Jessica Riddell
We see that in so many different kinds of symptoms of broken systems, but we haven’t changed the systems. We’ve just been focusing on increasing resilience. Okay, we’re just going to help you do better under deteriorating conditions. And I think we’re at the tipping point right now where we have to look to the cause of the deteriorating conditions. We can no longer just ask our students and our staff and our faculty to be resilient and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get gritty and develop academic buoyancy, because we have to look at the systems that are making us unwell, exhausted and dropping out.

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr Jessica Riddell to discuss her book Hope Circuits, rewiring universities and other organizations for human flourishing. What a great title. The book’s just having its one year birthday right around now, this book is both a critique of the status quo and a call to rethink, reimagine and rebuild institutions of higher education in new ways. I’m really looking forward to the conversation Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for those of us who work alongside, within or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browser archives at studentaffairsnow.com Today’s episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve helps higher ed senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience and Huron. Huron’s education research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his? I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help higher ed leaders transform organizations through better learning, leadership and equity. Can find more details about me at Keith edwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. Dr Jessica Riddell, let’s bring you in here. Thank you for being here. Thank you for writing this book. Thank you for being here to talk about it. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit more about you?

Jessica Riddell
Hi Keith, and thank you so much for this invitation. It is such a treat to be able to talk to the student affairs folks, because I think in many ways, is the unsung hero of student success, persistence, flourishing, finding purpose, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in partnership with people on campuses across Canada and around the world. I am joining you from the Eastern Townships of Quebec on the unceded territory of the Abenaki and Wabanaki Confederacy, where bishops University is located. This is a small, primarily undergraduate, think less than fewer than 3000 students, founded in 1843 and teetering on the brink of extinction since 1843 because an Anglophone, small, primarily undergraduate University and the landscape of higher education is persisting and innovating despite, not because of the conditions within which we are being funded and recognized. And yeah, I am a messy emergent learner, a voracious one. My pronouns are she, her and ella, because I’m in Quebec, and we live in multiple languages at the same time, and I am a Shakespearean, both by training and disposition. And by that, I mean that I see the world unfurling in real time in co creative spaces. So if you think about a Shakespeare play, you think about going into the theater and watching an entire universe come into being right in front of our eyes. That there’s a lot of characters on stage who are talking and moving through the world in real time. They’re managing really disruptive change, and they’re all hoping for a happy ending. And if that’s not a metaphor for our learning institutions and for a civil and just society, more broadly, I don’t know what is right that we’re all, for the most part, having really good intentions called to this work, because there is full purpose managing seismic change, working within broken systems, metabolizing uncertainty in real time and hoping that everybody has a happy ending and what that looks like and how that that emerges, is for me, the curiosity and the purpose of my life. So I came to this book on systems thinking, really, as a, as a Shakespearean, as a, as a learner of people, and as a learner really, of how people and systems and institutional cultures converge so that they’re shaping our behaviors, mindsets, values and dispositions, but that we are always open to The rewiring of that to the reframing into the recentering of it. So I’m I’m delighted in my messy journey to join you today for what I know will be a lovely conversation.

Keith Edwards
That’s great. Well, one of my secret questions was, how does a Shakespearean scholar write a book about rethinking, reimagining and rebuilding institutions of higher education we can. Cross that off the list. You just answered that beautifully. So that’s really great. The book is hope circuits, and I’m a big fan of hope, and I find it often misunderstood, so I’d love to hear a little bit about how you define hope for folks out there. Thanks,

Jessica Riddell
Keith and I really, I came to this project thinking about hope as from Shakespeare. Shakespeare was, for me, an a kind of invitation to look at systems. So if you think about Hamlet, the play, right? We all, we always think about Hamlet as the sort of 19 year old existential angsting goal was smoking university student who has left university to come back to the sudden death of his father. And in the cultural imaginary, we kind of dismiss Hamlet. We’re like, come on, Hamlet, just make up your mind. The answer is to be, get over yourself and get back to university and stop trying to solve the problems of the world. And that’s, I don’t think that’s what the play is about. I think the play is about that Shakespeare tells us, anyway, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Something is rotten in the state of the systems. Doesn’t matter what you know, counseling and advising and Task Force and support system we put around him in his university in Wittenberg, or his home as he’s managing grief, because the systems themselves are broken, he cannot flourish. In fact, he can’t even be resilient, because the conditions are deteriorating around him. And so I think that, you know, looking at that as a metaphor for me, going into this kind of book, going into hope was really a kind of light bulb moment for me where I was like, Oh yeah, the things that I love about university and education and the things I love about a civil and just society are the same things that I love about the theater. And I just finished writing a book called Shakespeare’s guide to Hope, Life and learning with two Shakespearean colleagues. We were talking about the joy of classrooms, the joy of working with students, the joy of making something together that we couldn’t make on our own. And then we theorized What hope was. We theorized what it meant to be hopeful. Rather than, I think, Keith, you’re absolutely right, we tend to define hope in terms that are not helpful. So optimism, for me, is a stance. If you sit in optimism, you think everything’s going to work out fine. I’m not sure how, but it’s going to work out fine. That’s a pretty dangerous stance, because it means that you don’t have agency. You’re not an architect of what it’s going to look like. And for me, hope is very different than optimism. Hope is a verb. Hope is something you do, and it’s something you do in relationships. It’s what you do in decisions. It’s what you do in choosing the language to describe who you are and where you are in the world. It is it is active. It lives in bodies. It lives in communities and in relationships. And when I started interviewing people for Hope circuits in the early days of COVID, I was actually just asking them what they mean by hope. How do you define it? What does it look like? And a lot of people who I would identify as hope warriors, like these really dynamic, unruly, bad ass, educational leaders, transformative, courageous, playful, who are doing things in the world despite, not because of the conditions within which they’re working. You know, they were even nervous about calling themselves hopeful. So a bunch of them were like, well, I’m I’m hopeful, but I’m not a Pollyanna, because they were worried that they would be called hopeful and therefore dismissed, right? Therefore. And think about Pollyanna that from that Haley Mills movie where Pollyanna is a young girl. So we’ve just taken hope and we’ve infantilized it and effeminized it and become estranged from the very concept that I think is going to save us. I think it’s going to rescue us. It’s going to bring us together with shared purpose. To imagine, my favorite definition is that hope is challenging the actual in the name of the possible. That comes from American rhetoric scholar Ira shore, who wrote a book called empowering students and the ways that we do this. We can’t do this on our own, but we absolutely together. Can sit in rumbly, difficult and uncomfortable spaces, do some collective sense making and figure out where we need to go, because hope always lives in the future. It’s always saying that we can create a world that is better, more just, more equitable, more humane, more inclusive than it is right now. And I think that the student affairs folks are doing that every single day, which is why I’m so excited to be in this community.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, and. And you’re you’re making me think about lots of things. You mentioned, an author on hope that I’m not familiar with, but also Shane Lopez, who are making hope happen, and Carrie grain, who we’ve both had been able to have conversation with another Canadian her book critical hope building on Paulo Freire and Jeffrey Duncan Andrade and Michelle’s you’ve kind of imagined here, hope University, this university where hope is a part of how we function and how we operate, and doing this thinking and reimagining. And you offered 10 tools, and you really kind of say, Here are the 10 tools, and then you apply them chapter after chapter in learning and teaching and mentoring and research and all the different kind of functions governing funding. But I wondered if you could walk us through 10. I don’t know if we’ll get through all 10. We’ll let you kind of pick your favorites. There are 10 in the book that they get applied again and again. But what would you want to sort of share with folks about these tools?

Jessica Riddell
Thanks, Keith. I think one of the things about these tools is they’re not prescriptive. They’re an invitation for us to adopt and adapt them in our own context, and they really only emerged in conversation with 300 people for the hope circuits book, only 300 people for those I know well, you know what? I think that hope for me is one conversation at a time. And I was starting to reach out and ask people where and how they they found hope in their everyday lives. And because I wasn’t feeling very hopeful, there was a lot of different I talked about in the book. There were a lot of personal and professional convergences where I was doing a lot of howling into the abyss.

Keith Edwards
So I thought, I mean, a lot of people can relate to that right now. Oh, my goodness.

Jessica Riddell
I know. And hiding under the covers. I used to during COVID, just schedule some time where I would hide under the covers once a week, where I would sometimes, literally just hide under the cover. Sometimes I’d read a book, sometimes I go for a walk, but I would just carve this time out. And you know, I had to write the book I needed to read, but what I really needed to hear was where these people were finding hope, where they were finding meaning, how they were getting out of bed in the morning.

Jessica Riddell
So the 10 conceptual tools emerged in conversation with 300 people. I wish I could take credit for making them up, but all I did was listen, and I listened really intently to these people who were getting out of bed every morning and making the world better, and so they might have named it something different in their own context. But what I heard were these 10 conceptual tools that. I started to pull out of those conversations, and then I started to use them in my everyday practice. I even have them printed out in a postcard, and they’re on every desk and in every purse and in every bag, because I have to confess, I’m not good at these conceptual tools. I’m actually pretty bad at them, which is why I need to do it over and over. It’s not like I needed to write the book. I know I need. I wrote the book. I needed to read and and relearn it. So it’s a lesson that I have to learn and relearn every single time. And you know, one of the the ones I guess I’m the worst at, is the first one, which is slow down and pause during COVID. I was listening to this lecture that Nigerian poet and scholar bio Akima Lafe gave, and I stumbled upon it really accidentally. It was on YouTube, and he started this lecture by saying, The times are urgent. Let us slow down. And that knocked me right on my butt, because the times are urgent. Well, you know, when you’re working in these spaces where there is permac crisis, something happens. You work longer and stay later and build coalitions and strike task forces, and everybody is in hyper arousal, right? We are absolutely attuned to it. We’re texting, we’re we’re bringing in people, we’re doing crisis management all of the time. And then it’s kind of exhilarating, right? Your adrenaline is pumping, and yet bio, aka malafe, asks us to do something other than our default response. He asks us to take a pause and make space for a second learned response, which is, let us slow down. And I have I’m part of late stage extractive capitalism, so I’m part of hustle culture, right? So hustle, hustle, hustle all the time, and I think that what he did so elegantly and so simply with that invitation, was to invite me to pause, to surface my default response, to surface what I’m responding to in real time during a crisis, and just to take a beat and to Think about what an optional response might look like, sometimes the opposite, sometimes just a little bit divergent, and sometimes, Keith, your first response is the right response, because your experts, you’ve got, you can Malcolm Gladwell talks about thin slicing. You’ve got 100,000 hours of knowledge and expertise. You can see something so quickly that other people might not be able to or might not be able to have the experience or the depth. So don’t throw away your first response, but that first conceptual tool is just to pause and to look around to see if a second response is possible. And then once you’ve done that you can start to surface the systems. And that’s the second conceptual tool is, how do we look at the systems that are often so invisible, right? We’re immersed in systems all the time. We are following rules explicitly and implicitly. We’ve internalized these systems and structures so that they are intuitive and natural, and the longer within a system, the more invisible it becomes to us, which is why I love spending time with students, because they are systems thinkers. They’re running into systems all the time, and they see things that, you know, I’m a full professor. I’ve been at my current university for 16 years. I’ve become so immersed in those systems, I don’t see them. So for me, students are really incredible for surfacing those systems, for making them visible and then inviting. And you know, they ask the most wonderful questions, like, why do you do it that way? Then you go, oh no. And some folks will say, Well, we’ve always done it that way, which is, of course, where good ideas go to die. So how do we get into spaces where we can see the things that we are the most immersed in? And so that’s the that is the second of the tools. And that’s, I think that’s the great joy of working with students, with young people, is because they they’re constantly curious about these things that we might have become a little bit unaware of right as go through in the busyness of business.

Keith Edwards
Let me ask you about a couple of others of the 10, what I have is five and six with the real key, living the questions and and staying in the trouble was just really resonating with me as I think about getting in good trouble and and the legacy of that in the civil rights movement. And so, could you speak a little bit about living in the question? Questions and staying with the trouble.

Jessica Riddell
Yeah, you know, I think that the living into the questions one was also when I had to learn the hard way. I was reading Roque Austrian poet. He was writing letters to a young poet, and so he was mentoring this young person, and and he said, you know, you can’t skip to an answer right away. You can’t skip to knowing the right thing. You’re You’re too young to inexperienced, too emergent and, and, in fact, you’re going to come up with a an answer that’s un nuanced and not that interesting. What you can do instead is live into the questions and live into the right kinds of questions. And if you can live into them for long enough, you can start to live your way into an answer. And I read that and thought, first of all, Gosh, I really would have used that as a student All right, to get away from the tyranny of a right answer, to stop imagining what my professor was looking for in an exam or an assignment that I was passing in to to teach me how important it was to be curious to sit in what kinds of quality questions are you asking, and then, you know, ask people and ourselves fundamental questions that we might have forgotten or might have never reflected on. And, you know, I write about it. I’m just finishing the second book of Hope circuits, and I write a little piece about the fact that I was living into the wrong questions. I was living into questions about whether or not I was happy, and happiness. You know, in the middle of COVID, with two young children at home, my husband was diagnosed with cancer, my workload tripled overnight. All of the world was in disarray, and we saw core and heartbreak everywhere. When I was asking, am I happy? Of course, we weren’t happy. Of course, even if I was happy, I felt awful about being happy, because the world felt so uncertain and heartbreaking. And so what I realized when I was reading real gay was I wasn’t living into the question of whether I was tapping into my purpose and if I was serving something greater than myself, and that is, you can be happy or unhappy. You can be in various states, but if you’re if I was living into that question, then I could live into the question of, How can I flourish? And how can I help others flourish by tapping into something greater than yourself, that that kind of purpose will work. And so that, for me, was a rewiring. And then, of course, when you ask questions, especially difficult ones that you haven’t asked yourself for a while, or maybe ever, about the systems within which we’re working, about our purpose, about if we’re living into our integrity. Sometimes the answers are really uncomfortable. Sometimes what we surface is a lot of things that are uncomfortable, and we recognize, I have had to recognize, all of the time that I am complicit in broken systems, even as I seek to upend them, just sitting there thinking about, wow, sometimes I’m I’m doing things I haven’t unlearned enough things so that I am, I am actually guilty of structural violence or going too fast and not paying attention to somebody who is falling behind. And so that staying with the trouble, sitting in the discomfort, staying with the difficulty as the place where we can ask questions about what can we learn from it? Those were two of the things that really rearranged the furniture in my brain, and it’s completely changed the way that I lead, administer, manage, write, facilitate and gather, because it is a kind of broken openness, right? It’s like, okay, this discomfort is a feature, not a flaw of transformation. Okay, living into the questions gets us to a place that we can’t get to if we’re just in toxic continuity, if we’re just in right answer mode, if we’re just in solutions to each problem or putting out a fire as it arises, it asks us to stretch ourselves and stretch our thinking, and that has been nothing short of transformative in my own practice.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, that was John Lewis. Was the good trouble I was trying to put the name to bringing that up. And I think I’m glad I pulled those two, because they clearly pair together in your mind, and I think it’s worth noting, one of the things I often talk about is bringing a beginner’s mind. Let’s have this conversation as we’ve never had it before. Let’s look at the structure, let’s look at the semester. Let’s look at the syllabus as though I haven’t taught the class 10 times before I. Yeah. And I think what’s challenging about that, and with living in the questions, is in in our society, in general, in our in higher ed particularly we we could fetishize knowing certainty, being the expert, having all the right answers. And of course, when we’re in a good place, we can recognize how flawed that is, and that is reinforced all the time. And so I think living in questions pushes us to be in that space of question, not answer, and staying with the trouble also puts us in the discomfort of that as well.

Jessica Riddell
And I love that looking at a syllabus like it’s the first time you’ve seen one, or looking at something, right? To make something that is familiar

Keith Edwards
strange, or Hamlet, yeah, exactly.

Jessica Riddell
Or make something that’s that’s strange familiar, right? How do we, how do we look with fresh eyes at this? And I think that, you know, I make the joke all the time that universities are really good at studying everything but themselves. And my goodness, we, all of us, came to this work, I think because we were curious and we wanted to sit in wonder, and we had full of we were full of inquiry, right? We were peeking over the edge of the unknown into the unknown with a kind of awe about what what was out there, and how humbling that is, and how much of an invitation that is for us to ask the right questions. And I think that, you know some folks, the further they get into the academy, and the higher they rise, and the more they get to centers of power, the more they’re looked to and expected to be authorities and experts, rather than learners. And I think that’s where we do ourselves a real disservice, is that we we look for to our leaders, to our administrators, to our managers, to be the experts, when in fact, we’re living, as you said, in so much uncertainty. We actually don’t know what it’s going to look like in a year, much less five years, in a way that we knew for the last about 70 years. I would say our higher education model has stayed relatively stable, stayed relatively the same. The funding models are the same, the pedagogy is the same. We’ve had to grow our Student Affairs because we know that our students are not thriving, our faculty are not flourishing, our staff are exhausted. We see that in so many different kinds of symptoms of broken systems, but we haven’t changed the systems. We’ve just been focusing on increasing resilience. Okay, we’re just going to help you do better under deteriorating conditions. And I think we’re at the tipping point right now where we have to look to the cause of the deteriorating conditions. We can no longer just ask our students and our staff and our faculty to be resilient and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get gritty and develop academic buoyancy, because we have to look at the systems that are making us unwell, exhausted and dropping out. We have to Yeah.

Keith Edwards
We have to Yeah, this time of it’s hard, so we’re going to stay later and work harder and come home earlier. You can’t do that when you’re trying to outpace 20 years of a trend in the industry, right? Like you can do that if it’s a tough week. But here we see, you know, demographic cliffs, intrusion by external constituencies, challenges from so many different sectors. And you know, it does really call for, as you said, the Rethinking, reimagining and rebuilding. We’ve only hit up four of the 10, which maybe makes our listeners and viewers a little curious about the six might be and they’ll probably come up as we go. I’m wondering. You know, this book is really about how institutions of higher education function, how they’re structured, how they’re organized, and how we do their work. And this is student affairs now. So we’re focused a little bit on Student Affairs. And I know you’re talking at a C and u and MLA, and working with lots of different folks, I wonder if we could just give you the treat of focusing just a little bit. What would you how would you apply this to student affairs, student affairs function, Student Affairs leadership, all that student work beyond the classroom. What’s kind of coming out to you? And not that you need to remember all 300 of those conversations. And I know you’re talking with lots of folks now and moving things forward, but what kind of is top of mind for you around the student affairs, reimagining, rebuilding and reinventing.

Jessica Riddell
So I love student affairs. It is one of my favorite spheres. I think that, and we know from the research that it is the greatest predictor of student success and student flourishing is is not in the classroom. Don’t. Tell my faculty that, don’t tell the university presidents that. But the real transformative connections, where students feel that they matter and they belong, happens beyond the classroom and in into the world. Right? All of the learning that I did Keith in my undergraduate was after I left the class, when I went, you know, to the campus pub and had a beer, or when I went for a late night study session, or I had a coffee with somebody, and I thought, what it what’s happening over here, what’s going on in this micro economics class, and what does it mean by scarcity, and what is the so, you know, and, and you’re constantly having those conversations in your residence rooms. You’re having those conversations at the dining hall, you’re having those conversations in the athletics facility. You’re having those conversations with your career counselors. You’re earnestly trying to figure out what you’re going to do with your lives. And so for me, I was I was so informed by my friend Peter Felton’s book, relationship rich education, where they did a big why he and Leo Lambert at Elon University at the time, did a big research study where they were trying to figure out where and how students were succeeding and persisting. What they realized is that the students were flourishing when they were in relationship rich environments where it wasn’t just one mentor or one person, it was all of us recognizing that we’re responsible for the stewardship of this community. And so, you know, I think the greatest unsung hero of retention rates at my university is true Trudy. And Trudy works at the Dewhurst dining hall, and she checks student IDs as they come in for three meals a day. And Trudy says, Hi, love. How are you? How was the test last week? How you doing? Did you go home for spring break? And when Trudy asks you and remembers the next time she sees you how you’re doing. That is the greatest indicator of flourishing, because students feel that they matter and they belong, that they’re connected in a web of relationships where people are deeply interested in them as humans and that they are loved and that they are valued, and that is the case not just for our students, but I think, for our staff and our faculty and administrators when we live in communities where we are humanized, even radically humanized just by remembering something that they said, or following up with them or sending them an article. I had a student I’m teaching this semester for the first time in a while, and I had a student talk about his grandfather and his grandfather’s fascination with entropy in the final years of his life. We were talking about generativity and legacy building, and I just came across an article that Maria Popova wrote about on entropy, and I just copied it and paste it and threw it into an email and said, Rafael, I think this is something you might be interested in. It cost me nothing. It cost zero time. It cost me just a little bit of attentiveness and to reach out that I was listening to you and you matter, and I thought this might be interesting to you. So for me, student affairs teams are creating that relationship rich environment, that web of relationship that is so meaningful and it’s almost impossible to measure, it’s almost impossible to throw in a year end report or create a dashboard of metrics or impact and yet, that is where we need to move. And we need to create systems where Trudy is able to say hi to students when they come in for lunch, and that she feels like she is included as a essential member of this community and of radical humanization in all of its forms. And so I think what we don’t do super well in higher education is is invite everybody on campus to see themselves as stewards of this community, of this organization, and I think we need to do a better job of that.

Keith Edwards
Well, I love that example. I still remember the the woman who in my undergrad dining hall who knew everybody’s name, like she she knew everybody’s name, and you walked in, and she was there for lunch and dinner, and she knew everybody’s name, and what a difference it makes. Now my focus is on not the difference that Trudy makes, but does Trudy feel like she matters, that people care and value her as well along the way and making sure that those faculty and staff who do have such an impact, i. I feel like they’re a valued part of the system as well.

Jessica Riddell
That’s absolutely essential if we’re taking a systems level approach. We need to figure out how to make Trudy and, you know, Katie and student leadership and Steena and student affairs and all of these folks feel like they are part of an intentional community, that they have shared purpose, that they have shared vocabulary, and that they’re all contributing in their own sphere of influence and context. And I think that is so essential, that the way in which we say you matter and your work is important and it’s valued, it’s compensated, it’s purposeful, and that we get to slow down and stop and say thank you and practice that kind of gratitude. But also, if they’re burning out or getting tired or feeling overwhelmed, what does it look like at this systems level for us to alleviate that pressure so that they can do that work of purpose? And I talk about it a little bit in this, this new book about blueprints, like, how do we actually create blueprints at the systems level to free people up to do work that is meaningful, and I talk about it through the lens of the ethics of efficiency, where, when we talk about efficiency in a scarcity culture, we talk about cuts, we Talk about layoffs, we talk about doing more with less, but when we live in a sustainability culture, the ethics of efficiency means that, Keith, I value your work, and I’m going to create the systems, whether it’s, you know, the student management system or the learning management system or the Check requisition system, where you are not dead by death of 1000 paper cuts, right, that you’re not filling out 10 forms for one thing, that most of your work, that we can create systems to free you up to do the work that is the most meaningful, that is the most human, that is, you know, high relational good Structures building institutional cultures, and so that ethics of efficiency is an invitation for us to think about how we spend our time, where we spend it, what our purpose is, and if we are spending most of our time doing stuff that is not part of our job description, our wheelhouse, or employing our superpowers, then what do we do to reimagine those systems differently? Yeah,

Keith Edwards
well, for those playing at home, we’ve stumbled through eight, nine and 10 of our tools. Number eight is taking a systems level approach, which you’re talking about. Nine is changing language to change the world, which you also are talking about. And 10 is building that intentional community, which Trudy was a great role model of. I think we’ve still got a couple more to go before we circle to number four, which is committing to unlearning and relearning. This came from interviewing 300 people. You have a trilogy. What book one of the trilogy is? Out right? Hope circuits, which is kind of the why book. Tell us about the next two books, because then I’ll move to our next question about learning and unlearning.

Jessica Riddell
Thank you, Keith. I could only talk myself into finishing this first book because I promised myself that the conversations would be ongoing, and really the first book was about naming what is happening in this moment. The moment felt really overwhelming, and I was struggling a lot to metabolize in real time what was all coming at us. And if you recall, in COVID, it was coming at us fast. I think it’s coming at us faster now, right? We’re just bombarded with these, you know, the word of 2022 is perma crisis, right? That our little bodies are in constant hyper arousal and systems dysregulation, because things are coming the the change of pace is accelerating. And so for me, the the first book was really just about how to take this moment. What are the tools we need to take this moment to metabolize it into a mindset? So how do we build a kind of robust mindset? And so I use those 10 tools every single day. You know, a project fails, a committee goes sideways, I get a rude email from somebody. I go to my little postcard of the 10 conceptual tools, and I literally walk myself through them. I’m like, okay, okay, wait a second. Slow down and pause service the system. Um, and then so I, I really needed the second book to be the blueprints. So the, how do you do this? Okay, so you’ve worked on yourself, okay, so you’ve got your tools. Okay, so you’ve got some mindsets. What I really wanted to do is to think about, how do we move from mindset to movement? How do we do this? How do we anchor it in our practice, not just for ourselves, because you can do all the work you want on yourself. You can be robust. You can develop. Audience. But if you’re still stuck in these broken systems, you’re still stuck in intractable spaces that are resisting change. It doesn’t matter how many tools you have to be resilient, you’re still going to burn out. Right? So the second book is about how to create blueprints for us to do this, systems work to do this, systems change to go from moment to mindset, and then in the second book, to go from mindset to movement. How do you bring people along with you? How do we get folks to live into the same questions that we are while still preserving difference, while still preserving different ways of thinking as strengths? And so, you know, I always quote Loretta Ross, who’s a social activist who defines a cult versus a movement, and so she says that a cult is a bunch of people moving in the same direction, thinking the same thing, and a movement is a bunch of people moving in the same direction, thinking different things. And as soon as I read that, I was like, that’s a university. That’s what we do, like that’s our superpower, is that we’ve got physicists and shakespeareans and, you know, we’ve got Student Athlete Support, we’ve got advising, we’ve got, you know, orientation folks, we’ve got party planners. We’ve got all of these huge skills, all of these superpowers. We need to preserve them while also moving in the same direction. And so the books really are building shared vocabulary, giving examples and case studies in vignettes, really stories, right? These are data with souls, opportunities for folks to see themselves in the work, so that they are empowered as architects in their own space, in their own sphere of control and influence, so that they believe that something is possible together. So that, you know, the second book is about blueprints. The third book is in conversation with 50 different luminaries across the higher education sector in Canada and the US for the most part, who are building and illuminating, who are doing who are getting out of bed in the morning and changing the world for the better, from their own perspectives, with joy, as much as with, you know, advocacy and social movement, building with pleasure, with belly laughing with delight. And I think that, you know, I’m, I’m going to finish this trilogy and think about maybe two more trilogies, because the conversations for me are, the are the thing, the books aren’t, you know, sort of proposing that I’m the expert, right? I wouldn’t have the audacity or the arrogance to imagine that one single author can write a prescriptive book about how to rewire your systems. It has to be the the books for me, are an entry into a conversation. So I go with the book. I go into an ecosystem. I go into a university or a college or an organization. They read it in advance. They have some shared vocabulary, and then we rumble on it in the distinct ecosystem. We play with it, and we say, what can we adopt and adapt in our in this unique space that is helpful for this group?

Keith Edwards
Yeah, well, again, for those playing at home, that was number three, practicing divergent thinking. We even got into number seven. I think that means we’ve hit on all 10. Number seven is reimagining authority and expertise you got in two references to Brene Brown there around rumbling and stories of data with with a soul. So that’s great. What I want to ask is you’ve got a why book, A how book, and then a chicken soup for that soul stories kind of book on their way, and we’ll have to have some more conversations when those are ready. But as you had these conversations with 300 people that led to these 10 tools and hope circuits in this book, as you’ve been talking with universities and associations and giving these talks and then listening to people and engaging with them, and as you’ve been thinking about the architecture and receiving some of these stories from these luminaries. What are you unlearning and relearning in this process? What? What’s what’s new learning and unlearning and relearning for you.

Jessica Riddell
Thank you for that question. I love that question. And in fact, every single time I go into a different ecosystem, I get my brain rewired, like I realize, oh, wait, we’re using this word which means something different over here, or I was assuming that we share this fundamental principle, which I should not assume. And so I have and yeah, thank you for listening to me listening I just absorb what people are saying and how they’re engaging and how they’re being in the world, and what is keeping them up at night and what is getting them out of bed in the morning. And what I have learned is that each ecosystem is distinct. In the last year, I have been in 57 different ecosystems at universities, colleges. Those associations, and what I have learned is that people want to talk about their feelings. They want to talk about what they love. They want to talk about what is worrying them. They are tired of toxic continuity and toxic positivity. A are not hearing their their deep and unprocessed grief finding a voice, but they’re also not seeing joy and pleasure and irreverence and play reflected in the systems, in the culture, in the storytelling around our organizations. And so, you know, I host these hope summits, I host these retreats, I take you know 1000 people into a conversation about it, or I’ll take you know 50 from the senior leadership team on a two day retreat. It’s every it’s everything. It runs the whole spectrum of engagement. But what I’m always surprised is, how many feelings are there? How often people are crying, not because there’s they’re sad, necessarily because it’s sometimes the first time they’ve been asked what they love about the institution, about the community, about the work that they’re doing. It’s sometimes the first time that they have heard named Hope that is large enough and expansive enough to hold anger, rage, despair, certainty, disorientation, at the same time as we put in abundance joy, pleasure, delight, and so I did not realize that I had, you know, I’m a Shakespearean, so I’m used to dramatic things happening on stage, but I didn’t realize how much people wanted to talk about that, and how hungry they were to sit in rooms together and to see each other’s common humanity, to sit and to listen and to be willing to be transformed together. And I think that, you know, I I read Parker Palmer’s book, the courage to teach when I was very young in my in my journey as a junior faculty member. And he said something that I will never forget. And I think about, I thought about every day for about three years during COVID, and he said that there are broken hearted people everywhere, and there are broken hearted people who are broken apart with 1000 shards of being in this world. And then there are broken hearted people who are broken open and broken open into transformation and broken open into community. And he said, we have a choice. Do you want to be broken apart or broken open? And I I look around, and I think that there is, there is a language and a framework and an invitation that we must give to people within this sector who, and I think education is the only sector whose prime purpose is hope. It’s our it’s our sole mandate to challenge the actual, the name of the possible industry doesn’t have that mandate. Government doesn’t have that mandate. That’s our mission in education, and I think at this moment, there is such an appetite for people to reclaim hope, to rehabilitate it, to find it, to figure out how to build it into our everyday lives. And that has to be sitting with the trouble that has to be saying the quiet things out loud, that has to be gathering in community and recognizing each other’s common humanities. So I’ve had to unlearn my my cognitive, intellectual brain living in the academic enterprise, and sit in those three dimensional, emergent, messy spaces with people willing to be broken open. And that has been a joy that has been really hard. It’s also the greatest privilege for me to hold those feelings and to help people name them.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, well, just like we were talking about how we know that questions are so powerful, but we’ve been socialized into the certainty and having the right answer. We know that emotions are a critical part of our human experience and have so much value and insight, and we’ve been socialized in the academy to not keep the feeling separate, be objective, be neutral, and just say what the evidence has in many disciplines. And I think that plays out, and I think we’re seeing people yearning for sidestepping that and being in the emotions and the uncertainty and the hope, and as you were talking about toxic positivity, I often think about positivity, optimism and hope, and sort of that progression, right? Positivity, everything’s great is toxic when it’s not right, if things aren’t great, and you’re just pretending that’s really toxic. And then I. Optimism, as you started this conversation, is things will just magically get better, which is just as fatalistic as pessimism. Things are just going to be terrible, right? And then hope is, what is really going on. I can imagine something better. And what’s the role that I can play? Not that it’s all on me, but I can play a role in that.

Jessica Riddell
I love that, yeah? And I think you’re absolutely right. You can write my book for me. It’s not writing itself, yeah, that notion, you know, when I was writing, and I was doing a lot of reading, and lots of reading outside of the discipline, lots of reading about higher education, but also lots of reading from community organizing and, you know, Rebecca solnits work, Adrian Marie Brown, Prentice Hemphill, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, you know, just immersing myself with the the intellectuals of our time. And what I realized is that there are so many self help books there that are just saying, like, just, you know, be better in these, in these, and figure out how to manage these broken systems and work on yourself. And there are very few collective help books. Yeah, the hope circuits, for me is a collective help book. It was, I wrote it so that people could read it on their own, but then get together in book clubs and rumbles and spaces and retreats where they could take the book, stick it in the middle of the table, pull it apart and put it back together. Because we can’t do this on our own. We can’t continue to just think, Okay, well, you know, I’m going to try as hard as I can, and then as soon as I can, I’m, I’m out. Yeah, you know, there’s that Yale professor who just left. He was the the expert in the US in a civic democracy. And he was like, I’m out of here. I’m going to Toronto. I’m like, No, we need we need you. We need everybody invited into this work. We need everybody to see themselves in the work, to be reflected in the work, to find radical welcome in that work. So that that and that we can do it together, that we can’t. We will. We will burn out if we don’t do it together. So how do we sit in those spaces and sit, you know, and Loretta Ross’s notion of moving in the same direction, thinking different things, and imagine what is possible.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I’m thinking about so many people who are who are staying in tough situations and tough circumstances, because this is where I’m needed most. And I so admire that more than admire I revere that. And if there aren’t collective movements around those individuals to support them and nourish them and replenish them and change some of those things and make progress, it’s asking a lot of those people to be there at cost to themselves to benefit others. And I think that’s another toxic thing that happens, right? Well, we are running out of time. This is just flying by, as we name drop all sorts of fun folks we both like, but as we’re running out of time, the podcast is Student Affairs NOW, and we always like to end by asking your guests, what are you thinking, troubling or pondering now might be related to this conversation or something else, and if folks want to connect with you, Jessica, where is a good place for them to do that?

Jessica Riddell
Oh, I hope that they do. I have a website that my students built for me called www dot Jessica riddell.com. So Jessica Riddell is R, I, D, D, E, L, L.com, it is always messy and under construction, and so are my partnerships with my incredible students. And they’re, they’re my truth tellers and joy bringers and systems thinkers and yeah, and you can also email me. J Riddell at you bishops.ca. The the thing that I’m really interested in in the work that I’m doing, is that I get to go to tables and into communities that other folks don’t get to because I’m not a consultant, I’m a Research Chair, I’m a restless learner and listener, and so I am able to pop into spaces with, you know, boards of governors and boards of trustees. Because I sit on boards, I get to go into senates with faculty. And because I’m a senator and I’m a I’m a faculty member, I get to go in and work with student unions, because I believe in partnership with students is a fundamental that students are truth tellers, that they are constantly for me, I surround myself with these young people who will tell me things that are probably uncomfortable, always uncomfortable with deep, deep love and deep joy for that co creative space, and I get to work with senior administrators and senior leaders who are also exhausted and depleted and don’t always have the time to slow down and pause. And so where my my sort of thinking is is how. I continue to convene these conversations and then can connect people together, right in these constellations that we are so used to, and our systems are driving siloed and compartmentalized thinking. Our systems are built on vertical, rigid hierarchies. Our systems are built on exclusion and mystification, and we can’t afford that anymore. We have to be kinetic. We have to be gathering. We have to be building conversations and shared vocabulary. And so I think that the thing that keeps me up at night is I have these beautiful conversations with 30 university presidents, I’m like, You really need to tell the Senate that because they hear you thinking through these complexities, or we need to engage with our alumni, our donors, our foundations, the ways in which we are building conversations and coalitions, because at the beginning and the end of the day are students, and their flourishing is of our foremost importance, and then also the systems that you know, allow Trudy and you and you know, Stina and everybody around us to be able to flourish so that we can do the purposeful work of stewarding these complex communities in the in the role of hope, right? It’s our IT. We are in the sole business of hope. How do we reclaim it? How do we share it? How do we build momentum, and how do we create social movements around that?

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Well, awesome, wow. Thank you, Jessica. This is great. Love the book hope circuits. People can get it. It’s having its first birthday right around now. And then it’s also, we’re finding out today. It’s first in a trilogy of an architecture book coming out and blueprints, and then also some stories from some luminaries, as we were talking earlier, a Chicken Soup for the Hope Circuits soul, something like that, right? We’ll see. We’ll work on a title. Thank you so much. This has been awesome, and I really appreciate you, your book, your work and your leadership in this space. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode Evolve and Huron. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead, along with my colleagues, doctors, Brian Rao and Don Lee. We offer a personalized experience with high value impact, the asynchronous contact and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for change and Huron. Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation. Brian by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo, Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher ed. For more information, please visit them at go.hcg.com/now and as always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat Ambrosey, who makes us all look and sound good, and we love your support for these conversations, your support as our community is super helpful. You can help by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our newsletter where we release information about our newest episodes each week on Wednesdays, you can also leave us five star review to help great conversations like this, Jessica and I reach more folks. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, thanks again to our fabulous guest, Jessica Riddell, today, thanks to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week.

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