One: Rebellious Way-Finding

 Interviewing Selves: It looks really beautiful where you are. Where are you?

Anne Bahr Thompson:   I'm at the American Yacht Club in Rye, New York. I try to be outdoors as much as possible these days and when we're in New York City it gets a little bit claustrophobic at times.

IS: Where is home or is home sort of a moveable place?

ABT: Home is kind of in-process at the moment. We've historically been big city people and actually, my husband and I both are very much about being on the water, too. So, we lived in New York and then we moved to London for many years. Then we came back and were briefly in Greenwich, Connecticut, for family reasons and then we went back to Manhattan. We had a house in the UK, still, in this place called Cowes, which is on the coast of the Isle of Wight. It sits on the edge of what's called The Solent.  I actually miss my garden from the Isle of Wight. I miss looking up and seeing the water from home, and I miss just walking outside every morning and feeling the earth. Now we’re between Little Compton, Rhode Island and Manhattan.

IS: It gives me a sense of your journey and I think people's physical journeys factor a lot into their more philosophical and professional journeys, too. Do you have a garden now?

ABT:  I do. And people think I'm crazy, but I like to weed. Although the thing that's a bummer about weeding in North America versus the UK is here there's poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac. In the UK, there's none of that and the bees in the UK are much friendlier. I've always been someone frightened of bees but when I used to garden on the Isle of Wight, the bumblebees would sit there and linger with you as you went from flower to flower and you can pet them. Like here, I would never consider petting a bumblebee. Here they're a little more aggressive, although I still have a greater fondness for them having experienced that, than I used to have.

IS:  Over the last five years, there's been a meteoric rise for you and for the Integral Collective. Can you summarize that from a personal and professional perspective?

ABT:  From a personal perspective it’s like… wow. Because it truly is about everything just suddenly being alive after this very long period of awareness of direction and purpose. I hesitate to use the word “purpose” because I have a whole set of different beliefs on purpose these days, but rather this understanding of my mission. 

As a little kid, I always knew that I was here to do something important. When you’re a little kid approaching that and you say to people “Ta-da! Here I am! Embrace me, love me, accept me!” you're constantly —especially as a little girl in the 60s and 70s— being told, “No, no, shush, be quiet!” I came from a family that has a history of Jewish trauma. You take on the fears of the people around you and you get conditioned and you take a pathway. 

I had a little bit of a rebellious spirit in my pathway because I didn't take safe routes. I wanted to be a little fashion designer. I always had these weird interests in so many varied things. I was a reader. I drew. I sold paintings in college. I ended up studying biochemistry. After reading Desmond Morris' book Manwatching, that transformed my education. I decided I wanted to study people, not rats. 

I was a girl in what is known as STEM now, on the Dean's list. When I went to the dean and said “I'm switching to communication,” they looked at me and said, “Smart girls —smart people, full stop— don't leave biochemistry for communication. It's only the people who are failing.” And I was like, “I'm leaving.” I had this rebellious streak, and I didn't necessarily follow the pathway I should have. I do believe we have multiple right paths we could go on, that would be fitting. I don't believe in necessarily looking back because when you look back, you're creating who you're going to be based on who you were. 

Out of business school in the 80s, I became the glorified Product Manager for funds transfer, then was learning to do all this stuff in a startup that was doing big data modeling, then back to banking. Then I quit my job and went out on my own because I was hitting that glass ceiling. There's just an interesting female story in there, which I'm not going to divert. 

I eventually reemerged in branding. The role I took at Interbrand was very much about balancing right brain and left brain, which people always think it's this great thing and actually it really isn't. Even as we move into a more holistic way of living, the world still is not designed to balance right and left. So, if you're someone who needs both of those things to be fulfilled, it's a complicated world. Brand consulting was a perfect thing for me because I did it rooted in research and yet simultaneously, you're doing big visions and seeing how to connect paradoxes within organizations, bring them together and unify them. That sense of bringing things together and unifying them has always been the essence of who I am. 

From Interbrand, I went and started One Sixty Fourth and we did cultural research, watching cultural shifts. That's when Brand Citizenship started emerging. That was the way in to help start fixing business.

I took a job at an NGO and then left during COVID. They were leaning very heavily into the mindfulness space with philanthropists and I thought that was going to be my nirvana. But what I realized is, in a lot of ways, the mindfulness space within the organization itself was an excuse to not deal with issues. So while philanthropists were becoming mindful major global philanthropists, it still wasn’t creating multi-sector coalition. 

But where I learned about systems perspective was in that environment. Business people are not taught about systems. They’re taught about operations and processes—which are systems, but isolated to within the business itself—not how that fits in a broader perspective. So, I was just trying to figure out where I was going next and I did this ESG training with Emission, who I have this amazing partnership with in Berlin. They're an amazing group of young, predominantly film people, ironically, who had this vision of how they could help fix the world by creating a better sense of ESG. 

I was researching authenticity because the word has bothered me for years, because people curate authenticity and the world’s okay with that (in social media, etc). Because we craft who we are every day, curating your authenticity seems to be okay. But that's not sincerity and coming from the heart. 

In one of these spiritual lectures I was listening to, someone said that the second definition of the word authenticity is integrity, which is about completeness and wholeness. Because I had this issue with authenticity, I said, “Wow, that is so big.” To me, that was just huge, because authenticity is the story you're creating for yourself every day, but integrity is where you live in that wholeness of it and how it interacts with other things and how it pulls together. 

During this realization I was having, the phenomenon of what was known as “quiet quitting” was happening. People put a name to the idea of just coasting along at work. People always had done this, but then people were starting to wear it as a badge of honor. It was like how to use a business. That was the thing that triggered me. So I started saying: Maybe the whole issue is just a notion of purpose that we've put on organizations as well as people. People were saying work has to be the one thing that fulfills them rather than one piece of the system that makes you integral, whole, complete. 

Purpose is just waking up every day in every moment, choosing what you're defining as your authentic self. This takes the pressure off you to have one thing be the focus of your life and allows you to see all the different pieces of your life come together in this holistic system, in the same way, business lives in a bigger holistic system and a business's purpose is to produce the goods and services it does. 

I did this ESG training and a second podcast interview for the Association of National Advertisers. Someone in Bloomberg saw the training and was like, “Wow, there's a bigger conversation under the surface here that this woman needs to help us start.” They’ve always operated from a much more rational arm and they wanted to move into a softer side. So, they saw me as a way to help them do that. We started opening this larger conversation about purpose, integrity, and the systems we all sit in. The Integral Collective came up organically from it and little by little one thing led to another, to people wanting more workshops, more training, and more consulting with organizations.

The whole boom of The Integral Collective started with all these weird little strands of my life: this interest in spirituality, this interest in existentialism, and this interest in how business can be better and fairer, more equitable. It was a Big Bang and quiet quitting was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was a bifurcated world. It was productivity on one end and then this desire for super high touch on the other. We seem to have lost all the things in the middle. I think that desire for that other side of things, was also essential to the creation of The Integral Collective. People wanted to have more of those conversations. That's why Bloomberg wanted to have a more open-ended conversation about purpose that wasn’t always tied to productivity, but actually tied to well-being. If you go back to Newton: For every action, we need an equal and opposite reaction. That's what we did. It was a reaction to all that productivity and virtualness. We needed something high-touch to allow people to actually start thinking again because the digital and virtual world actually takes away from a lot of our thinking. It numbs us.

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Two: Liberation as Eating Yourself

IS: What I think of next is the monopolization that's been occurring in business to an almost exponential degree. What’s your opinion on businesses acquiring so many other businesses, which is reducing the biodiversity, if you will, within business globally. Do you feel this imbalance and does your work seek to address that?

ABT: I think that a lot of what you're talking about does go back to the notion of Darwinism and survival of the fittest. But simultaneously, you see all these new models, the fourth sector, social enterprise, etc. A lot of people who measure the number of companies within social enterprise say it's larger than the corporate space now, but it's fragmented. So that's why it doesn't feel like it's happening because it's fragmented.

This is why I like to work with big companies to get them to be integral and whole, because if you can get one big company to fix itself and see themselves within this much, much wider, broader system, the impact it has is huge. To push business forward, maybe rather than seeing it necessarily as gobbling it up, maybe it's seeing that these businesses are whole and good. Maybe we need to change our perspective on how we're looking at this. If we start seeing it from a new perspective, we change what it represents because people are starting to experience it in a different way.

IS: Can you talk about liberation and how it relates to your work?

ABT: Wow. Oh. That's an interesting one.

IS: This is why I don't like to send questions beforehand—is all the wheels that are turning in your head right now.

ABT: God help us, my husband always says, “You sound like you know what you're talking about, but you usually don't.”

IS: I don't know if I agree with that.

ABT: Liberation. When I think of it in this way of integrity, I would say liberation is the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. Not liberation in that more traditional bold way. Even though a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis is bold, it's beautiful. It's an unfolding, and it’s an opening. Liberation and freedom is about opening and expansiveness, not about letting go and walking away, but about opening yourself.

IS: Is that to say that the chrysalis represents a lack of liberation?

ABT: No, it represents the eating of yourself so you can open to the new. It's like you're letting go of all the bonds and the things that have tied and worn you down. It’s why so many people before they have an epiphany are in their worst condition, because they had to get to that. They had to be able to let go. 

IS: That's a beautiful concept.

ABT: There’s a Sanskrit word: Aparigraha, The Art of Letting Go. It invites us to let go and pack lightly for our journey through life, all while caring deeply and enjoying. You have to let go of what you need to let go of to let in. In some ways we think of liberating ourselves from other things. But other things only have control of us if we allow them to. So, liberation is about letting go of yourself. That's what moving out of the chrysalis is: letting go of your old self and emerging as your new self. 

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Three: The Pressure of Purpose

IS : Can you talk about a moment from your young childhood that gave you a clear preview of what you're doing now and so, age 10 and younger?

ABT:  I didn't have a clear preview.

IS: Okay, fair enough.

ABT: I just knew I was supposed to do something. I never knew what it was, it was just knowingness. People talk about your whole life as a journey of remembering. I'm still remembering what I'm here to do. I think I found most of it, but I didn't know it, in childhood. Some days, I think I was born into the wrong family and not because I had a bad family but because the things I wanted were so different.

I will give you one moment. It was around fourth grade. I was 10-ish. My aunt had given me a Scottish sweater. It was one of those white thick sweaters with a kind of Scottish pattern. I was waiting for my ride to Sunday school and not being Christian, but Jewish. We had a carpool and someone was picking me up and it was March, right around the turning of the seasons. I was in this sweater and it was this warm, beautiful, not warm-warm but a warmer when you felt the sun. There was a lilac tree and I remember walking up to the lilac tree and feeling very bonded with it and with hyacinths that were opening their buds up. I think in some ways, that was actually a notion of this connectedness and wholeness. So, just sort of like the sense of oneness and being part of nature in the world, this thing around us and feeling part of that. In that moment that day waiting for the carpool ride, I felt so bonded to that tree, and that hyacinth, and the sweater. All of it was part of one single picture.

IS : Someone recently introduced me to the idea that improvement doesn't require you to be sick to begin with. Do you think that the world, or that business specifically, is broken and needs to be healed?

ABT: It's kind of interesting because I never thought of that. I guess it depends on how you look at the word heal. I think we're healing all the time as we're aligning. You know, maybe healing is a way to liberate yourself.

IS: So I'm starting to conceive of your work as helping individuals and companies become whole. Are you of the belief that wholeness already exists within the organism or the business? Like little lights that have been shut off and need to be reignited again? Or is it that in order to become whole, the organism needs to pull in things from the outside world into themselves?

ABT: It needs to become whole. It needs to deconstruct and reconstruct itself as a holistic mechanism that has to see itself in this broader system.

IS : So then, is a lot of your work about helping people uncover the solar system that they are existing within as a star?

ABT: That's certainly part of it. First, you have to figure out why you exist, and if we go back to that purpose as becoming your best self, well, what is the definition of your best self? How do you envision that today?

IS: I think you phrasing it, “How do you envision that today?” is crucial, because I think part of the backlash against the question of “Why do you exist?” comes from people feeling pressured by the enormity of that and knowing that in a long term way.

ABT: Exactly.

So you first have to understand who you are and who you're not. Sometimes understanding who you're not is easier than understanding who you are.

Since the days I was at Interbrand, I've always used the idea of purpose, your grand vision, or your core idea for your brand. This is your ambition—your highest reason for being. Often people can't see it, so I get them to figure out at least who they're not, then some of the things they are, some of the things they admire and would like to be. Then I have them figure out who their operations actually touch, and see if any of those things intersect. As their operations grow wider, they start becoming honest with themselves about how they add value. So much of your purpose is how you can add value to society through what you sell and how you can make the things you touch better. It's like having a war room that keeps expanding. 

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Four: Moving Business into the Quantum Era

ABT:   The universe is expansive. Part of the challenge is that business was invented from the industrial age which comes from the Newtonian era of science, which was all about productivity and numbers. When you start moving into the quantum space, which is where we are now, it's about possibilities. 

The quantum era is all designed for well-being, not for numbers and productivity. When you focus on numbers and productivity, you're focusing on linear growth, not explosive possibility. As you create a systems perspective, you get people to start seeing wider and wider.

IS: You’re blowing my mind with the idea that the very model, the predominant model of physics, can impact how we think of business. Do you feel like you're helping transform business to following that model?

ABT: I'm bringing it into that consciousness. I'm helping businesses let go of the Newtonian mindset, the industrial mindset, because even in the post industrial age, we’re still trapped in that Newtonian mindset and the whole productivity thing—Asanas, program management software, email. It's digital, but it still comes from a Newtonian way of being. It doesn't come from quantum. It's still linear. It’s all linear.

IS: Yeah, and that linearity is an enabler of modern business’s obsession with metrics and measurement.

ABT: Metrics and measurement are fine. But you have to leave space for metrics and measurements that equate to things that aren’t numeric. That's why I talk about changing the consciousness of business. It's about getting people to see differently. To be honest, that's the thing that people resisted for the longest time. My work from the day I started working, was always about changing perspectives. 

You have to be aware of your perspective. Social science has something called grounded theory. It’s that whenever you're looking at something, you're looking at it from your perspective and you have a bias in that perspective. If you're not aware of that bias, you're not going to understand how you're influencing where you're going.

IS: Do you see that as a major blind spot of business today?

ABT: Yes. Absolutely. That's why when I talk about focusing on conscious leaders who are healing themselves, it’s people who are aware they have a bias. Conscious leaders aren’t necessarily socially conscious all the time. It's a leader who's aware and mindful of their biases, mindful of the organization's biases, mindful of each stakeholders' biases. You're aware of everything around you.

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Five: Controversy Breeds Change

IS: Can you talk me through a recent experience of working with client in cultivating awareness of their own biases and how they might have changed?

ABT:  A lot of that's really confidential. But I think of one CEO and the whole executive team. We took on a learning journey into a community where their suppliers lived and they suddenly started realizing that it wasn't just the supplier itself who they were impacting. They started realizing that the suppliers are actually more than just the workers of the suppliers. It was this whole community that these workers were part of and their homes and their families. It was in a not completely underdeveloped country, but one that was not necessarily developed. We went there and actually spent a week in people's homes, almost like an ethnography let's call it. It started making them realize how far everything they did actually expanded. So they wanted to learn the process of figuring out how to get their customers to realize that when they buy their products, to see who they're actually impacting and how far down this issue of sustainability goes.

So, now they’ve created little mini sabbaticals where employees go visit those communities, once they get to a certain level. They’ve tied it into the achievement of goals. 

It's about giving equal agency to everybody and then thinking about, potentially down the line, doing something really controversial. Maybe matching a worker family at their supplier with one of the worker families with more white-collar kinds of jobs—somehow figuring out a way to get them to visit each other. It's very long term but it's about how you bring this sense of how many different lives and communities we’re actually touching through using each of these suppliers. 

A lot of the idea of those learning journeys stemmed from my experience in an NGO because we took philanthropists on learning journeys. But so many of them were just in classrooms. We were out on the edge of the Amazon in a hotel room with philanthropists talking to each other about their philanthropy rather than taking them into the Amazon. 

I think we need to understand what it is to not just solve problems for other people, but to allow people agency to solve their own problems. That's also about understanding the whole, and how we're each essential in the system. It's not just about the heart in the human body, it's about the red blood cells, the white blood cells. Each of these parts matters and if any one of them is a lie, the whole thing goes wrong. Yet, our whole notion of leadership historically has been about the one hero dropping in and fixing everything.

IS: Where have the biggest obstacles come from in the last five years? What have the naysayers said?

ABT: I had a friend who worked at a big agency and I participated in a series of roundtables with them. I said to him, “You're so kind, you’re always promoting my book (Brand Citizenship),” and he said, “Because there's no gaps in the model. You can tell it's just natural and it just flows.” And that's what came from people. it wasn't something we created, it's what came from the grassroots up. So I said to him, “Can you explain to me why I haven't been able to break through in the way I envisioned, the way my editor, publisher, and my agent envisioned?” and he said, “Because, Anne, you’re like the Scarlet A. Because you’re not saying communication is our only answer. You’re saying the way you conduct business has to change. You have to change — that’s the only answer.”

So that continues to be the pushback. There’s not a quick fix. There’s no next big thing. There’s no set answer. This is about you changing. Business changes when you change. 

IS: Right. And that scares people.

ABT: Change is great, except when you're the one who has to do it.

IS: I think that's true for a lot of people.

ABT: There’s a lot of struggle and pushback. It's just energetic and you just have to stop fighting it and that takes a lot of maturity.

IS: It sounds like the pushback, in a way, is a good barometer too.

ABT: It’s the turbulence that pushes you back on the pathway.

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Links

• AnneBahrThompson.com

• Do Good: Embracing Brand Citizenship to Fuel Both Purpose and Profit