of just answering the question right there and then I said, “Let’s embark on a journey here, because I often find that I need to reframe the questions.”  And I said, “What is it that you’re after?  Are you after being right, in which case, yeah, you will be absolutely correct to voice your frustration. But is that the ultimate outcome you’re after?  Or are you after being impactful in the situation in a way that will shape that person’s opinion and even influence the company broadly?” because she initially said in a question, “I do not want to compromise my integrity.”

And what I ultimately took her to discover with me was the realization that integrity is not just one thing.  And as we unpack that answer, we actually framed five different levels or five different dimensions of integrity.  We said the first dimension of integrity is you say what you feel, and you would be absolutely right in certain circumstances to come from that.  And it is my right to say what I feel.

But recognize that there is integrity dimension two, which is, your actions match your words. That means if you promise to deliver three alternative solutions by Friday, you will deliver three alternative solutions.  And that’s the objective, not how you feel in this moment. 

 But then I suggested, you know, there is integrity dimension three, which is your actions no longer just match your words, they match your potential to contribute.  What happens if you work on the project and you came up with four alternative solutions and you are prepared to present those two days earlier, on the Wednesday.  And not only that, you’re going to reason why you recommend option two. Then you do it because it’s in your potential to deliver that.

And then dimension four is your actions match their needs.  How do you communicate to a 2-year-old, 7-year-old, and 16-year-old would be different because the needs are different?  

And finally, the fifth dimension is you are congruent with purpose, which is different often from how I feel in this moment.

Andrea: Yes!

Aviv Shahar:  So, what am I saying by framing these five different aspects or dimensions or levels of integrity?  I’m saying that you want to be become aware of the different voices.  That’s right, different voices.  You’re not going crazy when you have different voices, you are a multifaceted human being. You have many aspects of your life, many voices competing.

And part of being an enlightened, self-aware leader is being able to negotiate those different voices and determine when and where you should act out of which.  It sounds like horribly called “calculated,” which is not totally what I mean, because when you have worked in this way for a long time, you become so spontaneous and you become a vessel that’s ready to respond in the moment from the point of need in a way that’s congruent with your purpose and why you are here in this life.

Andrea:  I absolutely love that.  And the five different levels of integrity I think are super important.  One of the ways that I talk about it is just very, very simply, in a very simplistic way, is just to say, “you can be real without baring all.”     So, there’s different levels of “real.”  And you were saying, there’s different levels here and what is the deeper need or the deeper desire to ultimately be congruent with your purpose and not to have to feed the ego, like you were talking about.  I love it!  This is good, good, and wonderful stuff.

Aviv, we’re getting to the point where we need to wrap up.  I’m curious, let’s start with where can people go to find you, and what kinds of things do people come to you for when they’re needing help with something. How do they know that it’s time to reach out to you?

Aviv Shahar:  Great question.  Thank you for that.  Most of my clients are senior executives in the Fortune 100 companies that can sign a check of a hundred thousand dollars and more.  That’s why I’ve been so focused in the corporate arena.  And oh, by the way, that can refer me to 40 of their fields.  And I’ve not done anything in their public space for many, many years up until now.

So, most of my work has been, essentially 99 percent of my work is word of mouth, is referral based, one senior executive telling another senior executive, “I know how much you hate consultants. You have to talk to Aviv. He’s very different and he will help you reimagine your organizational mission and vision and strategy.”  Or somebody who is in a new role where two organizations were collapsed together and there is a need to lead that change,  major acquisition, managing of two companies.

All of the above, people often call me into complex situations like this when you need to address a strategy, the product portfolio, the organizational design and culture, and the development of the people.  So, the entire portfolio.  So, that’s most of the work I do.  I am, for the first time now, offering a public offering, which is a workshop called the Reframe Workshop, which was inspired by a young entrepreneur who asked me in the last few months to learn from me about the work that I do.  And I said, you know, the best way to do this is to collaborate on a workshop.

So, people can find me at avivconsulting.com.  They can find there also my podcast show that’s called Create New Future.  And they can find the book Create New Futures on Amazon with all forms, obviously Kindle, hard copy, and the audible too.  And they can find me on LinkedIn with the same name, Aviv Consulting and they can find on the website the Reframe Workshop. Come join us.

And I’m going to essentially, that workshop, disclose for the first time what I call the universal operating system.  That’s the, you know, structure that enabled me to develop more than hundred different frameworks over the last 25 years to produce a breakthrough consulting and breakthrough results with senior executives.

Andrea:  Sounds great!  Okay, so, we will be sure to link to all those things on the podcast show notes.  So, Aviv, if somebody is interested in attending your workshop, can you tell us a little bit more about the workshop and when it takes place and any other information that you’d like to share about it?

Aviv Shahar:  The workshop will happen in Seattle on the weekend just before Labor Day.  So, the last weekend in August, it’s going to be two days and we are going to be teaching the frameworks and the modalities that enabled me to create this pretty rarefied,  high-level consulting practice that I developed.  We would love to have, Andrea, your audiences and people that are listening to your show, and we will create specially for you a coupon discount, which will be called Voice of Influence.  So, there will be a coupon when you come to the convergence page, to the pay page, and it will produce for you a special discount, so you can get more for less.

Andrea:  Ahh! That sounds wonderful!  Thank you for doing that.  We appreciate it!

Aviv Shahar:  Absolutely.

Andrea:  For closing here, for somebody who is a leader, who is wanting to create a new future, they’re seeing that they’ve sort of been stuck in a system where they continually have the same results or continually facing the same problems, what’s the one thing that you would like to leave them with today?

Aviv Shahar:  The first immediate thing is we’ve discussed a lot on this conversation and there are other tips and ideas on your other shows.  When people listen to a conversation like this, they should take the one thing that excites them, and they should do something right there and then with it.  I call it “The 72-hour rule,” by which I imply that the incidence of learning, you enjoy the excitement and the 100 percent “protein value” of that new insight of wisdom.

And if you don’t do something with it there and then, begin to take it through the learning cycle, which is stage two, validate the learning, stage three, begin to apply the learning to run water through the pipes, and stage four, begin to teach it to somebody else, ultimately to all the people in your ecosystem; unless you do that within 72 hours, that new learning, the “protein value” dissipated and got diluted below 50 percent, at which point the gravitational pull of your everyday demands and activities overwhelmed the excitement you initially experienced in the learning.  So that’s number one, take the one thing from this conversation and do something with it.

And the second advice is how I answer the question of what is the highest leverage that you have as a leader.  And my answer to that is, it’s not how you allocate your resources, and it’s not even just how you define the mission of the organization.  You’re a leader because you have the capacity to shape the conversation agenda.  And when you get to shape the conversation agenda, it means you get to walk into the room and ask, “Are we in the right conversation or should we be in a different conversation?”  And if we should be in a different conversation, you are there to frame and articulate the new questions that we should be asking, which will ultimately create new conversations.  And unless you do that, if we are today in the same conversations we were in last year, by design, by definition, we will end up where we are.

So, to your question, Andrea, the new future actually begins by creating a new conversation. First, you create a new conversation in your own head, and then you create a new conversation with the important people in your life.  And your conversations typically begin with asking new questions.  There is a lot more about that in Create New Futures, but that is the beginning of this inquiry and how I will offer a leader to begin to embark on creating a new future for himself or herself for the team, for the company.

Andrea:  Great stuff.  Thank you so much for being with us and for sharing your Voice of Influence with our listeners, Aviv!

Aviv Shahar:  Thank you!  This has been a fun conversation.

 

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