Podcast | Positive Turbulence

Exploring the Ecosystem of Self

In this episode, we explore systems thinking with Michael Lindfield, a deep systems thinker with over 50 years of international experience supporting individuals and organizations to unleash the creativity of the human spirit to meet the urgent needs of our times and the compelling call of a more just and joyful future that works for all.

Unlocking Creativity

Have you ever found yourself in a rut? Do you feel like your creative spark has flickered out? Maybe you’re not even sure you even have that spark. In this episode, we engage with two extraordinary minds, Jane Hilberry, Professor of Creativity and Innovation, and Felicia Rose Chavez, Creativity and Innovation Scholar, both at Colorado College. They’re here to shed light on the untapped creativity within each of us, even those moments when we might not feel particularly creative.

With a Little Luck, You Can Find Your Inner Will

This story about a granite and gravel company (Luck Stone) pivoting into a values-based leadership and coaching not-for profit business (Inner Will Leadership Institute) as well as spin off a number of related businesses (Luck Companies) is a story about the power of vision. It’s about why connecting with your values matters, and an example of positive turbulence in action. To make things even better, we were able to talk to Dr. Tom Epperson, who started working at Luck Stone in college as a summer job and grew with the business through the transition to being the President of Inner Will (as well as the author of InnerWill: Developing Better People, Braver Leaders, and a Wiser World through the Practice of Values-Based Leadership) and Greg McCann a consultant, coach, presenter, author and professor and on the board of Inner Will. Don’t miss it.

Simulating Turbulence

From the center for medical simulation in Boston to our periphery, we bring you a conversation with Jenny Rudolph, Executive Director at the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston Massachusetts. Jenny is a master at team building and leadership and a natural and effective turbulator. The discussion of Leadership is so often focused on individual strengths and skills. Jenny offers us a framework for how individuals combine to create effective teams.

Discover Your Venus Genius

The problem with innovation is that it’s handled like a business with masculine energy. It is very fact-based, data-based KPIs performance, speed, or so says Fabienne Jacquet, author of Venus Genius: The Female Prescription. Fabienne offers a solution and a whole lot of positive turbulence by making an important link to the power of feminine traits and how these are key to the front-end of innovation. She’s pointing at something that everyone sees, but no one is talking about.

Concert of Ideas: Activate the Genius Inside

Is your team stuck in a rut? Maybe you’re all burnt out after flexing, managing and adjusting through the pandemic. Join John Cimino, founder of Creative Leaps International, as we explore one highly effective way he developed to quickly generate positive turbulence for teams and change cultures using a technique called Concert of Ideas. It’s unusual. It’s out there. And it works! John’s got 30 years of experience doing this and he shares some amazing stories.

The Calculus of Trust

Darryl Stickel, the founder of Trust Unlimited, has cracked the code on building and maintaining trust. He’s the rare academic who not only has a big breakthrough in his field but also has developed a highly practical model. He’s applied this model in war zones, business settings, and families, all with great success. Darryl offers us the gift of learning how to build better and nurture trust. Our conversation with him dives into how vulnerability, uncertainty and context play into creating or inhibiting trust…and offers more than a few solid insights along the way.

Marketing the Gentle Way

Whether you are an entrepreneur or a professional looking to get ahead, you need to figure out how you are going to approach your marketing. There are endless hype-marketing-based services out there with some variation on connect-and-pitch. But what do you do if that’s not for you? Listen to Sarah Santacroce and her approach to Marketing the Gentle way.

Positive Turbulence + Green Sand = A Potent Tool to Fight Climate Change

Climate change is a wicked problem. It will take a systems-thinking level solution to tackle it. Kelly Erhart, co-founder of Project Vesta has just the elegant solution we’ve been waiting for using green sand beaches and enhanced coastal weathering of olivine rock. Talk about turbulence! Kelly is a practical optimist and has a remarkably elegant solution. There’s hope here and some big mental shifts to check into.

Turbulent Language for Positive Social Impact

Language and storytelling have to power to change the world. But finding your voice and the right words to make the impact you want can be challenging. Tramaine Chelan’gat’s shares her journey to finding her words. In doing so she found her calling as a Social Impact Strategist. Tramaine is inspired and inspiring, and in telling us her story, in confidently giving us the words to frame who she is and what she does in the world, Tramaine opens the door for all of us to consider our own stories and to reintegrate all of our compartments into a single, beautiful whole. Stay tuned, you’ll be challenged, you’ll be motivated, and you may even find the space for a good laugh.

Solutions Journalism: Positive Turbulence in Action

Most of the journalism we encounter today asks what went wrong yesterday and who’s to blame, or so says David Beers of the Tyee.ca. He and Summers McKay and Kristy Jansen of the Optimist Daily joined us for a rich and robust exploration of solutions journalism. What is solutions journalism you may ask? Solutions journalism is about investigating and reporting on potential solutions to our biggest challenges. It’s investigative journalism with a focus on how people are responding to and solving problems. Because it is not spin or fluff, it is a potential answer to the emotional inflammation that many of us are experiencing today.

Positively Powerful Partnerships

Marsha Semmel is a powerhouse in the world of museums, libraries, national cultural policy and program development, philanthropy and the development and implementation of strategic public/private partnerships. Marsha is opening a door to a new way of thinking about museums and museum experiences. In doing so she’s signalling that the cultural changes we are seeing in the world are going to force us to change how we do a lot of things. Through effective partnerships to support, broaden, and evolve our approaches for how we learn, Marsha sees big opportunities for libraries and museums to play in the education space.

Small Town Genie-us

Chad Shipmaker’s story is a fascinating exploration of the outsized impact remote working can have on innovation and creativity in small towns. This is a positive story about what happens when you apply big idea thinking and practical problem solving to solutions that work in these small-town contexts. And while there may not be the talent pool and big money you get in a Silicon Valley, Chad says connected, authentic community connection provides opportunities you just can’t get in these larger places.

The Human Side of Leadership

Another crack in the system that is being exposed right now is that the Great Person Theory of leadership, which is really the command and control model in a nicer suit, is way too rigid. To be great leaders we need to cultivate our emotional intelligence and ability to flex and be collaborative. Elaine Broe offers us a fresh take sprinkled with humor and humility.

Positive Turbulence in Negatively Turbulent Spaces

Pete Engstrom is currently the co-founder and board President of At Home Chesapeake, an innovative not-for-profit program for seniors. They want to create a new social covenant on ageing so that seniors can age in place. At Home Chesapeake is a member of the Village to Village Network, where Peter is an active board member. Prior to this gig, Pete served in the US air force in intelligence, innovation, and international negotiation. He is also a founding leader of AMI. To describe him as a force of nature might be an understatement.

Turbulent Non-Profit, Positive Community

Here we headbang with Mike Moss, Strategy Catalyst for Non-Profits and creator of momentum for positive change. There are few professionals who don’t belong to some not-for-profit association in one way or another. You might belong to a more formal one that is a governing body for you, like the Society for Professional Engineers. Or you might be a member and follow a group in your community like Creative Mornings. Whatever your affiliation, these organizations have a big influence on how we work, how we define success, and how our industry will evolve.

Turbulent Retirement, Positive Aging

Consider what you think you know about aging and retirement. Those words often conjure up ideas of failing health, loneliness, and dependency. But Elizabeth Isele, Founder and CEO at The Global Institute for Experienced Entrepreneurship is here to tell you to its time to shift your perspective. Not only are people who work longer healthier, on the whole, but the so-called Silver Tsunami is also the scaffolding for the change we need in how we work.

Creativity, Jazz, Hip-Hop and Turbulence

Daniel Seeff is the West Coast Director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz and host of Excursions Radio on KJazz 88.1 in LA the only hip-hop and jazz radio show in the world…we think.
He’s also a creative leader who has a finely tuned ear for connection. Daniel’s insights may be grounded in his experiences in music but they are not just for musicians. They are for anyone looking to innovate, lead a group, be creative or manage change. We explore the creative process with Daniel and how to, as he puts it, keep the tap flowing, while still pushing for excellence.

Innovating Food, Turbulating Your World

Natalie Shmulik calls herself a Food Business Incubation Specialist, Creative Strategist and Innovation Anthropologist. She’s the CEO of The Hatchery Chicago, a Food Business Incubator. If you’re an entrepreneur, innovator or someone who works with a product of any kind, you want to hear what Natalie has to say. We cover a lot of ground including finding your why, the other exit, connecting with community, and finding balance. All in the highly demanding space of food innovation.

Positively Imagining the Future

We all know that the stories we tell ourselves have a habit of coming true. So what if someone could help you craft stories about possible, practical futures, that were positive? Stories that you could believe in? Wouldn’t that be kind of like having your own magic wand? That’s what Joe Tankersley does. He uses his gift of telling stories and uncanny ability to identify important trends to give us futures we can get excited about.

Artistic Coaching, Turbulent Art

The work of creating art may seem radically different to your notions of leadership and coaching, but Patti Streeper has found that delicate balance. This feminist artist who paints portraits of women of historical significance is also an executive coach. Through her ability to listen deeply to what both the women she paints and the leaders she coaches have to say, she is able to find deep meaning and generate positive turbulence for her viewers and clients.

Curiously Turbulent Architecture

Here we explore community and connectedness, and the intersection of art and design with Darryl Condon, Managing Partner at HCMA Architecture + Design in Vancouver BC. Without knowing it, HCMA is the perfect case study for positive turbulence in action. Their Artist in Residence Program, Curiosity Lab, and experiments like the Faraday Cafe and Alley Oop have garnered them international media attention. These initiatives are also a driving force to the firm’s ongoing and outstanding creativity.

Positively Magical

Inviting a magician to your strategic planning session, leadership training or visioning workshop sounds crazy, right? Magicians are for kids. Not so! Let us introduce you to Magic on Purpose and Andrew Bennett, the founder, and Dan Trammattor, a member of the group. They use magic to shift perspectives. Their collective impact from mental health in high schools, to building empathy in the workplace, to big strategic shifts in organizations, is massive. Coming up, transformation stories, perspective shifts, and a little bit of magic.

Turbulating Food Waste

Food waste is not high on our collective radar when it comes to thinking about climate change and environmental action. Yet, did you know that in terms of global warming, food waste has an estimated impact that is six times greater than the aviation industry? Lilly De Gama, the Food Waste Doctor and Chesta Tiwari, a sustainability and food packaging expert, will blow your fridge door off. The two of them are a phenomenal storehouse of both facts and wisdom about food waste. They will help you understand why you should care about food waste and provide some great tips on how you can take action. Prepare for your kitchen to get some positive turbulence!

Welcome to the Positive Turbulence Podcast!

Browse all of our episodes here