Transcript
Speaker: Terry, welcome back. You were on episode 30, and now we're closing in on episode 100. And so I'm going to ask you to tell me about yourself because most people will not have listened to that first episode. But just so that you know, i mentioned this again before recording so that the listeners know, you have, I think, the third or fourth most viewed clip.
Speaker: of all time on YouTube, at least for our podcast. And so you've written a new book and I want to hear about you and all that. But first and foremost, thank you for coming back.
Speaker: Oh my gosh. and you know, it's been ah a little over a year, so I am really impressed too. You know, in one, and little over a year, you've done 70 more episodes, something like that. Amazing.
Speaker: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Okay. So I mentioned this just a second ago, but many people will not have heard that first conversation.
Speaker: i will, of course, link to it in the show notes and hopefully they will go back. But would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? I live in Colorado. ah First and foremost, I'm a mother and parenting is one of my favorite things. So as I do leadership consulting and executive coaching out in the um business world, i love I love to see how things kind of relate. It's very is very fun as a parent. um i I've spent the last...
Speaker: maybe two decades working on you know, what does it really take to mobilize a large group of people? can be a workforce. It might be a team.
Speaker: um It might be a community. But what does it really take to mobilize people into a new future? And ah many people say, what's your profession? I'll say, oh, you know, I'm a consultant, but that doesn't really say it. You know, I'm ah i'm an expert in human mobilization. And ah because of that, I end up going into areas like strategy.
Speaker: Having a clear strategy is really important to mobilization. I go into areas like structure, right? So what kind of structure enables good people with good intentions to do good work?
Speaker: Many of our structures make it difficult for good people with good intentions to do good work. i have to do a lot of workarounds and you know half their work is making it through that. um I delve into leadership quite a bit. you know What kind of leadership can we provide that inspires people into that action that they feel part of, right?
Speaker: And so I go quite a bit into the leader's role ah in in that mobilization. fact, that's primarily where I'm working. And then i I delve into areas like culture, you know, what kind of culture will support that movement into that kind of future. So ah so that's that is what I do.
Speaker: I think in the last episode, we talked a little bit. I am a veteran. I'm a combat veteran. And, uh, some of my early insights and even today, some of my insights come from being in the military for a good chunk of, uh, my early career.
Speaker: You mentioned mobilization in our last conversation, and I really liked, I guess you're thinking about it or how it was different from how we talk about leadership or i don't know if I would say strategy, but certainly execution.
Speaker: So guess before we go too much further, Why is it that you say mobilization of people rather than i think just leadership by itself or management or something of that nature?
Speaker: When I'm doing, for example, a executive development or leadership of development, I'm looking in terms of your impact on others. Right. And when I'm working in an organization, I'm working with leaders in particular, and that's mostly who I engage with. You know, it's it's somebody who who wants to impact the people that they're, um you know, charged with producing an outcome.
Speaker: And if you really look at, well, what's the effect of leaders? What's the effect of strategy, right? It is to move people from one state into the next.
Speaker: And so it's really active. It's on the court, right? And it's it is the movement of something. And, and you know, i'm not developing products, right?
Speaker: i'm I'm working with people so that they can take new action towards a new kind of future state. Right around when you were first mentioning mobilization, you said something about moving into the future. And at least for me, when you say mobilization and you're talking about business or a team I think of that sense of a group of people getting together and going somewhere.
Speaker: When you say mobilization, I think more of going into new territory and less about just eking out some efficiency gain in an established process in well-understood territory.
Speaker: I think more and more that's what's being called for from leaders as, you know, today's day and age. We've been a a year ago when we started to talk a little bit about the ah age of a i coming into play. I think we might've talked about that a bit in the, in the last episode a year ago, but it it's,
Speaker: phenomenally in play now. And so the productivity and the efficiency gains are no longer going to be as much of a differentiator, I think.
Speaker: I like where you're going and i imagine this is going to relate, but at the risk of changing directions and maybe having to come back, you have written a book and your book will be coming out right around the time that we release, release this episode. So can you tell me about your book first and foremost?
Speaker: My book is called Re-Placed, and there's a dash, Re-Placed, Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI. I spent you know over two decades working with people as they invent and move into a new future.
Speaker: And I spent over two decades watching people live into a kind of default, I wound up here, kind of future. And so, you know, the work of leadership is to shift from we wound up here kind of future into more of a intentional co-created one and then to mobilize our people toward that end. And so the book itself is about the disruption that AI is bringing into something that I'm going to say is really sacred to us, but we don't understand how sacred it is to us.
Speaker: In fact, it kind of organizes most of the modern world and that's our work. So AI is disrupting the thing that kind of holds the container for us as humans, our work.
Speaker: And I believe we're going to wind up somewhere if we don't step up and provide the kind of leadership that says, okay, here's an intentional future in which we need to intentionally mobilize ourselves towards that.
Speaker: We need to redesign, reinvent, rethink this container that we have called work. Where are we going to find our identity, our contribution, our sense of belonging, our meaning? See, work provides that for all of us. Even if we don't like our job, it provides that for us.
Speaker: And as at as that's getting disrupted, many of us, are are we're not we're kind of adapting to the situation.
Speaker: But the book says, and what i've what I am asserting is we need this proactive leadership to say, okay, how are we going to leverage these new tools and technologies towards a future that we create, not just a future we wind up in?
Speaker: feel like with the title of your book that you're making a distinction between an idea i'm going to say of being replaced versus re-placed and i think i get what you're saying but so that i can hear it from you what's this what's the difference here thank you for calling that out specifically so replaced is like being displaced um
Speaker: i've been I've been replaced by another person or I've been replaced at this moment in time by an AI agent. My job has been replaced. my ah you know Would I come to work? where Where I produce my value, where I give my value. you know Maybe my value has been answers, expertise, efficiency, productivity, Right. All of these things, information, maybe I'm the one who has access and can give access to information or I can analyze that information. Right. And all of a sudden, this technology is doing that job and is doing it better than me.
Speaker: So, yes, I'm being replaced in that way. Right. And we actually already seen this in organizations. And so that's replaced, displaced. And this has happened in history before.
Speaker: um Re-place is actually pulling on a philosophical term called placidness.
Speaker: And it's our placidness in the world. And that when we're displaced, we don't know how to find our place. Where do I belong? Right? Where do I find my identity? Where do I see my future? Right?
Speaker: re-place is to find our place again, right? So the work of ourselves and our leaders in this at this time is to actually reinvent our place, to create a new place for ourselves.
Speaker: And that's a very intentional act. And that's why the subtitle, answering the call of leadership in the age of AI, right? There's a call for leaders to say, okay,
Speaker: Things are changing dramatically. Our job is to create again our place, right? Our place for ourselves, our organizations, and the humans involved in that.
Speaker: And I'm not saying don't use the technology. I think it's great. But technology is neutral in that way, right? Like you can use it to support and get up underneath that future and that strategy, or or you can use it in a way that really undermines it.
Speaker: It feels to me like when we make this distinction between replaced all one word and re-placed that the first, the former is a little bit like zero sum thinking that I have a certain budget that I need to hit every single year. And, you know, maybe my revenue is going to go up 10% every year or who knows what. But the thing is that at the end of the day,
Speaker: i I'm really thinking about a constrained world or a constrained environment, something like that, that I'm working within. And so there's not so much about ah innovative thinking or imagining the unknown or a black swan or something like this.
Speaker: And instead, it's like, I just have to play within this certain set of rules or within this certain environment. And that's the best that I can do. And so if I think about if I'm a ah manager, I'm i'm probably going to think, how can I get the same work or more work done with ah with less costs?
Speaker: And maybe ai of one type or another actually does a worse job than employee, but the cost to get that work done is just so much less. So the ah ROI is potentially higher.
Speaker: versus when you put forward re-placed, at least for me, the thing that comes to mind is an idea of sort of like transcending our current situation while including what we were before. So if we are a car manufacturer, perhaps.
Speaker: is AI or automation or mechanization, globalization, anything that comes around that's new going to change our work? And is it going to change the jobs that people have? Is it going to change the way that we communicate?
Speaker: More than likely, depending on which you know switch we flip here, the answer is yes. And yet, That doesn't have to mean that there can't be something completely new, that we can't transcend what we are now and become something bigger or greater or different.
Speaker: And I feel like you are thinking similarly in that as AI is changing the way that a consultant would work.
Speaker: for example, or the way that a leader would think about their team or knowledge management, that you you're sort of it sounds like you're inviting or challenging someone to think about what's the new possibility rather than just how can you do more for cheaper?
Speaker: When I really get to the heart of what is leadership really about, like, you know, you can you can talk about it in a little way, a medium way, or a big way. If I'm talking about it in a big way, it's really about transforming the very reality in which we're living.
Speaker: And to say that in a more simple term is to shift the context that we're operating with it. And so it actually has this think differently about almost like see and orient differently to the situation and to the possibilities in the future. This is like actually creating a different reality to live inside of. So one of the examples I use in the book is Kodak and Fujifilm.
Speaker: And, you know, same, same shifts in the market, same shifts in technology, Kodak held on to their existing business, right? And they slowly managed the decline, right? They didn't shift the context in terms of who they were or what they were about.
Speaker: Fujifilm actually shifted into, you know what, we're not just about memories. We're a chemical company. Right. And so they totally shifted their entire context or way of the reality in which they were operating and inventing.
Speaker: um You know, you can see the same thing with, ah you know, the shift from owning and selling property or materials to selling access.
Speaker: and And you think about the shift from, you know, renting a car to Uber or taxis in which you you actually owned the asset to owning the platform in which the assets are shared.
Speaker: Or Airbnb. Right? Or Netflix. Or, do you know, like the the shift in an entire way of thinking and reality.
Speaker: And so, you know, manage, adapt, and transform. And I think but we're seeing all of that in every organization right now. But I think those who are really on the cutting edge are altering really thinking newly about, okay, what is the human contribution? What is the artificial intelligence contribution? And how do we redesign and rethink and reimagine what's possible now?
Speaker: You brought up cars, a car manufacturer. And another example i I write about in the book is blacksmiths. You know, when when we went from horse and buggy to transportation. That was the whole industry.
Speaker: Horseshoes. In a very short amount of time, they had to replace themselves into a different future. So they started thinking, okay, well, this is transportation. And many of them did shift into the bean mechanics, right? Or one of my favorite movies, Hidden Figures, when the human comp computer went away, they became programmers.
Speaker: And so they had to start to rethink, like, who am I What's my contribution? What's my value? And and and re-imagine that. So I know that you have not just examined other people's case studies or the Harvard Business Review or something like that. But I recall that in our first conversation, you told a story about being over in Kuwait. And i don't know if it was the context that changed as much as your understanding of the context or the paradigm that you were working in. So
Speaker: I am more than likely going to insert you telling that story here. And then when we come back, I want to open up space for you to tell me where the context has shifted or your understanding of the context has changed.
Speaker: Because I know that you're not just one story or one dimensional. So going to play that here. The first experience that I had truly of an organizational transformation was me leading one as a lieutenant during Operation iraqi Freedom.
Speaker: I was stationed in Kuwait and I arrived into a unit that, you know, we were okay. It was a bit... It wasn't great, actually. I wouldn't even say it was okay, to be honest with you. It was, you know, a substandard, really.
Speaker: You know, we weren't even truly making the standards that we were supposed to be making. But, you know, as you arrive, you see, oh you guys are working out of that bombed out shelter.
Speaker: So here I am with my troops. with my airmen and i was aircraft maintenance. That was my my background. Air Force Academy grad, so so I was an officer. And chose aircraft maintenance, by the way. i That's what I wanted to do.
Speaker: And, you know, what where we got stationed, where we got placed was this this bunker. So I guess it is true. was a bunker. It's a bombed out bunker from the first Gulf War.
Speaker: And it was a little disconcerting because i mean, it's not like we were put in there for safety's sake, because there's a big hole, you know, in the top of the bunker, where even during the monsoon season, we weren't even protected from the rain, right? So it's like, well, this didn't work, but you're putting us in the one that didn't work, and it has a big hole in it.
Speaker: So we simply constructed almost like a mobile home inside of the bunker. That's another story for another time, because there was like an acre of land right next to the bunker that...
Speaker: we didn't construct something on, which, you know, by the time I left, was like, could we just make something there? and and the answer was yes, we never thought of that. And it was so alarming And but it it says to what I arrived in, which was, you know, we would come in and come out. You know, people would rotate in, don't know, six months or so.
Speaker: And you'd come in for six months and you'd leave. So this was nobody's home. Right. We were just here for six months and gone. Right. So there wasn't agency. There wasn't ownership. We had fairly mediocre tools, to be honest with you.
Speaker: You know, keeping the missions going, we had a pretty barely making it kind of standardization. We're supposed to hit like a 75 percent mission you could call accomplishment or mission capable rate. And we were hitting about 65 percent.
Speaker: You know, we'd have pretty big, pretty bad repeat, you know, maintenance. People would take off and or not people. Airplanes would take off and come back. They'd have a problem and, you know, we would fix it.
Speaker: They'd take off and have to come back for the same thing. You know, that's not that's not good. It wouldn't be good for business if we were a for profit company. But things were kind of OK. And i don't know. We were just we were just there like we'll put up with it until we leave.
Speaker: It's fine. It's like five, six months. We can we can deal with this until we leave. And it wasn't until I actually got the call to go into Balad where I really got the firsthand experience and the firsthand knowledge of what we were really doing there.
Speaker: Right. So one of our aircraft had been hit by a surface to air missile. We had to I had to take a troop. It's called a maintenance recovery team into the area, into Iraq to fix the aircraft to bring it back.
Speaker: Right. And, you know, and that's when things really got real. Kuwait, it's where the Marines would come for their own R&R. And, you know, there was like a swimming pool. Right. Like yeah you were deployed. It was very hot, but it wasn't really a hardship compared to, you know, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Speaker: And so when I really went into Iraq and I said, oh, my gosh. Right. Like this is. This is where aircraft are going. This is where the supplies are going. You know, when when those troops get on our aircraft, we're sending them, they're really needed. And all of a sudden, a 65% mission capable rate and a, you know, I can't remember the repeat, but the repeat failure was really unacceptable.
Speaker: it It truly was unacceptable, right? Because I went into Iraq and, and you know, that's when the more I got to experience those mortar attacks, I got to experience not necessarily what many army and Marines and some of those guys experience on the ground in the fight, but certainly was at the base in the fight. And so things got really meaningful. So when I came back from that, and what I really saw was even, you know, some of our aircraft that had like radar jamming equipment, things like that, When they don't fly, you know, i i i kind of had this, the bit of a mantra for myself, which is like, man, when we don't fly, people die.
Speaker: They're not getting the supplies. They're not getting, you know, new troops, fresh people. They're not getting radar jamming happening. So it was all of a sudden aircraft maintenance, which seemed like, oh, we're just going to put up with this desert place with mediocre tools and equipment. And, you know, it's fine. We'll get home soon.
Speaker: That was absolutely unacceptable. and And it just didn't didn't look like that when I showed up. And so when I came back from that first recovery team experience, things had to change.
Speaker: And so, and i I had to start, you know, it really did start with me. And that's what we find when we do organizational transformation. Is if the executives and the leaders aren't leading it, it's not going to happen. Right. And so it must always start with those executives. My partner has a term, the fish rots from the head, which, you know, we really don't be saying among ourselves, but it's true. And I feel like I can say that because that happened for me, you know, as the leader goes, so does the organization. Right.
Speaker: And so in my own personal shift, I was then able to lead a shift because I now could stand for something. I could stand for what it should look like. I could say, you know, you can't pencil with things anymore. You know, we actually need to do that work. We need to do the good work. And we I will say we actually turned our unit completely around. But again, it didn't happen just by virtue of me.
Speaker: i had to learn some hard lessons around mobilization. You know, if the chiefs, if the senior enlisted weren't bought in, also that was not going to happen, right? If they didn't have an opportunity to contribute, to to say what it should look like, to shape the future, to galvanize that next level, they knew how to communicate better.
Speaker: with the next level down than I did, right? So I really, i learned some really critical lessons who, you know, who we knew ourselves as. We, you know, we were the E-models. We fixed the aircraft that were used in the Vietnam War, right? So we worked out of the bombed out shelters and bunkers. So we had to shift who we were for ourselves, our own identity.
Speaker: We had to say, and then we had to shift the way our routines and what our day-to-day work looked like. And we we had to shift the way we spoke. and We had to shift the things that we reinforced.
Speaker: And I certainly, as you know, i was very young, i was i was like 26 or something like that, 25, 26. And the people, the next in line, my chiefs had daughters that were my same age.
Speaker: So I certainly didn't have enough credibility to just tell people what to do. Right. I had to engage people and I had to engage their interest in what they cared about. And I had to make sure that they saw something.
Speaker: They got to be someone bigger in that change. That's when I started to really learn about mobilization. OK, so that story having been told, do you have other times in your career, military or otherwise, where you have gone through this experience?
Speaker: Yeah, i I think, you know, thanks for playing that clip. i i I yeah tell that story quite a bit. um I think context shifts happen consistently over time.
Speaker: um As a mother, you know, becoming a mother, I had to go from ah being someone who would travel the world, do my work. ah and And all of a sudden I had this baby. And so I had to redefine, you know, what is it not just to have a voice in the world, to be but to be a mother with a voice in the world.
Speaker: And that was a big context shift for me. I think when I left the military, that was a big context shift. You know, what gave me my value in the past was I was a military member, you know, and and that was how I would identify myself.
Speaker: ah I taught at the Air Force Academy. That gave me a lot of credibility. um i was a combat veteran. That gave me credibility. But who am i without that? And I had to start to invent my identity in the civilian world.
Speaker: And by the way, i worked a lot with military members coming back from hardship deployments or just transitioning from the military into the civilian world. And that's a big transition for people.
Speaker: um I've had to transition my own company, right? So ah right now we're in the middle of that. You know, how do we go from just working with humans to now leveraging ah the artificial intelligence and these new technologies to amplify the impact humans can make.
Speaker: you know So our own context shift is going from you know one context, which is to ensure successful change efforts, to now the new context is to unlock the distributed genius throughout a system, right? And that's the way we say that. And and by distributed genius, I mean that there's um incredible human intelligence throughout an entire ecosystem that is accessed maybe 10% of the time.
Speaker: And our work has always been trying to unlock those perspectives and insights and intelligence on the front lines. But now I think it's even more important It's more important because while we're chasing artificial intelligence, we're simultaneously suppressing the human intelligence.
Speaker: And before we even entered this era, we had ways of suppressing that human intelligence, right? you know They'd get suppressed through hierarchy and you know you can't many executives couldn't even get frontline insight until unless it was you know sanitized um and you know had enough quantitative data to show up in a dashboard or a presentation.
Speaker: We've always been trying to help those leaders get access to what I've called beta, which is you know the bits of information, not just waiting for the data that gets to them.
Speaker: By the way, by the time the data gets to them anyway, you know people have agendas and they take things out and they guess what you want to know. Okay, so now we're amplifying that.
Speaker: right We're saying, look, human intelligence is more important than ever. So as we're going into organizations that are trying to, you know, redefine how they're going to create value with this artificial intelligence, our work now is not less humans, but more humans.
Speaker: Right? And that's so we're undergoing a ah pretty big context shift ourselves from successful change efforts to unlocking this distributed intelligence that's always been there, but is getting suppressed even more today.
Speaker: How much is the is a point of maximum leverage, you know leverage to create change or to respond to this to take up this new challenge? How much is that point of maximum leverage with leadership versus potentially being with the frontline worker in the sense of, you know, a leader has a town hall meeting and they say something like, we're going to be an AI first company.
Speaker: And then the implication, if not in words, certainly indeed, is you all just figure it out. versus how much of the the point of maximum leverage in reality is leaders setting an example, setting the right kinds of expectations or or managing in some way that's different?
Speaker: I guess, where is the appropriate challenge? Is it to leaders? Is it to all of us? I don't think... leaders can lead from the same place they've always led.
Speaker: Right. So there's always been a movement about the leader with the answers. And, you know, there's always kind of been this shift from away from that, but it couldn't be more critical now.
Speaker: And what I mean is there is that you as a leader can possibly know what to do next by yourself. There's just no way, right? um When dealing with highly complex situations, which we are now, is very uncertain. It's very unpredictable.
Speaker: Things are changing so rapidly. you have to be able to get multiple divergent views. You have to have a way of keeping track on what's changing.
Speaker: So ah the leverage point, I think, for a leader is to be someone who creates the context in a condition in which you can really access the insights.
Speaker: And I do mean the insight from throughout the organization. You know, let fight let let the AIs handle gathering the information, summarizing, analyzing, processing. Let that happen. No problem.
Speaker: Right. But who's actually going to know how to leverage that ai is going to be the, you know, in retail is going to be the, you know, person in the shop. In health care is going to be the person with the patient.
Speaker: or the administrator trying to figure out the scheduling, right? That's where the opportunities are gonna lie. And so I've got two different clients right now that are kind of on both extremes of what you're talking about.
Speaker: One says, okay, we're gonna figure out the AI thing and then we're gonna roll it out to you and let you know what to do. That is so old paradigm. And if they think that they're gonna know what to do, I mean, they're so mistaken.
Speaker: Right. The other one did just what you said. OK, we're now going everybody use AI. And it's like the wild, wild west. No governance structure. Right. No. Like, i mean, it's just ah all over the place what's happening. So, you know, I think the leader's job is to create the right, you know, it might be the right policies. It might be, you know, the. um There will be, you know, where does the data come from? does something like exist?
Speaker: You know, what is it getting trained on When does it enter a conversation? um you know, I think that it's going to be critical that a leader today creates the right kind of infrastructure in terms of what are we, ah how do we preserve that human capability next to the AI capability? So there's a lot to figure out, but I think it's like, I think the leverage is creating the conditions.
Speaker: in which these ideas from the field can surface, can be tested and can be um ah scaled throughout the organization if it works, right? Or turned off if it doesn't work.
Speaker: ah So I don't think that I think the leverage comes from creating a condition for this to work. And there's a lot to think about. um One of the things that I'm noticing is people don't really understand the difference between what AI is masterful at and what humans are masterful at.
Speaker: So, you know, if we think that the whole way that we create value is productivity, or efficiency, ah that's about to, or access, right? Access to information or perspectives.
Speaker: That's ah really getting flattened out, right? That's like becoming table stakes. That's not where people are going to find the differentiator anymore. Where they're going to find a differentiator is how do you access the the first person experience of those that you serve right so it's not so much the data and the analysis and the information and the productivity for example health care everybody's going to have access to those same systems but what's the patient experience coming in and what's that human connection and you know why would that patient
Speaker: want to walk through your doors? Are they getting, are they being efficiently put through the system where a robot enters and, you know, like that? Or they, are they being put efficiently through the system with a wonderful human connection and they get to feel a care?
Speaker: How are you making the best decisions. You know, people, there's this big conversation right now about, and all the AIs are saying it, keep the human judgment.
Speaker: You know, we gave up our judgment a long time ago. Yeah, look at the algorithms in all of our social medias. Do you actually get to judge and decide what movie you watch anymore?
Speaker: no you don't. An algorithm's already given you your taste. Right? Do you get to decide who you connect with? No. An algorithm's already done that for you.
Speaker: Right? So, yeah, we got to keep that discernment and that judgment. But y'all, we've given that up already in so many ways.
Speaker: Let's imagine that it's 2040 and someone has taken your book seriously. How might they have lived differently, work or otherwise? How might they have led differently over the last 14-ish years differently from someone who doesn't take your book seriously?
Speaker: First of all, they would see that responsibility for the future belongs to us. Okay. So AI cannot be accountable.
Speaker: It can't be responsible and it it can't care. And I think that's probably one of the most important things is it can't care. So if you take the book seriously, you're going to see that we have to care and we have to design.
Speaker: The other thing AI can't do is it can't invent a new future. It can come up with ideas It can regurgitate what it's had access to.
Speaker: But I think even coming into this time period, humans really didn't understand how much they're always creating and inventing their own futures. And I think that it's super critical that we see that we are actually still in charge at this moment.
Speaker: we are still responsible and able to say, this is the direction we want to go, right? And we're going to use all these phenomenal tools to support that direction.
Speaker: But I think the really important thing is that we maintain and that we maintain authorship of our own future. So I think that's something that, you know, if people really took the book seriously, they would say, okay, what's unique to humans is we invent futures, we make futures, we realize futures, and that we actually can, and we have a responsibility to do that in a way in which the humans thrive.
Speaker: In essence, I feel like you're talking about being intentional. That's important, not just for us individually, but it's even more important for leadership because while leaders do not completely control a culture, for example, they have the potential to set the tone for an organization.
Speaker: And so like when you're talking about, you know, we've given up on, you know, deciding what movie we're going to like or whatever, That doesn't always have to be a bad thing, right? And I don't think that you were saying that that's necessarily bad as much as to be conscious of, you know, to use a word different from intention here, just to be conscious of what do I really want out of the next 60 minutes, the next, said, 20, 40, the next 14 years, where do I want to end
Speaker: end up Or might we do as a another guest of mine said this, and I really liked this phrase. He said, I worry about this idea of a sleepwalking into irrelevance.
Speaker: I really liked that idea that you're just going along and you're not really saying what's the best opportunity. What's the best thing that we can do with AI.
Speaker: So to come back around, I feel like that intention, the idea of intention really ties well between what you were just saying and some of the things you said earlier. Yeah. I think you brought up a lot of good things in there. Um,
Speaker: You know, one is many of us really aren't aren't aware that the algorithms that we have already given up judgment. OK, so that's really important. um I like the idea of sleepwalking into irrelevance because it's like a little bit of a time to wake up.
Speaker: I do think that we have an opportunity to understand ourselves better. we We really don't understand human beings well.
Speaker: Even something, you know, something I've learned from Dave Snowden is this idea of an energy gradient. Okay, an energy gradient. And why I'm bringing this up is because intention takes a lot of discipline.
Speaker: Right? And so it's really easy to say, for some of us, it's easy to say, yeah I'm just going to have intention here. And those of us with a high degree of discipline, that works.
Speaker: Right. But an energy gradient basically says, you know, the brain, what the brain is going to do in our brain is way more efficient than AI. Because what it does is it takes the least effortful path.
Speaker: Right. So it uses the least amount of energy to get the outcome. So we are going to move towards going to our chat bots or agents to get to get the answer, to get the outcome.
Speaker: i I would bet my car, and I have a nice new car, that i at least over 50%, if not more, who have started to use AI. And I say started because in my world, everybody's in it. But I understand that not everybody's still, like some people are still just entering.
Speaker: Once you see what it can produce, you're going to let it start doing your thinking. And you're not going to know that. So like screens and teens, right?
Speaker: We now have research about screens and teens and and brain development that we didn't have 10 years ago, right? So I just, I recently saw a talk that, you know, for the first time, the generation is not getting smarter than than their parents.
Speaker: You know, and and if you look at some of the data, right, it's like, oh screens, okay, on one hand. and And you really miss something. So we thought it was just the content of the instruction, and it's not. There's a lot more happening in instruction. So the same thing.
Speaker: We're going to learn, and I'm seeing it everywhere. You know, the the writing is getting worse. The thinking is getting worse. We're all kind of converging on one way of thinking. because we offload our thinking.
Speaker: You know, another term for you is we have to maintain our thinking sovereignty. Yeah. And so I think with the energy gradient, it's easy to say I'm going to be more intentional, but it's just in any moment, humans are predisposed to do what's the least effortful thing to get to the result, right? That's why it takes so much. And it's so amazing these, you know, these athletes or these masters in music, because they've overcome that to practice and practice and practice and practice to become something. So I think it's really important that we note that's the case.
Speaker: It's also really important that, you know, we, we start to value we we actually pay attention to our values, that it isn't just the output, that it's not just getting it done faster, but we start to value. And I mean, value like our time and our money, you know, where are we placing our time and our money and our attention or attention? That's the third one, right? Or our attention. You know, are we placing it on ah getting the thing done are we pre placing it on like the qualia of an interaction, the quality of the interaction, not just the quantity of interactions, right? So where where where are we doing that? So i I think what's important to note is we really don't know. We don't know the impact this is having on our psychology. We don't know the impact this is having on, um,
Speaker: the quality of what we're producing. We don't know the impact this is having on our truly our creative imagination, ah our connections. So I think it's really important that as we are in, you know, saying, and we are intentional about designing, and that is why, ah the subtitle of my book, answering the call of leadership in the age of i AI, there's a call for leadership to do this intentionally. um that we we spend the time to see what is actually very important to us humans and can we actually create an economy that values what we value.
Speaker: And then just the last thing that I wanted to note from what you said is leaders. When I speak about leaders, yes i so yes, the people in a position of leadership from a role perspective are the people who have hired me. So I kind of speak about it interchangeably like an executive and or a leader, but no, I don't think that's a role, you know, is the act of, so the call for leadership is, is for all of us, for parents and really paying attention to how our children are getting educated.
Speaker: you know, for teachers to do that, for, um yeah you know, the leaders, we lead ourselves in in this reinvention. um But i but i i intentional is the right word.
Speaker: i just want to note that it's not so easy to be intentional, especially when we don't understand what's happening to us. We can be intentional and drift down the river.
Speaker: Carrie, your book will come out around the time that we release this episode. So one, remind me of the title. Two, when does it come out? And three, where should people go to get it? And also maybe to follow you or check out your company.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks so much. It's Re-Placed, Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI. And it's out now in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, anywhere where there's an online bookstore.
Speaker: um But Amazon's usually really easy place. You can get it in Kindle or paperback. ah Give me a few months to get it into Audible. And where do people find me? They find my company. at TGN-consulting.com.
Speaker: TGN-consulting.com. That's our company. ah And then you can find me at CarrieZeller.com or you can find me on LinkedIn, Carrie Zeller. I want to hear from people. i want to hear what they're innovating, the way that they're reinventing their ah offers, how they're replacing themselves and their organizations. I think that's the work for us that's ahead of us.
Speaker: Awesome. Well, I am really looking forward to you checking out the book. I appreciate you being here. I've enjoyed the conversation. And hey, you know this is the second time around. So i'm I'm glad that I didn't scare you off the first time, Carrie.
Speaker: ah Likewise. Thanks, Eric.
