*Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Robin:

So, we’re excited today to have Jon Berghoff with us from xchange Approach. I learned about xchange in August of last year, so almost a year ago, and I’m thrilled with their protocol. Jon will explain some of that in just a moment in the context of a book that Kathy and I are writing. We were looking for a model of leadership and naturally turned to nature for inspiration.

We observed the beautiful formations called murmuration of thousands of starlings, which you’ve probably seen flying through the skies. They are a beautiful example of collective impact, collaboration, resiliency, adaptability, and unity. We transferred the learnings from our research into human life experiences. In our book, we present these insights and invite the readers to explore them by applying them to both their personal and professional leadership, as well as all aspects of life.

With my love and connection to xchange, we wanted to bring them in to talk about their approach and how to expand into murmuration in the way that they do it. So, welcome, Jon. Thank you for agreeing to have this conversation. If you would, please share whatever you’d like as a brief overview of xchange.

Jon:

Sure. Thank you, Robin. I’m happy to chat with you, and I’m looking forward to what you all are creating with your book. Our passion at xchange has, for quite some time, really centered around this question: How do we unlock the potential? How do we tap into the potential available when groups of people come together for various reasons, whether to learn together, solve a problem, or work together? Our niche focus is on what we’ve learned and how to apply it to designing and facilitating different types of meetings and gatherings.

Our interest overlaps significantly with what you are working on with this book. One of our guiding questions, even before our company was founded, was: What brings a human system alive more naturally, faster, and more effectively than ever before? This also led us to learn from any living system. There’s a lot of inspiration we’ve gained by trying to understand how, when groups of people come together, there is this collective capacity or collective intelligence. We have a lot of curiosity around that, and I think you do as well. I’m happy to go wherever that takes us.

Robin:

That’s beautiful. I love the idea of inspirations so we’ll jump off from that. With us, we saw the inspiration of potential greatness when we looked at the murmuration, and we call it a vision of murmuration. So, when you consider, think about, or watch these beautiful birds in their murmurations, what inspires you about that?

Jon:

I think there’s something mysterious, something magical. I was on a paddleboard this morning, surrounded by wildlife on the lake right behind my house. There are these enormous turtles that have been showing up lately. When I look at them, I have a similar reaction to when I think about a flock of murmuring birds. There’s a mysterious spirit that somehow connects them all. Whether it’s the turtles, the trees, or the birds, I don’t think they had a meeting to talk about who’s going to turn left and who’s going to turn right. I’m in awe and really curious about what that organizing intelligence is and how we can learn from that when we come together in our everyday meetings.

Robin:

Exactly. That’s why, when we looked at the images of murmuration, we wondered, how do they do that? So, that’s what got us into that same exploration. As we learned about it, or as we looked at it, we discovered there’s a transformational interconnected journey that occurs. It starts with an individual bird and expands to a team of seven. The research specifically mentions seven, and then many of those teams come together into a larger group.

We call the individual bird “ME,” and that’s the critical starting point for any change—the individual’s responsibility. Then they move into a team, which, in human terms, could be a team of four to seven, representing collective support. From there, they move into a larger group, which we call “US,” a collective movement. This movement leads to collective action and cohesive action. We love the idea of an entanglement or energetic intertwining that occurs, so every “ME” is still a “ME” within the “US”. They don’t lose themselves; they’re still part of the group.

So, how does the xchange Approach access the strengths of the individual, which we call the “ME”, while expanding into a team “WE” or a larger group of “US”?

Jon:

Yeah, I love the question. Before we founded xchange, a lot of what led to the development of our method came from my experiences as an executive at Vitamix Corporation about 15 years ago. I noticed we were trying to achieve several things simultaneously: creating positive change, dealing with difficult changes across our sales organization, getting results (which many people cared about the most), and multiplying knowledge across the sales force. I had a deep interest in fostering a healthy culture because previous experiences taught me that healing our culture was crucial to achieving all these business results.

The reason I bring this up is that we kind of accidentally realized that the greatest leverage we had to achieve these goals was when we came together in meetings—whether it was 20, 50, 100, or 500 of us all at once. Over the years, what we learned at Vitamix eventually became the xchange method. We found that we could leverage what’s available collectively to bring people alive individually.

I’ll give you an example. We would run a meeting and say, “The purpose of this meeting is for all our salespeople to learn and share information so they can all improve.” No one would argue with that. Over the years, we learned that people are actually better at learning and contributing their learnings to each other when we focus on how we connect them. When we connect people in ways that foster a collective sense of belonging, individuals come alive much faster.

What we’ve witnessed again and again is that bringing people together collectively can actually bring individuals alive, which in turn contributes to a positive collective experience. It’s a loop that works back and forth.

Robin:

Yeah, absolutely. I 100% agree. We started at the “ME” side and moved up. We also recognize that if you start with the vision of murmuration, and that’s where the culture wants to be, it feeds and educates what has to happen at the “ME & WE” level. We are totally aligned with whichever direction we go, whether it’s on an individual or the organizational or cultural level. As you mentioned, and as we also discuss in the book, we’re not just talking about business organizations. This applies to any organization, whether that’s your family unit, a church, a nonprofit, or whatever. It’s all of our collective experiences, wherever they show up in our lives.

We’re also inviting people to step into a new way of walking, to see things differently, and to choose to change. We’re asking them to choose to change how they explore and navigate. We’ve titled these the “ABC’s,” which is part of the title of our book. To explain it briefly, the “A” represents “awareness”, meaning “to attend to the now and be present.” The “B” represents “beliefs”, which is “to adapt to new perspectives”, to be open and curious. The “C” relates to “connect, act as one”, which means engaging with a greater purpose. Always have that purpose in mind as we’re making decisions and moving forward.

So, taking the concepts of “awareness”, “beliefs”, and “connect, act as one”, in your experience with xchange, what do you see as possible for transformation? What have you seen, and what do you desire?

Jon:

Yeah, well, I’m going to start with beliefs. What I’ve seen is that there is potential that is available, and I think it’s actually the role of whether someone identifies as a leader or, as many of the folks we work with are, consultants or coaches. Sometimes we broadly just use the phrase change agent. One of the things we’ve seen and learned is how important it is to believe in the potential of a group.

If you’ve ever been part of a team or an organization, or in our case, an event or a gathering that has been transformational, it can be easier to believe in the potential of what happens when we gather. If you haven’t, it can be harder to believe in that. In our case, we’ve had the privilege of seeing what is possible, and that fuels our belief in the potential that’s available when we come together. Unfortunately, what we’ve also seen is that it’s not always the default. It’s not always the norm that we actually tap into what’s available when we come together to meet. I mean, how many people walk out of meetings thinking there could have been a better use of time or that it should have been an email or that now they need to have another meeting, right?

So, there’s a lot of opportunity here. We can talk about the technique and the strategy, and we have systems and tools for how to design and facilitate meetings, but it actually has to start with the belief in that potential that lives when a group of people walk into a room. That’s the first thing that comes up.

Then, I want to make a comment about awareness—tend to the now. I wrote that down when you said it. It’s a lot easier to write down than it is to do. I’ll just say one thing about that. We live in a time where, I’ll speak for myself, I’m here with you having this conversation, and I’ve gone out of my way to be present. I really have to go out of my way to be present because whether it’s the digital things that are going to ding and ping and vie for my attention or the fact that it happens so much that it’s my mind wandering what’s going on in the background, combined with the stresses of being a dad or an entrepreneur but then compounded by this moment in time with all sorts of chaos and conflict and disruption, it’s challenging.

I think tending to the now is a lot easier to write down than it is to do, both individually and for anyone who has the privilege and responsibility of bringing groups together. Part of our goal is to teach people—and you’ve been a part of our work for a while—that really masterful leadership of a meeting, event, gathering, or workshop largely comes down to how we manage people’s energy and attention. It’s easier to say than it is to do, and we have to take responsibility for doing the work so that we have our own ability to attend to the now as we’re trying to invite others to do the same.

We could talk a lot about acting as one, but I’ll stop there. Those are the things that come up when you say that.

Robin:

Well, thank you, and I’d love to hear more about your perception of the “Act as One.”

Jon:

In 2016, around the time we were founding xchange, long before we had actually developed our method and were teaching it to others, I had just left Vitamix a couple of years prior. We knew we wanted to support heart-centered or purpose-driven leaders and change agents, but we weren’t exactly sure where to focus.

I was at a meeting hosted by an organization called Conscious Capitalism, and they had brought in a speaker whose name I had heard but whose work I wasn’t familiar with: Joseph Jaworski. I did a little research before the meeting and found out he had written a book called Synchronicity and another book called Source. He was previously an executive who did scenario planning for Royal Dutch Shell, one of the oldest and largest energy companies in the world. Here was this guy talking about synchronicity and tapping into inner knowledge and creation.

I’ll always remember sitting right in the front row and listening to Joseph talk about how there is this capacity that groups of people have, and one of the responsibilities lies with a facilitator. That facilitator needs to do the inner work, and when they do, they can create the conditions where a group of people can act as a single intelligence. I remember the moment he said that, thinking I feel like I’ve witnessed that at Vitamix. That one phrase of his became a focal point for us into the future.

When you ask about “Act as One,” over the years we’ve become known in the marketplace as a method that consultants use to design and facilitate meetings, or that large conferences use to design and facilitate meetings. And if we were really trying to say, what does it really mean to act as one in practical terms? When we lead groups, we bring in questions and conversations at a scale that is really interesting.

Dr. Ron Fry, one of the original pioneering creators of a methodology called Appreciative Inquiry, which is baked into our approach, taught me years ago that a good way to think about an organization is as nothing more than a constellation of conversations. The work we do is designing questions that prompt conversations, and we do it at scale. What’s amazing is when you have 100 people in a room all exploring their shared purpose, learning from their past successes and struggles, or envisioning a shared future. I mean you look at it and this is murmuration. And, they are acting as one.

In very simple terms, what we’re doing is scaling up curiosity through a methodology and a set of tools. When you scale up curiosity, you’re actually scaling up a bunch of other healthy dynamics. So that’s the beginning of me describing what act as one looks like, sounds like, and feels like in our world.

Robin:

Beautiful. Thank you, Jon, for that. Yeah, Jaworski—I read his book probably in the 80s, and it was just mind-blowing. So, speaking of moving towards organizational systems, our history has been a hierarchical style. There’s a leader, and it runs down the pyramid. There’s been a transition, and Conscious Capitalism is one that’s very impactful in moving from that hierarchical standard to more of a leaderful ecosystem-type of leadership. In this model, anyone at any level can step into a role of leadership, whatever that is defined as for that experience. We believe it has to start with a mindset, and then it can become a reality. You have to believe you can work that way, and then it moves into reality.

So, from your perspective, how can we collectively move faster and more efficiently towards that leaderful organizational concept?

Jon:

It’s a really good question. It’s one that we’ve been curious about. There are some examples and bright spots, but it’s also really good to acknowledge that many others have been asking this question. Many of those at the forefront have asked, what is the future of what it means to organize, lead or manage? Almost all the people that we have worked with or come across; they all confess that it’s the future that is not yet the norm. It’s not widespread, and there aren’t many examples.

Gary Hamel is a good example; he is the most widely cited contributor in the history of Harvard Business Review. He wrote The Future of Management years ago, and at the beginning of that book, he says, “I have more questions than examples and answers.” One of his questions is: How do you invite ideas and innovation to come from everywhere?

Another contemporary, Frederic Laloux, wrote “Reinventing Organizations” and talks about three levels of consciousness. It’s a beautiful invitation, but there are only so many examples. One of the original contributors to this conversation is Margaret Wheatley. She’s been a personal mentor to me for years, and she wrote about this in the early ‘90s. Twenty-five years later, she put out another book saying, “I don’t think it landed the first time, and I don’t know if it will land this time, but I’ll try again.”

What I’ve been curious about is the common threads among those who have been asking this question the longest and have genuinely tried to find answers. The common threads that I’ve seen include, first of all, something that you are right at the center of: the need for us to think about managing and leading through a new metaphor. This new metaphor no longer sees an organization as a machine where we push the button or pull the lever to try and get more performance more efficiently. That metaphor made a lot of sense and got us to the point where you and I are talking about Zoom right now. But it came from another time. Now, we need a metaphor of an organization as a flock of birds, a forest, a living system. This metaphor is hard for people to grasp because it’s not the norm and it’s not what’s baked into many of our institutions.

For example, my kids go to great schools, but you can still see they are sitting in rows, being prepared in a way that made more sense a long time ago. Many meetings today are still led with a few people providing answers for everyone else.

A starting point for practical solutions to invite self-organization and natural hierarchy is humility—not just at the top, but collectively. If we can flip it from every time we come together, I’m trying to prove my point, to every time we come together, we’re open to each other’s perspectives and where we’re coming from, I think we need that collective humility, which is really just curiosity. Most of the problems that organizations are trying to solve are things no one on the team, including me, has ever done. So, I have to be open and curious to ideas from others on our team, not because of their titles or experience, but because none of us individually have the answer. So, we better be open to the collective ideas that come.

So, I think an embodiment of curiosity is essential. I also think teams and organizations today are under immense pressure and stress, especially as they strive to achieve what they haven’t done before; this demand often exceeds their perceived resources, leading to serious mental health issues. If people aren’t capable of tapping into their creativity, we need curiosity and compassion. We need heart, whatever you want to call it. We need to remember that prioritizing the wellbeing of the humans on the team is crucial. Without it, they won’t even be capable of accessing their creativity. So, really having a concern for the whole health of each person in an organization is important today. I think it will become increasingly important as teams and organizations try to solve things they’ve never solved. So, those are the first things that come to mind.

Robin:

Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Thank you. I love the idea of the wellness of the whole being, which again, is the “ME” and the whole being of the “WE”, and then that impacts the whole being of “US”.

One of the things you referenced was being open, curious, and humble. What’s interesting is that it aligns beautifully with our research about the starlings, the birds that create murmuration. They have three innate behaviors, which we’ve adapted to human terms: they step up, which means they initiate the first action; they step back to allow others to step up; and then they know when to step together by embracing what we call mutual trust and respect. In your work, how have you seen these identified bird behaviors—step up, step back, and step together—demonstrated?

Jon:

I was just writing that down. I love that. One thing that comes to mind is what gets in the way of people stepping up. If people can’t step up, the whole process of stepping back and stepping together doesn’t quite work out. If they never step up, they’re never truly engaged, and they can’t do anything together. We have terms like quiet quitting to describe this disengagement.

One thing that comes up is how important it is to how we lead, especially in the xchange model. We always convert “how we lead” to “how we gather” because that’s where we have the most leverage. That’s where the murmuration of people often happens in ways we can

practically understand how to affect it. In a team, organization, or meeting, one of the things that stops people from stepping up is that they don’t feel safe doing so.

We become really curious about what safety is, why it matters, and how to enable it. As you probably know, Amy Edmondson, widely cited as a pioneering contributor to this topic, wrote The Fearless Organization. She talked about how safety doesn’t mean we’re all nice to each other.

It means we can take risks, which in everyday terms means we can say what we need to say when we need to say it. I mean, that’s why most teams and organizations fail—they don’t have the environment where people can say what needs to be said when it needs to be said. I think that’s why personal relationships will struggle. Safety is the condition where we can take those risks. 

If someone is a leader by title or wants to be a leader by behavior—which I think is the most valuable form of leadership—understanding that they can do certain things to help others feel safe is crucial. For example, when someone around me makes a mistake, how do I respond? If I reactively and unconsciously shame them, they’re not going to step up again. But if I honor them for taking a risk, which we’re going to need, and say, “What can we learn from that?” they’ll continue to step up.

For leaders who want others to feel safe, if curiosity and humility are at the center, they must show their own flexibility. Do I reveal when I’m open to changing my mind because of something you said? Modeling this behavior—not commanding or coercing it—helps others feel safe. There’s a long list of things that can contribute to others feeling safe. Acknowledging that I don’t have all the answers is a fast way for others to feel safe because they won’t have all the answers either.

To me, that’s a very practical place where we can explore how to enable people to step up in the first place. Once people are willing to step up, if we have humility, we’re willing to step back, and then we can do things together. That was the first thing that came to mind when you shared that.

Robin:

Absolutely. Yeah. That critical aspect of feeling like you belong and that you’re not going to be kicked out of the tribe for giving a different perspective is essential. We can agree to disagree, and that’s part of the safety idea. Thank you for your insights on that.

To expand, one of the things I’ve heard you speak of, and which we totally agree with, is that whether the collective is the organization or in nature, there are fields of energy at play. A lot of people don’t want to believe in energy, but we are all energy. If you look at anything from a quantum perspective, all we are is energy and empty space.

We perceive that the individual energy field “ME” is the field of activity. “WE” is the field of relationships, and “US” is the context for meaning and purpose. And when all of this comes together in harmony, then it actually creates what is known as a fourth field (convergent whole field) or collected wisdom as you mentioned earlier. We visualize, see, feel, and hear this convergence of fields as a murmuration. What do you see, hear, and feel this fourth field as?

Jon:

I’m just writing down what you’re sharing. I love it. I think this fourth field is the experience that’s available when we organize and operate in ways where the individual, relational, and collective are all experiencing coherence—using a HeartMath term. I think this fourth field is where the sum of the parts becomes greater than just the addition of those parts.

That’s where I think there’s a bit of a mystery. There’s something magical and mysterious that’s available when we come together in ways where, individually, relationally, and collectively, there’s health. That’s the first thing that comes up for me.

Robin:

Exactly. We want to experience that fourth field, but people have a hard time naming it or describing how to get there. But they know when they get there. The feelings and emotions that I would attribute to it are peace, connection, and belonging. What are some of the words you would use to describe that field? What is that feeling?

Jon:

Yeah, I think of everything through the lens of how we design and facilitate group experiences. When we organize in certain ways, at the individual level, people go from not just disengaged, but often demoralized, whether at work or at home, to absolutely thriving. I think that fourth field contributes relationally, not just to people who are disconnected but there’s distrust and, in some cases, experience toxicity, to really feeling safe where they can authentically have deep, meaningful human connections.

I think that the fourth field enables collectively, not just dysfunction, which is not the worst there is—dysfunction unfortunately is more normal than not, at least from what we see—but the worst thing that is happening collectively is this feeling of shared victimhood. There’s nothing that brings a group down collectively more than the feeling of shared victimhood. On the other side, as you said, there’s a connection to shared meaning and purpose. And we are actually co-creating where we’re going, who we are, and how we’re going to get there.

This fourth field, or convergent field, has a combination effect. When we are thriving individually, relationally, and collectively, there are different names for it. You asked what words we use, and I mentioned “magical” and “mysterious.” Others might call it a “connection to a consciousness of connectedness.” We can find many words to try and describe this indescribable thing, but when we tap into it, it elevates all the other levels. And that’s really cool. I feel like we’ve witnessed this through trainings and workshops. When that happens, people say things like, “This was a collective experience of healing.” What’s interesting is we often run events where we don’t say that is our goal, although privately I might say it’s a beautiful goal. Yet, to me, that’s the most meaningful collective outcome we could create. This almost hard-to-describe and hard-to-believe possibility that when everything lines up the right way, and you connect to that fourth field, it becomes possible.

Robin:

Absolutely. It allows for the magic and the mystery. I’ve watched people have experiences in your workshops and events, and it impacts at the group level, but each individual also has that evolution that occurs within them. So, along this journey today, you’ve shared some of your inspirations and aspirations. But just in closing, what do you see as your aspirations for an evolutionary legacy?

Jon:

Well, I think in the context of xchange, our highest aspiration is that what we’re learning, and what we continue to learn, becomes more widespread in influencing how people design and facilitate the way they gather. I realize “gather” is an interesting word, but to your point, our work is brought into all sorts of environments where the goals are to connect, learn, or create a sense of belonging. There’s almost unlimited opportunity there.

Our big aspiration is that our method continues to spread. I believe it will, and it becomes more widely embraced and accepted as a healthy way to approach how we gather. This leads to all sorts of other enjoyable aspirations as a business. But we have to do our part. As an entrepreneur, it’s cool when things work, and it’s a challenge to bring something to the world that is almost the opposite of what people are used to. Our team and I are embracing that challenge because we’re up against these shackles, these handcuffs, this invisible constraint that people don’t even realize is there when they think about what it means to organize, manage, lead, or put on a meeting.

We’re embracing the challenge of choosing to stand for gathering in ways where being present isn’t the high aspiration—it’s the entry point to where we make magic happen. In a lot of meetings, if people are present, that’s considered a win. For us, that’s just the starting point. We’re up against some cultural norms, but we’re great with that because we believe what we’re doing is good. It’s good for people; it’s healthy. So, we’re going to keep working at it no matter how hard it is.

Robin:

Beautiful. Well, that’s that vision of meaning and purpose that can keep us moving through the challenges. I love that. Let’s stay curious and focused and see what the mystery wants to bring us. So, thank you, Jon, very much for your insights and for sharing your time and energy. I appreciate it, and I agree with the aspiration of xchange moving out into greater visibility in the world.

Jon:

Thank you, Robin. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed talking about this.