transformative leadership with paul bellows
angela_r_howard (00:01.566)
All right, hey Paul, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.
paul_bellows (00:06.842)
Hey, Angela, it's great to be here. Nice to properly meet you today. I'm looking forward to what we're gonna chat about.
angela_r_howard (00:12.254)
Yeah, yeah, we had a little bit of time to warm up right before this conversation. And I'm just really excited about, first of all, we were talking about the rebrand of the podcast, from humanly possible to social responsibility at work. And the work that you're doing, I think, just beautifully ties into this conversation. So before I give it all away, tell us who you are.
what you do, but also the impact you're looking to make on the world.
paul_bellows (00:42.346)
Absolutely. So my name is Paul Bellows. I am an entrepreneur. I'm based up in Northern Canada, far from everything cool. But we'd like to think we've got our own cool up here. Sometimes it's just cold. A little chilly in the winter. We're in the good time of year though. It's August, so it's nice and warm. But my firm is called Yellow Pencil. We started 25 years ago as a digital agency. And we were designing websites and building platforms and working with everyone from
angela_r_howard (00:51.022)
I'm going to go to bed.
angela_r_howard (00:54.962)
It's a little chilly.
angela_r_howard (01:00.952)
Mm.
paul_bellows (01:12.738)
Home Depot to banks and, you know, just whoever had complex information to deliver. And we were quite good at delivering complicated information. But the last five or six years ago, and it's partly just because, you know, sort of in my heart, I've got to, you know, I'm really interested in the impact we can make in the world. You know, I became a dad eight years ago and for the first time. And, and you start to start to look out at the world and say, well, I could run an organization that
angela_r_howard (01:30.127)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (01:39.274)
generates revenue or generates profit for shareholders. And that's unnecessary thing to do. Those are unfortunately the constraints we live in, or fortunately, unfortunately, it's just the reality of our world. But it doesn't mean we can't also have impact, you know, that we can't actually like deliver value back into the world. So, you know, we like to talk about the public sector and that's the organizations in the world, you know, we would call some of them government, but there's a lot of folks around government that are sort of responsible for
angela_r_howard (01:44.55)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (01:59.356)
Hmm
angela_r_howard (02:05.345)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (02:09.514)
delivering the essential services that keep our society whole, you know, and, you know, again, you can't fix, I'm not here to fix politics. Politicians can continue to promote ideas and kind of rage against each other. That that's there. But then there's this core of people that just come to work each day and they're about delivering essential services, making sure roads get paved, that schools operate, that essential services are delivered, that folks in great need, whether that's a mental health crisis or.
angela_r_howard (02:13.51)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (02:38.994)
situation of safety, you know, like our law enforcement, our court system, you know, all these parts of government that are these essential services that really are about creating equity. You know, my mindset is when government is working like it should and like every organization, it doesn't always, you know, but when government is working as it should, it ensures that there's a floor that no one falls below, that we in our society say, you know, the other members of our species...
angela_r_howard (02:57.611)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (03:06.762)
deserve an absolute minimum threshold of life experience and quality of life. There are things called human rights that we believe in. And government is the organization whose purpose, you know, in addition to other things, but primarily is to ensure that we maintain those floors, that there is someone when someone's having a mental health crisis in a public park, that there's someone to make sure they get to a safe place that they can be cared for rather than just left to fend for themselves. You know, these, these moments of people being in crisis, that someone
angela_r_howard (03:13.998)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (03:33.788)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (03:34.734)
who's lost a job suddenly and maybe just doesn't have the savings to feed their children, has a way to make sure that there's food on the table for their family before they have to make really awful decisions while they look for their next job. All of these systems that create this safety net, below which we don't want people to fall, as members of our common species, that's the role of government. I know that's not universally agreed to in the world, but that's my mindset and where I come from. Our company is here
angela_r_howard (03:48.567)
Yes.
paul_bellows (04:04.214)
to help build trust in government. That's really our fundamental purpose. And I think the trust comes from communication. And so that's what we get out of bed to do is to help government to communicate effectively in the current digital world, which is a fragmented, omni-channel, messy, messy world to communicate in. There was a time when building a website was enough and it's just not that way anymore. We need to be strategic. We need to think about where people are actually getting their information.
angela_r_howard (04:11.565)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (04:28.626)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (04:30.282)
I mean, you tell consistent stories and realistic stories and stories that are relevant to people and deliver information that's relevant to people in the world as it actually is. And that's a hard journey. So that's what we're about.
angela_r_howard (04:42.482)
Yeah, and the reason why I was so interested in talking about this is because, first of all, it was kind of fascinating to me to understand the fact that trust is our the greatest currency right now. Right. Like people are battling for people's trust. Organizations are battling to bring in good employees into their organizations. Right. During Covid, you know,
paul_bellows (04:58.344)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (05:11.398)
from a US perspective, I remember working in industry and a lot of people would come to me as the head of HR and say, please tell me what's going on. I am hearing this on this news channel and this on this news channel and the CDC is saying something different and I don't know who to trust. And people would come to me and to the executive team at our organization to be like, please consolidate this into something that makes sense and is digestible and is fact-based.
paul_bellows (05:35.145)
Yeah.
angela_r_howard (05:39.11)
And I'm just going to read this because I want to get this right here. But there was a recent report and I think this organization, Edelman, their communications consulting firm, they do a report on a, like a trust barometer. And they believe that trust is our greatest currency. And in their words, lasting trust is the strongest insurance against competitive disruption. The antidote to consumer indifference and the best path to continued growth.
paul_bellows (05:49.283)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (06:09.026)
And so they basically, in this recent report in 2021, focused on employees and where their beliefs came from and how that Omni-channel was working. And basically they were saying that a lot of employees are now looking to their organizations for information, which is, I don't know. I don't know if that's an issue. I think it is. And it kind of gets back to this.
paul_bellows (06:35.403)
I think...
angela_r_howard (06:38.094)
Yeah, what do you think? Tell me.
paul_bellows (06:38.226)
It's a huge issue, right? Well, yeah, sorry. And I started stepping on your toes there, but you know, um, it's a huge issue because, you know, you think of I'm an employer, um, if my employee comes to me and says, um, you know, globally, you know, the media landscape, I don't understand the story, you know, elected officials, I don't understand the story. Professional pundits. I don't understand the story. Can you interpret it for me? That's an odd place to put me as the person who helps you build digital products.
in your job during the day. I don't really have the qualifications to interpret that. And I'm not sure that it would be responsible of me too. And yet, where is the trusted voice? Who can you trust these days? And occasionally, in the situation of employers, we're getting asked to wear a hat that is above our pay grade, essentially. I'm not sure that I... You probably shouldn't come to me for health information either, because I am not...
angela_r_howard (07:08.132)
rates.
angela_r_howard (07:19.119)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (07:30.519)
Yes.
angela_r_howard (07:34.41)
Right. Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (07:35.438)
physician. I have no training, no expertise. And yet in organizations, it's odd to see that kind of shift of, I might trust my employer more than I trust the people whose actual career it is to tell me these things. And what a funny place to have moved to in our society. It's a privilege, but it's an enormous responsibility for employers to wear that hat, and potentially a liability. And yet here we are.
angela_r_howard (08:05.282)
Yeah, and to your point, I mean, this gets back to the government or these, you know, public sector organizations that have been built to create, to fix, to, you know, create equality or equity, depending on what we're talking about. And really, usually the main barrier to that is usually communications, right? And how information gets to the public. And, you know, everyone talks about like, you know, we always make fun of like,
paul_bellows (08:29.582)
Absolutely. Yep.
angela_r_howard (08:35.142)
the DMV, right? Like we go to the DMV and it's like the most inefficient system or we go to, you know, you know, all these systems seem to seem to be inefficient. And if they're inefficient, they're not delivering the services that they need to provide. So how do we do that better? How does digital make that happen?
paul_bellows (08:36.972)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (08:54.123)
Well, it's such an interesting moment. So here's a funny little business anecdote that's so relevant to this topic. So in 2019, the California DMV had this massive problem. So this is going to be a very US-centric thing. So folks outside of the US may not know about this. Maybe not everyone in the US knows what real ID is inside of the US.
So Real ID is this authenticated identification system that can sort of bind who you are to a piece of ID. And up until 2020, now this is, I gotta catch up because I'm not sure exactly what's happened over COVID. I know a lot of things were delayed, but up until 2020, so your passport would be qualified as Real ID because there's sort of some biometric information, it's been officially certified. If you lose it, there's a whole thing to regain your passport and be re-authenticated, but it allows you to travel internationally.
So RealID is this US concept that we can apply to driver's license and other forms of state-issued identification so that you can use it to access facilities or services. So up until 2020, RealID was required to enter certain US government buildings, to enter a nuclear power facility in the US. So as a Canadian visiting, if I wanted to get into certain federal government buildings when I came for meetings, I had to bring my passport, and that was considered valid.
What was going to change in 2020 was real ID was going to be required to board a domestic flight in the U S. So now you think about the amount of identification reissues that have to happen in a year because not everybody in the U S has a passport, you know, not everybody in the U S has ID so that the California DMV had this major timeline coming, they had a brand new executive director, they had ancient technology and ancient practices around technology, like good practices, but
angela_r_howard (10:20.602)
That's right.
paul_bellows (10:43.202)
from another era and now they're saying, okay, we might need to like issue 30 million IDs this year so that people can get on airplanes to do their job, to see their family, because this deadline is coming fast. So they held this sort of agile sprint kind of based procurement thing. And we were actually shortlisted of one of 10 companies globally who got to the final conversation. And they were saying, how are we going to provide this massive layer of service? And so our concept, what we pitched was,
angela_r_howard (10:44.444)
Hehehe
angela_r_howard (10:49.465)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (11:02.299)
Mmm.
paul_bellows (11:11.086)
What we're going to do is we're going to roll specially outfitted sprinter vans across communities all across California. You will have sort of a digital interface for finding where they are, booking an appointment, preparing with all the things you need to bring. And they might be outside your office. You can pop out at lunch, you know, you don't, so we're going to essentially expand the built infrastructure of the DMV for a short period of time. This burst of extra capacity and staffed vehicles are sort of this high security kind of like cloud connections, no data lived in the van. And we're going to just give you this sort of like.
angela_r_howard (11:29.892)
Mm.
paul_bellows (11:40.558)
huge footprint, like expand the surface area of the DMV just around ID issuing around real ID and the biometric and fingerprint capturing. This is this thing we're gonna do. And they were going to buy it. And so we were gonna, you know, this is the kind of the kind of digital solution. And just as they were starting getting on the decision of which of these vendors would they were gonna pick, we were one of 10 and they were gonna pick a group. Then COVID happened and I got spared having 250.
angela_r_howard (11:48.059)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (12:06.194)
Sprinter van leases on the ground in California with me as a Canadian, not even able to enter the country to run this business. So anyway, it was such a cool opportunity. It was going to be this amazing way that digital technology might let us do something powerful and sort of hit this thing, getting people onto planes to do their jobs, see their loved ones. And it was a narrow miss for us. It probably would have been an existential event for our business if I actually had to finance the lease of these 200 grounded Sprinter vans all over the state of California. So that was my business adventure there.
angela_r_howard (12:11.654)
Oh, that's right, yes.
angela_r_howard (12:34.047)
Oh my goodness.
paul_bellows (12:35.67)
That's the kind of thing, you know, like saying like digital technology is not just about websites or Twitter or, you know, how do we influence people on Tik Tok? It's what else is possible because of technology that we have and how do we employ that technology in a responsible way in a way that immediately returns value back to government, you know, to say, it's not just about doing cool things. It's not about augmented reality to process a fishing license. That doesn't add a lot of value to anybody.
angela_r_howard (12:47.957)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (12:59.596)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (13:03.798)
But you know, kind of what's possible, what's within the state of the art and how can we execute on this in a way that improves service outcomes, improves communication outcomes, and lets government respond to some of the real time events that occur that are just massive in scale and disruptive in nature.
angela_r_howard (13:19.074)
Yeah, and I think it kind of gets to this idea of, you know, change management, which is something that, you know, I kind of work in, you know, where it's like, how do you change, how do you change, how do you get something from point A to point B, something really big, something really transformative, and your task with filling in the gaps. And it's not just about assets, but it's also about changing behavior and the human condition and what we respond to.
paul_bellows (13:25.3)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (13:45.918)
Oh yeah.
angela_r_howard (13:48.75)
So I think it's just kind of this looking at providing these services through a transformative and change management lens. And one of the things, like literally one of the vehicles, literally and figuratively, could be these vans that you use to go into the communities and bring the service to people.
paul_bellows (13:57.499)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (14:08.775)
Yeah, so you talk about change management, I just wanted to like latch onto that for a second because I think it's really interesting, you know, you sort of think about the journey the government is on right now, you know. And so one of my friends and someone who really inspires me is a woman who's in my part of the world, Dominic Bond, and she's the chief, sort of essentially the chief digital officer for the province of Alberta, which is where I live, provinces. For you in America, provinces like a state, but friendlier.
angela_r_howard (14:31.085)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (14:35.438)
Yes.
paul_bellows (14:36.746)
Yeah. And then we say, sorry, more. Um, but the, or maybe should, um, but. So Dominic is responsible for this transformation. She's we were having a conversation a year or two ago. It's, she said this interesting thing. She said, you know, we, so we have an IT department in the government of Alberta, who's responsible for IT and technical service delivery, which is there's 1200 employees of that department who are on all these systems. The weird thing is none of them are designers and coders. They're.
angela_r_howard (14:42.042)
Hehehe
paul_bellows (15:03.542)
Procurement experts, they're project managers, they're program managers, they're security experts. But no one's writing code and building software. And so that's the old way of government, you know, which is, oh, we need a system. We will do an RFP. We will buy something. We will hire a vendor. We'll manage that vendor. They will deliver the solution. We're procurement and program managers here. But that's not where government is going. You know, so you look at things like in the U S some of the, you know, the, um,
angela_r_howard (15:03.615)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (15:18.394)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (15:33.106)
you know, 18F, which is essentially a digital agency inside of government that said, we're going to go help government actually become more like a software company, more like a startup, because that's actually where technology is going. But then you think about who works in government 20 years ago and who might work in government in 20 years, if the nature of the organization itself moves from procurement, administration, bureaucracy and project management to
angela_r_howard (15:46.107)
Mm.
paul_bellows (16:02.63)
Agile design build teams that can be responsible and build high secure, highly usable applications in real time and improve those and maintain them. Well, there's a really different organizations. How do you change the entire DNA of just what the organization is, you know, on these short times, you know, and 40 years might sound like a long time scale in the world, but it's, it's a short time scale at like, like human career and employment, like a lot of people go into government cause they say, Hey,
angela_r_howard (16:17.115)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (16:29.058)
Hey, I want to do some social good in the world. I want to work for my community. I also kind of want just a reasonable paying job where I can live and raise a family for 50 years. You know, I can have these careers. It's kind of one of the reasons you go work in government. It's not the highest paying job. It's not, you know, maybe always the coolest job. And it comes with a lot of overhead of just the bureaucracy, but people do that because there's this great trade off of, you know, it's a career. I can count on it. I can, I can grow old in this.
angela_r_howard (16:38.848)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (16:53.655)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (16:55.722)
And if that's suddenly no longer true, and suddenly I need to become something that I wasn't before, that's a big change to ask of government itself. How do you create the conditions for that kind of success? And so I think that's one of the crises governments in right now is it is hard to become a modern digital communication provider because everything about who you are and who works there and how you operate and what you even do all day, you know, your actual, the nature of your operations has to change. That's a big thing to ask of a more bureaucratic organization in nature. That's it's a big.
angela_r_howard (17:05.679)
Mm.
paul_bellows (17:25.515)
It's a big lift.
angela_r_howard (17:27.926)
Yeah, and it sounds like, you know, we're really talking about how do we, how do we future proof, you know, this sector. But you know, I also think about, and I would love to get your perspective on this because, you know, digital transformation, we know is like, we're in it. It's not like, it's not like this long term thing anymore. It's like, it's happening. But we still see a lot of inequities around who has access to technology, who can afford it, who can...
paul_bellows (17:33.746)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (17:51.346)
Oh yeah. Yeah.
angela_r_howard (17:54.638)
So do you see a shift happening there where things are becoming more accessible? How do you plan for that with your own company to make sure communication channels are accessible to everybody?
paul_bellows (18:07.114)
So I think when I look at who's doing this well, you know, a colleague of mine, Lawrence Edda, he's the Chief Digital Officer for the City of Toronto. So Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America, the first of course being Mexico City, largest city in North America, then New York, LA and Toronto. So this is a big region. They have a lot of people in this region. It's very spread out. There's a, there's a, it's also an enormous.
angela_r_howard (18:17.219)
Mm.
paul_bellows (18:33.982)
immigration and newcomer kind of destination, people who come to Canada for new life, coming to kind of restart, want to come to North America. Toronto is a place a lot of people come and newcomers to Canada don't have, you know, like there's language barriers, there's credit barriers, there's job qualification barriers, just cultural barriers to being successful. So you look at Toronto and there's this huge disparity on who lives in the community and their access information, even their cultural expectation of what government is for. So Lawrence has this
angela_r_howard (18:36.038)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (18:47.048)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (19:01.382)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (19:03.914)
vision for how we're going to do this. And you know, so there's simple things that you do simple things. There's straightforward things like this makes things are accessible, let's make sure they work on any device. But then he's also looking at how is broadband deployed in our city regionally? Like, is it accessible to people everywhere? Or do you need like $150 a month, you know, cable or telephone subscription to get the high speed internet and everything else? And can everyone afford that? Is everyone in the community housed? And do they have you know, do they actually have local internet? Or are they relying on a local
library or like a city hall or sitting outside Starbucks, you know, how are people actually getting to internet? And then can we deliver to the devices that they have? So they're doing huge work on supporting the commercial entities in the organization that provide business and consumer internet to say, we also need like broadband Wi-Fi in the city that just blankets the city and some of those areas where A, people at a household level might not be able to afford equitable access to the internet.
angela_r_howard (19:38.222)
Yeah.
angela_r_howard (19:44.262)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (20:03.07)
or might be making a choice between a modern device and access to the internet. And then just also maybe areas, folks who are unhoused, who don't actually have a roof or an address at which to subscribe to something. Maybe someone living in temporary housing or in a vehicle, or sometimes in a city park, because they're just that in between moments of life where they just don't actually have a home to go to. So how do you deliver there? I think...
angela_r_howard (20:03.136)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (20:07.481)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (20:26.746)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (20:30.186)
Like that's the kind of thing that government can do that. I don't, I don't think we could rely on business to deliver, you know, to say, Hey, how would we create this blanket? You know, it's up to government to take on those types of initiatives and to kind of close the gaps between what private sector does and, and what society really needs. So I love that kind of mindset of saying, you know, it's not just about building a more mobile compatible interface to our service and making sure it's easy to use. It's also making sure you find, figure out like that last mile of like, who can't even get on line.
angela_r_howard (20:35.15)
Mm, yeah.
angela_r_howard (20:59.516)
Right.
paul_bellows (20:59.774)
And what might we have to do to make sure that there's equitable access to everyone in the community? Otherwise, we're creating that famous digital divide and amplifying it.
angela_r_howard (21:09.366)
Exactly. And to your point, you know, I think, you know, you're seeing a lot of businesses tackle some of these really tough issues, right, like homelessness, racism, you know, these societal issues that need fixing. And I think the one thing that, you know, regardless of how you feel about government, because, you know, everyone has their own, everyone's on a different spectrum, part of the spectrum at this point. But the one thing that, you know, government is also an organization, you know,
paul_bellows (21:19.913)
Yep.
paul_bellows (21:30.06)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (21:37.985)
Yeah.
angela_r_howard (21:38.962)
the United States or Canada, like we have our own set of values, right, that we're trying to deploy and organize around. And, you know, government, if run well, to your point, can really make sure we're putting all of our resources towards the biggest need. And so that's the piece that I feel like is missing, like with, you know, it's lovely that business owners and startups and things like that are trying to put their money.
paul_bellows (21:41.367)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (21:44.894)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (22:06.01)
where their mouth is, I think that needs to continue to happen, but it's about allocating those resources to the right places and making sure they get to the biggest need and the biggest gaps systemically, I think.
paul_bellows (22:17.87)
Well, yes. And I think there's also this question of, there's some subtleties in the conversation right now. So there are, I'm gonna just slightly simplify a picture here, but you know, and try and make this two positives, rather than one, but they are, can be opposed to each other. But there's a mindset that says,
angela_r_howard (22:26.648)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (22:33.167)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (22:40.344)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (22:42.986)
We, you know, again, I talked about like a safety net or a floor below which we don't allow other members of our species to fall in our communities where we live, work and play, right? To say like, it's not good for any of us if we have people that are in complete crisis, you know, because, you know, A, that's unjust, you know, and it's undesirable. And I don't think people appreciate human suffering. I don't think most of us really appreciate seeing, we don't enjoy seeing other humans suffer. We wish for that not to be the case.
angela_r_howard (22:49.243)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (22:57.281)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (23:01.628)
Yes.
paul_bellows (23:11.894)
And not everyone is able to lift themselves up at all times. You know, people have genuine barriers. So there's that mindset. And then there's also this mindset that exists. And I think it exists here in Canada as well, but it's sort of one of these beautiful parts of the United States when it's brought to bear in a positive context, but this sense of like self-reliance of doing it yourself, you know, like that's sort of, the American dream is if I work hard, I can succeed.
angela_r_howard (23:15.547)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (23:34.054)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (23:40.278)
And this is a country in which you can build something wonderful if you bring your best self to it and you lean into it. And I think both of those things are really positive concepts. They don't have to be opposed to each other. And yet we often, I think, line up around them and other the other side and say, well, the downside of safety net is people get lazy and people become dependent on the system.
Yes, that's a risk of it, right? And then, you know, you look at the other side and say, well, if it's just self-reliance, what about those people who, you know, someone's born with a learning ability issue, someone is born with, you know, maybe a physical defect, someone's born into a context in which it's unlikely that they will survive without structured supports, you know, to help them, you know, grow. Maybe they're born into a house with, you know, a fetal alcohol syndrome because of parents' decisions or, you know, kind of cultural or community
patterns of behavior that were unfortunate. Lots of reasons why we can imagine someone might be born at a deficit in terms of their opportunities. Well, how do we help those people to succeed in this, you must be self-reliant, you must do it yourself. What if someone simply doesn't have the means, the social capital, the financial capital, the health capital to succeed on their own? What if we actually have inequities here? How do we balance that out? We can line up on other sides of that. So, I mean, the answer is communication.
angela_r_howard (24:43.217)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (24:57.546)
Right. Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (25:08.726)
We need to learn how to talk to each other. I mean, learning to learn how to find common ground. And I don't think there's a good reason why these two mindsets have to be lined up on either side of a spectrum. You know, we can find balance between these two things. We can find middle ground. I think that's where a lot of folks in America and Canada as well, really would like to be. But when all the information we get, our entire media ecosystem has become this polarized, you know, us versus them space.
angela_r_howard (25:09.115)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (25:19.919)
Right.
paul_bellows (25:37.97)
it's hard to have dialogue because you genuinely start to feel like it's the other people that are making you unsafe. It's the other people that are the threat and the problem. When in reality, you know, we're sort of looking at the same problem from a different perspective. We kind of want something in the middle to happen. And if you can find a way to have dialogue and communicate again, I think that is our path forward. It's just really hard to do right now. Cause we've lost most of our paths of having those conversations.
angela_r_howard (26:00.943)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (26:04.482)
You know, some of our community institutions have changed, you know, the nature of, let's say churches has changed a lot demographically in the last 30 years, that used to be a community meeting place, not for everyone, you know, not everyone had access and not everyone was part of that, but it was at least a place where a certain percentage of a community would go and have dialogue and have hard conversations. Our demographics have changed. What church is, what those things are to people, what's it been replaced by?
angela_r_howard (26:12.263)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (26:28.826)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (26:32.758)
You know, other systems, we had, you know, media, we had, you know, storytelling, we had local news. Well, that's changed a lot too. We only really have national news now. We don't really have a lot of local news anymore. So the information we get, you know, in ourselves, you know, we get things from social media now, which is designed to make us feel more things, feel bigger feelings about the things we think about and talk about. Well, that's a hard environment for us to be successful in as the species we actually are. You know, like we're not really good. We're, you know,
angela_r_howard (26:33.08)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (26:48.518)
Great.
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (27:01.394)
It took us a long time to know how to have phone calls and be effective on the phone. You know, we've, you know, like we had party lines and we had, you know, phone etiquette and then we built call centers. You know, we're pretty good at the phone now, just at the point where we don't really use the phone all that much anymore. Now we're just having to learn how we do all of this using these new tools, new channels, new interfaces, context where bigger organizations are making, making curated decisions about what we see and who we talk to and who we, what we discover. Um,
angela_r_howard (27:05.439)
Yes.
angela_r_howard (27:12.978)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (27:19.002)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (27:29.802)
It's a hard place to be. So, you know, I like to be generous towards our species and say, you know, like we're, we can't expect to get this all right the first time, you know, th this is, we're going to fail in a lot of ways, but we need to find ways to give ourselves at least a hope of succeeding, you know, and I think that really comes to bat down to communication at the end of the day. How do we talk to each other? How do we listen to each other? Um, and that's the space that we've chosen to work in day to day.
angela_r_howard (27:48.443)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (27:56.406)
Yeah, well, I think it's definitely in the context we're talking about is, I think it's something we can we can make an impact around immediately, right? Versus, you know, it's something that action can be taken to close the gap between, you know, reaching that threshold, right? And where people are.
paul_bellows (28:09.314)
Yeah.
angela_r_howard (28:21.59)
I think the next step, which I'm sure you all are thinking about is how do we go from just surviving to thriving? And I think that is the conversation and where more people want to see the momentum, which is like, let's not just talk about the bare minimum of human condition and survival. Let's actually get to the point where everyone can have an opportunity to thrive and systemic and systematic barriers are removed.
paul_bellows (28:46.348)
Yeah.
angela_r_howard (28:49.498)
And a lot of times those systematic barriers are real barriers. It's communication, it's organizationally, it's leadership, it's things like that I think we have an opportunity to just do better.
paul_bellows (28:56.177)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (29:05.214)
You know, the barriers are real. You know, you think of something just like language. You know, I would struggle if dropped in the middle of China to communicate with people because I don't speak the language, right? Like outside of any other kind of political or ideology or anything, your culture. I just don't speak the language. How do I talk to people where I don't share a common language? And you sort of break that down to even there are a lot of people who speak the same language that I do.
angela_r_howard (29:23.211)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (29:30.331)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (29:34.954)
where words mean very different things to me than they do to them. You know, we have different ideas, we're coming from different assumptions. So, you know, you think of all these barriers we face and these disadvantages we face just to talk to one another. It's hard to do. It's a learned skill. We don't, it's not innate. You know, we have to practice. Um, you know, can't just drop a group of people to room and assume they'll figure it out. Although, you know, we're remarkably good at that when we are in a place with sort of a
angela_r_howard (29:37.113)
Yes.
angela_r_howard (29:49.806)
Mm.
paul_bellows (30:03.71)
a human scale to it of like a group of eight people we can often find a way for, not always though. So I'm a great believer in humans capacity to communicate with other people. But you know, systemically, you know, we need to look at how we're enabling this and how we're encouraging it and amplifying the quality wrong. I think where it gets really complicated at a government level is then you overlay scale, you know, of hey,
angela_r_howard (30:05.75)
Yes.
angela_r_howard (30:29.744)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (30:30.39)
We have all these community differences and cultural differences and language differences and, you know, economic brackets give you different contexts and different social capital in the world. You have access to different information, different perspectives. We have all these overlays, these things that can divide us. And you layer scale over that, you know, and like, like the U S is a big place and there are a lot of people live in America, right. And, and, and how do you talk to all of them? What is, what is the.
angela_r_howard (30:40.704)
Yes.
paul_bellows (30:57.874)
How does that work? And even more so, how do you listen to everyone? That's a challenge. That's a big challenge, especially when not everyone has shared interest in what story is being told. So, there's wicked problems in that space. But like what you said is we need things that we can do. What we can do as individuals is just start getting into dialogue and talking to each other. And the old thing I say to my eight-year-old is two ears, one mouth.
angela_r_howard (30:58.35)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (31:02.823)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (31:26.862)
start by listening first, you know? And I think that lesson applies. It's just, you know, you overlay complexity and scale, sort of the wicked problems of doing this in big place. That's where that's challenging technology to put in place and like design thinking and like, how do we create these environments? But, you know, it's always encouraging to me, you know, how far people can come when they start having the right kind of conversations. And I think that just comes from the mindset that you bring to the conversation, how you show up and who you intend to be in that conversation.
angela_r_howard (31:28.811)
Yes.
angela_r_howard (31:41.98)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (31:55.426)
When you show up intending to be an antagonist, that's probably where you'll end up. And you'll probably have an antagonist conversation where you show up intending with the intention of being part of common ground and you're finding, you know, shared interests and shared goals. Well, you're much more likely to get there, you know, and I'd like to see a little more of that with the adults who are running the place. I think that'd be nice.
angela_r_howard (31:56.274)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (32:13.466)
now.
angela_r_howard (32:18.054)
Yes, that would be wonderful. I would love to hear, and this will be the last question before we go into a wrap up. But you are running an impact-based, values-based organization. I know we've talked a lot about the solution you're providing, your organization is providing. But do you have any perspective for people who are listening as to how
paul_bellows (32:20.299)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (32:26.132)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (32:45.842)
create that movement across your employees, right? And getting everybody along to this purpose that you're driving as a founder or president of a company, what are some things you've done and what has worked well?
paul_bellows (32:59.774)
It, well, I'll say it's, it's the most important part of my role. And it's the hardest part of my role. It's, it's the thing that I most need to succeed at. And it's the thing that is most easy to not succeed at, you know, just given sort of, you know, um, and especially, you know, since COVID we become a remote workplace too. So, you know, we're, we're missing some of the shortcuts of just being, you know, face to face with people. Everything is scheduled. Everything happens in like bite sized chunks. And there's, there's not, there's not a lot of, um,
angela_r_howard (33:06.087)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (33:12.271)
Yes.
angela_r_howard (33:18.428)
Yes.
paul_bellows (33:30.99)
The edges of everything are fairly rigid and not as fuzzy as they used to be when we were in office and there was sort of that chance for this in-person mentorship and sharing of information informally. Everything is formalized. You have to be that much more intentional about it. This is not accidental. There used to be happy accidents. Everything has to be designed right now. So just for me in the last two or three years, this has been more challenging at any point in my career. So what I actually do to be more successful in this space is...
angela_r_howard (33:39.183)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (33:52.858)
Mm.
paul_bellows (33:58.91)
Managing communication, I need to be consistent and clear and I really can't go off topic. You know, and I'm a wanderer. I have a background as a musician and an artist and, you know, way back the day, I will just talk for hours about almost anything people will listen to. And I like, I probably overprivileged the sound of my own voice in the world. But, you know, managing self, creating an environment of safety where people can ask real questions. You know, people need to believe that they will be heard.
angela_r_howard (34:13.906)
I'm gonna go to bed.
paul_bellows (34:26.274)
They need to believe that while you can't act on everything in real time, you're actively listening, you're hearing them, that it matters when they speak and that they can make a difference. So people need to believe that they can be trusted. And we have so many social barriers to being successful at work, like ideas of hierarchy and ideas of what power is in an organization and ideas of what we're allowed to do. And so for me, it's the unlearning process, helping people unlearn a lot of those things.
and then relearn a new way of working, which is I am on a team and I am empowered and I can make decisions and I can make certain kinds of decisions, but not other kinds of decisions. You know, there's certain decisions that can't make and what are those, but within the set of what I can do, I am empowered to be successful and to solve problems and to make clear decisions with my team. Encouraging, you know, creating an environment where people learn to listen to each other, you know, and learn to hear every voice. You know, we do something, here's a small example of one thing that's sort of a ritual in our organization that we do.
angela_r_howard (35:04.818)
Yes.
paul_bellows (35:23.806)
And it's connected to how we make decisions and it's called our alignment model. It's probably not as prevalent in my organization as I would like to believe it is over growing it. Um, but you know, the idea that when we have made a decision, first, we decide whose decision it is and then it's the decider's accountability to ask for alignment and we use a numeric scale of one to five, you know, where one is. This is a terrible idea. I can't go along with it. I will dig my heels in. I'm in full resistance mode and you need to know that.
angela_r_howard (35:26.461)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (35:41.403)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (35:51.882)
as you're processing this decision. So I'm going to see it out loud and explicitly right up to five, which is I am both intellectually and emotionally committed to this idea. Wholeheartedly, I believe it. And each time we're making a decision, it's the decider's obligation to hear every voice and it's a quick thing to do because it's numeric. And if three people are a five and one person's a two, we should find out why, because this decision is probably not going to be successful if someone's got their heels dug in.
angela_r_howard (36:09.668)
Mm-hmm.
paul_bellows (36:18.558)
And they see something about this decision, either it's their misunderstanding and we need to help them come along, or it's the rest of our misunderstanding. And they actually have a unique perspective based on experience or skillset. Um, and we need to hear their voice because it improves the quality of our decision. Um, so to me, that's a small thing that's, it can be adopted by organizations, but it leads into that, like I, there's every time important decisions are getting made on my team and with the group of people I work with, my voice will always be asked for, heard.
angela_r_howard (36:27.862)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (36:34.278)
Yes.
paul_bellows (36:48.426)
and record it, you know, and when I have a major opposition to something, I have a chance to explain why and unpack my thinking, which either lets me change my thinking and see it a different perspective, or share my unique perspective in a way that makes the entire team stronger. So I think there are things you can do, you know, it's hard to get a whole group of, you know, there's 60 of us in our shop, and it's remarkably hard to get a group of 60 people always doing this and doing it well, but we're on a journey there. But where we do this, I think it vastly improves how we communicate, how we make decisions.
angela_r_howard (36:50.268)
Hmm.
paul_bellows (37:18.39)
And again, it's not a silver bullet. It's not magical. It's just that idea. We need to communicate. We need to talk. People need to feel heard. They need to feel like they have a legitimate seat at the table. And it's not just the highest paid voice in the room that makes all decisions and owns all the accountability of those decisions, because it's so easy to think we've made a decision and not really have made a decision, just one person got what they wanted and it's not even actually going to happen because nobody else agreed with them.
angela_r_howard (37:42.895)
Right.
paul_bellows (37:46.99)
They were just quiet and then eventually they will just undermine it over the next three months and that potentially great idea could fail just because we didn't get everyone bought into it and we didn't have a culture in which people believe that decisions matter, that they have a voice and that they can be part of solving problems. That's the kind of thing that we've done that's been successful and I think it's very achievable for organizations to adopt a ritual like that and I think it changes your culture over time.
angela_r_howard (37:47.375)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (38:00.454)
Mm.
angela_r_howard (38:11.594)
Yeah, I think it's a good lesson as to how other organizational systems can work, like, like government, right? Like, what is our mechanism for listening? And not that specific tactic would work for, you know, millions and millions of people. But I think the essence of creating the space, taking the time to listen, internalizing what you're hearing.
paul_bellows (38:18.966)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (38:32.6)
Mm-hmm.
angela_r_howard (38:37.834)
viewing the differences that are different than yours, but you know, being open to changing your mind, and then communicating back and saying, hey, this is where we landed. I considered all of your all of your opinions. Thank you so much for your feedback. This is the direction we're going in. Any reasonable person typically, as long as they've had time to articulate, and as long as it doesn't go against their ethics and integrity, any reasonable person is going to be, oh, I totally get it. Okay.
But I think there's this fear sometimes with leadership where it's like, if I ask for it, I'm gonna open this can of worms and it's gonna be horrible. And so I love the way you're approaching that. And I think it's also, it's a great parallel to the work that your team is doing for other organizations because I think the same type of structure is needed most of the time.
paul_bellows (39:12.746)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (39:29.482)
Isn't it funny that it's so characteristic of humans? We have this bias, like loud voices, forcefulness, authority, gets things happening, but that idea of as a leader, and you can be the same leader, whether you're forceful, authority, and yet you're like, I wonder if there is a can of worms. Wouldn't it be good to know? Wouldn't it be better to know that my people think I'm a fool for making these suggestions? They see it totally different.
angela_r_howard (39:52.475)
Right! Yes!
paul_bellows (39:59.138)
They never believe we're going to get it done. Wouldn't I want to know? Wouldn't I want to engage in dialogue? And at least if I know that I have that problem, I can solve it. Whereas if I just say, we're doing X, get out of here, get to work, and people walk away not believing it, the odds of success are low. You know, and so, you know, by believing this, you know, we can't have those real conversations. There's one of my favorite books is a book called, An Everyone Culture.
angela_r_howard (40:15.696)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (40:23.774)
And I should have the authors memorized because I read it a couple of times now and I love it. And it's a fact that's fleeting from my brain, I'm sorry, but everyone cultures, a couple of folks from Harvard. And, you know, they sort of like the premise is what if you could come to work and not be doing two jobs, the job that is in your job description and the job of playacting who you think you need to be to fit into that organization, right? Like pretending to be inside of that culture. Is it like?
angela_r_howard (40:24.206)
Mmm.
angela_r_howard (40:47.863)
Yes.
paul_bellows (40:51.65)
We're literally asking people to do two things at the same time with their brain. And we're getting less value on the thing we're actually paying people for. Cause we're asking them to also be play actors the entire time. You know, if that takes work and cognitive load and, you know, what, if you could just eliminate that second job and just actually say what you think and be who you are and build a culture where that's possible, you know, or that could be successful to me, that's just, it's an inspiring question to ask.
angela_r_howard (40:55.652)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (41:08.6)
Hmm.
angela_r_howard (41:18.118)
Yeah, and I just pulled up the book. So it's, for those of you who are listening, and Everyone Culture Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Lisa Leahy and Robert Keegan. Yeah. Yeah, and that gets back to, you know, Korean equitable culture. And, you know, I think everyone thinks about culture as this top-down thing. But it's also.
paul_bellows (41:26.254)
Mm-hmm. Yes. And Robert Keegan. Lisa and Robert. Yes, absolutely. It's great. It's great. Yeah.
angela_r_howard (41:47.362)
It's definitely a groundswell more than it is a top down. And culture is also a reflection of leadership. So there's a lot of different angles to be from an organizational development perspective to shape. And the first step is just a reality check. And I think folks at the C-suite are kind of like, where are we at now? Where do we want to go? And these tactics that you've mentioned around the alignment model and all
paul_bellows (42:06.282)
Yeah.
angela_r_howard (42:17.21)
that as a way to get closer to where we want to be. So I appreciate you sharing that. And thank you so much, Paul, for, we could talk all day. I think this could, we could probably do another whole podcast episode on what we, you know, different elements of unpacking. So tell us where people can find you, if they're interested in chatting more or partnering. And then we'll wrap up.
paul_bellows (42:20.321)
Yeah.
paul_bellows (42:26.725)
Clearly.
paul_bellows (42:36.652)
Yeah.
Yeah, so our website is yellowpencil.com. That's our digital agency. You can find me, I'm at Paul Bellows on Twitter. I'm not prolific on Twitter by any means, but I'm there and you can find me. And you can email me at paul at yellowpencil.com. And you know, if you're interested in the way we work, or if you're certainly in the public sector, if you're working alongside or kind of around the public sector, you just want to have these conversations.
I'll say I have a little podcast too, this is called the 311. It's just sort of highlighting the people inside of government who are doing this work. I think they have interesting stories. So you can probably get that in all the places you get this awesome podcast. I've got way fewer episodes than you do. It's hard to publish when you're also running an agency, but we've got some great stories there of people doing interesting, impactful, meaningful work around change.
And yeah, those are the places you can find me and I'd love to hear from you. And I'm always looking for like minds and people who are caring about the things that I care about.
angela_r_howard (43:43.61)
Thank you so much, Paul. It was a pleasure chatting and we'll have you on the podcast soon again, I'm sure as things progress.
paul_bellows (43:51.238)
Anytime, this is what I like to talk about.
angela_r_howard (43:53.586)
Thank you.
paul_bellows (43:54.926)
Thanks Angela.
