By his own admission, John Chambers likes action. In the times I have chatted with him and seen him speak, his energy and desire to create positive change emanates out of him. And positive change is what he is enabling through his life’s many aspects: start-ups; helping corporates innovate in a way that suits them best (ie not trying to be like a startup); working with people to help them grow; seeking ways to grow awareness and connection with Aboriginal Australians.

After getting to know John a bit more, it becomes apparent that behind this desire for action and change is a willingness to listen, reflect, and humbly grow. It was excellent to talk with John and to hear the ways in which he has been challenged and had to change through the ventures and adventures he has untaken.

Currently, John is one of the Managing Partners at IE, an organisation that helps other organisations innovate and bring their ideas to market. He also hosts a podcast of his own, The Corporate Innovator, in which he talks with visionary corporate leaders, makers and advisors from around the globe.

If you enjoyed listening to John, you may also enjoy our conversation with Amantha Imber on applying science to the art of innovation, or Gus Hervey on being intelligently optimistic about the change we can make in the world.

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Nature can provide inspiration to many of us, but it’s been particularly significant to Naturepreneur, Ian Banyard, who been discovering how reconnecting with the natural world is key to saving both ourselves and our planet.

In our first Subtle Disruptor interview outside of Australia, Richard Holmes talks to Ian Banyard from the UK about his personal journey into natural mindfulness, and the role nature plays in helping us all feel healthier, happier and more peaceful.

As we experience living in an ever-changing, fast-paced, busy world, Ian encourages us to find an opportunity to get outside, pause, breathe and unburden our busy minds through appreciating the natural world around us. He helps us reflect on how trees have grown from seed using the abundance of resources around them, and encourages us, as human beings to reflect on what we have near us that can help us to thrive. Richard and Ian also discuss how more people are taking inspiration from nature to inform how they develop themselves and their organisations as they move towards evolutionary thinking, leaving the mechanical world behind.

You can find out more about Ian at www.cotswoldnaturalmindfulness.co.uk

If you do enjoy listening to Ian, you may also enjoy listening to Sieta Beckwith on falling in love with the earth again, Jordan Osmond on living the change we want to see in the world, and Masha Gorodilova on bringing stillness to our talkative urban minds.

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Something happened to me when I was about 8 years old – I somehow developed a belief that I was not creative, that I could not draw. I stopped drawing from that point on and dreaded going to art class each week.

Flash forward 30 years I am sitting down at a table with my son at his kindergarten. In front of us is a sheet of paper and some pencils. He asks me to draw him something. I freeze. That same belief is still there: “My son is asking me to draw…but I can’t draw!”. But I can see the anticipation in his eyes and decide to give it my best shot.

I was amazed at what actually flowed out of my body and through my pencil. Perhaps I was wrong about my ability to draw, but what seemed to be even more important was how I felt because of the drawing I was doing. It was liberating and awakening. And of course, my son loved every line.

My guest for this week is Melanie Knight. She curates experience like the one I had with my son in his kindergarten, where adults can tap back into a creativity and expression that may have been dormant since their childhood years. Dr Sketchy’s is an experience specifically focus on drawing, and Dead Letter Club is about remembering what it was like to make up a story and a character through the medium of hand-writing letters.

I enjoyed the depth of discussion with Melanie in this conversation. I love her ability to show up just as she is, to bring what she sees as valuable and important into the world.

If you do enjoy listening to Melanie, you may also enjoy listening to Kate Challis on the connection between design and wellbeing, Mykel Dixon on bringing the artist in all of us back into the workplace, or Luke Hockley on creating settings where we can safely explore our expression.

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Thinking about organisational structures and organisational design are two of my interests, and gratefully I also get paid to implement these ideas through my job as a consultant.

That’s why it was excellent to talk with Jason T Smith, founder and CEO of the Back In Motion Health Group, an organisation which has undergone a not too common transformation over the past few years. Titles and hierarchy were taken away, with a new model created that more closely resembled an evolving ecosystem that embraces change and encourages frank feedback.

If you do enjoy listening to Jason, you may also enjoy listening to Amantha Imber on creating innovative organisations, or Bec Brideson on removing the masculine-tinted glasses from our organisations.

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Deep listening is a theme that has emerged from the last few conversations. Listening is about slowing down, about building empathy, and deep respect for another human and their thinking being.

This week my guest is Luke Hockley, and the theme of listening once again emerges. Luke is a performer who is listening to himself and creating spaces where others can be seen and heard. But Luke does not stop here: he and draws upon listening as a precursor to action.

Listening, movement, contemplation and expression: we explore some of my favourite topics in this conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening.

If you do enjoy listening to Luke, you may also enjoy listening to Carmen Hawker or Summer Edwards.

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The implications of a 2-degree rise in temperatures had never really sunk in for me. Needless to say, neither had those of a 3-degree increase or 5-degree increase. Listening to a conversation at The Wheeler Centre recently made the potential challenges of rapid climate change significantly more real for me.

Soon afterwards I found myself channel surfing free-to-air TV. It’s not something I normally do but I stumbled across a program about the First Australians living near Alice Springs at the time of European arrival. I was taken by the contrast between the intimate and ancient connection between land and people of the First Australians, and the brutality and arrogance of the European Australians.

Contemplating these two experiences over the next few days, I started to feel a sense of grief. I had heard about this happening to others before but dismissed it as over-sentimentalism and something irrelevant to a truster in humans’ ability to adapt, like myself.

The grief grew slowly. I contemplated that abruptness of the change First Australian’s experienced after tens of thousands of years living close to the land. I found myself thinking that things do sometimes change quickly and dramatically for the worse.

I also contemplated all that has been lost or continues to be ignored. First Australians have much to teach later coming Australians about taking care of a place with tens of future generations in mind. We have treated our environment with such disdain and complacency, and have lost so much of its beauty.

This experience is what prompted me to reach out to one of the speakers from that event at The Wheeler Centre. Her name is Katerina Gaita, and she is the guest on this week’s episode.

Katerina experienced her own degree of grief for our planet, albeit quite a few years before I did. She wrestled with it for quite some time, wondering if there was any point in trying to do anything about it. As she thought about this, she asked herself, “Have I given up hope?” When the answers was a clear “No”, Katerina decided to do all she could to start to reduce and reverse the impacts of rapid climate change.

Katerina and I had a hopeful and contemplative conversation about the reality of the time we are living in, the possible ways of making a meaningful impact, and how each of us can contribute to this with a relatively small amount of effort, and achievable change to how we live.

It was a poignant and uplifting conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening.

If you do enjoy listening to Katerina, you may also enjoy listening to Patrick Jones or Matt Wicking.

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I’m feeling nervous as I make my way to the WeWork co-working space on Collins St, Melbourne. Today I am interviewing somebody who is an expert in something I need to be good at.

I am nervous partly because I am running a bit late. And partly because I have a fear that I am going to be shown up on my own podcast. I have this sense that it is my role as an interviewing to listen deeply to people. To look for the meaning behind what they are saying. To connect disparate parts of their stories into some kind of synthesis.

What if that fails me today? What if I am schooled by the expert in deep listening? What if I am a fraud?

I arrive perfectly on time, somehow managing to bump into Oscar Trimboli in the lift as he was coming to meet me.

We make our way to the place for our interview, and Oscar helps me feel at ease.

Our conversation is thoughtful and spontaneous, and I am left feeling I have learnt something important.

But as I say goodbye and leave, I am struck by the feeling that I missed an opportunity. It takes me a while to put my finger on it, and when I do I realise that is was the opportunity to be vulnerable. To connect and name that sensation that comes across all of us from time to time, that we are not good enough.

Which leads me to make an apology: to you, the audience, and to you Oscar, my guest. I didn’t push my edges in this interview as much as I could have. I didn’t reveal my limitations and seek to learn like a beginner.

So here I attempt to push my edges through text, and I admit I was not listening as well as I could have in this interview. I was concerned that I would be seen as someone who was not really a very good listener. I was focused on how I would come across, rather than tuning into your meanings and flowing with my intuition.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have met you, and to have learnt about my own listening limitations.

——

Oscar Trimboli is on a mission to help 100,000,000 million people become deep listeners. He helps organisations become slower so they might listen to each other more, hear the meaning behind the words, and to sense what the organisation as a whole is trying to say.

It was a privilege to listen to him and to be shaped by him. I hope you are similarly impacted.

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Somehow Lina Patel and I keep on bumping into each other in different contexts: conferences, workshops, and even working together at Code for Australia. And in those different contexts, my admiration has continued to grow for the manner in which she speaks with truth and conviction, stands up for people, moves into discomfort, and fills a room with energy.

One of the things that fascinates me about Lina is the way in which she plays with edges: between joy and ferocity, between what is permitted and what is possible, between power and purpose. In playing with these edges she seems to find ways to bring new things into being, to help people collaborate, and to bring good things into the world.

This bringing good things into the world has been a particular focus since going through a significant transition away from the familiarity of working in the corporate finance world, and into the unfamiliar world of codesign, facilitation and collaboration.

If you enjoy listening to Lina you may also enjoy listening to Ruby Lee on side-hustles and changing the relationship between people and organisations, to Penny Locaso on career change and getting comfortable with discomfort, and David Packman on using a personal crisis as a platform for personal change.

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One of the side benefits for me of creating this podcast is that I get to chat with some of my heroes; people I have admired from a distance for a long period of time.

My guest for this week is in this category. I was once an aspiring urban designer/place-maker, and through exploring this field came across the work of Village Well and Gilbert Rochecouste. This was around 2005, and I was blown away by the behind-the-scenes work they were doing in shaping the city I loved.

Now considered to be one of the most livable places in the world, 30 years ago the city centre of Melbourne was ranked at the other end of this scale. There have been many factors in enabling this turnaround. People like Rob Adams, Jan Gehl, and of course Gilbert being some of the influencers. It’s hard to imagine that 30 years ago barely anybody lived within the centre; eating outside was considered ludicrous, and heritage buildings were available at what would today be considered bargain prices.

In our conversation, Gilbert talks about the process of placemaking within Melbourne. Of helping people come together around a place; of considering the role and rights of non-humans in creating place; and of bring joy, justice and connection to communities.

We also talk about the story that is emerging in our city. Of the long history that Aboriginal Australians have with space, and what can be done to incorporate this wisdom into the city we are all creating.

I am captivated by cities. I love exploring them by foot and trying to work out what makes a place work and flow. I think this conversation captures the role cities can play in bringing people together, and how we can contribute to that. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

If you enjoyed listening to Gilbert you may also enjoy listening to Jirra Lulla Harvey on emerging Aboriginal entrepreneurs, and Maria Cameron on peacemaking within the suburbs.

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There is a moment when I am talking with David Holmgren that I notice a shift in myself. He has been sharing the origins of the concept of permaculture in the 1970s, and how quickly it was picked up by people at the time. It seems that some people became quite fervent about it, seeing it as a way that they were going to change the world.

What I gather from our conversation though, is that David was not so sure about using permaculture in this way. He believed in it and wanted to see the ideas grow, but he did not think that it was going to be the vehicle to right all the wrongs of the world. Perhaps in part because of this, for many years he stayed out of the permaculture limelight while continuing to implement its ideas through his permaculture design practice.

The shift that happened to me was because I had made some judgements about myself and assumptions about David. I had assumed that as a person who was living in such an authentic way and had been part of bringing such an important new idea into being, he would look at the way I was living as pitiful in comparison.

But what I experienced, in reality, was a deep humility and honest connection from somebody who wants to share the wisdom he has learnt to this point in his life. Somebody who does not assume that their idea is going to be the way the world is saved. But rather sees that in doing their bit, in helping a few live in a different way, that this may cascade into something bigger down the track.

In many ways, this is the essence of subtle disruption: making the small change that is within our power, the change that can have a positive impact on our own life or the lives of those around us, and then experiencing the aggregating impact had by all of those subtle disruptions across people and through time.

David’s latest book is called Retrosuburbia; a handbook for those who are anticipating a future operating with much less energy than we have available today, and who are looking for practical wisdom on how to create a different way of living for themselves.

His first book, Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements, was co-written almost forty years ago Bill Mollison and was the start of what could be one of the most important ideas to come out of Australia.

It was an honour to be able to speak with David, somebody who has had a direct and indirect impact on many of the other guests on this podcast. Some of them include Maria Cameron who I spoke with about a retrosuburbian community in Heidelberg West, Patrick Jones or Matt Devine who both have families that live by these principles, and Samuel Alexander who is working to convey these ideas to a broader audience.

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