Getting to Yes, And

Ori Brafman: The Chaos Imperative

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Ori Brafman

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Second City Works “Getting to Yes, And” – Rule of Three

This week we talked to professor and author Ori Brafman.

You are a college professor at Berkeley, a vegan with liberal politics – how did you start working with the US Army?

“8 years ago I heard from this four star general, Martin Dempsey. What he needed to do is to imagine a future that hasn’t happened yet. He wanted to better foster imagination in the army. We talked about this challenge of how do you move a very, very large organization to make it more creative and agile.”

You have to improvise.

“Right? And that’s the thing that surprised me the most, actually, is that when they are in action, they’re highly improvisational. So the question is how do you train people to be improvisational and how do you capture the improvisation and creativity that they might have on the battleground, when they come back home and try to tackle different issues.”

Your new book with Martin Dempsey is called “Radical Inclusion.” What’s it about?

“We look at inclusion as not just a nice to have, but as a strategic imperative – and that you need inclusion in order to be more effective. We argue that inclusion serves you in two specific ways: The first is that it enables you to better gather information from the edges of the network and the second is that it enables us to better channel our message through the organization. To have more stickiness, you need a bunch of different voices all in sync.”

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