Reimagine Episode Four

Halla Tomasdottir [00:00:03] We know that the world is broken. We know that all of our systems need to be upgraded. The question is, are we choosing to be the leaders that show up in a way that allows us to come together to solve these great big challenges fast enough and at the scale that they require? 

Peter Drobac [00:00:33] Hello and welcome back to Reimagine: System Reset Edition. I'm Peter Drobac. We're continuing our look at the big existential crises of this new decade and what it will take to reimagine and reset our broken systems. And in this episode, we've got a real treat in store for you. We're talking global economic reset with a woman who was very nearly Iceland's president and is now leading a much bigger movement. Halla Thomasdottir.

Halla Tomasdottir [00:01:04] Please come to Iceland, Iceland is a fantasy country in so many ways. 

Peter Drobac [00:01:08] This is not your average discourse on economic reform that you might expect from a top CEO. Hala is such good company and she's not afraid to bring the personal into the professional. In fact, she actively encourages it. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:01:21] I'm still going to run for president, even if you have all those doubts. 

Peter Drobac [00:01:25] So we chat about the perks of her imposter syndrome and the personal motivation behind her presidential campaign, as well as the pitfalls of hubris syndrome, the crisis of conformity and leadership, and the tools we need to lead effectively in an entangled world. Born in Iceland, Halla started her leadership career in corporate America, working for Mars and Pepsi-Cola. She was the first female CEO of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce and later went on to co-found an investment firm which brought feminine values into finance. Notably, that company survived the economic meltdown in Iceland. 

Peter Drobac [00:02:06] Today, Halla is the CEO and chief change catalyst of the B team, a coalition of heavyweight business and civil society leaders working to shift the culture of accountability in business to include not only numbers and performance, but people and planet. She also co-chairs Imperative 21 and the Reset campaign, both of which advocate for radical reform of our economic systems. Halla and I started our conversation talking about something we have in common. Both of us helped to found universities. Now in some ways, Reykjavik University in Iceland and University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda couldn't be more different. But there is a common thread. 

Peter Drobac [00:02:49] Both universities have placed entrepreneurship at their core. I asked Halla about her experience starting a university and what she took from it. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:03:00] Yeah, it's interesting. I had actually lived in the United States for about a decade when I came back to Iceland and coming from a country of 300 million to a country of three hundred and something thousand at the time, I didn't find professional satisfaction in working in the Icelandic business community alone. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:03:18] I wanted to try to do something more transformative. And one of the things that I do really believe America has a lot of is an entrepreneurial spirit. And so when I had been back for less than two years, I was asked to join this founding team of a new university that had this idea that a university could be a force for entrepreneurship and innovation in our country. And that was this really compelling. I had never really thought about becoming involved in the academic world, but building something that would build foundations for entrepreneurship, innovation and maybe challenging some of the conformity and education that had led to me leaving Iceland after my high school education and go to America to go to university and then later do my MBA. So, yeah, I joined the team and I was involved in some way for over a decade. It was a really, really interesting journey, particularly because we got to build everything from the ground up. It was hard, but I do think that two things happened to me at that time. I became absolutely fascinated with leadership and organisational culture. Somehow it is so important to really think about these things when you want to transform things, and it is more difficult to do that. And older and established institutions be it universities, companies or in politics. So I became fascinated with that. And on the other side, I really became fascinated with how women can be a source of great innovation and economic growth and social progress as entrepreneurs, as leaders, because I, I got to set up and run a programme focussed on that. And early in my career, I would never have admitted that I thought maybe there was a difference whether you were a woman or a man in business, because in my 20s in the United States and corporate America, you were not supposed to highlight that you were a woman. You were rather supposed to be a leader who ran with the rules of the game as they were. And the rules of the game had been made by men for men. So I was quite reluctant to be honest, when I was asked to lead this programme to focus on women's entrepreneurship. But it transformed me. I also became a mother to a boy and a girl at the time. And so those years of building a university from the ground up were challenging. But they gave me a real purpose to my life. I felt like the university gave real purpose to some things that we were doing in Iceland. And I think I came to own my passion for gender balanced leadership. So not to say that women do everything better, but I certainly have ever since been absolutely convinced that women and men together make for better leadership teams, make for a better society, make for better parenthood and so on and so forth. 

Peter Drobac [00:06:15] Maybe not everything, but most things. 

Peter Drobac [00:06:17] Right?

Halla Tomasdottir [00:06:18] Well, Peter, only I could say this so openly with you, but yeah, I think we have challenges in a world that's been led by majority male leaders and dare I say, white male leaders from the rich part of the world. 

Peter Drobac [00:06:33] I can't disagree with you. And when you look around the world at what differentiates the countries that have done pretty well during the pandemic and in which ones have really struggled more than resources, more than hospital beds, more than technology, it's been leadership. And and then to take that a step further, you look at the countries that have done really well. Many of them are led by women. You know, Jacinda in New Zealand, Angela Merkel and Germany, Tsai in Taiwan. And, you know, I think there's there's something to that. I don't know what you think?

Halla Tomasdottir [00:07:07] Yes, there is and the jury may still be out, to be honest, so I'm a little careful in celebrating success because we're not through this. Having said that, I think there are some essential qualities and leaders that meet moments of crisis well, and it so happens that women more often embody it. But it certainly isn't a skill set or a mindset that's only available to women. But it's just more common that women have it. And I would say one of them is humility, because I think that leaders who have failed to the most sort of obviously in facing the pandemic and the what it called for from leaders have been the ones who think they know it all and don't need to listen to others or bring in sort of a collaborative effort. The ones who think that they have all the answers have just not done well. And so to me, humility has been a missing leadership skill for a very long time. And hubris and the hubris syndrome has been a cancer in leadership in both politics and in business for way too long. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:08:19] And I'm not sure I like to say it because,

[00:08:25] Yeah, but it's just the fact that women have generally been either tokens or a small minority around the table. So they've never really gotten to a place where they have thought they have all the answers or that they are the best at anything. They always have a bit of this confidence gap, which is maybe an issue on one hand, but it does give them and I've certainly felt it in my own life, this this humility that allows you to reach across the aisle, allows you to reach out to scientists and listen to them and learn from others. Doesn't make you think that you alone have all the answers. So you build coalitions. You are more collaborative. Women are often more heart based. They find empathy and they feel what people are feeling. And so they try to communicate more into that space. We've seen that across the women prime ministers across the Nordic countries have done an extraordinary job at that I think and so I think there are some qualities that I'm not going to say are necessarily biologically placed, but maybe sociologically nurtured more and trained more and allowed more in women leaders. Whereas on the other side, we have sort of trained maybe boys not to be as emotionally intelligent as we need them to be. And we have maybe not given men the licence to embrace this part of them selves in leadership. So I don't think it is as much about women versus men as it is about to embrace more feminine values and styles or a balanced set of masculine and feminine values. Or do you just think that this has sort of been the model behind our economy, behind how we do business, behind how we think of leadership? It's just sort of I know it all. I have all the answers I need to show up with that certainty, with that strength. And yeah, those leaders have failed. We don't have the answers. We don't have the answers to the pandemic, any one person or any one country, nor to climate change, nor to our widening inequality crisis, nor to the breakdown in trust and democracies around the world. And it's going to take a very different leadership style to address any of those. And I think many women are very well poised to do that. 

Peter Drobac [00:10:54] I think you've hit on something so important because our our archetypes of leadership and what great who great leaders are, the sort of square jawed, decisive command and control type, reflects a world that doesn't really exist anymore. Right. In a distributed, entangled, interconnected world, you know, hard power just doesn't go as far as it used to. And, you know, we talk a lot at the Skoll Centre about systems leaders. And and I think that encapsulates a lot of the qualities that you're talking about, the humility, the ability to walk in the shoes of others, the ability to see different perspectives and build coalitions for for collective action. Because all of our problems, as you say, are bigger than any one company, any one country can can solve on their own. Halla, you mentioned something, a term that kind of pricked my ears up, hubris syndrome, when you were talking about leadership. And, you know, we've all heard of impostor syndrome, but what is what is hubris syndrome? 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:11:51] I think that's by no means my term. But there are academics who have been looking at it, and that is this issue of overconfidence. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:12:04] And it is this idea that often happens to leaders who are in power for too long and do not surround themselves with people who challenge them, question them, their ego is unchecked, their belief that they have the answers, that they are the person that can solve the challenges at hand, leads them to overestimate their ability to meet the moment, whatever the moment or the crisis or the challenge is, and underestimate the value of surrounding yourself with others who will make you better. And I actually think that the greatest qualities of a leader are the same qualities of a great team player. And I think being a great team player today is so critical because there again, it's not just about you not being able to solve the challenges in your company alone or in your country. You can no longer tackle any of those big challenges with just a private sector perspective or just the government perspective or just a civil society perspective. We need radical collaboration from all stakeholders to meet the challenges of the magnitude that we are now facing one on top of another. And it's going to take a lot of humility and ideally leaving our egos behind because ego makes you think my way or the highway. And that doesn't work when it is about bringing multiple stakeholders together. It's about a search for better answers. It's about innovation and innovation can come from anywhere. And it is about a different idea about leadership, because we've had this idea that leadership comes from the top. But actually leadership comes from inside of each and every one of us. And some of us are certainly in positions of power and we have disproportionate responsibility or accountability to do right for the next generation. But many people are exhibiting incredible leadership without having any kind of formal position. And that's the kind of leadership that may unleash the very grassroots bottoms up innovation that we need in addition to transforming the leadership that we see in existing positions of power. 

Peter Drobac [00:14:29] Hmm. And I've heard you speak about embracing your inner imposter as well. A lot of us at some point have to overcome that imposter syndrome. But you talk about what it means to kind of keep that with you and stay grounded a little bit as you move along in life. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:14:45] Yeah, I, I definitely suffered the imposter syndrome. And frankly, Peter, most people that I have met who have made any kind of a meaningful difference for others in life, they have had that. And I didn't really realise how many people actually have had episodes of that. Who we look at today I think are hugely successful. I remember when I first shared my imposter syndrome with Richard Branson, who most people will consider the fearless entrepreneur who who would surely not suffer from it, he, that was one of the messages he connected with the most. When I shared personally with him, who I am and how I have become who I am. So I think everyone has some of that inside of themselves. And it is bad if it holds you back from leaning in to the leadership to your own voice, your own values and the opportunities to make a difference in the world, then the imposter is a problem. But if you befriend it, which is something that I've managed to do with a lot of work over time, it can actually be the antidote to the hubris syndrome. It can be the voice that makes you want to excel and do more and better to listen to others, to always be on a growth journey, to never think that you were there, to never think that you've learnt it all or know it all. And it can help keep you grounded and wanting to surround yourself with people who teach you, people who make you better. So I find that my imposter is that it's not an inner voice that doesn't run my life, but it certainly makes sure that my ego doesn't go out of control. I hope, so I love my imposter today. I've befriended it. I will listen to it. But I also know there's a stronger inner voice. My true voice and values sometimes talk to the imposter and just let them know I hear you. 

[00:16:46] I'm not losing my mind, but I believe we can make the world a better place. So I'm I'm still going to run for president, even if you have all those doubts. But it often takes it's often a conversation for me. And I only started sharing it after I ran for president, Peter, to be honest. And one of the reasons I started sharing it, as I started realising after working with people, that almost everybody I knew who was truly transformative and brought others along was humble and actually shared with me that they also had some self doubts, whether they call it an imposter or not. And that's probably healthy. It's far healthier than overconfidence and hubris. 

Peter Drobac [00:17:26] Let's talk about that run for the president, because that was quite remarkable. You're you're not a politician. You were perhaps an unlikely politician or one to run for political office. And despite not being part of a party or having a big political machine or lots of money, you came awfully close. Talk about what drove you to to run for president and what that was like. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:17:49] Well, it was the hardest decision I've ever made, and I've never had a longer battle with my impostor, Peter, to tell you the truth, and the reason I did it is so I have been a teacher at a university. I've given lectures and I've always been very occupied with the fact that I'm such a lucky person. I'm born in a country where women have embraced their strengths. Since I was a little girl I was inspired and I stand on the shoulders of women who had the courage to take the day off in 1975 to show that gender equality matter. And this is something that impacted me. And five years later, Iceland was the first country in the world to elect a woman as president in a democratic election. And I was just inspired by this. And I've always felt very strongly about the kind of leadership that I think matters to young people. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:18:38] And so I've given so many speeches about young people leaning in to their own voice and values and not being afraid of leadership roles and taking on challenges, and if they think the world is wrong, you have to do something about it. And so it happens as this, we had a president who had been in office actually for 20 years, male president that replaced our former female president. And he had been in office for a very long time. And I was often speaking about the need for role models and all of that. And then a group of young people, some of whom I had worked with, they started a Facebook petition encouraging me to run for president. And to be honest, I just did not want it. And I tried so hard for months to point out the window and even meet other people and other women who I thought should run for president rather than me. It was not something I had been inspired by our female president. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:19:33] I had often thought about the role of the presidency of Iceland being a very important one as a moral leader in the country. But I hadn't thought about myself and I had a lot of issues and self doubts about whether I was right for it, whether I wanted to be that public of a persona and put my family through it. My I thought a lot about my teenage children and how harsh social media and media is to public people in public office. And so it was a really hard decision. But ultimately it boiled down to a simple truth, which is that I could not go out and give another talk to young people and say, you know, don't look somewhere else for the leadership that we need to look in the mirror and think about what you can do. And then I was asked to do it and it just felt like I was cheating the very mission I was on in life by failing to do it. But I had to do a lot of work because it was unlikely. As I said, I was an independent candidate. I didn't really have a machine behind me. There was not a lot of time. I was not always in the media. As a matter of fact, I had been kind of withdrawn for a few years and making speeches internationally about gender equality. So I had not been preparing in any way. So what I had to come to terms with is why would I run? And it was very clear that I've long burned for what kind of society and role model Iceland can be for the world when it comes to sustainability, equality and and entrepreneurship. And I had some ideas around what I wanted Iceland to be after we experience the infamous financial meltdown in 2008. And I didn't think we had held the loans. And I had some reasons. But most importantly, I had to agree to myself that my definition for success, if I ran, may be needed to be different than winning, that I needed a definition of success for myself. So I came up with four principles that were sort of meant to underpin my campaign, and it was more about me uplifting those principles and how I would be as a candidate and what I would put on the agenda as a candidate and how that voice and those values could impact the conversation about the future of Iceland than about me winning. And it was hard, I had one percent in the polls forty five days before Election Day. And everybody asked me, including my loved ones, if I was going to quit. That was never an option for me because my definition of success wasn't winning or losing. My definition of success was to bring certain issues and maybe focus to the responsibility of leaders to the next generation who encouraged me to run. That leadership is about being in service of something that is bigger than yourself. I emphasised the importance of girl power. A lot of people advised me against it, but I really emphasised that I. I thought girl power was something that Iceland should be proud of. I emphasised transparency. I think if you want to build trust, I came from business. Panama Papers came out during the middle of the presidential campaign. A lot of people had doubts about anybody with a business background. So I emphasised transparency and took questions from voters on Facebook Live, which was new at the time, and really emphasised the sort of direct engagement and honesty. And and I think there was something about how I ran that actually made me feel at the end and somehow came through after the one percent. And yeah, I came pretty close. Some people say I needed another week or two to win, but I ended up with close to 30 percent of the vote. And to me, it was a real win because I made an impact in line with the definition of success and the principles I set out to model during the campaign. 

Peter Drobac [00:23:44] What I wanted to dig into next with Halla was the effort she's been helping to lead amongst business leaders to transform not just business but our economic systems. Halla and colleagues recently launched The Reset campaign, which argues that it's time to wave goodbye to the invisible hand of free market capitalism and build a new economic model that puts humanity and the planet at the centre, one that prioritises long term value over quarterly earnings. Notably, the campaign was formally launched on the fiftieth anniversary of Milton Friedman's legendary declaration of shareholder primacy. So what does the Reset campaign hope to achieve and why did they choose that moment to kick things off? 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:24:30] Yeah, I'd love to talk about this. So it's been 50 years since this one American economist put out a theory and a New York Times essay now infamously known as the Friedman Doctrine, and that has created growth, value, prosperity. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:24:51] But it has failed at searing that justly, it has failed at calculating into that definition of success, which was basically that purpose of business, is to maximise shareholder wealth and it failed to take into account that when companies do that, when our economy does that, they are also extracting value from our environment, from nature, from people, from communities, even from our social contract or trust base. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:25:25] And so basically, while this worked at fuelling prosperity, economic growth, it has come at the expense of, well, 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:25:36] the reality is we have a burning planet, melting ice caps, collapse and biodiversity. We have incredible crisis of inequality within countries and between countries. We have essentially a broken or fractured social contract, low trust. Our democracies are under threat in lots of countries around the world. And so I would say a lot of that has come from a faulty theory that was put out 50 years ago and a crisis of conformity and leadership that has continued to operate to that faulty theory way longer than we should have because we had a really bad warning in 2008. We had basically a global financial crisis, one that brought the most infamous financial meltdown to my own country, Iceland. And we just haven't learnt enough, it seems, and so here we are in 2020 and we have Covid hit us on top of all of the other crises that were already there. And Covid has accelerated the fractures and exposed them. And so all of these fractures are coming out on coming to us in very powerful ways. And the B Team where I am a CEO today was founded to confront business as usual. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:26:57] Seven years ago, these global leaders came together and said business as usual is no longer an option because we're facing these multiple crises already. While seven years on and I joined them about two and a half years ago as a CEO, we started realising that while leading by brave action in our own companies was important and all of the B Team companies have tried to do that, put climate on the agenda, address the inequality, address issues that have eroded trust in terms of how we govern and do business in the world. And they've done many good examples of that. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:27:30] But it's not enough to lead by brave action inside of your own company anymore. The scale of these crises is so big and so global and the speed at which we need to tackle them because they're coming at us. We think Covid is hard? Climate change is a bigger challenge for us to solve. Inequality is a bigger problem in our society and even bigger now after Covid and without trust, without democracies that work. I worry about the state of the world and all of us do. So we think capitalism, our economy needs an upgrade. Milton Friedman needs to be respectfully thanked for the 50 years that he has guided us. There's no need to make this personal, but we need to upgrade and we need a new vision. And that vision we're trying to capture in this recent campaign. And the interesting thing about the recent campaign is that we set out to engage with multiple stakeholders from around the world who are interested in an economy and a version of capitalism that actually serves humanity and our only home, the planet. And so we engage with artists and activists and business leaders and people formally or currently in public service of some sort. And it's been just this robust but very difficult dialogue about what is it actually that needs to happen. And we decided to uplift it on the fiftieth anniversary of Milton Friedman as a new vision and really focus on the norms shifts that have to happen inside of ourselves. So how do we go from thinking about an extractive economy to a regenerative one? How do we go from thinking about a male dominated leadership world to a gender balanced and diverse one? How do we go from minimum wage to a living wage and so on and so forth? And it's only the start because the reset is going to take us, well we think about it on the B Team as the work over the next decade. And the next decade needs to be one where we all come together across multiple stakeholders and across all of this intersectional crises and build back better deliver the global goals. That's the that those are the goals we have agreed to five years ago in the world. But we're not getting there at the speed and scale we need and agree to what we as the B team have made as our own overarching goal, which is to have an inclusive economy that drives shared prosperity and well-being on a healthy planet and a healthy community by 2030. So that's what Reset is about. And it is the biggest challenge I've taken on, but the most exciting one. It's in line with everything I've always believed in, and I couldn't be more grateful to have an opportunity to work

Halla Tomasdottir [00:30:21] in allyship with so many people from around the world who know that the world economy isn't working and are now powerfully coming together to figure out how we shift the system to work for us. 

Peter Drobac [00:30:38] Yeah, I just want to say I love the way that you've engaged artists and storytellers and others in the campaign and not just sort of leaders and technocrats. We had this great futurist, Anab Jain, at the Skoll World Forum a couple of years ago, and she said something that stuck with me, that it's not about seeing the future, it's about feeling the future. That's what really transforms mindsets. And that's part of what we need, right, is the kind of big shifts we need. I guess there's two things I'd like to talk about, right? To actually accomplish a systems change is about how do you shift mindsets? And the people with the most interest in changing a system are usually the people with the least amount of power to actually do so. Right. But there are a lot of people who are really benefiting from the Friedman doctrine and status quo even today. So how do we shift mindsets and then the second part of that, now these are big questions is we have to go beyond voluntary action by businesses, right. To changing the rules of the game. And you touched on this a little bit earlier. So what are the steps that we need to take to get to those big kinds of shifts? 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:31:44] I would not be exhibiting the humility principle if I said I had the answers. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:31:50] But let me let me start with your latter question, sort of what are the shifts or the upgrades in the system that need to happen? And how do the people who often feel like they may not have power play into that? Because I actually think we all have more power than we realise. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:32:08] And I think collective power is coming out in the Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too Movement and kids for Fridays for Futures climate strikes, et cetera. So I think there's incredible power being and leaders have been unleashed from those who may not sit in existing power and we call it new power or emerging power. There's a lot of that now. But first, let's try to simplify the task because it is an enormously big challenge. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:32:35] First, we need to shift our time horizon. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:32:39] The time horizon in the current system has been boiled down to quarterly reporting, and we need to almost go from quarterly thinking to quarter century thinking when it comes to issues like climate, when it comes to really serving the next generation. And I think one of the most powerful ways we can make that happen is by bringing the next generation more powerfully into the conversation to the table. I've seen a couple of really exciting examples. While I do not disagree that we need policy changes and structural reforms, there are some innovative companies that are starting to do this. For example, one of our B Team companies, IKEA, the Nordic retail store, we had an intergenerational dialogue with some of the kids that were leading climate strikes on some of the existing global CEOs a year ago. And that led to them creating a sustainability council of next generation leaders. And that's really fuelling some amazing innovation in their company. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:33:37] We have a more traditional company, may be Allianz, the largest asset manager in Europe, and they have a separate ESG board, environmental, social and governance board or a subcommittee of their board. And once a year, they bring the next generation in to actually question those board directors about the issues they care about. So there are some powerful and innovative ways happening to help us shift our horizon. And perhaps the most powerful way I know is talk to your kids. Any CEO I know if they are truly transformative and truly courageous, they have had a very interesting conversation with their kids or their employees of the younger generation that's helped shift them. So there's something powerful about shifting our time horizon. That's the first shift. The second shift is to expand our definition of success. Our definition of success given by Friedman has been financial profit for the short term. It now must include the global goals or the ESG or all stakeholders. And I find that the only way that happens is when you change who is around the table at the top. So at the B Team, we are calling for changing who to change how we measure success and talk about things. And we really believe gender balance and diversity in and the boardroom and senior leadership thinking about things like workers voices in influencing decision makers, getting people from the global south to influence global companies that are operating in the global south, but have a very global north mindset. So changing who to change how is, in our opinion, one of the most important ways to expand our definition of success and see all of our challenges and innovate solutions that are actually going to resonate with those who are impacted by climate change, by inequality, by that breakdown in trust and our democracies. And then last but not least, we do need structural change in terms of what is the responsibility or purpose of a company, and we think that shift from shareholder primacy uplifted by Milton Friedman, the main operating model for our economy ever since, needs to become stakeholder governance or actually somehow we need to shift laws and policies. And there are different approaches in different regions of the world right now. But the B corporation, the benefit corporation or the the massive move towards probably what I think should be mandated transparent disclosures around environmental, social and governance impacts is where we need to go to shift the responsibility and accountability that those who lead companies have towards their actual impacts. And so this is trying to simplify it. Use the next generation to help expand the time horizon. Use a more diverse perspective of those who sit around the table to expand the definition of success and use a different governance model to shift the responsibility and accountability that in leadership. And of course, it's more complicated than this, but this is what I would boil it down to. On the mindset issue, you know, if we want to change the world, we have to start with ourselves. And this is why I think it is. The inner work we need to do on ourselves is so important. And I think it's neglected in our education system. I think it's neglected in business. And so I sometimes word it as if you want to really if you want to be in service of a better world, if you want to live in this inclusive economy, in this world where we have delivered the global goals, you have to start with me. You have to know you have to do the work on yourself and then you can move into the 'we' more powerfully, because you've got your ego in check and you realise that you're just the small part of one big, wonderful world. If it does indeed come together, you stop thinking that you have all the answers. You start opening up and finding the courage to let your real voice and values come out as you work with others and as human beings we share far more than we are divided on. We just focus so much on our divisions right now. And so I think one of the most important imperative coming out of this difficult year all over the world is for leaders to show up with bridging and healing leadership, leadership that listens to the many voices and concerns out there, because there are real reasons why people are feeling left behind. There are real reasons why people are feeling let down by leaders in business and politics. There's real reasons why our democracies are facing threats. And so we need to listen and learn. There's a lot of inner work that needs to happen. And so one of the things I hope we can model in 2021 from some of the B Team companies is what we call the Reset dialogues, where we bring people across multiple stakeholders together in a different way and start leading in more collaborative, creative ways because the solutions do exist. 

Peter Drobac [00:39:07] Mm hmm. 

Peter Drobac [00:39:09] One of the paradoxes of our moment is that we need more cohesion and collectivism at a time when we're all, you know, literally physically distance and mostly stuck in our homes. And your role is I mean, the heart of everything you do is about bringing people together and building coalitions. Has that been difficult to do this year? Have there been challenges? Have there been have there been advantages? I don't know. What's what's it been like? You're not able to travel around the globe and meet with people and meet with organisations. So how how are you sort of getting on with your work in this in this new reality? 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:39:43] Well, much like everyone else, I probably have Zoom fatigue. I am on there's this virtual arena pretty much 10, 12, 14 hours on most days. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:39:53] But I have found this to be a powerful period in more ways than one. It's been a painful period. But I like to liken it to what Leonard Cohen sang about, which is that we have in some ways been cracked open. We have unleashed our humanity. We are more vulnerable. We're in our homes. Our kids are, you know, interrupting our meeting. So are our dogs. Not to forget that many people are working on the front lines and do not have the benefit of staying safe in their homes, as some of us and more privileged do. But but I do think there's something that's cracking us open. And when we're cracked open, the light gets in. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:40:31] And I think there is a massive awakening happening, and I don't know many people anymore, in business, in government, in civil society who think about getting back to business as usual, which was the founding principle of the B Team to confront. So I think the pandemic experience, the pandemic pause that it's been for some, from business as usual has given us an awakening. I think the challenge is it's becoming painful. It's long. It's hard to find the light at the end of the tunnel. It seems to be unfolding in such tragic ways and with unnecessary division that I think our mental health could very well become the next pandemic. And I don't know that I have the answers to that. I worry about it quite a bit. I worry about the mental health of our young people who are losing a lot of moments and opportunities to shape who they are and energise or regenerate themselves. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:41:35] And I know I feel it even myself, but I have just made a simple choice in my life. I have decided to focus as much of my energy as I can in bouncing forward from this moment personally for my family, for those I interact with, for the B team, for Imperative 21 and to focus the energy on Reset, because I lived through a pretty traumatic experience in Iceland in 2008 where our social contract broke and our, you know, financial sector melted down. And we did build back better, but not better enough. We did not learn enough in Iceland or in the world, in my opinion, to really bounce forward. So I have just decided I am not wasting this crisis on wallowing and lots of things I could wallow about with others or alone, but I recognise the pain. I see it and I recognise it. Our inequalities are starker. Our climate crisis is is accelerating. Trust is at the lowest levels I've ever seen it. And we are so divided and social media feeds into it. We need to talk about that. And I worry about that side of our societies and our well-being going forward and the lack of accountability from social media. So I am just trying to consciously choose to spend my time with people who get it, to bring them together, to connect them and to reimagine, rethink and reset my own ways, the ways of those I can influence. And I believe if we all put as much energy as we possibly can find towards that direction, we will build back better. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:43:13] And so most days I'm stubbornly optimistic, if not hopeful, that we will one day look back and say 2020 was the year where we finally started to do the hard work to create and co-create shared prosperity on a healthy planet because that is in service of every single person and nothing should be able to unify us more than that objective. And that, to me, is not politics. That to me is not about women versus men or the current generation or the next generation. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:43:44] That is about all of us. That's about humanity's best interest. I think there are sort of a set of skills. Maybe I'll leave you with that. There's sort of a set of skills we should really be working on in ourselves in order to be the leaders this moment calls for and I think it's unleashing courage and that comes from the heart much more than the head. So we need to learn to jump a little bit or drop from our head to our heart a little more and really unleash courage because we cannot confront a crisis of conformity without a lot of courage. And we need to confront a lot of conformity. We cannot continue to do business as we always have. And the humility we've talked a lot about that. I think that's the essential balance to courage, because otherwise we feel like arrogant and we know it all and we don't bring others along. I think the collaborative muscle we need to exercise, the inclusive leadership style is going to be the one that wins this era. And last but not least, I think we need to unleash our humanity. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:44:46] And that's everything from empathy to listening to sharing more openly that we are, at the end of the day, human beings and not machines. 

Halla Tomasdottir [00:44:57] And we didn't just burn up the planet in this broken model we had. We also burned out ourselves, probably. 

Peter Drobac [00:45:09] Halla is a special human, isn't she? She made me think about how the personal comes into the professional at times like this, working and schooling from home has shattered any boundaries of so-called work life balance. Something about moving into a second lockdown here in the U.K. has felt really suffocating to me. We're all talking about how we can build systems that are more equitable, but also more resilient. And to do that, we also need to look inwards and tend to our own resilience. And that's something I really didn't appreciate before. My thanks to Halla Tomasdottir. You've been listening to Reimagine, a podcast from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University's Sa•d Business School. In the next episode, we'll be looking at dismantling systemic inequality and injustice, but through a fresh lens, knowledge equity. You won't want to miss it. Do you want to see things differently? Subscribe to Reimagine wherever you get your podcasts and take a moment to rate and review us. Find me on Twitter @PeterDrobac and to learn more about social entrepreneurship and the Skoll Centre visit reimaginepodcast.com. From Oxford, I'm Peter Drobac and you've been listening to Reimagine, a podcast about people who are inventing the future. 

Peter Drobac [00:46:37] Before you go, I wanted to let you know about another podcast from the University of Oxford returning for its third series, The Future Makers podcast follows its host, Professor Peter Millican, as he talks to researchers from around the world about some of the devastating pandemics humanity has experienced. Peter and his colleagues look at 10 major outbreaks from the plague of Athens to the West African Ebola outbreak, from the Black Death to cholera and smallpox, and ask how these outbreaks have shaped society, what we may be able to learn from them today and where we might be heading. At the start of the series I was lucky enough to join Peter on Futuremakers to talk about what the future after covid-19 might look like. That's Future Makers with a series on the history of pandemics available now, wherever you get your podcasts.