Suffering could be a sign the same way that a pain in our body is a sign.

Bill. So, you have these wonderful Newfield graduates. They go into organizations that desperately want them to reduce the pain in the organization, make it so we don’t hurt as much. And part of what you’re doing is you’re saying to your people, when you’re going in initially at least, there’s probably going to be more pain, more suffering.

Julio. There will be a moment in which that will happen. Now, what I want to mention is that it’s not by design that we look for it. For instance, I had an experience with the CEO of an inter­ national company in Latin America. When we met with all the executives, we achieved enormous things, but we hit a point at which we couldn’t go any further. I felt, clearly, the conversations didn’t move on. So I took a risk, and I put all the people together, and I put this man in front of them, and I said, “There’s something that we are hiding here; something’s happening underneath all this great work.” There was complete silence in the room. And I said, “I want to know what it is.” There was enough trust already built to do that. So, after painful moments of silence, a woman raised her hand. She was the boss of some particular division, and she said what happened was that she had the assessment that her boss didn’t listen to them. She said that he visited her area and offered a lot of great ideas. He was very charming but did not listen one bit to what she had to tell him.  And she said that this is what she had never said. And then there was long silence again.

So, after a little while, seven people stood to say the same thing. The eighth person however said, “Wow, it’s easy to shoot at this man, but it’s not easy to say why we haven’t told him that before. Why do we need to come to this moment to tell him?” Then he said it was because they were too cowardly to have that conversation. Well, from that moment on, that group of people talked about anything. They broke through a conversational black hole. Was it a tough conversation? Was there suffering in the room? No doubt. You should have seen the faces of those people. But if we didn’t risk going to that moment, if we didn’t acknowledge that some conversations are very hard to have for whatever reason but absolutely critical to achieve our dreams, if we had avoided that moment the learning would not have come. Everybody, including the boss, was profoundly grateful that we crossed that threshold. Was I looking for pain and suffering? Of course not.

Bill. It sounds like it’s about trust, but it’s also about courage.

Julio. Both are needed.