Read the full transcript of Episode 13 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features a recording of Matthew Barzun’s live keynote conversation with NAIS Chief Innovation Officer Tim Fish at the 2022 NAIS Annual Conference.
Tim Fish: On today's episode of New View EDU, we're doing something a little bit different. I recently had the chance to record a live interview with Matthew Barzun at the NAIS Annual Conference, and I'm so excited to share our conversation with all of you today.
Matthew Barzun has always been fascinated by how we can stand out and fit in at the same time. He helped countries do both when he served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and to Sweden; he helped citizens do both as national finance chair for Barack Obama, 2012, by pioneering new ways for people to have a stronger voice in politics.
In his book, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go, Matthew explores this idea along with a new organizational mindset: constellations. Organizations designed as constellations are dynamic and flexible networks of distinct yet interwoven individuals. Each member of the team feels like a singular star and is also connected to others to form something greater.
Matthew has deep roots in independent schools. He's a graduate of St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. He's an independent school parent and he has served on various independent school boards. This fall, I read Matthew's book and I'm telling you, it blew my hair back. A few weeks later, a school head and friend connected us. And we've been in conversation ever since.
Our goal today is to invite you into one of our conversations. So Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today and let's just jump right into it. This notion of constellations and the sort of other side of constellations, the other side of the coin, if you will, pyramids, can you give us a kind of overview of what you mean by constellations and pyramids?
Matthew Barzun: Sure. And I'm mindful and, and Tim, please hold me to it because as you said in the introduction, once we were introduced, we have had this wonderful wide ranging, meandering, and highly energizing—to me—and constructive set of conversations. So I want to make sure we don't get too far, I don't get too far ahead.
So yeah, so in a, in a symbol, there, there are two images I want to talk about with this wonderful group. And Aristotle once said the soul never thinks without an image. Well, let's say he was right. The two images are the pyramid on the one hand and the constellation, which you talked about in the introduction.
And I want to start with the former because with the pyramid, because it is something everyone on this call is highly familiar with, and I would argue good at, right? We are, at whatever type of leadership we're all doing in the classroom, within a school setting, because we've gotten good at the pyramid.
Now the obvious form of the pyramid is the world of top-down. And I think we all have gotten the memo at this point, that sort of bosses bullying people from the corner office is, is, it's not eliminated, but it's certainly sort of out of favor. But the point I try to make in the book is that those hierarchical structures exist.
I mean, big corporate America is one place we could point, but it is in non-profits, it's in school systems, it's in, it's everywhere. And it isn't just sort of out there in those organizations. It's actually in each of us. And I'll tell you just quickly what I mean. Like if you try to make an org chart in Microsoft office, I mean the default setting is literally pyramid. It'll just stack those boxes into a pyramid. If you try, and I have, to do some other kind of diagram for how we all work together, I mean, it's sort of possible, but it's clearly not the default setting. And so in the world of the pyramid, the world of up, down, in, out, win, lose, we all get really good at three things.
We kind of ask ourselves instinctively. We say, who's in charge? What's the point? Where do I fit in? Right? And that's really important because in a pyramid, those kinds of questions and the answer they lead to are kind of like the wiring cables that make the whole thing run like a machine, so that we're good at it.
And I think there's a cost to that. And the cost is as we get really, really good at knowing who's up and who's down and that kind of order, we lose sight of other kinds of order. And we'll talk about that later, but the order of notes in your favorite song, the order of a tidal pool at the beach on vacation, the order of a classroom. Secondly, when we get really good at focus—and everyone here is good at focus—we get so good at focus, focus, focus that we start to get tunnel vision, and we start losing sense of what's behind us and above us and to the side of us.
Tim Fish: So the constellation is not just the opposite of a pyramid, right? It is its own distinct thing. And sort of what are the characteristics that make the constellation sort of a new constellation?
Matthew Barzun: And I remember, you know, in, in the course of the book tour and talking to people, there's, it was one particularly honest, skeptical person who was sort of doing the zoom equivalent of like arms crossed, shaking their head in the front row. Like I don't buy this. And so I was curious, I asked him, I was like, well, what's going on?
And he said, I think if you leave the pyramid, you're basically advocating either anarchy, which is like just every person for themselves, or you're advocating for communism, like one big group hug or something. And I thought, oh, okay. That's interesting. I'm not advocating anarchy or communism.
In fact, I think this—the, the fancy word for it is interdependence, right. And that word is kind of loaded. But if the pyramid is the world of dependence, right? You're depending on the person above you and below you then you escape that and you're just sort of all on your own, and that feels better for a second, but that leads to loneliness and alienation, I think.
And so how do you get the best of both worlds? How do you get the best of being you, Tim, or you, Donna, distinct, but also connected. So like you're special, you're a star, but you also want to be part of something special to you. Right. And that's where like, oh, and so it just so happens that this symbol is hiding in plain sight.
If you have an American passport, you've seen it a thousand times. If you have a US $1 bill, that constellation is sitting right on the back of it. There's the pyramid, which has gotten a lot of, sort of Dan Brown attention with the pyramid and the all-seeing eye, which is on the back of our US logo. And on the front of the logo is the Eagle gripping, the olive branches and the arrows, right? And it's got our national motto. E pluribus Unum. And then there's this funny little shape right above the motto. And that these things are not there by accident. We can get into this if that's of interest, but that is 13 originally asymmetrical stars.
And the people who made this logo back started in 1776.It took longer to design the logo than win the war. This was an image they thought through and they picked, that this ought to express how we can be many and one at the same time, not how we can be many bricks in one pyramid. And when Washington was elected, the first president under the new constitution, one of his first acts was to name the first five Navy frigates. And he didn't go for classical or biblical or whimsical. He was like a super on the nose kind of namer, the USS United States, the USS Constitution, the USS President, the USS Congress, right.
And then the fifth one is what you said, the USS Constellation. That is how central this image was back then. Now it's worth saying: Deeply hypocritical at the time, that this idea that you could be…You know what I mean? I mean, with what they also enshrined in that constitution.
So we fell short of it, then we fall short of it now, but I think it is the best idea America has ever had, which is how you can stand out as your own and fit into something bigger. And not this world of the pyramid, where you either fit in or you are left out.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, that's, that's exactly it. And it, and it's also, you know, we talk at NAIS a lot about the notion of Barry Johnson's work around polarities.
And in some ways I think this is a polarity, that there's, it's not about never be in a pyramid, or never be in a constellation and always be in a pyramid thinking, but to really manage the upsides of both of them, to try to find out when do we really need them. And also it seems, though, that we want to make sure that we try to create this space where we sort of have a pure, a constellation first mindset. It seems to me.
Matthew Barzun: Well, that's it. And I think I did this deeply unscientific, so apologies to the science teachers on the call. But when I got back from serving in London, so this is right around the beginning of 2017, pre-COVID, so you could meet face to face. And so wherever people were gathered, I would do this untimed scientific experiment, 10 people at a time to keep the math simple.
And you ask people, you're like, Hey, what's the opposite of winning? And everyone says losing. And I said, okay, that's just a warmup. And then you say, well, what's the opposite of winning and losing. And that's when something interesting happens, which is nine out of 10 of us say, I don't know, not playing, sitting it out. Nine out of 10.
One out of 10, and the answer is always different, but it's basically one out of 10 says playing, or laughing or learning or loving or anything. All, in fact, all the things we do in life that don't lend themselves to winning or losing. And your point, Tim, is once the other nine of us hear that other person acknowledge that, like, the body language changes, they're, they're like right, of course there's something beyond winning and losing, but boy, are we good at tricking ourselves that if we're not winning or losing, we're doing nothing. And yet you do not win your partner relation—You know, you do not win a marriage. Let's say you could certainly lose one if you try. You don't win parenting. You don't win your career. You don't win teaching. You don't win learning. All these things we value, you can't win. That's how deep the pyramid goes within us.
Tim Fish: Yeah. It gets to Simon Sinek's work also on the infinite game, I think. Right? And this idea that this work, that, that participating in a constellation...
When I read it, I thought back on my own sort of experiences, my professional groups that I've worked with throughout my career. And as you describe a constellation, the interdependence of the team, each time, I was like, that's it! That made the groups that I worked with so special, a thing that made them special, I think in many ways, it's because they were constellations. And in the book you talk about this notion that in a constellation you're seen, you're known, and you're needed. And for me that was like one of these huge ideas, because I think in our schools, we do a phenomenal job of seeing and knowing every student. I think our teachers have done that whether they've been online, in person, hybrid, whatever. I think our teachers have figured out how to do that incredibly well. The needed part is the one that I find fascinating because I think we do do that, but I wonder sometimes, like when I taught seventh grade math, I don't know that those kids would say they were needed in my math class every day.
Matthew Barzun: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Fish: And it's sort of, for me, it's one of those ideas that pushes me to think, am I creating constellation, is each person in this group actually needed?
Matthew Barzun: Yeah, it's a really hard test. And it's one of the things that in our previous conversations leading up to today, and why I'm so eager for this wonderful group, the NAIS community and their schools and their leadership teams to wrestle with, push back on, engage with this idea, because I am already working on book number two, and I really want to dive into that question Tim. And the honest answer is like, I don't know how to make seventh grade math students feel needed. You know what I mean? Or for the seventh grade math teacher, more importantly to need them. Because I'm not, it's hard. It's fun to imagine what that might look like.
Tim Fish: You know, it also, one of the things I was curious about when I was reading the book is that there's, there's this great sort of concept of constellation, but the book's not called constellation thinking or constellation leadership. The book is called the power of giving away power. And how is this idea of giving away power connected to constellations?
Matthew Barzun: It's funny. So I, a wonderful, smarter wiser person in the area of book publishing than I am, with Simon Sinek's great help, came up, it was Simon's idea to name it that. And I thought, oh, that's a piece of it, but I wanted to call it the constellation way.
He's like, but nobody knows what the, like, that's just weird. Like, no one's going to get it. I was like, yeah, but it's so cool. He's like, yeah, well you can call your second book that, if people like the first one, you know? So it was really his insight. I need to credit him and Adrian, the publisher and, and my editor as well, they really were like, no, no, this is an essence of this thing.
And so then I reflected on that and I think what they picked up on, which I missed, just because I was so close to it, is that all these leaders, not only Visa and Wikipedia, Alcoholics Anonymous, the internet itself, all these really quite disparate organizations. What the leaders behind them had in common, and their teams, was that they had a common way of thinking about power. And they didn't think you should lord it over others. Okay. They didn't think you should hoard it to yourself. And they didn't think, and this is the trickiest, because we often find ourselves saying this. They didn't even think it was something you should divvy up and share. Now power sharing is very trendy and I'm often like, and I know what they mean, but the problem with power sharing is, because so much of us are in this pyramid mindset, it's sort of like, well, if I have 10 units and we share it, I guess I'll have five and you have five now.
But what all these amazing leaders who inspired me realized was no, no, no, power isn't a finite thing, like something you mine in Western or Eastern Kentucky, like coal. It is something, it is infinite and you make it. And you make it with other people sitting around a table, virtual or real. And it all begins with giving away power.
Tim Fish: Yeah, it's almost like there's this like power cycle, right? And it's a component of the constellation, that power's going back and forth, right? That there's influence and ideas and getting things done and moving things forward and being part of things. I also think about other times in my career, when I looked around, look around now, knowing this, it's kind of like once you see pyramids and constellations, you can't unsee them.
And I think now boy, I was really working in a pyramid at that time. And you know, sometimes I was the one who was making it a pyramid. So it's not like others are being, doing, I was absolutely doing it. And so the question I asked myself is if you're in a pyramid and you're working in one, like, what do you do to make progress?
How do you start giving power away? What, what could that look like? And in particular, I'm interested in the Obama campaign that you write about, where there was a moment at which they had to give power away in the form of the database. And sort of, and how that connected the volunteers. Because for me, that was one of the most powerful parts of the book.
Matthew Barzun: Yeah, and I'm, I'm glad that resonated with you, too. This is back in 2007, so it's the Democratic primary. And Senator Obama is 27 points behind Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, his party rivals.
And there were two young people on his campaign, a guy named Jeremy in South Carolina and a woman named Buffy in California. They were friends. They were in charge of organizing these big states. California was huge and went late, and South Carolina was not that big, but went early. And so they both were under a lot of pressure.
And they said to the campaign headquarters, Hey, often, and this is, you know, often in political campaigns, the people who raise their hands to volunteer are...kind of kooky. And they're like, these volunteers are amazing. They're retired school teachers, they're former judges. They're just these wonderful women and men, by the way, mostly older. I mean, this is not the young crowd. This is older, older, wiser people. And they basically, each of them said together, like we have to empower these people and treat them as if they were staff like we are. If we just treat them like volunteers who can only go knock on doors, like we have to give them full access to this database.
And interestingly, the headquarters in Chicago at first said, no, they might be spies.
Tim Fish: Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Barzun: And Jeremy and Buffy is like, well, I can't guarantee you they won't be spies. I don't think most of them are. I mean, I see these people every day, they seem normal and in it for the right reasons. And I don't think we have a choice.
And so they took this leap. Finally, the headquarters said, fine, try it, give power away to all these people who don't work for us. And lo and behold. And, and a great sort of numerical for the math people on the call, there is a very famous no, sorry, very famous, sort of famous within the campaign world, a bit of lingo that I learned, which is called the flake rate. So this is how many people, how many volunteers flake out on you? Right? So a really bad flake rate is 80%. So 10 people say, they'll show up next Tuesday to do whatever. And only two show up. A really good flake rate, like the best you could hope for, is a 30% where seven out of 10 show up.
But by rule of thumb in this sort of grizzled world of party politics you plan on a 50% flake rate. So if you, if you need 10 people to be there, you got to get 20 to say yes. Right? So Buffy and Jeremy start this whole thing. It takes over. And finally, it's the big election day in November. The one that really matters. And I was there in Chicago in Grant Park, and I saw the person who was doing, or talked to the person who had just gotten off the phone with Virginia, which was one of these swing states that he ended up winning. And I said, what was the flake rate in Virginia? And they said, I know, it's really weird. It was negative 50%. I was like, what are you like, I'm not a math person, by the way. So I was like, well, what is negative 50%? And they said, well, I don't even know if that's the way you phrase it. But for every 10 people who said they would show up, 15 people showed up.
Tim Fish: Wow.
Matthew Barzun: They did the opposite of flake. And so I started calling it like the snowflake rate, and snowflake's become a politically pejorative term, which at the time it wasn't, it was just sort of like snowflakes, which are like fractals. Right. If you look at a snowflake under a microscope, it's made up of little snowflakes, and then you look at that little snowflake and just still at, at any scale, you get that same interesting pattern. That's kinda the key to, if you set that pattern of giving away powers to others for an area of shared interest, you get this beautiful snowflake and you get a negative flake rate. So it works. It's not just sort of touchy, feely.
Tim Fish: Yeah. It, it's, again, some of the most powerful stuff I've been part of is when I've done that. And I wonder about what's held me back as a leader. And if you've seen certain things that hold leaders back from creating constellations. Cause I have my own theories for myself, but what is, what, what is it that holds you back?
Matthew Barzun: It's a great question. It, it, it kind of gets to the other part of your question, which I didn't really answer, which is like, well, what do you do if you work in a big pyramid? If your school, your school head is particularly, or the board chair is really hierarchical, how could you possibly, that's probably the question I've gotten the most on the book tour so far. And the way to do it, if you're a leader of a group, it's, it's fairly straightforward to do. If you're not the leader of the group, it's a little bit trickier, but not impossible.
It's three words that you have to say out loud. It would be really fun if you had a colleague who was in on it with you, because it makes the leap a little less nerve-wracking, but it's the power to say, I don't know. And then sort of dot, dot dot. Maybe we might, dot dot dot. And it's that recognition. So much of the misery we create for ourselves and others in the pyramid is because... and the first three words of the book are pretending is exhausting. And life in the pyramid is a giant pretending exercise. You pretend you know the key goals and then you work yourself backwards. What do we need to get there? And all the pretending that goes along with that. But the reason we're willing to put up, I think, with the exhaustion of pretending, all of us, I mean, I do lots of it, is that what we fear more is the anxiety of uncertainty. So the pyramid tries to factor out things you can't control and just, you can focus on the things you can.
And again, there's a time and place for it. But when you keep doing that, and all these other leaders haven't feared uncertainty, they've just embraced it and made it at the core. So back to Jeremy and Buffy, they didn't guarantee and like triple interview and background check every single volunteer to make sure they weren't a spy for a rival democratic campaign. I mean, they could have, right?
And by the way, this is a weird connection, but it flows. If you will indulge me, you mentioned Wikipedia, right? There's a, Harvard Business School wrote a case study a while back. And they said it was about the company that went digital and beat Britannica. So if you ask people, they would guess, oh, they must've written it on Wikipedia, but they didn't.
They wrote it on Microsoft Encarta, which anyone here on the call of a certain age remembers, richest company in the world, like you said, for six months. Beat Britannica. But of course Encarta is dead, and Wikipedia is alive and well. And when Jimmy Wales and his team started that, they didn't call it Wikipedia. They called it NewPedia. And it was almost the same with one crucial difference. They're like, look, we're not going to pay anyone to write. We're not going to charge anyone to use it, which was kind of weird back then. So it'll be volunteer driven, but Hey, we're, we're, nobodies, no one knows of us. So we have to be really paranoid about sort of their equivalent of a spy. We have to be worried about plagiarism, something this group I'm sure knows a lot about. So they built a double peer reviewed system in order to get an article live on NewPedia. And after one year they had only 18 articles that had made it through. But you don't have to be good at math to know that that is, you're never going to beat Britannica, you're never going to beat Encarta, at 18 articles a year.
So someone comes up to Jimmy and says, Hey there's this new technology called Wiki. It's Hawaiian for quick. And it lets people collaborate on encyclopedia articles. So you don't have to have one person write all of it and get it double peer reviewed. You could write a paragraph, Tim, Donna could write another paragraph. I could add a sentence. Right. And you do it like that. And at the end of the first year, and it's like, what do you mean? Just give away power to everyone? It's like Yup. And then there were 18,000 articles. And now there's 5 million in English alone, and 240 languages in the world. It's the largest human knowledge transfer engine the world has ever seen.
And it all began by this scary leap to give away power. And we'll get to this later, but like, and with, in a really rigorous way, because I think the biggest misunderstanding of the constellation is that it's a group hug like I said earlier, or it's some bad middle school science project where one person does all the work and everyone else free rides, you know? And it's like, no, no, this is rigorous hard work. There are clear boundaries. There's goals, I mean, there's all that stuff at work, in a good constellation.
Tim Fish: Doing that thing that's never been done, you know? And in it, you talk about, so I'm thinking about constellations, I think about pyramids. And I'm also thinking about your work in the State Department, US Ambassador. You know, as I think about pyramids, I think big US government organizations seem to me like some of the biggest pyramids. And yet as US ambassador in the book, you talk about things you were able to do to sort of break that open a little bit and to, to get feedback from, from others.
And I'm thinking about the school visits to the UK. And I'm wondering if you could just share a little bit about how, as ambassador, you were able to bring some of the constellation type thinking to get out into the community.
Matthew Barzun: Yeah. I didn't have the word for it or the image for it back then, but I—this group will be very familiar with the work of Pew charitable trust, the Pew research folks.
And they had just issued, I show, it's 2013 and I arrived in London and Pew did this big global report basically on like asking young people across the world, 40 countries. Do young people have a favorable opinion of America, kind of neutral, or negative, relative to their parents and grandparents? In 39 of the 40 countries, the young people had a more positive thing than their parents, except for one country, which was the country I had been assigned to, which was the United Kingdom.
And I thought, well, oh dear. Okay. And so you start to think about young people in the UK and it's like, they don't remember Churchill and FDR, right? I mean, they're just not, they remember the second Iraq war. They remember Afghanistan. They remember Edward Snowden. I mean, this is sort of, what's swirling around when they think of the US. So I thought, okay, well, we should do something about this. And I knew one thing I didn't want to do, which was to show up to young people, which is a phrase only old people use, right? And give them some lecture about US foreign policy. I had three teenagers. I knew they didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to give it. So my wife's an art therapist by training. And I would show up with what they call an A-5 card, you know, four by six blank index card and an embassy pencil.
And we would do a hundred students at a time. And I would go up and I would say, please draw me a pic, doodle a picture of something that frustrates you about America. Or concerns you or confuses you. And then I'd call on people and we would talk about it. So by the end, I did 200 schools, a hundred kids, so I have 20,000 index cards of young people. 10,000 of them have the exact same doodle, which is a handgun.
Tim Fish: That's what I was going to say. Yeah.
Matthew Barzun: And so 10,000. And so after each school, we would make a word cloud, which everyone now, you know, so the most drawn or most written word is the biggest. And then I would color code them because the next most popular, popular is a weird way to say it, but the next most drawn or written word was racism and police brutality. This is 2013, 14, 15, 16. So I would make all those words red, and then words like Israel, Palestine, drones, surveillance, Edward Snowden, Iraq, all those things. They were there too. They just weren't very big on the word cloud. And I put them all in blue.
And the not very subtle—and I would show it to President Obama when he visited, Secretary of State Kerry, anyone and everyone who came from the States, I just carried one around and I'd give them one. And I would say, we can make all the distinction we want about foreign policy and domestic policy. But these young people who are the future leaders of the UK, they make no distinction between the two.
Tim Fish: I love the idea of the index card. And I wonder, if I were in a school and I was going to do that with our students, to hand them an index card and have them draw something, what are you confused about? What do you imagine for the future? What you could get just from that collection of index cards would be, would be a fascinating thing to look at.
Matthew Barzun: Well, quickly here, cause I think it's relevant to this group. I, so the, the feedback was, so, I mean, you can just tell, you know, everyone on here, you know, when, when a class goes, well, you know, it's magic, and when it doesn't, it's the opposite. But I can just tell after I did a couple of these things, and this young staffer on my team said, okay, Sir—they had to call me Sir.
Okay, Sir, are we done? And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, they're all the same, you know? And I'm like, well, the people aren't the same, right? I mean, these are different people we’re doing it with every time. No, no. We're going to do two a week till I leave. And it's just like, oh no. But then I would do the index cards with two groups that I think are quickly worth sharing here.
One group was my senior team. These are amazing women and men who've served in Syria, you know, all over the globe. And they're coming, they've achieved a high rank in the State Department and they're coming usually towards the end of their careers to take some time in London. And I did the exercise with them and I just said, please draw for me, doodle for me what life is like on a bad day in the State Department.
And then we, and there's only 12 of us or whatever. So we went around the table and everyone shared, and these were all really gifted writers. And so part of the gift was, or the trick, was to get them out of their comfort zone. I don't want a paragraph from them on what's a bad day. Cause you know. But if you get them to draw and, and then I'd flip it over and say, what's a good day like? Just like with the, with the high school seniors, I also had them, what do you, you know, what inspires you about America? But the interesting stuff is in the tension. So of these 12 people, the, the positive side, a good day at work, were incredibly different. Bad day at work, all had the exact same image in it. I kid you not. A giant triangle. And sometimes the top of the triangle was called DC. Sometimes it was like "my office." Sometimes it was the White House. And they drew themselves as stick figures at the bottom of this pyramid with, like, some had arrows coming down to them, some had boulders coming down, it was really evocative of just life at the bottom of a pyramid, trying to get up and getting pushed down.
And then I, then I kept it going in America. Now I had no reason to go to high schools when I got home to Kentucky, Louisville, where I live, but people are nice there. So they sort of let me, I didn't do it at the scale of, of that I did in the UK. But I asked these American students about America.
Number one fear and frustration was division, economic, racial, social. Followed closely by loneliness. That's the negative side. On the positive side, like what inspires you about America? Number one, diversity, followed closely by freedom. So this to me was like this big aha on the journey of writing this book.
I was like, okay. So think about that. Diversity and division. They have the same root, div. So what they love most and fear most has something to do with separateness. And so that, you know, now we see where it ends with the constellation. I was like, so they want to stand out as an individual like me, but they don't want to stand out so much that they're lonely. Right? So they wanna stand out and fit in. And then I was like, boy, do we have a good image for that in the form of a constellation. Stand out, be special and form something special to you. Easy to say, hard to do.
Tim Fish: Yeah. It's a lot like your two by two, right? Where you've got this sort of... special relationships, special and transactional relationships. And I wonder if you might want to spend a second just talking a little bit about that, because I think it relates.
Matthew Barzun: In our lives, we can all think of it without a lot of help. There is so much frustrating friction, right? Just to evoke one, going to the doctor's office, giving a clipboard. You've been there eight times and you're like, I have to fill this all out again? Aren't I already in the system? Right? And just these frustrating moments in any organization we have. That when we are offered the choice to pursue a friction-free world, we leap at the chance, aided and abetted by some amazing technology.
So we have sought to get away from frustrating friction, to seek out friction-free. Totally understandably. And I just think there's a catch and a cost to all the friction-free that we have brought into our lives, which is—and the special relationship thing comes from Churchill, which we don't have time to get into—but when he confronted, and it's interesting with everything that's happening in Ukraine, when he was, you know, at what became the Cold War in 1946, he comes to America. He gives the famous Fulton, Missouri speech. Everyone calls it the Iron Curtain Speech, right, because of his image, very powerful image for authoritarian military rule coming from the Soviet Union. And what he prescribes in that speech was what do we do?
Should we build an Iron Curtain of our own? Should we fight pyramid with pyramid, to use my language? No. He said we should form millions of special relationships. And what he actually called the speech was the Sinews of Peace. And that the way you combat consolidated authoritative power is not with forming your own authoritative consolidated power. It is formed in all of these millions of connections. I think of it as a constellation, Sinews of Peace, same sort of image. And his point was: special relationships are filled with friction. Think about a family dinner table. You know what I mean? It's like, there are, people laugh, people cry, it's high stakes.
And it is a, and they work. So anyway, we need to seek out fruitful friction. And Google proved this. They did that famous study called the Aristotle project. What makes good teams, what's the difference between good teams at Google and great teams at Google? Is it the most diverse team, least diverse team, smartest combined IQ, best leader? None of those. It is the groups that can, you talked about Adam Grant and he talks about, you know, that can create psychological safety for one another. In other words, places that allow for fruitful friction. I don't have to tell this group, I mean, classrooms are, couldn't be, I mean, if they were friction-free no learning would happen.
Right? And so this group, better than I, knows the conditions for and the hard work required to create fruitful friction.
Tim Fish: Yeah. How do we enact that notion of creating that space? Right. Creating—that's the component. One of the characteristics of a special relationship is this ability to sit in fruitful function, to get friction together.
So here's a question from someone in the audience, if... how does, how does this constellation thinking and giving away power interface with the rise of social media use in a world, in a way power has already been given away on platforms. Everyone has a voice in that case, very much like Wikipedia, but what we've actually seen is this seemingly, as it's led to division, misinformation, fake news, et cetera. So sort of in that case, that is, did not create a constellation, it created a real challenge for all of us.
Matthew Barzun: Totally. And, and by way of that, was this questioner articulated better than I did when I pushed back against my publisher and against Simon, on calling the book, The Power of Giving Away Power, because I thought, yeah, look around. That seems so like the opposite thing we should do given the questioner's thing.
Here. So, uh, Harvard Business Review, this is an answer. Cause we haven't talked about this important person yet, and she gives the right answer to this great question. Harvard Business School, 20 years ago, asks 200 global business leaders, academia, corporate, you name it, who was your guru? And they proudly published the gurus' gurus list.
Number one, Peter Drucker, a name known to everybody on this call. The most quoted management leadership thinker, non-profit, for-profit, education, of the last century. What's interesting is a couple of years before he died, he admits that he had a guru all along. She was nowhere on the Harvard list, not number one, not even on the list, never mentioned by the 200 people. And yet he said she, every good leadership idea we have today came from her. Her name was Mary Parker Follett, 1868 to 1934. I don't have time to do her justice. She's in chapter three of my book, an amazing biography written of her by a woman named Joan Tonn, T- O- N- N. But here's what she says in a nutshell. She's writing a hundred years ago, America's coming out of a global pandemic, racial social economic division, everywhere she looks, raging debates about the fear of big business, raging debates about what government might overreach to try to do something about the power of big business. Sound familiar? And she said, look, all of that can be really daunting, but there's something each and every one of us can do about it beginning at our next Monday morning meeting.
And so by way of answer to that question, Mary Parker Follett says there are four possible outcomes of a meeting, and only one of them is worthwhile. And this is where the social media thing falls down. Number one, a bad outcome, is you—me, Matthew—I try to win the meeting. It's like, well, why did you invite other people, if you have a pre-baked idea already done? Bad outcome number two, you acquiesce. Tim seems super fired up. Donna seems to have it all figured out. Just let go. No, that's no good. You're denying the group a unique perspective, your own. The trickiest is bad outcome number three, cause we're all taught that this is good: compromise.
She's like, compromise sounds better, but it's just little mini victories and mini acquiescences. She says the only reason you should ever get around a table with a team is to make something, or co-creation, to use a fancy term. If you make something with a group of people, this magic happens, which is you are forever part of that thing you made, yet you didn't come into the meeting with it, but you're leaving the meeting with it. It is forever part of you. And that commitment to co-creation and to making things in groups, that is what I think is so lost that what you've seen in the social media thing is the pure, what happens when the pyramid mindset not out there, in our, is just given unlimited trading. But anyway, we can't blame the technology.
By the way, I firmly believe that my wonderful mentor and grandfather Jacques Barzun, who wrote Teacher in America and wrote a lot about education. He always said his life's work was to fight the mechanical. And he said, and I don't mean machines. I want to fight mechanical thinking. Machines tyrannize, he said, only with our permission. So this is inside of us and what we choose to do with this. And we end up being, acting like bully bosses, little mini bully bosses, all of us. And it's awful. And the alternative is to sit around tables, embrace fruitful friction, and try to make things together.
Tim Fish: That leads us to your newest project, which we didn't talk about in the introduction, but you're in the midst of working with some others in the UK to create Tortoise Media. A new sort of platform for news and information and media. Tell, tell us more about it. You know, when I went and checked it out, I saw that it said Tortoise Media is here to sort of respond to two problems. One is the daily news, and the other is the power gap. And by the power gap, it's the divide between the powerful and the powerless is widening, that we all feel locked out, alarmed by a lack of vision, hungry for leadership in business, technology and society.
And that at Tortoise Media, we believe in responsibility and we care about dignity. So tell me more about this approach to journalism.
Matthew Barzun: You know, it's co-founded by this, founded by this wonderful guy, James Harding, who was when I was in London, he ran the BBC. Top journalist at the BBC, 8,000 reporters globally. And this remarkable woman, Katie Vanneck-Smith, who was president of the Wall Street Journal, she's British. We teamed up to do this thing, a new kind of newsroom. And I don't think you see it on the website, but the way we think about it internally was, Hey, and the previous questioner really got at this, it's like, Hey, we've seen what happens when you go fast and break things, which was famously, a certain major social media company was written on their walls proudly.
It's like, well, we at Tortoise want to go slow and make things. And we make, we make stories and podcasts, but it's really like, we want to make understanding together. And one of the interesting things that—also not on the website, but I think at the core Tortoise idea—we didn't have time to get into the story of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I'm sure, I mean, everyone on this call, I'm sure has someone in their friend or family network whose life has been changed by the world's largest recovery platform in the history of the world.
And the story of its founding is fascinating. And that small, back to snowflakes and the small little pattern that gets repeated and repeated and repeated and could lead to something big and beautiful, was the recognition on how a stockbroker from Akron, Ohio helped save a doctor. And in that formative story, he starts to slip back and he calls a priest and he says, I need to be put in touch with an alcoholic. Do you know one? And he said, I don't, but I know a woman who does. And this remarkable woman connects the two people who end up starting AA. And the recognition was, I can only heal myself by helping someone else heal. It's this mutuality thing again. And I think in the realm of journalism, like we can only understand with and through one another.
And so that's what we're trying to do in the newsroom. One way I like to think about the constellation and the kind of mindset that I'm hoping we can all do more of in whatever realm we're in, certainly schools, and classrooms as a subset of schools, are a really interesting place to see if and how this plays out. But if you had two cars in the parking lot, we don't have the, everyone here will get the right answer. And there is a right and wrong answer. Two cars and you have to guess who's the Democrat car. Who's the Republican car. They only have one bumper sticker each with one word on it. Car number one says freedom. Car number two says together. Everyone correctly guessed the freedom car is the Republican car, the together crowd is the Democrat car. So in our adult lifetimes, Tim and others on the call, we have seen the freedom crowd take that word to a logical extreme of freedom from this, freedom from that, just leave me the heck alone.
We have seen the together crowd take together to a logical extreme of total togetherness. One candidate saying not me, us, lose yourself in the collective. And as I look at that, I think, wow, what we need and what I think we all actually want isn't freedom from one another. And it isn't total togetherness either. We want freedom together. And not some mushy compromise, right? Half freedom, half together. Freedom with and through one another. And bringing it back to our founding, our imperfect and inspiring founding. That is what was remarkable about 177—any band of revolutionaries can declare independence. They do it all the time.
The hard part was how could we figure out how to be free together? 13 separate colonies. And we did a constitution and we, you know what I mean, all that kind of stuff. And we had a motto for it: From Many One. And we had an image that was supposed to go—remember, he named that ship, the USS Constellation. We had an image that's supposed to go with that motto.
Aristotle says we never think, we never think without an image. I would hope that we could have this image of a constellation, which is how we can be free together.
Tim Fish: Yes. You know, and you said something just a minute ago, I'm going to have our last question be focused around the idea of a classroom. You and I have spent, in a lot of our conversations, we've been, we've been on this journey thinking about classrooms. And you mentioned something that really stuck with me. That notion back to my math class and that idea back to that sort of, well, how does it, how do I create a space where every student is needed? And what you just said was understanding together. If I structured the class, I'm thinking back now, to create a context where the students and I were building understanding together, as opposed to I have understanding, and I'm trying to give it to all of them. Right?
All of a sudden, it changes the dynamic significantly, and that notion of how do we create school communities, where we're building understanding together?
Matthew Barzun: Well, and maybe closing with this because I am so excited to see and to learn from all of you how that might go, because I don't do that hard, meaningful work of teaching in the classroom. You know, I got to go in with my index cards for an hour and leave, right? So the amazing work that happened for the 99.99% of the time when I wasn't there, I'm, I'm eager to learn. I might close with just a very short sort of, at the risk of being glib, but I don't find it glib. I find it really helpful to me, which is the lesson I learned from this standup comedian in London. Weeks after I get there, I'm seated next to this guy named Jimmy Carr, like deeply inappropriate Netflix special. You can go watch if you want. I'm not telling you to. Anyway, he's one of those sort of cringy, hilarious if you like that sort of thing, comedians. So I had always wondered what—I never met a standup comedian. So I was like, Jimmy, what, what percentage of your jokes get a laugh? You know, when you're trying them out in Liverpool or Louisville equivalent. Right. And he says, oh, well, I'm pretty good at it now. So I get as many as three laughs for every 10 jokes. I was like, oh wow, that's pretty good. And then he's like, by the time it comes to the Netflix special, I'm nine out of 10 because I've tried out all the ones that don't work. Right?
So I'm sure that's true of teaching too. Like you just see what connects and you're always cycling and then you get it down. But that's not what the interesting thing he said to me, cause I kind of turned to talk to the person on my other side and he tapped me on the shoulder. He's like, but do you want to know something interesting about jokes? Sure. So jokes are strange things. If you tell a, if you play a song and nobody likes it, it's still a song. If you put on a play and everybody walks out, it's still a play. And if you tell a joke and nobody laughs, it's just a sentence. And you know how you said your head bl—I was like, oh my gosh. And I was like, did Groucho Marx, did someone, Mark Twain, who said that? And he's like No, I said that. I was like, I think that is deeply profound. And I thought about it in the context of trying to be a good ambassador and about my previous chief strategy officer. And every time I had fallen short of what I think the lesson is of that story, which is the comedian does his or her part, the audience does their part, and together they make a joke.
Tim Fish: Yes.
Matthew Barzun: It exists between them, like teaching and learning. This—it cannot be isolated to the teacher or to the student or to the comedian or to the thing. It's this mutuality, it's this interdependence. It's the invisible. When someone shows you Orion's Belt, right? The lines aren't there, you have to imagine them. And then once you've seen them, you can't unsee them. And so that, I think, is what's going on here, that if we can find those connections, pass them onto the next generation, they will be alive and not be able to unsee them and be able to build useful, much more powerful things together than we could on our own.
And that's what I'm hoping as a plea to this wonderful group. If you engage with it, I would love to, and Tim knows how to get in touch with me. I would love to hear where it resonates, but just as importantly, I'd love to hear in the spirit of fruitful friction, what I call, I have a big collection of index cards called "Yeah, but like, ah, I'm not so sure." And, and you all are at the, at the coalface, like they say in the UK, of where all this stuff is happening. So I'm eager to learn it.
Tim Fish: Matthew, this has been a great conversation, as I knew it would be. And thank you so much for taking the time to spend with our community, to introduce us to these ideas. The concept of constellation has stuck with me in a big way, as has the power of giving power away. And as you said, getting it to come back. Creating the context where the cycle is flowing. What an incredible, incredible conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Matthew Barzun: Thank you guys.