#01 Beyond Self-Made: The Power of Team and Ecosystem with Vjera Orbanic
There is almost like a dismissal that no one got that successful on their own. Like you don't exist in a vacuum. Like there was a whole team of people, a whole lot of individuals that supported you for you to then achieve success, to then achieve whatever you're achieving, right? So when we're talking about team, I think like that's something that always surprises me, how we are aware that we need others to succeed. But then we also live in this legend of I'm self made.
Vjera Orbanic:I made it on my own and I'm here because of me. So I'm finding that to be very paradoxical.
Carlo Mahfouz:Hello, unconventional founders, and welcome to The Founders Truth, a conversation with Carlo Mahfouz and guests. Today is the first episode, and I'm super excited to introduce Vjera Orbanic, AI and human behavior specialist and partner at ethical intelligence, who will navigate this dialogue as we uncover the pillars of the founder's truth, understand how ambiguity can be leveraged on your own journey, and dismiss the narrative of the self made founder.
Vjera Orbanic:So, Carlo, I wanted to start by asking you about the three main pillars of the founder's truth. And we discussed about this idea you had of it being ambiguity and then absurdity. And then the third one was aliveness.
Carlo Mahfouz:Yes.
Vjera Orbanic:So, and I know it's maybe like a big question, but I would love just to hear more about those three.
Carlo Mahfouz:Yeah, absolutely. So in some way, I think those three serve for multiple purpose at the same time. So one of them is defining how I see founders. So who who's a founder for me? So and I think founders are defined in let in in a lot of different terms, you know, who started the company, did startups, whatever.
Carlo Mahfouz:There is different ecosystems and how they end up being introduced. But for me, a founder is someone who imbues these characteristics, which is ambiguity, absurdity, and aliveness. And as such, that's as well what all the three books are gonna be targeting because each book is aimed at one of those, if you want, characteristics or principles even, if we wanna talk about it in that way. Because the first book, Reality Check, which is now relaunched with a specific focus on founders, it's where you as a founder start discovering who you are or like who you have always been, but kind of is hidden behind all of these layers and all of these things that came through. And as a result of that, it's really a dance between ambiguity and clarity, and like finding through ambiguity clarity, and like kind of holding that paradox longer rather than just basically trying to decide, is it this or that?
Carlo Mahfouz:And I think that kind of leads itself very nicely into the second book, Relativity Has Lost Its Purpose, which is really focusing on teams because no founder at the end of the day can be a founder or actually achieve whatever they have in mind, their vision alone. And what and when I talk about teams, I'm talking about the team direct and indirect. Like, I'm not talking I'm talking the whole ecosystem around you, which is allowing you. And I think I chose here absurdity, which holds that one because we tend to always optimize almost the work of teams or even ignore the work of the ecosystem of the team around you to a certain level, which seems almost absurd and almost almost dismissed. So really that one is probably gonna be the hardest for people to grasp, and that's gonna be coming in book two, because we're gonna talk a lot about these dynamics.
Carlo Mahfouz:And I think the third one, which kind of brings it whole and actually brings it back home, not only whole, as a full circle, which is the culture of why and the rise of AI. We cannot dismiss the level technology has kind of shaped our reality today, or it's constantly shaping our reality. And it's the founder against society. It's against how they disrupt and how they create the world around them and how they can shape it both to have services and products and things like that, or to bring their visions to true, and how technology will reshape that world, how AI is reshaping that world. And here we talk specifically around aliveness.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like we bring this topic of aliveness more to the core of probably what feels missing a little bit in the dialogue between human and technology and AI and, like, right, and intelligence and all of the stuff which, you know, we can go and on. That kind of sums it up. I know it's a big question, so I try to wrap it up as quickly as I can. But it kind of holds the thread through throughout the journey and makes it easier both to recognize who you are and how you can capitalize on these, if you want skills, which not even skills, like characteristics even further and make them a core pillar of how you move along your journey, which I know for many is a very, very difficult journey. And we admit that we're not shying away from that difficulty.
Vjera Orbanic:Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you for sharing all of that. And I wanted to actually, as I was listening to you, there is like this first concept of ambiguity, which you're exploring in the relationship within yourself, right? Which I find really interesting because I am experiencing that right now where we're at in society, we kind of lost the ability to be with that ambiguity of life, right.
Vjera Orbanic:To hold things that might be opposite or not completely aligned in our head at the same time, right? Like as society, right? I'm now generalizing. And so when you look at it, I guess through the point of view of developing as a founder, can you tell me a bit more about that? Like how can people leverage ambiguity to develop themselves in their funding journey?
Carlo Mahfouz:Yeah, it's great question. I think it's a very pertinent one considering the circumstances we live in. But it is true actually that we've been optimizing for so long for precision and clarity up to the point where we stopped appreciating that the value that ambiguity brought. Actually we there's a lot of ways we can see that. We see that as well in the loss of art and shaping education and the loss of poetry and theater and dance and like all of these expression, which actually at their core is ambiguity.
Carlo Mahfouz:Because if you think about it, you see a painting and you can interpret it in one millions ways, you read a poem and like everyone who reads it understands a different thing, that's ambiguity. Like that's ambiguity at work where even though something is defined and said, it still allows you for the multitude of possibilities. And I think that's what we're missing, the multitude of possibilities because we've optimized so much for like the answer, the one thing that will take you there, the whatever. Right? And that started in schools, honestly, to a certain extent.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like education has been primed for these type of interactions, which puts everyone almost at a disadvantage. And I think society as a whole is suffering because of that, as a symptom of that almost. So in the book, the way I guide the founder and different individuals through that process is really kind of shedding one layer at a time. Like, how can we start removing some of these things that have created this perception of the world that it's not the case. And it starts with your environment, like the context that you operate in, how you can start recognizing it without judging it first.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like for example, which sounds very simple, but it's really a big deal. We have a tendency of defining things as right and wrong and like kind of playing that game. And we rarely understand how detrimental that is to the process. So kind of getting that out of the way, working a lot on exposing those things. And then we move from that to time, we move into like the past and the present and the future, like how we are stuck a lot in your title, for example, as the simplest mean, you know, you're an author, you're a coach, you're a VP of whatever, like it doesn't matter how much that holds weight on you, that it almost changes the relationship that you have with everything around you.
Carlo Mahfouz:And how starting to create some gaps or more ambiguity in it or more uncertainty almost in that conversation allows you to see more opportunities, allows you to be much, you know, actually much more clear. That's the interesting part. It is it makes you clearer on the things almost that you need to doing or are you doing, not less clear, which sounds it is paradoxical in nature, absolutely. And I think the last one just really quickly, it it comes to you as an observer, as someone with you know, I I started with language because we really underestimate the influence of the words. So I start from external, which is words.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like, we really underestimate how much words shape our reality and how we are hostage to that reality, which is shaped by our words in retrospect. So there's an interesting dynamic there moving internal to kind of the biases and the things in your history, like I call them anchors, like things that hold you down, good or bad, like, right, you you're someone who care about family a lot, like that's something holding you it's good. It's not I'm not judging it as good and bad, but it's something you need to recognize because it shapes your priorities, it shapes your view of the world. And I kind of bring it on with listening. I believe we lost patience for listening.
Carlo Mahfouz:And I wanna say listening is listening to what's happening now, not sitting in your thoughts, not sitting in with the future or the past or whatever in that. And I think that's a very simple thing to do and a very hard thing to do.
Vjera Orbanic:Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And I can absolutely see that, you know, just I think there is something you said, which made me think, and it was about the fact that, you know, we optimize so much for clarity. And I think in this optimization, you know, whenever you try to simplify something, there is all the different complex, like if it's complexities or nuances that then get lost, which are the ones that give flavor to the world in itself. And then as you were talking about like the third book and the fact that you're going to look at this intersection also with the world and technology and AI, one thing that then resonates from this conversation of like kind of optimizing for clarity and losing the flavor of it.
Vjera Orbanic:Yeah. That I think translates also in that in terms of like, you know, every time we digitize data, we lose something as well. And so I wanted to ask you if you can just talk a bit about the parallels there.
Carlo Mahfouz:It's interesting. That's a great point you bring up here. I think we almost kind of dismiss the reduction that's happening when we move from one forum to the other. Like that. And and technology is amazing at reduction.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like, don't get me wrong. And this is probably one of the greatest benefit is that technology does a great job in reducing things and AI and retrospect that does that really well. Like, you know, it's taking huge, huge dataset and then reducing them to one answer for the most part. I get it. But we don't we as you said, we miss the flavor.
Carlo Mahfouz:We miss what's happening along the way. We miss how a lot of that time, actually, what's happening along the way is more important. I I mean, it's a cliche and I'm gonna say it regardless, you know, it's about the journey, not the destination. Yes. But in some ways it is at the same time.
Carlo Mahfouz:And the nuance lives in the journey, the nuance in how we are doing things. And like, probably let's make it very tangible. If we talk a little bit around digitalization, like, you know, moving into the digital world. I had a very interesting conversation and that's gonna be part of the book, I'm not gonna share too much, but I'm gonna share a part of it, which was, I was saying, yeah, probably AI can capture, the scenario was about someone reporting an incident and that incident being reported by the individual or the team who had like faced with it. And I was saying, yeah, possibly there is a potential here for digitizing that and AI or videos or whatever capture that.
Carlo Mahfouz:And then you make it more efficient for those people. But what ends up being lost is by those individual documenting it themselves, they're processing it themselves as well with what's happening. And the benefits and the learning of that processing outweighs the actual documentation. Like such a huge thing, it's not a small thing, and this was in the context of healthcare. So you have someone in the process of actually going through again and like documenting or trying to report on what happened, processing emotionally, processing it intellectually, processing it in so many other verticals that you actually kind of almost don't even consider.
Carlo Mahfouz:So the efficiency gain there, like, again, this is where the optimization is for the wrong thing. What we're losing is we're losing all the lessons, all the, like, all the probably emotional trauma that that incident had created in that moment, that only, you know, by having that space, by having that patience and the opportunity to do so, you're actually processing. And that tells you so much because that same example is being replicated all over and all over. And don't get me wrong, there is a great gains from the efficiencies, right? But don't forget what you're losing.
Carlo Mahfouz:And sometimes it's okay to lose it. Like there is places where it's okay, we can make it more efficient and there is no problem in losing some of that. And then some places that loss is more important. And it is more important because we didn't understand its value from the beginning. Because if we haven't, we wouldn't have, you know, we dismissed it so easily.
Vjera Orbanic:Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. No, it's great. I think like there is something about because it daps into awareness, like what you just said now, like it goes into our awareness that we have of how we develop and evolve as human beings, right?
Vjera Orbanic:What brings value to that process? As you said, it's not about the destination, right? But it's about the process. So like our growth process, our development as human beings. And in this specific instance, if we look at founders and, you know, I always think that becoming an entrepreneur is a really great personal development course, you know, like you kind of like have a lot, right?
Vjera Orbanic:So looking at that through that lens, I think that there is so much gold in what you said with like also being aware of what brings you that value and honoring that and in a way protecting that and maybe optimizing for other things that actually don't bring you that much value to your own boat as well. Awesome. I also wanna talk a bit about the second piece, which is the absurdity, right? So we mentioned before and where we go from the I to the us, right? So we go from being an individual to then to the collective and our team.
Vjera Orbanic:And I wanted for you to just share a bit more about what you're seeing right now in the current environment? What would you say is happening with Teams? What's needed? What are you noticing? And if you could just tell me a bit more about that.
Carlo Mahfouz:Yeah, a great segue I think into, so what am I noticing? I'm noticing a lot is put on data, data, data, right? Everyone wants to collect data, they want it for the performative kind of scorecards or whatever you name it, and any process that you are following, I don't care, whatever. And ties really very well with what I just said, which is what are you end up optimizing for by actually following those reductionist kind of numbers that are reducing so much that is happening in your team dynamics into numbers which might dismiss actually what's creating the value. We can talk about that a little bit more, you know, directly.
Carlo Mahfouz:So, you know, you end up measuring a lot of the times, the outcomes, the performance, the time spent, all of those things. But for example, you don't measure, have yet to see, for example, you know, the level of transparency or the frustration or, like, really actually what drives the team dynamics to be working or not working. We no one has actually and to be fair, they're hard to measure. Like, don't get me wrong. It's not that they're easy to measure and like we're ignoring them, measuring them.
Carlo Mahfouz:They are hard to measure, but that's where the ambiguity kind of comes and marries the absurdity almost is the things which actually make the teams work are less so the things that you are measuring. Again, that does not mean don't measure. That's not the point. The point is don't underestimate the other things that are happening in the context of teams that is actually what makes them work, not necessarily what doesn't, you know, make them work. And this is where I think a lot of basic concepts, honestly, around trusts.
Carlo Mahfouz:I think you just wrote a beautiful article around that, which I think is really important and key here. We observe these behaviors as part of an ecosystem, not as actually part of an individual skill almost. And yet we try to achieve them as an individual kind of skill. Like fascinating, like how we completely missed the point. So you have something which presents itself as a function of the collective, yet we end up going and say, let's build, you know, that build trust, let's build transparency, let's create whatever psychological safety.
Carlo Mahfouz:I'm like, what is such bogus? You know, you cannot build these things because at the end of the day, they end up representing themselves as a function of the whole, not as a function of you as an individual. So and I think that's where it becomes really interesting. And that's the things I really wanna bring out in the book, which is, I would say a lot of the times people attribute to them to like a cultural components or, you know, soft skills and whatever. Yeah, these are the blurry ambiguous things that we cannot really put our finger on and we really want to put our finger, but that's really what make the team, tick, what make the team actually work.
Carlo Mahfouz:And if those things don't exist, we usually try to justify them by any other means possible. And that's where the data becomes completely useless. Because then we start to try to create correlations, which are completely absurd. And this is where the absurdity starts kicking in to justify the behaviors that we're seeing and saying, oh, this is why it doesn't work and this is why it works.
Vjera Orbanic:Yeah. I mean, it's it's actually quite surprising how we as people, like, if you think about it, a lot of the things you mentioned that exist in a perceived culture, like trust and transparency and collaboration and so on. Like these things like exist in the shared space between people, right? They don't exist, as you said, as a objective almost of a person, right? We say like, oh, she's a great collaborator or she's trustworthy or, you know, like we attribute these qualities to people, but actually they arise in the in between all the people involved.
Vjera Orbanic:It's something that why I'm finding it surprising is because it's almost like there is a lack of awareness that people have of that. But I also think that with what you mentioned about data and becoming basically absurd within all of this, I think that there is another interesting point that I would just add, which is I think that we live also in the time when there is like, we have this legend of the self made person.
Carlo Mahfouz:Yeah.
Vjera Orbanic:And I think that's specifically true in Western culture, maybe even more so than in other parts of the world where there is almost like a dismissal that no one got that successful on their own. Like you don't exist in a vacuum. Like there was a whole team of people, a whole lot of individuals that supported you for you to then achieve success, to then achieve whatever you're achieving, right? So when we're talking about team, I think like that's something that always surprises me how we are aware that we need others to succeed. But then we also live in this legend of I'm self made and I made it on my own and I'm here because of me.
Vjera Orbanic:So I'm finding that to be very paradoxical.
Carlo Mahfouz:Yes.
Vjera Orbanic:And I don't know if there is something you wanna add on that.
Carlo Mahfouz:No, I think it's spot on. It comes back a little bit, and I think that's really interesting. It comes back to the clarity. It's much easier to justify things for yourself and like put them on one rather than putting them on Teams. Like, right?
Carlo Mahfouz:Even if you think about it into like what you know, even in an organization, what do usually they measure like revenue, like for the most part, because that's the And then for example, salespeople can measure their own revenue very easily, but try to ask a product manager or an engineer to understand that the value that they You see how this breaks like almost instantly, like very tangibly. And I think this self made kind of, you know, person the interesting thing is in in all of the three books, what you're what I'm really trying to get you at is in the reality check is where you disappear. Like there is the whole point of removing all of these layers is what used to be so present that you disappear. And that's a very difficult concept and very simple. And actually the same applies into the two other books, except it shifts from you dissolving between you and the teams, there is no boundaries, and what that relationship create when those boundaries no longer exist.
Carlo Mahfouz:And the same is with society and the whole. And actually it becomes actually very, very difficult when it gets to the society level because the distance is very, very far. Like, especially in on this Latin track because unless you are really someone very successful or etcetera. And actually, even in that case, you're creating a side of you, like, which is making you distinct from everyone else to a certain extent to make you, you know, almost be visible. So I think that is that's probably one of the really interesting as well shifts that needs to start happening, which probably you're gonna resist.
Carlo Mahfouz:I think a lot of people are gonna resist in their journey and like because everyone almost I think it's really interesting. Everyone keeps telling you like, you know, it's up to you. Right? But is it really up to you? Like this one, no one wants to accept as well.
Carlo Mahfouz:Is it truly, really up to you? And I think what's always missing from founders who are successful and not successful is no one talks about the advisors and the coaches and like, you know, the money and the finance, like no one talks about these things as if those are given. And yet those are the foundation that you actually stand on, Like without them, no one actually gets anywhere, period. Like I don't care. I literally don't care who you are and whatever the story you kind of bullshitted yourself into after the fact you tell people, like I'm gonna put it in that way because everyone is like have this amazing story or whatever.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like that narrative is complete BS. The reality is there has been, you know, even this one friend, the client eventually who basically bought into you when no one when everyone thought what you're talking about is total BS. Like literally, that's not you alone, period. Yeah. And I think that's really critical.
Carlo Mahfouz:Like it's really critical to just shed a light on it. I'm not saying we're gonna crack it, but like expose it again. Because I think to your point is that story has become the de facto narrative that everyone needs to follow. And no wonder, you know, you have so many people failing, like really no wonder you have so many people failing because they don't have any of the foundations around them. And they keep saying like, oh, it's on me, on me.
Carlo Mahfouz:And when we end up with, on me, on me. We end up with burnout, overwhelm, people basically, you know, burning it at every single end and depression eventually, unfortunately.
Vjera Orbanic:Yeah. Yeah. Well said. I'm always quite aligned with everything you said. And I think one important thing that you mentioned, which I would like to shed light is this concept of disappearing the self.
Vjera Orbanic:And that's also related to your presence, you being present in the current moment.
Carlo Mahfouz:Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We will continue the conversation in episode two with Vjera, taking it a little bit a notch up and diving into ambiguity, presence, how that dissolves between us when we are completely in the moment, and what happens when we bring technology in the mix and how that amplifies it even further. If there is only one takeaway from today's conversation that I would like you to keep in mind is look at the team around you from advisors, coaches, people you trust as part of your ecosystem, as part of your founder ecosystem, and nurture them, they probably are as important as all the hard work that you are putting in. Until the next episode.
