There's a whole leader session
and set of work that we have to do
and build new skill sets and mindsets
and one of those is having the humility to know
this is scary,
and we're gonna work through this together
and being able to say that as a leader.
I think courage feels a lot like fear when you're in it.
Yes, yes!
This conversation isn't comfortable
and that's the whole point.
Amalia Goodwin is the global
managing director of adaptive organizations
at Slalom and she works with executives
who already know something
most leaders avoid admitting.
The systems that made them successful
won't survive the AI age.
In this episode we dive deep into two ideas
that challenge the status quo: 1
why incremental change is actually dangerous right now.
and 2
what it means to lead organizations that can sense
decide and evolve fast enough to stay relevant.
If you're leading through uncertainty
and everyone is this conversation offers a few nuggets
you'll appreciate so let's dive right in.
So I'm all about helping organizations be successful
and this technology I think
levels the playing
playing field in so many different levels.
So it's so much fun.
That's awesome you're Portland
Oregon right?
I do live in in the West Coast,
I have had you know
ventured out living in North Carolina and other spots
so
I do love when I get to come play in the south as well.
Well I'm from Eugene, Oregon
so. You are. And I lived in Portland for 10 years
and I've got to say welcome to the south.
I appreciate that. Go Ducks!
Go Ducks! Go Ducks!
Yeah I'm, I was born and raised in Idaho.
And really I've spent most of my life in the northwest
in Oregon and Washington, Seattle and Portland,
but I always love coming back down to Nashville
into the triangle. That's probably you know
I sort of think about like the third act of my life
and what's that gonna look like?
And it and like this keeps calling me back
so We'll see. Well
come on down, come on down,
Actuall, no.
We're full thank you.
You're full. Yeah
like I say this and when I I will talk to folks and
when I go back to Idaho like
but hey I like I did my undergrad here
I did my high school here
I was born and raised you have to accept me back.
Even though I left for a minute.
So what is it? What's.
We're
On behalf of the Greater National Technology Council,
I'll ask the question, what is it?
What do we have here in Nashville.
You know what you have is, you have an interesting
I guess the
like spark is the first word that comes to my brain.
You have a energy, that is around people and culture
but is friendly to business and innovation.
And being able to bring that secret sauce all together
and have fun with it. I believe creates community right.
So
when your businesses are thinking about your community
and when your education systems. And what we
you know what I got
meet some amazing people that are
really trying to think through
how do we think about education very differently?
Because we should. I don't see that I.
I get the privilege of going to many different
cities and around the around the country
I don't see this everywhere.
So it is pretty special what you've created
and the excitement that the businesses have around okay
how do we do this how do we think about this
how do we involve the community.
Inclusive of the education system,
that just doesn't exist. So I've been like everybody
sort of addicted to this conversation about AI.
And I'm gonna tackle it from a different angle.
I think the definition of value
is changing. What is value?
What do you think is changing?
Well
I was in a conversation with a client this week and I
I do M&A work and yeah and I
and everybody is looking does
does the guy who's gonna buy you
have a better strategy than you
and are you moving in that direction.
And everybody's evaluating AI strategies specifically.
But the companies themselves often seem to wonder,
let's say for example;
if we could just get this project done in six hours
that used to take us 60 do we value
do we pass that value on to the customer?
Do we pull that value inside?
What is the value of the service we delivered
if we now know it can be done in six hours.
Yep. And all of our perspectives are defined by 60.
And these are 10 x changes in everybody's life.
Internal and external perspectives
so there's a war
I think going on about the definition of value.
I'm curious how you see that playing out?
I think that's a really great
and a good perspective to have.
What occurs to me about value is
when you save that time.
I think a couple things are happening
one is there's people are like
you often hear "it didn't work"
I'm like yeah
you got savings you got leakage.
Cause you haven't
redefined what you want people to be doing.
And I think value starts to like.
I think the organizations that will succeed is going.
The value is gonna be
how do they continue to reinvent themselves.
So we call it like how are you like continuously
like being an adaptive or an adaptive leader.
But it is reinvesting in the continuous
change that this technology is bringing.
But I also do think
how an organization measures itself
like there will always be the tried and true things
that you're looking at from an M&A standpoint
and from a business standpoint
for sure.
But I do think it starts to shift
and so you are going to start like.
What I'm valuing and what I want out of the teams
like I get the fortune to work with and manage are
what is your learning velocity?
Like how fast are we learning and pivoting
so that we can help our customers differently?
And learning velocity isn't training courses
it's behavior changes. How
how are we thinking about in an innovation cycle
and an innovation metabolism
where we take ideas to
how fast can we pivot those ideas to actual revenue.
Like that is a different
value that we need to start thinking about.
And how do we think about the
the decision velocity that leaders have?
Like that is of a different value that.
And what will stop and slow down organizations is
wanting to be sure and that is really hard.
Like it from a leader standpoint
wanting to know all the answers before you move forward.
And knowing
when do we know enough to start testing and playing.
And in a way that's like often and you hear Amazon
talking about a two way door
so when is it where we can still play
and it's not cutting us off
and
and where do we need to really slow down and go slow?
We are
we're treating everything like as a slowdown.
So I think valuing and decision velocity.
So I think there's a whole and then like
what is the overall experience
we're creating for our customers
and our people?
That will be of a different value as well.
Like I think it all does start to shift
and it becomes more than revenue,
revenue is always gonna be a a judging stone.
But I think your ability to create new revenue
because all of our expectations change
is gonna have to shift
cause you're thinking about it very differently.
I love this the term innovation metabolism
and when I think about metabolism
you know you can feed your body energy
and then not work out and get no
no muscle from it or you could
fast and and have completely different life experience
just by changing the nature of how you feed.
How you fuel yourself. So AI
is changing the nature of how leaders fuel themselves
how they make decisions how the people respond to it.
How are you stamping the fear out
cause I think fear is the root of why
people want to be sure of something
cause yeah they're afraid of something.
How are you stamping fear
out of strategic decision making
and an innovation metabolism?
Yeah. Yeah
like it's
fun.
I think it's okay to be afraid
I think part of this is there's gotta be leader
a lot of leader work that is happening right
so working with your C-Suite
and your leaders
and your executives throughout the organization.
And part of this is
we have gotten here
like I've spent almost 30 years in my career
and I've gotten to this point because like
I've Learned something and I know how to reapply it.
And now we all have to learn something brand new
and maybe all of our experience
doesn't have the same value as it once did
and my value is now relearning
and helping
people know that I can help them get through this
because we're all scared.
It's okay for humans to be scared
in the fear that exists
like it's helped us evolutionarily
we need it and
but it is okay to like
we need to acknowledge that and go okay
this is a little scary let's try.
Like let's have fun trying!
So I think the biggest thing that we've done
is make it fun.
And so we've done things like creating Blackout Bingo
to learn the new skills
to create it as like using AI in your day to day work
and Blackout Bingo for teams and departments
and like it's true
we created Tic Tac Toe for executives
made it a little easier and to
to have like you know
our our C-Suite
come in and start playing with this technology
in a different way.
But having fun with it acknowledging it yeah
it's a little scary. The first time I had it like
and I like my experience with this has been
I was lucky enough with Slalom
in our innovation lab
to be playing with the 2.0 model
so I saw it with some um early avatars
I'm like okay
that's neat and it's clunky
and a lot of the innovation teams would come through
and like they were seeing value.
And I was like that that makes sense
I'm like no Amalia
you need to be paying attention.
And I smiled at him like yeah
I got I got an org design I gotta do that's neat.
And
then three out of like six months later happened
I was like and tell and then that blew me away.
I was like oh
it just made an SOW for me.
I often tell the story I'm like
and it was maybe better than what I would do.
And and there's that feeling of oh
then what do I do but if I'm honest with myself
I don't like doing that work
I like doing the like working with the leader work
I like doing
like connecting with the teams and helping them.
So and that is not necessarily something
a GPT is going to do for you
or an agent is going to do for you.
And so
I do think there is something around acknowledging it
like
there is a whole leader, there's a whole leader session
and set of work that we have to do
and build new skill sets and mindsets.
And one of those is having the humility to know
this is scary
and we're gonna work through this together
and being able to say that as a leader.
I think courage feels a lot like fear when you're in it.
Yes! Yes!
And like it's okay to feel fear and you keep going.
Yeah. And that's like what happened to me
I was like oh
I can either be bored in my career for another 10 years
and be done
or I'm gonna jump into this and change it all
and be really scared and have some fun
and that's the only thing I know to do.
I've always.
I've always heard courage isn't the absence of fear
it's the presence of
or it's action in the presence of fear. Still no
it's there and you still move forward
it's kind of like the bison you go into the storm right.
Well you
you use some some really interesting terms and you
you mention the term relearn
I'll full disclosure
I heard you speak yesterday in present
and I was fascinated by this
this slight change
by changing two letters and use the term unlearn.
Relearns a function.
I get it unlearns a little more complicated
so tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah
unlearns hard and this is
I believe that
and one of the things I often will say is it's leaders
it's us
that's gonna get our own way with this technology.
And leader like
and part of that is we got here knowing some things
right and we were good at what we do. And
so how do I stop and go okay
what has served me in the past
is not gonna help me in the future
so how do I stop this current behavior?
And as a leader some of that is thinking
you know what's next and when
like we if we really are honest
2027 is pretty hard to predict
from a technology standpoint.
And what's gonna really be there
so how do I um
really stop and challenge what I think I know
and really start thinking of
and like a very tactical thing.
I do with leaders is
you need to think in six months increments
in six months
you can take what like GPT5 just came out
Microsoft got something coming in two months
two weeks
I think ish like they will all have something in like
you know
about the same period of time where you can make
alright what's my BHAG for the next six months
and you should
start thinking about this in six month increments
not to the two to three years.
And so that is like an unlearned behavior of like
everything I think I know I do in this time period
and I'm gonna we're gonna get to this roadmap
that's two to three years like hmm
getting your team to a spot where you can do that
in six months is a very different thing
it's a very different thing.
So how do you like things you know to be true
and everything you do
like how do you ask the question and stop and go
is that true is the strategy really to your roadmap
or is it a six month roadmap against a very large
30 year massive transformative vision.
It like feels like science fiction
but you'll probably get there
because of this technology.
A massive 30 year transformative vision.
You can string some words together.
Do you like it? Get me jacked up,
pumped up! Yes!
It's so much fun, how much fun is this
yeah right? Yeah.
I you mentioned earlier games
putting games together or yeah
you've used the word play.
And I've
I recently thought about you know
when kids get together
they're playing there is no rule set.
Then we eventually teach them the rules of the game
which sort of like wreck the play part.
And now it's a contest and a game
and then later on you know
nobody want games are no fun right.
So we've we sort of pressed the fun out of play.
Yes. And wouldn't it be great,
if we looked at this as a big playground?
Yes. For the creative expression of whatever
we haven't figured out yet.
So what's the most exciting
thing that you have seen people do
that is playground oriented?
You know. It sounds like we need to unlearn some things.
Yeah like there is an unlearning thing
I think one of the thing like I've got an.
Something that a team is working on right now to
to that answer one of the things I think is really true
what you just said there is really profound is
and there is something really
interesting to watch out of kids and like
their excitement for learning.
And one thing that something happens in
happened in my educational system around learning rote
information that we no longer necessarily need to know
we need to learn how to learn.
And so like
if we can help kids and help like
and adults really think through
really what we do now is learn how to learn.
And use this technology to help us learn
and like you know
you do our critical thinking and that sort of thing.
And you can have fun with that too
like and have a playground with it.
We have a team doing bake offs like
we always do kind of a
we've always done fun hackathons
where you gather a team together and
you present ideas. What was really fun about
this last year's hackathon within our organization
we had we had a business team with no
and low code team win the hackathon.
That was a technology hackathon because I mean
and I think that shows something very interesting
around. These were business consultants
these weren't like the tech teams.
So there
I think
there's something also happening in organizations
where we've done this bottom ups use case view
and we said OK
tech go build this for us.
And I'm like half of those use cases
I think
we could teach low and no code skills to the business
and they can self serve. And our experts in technology
should be doing the bigger harder
more complex things.
So there's a different way to think about that.
And so in that the
so we've done definitely done the bake offs
I think we're going to do another bake off
around agentic flow right now where
we'll have our senior execs do
and we've done this with clients as well
where they come in and they get to be the judges.
And so we give people a period of time
and it could be two or three days where like
they war room it and they create from like
vision through pretty much Figma
workable code to something pretty amazing
and you can get that done in two to three days.
And like do like
what's the concept that we like
that we wanna do and play with
and take to the next level.
Many clients do fun things like that as well
and you can have fun with it when you're doing that
and you're then allowing people that maybe were like
I'm not sure about this AI thing
and they're now presenting to your C-Suite
or they're presenting to their CEO
or their COO or whoever's in that organization
that
they probably would have never had that opportunity to
of like what they just built in two days is like you
you have people that will follow that forever.
A bake off sounds like the right answer.
I love it. Let's play
I love it. Thanks for joining us today.
Yes thank you.
Welcome to Nashville. Go Ducks!
Go Ducks! Thank you, so much!
Had a blast