Vance Crowe Speech: My Grandfather's Axe; Succession Planning for Organizations

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] This man seems like an unlikely person to talk about at a Farm Bureau meeting. His name is Wes Watson. He looks like a convicted felon 'cause he is a convicted felon.

Listener intro (station ID) [00:00:00] This is Kate Crosby in the Central Valley of California. I'm a quantitative geneticist, data scientist and agronomist, and you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we're gonna do something a little bit different. For the last few weeks, I have been traveling around the country to deliver keynote speeches at conferences. This is an exciting time for me because COVID shut everything down for 17 months. And if you're a long time listener to the podcast, you might not know that. Most of my professional work when I'm not interviewing people is around helping organizations think how about how to overcome challenges that are really big in scale or really opaque or abstract things that you know you need to address. But there's not an actual problem standing right in front of you. You don't exactly know what it is that you need to go after. So people hire me oftentimes to either put on workshops or give keynote speeches to both make people think and inspire them to try and do things differently. Now, in order to put out these new talks that I'm doing after 17 months of COVID, it is required a huge amount of preparation. I'm trying all new stories, different ways of thinking and constructing arguments and ideas, and I haven't had time to produce the sorts of interviews that you have come to expect from this podcast. And so I sat down with my executive producer, Ben Anderson, and said, Ben, what do you think we should do if I don't have time to put out an interview this week? And he said, well, I think the audience is actually uniquely set up to listen and enjoy some of these speeches that you're putting out.

Vance Crowe [00:01:54] And Ben's totally right. Many of the ideas that I'm now using in my speeches come from conversations that you and I both heard on this podcast. So I reached out to a group that I recently gave a speech at the Arkansas Farm Bureau Officer and Leadership Conference, and I asked them if they minded if I put this keynote out. And they said, sure, we'd love it for you to do that. And so what you're about to hear is a little bit behind the curtain because you are going to see what I do in my professional life when I'm not interviewing people. But you're also somebody that is well acquainted with many of the ideas that I'm sharing. This makes me both excited to have a group of people that can share and think through these ideas with me, but also a little bit nervous because some of the conclusions I've come to you might not have come to the same conclusion. So normally the audience, these are completely new ideas. They haven't heard them before, but you will have some kind of experience with them. But I think that this should make for a great conversation. And I hope after you listen to this interview, well the speech, rather that you engage me, go out on Twitter at Vance Crowe and let me know that you heard it and what you thought of it. I'd love to stimulate a dialogue. Also, if you are the person in your organization that has to put forward ideas about who can we bring in to give a talk, you can always reach out to me at VanceCrowe.com and just schedule a time for us to sit down and talk about your conference, talk about what challenges your organization is facing, and we can figure out if I'm a good fit for you.

Vance Crowe [00:03:32] This is an exciting presentation. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much for being here, and we'll be back next week with an up the graph interview for the Vance Crowe podcast. Buckle in and enjoy

Vance Crowe [00:03:45] Judging by where everybody's at right now. I think I know where you all sit when you're in church, right in the back. It's an honor to be here. I've had a chance to travel around the United States, really all over the world and meet with different farm organizations. And I can tell you emphatically that there is no other farm bureau that runs a meeting the way that your group does right here. Whatever you have done to create this institution is really something that is worthy of note because your meeting right here for your leaders and officers is not like other meetings. You are exceptionally advanced and it might not be something that you can tell just because you are in Arkansas and not traveling around the country. When I think about being in the prime of someone's life where when your muscles are strong and everything is going right, I think about the time that my father woke me up one morning and he shook me awake. Now I'm the middle child of seven, so he could have woken anybody up, but he woke me up and he said, Vance, I need your help. My dad, the big strong man that he was, needed my help. I bolted out of bed, I threw on clothes and I ran downstairs and I don't even think I had breakfast. I sprinted outside and there was my dad putting all the wood that he had let dry for a long time in these in from the pile and just stacking it up. And he said, Vance, I want you to go into the garage and I want you to get your grandfather's ax down and bring it to me.

Vance Crowe [00:05:22] Now, I had never been asked to pick this thing up, let alone use it. So it was a really exciting moment for me. So I go in there and this thing, which we'd never been told, we weren't allowed to touch, but everybody knew that's something really sacred. That's something you don't touch. So I pick it up off the wall and I bring it to my father as though I'm carrying the Dead Sea Scrolls and I bring it to him and he's there and he's got the toolbox next to him and he pulls out a file and he sits that thing on his leg and he starts sharpening it. Now to Young Vance, I am so excited because I might just might get to chop wood with this ax, a responsibility I'd never had before. And if you've never done it, it's something you really want to do. So my dad's taking his time and he's filing it and filing it, and I think we're just about ready to go. And then he pulls out a wet stone and he sits there and he grinds it. And I'm losing my mind 'cause all I wanna do is get this thing started. I'm so excited that my dad needs my help with this. And then when the ax is ready, he picks up one of the pieces of wood and he sets it up on a larger piece of wood and he leans back and he takes it and he chops it. And you know that beautiful sound that comes from a perfectly chopped piece of wood that echoed all the way throughout our yard. It was the perfect chop. And then he picks up one of the two pieces. He split and he put it on there again and he does it again, bang, a perfect chop.

Vance Crowe [00:06:57] And so I watch him do this for four or five pieces of wood. And then finally my dream comes true. He hands me the ax. And every single one of you that has ever wielded an ax on a piece of wood knows what happened next, I pull this thing over my head and I'm going to thrust it down with all of my might looking for that wonderful, beautiful chop sound. And instead smack, I hit the handle and nothing happens, right? My hands are reverberating and the wood falls over and I'm embarrassed and I think, okay, let's do this again. And my dad kind of dusts me off and sets it on there again. And I'm sure that everyone here knows exactly how this process went. I then continue to smack and swat that this thing, and I can barely get wood chips to fly off of it, let alone get that axe to have that beautiful chop. But my dad just sits there and watches me do this over and over again until finally I get it in the wood. But it's not all the way through. So we've gotta take the little sledge and push it all the way down. But after a little while, my dad said, I need your help. We're not gonna get this done by wintertime unless you help me out. So here you go. And he goes in and gets dressed and goes off to work. So now I could have viewed this as a chore, but because he needed my help, this was me now having a place in the world. So I sat there that day and every other day for the rest of the summer chopping wood. Now I'm sure over that time I split a handle and then my dad had to come home and cut it off and remove it and take the tack and the wedge out and get the head back on there and soak it in a bucket.

Vance Crowe [00:08:41] And then over time, if you're doing this for long enough, eventually, and maybe not that summer, but a few summers later, the head of that ax needs to go and we go get a new one. But one thing always happened was at the end of the day, whenever I was done working, I would dust myself off, put the wood away, stack it up and put my grandfather's ax up on the wall. Now, fast forward probably about 30 years, and I come home to visit my parents after coronavirus, only this time I now have a child of my own. And so I'm bringing this child, she's 11 months old, little violet. She's so bubbly and excited and we share her with my parents and then it's time to go. And right as we're about to leave, my dad stops me and he says, Vance, I want you to go into the into the garage and I want you to get your grandfather's ax, and I want you to take it home with you. You now have someone to pass that on to. So I do. I get the ax, my wife now has to move around the luggage and we put it in there. And as we're driving home, I am talking as though I have just inherited the entire farm. I've been given my grandfather's ax, and my wife looks at me like I'm absolutely insane because she's seen the new blade and the handle that is obviously not 80 years old. And she says, are you sure that's your grandfather's ax? Now this brings up an interesting question.

Vance Crowe [00:10:14] Is it my grandfather's acts? What was my father passing on to me if it wasn't my grandfather's acts? So I wanna talk with you about that today because it is actually a rather profound question. It is passing down is succession in some way. What is it that you pass down to people? Now in the ag community, you are hyper familiar with inheritance and how things get divvied out. And this is a question that human beings have had to face for as long as there have been human beings working together. How are we going to pass down things of great value? How are we going to split them up? But this isn't really that, just like my father was in the prime of his age, he was passing something along to me and you right now, the Arkansas Farm Bureau are absolutely in your prime. I have never seen another farm bureau that operates and runs like this. And the question is, what is it that you will be passing down? Now I came to the idea that this is a very important question. While I was doing an interview on my podcast, in my podcast, I get to interview some of the most fascinating people from around the world that the media has no interest in because we're not warring over things. We're not just pushing on whatever the hot button political issue is. And I came across this sort of academic fellow, his name's Ben Landau-Taylor, and he works for a company called Bismarck Analysis. Now what this company does is large sovereign wealth funds that are going to invest, they're gonna put a huge capital investment to build a factory in a country that maybe hasn't been around for all that long or maybe isn't all that stable.

Vance Crowe [00:11:55] So his company goes through and analyzes their culture. How are they doing? What's their political situation to determine will the country still be strong in 15 years that you'll be able to finally get paid out for your factory? And so almost tongue in cheek, because I thought, Hey, we're living in America, I said, well, what do you think if somebody came to you and said, should I build a factory? Should I invest into the United States? He said something that stunned me. He said, the greatest threat to the United States right now is its inability to pass on its institutions. We see this all of the time right now. We're watching it happen in our politics. We see how vitriolic things have begun to be. We see how things that we used to do and know how to do, the ways that we used to get along aren't working anymore. But it's not just in politics. If you go into my community, all of those institutions that were so famed, the things that brought us to our golden age, things like rotary clubs and masons lodges and churches, even the Boy Scouts, no one is showing up to these things. They're collapsing under their own weight. And so Ben goes on to say that this is a terrible threat. And I started to realize that this is a huge problem. Maybe this is a big part of the reason why we're seeing so much chaos in the world. And it goes along with my hypothesis because I was the director of millennial engagement for Monsanto.

Vance Crowe [00:13:29] I got to spend five years deeply embedded into the agricultural community. And many of you have seen this graph right here. It's the one that shows how many farmers have picked up, dusted themselves off and left the farms and moved into the cities. Now normally this is where that story ends. People don't talk about what it was that these immigrants took with them. And I would say so many of these institutions that brought people together, that helped people figure out how are we going to solve our problems were created by the farmers that had figured that out in the countryside. Now, Mr. Taylor has a business associate named Samo Burja. Samo refers to these institutions, these groups that we've come, that we've gotten to get together to be able to figure out how do we get along as social technologies? Human beings don't by nature, just get along. We all have our own personal private ideas of what we wanna do, our own goals, our own ambitions. And so over time, human beings have invented technologies like these institutions like the Farm Bureau to help us figure out how do we align our interests? How do we make them work together? And these social technologies are something that humans have invented and they have not always been there. But more importantly, they can be lost. We don't really think about how frequent it is that human beings have lost technology.

Vance Crowe [00:15:05] But this is actually a grave threat that resides at all times to our civilization. You don't need to look any further than Rome. These columns here, these buildings have been around for more than two for almost 2000 years. That's amazing. Can you imagine pouring concrete that would last for 2000 years? In today's day and age, we can't even get roads that last more than five years. It turns out that the Romans had invented a technology, what they now call Roman concrete, which allowed these, these special columns to survive in incredible situations. So for example, if an earthquake happened because of the ingredients that they used in this concrete and the way that they made it, if a crack started to happen in one of these columns, it would become localized and not spread to the rest of the column. Also, they could put this concrete in ocean water. And over time, if that concrete started to get little cracks in it, which normally with our concrete today, if it starts to get a little crack in it, it gets worn away. But this concrete was self-healing. It would actually restore it and make it strong, which is why you can go to Rome now or Italy and still see so much of the concrete that they had. Now we have gone back and been able to reverse engineer 2000 years later how they did it. And we think we know, but we don't know for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:16:36] And that technology was lost for thousands of years. Think about what the Middle Ages might have been like had they had this technology to be able to build their own things that ended up withering away because of the weather and the elements. But just like Samo talked about, you are in charge of a social technology, the ways that human beings come together and figure out how to work together. And this is in a great threat of going away as well. This graphic right here represents a poll by the Gallup organization. They've done this poll since the 1940s every single year. And they've asked people a very simple question, are you a member of a church? And from the 1940s all the way to 2000, that number stayed at about 70 to 71%. But in 2000 we started watching this go way down. In fact, just this year in 2020, the last time they ran this poll, it turns out that less than 50% of Americans say that they are a member of a church. Now, if you are a devout believer, you can think about this in terms of morality and what that means. But let's also think about this as a social technology because a lot more happens at church than just the worship of God. People come together, people that you don't necessarily choose to be able to talk.

Vance Crowe [00:18:08] Now I've started bringing my own little daughter to church and you can see very quickly what happens when a child's there. She just sits there and waves and smiles and laughs. And people that I would never have come in contact with, people that I never ran into at the grocery store, never saw at work. Now have a reason to come up and talk with me and check in on me. And I get to check in on them and hear about what's going on, what they think about things You're exposed to, ideas that on the internet you might completely shun, but you can't shun people at church 'cause you're gonna see 'em next week too. So what happens to a society when people stop using the social technologies that they once used? Well, this goes away and this starts causing all sorts of other problems, things that we cannot even predict. And it's easy if you're sitting in a great organization, one that is brought together more than 550 people to be able to say, ah, that's their problem. The people living far away have to deal with this, but not us. This is something we've figured out. But I would say that you must be careful because we have entered the age of acceleration. Things are moving ever faster. So much is changing right now that the old ways that we did things are maybe not as relevant and not being used. A great example of this is how many of you to drive to this place used your GPS turn by turn navigation?

Vance Crowe [00:19:44] How many people a lot more than just raise your hand, all of you. And if you didn't, then just think about what that means because most people, including myself, probably couldn't have navigated here without that box. Or if we could, it would've taken so much longer. Think about what it was like to travel to go to a place you've never been before. Back in the day, what did you have to do? You had to get out in Atlas, you had to sit down and plot that course. You had to know this mile marker is where we're gonna get off. And at that time, your copilot, which is what I call my wife, really had an important role. Now she thinks she has an important role in telling me how to drive, but that's debatable. So you can get in your car and you can drive anywhere in the United States, really anywhere in the world. This thing works in Africa and China, all over Europe. You don't even have to look at a map anymore. And this has saved us unimaginable amounts of time. You didn't have to to worry about, oh, I missed the turn, I gotta go all the way back around. I didn't realize it for 30 minutes after I'd gone too far. So we've gotten all this time back, but does anybody here feel like you have more time even though you have those technologies? No, because everything is accelerating. Everything is moving faster. And so we're starting to lose that dynamic of planning and thinking and being really conscious of where am I going?

Vance Crowe [00:21:15] I run a group called the Articulate Ventures Network, and every month we decide to do a different experience. Some months we say no drinking of alcohol for the whole month. See what that's like. See if how that changes your life or make sure you set a bedtime and hit it every single night for an entire month. What will that change about how you feel every day? Well, one time, somebody not all that long ago said, why don't we just try and do no turn by turn navigation? And I was like, yes, this is gonna be great. I don't really need that. I just really travel around inside of St. Louis. But on day two, I realized how big of a disaster this was because I found out very quickly that even though I'd lived in my city for more than 10 years, I didn't know the names of the streets four blocks from my house. Everyone in this group, about 60 people reported the same thing. It used to be that you'd be getting directions and it would say, go up to the Weidner's house and turn left, or go up to that old shop and stop in there and ask them for directions. But right now we don't do any of that. So we have so much less interaction with the world that is right around us. If you don't know where you are, then you lose some meaning. But another big way that people get meaning in their lives is through their jobs. And there is a a a theory out there put forward by a guy named David Graeber who says, most Americans right now, millions and millions and millions of them work in bullshit jobs.

Vance Crowe [00:22:52] What is a bullshit job? Well, a bullshit job is one of those jobs that used to take a person 40 hours a week to do. Maybe if they were lucky, they could get it done in 35 or 36, but most of the time it took all kinds of hours. Even if it was a an office job, you had to wait for the facts. Or if you wrote a letter, it took you so long to send it out and get it back. If you really wanted to meet with people, it really took a lot of time to get everybody together, plan these meetings. But now the work is the same and yet the amount of time it takes for you to get that work done has dropped all the way down. Some of his research says A 40 hour a week office job is actually about four to six hours of work. Because some of you might be completely shocked by this, and you might ask yourselves, well, what about these blood thirsty corporations? I hear about trying to wrench every ounce of productivity out of their employees? Well, yes, maybe corporations work that way, but there's a hidden element to the way companies work. If you're a manager inside of a large corporation, your largest budget item, the thing that gives you power and status in an organization comes from payroll. How many people work for you? So now they know, Hey, I don't need this person doing that job. It's only taking 'em 20 hours a week to get it done. But if I cut them, my power inside of this organization goes down. So they don't want to do it. So people, according to David Graeber start to do this cycle that you wouldn't expect, which is that they start saying, you pretend to work and I'll pretend to watch what work you're doing.

Vance Crowe [00:24:34] And it's a vicious cycle because the manager doesn't wanna lose people. They wanna keep moving up in the organization. And even if they did cut a person or two or five, that doesn't show up in the bottom line of that corporation's huge multi-billion dollar budget. And so what is important to realize is we've raised a generation and now it'll be the future one where people are going to work knowing that the report they're creating, the work that they're doing is completely meaningless. So if they look around and they say, what is this all, what is my life worth? If the work that I'm doing isn't important, I don't really know where I am in this world because I'm always looking at the world through maps. I would say this is what has generated a crisis of meaning in our country. And I think we all feel this. I think we know it when we see people burning buildings down or fighting to the absolute death over these really weird political ideas, people can't live without meaning. And when I'm talking about this with a group of farmers, this has got to be something that's a little bit difficult to understand. You know what it's like to have a full day of work to come in exhausted after clearing things out and not feeling like you got anything done, but knowing that by the fall you're gonna see those plants come up or that by clearing out that brush, the cattle aren't going to get, eat something that they shouldn't and get sick.

Vance Crowe [00:26:08] Your lives are filled with meaning. But are your organizations, are you having an institution, a social technology that has enough meaning that when people that don't know where they are and don't have meaning in their work can find that value in what they do when they come to a meeting? And I think that this is a really difficult thing to wrap your mind around and to figure out how is it that we can give our members or people that are not members, but we want to invite in this sense of meaning. And I think that that is why what I'm talking about today, the art of succession. How are you going to pass on this institution so that it lives beyond just you and just right at this point? It's hard to talk about succession when you're absolutely at your prime. When your organization is running in with pristine elegance, it's gotta be really difficult to think about how are we going to pass this on and how much should we change? But you must because in order to survive, you have to change while you are in your prime in order to survive in this age of acceleration. So let's talk about the art of succession. Samo Burja, who I mentioned before, has a very elegant way of putting this. He says, in all organizations, if you want to pass them down, you have two kinds of power borrowed and earned. Now, power is not what we think about in the movies.

Vance Crowe [00:27:43] It's not necessarily being strong or being physically demanding or being able to just command people what to do. Power is the ability to influence things. It's about the ability to go to a meeting and have your voice be heard. It's about the ability to know who should I call in order to solve this problem in order to be able to get around this obstacle that's there. Now, when you are fully instantiated in an organization, you've been around for many, many years, you sometimes wield power and influence and you don't even realize you're doing it and there's nothing wrong with it. All organizations need to have power. You need to have the ability to influence where are we taking this policy? Where is the organization going overall? How do we resolve these problems? But if you, when you're at the top, don't start thinking about how can I loan this out? Then your principle will remain the same and over time will be decayed just like a bank account. And so borrowed power is where you begin. You have to find people that just like Childhood Vance, who didn't know how to swing an act. You bring them out and you say, I'm going to give you a chance to make decisions. So you maybe connect people to organizations or parts of groups or you put them in charge of things that they are not yet ready to lead. The decisions that you would make, the way that you would wield power, the way your group would wield power is different than the decisions that the people you're installing would make.

Vance Crowe [00:29:16] And they're going to make mistakes, which is why this is so difficult. But borrowed power as it extends out, as people are able to learn different ways and start to practice and get good at knowing how to solve problems starts expanding and eventually borrowed power becomes earned power. Those people are no longer making the decision at the meeting because you are the one that gave them the authority to make it, or your support is what made it happen. But eventually they come into their own. They know how to wield the acts. And so people start trusting their decisions. And as they do, once they start getting earned, power is where the really difficult thing happens. Because as a person develops earned power, they build up relationships and networks that allow them to make choices and changes. Then all of a sudden they start making changes and adding new groups and new ways of doing things that you would not make things that are very different than the decisions that you yourself would make or even think are important. Maybe it's like a technology like starting to use virtual reality or using different internet ways of structuring your internet. These are things that maybe on your face surface you might say, that policy or that idea is terrible. We tried that before, but we don't want to. But when you give someone power and they convert it from being borrowed to earned, they're going to start making decisions that will change the shape of the organization. And they may even stop doing things that you had been done that had been done in your organization before.

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] This is a critical step that most organizations can't do, which is why we've watched in the city all of these organizations ossify and go away. The next is mentorship. Now, everyone in here that has achieved something of note had a mentor. Whether or not you named them a mentor, it was somebody that got you to do things that you didn't think you were ready to do. It's somebody that talked you into making a choice or doing something difficult. And it's really difficult to explain to people how to set up a mentoring situation. Somebody that's been mentored gets asked somebody like me, I've had many mentors in my life and I've had young people come up and say, I don't know how to find a mentor. I, I don't know what to do. Corporations saw this. They know, Hey, the employees that get the most done are the ones that are mentored. So here's what we should do. Let's create a a mentor program at this corporation. But mentoring doesn't work that way. You can't just force two people together and say, Hey, you two swap ideas. It's something that comes up. It's something that grows almost wild and untamed in a way that you can't really know. So it's really very difficult to explain to people how to set up a mentoring program. But I have definitely tried. I've read dozens of books, I've asked my own mentors, how did you do it? And I've thought about this very deeply, but it wasn't until I found this guy that I really started to understand mentoring.

Vance Crowe [00:32:27] This man seems like an unlikely person to talk about at a farm bureau meeting. His name is Wes Watson. He looks like a convicted felon because he is a convicted felon. He went into prison as a guy making all kinds of bad decisions and then had to live with the consequences. And so over time, he developed discipline and he started working on his physique and getting strong and being disciplined. And now that he got out of prison, he creates these YouTube videos about how to be disciplined, about how to change your life, about how to transcend the mistakes you were making in the past. And one day I was watching these videos and they're not safe for work because he sits there and yells and use all sorts of swear words, but he's not talking to me. He's talking to convicted felons. And one of the things that he brought up is guys come to him and they say, Wes, you've taught me so much about how to reform my life and I now know what mistakes I made. And my nephew, I see him making the exact same mistakes I was making. And I try and tell him and he won't listen. And Wes Watson says, the reason he won't listen to you is because he doesn't wanna be you. That's a cold, hard truth about mentoring. We go towards the people and we ask people that we want to be like, how did you get where you're at? How did you do what you did? And so if you're looking around and saying, Hey, we've got this organization, or I've got these skills, or these thoughts and ideas that I think could really help young people, but they're not coming to me, you have to ask yourself, how can I become the type of thing that other people want to become?

Vance Crowe [00:34:15] Now, on the flip side, if you are the person that wants to be mentored, this is a two way street. And I often talk with young people about the challenge of going to somebody and asking them for advice. Because if you ask somebody for advice or a book recommendation, something that they can do that can help you along, then if they tell you, read this book, you know what you've now done, obligated yourself to read that book. Mentoring is something that's really very difficult. But if you're looking around and saying, we don't have enough people here in our group, we haven't been able to figure out people that want to join our group, which I would guess from the number of people that have shown up here, this is not your problem. But if you do see this coming, you have to say, what do we need to change to be the sort of organization that other people wanna learn from? And finally, the one skill, the tangible thing that can allow you to be able to build up an organization to find the new people that you can give borrowed power to, the ones that are going to change the way your organization looks, starts with small talk. How many people in this room enjoy doing small talk? Arkansas, you guys are pretty good at it, but still, it's one of those things when I asked in South Dakota last week, there was like one hand that went up, right? They'd rather look at their shoes. But small talk is one of those things that is a passport.

Vance Crowe [00:35:46] If you become very good at this, you can start to open up other people in ways that you couldn't imagine. I would say that the way that I was able to do the different jobs, whether it was a deckhand or the halls of power at the World Bank or tribal leaders in Africa, wasn't because of some grand skill. It was because of the tiny skill of learning how to do small talk. Small talk often revolves around things like the weather, or you're talking to another person and you just ask them the question that's obvious, right? The questions that are obvious are the things that are, somebody says, oh, I went to this fancy school. So you ask them about that, or the person that wears the giant cowboy hat or the big dangly earrings. Those are the obvious things people put those symbols on because they want to be asked about those things. But the funny thing is, if they want to be asked about them, they already have an obvious answer. So you don't discover anything new, you're just kind of going through the motions, which is why small talk is so awful, right? We sit there and we say, I don't know. I've gotta sit here and focus and think about what's the next question I'm going to ask? How do I get better at this when I get so lost in these conversations? So what I developed over time was this thing that I call the tiniest choices game. When I'm talking with somebody, I don't look for the largest, most obvious choice that they made. Instead, I look for the smallest one. I look for the most indiscreet piece of jewelry, one that's put on just for that person.

Vance Crowe [00:37:18] I listen for just that tiny little detail that they added into a story that they didn't have to, but they did because the story that they're telling is so personal to them that they couldn't leave it out. For example, I interviewed this man named John Jennings. Jennings runs a company that manages the wealth of billionaires. I'm interviewing him on the podcast. And the way that I came to find out who he was is he runs an incredibly popular blog called The Interesting Fact of the Day. So I asked John one on this interview, John, how did you come up with this interesting fact of the day blog? And he said, well, it's funny. I was out horseback riding with my dad and he said to me something, he said, John, you're a good father. You provide for your children, you give them what they need, but your brother, he's a great father. John was like, I was so hurt by this. And so I said, why dad? And he said, well, your brother doesn't just spend money on his children, he spends time with them. And so if you wanna be a great father, you have to spend time with your children. And so John said, how am I going to do this? I have such a demanding job. I have to be reading all the time. I've gotta be focused on learning all these new things from my clients. How in the world am I gonna spend time with my daughters? And he said, well, I realize I'm going to now change what I'm doing when I'm reading. I'm going to, when I'm doing all of this studying, I'm gonna look for the one interesting fact that I can tell them about when I'm tucking them in at night.

Vance Crowe [00:38:54] And so that's what he said. I started to do this and I started to realize what facts they found interesting and which ones got 'em to light up and get excited. And so when, when they really liked one of the the interesting facts that I told them, I would then take that and write it out and send it to a few of my friends so they could share it with their children. And what I found out was they started sharing it with their friends. And so I started this blog just sharing the interesting fact of the day. That's how it worked. Now, ask yourself a question. What is the next question you would ask John? Most people would ask, what's the most interesting fact you've ever heard? What's, where do you get all of these interesting facts? But I sat there and in that moment was, what was the tiniest choice he made in telling this story? The tiniest choice he made was saying that his father was the one that prompted him to do this, that his father saying it was my brother being a better father. So I asked him the most obvious tiny question I could think of, which was, does your father still think your brother's a better father? John lit up when I asked him that. And the reason it was okay to ask him is 'cause he's the one that brought this up. It was a tiny detail that was so important to him. He had to have it in the story. He didn't have to tell the story that way. He could have told it as though, eh, I wanted to be a better father to my daughter. So I started doing this. But because that story was so personal to him, he added that detail in.

Vance Crowe [00:40:27] And by asking him, it unlocked him. Watch the rest of the interview. He talks about all kinds of things that are deeply important to him. And later, John and I became very close friends. This tiniest choices is the thing that you can do when you're talking with people in the rare opportunity that you get to meet people in real life these days. But when you do looking for what is the tiniest choice that they made, and if you ask them about it, it will open them up. And ultimately that will bring you to the four most important words that made the acts that my father gave me. My grandfather's acts, the very acts that I'm going to hand down to my children one day. The four words that make that acts, even though all of the parts have been removed, the four most important words, what he's actually handing down is, I need your help. When you go back to your counties, you are the leaders. You are the ones that have figured out how to succeed in your farms and how to lead policy and how to make things happen. And you look around at the people around you and you think, well, I could just get this done on my own. I know how to do this. I know how this works. But if you want to have people that can come in and take over the organization and lead it on into the future, these are the four most important words that you can ask or say, I need your help. And I would make the case that this is of a bigger importance than just the Farm Bureau and just your county office.

Vance Crowe [00:42:07] All of the other institutions are decaying. The Farm Bureau, the people that brought the way of thinking and about how the social technologies that made our country great, were started in your counties, were started just off of your farms. And the way you will continue them is to find people that don't know what they're doing, that don't know how to wield the acts that are gonna make mistakes and say, I need your help. Those four words give people meaning, they show them a way to have place. And it's the one thing that will allow you to continue your organization for another 85 years so that people one day will be sitting here and saying, how can we pass it on in the future? So thank you very much for inviting me to come in. And I hope as you go back to be leaders in your county, you find people over the next year to ask for help even if you don't need it. Thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:43:07] So from here we go into Q and a. And I love q and a, and the Arkansas Farm Bureau did not disappoint because they made it a lively discussion. And you know, during these sections, you really get to hear, how did the audience interpret what I said? What is the challenges they feel like they're facing? And you really bring up things that should just stay between me and that organization. So I decided not to air any further. I wanna thank the Arkansas Farm Bureau for bringing me in. You are an amazing organization and it was great that you decided to allow me to air this keynote. I really do appreciate that. And I want to thank you for listening to this keynote speech. It really means a lot to me that you were around through the whole thing. And if you have been a long time listener of the podcast, you probably remember where a lot of these ideas came from. I would love to have a conversation with you about it. You can do that on Twitter at Vance Crowe. Or if you're the type of person that loves talking about these ideas and you wanna talk about 'em, not just with me, but with other people that love the podcast and are open to listening to a keynote by me, you may wanna consider joining the Articulate Ventures Network. It's a place where it's a private social media channel. We just have conversations that are kept with us. They're about all different sorts of things, and people from all over the country are a part of it. You can learn more by going to Network dot Articulate Ventures and consider becoming a member of that group. And we can talk about these in that place. And finally, if you are a person that organizes conferences like these and you would be interested in seeing if we're a good fit, then you can go to Vance Crowe dot com and schedule a conversation where we'll sit down and talk about your conference.

Vance Crowe [00:44:53] What is the theme? What are some of the challenges your organization is facing? And I can provide some ideas on things that I can talk about that might fit those concepts. Thank you so much for joining me, and we'll be back next week for an interview that you are normally used to coming to the Vance Crowe podcast for. Thank you so much for listening. I'm so glad you're here.