Biz and Tech Podcasts > Business > The Salience Podcast
Salience is the state, quality or signal that stands out. It's the difference that makes the difference. Each fortnight in The Salience Podcast, we uncover patterns of sensemaking, thinking and acting from the frontiers of human performance, science and art to provide new and improved ways of acting in complex and uncertain times. When something, a state, quality or signal of some kind stands out from the clatter and noise, that is Salience.The Salience podcast is a fortnightly dive into the frontiers of advanced human performance. Host Dr Ian Snape interviews expert guests and game-changers from the world of science, art, sports, business and defence, to discover how we can all become better at surviving and thriving in complex and uncertain times.
Last Episode Date: 14 January 2025
Total Episodes: 44
On todays episode, we will be discussing what it is like to support the transformation of a 100 year-old institution with close to 100,000 employees across different countries. With me today is my friend Ian Macdonald. On top of being an amazing person to work with, Ian has over 25 years of experience in areas spanning entrepreneurship, communication, leadership development and strategy. He also has several creative specialties such as advertising, photography and design. Ian is currently part of the People Management area at Itaú Bank in Brazil where he is Head of Applied Complexity in the internal Transformation Consultancy.Ian is also a bi-lingual executive coach, consultant and facilitator in complex adaptive systems. Based physically in Brazil he has worked with a wide range of individual students, governments and corporate organisations from varying sectors and sizes in Latin America, United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Ian is a digital complex facilitation wizard, and also contributed to the design and implementation of the Itaú Complexity Lab where he now works.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
In this episode, we will be discussing what it means to facilitate strategic dialogue to work on intractable problems. With me today is practitioner of strategic dialogic methods, Marco Valente. Marco is currently a Consultant and member of the executive team at Cultivating Leadership. In this role, he is working primarily as a coach with both individuals and teams, and as a facilitator of executive teams to help them make meaning of their most pressing challenges. He uses a complexity-informed lens to tackle these challenges more effectively, and to create better team cohesion and social capital. He has also worked on multi-stakeholder dialogues with a diverse range of partners: from municipality planners across Europe, to LGBTI communities worldwide, to nanotechnology scientists at Harvard, and more. He describes his work as providing teams with formats to improve their capacity to make sense and skilfully act on complex challenges. His work is informed by complexity theories, a decade of experience in facilitation, and over five years as a university lecturer in “Leading for Sustainability”. Marco also blogs through his LinkedIn page, and his writing can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-uncertain-lets-embrace-its-promise-delight-marco-valente-yeede/ For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On this week’s Salience Podcast, we explore anthropology, sensemaking and complexity.Our guest is Ellie Snowden. For those familiar with the Cynefin framework and its developer Dave Snowden, well Ellie is his daughter. Apart from an enormous requirement for personal resilience being Dave’s daughter, Ellie has developed her own deep competency in the field of anthro-complexity and sensemaking. Ellie leads the Cynefin company's work on health and healthcare with her experience of supporting centre members in their use of SenseMaker® and surrounding methods. In this episode, we talk about the importance of narratives in expanding our world view, and how surfacing multiple voices can help cultivate culture. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On this episode of the Salience Podcast, we turn our attention to the relationship between human factors, systems, and analysis of safety incidents and accidents. As you might imagine, a company with a name like Frontline Mind is intimately involved with frontline action. The agencies and people we specialize in work in fast-paced, complex, and at times high-risk environments. Inevitably, there are near misses, incidents and accidents. How we best learn from these is not straightforward. In fact, when we work with agencies for the first time, we find that most after-action reviews or operational or cold debriefs have made matters worse. Partly, this is because there is an unrealistic focus on events that emerge and are only visible in hindsight. This is partly because there is a strong focus on errors and what went wrong. We can see and hear this bias in a deficit-based language where there is a focus on what went wrong. Now, I'm not a fan of an exclusive focus on what went well either. The danger of overdone positivity or staying in happy, clappy land is also unhelpful and is just as much of a concern as an obsession with what went wrong. So it's this use of language and the way we can direct attention that we are going to focus on today. And to help us unpack, how we can learn from near misses, incidents and accidents without falling into a judgmental binary of good and bad. we are joined by Dr. Steven Shorrock from Eurocontrol, where he works to support aviation throughout Europe with human factors, applied psychology and systems thinking and practice. Steven is a chartered psychologist and human factor specialist. He is editor in-chief of Hindsight Magazine and adjunct associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast Center for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On this episode of the Salience Podcast we return to cross-domain mapping, exploring how tactical leadership and decision-making taught in the military can be applied to start-up and scale-up challenges for business and as a way to accelerate change in frontline agencies. One of the biggest challenges for military-trained leaders is adapting to the radically different power structure of civilian organisations. For starters, command and control just doesn't work the same way.I often see veterans appointed to civilian leadership roles and the civies just don't respond at all well to being told. I've seen the opposite where veterans really do lead adaptively using a range of leadership approaches that suit the situation. So today I want to tease apart the difference that makes a difference in effective leadership and decision making through that military lens. Today's guest is Ben Ford from Mission Control.Ben is a former Royal Marine and uses what he learned in the Defence Force to help veteran entrepreneurs develop a competitive advantage in business. I first came across Ben through LinkedIn where I noticed his posts about OODA, John Boyd's Observe, Orient, Decide, Act decision-making framework and how to apply that process in tech.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we explore risk and decision-making and consider what we can learn from fatal mistakes. In a number of our interviews, we have stressed the importance of safe to fail experimentation. This is of course the preferred way to learn. However, we can also learn from critical incidents that are not fatal to us. In today's interview we discuss one such profound experience that inspires me to remember some important aspects of human factors in decision making. Today's guest is Ken Wiley. Ken is a mounting guide by training, although he is known globally as an author, an engaging public speaker, and through his company Archetypal, he is an advisory and human hazard management educator. In 2003, Ken survived an avalanche that resulted in fatal consequences for seven guided clients.In a very humble way, Ken acknowledges he was part of a professional team whose failure to communicate and work together with mutual respect resulted in the fatal avalanche. Ken has detailed the background to the tragedy in his best -selling book, Buried. I recently had the privilege of listening to Ken's story at an avalanche conference in New Zealand. There are many similarities with what we teach in Frontline Mind. So I was inspired to reach out to Ken to relay his story on the Salient's podcast and pass along some of the most important lessons to our listeners.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On this episode of the Salience Podcast , we are exploring feedback and feedforward in the complex space of policing and investigations. We are joined in this episode by Lou Hayes, who is a 26-year veteran Police Officer & Detective for a suburban Chicago police department. Some of his assignments have included: Patrol, Field Training Officer, Criminal Investigations, Firearms & Tactics Training Unit, Crisis Intervention Team, and SWAT. His current roles are with a regional homicide unit, with a passion for multi-agency intelligence & technology.Lou has also developed and pioneered The Illinois Model - a non-linear, problem-solving process for police officers. The model prioritizes life, Constitutional objectives, incident strategy, and tactics in rapidly changing and high-stakes circumstances. Since its development, The Illinois Model has expanded greatly to serve as a pathway to human and organizational adaptability.We chat with Lou about and feedforward loops, and how these are important when training teams and conducting investigations.http://www.theillinoismodel.com/p/what-is-illinois-model.htmlhttp://www.theillinoismodel.com/p/the-illinois-model-summary.htmlFor more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we return to our origins unpacking the patterns of behaviour of extreme high performers, learning what we can to apply in everyday life work and the rest of life. We are joined by Sara Stone. Sara is a professional sailor, and has sailed everything from dinghies to ocean racing yachts. She is currently in Barcelona preparing for the women's americas cup later this year.Our interest in Sara though is as much about her high level sailing as work experience - in a former life Sara was an epidemiologist and emergency response professional. So today I want to explore the similarities and differences between different facets of Sara’s experiences. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On This episode of the Salience Podcast, we explore feedback and feedforward in the context of design and innovation. We are joined today by Tom Kerwin. Tom has 25 years of experience as a leader in design, research and innovation. He’s co-founded two successful startups and worked both agency-side and in-house, coaching cross-functional teams to innovate. Tom is also the author of Innovation Tactics, the deck of cards from Pip Decks that’s packed with pragmatic methods for making things people want. Since running his first usability test in 1999, Tom has been obsessed with adaptive sense-making. To quote from Tom’s bio “how do we continuously make sense of the world so we can act more effectively in it?” And that’s really at the heart of feedback and feedback and what we are exploring in this season’s Salience Podcast. For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
On this episode of the Salient podcast, we journey into the world of mapping and explore the role of feedback and feedforward in navigating complexity. We are joined by Marcus Guest. Marcus is originally from the UK and is one of the small number of people actively developing adaptive strategy using Wardley maps.What's interesting about Marcus is his solid grounding in the science of complex adaptive systems. In his past life, Marcus worked in organisations in Europe and Asia, overseeing the rapid expansion of operations and as a strategy director in a leading consulting firm. In addition to the competitive use of Wardley maps, Marcus has a unique perspective on Eastern and Western approaches to strategy and complexity. Amongst all of these broad experiences,I want to challenge myself in today's interview to really zero in on the role of feedback and feed-forward within a mapping and adaptive strategy approach in business.For more information about The Salience Podcast and Frontline Mind please visit our website at https://www.frontlinemind.com/the-salience-podcast/ You can also sign up for our newsletter here https://frontlinemind.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=ff181d12c77d7cea5f19a2c48&id=fd7357f614
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