Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Rethinking Leadership in the Digital Workplace (w/ Patti Blackstaffe)

Transcript

Rethinking Leadership in the Digital Workplace (w/ Patti Blackstaffe) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
0:07
Let's get into it, HALLI, change Makers, Welcome to another deck
0:11
show, this one live from Boston's sort of the heart of Next Thing,
0:16
maybe the brain of Next Thing. Maybe I don't know, the brain and
0:19
heart, brain and heart between Lasan and Boston. Anyway, the two centers
0:23
of Next Thing. And it means I'm I'm here recording live with my main
0:26
man, Tim Flower, in the same room, mate, Tim, because
0:29
it's a pleasure. Yeah, So you know, we share, we share
0:32
the podcast and now we share a microphone. So this is it's always cool
0:35
to be in the same way. We're doing our righteous Brothers act where we
0:38
both lean lean romantically in and we were actually out with some Next thinkers last
0:43
night, had a good night and there was, you know, a few
0:46
drinks where we're drunk. And last thing I remember, in terms of group
0:51
conversation, Tim was all about which which celebrity would you be if you were
0:56
the opposite gender to yourself. Now, listeners male not be curious to know
1:00
that I was quickly identified as Courtney Love, which I don't know. I
1:04
mean, it might surprise me. I couldn't see it, but you know
1:08
that might be interesting to listeners who haven't seen her. They just picture a
1:12
male Courtney love listeners, and I can't. There was a lot of debates
1:15
him over over which which one yours was? Who did you get? Yeah,
1:19
I gotta I got a couple. First was there was a picture of
1:23
of Gwyneth Paltrow and one of her one of her friends. So I got
1:26
Gwyneth Paltrow for a while. And then somebody, I don't know how to
1:29
take this one. Somebody learned it on Betty White, so it's one of
1:34
the Golden girls. You have to I'll let everybody google that one will see
1:38
somewhere between Gwyneth and Betty. Yeah, and anyway, we've got a there's
1:44
a lovely occasion to we're putting together, and we've got a We've got a
1:47
special returning guest in order to help us celebrate this auspicious moment. She's CEO
1:53
and Transformation Specialist at Global Sway. She's an author and a genuine thought in
2:00
the digital employee experience space. We always keep an eye on what she has
2:04
to say. Welcome back to the deck Show, Patty backstaff. Hi,
2:07
Patty how are you doing well? Hello, I'm doing very well. Thank
2:10
you, thanks for having me back. I'm really quite thrilled to be here,
2:15
beautiful. And you know, I was looking back on your last appearance,
2:19
Patty, and you know you have those moments where something makes you feel
2:23
old, right, something makes you personally feel old. Well, this made
2:27
the show feel old because it was it was we were discussing the post COVID
2:30
workplace. Doesn't that feel at this point rather historical and quaint a good way?
2:37
I guess. You know, we've flowed on from that so far,
2:40
all the way back on like episode forty something. How have you been,
2:45
Patty? You've been well, been very well. A lot has happened since
2:51
that podcast. I've published a book, I've had I'm having lots of fun
2:55
speaking and talking about digital leaderships. So nothing like the fallout of post pandemic
3:04
fund to really highlight and rip open the underbelly of leadership. Well said,
3:10
yeah, absolutely, we are going to be kind of focusing on leadership.
3:15
So let's start with a sort of a general table set question, Patty,
3:21
how in the broader sense that you care to address it is digital change impacting
3:25
the traditional leadership paradigm in business and what are the implications to leaders hip.
3:31
Well, I think the big one is that we have never before been in
3:36
an environment with so much converging change. Right, The converging forces on our
3:39
businesses, whether it's economies, shareholder reputation, environment, climate, community,
3:47
worker perception has changed. I think that networks, software, connections, interconnections,
3:57
partnerships, board governance, revenue changes and profits and how they're achieved,
4:04
customer expectations. The entire business is being impacted that way. And I think
4:11
another significant change in the last few years is people caught up, especially during
4:15
that pandemic, people caught up with their ability to you know, move to
4:24
the cloud, and really it just accelerated everything which changed our environments. Our
4:30
entire businesses are run digitally now and most people would say that, you know,
4:38
you lose, you lose your connection, you lose your business. It's
4:43
a whole different world than the industrial area era. Right. It's certainly putting
4:50
the pressure on leaders to learn how to lead in that kind of an environment,
4:56
especially leading smart specialized workers who understand how to work at the speed of
5:02
business with agility and the environments around them and the interconnectedness with not just the
5:11
business, but the vendors and the customers, and you know, we're we
5:15
are really really hyper connected, and we have a different type of worker that
5:20
is kind of writing a new social contract, and leaders are a little bit
5:25
different. The fuddled maybe, I guess is the word. Yeah, so
5:29
well said, And before we kind of drill into this theme a little more
5:32
deeply, continue with the kind of broader context because I think when looking at
5:39
your book and at your sort of more recent reflections on the space, I
5:44
think I sort of phrase digital workplace maturity, which I was really pleased to
5:46
see because it's something our leadership is talking about a great deal. It's the
5:51
kind of backdrop for employee experience innovation, Digital employee experience innovation. More specifically,
5:58
interested in what that frame of that concept means to you and how does
6:01
that concept or aspiration of a business at largely dovetail with those leadership insights who
6:08
are just starting to share her well. I think that when we talk about
6:12
maturity, we talk about playing the long game, you know, building organizational
6:17
trust and learning how to lead high performers. If we're looking at digital workplace
6:24
maturity, then we have to understand the people that are working in them.
6:28
We're not talking about laborers in a field here. We're talking about very very
6:32
smart people with some pretty specialized skills. The maturity then means that we have
6:39
to be much like a surfer riding away, right, you're riding away and
6:44
you think about that, you have to balance and be able to adjust every
6:48
time the wave adjusts, and every wave is different. And I think that's
6:53
the environment we're doing business in right now. And as we do that,
6:58
that means we have to truly define what we what we say we need as
7:04
leaders. So let's look at our strategic outcomes. Ideally, every business,
7:11
that's what we're about, right We're about those strategic outcomes and the objectives that
7:15
we're trying to meet, because that's why we're in business. But very few
7:19
companies define their leadership principles against those business objectives, nor do they set performance
7:27
that way. I think that a strategic leadership plan has to be in line
7:33
to look at the entire system as you are looking at your strategic business objectives.
7:41
Okay, so we're going to achieve this, and we want to achieve
7:44
this, And the big big ticket item right now is AI. The hype
7:47
that is the hype we are. We're saying we want to be one thing,
7:54
but the leaders aren't leading teams successfully enough to get there. Right,
8:00
we have to build a legitimate leader pipeline where leaders understand how to deal with
8:05
these high performance teams that are supposed to be agile at the speed of business.
8:11
And then we need to invest in the kind of leaders that can manage
8:16
today's environment. And most organizations aren't doing that. So Maturity would be looking
8:22
at it systemically, closing the leadership gaps, taking a look at how individuals
8:30
lead, which is what we've done for fifty years, but then expanding that
8:33
on what are the essentials necessary for leaders in today's environment, for the system,
8:39
for the business, for the business objectives? What do those people look
8:43
like? What are the characteristics we need? So Patty it is notorious for
8:50
having gaps in how they operate. An IT practitioner will focus on the bits
8:56
and bytes, Right, I got this cool tool, I got this technology.
9:00
Now it's AI. There's so many things to dig into, and they
9:03
almost focus on it so much, even to the detriment of their own career.
9:07
Right, They're focused on the here and now in this technology, and
9:09
my career will evolve along with tech. They're also notorious for not connecting very
9:15
well to the business that they support. They focus on the tech and not
9:18
the business outcomes. And thirdly, they kind of disconnected even from their own
9:24
leadership. Right, I'm not in tune with what my leader is doing.
9:30
I'm just going to continue to focus on this tech stuff and all that stuff
9:33
is management noise. How do you see the changes that you're describing and talking
9:37
about at the leadership level? How do you see them either an ability to
9:43
influence and affect those technology professionals and practitioners in the organization. How do you
9:50
see that kind of that gap being reduced in particularly in end user computing.
9:56
Well, we have to kind of peel away the onion, right, you
10:00
need to peel the way the onion and look at root cause. And there
10:05
are many causes, and changing leadership isn't going to fix everything in your discerntional
10:09
business. It's just not going to happen. But it is one component.
10:13
So you're looking at people who have dealt with an outdated view of what they
10:20
do. So people in it are still being treated. They're supposed to support
10:26
the entire business in a way that is adaptable and using new technology and managing
10:33
change and all of these things, and yet they're still looked upon by the
10:35
leadership as these guys in a basement corner managing desktops. You know, there
10:41
is a paradigm shift that has to happen in business where the respect is to
10:46
a street and these folks. When you look back on the disjointed efforts,
10:52
inefficiency, fragmentation at the very top and through all the departments, the failure
10:58
to high digital leaders, the stifled innovation. They're trying to adapt. Oh,
11:05
this new cool tech, I'd love to be able to apply this and
11:07
adapt it to the organization, but no one's listening to me. So when
11:11
you look at itsm and ESM efforts where they're trying to bring other departments in
11:16
and they're saying, hey, you know, we really really want to be
11:20
able to help you, and we think we can, and they get shut
11:24
down because they're viewed as these annoyance down in the basement, right. It
11:30
creates an atmosphere where they don't feel like they have the conditions in place in
11:35
order to succeed. So there's lots of gaps in training, there's hampered collaboration
11:39
and communication, there's leaders who are still We're still in organizations. I can't
11:45
even believe that it's twenty twenty four and we still have micromanagers who are successful
11:50
right ineffective decision making meaning my voice doesn't matter. You're making decisions, and
11:58
you never once ask people in the know. So it's really easy to say,
12:03
hey, these employees are the problem, but the employees aren't. Necessarily
12:05
this is a two way street, right, And so I think we need
12:11
to open up the door to learning what exactly we need to do to set
12:16
the conditions in an organization in order for adaptability to be accepted and practiced.
12:24
And then we need to really take a look at how individuals have been treated.
12:30
I mean, you take a look. Here's one small example. Let's
12:33
look a little bit at an organizational betrayal. We say we want one thing,
12:39
we hire, we hire, we hire, We tell them we're going
12:43
this direction, and the next new thing comes out, we let everybody go
12:48
and we hire over there. We ask people, hey, we want you
12:56
to really, you know, double down on working for from home and keep
13:00
us open during a pandemic. But then the next couple of years all we
13:05
hear is all of our problems belong to the employees and we want you all
13:09
back in the office. They're not looking at data, they're not looking at
13:13
feedback, and they're not hearing the voice. So I think we need to
13:16
shift our paradigm on the leadership side. And that's what we talked about with
13:20
the maturity, right. We need to shift our paradigm about what we say
13:26
and what we do are real and they unite, and that we change the
13:33
relationship between employee and organization because it's broken. Yeah, I think one avenue
13:41
there is to start focusing at the individual level. The organizational level is great,
13:46
the career the goals of the org, but talking specifically to the individual,
13:52
whether they're a practitioner or a leader, I think is really important because
13:56
it the evolution of technology very often parallels the evolution of your career. So
14:03
talking to that individual and helping them understand that as technology evolves you need to
14:09
as well. I worked with a lot of people early on in the mainframe
14:11
days and the VACS VMS days, and many of them became dinosaurs because they
14:16
didn't evolve with the new technology and they found themselves in a place that was
14:22
kind of limiting for their career. I'm curious what you see as technology evolves,
14:28
what opportunities if I don't know if you can be specific, but what
14:33
opportunities do you see open up for either an individual leader or any UC practitioner
14:39
in terms of career opportunity and acclaim. What are your thoughts about the opportunity
14:46
at the individual level? I think that I so I'm going to tell a
14:50
little story. I'm going I do a little backwards. You know, when
14:54
we strategically tried to say how can we help organizations best, we started with
14:58
the individual and then move to Okay, now let's work with teams. Now
15:05
let's work with the system. But what was interesting is we never ever ever
15:11
got a chance to change or shift the paradigm at the executive level. And
15:16
I think those go hand in hand. So the book that we just wrote
15:20
is is for one in a series of four books, three to come out
15:24
soon. The first three were the first actual planned activities that we wanted to
15:33
approach organizations with, and we suddenly realized as we were going into these organizations
15:39
that everything we tried to do at the individual level was not supported at the
15:45
executive level. So then we took a step back and said, we have
15:48
to write a different book to start with, because this starts first. So
15:52
let's take a look at that. We're not upskilling people, we're not investing.
15:58
And I think that the organization that invests in training understands their skills,
16:06
you know, uses the SIFA Foundation Skills Matrix, that really understands how to
16:11
describe what they do, knows how to hire the right people with the right
16:18
mindset, understands what that pipeline looks like and defines it defines the principles necessary
16:23
under which they work. I think if we're looking at that, that has
16:29
to go hand in hand with as we approach the individuals. So let's get
16:33
to these individuals. I think that we have we have five different generations and
16:42
organizations right now, many of which are sharing the same values. They want
16:47
to contribute, they want to be heard, and they want to be brought
16:52
along as they go, and so they're missing some of them the pieces individually
17:02
that make them adaptable. How influence works both ways, the different kinds of
17:10
how to set and get expectations. So those expectations, so these are part
17:15
of what we believe are the foundations, are the essentials for the individual.
17:19
How to build a healthy environment themselves, and that might mean a you know,
17:25
in a toxic environment, it might mean a little pocket happiness. Right,
17:29
but still looking at what does the environment look like for me as an
17:33
individual and for the people around me having the code of courage to be able
17:37
to understand how to address conflict. Were living in a conflict epidemic. We've
17:42
got so many people who believe disagreement is conflict. Right, so we'll have
17:52
somebody that we might call a dinosaur. But if we tap into the commonality
17:56
of the values they have for the organization, team them up with the right
18:02
people, give them the right training to be able to work together with all
18:07
generations within a group in a way where everyone's heard. And I think that
18:12
again goes to leadership, Right, how are we doing that? How are
18:17
we inviting the voice? One of the things we do is really clearly define
18:22
within a group, Hey, if the organization is going here, if we're
18:26
going to have to adopt and adapt at speed, what does that look like
18:30
for our team? What's our team agreement together? What is the mission we're
18:36
under in order to try and accomplish this? Right, So there's a it's
18:44
a twofold thing it's looking at how does the system, the organization at the
18:48
executive board level really describe leaders we need, because once that's defined, the
18:56
leaders we don't want will fall away, right, I mean, we propagate
19:03
what we tolerate. And so I think that we're looking at this neat shift
19:10
right now because all the doors are open while we look at the potential and
19:18
the peril of AI and how that's impacting all of our organizations, the tools
19:23
we use, the experience we receive, and as we look at that,
19:27
the doors are open for us to say we can redefine this. We can
19:32
now look at what does it mean to have collective intelligence? How do we
19:37
define that human and non human combination of who we are. I think we're
19:41
in just the neatest space right now for experience to really become an explosion of
19:52
smarts being able to be applied within the organization, utilizing the tools at hand,
20:00
and to work with people. We need to really focus on what are
20:06
you doing today and what we want you to do tomorrow and how are we
20:11
going to bring you along with us because if we leave it to the individual,
20:15
it won't happen. We need as an organization to define that. Yeah,
20:22
I think those leaders, the technology leaders, really need to assist in
20:27
the evolution of what it means to have an EUC career. Right. The
20:33
EUC career can in many ways, and for long stretches of time, feel
20:40
like you're on a treadmill. My career is I work at the help desk.
20:42
I take the exact same calls on Monday and on Tuesday, and on
20:47
Wednesday, I get up and do it again on Thursday. Or I build
20:51
PCs or I install software, and you kind of start to get tunnel vision
20:56
and lose track of that career. And to your point, if you don't
21:00
break somebody out of that cycle as an IT leader and say no, your
21:03
career has these opportunities. We've got to be better as leaders to define what
21:07
that career path looks like for folks to keep them kind of progressing in their
21:11
careers, right, right, And I think that even leadership development is so
21:15
broken right now. You know, we're we're teaching leaders the same kind of
21:19
leadership stuff we taught fifty years ago, to a point. I mean,
21:26
we've introduced empathy, we've introduced vulnerability, okay, but we make a poor
21:30
leadership investment saying we're going to count on the good nature of the individual to
21:36
change, but we're not actually going to insist that that change is necessary in
21:41
our organization. We're still going to tolerate outdated leadership styles. We are going
21:48
to allow them to attend these theoretical training but never show them how to apply
21:53
it within the organization. We're lacking into personal skills because we're not anymore.
22:00
It's not taught, and I think that the more technical we become, and
22:06
the more in our phones and texting and everything becomes that way, we as
22:10
a society are losing those social skills, our ability to really collaborate. And
22:15
so we've got all these incredible collaboration and experience tools that we can use if
22:22
we're not utilizing them right. Yeah, in the gathering that we had last
22:26
night, some of us were kind of comparing notes and saying that getting out
22:30
with the team kind of felt like a bit of a high school reunion,
22:33
and somebody made the comment that they, you know, most of us didn't
22:37
go to anything beyond our tenth year anniversary or tenth year high school reunion.
22:41
And part of the reason was people are so connected on Facebook. They see
22:45
their high school friends from twenty thirty, forty years ago. I don't want
22:48
to go out. I already know what you had for breakfast yesterday. I
22:52
don't need to go to my twentieth and see everybody again. So in a
22:55
way, social media is making us less social and it's a really interesting aspect
23:00
to think about in terms of t Yeah, and I put you know,
23:03
finger quotes in the air when we say connected, because are we you know?
23:07
I made a commitment about three years ago that I was never going to
23:15
say happy birthday on Facebook. I was going to notice it and then phone
23:18
my friend. And that changes the world. It does. It just completely
23:25
changes the world. There are some things that we can do as individuals to
23:29
really shift that. And as leaders, we're told, oh, we're not
23:33
connected enough, we're missing each other, we're not in the same room,
23:37
and we are missing those things. But no, it's teaching leaders that most
23:45
employees don't work that way. Most employees don't work collaborative, collaboratively every day
23:49
all day long, right, They're working in bursts of collaboration. So we
23:55
can plan those things as leaders, like what do we need? Are we
23:59
going to do it? Month cadence where we all get together, are we're
24:02
going to do a six month cadence. What do we need If it's project
24:04
related, then it's got to be a little you know, more often are
24:08
we interconnecting with other departments that way? When we plan a burst of collaboration,
24:15
Are we getting into a room with whiteboards with other members of the organization
24:19
so that our interdependencies are understood? You think about think about onboarding alone,
24:26
right, and the disconnect between HR and IT and you take a look at
24:32
while in offboarding we won't even talk about that. But the whole idea of
24:38
bringing people together doesn't have to be an all or nothing, zero sum game,
24:42
right. We need to really teach leaders what collaboration looks like. There's
24:48
lots we can do asynchronously, but yeah, we should probably plan some bursts
24:52
of collaboration to get them together. We also need to understand if we're if
25:00
the organization is saying we have to move from here to here in the next
25:03
three years. We need leaders to sit down with their teams and say,
25:07
do you know what that means for you? You know, there's nothing worse
25:11
than being involved in an ASM project where the network guy knows if I contribute
25:17
to this, it means the end of my job, right. Yeah,
25:22
So leaders are typically really skilled a communication. It's part of the reason or
25:26
part of the path that they took to get where they are. How do
25:32
you what guidance do you give to us to the technician, the practitioner who
25:37
is really good at the bits and btes. But and it's rare to find
25:41
somebody who's really good technically and a really good communicator, how do you give
25:45
them some guidance to look at the opportunities to skill up on those communication skills
25:52
and take advantage of the opportunity. If leaders are going to be communicating more
25:56
and doing that kind of downward calm, how do you skill up your individual
26:00
techies to take advantage of that and actually engage and use it for their career
26:07
benefits. Here's something I t is really bad at, and that is self
26:15
promotion. We're really really bad at that. I have a checklist and it's
26:22
a two page checklist that we give to our clients that is all about communication.
26:26
And it isn't one on one. It isn't about me being a good
26:30
orator. It's about how do we share the value we give, the value
26:36
we add to the organization. And there's lots of different ways. We always
26:41
start them with the easy stuff, like, let's do a little marketing campaign
26:45
every time you have a win. Right, this is easy, This isn't
26:49
hard stuff. But you can work with marketing to do this. You have
26:53
televisions in your head offices that you haves that you can change on a dime
27:03
for everyone. You have the ability to contribute to a newsletter, to put
27:08
it into the organization in a what you didn't know or did you know kind
27:17
of way, the ability to send out, you know, happy grams,
27:22
little things like that. So we have this huge list. The second step
27:26
we ask them to take is start a community of practice. So if you
27:32
are the are the person in the know in it, and you have some
27:36
really great things you'd like to share out, ask the organization if people in
27:41
other departments would like to understand that community of practice. Right. You have
27:47
the ability then to start leading and slowly building up your competency and your ability
27:52
to be able to communicate how they can better their world. And the biggest
27:59
question you can ask that it hands down, how can what I do make
28:07
a difference in making you successful? And then you just stopped talking and suddenly
28:14
you're listening, writing it down, trying to make a difference, and you've
28:18
just become a really good communicator in the organization. Maybe anticipated my question a
28:26
little bit there, pathtic because it's all about the delivery of value and what
28:29
value specifically means from between contrasting the old model of expectations and deliverables with this
28:37
emergent one. I mean, I wonder if you have if you could unpack
28:41
that notion of how we demonstrate value, how we measure value in this new
28:45
emerging paradigm. Well, one of the things we often do, especially you
28:52
know when you're talking about experience and support and service and the areas of the
28:59
of it that are doing their best. We've taken metrics and turned them into
29:08
must dos as opposed to informing decisions. So our metrics really should be about
29:15
informing decisions, and we will focus on one. You know, one client
29:19
had ticket times where there be all and end all, and if we weren't
29:25
doing ticket and that went up to the executive and they were firing and hiring
29:27
people based on ticket times, but they weren't merging any of the other data
29:33
together to really look at how experience is happening within the organization. They were
29:38
using tools right that are supplied that understand sentiment and understand you know what you're
29:45
doing. Here's the goal. All your job is really is to ensure you're
29:52
enabling other people to do theirs. So when you look at metrics, what
29:57
matters? How do we help people do their jobs the very best we can
30:03
and get them to those business objectives? And that goes throughout the whole organization.
30:11
Then, because what we measure matters and it speaks to performance. I
30:17
can't tell you how many executives I've worked with who say, yeah, I'd
30:19
really love to build a better organization, but that's not how I'm measured right,
30:26
Right, And then when you look at the front lines, I'm going
30:30
to change everything I do based on how I'm measured. So what you measure
30:36
matters, and the experience people receive is so tightly tied to what you're measuring.
30:44
And of course the backdrop to all this is an incredible influx of really
30:48
unprecedented AI and automation capabilities coming into the experience base. I'm sure you've kept
30:53
a close eye on this party absolutely. What are your reflections on how on
31:00
this influx so far and how do you expect it to further influence the picture
31:06
you're painting here. I think that we're going to I think we're going to
31:11
experience an awful lot of excitement that is followed by an awful lot of pain
31:17
and then a reset. I think in three years, we're going to see
31:22
organizations saying, wow, Okay, well we're a little tired of AI hallucinating
31:27
and so we gave it a little too much autonomous go ahead, And we're
31:33
going to see other organizations that train their people to really utilize the tools in
31:37
a way. Oh my god, it's just glorious how they can be used.
31:41
You think about the potential for what we can use AI for when we're
31:47
on a call, and how it can summarize the call, It can put
31:49
the notes in where one person might be really good at another person might not
31:55
be good at it. Now AI is able to create these summaries that are
31:59
really quite specific and amazing to the call, which then leads to better personalization,
32:05
which then leads to how we track patterns within the organization. Is really
32:12
quite remarkable. So I think when we look at AI and what I've seen
32:16
at the onset of this is a whole bunch of oh, we can replace
32:22
all the humans. We really can't. You know, it's not possible to
32:28
replace all the humans. What we can do is create efficiency. So if
32:31
we're creating efficiency by say two to three minutes per ticket, we've just you
32:39
know, accumulatively created some really amazing time savers and productivity saves. We have
32:47
to start tracking that. We need to understand what we're saving and what we're
32:52
not saving. Air Canada recently had a case where they allow out their bought
33:01
to be a little too conversational without some parameters, and it wound up in
33:09
court and the customer actually won because the AI bought delivered what it was supposed
33:20
to deliver make the customer happy, but make the customer happy went against the
33:23
background policy of refunds. Right, So we need to really understand the data.
33:30
We need to have our data cleaned up, we need to segment our
33:34
data, we need to have sensitive data labeled properly. We need to ensure
33:39
that we're still meeting security and privacy regulations in so many different areas, right,
33:46
you know, from state to province to county to whatever. That looks
33:52
like everyone's jumping on the governance bandwagon. And I think that our job as
34:01
an organization is to look at what's safe, what's realistic, and start small.
34:08
Let's start where we're at, Let's test this, let's experiment, let's
34:13
have some fun with this. I heard a really interesting quote I think it
34:16
was at the Gartner conference last week. It really made kind of it settled
34:22
some nerves. I think the quote was essentially AI A person that uses AI
34:30
will replace a person that doesn't use AI well, AI removing people. It's
34:37
about people leveraging the technology. You will be more valuable and you will replace
34:40
the people that don't use AI well. And the thing is, it's the
34:45
easiest technology to learn how to use if it's applied properly by the organization.
34:52
Right. James Finister, who is I listened to a webinar last week with
34:58
him on the call, and he's an AI asist who said, now I'm
35:02
paraphrasing, so sorry, James. If you have a broken leadership, if
35:09
you have a broken culture, if you have a dysfunctional organization, AI will
35:14
accentuate it way faster than you expect. And so I think that's get your
35:22
house in order is really an important aspect of the adoption of AI within organizations
35:30
on the individual level. Oh my gosh, you can have so much fun
35:34
with us, so long as you're working within the parameters the organizations set right.
35:42
I just went and had a look at what we say AI bought.
35:44
I'd been telling Air Canada customers. It wasn't as salacious as I thought it
35:49
might to say. I keep saying it was making. It was making a
35:53
big offers text it could write and checks. It couldn't catch discounts, which
35:58
is a bizarre and fascinating. But the cases are but cases are rising though
36:08
where we've seen articles come out of doctors who have used AI to try and
36:15
have a conversation with their patient, but they dumped all the patient's data into
36:20
AI on a model. It was training on that data and suddenly, you
36:27
know, breached privacy of someone's healthcare. And so we need to really think
36:31
about how we're using it, and organizations need to really define the parameters and
36:37
where they're getting their data from, where it's been trained, because we don't
36:40
know. If we don't know, we shouldn't be jumping in intriguing stuff and
36:46
triaguing conversation. Pat you really delighted to have had you back on the show,
36:51
tell us tell the listeners a bit more about your book, and we'll
36:53
include links to it, but you can also mention where they can find it
36:57
if they are listening and can't be bothered. Just checked. The book is
37:00
called Upheaval, an Executive's Guide to Organizational Digital Leadership, and it's available on
37:07
Amazon all over the world. You can find it order it online from several
37:14
bookstores which are quite new. We haven't we haven't expanded to having it in
37:17
a lot of bookstores at the moment. And and TSO shop also has it
37:23
available there, and it's really just the start. Fabulous, fabulous. It's
37:30
been lovely to have you back on. Definitely love to speak to you again.
37:35
We won't leave it quite so long this time. A pandemic come and
37:38
go. Been a pleasure to have a joy. Thanks for having me here.
37:45
To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show
37:49
in Apple Podcasts, Spotify your favorite podcast player, and if you're listening on
37:53
Apple Podcasts, make sure to leave a rating of the show. Just have
37:57
the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to learn
38:00
more about how next Think can help me improve your digital employee experience head over
38:06
to nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,