Radical Respect

Episode 521 – Guest: Kim Scott Copy
Guest: Kim Scott

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Kelly welcomes back fan favorite Kim Scott to the podcast to discuss how she decided to reframe and significantly rewrite her book “Just Work” to turn it into “Radical Respect.”

You talk about the importance of the words – your book title changed from “Just Work” to “Radical Respect” and respect can mean a couple of different things.

“You know, nothing is universal. And it’s, of course, confusing that there’s these two different definitions of respect. But just saying we owe each other respect – maybe I should have called it radical regard. Regard is a more nuanced word. Yeah, but we owe it to each other to have regard for the other person that we’re interacting with, no matter who they are. I think people have a hard time arguing with that.”

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One of the things I love that you do, is that you break down the three things that might be happening in these scenarios – it’s not all bias.

“I think that it’s interesting to think about what gets in the way of the kind of respect we were just talking about – this regard that we owe to everyone. I mean there’s a million things, but I’m going to boil it down to three big ones: bias, prejudice and bullying. And I think when we talk about those problems, we conflate them as though they’re one problem, one monolithic problem. And when you conflate three different problems and assume it’s a monolithic problem, it’s easy to give way to despair.”

I also like that you find ways to inject humor into what may seem like a humorless topic.

“And humor, I think, is important as well. Your wife writes about this: going from the Ha! Ha! To the Aha! Like, the evolutionary purpose of humor is to help people notice things they’re reluctant to notice. And that is why humor is really an important part of what I tried to bring to Radical Respect. And, in fact, when you and I did a workshop at a certain large tech company, we did a session together around using some improv exercises tied to some of the ideas in Radical Respect, and somebody said to me at the end of it, ‘Oh, it was such a relief to laugh about these things.’”

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Photo Credit: Stephanie Lim & Nick Ditmore