AI in the Workplace: The Problem No One Names

Thank you for having me. I'm so thankful for you having me on your show. You've been around for a long time, and it's, truly an honor

Yeah. So I've been in a role where I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of leadership and frontline individual contributors in the productivity space for a really long time. I was on the infrastructure side, so very early in my career, understanding support on why people kinda do work with these different types of productivity tools every day issues, problems, why they do these different types of things. And that's just naturally accumulated over time as I built up my career and did a lot more complicated systems and security, as well as moved into solution development, and that's where I've been spending most of my years is designing solutions for a lot of these different types of teams. And a lot of times I'm not designing up here, I'm designing down here for all the challenges that everyone is facing and trying to overcome those challenges so they can be more efficient and around it. And as a part of that history I've worked with tens of thousands of solutions at this point in my career. I've been given the opportunity to ask some questions, and sometimes they're hard questions for the organizational dynamics, like, why does this exist? Why are you doing the things that you're doing every day? Why is this file being handled in this manner? And because I got to ask that question so many times, it allowed me to have a perception into how organizations work that a lot of people don't have. And it's, all about proximity and, proximity to the issue and problem and being that outside observer. So then as I transition into AI and as AI came on board and then people are asking, where are these opportunities for AI to provide that? So I'm thinking about all my lived experience in, all this area. And so how do I explain this? How do I translate this so that they can understand as a user or as a leader? And then I'm thinking about all of the external factors that are coming in from an AI standpoint. There's a lot of concern, there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of hype relating to this There needs to be a translation. And I was actually at a legal conference just recently about this, talking with some legal counsel, and a lot of times they were saying that seems to be a voice that's missing in this entire AI conversation, is proximity. Proximity to the challenges of the everyday leader and the everyday user, and talking what that really means about AI. And which kind of just certifies what I put together from a book standpoint is because the book is based off of a collection of thoughts. It's a... I- as I was moving into the space, I was journaling on what this change means and how I would explain it to potential clients with this. And and it just accumulated into kind of these sections of narratives and stories, and I feel everyone's asking for something to make it real, translate on how they behave in an organization, and that's what I wanted to try and do. I'm not the perfect person out there, but I think the message is strong in the book as far as creating meaning and understanding on what that really how they can help them and get grounded in this AI changing world.

Yeah. One of the two biggest factors I talk about in my book and when I give presentations is that there's two documented avenues of, how work done is, done in a workplace. There's the official version, which is the presentations that we lead up into leadership, our job descriptions, all of our values. We have documented artifacts that basically presents the organization in a certain way, standardized procedures, those types of things. Then there is what I call the unwritten contract, which is how work actually gets done. It's all of the side conversations, all of the what, we essentially mitigate challenges as things come up relating to a task or a business process or conversations that need to happen, all of the organizational dynamics that need to happen in order to accomplish the major steps in our official version. That's the area that no one really knows how the job gets done. They just know the job gets done in some way, in some fashion. And and the only way to truly understand that is to be in proximity to that. Executive leaders up top don't necessarily know how the job gets done necessarily. They just know the job was done in some capacity, at least in the official documented version of it. But it, they don't know that it took a team of people five months to have a lot of organizational discussions, work through issues and problems and concerns, all that kind of stuff, in order to make that happen with that process. So, that unwritten contract is the best way to understand where there are opportunities to accomplish goals and solve business problems and solve process challenges in an organization, is understanding that unwritten contract, those behavioral dynamics in order to be able to get the job done.

So one thing I talk about in the book is what I refer to as the inbox. And because that, those dynamics are documented somewhere and, they're documented in two main places. They're in people's heads and we connect as humans of everything we need to figure out and discuss with that. It's also documented in what I call the inbox, which is the behavioral record of our communication and collaboration data. So when you connect AI to our emails, our instant messages, our meeting transcripts document comments, all of those dynamics that are happen are captured in some way. And email is probably the easiest example to... is when people are working through issues, especially in a remote work type of standpoint, they're emailed back and forth discussing and, in those email dynamics, there is context and then there's also inflections in regards to those dynamics that are captured in there as well. You can tell when someone is irritated. You can tell when someone is struggling, someone is having challenges, someone is not responding, because silence is also a signal relating to these different types of things. That tells a story. And so the idea is that if I can take a step back from what AI means for our organization, and I use AI as a tool for organizational self-realization, then I can truly understand where that opportunity of AI is gonna provide value to me, because that's what it's here to do, is to mimic human behavior. And so if you're gonna mimic human behavior, then make it human. So you need to understand all the human dynamics around it. And so that's what I'm trying to do is point to where, Commonly, when I give presentations on this, I said, "Find a challenge spot that everyone mutually agrees is a challenge spot." Let's say an approval process. That's very common in most organizations. It takes forever from something to get approved from A to B. Why? What is the dynamics of that? What is causing that? Because everyone seems to think that AI is gonna solve the problem, but why not use AI to help you identify the problem so that you can solve it? Because you may not need AI to solve it. It may just be a conversation with somebody. It may be more authority. It may be better documentation around these different types of things. Those are all organizational dynamics that slow processes down. So utilize that behavioral record as a way to discover. Now, it's not just a simple, immediate I ask a single question, and it just reveals It It requires some cultivation of Q&A to basically figure out that dynamic. And is it always gonna be 100% accurate? No, because you're forgetting the one main thing. All the people involved are also a part of the dynamic. So it needs to just give just enough visibility to see that here is a potential pattern. Now I can go talk to the people and discover what is the real challenge so that I can move forward and improve our business processes

Yeah. So for example is people asking doing constant follow-ups from an email chain. So I, have a problem and I'm asking someone else, and I'm asking someone else, and I'm asking someone else. Right there, that can show a tone that person doesn't trust to be able to make a decision to move forward. Even though they may have been given the authority, they don't feel like they have the authority to move forward. And it also could mean like they're just confirming that confirming the answer's accurate or the problem is being resolved. But if you study behavioral science with this and I'm not a behavioral science expert, but I would say I've been in the proximity of a lot of the organizational dynamics in real time with some of these things. A lot of the conversations back and forth reveal a lot of interesting patterns, especially in meeting transcripts. Meeting transcripts reveal all kinds of information around dynamics between people. And so you can see hey, I have a business process that's not getting anywhere because for the last five meetings, these two individuals have been discussing back and forth and not agreeing with each other relating to this. And I need to, This is what they're talking about. This is what they're arguing. I need to settle this. I need to work through this dynamic so that we're not utilizing company time working through a problem that can just easily be solved with a decision. And and so the other thing around dynamics is silence. How often have you sent an email and you've never gotten a response? And you consistently send emails and you never get a response. Why? I need this person to do something. It doesn't happen. What are the dynamics behind that? That person could be, The reality of that is, is if you start looking through the things that you're working with and collaborating on, they could have a huge workload. They don't have the capacity to have this conversation and think through these issues and problems. That's why things are not moving forward. So it's an opportunity to self-discover some of those organizational dynamics so that you can understand, how do I best approach this issue or bring up to leadership or handle this? Approvals comes up a lot. Like why, is it taking someone like three weeks to approve this? If you look at their backlog they're, booked for ei- you know, eighty hours over the next two weeks, essentially. Like they don't have any time. So maybe the question is, that maybe this is not the right person to approve stuff. Maybe we need to move the approval somewhere else so that this process can keep moving forward and keep happening. So it's those kind of dynamics you can discover in here to work through those issues and challenges. Now, a tool may help with some of these things, I'm not discrediting that, but I think there's human ways to solve problems by utilizing these behavioral records to help create that realization and have that storytelling to be able to move forward with your challenges

More information at hand. Yeah, absolutely. And the one thing that what this behavioral record reveals is why we hire people to begin with. Because the one thing that AI that AI cannot do that humans do really well is lived experience and lived consequence. They go through the trials and tribulations. They understand what a decision can ultimately mean. That's why some of these things have to be worked out through behavioral dynamics. AI can create signals, it can create realization around it, but it's still judgment, authority, accountability, all those different types of things still rely on whoever we have assigned that role and job duty to. And that's one thing that it seems to forget is that we hire people not because necessarily of the skills and the tasks, that they can apply those skills and the tasks with proper decision-making, proper authority, so that it can move forward when things don't go the way they needed to go. And and they can work through all those issues and challenges. That's what we treasure about people is that they can think on their feet, they can work on it. And I refer to this situation is the the unfortunate recent plane crash in LaGuardia that happened where it hit the firetruck with this. It came out that the pilot had six seconds to make a decision to either hit the truck dead on or swerve. That six seconds in all of his lived experience and consequences, his understanding, he understood that he was gonna die likely, his, the pilot was gonna die likely, and it's gonna affect all of their families, but it was gonna have a high probability that all the passengers were gonna survive and wouldn't affect all of them. So if he would've swerved, there was a higher chance for that happening versus hitting it direct. Only lived experience can capture that moment. AI will never do that. Even when we hit AGI, until AI comes out of the machine and is living amongst humans every day, understanding all those human dynamics, and it decides for itself what those human dynamics mean by living in amongst us, it's never gonna truly understand what lived experience and lived consequence means. That's why humans matter, and that's why we hire people. And that's why you treasure as a leader when you hire people and put those into positions is that's what they're giving to you. People can be taught skills and be trained and all that kind of stuff. It's what everything else they bring to the table. That's what you like about those people.

So when I talk about this behavioral record, every organization has challenges. They have I use the word dysfunction, but that's not a good or bad thing. It's just reality. So you recognize you're gonna have a degree of dysfunction. But I think it comes down to what does that mean for your organization? If you accept that every organization has a degree of dysfunction, but your lens is, I want to understand and move forward with the company. So when AI is introduced from an organizational standpoint, I don't look at I'm replacing people. They're already doing all kinds of dynamics that I can't see. The problem is I'm not giving them enough time to work through those dynamics and giving them enough time to move forward as the company. 'Cause people are stretched. They're doing tedious tasks. They're doing a number of different things. But why did I hire them? I hired them to do critical thinking, to help utilize what they are capable of to help move themselves forward as well as the company forward. If they are drowning in a bunch of tedious tasks with that, and I'm not giving enough time for them to breathe in regards to help us excel forward that's not us moving forward. And that's the lens that I encourage executive leadership is AI is here to enhance or augment behavior, but it's not here to replace humans. It's here to help humans breathe in a highly volume high volume type of organic work, so let me give you the opportunity to breathe. I need your critical thinking skills. I need your capabilities that what I hired you for. I wanna give you that opportunity to breathe. And so it comes down to messaging. If that is your messaging, those are gonna be the most successful organizations when it comes to AI. Because the more you can have business in what AI really means for that, you're gonna create an ideal culture where it's symbiotic. Because that's really long term. It's gonna take us a while to get there, is AI and humans are gonna be a symbiotic relationship. There's things that humans will always excel in and there's things that AI will excel in, but they will rely on each other in order to be able to make that happen. But you have to build a culture for that to happen, and you have to have the right mindset for it

Yeah, so I think that, I'll take it from a lens of how I've been generally coaching people is scale it down. S- don't look at your organization first. Look at yourself and, what that ultimately means. And because a lot of times people have not given them the chance to self-discover on what AI really means for them. And so with that you already know what you do every day. You already know your challenges and your dynamics that you handle. You're a smart individual. You deal with this every day around it. So how can I see where these opportunities arrive for me? So why don't you tell your story? So pick up your phone and start dictating how you do your job every day. How do, how... What are the challenges? What are the dynamics? What are the things that, you know... Talk about all the steps in the your, business day-to-day stuff. Start digitizing that and capturing that. Essentially, digitally journal how you do your job every day. Things come up, journal that. Other things come up, journal that. That's gonna unfold this behavioral record for yourself. Once you have that, then you can utilize AI to say, "What does this story tell me? What kinds of issues, challenges, or dynamics are happening around the way I do things?" Then you can start asking question, "How are people perceiving how I do things?" So you take these dynamics, and you merge it with other knowledge, like your emails and your instant messages. How other people are perceiving how I'm doing things. Where could I be better? How can I communicate better? All those different types of stuff. Because that's really where it starts, is that kind of self-discovery. If you create that opportunity for self-discovery, then you can start realizing where that opportunity is from a leader standpoint, a team standpoint, what kind of stories that could tell for them. And, you start putting together that, those patterns and those stories into something that can culturally go bigger. AI needs to change on the intimate behavioral level to be the most successful for an organization. The t- the big overall decisions, they're really hard to be successful in order to make some of these things happen. The success is building that relationship. So I talk about AI in the book as this third presence. It's a relationship dynamic. It's a relationship at least from a work standpoint, there's me, the organization, and now there's AI as a part of this. What does that triangle of a relationship look like? How do I work through those dynamics? We're gonna have issues. We're gonna have problems. There's things that each other of us are not gonna understand. How can I help me understand that, so I can help it understand me? So that's what I talk about with this. That is probably the most realistic way where I have guided people in organizations to start there, because that is where the value is going to be

Yes

Yep

Yep

Yeah, exactly. And it,

You're totally going the right direction, and it's not just about right now. When you have email's been around a long time. You have all this email history. You also have all of the meetings that you've been invited to. Those are data points. Those data points tell stories. And, so basically pulling that information, asking those questions to tell cultivation of stories to basically help paint a picture on where there is opportunity to help overcome challenges, whether it's yourself or the entire company, that is where the real initial power is going to be for AI from an organization, is this concept of self-realization. It's okay to slow down and you have to recognize you have a problem, and then look for tools to address that problem. But you have to look at where that problem is and where it's happening with that. AI is another tool to help figure that out, and then maybe an AI tool will help it. Maybe it'll help discover there is an opportunity for this. But let's make it human. Let's make it real in that regard, and let's have those conversations first before we start diving deep into spending huge amounts of money on trying to solve an initial problem utilizing AI

And exactly, and also your dynamics between... So you have a staff of five people. One thing that can be revealed through that is how often am I actually communicating with these individuals from a statistics standpoint? So every week, every email I sent or replies, like for this person I'm responding 80% of the time when they send me an email. But this other person, I'm only responding 20% of the time. What does that lens create for that dynamic between me as a leader to that person? Because silence tells a story. They don't think "Hey, they're not responding," even though they've emailed them a number of different times. "Do they not like me?" Because that tells a story. Those are all those little human tells are. So I can help understand and uncover these different types of things. AI can also be used as an automation tool. It's "Hey, it's time to reach out to so and because you do want to reach out to them, but you get busy, you get distracted, but sometimes you need reminders for these different types of things. But but ultimately, the idea is that there's all kinds of storytelling that can be done in this entire ecosystem. And this is the conversation that no one's really talked about yet but I started to see it because I was trying to explain where that value of AI is, and this is what I kept coming to. You you guys for all these years have been telling all these organizational dynamics and challenges and issues with that, and they're all documented in the same spot. What if I started asking these questions? What if I started doing these things? What kind of story does it tell me? And the one thing I kinda talk about when it comes to process issues with an organization, there is one artifact That is universally, no matter what company, kinda registers how much behind the scenes organizational process challenges you may have, and it's the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is the default artifact that is created to deal with, "I need to get the job done, so I'm gonna create something to manage something to get from A to B. I don't have a tool. I don't have a process. I need just something. I need a tracker to do X, Y, and Z." So if you look at a company and if they have millions upon millions of spreadsheets, yeah, there's use for analytics and reporting, but I would say a large portion of those are being used for dealing with this behavioral record of expectation of "Hey, I don't care how you get it done, just get it done,". And so I'm like I don't have a tool, so I'm gonna use a spreadsheet to make this happen,". And even with some of the new modern AI tools they default to a spreadsheet anyways because that's how people organically work. I spin up a spreadsheet to manage and track something. So to a certain extent, it's still industrializing the same human behavior that people already do every day. So the one thing is that I've always advised organizations is that if you think AI is gonna come in and save your company, if you already have a lot of dysfunction, and if AI is there to industrialize human behavior, you're just gonna industrialize dysfunction also. So that's why self-realization and taking a look at that lens is gonna greatly help you slow down, have it make sense, have the proper ROI, and go in the right direction you need to go

Yep

So it comes down to lens and messaging. This is why I critically talk about is util- using the lens of what AI is gonna offer a company for insightfulness and progress moving forward. If you don't have the right message and, have the right attitude on what AI is going to offer an organization, people are just gonna see it as surveillance. That's the reality. They're gonna see, And, the one thing is as any human does, if they're being surveilled, they're going to change the way they behave knowing that surveillance is happening and which pulls your company back. You regress. You naturally regress. and and so you don't naturally will ever move forward. So you need to have the right messaging up front, and that's kinda what I talk about, like why do we value as an employee? And we value you because of what you bring to the table. We understand that we can hire anybody from a task. We hired you and what you offer and what you bring, your lived experience, lived consequence, what you know, because that's the one thing a lot of leaders forget is there is one machine, and I'll use the term machine in this language, that is a part of this entire equation, and that's the person. We are amazing, beautiful, and flawed machines in many different ways. That's what makes us rather unique. If you take someone out of that machine, the, that whole process could fall apart. You think about how many business people are managing an entire business process behind the scenes, and if that person left, the entire thing falls apart and sets you behind months in an organization because that one individual left. It's because of all of that undocumented work that they do, what they know with all their lived experience, and they can just handle it. AI is never gonna be like that. And and so You need to value your employees and value the way you think and look at your employees when you approach AI and just say, "Hey, we're gonna approach this in a way to be able to move forward. We have real cost concerns." you can even be honest. People will understand if you are honest. " We can't hire any more people. We know we have issues and problems, but instead of hiring more people, we're gonna help you make, be more efficient by taking these challenges off of you so that we can keep moving forward. Maybe in the future we'll hire new people, but the jobs will change at that time." So I think as when I talk about with this AI and being connected to all this communication and collaboration, it creates this atmosphere where a company needs to be more honest with itself and its employees. And authenticity goes very far now because they want, realism, they want practicalism with this. You can't hide behind these different types of dynamics anymore with AI now being in the space because technically everything is discoverable if you know how to ask the right question. So let's change the way we think about how our employees and this relationship with AI. Humans will always be valued. I just wanna give time back so we can help move the company forward and work through issues and problems. If you strip out the word AI and just say, "Hey, we're gonna do process improvement," because that's really all that AI is. It's a process improvement tool. And so we're gonna improve our processes so we can be more efficient, we can be more profitable, and we still value everything that everyone does as a part of this dynamic. Does that mean that there are going to be positions that eventually phase out? Yeah, because likely that position probably never needed to exist because they're dealing with all of these organizational backend dynamics and dealing and It shouldn't really exist if they had a more of an improved process. But that doesn't mean that person has to go away, it just, we can shift them into something else. So I think that it's messaging and marketing that's critically important, and the right lens. And that's why I wrote the book is like, "Hey think about it in this way because this is how you're really gonna succeed." Because the people are not gonna follow you the individual employees will recognize what all this stuff means. And if you value what they bring to the table and you need to be reminded of what value they bring to the table, all of those human dynamics and behind the scenes, we you will excel as a company very much greatly and excel beyond anything that you could possibly imagine if you think about it in that lens

Yeah, absolutely. And I talk about AI in kind of two buckets: self-service AI and controlled AI. The challenge with self-service AI and giving a lot of people these tools you're essentially giving people the ability to create self-service solutions. That's fine. The challenge with that is, is that you don't want 50 of the same solution going across multiple different people to solve a business problem. So if you understand the dynamics of a business process and recognize even though they can doesn't mean you should, we see an opportunity here to build a controlled solution where it can be done the same time every time and in the way that we want it to be. And that's where that controlled AI solution makes sense is this is gonna come up, this is gonna be a, pattern that's gonna be reused. And from a business user standpoint, a lot of times they don't wanna work with a chat agent. They want push-button AI solutions. And honestly, they don't even wanna know if it's actually AI. They press a button, AI just goes and does something, it comes back, and they move on to the next step. That's how business users respond. They don't care how the system works, it's just that it works. So the more you can understand the human dynamics when you're designing an AI solution, the good and the challenging, the more successful that AI solution is going to be. And so that's why I said if you create push-button AI solutions, you're and they don't even see... They don't have to chat, they don't have to write, they don't have to do any of those types of things, then you're gonna be a lot more successful because the business will be bought in because it's working for them. They understand what value it's providing around it. So those are some of the kinda dynamics I talk about and to kinda make it real before you just kinda give everyone open the door for Claude or Copilot or anything like that, is like understand what you actually need first by realizing it and make sense of what things are self, better for self-service versus something that's more controlled.

Yeah. So one thing I'd like to do to leaders as well as individual contributors that watches, I think a lot of people in their day-to-day work don't get the opportunity to hear a thank you. And so I wanna give that opportunity to all of you because I know there's a lot of fear and, a lot of mistrust around AI, and I wanna say thank you to all of you. Every service you provide to all of us is valued. We appreciate it, and and you will continue on. You don't need to fear relating to this because the reality is, that you are all still needed, and we need your services

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure