The Wicked Podcast

Karen Cornwell: You can't fix what you can't see

• web@thewickedcompany.com • Episode 26

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We interview Karen Cornwell about equality and the value of diversity of thinking in the business of the future.Karen Cornwell spent her career in Tech; she lived it, learned from it, and now wants to change the tide for future technology aficionados. Her lifelong quest is to improve innovation and drive top-line growth for technology companies. Karen believes to really do this we must learn to leverage our gender diversity.

00:35 Insights & Takeaways
06:30 Interview

Links:
Book on Amazon: here
Author website: here
Twitter: @CornwellKarenF

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Marcus Kirsch:

Welcome to the wicked podcast where we read the business books you don't have time for. I'm Marcus Kirsch. And I'm Troy Norcross, and we are your co hosts for the wicked podcast,

Troy Norcross:

we take from the 1000s of business books out there and test the author's ideas by comparing them to real world challenges. With over 40 years or projects between us, we've got quite a bit to compare against. We give you the condensed takeaways followed by an interview with the author's

Marcus Kirsch:

we know you want actions, not theories and his actions that we want to help shape, because that's what the wicked podcast is all about helping you to become a wicked company.

Troy Norcross:

Do you know what that sound is? Marcus? That's dripping water. Do you know why I've got the sound of dripping water.

Marcus Kirsch:

And don't know, because I

Troy Norcross:

installed my neighbor's washing machine over the weekend. And it's dripping. And all during the podcast. She's been texting me saying there's a drip in my washing machine. Get over here. So anyway, Mark is while my friend's washing machine is dripping. Who are we talking to today?

Marcus Kirsch:

Wow. Okay, my intros have to become more surreal as well, I guess. And I'll find something for next time. Well, this, this week, we're talking to Karen Cornwell and her book, you can't fix what you can see. And her book is a lot about the difference between how women and men think how they approach problems and devalue that a lot of organisations are missing because there's not equality. And if there would be more equality, organisations would function actually much better and would do a better job at what they're doing. They don't

Troy Norcross:

you and I were talking about it before she actually joined the show. And it really is interesting that a lot of the key principles she's talking about are things that you and I have both seen more so you in design thinking, how do you actually solve problems in today's world? Specifically, how do you solve wicked problems?

Marcus Kirsch:

Yes, I think you know, for, obviously, for me, as a man to read a book like that is quiet, always shocking, makes one very humble, and realising there's tonnes of more things going on, that I'm rarely really aware of, or I, to be honest, consider because it's just not part of my brain, or it's a part of my always, day to day perception. So it's a really great book, I think, for the man to read to have a look and go, look, those are the numbers. You know, there there are there things in there where they say, about 50, or 60% of men think that there's about 50% of women working there, where there's actually, only 30% of women know that it's not that equal in the in the in the in the workspace. So it's pretty, some pretty grim numbers in that, but they're really, really good to know. Because I think that just make you more aware. And as he says in the title, if you can see things, you can actually start fixing them. Now, if we want to look at what we would propose for people to do, my biggest takeaway in this one is the fact that when she describes the prevalence, or the difference between a community on independent thinking and men are not only, but to a large extent more independent, individually thinking, whereas women have more of a tendency. And again, it's not a black and white thing. We know, it's all grey, to think more community oriented. So she is listing about six characteristics that are more part of the community view of thinking. One is more collaborative, one is more or more systemic approach, and so on. And all those six characteristics are the one we talk about, all the time when we talk about wicked problem solving, which essentially makes women better wicked problem solvers, which means the future of organisations should be more on the side of women and women. Well, what about a woman?

Troy Norcross:

What about a woman's approach? Is that a woman specifically? Because I will not to say that men cannot learn how to act in the morning.

Marcus Kirsch:

Right? No, that can't. But yeah, so I'm obviously trying to be a bit more challenging here in terms of, you know, what actually is worth looking at? Obviously, yes, we should not but that's the point. We should learn more of that. So I would propose to organisations to look at those characteristics and say, right how can we grow these characteristics? No organisation better because that will create better problem solving full stop, right? So that alone is my biggest action I will take from this as someone who owns a company or was part of a company and said, right, those are the things. How good are we on those? Are we good enough or not? That's what I would be proposing based on this book.

Troy Norcross:

So I think my takeaway and actionable kind of advice to clients would be to really take a little bit and look at this unconscious bias training that is starting to become available. Because as the book title says, You can't fix what you can't see, raising awareness of your biases, both conscious and unconscious is a great place to start. And then the other thing, and we talked about it, quite interestingly, towards the end of the show, about not keeping a 90 day focus, having a longer term vision and a longer term horizon, for impact for experimentation. And for overall results.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, I think both of those are great things. And again, as Tobias keeps coming up massively, you know, we talked to Richard and so on, and two other people were, I think, especially leaders to more admit and communicate that they're biassed as well, I think is a really good starting point there, you know, to stop communicating that

Troy Norcross:

those drips are back again, Marcus, I think we better go.

Marcus Kirsch:

Okay, let's go to the interview. So Hello, everyone. Today we have Karen Cornwell with us. Hello, Karen. And thank you for making time for us.

Karen Cornwell:

Hey, Marcus, thanks for inviting me onto your show. I've been looking forward to it.

Marcus Kirsch:

Super. So let's, as usual start at the top and tell us a little bit. who you are and why you wrote the book,

Karen Cornwell:

please. You know, so that's a that's kind of a deep question. So I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree many, many moons ago. And when I graduated, I will not forget that what I really wanted to do was solve problems, complicated problems and hard problems. But I also want to stay technical forever. I remember saying that when I graduated, I'll never go into management. Now, of course, I hired on my first job as GE and I think we all know that they're kind of famous for training management. So I think I lined my stars up a little bit incorrectly there. And I was on a technical leadership training programme, which was absolutely fabulous. That was back in the day, when GE created their own leaders, they actually grew them. And one of the ways that they grew them was they gave you stretch assignments. And stretch assignments were fun, because they're like bonus assignments, in addition to your day job, where you get to prove yourself generally an area that you knew absolutely nothing about. And so they asked me to co lead the first g Diversity Council. And honestly, when they asked me that question, I said, why would you take perfectly good engineering talent to lead a Diversity Council? And what is it that we are trying to accomplish? And that was kind of one of those, I don't know slaps in the face that you get from life. And at the time, we were doing a lot of international work, we were building nuclear power plants all over the world. And so we picked up on the cultural aspect of diversity because we were working with a lot of culturally different clients. And we taught the company, you know, what different cultures believe different things. And it was a really cool assignment. But, you know, about two years into it, we realised that anything that spoke of diversity was getting dropped in our laps as the council. And we learned a tonne of stuff. It was amazing what we learned. And then we looked at our leadership team. And they had learned nothing. Because they dumped everything on us. They didn't go through and pick up any of the lessons that we were picking up. And that was when we had to make some really hard decisions. And so the team got together and we said, You know what, we quit interfering with your ability to learn because you're giving everything to us, you are not picking up on any of these lessons. And so we quit. Honestly, I thought that might be the last day I was working for GE but you know, they have a lot of they have a lot of flexibility. And and I think they heard a part of the message, right? They heard apart in the message that they needed to get a little more engaged. So you know, I worked there for for many, many years. And finally, I left there And, you know, you don't realise what you've got until you don't have it anymore. And I was in a very successful leadership company and actually had been trained by some amazing leaders. And then I went out into the rest of the world in Silicon Valley. And I was shocked by what I saw, you know, you you, you go to G's training facility Croton Ville, and it's, you know, it's like, it's like, being at Harvard, honestly, they fly people in, they fly professors in from all over the world. And they, they teach you all this, all these massive things of what to do. But you know, as a part of that, there's a lot of case studies of, you know, companies that did it wrong. And it was like walking out into all the bad case studies in the world into the jobs that I went into, it was absolutely awful. And I thought, what, how can people get anything done? When they're not really, they're not doing the things that they need to do to make people grow and to make people more aware. And this went on, I went through several different jobs in Silicon Valley, mostly doing product management, because that's what I had done. And then, because I was so devoted to my career, I didn't have my first kid until I was 45. And then, two years later, I had twins. And I sent them to a parent participation school, and they're you, you go to school with your kids, and you help teach them. And I listened to us repeating to them over and over that life was fair, you noticed that you worked hard, you would get your own. And that people were taking care of you and that everything was fair. And then I went to work. And it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all. In fact, some of the same things that had happened, happened over and over and over again. And, you know, by then I'm mentoring other women. And it's really hard to explain that they could you know, that we could, that we could be in this state, and continue to be in this state. And they're like, Well, we've pointed this out, but nothing has changed. And somehow, that dichotomy just smacked me in the head. And I said, you know, life isn't fair. We're lying to our children, that this is going to be fair, and that everything's going to come out in the wash, that that's not how it's currently panning out. And over the course of several years, I think that's when I decided, you know, we can't just continue to lie to our children like this, we should fix this world, we should hand them a better world, we should hand them a place that everybody can flourish, and not hand them what we're currently poised to hand over to them because all the things we've told them about how they should be, are not how our world is, and we're not doing anything to change it. So that's what I decided. I wanted to really go into this field. And of course, I'd been looking in studying this for four years, right? I read 1000s of books. It's incredible, the information that's out there. But it wasn't a continuing to do product management wasn't going to float my boat anymore. I was like, No, I really think we've got to change this because we had been fixing this for women, since I graduated from from college, right? And it's like, we haven't fixed the thing really. So I so I kind of devoted the rest of my life to this. And I said that this is what I'm going to do, I had an opportunity to, to write the book to put my thoughts down on paper, if you will. And I did that and published it at the end of last year. And, and now I'm out to go change the world because we really should be turning over a better world for our kids, right, we've learned a lot and there's a lot of things that they can learn but that's kind of why i i i wrote the book, and a little bit about who I am as a person.

Troy Norcross:

Super, super interesting.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, I think there's just there's just so many things that I think you know, I would say you even as a man it's sort of when you get older and you hear more stories and and I got a I got a I got a young daughter as well. You know, you obviously start to think a little bit about some of those aspects and and I was talking to a friend of mine as well, on the weekend because I was finished reading the book and you know, she told me stories. Unlike, you know, you don't see how it really is. And I said, I don't. I know I don't. And, you know, in some parts and some aspects, unfortunately, isn't even the conscious aspect of it. I'm sure there's plenty of people who want to help change this. But there is, unfortunately, and you write about this in your book, certain biases and effects are in place where we're subconsciously not even aware of this, you know, and so you mentioned the Dunning Kruger effect, for example, where there's just often a standard lack of self awareness in a lot of organisations and, and that's just something that people are often not even aware of, not even this, this basic aspect that affects all of us. So so in that sense of you, for example, ever seen that anyone made the business case? For women, or the the impact of that lack of awareness or self awareness of what's really going on in businesses? Because the numbers in the book, obviously, they're just just shocking, you know, how much how much value is missing? Because there's no equality? Have you ever seen anyone trying to turn it really into numbers? And because obviously, a lot of people are talking about this is not great. This is not good. But just saying it's not good as an upgrade. That tends to not get organisations into action, right? So have you ever seen someone really making sort of the nearly the bottom line case for this because the bottom line case for that must be immense to say, look, this is all the value missing?

Karen Cornwell:

Oh, too, and it's been studied in and this is what kind of really wipes me out. It's huge. And it's been studied. And I mean, I could quote you numbers until your eyes just glazed over, right? Those numbers don't seem to impact people, which always surprised me that you mentioned that that the Dunning Kruger effect. And and I want to share with your listeners what that was, because when I found that I thought it was pretty interesting. So the donor Kruger effect is the fact that the least competent people tend to be the most confident in their abilities. And, you know, working in the tech industries that I've worked in nuclear power and those kinds of things, you know, there's a lot of experts, right. And amazing thing about the Dunning Kruger effect is many of those experts are wrong. And I think we see some of this, I think we've seen some of this with you know, the Centre for disease control and masks and what we're supposed to do in Coronavirus. You know, there's conflicting information, there's, you know who's right. Personally, it's a no brainer for me, doctors have been wearing masks in hospitals for how many aeons. They're good for us, too. But the Dunning Kruger effect. And there's many, many other psychological aspects where, you know, we really believe what we see, but what we're seeing and what we're interpreting is really not the whole picture. And when you go, you know, look at the science and look at some of that, I'm, I'm always amazed at what comes out. And the fact that you know, the average Joe doesn't necessarily know any of this.

Troy Norcross:

So it sounds to me like you, there's a lot more to it than just the numbers that are going to be required to make change. And one of the things that we've been hearing from both our clients and in various interviews at our podcast series, is that unconscious bias training is becoming quite a thing, where they're trying to help people raise their awareness of their of their unconscious bias. And then in the in the social awareness in the twitterati, etc. There's the concept of of wokeness. And I'm trying to see if that ties back to the title of your book, you know, you can't fix what you can't see. Do you think that unconscious bias training, or overall the trend of wokeness is, is a good trend? Do you think it's being effective?

Karen Cornwell:

Yes, I think it's absolutely effective. It doesn't solve the problem. But it it really increases your own self awareness, and your awareness of what other people are doing to understand that those biases are there because we all have them. You know, if you meet somebody and they say, Oh, I don't have any biases. Well, you know, they're, they're suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect. Exactly. We all have biases and and they factor into our decisions on a daily basis. And that's why it's so important. We have teams and almost everything these days is done with teams, and the mix of your teams, if you get the right mix of teams and skills of people that think differently, you're less likely to do something colossally stupid. Hmm. Right? I mean, there's, you know, there's a there's a lot of, you know, things, things in our history like the Titanic, right? This steel ship that couldn't sink sunk on its maiden voyage. Right? And not, you know, coming from the engineering field. There's no history is littered with with these things. And but if you go back and look at who, who were the teams who design these things, how did they think, how did they make their decisions, and a lot of those things that can factor into whether or not you end up with a titanic or you know, the ship that actually made it. So it's really a, it's really vitally important.

Marcus Kirsch:

I think I think there is the one thing I picked up and that might pull it both a little bit into, so I don't want to sound gender biassed here. But um, so because my background is design thinking and service design. So the methodology I've been trained up with is all from Stanford, the D school design thinking approach, which has, for example, a very big focus on empathy. And empathy is also one of those things that seems to be not too taken as big value for organisations as it should be even. So there's plenty of proof points that it increases value creates values, reduces problems, reduces risk, and so on, and so on. Because you're actually going to understand the problem better. But there's a variety of other aspects as well. And what I'm trying to say is that, um, since design thinking has sort of a resurgence in the last few years, what's being promoted from from, from my background, my practice, industry area is a lot more holistic approach to problem solving. And obviously, one aspect of that is to have more diverse teams, because as you said, there's plenty of evidence and research being done on cross disciplinary or having right in your teams in different viewpoints, reduces the risk and comes up, on average with way better solutions. The other aspect is also that you will be more focused on unders this understanding the problem better. And the really, the thing that really struck me in the book is that when I when I had to look at a way describing independent or community approaches, towards looking at the problem is that all the six characteristics that you're listing under the community aspect, which tend to be seemingly better solved, or looked at by women, are actually all the six aspects that I've seen over the last 20 years to start to really bubble up. In terms of, we need more of this. We need more, you know, collaborative efforts, we need more of these varied views, we need more, maybe we need more qualitative evidence and insights to come in not just quantitative, you know, so. And there's a direct correlation for me between I look at design thinking, and I look at wicked problems, which are these really highly complex moving target problems that we're trying to solve. And because there are more and more of them, and COVID-19 being one of them. And those six characteristics that you actually need, which leads me to nearly in conclusion to say, those aspects are way more important for the future, potentially, then those independent approaches. So can you can you elaborate a little bit more to our viewers, these differences of the independent and community approaches to problem solving, because a fund is amazingly stunning, how many of those are starting to become real trends of value?

Karen Cornwell:

Oh, definitely, that the a piece a big piece that women bring, and I'm going to say men and women, but but I'm also going to back this up and say, you know, I was very successful in a highly technical community. But if you peg me on all these scales, I come out on the independent side. So I act like a man and often I think like a man. And I think that's part of why I was so successful, but at the same time, I'm a woman. So I have all this this other stuff that you know, that leaks over and that continues to leak over. So I think I kind of ended up in the middle so I could see both sides which which I think was was really helpful. But a lot of the traits that women bring are a longer term view. They weigh more of what does the outcome look like? And who is the outcome for? So they they look at things from a much longer term perspective. And I think that is, you know, we've been driven by, you know, short term quarterly business results for I can't tell you how long right, it seems unending. And you got to look at that at some point and say, is that driving us in the right direction? Well, that's not going to drive you to long term thinking, that's not going to drive you to solutions that take five to 10 years to implement. Right? So I mean, I worked in the nuclear power industry, you know, things move in decades there, it's painfully slow. And things get designed over decades, and it's painfully slow. But you think differently when you're in that longer term mindset. So the things that you're seeing in design thinking, you know, being aware of your audience, and what is the problem. There's one piece of my book that I that I really like that I took from, from Melinda Gates, right. And, and she went out and was, this woman had had her baby and one of the new clinics that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had had founded, that allowed women to successfully have a baby and, you know, get it nursing and bring it home. And this woman said, you know, but I, what, I have no hope that this child will ever grow up. Why don't you take him home with you? Because that's the only hope that I have. And that that was when Melinda, it hit her right, between the eyes, I have done all these things to make birthing easier and safer for these mothers. But I have not brought them adequate birth control, so they can feed their families. Big Miss. Yeah, I think what the woman does, it's a it's an what, you know, what she did was beautiful. But you know, now she's in a pivot to move in that other direction and say, know, what these women need is, is to time the birth of their children, so that so that they can afford them so that they can raise them? Because that, you know, so it's and it's how did you? How did you look at that problem, and I'm sure for years, you know, she, she looked at the problem of we need to help the birth process. But when she sunk deeper into it, she saw Wait a minute, there's a, there's a bigger problem here. And we need to work on that too. And I think that's the difference that you can start to see in these problems of, you know, I'm going to allow these women to have healthy babies, but you know, then they're not going to be able to afford to feed them. Sometimes you have to see the chain before you see the whole thing like in design thinking, you know, what, where will that go when we get to here? So I think these things really go hand in hand and they're vitally important.

Marcus Kirsch:

Absolutely. And I think I think I've seen those, you know, that's the thing I've found also often very flabbergasting on working on big transformation and change programmes where it should be a bit more common sense to know that this takes a long time. Yet, despite that fact, companies want returns or something to already happen and work within three, four months, you know, they set it out for two years, and before you know it, budget for the second year's car, yes, a couple of months, and then the numbers have to come back and you go, these things don't react like that these things don't work like that. And I've seen tonnes of innovation efforts fail for the same reasons, you know, you even if things got built, as you said, the context is not set. So you build something and then you put it into a new team or new department of the company, and they were not prepared for it. They didn't know what to do with it didn't have time with it, there was no one there to take care of it. You know, just kind of nurturing aspect of the growing aspect is it just doesn't exist often. And that's what companies really need to learn.

Troy Norcross:

Every one of our favourite sub topics is Milton Friedman's kind of philosophy, that the only purpose for a corporation is to increase shareholder value. And that kind of started off on the first layer and now it's increased shareholder value every 90 days, like over and over and over and nobody can do long term thinking and even our politicians are only looking as far as their their next reelection. Nobody wants to make the hard choices that are 20 years or 25 or 30 years down the road. And we keep hearing about China, China, China. Well, China has 100 year plan that they're executing on any given time.

Unknown:

Yes.

Karen Cornwell:

You are much more integrated than we are.

Troy Norcross:

Yeah, absolutely. Moving on to another one of our questions, because if we're not careful when this happens to us, almost every episode, we run out of time before we run out. So business has class to crumble in that it is a good problem. Business has been classically very competitive. And you know, possibly, maybe you'd agree that, that men are competitive by nature, I found it really interesting that you said yet part of your philosophy part of your nature is indeed more independent, because that was kind of where you grew up and where you learned leadership. But business today is moving towards being more collaborative. And another broad generalisation is that women tend to be more collaborative kind of in the way that they're thinking and the way they approach problems. I come from a business background focused on blockchain and blockchain systems. And we always talk about this magic word Co Op petition, where you're cooperating or collaborating with your with your competition. And that's so important to build the framework for a good blockchain network. So the question is, what change Do you think organisations need to make to get ready for a shift from only competition, to selective competition and more collaboration?

Karen Cornwell:

I think incorporating a lot of the pieces in my book will really help. It's and in and honestly, in the environments that I've been in this collab, collaborative competition has been around for a long time. And maybe it's because it's, you know, the nuclear power industry, you know, where I originally got started is very small. Right, it can't hold very many players. And so there has been for years. Collaboration between some of the big companies that do this kind of thing. You know, it's, I've been on many technical exchanges, where it's like, okay, you're going to go off and evaluate their technology, and they're going to evaluate our technology, and then we're gonna see where we might do some mutual development.

Troy Norcross:

Of course, when it comes to nuclear power stations, it's the kind of thing you can't get wrong. So you need to work together.

Karen Cornwell:

Yes, you, you. It really, it really is, we've seen what happens when it goes wrong, right? That was, we've seen this happen a couple of times. And so you, you really have to get it right. And so that model is is not, is not new. But it isn't used very much. And there is a deep, one of the Silicon Valley companies that I worked for. I was I was absolutely blown away. And I was talking to somebody at the company and I said, You know, I said, Do you know that we spend 50% of our time talking to each other about competing things, and internal things that don't make any difference to our customers? and inner department wars, and I mean, all this craziness, right? And I said, imagine what would happen? If we focus all our time on serving our customers needs instead of all this internal bs? on that person looked at me and said, well, crime, any Karen word, we're a billion dollar company. We're a $10 billion company. And I said, Yeah, and imagine what would happen. If we, you know, if we actually focused all our energy on getting stuff done for clients, instead of screwing around internally with each other. It would free up an amazing an amazing amount of resources. But as far as I can tell, that companies still doing the same thing, right? It's, you know, it's still, it's like, wow, it's all right here and you just walked right over it, right. But we've seen that time and time again, right?

Troy Norcross:

Because we don't have a proper incentive for change has got to be some driver that gets people to change behaviour. I mean, behaviour is behaviour change is one of the most difficult challenges around whether it's getting somebody to take their blood pressure medication or getting an organisation to spend less time building fiefdoms and more time focused on the customers.

Unknown:

Sorry, go ahead.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, that's a good one. I think wanted to bring in maybe as a good set of bigger question. Durkin spent the last five minutes on his. So what I've seen a lot is when we talk about shifts, we often talk about shift in language, often, you know, the way you start describing things differently, you give different things different name, you actually are able to talk about. Not just talk about things differently, but actually do things differently, right? Because you're approaching the problem differently, because you notice other things going on. My question always is, and I've seen this a lot in projects, and that's a bit maybe similar to what you just described, as a lot of you internally, are fixing things internally are doing something, spending time on things that sit in the business with a very navel gazing kind of business focus, instead of outside, where you say, Well, you know, why don't we focus more on the customer? Don't we focus more on what we're actually doing out there? And the way I often see that is as a difference between talking about efficiency and talking about effectiveness, right? So efficiency, as a simple description, saying, right? Well, we already have the old stuff we've got sitting there, we just fix it, polish it, that's efficiency, right? So we do it a little bit better, with effectiveness would actually be a view onto the outside and say, Well, how is that actually affecting the customer and the customer value? What does that do different to the customer, as you said, there's a lot of things happening inside of organisations to have no impact whatsoever on either the perception of the customer towards the business nor the customer value created. And for me, effectiveness seems to be a bit of more of a shift the second you start talking about it, you moving away from efficiency and fixing all stuff into Well, that's a different focus, just actually being able to solve something better outside, do you see a similar difference? In a way, when you use that kind of language, or you see you see potentially also a gender specific difference in language, that that talks about problems like that, where the focus is quite different?

Karen Cornwell:

I think there there are a lot of language differences that show up. But I what I really like is, is, you know, what, what are you focusing on? And I think one of the hardest things with the gender thing is the first thing we have to change is ourselves. It's in our heads, we created this huge social construct of gender differences. And we've been playing them out for hundreds of years. It's really scary when you think about it. And we don't have to do it that way. But to get people to change that in their head, is I think part of what's holding us back, we'd all like to say, we want to change a system, we want to change a programme, we want to change someone else besides us. And really, the only way to get your head around this is is to look at where your head is. and start to make this shift yourself. And then you can help other people see things differently. But that's that's hard. That's that's working on yourself. And, you know, most people do not want to do that.

Troy Norcross:

Yeah, that kind of leads me nicely into what what I think I'm going to list as a kind of a wrap up question. Change isn't painful, but fighting it is. And I think there's a whole lot of people that society has changed, the world has changed. And it's not been with everyone's consent. It's not been at everyone's particular rate of change. changes happened too fast. in the minds of a lot of people. That just tends to be the way society is things are just changing really, really fast. And we're not even talking about technology per se. As a missourah guy, a corn fed Missouri guy. You I'm watching the American and the elections that are currently going on and the big move of Make America Great Again, which largely aligns with returning to things back when they were in the 1960s. And that was pretty much a male dominated sort of environment, you know, at home and at work. It was Don Draper it was it was mad men and all things in that regard. And even here in the UK, you know, the UK is voted to leave the European Union for Brexit. And a lot of people were like we didn't need the EU before we don't need the EU. Now let's let's go back to kind of the pre 1970s time and again, it was predominantly more more male dominated. So even though we all three of us on this call are talking about on this part. Cast whether I think it's a call, but gosh knows it's things are changing all the time. That that the going forward is indeed about collaborative It is indeed less kind of gender disbalance more gender parity, more collaborative working, and the change is going in the right direction. I still see a lot of society pulling to go backwards the way things were going before. And I'd love to just, you know, take get your take on on the big society moves as a final question.

Karen Cornwell:

So I love that. I mean, I thought that I think in some some point in my book, I refer to Happy Days, right. That was that era, right where the Fonz, right? I mean, Leave it to Beaver was there and life was wonderful. And your mom wore pearls and vacuumed in ideals, right? Um, personally, I don't want to go back there. But but you also have to look at what what do people want? Why do they want to go back there, they want to go back there because it's safe. They want to go back there because everybody knew their role. Because the roles were clearly defined. And if you stepped outside of them, you would be squelched, right? They want to go back there, because it felt good. But the time we're in now, is, is not that time. At that time, we were isolated nations. And what we did did not depend on what China did, or what Japan did, or what other countries did. We are now so integrated. That when we have a flu, it's a pandemic. Right, we managed to spread that baby all over the world.

Unknown:

So

Karen Cornwell:

you can't go back. The world is interconnected. So the lovely expression,

Troy Norcross:

on bake the cake,

Karen Cornwell:

was the only way forward is to figure out how to be interconnected better. And then we can learn and we're back to now we can learn more from each other. Now, we can maybe not repeat some of the same mistakes that some countries have made, maybe other countries haven't. So, so well, I want that feeling to write. But I recognise we can never, we can't go back there. Even if we you know, we said we're going to close the borders, and we're going to go hide, we're in an interconnected world, what what we do changes what happens in the UK, you know, what China does changes what happens in Iran, right things, things are interconnected. And it's very complicated. And we need to learn to deal with it. And we need to look at it from a broad base perspective of, of what's good for everybody. You know, when you look at global warming, we all want to point our fingers and say, you know, it's somebody else who's the bad guy, but you know, what, we only got one planet. And we're, you know, and, and there isn't, there isn't a lifeline coming from another universe that's gonna, you know, suck the ozone and make our world all better. We're the only ones who can do it.

Troy Norcross:

And I think that some of the things that are in your book, give people a bit of a roadmap on on the changes that they need to make to be able to do that. And on that note, I want to say thank you so much for giving us your time this morning. We really, really appreciate it and it was a real pleasure to read your book.

Karen Cornwell:

Oh, awesome. I really appreciate it. Troy and Marcus. It was It was great. Thanks.

Marcus Kirsch:

Lovely. Thank you so much, Karen.

Unknown:

All right.

Troy Norcross:

You've been listening to the wicked podcast with CO hosts Marcus Kirsch and me Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch:

please subscribe on podomatic iTunes or Spotify. You can find all relevant links in the show notes. Please tell us your thoughts in the comment section and let us know about any books for future episodes.

Troy Norcross:

You can also get in touch with us directly on Twitter on at wicked n beyond or at Troy underscore Norcross also learn more about the wicked company book and the wicked company project at wicked company calm