The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 395 - Trojan Horsing

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hey, Peter.

Pete: I want to talk to you today about a big wooden horse.

Jen: Okay...

Pete: A big wooden horse that has famously been referred to as a Trojan Horse.

Jen: Oh, yes.

Pete: And how I think that Trojan Horsing is one of the most underrated ways to help people learn, to help teams work better together, and to help ourselves get things done.

Jen: I love a Trojan Horse. I am so excited to hear your take on this. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: So I want to think that we all know what we're talking about when we're talking about Trojan Horsing, but maybe I should just like put on the table my paraphrased and vaguely recollected version of what a Trojan Horse is, back from Year Nine History or whatever class it was, that we learned about Trojan Horses. My recollection is there was a famous moment in the Trojan War (I think it was called), and the Greeks (I believe it was) used this giant wooden structure to present at the gates of the enemy they were fighting, the Trojans, to say, "Here is a gift, in an act of good faith. We are leaving, and we want to give you this giant wooden horse." And the Trojans, thinking they just received a great gift of a giant wooden horse, let the horse into the gates of their (not sure) community / castle...feel free to fact check me, people. And then, once they went inside and nighttime came upon us, out of the Trojan Horse, a bunch of Greek soldiers ran and I guess went on to terrorize the Trojans. It's kind of dark, when you think about it.

Jen: That's not the part I love. But...

Pete: It's definitely not the part I love. But the part I love is, can you sneakily insert things or package things up in a way that looks like one thing but actually is something else?

Jen: Right.

Pete: Like I think about Trojan Horses every day, in my role as a facilitator of leadership development programs and executive coaches. And so, a couple of examples that just spring to mind that are very recent. I'll very often have an organization or a team or a senior leader come to me and say something like, "Oh, we need our team to be more collaborative, or we need to increase psychological safety in our team because we're not working very well together." And I'll say to them, "Well, we can't just walk into the room and say, 'We're here to talk about psychological safety. Let's get excited.'" Because that just doesn't work. Like psychological safety is the outcome of certain conversations, in my mind. And so, we need to Trojan Horse psychological safety through conversations like, "Hey, everyone in this room, you're all working on different work streams. And so, I want to start with a conversation around what is the current hard part of your particular work stream. What's the bottleneck? Where do you feel stuck? And maybe, as a collective, we can help you solve that problem." And in doing a conversation like that or facilitating a conversation like that, what you start to see is people start to trust each other more, start to let their barrier down a little more. And as a result, it starts to increase psychological safety, and the ability to collaborate becomes more effective. So we kind of Trojan Horse psychological safety through the conversation or the wooden horse of, "Let's talk about the hard part right now." I have like a hundred and five different examples of this, but I'm going to stop because I want to give you a chance to speak, because I'm ranting. How do you think about Trojan Horsing? Am I making sense? Do you think this is applicable?

Jen: Yes. I actually also think about Trojan Horsing quite a bit, in several different ways.

Pete: There we go.

Jen: One is, as a person who works in the theater, part of what we do in creating productions is Trojan Horse messages and values into the work.

Pete: Ah, of course.

Jen: Right? So my husband is a playwright and a director, and I hear him talk about this all the time, Trojan Horsing certain ideas into pieces that might seem kind of light and fluffy or silly. But he'll Trojan Horse serious messages about love, and understanding, and empathy, and community into his stories. So it's funny because I sometimes will reference what I call Eat Your Broccoli Theater, which to me is like the opposite of a Trojan Horse, where you go see a play and it feels like you're being lectured about what the takeaway is supposed to be. That's Eat Your Broccoli Theater.

Pete: Oh, interesting. And does that have a place? Is that effective? Or are we saying not as effective as Trojan Horsing? Or is it just a different form?

Jen: I'm sure it's effective for some. It's just not effective for me. That is not something I enjoy. It's funny because a good Trojan Horse will help me to feel like I have drawn my own conclusions, and that's what I prefer.

Pete: 100%. To me, that's central to someone who takes on a coaching role or a coaching posture, is: I don't have the answer, necessarily. And that could be in a 1:1 conversation I'm having with an executive, where I'm like, "I don't know how to fix the problem that you have, but I can help you fix it yourself, by asking questions. And as a result, you'll feel more excited about moving it forward, because you came up with the idea." Like you kind of Trojan Horse agency into the conversation, by asking them questions. And the same is true in a team format. Like, I love that. Like the Eat Your Broccoli version of this is, you know, in an old leadership development world, it might be a team sits down and listens to a sixty-minute lecture from a professor at University or something, and is told how to be a more psychologically safe and collaborative team. And maybe that still has a place. And I'm sure there are people that would still get value from that. But I think more and more about creating the conditions for people to learn themselves. And to me, that's Trojan Horsing.

Jen: Yeah. You know, another way I think about Trojan Horsing is as a coach. That so many of the exercises I've created over these, oh my gosh, twenty-something years...I just can't believe it sometimes. These twenty-something years that I've been coaching, the exercises are all Trojan Horses. All of them. I'll have you do an exercise that seems on the outside to be about movement (and in some ways, it is), but the Trojan Horse is carrying courage, or risk taking, or empathy, or these other things that I want to help people cultivate. But if I say, "You know what I think you need? Courage."

Pete: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, "Have you tried being empathetic?" Yeah, yeah. It doesn't quite work.

Jen: Yeah. "Can you try being a little more courageous for me?"

Pete: "Here's a note for you." Yeah, I agree. I mean, listeners that have listened to this podcast for long enough will be bored of and I get bored of hearing myself talk about that. But the sort of real human skills of leadership that I think about around curiosity, and empathy, and humility. And I really think of these as the ultimate Trojan Horse tools. Like another metaphor (not to mix too many) I think about is like primary colors. That there are three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, that make up all of the other colors. If you strip them all back, like what's the color behind the color? It ends up being like some version of red, blue, and yellow. And I think about this as it relates to leadership skills. It's like, what's the skill behind the skill? How do I be more collaborative? Or how do I be more coach-like? Or how do I have better communication? How do I navigate difficult conversations? How do I be more agile and adaptable in the way I lead? All of these wrappers or secondary colors that we love talking about (and I say "we" in terms of, you know, in corporate world), I think you can strip back to, well, in order to be a more effective communicator, you need to have empathy for your audience. In order to be able to coach people, you need to be practicing curiosity. In order to be more adaptable, you need to have the humility to go, "I don't necessarily know what's about to happen." And so, I feel like I'm forever Trojan Horsing or constantly trying to help Trojan Horse the three of what I think of as like primary colors or primary skills of leadership. And I was interviewed on a podcast recently. I'll put a link to it in the Box O' Goodies when it comes out. It was a really great conversation, and a bunch of fun. And one of the things I was challenged to come up with was like, "Maybe people are sick of hearing about empathy though. How else can we talk about it? Can you Trojan Horse it for us, Pete?" Because it's like, to your point, they eat the broccoli. You can't just say to people on a podcast, "You just need to be more empathetic." But you could say, "Have you thought about what might be important to the other person?" Or a question to ask in a conversation might be, "Hey, Jen, what's on your mind? What's your current challenge? How have you solved problems like this before? How could I help you?" And in you answering those questions, I can't help but now have empathy for your situation, because I understand it more. So it's like, I don't know, I'm just sort of ranting now about different ways we can think about Trojan Horsing, the actual thing we're trying to talk about.

Jen: I'm sure I've shared this on this podcast before but definitely not for a long time, that when I used to do more work in the corporate space, you have your call with the people who are helping to organize the event and hear about what their goals are for the team, and it's like, "We just want people to put more of themselves into the work," or, "We want people to be more committed," or whatever it is. And so, what I used to do (this was one of my Trojan Horse activities) is I would get people on their feet and I'd ask them to do the Hokey-Pokey with me.

Pete: Oh my god. I remember being in the room when you did this with a bunch of executives...and the horror that came over some of their faces, like, "Are we really doing this? Is this lady about to make us do this?"

Jen: So embarrassed. I'm like, "You put your right hand in. You put your right hand out." And they're like, oh my god, they're half-assing it. And then, we do the left hand. And then, we get to the end. We do a couple of verses. They're like tentative. And then, I say, "You put your whole self in. You put your whole self out." And they're, again, half-assing it. Then, we finish. "That's what it's all about." And then, I bring up some of the things that they brought up, which is this expectation that people can just put their whole self in. That's maybe unrealistic. And we have to create the conditions for people to feel safe putting their whole self in and feeling like they're allowed to look silly or make mistakes. And to me, that's an example of a Trojan Horse moment.

Pete: That is a beautiful Trojan Horse, of like, "Are you willing to do the thing you're now asking your team to do? Are you putting your whole self in, as demonstrated by that activity? Maybe not, because it's really hard and uncomfortable and embarrassing. And I'm worried about what other people are going to say." And so, oh, I love that. I don't feel like I can get away with it. I feel like that's such a perfect Jen Waldman activity.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: We also talked about a Trojan Horse that we both used recently, in an episode titled Breakfast (I think it was).

Jen: Yep. That's right.

Pete: Where we, for those that didn't listen, we talked about this activity that we both have done in workshops with leaders, where you say, "Turn to the person next to you and tell them the story of what you had for breakfast." And everyone's like, "What? Why are we doing this? This is a weird activity." Some people get right into it and they describe their breakfast. Some people sit there with their arms crossed and go, "I didn't have breakfast." And it's like, all of the answers are telling. And the things that you can Trojan Horse into that are lessons like everyone is a storyteller and everything has storytelling value. That, you start to also Trojan Horse empathy and understanding of other people. You start to Trojan Horse curiosity about how other people have different routines than you. There's all of these things, these flow-on effects that happen as a result of such a simple prompt. And so, it might look like a wooden structure or a story about breakfast, but actually, it's so much more.

Jen: I love that. Here's another thought about Trojan Horsing. I think all the listeners know this, but in case you didn't, most of my clients are actors. And I'm helping many of them with their marketing materials. And we'll talk about the difference between overt and covert messaging in marketing. And similar to the idea of Eat Your Broccoli Theater, sometimes the thing that they want you to know is so overt that it's off-putting. And so, I'll ask, "How can you share this information with me in a way that's more covert? How can you Trojan Horse this information in? Sometimes, instead of saying it with words, say it with a photo. Sometimes, instead of laying it out for me so literally, share it with me in a way that is embedded in the material. So that, again, I will draw the conclusion that this is what the message is." So there are so many different areas of our lives where we could look at or ask ourselves the question, "Would this be more effective with a Trojan Horse?"

Pete: I love that as a question. "Would this be more effective with a Trojan Horse?" I actually want to ask myself the opposite question, because maybe I think about Trojan Horses a little too much, which is like, "When is there an opportunity for an Eat Your Broccoli moment?"

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: If we think about something like a Brené Brown-ism of, "Clear is kind," if we think about something like a Claire Hughes Johnson-ism of, "Say the thing you think you cannot say," ...and I'll put an episode to that idea in our Box O' Goodies, we've talked about it before. But there's these other versions of, certainly in my world of leadership, where people aren't being clear enough and people are dancing around topics or not saying the thing because they're uncomfortable. I don't actually think that's a Trojan Horse, necessarily. It's more just an unwillingness to say something uncomfortable. But I feel like sometimes there's an opportunity to go, "This might be an Eat Your Broccoli moment. What's the thing you need to say that we're not saying right now?"

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: So I'm just noodling on that, of like I came in here thinking, "Let's talk about how great Trojan Horses are," but I'm also like, "Huh, but there might be some opportunities for more Eat Your Broccoli."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Eat your damn broccoli, team.

Jen: Who knew that the opposite of a horse is broccoli? You learn something new every day. Well, you know what, Pete? This is actually reminding me of a saying that I learned from you, that I'm pretty sure you learned from someone else, which is, "Don't steal the revelation." And when someone's going to have a potential aha moment / awakening / insight / epiphany, a Trojan Horse might really be called for, because you don't want to take that away from them. But when someone is not going to arrive at the thing on their own but it's something that you know they will be pleased to arrive at, maybe that's when the broccoli comes out.

Pete: I totally agree. And I credit Paul Jun for teaching me that, who is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant human. I'll put a link to his work in the Box O' Goodies. We've mentioned him before, but the, "Don't steal the revelation," is an idea we used when we were working on the altMBA together. And the premise of that was, "There's no right answers. We have to help people find their own answers, i.e. Trojan Horse their own learning." And in doing so, you're actually also Trojan Horsing agency, and Trojan Horsing their ability to have ownership over the choices they make, and all of these other things. And every now and then, what we would discover is there's a person, there's a moment, there's a situation when we might say to each other, "You've got to steal the revelation for this person. You've got to give it to them, because they're not getting it." We tried. We asked a question. We said, "Have you thought about this?" We did. And then, there's a moment where you're like, "You need to see the thing that's right in front of you. There's a horse here, and there are people inside of the horse." You've just got to tell them what you see, and that can be a gift in and of itself.

Jen: Yeah. Well, Pete, this is going to seem a little convoluted or maybe meta, but in offering the idea of the Trojan Horse today, I feel like you Trojan Horsed a whole lot of other ideas. Very impressive, my friend.

Pete: And I want to say it was deliberate, but it definitely wasn't. Such is the nature of this podcast.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.