Design Mind frogcast Ep.52 – Expanding the C-Suite

On this episode of the Design Mind frogcast, we’re sitting down with Kara Pecknold, Vice President of Regenerative Design at frog to talk about the world-changing potential that can take place when we come together and share space—whether it’s around the boardroom table the dinner table, or even nature’s table. For starters, we explore the need for new business strategies in the face of disruption, followed by a main course of the evolving role of leaders and we finish off by asking if the solution to the climate crisis could be found by looking at nature’s cycles.

Listen to the podcast episode below. You can also find the Design Mind frogcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Kara’s recommended reading:

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William Behrens III
• The Future of the Responsible Company by Vincent Stanley and Yvon Chouinard
• Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus
• The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

Episode Transcript:

Design Mind frogcast

Episode 52: Expanding the C-Suite

Guest: Kara Pecknold, Vice President, Regenerative Design, frog

[00:00:03] Elizabeth Wood: Welcome to the Design Mind frogcast. Each episode, we go behind the scenes to meet the people designing what’s next in the world of products, services and experiences, both here at frog and far, far outside the pond. I’m Elizabeth Wood.  

[00:00:19] Elizabeth Wood: Today on our show, we’re talking about the world changing potential that can take place when we come together and share space, whether it’s around the boardroom table, the dinner table or even nature’s table. To do this, we’re sitting down with Kara Pecknold, Vice President of regenerative design at frog. 

[00:00:35] Elizabeth Wood: For starters, we explore the need for new business strategies in the face of disruption, followed by a main course of the evolving role of leaders. And we finish off by asking if the solution to the climate crisis could be found by looking at nature’s cycles, plus listen out for insights from Futurescape, frog’s recent trends report, which Kara contributed to with her trend expanding the C-suite. You can find the link to the report in our show notes. But first, here’s Kara. 

[00:01:01] Kara Pecknold: Food is a powerful means to actually just open up a different kind of conversation, because we’re not focused just on the problem. We’re focused on something, hopefully beautiful, tasty, savory, all our senses are engaged, and when we’re in a boardroom, there are possibly less senses that are engaged. We might have different kinds of decisions we need to make. We might have different levels of authority in a boardroom. A boardroom, and so when we come to a dinner table, the hierarchies fall away. You may know that that’s the boss sitting across from you, but the nature of coming to a table melts that all away. It melts our socioeconomic differences. It melts our hierarchies of organization. Those things disappear because we’re coming to the table for a very different reason, and I think it opens up the conversation to be perhaps safer, perhaps more open to exploring alternatives, and we’re engaged in a different kind of dialog. 

[00:01:55] Kara Pecknold: For me, being able to talk one-on-one in a sacred space with a leader, I think, is one of the most powerful opportunities to have the most honest conversations that could actually start to move the needle in how we lead businesses in the future. My name is Kara Pecknold, and I’m a VP of Regenerative Design at frog. I hope, in my role, that I can be part of really making the change that is required to preserve the planet we live on. My aspiration is to use business for good and to make sure that we have somewhere to exist in the coming years. 

[00:02:30] Elizabeth Wood: Kara’s passion is supporting leaders to integrate regenerative practices, considering environmental interdependencies and collective values to ensure long term business viability. 

[00:02:41] Kara Pecknold: Regenerative design is moving past sustainable. Sustainable makes sure we sustain. Regenerative is always thinking about how we bring things back into a closed loop. Regenerative design, for me, is just making sure that we’ve accounted for including nature and how we’re going to keep on using nature in the right way. 

[00:03:01] Kara Pecknold: I think it should be the intention of every leader to really think about and curate the mission they have in the world, figure out what role that can play in the larger business, and be committed to asking your other leaders to join you and finding the places of synergy and unity that could actually carry that out in the business. I see such a high risk to the very natural world that all of these businesses are dependent on. That you can buy products today is because we had to take a resource nine times out of 10 from the earth, be it a raw material, be it wood, be it soil that we need to be able to grow the food that we eat. 

[00:03:43] Kara Pecknold: All of those things are dependent on having a planet that can keep moving, keep going, keep providing these types of materials. And when we over consume or we overuse it, or we overburden it, it begins to break down. And we see that happening in some of the extreme weather conditions, the fires in LA, those types of things are happening because we’ve put too much pressure on a planet that needs to be regenerated, maintained, sustained. But when we don’t do that, business will break down. And there’s many predictions that will say that businesses that are alive today, and seemingly doing well today may not be doing so well in 10 years. 

[00:04:25] Kara Pecknold: So a lot of this has to do with leaders who can also have a future vision of what their business might need to do to pivot and change in light of what if your supply chain is again disrupted, it was disrupted during COVID. What if it is again disrupted? And so some of that is bringing different views and perspectives. Imagine you had a chief science officer on your team who is actually guiding and advising you. The philosophy or the moral leader can help think through some of the social implications of the decisions that you’re making.  

[00:04:55] Kara Pecknold: So reframing the necessity to enable you to realize what you’re dependent on in order for your business to even thrive has everything to do with the land we’re standing on right now. 

[00:05:07] Elizabeth Wood: Kara contributed her visions for tomorrow to frog’s recently published Futurescape Trends Report. Here she goes deeper into her trend expanding the C-suite. 

[00:05:16] Kara Pecknold: We’re in a time where the traditional models of how an organization can run and operate are really being challenged, and my hunch is that we will see changes in the types of roles that leadership will need to take. It would mean we’re not just having a CEO having to make all the decisions. We’re not just having a CTO or a CIO some of the traditional expected roles in leadership, but rather looking at people who might have to talk about the ethical or moral decisions that a business may have to make. 

 [00:05:51] Kara Pecknold: I think there are some attempts that have been made in the world where there are companies that are labeling a chief philosophy officer. I’ve seen other companies that actually have nature as a representative on the board. It’s a person who’s obviously actually acting in lieu of nature, or standing in for nature. And I think this is maybe small scale, if we talk about real transformation and making a huge impact. It’s a signal of what needs to happen and what could happen to really transform what the C-suite actually looks like 

 [00:06:23] Kara Pecknold:  So I think first it starts with a bold leader, who really builds a bold board, who builds a bold team. We do see that there are some who take steps to align more closely with values that need to not just be nice in the world, not be caring in the world, which I hope people want to be. But on the flip side, really taking into account the things that they are dependent on. All of our GDP is dependent on nature. So think about a leader having to make a new type of decision, where they include those decisions much more readily, from the front, from the beginning, from the narrative that they speak to the organization, to the board, and so how you go about that, I think, is not a one day in time type of process. It’s definitely something that has to be planned for and thought through.  

[00:07:13] Kara Pecknold: But I think a leader who brings the right people to the table and enables that kind of conversation to happen, not in light of doing good for the world, which is a good thing to do, but in light of making sure they have a business to actually lead in the future, businesses today are now being required, whether it be some sort of legislation that exists, to officially report in on their activities and behaviors. So ESG, scope one, scope two, scope three, emissions. So how you use the resources that you use, you are actually reporting in on that, and that is fine on some level. I think there’s varying views on how that actually plays out in a business. 

[00:07:54] Kara Pecknold: But I think the larger topic, maybe is one that I’d raise sort of a higher bar, which means it’s not just something that is decided from the top. It is something where initiatives from the bottom of the organization can also be contributing to transformation and change. And I think a lot of junior employees who are quite passionate, they are the ones who are often speaking up and advocating for real transformation.  

[00:08:17] Kara Pecknold: So giving permission within your strategy to enable a little bit of experimentation enough to maybe see how your business could shift, see how your product could shift, see how the ways working could shift. It will vary from company to company, but those types of things, I think work best when it is commitment from the top and a little bit of freedom to explore from the bottom, or at least present new ideas to the larger organization to see what might be successful. 

[00:08:44] Elizabeth Wood: Kara is also involved in Dinner with a Side of Design, a project that is all about a different type of shared table. So now let’s move from the boardroom to the dinner table. 

[00:08:54] Kara Pecknold: Dinner with a Side of Design was a really fun opportunity to work during a Design Week in Vancouver, Canada, where I was living at the time, and they offered a week of programming and speakers and different kinds of workshops and things like this. But one of the things that was, let’s say, missing, was, what were we gonna do for the social after the conference and I proposed an idea to have a shared table dinner over three nights, tackling different challenges in the world, so economy, culture and sustainability. 

[00:09:33] Kara Pecknold: So over the course of three nights, each of those nights held one of those themes, and we invited the keynote speakers from the conference. We invited people who were city officials from Vancouver, we invited the attendees of the conference, and over the course of three nights, we had 40 people at a long table in a lovely little restaurant in Vancouver, and we did a guided dinner where we put design on the table and asked people to re. Imagine solutions to make the city of the future, and bringing diverse perspectives and giving people, we gave them actual currency of what they would invest in, and to see all these different perspectives from different parts of society coming at one long table over a beautiful meal, really demonstrated how good ideas come when we come together at a table. And I took inspiration to come up with the idea by looking at how governments that do well often have invited the key state leaders who are visiting to a meal the night before they have the harder discussions. 

[00:10:39] Kara Pecknold: So I think there is a real place for kindness, tenderness, a different kind of conversation when you’re looking somebody in the eye over a shared meal, as opposed to an official meeting in a boardroom where you have to make decisions, and I appreciate and respect that so much as a means to really build bonds with people who have differences of opinion to you. So that’s really what it was about, was to look at how when we have differences of opinion, we could come to the table and still imagine a city that we all wanted to live in in the future. I brought that to frog and I brought it to different clients who wanted to make tougher decisions together. So we’ve helped major automotive companies reimagine a manifesto when they were joining multiple brands together. We’ve helped an athletic company with multiple brands knowing that the multiple brand transformation seems to be one that’s a little bit more hard to do because I’m sitting with my brand that has a particular voice. Your brand has a slightly different voice. 

[00:11:40] Kara Pecknold: But when we used the dinner table as a means to collaborate and build something that we could share together, it transformed the meetings we had the next day, because suddenly a lot of the perhaps walls that were put up, the defenses that we had up, were brought down, because we got to sit at a table together and share our views and opinions in a very different way than one person standing at the front of the room and dictating a story to the rest of the room. Now I’m having a conversation with three or four of my potential colleagues and looking at the problem very differently. So the dinners are not just food, they’re interactive. There’s there’s content that comes onto the table, there’s provocations that get put onto the table each course sort of drives the next part of the story. And I think my experience is our clients have had a lot of fun doing it and remember it, and have asked us to bring it back for other hard conversations that they’ve had. 

[00:12:34] Elizabeth Wood: We’re going to take a short break. When we return, Kara will talk about how and why businesses can step up to ensure long term viability. 

[00:13:11] Elizabeth Wood: Now back to our conversation with Kara Pecknold, Vice President of Regenerative Design for frog. Here, she’ll discuss the value of play and particularly a popular tool from frog called Cards for Sustainability. 

[00:13:22] Kara Pecknold: Because I work in a creative space, I’ll always bring back the importance and value of play. I think we get very serious when we talk about some of these things that I’ve been speaking on. And even though you may be a leader, a seasoned leader, I highly recommend making sure that play becomes part of your life, part of your team, part of your experience, I think it brings levity. It brings a different way of looking at the world. Cards for Sustainability was something that was inspired actually by the work from cards for humanity, which is inspired by Cards Against Humanity. Cards for Sustainability was a means to really begin to think through what could be an intimidating topic in the creative world, where we are not necessarily trained to be people who do ESG reports, we were not necessarily trained on all the things that were impacted by science.   

[00:14:14] Kara Pecknold: We had other trainings to make creative work, and so what we wanted to do was use that creativity and use a playful tone to build a game. And the game allows for three key characters, so somebody who’s a business character, someone from society, and the third is something from nature. And so our tagline is, have you ever built a business plan for a bird? And the idea is that the game can be played pretty much anywhere. We’ve played it with clients. We’ve played it at conferences, and we enable three people to kind of take on the role of decision maker about our big ideas that we want to bring to the table. And could be an idea about a new business, a new product, whatever. And what happens is everybody of those three characters get. A chance to vote whether they think it’s serving the best interests of them to have this thing come into the world. And of course, it brings lots of laughter, because each of the characters actually tell us what they’re worried about in the world. So it’s very funny and playful. 

[00:15:14] Kara Pecknold: But in the end, it really does demonstrate how when we don’t get so caught up in our anxiety and our worry about a topic, we’re able to let go, because we’re putting on a playful mind. And we put on a playful mind just like children, we’re imaginative, we’re exploratory. We create whole new worlds. And I think the beauty of creativity and design and the arts, you could even say, is that it helps us to look at the world through these more you know, imaginative, open, hopeful possibilities, not just this will never work. This can’t get off the ground. And so watching a bunch of people play it at a conference was a laughable it was very funny to watch people who are maybe a little bit more serious take on the role of a bird or a turtle or something. But I think the outcome really demonstrates a different way of asking different kinds of questions and inviting different kinds of voices to be part of the decision making of what we put into the world.  

[00:16:13] Elizabeth Wood: During our conversation, Kara shared insights from her experience of working with innovative leaders and outlines the methodologies that frog and leading organizations are using to develop skills and qualities needed for effective leadership, from sitting down at nature’s table to the value of letting go.   

[00:16:30] Kara Pecknold:I see places where people are enabling their people. Companies are enabling their people to go off and do unique types of experiences. So we’re going to take you actually into nature. We’re actually going to bring you to nature’s table, and we’re going to talk about, what are the implications of that. And we’ve done that with a company. In fact, we worked on a project where we wanted to bring much more of a story of how their company was going to better connect with their community. So you could talk a bit more about like a loyalty program. And instead of going to an office somewhere, we actually went out to the North Sea and we learned what it meant to be in the boat, in the waves crashing. I think I actually absorbed my body weight and water that day, but we had to work as a team while we faced some stormy waves in a boat, and then we did all of our activities and learnings brought us out into nature, so we were very close to the very world that was going to be impacted by the business decisions that were made in this workshop.  

[00:17:39] Kara Pecknold: So I think a method of change can be a method of changing where you do your meetings, changing where your people get exposed. And so as frog, we have started to do these types of things, and it takes the right client, it takes the right moment, but it’s the type of thing that I believe is what’s needed to disrupt our thinking, to make us think in new and different ways about the business we build. One of the things we’ve really been focusing on, even in some of our team efforts, is how can we encourage that in in our organization on a weekly basis in some form? I think a principle that I’ve stuck to is the idea of purging. So if you don’t need something in your life, then let it go and figuring out what needs to stay and what’s important and what’s not important. And I think I learned that also from the processes of nature, right? I watch a lot more as I’ve grown older to see how does nature deal and using that as a principle of my own ways of thinking. So instead of thinking in quarters, I think in seasons. And I think, what does winter show me? It shows me maybe it’s time to be still. It shows me some things could go dormant. I don’t have to plant a billion seeds. I can let something go dormant. And there’s a real freedom in that. And then following the rest of the calendar, right? When it is time to harvest, when it is time to plant, when it is time to blossom. And I like mapping my year that way and looking at what are the kinds of activities I can bring out by just looking at how the seasons reflect in the world. It’s not failure to pause. It’s not failure to think about, what if you thought about the way you sold your product that wasn’t in a 12 month cycle. What if you thought about it in a different way? And new growth doesn’t come because we cut down everything. New growth doesn’t come because we fill a garden with way more trees than the soil can sustain. 

[00:19:32] Kara Pecknold: We think through thoughtfully, intentionally, about where is the best investment, and I think what we think is more is better because we think we’ll make more money, more profit, more whatever. But somebody who’s really thought through a business plan and strategically thought about the things that they have as things they don’t have to waste, can change the way they run their business and can change the way it’s delivered. And to me, that is actually much more in line with what we are actually connected to, which is. The natural world. 

[00:20:01] Elizabeth Wood: Kara believes that good culture is central to positive change. He or she discusses a need for softness and how we can reevaluate our priorities based on what really counts. 

[00:20:11] Kara Pecknold: The more I have one-on-ones with my clients who are really honest with me, the more I hear their aspiration and desire for something to change, because they are burnt out. They are exhausted. They are asking themselves, why am I here? Why am I doing this? And I think every company knows that a culture is a really important thing, a good culture, a culture that delivers on what it promises, be it the product, be it the inner workings of the business. And I really appreciate and respect that my clients feel like they could say those things to me so openly. And so I think there is this under the surface, kind of hope that with the role that business can play in society, that business could rise. 

 [00:20:58] Kara Pecknold: People now are expecting businesses to solve for things that, formally, other institutions in the world would solve for, the church, community centers, and when you don’t have those things, or those things get defunded, all of a sudden, business becomes kind of an important part, an institution in the society we live in. And I don’t know if business is ready to take on that role, but it is a pressure being put upon organizations, I believe, to satisfy the happiness of their employees, where maybe in former times, other institutions were helping to satisfy that. And that just makes me realize all the more and why I said in the future scape report, if we don’t build new muscles for this, we get weak. And the institution that we are in, which is the business world, the thing that drives and shapes a lot of the societal realities we face. If those new muscles aren’t developed in a good way, in a proper way, then we have a tendency to break right in our own human body. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we get sick. If we don’t strengthen our muscles, we could fall and break our leg. So I think these are these are maybe metaphors, yes, but I think they are really important ones to analyze when we see the role that business has in the world, and the role that business has is built of people, and people lead a business, and people make decisions for a business. And so these types of things have a great impact, not just on the business, but on society at large. 

[00:22:23] Kara Pecknold: A behavior is being modeled into the world right now, which is suggesting that cutthroat, aggressive, you name it, is a way that you get things done, and there is a message that that really creates a division when you operate that way, and when we deal with the softer sides of who we are, it creates a discomfort, because those are emotions, those are vulnerable places. Those are things that may make us feel exposed, but those are the very things that make life worth living. Again, if we’re gonna be people who lead the future of the business world, and we make the impact the way business can make impact. It’s a huge force, and it can be a huge force for the good that we see in the world. But if we have only ways of operating that are cutthroat, only ways of operating that are in complete opposition to building, to growing in a true way of growing, then it becomes an accepted norm. It can become an accepted way of being, and we assume that this is the way it ought to be. And I think it’s a time for asking, is it the way I want to live my business life? Is this the way I want to come into the world? And sometimes it is perceived that this is a female trait to be focusing on these topics. But I want to dispel that myth. There are many people of all genders who are committed to this type of work and committed to leading and operating in a way that is actually generous. Generous doesn’t mean weak. 

[00:23:51] Kara Pecknold: Growth in nature means sometimes things have to die, but how those things die also provide nutrients for the next. And I think if we think about what has to be broken, separated, what has to fall away. We can do it in a way where we’re thinking about the nutrients that that can bring, as opposed to the destruction that it brings. And that’s such a mindset shift. It’s subtle, but it’s major to me, and yeah, for me, this new C suite can be a very different kind of C suite. If we look at moving into an economy where things are risky, things are harder, and it can feel a little bit more like a survival mode, and I get how companies might feel, I get how employees might feel, but when I think about how really great things in the world survive, it’s because they collaborate together. They don’t do it because I do this in isolation and alone, I do well, because I seek the advice, the counsel, the support, the expertise of more than one type of person, and I invite them to that table, and we have a different kind of conversation. And if it’s about survival, then we’ll talk about it being about survival. If we’re talking about thriving, then let’s make it about thriving. Different perspectives are going to. Help you see how to solve it differently. 

[00:25:03] Elizabeth Wood: That’s our show the Design Mind frogcast was brought to you by frog, a leading global creative consultancy that is part of Capgemini Invent. Check today’s show notes for transcripts and a link to download frog’s Futurescape report. We really want to thank our guest, Kara Pecknold for her perspectives on how leaders can change the world for the better one table at a time. We also want to thank you, dear listener. If you like what you heard, tell your friends. Rate and review to help others find us on Apple Podcasts and  Spotify . And be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Find lots more to think about from our global frog team at frog.co/designmind. That’s frog.co. Follow frog on Twitter at @frogdesign and @frog_design on Instagram. And if you have any thoughts about the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at frog.co/contact. Thanks for listening. Now go make your mark.