Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / From Adaptation to Adoption: Leadership in the AI Workplace 🌱 w/ Heather McGowan

Transcript

From Adaptation to Adoption: Leadership in the AI Workplace 🌱 w/ Heather McGowan · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome It change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim
0:05
Speaker 1: Flower and Tom McGraw. Let's get into.
0:07
Speaker 2: It all it change Makers. Welcome back to the Deck Show.
0:12
Speaker 2: Tim and I are today very very fortunate to be
0:15
Speaker 2: joined by somebody. I would definitely have to say one
0:17
Speaker 2: of my sort of I never quite know how to
0:19
Speaker 2: describe your profession. He like, I always think of you,
0:22
Speaker 2: like as a business philosopher people like yourself, or a
0:26
Speaker 2: strategic philosopher. Would that sound accurate? Would that sound preposterous
0:29
Speaker 2: to you? What do you think?
0:31
Speaker 3: You know what? I struggled when when I first started
0:33
Speaker 3: doing this, people were like, well, we need to call
0:35
Speaker 3: you something.
0:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, my athlet.
0:37
Speaker 3: Was not you know, typical I had come out of
0:39
Speaker 3: I had been in corporate, I've been in academia, and
0:41
Speaker 3: basically I was seeing nobody was really getting work right.
0:45
Speaker 3: And so a friend of mine went on one of
0:46
Speaker 3: those websites that says pick something from each column, and
0:49
Speaker 3: she came up with future work Strategist. And that was,
0:52
Speaker 3: you know, like a decade ago. And now I see
0:54
Speaker 3: there's a lot of future work strategists out there. So
0:56
Speaker 3: I think it's called.
0:58
Speaker 2: You started to tread. There's a there's a rapper called
1:02
Speaker 2: post Malone who came up with his rap name on
1:05
Speaker 2: a on a rap name, since you know, like a
1:09
Speaker 2: really generator. Yeah, that's where it comes from. Sounds kind
1:12
Speaker 2: of similar, like like post Malone, Heather, You've made a
1:15
Speaker 2: big attact. So but it's genuinely a thrill to have
1:20
Speaker 2: you on the show. You obviously am a renowned writer
1:24
Speaker 2: the adaptation advantage and the empathy advantage, and and I say,
1:29
Speaker 2: I've been following your work since around twenty twenty, back
1:33
Speaker 2: in the kind of midst of the pandemic. I think
1:35
Speaker 2: it was around the time the adaptation advantage came out.
1:38
Speaker 3: Perhaps, Yes, well timed book launch, right, Yes, twenty great
1:43
Speaker 3: time to launch a book.
1:44
Speaker 2: Quite so? Quite so? Yeah, well, you know, for listeners
1:47
Speaker 2: who don't know Ben Heather, what were it why was
1:49
Speaker 2: it so well timed? And what were the key themes
1:52
Speaker 2: and what challenges were top of mine for organizations, not
1:55
Speaker 2: in general, but maybe at that specific moment of time.
1:58
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, Chris Chiapli, who's a technology journalist, and I
2:01
Speaker 3: actually met in Australia when we were both doing talks,
2:04
Speaker 3: and turns out we were living like eight miles apart
2:07
Speaker 3: at the time. Just in Boston, so we traveled halfway
2:10
Speaker 3: around the world to meet each other. And her particular
2:14
Speaker 3: talents are just to put all the ideas that you know,
2:17
Speaker 3: I vomit basically into pros you'd want to read. So
2:20
Speaker 3: I do, you know, ideas and frameworks, and she structures
2:24
Speaker 3: them into things that you know, people can follow in
2:26
Speaker 3: the written word. And it was about a four year
2:28
Speaker 3: process for us to write The Adaptation Advantage. We saw
2:32
Speaker 3: technology changing things and we saw really that humans weren't
2:36
Speaker 3: adapting or weren't even really understanding that they needed to adapt.
2:40
Speaker 3: So we wrote the book and basically said, you know,
2:43
Speaker 3: learning is continuous, You're going to have to learn and
2:46
Speaker 3: adapt for life. Leaders are going to have to lead differently.
2:49
Speaker 3: No longer about command and control, but much more about
2:52
Speaker 3: how do you effectively help people increase their individual capacity
2:56
Speaker 3: and there by the organizational capacity. And this was you know,
2:59
Speaker 3: pre and everything, and the book came out in April
3:03
Speaker 3: twenty twenty, and the world shut down in you know,
3:07
Speaker 3: mid March twenty twenty, so any book tour stuff we
3:10
Speaker 3: had that completely collapsed. But it ended up being a
3:13
Speaker 3: bit of an accidental guide to the pandemic because if
3:16
Speaker 3: you look at you know, I believe it was. It
3:19
Speaker 3: was either mckinziy or Deloitte said that we leapt forward
3:21
Speaker 3: five years in our digital transformation. In the first three
3:24
Speaker 3: days we went through this rapid, you know, very rapid
3:28
Speaker 3: moment of adaptation, which really just showed us we could
3:31
Speaker 3: do it. Humans are more than capable of doing it,
3:34
Speaker 3: which it just created this and if you look back
3:36
Speaker 3: through time, the same thing kind of happened, or the
3:39
Speaker 3: nineteen eighteen flu which ushered in the electrification era or
3:43
Speaker 3: you know, the Second Industrial Revolution according to some people,
3:46
Speaker 3: the third being digital and now us being in the
3:49
Speaker 3: fourth or the fifth era in human human era in
3:53
Speaker 3: human history, which is really the augmented or the cognitive
3:55
Speaker 3: or the AI era. And so this really got us
3:58
Speaker 3: ready for that, and so that book, The Adaptation Advantage,
4:01
Speaker 3: became sort of an accidental guide to you know, which
4:03
Speaker 3: way is up and what do I do now?
4:06
Speaker 2: Fascinating, so many, so many paths we could go down
4:09
Speaker 2: from that intro. Ever, but you know, since then, see
4:13
Speaker 2: we've you know, I guess the era was being presaged
4:17
Speaker 2: at that moment has come has come on unmissibly since then,
4:24
Speaker 2: shall we say, and we've seen many major shifts from
4:27
Speaker 2: obviously the hybrid work explosion, to the advancements in AI
4:30
Speaker 2: and with it constantly evolving employee expectations and changes to
4:35
Speaker 2: the dynamic between employee and employer. What's what what? What
4:39
Speaker 2: are the biggest trends of changes that stand out to
4:42
Speaker 2: Heaven MacGowan during that period.
4:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we're actually shifting into a new era.
4:47
Speaker 3: So you know, it's very similar to what happened in
4:49
Speaker 3: about this time one hundred years ago when we moved
4:51
Speaker 3: into the electrification era. We saw societal and cultural, political changes,
4:56
Speaker 3: global strategy or strategic changes. Seeing all of that now,
5:00
Speaker 3: and so I think one of the things that everybody's
5:02
Speaker 3: focused on is they focus I think on the symptoms
5:05
Speaker 3: like you know, AI or social and political polarization, which
5:09
Speaker 3: is they conclude is really a social media base now
5:12
Speaker 3: certainly in accelerate COVID was an accelerate, But I think
5:15
Speaker 3: really it comes back to the in the nineteen twenties
5:19
Speaker 3: in the US, we about twenty twenty five percent of
5:23
Speaker 3: US moved households every single year, lower home ownership. Then
5:27
Speaker 3: most of it was rentals, but it was moving to
5:29
Speaker 3: that next grade apartment or the next big house you
5:31
Speaker 3: could get and it was part of your optimism and
5:34
Speaker 3: your risk taking. But when you did that, you had
5:37
Speaker 3: to join. You had to join book clubs and rotary
5:40
Speaker 3: clubs and churches to create new community. And in that
5:44
Speaker 3: process we created a high level of trust in each other.
5:48
Speaker 3: We also in high levels of entrepreneurship because if you
5:52
Speaker 3: were risking things and you were moving and you were optimistic.
5:55
Speaker 3: Now we've got the opposite of that. In the US anyway,
5:58
Speaker 3: it's eight to nine percent of people in movie every year.
6:01
Speaker 3: We have very low levels of trust. We have very
6:03
Speaker 3: levels levels of trust globally, but in the US it's
6:05
Speaker 3: really acute. Social media filters any of these societal, cultural
6:12
Speaker 3: technological changes into your bubble, so you have an idea
6:15
Speaker 3: about them which may or may not be based in reality.
6:18
Speaker 3: And I think that is a bigger challenge to us
6:21
Speaker 3: today than AI. It's going to link with AI because
6:25
Speaker 3: as artificial intelligence comes in and consumes more individual tasks,
6:28
Speaker 3: it's going to be our ability to collaborate. And right
6:31
Speaker 3: now we've got the lowest levels of trust. We also
6:33
Speaker 3: have a global loneliness epidemic. When you're lonely, you're Amigdala
6:37
Speaker 3: goes into overdrive. You go into fight fight, freeze er apiece,
6:40
Speaker 3: you go into us versus them, so our brains are primed.
6:45
Speaker 3: At the same time, we've got this riptide to change
6:47
Speaker 3: coming at us, and then so much information foltered through
6:50
Speaker 3: social media. So what I think leaders need to do
6:53
Speaker 3: today is first realize that they're kind of just focused on,
6:56
Speaker 3: you know, if you think about it like an iceberg,
6:58
Speaker 3: the change they're trying to do, which is outside water.
7:00
Speaker 3: You know, this new business model, adapt ai, you know,
7:03
Speaker 3: new markets, growth plans, whatever it may be, without realizing
7:07
Speaker 3: that below the surface there there's a whole lot going on.
7:10
Speaker 3: And once you understand people needed to be seen and heard,
7:13
Speaker 3: you need to have build a level of trust in
7:16
Speaker 3: psychological safety. Collaboration is going to be essentral to your success,
7:20
Speaker 3: and you have to understand these other tectonic shifts taking
7:23
Speaker 3: place as we move into a new era.
7:27
Speaker 2: When you were talking a little earlier describing the sort
7:30
Speaker 2: of the process of regularly moving and then starting new communities,
7:34
Speaker 2: you made me think in a really vivid way about
7:37
Speaker 2: how much entrepreneurial opportunity there was in boredom, you know,
7:42
Speaker 2: twenty thirty years ago, right before people had so much
7:45
Speaker 2: access to the world through their phones. You know how
7:48
Speaker 2: much business opportunity there was for individuals, not just in
7:50
Speaker 2: terms of building communities, but building commercial opportunities, hosting things,
7:55
Speaker 2: being being a conduit for others to come together. And
7:58
Speaker 2: that's something that's really passed. And it's interesting to me
8:01
Speaker 2: that the concept of empathy, which you haven't touched upon
8:04
Speaker 2: direct yet, I don't think has kind of come to
8:06
Speaker 2: the four in your work because we've gone from I
8:08
Speaker 2: think the adaptation advantage to the empathy advantage in that
8:11
Speaker 2: interim period of time. So maybe tell us about why
8:15
Speaker 2: that's an important part of your real conversation and why
8:18
Speaker 2: that was the key update for you.
8:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of folks conflate empathy, sympathy, compassion in
8:24
Speaker 3: their different things. Empathy is not, as someone asked me
8:27
Speaker 3: on one of my interviews during the book tour, yeah, yeah,
8:31
Speaker 3: I get empathy. And they had COVID fatigue and they said,
8:34
Speaker 3: I know, I got to feel bad for people, check
8:37
Speaker 3: less of them, and they saw empathy as a path
8:40
Speaker 3: to lower performance. And I was like, that's the exact
8:43
Speaker 3: opposite of what I'm talking about. Empathy is how do
8:47
Speaker 3: I help? How do I understand the people who report
8:50
Speaker 3: to me?
8:51
Speaker 2: How do I.
8:51
Speaker 3: Understand how to motivate them? Because we are never going
8:54
Speaker 3: to get our people to learn and adapt at the
8:56
Speaker 3: speed scale and scope we're going to need through punishing,
8:59
Speaker 3: through rewards. It's something that going to work. We can't
9:01
Speaker 3: use extreme pressure anymore. We need to tap into intrinsic motivation.
9:06
Speaker 3: And since most leaders today are managing teams of people
9:08
Speaker 3: who have skills and knowledge they may not, they have
9:11
Speaker 3: to move from individual intelligence to collective intelligence. How do
9:14
Speaker 3: you move to collective intelligence? How do you tap into
9:17
Speaker 3: intrinsic motivation? How do you get your people to peak performance?
9:20
Speaker 3: The answer to all three of those things is empathy.
9:22
Speaker 3: How do I understand them? What are they interested in?
9:24
Speaker 3: How do I motivate them with their own interests? How
9:28
Speaker 3: do I get collective intelligence by tapping into their interests
9:32
Speaker 3: and being part of the solution, being part of feeling
9:35
Speaker 3: a sense of agency. So it was empty not to
9:37
Speaker 3: feel bad for Compassion has a place, Sympathy has a place,
9:40
Speaker 3: for sure, and folks have had a lot going on,
9:43
Speaker 3: particularly through the pandemic and even today. But it's really
9:47
Speaker 3: much more about how do I understand my customers? More.
9:50
Speaker 3: How do I understand the people who work with me,
9:52
Speaker 3: inform me more? How do I connect with them anymore?
9:55
Speaker 3: And really the root of that is curiosity, which I
9:57
Speaker 3: think is the next frontier. Is when the change rate
10:00
Speaker 3: is this high, people lunge at certainty, and this is
10:03
Speaker 3: not a time to lunge at certainty. We need more
10:06
Speaker 3: explorers who are curious.
10:09
Speaker 4: And another Tom mentioned it a little while ago, There's
10:11
Speaker 4: so many things that we could explore. We could probably
10:13
Speaker 4: stay on that one topic for an hour and just
10:15
Speaker 4: explore empathy and its impact to corporate life. But let's
10:19
Speaker 4: talk a bit about adaptation through education. Being in technology myself,
10:24
Speaker 4: I learned very early on in my career that if
10:26
Speaker 4: I don't learn, my career will die. I've got to
10:29
Speaker 4: stay up with the changing technology. But I think learning
10:33
Speaker 4: can sometimes be thought of as a point in time activity.
10:36
Speaker 4: It's very time bound. I'm going to start my education here,
10:39
Speaker 4: I'm going to stop my learning here. How that lifetime
10:42
Speaker 4: learning is a core theme in both of your books.
10:46
Speaker 4: Why is the habit of continuous learning no longer that
10:50
Speaker 4: nice to have but really needs to be a strategic
10:53
Speaker 4: comparative for both people and organizations.
10:56
Speaker 3: Well, for one, I stopped using the word educated because
10:59
Speaker 3: that implies an end state, and I use learning because
11:02
Speaker 3: it's continuous. And we had this idea that you know,
11:06
Speaker 3: education took place at the first third of your life,
11:08
Speaker 3: got you in a career escalator, collect a pension, die
11:11
Speaker 3: a year later, so it was education career retirement. Now
11:15
Speaker 3: I think it's learning, leverage, longevity and leverage of that learning,
11:20
Speaker 3: so it becomes a combined act. That's what work is.
11:24
Speaker 3: And I've used two expressions. One we used to learn
11:27
Speaker 3: once in order to work. Now we're going to work
11:29
Speaker 3: in order to learn continuously. And two, learning is what
11:32
Speaker 3: makes you more valuable tomorrow than you are today. And
11:36
Speaker 3: if you just look at our models of AI, when
11:39
Speaker 3: you test something and you know this from technology, you
11:42
Speaker 3: need a certain period of time to test it. Now
11:46
Speaker 3: the models are replacing the prior models faster than the
11:49
Speaker 3: testing period. So when technology is moving at that clip,
11:53
Speaker 3: the human can't just dine out on one piece of
11:56
Speaker 3: education and one piece of stored knowledge. And that's why
11:59
Speaker 3: that was part of our thesis. And the adaptation advantage
12:02
Speaker 3: is we need to stop asking young people what are
12:04
Speaker 3: they going to do when they grow up? Absurd question.
12:07
Speaker 3: We got to stop asking each other what you do,
12:09
Speaker 3: because that in some cultures, particularly in the US, we
12:12
Speaker 3: tend to ask people that before we've man ask them
12:13
Speaker 3: their name, and when you do that, you solidify a
12:17
Speaker 3: fixed occupational identity. And there was some research prior I
12:21
Speaker 3: think it was twenty eighteen or so when they found
12:23
Speaker 3: that involuntary job loss, what was being fired or you know,
12:27
Speaker 3: reduction force, whatever it may be, can be harder to
12:31
Speaker 3: overcome than the loss of a primary relationship. And sometimes
12:34
Speaker 3: people don't even get to the same level of well
12:36
Speaker 3: being afterwards. It's because since a very young age, what
12:40
Speaker 3: you do is who you are. That's what we told people,
12:43
Speaker 3: and by asking each other, we were fixing it to
12:45
Speaker 3: one identity when we really need people to have much
12:48
Speaker 3: more adaptable identities as well. So learning is what makes
12:51
Speaker 3: you more valuable than you are today. And so I
12:54
Speaker 3: think it's probably the gen Z. I don't get too
12:56
Speaker 3: much into generations. I think there's important stuff about them,
12:59
Speaker 3: but there's they're not monolists. They're the first generation I
13:03
Speaker 3: think that really understands that. In fact, I think what
13:07
Speaker 3: they're looking for from work is no longer the old
13:10
Speaker 3: I'll trade my loyalty for security. That's a promise that
13:14
Speaker 3: it hasn't been fulfilled in decades, and boomers might be
13:17
Speaker 3: the last generation for which that promise is true. So
13:20
Speaker 3: I say there are five ms. You need money, mission, mentorship, membership,
13:28
Speaker 3: and meaning. So money pay people fairly. Mission people want
13:32
Speaker 3: to be part of something larger than themselves. Meaning people
13:35
Speaker 3: want meaningful work. What they do is a contributor to
13:38
Speaker 3: that mission and part of their suff expression, Mentorship because
13:41
Speaker 3: they know that learning is important, earning, and then membership
13:44
Speaker 3: because work is one of the last places that a
13:46
Speaker 3: lot of folks can belong.
13:48
Speaker 4: That's great. I love those, I love those. The five ms.
13:52
Speaker 4: I've got to make note of that. One. My last employer,
13:56
Speaker 4: which was a while back, the learning matra there was
14:01
Speaker 4: if it is to be, it's up to me. And
14:04
Speaker 4: you talk about the importance of that driving that internal motivation.
14:09
Speaker 4: How can companies create environments that encourage employees to take
14:13
Speaker 4: that same kind of ownership in their own upskilling.
14:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, so first it's making stuff available to them, but
14:20
Speaker 3: it also begins when you hire them. So when you
14:22
Speaker 3: hire people into a fixed job, we used to hire
14:25
Speaker 3: people because they've done the job before. So we're looking
14:27
Speaker 3: for somebody who's done this nours. We're reaching a point
14:31
Speaker 3: where we can't find people who've done it before because
14:33
Speaker 3: nobody's done it before. So we went from in our progress,
14:36
Speaker 3: we went from hiring people who did it before. Then
14:38
Speaker 3: when we couldn't, we'd hire people with a degree in it,
14:41
Speaker 3: so cybersecurity, data analytics, what have you, because they were credentialed.
14:45
Speaker 3: But that really takes about a decade to build a curriculum,
14:49
Speaker 3: put a cohort through it, prove it. Then it went
14:51
Speaker 3: to skills, where can we get people who've got badges
14:54
Speaker 3: or something in the requisite area. And now I think
14:57
Speaker 3: we're going to be looking at behaviors. So you certainly
15:00
Speaker 3: hire people who are credentials. You'll certainly hire people who
15:03
Speaker 3: have past experience you want. I don't want to have
15:05
Speaker 3: surgery by somebody who likes to watch YouTube videos to
15:07
Speaker 3: figure it out. I don't want to drive over a
15:09
Speaker 3: bridge by somebody who's seen something on TikTok, you know.
15:12
Speaker 3: And we want credential people in areas when we need
15:14
Speaker 3: them to be credentialed. But I think we're also going
15:16
Speaker 3: to be looking more and more at what are they
15:19
Speaker 3: going to do when their drop changes, which it will.
15:22
Speaker 3: So hiring people that expectation. Are you curious, are you empathetic?
15:26
Speaker 3: Are you proactive? Are you pre pro social? Are you diligent?
15:30
Speaker 3: Those kinds of things to look at sort of like
15:33
Speaker 3: you got through your degree, your certificate, your past job experience.
15:37
Speaker 3: You've proven some of those behaviors, but what do behaviors
15:40
Speaker 3: look like going forward? So you're setting up that expectation.
15:43
Speaker 3: You're hiring people who have agency, and you're saying, Okay,
15:46
Speaker 3: these are the resources we have available. This is the
15:48
Speaker 3: mentoring opportunities. We want you to learn here. So you
15:52
Speaker 3: are more valuable tomorrow than you are today, both to
15:54
Speaker 3: yourself and to us. So you increase your individual capacity,
15:58
Speaker 3: you create our organizational capacity. That case greater organizational health,
16:02
Speaker 3: That creates for greater organization residience.
16:06
Speaker 4: So the early concern when Google first hit the scene
16:11
Speaker 4: was that people wouldn't need to learn anymore. I'll just
16:13
Speaker 4: google it. I don't need to I don't need to
16:15
Speaker 4: educate myself. The knowledge is out there, I'll just go
16:18
Speaker 4: find it.
16:19
Speaker 3: Now.
16:20
Speaker 4: AI has advanced, in my opinion, advanced that concern even more.
16:24
Speaker 4: Not only am I going to ask Ai, but I'm
16:27
Speaker 4: no longer going to get fifty sources of information. I'm
16:31
Speaker 4: going to get one response. So it's very limited. It
16:34
Speaker 4: might be very a very educated or seemingly educated response,
16:38
Speaker 4: but it's still one response versus kind of a research mentality.
16:44
Speaker 4: How do you see AI reshaping the way we think
16:48
Speaker 4: about learning and work and career growth. How is it
16:51
Speaker 4: impacting our daily lives as we as we move.
16:55
Speaker 3: Through Well, that's an area that I think is really
16:58
Speaker 3: important to pay attention to right now. So I like
17:01
Speaker 3: expressions that people that are easy for folks to remember.
17:03
Speaker 3: So I say, what we automate atrophies, what we augment enhances,
17:09
Speaker 3: and so think about it. My handwriting is illegible, I
17:14
Speaker 3: can't remember a ten digit phone number, I can't navigate
17:17
Speaker 3: anywhere without GPS. I've automated all those things, and what
17:20
Speaker 3: abilities I had there have absolutely atrophied. And that's across
17:23
Speaker 3: the board true for most of us. But where we
17:25
Speaker 3: augment what we've found so far, even with the early
17:29
Speaker 3: studies on large language models like chat GDP, when you
17:33
Speaker 3: give people those tools to ideally augment, if they just automate.
17:40
Speaker 3: So if I go to a meeting, I participate in
17:42
Speaker 3: the meeting. I use order or something like that to
17:45
Speaker 3: transcribe the meeting, and it gives me an automatic summary,
17:48
Speaker 3: and I look at it, I don't even read it.
17:50
Speaker 3: I copy it and I put it in an email. I
17:51
Speaker 3: sent it to somebody else. I've missed an opportunity to reflect.
17:56
Speaker 3: I've missed an opportunity to think what were the most
17:58
Speaker 3: salient moments because I've outsource that, and we become less
18:03
Speaker 3: comfortable with being uncomfortable. People don't need to say I
18:07
Speaker 3: don't know anymore, because if I not only can find
18:10
Speaker 3: the information, but find the well crafted answer, I'm not
18:13
Speaker 3: creating it anymore. So I think where we're using AI
18:17
Speaker 3: it's really important. I think everybody should be using it.
18:19
Speaker 3: Everybody should be playing with it, but it should be
18:21
Speaker 3: a tool we learn from and with rather than just replace.
18:24
Speaker 3: Because where the studies we've seen is where it's been
18:26
Speaker 3: given to folks who use in the workflow. It'll take
18:30
Speaker 3: a C player and make um a B player. It
18:32
Speaker 3: doesn't necessarily make an A player, and it will take
18:35
Speaker 3: their baseline function from you know, say it's seventy percent
18:38
Speaker 3: to eighty percent, and then when the tool is taken away,
18:42
Speaker 3: they drop back to something like sixty percent, so it
18:45
Speaker 3: actually atrophies their cognition. So John Nasik, who writes a
18:49
Speaker 3: lot of great articles on psychology today, says he's concerned
18:51
Speaker 3: about the death of I don't know, because if we
18:54
Speaker 3: don't sit with I don't know, and we don't sit
18:56
Speaker 3: with that friction and that uncertainty and bounce things off
19:00
Speaker 3: other and try different things, we're missing an opportunity to
19:03
Speaker 3: build the most important cognitive muscle, which is our own.
19:08
Speaker 4: So I had a psychology professor in college handed out
19:12
Speaker 4: each each student in the class ten three by five cards,
19:17
Speaker 4: and for the final exam, she said, you can write
19:20
Speaker 4: anything and everything you want on these three by five
19:23
Speaker 4: cards in preparation for the final, and bring them with
19:26
Speaker 4: you to the final. And I had a tiny print
19:29
Speaker 4: and color coded and indexed. I wrote everything down I
19:33
Speaker 4: needed to know, and by the time I got into
19:35
Speaker 4: the final, I didn't need them because I had gone
19:38
Speaker 4: through that exercise of researching it and writing it and
19:41
Speaker 4: indexing it, and I learned it. It was a process
19:44
Speaker 4: of learning, and it was a great almost a psychological
19:47
Speaker 4: trick to get the class to really learn the material.
19:51
Speaker 4: It was a really cool exercise that I've never forgotten,
19:54
Speaker 4: but that the need for upskilling of people and going
19:58
Speaker 4: through those kinds of exercise is to learn really has
20:02
Speaker 4: to be a priority for organizations and enterprises because technology
20:09
Speaker 4: is easy to change. You can distribute a new application
20:12
Speaker 4: to one hundred thousand people overnight, but the people are hard.
20:15
Speaker 4: The people need to transform and learn how to use that,
20:18
Speaker 4: how to what the workflow is. But it's traditionally been
20:22
Speaker 4: very difficult for technology people to to get that into
20:29
Speaker 4: a practice of upskilling h employees. What does good digital
20:35
Speaker 4: upskilling look like in practice?
20:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's that's a that's a great question. I've
20:40
Speaker 3: spoke at a CEO sum at a couple of years ago,
20:42
Speaker 3: and in the prep call, one of the CEOs said
20:45
Speaker 3: to me, you know, ahead of the technology is easy,
20:47
Speaker 3: the humans are hard. And he wasn't being funny or ironic.
20:50
Speaker 3: I was like, exactly, because the technology is only as
20:53
Speaker 3: good as the human that uses it. So I think
20:56
Speaker 3: one of you know, just to make a comment on
20:58
Speaker 3: your observation and about being allowed to bring any information,
21:02
Speaker 3: so you recalled it and reflected on it repeatedly, so
21:07
Speaker 3: by the time you got there you didn't need it anymore.
21:10
Speaker 3: My undergraduate degree is from Right Island School Design and
21:12
Speaker 3: at Rizzdy, which is an art school. We learned much
21:15
Speaker 3: more about finding the problem and proposing the solutions than
21:19
Speaker 3: having the right answers. So we would go into a
21:22
Speaker 3: class or a situation and they would tell us what
21:25
Speaker 3: is the ask us to find the problem? What's wrong here?
21:28
Speaker 3: They would take us to a train station and say,
21:30
Speaker 3: find all the problems here. That's much more of the
21:33
Speaker 3: kinds of education that we need to have to prepare
21:36
Speaker 3: people to seek for the questions the problem finding the
21:39
Speaker 3: problem framing because we can access the answers, so we
21:43
Speaker 3: need to we can access the information, we can access
21:45
Speaker 3: the answers, we need to focus on how we think
21:48
Speaker 3: about those answers and what they mean, as well as
21:50
Speaker 3: trying to find the problems. Now, when it comes to
21:53
Speaker 3: reskilling and upskilling, we've got to figure out what are
21:55
Speaker 3: the people trying to do before we plug the tool
21:58
Speaker 3: in as part of the process. Because if you look
22:00
Speaker 3: at the Jetsons, for example, if we reimagined transportation in
22:05
Speaker 3: the future back in the nineteen sixties, it was flying cars,
22:07
Speaker 3: but George Stressen was flying his own car. We didn't
22:10
Speaker 3: even imagine autonomous driving them because we were still thinking
22:14
Speaker 3: about what the human did, what the car did. Now
22:16
Speaker 3: maybe it's in the air, but the human's still doing it,
22:18
Speaker 3: or a robot doing something the human was doing before,
22:21
Speaker 3: rather than a systemic view. And so what we need
22:24
Speaker 3: to do when it comes to rescaling and upskilling around
22:26
Speaker 3: technology is what is it we're trying to do and
22:29
Speaker 3: where does the human come into play? How does the
22:31
Speaker 3: technology come in? What is it they need? I mean,
22:33
Speaker 3: Steve Jobs famously said customer is not the customer's job
22:36
Speaker 3: to tell you what they want or need. It's to
22:38
Speaker 3: pay attention to what is it they're trying to do,
22:41
Speaker 3: what is it they could do, and where does the
22:43
Speaker 3: technology come in to enable that? We got to start
22:45
Speaker 3: with the human. We don't start with the human, We
22:47
Speaker 3: start with the technology. And that's backwards.
22:49
Speaker 4: And it's a great conversation that I have in terms
22:52
Speaker 4: of our teams when we're out talking with people about
22:55
Speaker 4: next think and what we do. I focus and make
22:58
Speaker 4: sure that the people were talking with have a firm
23:02
Speaker 4: problem definition what is it that you are trying to solve?
23:05
Speaker 4: And many times they don't know it's a vague statement
23:08
Speaker 4: or it's not very detailed. And the conversation in pursuing
23:12
Speaker 4: that problem. Definition can be very enlightening because it then
23:16
Speaker 4: opens up all kinds of doors to different solutions. But
23:18
Speaker 4: you can't talk about solution until you've really defined that problem.
23:22
Speaker 4: I think that's a great way to look at it,
23:24
Speaker 4: and it's one that we try to emulate as well
23:27
Speaker 4: in terms of finding finding a way to get people educated.
23:34
Speaker 4: As digital transformation happens. One of the typical problems in
23:39
Speaker 4: it at least is it's very easy to, like I said,
23:44
Speaker 4: to deploy that software. But technology people are technicians, they're
23:49
Speaker 4: not educators. They're not trainers, especially when it comes to
23:53
Speaker 4: a business application that they don't even know. They know
23:55
Speaker 4: how to deploy it, but they don't know how to
23:56
Speaker 4: use it. What role really should teams be playing in
24:01
Speaker 4: that broader upskilling and adaptation efforts in an organization when
24:06
Speaker 4: it can be difficult for themselves to even do it well.
24:10
Speaker 3: I think the key is to show the gain of
24:13
Speaker 3: function or the gain of time that might be saved.
24:16
Speaker 3: So if you look at like in healthcare, do a
24:18
Speaker 3: lot of talks and healthcare environments, and when electronic medical
24:22
Speaker 3: records first came in, it was sold to doctors and
24:25
Speaker 3: clinicians and staff as being something that was going to
24:27
Speaker 3: be a time saving and ended up actually being a
24:30
Speaker 3: time addition because it was one more thing they had
24:32
Speaker 3: to do. And when a tool is presented as one
24:36
Speaker 3: more thing you have to do and one more thing
24:38
Speaker 3: you have to learn without an obvious like, what's the
24:40
Speaker 3: benefit to me, I think you've got to start with
24:43
Speaker 3: we're doing this because it is the benefit of for you,
24:45
Speaker 3: and like you might have to go through an increase
24:48
Speaker 3: in effort to get to the other side where there'll
24:50
Speaker 3: be a decrease in effort or an increase a decrease
24:53
Speaker 3: in productivity to get to an increase in productivity. Showing
24:56
Speaker 3: them there is something on the other side of that
24:58
Speaker 3: hill that is valuable to them, because you're not going
25:01
Speaker 3: to get them on board to do one more thing
25:03
Speaker 3: unless they can see that one more thing will eventually
25:06
Speaker 3: become more beneficial to them.
25:09
Speaker 2: Brings us to digital adoption, which is often something of
25:12
Speaker 2: a bottleneck when it comes to digital transformation at large
25:17
Speaker 2: and beyond what you just described, how can companies better
25:20
Speaker 2: and shure of that employees not only have access to
25:22
Speaker 2: the right tools, not only have a sense of fee
25:25
Speaker 2: purpose of FoST tools, but can actually adapt and use
25:29
Speaker 2: them confidently and effectively.
25:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think there's got to be a
25:35
Speaker 3: clarity of expectation. These are the tools we need you
25:37
Speaker 3: to use. What do you need to be comfortable doing it? Again,
25:41
Speaker 3: it's showing them that benefit so that they want to
25:43
Speaker 3: use it. And then sometimes I remember when my dad
25:46
Speaker 3: was the CFO of a nuclear pharmaceutical company, and this
25:49
Speaker 3: was back in the he started his career, probably went
25:52
Speaker 3: from nineteen sixties to two thousand ish, and when computers
25:58
Speaker 3: first came in, he was to see of a company.
26:00
Speaker 3: They didn't want him to be embarrassed, so they came
26:02
Speaker 3: and put a computer in the basement of our house
26:05
Speaker 3: and they said, you just work with us, you start
26:07
Speaker 3: playing with us. We got a phone line for you
26:09
Speaker 3: to call when you have questions. We don't want to
26:12
Speaker 3: put it on your desk until you feel comfortable using it.
26:16
Speaker 3: And I think that was you know, it was a
26:18
Speaker 3: long time ago, but the same version of that. How
26:21
Speaker 3: do we make it so that people feel comfortable being uncomfortable,
26:26
Speaker 3: making it maybe private at times, so that they can
26:28
Speaker 3: experiment with it, so that it feels like an valuable
26:33
Speaker 3: and as a CFO. I mean that it was lotus one, two, three,
26:36
Speaker 3: and then you know, excel et cetera. A huge gain
26:39
Speaker 3: of function for him in terms of like gain of productivity.
26:42
Speaker 3: But he had to go through this like fear in
26:44
Speaker 3: this learning curve. And maybe the people who work for
26:46
Speaker 3: me are going to know a lot more about this
26:47
Speaker 3: than I am, so they're gonna they kept it in
26:49
Speaker 3: the privacy of our basement that he could learn it.
26:51
Speaker 3: I think we need some of those kinds of tactics.
26:54
Speaker 2: That's incredible, pritiant, and you know, I interested. Obviously, empathy
26:59
Speaker 2: is is a big feme in your work. Are you
27:02
Speaker 2: one of those people who see with the development of
27:06
Speaker 2: AI is handling more and more tasks as soft skills?
27:10
Speaker 2: Is there sometimes called like emotional intelligence creative leadership. Do
27:14
Speaker 2: they suddenly come to before is what distinguishes a good
27:18
Speaker 2: hire besides adaptability, that they become more important in this era?
27:23
Speaker 3: I think it should. I mean we're going through a
27:25
Speaker 3: bit of an empathy deficit right now globally. I mean
27:28
Speaker 3: some of the cruelty and the division in treating each
27:33
Speaker 3: other in a way, particularly online. But I remarked to
27:36
Speaker 3: function line an airport, sometimes almost every day, and an
27:39
Speaker 3: airport is the most anonymous environment where it can be
27:43
Speaker 3: the ruthless survival of the fittest. And I was in
27:46
Speaker 3: an airport in the last couple of weeks and I
27:48
Speaker 3: was rushing on my gate like everybody else, and an
27:50
Speaker 3: elderly woman fell in front of me, maybe fifteen feet
27:53
Speaker 3: away from me, and I asked, I've asked everyone this question,
27:55
Speaker 3: what do you think happened next? And everybody said, well,
27:57
Speaker 3: everyone stepped over us, and now every single person and
28:00
Speaker 3: stopped to help it. Almost It was ridiculous how many
28:02
Speaker 3: people were trying to help her out. And then like
28:04
Speaker 3: a week later, I was in a food court, and
28:06
Speaker 3: then I decided a food court actually might be even
28:08
Speaker 3: more survival of thet than the airport itself, because people
28:11
Speaker 3: are trying to get their food before their flight, and
28:13
Speaker 3: people are elbowing each other to get in line. And
28:15
Speaker 3: this woman came out with a bagel with lots of
28:17
Speaker 3: stuff on it, and she just dropped it and it
28:19
Speaker 3: went everywhere. And once she dropped the bagel, there was
28:22
Speaker 3: no recovering it. She wasn't going to eat it off
28:23
Speaker 3: the floor. People didn't want to lose their place in line,
28:26
Speaker 3: and everybody stepped out of line, helped her clean up
28:28
Speaker 3: the floor for everybody else, and then somebody led her
28:31
Speaker 3: back in line in front of her to get a
28:32
Speaker 3: new bagel. And it's like in humans are hardwired to
28:36
Speaker 3: be good most of us. Technology allows us to be
28:39
Speaker 3: a little bit anonymous in a way that the cruelty
28:41
Speaker 3: rises to the top. But I am a belligerent optimist,
28:44
Speaker 3: and we've done more in this human lifetime to improve
28:47
Speaker 3: the human condition in all of recorded history. So I
28:49
Speaker 3: think we have a real opportunity right now we need
28:52
Speaker 3: to make kind cool. I think we need to bring
28:55
Speaker 3: empathy back into leadership, the command and control stuff, which
28:58
Speaker 3: we're going through a little bit that right now. I
29:00
Speaker 3: don't think that actually motivates people and gives you real performance.
29:03
Speaker 3: So I think empathy back in the workplace helping increase
29:08
Speaker 3: human performance not too deep, expect deep is expected less
29:11
Speaker 3: because I think humans really do want to do hard things.
29:14
Speaker 3: They do want to care about each other, and they
29:15
Speaker 3: do want to learn and grow. They just kind of
29:17
Speaker 3: be given the agency, the trust and the understanding to
29:20
Speaker 3: take the risks whatever.
29:23
Speaker 2: I was going to end on a big question, and it
29:24
Speaker 2: be like, how dold you distill everything you've learned and
29:27
Speaker 2: your years of writing into something what message executives or
29:31
Speaker 2: employees could take about the future of work. But I
29:33
Speaker 2: feel like you might have just done it, am I right, Yeah,
29:36
Speaker 2: if that works, it works, it's very good.
29:38
Speaker 1: It's very good.
29:38
Speaker 2: Indeed. Well look absolutely a pleasure to have you on
29:41
Speaker 2: the show, Heather. Thank you so so much for coming on.
29:43
Speaker 2: As I said, genuinely been following your work for years,
29:46
Speaker 2: so it was wonderful to have a chance to have
29:47
Speaker 2: a proper conversation with you. And you know you have
29:52
Speaker 2: you have a great website, I believe, and we can
29:54
Speaker 2: do things to that.
29:55
Speaker 3: The new website come out in a few weeks and
29:57
Speaker 3: a new showrail and stuff like that. So when does
29:59
Speaker 3: this launch?
30:00
Speaker 2: This will be out in two weeks time.
30:04
Speaker 3: Okay, might have a new we.
30:06
Speaker 2: Have a new website, and you know you'll find out
30:08
Speaker 2: listener if you tap the link in the show notes.
30:11
Speaker 2: Have a great pleasure, Thank.
30:12
Speaker 4: You so much.
30:14
Speaker 1: Pleasure to make sure that you never miss an episode,
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30:31
Speaker 1: If you'd like to learn more about how next Thing
30:33
Speaker 1: can help me improve your digital employee experience, head over
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Speaker 1: to next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
30:39
Speaker 1: Until next time,