Complex Problems Need Complex Thinkers: Finding Clarity When There Are No Easy Answers w/ Daniel Hulter

Daniel Holter shares how complexity thinking, sociology, and authentic leadership can transform organizations and help us navigate a world without easy answers. 

• Embracing complexity means understanding that bureaucratic systems can't account for every human situation
• True leadership requires creating psychological safety where people can bring their whole selves
• In ordered systems, roles of components matter most; in complex systems, relationships between components are key
• Crisis disrupts habitus (cultural norms) and enables innovation when the status quo no longer works
• Customer service problems in organizations often stem from leadership failing to create meaningful purpose
• Bureaucracies reward conformity but remember innovation by those who broke the rules
• Team culture depends not on the quality of what's broadcast from the top but on relationships between members
• Creating belonging means allowing people to express different views rather than forcing conformity
• Psychological safety allows people to interact authentically rather than putting on a character for work
• True understanding of others requires moving beyond initial categorization and lazy pattern matching

Connect with Daniel Holter on LinkedIn and Substack where he shares longer-form essays on complexity, leadership, and organizational culture.

https://mindforcepodcast.buzzsprout.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Episode Introduction
• 1:46 Daniel's Background and Identity
• 3:53 Worldview Shifts and Diversity
• 8:30 Military Complexity and Mission Command
• 14:47 Navigating Bureaucracy in Complex Situations
• 21:48 Customer Service and Human-Centered Design
• 33:10 Sociology and Cultural Capital
• 42:13 Leadership and Creating Belonging
• 52:47 Final Thoughts and Outro

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:02

Thank you. Hey everyone, welcome to Mindforce. I'm Nate Shear, and this podcast is where deep minds and real stories meet. Today's episode is for the thinkers, the observers and the leaders, the ones trying to make sense of a world that doesn't always make sense back. Today, we're diving into why complexity isn't something to fear, how sociology can teach us something to lead with empathy, and what true leadership looks like when life throws curveballs. Let's get into it. Let's start with the group or the guest introduction. I'd love for you to introduce yourself in your own words. Who are you, what are you passionate about right now and what's something that has shaped the way you see the world now?

Speaker 2: 1:44

and what's something that has shaped the way you see the world? Yeah, hey, I'm Daniel Holter. I'm, who am I? So I've been in the Air Force for 19 years but I don't actually identify strongly with like that as a huge part of my identity. I see that as kind of a space that I occupy and obviously it's been a huge part of my life. But other elements that really feed into who I am are, you know, having a family, being a creative, being neurodivergent and you know, all of those things have really shaped the way that I see the world.

Speaker 2: 2:14

I came from an interesting religious upbringing. Eastern Orthodoxy has spent the first 18 years of my life sort of deeply enmeshed in that religious experience and the community experience. 18 years of my life sort of deeply enmeshed in that religious experience and the community experience, while also being a, you know, a bit of a divergent thinker, you know, which put me at odds and led me on my own kind of sense-making path, and then started a family very young, at 18, and had a daughter who was basically terminally ill for 14 years of her life and she passed away in 2020. So all of those things, as well as being creative, being involved in the Air Force innovation space. It's a big hodgepodge of interesting elements that lead me to who I am really. I don't know if I got all of those questions.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Well, yeah, that was perfect. And just out of curiosity, where are you joining us from today?

Speaker 2: 3:07

So I just moved here from Colorado. I am a uh, I just PCS to a permanent change of station. I don't know how military your audience is.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Uh, I was trying to do the acronyms from.

Speaker 2: 3:20

I was at air force Academy for four years working for an innovation lab called Air Force Cyberworks, and now I am working at Fort Meade, still waiting to find out what my job is, because in the military it's always a lot of, you know, hurry up and wait, and so I'm in the waiting part right now, before I find out what my job actually is.

Speaker 1: 3:43

Okay, we'll start with the warm-up. Tell us about a time your worldview completely shifted. What happened and what changed?

Speaker 2: 3:53

So the first example I can give is like when I, you know, like I said, I grew up in this interesting religious community.

Speaker 2: 4:00

You know it was a fantastic growing up experience, very close knit.

Speaker 2: 4:04

It was a deeply religious, you know, eastern Orthodox community, but in California, in the Santa Cruz mountains, so sort of heavy liberal area, but it was very insular, who was really interested in arts and creativity and just new ideas and philosophy and all that was.

Speaker 2: 4:28

I ended up branching out, which is, of course, you know, to some communities a dangerous thing, and in my case it was a dangerous thing because I started encountering people that I had not been exposed to, for example, members of the LGBTQ community and people who just were not thinking the same way that the people I grew up around were thinking, and that created for me a pretty significant shift in the way that I saw the world as not, you know, as the ideal being a sort of a heterogeneous, multifaceted, many people making sense of the world, rather than this insular group kind of all seeing things the same way.

Speaker 2: 5:05

So it kind of speaks to the importance of diversity and that was a pretty big shift for me just conceptually, and I think that that is part of what led me into the complexity stuff was realizing that the myopic view, the one-sided view, like one set of eyes, is insufficient, like having somebody or having interaction with people who are seeing the world from that other angle can just well, in perception, science, it's what gives us three-dimensional vision. Right, it's having two eyeballs rather than one.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Yeah, that's really good stuff. It reminds me of my career field. So I'm on my third career field in the Air Force. I think we do a wonderful job and I don't know if I've just been lucky or blessed enough to have people from completely different backgrounds. So far I've worked with like a professional softball player, someone that worked at Bank of America, a long list of different prior enlisted career fields, and so it's so nice when we're looking at different problem sets. You know we're looking at a wide range of solutions, so it's nice that everyone's coming from different things. Like the professional softball player doesn't have a wealth of knowledge in the healthcare sphere, but can she bring a team together? Her teamwork skills are amazing. I mean, she's pretty amazing at healthcare now that she's been in a few years. Yeah, hospital administration has been really wonderful and I think it's funny.

Speaker 1: 6:26

I identify a lot with you in like the struggle to fit in, and so it's kind of funny. I remember my dad as he was growing up or as I was growing up. I'd watch him like blouse his pants and he had all these rules and structure and I was like I'm never going to do that. I don't want to PT. I don't want to PT, I don't want to wear this uniform, and and then you know, now I'm at 16 years here, so it's funny like the rules and the uniformity. I was like I have no idea how I got here, but I think it's important. I know a lot of people don't want us, you know, thinking differently to be here, but I think we bring good, good solutions and different eye sets to the problems and things like that.

Speaker 2: 7:02

Yeah, I'm going to pull up a Mattis quote here for you. This is one of my favorite quotes. But first, as I get there, there's this thing that you just mentioned about people from different backgrounds kind of being in the same space. That's one thing I really liked about getting into the innovation space in the air force and and like it. Right now you have the I feel like it's it's evolving and maybe shrinking a little bit, but I was lucky enough to get into a bit of a, an enclave that was well protected for several years. But you have the spark cells right at various bases and affworks, kind of pushing that that community thing. One of the cool things about that is one how they integrate with industry and academia and bring them into the military space, and so you have those extra angles Like we tend to.

Speaker 2: 7:57

We've historically looked at military problems just with military folks and military. You know, being in the Air Force, you do get used to just being thrust into jobs that are were definitely not your AFSC and if somebody tells you, hey, you know, your job is is making sure that the windows are see-through, it's like I guess I'm going to figure out how to do that. It's, you know. In most cases it just means cleaning the windows. But that's what we're multifaceted by nature, right? That's a key part of being in the military is you can just be hacking on the same thing and it was kind of you know it. There's the what we learned from our afsc, but there's also like the values that were inculcated in us by the, by the skill community, because you end up with these cultures and the only other place that I've seen that is in like pme, where you're at nco Academy or something and you're like, oh, now I have to figure out how to be in a class with you know a couple of cops and a couple of maintainers and like it creates friction. That I think is really interesting. But in the end everybody kind of grows as a result from it and the outputs are interesting.

Speaker 2: 9:22

But that divergent thing reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from military members, general Mattis. He has this quote that says take the mavericks in your service, the ones that wear rumpled uniforms and look like a bag of mud but whose ideas are so offsetting that they actually upset the people in the bureaucracy. One of your primary jobs is to take the risk and protect these people, because if they are not nurtured in your service, the enemy will bring their contrary ideas to you, which is like you know, I encounter a lot of like crusty chiefs and, uh, particularly I feel, like senior enlisted who are standards. Right is like standards are so important and we need to. We're willing to sacrifice the individual at the altar of standards and then you lose these fantastic, amazing people who just couldn't keep their hair short enough right, or just were bad at keeping their uniform straight.

Speaker 2: 10:14

I credit my presence in the military. I once did a I've said this a bunch of times I like posted about a bunch of times I was horrible at making my bed in basic training. I suck at that stuff Like my boots are awful. You know I attribute a lot some of that to neurodivergence also, but you know you could say it's laziness or or whatever, but one way or the other people around me who had those strengths lifted me up and the best chiefs that I ever had in the air force have been the ones who were like, oh yeah, he's got these weaknesses, but I kind of want to keep him around for these strengths that he has and so the collective strength that we can have when we kind of make up for one another's weaknesses as opposed to punishing each other for our weaknesses. That's a big part of my viewpoint on leadership in the military.

Speaker 1: 11:07

So what would you say to the members that say if you can't do the little things, then bad things are going to happen?

Speaker 2: 11:15

So that's obviously that is the case in certain contexts, right. So, like, context dependence is a really important thing to understand. And in contexts where you know where the stakes are crazy high, right, and obviously an obvious one would be, like operators who are doing door kicking downrange and they are relying on one another to have every detail down pat, having those standards set for what makes for an unsafe mistake in this context is, you know, I've heard about it with maintainers too it's like if you lose track of your tools, that can be catastrophic, right, because if you leave a wrench and I don't actually know that much about jets, even though I've been in the Air Force for 19 years but what I've heard is that if you make certain types of mistakes, it can actually lead to death, right, or the enormous loss of resources. So, understanding the level of risk like what are the catastrophic risks within a context and therefore what is unacceptable here and then we can hold each other accountable on those things the thing that I don't really buy into is that those are universal that we shouldn't treat. This is really similar to the argument I've heard about whether cyber operators should be kicked out for being overweight. Right, it's like we're not.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Some people would say well, we're always an expeditionary force. In reality, there are many people in the Air Force who do not, who could go without deploying for the entirety of their service right, and I have deployed. Personally, I've had one deployment under my belt. I'm a Chinese linguist, which is my career, so Intel, I have one deployment, and what I did when I deployed was I sat at a computer right and there was an increased risk that maybe, like you know, boggern would be overrun. That's a, that's a very real risk in in context like that. But being clear-headed about the context, dependence, that's a big thing, for complexity is understanding that blanket rules across a massive scale will fail across the system, and so you create these rules within a context and then you give people within that context the capacity to adjust. That's actually the nature of mission command too, which is part of air force doctrine that's funny, I was thinking of that too.

Speaker 1: 13:51

We're trying to do that mission command and empower squadron commanders and below, you know, and that totally makes sense like there's different situations for different things. So hopefully we'll continue down that route road and, you know, give that empowerment. But we'll move on, because we could probably talk about standards for the entire episode, probably for sure. But we'll move on to the next thing. I'd like to see if you have a question for me, because I feel like these interviews are kind of one directional and then we'll jump into your three main pillars yeah, I guess I so one.

Speaker 2: 14:20

One question I'm always curious about for people is like what is the most? What would you say is like the most complex problem you've ever faced?

Speaker 1: 14:29

Most complex problem I've ever faced. Oh parenting probably.

Speaker 2: 14:35

Oh yeah, that's great. That's a really good example. What about parenting is complex, would you say.

Speaker 1: 14:41

I think the most difficult part is there's no instruction manual. So I think a lot of us, you know as humans, we want A, b, c, we want a manual, we want pictures, we want step-by-step processes, but that's not how it works. And then it's even more funny because you have multiple kids and you're like oh cool, I kind of figured it out that one went a certain way and then the next kid is nothing like that. So we have boys and girls and so I always tell this story.

Speaker 1: 15:06

I just find funny, like the girls, they, you know, get off the couch. They'll walk to the edge, turn around, slide down on their stomach, be very safe, and get off the couch and go run around. The boy, like, as soon as he could walk, just wanted to walk off the front of the couch, like the most dangerous maneuver you could do, but that's just how they operate of the couch, like the most dangerous maneuver you could do, but that's just how they operate and it's just completely different. And then you have introverted and extroverted and you know so many different variables and you know one favors mom, one favors dad, or you know so many different things, and so you can have three, four kids or however many and you're never going to have, I don't think, any that are like the previous one.

Speaker 1: 15:39

So I think that's probably the most complex, because normally you find a solution and you can repeat it. You can't even have a repeatable process with a child, mom's posture towards my wife's parenting was always.

Speaker 2: 15:49

I can't tell you what's going to work, Despite this woman having my mom, having had probably more experience with parenting right than the majority of people who give birth right, Because the average is what? Two and a half. But the more experience you have in the case of my mom, she demonstrates that the more experience you have, the more sure you become that there isn't a playbook right, and so it was, and it's funny because them, using the same techniques on different kids, resulted in wildly different outcomes. My siblings and I are wildly different, you know. Even, like you know, you gave the example of the difference between girls and boys, and the most outdoorsy, like strong athletic one, among us is my sister.

Speaker 2: 16:55

It's like all of our preconceived notions about what, how we're supposed to categorize, will just go out the window because people are wildly complex. So I love that. It's like you know, my people would try to give me advice and I was like, as somebody who had a ton of young siblings, I probably have way more experience with this than you, even though I hadn't had kids yet, and I'd be like you don't know, like it's not. You know, and it used to be, that we would create these rules and we'd try and come up with elaborate systems and there's like all these methods from the 60s and 70s and even way back about how you're supposed to raise kids, and there's a book and you read it and it's like the no cry sleep method. We did the no cry sleep method on one of our kids. It worked and the other one it absolutely did not. It was the wrong technique because our son needed something else because their brains are different.

Speaker 1: 17:47

Right, I think that's something. That's funny too, because the rules you know, quote unquote are always changing. I remember, like swaddle them or don't swaddle them, oh, you can't sleep in the bed with them. Or sometimes you can, or you know, chocolate's good, chocolate's bad, like I'm like geez, we can't make it any. So if you have goalposts that are always moving and the child's completely different, it's like an impossible solution yeah, yeah, and this does come down to like.

Speaker 2: 18:11

This is like the pat. One passion of mine is complexity, and that's a key indicator of when you're in. The complex space is when you cannot make a, you cannot come up with a in like, if I know the inputs, I know what the outputs are going to be. Like that is. A complex system is one in which you put something in. You do not actually know what's going to come out of that system. You know you're in a non-complex system when which is in the Kenevan framework as an ordered system. You know you're in an ordered system If, every time you do X, I is going to result, which means you know, like I like to say like a calculator is obviously every time I'd use, every time I want to do an addition function, I'm going to push one number in the addition and the plus button and then the other number and I hit the equal button.

Speaker 2: 19:02

It's with this category. I do this and then, like car mechanics, you're dealing with a car. If I do these things, then I know this is the diagnosis and I know that this is the solution. It's like you need expertise for that, but medicine is a little bit like that it's like 99% is like I can look at a thing, I can diagnose because I have a ton of expertise. And this actually ties back to something we were talking about earlier, which is the diversity piece. With it, with mechanics and with medicine, you need experts. Experts are great, they're super useful. They're people who spent you know, medical professionals spent 12 years in school and they are now really good at ear, nose and throat. They know how that system kind of works. They can look at it and go here's the diagnosis and here's the treatment and I'm 99% sure it's going to result. But we're going to check and see if the therapy worked Right.

Speaker 2: 19:56

So it's still a little complex. But when you're in a complex system, expertise stops mattering as much. It actually becomes a negative effect. When you're just looking at it through one expert angle, it's because expertise leads you to have deterministic thinking. It tends to. It's like I'm seeing it through this very limited lens which is more deterministic, which is which is more deterministic?

Speaker 2: 20:26

And then, but if something's complex, like raising a child, right, and you bring in like somebody who only sees the world through one therapeutic technique this is actually really common. It's like psychologists who are dead set on one therapeutic technique and they're like this is how you should raise your child. And that's how you end up with books that people try and apply to their kids, because an expert is telling them, through a limited lens, how to deal with a complex thing. And it's like sometimes, yeah, but in actual complexity you have to be adaptive and you have to try different angles right and be experimental and find out in the moment not only what's going to work long-term, but really what's working right now, because this technique it worked for my kid when when they were six, but then it stopped working when they were eight, so I had to come up with a new one and so you're switching experts, right. So that's like. This is why innovation and bringing in multiple viewpoints and not relying so much on the expert thing is like the complex systems approach.

Speaker 1: 21:29

Yeah, it reminds me of, like the personality quizzes. You take this thing and you're supposed to be put in this box and all of you are supposed to be the exact same in that particular box, or color, or four letter character or whatever, but I always just find it so funny. Or four letter character, or whatever, but I always just find it so funny. People are wildly, you know, original and completely, you know, different than others. But this is a good segue into your first main pillar, which is living in a complex world. So can you share a moment?

Speaker 2: 22:01

when you had to make a decision with no easy answers, a moment with no easy answers. I would say like one of the most difficult periods that I dealt with, and this kind of relates to, you know, family like the. My daughter was terminally ill and the Air Force I was running up against Air Force policy where they were trying to send me to, they're trying to send me on an assignment that was going to be three years. I didn't know if my daughter was going to survive for the duration of that assignment and so I was like obviously we should, we should like I should be able to just stay here and keep doing my job and they shouldn't send me overseas. This was just a regular assignment. It wasn't. This wasn't like a contingency, emergency war fighting. This was just I'm going to go do the same thing in Hawaii for three years, right On a computer. And so for me it was like, oh, obviously I should, you know, have I should be able to just have this assignment turned off. And I went through a process. It got canceled and a few months later I got the assignments again and I was like this is kind of intense, and then I tried to get turned off. I might've gotten turned off twice, but one of the times they were like no, you have to go, you have to be gone for three years and you know, if you know we can, we you could do like a humanitarian or something. If your daughter is like worse, but she was already very like death store.

Speaker 2: 23:22

So I was faced with this situation where the so the bureaucratic system, had these rules and everybody was looking at AFIs. So the you know Air Force instructions because that's what everybody leans on is like this is the policy, these are the ordered rules of the ordered system of the Air Force. And here I was the complex exception that was like well, obviously these rules don't work. And everybody I talked to would be like oh yeah, this is crazy, like you shouldn't have to do this. But you know, here's the process and we do the process and they say you have to go and I don't know what we're supposed to do. So what I did was I just started just branching out into a variety of different methods. So and this is very like complexity theory, kenevan how you approach a complex problem is to just do multiple experiments in parallel and see which ones start producing the patterns that you want and then start investing in those, the thing that ultimately ended up working.

Speaker 2: 24:20

So I was doing like letters to people and I did a congressional inquiry and I started showing up to the Pentagon public meetings on exceptional member, exceptional family member program policy, like which is just how we treat military family members with special needs. And I at those meetings would just talk to people who had been on panels and stuff, and I ran into at the time Chief Magistrate of the Air Force, cody, who, despite being wildly unpopular with the enlisted force, he was nice. He connected me with his exec, who was a chief, I believe, caldwell, and then he said call me. When I called him, it actually Chief Cody was being replaced by Chief Wright and Chief Wright answered the phone and I talked to SimSaf K Wright and we talked for a while. He just listened to me and he was like yeah, let's see what we can figure out. No-transcript.

Speaker 2: 25:45

I was dealing with this situation and my wing commander talked to his command chief, chief Chad Houck who's great and he just reached out to the AFPC command chief and he said hey, is there a code that we can just use where you can be like get no assignments for however long and we'll check in every year to see if things have changed and we can remove the code. And they were like, yeah, we can totally do that. So the thing, the funny thing, was like the solution to this was relationships. It was just enough people being aware of it that they kind of come together and go, hey, what's a creative way that we can solve this problem? Hey, what's a creative way that we could solve this problem?

Speaker 2: 26:25

The problem with the bureaucracy and people operating within those ordered rules is that they just look at what's in front of them like, oh no, there's limited words on this page and they are. All I have to work with, which is a very ordered system. Right, it's what's in the manual, but people aren't cars, so there's lots that extends beyond the manual. Their lives are complex and there are plenty of times when you just have to do good old fashioned sense making, which involves conversation and knowing the context of the life, and then going what kind of weird thing could we make up? And it solved the problem. But it could have happened years before. But that took me fretting and bothering people and writing letters for years before you know.

Speaker 2: 27:14

I ended up doing a tedx on this and what the tedx hiccup.

Speaker 2: 27:18

I think I linked to it.

Speaker 2: 27:19

I think it's linked on my linkedin, but the this is part of what got me into innovation theory was this idea that sure, you can have bureaucratic systems and policies and those are an important part of this, but you have to acknowledge that, because things are complex, they are not going to account for everything there.

Speaker 2: 27:47

Everybody involved has to understand that your job extends beyond the policies and processes that we've given you, because you need to know why you're there. The personnelists need to know why they're there, what effect they are supposed to be creating. It's, you know, in many cases like finance office, it's customer service, and that is a value as a guiding principle. My goal is to make sure that people you know painlessly get what you know, whatever it is in the private sector. They're pretty good at this. They're like well, yeah, like customer service, and it involves treating people well and it involves making sure they're comfortable and involves making sure processes are quick, right. This is something I see. Missing from a lot of the Air Force is having that base level value that we're creating. So I tend to rant like you got me.

Speaker 1: 28:31

You got me. No, no, it's perfect. It's just interesting to me because I feel like the customer service has really gone downhill and I wonder if it's the customer service people, you know, we immediately jump to personnel, the CSS or finance, and I wonder if they've just been beaten down so much like their initial thing always seems to be no. It's not like yes, but you would need this code, or yes, but you would need to do this, or something like it just feels like it's always no, and then it ends like can we go with? No, but there's this thing that you can do, there's a route, there's a something like I just wish we could get them. You know putting the other pair of shoes on and like hey, like if you were over here, would you want to go?

Speaker 2: 29:14

I personally think it's a leadership problem, because I don't expect people in their first couple of years of being in a job, like you know, a lot of those personnelists who are working the desk. They're very early career, and so who is setting the tone for why they're there? Like, what is your purpose here? The cool thing about being beholden just to a bunch of policies is that you can then just use that. It's like oh, my job can be super easy, it can be simple, it doesn't have to be complex at all. I can just go your situation, I check it against this thing, and then I can actually use that thing to make my job easy. I can go hey, sorry, here's the thing, and then not give you anything else A person sitting behind a desk whose role is, you know, finance.

Speaker 2: 30:08

I've encountered people who were actually really good at this, who were good at the customer service. Like my job is to make sure that you are financially okay, for example. Like that'd be an interesting value for finance troops to have. Like our goal is to make sure that you feel this is like the power of having a vision in an organization, especially a customer service organization, is how do we want people to feel when they leave our office. I actually think every organization should do this is pay attention to how they want to make people feel when they interact with them, because it's good for not just the people dealing with them, but it also gives you a sense of purpose as the employee, right? And so this is really big in the innovation space is doing exercises.

Speaker 2: 30:58

Where you go, you know, and I got really heavily into design and human centered design, which was a lot of my job in Air Force Cyberworks, and you spent a lot of time going not only what is the least I have to do in order to have earned my paycheck, but when we've accomplished what we set out to accomplish, how is everybody involved going to feel Like when? So in you know, in UX design is a big one when people are interacting with this application, how are they going to feel? And we specifically target in user experience design. We'll map out the interaction of a person with a product. It might be a software product.

Speaker 2: 31:41

We'll find out where the most frustrating point they might reach in that product is and we will target that point that emotional low as a high priority for redesign, because it's like, well, we don't want anybody, and it comes from the private sector, right, because you have so much competition there that you don't want anybody dealing with your banking app to feel super frustrated because they'll just go find another bank. We don't want anybody dealing with your banking app to feel super frustrated because they'll just go find another bank. We don't have the competition problem in the Air Force or in many government systems, right? So we don't tend to center this human-centered design, user experience design thing, but I think that that whole question of how are people going to feel when they walk out of my office or how are people going to feel when they get off the phone with me, is a really, really important one, and it's one that leaders are responsible for guiding the design, and that's what strategy is in my view.

Speaker 1: 32:40

Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's one of those things that's really difficult because we're not for profit. You know, working in the healthcare section, normally you do certain things to make money, but we don't make money. Yeah, so it's one of those challenges where we can't do some of those same things. But I think we'll move on to your second pillar, which is seeing the world through sociology. So what's one pattern you see in people or society that fascinates you now, and why?

Speaker 2: 33:08

pattern you see in people or society that fascinates you now, and why? Yeah, so the function of so? Yeah, I have a bachelor's in sociology. I went through American Military University. Their program was pretty good, but I've also done a lot of sociology reading outside of that. I actually here I'm going to talk about something that I wrote about while I was in school, but I've thought about a lot since then and it relates to a little bit to, like the innovation thing, which is there's, there's this theory, there's a sociological theory from a guy named Pierre Bourdieu, who he talks about habitus, and habitus is a system of, like our schemes of perception and experience that guide us to act certain ways, and in part, it's that we give social and cultural capital to people who kind of exhibit certain behaviors they like carry themselves in a certain way right.

Speaker 2: 34:01

It's like you can think of it as, like charisma in leadership is like leaders who have that charismatic presence right, or leaders who say the right things about standards, or you know, they get rewarded with social and cultural capital. In the case of the military, it's they legitimately get ranked up right, which is like a gamified system of cultural capital within the military, and then they get more enforcement power for how the people around them behave. But this is like multifaceted. It's like even within niche groups. It's like if you're in a D&D group, behaving in a certain way gives you more social and cultural capital within that group, and that's going to look different from how it looks for a bunch of senior officers right, and the people who stand out as like not fitting into that, they'll be downgraded. They lose cultural capital. So we have this within career fields and we have it within peer groups of like what a staff sergeant is supposed to be and what a senior airman is. Peer groups of like what a staff sergeant is supposed to be and what a senior airman is supposed to be and what a master sergeant is supposed to be. And it can also be kind of unhelpful because it causes us to, in order to maintain that capital, causes us to reinforce the status quo. This is how we're constantly restructuring the system. Like the cultural system that we exist within is it's like you enforce that I behave a certain way and then I do, and then you'll kind of give me cultural capital and then I'll enforce that other people do, and so we're constantly recreating this way of being Right. So this is like an interesting economic way of looking at the way that culture reinforces and like continues to rebuild itself within groups.

Speaker 2: 35:46

One thing I was thinking about that I did a big paper on was the military's incapacity for innovation being potentially a product of this is that reinforcement of the status quo actually wins you points and going against that will get you lose you points. You're less likely to get promoted if you're like rocking the boat. So one of the things in the research that disrupts this process is crisis. So in a crisis, you'll see these things break down. It's like overseas, you know, when we're like actually fighting, like in a in a.

Speaker 2: 36:25

When crisis breaks out, people aren't going to stop like rewarding each other for standards enforcement. They're going to start rewarding each other for really bold acts that increase chances of survivor, like survivability, right. Or like acts of heroism. Nobody's looking for acts of heroism in the finance shop, right. Or like acts of heroism Nobody's looking for acts of heroism in the finance shop, right. So crisis can play this really important role in disrupting.

Speaker 2: 36:52

And one thing I thought about was you know, senior leaders are always trying to tell us that we're like facing this crisis with China, right, and what they're trying to do is they're trying to give this sense of urgency, but crisis about China and them threatening our way of life and the American way of life and American soft power in the world, and all of that? Nobody, I don't think. Actually, people feel that they're just like, intellectually, oh yeah, I get it, but as I'm doing my job, that does not create a sense of crisis. That's going to disrupt the habitus where I just keep doing business as usual. It also doesn't do it in the Pentagon, where people are, you know, mid-level bureaucrats are just going about their day, and I do not denigrate mid-level bureaucrats. I think they play an important role, especially in this day and time where they're facing a ton of denigration. I think it's really important that we note that they are important and valuable people. Everybody within this system, within a bureaucratic system, tends to be doing this reinforcement of the status quo.

Speaker 2: 37:57

What does create a sense of crisis is local leaders creating a vision for what, within our context, is our crisis that we face? And in the case of a finance troop, or in the case of, like I'm, an intel troop, in the case of an intel troop, the sense of crisis isn't about China taking over the United States or invading Taiwan. It is we are. If we were doing our best, what would it look like? It would look hold on a second Sorry, my son was calling me. It would look like.

Speaker 2: 38:39

A really good example is software teams. Software teams operate in sprints. They set a vision for what they're going to accomplish in the course of the sprint. It's usually two weeks. It has a set goal and their vision is to have accomplished all of these. This many story points in the course of this and they reflect on that and they would experience a sense of felt crisis over whether they were on target to hit that vision.

Speaker 2: 39:06

And so what I believe is that the problem of disrupting the habitus of status quo enforcement is a problem of local leadership, not one of global leadership. Not one of you know. It's not at the, it's not even at the unit level. It's at the flight level. If you want people to disrupt their habits of status quo reinforcement, you need a flight chief, a flight commander, who understands these principles of setting a vision and inspiring people to want to hit that vision and then giving them a felt oh no, what happened? Right? A retrospective. What happened these last two weeks that we failed to, you know, let's say we actually did care about how people felt when they walked out of our office, out of our finance office. Let's, let's set up a system where we can actually reflect on that. Why did we get these numbers that we did, you know, give them a little way to radar rate how they feel as they walk out the door or something, and then have that be the driver of that sense of felt crisis.

Speaker 2: 40:11

So you asked me what one pattern I see in society. One pattern I see is that we expect, as local leaders, the vision to be set too high. It's supposed to be set by, you know, like our unit commanders. I think the vision has to be set like. Unit commanders play a role, right, and so do wing commanders, and so, like I thought that you know, chief master, sergeants of the Air Force some of them have been really good at this chief staff of the Air Force, some of them have been really good at this it's that it loses potency at that scale and there's nothing like a local leader who can create that sense of give a right. Oh, we could actually come up with a metric and hit those and feel good about ourselves oh, that's wild, yeah, that's super powerful.

Speaker 1: 41:01

because I've always found it super fascinating where on one side of the military we have like the shut up in color, you know, do what you're supposed to do, the thing we've always done and then the Air Force out of the branches is usually a little bit more on the innovative side. But it's always weird to me because it's like kind of, you know, fall in line and do what you're supposed to, but when you go to PME or you look at any of the books, the people that are stand out like did usually something they weren't supposed to do. They, you know, pushed it too far, they, and so it's funny, like we say, fall in line. But then the ones we remember and that makes the make the books, you know, didn't do what they were supposed to. So it's pretty bizarre. But yeah, your last pillar is leadership in the real world. So, Daniel, how do you lead people with completely different personalities and beliefs?

Speaker 2: 42:05

to what a lot of people think. In a lot of things, right, I think a lot of people think that the way to get people to so one of our core metrics of a good functioning team is belonging, that people feel like they, that they belong there. And this is something I've written about a lot on my Substack, especially recently, is because I think a lot about team culture and team culture is wildly complex. It can be a team culture can be can be ruined by an individual who isn't the leader, if the leader doesn't know how to, how to intervene with that individual kind of poisoning the well. And so some people get lucky and they just end up with a bunch of super cool people who are good at interacting with each other, and the quality of those relationships is what creates good culture. It's not the quality of what's broadcast from the top, it's not the quality of the people, it's the quality of the relationships between the people. So, like in complexity theory, one thing I repeat a lot is that in ordered systems, what matters is the roles of components, and ordered systems, what matters is the roles of components, and in complexity, what matters is the relationship between components. Those components are constantly changing and they're diverse and they are, you know, like there's components outside of that system that are interacting with that system, so like the culture of a team might be affected by what's going on politically or it might be affected by the fact that somebody knows somebody somewhere else who said something about their leader, right? So it's like it's not just this, so the relationships between these components creates this resilient thing.

Speaker 2: 43:36

So how do you lead people? So I said, one of the core things is to create a sense of belonging. One of the mistakes I think people make in military leadership is thinking that the way to get politically minded people to get along with each other is to refuse to let them talk about politics. That doesn't make people feel like they belong. It makes them feel like they're bringing only a part of themselves to your team, right, it means they're leaving a big, a significant part of themselves somewhere else. So I really liked, you know, chief Wright's and General Goldfein's approach to like after the murder of George Floyd, they were like let's start having conversations and it wasn't just let's start having conversations about how bad it is for black people in the United States. So you know, obviously a significant part of it it is for black people in the United States. You know, obviously, a significant part of it, but those conversations also included white people who were not bought in bringing themselves to these conversations and I saw this.

Speaker 2: 44:34

And when you create an environment in which it is actually safe for people with these disparate views and this requires pretty skilled facilitation in some parts, facilitation is a really big part of my, is a big passion of mine, it's a really big part of my leadership principles when you make it actually safe for people to have these interactions, they will. They might not like each other, but you can create, you can improve the quality of the relationship between those people. I have had very quality relationships with people who had wildly different views from me and it was because we managed to have an open and honest and safe exchange. Right, and this is the importance of psychological safety is because it allows people to bring their whole selves to an interaction and then, in the case of my view, is repugnant to you maybe. Well, you can share that with me and I will be responsive to it. And if I'm not responsive to it, then I'm the one who's poisoning the relationship between us, right? So we have to be actively responsive to one another. So if you have people of different personalities or beliefs, you have to create the conditions for them to one bring their whole selves, and that means create conditions that are safe for them to actually interact as themselves, not like some, not a character that they're putting on for work, and then do that consistently so that they kind of grow accustomed to each other. There can be like an easing into this, and there are some people who you know there can be a level of fragility which makes this really difficult on and I'm not saying fragility on any one side or the other, like people can be fragile for a lot of reasons, including trauma or whatever else. So it is. It is a dangerous thing, but that's always been my.

Speaker 2: 46:16

My goal is how do I create the conditions for these people to bring their whole selves and feel like they actually belong in this environment, because it accounts for them right, because they have the ability to say well, I actually don't agree with this.

Speaker 2: 46:33

So it gets a little weird in environments where there's only one outlier, which can be the case in military environments, a lot is you have a lot of people who think the same way and then there's one outlier, and creating the conditions for that person can be really tricky, but I think it should always be. The goal is to say how do I make you so? The? The question was how do you lead people? There's no playbook. There are maneuvers that you can try right. There are facilitated exercises that are all about bringing good culture, but I think goals should be authenticity, openness, you know, grace for one another, that we come upon our, that we come by our opinions honestly, and then, and then acceptance. And then it's like, within this environment, we might we're not here to change each other's opinions, but I'm going to make space for you to be your whole self and you're going to make space for you to be your whole self and you're going to make space for me to be my whole self.

Speaker 1: 47:31

And then, and that's- going to create a quality relationship.

Speaker 1: 47:32

That's interesting because I actually did that.

Speaker 1: 47:35

I didn't really realize or know what was going to happen ahead of time, but we actually had weekly sit downs around our table as a flight after those events and it's so powerful how just someone hearing someone else's point of view, that transparency, and so I think that's super powerful and a good reminder of what you said is, if they don't bring it up, then they just bottle it and then they kind of know, but they don't know and they're just kind of angry with each other because they think they know what the other person's thinking. But just us sitting and I don't know if I did I think I did a decent job, hopefully of facilitating, but really just people being able to voice how they felt, just almost I hate to say, like solved it itself, because obviously it didn't like take care of everything. But even the people that were on completely different sides just hearing it, they were like okay, I never really thought of it or they'd go and ponder and then we'd come back the next week, but the transparency was wildly powerful. That's a really good reminder.

Speaker 2: 48:33

Yeah, I was actually really excited. Chief Bass put out a thing and I'm not convinced that this actually fleshed out to the degree that I think she was hoping. I think it could have been more the stigma memo Explicitly fleshed out to the degree that I think she was hoping. I think it could have been more the stigma memo Explicitly. No, it was the airman's time, which is exactly what you're talking about. Is you remove yourself from the environment of the work? So you're not actually talking about the work, right, and it can be.

Speaker 2: 49:01

I actually noticed it in my new unit at the 70th ISR at the wing. They're still doing these, it looks like they're still doing. It might be through like the SAPR office, it might be through the chaplain, right. Those offices tend to also be much more attuned to these cultural concepts, right, but I think, like they EO, sapper, chaplin and Psych, they tend to be more attuned to these like institutional, organizational psychology principles which you know, if you read Adam Grant or any of the Brene Brown or any of that, it becomes really clear that there are principles of focusing on the health of groups of people, not just health of individuals, like in this granular way, but that groups and this is, like you know, from the sociology standpoint, looking at not just like.

Speaker 2: 49:56

Psychology is focusing on whether people are like, how people function right and their perceptions and how they integrate what's going on in the world through their experiences. Sociology sometimes gets overlapped. There's a significant overlap between that and psychology, because we're talking about how groups function, which is about the quality of the relationships between them, and IO. Psych and sociology have a lot in common. One of the things I really one book I really recommend actually on the subject is called Anthrovision.

Speaker 2: 50:27

It's by Jillian Tutt and she's talking about looking at an organization through the lens of an anthropologist and some of the techniques that they, that an anthropologist, would use to try and get a a, an honest look at what life is actually like for the people within an organization, which you don't tend to get from an administrative perspective, right. The tools that administrators use aren't as useful as the tools that anthropologists use, and so you end up with things like culture which actually pretty significantly affect the quality of team performance, right? So I tend to focus more. I've told a lot of people not to make me a flight chief, because I'll focus entirely on culture and I'll break all your deadlines because I'm terrible at admin. They're probably going to do it eventually, but they'll regret it.

Speaker 1: 51:16

You just got to have a balance. I think we should pair flight commanders and flight chiefs with their opposites. I think things would run a lot better if we had balance in that world, but for some reason I end up being the same person, which doesn't really help anybody. You need the daydreamer and then the action person.

Speaker 2: 51:33

Yeah, this speaks to like the habitus thing, though, is like I always I think oftentimes we associate like elevation to those roles with certain characteristics like being good at numbers. You know, like actually, most of our promotion system is about promoting people who are good at writing bullets Right, so it's like I'm terrible at writing bullets. I only got promoted because other people helped me with my bullets. But I had people who were like, why aren't you a master surgeon yet? And they worked really hard to make sure that I did it, because I was like over here being flighty and like focusing on culture and stuff, I was doing good things. I get a lot of, you know, I get pretty high praise when I'm in the context where I actually do the work I'm good at. But, yeah, it's always been people who made up for my weaknesses that got me promoted.

Speaker 1: 52:27

Yeah, it's interesting. I finally figured out bullets. You know 13, 14 years of writing them and then now we went narrative. Anyway, daniel, we'll try to bring it all together, all these fun topics. We went through your three main pillars. Let's try to bring it all together. What's something you've learned about people that continues to shape the way you show up?

Speaker 2: 52:48

One thing I've learned about people is that only an individual can tell you how they are and you cannot go oh, I've seen this before. Oh, I know what type you are. Seen this before I, oh, I know what type you are. So, like that categorization piece is like. The one thing I've learned about people is that your first impression is just lazily putting what you like a very small amount of information and then quickly categorizing it right, based on pattern matching, and what you'll find out is that if you just interact, just increase the amount of interaction that you have that is, that person focused right you will very quickly increase the fidelity of your understanding of that person and they will no longer fit into that category that you had them in, and I think that's super important. Leaders have a responsibility to spend a significant amount of time interacting directly with these individuals, because if you don't know who they are and where they're coming from and you just kind of lazily put them in buckets, then you're going to lead them poorly.

Speaker 1: 54:01

Yeah, you can't motivate people if you don't know what motivates them at all. Well, daniel, where motivate people if you don't know what motivates them at all? Yeah, well, daniel, where can people connect with you and learn more?

Speaker 2: 54:10

I'm mostly on LinkedIn, but I've been putting stuff on Substack a lot in the last couple of years, so that's my primary platform for longer form essays. I'll occasionally do a YouTube video. It's been a while since I did one of those, but when I have a particularly a thing I really want to talk about. One of them is the complexity piece. I've got a video up on YouTube that is pretty good. They're all just under my name, daniel Holter.

Speaker 1: 54:37

Well, daniel, thanks for coming out, thanks for joining us on this deep dive, because the world is complex, people are layered and leadership is more about than just calling the shots. If this sparks something for you, share it, reflect on it and maybe bring it up your next team meeting or dinner table conversation. Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded and keep showing up as your fullest self. This is Mindforce. I'm Nate Shear. I love you all. See ya, thank you.