The Nonsense Dialogues – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Nonsense Dialogues

David and Randal

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/66d. Total Eps: 14

Welcome to the Nonsense Dialogues. "Dialogues" because we would like to think we sound like Socrates and Plato at the Academy. "Nonsense" because we think we sound like the great sceptics - Hume, Wittgenstein, Kant and so on. Actually, neither is true. Randal and David just like to argue about organisational and social psychological theory and practice in an invariably vain attempt to figure out what works and to complain about the myths, half-truths and just plain wrong shite that pass as good science and good practice in the workplace. And we are just conceited and deluded enough to think that someone else may be interested in listening to us do so.

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Why do people believe such obvious bullsh1t?

Episode 13

Thursday, April 3, 2025 • Duration 01:08:22

Sorry for the delay between episodes but Randal and I have just been freed from an El Salvadorian prison after Border Security found episodes of the Nonsense Dialogues in our phones. This experience may have influenced the topic of this podcast where we explore the psychology behind why people believe obvious lies, using Donald Trump as a starting point. Yes dear listener, we have succumbed and have been sucked into the Trump Maelstrom.

Thankfully, we soon leave him far behind and rather than the usual approach of examining the pathology of liars, we take an audience focused approach to understand why do people believe lies. We discuss the cognitive processes that lead to belief, the influence of followers, and the role of authority and credibility in shaping perceptions. We then provide the public service of providing our listeners with strategies to resist being influenced by bullshit. We discuss the need for empathy, rapport building, and shared goals in persuasion. We propose, perhaps unsurprisingly, scepticism as a method to counter the lies and bullshit that surround us all in an informational miasma.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.

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Have we actually learned anything new about leadership in the past 4000 years?

Season 1 · Episode 12

Monday, November 18, 2024 • Duration 01:23:09

In a world increasingly looking backwards (Make Leadership Great Again!)1, Randal and David thought perhaps they too should look way back for inspiration. So they invited leading international leadership and coaching psychologist, Gaj Ravichandra to discuss leadership through the lens of Eastern philosophies, particularly the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.

As expected, the Gita proved to be a great starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of leadership development. This included the role of self-awareness, storytelling, cultural contexts, kindness, and particularly, the contribution of the scientific process to the advancement of our understanding of the efficacy of leadership development. This last point proved to be a bit of a trigger for a “vigorous” discussion between Gaj and David - who jointly proposed that our knowledge and practice of leadership has not really progressed much in 4000 years - and Randal, who vehemently defended the contribution of modern science. Have a listen and see which side you come down on.

1 Too soon? Or just not funny in the first place?

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Power is a team not an individual sport

Wednesday, August 7, 2024 • Duration 01:17:14

How to become more powerful and successful using the power of others.

That was going to be our shamelessly clickbait title for this episode but the Olympics are currently on and we thought we'd instead piggyback on everyone's excitement over that.
This episode does indeed explore the concept of power, where does it come from and how can one gain and deploy it. To help us, we have invited Dr Andrew Frain, a social psychologist, who like Randal, is a true believer in the social identity approach. The Nonsense we address this week is the conventional individualistic approach to power as characterised by French and Raven’s bases of power. Instead, Andrew presents John Turner’s model for understanding how power can be gained and deployed through leadership, authority and coercion. We all then discuss the implications of this with each of us taking a different perspective. Randal shows off his intellectual pretensions by quoting Nietzsche and David tries to be the cool kid in school by taking a Marxist approach to the distribution of power in organisations. On the way, we cover the absence of power as a topic in management education, how to resist power, the shaping of collective realities in deriving and sustaining power, and we start to discuss the application of all this to improving management, leadership and change in modern organisations. However, as usual, we ran out of time and decided to carry that discussion over into Part 2 of our exploration of power. That episode will be coming soon. Promise.

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Resilience racket or corporate calm? What works when building resilience, psychological health and well-being in the workplace.

Season 1 · Episode 11

Wednesday, July 10, 2024 • Duration 01:37:28

Resilience racket or corporate calm? What works when building resilience, psychological health and well-being in the workplace.

In this episode David and Randal share their microphones with Diya Dey, an organisational psychologist and leader in the area of evidence based approaches to enhancing psychological health and wellbeing in the workplace. Their discussion explores the concept of resilience in the workplace, its historical context, and its impact on mental health. It delves into the components of resilience, the role of mindfulness, and the challenges of implementing resilience programs in organisations. The conversation delves* into the evidence base for resilience training, and the need for a systemic approach to mental health in the workplace. It also explores the concept of well-being, the SMART work design model, and the importance of group identification in fostering resilience. The impact of workload and the cultural aspects of organisational change are also discussed. The conversation delves further into the concept of resilience, organisational justice, and the systemic approach to building resilient communities. It explores the interplay between individual and situational factors, as well as the importance of prevention and control of controllables. The discussion also touches on the challenges of screening for resilience and the need for a holistic approach to psychosocial risk management.

*Ok Ok busted…we got an AI to generate this summary. The word delves was the giveaway wasn’t it? Anyway, we thought it did a pretty good job. Lacked our usual smart aleck tone but probably more informative. Hopefully, it has encouraged you to listen to the episode. We think it’s one of our good ones as Diya really does know what she is talking about here. It’s motivated us to seek out more collaborators and guests. Watch this space for new episodes on power at work, military leadership and bad/zombie leaders.

PS Sorry for the long break between episodes. Both of us got busy and two guest speakers cancelled their sessions. No Christmas presents for them this year. But we managed to get one of them back so expect another episode in the not too distant future.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others. We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.

We need to speak about Elon

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 • Duration 01:08:19

Following from our previous episode on Bad Leaders, we look for lessons in leadership from the case study of Citizen Musk. David takes a psychologist’s perspective and examines if Elon’s self reported Autism Spectrum Disorder and his apparent narcissism offers both explanations for his combination of extraordinary achievements and appalling / idiosyncratic behaviours. Randal questions if he can be considered a leader at all - why not just an entrepreneur?

We go on to debate neurodiversity in the workplace, rockets, charismatic leaders, the need for transformational leaders to have complementary transactional managers, and if the social identity approach can help us understand Elon’s appeal. Throughout Randal maintains a very sceptical attitude towards Elon, whilst David speaks as a transitioning fanboy.

The narrative arc of the episode climaxes with what appears to be a reconciliation between the two protagonists but then, in a stunning and unexpected twist, we end up shouting at each other yet again over what we should take from Elon’s story. Plus ça change…

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Bad Leaders - what can we learn from them?

Season 1 · Episode 8

Thursday, October 19, 2023 • Duration 54:45

In this episode we take a positive approach to discussing leadership development by considering what can we learn about good leadership from bad leaders. And also, can bad leaders grow into good ones? Elon is mentioned. But will it be as a bad leader or as a champion of the iterative fail and learn development model? Listen and find out!

Our conclusions (spoiler alert) is that leadership has to be learned and that even initially inept leaders can become good ones with the right mindset and sustained iterative efforts to learn and improve. Good news!

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Episode 7 Prof Mark Williams - a Neuroscientist's view on psychometrics and leadership

Season 1 · Episode 7

Sunday, October 8, 2023 • Duration 01:26:30

We are very pleased to welcome Prof Mark Williams to the Nonsense Dialogues. Mark is the author of the best selling book “The Connected Species” and is a cognitive neuroscientist with an extensive international career. Randal invited him to present the neuro cognitive perspective of psychometric assessments with the obvious expectation that Mark would join him in denigrating the whole domain. Well, Mark sort of does do this but also provides a great range of insights into the challenges of transferring psychological science to practical applications. David does his best to defend the interests of the psychometric industrial complex but finds himself being less antagonistic than he expected.

Did we come to a conclusion? You’ll have to listen to find out.

All in all, we think having a guest with actual expertise greatly improved the quality of the discussion. Have a listen and see what you think. We’ll probably do it again. And sooner, if we get some positive feedback on this episode.

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Episode 6 Is Mindfulness in the workplace snake oil, helpful or a distraction?

Wednesday, August 30, 2023 • Duration 55:46

Randal has a lingering suspicion about anything that reminds him of cults, mysticism or good old fashioned snake oil. What has been attracting his sceptical attention of late are the various claims made by the proponents of Mindfulness for improving psychological health, well being and performance in the workplace.
This episode is mostly Randal checking in on the evidence around these issues and best practice on mental health in the workplace with an authoritative practitioner in workplace mental health who has over 40 years of professional experience as a registered allied mental health practitioner. Unfortunately, that person didn't turn up so he spoke to David instead.

PS. Just a small request. If you like this rubbish and think someone you know might also like it, please pass on a link and recommendation. Word of mouth and recommendations are the best way for the Nonsense Dialogues to grow. Also please mention and recommend us on social media, in the campus common room, at the Qantas Chairman's Lounge; wherever you think prospective Nonsense Dialogues aficionados may be. Thank you.

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The Nostalgia Episode

Season 1 · Episode 5

Friday, June 23, 2023 • Duration 59:37

Where Randal and David unfurl their inner Boomer and look fondly back on how leaders used to develop before those horrid consultants came along and ruined everything.

Was leadership development much better in the past – slow, natural, organic and bespoke – compared to our modern, industrialised model of rapidly producing leaders in bulk by force moulding them into a generic corporate leadership template?

But is this just a nostalgia driven view of preindustrial leadership development which unfairly depreciates the more deliberate modern “artificial” approach? David draws the analogy between leadership development and the Japanese practice of growing melons inside a rectangular box so as to make them fit better into display shelves and perhaps produce a more aesthetically pleasing uniform shape. He is way too self satisfied with his own cleverness in making this analogy. Please don’t encourage him anymore as his ego is already insufferable.

This takes us down the path of do the competency profiles (the moulds) help produce ineffective but compliant leaders? And is this any better than the inheritors of the Human Potential Movement who aim to make better leaders by unlocking the infinite potential that lies within each of us…man. ✌️

And in a diversity and inclusion prioritised world, shouldn’t we be changing the organisations we work within to be accommodating of leaders who aren’t old, rich, white men or at the very least, be better environment in which to lead? Maybe it’s not our leaders who are ineffective but our organisations, and we need to be developing them not our individual leaders?

We also briefly address the issue of the individual motivation of participants in leadership development program. Perhaps the failure of the collective mindset in leadership is reflected in the motivation of LD participants for personal career success rather than advancing the common good? But is Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand is right even about leadership and we all benefit from the selfish ambitions of our leaders? If you disagree with that or anything else we say, please make an angry post on our Twitter account @NonsenseDilogs.

Next time, we’ll bring you some case studies of our experiences in developing leaders. Until then, it’s goodnight from me and it’s goodnight from him.

Episode 4B Leadership Development that works better than all that stuff we've been criticising.

Season 1 · Episode 4

Tuesday, June 6, 2023 • Duration 32:30

In episode 4 part A we talked shite about leadership development practices and in this next episode, part 4B, we explore what we think effective leadership development programs should do to be actually effective in developing leadership for results.

To save space, here is a summary of the episode as a series of lists.

First list:

Leadership programs should:

Be tailored to the organisation’s strategy and people.
Focused on non trivial strategic changes that leads to a distinctive team identity and sustainable performance.
Aimed at the group level rather than solely focused on individual leaders.
Long term changes require long term interventions not just a single workshop or point of intervention.

Second List:

In our view the 5R leadership development program is, at present, the best evidence-based approach to helping people become better leaders. It is based on the decades of research into the social identity approach and developed by a team led by Prof Alex Haslam at University of Queensland.

The 5Rs are:

Readying - Why do we matter? Raising awareness of the importance groups and social identity to leadership.
Reflecting - Who are we? Understanding followers.
Representing - What are we about and what do we want to be? Clarifying group aspirations and values.
Realising - How do we become what we want to be? Implementing strategies to achieve group goals.
Reporting - Are we becoming what we want to be? Monitoring progress to group goals.

For a more extensive presentation of the 5Rs and the whole area of social identity leadership we recommend you read Haslam, Reicher and Platow’s “The New Psychology of Leadership” Second Edition, 2020.

Third List:

And once again our 4Cs.

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The Nonsense Dialogues – Details, episodes & analysis

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