Resiliency The Podcast

Jenn Quader (00:05)
Welcome to Resiliency, the podcast. Today's guest is a high level international businesswoman with over two decades of expertise in leadership and organizational development. She is the founder of Visual Metaphors at Work, a company behind a groundbreaking methodology called Lephoris, which transforms knowledge within teams and individuals into tangible insights to drive meaningful action.

And we're actually gonna show this to you guys today. So we do wanna encourage all of our podcast listeners, those who might be via audio to please tune in via YouTube and you'll be able to see a short visual demonstration. Obviously we're gonna keep talking and explain it to all of you listening on audio. But this is such an important subject. Dr. Potter was inspired by growth challenges across organizations of all sizes. She's worked with multinational organizations all the way down to startups.

and she has some really actionable insights that can help leaders from the tops of companies to even small teams. So we are just honored and excited to welcome, please give her a hand, Dr. Kirsten Potter.

Dr Kelly Culver (01:13)
Yay!

Kerstin Potter (01:16)
Thank you.

Dr Kelly Culver (01:18)
I'm just so excited to see you Kirsten. ⁓ you know, sometimes we start our podcasts by figuring out where people are because we are a global podcast. So Jenn, where in the world are you today?

Jenn Quader (01:31)
just outside the LA market. we sit right in Mission Viejo, California, SoCal in the US of A.

Dr Kelly Culver (01:40)
huh. And Kirsten, where are you?

Kerstin Potter (01:43)
Well, I'm sitting on an island on the southeast coast of Sweden. So completely different.

Jenn Quader (01:50)
want to go visit that sounds absolutely beautiful an island off the coast of Sweden Wow tell us were you born and raised there did you move there in your life

Dr Kelly Culver (01:51)
Yeah.

Kerstin Potter (01:54)
It is. ⁓

Yeah, actually, I was born in the town next to Lång, but I left there when I was two and half years old and I lived outside Sweden ever since then and came back because I happened to be here during the pandemic and then got stuck and realized how beautiful it is. So here I am.

Jenn Quader (02:23)
Stuck in a beautiful place is a good place to be.

Dr Kelly Culver (02:25)
Yeah, and it's funny because what Kirsten just said is she in the pandemic, she went home, I will say, know, just not that far away, but back to Sweden and ⁓ that has a calling. I'm at my old home ⁓ today in Canada in southern Ontario on the farm. So we are all around the world and I think that's pretty cool.

But let's get started. Kirsten, if you're ready, could you tell us, what does resiliency mean to you?

Kerstin Potter (02:57)
Well, I think it's, I'm wavering between two expressions here. One is survival and the other one is bounce back. And now none of them is quite right. So I think it's somewhere in between because survival to me has a connotation of, know, just keep going, nearly closing your eyes and just keep going. And you just need to get

to still be there, whereas bounce back is nearly bouncing back without thinking too much. So it's somewhere in between those two. It's about keeping going, but also in a new way, in a more innovative way, perhaps. ⁓ I think it's called pivoting, but something like that. ⁓ So that's resilience. But the other thing is that I think there is something which is more like personal resilience.

And then there is group or team resilience. And then there is organizational or ⁓ corporate resilience.

Dr Kelly Culver (04:05)
The way you've described resilience, it's interesting, sorry, Jenn, the way you describe resilience is interesting because if you take it back to its root word, R-E-S-I-L-E, one of the definitions for resile is like an elastic band. So it's like bounce back, it's like adapt, it's move and it's shape, it's like this, it's always moving all the time. So Jenn, over to you.

Jenn Quader (04:29)
Well, I just wanted to speak to the kind of three tiers you spoke to because I think we all think, you know, I certainly think of resilience as kind of one thing sometimes and that's wrong because Dr. Kelly has reminded me there are how many definitions of resilience, Dr. Kelly? Woo, 47. 47.

Dr Kelly Culver (04:42)
47.

Jenn Quader (04:48)
And what I think is so important and why this is a topic that has to be talked about and why the research and the work and the methodology that you're working on, Dr. Potter, is so important is that exactly what you said, this is not just for me personally, it is also for the groups and teams in which I work, and then it's also at those large company levels. And we all understand the seismic impact.

that those massive companies can have if you don't have understanding within them. We're seeing it in the current world. So I just wanted to speak to the importance of your work, which I know we're gonna get into as it relates to really ⁓ deepening understanding among teams and I think also breaking down barriers to growth.

That's my comment. my question to you, Dr. Potter, off of that, and I don't wanna, know, Dr. Kelly is gonna talk to you a little bit about visual metaphors, but I think I wanna ask a little bit about the genesis before she talks about the actual work. You you did all this work internationally. What was it that led you to doing this work that would help you to carve out this work for personal groups and teams and then organizations?

Kerstin Potter (05:30)
Yeah, that's correct.

Well, I'm afraid it's a rather long story, but I'll try to it short. ⁓ I think actually it started quite a long time ago when I was 13 years old and my family moved from Sweden to Switzerland, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. we moved to a small town. There was one school for boys and one school for girls. And the school for girls was in the local convent.

Dr Kelly Culver (06:02)
Ahem.

Kerstin Potter (06:20)
So I was placed there, didn't know a word of French. The nuns didn't speak anything but French. And I came from a Protestant country. My family wasn't at all religious. So there I was, not understanding a word was spoken to me. And I couldn't understand what was going on around me. The rituals, you you went to...

chapel several times a day. were prayers before each lesson. I knew that they knew I wasn't Catholic. So could I behave in that world without upsetting anybody? so I started to actually look at how people were behaving and trying to then do something to see how they reacted to what I was doing.

And this was really the way I think I started trying to understand more how it felt to be in a foreign and different culture and also not being able to understand what was spoken around me. And I also very quickly realized that because even if I knew something, as I couldn't talk about it, people around me thought I didn't know it. You I was stupid.

I hadn't understood something and hence I was stupid. So this is something I carried with me from then on. And after that I went and studied sciences. I read chemistry and then did a PhD in chemistry. I think that came from this wanting to study, try something out and see what happened and ⁓ poking the system essentially.

which is really what scientists do, we poke systems and observe what happens. But after that, I went straight into sales and marketing in large organizations, middle sized organizations and also startups, as you mentioned earlier on. And that's where I started working with teams. At the beginning, I was part of teams. And as I moved up and through organizations, I became responsible for teams. And I got more and more

frustrated and saddened by the way that it was difficult for people to express themselves, often due to corporate culture and team politics and those sort of This is really a long story leading to realizing what keeps companies...

not really being as effective and as happy as they can be. And teams not being as happy and effective as they can be. I then moved on to, ⁓ was briefly ⁓ Director of Executive Development in a business school in the city of London. So I moved into finance after the sciences. And then moved into

team coaching and corporate coaching, organizational coaching. Because I realized that you really have to get down to that level in order to actually start thinking about how teams and how people can work better together. And that's when I realized and remembered that some years previously I'd come across a professor at London Business School who was looking into and doing research on how

⁓ complex organizations innovate. And for her it was important that it wasn't only the development department, the research and development that had anything influence on innovation. It was the whole organization, from finance to lawyers to all the way through. And in trying to do that research, she realized that there was no common language in the different departments.

of the organization. So they couldn't talk about something like innovation. And that's how she started looking at using visual metaphors, images, because she had a rather unusual background. She had done a master's in fine art at the Royal College of Art in London. ⁓ So when I was starting to look more deeply and learning more about team coaching and organization coaching,

This came back to me because team coaching, at the time anyway, this was in 2008, 2009, is something that took nine months to a year to coach one team. I mean, with two coaches, you need two coaches. This was so, to me, so inefficient. And remembering her approach with these images and how quickly you can start talking about important and deep things.

I went back to her and unfortunately she'd been quite ill. So during her lessons, we kept on taking long walks together and we talked about how what she'd done could be worked within organizations in a different way. And that's how we started Visual Metaphors at Work together in 2012.

Dr Kelly Culver (11:36)
It's fascinating. I love the journey that you've described to us, Kirsten. And I also have had the benefit or the pleasure, if you will, of having Kirsten take me through visual metaphors of work, through her system, Lephorus to look at resilience and to look at a concept we've talked about here before around navigation, navigational leadership. So my question,

How do you use visual metaphors to unlock group intelligence? You know, can you give us an example of this? Can you talk to us about this? And then maybe if things work fingers crossed, we can see it in action.

Kerstin Potter (12:15)
Well, we all use what we call verbal metaphors when we want to talk about something that is complex. For example, we say time flies and we say time is money. We've done this for generations for humans and it's something very young people, very young children understand without actually having to think about it.

It's a way for us to paint images of something that complex and difficult to understand. In the same way, you think about when you dream, do you dream in words or do you dream in images?

Yeah.

Jenn Quader (12:56)
Images, yeah. I mean, I'm like, for sure. Sometimes very

graphic images.

Kerstin Potter (13:01)
can

be. And it's also been shown, there was a recent paper from Harvard Medical School in 2017, I think, that when they were looking at how the brains and the use of images in the brains, and they realized that when the more complex the issue the brain has to work with, the more images are used in the brain.

So even people who generally don't think that they think visually, when something complex has to be considered, their brains automatically turn more towards images than otherwise. So I think it's just very interesting. We often say that some people have more visual acuity or more penchant or more likely to think visually than others.

But this piece of research shows that it depends on the complexity of what we're trying to figure out.

Dr Kelly Culver (14:07)
You know, it's really interesting you say that because I'm working with an organization in the UK right now and they're a technology-based company. And ⁓ we wanted to look at resilience, innovation, opportunity, and risk. And they said, help us develop a matrix for that. That's okay, that's fine. We can do that very easily. And they said, and we wanted to look like an air traffic control tower. Because that's how we think.

Kerstin Potter (14:15)
Mm.

Ha ha.

Dr Kelly Culver (14:33)
So we want our team is in the tower and they're spotting signals which are risks and they're seeing these opportunities and they're seeing these innovations. And I said, no problem, we did that and it was so much fun. And we started to talk a bit more about the idea of air traffic control tower and one of them said, do you know, I've just done some research, 75 % of people can't see the image when you speak it. That there's research that.

We talk about time flies. So we talk about imagine an air traffic control tower, 75 % of people can't instantly call up that image in their head. I found that fascinating. That's a piece of useless trivia.

Jenn Quader (15:12)
I don't find that useless though, Dr. Kelly. find that, I also find that fascinating and I also find it ⁓ comforting. Okay, so for, cause for example, you know, and this is in that personal side versus the team side, but in the personal side, I particularly have difficulty visually seeing when someone is talking to me about construction. There are people who can go, you know, there's this wall and behind that wall is a pipe and then over here is this. I can't see that in my head. And, but, that person who's telling me can, so it's fascinating to me.

that there are these natural abilities. And I think that's what really makes me so interested in this work, Dr. Potter, because by creating this methodology, we're already talking about, you've got, as Dr. Kelly said, 75 % of people who are having trouble being able to see it, other people who are, as you said, finding it out of necessity because the complexity of the thought is requiring it. So what an interesting idea to then take this and turn it into something that can really train

teams that can and you also mentioned a common language and I find in all 47 definitions of resilience, I think if people are working together, they gotta know which definition they're going to. So I say that, I know we're about to get into the example of this, but I wonder if you can, let's get in it and talk to us a little bit more about how people who don't have this knowledge or who do,

can begin sharing that across different personalities and different thinking types.

Kerstin Potter (16:45)
Well, exactly. think the easiest would be to actually go through the exercise.

Jenn Quader (16:52)
was hoping you would say that. Yes, let's get in it. We love to get hands on here at Resiliency, the podcast.

Kerstin Potter (16:56)
Good.

as I'm laying out these images, I'd like you to think about this manufacturing company that you're part owner of. Is there an image here that looks like this very efficient, very well run company that you're part owner of?

There is no right or wrong answer. So just really go with your gut feel.

Jenn Quader (17:30)
I'm gonna describe this for just a moment while she's doing this for anybody who might be listening. What's happening is there's a screen in front of us and Dr. Potter is pulling out very different, I would describe them as fine art images. are very, ⁓ very different in style, very different in texture and in feeling.

I'm seeing all these different images on the screen and it's really interesting, Dr. Potter. ⁓ I'm drawn to some of these that have movement. ⁓ I'm drawn.

Kerstin Potter (18:03)
Mm-hmm.

Jenn Quader (18:05)
I am not as drawn, it's interesting because even though I'm the owner of a toaster company, I'm not as drawn to the ones that have very angular shapes. I'm drawn to a little more of the round. ⁓ I like those where I can see grouping together, where it feels like things are in synergy. Some of the other images, for those who can't see them, ⁓ maybe one looks like a fence and it's straight up and down and I can feel how that company might feel.

but I feel like my toaster company doesn't feel like that. My toaster company feels more like there's a little flow and we are together. Those are what I would take. How did I do, Dr. Potter?

Kerstin Potter (18:46)
Very well. On these images you can see the numbers. Is there an image that you can sort of identify, like the one that you really think this toaster company looks like? And you can give me the number. ⁓

Jenn Quader (18:57)
12. Yeah, 12 is the

one. And three is the one it doesn't look like, really heavily doesn't.

Kerstin Potter (19:03)
Okay,

yeah, yeah. So this is a sort of bit of a wave shape and it looks very as if it's a part of floating ⁓ and going with what's happening in the market in a way. And it also looks like a very happy company that knows what it's doing. Is that correct? Is that what you feel?

Jenn Quader (19:25)
Yes, I love how you said, knows what's happening in the market. What I felt in this was a forward momentum and I didn't see it as a wave, but when you said it, that helped me see that differently. And then I, yeah, I very was feeling that happy. think that came from you describing it as a family owned business that was 50 years old. So yeah, that is precisely.

Kerstin Potter (19:47)
Now, so this is the company doing very well. unfortunately, something happens. And I know it's very far fetched. But let's say this anyway. Suddenly, somebody decides that tariffs are going to treble. And they actually import a very important part of their toaster from a company on the other side of the water.

So this is ⁓ a real ⁓ blow to the company because it's going to make their toasters much too expensive for their market in the country where they are. This is going to happen 10 days from now. And first of all, I'd like you to look at the images again and see if there is an image that looks like the way you as the owner would not like the company.

to react. So the negative response to this horrible thing, that of course is most unlikely to happen, but still.

Jenn Quader (20:57)
looking at it right now. My eye, you know, as you said to go with the gut, my gut went to 10. And I'll describe that for those who are listening. 10 is actually quite a beautiful image. It looks almost like stained glass. It has kind of some triangles and squares, and it's kind of full coverage of the entire canvas. So I would say 10.

Kerstin Potter (21:04)
Mm.

Okay, and what would that mean for the organization? It's sort of...

Jenn Quader (21:25)
I think that what I see in that is that it's faded. is, and ⁓ this is, yeah, this is fun. It's really cool for those who are listening to try to speak about what I'm seeing in my head and try to take that visual and make it verbal. But I would say that it looks diluted. It looks ⁓ as though we are no longer kind of together. We are all just kind of flattened out across the board. We've lost the oomph inside of us.

Maybe it's a little bit of giving up. ⁓ And we've lost that forward momentum. And so I think that's what I see in the image that I wouldn't want, which is number 10.

Kerstin Potter (22:06)
And just another quick question, what in the best of worlds should they have done? Is there an image that looks like a good reaction, a constructive reaction?

Jenn Quader (22:18)
Yeah, funny enough, it's number four, and I'll describe that for those who are seeing it. It's totally different image. It looks almost more like icons, like iconography, and I would call it maybe a conceptual machine. And you can see that there's maybe one part that has, I'd say maybe it looks like something you look through like a... What is a pirate? Help me, Dr. Kelly, what's a pirate? Look, the telescope! Like, I can't think of the word.

Dr Kelly Culver (22:44)
Yep.

Jenn Quader (22:45)
So I see like a telescope on one end and then that kind of connects into a middle funnel and then on the right side there's kind of a ⁓ piece with a circle on top. And so what it looks like to me is that perhaps we've reorganized and we've restructured but the energy and the movement is in a clear way going from one piece to the next piece to the next piece. We are working together not in the wave anymore right now. Right now we each have to have our own piece of the pie.

⁓ but there's clarity in what's happening.

Kerstin Potter (23:18)
Great. So what we do, I've rearranged these images a bit to say this. On one side, I put the image where you start, where you are when things are going well. Then on the other side, I put the images in what's happening, how you respond constructively and how you respond negatively. So you can start building a map on where you come from, where you're going. ⁓

Then you can start to use other types of images to say, for example, if we move down a bit, how work with this? What do do? ⁓ These are images of chairs that I'm putting out here. So, for example, which chair should the CEO sit in in order to be able to get to this constructive?

part of the chart that we're starting to build. And then everybody can start in the organization, can start looking at which type of chair should they be sitting in, what should be their attitude, be doing, what are their responsibilities. So we start building using different types of images, asking different types of questions.

questions about how to get to where we want to get to, building a chart. I don't think we should go any further than that, this is trying to give you a feeling for what we can do with images.

Jenn Quader (24:50)
I want to say having just gone, I'm fascinated at the intersection of science and how this works. And I want to comment on this question of which chair for the CEO. For those who can't see it, there are very different chairs here, guys. There's like a really staunch kind of wooden chair. There's a soft little chair. And this connects to something for me. many of our listeners know that I own a company called the Smart Agency and that we do public relations and branding and communications all for commercial real estate and finance companies.

And one thing we've talked about, you know, because when you're branding a company, you're creating something, ⁓ we kind of almost have a little running joke inside that ⁓ there are companies out there who, when they go to brand something, they just say like, which car are you? You know, are you a Jaguar or a Range Rover? And that's kind of our funny way of saying, like, frankly, like lazy branding, if you will. And I find this so interesting, Dr. Potter, because what you've done is you've taken that concept that our firm would maybe call lazy branding, which is kind of

just seeing something outside yourself, making it aspirational and trying to go toward that. And I'm gonna tie it back to what you said as you introduced this concept of Lephorus, which was that when you look at this language and understanding, you have to look both at the personal resilience, the group and team resilience, and then the company resilience. And I think the fact that from a science level, you are breaking down the question, what seat should the CEO sit in?

You are bringing that to a personal level for the CEO. You're bringing it to a team level and a company level that really, I just want to comment on how fascinating it is that you can create something so granular and then it doesn't feel granular. And that's something I want to ask you about. how does this application work in real life, right? How do you take what you just showed me

and how do you bring that into teams and organizations? And I think before we ask, you know, how it affects the actual people in the team, I wanna kinda ask, how do you get this through? My question is, when I look at it, I see the brilliance, but I also see it as highly conceptual. And so I'm wondering, how do you power through the roadblocks of leadership to say, look, this is a formula that you need. And then I'd like to get into kind of how does this help

maybe the quieter voices or those voices on a team that don't get heard as much, how does it help them? So can we talk about how you break through to get people to believe in this at the top level and then how does it then trickle down and help that team?

Kerstin Potter (27:19)
Well, really, it's by using it. We usually start actually to talk to the board. ⁓ We spend usually not a long time with that, but an hour or so with the board is usually enough. But it has to be on something concrete, a real problem that the board has. There's no point in just talking in theory here. So we come in.

when there is a really hard problem that the board finds very difficult to actually get a handle on. And in a very short time, they can actually start talking about it. What happens is that, and what has happened, and the comments I've heard a lot is, here we sit around this board table and we have a very sticky problem and we have a very difficult problem. And we look at each other and say, what are we going to do with this very difficult problem?

But how do we actually get a handle on it? How can we start talking about it? Whereas when we then come in and say, there an image that look like you're very difficult and hard to handle problem? You can actually start talking about it because you each board member chooses an image. This is what the problem looks like. So you've you've immediately stopped having that blank page in front of you.

you can start talking about it. And you talk about it from different viewpoints, because each board member will have a different viewpoint on this sticky, horrible problem. But they hadn't realized, and that's usually what happens, they hadn't realized that that was the case beforehand, because they hadn't even been able to start talking about it.

Jenn Quader (29:10)
You know, I want to speak to something having just done this too. And I've done some, I'm not certified at all, but I've been coaching and understanding around emotional intelligence. And what I think too is that there's something really brilliant in the fact that when there's a problem, I have emotions around it, right? If my company's having a problem, I'm feeling something. And so when we start talking about the problem, I start getting all these emotions that can affect my body and how I'm thinking.

But when you take the images, it actually removes a lot of the emotion around the specific problem and it allows you to move into a, it's very magical. Dr. Potter, very impressed.

Dr Kelly Culver (29:50)
And now

Jenn, you have just had the experience and the insight that I did. What you've just described is the fact that we can talk about things that we might not be able to. I was, I loved your description of the chair. What chair should the CEO sit in? And how do we have that feedback? So a team member can actually speak what's on their mind when they're using the visual metaphor that Kirsten has, and it's not threatening.

That's the breakthrough.

Jenn Quader (30:23)
non-threatening. What a beautiful way to say it too, because you're tying it back to corporate, you you said earlier, Dr. Potter, kind of corporate politics and not even that, that almost makes it very negative. And I don't think all companies have negativity. Sometimes it's just corporate habits, corporate trends. I'll speak to this for just a moment and it'll bring us into the next question, which I think is important for all of the leaders that are listening to us, all those people who lead teams. You can hear I'm a pretty talkative.

gal, right? I'm a very high verbal communicator and I have a big way of saying, speak up, speak up guys, I want to hear you, I want to hear you in my meetings. Well, as a team, we've had a lot of conversation around the power of introverts. We read Susan Cain's book Quiet and we've had a lot of conversation around that and yet I think the problem persists. I think it's still very difficult to get introverts to speak up and it's so interesting that you said Dr. Potter,

Back just in your personal life, when you didn't understand the language, people assumed you didn't know. They assumed you didn't understand. And see, in the real world of that, if I have an introverted employee who's really good at what they do, but they can't quite speak up, then maybe a client doesn't think they understand.

Dr Kelly Culver (31:27)
Mm-hmm.

Jenn Quader (31:39)
Maybe their knowledge is not trusted. So giving them tools like this not only lends to the inner internal company understanding, but it could actually really affect profitability in a very positive way because you're giving your team those opportunities. So I wanna ask, talk a little bit about how you've seen this methodology help those quieter voices to be heard and what's the benefit of that from your perspective working in various organizations, Dr. Potter.

Kerstin Potter (32:09)
Well, first of all, think and I believe that most people actually want to bring their best into their job, to the work they do, and are sometimes very frustrated because it's very difficult to do just from the reasons you've been talking about, for the reasons you've been talking about, which actually makes for unhappy employees in many cases. And if you look, if we actually look at statistics,

look at the number of people who actually don't seem to be engaged in their work or who seem to be unhappy in their work. So ⁓ just being able to express yourself and to be heard and to have somebody to actually listen to what you're saying, I think is incredibly important. The next step is not only to be listened to, but for somebody to actually act to on what you are saying is

incredibly important. And this is what we often say when we start working with an organization is it's important to actually listen to everybody in your organization from the person cleaning the floors who can have fantastic insights on what should be happening and what is going wrong in your organization to the very top level. But if you listen to people and then don't act,

it's worse than if you're not doing anything at all. So we think that that's very important. ⁓ If you give people the hope that they listen to, that their input is actually going to be taken seriously, and that doesn't happen, nothing is acted on, you're worse off. So that's, I think, very, important. ⁓ Then, I've so many times heard

people after workshops coming to me, for example, saying, I was born in India, I've been working in several different countries, I'm not working in the Middle East, I did my MBA in the UK, I speak perfect English, but this is the first time in 10 years of career that I actually felt I could express myself and that was in your workshop.

Jenn Quader (34:32)
Wow.

Kerstin Potter (34:32)
That

happens all the time. So it is about people being able to express themselves. But then it's the, I find it very important to say, then it's the duty of managers in the organization to actually act on what is being said, because otherwise it's counterproductive.

Dr Kelly Culver (34:55)
It's acting almost being said and it's also connecting everybody. You said something earlier at the beginning around that purpose, know, so that everybody has a common purpose, the vision and the values. And I'm struck by the comment you said about the janitor ⁓ working. you know, I go back to Kennedy.

going to NASA and saying, interviewing the staff, saying, are you doing here? And we're here to put a man on the moon and he sees the janitor, what are you doing? And this actually happened, the janitor said, my job is to put a man on the moon, not clean. That's my job. Yeah, and that's what you're doing. And so how do you help teams?

move from that sort of you just talked about individual resilience, maybe in the description you gave about that the person saying this is the first time I felt like I've been heard, but I've had to be resilient to stay in what I'm doing for this length of time. How do you help teams move to a shared ⁓ vision or even you know, some sort of cohesive group that creates organizational resilience? What's that bridge that Lephorus helps achieve?

Kerstin Potter (36:04)
Well, it's because you're actually working on this together and you're building a map, if you want, we call it a chart, of where your organization is today, where you want to get to. And also, you can actually build images of the steps to go from A to B, if it's a long distance. But this is built together.

Dr Kelly Culver (36:18)
You

Kerstin Potter (36:31)
with people from different levels of the organization. So that once it gets to deciding what are we actually going to do now, you don't need to convince anybody because it's been something that's been co-created, it's been built together. So we see that actually taking action happens very quickly and very easily. For example, I was working with a company that had reached the

to about 80 or 90 people. And it really needed to grow very quickly because it was very successful. But we all know that it's very difficult to get that growth going. How do you scale? And they knew they had to change their organization the way they organized, but didn't know how to. And we ran workshops at all the levels of the organization for about three months.

ten workshops or so across the organization where we were looking at the common vision where to get to and also where we are and how and the steps in between. And at the end of that, there was a common vision across the organization. But not only that, there was a vision about the steps and how to get there. And when we left, this took about three months in the summer months, two months during the summer.

the organization, did the change, the restructuring completely utterly themselves without any other involvement. And it works beautifully. It was clear we all knew that were some details that were needed to that needed tweaking at the end of the reorganization. And that was done again with the help of Lephorus and with teams, small teams with

people from the intern to one of the directors. And they together developed templates for changes and so on that they tested between the workshops, tested in the organization, tested with their colleagues, and then made a recommendation to the board how this particular bit could work differently, which was accepted. And because it had all been, again, co-created, there was no...

no problem about implementation as such.

Jenn Quader (38:55)
Wow. What's amazing to me is how it really helps to bring a common language and to overcome those barriers. And I think ⁓ that's important, not just in global organizations. And there are plenty of those that are trying to... You described an employee who spoke perfect English, but had an accent and had trouble being understood. And so when we talk about the movement

I'm gonna ask it this way, like the movement from visual to verbal. So you've worked across cultures and different languages and you're now using this visual metaphor to really help overcome communication barriers. Because what you just described is that this method can help us to establish our goals and break those projects out and we can understand where we're going. But then how do these visual metaphors actually help us break through those communication barriers, the verbal part that does

trip us up and make it really difficult. Where does that nuance come in?

Kerstin Potter (40:00)
once you actually articulated in the images and talked with the others, because once you've chosen your image, you talk to the image, even if you talk to the image with a...

with an accent and perhaps not very beautiful vocabulary, but you still talk to the image. And that is then listened to by your peers. So you actually start using words very quickly. And often when you construct a chart, ⁓ we use post-it notes and put words on those post-it notes that we put.

near the images.

Jenn Quader (40:45)
That's a beautiful visual, thank you for that. Because I think that combines for me the power of the visual metaphor with the power of words. Because I truly believe there's massive power in words. I think we all agree in that. And so it's not about visual metaphors instead of words. It's about visual metaphors getting us to the right words that everyone understands together. Have I captured that appropriately?

Kerstin Potter (41:09)
Correct, absolutely.

Dr Kelly Culver (41:09)
Bang on. Yes. Excellent.

Jenn Quader (41:10)
Beautiful. Boom. Well, it's Dr. Potter's

work, guys. This is really impressive. Well, look, let's bring it to the actionable. We're about to, we're going to get into rapid fires in just a minute. But everybody who's listening, know, some people run teams, some people don't. But everybody has moments where they feel stuck. Everybody has moments where they're stuck either in their own career. How do I get through this barrier? Or how do I get more productive with my teams? So.

Dr Kelly Culver (41:20)
You

Jenn Quader (41:35)
Obviously, I'm going to encourage our users to look into the Lephorus and do those things, but outside of that, how could we start using visual thinking right now to unlock a new path forward? What can our listeners do today to use this methodology in their life and be happier and better and more effective?

Kerstin Potter (41:54)
Well, think what you can do, you saw that those of you who could actually look at the images is that they're really more abstract. The first images we used, abstract images. You can go online and find a collection of different types of abstract paintings and then think of your situation and say to yourself, know, is there an image here that looks

like I feel today. And then look at the images again and say, is there an image that looks like the way I'd like to feel tomorrow or I'd like to feel this afternoon? That's entirely possible. Having said that, I must say, you we spent 20 years developing Lephorus as it is today. The images that we use are now the fourth generation images.

We've adapted and learned as we've gone along. We have also looked a lot at the research that's been happening about how the brain works and so on. there is a lot of experience in there. Every time we run a workshop, we sit back and think, what happened there? Was this the right images? the image family right? ⁓ Should we change it in that? What do we need to add?

And every time we think of a new situation in an organization, we also look at our families of images. Do we need to add something? ⁓ What can we do? Or we just go for a walk and see something and say, wouldn't it be nice to have this type of images in our workshops? ⁓ So it's a constant development, if you want, and constant reflection.

on what will work and how.

Jenn Quader (43:52)
love that Dr. Potter and I'll say that what a beautiful way to to wrap and move into ⁓ rapid fire which is to say I think resilience is also a constant development. So this visual metaphor is a constant development, resilience is a constant development and and and really ⁓ kudos to you for that consistency because you're bringing something that is very fresh and very interesting and very very needed especially at this point in time. So with that I'm gonna pass it over for the fun part. Dr. Kelly.

Dr Kelly Culver (44:22)
I love this part. Thank you, Jenn. All right, Kirsten, what's your favorite movie or TV show that makes you feel resilient?

Jenn Quader (44:22)
Bring us home!

Kerstin Potter (44:33)
Well, actually, it's an anti-resilient thing. ⁓ It's a film called Goodbye Lenin, which was made in, I think, 2003 or something like that in Germany, just after the fall of the wall. And it's about somebody who is not resilient and about who can't face what's happening and how the family around that person is helping them live in the past. And this goes back a bit to what

we're doing with Le Lephorus is saying, you know, what shouldn't it be? ⁓ Because we find that very important, not only to think about what things should be, what the beauty should be, the best thing that could happen. We also need to think about what shouldn't happen or what is the worst thing that could happen. And for me, that film, Goodbye, Lennon, is a beautiful film. It's a film full of love, but it's also showing

somebody that is absolutely not resilient. Anti-resilience.

Dr Kelly Culver (45:39)
And that's a good counter. That's a good counter. You know, this is one way and this is the other way. Now what about a song that makes you feel resilient?

Kerstin Potter (45:48)
⁓ well, it has to be Nina Simone and ⁓ her ⁓ song, feeling good. It's about a new dawn, a new day, a new life. But what I really love about that song is that you can also hear in her voice that she carries with her everything that's happened before. So it's not forget everything and look for a new dawn, a new day.

Dr Kelly Culver (45:52)
Ha ha ha ha ha

Yep.

Kerstin Potter (46:17)
a new life. It's carry with you what you have and look for a new dawn. I think it's beautiful.

Dr Kelly Culver (46:25)
It's not just the words, it's the music too. It's the melody of that song. It catches you, makes you stop and listen. It's a powerful song. What a great choice. Now, what's the last thing that made you laugh out loud?

Jenn Quader (46:25)
is beautiful.

Kerstin Potter (46:28)
Ugh.

⁓ That was my grandchildren. ⁓ My six-month-old grandson was sitting on a... He just learned to sit. Sitting on a chair, not attached anywhere, on a small kitchen chair. And my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter was pushing him around the kitchen floor at great speed. And it was his face, how he first of all was frightened and thinking...

Dr Kelly Culver (46:44)
Yeah.

Kerstin Potter (47:08)
What on earth? How is this going to finish? It's going to be a real catastrophe. You could see it on his face. He was frightened. And then it was, wow, this is actually quite fun. I wonder how this is, this is great. And then he went back to being frightened and back to what fun. And that was so great to see.

Dr Kelly Culver (47:28)
you

Jenn Quader (47:31)
That is joy.

Kerstin Potter (47:32)
It was a real joy.

Dr Kelly Culver (47:32)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. What's a question you would like to leave for a future guest?

Kerstin Potter (47:41)
Right. Well, I think resilience is something that, you know, it's not, it doesn't happen once, as you were saying, it's something that is keep on, you know, you have to, you face resilience situations several times in a life. So I'd like to ask, is there a situation of resilience where you actually, that is actually your favorite?

Jenn Quader (48:12)
I love that, yeah.

Kerstin Potter (48:14)
Not one that made you feel good or whatever, but your favorite.

Jenn Quader (48:20)
Your favorite. I love it. Well, now I have a question for you from a prior guest on Resiliency, the podcast. All right, here we go. Drum roll, please. doctor, Dr. Kirsten Potter, what do you think your legacy will be?

Kerstin Potter (48:26)
wow.

I think, well I hope that it would actually be that Lephoris is something that's going to survive and be used and carry on being used. But that's my hope.

Jenn Quader (48:50)
Well, that is our hope as well, Dr. Potter. We are so grateful to you for sharing this knowledge. And I want to ask and invite you to please let our listeners here at Resilient see the podcast, know where can they find you, follow you online? Where can they learn more about Lephorus and this really important and cutting edge methodology?

Kerstin Potter (49:10)
The easiest is actually to find me on LinkedIn. I think there are not very many custom buttons on LinkedIn, so I'm easy to find. There is a website, it's ⁓ visualmetaphorsatwork.com. So it's a bit long. LinkedIn is the easiest.

Jenn Quader (49:27)
Beautiful. So for all of our listeners out there, give Dr. Kirsten Potter a look on LinkedIn. You'll find her at K-E-R-S-T-I-N-P-O-T-T-E-R, Kirsten Potter. And then as she mentioned, visualmetaphorsatwork.com.

And with that, we want to say thank you for joining us on this beautiful, resilient journey as always. I am Jenn Quader You can find me online at jennquader.com at JennQuader on all the socials, and at the smartagency.com. My fantastic, wonderful, powerful, and brilliant co-host, Dr. Kelly Culver. You can find her at Dr. Kelly Culver on LinkedIn and on Instagram, and also at theculvergroup.ca, because she is the queen of all things Canada.

And guys, thank you for listening. Resiliency, the podcast is the place where we share stories and strategies and inspiration on how to overcome change and embrace that change, overcome challenges and redefine resilience in today's ever evolving world. We encourage you to tune in, like us if you're listening and tune in again next week. We're gonna keep these resilient stories coming for you. Thank you again for listening. Have a resilient week ahead.