Vulnerability equals weakness and other myths

One of the first things we talk about in the Dare to Lead™ programme is the mistaken idea that vulnerability is the same as weakness. It's definitely a common conflation —even my 11-year-old stepson said weakness was the first thing he thought of when I asked him about vulnerability.

But having been working with this material for four months now, with groups ranging from small senior leadership teams to large public programmes, I've observed that this isn't the only conflation error we make.

So I wanted to share with you why "vulnerability equals weakness" is so problematic, along with a few other inaccurate "this equals that" myths that are coming up regularly.

Myth One: Vulnerability equals weakness

In every training we do, I ask the room how many have ever associated vulnerability with weakness. Inevitably, every hand goes up. Then (per Brené's teaching) I ask people to try to think of a single example of courage that didn't require vulnerability. And no one can.

If you Google the word vulnerable, the first definition that comes up is, "exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally." And that sounds weak to us. After all, if we were strong, we couldn't be attacked or harmed, right?

In the context of Dare to Lead™, however, the meaning is a bit different. Our definition is: “risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure.” And while being in a position of risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure means you’re open to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, it is also the only way to authentically connect with others.

If you’ve got your armour up, you can’t be truly seen. And if there’s no risk, uncertainty, or emotional exposure, there’s no courage. After all, if something is risk-free, it doesn’t make you very courageous to do it, right?

As Brené says, far from making you weak, vulnerability is actually our most accurate measure of courage.

Myth Two: Toughness equals courage

The flip side to the “vulnerability equals weakness” conflation is the equally false idea that toughness equals courage.

Before we ran our first Dare to Lead™ programme, I started pulling together a playlist of songs for the breaks. I had a few that I knew already I wanted to include (“Brave” by Sara Bareilles being right up there), but it definitely wasn’t going to be enough, so I started searching for songs about courage.

The results made me disheartened. Almost every song was what I would call a “screw you” song: you dumped me but I don’t need you, I’m better off without you, I’m stronger than you, who needs boys anyway, who needs girls anyway.

It’s as if our artists are all making the assumption that the only way I can be strong is for you to be weak. The songs are not actually about courage; they are about putting on armour to cover up our hurt.

Courage isn’t measured by how little we need other people. It is measured by our willingness to lean into vulnerability.

Myth Three: Kindness equals not speaking up or setting boundaries

The sub-title for the “BRAVING Trust” section of Dare to Lead is straightforward: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” And the whole purpose of the work is to allow us to lean into vulnerability, to speak our truth, and to listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard. And while we do dive deep into empathy — and the need to say hard things without shame or blame — we never recommend pulling punches in order to spare someone’s feelings.

And yet, inevitably, someone will bring it up as an objection. “All this empathy stuff is fine, but sometimes a person is really terrible at their job.” As if having empathy means you aren’t allowed to address performance issues or attitude issues. As if being kind doesn’t allow you to set clear boundaries for what behaviour is okay and what’s not okay.

Being kind does not mean letting people get away with anything they want. It does not mean you have to let people walk all over you. It does not mean you have to put up with inappropriate or dysfunctional behaviour.

It does mean you can hold people to account for that behaviour without shaming them — without implying that the bad behaviour means they are a bad person. It’s the difference between guilt (“I did something bad”) and shame (“I am bad”). And it’s a substantive difference.

Ngā mihi mahana,
Kaila

Kaila Colbin, Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator
Co-founder, Boma Global // CEO, Boma NZ

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Global learning initiative Boma launches in New Zealand

Originally published in The Press on 27 July 2018.

Kaila Colbin, co-founder of Boma, said the new learning initiative was about being "more intentional and intelligent about the future we are creating".

A new global learning initiative with links to New Zealand sets out to walk the walk while talking the talk to help solve future problems on a huge scale.

Boma launched in Christchurch on Thursday. Christchurch-based Kaila Colbin is one of four partners who started the organisation.

Colbin said Boma will deliver a range of learning events discussing technological, geopolitical, economic and social change, as well as climate change.

Boma co-founders from left, Michel Levy-Provencal, Lara Stein, Stephan Balzer, and Kaila Colbin. Colbin said Boma's events were "designed explicitly to generate tangible impact and outcomes, creating a better, more sustainable, and more human-centred future".

When these "vectors of change" combine, humanity is faced with "a future that is highly uncertain and ambiguous", she said.

Boma's events will range from free community events, to corporate training, to Jeffersonian-style "impact dinners" where groups gather to debate particularly "thorny" topics.

"We need to have more robust ways of dealing with this uncertain and ambiguous future, so we can be more intentional and intelligent about the future we are creating," Colbin said.

"Boma is specifically focused on these vectors of change affecting our future, and all the work we do on our events is designed towards outcomes rather than ideas."

Colbin is co-founder of the Ministry of Awesome, director of ChristchurchNZ, curator of SingularityU New Zealand and has held the Christchurch licence for TEDx events since before the earthquakes.

Last year, she ran a TEDx event at Scott Base, Antarctica.

Joining her as Boma co-founders are TEDx founder Lara Stein, TEDxBerlin founder Stephan Balzer, and TEDxParis founder Michel Lévy-Provençal.

"It's pretty cool that this global organisation has started from Germany, France, the United States and Ōtautahi Christchurch," she said.

"The organisation is self-funded right now by the founders, and the offerings we will have range from free events for the community to paid events that people attend."

Christchurch's first Boma event would be a "fishbowl" discussion on August 23. It would be free and open to the public to attend and participate.

Colbin said there would be an impact dinner at about the same time, but the date had yet to be confirmed.

"Our industry summits and conferences, executive education, and customised programmes are designed explicitly to generate tangible impact and outcomes, creating a better, more sustainable, and more human-centred future," Colbin said.

Boma was launched globally in Paris on July 4. It launched in Auckland and Wellington earlier this week. 

More details of Boma events are available on its website.

- Stuff

Forget preparing for the future, we need to create it

Originally published in The Press on 26 July 2018.

Understanding exponential change will help us make more intelligent decisions about New Zealand's future. Kaila Colbin explains.

In Shanghai, China, there lives a factory belonging to JD.com. It's an e-commerce outfit, competitor to the likes of Amazon and Alibaba, and this factory is one of their fulfilment centres. It encompasses 10,000 square metres and processes 200,000 orders per day with 99.99 per cent accuracy.

It has four staff.

In May in North America, a company called eXp Realty joined the Nasdaq stock exchange. They have more than 12,000 property brokers operating in more than 300 markets in the US and Canada, selling real property in the real world.

They don't have a single office, operating instead exclusively on a virtual campus along the lines of a Second Life.

Their market cap is in excess of NZ$1 billion.

These are just two examples of the way exponentially accelerating technologies are transforming our world.

Exponential technologies are technologies where the price-performance – how much performance you get for your dollar – doubles on a consistent basis. In computing, for example, "price-performance" refers to the number of instructions per second you can buy for $1000.

In genetic engineering, "price-performance" refers to the cost to sequence a genome. We're seeing doubling in artificial intelligence, energy, biotechnology and more.

The difference between linear progress and exponential progress is hard to wrap your head around. Take 30 linear steps, and you've gone 30 metres; take 30 doubling steps, and you're 26 times around the planet. 

Exponential technological progress is why the artificial intelligence AlphaGo was able to beat world champion Lee Sedol at the immensely complex game of Go, fully a decade before researchers expected it to happen.

It's why self-driving cars have gone from being a flight of Google's fancy to an inevitable future of transport in just a few years. It's why plant-based protein has suddenly become price-competitive.

These technologies affect every aspect of our lives, from the economy to government to education to health care and beyond. But the disruptions coming our way go well beyond technology. We're also experiencing geopolitical change, economic change, social change, climate change. And all of these vectors of change are converging to create a future that is highly uncertain and ambiguous.

We'd be foolish to try to respond to these dramatic changes using yesterday's thinking. And yet often our first response to disruption is to ask, "How can we adapt so that we can keep doing what we've been doing?"

Kaila Colbin is well known in Christchurch as a co-founder of the Ministry of Awesome and the curator of TedxChristchurch. She's now co-founder of Boma Global and the CEO of Boma New Zealand.

If we have a big company, how can we adapt so we can keep having a big company? If we run a school, how can we adapt so that students keep coming to learn from us?

But we need to be smarter about this. We need to ask questions from first principles: What is the purpose of the corporation? What is the purpose of education? Is this the best way to structure society? How should we define success?

These are difficult questions with no correct answer, but they are among the most critical questions of our time. 

When Air New Zealand offers Impossible Foods burgers, instead of saying, "How dare you? This is an insult to our beef and lamb industry", we should be saying, "Wow! The Impossible burger is now so well accepted that Air New Zealand is offering it to its premium customers".

"What does this mean for our beef and lamb industry? Is this the best industry for us to be in? If so, how can we maintain a premium position in a world where vegan alternatives to meat are starting to gain mainstream traction? If not, how can we transition so that our farmers have viable and profitable pathways to continue to thrive? And how do our ethical and environmental responsibilities and aspirations factor into this?"

These are not technological questions. These are questions that require us to think hard about who we are, who we want to be, and what we're willing to do to get there.

Along with a group of my international colleagues and counterparts, we've launched a new venture, Boma, to tackle these questions. But these questions are bigger than any one organisation or institution. This is about our shared future. We should all be involved in the conversation.

People often ask me whether I'm optimistic or pessimistic about the future. To me, the question fundamentally mischaracterises the future. The future isn't some static thing, out there waiting to happen to us. The future is created by us, by the sum of the choices we make every day. It's time for all of us to come together and make more intentional, intelligent decisions about the future we're creating.

What kind of future do you want?

Kaila Colbin is the co-founder of Boma Global and the CEO of Boma New Zealand. She is based in Christchurch. 

 - Stuff

New Zealand partner launches new global learning network

International entrepreneurs recently announced the launch of Boma, a new global learning and impact network for local decision and change makers.

Boma’s transformational learning experiences are linked directly to outcomes to drive change at a global scale. Headquartered in New York with founding partners in France, Germany and New Zealand, Boma plans to build a global network of partners in 50 countries within five years.

New Zealander Kaila Colbin, curator of TEDxChristchurch and the SingularityU New Zealand and Australia Summits, is a founding partner of the new venture. She is joined by TEDx founder Lara Stein, TEDxBerlin founder Stephan Balzer and TEDxParis founder Michel Lévy-Provençal.

Boma New Zealand, the local country partner of the global network, launches next week with events in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, with the company’s main operations currently based in Christchurch.

“Boma’s offerings will help individuals, institutions and organizations navigate the many vectors of change affecting our future — technological, geopolitical, social, environmental, structural and economic,” says Kaila Colbin. “Our industry summits and conferences, executive education, and customized programs are designed explicitly to generate tangible impact and outcomes, creating a better, more sustainable and more human-centered future.”

The name “Boma” has its origin in Africa. The boma is the enclosure for the community and elders to gather, a sacred space for meaningful discussions, profound decisions and powerful action.

Boma Global is supported by a prestigious brain trust, including the director of the MIT Media Lab Joi Ito, co-founder of ExO Works Salim Ismail, Singularity University faculty member Lisa Kay Solomon, former Google X Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat and many more.

Boma New Zealand faculty include chair of the Superdiversity Centre for Law and Business Mai Chen, founding education director of The Mind Lab by Unitec Chris Clay, serial inventor Grant Ryan, director of the Murchison Widefield Array Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, Singularity University Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies faculty Mandy Simpson, independent director and future strategist Sue Suckling, and microbiologist and scientist Dr Souxsie Wiles.