Dr. Paul LeBlanc on How We Can Fix Our Social Systems

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Backslash, New Pathways. Paul, why is it time to put human questions back at the heart of human serving institutions? You know, Tom, I’ve been consumed with this question of how we lift people up. These are institutions that are supposed to help transform people’s lives, so education through better healthcare, a number of other ways, mental health treatment.

Yet they so routinely dehumanize the very people they’re meant to serve, and this was the starting question for me. I’m very painfully because I love our industry so much, and I know what it meant for me as a student. I see it in higher ed all the time. And it’s really what I set out to do is say, look at weakened scale.

Like we do, right? Higher ed is big. Healthcare is big. K-12 is big. And yet I would argue it isn’t successful. Like it isn’t working. Our scaling strategy is not working. Take a look at, you know, the failures of K-12. Take a look at the fact that America spends more than any other country in the world on healthcare.

And yet our results are so much poorer in so many areas. So that shows the increase. Like if we don’t get the human piece at the heart of this, it’s the starting point without it, you literally can’t be successful. You cannot transform lives if you’re outside of a relationship.

If you don’t have a human relationship in the middle of it. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Van Der Rik, and I have the pleasure of being joined today by Dr. Paul LeBlanc. He’s the president of Southern New Hampshire University. Paul is the author of two really terrific new books that we’re going to talk about today.

One that just came out called Broken, How Our Social Systems Are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them. A more policy-oriented book called Students First, Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Ed. I think Paul was this published by Harvard Press? Harvard Education Press, yeah. We’ll talk about both of these, but you were busy during the pandemic.

I’ve no social life, Tom. This is an abject indictment of my social life during the pandemic. Paul, Students First is the best and I think most important description of competency-based education that has been written, certainly about higher education. You really believe that our systems have to be, that we’re trapped in a time-based system and we really have to shift to a learning system.

Is that one of the core messages here? Absolutely. We’ve built a whole industry and a foundation of the credit hour, which was never intended to be used the way we use it. It’s very good at telling us how long someone sits. It’s not very good at telling us what someone’s learned.

It’s also structurally, it has a structural inequity about it and that time is a reflection of privilege, right? The more privilege you have, the more time you have and or the more control over your time. Let me give you a simple example, Tom. If you work in big swaths of the American service industry, restaurant, retail, healthcare, travel, hospitality, you may not know what your schedule is next week till Friday.

And yet we’re asking you to commit to being at a certain place at a certain time, Wednesday at three o’clock in class, right? So time-based systems are so flawed to my mind, it’s a foundation of sand. It also doesn’t give us a genuine measure of what students actually know. So we’ve built a whole industry on very poor assessment practices by and large. So I think if we can move to a genuine assessment of student learning through competencies, the mastery of competencies,

what can they do with what they know? We can capture better what they bring to the equation before they ever start class with us. We can move them through faster or slower as the needs be. We can untether them to schedules that have inequities built into them if that’s not best for them. And we can say to the world at large, these are the claims we make for graduates and here’s how we know.

And that’s very powerful. I appreciate the detailed look at assessment and your acknowledgement that it’s the hardest work ahead of us. But it’s, students first is a beautiful description of why performance assessment is why it matters in building systems that can really back up skill assertions. That seems key to the trust transaction of helping people build valuable skills and being able to share those with employers. Yeah, Tom, I think, you know, we tend, you and I feel very comfortable framing competency based education around skills, but I would argue that it’s very powerful for skills writ large and not merely the vocational

because a lot of people want to go directly to what they would call the more vocational. Can you write code? Will it compile? Can you do a process? In fact, I would argue it’s as powerful for the humanities, which has struggled to actually defend their value quite often. And I say to the philosophy department, you should embrace CB. Your graduates have competencies that companies like McKinsey and Accenture value greatly, but you never talk about them.

And why not? There’s a reason we Accenture and Delight recruits from the philosophy departments of fine universities. Yes. You, in students first, you talked about schools of theology using them as an example for that answer for that reason. Yeah, it’s held Dakota, wonderful example. Paul, what this book does a really nice job of is helping people, I hope, particularly policymakers understand that we’ve baked time into two constraining conditions and that’s both financial aid and accreditation. And I’ve watched you for the last almost 20 years operate within these bizarre constraints that we’ve created, but you make a beautiful argument in here of why we need a different approach to aid and a different approach to accreditation.

Can you summarize those? Yeah, so it’s interesting and I learned this when I did a little stint at the Department of Ed, but you know, the legislative language entitled for that allows for direct assessment of student learning. And by the way, imagine this, there’s a phrase in there that says as an alternative to the credit hour institutions use direct assessment of student learning. Isn’t that the standard you should be embracing? But so we were the first to invoke that standard. But the problem was, while the legislation made possible that policy change that approach, none of the underlying administrative rules around financial aid changed. So they’re all still tethered to time. And there’s a phrase that someone taught me at the department, they said, this is what we call not breathing life into the body of the policy.

In other words, your administrative rules have to breathe life into the policy change. So, so even though we’re all working at interesting CBE approaches, we all have to kind of twist ourselves into pretzels to make to comply with these time based rules for financial aid disbursement. So things like satisfactory academic progress. That’s a measure of time. How are you defining the credit hour, even though you’re not using the credit hour, what’s your equivalency? What are you defining? What’s your term definition? That’s a time based question again. And those are all still very much embedded. So I argue for a demonstration project, because it’s way too big and complex a system to think you can flip a switch and change it overnight. But demonstration projects are powerful and they can within the guardrails within the sandbox you create, they can show the rest of the industry, including the department of Ed, how we might implement an alternative or a parallel track in which financial aid systems now are matched with and commensurate with the kinds of competency based models we want to employ. Similarly, so much of quality assurance or accreditation is built on not only the credit hour, but the sort of input model, right?

We’ve talked about this as well established. And what we’re really asking for, and I think it unleashes so much innovation, is that look at, if you ask providers to be crystal clear about the claims for learning and how they know, if you can be really comfortable with that, you can unleash them on all kinds of different ways. On all kinds of delivery models. We shouldn’t care, right? Because what matters is, yep, your graduates can do it, and we know it. We know with assurance. So I think it’s a real, it’s a great way to get at innovation in free frames the argument right now, because right now, if you take a look at the Department of Education, it’s dominated by really sort of consumer protection minded people who for good reason, they’ve seen the abuses, they’re massive, are really distrustful of innovation. It just looks like more fertile ground for abuse. But if we can say no, no, no, we’re talking about very transparent claims and very transparent assessments, you can hold us to those, then they can breathe a little bit. That’s what we tried to do with the program that I worked on when I was at the Department of College Quip, but it kind of got floundered on the bureaucratic rocks, if you will. Paul, I assume that you agree with our friend, Stig Lesley, that we really need a new crop of accreditors focused on outcomes. Is that at least part of the prescription here? Yeah, in fact, Stig, I think is, you know, quietly working and trying to stand up, perhaps a new creditor, it hasn’t been done for a long time, but one which would be very focused on outcomes. And what I see right now, Tom, what I’m super encouraged by is a couple of number of big shifts in the ecosystem.

So one is people like Stig and others really rethinking quality assurance. And I think we have people quietly working on, could we do a demonstration project? Can we look at alternative ways of dispersing financial aid? These are big parts of the ecosystem that you have voted. But you also have the external conditions where you now have the workforce. Employers saying, wait a minute, degrees may not be the measure. Like we need like sub-degrees, micro-credentials, give us skills, make sure they’re clear, make sure they’re mapped to hide neat areas. So now you’ve got the external market is now favoring competencies. And as I described in the book, I was at the CBIN conference last fall and it just happened again last week. And what we’re seeing is this quiet wave of new institutions that are entering into the CBE space. They’re showing up a day before for the workshop for new providers saying, how do we do this? And I think we’d be, I think it would be surprised at how much CBE is now permeating through the system. So all of these big movements are starting to cohere. I think the time is right. We do too. Paula, I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about high school. We are getting smart at launched a new pathways campaign to try to help the country reimagine.

Pathways to and through post-secondary learning into opportunity. Can I assume that you believe that this focus on competencies and credentials is something that we can and should bring into high school? Yeah, so absolutely. I think a number of amazingly exciting things happen. Then I think I then need to put a warning flag up on the exciting things happening. I think we again we start to break away from sequential time based notions of when a student is a student and what’s, you know, the junior senior high school college. And to say, you know, I’ve all said to our folks, we want to build a competency based learning ecosystem in which we’re as comfortable with a 10th grade student getting her associates degree or at least getting a whole bunch of college credits under her belt because she’s really good at math. Right. As we are with a 60 year old going back and working on competencies to get that micro credential that allows them to reskill and unlock an opportunity. So I think that’s one and we’re already partnering as you know, Tom, with a number of high schools to bring at least, you know, the associates degree in a first year of college credit into the high school.

So early college models, dual role models are all kind of at play. But the idea that a student could walk across the stage and with the same handshake at their high school degree and either an associates degree or micro credential that has a job waiting for them on the other side. That’s just really exciting. I think we can get there. Here’s the flag and it’s true for K 12 and it’s true for higher ed as well. If you do this with integrity and rigor performance is going to look pretty ugly for a while. We’re going to see just how ill prepared so many college juniors and seniors are when they go through those rigorous assessments. It will be it’s the right pain though. It’s the pain that says now we’ve got to get our act together. You know, you know, 50% of the students who arrive on my campus as a as a two across the country are not ready to do college level math first year math or first year writing.

Right on both fronts, guidance, college and career guidance seems more important than ever in this complex landscape. The job market is getting more complex and there’s more post secondary alternatives. What should college and career guidance look like in high school and then and then in in college? Yeah, so the fundamental problem for much of high school and a lot of college is that we just don’t allow enough time for what’s most important. What’s important is that that guidance counselor and that student have a relationship that allows them allows that counselor to really know that student in a holistic way and then be able to put in front of that student and who’s her family options, more options and and And then, commensurately, in college, or in higher ed, oftentimes our advisors, our career advisors or academic advisors, again, face the same challenge.

So I cite the number in the book, I think in the California Community Colleges, then the average number is less than like 1600 students to an advisor. Now we, in our own model, which is very advisor centric. We call them academic advisors, I think of them as life coaches and learning coaches. We’re trying to bring our ratio down to under 200 per. And the reason we want to do that is that a, with the pandemic, we’ve seen real challenges to persistence and real challenges to the mental health of our learners, etc, etc. And I think that’s also the data backs it up that’s happening everywhere, including high school.

You can only address that if you are in relationship and conversation with someone. So, so the first thing you have to do is you have to, you have to get the numbers right. You can’t short change time in a relationship. That’s the most important thing. You, you frequently quoted in broken you quoted our mutual friend Dennis Litke, Dennis, the one that really taught me that 20 years ago. Paul broken is such a beautiful important book. I appreciated learning more about you and your journey.

And I love that the first chapter of this book is called mattering. That’s really what we’ve been talking about. But what is that and why is it so important in in high school and college. Yeah, there’s a wonderful, there’s a wonderful phrase I took from a military officer works at West Point is said about soldiers. They never care what you know, you sign officers, they’ll never care what you know, unless they know that you care. Right. So your leadership, your expertise, your knowledge just doesn’t matter unless they feel like you care about them.

And I think that’s like, it’s beautifully succinct sort of notion that you can’t build a system that transforms lives, which is what education is about. If the students don’t first feel like they’re seen that you know me, but I matter to you. If I walk, I use the examples of, you know, if I’m walking across a dangerous neighborhood to go to a school in which there’s mold on the walls and adequate heat textbooks that are 40 years old, where there isn’t, you know, adequate food, I’m coming in hungry and maybe no one knows that I’m hungry, by the way, it where the teachers are dispirited and the staffing levels are not adequate. I don’t feel like I matter to that system. I don’t feel like I matter that place. I probably don’t feel like I mattered to any person.

And I love the work. So, so that’s the most important thing. It’s different than belonging. Belonging is like affinity. Like, you and I belong to organizations that I don’t think I matter to them. They, you know, I value my affiliation, the journal they send me and I send them a check every whatever and that’s belonging. I can belong to a club. But, but mattering is that sense of when you walk in, it matters to somebody that you’re there. You know, I was just sharing this morning with someone talking about K-12 and saying, a very wise principal once said to me,

you can tell the health of the school in the first five minutes of the day by watching how students walk in, both to the building and then into their classroom. What does that look like? And a good teacher, a good principal knows like that. These students feel like they’re loved. And, and I think that’s, that’s the critical piece. You know, Tom, it’s not in the book because I wish you I had those data point was an MPR. But I heard it recently, what’s the average length of time an American physician goes before they interrupt their patient? I’ll take a guess.

Six seconds. Six seconds. And if you remember from broken, I love say, Laura’s who absolutely transformed the University of Utah health care system, biggest health care system in that state. And he, he didn’t, he took them from the bottom in terms of students that a patient satisfaction and happiness to literally the number one health care system in the country. He did in about five or six years, you know, and he did a lot in order to get there, right? He had to break through the culture and the mindset. It’s a great story. I’d be happy to share with you if you’re interested in hearing a reminder you about it. He had to change the incentive structures. He did a whole bunch of things by said, well, I said, at the end, what was the key? Like what was the takeaway?

He said, patients just wanted to be seen. They wanted to be respected as human beings. The one doctor just doesn’t know them. And I think that’s really, if you don’t have mattering at the heart of the system, nothing else you do after that will lead to success in my view. I’m kind of finished because it’s like so important. I love Greg Elliott, the sociologist at Brown University, who I’ve gotten to know over the years and who really got this in my head. But I think, you know, if you, if no one whose life was transformed, no one who’s been lifted out of poverty, no one has been lifted out of trauma, cited a policy. No one cited a software system. No one cited a curriculum. Everyone cites a person. It’s in its relationship.

I loved you point to some important research here. One quote from your book is that mattering is made up of awareness, importance and reliance. I thought those were interesting dimensions. So awareness, feeling a sense of importance important to the system and then reliance is an interesting add. Yeah, so I can, if you’re my employee, I can recognize you, right? It can make you feel valued, acknowledged, reasonable pay and good benefits and treat you well. I can acknowledge you in various ways. I can give you development programs. I can give you that sort of little plaque that says you finished the program, etc, etc.

But if you feel that I don’t, I don’t take your input that I don’t actually give you agency within. So I’m going to go all the way back to Greg Elliott because it’s very, this was a real important nuanced insight for me. Greg taught, you know, Greg was a worker on matter and started by studying gangs, I think in Chicago. And the question was, why do people, young people join gangs with all of the violence and etc, etc. And what he said was, look, if I wake up every day in a house without any heat, no one’s made me breakfast, no one seems to care that I’m even there, no one’s seen me off to school and I come home to a house that’s equally dysfunctional. I don’t feel like I matter in that. There’s no mattering in that family. I don’t matter to anybody. And then I walk across the unsafe neighborhood to get to a school that I described to you earlier, no heat, bad books, mold on the walls, the spirit teachers. I don’t feel like I matter that system. And if very encountered with the police is one full of suspicion and aggression, it’s lack of matter and maybe even hatred.

Gangs make sense. It’s one place where you belong, right? You’re part of this. We will kill for you. That’s how much you matter. But the last point to the point you just raised, and we have expectations of you. Mattering is a two way street. It’s a relationship, right? We will have expectations of you. And I think one of the cruelest things that I’ve seen in education is when faculty impose the penalty of low expectation. You matter to me so little that I don’t actually, I’m not going to ask very much of you. I’m not going to, you know, so teachers that have mattered most to me, the ones who have been the greatest influence on me, demanded a lot from me. Because they care, right? Because the second piece of that book, the next chapter is about aspiration, helping people dream big dreams. And the poverty of aspiration can be as debilitating as the poverty of finance in some ways. And the people who believe in you, so I talked to Matt Beal, who’s the head of Child and Adolescent Psychology at Georgetown, a good friend.

I said, Matt, what does some kids make it? Like, what is the resiliency that pulls people up and out? He said, it’s usually three things. It’s complicated, obviously, but if I ever said overly simplified for the purposes of my book, at least three things. They have some passion you can hook into. The matter with is basketball, fashion, music, something that you can hook into. Second is, they have some vision that there’s a better normal out there. Ideally, they’ve had a year of normal in their past, but they’ve had exposure. I described a kid who came to us from the poorest neighborhood of Boston in the most challenging circumstances, like out of the wire, right? No father, drug-addicted mother, brother in a wheelchair from a drug shooting in and out of public housing, kicked out, blah, blah, blah.

He was bussed out to a white suburb of Boston in the Metco program, and he looked around and said, wow, your house doesn’t have to look like crap. Actually, you can have a house, and this is what a father, he had a vision. He never experienced it, but he had a vision. But Matt would say the third thing is the most important piece, that there’d be one person who believes you’re better than this, who believes in you, who says, Tom, you have such a great future and it’s not here. And you don’t even believe that yet. And all of a sudden, and I had that as a working-class immigrant kid, no one in my neighborhood even went to college. I had a teacher who believed in me, Mrs. Collins. I spoke at a retirement party about that, about so many years ago.

And she just had this belief that I could be in a better world. Paul, this book, the third chapter is on the power of stories. I feel like you, during the pandemic, discovered, or rediscovered, I know you’re a hearing English prophet at heart, but you rediscovered the power of stories, and that really comes through in a beautiful way. But what does that have to do with building better public systems? Why? What’s the importance of the power of stories?

Well, you know, Tom, this is a book, to some extent, written by somebody who leads a big organization in an industry that I care deeply about. And it’s written to some extent for people who lead systems and lead organizations. And I think I fell into the old cliché that CEOs are kind of the storytellers in chief, right? It’s our job to tell our organization’s story, to inspire people to get the balance. And it is. Those things are true. But what I realized was that if we really want to improve our systems, we have to be collectors of stories, and we have to be open to the stories that we don’t like, that don’t fit our narrative, that make us uncomfortable.

Because it’s in those stories that we find the places where we’re letting people down, where we’re failing, where we’re not as good as we like to pretend we are. And that’s where you make your improvements, right? You know this. Most of your best learning, my best learning, has come when we’ve stumbled. And I tried in the book to share my mistakes, for good or bad, because they were important learning opportunities for me. And I think that’s true as an institution. I’m going to go back to the University of Utah healthcare system. I told the story because it’s so powerful, which is that Laura, who was the CEO’s wife had an unexpected attack of kidney stones, which is apparently just so painful.

He took her to one of his hospitals and she proceeded out of a terrible experience, a dehumanizing experience. He thought, I stopped him and I said, wait, Laura, did they know who she was? And he said, yeah, I’m standing right there. I’m the CEO of the hospital. So anyway, he did great credit in a kind of act of radical responsibility said, this is my fault. I lead this organization. I build this system. This is my fault.

And he went to the department that collects patient feedback. And what he learned was that they were giving him a lot of data, but they were averages, which means averages obscure the worst cases. So he said, give me the worst. And he read them. This is a remarkable, I don’t remember this, Tom. I think it’s a remarkable thing he did. He sent out a video crew for those who were willing to share those stories and he collected those stories without telling anyone. He had a high production and then he brought his whole clinical staff to do a huge auditorium, closed the doors, turned on the lights and played it.

And he said, he was tearing up as he told me this in the interview. He said, people still, they were crying and they said, this isn’t us. And he said, this is exactly us. This is us. We did this. And he had to sort of break through. He collected the stories and share the stories, which were not the narrative at the University of Utah systems healthcare brochures. And their commercials on local television. And I thought it was really, really powerful. And one of the things I wanted to do in this book was share my stories, S&E Jews stories of where we get it wrong, because I don’t think we do that enough.

Like, you know, you and I have been to enough academic conferences where we talk to leaders, how’s everything going? Great. Just great. Everything’s going great. I’m like, really? Like, can it be going that great? So I’m trying to be a little bit vulnerable in the board, I guess. It’s interesting that you dove into this book with a really interesting driving question. And I believe that was, can higher ed love it students? I actually said, could it learn to love its students again? And then my wife said, did it ever? And I was like, yeah, I felt like I had an experience. I felt like I was loved. But that’s a beautiful driving question provocative one, right?

It’s the, so it brings up the hardest word, which is the L word. And the hardest chapter for me to write with the final chapter, which was about the responsibility of individual leaders, because systems don’t happen organically, systems are designed. We lead systems, we can change systems. And, and the need to do that from a place of love, which is a word that we don’t use very often in leadership and management theory, etc. But I don’t think you can do the work of systems I’m talking about if you don’t love the people you serve. And the people who work in the system, because I think too often we forget how dehumanizing these systems are the people who work in them, not just the people who come to them for help.

Love is the opposite of fear. And I loved down the last chapter you said it’s not enough to be a nonprofit organization we have to be a for love organization. Slightly corny I know. But I. Yeah. And if you build your incentive systems your reward systems the things you value most for that which is not around the care and the transformation of student lives and you’re something else and we need universities to do other things I get it we need that to do research and we need

universities to be the economic engines of their communities just as we need hospitals to do those things as well. But, but our fundamental reason for existing is to transform lives for the good of our society for the good of our citizens. And I think you can only the great lesson I learned from Matt Steinfeld at Yale or Jessica Benjamin noted feminist psychologist at NYU. And I think the biggest experience is that when you do this from a place of love for those you serve, which means you take them for all their messiness and their foibles and all right like my kids drive me crazy sometimes don’t love them a bit less. When you start from that place, then I think you, you, you have the possibility of doing generally good work, transformative work.

And we have to, if systems are going to to sort of embrace that notion, then we have to flip the way we build scale systems which is today we use an industrial model and I think very much shaped by capitalism by short term reward by things like the cost of delivery of goods etc etc. And I would say, how do I automate as much as possible? How do I standardize as much as possible? How do I segment as much as possible? How do I do repeatable processes as much as possible and drive out the human as much as I can because humans are expensive and messy and time consuming. And I would flip it. And I would say, how do I put those messy powerful transform human relationships at the center, and then automate the hell out of everything else that doesn’t matter. So, I mentioned a conversation with somebody who works in K 12 she said to me, you know, I’ve heard teachers say, wait, you want me to like love my students. Are you kidding you’re looking at my day, do you see what I have to get done. Crazy, like you’re asking for the impossible to herculean. And what I would say is you’re absolutely right. You can’t. We’ve built a system that doesn’t leave space for what I’m asking you to do now.

We’ve got to flip it. We’re gonna say, what do you need? What amount of time do you need? What kind of transactions, kind of engagement of relationship building do you need? And then let’s take everything humanly possible off your plate for everything else to make that happen. I think that’s that’s really how we have to rethink the building of systems of scale for that sort of, you know, genuinely humanized with people up. Your book broken. It includes a lot of stories of organizations that have done at least some of this at scale in in colleges in healthcare, even in corrections in the justice system. So your I think the takeaway is we can and must build scaled institutions, human delivery system institutions that put people that put the human at the center set that the takeaway. Yeah, and we have the models. This isn’t this isn’t sort of pie in the sky sort of thinking I love the example of our health, for example, later became one medical and this is so I wish this had happened where the book was still being written because Alexander Packard, the CEO of our health did a remarkable job really be thinking

use of healthcare coaches, counterintuitively minimizes the amount of time you get with the doctor with clinical staff maximizes the time to go with the healthcare coach has much better results as right. So and now he’s in not only in multiple states, but his company’s healthcare system was acquired by one medical, which was just acquired by Amazon. Amazon didn’t buy it for a quirky little non scalable work right Amazon seeing what’s possible there. So that’s a great example. Laura’s runs the largest healthcare system in Utah.

He did it. He made that the number one performing healthcare system in the country in terms of how patients felt about the way they were treated and humanized. There are lots of wonderful examples as example, small example, but a company that’s doing work in opioid treatment, right, which is just afflicted our country in terrible ways with results two to three times better than the industry average. But the way they do it is by shifting the focus of care to the counselors. Why?

Because counselors know you. They’re in the sessions with you. And they had to persuade and all of these innovators had to shift the way the money moves within their systems. So in that last example, health insurance companies will pay for drug testing all day long. I can get you tested every day if you’re a client Tom, and I will make money like my bottom line looks better as a cell because it’s an income source.

It’s an income source for me. I got my piece of the action. It’s not doesn’t do anything for you. Doesn’t make you any better. In fact, it’s pretty dehumanizing.

You don’t trust me like I told you I’m not using. I mean, you’re testing me again. And on the other hand, insurance companies don’t like to pay for too many counseling sessions. They had to persuade the insurance company to flip that by showing them that they could have better results and have less repeat, right? So it’s just it can be done.

That’s part of the optimism of the book. I said before we started recording that I appreciate the optimism in the book. We hope everybody listening gets and reads both of these books. Students first, it’s a prescription for I would say secondary and post secondary learning. It’s a great case for competency based learning and why we need policies that support it.

It’s broken. It’s an evocative book. It’s about love. It’s about creating public systems that put people back at the center. Paul, both of these books are a real gift and we appreciate the gift of your time today.

Thank you so much, Tom. And thank you for the warm praise for the books. It’s these are really distillations of learning from colleagues like you and so many others. I just get to be the storyteller. But the storyteller is a pretty good role too.

I love the aspect of story. Story comes through in a couple ways. One, it’s listening to people’s stories. I appreciate that. But I also think we’re at a time now where we’re thinking about story is the mental model that we have about the world that we live in.

And so I think that the power of story of sort of understanding your own story, listening to other people’s story and getting clear about the story that you tell yourself about the world that we live in is more important than ever. And your book was a great reminder of that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate it, Tom.

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