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Steve Kozel: The Myth of Control
21 Plays16 days ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum talks with strategist and thinker Steve Kozel about the tension between our craving for certainty and the messy reality of complex systems. Steve—Director of Strategy and Marketing Technology at Osborne Barr Paramore—shares what he’s learned from years helping organizations make better decisions in conditions that can never be fully predicted.
They explore what strategy actually means (and why the word itself often obscures more than it clarifies), how fear and risk aversion shape corporate culture, and why “best practices” often kill the very innovation they promise to protect. The conversation moves from agency life to complexity science, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Ken Wilber’s idea of “transcend and include,” and the cultural fragmentation of modern life. Together, they examine how individuals and organizations can think—and act—more clearly when faced with uncertainty.
Topics Explored:
- The many “altitudes” of strategy — and why most strategists never reach the highest one
- Why true strategy demands choice and risk
- How fear of failure and craving for certainty distort business decisions
- The contradiction of wanting scientific proof while avoiding experimentation
- Lessons from complexity science and why interdependence can lead to stagnation
- The shift from geographic to affinity-based communities and what that means for culture
- Identity, ideology, and the loss of foundational “pace layers” in modern life
- What Plato, Roger Martin, and Ken Wilber can teach us about thinking in systems
Links:
- Steve Kozel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevekozel/
- Richard Rummelt – Good Strategy Bad Strategy: https://amzn.to/3JckbKJ
- Roger Martin – Playing to Win: https://rogerlmartin.com
- Robert Wright – Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny: https://amzn.to/4nOuLXt
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Steve, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? um I guess today I would consider myself squarely in the world of being pretty fired up.
00:00:14
Speaker
A lot going on. um Plenty to dig into. I based in St. Louis, but I um am in the midst of a lot of seasonal planning stuff at work.
00:00:27
Speaker
And obviously there's a lot going on in the world that's turning my gears. So I'm excited to get into it. You and I met. about five years ago, something like that. that's right We got coffee because I was new to the area and we had mutual connections and all that. And I carried with me that you were really intelligent and engaging, charismatic and all that. So hopefully i I'm not, you know, laying it on too thickly here but I had a very positive impression and then you know we've stayed connected and I see things that you write periodically whether it's a LinkedIn update or i don't know what's going on with some other things that you've worked on like in at some point you had a project called the light shed maybe we'll talk about that I don't know if that's still going on but yeah
00:01:22
Speaker
can you refresh me or bring me up to date on you know who you are i guess sure yeah uh so i and currently at a agency it it's originated here in st louis we're remote distributed across the us uh name of the agency is osborne bar paramore we have traditionally worked in the verticals of agriculture and tourism And my role there um originated in strategy. I helped start the current strategy function at the agency. And it's kind of grown over the the years.
00:02:01
Speaker
My role has kind of evolved into being um in support of media and marketing technology as well. So um that's kind of my day to day. And beyond that, I stay pretty busy raising four boys ages 12. 13, 10, 8, and 5. So my life is not boring.
00:02:22
Speaker
Having a marketing agency background myself, I'm really curious when you said I think you originated the strategy function at your agency or something like that. What What did that look like or what does that mean to you? And I'll tell you why I'm asking is because there are so many things that are called strategy in my experience in the marketing space or marketing agency space. And I can certainly pass judgment on whether that's good or bad or whatever, but I'm really mostly curious about what strategy means in your history, I suppose.
00:03:03
Speaker
I would say a lot of my time and and thought has been spent on that question over the years. Um, the we could go very, very far down this tangent.
00:03:17
Speaker
But what I will say is, I don't think it's uncommon for strategists who are working in an agency, regardless of the specialty of the agency, as soon as they have that word strategy attached to them, and their role, whatever that may be. And oftentimes, they start being called a strategist, even though their day to day work isn't changing a whole lot and then they have to figure out, well, what am I now? Right.
00:03:42
Speaker
um What I've learned over the years is that they're kind of levels or altitudes of of strategy. At least that's how I think about it. And it's not uncommon for strategists to um root into the information and expertise and resource around whatever their core function is in that moment and learn as much as they can about it. But at some point,
00:04:09
Speaker
They will, I guess I would use the word outgrow, let's say trend transcend and include ah ah another level of strategy that they exist within. Right. And so um all of a sudden, maybe they started out in like social or content or something, and then they start to realize that there's kind of a ah larger sphere of strategic choice that informs what happens in channel or or from a content perspective. And now they're starting to think about communications more broadly, maybe in a marketing context, maybe outside of that. And then as they learn and to navigate and apply that strategic function and and specialism in that domain, they become aware that they exist in even larger domains. So now they maybe start to zoom out and think, even bigger picture around what, what marketing strategy. And I mean that in a traditional four piece sense, like you think about somebody like a Michael Porter becoming very influential as you dig into what it means to apply, um marketing to business direction and decision-making around, um, you know product development and and growth in that context. And so I say all that to say that that in my experience, that's not an uncommon journey to go down is to become a strategist before you really have a complete concept of what strategy is. And then along the way, become more and more aware that it's really just a series of nested choices within an organization. Obviously for an agency, we're interfacing a service context at a certain altitude.
00:05:40
Speaker
um and think that's also the flip side of that is as you kind of awake to these bigger, these higher altitudes or or larger spheres, you also start to feel smaller within the one that you're in. And so I think you tend to want to apply higher level thinking because you realize that maybe there's a lack of clarity around the the choices or decisions that you are working in or that your client is working in. And you want to have greater influence or at least get better definition to inform how you apply strategy in your context.
00:06:13
Speaker
And it's not uncommon to realize that you don't have access you're You're too far away from the you know, the the capital M marketing strategy and the decisions that inform that. Your job is to help your team shut up in color, right? Your job is to help your team find that the pretty pictures and the nice sounding words that help sell an offering.
00:06:37
Speaker
So to put a pin in or to wrap this up, I would say, It's an expensive word. i don't really love the utilization. if I oftentimes find myself avoiding saying the word strategy because it is so hard for people to pin down. But at the end of the day, regardless of what level you're operating at, um and I do think like you can have a strategic approach at any of the altitudes I just described, but I think it has to entail some sort of decision-making
00:07:12
Speaker
Between multiple feasible options. That's based on some.
00:07:19
Speaker
Insightful understanding of the situation. And some. focus on what effect or what result you're looking to achieve. And that's universally applicable across all of those is I have a deeper understanding the situation, the context that we're in. I know what we're trying to accomplish. And I have multiple approaches that we could take to do that. And my informed choice is a over B through Z. Um,
00:07:47
Speaker
And then ideally, once that decision has been made, every nested strategy within that, every, as like Roger Martin would call it, a choice cascade, it falls out of that, is informed by that choice.
00:07:59
Speaker
That's how I think about strategy. When you pointed out that that, or when you said that, forgive me, I'm not going to get your phrasing correctly, but something like, making a decision is important to, it's a, it's a sign of strategy, if I can put it that way, but something along those lines, you reminded me of, I think it's Richard Rummelt who good strategy, bad strategy.
00:08:24
Speaker
Yep. That was the book that I was thinking of. And I, I could be wrong, but I think it was in one of his books where I recall first encountering someone saying, it's not strategy.
00:08:37
Speaker
If you're not He didn't put it this way, but it was something like, if you're not sort of going out into the unknown and making a decision about what to do, what direction to go. And I don't know if you intended that or not, but that was immediately what popped to mind was,
00:08:55
Speaker
i I remember reading whatever book it was. I remember thinking, I don't know that I've thought of strategy it as as like putting that stake in the ground.
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, it has to be a choice. And it's the hardest part. And honestly, I think that's why agency strategists struggle because oftentimes they're not really given um latitude to make a choice of any significant.
00:09:22
Speaker
um yeah like we're often seen as a means to an end, right? So we're helping to guide a team to deliver on what a client has ultimately bought, right?
00:09:36
Speaker
um And then that can be really hard. And I think that can make agency strategists struggle a lot. There's also the sense that um the role in an agency context for a strategist is to provide insight, but not prescribe a solution. And so there's even some ambiguity around to what extent a strategist gets to make the choice on behalf of their team, on behalf of um the the client's ah team or their or their work. I think about it this way. So um Roger Martin, I mentioned him already, but he he talks about strategy in the context of where to play, how to win. It's a pretty common um way to think about it at this point. But um what I try to do is frame it as this. So
00:10:21
Speaker
if a marketing strategy is about where to play and how to win in the market, i view an agency strategist role as taking that to the domain of psychology and thinking about where to play and how to win in the mind.
00:10:36
Speaker
But that still requires a choice because it means you're actively deciding what kind of perception you're trying to shift an audience towards, what kind of behavior you're trying to move an audience towards. and I think my biggest struggle and part of the reason why I've started to gravitate more outside the context of, of advertising or even marketing and really thinking more about organizations, um,
00:11:05
Speaker
is, you know, I i got frustrated with the the the sphere of influence that I felt somewhat stuck in, but also I would see inside these client organizations and I could see my counterparts within the organization in that same sphere, right? Kind of stuck in a way.
00:11:23
Speaker
um And the thing that... ties both you know the agency life and culture and experience to any broader organization and kind of connects the dots between the two is the tendency that i see for us to abstract um brands and businesses from brains and and behavior right so like we talk about quantitative metrics and we talk about finances on paper and we talk about lead volumes and we talk about, um you know, even like go to market plans as if they don't involve people at all.
00:12:03
Speaker
You know, and um the same thing I think is true for internal operational things when we talk about or or structures and in internal transformation initiatives. And um we we lay out all these plans. We put these numbers on paper. We model out these projections.
00:12:20
Speaker
And I don't think it's intentional, but it's just easier to math out the future that we think we want than to deal with the messiness of of neurons. Right. And so that's the thing that I think is.
00:12:32
Speaker
is most kind of captivating for me right now is trying to think about these complex systems, whether it's a market or within an organization in the context of of people who are probably gonna do what they are gonna do. And we have very little latitude to influence any sort of change there, but we that we have to be thinking about what's happening in their brain.
00:12:57
Speaker
Do you get in situations where, for example, a client perhaps is asking you for certainty about whatever the project is.
00:13:09
Speaker
And I don't know how you present it, but there's at least inside of you, if not in your words, perspective, thought of, well, can't guarantee what's going to happen. People are messy.
00:13:26
Speaker
The world is complex. But going with the idea as well of making a decision, well, the client is paying us for whatever it is, a website or a direct mail campaign or whatever you're working on. They're also expecting a certain kind of result.
00:13:45
Speaker
And so client, I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen. I can tell you that I'm attempting to make the decision that I believe will get you where you want to go. And so then, having described a very vague situation, do you find yourself getting into interactions with clients where they expect a commitment to a specific result rather than to, let's say, a plan of action?
00:14:17
Speaker
There's a few things there. There's fear and risk, and those relate really closely to the need for a level of confidence and and certainty.
00:14:29
Speaker
um but We could say a lot about that. But I also think there's a tendency to want to math out a plan so that we can say we have a plan to deliver the results we're looking for.
00:14:46
Speaker
and the way that that's so often approached is almost like you're, you're working with a contractor on a house that's going to be built, which even in that context, it feels pretty straightforward. Here's the plan.
00:14:59
Speaker
Here's the blueprints. I've got all the subcontractors lined up. Here's the sequence that we're going to be building this in. And things still happen. You know, you still encounter things. I mean, especially like if we're talking to like renovations, gosh, you never know what's inside the walls, right? Like, but What we often are doing is working in very large, complex, adaptive systems where there is no way to control these like a machine. There is no way to model out projections that are going to be accurate within a certain margin of error.
00:15:36
Speaker
Because at the end of the day, like... There are so many factors and variables at play and the instruments that we're utilizing are actually pretty weak. They're effective, but incrementally so.
00:15:49
Speaker
and And I think that's what a lot of people overlook. But I also think people just want to know that there's a plan and they want to hear you say it's going to work so they can check that off their list and move on to all the other things they have to do.
00:16:01
Speaker
um And that's another issue is we... we In our professional domains, we're so pressurized right now.
00:16:12
Speaker
um You know, when we think about fear of failure, we think about avoidance of risk and risk mitigation. I would love to talk more about placing bets, but even the the language around that carries with it this sense of gambling and risk that people really have a hard time with. I mean, I've been in conversations where people have said they don't like to call things problems, you know, and like what kind of culture and and and climate does that create if you.
00:16:44
Speaker
every answer has to be positive. I mean, like you're talking about toxic positivity in the workplace. i mean, I've i've seen the the reports where somebody has said, I need all these arrows to...
00:16:57
Speaker
to be up and to the right and green, no red, no bad numbers. you know like I've had people tell me I want this to be an aggregate accumulation metric so there's no downward trend line. It just always goes up because we're just totaling the volume. you know like What does that do for anybody?
00:17:13
Speaker
um So that that that's some of what comes up when you ask me about that is understanding where that fear and risk aversion comes from, understanding why people are so desperate for the competence that comes from a sense of certainty.
00:17:30
Speaker
um And that's not the kind of thing that that one person is going to talk you out of in a moment. That's that's ah a cultural shift where we have to start norming unknowns where we have to start calling out certainty as a as a fallacy.
00:17:47
Speaker
And we have to start thinking about how we can be creating space for creative bet placing and be talking about things in terms of where the trajectory that we want to head in um without necessarily being able to guarantee an outcome.
00:18:06
Speaker
And it's just going to take time. Some organizations are better at that than others. um And I think it has a lot to do with how long they've been around, what kind of business they're in. I think even just giving some language to what level of risk is appropriate at any given point in time.
00:18:21
Speaker
um I just read somewhere on LinkedIn I can't remember whose post it was. So I'm going to reference it without citing. ah But they were talking about decision rights and they were talking about um understanding the potential risk within any decision. And they talked about it in terms of hats, haircuts and tattoos in terms of like the degree to which the decision getting the decision wrong is going to have you know, outsized failure or relatively no consequence. You picked the wrong hat on a day. It's a day. It's a hat. You can take it off any point during the day. You get a bad haircut. You got to live with that for a few weeks, at least until your air grows back out, put a tattoo on. You don't like now you're in a situation where you're talking about spending a lot of money or just having regrets. So there's different scales of risk. And I think that needs to be acknowledged when we're having these conversations. I mean, sometimes, especially in our context, um,
00:19:16
Speaker
Failure fi feels really big and ominous, but I think that's also because we aren't being honest about how bad it would be if we failed, and maybe it wouldn't actually be that bad, and that makes us feel not as important as we want to feel.
00:19:30
Speaker
Yeah, I can think of so many times in my career where i have more or less run a test.
00:19:42
Speaker
You know, you have an A-B b split thing, whatever the channel is, whatever the thing is that you're doing, you have a test version of the thing. And in my experience, at least,
00:19:56
Speaker
I know in every one of those planning discussions, we were talking about, well, we think this is a good idea, but we don't know if it's going to work.
00:20:06
Speaker
So we're going to try it. We're going to test it. But in some large percentage of those post-talk, you know, after-action meetings, review meetings, someone, and I don't mean to, you know, talk badly of clients by any means, but, you know, at the end of the day, a client needs some form of results for their dollar.
00:20:32
Speaker
And so it is more often than not the pressure is coming from the client and not your client services team or whoever. Someone says, well, this was a failure.
00:20:44
Speaker
And maybe like that sort of how you placed the word strategy or described it, what we mean by...
00:20:55
Speaker
The word failure at that time is really important. Did this experiment fail? Did this test version fail? And did we learn something, you know, about what might we do next time?
00:21:08
Speaker
Or did it fail the implication being that it was a waste of time? Perhaps. Right. And as you're talking about that, I'm thinking back to so many times feeling like, why did we have to change our understanding of what we were trying to do from the planning discussion to the after action review?
00:21:31
Speaker
i So I love this. And this... This actually exposes what in my mind is one of the big contradictions that we have in corporate culture right now. So the thing that I find so fascinating is on one hand, you've got this sense of anxiety that emerges when you use the word experiment.
00:21:54
Speaker
Right. You talk about running an experiment and all of a sudden that sounds experimental. And clients, not even clients, you know, a lot of people in a professional context want that sense of certain certainty. and they they want to hear that what you're trying is a proven solution.
00:22:11
Speaker
Right. They want to know, does this adhere to best practice? the The challenge there is if everybody adheres to best practice, then no one has an advantage. You know, this is what people always talk about with the big four consulting firms, just selling the same solutions to everybody in a category because they're proven solutions. But if everybody in a category is following the same template, where's the diversification? Where's the advantage, right?
00:22:36
Speaker
um So you've got this aversion to the notion of experimentation, right? You've got this sense that we can't learn from failure. Failure is just the opposite of success. So that's bad.
00:22:48
Speaker
And yet what we want is for people to be thinking more scientifically about their jobs. And so they there's this trend towards being super rational and being very logical and wanting to see the evidence and wanting to see the numbers. And yet if you talk about what science actually would do in this situation,
00:23:10
Speaker
You know, that that sounds unproven. Or God forbid you do some sort of holdout test or do something where, you know, some region doesn't get ad spend or some department doesn't get the new thing that you're trying. And all of a sudden you're afraid somebody is going to complain. Well, we can't afford to have numbers go down anywhere.
00:23:31
Speaker
So even isolating variables um or or running a test that might cause, you know, subpar performance in one area is is a non-starter. And so it's just, it's funny because there's this sense that we want to be sure and certain We want proven solutions.
00:23:51
Speaker
We want to see hard evidence. And yet we don't want to run experiments. We do want to have innovation and advantage, which are not going to come from doing the things that everybody else is doing and has done a million times. We want to be efficient and innovative, which I think I just said on LinkedIn today is an oxymoron. There's no such thing as efficient innovation.
00:24:13
Speaker
And so there's just this this contradiction that we tend to exist in where we seem to want to have our cake and eat it too. um And it it comes up time and time again.
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah, agree. Completely agree with you. And at the risk of straying too far in the stream of consciousness, you know, I think we could, if we wanted to, opine on how this shows up in culture, you know, outside of just marketing or business, but in parenting or yeah what we expect of the education system, whatever it is that your children are going through. But I, I, I fear we risk getting into maybe too much.
00:25:01
Speaker
It's not confirmation bias, but, uh, just affirming one another's probably shared beliefs. So I'm going to, well, I have a thought on that if it's helpful.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah. So complexity is, is appropriately a very complex topic. If you've ever tried to like wade into complexity science, um it's, it's hotly debated, you know, like if you're not interested in these topics at all, it will, it will just sound like the most inane dialogue ever. But like, there are people who argue very vehemently about the nuanced differences between systems thinking and complexity science and like,
00:25:46
Speaker
It's just funny to me. But the thing that I find really fascinating is when you think about um the dimensions of any complex system, um the the different like levers and variables that could be dialed up or dialed down to change the level of complexity within a system.
00:26:04
Speaker
It's all about like the the relationship between whatever the agents within the system are, right? So how interdependent they are and connected and diverse. And what's interesting to me, and I was thinking about this um a few weeks ago as I was kind of like learning about some of this stuff.
00:26:23
Speaker
There's this assumption that when you dial all these up, when you dial up interdependence and the number of connections and the diversity within a a system, the adaptability of the agents within the system, you you think the level of complexity is just going to go up and up and up and up. But that's not what happens.
00:26:41
Speaker
Eventually, it reaches equilibrium and you kind of reach a more homogenous dynamic. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is the thought that came to me was that each of us as individuals play different roles in different contexts in our lives, right? So I am an employee of an organization.
00:27:02
Speaker
I'm a supervisor. I'm a coworker outside of a professional context. I'm a dad. I'm a son. I'm a brother. I'm a husband. um Socially, I live in a neighborhood. I have neighbors. you know i I go to a church. I'm in a church community. There's just you know there's a variety of different contexts where i have a role to play.
00:27:21
Speaker
And each one of those contexts is in and of itself a complex system, right? And what's crazy is i think if you rewind, you know, maybe a few decades, most of those systems and most people's lives had probably reached a point to where the level of complexity was rather low because there was a lot of homogeneity in the system, meaning um everybody in my neighborhood pretty much looks like me and we're very similar in our stage of life, socioeconomic status, etc. Everybody in my family mostly thinks how I think and believes what I believe. When I go to my church, we all think the same things. That's why we're here at a church together. Like in my job, we know what we do in our company. It's X, Y, and Z. The process is clear. We have best practices. We can pretty much do our jobs in our sleep.
00:28:13
Speaker
Politically, things were pretty black and white, pretty boring. All of that feels completely undone now. I mean, even as a parent, it feels like nobody knows the right way to parent anymore. And it's all up for debate. In a in a workplace context, everything is changing all the time. I don't care what industry you're in.
00:28:34
Speaker
i mean, especially now with AI, feels like it's undoing all of the things that were done even just a couple of years ago. But like I think it's really fatiguing. for individuals to be existing in all of these different contexts where you feel like you have no safe zone. You go back to this notion of certainty, like in what domain in your life do you feel like you have any certainty that like maybe sports?
00:29:01
Speaker
Because all you know, the only thing that's uncertain is what the outcome of the game is going to be or the match, you know, but by and large, you've got your tribe. You you kind of know the norms. But like, i think we We as individuals in society now just don't have that many places where we can truly decompress and settle into a known environment because so much is constantly shifting and changing. And I think that affects all of the things that we're talking about, whether it's in a professional context, in a workplace context, but also just in our everyday lives. And that shows up in work too. That makes people less willing to take risks because we're just running things
00:29:42
Speaker
tense and scared in every moment of every aspect of our lives, which is sad. It shouldn't be that way, but I feel like that's where we are. You said when you dial up, you know, innovation, interdependence, any number of things that you would think that, I forget what it was, was it that you would think that complexity goes up as well? So the the the four kind of variables, as I understand it, are again, with the relationships of the agents in a system, interdependence, meaning how much does each agent depend on another agent? um Connectedness, um meaning like how many connections one agent has to other agents in the system.
00:30:25
Speaker
um Diversity, meaning how different the agents are from one another and adaptability, meaning to what extent an agent has the ability to change itself in some way. um Oftentimes as a component of the interdependence. So if one agent is dependent on another and that agent changes, that's going to make this agent change, et cetera.
00:30:44
Speaker
So the the point is that you, I think there is ah an instinctive way of thinking about it, that if you increase the number of connections, if you increase the and interdependability, if you increase the diversity, if you increase all these things, this, the system is just going to get more and more and more and more complex because now everybody's connected and everybody's independent and we're all different. But what happens is those interdependence,
00:31:08
Speaker
interdependencies and the adaptability and the connections actually reduce the diversity because you start to become hit the meaning of like yeah everything starts to kind of norm out and and that's that's where I think people tend to feel comfortable because you're you're kind of just sitting in a nice warm bath and nothing's changed it feels great but obviously you don't have any of the positive elements that come from diversities in a complex system, the the change, the evolution, the innovation, all those things
00:31:47
Speaker
Are you familiar with a book called Non-Zero by Robert Wright? I think I heard him on the ah Partially Examined Life podcast at one point. More than likely, yes, because he wrote The Moral Animal. Yes. He wrote yep Why Buddhism is True. And there was another one that I'm blanking on. There are people who are very critical of his work. So I'm not saying by any means that everything that he has thought is correct, but You're reminding me of, in non-zero, the basis of the argument is that human
00:32:26
Speaker
activity is additive or less to whatever, whatever the scenario is, as two people interact, they create something that is greater than what the individuals had alone.
00:32:41
Speaker
And he talks about, you know, when you have a village that has some number of people, let's just say a hundred people in it, And there's another village that is a day's walk away that has a hundred people and you never interacted. Well, once you, once one person walks down a path for a day and gets to the other village, they get some information they didn't have before.
00:33:06
Speaker
And eventually, that, you know, when that information comes back, it adds to that village. And so now i forget who says it, forgive me for now bringing in another idea, but in the development between gross domestic product and, uh,
00:33:26
Speaker
Gross National Product and all of that, you know, canes, and I can't remember who else was involved in that stuff. One of the things that someone, I forget who it was, brought into the thinking was that, well, I think it was with Gross National Product maybe,
00:33:43
Speaker
you're not factoring in the value of things like ideas. right When you have an idea about how to build a you know some sort of structure, that has some value.
00:33:56
Speaker
But the thing is that when you build a second building, it adds to, it uses an existing idea to produce a new amount of a value above and beyond the individual components. And so.
00:34:14
Speaker
Right. Nobody starts from scratch. Robert Wright talks through, okay, you go from the village to eventually a world society or culture, which he doesn't, as I recall, go so far as to say, you know, we have one world culture, but I'm just going to way oversimplify here and say, okay, well, we're all on Facebook or X, or we're all watching the same Netflix shows or whatever it is.
00:34:39
Speaker
There is no monoculture. Exactly. Yes. And so you, when you're interacting with people from a different culture, I'm just going to keep going with that word, even though you could say people who are different from you or whatever. Sure.
00:34:54
Speaker
When you're acting, when you're interacting with people from a different culture, initially there is much more uncertainty because, you know, these people look different from me or they sound different. Do I know what to expect?
00:35:07
Speaker
And then even if they're not dangerous, then, you know, let's go back 10,000 years or whatever. but A stranger might very well have been dangerous, right? not Not so much today in many parts of the world, at least.
00:35:22
Speaker
that Even if they're not dangerous, there's just, you know, I don't even know if we can speak the same language because I heard that they speak some other language. And do I even want to deal with that?
00:35:34
Speaker
that problem, that challenge today? Or do I just want to avoid that person? Well, because of some interconnectedness, because of, you know, people moving around the globe or whatever else, we get exposed to, we have those interactions where for the first time I'm around someone who speaks Russian or whatever it happens to be that eats food that's different from me.
00:35:58
Speaker
But in the next generation, that person's children and my children are, have become accustomed to the different food from our different cultures or the different languages and, or our accents. And they begin to share those things. prep And it's, it's interesting because I remember when I read this, I thought about, I lived in Germany and at the time that I lived in Germany,
00:36:30
Speaker
i if you listen to the radio, there would be a German rock band or something. And then the very next song would be Eminem. And then the next song after that would be a techno song or whatever it was. yep And you had people who, you know, there were 60 year olds who...
00:36:51
Speaker
probably wanted to listen to some German folk music or something, but they were listening to the same radio station that the kids were listening to. And at least as far as I could tell in their behavior, there was no like, I don't want to listen to this. It was, that was the norm yeah for them. yeah And it, you know, i I remember thinking at the time that this must mean something, I guess, and which is probably a very juvenile or immature thing to say,
00:37:20
Speaker
but i I then started to, as I explored it in my immature way, I started to talk to people about why it is that in a country like Germany, there were still different parts of the country where people had very strong and very different accents.
00:37:42
Speaker
Whereas in the United States, yes, there's a Southern sort of accent or whatever, and or New Yorker sort of dialect. But for the most part, you can understand everyone. The differences in the way that people speak and in their food or the media that they watch is it's almost, but there are almost no differences.
00:38:05
Speaker
And I thought that, well, part of it is that we have had national radio and then national TV. We've had this national media and eventually, ah you know, with social media or whatever, a community of sorts.
00:38:20
Speaker
for so much longer. So the next generation that comes up, it's no longer, oh, I'm watching TV from some other group. It's like, that's their station, not my station. yeah But rather, it's,
00:38:36
Speaker
their kids and my kids grew up on the same diet. And whereas in Germany, this was a country that had national media so much later than the United States.
00:38:48
Speaker
And so they hadn't gone through that generational change. And you're as you were talking about that, I was thinking, So the there is this additive nature of building connections and and going through a change, I guess, feels like things are moving off in ah a direction, a path that things are are getting worse. They're pulling apart. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what to expect.
00:39:21
Speaker
When I'm sure that this is not 100% the case, but if I'm hearing you correctly, it's, it sounds like you're saying generally what occurs after that is actually a what was two communities becomes one bigger, less complicated community. Is that right?
00:39:47
Speaker
It could. and so gosh, there's a few really good things to build off there. So let let me go back to what you were talking about with ah Robert Wright and the villages, because what what I find really fascinating about this, and um i dug into this with a friend of mine in conversation a while ago, but... um There's this sort of oscillation that can happen at a social level, but it um it happens all the way down to a cellular level and even like evolutionarily where you have competition between independent agents, whether it's like amino acids or like cells or people.
00:40:28
Speaker
But at some point, a connection gets made. And something new gets created from that connection. And almost inevitably, in any context, that new thing needs to be protected from all the other things.
00:40:43
Speaker
And so you start to see this pattern of unique, independent things competing, connecting, converging, and creating something new that then has to compete in that context.
00:40:56
Speaker
And so there's this pendulum swing between a generative connectivity and coming together and then it did a bit of visionary protectiveness, right? Now that we have the new thing that we are a part of together, we have to be protected from everything else that threaten threatens us until almost inevitably we connect with them and create an even bigger thing that now has to be protected from all the other big things, right? And then, and so on and so forth.
00:41:24
Speaker
And I think that, um We're in a moment right now where that protective instinct is very strong. I think what you're discussing with the fragmentation of culture is a rare instance of division in a millennia-long pattern of convergence.
00:41:47
Speaker
Because what I think has happened is your example in Germany, where you have communities that are largely localized by geography, we're now relocalizing by affinity.
00:41:59
Speaker
So our online culture has essentially taken what you're talking about when with more of a monoculture in the States, when you go back to like broadcast communications, now those are all fragmented up and targeted around the things that you are interested in or that you a align with or that you identify with. And so instead of having close-knit communities. I mean, we still obviously do have close-knit communities geographically. Like I already mentioned, the neighborhood that I live in, you go out to rural communities and by and large, there's still a fabric there. But more and more, we're part of a community online of people who are in some way, shape or form similar to us and are therefore exposed to very, you talk about bubbles all the time. um
00:42:43
Speaker
In my work, I don't really love to talk about brand because I think it just makes you sound pretentious, but For me, that that's just a shorthand way to talk about the construct that somebody has in their mind of a thing.
00:42:58
Speaker
um An offering that a business provides the the persona of a celebrity. i don't care what you want to call it, but it's basically like I have this mental model of or construct of what i how I perceive a thing.
00:43:15
Speaker
And for a long time, we had pretty consistent concepts of the macro brands and culture. And I think what's interesting now is as brands tend to move towards this fragmented model of communication,
00:43:33
Speaker
we can experience them pretty differently. um You know, the thing that I have always been down on when it comes to digital media, for instance, is that it's not a shared experience. I have no context for how big or small a brand is because I don't know if anybody else is seeing the ad that I'm seeing. I don't know if they're getting the email that I'm getting. So there's no fame building device there because I'm not witnessing this communication in the presence of others, right?
00:43:59
Speaker
Right. If I'm driving down the road and I see a billboard, I know everybody else is seeing that same billboard, right? It used to be when you watched the Super Bowl and saw a spot, you could be pretty sure that everybody else in the country, if not the world, was seeing the same spot. We got the World Cup coming to the States next year. I'm working with clients as to what we're going to do around the World Cup. And one of the things that I find really interesting is the ad experience in that broadcast across the tournament is going to be very individualized, you know, and it's just not to go down an advertising path, but I think as we think about the ways that we are othering people who aren't like us in society combined with a fragmentation of who we identify with and what we identify with,
00:44:47
Speaker
I think you're starting to see these constructs, these mental models of, you know, what a Democrat is versus what a Republican is, right? Or what an American is versus any other nationality, what an immigrant is.
00:45:01
Speaker
is largely going to differ in ways that maybe never has before because the way that we're experiencing these things is so unique to how we interact online and who we interact with and how the communication is being tailored and targeted.
00:45:21
Speaker
um And so that can be really scary. Because there's a lot of social ramifications that I think we're in the midst of experiencing the consequences around.
00:45:33
Speaker
But it can also be really exciting because there's never been a time where media is more democratized in some ways. Um, I think it's also very monopolized in some ways, but, you know, here we are recording, uh, content that will be made available to the public in a way that you never used to be able to do, you know? And so, um You know, as as always the case, there's trade-offs. But I just find that sense of like, we're in a very divisionary moment right now. And we're in a very protectionist moment right now. And as I tend to think about these things in cycles, I'm hopeful that um we get back to the connectivity and the generative evolutionary part of it before we kill ourselves.
00:46:22
Speaker
Earlier, you, think, used the phrase transcend and include. That's a Wilburism. Yeah. Okay. Yes. So ah tell me what you think about this.
00:46:36
Speaker
I think that we, if you think of different aspects of your life as being one depending upon another, perhaps, you know, your sense of identity relies upon at at a very deep level, maybe there's some sort of biological sense of, you know, you being male or whatever it happens to be.
00:47:02
Speaker
And you go up from there and...
00:47:07
Speaker
historically, you know, and still for a lot of people, fairly low down, you know, one of these more foundational layers tends to be some sort of religious identity. And somewhere in there might be ethnic or, you know, related to ethnic perhaps is language or whatever else.
00:47:26
Speaker
i well what I would like your opinion on is I think that over time we have chipped away at some of these layers, some, some of the more foundational layers.
00:47:42
Speaker
And so I, are you familiar with the idea of pace layers? Yeah. Okay. So let's use that as a, you're just very basic structure.
00:47:55
Speaker
So if, if a very foundational layer in your life, your sense of identity or whatever is religion, And then we raise you in such a way or you change in such a way that you actually get away from any conscious belief that religion is important.
00:48:18
Speaker
Well, a layer that's going to sit higher than that is some type of politics, you know, group identity or any number of other things. I'm just going to put it as, you know, religion and then politics above that.
00:48:34
Speaker
Sure. e If you believe that, you know, no faith system of any kind, it could be, you know, some so secular beliefs. Sure.
00:48:47
Speaker
ah If you believe that those are not important, I think that you will begin to treat the layers that used to sit upon that as your religion, more or less.
00:49:00
Speaker
And I believe that this is why we have greater sort of we have greater division, but also identification with division around and identification with political beliefs.
00:49:15
Speaker
It's like me being a Democrat or Republican or whatever it is, is today just as important to my sense of identity as being a Catholic or Jew or whatever it was, maybe 50 or 70 years ago.
00:49:31
Speaker
And so as you're talking about greater division in certain areas. What I'm thinking is there is this way in which we are more divided, but there's another layer of life, it or I'm going to call it life, the world, in which We're all experiencing the same thing. We're all the same in going through this.
00:49:56
Speaker
And when we weren't all connected, you know, when one village was not connected to another, a village could be going through this kind of division or change, but the next village over wasn't.
00:50:07
Speaker
Whereas now in these two villages that I'm making up, everybody in the village is going through division. And that's some of what makes us the same. That is some of the homogeneity that I think I was hearing from you.
00:50:27
Speaker
But then when you talk about division, i think I'm also thinking like the pace layers aspect of it. We're chipping away. We're getting rid of one of these foundational layers. I think part of that is that people wear these things a little differently at different moments of their lives.
00:50:46
Speaker
And sometimes they never even reach those moments. What I mean is, um you know, in the same way that I talked about people maybe having different mental constructs of a brand based on their experience, right? Like um I went and...
00:51:02
Speaker
ate at a restaurant and had a great dinner. You went and your steak was undercooked. And now all of a sudden we think about that restaurant in two very different ways. Right.
00:51:12
Speaker
But going into that restaurant, also said something about us, right? And maybe to a certain extent, like it's a CNBC type of place. And so by dining there, you feel like that conveys some sort of status or, you know, whatever social um signaling,
00:51:32
Speaker
just by being there, right? By patronizing that restaurant. And so I think about brands, I can't remember where I picked this up, was not my original idea, but as kind of bird's nests of experience that people assemble when they have an experience with a business and its offering, they kind of start to come cobble together this idea of the business and its offering as a brand.
00:51:55
Speaker
I think we do that with our own identities. And we we talk about things like, um political affiliation or religion, i do think a lot of people just pull those things into their bird's nest.
00:52:10
Speaker
And so these are quick little shortcuts that they can use to tell you who they are. Right. So there is much symbols of how they understand their own identity as they are anything else.
00:52:24
Speaker
However, you would think that political affiliation and religion being what they are would have much more substantive implications for people because they're organizing ideas about how you see the world, how you want to live in society, what policies should be, et cetera, right?
00:52:43
Speaker
I just don't know how many people Actively operate at that level where these are components of their operating system, where they are making decisions day in and day out, understanding the dynamics of their community, their world through the lens and the context of what party they belong to or, you know, what house of worship they go to if they go to one at all.
00:53:07
Speaker
And so I think what you're talking about is sometimes that pace layer gets knocked out when people are confronted with the bobble in their bird's nest actually needing to be a lens through which they see the world and it starts to fall apart. And all of a sudden they don't have that anymore. They've got a missing piece in the operating system.
00:53:23
Speaker
And that's when they start to have some of those cascading faults. And mean, you see this in religious context a lot there for a while, um, in kind of online Christianity, it was really popular for um former evangelicals to go through what they termed deconstruction of their faith, which was essentially a process by which they would critically assess the foundational components of what they had always adhered to and start to realize that certain pieces of that just weren't working for them anymore. And the whole house of cards would begin to fall down. And then they were left to kind of
00:53:55
Speaker
reassemble what faith would look like to them, if it at all. And a lot of them never return, you know? um And so I think you can have that, like this is such a terrible example on the heels of that, but even just like what a lot of people on the far right went through with QAnon. I mean, QAnon was almost like a mainstream thing on the right to the point where like everybody probably had an aunt or an uncle that had like dipped their toes in some aspect that conspiracy. And now nobody talks about it, right? Because it was such such a ah like failure to launch when all of the things that were supposed to happen never actually happened. i mean, we just, we forget about that, but yeah,
00:54:34
Speaker
That was a house of cards that came falling apart. And, you know, they've they've moved on to replace those components with other things. But i I do think you're right that people tend to have a hard time when they really take a hard look at some of these foundational components of their identity and the implications that they are meant to have for the decisions that they make in their lives.
00:55:00
Speaker
When you confront the reality of them, they become really inconvenient. And the contradiction can be hard. The dissonance can be hard. um And organizations go through this too. I mean, we do this individually. We do this collectively. And this is like, these are the soul searching moments. These are the, you know, dark nights of the soul. These are the the things where you have big decisions to make. um And I think a lot of people are going through that right now, which can be a good thing. You know, it's like the...
00:55:33
Speaker
the what one of my favorite things it's such a cliche thing to talk about but um i still find it so fascinating when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly in the middle of that transformation in a chrysalis it's just goo which i think is so like it completely um just undoes itself and then redoes itself into something totally different, which is why it's such a compelling symbol of transformation. But nobody really talks about the, like, I'm in the goo moment right now, but um you go through goo sometimes.
00:56:08
Speaker
As we were talking about earlier, people wanting certainty. You know, you don't want what you, what you think of as being an experiment, you think of as being bad, perhaps not you, Steve, but somebody else, right?
00:56:23
Speaker
The, the, you know, the account manager, the client, whatever, not to speak ill of, of any of our colleagues or clients or whatever, but you know, this, this straw man that I'm setting up, what you think of as an experiment, you think of as being bad and you want certainty. You don't want experiments.
00:56:45
Speaker
It, it strikes me that if we could go back to a time, decades in the past, perhaps maybe a century in the past,
00:57:01
Speaker
When, when someone says, well, why I'm not paying you to run an experiment. I'm paying you for results, you know, leads, revenue, whatever it is. Yep.
00:57:15
Speaker
It seems like I'm putting pieces together here at the moment. I'm i'm wondering if we might say that I could fall back on a more foundational explanation for the reason to run an experiment, which might be Not that in your industry, this is the way that we go about marketing or innovation or whatever, as much as this is just the way that innovation is done, or this is the scientific process.
00:57:46
Speaker
This is, you know, empiricism or whatever I want to characterize it as. And so
00:57:56
Speaker
you know, when when scientific management, let's say, came around, and we can have plenty of criticisms of scientific management, yep but in terms of generating efficiency, you know, for a long time, that produced a lot of profit, you know, gains a lot of value for a time.
00:58:16
Speaker
And I'm, I happen to be critical of it at the moment, but we could get into why later maybe, but I forget the book and all that I think it was called scientific management and was the guy, Frederick Taylor.
00:58:27
Speaker
There we go. Frederick Taylor. now He wrote that book in, was it 1912 or something? It was the early 1900s. And you know, for the next 30 years, perhaps,
00:58:40
Speaker
if you worked for ford or you worked for some other business that existed and somebody said well why are you rearranging our org chart in this way you wouldn't say well because that's how we do it in this industry you would say because that's how you do management or that's how you do org charts And that is, at least in the way that I'm thinking about it, broader.
00:59:06
Speaker
i was i was saying more foundational ah just a minute ago. and But 50 years later, when somebody says, why are you organizing the business in this way? You would say, because that's how we do it in automotive.
00:59:23
Speaker
Or that's how we do it, not in automotive, that's how we do it in electric car companies. And
00:59:32
Speaker
The certainty that i think i maybe I start to rely upon is anchored at a much higher level, a much higher pace layer, perhaps.
00:59:43
Speaker
And asking me to go down to a deeper level of this is just how scientific management is done. For example, this is just how management is done.
00:59:55
Speaker
asks me to draw on a deeper understanding or a open maybe a broader understanding, i'm I'm lacking for words at the moment, that is simply perhaps too complex. It it requires too much time and too much thinking.
01:00:13
Speaker
and And if I was to go deeper, then maybe like you were describing in your own journey, where you're at in your career, It might open me up to too many questions about why do we do it like this?
01:00:26
Speaker
And how does what we do in our industry relate to other industries? And what does that say about us? And so on. I don't know that I have a question here. It's just, I feel like it ties back to what we were saying earlier.
01:00:37
Speaker
it It makes me want to go to two different people, ah Chris Argyris and Plato. So i'll I'll do Plato first. I encounter this all the time. So you're familiar with shadows, cave, the whole notion that for the most part, we're not existing, experiencing reality. We exist in this dynamic where we're only seeing shadows cast on the table. All right.
01:01:00
Speaker
I am always the guy trying to get people out of the cave. And what I've found really fascinating is The assumption is that people don't realize that the shadows aren't real, aren't reality, that they don't know that they're in a cave, that they don't know that the the whole real world is outside.
01:01:21
Speaker
What I tend to experience is people saying, Steve, we know the world's out there. We know these are just shadows on the wall, but we're, we're sitting, we're tied up facing this direction. Can we just talk about these shadows?
01:01:33
Speaker
Like we've got to get the work done with the shadow, Steve. We aren't going outside of the cave. Yeah, we know what's out there. We'd love to be out there, but we're not out there. We're here with the shadows. So i like that is a very common experience that I have. and um And that could be in any context. It's just like it is inconvenient for people to like be pulled away from the immediate context and their responsibilities. And you any effort you try to contextualize it in a bigger Zoom out, you know, and we can go to the marketing thing. We can go to the experiment thing. Think about what an advertising experiment is. You're actively trying to determine which of two or more ways of letting people know about the value being offered is most effective in them accessing that value.
01:02:22
Speaker
We're not talking about the value that's being offered. We're talking about letting people know about the value that's offered so that we can incrementally influence some percentage of them that wouldn't have otherwise accessed that value to do so, which is kind of nuts if you think about it. It's like just like an extension of an extension of the actual thing that that business is about. But we treat it as if it's this weighty thing when you could probably make much more incrementally valuable changes just by focusing on how you are creating the valuable and making it available, the the value making it available.
01:02:56
Speaker
and And that's the thing that I find really frustrating sometimes is that marketers, and I feel I have so much empathy for my clients at times because they are charged with marketing a product that has not really been oriented to the market or at least not reoriented in any recent timeframe, right? Like,
01:03:18
Speaker
Why do we make this thing that we're trying to sell? i don't know. We were already making it and then we just made a different version for another segment of the market. So we need you to get out there and sell it. We need leads to the sales team. thing and And like, we're not actively talking about whether the market wanted this thing or if it could be improved to, you know, solve a new problem. So that's the, that's the world outside the cave.
01:03:41
Speaker
And the AB tests are the shadows on the wall. And people are just like, we we just got to deal with these shadows, you know? So that's what's frustrating. And it goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning with like the the altitudes, right? It's like desperately just trying to get to the bigger picture and say like, well, it what if what if the the product is poorly designed?
01:04:00
Speaker
What if it's too expensive? What if we're we're charging too much for the value it creates? What if there are additional value adds that we haven't explored? Those are the conversations. Because if you have those conversations, everything cascades really cleanly.
01:04:14
Speaker
Everybody starts to understand what it is we're trying to do for who we're trying to do it. what the unique way that we're creating that value um is or like what's unique about the value. And then everything else starts to make sense. Like, oh, got it. So this segment of the market has this unique problem for which we've created a unique solution. And our job is just to make sure they know about it and that they're willing to pay for it and they can get their hands on it.
01:04:37
Speaker
And we're all aligned. And then there's not so much weight on these little things that are kind of divorced from the the heart of of the business. I go to Arduous because...
01:04:49
Speaker
his whole concept of single loop and double loop gets to this in my opinion, right? Because the the notion is that, and this gets to the orchard thing too, in scientific management, because,
01:05:00
Speaker
we have been so conditioned to be managed. We have been so conditioned to be organized that we have been trained in single loops. And if you're not familiar with the concept, it's basically that like the the things that are very linear, linear so sequential, repeatable processes that can be optimized are essentially recipes or formulas that we follow. And this is what makes jobs easy to do,
01:05:26
Speaker
Because there are predictable, repeatable steps. As soon as you introduce complexity variable variables, things that can start to unravel that linear sequence or process, people get really anxious and overwhelmed.
01:05:43
Speaker
And, you know, I spend a lot of time looking at organizations that are moving in more of a self-organized context and moving towards a model that pushes a lot of autonomy to teams to to organize themselves in whatever way they see fit in order to create value at the periphery of an organization.
01:06:01
Speaker
I think people have a hard time with this for two reasons. One is leadership doesn't think that their teams are capable of it. They think if I let my team self-organize, they want they're going to look at me with your headlights. Well, maybe that's because they've lived their entire lives being organized.
01:06:15
Speaker
Maybe that's because they've been managed. We haven't trained people how to be completely comfortable with the double loop that Ardress talks about, with the ability to have a critical approach to navigating, you know, nonlinear problems without proven solutions. So we have to be creative in the ways that we approach them. And we have to do it in collaboration where roles maybe aren't defined, where decision rights haven't necessarily been outlined.
01:06:45
Speaker
And I just think the tendency is to think people aren't capable of it. I think the reality is people haven't been allowed to do it. They've been trained literally since we were in school.
01:06:58
Speaker
To sit in a classroom, listen to the teacher, get assigned work, complete the work, turn it in and get good grades. And that is how most people think about their jobs.
01:07:09
Speaker
So yeah, if you back up and say, you guys figure out what needs to get done. Figure it out amongst yourselves. what's What's crazy is kids are actually really good at that.
01:07:20
Speaker
Even in in the modern classroom context, like you throw a bunch of kids together and say, here's the problem. What do you guys think? Have at it. Kids don't have that that anxiety, that fear that that adults do that are conditioned to, and Argyris talks about this too. So he's got, he talks about theories of use and he basically says like, we all bring these assumptions into our everyday contexts and they can be individual, but they're oftentimes shared within the organization. Like we default to these truths that we haven't even articulated. So the most common ones he talks about is like the tendency that people want to always have control, that they want to be,
01:07:59
Speaker
successful, like no matter what we we should be winning and never losing. So to your point earlier, like failure is not an option, right? We always want success metrics, needles, charts are always going up to the right. We want to feel bad about ourselves or our colleagues. So like from a performance review context, like we don't want to hear any negative feedback. We don't want hear about what what went wrong.
01:08:20
Speaker
And to the point that we brought up earlier, like everything should be logical and rational. And we want to try try to math things out because we feel like that provides us the certainty that we're so hoping for.
01:08:33
Speaker
And so, yeah, that we are conditioned for rigidity and we are not, we have not been trained in fluidity. And I think that it's really inhibited not even our ability to transition the ways that we work together, but even just convincing organizations to provide their people the opportunity to do it.
01:08:55
Speaker
And so everybody's just sitting there like, guys, we got to deal with these shadows. This is the shadows are what we've been getting. This is our scope is the cave wall right here. at the risk of seeming quite odd, I'm going to tie your LinkedIn profile to the band Kiss.
01:09:12
Speaker
Okay. And so you have this Buckminster Fuller quote on your profile, and i'm I'm looking over here, is to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
01:09:26
Speaker
And
01:09:29
Speaker
the the band Kiss. Now, I forget where I encountered this, but I remember someone saying that as a thing, ah a practice, an art, whatever it is, becomes more developed and you've eked out as much profit or gains or whatever as you could do, obviously do.
01:09:57
Speaker
you know, without a lot of thinking or a lot of work, or a lot of creativity, the likelihood that someone begins to add things that are extraneous and are basically just decorations goes up.
01:10:11
Speaker
And I forget when I encountered this idea, if the person was talking about the band Kiss, but I thought about the band Kiss because you have this makeup, which adds nothing to the music itself. Now, maybe it adds to the experience when you're watching them. Yeah.
01:10:29
Speaker
And you could think of any other musician. I think you could think of plenty other art forms, but think of whatever for you is you're looking at it and going, why are they doing all that stuff? It's not adding to their rock, their rap, their whatever it is. It's just you know, like it's an NFL player who is being loud and boisterous or they're doing the celebration dance that actually adds nothing to the game. Now, maybe it adds to your entertainment experience, but it doesn't make them a better player.
01:11:05
Speaker
And that this person was saying, you begin to do this because you don't know how to actually get better at your art. And you're trying to look like you're better or different. Just adding ornaments.
01:11:20
Speaker
Yes. And so you have this Buckminster Fuller quote, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And I'm thinking about you saying, which I agree with you, that i think you're saying that more and more over time, more people are ingrained in or entrenched in being comfortable with, you know, could I, am I actually tied up in this cave or do I just choose to stay here?
01:11:54
Speaker
You know, am I actually limited by you know, some sort of understanding of what we're supposed to do with the client? Or can I ask questions?
01:12:07
Speaker
It doesn't matter whether I'm actually limited or not. I think I hear you saying more and more, we just say, let's just not try anything new. and as And so I think maybe what I'm adding here or what what I'm asking you about is,
01:12:24
Speaker
A lot of the things that we try that are new are just decorations and they're not actually adding to the performance or adding to the value. It's just like flashy things like look over here or trends.
01:12:39
Speaker
And at the end of the day, as as entertaining as those things might be, maybe they're not actually building a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
01:12:51
Speaker
So I think you're right. But here's a couple of things I'll throw out there. um You familiar with ah the Maya principle?
01:13:02
Speaker
So it's the most advanced it yet accessible or ah acceptable. But basically, it's this notion that like, in order to get people to adopt any new innovation, there's a threshold that you can't cross.
01:13:21
Speaker
Essentially, it it can't be so weird as to be alien. There has to be a balance of familiarity and novelty. right Right. I tend to think that true creativity is far more rare than what most people realize. I mean, a lot of times what is ultimately happening is some kind of remixing.
01:13:41
Speaker
um You know, Go back to Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. um But I do think there are novel combinations of things. I would actually say this. I think that creativity is not just about novelty, getting back to the notion of decorations. I think that is novelty and expression. I think that's important.
01:14:01
Speaker
If you would to asked me this 10 years ago, I probably would have not said that, which is funny because I was doing probably more creative things earlier in my life than I am now. But I think expression is really important.
01:14:15
Speaker
I think one of the things that we overlook especially in our professional context, is spirit. And I don't mean that in a religious sense ah or ah you know ah a God sense from a holiness. thing I just mean like whatever you consider to be the animating energy that moves the bag of bones and meat that is you through your life, right?
01:14:43
Speaker
And I think you can have a novel combination of things But if it's not expressing something, it's not really bringing forth something new. It's just like a Rubik's Cube where things have been rearranged.
01:15:01
Speaker
And so in a weird way, if you take KISS, a band that I never got into, by the way, the thing that they had was an expression So even if the music itself wasn't especially remarkable, and I personally don't think it was, but you guys can at me for that later.
01:15:21
Speaker
I think what they brought was just another dimension of expression that created something new in the musical canon. Even if their music itself wasn't groundbreaking, their contribution to what a rock band was,
01:15:39
Speaker
What was something new and different? I mean, like theyre the performative side of experiencing music, the um kind of fame building elements of being dressed up with makeup. I mean, there's so many bands now that have that as a key component of how they um express themselves in their music. So coming back to workplace culture,
01:16:07
Speaker
I think expression is really powerful. I think just to go really inside baseball from an agency strategy standpoint, I think the best strategists put a little bit of themselves in a brief.
01:16:21
Speaker
um I'm always trying to push clients to be like live up to what I see as the potential of their organization and the value they can create largely in a way that my spirit can connect to that I think is like additive in terms of value for the world.
01:16:40
Speaker
So that gets me into trouble because once again, I'm trying to get them out of the cave. um and the And the cave thing with Plato is so brilliant because like, and i don't even know if he meant to have this sort of like duality of meaning, but like the cave is safe, you know, it's, it's warm, it's safe. The the danger is largely outside.
01:17:00
Speaker
so People aren't necessarily motivated to get out of the cave. And ah it's scary, but like that's where the that's where the creativity is. You know, that's where um you can interact with a much larger and diverse ecosystem, combine and recombine all of those things that may not be new under the sun, but haven't been connected in a way. And you doing it includes a different expression than me doing it.
01:17:27
Speaker
If you combine things in a novel way, and I was over here combining things in a novel way, they wouldn't necessarily be the same thing because they would be expressed differently. And I think that is really important.
01:17:39
Speaker
The point about expression feels to me like it's highly or closely related to... a decision being a sign of strategy or important to strategy.
01:17:55
Speaker
And I don't know that it's the same thing necessarily, but it it feels to me like if you just took a bunch of activities and said to a client, well, we could do this.
01:18:09
Speaker
And There was no why behind it, except perhaps something very basic, like, well, you paid us some money to do marketing. Yeah, right. Then you you'd have some activity, some action, you'd have some numbers, but...
01:18:29
Speaker
that you you would, it'd be sort of like stumbling blindly towards a potential new, better way when you could have a hypothesis, perhaps, and you could test against that hypothesis. And somebody says, well, why did you choose to do this hyper-targeted media at this time in this market, whatever it is?
01:18:55
Speaker
And your And the way that I, if I can try and tie these things together, hopefully I'm not abusing language too much. the The way that it's expressed, the expression is dependent upon a decision. The decision being that I believe I have decided that this is the best way to use that that money that you're going to pay us, that this is the best way to accomplish your goals.
01:19:27
Speaker
Yeah. There's this assumption that an i idea for the right thing to do comes from the experimentation and the testing.
01:19:40
Speaker
But that's not true. You test once you have the idea. i mean, people don't realize this, but like scientists are some of the most creative people we've ever had in the history of humanity because they actually come up with the novel ideas. It's just that they then go through the rigorous process of making sure the ideas are good and work.
01:20:04
Speaker
we just got into this weird dynamic where we divorced the two practices. And over here, we've got people who are creative and come up with wild and crazy, cool ideas and don't want to know if they actually work. They just want to live in the vibes world. And then over here, you have people who are just full on optimization of what we're already doing.
01:20:24
Speaker
and And for incremental gains, we're just going to take the things that are working and make them work better. And so it like, the fact that those two modes of thinking have been separated when in the pure spirit of science that like they are, you know, part and parcel of the scientific method, like it's kind of crazy to me. I mean, I said earlier, most of what we think of as creativity isn't really, but And the marketing and advertising world, it's even worse because like we literally call the ads themselves the creative, which is terrible.
01:21:03
Speaker
ah We have a department that is the creative department as if they have a monopoly on creativity. um Most of the time, most of the work that we're doing is more or less paint by numbers.
01:21:16
Speaker
There's not real... novelty coming out of it. I mean, like it or not, a lot of the ads that get produced in some way, shape or form are informed by other ads that we've seen, you know? um So i don't think that creative people are often as creative as they think they are.
01:21:35
Speaker
And I think that the people who tend to be more quantitatively and optimization minded have way more creative potential then they exercise because they're so accustomed to thinking that the job is to take what we know works and improve its performance rather than say, what if we tried x y and Z?
01:21:59
Speaker
That's an interesting idea. How could we test that? What would we need to do in order to validate it? You know, to borrow another Roger Martinism, like what would have to be true in order for us to to buy into that approach? And Roger Martin, I love, as is evidenced by the number of times I've referenced him, because he talks about strategy as a largely and primarily creative exercise because you're starting with an intuitive approach.
01:22:26
Speaker
inkling of what might be the best way forward. And then you go about the effort of trying to validate and get to a point of confidence. It doesn't start with what is the thing you would be most confident in doing? And then what's the absolute best we could do it?
01:22:41
Speaker
Because the gains between those two approaches are exponentially different. You're talking about 10X versus 10%, you know? The problem is nobody wants to take the 10X unless, that was the one, by the way, just side note, that was the one beautiful thing about the startup boom that happened, you know, around a decade ago and has largely tailed off now that most of the VC funding for it has dried up. But just the the mindset,
01:23:10
Speaker
of, of that was so great because there was this sense that you could try anything, you know? Um, and I think we're in a season now, unfortunately, where the, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, where what people are willing to try is going to be less and less.
01:23:29
Speaker
Did you come up with the term fear? Oh, S Uh, i mean, I didn't, I didn't take it from anywhere. I can't claim to be the first person to ever use it, but yeah, that was when I was writing about Ardress, I was thinking about it in terms of like this in implied unspoken subconscious operating system that drives a lot of organizations. It's just this like foundation of fear, which gives rise to all these other things.
01:24:00
Speaker
And It was a while back, I think, that I recall you writing about this, but you you spoke to it there a bit. and I think there's been a ah thread that someone could likely pull out of our conversation that makes us fairly obvious, but just to state it or or maybe restate it Your idea was, that is that There is a a common set of behavior, perhaps. There's a culture.
01:24:35
Speaker
There are high priorities or motivating factors within a number of organizations, maybe a lot, maybe the majority of organizations, that it is fear-driven.
01:24:49
Speaker
You know, we we are going to make decisions to hit the quarterly numbers or whatever it is, not because we believe there's a better potential future, not because we have a vision for the future, or i don't know what the alternative necessarily to a fear OS might be, but let's call it vision OS or love OS, or I don't know what.
01:25:12
Speaker
It's not because we think the future could be better, but rather because we're just trying to stop the future from being worse than today. And so I guess the question is, am I...
01:25:26
Speaker
Am i either recalling your idea correctly or maybe tying it into some of the things you've said properly? Yes, 100%. I think the one dimension that we haven't touched on that's a big driver of this is the competitive context meeting shareholder capitalism.
01:25:52
Speaker
that generates the external pressures that both drive short-termism and just general impatience for results and needing evidence of results.
01:26:05
Speaker
Um, and that just cascades down through organizations. So there's this permeating sense that whatever I do, i can't do something wrong. I mean, this goes all the way to the saying, like nobody ever got fired for hiring insert IBM, insert McKinsey, but like,
01:26:26
Speaker
We go back to the notion these best practices because it feels like the safe move, because that's the only thing you feel like you can afford to do is the safe move. And we've talked a lot about testing and experimentation.
01:26:38
Speaker
you know, for a long time, there was this notion of failing fast and startup culture. um ah Even within organizational design communities, you talk about safe to fail experiments.
01:26:51
Speaker
I think you can collectively get buy-in on those at times, but individually, I think it's really hard ah for individuals to feel like they can step outside of what is a pressurized culture and context. So,
01:27:03
Speaker
it's safer to stick to the linear sequential this is how i do my job these steps are proven this recipe i know this recipe works um and not take risks individually let alone collectively you know given where we're at in we're recording this in early october 2025
01:27:28
Speaker
Do you, what's your opinion, your stance, your prediction of the future, maybe on AI and some of the things that we've talked about? Like, do you see generally or in certain pockets that,
01:27:43
Speaker
some type of generative AI or technology change, changing the creative process, not just, you know, design or whatever, but strategy, creative thinking. Do you do you think that AI and the changes in technology are making more people fearful and less willing to take risks?
01:28:06
Speaker
Do you, I guess I'm asking you to predict the future as much as I'm asking your opinion on today. Well, am i it ties into a lot of what we have already talked about. um I think you can ballot balance the potential for AI on a knife's edge.
01:28:23
Speaker
And the precarity of that is is like really overwhelming, I think, for for a lot of people. But the the places that I see it coming into play, I think you're already seeing this tendency towards efficiency gains from the top down of organizations where they are seeing it as a mechanism to maximize margin by reducing costs and increasing speed to market for whatever it is they're doing.
01:28:56
Speaker
with the actual operational components of that being largely unproven. I mean, I think that there are folks that are way into this way further than I have been. um But i I've seen a lot of implementations and applications of it that ultimately replace the bullshit jobs that people were doing with AI doing bullshit jobs.
01:29:22
Speaker
and one experience that I personally have had that I think a lot of people can probably relate to is you ever have somebody on the team where you ask them to tackle a task or whatever, and what they bring back is so um overwhelming that you don't even have time to review it or digest it because they just brought back all of the things they found or all the stuff that they made.
01:29:49
Speaker
And I think ai is going to start doing that on scale, especially as we get into some of the like mo multi-modal agentic workflows. It's like, what happens when it's producing a lot of information that people don't have time to actually review anymore.
01:30:07
Speaker
um You know, there's this whole notion of work slop. Like, I think that's what happens when you give AI bullshit jobs and ask it to make the things that people were already making that didn't really matter, but make it faster and at scale. And all of a sudden it's just like, well, what good was this? Now we just have computers making all this crap that nobody is going to look at um or use.
01:30:29
Speaker
So I think there's that, this false promise of, operational efficiency by installing AI where people were without taking ah ah the opportunity to say, did we need all these people doing all these things? you know And I think that there's a little bit of that um swapping happening.
01:30:48
Speaker
The other thing is just the mental atrophy side of it. um You asked about the contribution to creativity. I think it can be a very powerful tool to both accelerate the genesis of ideas and um help with both the divergence and convergence within, you know like thinking about it in terms of design thinking or, you know, just general ideation. I mean, part of that process is coming up with all of the what-ifs and then whittling it down to the what-shoulds. And i think AI can be a really powerful tool to do that
01:31:31
Speaker
more quickly, do it with fewer people, sometimes do it by yourself. um So it's a lot, a lot of it is similar to what we were saying earlier in terms of theation the democratization of media.
01:31:46
Speaker
it it just becomes something that can democratize a lot of other elements of what we do professionally in a way that gives people more of a level playing ground because they have access to this very powerful engine that pattern recognition engine that can produce a lot of things that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to on their own or had access to.
01:32:07
Speaker
um The challenge that I see in it is you don't know what you don't know. And if you lack the knowledge and expertise on a topic, but you have AI create something on that topic, how do you know if it's right?
01:32:27
Speaker
And I think it's it's we're going to see a lot of stuff out there in the world that isn't great. um And I think that that's just going to be a difficult thing to navigate for organizations is how do we ensure that the use cases and application still have review and oversight from people who know what they're looking at and talking about.
01:32:56
Speaker
It seems to me like that last point is particularly important for existing organizations to prioritize, I guess, that, you know,
01:33:11
Speaker
Maybe you have a 200 person organization right now or whatever the number is. And you decide, hey, we're not going to grow, but we are, you know, we're not going to grow the top line. We're going to cut the bottom line. So we're going to go down to 100 or 150 people. And maybe you can make that work with new technology and whatever else.
01:33:32
Speaker
I suspect there would be a lot of challenges to make that work. But let's just say that yeah you're going to make that work. ensuring that your people now think critically. You know, they, you have, you cut all of your entry level people.
01:33:48
Speaker
yeah And so now you have these people who have basically just become middle managers of AI or very few people using AI. So instead of a small three-person design team, you have a manager and you have one designer who's using Sigma, Canva, I don't know what people use in the design space now.
01:34:09
Speaker
And they are in this, you know, silly example that I'm setting up. reducing the volume of what was previously three junior designers.
01:34:20
Speaker
that says Well, that mid-level manager still needs to be able to think critically about the work and guide it in whatever way they need to guide it for their level.
01:34:33
Speaker
And it seems to me like as we go up through an org chart, and maybe it's not just an org chart, it's rounds of review, it's whatever things need to go through to get to the client, that the critical thinking, the things that humans actually should be able to do very easily, we just choose often not to do them.
01:34:56
Speaker
You know, yeahp those are those things are that, you know, I'm sure you've heard this saying it's what is it? It's something like things that humans find very easy. AI finds very difficult and things that AI finds very easy. Humans find very difficult, like, you know, multiplying six digit numbers or something.
01:35:18
Speaker
Excel can do it like that and a human will take. a while and and then but you go to like reading facial expressions and most humans find that quite easy the ai has to turn that into a computational exercise i imagine you've encountered this whether it's generative ai images or it's generative ai music or whatever else but because in you know in generative music there at least at the moment i think people are not the the ai is not generating the guitar line independent of the drum bass vocal whatever line is writing the waveform all at once right and
01:36:08
Speaker
And at some point, I'm sure that if not already, you know, at a high level, at some point, all of these commercially available generative AI tools will generate the bass line separate from the guitar line, separate from whatever.
01:36:24
Speaker
But right now, because the AI's understanding of music is as a whole and not the constituent parts, and then how do those parts work together, there is a lot of there are a lot of artifacts in the music, so you're able to begin to pick those out.
01:36:43
Speaker
And might you know might the audience, the broad audience, be fine with AI, pop music, or who knows what it is? Yes, they might. but the the experts can pick it out. And if your marketing agency, and I'm not saying yours, Steve, but anyone is producing something that is good enough for the masses and you're able to do it at a higher level efficiency, I don't know what the terminology should be here, than you were able to do before,
01:37:21
Speaker
It may be just fine, but it seems like there should be a lot of opportunity right now for individuals, startups, for new endeavors to try something completely new. to I guess I hadn't intended this, but to go back to the Buckminster Fuller quote, to...
01:37:42
Speaker
you know, build a new model and make the old model obsolete. Of course, I suppose if we're thinking about startups and marketing agencies and all that, Steve, if you go out and start some new model, you'll probably get acquired by the old model anyway.
01:37:58
Speaker
It's true. But it seems like there's a lot of opportunity. There is. i mean, i go back to what we were talking about earlier. um when I was talking about the importance of expression and creativity, and I think that's the one thing that is missing in what AI can do. ai is still very flat technology, you know what I mean? and And so I think that when you hear something is generated by AI, that the reason why...
01:38:25
Speaker
a lot of people sense a lifelessness to it is because it is a truly synthetic creation. And I think on some level, we can sense a lack of expression. Like there is no spirit in that. Now, can it be pleasant enough to fulfill whatever need we have, whether it's background music or filler for, you know, sure, I'm sure, you know, but going back to what you were talking about in terms of how we tool teams in an AI context or how we organize teams, I think The challenge, and I was saying this earlier, when you think about evolving models, is determining where and how to insert AI into an existing organizational structure. And I would imagine that oftentimes that requires the close collaboration between an a HR function and IT t function, as well as, you know, depending on what nature of organization, whatever the operations component is,
01:39:23
Speaker
To figure out how to weave that in. And there is a tendency, I think, to say, well, we take this person out and put this spot in and we take this person out and put this spot in. And I think we're going to see that fail if we haven't already.
01:39:36
Speaker
In some cases, the other way to think about it is like AI is like a mech suit that we're going to put our employees in and we're going to make them like super charged versions of themselves. And like, that's great.
01:39:47
Speaker
But when you live life in a mech suit, you become just like a shriveled up atrophied version of yourself because like the robot's doing all the heavy lifting. And then all of a sudden you climb out of that mech suit and you're this little weakling, you know?
01:40:03
Speaker
And I do worry about that. I think there's been a lot of conversation about that online. um People really starting to feel the effects of outsourcing the active cognitive work that they had been doing.
01:40:17
Speaker
And I think to your point earlier, there are things that people have to do in their job that they don't really love doing and don't care about doing. And that's the first thing they're going to use AI for. And I think that's where you're going to see a lot of stuff that should have gotten caught, not get caught because nobody really cares.
01:40:34
Speaker
And so I think you're the mix of human apathy, the tendency towards atrophy, and just not knowing how to weave it into an organization is going to take those attempts to introduce new models and largely be a point of failure in implementation. Not because people within an organization are opposed to utilizing ai but I think...
01:41:03
Speaker
and this is my working theory, because organizations don't understand themselves well enough. um And i know I don't think most people, are going or most most people don't understand AI well enough either, probably. um So you have a lot of users who don't really know what the technology is.
01:41:26
Speaker
I think about it in some ways, like the advent of the light bulb, right? like when artificial light was created, it quickly became a thing that everybody had in their homes.
01:41:37
Speaker
And I think the way that like you and I talk about AI, um i imagine going back in the day and having the two of us sitting in a room with artificial light and talking about like,
01:41:49
Speaker
You know, are people going to be going outside less during in the day because now of a sudden their rooms are lit at night? And how do we know that these electrified filaments aren't doing things to our eyes and brains? And but like we could neither one of us could have made a light bulb.
01:42:03
Speaker
Right. Like we couldn't even explain how it worked. Like, do you know what i mean? And so I think a lot of the discussion around AI, a lot of the utilization of AI is between and amongst people who don't really know. Like generally we have a concept, but we couldn't make it ourselves, right?
01:42:21
Speaker
And so that's always a challenge because you've got a system, but like an organization that thinks it knows how it works, but probably doesn't really I mean, teams maybe know better than, you know, but largely like the people who are rolling these things out don't necessarily understand how the teams they're rolling it out to actually do the thing. And so they're prescribing how it's going to get used. And that always fails. Even pre-AI, that's just a bad way to do transformation.
01:42:50
Speaker
But then you also have like that people don't really understand the thing that they're introducing either. And that's that I think is the hardest part of this is like it's one thing when you were talking about digital transformation and rolling out like enterprise technology and like largely people got what the software did and how it worked.
01:43:08
Speaker
And those even those transformations hit some really bumpy spots. Well, now you're talking about rolling out technology that a lot of people who are doing it don't really understand super well.
01:43:20
Speaker
Um, And I think it's just going to, it's going to be really messy. um I cannot believe some of the wholesale changes that organizations are making. um And I think it's largely due to just this sense of FOMO and this tendency towards um immediacy and impatience and like the latest thing must be adopted as soon as possible or are the board or shareholders are going to be breathing on my neck. Like, what's your AI plan? You know, and So you you have a lot of leaders just forcing it down the throats of their organizations. and And like just coming back to the themes we've been hitting on through this whole conversation, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are rolling out AI in their organization that are not in any way confident that they're doing it the right way, but they are feeling the pressure to do it some way.
01:44:08
Speaker
And so it's ironic if you think about it that we talk about these cultures where there's so much fear of failure, but also people are so often pressured into positions where they're not set up to succeed because they have to move fast and get results quickly. um And so you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't in a way, which is sad, it's hard. But the the one takeaway in all that that I would want people to think more about is not the AI side of it.
01:44:39
Speaker
It's the how well the organizations actually understand themselves. Because I think the answer is not well. And I don't think that that's just limited to leaders. I think the average person does not really understand the physics of the organization they exist in. And I think that's a huge problem.
01:44:53
Speaker
that if i If there was one thing I was really passionate about, it would be trying to get more people to understand how the place that they work at works and what they can do to influence it in a way that can make it better, a healthier environment, ecosystem, you know, et cetera.
01:45:14
Speaker
Because then introducing AI, i think has a much but greater chance of success. you You put AI into a unhealthy system. It's not going to go very well. I think that there are plenty of times when it may not even be asking a question about how an organization works.
01:45:33
Speaker
It might be asking a question about some marketing, advertising, whatever strategy saying, well, Hey, what are we trying to accomplish here? And, you know, or,
01:45:46
Speaker
is this really what the audience cares about? Whatever the question is, there times when it's sort of like a pullback question and let's let's look at things at a little bit higher level.
01:45:57
Speaker
And someone, it's it's different person every time, i'm not even going to take a gas test in one circumstance or another, what percentage of the population is, but someone thinks,
01:46:12
Speaker
Why are you asking about whether or not we understand the way that the organization works? It works. We don't need to ask that question.
01:46:22
Speaker
And I feel like when I've been in those circumstances, and I've probably been that person plenty times too, you know, but when I've been in that situation, I have felt like,
01:46:35
Speaker
I'm not saying that we need to go back and rethink everything as much as I'm just trying to ask, do we know what the objective of the war, the battle, the engagement is?
01:46:48
Speaker
And once we confirm that we do, then at least for me as an individual, it's much easier to move forward. But to just say, well, we understand it or it doesn't, we don't understand it. We just know that it works.
01:47:04
Speaker
I think really misses the point. Big picture questions are always inconvenient and people hate them. i I keep coming back to the Plato cave analogy, but like,
01:47:17
Speaker
It's like being like, hey guys, are we even there in the right cave? Like, like yeah nobody wants to hear that question. But I also, it's scary how many organizations... can't even get to first principles that quickly or clearly you know i mean part of the reason these questions get asked is because there isn't a shared understanding of those basic foundational things like ah be having laser clear clarity on like why we exist like who do we create value for said this earlier um
01:47:53
Speaker
How do we deliver that value? How are we improving the way we get into these abstractions of the business so quickly and we start talking about things in a context that's completely removed from the the central purpose of the organization. i think that's where you start having those questions come up because all of a sudden you get all the way down a path, all the way into these little nooks and crannies of execution and implementation and somebody is kind of like, wait, hang on, are we still attached to the the the main thing? What is the main thing again? you know um And it's hard. It's a hard moment to be in. and i But i just connecting it to the conversation we were just having about AI,
01:48:37
Speaker
if you if If you don't have broad understanding of the the foundational principles that your organization operates on it's going to be very hard to implement anything, let alone AI, with success because everybody is going to be operating in ah in an unknown context.
01:48:56
Speaker
you've you've You've lost all of the things that could be connective in the ways that they utilize it. And so all of a sudden, you've got people making their own context, you know? um And that's I think that's where...
01:49:12
Speaker
those questions arise. And that's why people tend to either have like the, can we just shut up and like, keep our head down here? And know, like, I don't want to, I don't know the answer your question. And just the fact you're asking me the question, Eric, makes me kind of feel like I should know the answer. And that makes me a little bit insecure. And now everybody on the Zoom call is like, you can't tell, but they're sweating a little bit because you asked the question that none of us know the answer to, but it should be a question we all know the answer to.
01:49:39
Speaker
And now we're sweating, you know? And so like, And I had certainty until you asked that question. Right. And I want certainty. i thought I knew. No, I don't. And now that you asked, I realized I don't. I just assumed, but I i don't know.
01:49:53
Speaker
and know. yeah it's and it happens more often than anybody would ever want to imagine. At every level of the organization. Steve, I have i've kept you well over our time that we were booked for. And I feel like we, at least for me, if not for someone that listens to this, we might have to do a part two. But sure before we get to the to be continued, you said in response to one of the first questions that you're fired up.
01:50:25
Speaker
And so I wanted to ask about what that is. And maybe maybe we'll talk in depth. in a future conversation, but we can explore it to the extent that you would like to now.
01:50:38
Speaker
And then we'll get to where should people go? How should they connect with you? And that first question that I asked might even answer the the final question, which is if you were going to leave me or a listener with something to think about or look into, what might that be? So I hit you with three questions there, I guess.
01:50:59
Speaker
I'll make them all connected for you. I suspect that a lot of people spend a lot of their life in context where they feel frustrated or disillusioned or disenfranchised. um You know, there there was a lot, at least within the marketing world, there was a ah roiling debate about purpose ah for a long time, and especially in the context of whether or not a a marketing campaign should be rooted in an organization's purpose.
01:51:35
Speaker
um And I'll spare you all all of the details of that discussion, but i the The short takeaway from my perspective is purpose should not be your marketing campaign.
01:51:48
Speaker
But I do think it's important for people within an organization to have a sense of clear focus that they can tap into and connect so that the macro value that an organization creates they can see clearly the micro value that they contribute to that and that it's something that they value themselves. And I, that's some, i mean, that's something that I've been wrestling with for a long time is just continuing to ask myself, what is it that I value that I can also create value around that other people value, right? Um, aligning those three things in order to try and, and, you know, provide as much of that value to the world as I can. And so
01:52:30
Speaker
When I bridge the gap from thinking about marketing and thinking about organizations, that's where those things come together for me is just thinking about this ecosystem that we spend most of our lives within, which is our professions, which is a marketplace that we transact within every day of our lives.
01:52:51
Speaker
In trying to make it less frustrating and trying to make the organizations that make up that ecosystem more healthy and trying to generate real value um as individuals, as organizations.
01:53:04
Speaker
And this all sounds super abstract when you don't talk about specifics, but the point is, We just spend so much of our lives falling short of potential and settling for less and feeling like we can't make change and not feeling like we're afforded the agency to do anything about and any of that.
01:53:29
Speaker
So I come back to what I was saying earlier, which is I would love to and intend to um try to help people better understand how they can navigate some of those contexts and understand the dynamics and the physics of the systems that they exist in so that they have a clear way to make a difference, to impact it positively, to shift the the pH levels of their um organizations in ah and a more positive direction. So that's that's what I'm focused on. That's what if you...
01:54:07
Speaker
Find me and follow me on LinkedIn. You will probably more about more about that Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, we have at this point, think we are we're minutes over a two hour recording window. So I appreciate you sticking with me, Steve. And it's nice to see you after so long. And if you don't have to commit yet, but if you will entertain it, hopefully i will have you back soon.
01:54:34
Speaker
I'd love it. It'd be great. I appreciate eric This has been a really great conversation. Thank you. I agree.