Accessible Disruption - Strategy Table

Who is Anthony Vade
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Tahira Endean: [00:00:00] I am excited today to be talking to Anthony, one of our other co-founders about our origin stories and what makes us comfortable with change.

Anthony Vade: Often would have snakes and spiders and all the creepy crawlies that Australians are known for.

Podcast Host: The world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Whether you are a startup working on agile processes or a mature organization, navigating change within existing complex structures, the mindset and skills to adapt has never been more vital. The team from the strategy table want to help the wider world understand the need and approach to meaningful and impactful change management, helping organizations navigate disruption and make change accessible to everyone.

This is Accessible Disruption.[00:01:00]

Tahira Endean: Welcome to Accessible Disruption, the podcast. For Strategy Table, I'm Tehir and I am excited today to be talking to Anthony, one of our other co-founders about our origin stories and what makes us comfortable with change. I'm also really digging, Anthony, that we are doing this without video because it's kind of a throwback.

To me, lying on the floor with my feet up on the wall, my coil telephone cord, and my dad saying, you only have seven minutes for this conversation, so let's go.

Anthony Vade: I'm totally ready. I I'll also. Back you up here because I actually, some of my foundation and heritage behind this comes from working in radio, so this is a bit of a flashback to some great old days of mine as well.

Tahira Endean: Well, you know, you have a good face for radio.

[00:02:00] We wanna really just go way, way back. So tell me about your, where were you born? You have this great radio accent, so where were you born?

Anthony Vade: I grew up in Australia and I spent my formative years in Australia and a beautiful part of that country called South Australia, which is on the south central coast, and I was blessed to grow up with white sand beaches.

Beautiful. 300 I. Plus days of blue skies and sunshine, and I moved to Canada in the late two thousands and it's been a complete change for me to be on the other side of the planet. But it was really a unique experience to navigate that change between the southern hemisphere, that culture in Australia and the Canadian culture where I'm now based in Toronto.

Tahira Endean: Now you say you grew up with white sand beaches. Of course. That sounds lovely, but childhood isn't just about everything being lovely, unfortunately. Childhood things happen. We might, you know, fall down, fall out of a tree, get snagged [00:03:00] by a shark. Of course that didn't happen. But what might be some of the things that happened when you were, what were so like gimme a really great standout memory from when you were a kid?

Anthony Vade: I. I was very blessed as a child. One, I was, I was born with some pretty unique neurological biology, which we can get into a bit later on. But I was also born to a, a, an immigrant father and mother. My mother's originally from Australia, but my father grew up in Europe. I. In, in the former Yugoslavian was a refugee who, who immigrated to Australia.

So I got that perspective, which was very unique. Anybody who is a child of a refugee has been exposed to a different mindset, a different way of life, and certainly a different level of gratitude that they have a place where they can now call home after being forced to leave the home that they had. So.

My father taught me a lot about understanding change and, and understanding adversity, and I took a lot of that on board. The other thing that my father taught me [00:04:00] was to be boundlessly curious about the world and to explore it and question it, and not to be fearful of not knowing things or be fearful of things that other people may perceive as as risks.

And the best example of that, we lived in a suburban neighborhood area that was on the outskirts as the city was sprawling. They were taking over former farmlands and building housing developments, and my parents were lucky enough in the seventies to pick up a property there. So we were living on this little outskirt sort of community suburban, sub suburban community, and my father was working at the Royal Adelaide Zoo at that time as a sort of animal nutritionist, helping out with feeding the animals.

Fascinating for a small child to have that. But it also positioned him uniquely that he was well versed with wild animals in his role, in his day job. That the neighbors in our little community that's on the outskirts often would have snakes and spiders and all the creepy [00:05:00] crawlies that Australians are known for turning up on their doorsteps because we were on the edge of wilderness.

And of course, who did the phone ring? Pretty regularly to my father to say, Hey, we've got another snake on our doorstep. Can you please come down and help us relocate it down to the conservation park nearby rather than threatening our family. And so my immigrant father, despite not being raised around snakes, would rush off down the road to help out the neighbors pick up that.

Snake that they were afraid of that big risk that they saw and relocate it so that that snake could continue to live a healthy, happy life in, in the environment that it was supposed to be in. And so that the residents felt safe as well. So for me, risk and change worked really something that I feared.

It was something that was an inevitable part of life and I was always taught to embrace, to lean into, and, and ideally bring about a greater good for everybody who's involved in whatever that change is.

Tahira Endean: Obviously before you moved to Canada, you [00:06:00] must have done some work while you were in Australia. So you said mentioned radio.

What were some of the things that, some career highlights along the way that have contributed again to this sort of comfort with risk and change?

Anthony Vade: Yeah, so I think back really early on, uh, I, I was pretty lost as a student, like many. Students can be and, and I wasn't sure what direction I was going to go in my career during my primary school, elementary school, and high school.

I'd had some challenges, learning difficulties with my unique brain biology. We won't get into that today. I think there's probably a whole episode exploring neurodiversity and how different brains work and how we can optimize them. But suffice to say that didn't make my career choices or direction. Any easier to navigate, and certainly at that time and place, there wasn't a lot of support from university school counseling to really understand what the career options were, because arguably a lot of that uniqueness in my brain [00:07:00] is what's made me so successful over the years and what makes me uniquely skilled at this sort of facilitation and a team collaboration that I've specialized in.

What if we take a step back and think about, you know, getting into that university and go going through that sort of academic career. I didn't really know where I wanted to head. I fell into a university degree after a lot of work to get there. During that first year in university, I met a bunch of people that were working in the local community radio station and they got me in involved in that, and I really enjoyed the storytelling aspects of that and interviewing people and celebrities and all sorts that came across our microphone desk and that kind of got me interested more in the media.

And the art side of the media, which got me interested in theater and the emotive power of music and theatrical performance and storytelling that comes from that. Then meeting some people in event [00:08:00] production that were putting on large conferences, large scale brand experiences, uh, which. Got me very, very interested in the technology behind them and how do we use technology to make really impactful and emotive experiences into working with large multinational corporations and organizations and nonprofits, fundraising organizations around their events.

Uh, which got me very interested once again in human behavior and understanding how do we craft experiences that shift human behavior in the most positive direction possible. So as you can kind of catch on there from not knowing what I was doing as a student. I sort of rolled through a bunch of different, uh, experiences and careers that that led me to now what we're looking at doing with Strategy Table to really make experiences drive the right kind of transformation that organizations need.

Tahira Endean: Well, I think that, you know, we deeply recognize the power of [00:09:00] experiences.

Anthony Vade: Let's take this opportunity to take a short break now and hear from some of our sponsors. But of course, if you want to hear this ad free, along with extended versions, access to our book club and the chat community, you can visit strategy table.co or click on the link in the description.

We'll be right back.

Podcast Host: Our world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Uh, keeping up in a competitive business environment requires confidence in your team's Adaptability, leaders are expected to lead adoption initiatives, evolve team member skills, and build resilience with intentional change management strategies.

But even the most seasoned leader or executive can find it challenging to get things started on the right foot and in the right direction. [00:10:00] Engage with Strategy Table to kickstart your organization's change management and continuous improvement initiatives. Address and elevate your team's agility. And build a confident innovation culture.

Make your team feel and believe in the shared responsibility supporting each other bravely and boldly into the future no matter what it has in store. We are not your average consultants. We are skilled guides helping you elevate your team's thinking, and turn it into impactful doing. Find more information at Strategy Table Co.

Tahira Endean: Well, I think that, you know, we deeply recognize the power of experiences. I wanna go back to just one thing that when you talk about music and theater and all of those things, you had interest in composition. So let's just talk a little bit about how the, what are the similarities between the composition of.[00:11:00]

Music and, and how that applies to teamwork and collaboration and some of those things.

Anthony Vade: Yeah, that's a great question. So I started playing music very, very young and part of why I got into music was, was my mother's great foresight to realize that if she could give me a skillset that included.

Understanding rhythm, understanding melody, and that very close link that that musicality has with storytelling. How do we make things very emotive? I. It really helped me to sort of deal with some of those language challenges that I had because of my biology, and, and more than that, it was sort of, it allowed me to better connect with human beings because anybody who's composed music knows that we mostly do it because we're trying to express an emotion.

In some way, shape, or form, whether it's how we feel, how our person commissioning that piece of music feels, [00:12:00] how the TV show that you are watching or the movie that you are watching tries to elicit a specific emotion. And so in many ways. When you approach composing a piece of music, you are leading with a human first mindset.

What is the emotion? I'm trying to get the person hearing this piece of music, to feel exploring that. Over the years, I did a lot of work in film and television, composing music, doing soundtracks and sound design for those elements, but I started. To recognize that it's, it's a journey that you take that viewer, that listener along.

There's a reason why music has structure to it because we, we need to follow a pathway in order to feel those emotions in a positive way that's intended. And so I could apply that approach to change management, to engaging with teams, facilitating collaboration, understanding that I was writing a piece of music almost, that the team [00:13:00] needed their ups and downs, their crescendos, their quiet moments.

They're loud and inspiring moments. So when I go into engaging with teams, I'm often thinking about us as if we're writing a piece of music together, as if we're taking that change along this journey, and recognizing when it needs to get louder, when it needs to quiet down, and make sure that the right instruments are playing the right notes at the right time, which is often the team members that are collaborating through that process.

Tahira Endean: I think that that there's so much alignment with that and the work that we're doing at Strategy Table to look at how we create alignments for organizations and help them move forward with the greatest amount of collaboration so that they can get to those places of prototyping and innovation and efficiencies and productivity and all of the things that organizations need, but that they each need to be supported by individuals.

So if we look at, you know, how do we work with. The groups [00:14:00] that we're working with and bring out the best in each individual. So that they can then contribute in the most meaningful way to the greater good. That's such a great analogy. I really appreciate that. Thank you Anthony. So my pleasure. Any other, what's a, any other key lessons that you have, um, as you've gone through, you know, in sort of 10 minutes of your life story, you know, what would be one thing that you would really wanna leave people with to think about as they consider.

Ways that they're gonna incorporate and become more comfortable with change in their own lives.

Anthony Vade: You know what? Let's let, let's continue with the music motif. 'cause I, I think we're onto something there and I think it's key to what we do as an organization and how we ground ourselves in perspectives.

I've seen organizations over the years that are writing music together, let's say, and, and the CEO and the leadership team think that they're hearing a beautiful coral [00:15:00] Beethoven's ode to Joy. There's a lovely piece of music that's very stirring and everybody should be behind singing together, arm in arm.

But very often I've come across teams where the other participants sitting around the table from them don't necessarily connect with the CEO or the executive leadership's vision in that way. And instead, maybe they're hearing the funeral march. And so a lot of the time these leadership teams think.

That they're writing this beautiful piece of music, but they've failed to properly connect with the perspectives of the others around the table from them and, and be open and vulnerable enough to say, Hey, are you hearing Ode to Joy? Or are you hearing DAF Vader entering the scene with some ominous music as well?

And I think what I have as an inherent trait, thanks to some of my unique biology. I'm pretty good at sensing when the team members around that table are hearing what sort of music and, and make it okay for those individuals to [00:16:00] be able to share their concerns or their, their fears in that moment that they're in.

Tahira Endean: I think that that is an excellent way for us to close up our peak into the life of Anthony Vade and the origin story that has brought you to this time of being a co-founder. I'm so excited to be starting on this journey with you where we are going to be able to make a lot of impactful change going forward.

Anthony Vade: And I echo that. I'm really excited of this and I'm really looking forward to perhaps interviewing you too on the next episode of this. Do you think we could do that? I, I think we could do that. Okay, so what about if we go out now to a classic Beethoven? Peace the ninth Symphony.

If you enjoyed getting to know Anthony Vade and you want to learn more about Tahira and Anthony's conversation, head to strategy table.co.co. And join our member community where you'll be able to hear [00:17:00] extended versions of this interview. Participate in online forum conversations and access exclusive member only resources.

See you online.

Podcast Host: Accessible disruption is written and spoken by Tahira and Dean Ryan Hill and Anthony Vade. All content is developed in collaboration with the team at Strategy Table Podcast Production by Experience Design Change Inc. An association with the change lead network. Find more information@strategytable.co.