Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Where in actuality, what we should be doing is figuring out how do we take nature and separate it into its functional bits and pieces, because sunlight creates free materials for us. That's what's. So sustainability really should be sun stain ability. Because if sunlight doesn't make it, why are we doing it? And then. But to do that, we have to get this complex cellular network. And how this beauty of hydrogen bonding in a plant or a tree, how do we get it apart?
I'll tell you what you don't do. You don't stick it in the flame and beat it with the stone.
You got to get it to come apart the way it prefers to, which involves energy, frequency, soft bonding.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in Northeast Wisconsin.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Foreign is the podcast companion to my book, the Soft Power Model, for which I don't have a release date yet, but it's coming soon.
Soft power didn't start with a theory. It started actually with a rupture. And that's where we will begin. Before we get into it, there's something you should know. I am known in the sustainable packaging world. Yep, packaging. That printed layer between you and your food.
I coined the phrase Earth digestible packaging, and I've spent the last near decade redesigning the materials that wrap around our lives to be that Earth digestible.
But this show, it's not just about compostable materials or circular systems. It's about power and how I realized, while working inside one of the most invisible and underestimated industries, packaging on the planet, that the same forces that hold a pouch together are the same ones that hold people, teams, companies, and even civilizations together.
Soft bonds, hidden tensions, and the quiet cracks that no spreadsheet can see.
Because here's the truth.
Eight billion people now depend on food systems for which they have no control. Which means that packaging isn't a footnote. It's central. It's essential.
If we don't change how we bond materials, how we mix the dead carbon from the Earth with the living carbon on top of the Earth, we're just speeding up entropy.
So, yeah, for me, this isn't a pivot. It's a transmission from packaging to people to power.
And for me, that signal started in my front yard. In this first episode of the Roots to Fruits podcast, I have joining me Chris Schaefer. Chris is a sustainability advocate and tenured marketer in materials that have a positive environmental impact.
Chris grew up composting for her family's organic garden, and she's passionate in building a healthier people on a healthier planet. I'm going to say something that might sound strange, but it's true.
The single biggest turning point in my life happened while mowing my lawn.
Not in a boardroom, not on a mountaintop.
I was pushing a mower through my small but proud yard of my first home in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Mechanical pencil in one hand, spiral notebook in the other. And right there, somewhere between the buzzing in the dust, I scribbled the phrase, the ultimate human dilemma.
In that moment, everything changed.
Welcome to the story of how I found soft power. This isn't a podcast about how to win or the do's and don't do's in business. It's about what happens when the old ways of working, when the system breaks down at work, at home, inside yourself, and you don't know what to do with your feelings about it.
I've spent the last 30 years working for and with organizations of all sizes. Like anything you can't unsee, once you know how to see it, seeing those things quickly become autopilot.
Where I thought I was looking for the elements of the ultimate human dilemma, I was actually measuring energy.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: Kelly, this is really the map back to that moment, the story of how you got here, how that just clicked with you.
Soft power wasn't something that you built. It was really something that you personally remembered.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: It's strange, isn't it? Sometimes the biggest truths don't drop in your lap in a moment of chaos, but they happen in a moment of actually rhythm, you know, where things are moving along.
For me, it was mowing the lawn. No music, no podcast, just motion. The hum of the mower became kind of like a moving meditation for me.
And in that space, somewhere between the blades in the sky, this phrase landed in me. The ultimate human dilemma.
I didn't know what it meant yet, but I knew it captured what I was experiencing and feeling.
[00:04:56] Speaker C: Kelly, why would you be mowing the lawn with paper and a pencil?
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Great question. It's because I had reached this same insight before while mowing, but I kept losing it.
And this was the first and only time I came prepared. And I caught it. I caught all of it. And when I looked down at what I just jotted down the connection points to it, that's when that metal bar of the lawnmower, I let it go.
My heart started to palpitate. My head got numb. When I wrote those four words, the ultimate human dilemma.
Unknowingly, that the journey towards soft power had already begun.
Because at that time I was actually living two worlds and both of them were cracking simultaneously. At work, I was navigating the post mega merger wave in petrochemicals and plastics, where companies were consolidating, culture was collapsing under spreadsheets.
I was rising fast. In fact, I was the youngest in my company's history. So they told me to ever make the business team.
But I started noticing something that no one else seemed to see.
People weren't speaking different languages. They were actually running entirely different operating systems.
The real frictions weren't between projects, they were between functions.
And here's where it really clicked for me.
People weren't just clashing because of roles or incentives.
They were running completely different cognitive code.
You see, we're all born with one of two types of mental hardware, sensing or intuition.
And we're loaded with one of two primary softwares, feeling or thinking.
Now I know that sounds like psychology speak, and I'm not a psychologist, but it's real. Myers Briggs Personality Inventory data shows us that 25% of people are intuitive and the rest are sensing. Which means 75% of people need proof before permission. They need to see the dots before they'll connect them. But intuitives, we feel the curve. We sense the shape of things before they arrive.
So I'm going to use a junior high math metaphor, so walk with me here. Sensing minds are what we call interpolators. They calculate what's between two known points.
If the data exists, they find the answer. But ask them to step outside of that data to predict where the curve is headed. It's syntax error.
Intuitive minds are naturally extrapolators. They curve fit the present into a vision of the future. They don't need all the dots to see the picture or to imagine the curve.
So now imagine what happens when one group is tasked with innovation and the other is taxed with tasked with control, such as finance. And neither knows the other exists. So it's the perfect recipe for friction. And I saw it everywhere, Chris. They were everywhere. Then came this hammer dressed as a process called stage gate.
In theory, it made sense because you don't build a house until you've appraised the land.
But in practice, it was a meat grinder for anything visionary.
It asked the innovators to map the unknown using only the known.
It was a structure based resistance where innovation got trapped in like a spreadsheet dipped in groupthink.
Instead of helping ideas grow, it cut them off at the root.
Because systems like that, they don't reward resonance, they actually reward resemblance.
And if it looks familiar, it's safe. If it feels new, it gets flagged. And for someone wired to see the curve coming, that's a slow death by a thousand dry meetings.
Meanwhile, at home, I was living through something I didn't have language for yet.
Gaslighting.
I'd question reality only to be told I misunderstood it. I'd offer truth and be met with doubt.
The dissonance outside my life started to mirror the dense, the dissonance within.
And then one day, I found myself on that edge. And I could either dehydrate and sink into a guarded mass, or find that inner lattice and climb upward to a more hydrated place.
[00:09:13] Speaker C: Kelly, you're standing in your yard. The sun is shining on you, and you'd know you'd hit upon something intuitively. You just know it.
Did you know that this was going to change your life? Did you know that in the best way, that this opens something that really wasn't ever intended to close?
[00:09:31] Speaker A: It certainly didn't feel like an answer, but it pointed to it, if that makes any sense. Did it feel like something that cracked? Yeah, I would say more like a rupture, like an earthquake. It just cracked open the foundation I'd been standing on. I didn't know where it was going to take me, but I knew that I was. That I was going to follow it. There's. I had no choice. And that phrase, the ultimate human dilemma was more like an invitation not to solve a problem, which you're trained to solve problems, but to see something differently. That's really what. What led me to. To this current point. It didn't take long to start seeing the same patterns everywhere. Different logos, same fear, same resistance, same allergy to intuition.
And that's when it hit me. This wasn't dysfunction. This was actually design.
It was systemic dehydration, like a blueprint replicated across industries.
Something that looked strong on the outside but were brittle beneath the surface.
So I did what I've always done. I traced the pattern. I didn't call it soft power yet. That took 23 more years, but I started watching what bonded, what broke, what quietly held together, and understanding those forces.
[00:10:42] Speaker C: So if that was the fracture point, what was really the first threat of repair?
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Looking back, I didn't realize it at the time, but none of these systems, my company, my marriage, even my thinking were broken. They were just.
They were dry, brittle from too many seasons of fear and worry, too few seasons of curiosity and listening. Like over tilled soil. You know, that looks fine from a distance, but it can't hold water and doesn't form roots.
So what I needed wasn't more data, it wasn't a promotion, it wasn't even a plan. It was really just what I now see was hydration.
Now that kind of comes with that self help book feeling, but it's not, trust me. This is the kind of of soft power that moves in silence. It's rooted in curiosity and resonance.
It was a different kind of pull.
I, it had always been there. I guess I just wasn't really paying attention to it. But now I started to feel it and now I refer to it as soft bonding. It doesn't command, it doesn't control. It simply connects.
That kind of force that doesn't grip tighter, it opens wider.
And once I realized that it's not a push, but rather an invitation, then everything kind of changed. The way I looked at everything really started to take a different shape.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: Kelly, I read what I'm confident will be your first book and it was to me like so insightful. I found that soft power was really very relatable, certainly very natural. So if you could just explain soft.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Power for us, I think we probably should do that because I've mentioned it enough times.
So I think the easiest way to describe soft power is it's that invisible force that holds everything in nature together without using force.
It's how water moves up plants against gravity. It's how enzymes catalyze change in living systems, such as opening up a DNA molecule.
But it's also how trust creates coherence in teams. It's not about domination or extraction. It's about connection, hydration and resonance. In material science, it's the hydrogen bond.
In business it's cultural alignment.
In life it's empathy, intuition and being in tune.
It shows how everything from packaging to of people work better when bonded softly, not covalently cross linked and held tightly. You know that that's. So it's a model for regeneration, for building systems that adapt, respond and thrive. And not through control, but through coherence.
Soft bond is, is what holds it all together and makes it flow.
[00:13:25] Speaker C: That's really the paradox, right?
You didn't find your way out through force. You found it through what I've often heard you refer to as coherence.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Exactly. Because you can't brute force your way out of dehydration. You can't, you have to dissolve something first. You gotta soften the armor before you can grow new skin. And when I stopped trying to win, I started to remember how to move again. And you start to. So, so this soft power goes from biology to understanding ourselves, teams, organizations and cultures.
And the real premise of that soft power is hydrogen bonding. So I know I mentioned it earlier, but I'm going to take just a little moment to explain how important that is. In chemical engineering school, you're taught it is the weakest force in all of the universe is hydrogen bonds. So they're very tiny, like little hands holding each other. And it's how our bodies stay together. It's how trees stay together.
So a person, a plant or a tree have a lot in common. We're roughly 70% water.
We have the, the difference between chlorophyll and hemoglobin. One has a manganese in the middle, one has iron in the middle. Why one is green and one is red. Otherwise they serve the same function. But all of those molecules, from DNA to the fascia in our muscles, they're all held together by these soft bonds. Enzymes are the ones that, that unlock them and allow them to, to, to transform or to open up or catalytically and do all these great things. But what, what we fail to realize is how important water is. So that water is really the connection of those tiny hands holding everything together through soft bonding.
But it doesn't stop. In material science, the same parallels go into how we develop from, from, you know, using yoga, from a root chakra to the third eye that you develop throughout your lifetime is again that same scale of soft power where you're either condense mass, which is what happens right to nature when, when those leaves and trees get down into the earth, we fossilize them. So we're actually.
It's still carbon. We've just transformed that carbon to be so dehydrated it propels water altogether.
Societally, personally, organizationally, we don't want to be that. We want to be resonating at higher energy through soft bonds and building resilient infrastructures for which we communicate. So that's kind of the multiple angles all coming in together for what soft power means.
[00:15:59] Speaker C: Kelly, this just intuitively, now that you've explained it, it makes so much sense. What is the best way for me to apply it really in my life, but also application to work where it seems like there are so many examples that we could all point to that could be bettered.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: But I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and in the book, I actually have references at the end that give you those tools to do it. But one way to think about in every situation, we're all built around stacks of dichotomies, right? So those dichotomies are like gate valves in plumbing system. So if it's open, it flows, if it's closed, it doesn't flow.
So open or close, hate, love, trust, fear. So you start stacking those things up so you, you end up with this residual description, whether it's you as a person, how other people would describe you, or how people would describe your small team that's on a task, or your entire organization has an identity. And that identity, if you sift through it, is tied to where those dichotomies are open or shut up.
So dehydration is when you start living out of fear. So you're re. So if you think about classic business, we're extractive capitalism. Never share your customers, always covet your vendors competitive pressures. Like it's, it's, it's, it really reinforces mass over spirited collaborative energy. So we're almost like in a pickle altogether because we've, we've defined ourselves, we've raised ourselves and in competitive fears and resource guarding where really we're not now part of a mycelial network underneath the ground. Our roots are not connected to the other roots because we're afraid to. You can use this soft power analogy for anything, whether it's your own personal development. Are you fearful or fearless, Are you grounded or are you worried?
So I think, and it's easy to drive towards math through reinforcing fears.
But then I see this kind of colloidal mix of people that are kind of stuck in organizations, stuck in the fear and others trying to regeneratively succeed and build, build for the future. And it's just interesting to see. And when you start breaking it down, it's dichotomies. You find the right dichotomy, you can open up where hydration needs to start and it cascades hydration. It's got to figure out where that first one is.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: Exactly.
I'm going to take you back to really your area of expertise, which is packaging.
In the book, one of the things that really resonated with me was when you were talking about how paper is made, how cell is made, and really the force that is impacted upon that when really there are systems where the reverse could be true to that dichotomy you're talking about where it's a softness that's applied to straw. Can you elaborate on that?
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Would love to. And it's a great example because we're in, in the world of sustainability, you know, trying to get away from fossil Plastic dependence.
But now plastics has its own connotation. So bioplastics are kind of caught in that. But it's moved paperization of packaging more and more paper because it's natural material. Well, it is and it isn't.
Because if you look at what we do with trees, first of all, the reason we use trees isn't because there's more cellulose than plants. Hemp has almost twice as much cellulose as a tree, but because we designed that plant when we needed the cellulose. So the concept of a craft pulp is 6 to 800 tons a day. So you have to use trees. You can't ship that many bales of wheat straw or hemp bales because it's just too big. So the solution to pollute to pollution has always been dilution with the way we make paper. But that's not even the problem. The problem is we use what I call caveman chemical engineering.
When you don't know how to take nature apart from its soft bonds, where you can get it to let go of itself, you do what we do. You stick it in the fire and you beat it with a stone. And that's what we do to make paper. So there's no, should be, no, no surprise, right, that, that the cellulose that we use to make paper and paper products has been hornified. It has been dehydrated beyond recognition. It's not alive anymore. It doesn't have fluidity. It has been so it's calcified. It's like. So when we, when we're sending it to different places, we wonder why it has the properties because that's what we did to it. Where in actuality, what we should be doing is figuring out how do we take nature and separate it into its functional bits and pieces because sunlight creates free materials for us. That's what's so sustainability really should be sun sustainability.
Because if sunlight doesn't make it, why are we doing it? And then, but to do that we have to get this complex cellular network and how this beauty of hydrogen bonding in a plant or a tree, how do we it apart? I'll tell you what you don't do. You don't stick it in the flame and beat it with the stone.
Yeah, you got to get it to come apart the way it prefers to, which involves energy, frequency, soft bonding.
[00:21:22] Speaker C: What would be your best near term recommendation for regenerative packaging?
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Boy, that is a great question. And that's an episode in and of itself. But I, I, I feel like there's this, this.
I'm not going to get into recycling versus Earth digestible, but what I will get into is carbon footprint. So there's a lot of move to move towards paper. Well, the carbon footprint is not ideal. You don't want to go from a fossil plastic here to a paper carbon footprint that's up here. You want it to go down. And the way you go down is to rethink the cellulosics, how you extract and how you build. So I, I feel like what we should be doing is looking towards where I think ultimately it's going to go. I don't think there's anything you cannot make out of nano cellulose. So if you can make nano scale cellulose from regional biomass where you need it, that's ultimately, I think where it's going. And the only way to do that is to again, one gram of cellulose. Do you know how many soft bonds, how many soft hydrogen bonds are in one gram of cellulose, Chris?
[00:22:27] Speaker C: I have no idea. I suspect it's immense.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: 10 to the 21 power, which is like a billion trillion.
So 1 gram has so many soft bonds, no surprise that we decided to overcome those soft bonds with brute force. Yeah. But if we learn to sing to it, we can get it to fall apart and then we can now valorize. So what it's really interesting because I see a lot of this going on. What's happening in sustainability is somebody will take a synthetic hydrocarbon molecule that does something very special and they go out in nature and they find one of those little molecules, it looks pretty similar, then they take it and what do they do with it? They don't figure out how to engineer an enzyme because, you know, we can do that now. We don't have to go flipping rocks in, in Africa or digging mud in Mississippi to find an enzyme. We take one that does close and we can modify it, engineer it, evolve it with godlike power to do these things. But, but once, once you, you have that ability to, to separate it into its bits and pieces, you can valorize it. But what they do is they take it and they hit it with the same fire and stone that they did these synthetic materials. So they're not really, they're just changing the carbon footprint on the front end. They're not fundamentally addressing regenerative, they're just swapping out molecules.
And next episode we're going to dig into that a little deeper as to where are the companies in this and where are they broken and where are they alive? We're going to dig into that a little bit more.
[00:23:54] Speaker C: Kelly, in the book, I recall a number of references to Green Key. Can you tell us about Green Key?
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Yes. Green Key is a startup of mine and it part of why I was able to piece this together into a unifying theory maybe of how to understand not only business, culture, society, teams, organizations, individuals, all the way into how you, you know, understand how to work with nature directly is, is Green Key. So when I, I won't give the backstory how I came to be introduced, but I went back three times because I didn't believe what I was seeing because they were showing me how to make, how to take a plant apart into cellulose and everything else that was in that plant without involving temperature or brute force.
And I was mystified by it. How could one of the oldest industries in, in mankind, the paper industry, have missed this?
But it doesn't take long to realize, yeah, they did miss it for all these reasons because they didn't know how to sing to the, to the, to the plant.
So they put it in the fire and hit it with the stone because that's all we knew how to do because there was only one part of that plant we wanted. We didn't want the rest of it.
So when I saw that, I became intrigued with it. And, and what I realize now is that they, they hit the combination of what it takes to get nature to fall apart for you to, to decide to disassociate those soft bonds. And when you do that and you realize the implications of what you can do with that, you can start, because the problem with biomass, we can ship trees long distances. So again, the paper industry is basically the fossil industry using trees instead of hydrocarbons from the Earth because the process is still large, centralized, high energy, CO2 emissions. It's still very, it's, it's caveman chemical engineering. The problem with taking regional biomass like hemp or, you know, when we grow food, I think the average harvest index is 48%. So 52% of what you grow is biomass. What are we doing with it? But you can't ship that thousands of miles to up to a paper mill or to a pulping factory. You have to, you have to take the process to the source.
So if you have a way. So Green Key is that Green Key is a scalable. Do you know, it's not one plan. You want 50 of these facilities taking nature, separating it into its bits and pieces, so then the chemical companies can take that and valorize it and Create, start that process of truly regenerative material science, which is where we absolutely have to get to. To think that we can disperse fossil carbon into the environment and manage that entropy is, is honestly insanity. I'll just say it, it's insanity because entropy dictates that when you do that you will create an unresolvable complexity. Ocean plastics is the plastics that we see.
Microplastics is the plastic that we can't see and the more dangerous one. So at some point it's, we're going to realize that the future is regenerative material science. But how do you get started when you've been living this, this fear based and then you get large and global. It becomes very hard, you know, to, to rethink that. So I think it's, it's shows like this, it's, it's innovators like you Chris, that, that we need more of. We need to self bond with each other so we can start driving what that future looks like.
[00:27:29] Speaker C: Absolutely. I feel that process that you described could be so easily replicated and give such a benefit locally in just very, I'd say transitionary steps where you could have immediate benefit.
I hope that that's a near term future.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: I love it. Exactly.
Recently I gave a talk and I used this example.
In our bodies we have 30 trillion cells. 30 trillion cells that are like little glasses of water because again we're 70% water, just like the trees. So communication not only does that water soft bond our molecules together that if we turned it off we would fall into a puddle. Right. That's what holds us together, but it also is how communication resonates through the system. So imagine those are 30 trillion little, little cells, little glasses of water that are communicating and doing all these great things.
What we have built because of what fossil plastics allowed us to do is to create these enormous supply lines that stretch multi continent and they're not sustainable. The, the, the recession, the global recession of 2009 was a warning flare. The pandemic was a warning flare. These supply chains are vulnerable and fatigued because it's like living in a human body with 300,000 cells versus 30 trillion.
So when you have 300,000, you take a hit, a port shuts down a claimant event in this region. It creates a cascading interrelated cause and effect.
If we have 30 trillion, not literally 30 trillion, but if we had the right number of cells, then you take those impacts, the other cells pick up and help like you, you can. So you start to realize that circularity is impossible when you do it continentally, but recycling works when you do it locally. So. And then locally is where the grassroots of this effort is going to come from. It's going to prove that it works and it'll start to expand. And I think even legislatively, we have no choice, right? We have the law passed in 1979, the Resource Conservation and Recovery act, which is essentially the federal government saying, Hey, 50 states, waste is your problem.
We're not treating it like waste anymore. It's a feedstock. It's a regenerative material source.
So I feel like, in spite of having legislative change, we have no choice but to build this from the ground up and prove that it works.
[00:29:57] Speaker C: Cannot wait.
Those are the questions I have.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: So hopefully this was insightful to everyone. I'll let you know a little bit about what episode two is going to entail.
We're going to dig in much deeper into the organizational side in general. We're going to talk about what does a dehydrated team look like? What does a dehydrated organization look like?
And to give you the tools to see that. And then we're going to relate it to why we're stuck in sustainability and how we can maybe use that, those insights to start to hydrate some of those blocked valves that we can start flowing in a better direction. So that's what we're going to dig into next time. Until then, bond soft and build strong. We're all led to believe that the most powerful companies are that they're powerful, but in actuality, they're not. The most powerful companies are not formed by strong bonds. They're actually formed by the softest bond you can imagine.
[00:30:58] Speaker C: When you think of the bonds of nature and you think about the bonds of relationships, whether they're personal or whether they're professional, you always think of them from a position of strength.
They're actually soft in a very powerful way. So here, when you think about soft, I really would like you to think strong.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to Roots to Fruits. If this conversation resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to grow with us. Let's build something lasting together.
