The Space In Between Podcast

Leadership Masterclass with Everett Harper: Move to the Edge, Declare It Center

• Leigh Morgan • Season 2 • Episode 17

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When the world feels divided and uncertain, great leadership matters most. In this episode of The Space In Between, tech CEO and leadership wisdom-keeper Everett Harper joins me for a candid, deeply human conversation about leading with integrity in challenging times. Everett reflects on his journey as a trailblazer in sports, college, as an African American tech CEO, and on his track record of innovation in his remote-first company, Truss. He shares insights from his book Move to the Edge, Declare It Center, along with practical tools like the “pre-mortem” that help leaders navigate complexity, build trust, and connect across differences. We also explore ways leaders can improve effectiveness by making time to center and ground ourselves using simple, easy-to-do daily practices. This conversation is both practical and inspiring—a guide for leading with courage, clarity, and purpose in challenging times.

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Hello and welcome to the. Space in between podcast. I'm your host Lee Morgan. Again, this podcast is for listeners who are fed up. Up with the hyperpolarized nature of the world today. And who crave. Craves spaces where current events can be discussed in construct. enlightening and delightful ways. Let's get.

Leigh Morgan:

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me on The Space In Between podcast. Today's episode is part of my leadership masterclass series where we focus on how to lead in a world that can often feel polarized, fragmented, and sometimes a little chaotic. My hope, as with all of our episodes is that today you will touch and feel the opposite, A sense of hope, connection, and momentum about the many places and spaces where connection and trust are thriving the ways all of us who are in leadership roles, big or small, can catalyze ourselves, our teams and organizations to be at our fullest potential. My guest today, Everett Harper is the perfect person to help us find ways to lead effectively and with integrity while navigating the tricky societal issues we all face. I've known Everett for 30 years as a dear friend and colleague, and he is first and foremost a lovely human being. He is also a wise, thoughtful, and very successful leader in the tech sector. He is CEO and co-founder of Trust, an award-winning software development company based in San Francisco, where he had the foresight to build a company that's been remote first since 2011. That's way before CO folks. The company tracks top tier diverse talent to its high performance culture. He is also on the Board of care, a prominent global nonprofit that works around the world on issues related to poverty and supporting women and girls everywhere. Everett is a much sought after speaker on leadership, remote work, the tech sector, and social entrepreneurship, and today we will explore concepts from his moving and deeply personal book, move to The Edge Declare Center, which he published in 2022, coming out of COVID Everett, I'm so glad that you're on the podcast. Welcome

Everett Harper:

Yay.

Leigh Morgan:

the space in between.

Everett Harper:

Thank you. Thank you. Uh, it's so fun to do this. and I have to say, it's wonderful to see this podcast because I've seen you do versions of this work since the early nineties, and to see it all coming together and all the wisdom that's evident in the gist that you can get on your podcast, it's definitely reflective of all the stuff that you've been doing for a long time. So I hope I can add to this list.

Leigh Morgan:

Oh my goodness. You definitely will. And thank you for that. We've probably shared almost all of our life chapters with each other. So, it's such a beautiful thing to have you here in this virtual space, and since I've known you for so long, I wanna share with listeners that among your many inspiring qualities is your capacity for self-reflection,

Everett Harper:

Hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

commitment to uplifting communities that you are a part of. The other thing is your ability to see patterns amidst complexity. And so my first question for you is, where does your endless passion and capacity for these things come from?

Everett Harper:

Where it comes from at first is kind of being the first or only in a lot of the communities I've been in. So growing up as a black person in a predominantly white area, being the first black person in my soccer team, or an orchestra, or an honors class or whatever, and the first person in my family to go to college. So some ways it's survival. Who can I trust? How can I reach people and how can they reach me? Became something I had to really develop I would say what happened was developing an attunement to being in multiple networks and understanding the differences and commonality within those, and eventually became a skill and being able to say, oh, can see groups that might be in conflict. And then leading groups through that conflict. That was some of the work we did in the nineties, merging school districts, urban rural school districts in Durham, North Carolina, where urban was mostly low income and black. The was, uh, slightly higher income in white. And we had to figure out how to get that done. and then going to school. And organizational behavior and taking a class with a guy named Mark Granovetter, who, and his work on strong and weak ties, really kind of put a scientific perspective on the things I had been doing and really enjoyed. So finally, I think it, it really became an advantage eventually, to think differently and be able to step into hostile environments. And then of late, it's really been focused on trying to recenter and existing the vigilance, but with the centering to say, oh, I can exist between these constellations of ideas and communities and practices and cultures, and frankly, it's amazing.

Leigh Morgan:

Wow. I am, I love what you said, which is recenter without vigilance, because what I make up about that is that vigilance takes energy

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

and it's energy that requires us to constrict ourselves. It's a protective stance. Did

Everett Harper:

That's exactly right. Nailed it.

Leigh Morgan:

you talked about your experience as a first in many places and having to survive and then cultivating that a little bit of a, out of a sixth sense perhaps, and then a skill that now you're able to use as a leader. Did you pick up any of that in your family culture, or was it just unique to you and the settings that you found yourself?

Everett Harper:

I'm sure I'm not unique. I think there's a, a bit of family culture. I mean, my parents moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a small town in, in Hudson Valley, New York. My dad being recruited to be an engineer in the early sixties on a high school degree. And even more amazingly, my mother, also high school degree, recruited first to be quote unquote secretary. IBM at that time did not, allow women to be pregnant on the job. So when she got pregnant with me, they said, sorry, you're out. But when she came back 10 years later, she said, I think I wanna be an engineer. And she took the test and had a 30 year career at IBM. always take podcast time to shout out my mother, by the way. I'll just say that.

Leigh Morgan:

I think you should, we should shout out all of our mothers.

Everett Harper:

she is probably one of the first, black women a major corporation. gonna do some research on that, relatively soon, but she's one of the earliest. And so her having to navigate the complexity of that both from gender and race, even though she'd never talked about it, must have, not just paid off, but must have infiltrated into how she helped raise us.

Leigh Morgan:

That's an amazing story and you know, we have a, a, a shared great friend Theresa Ramos,

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

mother, you, I don't know if you know this, her mother was a, a computer programmer at Los Altos in New Mexico

Everett Harper:

Yes,

Leigh Morgan:

as a

Everett Harper:

yes,

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah. Mexican American immigrant. There's entire families. There should be movies about that. And, and I think perhaps your, your family is as well of

Everett Harper:

have, we should have a meeting of the minds,

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah.

Everett Harper:

out here and, uh, and, and go hang out and just sit and listen to the stories.

Leigh Morgan:

this notion of, uh, being a trailblazer, so your mother sounds like, didn't talk about that very much. You have written and are a well much sought after speaker about leadership and your personal story. So your book Moved to the Edge, declare its Center, and it's in a remarkable books folks, and I'll make sure to put a link to that and Everett's website on the show notes. Everett, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about why you wrote the book. wrote it I think at the beginning of COVID and at the beginning of America's reckoning with police violence against African Americans, or as I like to say, the reckoning of white people with. The reality of police violence against African Americans, which was caught on camera for at the George Floyd, murder.

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

Tell me what motivated you to write the book.

Everett Harper:

Yeah. So what motivated me to write the book was, I think two factors.

Leigh Morgan:

I.

Everett Harper:

One was, was a moment we had COVID, we have a pandemic, we are working from different places, and as you said, the police violence. a personal standpoint, I realized that as a person who's leading an organization and having these things impact people in the organization, I have to speak to it. But then I'm also a target. So I wrote both to my company. I'm a leader and a target and it feels really weird, but I gotta move forward and I'm just gonna be real with you. I wanted to share that experience personally because I think a lot of people either relate to that specific thing or they relate to it in whatever context they're in. If you're the first, if you're the only, if you're new, if you are trying to go up the corporate ladder, whatever happens to be, there's a moment where you're not sure of your standing and where you should be and how you should be and whether you're going to be successful or not. And that is the uncertainty at the center of what we were all feeling at that experience. So I wanted to see if I could expand that.

Leigh Morgan:

and The notion of uncertainty was so acute at that time.

Everett Harper:

Absolutely we were existentially threatened and no one, I mean, we think back on it, we didn't know what was going to happen. The second reason I wrote the book is that at trust, we did a lot that put us on the edge of new and innovative things. And being new and innovative doesn't mean, oh yeah, we know what's going on and so forth. No, there's a lot of uncertainty going into into something new. we tried remote work and tried to build systems for that. made our salaries transparent all the way up to the CEO that has a lot of risk. You don't know whether people are gonna just up and leave. And we built a software company that looked like America in an era and in a place where most of them don't. All of those have risk, all of those are innovations and all of those emotionally create uncertainty. So what can I add from that experience that might help others who are going through that same And that's why I wrote the book.

Leigh Morgan:

that's really powerful and, again, I mentioned in the introduction that it was 2011 when you, I think, started the company and you started as a remote first company,

Everett Harper:

Yeah,

Leigh Morgan:

and so you actually had experience as a company. Managing the risks of not having people in the same space.

Everett Harper:

that's right.

Leigh Morgan:

you had some experience going into COVID when remote work, happened in many places, not everywhere. What were some of the risks in you found when you started the company and What was that uncertainty and how did you try to compensate culturally?

Everett Harper:

Sure. So when we started, it was 2011, we formalized in 2012. I think the risks were that first people buy in? It wasn't that popular. So, you know, you could have a great person says, ah, no, I need to be in an office. Second, how do we manage people's quote unquote productivity? Do they show up? Do they meet their deadlines? are the standards managing an organization, do they still hold, going forward a little bit? One of the things I thought that was fascinating and unfortunate, but fascinating anyway. You think about re being remote, having co you know, the pandemic we had to work from home. It challenges some fundamental management and leadership concepts because they all depend on a building, whether you're doing manufacturing or office work, it assumed a building.

Leigh Morgan:

Right.

Everett Harper:

if you take that out, all the things around creating cult culture by putting people in pods and creating a fun environment and all those experiments people were doing, when that goes away, what's left? We had to deal with that right away. that's the risk that we were facing. And we can go into details about the things that we did to support people, but we, what we did know, and this actually gets to the Declare It Center part, if Moving to the Edge is doing remote work. Declaring at center means how do you build systems that are repeatable to support people doing remote work? So had all hands meetings every Friday. We had, communication standards. We used Slack so people were available to each other. We would do things, and this was a thing that somebody, at trust, came up with called Being Humans Together. So, half an hour get on a call, and not about work. It's about a, just a simple question. tell me about one object in your room. Bring it up to the screen and tell a story about it. what's the most boring fact about you when you were 13? So it's getting of the little chit boxes and into, oh, this is a human being that has a 3D life. And that has continued. All those things have continued. Since probably 2015.

Leigh Morgan:

So that was a part of the repeatable processes that, that you did to humanize this remote first work environment that you, that you really pioneered? I'm not sure there's any other tech company that was remote first. Certainly now we have a lot, you know, that we learned that we can do it. And your company's been, so successful.

Everett Harper:

Just to give credit, automatic is one of the people that was a little bit earlier than us, and I, I got a lot of, great, insight from, of their folks, particularly their, their head of people was really instrumental in us going back and forth about these practices.

Leigh Morgan:

And so you were able to a, adapt and, and customize to your, culture, which was probably similar but also different.

Everett Harper:

Yeah.

Leigh Morgan:

so I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the key concepts in your book. And let's start just with the title. What does that title mean? You, you referenced Moving to the Edge is actually working remotely, but the center is repeatable processes. Why did you pick that title? What does it mean? And then what are some other concepts that you want us to be aware of?

Everett Harper:

move to the edge. Declare it center is sort of two parts. to the edge is about moving to the edge of your knowledge. In short, where do you learn that's where innovation happens. You're trying to do something different, and I mean, innovation, small eye, it could be just doing a meeting differently, meeting a different person and making a practice of creating little experiments on the edge challenging yourself on the edge and then iterating quickly and seeing what works so much doesn't. It also means intersecting with other people's boundaries. So if you imagine a circle around you and you have these boundaries of your knowledge and insights, well, you interact with others you have a little Venn diagram that can lead to a lot of discovery. It can lead to a lot of community. It could lead to new coalitions being built. the third part of move to edge is it's most important when the context changes. So you think you're going in a business that looks like X and then everybody has to work from home, or there's a new market entrant or what have you, or tariffs come and now your cost of delivering is 50% higher. How do you learn quickly? Is probably dependent on the amount of systems that you've built to learn quickly that happens.

Leigh Morgan:

Wow.

Everett Harper:

all those things come together in this concept of move to edge. Declare it center is about building the operations. Once you've made that discovery, or once you see a little product market fit, or once you see, oh, we've passed, a clinical trial, how do you build the operations to support that, repeat that, accelerate it and scale it. that's where a lot of innovations fail because they don't build people, don't build the systems behind it. it's also true for ourselves as people. We build an infrastructure for technology, but we don't build an infrastructure for ourselves. that's sort of the high level meaning of those two terms.

Leigh Morgan:

It's a very evocative title, and it makes me think about. Even the title of this podcast, the space in Between, because we, we speak about the space in between as that liminal space between two opposites, when we can stay in that space in between, there's a potential for innovation, creativity, and so that when you wanna question a context,

Everett Harper:

Yeah,

Leigh Morgan:

you can look at it from a different perspective so you aren't wedded to an edge per se.

Everett Harper:

that's right.

Leigh Morgan:

do you see, that relating to your concept?

Everett Harper:

So. Not being wedded is a really important, concept, and practice. I'm remembering the story of Andy Grove when as, head of Intel realized that the market was going to be going to a place where they were not gonna be successful. essentially he said, we've gotta do a complete pivot and give up the thing that we're really good at. Because it doesn't matter if you're good at something that no one wants anymore, right?

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah.

Everett Harper:

is a huge bet, you have to not only be smart for thinking, et cetera, but also you don't know the answer.

Leigh Morgan:

Right.

Everett Harper:

It's a skill to be able to navigate when you don't know the answer. And it's contrary to everything we've been taught fourth grade. Like, what do you do when you answer a question to the teacher? They ask you to raise your hand, speak fast, speak loud, you know, that's the good student. instead it's some level. especially in a complex world, it's about how well can you handle the uncertainty of not knowing and then be able to incorporate perspectives that are different than your own so you can learn fast.

Leigh Morgan:

That's powerful because in this world, we think about COVID times really hard

Everett Harper:

Yeah.

Leigh Morgan:

and you know, sense of vulnerability of people getting sick and then the nature of work changing. People lost jobs, people got sick. Ways of being in the world got dramatically upended. And then for those, I would say, who were paying attention to really understand, getting an insight into some of the dynamics of race

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

criminal justice system, it was, big fissure for many people. Nothing really new there, it's just as a society, I think we began wrestling with that in a new way. So it felt like really chaotic times. And then we fast forward to now

Everett Harper:

Yeah.

Leigh Morgan:

and, levels of distrust towards business government leaders towards each other is measurable and is at all time highs. And, you know, the sense of chaos, geopolitical, economic here,, we certainly have a new administration that is upending. Unbelievable norms, right? Using the department of justice as kind of his own personal department, et cetera. Just so many things are shifting. So this navigating without answers for leaders. This just seems harder.

Everett Harper:

Yeah. Welcome to the job.

Leigh Morgan:

I know it's hard. Sorry.

Everett Harper:

welcome to the job. And I mean, in some ways what helps make it easier from my perspective are things. One, you can practice the things I've talked about, building systems or, Building experiments can be practices. You repeat them over and over and you get better and better and better. Whether it's things like pre-mortems is a great example.

Leigh Morgan:

What's a pre-mortem for folks who don't know?

Everett Harper:

Yeah. Pre-mortem is, is one of my favorites. It was, uh, started by, thinks Gary Klein. essentially it's saying, okay, of a project. Anybody listening, think of a project you're working on right now, or you're building toward launching. Then project six months out after it launches, and then imagine that that project is on the wrong side the New York Times, or whatever journal makes sense to you important for you in your field. And the headline essentially is that project has failed. It costs lots of money. People have been fired, your clients are pissed off, and all your partners are pissed off. What happened? That's the the prompt question, and without going into all the details, what you do is work backwards. Well, what did happen? What led us to that point? Well, it's usually communication or we forgot this, or we forgot that. And you work backwards and say, how could we mitigate the most important of those things that we can actually control? So now you looked back at your plan to launch, and I bet you're gonna find one or two things like, oh no, we forgot this plan for this partner, or We need to bring in engineering to make sure that the post-launch of this product, they have the ability to support whatever might go wrong. It's like learning from regret in advance.

Leigh Morgan:

I should let listeners know that Everett did an amazing workshop at a, a annual conference that I go to with a bunch of other climate leaders. And Everett came down and led a workshop on concept, and he had all of us get in small groups and we thought of a project and we did. We picked a pre-mortem. To work on together. And on the one hand, initially everybody thought, oh, this is gonna be such a downer, right? Because you're thinking like, what's gonna go wrong? Of course, you know how it works. But working through it, it really illuminated just ideas and concepts that were actionable to keep on the radar screen. and it actually introduced a level of creativity and new perspectives about the project itself. And so, for folks, again, uh, Everett writes about this in his book, but it's a pre-mortem. It's, it's really excellent. So you still do this to, to this day.

Everett Harper:

Oh yeah. not only that, we, do it with our clients. Imagine starting a project with a client and doing a pre-mortem.

Leigh Morgan:

Okay.

Everett Harper:

it does is build trust.

Leigh Morgan:

Ah.

Everett Harper:

inevitably, you, they will tell us something that we had no idea that is a potential risk. By doing it at the beginning, we have time to mitigate that risk. And the second part that's so important, it. Reduces the fear of that uncertainty brings. So a lot of people, like if, if things are uncertain, they feel fearful, and it means you freeze, you fawn, and you do all the things. Naming the thing itself an environment that's ahead of time, often lets people say, I've been thinking that too. Ooh, I'm gonna say the quiet part out loud. You know what I mean?

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah.

Everett Harper:

And with a group, and you see the people around the table nodding their heads, it's like, oh, I'm not the only one naming it, brings it down, lets people feel it. And then you start working backwards. And then all of a sudden it becomes, oh, there's a process to mitigate. There's a way to prioritize. And it gets into one of your first, first things. It gives people agency

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

Everett Harper:

and not feel like I'm purely. buffeted by the currents. Instead, I can figure out how to row this thing because I do have half a no and something that's still, even though it might, it's got a hole in it, you know? have a life raft

Leigh Morgan:

what an anecdote as a practice.

Everett Harper:

Yep,

Leigh Morgan:

this sense of there's just a lot of fear in society today,

Everett Harper:

yep.

Leigh Morgan:

more now than a year ago, perhaps, think more than during COVID times.

Everett Harper:

I agree.

Leigh Morgan:

And so amidst fear agency, personal agency, or a sense of agency and teams, or between your company and one of your clients, that's a really generative space where creativity can flourish, connection can actually happen, and that's a very freeing, emotional and mental space to be. And I think that's where innovation thrives.

Everett Harper:

Yeah. Two points that I didn't bring up as I was describing. One is this is done in a team environment, ideally with diverse perspectives, product engineering, marketing, leadership, et cetera, because they're gonna bring up different perspectives. You want to hear everybody's opinion in the room. The second part, just to reinforce, it's a practice, which means you can do this at any launch. Do this at any project. Do it with any, anything. did it last year, starting last June, the notion there's gonna be an administration change and we do it quarterly, on the regular, sometimes even more if we think that things are changing and we predicted some of the things that were gonna be happening, not because we're smart. We had some insight. The most important thing is we had already built mitigations for them beforehand. It doesn't solve everything, but it sure makes it easier to talk about and it, given that most of our clients are federal government clients, we have, been able to navigate these waters, a lot less, fear, even though it's pretty intense.

Leigh Morgan:

Because this particular practice, and again, there's others in your book, this one helps people actually name their fears.'cause you're calling it a pre-mortem.

Everett Harper:

Yep.

Leigh Morgan:

This notion of naming a situation, doing that with others where it's, safe enough to do so I can actually speak it, whether it's in a remote environment or the same room.

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

It's actually quite a transformational practice. Everett.

Everett Harper:

It's one of our core things that we do. And I, I love it. I, I do it for me personally, but in a company setting, when you have those diverse perspectives, it's unbelievable.

Leigh Morgan:

And what happens if you don't have diverse perspectives? What's the pre-mortem on that?

Everett Harper:

It's a good question. I think, the thing you do when you don't have, diverse perspectives available, is one to say, Hey, we don't have diverse perspectives available. do we wanna do about that? One of those, pre-mortems could be, Hey, got blindsided X because we don't have anybody on our team that understands x. We were blindsided by what happened. The reaction in Europe. We don't have anybody around the table that has worked in Europe. Oh, guess we need to get somebody in Europe. So that is one way I could imagine it going through. Another way is this is really the responsibility leader, frankly, is to identify, wow, we don't have this perspective. How do I get that in? I'm gonna invite a client in the room. gonna invite a customer in the room. I'm gonna invite a in the room, we're gonna construct the world so that we are covering all our bases. And I'll bet most clients, vendors, et cetera, would be, surprised and appreciative of being able to have an insight into what's going on down the road and having their perspectives be heard because it's in their interest too.

Leigh Morgan:

those are two great examples because I think most of us can relate to it, whether we're in a team or in a leadership position of you're. Giving examples of how we can find agency regardless of the situation of, oh, okay, we're lacking a perspective or perspectives. What choices do we have about it? And that's a very empowering stance

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

in a world that, feels a little nutty and chaotic.

Everett Harper:

Yeah.

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah. And some companies, you know, thriving or struggling, I mean, this is, this is really important. So I wonder what other concepts from your book, feel relevant today? Again, wrote the book, I think in 20 21. And then I'll ask the other side of that, are there any approaches you've evolved your thinking on?

Everett Harper:

Yeah, so I think the other concept is that practice matters a lot. I put that in there. I think that's been reinforced. I wrote this in a mo what I thought was a moment of volatility. I tried to write it really fast and get it out because I didn't want the moment to pass. And in fact, it's now an era and I don't think that's, has any, sign of stopping in the near future? any of these things. These are long-term trends.

Leigh Morgan:

Meaning this sense of fragmentation and uncertainty and polarization. Yeah.

Everett Harper:

We have assumptions about the way. The country works, the world works. Who are friends, who are foes? What's my job? These are fundamental questions that are being asked right now. The idea that will return to sort of predictable stability is sort of like the people who said April of 2020, oh, this COVID thing, it's gonna be ba, it's gonna be done in a, in a month, and we're gonna go right back to work. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, no, no, no. So I think personal practice matters. I wrote in the book, how are you gonna win if You Ain't Right Within that, that was the title from Long Hill. Because I think it just says the whole thing. We have to put our air masks on first. People feel isolated. feel onward. There's a lot more about trauma informed. I went and looked up like Google Word search to see

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah,

Everett Harper:

the trend was. I mean, it's since about 2018, it's just been on a steady rise. And that's great because it means that there's

Leigh Morgan:

some. Yeah.

Everett Harper:

So I think essentially having a personal practice, whether it's gratitude practice, mindfulness, exercise, space where you can find a way to be present, to be mindful and do it as a practice, all these things in practice means you can get better at it. and so I've been exploring and expanding some of those over time,

Leigh Morgan:

Mm-hmm.

Everett Harper:

but I think those are still absolutely essential.

Leigh Morgan:

One of my solo podcast I talked about seeking other seekers.

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

You talked about this sense of isolation that many people are feeling, and that's growing and we know that because of the rates of mental health issues that we're finding. And looking for other people who have some practice or want to stay in that space in between. That reminded me of how important that is around the notion of not being isolated.

Everett Harper:

Yeah. And, and I'll, I'll say to the question of what have I revolved or rethink, I have a, a lovely back and forth with a friend of mine named Derek, another, uh, um,, is a commercial real estate guy. And we have gone back and forth about what makes a great office and then COVID hits and'cause he is like, oh, you work, you work remotely. Like you don't have a good, work environment. Then we go back and forth. It's been really useful what we've actually centered on and where we really overlap is whatever your work environment, it has to be conscious and it has to be constructed to get the best out of people. And there are some things that you cannot do remotely.

Leigh Morgan:

Right.

Everett Harper:

We've seen that, younger people, younger in the kind of their career, need more apprenticeship and need more guidance early on in career, which often happens when you're sitting next to somebody or you attend a

Leigh Morgan:

Pain.

Everett Harper:

from your lead and you see the subtleties of how they work the room. That's hard to do in a virtual environment. And what I think it says is we've learned, or I've learned, there's more apprenticeship. That needs to be supported.

Leigh Morgan:

Hmm. I see.

Everett Harper:

if that would've been thought, before. Another example is, people who are in the newly leadership roles,

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah.

Everett Harper:

he was saying that, at headquarters, if they had a remote workforce and you just reported, promoted a bunch of people, that the people who were out of the headquarters were gonna get a completely different experience. But what you want for a large company is a sort of, consistency in that training. So he saw that people were bringing that cohort to the central headquarters some lengthy piece of time and given even more hands-on apprenticeship, mentorship, training. Because know that that level, especially the far leader up you go, is a lot of subtleties. It's not written in the book. It's gotta be done through watching and experimenting and having guidance and so forth. So as a person who is a proponent of remote first work, does not extend into every single thing. now it's how do you blend those two concepts together and make sure that people are doing, you know, that in-person matters. For example, just give one quick example for the last about three years, whenever I travel, say, Hey, if I'm within a hundred miles of anybody who works a company, you have people in 30 different states, I'm gonna come here, I'm hosting dinner on my dime. Come in, we'll hang out.

Leigh Morgan:

Great.

Everett Harper:

Right?

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah.

Everett Harper:

small. It's simple. They don't have to come. It's not, dinner. It's not work, it's relationship building. Same in going to Washington. I've been going once every eight weeks or so. Showing up to people's offices means so much to them. I really underestimated that. That's another thing I'm rethinking. a CEO show up at the office of a client really communicates that they matter. And I love doing it because I learn things. I get to exchange things that we get to talk about stuff. We get to build a relationship because what we're trying to do is very, very hard. So let's take a walk around, oval and discuss what we're thinking and, and what we're looking forward to, and that paid off.

Leigh Morgan:

So you're giving examples where you've evolved your thinking and so that center. As a practice is more in-person connectivity because you're finding it actually enhances the work that you do together with your clients. So that's a, a concept you've evolved that makes a lot of sense to me. Um, but, and I'm sure during COVID, the fact that you had many years of practice,

Everett Harper:

Yep.

Leigh Morgan:

Tru Trust didn't miss a beat during COVID because you were on the, edges, trying to find what that was. But you had these practices of connecting with each other as humans that you talked about, you know, having those get togethers, you know, I worked at the Gates Foundation

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

and we had an interesting practice and I've been gone for several years now. But I would guess there's mostly, mostly similar practice, which is. The mothership is in Seattle. That's the epicenter of everything. And I traveled a ton. A lot of people travel from Seattle to get out to all of our places around the world, but still the epicenter was in Seattle. So Grantees would come to us. once a month or once every two months, all your team would come to Seattle. And it was really expensive, but the upside was there was a lot of FaceTime and because you,'cause it's really a giant family foundation. So reading the tea leaves is extra important in those sort of organizations. And so reading tea leaves, adjacency and proximity can be really valuable. And then when, I was a founding executive at Nero, a different foundation where we were global from the start and we turned it inside out, which was what's most important was in actually out in the field. And our colleagues were based in territory or in country. And that was really good, and we learned over time also, Everett, we had multiple, multiple, multiple languages, we had, dozens and dozens of indigenous identities on the team. All sorts of diversity and background,, in the US. And unless we were in the same room, we didn't even know when we were making different assumptions using the same,

Everett Harper:

yeah,

Leigh Morgan:

same word, So, just different ways of designing, but the same principle is how do you find connection so that you can come together and work effectively together?

Everett Harper:

What you just said is really interesting. I just sort of realized this. We're talking about center and Edge, and I had a model at the company of remote work, so you have people remotely, but that's the concept of remote work is what we're centering. You just brought up the example of Gates where it's the mothership, it is very based and people come to it. then talked about Neo, we started by saying the center is actually in all the other places, and we will go there

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah, the center is where our partners are exactly.

Everett Harper:

where our partners are. And that for me is where it starts to get very interesting. I think a lot about networks. And is the center actually a network? Not a place, not one center. It's actually a network that forms this web and the center could be by a shared purpose, a shared goal, shared initiative, shared threat, any of those things. Can unite people with distance, but still say that that network is the center. And that gets real interesting when we're thinking about where this goes and, and the, the challenges that we might be facing in the future. Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

because. center around a shared purpose or goal could be so compelling as a way to mitigate feeling, uncertain, feeling, not seen. Not heard. Which was a lot of what a lot of voters who voted for Trump would say, you know, I felt like the political elites, whether it's Republican or Democrat, they didn't use my language. They didn't talk about things that were happening to me. And here comes Trump. And he is using a different language and saying, I uniquely alone will save you. I see you, and nobody does. And that can be a very compelling way to calm our nerves or feel more seen. And that can be a center. The other part can be true also. It can be a center that's in the space in between where One can imagine any number of truths being meaningful and thoughtful and interesting,

Everett Harper:

Right?

Leigh Morgan:

not adhering super hard or to one side or the other. So sense do you make of that,

Everett Harper:

What I particularly resonated with was the last point, I think one of the skills for the future. Is not adhering to your center so tightly that you can't expand

Leigh Morgan:

right? Yes.

Everett Harper:

and you can And this is gets to the edge. I'm gonna go and overlap with somebody who I may not believe I can. I agree with, but we actually have an overlap on this one issue. I wonder what, where they're coming from, because I think we agree on this, but we might be coming from two different places. Huh? What can I learn? And I think times where you said it earlier, when we're feeling fearful or acting from that place, we tend to shrink. We shrink our center. there's some very interesting work to do to think about how to expand or make that center a little more fluid, a little less protected, so that you can bring people along. Where you actually have overlap where the, you talk about space in between. Well, yeah. If, if I can build a coalition with you of a certain issue, our Venn diagrams overlap, how would I know? Right. So there's needs to be new tools and new data and new ways of thinking to reveal these coalitions and then be able to say, oh, we can go and do things together. And I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking about business deals. I'm talking about, departments in a company that are at loggerheads with each other. If we release a little bit of the tightness of the center, I think there are so many new opportunities, that we aren't understanding yet and might give us a lot more wisdom going forward.

Leigh Morgan:

Beautifully said. And that notion of expansiveness is so important in this world of, what can often feel like increasing constriction and constraints

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

in many levels. And you shared some practices, right? Pre-mortems done, well actually create that, a center space

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.

Leigh Morgan:

where things can be spoken and touched and felt in ways that elicit really interesting ideas.

Everett Harper:

Yep.

Leigh Morgan:

you also earlier talked about the personal practices. Finding center

Everett Harper:

Yep.

Leigh Morgan:

you and I know it can take one minute, a day can be just it. You can also go on a vision quest, which

Everett Harper:

Right.

Leigh Morgan:

both can be good my friends, but it doesn't necessarily take a lot of time. It just, the intention, which you spoke to,

Everett Harper:

the repetition.

Leigh Morgan:

and the repetition. And so I have two last questions for you as we we begin to wrap up. Where, are the bright spots that you see where people are, on the edge, declaring center, but declaring it in this expansive manner? what's something that's happening in, in your life or that you see that bolsters you?

Everett Harper:

yeah. what comes to mind? I have the privilege of being on the board directors of care. Our board consists of Republicans and Democrats, but we're united in a, deep belief that humanitarian aid support for women and girls builds communities and frankly saves bullets. You,

Leigh Morgan:

wow.

Everett Harper:

support and build communities that have agency that can be self-supporting. Those communities are less needing to go into conflict and the

Leigh Morgan:

it.

Everett Harper:

is there.

Leigh Morgan:

Yep.

Everett Harper:

many generals have signed onto this, by the way,

Leigh Morgan:

Yep.

Everett Harper:

'cause they know

Leigh Morgan:

Yeah.

Everett Harper:

is a lot more effective sending troops in someplace. that's one place I get a lot and I learn a ton.

Leigh Morgan:

That's awesome.

Everett Harper:

second was a project we helped build, which called direct file. It's IRS direct file. an ability for citizens to file directly with the federal government, their taxes, but done in a modern way that actually gives them agency, enables them to do things faster. And, was incredibly successful. It had an NPS score of over 80. So for any of those NPS people there, you know how high that is. the central tenant was building trust. we build something that works. It builds trust in government, and if you build trust in government, you are starting to be able to bring people back into community that can interact with each other. Those are bridging divides because red states were part of the program. And guess what? People in red states like getting their money back and filing their taxes quickly because they get other things to do.

Leigh Morgan:

Amen to that.

Everett Harper:

Amen to that. Everybody likes that,

Leigh Morgan:

It's also such an equity,, tool because what, 40, 45% of folks in the US don't have$400 to respond to an emergency, a medical emergency.

Everett Harper:

yep,

Leigh Morgan:

So for people filing taxes, look, it's a pain in the ass, right?

Everett Harper:

yep,

Leigh Morgan:

if you want, if you're charged 150 bucks on TurboTax

Everett Harper:

yep.

Leigh Morgan:

to file that, you have even less money

Everett Harper:

Mm-hmm.,

Leigh Morgan:

respond when your kid rips their pants, right? And you can't afford to, to get your kids some decent clothes or respond when you chip a tooth or something. It's such a powerful thing.'cause direct file is, is free.

Everett Harper:

and I go even one step further. The earned income tax credit, among many benefits citizens are, are eligible for go unused because they can't the Byzantine systems. part of our job was to make it simple, direct and the, the admission rates went way up. Our ratings were fantastic. wish it was continuing. there's a way that it will,

Leigh Morgan:

Was it? Was it cut by the administration?

Everett Harper:

as far as I know at the moment, there is a money being allocated to a study for 18 months. With a public private partnership. and so, we'll see what happens with that. But that was actually the thing that we were trying to avoid at the beginning of the program. The leaders of the program smartly said mantra was demo not memo. means instead of

Leigh Morgan:

Make it, make it work.

Everett Harper:

just build it and see how it works and iterate on that.

Leigh Morgan:

I see. Well, I I love that, approach. So those stories are boosting me, Everett. Thank you. And, uh, I have one last question for you. You I want you to imagine that you have a magic wand or a staff kind of like Gandalf staff and Lord of the Rings. What is one wish you would have for listeners and how to apply the concepts we've talked about today from move? To the edge, declare it center, or any other concepts to help all of us find that edge experiment and hold that center with the intentionality that you've, spoken about.

Everett Harper:

Sure. I'll give two answers, one for people listening who this may be new, they don't have a practice. This is like, wow, this is big and aspirational seems overwhelming. My Gandalf wish is, begin small. Three, Write down three things you're grateful for in the last 24 hours every day for the next month. Start there. That is the centering practice that everybody can use and go from there. I have a big one that, gonna try out. We'll see. Tik, not Han, said, um,, the next Buddha might be a community and and we can practice making our edges dynamic with discovery and with learning and enable our centers to be expansive. We can create community wisdom and strength. That's the magic wand that I, I wish for people and the practices could lead us there.

Leigh Morgan:

Well closing out this wonderful conversation with a a way forward for more wisdom and more strength is a beautiful gift that you've shared today. So, thank you Everett. What a great conversation. And I wanna encourage everyone, I'll, learn more about these concepts. Definitely find the book, move to the Edge, declare It Center. It's awesome. So thank you for spending time today, Everett, on the space in between podcast.

Everett Harper:

Thank you. Thank you for occupying the space with me.

Leigh Morgan:

It's a pleasure. Bye for now.

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