Operational Excellence, Change, and Community: Turning Big Ideas into Action with Ozzy González

Kim Allchurch Flick: Welcome everyone. This is Kim Allchurch Flick. I’m so excited to be here today with Ozzy Gonzalez and. This is a fascinating individual who has done many, many things. Ozzy Gonzalez is an architect, educator, facilitator, and performing artist who brings creativity and empathy to every aspect of his work.

Over his 25 year career, Ozzy has served on over a dozen boards, including most recently as TriMet board president, and currently as chair of the Governor’s Commission on Hispanic Affairs in 2019. Founded P three, a private consulting practice dedicated to helping clients realize their grandest ideas by guiding them through the story they wish to create into tactical strategies, organizational policies and operational roadmaps to success since its founding in 2019 P three has helped clients create supplier diversity programs, implement zero carbon and zero waste goals.

Roll out respectful workplace programs to construction job sites. The topic today is operational excellence, whatever that means. Ozzy, welcome. It’s so great to have you here. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Thank you so much, Kim. It’s such a treat to be here. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And as we were talking before, we met years ago through I believe LinkedIn Local.

You were a presenter and at the time you were also doing a play. And then we also had a dinner where you talked to me about your time in Arcadia, Northern California, and your knowledge and love of the redwoods from a scientific perspective, but also just a love of nature perspective. So I would call you a polymath, meaning.

Good at very many things and a multipotentialite. It’s very good at so many things. So let’s get started. What has been your journey and the values leading you to this point? Ending in the creation of P three and then growing P three. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Cool. Thank you. That was a nice intro. Like, wow that person sounds pretty neat.

I want to hear their show. That sounds fun. Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s, and I appreciate you recalling our conversation during our first meeting that draws from periods of time in my life that I feel are so far away right now. My mind’s been elsewhere, so it’s really nice to recall those things.

I, first and foremost, I consider myself. I think the easiest way for me to understand me is to first and foremost recall my upbringing as a Mexican. It is so deep in my culture and it speaks to some of this. These fancy words that you attributed me to that I just think of as well. We gotta be able to be resourceful.

We gotta be able to be agile and learn how to solve problems from many different vantage points and try to understand systems the way things work so that you know how to not get caught behind the ball of something that you don’t understand. So getting good at mechanical, technical, artistic living a life of right brain, left brain and learning how to solve problems that.

Nobody’s asking you to solve. And just seeing 

With clear eyes that we’re in a constant state of improvement and innovation and there’s always something that can be done. A little cleaner, a little better, a little bit more efficient, or a little bit more holistic. There’s so much area for improvement that it feels like an endless journey of invention and reinvention.

So that creates in me a spirit of can-do. Let’s figure it out. Things can always be done better. So constant improvement, constant growth, and that’s just resulted in. An adult that can do all sorts of different things and knows how to have fun creatively has, isn’t afraid of the technical side of things.

And I have to apply myself in life and not wait for people to guide me into the problem I need to be solving. I’ve always had to learn how to be resourceful, even in where I put my own attention. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s so fabulous and good words for all of us, and to be resourceful and be agile and nimble.

And as you’ve done so many things, what do you see as the importance of things like board service, policy advocacy and your current work, but also your previ previous work? What is some of the importance of that in the community and your own learning? 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Thank you. On the surface, it might look like my career over, over the years is a bit schizophrenic because I’ve done a lot of different things that too many are seemingly disconnected and it could look like my career has shifted from one problem set to another.

And it makes it a challenge. Also in this version of myself where I’m a consultant and I have my own business people consistently ask a fair question to ask any consultant, what do you do? And I find that that’s a hard question to answer for no matter what you do as a consultant. In those types of businesses are typically ones that are solving problems that people have not thought to ask for.

Necessarily, yes. No one wakes up wanting to hire a consultant for something. You have to understand your problem before you know there’s even help in it. For me, it feels even more complicated to answer the question of what I do as a consultant because I solve problems, and those problems can be.

A variety of sorts and what ties a thread through my entire career and what allows me to jump from equity work to sustainability work to policy work from very technical exercises to very creative ones are that by and large, what I’m helping do is. Take a loose idea that doesn’t really have form and help create some structure around it so that you can bring that idea to life, and that is a magic process that in from my experience.

At its best, it’s done at an organizational level because the most complicated, the most wonderful things we as a species can accomplish are things that we accomplish through collective action and the luxury to be able to walk into a space with someone that says, I have a lot of influence and I have this big idea I want to bring to life.

And I wanna bring my team along with me. Taking that and turning that into a process where you get buy-in, you get people Yes. Getting out of their own silos, exposing their vulnerabilities sharing ideas and challenging each other’s ideas, maybe even growing and learning along the way. That’s the luxury I get to experience when I bring a team through a process of strategic planning and facilitation.

So what ties it all together for me is. I am highly motivated for this idea. You meant, you, you questioned this notion of op operational excellence. What it means to me is we get better at doing the things that we want to be good at, and we have to know what we wanna be good at, and then we have to know how to measure.

If we’re doing better or not. And once we get there, we can self-reflect, we can self-evaluate and correct. To always strive to be, get closer to that better. And so for me, I don’t necessarily choose which version of better. So it allows me to go into equity work. It allows me to go into sustainability work.

I’m working on it with a client right now that simply wants to help increase retention. And through that conversation we’re talking about mental health, psychological safety. We’re talking about support programs, mentorship, career development and there’s a lot inside of that. And it’s all pointed right to helping with retention.

But that retention word became. The box that we were able to enter this conversation through. And it was, it’s really exciting. Yeah, a little bit of how my life has gone from one place to another. And I’d say board service is an important element to that. For me, it’s one of the ways I give back to community.

But it also feels very selfish because I get so much out of it. The people you get to meet, the problems you get to work on, the fact that they are by and large volunteer positions eliminates so much confusion about why you’re there. And it’s really nice to be able to rally around the mission of an organization.

And being able to do that work has really helped sharpen my skillset on how to quote unquote, keep my eye on the prize. When you’re doing some good work with so much work to do in this world knowing how to focus an organization and their effort around a mission is an important piece of the puzzle.

Knowing, part of operational excellence, part of doing better is knowing what to say no to. And so having a clean mission and an idea of what you wanna get really good at makes it easier to know what you can say no to, what you can outsource, and not have to own as you’re part of your problem set.

And that, that’s exciting stuff to me. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And you, you mentioned also getting a lot out of it, and it almost sounds as an, as a metaphor. Feeding people, nourishing them and being nourished at the same time. And those two things can be true at once while you’re serving on a board. It’s, and it’s not food nourish, but emotional nourishment collective nourishment, forward motion, nourishment.

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Yeah, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: just the nourishment of understanding and clarity, things of that nature. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Absolutely. I like the way you frame it. I do think of it as nourishment. It’s, it goes back to a little of your first question on who I am. I think growth is vital to our wellbeing. I feel like there is no homeostasis in this lifetime.

You’re growing or you’re decaying just based on where you’re putting your energy. And so for me, consistent and constant growth shows up in the form of curiosity. Wanting to learn more, wanting to really understand a person and not being afraid to, continue to challenge myself.

That I don’t know how else to do it, Kim. I feel like that gets me outta bed in the morning. It keeps me nimble and flexible and hopefully strong and healthy longer. But that’s how I operate. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And I think that’s why I was so excited that you could accept this podcast is I knew that A, it would be a joy, and B, I’m always learning something from you.

That’s amazing. And how in your life do you see the architecture. And being an actor as informing these other things. And it seems that you don’t leave things behind. They may evolve and be in the background, but there’s something there still being informational to you. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Good catch. In early days in my career, I used to think that those different skill sets that I brought to something.

Had a place and architecture wasn’t the place where I needed to bring my acting and theater skills, for example, and vice versa. Over the years, boy have I learned differently and I have learned to bring my whole self into all the spaces that I occupy. So I love this question because it. I feel like now more than ever, I celebrate the fact that I bring architecture into my work.

I bring acting and theater and performance art into my work. I bring my whole self because part of what I try to do when I lead groups through a process is that I try to. Call up their whole self as well. I invite them to bring their whole self, not just the business card, not just the title, not just their degree or their discipline in the stakeholder meeting, but to their whole self.

And so I feel like I. I have to own that within me. 

Before I can expect anyone else to do that. And this is where theater becomes very useful. I’ll say I, I do some mentorship once in a while, and one of my favorite things to tell young students is that architecture, my degree, environmental science and architecture, those are my degrees.

They got me in the door of some really important rooms with some really big conversations. But theater pays my bills. Theater is what lets me be effective in that space. And what I mean to say by that is that, I received the technical discipline of architecture. I learned through architecture about project delivery processes, about government contracting, about risk management, about how to make.

A lot of complicated and interdependent decisions in a clean way and how to give people enough creative license to be able to do their work and bring their best talent without having to gain approval for every decision they made. I learned how to, how. That doesn’t always happen as a designer. You sometimes get hired and told exactly what to do, and it does not let you bring all of your skills to the solution.

For example, and it’s made me very sensitive to not doing that. Whether I’m talking to a designer, an engineer, or I’m just talking to, a stakeholder from a meeting a community member whom I don’t know what they studied or if they studied, I like to give people that space to, to teach and to learn.

So in architecture I learned a lot about how to facilitate a large group of. Very busy, very expensive, smart, ego driven people and get us to have a collective e experience. Doing that over and over gave me a lot of skills. And, I use a lot of techniques from that. Just basic things like, how.

How to lay out an 18 month plan on the wall with sticky notes and a pen and paper. With a lot of moving pieces. Doing those kinds of things is, are really useful. When I’m facilitating groups, our theater has allowed me to tap into a level of empathy that I don’t know how else I would’ve gotten, frankly.

Not only does it give me the space to. Be creative to take the power of storytelling and use what I’ve learned in theater through storytelling and bring that to technical experiences. It’s why, in, in my intro I talk about and how I, it’s how I present my business. I help you write the story.

That you want to tell and then I help you bring it to life. And that comes first straight at a theater for me. But it really feels that way. Really it’s tantamount to, I. What, what is our five year strategic plan? What kind of organization do you want to be five years from now? There’s there’s a very dry, black and white way to walk into that conversation and there’s a very open-ended let’s dance around and explore this idea a little bit and then let’s see what feels good. So that I get to draw from different type of processes. Really left brain, really right brain and.

To me it’s it’s a luxury. I get to give people the creative license to get outside of their bubble and think about bad ideas or silly ideas and be playful. And it’s the artist in me that allows me to do that and be silly. And then that gives my room of engineers a little bit of wiggle room to be silly.

And so that’s, that, that playfulness is, I think, part of the process of bringing the whole human to a problem and ultimately remembering, yes, this is all serious adult stuff we’re doing by trying to make the world better. Or dealing with things like sustainability and policy. Equity.

These are heavy, burdensome, terms. And they’re real and there’s a lot of emotions attached to them. But at the same time, we’re talking about life and making this world a better place, and we must know how to rejoice in our triumphs and laugh at our tribulations, so enough that we can actually grow from them.

And we don’t let ourselves get beaten down. Change is an exhausting line of work, and if you can’t fill your battery and know how to give I’d say give appreciation and celebration to the fact that you got up again and you’re still in the fight. No matter how hard it may be, that is fuel that I 

That I draw from and I try to transmit. So I think theater has given me a lot of that, a lot of historical context as well in the human story. Architecture taught me. How we as a civilization can shift and reprioritize elements of society. Theater has taught me what behind all of that is still universal about humans.

And what makes us tick. So I feel like that those two have given me such a gr breadth of of experience to be able to draw from. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that. I don’t, I was thinking as you were speaking, because I’m also a consultant that observing how. Through either Concern, worry, or Hyperfocus that people can actually get in their own way from making the progress they actually want to make.

And they might see the goal, but they don’t know how to get there. And I love the way you talk about being plateful and bringing joy and possibility and silliness into that process because it may help some people break down those barriers. Take a breath, relax, and look at. Possibility and then the process becomes so much easier.

’cause sometimes we fight our own way through a process. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Oh boy, you’ve heard, don’t let perfect be in the way of progress. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Or phrases of that nature. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing because we do, we tend to take ourselves, our lives, our jobs ourselves, so seriously that, we’re afraid to get it wrong and we could become hesitant to try a new thing because we are not sure if it’s gonna work.

It’s so liberating to know that you’re supposed to try a new thing so that you can fail as early as possible so that you can start to find out how to work it. And no matter what you try in the beginning, the I most important quality you can incorporate into this change is the ability to adjust. Trying something early, seeing where it failed. Learning how to adjust is the most, is such an important part of the musculature of change. A lot of people tend to, wanna get it right the first time or be afraid to try something that might be wrong and have to be corrected. And one of my challenges is to get people over that, frankly to say, no, no, let’s try to fail as often and early as possible in the first three months so that we can correct as many things as possible.

And sometimes it’s same with the strategic planning exercise, if you’ve got an all day retreat and you’ve gotta get people to some clear idea, in eight hours with a lunch break in between. Trying to get them to give you all of the, I find a lot of pro of joy and benefit from just getting people to give me all the bad ideas first.

If we were to try to get this as wrong as possible Yeah. If we really wanted to break it, what are the things we would do to break it? And it leads to silly conversations, but there’s a lot of ahas in the process of what I really want out of this. And why? Why is that breaking a bad thing?

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed, and helping people anticipate. I think that’s some of it too, looking forward and saying, okay, what are the roads that this will take? Take you to anticipate the good, the bad, the possible. And sometimes it makes a shift. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: It’s so much easier sometimes for us to begin with what we don’t want than to just come out and say, this is exactly what I want. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that. And how do you see around your community is large and multifaceted. From the political to friends, to the theater, to businesses. You’re very active in your community. And how are you seeing the community’s needs?

And this question is coming up. In January of 2026. So particularly currently,

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: we seem to be in such heightened times. The stakes seem to be really, really high right now across all communities. And I hear this question as. As a way it brings me to reflect on what I consider to be my community or the community. And we’re in such interesting times where there is so much divisiveness that I see people from within the same community, the same family structure, the same city, the same state really at odds with each other, having a hard time reconciling differences.

And a lot of disagreement. So I, I’m aware of that. However, that’s there, there’s, even though we’re in heightened times now, there’s always been some version of that. It’s not like we were frictionless before. However, throughout all of this time and including this heightened time.

I’ve navigated the world with the sort of Russian nesting doll concept of community because there’s always like the nucleus, like my house, my kitchen table, my, my household and the people that are on my street the, I grew up in, in a very small. Like enclave of Southern California where the people on my street only spoke Spanish.

No one spoke English on my street. But you go outside of that street, you cross the street. And you’re in now a place where no one speaks Spanish and they only speak English. And so for me it cultivated this idea that I have there’s the first sort of doll inside the Russian nesting doll.

That’s my family. Yes. And my household, my kitchen table. There’s my community as in my neighborhood, my physical geographic proximity. So here, it’s the neighborhood I live in. It’s the city of Portland. And I extend that to the state of Oregon. I extend that to the country. I live in the United.

States. And then I extend that to the, I say the continent because I’m lucky enough that, my, my dual citizenship, my dual identity is Mexico and US and they’re geographic neighbors. So it’s just continues to extend geographically that way. So I’d say North America is a community for me and then of course it’s the world.

And all of those are versions of. My community. And I would say when I think of the world, I’m thinking of humanity at large and what is in the best interest of human beings. And it’s interesting because, I could have a conversation at my kitchen table with somebody across from me that I consider in my nucleus of my community, and I could have a very different answer about what is best for us to do right now than if I’m thinking about humanity at large.

And 

Kim Allchurch Flick: that makes sense. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: And it’s, and same like with Oregon State versus federal, I’m on the Hispanic Commission, I’m on the Oregon Commission on Hispanic Affairs. It is a state organization. We are serving the Hispanic community, which is in an. In a peak moment in my lifetime, this feels like a feverish moment of fear and anxiety about their wellbeing and their stability.

My community is more afraid than I’ve ever seen them. And yet I’m sitting in this policy advisory body and it’s at the state level. And the problems that we’re having have my community’s having are not state level problems. In fact, the animosity between the state of Oregon and the federal government.

Is not necessarily a of service to protecting the safety of my community in Oregon. Those kind of things are really difficult to navigate. Frustrating because I see a big problem and I have a fancy title connected to people in government, yet there’s not much those people in that layer of government can do for the community that.

I have that I’m connected to, and that’s deeply frustrating because these, these issues have so much to do with how the federal government’s doing whatever they want. And the states are trying everything under the sun to cooperate, not cooperate challenge litigate. And none of it is making my neighbor feel safe to go outside today.

It’s all they’re talking around it. They’re talking about legal support, but that legal support only begins after someone’s been picked up and they’re trying to find them. It’s very frustrating. Okay. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I’m listening and thank you for that. That’s the layers are deep and broad at the same time, it seems, and I think awareness.

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: So yeah, 

I 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: feel like I have 

Kim Allchurch Flick: layers of 

communities 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: and they all have different needs. Sorry. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes, indeed. So it, the question about what are the obstacles? You’ve in a way already. Answered in, in that area, in other areas of your life, what do you see as some obstacles to doing what you want 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: to know?

Oh gosh. As I started, there’s so many, so much room for improvement. So many areas to, to innovate and improve. We’re having a hard time right now. The state of Oregon is having a hard time. Economically politically we’re in a weird sort of, it feels like a limbo stage. The urban rural divide is palpable.

And. Portland as a city, the urban side, the I five corridor is struggling right now as if you compare it to other, our states neighboring to the north, south and east. Yes, we are a tough we’re not the horse to beat right now. We’re not sure if we’re even in the race.

It feels, that’s a challenge. And that doesn’t bode well for opportunities for people in Oregon. As a small business in Oregon, I definitely feel that reality, I’m trying to, I’m trying to cultivate clients in the area, and if I were to grow as a business, what growth potential does this area provide me?

And I know I’m not alone. And I’m just a small guy with my own shop. There’s businesses all up and down the state having to make the calculation that I, in a similar way that I’m making. And it’s a tough, it’s a tough one. And I don’t know that our, I feel like our relationship in the state of Oregon between job market I’d say employment centers, education centers, and.

And quality of life are not strong right now. And I wish our leadership was a little bit less focused on us and them tit for tat who took the credit. And really more on just trying to think about the wellbeing of the whole state. And so my community needs that needs something different here.

My Hispanic community across the country needs something. We are watching right now. How federal immigration enforcement is crossing beyond the original premise of, oh, we’re just gonna take criminals, convicted criminals that are not, that don’t have documents, and we’re gonna get the bad ones outta here.

To where now people are seeing through that and are seeing the inconsistency to be diplomatic between those words and what we’re seeing outside in the world on camera, in the streets it’s only feeling farther and farther from that premise. Which was not a good answer to begin with, but it was the palatable one. And yeah, I don’t know where I was going with that. I lost my train of thought. I just think it’s a messed up situation. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: It’s easy to do these days and yet you and I are in a community Portland, Oregon area where, and you’re one of ’em. See people that I gravitate to and I find so much strength and commitment to doing things.

And we were at the pregame brunch just a couple of weeks ago. There are organizations that are just forging forward that are. Very diverse and inclusive and small actions collectively can be become pretty big. So what do you think about that in individual actions and actions of small organizations and what makes you optimistic?

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: I’ve been in the, thank you for that. I’ll take that in pieces. So I’ve been on the, I’ve been in the change making space for a while. I’ve been on the edge of industry change, many times. And I’ve learned, I’ve seen the patterns over time of how change, takes place and becomes normalized. When it’s on the fringes at the beginning.

You need those early adopters, the ones that are mission-driven and unafraid of the uncertainty factor to be able to take something on and do it. They become the proof in the pudding that motivates everyone else to make that change. And those people are technically, generally speaking our.

Willing to take a risk that may not, that many perceive as a risk that they see as an opportunity to get to increase value. And that’s what demonstrates it to everyone else. I. Find myself really excited to find those people as early as possible and work with those people as much as possible to get that case study proven and to go do the thing without needing anyone else to show us the way that.

Allows me to get farther faster.

I don’t have to be doing the convincing when I’m trying to get someone to be motivated to make change. And it’s. So long as I could keep finding those people, I feel like I won’t, I will not get bored and I will be able to continue to do good work and stay on the edge of innovation.

It’s not that I’m a, an adrenaline junkie per se. I just I’m comfortable in that space and it’s, and I understand that many people are not. And I’ve guided people through the unknown of, into uncharted areas of an organization. That it’s, yeah, I’ve seen the pathway enough times that I can guide people through it.

I’ve tried to do some of that. Now. One thing, now, having said that I, I do consider, my experience has shown me that it’s a minority of people that are those early adopters. Sure. It’s, it’s not the majority of people that are, that in the beginning. You gotta find the oddballs, and having done that, I feel like it, it’s a good reflection of what makes me optimist about society. We are, even though my client base is predominantly the more proactive of the bunch, I will say I am most optimistic about. Humanity about all the layers of the community in the rushing nesting doll.

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: and I’m optimist about all of ’em from the kitchen table to the humanity at large. I’m optimist that. We are, we have demonstrated to be an incredibly agile, adaptive resilient species that can live in any climate zone, that can create shelter out of anything that has tools and abilities to allow us to find ways to sustain ourselves.

And in. Every condition this planet has thrown our way. We are incredible at that. We are incredibly agile at adapting ourselves. I don’t think we’re very good at being proactive about it. So I’m not surprised when we go through these cycles of struggle. When the push to change feels so messy and has ups and downs and two steps back and before a step forward kind of thing.

I feel like that is a part of the process of change. And from that frustrating moment, a couple of outliers will pop out of it and go try something new. That cycle can happen overnight. We watched, we felt that when we got the pandemic, the, couple years back, how profoundly we can shift our patterns and so quickly.

Because of changing conditions and something that might have felt so not normal before could feel so normal. For a while there we weren’t sure we’d ever come back to commuting to work because it just did not feel, it felt so foreign. I forgot how to tie a tie for a while there. We are nimble and I’m optimistic in that.

When push comes to shove and even though sometimes our back has to be up against a wall, human beings are so powerful at being able to adapt and find survival. It doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come in the beginning and it usually takes a lot of pain and suffering to make the change.

And we’ve heard, perhaps you’ve heard the Adam from the Axiom from. Change makers, change occurs when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain to change. And that’s, oh 

Kim Allchurch Flick: wow. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: And that’s another way of for me, understanding this idea that, we are really good at change.

We are just really bad at doing it before we have to. And that is what gives me such faith in us. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, that’s a quote. Good at change. We’re really bad at doing it before we have to. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Yeah. And so all of this like push to climate change and climate action. I understand. We don’t know what’s gonna happen and I come from science and so I can argue the studies and the projections.

But at the end of the day I feel confident that, when push comes to shove we will adapt. I just don’t know what that means yet. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. Oh, this is so profound and so good. It, what are just one or two things? You see some of those people that are, see change needed but are slow. What are just one or two things that they could do?

Now in that thought process, oh, what’s an action people can take? 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Oh, this is the way I operate learn how the machine is functions so that you know which lever to push. So take time. You know the, you know how I think it’s a Einstein quote, and it was like something like if I was given. I don’t know.

It was, if I was given 10 hours to solve a problem, I’d spend nine hours and 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes solving it. And I think that, that’s what I’m saying here is, before you go beautiful screaming and raising your arms and writing letters or whatever, getting all up in a bunch.

Look at the machine, look at the system. Follow the money, follow the decision making process. Look at how it is it actually operates, and who stands to gain by the thing doing what it’s doing. Who stands to lose by the thing changing? Look at all of that because those are gonna become the winds,

of your crosswinds, those are gonna become the resistance that you are going to face. Even if the idea is good and a benefit to humanity. Change does not take place without impacting somebody. And even those that want the change might. Might gri when it actually requires them to get up and do something different.

Change is hard even for the people that are asking for it. Keep that in mind and look at the way the machine is built, understand all the little pieces and you’ll find that it might just be a little pin that you need to pull in one little cog and the whole thing unravels. And if you just spend time getting to that little pin.

Save yourself the trouble from all the other sort of just walking up with a sledgehammer and just trying to beat it up. There’s tactic and precision to these things. And don’t think for a second that whatever you consider the counter forces against humanity that they’re not thinking the same way.

There’s a lot of what we’re seeing right now. There’s a bit of a tangent. A lot of what we’re seeing right now. Playing out at the federal government level, in the government level in the US right now, I would say the reason why a bunch of us are having to brush up on constitutional law and the checks and balances of our system are because they’re all getting tested.

Somebody out, there’s pushing levers, pulling buttons, and messing with the machine. But believe you, me. They studied this machine for a while before they, they started all this stuff. This, this is years in the making of understanding how, how voting systems work, how electoral systems work, how the maps work how the checks and balances work.

How are court systems work. Though all of these things are part of a strategy that is very precise in its interventions. And if we, and to all of my friends out there that are very concerned about what’s happening and what can I do? My first answer is go study and learn a little bit about how, what, how this has been done in the past and what is actually being done now before you go and take action.

Go see what is being done and why, and who stands to gain. These are really important things to really know how to make the change. Otherwise I would. I would go bonkers right now. Serving at the, OR advocacy commission at the state level Advocacy Commission for Hispanic Affairs. In this time I would go nuts and I have some colleagues that are going bonkers right now because we are not doing enough in the advocacy commission for our community.

And I walk into that work knowing that. The work that needs to be done for our community is not gonna be done or supposed to be done or can be done within this particular bubble of influence. The machine that needs to be tinkered with is in another department, and we need to learn how to get to that department and find.

Those allies. Meanwhile there’s needs that our community has right now. So it’s deeply frustrating if you don’t know how a machine works to be somewhere where you think there’s influence and be hitting, an empty wall or just getting, it’s getting nowhere. And I think that we do that too much.

We waste a lot of energy barking up the wrong tree because we don’t know, we’re not in the right. Jurisdiction. We’re not in the right layer of government to do the thing we’re trying to do. Learn the machine and learn the layers so you know precisely which office, which phone number to get to, to get the thing done.

Otherwise, yeah, we get frustrated. It’s already hard enough 

Kim Allchurch Flick: and thank you for that. And it’s a good reminder. And I would add to that I’m a history buff. I find knowing history is such a good tool for anticipating and seeing something that’s happening again and then saying, okay, this has happened before, so we need to be earlier, nipping it in the bud because this is not a new idea.

And thank you. Look what happened and I think it’s the same thing, knowing how the machine works, is history teaches us that as well. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: You see the pattern? And you’re seeing what we’re, what’s happening now. You’re seeing how it’s not, this playbook has been seen before. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes, exactly. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Yeah.

Kim Allchurch Flick: So you are so fascinating. Is there anything else you’d like to share? And how can people reach you to work with you at P three to oh, thank you. 

Go to a play that you’re in. What, how can they reach you? 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: You wanna see me in the real world? You can come see a play.

I’m actually gonna be performing in Milagro Theatre this February and March. There’s a Spanish language production that I’ll be involved with called Los. And that’s at milagro.org. Let’s see, that’s the artistic side. I do open mics once in a while and perform music here and there, but there’s no rhyme or reason.

So I don’t know how to point you other than follow me on Instagram. I am, on Instagram, digital nomad, PDX, I’m on LinkedIn and you could also try to chase me down on YouTube. I’ve got a small channel that I’m starting to grow. To answer the question, what does Ozzy do for work? And so that’s where I’m sharing small snippets of the a day in the life of the kind of activity I do, what gets me excited about it, what sort of challenges I come into so people can see what is happening behind the curtain of change.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Fantastic. I love that. And the last question is, if you could have dinner with anyone up to a table of four living or deceased, who would they be? Need.

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Gosh, the people that come to mind right now are deceased by and large, and they’re folks, and I think about that because I feel like they’re gonna be able to give me like the most candid. Answers to things like they could tell me all the things they couldn’t tell me in life about themselves, about how they see us, the situation we’re in.

I I wanna ask some historical people and I think of my grandfather, as one of them. I grew up on a farm in my very early years and I would spend time in Mexico with my grandfather. He loved baseball, so I would want to talk about baseball with him and about where we are in the world.

He was a really wise man, so I would love to hear his perspective on things. My mother and my sister, because I didn’t get to have enough conversations with them. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much. 

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: You are a treasure. And listeners, thank you for being here.