Sorry for the delay between episodes but Randal and I have just been freed from an El Salvadorian prison after Border Security found episodes of the Nonsense Dialogues in our phones. This experience may have influenced the topic of this podcast where we explore the psychology behind why people believe obvious lies, using Donald Trump as a starting point. Yes dear listener, we have succumbed and have been sucked into the Trump Maelstrom.

Thankfully, we soon leave him far behind and rather than the usual approach of examining the pathology of liars, we take an audience focused approach to understand why do people believe lies. We discuss the cognitive processes that lead to belief, the influence of followers, and the role of authority and credibility in shaping perceptions. We then provide the public service of providing our listeners with strategies to resist being influenced by bullshit. We discuss the need for empathy, rapport building, and shared goals in persuasion. We propose, perhaps unsurprisingly, scepticism as a method to counter the lies and bullshit that surround us all in an informational miasma.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.

In a world increasingly looking backwards (Make Leadership Great Again!)1, Randal and David thought perhaps they too should look way back for inspiration. So they invited leading international leadership and coaching psychologist, Gaj Ravichandra to discuss leadership through the lens of Eastern philosophies, particularly the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.

As expected, the Gita proved to be a great starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of leadership development. This included the role of self-awareness, storytelling, cultural contexts, kindness, and particularly, the contribution of the scientific process to the advancement of our understanding of the efficacy of leadership development. This last point proved to be a bit of a trigger for a “vigorous” discussion between Gaj and David - who jointly proposed that our knowledge and practice of leadership has not really progressed much in 4000 years - and Randal, who vehemently defended the contribution of modern science. Have a listen and see which side you come down on.

1 Too soon? Or just not funny in the first place?

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.

How to become more powerful and successful using the power of others.

That was going to be our shamelessly clickbait title for this episode but the Olympics are currently on and we thought we'd instead piggyback on everyone's excitement over that.
This episode does indeed explore the concept of power, where does it come from and how can one gain and deploy it. To help us, we have invited Dr Andrew Frain, a social psychologist, who like Randal, is a true believer in the social identity approach. The Nonsense we address this week is the conventional individualistic approach to power as characterised by French and Raven’s bases of power. Instead, Andrew presents John Turner’s model for understanding how power can be gained and deployed through leadership, authority and coercion. We all then discuss the implications of this with each of us taking a different perspective. Randal shows off his intellectual pretensions by quoting Nietzsche and David tries to be the cool kid in school by taking a Marxist approach to the distribution of power in organisations. On the way, we cover the absence of power as a topic in management education, how to resist power, the shaping of collective realities in deriving and sustaining power, and we start to discuss the application of all this to improving management, leadership and change in modern organisations. However, as usual, we ran out of time and decided to carry that discussion over into Part 2 of our exploration of power. That episode will be coming soon. Promise.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.