“Ideas to shift the world”: in conversation with Unstoppable Conversations
When we met the team at Unstoppable Conversations, we were moved by their core purpose: to cause leadership for a transformed world. 2020 has demonstrated a rapidly changing world, with profound effects on our economies, communities, and environment. Among the lessons we are all learning, it’s clear we need a new approach to leadership.
Unstoppable Conversations works with private, public, and social sector clients who want to intentionally disrupt the status quo to go after something big. We sat down with co-founder Kevin Gangel to celebrate their recently-achieved B Corp certification, and discuss the role of transformational leadership in accelerating results, movements, and ideas.
Why are you in business? What problem are you trying to solve?
I’m in business to make a difference. There’s so many things in the world that don’t work, and they don’t work in predictable, repetitive ways. A great example is the current paradigm of “the environment or the economy? Pick one.” I woke up to the environmental conversation 16 years ago. I was just shocked, angry, and sad that humanity knows exactly what is happening, we even know what to do, but we can’t figure out how to do it together. It’s at the organizational level too; the more people you put in the room, the lower the collective experience gets. Teams waste massive amounts of time and energy stuck in self-reinforcing loops. We get out in front of that to impact people at the level of fundamental human design.
I experienced personal transformation – the way we do it – in 1998, and I realized how many ways I was limiting myself. And not just me, this wasn’t a personal thing, it’s a human being thing. I thought, “If only I would have known this when I was 10, or 14. Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner?” And then I thought, “OK, everybody has to have this.” I thought about how we could take the power of that transformative moment and deliver that to teams, to groups, to organizations. I co-founded Unstoppable Conversations as an attempt to do that. Let’s take transformation to organizations, have it come to them.
So how do you do that? How does Unstoppable Conversations solve these problems?
We get hired by executive leadership teams who want to go after something big, but something is holding them back. Usually it’s identified as a gap in leadership, or they know there needs to be a cultural shift, or occasionally there’s conflict that’s so bad that they’re willing to fess up and ask for help. Those are some of the presenting issues that lead them to say, “It’s time for a big leap.”
The nuts and bolts of it is we typically go in and work with the CEO, Executive Director, or board chair and their first level of management. We often start with a two-day intensive, where the team reverse engineers the root cause of their biggest problems. We follow the breadcrumb trail back into the dark part of the forest to find out what’s really going on. We have a moment where we identify a shared mental model that’s invisibly guiding people’s action, and we put that together in their language. It’s a real-time discovery process. And they laugh or they cry or they get angry or they just go “Oh! That’s why it’s the way it is around here.”
We take that mental model and we grapple with it, and what will inevitably continue in their organization if the mental model stays in place. Inevitably, that’s not the future they’re looking for. Then we say, ok, before you figure out the new future, you’ve got to figure out the why of their core purpose. With the old paradigm revealed and out of the way it all happens surprisingly quickly. Then we design a new mental model specifically to fulfill on that core purpose. From there, it’s coaching for implementation.
The impact happens on a couple of levels. There’s an impact in whatever the traditional metrics and KPIs of the company are – growth, revenue, sales. It’s not a gradual impact; it’s exponential. And then there’s an impact at the level of team dynamics: people’s experience in being at work and the trust and the affinity for each other. We usually wouldn’t say it this way, but there’s an increased amount of love amongst the team. And then there’s an impact for them in their personal and home lives, which we don’t advertise or put into the contract, but it invariably happens. And that’s in the realm of priceless.
What does B Corp mean for you?
When I was in second grade, I have a memory of standing outside this barn with my best friend, talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said I wanted to be an astronaut and write science fiction novels. I wanted to build space ships, because that was like humanity doing something together to achieve something that seems impossible. And I wanted to write science fiction – the narrative and adventure of getting tested and being courageous and keeping going when you think you can’t and all of those things… and just being able to escape the mundane through your own creativity.
Growing up with that, I’ve had lots of ways I’ve tried to express that. Eventually, I got into environmental conservation, and started to marry up my volunteering and leadership and my corporate skills and my public speaking skills… I started trying to find my tribe. I found that in a number of places, but I’m really clear that B Corp is part of that, just like 1% for the Planet is part of that. B Corp represents where my tribe is and always has been, and I hope where the rest of my tribe will continue to come to as the beacon.
B Corp represents people, tools and ideas that are out to shift the whole world – like the climate movement, or the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or Theory U. I think these worlds of impact don’t usually marry up with our version of transformation. It’s not that they don’t overlap, but there’s no systemic bringing together of these worlds. I think the bringing together of those two worlds could be the missing ingredient. Transformation is about rapid, non-linear, unexplainably exponential results. For the social impact world, what if we had this piece that can exponentially accelerate our impact, or what if we gave you this piece that allows you to wake up other people. I don’t know quite what the intersection is, but that’s what’s next for us.
What did the process look like to become certified? What was most surprising?
I met Kristy a year ago and said “I love what you do, and I love the B Corp movement, and we’re going to do this someday.” And she said, “Oh, awesome. What are you waiting for?” I said it wasn’t the right time and that we were already mostly doing it… and then as I was saying it I heard how silly that was. If I say that these things matter, that I am these things, why not do it as soon as possible, then tell people, and then demand the same of them. So we just got started, putting the two teams together for three amazing days in Vancouver.
One piece that really jumps out from our three days together was when we took the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and matched all our clients against them on the circle, asking “are they already that?”or “could they be that?” Seeing that visually, which clients line up with which goals, which are already in the game or could easily be in the game, was very powerful. It empowers us to go to our clients with a very distinct conversation. Not all of their vendors are going to them talking about how they can partner on solving the world’s to-do list. We can now do that.
How has B Corp influenced your response to the pandemic?
B Corp is one of the things you can build right now for the next crisis you do not know is coming. And there is another crisis coming, and another one and another one. You think the pandemic is interesting? How about climate change at 1.5 or 2 degrees? Now throw in systemic racism, poverty, and any number of systems that are breaking down.
B Corp has you grapple very straightly, very deeply, with whether you are doing good in the world by being in business, or whether you are not. And if you are not doing good in the world as a business, and a crisis hits, and then you try to go to your clients, your customers, your stakeholders, and you try to say “let’s get through this together,” they’ll be like “who are you”? But if you are doing good in the world (and by that I mean what you’re actually doing, how you’re being about it, and what you say about it all line up), then you can go to your partners, your vendors, your clients, your staff, your staff’s family, your local government, your provincial government, your local charities, people you don’t even know yet, you can say let’s get through this together. And that’s a completely different conversation. Very few businesses are aware of how they are in community with their network of stakeholders.
Internally too – my team knows why we went for our B Corp certification, they’re fully behind it, they know what it means. They’re excited about it, and they know we’re putting our money – and our energy, our time, our blood, sweat, and tears – where our mouth is. There’s a trust, an authenticity, an ability to get things done together in a very strange situation, make decisions quickly, make good decisions, experiment together. I would put our ability to experiment and pivot in the crisis, our flexibility, our power and speed with all of that is directly related to our process of going through the B Corp certification. I’d invite all businesses to get in the game.
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