Epic Entrepreneurs

You, Me, and We: Designing Collaborative Awareness at The Asheville Business Summit with Maureen MCarthy & Zelle Nelson

• Bill Gilliland

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Have you ever wondered why a team of brilliant individuals sometimes fails to work effectively together? The answer lies in collaborative awareness—understanding not just who we are individually, but who we become when we're together.

Maureen McCarthy and Zelle Nelson, co-directors of the Center for Collaborative Awareness, join Epic Entrepreneurs to share their revolutionary approach to designing relationships that thrive even amid uncertainty and stress. Their remarkable journey began 27 years ago when they met during the year doctors predicted Maureen would die from a rare genetic lung disease. Facing this profound uncertainty, they created the first "Blueprint of We"—a relationship design document that helped them navigate unprecedented circumstances together.

That personal innovation evolved into a globally-used methodology helping teams, organizations, and couples intentionally design their relationships rather than leaving them to chance. Drawing from neuroscience, their approach helps people understand their own triggers and flow states, then share this knowledge to create more effective collaborations. The result? Teams that experience less friction, greater productivity, and more joy in working together.

Their work with companies like Dropbox demonstrates how these principles transform organizational culture by providing a framework for understanding each person's working style and creating shared agreements about how teams will function. By shifting from a problem-solution mindset to what they call "what does this make possible" architecture, they invite a more expansive, creative approach to collaboration.

Want to experience this transformative approach firsthand? Don't miss Maureen and Zelle's interactive session at the upcoming Asheville Business Summit. Register now at wncsummit.com to discover how your team can become wiser together.

https://www.collaborativeawareness.com/

Thanks for Listening. You may contact me or our team at https://billgilliland.biz/

All the best!
Bill

Thanks for listening. Please hit the subscribe button, leave us a 5 star review, and share this podcast. You can reach me at williamgilliland@actioncoach.com or at https://billgilliland.biz/

All the best!

Bill

Speaker 1:

Hey there, welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. And before I get to our guests, which I am super pumped about, I want to remind you that it's time. We're not saying it's not too late, but it's getting close. You're going to want to get your tickets to the Asheville Business Summit. All you have to do is go to wncsummitcom, so get out there, get your tickets. It's going to be amazing. We've got a couple of the speakers here today as guests on the podcast. We've got Maureen McCarthy and Zell Nelson. They're co-directors of the Center for Collaborative Awareness and I mean they have got a story to tell and it is going to be amazing, and so I want to hear. So welcome to the podcast, thank you.

Speaker 3:

Great to be here with you when should we start, Someone should talk about right?

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, I'm scared. I'm almost scared to ask because it's so wide open. Let me tell everybody kind of how we got to this and what the Center for Collaborative Awareness is all about and what the Center for Collaborative Awareness is all about.

Speaker 2:

Well, we look at who we are together. There's a lot out there about people becoming a better version of themselves or more self-aware, but there's something that happens in groups and we work in many countries around the world and many languages and cultures and it happens everywhere. You can get a group of really brilliant, self-aware, smart, like really great people together, and why does it sometimes not work? Why can we find ourselves like not in flow, feeling the stress of uncertainty and chaos and the pace of our world, right, it just gets faster. So our work has really been about looking at who we are in groups and understanding that, as things become more uncertain, what's really important is that we pause and begin to know and understand who we are together. That's actually the definition of collaborative awareness.

Speaker 2:

So it includes self-awareness, but it's like wait a second. Who are we together? Self-awareness, but it's like wait a second. Who are we together? There's a heartbeat and a personality to every team, every organization, every group of people anywhere. So how do we start making that something that works for us? How do we learn about who we are together and then design it very specifically to work for us?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we're getting into this idea that it's really a design conversation about let me know a bit about who you are and how you show up. I'm going to share a bit of that about myself and then we can design together how we're going to get to the things that matter to us.

Speaker 2:

But here's the thing that's different from our perspective.

Speaker 2:

We're really looking at the neuroscience of collaboration. There's something that happens in our brain when we get triggered by that person or overwhelmed by something, or feeling that we need to protect ourselves, and those are the kind of things that seem to be like the faster pace of things makes it even more possible to happen. So how do we step back for a second and find our flow and design from that on an iterative basis, on an everyday kind of who are we, who do we want to be and how do we want to get this work done? Through the lens of how my mind is seeing the rest of the team, the work I have to be done, and we've created many tools that are used around the world in many places to actually help calm our minds, help us be more present and be in a design conversation. Look at stress more as a design cue. We've been taught, we've grown up to believe that stress is a warning system and really stress is a messaging system. It's just trying to get our attention about what matters.

Speaker 3:

And it could be a bit of a cliche, but I mean, you look at a sports team and they'll practice what they're doing. They have plays, they have a plan to do to handle what comes up in the midst of a game, and it's the same thing in an organization or a team.

Speaker 2:

But in an organization you have things you do and people are generally good at whatever they're hired to do. But it's who we are with each other, how the team feels when we sit down to a meeting, when you ask somebody to get something done, when you have expectations for how something's going to turn out. We have all kinds of stories that go on in our individual minds and then collective minds that can either get in our way or actually create more ease between us, which makes the work easier and a lot more fun.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating subject. I do have a question about it. Rose brought up a couple of things for me One. The first question is does a group or a couple, or do you start with the goal, or do you start with who you want to be?

Speaker 2:

Well, yes, there will always be goals, especially in business. We have goals and we can have goals that are getting the work done and how we get the work done, but there also can be goals in how we show up with each other. What do we care about? What kind of emotions do we want to feel on a regular basis that we can actually check in and measure? What is the personality, the heartbeat, the way of being that we actually want to be, instead of coming together with a group of people and just sort of crossing our fingers and hoping it's a good thing, you can actually stop and design it really quickly, like on the fly. This is not some big deep dive kind of conversation.

Speaker 3:

And there's two pieces. We're at work or at home with people, you know, eight, ten hours at a time, and, like, I want to feel like alive and connected. While I'm doing that and I can invite you to help me do that as well there's that piece of that intrinsic. You know why I get up in the morning. I want to engage with people, I want that to be in a good space. And there's also this element that if we are connected and flowing and in the zone together, the work's easier, we get more stuff done. It's just better.

Speaker 2:

Let me give you a little background on how all this came to be. So Zell and I are a married couple. We've been together for 27 years. We met the year. You can see I have oxygen on.

Speaker 2:

I actually have a genetic, a fatal genetic lung disease. I've lived longer than anyone else that has this rare disease, but I only have 10% lung capacity left and I have a whole host of crazy things that go on in my body and have since I was about 13. So it's a progressive disease where you eventually can't breathe. It's a crazy life in a lot of ways. And we met the year that my doctors told me I would die. Like, prepare, get everything you're done, you're on your way out. So we met and it was like well, we have nothing in front of us, like nice to meet you, but I'm going to die soon. So what are we doing? And we found ourselves like, well, do you want to go out for dinner tomorrow or do you want to go do something on Thursday? We were just doing this really in the moment choice, all right, we have today. Can you want to do something today? Sure, let's do something today.

Speaker 2:

And what we found after a couple of months of being together I was still alive was that we didn't have the normal off-the-shelf ways of being to just figure out who we were as a couple. Same thing is going on across the world for people in groups of like how do you do this work together? How do you create this startup? How do you stay in a good relationship with a team of people when everything's going crazy? There's a lot of chaos that goes on in this vessel. I'm in and yet I'm still. I'm literally one of the healthiest people you'll ever meet. I'm an incredibly happy person, but it's because, in coming together with Zelle, we realized we needed to custom design a relationship that we'd never seen before, that this can't just be some normal. You get engaged, you get married, you get the white picket fence.

Speaker 3:

The man does this, the woman does that.

Speaker 2:

It just doesn't exist like that, and especially it didn't for us because we had no future. So we still to this day. We created the first what's called a blueprint of we collaboration documents, a relationship design document that we created at the very beginning of our relationship because we wanted to think about who we could be Like. All right, if nothing's on the shelf, then everything's on the shelf. What do we want to do? And over the years we still have that same blueprint of we, but it is a thousand percent different than when we first met because we've evolved and changed our situation, my health, like there's lots of stuff that's changed. So we're constantly upgrading it and learning more and experimenting with things and it's been really fun. We have two kids. They did their first blueprint for us as a family when they were four and six years old. We do them in every. We use it as our contact contracting process. So we don't use traditional legal contracts, even with gosh governments and universities and corporations that live and die by their contracts, with gosh governments and universities and corporations that live and die by their contracts, because what it does is it takes all the traditional things you're going to want to do together, the agreements. You make the goals, the ways you're going to. You know High frame deliverables, all those people, and then you wrap that around with who the people are, because if you take these five people versus another five people, you're going to get two different ways of going forward with something. Let's make it something that works for us.

Speaker 2:

I want to know a bit about who you are. Bill, tell me like you in flow looks like this. You talk like this, you act like this. It shows up like this, and what can I do to be part of helping you have more of those in flow days? On the flip side, I'll tell you what my most stressed out version of me looks like. It looks like this. I talk like this, I act like this. It has nothing to do with you. I've been doing it all my life. This is what I look like, and here's some things, some invitations. I have never demands of how you can help me have like, pull myself back from the stressful days and find more ease again. So whether you're in any group of people of any size because entire corporations use this schools, community organizations like couples, families, whatever, doesn't matter how many people. You can all build this design document together.

Speaker 1:

That's impressive, I like it.

Speaker 1:

We have. I mean, you've probably heard the formula B times do equals have Right, and so I mean, of course, it's have equals, b times do is the way most people look at it. It sounds like to me that you've really come up with a way to be very intentional about who you become, not only and most of the time, it's done as an individual, and you know so I love that. What you've done is come and collaborated and creating a collaborative way for people to, for teams, for couples, for corporations to really work on that B side of the equation. And my guess is, and my theory is, every time that you become something a little better, a little different, then you do things a little different or a little better anyway, and so it's kind of cumulative.

Speaker 1:

So I, I, I love, you know, I, I love, I love this, um, so we were so blessed to have you guys coming and leading. Uh, I we'll call it a, we'll call it a keynote, but it's, I know it's collaborative, I know it's a workshop, I know it's a lot of things, and it sounds like to me that all you do is a lot of things, and so I'm super pumped to hear about it. Tell us a little bit about what's going to be happening at the summit.

Speaker 2:

So we want people to experience a bit about how their own mind works, like what do they look like when they do the typical day-to-day kind of things that are in their work?

Speaker 2:

What do they look like when they're in stress? We need to know those ways of being first before we can ever upgrade them, so become familiar. I know exactly what I look like when I'm stressed. In fact, I've known it so well for so long now that even when I do get stressed because of course we all still do I feel like I'm more, instead of being in the eye of the storm like I used to be, I'm watching my own self as a storm, two miles off the coast. There's something in the awareness where I can be like oh, there's me doing that again. Okay, and I move through it so much faster because I know Same thing with me on my good day what sets me up for a good day, what kind of things, what kind of interactions or ways of being alone or whatever the things are that I need that are really helpful.

Speaker 2:

And so we want people to get a little taste of doing that for themselves connecting with some other people about how that works for them and then understanding how you can create experiments, to start turning up the volume on the stuff where you're in flow. You've got to know it and be familiar with it. You've got to practice it. I want to practice a good day. I mean it's great when you get a team of people who understand, like, who they are doing something in flow, and then we say, okay, on Thursday you're going to practice. That day You're going to do all the things that you've just described, that you know you can be, and it's fascinating how much people can do it when they stop and actually say, like, these are the things we do. This is how I come in in the morning. This is how I ask for this.

Speaker 3:

And you start to build the neural pathways that you can repeat, that you can pull on when you know things get kind of a little weird or hairy. You got to have that muscle built to be able to pull on that connected space. And it's not hard. No, this is not hard work and it's iterative, like you would say yeah.

Speaker 1:

I was going to say is it as simple as practice, or is there a little more to the techniques?

Speaker 2:

We have different tools for like calming your own mind that are not like anything else that's out there. So we've got like we call them the clear mind tools. But when you pair the clear mind tools like working on your own mind, then you can come into a group and start to design like, ok, here's what sets me up for my best self. I don't want you to change. If I me up for my best self, I don't want you to change. If I'm going to work with you, I don't need you to be different, I don't need you to be like me, but I do want to know and understand from your perspective who you are, so that I can totally support you in that.

Speaker 2:

When we start getting into groups and we think like, oh well, if they would just change and if this would be different, like it just never gets us anywhere, no, but it's very possible to stop and understand what are the things that people are caring about? What do they feel like is not being loved or supported or accelerated, and those things can be designed in. It's generally the container of the relationship of a group. That is the issue, not the people.

Speaker 3:

So here's an example. We were working with a team that needed to get their sales numbers up. It's a pretty simple piece and we had them walk through how they show up when they're making a phone call, how they show up when the order doesn't go well, how they show up when the order arrives and it's a big yes. How are they going to be? What happens when I get down and what can I invite the other people on the team to do to notice when I do get down, that hey, I need a phone call or hey, somebody see it says, go, take a walk, we're there for each other. They were there for each other in that team design and they found that they were able to better, like, meet the sales numbers. I mean, it was just a pretty straightforward understanding. But we rarely sit down to think, oh, let me understand what that other person across the desk needs in that moment. What do I need in that moment? How do we design for each other? How do we invite each other to bring our best selves?

Speaker 2:

There's at least three entities in every relationship there's you, there's me and the third entity of we, who we are together. We often know what we want. The other person knows what they want, but we actually need to take all three entities into consideration in our design, and it's wonderful to watch traditional situations that have a lot of contentious behavior and stress leading up to it suddenly turn into now. Granted, everything isn't like oh on a dime, it's different. There is a you know, you're over time learning.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and the beauty of like the blueprint of we is actually also like a third-party mediator document. You so let's say the three of us we were gonna go work on a project together. We put our most emotionally intelligent selves down on paper ahead of time, because when things go crazy, we can't access that part of ourselves. So how do we put it down on paper ahead of time? Also, surround that with like, here's who I am, here's how I work best. This is what I'm all about. When you go back and read your document, like, let's say, I'm here's how I work best, this is what I'm all about. When you go back and read your document, like, let's say, I'm having stress with Zoe, if I take five minutes, go back and just scan the blueprint that we have together, reorient myself with who I am when I'm in flow, who he is, what things matter to him, what he cares about, I suddenly like my whole, that whole part of myself that is fighting, is pushing, is protecting, can just soften a little. It's fascinating to see, it's wonderful to watch.

Speaker 2:

I think the work we do is some of the most spectacular on the planet, because we spend time with people in a space where they feel seen and they feel heard. It's not about changing anybody. It's an invitation to know one another and you know, like what our brain does is we take in information about. You know everything in the world.

Speaker 2:

We have, in essence, a metaphorical filing system of our mind and I just meet you, bill, and I take the files from my own brain and I pull the ones I think have something to do with what meaning I should make of you and then I attach them to you. It doesn't actually matter whether they're anything like you. Those are my files, but they're all I have. Every meaning we make of the world. It's all I have. But if I say to you, bill, give me the files about who you are and how you work and what matters to you and what doesn't work for you, I want you to fill my filing system with the files of you. We have a much better chance of doing that dance when we can continue to learn and know who we are, exchange that information and then take into consideration what happens when we're together. What is that personality and heartbeat of us together?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's fantastic. So you, me and we it sounds like a movie. It's great. Hey, give us a couple of stories of what's worked and what hasn't. Give us a couple of practical success stories from your work.

Speaker 3:

I know you've got thousands. I know you've got thousands.

Speaker 1:

It's probably hard to pick the favorite, but whatever comes to your mind would be great.

Speaker 2:

So, like you know the company Dropbox.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So Dropbox was using the blueprint as a way to really get to know who each individual was better. And then, because everybody's doing a blueprint, there's a blueprint of me where I write just about here's who I am, how I work, what I'm about. You each write yours and then in an organization you have an entire directory where you can click on anybody's photo and get to their blueprint of me that says here's who I am, how I work. It's brilliant in companies where everybody isn't sitting in the same place together, especially so in that experience of doing that. Now you've got all these individual here's who we are and I might be on three different teams. One's a project team. I've got a blueprint of we. In essence, the group got together and looked at our individual me's and then collectively spoke who we are together and captured that.

Speaker 2:

Here's one of the things that's really interesting when I learn something about myself and I actually become more self-aware, more knowledgeable, whatever it is, I have a brain and a heart and a body that holds that. That holds the artifact of who I've become. In groups of people there's no artifact. There's no mind and body that holds on to that. So having something like the design document is an artifact of who we are together so we can pay attention. So, for instance, in Dropbox, if I'm on three different teams, I have three different operating blueprints of we and then my me can be put together like puzzle pieces with anyone else in the company. But if nothing else, even if I call you because maybe we don't work together but there's something I need I can do a 30-second look at your blueprint of me and have that much more of a connection. When I give you a call, there's something about feeling like someone has your back or someone wants to take you into consideration that just energetically can change. Picking up the phone to call someone or sending them a message in Slack Like the way we are with each other, we're often feeling like we need protection and we've grown up in a world that is built on problem-solution architecture and what we've found over the years in our work is that problem-solution is excellent for my car or my toaster, but we're finding it's not robust enough for people to go into the future that's coming, and so there's a new way that we need to create the architecture of who we are together.

Speaker 2:

We call it. What does this make possible architecture? There's a landscape, just like the physical body I live in. That's a total circus or World War III. There's a landscape here. But instead of feeling like I'm broken, I need to be fixed here. But instead of feeling like I'm broken, I need to be fixed. Something's wrong that literally stops me from breathing, like when I'm in stress. Just a stressful thought, bill. A stressful thought. I can't put my arms over my head, I can't get in the shower, I can't get dressed because I have 10% lung capacity left and it literally gets taken away by stress.

Speaker 2:

It's why we like speaking on resiliency, because we've learned through the years of living in this, creating tools based on, like how do I stay in this body? What resiliency is when it is uncertain, when it is a progressive disease, when there are so many things that we can't know or understand. We've been living the world that we're moving into for the last many years and learned a lot about how our own brain can either get in our way or really support us, but even more important is how our brains interact with each other. I want to embrace you. I don't want to be someone who thinks I need to protect myself from you. I want you to be you and I want to also look inside my own mind to see how can I just like release whatever my thoughts are that believe you should change or there's something wrong with you.

Speaker 2:

Nobody. Nobody shows up better when someone says to them like there's something wrong with you, you are, we got to fix. Fix you. No one has more energy and I need to attest to that yeah, if we were wandering around saying what is wrong with you?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I mean, all the time, it just, uh, doesn't work. So that's uh, man, that is, this is fascinating stuff. Yeah, you get your tickets now. I mean, this is to be. You're going to want to hear this. This is life-changing formulas and life-changing stuff for everybody. Was there anything else that you'd like to say? I mean, I can't tell you how excited I am to hear this myself, because what we've found in businesses, in most of our businesses, what we found in businesses and most of our businesses that it's all about people working on who they can become, because there's always a lid on the business and it's all around. There's only so much people can do and they run out of energy and they've got to change the way they do things. So this is right down that alley, absolutely do things.

Speaker 2:

So this is right down that alley, absolutely. I just want to say how thrilled I am that this business summit is taking a really resilient community that we are.

Speaker 3:

And getting us together. Yes, getting us together. Share ideas and thoughts and just make connections around. You know, learn new things and talk to other people about. You know what are your challenges, what's going on with you and how do we like make ourselves. You know, better together.

Speaker 2:

Let's be wiser together.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I love that. Let's be wiser together. I still think I'm going to call the episode you, me and we, but I do like let's be wiser together. So I'm going to write that one down too. Yeah, I love that. Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and thank you for contributing to our community and because I know you're all over the world, I mean, it's just it's awesome that you're, that we've got some work to do at home, huh, it's awesome that we've got some work to do at home, huh.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for all you do. I'm really, really grateful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you, hey, and until next time, all the best.