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Stela Lupushor on AI, Work, and What History Tells Us
8 Plays6 days ago
In this episode of MustardHub Voices: Behind the Build, Curtis Forbes sits down with Stella Lupushor, founder of reframe.work and co-author of Humanizing Human Capital and Humans at Work, to explore what it actually means to keep work human as AI reshapes every layer of how organizations operate.
Drawing on a career that spans Fidelity, IBM, TIAA, and PwC, Stella brings a rare lens to the conversation: part technologist, part workplace humanist, part historian. She argues that the AI transition is not just another technology upgrade but a foundational shift comparable to the introduction of electricity, one that requires organizations to rethink the most basic questions about what work is, who does it, and what the exchange is actually worth.
The conversation covers the unbundling of the traditional job, why digital labor now belongs in your workforce planning, what managing for endurance looks like when volatility is the permanent condition, and why most leaders are still treating AI adoption as an IT project when it demands something much closer to societal redesign.
Whether you lead an HR team, build workforce technology, or are simply trying to make sense of what comes next, this episode offers grounded, historically-informed perspective on navigating change without losing the humans at the center of it.
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Transcript
Introduction to Building Better Workplaces
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello again, everyone. Welcome to another installment of Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. In these episodes, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes.
Role of AI in Modern Organizations
00:00:16
Speaker
My guest today is Stella Lubashore.
00:00:19
Speaker
Stella is a thought leader, speaker, educator, and self-described workplace humanist who helps organizations navigate AI adoption without losing their humanity. And as the founder of reframe.work, she advises startups, enterprises, and even governments on human-centered work transitions.
00:00:39
Speaker
She serves on the faculty of and NYU and is the co-author of two books, Humanizing Human Capital, Invest in Your People for Optimal Business Returns, and Humans at Work, the art and practice of creating the hybrid workplace.
00:00:54
Speaker
Earlier in her career, Stella transformed workplace practices at Fidelity Investments, TIAA, IBM, and PwC, along with their clients. Welcome to Behind
From Math to HR: Stella's Journey
00:01:05
Speaker
the Build, Stella. I've been really looking forward to this one.
00:01:08
Speaker
Trilled to be here, Curtis. Thank you for the conversation. Yeah, of course. isn't it Isn't it nice to have your bio read back to you? and make Makes you always think, yeah, I really did all of those things. I did. And it makes me always feel uncomfortable. Even the title, when I was going solo, I couldn't come up with, what is my title? CEO?
Becoming a Workplace Humanist
00:01:36
Speaker
That sounds too big. Yeah.
00:01:39
Speaker
A president sounds even bigger and kind of unfitting, but thinking of what I do day in and day out, I help people reframe how they see the world and how they see the opportunities. Like, okay, I'll declare myself as chief reframer. So I updated my LinkedIn profile and next day I got a connection request from on the Adam Munoz, who is in the framing business, as in window framing. Oh, yeah. Interesting. knew I found my tribe right then.
00:02:08
Speaker
um that That's actually really funny. I mean, I like Chief Reframer, but and and and when you say that, I didn't immediately think of that other side that um is the and the unintended side to it. um So I want to, before we get into all the big stuff, like I kind of want to just start with you. You you describe yourself as a workplace humanist, which which I really love. What does that actually mean? How did you end up, you know, how did you end up there? What what what brought
Integrating Human-Centered Design in HR
00:02:43
Speaker
you here?
00:02:45
Speaker
So my background is in math and computer science. The furthest away from a human-centric anything. And it was by chance that i ended up in ah HR. I worked ah for Pricewaterhouse in Moscow, and everybody was being trained on SAP.
00:03:07
Speaker
um And I was told, hey, you're a girl, go learn HR module of SAP. um And I had to learn both SAP configuration and HR at the same time. But I never was able to look back. To me, I found a place where I can have an impact. I can see the technology um and how it's changing what people do and how they do it. I could connect a lot of the um the transformation that comes with adoption of some of these large technologies to the human change and what it requires to make it more effective.
00:03:49
Speaker
So i found I found myself in the space of HR. And
Analytics as Human Stories
00:03:53
Speaker
then from there to human centricity wasn't too big of a ah jump um because I realized through all the consulting projects that I've done and through all the technical transformation is um it's so easy to embrace you know analytics and embrace data-driven decision-making and embrace technology without acknowledging that every number in those dashboards, it's a human being, it's a story, it's an aspiration and ambition, it's a life stage, and everything needs to be
00:04:32
Speaker
dealt with with care. and
Teaching Human Capital at NYU
00:04:35
Speaker
you see, of course, in um workplaces, good and bad decisions and good and bad decision makers. And you know how powerful a lot of that analytics and decisions can be.
00:04:47
Speaker
so being that voice that elevates the profiles of humans in that cell or in that number represented and their stories is kind of became my mission. How can i help everyone I interact with to see them in a way that creates relations with that persona or whatever you want to call it.
Reframe.work's Corporate Role
00:05:08
Speaker
um And then, of course, complaining about how HR is not getting it is, you know, not helpful. So I said, I need to do something about it. So let me go teach it. So that's how I ended up um as a faculty at and NYU and teaching variety of courses in the human capital analytics and technology. So it's again, a program that is equipping HR leaders or future HR leaders with technical and quantitative skills.
00:05:37
Speaker
I love that. and it And it kind of brings us to reframe.work, right? I mean, for for anyone who hasn't come across your work yet, why don't you tell tell us a little bit about reframe and and the role that you play maybe for the organizations that bring you in there?
Worker Experience vs. Consumer Experience
00:05:57
Speaker
For the most part, the projects I engage with are with large corporations, because that's where my network is, that's where my skills are. But at the core, I bring together three disciplines. One is the human-centered design.
00:06:13
Speaker
Second is technology that can be used to improve the worker experience and analytics that allows you to not only measure the baseline of what improvements could be, or where the improvements and interventions in that experience can ah can occur and the outcomes you're going after.
00:06:35
Speaker
So but let me give an example, right? yeah If you are a consumer facing brand, you will have all sorts of measurements along the life cycle of that consumer to understand what attracted them to you how can you make that experience better, how is the purchasing experience looking like up until they, you know, put the credit card or whatever it is, the outcome that you're going after. And along the journey, there are ways to, you know, look at the the profile, to look at the journey and experience at drop-off, at, um, engagement with whatever content that you're providing. All of those are signals that help companies make better decision to engage with that consumer.
00:07:24
Speaker
I'm trying to bring the same mindset to the world of HR to think of the worker in the same way.
Improving the Employee Journey
00:07:30
Speaker
What it's like to be someone one who never knew about your brand and then they discover through I don't know, and a visit to the high school or to um buy an impact project in the community that people leave. And then they decide to come and bring their talent because they believe in the company, believe in the message, whatever impact the company is trying to project, they decide to become a candidate, they go through the hiring experience. What it's like to be that?
00:08:01
Speaker
What it's like to go through that experience? Do you feel that there is someone at the and end that cares and wants to come yeah and help you navigate that experience? Or do you get ghosted? Do you get the offer or you don't?
00:08:16
Speaker
um Even if you get the offer, what it's like to get on board? Do you get connected to your team members, to the managers? Do you get the opportunities that you expect at the right time? When is the right time? Do you have the opportunity to grow, um progress in your career even when you leave? What is that relationship of leaving and departing and the memories that you're going to hold? And then what will be the subsequent relationship? Do you have um ah opportunity to come as a contractor. do you participate in volunteering activities for the company? do Are you a brand ambassador? do you want to come as a boomerang employee again? All of that creates lots of interaction and opportunity for data to capture. And
Connecting HR to Business Outcomes
00:09:03
Speaker
then you can think through ways of improving that experience, reducing the friction for the worker, and then trying to create those interventions from HR perspective that will have an impact on the business outcome. So if you care about growing your top line, you need to find the right type of salespeople who can build the right type of relationships, who can be in the right environment with the right goals and the right training, access to the resources they need such that they can close that relationship and and close that sale.
00:09:36
Speaker
You can create a very quick value chain between the decisions you make along the way and the experience you create for that salesperson and the business outcome.
Managing Internal Teams as Customers
00:09:46
Speaker
So that was a longer answer probably that you were expecting, but that encapsulates the work that I do with my clients.
00:09:55
Speaker
We're very big on data here. So you're you're kind of speaking my language, right? Especially when we look, you know, at at internal teams, right? Not necessarily customers, um but, um well, internal customers, right? If we want to consider them, you know, your your employees that, which is, you know, often how I used to characterize them and in in some of my,
Adapting to AI and Geopolitical Changes
00:10:15
Speaker
you know, former ventures. But, you know, you've sat inside places like Fidelity and IBM and Pricewaterhouse, you know,
00:10:24
Speaker
And now you advise everyone from from startups to governments. So I'm curious, which is you know, i mean, oh what did seeing the workplace from all those different altitudes kind of teach you that maybe you couldn't have learned from any single seat?
00:10:48
Speaker
It may not. It may seem counterintuitive because you think of the scale and the complexity of problems they all deal with, yeah but they're very interconnected. So let's take an enterprise. They have a problem. Well, how do we transition to this AI-enabled future?
00:11:08
Speaker
there are not textbooks There are no are easy methodologies. Everybody's figuring it out because we're all very early on. Things are changing very fast.
00:11:20
Speaker
The way to stay connected and understand what actually is getting built that can help with the transition is monitoring and staying on top of what type of technology is being built, looking at the startup ecosystem, where the investments are going, and what are the capabilities and features that are going to be available at what trajectory in the future.
00:11:47
Speaker
You need to also understand the broader conversation and context around it. You need to understand the regulatory environment. You need to understand where political leanings and preferences are going to go. And it's a global conversation because if you have a global company and a large large enterprise multinational, they may have very different regulatory environments to navigate. And the solutions may be very different, right? In the US, we're privileged to have majority or all of this majority of the frontier are foundational models, companies that are being
00:12:24
Speaker
you know, breakneck developing um the the latest models and pushing them out, as opposed to in other countries, they have to figure out how to adopt their strategies, solutions, but also integration into the global supply chain.
00:12:44
Speaker
And for them,
Evolving Workplace Dynamics
00:12:45
Speaker
the the solution may be very different than what the U.S. s companies will decide. And then looking at the teaching experience, I can see my students who are just entering the labor force and the concerns they have and the behaviors they exhibit in interacting with a lot of these technologies. And it makes me think, wait, what does it mean in terms of the education? What does it mean in terms of the workplace dynamics and relationships?
00:13:13
Speaker
their teammates and relationship to their managers. And what does it mean the HR level? do you need to change performance management? Do you need to change how you recruit and how you assess people, how you pay them? All of that is interconnected. um And you cannot think of this in as ah as a small subsystem. You really need to look at it holistically in order to understand what's changing, how is changing and what the possible outcomes and solutions you you're gonna go after.
00:13:45
Speaker
When you
Rebuilding Work Structures
00:13:46
Speaker
say, and so I wanna kind of tap into that a little bit. you know When you and I first talked, you you described something that kind of stuck with me ever since. And it was this idea that the the bigger systems we all operate inside are coming apart and getting rebuilt.
00:14:06
Speaker
And walk me through kind of what you mean by that. What's what's shifting? What
AI's Impact on Job Roles
00:14:12
Speaker
is changing? Let's take it at the macro level. If you look up the world in general, the rule-based world order is unraveling. You see it shape up in terms of the political divisions and alliances, you see it in terms of the wars and um
00:14:41
Speaker
shifting supply chains that forces them companies to rethink where they operate and what they do and with whom they do. It changes how they need to um orchestrate the work across the the different geographies and politics and parts of the economy.
00:15:03
Speaker
We see that unbundling happening at the job level, and that's because of ai and because of all those other macro changes. What work is now is changing because certain activities can be done by regular humans, others can be done by the digital agents, and you have a lot more um ri re um reorganization that a lot of the existing structures are not designed to support.
00:15:36
Speaker
The job itself and what has been bundled as part of the employment value proposition, be that in addition to the salary, you have benefits benefits and fringe benefits, right? You have education that the company is investing in you you have access to discounts for company products or access to yoga studios, whatever it is that the company decides to include in their offering.
00:16:02
Speaker
That also is being ah bun unbundled. And as more and more people pursue independent work and freelancing and gig um geek work, all the the the parts of the bundle have now been transferred to the to be the responsibility of the of the individual. So people have to figure out where to buy healthcare care on the market, which is a lot more expensive. They have to invest in their own equipment and their own upskilling. So it
00:16:33
Speaker
the the risks associated with being a worker is shifting to the worker. And of course, it's not to say that there aren't organizations out there trying to solve for, but a lot of those organizations work in some out of a silos, right? You would have marketplaces that offer you healthcare. care um You have other you know learning and content and upskilling that you have to go to Coursera's of the world and Udemy's of the world.
00:17:02
Speaker
And self-funded. You have um employer of record and accounting firms. So all of those exist, but they're not integrated around the worker and the experience they need to have in order to be productive. So now suddenly you are a
Complexity in Organizational Systems
00:17:19
Speaker
worker that have to be an accountant and business manager, a content producer, a you know good negotiator for everything that usually companies have the skill to be able to negotiate on your behalf.
00:17:32
Speaker
You know, you you you talked about a lot of different things, right, that don't always show up in those HR conversations, right, whether it's these global or macroeconomic, you know, or externalities, right, outside of the control of those those organizations themselves, right, different things.
00:17:52
Speaker
you know, political issues, you know, supply chains, relocalizing um a lot of things. and And then AI obviously layered on top of all of these things. um And it I don't know, it's kind of, it's, it's, it's incredible to think how those forces reach down and land on the the company's people, the individuals, like you said, who are now having to bear a lot of this burden.
00:18:19
Speaker
And maybe I would, turn that around and say, i think a lot of leaders can feel pressure, but don't maybe know how to articulate or name what that pressure is that they feel. And and when those,
Rewarding Desired Behaviors
00:18:34
Speaker
when those macro forces hit an organization,
00:18:39
Speaker
What's the first, maybe what's the first thing in the organization that starts to to bend? um You know, i understand how it affects the people, right? Disproportionately, but now what happens inside the organization?
00:18:53
Speaker
We need to think of organizations also as complex systems, right? People, organizations are a collection of people and people behavior and performance important.
00:19:08
Speaker
their natural reaction to the context in which they work.
Skills for Adaptation and Change
00:19:13
Speaker
So if I am rewarded for certain behaviors, I'm going to do that, regardless of what the values of the company on the wall say, regardless of what the shareholder you know meeting was was about.
00:19:30
Speaker
People do the easiest thing day in and day out that is a natural reaction to the environment in which they work. So if you want to help people and collection of people in the organization to go in the right direction, you need to construct some of these systems in a way that rewards the type of behavior that the company needs to survive.
00:19:55
Speaker
And lately, I think the collection of those behaviors is changing, right? It used to be that you need to have this longer term view, but also you need to balance it with the quarterly results expectations. And certain decisions are being driven mostly by financial engineering and accounting, you know, games that you want to play.
00:20:17
Speaker
And now, given the volatility that we see around us given the pressure we have, and given the fact that a lot of content became so personalized down to the little bubble that you belong to that there is no big shared reality for everyone. You really need to develop new type of skills and new type of muscles first,
00:20:44
Speaker
How do you understand the signals such that you can construct ah a real understanding of what's happening, right? Not what is breaking news because the news cycle in 24 hours will move on to something else. and It'll be too late for you to react.
00:21:00
Speaker
How do you detect
Four Ws Framework
00:21:02
Speaker
what has a staying power versus what's kind of a flash in ah in a pan for the time being? How do you prepare for the long-term future more through the scenario planning lens? What are the best case scenario? What are the worst case scenario? what is the more likely scenario? And what are the steps that you can take now regardless of what scenario is gonna play out because those are the good decisions to make. How do you make decisions?
00:21:28
Speaker
How do you make decisions for the whole collection of stakeholders, not just prioritizing shareholders or certain stakeholders in your ecosystem?
00:21:41
Speaker
Does the company reputation matter? How do you manage that? How do you communicate it to both internal and external stakeholders, so to speak, because it has to match just because you don't have any more the luxury of time and things spread very quickly.
00:22:00
Speaker
And customers are very smart. prospective Prospective employees are very smart. Everybody is staying attuned to what's happening and everybody's going to make decisions for, um for themselves on whether or not they want to associate themselves with your company. So the type of leadership that we need to build in the skills are relatively okay more about being adaptive and yeah being very astute about the world around you and and knowing how to navigate that uncertainty and helping your team do the same.
00:22:36
Speaker
That sounds, i mean, it almost sounds like that's an entire semester's worth of of ah of content and classes ah by itself. But it's almost, you know, just rethinking the most basic questions, you know, what what is what is the job and who does it and where is it done? um
Aligning Work with Values
00:22:59
Speaker
And and you're you're putting those um suddenly back on the table, right? After they've been, you know, we've we've we've treated we've treated them as settled, right, for a very long time.
00:23:13
Speaker
and And now it's, it's um like I said, it's putting it back on the table. And it's more than just the work and the workforce. I refer to this framework as four Ws, right? First of all, you have to start with what is the work that needs to get done, not the jobs you're hiring for. Those are just containers to filter out unqualified candidates. But what is the essence of what needs to get done?
00:23:42
Speaker
Who is the optimal worker to do that work? And that, again, is not just a binary system. an employee or a contractor, it can be teams, it can be alliances, it can be partnerships, it can be digital labor, it can be robots, right? That's all part part of your workforce spectrum. Once you understand the match between the work to be done and the worker that can do it best, then you think about the workplace and that context, what type of environment do you want to construct for those two to be done effectively. And then the last W, it's worth. It's the value exchange. Yeah, okay. Because what people come to work for is very different. Some people at the early in their career, they want to grow up in their skills, grow up in their status, attain whatever title, they the corner office. Some people just want to do their work from nine to five and then...
00:24:43
Speaker
go live your life um during the pandemic well-being and safety was a top priority now no longer the case now stability matters so it's not only that it changes what matters to you depending on your life stage and your upbringing and your expectations but also the environment and the world around us and um that is shaping the conversation. So thinking through that lens and organizations need to make decisions ah about what it what is it that we want to be known for as a company, because that will then become the lens and the filter to which we make decisions and saying, you're not going to be here
00:25:26
Speaker
for making the maximum amount of money, but will make it employable for the rest of your life. That's just one critical principle that you use. And then you make the decision through that filter. And then the people who are expected or interested in that value that you offer will be attracted by that because you are living through it. And the current
AI as Workforce Component
00:25:49
Speaker
employees will be showing the evidence, the practices that people are experiencing will have the evidence. So it's kind of a fair exchange and you're not selling vaporware at the end of the day. yeah you You said it a few minutes ago um and like I want to bring it up, but you know so something that we talked about on our call and I've sort of been chewing on this is this question of whether digital labor is now part of you know your workforce.
00:26:21
Speaker
And I guess that that what changes then um a moment a leader has to start thinking about AI as headcount, right? I mean, which which sounds crazy, but it's also not crazy. It's a legitimate question. And and and you even you even framed it sort of pretty pretty plainly, right? Is it cheaper and more effective to deploy an agent or to hire an intern to do the work?
00:26:50
Speaker
um how do you see organizations actually wrestle with that? It's work in progress, as you can imagine, because we are not necessarily equipped yet to have those conversations, right? The regulatory environment, the way we tax ah the use of AI, all of that is still unresolved, and it's early innings of of this conversation. Yeah.
00:27:18
Speaker
There are examples of where companies leaning in heavily on AI utiliz utilization. And we've seen in the last couple of days news coming out that Amazon and Microsoft um cut out the letter boards and the and did the the measurement of your token utilization because they realize how expensive it is. And it's not cost effective to just compete on who's going to use the most AI tokens, token maxing, because that you know people are going to game the system, right? Back to what we said yesterday. if yeah If
AI's Organizational Impact
00:27:58
Speaker
you put a system in place that rewards certain behaviors, people are going to game it. It's rational. So it was only a matter of time until something like this happened. And when we think of the FTEs,
00:28:10
Speaker
of course, it's very compelling from finance perspective saying, hey, we're gonna invest, automate, and let's get rid of people when in fact, we don't think of the cost of deploying these tools, cost of running this, but more importantly, the the day after, right? um And I have a friend, I'm gonna quote him. um the the The statement was,
00:28:39
Speaker
A German statement um surgery is successful patient dead. But in essence, you've done everything effectively and you cut the cost and you create a very lean and mean efficient machine.
00:28:54
Speaker
But then the next morning you realize, well, you forgot an instrument inside. you cut an artery in the process or you introduced an infection. So you didn't really plan for subsequent the next day after the surgery, all the, the way the system needs to reabsorb what has been cut versus how it needs to be reorganized. And the, the, the long tail of that transition needs to be really,
00:29:22
Speaker
embedded in the original business case of deploying some of these technologies. And then there are all sorts of smaller questions. Like, do you need an inventory of ah all of these agents? You need to have a way to monitor them so they perform accordingly. You need to have a way to, or a decision-making to evaluate their lifetime, so to speak. When is it time to sunset them just because there are new technologies that can do it better or they no longer adequately satisfy the needs, the original intent behind it. How do you need to train managers to orchestrate the work and allocate better
00:30:00
Speaker
Do you think of the quality control and managing risk on behalf of the company? Because now you have a whole different relationship to this agent that performs the work. And it's very jagged because some tasks it's amazing at, others like telling the time it's awful, right? So you need to know completely re-establish allocate the skills requirements across your entire workforce in order to be able to work effectively in the new reality.
00:30:33
Speaker
I think that it it brings into question this idea of value itself. Like, is Is it creating value alongside the people? How do you decide what the value is anymore and who gets credit for it after that? Right. Because HR
Endurance in Constant Change
00:30:50
Speaker
historically has been trained to think in those, in those terms, right? Think about, think about something like performance management, right? When, if the performance is coming from something that isn't a person, right? Then how, how do you evaluate that, that value, you know? Um,
00:31:12
Speaker
And i'd say that's that's a question I don't have an answer to. You said, you also said something, I think, which is, which is I think, kind of ah at the heart of this whole conversation today, that that leaders have to manage for, know, what is it? Endurance against this constant change, I think is is kind of how you put it. And and I've never really thought about man this idea of managing for endurance. What what is what does that look like day to day How is it different from what we did 10 years ago? And what does that look like in terms of now, you know, this the are our our coworkers who are no who are not human?
00:32:04
Speaker
And to just give more context to the listeners, right? We always talk about resilience. You need to build resilient organizations, resilient people, such they can deal with stress. But when there's stress and changes in volatility, it's relentless. It's day in and day out. you You need to strap on for the long haul, right? This is not something that will come and go tomorrow or will come, you'll take a yoga class or meditate and calm down. You have to build that endurance for the long term to be able to live in this high stress environment and fast paced changing. So what
00:32:45
Speaker
skills and what exposures you need to have such that you can build that resilience for the long haul. Because it's part of exposure therapy, so to speak, right? The more you get to play in this environment, the more you build the capabilities to do it.
00:33:06
Speaker
How do you create that environment for your team members in a way that is safe and doesn't burn them out? And again, this is not a ah classic leadership model, top down, you shall, right? That's not going to work. You need to build resilience. You need to build, um ah give exposure to team members to to do it in a safe way. You need to have empathy when things fail and fall apart. You need to give people space and grace when things don't work out. You need to celebrate
Empathy in Leadership
00:33:39
Speaker
failures because that's the only way they'll learn to take risks again. You need to fight the system to change the reward structures to reward the right type of behavior and create that context for people. So again, it requires not only a different management style, but then also working with HR to change some of these ways to measure and reward and motivate people in support of it.
00:34:06
Speaker
I have to ask because... That's the hard part, right? keep Keeping the people motivated without burning them out, just like you said. and and and You've been honest that that pace is not sustainable for a lot of people, but have you watched leaders get this right? I mean, what were they doing that others weren't?
00:34:26
Speaker
Practically speaking, that that would be, um and i should I should be taking notes here. Thank thank goodness this is recorded. But i like i have to I have to know because that list is something that I think every leader thinks about. So how do you do it?
00:34:42
Speaker
think the best period when a lot of these behaviors were very front and center was during the pandemic. We saw policies change and under two weeks when typically it would take a whole year to to make a change. You saw leaders showing up on Zoom calls with you know kids running in the background making it okay to not be okay, being vulnerable and showing empathy for themselves and for the teams, making decisions that may not have been politically correct just because that gave the stability to people or the message that they needed at that point in time.
00:35:24
Speaker
you You don't have the answers and you have to be honest that you don't and nobody has them. You
Making Work More Human
00:35:32
Speaker
can share the type of decisions you're making given the information you have and you move on and you make it okay for people to say oh i made a mistake and we need to go course correct here and here's how we're going to adopt the situation so just being normal i think that's kind of the first principle that you need to to go back to it's like make people make sense or protect them from some of the the the
00:36:02
Speaker
political BS that you have to they be exposed such that they can do their work um in the way that makes sense to them. You know, i um this kind of is is a little bit of a backdoor into something i've I've been, a conversation I've been dying to have and I know that you're the right person to have this conversation with, right? But everybody everybody in our space says the same thing, right? AI doesn't doesn't replace people, it amplifies them, and we have to keep work, you know, more human. I'm using air quotes there.
00:36:40
Speaker
and And everybody nods along and everybody agrees, right? But nobody really, i don't i don't see a lot of people go a deeper. So so i want I want to do that here about, you know, what does making work more human actually mean? And and when you hear a leader say, we want to stay human, you know, through this or or whatnot, what What do they usually think that means? What does it mean to them, right? Where where are they wrong?
00:37:11
Speaker
Where they right? And I'm interested in in in really practical terms, right? if If more human isn't just a slogan, what does it look like inside an actual decision a leader makes? And I know we just packed
Human-Centered Work Design
00:37:25
Speaker
a whole lot into one one thing, right? But it's but it's all related. Yeah. I have a great talent of packing a lot of content in own question. So I was furiously looking through my tax exchange. So my my son bought a book recently. It's called 80,000 Hours. So it's about how you think of your career and how you spend 80,000 roughly hours that you will spend at work in a way that it's most productive. And one comic there was
00:38:00
Speaker
a conversation between the two individuals and says, sure, AI may take my job, but can it hate it as much as I do? and And think the point that I'm trying to get to is bunch of stuff in our work, it's waste of time to some degree. yeah You have to do mindless activity for the sake of activity. And you get measured on how much time you spend on doing that activity when in fact it doesn't help you accomplish the end goal that you're trying to get is just showing that you're making motion, um not really
00:38:47
Speaker
doing what needs to get done. How many times we've been in a situation where it's like, who came up with this process? Because a lot of it, it's engineered by engineers and they think in a certain way, not necessarily how the humans participate and do the work and build the relationships. So we you need to move from that design by engineers towards design by designers.
00:39:17
Speaker
So you have a lot of systems that were designed by engineers that assume that you have all the skills, you have all the resources, the process is going to go effectively. There's no you know option A, option B, option D that may have a lot of exceptions, or maybe you're disabled or have low vision or it cannot hear. And it's not it works for 80% of the time for 80% of the people, but there's a whole 20% left out there and ah as as kind of edge cases.
00:39:47
Speaker
design human-centered design brings different lens you look at the different personas that are engaging with whatever you're building you look at what are the exceptions and the age cases that you need to account for how might you come up with solutions that include everybody not just what's optimal and the cheapest way to do it simple example right do you say we're going to have parental benefits What if I'm not a parent? What if I'm too old to be a parent, but I have caregiving responsibilities and I still need the same benefits, but it's just called differently? Can you create an offering that more people can take advantage of?
00:40:29
Speaker
If you're thinking of designing a um just a hiring experience, how will different people... was at low vision, let's say interact with your website, is it accessible?
00:40:45
Speaker
um You would be surprised how few people consider accessibility as part of the initial design process. And as a result, you know, we end up with a society that,
00:40:57
Speaker
um has, I think, 75% of unemployment across people with disabilities. um That's talent. And that talent that type of talent can teach you a lot more of how you design human-centric workplaces than anybody else, because they have to struggle. Everything is ah is a challenge for them, but they figured out how to navigate the reality. So it's spending more time with people, understanding how they do what they do in wild, and then how to design systems around that capability or limitations that they have. And I think that the great part is we have technology now that can do all sorts of personalization and adaptation.
AI Transforming Work
00:41:42
Speaker
so and And you can easily collect a lot of the data to understand how to make these changes. You just need to have the will to do it. yeah
00:41:51
Speaker
you know you you bring When we talk about this sort of this idea of workplace design, you know in a lot of ways this touches culture. um in fact, there's quite a quite a lot of overlap there. and it makes me First, it makes me curious. right Is there a version of this AI adoption that makes work almost more human than less? And and and what would separate those two paths? um And then I guess second...
00:42:20
Speaker
I'm curious the mistakes that you see leaders make when they're trying to hold on to these like old work, old culture, right? In a workplace that no longer looks like what it used to because of this new adoption. Another simple question. yeah Exactly. Yep. In 30 seconds.
00:42:40
Speaker
um I think the...
00:42:45
Speaker
To your question, whether ai is making work more human, it depends on the human, right? You see the human really quickly figuring out like, hey, I can take short cards shortcuts here. i can generate a bunch of slop and let the the other the reader figure it out. you know I will use my AI to generate my slop and they will use... um oh actually, I have another quote for this. AI will be the death of learning and so on. To this, I say, no. My student brings me their essay, which was written by AI, and I plug it into my grading AI, and we're free. While the learning happens, the super ego is satisfied. We're free now to learn whatever we want.
00:43:34
Speaker
Right? So we we can delegate stuff that really didn't in some cases, bring value or didn't really address what the original intent was.
00:43:47
Speaker
And we give that to AI, let AI do the the the the heavy duty work such that we can create space to either go learn something new or build relationships or have a conversation as a human. Go outside, take a walk, expose yourself to the sunlight.
00:44:04
Speaker
a lot of things are not... and And our culture is driven around it's where it's it's around the the the the worship of doing more.
00:44:17
Speaker
Doing the work, making more money, you know going after the more. This is really pushing us to say, well, is that their right is that the only way? right Can we um use that efficiency?
00:44:32
Speaker
as a way to create space for us to upskill ourselves and use AI to learn something new that we've always wanted? Is this an opportunity to create space to take on more customers or spend more time with them as opposed to routing them to the IVRs or whatever chatbot interaction is?
00:44:49
Speaker
um I think it's just that he reorganizing things and pushing things that we always wanted to get off our plate um into into the you know, space to be done by technology.
00:45:02
Speaker
As far as the culture, I think what's missing from leadership discussion is the transition. think of this project or transition to reorganized, reorchestrated workplace as yet another technology adoption. And we will have IT design the project plan and deploy environments and build guardrails and you have cross-functional teams deciding what you shall or not do and off you go. You got your
00:45:36
Speaker
um marching goals and somebody is going to have a leaderboard tracking your token uses and make decisions based on that. As opposed to saying it's it's a very different type of transformation.
00:45:50
Speaker
You need to look at AI as one of those foundational technology, general purpose technologies. So how mechanical loom was a general purpose technology that transformed textile, build new skills, reduce the variability of craftspeople and created whole new sets of industry, opened the door for mechanization, um connected, you know,
00:46:14
Speaker
no broader industrial ah bases and machines. Electricity was another foundational or general purpose technology that then created whole new sectors and new ways of making money and powering up the factories and reducing more human variability in the process. Right. So we need to look at AI as a similar type of general purpose technology that creates space to reinvent a lot of things. And that transition to the future requires a lot of deliberate planning. not only at the organizational level, how you help people navigate through this transition and adopt it and change the work, change the work system, the context, but also the governmental level, right? We talk about safety nets and those get activated when you're in dire strait. And
Navigating AI Transitions
00:47:05
Speaker
it's only for a period of time, as opposed to thinking through the concepts of transition net, helping people
00:47:13
Speaker
Build that endurance because they will have to change jobs and reimagine and reinvent themselves and ah having the network of people to help them find that next opportunity or de refer them to that, helping them upskill in between the the jobs opportunities, helping them with work.
00:47:32
Speaker
all the the things that were in the bundle, so that they they're not desperate to find the job and they don't feel they are forced to be in ah in a job just to have an income, but they actually can feel fulfilled and do meaningful work and do something that leaves a legacy for them or whatever it is that they are going after.
00:47:56
Speaker
i love that. i um, You know, I know that as as the technology just becomes more capable, there's ah there's going to be a lot of things like this, to you know important things to consider, right, about about the human side of work, right? And this i like how you position this sort of general purpose technology and the advantages, right, that it can give us.
00:48:24
Speaker
which for me as an eternal optimist is a much better lens to be looking at, right? Than the doom and gloom. um Before we wrap, you've written two books that that are at the center of all of this.
00:48:36
Speaker
So for someone who wants to kind of keep going after this conversation, where should they start? Tell us about both of them and where they can find them. Of course, Amazon or anywhere you buy your books um will be the destination to find them.
00:48:51
Speaker
um For humanizing human capital, ah Michael Autor and I, Solange Charras, we write monthly blogs on different topics. So last year we had a whole series social We've been here before looking at it through the lens of history and how some of these waves of different technologies changed ah what work is, how the work gets organized, how it impacts economies, how it changes human relations to the workplace.
00:49:25
Speaker
This year we're writing of what have we learned from that experience and looking at it through the lens of individual leaders and how the practice of HR became what it is today. And because it wasn't there for, you know, at least a hundred years and how we as humans can have a choice to take a stand on making certain changes or influencing them, be that by organizing, be that by speaking out, by being at the right place at the right time to influence the right decision maker. So
Final Leadership Advice
00:50:00
Speaker
the call to action in some of these blogs are, hey, we we all have a role to play in this ecosystem, in the change.
00:50:07
Speaker
take the chance when you are exposed to that opportunity. So follow us on humanizinghumancapital.com. That's another source of our insights. Love that. And um just to bring us home, i like to always ask this question. You know, if if a leader, just for some practical, you know, advice to kind of walk away with, if a leader were to come with you,
00:50:34
Speaker
I don't know, maybe maybe overwhelmed by all all of these changes going on, right? the The macro chaos, the AI, the changing shape of their team and asked you for maybe one thing to to hold on to, you know, in in how to approach it and how to motivate their people in how to keep perspective, I think.
00:50:55
Speaker
Maybe that's the biggest one, right? And how to keep perspective. Yeah. in terms of the direction that these things are going and the impact right on their organization, what is it that you're going to tell them if if you did? and And I know that's one of another one of those simple questions, right? But if you only had ah ah had a minute on an elevator before it got to the to the top and their door, they walked right out the door, what is it that you'd tell them?
00:51:19
Speaker
We've been here before. That's one line that helps me ground myself and say, all right, can we find in the history what parallel or analog activities happen? How did humanity navigate How did it change how decisions are being made, what the reality looks like, what you as a human being need to continue to hold on to? So looking through the historical analogs, usually it's a very calming exercise. Like, well, we actually live in an environment and in a society where we have abundance of resources. We have so much innovation happening. There are so many breakthroughs.
00:52:10
Speaker
We are healthiest. We are the most wealthy um that we've ever been. So it's always looking in broader historical arc that will help you realize that it's it's okay. We are in the place where we need to be. We all have the chance to make an impact day in and day out, building relationships, helping other people make meaning out of the work they do. um Stressing over things you cannot control is useless. So stress over things you can and do a good thing for the human next to you.
00:52:48
Speaker
I love it. Stella, that was ah that was every bit the conversation that I hoped that it would be. I really appreciate you joining me here today. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
00:53:00
Speaker
Thanks to all of you watching and listening to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. If this one resonated, go pick up Stella's books, Humanizing Human Capital and Humans at Work, and follow her work over at reframe.work.
00:53:13
Speaker
Visit us at mustardhub.com to learn more about how we help ah become destinations for workplace happiness and turn culture into a competitive edge. And subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Until next time.