Roger Kastner on Next-Level OD, IFS-Informed Coaching, and Uncovering Your Superpower
In Brief: Roger Kastner (linkedin.com/in/roger-kastner/, whatdoyouknowtobetrue.com), a coach and org development practitioner who has led initiatives from Fortune 100 companies to small non-profits, joins host Dan Freehling. Roger shares insights on aligning culture and strategy with daily work experience (04:04), his evolution from expert to facilitator who co-creates solutions with clients (15:32), and his coaching philosophy informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), which focuses on understanding and appreciating the different parts of oneself to overcome personal and professional challenges (19:00). Roger also discusses his podcast "What Do You Know To Be True,” which explores superpowers and their connection to purpose and potential (29:01), and emphasizes meditation as a tool for enhancing presence and decision-making in leadership (50:31).
Recommended reading: “Hidden Potential" by Adam Grant, “No Bad Parts" by Richard Schwartz.
Dan Freehling
[00:03]
Hey everyone, Dan here. Welcome to another episode of Forward-Looking Leadership. I'm honored to be joined on this episode by Roger Kastner. Roger is a coach and consultant who's led organizational development interventions at some of the world's leading companies. He's also the host of the podcast What Do You Know To Be True? Roger, thanks so much for joining me on Forward-Looking Leadership.
Roger Kastner
[00:25]
I'm so looking forward to this conversation with you, Dan. Thanks for having me on.
Dan Freehling
[00:29]
I'm so excited to nerd out with you on all things OD and leadership and coaching and all of that. So let's get right into it. On organizational development, I know it's such an amorphous word and concept, and as someone who's part of my business and part of my practice is being an OD practitioner, I still run into different ways of defining this, different ways of conceptualizing this all the time. I would love to hear from you: How do you think about OD?
Roger Kastner
[00:59]
As an OD practitioner, do you find yourself asking people to define simple words like accountability or trust? Or, "Hey, when you say that, what do you mean by that?" I do it all the time, so it's good to know it's not just me.
So I think of organizational development as this holistic practice that addresses issues impacting people, teams, and systems so that organizations can achieve their goals—and sometimes, I think more importantly, as Adam Grant might say, make work suck less. Or as I like to say, create environments where people feel like they can grow, find meaning in their work, and ultimately thrive. I think that's actually the secret sauce: when we can create these holistic systems, holistic solutions that allow businesses to achieve goals and create environments where people can thrive.
I think of org dev as this multidisciplinary umbrella that includes leadership development, team development or coaching—that is, team coaching—individual coaching as well can fit in here sometimes, or not. What I like to call op model and org design—I don't like referring to one or the other separately, and we'll go into that I'm sure. Learning and development and capability building fits in here, and then ultimately change management. I like to joke that change management is the gateway drug to org development, but it is in everything we do. It requires change in and of itself. So change—we could do it by itself or we could do it as part of that holistic approach.
[02:40]
I tend to think the reason why I find so much enjoyment and meaning in this work is that I think since we're going to spend the majority of our time working—the majority of our life working—being able to find this balance between business outcomes and personal growth and thriving is really critical for us to not only get meaning out of our paycheck, but also get pay out of our paycheck and be able to find that balance. And the research actually supports this: that in order to create higher-performing teams, we need to have that balance focused on the mechanics of getting work done, of achieving our goals, but then also facilitating individual and team growth and finding meaning, finding flow, and thriving.
Dan Freehling
[03:29]
I love cutting to the heart of what this is all for. I think you did that really beautifully.
Roger Kastner
Oh, thank you.
Dan Freehling
We can debate definitions and all of that all the time, but really at the end of the day, this is a holistic process and it's for all of these reasons that you mentioned. So a lot of these are very familiar to me and I'm sure to a lot of our listeners. What I don't know as much about, and I would love to hear from you, is this op model and the org design. I'd love for you to go into: What do you mean by these? How do you go about it? And why should practitioners care? Why should leaders care about these?
Roger Kastner
[04:04]
Awesome. Yeah, you're winding me up on my top issues because I feel pretty strongly about this idea of the operating model and organizational design. Operating model is one of those terms that when I hear someone say "op model," I'm like, "What do you mean when you say op model?" just so we're on the same page. It often is very different things.
So when I think about this org development space where we can go anywhere from culture and strategy all the way down to the day-to-day work experience of employees, I think that—at least in my experience—I have found what we talk about on one end of that spectrum is very different than the experience on the other end of this spectrum. And they're not coherent, they're not tied together and aligned. I think that operating model and org design work have the ability to actually be the connective tissue, to provide the clarity and the structure and the systems to make culture and strategy be something that actually gets lived out in that day-to-day experience of employees.
[05:12]
So again, org design—oftentimes people think of org design as boxes and lines, org charts, the reporting relationships. And that is an output, but that's not where we want to start. I think a lot of our friends who are in the HR business partner space have leaders show up on Monday morning with a PowerPoint slide and two or three names connected with those lines, saying, "Hey, fill out the rest of my org chart. We need to align to a new strategy," or "We're incorporating this group into our team and here are the key people. Make the rest of it work out." That's not a great place to start because yes, that might tell us a couple of the reporting relationships, but it doesn't tell us what we need to be successful. It doesn't tell us how we're actually going to operate this new structure.
[06:02]
It just tells us who's going to report to whom. And although there's some value in it, not enough value. When I think operating model, I think the operating model ultimately has to show the capabilities—in order to produce what we're expected to produce, what are the muscles in the organization that we need to flex, and only those muscles, to produce the value of the vision. Then I want to understand how is work going to flow through the organization? How are we going to take requests coming from our customers? How are we going to prioritize, get those assigned? How are we going to get the work flowing through the right teams and the right people, and then have those handoffs that are critical for making sure that we're giving the work to the right people or handing the product off to the customers in the right way.
[06:53]
So understanding how work's going to flow. Then we get into governance, which I think actually just boils down to how we make decisions and then how we measure the effectiveness of those decisions. And if we understand the workflow, we could understand where are those key repeatable decisions, and then let's build some framework around it. What's the approach for making those decisions? What are the decision rights?
Dan, you wouldn't be surprised, but it's always surprising for me when I walk into different organizations and find out no one's mapped out how we make decisions. In the Pacific Northwest, we use a lot of consensus-based decision-making when we don't need to. We often defer to that approach. It takes a lot longer and it isn't always necessary. And when we find out—when we ask 40 people for their opinions and then those 40 people find out that the decision was already made and they were just giving input—it actually begins to erode trust. So we can get better at understanding how we're making decisions and calling the ball early on: who has decision rights and what approach we're taking.
[08:02]
And I think that's really the basis of our governance piece. Additionally, within that operating model, I want to understand what are the roles and accountabilities assigned to those roles. Again, if we do the workflow mapping, we can assign the work to individual roles and have an understanding of who are the doers and who are the approvers.
And then we get to structure. We finally get to structure. Okay, we're building boxes and lines, and in order to build those boxes and lines, what I want to understand is: based on the workflow, based on the roles, and then based on the work volume, now we know how many individual contributors we have. Based on those individual contributors, we can then look at our philosophy around spans of control. So now we know how many managers we have, how many directors we have. We can build up from the bottom of that org chart, but also from that workflow, also understanding the capabilities.
[08:54]
We could look from top down: How do we want to structure how we're going to manage all this work? And so we will look at things like, do we want to structure the top of the organization based on our customers, our processes, the products or services, by region? There's a host of things that we can look at for how we want to structure the top, and we kind of build the structure from top down and bottoms up and we meet somewhere in the middle. Yay, we get a structure.
Lastly, the one thing that I have found that most teams do not talk about as part of their operating model gets to behaviors. And this is the critical few behaviors we want to see—sometimes related to talent strategy, sometimes just related to our business strategy—but what are the behaviors that we need to see within our organization to produce the value that's inherent in the vision? And we need our leadership team, the top leadership team, to show those behaviors early and consistently so the rest of the team knows that it's safe to move towards those behaviors. They know what it looks like, they know what's expected of them when they're asked to act with accountability—or insert cliché here—because they've seen those behaviors from the leaders and they know it's safe to behave differently. So operating model is a combination of those capabilities, the workflow, governance, roles, structure, and the last piece of the pie is behaviors.
Dan Freehling
[10:25]
It's such a clear explanation, and I think this is exactly right. You're seeing this as the kind of handshake from strategy and vision and culture and all of that to, okay, now how does this actually get enacted in an organization?
Roger Kastner
[10:39]
Yeah, I mean too many times I think teams will make decisions about how they want to be structured and how they want to go about achieving what's inherent in the vision, and they just have assumptions about how the work's going to get done—whether it's a new organization or a change to an existing organization. There's just a lot of assumptions. And if you've ever spent any time doing process design—and I know you have, Dan—it's always amazing: once someone writes out the process, the one-through-six, seven steps, someone in the room's going to say, "Oh, you do it like that?" And these are people who've been working together for so long. It's surprising to hear. Well, now do that on a system level and find the assumptions that have been made all along. It can be shocking, and yet it's so simple to address.
Dan Freehling
[11:35]
One of those things that is ostensibly simple, but nobody has ever asked about it, which is really, really powerful there. You mentioned some of these overly collective decision-making cultures. I'm wondering, what is the interplay with these kind of decision-making cultures and doing this kind of model and org design? Who are you talking to about this? Who's able to actually make decisions and let you move this forward?
Roger Kastner
[12:00]
Usually a lot of the teams that I'm working with, there's a C-suite member and then there's their direct team. And oftentimes when we start poking around how decisions get made, they don't know. There's an assumption that decisions are being made lower in the organization, and then we ask the people lower in the organization, "Where do these decisions get made?" And they're like—it's a game of pointing fingers where they think decisions actually get made and who has decision rights. And then once you start putting names on paper and walking through what that process looks like, you find out, "Oh no, actually that director does not have decision rights."
[12:48]
What they do is basically create a recommendation where the VP looks at it, gives it a yay or nay, and then provides it to an SVP, and the SVP says yes or no. So the decision's really two levels up, for better or for worse. Sometimes it doesn't need to be that way; it's just sort of an approval.
There are many different decision framework models out there. If you're familiar with RAPID, which is kind of like a RACI for decision-making: you got the recommender, you got the decider, you got the implementer, the performer—all these different roles. At one engagement, I had to add an S at the end: RAPIDS. And that S is the role of the boss of the decision-maker. The S stands for supporter.
So the way it looks: if I have the D, I'm the decider, and I go to Dan, my boss, and I say, "Dan, we had the choice between green or blue, and I think green is the right decision. What do you think?" At that moment, if Dan's being a good S, a supporter, Dan says, "It's not my decision, it's your decision. Tell me why you said that. Tell me why you think it's better to be green than blue." And that's it. It's not overriding, it's not informing or changing the decision. It is supporting the rights of the decision-maker. And that's really hard for leaders to do—not to fall in and start putting their thumb on the scales, whether they know it or not.
Dan Freehling
[14:20]
It's an amazing framework to add to everyone's toolkit. I think a lot of people listening will be very, very happy to have heard that—it's a really cool one. So you've been doing OD in a number of organizations over a number of years, and I'm really curious: What have you changed your mind on as you've advanced as an OD practitioner?
Roger Kastner
[14:41]
So I've had multiple careers overlap. Prior to OD, I was doing technical project management for about 12 to 15 years, and now I've been in OD for about 12 to 15 years. And in the middle, overlapping all of that: 18 years of external consulting. So I've been in many different environments, many different conditions, working in various ways.
And I think when I was late to consulting, but when I got into consulting, I would be referred to as the expert—whether it's project management expert, portfolio management expert, change expert. Now it's the org design expert. And early Roger, early-career Roger, would really attach to that idea of being an expert. Not that I thought that I knew everything, but I was aware other people thought I knew everything and thought I would be able to ascertain what's the right thing for them to do. And I held onto that a little too tightly.
[15:44]
It was around that time I got this idea presented to me that we should never, as consultants or as coaches, work harder than our clients. I'm like, "Oh, okay, I can see that. If I'm bringing more energy and doing a lot more work and more focus on this thing and it's not a priority for them, or they don't have the resources to make it happen, I should really step back from that."
And then I realized what it really meant is: ultimately, whether I'm doing organizational development or change management or project management for a client that's internal or external, I'm not a part of that team. I am walking away at some point, and they need to not only own the solutions that they carry out, or that we designed—they need to own it and they need to reinforce it and make it work.
[16:44]
Then I realized, oh, they're already thinking about these challenges every day. They're closer to the problem than I will ever be, because I'm going into different industries, different companies, different environments, different disciplines. I will never know more about the thing that they're working on than they are—in their environment with their constraints and their strategy.
So I came to this realization that instead of being the expert at the thing I'm doing, I should be the expert at facilitation. I should be the expert at creating a container for a process to unfold. I should be the expert in letting co-creation happen. So the people closest to the problem that are allowed in the room, in the conversation—those people who are closest to it—allow them to bring their zone of genius into the room and to come up with the solutions. Because those solutions are probably going to be better than anything I'm going to be able to come up with, and they're going to own the implementation.
And so it is moving from that expert to the facilitator thinking. I had to come with solutions, and then: "Oh no, we co-create the solutions together." That's been the biggest change for me in my career.
Dan Freehling
[18:03]
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And I love your nuance on—it's not that—I think when people get this wrong in the coaching world and the facilitation world, they show up as, "Oh, okay, I'm not supposed to be the expert, so I'm supposed to show up and know nothing and not have anything to contribute." And it's like, no, your job is to be the expert facilitator here. Be the expert on creating this container, as you said. And the more you can get really good at that, that is great. And a solution that the group can own is better facilitated when you do work on developing your expertise in that area.
You described yourself as an ICF-certified—which I think everyone understands—and then IFS-informed self-leadership coach. So especially that back half there, I'd love for you to walk me through all the different parts of that. What does that mean and how does that impact your coaching?
Roger Kastner
[19:00]
IFS, as you know, stands for Internal Family Systems. It's a modality of psychology that was developed by Richard Schwartz about 40 years ago as he was working with patients that were dealing with trauma. And they were talking about, "Oh, there's a part of me that feels guilty about this," and "There's a part of me that's angry about this," and "There's a part of..." And they were using the words of parts.
It's not like Richard Schwartz trademarked the word parts and the parts started then. Jung talked about parts. Freud talked about parts. The language and awareness around parts have been around for a long time. It's just getting more and more commonplace. I think what Richard Schwartz brought was an easier way of understanding these parts and what the parts are trying to do for us.
So the clients that I work with in the coaching space are coming because they are trying to achieve something, but something keeps getting in the way—whether it's a story or whether it's an emotion, there's a pattern that they're up against.
[20:09]
And parts work is just a way of helping them identify what that part looks like, creating a little space between themselves and the part, understanding that part and what the job is that that part is trying to do, and then showing some appreciation for that part. That's actually how we soften those parts. If we go in there trying to fight them, trying to get them to go away, that doesn't usually work with other human beings. Why would it work for part of our own personalities?
So once we show a desire to understand, show appreciation for the job it's trying to do—because ultimately it's trying to protect you from some negative experience you had earlier in your life—and I know there's probably some people out there hearing this maybe thinking, "Oh, I don't want to talk to my inner child when I'm trying to get a promotion or I'm trying to do this thing at work." And it's like, yeah, no, I get it. That seems like it's in the past and we should just be able to achieve in spite of that thing. Good luck with that. That's the pattern that we've been in.
And so these things that occurred early in our lives still show up with us. They still show up in how we respond, in ways that we might not like. It still shows up in those blockers that prevent us from doing the thing that we really want to do.
[21:41]
The way out is through: becoming and developing relationships with our parts, understanding what they're trying to do, appreciating them, showing gratitude for them. That softens them. And then we get to actually go in and do the real work of trying to understand something that happened to us when we were six and we're now 46 or 56. We're a lot more resourced than we were then. The parts were preventing us from actually doing some healing, from getting beyond it.
And so we're beginning to get into that border between what is therapy and what is coaching. And that makes a lot of sense from a therapist standpoint and a coach standpoint for our clients—they're in that space right there, they're in that energy. So I think our role as coaches is to help them develop the relationships with the parts better, understand themselves, become self-reliant and come from a sense of self to be able to address those parts, address those challenges, and then manage themselves and have that connection happen all internally.
[23:02]
And yes, a coach might be helping facilitate that conversation, that developing of the relationship, and helping the client be aware of the choices that they can make. But it's about them. It's not about creating a relationship with the coach; it's about creating a relationship with our parts.
And so that's where this self-leadership component comes in. I want to focus my clients on how they can be the leader of themselves, how they can be able to identify the patterns, the stories they tell themselves, the things that are getting in their way, and be resourced enough where they can start working through that whole process, that whole system, to become more aware, to have a greater sense of presence, a greater sense of self, and that they actually get to make those decisions and not let the parts make the decisions for them.
Dan Freehling
[24:04]
This is a really fascinating concept. What's a really practical example of a part that might be playing a protective role in somebody's life and now kind of getting in the way? What does this really look like?
Roger Kastner
[24:18]
Yeah, well, I think earlier I was using that example of the younger-in-career Roger, who was told he was the expert...
Dan Freehling
[24:28]
And...
Roger Kastner
[24:29]
There was a part of me that wanted to be the expert. It felt good. It felt really good being seen as that person that had all the answers. The problem is Roger didn't have those answers, but there was a part that really felt valued and respected. And so that part would sort of come to the front of the stage, if you will, and own that mantle of being an expert. But Roger, the self, didn't have that expertise.
And so then there would come that position of like, "Okay, now it's time to produce. Now it's time to give the solution, tell them what they're supposed to do." And then there's another part standing up and like, "Oh dude, you stepped in it now. Run." Shame, vulnerability—all those other parts are coming up. So it's the example of that pattern, that voice in the head.
And what's really interesting about the parts work is it becomes very difficult to tell what's a part versus self. And through these conversations, getting to know, "Oh, this is a part. It's trying to do something for me. It's trying to protect me from negative feelings. It's trying to..." Anytime it's trying to do something—that's not self. Hopefully that's a good enough example. I only got a thousand more if you want.
Dan Freehling
[25:52]
No, it makes it very clear for people. And just a really evocative example—and thanks for being willing to go personal, a lot of which I know is no problem for you and the podcast that you host as well.
Roger Kastner
[26:06]
Thank you.
Dan Freehling
[26:09]
On this line of therapy and coaching, I've softened my stance on this, I think for very good reason. Coaching training programs, you're very much taught this stark dividing line of: past is therapy, future is coaching. And as you mentioned, life doesn't work that way, obviously. I'm wondering how are you thinking about this interplay now?
Roger Kastner
[26:35]
Yeah, for my clients, when I can tell there are some strong experiences in the past that are still with them today, I will ask if they're in therapy for those conditions or the situations that they're working on. And often a client will be also in therapy as well as going through coaching at the same time. And I will ask them to check with their therapist if the therapist is familiar with Internal Family Systems. Fortunately enough, each time it's come up, they have been, so they have someone to go to and then get into that deeper work.
Dan Freehling
[27:20]
That's such a nuanced and obviously deeply humane way to go about this, I think, and to navigate these—what are very much confusing waters a lot of the time. And obviously we don't want to go past our qualifications in terms of ability to process some of these really deep traumas. And at the same time, people are not just these forward-thinking robots who don't think about the past at all in a coaching conversation.
Roger Kastner
[27:48]
Yeah, I mean, I've tried to remember the saying: the past is the present. Those things that happened in our past come up all the time in very inconvenient ways if we don't know—if we haven't done the work. And so this idea of therapy is about the past and coaching's about the future—it's like, that sounds great, that looks great on a PowerPoint slide or in a book. It's not how we operate as humans.
And so I'm not advocating to do anything that's unethical, anything that looks like malpractice. You want to make sure that our clients are resourced and supported through their journeys. And I have a set of psychologists that I know are IFS-trained that I can refer my clients to if they need it, if they don't have their own. But I also just don't want to leave my client stranded on the highway when they find themselves in those situations.
Dan Freehling
[28:51]
On your podcast, you talk about understanding other people's superpowers a lot. What is behind this question? What about this is important to you?
Roger Kastner
[29:01]
The podcast turns two this week, and about a little more than two years ago, I was contemplating: What am I going to do with the last 10, 15 years of my career? And I had collected this wonderful network of people who had gone independent, had become coaches and independent consultants, and really leaning into a specialization. And I was curious about, "Okay, what is this about? Is it that they just no longer fit within the corporate experience? Did they get pushed out of consulting firms? What is it about?"
And so I started having conversations with people, and what I learned was that they had a superpower—an extraordinary talent—that they loved doing that thing so much that they wanted to do that thing all the time. And as a corporate employee or working for a consulting firm, you didn't get to do that thing enough.
[30:05]
If it's not 110%, it's not enough. You want to go do it more. And so they started out on their own. And in a series of these conversations, when I'm learning about—"Oh, you don't want to be an entrepreneur, you don't want to run your own business, but that's how you thrive, and it's by living into your superpower." Tell me more. I want to learn more about this.
And a couple of those conversations ended up with people saying, "Oh, we should do a podcast." That put me in the wayback machine, went back 20 years to my project management skills: "Oh, well, if we're going to do a podcast, we're going to have to have themes and recurring sessions." And just you and me talking every week about your superpower and my superpower—that's not going to go very far.
[30:52]
So there was this element of: interesting idea, can't think of how to execute on it. And then I got the idea: Why don't I just continue to have these conversations with new people and learn about their superpowers? And again, the idea was, if I'm getting inspired by this, I think other people would get inspired by it. So let's inspire a bunch of people to live into their superpowers.
Because these people—they're doing really difficult things by running their own businesses. It's really hard to go get new clients, it's really hard to keep revenue coming in. There's a lot more nos than there are yeses. And yet, being in their zone of genius, living into their superpower, is how they were finding purpose and meaning in life. So that was super exciting. Like, yes, I want some of that for myself.
And I've developed my own purpose statement over the years: I'm unlocking my potential when I'm working with others to unlock their potential.
[31:56]
And so here are people who've unlocked their potential by living into their superpowers. And at first it was, yeah, let's go find out about superpowers. And then I found out, oh, the superpower is the thing they do. The purpose is why they do it. So we started talking about—the first year was really about understanding the connection between superpowers and purpose.
And then I realized purpose is in service of something. And what came to my awareness was: purpose is in service of our potential, or our possible self. So then I was like, "Okay, well what else is there? What else are the building blocks?" If we have our purpose, our North Star, what else helps us live into our potential?
And I looked around and saw some research of what other people were thinking about potential. I read Adam Grant's book. I looked into this and it was like, there's got to be something else.
[32:56]
So I started just writing down what I thought were the building blocks, and I came up with five—it's grown to seven. But we have our purpose, which is our North Star. Then we have joy, which is the fuel, and it's also the motivator for living into our purpose.
Next, I was going to call it agency. This is the most controversial one, I think. I was calling it agency, and then realized that Charles Snyder, the psychologist back in the eighties who came up with his theory of hope, defines hope as: the belief in our goals, the belief in our plan, and the belief in our actions and abilities to make change happen. It's not hope as a wish or as a prayer.
[33:46]
It's dripping with action and belief and trust. So that's the third pillar.
The fourth pillar is adaptability: growth mindset, resilience, learning agility.
The fifth pillar is wellbeing. We've got to take care of our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual being for us to show up in our best way in the service of other people.
The next pillar was really this acknowledgment that we could have our North Star, we could know where we get our fuel, we can have our hope, we can have all the adaptability in the world, and we could take care of all of our being—but some days it's just hard to get out of bed. Some days it's hard to get into the arena when we know we're going to get our ass kicked, when we know—the whole Teddy Roosevelt quote. And so what it takes is courage. It takes courage to show up.
[34:45]
It takes courage to continue to grow. It takes courage to say, "I don't know the answer to that." It takes courage to hold space for other people when they're trying to figure out why they can't do the thing that's so important to them.
After courage, I think—and this was a critique I heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs—that there was no sort of awareness of the contribution of the team, of the community, in helping us achieve our potential or possible selves. And so that last piece will be around community, will be around team. And I think it's going to be more about how do you become a better teammate or a better community member, than what the team or the community can do for you. I think the superpower is the connective tissue in all of that.
Dan Freehling
[35:42]
This is such a cool concept. How do you think about this in terms of: Are these prerequisites? Are these constantly being developed? Do you hit a tipping point in these? What is your thinking on sort of the born versus made, so to speak?
Roger Kastner
[35:57]
I originally started the podcast thinking we are going to go season by season based on those pillars. And this year, year two, was all about the year of joy. And as soon as the calendar flipped to 2025, I started hearing about how joy is elusive, joy is really hard right now. So maybe it was a bad time to have a season of joy, or maybe we needed it more than ever. The jury's still out on that one.
But I came to realize that no one is going sequentially through these pillars, that they're experiencing them all the time, that they're developing, growing, honing, nurturing all the time—if they choose to. And so I do not believe it's something you're born with. I do not believe—and I might have this argument with some of my guests around, "Are you born with your purpose?" I don't know.
[36:57]
I think what I have found: a lot of the purpose, the superpowers, come out of experiences we have when we're really young—an unmet need, whether that's something that came through trauma or just something you were lacking in your life. And that superpower is that talent that you found, actually, that answers that, that attends to that unmet need. So you do it more and more, you get good at it, and then you become the superhero when you're doing it in service of others. Like, Batman doesn't have a cape—he's just in it for himself, right? He's doing it for all of Gotham.
So anyway, I think these are pillars that we're working on, can be working on, all the time. We can focus on one, but there's elements of the others. And it has informed my decision to not go season by season, but then just to start popcorning the interviews based on the relationship between the guest's superpower and then whatever pillar that makes sense.
And it's funny, when I'm interviewing guests, I think it's one pillar and then they actually come up with—it's like, "No, no, no, it relates to this one." And they explain it to me. I'm like, "Of course. You know your superpower better than I do."
Dan Freehling
[38:15]
This is very on point for the rest of the conversation too. This is great. What is the most surprising thing you've learned from a podcast guest?
Roger Kastner
[38:25]
There's been a theme lately where guests have been talking about the power of choice and how they're choosing their superpower on an almost daily basis. And so frequently the quote attributed to Viktor Frankl keeps coming up—this idea of: between stimulus and response, there's a space, and in that space is the freedom to choose.
The guests keep talking about how they have to remind themselves on a daily basis to choose positivity, to choose authenticity, to choose joy, to choose creativity. It just keeps coming up and up and up. And I would think—I guess I had the assumption—oh, if this is your superpower, it just comes naturally. And no, no—it's a choice. And the learning for me continues.
Recently I had this experience where I was going into a situation where I knew I was going to be able to make a choice for me to show up in a certain way—for me to be more present, more self-regulated, more forgiving—and I totally failed.
[39:41]
I totally failed at it, and I was kicking my butt for it for a couple of days. And I'd made that choice going into it. But then I had realized, in the moments that got me a little dysregulated, I was choosing something else. I wasn't sticking to that choice.
And so it made it clear: now I get why the people who are really good at this are making that constant choice on a daily basis—and in the day, hourly, minute by minute—they're making the choice to show up that way. And I needed to work harder at that.
Dan Freehling
[40:19]
That's a really compelling story, and I don't know how you feel about this—I think a lot of the superpower stuff, this zone of genius stuff, is countercultural in a lot of ways and can be kind of hard to be out there with when you have a lot of people, for their own reasons and for just broader kind of societal reasons, of that kind of, "I'm more comfortable not looking into this more deeply for myself. I kind of want to stay in this box, so I kind of want you to stay in this box." I'm wondering if that kind of stuff has come up for you or for guests.
Roger Kastner
[40:55]
I think—I don't know if—I do know—I don't know if you've noticed an energy shift in me when I start talking about superpowers and the podcast. Everyone tells me they see an energy shift, so I'm assuming it's pretty apparent.
I think if I'm talking to anyone who doesn't want to talk about podcasts, they bounce from that conversation very quickly. They don't want to be a part of it. They know I'm coming in with a lot of Jack Russell terrier energy to talk about it, and they're just going to avoid me for whatever reason—at least that's the story I'm telling myself, and it has nothing to do with my personality.
But I think it's really challenging for people. And I think we could get into the parts discussion here as well: if they feel like they are not comfortable living into their meaning, their purpose—if they don't know what it is—there's a sense of the messy middle that they have to go through to figure that out.
[42:07]
There might also be the awareness that they're doing something that—they already know this, but they don't want to be honest about it. They're already in a line of work that does not bring them joy, does not bring them happiness, but they're doing it for another reason. They're doing it for the paycheck, they're doing it because it's safe, they're doing it because of fear of doing something else that's maybe more meaningful for them but puts everything that they have at risk.
And so I think there's probably a lot of reasons why people are a little scared off from having these conversations. And there's a part of me that wants to talk about abundance and scarcity mindset, but I've learned from one of my guests about polarity management. And we continue to have these conversations: that whenever you think of things as being binary—between an A choice or a B choice—it's time to start looking for the C choice.
[43:10]
There's the space in between. There's the energy in between, and that's the place to go to. And so in thinking about abundance and scarcity, I think people—it's a continuum. We lean more one way in a certain situation and the other way in another situation. And on average, I think people who want to avoid these topics probably spend a little bit more time on the scarcity side of that continuum than the abundance.
I know I'm in the middle. There are better days than others for sure. There are things that I talk about doing that I haven't done yet, that I still have opportunities to do. But there's a part, a voice in the back of my head saying, "Dude, you could have done that five years ago. No better time than doing it now." And here I am.
Dan Freehling
[44:02]
Bringing these conversations to light, I think, can help to tip that in ourselves and in other people—to just seeing more and more examples of people who are living into this. So it's a really cool thing you're doing with it. Can I ask you: What is your latest conceptualization of your own superpower? Having asked about this for all this time—I'm sure it's developed yours and refined yours over these episodes.
Roger Kastner
[44:26]
Well, Dan, I'm glad you asked. We actually just released an episode—the last episode was in celebration of the second year of the podcast—and a couple friends had made suggestions independently that I should be a guest on my own podcast. And so one of the people who made the suggestion, I said, "Well, will you host the podcast when I'm on it?" April McCormick graciously agreed to be the host. And so she interviewed me about my superpower, and we went back and forth a little bit trying to figure out what it is.
And once I said it, it kind of smacked us both in the face, like, "Of course!" And it's: using simple frameworks to create artificial constraints and borders to enable creativity, innovation, and authenticity to show up, so individuals and teams can make better-informed decisions about solutions that they're looking to deploy for whatever thing they're working on.
[45:36]
And I have been, throughout my career—whether it's project management, change management, now in the OD space—I've either found simple frameworks or have created simple frameworks that have allowed some level of success in whatever it is I'm doing.
But 10 years ago, I published a book about a project management framework that I had developed around creating successful projects. My experience: project management, the discipline, talks about scope, schedule, budget being the holy trinity. But my experience was that no one cares about scope, schedule, budget once you launch. They care about a whole host of other things. But those things were known before we started. So this process was: let's identify what we think the critical success factors are at the beginning, put it in our scope, put it in our measurements. The converse of those things is our risk management plan. And let's drive the heck out of those critical success factors. Pretty soon, projects are all successful during the beginning, during, and at the end. Once scope, schedule, budget wasn't as important.
[46:39]
And I started teaching people within my consulting firm about this practice. I then had the opportunity to teach it at University of Washington. I started blogging about it, and I took those blogs, put them into a book, published it. At that time, I'd already moved into change management, and I realized, "Oh, I really don't want to be promoting a project management book. Doesn't do well for my career." So I just let that linger—still available on Amazon. So if anyone wants to look up a fun little project management book... Anyway, I'm sure that sold no units.
[47:24]
The other framework I realized that I created was my podcast—those same seven building blocks for potential. Simple framework. So much of the coaching experience that we create: the container, the questions, the mirror—these are all frameworks. IFS is a framework.
So finding those frameworks, creating my own when there's not one that exists, and then sharing it—whether it's teaching it or talking endlessly, as you're experiencing right now, about the frameworks that I love. Because what I have found is that not only does that help me achieve my purpose, there's a part of me that needs external validation. I'm not unique. It feels good when I'm able to deploy the framework, facilitate the process, and then the individual or the team is able to go do something that they weren't able to do before. That feels good.
Dan Freehling
[48:27]
And there's this interplay too, between the very tactical and the bigger picture. And it's something that I found in my practice as well. And I relate to you a lot. I came from a project management background as well.
Roger Kastner
[48:42]
Oh my goodness. We're the same person.
Dan Freehling
[48:44]
We are. It is scary. It is scary. But yeah, forcing these kind of artificial constraints to surface conversation is so powerful. And I think sometimes in these kind of more personal, more people-to-people things, we can get so far away from anything that feels constraining that it actually neglects that.
Roger Kastner
[49:07]
Yeah, it's coming up for me. And my awareness is: a colleague I used to work with had an exercise she would do with leadership teams called Tall Curbs and Wide Boulevards. And the idea is the tall curbs were the constraints and the wide boulevard was what we had agency over—those decisions we could make, the control we had. But we had to adhere to the curbs.
And so we'd actually draw this out when we used to be in rooms and we got to draw on whiteboards. We would draw like the city and the distance and this boulevard—the wide boulevard and the tall curbs—and we'd just name: What are the things that are our constraints? What's the third rail, the things we can't touch, what do we not have control over? And then everything in the middle. It was a way of increasing our sense of certainty and agency. It was a great activity.
Dan Freehling
[50:03]
That's another great one. And again, I'm really glad we can nerd out and have people add all of these things to their toolkits. It's so cool. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a book—I know people have very mixed feelings on the world of business books and leadership books and all this kind of stuff. Any resource of any kind—it can be podcasts, it can be books—what kinds of resources do you most recommend to leaders, to org development practitioners, to coaches? Anything like that.
Roger Kastner
[50:31]
It's going to sound cliché, but it's meditation. If you—you deserve 15 minutes of quiet time in your life on a daily basis. And it's not just relax and rejuvenate and just sit there and be quiet. You're actually taking your brain to the gym. Because the brain—it's there to think thoughts. It's there to think of distractions. It's there to keep you entertained. It will be constantly working.
And when you sit for however long you sit and those distractions come up, and you figure out your way of acknowledging that thought and then letting it go—you're teaching yourself how to be present.
[51:20]
All the books that we read, all the podcasts we listen to—I love podcasts, don't get me wrong—but all the information out there: if we're not present in the moment, the things we learn, the things we know to be true, the things we know we should be doing—if we can't be present in the moment, all that information is just wasted. Because we didn't have the ability to choose that knowledge, that wisdom, and implement it in the moment—because we were distracted by something else.
So I think meditation is this idea of training our brain to be more in the moment, to be more present, and being able to use that knowledge and wisdom we spend so much time trying to gain.
Dan Freehling
[52:08]
And especially as we go into this unknown age of AI and just even more ubiquitous knowledge just everywhere around us, this focus and this ability to pull this in is more important than ever, it seems.
Roger Kastner
[52:23]
I mean, how many times have you left a room and you think, "Oh, I should have said this," or "The answer came to me," or "Oh, what if we tried this?" And why didn't it come to you in the middle of the conversation? Why didn't it come to you in that room? Well, it could have been something else going on in your mind. You could have been thinking, "How do I look like the expert?"—not that that was a familiar phrase for myself—or "Oh, they're putting me on the spot. They might think I'm an idiot if I say anything." Like, whatever story we're telling ourselves in the moment.
If we have this learned ability to quiet the mind and just be there for what shows up, that's when we're able to bring out that wisdom. That's when we're able to bring out that knowledge.
[53:09]
And I truly believe that meditation is an act of love towards your family and those that care about you, because when you can be more present with them, you're a better version of you, and it's a better connection. I think it's an act of rebellion against this culture of busyness and algorithms that want to feed our eyeballs, that plug us into the matrix, that we're the product, we're the power supply, we're the resource that they're tapping into via our choice.
I think it's also an act of regeneration, because the more present we can be, the more we could be the better version of ourselves.
Dan Freehling
[53:53]
It's a beautiful place to leave it. Roger, thank you so much for joining me, for sharing all of these different tools and frameworks and recommendations, and then leaving us in this place of: let's be present, let's meditate, and let's use them.
Roger Kastner
[54:10]
Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.
Dan Freehling
[54:14]
My pleasure. So if people want to follow along with you, follow along with your work, get in touch if they'd like, what's the best way to do that?
Roger Kastner
[54:22]
Yeah, probably the best place right now is via LinkedIn—Roger Kastner. And then if you want to listen to or watch any of the podcast episodes, you can go to whatdoyouknowtobetrue.com, and they're all up there.
Dan Freehling
[54:36]
I would highly encourage everyone to do that. We'll put the links to all of this in the show notes at consleadership.com. And Roger, thank you so much again.
Roger Kastner
[54:44]
It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Dan.
